Chapter 31: The City of Sand
Scene 1: The Lion's Trap
Location: The Throne Room, The Red Keep.
Time: The Height of the Sack (Morning).
The great oak doors of the Throne Room, already splintered from Robert's entry, were shoved wide open.
The sounds of the Sack flooded into the silent hall—a cacophony of women screaming, men dying, and the crackle of fires being lit in the yards below.
Through this corridor of noise rode Tywin Lannister.
He was magnificent. His armor was crimson steel, polished to a mirror sheen, inlaid with gold lions that seemed to prowl across his breastplate. His cloak was a waterfall of cloth-of-gold. He rode a white destrier that stepped high over the bloodstains on the marble floor.
He looked like a conqueror. He looked like a savior. He looked like a man arriving precisely when he meant to.
Tywin reined in his horse at the foot of the dais. He looked at the scene before him with cold, assessing green eyes.
He saw the corpse of Aerys Targaryen, sprawled in a pool of his own blood on the steps of the Iron Throne.
He saw his son, Ser Jaime, standing pale and shaken, his golden sword bloody, his white cloak stained.
And he saw Robert Baratheon.
Robert was leaning against the base of the Iron Throne, catching his breath. He looked like he had crawled out of a slaughterhouse drain. He was covered in black sewer muck, red clay, and dried blood. His beard was matted. He stank of death and excrement.
Tywin's expression did not change, but there was a microscopic tightening around his eyes. He had expected to find Aerys alive, cowering. He had expected to present Robert with the city. He had not expected Robert to beat him here.
"Lord Tywin," Robert said. His voice was a rasping croak, heavy with exhaustion. He didn't bow. He didn't straighten up. He just leaned against the swords.
"Your Grace," Tywin said smoothly, his voice echoing in the vast hall. "It seems I am late. The city is yours. I have secured the streets for you."
Robert laughed. It was a dry, hacking sound that turned into a cough.
"Secured," Robert repeated, wiping slime from his forehead. "Is that what they call rape and murder in the Westerlands these days? I thought it sounded a bit loud for a liberation."
Tywin sat straighter in his saddle. "War is messy, Your Grace. Aerys refused to yield. My men are... enthusiastic in their loyalty to the new crown."
"Enthusiastic," Robert muttered. "Right."
Robert pushed himself off the throne. His knees popped audibly. He walked slowly up the steps, past the body of the Mad King, toward the back of the dais.
Tywin watched him, frowning slightly. "Where are you going, Robert? The city is that way." He nodded toward the city.
"Just checking the pantry, Tywin," Robert called back.
He disappeared behind the massive chair for a moment. He kicked open the hidden panel Aerys had left unlatched. When he emerged, he was holding something in both hands.
It was a clay jar. About the size of a man's head. It was sealed with wax, and the clay felt strangely warm to the touch.
Robert walked slowly down the marble steps. He held the jar casually, like a serving wench holding a pitcher of ale.
He stopped ten feet from Tywin's horse.
"You know, Tywin," Robert said, his voice dripping with tired sarcasm, "you always did have impeccable timing. Waiting until the battle was decided. Marching in when the hard work was done. Brilliant stuff, really."
Robert hefted the jar slightly.
"But you missed one little detail in your grand calculations."
Robert didn't throw the jar. He just opened his hands and let it drop.
SMASH.
The clay shattered against the marble floor at the feet of Tywin's magnificent white charger.
Thick, oily green liquid splashed across the white stone. It shimmered with an internal, malevolent light. The smell was instantaneous—a cloying, chemical stench that burned the nostrils.
A droplet of the oily substance splashed onto the horse's fetlock. The chemicals burned the skin instantly. The destrier shrieked, bucking violently. It reared up, neighing in terror, dancing sideways to avoid the glowing sludge.
Tywin Lannister, for the first time in twenty years, lost his composure. He had to fight the reins, his face tightening into a mask of fury as he forced the horse back under control.
He looked down at the green pool. He recognized the substance. Every high lord knew what the Alchemists brewed.
Wildfire.
Tywin looked back up at Robert.
Robert hadn't moved. He was just standing there, filthy and exhausted, looking at the most powerful man in Westeros with absolute boredom.
Robert pointed a mud-caked finger at the green puddle.
"That was under the throne, Tywin. Aerys was about two seconds away from lighting it before your son put a sword through his back."
Robert stepped over the green puddle, closing the distance to Tywin's horse.
"And here's the punchline to your grand entrance," Robert said, his voice flat, void of any humor. "There are four thousand of those jars stashed under the city. Beneath the Sept. Beneath the Dragonpit. Beneath every whorehouse in Flea Bottom."
Robert gestured vaguely toward the doors, where the sounds of the Sack were still raging.
"Your 'enthusiastic' men are out there right now, looting burning buildings and kicking in cellar doors."
Robert leaned in closer to the horse, looking up at the Great Lion.
"If one spark hits the wrong cellar, Tywin... the whole city goes up. The Red Keep becomes a crater."
Robert smiled, a tired, grim baring of teeth.
"You didn't conquer a city, Tywin. You just walked into the world's biggest fire trap."
He nodded toward the open doors, where the smoke was drifting in.
"And the worst part? I'm not holding the match."
Robert's eyes went cold.
"Your own dogs are out there holding bonfires in their hands. If we blow up, it's on you."
[End of Scene]
Chapter 31: The City of Sand
Scene 2: The Pivot
Location: The Throne Room / The Red Keep Courtyard.
Time: Minutes later.
The silence in the Throne Room was absolute.
Tywin Lannister looked at the green puddle of death fizzing on the marble. He looked at his son, Jaime, who was standing uncomfortably close to where Aerys had been scratching at the trigger.
Tywin did the math.
If the city exploded, House Lannister ended. Tywin died. Jaime died. The army—the instrument of his power—vaporized. All for the sake of a few hours of looting.
Robert Baratheon stepped back, leaning heavily on the hilt of his sword.
"You have two choices, Lord Tywin," Robert said, his voice raspy.
He held up one finger, coated in dried mud.
"Choice One: You keep sacking. Your men find a cellar in Flea Bottom. They kick over a candle. The wildfire catches. We all turn into green ash. You go down in history as the fool who walked into his own grave."
He held up a second finger.
"Choice Two: You become the hero."
Tywin's eyes narrowed. "Hero?"
"Stop the sack," Robert commanded. "Sound the bells. Open the gates—all of them. Not to let people in, but to get them out."
Robert gestured to the open doors.
"Use your army to clear the houses, not loot them. Order the smallfolk into the fields beyond the walls."
He pointed at the green sludge.
"And bring me sand, Tywin. Tons of it. Wet sand. It's the only thing that smothers the substance. Water just spreads it."
Tywin sat motionless on his horse for a long, agonizing second. He was weighing the humiliation of taking orders against the survival of his dynasty.
He looked at Jaime. His golden heir. The boy for whom he had resigned the Handship. The future of Casterly Rock, if Tywin could ever pry him out of that white cloak.
If the fire takes him, I have nothing, Tywin thought. The legacy turns to ash.
The calculation was complete. Self-preservation overrode pride.
Tywin turned his horse sharply, the hooves clattering on the stone. He looked at Ser Kevan Lannister, who had ridden in behind him with the household guard.
"Kevan," Tywin said. His voice was ice.
"Brother?"
"Sound the horns," Tywin ordered. "Call off the attack. Immediately."
Kevan blinked, stunned. "The men are... spirited, Tywin. Stopping them now—"
"I said stop them," Tywin cut him off. "Any man found looting from this moment on loses a hand. Any man found lighting a fire loses his head."
He looked back at the green puddle.
"Clear the city. Move the populace to the tourney grounds. And send the sappers and siege crews to the river. Dig sand. Wagonloads of it."
"Sand?" Kevan asked.
"Do it!" Tywin roared, a rare crack in his composure.
He spurred his horse, riding back out toward the courtyard.
Location: The Outer Yard.
The chaos outside was deafening. Smoke drifted thick and heavy.
A Westerlands knight—a brutish man in the livery of House Lorch—was dragging a screaming serving girl across the cobbles. He had a torch in one hand and a bundle of stolen silverware in the other.
He didn't see the Lord of Casterly Rock until the white shadow of the destrier fell over him.
"My Lord!" the knight laughed, drunk on wine and violence. "The Keep is yours! We are burning the—"
Tywin Lannister didn't speak. He didn't scold. He stared at the open flame in the man's hand with a look of pure, terrified hatred.
He drew the longsword at his hip. It was a fluid, practiced motion.
Whisshh.
The blade flashed in the morning sun.
The knight's head, still wearing a grin of debauched triumph, toppled off his shoulders. The body collapsed.
The torch fell from the dead man's grip, rolling across the stones.
Tywin barked a command to his personal guard. "Put it out! Smother it!"
Two guardsmen scrambled to stomp the torch into the dirt until it was nothing but black charcoal.
Tywin sheathed his sword and looked at the gathered Lannister men, who had frozen in horror.
"The Sack is over," Tywin announced, his voice carrying over the screams. "If I see another torch, the man holding it joins him."
He pointed to the gates.
"Clear the city. Now."
[End of Scene]
Chapter 31: The City of Sand
Scene 3: The Great Exit
Location: The Streets of Flea Bottom / The Gate of the Gods.
Time: Mid-Day.
The citizens of King's Landing had expected death. They had locked their doors, barred their shutters, and huddled in cellars, listening to the boots of the conquerors thundering on the cobblestones.
When the kicks came to the doors, they screamed.
A baker's wife near the Street of Flour clutched her two children as the wood of her shop door splintered inward. A Lannister man-at-arms, his armor spattered with gore, stood in the frame.
The woman fell to her knees, begging. "Mercy, ser! Take the silver! Take the bread!"
The soldier didn't draw his sword. He grabbed the woman by the arm and hauled her up.
"Leave the bread!" the soldier roared, his voice cracking with urgency. "Get out! To the Tourney Grounds! Move!"
The woman blinked, paralyzed by confusion. "My... my Lord?"
"The city is rigged!" the soldier shouted, looking nervously at the floorboards. "Out! Go to the gates! Run, you stupid cow, before the ground opens up to GREEN HELL!"
He shoved her into the street.
All over the city, the scene repeated. The Sack had inverted.
Lannister knights, who an hour ago had been looking for loot, were now galloping down the main thoroughfares, their horses foaming.
"EVACUATE!" they bellowed. "BY ORDER OF THE KING ROBERT! LEAVE YOUR HOMES! MAKE FOR THE OPEN FIELDS!"
Thousands of people poured out of the alleys like a river of ants. They carried babies, heirlooms, and clothes. They ran not from swords, but from the sudden, terrifying rumor that was spreading faster than any fire: The Dragon is waking up beneath us.
Location: The Dragonpit.
While the streets emptied, a different kind of war was being fought in the shadow of Rhaenys's Hill.
Ser Kevan Lannister oversaw the operation. He had stripped off his heavy cloak and was shouting orders to a bucket brigade of three hundred men.
"Steady!" Kevan commanded. "If you drop it, we die!"
The Lannister sappers, usually tasked with mining walls, were now walking on eggshells. They moved in pairs, carrying heavy wooden crates filled with wet sand.
They descended into the dark, vaulted cellars of the Dragonpit.
Deep inside, arranged in neat rows like vintage wine, were hundreds of clay jars. The wax seals were glistening.
The men didn't try to move the jars—it was too risky. Instead, they dumped the wet sand.
Shhh-thump.
Bucket after bucket.
They buried the jars. They smothered the cache in tons of heavy, damp earth, turning the volatile explosive dump into a harmless sandpit.
Outside, wagons arrived from the riverbank, their axles groaning under the weight of river mud.
"Faster!" Kevan yelled, wiping sweat from his brow. "The sun is high! Keep the sand coming!"
Location: The Battlements of the Gate of the Gods.
The sun beat down on the massive stone archway where ten thousand terrified citizens were streaming out of the city, flooding onto the grassy plains of the Tourney Grounds.
Above them, on the high wall, a horn blew.
Booooooom.
The crowd looked up.
Robert Baratheon stood at the edge of the parapet. He was still wearing his filthy, bloodstained chainmail. He looked exhausted, a Titan who had held up the sky for too long.
Behind him, two Gold Cloaks dragged a man forward. It was Wisdom Garigus, a high-ranking Pyromancer. He was bound in heavy iron chains, gagged, and weeping.
Robert stepped forward. In his hands, he held a single jar of wildfire. The green liquid inside caught the sunlight, glowing with a terrible, hypnotic beauty.
A hush fell over the crowd below.
Robert didn't speak. He didn't have the breath for a speech. He nodded to the Royal Heralds standing on the towers.
The Heralds raised their trumpets, then their voices projected over the silent multitude.
"CITIZENS OF KING'S LANDING!"
The voice echoed off the walls.
"BEHOLD THE TRUTH!"
Robert raised the green jar high above his head.
"THE MAD KING RIGGED THE CITY!" the Heralds screamed. "THE DRAGON WANTED YOU TO BURN!"
A gasp rippled through the crowd like a wave. They looked at the green jar. They looked at the terrified Pyromancer in chains.
"HE PLANTED THE WILDFIRE BENEATH YOUR HOMES! BENEATH YOUR SEPT! BENEATH YOUR BEDS!"
Robert lowered the jar, handing it carefully to a waiting soldier who placed it in a box of sand.
Robert then pointed down at the Lannister soldiers who were marshaling the crowd, keeping order, handing out water skins.
"THE STAG AND THE LION ARE CLEARING THE TRAPS!" the Heralds bellowed. "ROBERT BARATHEON HAS SAVED YOU FROM THE ASHES!"
"LORD ROBERT HAS SAVED YOU FROM THE FLAME!"
The narrative shifted in an instant.
The confusion and terror of the morning crystalized into gratitude. They weren't being driven out by conquerors; they were being rescued by heroes.
A single voice from the crowd shouted, "Bless the Stag!"
Robert stood on the wall, watching the sea of people. He felt no triumph. He just felt tired.
He leaned against the cold stone of the battlement, watching the city empty out, safe from the ghost of the Mad King.
We won, Robert thought, the adrenaline finally fading. Now comes the hard part.
[End of Chapter 31]
Chapter 31: The City of Sand
Scene 4: The End of the Dynasty
Location: The Tourney Grounds, Outside the Gate of the Gods.
Time: Late Afternoon.
The sun was dipping low, casting long, golden shadows across the sea of tents, bedrolls and just plain enclosures that now covered the fields outside King's Landing.
It was the largest gathering of smallfolk the realm had ever seen. A hundred thousand people, displaced but alive.
They huddled around fires—safe fires, dug in pits, watched by nervous Lannister guards. They ate bread distributed from the royal granaries, brought out by wagon trains on Tywin's orders.
But they were not celebrating. They were seething.
The shock had worn off. The adrenaline of the evacuation had faded. In its place, a cold, hard rage was setting in like concrete.
Rumors flew from campfire to campfire, growing darker with every retelling.
"They say there were fifty jars under the Street of Silk alone."
"My brother saw the pits in the Dragonpit. The sand was glowing green."
"He meant to kill us all. To burn us like pigs in a sty."
The name Targaryen was no longer spoken with fear or reverence. It was spoken with spit. The Dragon wasn't a god anymore; it was a rabid animal that had tried to bite the hand that fed it.
Tywin Lannister stood on a rise overlooking the encampment. He had removed his helmet. His golden armor gleamed in the sunset.
Beside him stood Robert Baratheon. The Storm Lord had finally washed his face, though he still wore his travel-stained clothes. He looked less like a wild beast and more like a weary general.
"Listen to them," Tywin said softly.
A low murmur rose from the fields. It wasn't the cheering of a victory parade. It was the growl of a betrayed population.
"They are furious," Tywin noted. "They feel... personally insulted."
"Fear breaks," Robert said, taking a bite of an apple he had swiped from a supply wagon. "Fear goes away when the sword is sheathed. But hate? Hate lasts forever."
Robert gestured to the city walls behind them.
"If we had just killed Aerys, they would have mourned him eventually. They would have told stories about the 'Good Old Days' of the Dragons."
Robert threw the apple core into the grass.
"But now? Aerys isn't the fallen King. He's the madman who tried to burn them, their children and their whole families."
Below them, a group of smallfolk had found a Targaryen banner—a three-headed dragon on black silk—that had been torn from a gatehouse.
They didn't burn it. They were too afraid of fire.
Instead, they threw it into the mud. Men and women took turns stomping on it, grinding the dragons into the filth, spitting on the red thread until it was unrecognizable.
Robert watched them.
"The Dynasty is dead, Tywin," Robert said. "Not because I killed Rhaegar. And not because Jaime & I killed Aerys."
He pointed to the angry mob destroying the banner.
"It died the moment they realized the Dragon didn't love them."
Robert turned away from the field, rubbing his neck.
"I'm going to find a bed. Wake me up when the sand is deep enough to walk on."
Tywin watched him go. He watched the broad back of the man who had just conquered the continent in less than a year.
For the first time in a decade, Tywin Lannister felt a flicker of genuine admiration.
He thought back to the Throne Room. The audacity of it. Any other man would have charged Tywin, or begged for terms. Robert had simply walked up to the most powerful army in Westeros and told that everyone will blow up to hell if they didn't behave.
He has the guts of a brawler, Tywin mused, his eyes narrowing. But he has the mind of a statesman.
Tywin looked down at the banner being trampled in the mud.
That was the masterstroke. A lesser conqueror would have sacked the city to punish the loyalists. Robert had turned the Sack into a rescue mission. He had not only saved the population, but he had also weaponized their gratitude. He had turned the Targaryens into terrorists in the eyes of their own subjects.
It was a piece of political theater so ruthless and so effective that even Tywin hadn't seen it coming.
I thought he was a hammer, Tywin realized, a cold smile touching his lips. But he is an architect.
This was not a King who would go crazy with power while his Hand ruled. This was a King who understood the terrible weight of power.
Tywin looked back at the city. The Red Keep stood tall against the darkening sky.
It was not Tywin's city. It never would be.
It belonged to the Stag now.
But as Tywin looked at the orderly lines of his soldiers distributing food, and the sappers and workers moving tons of sand to secure the capital, he knew his place in this new world.
The Stag had the vision. But he would need the Lion to build the foundation.
Tywin put his helmet back on, hiding his eyes.
"Kevan," Tywin called out, his voice crisp and commanding. "Double the guard on the King's tent. If anyone disturbs his sleep, they answer to me."
[End of Chapter 31]