House Among Chaotic Kingdoms

Votes for this Turn:

A1 - Infantry - 47

A2 - Reputation - 0

A3 - Magic&Med - 8

A4 - Physical - 2

A5 - Mixed Army - 2

S1 - Wikipedia - 0

S2 - Steam - 50

S3 - Wookiepedia - 9

S4 - World - 0

Invest:

Yes - 32 (Unanimous!)

No - 0

-----

Rolls for this Turn:

Personal: Steam Games

Thanks to I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream, the Others are now a Hierarchical Cognitive Lattice rather than a singular Sith Lord and his apprentices.

As a result, expect every single Other to have any knowledge that any other one has, whether it be strategic, combative, or of the Force.

Hierarchical Cognitive Lattice:

Night King - Keystone Node.

He joined the Others following their defeat in the previous Long Night and has massively increased the danger posed by each individual Other.

Most importantly, he creates the group-wide Cognitive Lattice.

Knowledge can be shared across the entire network because every Other is ultimately linked through him, though he can limit or prioritize access depending on his current favor toward particular individuals.

(He is still a Sith Lord, after all.)

He also massively amplifies the Others' ability to control the dead, increasing both the number of Wights they can support and the range over which they can control them.

If the Night King dies, the lattice collapses, but the surviving Others remain fully functional individuals with whatever knowledge, skills, Force abilities, and necromancy they personally possess.

This includes the ability to raise and control the dead, albeit at dramatically reduced range and in much smaller, less coordinated numbers.

Others - Autonomous Relay Nodes

The remnants of the previous Long Night.

Their population is now a tiny fraction of what it once was, but their individual abilities and understanding of the Force have increased by orders of magnitude.

While connected to the lattice, knowledge possessed by one Other can become available to the rest, subject to whatever access the Night King currently allows them.

The lattice shares knowledge and skills, however, not raw ability.

A weaker Other can therefore possess a Sith Master's understanding of an advanced Force technique without possessing the raw power in the Force necessary to perform it.

Wights - Local Hive Extensions.

These are just corpses.

They possess no meaningful cognition or supernatural abilities of their own, and without their local Relay Node being both alive and within range, they behave the way corpses usually do.

While within range of an active Relay Node, however, any viable corpse, meaning one that hasn't been burned or rendered unusable by dragonglass, can become a Wight.

Those Wights function less like independent undead and more like limbs of the controlling Other.

An Other perceives, directs, and coordinates its Wights in a Hive-Mind-like fashion, with the individual bodies providing essentially none of the intelligence involved.

The number and sophistication of those Wights remain dependent on how much cognition their controlling Other can devote to them.

An out-of-favor or strategically unimportant Other may therefore control either a huge but slow and stupid host (Shambling Zombies) or a much smaller force capable of complicated independent-looking behavior (SEAL-Team-Wight).

Notes:

The Night King does not possess the Others' ability to raise Wights, although he is an extremely dangerous opponent personally.

Even without him, the Others remain a serious threat.

What they lose is the Cognitive Lattice, access to knowledge they don't personally possess, and the massive increase in Wight capacity and control range that he provides.

Without that support, each Other can only control as many Wights as its own mind can support.

This means killing the Night King does not end the threat.

It reduces the Others to roughly the kind of threat the Bronze Age First Men were capable of defeating during the previous Long Night, despite facing far greater numbers of Others at the time.

It is probably worth remembering, however, that a surgical strike on the Night King will almost certainly get whoever attempts it killed even if the strike succeeds.

World: Might & Magic Wiki

Thanks to Wind Shield (card), Hart Weard (our shield) now grants immunity to ranged attacks in the direction the shield is facing.

So if an arrow (or bullet) comes from the direction we're blocking, then we’re 100% guaranteed not to be injured by it, but the same arrow coming from behind can still injure us.

Similarly, this effect works on ranged magic, but only the ranged impact effect, so a fireball won't knock us back but will surround us in dangerous fire.

Interestingly, this grants us basically complete immunity to purely magical/force attacks, because while the fireball still involves fire, the Mana Bolt or Force Push is just magic/force thrown at range, which we can now 100% no-sell (so long as we see it coming).

Note:

This one is new, which is why I’m not inventing a lucky arrow we inexplicably survived in the past.

-----

Story:

The Red River looked black beneath the last hours of night.

Torchlight reached it only in broken strips, each reflection trembling whenever the slow current disturbed the surface.

Beyond the water, darkness had swallowed most of the enemy camp.

Fires, pale canvas, and the occasional glint of moving steel were about all it gave back.

Your own side was easier to understand because you knew what everyone was waiting for.

Men stood in long clusters near the bank with pikes raised awkwardly above other heads, while officers moved carefully enough that nobody wanted an accidental shout ruining several days of preparation.

The strange part was that all of this depended upon a raven.

At least that was the version everyone around you was supposed to believe.

Ivy stood beside you with her hands folded behind her back.

Nobody else perceived her presence, which remained convenient.

"You've become remarkably comfortable basing military operations around increasingly suspicious animal training."

Her mouth curved slightly after saying it.

You kept your eyes on the far bank.

Answering Ivy aloud while surrounded by several hundred soldiers would undo far more careful work than Janus ever could.

None of this had started in Dorne.

You'd first started wondering about the Stark children during the royal visit to Winterfell, back when too many wolves behaved too intelligently around too many children for coincidence to remain satisfying.

Arya and Sansa had made the pattern harder to ignore in King's Landing.

Robb had finished most of the remaining argument during months of campaigning together.

You didn't understand warging particularly well yet.

You understood that the Starks could do it.

More importantly, you understood that Wulfric and Jon were the two members of the family most likely to accidentally make the whole thing obvious.

Neither man was particularly talented at acting innocent while somebody asked the wrong question several times.

Robb could sell almost anything with enough warning.

Sansa had spent half her life learning exactly how to behave in rooms full of people watching her.

Arya could lie when she actually considered lying worth the effort.

Wulfric and Jon tended to approach deception as though sufficient technical accuracy would eventually make everyone stop asking inconvenient questions.

So occasionally saving Wulfric and Jon from their own attempts at deception served everyone.

Wulfric was your friend, Robb was your closest friend, and Arya was eventually going to be your Queen and Lady Wife.

The last part made the problem potentially hereditary.

King's blood mattered to magic somehow, although every person who claimed to understand exactly how usually became less convincing after another five minutes of explanation.

Stark blood clearly mattered to magic as well.

You were therefore quite hopeful that your eventual children with Arya would inherit whatever talent let her family step through an animal's senses.

The world had developed an alarming number of things interested in killing children lately.

A wolf capable of seeing danger before your son did sounded more useful than another jeweled cradle.

That meant the harmless explanation needed years to become boring.

Starks were unusually talented with animals, everyone knew that, and anyone seeing another suspiciously clever wolf twenty years from now should already have a perfectly respectable explanation waiting.

Ivy glanced toward the riverbank where Wulfric was speaking with several men.

"Unfortunately, your weakest evidence continues receiving the most opportunities to explain itself."

You almost smiled after hearing that observation.

Wulfric had somehow positioned himself beside one of the few fires kept low enough that enemy eyes wouldn't easily find it.

That Sergeant was there, the one with the injured leg apparently recovered enough for marching but not enough to earn him the first crossing.

Two other men wore Crownlander badges you recognized, while another carried the dull red and blue marks of a Riverlands company.

Wulfric listened carefully while one of them spoke.

Nothing about the interaction looked like a lord graciously remembering that common soldiers existed.

His shoulders remained loose beneath the weight of his armor.

He leaned closer when the soldier lowered his voice, answered something that made Sergeant Hugh laugh, then immediately turned when one of his own officers approached with a question.

Wulfric didn't straighten, harden his voice, or otherwise remember to become Lord Wulfric Stark.

He answered the question and everyone listened.

You found that more interesting than most people would've.

You'd spent years learning exactly how much of leadership could be constructed deliberately.

A confident King stood differently from an uncertain prince.

He let silence last longer, looked directly at whoever challenged him, and smiled only when the smile served some purpose.

None of that made the confidence itself false.

Performance and sincerity weren't opposites unless someone insisted on making them so.

Wulfric simply wasn't performing this particular part.

He liked these men, and they knew he liked them.

Robb caught your eye from several paces away.

His expression barely changed, but you knew what he was asking before he glanced toward the eastern edge of the ford.

You looked toward the same place yourself.

Edmure had already noticed the problem and was shifting two companies farther downstream, where their approach would be harder to see from the enemy bank.

You gave Robb the smallest possible nod.

He looked away before anyone nearby could mistake the exchange for uncertainty.

That was another advantage of campaigning with people long enough.

Eventually entire conversations became completely unnecessary between you.

A dark shape crossed above the darkened water.

Several nearby heads tilted upward at once.

Janus disappeared briefly against the sky before dropping toward Wulfric.

The raven landed where Wulfric could reach him and immediately received something from a pouch at his belt.

Naturally, the magical reconnaissance raven had been trained to work for snacks.

That helped the innocent explanation more than anything else.

Then the bell sounded from the sept.

One deep note carried over water and darkness.

Wulfric immediately looked back toward you.

You raised one hand, then let it fall again.

That simple gesture finally began the battle.

The first men entered the river carefully enough that the water barely announced them.

Pikes were carried high, shields tilted awkwardly, and every step had to find ground hidden beneath black water.

Wulfric went forward with the first group.

Jon moved behind him, while Garlan Tyrell entered farther along the same formation.

Even in darkness, the three men created very different impressions.

Garlan somehow looked like somebody troops wanted to watch despite being waist deep in cold water before dawn.

Jon looked dangerous, as he almost always did.

He had always possessed that quality, even before his swordsmanship became absurd enough for older knights to stop using his age as an explanation.

Wulfric looked useful in an entirely different way.

That sounded less impressive until you watched everyone else behave around him.

A sergeant pointed toward a section drifting too far downstream.

Wulfric redirected several men without looking toward Garlan for agreement.

Garlan saw the adjustment and immediately shaped his own group around it.

Jon did much the same thing several moments later.

Nobody stopped to consider whether a Tyrell, a bastard raised at Winterfell, or a Crownlander sergeant technically outranked whichever person had spoken.

The problem involved infantry moving through dangerous ground.

That made Wulfric the relevant authority there.

Everyone acted as though the conclusion were obvious.

Ivy watched the crossing quietly beside you.

"You did choose his command unusually well."

That thought pleased you more than you intended.

Wulfric had been useful before you ever gave him Infantry, but usefulness and fit weren't the same thing.

He belonged exactly where you had placed him.

Several thousand organized infantrymen made an extremely persuasive argument that you'd gotten at least one important decision right.

The first alarm came from the enemy bank.

A shout carried across the water, then another followed much closer to panic.

Arrows began coming across the river shortly afterward.

The first volley was ragged enough that most disappeared harmlessly into the water.

The second volley came noticeably lower than that.

Men raised shields while still trying to move without knocking one another sideways.

Several arrows struck wood hard enough to be audible from your side.

One man stumbled, another shouted, and a third vanished briefly when the current took his footing.

Wulfric remained exactly where he had been standing.

That still meant absolutely nothing by itself.

Then another volley crossed the darkened river.

Several arrows landed around him, while one struck the water directly beside a man close enough to brush Wulfric's shoulder.

Nobody immediately around him actually fell down.

That also meant absolutely nothing by itself.

The fourth volley made the developing pattern irritating.

Wulfric had somehow occupied some of the most heavily targeted parts of the crossing without taking a wound, and the men pressed nearest to him kept displaying similar luck.

He used Hart Weard constantly while fighting there.

An arrow came from a slightly different angle, disappeared into the cluster around Wulfric, and failed to produce the wounded man you expected.

Ivy turned her attention directly toward you.

"You noticed that one as well."

You continued watching the crossing without answering aloud.

A battle was a terrible place to decide whether something impossible had happened.

"That joins a fairly crowded collection."

Ivy sounded almost pleased by the problem.

Wulfric had developed a habit of acquiring those.

Plants grew better around him, hostile magic disliked him, animals behaved strangely, old powers noticed him, and now arrows appeared to have started negotiating before approaching.

Your private explanation remained completely ridiculous anyway.

Unfortunately, ridiculous explanations had been performing better than respectable ones lately.

Ivy called them Named Characters now.

That was her term for people who appeared important to whatever story the world's magic thought it was telling.

You didn't actually believe reality was some enormous mummer's play.

It was simply difficult to ignore how often the impossible gathered around the same handful of people.

Wulfric clearly qualified for that particular category.

You were starting to suspect Aegon qualified as well.

You suspected your own role involved standing nearby while more interesting people convinced the universe to misbehave.

That was safer for you anyway.

The first pikes finally reached the opposite bank.

Wulfric climbed out with water pouring from his armor and immediately started turning exhausted men into a formation again.

More loyalists followed him onto the bank.

The crossing accelerated until secrecy became irrelevant.

That was where most of the cleverness ended.

Everything after that involved putting enough men on one side of a river that nobody could push them back into it.

The destroyed bridge remained a dark shape farther downstream.

There was no elegant maneuver capable of convincing several thousand armored men that water no longer existed.

So the loyalist soldiers kept crossing the river.

Then still more soldiers crossed behind them.

The Golden Company and Dornish forces pushed forward hard enough to stop the beachhead from becoming comfortable.

Your first ranks pushed inland, lost several yards, regained them, then stopped moving entirely while both sides discovered that human bodies remained inconveniently solid.

Messengers began arriving faster than useful answers.

One wanted reserves moved farther upstream immediately.

Another insisted those same reserves were needed downstream.

A third had discovered that part of Edmure's line was moving faster than the neighboring Crownlanders.

You gave the first answer before hearing the fourth question.

Robb solved another problem without waiting for you.

He looked toward a gap forming near the center, caught your eye, then glanced toward a reserve company behind him.

You knew exactly what he intended to do.

You gave him permission with another nod.

Robb was already turning away when the messenger arrived to request permission.

Edmure required even less guidance from you.

You saw him staring toward one of his own formations, then toward the road feeding reinforcements into the ford.

He shifted men before you decided whether the problem needed an order.

That saved you from issuing one yourself.

The three of you had spent enough months doing this together that trust had become a form of speed.

You didn't need every decision passing through your mouth merely because you wore the crown.

That became increasingly useful as the hours accumulated.

The battle turned less dramatic with every passing minute.

Men pushed until other men stopped them.

Then somebody else usually started pushing again.

Someone somewhere misunderstood an order, forcing three other people to repair the consequences.

Pikes tangled, shields broke, officers lost track of companies, and exhausted men crossed the river only to discover they were expected to continue being useful afterward.

You performed confidence through most of the chaos.

Kings apparently weren't allowed the luxury of looking as confused as the information deserved.

You kept your shoulders relaxed when another report contradicted the previous one.

You asked questions slowly when speaking quickly would make people think you were frightened.

When a messenger brought bad news, you reacted as though the bad news belonged inside whatever plan you had expected all along.

Usually the bad news actually did belong there.

Occasionally it very definitely had not belonged there.

The distinction remained nobody else's immediate problem.

Ivy noticed because Ivy eventually noticed everything about you.

"You understand that looking calm doesn't reduce the number of things currently going wrong."

It reduces the number of people who panic because they think I believe everything is going wrong.

You kept that perfectly reasonable answer inside your own head where it belonged.

The sky slowly began betraying the darkness.

Black became gray along the eastern horizon, then gray spread until faces started emerging beneath helmets.

For hours, blood and river water had looked identical from a distance.

Dawn eventually corrected that particular visual distinction.

The river remained full of both regardless.

You decided you preferred darkness in at least one respect.

Aegon's standard appeared intermittently through the fighting.

Every time you saw it, the same old instinct returned.

Kings were supposed to meet one another.

Stories had trained half of Westeros to expect that much before real history started teaching anyone better.

Your father had certainly helped create that expectation.

He could make the Trident sound like the only battle worth having.

You had already followed that instinct once.

Jaime was dead because you had followed it.

That made ignoring Aegon easier than it would've been a month earlier.

You wanted him badly enough that the wanting occasionally became physical.

Wulfric complicated the temptation in another direction entirely.

If Ivy’s ridiculous named-character theory had any value, putting two of those people in front of one another would produce useful information.

It could also produce Wulfric's dead body.

Conducting experiments with your friend's life remained strategically questionable.

Ivy didn't need to comment on that conclusion.

Sometimes her silence was more insulting than advice.

Several hours after the first crossing, one portion of the line began moving wrong.

You noticed it first as a difference in rhythm.

The rest of the loyalist front shifted in small ugly increments.

That particular section moved backward too quickly.

A cluster of Dornish troops had found enough strength to push into exhausted men whose formation had already become ragged.

The opening widened faster than you liked.

You looked toward Wulfric before deciding whether to send anyone.

He was already moving toward the problem.

Of course he had already noticed it.

He had seen the same problem from far closer.

Wulfric entered the weakening section with several NCOs around him.

You watched men notice him before he reached them.

Several exhausted bodies visibly straightened when he approached.

A sergeant shoved two soldiers into a better position.

Someone farther back started yelling for men to dress the line properly.

The formation had not recovered yet, but it stopped looking like something waiting to break.

Then the man in white armor appeared.

You saw him first because the armor should've been beautiful.

It was obviously extremely expensive plate armor.

Even from a distance, the workmanship announced itself through the shape of the shoulders and the carefully fitted joints.

Someone had once spent an obscene amount of money ensuring that suit could shine.

Now white enamel had become streaked with grime and old brown stains.

Rust darkened several edges across the armor.

Filth remained packed into places any knight who still cared about his armor would've cleaned before sleeping.

The man inside the armor hit the loyalist line with enough force to make the first man he struck disappear beneath other bodies.

He reached Wulfric soon afterward anyway.

The encounter had enough inevitability that nearby soldiers began making room without anyone ordering them.

Both men had already been fighting for hours.

Neither man looked remotely fresh anymore.

The white knight attacked like exhaustion was for lesser men.

His first blow forced Wulfric back half a step despite Hart Weard catching most of it.

Wulfric recovered before the knight could turn the movement into anything useful.

Then he answered with something much less elegant and equally unsuccessful.

The duel continued beneath everyone else's attention.

It wasn't beautiful by any reasonable standard.

Hours of fighting had reduced both men to whatever still worked.

Most of the beauty had already been beaten out of them.

The white knight relied primarily on monstrous strength.

He kept trying to create one decisive exchange that would end everything.

Wulfric kept refusing to provide that exchange.

He gave ground whenever refusing would've been stupid.

He planted himself whenever giving ground would endanger the men behind him.

He absorbed ugly glancing hits, recovered, and forced the other man to start again.

There were objectively better swordsmen elsewhere in the army.

Barristan was better by an absolutely absurd margin.

Jon and Edmure were cleaner swordsmen than Wulfric as well.

None of them would have done near as good here.

This was exactly Wulfric's kind of fight.

Everything important about it rewarded what he did best.

Heavy armor covered both men almost completely.

Exhaustion had stripped away most unnecessary movement.

A line needed somebody to remain exactly where he was.

His opponent expected overwhelming force to solve the problem eventually.

Wulfric was extremely difficult to solve that way.

Ivy watched him with unusual concentration beside you.

"You trust him because he does this everywhere."

She wasn't speaking only about the duel anymore.

That observation was completely true of Wulfric.

His best quality was that you could give him the problem nobody could afford to lose, go deal with five others, and reasonably expect the first problem to still be handled when you returned.

The knight hit Hart Weard hard enough that several men nearby recoiled from the sound.

You expected Wulfric to finally go down.

He somehow stayed upright through the impact.

He did not make staying upright look comfortable.

He did not pretend the impact meant nothing.

He simply remained where everyone needed him.

The white knight committed himself heavily again.

Wulfric answered before the man could fully recover.

His sword came around with both hands and enough force that the armor finally failed.

The blade tore through white plate and the body beneath it in one brutal motion.

The man collapsed in a heap.

For half a heartbeat, the entire section around them appeared stunned.

Then the loyalist soldiers around them erupted.

The sound rolled outward faster than anyone could explain what had happened.

Men who had been retreating seconds earlier pushed forward.

Sergeants started screaming orders through grins they weren't bothering to hide.

Wulfric did exactly what you expected afterward.

He barely looked at the corpse before turning back toward the line.

Naturally, that made the emerging story even better.

Everyone else had seen something worth remembering, while Wulfric had apparently seen another problem that needed finishing.

Ivy smiled at Wulfric's complete obliviousness.

"He doesn't know what just happened to him."

You understood exactly what had just happened.

An excellent commander had just become a story.

The men around him would tell their children they had been there when Wulfric Stark killed the white knight at the Red River.

Their grandchildren would eventually hear cleaner versions where everyone involved looked much better and the weather behaved dramatically.

Whatever songs survived this war had just gained another name.

Wulfric himself would probably need several months before somebody successfully explained that to him.

A voice suddenly carried from farther along the enemy line.

Aegon was shouting something toward his men.

"Duck!"

You blinked several times after hearing that.

There were several hundred sensible things an enemy King might shout during a failing battle.

Ducks had not been anywhere on your list.

For one bewildering instant, you wondered whether Aegon had finally lost his mind.

Then somebody tried killing one of your messengers and the mystery of enemy waterfowl stopped being important.

The line continued moving despite your confusion.

The strange part came several minutes later.

Enemy soldiers behind the front began moving sideways instead of backward.

At first you assumed they were simply repositioning.

Then steel flashed where no loyalists stood.

Men started fighting inside Aegon's own formation.

The confusion spread quickly enough that several officers near you began asking questions nobody could answer.

Dornish banners pulled away from Golden Company standards.

A cluster of men wearing Aegon's colors tried stopping them.

That intervention produced even more fighting.

Then the Dornish started withdrawing toward Yronwood.

The Golden Company disengaged separately from them.

Whatever had just happened, the alliance was no longer behaving like one army.

You watched wagons, servants, camp followers, drivers, and wounded men flowing back toward the castle with the Dornish.

Some of those people secretly belonged to you.

There were not many of them.

There were still enough to matter.

The infiltrators had been meant for just this possibility.

If the Dornish retreated behind Yronwood, the people hidden among their logistical mass were supposed to go through the gates with them.

It seems that at least part of that plan had just succeeded.

Aegon's standards were moving away in the opposite direction.

Robb saw them at almost the same moment you did.

You knew what he wanted before he reached you.

His face had acquired that particular stillness which meant he had already constructed an argument and was merely waiting for everyone else to catch up.

Barristan arrived before Robb could begin.

Samwell Tarly came soon afterward, looking exhausted.

"We should secure the crossing before anything else changes."

Barristan looked toward the retreating Golden Company before continuing.

"They remain dangerous, and a retreat can become pincer movement very quickly."

Robb shook his head.

"They're split, hurt, and moving away from the only Dornish force still large enough to matter here."

"If we give Aegon time, he'll put the Golden Company back together before we see him again."

"Yronwood isn't going anywhere before tomorrow morning."

Robb pointed directly toward the continuing retreat.

"Aegon might never give us another pursuit this clean."

You agreed with him on instinct.

That was exactly why you distrusted the feeling.

Aegon was there, and Aegon was vulnerable.

Everything interesting in you wanted to chase him.

Sam looked back toward the river instead.

"Most of our army isn't actually here yet."

His voice lacked Robb's force, but not certainty.

"The men who crossed first have been fighting for hours, the rest are still coming through the ford, and half our supply movement is stretched across both banks."

Sam glanced toward Aegon's withdrawal before looking back.

"If he planned this, we'd be sending our freshest fast troops after him while separating them from everyone else."

"He may simply be losing, but we don't need him to be clever for that to become dangerous."

Barristan nodded slowly after hearing that.

Sam continued before anyone else interrupted him.

"Yronwood is also worth more than another few miles of pursuit."

"It's probably the second most important political center in Dorne."

That argument landed harder than Robb's had.

You looked toward the castle beyond the fighting.

The larger plan behind Yronwood had existed long before this morning.

Yronwood mattered after the war ended.

You needed the castle, the house, and whatever remained of its legitimacy.

Aegon was still retreating while you watched.

Robb was still correct that the opportunity mattered.

You hated how much that continued tempting you.

Then you deliberately made the other decision.

"We take Yronwood before chasing anyone farther."

Robb looked disappointed for exactly one second, then immediately turned toward the problem you had chosen.

That was another reason you trusted him.

He could disagree honestly and obey without sulking afterward.

Orders began moving through the army immediately.

The armies shifted toward what everyone assumed would become a siege.

Most people didn't know the gate already had help approaching it from the wrong side.

Your infiltrators had gone into the Dornish camp as the people armies barely noticed: drivers, servants, laborers, and camp followers.

If they reached Yronwood, opening a gate was ideal.

Burning supplies, cutting ropes, gathering information, or generally making themselves troublesome would also do.

You needed that because three armies could not remain here forever.

The Boneway force, western army, and Prince's Pass army were cooperating well.

That did not make them a single army.

Every week all three remained gathered around Yronwood was another week Stannis and Aegon, would do something inconvenient elsewhere.

A quick victory mattered almost as much as victory itself.

Apparently your infiltrators agreed with that assessment.

The loyalist assault preparations had barely started when shouting broke out near one of the gates.

Then the gate itself began opening inward.

For several seconds nobody around you appeared willing to believe their own eyes.

The opening continued widening in front of you.

Men inside the castle were fighting over it.

You started moving before Barristan finished swearing.

"Your Grace, we don't know whether that gate remains secure."

"Then we should discover that before they close it again."

You were already drawing your sword anyway.

Wulfric appeared from the side before you reached the first troops.

His helmet was off, and dried blood ran across one cheek without appearing to belong to him.

"The outside isn't settled enough for this."

He looked toward the gate, then toward the river behind you.

You understood the rest without hearing another word.

Golden Company troops were still withdrawing across the field.

Dornish formations remained scattered around the approaches.

Thousands of loyalists had not finished organizing after the river battle.

If everyone important charged inside Yronwood, somebody needed to ensure the outside did not become a disaster while nobody watched.

You looked directly back at Wulfric.

He looked back at you.

Nothing else truly needed to be said.

You nodded once to show your agreement.

Wulfric returned the gesture just as quickly.

"Jon goes with you."

He turned before Jon could object.

Jon had apparently learned enough about Wulfric's command voice not to bother trying.

He moved toward you instead of arguing.

Barristan followed because allowing the King to run through an enemy gate without the Lord Commander would've been difficult to explain afterward.

Several nearby companies followed because they happened to be close enough to exploit the opening.

That was the entirety of your assault plan.

Whoever reached the gate before it closed went inside.

Yronwood became chaos the moment you crossed the walls.

Open battle had possessed the decency to give everyone roughly the same direction.

Inside the castle, men came from doors, stairs, passages, and courtyards.

One Dornish soldier dropped his weapon while another twenty paces away tried cutting down the first loyalist he saw.

Several infiltrators were shouting passcodes loudly enough that you suspected half the castle would know them by evening.

That was still preferable to loyalists accidentally killing them.

Stone walls changed the sound of everything around you.

Steel echoed loudly between the surrounding walls.

Shouts bounced from passages until direction stopped meaning much.

Dust hung in several courtyards where doors had been smashed or horses had panicked.

Barristan remained close enough that anyone approaching you had to solve him first.

Most men sensibly reconsidered before approaching Barristan.

Jon stayed near for several minutes before another group of loyalists pulled him toward fighting farther down the yard.

You let him go because Jon was more useful where swords were still moving.

The first genuinely important prisoners appeared in a smaller court near one of the interior halls.

Quentyn Martell looked exactly like a young knight who had reached the unpleasant conclusion that dying now would accomplish nothing.

He held a sword loosely in one hand.

He did not point it toward Barristan.

That was sensible enough under the circumstances.

The servant's clothes fit the woman behind him.

The supposed servant herself did not fit them.

Quentyn kept himself between her and everyone approaching, while she watched Barristan, you, and every man entering the courtyard with the nervous attention of someone raised around nobles rather than beneath them.

Ivy appeared quietly beside the young woman.

"She keeps looking directly at Ser Barristan."

You had already noticed the same detail.

Smallfolk frightened in front of Kings generally discovered fascinating things about floors.

This woman was frightened enough that her fingers had gone white around her skirts.

She still looked directly at Barristan when he spoke.

Then she looked directly toward you afterward.

There was nothing defiant about the gesture.

It was simply the instinct of somebody raised around people whose eyes she was permitted to meet.

She tracked the men entering the courtyard instead of waiting passively for someone else to decide what happened.

The clothing said she was merely a servant.

Almost everything else said something very different.

You finally looked back toward Prince Quentyn.

"Your paramore should probably stop pretending to be your maid."

For one heartbeat, his face became completely empty.

Then the woman slowly closed her eyes.

Quentyn's entire posture changed at once.

"Her name is Gwyneth Yronwood, Your Grace."

"She is my wife, and none of this was her doing."

Yronwood and Martell had just become married.

That combination was extremely inconvenient for you.

Somewhere inside your head, several very convenient plans for Dorne died at once.

You did not have time to decide exactly how badly.

Something crashed hard enough in the next courtyard that several birds exploded from the walls.

Then someone loudly shouted Jon's name nearby.

Barristan was already moving before you reacted.

You left Quentyn and Gwyneth under guard and followed.

The next courtyard looked like somebody had placed a corpse upright and taught it to fight.

The man facing Jon was absolutely enormous.

His body also looked horribly sick beneath the armor.

His face was swollen rather than merely thin.

The skin around one eye had a dark unhealthy discoloration, while his neck bulged above his armor in a way fever should've made impossible to ignore.

A normal man looking like that belonged in bed.

This man was moving quickly enough that Jon barely avoided the first strike you saw.

There was no mistaking Grandfather's work here.

You all had became familiar with the sight of a dying body refusing to respect the limitations of dying men.

The corruption always found new ways to make the body contradict itself.

Something visibly dying moved with strength beyond ordinary health.

The stranger part of the scene was Jon.

You had watched Jon fight for many years.

This fight looked completely different from before.

He planted himself in front of an injured Tully soldier and fought as though retreat had stopped being one of the available movements.

The giant struck at him without hesitation.

Jon met the blow without retreating fully.

He moved enough to redirect force, but not enough to create the distance you expected.

Again the giant attacked him with everything.

Again Jon remained exactly where needed.

Jon fought like he believed he was made of stone rather than flesh.

The giant appeared to believe force would eventually resolve the disagreement.

Jon appeared equally convinced that force could arrive wherever it wanted and discover him still standing there.

There were movements inside the technique you did not recognize.

Small changes in position, angles where Jon accepted pressure instead of avoiding it, brief moments where his footing looked wrong until the opponent committed against it.

Then the giant did exactly what Jon wanted.

He drove forward with enough confidence to make everyone nearby tense.

Jon held exactly where he needed to.

For one frightening moment, he held too close.

Then Jon's steel moved between them.

He turned the commitment aside and opened the giant from somewhere vital enough that the result became immediately obvious.

The enormous man fell onto the stones.

His blood had no intention of following.

It sprayed across Jon from close enough that avoiding it was impossible.

Jon ended the fight looking like he'd just swam through a lake of blood.

The wounded Tully soldier started cheering before anyone else.

Others joined his cheering soon afterward.

Barristan looked at Jon, then at the dead giant.

You knew the expression on the Lord Commander's face.

You also knew exactly what needed to happen next.

Jon needed Berenice before anything else happened.

He needed her attention immediately after this.

He needed every scrap of corrupted blood removed before he died from it.

Barristan stepped forward despite all of that.

"Jon Snow."

You opened your mouth to interrupt Barristan.

Then your father spoke from several years of memory.

Father had complained often enough about people ruining excellent moments by becoming boring at exactly the wrong time.

You knew exactly what he would say.

The ingredients were obvious: a battlefield, a dead monster, a wounded man defended, and Barristan Selmy standing there with a sword while soldiers watched.

Father would've called waiting here a crime against a perfectly good battlefield.

You closed your mouth instead of interrupting Barristan.

Barristan drew his sword fully from its sheath.

"For defending an injured comrade in the face of evil, I, Ser Barristan Selmy, Lord Commander of His Grace King Joffrey Baratheon's Kingsguard, do name you Ser Jon Snow of the Red River."

The blade touched Jon's shoulder before rising again.

For once, Jon looked genuinely startled by something.

He still managed to answer Barristan properly afterward.

That was enough for everyone watching nearby.

The wounded Tully man shouted first.

"Ser Jon the Red!"

Another soldier immediately repeated the same title.

Then several dozen men found the name together.

"Ser Jon the Red!"

The entire courtyard took up the cry.

Jon stood through perhaps three repetitions before his knees stopped cooperating.

Barristan caught one arm before he fell.

The tully knight caught the other.

"Now get him to the healers."

Your order came out perfectly calm anyway.

This remained an objectively terrible medical decision.

Father would've absolutely loved every second of it.

By afternoon, Yronwood had stopped being a battle and become several hundred administrative problems wearing blood.

You almost preferred the battle by then.

Prisoners needed separating into manageable groups.

Surrenders had to be recorded properly somewhere.

Several gates were secure, one was damaged, and another remained blocked by enough wreckage that nobody could decide whether repairing it or leaving it shut would be faster.

Every commander wanted to know which troops were remaining inside.

Every healer wanted fewer troops inside.

Every quartermaster wanted everyone to stop moving supplies until somebody explained where the supplies were supposed to go.

You spent most of the afternoon making decisions which nobody would ever sing about.

That was probably healthier after the morning you had endured.

Wulfric appeared repeatedly once the outside situation stopped threatening to collapse.

The first time, he was with several Crownlander Infantrymen.

Later you saw him eating beside men whose accents placed most of them in the Riverlands.

Another hour passed before a Northman sergeant stopped him near one of the gates and turned a thirty-second report into a five-minute conversation.

You registered the recurring pattern without examining it yet.

There were too many other things demanding attention.

The next morning gave the dead giant a name.

The dead giant was Archibald Yronwood.

That information improved absolutely nothing for you.

It actually made several things much worse.

Anders Yronwood had died during the plague.

So had his eldest daughter and her children.

Cletus Yronwood had become the obvious heir afterward.

Then Cletus and Archibald had fought a duel whose exact circumstances remained irritatingly unclear.

Archibald won that particular family disagreement permanently.

More specifically, Archibald had killed his cousin.

Afterward Archibald took control of Yronwood and behaved as its lord.

That made yesterday's bloated monster a kinslayer with an excellent castle.

For several hours, it also looked like Jon had killed the last politically useful member of the main Yronwood line.

That would've been extraordinary inconvenient for your plans.

Your plans for Dorne had relied on Yronwood existing afterward.

A dead house was substantially harder to elevate.

Then Gwyneth stopped being merely Quentyn's surprisingly important wife.

The relevant genealogies finally arrived for examination.

The plague had cut through House Yronwood more thoroughly than you realized.

Removing the dead from the family tree left Gwyneth at the top and every convenient alternative several generations down some increasingly desperate branch.

She was therefore Lady Yronwood by law.

That was excellent news for approximately one moment.

Then you remembered who she had married.

Ivy sat on the edge of the table while you read the marriage testimony again.

"You dislike how tidy this suddenly became."

The original plan had been remarkably elegant.

Dorne had rebelled against its lawful King.

When the war ended, princely status could disappear with the rebellion.

House Yronwood had spent centuries as Sunspear's greatest internal rival.

A loyal Yronwood raised to paramount authority offered a native Dornish center of power without requiring permanent occupation.

Marry the heir to a dependable loyalist house and the political structure gained another anchor.

You had even possessed enough possible loyalist marriages to make the idea practical.

Now the lawful Lady Yronwood was already married.

She was married directly to Quentyn Martell.

Of course she had married a Martell.

You could dig through the family tree until somebody useful appeared.

There was always another cousin if you went far enough.

That would defeat the entire point.

The whole value of your plan came from restoring law after rebellion.

You would be the King who returned the rightful lord to his seat, reestablished the King's peace, and punished people for breaking established order.

Passing over Gwyneth because her marriage was inconvenient would make the entire arrangement look exactly as manufactured as it was.

You would lose more than you gained.

The original Yronwood plan was finished now.

That did not make Quentyn and Gwyneth useless.

Quite the opposite was becoming increasingly obvious.

You spoke with them both long enough for Ivy to become nearly as interested as you were.

Quentyn remained unassertive about almost everything except his wife.

Gwyneth was more composed after the immediate danger passed.

Her fear remained real, but so did the fact that she expected to be treated as a noblewoman rather than spoils.

Neither reacted like the Grandfather devotees you had dealt with.

No strange fervor appeared when the religion came up.

Neither tried to reinterpret every disaster as favor.

Neither seemed hungry to prove suffering meant something grand.

Mostly they wanted each other to remain alive.

That was refreshingly manageable compared with recent problems.

Treat them with dignity and give them a settlement they could live with, and you expected both to behave loyally.

They were potentially very useful people afterward.

They were simply not useful in the way you had wanted.

You ordered them kept close and treated accordingly.

Whatever happened with Dorne afterward, you intended both of them to spend at least several years in King's Landing.

Hostages sounded uglier than honored royal guests.

The distinction mattered enough to maintain publicly.

The practical effect could remain reassuringly similar.

Wulfric found you later that day with a corpse.

That sentence had become less unusual than it deserved.

Oberyn Martell lay beneath a cloth near one of the captured wagons.

You recognized enough of him before the cloth was pulled back entirely.

His death pleased you less than expected.

Jaime was still dead despite Oberyn's death.

Oberyn joining him did not make the exchange fair.

It simply removed one extremely dangerous man from Aegon's side.

The wound interested you much more than satisfaction.

Something had gone through the back and side of his neck.

That did not look remotely like the heroic death you would've predicted for Oberyn Martell.

"What exactly happened to Prince Oberyn here?"

Wulfric looked toward his man, Omek rather than answering.

Before Omek even spoke, you'd learned who Wulfric trusted to know what the soldiers were saying.

Omek stepped forward with the expression of a man who had spent several hours hearing stories nobody sensible would've invented.

"There are several versions going around, Your Grace."

"Start with whatever all the stories agree about."

You preferred usable absurdity over decorative absurdity whenever possible.

Omek nodded before beginning the unpleasant explanation.

"Jon Connington and Prince Oberyn had apparently become lovers."

"Not exactly openly, but open enough that everyone in their camp seems to have known."

You stared at Omek for several seconds.

Omek remained completely serious while you stared.

Wulfric's expression suggested he had already spent his surprise.

That seemed distinctly unfair from your perspective.

Omek continued before you could complain about it.

"They'd also been fighting more often lately."

"Most people put Grandfather somewhere in the middle of it."

"Oberyn converted, and Connington apparently never did."

Omek folded his hands behind his back.

"During the battle, they seem to have argued again."

"Several people say Oberyn accused Connington's refusal to convert of causing problems for them."

"After that point the stories stop agreeing cleanly."

"Some say there was a fight, some say Connington tried leaving, and some say Oberyn threatened him."

Omek glanced briefly toward the covered corpse.

"They all end with Connington putting a blade through his neck from behind."

You looked down at Oberyn again afterward.

Apparently the war had decided ordinary politics were insufficiently complicated.

"And then the Dornish broke from Aegon."

You already knew that much had happened.

"It happened immediately afterward?"

Omek nodded once before continuing his report.

"Once word spread that Connington had killed him, the Dornish started severing themselves from the Golden Company."

"Most of the retreat to Yronwood happened after that."

Ivy crossed her arms while considering everything.

"That relationship was holding more of the alliance together than anyone realized."

That conclusion sounded correct to you as well.

The romance itself was fascinating in the way other people's disasters often became fascinating:

From a safe distance

The religion mattered more to your plans.

Grandfather had created a fault line inside Aegon's coalition.

Oberyn had crossed that particular religious line.

Connington had apparently refused to cross it.

Their relationship had somehow held until it ended with a blade through Oberyn's neck.

The result was horrible, absurd, and extremely useful.

"Keep collecting every version of these stories."

You looked directly toward Omek while continuing.

"I want to know whether Connington is unusual or whether other senior men are refusing conversion."

"If there is a split there, I want to know exactly where it runs."

Omek nodded before accepting the assignment.

Wulfric gave the smallest approving glance toward him before both men left.

You found yourself thinking less about Oberyn and more about how the answer had reached you.

Wulfric knew exactly who he should ask.

Omek knew who he should question.

Then the information reached you in a form worth using.

There were much worse ways to build an information network.

Unfortunately, armies also built their own explanations.

Within several days, the story about Oberyn and Connington had become theology.

Sword swallowers were apparently cursed by every god so thoroughly that even Grandfather couldn't keep them loyal to one another.

You discovered this from three separate soldiers making versions of the same joke.

By evening, several officers had heard it too.

Ivy found the entire development less amusing than the men did.

"You clearly don't like this particular rumor."

You disliked it much more than expected.

Your uncle Renly existed, after all.

Whatever else you thought of him, you had never believed his taste in men meant seven different gods had personally agreed to make his life worse.

The current rumor remained obvious theological nonsense.

That did not make suppressing it simple.

Grandfather's followers were already visibly fracturing.

A story claiming even their god couldn't overcome some older curse made the cult look weak, ridiculous, and internally dangerous.

That had obvious strategic value for you.

You considered ordering people to stop spreading it anyway.

Then Father arrived in your memory again.

He had made jokes about sword swallowers.

A great many jokes.

Some of them had been about Renly specifically.

Your father would've considered the current rumor exceptionally funny.

He absolutely would not have interrupted an army to protect sword swallowers from being mocked.

Remembering that did not make the rumor more true.

It merely made ignoring the rumor easier.

So you deliberately chose to ignore it.

You did not publicly endorse the story.

You certainly had not invented the rumor.

You also made no effort to stop it.

Sometimes ruling involved deciding which stupidity deserved your limited supply of attention.

By the end of the first week, Yronwood had stopped producing emergencies every hour.

That gave you enough time to start noticing Wulfric again, mostly in passing.

You had far too much work to actually watch him, which made the pattern more interesting once you realized you'd noticed it anyway.

Every time your paths crossed, Wulfric was around different soldiers.

He arrived at one meeting with two Riverlanders still finishing some argument about rations.

The next day you saw him beside Crownlander NCOs near the practice yard.

Later, two Reach infantrymen greeted him while passing a gathering of lords.

Another afternoon you found him with Northmen.

The following day it was Stormlanders instead.

The accents, companies, and badges kept changing.

The relationship around Wulfric did not.

Men smiled before they started speaking to him.

They stood close enough to make clear nobody worried about violating noble space.

They sometimes disagreed directly with him as well.

More importantly, Wulfric listened when they did.

Then Wulfric issued an actual order and everyone moved.

Familiarity had not cost him any authority.

If anything, it made the authority faster.

Ivy eventually pointed out the part you had been circling.

"Those aren't the same men every time."

She watched Wulfric walking across the yard with a Reach sergeant you did not know.

"They almost never are the same men."

You followed them with your eyes for another moment.

Some common-born favorites would've been unremarkable.

This was something larger than that.

Wulfric had not collected some common-born favorites.

He had versions of this relationship scattered through the Infantry.

The soldiers looked up to him in several senses.

One of those senses was embarrassingly literal.

Wulfric was tall enough that most people had to tilt their heads upward when he stood close.

The more important version was visible in their faces.

There was obvious admiration whenever they approached him.

There was also Trust.

More importantly, there was a sense that Lord Wulfric Stark understood the problems they expected most nobles to ignore.

Wulfric returned that comfort completely naturally.

There was no little pause where he remembered to become approachable.

There was no adjustment into artificially simpler words.

There was no careful laugh designed to demonstrate that the great lord could enjoy a common man's joke.

He was simply comfortable around the soldiers.

The soldiers knew that even if they never consciously analyzed why.

You analyzed it because that was what you did.

This was inconveniently close to the part that mattered most.

You could teach Wulfric more politics.

You could make him practice public speaking.

You could introduce him to another hundred lords until some of them stuck.

You could even teach him that talking about runes over wine sometimes counted as diplomacy.

Teaching him to genuinely care whether some Crownlander sergeant felt forgotten would've been much harder.

Teaching several thousand soldiers to trust that he meant it would've been harder still.

Neither lesson appeared remotely necessary for Wulfric.

Omek made the entire thing scalable beyond personal acquaintance.

You noticed that institutional part as well.

Omek knew which company had lost a beloved sergeant.

He knew which corporal had taken over when an officer fell.

He knew which men were grieving badly enough that someone ought to check on them before discipline became the only available response.

Wulfric actually used that information once he had it.

Without Omek, Wulfric could care about the men he happened to meet.

With Omek, he could know which men actually needed him.

That pleased you.

Ivy noticed your satisfaction almost immediately.

"You are going to become insufferable about the Hand idea again."

She sounded resigned before you even answered.

You had not mentioned that possibility in months.

That did not mean you had forgotten it.

Wulfric was nowhere near ready to become Hand of the King.

Ivy had been quite clear about that the first several times the idea appeared.

She had also been right about it.

Being useful did not automatically translate into running half a kingdom's politics.

Now she looked toward the yard again.

"I still think you were premature before."

That was not the same sentence she used before.

You waited for Ivy to continue.

"He has more of the difficult pieces than I expected."

Ivy's concession became more satisfying with every word.

Ivy had finally reached the interesting part.

Wulfric already possessed things you could not easily manufacture.

He took responsibility without needing to be chased.

He managed loyalty without becoming stupid about it.

He was comfortable with people.

He built systems rather than personally becoming every system.

He was entirely willing to use specialists.

He possessed enough stubbornness to tell powerful people when their ideas were bad.

The missing parts were politics, presentation, and broader aristocratic relationships.

He also needed to recognize when competence needed to be displayed rather than merely possessed.

Those were deficiencies a King could work with.

A King did not simply wait for perfectly prepared men to appear whenever an office became empty.

Sometimes you found someone with the underlying qualities you needed and spent years ensuring he gained the rest.

Putting Wulfric over Infantry had been exactly that sort of decision on a smaller scale.

You had years available for the larger project.

Wulfric was already one of your closest friends.

Once you married Arya, he would effectively become family.

That did not automatically make him suitable for office.

It made his development personally important as well as politically useful.

You liked plans that solved more than one problem.

Wulfric gave you a much smaller reason to feel vindicated two days later.

He sent orders back to Long Lake expanding wine production.

Apparently enough of your argument beside the Sea of Dorne had survived his first taste.

He still insisted the market depended upon locating Southerners with damaged tongues.

You remained convinced those people absolutely existed.

Someone always liked the unpleasant thing everyone else considered undrinkable.

The question was whether there were enough of them to pay.

Wulfric was now detrmained to find that answer.

By the second week, the rest of Westeros stopped allowing Dorne to monopolize your attention.

Reports accumulated faster than your actual meals.

The table in your borrowed solar gradually disappeared beneath maps, sealed letters, copied summaries, naval reports, and intelligence notes.

You knew considerably more than most of your competing Kings.

That was comforting right up until you remembered how much of that knowledge came from one smiling eunuch you barely understood.

The Spider had turned out to be on your side.

Or at least he had behaved consistently enough in your interest that arguing over the exact definition of loyalty could wait.

You were genuinely grateful to him.

You were also increasingly uncomfortable with how little you understood him.

Varys supplied enormous pieces of the world you acted upon.

He knew which houses were quietly wavering.

He knew which ports were moving supplies.

He knew which rumors were merely rumors and which had three unrelated witnesses.

A man who provided that much of your reality should not remain a smiling abstraction attached to an office.

When you returned to King's Landing, you needed to fix that.

You wanted to understand the man.

Why had Varys chosen to support you?

What did he actually want from everything?

How did he decide what information mattered?

Those questions could wait until you were in the same city.

The information currently arriving from the Vale could not wait.

Gulltown had already fallen to enemy forces.

Runestone was currently under active siege.

Redfort had declared for you before coming under siege itself.

That last detail made everything much worse.

Loyalty needed to look useful to everyone watching.

If houses publicly chose your side and were then destroyed while you watched from Dorne, every undecided lord learned something you absolutely did not want taught.

The Blackfish had already ridden northward toward them.

His Vale connections gave him a chance of reopening the Bloody Gate or at least making the approaches less impossible.

That helped considerably, but not enough.

The Vale remained the Vale regardless.

Mountains did not become passable because Brynden Tully knew people.

The map kept dragging you back toward Stannis.

Ivy looked at the reports without touching them.

"You still don't know that he killed them."

There were times when her timing became almost offensive.

You knew exactly which dead people she meant.

She meant Father and Mother, of course.

You had never possessed proof that Stannis ordered the assassinations.

You were not stupid enough to confuse anger with evidence.

"I know perfectly well what I don't know."

"Then stop treating suspicion like certainty."

Ivy's voice remained annoyingly calm throughout.

You looked down at the map instead.

"Fine, assume Stannis didn't order their deaths."

She waited instead of rewarding the concession.

You hated when she did that deliberately.

"Who actually killed them instead, then?"

The question felt uglier than you intended.

Ivy had no answer she could give you.

Of course she did not have one.

Her silence proved absolutely nothing either way.

You knew that perfectly well intellectually.

It still left the anger with nowhere else to go.

Stannis remained the best suspect you had, even if best currently meant inadequate.

Emotions were not courts with proper rules.

They did not release a defendant because the evidence failed some proper standard.

Thinking about Stannis inevitably produced thoughts of Shireen.

That part of the subject carried no anger.

Whatever happened to her father, you had no intention of punishing your cousin for his rebellion.

One possible future kept looking annoyingly convenient: Shireen married to Wulfric at Long Lake.

Nothing had been arranged or even discussed, and nothing resembling courtship had happened yet.

It was simply a possibility that kept looking useful from every direction.

Wulfric was someone you already trusted deeply.

Shireen would remain important without complicating whatever Baratheon succession arguments survived the war.

Long Lake was distant enough to give her space and significant enough that the marriage would not look like disposal.

There were already useful religious connections between them.

There were personal connections too, even if nothing resembling courtship had happened.

It would also bind Wulfric more tightly to the royal family.

You liked the overall shape of that future.

The people inside it could decide whether they actually liked each other.

You were not going to become your grandfather.

Fortunately, the entire realm had not conspired to irritate you.

The Stormlands had actually improved somewhat recently.

The Slayne valley was back under loyalist control.

King's Mountain had returned with the valley.

Stonehelm and Crow's Nest were secure enough that the Rainwood could no longer be treated as Stannis's unquestioned territory.

The map there had become complicated again.

Complicated was much better than lost.

Mace Tyrell had also managed to surprise you.

He had gathered much of the remaining loyalist naval strength along with whatever newly built ships could actually float and fight.

Estermont had fallen back into loyalist hands.

Tarth appeared to be his next objective.

After Tarth sat the fortress of Storm's End.

During Father's rebellion, Mace had possessed an absurd advantage outside Storm's End.

Mace had more men, food, and time.

He still never actually took the castle.

People remembered that embarrassing failure very well.

Mace certainly remembered it better than most.

You suspected he wanted another chance at the story.

Ned's reports were much more reassuring initially.

He had secured Crackclaw Point and the Bay of Crabs, ensuring that Maidenpool was cut off without pressuring the fanatics holding it.

Maidenpool mattered for extremely unpleasant religious reasons.

Red Priests inside the city were threatening atrocities if loyalist forces pressed too close.

The man commanding your side worshipped the Old Gods.

One disaster there could become a story about religious war before anyone had time to explain what actually happened.

That could damage years of careful work.

You thought about the problem for several uncomfortable seconds.

Then another much simpler thought replaced it.

The commander involved was Ned Stark.

Father had always trusted Ned completely.

Ned would handle whatever happened there.

You moved on to the next report.

The Iron Islands required a very different sort of thought.

The tiny coalition everyone had expected to accomplish almost nothing had taken Blacktyde.

They had also managed to cordon off much of the eastern islands with a collection of ships you still hesitated to dignify as a fleet.

You wished them extraordinary luck, entirely in private.

Publicly, the matter required far more care.

The edict you had issued around the Drowned God had always possessed a deliberate gap.

You wanted the religion completely gone.

You did not want it merely moderated.

The Old Way could disappear alongside it.

Raiding, their diffrent words for slave such as thralls and salt wives.

The whole cultural structure repeatedly producing those practices deserved no protection simply because it was traditional.

The Ironborn themselves were an entirely different matter.

You did not support the more aggressive solutions that would have the islands emptied.

You did not want children killed because their parents prayed to an evil god..

They could keep their names, houses, ships, songs, fishing, feasts, and every harmless custom they cared about.

It was the Drowned God that had to go, not the Ironborn themselves.

Eventually, politics would require you to restrain whichever loalists were doing the purging.

Sadly, Kings were expected to stop things once success became embarrassing.

Until then, you hoped they achieved as much as possible.

That thought remained comfortably and deliberately private.

Every report eventually returned to the same irritating fact.

You could not leave three major loyalist armies sitting in Dorne forever.

That made Arianne Martell's delegation unusually welcome when it finally arrived.

The man formally leading it surprised you first.

Lord Garibald Shell was young enough that several older lords would probably call him boy when annoyed.

He was not young enough to actually look like one.

His face was pleasant rather than particularly striking.

He was handsome enough to be noticed if someone bothered looking, but not so handsome that he became the first thing in any room.

His clothes were of good quality without aggressively advertising their expense.

Nothing about the young lord demanded attention.

That alone made his position rather interesting.

Then the name reached the part of your mind that collected history for fun.

The name clicked into place: House Shell.

"Your family held the High Kingship of Dorne several times when the First Men still elected it among their kings."

A few heads turned toward you afterward.

Garibald himself brightened at the recognition.

The careful diplomatic smile disappeared so quickly that the one replacing it had to be genuine.

"Your Grace actually knows our family history."

His pleasure sounded personal rather than strategic.

"I know a great deal of history nobody has ever thanked me for remembering."

That drew a small laugh directly from him.

The negotiation began on better footing because of something the rest of the room considered mere historical trivia.

It took less than one meeting to understand why Garibald led the delegation.

He was not actually leading most of the negotiation.

Lady Jayne Ladybright spoke most cleanly for Arianne.

Areo Hotah spoke far less, but when Doran's authority became relevant, everyone watched him.

Garibald's real job was apparently to be acceptable to both sides.

He belonged firmly enough to neither faction that neither found him threatening.

Both factions still trusted him well enough.

That made him an acceptable face for the delegation while the actual difficult questions repeatedly moved between Ladybright and Hotah.

You appreciated the arrangement more than expected.

It was clever without obviously looking clever.

The negotiations themselves remained deliberately unresolved for now.

That was acceptable enough from your perspective.

You knew you needed an eventual outcome.

You had not decided to announce exactly what outcome you would accept.

Quentyn and Gwyneth had already destroyed the easiest design.

The wider war made speed more valuable.

Those facts did not require you to negotiate against yourself before Arianne's people even established their opening position.

Unfortunately, Aegon refused to stay out of even negotiations he wasn't attending.

Publicly he remained Aegon Blackfyre to you.

That label remained politically useful right now.

Privately, you still did not actually know.

He could genuinely be a Blackfyre.

He could truly be Rhaegar and Elia's son.

He could be something stranger than either explanation.

Blood mattered less than what people belived about it.

Arianne had abandoned him despite whatever claim he carried.

If he truly was Elia's son, that made the break enormous.

If he was not, the split remained useful anyway.

You saw no reason to share your uncertainty.

Kings were allowed to keep private questions.

Negotiations continued for several more days.

That inevitably produced a number of meals.

Those meals eventually produced Long Lake wine.

Wulfric noticed the bottle before Lady Jayne did.

You watched his expression carefully enough to see resignation arrive.

He had apparently accepted that diplomacy now required poisoning guests with his homeland.

Lady Jayne took the first experimental drink.

Her face changed immediately after tasting it.

Wulfric noticed the reaction just as quickly.

So did you from across the table.

The interesting part came when she drank again before anyone asked what she thought.

That second drink was clearly not politeness.

Polite guests praised something exactly once.

People who genuinely liked something returned voluntarily.

She asked where the wine had come from.

Then she asked whether more could be obtained.

You looked across the table toward Wulfric.

He looked directly back toward you.

No words were necessary between you anymore.

His expression acquired the exact amount of annoyance you had hoped for.

Ivy laughed quietly beside you at him.

That made the victory substantially sweeter for you.

One Dornish noblewoman did not create a continental market.

She did prove the strange people existed.

Long Lake merely had to find more of them.

Garibald became easier to understand once formal meetings stopped occupying every part of his day.

You found him one afternoon with Wulfric and Samwell Tarly.

Several papers were spread across a table between them.

At first you assumed Sam had discovered another supply problem.

Then you noticed the unfamiliar marks across them.

Those marks were unmistakably First Men runes.

Runes were enough to derail your walk past.

Garibald was explaining something with much more animation than he ever displayed during formal negotiation.

Dorne had its own surviving First Men rune traditions.

They were different from Northern traditions.

Old Dornish houses had preserved fragments of their own.

Different geography, different history, and different surviving families had pushed the same broad inheritance in different directions.

Sam looked absolutely delighted by the discovery.

There was a particular way Sam changed when a subject became interesting enough.

His posture visibly straightened while he listened.

His hands started moving more often.

Questions arrived before the previous answer completely finished.

Garibald appeared equally pleased to discover someone outside Dorne who cared.

The useful part was that none of them seemed to know this was useful.

Wulfric simply wanted to discuss interesting runes.

Garibald wanted somebody to care about his history.

Sam wanted everyone to stop wasting time on subjects less important than runes.

Somehow that produced better diplomacy than half the deliberate meetings you'd attended.

Ivy appeared quietly beside you once again.

"You are going to count this toward the Hand idea."

She sounded almost accusing while saying it.

This absolutely counted toward the Hand idea.

You did not need to answer her aloud.

Once again, the difficult part was already there.

Wulfric formed useful relationships most easily when he forgot they were useful.

Now you only had to teach him that this was politics without convincing him to ruin it by trying.

Fortunately, you still had plenty of time.

By the final week, Yronwood no longer felt like a captured battlefield.

It felt more like a political problem.

That represented considerable progress from last week.

Arianne's delegation still remained inside the castle.

Ladybright and Hotah kept negotiating with your people.

Garibald moved through the loyalist camp without anyone treating him like an enemy envoy.

Quentyn and Gwyneth remained under respectful guard.

You and Ivy understood both of them better with every conversation.

Aegon remained somewhere beyond your immediate reach.

The Golden Company remained dangerous despite retreating.

Dorne had not become loyal because one castle fell.

Nothing important became quite that simple.

Wulfric continued appearing around different Infantrymen.

By then the pattern no longer required analysis.

If he had spare time, some collection of soldiers eventually acquired him.

They were never quite the same collection twice.

One afternoon a Stormlander corporal stopped him near the outer yard.

Later the same day, a Northman and two Reachmen were walking beside him while arguing about some complaint you never heard.

You kept dragging Wulfric toward lords whenever you could.

Given freedom, he kept wandering back toward soldiers.

So far, the two habits were learning to coexist.

The command group had changed in a quieter way.

Everyone wasted much less time than before.

Robb, Edmure, and you had accumulated enough shared experience that smaller decisions often happened through looks, gestures, and trust.

Robb still pushed harder than Barristan liked.

Edmure still saw Boneway problems before most people.

You knew what each man would do before he did it often enough that surprise became rare.

Months ago, all of that would've required a meeting.

You liked the new arrangement much better.

At the end of the month, the map was still ugly.

At least several parts were now ugly in your favor.

Yronwood now belonged securely to your side.

The Red River and Red Mountains had been decisively won.

The Dornish and Golden Company alliance had broken violently.

Oberyn Martell was finally dead as well.

Grandfather worship had created at least one exploitable fracture inside Aegon's coalition.

Quentyn remained alive despite everything that happened.

Gwyneth gave Yronwood a lawful ruler.

Arianne was actively negotiating instead of fighting.

Dorne was starting to look like something which might become a political problem instead of an active military front.

That was an enormous improvement by itself.

Wulfric had somehow spent the month becoming a story, reconnecting himself to half the Infantry, making friends outside the North, and extracting a concession from Ivy.

The last achievement might actually have been the hardest.

You intended to enjoy that concession for years.

Aegon remained alive despite all your victories.

That ruined some of the satisfaction.

You still did not know whether the man was Blackfyre, Targaryen, or something nobody had guessed correctly.

The world's magical absurdities kept gathering around Wulfric enough that the named-character theory had gained more evidence than you wanted.

You remained suspiciously adjacent to all of it.

Perhaps Kings were supporting characters with unusually expensive costumes.

The thought entertained Ivy a lot more than you.

It did not entertain you enough to keep your attention from the Vale.

Runestone still desperately needed outside help.

Redfort still desperately needed outside help.

Stannis was tightening his grasp around the most defensible kingdom in Westeros while your armies remained several kingdoms away.

Every improvement in Dorne made that problem harder to ignore.

The realm possessed an irritating objection to being solved one problem at a time.

You could spend a month solving something genuinely enormous and still reach the end with another enormous problem waiting impatiently.

Still, Dorne might finally be becoming manageable…

-----

Skills:

Pursuits:

Martial:

(12) Physical Form - 240/400 (+30)

(11) Westerosi Swordsmanship - 190/300 (+20)

(12) Archery - 190/400 (+10) (Gifted)

(13) Heavy Armour - 250/500 (+50) (Prodigious)

Avocations:

(12) Equestrianism - 65/400 (+10) (Talented)

(10) Hunting - 20/200 (+0)

(10) Seacraft - 45/200 (+5) (Knack)

(7) Fishing - 60/100 (+0)

(6) Swimming - 40/100 (+0)

(6) Climbing - 60/100 (+0)

Scholarly:

Applied:

(12) Accounting - 310/400 (+25) (Prodigious)

(7) Northern Law - 80/100 (+5) (Knack)

(7) General Westerosi Law - 70/100 (+5) (Knack)

(8) Castrametation - 90/100 (+20) (Knack)

(4) Poliorcetics - 85/100 (+0)

Contextual:

(10) Mathematics - 10/200 (+15) (Knack)

(10) Northern History - 200/200 (+5) (Knack)

(8) Northern Cultures - 80/100 (+0)

(8) Westerosi History - 60/100 (+10)

(7) Westerosi Cultures - 65/100 (+25)

(7) Common Literacy - 50/100 (+25)

(6) Valyrian Literacy - 30/100 (+0)

Social:

Public:

(14) Management - 200/500 (+50) (Prodigious)

(9) Stewardship - 20/100 (+15) (Knack)

(12) Strategy - 265/400 (+30) (Prodigious +)

(10) Public Speaking - 20/200 (+50) (Skilled)

Personal:

(12) Interpersonal Communication - 210/400 (+35) (Skilled)

(5) Acting (Lying/Politics) - 85/100 (+5) (Incapacity)

(11) Common Speaking - 240/300 (+40) (Knack)

(11) Old Tongue Speaking - 215/300 (+15) (Knack)

(8) Valyrian Speaking - 25/100 (+5) (Knack)

Magic:

(1) Theory of Magic - 25/100 (+5)

- (1) Potentium: Heartsense + Warging - 20/100 (+10)

(19) Verdancy:

- (11) The Green Aura - 60/300 (+30) (Talented)

- - (3) The Green Touch - 30/100 (+10)

- (6) The Green Knowledge - 15/100 (+5) (Knack)

(37) Potentium:

- (1) Potentium Studies - 85/100 (+5)

- (4) Combat Intuition - 40/100 (+25)

- (2) Clairsentience - 10/100 (+0)

- - (11) Heartsense - 60/200 (+50)

- (6) Warging - 50/100 (+30) (Talented)

- - (3) Warging Theory - 70/100 (+5) (Knack)

- (2) Somatic Insight - 95/100 (+10) (Knack)

- - (5) Force Healing - 95/100 (+15) (Gifted)

- - (6) Healing Trance - 30/100 (+15) (Knack)

(7) Enchanting:

- (6) Westerosi Runes Theory - 100/100 (+50)

- (1) Westerosi Runes Practice - 100/100 (+0)

(18) Adamancy:

- (8) Armored Recuperation - 70/100 (+50)

- (5) Burden Opponent - 70/100 (+50)

- (3) Ending Blow - 100/100 (+50)

- (3) Ocular Renewal - 15/100 (+10)

- (2) Cold Resistance - 10/100 (+0)

(5) Numinance:

- (2) Revive - 100/100 (+100)

- (4) Sensor Shroud - 25/100 (+15) (Knack)

-----

Resources:

Earning: 9

Spending: 25

Banked: 114

-----

Rolls for Next Turn:

T1 = Person/Event in the World

L7 = Convenient

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Voting:

Main Actions: (What should we focus on in the next chapter?)

A1 - Focus on the needs, wants, and skills of the Infantry Soldiers and Non-Coms.

A2 - Focus on your reputation with the Lords and Fellow Commanders.

A3 - Work on your Understanding of Magic with the Medcorps and Green Study Group.

A4 - Work on Physical Skills & Magics by training with and against the Martially Minded like Jon.

A5 - Focus on the Strategic & Logistical situation of the Army. (War Games, Runes, etc.)

Personal Rolls Sources:

S1 - Wikipedia

S2 - Steam Games (On Cooldown 1/1)

S3 - Wookiepedia

S4 - World Rolls List

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Information/Maps:

1 - Varys The Spider’s War Map

File Garden - Imgur - Catbox (... is broken again)

Key:

Red - Baratheon Loyalist Coalition (POV)

Blue - Stannis’s Rebels + R'hllor Support + Privateers + Euron

Purple - Slaves of the Grandfather (“Golden Company” + ”Dorne”)

Yellow - Independent Veil (Arryn Loyalists + Mountain Clan Rebels)

Pink - Arianne Martell’s Counter-Rebellion

2 - Long Lake Province - Lands and Governance Map (Updated)

Imgur - File Garden - Catbox

3 - Full Planetos Map

Note: Not accurate to Westeros or Western Essos/the Free Cities.

4 - Small Mechanical Retcon + Update for Relationships (HACK Lore: Ch17)

Fine → Ok → Good → Friendly → Friends → Close Friends → Lifelong Friends → BFF’s

Anything in (Brackets) is Potential, not a current relationship.

Accurate as of Ch80:

Sansa - BFF

Jon - BFF

Arya - BFF → Lifelong Friends

Ned - Lifelong Friends

Joffrey - Lifelong Friends → Close Friends → Lifelong Friends (→ BFF)

Yara - Friends → Close Friends → Lifelong Friends

Rob - Friends → Close Friends → Lifelong Friends (→ BFF)

Theon - Friendly → Friends → Close Friends

Domeric - Friends (→ Close Friends (→ Lifelong Friends))

Myrcella - Friendly → Friends (→ Close Friends)

Tommen - Ok → Good → Friendly → Friends

Cat - Distaste → Strong Distaste → Dislike (→ Strong Dislike or → Strong Distaste)

Originally, I intended the reputation system to be mostly mechanical.

That’s becoming increasingly incompatible with how important relationships are to the actual Quest, because some of the numbers just don’t make sense once they have to represent real relationships instead of bars filling up.

I’ve tried to make this mostly a buff.

The biggest actual downgrade is Arya.

She reached BFF and then basically disappeared from Wulfric’s life for several years. That works fine if BFF just means “number got very large.” It makes considerably less sense now that getting someone to BFF means I need to keep that relationship occupying part of my brain whenever I’m writing Wulfric.

I originally described BFF as something roughly like Robert and Ned, but I didn’t really enforce that standard mechanically.

Jon and Sansa are better examples of what it means now.

We’ve spent a ton of time with Jon.

We haven’t interacted with Sansa nearly as much lately, but I fully intend that relationship to be completely intact when they meet again.

Meanwhile, Lifelong Friends has basically become what BFF used to mean.

These are people Wulfric is extremely close to and expects to remain close to for life.

They just don’t come with the same narrative obligation to constantly think about the relationship.

That also means BFF isn’t something you unlock because the relationship bar hit one hundred.

Someone needs to already be a Lifelong Friend and then actually spend substantial time at that level.

That might be six months of near-constant interaction, or several years of frequent interaction, but the relationship needs time to naturally become that important.

So, with that clarified:

Arya: Down from BFF to Lifelong Friends, though very much toward the warm end of it.

They got extremely close.

They just didn’t stay together long enough after reaching that point to cross the final threshold before immediately separating for several years.

Joffrey: Still Lifelong Friends.

I was probably too eager about exactly when he got there, but he’s in the right place now.

They became steadily closer over the years, and the war is what finally pushed them across the line.

BFF is very possible over the next few years, though naturally slower than Jon or Sansa because they aren’t constantly together.

Yara: Quietly bumped to Lifelong Friends.

The main thing holding this one back was opportunity, not the actual relationship.

Theon: Bumped to Close Friends.

Readers prioritized him somewhat less, but again, there just weren’t that many opportunities to interact with him.

Robb: Bumped to Lifelong Friends.

We didn’t prioritize him especially hard before the war, but fighting the war together has brought them considerably closer.

BFF is distinctly possible, though I’d put it below Joffrey and expect it to take longer because their interaction is more intermittent.

Myrcella and Tommen: Both bumped to Friends.

They may or may not become more important later, but after several years of interacting with a bunch of people who already like Wulfric, leaving them lower felt increasingly silly.

Domeric: No actual change.

His relationship with Wulfric is still where it was, but there’s now a clear possibility for it to deepen.

He’s a distinct possibility for becoming the future spouse of one of our two BFFs.

Cat: She’s gone from Distaste to outright Dislike.

That one’s deliberate.

I was tempted to improve it, but I think it’s more interesting if Wulfric has actual weaknesses inside the core Stark family instead of every relationship naturally becoming excellent because he’s the protagonist.

It’s the same reason Politics is leveling painfully slowly and actually has an Anti-Talent attached to it.

Wulfric doesn’t need to become good at everything.

Sometimes it’s more useful, and frankly more interesting, for him to need allies and family members who are better at something than he is.

Cat isn’t locked there forever.

If people eventually want to prioritize improving that relationship, or it becomes important during something like the Long Night, I’m not going to prevent it.

She could warm up.

Things could also get worse.

For now, though, this is simply one of Wulfric’s weak spots.

So the main clarification is: Lifelong Friends is already an extremely close relationship.

BFF now requires substantial interaction after reaching that point instead of being the next automatic reputation threshold.

5 - Where this Quest is Posted + Extra Votes

NovelPhoenix

Space Battles

Sufficient Velocity

Questionable Questing

Archive of Our Own

Anyone can vote on any or all of these places, so if you want more votes feel free to use them.

While the other 4 require accounts, anyone can comment/Vote on AO3.

Anyone who votes on atleast 4 of the 5 places gets the free Bonus vote.

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Write-In/Questions:

1 - Did you like the Joffrey POV?

Did it feel like we were seeing things from a reasonably different POV?

I really tried to keep in mind that Joff is a different person with different skills, knowledge, and beliefs.

So, I hope that showed up in the text, but if there was any weirdness, I’d really appreciate hearing about it.