The moon is dark and the wind is not high, and the waves gently lap on the shore.

Everything was peaceful.

The harbor on the shore of Skagos Island is not large.

There are more than a dozen building ships docked inside.

This building-like ship resembles the dwelling place of the sons of the forest who build treehouses on trees.

This is a building ship built by the Skaggs.

Will and Arya ride a griffon, whose talent for vision is unmatched.

The two griffons let out a low cry, and Will understood what the griffon meant, and he patted Blaze on the neck, causing Blaze to fly close to the ship, which was empty.

There are no unicorns either.

Two griffons landed on the deck of the ship.

There is a smell of fresh paint wafting from the ship.

"They put new paint and painted it. Arya said.

"Just these days?"

"Yes, just for a few days. ”

Arya and Blue Crystal had come to the East Sea a few days earlier, for one purpose, to reconnoiter the situation on Skaggs Island.

Scags Island is reconnoitred from the air, even if it is detected by the Skags.

They have unicorns, but they can't fly into the air.

"Why did they suddenly paint these ships?"

"I don't know, Skagus Island is mysterious. ”

"You go back and inform everyone to enter the port, grab the boat first, don't move for the time being, wait for my order, I'll go to the island to have a look." ”

"Good!"

Call!

Flames soared from the ship, followed by Aquamarine, and the two griffons flew in opposite directions.

Will rode the griffon towards the center of the island. After a few moments, he saw a fire in the distance.

Looking at the past from afar, there is a sea of fire in the distance.

Will was taken aback, was there anything going on on the island?

Flying towards the firelight, he soon heard the sound of singing and drums, and then saw the figure swaying in the firelight.

Closer, people are partying. The Skags are holding some kind of grand celebration.

What to celebrate?

Celebrating the robbery of ten boatloads of grain?

Flames flew closer, and Will's visual abilities evolved greatly because of his close relationship with Flames.

He saw a scene of thousands of people reveling, men, women, old and young, all singing and dancing around piles of fire. On the high platform, a priest in a robe prayed to the heavens, shouting something to the sky, and the language of the Skags was not understood by the languages of other places, and few of them spoke the lingua franca.

Will let the griffons fly closer, and it was not surprising that there was not a single vigilant soldier or unicorn on the periphery of the revelry.

Why are not a single unicorn?

The unicorn was kept underground by the Skaggs.

Unicorns are burrowing, living in dark, damp places underground, swimming and burrowing themselves to hide themselves. The waters of the north are cold, and unicorns can swim in the cold waters, they like the cold and adapt to the cold environment.

Will wants to learn as much as he can about the secrets of the Skags and the unicorns before he comes.

The book is limited, and so is what Maester Aemon learned through his apprenticeship at Skagus.

Why are there no one on duty on the boats, do they think they are invincible, or do they think that no one can enter their complex waters?

The island's waters appear calm, but in fact they are full of reefs and currents are complex. Without Master Emon's waterway map, and without Asha's exploration in the past few days, the Night's Watch warship would indeed not have been able to approach the island.

The Skaggles, who had never been disturbed by outsiders, were really not vigilant at all.

They have been living for a long time robbing other people's things, and no one can do anything with them. It is said that the ships of the Braavos Sea King were all robbed by them, and the Sea King had the most powerful navy in the world, and still could not do anything to the Skagus.

Will decided to go down and get up close and personal with the men.

The scene was chaotic and revelry, there were so many people that no one could tell who Will was.

However, the priest on the high platform suddenly pointed to the sky and shouted something to Will.

Then, the people of one of the islands looked up at Will's location.

The priest on the high platform suddenly knelt down, and the whole person was lying on the ground, looking really pious.

Then, all the Skags fell to their knees.

Their knees are also very different, first on their knees, and then on their whole body, with their palms folded in front of them, stretched out straight.

No matter how you look at it, this has a very religious connotation.

Will was pretty sure that ordinary people should only see griffons, not him.

But he didn't know if the priests would see him.

Some of the ancient priests had some inexplicable abilities.

Looking at the Skags who were kneeling in the black press below, Will's mind flashed, and he suddenly remembered that Maester Aemon had told him about the ancient beliefs of the Skags.

But it can't be such a coincidence.

This belief is that within three days of the death of the island's elders, outsiders entering the island of Skaggs are regarded as auspicious messengers sent by the gods. Then this messenger will have a month of god-like heavenly life, and he can do anything on the island, such as the wife of any person he likes, he can ask this woman to sleep with him. He can enjoy any of the island's delicacies, gold, and on the last day of the month, he will be able to leave with the rich gifts from the people of the island.

In short, you can do whatever you want on the island, everyone will love you, the bravest warriors will protect you, you can ask a virgin to sleep with you every night, you can get drunk, any boss's room, bedroom, you can enjoy it.

When the month passes, when the elder's soul returns to heaven, the people will send you away, because your mission is over, and you have to go to heaven to return to God and take the elder's soul and let him rest in peace.

And at any time after this month, if the same people reappear, they will be captured by the people of the island, and they will torture you for a month, and they will not let you die, and they will make you suffer the most cruelly, and finally you will be put to death, and then you will be thrown into a cauldron, and the fire will be boiled, and the whole people will eat it up, and drink up a large pot of soup. In the end, the bones will be polished into powder, and handed over to the new elders of the island to make a holy medicine for soaking in water, until all the bone powder is eaten.

The month of torture to death is called the month of punishment.

The person who came when the elder died was an oracle, and if the oracle suddenly came back again, it was not an oracle, but a demon. The envoys of the gods should be greeted and sent, and the demons should be tormented, so that the demons will be afraid, and they will not dare to come to the island again to deceive people.

Will didn't know if he belonged to the oracle or the demon now, because whether it was an oracle or a demon, when people saw it, they would fall to the ground, the former out of respect, and the latter out of prayer. People are praying for the devil to leave before you set foot on the land of the island, but as long as your feet stick to the land of the island, sorry, they won't and won't dare to let you go.

It was a peculiar belief that was hard for Will to believe, but Will believed that what Maester Aemon said was true.

Will decided to change his mind, instead of thinking about disguising himself after landing on the ground, let's see what these people want to do now, if it's an oracle, it can avoid a vicious battle, if it's a demon, as long as its feet don't stick to the dirt of the island.

*

Chapter 0862-2 The Divine Messenger descended from the sky

Will patted the griffon's neck as the flames slowly lowered in height, and Will noticed that there was no one standing around, and that they had no weapons on their hands.

Not far away, there are low-rise villages, one by one conical houses, all made of thatch. There are no fences, no stone walls, no outlines of cities, this is the most primitive civilization, the level of architecture is very primitive, and the degree of civilization of these people may still stay in the primitive social stage.

Will saw a long stool in the center of the high platform, on which was an old man with thin hair and beard, who seemed to have stopped breathing, and if this man was the elder of Skaggs, then Will was the oracle of error. On a few stools shorter than this one, there were several living people tied up, their faces covered with white cloths, but their bodies could be seen writhing.

Is this a living sacrifice after the death of an elder?

If the people of the whole island do not wait for the messenger within three days of the Elder's death, then the Elder will be cooked, which is said to be a sign of respect for the Elder, so that the Elder does not leave, and he is reborn and lives in the body of his people. The bones of the elders are buried, put into clay jars, buried in circular pits, and then filled in with a mound of rubble.

There is one stone for each person on the island, no more and no less. The baby who is unable to walk will be replaced by his parents with a piece of gravel. So on the island of Skagus, you can touch it anywhere, but you can't touch the rubble, that's their most sacred thing.

Unbeknownst to outsiders, if you accidentally touch a pile of rubble on the island, no matter how good your relationship with the locals is, they will immediately turn their faces and brutally hunt you down.

Will descends from the sky on a griffin, but full of vigilance.

He had to figure out if he represented an oracle or a demon.

If an old man with long hair and beard is an elder and has died, then he is an oracle. In the eyes of the Skaggsians, the oracle could be anyone. They only look at the timing of the coincidence, and it has nothing to do with who the messenger is, whether he comes from the water or from the air.

The oracle is the spirit of the elder.

The Skags also left the island to go to the outside world, the Skags came to be the night watchman, and in the continent of Essos, there were also the Skags who went to work as mercenaries.

Although these interactions with the outside world are rare, there is definitely contact with the outside world.

During the Stark family's history of ruling the North, the Starks have fought the Skags several times, and the Stark tried to conquer them, although they were unsuccessful. The most successful was when both sides agreed to a peaceful ending, when the Skags accepted food and cloth from the Starks, nominally recognizing as vassals belonging to the Starks, but maintaining de facto independence, the highest level of integration with the outside world in the history of the Skags.

That fragile relationship between lord and vassal was forgotten a few years later.

In the bitter cold of winter, the Skags also rode unicorns to land on lands in the north and looted villages.

In Will's knowledge of the Skags, there should be very few people among the Skags who can speak some simple lingua franca.

Looking at the clothes they were wearing, they would also trade with the merchants outside in exchange for cloth, salt, and iron.

"Is there anyone who speaks the lingua franca?" asked Will.

His voice was loud and resounded throughout the audience.

Since the Skags are not armed, they can be lowered a little more.

The priest looked up, and Will saw a face painted with unicorn patterns.

His mouth came out with strange syllables that Will couldn't understand a single syllable.

The priest was very excited, and kept gesturing with his hands, but Will took a deep breath and watched the other man stop talking.

The priest's cane was pointed at the people lying on the ground, and he spoke quickly, and the people stood up as if they had been forgiven.

"I'll speak a little bit of the lingua franca. A woman came up to the platform and waved her hands at Will, "Ah, please come down, you are our oracle, we have seen through your disguise, come down, ahna!"

Will didn't go down: "What's your name?"

The girl said: "My name is Millie, my brother went to Braavos to be a mercenary, my grandfather was an elder on the island, you look at him, he died yesterday. ”

"What about your parents?"

"They were killed while they were making deals with evil people out there. The girl said.

This Will did not suspect that, according to Aemon, the Skags did not initially hate the outsiders, and that they had only become full of hatred for the outsiders after being robbed of their trade and deceived many times. But these things have nothing to do with their strange beliefs.

Eamon, who had learned a little of the Skags language from his Skags apprentice, came to the island as a young man to bring medicine to heal the sick and save people, so he was very popular with the Skags.

It is said that all the horns with magical powers in the world come from the unicorns of the Skaggs.

Many people have also waged wars against the islands because of unicorns, but they have all ended in tragedy.

"Who are you bound to, are you from the outside world?" Will asked.

"Yes, it's all some evil people. ”

"Can you remove the cloth from their faces?"

"Of course!" said the girl.

The girl's face was painted with a lot of paint, and her face could not be seen, and only a cloth was around her waist, and the rest of her body was covered with patterned paint.

A long black hair was scattered around the girl's waist.

Several of the men guarding the dead removed the white cloth covering the face of the sacrificer, and Will lowered his height again, two of whom Will knew, who were the former Kingsguards and the two Kingsguards who sold King Joffrey to pirates during the fall of the West: one was the taciturn Sir Mandon Moore, who was originally a Vale but was very insidious and vicious, and the other was the spineless Ser Marin Tran.

"Can I order you to let five of them go and kill two of them?" Will said.

The maiden translated Will's words to the priest.

The priest muttered a lot of impassioned words to Will, which the woman translated to mean that Will was an oracle, and his words were will, and as long as they did not harm the Skags, the Skags would not disobey them.

So, Will decided to get off the griffin and give it a try!

He had come to conquer the Skaggs, not to kill. Whether or not he could command the Skags to ride unicorns against the wraiths on this basis, Will didn't know, but he could try.

According to Samwell, it is recorded in ancient books that the stronger unicorn is the nemesis of the ice spider, I don't know if it's true!

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