~ 💎 WEEKLY POWER GOALS 💎🔥 60→1ch | 100→2ch | 200→5ch ⏰ Resets Monday! Thanks!
In the courtyard.
Hundreds of Frey women, like lambs waiting for slaughter, were herded together by Tully soldiers under Lynn's command.
They wore plain, worn clothes. They looked no different from commoners.
Life in the Frey household had not been kind to them.
Every face was pale. Every pair of eyes was hollow.
Among them were Walder Frey's countless wives and mistresses. His dozens of daughters, granddaughters, even great-granddaughters.
Three days ago, they had survived in the lightless shadow of House Frey.
Now they were Lynn's prisoners.
What fate awaited them?
To be given as rewards to soldiers who'd earned them?
To be sold to the brothels of Essos?
Or... to be buried alive, like the women of House Reyne?
Fear was a noose pulled tight around every throat. They didn't even have the strength left to cry.
Roslin Frey stood at the front of the group, guiding the wretched women forward.
She had changed into a clean maid's dress. Her hair was combed without a single strand out of place.
Against the disheveled, filth-streaked women around her, she looked entirely out of place.
She studied those faces, familiar and strange at once, and felt something complicated move through her chest.
There was the sister who had always found ways to comfort her.
There was the aunt who used to slip her sweets in secret, but never once dared defy their father's cruelty.
And countless others , distant blood, names she couldn't even recall.
Three days ago, she had stood among them. She had been just as certain she was going to die.
Now she stood as the victor's maid, watching their fate from the other side.
But the outcome would be good.
Because Lord Lynn had decided to spare them.
Roslin could already picture the relief that would break across their faces.
A smile touched the corner of her mouth.
Her gaze drifted, almost on its own, to the dark figure standing on the tower above, watching in silence.
"Lord Lynn..."
She murmured the words to herself.
---
The North. Winterfell.
Ned Stark set down the raven's message and let out a long, slow breath.
He looked out the window at the fine snow drifting down.
As the Long Night drew closer, the cold deepened with each passing day. Even at noon, there was no warmth to be found.
The letter was in Lynn's own hand.
Few words. Staggering information.
House Frey was destroyed. Their women would be escorted to Dragon's Fall Keep within days. The letter also laid out the specific methods for keeping them quietly watched and controlled.
Ned's brow knotted.
He had expected a bloody purge. That seemed inevitable. But Lynn's way of handling it...
Those women would be given work at the foot of the Wall. They would survive by their own hands.
"This Lynn..."
Ned muttered, pressing his fingers against the bridge of his nose.
Then he let out a short, bitter laugh.
He didn't understand Lynn's theory that population was wealth. But he understood what this choice meant.
No rage taken out on women and children.
Ruthless when it was needed. Measured when it wasn't.
This wasn't the act of a man driven by revenge. This was the hand of a leader who knew what he was doing.
Perhaps Westeros had truly found someone unlike any lord it had seen before.
Once Lynn united the Vale and the Riverlands... could Ned himself finally set down this weight?
He shook his head and turned to give his men their orders. There were people to receive.
---
Time moved fast.
The deadline came.
The Twins , that great fortress straddling the Green Fork, standing for centuries , welcomed the darkest day in all its history.
Once, this place had never known quiet. Merchant caravans and travelers flowed through in an endless stream, pouring wealth into Frey coffers year after year.
Today, it was silent as a tomb.
The drawbridge was raised. The gates were shut. Along the walls, Frey soldiers stood in clusters, dim shapes against the gray sky.
They were not the same men as three days ago. The arrogance was gone. Every face was ash-pale, every pair of eyes hollowed out by despair.
On the plains below, a dark tide of soldiers stretched to the horizon with no visible end.
The direwolf banners of the North. The silver trout of House Tully. The sigils of every major Riverlands house. They snapped and cracked in the wind.
Tens of thousands of troops stood ready. Cold armor caught the flat, overcast light and threw it back like a warning.
The air itself felt heavy, thick with something that pressed down on the lungs.
Edmure Tully sat his warhorse at the head of the formation, clad in fresh armor. Behind him stood Brynden the Blackfish, and every Riverlands lord who had answered the call.
He stared at the castle that had broken him once. The fire in his eyes was not fury. It was something older and quieter than that.
Three days. That was all it had taken to retake full control of Riverrun.
Under Lynn's guidance , and the brutal reality of what had happened , every Tully bannerman had fallen into line without hesitation. They had mustered and marched with speed that would have seemed impossible a week ago, spearhead pointed straight at the Twins.
"Lord Edmure."
A Northern messenger came riding hard, pulling up before the formation.
"Lord Lynn commands — the hour of the assault has come!"
Edmure drew a breath. His hand found the hilt of his sword and pulled it free.
"All forces —"
He never finished the order.
BOOM——!!!
A sound struck the world like a hammer on an anvil. It came from somewhere deep in the Northern formation and swallowed every other sound on the field whole.
It was not a drum. It was deeper than any drum. It was the sound of something ancient and enormous, and the earth shook beneath it.
Every Riverlands soldier turned toward the source. Edmure turned. Brynden turned.
The Northern battle line was parting. Slowly, deliberately, it split open down the middle, making way for a wide corridor.
What came through it was something none of them would ever forget.
Ten giants.
Each one stood over four meters tall. Each was encased from head to foot in black plate armor, brutal and seamless, like a moving fortress given legs. They came out of the formation one by one, each step landing with a low, rolling concussion that traveled through the ground and up through the soles of every man watching.
They carried no weapons.
They simply walked, steady and unhurried, toward the Twins.
"What... what in the gods' names are those..."
A Riverlands knight's voice came out in pieces. His warhorse was screaming beneath him, twisting and rearing no matter what he did. Around him, every other horse in the Riverlands formation was doing the same , a wave of animal panic rolling through the ranks.
This was not trained fear. This was something older. The fear that lives in the blood, the kind that surfaces when a creature finds itself in the presence of something higher on the chain of death.
"Fully armored giants..."
Brynden the Blackfish said it quietly. His lips had gone dry.
He had heard Lynn commanded giants. He had not imagined this.
And it was only the beginning.
Boom. Boom. Boom.
Three more impacts, measured as a heartbeat.
From behind the formation, a line of giant archers stepped forward.
Each one carried a longbow taller than two grown men standing end to end. The bowstrings were thicker than ship's rope. They took their places in a single rank before the formation, reached into their quivers, and nocked arrows that looked like siege spears.
Then came the cavalry.
ROOOAR, , !!!
The sound hit before the sight did.
Dozens of mammoths thundered out from behind the line. Each one was the size of a small hill. Each wore heavy iron barding. Their tusks had been fitted with sharpened steel spikes. On their backs sat giant riders in full armor, each one gripping a chain flail the size of a cart wheel.
Mammoth cavalry.
They didn't charge. They spread to the flanks of the giant infantry and began to pace, slow and restless. Every breath from a mammoth sent a great plume of white mist into the cold air. Every footfall sent a tremor through the ground.
The Riverlands soldiers had stopped making any sound at all.
Edmure's mouth was open. He was staring at an army that should not have existed outside of old stories told around fires.
Fully armored giant infantry. Giant archers. Giant mammoth cavalry.
He felt it then , a cold, clear understanding settling into his chest. The twenty thousand men behind him, every knight and spearman and veteran soldier he had gathered, were children with sticks. That was what they were, standing across from this.
Against power like this, strategy was a joke. Courage was a joke. Everything was a joke.
---
On the walls of the Twins.
The Frey bastards manning the battlements stared down at the giants like men watching a nightmare walk toward them on two legs.
The ten armored giants had reached the moat.
They didn't slow down.
They walked straight in.
The water rose to their waists in an instant, but they didn't stop, didn't stagger. They pushed through, churning the surface into rolling waves, and kept walking until they stood directly beneath the raised drawbridge.
The drawbridge hung from several iron chains, each one as thick as a man's forearm.
The lead giant reached up. His gauntleted hand closed around one of the chains.
The defenders on the wall watched.
He pulled.
SCREEEECH,,
The sound of it set teeth on edge , metal twisting under a force it was never meant to withstand. That chain, forged from hardened steel, was bending. Stretching. The drawbridge lurched and shuddered.
"Stop him! Arrows! Loose arrows! NOW!"
The commander on the wall had found his voice. It came out ragged and shrill.
A thin scatter of arrows rained down on the giant. They struck his black plate armor and rang off it like hailstones on a roof. Not a mark. Not a scratch.
The giant didn't look up.
He roared , low and resonant , and the muscles in his arms drove upward with everything he had.
CRACK, , !!!
The chain snapped.
One side of the drawbridge dropped and smashed into the water below, throwing up a wall of white spray.
The other giants moved in.
Each one seized a remaining chain.
Crack. Crack. Crack.
Three more. Then silence.
The Twins' great drawbridge , the pride of the crossing, the symbol of Frey power , hung in pieces, torn apart by bare hands.
The wall went quiet.
Every Frey soldier stood motionless, staring at the wreckage below. They looked like men whose minds had simply stopped.
The Riverlands army below was equally silent.
They watched the giants wade out of the river and continue their unhurried march toward the city gate, and something in the collective worldview of twenty thousand soldiers quietly came apart.
---
Inside the gatehouse.
A Frey bastard commander was pointing at the nearest approaching giant and screaming at his scorpion crew.
The scorpion was a heavy siege weapon, purpose-built for defense. Its bolts could punch through the hull of a warship.
The operator's hands shook as he cranked the winch. He lined up the shot. Center mass. The giant's chest.
"Loose!"
THWANG,, !
The bolt crossed the distance in an eyeblink and hit the giant square in the chest.
THUD.
A deep, wet sound.
The bolt punched through the plate armor. It buried itself in the giant's chest.
The wall erupted.
"It hit! It hit him!"
The Frey soldiers screamed with the relief of men who had just been pulled back from the edge. They cheered. They grabbed each other. They pointed.
The giant looked down.
He looked at the bolt sticking out of his chest the way a man looks at a splinter.
Then he reached up, gripped it, and pulled it free.
Blood came with it, dark and fast. He dropped the bolt in the water without looking at it. Then he kept walking.
The cheering stopped like a blade through a rope.
Every face on the wall locked into the same expression.
What in the hells is this thing?
---
The command horn sounded from the Northern formation.
The giant archers moved as one.
They raised their bows. They drew , smooth and easy, as though the weight of those massive limbs meant nothing at all. The bows bent to full draw, held for a single breath.
SWOOSH, , !!!
Dozens of black shafts tore across the sky in a flat arc and came down across the walls of the Twins like a storm.
One Frey soldier never even registered what was happening. He felt a force hit his chest , enormous, total , and then he was airborne. He flew backward over the full width of the wall and dropped into the street below. He hit the cobblestones and didn't get up.
"AAAHH,—!"
Another man's thigh exploded. He went down screaming.
Another was pinned through his body to the crenellation behind him, nailed to the stone, making sounds no human throat should make.
One shaft missed its mark and buried itself in the wall itself, half its length sunk into solid stone.
The wall became a slaughterhouse.
Blood and pieces of men. Screaming that didn't stop. One volley from the giant archers and the entire defense was finished. The survivors ran. They threw down their weapons and fled into the city, screaming, and nothing was ever going to make them turn back around.
---
Edmure and Brynden watched all of it without moving.
When had taking a castle become this easy?
Lynn was using the Twins , the Frey family's greatest stronghold , to send a message to every lord in the Riverlands. This was what he had. This was what he could bring to bear against anyone who chose the wrong side.
This display wasn't for the Freys.
It was for them.
"Gods..."
The word slipped out of Edmure's mouth before he knew he'd said it.