Time did not pass gently.
It pressed.
Garen Stormguard learned that truth not in battle, but in accumulation—in the slow layering of obligation, compromise, and consequence that came with permanence. The holdfast by the river became a place where weeks were measured not by events, but by what didn't go wrong.
And that, in the Riverlands, was remarkable.
The first winter after the knighting tested everything Edmure had gambled on. Grain levies tightened. Minor lords pushed and pulled through parchment and proxy rather than steel. Old rivalries flared where order made them newly visible. More than once, Garen found himself standing between offended pride and necessary restraint, absorbing pressure without ever letting it break into violence.
The Dauntless Vanguard weathered it.
They did so not by brilliance, but by habit.
By the end of the first year, the order no longer felt like something being maintained. It felt like something that existed.
Two hundred.
That was the number Garen wrote down one night and did not revise.
Two hundred active soldiers, not counting cooks, armorers, grooms, messengers, and the quiet web of villagers who supported them because it was safer to live near blue than without it. They were volunteers—sons and daughters of the Riverlands, men who had decided that being trained and paid was better than being desperate and hunted.
Garen believed it was the maximum.
Not because he lacked coin—Edmure's support and careful budgeting had kept the order solvent—but because cohesion had limits. Above two hundred, discipline would thin. Command would blur. Identity would fracture.
This force needed to be sharp, not large.
Training had changed accordingly.
Drills no longer focused on survival alone. They focused on control. Formations held under fatigue. Commands passed cleanly from officer to officer. Tom Rivers now commanded a full company in all but name, his voice carrying authority that no longer borrowed from Garen's presence.
Merrick oversaw logistics with an iron calm, turning the holdfast into something bordering on professional. Armor was standardized where possible—basic plate for the core units, blue tabards worn even in mud and rain. Not ornate. Not impressive to knights.
But unmistakable.
The Dauntless Vanguard had not yet faced a true test.
Bandits no longer challenged them openly. Small groups scattered at the first sign of blue. The few fools who tried were crushed quickly and quietly, their names forgotten within days. It was effective—and dangerous in its own way.
Victory without cost bred assumptions.
Garen watched for them relentlessly.
The system reflected the change with cold precision.
[SYSTEM REVIEW — POST-CONSOLIDATION]
Force Strength: 200 (Active Cap)
Training Status: Advanced (Unblooded vs. Peer Force)
Command Structure: Stable
• Garen Stormguard — Knight-Captain
• Merrick — Vice-Captain
• Tom Rivers — Company Commander
Regional Stability: High (Riverlands Core)
External Pressure: Dormant
Internal Risk: Complacency (Monitored)
Politics inside Riverrun had been a quieter war.
Edmure Tully grew into his authority the hard way—by surviving it. Older bannermen tested him constantly, sometimes subtly, sometimes with all the grace of a mailed fist. Edmure leaned on Garen not as a weapon, but as proof: this is what competence looks like when rewarded.
That alliance held.
Not without cost.
Garen declined more marriage offers than he could easily remember. Some offended houses withdrew support in small, petty ways—delayed shipments, unhelpful reports, sudden reinterpretations of ancient rights. Garen met every maneuver with the same response: documentation, restraint, and results.
Eventually, most stopped trying to undermine him.
A few began to emulate him.
That worried him more.
Because imitation without understanding was how disasters were born.
The Riverlands settled into something dangerously close to peace.
It was during that quiet that Garen began planning beyond it.
He had maps drawn—not just of roads and villages, but of houses, alliances, and likely fault lines if the realm shifted. He studied royal finances, tournament cycles, the movement of court figures. He asked messengers to linger in King's Landing longer than necessary and return with rumors rather than proclamations.
The pattern that emerged was subtle.
But unmistakable.
The crown was bleeding gold.
The king rode more than he ruled.
And the realm was drifting toward a moment it would later pretend had come out of nowhere.
The news arrived on a gray morning.
A rider came hard from the south, mud-spattered and hoarse, bearing a sealed message that had changed hands too many times to be ignored. Garen broke the seal himself, standing in the holdfast's upper chamber where the river could be seen moving steadily past the walls.
The words were brief.
Lord Jon Arryn was dead.
No cause given. No ceremony described. Just the fact, bare and heavy.
Garen closed his eyes for a moment.
Jon Arryn had been the quiet pillar holding the realm upright. If he was gone, then something had already begun to move beneath the surface.
The rider swallowed and added, "There's more, Ser."
Garen looked up.
"The king has been seen on the kingsroad," the man said. "Heading north. Large retinue."
That confirmed it.
Robert Baratheon was leaving the capital.
The game had begun.
Garen dismissed the rider and stood alone for a long time, hands resting on the stone sill, feeling the vibration of the river through the walls. Two hundred trained men waited below. Officers he trusted. A holdfast that could hold—if used correctly.
He did not panic.
He planned.
The Riverlands would not be the first to burn.
But when the realm cracked, it would do so along lines that had already been drawn—and Garen Stormguard intended to decide which of those lines he stood upon before they became battlefields.
The quiet had ended.
And this time, it would not be bandits testing the roads.