Chapter 33: The Sermon of Deeds
The road through the Riverlands was a study in scars. Aemond's fiery passage had left a legacy of blackened farmsteads, fallow fields, and villages haunted by the ghosts of the dead. It was through this wounded land that the Hands of the God walked, a small band of nobodies now tasked with the work of saints.
They were an unlikely fellowship. Ellyn the weaver, her hands now as capable of mending flesh as they were thread, had become their unspoken leader. Matthos, the old soldier whose leg had been remade, walked without a limp, his presence a silent, powerful testament to the god's power. Serra, the farmer from Duskendale, seemed to draw strength from the blighted earth itself, her calloused palms humming with a patient, green energy.
"I've never been this far from home," Serra said one evening as they made camp by a stagnant stream. "The ground here… it feels sick. Thirsty."
"It is a land of much untidiness," Matthos rumbled, his voice the gravelly sound of a man who had not spoken much for ten years and was now making up for lost time. "The war poisoned it. The One-Eye cauterized it. Now we are here to what? To bandage a corpse?"
"We are here to mend it," Ellyn said, her voice quiet but firm. She was tending to a blister on the foot of a young boy who had begun following them from the last village. A soft, starlit energy flowed from her fingers, and the boy's whimper of pain ceased. "The Great Power did not send us to offer comfort. It sent us to restore order. We are not septons offering prayers for the dead. We are masons, rebuilding the foundation."
Her simple, unshakeable faith had become the anchor for them all. They were not driven by glory or a desire for power. They were driven by a divine mandate to be… useful.
They arrived at the town of Wendish Town two days later. It was a place of deep suffering. The river had run low, the fields were barren, and a flux was working its way through the youngest and oldest of the population. They were met not with hope, but with the hostile suspicion of the desperate.
The town's septon, a gaunt man with a fanatic's fire in his eyes named Septon Orland, confronted them in the muddy square before his small, smoke-stained sept.
"Witches!" he cried, pointing a trembling, bony finger at them. A small crowd of grim-faced townsfolk gathered behind him, armed with rusty scythes and cudgels. "Agents of the shadow! I have heard the tales! You perform your dark miracles to lure the faithful from the light of the Seven!"
"We have come to help," Ellyn said calmly, her hands open at her sides.
"The Seven test our faith with this hardship!" Orland shrieked. "Our suffering is a trial to purify our souls! You offer an easy path, a devil's bargain! Be gone from this place, lest you feel the Father's justice!"
Matthos took a step forward, but Ellyn put a hand on his arm. She looked past the frantic septon, at the faces of the people. She saw their fear, but beneath it, she saw the deeper pain of hunger and the hollow-eyed grief of parents with sick children. Words would not win them.
"We will not argue doctrine with you, Septon," Ellyn said, her voice carrying across the square. "The god we serve is not a god of words, but of deeds."
She turned to Serra. "The fields," she said.
Serra nodded and walked to the edge of the square, to a plot of land that was nothing but cracked, grey earth. She knelt, placing her palms flat on the ground. The townsfolk watched, murmuring. Serra closed her eyes. A faint green light, the color of new life, began to glow from her hands, pulsing into the soil. For a long moment, nothing happened. Then, a single, green shoot pushed its way through the hard-caked earth. Then another, and another. A patch of green spread from her hands, the dead soil reviving before their very eyes. The crowd fell silent, their mouths agape.
Ellyn then turned to Matthos. "The wounded," she said.
The old soldier nodded and walked towards a group of men who huddled together, men with old, festering injuries from the war that never truly healed. One man leaned heavily on a crutch, his leg a twisted, painful memory. Matthos, who knew their pain intimately, knelt before him. "Brother," he said gently. "Allow me." He placed his hands on the man's withered leg. A warm, golden light enveloped the limb. The man cried out, not in pain, but in shock, as he felt strength, real strength, flow into the deadened muscles for the first time in a decade. He tentatively put weight on it, then more. He dropped his crutch and stood, unsteady but whole.
A woman in the crowd screamed, a sound of pure, unadulterated shock.
Finally, Ellyn walked towards the hovels where the sick were kept. She found a mother weeping over a small child, a girl burning with the bowel flux. Septon Orland rushed to block her path. "Do not touch the child, witch! Her soul belongs to the gods!"
Ellyn simply looked at him with her calm, pitying eyes. "The gods seem prepared to let her die. Mine is not." She pushed past him gently and knelt by the child. As she had done for her neighbor's son, she placed her hands on the girl's fevered brow. The starlight flowed. The fever broke. The child's breathing eased.
The mother fell to her knees, not before the septon, but before Ellyn, grabbing the hem of her simple woollen dress. "How?" she wept. "Who are you?"
Ellyn looked out at the silent, awestruck crowd, at the septon whose face was a mask of utter defeat. "We are no one," she said, her voice clear and true. "We are the Hands of the God. The Great Power on the hill, the one who ended the war, saw your suffering. It saw the disorder. It sent us to correct it." She looked at the field where green shoots were now pushing up in their hundreds. "We ask for no coin. We ask for no tithes. We ask only that you understand. The peace you now enjoy, the food that will fill your bellies, the health that returns to your children… it flows from the god that watches over us all. It is a testament to the power of its order."
That night, the town of Wendish Town feasted. Serra had blessed their communal grain store, and a single sack had provided enough meal to bake bread for everyone, with more left over. The mood was not one of pious reverence, but of stunned, grateful celebration. They had spent a decade living in fear of a silent god. Now, for the first time, they saw it as a provider. Septon Orland sat alone in his empty sept, the sound of the town's joyful celebration a more damning sermon than any he had ever preached.
The stories of the "Saints of the Shadow," as the smallfolk began to call them, spread through Westeros on the wings of rumor and wonder. And with each story, the foundations of the old world cracked a little more.
In the Starry Sept, the High Septon listened to the reports with a growing sense of despair. "He is not merely content to rule their bodies," he told his council, his voice heavy. "He now claims their souls through charity. He performs the miracles the Seven are meant to. He is answering the prayers we can only receive in silence."
Septon Eustace, his face pale, wrung his hands. "This is a disaster, Your Holiness! He is stealing the hearts of the common people with full bellies and healed children! How can we fight that? He makes us… irrelevant."
"Then we must become relevant again," the High Septon declared, though his words lacked their former fire. "We must empty our coffers! We must send our own septons out to feed the poor, to tend to the sick! We must match his deeds with our own!"
"With what power, Your Holiness?" asked Septon Lorent. "We can give them bread, yes. But we cannot make a withered field green. We cannot mend a broken body with a touch. He is performing magic. And all we have are prayers."
In the Red Keep, the reports were met with a different kind of dread. Rhaenyra listened to her master-at-arms describe the events at Wendish Town, her face a mask of cold fury.
"Saints," Jacaerys spat from beside her. "He is not just a god anymore, he's a religion. And it's spreading faster than the bloody flux ever did. How long before the people see us as useless parasites? How long before they wonder why they need a Queen at all, when the god provides for them directly?"
"He is winning their love," Lord Corlys stated, his analysis as sharp as ever. "And a ruler who does not have the love of the common man sits on a very shaky throne indeed. Even a throne granted by a god."
Larys Strong, ever the silent observer, chose this moment to speak. "A most efficient strategy, Your Grace," he noted, a hint of admiration in his voice. "Fear ensures obedience. But gratitude ensures loyalty. He is building a foundation for his rule that will last a thousand years, built not on the submission of lords, but on the willing devotion of the smallfolk."
Rhaenyra looked at him, at the man who had whispered this new path into the god's ear. "And you admire this, Lord Larys? This complete usurpation of our authority?"
"I admire its elegance, Your Grace," Larys replied with a slight bow. "And its permanence. He is not just ruling the kingdom. He is remaking it in his own image."
Larys was right. Krosis-Krif felt the change. The thin trickle of faith energy from his temples was growing into a steady river. The belief born of gratitude was a hundred times more potent than the belief born of fear. It was a rich, heady, and utterly satisfying power source. The experiment was a resounding success.
He sent a private, pleased thought to his whisperer. "THEY ARE EFFICIENT. THEIR GRATITUDE IS A PURE, STRONG CURRENT. THE EXPERIMENT IS A SUCCESS."
Larys, in his study, allowed himself a small, private smile. I am pleased my observations proved useful, Great One.
"EXPAND IT," Krosis-Krif commanded. "IDENTIFY MORE WHO ARE WORTHY OF THE GIFT. THE ENTIRE REALM MUST SEE AND FEEL THE FRUITS OF MY ORDER. THE HARVEST IS PLENTIFUL, BUT THE LABORERS ARE FEW."
The command was clear. The program was to be scaled up.
The chapter of the story unfolding in the Riverlands reached its crescendo a week later. Ellyn, Matthos, Serra, and their now-sizable following of disciples and believers arrived at the gates of a larger town, one that had been hit particularly hard by both the war and the famine. But this time, they were not met with suspicion or hostility.
They were met by a crowd. Thousands of people, their faces thin with hunger but alight with a desperate, fervent hope, had gathered outside the walls. They knelt in the mud as the small band of saints approached.
"Saint Ellyn!" a man cried out, holding up a sick child. "Bless us! Heal my daughter!"
Ellyn looked out at the sea of faces, at the desperate hope directed at her, and she felt the immense weight of the god's power within her. She had become a symbol. She raised her hands, and a hush fell over the massive crowd.
"I am no saint," she said, her voice clear and carrying, filled with a quiet authority she had never known. "I am merely a hand. The god is the one who heals."
She pointed back towards the distant capital, towards the unseen hill where their new god resided. "Do not thank me. Do not praise me. Open your hearts and thank the Great Order that has brought peace to this land. It is the power that watches over you, that mends your children and will soon fill your bellies. Its peace is a gift. Its order is a blessing. Embrace it, and you will never know true hunger or fear again."
A great roar of adulation went up from the crowd, a sound of thousands of voices joined in a single, powerful prayer, not to her, but to the god she represented. Their combined faith was a colossal wave of energy, a psychic tsunami that washed over the land and flowed all the way back to King's Landing.
On his throne of ruins, Krosis-Krif felt the wave hit him, and he basked in its glorious, intoxicating power. The victory was now absolute. He had conquered their bodies with fear, and now he had conquered their souls with kindness. He was their monster, their king, their provider, and their god. And his flock, he knew, would only continue to grow.