End of Games

Chapter 17

The Unsullied Pyramid
Boyd:

"I'm surprised that you didn't kill the Green Grace and her Graces," I hear Missandei say with a bite in her tone as I enter the throne room after a bath.

I couldn't be around her smelling all sweaty from snapping slavers's necks all night while she smells all good and looks like a model, so I had a bath followed by a change of clothes. Sure, I'm wearing the same type of Unsullied uniform, but it's an improvement because it's clean.

"We killed her too," Mossador informs Missandei. "And some of her Graces."

"Of course, you did," she comments with an audible undertone of annoyance and frustration.

"Is everything OK?" I ask, startling her.

"Everything is fine, Master," she quickly replies, closing in on herself and bowing her head and casting her eyes down, body shaking and heart racing, afraid. "This One…"

"Missandei," I interrupt her softly, and move to comfort her like I used to comfort Erica during our early days as the Alpha Pack's captives, but she flinches like she's expecting an attack, so I give her some space. "Sorry. I'm sorry. I'm not going to hurt you. I'm not Kraznys, and I'm not your master and you're not a slave. You know what? The list can wait. Take the rest of the day off. Do you have a friend you can talk to?"

I mentally shake my head at myself. She needs the rest of her life off and a lifetime of therapy. And so do I and every Unsullied.

"I don't have a friend, Alpha," she responds, and I frown at her addressing me as Alpha, but I notice the familiar undertone of being friendless and loneliness, although it's soon replaced by contemplation and excitement. "But I do have an idea about the list. Perhaps it would be better to focus on the slaves you freed and visit them and the servants instead. They, like me, have certain talents and skills that can help you get Astapor up and running within a week.

"There are field hands, craftsmen, sailors, scribes, tutors and even healers among the slaves, to name a few. And there are servants that know the ins and outs of the city better than even the masters did, and they can continue doing their duties as usual, but for you. Even the bed slaves and barmaids can help! They make the best spies and they can keep you informed about everything in the city. Alpha, you have everything you need in household servants and skilled slaves to rule Astapor. You need only unite us as you did the Unsullied."

Missandei finally builds up enough courage to look at me, but she looks at me with uncertainty, checking my reaction, and I think also seeking my approval.

"That's a great idea, Missandei," I don't make her wait, and she relaxes a little.

This kind of reminds me of Erica's, Isaac's and my relationship with Derek, particularly before things got so bad that Erica and I left his pack. How we sought his approval to the point where Erica and Isaac kidnapped Jackson for Derek and we were going to help him kill Lydia. I'm now in Derek's position and Missandei and the Unsullied are in ours. We've already kidnapped and killed people, and all because I said so. For our freedom, sure, but still.

It feels like I'm taking advantage of everyone, and now with Missandei's idea, I'm going to do it to even more people, victims of slavery, like us. Her idea is great, and I'm going to realize it, but I know that I should feel guilty for taking advantage of all those people. Many of them don't know any better, including Missandei. They were trained into slaves from a very early age, most were literally bred for slavery, and I'm going to take advantage of that and use it to my benefit to fix the mess I made.

I think I feel a little guilty, ashamed. It feels good to feel that, even if it's imaginary. I had a lot of people killed last night, hundreds of them, and the Unsullied are still out there hunting more slavers and killing them, because I told them to. Slavers or not, I should feel guilty for taking lives, for having their children killed with them, but I don't. Not really. I know that whatever guilt I think I feel is imaginary. I'm Unsullied, Unsullied don't feel guilt.

It's disturbing. It's unnatural. And it's the slavers's fault I'm like this, that the Unsullied are like this, and we made them all pay dearly for it. They're lucky we gave them quick deaths, but it wasn't out of mercy, it was out of necessity and efficiency. I didn't want the coup to turn into chaos and result in unnecessary casualties, and I still don't want it to.

"Alpha, I have returned," Chameleon announces his return.

"Welcome back, Chameleon," I reply, accepting his use of Alpha because it's the one choice the Unsullied made for themselves independently and it's not something that was trained into them, us. "What's the report?"

"The Green Grace is keeping her word," he says, to my relief. "She managed to convince her council to keep the peace and not incite rebellion or associate with our enemies. The banners in the Temple of the Graces are being taken down as we speak, as well as figurines of the harpy."

What a relief, but I didn't know the Temple of the Graces has a council.

"Thank you, Chameleon."

"It's my honor, Alpha."

I give him a grateful nod before I look at Missandei.

"Can you help me write a speech?" I ask. "All servants and enslaved were moved to the Good Masters's pyramids. At least the healthy ones. The sick and injured were taken to the Temple of the Graces. They aren't like the Unsullied, I can't unite them the same way I united us, but I think a good speech should do it."

"I'll do everything I can to help you write that good speech, Alpha," she replies, more confident. "They may not know it yet, but you freed us and we owe you our gratitude and loyalty."

Afternoon finds me going pyramid to pyramid with her, Mossador, First Kanima, an invisible Chameleon, Weapon and Vengeance, announcing the deaths of all slave masters, including the Good Masters, and human traffickers in Astapor and the change in power. I get the same kind of reactions I got from Mossador and Missandei when I announce that everyone is now free, in every pyramid, and then capitalize on that by offering everyone jobs with benefits, which include better working conditions, day offs, shelter and protection.

All servants accept my offer, and so do most of the formerly enslaved, but some decline it in favor of returning to their homes. I wish I could return home too, and I wonder if I can or if I'm stuck here forever. I don't let myself wonder for long. After the announcements, I gather the oldest and most experienced servants and ask them to give me a crash course on how to rule—well, how the Good Masters ruled—the city and to serve as my consultants.

As much as I want to open the gates and port of Astapor within a week, my new consultants advice me to wait and stabilize my rule internally first and see how Yunkai and Meereen react. They also advice me to make peace with the remaining influential people like fighting pits owners and those with connections outside the city. They give good advice, but I'm not the Good Masters, I don't make peace the way they would and I don't have to.

The moment I say that we killed the Good Masters and their entire families and that the Unsullied now claim Astapor with me as the new ruler, everyone submits in fear. The Green Grace displayed a better brave front than everyone else I visit after her. Several make the mistake of gifting me some of their servants. I realize that there are more slave masters and owners who survived, but only because they don't have Unsullied guards, just enslaved servants.

I make them all pay the servants and those who have a problem with this immediately lose their lives via neck snaps I personally deliver, and their surviving family members fall in line. Still, I listen to my new consultants's advice and don't open the city within a week. It takes three and a half long weeks to design a new governing system and new laws to be followed by residents and visitors, but it takes months to put them in effect and reliably enforce them afterwards, with regular adjustments.

In the end, it takes five whole months and a week before everything runs smoothly and today, nine months after I woke up in this world, we finally open the gates and port of New Astapor with improved systems, laws, infrastructure and security. Thanks to listening to Missandei, I discovered in these nine months that autocracy has its own benefits over democracy. It allows me to bring real changes in real time and New Astapor is better for it, not that everyone agrees.

I had to reopen the Plaza of Punishment, though renamed, because of people who don't agree and just had to do something about it. And now, I start my morning on this special day with a visit to them because they helped build me into a better ruler, a better Alpha.
~
Aisle of Lawbreakers (formerly Plaza of Punishment,) New Astapor
Cleon:

I knew something was wrong that day, there were signs, but I didn't know that the Unsullied turned against the Good Masters and killed them and replaced them with their leader the Alpha, who's title apparently also functions as a name, as the new ruler of the city. I also didn't know that this new ruler would end slavery in Astapor, I mean New Astapor, and have the Astapori harpy statues removed from the former Plaza of Pride, renamed 'City Square,' and the city gates two weeks later.

Many highborn and freeborn didn't welcome these changes, especially the removal of the harpy statues, and some of us came together in secret. We formed a resistance group called the Harpies and planned to kill the Alpha's freed slaves equal to the number of the harpy statues he had removed each day until he at least returned the statues where they belonged. Someone betrayed us, because we were all caught the day before we began the killings some time ago.

I don't know how long it has been since we were caught, I lost count of the days after it was my turn to be interrogated and I saw the beautiful monsters the Unsullied are. The pit fighters have always tried to look intimidating by twisting their hair into shapes like horns, knifes and the harpy's wings and by slaughtering their opponents in gruesome ways in the fighting pits, but the true nature of the Unsullied puts them to shame.

Oh, how I regret rebelling against the Alpha. He looks like a Summer Islander, but him and his monsters may be the forgotten gods of Old Ghis come again hiding under their human appearance, and I disobeyed them, him. Now, here I am, nailed to a cross naked, save for my manhood, at the Plaza of Punishment, I mean the Aisle of Lawbreakers, never to fuck my wife again or witness the empire the Alpha will surely build.

"Mercy, Your Alphaship!" I suddenly hear Douquor, former owner of a fighting pit, cry out beside me. "I beg for your mercy!"

As we're at the end of the Aisle of Lawbreakers, that starts at the main gate, I'm able to see the Alpha with his Unsullied guards, walking towards the Aisle. I've only seen him from afar, I feel blessed as he comes closer, and undeserving. I had a wife and children, a family, and all I had to do was obey the Alpha's laws, but I tried to rebel against him, a possible Old Ghis god. I wish I could bow my head in shame, but our heads have been held up with rope.

"We beg for your mercy, Your Alphaship!" We all join Douquor's cries, even the lawbreakers whose crimes I don't know.

He ignores us until he stops at the middle of us and faces us. We quiet down. He looks at us in the eye one by one, and I feel a chill run down my back when his eyes reach mine and I look down.

"Congratulations!" His Alphaship says loud enough for me to hear after several silent intense moments. "This barbaric practice wasn't suppose to exist anymore, but it does because of you! You wanted things to get back to the way they were during the Good Masters's rule and you got your wish, with an ironic twist! Thank you for volunteering to serve as warning to everyone thinking and or planning to disobey New Astapor's laws!

"But most of all, thank you for making me realize that the New Astapori just needed to see my werewolf form to forget the harpy and accept and embrace me and my rule! But you'll get no mercy from me!"

"Fuck you, then!" One of us yells, but I can't see him. "You fucking eunuch!"

I wait with baited breath for the Alpha's reaction, as do everyone.

"You want a quick death!" He sees through the man. "I'll not give it to you! Cut out his tongue and make sure he doesn't choke on his own blood!"

I've watched many fights in the fighting pits and heard men scream like little girls and enjoyed the entertainment, but the screams and choking sounds that come out of the man are anything but entertaining. They're worse than any of the screams we made when we were nailed to the crosses earlier this morning.

"When those gates open and people walk through here, you better be on your best behavior!" The Alpha warns over the muffled screams of pain. "Or losing tongues will be the least of your worries!"

His warning delivered loud and clear, he leaves us shaken. I thought I had lost everything and I had nothing more to lose, but now…
~
New Astapor
The Green Grace:

Walking from the Temple of the Graces to the City Square, formerly known as the Plaza of Pride, for the grand reveal of the new statue that replaces the harpy statue before the grand opening of the city, I look around and find that New Astapor certainly looks, smells, sounds and feels new. It's unlike anything I expected when Alpha stood in front of me nine months ago and introduced himself as the new leader of then Astapor. Who would have thought that an Unsullied would have such a beautiful and peaceful vision for a slaver city?

Astapor has always been beautiful during the night, but now… The old red bricks that were used to build Astapor and gave it the name 'the Red City' and were crumbling before are crumbling no more. They have been replaced with new ones of varying shades to create artful patterns, even on the streets, by hundreds of former slaves, now known as freedpeople, and they did so with a passion I've never seen before. I saw this passion first-hand because I worked closely with them, their architects, due to Alpha asking me to add color to the city in the form of vegetation in certain areas.

Several of these areas are what Alpha calls parks, which are areas reserved only for recreational purposes for the young and old, and sport fields, some of which were once fighting pits but he took them from fighting pits owners like Douquor, also for recreational purposes. How an Unsullied thought of these things is a mystery and this mystery may be a girl by the name Missandei, Chief Missandei, Good Master Kraznys's former slave translator now Alpha's Chief of Staff, a position equivalent to Westeros's Hand of the King.

She has blossomed into quite a confident, powerful and influential beautiful young woman like myself since that night. She wields even more power than me, and according to Red Grace, Chief Missandei also has Alpha wrapped around her little finger, but her infatuation with and loyalty to him prevents her from taking advantage of her power over him. I would have thought that Red Grace was making excuses for failing to seduce him or being scared of him after we saw his 'werewolf form,' but I've seen the way he and the Chief of Staff look at one another when the other isn't looking.

They each have a spark in their eyes when the other enters the room. Sometimes I feel envious of Chief Missandei, but then I look around the city, at my work as New Astapor's Green Grace, and remember that we all have a part to play. Today isn't one of those times. We rebuilt this city together, all of us, and today we give birth to it, starting with the reveal of City Square's new statue. I didn't know what to expect from Alpha's rule, certainly not New Astapor, but I'm glad I supported it and him, despite the condemnation I will get from my fellow Graces in Yunkai and Meereen.