~ 💎 WEEKLY POWER GOALS 💎🔥 60→1ch | 100→2ch | 200→5ch ⏰ Resets Monday! Thanks!
"CLANG! CLANG! CLANG!"
Every aisle. Every exit. Every corner of the Great Hall.
Hundreds of Frey soldiers drew their longswords at the same moment.
The gleaming blades caught the flickering torchlight and threw back a cold, bloodthirsty glare, transforming the entire hall into a steel cage bristling with fangs.
At the same moment, the two massive oak doors slammed shut and locked.
BOOM!
That single sound cut off every escape route. It shattered the last shred of hope in every Tully heart.
"Ah!"
A Tully woman screamed. Her husband clamped a hand over her mouth before the sound could finish.
Panic spread through the Tully seats like plague.
"Walder Frey! You godforsaken bastard!"
"Go fuck yourself!"
Brynden Tully , the Blackfish , eyes blazing with fury, hurled the table in front of him aside and ripped his sword free. Wine cups and plates exploded across the floor with a piercing crash.
But the moment he rose to his feet, the world lurched. A violent, twisting pain tore through his gut.
"Pfft—"
Black blood burst from his mouth and splattered across the white tablecloth.
"The wine... the wine is poisoned?!"
Brynden dropped to one knee, sword planted in the floor to hold himself up. His weathered face was twisted with rage he couldn't bring himself to believe.
He looked at his nephew Edmure. He looked at the Tully bannermen around him , faces contorted in agony, bodies crumpling to the ground one by one.
They had all drunk that wine. That so-called wine of reconciliation.
"Lysa!"
He forced his head up with everything he had left.
Those bloodshot eyes locked onto the woman seated at the head of the hall, her face alight with venom and madness.
"You poisonous bitch!"
"You'd slaughter your own blood?!"
Edmure Tully had already fallen. His body convulsed against the floor, the poison ripping through him, his handsome face twisted beyond recognition.
He stared up at her. The woman who had once curled up in his arms and begged him to carry her through the gardens of Riverrun. His eyes held nothing but grief and despair.
He never could have imagined it.
Blood. Family. All of it shattered the moment power entered the equation.
She truly meant to destroy House Tully.
Lysa Arryn watched it all and began to laugh.
"Haha... hahahaha!"
The sound rang through the Great Hall, shrill and unhinged.
"Kin?"
"The moment you chose to stand with that bastard, you stopped being my kin!"
She extended one finger and swept it across the room , Brynden, then Edmure, then finally settling on Catelyn.
"You are all my enemies!"
"And today, every last one of you dies here!"
Walder Frey's rat face was stretched wide with satisfaction. He savored it , the power over life and death, the sight of great lords brought low, dying at his feet.
The Red Wedding?
No. This was his coronation.
From this day on, the entire Riverlands belonged to House Frey.
"Do it!"
Walder's voice cracked into a shriek.
"Kill them all! Leave no one alive!"
The Frey soldiers raised their blades and grinned, closing in step by step on the Tully men who could no longer even lift their arms to fight back.
Death settled over the Great Hall like a shroud.
And then, at the most desperate moment of all ,
CLAP. CLAP. CLAP.
Steady. Unhurried. Rhythmic.
The sound wasn't loud. But it hit every person in that hall like a hammer blow, precise and deliberate, cutting straight through "The Rains of Castamere," cutting straight through Lysa's laughter.
The music stopped.
The Great Hall went utterly silent.
Every eye turned , Frey soldiers mid-swing, Tully men mid-collapse , all of them searching for the source.
It was Ned Stark.
He stood exactly where he had been standing, calm and still, no pain on his face, no sign of poison in his body. Catelyn beside him looked the same. So did the eight Northern guards at his back.
All of them perfectly composed, as if the bloody betrayal playing out before them was nothing more than a tedious farce.
"Ned Stark's" face even held a faint, amused smile.
He kept clapping as he stepped forward.
"Brilliant," he said. "Truly brilliant."
The voice was still Ned's , low, resonant, unhurried.
"In all my years, this is the first time I've witnessed such a... foolish betrayal."
Lysa's laughter died in her throat. Her face went rigid.
Walder Frey's smug grin froze on his lips.
"You — why aren't you poisoned?!"
Lysa jabbed a finger at Ned, her voice climbing into something barely human.
That poison was a variant of the Tears of Lys. Her final card. Colorless. Odorless. It killed the moment it hit the blood. A dragon could drink it and still die.
So why?
Why were Ned Stark and his family completely untouched?!
"Poisoned?"
"Ned Stark" smiled.
The corner of his mouth curved into something cold and mocking.
And then his voice changed.
Not gradually. All at once.
Gone was Ned's low rumble. In its place , younger, cleaner, carrying a lazy, unhurried magnetism.
"With your little parlor tricks?"
That voice.
That voice.
Why did Ned Stark's voice change?
Who was this man?
Every drop of blood in Lysa Arryn's body seemed to freeze.
"Who — who are you?!"
Her voice shook with a terror so complete it barely sounded like her own. She stumbled backward, step by step, as if she'd seen something that couldn't exist.
"Me?"
"Ned Stark's" smile widened. And went colder.
He walked forward at an easy, unhurried pace, as if he were strolling through a garden. With every step he took, the Frey soldiers around him , blades in hand , took one step back without realizing it.
Something invisible radiated off this man and filled the hall with dread.
"Haven't you always wanted me dead, my dear... Lady Lysa?"
The moment those words left his mouth in that mocking drawl, Lysa's last defense crumbled.
"No — impossible!"
"You're Lynn!"
"You were at the Eyrie! How are you here?!"
Lynn smiled.
He raised his hand, and under the stares of every person in the hall , eyes wide, barely breathing , he reached up and grabbed his own chin.
Then pulled.
RIIIP!
One clean sound.
The face of Ned Stark , resolute, stern, unmistakable , peeled away like a painted mask.
Beneath it: a young face. Handsome. Wearing a smile that didn't quite belong in this world.
Lynn.
Time stopped.
The musicians didn't dare touch their instruments. No one in the Great Hall made a sound.
Walder Frey's mouth hung open. His rat eyes were filled with a shock so total it had stopped looking like an expression. The wine cup slipped from his fingers and shattered on the floor.
The Frey soldiers stood frozen, as if something had turned them to stone. The blades in their hands felt like they weighed a thousand pounds. Not one of them could lift a weapon.
Lynn smiled.
"Forgot to mention."
"My dragon flies fast."
The Tully men who had been dying on the floor forgot their pain. They stared at the scene in front of them, mouths open, unable to speak.
Ned Stark... had been Lynn in disguise?
Then , what about Lady Catelyn?
The "Catelyn" beside Lynn raised her hand and tore off her own face.
Beneath it: something cold and still. A dead man's face, smooth as carved stone.
And it didn't stop there.
The eight "Northern guards" behind them moved in perfect unison, all eight hands reaching up, all eight masks coming off at once.
"AHHH, !!!"
"THEY'RE ALL FAKE!!!"
The scream tore through the silence like a blade.
One Frey soldier , the weakest nerve in the room , broke. He flung his sword down and bolted.
He made it two steps.
A blue blur crossed the air.
SHUNK!
A head left its shoulders and spun upward.
The body ran on for a few more steps before it understood what had happened, then pitched forward and hit the ground.
The blood never even had time to flow. The cold was so absolute it froze solid at the stump of the neck.
An Other lowered its ice blade, conjured from nothing, already retracting, and regarded the corpse with blue eyes that held no more feeling than a man swatting a fly.
"Run?"
Lynn's voice moved through the hall like something dredged up from the bottom of a very dark place.
"Did I say you could run?"
He looked around at the Frey soldiers. Legs shaking. Barely standing.
The smile on his face was the smile of something that had stopped pretending.
"Lord Walder Frey."
His gaze came to rest on the old man who had melted into his chair.
"Didn't you just say it was time to see your guests off?"
Lynn walked toward the head of the hall at a measured pace. Behind him, the nine Others moved in formation, distributing antidotes to the fallen Tully men.
"Ser Brynden."
"To let you see Lysa's treachery with your own eyes, I had no choice but to put you through this."
"You suffered for it. I'm sorry."
"The antidote is a gift from a friend of mine , a man named Jaqen. He gave it to me before I left."
"Worth noting: Jaqen is the one who made the poison you were given."
"And as it happens, he also knows how to make the cure."
"Quite the coincidence that what he chose to give me was exactly these antidotes."
"But enough of that." Lynn stopped in front of Walder Frey and looked down at him. "Now it's my turn."
"I'd like to see a few guests off myself."
"On their final journey."
➤ Next: Walder, Die!