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Disclaimer: This is a work of fiction, and all rights for characters, plots and settings belong to G.R.R. Martin and FromSoftware. I have no ownership.
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The Riverlands, The Twins
301 AC
Walder Frey, Lord of the Crossing
The trouble with being old, Walder Frey had concluded over nine decades of evidence, was not the body. The body was a nuisance, with legs that gave out, eyes that fogged, and the endless negotiations with bladder and bowel that consumed a humiliating portion of every day, but nuisances could be managed. Servants existed for this purpose.
The trouble with being old was the waiting. At ninety, a man had outlasted most of his enemies and all of his friends and found himself in the peculiar position of having to wait for the world to catch up to decisions he had made decades ago.
He sat in the high-backed chair in the Lord's Room of the East Tower and did not sleep. Sleep came less easily now, and when it came, it was not restful, more a temporary suspension of consciousness than the deep forgetting of his youth. He had given up fighting it. He simply sat and waited for the night to pass and thought.
The ledgers were open on the table before him. He had not been reading them. They were there as a pretense of purpose, in case anyone came in and saw him sitting in the dark.
Nobody came in.
The Twins were quiet tonight. They were usually quiet now: fewer guests than there had been before the wars, fewer traders passing through, fewer lords making their way north or south with their retinues and their tolls.
The wars had disrupted trade. Wars always disrupted trade. It was one of the things Walder Frey genuinely resented about wars: they were conducted by men who thought nothing of the economic systems they disturbed, who crossed bridges without considering what it cost to maintain them.
He thought about the North.
He did this less than he had done in the weeks immediately following the Red Wedding, when the silence from his northern men had been a presence in the room rather than an absence. Hosteen and Aenys had gone with forces sufficient to hold a position at Winterfell.
Bolton's invitation, Bolton's arrangement, and his own men to supplement the garrison. A sensible deployment. He had expected ravens, reports, and the ordinary correspondence of men in the field. There had been nothing.
At first he had told himself the roads were bad. Then that the ravens were lost. Then something had gone wrong with the birds: disease, cold, or one of those inexplicable collapses that sometimes afflicted raven stocks. He had sent his own ravens north, to Winterfell, to the Last Hearth, to anywhere that might relay a message. No replies.
The conclusion he had been avoiding for some weeks was that there was no one left to reply.
He did not permit himself to dwell on this with anything resembling grief. Hosteen and Aenys were assets, deployed in service of Frey interests, and if assets were lost, the appropriate response was to assess the damage and identify alternatives.
He had other sons. He had grandsons beyond counting. What he did not have were those particular sons, who had been competent and reliable and invested in the Frey position in the North, and their absence was a strategic loss of a specific kind that could not easily be replaced.
The Frey position in the North, he was beginning to suspect, no longer existed.
He turned this thought over in his mind without sentimentality. Bolton was the strongman of the North. The Red Wedding had been conducted under Bolton's eye and with Bolton's tacit approval.
Frey and Bolton had been complementary pieces, one holding the crossings, one holding the land. If the Bolton position had collapsed and the silence strongly suggested it had, then the northern alliance was worthless, the investment in those forces was lost, and Walder Frey was left with nothing in the North but the names of dead men.
This was irritating. He had made a careful calculation, and it had not paid.
He was trying to determine the precise nature of the miscalculation when the first bell began to ring.
It was not a scheduled bell. He knew all the scheduled bells, the changes of the watch, the prayers his septon insisted on conducting at hours that served no useful purpose, and the morning bell that woke the household. This bell was not any of those. This bell had a quality of urgency that made him lift his head from the ledgers he had not been reading.
A second bell joined the first.
Then shouting, distant and multiplying, was the sound of many men discovering something at the same time.
Walder Frey reached for the arm of his chair with the patience of a man who has learned that urgency only makes old joints hurt more and pushed himself upright. He could walk, after a fashion, with a cane and a wall and a servant to steady him, but the servant was not here, and the cane was across the room, which was an indignity he had not anticipated when he dismissed the night steward two hours ago.
He made his way to the window instead, which was closer, and looked out.
There was light in the north.
Not torchlight and not firelight and not the particular orange of a burning building, with which he was unfortunately familiar. This was different. Blue, pale, and cold and somehow sharp, like the light that came off ice at certain angles in winter but was moving. Coming from the north at a speed that told him, before anything else did, that what he was looking at was not a fire.
It was very large.
He stood at the window and watched it come and did the calculations he had been trained by ninety years of scheming to do automatically: what is it, who sent it, what do they want, and what can I offer them?
The first calculation failed immediately. He did not know what it was.
The second stalled. He did not know who had sent it. Although.
He had heard things over the past months. Stories that came south with merchants and septons and the occasional lordling fleeing whatever was happening in the North.
Stories about a bastard who had somehow consolidated the northern houses. About a battle at Winterfell with something unnatural. About fire, yellow fire, they said, the color of madness, and about a man who walked through it and came out the other side wrong in ways that were not entirely bad if you were on his side and catastrophic if you were not.
He had dismissed most of it as the embellishment that always gathered around unfamiliar events the way barnacles gathered around ship hulls. Men who had not seen a thing described it in terms of what they had read about, and what men had read about were dragons and sorcerers and the heroes of old stories, so naturally every northern lord with a sword became a hero and every battle became a legend.
But there was something in the sky.
And it was coming from the north.
He could hear, from below, the sound of his men making a decision about crossbows. He could have told them to save the effort, but the window was too far from the stairs and he was too old to shout.
The shape resolved itself as it came closer.
A dragon. It was unmistakably a dragon, despite the strange protrusions along its spine and shoulders that caught the moonlight like scattered gems. It was enormous in the way that things that should not exist are enormous. Not just physically large, but conceptually large, too big to be accounted for by a mind that had never budgeted for it. It moved with the particular ease of something that big.
On its back, a rider. Walder could not make out details at this distance, but there was a rider, and the rider was upright and still and gave every appearance of knowing exactly where he was going.
Toward the Twins.
Toward him.
Walder Frey stood at his window and looked at the thing coming for him and understood, with the clarity that sometimes visited very old men at the end of very long calculations, that he had made his miscalculation some time ago.
Not at the Red Wedding; that had been a sound investment, properly executed, and he refused to reconsider it even now. Before that. The miscalculation was in the assessment of the North itself.
Starks had gone soft, gone political, gone south, and gone to their deaths one by one through the peculiar Stark weakness of doing what they considered right regardless of whether it was wise. He had concluded from this that the North was manageable.
He had not accounted for the possibility that something would come into the North from outside the game entirely.
Something that did not know the rules of the game.
Something that had not read the right books.
The dragon crossed the castle wall.
The sound it made was not what he expected. He had expected roaring, the dramatic sound effects of old songs. What he heard instead was something lower and more constant, a vibration that he felt in his chest before he heard it with his ears, a frequency that made the stones of the East Tower hum faintly against his hand where it rested on the window frame.
The dragon's wings beat slowly, unhurried. It was not in a rush. It had arrived where it intended to go.
The screaming started in the yard.
Not the screaming of men running away, though there was some of that, but the brief, specific screaming of men dying suddenly. Then a sound Walder Frey had no previous reference for: a crack like ice breaking on a river in the first thaw but louder and sharper and followed by a silence that was somehow worse than the screaming had been.
He looked down at the yard.
The light from the dragon's breath, if breath was even the right word for it, was the same cold blue as its hide. Where it touched the ground, it did not burn in the way fire burned. It crystallized. Men who were there were, in the space of a second, not there in the same way.
The yard was full of jagged blue-white shapes that had not been there before, catching the moonlight, catching the dragon's light, catching everything and giving it back wrong.
Walder Frey had seen men die before. He had ordered it himself on a number of occasions. He had never seen anything like this.
He noted, with the part of his mind that continued to function as an administrator even now, that the dragon had not touched the bridge.
The bridge stood. The gatehouse on his side was taking damage; he could hear the stone cracking and see the dust rising, but the bridge itself, the span across the Green Fork that was the entire reason the Twins existed, was untouched. The rider on the dragon's back had steered around it. Deliberately, it appeared.
He was not destroying the crossing. He was destroying the Freys.
Walder found himself almost admiring this, in an abstract way that had very little to do with his current circumstances. Removing a house was not the same as removing a bridge. One was an execution; the other was waste. Whoever was riding that dragon understood the difference.
The dragon banked and came around the East Tower.
At this angle, through the window, Walder could see the rider clearly for the first time. Younger than he expected, though age was hard to judge at this distance and in this light. Fair hair with something wrong about one of his eyes, something that glowed.
He did not look down at Walder Frey. He looked at the tower.
Walder understood the distinction.
He was not being acknowledged as a lord in his own seat. He was being identified as an obstacle in a structure about to be demolished. It was, in its way, the most complete dismissal of everything he had built that he could imagine. Ninety years of scheming and positioning and carefully maintained indispensability, and this man looked at his tower and saw a thing coming down.
He looked at the rider for a moment longer.
Then he looked past him, at the night sky beyond the Twins, which was very large and very dark and entirely indifferent to what was happening in the bend of the Green Fork below it.
His final thought was not about the Red Wedding. It was not about his sons, his daughters, the eighty-some children he had scattered across the Riverlands through four wives and assorted other arrangements. It was a technical observation, made with the same cold precision he had applied to everything for nine decades:
He had wagered on the wrong lords.
The East Tower came down.
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The traders who had been sheltering for the night at an inn three miles south of the crossing heard it first as sound: a low vibration that came through the walls of the building and made the candles gutter, followed by the kind of silence that follows a very loud noise.
Then light through the shuttered windows, pale and blue and wrong. Then nothing for a long time.
When dawn came, the man who ran the inn walked to the road and looked north.
One of the towers of the Twins was gone. The other stood, damaged, smoke rising from what remained of the upper floors. The bridge between them was intact, arching over the Green Fork in the early morning light, its gates hanging open, unguarded, the road through it empty in both directions.
He stood looking at it for a while.
In his father's time, and his grandfather's, and as far back as anyone could remember, the crossing had never been free. You paid the Freys to cross, or you didn't cross. That was the law of the Green Fork, older than most of the lords who obeyed it.
He turned back to the inn and went inside to wake his wife and tell her what he had seen.
The crossing was free.
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Iron Islands, Pyke
Euron Greyjoy
He had sent everyone away.
This was not unusual. Euron Greyjoy had been sending people away for as long as he could remember: servants, salt wives, advisors, and his own brothers when they became tedious, which was always eventually.
Solitude was not a hardship for him. It was a preference. The things he did alone were different from the things he did in company, and the things he did alone were the ones that mattered.
The chamber was carved into the rock of Pyke itself, below the Sea Tower, below the waterline. He could hear the sea through the walls: a constant pressure, a rhythm, something between sound and pulse. He had chosen this room specifically for that quality. It helped him think.
The object on the table before him was the length of his forearm and the shape of a trident, three tines of unequal length, the longest nearly the span of his hand, carved from something that was not quite stone and not quite metal and not quite either.
It was black, or appeared black in most lights; in the right light, held at the right angle, it showed an iridescence like oil on water, colors that weren't colors so much as the memory of colors, faint and shifting and gone the moment you looked directly at them.
He had been calling it the Key to the Abyss.
He did not know its actual name. The inscription along the longest tine was in a script he had spent three months working through, and he had made progress, more progress than any living person had made with that particular script, he was fairly certain, since no living person had found a piece of it to work with.
The inscription did not appear to include a name for the object. It was instructions. Practical instructions. What to say. Where to be when you said it. What to expect afterward.
He had followed the instructions precisely. He was a precise man when precision was called for.
It had taken him years to get here.
Not years of searching, exactly, more years of understanding. He had known for a long time that there was something below the Hightower. He had come to this knowledge gradually, the way one came to any genuine knowledge: through pieces, acquired in different places over many years, that only cohered into meaning when you held them all together at once.
A fragment of a text in the Shadow Lands. A story told by a man in Qarth who had heard it from a man in Yi Ti who had heard it from a slave who had escaped from somewhere that wasn't on any chart Euron had seen. A conversation with a woman in the Far East who was older than she should have been and spoke of the Hightower the way one spoke of a landmark over a buried treasure.
The Hightower was not what Oldtown thought it was. The Maesters cataloged it, studied it, and argued endlessly about the black stone at its base and its relationship to similar black stones scattered across the world, the Seastone Chair on Pyke, the monolith at Asshai, and certain foundations in the ruins of old cities that no one had built and everyone found.
They argued and catalogued and never once asked the obvious question, which was not what the black stone was made of or how old it was but what it was for.
He had asked the obvious question. Eventually, after a very long voyage to a very distant place and a conversation he preferred not to think about in detail, he had gotten an answer.
The black stone was an interface. A point of contact between the surface world and what lay below it. Below the ocean, below the stone, in the darkness that had been darkness before light existed, there were things.
They had been there longer than anything else. They had watched the First Men arrive and watched the Children of the Forest and watched the Long Night come and go, and they had pulled back into the deep places and slept, because the surface world was noisy and bright and full of small creatures doing small things, and sleeping was simpler.
They were not gone. They had never been gone.
They needed to be called.
He had the thing that called them.
Euron turned the Key to the Abyss over in his hands. It was cold, as always, not cold in the way metal was cold, retaining the temperature of the room and releasing it slowly, but cold in a more fundamental way, as if it were pulling warmth out of whatever touched it and giving back nothing. He had grown accustomed to this. He had grown accustomed to stranger things.
He thought about his krakens.
He had three. Three was more than anyone else had ever had, and he was proud of this in the way he was proud of everything he did that no one else had managed. The krakens were magnificent. They could pull a warship under in minutes.
They could wrap themselves around a harbor chain and tear it loose. They could reach over a seawall and take men off the top of it.
They were the closest thing to a divine weapon that Euron had possessed before he found the Key to the Abyss, and he had used them accordingly at Oldtown, and the result had been exactly what he'd intended: an enemy so frightened that they did not think clearly and a city so damaged that its power in the region would take a generation to restore.
But krakens could not hold a city. That was the problem, the fundamental, irresolvable problem with krakens as a foundation for power. They were a weapon of terror, and terror was a tool, not a strategy. You terrified an enemy into inaction, and then you needed something to step into the vacuum you'd created, and krakens could not step anywhere.
They lived in the water. They were not organized in any way that permitted direction beyond the simplest impulses. They could destroy. They could not build. They could not garrison it. They could not hold a gate or row a ship or follow a complex order or do any of the things an army needed to do.
The Deep Ones were different.
He had read everything there was to read about them, which was very little and mostly wrong in the specific ways that legends were wrong: correct in the broad outline, distorted in the details, shaped by the fears and wishes of the people who had recorded them rather than the reality of the things they described.
They were old; that part was right. They were terrible; that was subjective but also right. They were not human, which was the most important and most misunderstood part.
They were not human, but they were people. There was a difference.
People could think. People could follow orders. People could hold a position, guard a gate, crew a ship, and respond to complex situations with something more sophisticated than instinct. People could be loyal in the particular way that things that had been dormant for thousands of years and were now awake and grateful to whoever woke them might be loyal.
With krakens, he could frighten people. With the Deep Ones, he could rule.
He had tested this, six weeks ago, off the western coast of Pyke on a moonless night with only the most trusted of his silent crew present.
He had lowered the Key to the Abyss into the water on a rope of braided iron and spoken the words he had worked out from the inscription. His pronunciation was imperfect, the phonology of the script implied sounds that human mouths were not designed to make, and he had done what approximation he could, but the approximation had been sufficient.
The instructions had said precision was less important than intention. He had believed this, because it was the kind of thing that was true about most forms of power: the intent mattered more than the formula.
Something had come up.
Not a Deep One, too small, and wrong in the wrong ways. A scout, perhaps. A lesser thing is sent to be verified before the greater things commit themselves. It had surfaced twenty feet from his ship, and it had looked at him, and he had looked at it, and he had felt the particular satisfaction of a man who has been right about something for a very long time and has finally received confirmation.
It had too many limbs. Its eyes caught the darkness and gave back a faint phosphorescence, the way deep-sea things gleamed when they came up. It had looked at him with an attention that was not animalistic. It had considered him. Then it had submerged, and the water had closed over it without a ripple, and it had not surfaced again.
His crew had said nothing. His crew was not capable of saying nothing in the usual sense; they were incapable of saying anything at all, but they had communicated nothing with their bodies either, which in men who had their tongues removed meant that what they had seen had exceeded even their capacity for visible reaction.
He had retrieved the Key to the Abyss and gone below deck, and he had been smiling ever since.
The scout had gone back to report. To something larger. Which reported to something larger than that. Down in the dark water, in whatever depth they had retreated to, something had received the news: the key exists. The one who holds it is at the surface. He is calling.
They were not awake yet. But they were stirring. He could feel it, not through any physical sense, but through the Key to the Abyss itself, which had been incrementally less cold since that night, as if something on the other end of it were beginning to generate warmth.
He did not know if this was literal or metaphorical. He had found, in his life, that the distinction often mattered less than people assumed.
He had heard, through the usual channels, about the dragon in the North.
A Targaryen, they said. Or someone claiming the name. He had filed this under interesting. He was not threatened by dragons; he had thought about dragons for years, had acquired the Dragonbinder horn through means he preferred not to enumerate, and had studied what was known about the bond between dragons and riders and the mechanics of breaking it.
Dragons were impressive. Dragons were powerful. Dragons were, ultimately, comprehensible.
What was happening in the North was a war for survival. The Others, the Wall, the smallfolk running south to escape something that had always been there at the edge of the world. It was an emergency. Emergencies consumed the people inside them; they did not leave room for anything else.
He was not in an emergency. He was making a plan.
There was a difference between the man on fire and the man watching the fire from a safe distance, calculating what the fire would clear away and what could be built in the aftermath. Euron Greyjoy had spent his entire life being the second kind of man. He had no intention of changing this now.
He put the Key to the Abyss back into its case, lined with dried seaweed treated with a compound he had extracted from certain organisms found only in the deepest trenches, which muffled it, reduced its pull on the temperature of a room, and made it possible to keep in enclosed spaces without everything around it going wrong. This had taken considerable research. He was a thorough man.
He went to the window.
The sea below Pyke was iron-dark and vast and very old. It had been here before the Iron Islands were islands, before the First Men came, before any of the stories anyone told about anything. It would be here after. Euron found this not frightening but clarifying. He had always been drawn to things that were larger than the games people played, things that put the games in context.
He looked at the water for a long time.
Far below, near the base of the cliffs where the black stone of Pyke disappeared into the sea, something moved. Not dramatically. Not the breach of a great beast or the surface disturbance of a wave. Just a slow movement, deep in the water, a shape too large to see clearly and too deliberate to be a current.
Something shifting in its sleep.
Something began, very slowly, to remember what waking felt like.
Euron Greyjoy watched it for a while, his blue smile sharp in the darkness, the cold salt wind off the sea doing nothing to diminish it.
Then he closed the shutters and went to bed.
He slept very well.