Author here, hope you are all having peaceful holidays. Here in Italy, we place a lot of importance on Easter, but wherever you are, I want to bless you with peace and health.
Enjoy the chapter, comment, and support this story with your fantastic stones.
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The raven from Ironoaks did not arrive with the panicked, frantic beating of wings that usually accompanied news of war. It arrived silently in the deep, freezing quiet of a winter morning, bearing a seal of green wax stamped with a broken wheel.
The message was brief, penned in the elegant, flowing script of Lady Anya Waynwood. It contained no treason, no grand declarations, and no overt promises. It simply stated that the high mountain passes were growing too treacherous for merchant wagons, and that she and her ward, Ser Harrold Hardyng, would be riding to Runestone to celebrate the coming of the new year, seeking the warmth of the coastal hearths.
To Bronze Yohn Royce, it was a polite notice of a social visit.
To Rhea, it was the sound of the hammer striking the anvil. The first piece of the new alliance was falling into place.
A fortnight later, the vanguard of House Waynwood appeared on the western ridge. They rode through the snow like a line of dark emeralds, their green cloaks snapping in the bitter wind. Lady Anya rode in a heavy, fur-lined wheelhouse, while Harrold Hardyng rode beside the carriage on a magnificent sand-colored destrier.
Harry the Heir was eighteen now, freshly knighted, and he carried himself with the arrogant, golden confidence of a young man who knew the entire Vale would one day kneel to him. But as they rode through the massive, iron-studded gates of Runestone, beneath the ancient bronze runes of the First Men, even Harry's posture stiffened with a wary respect.
Runestone was not a castle that invited casual arrogance. It was a fortress of dark stone and roaring fires, smelling of coal smoke, roasting meat, and salt spray.
Rhea stood beside her father and brother on the steps of the Great Hall to receive their guests. She wore a tailored gown of deep bronze wool, but it was not the restrictive, suffocating garment of her childhood. It was split for riding, belted with thick leather, and the Bravoosi sword rested openly at her hip. She had earned the right to bear steel in her father's halls, and she would not hide it for the sake of polite society.
As Harry dismounted, his eyes caught the silver-chased scabbard at her side. He paused, his gaze traveling up to meet hers. He remembered the ten-year-old girl in the Eyrie gardens who had humiliated him over brass pins. He saw a fifteen-year-old woman with pale hair, cold gray eyes, and the quiet, dangerous stillness of a drawn bowstring.
"Lady Anya," Bronze Yohn boomed, stepping forward as the older woman was helped from her carriage. "Runestone is honored to host you. The winter winds are bitter this year, but our fires burn hot."
"Lord Yohn," Anya replied, her sharp eyes missing nothing as she took in the heavily armed guards and the rigid discipline of the courtyard. "I have always found the air of Runestone to be incredibly... clarifying. A stark contrast to the fog of the Eyrie."
It was a subtle opening, a quiet acknowledgment of the coded letter Rhea had sent. Yohn caught the implication, his thick brow furrowing slightly, but he merely offered his arm to lead her inside.
The feast that evening was a heavy, hearty affair. There were no delicate lemon cakes or spun sugar creations. There was roasted boar, thick stews of root vegetables and venison, and dark, heavy ale. The Great Hall was filled with the loud, boisterous laughter of Royce and Waynwood knights trading stories of tourneys and mountain skirmishes.
Rhea sat near the head of the table, her plate mostly untouched. She did not drink the ale. She watched.
She watched how Harry interacted with Andar, the two young men sizing each other up with the competitive camaraderie of highborn warriors. She watched how Lady Anya navigated the conversation with Bronze Yohn, steering the talk away from the War of the Five Kings and focusing intently on the immediate, practical matters of the Vale's internal security.
When the meal concluded and the men-at-arms began to sing bawdy songs by the lower hearths, Lady Anya leaned toward Yohn.
"The hall is loud, My Lord," Anya murmured, her voice perfectly calibrated to carry only to the head table. "And my bones ache from the road. Perhaps we might retire to your solar? I brought a cask of Arbor gold that requires a quiet room to truly appreciate."
Yohn nodded slowly, the political instinct of a liege lord overriding his host's hospitality. "Andar. Rhea. Come with us."
The solar was a sanctuary of silence. The heavy weirwood doors shut out the noise of the Great Hall entirely. The only sounds were the crackle of the massive hearth and the howling of the wind against the leaded glass windows.
Lady Anya took a seat by the fire, accepting a goblet of wine from Andar. Harry stood behind her chair, trying to look imposing, his hand resting on the pommel of the beautiful, perfectly balanced sword Rhea had forged for him years ago.
Bronze Yohn stood by the map table, his massive hands resting on the edge. He did not waste time.
"You did not ride through ten days of mountain snow to drink wine, Anya," Yohn said, his voice a low rumble. "Speak plainly. The Eyrie is sealed. Lysa has commanded that we do not involve ourselves in the wars of the lowlands. If you have come to ask me to march on the Riverlands, you waste your breath. I will not break my oath to House Arryn, even if the one speaking for it is a frightened widow."
Lady Anya took a slow sip of her wine. She did not look at Yohn. She looked directly at Rhea.
"I did not come to ask you to break your oath, Lord Yohn," Anya said smoothly. "I came because your daughter wrote me a very interesting letter. She spoke of the coast being secure. She spoke of the bronze being ready. And she suggested that it was time to look toward the sky."
Yohn turned his heavy gaze upon Rhea, surprise flashing across his weathered face. "You wrote to the Lady of Ironoaks without my seal?"
"I wrote of trade and winter preparations, Father," Rhea answered calmly, stepping into the light of the fire. "But Lady Anya is a woman of immense vision. She knows how to read the grain of the wood, not just the polish."
Anya smiled, a sharp, approving expression. "Indeed I do. The Vale is bleeding, Yohn. Not from Lannister spears or Stark wolves, but from within. The mountain clans are growing bolder than they have been in a hundred years. They are not just raiding isolated farmsteads; they are attacking armed merchant caravans. They are hitting our supply lines."
"The clans have always been a nuisance," Andar interjected, crossing his arms. "They are starving savages with stone axes and rusted iron."
"They were," Harry Hardyng spoke up, his voice tight with anger. He stepped forward, drawing the sword Rhea had made for him. He laid it flat on the map table. Beside it, he placed a jagged, broken piece of metal he drew from a pouch on his belt. "Look at that."
Rhea stepped up to the table. She didn't need to touch the broken metal to know what it was. Her crafter's sight instantly recognized the folded carbon lattice, the specific heat-treatment marks, and the deep, purposeful fuller meant to lighten the blade.
"This is not rusted iron," Rhea said, her voice turning cold. "This is castle-forged steel. Good steel. The temper is flawless."
"My scouts recovered that from a dead Stone Crow two weeks ago," Anya said, her voice grim. "He was wearing a chainmail hauberk that had not a speck of rust on it. The savages are armed, Yohn. They have heavy plate, good swords, and stout shields. Someone has outfitted an entire army of savages right in our own mountains."
Yohn Royce stared at the broken steel, his jaw clenching so hard the muscles in his neck jumped. "Who? The Lannisters? Why would Tywin Lannister waste good steel on mountain men?"
Rhea's mind flashed back to the Eyrie, to the trial by combat, and the dwarf who had walked free.
Tyrion, she thought, the realization settling like a stone in her stomach. He promised them the Vale. He promised them weapons if they fought for him in the Riverlands, and now they have returned home to claim their prize. She could not tell them the truth of how she knew. She had to lead them to the tactical reality without exposing her omniscient knowledge of the canon timeline.
"It does not matter who gave it to them," Rhea said, looking up from the table. "What matters is what they will do with it. The clans are not a nuisance anymore. They are a standing army. If they realize that the Lords of the Vale are paralyzed by Lady Lysa's edicts, they will not just raid caravans. They will march on the lower castles. They will take the foothills."
"And Lysa will do nothing," Anya agreed, her eyes hard. "She sits in the Eyrie and tells us to close our gates and hide. I will not hide behind my walls while savages armed with foreign steel burn my villages."
"We must strike them," Andar said fiercely, his hand dropping to his sword hilt. "We must gather our levies and ride into the mountains to root them out."
"No," Rhea interrupted, her voice cutting through her brother's bravado with absolute authority. "If you march an army into the Mountains of the Moon, you will be fighting on their terrain. They know the caves, the goat paths, and the ravines. If they have good steel now, an uphill battle will be a slaughter for our men."
Harry scoffed, his pride bristling at being corrected by a girl younger than him. "So we do nothing? We wait for them to come to us?"
"We don't wait. We bait the trap," Rhea replied, her mind already shifting the pieces on the board, her eyes scanning the map of the Vale. She pointed a calloused finger at the High Road, the treacherous pass that connected the Vale to the Riverlands. "They are armed, which means they are confident. Confident men get greedy. They will not target small farmsteads anymore; they will want a prize worthy of their new swords."
She looked at Lady Anya. "Lady Waynwood, you control the eastern trade routes. If a rumor were to spread that a massive shipment of winter grain, silver, and fine Arbor wine was moving from Ironoaks to Runestone to solidify our new... alliance... it would be too tempting a target for the clans to ignore."
Anya's eyes narrowed, processing the strategy. "A decoy caravan. Heavily guarded, but appearing vulnerable in the narrow passes."
"Exactly," Rhea nodded. "But the guards will not be common men-at-arms. It will be the Runestone Vanguard, fighting alongside the elite knights of Ironoaks. We draw their largest warband down into the valleys, away from their caves. We engage them on ground of our choosing, where our discipline and our armor hold the advantage."
Bronze Yohn stared at his daughter, the flickering firelight casting deep shadows across his face. He saw the cold, brilliant tactical mind that had slaughtered the Sistermen pirates without a single loss of Royce blood. He saw a warlord.
"It is a bold plan," Yohn said slowly. "But to execute a joint military operation without the explicit command of the Eyrie... if Lysa hears of this, she will name it an act of rebellion."
"Lady Lysa does not rule the roads," Anya Waynwood said, her voice dropping to a dangerous, silky whisper. "She rules the sky. Let her keep it. We must rule the earth. I will pledge fifty of my best knights to this operation, Lord Yohn. We will fight under your command. It is time the Lords of the Vale remembered who truly bleeds to keep these mountains safe."
It was a staggering political shift. The Waynwoods were offering to place their troops under Royce command, effectively creating a rogue, independent military force within the Vale, entirely bypassing the authority of the Arryns.
Yohn Royce looked at the broken steel on the table. He looked at his son, eager for battle. He looked at the Lady of Ironoaks, offering an alliance that could reshape the kingdom. And finally, he looked at his daughter, the architect of the storm.
"Andar," Yohn commanded, his voice rumbling with absolute, terrifying finality. "Marshal the Vanguard. You and Rhea will lead the decoy caravan. Let us see how good this foreign steel truly is."
The preparations in the Runestone armory were frantic, purposeful, and entirely under Rhea's absolute control.
For the next week, the fires roared day and night. Rhea did not sleep. She relied on the Pulse breathing to banish the exhaustion from her muscles, her mind operating with the terrifying clarity of a machine.
She outfitted the fifty knights of the Runestone Vanguard with the new armor she had designed—the layered canvas gambesons woven with her multiversal silk. But she knew that armor alone would not win an ambush against an enemy that fought with the wild, chaotic ferocity of the mountain clans. She needed to control the battlefield.
She stood at the heavy granite anvil, working a piece of high-carbon steel. She did not forge a sword. She forged a series of heavy, spiked iron pitons, attached to thick rings.
Hugh the Blacksmith watched her, bewildered. "What are those for, My Lady? They look like climbing spikes, but the iron is too brittle to hold a man's weight on a cliff."
"They are not for climbing, Hugh," Rhea said, quenching the iron in the oil barrel with a loud, aggressive hiss. "They are for anchoring."
She took the heavy spool of her remaining magic silk, the multiversal polymer that could stop a sword strike. She did not weave it this time. She braided it, twisting the incredibly fine threads into a cord no thicker than a bowstring, but possessing the tensile strength of a massive ship's hawser. She tied the braided cords to the iron rings of the pitons.
She was building snares. High-tension, invisible tripwires designed to break the momentum of a cavalry charge or a massed infantry rush.
When the caravan finally departed Runestone, it looked like a fat, wealthy prize. Six heavy wagons, covered in thick tarpaulins, rumbled slowly up the winding roads toward the foothills of the Mountains of the Moon. They were escorted by a hundred men—fifty of the Royce Vanguard in their dark bronze cloaks, and fifty Waynwood knights led by Harrold Hardyng, their green and yellow oak leaves bright against the snow.
Rhea rode near the center of the column, her dark leather armor concealed beneath a heavy, fur-lined cloak. The Bravoosi sword was strapped to her hip, and hidden in the deep pouches of her saddlebags were the iron pitons and the braided silk.
High above, invisible against the overcast, slate-gray sky, Horus flew.
For three days, they marched deeper into the treacherous terrain of the lower passes. The roads grew narrow, flanked by sheer, rocky bluffs on one side and steep, forested ravines on the other. It was perfect ambush country.
On the afternoon of the fourth day, the temperature plummeted, and a thick, freezing fog began to roll down from the peaks, reducing visibility to less than fifty yards.
A warning. The mental pulse from Horus hit Rhea's mind like a physical shock of cold water. Through the falcon's eyes, piercing the fog with supernatural clarity, she saw them.
Hundreds of them.
They were crawling down the rocky bluffs like a swarm of dark ants. They were not screaming. They were not charging blindly. They were moving with a terrifying, coordinated discipline that the mountain clans had never possessed before.
And as the fog shifted, Rhea saw the glint of castle-forged steel. Broadswords, half-helms, and chainmail hauberks. It was an army of savages armored in the wealth of Casterly Rock.
"Halt the column!" Rhea shouted, her voice ringing out crisp and clear over the rumble of the wagons.
Andar, riding at the head of the Vanguard, instantly raised his fist. The column ground to a halt. The knights drew their swords, the sound of steel sliding from leather echoing ominously in the narrow pass.
"What is it?" Harry Hardyng demanded, spurring his destrier forward to ride beside Rhea, his handsome face tense. "I don't see anything."
"They are on the bluffs above us," Rhea said, her eyes fixed on the gray wall of fog. She slipped from her saddle, her boots hitting the frozen mud. "They are waiting for us to enter the narrows."
She didn't waste time explaining. She grabbed the saddlebags containing her snare lines and ran toward the rocky embankment bordering the road.
"Andar!" Rhea barked, moving with a frantic, terrifying efficiency. "Form a shield wall facing the bluffs! Lock the shields! Harry, take your Waynwood knights and form a secondary line behind the wagons. Do not charge! Let them come to us!"
"You cannot command my knights, girl!" Harry protested, his pride bristling even in the face of an ambush.
"If you charge into that fog, you will die, Harrold!" Rhea snarled, spinning to face him, the absolute, cold authority of a warlord flashing in her gray eyes. "Form the line!"
Harry swallowed hard, intimidated despite himself, and wrenched his horse around to bark orders to his men.
Rhea worked with blinding speed. She drove the iron pitons deep into the frozen earth using a heavy iron mallet, anchoring them securely. She strung the braided, invisible silk across the road, creating a staggered network of high-tension tripwires at knee height, just ahead of the Royce shield wall.
She had just finished securing the final anchor when the war cry erupted.
It was a sound that froze the blood. A guttural, terrifying roar from three hundred throats, echoing off the canyon walls.
The Stone Crows and the Burned Men charged down from the bluffs, bursting out of the fog like a nightmare. They were a terrifying sight—wild men covered in scars and furs, but wielding the pristine, deadly steel of the Lannister armies.
"Hold the line!" Andar roared, his runic sword raised high.
The first wave of clansmen hit the road, screaming for blood, their heavy swords raised to shatter the Royce shields.
But they never reached the wall.
The vanguard of the charging savages hit the invisible, high-tension silk snares Rhea had strung across the road. The braided multiversal polymer did not snap. It caught them across the shins with the force of a swinging iron bar.
Dozens of clansmen were violently ripped off their feet, their forward momentum flipping them through the air to crash brutally onto the frozen, rocky ground. Legs snapped with sickening cracks. The charge was instantly broken, the front lines collapsing into a tangled, screaming mass of broken bones and dropped weapons.
"Push!" Andar bellowed.
The Royce Vanguard, armored in Rhea's impenetrable silk-lined gambesons, surged forward. They drove their spears and swords into the chaotic, fallen mass of clansmen, slaughtering the first wave with ruthless, disciplined efficiency.
But there were too many.
The second and third waves of the clansmen scrambled over their fallen brothers, their Lannister steel clashing against the bronze shields of the Royce line. The battle devolved into a brutal, deafening meat grinder of close-quarters combat.
Rhea threw off her heavy cloak and drew the Bravoosi sword.
She didn't stand in the shield wall. She moved to the flanks, where the discipline of the line was fraying. She engaged her Pulse breathing, her heart hammering a steady, supercharged rhythm.
A massive Burned Man, wearing a chainmail shirt and wielding a heavy morningstar, shattered the shield of a Royce guardsman and raised his weapon for the killing blow.
Rhea blurred forward. She didn't try to parry the morningstar. She dropped to one knee, sliding across the frozen mud, and drove the razor-sharp tip of the Bravoosi blade upward, finding the unprotected gap beneath the man's armpit. She severed the artery perfectly. The man collapsed, drowning in his own blood.
She was a ghost on the battlefield. The brutal, heavy combat of the Westerosi knights was too slow for her. She used the evasive, fluid footwork Lyn Corbray had beaten into her, dancing through the chaos, her silver blade flashing like lightning in the fog. Every strike was calculated. Every movement was an economy of lethal motion.
But the sheer numbers of the clansmen were overwhelming the secondary line.
Harrold Hardyng was fighting desperately, his golden arrogance stripped away by the terrifying reality of war. His horse had been killed out from under him, and he was fighting on foot, his Waynwood helm dented, his breath coming in ragged gasps.
He parried a heavy blow from a clansman's broadsword, but stumbled on the icy ground. The clansman roared, raising his blade for a decapitating strike.
Harry raised his arm, bracing for death.
Father Time.
Rhea felt the massive, agonizing drain on her soul as she ripped the moment out of the river of time. The chaotic roar of the battle distorted into a deep, slow-motion groan. The falling snow hung suspended in the air. The clansman's sword crept downward at an agonizingly slow pace.
Rhea pushed her supercharged muscles to the absolute breaking point. She sprinted across the frozen mud, covering the ten yards between them in what felt like wading through thick mud.
She reached Harry just as the clansman's blade was inches from his neck.
Rhea swung the Bravoosi sword in a brutal, two-handed arc, completely severing the clansman's hands at the wrists.
She released the hold on time.
The battle snapped back to full speed with a deafening roar. The clansman shrieked in agony as his severed hands and the heavy sword dropped harmlessly into the mud. Harry stared in absolute shock, having not even seen Rhea cross the distance. One second he was about to die, the next, his attacker was dismembered, and the pale-haired Royce girl was standing in front of him.
Rhea didn't check to see if Harry was alright. She spun on her heel, her lungs burning, her vision swimming slightly from the massive exertion of the temporal magic.
"Horus!" Rhea screamed, projecting the command into the sky with every ounce of willpower she had left. "Break them!"
The clouds above the pass parted.
The massive snow falcon plummeted from the sky, a streak of blinding white and icy blue. He didn't just target a single man. As he swooped low over the remaining mass of clansmen, he unleashed a continuous, horrific torrent of absolute zero frost.
The air itself crystallized. The freezing vapor washed over the back lines of the clansmen, instantly freezing their armor to their skin, shattering their weapons, and turning the damp, freezing fog into a localized blizzard of lethal, biting ice.
The supernatural terror of the giant, shrieking bird and the sudden, unnatural freezing death of their comrades broke the clansmen entirely. The discipline they had been taught evaporated. The survivors threw down their Lannister steel and fled in absolute panic back up the rocky bluffs, desperate to escape the demon of the storm.
Silence slowly fell over the bloody, frozen pass, broken only by the groans of the wounded and the heavy, exhausted breathing of the surviving knights.
Rhea stood amidst the carnage, leaning heavily on her Bravoosi sword. The Pulse breathing faded, leaving her muscles aching and her head throbbing from the use of her time magic. She looked down at her hands. They were trembling, covered in the blood of men she had slaughtered.
Harry Hardyng slowly picked himself up from the mud. He looked at the severed hands of the man who had nearly killed him, then looked at Rhea. The arrogant boy who had polished his helm in the Eyrie gardens was gone. He looked at her with an expression of profound, unshakable awe and terror.
He walked over to her, his sword lowered, and dropped to one knee in the blood-soaked mud. It was not a courtly bow. It was the raw, primal submission of a warrior to a superior force.
"You saved my life, Lady Rhea," Harry breathed, his voice hoarse. "My sword belongs to you. To House Royce."
Andar jogged over, his face smeared with soot and blood, but his eyes blazing with the fierce light of victory. He looked at the piles of dead clansmen, taking note of how few Royce and Waynwood men had fallen.
"The layered silk held," Andar said, looking at a deep slash across his own gambeson that had failed to penetrate the fabric beneath. He looked at his sister, his chest heaving. "Your armor held, Rhea. Your trap broke them."
Rhea slowly straightened up, forcing her trembling hands to steady. She looked at the dead men scattered across the pass. She walked over to the clansman who had nearly killed Harry. He was dead, bleeding out from his severed wrists.
She knelt beside the body and picked up the heavy broadsword the man had dropped.
She wiped the mud from the steel flat. Near the hilt, stamped deeply into the high-quality metal, was a small, unmistakable maker's mark.
A roaring lion.
"It wasn't just a trap," Rhea said softly, her voice carrying the cold, chilling certainty of the winter wind. She stood up, holding the Lannister steel for Andar and Harry to see. "It was proof."
The War of the Five Kings was not just happening in the Riverlands. The Lannisters had reached their golden claws directly into the Mountains of the Moon, attempting to bleed the Vale from the inside out while Lysa Arryn hid in her tower.
Rhea looked up at the sky, where Horus was circling lazily, the master of the freezing winds.
She had the absolute loyalty of her brother. She had the sworn sword of the heir to the Vale. She had an army equipped with multiversal armor, and the tactical brilliance to crush a superior force.
"We do not return to Runestone," Rhea commanded, her voice ringing out across the bloody pass, carrying the absolute authority of a warlord. She looked at Andar, then at Harry Hardyng. "We ride for Ironoaks. We show Lady Anya the lion's mark. And then, we unite the Lords of the Vale."
The board was set. The pieces were moving. And Rhea Royce was no longer waiting for the game to come to her. She was going to rewrite the rules.