The tourney grounds felt like a fever dream. The sun was too bright, the banners too colorful, and the sheer volume of the crowd cheering made my ears ring. Thousands of people had gathered just to watch men knock each other off horses, oblivious to the fact that they were sitting on a powder keg.
I sat at Ned's feet, tucked under the heavy wooden railing of the Hand's pavilion. While Ned sat stone-faced beside the King.
Robert was already three goblets into the morning, shouting jests and slapping his thigh while Cersei sat next to him like a statue carved from ice. She hadn't looked at me once, but I could feel her presence. To her, I was a stain that wouldn't wash out.
I kept my [Detection] active, but it was being drowned out by the crowd. So I had to narrow my focus. I turned my attention toward the tilting strip, where the knights were preparing for the first jousts.
That's when I saw him.
Gregor Clegane, The Mountain That Rides.
In my old life, I'd seen the CGI hulk of the Marvel film, being that could level cities. Seeing Ser Gregor in the flesh was a different kind of horror. He didn't look like a man; he looked like a giant orc in plate armor. He stood nearly eight feet tall, his massive shield decorated with the three black dogs of his house.
[Threat Detected: Gregor Clegane]
[Aura: Unfiltered Bloodlust]
A deep, pulsing red light began to bleed from his form in my vision. It wasn't the jagged red of a common thief or the flickering heat of a palace spy. This was a solid, suffocating cloud of violence. It draped over him like a shroud, so thick it seemed to darken the air around his horse. He wasn't just a knight; he was a mad man that only knew how to break things.
"Ser Hugh of the Vale!" the herald shouted.
A young man rode out to face the Mountain. His armor was polished to a mirror finish, blue and silver, but it was new. It looked like it had never seen a real strike. I saw Ned lean forward, his eyes narrowing. He'd been trying to get a word with the boy for days. Hugh had been Jon Arryn's squire. He was a link to the truth, and he was currently shaking in his saddle.
The horses took their positions. The crowd's roar reached a deafening peak.
I looked at Gregor again. The red aura intensified, focusing on the tip of his lance. He wasn't aiming for the shield. The angle was wrong. He was aiming for the throat, right where the young knight's gorget was fastened poorly.
Common sense told me I couldn't stop it. I was a hundred yards away, separated by a wooden wall and thousands of people. I watched the Mountain's horse begin its charge. It sounded like a landslide.
The impact was a hollow, sickening crack.
The Mountain's lance didn't shatter against the shield. It drove upward. The splintered wood caught Ser Hugh in the throat, punching through the steel and the flesh with the force of a battering ram. The boy was lifted out of his saddle, his body spinning through the air before he hit the dirt with a heavy, final thud.
The silence that followed was instant. It was as if the world had forgotten how to breathe.
Ser Hugh lay in the dust, his legs kicking once, twice. His blood began to pool around his neck, staining the blue-and-silver silk of his surcoat. He was dead before the blood even reached the grass.
The Mountain didn't stop. He didn't look back. He simply rode to the end of the lists, tossed his broken lance aside, and signaled for a new one. To him, this wasn't a tragedy. It was a Tuesday.
I felt wrong. But this wasn't a movie where the hero arrives in the nick of time. This was the raw, ugly reality of this world.
So I didn't think about the crowd. I didn't think about the Queen. I stood up, my claws digging into the wooden floor of the pavilion. I threw my head back and let out a howl.
It wasn't a bark. It wasn't the sound of an animal looking for food. It was a long, mournful, hollow note that vibrated through the silence of the arena. It carried my current nature, my current self and my current emotion.
The sound seemed to hang in the air, echoing off the stone walls of the Red Keep in the distance. When the howl finally died away, no one cheered. No one spoke.
I felt the change in the atmosphere. I looked up and saw people in the stands pointing at me. The commoners were whispering, their eyes wide with superstition.
"That's not right," a man muttered from the front row. "Hear it? That's death, that is."
A woman beside him drew in a breath. "The Seven save us…"
Ned looked down at me, his hand resting on the hilt of his sword. His face was unreadable, but I saw the way his fingers tightened on the pommel. He knew the death of the boy wasn't an accident. He looked at the Mountain, then back at me, his expression softening for a fraction of a second.
Robert cut through it with a loud, rough laugh and carried too far.
"Seven hells, Ned," he said, shaking his head as if the whole thing were an inconvenience. "Your bloody dog sounds like a funeral bell."
He leaned forward in his seat, already waving a hand toward the field.
"Get the boy off. I won't have the day spoiled over this."
He snorted, more annoyed than anything else.
"Plenty of fighting left in it yet."
But the crowd didn't come back the same way.
The cheers didn't rise clean.
Doesn't matter in the end, so I sat back down at Ned's feet, my gaze fixed on the red aura still radiating from Gregor Clegane.
[Level 15]
[Status: Omen of the South]