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Disclaimer: This is a work of fiction, and all rights for characters, plots and settings belong to G.R.R. Martin and FromSoftware. I have no ownership.
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Harrenhal, 301 AC
Aerion Targaryen
He stood half a mile from the walls and watched the torches on the towers.
Five towers. Walls wide enough to drive a cart along the top. Three thousand men were inside, by the last count his scouts had given him. The largest castle in Westeros outside of King's Landing, built by a king who had wanted the world to understand what dragonfire could do to stone. The walls were still here, half-ruined and unmistakable, three hundred years later.
He was not going to use dragonfire tonight.
He reached inward, past exhaustion, past the soreness in his shoulders from two days of riding, into the place where the Ashes waited. Patient in a way living things were not, without urgency. He had learned not to think of them as soldiers.
One by one he called them forward. Eight. Twelve. Eighteen. He pushed further, feeling the tightening across his ribs, the pressure spreading behind his sternum. Twenty-four. He felt the edge of what his body would carry tonight and stopped there.
He gave them a simple directive: every gate, every postern, and every gap in the outer wall wide enough for a man to pass through. Seal them. Let no one leave. Kill only if there is no other choice.
They crossed the open ground without sound. At the walls they did not slow. They passed through the stone the way smoke passes through a lattice, and then they were inside, and he was alone in the dark with the wind and the distant torches.
He gave them four minutes. He stood in the dark and listened to the wind off the God's Eye and counted.
The alarm bells started at three and a half.
He walked toward the main gate at an even pace. An archer on the wall spotted him at two hundred yards and put an arrow through his left shoulder. The impact turned him half a step. He steadied and kept walking. Two more arrows by the time he reached the wall: one in his right arm just below the elbow and one that opened a long cut across his jaw. He stopped at the gate and looked up.
Six men on the parapet above him. All with bows were looking at the man with three arrows in him, who was now looking up at them.
"Open the gate," he said.
None of them moved.
He put his left palm flat against the gate wood. The bar behind it was iron, a foot thick, set in stone brackets. He braced and pushed. The wood flexed. The bar bent. The brackets cracked, and the gate swung inward.
He walked through.
The outer yard was fifty yards across. Torches on all four walls. Two full ranks of spearmen, shields locked, spears leveled. Behind them, swordsmen in loose formation. Archers on the walls above. Someone had organized them fast and well.
He drew the greatsword from his back.
A Lands Between blade. Longer than a man was tall, dark grey steel that caught torchlight differently from Westerosi iron, ground to an edge that split mail as easily as cloth. He had carried it for two years. It weighed as much as a small child, and he held it with one hand.
He went in at an angle, not straight at the center. The spears on the left side had to rotate to track him, and rotating broke their footing. He hit the weak point with the flat of the blade, driving through the first rank by sheer mass, and the line buckled.
The second rank was steadier. Four men formed a tight group with overlapping shields, attempting to push him back while others flanked him. He stepped inside the shields, positioning himself too close for the spears to reach, and within two seconds, he used his elbow, knee, and the pommel to strike. Three of them went down. The fourth got a blade across his ribs before they pulled back.
He took that cut. It was not deep.
A sword skidded off his back, found a gap between his shoulder blade and his arm, and opened something that bled freely. Present, relevant, not a reason to stop.
He drove forward, swinging in long horizontal arcs that cleared space, pressing toward the far gate. Men gave ground. Some ran. He moved past the men who remained.
A sergeant came at him from the left with a halberd, using the reach well, feinting high and cutting low. He was excellent. Aerion backed a half step, grabbed the shaft behind the head, and used the man's own pull to take him off balance. He put him down without killing him.
Two swordsmen filled the gap. He dropped one with the flat of the blade and took a cut on his forearm from the second before getting inside his guard. He rolled his wrist to check the grip he held and kept moving.
A third man came in from the right, younger and faster than the others, and he knew what he was doing. He went for the wrist on the sword arm, not the body. Aerion turned his hand and let the cut land on the back of his forearm instead of the wrist, which was the right response, and the young man saw it and adjusted again. They traded three exchanges in quick succession before Aerion drove his shoulder into the man's chest and put him down under his weight.
He got back up. Aerion let him.
He switched to the axe when the press got tight near the arch.
Not a Westerosi weapon. Shorter handle, broader head, double-edged. He drove the flat of it into faces and the butt into throats and used his elbow and his knee for the gaps the axe could not reach. Men went down. Men got up. He put them down again.
He moved through the yard the way water moves through a blocked pipe: not fast, but constant, always finding the line of least resistance and pressing through it until the pressure gave. The formation tried to regroup twice. Both times he found the joint and hit it before they could set.
He switched back to the greatsword when the press thinned.
At the center of the yard a cavalry officer had formed eight horsemen in a line and was charging them at his back.
He heard the hoofbeats.
He drove the greatsword point-first into the ground, let go of it, and pulled the spear. A Lands Between weapon: longer than a cavalry lance, lighter, with a crossguard behind the head. He turned, set the butt against the earth, and braced. The lead horse hit the spear at full gallop, and the impact drove him back two steps before the animal went down. He stepped clear, drove the shaft into the second horse's chest, dropped low to avoid the rider coming off, and had the spear free before the third horse reached him.
The cavalry charge ended.
The surviving horses went sideways. Riders who had stayed on tried to turn them and found they could not. Animals were excellent judges of certain things.
He retrieved the greatsword and kept going.
Behind him the outer yard had gone quiet. He could hear the Ashes moving along the walls, steady and without hurry, and the low sounds of men who were hurt but not dead finding walls to lean against. No one was running. The gates were held.
The corridor to the inner yard was narrow. Twenty feet wide, arrow loops every ten feet. He moved fast through it, head down, one shoulder against the wall to narrow the angle on the loops. Arrows clattered off the stone around him. One went through his left thigh. He pulled it out mid-stride.
Thirty men at the far end. Tight in the corridor, shields up. He could see the torchlight on their faces from fifty feet away. Most of them were watching the arrows and wondering why none of them had done the job.
He stopped, planted his feet, and reached into the part of himself that was storm and fire. The power gathered in his arm and ran up through his shoulder, his elbow, and his palm.
He threw it.
Not at the men. Into the floor between them. The lightning cracked through the stone and branched in six directions at once. The air tasted of iron and rain. The concussion knocked him back a step. In the corridor, thirty men fell to the ground.
He stood still for a moment. The ringing in his ears. The smell of scorched stone. He breathed through it and walked forward through the silence.
He stepped around those who were moving. The ones who were not, he stepped over.
The inner yard was where the last of them had made their stand.
A circle formation, shields outward, spears angled down, two ranks deep. Torches were placed to keep the center bright. Someone had thought about the arrangement. Someone had either known or guessed that the creature entering their castle would not simply rush into a prepared position.
He circled them at ten feet. They rotated. He moved faster. The problem with a circle was always the same: it had no front.
He switched directions twice without warning. The formation adjusted both times, but the second adjustment was slower than the first. For ten minutes, the men on the east side had been turning, and their legs were beginning to protest.
Four men broke from the formation and came at him together. He took a sword cut on his forearm, drove his elbow into one man's face, threw a second into a third, and put the fourth down with the pommel. He switched the greatsword to his right hand to rest his left.
He walked to the near side of the circle and pushed into it.
Not finesse. The blade moved in short, controlled arcs, using mass and momentum to press bodies backward. The circle deformed. Men from the back rank stepped on men from the front rank. The Ashes were at the far side, pressing inward. The space was shrinking.
He took a spear thrust in his left side that skidded off a rib. A sword cut across the back of his right hand. He kept pushing forward.
Three men rushed him from the left. He dropped the greatsword inside the circle and used both hands. He caught the first man's wrist and threw him into the second. The third got an elbow across the face. He retrieved the greatsword before any of them were back on their feet.
An archer too close to use his bow tried to use it as a club. Aerion blocked it with his forearm and looked at him. The man threw the bow down.
The circle was half its original size. Men at the back were pressed against the Ashes, and the Ashes were not moving.
The sergeant commanding them was a grey-haired man with a broken nose. He watched Aerion come through his men and did not run. He stepped out of the circle alone and planted himself in Aerion's path with a hand-and-a-half sword in both hands.
"You've taken enough," the man said.
Aerion stopped three feet from him.
"You fight well," the sergeant said. "But you're bleeding from six places, and there are still eighty men in this yard."
"Eighty can try," Aerion said. "Or they can sit down and go home when this is over."
The sergeant held his ground for another three seconds. He glanced at the ashes behind him. He looked at the arrows still in the man in front of him. He had been a soldier long enough to know the difference between a fight that could go either way and a fight that had already been decided.
He stepped aside.
"Weapons on the ground," he said to his men. "All of you."
The swords went down. Slowly, then all at once.
He was worn out. Not the ordinary tiredness of a long day. The weight came from the ashes, from the sustained summoning, and from the lightning. He could feel his edges, where the reserves had run thin.
He stood in the middle of the inner yard and looked at it. The fallen men. The ashes moved slowly through the quiet. The torches are still burning, the walls still standing. Harrenhal had survived another night, the same way it had survived every other thing that had tried to bring it down. It simply absorbed the damage and remained.
One man had done the impossible. He was always slightly surprised by that, afterward. In the Lands Between it had been unremarkable. Here it was different.
He went to find Jaime Lannister.
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Harrenhal, 301 AC
Jaime Lannister
The bells were still ringing when the first shape came through the eastern parapet.
Jaime saw it from the walkway: roughly man-formed, pale in the torchlight, moving through the stone of the wall as if the wall were not there. It reached the walkway and stopped and looked at the two guards standing twenty feet away. The guards ran. The shape did not pursue them. It turned and moved toward the tower stairwell.
He stopped at the top of the stairs and looked out over the outer yard.
His formation was holding. Two solid ranks, shields up, spears level. The torches are bright enough to see clearly. He had good men. He had built something here worth keeping, and three months of work had given him a garrison that would not break for nothing.
Then the gate came open.
The bar bent, and the gate swung in, and a man walked through it with two arrows already in him. Jaime's archers on the wall above were shooting. He saw both bolts hit. The man did not stop. He kept walking toward the formation as if it were a minor inconvenience rather than a hundred men with leveled spears.
Jaime started down the stairs.
He received four reports before he reached the yard.
Eastern postern: men dead at the door, door intact.
Western tower: something in the stairwell moving upward, three men sent to investigate, no word back.
Main gate: bar bent outward, as if pushed from outside.
South wall: shapes on the ramparts, moving between men who could not hit them and could not stop them.
He put on his armor in the outer yard while Ser Addam organized the men. Chestpiece, vambraces, and gorget. His right hand remained as it was, while his left hand fastened all the buckles.
"Do we know what we're facing?" Ser Addam said.
"No."
"The shapes, or the man?"
"Both," he said, settling on the gorget. "The shapes don't seem interested in killing people who aren't in their way. The man I don't know yet." Form two ranks of men in the outer yard, with shields up. Place archers on every wall."
"And if the archers can't stop him?"
"Then we find out what does."
Ser Addam went. Jaime drew his left-hand sword and followed.
He reached the arch as the man came through the gate.
Dark hair. No armor. The sword on his back was wrong in every proportion, too long for a man to carry, and yet he carried it. When he drew it, the sound was nothing like steel on a scabbard, lower and colder, as if the blade were announcing something.
The ranks held. Jaime gave them credit for that. They held until the man hit the line, and then the left side of the first rank came apart in three seconds. Jaime had seen the best swordsmen in the Seven Kingdoms. He had never seen anyone move through armed men like that, with the sword and without it, as if fighting were a practical problem to be solved rather than a performance.
He had seven arrows in him by the time the cavalry formed. Three that Jaime had watched landed, and he had kept walking through every one of them.
"Cavalry!" Jaime shouted.
Ser Ryman had eight horses ready. He quickly led the horses into a charge, demonstrating his skill, while Jaime watched from the arch as they raced towards the figure in the yard.
The figure turned. He dropped the sword, had something else in his hands before the horses reached him, set it, and braced, and the lead horse hit it and went down, and everything after that was chaos.
Three horses fell within the first ten seconds. Two more broke away. The remaining three-wheeled riders were fighting animals that had decided they wanted no part of the race.
The man retrieved his sword and kept walking.
Jaime stood at the arch and watched. He had no more cavalry. His archers had put a dozen bolts into the man, and none of them had slowed him more than a step. His spearmen were regrouping, but they had already broken once, and they knew it.
He thought about what else he had. He did not come up with much.
Jaime grabbed Ser Ryman by the arm.
"Regroup on the arch. All of you."
"My lord, the shapes won't let anyone through the side gates."
"I know. Regroup on the arch."
He got his men moving. Some were standing still, staring. He shoved three of them toward the arch, and the rest followed.
He looked back once.
Seventy feet away, the man stood in the middle of the outer yard and watched him. Not advancing. He had arrows in him and blood on his face, and he was standing as if nothing around him required his immediate attention.
Jaime turned and went through the arch.
From the inner yard he could hear fighting. Whatever was inside with his men remained there. He considered sending more men through but concluded that it would achieve nothing other than providing additional targets for whatever was inside.
He retreated to the corridor between the yards, accompanied by about forty men. Some bleeding. All looking at him.
"Shields up. Lock together. Nobody moves until I say."
They locked.
He stood at the front and listened to the footsteps coming down the corridor.
Slow. Even. Unhurried.
Thirty-eight men behind him with shields and blades. He had counted twice. None of it was going to be enough. He knew that now, the same way you knew a hand was lost before the maester confirmed it. He raised his sword anyway. He was Jaime Lannister. This was what he did.
The footsteps stopped. Somewhere in the shadow between torch brackets, out of sight, he heard the air change. A pressure that was neither wind nor sound was building in the stone under his feet. The torches guttered. The men behind him felt it too; he could hear them shifting their weight, shields coming up tighter. None of them had any idea what they were bracing for.
Then the floor lit up white and gold, and the sound of it hit him in the chest like a hammer, and he was on his back before he understood what had happened.
The stone under his back was warm. His ears rang. He turned his head and saw his men down around him, most lying still.
He got up.
His legs held. His ribs hurt. He raised his sword.
He had lost his sword hand and rebuilt himself from nothing. A man who had accomplished such a feat would not remain on the ground.
The man was walking toward him through the corridor, stepping around the fallen with something like care.
He stopped six feet from Jaime.
Up close he was younger than Jaime had expected. Dark grey eyes. A cut along his jaw was still bleeding. Two arrows in his upper body, one in his arm. The wounds looked like inconveniences he had noted and set aside.
"Jaime Lannister."
"Aerion Targaryen," Jaime said.
He had not meant to say it. The name had simply come out because there was only one thing in the world it could be: the name of the man who had killed his father.
"Yes."
"The castle is mine," Jaime said. "Until you take it from me."
"I have taken it."
"Not yet."
He went for the throat.
He was adept with his left hand. Two years of necessity had made him good in the way elegance could not teach. He drove in fast and angled past the sword arm, going for the jaw. The man moved his head, barely, and the blade went past him. A hand closed around Jaime's sword wrist and held it.
Not crushing. Holding.
He could not move his arm.
He tried a knee strike. Aerion stepped inside it and hit him in the chest with an open palm, and Jaime went backward six feet and hit the wall.
His sword was still in his hand. He pushed off the wall.
"You're going to hurt yourself," Aerion said.
"I've done it before."
This time, he came in lower, feinting to the right and cutting to the left, successfully getting through and drawing blood from Aerion's side. Something real. He was already spinning for a follow-up when Aerion caught his wrist with the same hand, the injured side, and swept his legs and put him face down on the stone floor with one arm pulled behind his back.
Three degrees from dislocating the shoulder.
"Stop," Aerion said.
Jaime lay still. His cheek was against the warm stone. He could see the corridor, the torches, and the fallen men.
He breathed. His ribs made themselves known. He thought about whether there was anything else he could do from this position and decided there was not.
The angle on his shoulder. The men around him are still alive. Three thousand soldiers surrendered in the yards below because this one man had walked through them.
"If I let go," Aerion said, "are we done?"
He had held this castle against the Brave Companions. He had rebuilt what Roose Bolton had left him. He had convinced three Riverlords to pay him something like respect. One night. One man. Not a siege, not an army. One man.
"Yes," he said.
The pressure released. He pushed himself up. Aerion stepped back and gave him room.
He held out his sword. His hand was steady. He was mildly surprised by that.
Aerion looked at it. Took it. Turned it once, testing the weight, then handed it back.
"Keep it. You'll want it on the road."
"What road?"
"North. Things need settling about what comes after, and your family is part of that."
Jaime looked at him. "My children are not hostages."
"No. But they are Lannisters, and the Lannisters have a throne, a queen, and debts owed in every direction. I am not going to sort that alone."
"You could have sent a raven."
"I was not certain you would come."
"You were not certain I would come, so you took my castle with one man and a handful of ghosts."
"Yes."
Jaime looked at the corridor around them. His men, appearing as pale shapes, moved toward the inner yard. The pale shapes were moving his men toward the inner yard. None were being harmed. Whatever the shapes were, they were handling three thousand soldiers with a precision that no ordinary force could have managed.
"My men," he said.
"Prisoners of war. No harm. Released when there's a settlement."
"And if I refuse to go north?"
"Then you stay here under guard until you reconsider." Aerion pulled the arrow from his forearm and dropped it. "I would rather not wait."
"How long have you been planning this?"
"Long enough."
He looked at the man in front of him. Two arrows still in him. A wound in his side that Jaime had put there. He stood there as if none of the events required any comment.
He had held Harrenhal with three thousand men, and it had lasted one night.
"All right," he said.
Brienne was outside the gate with two horses. She looked at Jaime when he came through, then at the blood on his face, and then at Aerion behind him.
"You're alive," she said.
"Apparently." He took the nearer horse's reins. "You knew he was coming."
She did not deny it.
"You were trying to get me out. Before this." He thought about the road south three weeks ago, the scout who had come back alone, and the Isle of Faces. "You were trying to pull me away before it happened."
"I was asked to bring you to Lady Stoneheart," she said. "I couldn't do it. He gave me another way."
"He gave you me as a prisoner instead of Stoneheart giving me as a corpse."
"Yes."
She said it without flinching. He had known her long enough to know that she did not lie easily. Whatever she had done here, she had done because she believed it was the better choice out of two bad ones. He could not argue with the arithmetic.
He thought about it. He was alive and riding north with a Targaryen. He was also not dead, which Stoneheart would have fixed.
"Come north," he said. "If Sansa Stark is alive, the man who just took Harrenhal probably knows where she is."
She looked at Aerion.
"I can find her," Aerion said from behind them. "After."
Brienne was quiet for a moment. Then she mounted.
They rode north in the dark. Harrenhal fell behind them, its towers against the stars, the bells long silent.
Jaime did not look back.
His shoulder ached. His ribs made themselves known with every step of the horse. The wound from the lightning strike in the corridor needed to be examined as soon as it was light.
Aerion rode a few lengths ahead. He had pulled the last arrow from his arm while they were saddling the horses, wrapped the wound in cloth from a saddlebag, and said nothing about any of it.
Not many men had beaten him throughout his life. Most of them had taken some satisfaction in it. This one was just calm.
He was not sure what to make of that yet. He had a long ride to work it out.