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Chapter Text

Chapter 1: A Lannister Sent

The clang of steel rang sharp and clear across the training yard of the Red Keep. Jaime Lannister parried a blow and twisted his wrist, sending Ser Brett Spicer’s sword clattering across the dusty stone. The younger knight staggered, winded and stunned, and Jaime stepped back with a smirk, golden hair glinting in the sun.

“You keep swinging like that,” Jaime said, “and even the whores in Flea Bottom won’t pretend you’re a real knight.”

A few of the other men chuckled. Ser Brett flushed red, picked up his blade without meeting Jaime’s eyes, and limped off toward the well. Jaime wiped sweat from his brow and took the offered goblet of water from his squire.

Across the yard, Ser Barristan Selmy watched with his arms folded, unreadable as always. Jaime gave him a mock bow.

“Careful, old man,” Jaime called out. “If you keep glaring like that, your face might freeze.”

Selmy didn’t answer, didn’t even twitch. Of course he didn’t. The Lord Commander of the Kingsguard had always been too honorable to bite at Jaime’s jabs. That’s what made it fun.

Jaime drained the goblet and handed it back. His muscles buzzed from the fight, his blood was up, and for a moment he felt like the best swordsman in the realm again. Not the Kingslayer. Not Tywin’s heir. Just a man with a blade in his hand and no past behind him.

Then the page arrived, red-faced and breathless. “Ser Jaime—Lord Hand Tywin requests you. Immediately.”

Jaime sighed. “Requests,” he repeated. “How polite.”

He tossed the practice sword aside and left the yard without waiting for his squire. The gold-plated armor he wore in court was heavy, ceremonial. The armor he fought in—sleek steel trimmed in lion motifs—still felt like a second skin. He didn’t bother to change.

Tywin Lannister’s solar in Maegor’s Holdfast was cool and dark, thick with the scent of ink and parchment. It always was. It smelled like judgment.

Jaime pushed open the carved door without knocking. He never knocked. The heavy wood creaked, just slightly—he liked that. Subtle reminders that he was coming. That he didn’t wait to be summoned like a pageboy or a petitioner with a cap in his hands. He was Tywin’s eldest son after all, and a knight of the Kingsguard. That still had to mean something.

His lord father didn’t look up. He rarely did. Tywin Lannister sat at the long table as if carved into the stone behind him, half-swallowed by the ledgers, missives, and precise columns of figures no one would ever call poetry. He was alone, save for a goblet of dark wine at his elbow—half full, because Tywin never lost control of anything, not even a drink.

“You’re late,” he said, still reading. His voice was as clipped and measured as the lines of his handwriting—one never wasted ink, or air, on flourishes.

“I was fighting,” Jaime replied, dragging out a chair and slouching into it with deliberate ease. “You remember fighting, don’t you? Steel, sweat, that sort of thing.”

He kicked one boot up onto the edge of the table and leaned back, arms spread wide across the carved wooden arms of the chair. He grinned—not a warm grin, not lately. The grin of a man used to being hated, and learning to find his pleasure in it.

“I remember winning,” Tywin said, still not glancing up. “And I remember that men who waste time with sparring matches in courtyards are not men who win wars.”

The grin faltered, just slightly. Jaime let his hand drop and rest against his thigh. He knew the tone. That unshakable authority his father spoke in—it didn’t leave room for arguments, only consequences. But still, he kept the edge in his voice.

“If this is about the brothel incident, I didn’t—”

“It isn’t.”

The folded parchment slid across the table with a dry whisper. Jaime didn’t reach for it. He watched it settle, white and neat and perfectly aligned, like everything else Tywin touched. Probably sealed with wax. Definitely boring.

“There’s a house in the Westerlands—House Morell,” Tywin said. “Loyal. Small. Old blood. They control a series of mines near Lannisport. Lately, their reports show less and less yield. Coin isn’t reaching Casterly Rock. Their ledgers don’t match the shipments.”

Jaime tilted his head, then let his eyes drift to the wine. Not once had Tywin ever poured him a cup without prompting. Not once had he offered, like a father should to a son returning from the field.

“Let me guess,” Jaime said. “You want me to audit their books.”

Now, finally, Tywin looked up. That stare—pale, flat, unreadable as polished brass—locked on him. There was no warmth in it. There never had been. Not even when Jaime was a boy. Not even when he'd sworn his white cloak. Especially not then.

“I want you to remind them who they answer to.”

Jaime raised an eyebrow. It was an art, raising just one. “You’re sending me to lean on a minor bannerman? What, did Kevan fall asleep? Is this the punishment round?”

“It’s a test,” Tywin said, as if that answered anything. “One you’ll pass, or you’ll fail. But it’s time you started carrying more weight than your sword.”

Jaime laughed. Not loud, not amused. Just once, low and bitter. He leaned forward now, fingers drumming once on the table’s edge.

“You mean more weight than your shame?”

There it was. The line. He crossed it like a man stepping into a blade.

The silence that followed was tight as a drawn bowstring. Jaime held his father’s gaze and hated himself for needing to.

Tywin’s voice, when it came, was ice over steel. “You think wearing white absolves you of your name? You think hiding behind a crown excuses your failure to become a lord, a husband, a man?”

It landed harder than he wanted to admit.

Jaime didn’t wince. Didn’t blink. But the words stabbed somewhere he never let anyone touch. Not even Cersei. Especially not her.

“I think I killed the Mad King and saved the city,” Jaime said, voice low, steady. “But no one sings songs about that, do they?”

“No,” Tywin said flatly. “Because you lack the discipline to control your own legend.”

That was Tywin, always: legend as legacy. Appearances over acts. Image as inheritance. It wasn’t enough to do the right thing—you had to do it with the right banner behind you, at the right moment, in the right posture. Otherwise it didn’t count. Otherwise it was treason.

Tywin stood and crossed to the sideboard. His steps were silent on the stone. He poured more wine—again, no offer. Jaime didn’t want it anyway.

“I’ve already had ravens sent. You’ll leave tomorrow. Take a dozen men. Ride fast, strike harder. Make it clear—if House Morell forgets who they serve, they will not be missed.”

Jaime tapped a finger against the edge of the parchment. His tone was still casual, but his mind had drifted. He was already imagining the road: dry, dull, predictable. No glory there. No challenge. Just another errand boy in a lion’s cloak.

“And what if they’re just scraping by?” he said, because some part of him—it surprised even him—wanted to ask. “Drought, bandits, bad luck?”

“Then they should have sent word and asked for aid, not lied,” Tywin said without pause. “Deception is weakness. We do not tolerate weakness.”

There it was again—we. As if Jaime had ever had a say in the definition.

He stood slowly. No bow. No salute. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d said "yes, Father" and meant it.

“I assume I’m meant to return in time for the royal procession?”

“Preferably,” Tywin said, inspecting his wine. “Though if you’re late, I’m sure your sister can find someone else to warm her bed.”

The words were designed to provoke. They always were. Tywin didn’t just use knives—he used facts as scalpels. Jaime didn’t flinch. He’d grown up on this diet. He only smiled, tight and polished like a knight at a tourney.

“And here I thought this would be another quiet week in paradise.”

He turned to leave, already thinking of his horse, the gear he’d have packed, how many men to take who wouldn’t talk too much. But Tywin’s voice followed, low and exact.

“Jaime.”

He stopped. Looked back.

“You wear the white cloak,” Tywin said, “but you carry the lion. Don’t forget which came first.”

Jaime said nothing. He just stood there, the cloak of the Kingsguard heavy on his shoulders, a shining, empty thing.

In his father’s eyes, he would never be a knight, never a man. Only a tool, a blade with a name.

But the worst part—the part he never said out loud, not even to himself—was that part of him still wanted Tywin to be proud of him.

And he hated that part most of all.

—

The wind smelled like iron and dust.

Jaime Lannister rode at the front of the column, his white cloak trailing behind him like smoke off a battlefield. The twelve riders behind him said little—smart men, most of them. They knew better than to chatter when the Kingslayer didn’t feel like hearing his name echoed back at him with every bump of the road.

The road west from King’s Landing was dry this season. The green had dulled, beaten into submission by months without real rain, and even the grass looked tired. Jaime had seen worse. War roads. Burnt villages. Fields salted with blood and ash. But this—this was quieter. Smaller. A dying land gasping with its last breath and no one bothering to listen.

They passed a market square at midday. Or what had once been one. Crumbling stalls, canvas roofs eaten by sun. Chickens scattered from the hooves of Jaime’s destrier. One boy, barefoot and bone-thin, watched from behind a leaning pillar, holding something in his hands. Jaime looked, just once. A wooden knight. Crude. Painted gold, badly chipped. He didn’t wave. He didn’t speak. Jaime didn’t either.

He didn’t have the energy to pretend.

The land blurred, mile after mile. The rhythm of hoofbeats was its own kind of silence. Time lost its shape. Only the heat remained—pressing in beneath his armor, sticky and relentless. His shoulders ached. Not from weight, but from memory.

He hadn’t ridden west in years.

Casterly Rock was three days north of their path, but he could feel it anyway. Like a mountain on his back. He remembered the first time he’d taken this road—fifteen, proud, golden, invincible. His armor had gleamed then. Every banner waved for him. He rode beside Tywin, all fire and law, a young god trailing a greater one. His father hadn’t spoken much then either. But when he had, Jaime had clung to every word.

It had been enough, once, to make him try to be like him.

Now?

He wasn’t sure if he’d succeeded—or if he was just the echo of a man who never looked back.

“Ser Jaime,” came a voice behind him—Ser Forley Prester, his second on this ride. A safe, dull man. Loyal, efficient, forgettable.

Jaime slowed his horse slightly, enough to let Forley ride beside him. “Speak.”

“We’re close,” Forley said. “Another half-day to House Morell, if the hills hold. I sent a scout ahead this morning.”

“And?”

“They knew we were coming. Courtyard’s been cleared. Banners up. Lord Morell’s expecting a show.”

Jaime let out a breath through his nose. “Always is.”

Forley hesitated. “The reports… the house is poorer than expected. Three of the mine shafts have collapsed in the last two years. No coin for repairs. They’re digging with broken tools and borrowed hands.”

“And the gold?” Jaime asked.

“Still less than what they report to the Rock. But it’s close. Could be real bad luck.”

“Could be,” Jaime said.

Neither of them spoke for a while after that. The hills rose around them, squat and yellowed, patched with dying scrub and stubborn weeds. Off to the left, he spotted a small farm—fields fallow, roof half-caved in. A dog barked as they passed, low and hungry. No people in sight.

“How long have you served the Rock, Ser Forley?” Jaime asked suddenly.

“Since I was a boy, ser. My father before me. Captain of the watch at Lannisport.”

“Ever met my lord father?”

Forley blinked, thrown. “Once. Briefly.”

“What did he say?”

Forley frowned. “He told me not to lean on my sword like a farmer leaning on a shovel.”

Jaime snorted. “That sounds right.”

Another silence. Then Forley asked, too carefully, “Do you believe House Morell meant insult?”

Jaime didn’t answer right away. He watched a hawk circle overhead—wings catching the dying light. When he spoke, his voice was low.

“I think small houses don’t survive long unless they learn to bleed slow.”

He hadn’t meant to say that. But it felt true.

They rode on.

By late afternoon, the sun dipped lower, casting long shadows across the road. The path narrowed, flanked by low rock walls and shriveled trees. Jaime raised a hand to slow the column.

“Camp here,” he said. “No banners. No fires. I want to watch how they sleep.”

Forley gave the order. The men dismounted, tying horses, unpacking gear with practiced efficiency. Jaime stayed mounted, staring west. The keep was out there—two hills over. He could feel it. The taste of stone and old grudges on the wind.

He dismounted last. Didn’t speak. He wandered to a high outcrop and sat down, overlooking the land that would become the next problem solved in Lannister red.

He thought of Tywin’s voice: Remind them who they serve.

He thought of Cersei’s laughter, drunk in his ear: Why bother with backwater families when you can be a king’s brother in the capital?

He thought of his own hand on Aerys’s throne, the blood slick, the silence heavy.

The white cloak billowed beside him in the wind. Impossibly clean. A lie, like all the others.

A knight in the songs wouldn’t be here, he thought.

A knight in the songs wouldn’t be sent to break peasants so the vaults in Casterly Rock didn’t echo.

He sat there until the sun died, and the stars came out without warmth.

There was a certain kind of cold that didn’t come from the air. Jaime had known winter in the Riverlands, nights so bitter men pissed blood and cracked teeth from shivering. But this chill was different. It crawled into your chest, not your bones. It whispered: You don’t belong anywhere, not even here.

He pulled his cloak tighter and let the night stretch around him.

Below, the camp was quiet. His men knew how to sleep with one eye open. No songs, no fires, no laughter. Just tired hands wrapping themselves in wool and silence.

A few owls called. Somewhere in the dark, a fox screamed like a dying child.

He waited another hour, then rose, dusting the dirt from his gloves. No sense delaying. Whatever was waiting over the hills wouldn't change by dawn. He'd rather ride under moonlight than sunlight anyway. Less fanfare. Less pretense. He wasn’t here for ceremony.

By the time they saddled up, the moon had risen high—white and thin like a sharpened coin.

Jaime rode in silence. His men followed without question. The road narrowed between two steep shoulders of earth, then opened out again, revealing a low stone keep squatting against the hillside.

House Morell.

It looked older than it should’ve. The outer walls were sagging in places, vines choking the mortar. No torches lit the gatehouse. The banners hung limp and faded: yellowed cloth, the sigil barely visible—a black badger on grey. A miner’s house. Functional, quiet. The kind of house that didn’t make history unless someone burned it down.

The gate was closed, but not barred. No guards on the battlements.

He pulled his horse to a stop, studied the structure for a long moment.

“This is it?” he asked, not looking back.

Forley Prester nodded behind him. “According to the map. If not, they’ve done a fine job hiding from the Rock.”

“Wonderful.”

He rode forward alone.

The sound of hooves on stone echoed too loud in the stillness. When he reached the gate, he didn’t call out. He simply waited.

A minute passed. Then two. Finally, a shape appeared in the shadows above—a guard, or what passed for one. Young, slight, with a pike that trembled slightly in his hands.

“Lord Morell,” Jaime said, without raising his voice, “has a guest.”

Another pause. Then the sound of chains. The gate creaked open, begrudgingly.

Inside, the courtyard was quiet as a grave. A few torches flickered. A stablehand blinked at them sleepily, unsure whether to bow or run. A pair of soldiers stood by the stairs to the main hall—mail half-rusted, boots caked with dried mud. Not enemies. Just tired men.

The doors opened before he reached them. Someone had been watching.

A tall man emerged—thin, balding, with a neatly trimmed grey beard and a face like weathered bark. He wore a doublet that had once been black, now faded to charcoal. His belt sagged slightly from where the gold trim had worn away.

“Ser Jaime,” he said. “I am Lord Morell. Welcome.”

The man didn’t bow deeply. Just enough. Jaime noted it. He dismounted without help.

“No trumpets?” Jaime asked.

“We prefer to keep our brass in the mines.”

A dry answer. Clever, maybe. Jaime didn’t smile.

“I’ve ridden a long way.”

“And we’re honored to have you, ser. My household is small, but your men will have beds and meat. I trust the Rock sent you with particular concerns?”

Jaime looked past him, toward the hall. The torches inside flickered weakly.

“We’ll speak in private.”

Lord Morell inclined his head. “Of course. This way.”

Jaime followed him into the keep. The doors groaned behind them.

The hall was modest, low-ceilinged, with old banners hanging limp between stone arches. The hearth was lit, but small. A stew simmered on the fire—onions, root vegetables, maybe a scrap of pork. Enough to fill the air with the smell of humility.

A handful of servants stood along the wall. All eyes on him. All quiet. He hated the way they looked at him—not afraid. Not reverent. Just… resigned. Like he was winter come early.

Lord Morell gestured to a chair near the hearth.

Jaime didn’t sit. “How long have your mines been failing?”

The older man’s face didn’t shift. “They haven’t failed. They’ve… slowed.”

“Convenient timing.”

“There were collapses. Two shafts sealed. Our best foreman died last spring. The rest do what they can.”

Jaime stepped closer, lowering his voice. “Your reports to Casterly Rock don’t match your shipments. Why?”

A long pause. Lord Morell folded his hands.

“Because if we told the truth, my lord, the Rock would strip the mines and bleed us dry. And you’d be here anyway.”

Jaime didn’t answer.

The older man went on. “We paid what we could. We didn’t steal. We survived. If that’s a crime in the eyes of the lion—then so be it.”

Behind Jaime, a small sound—movement. A boy stood near the stairwell, half-shadowed. Ten, maybe eleven. Barefoot. Thin as a sapling. A mop of dark curls and wide, curious eyes.

Watching him.

The boy didn’t flinch when Jaime looked directly at him. Just stood there, studying. Jaime stared back. The air seemed to thicken between them.

“This him?” Jaime asked quietly.

“My son,” Lord Morell said. “Tion.”

Tion. Of course it was.

Tion stepped forward. One step, no hesitation. He didn’t puff his chest or lower his gaze. He just moved—measured, unafraid, and without drama. Not brave, nor timid. Just... certain. As if the decision to approach had already been made hours ago, and now he was simply walking through the scene he’d rehearsed in his head a hundred times.

“I’ve seen your face in books,” Tion said. “You killed the Mad King.”

Jaime didn’t blink. “I did.”

The boy nodded once, like that settled something in his mind.

“You don’t look how I imagined.”

Jaime tilted his head. “Better or worse?”

Tion shrugged. “Just different.”

The fire crackled. No one spoke. After a moment, Jaime turned back to Lord Morell. “We'll speak again in the morning. Be ready to show me the ledgers.”

“As you say, Ser Jaime.”

He turned to leave, the weight of twelve eyes dragging behind him like a second cloak. At the door, he glanced once over his shoulder.

Tion was still watching him. The same expression, not with reverence, nor with fear, but with simple recognition. As if he were staring at a knight from a song… and waiting to see if the story ended the way it was supposed to.

Jaime stepped out into the night.

The air was cold again. Not the kind that touched your skin, but the other kind—the kind that slipped beneath the breastplate and nestled against the bones. It was the cold that came when a room emptied and something unsaid followed you out. Jaime felt it in the space between heartbeats, in the stillness that clung to the stones underfoot. Not a wind, not a chill, but a waiting. The sort of cold that made silence feel like a second presence, walking just behind you. His cloak stirred faintly as he moved down the steps, but it wasn’t the breeze that raised the hair on his arms. It was that lingering weight of being seen too clearly by someone too young to lie about it.

He didn’t quicken his step. Didn’t look back. But the boy’s gaze still felt near, as if it had followed him out the door and settled into the dark beside him. That look—quiet, level, undecorated—stayed with him longer than any title, longer than the scrape of steel or the weight of duty. It wasn’t awe. It wasn’t judgment. It was recognition.

And that, somehow, was colder than either.

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Chapter Text

Chapter 2: Like in the Songs

The smell of damp stone clung to everything in the guest room they'd given him. It was the kind of chill that settled into the corners of a man’s bones, the kind you didn’t sweat out or drink away. Jaime sat at the edge of the narrow bed, unstrapping his greaves with stiff fingers, watching the fire snap low in the hearth. The walls were close, the ceiling low. The last time he’d slept in a room this size, he was squiring for Lord Crakehall and taking his meals with the servants. Now, he wore the white cloak. Now, they called him Kingslayer.

Outside, the wind shifted and moaned through the courtyard. Somewhere in the hall below, a dog barked twice and fell silent. The castle wasn’t dead, not quite, but it had that same thin silence of places that had been slowly starving. Everything here—from the buckled armor on the guards to the patched robes of the septon who'd passed him in the corridor—spoke of quiet desperation. This wasn’t a house with gold tucked in its floors. This was a house trying to survive a long winter with no snow.

His fingers drifted to the small table beside the bed. A pitcher of water, a chipped cup, and a bowl of apples sat waiting—too polished, too intentionally placed. Someone thought hospitality might save them. Jaime picked up an apple, turned it in his hand, then bit into it hard enough to split the skin. It was mealy, under-ripe. Still, he finished it.

Footsteps approached in the corridor. Light ones. Someone trying not to be heard. He stood, brushed the crumbs from his hands, and waited. A soft knock followed—just two taps, hesitant. He opened the door.

Tion stood there, clutching something behind his back. His hair was still damp from sweat or maybe a hasty wash. His tunic was too large, sleeves rolled at the cuffs. He didn’t speak right away, just looked up with a kind of stubborn courage that reminded Jaime too much of himself at that age. Gods help the boy.

“I brought something,” the boy said finally.

Jaime arched an eyebrow but stepped aside, letting him enter. Tion walked in carefully, his boots scuffing the stone, and held out what he’d been hiding—a small wooden lion, carved roughly but clearly. Someone had taken the time to give it a mane, and though the legs were uneven and the paint smudged, it looked enough like the sigil that Jaime recognized it immediately.

“My brother made it,” Tion said. “Before he died.”

Jaime took it without a word, turned it over in his palm. It was light, unbalanced. He could snap it in half with two fingers. Still, he didn’t.

“He said Lannisters always had lions,” the boy continued. “Even the ones that didn’t wear crowns.”

Jaime placed the carving on the edge of the table, next to the pitcher, then turned back to face the boy. “Why are you really here?”

Tion hesitated, chewing his lower lip. “You’re the first knight I’ve ever met. I mean… the real kind. The kind from the stories.”

That was dangerous talk. Jaime almost smiled, but it didn’t reach his eyes.

“I’m not in any of the stories they tell here,” he said.

“They say you killed a king,” Tion offered, not quite as a question. “That you sat on the throne before Robert got there.”

Jaime leaned against the table, arms crossed. “That part’s true.”

“Did it feel good?” the boy asked, eyes bright. “Killing him?”

For a moment, the fire crackled and nothing else moved. Jaime didn’t answer right away. He let the weight of the memory roll over him—Aerys’s wild eyes, the stink of burning flesh, the way the sword had opened the old man’s throat like a rotten fruit.

“No,” he said finally. “It didn’t.”

Tion looked surprised, but not disappointed. Just curious. That was worse.

“They say you’re dangerous,” the boy said. “But my father said you were the only reason the city didn’t burn.”

“Your father talks too much.”

That earned a smile. Small, quick, but real.

Tion stepped closer, his voice softer now. “When I grow up, I want to be like you.”

Jaime felt something tighten in his chest. It was reflex, the same thing that used to happen when Cersei smiled just so, or when Tyrion said something true by accident. Something between pain and fury, all tangled in the gut. He turned slightly away, looking at the lion on the table.

“You don’t,” he said.

“But—”

“You want to be a knight, fine. Find someone else to copy.”

“You’re the best sword in Westeros.”

“That’s not the same as being a knight.”

Tion blinked, confused. “But knights protect people. They stop bad men.”

Jaime stared at the boy, and for a moment the mask nearly slipped.

“I swore vows,” he said quietly. “To protect the innocent. To obey the king. To serve justice. But the king wanted the innocent burned. The justice was fire, and I obeyed… by killing him.”

Tion frowned. “Then you did the right thing.”

Jaime laughed once, bitter and flat. “Tell that to your septon. Or your maester. Or any bard in any inn between here and the Neck.”

The boy was quiet for a long time. He walked to the fire, looked into it the way only children and old men did—like it might answer something if stared at long enough.

“My brother died in a cave-in,” he said eventually. “He was trying to get gold for the Rock. I asked my father if he would’ve died for a better house, and he said no. He said gold doesn’t care who digs it. It just takes.”

Jaime watched him, something sour curling in his stomach. The boy’s words were too close. Too sharp. There was a truth in them Jaime didn’t want to acknowledge. Not here. Not now. It pressed at the cracks in him.

He didn’t reply.

Tion turned back toward him, that same strange certainty in his eyes. “But I think maybe gold can give something back, too. If someone like you wears it right.”

There it was again—that belief. Not admiration. Not fear. Belief. The kind Jaime hadn’t seen in anyone’s face in years. Not in the court, not on the battlefield, not even in Cersei’s smile. It was the look boys gave their first sword, or a storybook knight, or a painting of some long-dead hero with a lion on his shield and fire in his eyes.

And somehow, gods help him, it was directed at him.

Jaime didn’t know what to do with it.

So he reached for the pitcher and poured a drink—just for something to do with his hands. A useless gesture. He handed the cup to Tion with a dry smirk.

“No wine until you’re of age.”

The boy smiled and drank anyway, probably just water, but he held the cup like it meant something. Then he set it down and straightened his shoulders with a kind of awkward dignity, fingers brushing his brow in a salute. A gesture plucked from a story, from half-remembered tales of honor and noble quests.

“I’ll see you tomorrow, ser.”

And then he was gone.

The door closed with a soft click behind him. Jaime stood in the stillness, watching it, as if the air itself had changed when the boy left. It had. It always did, after something real happened—no matter how small.

He turned back to the room slowly, his eyes settling on the wooden lion Tion had brought. The carving sat on the table, rough and uneven, chipped paint clinging to the grooves like old blood. One leg shorter than the others, the whole thing tilted slightly. It looked like it would fall over if you breathed wrong.

He stared at it too long. Then sat, slowly, as if the weight of the white cloak had doubled on his shoulders.

The fire in the hearth crackled low, its orange light painting soft shadows on the stone walls. He pulled off his boots, methodical and quiet, and set them beside the bed like a good soldier. Then he leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees, hands hanging limp between them.

It wasn’t supposed to matter. This place. This house. These people. It was a dust-covered corner of his father’s kingdom. A routine message of dominance. Gold was missing. Power had to be shown. The lion’s teeth had to gleam from time to time or the smallfolk forgot it still bit.

That’s what Tywin would have done.

Burn a barn. Strip the mine. Hang a man. Take a hostage. Leave behind a silence heavy enough to echo in every bannerman’s halls.

But now the boy’s voice haunted the corners of the room. Not just what he’d said, but how he’d said it—If someone like you wears it right...

Jaime leaned back, exhaling slow.

He had done worse to better men. Slit throats in the dark. Gutted knights who knelt. Broken bones for the sake of reputation. That was the game. The cost of loyalty, or the lack of it. It was supposed to mean nothing.

But this—this wasn’t treason. This wasn’t rebellion.

This was a boy whose brother had died clawing at the dirt for gold he’d never spend. This was a house that had tried to hold itself together with broken tools and borrowed time. They hadn’t defied the Rock. They’d just lied to survive a little longer.

And for that, Tywin would’ve starved them out and sold their bones for copper.

Jaime ran a hand through his hair, fingers catching in the knots. He hadn’t noticed how long it had gotten.

He stood and crossed to the window. The glass was warped, bubbled with age. Outside, the keep was quiet. A few torches still burned along the battlements. The stars above were sharp, cold, uncaring.

Mercy was weakness. That was the lesson, always.

But maybe weakness wasn’t the worst thing he could be.

He closed his eyes for a moment, jaw tight. When he opened them, he felt something settle—not peace, not pride, but certainty. A decision was still a decision, even if it cut the wrong way.

In the morning, he would demand coin. A sum large enough to sting but not ruin. He would take two of their guards as collateral and send Lannister men to inspect the mines regularly. No executions. No torched fields. The ledgers would be rewritten. The illusion of dominance preserved.

It wouldn’t be justice, not really, but it wouldn’t be a massacre either. And for the first time in a long while, that felt like enough.

He turned from the window, lay back on the thin mattress, and stared up at the dark wooden beams overhead. They groaned faintly in the wind, as if the keep itself disapproved.

“Gold doesn’t care who digs it,” the boy had said.

Maybe not. But maybe the one holding it did.

The fire crackled, then died low. The carved lion stayed upright on the table, just barely.

—

The road was quiet that morning. Too quiet.

They were half a day’s ride from House Morell, the sun not yet burning through the low mist that clung to the hills like a veil. The world looked soft in the grey light, like it hadn’t decided what kind of day it wanted to be. Jaime rode at the front of the column again, though his reins hung looser today, his posture less rigid. He felt lighter, in a way he didn’t trust. Not proud, not content—but something quieter, something close to peace.

He’d left Morell with coin, contracts, and two Lannister men stationed in the mines. No blood. No fire. He'd spoken the words, signed the ledgers, and ridden out without ever needing to draw his sword. It felt strange. It felt… right.

Tion had been there that morning, at the gates. Holding a wooden sword half his size, grinning like he’d been knighted in secret. Jaime had told him to go back inside. The boy had saluted again and said, “I’ll follow after you someday, ser.” Jaime hadn’t had the heart to argue.

He should’ve argued.

They were winding through a narrow pass when it happened. Sparse trees on both sides, enough cover to make a man uneasy. Jaime’s horse stamped the ground, snorted once. He heard the hiss of steel before he saw it.

An arrow whistled through the morning and slammed into the chest of the man riding behind him—Ser Vylen. He toppled backward off his mount without a sound. The horse shrieked, reared. Jaime’s reflexes took over.

He was off the saddle and drawing steel in one movement.

He turned sharply, blade already in his hand—not a sword, but an extension of himself—the same castle-forged steel that had split men from collarbone to hip without slowing.

"AMBUSH!" he barked, voice cutting through the fog like a warhorn.

The woods erupted. Six riders came howling down the slope—no formation, no order, only fury and desperation. Their faces were masked, their armor cobbled together from dead men and rust. No banners, no signals. Hired trash.

Jaime moved.

He was already striding into the chaos before his men could form a line.

A rider came straight at him, axe high, screaming. Jaime ducked beneath the first swing and came up inside the horse’s reach. His sword flashed once—diagonal, hip to shoulder—and the man’s scream died in his throat. Blood misted in the air. The horse bucked, rider already gone.

Another charged him from the right. Jaime pivoted on one foot, left hand catching the man’s bridle, and dragged the rider off with a single twist, flipping him out of the saddle. He stabbed downward, precise, fast—steel through the throat, straight into the dirt.

His men were moving now, forming a half-circle, shields locked.

Another mercenary broke through and went for a younger Lannister soldier—Jaime intercepted, throwing his blade low. A leg came off at the knee. The man went down, screaming. Jaime didn’t stop. He turned, rolled under a clumsy swing from a warhammer, came up inside the attacker’s reach and slammed the hilt into the man’s face, shattering his jaw.

Three were dead. Another tried to retreat. Jaime caught him mid-turn, leapt from his own horse, and brought the full weight of his body down behind the swing. The blow opened the man’s back from shoulder to ribs.

Screams. Metal. Hoofbeats on wet ground. Jaime moved through it all like a man dancing through water. Efficient. Beautiful. Deadly.

One of the last mercenaries dismounted and tried to run. Jaime didn’t hesitate. He mounted again, leaned low in the saddle, and chased him down. The man darted left, tried to vanish into the tree line.

Jaime spurred his horse and followed.

They were in the thicket now. Wet branches slapped his face, mud clung to the horse’s hooves. He saw a flash of movement—then the man turned to throw a dagger.

Too slow.

Jaime ducked, and as he passed, he slashed low, backward, the kind of strike only a swordsman with perfect control could land. It tore through the mercenary’s thigh. The man screamed and crumpled.

Jaime turned his horse again, slower this time. Dismounted. Walked toward the man who was now trying to crawl away, hands slick with his own blood.

“Please,” the man said. “I was paid—didn’t know—”

Jaime didn’t answer. He drove his sword through the man’s back, straight through the heart. Clean. Final.

He yanked it free, turned—

And that’s when he heard it.

Behind him. Not a scream. Not a shout. A voice. Small, Familiar.

“Ser Jaime?”

Everything in him stopped. The weight of the sword, the rush of the blood. He turned, slowly.

The mist had thinned now, and in the clearing by the road, he saw a blur of white and red on the ground—his cloak, torn and trampled.

And beside it—

A boy. Tion.

The wooden sword dangled from his fingers, cracked in half. His other hand clutched his belly, fingers red and slick. Blood soaked his tunic. His knees barely held him upright. He swayed like a broken reed in the wind.

Jaime didn’t remember crossing the distance. One heartbeat he was standing frozen, the next he was running—sword dropped, knees sliding through the mud.

He caught the boy as he fell.

“I didn’t…” Tion’s breath hitched. “I didn’t get to draw it.”

Jaime cradled him, already pressing both hands to the wound. It was deep. Too deep. The kind that cut through and didn’t stop.

“Tion—what are you doing here?” Jaime said, voice tight, almost cracking.

The boy blinked, face pale, lips blue at the edges. “I followed you. I wanted to see. I wanted to… be brave.”

“You’re a fool,” Jaime whispered, lowering himself to his knees, hands pressing against the warmth pouring from Tion’s stomach. “You stupid, stupid little fool…”

His hands were slick with blood. It wasn’t spurting—just seeping now. Slower. That was worse.

Tion’s breath hitched. His body trembled, then stilled. His head lolled toward Jaime, lashes fluttering as he tried to focus.

“Was it a real fight?” he asked, voice slurring, barely audible.

Jaime clenched his jaw. The smell of blood was everywhere now—hot and sharp and iron-heavy. “Yes,” he said. “It was a real fight. And it’s over.”

“Did I…” The boy’s throat worked around the words. “Did I help?”

Jaime looked down at the boy’s sword—wooden, snapped in two near the hilt. His other hand still clutched the broken half so tight his knuckles had gone white.

“No,” Jaime said softly, and then—because he couldn’t leave it at that—“But you were here. And that’s enough.”

Tion gave a tiny smile, the kind that children give when they think they’ve earned something. “I’m cold,” he said, voice barely above the wind.

Jaime reached behind him, dragging his white cloak through the wet dirt. It was soaked, ruined—slashed from riding, caked with blood—but he wrapped it around the boy anyway. It swallowed him whole.

“Hold on,” Jaime muttered. “You’re all right. Just hold on.”

But Tion wasn’t holding anything. His small hands trembled once, then relaxed. His chest moved—once. Then again, slower.

Then nothing.

The boy coughed. Blood foamed at his lips. His eyes lost focus. His body sagged deeper into Jaime’s arms like something slipping beneath water.

“No,” Jaime said. Not loud. Not commanding. Just quiet and wrong. “No, not yet.”

He pressed his hand harder against the wound. Useless. The blood wasn’t coming out anymore. Because there wasn’t any left to give.

“Tion.” He leaned down. “Tion.”

The boy didn’t respond.

Jaime sat back on his heels.

The silence stretched. His men lingered at a respectful distance, faces hard, eyes lowered. The mist was lifting, but the air still held the hush of a grave.

Jaime looked down at the boy in his arms. His face looked peaceful. Peace was all that was left. His skin had gone pale, the kind of pale that didn’t come back. His small, broken body weighed almost nothing now.

This wasn’t war, this wasn’t vengeance, this was a child who’d believed in him.

A child who had called him ser. A child who thought knighthood meant something. Who followed Jaime out here not to fight, but to see, to understand the shape of the stories. He wanted to watch a knight in battle.

And instead, he bled out in the mud like a dog.

Jaime didn’t speak. Didn’t scream. He just sat there, his white cloak around a corpse, his hands still red, the stink of failure rising around him like fog.

Then something caught the corner of his eye.

A leather satchel—one of the dead attackers had carried it. It lay torn open where a fallen horse had rolled over it. Half its contents were scattered across the grass: bread, a rusted dagger, a waterskin, and something that gleamed red in the broken light.

Jaime stood slowly. The movement felt heavy. He stepped over the body of the dead mercenary and crouched beside the satchel, brushing aside the bloodied cloth.

The glint came from a signet ring.

He plucked it out and turned it in his hand.

Black badger. Grey field. Morell.

The ring was caked in dried wax and dirt, but it was unmistakable. No mercenary would have a house ring unless someone gave it to him. And this wasn’t stolen jewelry—this was a token, a seal.

Permission. Proof.

Jaime stared at it for a long time.

Not one of the attackers had been old enough to be Morell’s bannermen. Hired hands. Scavenged gear. But someone from inside had funded them. Equipped them. Directed them.

And someone had let Tion follow.

He turned and looked back at the boy. How had he even gotten out of the keep?

Someone let him. Someone wanted this. Or at least didn’t stop it.

The boy’s pale face stared at the sky.

This hadn’t been a mistake. It had been a betrayal.

Something in Jaime’s chest cracked. Not a loud break. Just the start of something.

He bent, gathered the boy again—so gently, as if he could still feel it. He wrapped the ruined cloak tighter, tied it at the neck with a leather strap. Tion’s arms folded naturally, like he was sleeping.

Jaime lifted him off the ground. Cradled him like a knight would a child in the songs.

When he turned to face his men, there was no question left in his eyes.

“We ride,” he said.

He didn’t raise his voice. He didn’t have to.

Ser Forley Prester stepped forward. “Ser—”

“We ride,” Jaime repeated.

He mounted with the body in his arms, laying the boy across the saddle before him. He didn’t strap him down. He didn’t cover his face.

Let them see. Let everyone see.

His men followed without another word. The road turned toward the rising sun, and behind them, the mist began to lift.

Chapter Text

Chapter 3: The Lion’s Lesson

They rode through the morning mist like ghosts.

Jaime didn’t speak. The others didn’t ask. The boy’s body lay cradled in front of him, bundled in what was once a white cloak but now looked more like a blood-soaked shroud. The cloth sagged with damp, the crimson nearly black now, heavy with death. Tion's limbs moved with the rhythm of the horse—soft, weightless, like a ragdoll.

The other knights followed at a distance, quiet. Even the horses seemed to know better than to break the silence. No one asked where they were going. They already knew.

The fog peeled away as they approached the Morell lands again, revealing the same dry hills, the same brittle brush and brittle stone. But it looked different now. Smaller. Meaner. Jaime’s jaw ached from clenching. His fingers were numb from holding the reins too tightly, but he didn’t let go.

The keep rose ahead of them, squatting atop its hill like a rotted tooth. The grey stone walls looked even older now, as if they’d aged in the days since he'd left. The banners still hung—threadbare, faded. A black badger on a field of ash. Cowards behind cloth.

The gates were closed. That was their first mistake.

Jaime didn’t slow. He rode right up to the heavy oak and steel without breaking stride.

One of the guards called down, confused. “Ser Jaime? We weren’t—”

He didn’t wait for the end of the sentence.

“Break it down.”

Forley Prester hesitated behind him. “Ser, we could—”

“Break. It. Down.”

There was no shout in his voice. No fire. Jaime didn’t need to raise his voice anymore. Not today. The weight behind the words was heavier than steel. It was grief. It was guilt. It was rage honed to a blade’s edge.

His men obeyed without hesitation.

They cut down a nearby tree just outside the keep walls, stripped it, and rammed the trunk with leather and iron for grip. Four of them lifted it, staggering under the weight, and moved forward in rhythm like a siege team that had done this before.

The first blow came like a heartbeat. Thoom.

The gate shuddered. Wood splintered. Bits of dry moss and rusted iron shook loose from the top arch.

The second blow came harder. CRACK. One hinge screamed and bent at the joint.

The third came with a scream of effort from the men. The latch split down the middle. The gate—thick oak and black-iron bracing—held for a heartbeat more, as if even the structure itself was hesitating.

Then it buckled inward with a crack like thunder.

The gates groaned, twisted, and crashed open with the screech of tearing iron and the deep rumble of breaking stone. The sound echoed across the valley like a war drum.

Jaime rode in at a slow, deliberate trot.

No trumpets. No banners. No fanfare. Just hoofbeats on broken stone and the mounting panic of people who had no idea what they had called down on themselves.

A steward stumbled from the side corridor. “Ser Jaime, we weren’t told—”

The flat of Jaime’s sword caught him across the temple before he finished the sentence. The man dropped like a sack of wet grain, blood from his temple mixing with the dust. Jaime didn’t look back.

Two guards stepped forward from the main hall, spears raised in trembling hands. When Jaime turned his horse to face them, they saw the blood-drenched white cloak, the small shape bound within it, and dropped their weapons without a word.

That was all they needed to see.

“Bring them all,” Jaime said. “The lord. His household. His servants. Every last one of them.”

They obeyed.

What followed was a parade of shame. One by one, House Morell was dragged out onto the stone of the courtyard. Lords, ladies, retainers, maids. The master-at-arms with his one working eye. The septon who looked ready to faint. A daughter barely into her fifteenth year, eyes already full of tears. Even the cook, hands dusted with flour, still clutching a dough-caked apron.

Last came Lord Morell.

He wore a black robe that hadn’t been belted properly, hanging crooked over his thin shoulders. His greying hair was damp, plastered to his forehead. He blinked against the light like a man waking from a dream.

He hadn’t expected Jaime to return. Not like this.

Jaime dismounted slowly.

He did not throw the boy’s body to the ground. He didn’t shout. Didn’t snarl.

He lowered him—gently, reverently—and knelt beside him. The motion was slow, painful, deliberate. He unwrapped part of the cloak, just enough to reveal Tion’s face. The boy looked almost peaceful. His small lips were pale, skin tinged with blue, blood dried in the corners of his mouth. His hands were still curled in near-fists, like he was bracing for something that never came.

The courtyard went still.

Jaime rose.

He looked straight at Lord Morell.

The man’s color drained at once.

“My son—” he began.

“Your son is dead.”

Jaime’s voice was low. Controlled. Not calm. Ice was never calm—it only waited to break.

“Ser Jaime, please—” Morell took a step forward, arms half outstretched.

“No.” Jaime stepped forward, boots quiet against the stone. “No more ‘please.’ You had your chance. You gave me smiles. Paper. Promises. You gave me your son’s loyalty.” He turned slightly, looking back at the small, wrapped form on the ground. “And then you sent men to kill me.”

“No—no, I didn’t—”

Jaime reached into his belt pouch and held something up.

A ring. The Morell signet. Black badger on a grey field, caked with dried blood. Not stolen. Given.

“I took it off the hand of a sellsword,” Jaime said. “He died with it still on. A man who murdered your son. For gold you paid him.”

The air felt like it had been sucked from the courtyard.

The servants stared, frozen. Even the horses had gone still.

Morell’s mouth opened. Closed. “I didn’t know—”

“You knew he wanted to follow me. You let him. Or worse—you let someone else. You didn’t stop it. You knew what it meant to me that he believed. You knew what it cost me to spare you.” Jaime’s voice was trembling now, barely controlled. “And he followed me. With a toy sword in his hand.”

He stepped forward again. Inches from the lord now. “And he died. Like a dog. In the mud. Alone.”

The world tilted. Jaime felt it—the moment of decision. The crack in himself. The white cloak tugging one way, the lion pulling the other.

He turned to Forley Prester, who stood waiting, grim-faced.

“Hang him.”

The words landed like stone.

Lord Morell collapsed to his knees, fingers clawing at the front of Jaime’s tunic as if he could tear the command from his chest and swallow it whole.

“Please,” the man sobbed, voice breaking apart. “Please—I’m sorry—I didn’t mean—”

His grip was feeble. A child’s grasp. Jaime could feel the dampness of tears and sweat as the man’s fingers curled uselessly around the lion embroidered into his surcoat.

He looked down at him—this man who had once tried to stand proud, who had smiled and bowed and offered his son’s loyalty with open hands and poisoned silences. Jaime saw none of that now. Just a quivering shape of cloth and regret.

He shoved him off.

The man collapsed backward onto the flagstones with a grunt, robes tangled around his knees, spine hitting the ground with a dull crack. He groaned, rolled onto his side like a beaten dog.

Jaime didn’t look at him again.

“Hang him from the gate.” His voice didn’t rise. It didn’t need to. “The same gate he didn’t open fast enough.”

The silence that followed was the kind that only came when something sacred had been broken.

Forley Prester gave a nod, face carved from stone. Two guards stepped forward—not eager, but without hesitation. No one questioned the order. Not after what they’d seen.

They pulled Lord Morell up by the arms, and he went limp, mouth still working uselessly.

“No—no, please—please—listen to me, I didn’t—Ser Jaime, listen, I didn’t mean for this to happen! I didn’t—my son, he—he was only a boy—”

“You should have remembered that before you let him die,” Jaime said.

There was no anger in his voice. Just a void where anger used to be.

Lord Morell began to scream.

It was high-pitched, frantic, ragged at the edges like torn cloth. Not noble. Not dignified. Nothing that would be remembered in song. His feet dragged as they pulled him, slippers scraping uselessly across the stones, robes bunched around his knees. His daughter lunged forward, shrieking his name, but a guard caught her by the waist and pulled her back.

“Father!” she screamed, and her voice cracked in half.

Jaime didn’t turn.

They brought him to the gate—the same one Jaime had broken through just hours ago, the beam above it still splintered, sagging slightly from the damage. There, the guards worked fast and wordless. One pulled the rope from his saddle, thick and coarse. Another climbed the frame and looped it over the jagged beam. The sound of it unfurling echoed across the courtyard like the uncoiling of a whip.

Lord Morell’s begging had dissolved into a stream of breathless sounds—words half-formed, prayers half-forgotten, all lost in the rushing collapse of dignity.

The noose was tight around his neck before he realized what was happening.

“No—wait, please—just listen, I didn’t—” The rope jerked once as they pulled it snug. He choked mid-sentence. One of the guards shoved him to his knees.

A moment of stillness.

Then they pulled.

The man went up like a sack of grain—feet kicking once, then twice. His arms thrashed wildly, then slowed. His mouth worked silently, lips moving without sound, until even that stopped. His legs twitched. Then hung still.

It was not quick. And it was not clean.

The sound his body made when it reached the end of the drop—that deep, wet crack of vertebrae and weight—rang out across the stone like a hammer striking flesh. It echoed once, then faded, swallowed by the air.

Silence returned.

Jaime stood still.

He didn’t flinch, didn’t blink.

A few servants turned away. One of the kitchen girls began to cry, hands pressed to her mouth. The steward who had once offered him wine looked like he might collapse. The septon had fallen to his knees, head bowed, whispering a prayer no one could hear.

Jaime turned from the gate.

He walked back across the courtyard, each step deliberate, boots soft against blood-dusted stone. His sword hung heavy at his hip, but he hadn’t drawn it once. He didn’t need to.

He reached the small bundle still lying where he’d left it. The boy’s body, swaddled in the cloak that had once meant something—purity, loyalty, oath. Now just stained wool.

He knelt beside him again.

Tion looked smaller than before.

His arms had shifted slightly, one hand curled near his chest. His face had gone grey-blue, but the shape of his features—the curve of his lips, the slight rise of his cheek—still looked almost peaceful. Like he might blink. Like he might ask for a sword lesson.

Jaime reached out.

He laid a hand on the boy’s shoulder. Not for show. Not for grief. Just… to feel something human. The fabric of the cloak was stiff with dried blood. Beneath it, the skin had gone cold.

He swallowed hard. The air in his chest felt like iron.

Slowly, he reached out with two fingers, as if touching something sacred, and closed the boy’s eyes.

He stayed there a long time, hand resting lightly on the boy’s brow.

The only sound was the rope above, still creaking as it swayed in the morning wind.

It came and went, a soft wooden groan as the corpse of Lord Morell twisted slightly where it hung. The knees pointed down now, head sagged low, neck tilted at an unnatural angle. Eyes bulging, tongue bloated and black. A man unmade.

Jaime rose from beside the boy’s body slowly. No rush. Every movement in him was deliberate now—no longer the swift, instinctive steps of a swordsman, but the cold precision of a man who knew exactly what came next.

He glanced to Ser Forley Prester.

“Bring me the maester.”

Forley nodded and disappeared through the shattered entrance to the main hall. Jaime didn’t move. He stood beside Tion’s body in silence, letting the tension fill the courtyard like smoke. People shifted. Servants looked down. The guards kept their hands near their hilts, though no one would draw steel today.

A few minutes passed before Forley returned, dragging a man in grey robes by the collar.

The maester stumbled across the stone, hair disheveled, chain twisted around his neck. He was older—sixty, perhaps—but not frail. His expression was defiant in a way Jaime immediately despised.

He stopped in front of Jaime, breathing hard. “This is madness. I had no part in it. You’ve already murdered your lord—what more do you want?”

Jaime looked at him like he was something dull beneath a boot.

“You’ve served this house twenty-three years.”

The maester blinked. “I—yes, but—”

“You sent the letters to Casterly Rock. You wrote the ledgers. You knew the reports didn’t match the shipments.”

“I—was ordered to say nothing—”

“And you obeyed.” Jaime stepped closer, eyes sharp. “You knew the mines were collapsing. You knew the family couldn’t meet their quota. You knew they were hiding it.”

“I served my lord—”

“No,” Jaime said, voice like flint. “You served a kinslayer.”

The maester opened his mouth to protest, but Jaime had already turned to the guards.

“Strip him of his chains.”

The order hung in the air for a moment.

The guards hesitated—only briefly—then seized the man by both arms. The maester screamed, struggled, but they slammed him to his knees. One held his head forward. The other brought out a dagger.

Link by link, the chain was cut away from his throat. Iron clinked to the stone with each snap—ravens for messages, gold for accounting, black iron for war. The marks of a learned man, falling like trash at his feet.

He screamed curses. Jaime didn’t answer them.

When the final link hit the ground, Jaime gave the next order without turning his head.

“Drag him to the edge of the keep. Leave him outside the walls. If he walks back in, gut him.”

They hauled the screaming man away.

He was still shouting when the next command came.

“Bring me the ledgers.”

A servant scrambled to obey. The records came in a stack of worn leather-bound books—dozens of them, all meticulously copied. Jaime flipped through them at the edge of the hall, fingers trailing the ink.

He found the entries. He found the false counts. He found the symbols that marked payments made, debts owed, discrepancies brushed away.

Then he took the whole stack and threw it into the fire.

The hearth crackled high with dry logs, and the pages caught instantly. Years of lies—carefully inked, bound, stamped—blackened and curled. The fire devoured them hungrily, the pages crumbling into flakes of ash that drifted up toward the blackened rafters like the memory of something sacred being unmade. No one spoke as the ledgers burned. The room seemed to shrink, pulled tighter with every curl of flame. What had once been numbers and names and ledgers of tribute now hissed and turned to dust.

“Bring the heir,” Jaime said.

They pushed him forward a moment later, and Jaime looked at the boy like one might study a map of a land already lost. He was sixteen at most, tall but unsteady on his legs, as though his bones hadn’t quite grown into their skin. His eyes were swollen from crying. His lips trembled. His tunic was plain, hastily thrown on, probably yanked from a servant’s chest in the rush of fear. He stumbled to his knees without needing to be told. The boy’s hands clutched each other, white-knuckled, and he began muttering prayers—not to the Seven, not to the Old Gods, just muttering fragments of sound and sobs stitched together like someone trying to sew a shield from string.

“You’ll ride for the Wall,” Jaime said, his voice dry, almost bored. “Now. No possessions. No gold. If the Black Brothers refuse you, I’ll send them your head in a box.”

The boy nodded, jaw trembling. His forehead touched the stone a second later as he collapsed into a full kneel, tears smearing across the flagstones like saltwater on old leather.

“Take the daughters,” Jaime continued, without turning to look at them. “Marry them out. House Garrison. House Broom. No dowry. No title. Let them scrub floors and birth bastards. They carry the name of traitors. That’s all they’ll carry.”

Gasps rippled through the small crowd of servants and retainers who had dared to watch from the fringes. The younger girl—blonde, barely into womanhood—sank to her knees and began weeping into her skirts. The older one stood frozen, mouth slack, hands shaking at her sides. Neither made a sound. The weight of it silenced them both more effectively than any sword.

The air in the courtyard changed. Not grief. Not sorrow. Something older. Deeper. Fear—the real kind. The kind that coils in your gut when you realize the world you knew is gone, and nothing is coming to replace it.

This was not justice, this was erasure.

Jaime stood at the center of it, unmoved, armor dusted in ash, blood still dried along his gauntlets. He looked like a man carved from the same stone the castle was built from—older than he should have been, and harder than any one day should make a man.

“From this day forward,” he said, looking to the hall, the parapets, the eyes peeking out from behind wooden shutters, “there is no House Morell. No sigil. No name. No banners. Your bloodline is broken. Your gold belongs to the Rock.”

He turned to the steward, a skinny man with ink-stained fingers and cheeks sunken from too many sleepless nights.

“You have men in the mine?” Jaime asked.

“Y—yes, ser,” the steward stammered. “Thirty men. Maybe more with the hands—”

“Tell them to dig,” Jaime said, voice iron-flat. “Until there’s nothing left. Strip the gold from the walls. Strip it until they hit stone. And then keep going.”

The steward swallowed hard and nodded.

“If they die down there,” Jaime added, “bury them where they fall.”

A few men glanced at one another, unsure if they’d heard him correctly. Jaime didn’t clarify. He didn’t need to.

He stepped forward and slowly drew his sword—not for punishment, but for clarity. The sound of steel leaving its scabbard was like a bell in the stone hall. The edge gleamed faintly, catching the last light of the burning ledgers behind him.“There will be no rebellion here,” Jaime said, voice rising just enough to carry. “No whispers of treason. No revenge songs sung in secret halls. The gold that bought a boy’s death will be melted down, coined, and sent back to the Rock. Let every bannerman of the West carry a piece of that shame in their purse.”

He let the words settle before turning his gaze upward.

On the walls above the hall, four banners of House Morell still fluttered in the wind. They hung limp, barely catching the light, black badgers on a grey field—faded cloth, but still proud, still high. They flanked the entrance like guards, as if clinging to the last dignity of a house already in its grave.

Jaime raised a hand.

“Forley. The banners.”

Forley Prester turned immediately, already moving. Jaime didn’t need to explain. His second understood what was being asked, and more importantly, what was being undone.

Two Lannister men scaled the sides of the hall with ladders and rope, tearing the banners free from their poles. The cloth came down in folds—slow at first, then fast, like a curtain closing on a stage no one wanted to see again. The first fell to the courtyard with a soft flutter. The second snagged on stone and tore halfway down, the black badger twisting upside down as it sagged.

When they were all down, Forley carried them to the center of the yard and dropped them at Jaime’s feet.

They were old cloth, heavy with soot and weather, frayed at the edges where wind had chewed them through the years. The sigils were painted, not stitched, but the colors still clung to the threads. Jaime stared at them for a moment. Then he stepped forward and opened the tip of his wineskin. A splash of oil hit the banners, soaking in fast, darkening the grey.

Jaime bent down, struck flint, and let the fire take them.

It wasn’t fast. Cloth burned slower than parchment. The edges curled, blackening, the red-orange flame creeping up the badger’s snout like a slow rot. The smell of it—grease and old wool—curled in the nostrils. No one moved to stop him. No one dared.

“Lord Tywin would’ve hanged the whole household,” Forley said quietly beside him.

Jaime didn’t answer right away. He watched the last of the cloth collapse in on itself, nothing left but smoke and threads of glowing wire.

“Lord Tywin didn’t carry the boy,” he said.

And that was the end of it.

He looked out across the people gathered—the guards who had once stood straight and proud in Morell black and grey, now hunched like children in a thunderstorm. The maids. The stable boys. The septon, still weeping at the base of the stairs. All of them held in place by something heavier than fear: the knowledge that something had been broken, and it would never be rebuilt

He turned then—not toward the keep, but toward the grove at the far end of the yard. The godswood stood there still, untouched. The red leaves hung motionless in the still morning air. The weirwood’s carved face was faint but unmistakable, its eyes two deep red knots above a mouth that seemed less like a smile and more like an open wound..

But he didn’t go there. Not yet.

He walked to the boy’s body once more. Tion still lay beneath the blood-soaked cloak, small and silent, one hand curled awkwardly against his ribs. Jaime crouched down and lifted him again, slowly, as though the boy were something fragile and precious. He carried him through the center of the yard without a word.

No one dared speak.

The Lannister men parted. Jaime walked past them with the boy’s corpse in his arms, back toward the weirwood trees and the grove beyond the old wall. His boots left prints in ash and blood as he passed through the shattered courtyard, through the stench of burning parchment and scorched guilt, past the silent stares of servants and soldiers who no longer looked at him with awe or hatred or anything human. Only fear remained now. That, and silence.

Tion’s body was light. Too light. His limbs barely shifted as Jaime moved, bundled in the bloodied white cloak, his small face hidden beneath a flap of ruined wool. The boy felt like something unfinished. Something left out too long in the sun. He’d followed Jaime for one day and died for it. That was all. A boy who believed too much in songs, and in the wrong man.

They passed beneath a low arch where moss had grown thick over stone. Beyond it lay the godswood.

Not much of one.

A few trees twisted up from shallow earth, their roots raised like ribs pushing through skin. Their leaves had browned at the edges, starved of good rain, though the central weirwood still stood—narrow, slender, pale as bone. Its carved face, though softened by time, stared outward with the same eerie calm all weirwoods wore, as if it knew things it would never speak aloud.

Jaime paused beneath it.

He did not kneel.

He laid the boy gently at the foot of the tree, his hands moving slower now. There was no ceremony to it—just necessity. He folded the cloak tighter, adjusted the boy’s arm across his chest, and tucked the wooden lion beneath his fingers like a knight might be laid to rest with his sword.

He stood, looking down at what was left.

The tree loomed over them both, watching, impassive.

He remembered other weirwoods—Winterfell’s great red giant, gnarled with ancient grief. The quiet grove at Harrenhal, growing defiantly in a land of curses. This one was nothing like those. This tree was tired. Hollow. Its face, carved generations ago, had sagged with age, the mouth barely open, as if it had once tried to scream and had given up.

Jaime reached for the torch.

It had been burning since the ledgers were tossed in the fire. The flames curled around the pitch-soaked cloth like fingers, steady and hot. He looked down at it, then up at the tree. The godswood stood still.

No wind, no sound, only that old face, staring.

“Where were you?” he asked.

His voice was hoarse, not loud, but the quiet made it sound like thunder.

The tree didn’t answer.

“You watched a boy die,” he said. “Watched him bleed out alone in the mud. Not for treason. Not for ambition. Just for following a man who didn’t deserve to be followed.”

He stepped forward, holding the torch higher.

“You didn’t stop it. You didn’t send a dream, or a raven, or a whisper. You just watched.”

Jaime’s hand didn’t tremble. He pressed the torch to the roots first.

The bark hissed, darkening instantly. Sap boiled out from the wood, popping and blistering in the heat. He dragged the flame along the trunk slowly, like he was carving his own message into the bark. The lower branches caught next—dry, brittle things that cracked as fire spread through them in sheets. The leaves curled into themselves, black at the edges, then bursting into red-orange flame.

The mouth of the tree opened wider as it burned.

It looked almost like it was screaming now.

The light turned wild. Shadows flung themselves across the clearing like broken wings. The smaller trees nearby began to catch—first the leaves, then the trunks. The air filled with the smell of burning sap and old roots, thick and choking. The red leaves fell around Jaime like bloodstained snow.

Still, he stood there, torch raised.

Still, he watched.

“Where were you?” he whispered again, quieter now.

The tree’s face cracked.

A long, jagged line split the carving’s brow and ran down through one of the eyes. The heat deepened it. The weirwood groaned—not a voice, not truly, but something deep and mournful inside the wood, like breath escaping something ancient. The trunk split again, louder this time. A piece of burning bark fell inward.

Then the face caved in.

The tree collapsed in on itself with a roar. Fire poured through the hollow center, and a storm of ash belched upward into the sky, darkening the morning sun.

Jaime stood at the edge of it, face lit orange, watching the gods die.

When it was done—when the grove was nothing but flame and charcoal—he walked to where the boy still lay.

The heat rolled over the ground now, wild and hot, but he knelt anyway, resting one hand on the boy’s head.

“I tried,” he said softly, not knowing if it was meant for the boy or for himself.

Then he took the small lion carving—the one Tion had given him back in the guest room, the one with chipped paint and uneven legs—and pressed it into the ash where the weirwood’s roots had once sunk deep.

The carving sat crooked. Burned on one side. One leg shorter than the rest. But it stood.

He stayed there, crouched for a moment longer, then rose and turned toward the yard.

The air behind him was thick with smoke. The trees crackled and snapped. Somewhere in the haze, one of the guards retched into the dirt. Another crossed himself and muttered a prayer with trembling hands. Jaime said nothing.

He mounted his horse without a word, armor scorched, the white cloak at his back now only a memory.

He did not speak. He did not look back. And as the black smoke curled up into the morning sky and drifted east, the lion rode beneath it.

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Chapter Text

Chapter 4: The Lion Of Lannister

They rode through the hills in silence.

Not one man dared to speak. The horses moved slowly at first, picking their way over uneven ground and loose stone, but as the day wore on, the road smoothed and their pace quickened. The wind blew eastward. Behind them, smoke still rose from the bones of House Morell, blackening the sky with the last pieces of its name.

Jaime rode at the head.

He hadn’t changed his clothes. His cloak was gone—he’d left it behind, wrapped around the boy’s corpse, buried beneath the ashes of the godswood. His armor was soot-stained, his greaves scuffed, the lion on his breastplate dulled by smoke. He wore the same gloves he’d used to touch the torch to the weirwood.

He didn’t take them off.

Each time the wind shifted, the scent of char drifted forward—charcoal, blood, scorched wood. No matter how far they rode, it clung to him.

Forley Prester rode beside him for a while. The man said nothing. He’d stopped trying to make sense of it after the godswood burned. Eventually, his horse lagged behind. No one filled the space.

The landscape changed as they left the Morell lands. The hills grew taller. Thicker patches of forest lined the roads, though the trees still looked sick from the long drought. Villages came into view in the distance—small ones, half-abandoned, more dust than stone. Peasants stared from the fields, unsure whether to wave or run. Jaime didn’t acknowledge them. He kept his gaze ahead, fixed on the road that stretched like a scar across the land.

Midway through the afternoon, they stopped to water the horses. No one asked. The column just slowed and dismounted by silent agreement. Jaime took his horse to the stream alone. He knelt beside it, not to drink—just to look at his reflection in the water.

What stared back was not the Kingslayer. Not the white knight of court whisperings. Just a man with sunken eyes, stubble clinging to his jaw, blood dried along one cheek. The wind tugged strands of blond hair across his forehead, but they didn’t shine like they used to.

He reached down and plunged his hands into the water.

The cold bit instantly. He scrubbed at the leather gloves, rubbing them together hard enough to burn the skin underneath. The blood came off first. Then the soot. Then nothing. No matter how hard he scrubbed, the stink of smoke stayed.

He sat back on his heels, staring at his wet hands. Red patches bloomed along the knuckles where the heat had dried the skin beneath the gauntlets.

“Mercy,” he said quietly, to no one.

The word hung there for a while.

Then he stood, walked back to his horse, and mounted again.

They rode until the sun dipped low behind the trees.

That night, they made camp near a ruined tower. The stones had collapsed in on themselves years ago, but the walls still offered shelter from the wind. A fire was built. Food was cooked. No one asked Jaime to eat. No one brought him a plate.

He sat with his back to the tower wall, sword across his lap, and stared into the flames. One of the men approached with a cup of wine, but Jaime waved him off without looking.

When the fire died down to coals, the others went to sleep. Jaime stayed awake.

He listened to the night sounds—owls hunting, insects chirring, branches creaking in the wind. At one point, he thought he heard something in the woods beyond the ruin. He rose, sword in hand, but it was only a deer moving through the brush. Young. Unscarred. It didn’t see him.

He watched it vanish into the trees, then lowered his blade.

When he returned to the fire, he sat down in the cold ash left behind and laid the sword across his knees.

The only light left came from the moon.

He didn’t speak nor sleep.

He just waited for morning.

—

The red walls of King’s Landing looked too clean.

They rose behind the dust and stink of the outer city like a curtain drawn too tightly, pretending the capital wasn’t rotting behind it. The walls gleamed in the morning sun, banners fluttered like they had something to be proud of, and the guards outside the Mud Gate snapped to attention as Jaime approached—as if that meant anything now.

The gates swung open with the usual show. Trumpets rang out from above. Cloaks of gold and crimson snapped in the breeze. Somewhere nearby, a baker’s boy shouted about lemoncakes while the breeze carried the thick, salty rot of the fishmarket up through the teeth of the city. Jaime ignored the fanfare. He didn’t slow.

He rode in through the Mud Gate with dust on his boots and dried blood on his gloves. His horse, exhausted and half-lame, limped slightly—one of its shoes cracked from the ride north. The beast had bled in the fetlock by the time they passed the outer wall, and Jaime hadn’t spared the time to stop. He hadn't spared time for much. Not since the boy died.

He dismounted without ceremony outside Maegor’s Holdfast. The stableboy opened his mouth to speak, to offer help or take the reins, but one look at Jaime’s face stopped him cold. Jaime handed off the reins like handing over a corpse. The white of his cloak had turned a grim, crusted grey. Ash and blood streaked the hem. The lion on his breastplate looked dulled, as if even the metal had turned its eyes from what had been done.

Forley Prester moved up beside him, face pale from the journey. “Should I send word to the City Watch? Or to the Council?”

Jaime didn’t even turn. “Let him tell my Lord Father himself,” he said. “I’m done talking.”

He walked alone, through halls he’d known since boyhood. No escort came to meet him. None was offered. The guards stationed throughout the Keep—many of them wearing the Lannister lion—acknowledged him with silent nods. Not one smiled. Not one saluted.

They saw what he wore.

Not the cloak.

The Kingslayer, the man who burned down a Godswood.

By the time he reached the Tower of the Hand, Jaime was trailing the scent of old smoke and new steel. His boots left marks on the polished stone floors. He took the stairs two at a time, because standing still made it harder to breathe.

The doors to the solar were open.

Of course they were.

Tywin Lannister didn’t knock, and didn’t need knocking to know when someone was coming. Jaime stepped through the threshold without pausing. No point pretending this was ever going to be a conversation.

The solar was awash in sunlight that cut through the tall windows in long, diagonal lines. Maps lay spread across the great table—military placements, grain supply chains, taxation routes through the Riverlands, marked with brass lions and stag-shaped tokens. A single goblet of wine sat untouched on the table’s edge, next to a sealed letter broken only moments earlier.

Tywin stood where he always did, one hand resting lightly on the Westerlands, as if the stone and ink needed his touch to stay where they belonged.

He didn’t turn as Jaime entered. Only said, cool and measured, “You took longer than I expected.”

“I buried a boy,” Jaime said.

The words dropped into the chamber like a hammer. Tywin took a long, slow sip from his cup. He did not ask whose boy. He didn’t need to.

Jaime stepped closer to the table. He didn’t sit.

“I ended House Morell,” he said. “The mines are stripped. The lands are seized. The name is gone. They won’t rise again.”

Tywin nodded, his expression unmoved. “Good,” he said. “I trust you made it clear what happens to those who forget their place.”

Jaime didn’t answer.

There was no part of what happened that had felt like clarity. The boy’s blood hadn’t made a statement. It had made a mess. The fire hadn’t brought peace—it had burned something permanent out of him. Jaime had carried out the sentence, but when he walked away, he wasn’t sure which side of the blade he’d been standing on.

Tywin set the goblet down with a soft clink. Not sharp, not pointed. Just a sound of control. Everything with Tywin Lannister had a purpose, even silence. He studied Jaime more closely now, as if weighing not the words, but the residue they left behind.

“You burned the godswood,” Tywin said.

Jaime nodded. “Yes.”

“And the keep?”

“No. I left it standing.”

Tywin’s brow lifted—not in alarm, but in brief and unmistakable calculation. He didn’t frown. He didn’t curse. He simply adjusted his stance slightly, as though testing the weight of that choice.

“I assume you secured it for our own men.”

“Fifty guards, a steward, and a mining foreman from the Rock,” Jaime said. “The banners are down. The name is struck. It’s not a home anymore—it’s a ledger.”

Tywin inclined his head slightly. “Then you did well. We have too few strongholds near the coast to be wasting one for sentiment.”

“I didn’t leave it for sentiment,” Jaime said. “I left it so it would rot in plain sight.”

Tywin’s gaze didn’t flicker, but something in the line of his mouth shifted—approval, perhaps, though he’d never say it. He reached down and adjusted one of the brass tokens on the map—a lion, placed squarely at Lannisport.

“You speak as if you've done something unforgivable,” Tywin said, not looking up.

“I didn’t say unforgivable,” Jaime replied. “I said unforgettable.”

Tywin tapped one finger along the Westerlands. “Then you’ve succeeded. They will remember.”

Jaime’s hand curled slightly at his side, the leather glove stiff and creaking.

“Do you know the boy’s name?”

Tywin looked up again, slowly. “What boy?”

“The one who died,” Jaime said. “Tion. Tion Morell. The second son. He was the one who met me at the gate when I first arrived. Gave me a wooden lion he’d carved himself. Followed me into an ambush with a smile on his face and a broken wooden sword. He died trying to protect me. Bleeding out, shaking, and all he wanted to know was whether he helped.”

Tywin stared at him for a moment. “That’s the price of loyalty given to the wrong man,” he said. “It’s a lesson.”

“It was a child.”

Tywin’s tone didn’t change. “He was a son of a house that betrayed their oath. That makes him their blood, their consequence. We cannot mourn every child born into failure. That is the way of peace.”

“No,” Jaime said. “That’s the way of policy.”

Tywin didn’t blink. “You’ve spent your life watching kings die for mercy. Are you so eager to follow them?”

Jaime didn’t answer immediately. He stepped forward slowly, his boots loud against the stone floor. The air in the solar seemed to shrink around them. Even the sun filtering through the windows felt colder.

“I gave you what you asked for,” Jaime said. His voice had weight now. “I erased a house from the maps. I branded their sons and sold their daughters like they were nothing. I had their lord dragged to his own gate and hanged from the beam that failed to open when I rode in. I took a godswood older than their bloodline and burned it to the roots. I buried a boy who still thought knighthood meant something. Don’t ever call him a tool again.”

Tywin didn’t flinch. He didn’t retreat. But for once, he said nothing.

“You sent me to do what you didn’t want to be seen doing,” Jaime went on. “You let the court believe I wear white for the crown, but I came back soaked in ash and blood for your name. And now it’s done.”

Tywin moved a single weight from the Reach to the Stormlands, then looked back to Jaime with the faintest narrowing of his eyes. “You sound like a man asking for absolution.”

Jaime shook his head. “I’m not asking for anything. Not from you.”

“Then why are you here?”

“Because I wanted to see if you remembered the name,” Jaime said. “I wanted to know if the boy who died screaming in the dirt mattered at all to the man who gave the order.”

Tywin met his gaze, level and flat. “He mattered enough to send you.”

The words landed like iron.

The room went still. No quills scratching, no ravens cawing. Only the long, distant groan of timbers shifting as the tower settled in the noonday heat.

Then the knock came.

A knight stepped in, his armor polished, a lion sigil shining over his chest like a mirror. “Lord Tywin. The queen asks for Ser Jaime in her chambers.”

Tywin gave the smallest of nods, turning back to the map before the words were finished.

Jaime turned and walked out without waiting for dismissal.

His boots echoed down the corridor, heavy with ash and silence. He didn’t want to see her. He didn’t want to hear what he already knew would come—the knowing smile, the wine already poured, the soft venom in her voice when she reminded him just how inevitable this had always been.

He didn’t want her to tell him he was his father’s son now.

But he went anyway.

Because if he didn’t, she would come to him.

And he didn’t want her to find what was left of him on her terms.

—

The halls were warm. Too warm.

King’s Landing always stank in the heat—old piss, boiled onions, and roses crushed underfoot. The kind of heat that clung to your skin even in the shade, that made the stones sweat and the air inside the Red Keep feel thick with breath that didn’t belong to you. Jaime moved through the corridors without haste, his boots muffled on the woven rugs Tywin had imported from Volantis. The red walls rose high around him, blotting out the sun in strips of gold light, trapping him in a palace that looked more like a wound than a home.

When he reached Cersei’s chambers, the guards on either side of the door stiffened. They didn’t salute. They didn’t nod. They simply moved, wordless, stepping aside like furniture being rearranged. Neither looked him in the eye.

He didn’t knock. He hadn’t needed to since they were fifteen.

He pushed the door open and walked in.

Cersei was at the far window, her silhouette framed in green velvet and afternoon sun. The city lay sprawled beyond her, rooftops and spires flickering in the haze like a mirage. She held a goblet in one hand, the stem balanced delicately between two fingers. Her hair was pinned up, gold spun into a crown of braids. To anyone else, she would have looked like a queen painted by a careful hand. To Jaime, she looked like someone waiting to strike.

She didn’t turn.

“Well,” she said, voice light, effortless, “did the boy die prettily, at least?”

Jaime shut the door behind him with a quiet click. The sound seemed louder than it should have in the still room.

“He followed me into an ambush with a broken toy and a smile,” Jaime said. “He bled out asking if he helped.”

Cersei sipped from her goblet. Then, as if she’d just remembered he was there, she turned to face him. The motion was smooth, practiced—like everything she did when she wanted to appear casual. Her green eyes caught the sunlight, glinting cold above the rim of her cup.

“And did he?” she asked.

Jaime shook his head slowly. “No.”

“Then he died in service of the truth,” she said, lifting her glass again in mock toast. “That’s more than most get in this city.”

He stepped further into the room, boots silent on the polished stone. “You knew.”

Her expression didn’t shift. She took another sip of wine. Her lips, painted the color of dried cherries, pressed together gently.

“I suspected,” she said, as if discussing spoiled fruit. “The coin wasn’t reaching the Rock. Father wanted answers. You wanted to play at justice.” She turned slightly, wrist rotating the goblet in her hand. “Something was going to crack. It always does.”

Jaime watched her carefully, his eyes not moving from hers. “You had him killed.”

“I had nothing done,” she replied, still smiling faintly. “But I’m not surprised it ended in fire. You never were very good at restraint.”

The silence between them tightened.

Jaime took another step forward, slow and measured. The sunlight from the window caught the soot stains on his armor, the ash still clinging to the fine joints at his elbows and shoulders. He looked tired. Not the kind of tired that comes from days in the saddle, but the kind that comes from carrying something too heavy for too long.

“He was a boy,” Jaime said. “He trusted me. He followed me because he thought I was a knight.”

“Then he was an idiot,” Cersei said simply. “That’s not your fault. The world teaches children to believe in songs. You did him a favor by ending the story early.”

He stared at her. “Is that what this is to you? A lesson?”

“Everything is a lesson,” she said. “You taught the Westerlands what happens when they lie to the Rock. That’s what matters. Not the boy.”

“He died choking on his own blood,” Jaime said, voice low. “Calling my name.”

Cersei raised one eyebrow. “Would it have been better if he’d choked on someone else’s?”

Jaime’s hands clenched. He didn’t know when they had started to shake. He looked down at them—burned, blistered, still red from where the torch’s heat had licked through the gloves. He flexed his fingers slowly. They didn’t stop trembling.

“You think this was a success,” he said.

“I think it was necessary.”

“I burned a godswood.”

“You burned a lie,” she replied. “You did what Father never could: you made fear into faith. They’ll remember this, Jaime. Not because you were merciful. Because you weren’t. You taught them the only lesson that matters in this world—what it costs to forget who wears the lion.”

He stared at her for a long moment. Something flickered in his eyes—anger, or grief, or both wearing the same mask.

“You don’t feel it, do you?” he said.

“Feel what?”

“Anything.”

Cersei blinked slowly. “I feel victorious.”

“No,” he said, taking another step forward. “You feel nothing. Not for the boy. Not for the house. Not for what it took. You want to win so badly, you don’t care what’s left of you when you do.”

“You think this changed you?” she said, her voice sharpened now. “It didn’t. You’ve always been this man. The rest was just polish. You’re a Lannister, Jaime. A real one now.”

He looked at her for a long time.

Then, quietly, he said, “You sound like him.”

The silence that followed was not comfortable.

Her jaw set, just slightly. The smile was gone now.

“Then he taught me well.”

Jaime nodded once. He turned and walked out without another word.

She didn’t call after him.

Chapter Text

Chapter 5: The Things We Say in Ashes

The fire was dying, which suited Tyrion just fine.

Let the flames lower. Let the shadows stretch and the room grow dim. The night didn’t need light—it needed honesty, and too much light always ruined that. Tyrion poured himself another cup of wine from the Dornish bottle he’d opened hours ago, half-hoping it had turned sour while he wasn’t looking. It hadn’t. Too bad. He took a long drink anyway.

The parchment sat on the table like a corpse no one wanted to claim. A raven’s report from the steward at the edge of Morell land—formally scribed, respectfully titled, but written in a hand that betrayed more fear than reverence. Most letters asked for aid. This one simply described the aftermath, as if still afraid the fire might spread through the page itself.

Tyrion had read it twice.

He didn’t read it a third time.

Outside the window, the wind tugged at the towers of the Red Keep like a child pulling at a sleeve. Somewhere below, a dog barked. Somewhere closer, the city breathed with its usual stink of sweat, piss, and cooked garlic. He let it all wash over him and tried to think of a clever way to toast the end of a house.

Nothing came.

He reached for the cup again when the knock came.

He didn’t answer it. He didn’t need to.

The door opened.

Jaime stepped inside like a man who wasn’t sure if he’d be allowed. The whites of the Kingsguard had long since turned to ash. His gloves were still marked from the ride. His eyes, however, were clean—too clean, like someone had washed them with ice water and left them raw.

“You’re late,” Tyrion said. “I was beginning to think you’d gone off to burn another tree.”

Jaime closed the door behind him and didn’t smile. “It’s been a long ride.”

“So I heard. A dozen men say they saw the godswood go up in flames from three leagues off. It’s not every day a knight of the Kingsguard lights up a weirwood like a bloody bonfire.”

Jaime said nothing. He crossed the room, stopped near the hearth, and looked down at the coals. They glowed faintly—dim, slow, reluctant. Like even they didn’t have the strength to burn anymore.

Tyrion studied his brother in the flickering light.

“You know,” Tyrion said, swirling the wine in his cup, “when I heard the rumors, I thought to myself, ‘Surely not Jaime. Not my brother. He might kill a king, fuck a queen, and stab a dozen poor fools in gold cloaks—but burn a godswood? That’s beneath him.’”

Jaime didn’t look up. His eyes stayed fixed on the embers in the hearth, their glow licking at the dark like they were trying to remember how to be fire. “It was dry.”

“Is that your defense?” Tyrion raised one brow, setting his cup down on the table with exaggerated care. “‘It was dry, your honor. And terribly flammable.’”

“It wasn’t justice,” Jaime said, quiet now, like he was trying to convince himself more than his brother. “It wasn’t vengeance either. It was… something that had to happen.”

Tyrion leaned back in his chair and hooked one leg over the other, boot resting lazily on the edge of the table. The leather creaked. The shadows on the wall shifted. He studied Jaime—not just the lines of his face, which looked more carved than drawn, but the way he held his shoulders now, too still. A man whose armor had grown too tight, and not from pride. “Spoken like a man who’s been spending far too much time with Father. You’re starting to sound like a Lannister.”

Jaime’s lips moved, a twitch of something that might have been a smile in better years. “And what do I sound like the rest of the time?”

Tyrion didn’t answer right away. He tilted his head, weighing the question, then reached for his wine again. The cup felt heavier than it had an hour ago. “Like someone trying not to drown in a uniform that doesn’t fit.”

He saw the flicker in Jaime’s eye, just for a moment, before it disappeared again into that mask of stillness he’d perfected since coming home.

“They’re saying you hung Lord Morell without trial,” Tyrion said eventually, turning his attention to the fire, because looking directly at his brother made the truth sit worse in his throat. “Sent his heir to the Wall in chains. Married off the daughters to pig farmers and minor sheepfuckers. Burned the godswood, stripped the mines, and left a lion carving in the ashes like some twisted signature.”

“I did.”

Tyrion didn’t flinch. He’d expected denial, or at least weariness. But the admission came flat and unadorned, like a stone dropped in a dry well. “They’re also saying,” he continued, “that you killed the boy yourself. That you carved the sigil off the gate with your own blade. That the weirwood screamed when you burned it.”

“It didn’t scream.”

“I know,” Tyrion said softly, finishing his cup. “But the truth’s never half as interesting as the lies.”

Jaime finally looked up, and for a moment, Tyrion wished he hadn’t. There was nothing burning behind those eyes. No rage, no guilt. Just… quiet. And something hollow underneath it. “Do they think I wanted to?”

Tyrion gave a tired smile, more out of reflex than belief. “They think you’re your father’s son. That’s enough.”

The words hung there, suspended like smoke that refused to drift.

Jaime lowered himself into the chair across from Tyrion, not with the weight of armor but with the weight of everything that clung to him now—guilt, silence, memory. He didn’t sprawl like he used to, didn’t lean back or stretch out or tap the table in impatience. He just sat, as though movement itself was a cost too dear to pay.

“There was a boy,” he said after a long pause. “Tion. He gave me a wooden lion when I arrived. Said he carved it with his brother. Followed me with a toy sword. Died thinking he helped.”

Tyrion didn’t respond immediately. He looked at his cup, then at the bottle, and decided not to pour again just yet. “I know.”

“You read the letter.”

“I did,” Tyrion said. “Twice.”

There was a pause. Jaime gave a brittle sound, something that might have been a laugh in a younger version of himself. “And?”

“And I’d have burned it all too, if it had been me.”

“But it wasn’t you.”

“No,” Tyrion said, setting the cup down. “It never is.”

The fire in the hearth was down to its last red nerves now, casting long shadows that danced over the ceiling in slow, curling shapes. Outside, the wind scraped along the tower walls like claws. Somewhere far off, a bell chimed the hour—soft, distant, like a warning whispered too late.

“You didn’t come here for absolution,” Tyrion said finally. “You never do.”

“No,” Jaime replied. “I came to see if there was anyone left who’d tell me what it meant.”

Tyrion leaned forward, elbows on the table, his fingers laced. “It means they’ll fear you now. Even the ones who didn’t before. And fear?” He shrugged. “It makes for short memories. And long knives.”

“Do you fear me?”

Tyrion shook his head. “No. But then, I’m your brother. If you ever kill me, I’ll probably deserve it.”

Jaime didn’t laugh. Not even a flicker this time. He only stared into the fire like he could find something he’d lost between the embers.

Tyrion reached for the bottle, poured another cup, then pushed it across the table.

“Drink,” he said. “Gods know you need it.”

Jaime looked at the wine. He didn’t reach for it.

“Afraid it’ll taste like ash?” Tyrion asked, voice softer now, all the edge gone from it.

“It all does.”

That silence again. That awful, heavy silence that wasn’t really silence at all, because it was filled with the sound of what went unsaid—boys dying in the mud, fathers giving orders with wine in their hand, and the kind of fire you could never quite wash off your skin.

“They’ll call it a victory,” Tyrion said after a long moment. “They’ll say House Lannister doesn’t tolerate weakness. That the gold always comes, even if it’s soaked in blood.”

“Then they’ve learned what Father wanted them to.”

“And what did you learn?”

Jaime didn’t answer right away. He watched the fire until the last ember collapsed into itself with a soft hiss, and only then did he speak.

“I learned what it costs,” he said.

Tyrion didn’t reply. He raised his cup in a slow, solemn gesture that didn’t feel like a toast but more like a tribute, then drained it in a single pull. The wine hit his chest like a hammer, warm and deep, and didn’t help much.

They didn’t speak again.

Not because there was nothing left to say.

But because some truths, once spoken, linger longer in the quiet than in the telling.

Chapter Text

Chapter 6: Man Without Honor

The stink of old boar fat lingered in the corners.

Robert Baratheon leaned back in the great leather chair beside the hearth, one leg kicked lazily over the armrest, goblet sloshing in his hand. The room smelled of sweat, grease, and summer wine left to sour. Fire crackled in the grate. The walls were lined with trophies—tusks, antlers, swords no man had sharpened in ten years. A black banner drooped near the far wall, half-covered by dust and a stag’s antler nailed to the wood. Everything in the room was heavy. Everything was too much. And he’d built it that way. When he’d claimed this chamber, he’d told the servants to fill it with things that killed. Weapons. Animals. Men’s memories. No tapestries, no books. Just things that bled.

It was the only room in the Red Keep that didn’t pretend.

He drank.

The wine was strong, sour, a Dornish vintage that tasted like crushed stone and copper. He liked it. It reminded him of war.

From the hallway beyond the heavy oak door, he could hear the footsteps—steady, armored. Jaime Lannister. The golden ghost of a better age. Kingslayer. Oathbreaker. Bastard in a white cloak. And still the only man Robert trusted to guard his door when his back was turned. Because however much he hated the man, Jaime was the only one in the Keep who killed kings when they needed killing.

And that counted for something.

He shouted toward the door. “Kingslayer! Get in here before I fall asleep and dream of something worse than this miserable realm!”

There was a pause—just long enough for Robert to wonder if the man would ignore him, which would have been fair—and then the door opened.

Jaime stepped inside. He looked like something hauled out of a grave. His white cloak was stained grey, his boots still held dust from the road, and he smelled faintly of smoke. Robert watched him in the firelight and thought, That’s what a lion looks like after the feast ends.

“Close it,” Robert said, and Jaime did, the wood slamming shut behind him like the end of a sentence.

Robert didn’t rise. He waved vaguely to the second chair near the hearth. Jaime didn’t move to sit.

“Suit yourself,” Robert muttered. “I can’t get anyone to drink with me anymore. Cowards, the lot of them.”

“You’ve outlived most of your drinking companions,” Jaime said.

Robert grunted. “That, or I’ve scared them sober. But you—you always looked like a man who’d pour wine on a wound just to see what it screamed.”

“I’ve seen enough wounds for one week.”

“Ah, yes.” Robert drained half his goblet and wiped his mouth on the back of his hand. “Morell. Or what’s left of it. Word travels fast when fire’s involved.”

“I didn’t burn the town,” Jaime said. “Just the tree.”

Robert looked at him for a long beat, then leaned forward and set the goblet on the table with a dull thud. His fingers lingered on the rim, thick and calloused, trembling slightly—not from fear, but from drink and the steady collapse of a body that once carried a kingdom on its shoulders without buckling. “You say that like it matters.”

He pushed the goblet aside and sat back. His eyes, bloodshot and rimmed with exhaustion, didn’t waver. “You hanged a lord from his own gate. Sent his son north in chains. Turned the daughters into coinless broodmares and sent them off to scrub floors for men who can't spell their own names. And then—then—you burned the godswood. That part sticks, Jaime. That’s louder than the rest. That’s what they’ll write down when the bards are paid. And the bards always get paid. One way or another.”

Jaime didn’t blink. Didn’t argue. Just stood there, still as stone, his white cloak dulled to the color of ash and shadow.

“I did what had to be done.”

Robert scoffed. He reached for the dagger on the table—a short hunting blade, polished to a gleam, one of the only things in the room that still shone. He turned it in his fingers with practiced ease, letting it flash in the firelight. “Aye. That’s what we all say, don’t we? ‘Had to be done.’ Like it’s a spell. Like it buys back the part of your soul you just sold.”

He spun the blade once, then stilled it in his palm, watching Jaime with that heavy, animal stare he used to wear in the melee pits. “It’s the song we sing before the pyre’s even cold. I’ve sung it too. Loud. And often.”

Jaime didn’t answer. He hadn’t come to confess. Robert knew that. He hadn’t come for judgment either, or for a drink, or for one of Robert’s sprawling rants about courage and duty and the stink of kingship. He’d come because he’d been summoned. Because that was what you did when you wore the white cloak. You showed up.

Robert studied him anyway. Studied the way Jaime didn’t lean, didn’t slouch, didn’t twitch. Just stood. Like the flame that had been burning in him was burned out now, and only the shape remained.

“You remind me of me,” Robert said, and it wasn’t a compliment. “That should scare you.”

“I’m not scared.”

Robert snorted and sheathed the dagger. “Then you’re either a fool, or drunker than I am.”

He pushed himself up from the chair, and his joints cracked under the weight of his body. He wasn’t as fat as the court liked to whisper, but he was broader than he’d been at the Trident. His gut pressed against the leather laces of his tunic, his legs ached more than they should’ve after a short walk, and his heart—well, his heart had been tired for years now. Tired of being angry. Tired of pretending.

He walked to the window. The shutters were thrown wide, and the city stretched out before him like a blanket of rot and smoke. Torches flickered in the distance—Blackwater Bay’s reflection shivering with them. The rooftops glowed like dying coals. The wind brought in the scent of salt and fish, and something else. Something older. A memory, maybe.

“You burn a godswood,” he said, voice low, “people don’t forget that. You can hang a hundred lords, slit every bastard’s throat from here to Dorne, and they’ll still raise a cup to your name in some backroom tavern. But you touch the gods, and suddenly everyone gets pious. Even the ones who haven’t prayed since they buried their mothers start muttering about vengeance and signs.”

“I know what I did.”

Robert turned slowly. “Do you?”

His voice cracked—not loud, but sharp enough to cut the space between them like a knife.

“Do you know how many ravens I’ve read this week from the Riverlands? From the North? From some overfed septon down in Oldtown who thinks burning a tree is a sign of the Seven’s wrath? You’ve got the high lords clutching their pearls and the smallfolk whispering about curses in their soup. They don’t care about House Morell. They care that one of the Seven’s anointed lit a flame under their gods.”

He stepped closer, the floorboards creaking beneath his weight. The firelight caught the sweat beading on his brow, the faint tremor in his hands that hadn’t been there ten years ago. “You killed a house, fine. Maybe they deserved it. I don’t care. That’s how the game works. But you burned their gods. That part echoes. That part spreads. That’s the part that doesn’t stop.”

Jaime didn’t move. “Then let them fear me.”

“Oh, they do,” Robert said. “But fear’s like wildfire. You think you can hold it in a jar, aim it where you want. But it doesn’t stay where you tell it to. It jumps. It crawls. It gets inside your lungs and sets fire to everything you didn’t mean to burn. And by the time you realize it, you’re choking on your own legend.”

There was silence then. The kind that settles when neither man wants to keep talking but both know something still lingers in the air. Robert reached for the wine again. His hand was less steady than he wanted it to be.

He poured, drank, and wiped his mouth.

Then looked up and asked, “Did you enjoy it?”

“No.”

Robert nodded. “Good. That means you’re still alive in there somewhere.”

He moved back toward the table, slower now. The wine was starting to drag at him. Not the drunken kind, but the thick, syrupy pull of something that dulled the parts of him that remembered what it had felt like to win. He sat again with a grunt, poured another cup, and didn’t bother offering Jaime any. It wouldn’t do either of them any good.

“Cersei’s proud of you,” he said after a long silence. “She called it a masterstroke. Said even Tywin couldn’t have done it better. That’s what frightens me, Jaime. You’ve made her proud.”

Jaime’s jaw twitched. Just once.

“She’s not afraid of gods or fire,” Robert went on. “But she should be. And so should you.”

Jaime turned. He didn't bow. Didn’t offer some polished farewell. He turned because he was done. Because the room stank of truth, and truth always came with a cost.

He reached the door and placed a hand on the handle, ready to vanish back into the Red Keep’s arteries.

But Robert, suddenly, wasn’t done.

He spoke again, softer this time. Almost to himself.

“You should pray, Ser Jaime,” he said. “But maybe not to trees.”

—-

The godswood in King’s Landing was small. Tamed. The trees were soft-barked and ornamental, and the weirwood had no face.

Eddard Stark stood beneath its branches anyway, hands folded before him, breath visible in the chill of early morning. The city below was still half-asleep, save for the fishermen on the river and the guards yawning at their posts. A thin mist clung to the grass, silvering the roots. The light had not fully broken yet. It hovered at the edges of the world, waiting.

This godswood didn’t remind him of Winterfell. Nothing in this place ever did.

The trees here were young. Arranged. Shaped into pleasing arcs for courtiers to stroll through with their thoughts dressed up like wisdom. The weirwood, pale and silent, lacked a carved face. It hadn’t been marked by a First Man’s blade, hadn’t stared down generations. It was just a tree. And yet he stood before it as though it were more.

Not because it had power, but because it was the closest thing he had.

He was in King’s Landing for three days, no more. The excuse was grain negotiations—redistribution of Northern barley surplus to aid Crownland storehouses ahead of the winter Robert still refused to plan for. That was what the ledgers said, and the ravens. But Ned knew that wasn’t the reason Robert had summoned him. Not really.

The king hadn’t mentioned grain when he sent the raven. He hadn’t mentioned anything specific at all. Just a single line: Come south. I need eyes I trust.

That was all it had taken.

Now Ned was here, cloaked in fog and suspicion, in a keep that always smelled faintly of heat and rot, under a king who laughed too loudly and drank too much. The moment he’d stepped through the Red Keep gates, he’d felt the weight return—heavier now. Not just the ghosts of war, but the quiet decay of the realm. The rot had deepened in the years since he last walked these halls. He could see it in the banners, the cracked stone, the nervous looks between stewards. Tywin’s shadow was growing longer, and no one wanted to say it aloud.

He had seen the reports. Had read the letters. House Morell extinguished. Tree burned. Lord hanged from his own gate. The rumors were worse than the truth—and the truth was worse than war.

Ned had come to speak with Robert. He would. But not yet.

Not before finding silence. Not before finding what little peace could be salvaged from this place. Even a godswood like this—pruned, curated, emptied of faith—was better than nothing. Better than court.

So he stood beneath the faceless tree, waiting for the gods to speak.

They didn’t. They never did.

He sometimes wondered if they had stopped listening when he let his sister die. And he wasn’t alone.

He heard the quiet crunch of boots on frost before the man came into view. Not the heavy clanking of guards or the quick pace of messengers. A slower tread. Intentional. Familiar.

He didn’t turn. Not right away. He already knew who it would be. No one else walked like that in this city—like the path belonged to them.

Ser Jaime Lannister stepped into the clearing, dressed in the remains of white. The cloak had been freshly cleaned, but no amount of soap could erase the way the fabric moved now—stiff, heavy, like it remembered what had stained it. His hair was unbraided, falling loose around a face that looked like it had once belonged to a statue—beautiful in the way marble forgets how to feel. His sword hung at his hip, but his hand didn’t rest on it. He looked at the tree as if unsure what it was supposed to be. As if he knew it was supposed to mean something but couldn’t recall what.

“Stark,” he said, nodding. “Didn’t expect to find you here.”

“I might say the same.”

Jaime glanced around the grove. “There’s no face in the tree. Does it still count as godswood?”

“Not to the gods,” Ned replied.

A pause stretched between them. The morning birds were just beginning to stir in the higher branches. Far below, a cart creaked through the gates of the Keep.

“Did you come to pray?” Jaime asked.

Eddard looked at him. “Do you think they listen to men like us?”

Jaime smiled, but it didn’t last. “They didn’t seem to mind when I burned the last one.”

Ned didn’t rise to the bait. He turned back to the tree, his voice steady. “I read the reports.”

“Which version?” Jaime asked. “The one where I spared no one, or the one where I spared too many?”

“I read the truth between them.”

Another silence. Jaime shifted slightly, like he wanted to pace but knew it would make him look restless. “I was sent to make an example. I did.”

“You were sent to remind the realm that Tywin Lannister’s shadow still reaches into every corner of the West,” Ned said. “You chose to make it burn.”

“I did what needed doing.”

“No,” Ned said, turning to face him fully now, eyes calm, clear. “You did what you wanted to do. There’s a difference. One you used to know.”

Jaime’s jaw tightened. “Is this the part where you tell me about honor?”

“No,” Ned said. “This is the part where I tell you about consequences.”

He stepped closer, just one measured pace. Not a threat. Not a challenge. Just presence. “You hanged a man who begged for his son. You exiled a boy. You ended a bloodline with fire and ash and called it justice. Maybe it was. But don’t confuse justice with legacy.”

“I don’t want a legacy,” Jaime said. “I want peace.”

“Peace isn’t built on ash.”

“They lied. They stole from the Rock.”

Jaime’s voice didn’t shake. It didn’t rise. It was the kind of calm that had stopped being a choice.

“And that boy,” Ned said, and his voice was sharper now, a cut through the still air, “what did he steal?”

Jaime’s mouth didn’t move. His eyes flicked slightly, as if he were calculating whether the silence might be enough.

“Tion Morell,” Ned continued, stepping forward just enough for the words to meet Jaime head on. “Twelve years old. Tried to follow you with a wooden sword. Believed in the songs. Believed in you. And you buried him beneath a godswood you set on fire.”

Jaime turned his head slightly. He didn’t look away. But he didn’t answer either.

“I didn’t kill him,” he said finally.

“No,” Ned replied. “You just lit the match that made him think you were worth dying for.”

That landed. Not with a blow—Jaime wouldn’t react to that. But with something colder. Something slower. It wasn’t accusation. It wasn’t pity. It was truth. The kind that sat in a man’s chest for the rest of his life.

Jaime took a breath. The wind stirred the edges of his cloak. The fire had been scrubbed from the fabric, but not from him.

“You wouldn’t have done it.”

“No,” Ned said simply. “I wouldn’t have.”

He didn’t say it to claim moral ground. He didn’t need to. He said it the way you say your name. As a fact you know so well it doesn’t feel like pride anymore.

“I would have brought them to trial. And if they were guilty, I would have passed sentence and swung the sword myself.”

“I did swing the sword,” Jaime said.

“But you didn’t pass sentence,” Ned replied, voice low, level. “Lord Tywin did.”

That one struck deeper.

Ned watched it settle behind Jaime’s eyes, the way a stone sinks through still water. Not fast. Not dramatic. But final. Jaime looked down, just briefly, jaw tight. His hands were still at his sides, but there was a tension in them now—like they wanted to close around something that could still make sense.

“I never liked you,” Jaime said suddenly. The words came flat, but real. Not a jab. A truth.

Ned didn’t flinch. “I never asked you to.”

“You wear your righteousness like a sword,” Jaime said. “But you don’t know what it’s like to be raised with your name already whispered like a curse. You’ve never had to claw your way out from under your father’s shadow, only to find the whole world waiting to throw you back in.”

“No,” Ned said. “But I know what it’s like to bury a boy who thought the world was good.”

He let the silence stretch after that. Let the words sit in the cold air between them. The sound of wind through bare branches, distant seabirds, the shifting breath of the trees—the world didn’t rush to interrupt.

And the weirwood, faceless and pale, stood still.

Jaime shifted. Not out of discomfort—he was too trained for that—but out of something heavier. Maybe he didn’t know what it was yet. But Ned did.

“Why did you come?” Jaime asked finally.

“To see you.”

“Why?”

Ned looked at him fully now, not judging—measuring. “Because I wanted to see what kind of man sets fire to the gods and still calls himself a knight.”

That landed harder than any sword stroke.

Jaime didn’t reply.

The thing about Jaime Lannister—Ned had learned this long ago—was that he could wear silence like armor, but that didn’t mean he was untouched beneath it. And today, that armor looked thin.

“I’ve seen many kinds of men,” Ned said. “Cowards. Liars. Traitors. I’ve seen men who wept like children after swinging an axe, and men who smiled while gutting strangers for coin. I’ve seen murderers who begged for their mothers and lords who died with honor and no songs to mark it.”

He stepped closer. His voice didn’t rise, but it grew heavier.

“But I’ve only seen one man burn the gods because he thought it would silence what they saw in him.”

He waited.

No rebuttal came.

He turned then. Not sharply. Not to dismiss, but because the conversation had finished. The rest would be carried in silence. He walked slowly past Jaime, boots brushing frost, every step a closing sentence.

Before he reached the edge of the grove, he paused.

“My father used to say the gods speak loudest through silence,” Ned said, not looking back. “I wonder what they’re saying now.”

 And then he left. Jaime didn’t follow.

The godswood fell quiet again, save for the wind and the sound of birds overhead.

The tree had no face. But justice still watched, and the North would Remember.

Ned walked with slow steps, not from hesitation, but because he knew the weight of leaving a man behind when he was breaking, even if the man didn’t know it yet. His boots made soft indentations in the damp grass, and each step felt louder than it should have. Dawn had only just begun to bleed gold across the tiled roofs of the Red Keep. The city would be stirring soon. But for now, the godswood belonged to no one. Just roots, and memory, and the things men carried in silence.

His hands were cold. He hadn’t noticed that until he reached the archway that led back to the main path. He flexed his fingers once, twice, and only then realized how tightly he’d been holding them together at his waist while speaking to Jaime.

No sword, no threats, he thought. But the words drew blood all the same.

He paused under the stone arch. The red ivy clinging to it had started to brown. The leaves curled at the edges, drying too early in the season. He touched one without thinking and felt it crumble between his fingers.

Behind him, he knew Jaime still hadn’t moved. He didn’t need to turn to check.

The man stood like a statue. Not defiant. Not proud. Just… rooted. And Ned had seen enough trees in his time to know what rot looked like beneath bark.

He didn’t hate Jaime Lannister. Not truly. Hate was a hot thing, and whatever lived between them had long since gone cold. Distrust, yes. Disgust, maybe. But underneath that, something more complicated. The sense that here stood a man who had once been given every chance to be great—and had chosen to become something smaller, something sharper. A lion bent around a blade.

And yet—

There had been something in Jaime’s face today. Not remorse. Not repentance. Recognition. Like he’d seen his own shadow stretching longer than he meant it to.

Ned had known men like that. Not many. But enough.

The ones who didn’t flinch when they drew the sword, but flinched later—when the steel was sheathed and the fire was out and there was nothing left to hold but silence.

He looked back once.

Jaime was still staring at the tree. The one with no face.

It occurred to Ned, suddenly, that burning a godswood wasn’t just blasphemy. It was fear. A fear so deep, a man would rather destroy the eyes of the old gods than let them see him for what he was becoming.

He remembered something his father had told him when he was a boy, kneeling in the snow behind the great heart tree in Winterfell.

“The old gods see truth, Ned. Not just the lies we tell, but the lies we live. That’s why men fear them.”

He hadn’t understood it then.

He did now.

Ned turned again, this time for good, and began the walk back to his chamber. The hallways would be empty still. The courtiers not yet dressed, the servants busy at their quiet work. The city wouldn’t ask what he had seen in the grove. The king wouldn’t care. But Ned would carry this morning with him. In his shoulders. In the echo of his own voice speaking to a man who didn’t know how to answer.

Jaime Lannister had stood in a godswood without a face and claimed he wanted peace. But men like that didn’t get peace. They got memory. And memory had teeth.

Somewhere behind him, a bird called. Short and sharp. The sound cut through the morning air like a blade drawn across an old wound.

Ned kept walking. He didn’t pray.

The gods already knew what he thought.

Chapter Text

Chapter 7: The White Book

The heat of the Dornish evening was softer than most. The air outside the stone windows moved like silk, brushing over the marble floors and the sweat on Prince Oberyn Martell’s bare shoulders. The sun had just begun to bleed into the sea beyond the mountains. It touched the peaks with gold, but the gold meant nothing to him.

Below, Sunspear unfolded like a sun-drenched dagger; elegant, curved, deceptively beautiful. The Tower of the Sun rose behind him, carved from pale stone that caught every shade of dusk and held it like a lover. Its high windows were open to the breeze, narrow enough to fire from, wide enough to dream through. The Sandship, that long, low structure of domes and corridors, wound outward through the shadows like a serpent basking in its own legend. Courtyards bloomed in between—filled with orange trees, pomegranate vines, and the slow hiss of fountains that ran day and night with cool mountain-fed water. The scent of citrus and salt clung to everything, the way perfume clings to the skin hours after a lover has left.

The streets of the Old Town curved like fingers around the tower's base, stone buildings rising in uneven stacks, painted in sun-faded reds and ochres. Merchants still called to one another as they packed up their carts, and the smell of roasted lamb, saffron, and cloves still clung to the breeze. Somewhere beneath the rooftops, a woman sang in the Braavosi tongue. Children laughed near the Water Gardens—sharp, untroubled laughter that belonged to those too young to remember war and too clever to be caught by the heat.

The sea, visible from the open arch behind him, glittered like black glass beneath the descending sun. Ships rocked lazily in the harbor, sails furled. Beyond them, the world stretched out—green and gold and blue, distant and dangerous.

Sunspear was not a city of walls. It was a city of wind and stone and open sky. It did not need to hide behind towers. It stood tall and bare and proud, a place that endured not by denying its pain, but by learning how to wear it without shame. Its heat did not smother—it revealed. Its courtyards did not conceal—they welcomed.

He had seen prettier sunsets. He had watched the sky burn over the fields of the Reach, on bloodied grass and broken armor. He had stood on the docks of Lys while a whore with emerald eyes whispered prayers in his ear, and the clouds above them split like smoke rising from the old temples. The world loved to set itself on fire. The only question was who lit the match.

He turned the letter over again.

Parchment, cracked seal, a Lannister lion pressed into the wax.

He had already read it twice. He wasn’t sure why he read it a third time. The words hadn’t changed.

He sat with one leg thrown over the arm of the carved cedar chair, wine untouched beside him. The goblet was sweating in the heat, a single bead rolling down the silver rim like a slow tear. The scent of orange blossoms drifted in from the courtyard below, carried by a breeze that brought drums from the city’s lower quarters—celebration for some festival Oberyn had no patience for tonight.

“House Morell has been extinguished by the order of the Lord Hand. The King’s Justice was carried out by Ser Jaime Lannister. The household is broken. The sons removed. The daughters scattered. The godswood burned.”

That was the line that kept circling him. Not the deaths. Not the hangings. Not the talk of mines and ravens and traitor’s gold.

The godswood burned.

It wasn’t Jaime’s style, not really. Jaime Lannister was many things: arrogant, dangerous, golden with the self-assurance of a man who had never been told no. But he had always struck Oberyn as someone who played at honor because he couldn’t stomach what sat beneath it. His sword had never made Oberyn flinch. His silence had.

Burning the tree, though—that was something else. That wasn’t justice. That wasn’t punishment. That was a message. And not to the Morells.

To the realm.

Oberyn rose from the chair. He crossed the stone floor barefoot, stepping into the shaft of gold light that poured from the tall window. The world below him glowed with dying day. Sunspear was always beautiful in the evenings, its towers lit with orange and rose and flame. He watched a hawk circle once above the rooftops, then vanish into the air as if swallowed whole.

He thought of Elia.

He did not mean to, but he did nonetheless.

Not of her blood, not of her screams. He’d thought enough of those. No, tonight he thought of her laugh. Of the way she used to sit on the balcony above the Water Gardens and listen to the children’s songs, humming them under her breath like she’d written them herself. Elia, who had smiled so gently it seemed an insult to the world when it stole her breath.

You know who did that, a voice inside him said. You’ve always known.

And now the Kingslayer rode beneath a white cloak and a crown’s favor, burning the old gods like they were kindling for a lion’s fire.

Oberyn leaned one hand against the stone window frame, fingers splayed. His nails were clean, his knuckles scarred. Every mark told a story. He’d broken two fingers on a Myrish nobleman’s jaw. Another, on the hilt of a spear that split a sellsword’s spine in two.

He had not yet broken anything for this.

But he was beginning to feel the itch.

Behind him, the door creaked.

It would be Dorea or Loreza. He didn’t turn. “I said I wanted no company tonight.”

“It’s me,” said a low voice. Ellaria Sand, his paramour and lover.

Oberyn glanced over his shoulder, already knowing her shape before his eyes confirmed it. She was barefoot too, as she always was in the warmer months, her feet silent on the tile. Her hair hung loose, dark waves brushing her collarbone, the kind of unstudied elegance that made silks look foolish. She wore only a simple linen shift, damp at the hem where she’d walked through the courtyard’s dew. No perfume. No gold at her wrists. Just the quiet presence of a woman who never needed to announce herself.

She didn’t smile. Neither did he.

“Another letter?” she asked, her eyes flicking to the parchment on the low cedar table.

“From King’s Landing,” he said.

She moved closer, stopping just behind him. The scent of her skin reached him before her breath did. Sand, salt, something faintly sweet—sunlight, he often thought, if sunlight could linger on a person. “Tywin?”

“No.” He picked up the parchment between two fingers and waved it lazily, like a fan dispelling smoke. “His son.”

Her pause was brief, perceptive. “The pretty one?”

“The Kingslayer,” Oberyn responded. “They say he rode into the West in white and came back in fire.”

He let the words hang there, drifting in the heat. Outside, the drums had grown softer, the distant sound of celebration folding into the rustle of palm leaves in the courtyard. Somewhere below, a night bird called once. The stars were starting to show, but the sky was still purple with heat.

Ellaria moved to the table, picked up the goblet he hadn’t touched, and drank without asking. The wine was red and sharp—Myrcella grapes, chilled slightly to fight the heat. She set it down with a gentle clink. “Why does it bother you?”

Oberyn turned toward the window again. The light was gone now, but the afterglow painted the stone walls in shades of rose and ash. “Because I’ve seen men burn before. And I’ve seen what they become afterward.”

He didn’t say where. Didn’t have to. Ellaria knew his past well enough to understand what kinds of fires he meant. The kind that burned cities. The kind that left nothing but the story you told afterward. The kind that silenced screams.

“You think he’s dangerous?” she asked.

“I think he’s becoming something,” Oberyn said. “And I don’t know what it is yet. But I know the shape of ambition when it starts hiding behind silence.”

He closed his eyes for a breath, let the wind slip through the open arch, stirring the sweat-damp curls against his neck. The air smelled faintly of old stone and flowering citrus.

“Burning the gods,” he said, voice lower now, “is not about power. It’s about what you want the world to forget.”

Ellaria stepped beside him, arms crossed loosely, watching his profile. “You think he’s trying to erase something?”

“No,” Oberyn said, turning his head just enough to see her. “I think he’s trying to replace something. A story. A name. A memory.” His voice was flat, but his jaw tightened with the words. “And the last time a Lannister tried to rewrite the story, it ended with my sister’s blood on the walls.”

The silence after that was not empty.

It was heavy, like the air before a sandstorm.

Ellaria’s hand found his. She didn’t interlace their fingers. Didn’t squeeze. She simply touched his skin—enough to remind him that someone was there. Enough to keep his rage from sharpening into something too cruel.

She never told him to move on. Never once asked him to stop carrying the weight. That was why he loved her. Not because she softened him—but because she never tried.

He looked down at their joined hands, then at the wine, then at the letter again.

“I don’t trust quiet fire,” he said. “It burns colder. Longer. It leaves no bones.”

Ellaria studied him. “You think he’s doing this for Tywin?”

“I don’t know,” Oberyn said. “Maybe he wants to impress his father. Maybe he wants to silence him. Doesn’t matter.” He looked out again, toward the dark. “When men like that finally choose who they want to be, it’s always too late.”

For a long time, neither of them moved. The wind picked up, brushing their robes, carrying with it the scent of cooked dates and oil from the market below. The sounds of laughter drifted up from the lower terraces. Oberyn didn’t smile at it. Joy always sounded too far away these days.

He reached for the letter. Folded it with care. Each crease was sharp, precise. Deliberate. He tucked it into the sash at his hip as if it were a blade.

Ellaria tilted her head. “What will you do?”

“Nothing,” Oberyn said. “Not yet.”

“Then where are you going?”

He was already walking toward the door, bare feet silent on the stone.

“To the courtyard,” he said. “To sharpen something.”

—

The stairs wound upward like the spine of some coiled beast, stone slicked smooth by centuries of hands and boots and silence. Jaime climbed without hurry. His boots echoed softly against the walls, and the only other sound was the faint tap of his scabbard knocking against his hip.

The White Tower had always felt colder than the rest of the Red Keep. Not by wind or season, but by something older. The kind of cold that seeped in from legacy, not air. There were no banners here. No torches crackling in defiance. Just narrow windows, pale stone, and the quiet weight of names.

He reached the top, turned the final bend, and pushed open the door.

The room inside was small. Round. Empty of all but meaning.

The walls were lined with swords—not ornate ones, not trophies, but the real kind. Blades that had been carried by men who died with honor or shame or both. There was no dust on them. No tarnish. Only silence.

At the center of the room sat the table.

And on the table, the book.

The White Book. The Book of Brothers. Seven hundred years of names and deeds, written in careful, practiced hands. No flourishes. No embellishments. Just the truth, or what passed for it in ink. Men wrote their lives here one line at a time. Some were remembered. Most weren’t. But all of them had been seen—by someone.

Jaime stepped inside and closed the door behind him. The latch caught with a soft clack, sealing him in with names far older than his own.

He didn’t light the brazier. The dusk coming through the windows was enough. Dim, fading, uncertain. Like memory.

The room smelled of vellum, old leather bindings, faint dust, and iron polish. Even the air here felt slower. He’d come up these stairs a hundred times as a boy—chasing stories, chasing Ser Arthur Dayne’s shadow, chasing the idea of what a knight was supposed to be. He hadn’t understood then that you could bleed on the page the same as on the battlefield. He hadn’t known how long a blank space could stare back.

He walked to the table.

The book was already open. It always seemed to know.

He looked down. His page was half-full.

The left side held what couldn’t be argued: Jaime Lannister, son of Tywin Lannister, born in the year 262 AC. Sworn brother of the Kingsguard in the reign of King Aerys II Targaryen. Knighted by Ser Arthur Dayne at age fifteen. Commanded the rear guard during the Defiance of Duskendale.

The right began with the words no one spoke aloud in his presence anymore.

“Slayer of King Aerys II, the Mad King, at the sack of King’s Landing.”

And then it stopped. A long blank stretch of pale parchment.

Waiting.

He stood for a while without sitting. His hands rested on the edge of the table, fingers curled slightly. His gloves were off. He wanted to feel the grain of the wood, to hold something real. Something that wouldn’t turn to ash in his grip. The table was smooth, carved from some old Westerlands oak he half-recognized. Maybe it came from his father’s forest. Maybe not. It didn’t matter. It was still steadier than he felt.

He had stood at other tables like this. Tables with blood on them. With wine. With maps and strategies and silent accusations. But this one was different. This one wasn’t built for speaking. It asked nothing of him—only that he remember.

He sat.

Slowly. Deliberately. No ceremony. Just movement that felt heavier than it should.

The chair creaked beneath his weight.

The inkwell sat nearby, half-full, a thin sheen of stillness over the black. The quill rested beside it, its shaft worn smooth where dozens of men had held it before him. He picked it up and turned it in his fingers once. The weight was surprisingly light. Not what a sword should be. Not what his name had become.

He hadn’t written anything in years.

He dipped the quill, just once, just enough, and let the excess drip back into the well. The ink gathered at the tip, dark and fat like blood waiting to be spilled.

Then he hovered it over the page. It didn’t move.

He stared at the blank space.

The names of other men surrounded him. Names that had faced worse. Names that had survived. Names that had failed. And none of them could help him now.

He could write about House Morell. The mines. The missing gold. The hanging. The exile. The daughters. The godswood. The boy. He could write a hundred words that all felt like punishment, and none of them would bring peace.

He could write about justice. About duty. About the command he’d been given. He could write that it had to be done.

But he’d said those words already. They rang hollow now.

He could write what Tywin would want to see: that his son had restored order to a faltering bannerman, reclaimed the gold of the Rock, made the West strong again.

He could write what Cersei would smirk at behind her goblet: that fear was sharper than love, and far more useful.

He could even write what Robert might laugh at drunkenly—that a Lannister can swing harder than the king when he’s angry enough.

But none of it would be true.

Because when the tree caught fire, when the boy stopped breathing, when the last gods looked at him with eyes carved in wood, none of them had been there. None of them had smelled the sap go black. None of them had lifted a boy’s body with hands that couldn’t stop shaking.

He thought of Tion—grinning with that stupid lion in his hand, asking if he'd helped. He thought of Tyrion, watching him without judgment but also without rescue. He thought of Ned Stark, saying nothing cruel, just saying enough. And he thought of Robert, warning him that wildfire always spreads.

He thought of his own silence.

He pressed the quill to the page.

The tip touched the parchment.

It didn’t move.

The ink began to dry at the edge.

He wanted to write something small. Something simple. Something true. But the only truth he could summon was this: that he didn’t know who had come back from the West. Only that it wasn’t the boy who’d put on a white cloak believing it meant something.

He sat there for a long time.

The shadows in the tower shifted. The sun dipped further below the windows. The light turned from gold to blue. Then dusk. Then almost nothing at all.

And then came the sound.

Bootsteps.

Not hurried.

Not loud.

Measured.

Deliberate.

He didn’t look up.

The door opened behind him.

He knew who it would be before the man crossed the threshold.

The boots made that clear. No clatter. No swagger. Just the even, rhythmic tread of a man who had nothing to prove and nowhere to hurry to. The kind of walk a knight earns, not adopts.

Jaime didn’t look up.

He didn’t need to.

Ser Barristan Selmy the Bold, Lord Commander of the Kingsguard stepped into the chamber with the kind of quiet that didn’t ask permission. The door whispered shut behind him. He didn’t speak. Didn’t clear his throat. The air changed anyway. Like a cold wind finding its way through old stone.

Jaime stayed seated, hand still hovering above the White Book, the quill in his fingers grown stiff with dried ink. The page below him remained blank. The quill had not moved. Neither had he.

For a long moment, the only sound was the wind pressing softly at the high windows.

Ser Barristan stood just within the edge of the chamber, his posture straight, his face unreadable. He wore the white—not the pristine sort paraded before court, but the working kind, touched by travel and age, crisp with purpose. He carried no sword, but Jaime had never needed reminding of what Barristan Selmy could do with one.

When the silence had stretched to the edge of breaking, the older knight stepped closer. Not to the table. Not to confront. Just far enough that his presence could no longer be mistaken for anything but a witness.

“I heard you’d returned,” Selmy said, his voice low and clear, but without an edge. “I thought I might find you here.”

Jaime didn’t respond immediately. The words hadn’t surprised him. The voice hadn’t either. He’d expected some reckoning—some moment where the older man with the straighter spine and cleaner record would stand across from him and finally say what the rest of the realm only whispered.

But there was no accusation in Selmy’s tone. No disdain. That was worse.

Jaime stared down at the blank space on the page. “I thought you might be dead.”

“That day will come,” Barristan said simply. “Not today.”

A pause stretched between them again, deep and quiet, the kind of silence that wasn’t waiting to be filled. The kind that only came when both men in the room had lived long enough to know what their words were worth—and what they weren’t.

“You came to see what I’d write,” Jaime said, his voice low but steady.

“No,” Selmy replied, standing just beyond the edge of the table. “I came to see if you’d write at all.”

The words landed heavier than any rebuke, because they came without judgment. No venom. No challenge. Just a quiet observation from a man who had spent his life writing the truth in steel and silence. Jaime let the quill drift downward until it touched the page again, not with intent, but with weight. A smear of ink marked the bottom edge—accidental, imperfect, unclean. He didn’t wipe it away. He only stared at it.

“I’ve been sitting here an hour,” he said, voice soft, hollow at the edges. “Maybe longer. I’ve had all that time to decide what I am.”

“And?” Selmy asked, calm, unmoved.

“I don’t know.” Jaime didn’t raise his eyes. He didn’t need to. “I only know I’m not who I was when I took the cloak.”

“That’s true of every knight in this book,” Selmy said. His tone didn’t shift. He wasn’t comforting him. He wasn’t dismissing it. It was just fact—old and weathered and true.

Jaime looked up at him for the first time since he’d entered. “But they wrote anyway.”

“Yes,” Barristan said. “They did.”

Another pause stretched between them, not cold now, but full. Jaime looked back at the parchment. The blank space seemed smaller than it had an hour ago. Not less empty — just less impossible.

“What would you write,” Jaime asked, “if it were you?”

Selmy didn’t answer quickly. He folded his hands behind his back, the way he did in court, but there was no formality in the gesture now. Just stillness. His white cloak caught the dying light of the window, softening into shadow.

“I would write the truth,” he said. “Not all of it. Not every truth needs ink. But enough.”

Jaime gave a small, bitter smile. It didn’t last long. “You think truth has room for a godswood burning and a boy dying with a toy sword in his hands?”

“I think the truth has room for failure,” Selmy said. “And I think the page waits for men who are not finished yet.”

Jaime looked down again. He hadn’t thought of himself as unfinished in years. He’d thought of himself as already weighed and found lacking, hung from the gallows of history by a name that wasn’t ever truly his own. But maybe Selmy was right. Maybe some men didn’t get to finish until after they were broken. Maybe there was still room, even now, for something other than ruin.

He sat back slightly, the chair creaking beneath him again. His hand moved to the page. The ink was still wet at the quill’s tip, just barely. He let it linger there.

“You knew Aerys,” Jaime said.

“I served him.”

“Did you believe in him?”

Barristan didn’t blink. His gaze moved to the book and then back to Jaime. “I believed in the crown. It took me too long to see the difference.”

The room felt smaller for a moment—not because it closed in, but because the walls remembered. These stones had heard men speak of kings before. They’d watched vows be taken, and names be forgotten. The White Tower didn’t care if you were proud or broken. It only cared if you had the courage to record the difference.

Jaime didn’t thank him. There was no need. Selmy hadn’t come to offer kindness. He had come to be seen—and to see. That was enough.

They stood in silence once more. But this time, the silence didn’t choke. It wasn’t a reckoning. It was an acknowledgment. Jaime was still seated. Still uncertain. But he was no longer drowning in it.

Selmy turned to leave. He paused at the doorway, hand resting on the carved iron handle.

“You can’t burn your way clean, Ser Jaime,” he said, without looking back. “No matter what the songs promise.”

Then he left.

Jaime was alone again.

The chamber swallowed his footsteps and folded back into silence.

The ink was fresh, the quill was light.

He looked at the book, at the name he’d carried his whole life, at the blank space waiting for him to decide what pieces of himself were worth preserving.

He didn’t write a list of victories, he didn’t write the word “justice,” he didn’t explain, he didn’t ask to be understood.

He wrote a single paragraph—short, unadorned, without excuse.

“Rode against House Morell at the command of the Hand. Executed Lord Morell for treason. Sent the heir to the Wall. Ordered the mines stripped. Burned the godswood. Buried the boy himself. Returned to court with silence.”

He paused.

Then, below that line, smaller:

“The cloak does not change the man. But the weight may yet shape him.”

He placed the quill down.

He did not read what he’d written.

He stood and closed the book.

And for the first time since returning to the city, Jaime Lannister felt the silence around him not as judgment—but as a kind of quiet, aching truth.

He left the White Tower without looking back.