Sixth Moon, 116 AD (15 AC)
The King of Hardhome
He sighed in honest, earnest relief, when they finally set sight on Hardhome. It had been a terrifying few months, filled with more fear than he'd felt in fourteen years, since the last time he'd been in the presence of a dragonlord.
Just as he knew they always would, the Targaryens had finally come for the North, for Brandon Snow, and the sheer scale of the brutality and savagery unleashed by both sides was unreal. Tyrannical heathen dragonlords and blood mages waging war on mad wargs and skinchangers never ended well for anyone caught in the middle.
The nephew of Aegon Targaryen, the young Vaemond Baratheon, was but the first of many casualties and losses as Brandon Snow and his Wolf's Teeth had realized that targeting the Targaryens wasn't so simple anymore and so had resorted to attacking their armies, their supply lines, their officers, their commanders, their loyal vassals, friends, and kin. Hit and run guerilla attacks, raids in the night, possessing horses and other animals, and overall bringing the progress of the Targaryens to a crawl throughout the already massive region.
In response the Targaryens had begun unleashing their magic and dragonfire upon the North, just as they had upon the south. Burning villages that refused to comply and torturing information out of anyone even remotely suspected to know the locations of Brandon Snow and his ragtag army of skinchangers, legendary children of the forest, and stubborn burly Northmen resistance fighters.
Loren hadn't wanted to stick around to find out what the Targaryens' plans for the Wall would be when they inevitably won. He knew that for all of Brandon Snow's apparent successes right now, they were ultimately little more than an annoyance and the Targaryens were slowly but surely conquering the entire North and crushing it underfoot.
They had done it to the Riverlands, to the Vale, to the Reach, and the Stormlands, and he had seen them done it to his beloved former homeland, the Westerlands, firsthand. There was no stopping them at this point, and to even try was foolishness.
As soon as he had gotten word that the Targaryens had finally begun their Northern campaign and were marching on White Harbor, Loren had immediately called for a Great Ranging, citing some nonsensical excuses about wildling activity beyond the Wall (when half of the wildlings had already joined Brandon Snow's army).
On his Great Ranging, Loren had called up all of his loyalists and allies, taken everything that wasn't nailed down and even those that were, everything and anything that they thought could be of use from the castles they controlled along the Wall's east, and then, once the Night's Watch's entire fleet had reached Hardhome with a huge host of men and supplies, Loren had personally led his supposed Great Ranging by foot overland to Hardhome, and collapsed the tunnels of the castles they were leaving behind them.
He had done his best to forestall the rival factions in the Night's Watch becoming aware of his intentions and trying to stop him. It hadn't quite worked since it was so obvious but it had delayed them long enough that instead of presenting a united front to stop him or chase him to Hardhome, the Night's Watch had instead disintegrated into chaos as Traditionalists feuded with Faith Militant and with the Gardener and Arryn factions who had formed an uneasy peace.
Yet despite everything aligning just right, Loren hadn't been able to help fearing and worrying. He had worried so much that they'd be attacked on their journey to Hardhome, that the other members of the Night's Watch or the wildlings would ambush them suddenly, that they'd all freeze to death in an unexpected blizzard in the height of summer (not that impossible beyond the Wall), or that the Targaryens would even chase them beyond the Wall even when they were preoccupied with the Northmen.
But nothing had happened. His worries had been for naught and he couldn't be gladder for it.
Finally, after fourteen years of slaving away on that damnable Wall, fourteen years of bitter seething after his humiliation and the loss of his crown, fourteen years of not being able to openly have a woman in his bed, he was finally free.
He was a king again. King of Hardhome. And while Hardhome was an absolute shithole, a castle and town made from jagged uneven stone and frozen wood in the frozen wasteland of the Far North, it was his shithole.
A place to be free again, to be safe from Targaryens, Brandon Snow, and anyone else, a place where he and his line might have a new start and make something of themselves again.
In his heart, he would always long for Casterly Rock and its splendor but that was the past. Dead and gone. He would never see the Westerlands again and he had accepted that. Hardhome was his future, and there was a lot of work to do to ensure that future was bright and prosperous as could be in a place like this.
He had to make sure that their fleet was hard at work, setting up trade routes and trawling the seas for fish, whales, crabs, seals, and whatever else they could eat. The farmers he had forcibly imported from the Gift struggled to grow food in Loren's Point but any little bit was worth it, and he already had teams hunting in the Haunted Forest to further supplement their food supply and stock up their warehouses for when winter inevitably arrived.
They still didn't have enough women either, despite the smallfolk women from the Gift he'd forcibly moved and the wildlings that had been taken as tribute or allies. He might need to arrange large scale 'wife stealings' as the wildlings termed it to get enough women to keep his men happy and allow their population to remain stable if not continue to grow.
His sons needed women and brides of their own to continue their house, as would his brother Tybolt, and Loren couldn't say he didn't want one or a few himself either. It might be good to try and arrange some strategic marriages between his family and his important lords and allies like Lefford to the daughters of wildling chiefs they were trying to befriend and ally with as well.
And he still had to watch and worry that they would be attacked, that hostile wildings might come in force against Hardhome, or the Targaryens might come up north with their dragons, or that Gardener and Arryn may move against him.
He didn't know what the state of the Wall was right now or if anyone else had deserted like he had yet, but he had known in the years leading up to his own desertion that Gardener and Arryn had been jointly trying to set up a base at the Fist of the First Men. He wondered whether they would succeed, if they could successfully make it there and resolve their disputes over who was the senior leader or fall into infighting and freeze and starve in the coming winter, and what the ramifications would be regardless of which outcome came to be.
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Eleventh Moon, 116 AD (15 AC)
Visenya
The war in the North was like nothing they had ever faced before. They had fought rebels in the countryside before, militants who would attack and then run and blend back into the smallfolk in constant, incessant raids, but the Northmen took it to a whole new scale.
They would come in the night, launching volleys of weirwood arrows, sending mists and fogs to cloud their visibility, throwing rocks and manipulating the earth with magic and possessing animals to attack them and their high-ranking officers. Unfortunately, her dear nephew Vaemond had been only the first of many casualties and losses their officers and most trusted vassals had suffered as a result of the campaign.
Sometimes in the midst of these raids, Visenya herself or her kin would be beset upon even atop their own dragons by swarms of skinchanged birds flying and pecking at them suicidally before they eviscerated all of them with bloodfire. It was tedious and mentally wearing to deal with such attacks constantly. And whenever they tried to retaliate, the enemy would slink back into the shadows.
Magic added a whole new layer of complexity, danger, and difficulty to the already annoying guerilla war. So much so that Visenya had had to give the order that either herself or one of her other dragonriding family members in the army would be on shift every night along with the requisite Rangers, Dragonguard, and Eyes to spy for any magical threats and counter them with magic.
The Wolf's Teeth and their children of the forest allies it seemed, had some kind of magic that could obscure their scrying with the flames and the glass candles, akin to that of Storm's End and other legendarily ancient castles, but it was not infallible. Oft their usage of it would mark out their conspicuous absence and lead them to investigate, other times they could simply overpower or penetrate their defenses with precision.
Using the glass candles over such a large area was often like searching for a needle in a haystack, however. The North was so huge, that simply finding the enemy, even with magic, could be a challenge at times.
Some said that the North was large enough to fit all the six southern kingdoms within it with space to spare and while that was certainly untrue, the North was nevertheless extremely large, with vast expanses of open plains, woods, mountains, and so much more. They could go days without even seeing a holdfast or village and whenever they did, the local smallfolk were not very enthusiastic to help them.
Perhaps they could have been once, the Northern smallfolk had little love lost between them and their lords who abused them and their women with the First Night and taking food and other such mistreatments considered 'custom' by the barbaric First Men and yet their attempts to win their loyalty by outlawing these archaic practices and giving them aid with food and other necessities had had only mixed effects.
The Dragon's Wroth had unsettled and terrified much of the Northern smallfolk and their outlawing of the weirwood trees (which they continued to cut down wherever they found them) was seen as an attack on their religion. And so much like the smallfolk of the Reach, Stormlands, and Vale had resisted at first, so too did the Northmen.
Visenya and her family to resort to harsher measures to pacify and interrogate them, interspersing the carrot with the stick and enforcing their will and control with dragonfire and magic to break their minds and extract every piece of knowledge they possessed about Brandon Snow's forces.
The lords were little better, all of them stubbornly remaining loyal to Brandon Snow, either due to his control over them with his skinchanging or their fear of their reprisal. It wasn't like Visenya couldn't comprehend their logic after all, their policy of not giving clemency to most local lords above certain ranks after the rebellions in the Westerlands had not changed.
And so everywhere they went, they had had to slowly and systematically replace all the nobles and with their own Valyrian, Essosi, and Rivermen loyalists, subjugate, pacify, and interrogate the smallfolk, and root out all of the opposing militants led by Brandon Snow and his magically inclined allies.
It had been a long and tedious process, with few true battles but near constant fighting and raiding, yet finally as the year came to a close, they were converging on Winterfell. In the eastern front, her siblings, Valaena, Aegor, and Daena, had steadily secured White Harbor, Oldcastle, Ramsgate, Widow's Watch, Hornwood, and everything else east of the White Knife and south of the Dreadfort and the Lonely Hills, with a commanding position in the high ground of the Sheepshead hills directly due east of Winterfell.
Meanwhile, with Aerion, Rhaena, and Aenar by her side, Visenya had secured Barrowton, Ryder's Mark, the Gaff, Torrhen's Square, and everything west of the White Knife and south of the Wolfswood.
Despite only having a few major settlements in those regions, the vast expanses of land had required enormous amounts of manpower, time, and effort to fully clear of enemy forces and secure with their own loyalists. Especially when many of the castles were still ruined from the Dragon's Wroth they had unleashed many years ago and any inhabitants had dispersed into the countryside rather than challenge them directly.
Nonetheless, they had eventually succeeded in fully sweeping those regions clean, and once they did, Visenya had converged her armies and forces with that of her siblings at Castle Cerwyn which fell swiftly to their combined strength. They had united their forces in preparation for a strike on the blasted ruins of Winterfell, anticipating a true battle for once in this nuisance of a campaign.
With what little their spies and glass candles had been able to ascertain, Brandon Snow himself and a huge number of his forces were dug into the crypts of Winterfell, which had survived the Wroth intact and would not be overly affected by dragonfire even now, necessitating them to send their army into those crypts and root them out the hard way.
From these crypts, Brandon had been coordinating his forces from across the whole North and if they managed to kill him here, they might be able to bring this war to a close much sooner than they had hoped.
In preparation for this battle, they had scouted every entrance and exit to the crypts of Winterfell that they could find before obliterating what little Brandon had managed to restore of the surface structures with dragonfire once again and poured as much fire as they could into the crypt entrances to try and burn out and smoke as much of the catacombs as they could, though it remained clear to them that there were many defenders still down there.
When the war was over, Winterfell's remains would be fully torn down, its Stark crypts filled in, and its land area leveled so a new Valyrian fortress made of dragonstone could be built on new foundations. Perhaps it might even have the same name, but any remnants of its past allegiance or self would be utterly gone.
In pursuit of that vengefully sweet goal, they had established a total perimeter around the castle and all the crypt exits they had found and had stationed men and dragons around the whole length. Once they were ready, they ordered their army to advance.
Orys and their other commanders led the forces on the ground from the front, many of them including her half-brother were exceptionally eager to avenge their personal losses on the Northmen. Many of their Rangers and Dragonguard were accompanying their most trusted commanders to protect them and provide their magical expertise as they marched through the blasted ruins of Winterfell and into the crypts.
Visenya had never been one to shy away from a fight, nor had Aegon or many of their family. Their dragons were of no further direct use in this battle and though possible in theory, their magic was not yet on the level of skill and finesse that they could remotely command tendrils and whips of fire and blood into every corner of the crypt and sense all their foes.
And so, for a time they had even considered dismounting their dragons and personally joining their forces in the fight on the ground. Something their loyalists had beseeched them not to, arguing that the threat to their lives was too great to risk it given the complete uncertainty of what was in the crypts and how the defenders would fight back.
Unfortunately, those fears were soon proven true. As soon as a significant portion of their forces entered in the crypts, the soil around the entrances suddenly began to collapse and seal them shut, trapping their men inside.
Alarmed, Visenya immediately ordered Vhagar into a dive, knowing that time was of the essence and fearing for the lives of Orys and the rest of their men. Elsewhere she could see her siblings and their children doing the same.
'It must be the cursed children of the forest!' Visenya thought to herself as she hurriedly landed Vhagar at the entrance to the crypts.
She flinched as she felt arrows whiz by her, missing her by inches before the bowmen who loosed them were silenced by the twangs of their Rangers as they and their other soldiers began securing the area. While she knew the risks of continuing to expose herself like this were immense, she didn't have a choice. Her brother was down there damn it!
Slashing her finger with the blade in her ring, she cast out a large volume of her blood into the earth, trying to wrest control of the very earth from the forest-children and any other geomancers. Yet as proud as she was of her people's magic, Visenya knew that she was at a disadvantage here. Her people needed blood as a medium to shape stone and bend earth, but the children of the forest simply already had it in their blood to do so.
It was only when Vhagar began feeding her power and energy through their bond that she felt herself manage to eke out a stalemate long enough to open the sealed entrance and let some of their panicking soldiers escape, Orys among them.
They told horrible tales of assaults from shadowcats and direwolves, of a thick fog in the crypts and tunnels collapsing and the very earth moving beneath their feet, and Visenya knew they had made a dire mistake. They had underestimated just how much influence the children of the forest had over the earth with their magic and it had cost them.
Thousands of their men had died in that trap, vital precious men that would be needed to occupy the vast expanses of the North. It was an enormous setback, but they had come too far and lost too much to stop now.
In the end they had regrouped, and rethought their plans, and three weeks later when reinforcements and replacements for their tragically lost troops finally arrived, they brought with them enough wildfire to obliterate the entirety of the Wolfswood. It took weeks more for them to position the barrels in place while the defenders tried to stop them but they were the ones who had the last laugh.
The children of the forest might have influence over the soil, but even they needed to breathe. And if air could get into the crypts, so could water, and so could wildfire in its liquid form. Soaking and seeping and flowing down into the crypts. Half the time they weren't even the ones who ignited it, the desperate defenders did with their misplaced torches down in the pitch darkness of the crypts. It was a horrible gruesome death for all of them, and nothing less than they deserved.
However, to their everlasting disappointment, they eventually discovered that Brandon Snow was not among them. Either he had left before their perimeter had been established or the children of the forest's unforeseen geomancy had given him an unpredicted escape route.
No matter. They would track him down eventually. With Winterfell in their hands, Brandon and his supporters would be driven even further north, into the Wolfswood, the mountains, the Dreadfort, and beyond. Their guerilla campaign would be more dangerous and annoying than ever before in those wild lands but their end was inevitable with the loss of most of the North's fertile lands.
If not tomorrow, or next year, one day, as inevitably as the sun rose, Brandon Snow and all of his allies would be defeated. Because after all, as the Starks had always been so fond of saying, winter was coming.
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Twelfth Moon, 117 AD (16 AC)
The Warg King
The Wall ran for three hundred miles from the Gorge in the west to the Bay of Seals in the east and rose seven hundred feet above the ground throughout that whole length. It was the greatest manmade structure the world had ever seen, the last and finest creation of his ancestor and namesake, Brandon the Builder.
There were no others left. Storm's End had been perverted and twisted to serve the dragonspawn, and the Hightower and Winterfell had been utterly destroyed. The latter was a particularly bitter remedy for Brandon to swallow.
A whole third of his skinchangers and children of the forest had set a trap for the invaders in the crypts of Winterfell, a trap that should have rid them of the Targaryens' best forces while not losing too many of their own, yet in the end the Targaryens had turned their trap against them and some of his best loyalists had died screaming in wildfire.
The war after that had been brutal, tedious, and slow. Ambushes would strike upon their forces in the Wolfswood, the mountains, and the Lonely Hills. His skinchangers would possess the horses of the invaders and buck of their riders and trample their supplies, his archers and infantry would kill their soldiers, the children of the forest would use their magics to send fogs and manipulate the forests and earth to their advantage, and the giants and mammoths would stampede and crush any survivors.
Yet even that had not been enough. The Targaryens had mustered all the power of the south against them, even going so far as to once more hire mercenaries from Essos to supplement their forces. Over the course of the following year, the Targaryens had slowly but surely pushed north. And as the Night's Watch disintegrated following the mass desertions led by the likes of Loren Lannister, Mern Gardener, and Ronnel Arryn, the Wall had been left unmanned.
As their final stand, Brandon had, on the advice of the children of the forest, occupied the Nightfort as their base of operations. The ancient fortress' long and bloody history as well as the Wall itself gave the whole site a symbolic presence and magical energy of sorts that could help to empower their spells and magic against the Targaryens. The physical height of the Wall itself would also give their archers an advantage against the dragons.
They had dug a large series of tunnels beneath the Nightfort where their ground forces would unleash similar traps like they had at Winterfell, hoping to delay the Targaryens as long as possible. Meanwhile, the rest of their army had moved to the top of the Wall above the Nightfort and fortified the battlements, training their bows and scorpions on the sky while the giants waited with bows and rocks of their own though their poor eyesight made them inefficient at best at using them, often requiring human spotters.
Once they had moved all of their supplies into the tunnels and ice cells beneath the Wall and up to the top of the Wall itself, they had destroyed all the winch elevators and barricaded the ice steps leading up to the Wall from the Nightfort.
As they waited for the Targaryens to come, as they inevitably would, Brandon thought of his children, of his women. Many of their skinchangers and other allies had deserted the cause as the war had gone on, running to scurry and hide back beyond the Wall or to the darkest and deepest corners of the North. Those that had remained faithful had taken his women and children, and the women and children of many of the other skinchangers, children of the forest, and giants to secluded corners and caves all over the Wolfswood, the northern mountains, Skagos, and beyond the Wall.
They would be safe there, and when the battle was won, they would inherit the world itself. There was a reason Brandon had not gone and hidden with them. Not only was it unacceptable to his pride to hide like a rat from the dragonspawn who had butchered his entire family, but the children had told him that there was a chance, however so slight, that they could perform a ritual.
Using the ambient magic of the Wall and the Nightfort, using the power that would come from their own willing sacrifice and the spilt blood in the inevitable battle as the two armies clashed and killed each other, they could conduct a ritual the likes of which hadn't been seen since the Hammer of the Waters. They would tear the very dragons from the skies, and with just a scant few left in Summerhall, those that had been sent to safety away from this battle would be able to bring them down and free their people forever from the scourge of the dragons at long last.
They were taking an awful lot of risks though. If the Wall didn't interfere with the dragons as the children of the forest said it would, if the Targaryens cared not for the dangers of the Long Night they might unleash and just destroyed the Wall and them with it, they might never even be able to carry out the ritual. The ritual might not even work or have the effects they hoped it would but Brandon hadn't come this far to stop now.
He was mad, he had come to accept that. Driven mad by grief, suffering, and twisted magic, and as the true madman he was, he pinned each and every one of his last hopes on this insane plan.
The preparations had all been made. It was a quiet frosty summer morn. Brandon looked out north beyond the Wall and took in the stunning view. The mountains, hills, lakes, and forests stretched on for miles upon miles. Turning around, a similar though less spectacular view unfolded in the lands south of the Wall and directly below the Wall, were the deserted surface buildings of the Nightfort.
In the distance, he could see the Targaryen banners as their army marched towards the Nightfort. Yet the Targaryens themselves and their dragons were nowhere to be seen.
For a moment Brandon worried, wondering if they would come or not and if their whole desperate plan might be ruined before consoling himself that if they didn't come, they'd hold the advantage and kill their whole army anyway.
His worries soon proved to be unfounded.
"They're coming!" their skinchanger scouts reported, their birds showing them their last vision before the Targaryens incinerated them.
The shadow of their wings darkened the lands below them, turning day into night as they passed overhead. Nine dragons, bearing hard and fast down on their position.
"Battle stations!" Brandon cried as within minutes the dragons arrived.
The surface buildings in the Nightfort were utterly obliterated, just as they had anticipated. Once the fires died down, the Targaryen army would march in to secure the ruins and they would spring their traps, no matter how prepared the enemy was for it after the events at Winterfell. Bloodshed was all that mattered.
Brandon felt his heart pound in his chest as the Targaryens bore down on the Wall next. His elation grew as the dragons never unleashed their flames directly upon the Wall however, their gamble had paid off. Either the Wall was interfering with their magic or the Targaryens dared not damage the Wall itself.
Using their high vantage point, their arrows, scorpion bolts, and magic found more purchase than usual, forcing the Targaryens to defend themselves atop their dragons with their own magic. The sky above the Nightfort was soon filled with arrows, bolts, fire, blood, mist, fog, water, and more. And in the burnt-out ruins of the Nightfort below, the traps sprung as their ground forces lured the Targaryen soldiers into their tunnels or led ambushes against them while the Targaryen soldiers resorted to rolling barrels of wildfire to simply burn them out.
Brandon could feel the energy in the air, the magic sharpening into a point, and he knew the time had come. With a nod to Maple, the two of them and a hundred other children of the forest began chanting their ritual. The children sung in the True Tongue, and Brandon in the Old Tongue of the First Men, unable to speak the True Tongue yet essential to the ritual's success nonetheless as the sole greenseer present. All that energy and power would flow through him and he would be the guide of their vengeance upon the dragonspawn.
As the ritual continued and the song entered a new verse, the runes they had painstakingly inscribed into the floor below, etched into the ice of the Wall itself began to glow. By now, Brandon was all but blind to the battle raging around them, as were all of the other ritual participants. Their animal skins had been released to fight as they pleased as all of their sight and focus was on the ritual's completion. Their comrades continued to die and give their lives to buy them time for the ritual's completion, their sacrifices fueling its power.
It was so, so close now. He could almost taste it. He knew with every ounce of certainty that he and everyone else in this sheltered ice box atop the Wall would surely die when the ritual reached its pinnacle, but what a death it would be as they finally brought down those wretched Targaryens with them! All of his greensight focused on that future, intent on making it a reality as the energies of the ritual began to pour into him when suddenly he felt a sharp pain in his head.
The ritual collapsed. The power that had been so intoxicating just seconds ago dissipated like it had never existed. As Brandon opened his eyes, he saw Maple and the other children of the forest in the room being savaged, some outright killed and others strangled and captured.
He turned to face his own attacker and saw a tall and fearsomely built man, with dark hair, eyes, and a terrible rage. Desperate, Brandon skinchanged into his mind, finding his will was great and his defenses strong but he was there long enough to glean some key details before he was thrown out.
This man was Orys Baratheon himself, brother and Chancellor to Aegon Targaryen and his sister-wives. His second son Vaemond had died in an attack Brandon had ordered in White Harbor almost two years ago now and ever since Orys had been filled with a dark and overpowering rage, a rage that reminded Brandon all too much of his own.
Orys had volunteered many times to be in the vanguard of risky missions in his pursuit of vengeance, including delving into the crypts at Winterfell, and now here at the Battle of the Nightfort, he had been assigned to command one of two wings the Targaryens had sent to strike at them along the Wall itself.
With control of Icemark in the west and Snowgate in the east, the Targaryens had sent soldiers atop the wall using the stairs and winches at those castles before marching them all the way atop the Wall itself on a perilous journey to take them by surprise. It was something Brandon had not expected, and now his oversight would cost him dearly.
The last thing he saw before the pommel slammed into his face and his world went dark was Baratheon's murderous, dark eyes.
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When he finally came to, Brandon was in chains. All around him was desolation and death. Piles of bodies, giants, men, mammoths, and children of the forest alike, all stacked up and burning like kindle in a fire. The ground was soaked red in blood, feeding the hungry roots of the lone weirwood of the Nightfort, a weirwood he was stunned to see still intact and alive.
Circling the weirwood on every side were the nine Targaryen dragons, interspersed by platoons of their dragonguard, scale-plated and indomitable. There would be no escape for Brandon this time, not even if by some miracle he got free of his chains.
To his horror he watched as the nine Targaryens continued drawing abominable Valyrian glyphs all over the weirwood with the blood of his friends and allies, staining the white wood red. Then they took out Maple, one of his beloved wives, the earth singer who had opened his eyes and taught him how to become a greenseer.
"Brandon!" she screamed in despair and fear and he was powerless to save her.
And right before his eyes, one of the younger Targaryen girls cut her throat open.
"NO!!!" he screamed. He didn't know he had any more tears to cry, any more grief to give after all he had lost, but he did, and it hurt him more than he had thought even possible at this point.
His screams and sobs drew the attention of one of the Targaryens, who turned around and stalked towards him like a bear. Tall and terrible, his stature was greater even than his father and brother, a hulking figure of oppressively black armor and muscle and a sickly green emerald in place of his left eye.
Brandon knew who this was. Aegor One-Eye. The Cruel as many called him, for his malice and personal pleasure in the suffering of his people had become infamous. A twisted and perverted vengeance many had whispered, for the eye he had lost as a boy.
The girl who had cut open his wife's throat came up behind One-Eye and Brandon recognized her too now. Rhaena the Relentless, a terrible and unrelenting sorceress. The relentless witch nodded to her cruel husband, and in the next moment, One-Eye gripped him by the hair and dragged him to the weirwood, uncaring of the pain as his scalp almost tore from the force, as his knees and legs dragged painfully across the ground.
Finally, they reached the heart tree, and Brandon clawed in vain at the armored hand still holding onto his hair as he watched the other Targaryens turn to stare at him. There was a steaming hatred in all their eyes, a certainty of victory and evil. They looked like demons all of them. The Conqueror, the Ruthless, the Witch-Queen, the Bloodstained Red Twins, Aegor One-Eye, Rhaena the Relentless, even the youngest two, Daena the Daring and Aenar the Bard. They were all evil that should never have been born, abominations who had covered themselves in the blood of millions.
Unable to hold back the rage any longer, Brandon screamed. "You're all monsters! All of you! Evil the likes of which the world has never seen! You've taken everything from me! From everyone!!! Do you have no remorse? No guilt of any kind??"
The grip on his hair tightened painfully as his neck was dragged back so he stared up at the judging eye of Aegor Targaryen. His voice was cold, tight and measured, like he was struggling to control an eternal fiery rage within.
"Monsters you call us. Abominations, dragonspawn, evil. Yet, the one who targeted the innocent first was you. The one who turned beloved pets upon children was you. But let's give you the benefit of the doubt. It was all for vengeance after all, we had taken your kin from you in the heat of battle after all."
A warm liquid soaked into Brandon's hair and he soon realized it was blood as the blood contorted and tightened into whips and tendrils that held him in place, motionless as the Targaryen ungloved his right hand.
"Well, you know what they say about revenge," Aegor said menacingly, his left hand prying open Brandon's left eye as the fingers of his right descended. "A tooth for a tooth, and an eye for an eye."
Brandon started screaming and thrashing as One-Eye's fingers dug into his left eye socket, barely able to move as the Targaryen indulged in cruelty, enjoying every moment of his pain. He continued to wiggle and twist and dig his fingers all over before he closed them around Brandon's left eye and pulled.
The pain was unbearable, Brandon instinctively tried to cover the wound with his hand but his hands were bound and he could do nothing as the blood gushed forth, soaking into the ground before some of it was manipulated by the Relentless into yet more glyphs on the weirwood trunk.
Aegor meanwhile held his left eyeball aloft in the air, almost in admiration and envy before he squashed it like a bug with a sickening squish. The squished remnants ignited in his hand, burning until nothing but ash in the wind remained.
"You'll all pay for this!" Brandon sobbed. "This war isn't over. My children are safe and scattered all over the land! They have friends, supporters, and allies! They will avenge all of us! The Old Gods will take all of you to hell!" He was too far gone to even realize he shouldn't be telling them this and exposing their last secret hope.
The head of the whole demon family spoke then, Aegon the Conqueror himself.
"Oh Brandon," he mocked. "Even now you fail to understand. All this time, you and your insignificant skinchanging rats, your petty little kingdoms, and your weak, pathetic false gods… you exist because we allow it, and you will end because we demand it."
At that, all nine Targaryens took out glass candles and they blazed to life, twisting all light and color around them. Then the chanting started, and the blood began to activate. With his greensight, Brandon could tell what they were doing and he was horrified. They were using his blood, and the blood of all his fallen comrades and the connection they had to the weirwoods to find all of their last enclaves.
All of his offspring, all of his women, all of the last children of the forest, skinchangers, giants, and so much more. North and south of the Wall alike, Wolfswood, mountains, hills, Skagos, Frostfangs, Haunted Forest and so much more. They found every last of their hideouts, every last weirwood in the world, and quite possibly every last skinchanger and child of the forest as well, noting down all of their locations.
Then the screams started. His screams, and the screams of the Old Gods themselves. With the heart tree at their mercy here at the Nightfort, the Targaryens used their glass candles and invaded into the weirwoods themselves, into the hivemind of deceased greenseers and souls housed within, their ancestors, the Old Gods who guided and protected them.
Once upon a time, they could have crushed any interloper like a bug, but those days were long gone. The children of the forest had been slaughtered for eons, and now nearly every last weirwood between Dorne and the Wall had been cut down and uprooted. The Old Gods had weakened, and they were powerless to stop the invaders as the dragons joined their minds with their riders, amplifying their power as they scoured the Old Gods within their own weirwoods, ravaging them from the inside out.
And as a greenseer, Brandon was intimately connected to the weirwoods and to the Old Gods, having been destined to eventually join them himself. He felt all of this happening, felt the pain as the Targaryens and their dragons savaged the Old Gods and forcibly linked and connected every weirwood like never before, ensuring that whatever was done with magic to one would be done to all.
There was only a temporary respite from the pain as Brandon watched with horror, blood red flames ignited to life in the palm of Visenya the Witch-Queen as she stalked up to the heart tree.
"NO!! NO!!!"
Brandon's screams were in vain as the heart tree caught aflame, red fire spreading quickly until it engulfed the whole tree. The expression on the tree's face changed before their eyes into one of pain and fear as the Old Gods burned from the inside out.
In his mind's eye, Brandon could see the godswoods in the Red Mountains of Dorne, the groves deep in the Wolfswood and the Haunted Forest, the heart trees and weirwoods on Skagos and deep in the hidden corners of the world. All of them were engulfed in red flames, burning like blood bled from an artery. And in his ears, he could hear the screams as the Old Gods themselves burned with the trees, their minds and souls which had endured as a collective whole for untold millennia turning to ash.
He screamed and screamed until his voice went hoarse until finally the fires burnt out. Every last living weirwood in the world had turned to ash, the shrieks in his ears had stopped, the visions in his mind's eye had vanished as the greensight went dark forever.
Perhaps there might still be skinchangers and wargs and even woods witches, but their power would never be like what it had once been. And with the destruction of all the weirwoods, there would never be any green dreamers or greenseers ever again, and the children of the forest, Maple's race, were doomed to extinction. The Old Gods themselves were dead, and the world was forever changed.
"Just kill me now. Behead me, incinerate me, feed me to your dragons, I don't care. JUST KILL ME!" Brandon demanded. He should have died long ago.
"Oh, we will," Rhaenys the Ruthless promised. "But our dragons like their meals well done."
He watched in fear then as the Targaryen Dragonguard set up bricks and firewood in the ashen remnants of the heart tree, before placing a large cauldron full of water atop it. One of the Targaryens ignited that blood red fire in their hands and set fire to the wood.
Then Brandon did something he never thought he would, not for the dragonspawn. He begged.
"Please! Please! Anything but that! Have mercy! Kill me! Kill me now! Kill me quickly! It's the least that you owe me! Please! Please! No! No! I'm sorry! I'm sorry!!!" he begged as One-Eye dragged him by the hair once again, with Brandon struggling and squirming and fighting as much as he could to the very end.
With his great strength, One-Eye picked him up and threw him into the cauldron and Brandon screamed. The water was hot, as hot as the hot springs below Winterfell. Not yet deadly, but already uncomfortable. It didn't remain that way for long.
With their control over fire, the Targaryens moderated and changed the heat, slowly turning the heat up and cooking him alive as the water was brought to a roiling boil before they brought it down again and let it simmer before turning up the heat once again. On and on it went in an endless cycle, up and down, cook and simmer. Everything was designed to prolong the pain, to prolong his suffering. They cooked him like one cooked stew, simmering slowly and stirring the meat to extract all the juices.
Seconds turned into minutes, minutes into hours, and hours into eternity. He screamed until his voice was gone and then he screamed even more. His internal organs cooked and seared from inside out and his skin began to bloat and slough and his flesh began fell off the bone as it cooked.
When he tried bashing his head against the cauldron to end his suffering, they restrained him with more of their blood whips, forcing him to just sit and twist and scream in the middle of that pot of hot water.
What little remained of his fractured mind shattered long before his body expired, and some tiny part of him still clung to life somehow, barely aware when he was fished out of the water hours later and fed to the dragons at last, finally putting him out of his misery.
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Author's Note: Well… that was a pretty brutal ending. Took inspiration from the Hulu show 'Shogun' for it… yeah humans can really suck sometimes. Still, many of you called for a particularly brutal death for Brandon for all of his crimes and I hope that what the Targaryens had in mind satisfied those desires.
I hope you guys all enjoyed this chapter! Lmk your thoughts on Loren's kingdom, the Battle of Winterfell from Visenya's POV, and especially Brandon's POV of the Battle of the Nightfort and the Targaryens destroying the Old Gods and then effectively torturing him to death.
Fun fact, Aegon's line was inspired by a quote from Mass Effect by the Reapers if any of you caught that reference. I thought it was perfectly fitting. Another fun fact, this chapter was actually supposed to be two separate chapters and it took longer because the Loren and Visenya POVs just weren't long enough so I had to write and add Brandon's POV (originally planned for Ch30) into this chapter, hence the reason for the delay.
Anyway, please let me know your thoughts, suggestions, and questions for all of it in the comments below or over on Discord!