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Chapter Text

LADY SANSA STARK

28TH DAY OF THE TWELFTH MOON OF 299 AC

Lady Sansa Stark slipped through the last of the torchlit corridors with her hood drawn up, the Red Keep groaning around her like an old ship at anchor. It was early evening, the sky outside already dimming into a wash of indigo, the torches sputtering against the growing dark. Wind worried the arrow slits, sighing through the stone, and somewhere far below a gate chain clanked, the harbor bells tossing a dull, mournful note across the waters.

She moved quickly, her slippers whispering over cold flagstone, passing two Lannister men-at-arms stationed in the passage. They wore crimson cloaks and the lion brooch at their shoulders; one stifled a yawn while the other’s eyes tracked her too intently, sharp and prying. Sansa lowered her gaze at once, as if the floor might swallow her, and did not lift it until she reached the familiar door: iron-banded, scarred with a shallow gouge near the latch.

Her chamber.

The guards assigned to her were there as always, posted on either side of the door. They shifted their spears as she approached, straightening with precision. Neither spoke, though she felt their eyes follow her as she slipped within and closed the door behind her, shutting out their presence and the weight of the keep alike.

Inside, the air held the faint sweetness of lavender sachets and the cool of stone. The hearth was banked to coals. Brella rose at once from her stool by the fire and Shae turned from the dressing table where she had been setting out combs and a sleep-robe. Both opened their mouths to curtsy and ask after her walk, but Sansa lifted a hand.

“Leave me,” she said. Her voice sounded too small in the room. “I wish be alone tonight.”

Brella’s face softened with worry; Shae leaned her hip upon the table and tilted her head, catlike, as if to tease a smile from Sansa by refusing. But Sansa did not have a smile to give.

“Go,” she said again, more gently. “Please.”

They obeyed. Soft-soled steps, a rustle of skirts, the latch whispering shut. The chamber grew very quiet. Only the fire’s tiny breath and the night pushing at the curtains.

She stood there a moment, listening to that hush, to the hollow within her that the godswood had not filled. Then she crossed to the bed and sat upon its edge with the careful grace Septa Mordane had drilled into her, hands laid in her lap, back straight, chin high. The posture lasted for a moment before her shoulders wilted and she folded over them, pressing her face into her palms.

The tears came as they always did, unbidden and hot and somehow still a surprise. She had prayed in the dark grove for them all, whispering the names as if names could summon breath back into cold bodies. Robb. Mother. Bran. Rickon. Arya. Father. The godswood of the Red Keep had no real weirwood - only old oaks and a black pool that took the moonlight and made it colder - but she had knelt beside the water and prayed anyway, because there was nowhere else in this city where the walls did not listen.

Robb, crowned and slaughtered. Mother, her hair unbound and eyes gone to glass. Sansa saw them as she had not seen them: in song’s bright colors, in nightmare’s cruelty. Bran, sweet Bran with the eager smile; Rickon with crumbs on his cheek; Arya skittering like a swift shadow through Winterfell’s courtyards. Theon’s face came with Bran and Rickon, dark eyes over a smile that had once seemed sneering and proud; she could not reconcile that smile with treachery and burning.

Joffrey’s face rose last, pale as milk and sharp as a knife, and she whispered for the Seven to blister him, then caught herself and whispered a softer prayer for mercy on her father’s soul instead. Mercy for Lord Eddard Stark, who had stood upon a scaffold in a city of strangers while the crowd screamed for blood.

Her breath hitched. She pressed her knuckles against her lips to keep the sound in. If she made no sound, perhaps the sorrow would pass through her like a hard wind and leave her standing.

She could not keep it out, though, the thought that came creeping like frost up a windowpane: Jon Snow. Her bastard brother. 

It had been so long since she had let his name into her prayers. Not out of cruelty. Out of hopelessness. Jon Snow, her father’s bastard, who had vanished two years before King Robert’s grand procession rattled through Winterfell’s gate. Vanished as a footprint under fresh snowfall. No trail, no rumor, no bones in a ditch to mourn over.

Father had sent men and more men and come back empty-handed, his mouth set in a line Sansa had not seen before. She had never seen her father look so angry and frustrated and yet so sad and hurt. Arya had wept wild tears and hurled her wooden sword at a post until her hands bled; Robb had trained until he could scarcely lift his arm; Bran had asked too many questions and then gone quiet.

Even Mother, who had held herself colder than ice whenever Jon was near, had grown softer at the edges in those weeks, the way cloth loses shape when soaked, as if a grief not hers had seeped through the household and into her.

Sansa had not known what to do with her own sadness. She was supposed to be a lady. Ladies did not cry after bastards. She had cried anyway, alone, with the coverlet drawn over her head, and afterward had sat very straight at table and practiced smiling until her cheeks ached.

Now, in the red coals’ thin glow, the memories came one after another, bright as beads on a string she could not stop pulling: showing Jon the first figures of a dance in the great hall; his shy, lopsided smile when he asked if he stepped wrong; the way he had worn her blue favor in the yard when he and Robb took up practice swords, and how he had laughed, breathless with victory, when he caught Robb with a touch that would have been a killing stroke in a real melee. Lemon cakes cooling on a tray, the buttery smell of them filling the kitchen passage; Jon’s hand passing one to her and Arya when no one looked.

Don’t tell, he had said with his eyes, solemn as a knight while crumbs dusted his lip. She had not told.

Her throat tightened again. She brushed at her eyes with the heel of her palm, cross with herself. “Fool,” she whispered to no one. “Fool, stop it.”

Is he alive? The thought was a soft, dangerous thing. If he were alive, he would not sit idle. He would not let the world swallow their house without drawing steel. He would ride alone if he must, a single dark rider against a red sky. He would come to her.

She lifted her head and looked across the chamber as if he might be standing there by the hearth, a shadow among shadows. Only the three-legged stool, the dressing table with its scatter of combs, the wine flagon, the narrow casement shuddering in its frame. She drew a breath that shook and let it go.

For a moment, she allowed the fantasy to unfold: the doors of the great hall bursting like rotten wood before a storm, a figure in black striding through the Lannisters’ gold, Joffrey’s mouth opening on a scream too thin to carry, steel singing, the courtiers scattering like frightened birds. She imagined Jon lifting her. No, not lifting; offering his hand, and she taking it with a curtsey, a lady in a song. Winterfell’s cold clean air on her cheeks, smoke from the godswood fires, the wolves howling welcome from the walls.

The picture dissolved like breath on glass. Dreams were for minstrels and little girls. She was a married lady now, caged in a castle that gleamed too brightly, watched by eyes she could not see. Tyrion Lannister, her husband, treated her with courtesy and kept his hands to himself. He made wry jests at supper and sent her books and spoke to her as if she were clever. Sansa was grateful and she was not. Gratefulness was another kind of chain. Courtesy did not make the iron softer. The wedding had made her a Lannister by law, a hostage by truth, and a fool by feeling.

She rose and crossed to the window, pushing the curtains open with numb fingers. Cold air licked her face. Below, King’s Landing sprawled in a black map pricked with orange fires. The Sept of Baelor’s great dome made a darker curve against the sky, and beyond that the harbor showed its scattered lanterns; the river was a dull blade that did not shine. Somewhere out there, men drank and laughed and sharpened knives; somewhere a child cried for a mother who would not come; somewhere, perhaps, Arya darted between barrels like a cat and survived. Sansa’s hands curled against the sill.

“I am the last Stark,” she told the city in the smallest whisper. It felt wicked to say it and wicked not to. Robb gone. Father and Mother gone. Bran, Rickon and Arya too. Even Jon.

The last, the last, the words circled like gulls above the Blackwater. If she were truly the last, then the wolves were all bones and hide.

Behind her, the chamber waited with its rich tapestries of hunts and heroes, its polished chest with lion-head pulls, its bed carved with roses and crowned stags. Lannister red hung everywhere. Their red, their gold, their preening, their power. The colors made her think of fresh blood spilled across straw. She closed the curtains against the night and leaned her brow upon the cool wood.

She had gone to the godswood to pray because there was nowhere else to put the ache in her. The old gods might not hear her in this southern place with its oaks and black pool, but they were the only ones who had ever seemed to listen without asking for something in return. The Maiden gave her tears and the Mother gave her comfort and the Father gave her judgment and none of them had given her back a single soul. Perhaps the gods of the north would remember Winterfell if she whispered hard enough.

She straightened and wiped her cheeks again, the gesture small and stubborn. The mirror caught a pale oval of a girl’s face with eyes too red and too old, the bodice of a gown that felt heavier than steel. She forced her shoulders back and made her mouth into the soft shape that looked most like a smile and least like a plea.

“I will be a brave little bird,” she murmured, hating the word even as she borrowed it from Sandor Clegane. “I will.”

The fire gave a small crack. In the sudden quiet that followed, she heard only her own breath and the slow thud of her heart. Then even that seemed loud, and she moved to the bed again and sat very gently as if not to wake a sleeping beast that might share the room with her.

She folded her hands. She thought of lists Septa Mordane had taught her to recite when fear crept into her bones: the names of the Seven, the great houses and their words, the twelve kinds of stitches that draw one thread into beauty. She named them in her head - running stitch, backstitch, chain, feather, herringbone, satin - and under the litany the ache kept throbbing like a burn that would not cool.

If Jon lives, he will come, she told herself once more, and this time the thought hurt less because she knew it for a lie.

If Jon lives, he cannot come. The city would swallow him, the Lannisters would kill him, and the singers would make a sad song that forgot her name.

She drew her knees up onto the coverlet for an instant like a child and then put them primly down again. Somewhere in the keep a door thudded, a heavy sound rolled through the stones, and a dog barked twice and fell silent. The hour was late. The day had been long. Her eyes burned and her head ached and her hands felt like someone else’s, delicate and useless.

Alone, bereaved, and powerless. That was the shape of her life now, a shape as plain as the frame of the mirror. In the glass she saw her own smallness set among lions: their banners outside, their coins in every purse, their claws sunk deep into the city and into her. She lifted her chin one more time and looked at herself until the red rims of her eyes seemed to fade.

A wolf, she told the glass. The words had almost no voice left in them, but she gave them what she had. A wolf who remembers. A wolf caged in a lion’s den.

Chapter Text

TYRION LANNISTER

29TH DAY OF THE TWELFTH MOON OF 299 AC

The cellars beneath the Red Keep breathed dust and silence. Cobwebs hung from the arches like tattered funeral veils, and the air was close, dry, and thick with the scent of age, of stone, old ash, and the faint ghost of smoke from fires long extinguished. The darkness pressed down like a weight, broken only by the trembling light of a single torch that hissed in its sconce.

On a carpet faded to the colour of grave dust, Tyrion Lannister lay on his back, chest rising and falling in the heavy stillness after their lovemaking. Beside him, Shae twisted away, muttering as she brushed grit from her bare shoulder. Her skin gleamed in the dim light, a pale sheen against the gloom.

He watched her turn from him and thought, not for the first time, that warmth was always the first thing to leave him once the fire was out.

“Seven hells, it stinks down here,” his lover said, wrinkling her nose. Her fingers brushed something smooth and curved. A bone. One belonging to a dragon. She turned it over and froze, staring into the hollow sockets of a dragon’s skull that loomed above them. Its teeth, yellowed and cracked with age, jutted like knives from its cavernous jaw. With a sigh, she shoved it aside. “Why always here, my lion? Why always among bones?”

Tyrion smiled faintly, the expression weary rather than amused. “Because, my sweet, the skulls do not gossip. They do not whisper my name to my father or my sister or the guards in the next hall.” He reached for her, but she had already drawn her shift over her shoulders, shaking the dust from it as though to rid herself of the place itself.

“I’d sooner have feathers and a door that locks,” she said. “At least pillows don’t stare.”

Tyrion propped himself on an elbow, his eyes lingering on the skull she’d pushed aside. The flicker of torchlight danced in its empty sockets, as though some echo of dragonfire still smouldered within. Its jaws gaped in a perpetual roar, and Tyrion wondered whether the Targaryens had felt smaller standing before them than he did now. “Pillows are soft,” he said, “but they betray. These stones are loyal, if nothing else.”

Shae tied her gown, snorting. “You talk too much of your sister.”

“She talks enough of me,” he replied lightly, though a familiar bitterness lingered beneath the words. He rose, reaching for his breeches, the torchlight playing across the uneven stone. Around him, the dragon skulls loomed in uneven rows, their black hollows watching like blind judges. Once, they had inspired awe and terror; now they gathered dust while petty kings and cruel children played at rule above them.

The quiet pressed in until his thoughts filled it. The Red Keep above was anything but quiet. It was a nest of clattering servants, hammering carpenters, and fretting stewards, all consumed by the coming wedding. The twelfth moon’s end had brought a fever to King’s Landing: banners to be sewn, doves to be fattened, jewels to be set in crowns.

Tyrion pictured it all: a thousand golden coins spent for a day’s delight, a hundred men labouring to please a boy king he despised. One that happened to be his nephew. 

The only mercy of such chaos was distraction. In the whirl of silk and song, no one had time to watch the Imp too closely. No one, save his father. Tywin’s gaze missed nothing, and the old lion had ears in every corridor.

Even the walls above whispered unease. Servants spoke of coins vanishing from coffers, of vaults lightened in the night without sound or touch. Reports had already reached Tyrion of coin gone missing. Nobles robbed without doors forced or locks broken. A whisper of vaults lightened overnight. Ghosts, some called it.

Tyrion doubted ghosts had any use for gold, but he knew his father's displeasure well enough to dread the summons when it came. The Master of Coin’s duties might not extend to theft, but Tywin Lannister would make them his concern all the same.

His mouth tightened. And over it all hung the marriage, the union between Joffrey and the Tyrell girl. The thought of it was bile in his throat.

It is only a matter of time before Loras Tyrell follows my brother’s example. Tyrion thought to himself, a wry smile slowly unfurling over his mouth. If Joffrey does what Joffrey always does, Margaery will suffer, and the Knight of Flowers will need little encouragement to earn the title of kingslayer.

Shae was combing her hair with her fingers in the reflection of a dented breastplate, her expression distracted. He watched her in the flickering light - lovely, sullen, and distant - and felt the hollow ache of a man too clever to believe his own illusions.

To break it, he asked, “And Sansa? How fares my lady wife today?”

Shae rolled her eyes, all derision. “That little lady? The same. She prays in the sept. She prays in the godswood. She eats alone in her chambers. She stares at flowers like she’s waiting for one to speak to her. Tedious.”

But she hesitated, frowning faintly. “Though today… something was different.”

Tyrion arched a brow. “Different?”

“She smiled,” Shae said, almost grudgingly. “All day. First time I've seen her smile in a long time. Walking through the gardens as if she’d swallowed the sun itself. Floating about as if she’d forgotten she was in this wretched city.”

Tyrion frowned. “Smiling, you say? That hardly seems likely.”

Shae shrugged. “Perhaps she has a lover. You, her husband, do not seek her bed, and even dull girls like her have needs.”

He gave a short, humourless laugh. “If so, the gods have a cruel sense of humour. Still… no. She is too broken for that.” His voice softened. “Smiling. Curious indeed.”

The thought unsettled him. Smiling, in King’s Landing, for a girl who had suffered as much as she had. It was as unnatural as snow in summer. Yet part of him wanted it to be true, if only so that something in this wretched city could cause her to remember joy.

Shae brushed invisible dust from her sleeve. “What does it matter? She is no flavour, no heat. I grow tired of tending to her.”

Tyrion said nothing. He could see Sansa’s pale, grief-hollowed face in his mind.Tthe tremor in her hands, the quiet endurance that reminded him more of a statue than a girl. If she smiled now, there was reason for it. And reason, in this city, was rarely kind.

He rubbed his temple. Poor child. She belonged anywhere but here. She needed to be away from Joffrey’s spite, away from Cersei’s poison. Somewhere she might breathe again, see the world not as a cage but a garden.

He thought fleetingly of Casterly Rock: the sea below, the endless halls of pale stone, the air cool and salt-sweet. Perhaps she could walk there without fear. Perhaps Tommen too, soft, gentle Tommen, might find safety far from his brother’s shadow. He knew that Sansa would enjoy Tommen's company. Certainly more than she enjoyed his. 

Of course, his father would have to permit it. And Lord Tywin Lannister allowed nothing without purpose.

Shae broke his reverie with a brittle laugh. “You pity her,” she said. “Always pity. But what of me, my lion?” Her tone turned honeyed, but her eyes gleamed like cut glass. “Am I not the one who warms your bed?”

He looked at her - her beauty, her defiance, the hardness creeping into her gaze - and forced a smile. “You are,” he said softly, drawing her close again. Her breath was warm against his cheek, but the air around them stayed cold.

As he kissed her, the dragon skulls loomed in the dark, vast, unblinking, eternal. In their hollow sockets, the torchlight flickered like living flame, and for a heartbeat, Tyrion thought he saw movement there. Not light, but something deeper. A shadow taking shape. He blinked it away, and when his eyes opened, the darkness was only darkness once more.

Yet even as Shae’s laughter brushed his ear, he could not shake the thought of the shadow, and also of the girl who smiled in secret, in a city where smiles were rarer than mercy.

30TH DAY OF OF THE TWELFTH MOON OF 300 AC

Several hours had passed since Tyrion’s secret tryst with Shae in the bowels of the Red Keep. The memory of the dusty carpet, the stench of age, and the rows of dragon skulls now seemed as distant and harmless as a childhood nightmare. In his bedchamber in the Kitchen Keep, the night pressed down like a shroud. The stones bled cold through the walls, the air still and heavy. Sleep had claimed him quickly, wine still warm in his belly, dreams dissolving into the black quiet of the hour of the wolf.

A scream shattered the silence.

It came from far off, a shrill echo dulled by stone, but sharp enough to carve through his sleep. Then another - louder, closer - followed by a chaos of voices, shouts, and crashing metal. Tyrion jerked upright, heart pounding, eyes blinking into the murk. The sound seemed to come from everywhere at once. Tyrion could hear women wailing, men screaming, boots clattering, a door slammed open or broken down. He swung his legs from the bed, the floor biting cold against his bare feet.

“Sansa?” His voice cracked. He meant to shout louder, but his throat failed him. “Sansa!” The word fell dead in the dark. There was no answer, only the echo of another scream, this one cut short midway, like breath stopped by a knife.

Then the darkness around him moved.

Something vast loomed by the far wall. Deeper than shadow, swallowing the faint gleam of dying coals. At first, he thought his eyes deceived him, that he was still dreaming. But the dark had weight, shape, motion. It uncoiled, stretching upward until it brushed the ceiling, a silhouette of shifting smoke and armored density. Its edges rippled as if its flesh was made of shadow and steel, each breath distorting its outline.

Tyrion froze. His mouth opened, but no sound came. Then the fear broke through, raw and animal. He tried to think, but his mind would not obey. The world had narrowed to heartbeat and breath, both too loud, both wrong. His own body felt borrowed, something wearing him from the inside out.

So did the only thing he could do. He screamed. The sound tore through the dark. Thin, childlike. It did not sound like him.

The sound ripped from him, high and ragged, bouncing off the walls like a child’s cry in a crypt. His hands flew for the dagger beside his bed, his fingers fumbling, knocking it loose, the blade clattering uselessly to the floor. He lurched after it, but his eyes had already found the second figure.

A hooded thing stood beside the giant, motionless as carved stone. The space beneath its cowl was not a face but a void lit from within -  a smooth, glowing oval of violet-blue, glasslike and depthless, pulsing faintly like the heart of a dying ember. The light painted the chamber in eerie hues, throwing Tyrion’s shadow up long and thin across the wall.

A hand emerged from beneath the hood, impossibly pale, its movements slow and deliberate. It rose, fingers curling as if plucking a thread from the air.

Tyrion’s body locked.

It was not the stiffness of fear or the stupor of shock. It was as if the marrow in his bones had turned to iron. Every muscle seized, his breath the only thing left to him, shallow and frantic. He tried to shout again, but the sound died in his throat. His heartbeat pounded in his ears, wild, trapped, frantic, a drumbeat inside a coffin.

It was then that the great shadow bent and took him.

The motion was soundless. One moment it loomed, the next it was upon him. The air went cold where it passed. Tyrion felt its arms close around him. He could not flesh, nor could he feel armor. It felt as if it was something between. They were cold as the grave, rigid as ironwood, yet alive in a way that made his skin crawl. Its grip was unyielding, a clamp of darkness and death. Beneath its form, black mist seethed and coiled, licking the edges of its shape like a living thing. He dangled helplessly, limbs useless, breath wheezing through clenched teeth.

The hooded figure flickered. Not stepping away, not walking, but simply vanishing. One instant it was there, the next there was only air, and a faint scent of cold smoke. The violet-blue light winked out, leaving only the faint, unnatural glow that bled from the monster holding him.

The shadow turned for the door.

The heavy oak latch slid open of its own accord. The door yawned like a mouth and let them pass. The creature’s stride was long and soundless, yet each motion sent tremors up through Tyrion’s chest, as though the world itself recoiled from its touch.

The corridor was death.

The torches had all guttered out, leaving only the faint phosphorescence that bled from the shadow’s body. That thin light crawled across the stones, revealing what the dark had hidden. Blood streaked the floor in long arcs and splashes, black-red and glistening. The walls, once clean whitewash, were smeared with handprints and streaks of gore. The smell hit him next. It was thick, coppery, and sickly sweet, mingled with the stench of excrement and bile. The odor of slaughter.

The first body lay sprawled on its back, throat to ceiling, fingers still curled around the hilt of a sheathed sword. Its head was gone. The cut was too clean, the wound cauterized by something that was not fire. A few feet away, the head itself rested against the wall, face twisted mid-shout, mouth open in a final cry. Its eyes had rolled up white. Tyrion could see where the pooling blood had begun to thicken, already clotting in the chill.

Another, and another. A trail of corpses led down the passage - redcloaks, goldcloaks, even kitchen guards in quilted jerkins - every one of them headless. The cuts were perfect, surgical. Blood sprayed across the walls in high arcs, dotting a tapestry of the Lannister lion with a hundred dark spots that gleamed like rusted gold. A guard slumped against the wall, his hand still raised as though to ward off a blow. His fingers were gone, five little stumps that ended in bone and tendon, the digits scattered across the floor like white beetles in a pool of red.

He gagged. The motion made no sound, his stomach heaving against frozen muscles. The stench was unbearable -  hot metal, sweat, the sour tang of voided bowels. His eyes watered. If he could have retched, he would have. The shadow’s grip did not loosen.

Movement flickered ahead. A small, shuddering sound. Two servants huddled in a corner, clinging to one another. A scullion boy in a filthy nightshirt stared at the creature through eyes wide and bloodshot, mouth opening and closing like a fish gasping on the dock. The older woman beside him had both hands clasped over her mouth, her fingers trembling. When the creature passed, she let out a strangled noise and sank to her knees. The boy broke then, screaming once before choking on it, his body convulsing as if the sound itself had struck him down. The woman shook, teeth chattering audibly, and a dark stain spread beneath her skirts.

Another shadow crossed the corridor ahead, a hulking shape dragging a redcloak by one arm. The guard’s head lolled loosely in the crook of its other hand, his face slack and pale. The creature moved past without pause, its outline rippling like smoke, vanishing around the turn.

Tyrion’s eyes darted wildly. This cannot be real. No man moves so. No sword cuts so cleanly. He tried to breathe slow, to think. This is a dream. A spell. Madness.

But the blood was too real, the smell too heavy, the corpses too solid to deny. Somewhere inside him, his mind began to splinter.

He wondered if he was still dreaming, or if he had finally gone mad. It didn’t matter. Madness would have been kinder.

They reached the stairwell. The shadow’s stride was relentless, each step noiseless but felt in Tyrion’s bone, a vibration through stone and flesh. Down they went, past the kitchens, past open doors where food had spilled across the floors: overturned bowls, broken bread, spilled wine pooling like old blood. The air grew thicker, fouler, reeking of smoke and gore. Even the shadows here seemed darker, heavier.

When they exited the Keep and emerged into the outer courtyard, Tyrion’s mind gave up pretending.

The air was alive with screams. So many, each one was thick with agony. Blood slicked the cobblestones, pooling beneath bodies and running in rivulets toward the drains. Dozens lay sprawled across the yard: goldcloaks in half armor, redcloaks with their crimson cloaks darkened to black, knights still in their nightshirts. None had their heads. The heads were scattered. Some had rolled to the walls, some had been arranged neatly in rows by unseen hands. The pale faces of the dead looked up at the sky like an audience of ghosts.

The torches along the walls had been snuffed out, yet the yard glowed faintly with the unearthly light that bled from the shadow creatures stalking through it. They moved like phantoms, long-limbed and tireless. One bent to lift a corpse; another dragged two men by their ankles, leaving twin streaks of red in their wake. The silence between screams was worse than the screams themselves, heavy, suffocating, unnatural.

A man - a gate guard, judging by his half-sword and tabard - gurgled nearby, trying to crawl. His neck was half-severed, head hanging by a strip of flesh. He tried to speak and produced only a wet hiss before the shadow nearest him turned, pressed a hand to his back, and finished it with one soundless twist. The body went still.

Tyrion’s eyes found the barbican. The great bronze gates were barred and bolted, the beams sealed fast. A dozen men lay before it, or parts of them. One head rested upright against the door, eyes open and staring toward the sky as though begging the gods. Blood streaked the bronze where the warmth of it had met cold metal and steamed.

Beyond the walls, King’s Landing slept on, unaware. No bells. No horns. No watchmen shouting alarm. The silence of the city pressed in around the slaughter, making it all the more monstrous.

“Why?” The word tore from Tyrion’s throat in a rasp of disbelief, so faint he barely heard it himself. He did not know if he meant it for the gods, or for whatever hand commanded these horrors. "Gods, seven hells, what is this-what in the gods is this?"

No one answered. The wind moaned through the yard, tugging at cloaks, stirring the dead men’s hair. The shadows marched on, their cold light flickering against the Red Keep’s high walls like torchlight reflected in black water.

And in the arms of the monster that carried him, Tyrion Lannister could do nothing but stare and pray that the darkness did not turn its head his way.

The fifth shadow stood utterly still before the Iron Throne. It did not shift, did not breathe. It was a colossal, inky spectre, its faint violet glow casting long, warped silhouettes across the jagged blades of steel behind it. The others loomed like statues, holding their captives fast. But this one was different. It waited.

The air seemed to thicken around it. A faint vibration rippled through the stones beneath Tyrion’s feet, so slight he thought it imagination, yet he felt it in his teeth, in his chest. The torches nearest the dais guttered and dimmed, their flames bending inward toward the dark as if drawn by some unseen breath. The silence grew taut, alive, waiting to snap.

And then it began to die.

It happened all at once. The vast shape unravelled, its black mass shredding apart like torn silk. The air shimmered where it stood, as though the darkness itself were being peeled away. Wisps of shadow curled upward, writhing tendrils that twisted and dissolved into smoke. The towering figure disintegrated in silence, its outline breaking into drifting ribbons of black fog that slithered across the floor and vanished.

Tyrion’s pulse thundered in his ears. Something was inside the shadow, something emerging. His mind clawed for reason - some trick of the eyes, some nightmare of drink and fear - but no reason would come. His body strained against its invisible bonds, trembling as if the air itself carried power. 

A man stepped from the mist.

For a moment, the sight made no sense. He seemed too small, too human, to have been born of that monstrous darkness. Yet as he moved forward, the room itself seemed to contract around him. He looked scarcely older than twenty, but there was nothing of youth in his bearing.

Thick, dark-brown hair fell in untamed waves across his brow, its colour almost black in the gloom. His face was pale but strong, its lines hard-cut and lean. His eyes were grey, but not the cool, misty grey of northern skies. They were the grey of steel being forged, of metal that had tasted flame and still held the heat of it. When they passed over Tyrion, his breath caught. It felt like being seen and judged in the same instant, as though those eyes could flay a man’s soul bare.

He was dressed in black from throat to heel, no crown, no sigil, no armour. His garments were plain but immaculate, the fabric seeming to swallow the light. He was not armed, but he did not need to be. Power hung about him like a shroud, vast and silent.

The air wavered faintly around him, as though the room itself bent toward him. The torches flared, their flames drawn higher for a heartbeat before bowing low again. Even the shadows cast by the corpses seemed to stretch in his direction, thin and reverent. Tyrion felt the pull of it in his bones, a force both magnetic and repulsive, divine and monstrous all at once.

The young man said nothing.

Instead, he walked among them with an unnerving calm. His steps and movement measured, deliberate, predatory. His boots made no sound as he moved across the blood-slick floor. The silence magnified everything: the faint, wet drag of blood against the soles; the rasp of his sleeve brushing fabric; the low, shuddering breaths of those who dared to look upon him. He circled before the line of prisoners slowly, eyes gliding from one Lannister to the next like a wolf taking stock of his prey.

His father met that gaze and faltered. For the first time in Tyrion’s life, his father’s composure broke entirely. His breath came shallow, his throat working, and his eyes, once sharp as razors,  trembled with disbelief. His lips parted as if to speak, but no words came.

Even Cersei crumbled under that stare; her chin dropped, her hand gripping at the shadow’s arm as if its unnatural solidity might somehow anchor her in this nightmare. Her eyes darted between the young man and the throne behind him, as though the two were pieces of the same impossible dream.

His uncle whispered something - a prayer, perhaps - but his voice came out cracked and small, lost beneath the weight of silence. Lancel’s tears streamed unchecked, his mouth open in a silent sob, his knees trembling in the shadow’s grasp. Joffrey’s breath hitched audibly; his whole frame quivered, sweat glistening across his temple. Tommen had buried his face in his mother’s sleeve, whimpering into the crimson silk.

Then the stranger’s eyes found Tyrion.

For a heartbeat, he could not breathe. The gaze fixed upon him was cold, impersonal, dissecting. There was no recognition there, only appraisal, as though Tyrion were not a man but a piece of meat being weighed. The stranger’s lips moved faintly, the barest curl that was neither smile nor sneer, a ghost of expression that made Tyrion’s heart lurch with dread and awe. He had seen kings rage, lords beg, but this quiet, this composure, terrified him more than all of it. There was no madness in this man’s eyes, no joy in cruelty. Only intent. Cold, perfect intent.

And then the man turned.

He bent his knees, and before Tyrion could register what he was seeing, he leapt. The movement was fluid, effortless. Impossibly high, impossibly fast. He soared upward, cloak whipping in the air, and came down upon the dais before the Iron Throne with a heavy, echoing thud that made the torches shudder in their sconces. The air seemed to ripple outward from where he landed, stirring the thin veils of smoke that hung above the corpses.

He stood before the Iron Throne for a long moment, regarding it in silence. The monstrous seat rose above him, its blades glinting faintly, forged to wound, to scar, to remind all men that kingship was a torment. It had cut the Mad King, pierced Maegor the Cruel, drawn the blood of every man foolish enough to claim it.

But not this one.

The stranger ascended the dais without hesitation and seated himself upon the throne. The iron did not pierce him. The blades seemed to soften beneath his weight, as though the throne itself recognized its master. He sat tall and still, the dark folds of his cloak pooling like liquid shadow around him. One hand rested on the armrest, the other draped idly across his knee. His eyes were cast forward, calm and cold.

No one spoke. No one moved. Even Tommen’s whimpers had died into hiccupped silence.

The faint flicker of torchlight danced across the man’s face, and for an instant Tyrion thought the steel points of the throne behind him looked less like swords and more like wings that were black, serrated and half-unfurled.

The hall held its breath. No one dared shift or whisper. Even the shadows seemed frozen, their faint glows dimmed, waiting for his command. When he finally blinked, it felt like the first movement in an age. The world itself seemed to exhale, trembling under the weight of the truth that had taken form before them.

Tyrion’s heart beat so hard it hurt. His body screamed for air, but terror locked his lungs. Every part of him rebelled against what he saw, against the sheer wrongness of it. This young, nameless man, seated where kings bled and burned. Yet beneath that terror, another thought crept in, unwelcome but impossible to deny.

He looked right there.

Regal. Commanding. Inevitable.

The Iron Throne, bane and curse of so many, did not reject him. It embraced him. As though it had been waiting for him all along. 

Before Tyrion could make sense of what he had just heard, of Rhaegar, Lyanna, the blood of dragon and wolf, the world shifted again.

The man on the Iron Throne vanished.

There was no movement, no blur of speed, no step or sound. One heartbeat he sat upon the throne of swords, and in the next, he stood before them at the foot of the dais. The intervening distance simply ceased to exist. The air where he had been shimmered faintly, like heat over stone.

Tyrion’s stomach lurched. His mind scrabbled for sense, for any framework of reason that could hold such an impossibility. Even the shadows that bound them obeyed physical laws. They had moved, lifted, struck. But this… this was something else. The space between had folded. The man had stepped through the world itself.

His heart hammered against his ribs, a rabbit’s panic in a lion’s cage. Every hair on his arms stood on end. The torchlight dimmed as though the flames themselves recoiled from him.

When the man - Jon Snow, if such a name still meant anything - spoke, the sound was not loud, yet it filled every hollow of the chamber. It was as if the air itself bent to carry his words, amplifying them, echoing them through the marrow of the living and the dead alike.

“None of you will leave this hall alive. House Lannister will answer for its crimes. Against House Stark, against House Targaryen, against the blood of the innocent. When I am finished, there shall be as many Lannisters in this world as there are Casterlys.”

The voice carried no rage, no passion. It was cold and final, an executioner’s tone.

The meaning struck Tyrion like a mace to the chest. His lungs seized. His breath caught and escaped in a strangled gasp that he could not suppress. The sound of it was echoed by others -  the quick intake of Kevan’s breath, the trembling whimper from Lancel, the stifled sob from Tommen.

And then Cersei screamed.

It was Joffrey broke next.

The boy-king’s fear twisted into fury, brittle and shrill. “Monster!” he screamed, his voice high, cracking with hysteria. “You think you can threaten me? I am your king! I will have you torn apart, I shall have your head-” His threats devolved into incoherent rage, his words tumbling over themselves. Spittle flew from his mouth. “Traitor! Bastard! You are nothing! You are nothing!”

The man before him did not react. He stood utterly still, the faint flicker of torchlight tracing the hard lines of his face. His expression did not shift. There was no anger, nor amusement, until, at last, one corner of his mouth lifted. A faint, almost absent smirk. It was as though he regarded Joffrey’s fury the way one might watch a child scream at a storm.

Tyrion waited for his father to speak. He waited for the cutting voice, the command that would slice through chaos as it always had. The iron calm of Tywin Lannister, Lord of Casterly Rock, Warden of the West, Hand of the King, whose will had bent armies and kings alike.

But there was nothing. No order. No word. No sound. His father's silence was worse than any scream.

The only sounds in the throne room now was the flicker of torches and the ragged, broken cries of Tommen. The boy’s tears streamed freely, his sobs small and helpless. He clutched at his nightshirt, his small fists trembling, looking not at the figure before them but at the floor, as though he thought, foolishly, that if he did not meet its gaze, he might be spared.

Tyrion’s heart twisted painfully. Tommen was only a child. Soft, kind, guileless. He did not understand what doom had fallen over them. Even Tyrion was only beginning to understand. 

The words Jon Snow had spoken - the calm, absolute finality of them - left no doubt. This was not conquest. This was not vengeance as men knew it. This was erasure.

House Lannister - the golden lions of the Rock, whose wealth had bought thrones, whose name had been whispered in awe and fear for generations - was to be extinguished, struck from history, ground into dust.

It could not be. No single man could unmake a house so vast, so rooted, so powerful. And yet Tyrion could not convince himself of that lie.

Had not one man already slaughtered their guards like cattle? Tyrion had no doubt that this man commanded the shadows that held him and his family, that had slaughtered the guards. Had not shadows borne them like dolls through the Red Keep’s halls? Had not the impossible already become real?

He felt madness creeping at the edges of his thoughts. He felt a numb, dissociative haze. The throne room, with its pools of blood and flickering lights, felt unreal, like a painting half-seen through fog.

He thought suddenly of the Blackwater, of fire raining from the sky, of green flame devouring men alive. He remembered the agony, the taste of his own blood, the moment he had fallen beneath the chaos.

What if he had never risen again? What if this - the shadows, the slaughter, the man born of smoke and vengeance - was not life at all, but death? The fevered dream of a dying mind, the Crone’s final vision as she weighed his soul in her wrinkled hand?

His heart pounded against his ribs, fast and uneven. His mouth filled with the taste of metal. No, not dream. Not madness. The pain, the terror, they were too real. The man standing before them was real. His voice, low and terrible, still reverberated through the air like an echo of judgment.

And though Tyrion’s reason rebelled, his heart knew one thing beyond doubt: they were already dead. They had simply not yet been made to die.

It happened too quickly for Tyrion’s mind to comprehend, too suddenly for reason to keep pace with terror.

One moment the man stood motionless at the base of the Iron Throne - a dark figure framed in steel and shadow - and the next, he was gone. There was no sound, no stir of air, only a flicker, as if the world itself had blinked. When sight returned, he was standing again in the very same place, only now Tommen was before him, small and trembling, his head caught beneath the man’s hand.

The boy’s golden hair was flattened under the iron weight of that palm, his body rigid in terror. In the other hand, the man held a dagger - long, narrow, and curved like a serpent’s fang - its edge glinting in the torchlight, scattering it into a thousand cold, merciless shards.

Tyrion’s stomach dropped. His heart hammered once, twice, then seemed to forget how. He had not seen movement. Not the blur of speed, not even a shift of shadow. It was as though time itself had fractured, as though one heartbeat had been stolen from the world, and in its absence, doom had descended.

Cersei’s scream came first.

It tore through the throne room, ragged and raw, rising from deep within her like a wound given voice. The sound was not merely loud. No, it was unnatural, piercing the air like glass shattering against stone. Kevan bellowed Tommen's name, his voice hoarse with horror, while Lancel cried out wordlessly, the strangled sound of a child-man too terrified to pray.

And then came the sound Tyrion had never imagined he would hear: his father panicked shouting.

“Stop!” Tywin’s voice, once the command of kings and armies, broke in the air, harsh and cracked with panic. No calculation, no control. There was only naked fear. The sound of it froze Tyrion’s blood where it flowed. "Stop this madness! Release the boy! Release him now!" 

If Tywin Lannister could sound afraid, then the world had lost all meaning.

Tyrion felt his own voice escape him. A strangled cry, part plea, part curse, part incoherent denial. His body remained rigid in the unyielding grasp of the shadow, muscles locked, tongue thick and useless, but the sound tore free anyway, some primal instinct forcing it out. He wanted to shout No, to beg, to threaten, to do something. Anything.

But there was nothing left to do.

The man’s voice rolled through the hall like thunder over a grave. Cold. Final. Inevitable.

“The blood debt must be paid,” he said. “For my half-siblings, Rhaenys and Aegon, babes slaughtered. For their mother, Princess Elia Martell, raped and murdered. For the Starks who were betrayed and butchered. For my father. For my brother, for the King in the North, the Young Wolf. Their deaths will be repaid, with usury.”

The words fell heavy as tombstones. And then the dagger moved.

It was not a strike. It was an execution. One instant the blade glimmered above the child’s head; in the next, it swept in a single, perfect arc. No wasted motion, no flourish, no hesitation. The sound was soft, followed by the wet crack of bone parting and the rush of blood.

Tyrion watched as Tommen’s small body folded upon itself. For a moment it seemed to kneel, as though in supplication, before collapsing lifeless to the floor. A gout of blood fountained upward, warm and bright, splattering across the stone and the hem of the man’s black cloak.

In his left hand, the man held his nephew's severed head aloft. It was small, pale, and still. Eyes wide, mouth parted as if to speak a final plea that never came. The sight of it cleaved something inside Tyrion that could never mend.

The throne room erupted into chaos.

Cersei’s wails drowned the air. Her voice tore itself to shreds with every scream, rising higher and higher until it seemed to splinter against the vaults above. It seemed the paralysis had broken for her now. She strained against the arms of her captor, her hair tangled, her face contorted in grief so total it defied humanity. The sound of her anguish seemed to claw at the stones themselves.

Kevan’s cry joined hers, deep and broken. Lancel choked out a sob. Even Joffrey’s shrill bravado dissolved into hysterical noise. He shrieked denials, curses, threats, the voice of a boy-king stripped of crown and courage alike. His knees buckled, his limbs shook, and the words tumbled out of him like gibberish, a cascade of terror disguised as fury.

Tyrion could not move. Could not look away. The horror fixed him as surely as the shadow’s hand.

Tommen’s body lay crumpled at the stranger’s feet, his blood spreading in a widening pool that crept toward the dais in sluggish rivers. The rich red turned black where it met the cold flagstones. The smell hit Tyrion. It was copper, salt, something sharp and animal that filled his lungs and clung to his throat. He wanted to retch, but even that small mercy was denied him.

He had seen death before, more than most men. He had seen soldiers torn apart on the Blackwater, seen men crushed, burned, drowned, mutilated. But this… this was different. Those men had died as soldiers, as enemies in battle. Tommen had been a child. His only crime had been his birth.

And still the sound came.

Cersei’s screams clawed at his ears, echoing until it seemed the whole of the Red Keep was wailing with her. They rose and fell, broke and rose again, endless, relentless, each one sharper, more desperate than the last. The walls carried it, the iron of the throne drank it, until the very air seemed alive with grief.

No mortal voice should have been able to scream so long, so loud. Tyrion half-believed the sound was some kind of wicked sorcery - the mother’s agony twisted into an eternal dirge that would haunt the keep until the end of days.

His reason tried to resist. It whispered that this was illusion, some fever dream. That no boy’s blood could spill so much, no man could move like that, no woman could scream so endlessly. But the smell of iron, the slick of blood beneath the man’s boots, the chill crawling up Tyrion’s spine told him otherwise.

It was real. And the man - Jon Snow, or whatever he had become - stood unmoved amid the carnage, the boy’s head still in his hand, his expression as cold and pitiless as the grave.

For a long, unbearable moment he simply regarded it - the small, lifeless face, the wide eyes frozen in terror - before lowering himself to one knee. With a motion almost gentle, almost reverent, he set the head upon the blood-slick floor, as though returning it to the world it no longer belonged to. It was the kind of tenderness that belonged to septons and executioners, a perverse sanctity in the way he handled death, as though this act, too, was part of some holy reckoning.

The light caught the steel of the dagger again, glinting red with blood.

Tyrion felt his heart break. He could not even close his eyes. He could not look away. 

Before Tyrion could even wrestle sense from madness, the man moved again, or rather, the air folded around him once more, breaking and reforming as if time itself had blinked.

One instant, he stood still at the foot of the Iron Throne. The next, Joffrey was no longer clutched in the grip of the shadow that had restrained him. He was in the man’s hands, seized as effortlessly as if plucked from the air. One hand locked cruelly around the golden-haired boy’s skull, forcing his head back, while the other held the dagger that had slain Tommen. Its blade, long and narrow, glinted wickedly in the light of the scattered torches, catching every reflection of blood already staining its edge.

Tyrion’s mind could not process the transition. There had been no movement. No stride, no flash, not even the faintest blur of speed. The man had simply appeared, his arm poised for slaughter, the weapon already raised. It was not the speed of a killer but the power of something unbound by mortal constraint.

Joffrey screamed.

All the fury and arrogance that had once filled the boy-king’s voice dissolved into pure, undiluted panic. His threats collapsed into gasping, incoherent pleas. “No, wait, no, I am the King, I am your-” His words shattered into sobs before they could form. The sound was high and pitiful, like a child begging a storm to spare him. His limbs twitched against invisible restraints, muscles jerking uselessly as he struggled to free himself from the paralysis that gripped them all.

He could do nothing - none of them could - save tremble in the face of the impossible.

The man leaned close, his voice low but vast, cutting through Joffrey’s cries with terrible clarity.

“You murdered my father,” he said, each word measured and heavy, as if carved into stone. “You ordered Lord Eddard Stark’s death and called it justice. You named his a traitor. You mocked him as his head fell before your court. You made my sister watch, and you had her beaten for your pleasure.”

He paused, his grey eyes glinting like cold steel in the torchlight. “I did not enjoy killing your brother, and I will not enjoy killing your sister, but I will enjoy this far more than you enjoyed Sansa's pain.”

The dagger flashed.

A wet, slicing sound cut through the air, impossibly soft and yet deafening in the silence that followed. Blood spurted in a bright red fan, pattering against the stone steps. The man lifted the head high into the torchlight. The face was still frozen in disbelief - eyes wide, mouth parted as if still trying to form the word no.

The body crumpled beside Tommen’s, pale limbs folding limply atop one another, nightclothes darkening as the blood spread beneath them. The smell of it hit Tyrion in waves: copper and salt and something else, something sharp and burnt, like metal left too long in a forge.

Cersei’s screams tore the world apart.

They were louder than before. Louder than any human voice should ever have been. The pitch climbed higher, sharper, until Tyrion thought the sound might split his skull. It echoed and re-echoed through the hall, bouncing from the iron blades of the throne, turning the great chamber into a cage of grief. Her voice cracked and bled, yet still she screamed, each cry more desperate than the last, the agony of a mother transformed into something inhuman, the howl of a creature being torn from her own flesh.

The paralysis that had gripped the others seemed to have broken. His uncle was roaring. His father was yelling and screaming and thrashing against the grip of the shadow monster that held him and Cersei. Lancel sobbed uncontrollably, his voice breaking into gasps. Joffrey’s severed head swung from the stranger’s grasp, droplets of blood trailing through the air. 

The sound of Cersei's screams and wails became unbearable. Tyrion’s ears rang, his skull pounding as if struck from within. His vision blurred at the edges. He wanted to cover his ears, to shut out that endless wail, but his body remained bound in the unyielding grasp of the shadow.

Still the man did not stop.

The world blinked.

It was that same terrible stillness between moments, that silent dislocation that bent the laws of the world. One heartbeat he stood motionless amid the carnage -  a dark figure framed in shadow and steel - and in the next, he was gone. The air did not stir. Then, just as suddenly, he was there again, standing in the very same place, only now Cersei knelt before him.

Her body trembled, held upright by unseen force, her golden hair dishevelled and matted with blood. His hand was splayed across the top of her head, fingers threading through her hair, pressing down with terrible calm. In his other hand gleamed the dagger, its curved edge still wet with her sons’ blood.

She screamed even as he appeared, her voice breaking into a shriek that scraped the limits of sound. Her eyes were wide and wild, teeth bared like an animal’s. Her mouth worked soundlessly now, hoarse from terror.

Tyrion could not comprehend what he was seeing. His mind rebelled, denying what his eyes insisted upon. This could not be real. This could not be happening. And yet the moment stretched, terrible and eternal, until the blade fell.

A sharp hiss, a single motion,  too quick for the mind to follow.

Blood spattered across the tiles in a dark arc. The body that had once been Cersei Lannister crumpled gracelessly to the floor beside her sons, the crimson of her nightgown blending into the spreading pool beneath them. Her golden head rolled a short distance, its hair dragging through blood, eyes glassy and unseeing.

But her screams did not stop.

They lingered. Not from her throat, but within Tyrion’s skull. He could hear them still, echoing faint and distorted, as if her final cry had been branded onto the air itself. The silence that followed was somehow worse. It was vast, suffocating, crushing the breath from his lungs.

Tyrion strained for his father’s voice. Any sound, whether it be command, rage, defiance. He wanted to hear anything. But there was only quiet. 

At last, the man turned to Tyrion’s father.

There was no hesitation, no pause to savour the slaughter. One blink, and he was before Tywin Lannister. The air shivered with his movement, the torchlight bending, as though the very world recoiled from him. His hand came down like a vice upon the Lord of Casterly Rock’s head, forcing him to his knees. The motion was deliberate, merciless. 

Tywin was made to look. The stranger’s grip twisted, turning his father’s face toward the horror sprawled across the floor. The lifeless corpses of his blood: his grandsons Joffrey and Tommen, pale and slack with death; his daughter Cersei, her golden hair matted dark with blood; his brother Kevan lying like a butchered ox; his nephew Lancel collapsed beside him. Blood soaked their silks, pooled beneath them, streaked the stones of the throne room like the veins of some diseased heart. The Iron Throne loomed behind, black and pitiless, its shadow stretching long over their bodies.

Still, his father said nothing.

He did not plead, did not snarl. His lips pressed thin, his jaw clenched, but his eyes betrayed him. Naked, unguarded terror. The iron will that had broken bannermen and crushed houses seemed to crumble all at once. In that moment, he was not the Lord of Casterly Rock, not the Warden of the West. He was only a man. 

The stranger leaned close. His voice filled the hall; his voice was cold, resonant and steeped in venom.

“House Lannister,” he said softly, and the words seemed to shiver through the very air, “will be nothing more than a memory when I am done." 

He drew closer still. “No longer will your house remain. Your line will die, and once I am done, so will your name. You will not be remembered for power or triumph, but for ruin. For treachery. For a legacy written in blood and greed. The Rock will fall, and no man will sing your name except in curses.”

Lord Tywin's jaw trembled. For an instant, Tyrion thought he might speak. He saw the flicker of words forming, a breath drawn through clenched teeth, some last final defiance. But before the sound could come, the stranger spoke again.

“I was going to kill you slowly, Lord Tywin. Slowly, and painfully. But watching your blood die screaming before your eyes… that will suffice. You have reaped your harvest. I only collect the debt.”

His eyes burned with cold light. It was not rage nor madness that flickered in his eyes, but judgement. “I will find your son Jaime,” he went on. “He is out there somewhere. The Kingslayer will not escape me. He will die knowing you failed to save even him. After him, I will kill every man, woman and child that bears the name Lannister. And when all the lions are gone, when your lands lie silent and your house is naught but bones, the world will remember you not as the mightiest of lords, but as the architect of your own ruin.”

The dagger gleamed.

There was no ceremony to the act. No flourish. One swift, fluid motion, and the blade opened Tywin Lannister's throat with a clean, terrible finality. The cut was so precise, so effortless, that for a heartbeat Tyrion thought nothing had happened. Then his father’s head rolled from his shoulders, and the blood that followed came in a torrent, spilling across the floor to mingle with that of his kin.

The stranger lifted the severed head, holding it high. His eyes studied it with the cold scrutiny of a judge appraising a verdict. Whatever he saw there seemed to please him, for a faint smile touched his lips. Then, with a flick of his wrist, he let it fall among the others.

The thud echoed like a closing door.

Something in Tyrion broke. His thoughts fractured into silence, his mind hollowed by what his eyes could no longer deny. He tried to think, to reason, to comprehend, but reason had abandoned him. The mighty lions of Lannister, reduced to carcasses on a blood-slick floor.

The man turned to him.

Tyrion barely registered the movement, only the sudden presence before him. His mind and senses was numb to everything now. The stranger’s eyes met his, grey and merciless, the colour of storm clouds before the breaking. His shadow fell across Tyrion like a shroud.

The dagger rose.

Up close, the blade gleamed red, slick with the blood of every one of his kin that had come before him. Tyrion wanted to sspit in defiance, but he could not. His tongue was dead in his mouth.

The man tilted his head slightly, studying him. When he spoke, it was almost gentle.

“You were the clever and kind one, according to Sansa,” he said softly. “You treated her well. For that, I thank you. But still, it is not enough to spare your life. You are still a Lannister after all.”

The dagger plunged. Pain flared white-hot, cutting through his throat like liquid fire. He tried to cry out, but only a wet gurgle came. His vision blurred. The world tilted and spun. Blood flooded his mouth, warm and metallic.

In the heartbeat before the darkness swallowed him, he thought of Shae, of his brother Jaime, of Tommen and Myrcella, and finally, he thought of Tysha. 

The world faded. And then there was nothing.

Chapter Text

30TH DAY OF THE TWELFTH MOON OF 299 AC

The lantern above the door swayed in the wind like a temptress, its scarlet glass spilling a slow array of colour across the cobbles of the Street of Silk. Each gust set the chains creaking softly, so the light seemed to breathe, a languid heartbeat above the most perfumed lane in King’s Landing.

Within, the house glowed warm and red as a heart freshly cut from flesh. Perfume and spice hung thick in the air: amber, myrrh, and the faint trace of cinnamon oil. Cloying and sweet, as though even the walls exhaled desire.

Beneath the lazy hum of the pipes came the murmur of laughter, the rustle of silk, and the clink of glass and coin. The lullaby of sin.

Chataya sat beside a carved Myrish screen, its golden blossoms gleaming in the lanternlight, and watched her girls at work. The mosaic beneath her feet - two women intertwined in an endless embrace - shimmered like living skin in the red glow. She had chosen that piece herself, when the brothel was still a dream and she nothing more than a Summer Islander with a plan and a smile sharp enough to cut.

A house of pleasure, yes, but also of grace, of art, of power wrapped in silk and laughter.

She took pride in that. A whore in King’s Landing could be desperate, broken, or discarded, but never under her roof. Her brothel was sanctuary, a world apart from the stink of the gutters and the cruelty of men. Here, even sin could be beautiful.

Across the room, Dancy and Jayde fluttered about two young knights reeking of Arbor wine and arrogance. Ser Colwen Kidwell, red-faced and round as a blood orange, laughed too loudly at his own jests, slapping his thigh each time as if the noise might make them clever. Beside him, Ser Hobber Redwyne leaned close to whisper something lewd in Jayde’s ear, his breath thick with wine, his hand already wandering beneath the silk of her skirts.

Jayde’s giggle - light, musical, well-rehearsed - rippled through the perfumed air. Her dark curls tumbled forward, veiling her expression but not her intent. She caught Hobber’s hand, feigning coyness, then laced her fingers through his and tugged gently toward the stairs. Dancy followed suit with Brax, teasing him with a backward glance that made the pudgy knight nearly trip over his own boots.

Marei, the quietest but most beautiful of the three, lingered by the stairway, her smile soft as candlelight, a promise half-kept. When the knights reached her, she took each by the wrist and guided them upward, her perfume trailing behind like a lure. Their laughter echoed faintly on the steps - one that sounded brash, foolish, certain - until it was swallowed by the hush of the upper rooms.

Chataya watched them go, her expression unreadable but her mind quietly tallying the night’s earnings.

In the far corner, Yanelle and Sharra poured wine for a trio of Goldcloaks too far gone to remember their vows. Their laughter was brash, graceless, the sound of men drunk on both drink and comfort, but the girls handled them with artful ease. A hand at a shoulder here, a murmured jest there, movements measured as a dance. For a few coins, the weary could feel mighty again.

Six guards watched the walls. Thick-necked, broad-shouldered men in boiled leather, swords and cudgels gleaming at their sides. They were dull-eyed and patient, but dangerous all the same. Chataya had paid them well. No man disturbed the peace of her house. Not while she drew breath.

Her gaze, dark and sharp as polished onyx, drifted to the dais by the hearth, where her daughter sat upon the lap of Lord Inchfield. The Reachman’s cheeks glowed crimson beneath his powder, jewels winking from the sausage-thick fingers that stroked Alayaya’s thigh. Her daughter’s laughter - light, musical, and false - mingled with his in a concord of deceit.

“You are a treasure, sweetling,” Inchfield slurred, his lips slick with wine.

“And you are kind to say so, my lord,” Alayaya purred, brushing his cheek with practiced gentleness. Her voice was a melody born of habit, her smile a weapon honed to perfection.

Chataya watched with something like pride. That smile was her legacy. It was a smile that could melt coin from a miser’s hand, make a man forget his vows, his wife, even his name. Desire was a trade, pleasure a craft. Men did not pay for truth. They paid for the shape of their dreams.

So much of a whore’s work, she thought, was in performance, in illusion. The girls she trained were actresses as fine as any who graced the mummers’ stage. Each gesture, each sigh, each glance was a line rehearsed until it seemed effortless. To the untrained eye, their laughter was genuine, their longing real. That was the art of it. The trick was never letting the lie look like one.

Men came here seeking honesty in falsehood. They sought a place where their lies could be believed, if only for an hour. And the women who gave them that mercy were the finest performers in the city. A true courtesan could read a man as a bard reads a song: she learned his rhythm, his weaknesses, his hidden wants, and played them like strings.

That was her house’s pride. It was not the perfume, nor the silks, nor the gilded screens from Myr, but the theatre of it all. Every sigh, every whispered confession, every tremor of feigned affection was a kind of sorcery.

And none wielded that magic better than Alayaya.

And yet, as she watched her daughter work, her thoughts drifted elsewhere, back to the stranger who had darkened her door three nights past.

He had come late, cloaked and hooded, saying little. Tall, broad-shouldered, he carried himself with the unmistakable bearing of a man who had known war, yet he moved with a restraint no sellsword ever learned. His manner was quiet, but there was something in him that made the air itself seem to bend toward him. A gravity, invisible yet absolute, that drew the eye and held it fast.

Even before he threw back his hood, Chataya had known he was no common man.

When the light found his face, her breath caught. He was young, though not soft. Very handsome, so handsome that she had wondered why he was seeking the services of her establishment, but his handsomeness was one that possessed a kind of severity that made the word seem too small. His hair was dark brown and wavy, his mouth firm, his eyes a grey so dark they looked like storm clouds. 

There was something noble in him, not only in the sharpness of his features or the richness of his voice, but in the way he looked at the world, as if it all belonged to him and he simply had not yet decided what to claim first.

He looked, she thought, like a king out of the old songs, the sort who fought his wars himself and did not kneel even before gods. Regal, commanding, terrible in quiet.

She had known lords, knights, even kings in her time. This one was different. There was no perfume of privilege about him, no lazy arrogance. His power was not borrowed from name or birth. It was his by nature, the way fire belongs to flame.

She had not asked his house or his name, though she had wondered. His speech was too clean for the gutters, too measured, too formal. A northern noble, perhaps, from the look of him, though she wondered why a northern noble would be in the capitol following Lord Eddard Stark's execution and Red Wedding. 

In fact, the stranger had looked somewhat like Lord Stark, from what the little she had remembered of the man, when Lord Petyr Baelish had brought him to her establishment to speak with Mhaegan. He had similiar colouring, though whereas Lord Stark had been rather unremarkable in look, the stranger was anything but. 

When he spoke, his voice was low and steady, the kind of voice that carried further than it should, that filled a room without rising. Even his words seemed to leave an echo behind them, faint and dark.

He had chosen Alayaya and Marei, as many men did, but then he had chosen Chataya too. She had been been surprised. His coin pouch, which seemed to materialise out of thin air, had been heavy enough to make her pause, yet it was not just the gold that swayed her. Curiosity did. No, something more, something she could not name. His gaze stirred both wonder and unease in equal measure, and when he met her eyes, she felt the same strange pull that her girls must have felt before their first act of love: fear and fascination intertwined.

There had been other men, hundreds, but none who made the air feel alive.

He had looked at her, and in that gaze, she had felt small, mortal, and, perhaps most importantly, utterly seen.

When Chataya and her girls had taken him to the special room, when they had stripped him of his clothes, she remembered the way the candlelight had kissed his light skin, drawing gold from shadow. He had looked as though the gods themselves had shaped him from the clay of war and storm, a body sculpted for battle, lean yet powerful, muscled like a maiden’s fantasy.

There had not been an ounce of fat or softness on him, not a line that did not speak of strength held in check. His shoulders were broad, his chest hard beneath the touch, his stomach ridged and taut. His manhood had stood tall and proud when Marei and Alayaya had pulled his trousers down, so long and thick and heavy, one of the largest she had ever seen. 

Yet for all that perfection, it was his scars that held her gaze. Dozens of them, pale against the bronze of his skin. They were thin, silvery traces across his arms and ribs, the long, jagged memory of a blade at his side, another along his shoulder. They told the truth his face would not: this was no idle noble come to play at danger. This was a man who had lived with death and learned to master it.

He had been young. Not much older than Alayaya, from what she could tell. He looked far too young to bear such marks, and yet they suited him. They gave his beauty a kind of gravity, a mortal edge to the godlike form.

The air had seemed to hum where he passed, the stillness between his movements charged with something she could not name. His touch had been sure but unhurried, every gesture deliberate, as though he knew the power of restraint. His gaze - dark, searching, unreadable - had stripped her of her practiced poise, leaving her feeling raw and breathless.

There had been moments when she could not tell whether it was she or he who held the power between them.

The night had been long, full of heat and breath and half-spoken words and choruses of pleasure that lingered after sound had died. He had been tireless, but it was not the tirelessness of youth or hunger. It was something else, an endurance that felt unnatural, inexhaustible, as if what moved within him was not mere flesh and blood but the will of something vast and unseen.

The stranger had taken the three women at once. He had taken them in ways that only the rich and powerful could take a woman, having them pleasure him with their bodies all at once, using their talents to slake his lust. He seemed to revel and indulge in them, as if it had been far too since he had lain with a woman. He had claimed them in every way a man could claim a woman, spending himself in their mouths, their cunts, their faces and their arses. By the time they were done, every part of her - from her face, to her cunt, her arsehole and her thighs - were soaked with his seed. 

Chataya could not speak for her daughter and Marei, but he had made her feel like a woman again, in ways she had almost forgotten were possible. Years of experience had taught her every art of pleasure and illusion, yet under his touch, all her practiced control had unraveled. There had been a reverence in him, a kind of unspoken understanding that turned even the simplest gesture into worship. He had not treated her as a courtesan, nor even as a conquest, but as though she were something sacred to be remembered.

She had not known pleasure like that since her girlhood, the kind that left her trembling and quiet after, too spent to speak, too moved to smile. The kind that reminded her she still lived beneath the silks and artifice, that she was not just a keeper of dreams but still capable of being one. 

By the time the candles had burned to stubs, all three of them - Alayaya, Marei, and Chataya herself - had fallen into an exhausted sleep. He had outlasted them all. Even as their bodies gave way to weariness, he had remained wakeful, calm, almost watchful, as though rest were a thing that need not touch him.

Even now, she could recall how his presence filled the room, how the air had seemed to thrum around him, how every breath had felt drawn from his will alone.

And in that memory, despite the lingering ache, she found herself almost shivering.

When at last dawn came creeping through the window, she had awoken and had reached for him, only to find the space beside her empty. The bed was still warm, the scent of rain and iron still heavy on the air. He had vanished as suddenly as he’d appeared, leaving behind only the ache of memory and the echo of his voice in her blood.

Alayaya had sworn he was not mortal. Marei had been quiet, as usual, but there had been a strange light in her eyes since that night, a quiet contentment edged with longing.

Chataya had told herself it was only another evening’s labour, no different from the hundreds before it. And yet, every so often, when the candles guttered and the pipes grew soft, she would find herself glancing toward the door, half-expecting the stranger to return.

Shaking her head to dispel the thoughts of the tall and handsome young stranger, she turned back to her ledger, counting the neat stacks of silver and gold arrayed before her. The pipe-player’s tune shifted to something slow and wistful, a melody that wound through the air like smoke, and for a moment, she thought she smelled rain again.

Then came the scream.

It sliced through the music like a blade through silk, high, raw, and wet with terror.

Chataya’s head snapped up. Yanelle and Sharra were standing rigid, faces pale, mouths open. For a heartbeat she thought one of the Goldcloaks had struck them. Then she saw the blood.

Two of the men lay headless on the floor, their helms rolling away like kicked bowls, trailing hair and froth. The third’s head clung to a ribbon of flesh before it tore loose, eyes blinking, mouth still working as though it refused to believe it was dead. Blood sprayed in broad, lazy arcs across the tiles, soaking rugs and silks, speckling the ankles of the girls who screamed and scrambled back.

The perfume of myrrh curdled beneath the iron stink of death. The warm air seemed to thicken with it. Blood pooled across the mosaic, spreading between the entwined lovers until they drowned together in red.

The pipes fell silent. Even the laughter from the upper rooms choked off into stunned quiet. The only sound was the gurgle of blood and the thin, hysterical keening of a girl too young to remember war.

“Gods,” Sharra whispered, her voice shaking. "Gods, have mercy, please, have mercy on me."

“Guards!” Chataya’s voice cracked like a whip. “To me!”

Her men were already moving, steel rasping from scabbards, faces pale but set.

Then she saw it.

A shape was rising from the corpses. Man-shaped, but no man. It was too tall, too broad, too still. The air around it trembled, as if struggling to contain it. Darkness clung to its edges not like smoke but like a wound cut into the world, something the light itself refused to touch. The candlelight bent away, the colour bled out of the walls, the shadows deepened until even the air seemed to rot.

Her body screamed to look away, but she couldn’t. Her mind fought to give the thing a shape, a name, a sense, but there was none. It was a void given form. And yet, she felt its gaze. No eyes, but it looked. Vast, ancient, weighty. The pressure of deep water pressing down on her chest until she could scarcely draw breath.

Her heartbeat was too loud, her skin too tight. She realised her hands were trembling against her skirts. What are you?

The first guard lunged, shouting something she could not hear over the rush of her own blood. He vanished mid-stride. One heartbeat there was a man, then a ruin of limbs and blood. The others faltered, but terror turned to bravado, and they charged together.

Their blades struck air that turned to glass, shattering like ice. The thing slid through them in silence. When it passed, their bodies fell apart as though unstitched, blood painting the walls in ribbons. Bone snapped like twigs. Flesh came apart without sound.

And then it was gone. Just gone.

For a single heartbeat, the room stood frozen. The air itself seemed to recoil.

Then panic erupted.

The crowd surged for the door, overturning tables and trampling through wine and blood. Someone screamed “Demons!” Another shouted for the Seven. Coins spilled and rolled, clattering like scurrying beetles across the floor. The pipe-player dropped his flute and backed against the wall, sobbing. Dancy slipped in blood and went down hard, her scream lost beneath the roar.

From upstairs came more screams, shrieking and endless. Feet thundered down the stair. Dancy, Jayde, Marei, Alyssa, Benara. Her girls were all half-naked, hair wild, faces painted with terror.

“They’re dead!” Dancy sobbed. “The knights, the guards, gods, they’re all dead!”

The door burst open, and people poured out into the night, a tide of terror spilling into the street.

“Mother!” Alayaya’s voice was stripped of all its practiced sweetness. She ran to her, face streaked with tears and powder. “What is happening?”

“I do not know,” Chataya whispered. Her voice trembled despite her will. The words felt thin, weightless. “Something foul. Something not of this world.”

Lord Inchfield collapsed to his knees, his doublet soaked with wine and piss. “Demons,” he gasped. “Dark demons! Gods help us! Seven save us!”

Then the shadows came again.

From the stairwell, three of them descended, taller than men, silent as empty graves. Their bodies rippled as they moved, their outlines bending like heat-haze. In their arms hung the limp bodies of men: Ser Hobber, Ser Deziel, Ser Colwen, and others she recognised. Noble flesh dangling limp as broken dolls. Their eyes were open but glassy, their mouths parted in voiceless gasps.

“Seven save us,” Chataya breathed, though her voice had gone faint and dry. Her heart slammed against her ribs like a caged thing. She wanted to run, to hide, to scream. But her legs would not obey.

Gods, what is happening? Is this our end? Have the gods abandoned us to the darkness in the hells? 

One of the shadow creatures turned its helm toward her.

The air thickened. The torchs and lanterns dimmed. Frost bloomed on the rim of a wine cup. Every breath came out as mist. The silence pressed against her skull until she thought she might scream just to break it.

Lord Inchfield tried to crawl toward the door, sobbing like a child. The nearest shadow stooped, lifted him in one enormous hand - its movement as gentle as a mother would be to their infant - and straightened. His scream broke halfway. The Reachman's body sagged, lifeless, before the thing let it fall.

The sound of him hitting the floor snapped something inside her.

And then, as before, the shadows dissolved, bleeding into the air until nothing remained.

For a long moment, no one moved. The only sound was the slow drip of blood from the tables and the distant tolling of the bells.

Outside, the city screamed.

Chataya’s heartbeat hammered so loud she could feel it in her teeth. Her stomach churned with bile. She looked to her daughter, who stood shaking, eyes wide and uncomprehending.

“We must go,” she said. Her voice came out thin, brittle.

“Go where?” Alayaya clutched her wrist, trembling.

“We must go out,” Chataya whispered. “To see what is happening outside.”

Together they crossed the ruined hall - past blood, past ruin, past what was left of the dead men - and pushed open the door.

The Street of Silk had become a nightmare.

The red lanterns still burned, but their light now fell upon slaughter. Goldcloaks, men whose names she knew, whose coin had fed her girls, lay strewn across the cobbles like butcher’s scraps. Some were cleaved neatly in two. Others had been opened from throat to groin, their entrails glistening like jewels in the light. The air stank of blood, burnt oil, and fear.

Far away, the bells tolled on.

Her girls huddled in the doorway behind her, barefoot, trembling, their silks torn, their faces streaked with tears.

“Back inside!” Chataya’s voice cracked through the air like a whip. “Now! Quickly!”

They obeyed, stumbling and weeping, clinging to one another as they ran. Alayaya helped them, her hands shaking but sure.

Chataya turned one last time to look upon the street. The corpses lay where they had fallen, every one of them a man. Not a woman touched. And it was all guards. 

That thought momentarily chilled her more than the corpses. It was too deliberate. Too knowing.

“Mother,” Alayaya whispered. “What do we do?”

Chataya’s gaze swept the carnage - the laterns, the shadows, the flickering red light that turned everything to blood. She thought of the years spent building this house: the laughter, the warmth, the fragile illusion of safety she had carved out of cruelty. Her kingdom of silk. Her small empire in this city of treachery and cruelty.

“We bar the doors,” she said softly. “And pray they do not look inside.”

Together, mother and daughter herded the girls back in and slid the bolt home with a heavy, echoing click.

Outside, the Street of Silk screamed with the rest of King’s Landing. Inside, Chataya pressed her hand to the trembling wood, and for the first time since leaving the Summer Isles, she felt truly powerless. Her heartbeat still thundered, but the rest of her felt hollow, as though some unseen hand had scooped her out from within and left her body behind to shake in the quiet that followed.

It was the hour of the nightingale, when even the drunks slept and the last lanterns guttered low. Dawn had not yet bled into the east. The city moved like a beast in pain.

Word ran faster than legs. “Old Gate!” voices hacked the dark. “Old Gate’s open! Goldcloaks there! Go north!”

Others swore the gates were shut, that the Watch had fled, that the Stranger Himself rode the walls in black. No one listened. Words meant nothing now. Men clutched rumours as if they were ropes, and let themselves be dragged wherever the crowd went.

The people became a river - a heaving tide of flesh and fear, pressing north through crooked ways and stinking alleys. They dragged children, bundles, old mothers; they prayed and cursed in the same breath. A woman stumbled with a crying babe at her breast. A teamster hauled a chest by its iron ring until his palms split. Boys sprinted ahead to see and sprinted back to lie. Flesh on flesh, elbow against bone and sweat. Someone cried for a husband, someone for the Mother, someone for both, and all the voices tangled until they were only noise.

Among them lurched Corros.

Small and lean with hunger, hair like cobwebs, beard clotted grey against a hollow jaw. He had few teeth left, and those black. His breath stank of vinegar and old wine. Bare feet slapped stone slick with filth. He had slept in doorways, behind taverns, beside dung-carts. He had spent so much time in King's Landing long that he had long forgotten which road had first brought him here, or why.

He did not know why he ran now. The herd made his legs move. To stand still was to drown.

“Old Gate,” he muttered, as if the name itself were a charm. “Old Gate, Old Gate. Mother have mercy.”

His heart beat like a fist on a locked door.

Torchlight showed what others would not see. Goldcloaks lay where they’d fallen, in halves and quarters, or folded into shapes no man’s body should make. Yellow cloaks were black with blood. Armour that should have turned a blade had been sliced clean through, neat as cheese.

Swords lay by stiff hands, clean, unused and useless. Blood trickled into the gutters, mixing with piss and rainwater, a thin red ribbon dragging a tuft of hair and a torn scrap of golden cloth along with it. Corros stared, and beneath his terror, a thin, mean joy stirred.

“The gods have come at last,” he told the dead, his tongue clicking against the ruin of his teeth. “You laughed at old Corros. Kicked his bowl. Who’s laughing now, eh? Stranger’s come for the strong first. Yes, yes.”

The press of bodies swelled again, panic ripening into madness. Men in shirts and breeches, women in night-rails, boys with knives, the old with sticks. All were jammed together, shoving, gasping, choking on their own fear.

A door from a house flew open. A grey-haired man leaned out to ask what news and what was happening to cause such chaos. A stone struck his brow and he fell without a word. A candle-seller had not yet set her stall; the door burst beneath boots and shoulders, and her wares spilled like entrails. Men fought on hands and knees in the wax and wick. A baker’s boy hugged a warm loaf and ran. A larger man dragged him down, beat his fingers until they broke, and tore the bread away. The boy’s wail went high and thin, like a kettle left to boil.

Two washerwomen in damp skirts were driven against a wall by three men stinking of ale and terror. One pawed at laces with shaking hands while the others pinned arms.

“Hush,” one said, voice cracking. “It’s naught. At least if we die to these monsters, you’ll die happy, pretty bird.”

The women screamed.

“Leave ’em!” croaked Corros, though no one heard him. “Leave ’em, leave-”

The first shadow stepped between.

It was there, and then it simply was. Tall, impossibly tall, broad as two men. Smoke drifted from its edges like the breath of winter. It made no sound, but the air went silent around it, as if it had struck glass. The men froze mid-motion, their hands still clutching fabric and flesh.

One tried to speak a prayer. The word never came. The shadow raised an arm, and the first man folded neatly, boneless, like a dropped cloak. The second turned to flee, but his body came apart, the upper half sliding from the lower like butcher’s meat. The third dropped to his knees and wailed like a child before going still.

The women fled, skirts torn and faces white.

By a toppled onion cart, a vendor swung a cudgel at a thief. Another shadow slid out from between two houses, standing between them, like a a black gate where none had been. The cudgel fell from the vendor’s hands. The thief flattened himself to the stones as if hoping to sink into them. The shadow did not move. It only was. Until both men lowered their eyes and dared not breathe.

The city paused.

Knives dropped. Cries stilled mid-breath. Even drunks forgot to laugh. Breath steamed, and the steam curved away from the shapes that filled the streets. Torches guttered and flared, throwing shadows upon shadows.

Corros saw more. One could not help but see. They perched on rooftops like gargoyles come alive, crouched at chimney mouths, knelt upon walls as if in prayer. He counted three at a crossing where a puddle quivered with cold; lost count where two alleys met and the night itself seemed made of them. Their armour caught light in sharp, violet-blue pinpricks that moved when nothing else did. Here one tilted a helm that was no helm. There another turned its facelessness toward a cry, and the cry died unfinished.

They killed soldiers and cutthroats. They broke blades and the hands that held them. They stood between those who would harm and those who would be harmed, and let the rest pass. A man in a gilded half-helm shoved through with a dagger up.

He never reached his mark. The dagger hung in the air before him, quivering, before dropping, followed by what was left of him. A boy darted for a purse; a shadow behind him laid a finger upon his wrist, and the boy let go as if scalded, running away in tears.

“Stranger,” someone whispered. “Seven save us.

"Gods, save us!" Another one shouted. "Save us!” 

Another voice, raw as Corros’s own: “Don’t look at them. They can feel it. These monsters will kill us all!”

No one else was touched. Mothers clutching babes were let pass. A grey-whiskered whore stumbled, and one of the shadows loomed over her until she rose. She fled weeping, muttering prayers. Men who wished only to run were left to run. Men who wished to take were stopped.

It should have soothed him. It did not.

Corros felt seen. That was worse than fear. The city had never spared him. Why should anything start now?

The northward press thickened; the sound swelled - boots, bare feet, sobs, iron on stone - and then broke off. The crowd met something that would not yield, and silence rolled backward through it like a wave. Bodies jammed shoulder to shoulder.

“What is it?” voices cried from behind. “What is it? Gods, what is this?”

Corros wormed forward as he always had, for a crust, for warmth, for a coin, slipping between bodies until his brow was level with the front rank.

The Old Gate loomed from the dark like a beast’s spine. The portcullis was down, iron teeth biting stone. Before it, the Watch lay in a row neat as a lord’s feast: each man on his back, arms at sides, heads twisted wrong. Blood gleamed black. Helm crests were crushed like eggshell.

Above, along the battlements, the shadows stood one by one by one, more than a dozen at least. Some tall as heroes, some less so, all blacker than the night that cloaked them. Spaced like sentinels, they watched the streets and the mass of fearful flesh below.

Three more stood before the gate itself. Where their faces should have been, a faint inner violet-blue burned low, like banked coals. The air around them rippled; heat fled; sight faltered.

Corros’s belly clenched. The smell of blood was pennies on the tongue. His mouth watered, then dried.

“I’ll climb,” a man said down the line. A sellsword, by the look, with a patched jack, short cloak, hilt too fine for his hand. “There, the ivy. I’ll haul a rope.”

He ran. He did not make six strides. The nearest shadow lifted an arm. No sound, no wind, and the man flew backward as though snatched by a hook through his chest. He struck stone with a hollow crack and slid down limp.

Screams burst like birds flushed from cover. The front pressed back, the rear pressed forward. The slow went underfoot. Corros felt knees in his spine, a hand at his neck, a heel grinding his ankle. He caught a broken cart-shaft and clung on while the crowd heaved.

Another man leapt, shouting for the Warrior. He got half the word out before the shadow moved. His head rolled from his shoulders, the mouth still shaping the end of his prayer.

No one else tried. Whatever courage the city had left froze beneath that stillness.

They did not speak. They did not beckon.

A woman fainted and was caught. Not by hands, but by the thickened air itself. She was set gently on her feet again. Torches sighed out. The wind that had tugged the banners fell dead. Dogs ceased to bark.

Something moved. A tremor through bone. Corros felt it in his teeth. It passed through the street like breath drawn in reverse, and the noise of men’s throats died. Tears sprang to Corros’s eyes, though the air was not that cold. He did not know how long it held. Moments stretched thin.

Then, into that hush, came footfalls, and the sound of a child’s sobbing.

The press of the crowd opened, just enough. A boy slipped through like a mouse. Ten, perhaps. Barefoot, filthy, face streaked white with tears. He stared up at the shapes upon the wall and shook.

“All shut,” he gasped. “All the gates. Dragon’s, Blackwater, King’s, River - they’re all shut! They’re on ’em all. Won’t let no one through. They’re on the walls, everywhere. Monsters. Everywhere.”

He folded to his knees, forehead to stone, making a small, helpless sound.

No one went to him. The silence swallowed pity whole.

Something inside Corros broke. Some hard kernel that had kept him alive through hunger and cold and cruelty cracked at last. He had lived on the lie that there was always another street, another door, another mercy. There was not. The city was a bowl, and now the lid had closed.

“There’s no out,” he whispered. “No out, no way-” The words tasted of iron.

Men breathed again, but as if breath were taxed. Someone prayed the Mother’s name until it lost shape. Another promised the Stranger candles if he’d pass them by. A whore traced a seven-pointed star in the crook of her arm.

Corros looked up. The shadows were all spaced along the great walls, several upon the road, faces turned toward men who would never understand them. They did not move. They did not blink.

They were the still point around which the city screamed.

And Corros found he could no longer hear the city at all. His eyes told him it screamed, but the sound lived inside him now, and no gate would ever set it free.

The barracks stank of sweat and iron and men who knew they were doomed. The air was thick, hot with torch smoke, breath, and fear, yet Dorren could not stop shivering. The heat pressed against his skin, but inside he felt hollow, cold in a way that came not from wind or rain, but from knowing his death was near.

Noise filled every space. Captains shouted orders that no one heard. Boots hammered flagstones, shields clattered as men seized them from racks or dropped them in haste. A bench overturned. Someone screamed that the gates should have been barred hours ago. Another bellowed for calm, for discipline, for anything to make the panic seem like purpose. It was the sound of drowning men who thought they were swimming.

Outside, the city screamed. Inside, the Goldcloaks tried to remember they were soldiers.

Dorren stood near the armoury door, spear in hand, heart pounding so hard that each beat drowned his breath. He was one-and-twenty, dockborn, broad-shouldered from hauling casks and crates, his palms still marked with old rope burns. The spear trembled in his hands. He gripped tighter, until the wood bit through skin and his blood slicked the shaft. The taste of iron filled his mouth. He could not tell if it came from the air or his own bitten tongue.

“Hold the line!” someone roared above the din. “Hold fast!”

Ser Addam Marbrand, Commander of the City Watch, stood in the courtyard, his gilded armour gleaming like a torch amid smoke. He moved with the certainty of a man who refused to die cowering. “This is our city!” he shouted. “No man flees while any of us draw breath! Whatever these monsters are, we must kill them!”

The words rang bright and hollow all at once. Around him, men stood in ranks that wavered like candle flames in wind. Courage had leaked out of them long before the fight began. Dorren wanted to believe, but belief was a thing that required hope, and hope had drowned hours ago beneath the sound of screams.

Even the commander’s eyes betrayed him. They flicked once, quick and wary, toward the great doors at the yard’s far end, and there, beyond the barred wood and torchlight, something vast shifted in the dark.

The first blow came.

It was not a sound so much as a force. The gates quivered; the timbers boomed like a struck drum. Dust rained from the rafters. Men froze. Torches stuttered. Even the horses stopped their stamping, ears flat, eyes rolling white.

The second blow came harder. The hinges shrieked like something alive. The air itself seemed to draw in breath.

Then the doors gave way.

They did not shatter. They folded inward, bending like soft metal, curling into themselves until nothing stood between the yard and the night. Darkness poured through. Not the common dark of unlit places, but a darkness with weight, with shape, with purpose. It swallowed flame, sound, and courage alike. Men cried out to the Seven, but their prayers felt like children’s songs before a storm.

The first of them stepped through.

It was enormous. Man-shaped, but it looked so wrong and so inhumane. So demonic. Blacker than pitch, armour blurred at the edges, as though light itself refused to touch it. Two points of faint violet-blue burned in the depths of its helm where eyes should have been. More followed: three, six, a dozen, perhaps more. They moved without sound, without breath. Frost bloomed beneath their feet. The air grew sharp and bitter, stinging the lungs.

“Spears!” Ser Addam roared. “Shields! Hold, damn you!”

Dorren obeyed before thought caught up with him. He levelled his spear and thrust. The point slid through the thing’s chest without slowing, without meeting flesh or bone or anything a weapon could wound. A heartbeat later the wood twisted in his grip and snapped in half with a crack like thunder.

The shadow kept walking.

Around him, the world fell apart. The clang of swords became screams. The clang of shields became the crunch of ribs. The sound of men dying filled the air like a rising tide. Dorren saw a sergeant charge, blade raised, shouting the Warrior’s name. The shadow caught his sword mid-swing between two dark hands and crushed it as though it were tin. The man’s scream ended in a gurgle. His body flew into a pillar and slumped there, broken.

Dorren stumbled backward, tripping over a corpse that was still warm. He fell, palms slipping in blood. The cold hit next. It was a deep, biting chill that sank through his mail and skin into his bones. His breath came in white clouds. His teeth chattered though the room was full of fire.

Through the blur, he saw Ser Addam once more.

The commander stood alone in the yard now, his golden cloak flaring in the wind that followed the invaders. His sword burned bright in the gloom, molten steel in human hands. “Form on me!” he cried, voice ragged but strong. “For King Joffrey! For King’s Landing!”

He charged.

For a heartbeat, courage flared. Men shouted, followed, swung. Gold against black, light against nothing. Dorren saw the blade strike, saw a burst of light that seared his vision. For that instant, he thought the commander might prevail, that perhaps courage still had meaning.

Then the light went out, and the sound died with it.

When the torches caught again, the yard was a graveyard. Men lay strewn like discarded dolls, limbs at impossible angles, eyes wide and unseeing. Blood pooled around the fallen, reflecting the dim firelight in dull crimson patches. The smell was thick - iron, sweat, and something faintly sweet, the smell of burned flesh.

The shadows moved among the dead.

They did not rush or stumble. They walked with the calm purpose of priests performing a ritual. Where they stepped, frost spread across the stones in veins of white and violet-blue. A fallen man groaned; one of them paused, tilted its helm, and pressed a single hand to his chest. When it lifted, the man was still.

One shadow lingered beside Ser Addam’s corpse. The commander’s cloak was torn, his armour split at the collar. His sword lay beside him, broken near the hilt. The shadow seemed to study him, its head tilting slightly, a gesture too human to be comforting. Then it turned and walked on.

Dorren pressed himself against the cold stone of the wall, his breath ragged. His hands shook so violently he could not tell if it was fear or the cold that drove it. The air was white with his breath now, misting in front of him. The frost spread outward, creeping across the flagstones toward his boots.

One of the shadows turned. Its gaze found him. Two dim violet-blue lights, deep and endless, fixed upon his face. They were not cruel. Not kind. Simply aware.

Dorren wanted to pray, to whisper a name, to beg, but his lips were numb, frozen in place. The cold climbed higher through his chest, each heartbeat slower than the last. He felt it reach his throat, his jaw, his eyes. The world dimmed, as though seen through water.

The torches flickered once, then went dark.

When light returned, Dorren sat against the wall, his eyes open, rimed with frost. His spear lay broken beside him. The air still carried the faint scent of iron and snow.

And through the stillness, the shadows lingered. Patient, eternal and unbreathing, their violet-blue eyes burning like distant stars. 

High above King’s Landing, the wind carried the scent of blood and smoke. The city stretched vast and silent beneath the paling sky, its sprawl veiled in ribbons of mist that curled between the rooftops like fading ghosts. The Red Keep loomed upon its hill, its towers dark against the dying stars, its crimson banners hanging limp, stained by soot. The river glimmered faintly beyond the walls, reflecting the wan light of a dawn too pale to be warm.

On the highest roof of Maegor’s Holdfast, Jon Snow stood alone.

The night’s chill whispered through his hair and tugged at the edges of his cloak, black as the void between worlds. It coiled around his boots, flaring and falling in slow, soundless waves. Beneath his feet, the stone was slick with dew and soot; above, the sky bruised toward morning, its first colour trembling faintly along the eastern rim. His breath left him in pale clouds that vanished before the wind could claim them.

The Red Keep still trembled with distant noise. The city below had not fallen silent, though its chaos had broken. King’s Landing no longer screamed, but it had not yet found peace.

Where madness had ruled, there was now confusion, fear, and motion, but with purpose. The streets still seethed with people: beggars, merchants, mothers clutching children, guards stripped of their cloaks. They shouted and stumbled through the smoke, tripping over rubble and ash, their voices rough with exhaustion. The fires that had devoured the city now smouldered low, coughing red light into the fog. The air hung thick with the stink of soot and blood, the bitter tang of fear clinging to every breath.

The noise never stopped: pleas for salvation, prayers to the Seven, the crack of broken windows and the thud of boots on stone, but there was no longer bloodshed. Where men had turned on one another, the shadows stood. They lined the streets and bridges, silent, vast, and unyielding, their eyes glowing violet-blue through the haze. When someone raised a knife or reached for a torch, the air itself seemed to harden; the will to violence drained from their limbs like water from a cracked cup.

At every gate, throngs pressed to escape, shouting and pleading, but none could pass. The portcullises were sealed, and at each stood dark sentinels, still as statues, their presence alone enough to drive the desperate back. Those who tried to force their way through found themselves cast aside by unseen hands, shaken but unharmed.

The city was alive, noisy, and terrified, but it no longer tore itself apart. The panic had become order, the fury caged. The people still cried, still fled, but they did so under watchful eyes that allowed neither harm nor escape. 

Those watchful eyes were his shadows. Thousands of them.

They moved through the city in perfect order, silent and precise. Along the narrow, crooked lanes of Flea Bottom, they flowed like dark water. Across the bridges, through the gates, and over the wharves, they advanced in seamless ranks, a tide of black shapes whose eyes glimmered faintly violet and blue in the half-light. Their armour reflected nothing. Their blades did not gleam. They were darkness given form, obedience given flesh.

Where looters ran, the shadows halted them. Where fire threatened, they smothered it. Where men raised swords against each other, they stood between them, and the fighting ceased. The Watch was broken, its gold cloaks torn and burned, its captains dead, but order had returned all the same. The city’s chaos had been stripped bare, its noise devoured, its fury stilled. Even the wind seemed to hold its breath.

Jon watched it unfold from his high perch. His eyes caught the faint violet-blue sheen of his legion’s gaze below, mirrored in the pools that dotted the streets. It was a terrible beauty, cold and absolute. The rhythm of their movements pulsed faintly in his mind, each shadow a heartbeat, each command an echo through his blood. He felt them all. Every step, every stillness, every sword raised or lowered. They were all bound to his will as if they were the fingers of his own hand.

They were not merely soldiers. They were extensions of himself.

At the gates, they stood like walls of night, massive and unmoving, sealing the city from within and without. Along the docks, they watched the black river, their helms haloed by mist, their shapes reflected in the water like statues of gods drowned in prayer. Around the Great Sept, they ringed the marble steps, silent as the dead, violet-blue-eyed watchers beneath the shattered dome. Even the Hill of Rhaenys was theirs, shadows standing among the charred bones of the dragonpit.

No cry rose now. No song of steel. Only the faint hiss of smoke curling skyward.

The city was his now. 

Every stone, every whisper of breath, every heartbeat that dared continue belonged to his dominion. His shadows would replace the City Watch; they would guard the streets, keep the peace, preserve what life remained. He could feel them, even those furthest away, their cold presence pulsing through the tether that bound them. And within him, there were a thousand and more souls, all waiting, all listening.

His shadows were his eyes, his voice, his will. Through them, he could see the huddled survivors in their doorways, the widows clutching their children, the priests on their knees before shattered altars. He saw them all, and none could see him.

He turned his gaze toward the Red Keep’s towers, the sprawl of roofs and ramparts that crowned the hill. From this height, the castle seemed to breathe, its stones exhaling the heat of the fires that had tried and failed to reach it. Below, the courts lay littered with bodies: guards, servants, and courtiers alike, their blood pooling black in the shadows. His legion had swept through every hall and stair, sparing only those he had chosen. The rest were gone, their souls feeding the silence that now blanketed the fortress.

Jon’s jaw tightened. His face was expressionless, carved of stillness, but behind his calm his thoughts moved like winter storms. He had ended the war in a single night. He had done what kings and dragons never could, capturing the city without siege, without flame. The Lannisters were gone. The bells would toll again, but they would ring for him.

He raised a gloved hand, fingers spread to the wind.

Far below, the shadows stopped as one. Across the city’s breadth, from the River Gate to the Blackwater Rush, the legion knelt. Ten thousand black forms bent as one, their eyes flaring brighter for a single heartbeat, painting the streets in faint strokes of violet-blue fire. It was not noise that answered his command. It was stillness, perfect and unbroken, as if the entire city had fallen into reverent silence before him.

He lowered his hand, and the cold wind brushed across his face.

The sun’s edge broke the horizon, spilling pale light over the bay. The mist turned gold at its tips, but the city below remained shadowed. The dawn’s warmth did not reach it; it belonged to him now, to his rule, to the night made flesh.

He turned northward.

There, in the Kitchen Keep, behind those high stone walls, she waited. Sansa. He thought of her eyes, bright and full of hope even when the world turned cruel; of her voice when she had whispered his name; of the tremor in her breath when he had sworn that she would never be helpless again. He had kept that promise. The city was theirs now.

“Sansa should see,” he muttered to himself, his voice low, almost tender. “My sister should know what is ours now.”

Every marked target had been struck down, without delay and done so efficiently and precisely, the blades of his shadows moving with a precision only death could command. The Lannisters had fallen to his own blade - Tommen, Joffrey, Kevan, Lancel, Tywin, and Tyrion were all gone. The Lannister bannermen - Ser Addam Marbrand, Ser Flement Brax, among others - were all dead.

The Master of Whisperers, the eunuch Varys, had been slain in his own chambers. Grand Maester Pycelle lay slumped beside his table of scrolls, and the Kettleback brothers were killed where they stood.

The rest, those whose blood he did demand, had been secured. The nobles and courtiers - Lord Mace and his family, Prince Oberyn, Lord Ardrian Celtigar, Lady Tanda Stokeworth and her daughters, among others - he had marked for confinement were now locked within the Maidenvault.

None could flee, none could conspire. They were watched by his shadows. When the time was right, he would visit them, with Sansa at his side, to tell them what had happened, what the new order would be, and what future they might earn beneath his rule.

His gaze swept again over the Red Keep. Stones glistened with blood where guards had fallen. Servants lingered at the edges of the carnage, clutching one another, weeping, or frozen in disbelief. They were spared, as he had willed. The keep still needed its hands, and he would not slaughter those he deemed innocent.

Soon, he would have to speak with them, to set them to their duties, to restore order, to make them understand that they lived under a new master who sought not cruelty, but obedience and quiet.

Then came the matter of cleansing. The keep was a slaughterhouse, and he would not have Sansa see it so. She had seen enough of horror. When she stepped outside her chambers again, it would not be into a world of corpses and ruin. The blood, the guts, the stench, all of it must be gone before she walked the halls of her home.

His shadow-mages had their work ahead. Every body within the Red Keep would be gathered and brought to the main courtyard to burn. Those scattered across the city - soldiers, thieves, and the nameless dead - would be dragged to the Dragonpit and given to fire. The smoke would rise over King’s Landing like a warning and a cleansing both.

It was work, but not one to tax his strength. His mana would not be wasted on such things; the mages would channel their own craft, guided by his will. Cleaning the keep and the city with their spells would take a bit of time, but it would not be a burden on them either.

There was so much to be done before he could turn his gaze northward, before the Freys and Boltons paid their debts in blood and his siblings were freed from their scattered fates.

First, the city had to know its ruler. He needed to make his presence known, to establish his authority and power beyond question. Order and peace must be secured, stability restored. The Tyrells, Prince Oberyn and the other lords and ladies confined within the Maidenvault would need to bend the knee and swear their fealty. The High Septon must be met and won to his cause, and the realm would need to see him crowned in the Great Sept of Baelor beneath the eyes of gods and men alike.

These were the first steps toward the world he meant to build, and each would demand his hand before dawn gave way to day.

He pictured the coming hours: his shadows dragging the fallen through the gates, his mages sealing wounds in stone, servants scrubbing away the stains of kings and traitors alike. By the time Sansa saw the dawn from her window, the city would be changed, purged of its filth, its corpses ash, its blood washed from the stones.

Then, and only then, would he bring her forth to see what he had made.

The wind shifted, carrying his words away. He lingered only a moment more, his gaze sweeping across the still city, its towers and domes caught in the new light like relics of a fallen age. Then the air around him rippled. The black of his cloak dissolved into smoke. The place where he stood folded in upon itself with a whisper of frost, and he was gone. Only the wind remained, stirring the cold stones.

The night belonged to Jon Snow. And soon, so would the dawn.

Chapter Text

30TH DAY OF THE TWELFTH MOON OF 299 AC

Pale morning seeped into Sansa’s bedchamber in the Kitchen Keep, and a thin ribbon of light slipped between the shutters, painting her coverlet with a soft, ash-coloured band. She sat at the edge of the bed, and her feet pressed into the rushes while the chill of the stone floor rose through her soles. Her hands rested in her lap, and her fingers laced together as she blinked away the last veil of sleep. The air was utterly still, and the candle in the iron sconce had burned down to a cold curl of wax, while the brazier had long since gone dark.

Somewhere beyond the walls, the city should have been waking, yet the room held its hush like a sept, as if time itself hesitated to disturb it.

She felt unaccountably light, as though some great weight had been lifted from her shoulders during the night and gently set aside, and the thought made her smile before she could stop it. Yesterday had been the first day, since her father’s death, that joy had felt near enough to touch, and it had crept into her in small, stolen moments that she had tried to hide. She remembered catching her reflection in the looking glass at suppertime and how the corners of her mouth had threatened to lift of their own accord.

“Has something gladdened you, my lady?” Brella had asked as she folded gowns into the coffer, and her eyes had been sharp enough to notice what others might have missed.

Shae had been less delicate and far less patient. “If there’s a jest, you must share it, else it’s cruel to keep it,” she had said, her grin playful but edged.

Sansa had only offered mild, harmless words. “It is a fair evening. The air is sweet.” Lies small enough to pass as courtesy, and she could not tell them the truth that had warmed inside her like a hidden flame. She had gone to sleep with that small, guilty smile still lingering, afraid it would betray her if she let it grow.

Her gaze fell to the bedside table, and the small glass vial lay where she had left it, no bigger than her thumb, with the last amber stain of its contents catching the thin morning light. She remembered the feel of it in her palm, still warm from Jon’s hand, and how he had given it to her before night fell, his voice low and calm as he explained. It had been a draught to bring swift, deep sleep, and he had not wanted her to hear the screams or the chaos or the dying that would turn the city inside out before dawn. She would be guarded even in sleep, he had said, and Winter would keep watch.

She had trusted him, and the liquid had tasted sharp and bitter, with a faint trace of honey at its edge. It had spread through her chest with a strange, soothing warmth, and then the world had thinned and folded like gauze. No dreams had troubled her, and no memories had risen like teeth to gnaw at her rest. Only darkness, soft and whole, had held her through the night.

Now the afterglow of that rest lingered in her limbs, and there was no ache, no dread beating behind her ribs. She felt rinsed clean, as if she had woken in a new skin, and her hair had slipped from its ribbon and hung over one shoulder in loose, coppery waves. Absent-mindedly, she smoothed the coverlet where her knees had creased it, and she noticed the neat stitching Brella had mended only two days past.

The hush pressed in around her, and she listened harder, tilting her head toward the door. There were no footfalls in the corridor, no scrape of pails, and no murmurs of stewards passing orders. From the kitchens, there ought to have come the sounds of clatter and bustle of dawn. She should have been hearing the hiss of fat in pans, the thud of knives through roots, and the chatter of cooks greeting one another, but there was nothing now. Even the wind was silent against the shutters.

The silence was wrong. It was not the gentle quiet of a household still asleep, but the stillness that came before judgment. Sansa’s fingers tightened together, then eased, and she drew a slow, deliberate breath, counting it out to steady herself as Septa Mordane had once taught her when nerves had made her clumsy. In. Out. Again.

She let her eyes travel the room, taking in each familiar shape to keep panic at bay: the oaken chest at the foot of the bed, the narrow wardrobe with its iron latch, and the pitcher and basin, cool and clean. There was a single comb of bone with one tooth chipped near the end and a length of pale blue ribbon draped across the chair where Brella had left it. These small, ordinary things were anchors against uncertainty. They told her she was here and she was safe and that nothing was wrong, yet the silence contradicted them, and in that quiet contest, the silence won.

She thought of Jon then, for the thought had been waiting at the edge of her mind from the moment she had opened her eyes. She saw him as he had stood by lamplight the night before, the shadows carving his face into sharp planes of silver and black, and she remembered the careful way he had spoken and the promise in his eyes when he had told her she would be safe. The name Winter had entered the room like frost, and it gave her a chill. She imagined that shadow now, all silent, patient and bound to him and his will, while watching over her unseen.

Her brother had vowed to take the city, and he had vowed to end the lions and break their hold upon the Red Keep, and he had vowed to return to her. Her heart quickened despite the calm that clung to her limbs. What had the night demanded of him to keep those vows, and what had it made him do?

Sansa rose, moving slowly enough that the rushes barely crackled beneath her feet, and she crossed to the shutters. She set her palm against the wood, which was cool and faintly damp, and she did not open them. She was not sure what she expected to see if she did. Would she see smoke and ruin, or a city in order? Instead, she rested her forehead against the frame and closed her eyes, and the faint scent of lye from yesterday’s washing lingered in the linens, undercut by a whisper of lavender from the sachet Brella kept hidden among her dresses because it pleased her.

When she returned to the bed, she folded her hands in her lap once more, and she told herself that quiet could be mercy, that perhaps the silence was a promise that the worst was over. Yet her pulse disagreed; it beat quick and low, whispering unease beneath her calm.

She listened again, willing for some sound to break the stillness, like a footstep, a latch or a voice. She wanted anything to prove that the world beyond her door still turned. Nothing came.

Sansa kept her eyes on the door, as though she might summon Jon through it by wanting him enough. The ghost of the draught’s taste lingered on her tongue, and in her chest she felt the delicate balance of fear and hope meeting.

Had he done all he vowed to do? 

"Sansa."

Her breath caught. The sound of it seemed to ripple through the stillness, breaking the spell of silence that had clung to the room since she woke. She turned too quickly, her gown brushing against the rushes, and her heart leapt into her throat. For an instant she thought she was still dreaming, and that the sleeping draught had not yet fully loosed its hold on her mind. But then she saw him.

Her brother stood near the table by the shuttered window, the pale morning light washing over him in a dim silver-grey. 

“Jon,” she whispered, his name escaping her lips before she could stop it.

She moved before she thought. The distance between them vanished in a heartbeat. Her hands found his shoulders, the fabric beneath her palms warm from his body. He did not step back or raise a hand to stop her. When she pressed herself to him, he enclosed her with one arm, in a cautious, steady and protective manner. The other hung loosely at his side, fingers curling once, as if uncertain of the right to hold her.

She clung to him all the same. For a few breaths she could not bring herself to let go. Her forehead rested against the hard line of his chest, and she could feel the faint rise and fall beneath the layers of his tunic. He smelled of cold air and iron and faintly of smoke, like the scent that lingered after a hearthfire had burned through the night.

When she drew back, her hands still rested lightly on his arms. He looked down at her with an expression she could not quite read. The morning light caught the edges of his dark brown hair and glinted faintly off the black of his cloak. His eyes were rimmed with weariness, yet there was no trace of weakness, only the tempered strength of someone who had endured and endured until even exhaustion had become discipline.

“It is done,” he said at last, his tone steady. “The city and the castle is under our control.”

The words hung between them, almost unreal. Ours. 

She stepped back a little, her fingers falling to her sides. “You took it,” she said softly, her voice half disbelief, half wonder. “All of it?”

Jon inclined his head once. “Every gate, every hall, every tower. The Red Keep, the city below. We control the city and the palace now, and the lions and their allies are gone.”

There was no pride in his voice, only the stillness of certainty. Yet beneath it she heard something else, something that seemed like a thread of sorrow that did not belong to victory.

“It went as I planned,” he continued, his tone low, “but still… more died than I wished.”

Sansa’s heart gave a small, uncertain flutter. “Died?” she asked. “Who?”

“The smallfolk,” he said. His gaze dropped to the floorboards. “Too many. Thousands, perhaps. The shadows frightened them. The sight alone was enough. Some fled and crushed one another in the streets. Some fell where they stood. Others…”

He hesitated, and when he spoke again, his voice was quieter. “Others simply stopped breathing. Terror killed them, not sword or flame. I spent so many years in the other world hardening and strengthening my mind against all the terrors and horrors I saw that I...I misjudged how deeply fear runs in men and women and children in this world.”

Sansa pressed her fingers to her lips, staring at him. The silence of the city beyond the shutters suddenly felt different. It deeper and heavier, as though mourning itself had taken form.

She could almost see it: narrow streets lit by the red flare of torches, the shadows crawling across the walls like ink. People screaming, running, tripping, falling. The echoes of their panic seemed to reach her even now, faint but insistent. She imagined the shapes of Jon’s shadows gliding through alleys, unfeeling and unstoppable. Their power was his, their obedience absolute, but mercy did not live in them.

The image filled her with sorrow and awe in equal measure. It was terrible to imagine, and yet somewhere beneath her pity, a soft voice whispered that it was necessary. The city is ours.

Her hand fell from her lips, and she let out a long, shaky breath. “You could not have known, Jon,” she said, though her voice was barely above a whisper. “You did what you had to do.”

Jon lifted his gaze to her, and for a long moment he only looked. “That is what I have been trying to tell myself,” he said finally. “It sounded truer last night.”

The faintest ache touched her heart at that. He looked so calm, and yet she could see the cost behind it. She could see the stillness of a man who had buried his feelings so deeply that they no longer rose to the surface.

Then, after a pause, he drew in a breath and straightened. “The work is done. The Lannisters and their kin are ended. Those who served them are gone as well.”

Her breath stilled. “Ended?” she asked quietly. “All of them?”

Jon nodded once. “All.”

The word settled over her. She swallowed hard, but the question left her anyway, barely more than a whisper. “Who?”

He began to name them. “Joffrey, Cersei, Tommen, Tywin, Kevan, Lancel. And Tyrion. Their allies as well: Varys, Pycelle, the Kettlebacks, Boros Blount and Meryn Trant, Ilyn Payne, Addam Marbrand, Phillip Foote, Flement Brax, and others besides, their names meaningless now. All of them are gone from this life.”

The words seemed to fall like stones into deep water, each name sending out its own slow ripple.

Joffrey’s name struck first and brightest. Her breath trembled, and a sharp satisfaction took hold, one that was cold, pure, and unrelenting. The boy-king who had mocked her tears and ordered her father’s death was gone and who had humilated her and had her beaten. His laughter, his jeers and his voice, all of it was now silenced forever. 

It is done, Father. Sansa thought. Your death has been avenged. 

Then her thoughts came Queen Cersei. At that name, something quieter took root, heavier and colder. She could see the queen’s smirk as she had demanded Lady’s death, the false sweetness of her words, the way her beauty had always hidden venom beneath. Justice had once been a word for songs, something distant and shining. Now it had found her, hard-edged and real.

Then her thoughts went to Lord Tywin Lannister. Her mind conjured his face: those cutting green eyes, the unbending mouth of a man who smiled at nothing. He had been the architect of her house’s fall, the mind behind the ruin that had swept across her mother’s lands. His soldiers had burned the Riverlands, their banners bright above the smoke of pillaged villages. To imagine him gone was like imagining the sea dried to dust. The world felt different without his shadow stretching over it.

But then came Tyrion.

Her eyes opened slowly. A pang bloomed in her chest, unexpected and sharp. She remembered his awkward bow at their wedding, the hesitant kindness when he said she need not fear him. He had been broken, mocked, and monstrous in others’ eyes, yet never cruel to her. Although she had not truly cared for him, she had never disliked him, and had found him better than most others in the city. Of all the lions, he alone had shown decency, and now she was his widow. The word felt hollow and meaningless given the fact that they were practically strangers. 

Yet one name echoed louder than the rest. Tommen.

Her throat tightened, and a shiver passed through her. For the first time since Jon had begun to speak, a sense of dread coiled inside her chest. She saw Tommen as she remembered him: wide-eyed, gentle, his hair gold as sunlight, his smile timid and uncertain. A soft, good-hearted boy. 

The thought of him lying still and cold somewhere in the Red Keep, or worse, nowhere at all, filled her with despair. He had never harmed her, never sneered as his brother had, never played at cruelty. And yet his name had been spoken in the same breath as Cersei and Joffrey, as Lord Tywin, as those who had earned death a hundred times over.

She tried to tell herself it was justice and that his death was meant to serve as a form of vengeance, but her heart rebelled. A child, it whispered. A boy. The truth of it pressed on her chest like a stone.

“All of them,” she murmured at last. The words caught and faltered in her throat. “Then it is truly over.”

Jon inclined his head. “For them,” he said. “But not for us. Peace takes longer to build than vengeance.”

Her gaze drifted downward. The image of Tommen lingered still. She thought of his innocence, his small, kind and sweet and gentle smile, and her breath shuddered as she forced the words out. “But...Tommen,” she whispered, unable to help herself as she spoke about the dead prince. “He was only a boy.”

Jon’s expression softened, almost imperceptibly. “I know.”

She hesitated, her voice trembling. “You truly killed him?”

“I did.” His tone was calm, without pride or excuse. “It was quick. He did not suffer. But it had to be done.”

The words struck her like a blade turned in her chest. She had known it would happen. Jon had warned her he had planned to kill Tommen. Still, the image of that sweet, frightened boy who was now a corpse rose before her and would not fade.

Did it have to be done? She thought to herself. Did Jon really have to kill Tommen? He was just a boy. And with his shadows, no one could ever get to Tommen. 

“He was kind,” she said faintly. “Too kind for them. He did not deserve this. I know you said that you planned to kill him, and It thought I had accepted it, but I thought...I thought perhaps…” Her voice wavered. “Perhaps you might spare him. He could have been kept here, watched, kept safe. Sent to the Wall when he was grown. No one could try to use him for their ambitions or try to spirit him out of the capitol with you and your shadows always watching. I knew what you meant to do, but still I hoped...” Her voice broke. “I...I had hoped you would not.”

Jon’s eyes softened with a quiet sorrow. “I considered it,” he said. “He seemed gentle, and sweet and undeserving. But mercy can be perilous. He carried their name, their claim. Others would have used him. His death spared him that fate.” His gaze darkened slightly. “And his blood was the price the gods demanded for vengeance, for my brother and sister, paid in usury.”

He looked at her then, steady and searching. “Do you hate me for it?”

Hate him? The thought was impossible. He had freed her, avenged her father, broken her cage of fear. But the ache in her heart did not lessen. It was not hatred she felt, only grief for the child and the world that had made such death necessary.

“No,” she said at last, her voice low but certain. “I could never hate you. Only…” She paused, her chest tightening. “Only that I wish the world did not demand so much.”

Jon’s expression gentled. For a moment the power that clung to him seemed to recede, and she glimpsed the boy from Winterfell she remembered from all so long ago, the quiet, watchful half-brother who had played in the snow with her, Robb and Arya. “So do I,” he said softly.

Silence followed, deep and heavy. Somewhere outside, a raven called, its cry echoing faintly through the stones.

Sansa turned toward the shuttered window. Pale light slipped between the cracks, thin as breath. Beyond lay the Red Keep and the city below. It was a city remade, emptied of lions. Freedom, at last. But it did not feel light. It settled within her like something cold and unyielding. 

Her thoughts turned to Myrcella, who was in Dorne, blissfully unaware of what had happened to her mother and brothers and kinsmen. Golden-haired and gentle, with all her mother’s beauty but none of her malice. Myrcella had never been cruel. She had always treated Sansa kindly and gently, just like Tommen. And yet Sansa knew, as surely as she knew the sun would rise, that Jon would kill her too.

He has too now. Sansa thought. He cannot spare her after killing her brothers and mother. 

The thought left her hollow. She did not know what she felt, whether pity, dread, or fear. The idea of Myrcella’s inevitable death saddened her deeply, yet it terrified her more that she could already see the necessity of it through Jon’s eyes. Perhaps this was what power demanded, to look upon innocence and still see threat.

She pressed her fingers together tightly, her heart fluttering. Would he do it himself? she wondered. Would he look into that girl’s eyes and end her life as he had ended her brother? The image made her stomach twist.

When she looked back at her half-brother, Jon was watching her. The dawn caught his face unevenly, one half shrouded in shadow, the other washed pale in the light. There was something distant about him now, something vast and unearthly, as if he stood with one foot still in the realm of the dead.

Chapter Text

30TH DAY OF THE TWELFTH MOON OF 299 AC

"Seven save us all!" 

The Maidenvault no longer looked like a sanctuary. It was a cage, bright with cold morning light that showed too much. Marble floors gleamed faintly beneath bare feet and rumpled silks; the air smelled of fear, wine, sweat, and the faint lingering sweetness of spilled perfume. Once, Taena Merryweather had admired this place’s grace when she passed it on her way through the Red Keep. It was a delicate palace within a palace, where Targaryen maidens had been cloistered for purity’s sake. Now it held a hundred souls in their nightclothes, stripped of rank, stripped of calm. The songs of birds outside could not reach them here. The only sound was human terror.

Taena stood close to her husband, her red-and-black nightgown clinging to the curve of her hips, one strap fallen loose upon her shoulder. Her thick black hair was tangled from sleep and panic, and her olive skin gleamed faintly in the torchlight. Lord Orton Merryweather trembled beside her, his face pale and slick with sweat. His fingers clutched her arm so tightly that she could feel his heartbeat hammering through his palm.

“It will be all right, my love,” she murmured in his ear, her Myrish accent softening the words. “They will not hurt us if we keep quiet.”

It was a lie, but a necessary one. Orton mumbled a prayer under his breath, the same phrase over and over, words to the Mother that did not seem to help. Taena rested her hand over his, steady and patient. Her own heart thudded fast enough to make her chest ache, yet her face was still. She had learned long ago that fear shown was weakness shown, and weakness invited predators. In Myr, she had learned to watch before she acted, to read a man’s hunger or a woman’s envy in the turn of an eye. The same lesson applied here.

All around her, lords and ladies muttered prayers, sobbed quietly, clutched each other for warmth and courage. There were also shouting and screaming and people crying and yelling for mercy and salvation. The sound filled every corner of the vaulted chamber, a trembling chorus of disbelief. The air itself seemed thick with it. Silks rustled, jewels glittered in the dim light, and somewhere a woman retched into her own hands. Nobles who had dined together at golden tables were now huddled together on cold stone like frightened smallfolk.

The shadow monsters guarded the doors.

They did not move, yet their presence pressed upon the air. There were twelve of them; tall, faceless things of living darkness, their bodies shaped like men but their forms wreathed in faint blue light that pulsed as if they breathed. The glow throbbed slowly through their smoky forms, a rhythm that reminded her of heartbeats. They stood in silence, no clatter of armour, no breath or shifting weight.

When Taena first saw them, she had nearly fainted. Her knees had gone weak, her throat dry as dust. They had brought her here half-asleep, dragged from her bed after the feast at Margaery Tyrell’s apartments, wine still warm in her veins. Then she had opened her eyes and seen one of those creatures standing over her, still as carved onyx, and every drop of wine in her body had turned to ice.

It was instinct that had saved her, as well as pride and a strong sense of mind. She had bitten her tongue to stop the scream clawing up her throat, causing blood to coat the inside of her mouth. She had forced herself to breathe, to look, to understand what she was seeing. Panic was a luxury she could not afford. Panic made fools, and fools died quickly.

Now, over half an hour later, she stood quietly beneath the pale light that filtered through the high windows and studied the room the way she once studied court gossip, searching for meaning beneath the surface.

To her right sprawled the Reachlords, her husband's own countrymen. Lord Mace Tyrell, red-faced and damp, sat on the marble floor beside his wife Lady Alerie, both of them shaking and clutching hands. Their golden son, Ser Loras, knelt between them, his voice low and tight as he whispered words Taena could not hear. The Warrior’s boy, she thought, watching the muscles of his jaw flex as he spoke. Even knights prayed now.

Near them, Lady Margaery tried to comfort her cousins, Elinor, Megga, and Alla, who wept openly, their tears tracing bright paths down flushed cheeks. The sound of their sobbing echoed softly, fragile against the marble. Elinor's betrothed, Alyn Ambrose, stood a few inches away, a look of concern and panic etched across his face. The Queen of Thorns sat a few feet away, stiff-backed in her chair, her gnarled hands folded tight upon her cane. Her sharp tongue was silent now, her thin lips pressed white. Even Lady Olenna Tyrell, who had never looked afraid of gods or men, stared toward the shadow monsters with unease she could not hide.

Not far behind, the buxom Lady Janna Tyrell clung tightly to her husband, Ser Jon Fossoway. His broad hands rested protectively around her waist as though he could shield her from the cold dread that had taken the room. Their faces were drawn and pale, the colour drained from their usual cheer. Nearby, plump Meredyth Crane sat hunched with her arms around herself, her fine silk gown crumpled and askew. Normally the loudest laugh in any Reachman hall, she was silent now, her lips pressed together, her wide eyes glistening with unshed tears.

Ser Garlan Tyrell held his wife, Lady Leonette Fossoway, as she cried into his shoulder. Behind them stood Lord Mathis Rowan and Lord Paxter Redwyne with his twin sons, their eyes hollow, faces pale. To see them all so cowed made something twist inside Taena. She thought it some dark satisfaction, perhaps, or disbelief at how quickly splendour turned to helplessness. The Reach had filled this city with its flowers and banners, and now its finest lords sat trembling like plucked hens.

She turned her gaze left. The Dornish were a different picture entirely, clad in silks of scarlet and gold, jewels glinting, their dark eyes proud even now. Prince Oberyn Martell stood tall among them, shirtless and wearing only black trousers, his arm around his paramour Ellaria Sand, who leaned against him in wary silence, wearing nothing more than a thin shift. His face was still, but his gaze burned as if daring the shadows to meet it. Around him clustered his companions: Ser Daemon Sand, Ser Deziel Dalt, Lady Myria Jordayne, Lady Larra Blackmont with her children. They whispered prayers, some to the Seven, others to stranger gods, but their tones were measured, deliberate. Even fear could not strip them of grace.

Taena admired that, though she knew it was a mask. She saw the way Ellaria’s hand gripped Oberyn’s sleeve, the way one of the Sand children hid her face. She recognised that kind of fear: the quiet kind, disguised as poise. It was the kind she herself wore.

Close by, the hall grew more crowded. Ser Balon Swann lay stretched across the floor, groaning softly, his leg twisted grotesquely beneath him. A handful of lesser lords knelt beside him, hands trembling as they tried to splint the limb. The sight made Taena’s stomach knot. She had seen him try to fight one of the shadow monsters. Fool. Brave, perhaps, but foolish. The thing had merely lifted an arm, and Ser Balon had flown through the air as if struck by a giant’s invisible hand, crashing into the wall with a sound that still echoed in her mind. The screams that followed had frozen every breath in the room.

Even Prince Oberyn and his retinue had tested the shadow monsters soon after, pride compelling them to push where others shrank back. They had been thrown aside too. Though unlike Ser Balon, there was no blood, no broken bones. Only bruised bodies and bruised dignity. The creatures enforced their boundaries without anger, without hesitation. Precision, Taena thought. No cruelty, no mercy. Just rules.

She felt the pull of her husband’s hand on her sleeve, his voice quivering. “Why have they brought us here? Taena, what is this?”

“I do not know, Orton,” she replied quietly, though she had begun to guess. “But no one has been harmed since the knight. That must mean something.”

He swallowed hard. “They mean to kill us.”

Taena slowly shook her head. “Then they would have done it already.”

Her tone was calm, steady, convincing. It worked on him, and even a little on herself.

Everywhere she looked, fear shimmered like heat. The chamber was a hive of whispers and prayers, the air thick enough to choke. The noblewomen’s perfumes had soured into something cloying, sweet over sweat. The men’s silk nightclothes clung damply to their backs. The grand pillars and vaulted ceiling seemed to watch them all, pale witnesses to their humiliation.

Taena’s gaze drifted toward the doors again, to the sentinels who did not blink or breathe. She wondered if they could see her, if they even saw at all. They seemed carved from smoke and shadow, the faint blue light beneath their forms pulsing like cold fire. Her skin prickled as she stared too long, but she forced herself not to look away. Better to face what might kill you than to wait for it unseen.

She noted significant absences too: King Joffrey and his family were nowhere among them, nor was the girl Sansa Stark, married to the Imp. Perhaps they had fled. Perhaps they were dead. Taena found she did not much care, except to wonder whether the fate that had spared her had claimed them instead.

Her husband’s breath shuddered beside her. She felt it on her neck, hot and ragged. She imagined their son, Russell, asleep at Longtable, far from this place. The thought made her throat tighten. All she wanted now was to see him again, to feel her beloved son in her arms. Yet the world had shifted overnight, and she knew that survival came before longing. She would survive this, whatever it was.

Around her, the chamber whispered and trembled, a hundred frightened nobles caught between silence and hysteria. The once-holy Maidenvault had become a cage of terror, its marble floors slick with tears and fear.

And through it all, Lady Taena Merryweather stood in her red-and-black nightgown, her hair unbound, her eyes dark and sharp as polished glass. Her husband trembled, but she did not. Beneath her calm surface, her thoughts moved like knives, swift and cold. She watched, and she waited, and she wondered what power could command such monsters, and whether she might yet find a way to make that power favour her.

The thought had barely taken shape when the world itself seemed to answer her. A low, heavy sound stirred through the air - a deep groan of iron and stone that made the floor tremble beneath her bare feet. Then the great doors of the Maidenvault burst open with a booming crack, the sound rolling through the marble chamber like thunder. A rush of wind swept inward, cold and sharp, carrying the scent of rain and stone. Taena’s unbound hair lifted and whipped across her face, strands catching against her lips. Around her, nobles gasped and stumbled back, silks rustling, voices breaking into startled cries.

The two shadow monsters that had stood guard at the threshold moved as one. They pivoted inward with eerie precision, neither turning heads nor raising arms. Their smoky forms tilted toward each other until they framed a path, forming a living corridor of darkness and faint blue glow. The motion was silent but for the whisper of air displaced by their movement.

The noise in the chamber died at once. The sobs and whispered prayers, the frightened murmurs that had filled the vault, all vanished as if swallowed. A stillness heavier than fear fell over them. Taena felt her husband’s fingers clamp tighter on her arm until the bones protested. She did not pull free. Her own hand closed over his, her knuckles pale, her heartbeat hammering so fiercely she thought it might be heard.

From the doorway, two figures stepped into the cold light.

The first was a man. He looked young, but not boyish. From the moment she saw him, Taena’s breath caught. He did not stride so much as command the air to part before him. There was no shout, no gesture, no herald to announce his arrival, yet every eye turned to him as if drawn by some magnetic truth. Taena’s own gaze fixed on him helplessly. It was wrong, unnatural almost, how the rest of the world seemed to fade around his shape. Even the light itself bent toward him, catching in the faint gleam of his dark brown hair and the hard angles of his face.

He was tall and lean, the kind of body that belonged to a man who had lived through war. It was not a body that was soft from courts or comfort, but it was a body that honed and tempered. He wore black from throat to boots: gloves, tunic, cloak, all trimmed with nothing that glittered or proclaimed wealth. He did not need jewels. Power clung to him like heat, though his presence chilled the air.

Taena’s first thought, to her shame, was that he was beautiful. Not the delicate beauty of the Reach, but a beauty that was harsh and austere. It was a beauty born of iron and steel. His dark brown hair fell in a loose sweep over his brow, framing eyes the colour of stormlight. They found her once, briefly, and she felt stripped bare.

His face was carved and still: sharp cheekbones, a strong jaw, no trace of softness. Despite the severness of his expression, she did not see cruelty in his face. What she saw was distance. It was the face of someone who had stood too long in death’s company. A man beyond fear. A man who would not flinch even before gods.

Taena’s throat went dry. She had known kings, queens, lords and ladies, as well as courtiers, sellswords and charmers. None had ever made the air feel heavier simply by entering a room.

As he crossed the threshold, the temperature seemed to drop further. The faint breath of wind that had followed him turned cold enough to sting her skin. The shadow monsters guarding the doors bowed their heads slightly as he passed, their faint blue light pulsing brighter for a heartbeat.

In that gesture filled with reverance, Taena understood what every noble in the chamber must have felt in their bones: this man commanded them. He commanded these monsters. The creatures of darkness obeyed him, the air bent to him, and she, who had courted princes and outwitted lords, felt herself trembling beneath his gaze.

Who are you? she thought, her heartbeat quickening. What manner of man makes death itself kneel?

She did not even truly notice the second figure at first. It was only when a ripple of whispering stirred through the crowd that her eyes slid toward the young woman beside him.

The movement of pale fabric caught her eye first - the soft fall of a nightgown, white against the gloom. The girl walked a step behind him, slender and graceful, her head held high. Recognition struck with sudden clarity.

Lady Sansa Stark.

The sound of murmurs rose around her, quick and uncertain, like the first patter of rain on glass. Taena caught fragments - the Stark girl, the wolf maid - before they died under the weight of fear.

Sansa’s calm was a thing apart. The girl did not cling or shrink behind the man who led her. Her steps were slow, deliberate, her back straight, her chin level. Where the nobles trembled, she stood poised, her serenity unnerving. Her face, illuminated by the cold dawn light, was all soft beauty and steady composure.

Taena’s eyes lingered on her. She took note of the wolf maid's fine auburn hair that tumbled past her shoulders and down to her back, catching faint gold where the light struck; the vivid blue eyes, clearer than any sapphire, watching the room with quiet compassion. She looked almost holy in her stillness, and untouched by the chaos that had engulfed them all.

Taena took in the details instinctively, as she always did: the unpainted lips, the faint paleness of her skin, her bare feet pressing to cold marble without complaint.

The girl had grown since Taena had last seen her, only a few days before. The fragile, frightened thing from Joffrey’s court was gone. Even clothed in a simple nightgown, Sansa Stark carried herself like royalty. There was no trace of the timid captive she had been. Her beauty had ripened quietly, subtly, the kind that would one day cause kings to make foolish vows. Taena had thought Margaery Tyrell and Cersei Lannister unrivalled, but now she wondered. Sansa had a grace the Reach’s golden rose could never mimic. 

She recalled overhearing courtiers whisper of her, and how men of every station had stolen glances when she passed. Taena had pitied her then, this pretty little dove trapped in a gilded cage. But now, watching her walk beside the man who made shadow monsters kneel, she felt that pity shrivel into awe.

Her husband made a strangled sound beside her. “Is that…?”

“Yes,” she murmured, not looking away. “That is Lady Sansa Stark.”

“And the man?” he whispered. "Who is the man standing beside her?" 

Despite herself, Taena’s lips curved faintly. “That, my love, we are about to learn.”

Sansa and the stranger reached the centre of the chamber. The doors behind them swung shut without touch, slamming with an echo that rolled through the marble vaults. The shadow monsters along the walls shifted, bowing in unison.

The nobles gasped. Taena’s breath caught. She felt every hair on her arms rise. Whatever this man was, he was no lord of flesh and blood alone. And the girl beside him stood serene and shining in the cold light, her composure a quiet defiance of the dread that gripped the room.

Before Taena could draw another breath, the world seemed to move again. A deep, grinding and inexorable rumble echoed behind them. The great doors of the Maidenvault began to swing shut, the hinges groaning like a wounded beast. The sound rolled through the vast chamber like thunder trapped in stone, echoing off marble and gold. It reverberated in Taena’s chest, heavy and final, as if the castle itself were exhaling its last breath. The nobles flinched as one - a collective shudder of silk and fear. Several cried out, voices cracking in the still air; others stumbled backward or clutched at one another, as though the sound alone had sealed their fate.

Then the shadow monsters moved. The two that had stood guard at the entrance, tall and lean as men but without faces or breath, turned toward the newcomers. Their dark forms shifted with a grace that was not human. And then, impossibly, they dropped to one knee.

The movement was almost reverent. Their heads bowed low, and the faint blue glow within them pulsed brighter for a heartbeat, like hearts quickening in devotion.

Taena’s breath hitched.

Her wide eyes darted from one shadow monster to the next as the sight spread across the hall. One by one, the other sentinels stationed along the walls, numbering a little over a dozen, followed suit. Each bent in perfect unison, kneeling before the young man who had just entered. The faint light spilling from their bodies bathed the marble floor in an otherworldly gleam, ghostly reflections shimmering at his feet.

It was not the act itself that terrified her most, but what it meant.

These beings - these horrors of smoke and cold - had stood all night as the masters of this chamber. They had stilled the proud and the defiant, silenced the screams, and beaten down the very idea of resistance. Taena had thought them mindless extensions of some dark will, unanswerable to man or god. Yet here they were, kneeling. Not to a king with a crown, nor to a lion on a throne. To him. To the tall, grey-eyed stranger standing beside the Stark girl.

The knowledge hit her like a wave of cold water. It confirmed what she had already realised from the moment he entered. He commanded them.

Every breath she had drawn since waking now seemed thin, meaningless. Her heart thudded unevenly in her chest as her mind raced to make sense of what her eyes refused to deny. Whoever this man was, he held dominion over the creatures that had conquered the Red Keep. He had filled the castle with death, wrapped in living shadow.

Her husband’s hand dug into her arm again, shaking slightly. She could feel his nails through the fabric of her gown. He whispered something, a prayer perhaps, but the words tangled together and died in his throat.

Taena did not look at him. She could not. Her gaze remained locked on the man, on the faint blue aura that clung to him like mist.

A slow, icy dread unfurled inside her. Yet beneath it, something more dangerous stirred: awe, and a sense of fascination. She was a woman who had sat in courts and parlours, who had charmed and bartered with men who fancied themselves powerful. But none of them, not even kings, had ever carried this. This quiet, absolute command that required no title, no threat, no raised voice. He stood as if the world itself had been waiting for his permission to breathe.

The silence that followed was suffocating. No one dared speak. No one dared move. Even the air seemed to still in reverence or fear. The faint shimmer from the kneeling shadow monsters rippled along the marble floor, casting long, wavering reflections that made the walls seem to shift.

A soft rustle broke the quiet. It was the barest movement of cloth as Lady Olenna Tyrell adjusted her shawl. The Queen of Thorns’ sharp eyes were fixed upon the stranger and Sansa, her expression unreadable. There was fear there, yes, but curiosity too, the kind born of a mind that had always sought to measure and understand. Her lips pressed together, and Taena wondered if the old woman was already calculating how to survive this new order.

Lady Margaery, still holding her cousins close, stared with wide eyes. The tremor in her lower lip betrayed her fear, though her spine stayed straight, proud even in terror. Megga and Alla buried their faces against her shoulders, trembling. Across from them, Ser Garlan had drawn his wife into his arms again, whispering low assurances that sounded hollow even to his own ears. Their gazes flickered toward the newcomers as though expecting an explanation that would never come.

To the left, the Dornish stood tense and silent. Prince Oberyn Martell watched with a predator’s stillness, his head tilted, the faintest glint of dangerous curiosity in his eyes. Ellaria Sand leaned into him slightly, though her expression was controlled, her fingers clenched around his arm. The other Dornishmen around Prince Oberyn shifted uneasily, exchanging wordless glances. The Red Viper looked like a man assessing the reach of an opponent’s blade.

Taena’s attention drifted back to her husband. Lord Orton’s face had lost all colour. His lips parted in silent disbelief, his gaze flickering between the kneeling shadow monsters and the man who stood as their master. “Seven save us,” he whispered, barely audible.

She almost told him to stop, to keep quiet before the wrong ears heard. But her own voice would not come. Her throat felt tight, her palms cold. Fear coiled in her gut like a living thing, sharp and writhing. There was a strange pull, a sense that she was witnessing not mere sorcery, but the birth of something unstoppable. 

The shadow monsters rose. It happened all at once, soundless and smooth, their forms uncoiling like smoke caught in a draught. The blue light within them dimmed again to a steady pulse. They returned to their places along the walls, forming a ring of silent, watchful darkness around the nobles.

No one moved. The hush that followed was absolute. The kind of silence that could crush words before they were spoken.

Taena could hear the faint rustle of her own breath. A lock of her dark hair brushed her cheek, the sound of it deafening in the stillness. She glanced toward the polished floor and saw her reflection, wide-eyed with lips slightly parted, trembling in the dim blue glow.

The stranger and the Stark girl had stopped several paces before the crowd. They did not speak, did not gesture. They simply stood. It was enough.

Taena drew a slow breath and forced herself to think through the fear. These creatures obeyed him utterly. The nobles would bend soon enough. All of them would. That much was clear. The only question that mattered now was how quickly she could make herself useful to whatever power had just walked into their prison. She straightened her shoulders, lifted her chin, and fixed her gaze upon the man who commanded the dead. If death itself had found a master, then it was time to learn how to live beneath him.

The stillness that followed was suffocating. It was a silence so deep it seemed to press against the ear. Every breath, every shift of silk, every heartbeat echoed faintly in the vaulted chamber. Then, from within that quiet, came a sound that cut through it like the first crack of thunder after a long drought. A voice.

It was not loud, nor did it rise in command, yet it filled the Maidenvault completely, as though the air itself carried it forward. Deep and rough, it rolled across the marble with an unforced strength that demanded attention. Each word landed with the weight of certainty, measured and deliberate. It was the kind of voice that did not need to shout to be obeyed, and belonged to a man who had already been obeyed too many times to ever doubt that he would be again.

It was a strange accent too, not the clipped cadence of the Reach or the soft drawl of the Dornish, nor even the crisp tones of the Crownlands. There was a rough and hard edge to it. Each word felt forged rather than spoken, as if tempered by iron and loss.

He stood before them, unmoving, his gloved hands clasped loosely behind his back, and when he spoke again, his eyes swept over the gathered nobles without hesitation.

“My name is Jon Snow.”

The words were simple, yet the sound of them carried through the vast chamber like a verdict.

He paused, letting the name settle, though he seemed to know already that it meant little to them. His expression did not change. Those cold grey eyes were unreadable, and his posture remained still and self-assured.

“It is a name none of you would know,” he continued evenly, “and fewer still would care about. Once, it belonged to the bastard son of Lord Eddard Stark of Winterfell.”

A faint ripple spread through the nobles. A murmur, small at first, then growing. The name Stark held power even here, even in this southern prison of silk and marble. Faces turned toward one another, whispering, remembering. Taena heard the sound of her husband’s breath catch sharply beside her.

She remembered hearing the name of Eddard Stark even as a girl in Myr, the tales told in taverns and parlours. The cold Northman who had helped Robert Baratheon topple the dragon kings. That such a man could father a bastard had always seemed an oddity, a scandal whispered with half disbelief.

Even Orton had remarked on it once, years ago, as they dined in Longtable’s solar. He had seemed amused, perhaps a little smug. “Even the sternest oak may bear a crooked branch,” he had remarked. She had laughed politely, and then never thought of it again.

And yet if this man was who he said he was, here he stood. That crooked branch had grown into a weapon.

She studied him more closely now. There was no softness of bastardy about him. No meekness, no shame. He carried himself as though the word had never touched him.

A faint chill brushed her skin as an understanding crept upon her. If he truly was Eddard Stark’s son, then he had every reason to hate those who had torn House Stark apart. The Freys. The Boltons. The Lannisters. And the Reach had marched beside them in this war of five kings. 

Her stomach tightened. Would he see her, her husband and their son as complicit? As guilty by blood and allegiance? Would the shadow monsters that obeyed him strike them down on a whim? She felt Orton’s hand trembling against her arm again. Her heartbeat quickened, but she kept her face still.

Before she could think further, he spoke again, calm and steady, as though reading the shape of their disbelief.

“You know me as Lord Eddard’s son,” he said. “But Lord Eddard was not my father. He was my uncle.”

The words dropped like stones into still water. He did not pause for reaction. “My mother was Lady Lyanna Stark. My true father was Prince Rhaegar Targaryen.”

The silence shattered. Gasps rippled through the room like wind across a field. Somewhere to Taena’s right, a woman cried out, the sound stifled by her husband’s hand. Others simply stared, mouths open, eyes wide with shock.

Taena herself could not move. She felt her heart thud once, heavy and slow, then again faster, as her mind struggled to catch up with what she had just heard.

Impossible.

She had been a girl of eight when the Rebellion ended, when tales of Prince Rhaegar’s death and Lyanna’s abduction reached even Myr. The story was legend: the honourable lord’s sister stolen by the silver prince; her death in a bed of blood; the war that followed. Every bard and bravo in the Free Cities had sung of it. Lyanna Stark, the she-wolf who’d died young. Rhaegar Targaryen, the dragon prince slain at the Trident.

And now this man - this grim, shadow-clad figure - claimed to be their bastard son.

He bore no trace of the dragonlords. Even in Myr, there were many - though mostly slaves -  who had the look of Old Valyria, with silver or blonde hair and purple eyes. His hair was dark brown in colour, his eyes grey as smoke and storm. Nothing in his face bore the look of Old Valyria and the colouring of the blood of the dragon.

And yet, standing there, he exuded a commanding presence that went beyond blood or birth. 

She turned her head slightly, taking in the others.

The Tyrells were stunned. Lord Mace gaped like a landed fish, his ruddy face slack with disbelief. Lady Alerie had gone pale, clutching her husband’s arm. Margaery’s brow furrowed, lips parted, her cousins clinging to her skirts. Even Lady Olenna sat rigid in her chair, her mouth drawn into a thin line, eyes narrow and searching. The sharp mind behind those eyes was already calculating, Taena could see them now trying to weigh the truth against the implications.

Farther back, the Reach lords looked to one another in confusion, their pride shaken. Lord Mathis Rowan rubbed his jaw, muttering something under his breath. Lord Paxter Redwyne’s face had blanched, his twin sons exchanging nervous looks.

Across the chamber, the Dornish were another story entirely.

Prince Oberyn Martell’s expression had changed utterly. The lazy charm that usually framed his features had vanished, replaced by a still, controlled fury. His lips pressed thin. His jaw clenched so tight a vein appeared at his temple. Even more than several feet away from him, Taena could almost feel the heat of his anger from where she stood.

The others of Dorne looked between their prince and the dark figure at the centre of the room, uncertain. Fear and suspicion flickered in their eyes.

And Taena understood why. If this man truly was Rhaegar’s son, then he was also the living embodiment of Dorne’s greatest humiliation. Rhaegar’s betrayal had broken Elia Martell’s heart and had had destroyed her family, her house’s honour, her life. The children she bore him had been murdered because of that betrayal. Now the proof of it stood alive and whole before them.

Oberyn’s fingers twitched against his side, though his face remained still. Taena wondered if he imagined how easily a dagger might pierce the throat of the man that stood before them claiming to be the son of Rhaegar, or if he already knew it would not matter.

The air had grown heavy, so still that she could hear the faint clink of a goblet knocked against marble somewhere behind her.

Her husband whispered her name, but she scarcely heard him. Her eyes were fixed on the man. He did not flinch beneath the disbelief. He did not protest or defend himself. He stood there, quiet and sure, like a man who had spoken truth too many times to care whether anyone believed it.

Taena felt something cold settle over her. It was not dread this time, but a creeping recognition. Whatever his blood, whatever name he bore, this was a man who had seen the world break and chosen to stand over its pieces. And though she could not yet decide whether that made him saviour or destroyer, one thing was certain: every soul in this chamber now stood at the mercy of Jon Snow.

The thought had scarcely formed before his voice filled the space once more, low and steady, yet vast enough to seem everywhere at once. The air shifted with it, drawing taut. Each syllable landed with quiet precision, commanding attention without force, conviction without plea. The very stones seemed to listen, the chamber contracting around the sound.

“I know there is doubt,” he continued, his eyes sweeping the sea of pale faces before him. “I would doubt it myself, had I heard it from another. But it is truth all the same. I am the bastard son of Prince Rhaegar Targaryen and Lady Lyanna Stark. Lord Eddard Stark, her brother and my beloved uncle, raised me as his own. He bore the weight of dishonour to keep me hidden. He saved me from the wrath of King Robert Baratheon, and from the Lannisters who would have killed me before I drew my first breath.”

The words rolled through the chamber, unhurried but sharp. A ripple of shock coursed through the crowd. Some nobles gasped outright, though others whispered in disbelief, voices quivering like reeds in wind.

Taena felt her skin prickle. She could almost see the story unfurl behind his words: the honourable and dutiful Lord Eddard Stark, bearing the stain of sin to shield his sister’s son from the vengeance of kings. Even the king who he called his closest friend.

Though she had thought on it little, it had always seemed strange to her that a man so famed for virtue would betray his marriage vows so quietly, so cleanly, without scandal or song. But if this were true, if that betrayal of his marriage vows had been a mask to hide a greater loyalty, then all the pieces fit.

She imagined the North in winter, and a cold cradle for a child born of fire and shadow. Eddard Stark carrying him south, whispering to none, raising him in the hall of Winterfell beneath the eyes of a wife who must have hated the sight of him. The thought stirred something almost tender in her chest. Honour was something that Taena Merryweather had never cared for, but sacrifice was something that even she could understand.

Around her, the sound of disbelief grew. her husband murmured a prayer, his lips trembling. “It cannot be,” he whispered hoarsely, eyes wide. “It cannot.”

She said nothing.

Jon Snow’s voice cut through the noise again, steady and cold as the Wall itself. “I do not ask you to believe me. Only to hear what I say. I came to King’s Landing for three reasons.”

He turned slightly, his pale eyes catching the faint blue light that bled from the shadows. “The first was to free my sister from the clutches of House Lannister.”

At his words, Taena’s gaze flicked toward Lady Sansa Stark. The girl’s face had softened, her lips curving into a small, radiant smile. It was not just pride she saw there, nor just triumph, but gratitude, affection, and faith. She looked at him as though his presence alone steadied the world. The sight made Taena’s stomach tighten.

“The second reason was vengeance," Jon Snow continued. "For House Stark, and for Princess Elia Martell, my father’s wife, and her children, Princess Rhaenys and Prince Aegon, my half-siblings, who were murdered by Ser Gregor Clegane and Ser Amory Lorch at the command of Lord Tywin Lannister.”

The air shifted. The words carried an edge that made even the shadows seem to stir.

Gasps rippled through the nobles like a wave cresting in slow motion. Heads turned toward the Dornish cluster. Taena followed their gaze.

Prince Oberyn Martell stood utterly still. His eyes - which were dark and cutting as glass - were fixed on Jon Snow. In them burned a storm of emotion: disbelief, suspicion, pain, and beneath it all, the faintest flicker of hope twisted into rage. His jaw clenched. Ellaria Sand laid a trembling hand on his arm, but he did not move.

The rest of the Dornish looked stricken. Myria Jordayne’s lips parted in shock; Daemon Sand’s hand twitched instinctively toward his hip, reaching for a sword that was not there. 

Taena felt the tension coil in the air until it was nearly visible. It was a tangible, taut thing stretching from wall to wall. The shadow monsters seemed to lean forward, their faint blue glow flickering like candlelight in a draft. Even the faint rustle of breath sounded loud.

And still Jon Snow spoke.

“I have claimed part of that vengeance already.” His voice grew quieter, but the words cut like a blade drawn slow. “King Joffrey Baratheon and his kin are dead. The queen dowager: Cersei Lannister. Prince Tommen. Lord Tywin. Ser Kevan and his son Lancel. Tyrion Lannister. All gone.”

For a moment, there was nothing. No sound, no motion, only silence thick as ash. Then the chamber exploded into noise.

Gasps, cries, and screams tore loose all at once. Nobles reeled and stumbled; others covered their mouths or fell to their knees. Somewhere to Taena’s left, a woman fainted with a soft thud, her husband catching her before she struck the floor. Another shrieked. The sound of weeping filled the vault like rain on stone.

Taena could not move. The words echoed through her skull. All dead. Joffrey, Cersei, Tywin, Kevan, Lancel, Tyrion… and sweet Tommen.

She had seen the boy several times during her stay in the palace. He was a plump boy, all soft smiles and shining hair, shy and sweet where his brother was cruel and spoiled. He had asked for lemon cakes with a stammer and had thanked the serving girl when they came. He had reminded her of her son, Russell. She believed they were even the same age. The thought of him lying cold and still turned her stomach.

Whatever the Lannisters had done, Tommen had deserved life. Please, she thought, let him be lying. Let it be a trick. But the calm certainty in Jon Snow’s tone left no room for lies.

Beside her, Lord Orton clung to her arm, trembling. “He means to kill us next,” he whispered, panic cracking his voice. “We will not leave this place alive. Taena-”

She squeezed his hand hard enough to silence him. Her eyes never left the man who stood before the crowd of nobles.

The Tyrells were a tableau of disbelief and dread. Lady Margaery’s hand covered her mouth, her eyes wide and wet. Lord Mace had turned grey, muttering prayers to the Mother. Lady Olenna’s face was stone, her sharp gaze fixed on Jon, already searching for an angle, a path through this catastrophe. Ser Loras stood stiff beside her, jaw clenched, his knuckles white.

The Dornish, though shaken, were alive with a different kind of energy. Oberyn Martell’s lips moved soundlessly. Fury warred with something darker. Taena wondered if it was grim satisfaction, perhaps, or a reckoning long overdue. His stare never wavered from Jon Snow’s face.

The tension broke when two men stumbled forward through the crowd. The portly Lord Lucas Inchfield, red-faced and shaking, and the stout Lord Tomas Kidwell beside him, pale with terror masked as outrage.

“Lies!” Inchfield bellowed, his voice cracking. “All lies, you nameless bastard! You have no right to hold us here! Release us or-”

He never finished.

From the far corner of the chamber, a shadow monster moved. It did not walk so much as flow , sliding along the marble, the blue light within it pulsing brighter with every step. It reached the lords before they could retreat.

Lord Inchfield’s shout strangled into a gasp. He stumbled backward, tripping over his own feet and falling hard to the floor. Lord Kidwell froze, the blood draining from his face.

The shadow monster stopped between them and Jon Snow, towering and implacable. Its edges shimmered faintly, tendrils of darkness trailing off into air. The faint pulse of light in its chest throbbed once, slow and cold.

The nobles closest to the front cried out, retreating several paces. Taena’s hand flew to her mouth, her heartbeat hammering. Inchfield tried to crawl away, but the thing did not move. It simply stood, silent and absolute, as if its mere presence was judgment enough.

A spreading dark stain appeared across Inchfield’s breeches. The stench of urine hit the air, sharp and acrid.

The murmurs turned to sobs. The whole chamber recoiled.

Jon Snow did not move when the two Reachlords were silenced, nor did he appear the least bit disturbed by their outburst. He simply stood where he was, calm and unmoving, his grey eyes fixed upon the nobles like cold embers smouldering beneath ice. When he spoke again, his voice carried through the vast chamber, smooth and even, cutting cleanly through the last echoes of fear and whispering that lingered in the air.

“King Joffrey is dead,” he declared once more, the words ringing sharp against the marble. “The Lannisters and their men within this city are dead and gone. And with their demise, I fulfil the third purpose that brought me here, which is to claim the Iron Throne, and to rule the Seven Kingdoms as its rightful king.”

A low murmur swept through the nobles. It was not disbelief now but astonishment, the kind that numbs the tongue. The words seemed to hang in the air, heavy as stone.

Jon continued, unhurried, his tone level and absolute. “The city is mine. The Red Keep is mine. Its walls, its gates, and its secrets belong to me. You stand now within my hold. And the shadows that guard you,” he gestured lightly toward the silent figures at the edge of the room, “are bound to my will.”

At that, Taena’s eyes darted toward the nearest of the shadow sentinels. They remained utterly still, their faint blue light pulsing softly through their forms like slow, steady heartbeats. The air around them shimmered faintly, as though the light itself bent toward them. 

Her gaze returned to Jon Snow. He stood with the stillness of someone accustomed to obedience, his posture neither proud nor cruel, only steady. The absence of doubt in his tone made her skin prickle. He did not ask for authority. He simply was it.

Then came his declaration: “The reign of House Lannister and House Baratheon is ended. My reign begins now.”

The words fell like the toll of a bell. The sound of shuffling feet followed, the faint whimper of a woman near the back, the creak of someone kneeling in panic before quickly rising again. No one dared speak.

“For now,” Jon went on, “you will remain here in the Maidenvault. No harm will come to you. You will be fed, clothed, and kept in comfort. Servants will attend to your needs within the day.”

Taena felt Orton exhale beside her, a sound caught between relief and disbelief. She herself was not soothed. His words were steady, his tone even, but she could not forget the corpses he had named earlier, nor the way the shadow monsters had bowed before him like gods before their maker.

Jon’s voice carried on, smooth and relentless. “If you cooperate, if you cause no trouble, and if you agree to my terms, your confinement will not last long. When order has been restored, you will move freely within the Red Keep. But none of you will leave this place until the realm is made whole again.”

That last phrase lodged itself in Taena’s mind like a thorn. Restore the realm. What did he mean by that?

Her thoughts began to race. Perhaps he meant vengeance against those who had betrayed his kin, chiefly the Freys and the Boltons. Was he planning to march north against the Crossing and the Dreadfort with his shadow monsters? Would it only be House Frey and House Bolton who fell to him and the monsters under his command? Or perhaps he meant something darker, something colder, the kind of restoration that left nothing standing.

She could not tell.

Though his promise of mercy sounded sincere, the sight of those shadowed sentinels made her doubt that any mercy from this man would ever be gentle. He spoke of protection, of provision, but Taena could feel the truth beneath it: they were prisoners, no matter how soft their cage. And when she imagined how the realm would react - and especially how the Reach would react - she felt a flicker of desperate hope.

Word would spread. It had to. The smallfolk would talk; ravens would fly. Willas Tyrell, Lord Mace's eldest son who served as acting Lord of Highgarden in his father's steead, would not ignore it. He would summon his banners at Highgarden and, though he could not lead armies himself, he would send a grand host to liberate them. Perhaps Lord Randyll Tarly, grim and unyielding, would turn his soldiers from the riverlands and march back south. They would come to free the Reach’s nobility, surely. Someone would.

But for now, they were alone in the shadow of this new king.

Jon’s grey eyes swept across the assembled nobles. They settled upon the Tyrells.

He inclined his head slightly toward them. “You have dwelt here since the Battle of the Blackwater. Now, with the rest of the highborn gathered, the Maidenvault will be crowded, but large enough for you all. You will endure.”

The Tyrells stiffened, but none spoke, save for one. To Taena’s surprise, Ser Garlan Tyrell stepped forward. His wife, Lady Leonette, reached for him in alarm, but he gently freed his arm and took a measured step closer. His bearing was that of a knight cautious but resolute.

“My king,” he began, his voice low and courteous, but firm,  “you ask for obedience and offer mercy. What would you demand of us to earn that mercy? What oaths will you require?”

Jon Snow regarded him quietly for a moment, then nodded. His expression softened, if only slightly, and for the first time since he entered, his lips curved in what could be called a smile. It was not a warm smile; it was composed, deliberate, a thing of will rather than kindness.

“What I demand is simple," Jon Snow looked over the crowd of nobles. "I ask for an oath of fealty and obeisance. Nothing more. You will swear to me, as you swore to kings before me. Bend the knee, and you will keep your lives, your titles and your lands when the time comes. The Lannisters, the Freys, the Boltons and the Greyjoys are my enemies, not any of you. However, if you defy me, you will remain here in perpetuity”

His words were calm, but they carried a chill that reached her bones.

Across the chamber, Prince Oberyn Martell’s voice cut the silence like a blade drawn from its sheath. “And if we do not bend the knee? What happens to us if we refuse?”

Every head turned toward the Dornish prince. His voice was smooth, almost casual, but the danger in it was unmistakable. He stood tall, his eyes fixed on Jon Snow, defiance burning like banked fire.

Jon’s reply came without hesitation, without anger. “Then you will remain here,” he responded simply, “until time teaches you obedience.”

The words hung between them, cold and final. Oberyn’s jaw flexed; his lips pressed into a thin line, but he said no more. The silence that followed was heavier than before.

Jon turned his gaze over the crowd once more. “You will have food and clothing within the next few hours. Rest. Wait. The servants will attend to you when they are ready.” His tone was steady, almost mild, as though he spoke not to prisoners but to guests awaiting an evening meal.

Then he paused, his eyes shifting briefly to Sansa. “Before I depart, there is one more matter.”

The nobles held their breath. Taena felt the air in the chamber grow colder still.

“My sister,” Jon's expression softened, “is to be recognised as a princess of the realm. Princess Sansa Stark will be addressed as such and afforded every courtesy, respect, and honour due her station.”

His voice never rose, but it filled the room all the same.

“I know what was done to her while she lived under Lannister power,” he went on, his tone hardening. “I know how many of you looked away. Or worse, whispered, and watched, and did nothing. That time is done.”

The words sliced through the nobles like a blade. A few flinched openly. Taena’s stomach tightened. She remembered the girl’s humiliation, as well as the cruel gossip, the veiled smiles, and the whispers about the wolf-maiden and her dwarf husband. She remembered pitying her, yes, but she had done nothing. None of them had.

Around her, faces blanched. Some nobles lowered their heads in shame; others refused to meet Sansa’s eyes.

Jon’s voice darkened. “Any insult, any refusal to address her by her title, any slight upon her name or honour, will be treated as an insult to me. And I do not forgive insults.”

The final words fell heavy and absolute. And then the air shimmered.

Two shadow monsters appeared before him, forming from the nothingness like smoke solidifying. They rose tall and still, their faint inner glow pulsing blue through their formless darkness. The nearest nobles stumbled back in horror. A woman screamed; a man’s knees gave out beneath him.

Taena’s heart stuttered. The creatures stood motionless, but their presence was suffocating. The air around them chilled to frost. It was as though the darkness itself had come alive to listen, a silent warning made flesh.

Jon Snow looked upon them all one last time. “Remember this. You live by my mercy. And her honour is mine.”

Chapter Text

31ST DAY OF THE TWELFTH MOON OF 299 AC

Chapter Text

31ST DAY OF THE FIRST MOON OF 299 AC

DAWN

The sky was only just beginning to pale when Tarryn reached the wall. The city behind him lay hushed and bruised, the narrow streets still clogged with the memory of panic. Smoke lingered in the air, thin and bitter, drifting upward to stain the softening grey of dawn. Somewhere far off, bells had stopped ringing. The silence that followed felt heavier for it.

Tarryn did not look back. The Iron Gate rose ahead of him, flanked by stonework that had stood for centuries. Its adjoining wall loomed like a sheer cliff, rough with age, mortar crumbling in places where hands had worn at it over generations. He had watched it for hours from an alley mouth, counting patrols that never came, waiting for the moment when the shadows thinned. They never truly did, but dawn made him reckless.

He climbed with scraped palms and shaking limbs, fingers digging into cracks barely wide enough to hold his weight. Each breath came sharp and shallow, fogging the stone. His heart hammered so loudly he was certain it would draw attention, certain that something would hear it and come.

Up. Just a little farther.

The top was close enough now that he could imagine the feel of it, the rough stone biting into his forearms as he hauled himself over. Beyond it lay fields, roads, anywhere that was not here. Anywhere that did not belong to the darkness that had taken the city in the night.

A cold pressure settled over him.

It was not sudden. It was not violent. It was as if the air itself thickened, turning viscous around his limbs. His next reach failed. His fingers slipped, not from lack of grip, but because his arm no longer obeyed him.

He looked down. The shadow had risen soundlessly from the base of the wall.

It did not have eyes, yet it watched him. Its form clung to the stone like spilled ink, stretching upward in a shape that suggested shoulders, arms, a head bowed slightly as if in contemplation. Frost spread outward from where it touched the wall, whitening the stone beneath his boots.

Tarryn tried to scream. Nothing came out. The pressure increased. His body was forced downward, inch by inch, peeled from the wall as gently and inexorably as a tide reclaiming shore. He clawed at the stone until his nails tore and blood streaked the mortar, bright and useless.

“No,” he whispered, then louder, “gods, please, have mercy.”

The shadow did not answer. It set him on the ground with deliberate care and then pressed him flat against the earth. He could not move. He could barely breathe. The monster was everywhere at once, pinning his limbs, his chest, his thoughts. The cold sank into his bones, numbing and absolute.

Panic shattered him.

“I won’t run,” he sobbed. “I swear it. I won’t. I’ll stay. I’ll do whatever you want. Please, just let me up. Please.”

His words dissolved into broken begging, into tears that soaked into the dirt beneath his cheek. He waited for pain. He waited for the end.

It never came.

Slowly, the pressure eased. The cold withdrew like receding ice. The shadow pulled back from his body, its form thinning, melting into the stone and then into nothing at all.

Tarryn lay there long after it was gone, gasping, shuddering, unable to lift his head. When he finally rolled onto his side, the wall loomed above him once more, unchanged and utterly unreachable.

The sky had brightened to a soft gold, and from that moment onward, Tarryn did not try to climb again.

Dagred woke where he always did, curled against the lee side of a watch tower where the wind cut less sharply through the stone.

For years he had slept there, wrapped in rags and habit, rising and resting by the rhythms of the City Watch. The clang of mail, the scrape of boots on cobble, the barked orders at shift change. Those sounds had been his clock, his comfort, his warning. He knew which captains kicked beggars awake and which ones pretended not to see them. He knew when to move and when to stay still.

This morning, there were no orders.

The tower above him loomed in silence, its narrow windows dark. No banner stirred. No helmeted head leaned out to scan the street. The air felt wrong without the noise, too open, as though the city were holding its breath.

Dagred pushed himself upright, joints aching, and peered down the street.

The intersection beyond the tower lay bare. Where Gold Cloaks once stood with spears grounded and hands resting on sword hilts, there was nothing. No patrols. No dice games played in doorways. No laughter, cruel or otherwise. No guards harrassing or fondling and grasping at young women who passed by. Only stone, shadow, and the soft murmur of people moving carefully through space that no longer belonged to them.

Farther along, at the next crossing, something stood.

It wore the shape of a man only loosely. A figure of darkness occupied the watch post, tall and still, its outline bleeding into the morning light. Frost glazed the stones at its feet, creeping outward like a warning. It did not shift its weight. It did not turn its head. Even still, Dagred felt its presence settle over the street like a hand held up for silence.

People saw it and veered away.

They crossed early, pressed themselves against walls, took longer routes through alleys that stank of refuse rather than pass beneath the tower’s gaze. No one ran. No one shouted. Mothers drew children close without explanation. Men who had once cursed the watch now kept their eyes down and their mouths shut.

Dagred watched it all with a frown carved deep into his weathered face.

He had lived long enough in King’s Landing to know power when he saw it. The Gold Cloaks had needed noise. Whistles, commands, threats. They had needed numbers and the show of force, needed to remind the city every day that they were there.

This shadow monster did not.

Whatever stood in that tower did not need to speak. It did not need to move. Its authority was not argued with, not tested. It simply was.

Dagred pulled his rags tighter around himself and stayed where he was. He did not feel afraid, not in the way others did. The towers had always ruled the streets. Only the men inside them had changed.

As the light of dawn spread and the city stirred into its careful new life, Dagred understood one simple truth in the quiet way he understood most things.

The city no longer answered to voices, but to shadows.

Morton had always preferred cellars.

Stone and earth muffled sound. Secrets settled easily there. Flea Bottom was riddled with them, forgotten chambers beneath rotting tenements, crawlspaces widened into rooms by hands that knew where not to ask questions. This one had served him well for years.

Even now, with the city changed above them, Morton believed in the safety of depth.

The cellar was low and cramped, its ceiling blackened by old smoke. A single lantern burned on a crate between them, its light catching the faces of the men gathered around it. Familiar faces. Careful men. Survivors. They spoke in low voices, arguing not about whether the trade should continue, but how.

“The streets aren’t safe,” one said. “Not with those things walking about.”

“They don’t come down here,” Morton replied, irritation sharpening his tone. “They stand at gates and towers. They scare smallfolk. That’s all.”

Another man shifted uneasily. “They killed the Watch.”

“They replaced the Watch,” Morton snapped. “There’s a difference. Order always settles eventually. We just have to adapt.”

He leaned forward, fingers steepled, already reshaping routes in his mind. Fewer transfers. Quieter buyers. Older contacts. There were still those in the city who still hungered for what he and his men provided, no matter who ruled it. That type of hunger did not vanish overnight.

The lantern flickered. The light dimmed, then steadied. The air turned cold.

Morton frowned and opened his mouth to speak when the stranger appeared.

He stood by the far wall, tall and sinewy, dressed simply in dark clothes untouched by grime. His hair was dark brown, his eyes a flat, merciless grey. He had not come through the door. He had not made a sound.

Two shadows flanked him. They loomed like executioners made of living night, frost curling across the floor at their feet. The men around Morton surged backward in panic, chairs scraping, breath hitching, mouths opening in screams that never fully formed.

No one ran. The shadows moved.

It was over in moments. One breath. One blink. Limbs fell. Bodies collapsed where they sat or stood. There was no fight, no drawn blade, no chance to plead. The cellar filled with the dull finality of death.

Morton found himself alone.

He lay on his back, pressed into the stone, unable to move. The stranger approached, boots silent against the frost rimed floor, and looked down at him with naked disgust.

“You trafficked children,” the man spoke calmly but his voice was still filled with quiet, cold fury and hatred. “You took them. Bought them from their parents, swept them off the streets. Sold them. Allowed other men to break, defile and degrade them. All to fill your purses with coin. Disgusting.”

Morton tried to speak. His tongue felt thick, useless. Tears slid sideways into his hair.

“There will be no place for this under my rule,” the stranger continued. “Not in this city. Not anywhere in the Seven Kingdoms. No child shall come under harm while the Seven Kingdoms are under my rule.”

He gestured once, sharply.

“The children you stole will be found,” he said. “They will be freed. They will be protected. This city will protect them, because I will.”

The pressure on Morton’s chest intensified, crushing and absolute.

“I will hunt every organisation that preys on the helpless,” the stranger said, his voice hardening even more than it already was. “I will tear them out, root and branch. You are not an exception. You are the beginning.”

Morton sobbed, the sound thin and broken, continuing to beg for mercy. 

The man descended upon Morton, dagger in hand. When he lifted, there was nothing left to beg.

Above them, unseen and untouched, dawn continued to spread its pale light across King’s Landing.

MORNING

Summer kept her head down as she hurried through Pisswater Bend, the loaf tucked tight beneath her arm like something precious. The bread was still warm, its weight reassuring against her ribs, and the smell of it clung to her fingers. Her mother would scold her if she dawdled. The city was quieter now, but that did not mean it was safe to linger.

The bend narrowed into an alley she usually avoided, a slit of stone between leaning buildings where the light thinned and the air smelled old. She slowed despite herself.

A man lay there. He was sprawled awkwardly on the stones, one arm twisted beneath him, his face turned away. His clothes were torn and filthy, darkened in places where blood had dried. Summer recognised the look. She had seen it more than once in the days after the night the city changed. People crushed in doorways, fallen in the streets, trampled by fear when everyone had tried to run at once.

No one had moved him. She knew because the stones around him were clean, undisturbed by carts or boots. People passed the mouth of the alley quickly, eyes fixed ahead, pretending not to see. Summer stood still, her breath shallow, the loaf slipping slightly under her arm.

She felt it before she saw it. The air cooled. The shadows deepened.

A shadowy and dark shape unfolded at the far end of the alley, rising from the stone as though it had always been there. The shadow creature moved without sound, tall and dark, its outline faintly misted, a cold glow deep within its form. It did not rush. It did not hesitate.

It knelt beside the body.

Summer pressed herself against the wall, heart pounding, but she could not look away. The shadow slid its arms beneath the dead man and lifted him with care, adjusting its grip so his head did not strike the stone. There was no violence in the motion. No judgement she could see. Only purpose.

Then it turned and walked back into the darkness, the body held close as if it still mattered.

The alley felt suddenly larger.

Summer did not wait. She ran the rest of the way home, breath burning in her chest, fingers numb around the bread. When she finally dared to look back from the corner near her door, the alley lay empty.

No body. No shadow. There was only clean stone, as though nothing had ever been there at all.

In the Street of Looms, Perryn had learned to beg without lifting his voice.

Shouting scared people now. Anything loud did. So he kept his pleas soft and careful as he sat with his back against the loomhouse wall, Mara tucked close at his side. The stone behind them was cold through his thin shirt, and the smell of damp wool drifted from inside the building.

“Food,” he murmured as people passed. “Please. Just a little.”

Most did not look at him. Those who did flinched and hurried on, hands clutching cloaks or baskets, eyes darting toward the corners of the street as if expecting something to step out of the shadows. Coin had grown scarce since the night the city changed. Kindness, rarer still.

Mara’s stomach growled softly. She pressed her face into his sleeve, embarrassed by the sound.

Perryn felt the ache settle deeper, dull and steady, the way it did when hope thinned. He counted the cracks in the wall to keep from thinking about bread, about water, about how long it had been since they had eaten anything that did not taste of mould.

Footsteps stopped in front of them.

Perryn looked up, ready to be ignored again, and froze.

The young man standing was dressed like a lord. He stood tall and sure, broad shouldered, carrying himself with the still authority Perryn had only ever seen from afar when kings were spoken of in stories. Dark brown hair framed a face marked by hardship, but his grey eyes were steady and clear, seeing Perryn and Mara as though they truly mattered.

For a moment, Perryn could only stare.

The man looked like the fathers Perryn imagined in his dreams. Strong. Unafraid. The kind who came home at the end of the day and made the world feel less sharp. At first glance he seemed intimidating, hardened by things Perryn could not name, but when their eyes met, that edge softened. There was comfort there. Gentleness, carefully held.

For a moment, none of them spoke.

Then the man crouched and set a heavy bag into Perryn’s hands. The weight nearly pulled it from his grip. Coin clinked softly inside. Before Perryn could react, the man placed a wrapped loaf of bread and a skin of water beside Mara.

Perryn and his sister stared. He had not seen the man take them out. They were simply there.

“You’ll be all right,” the stranger spoke quietly, a small smile crossing over his mouth. "You are both so brave. You will never go hungry or cold ever again. I will ensure that you and your sister are looked after. Just be a little more patient."

His voice was calm and certain, as though he were stating a fact rather than offering comfort. 

Perryn tried to thank him. The words tangled in his throat. When he blinked, the man was already standing, already turning away.

By the time Perryn gathered the courage to look again, the street was empty.

He sat there with Mara, the bag of silver pressed against his chest, the bread and water between them. Neither of them moved. They watched the space where the stranger had stood, afraid that if they did, it would all vanish.

After a long moment, Mara reached for the bread with trembling hands.

Perryn did not stop her. He still was not certain the man had been real.

Joswyn had never learned to fear properly.

Pig Alley smelled of offal and damp straw, and the stones were slick beneath small feet, but Joswyn toddled along beside his mother with the careless confidence of someone too young to understand what the city had become. His eyes caught on movement, on shape and contrast, on anything new.

The shadow stood at the mouth of the alley. It loomed where a Gold Cloak might once have lingered, tall and motionless, its dark form bleeding into the light. Frost traced pale lines along the stones at its feet. People gave it space without speaking, skirting wide around its presence.

Joswyn tugged free of his mother’s hand.

“Jos,” His mother hissed, her voice catching as she reached for him too late.

He took three unsteady steps toward the shadow and reached out.

The alley seemed to stop breathing.

His mother froze where she stood. The other adults nearby went still as well, hands hovering uselessly, eyes wide, waiting for something terrible to happen.

It did not. The shadow lowered itself, movements slow and deliberate, until it knelt before the child. Cold mist curled gently from its form. Joswyn’s fingers brushed the darkness, disappearing briefly into its surface.

He laughed. The sound rang bright and startled, cutting through the tension like a blade. Joswyn pulled his hand back, then reached out again, fascinated by the strange chill that made his skin prickle.

After a moment, the shadow rose. It did not look back as it moved away, its form thinning as it slipped down the alley and vanished into deeper darkness. The cold retreated with it, leaving only damp stone behind.

His mother sagged against the wall, breath shaking. No one spoke. No one knew what to say.

Joswyn babbled happily and toddled back to his mother, unaware that he had unsettled every certainty they thought they still possessed.

MIDDAY

By midday, the heat had settled thickly over the crossroads near the Mud Gate.

Jocelyn stood to one side of the road with her basket of damp laundry at her feet, watching the street the way washerwomen learned to do. The crossing was always trouble. Too narrow for the traffic it carried, too close to the gate, too many wagons arriving tired and impatient. Arguments sparked there as easily as flint on stone.

Two wagons had met nose to nose in the centre of it. Their drivers shouted over one another, faces flushed, hands clenched tight around reins and hafts. One swore the right was his by custom. The other claimed priority by weight and urgency. The horses stamped and tossed their heads, sensing the tension. Jocelyn saw the moment coming, the familiar tightening before someone swung a fist.

Then the sound fell away. It had not faded or had it quieted. It simply vanished, as if plucked from the air and thrown away.

The shadow appeared between the wagons, rising from the stones as though the road itself had exhaled it. Tall and still, it stood at the heart of the crossing, frost creeping outward from its feet in pale veins. No voice carried past it. No shout dared finish itself.

The men froze. One by one, their eyes dropped. Hands loosened. Words died in their throats. Without speaking, without even looking at one another, they backed their wagons away. Wheels creaked. Horses were turned. The crossing cleared as though guided by an invisible hand.

The shadow remained only long enough to be obeyed.

When it withdrew, the noise returned slowly. Hooves. Cloth shifting. Breath.

Jocelyn realised her hands were shaking as she gathered her laundry and hoisted the basket against her hip. She did not look back as she walked on.

The city had always known fear. What unsettled her was how little of it was needed now.

Gaeron had learned to watch his stall the way a man watched the sea, always alert for the sudden shift that spelled trouble.

Fishmonger’s Square bustled even now, thick with smell and noise. Salt, brine, rot. Voices haggled and cursed, coins clinked, gulls screamed overhead. Gaeron stood behind his trestle table, thick fingers resting on the edge of it, eyes tracking the flow of bodies that passed too close, lingered too long.

He had chased thieves his whole life. Young men, mostly. Quick hands and quicker feet. Sometimes he caught them. More often he did not. Loss was part of the trade. He had learned to swallow it with his pride.

This time, they did not bother to be subtle.  

Three of them surged in at once, knocking over a basket, hands snatching at wrapped fish and hanging strings of dried eels. These were young men who normally the Gold Cloaks would ignore. Gaeron shouted, his voice rising instinctively, his heart sinking with the familiar certainty of chaos.

Then the air went cold, and the shadows came without warning.

They rose from the stones around the stall, tall and solid, their presence crushing the noise of the square down to something distant and unreal. One of the young men screamed as a shadow seized his arm. There was a sharp, wet sound. His hand fell to the stones, fingers still curled.

Blood splashed dark against pale fish scales. The other two fled at once, terror lending them speed Gaeron had never managed to outrun. No one chased them. No one needed to.

The maimed man collapsed, clutching the stump of his arm, shrieking until his voice broke. The shadows withdrew as suddenly as they had come, leaving only the aftermath behind.

Gaeron stood frozen behind his stall.

He stared at the blood pooling across the square, at the severed hand lying amid crushed ice and scales. His chest felt tight, his breath shallow. He had prayed for protection all his life. He had prayed for thieves to be caught, for justice, for order.

He had never prayed for this. And yet, beneath the horror, beneath the sick feeling in his stomach, he felt it.

Relief.

Gaeron swallowed hard, unsure whether he should offer thanks to the gods or beg them for forgiveness for the feeling he could not quite deny.

The granaries near the River Gate had never been quiet places.

Even at the best of times there was the constant scrape of carts, the groan of doors, the smell of grain and river damp hanging thick in the air. Now, the yards lay tense and watchful, men gathering in small knots, voices low, eyes darting toward the sealed gates and the distant towers.

Kennoth stood among them, his stomach gnawing at itself.

He had not eaten properly in days. None of them had. Rumours had spread faster than sense. The city was sealed. No grain would come in. What was stored would never be enough. Hunger sharpened every word, every glance. Fear made logic brittle.

“They’re hoarding it,” someone muttered. “Letting us starve.”

Kennoth did not argue. He followed when the others moved, because standing still felt worse than doing something foolish. They approached the nearest granary doors together, a dozen men with hollow cheeks and desperate eyes. Hands closed around crowbars and mallets scavenged from docks and worksheds.

The first blow never landed.

The shadows rose as one. They emerged soundlessly from the ground, from the walls, from the spaces between heartbeats, tall and immovable. They positioned themselves before every door, every narrow gap, every possible entrance, their forms knitting together into an unbroken barrier of cold darkness.

The men faltered.

Kennoth felt the fear hit him all at once, thick and paralysing. These were not the wandering shadows of the streets. These were sentinels.

“Back! Retreat!” someone shouted.

Camren did not listen.

He screamed, a thin, panicked sound, and charged, trying to force his way past the nearest shadow as if speed alone could save him. The shadow moved.

It seized him mid stride and wrenched his arm aside. There was a crack like splitting wood. Camren howled and collapsed, clutching at a limb that no longer bent as it should. The shadow released him and stepped back into place.

No further violence followed. That was enough.

Kennoth ran. He ran with the others, boots pounding, breath tearing at his lungs, shame and terror tangled tight in his chest. He did not look back. He did not help Camren. He told himself there was nothing he could have done.

Behind them, Camren’s screams echoed off stone and water until even they began to fade.

The granaries remained untouched. Shadows stood watch day and night, unmoving, patient, guarding the grain as though it were something sacred.

AFTERNOON

The shouting had started suddenly.

Stevyn had been mending a sole by the window when the noise rose in the square, rough voices carried on anger and hunger. He knew the sound. Everyone did now. It was the sound of men looking for something to take.

“Inside,” he said, already moving.

Marra gathered Ellyn at once, clutching her to her chest, while Robert and Lyon were herded back from the door. Stevyn slid the bar into place and felt the thin wood tremble under the first blow.

“Open it,” a voice outside snarled. “We know you’ve got food.”

Stevyn’s hands shook as he reached for the knife from the table. It was meant for cutting leather and trimming soles, its edge kept sharp out of habit rather than need. He weighed it in his palm, knowing what it could and could not do.

He positioned himself between the door and his family.

Another blow landed. The door bowed inward, hinges creaking. Ellyn began to cry, small and thin. Stevyn’s chest tightened until breathing hurt. He pictured the men breaking through, the knife rising and falling, and the certainty that he would not survive it.

He hoped only to slow them.

Then the noise stopped. No more shouting. No more pounding. Just silence so sudden it rang.

Stevyn waited, counting his breaths. When nothing happened, he edged forward and slid the bar back a finger’s width. He opened the door just enough to see.

A shadow monster stood in the square.

It loomed over the men who had been at his door, its dark form rigid and terrible. They lay broken on the stones, limbs twisted, blood seeping into the cracks between cobbles. The shadow did not linger. It dissolved into the light and was gone.

Stevyn closed the door at once and drove the bar home again.

His stomach churned. The knife slipped from his numb fingers and clattered to the floor. He sank down and pulled Marra and their three children into his arms, holding them so tightly Lyon gasped.

Horror sat heavy in his chest, as did gratitude. He did not know which frightened him more.

Hayton stood at the edge of the docks with his hands hooked into his belt, watching the crowd gather the way he had watched tides all his life.

The ships lay moored and patient, their hulls creaking softly as the river shifted beneath them. Sails hung slack. Ropes were coiled and ready. To anyone who did not know better, the way out lay plain as day.

Hayton knew better. He had tried the same thing that morning, slipping down the piers with his head low and his pack light. He had made it halfway to a gangplank before the shadows had risen. They had not struck him. They had not even touched him. They had simply stood in his way, cold and absolute, until he turned back.

Now others tried in greater numbers.

Men and women surged forward, voices rising as desperation overcame caution. Some pleaded with the captains. Others shouted at shadows that did not answer. Hands reached for ropes. Feet hammered on planks worn smooth by generations of work.

The shadows moved. They emerged along the length of the docks, stepping into place with silent precision. They blocked every gangplank, every narrow bridge of wood that led from shore to ship. They stood shoulder to shoulder, an unbroken wall of darkness between the crowd and the river.

No threats were spoken and no commands were given. The message needed none.

One by one, the crowd faltered. Shouts died away. People backed off, eyes averted, fear settling into something duller and heavier. The captains stayed aboard their vessels, faces pale, hands clenched tight on rails.

Hayton watched the tide turn.

The river flowed on, indifferent, carrying nothing with it. The ships remained where they were, bound to the docks as firmly as if they had been nailed in place.

No one left King’s Landing that day.

EVENING

Silvy knew the sound of a fight before it started.

She had heard it a hundred times in a hundred taverns. The scrape of a chair, the pitch of a voice tipping from jest into insult, the way laughter thinned and eyes sharpened. Broken furniture and blood on the floor were part of the work. She had learned where to stand when it happened and how to keep moving until it was over.

Tonight felt no different. The argument flared between two men near the back, both drunk enough to believe themselves invincible. Words were traded, then spat. A chair scraped hard against the floor. Silvy felt her shoulders tense as she lifted a tray, already bracing for the crash that would follow.

Hands drifted toward knives, and then suddenly, the air changed.

Cold seeped into the room, stealing breath and sound alike. A shadow unfolded beside the hearth, its dark form swallowing the firelight. Frost crept across the floorboards, thin and pale.

Silvy froze where she stood. As did everyone else.

No one screamed. No one moved. Patrons, guards, and staff alike were caught in the same grip of dread, eyes wide, mouths half open, bodies locked in place. The shadow did not advance. It did not need to.

Time stretched. Silvy’s arms began to ache from holding the tray. Her heart hammered in her chest. She waited for violence and found only the suffocating weight of being watched.

At last, one of the men swallowed and pulled his hand away from his knife. The other followed. Chairs were righted. Eyes dropped. Without a word, they sat back down and drank, hands shaking.

The shadow faded as quietly as it had come.

No one spoke for a long while after. The tavern closed early that night, its doors barred against the dark. Not a single punch had been thrown. Not a single blade drawn.

The inner chambers of the Great Sept of Baelor were meant to be a place of stillness.

Thick stone walls shut out the noise of the city, and high, narrow windows admitted only softened light, filtered through crystal and coloured glass. Incense lingered in the air, sweet and heavy, clinging to cloth and beard alike. Septon Oswyn had walked these chambers for decades, had debated doctrine and discipline here until the words blurred together with age.

He had never felt the room tremble with fear as it did now.

The High Septon sat at the centre of the gathering, robed in white and gold, hands folded atop his staff. Oswyn could see the tremor in those hands despite the effort to still them. The crystal at the staff’s head quivered faintly. Around him stood the Most Devout, men robed in cloth of silver, crystal crowns catching candlelight that suddenly felt too thin to warm anything. These were the shepherds of the Faith, voices that had guided kings and calmed riots, men who had buried doubt beneath ritual and prayer.

That certainty had cracked.

“They are not demons,” one septon insisted, though his voice wavered. “They do not behave as such.”

“And yet they inspire terror,” another countered. “They kill without trial. They rule without sanction.”

“Terror can be holy,” a third replied, forcing steadiness into his tone. “The Stranger is feared, yet no less sacred.”

Oswyn listened, fingers worrying the edge of his sleeve. He had spoken little. Words felt dangerous in a room where no one understood what now ruled the streets. Shadows that enforced order. Darkness that punished crime and spared the innocent. It unsettled every teaching he had ever learned.

“Are they tools,” someone asked, “or judgement?”

No one answered.

The candles flickered.

Cold seeped into the chamber, sharp and undeniable, stealing warmth from skin and breath alike. Oswyn felt it first in his knees, then along his spine. The doors at the far end of the chamber opened without a sound.

The shadows entered.

They flowed in like a tide of night, tall and silent, frost blooming across the marble beneath their feet. The Most Devout fell silent as one. Prayer beads stilled. Hands tightened on staffs. No one rose. No one dared to move.

Between them walked a man.

He was tall and broad shouldered, dark brown hair falling loose around a face marked by hardship rather than age. His grey eyes were calm, assessing, utterly unafraid. He wore no crown, no sigil of office, yet his presence carried the unmistakable weight of rule and authority. Oswyn felt his heart stutter as the man crossed the chamber with measured steps.

“My name is Jon Snow,” the man said, his voice steady in the hush. “The bastard son of Prince Rhaegar Targaryen and Lyanna Stark.”

Shock rippled through the room. Oswyn felt it like a blow to the chest. Bastard. Targaryen. Stark. Words heavy enough to break kingdoms.

Impossible, his mind whispered. Prince Rhaegar would never have fathered a bastard. He had no known child with Lyanna Stark. Such a child would never have been allowed to live. Robert Baratheon and the Lannisters would have seen to that.

Jon Snow did not pause.

“I command the shadows,” he continued. “King’s Landing is mine. The lions and the false stags within the city have been deposed and eradicated. I have claimed the Iron Throne.”

The High Septon’s breath hitched. Oswyn saw his shoulders shake as he tightened his grip on the staff, knuckles whitening beneath thin skin. The words landed like stones dropped into deep water. There was no triumph in them. No relish. Only certainty.

“I have not come to profane this place,” Jon said, his gaze settling briefly on the High Septon before sweeping the chamber. “Nor to silence the Faith. I wish to speak with you. To cooperate with you.”

A murmur stirred, then died.

“The realm has bled,” Jon continued. “It has known chaos, cruelty, and neglect. That will end. Peace, order, and stability will be restored, not only in this city, but throughout the Seven Kingdoms. The innocent will be protected. The faithful will be protected. That is my intent.”

He inclined his head, not in submission, but in acknowledgement.

“Together,” he said quietly, “the Crown and the Faith can ensure that the people of this realm are not abandoned again.”

The shadows behind him remained still, silent sentinels of living night.

Oswyn realised he was trembling.

Not from cold alone. From what stood before them. The High Septon shook openly now, his composure failing despite years of discipline. Fear was etched into his face, raw and unmistakable, and Oswyn knew it mirrored his own.

The Faith had prepared itself for kings and usurpers, for heresies and wars of words.

It had not prepared for a ruler who commanded darkness and spoke of cooperation rather than conquest.

As Jon Snow waited, patient and absolute, Oswyn understood with sudden clarity that the world beyond the sept had already changed. The Faith would have to decide, and soon, whether it would walk beside this new power, stand against it, or be left behind by it entirely.

NIGHT

Night settled uneasily over The Muddy Way.

The alley was narrow and foul, slick with refuse and shadow, its walls leaning close enough that Lysa could feel them pressing in as she backed away. Annet clutched her hand, fingers numb and shaking, her breath coming in short, panicked gasps.

“There’s nowhere to go,” Annet whispered.

Lysa knew. She had known the moment the men stepped into the mouth of the alley, blocking the way out with careless certainty. There were four of them. Filthy, wide eyed, reeking of ale and fear. Their voices overlapped as they laughed and argued with one another, words tumbling out half formed and wild.

“The world’s ending anyway,” one said. “Might as well take what’s left.”

Hands reached out. Fingers caught in hair and cloth. Fabric tore. Annet cried out as someone yanked her sideways, and Lysa lunged without thinking, striking at a face she barely saw. Panic drowned thought. The men pressed closer, breath hot and sour, convinced of their own righteousness by terror and drink.

Then the cold came. It swept through the alley like a held breath released, sharp and absolute. The men faltered mid motion, confusion flickering across their faces.

The shadow rose behind them. It did not announce itself. It did not threaten. It simply was.

Darkness surged, swift and final. The men fell where they stood, bodies crumpling to the stones without time for screams. Blood spread in thin rivulets, steaming faintly in the cold.

Silence followed.

Lysa collapsed against the wall, legs giving way beneath her. Annet slid down beside her, sobbing, clutching at torn cloth with shaking hands.

A shadow knelt before them.

Its form shifted, softened, and gentle hands lifted them both upright, steadying them as though they weighed nothing at all. Another shadow approached, smaller than the rest, hooded, its presence quieter. It raised one dark hand, and something unseen passed through Lysa’s chest.

The panic loosened its grip. Her heart slowed. The ringing in her ears faded. The world sharpened, colours and edges returning as though she had surfaced from deep water. Annet’s sobs eased into shaky breaths, her body no longer locked with terror.

Lysa did not understand what had been done to them. She only knew that the fear had receded enough for her to think.

She grabbed Annet’s hand and pulled her close.

“Run,” she whispered.

They fled the alley without looking back, bare feet slipping on stone, breath tearing free in ragged bursts. They did not stop until the street opened wide and light spilled out to meet them.

Behind them, the shadows remained.

They stood unmoving amid the bodies, keeping their silent watch as the night deepened around them.

The tavern on the Street of Flies was fuller than it had any right to be.

Its door stood barred halfway closed despite the heat, shutters drawn tight enough to leave the room dim and close. Smoke from the hearth and the press of bodies thickened the air, carrying the smell of sour ale, sweat, and old fear. People crowded shoulder to shoulder around low tables, sharing cups and whispers in equal measure. Rumours moved faster than drink.

“I tell you, they’re the dead,” a cooper muttered, leaning close so his words would not carry. “Those trampled in the streets. Those butchered in the Keep. They’ve come back wrong.”

“They don’t rot,” someone else replied. “They don’t moan. They stand guard like soldiers. Dead men don’t do that.”

“Demons, then,” a woman hissed, fingers tight around her cup. “Abominations loosed at the end of days. That’s what my gran said would happen. Shadows in the streets and the gods turning their faces away.”

A laugh followed, thin and brittle. No one joined it.

Whenever footsteps passed outside, voices dropped at once. Heads turned. Breath held. Only when the sound faded did the murmur return, cautious and subdued.

People spoke in fragments. A shadow at a crossroads. A man struck down for drawing steel. A child touched and unharmed. Each story contradicted the next, yet all carried the same unease. No one knew what the shadows wanted. Worse, no one knew what might happen if they ever stopped wanting it.

A washerwoman sat hunched at the end of one table, her hands wrapped so tightly around her cup that her knuckles shone white. She had not spoken until now.

“They saved us,” she said suddenly.

The table quieted. Even the nearby ones leaned closer.

“Me and my girl,” she continued, voice shaking despite her effort to steady it. “In an alley near Cobbler’s Square. Men cornered us. Thought the city had gone mad enough they could do whatever they liked. They were gonna rape us. Maybe even kill us.”

She swallowed hard.

“The shadows came,” she said. “Killed them before they touched us. Didn’t hurt us. One of them… helped us stand.”

Someone crossed themselves. Another whispered a prayer.

“They’re guardians,” the washerwoman said, eyes bright with tears. “They have to be. Sent by the Seven to protect the innocent when men failed.”

The words hung in the air, heavy and unsettling. No one rushed to agree. No one dared dismiss it outright either.

A silence settled, broken only by the crackle of the hearth and the faint creak of timber. People shifted in their seats, staring into cups as if answers might be found at the bottom.

At last, someone spoke, voice low and certain.

“Whatever they are,” he said, “thieves aren’t stealing. No one’s been knifed in the streets. No child or woman’s gone missing in days.”

Others nodded. Reluctantly. Uneasily. The city had grown quieter. Safer, in ways it had not been for years. Yet fear still clung to every wall and doorway, heavier than before.

No one knew what the shadows were. No one agreed why they had come. But veryone knew one thing only. King’s Landing was being watched, and the watching had not ended.

CHATAYA