Chapter 9: The March of the Griffin and the Prince's Shadow
The great rebel host, now swollen with the lords of the Riverlands and the Vale, moved north like a glacier of steel, an unstoppable force of nature grinding its way towards the Trident. At its head was the vanguard, and at the head of the vanguard was Kaelen Vyrwel. His legion, a seamless fusion of his own men and the broken-in soldiers of Horn Hill, moved with the terrifying precision of a serpent. They were the tip of the spear, and they slid through the countryside with a speed and discipline that left the rest of the army struggling in their wake.
This was Randyll Tarly's genius at work, flowing through Kaelen like a second soul. The vanguard's march was a masterpiece of logistics. Their scouts, handpicked by Kaelen for their sharp eyes and silent feet, moved miles ahead, mapping the terrain, testing the villages, ensuring no Tarly-esque surprises lay in wait. The supply lines were flawless, the foragers protected, the sentries ever-vigilant. The morale of the men was a hard, sharp blade, honed daily by Kaelen's chilling charisma. He was a constant presence among them, his black armor and the Valyrian steel of Heartsbane on his back a symbol of their inevitable victory. He knew their names, their fears, their ambitions. He nurtured their strengths and pruned their weaknesses, and they loved him for it with a devotion that was absolute.
This perfection, however, was a profoundly isolating thing. The other lords, commanding their own boisterous, chaotic, and often-drunken retinues, would watch the Vyrwel legion march with a mixture of awe and deep-seated resentment. They saw its success, its undeniable effectiveness, but they also sensed its deeply unnatural quality. Armies were not supposed to move like clockwork. Men were not supposed to follow their lord with the silent, unblinking obedience of automatons. Kaelen's vanguard was not just an army; it was an extension of his will, and the other lords felt like clumsy amateurs in the presence of a grandmaster.
While the army marched, the secret war began in earnest. Ser Gerold, the old knight with the weight of a damned soul on his shoulders, took his first clumsy steps into the world of shadows. It was a world that did not fit him. The simple, straightforward honor that had guided his entire life was a useless, cumbersome tool in this new, dirty trade. Kaelen had given him a purse heavy with gold and a list of names—grooms, camp followers, squires with gambling debts—and commanded him to build a web.
His first attempts were pathetic. He tried to buy information from a sharp-faced whore, and she laughed in his face, fleecing him for half a dozen silver stags before telling him a string of useless, fabricated rumors. He tried to intimidate a stableboy into reporting on the conversations of Lord Tarth's knights, but his gruff, soldierly threats only earned him a look of blank confusion. The old knight was drowning, his moral compass spinning uselessly in a sea of deceit.
He returned to Kaelen, ashamed and defeated. Kaelen did not berate him. He sat the old knight down and, with the cold patience of a master teaching an apprentice, explained the true nature of the work.
"You think of this as a negotiation, Gerold," Kaelen said, his voice a low whisper in the flickering candlelight of his command tent. "It is not. It is an application of leverage. You do not ask a man for his secrets. You discover what he holds most dear—his daughter's reputation, his hidden debt, his fear of the lash—and you place your thumb upon it until he gives you what you need."
Under this cold, methodical tutelage, Gerold tried again. This time, he did not offer coin. He discovered that a disgruntled knight in Lord Grandison's retinue, a man bitter about being passed over for promotion in favor of Kaelen, was planning to "accidentally" misdirect a convoy of medical supplies. Gerold, armed with this knowledge, did not expose the man. He cornered him, his face a grim mask, and laid out the consequences: not just disgrace, but a quiet, painful death on the road, courtesy of a Vyrwel patrol. The knight, his face ashen with terror, became Gerold's first true asset.
The small victory was a turning point for the old master-at-arms. He had succeeded, but the taste of it was like bile in his throat. He had learned that information was indeed a weapon, a silent knife that could kill a man's spirit without shedding a drop of blood. He was becoming the thing Kaelen wanted him to be, and he hated himself for it. His corruption was deepening, and the web, however crude, had begun to spin.
It was this fledgling network that brought Kaelen a message a week later, as the army passed through the bustling market town of Fairmarket. It was not a military dispatch or a piece of battlefield intelligence. It was a small, tightly rolled scroll, delivered by a street urchin who vanished into the crowd the moment the parchment left his hand.
Kaelen unrolled it. There was no seal, no signature. There was only a single sentence, written in a neat, elegant script.
"Breathe in, breathe out. The blood is just a river. You are the stone."
The world around Kaelen seemed to dissolve. The sounds of the market, the smell of sawdust and baked bread, the press of the crowd—it all faded into a dull, distant roar. His heart, the steady, cold engine in his chest, hammered against his ribs. The words on the parchment were a ghost, an impossibility. They were a mantra, a private litany from his former life, the words he, the brilliant, sociopathic surgeon, would whisper to himself before making the first incision in a difficult, bloody operation. No one in this world, this primitive, mud-caked reality of steel and superstition, could possibly know them.
His first thought was supernatural. Was it the Stranger himself, playing a game with his soul? Was there another, like him, another reborn soul who knew his past? Or was it Varys? Was the Spider's web so vast, so intricate, that it could pluck a secret from a man's very soul, a secret even he had forgotten he possessed?
The uncertainty was a physical violation, a crack in the cold, monolithic certainty of his existence. For the first time since his rebirth, Kaelen felt a flicker of something that resembled fear. It was the fear of the unknown, the terror of an enemy whose capabilities seemed to transcend the laws of nature. He retreated to his tent, obsessed, spending hours staring at the impossible words, his mind a maelstrom of paranoia and frantic calculation. The Spider was not just a spymaster. He was a monster of a different breed.
But Kaelen's fear, like all emotions within him, was a fleeting thing, a fuel to be consumed by the furnace of his ambition. After a day and a night of obsessive analysis, the fear burned away, leaving behind something harder, colder, and far more dangerous: a white-hot, personal rage. Whether Varys was a man, a demon, or a god, he was a rival. He had dared to reach into Kaelen's own mind and touch the core of his being. He had made the game personal. And Kaelen would make him pay. The shadow war was no longer a matter of strategy. It was a vendetta.
As the vanguard pushed deeper into the Riverlands, they left the lands of wavering loyalties and entered the heart of the conflict. Here, the smallfolk did not greet them with sullen silence, but with open hostility. They were entering the lands protected by Rhaegar Targaryen, and they could feel the Prince's shadow.
The resistance they met was different. It was not the canny, survivalist tactics of Randyll Tarly. This was a war fought with passion. The raids on their columns were daring, almost suicidal, conducted by knights who fought with a fervent, shining devotion in their eyes. Kaelen saw that his usual methods of breaking morale would be less effective here. These men were not motivated by fear of their lord or by a soldier's pay. They were motivated by love. Love for their handsome, charismatic, dragon prince.
Kaelen felt a profound, intellectual disgust. Love, in his estimation, was a chemical delusion, a weakness to be exploited. Yet he could not deny its power. He saw in Rhaegar a natural, effortless version of the charisma he had to steal and synthetically wield. The Prince was a rival in this esoteric art as well, and Kaelen was fascinated. He wanted to meet this man, to look into his eyes, to see the source of this power. And then, he wanted to consume it.
The most potent symbol of this Targaryen devotion was a knight who began to harry their advance. He was Ser Jonothor Darry of the Kingsguard, a legend in his own time, his white cloak a blur of righteous fury. He had not been with Rhaegar at the Trident initially, but had been leading a force to secure the Kingsroad. Now, he became a thorn in Kaelen's side. He and a small retinue of loyalist knights conducted a series of brilliant, lightning-fast raids, striking the vanguard at its weakest points, freeing prisoners, and disappearing before a proper response could be mustered. Ser Jonothor fought with the righteous fury of a holy warrior, a living embodiment of the Targaryen dynasty's claim to glory and honor.
Kaelen found himself admiring the man's skill, even as he cursed his effectiveness. He also knew he had to be eliminated. It was a tactical necessity, but it was more than that. The Kingsguard were the pinnacle of martial prowess in Westeros, their skills honed by a lifetime of singular, dedicated service. Kaelen wanted that skill. He wanted to consume a legend, to add the pure, distilled essence of a Kingsguard's vow to his ever-growing arsenal. It would be a message to Rhaegar, a declaration of intent written in the blood of his most loyal servant.
He decided to hunt the hunter. He devised a trap, using his new understanding of honorable men, an understanding gifted to him by the ghost of Eddard Stark's disapproval. He sent a small company of his men—fewer than fifty—as a decoy, making them seem like a poorly guarded supply train carrying medical supplies. He knew Ser Jonothor, a man of honor, would not be able to resist the chance to seize the supplies and strike a blow against the "usurper's" army.
The real trap was laid in a place of profound, ancient power: a small, forgotten weirwood grove they had discovered a league off the Kingsroad. The great white tree stood at the center of the grove, its carved face weeping red tears, its five-pointed leaves like blood-stained hands. It was a place of the old gods, a fitting stage for the death of a legend.
Kaelen waited in the shadows of the weirwood, alone. His men were hidden in the surrounding forest, with strict orders not to interfere unless he fell.
As predicted, Ser Jonothor Darry took the bait. He and his knights fell upon the decoy supply train, but as they did, Kaelen stepped out from the trees, Heartsbane in his hand.
"Ser Jonothor Darry," Kaelen called out, his voice calm and clear. "I am Lord Kaelen Vyrwel. Your quarrel is with me."
The Kingsguard, seeing his trap sprung, showed no fear. He ordered his men to disengage and turned to face Kaelen, his long, pale face grim, his eyes full of a weary sadness. "I have no quarrel with you, Lord Vyrwel," he said, his voice a low, resonant baritone. "My quarrel is with treason and madness. You follow a man who would usurp the rightful king."
"I follow no one," Kaelen replied, a cold smile touching his lips. "I walk my own path. You, on the other hand, are bound by vows. Chained by your loyalty to a prince who stole another man's betrothed and plunged a kingdom into war. Tell me, ser, where is the honor in that?"
"You speak of honor as if you could comprehend it," Ser Jonothor said, raising his own longsword. "My vows were sworn before gods and men. My loyalty is to my king and my prince. It is an anchor in a world of chaos. You have no anchor, my lord. You are adrift in a sea of your own ambition. And you will drown in it."
"Perhaps," Kaelen said. "But your vows are a cage, ser. A beautiful, gilded cage. I have no cage. And now, I will show you what a man without a cage can do."
The duel began. It was, Kaelen instantly recognized, the greatest test he had ever faced. Ser Jonothor was a master, a living embodiment of the sacred forms of swordplay. Every parry was perfect, every riposte precise, every movement a testament to a lifetime of discipline.
But Kaelen was a monster. He met the Kingsguard's perfect form with a terrifying, unpredictable chaos. He fought with the savage, axe-wielding fury of Ser Damon, forcing the knight onto the defensive. Then, he shifted, his style becoming the nimble, precise dance of a Myrish sellsword. He parried a blow with the iron-hard defensiveness of Randyll Tarly, then launched a counter-attack with the brutal efficiency of a tavern brawler. He was a legion of dead warriors, a terrifying symphony of stolen skills.
Ser Jonothor, for all his mastery, was bewildered. He had never faced an opponent like this, a man who seemed to change his entire fighting philosophy from one heartbeat to the next. He was fighting not one man, but a dozen.
The fight was long and brutal. Steel rang against steel under the weeping eyes of the weirwood. But slowly, inexorably, Kaelen's relentless, unpredictable assault began to wear the Kingsguard down. He made a small mistake, a fractional over-commitment on a lunge. It was all the opening Kaelen needed.
He flowed around the knight's attack, his own sword a blur, and Heartsbane, the sword of Randyll Tarly, bit deep into the gap between Ser Jonothor's helm and gorget. The Kingsguard fell to his knees, his lifeblood pouring out onto the roots of the ancient weirwood, a sacrifice of the new age to the old gods.
Kaelen knelt over the dying man. He felt the absorption begin, and it was a profound, chilling sensation. It was not the raw strength of a brute or the cold intellect of a strategist. It was something pure. He felt the sacred vows, the weight of the white cloak, the decades of discipline, all being distilled into a pure, cold essence of martial perfection. It settled into his soul like a block of ancient ice, a foundation of perfect, unshakeable form.
He stood up, his body now a vessel for the combined might of a dozen warriors, the strategic genius of a great commander, the charisma of a beloved leader, and now, the legendary, sanctified skill of a Kingsguard. He was a perfected monster.
He rejoined his vanguard as they were making camp for the evening. From the ridge where they stood, they could see it. In the distance, across the green expanse that led to the river, was a sea of campfires that stretched for miles. The main Targaryen host. And somewhere, in the heart of that fiery sea, was the Prince.
Kaelen looked across the distance, his eyes gleaming in the twilight. The war with Varys was a fascinating diversion, a game for his mind. But this… this was the main event. He could feel Rhaegar's presence, an opposing pole of the charismatic power he wielded. He could feel the weight of the Prince's legend, the source of the devotion that had fueled the man he had just killed.
A slow, predatory smile spread across his face. The appetizers were over. He had consumed knights, lords, strategists, and now, a legend. He had gathered all the tools he needed. He was ready for the main course. And the Dragon Prince, he knew, would be a magnificent feast.