Chapter 16: A Calculated Retreat - 282 AC

Chapter 16: A Calculated Retreat - 282 AC

Victory has a potent, intoxicating scent. In the wake of the triumphs at Summerhall, the Stormlands army was drunk on it. The campfires burned brighter, the songs were louder, and the men walked with the swagger of conquerors. Robert Baratheon, their embodiment of the storm, was a whirlwind of boisterous energy, his grief momentarily buried under a landslide of glory. He saw the path ahead as a straight line, a bloody road leading directly to King's Landing and the throat of Rhaegar Targaryen.

I, however, smelled something else beneath the aroma of victory: the cloying, metallic scent of hubris. War is not a song. It is a remorseless equation of logistics, attrition, and opportunity. While the other lords feasted and boasted, I was in my tent, surrounded by maps and ledgers, my mind a cold engine of calculation. My Thorneguard, now battle-tested and acting as the provosts of the army, enforced a disciplined order around the baggage train, a pocket of quiet efficiency in the chaotic camp. Their professionalism was a source of both respect and resentment from the other levies, which suited me perfectly.

The captured loyalist lords—Grandison, Cafferen, and Fell—were treated with a formal, respectful courtesy that disarmed them completely. I saw to their needs personally, ensuring their wounds were tended with my high-proof spirits and their accommodations were comfortable. They had expected retribution; I gave them mercy. In doing so, I was not being noble. I was acquiring assets. Their oaths to Robert were sworn in public, but their quiet, private debts of gratitude were sworn to me.

Our eastward march was a triumphal procession until the scouts brought the news I had been anticipating. Lord Randyll Tarly, the master of Horn Hill and the most feared battlefield commander in the Reach, was marching on us. And he was not leading a few disparate hosts. He was at the head of the entire vanguard of the Tyrell army, a vast, disciplined force that outnumbered our own by at least two to one.

The war council was a study in contrasts. Robert, invincible in his own mind, saw another opportunity for glory. "Tarly!" he boomed, slamming his fist on the map, making the wooden markers jump. "Let him come! We smashed three lords in a day, we'll smash this one before noon!"

The other lords, buoyed by their recent victories, roared their approval. Only I remained silent, my eyes tracing the lines on the map, the cold arithmetic of our situation playing out in my mind.

"My lord Robert," I said, my voice cutting through the din. The tent fell quiet. My opinion, the opinion of the man who fed them, was now one they could not ignore. "A victory against Lord Grandison is not the same as a victory against Lord Tarly. Tarly is not a proud lordling; he is a soldier. His men are the best trained and most disciplined in the Reach. And they outnumber us significantly."

"Numbers did not save Fell or Cafferen," Ser Ronard Tarth grunted.

"Fell and Cafferen were caught unprepared and alone," I countered, my gaze fixed on Robert. "Tarly will not be. He will have a fortified position. He will have archers in depth. To attack him now, with our forces weary from the march, would be to throw our men away for the sake of pride. It is an unnecessary risk."

"So we run?" Robert's voice was low, dangerous. His blue eyes, usually alight with boisterous humour, were now stormy seas.

"We withdraw," I corrected him. "A strategic withdrawal to the north. We link up with Lord Stark and Lord Arryn. We consolidate our power, and then we face the royalists with overwhelming force. Attacking now is what Tarly expects. It is what he wants. Why play his game when we can write the rules for our own?"

My logic was sound, my reasoning cautious and impeccable. But I was speaking to a man who was half-storm, half-grief, and fully convinced of his own invincibility. He looked at me, his friend, the man who had made his victories possible, and for a moment, I saw a flicker of doubt. But it was extinguished by the fire of his rage.

"No," he declared, his voice final. "I will not run from Randyll Tarly. We attack at dawn."

The Battle of Ashford was exactly what I had predicted: a bloody, grinding, and utterly pointless affair. Robert, leading the charge, was a force of nature, his warhammer a terrifying metronome of death. He and his personal retinue smashed through Tarly's forward lines, and for a moment, it seemed his sheer martial fury might carry the day.

But Randyll Tarly was a rock against which the storm broke. His lines did not shatter. They bent, absorbed the blow, and held. His archers rained down death with disciplined precision. His spearmen stood firm. It became a battle of attrition, a brutal, grinding meat grinder where men died not in glorious charges, but in muddy, desperate struggles over a few feet of ground.

In my command tent, pitched on a hill overlooking the carnage, I experienced the harvest. It was different from Summerhall. Not the sharp, shocking waves of death, but a continuous, agonizing flow. It was the psychic equivalent of a relentless, grinding pressure, the combined death-screams of hundreds of men forming a single, unending note of agony in my mind.

I worked through it, my face a mask of stone. My aides saw only their lord, calmly directing reserves, organizing the flow of wounded to the rear, a pillar of order in the chaos. They did not see the man inside, wrestling with a torrent of dying thoughts, building mental fortifications to channel the raw power of their deaths into the humming vortex of my ring. The power was immense, a steady, horrifying river of energy that made the silver band on my finger burn with a constant, searing heat. But the cost was a piece of my own sanity, a sliver of humanity sacrificed for every soul I consumed.

By late afternoon, the truth was undeniable. We were losing. Robert was uninjured, but his vanguard was shattered. Our flank was beginning to crumble. We had inflicted heavy casualties, but we had taken just as many, and Tarly still had thousands of men in reserve. The battle was lost.

It was Lord Jon Connington who finally convinced Robert, his own armour blood-splattered, his face grim. "My lord, we must pull back! We can't hold them. To stay is to be annihilated."

Robert, his face a thundercloud of fury and shame, finally, reluctantly, gave the order. The retreat began. And as panic began to ripple through the weary, battered lines, I knew my moment had come.

"Sound the recall to the baggage train," I commanded my own officers. "Signal the Thorneguard. They are to form a rearguard, effective immediately. No one breaks formation. Anyone who does is to be considered a deserter."

While other lords struggled to rally their terrified men, my two hundred Thorneguard soldiers moved with the cold precision of a well-oiled machine. They formed a disciplined line of shields and spears a mile behind the main battle, a solid wall that the disorganized retreat could flow through and reform behind. My pre-positioned supply wagons provided water and immediate aid. My healers, drilled for this very scenario, set up efficient triage stations. I had turned my logistical train into a fortified island of stability. I did not prevent the retreat; I managed it. I turned a potential rout into an orderly, strategic withdrawal.

But Randyll Tarly was not a man to let his prey escape so easily. His outriders, fresh and eager, began to harry our flanks, picking off stragglers, creating chaos. We were bleeding men, and the army's morale was dangerously low.

That night, as the army made a weary, furtive camp, I knew I had to act. Conventional methods were not enough. I needed an advantage, something decisive. The power I had harvested at Ashford, added to the already vast reservoir from Summerhall, hummed on my finger, a weapon of unimaginable potential waiting to be unleashed.

I found a secluded grove, far from the light of the campfires, my personal Thorneguard forming a silent, impenetrable cordon around me. I stood in the darkness, the only light the faint, eerie luminescence from the ring itself. I reached out with my will, not to the soul of a single man, but to the thousands now contained within my ring. I drew upon their collective essence, a terrifying ocean of power.

I was not weaving a simple ward or enchanting a single object. I was attempting to alter the very fabric of the environment on a massive scale. I pulled the raw energy from the ring, shaping it, molding it with my intent. I visualized the concept of concealment, of misdirection, of confusion. I pushed the energy out, not as a blast, but as a slow, seeping presence, commanding it to blanket the path of our retreat.

The expenditure of power was staggering. I felt a psychic vertigo, as if my own soul was being stretched thin. The world greyed at the edges of my vision. But it worked. A mist, unnaturally thick and cold for this time of year, began to rise from the ground. It was a clinging, disorienting fog that swallowed sound and twisted sight. It clung to our army, moving with us, a magical veil that rendered us all but invisible.

The next morning, the harrying attacks from Tarly's outriders ceased. They could not find us. Their scouts became lost in the mists. The army whispered of a miracle, a blessing from the Warrior, a lucky turn of the weather. I knew I had just performed an act of High Magic that would have been the stuff of legends in the Age of Heroes. And I had paid for it with the lives of the men who had died at Ashford.

The rest of the march north was still arduous, but we were no longer hunted. We were ghosts.

When we finally made camp in the northern marches of the Stormlands, a humbled Robert Baratheon summoned me to his tent. He was wounded, his arm in a sling, his pride even more so. The boisterous fury was gone, replaced by a grim, weary respect.

"You were right, Thorne," he said, his voice a low rumble. "I was a fool. I let my rage cloud my judgment. I nearly destroyed us all." He looked at me, his blue eyes clear and serious. "Your men saved us from a rout. That… fog… that was the luckiest thing I've ever seen."

I gave a slight, noncommittal shrug. "The gods favour a just cause, my lord."

"Perhaps," he said. He took a long drink of wine. "From now on, the strategy is yours. You are more than my Quartermaster. You are my chief advisor. You get us to the Trident, Thorne. I'll do the fighting when we get there."

It was a total capitulation. I now held near-total command over the strategy and logistics of the rebellion's primary army. My influence was second only to Robert's own.

Later, alone in my tent, I meditated, trying to gauge the new landscape of my own power. The great spell had been costly, draining a significant portion of the energy I had absorbed at Ashford. But the harvest had been so vast that my reserves were still far greater than they had been after Summerhall. I had spent a river of power, but I had gained an ocean.

My monologue was no longer that of a simple predator. It was that of an artisan, a craftsman of war and magic. Brute force failed. Robert's rage, his legendary prowess, it was not enough against a disciplined, strategic foe. But my power… my power succeeded. I did not win the battle, but I won the war of the retreat. I saved the rebellion not with a hammer, but with a whisper, with a fog. This is the true path. Not to meet their strength with strength, but to unmake their plans, to cloud their minds, to move like a ghost through their world. They play their game of swords and shields. I am playing a game of magic and manipulation they cannot even comprehend.

The Ashford calculus had been a lesson for Robert. For me, it had been a confirmation. I now had the power to not just profit from the war, but to actively shape its course. As we prepared to cross into the Riverlands, my thoughts were already on our next destination, the next great harvest. The Stoney Sept. And this time, I would not just be a scavenger. I would be an architect of the slaughter.