Chapter 17: The Serpent in the Sept - 282 AC

Chapter 17: The Serpent in the Sept - 282 AC

The long march north into the Riverlands was a grim and sullen affair. The swagger of Summerhall was a distant memory, replaced by the bitter taste of the retreat from Ashford. The army was a wounded beast, licking its sores, its morale as foul as the muddy roads we trudged upon. It was in this environment of doubt and weariness that my own power became absolute. While the other lords nursed their pride and counted their dead, I provided order. My logistical machine, humming with ruthless efficiency, was the only thing holding the army together. My Thorneguard, disciplined and implacable, became the spine of the entire force. Robert Baratheon, humbled and nursing a wounded arm, had ceded strategic command to me. He was still the storm, the heart of the rebellion, but I was now the mind that directed it.

Our arrival in the Riverlands was met with a new sense of urgency. Intelligence, gathered by my own scouts and confirmed by raven from Lord Jon Arryn, was dire. The new Hand of the King, Lord Jon Connington, a man known for his fierce loyalty to Rhaegar and his desperate desire for glory, was hunting Robert with the tenacity of a wolf. Robert, having pushed ahead of our main force with a small retinue, had been wounded in a skirmish and had gone to ground in the town of Stoney Sept. Connington's army, a formidable force of Crownlands men, was closing the net.

The war council, now including the grim-faced lords of the Vale and the first of the Tully bannermen, was a scene of barely controlled panic.

"He is trapped," declared Lord Hoster Tully, his face florid with agitation. "Connington is searching the town house by house. He will find him before we can break through."

"We must attack at once!" roared a Northern lord, his hand on the pommel of his greatsword. "For Lord Stark!"

They argued, they postured, they proposed doomed frontal assaults. They were lords of war, but they were thinking like soldiers, not strategists. I waited, letting the chaos of their fear subside before I spoke, my voice a calm, cold counterpoint to their heated debate.

"A direct assault on the town would be a bloodbath," I stated, drawing their attention. "Connington has fortified his positions. We would be fighting street by street, losing thousands before we ever reached Lord Robert, who would likely be killed in the crossfire." I stepped towards the campaign map, a new authority in my bearing. "We cannot save him with brute force. We must use a scalpel, not an axe."

I looked around the tent, meeting the eyes of men like Eddard Stark and Hoster Tully for the first time. Stark's grey eyes were quiet, steady, and deeply wary. He was studying me, the strange, cold lord from the Stormlands his friend Robert now relied upon so heavily. Tully's were the shrewd, calculating eyes of a politician, weighing my worth.

"Lord Connington believes he is hunting a single wounded man," I continued. "He is focused inward. He does not know that our combined forces are so close. I will take my Thorneguard, my two hundred elite men, and infiltrate the town tonight. My official purpose," I announced for the benefit of the council, "will be to make contact with the local resistance, to smuggle medical supplies to Lord Robert, and to gather intelligence on Connington's dispositions to prepare for your main assault."

My real purpose, the cold, dark secret that hummed on my finger, was far simpler. I needed to be within ten kilometres of the fighting. The coming battle would be a slaughter, a chaotic, close-quarters affair perfect for a bountiful harvest. And I had to ensure Robert, my ticket to the far larger harvest at the Trident, survived.

"You would go in yourself?" Ned Stark asked, his voice a low rumble. It was the first time he had spoken to me directly. There was a note of surprise, and perhaps a flicker of respect, in his tone.

"My men are the most disciplined. I know their capabilities best," I replied smoothly. "And I am, after all, the Quartermaster. Tending to the supply needs of our commander, even under duress, is my duty."

There were no further objections. My plan was daring, but it was also the most logical. That night, under the cover of darkness, my two hundred Thorneguard soldiers and I slipped through the loyalist lines like ghosts.

Entering Stoney Sept was like stepping into a different kind of war. This was not the open field of Ashford; this was a maze of terror. The town was a prison, every street patrolled by grim-faced Crownlands soldiers, every alleyway a potential ambush site. The air was thick with fear.

And the harvest began.

It was not the great, psychic wave of a battle line breaking. It was a thousand tiny, sharp pricks of death. A baker, accused of hiding rebels, cut down in his own shop. A young couple, caught out after curfew, run through by a patrol. A loyalist soldier, stabbed in a dark alley by a defiant townsman. Each death was a distinct, intimate burst of energy into my ring. I felt the baker's bewildered terror, the soldier's gurgling surprise, the lovers' shared, final pang of despair.

The sheer intimacy of it was more nauseating than the mass deaths of the battlefield. This was not the abstract horror of war; this was the personal terror of slaughter. I moved through the shadows of the town, my face a cold, impassive mask, while my mind reeled from the constant, sharp whispers of the newly dead. The Serpent, however, was untroubled. It processed the pain, filtered the emotion, and stored the pure, cold power.

My first task was to ensure Robert's safety. From Rhys's intelligence, I knew he was hiding at the Peach, a local brothel. While my men, under the command of Bronn—who was terrifyingly at home in this environment of urban skullduggery—began to systematically eliminate loyalist patrols near the brothel, I found a high, secluded bell tower that overlooked the establishment.

Here, I performed a new kind of magic. The power thrumming in my ring was immense, a vast ocean of souls. I drew upon it, not for a grand, sweeping effect like the mists of Ashford, but for a series of small, precise, and intricate weavings. I created a ward of silence around the Peach, a magical bubble that dampened sound. The laughter, the music, the very life of the brothel would now be a muted hum to any outside listener, masking any sound Robert might make. I then wove a subtle illusion, a ward of misdirection, over the street itself, one that would make patrols feel an unaccountable urge to turn down a different alley, to search the next street over instead. It was delicate, intricate work, like performing neurosurgery on the fabric of reality.

For a day and a night, we were the town's ghosts. My Thorneguard became specters of death, appearing from the shadows to slit a throat or fire a single, silent crossbow bolt, eliminating Connington's search parties with brutal efficiency. I was their eye in the sky, using brief, risky scries with my crystal—powered by the very men we killed—to locate enemy concentrations and guide my soldiers' movements. I was the unseen architect of the town's defense.

Then, Connington, enraged and frustrated, made his final, fatal error. He ordered the septons to ring every bell in the town, a signal for his troops to begin a full-scale purge. The methodical search was over; the massacre was about to begin.

The tolling of the bells was our signal as well. As the first mournful peal rang out, the horns of the North and the trumpets of the Riverlands answered from outside the walls. The main rebel army attacked.

The Battle of the Bells was not a battle; it was a riot. A chaotic, swirling melee that consumed the entire town. The fighting was in the streets, in the taverns, in the homes of the terrified smallfolk. And I was at its epicenter, a calm vortex in a hurricane of death.

The influx of souls was a deluge, a roaring, deafening flood of psychic energy. It was the grinding agony of Ashford and the sharp shock of Summerhall combined and amplified a hundredfold. I leaned against the stone wall of my bell tower, my body trembling with the sheer effort of processing it all. Soldiers from the North, the Vale, the Riverlands, the Crownlands—their souls all poured into me, a torrent of dying rage, honour, and fear. Townsfolk caught in the crossfire, their bewildered spirits adding a note of pure, tragic horror to the symphony.

The power was blinding, ecstatic, and obscene. The ring on my finger burned with a white-hot intensity, no longer feeling like a piece of jewelry but like a living, ravenous star fused to my flesh. I felt my own consciousness begin to fray at the edges, threatening to dissolve into the sea of dying minds. But the Serpent held firm, its cold, implacable will a fortress against the tide. It drank deeply, absorbing, filtering, storing.

The battle turned when Eddard Stark and Hoster Tully broke through the main gate, their fresh troops pouring into the streets. The loyalists, caught between the hammer of the main army and the anvil of the town's resistance, finally broke and fled.

In the midst of the chaos, I led my men to the Peach. We "found" Robert, wounded but alive, just as Ned Stark, his face grim and splattered with blood, arrived with his own men.

"Robert!" Ned cried, his relief palpable.

"Ned! You took your damned time," Robert roared, grinning through the pain. He then saw me, standing calmly in the doorway, my men securing the building. His grin widened. "Thorne. I should have known you'd be here. Is this your doing?"

"I merely offered what aid I could to the good people of this town, my lord," I said, my voice steady despite the psychic hurricane still raging within me.

Hoster Tully arrived moments later, his eyes taking in the scene: the wounded Robert, the relieved Ned, and me, the quiet lord from the Stormlands, somehow at the center of it all.

Later, in the ruins of the Guildhall, the three great lords of the rebellion were united for the first time. Robert, his arm being set by a maester, looked at me and then at his friends.

"This is the man who saved my army at Ashford," he said, his voice resonating with gratitude and authority. "And he saved my skin in this damned town. He may not have a crown, but he has the best strategic mind in the Seven Kingdoms. Listen to him."

It was the ultimate endorsement. In a single, bloody afternoon, I had transformed myself. I was no longer just Robert's quartermaster. I was the acknowledged strategist of the entire rebellion, my position cemented in the eyes of the Starks and the Tullys by the one thing they all respected: success.

That night, alone in my tent, the world was silent but my mind was a roaring sea. The ring on my finger pulsed with a power so immense it felt as if it could unmake the world. The souls from the Stoney Sept, a chaotic, tragic, and unbelievably potent vintage, had elevated me to a new plane of existence. The power I had used to weave mists and silence now felt like a child's parlor trick. With what I now possessed, I could level a section of this town. I could enchant an entire army. The possibilities were terrifying and limitless.

My monologue was no longer a reflection on the game. It was a declaration of my own ascendant divinity. They call this the Battle of the Bells. A victory for the rebellion, a testament to their courage. They are fools. It was not their battle. It was mine. They were simply the reapers. I was the one who gathered the harvest. Robert thinks I saved him out of loyalty. He is a tool, the hammer I need to smash the Targaryen dynasty. Ned Stark thinks I am a capable, if cold, commander. He cannot comprehend what I am. They are playing for a throne of twisted iron. I am playing for a throne of creation itself, a throne built on the souls of the dead.

The Trident was next. The final, great confrontation. The largest battle of the war, where tens of thousands would die. They saw it as the decisive moment of the rebellion.

I saw it as the final, greatest harvest. The one that would give me the power to reshape the world.