Scene 1: The Clash
Location: The Northern Bank of the Trident.
Time: Dawn.
The sun did not rise. It bled into the sky.
A heavy mist clung to the Trident, turning the world into a grey ghost-land. The river was loud, a churning, swollen beast fed by weeks of rain, rushing brown and angry over the stones of the ford.
On the northern bank, forty thousand men stood in absolute silence.
They were not the shivering, dysentery-riddled wretches that Rhaegar Targaryen expected. They were full-bellied. They were hydrated. They were rested.
Robert Baratheon stood at the front of the center column, surrounded by his Stormlands heavy infantry. He wore his full plate now—black steel, unadorned save for the antlers on his greathelm. He held his warhammer in both hands, the wood of the shaft feeling warm and alive.
He looked at the men around him.
To his left, the Riverlands levies under Hoster Tully. They stood in the mud, their boots deep in the mire, but their eyes were clear. There was no smell of sickness. Just the smell of wet wool and cold iron.
To his right, the Northmen under Ned Stark and the Valemen under Jon Arryn. A wall of grey and blue, bristling with spears and heavy axes.
"They are coming," Ned said, his voice calm, though his hand gripped the hilt of Ice so hard his knuckles were white.
Through the mist on the southern bank, the horns blew.
Boooo-oooooom.
It was a beautiful, deep sound. The sound of high chivalry.
And then, they emerged.
The Royalist vanguard.
It was a sea of steel and silk. Ten thousand heavy horsemen, the cream of the Crownlands and the Reach. They rode destriers draped in barding of red, green, and silver. Their lances were painted. Their shields were polished.
At the center rode Prince Rhaegar. Even in the mist, the rubies on his chest seemed to catch the nonexistent light. He looked like a figure from a tapestry, glorious and terrible.
Robert lifted his visor. He spat a apple seed into the mud.
"Look at them," Robert roared, his voice rolling down the line. "They look like a parade! They think you are grass to be stepped on!"
A low growl rose from the Rebel throat.
"Are you grass?" Robert bellowed.
"WE ARE ROCK!" forty thousand men shouted back.
"Then let them break themselves!"
On the southern bank, the trot turned into a canter. The canter turned into a gallop.
The earth began to shake.
Ten thousand horses hitting the ground at once is a sound that lives in the gut. It is a thunder that drowns out thought. The Royalists hit the water with a massive splash, a white wave of foam rising as they plunged into the ford.
"Hold!" Robert commanded.
The Rebel archers—Northern and Stormlands mixed—nocked their arrows. They didn't fire yet.
The Royalist cavalry surged into the river. The water was deeper than they thought. It came up to the horses' chests. The current shoved against the beasts, breaking their perfect formation. The mud of the riverbed sucked at their hooves.
The "glorious charge" slowed. It became a slog.
"NOW!" Robert screamed. "LOOSE!"
The sky turned black.
Five thousand arrows, fired from heavy war-bows, arched over the river. They didn't hiss. They roared.
They fell on the Royalist vanguard while they were trapped in the water.
The sound was hideous. The scream of horses. The clank-clank-clank of bodkin points punching through expensive plate. The splash of men falling from their saddles into the rushing current, weighed down by their own armor, drowning in inches of water.
The river turned red in seconds.
But they kept coming. The sheer mass of the Royalist army pushed the front ranks forward. They trampled their own fallen. They forced their way through the corpse-dam.
"PIKES!" Robert shouted. "BRACE!"
The front rank of the Rebel army dropped to one knee. The second rank stood. The third rank braced against the second.
A forest of steel points lowered, angled at forty-five degrees.
The "Steel Porcupine."
The Royalist knights, frustrated by the water, spurred their horses up the muddy northern bank. They wanted blood. They wanted to crush the peasants.
They hit the pikes.
There is no glory in physics. A thousand-pound horse moving at speed, carrying an armored knight, hitting a grounded steel spike results in carnage.
CRACK.
The sound of breastbones shattering. The sound of lance shafts snapping.
Robert watched as a knight of House Ryger, his shield blazoned with a willow tree, charged straight at a Stormlands sergeant. The horse impaled itself on the pike. The beast screamed, flipping over, crushing the knight beneath its bulk in the mud.
The sergeant didn't run. He held the shaft until it snapped, then drew his sword and hacked at the trapped knight.
"Push them back!" Robert roared, swinging his hammer.
He stepped into the fray.
A Royalist squire, wild-eyed and terrified, scrambled up the bank, swinging a sword. Robert didn't even slow down. He swung the hammer backhand.
The spike of the hammer caught the boy in the ribs. Metal crumpled like paper. The boy flew backward into the river, dead before he hit the water.
"They are slowing!" Jon Arryn shouted from the right flank. "The bodies are blocking the ford!"
It was true. The Royalist charge had stalled. The "Silver Tide" had hit a breakwater of discipline.
The Rebel infantry wasn't breaking. They weren't running. They were fighting with a cold, mechanical fury.
A Stormlands pike square, drilled to perfection by Robert over the last week, worked like a thresher.
Stab. Retract. Step. Stab.
They moved as one. When a Royalist knight managed to hack the head off a pike, the man behind filled the gap instantly.
Ser Barristan Selmy, leading a wedge of Crownlands knights, tried to break the center.
"For the Dragon!" Barristan shouted, cutting down a Riverlands spearman with a stroke of incredible grace.
But for every man Barristan killed, two more stepped up. They didn't fear the white cloak. They saw only an enemy who bled.
"Pull him down!" a corporal shouted.
Three men hooked Barristan's horse with guisarmes. The white destrier went down. Barristan rolled, coming up with his sword flashing, but he was surrounded. He was fighting in ankle-deep mud, against men who were fresh, hydrated, and angry.
Robert saw the white cloak go down in the press.
"Leave him!" Robert ordered his personal guard. "Focus on the ford! Don't let them gain a foothold!"
He looked across the river.
He saw Rhaegar.
The Prince was still on the southern bank, watching. He wasn't charging yet. He was watching his vanguard—the flower of chivalry—being ground into hamburger meat by "peasants" with sharp sticks.
Robert felt a surge of adrenaline that was brighter than the sun.
"You see that?" Robert shouted to his men, pointing his bloody hammer at the chaos in the water. "They bleed! They die! They drown!"
He grabbed a terrified Riverlands levy by the shoulder. The man was shaking, staring at the carnage.
"Look at me!" Robert roared.
The man looked. He saw the black steel. The antlers. The confidence.
"Are you tired?" Robert asked.
"No... no, Your Grace!"
"Are you sick?"
"No, Your Grace!"
"Then fight!" Robert shoved him back into the line. "Put them in the water!"
The Rebel line surged forward. It wasn't a ragged charge. It was a shove. A massive, collective heave of forty thousand men pushing the Royalists back down the slippery bank.
The river was choked with the dead. The water was foaming pink.
The Battle of the Trident had begun. And the Dragon was already choking on the mud.
[End of Scene]
Chapter 25: The Ruby Ford: Part 1
Scene 2: The Fatigue
Location: The Ford (The Center of the Meat Grinder).
Time: Mid-Morning (Two hours into the battle).
The adrenaline was gone. Now, there was only the weight.
Ser Richard Lonmouth swung his sword, aiming for the neck of a Stormlands man-at-arms. The blow was clumsy. His arm felt like it was made of lead. The sword glanced off the man's pauldron, sending a shockwave of pain up Richard's shoulder.
He gasped for air, the hot, recycled breath inside his helm tasting of copper and sour wine.
Why is it so hot? Richard thought, stumbling back as the river current shoved against his greaves. It is morning. It should be cool.
But it wasn't the sun. It was the fever.
Richard had drunk from the river yesterday. He had eaten the questionable pork from the baggage train. Now, his stomach was a knotted fist of cramping muscle. Every time he moved, his bowels twisted. He was dehydrated before he even swung his first blow.
"Push!" a voice screamed behind him. "For the Prince!"
Richard tried to step forward. But his legs were trembling.
Opposite him, the Stormlands soldier didn't step back. The man was a nobody—a face Richard would have ignored in a tavern. But the man's eyes were clear. His skin was flushed with exertion, not fever. He was breathing hard, yes, but it was the healthy panting of a man doing work, not the desperate gasping of a man drowning in his own armor.
The soldier swung a poleaxe.
Richard raised his shield. The blow landed with the force of a falling tree. Richard's knees buckled. He went down into the mud and water.
He tried to stand. His armor, usually a second skin, now felt like a coffin. The mud sucked at his sabatons.
I am so tired, Richard thought, panic fluttering in his chest. I have fought in tourneys that lasted all day. Why can I not stand?
Around him, the "flower of chivalry" was wilting.
Lord Celtigar, an old man who had boasted of his vigor the night before, was leaning against his horse's flank, vomiting into the river. His face was grey. He dropped his axe, too weak to hold it.
A Riverlands arrow took him in the throat a second later. He didn't even raise his hand to stop it.
The Royalist charge had stalled completely. The vanguard was a crushed mass of horseflesh and steel, trapped in the ford.
The problem wasn't just the pikes. It was the energy.
A Royalist knight would swing his sword three times, then drop his guard, his chest heaving, his vision blurring from the dehydration caused by the Flux.
And the moment he dropped his guard, a Rebel pike found the gap.
"Rotate!" a voice bellowed from the Rebel line.
Richard looked up through his mud-splattered visor.
The Stormlands line opened. The men who had been fighting for the last hour stepped back, moving efficiently to the rear.
Fresh men—rested, hydrated, eager—stepped forward to take their place.
It was unfair. It was maddening.
The Rebels were fighting in shifts. The Royalists were piling up on top of each other, trapped by their own numbers, exhausted, sick, and desperate.
"They are endless," a squire near Richard sobbed. The boy was leaning on his sword, his breeches stained dark with the tell-tale sign of the bloody flux. "My Lord, I can't... I can't lift it."
"Stand up!" Richard roared, though his own voice was a croak. "Stand up and fight!"
But the boy didn't stand. He collapsed face-first into the red water. He didn't drown; he just didn't have the strength to lift his head.
Richard looked at the Rebel line. He saw the water skins hanging from their belts. He saw them taking quick sips during the lulls in combat.
Water, Richard realized, the thirst clawing at his throat like a briar patch. They have water. We have wine and mud.
A fresh Stormlands sergeant stepped up to Richard. He held a mace.
"Yield," the sergeant said. He didn't shout. He just said it like a statement of fact. "You look done, Ser."
"I am a knight of the skull," Richard rasped, forcing his sword up. "I do not yield to a peasant."
The sergeant shrugged. He swung the mace.
Richard tried to parry. But his reaction was half a second too slow. His muscles misfired.
The mace didn't hit his head. It hit his sword arm.
CRACK.
Richard screamed as the radius bone snapped. His sword fell into the water.
The sergeant didn't kill him. He just shoved him.
Richard fell backward. The current caught him. He tumbled over the body of a dead horse, rolling downstream, thrashing in the bloody foam.
As he washed away, away from the battle, he saw the Royalist line buckling.
It wasn't breaking from fear. It was collapsing from exhaustion.
Men were simply falling down. Knights in ten thousand dragons' worth of plate were fainting from heatstroke and dehydration, toppling into the water to be stabbed by levies who had eaten a full breakfast.
The Dragon wasn't being slain by a hero. It was dying of fatigue.
Richard's head hit a rock, and the world went dark. The last thing he smelled was the stench of his own army—the smell of sick men dying in a river they had fouled.
[End of Scene]
Chapter 25: The Ruby Ford: Part 1
Scene 3: The Push
Location: The Ford (Transitioning from North Bank to Mid-Stream).
Time: Late Morning.
The momentum of a battle is a physical thing. You can feel it shift, like the tide changing in an estuary.
For two hours, the Rebel army had been an anvil. They had stood still, absorbing the blows of the Royalist hammer, letting the enemy break themselves against the pikes.
But an anvil does not win a war. Eventually, you have to become the hammer.
Robert Baratheon felt the shift before he saw it.
He felt it in the way the Royalist strikes were landing—slower, weaker, desperate. He saw it in the way the pile of dead horses and men in the middle of the ford had become a barrier that the fresh Royalist waves couldn't climb over.
The "Silver Tide" had stagnated. It was a churning, confused mess of men screaming for their mothers and knights trying to pull their hooves out of the mud.
Robert wiped blood—not his own—from his visor. He looked left. The Riverlands infantry was holding. He looked right. The Northmen were chopping wood, their axes rising and falling in a rhythmic grimness.
He raised his warhammer high above his head. The antlers on his helm scraped the grey sky.
"THEY ARE GASPING!" Robert roared. His voice was a thunderclap that cut through the screams. "THEY ARE TIRED! WE ARE FRESH!"
He pointed the hammer forward.
"ADVANCE!"
The drums beat. DOOM. DOOM. DOOM.
It wasn't a charge. A charge is chaotic. A charge breaks formation.
This was a press.
"Step!" the sergeants bellowed.
The entire Rebel line took one synchronized step forward into the water.
SPLASH.
Forty thousand boots hit the water at once. The sound was like a cliff collapsing into the sea.
"Brace!"
The shields locked together. The pikes lowered.
"Step!"
SPLASH.
They moved like a piston. A slow, grinding wall of black steel and oak that pushed into the chaotic mass of the Royalists.
Lord William Mooton of Maidenpool saw the wall coming.
He was trapped in the middle of the ford, his horse dead beneath him. He was standing in waist-deep water, surrounded by the wreckage of his own vanguard. He was exhausted. His beautiful coral-colored armor was dented and smeared with filth. He had lost his helmet. His face was pale, his lips cracked from thirst.
He looked at the Rebel line. It didn't look like men. It looked like a creature with a thousand metal spines.
"Push them back!" Mooton screamed, his voice cracking. "We are the chivalry of the Crown! Charge them!"
He gathered a knot of twenty knights around him—men of House Ryger and House Darry. They were brave men. They were skilled swordsmen who had trained in the yards of castles since they were boys. They knew the names of every master-at-arms in Westeros.
They charged the wall.
"For Rhaegar!" Mooton shouted, raising his sword.
He threw himself at the Stormlands pike square directly in front of Robert.
It was an act of supreme valor. It was the kind of moment singers wrote songs about. The lone lord charging the faceless horde.
But the Stormlands square didn't care about songs.
"Range!" a sergeant barked.
Six pikes shot out like viper tongues.
Mooton parried the first one. He dodged the second.
The third one caught him in the shoulder. The fourth caught him in the gut. The fifth took him in the throat.
Mooton stopped. He looked down at the shafts of ash wood burying themselves in his expensive plate. He looked up at the faces of the men holding the pikes.
They weren't angry. They weren't screaming. They were just... working. They held the pikes steady, their arms strong, their muscles fueled by the double rations they had eaten that morning.
They lifted him.
"Heave!"
The soldiers tossed Lord Mooton backward, off their pikes, like a farmer tossing a bale of hay. He splashed into the bloody water and didn't rise.
The twenty knights who had followed him faltered. They saw their lord dismantled in seconds, not by a duel, but by a machine.
They hesitated.
And in that second of hesitation, the wall took another step.
"Step!"
SPLASH.
The Rebel line slammed into the confused knights. Shields bashed into faces. Short swords stabbed through the gaps in the pikes, finding groins and armpits.
It was a slaughter.
Robert watched it happen from five yards away. He saw the look of horror in the eyes of a young Ryger knight as he realized that his years of fencing training meant nothing against a wall of men who refused to break formation.
Ned Stark appeared at Robert's side, Ice dripping with red water.
"They are breaking," Ned shouted over the din. "They are climbing over each other to get away from the pikes."
"They aren't breaking," Robert corrected, swinging his hammer to crush the helm of a man trying to crawl past him. "They are crumbling."
He watched a Royalist man-at-arms drop his sword and try to run, only to vomit into the water and collapse, his legs too weak to carry him.
Robert gestured to the carnage—the brave, foolish, exhausted charge of Lord Mooton.
"Look at that, Ned," Robert growled, his voice filled with a cold, industrial satisfaction.
"Mooton was a hero. He was brave. He had the blood of kings in his veins."
Robert stepped over Mooton's floating corpse, pushing the line forward another yard.
"But discipline eats valor for breakfast."
He slammed his visor down.
"PUSH!"
The Rebel army surged. They crossed the midpoint of the river. They weren't just defending the north bank anymore.
They were taking the ford.
And on the southern bank, Rhaegar Targaryen watched as his beautiful painting was slowly, methodically erased by a wall of black iron.
[End of Chapter]