The night was dark with no moon and stars covered in clouds, while the wind at the summit of the Giant's Lance bit hard.
The battle below was a smear of orange embers from torches against a sea of obsidian. From this height, the screams of men and clash of steel were lost to the gale, reduced to just a faint, rhythmic beat that Aemon Targaryen felt from the Red Queen's muscles beneath him, a beast of a size of a small mountain with her scarlet scales radiating a warmth that was the only thing keeping the blood from freezing in his veins.
Behind him, Sansa Stark was limp as dead against her bonds. A Stark girl, during the long flight, had fallen unconscious whether from terror, cold, or despair, Aemon neither knew nor cared. A bird with clipped wings, as Shiera has said Aemon thinks, his heart like a cold stone in his chest.
"They've begun without us, nephew," Shiera starts, her voice coming as a faint echo carried over the howling gale, in mocking tone from behind the bounded Sansa Stark. She pointed a gloved finger toward the Gates of the Moon, where the flickers were thickest, her blue and green eyes trying to view the carnage below "A dark mess down there, don't you think? Hard to tell a falcons from our own with no moonlight."
Aemon peers down at the Gates of the Moon that looked nothing of worth from this height. "It will just be a distraction to us Aunt." Aemon replies, his voice raspy and turns his head sideways to the Eyrie.
It was a pale, jagged crown perched upon the shoulder of the mountain, its seven white towers reaching for the sky like the fingers of a drowning man. It looked fragile from far away, a fort made of marble, yet it had never been taken by force. Not since the days of Visenya and the last boy-king of Vale who wanted to fly.
"The battle below belongs to the our men and lords," Aemon continues, urging Meleys into a tighter spiral towards the fort. "We have a castle to claim."
Meleys lets out a soft rumble which came out as half-growl and half-purr as she delights sensing the intent of her bonded.
Inside one of the hallways of the Eyrie, the air felt much like burning wood, ashes constantly flying from the hearth of the castle.
Ser Vardis Egen wakes to a sound of the frantic and rhythmic thudding of a fist against thick oak door. He was out of his furs before his mind was fully clear, his hand reaching for the familiar comfort of his sword resting beside his bed. He knew only disaster could have struck at this hour on the Westeros most impregnable castle.
"Ser Vardis! Ser Vardis!" The door bursts open, and a soldier wearing sky-blue cloak, a silver mail and wielding spears enters, white-faced with terror. "The Targaryen host ... the Gates of the Moon ... they've struck, Ser!"
"At night?" Vardis feels a cold lump settle in his stomach as he thinks hard of situation at hand.
"Then they mean to climb." Sleep vanishes from Vardis face soon enough thinking of reason of Targaryen march deep in the night. "The cowards are trying to march under the darkness of the moonless night."
Soon he strides into the corridor, his heavy woolen cloak billowing fastened by a silver falcon brooch at his throat. "Light the walls!" he bellows, his voice echoing off the hall of pale marble walls and floor. "Every torch, every brazier, every scrap of pitch-soaked wood we have! I want the Giant's Lance burning brighter than the forge. If they want to climb my mountain, they shall do it in the light, where my archers can pick them apart, let them see the face of the men who kill them."
Men scattered at once hearing order of captain of guards, their boots thudding against the mountain floor. Within moments, flames began to bloom along the Eyrie's pale walls one by one, then dozens turning white stone into an eerie shadow of flickering gold.
Vardis steps out onto the ramparts, leaning over the walls towards the path that lead to the castle, yet nothing but the abyss stared back at him. He heard no sound of men marching or sound clashing, but a low, rhythmic thrumming of flesh from the darkness around."Where are they?" he whispers to the almost silent night.
The path to the Eyrie was a knife's edge. Barristan Selmy felt his very age in the march. His lungs burned with the thin, freezing air high in sky, and his knees protested with every step. His fingers, encased in boiled leather, were almost numb. This was not like the tourney of his youth, the glory of the killing Maelys the Monstrous in war of Stepstones or the thunder of horses on the Trident. He watched the man marching by his side, Grey Worm. The Unsullied moved with a terrifying, mechanical grace, his bronze-tipped spear a silent companion in the dark.
The eunuch soldiers did not pant nor did they stumbled. They ascended the narrow, treacherous path as if walking across the plains.
"You need not climb with us, Ser Selmy," Grey Worm starts noticing gaze of Ser Barristan on him. His westerosi language carrying melodious lilt of the bastard Valyrian. "The cold will worsen with height. It is a weight for an old man."
Barristan let out a jagged puff of breath that might have been a laugh, the ghost of the man who had cut through the Golden Company at Stepstones and Darklyns of Duskendale "My bones have been cold since the Mad King died, a bit of mountain cold won't finish what a dozen battles couldn't. I have carried heavier weights than these commander," he replies, his breath coming as mist.
They climbed in a silence broken only by the scrape of boots on stone as Ser Barristan asks a question of his own, "Do you and your men not tire commander?"
Then, Grey Worm stops. He did not look down the valley, nor up at the shimmering lights of the castle but at the clouded sky. "We tire," the eunuch murmurs, a rare admission of weakness that stops Barristan in his tracks.
The old knight turned, squinting through the dark. "Even you?"
"The mountain does not care for our discipline," Grey Worm replied, his dark eyes fixed on the height. "The air is thin and lungs ache. We tire." He paused, and for a second, Barristan saw the boy beneath the soldier, a child who had been broken and forged by tortures of unruly bastards. "But we continue. That is why we are who we are."
Ser Barristan nods, a profound respect settling over him. They were not men, true, he thinks, and yet they are more men than the lords who hide in their silk beds. "I will see this through with you," he promises.
Then came the sound, a deep, thrumming roar that shook the very mountain they walked upon. A shadow, larger than any galley, sweeps down from the clouds. Grey Worm's mouth thins into something that seems lose to smile. "It will be warm soon," he whispers.
"Dracarys."
Aemon's voice was almost a whisper, but Meleys answered with a roar of her own.
She folded her wings and fell from the clouds like a fallen star. The sensation was sickening, giving sickening lurch in his gut. The Eyrie rushed up to meet them, a crown of white stone bathed in the orange glow of its own torches. Aemon saw the faces of the archers tiny and pale as they looked up and realized the light they had lit was not their salvation, but their death.
Then the fire came.
It was not the orange-red of a campfire. Meleys breath came scarlet, a roaring river of liquid sun that turned the night into a blinding, searing noon. It struck the battlements with the force of a battering ram. Stone did not merely break they melted. The white marble of the Arryns, that lived up the mountain for thousands of years blackened and ran like candle wax.
Ser Vardis Egen had one second see the dragon's eyes huge, reptilian orbs reflecting his own doom, to see the Red Queen's jaws open like the gates of hell before the heat reached him. He didn't even have time to scream as the air in his lungs turned to steam. His armor, his proud blue cloak, his skin all of it vanished into a charred smudge against the ramparts.
The Eyrie, the untakable fortress, began to run like wax. Meleys swept along the walls, her wings beating back the smoke, her flames carving a path of ruin through the ancient castle of Vale. There was no time for a prayer, no time for a final thought of the Vale. There was only the heat, and then the silence of men on the ramparts.
In the Reach, the air was thick with the scent of rose perfume and expensive jasmine. Willas Tyrell sat in a chair of carved ironwood, his bad leg resting on a velvet stool. He looked every bit the lord, calm and scholarly, yet the men surrounding him, Ser Stafford Lannister with his sour expression and Lord Forley Prester with his hard, soldier's eyes reminded all present that the Reach was no longer a garden, but an armed camp.
At the edge of the table on other side sat Renly Baratheon. He looked a ghost of the man who had moons ago claimed himself to be a king. His once fine silks were now much cheaper, and his dark hair matted, but the Baratheon stubbornness remained etched in the set of his jaw. He was a king in chains, a stag caught in a thicket of golden roses and pack of lions.
"Stannis Baratheon names himself king of Seven Kindoms," Willas begins, his voice as smooth as Arbor gold. He did not look at Renly, but at the lords of the Reach, Hightower, Redwynes, Rowan, Tarly, Merryweather, Ashford and others present. "He rises in rebellion against the Iron Throne trying to usurp the throne of his own nephew."
He let the silence hang. "The Reach has always been the shield of the realm," Willas continues, his eyes finally drifting to Renly. "And we shall be so again. We march not just for a king, but for order, to place the lord back to Storms End."
Outside, a sudden wind rattled the windows of the pavilion. It felt like a cold finger tracing the spine of every man present. The season of roses was over in Reach, the war has now reached south of Kings Landing.