The stench. That was the first thing Joren noticed. A smell he had never encountered before. It was not the honest, familiar smell of shed blood, iron, and sweat from a battle. It was something else. A chemical, acrid smell of burnt powder, of bowels that couldn't hold, of vaporized metal and calcified flesh, so thick it coated the back of his throat and made him want to retch.
He stood in the middle of the Watering Glade, or at least what was left of it. The morning sun, piercing through the shattered trees, illuminated a scene that did not belong to the world of men. This was not a battlefield. It was a slaughterhouse. A gaping, still-smoking crater marked the epicenter of the first volley. All around, pieces of armor, severed limbs, and torsos burst open like overfilled wineskins were scattered for dozens of yards. Farther on, the trees were scarred, some sheared clean through by the volleys from the "Reapers," their trunks bristling with steel bolts. The ground was blackened by grenade residue, and the few survivors his men were hunting down and finishing off were so badly burned they no longer resembled human beings.
Joren had fought all his life. He had been a sellsword in the Disputed Lands, had served under brutal captains, had seen bloody sieges and suicidal cavalry charges. He had dealt death up close, feeling his enemy's breath, seeing the fear in their eyes, feeling the shock of his blade against bone. There was a logic to that horror, a balance. A strong man, a fast man, a brave man, had a better chance of survival.
Here, bravery had served no purpose. Armor had served no purpose. Numbers had served no purpose.
He looked at his own men. The Steel Guard. A hundred veterans from Flea Bottom. They too were shaken, some vomiting behind the trees. They had not charged, not formed a shield wall, not risked their lives in glorious melee. They had been... operators. They had hidden behind cement walls and armored wagons. They had turned cranks, squeezed triggers. Ten of them, his "grenadiers," had annihilated an army of seven hundred men in under ten minutes.
Joren approached one of the grenade launchers resting on the ground, the metal of the tube still warm. "War is war," Tony had said. Joren was beginning to wonder if he still understood the meaning of the word. He had always despised the stories of the Targaryens and their dragons. Flying monsters that burned entire armies with a single breath. A coward's weapon, an abomination that denied all honor, all bravery. A weapon that made you so powerful you were no longer human.
He looked at the metal tube. Then he looked at his hands, blackened with powder.
What was the difference between him and a dragon?
He had pointed a tube at men he couldn't even see clearly, he had fired, and they had ceased to exist, pulverized, burned alive. He had felt no physical exertion, no fear for his own life. Only the weapon's recoil against his shoulder and the chemical smell of the explosion.
The age of chivalry, the age of the soldier, the age of the man whose strength and skill mattered, had just died in this clearing. He didn't know it yet, but the world had just turned on its axis, and he wasn't sure he liked what he saw on the other side. He was a warrior in a world that suddenly had no more need for warriors, or rather, would no longer need warriors of his kind. It just needed technicians of death. And that terrified him more than any cavalry charge.
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That night, Theron did not sleep. The roar of the blast furnace at Val-Engrenage, usually a comforting sound that lulled him to sleep, now seemed sinister. He was in his personal forge, adjacent to the main factory, the heat of the dying embers caressing his weathered face. He held a hammer in his hand, his favorite hammer, the one his own father had left him. The wooden handle was polished by decades of use, the steel head perfectly balanced. It was a tool. An extension of his arm, of his will. With it, he could feel the metal, persuade it, bend it to his art.
He had spent his life learning. Learning the nature of iron, the breath of the fire, the secret of steel. His honor, his pride, resided in his craftsmanship: forging a sword so well-balanced it felt alive, a plowshare capable of breaking the hardest earth, a gate whose scrollwork imitated the beauty of a flower. It was an art. A slow, difficult art that demanded a lifetime of dedication.
Today, he had heard the explosions. He had not gone to see. Joren had forbidden it, and anyway, he hadn't had the courage. But he had seen the men of the Steel Guard return, their faces pale, their eyes haunted, carrying the few lightly wounded. And he had seen the prisoners they brought back—broken men, trembling in every limb, looking at the workshops of Val-Engrenage as if they were the gates of the Seven Hells.
The world he knew was dying. His knowledge, his art... it hadn't become useless. It had been transformed into something he no longer recognized.
The kid, Tony, had arrived with his schematics, his demands for "precision," "tolerance," his concepts of "mass production." Theron had been fascinated. He had built a blast furnace, hydraulic power hammers, rolling mills. He had thought he was building the future, creating tools for the people, nails, cast-iron pots, plowshares. He had thought he was taking part in an act of construction.
But today, he realized he had only been a gear in a machine that was beyond him.
The kid had asked him to forge steel tubes. Not swords, not axes. Tubes. Tubes of a diabolical precision, capable of withstanding immense pressure. He had machined it all with insane precision. At the time, even though he didn't know their function, he had found them fabulous. The technique behind them was new. He was like a child building something blind, but whose enthusiasm never wavered. That enthusiasm died today. He wasn't going to spit on the fact that they were alive, thanks to these weapons, but so much power in the hands of one man terrified him. If the King had had access to this kind of weapon, the war would have been entirely different.
Today, his art was no longer about creating a unique object. It was about creating a component. An interchangeable part, produced by the hundreds, destined to be assembled into a machine whose sole purpose was to kill faster, farther, more impersonally. He had spent forty years learning how to forge the perfect blade, a blade that required courage to wield. Tony, in six months, had taught him to forge a weapon that made courage obsolete.
He looked at his hands, broad, powerful, covered in burn scars. They were the hands of a master artisan. Or were they now the hands of the greatest death-manufacturer Westeros had ever known? He no longer knew. He only knew that the muffled sound of explosions he had heard this morning was the sound of his old world cracking and collapsing. And he wondered if what Tony was building on top of it was a desirable future, or simply a more efficient hell.
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Lady Ermesande Rykker had remained at Hollard Keep, as Tony had ordered her. But when the first muffled BOOM had rattled the new glass windows of her chamber, she had been unable to resist. She had ordered her guards to escort her to the crest of the hill overlooking the valley, where Tony's sentries had their observation posts. Theron had cursed her, her guards had yelled at her to go back, but she was a Rykker. She did not take orders from commoners. She had to see.
She arrived just in time for the second volley of grenades.
What she saw froze her in place, the blood chilling in her veins.
She had grown up with tales of chivalry, with the glory of tournaments, with the idea that war was a matter of honor, of banners snapping in the wind, of heroic charges. She had expected to see Tony's Steel Guard, outnumbered, form a desperate shield wall, fighting bravely against a superior force.
What she saw was a calculation.
She saw the blinding smoke engulf the enemy army. She heard the whistles, then the explosions. She saw, through a guard's looking glass, knights in armor, the elite of any lord's army, being pulverized. Not pierced by a lance, not struck down by an arrow. Pulverized. Erased. As if they had never existed.
Then she saw the "Reapers" go into action, those horrible machines mounted on the carts, sweeping the forest with their steel bolts. It was like reliving a battle from the Dance of the Dragons. And dragons did not fight; they slaughtered armies.
She stood there, trembling, unable to look away, long after the last screams had died. She was not recovering from the horror. She was recovering from the meaning of the horror.
Her world, the world that had raised her, that had promised her a dull marriage as her ultimate goal, rested on a fundamental truth: that nobles were superior, that their blue blood, their education, and their code of honor gave them the right to rule. That chivalry was the bulwark of civilization.
In that clearing, chivalry had just died. Honor had not had a say. Courage had been nothing but an invitation to a swifter death. An army of seven hundred men, including knights and veterans, had just been annihilated by a handful of men commanded by a child, without a single one of them risking their own life in a fair fight.
And who were these men? Who were the victors? Not highborn lords. It was Tony, a nameless boy with terrifying knowledge. It was Joren, a sellsword. It was Kael, a silent artisan. It was Theron, a blacksmith. Commoners. Smallfolk. But they were organized. They were disciplined. And they were intelligent.
This was the most brutal shock for Ermesande. She realized she had spent her life looking down on the "smallfolk," considering them inferior beings, tools for the nobility. But these "tools" had just proven they could think, innovate, and wield a firepower that her brother, Lord Rykker, could not even dream of.
Her alliance with Tony, which she had seen as a bold political move for her own advancement, suddenly took on a much deeper meaning. She had not allied with an upstart. She had allied with a heresy. A heresy that asserted that merit was worth more than blood, that intelligence was worth more than tradition.
She descended the hill, her legs unsteady. She had seen the future. And it smelled of gunpowder and molten. Her world was collapsing, and she stood at the edge of the abyss, unsure whether she should be terrified or exhilarated. One thing was certain: after today, she would never be able to look at a noble, a knight, or even a simple craftsman the same way again.