The black fire of Balerion receded, leaving the battlefield shrouded in thick, freezing mist. Edric Stark, emerging from the smoke of his unyielding shield, mounted his massive dire wolf, Winter, whose furious growl still echoed the challenge laid upon the Great Dread.
The pair moved swiftly back towards the walls of Moat Cailin, the symbol of Northern defiance still unbroken.
The battle raged throughout the remainder of the first day. In the sky, the Giant Eagles and their riders proved relentlessly harassing, forcing the dragons to maintain high altitude or risk another crippling attack.
On the ground, the Targaryen army, now devoid of its vanguard and paralyzed by the magicians' devastating mud trap, attempted to scale the ancient walls. They found no clear advantage.
The magicians under the Stark banner, positioned along the battlements, maintained a relentless barrage of spells—flurries of ice shards, bursts of earth spikes, and localized wind blasts—disrupting every formation and climbing attempt.
By the end of the day, the staggering cost of the southern assault was clear: 10,000 Targaryen soldiers lay dead, drowned in the magically created bog or skewered on the walls.
The North's losses were minimal, a necessary sacrifice: eight Giant Eagles and their riders had been brought down in the high-altitude skirmishes.
The sun rose on the second day, but the mood was darker than the previous one. The Targaryen command had shifted. They would not waste more men on the impregnable walls. They would go for the head of the serpent.
This time, King Aenys I, Prince Maegor, and Prince Aegon led the charge from the ground. They were on horseback, clad in their finest armor, flanked by the few remaining, most trusted Dragon Knights.
Their target was clear: Prince Edric Stark. They would break the spirit of the North by killing its heir, at any cost.
Aenys, on his magnificent charger, was now guided by a cold, desperate resolve. Maegor's face was a terrible mask of vengeful fury, the scratches on Balerion's face a fresh insult to his pride.
Edric saw them coming. He had anticipated this move. He knew the war could be won or lost on the prowess of a single duel. He stood on the battlements, his Ice Blade gleaming.
He did not wait for them to reach the gate. He leapt.
It was a controlled, magical plunge. He propelled himself from the wall, slowing his descent with a cushion of Wind Magic and landing with the quiet grace of a cat directly in front of the three charging princes.
Behind him, twenty Northern magicians, each a master of an element, followed his lead, landing in a tight formation around him.
The sight of the enemy King, his brother, and his heir standing isolated before a single figure was enough to stop the entire Targaryen army in its tracks.
Aenys, Maegor, and Aegon immediately dismounted, drawing their Valyrian steel. They were not just warriors; they were elemental masters.
The three began to hurl spells at Edric instantly—a volley of fire and wind blasts designed to overwhelm. Edric met the onslaught with immediate defense: a single, vast Ice Wall bloomed before him, absorbing the combined elemental assault.
"STAND DOWN!" Edric's voice carried to his own men, sharp and clear. "I forbid interference. This is my duel! This is the North's answer to their Kings!"
The twenty magicians, though uneasy, obeyed. The battle was now three against one.
The combined assault of the three Targaryens was formidable. Aenys favored rapid-fire, precise magical strikes. Aegon threw broad, sweeping arcs of flame to control the area. Maegor, still raging from the previous day, hammered Edric with localized, destructive bursts of fire and brute force.
But Edric's training had been absolute. His control over ice was the strongest in the world, born from the primal cold of the True Winter. He moved and fought like the very element of winter.
He countered every attack with disciplined ease. When Maegor threw a terrifying wave of scorching flame, Edric didn't raise a wall; he conjured a rotating shield of razor-thin ice shards that deflected the heat outward, creating blinding steam.
When Aenys focused his fire, Edric used the air's moisture to spontaneously generate ice spikes at unpredictable angles, forcing the King to divert his offense to defense.
The three princes fought in synergy, but Edric fought with the total mastery of one. He was everywhere at once, dodging fire that melted the mud and leaving trails of freezing air that cracked the stone.
Edric saw the opportunity. Maegor, driven by fury, was predictable.
Maegor roared and launched a single, immense, focused blast of Molten Fire—a destructive, head-on attack.
Edric did not defend. Instead, he executed a perfect lateral dodge, sprinting to the side, and simultaneously, he initiated a devastating counter-attack. A massive, opaque Ice Construct—a perfect, freezing copy of a siege battering ram—materialized directly in the path of Maegor's blast.
Maegor's fire instantly vaporized the Ice Ram, but the resulting explosion of steam and pressure blinded Maegor completely for a crucial second.
Edric was already moving. He closed the distance, the Ice Blade drawn and humming. Maegor, blinded, swung his flaming Bloodwind wildly. Edric parried the wild swing with an elbow strike, knocking the blade upward.
Then, with blinding speed, Edric's Ice Blade plunged through the exposed throat gap of Maegor's armor. The magic of the blade did not cut; it froze. The cold was absolute and instantaneous.
Maegor's rage stopped. His massive body locked up, a sudden, cold tremor running through his frame. His lips opened in a silent, final gasp, but no sound came out. The fire magic in his hands sputtered and died.
Edric pulled the Ice Blade out. Maegor Targaryen, the brute force of the dynasty, the terror of his age, fell to the ground, his body a silent, frozen monument to his own defeat.
Aenys I Targaryen saw his brother fall. The sight shattered the fragile control he had maintained over his own sensitive nature. Grief, terror, and a primal, kingly fury consumed him.
His anger did not break his magic; it powered it. Aenys's control over fire, already formidable, surged to a terrifying new level, fueled by pure adrenaline and vengeance.
"MAEGOR!" Aenys shrieked, his silver-gold hair seeming to stand on end. He charged forward, discarding his sword in favor of unbridled elemental destruction.
"Majestic Flame Destroyer!" Aenys roared, unleashing a wide, sweeping cone of silver-gold fire designed to immolate the entire area.
"Water Wall Formation!" Edric countered instantly. From the earth beneath his feet, a massive, thick wall of pressurized water erupted, held stable by his ice-magic reinforcement. The torrent of fire struck the water, creating a dense wall of scalding steam that briefly hid both combatants.
Aenys, not pausing, struck again. "Great Fire Annihilation!" He compressed a colossal sphere of pure fire in his hands, throwing it like a fiery sun at the steam cloud where he knew Edric stood.
Edric, having no time to rematerialize his ice, relied on the secondary element he had mastered.
"Water Colliding Wave!" he shouted. Two powerful, spiraling jets of water shot from the sides of the water wall, meeting the Great Fire Annihilation head-on. The two forces violently canceled each other out in another explosion of steam and sound.
Aenys, now completely feral, was a blur of frantic power. He leaped and landed, gathering his last, desperate reserve of strength. "Great Fireball Technique!" He focused his fire magic into a stream of giant, cannonball-sized fireballs, hurling them like living artillery.
Edric, however, had the advantage of cool calculation. He used Aenys's own momentum against him. He slammed his fists together, channeling the very swamp water around them.
"Water Dragon Wave!" he commanded. A gigantic, serpentine column of pressurized water erupted from the mud. It was not fire; it was pure, unadulterated, concussive force.
The Water Dragon Wave slammed into Aenys before he could finish his last attack, lifting the King entirely off his feet and slamming him into the ground fifty feet away.
Aenys struggled to rise, his ribs likely cracked, his magical reserves spent, his spirit broken by the death of his brother and the failure of his own power.
Edric closed the distance, his Ice Blade raised. He looked down at the broken King.
"Winter Came for House Targaryen."
With a final, terrible incantation, he executed the killing blow, using a highly compressed, magically reinforced stream of water—the most lethal of his water techniques.
"Water Severing Wave."
A flash of pressurized water, sharper and faster than any steel blade, shot from Edric's palm. It struck King Aenys I Targaryen squarely in the neck.
The King's head was instantly severed from his body. The Aenys Targaryen, King of the Six Kingdoms, died in the mud of the North, slain not by dragonfire, but by the water from the land he sought to conquer.
Prince Aegon, the heir, the young husband of Rhaena, saw his father die. He stood alone amidst the mud and the corpses of his kin. His fear turned to a single, burning need for vengeance. All thought of strategy vanished.
He knew he could not win this duel. He drew his horn—the Dragon Horn, his grandfather had salvaged from Valyria.
Aegon placed the horn to his lips and blew a single, terrible blast. It was a command that surpassed a rider's voice; it was a primal summons.
Balerion, Vhagar, Starfyre, and the five younger dragons wheeled and dove instantly, abandoning the aerial battle. They all converged on Aegon, their scales flashing in the sun, their massive roars shaking the very foundation of Moat Cailin.
Aegon had called them to him, and he was going to use every one of them to kill the man who had just decapitated his House.
Edric Stark looked up at the terrifying sight: eight dragons descending, six riders ready for war, and the new King, Aegon, standing ready to ride. Edric's duel was over, and the war was now his alone.
He knew he couldn't survive a static position against eight dragons. His defense had to become his offense.
The Ice Blade was back in his hand, rapidly gathering frost and increasing in size until it was a colossal, two-meter sword of glittering ice.
Then Edric channeled his power into his back. With a sudden, explosive burst of cold, two vast, crystalline wings—span far wider than any bird's—sprouted from his back, reinforced by the same dense magic as his shield. Simultaneously, a thick, articulated tail of ice extended behind him, a rudder for balance and a potential whip.
Edric Stark was transforming. He was becoming an Ice dragon of the North.
As Starfyre swooped low towards Aegon, the new King hopped onto his dragon and commanded it to give chase.
Edric turned toward the sky, away from the walls and his army. He flapped his massive ice wings, the sound a high, rushing crackle of air and cold. He shot into the sky, meeting the challenge of the eight dragons not from a wall or a shield, but as a peer.
Edric Stark was now in the sky, facing eight dragons and six magically-enhanced riders, alone, the fate of the North riding on his icy wings.