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Divide and Conquer, Chapter 11: Iron and Gold
🕑 Added 2024-10-28 14:50:58 +0000 UTCFourth Moon, 102 AD (1 AC)
Rhaenys
Together as one, with their bond open to the fullest and their minds linked, Meraxes and her dived towards Castle Drumm, weaving in and out between volleys of arrows and scorpion bolts that bounced off of Meraxes’ scales harmlessly. The Westerlanders holding the castle were desperate, knowing that there was no escape for them.
Without even a word, her dragon’s silver-gold flames emerged from her maw, spraying the battlements with dragonflame and blasting through the gates and into the courtyards, setting fire to everything within. Unlike the towns and castles in the Riverlands all those years ago, or even the castles that she had taken in the Westerlands with Aegon before her redeployment here, there was no need for her to hold back now. Meraxes and her both relished in the feeling of cutting loose. They burned and burned until the castle was only crumbling rubble and its entire garrison had perished.
With her work complete, Rhaenys turned Meraxes around and flew to the northwest where her army had camped below Nagga’s Hill. She landed her dragon near the top of the hill, right where the bones began rising from the ground. Forty-four stone ribs that almost resembled large white trees, each of them as wide as a dromond’s mast and twice as tall. According to legend, the Drowned God the local barbarians worshipped had been responsible for turning the old sea dragon’s bones into stone to immortalize the Grey King’s victory over her.
Though she maintained her belief in the superiority of the dragons of the sky, Rhaenys could not help but feel impressed and awed every time she set sight on Nagga’s bones. How large and immense she must have been when she had been alive! Even Balerion would be dwarfed by the enormity of the sea dragon.
As she dismounted her dragon, she saw her cousin Jacaerys waiting higher up the hill, a party of guards with him, both hers and his. The Dragonguard and Velaryon guards all bowed to her as she walked up beside where her cousin was standing overlooking the encampment and the smoldering ruins of Castle Drumm in the distance.
“I saw you destroyed the castle,” he said simply as she arrived.
“You didn’t say not to,” Rhaenys replied smoothly.
Jacaerys simply sighed. “Fair enough. I’ve already ordered the army to move into the ruins and see if there’s anything that needs to be done, once the fires burn out that is.”
Some settlements that Jacaerys had asked her to spare she had, such as the town of Lordsport, the largest and richest town in the Iron Islands and his intended seat as Warden. For others however, examples had to be made.
Castle Drumm had simply been the latest in a long list of things that Rhaenys had destroyed in the islands. It was still in a better state than Castle Pyke was after she had eviscerated its swaying rope bridges and melted the towers of the castle into the keep itself, leaving the burnt-out husk to stand on that eroded cliff in the ocean like the shell of a dead sea creature.
Aegon had never given her instructions to do any of this but he had not told her to stop either when she had informed him of it. Most of the castles in the Iron Islands just weren’t valuable enough to go to the effort of restraining Meraxes from simply destroying them and annihilating all of their garrisons. None of them even had their treasuries anymore as the Lannisters had carried all the ill-begotten riches of the Ironmen back home to the Westerlands where Aegon was leading a far less destructive campaign than she was.
The castles she was destroying could be rebuilt anyway or they could build new castles in far better positions than the old ones had been. She somehow doubted Pyke would ever be rebuilt given how precarious its position on that eroded cliff was and that was good. Let it stand as a symbol of her family’s power and the might of their dragons. Not nearly as impressive an example as Harrenhal would have been no doubt but she was sure that it would suffice until her siblings and her found a better one.
Her seemingly wanton destruction had made her campaign subjugating the archipelago much quicker too and it had allowed her to make short work of Gerold Lannister and his fleet that had so badly defeated their own when Visenya was incapacitated, catching them off guard when she obliterated them alongside the port they had been moored in at Saltcliffe. Almost the entire archipelago save Lonely Light was under her control now, even if the work was far from done and there was much resistance still in the interiors of some of the islands like Great Wyk.
“If you want to rebuild Castle Drumm for yourself or for whoever we choose to hold this island, the Crown will help fund it,” she said to her cousin, reminding herself that while it was an enemy castle, it was still part of the Ward her cousin was meant to rule.
Jacaerys shook his head though. “Thank you, but I think rebuilding Castle Drumm would be pointless. I would appreciate if I could have the island for myself along with your help in funding the construction of a castle around the very hill we stand on though.”
“Oh?” Rhaenys raised her eyebrow, intrigued by her cousin’s idea.
“Yes,” he said with a smile, looking at the bones around them. “I think these bones are too fascinating to not be protected by a castle. Not to mention I hear that this hill is a holy site to worshippers of the Drowned God. Having it in our control will undoubtedly help with controlling the adherents of that religion.”
“If there are any left,” Rhaenys japed darkly.
The Westerlanders had been exceptionally brutal when they had been conquering the Iron Islands. Revenge for millennia of raiding and raping. They had freed all the thralls and killed all the men of every noble house and carried the women back home to the Westerlands as trophies. Meanwhile many of the common people had been massacred for their stubborn defiance and the Priests of the Drowned God and their acolytes, the Drowned Men, had been hunted down and killed to the last whenever the Westerlanders could get their hands on them.
One such massacre had taken place right here, atop Nagga’s Hill. A priest by the name of Lodos who claimed to be the Drowned God’s living son had gathered thousands of his fellow priests, their acolytes, and many more fanatic reavers and smallfolk to Nagga’s Hill where Lodos had been crowned King of the Iron Islands with a driftwood crown and prayed to his supposed father to send krakens from the deeps that would destroy Loren Lannister’s invading fleets.
When that didn’t happen, Lodos had put stones in his robes and attempted to lead his host into the sea to seek ‘counsel and protection’ from the Drowned God, but before that could happen, the Westerlanders had fallen upon them and massacred them all, painting Nagga’s white bones red for months before the rain had finally washed it away. Even now Rhaenys could still see some of the bloodstains on the bones from that massacre.
It had been a strange experience for the Rivermen in her host to see the Ironmen they had hated for so long begging them to save them from the Westerlanders but it had made their control over the Iron Islands easier, as depopulated as they were. Right now, Rhaenys just had to clean up any last strongholds of Westerlanders and Drowned God fanatics before they could really get to work consolidating the islands under her cousin’s Ward. It was just unfortunate that many of the former thralls which had already been freed by the Westerlanders had sided with them instead, wanting to see the cycle of revenge and bloodshed continue.
The Iron Islands had been shattered by the Westerlander invasion and the old ways of reaving and raping were pretty much gone. While many of the common people still prayed to the Drowned God out of tradition, their faith was all but destroyed. Many despised the Faith of the Seven though and would not convert to it since it was the religion of their invaders and so they had instead taken to adopting Exceptionalism and/or the Valyrian gods and other gods of Essos. Others had even taken to worshipping the Storm God instead of the Drowned God, seeing Rhaenys on her dragon Meraxes as some champion sent by the Drowned God’s rival to save them when the Drowned God had turned his back on them.
A lot of work would have to be done to rebuild the Iron Islands after all the devastation. Settlers would have to be brought in from the Riverlands to help repopulate the islands and this would further weaken and destroy the old Ironman culture and help to shape it into one that would be useful to Rhaenys and her house. Most importantly of all however, they had to give the Iron Islanders lucrative alternatives to reaving otherwise their cultural reformation may not truly cement.
Fortunately, despite their apparent barrenness, there was a lot of economic potential in the Iron Islands. There were of course the iron mines which contained truly staggering amounts of iron, more than any other known source in the world some had even said. Other ores and metals such as lead and tin were found in large amounts on the islands as well and if these metals could be exported to the mainland, not just as ores but in the form of finished products as well like tools, weapons, and armor, it would go a long way in not just helping the Iron Islands thrive but helping the rest of the kingdom develop and prepare for the future wars ahead. More miners, smiths, and the like would be crucial for this.
What little farmland the islands did have could see their yields greatly increase with the new fertilizers, ideas, and methods Aegon had brought in from Essos or had their learned men work on. Lands not suitable for farming crops could also be used as grazing for sheep or goats, providing wool, milk, meat, and horns. Some of the islands were already being used for this but the Iron Islanders had never truly realized the true potential and maximized their yields.
The islands’ forests were all but gone but there would be little point trying to restore them when the land would be much better off used for grazing sheep and goats, increasing those exports. What timber the Iron Islanders needed for construction, shipbuilding, and firewood, they would have to source from the few remaining forests they had or import from the Riverlands and other regions in the mainland, making them dependent on and integrated into the realm as a whole and that could only be a good thing in Rhaenys’ mind.
The archipelago was also ideally placed to be the home ports for large fishing and whaling fleets that would trawl the Sunset Sea for all myriads of fishes, crabs, lobsters, and whales. They could even go sealing if they went far enough north and the shallow waters about the islands might be good for collecting or farming snails, oysters, clams, urchins, mussels, and other such creatures, gathering shells and meat and potentially even dyes, pearls, and sea silk. Those same ports could also turn the Iron Islands into a trade hub, serving as a stopover point and link between the North, the Riverlands, Westerlands, and Reach, facilitating the movement of goods along the Sunset Sea coast and exporting the Iron Islands’ own goods in the process in exchange for wood, grain, and other goods they needed from the mainland, bringing untold prosperity to the islands while tying them to the mainland in the process.
Such had been the strategy employed by some of the Hoare kings of old until the Iron Islanders’ obsession with the Old Ways had seen them tear it down in favor of the barbaric reaving they so loved. At times she musingly wondered how House Hoare had fallen so far from great men like Harmund the Haggler to tyrants and fools like Harren the Black but she supposed it didn’t really anymore. That line had ended.
There would be no more real resistance to these changes by adherents of the Old Ways like what the Hoare kings had encountered but nonetheless with the depopulation and devastation of the islands, Jacaerys still had his work cut out for him making all of this a reality. Nonetheless Rhaenys was certain that he could do it. He was her cousin after all and he had been given all of these ideas by Aegon and Visenya themselves.
Jacaerys had chosen his seat well. Despite the island of Pyke being poorer in resources than some of the larger islands like Harlaw, Orkmont, and Great Wyk, the town of Lordsport had long been the largest settlement in the Iron Islands and the reason was simple. Lordsport had perhaps the largest natural harbor in the archipelago and was the closest port to the mainland and its trade routes. The city charter they had promised Jacaerys for Lordsport, combined with the direct rule of Pyke and Harlaw which he had already been given and Old Wyk which he had just requested, would make him exceedingly well positioned to lead the Iron Islands into a prosperous new future while keeping the locals in check.
Meanwhile a mix of Rivermen cadet nobles, landless knights, and dragonseeds would be raised as Jacaerys’ Defenders, Keepers, and Masters on the other islands of the archipelago. A fine reward to their vassals for their service while also ensuring the Iron Islands were under the firm hands of competent and loyal lordlings. Quite a few of those Riverlander lordlings were particularly eager to be ruling the Ironmen for a change; perhaps that satisfaction alone was reward enough for some.
Rhaenys hadn’t always thought in such terms herself, not able or interested in seeing the economic and strategic potential of lands, kingdoms, and vassals when she was younger, but years as Aegon and Visenya’s little sister and preparing to conquer and rule Westeros with them had rubbed off on her it seemed.
Idly she pondered what her siblings would think if they could see her now. For so many years they had coddled and sheltered her, fearing deep down that she would suffer her counterpart’s fate and now she had succeeded in commanding her own campaign and would soon oversee the consolidation of her conquests into their kingdom without either of her siblings to oversee her.
She hoped Visenya wasn’t taking her departure from the campaign too badly, she hadn’t had much communication with her since they had parted ways. She wondered how she was dealing with her pregnancy and managing the children and the realm back home in Summerhall. Rhaenys couldn’t help but feel the slightest bit jealous that her older sister had gotten to return home early while she was stuck burning these bleak rocks and trying to cobble together something useful out of the ashes.
As for Aegon, the last she had heard from him, his army was laying siege to Casterly Rock and Lannisport. Rhaenys was hardly a religious person but she still prayed that all went well for her love now that he was alone and without her and her dragon’s support in his campaign.
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Aegon
Controlling the sack of Lannisport would be easier said than done. Aegon wanted the city intact and its people as unharmed as possible knowing that it would soon be his to rule and profit from. However, keeping an army of men lusting for wealth and women disciplined was no easy task and if he came down too hard on them for the crimes some of them were no doubt about to commit, he risked losing half his army to executions and desertions and crippling the morale of who stayed, making them resent him. If he didn’t punish them at all however, the people of Lannisport’s hatred would only be left to fester and it would become all the more difficult for him to win their allegiance as he had the Riverlanders.
It was not always a balance that he could achieve as much as he wished he could. In the Riverlands near every castle, city, and town had greeted him and his armies like liberators and given eagerly and willingly what armies normally took by force and so there had been few problems. For rather obvious reasons, the Westerlands had been far from the same and every settlement they took which resisted would get his army’s blood up for a fight, for violence, and for taking what they wished by force. It was simply the way lesser men were, and there was little he could do to change it.
Had Lannisport surrendered without a fight it would have been infinitely easier to spare them a brutal sack. That had been what he had hoped might happen since the Rangers and the Eyes had reported to him that Loren Lannister had left little more than a skeleton garrison to defend Lannisport, drawing the rest of the soldiers Lannisport had to offer within the Rock.
Unfortunately however, the Faith Militant chapter in Lannisport had taken up the task of defending the city instead. A hundred Warrior’s Sons, a thousand Poor Fellows, the cobbled remnants of Lannisport’s garrison and city watch, and all the volunteers they could gather, united by fear, hatred, and the earnest religious belief that the Seven would aid them in their just battle against the heathen invader.
He could see them now with his far-eye. Manning the walls and the gates and patrolling the streets. Many had also holed up in the septs around the city and the people of Lannisport were either praying in those septs for salvation or cowering in their homes.
When he saw his friend Josua Scales, the Warden of Stoney Sept return from the truce before the gates, he could see him shaking his head and he knew the terms had been rejected.
He had offered safe passage to the Faith Militant and all of their Poor Fellows to their headquarters in Oldtown and promised that the city would not be sacked if they opened their gates. While he had known that would simply strengthen perhaps his most challenging future enemy, he had hoped to avoid prematurely provoking the Faith as a whole into war with him and avoid the bloodiness that an assault on Lannisport would cause.
Alas even as he had given the offer, he had known it wouldn’t be accepted. With a nod to his former Dragonguard commander, now the Warden of Golden Tooth, Lord Gaemon Gryvetheon, Aegon sounded the order for the army to ready into the formation to storm the city. The horns blew and the army began to assemble.
The Royal Knights formed the vanguard, accompanied by the knights of all the lords of the Riverlands and those of the Westerlands that had joined them. Directly behind them was the First Legion commanded by Legate Yavo and the levies and lesser lords of the Crown Province of Summerhall. Aegon had intentionally chosen these units for his assault because they were the most disciplined in his army and the most likely to follow his orders to keep the sack to a minimum.
The levies and retinues of the Riverlands Wards made up the rearguard, and they would not be entering the city, instead guarding the camp and the route into the city with their eyes fixed upon the mountain to the north to ensure they were not taken unawares by a sally from the Lion’s Mouth.
He doubted Loren was brave enough to order such a sally though. He wouldn’t have drawn his entire army into Casterly Rock if he was. That was fine though, they could all have front-row seats as they watched Lannisport fall.
Turning his head, Aegon saw his army had assembled in the formation he desired and he set off into the sky. It was a tried and tested tactic, one that almost felt repetitive at this point yet it worked so well. Scorching the battlements of the walls killed many of the defenders instantly and destroyed all their bows and siege weapons, ensuring that his army could approach the city unhindered and without losses. Destroying the gates shattered the main obstacle to his army’s advance and allowed them to enter into the city with ease.
With the power of a dragon, the two greatest obstacles to a storming of a fortification were swept away, and that was merely fraction of the power Balerion held. If he so wished it, he could have destroyed the entire city outright. Fortunately for them, that was wastage he was not inclined to.
As his army poured into Lannisport and swept its streets, Aegon continued flying overhead the city, with Balerion roaring every so often as a reminder to those resisting below that surrender was a far better option than continued defiance. Despite the temptation however, he did not use Balerion’s power again that day.
The first and primary concern was the fire risk it would entail. The last thing Aegon wanted was for the whole city to catch fire, burning his army to death along with all its wealth and people; that would be disastrous. The next most pressing concern was that he needed a target for his army to unleash their bloodthirstiness on and sate their greed and lusts.
He had given strict instructions to his army that they were not allowed to wantonly kill, rob, or rape any of the innocent civilians living in the city nor loot and burn their houses and shops and any who did so would be punished as if they had done the same to a loyal citizen in the Riverlands. For those who resisted however, they and the buildings that they operated from were open season for them to do as they pleased. He had not expressly permitted them to sack and burn those buildings and rape and kill their inhabitants, but he had as good as.
It was distasteful, barbaric, and savage. And yet such was the nature of war and any who denied that were blind fools lying to themselves. At least in this way, the rest of Lannisport might be spared such a savage sack, and that was good for the people and good for Aegon who sought to rule them and earn revenues and taxes from them.
That most of those buildings likely to be sacked were septs, septries, motherhouses and the like full of clergy, religious, devout laity, and the Faith Militant protecting them gave him mixed feelings. They were certainly up to the task of blooding his men and full of enough riches and women (and oh did that thought give him such disgust) to satiate their greed and lust. And he supposed that if this barbarity had to be allowed in any way, let it be against the Faith that so despised him and his family.
Yet the fact that it was against the Faith gave him pause as well. It was only throwing kindling onto the fire that would be the Faith’s inevitable war against him and there was naught he could do about it. One way or another the Faith would go to war against his dynasty as they did Maegor. Better he faced them than his descendants Aegon supposed grimly.
The day ended just as Aegon thought it would, with his army storming and sacking every last sept and Faith-owned property in the city, slaughtering the Warrior’s Sons and Poor Fellows to the last man, carrying off all the relics and riches as their spoils of war, and doing things to the innocents within that he preferred not to think about.
Yet in exchange, the rest of Lannisport did not suffer. When Aegon executed the few fools who had dared to disobey his orders and do harm to the innocents that had not resisted, there was a begrudging respect and gratitude in the eyes of the people of Lannisport and not a single word of protest from his army.
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Casterly Rock rose sheer from the ground, six miles long from west to east and two miles wide from north to south with a height of twenty-one hundred feet, thrice as high as the Wall and more than four times the height of Dragonsreach. The light of the rising sun illuminated the Rock and made it shine gold and he could understand why some said it resembled a lion in repose when the sun made its way across the sky and set exactly due west of where Casterly Rock stood. Aegon could not help but be awed and impressed by the mighty fortress, but he was filled with a sense of foreboding as he thought of what had brought him here today.
It had taken a few days for them to get Lannisport in order and fully secure their position in the city. All the while not even a single scout had dared to sally forth from the Rock. Aegon had made optimum use of that time devising a plan to make the Rock crack with as few casualties as he could.
Interrogations of the few surviving enemy soldiers in Lannisport had confirmed what his spies had reported and what the glass candle had shown him. Combined with the normal garrison of Casterly Rock and forces that had been recruited from Lannisport and the rest of the Lannister demesne as well as reinforcements from Lord Reyne and a few other Westerlords, there was a total of some eleven thousand men dug in and fortified within the Rock. They had enough food stockpiled for all of them to last them three years and the possibility of getting more food by ship through the protected docks in the caverns behind the sea gates on the west face.
In any ordinary castle those advantages would make it a near impossible challenge to conquer through conventional means though Aegon had done just that at Harrenhal with dragons. When it came to Casterly Rock however… well Visenya had supposedly said in that other world that Casterly Rock could withstand even dragonflame and he agreed with her.
Casterly Rock wasn’t really a castle, it was a mountain. And not even dragons could destroy mountains. The only part of the ‘castle’ that was exposed was the rookery and watchtower at the summit. There would be no melting and destruction of Casterly Rock as there had been Harrenhal in that other world, nor would Aegon have done so even if he could, it would have been such a waste of valuable gold.
That did not mean that there wasn’t a way to make the Rock fall however. The soldiers he had interrogated had told him such interesting things. It seemed that in his desperation, cowardice, and arrogance, Loren Lannister had forced many of his soldiers from Lannisport to abandon their families and garrison the Rock instead, with Loren not deigning to extend the protection of the mountain to the families of those soldiers to avoid draining his supplies.
Not just that, but even the normal garrison of Casterly Rock had been affected by this also as all of the servants and other non-combatants within the Rock save the royals and nobles had been expelled to Lannisport as well to save food, and in turn Lannisport’s own warehouses had all been emptied to fill up Casterly Rock’s stores even more. Effectively separating more than half of the eleven thousand men garrisoning the Rock from their families and loved ones in Lannisport where they had barely enough food left. The same city that they had just bitten their nails in nervousness and fear watching Aegon and his army conquer.
To make matters even worse, the remaining half of those men were from beyond the Casterly Rock-Lannisport region anyway and had little motivation to die here for the Lannisters while their families back home were exposed and at threat from Aegon’s forces.
Fear was rife in Casterly Rock and Aegon knew exactly how to poke at that fear until all of those men cracked under the pressure. He knew because he was a son, a brother, a husband, and a father too, just like all of them.
And so, when he was ready, he had marched himself up as close as he had dared to the gates of Casterly Rock atop Balerion with a host of heralds and guards, observing the gates from up close for the first time.
The Lion’s Mouth was a two-hundred-foot-tall natural cavern in the southern base of the mountain sheltering an enormous, gilded ironwood and steel-plated gate that was half as tall as the cavern itself. It was raised up from the ground slightly and accessible by a great stone stairway with steps wide enough for twenty riders.
The face of the mountain all about the gate and the rest of the base was lined with windows, arrow slits, and murder holes that looked small from the outside but that was merely an illusion caused by the enormous size of the mountain. Some of those ‘slits’ were large enough for scorpions to loose bolts from while being sheltered inside the rock of the mountain. The tactic that had served him so well in the assault on Lannisport and a dozen castles and towns before it wouldn’t work here, that was for certain.
At Aegon’s nod, his heralds blew their horns to ensure they got the attention of the garrison (if they hadn’t already) and some of them took enormous risks standing even closer to the gates and within arrow range so they could relay his words and make sure that they spread to all of the Rock by day’s end.
“Defenders of Casterly Rock! I come to you with a warning! Know that your king, Loren Lannister, has consigned your kin to my power! Even now I have at my mercy the family of every one of you that was born and raised in Lannisport and Casterly Rock! And soon I will have the rest as well! There is no part of the Westerlands that will escape the dragon’s wings! Castamere, Fair Isle, Crakehall, Banefort, and the rest will all fall as surely as Lannisport and the Golden Tooth did!
“It is not my desire to be brutal or cruel, but I shall do what I must. Until this castle yields and submits to me, I will lay to rest the family of one of its defenders right here before the Lion’s Mouth every day at noon!
“Choose wisely good sers. Surrender, and I swear on my honor that you and your families will be spared and allowed to live in peace under my rule just as the Riverlanders have done for years. To the lords within the castle, I beseech you to submit as well! Swear me your fealty and you may keep your lands and titles! Yield and your castles, homes, and families will not be destroyed!
“And lastly to King Loren and the Lannisters; shame on you I say! For you have parted good and honest men from their families and compelled them to watch and weep as their families are slain for your pride and your safety! Yield now and you will yet have my mercy. Yield and you will be allowed to take the black or the silent sisters’ vows! Refuse and you will all perish.
“Farewell for now Casterly Rock! I await your answer!” he cried out at last before he turned Balerion around and flew off back towards Lannisport, seeing the curious and frightened looks on the faces of some of the townspeople as he arrived back in the city.
Aegon’s mood fell a little then at the reminder of what his plan entailed. Some of the people in Lannisport he had gone to all the effort to spare a brutal sack would have to die anyway because of the stubbornness of the Lannisters. All of the fragile shreds of goodwill that he had built with the people of Lannisport in the past few days would be gone.
He supposed that it wouldn’t be that much of a loss. To begin with it wasn’t like they liked him that much seeing as he was a foreign invader that had conquered them and destroyed all their septs. Ultimately Aegon would choose to prioritize the lives of his soldiers and the expediency of his campaign any day. Still, it annoyed him and he wouldn’t lie that some small part of him wished that innocents did not have to die for his ambitions to be realized even if he had long ago accepted that would be the case.
That was the first day. The sun set and then rose and Casterly Rock did not yield. And so, at noon on the second day, the grim work began, for a threat once given could not be taken back.
Aegon had done his best to minimize the panic, fear, and hatred that would spread in the city once it became known what he was doing by taking the chosen family in the midst of the night from their home and taking care to make sure they would not be overly missed, seeing as they were Lannister cadets and distant cousins of King Loren, the same man who had abandoned Lannisport without food or defenders before the invader.
At noon they were brought before the Lion’s Mouth in bindings, a middle-aged married couple and their younger son, a merchant who had been implicated in various crimes but escaped without consequences due to his distant blood relation to the King of the Rock and to his older brother who was one of said king’s most trusted guards.
Aegon had done his best to avoid likening himself to the lesser men he had so derided during the assault on Lannisport, avoiding choosing children or young women to kill while also prioritizing Lannisters and their ilk to reduce the inevitable backlash that would come from Lannisport as much as he could.
With his command, his Dragonguard pushed the three Lannister cadets before the gates and forced them to cry out who they were and who their son and brother was within Casterly Rock, going into excruciating details so as to leave no doubts as to who they were and what it would mean to a certain someone were they to perish. Their words were all relayed into the fortress by the heralds who shouted it further for those who could not hear and when no answer came, their fate was sealed.
“Dracarys,” he said simply and Balerion bathed the three Lannisters in scorching hot black flames that instantly eviscerated them and turned them into ash in full view of the sentries in the Lion’s Mouth. A quick and painless death. It was all the mercy he could give them.
So passed the second day. The sun set and then rose and still Casterly Rock did not yield. And so, at noon on the third day he did it again, and then again on the fourth day and again on the fifth day.
Aegon’s patience was beginning to run thin, as was his limited supply of goodwill with the Lannisport townsfolk and disliked families and individuals with relations in Casterly Rock that he could kill to get his point across without making the city hate him too much more than it already did.
He didn’t exactly need to be loved by the people of Lannisport and he was smart enough to know that was unlikely to happen for decades if even that, but he did need them to tolerate and respect him enough to accept his rule and let bygones be bygones. Keeping them in line with fear alone might work right now but it would risk rebellions once he left the Westerlands and it would make for a woefully inefficient governance of the city and he did so hate waste and inefficiency.
Something had to be done, and he would admit he very much wanted to shatter the impression his actions may have created among some, friends and foes alike, that dragons could not conquer Casterly Rock. He agreed with the other Visenya that dragons could not destroy Casterly Rock, but he had never said anything about not being able to break it.
And so on the sixth day, he did something different. Once again he rode up to the Lion’s Mouth with a host of heralds and guards, but this time he had no hostages to execute and he was not mounted on Balerion but rather his trusted stallion, Thunderer.
With his heralds in place to relay his words, Aegon began to speak.
“Today marks the sixth day since I first presented my demand for your surrender! Four families have perished, and still Casterly Rock has not yielded. It occurs to me that perhaps I made a mistake. Perhaps I overestimated how much all of you care for your families trapped outside and doomed to die because of your stubbornness and pride.
“Did you perhaps think that if you sacrificed your kin, you yourself might survive? Fortified within this rock of yours that even dragons cannot conquer and food aplenty to last you years? If you were, then allow me to disabuse you of that notion!”
Knowing what was to come next, his heralds ran from where they were shouting his words into the castle and Balerion stalked forward, his wings swinging from side to side as he crawled up the stone stairway, cracking it beneath his weight. Even from here Aegon could hear shouts of alarm and panic from within the Lion’s Mouth and from the slits in the mountain’s face, arrows and scorpion bolts began loosing on his dragon.
Through their bond Aegon instructed him to keep his eyes closed so that no disgusting lucky shot could take his life and every last arrow and bolt bounced off harmlessly as a result. Finally, Balerion pressed his maw almost up against the gate he was as large as and Aegon gave the order.
“Dracarys,” he said both aloud and through their bond and Balerion obeyed.
The great gold and steel ironwood gate of the Lion’s Mouth was melted, incinerated and blasted open in seconds and Balerion crawled into the castle. His eyes were closed still but he knew where exactly where he was going, for he could smell the defenders’ fear and feel their air. He breathed fire again and bathed the entire hall on the other side of the gate in dragonflame, wreaking desolation and carnage upon the Lion’s Mouth and its surroundings before he finally reversed and crawled back out of the rock, leaving a giant gaping hole in the mountain face where the gates had been.
For the first time, Aegon could see inside Casterly Rock but all he could see was the glow of the gold in the entrance hall melting in the fire.
His heralds then approached the windows and arrow slits that were still intact in the Lion’s Mouth, with horns blowing to ensure they had the attention of the garrison after Balerion’s rampage. Aegon then made his final ultimatum.
“Last chance. Yield by the morrow, or we will storm the mountain, kill all in our path, and force the survivors to watch their families die before they join them!”
As the sun rose on the seventh day, Aegon was once again mounted on Thunderer, ready to unleash Balerion on the Lion’s Mouth yet again and clear the path for his army to storm the mountain.
He had not chosen to do this from the start because it would have been bloody, exceedingly so. For the defenders had eleven thousand men and he just twenty-two thousand after all the casualties, reinforcements, and defections over the course of the campaign. Not the best of odds to be storming a mountain with.
Still, it was clear that his gamble had failed and the men defending Casterly Rock were more self-serving and callous than he had thought them to be. There was no other course now than to storm the fortress
Yet just before he was about to give Balerion the order, he saw a party emerging from the broken ruins of the Lion’s Mouth bearing a truce banner. As they drew nearer, he realized that it was led by Lords Reyne, Farman, and Crakehall, and they dragged behind them a line of blonde-haired men, women, and children clasped in chains.
As they arrived, they threw their prisoners before him before kneeling. Lord Reyne, their apparent leader, spoke up then. “Hail to you King Aegon! Casterly Rock yields and your humble servants have delivered unto you your enemies, House Lannister.”
Aegon remembered Crowley informing him the offer had been given to Lord Reyne. He wondered what had taken him so long, but he supposed he couldn’t complain since the man had delivered at the end of the day.
“Rise my lords. Rest assured you will have your rewards for this,” he said before he turned his attention to the prisoners.
One of them still had a crown upon his head and Aegon knew that it could only be Loren. Behind him knelt a few dark-haired women, some of whom even had golden-haired infants in their arms; Loren’s Ironwomen concubines and bastards Aegon realized. He wondered with amusement what the man’s queen thought of that as he espied the angry looking woman kneeling on Loren’s right in fine clothes and jewelry. To Loren’s left, knelt a more familiar face. His old friend, Tybolt Lannister, who was glaring at him with a look of hatred and betrayal, one Aegon simply ignored.
He strolled up to where Loren knelt, refusing to even meet his eyes and took the crown right off his head. “You won’t be needing this anymore Loren,” he told him and he finally looked up.
The look of defeat, hatred, and rage on his face was a sight to see indeed. Aegon couldn’t help but relish in it, knowing how much this man and his dynasty would go on to trouble his own. The Lannisters, so arrogant and entitled, so grasping and reaching, scheming and murdering for a greater station than they ever deserved. But not this time. House Lannister’s fall from grace was all but complete, and only one thing was still needed.
“I want you to say it. Do me homage and hail me as king,” Aegon said.
“Must I?”
“If you want you and your family to live, then yes. The consequences for using the wrong titles will be dire by the way.”
Loren grit his teeth, looking like every last word hurt him to say. “All hail His Grace, Aegon of the House Targaryen, King of the Rivers, the Hills, the Isles, and the Rock.”
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Author’s Note: Hope you guys liked this chapter and seeing Rhaenys and Aegon’s progress in their campaigns! I especially would like to hear what you all think of Aegon’s devious plan to crack the Rock! I had Smaug invading Erebor in mind when I wrote Balerion blasting open the Lion’s Mouth. Let me know your thoughts, suggestions, and any questions in the comments below or over on Discord! https://discord.com/invite/NSEwuzpcWm
Also note, and I will be making a proper post on this, but I've somewhat settled on a schedule of two chapters per month for my university, though which weeks in the month they are will be up to change depending on my assignments and the like. Thanks for reading and stay tuned!
Comments
Tertius711
Indeed. I'm hoping I can get it done by this weekend!
Amit Efraim
hi Tertius711 did you mange to make some time to write the next chapter
Tertius711
Hey there! My next update is hopefully gonna be sometime this week. Got some free time and really hoping to try and get it out by next Sunday (a week from now basically) I very much suggest staying tuned because your question on the other kingdoms and the Faith allying as well as on whether the kids will take part in the Conquest will soon be answered in the arc that comes after Chapter 12 wraps up the Westerlands arc!
TyrantGod
When is your next update? Will there be an alliance between the other kingdoms and plots by the Faith through subterfuge? Will any of the kids take part in the battles (Next Conquest) after consolidation of the Rock?
Tertius711
Hmm those are some interesting ideas, some of which I hadn't yet even fully considered. It will deffo be something to think about and look into. Basically all ancient empires mixed up their conquered peoples so it makes sense.
Arcturus
I thought about how dragon trio would pacify Westerlands after occupation. It would be smart idea to mix populations from Riverlands, Essos as much as possible with Westermen, give soldiers lands with brides and houses to have strong grip in every settlement and town, in the case of rerebellious movements. Something similar to Late Roman limitans who settled on border and control territory for half of payment with other benefits
Tertius711
Thanks! Any more in-depth thoughts? :)
Tertius711
Hail King Aegon! I'm back! And what a return indeed. Any more in-depth thoughts on the chapter?
Kinggn
tremendous
Arcturus
All Hail King Aegon First of His Name!!!🐲🐉 Nice chapter, glad that you back 😊
