Chapter 38: The Field of Fire
The long peace had given the Theocracy's leaders a dangerous gift: the luxury of theory. From their capitol in Lysaro, they had become grandmasters of a continental chessboard, moving pieces, calculating odds, and funding conflicts with the detached precision of strategists in a war room. They had debated the morality of their Westerosi gambit, weighing the lives of foreigners against the security of their own empire. But the reality of war, the true cost of their calculations, had remained an abstraction, a series of reports on a page.
That changed on a hot, windless afternoon when a battered trading cog, not one of their own, limped into Lysaro's harbour, its sails in tatters and its hull scorched. It carried a handful of shell-shocked survivors it had picked up from a drifting wreck in the western seas. They brought with them the first whispers of a cataclysm, mad tales of a battle where the sky itself had rained fire and an entire army had been turned to ash.
The whispers were a precursor. Three days later, their own agent from Lannisport, a man named Corlys, arrived. He was smuggled into the capitol townhouse under the cover of night. The man who had left them a year prior had been sharp, confident, and meticulously dressed. The man who returned was a ghost. His face was gaunt, his eyes hollowed out by what they had seen, and a new, jagged burn scar ran from his temple down to his jaw. He was brought before the High Council, and in the torchlit silence of the war room, he told them the price of their strategy.
"They called it the Field of Fire," Corlys began, his voice a dry, rasping whisper. He drank a full goblet of water before he could continue. "I have seen battles, my lords and ladies. I saw the fall of Mantarys. I saw Jorah's legions break the Yunkai'i. Those were wars. This… this was an extermination."
He recounted the beginning, his words painting a vivid picture for the five immortal prophets. He described the grand army of the Two Kings, Loren Lannister of the Rock and Mern Gardener of the Reach, a magnificent host fifty-five thousand strong. "It was the greatest army this continent has ever seen," he said. "A river of steel and silk. King Mern was so confident, he brought his entire family—his sons, his cousins—to witness his glorious victory."
Jorah shifted his weight. "Were our assets deployed? The steel? The scorpions?"
"They were, Prophet," Corlys confirmed, nodding. "The Lannister household knights were clad head to toe in Saris-forged steel. It shone like a thousand suns. A marvel. And the scorpions… they built fifty of them from Hesh's designs. They were placed on the front lines, great, ugly war machines. The men were drilled, just as your manuals instructed. There was… hope. King Loren believed his knights were invincible. King Mern believed his numbers were insurmountable. They were proud, arrogant, and utterly doomed."
He described the Targaryen army, a paltry force of ten thousand, outnumbered more than five to one. He described Aegon's offer of single combat, and the two kings' derisive laughter.
"Then came the dragons," Corlys whispered, his eyes losing focus, looking back at the horror. "All three of them. I have heard the tales of our own Guardians, but I was not prepared for this. They are not just beasts. They are a living storm. Balerion… the Black Dread… his shadow fell over the field, and the sun vanished. The horses panicked. The men screamed."
The battle began. The Gardener vanguard charged, a great wave of knights and men-at-arms.
"Aegon met them with fire," Corlys said, his voice trembling now. "Balerion descended, and the world became a furnace. The front lines of the army simply ceased to exist, transformed into a wall of screaming, melting men. The smell… gods, the smell of five hundred knights being cooked alive in their armor…"
Elara closed her eyes, her face ashen.
"But the scorpions," Jorah pressed, his strategic mind overriding the horror. "Did they fire?"
"They did!" Corlys said, a flicker of life returning to his eyes. "The Lannister men held their ground. They unleashed a volley. Most of the bolts went wide, but some found their marks. I saw it myself. A great iron bolt, as long as a man, struck the wing of the queen's silver dragon, Meraxes. It shrieked, a sound that cracked the sky, and it nearly fell. For a moment, we thought… we thought it was possible."
Lyra leaned forward, her knuckles white. "A dragon was wounded?"
"Yes, Prophetess. Wounded. And it was then that we understood the true nature of our enemy. The Targaryens were enraged. The other two, the queen Visenya on Vhagar and Aegon on Balerion, they descended not with calculated fury, but with pure, apocalyptic vengeance. They stopped aiming for the front lines. They began to burn the field itself."
His voice dropped again, filled with the ghost of the memory. "The grass was high and dry from the summer heat. It went up like tinder. The entire battlefield became a sea of fire. The wind shifted, trapping the army of the Two Kings in a great U-shaped wall of flame. There was no retreat. No escape. The men were not fighting an army; they were fighting the world itself."
"Four thousand men burned to death," he whispered. "We could hear the screams for miles. King Mern Gardener and his entire line were consumed. An entire royal house, gone in an afternoon. The proudest kingdom in Westeros, erased."
"And the Lannisters?" Kaelen asked, his voice steady but strained.
"King Loren survived. Our steel, it seems, holds up to dragonfire better than common plate. He and the few knights who were not incinerated managed to ride through a gap in the flames. I saw him the next day. A broken man. He rode to Aegon's camp, laid his crown at the conqueror's feet, and bent the knee. Aegon named him Lord of Casterly Rock and Warden of the West."
The report was finished. The council chamber was silent. The strategic outcome was a catastrophe. Their primary proxy, the Kingdom of the Rock, was defeated. Their secondary proxy, the Kingdom of the Reach, was annihilated. Aegon Targaryen was now the undisputed master of the two wealthiest and most powerful kingdoms in Westeros, his own power increased tenfold. Their great gambit, it seemed, had failed in the most spectacular and horrifying way imaginable.
Elara was the first to speak, her voice a raw wound. "Four thousand souls," she wept. "Four thousand men, turned to cinders. And for what? So we could test a theory? We gave them the tools for this war, Kaelen. We funded their march to this… this funeral pyre. This blood is on our hands. How does the Covenant justify this?"
"The Covenant justifies the protection of our people!" Jorah shot back, though his voice lacked its usual fire. He was shaken. "The fault was not in our strategy, but in the arrogance of these Westerosi kings! They had the weapons to inflict real harm, to make Aegon's victory costly. The scorpion worked. But they met him in an open field! They stood still and allowed themselves to be slaughtered! You cannot blame the smith when a fool breaks a fine sword against a stone wall."
"The outcome remains the same," Lyra said, her voice a cold, hard diamond of analysis. "Our strategy has failed. We sought to prolong the war, to bleed Aegon's strength. Instead, our intervention may have precipitated this battle, luring the Two Kings into a false sense of security. Aegon is now stronger than ever. He will sweep through the rest of Westeros, and then he will turn his eyes to us, his power absolute. We have failed."
Kaelen felt the weight of their despair, their guilt, their failure. It mirrored his own. He felt the ghosts of the four thousand burning men. He had played a game with their lives, and he had lost. The moral certainty of his god's vision felt like a distant, hollow echo. He dismissed the council, needing to be alone with the magnitude of their failure.
In the solitude of his chamber, he fell to his knees. He did not pray. He accused. Was this your plan? he sent into the silence. This slaughter? This utter defeat? You showed me a game of balance, and I have delivered only a massacre.
The god's response was not immediate. It came slowly, a quiet, deep understanding that bloomed in the ashes of Kaelen's despair. A new vision formed in his mind. He saw the Field of Fire, a blackened, smoking scar on the land. But as he looked closer, he saw that the fire had not burned everything. In the south, the deserts of Dorne were untouched, green and gold, separated from the blaze by a great river. The fire had been contained.
Then he looked at the ashes themselves. He saw the survivors, the thousands of Lannister and Reachmen soldiers who had bent the knee, their faces filled not with loyalty, but with a deep, abiding hatred for the Targaryen conquerors who had burned their kin. And in the ashes, he saw tiny, fire-resistant seeds beginning to glow with a faint, resentful light.
The divine whisper was not a comfort, but a lesson in a harder, longer form of strategy.
A great fire burns the proudest, tallest trees first. It clears the field of arrogant powers. But it also hardens the survivors and clears the way for new growth from the embers. You did not seek to prevent the fire. You sought to contain it and to plant the seeds of future defiance in its ashes. Look closer at what remains.
Kaelen's perspective shifted. He had been looking at the battle as a single event, a profit-and-loss calculation. The god was showing him the long-term historical consequences.
He reconvened the council, his eyes no longer filled with despair, but with a grim, new understanding.
"We have been looking at this as a single, failed battle," he said, his voice steady. "We were wrong. We must look at the shape of the war that is left."
He walked to the map. "Yes, Aegon has won a great victory. He has taken the Reach and the Westerlands. But what has he truly won? He has won the allegiance of lords who now hate him with every fiber of their being. He has won a populace whose sons and fathers he turned to char. He has not won a kingdom; he has won a future rebellion."
He pointed to the scorpion bolt that had wounded Meraxes. "And what of this? For the first time, the world has seen that dragons are not gods. They can be hurt. They can be killed. That knowledge is now in the mind of every lord in Westeros. The legend of their invincibility is broken. We broke it."
His finger traced a line south on the map. "And the fire was contained. It stopped at the borders of Dorne. Dorne is untouched. They have not lost a single soldier. And now they know, with absolute certainty, that the anti-dragon tactics our Quiet Sisters are teaching them work. They have seen proof. We have lost the lions of the Rock, but we have hardened the vipers of the sand."
Their strategy had not failed. It had evolved into something darker, longer, and more subtle.
"Our work in the west is not over," Kaelen declared. "It simply enters a new phase. We will no longer support the great houses. They are broken. Now, we will fan the embers. Lyra, your agents will now focus on identifying and secretly funding the disgruntled survivors. The second sons who inherited nothing but ashes, the hedge knights who lost their lords, the new lords who harbor a secret hatred for their Targaryen overlords. We will fund a long, quiet, simmering insurgency. We will make Westeros ungovernable for a generation."
He turned to Elara. "And all our focus, all our aid, will now flow to Dorne. We will make them an unbreakable fortress. We will give them the resources to fight their shadow war for a hundred years if need be. Aegon may have won a great battle, but we will ensure he never, ever wins the war for the soul of Westeros."
A new, grim purpose settled over the council. They had learned a hard lesson in the price of playing the Great Game. They had caused the deaths of thousands, but in the cold, divine calculus of their god, those deaths had purchased a century of strife for their rival, and a shield of security for their own empire. They were no longer just builders of a civilization. They were now the patient, ruthless gardeners of history, and they had just learned how to use the ashes of a great fire to fertilize the seeds of a future rebellion. The work was darker, the morality greyer, but the path forward was clear.