Chapter 32: The Ghosts of Harrenhal
The world reasserted itself with a savage, wrenching violence. One moment they were in the torchlit, familiar courtyard of the Hand's Tower; the next, they were sprawled on damp, unfamiliar earth under a sky choked with a million strange stars. The five hundred men of the Protector's Guard, the new pride of King's Landing, were reduced to a groaning, retching mass. The Bifrost was not a gentle chariot; it was a cosmic hurricane that scoured the senses and turned the stomach inside out.
Thor was on one knee, his head bowed, his breathing ragged. The effort of transporting such a large number of men, even across the relatively short distance of a continent, had taken a significant toll. A trickle of blood ran from his nose, and the blue light in his prosthetic eye flickered erratically. He had the power, but his mortal, flesh-and-blood form, so long neglected, was still a weak vessel for the cosmic energies he commanded.
Ned Stark was one of the first to find his feet, his northern constitution more resilient than most. He pushed himself up, his head swimming, and took in their new surroundings. The air was cool and clean, smelling of wet earth and ancient stone. They were in a dark, open field, and looming before them, silhouetted against the star-dusted sky, was a nightmare.
It was Harrenhal.
The stories did not do it justice. It was not a castle; it was a monument to hubris, a scar on the face of the world. Five monstrous, melted towers clawed at the sky, their stone warped and blackened, like the bones of some colossal, burned beast. They were not the elegant spires of King's Landing, but vast, thick, and brutally ugly structures, fused together by dragonfire into a single, sprawling monstrosity. The castle was so immense, so utterly out of proportion with the world of men, that it seemed to generate its own oppressive silence.
"Gods be good," whispered Tobin, the blacksmith's son, as he staggered to his feet. His awe was shared by all who looked upon it. They had come to haunt a castle that was already haunted by the ghosts of kings and dragons.
"It's held by Ser Amory Lorch," Arric, the ex-Gold Cloak, rasped, spitting on the ground to clear the taste of the Bifrost from his mouth. "One of Tywin's most loyal… and most brutal… bannermen. They say he feeds prisoners to his dogs."
"Then we shall see how his dogs fare against a wolf," Ned said, his voice hard. His own awe at the sight of the cursed castle was quickly replaced by a cold, tactical focus. He drew his Valyrian steel sword, Ice, its dark, rippled surface seeming to drink the starlight. "Kael! Tobin! Arric! Get the men into formation. We move on the main gate. The garrison is small, but they will be well-armed. We strike now, before they can mount a proper defense."
The Protector's Guard, despite their disorientation, rallied with a speed that made Ned's heart swell with pride. They were not the city mob of a fortnight ago. They were soldiers. They formed up, their new steel spearheads a forest of deadly points in the darkness.
Their approach to the main gate was swift and silent. The gatehouse was a fortress in itself, its walls fifty feet high, the gate a behemoth of iron and blackened wood. A dozen sentries walked the battlements, their Lannister crimson stark against the dark stone.
"The gate is impenetrable, my lord," Kael, the stonemason, said, his expert eye assessing the structure. "It would take a month to build a ram large enough to trouble it."
"We do not have a month," Ned said. He looked at Thor, who had recovered his strength, his breathing evening out, the bleeding from his nose having stopped. "Can you…?"
Thor nodded, stepping forward. He looked at the massive wall, not at the gate. He placed a hand on the ancient, fire-melted stone. It was still warm, even after three hundred years, humming with a deep, resonant memory of the dragonfire that had forged it. He closed his eyes. He was not looking for a weak point. He was listening to the song of the stone, to its crystalline structure, its deep, hidden fractures.
He found it. A place where Balerion the Black Dread's fire had burned hottest, where the stone had been vitrified, making it as brittle as glass on a molecular level.
He did not use lightning. He did not use a great feat of strength. He simply gathered a low, harmonic frequency in the palm of his hand, a vibration tuned perfectly to the resonant frequency of the vitrified stone. He pressed his hand against the wall.
For a moment, nothing happened. Then, a low hum started, and a spiderweb of tiny, glowing cracks appeared on the surface of the wall. The hum grew louder, the cracks spreading, until with a great, groaning shatter, a twenty-foot section of the supposedly unbreakable wall of Harrenhal crumbled, dissolving into a cascade of dust and rubble that formed a perfect, sloping ramp into the courtyard beyond.
The Lannister sentries stared in dumbfounded horror, their minds unable to process what they had just seen.
"Now!" Ned roared. "For the North! For the Realm!"
The Protector's Guard let out a single, unified war cry and charged up the ramp of shattered stone, a river of new steel and righteous fury pouring into the heart of Harrenhal.
The battle in the vast, empty courtyard was a confused, brutal affair. Ser Amory Lorch, a man whose cruelty was matched only by his incompetence as a commander, was caught completely by surprise. His garrison of two hundred men, roused from their beds, stumbled into the courtyard in a disorganized rabble. They were met by the disciplined shield wall of the Protector's Guard.
Ned Stark was at the forefront, Ice a song of death in his hands. He was no longer a politician or a reluctant Hand; he was the warrior of Robert's Rebellion, the Quiet Wolf of the North, and he fought with a cold, deadly precision. He moved through the Lannister ranks, his Valyrian blade shearing through armor and bone, his face a mask of grim determination.
But it was Thor who broke them. He moved through the battle not as a soldier, but as a force of nature. He used Stormbreaker not just to kill, but to control the battlefield. A swing of the axe created a shockwave that sent a dozen men flying. A stomp of his foot shattered the ground, creating a fissure that broke a Lannister charge. He was everywhere at once, a whirlwind of destruction that shattered the morale of the enemy. The Lannister soldiers, who had expected to butcher peasants in the Riverlands, found themselves fighting a demon from their darkest nightmares.
Ser Amory Lorch, seeing the battle lost, tried to flee. But he was met by Arric, the ex-Gold Cloak, who held a deep and personal hatred for cruel commanders. Their swordfight was short and ugly. Arric, fueled by a desire for redemption, fought with a desperate ferocity, and his new, star-forged blade cut through Lorch's fine castle-forged steel, ending the knight's brutal career with a sword through the throat.
With their commander dead, the remaining Lannister men threw down their swords and surrendered. The battle for Harrenhal, a siege that should have taken months, was over in less than an hour.
As the sun began to rise, casting its first pale light on the grotesque, melted towers, the true horror of Lorch's rule became apparent. In the dungeons, deep beneath the castle, they found them. Dozens of prisoners, Riverlanders mostly, but a few captured Northmen from scout patrols. They were emaciated, their bodies covered in the marks of torture. The sight of their suffering filled Ned's men with a cold, hard fury.
They freed the prisoners, carrying the weakest into the courtyard. They gave them water and bread, their first kindness in months. A Riverland knight, his family's sigil of a leaping trout barely visible on his tattered surcoat, fell to his knees before Ned.
"My lord Stark," he wept, his voice raw. "We had heard… we had heard you were a prisoner. A traitor."
"The Lannisters are the traitors," Ned said, helping the man to his feet. "They have murdered their king and stolen his throne. I am here as Protector of the Realm, to restore the true king to his rightful place."
The news spread through the freed prisoners like wildfire. The Hand of the King was here. He had come with an army that appeared from nowhere and a champion who could break walls with a touch. He was not a prisoner. He was a liberator. A savior.
By midday, the direwolf banner of House Stark flew from the highest, most grotesquely twisted tower of Harrenhal. The cursed castle, the grave of kings, now had a new lord.
The news of Harrenhal's fall reached Tywin Lannister's command tent two days later. He was in the process of dictating orders for the systematic destruction of the lands belonging to House Piper, his face a mask of cold, patrician indifference. A rider, his horse lathered in sweat, was brought before him, bearing the frantic message from the handful of men who had escaped the castle.
Tywin listened to the report without expression. His commanders, who stood around his campaign table, exchanged nervous glances. The report was utter madness. An army appearing from nowhere. A giant who shattered walls with a touch. Ser Amory Lorch and his entire garrison… gone.
When the scout was finished, Tywin was silent for a full minute. He stared at his map of the Riverlands, at the neat, orderly lines of his campaign. And he realized that the map was now useless. A hostile army, led by his most hated enemy, had just materialized in his rear, seizing the most formidable fortress in the region. His supply lines were cut. His entire strategy was in ruins.
"How?" was the only word he spoke, his voice a low, dangerous whisper.
"We… we do not know, my lord," the scout stammered. "They say… they say he came on a bridge of rainbow light."
Tywin's knuckles were white where he gripped the edge of the table. He did not believe in gods. He did not believe in magic. He believed in gold, steel, and fear. And his enemy had just deployed a weapon that defied all three. For the first time in his adult life, the Old Lion of the Rock was faced with a variable he could not calculate, a threat he did not know how to fight.
His cold, pale eyes glittered with a new, terrible light. "The Mountain," he commanded, his voice like the chipping of ice. "Send for my brother Kevan. Tell Ser Gregor to break off his raids. He will march on Harrenhal with two thousand men. I want him to find out what this demon is. And I want him to bring me its head."
He turned back to his map, his mind already working, adapting. He was a man who had never known defeat, and he would not start now. But as he looked at the black, ominous shape of Harrenhal, he felt a sliver of something he had not felt since he was a child. A sliver of fear.
Back in the newly conquered fortress, Ned Stark was sending his own riders out, not with messages of terror, but of hope. He sent them to Riverrun, to the homes of the Blackwoods and the Brackens, to every corner of the war-torn Riverlands. The message was the same: The Hand of the King holds Harrenhal. The wolves have come to hunt the lions. Rally to the banner.
That evening, Thor walked the battlements of the monstrous castle alone. The scale of it was staggering. It was a testament to the destructive, ego-maniacal power of the dragons, a power not unlike his own. He looked at the melted stone, at the towers that looked like screaming faces, and he saw a warning. A warning about what happens when power is untempered by wisdom, when conquest becomes an end in itself.
He had won another great victory for Ned Stark. He had broken a castle, freed the innocent, and turned the tide of the war. But as he looked out over the burning fields of the Riverlands, he felt no triumph. Only the heavy, familiar weight of his own power, and the dawning realization that the ghosts of Harrenhal were not just in its stones. They were in him, too. The ghosts of all the battles he had fought, of all the worlds he had saved, and of all the people he had failed to protect.
The banners of the Mountain were already on the horizon. The next battle was coming. And Thor knew, with a grim certainty, that this cursed castle was destined to soak up more blood before the war was over.