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It was a pity this world was no more than an illusion, for if it had been real, Aegon Targaryen the Fifth would have carried the sound of that scream in his memory for the rest of his life.
The blazing surge of the Igni sign needed only a few heartbeats to turn Ser Duncan's helm into a furnace. Heat poured through the steel until the metal itself seemed to ripple.
That terrible fire seared his face to ruin. Flesh blistered and split beneath the iron. His eyes were destroyed in an instant, and pain beyond imagining tore through him. The Lord Commander of the Kingsguard writhed across the ground in blind agony, twisting and clawing like some helpless maggot.
It was the kind of torment Aenys had once endured, the sort of suffering no mortal mind should ever have to withstand.
The anguish of those burns was enough to sicken any witness, enough to draw tears from the hardest heart.
Aegon clenched his teeth until blood seeped between them, unaware of the taste on his tongue. He was king, yet even he held no power to halt this sacred trial.
Ser Duncan had not yielded. Bloodraven had not struck the final blow. The judgment of the gods was not yet complete, and the will of the divine would not reveal itself until the appointed moment.
As for why the punishment had turned so savage, the reason lay in a storm of feeling that could no longer be restrained.
Clay had been carefully attuned to every subtle shift in Brynden Rivers's mood. When the king's verdict was first spoken, the reaction was subdued. Beneath the surface lingered only the weary resignation that comes after anger has burned itself out, the quiet acceptance of a man who knows an old truth: when the ruler commands the death of a servant, that servant has no choice but to die.
Yet the instant Clay lifted the corner of his mouth and called upon the king to sanction a Trial of Seven, that resignation shattered. Emotion surged like a breaking wave.
And when Clay alone raised Dark Sister and cut through the full strength of the Kingsguard, the fury Brynden had kept buried finally reached its breaking point.
But the change Clay longed to see never came.
He remained confined within the first and most unyielding of Brynden Rivers's dreams, the iron prison of a mind that refused to bend.
With a single merciless stroke he severed Ser Duncan's head. The heavy helm tumbled as the lifeless head rolled across the stones and came to rest at the foot of the Iron Throne. At last the Trial of Seven reached its end.
Bloodraven stood alone as victor, having slain all seven of the king's sworn guards. By the oldest and most sacred law, the gods themselves had overturned the royal accusation. Brynden Rivers was judged innocent.
Yet if the Hand bore no guilt, someone still had to bear the weight of this spectacle.
The gathered lords shivered where they stood. Their eyes slid toward the throne, toward the young king who sat pale and drawn, shrinking into himself.
Whatever strange power cloaked the Lord Bloodraven could be pondered another day. For the moment, nothing mattered more than the figure upon that throne.
Clay watched Aegon Targaryen without the faintest trace of reverence. He too was a king, the Dragon King Clay Manderly. Had it been Aegon the First upon that seat, perhaps he might have stepped forward to speak with him as an equal. But the king before him inspired no such respect.
Blood dripped in a slow, steady rhythm from his chin, from the tips of his hair, from the edge of his sword, from the hem of his clothes. He had struck with thunderous force again and again, every blow meant to maim, and the final beheading had drenched him most of all. Now he stood as though risen from a pool of blood, his entire form steeped in crimson shadow.
Dark Sister in hand, he advanced toward the throne that now stood unguarded.
Aegon the Fifth pressed his heels against the floor, trying to force himself backward, but the cold iron of the great seat held him fast. His voice cracked into a thin, trembling sound as he struggled to retreat.
Clay advanced one deliberate step after another, the king's frightened cries echoing off the black walls.
The common guards did not dare move. They had watched the slaughter and felt their courage bleed away. To rush forward now would only add another soul to the tally of the Lord Bloodraven's dead. None of them wished to trade their lives for a hopeless stand. Better to stay still. Better to survive.
"You… what do you want?" The question scraped from the king's throat, half a plea and half a gasp.
Clay had no interest in killing him. He studied the boy on the throne for a heartbeat and found nothing worth the effort. Leaning close, he lowered his voice until it was a whisper that brushed the king's ear.
"Your Grace, it is time for you to declare me innocent."
With those words spoken, he stepped back from the Iron Throne. The king, nearly paralyzed with fear, no longer held any interest for him.
And Clay understood one thing with absolute clarity: he was not the "key."
The heavy scent of blood began to fade, and the nightmare air lightened as though a veil had been drawn aside. Aegon the Fifth stammered out the words that Brynden Rivers had been yearning to hear.
"I… I, Aegon Targaryen the Fifth, King of all Westeros and shield of all its people, King of the Andals, the Rhoynar, and the First Men, by the will of the gods, declare you, Brynden Rivers, innocent… innocent."
At that moment, the young king seemed as if all his bones had been hollowed out. He collapsed into a shapeless heap of fear and weakness upon the throne.
Clay felt the tension coiling around him finally begin to unwind. It was the weariness that follows the settling of a long-fought revenge, the hollow emptiness after a storm has passed. Something very much like that.
"It's about time to show yourself."
Clay muttered under his breath. He scanned the room, his eyes taking in nothing but a sea of terrified faces. Beyond that, there was still nothing.
Then, as if sensing something, he lowered his gaze.
At his feet, a pool of slowly flowing blood crept toward him, curling around his boots.
The black-red liquid spread across the floor like a polished, sinister mirror.
Clay crouched and leaned closer, studying the reflection that shimmered across the surface.
Soon, he noticed something perched on his shoulder, a creature that had appeared without his awareness: a raven, entirely black, its presence both calm and commanding.
Three eyes, the color of blood, fixed on him without a trace of emotion.
This was the "key."
Then he reached out his hand and plunged it into the pool of blood.
The floor seemed to vanish beneath him.
His hand sank into the world reflected in the blood, a world made entirely of crimson and shadow.
Clay laughed softly.
Of course. This was never the real world, so there was nothing strange about it.
Then he grasped the shoulder of the figure in the mirror. With a gentle pull, he drew his body forward, inch by inch, into the mirrored blood, sinking into it as if he were diving into a liquid that held him entirely.
As he moved deeper, a heavy sigh echoed through the vast throne room.
The world shattered… or perhaps it had never existed at all.
Having left Bloodraven's first dream, Clay passed through one luminous sphere of dreams after another, each representing a fragment of slumber.
These were dreams, seen from every angle, horizontal and vertical alike.
All dreams!
But Clay knew with absolute certainty that Brynden Rivers no longer lingered in these illusions, meaningless to the divine yet significant to ordinary minds.
Moreover, after passing through the blood-red mirror, a faint gray-white thread appeared in his field of vision.
This had to be the clue.
Clay understood.
He followed it, flying through countless lonely bubbles of dreams, navigating by instinct along the path that presented itself.
In dreams, time did not exist. To speak of it was already a paradox.
Clay had no sense of how long he had been flying forward.
This was the strongest manifestation of the Old Gods' authority known as "Greensight."
From the dreams of all living beings under their divine power, they could extract answers. It was without question one of the most terrifying forces that time itself could wield.
Clay, acting as an emissary of a different system, a god unlike any other, could navigate this realm without being fully exposed. Otherwise, every thought and intention of his would have already been laid bare before the Old Gods.
The Old Gods, the Cold God, R'hllor, and the Seven whose truth or falsehood remained unknown, the remnants scattered across the ruins of Valyria's Freehold.
Clay understood that this world was far larger than he had imagined.
There were countless things beyond his expectation, mysteries that might surpass anything he could foresee.
But it did not matter. For now, he would focus on the task at hand.
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There was no sun, no moon, only a perpetual dim glow. Time here had lost all meaning.
Finally, Clay spotted the end of the faint gray-white thread. A single dream bubble glimmered with a strange, shifting luster.
The space around it was empty. It floated alone in the vastness of the dream realm.
This had to be the seat of Brynden Rivers's consciousness.
"Finally, I found you," Clay thought.
His hand reached gently toward the surface of the bubble. In the next instant, his entire body was drawn inside.
Darkness swallowed him for a moment, and then light returned.
Clay found himself seated on deep green grass.
Before him stood a half-collapsed tower, and behind it, a castle stretched across the horizon, both coming fully into view within his sight.
"The sky hangs heavy and gray. This dream… it's got no fair weather," Clay whispered to himself.
He already knew where he was.
"Winterfell," he murmured softly. "As expected, it really is here."
He already knew that the Wall could block the Cold God's power and that the Three-Eyed Raven could seize another's body.
So when the Cold God came hunting for its life, what would it do? Of course, it would transfer its consciousness into a body named Bran Stark.
And right now, Bran Stark was not north of the Wall.
Once its will was south of the Wall, the Cold God could no longer harm it.
Clay did not know why it had not done this earlier, but now he understood. It simply wanted to survive. That was all.
So when he saw Winterfell and the ruined tower, he was not surprised in the slightest.
He noticed that his body had returned to the form he had worn before traveling to Winterfell.
It had even shrunk slightly in size.
In theory, all of this should have been constructed by the dream's master at this very moment, carefully built from their own memory. In other words, everything before him was not real.
They were merely… echoes of the past.
Shaking his head, Clay began walking toward the ruined tower.
He did not know whether he would witness the scene of the brat falling and becoming paralyzed from the waist down.
Who could say what the Three-Eyed Raven was doing at this very moment?
It was still late summer in Winterfell, and the temperature remained tolerable. The grass around his ankles grew tall and wild, brushing against him as he moved.
Soon, Clay reached the base of the ruined tower.
As he had expected, he saw the old man who had lain in a vegetative state for a hundred years, the shameless schemer, now luring a ten-year-old boy into mischief.
The sound of his footsteps drew the attention of the two. Both lifted their eyes and turned toward him.
Bran's clothes remained the same, the familiar furs and leathers of the Stark household. But Clay nearly lost control when he saw the form of Brynden Rivers.
The man had erased all the hairy, root-like growths covering his body.
He wore a robe as black as night, topped with a gentle, harmless-looking old face.
It gave an instant sense of warmth and trust.
Yet to Clay, the wolf's tail hidden beneath the robe, betraying ill intent, was glaringly obvious.
Seeing Clay, this iteration of Bran Stark, unacquainted with him at this point in time, naturally showed no reaction.
Brynden Rivers's reaction, however, was quite telling.
The old creature paused in surprise, then seemed to realize something. A spark of delight flickered across his weathered face.
He had just been about to step forward and speak to Clay when he noticed the magical energy pooling in Clay's hand, its power coiling and surging with a life of its own.
A shiver ran through him, and the step he had taken forward froze mid-motion, then recoiled instantly.
The kindly, gentle expression that had rested on his aged features vanished as if it had never existed, blown away by a sudden, sharp wind.
How he managed to flip his expression so quickly into one of obsequious flattery was anyone's guess:
"Ah, ah, Emissary of the Foreign God, please don't… act rashly."
"Listen, let me explain…"
"No, no, you…"
"Aard!"
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[Chapter End's]
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