Chapter 28: A War of Worlds
The air on the battlements hung thick with the smoke of distant fires and the stench of fear. Tywin Lannister's strategy was brutally effective. King's Landing, which had for a brief, heady moment felt like the capital of a new kingdom, was beginning to feel like a trap once more. The slow, inexorable tightening of a noose was replacing the thrill of open rebellion. Every new refugee who stumbled through the gates was another mouth to feed, another soul for Ned Stark to protect, another strain on their dwindling resources.
Ned stood beside Thor, looking out at the desolation his enemy was creating. He felt the weight of half a million lives on his shoulders. The cheers of the marketplace had faded, replaced by the low murmur of anxiety in the bread lines. He had their loyalty, for now. But loyalty was a poor substitute for a full belly.
"He will not attack the walls," Ned said, his voice grim. "He will let the city eat itself from within. He will let them grow to hate me for saving them, only to let them starve."
"It is the strategy of a man who values victory more than life," Thor rumbled. "He is willing to destroy the kingdom in order to rule it. A flawed philosophy." He turned from the smoldering horizon to face Ned, and the weary sadness in his eyes had been replaced by a fire that was ancient and terrible. "You have been fighting his war, Lord Stark. A war of attrition, of slow-moving armies and scorched earth. It is time you made him fight our war."
The Bifrost. The word hung in the air between them, a concept so audacious, so utterly outside the bounds of this world's reality, that Ned's mind recoiled from it. "You are certain it will work?" he asked, his voice barely a whisper. "The last time you tried to leave this world, it nearly tore the sky apart."
"I was trying to breach the veil between realms," Thor explained. "That requires immense power. But to move from one place to another on the same world… it is like skipping a stone across a pond instead of trying to throw it to the moon. The energy required is far less. It will be… violent. Unpleasant. But it will work." He hefted Stormbreaker, and the axe seemed to agree, humming with a low, vibrant energy.
"To Casterly Rock," Ned breathed, the name itself a synonym for power and permanence. "It is madness."
"No," Thor corrected him, a grim smile touching his lips. "It is lightning. The one thing the lions have no defense against."
The war council that followed was the strangest in the history of Westeros. It was held in the solar, with a map of the westerlands spread on the table. The council consisted of Ned Stark, a god from another world, and the three men who now commanded the Protector's Guard: the grim stonemason Kael, the young, fiery Tobin, son of the martyred Tobb, and the cynical ex-Gold Cloak Arric.
Ned laid out the plan, his voice steady despite the insanity of the words he was speaking. "Lord Tywin attacks our supplies. We will answer by attacking the source of his entire family's power. We will not go to steal his gold. We will go to ensure that no more gold ever comes from his mountain again."
Kael, a practical man, looked skeptical. "My lord, the Rock is a fortress. The greatest in the realm. We are but a handful."
"Our path to the Rock will not be on foot," Ned said, and then looked at Thor.
Thor stepped forward. He did not give them a long explanation of cosmic physics. He gave them the soldier's truth. "I can open a door," he said simply. "From here, to the shores of their home. It will not be a pleasant journey. But it will be a swift one. We will be a dagger in the heart of the west before they even know we have left the city."
A stunned silence fell over the room. The men looked from their honorable, grounded lord to the being who spoke of opening doors between continents. They were men of stone and steel, and this was the stuff of magic and madness. But they had seen him break the sky. They had seen him melt a sword with a look. They trusted him.
"What is the objective?" Arric, the ex-Gold Cloak, asked, his mind always on the practicalities of a fight.
"The mines," Thor said. "The Rock is rich, but its wealth comes from the deep veins of gold that run beneath it. We will seal them. We will use their own mountain to bury their fortune." He described a plan of tactical demolition, of using his power to create strategic collapses, to make the richest gold mines in the world inaccessible for a generation. It was economic warfare on a scale they could not have imagined.
The strike team was chosen. Thor and Ned would lead. Kael, Tobin, Arric, and Ned's last four loyal Stark guardsmen would make up the rest of the force. A dozen men to cripple a Great House.
The hardest part for Ned was the farewell to his daughters. He found them in their chambers, the tension between them a palpable thing. He gathered them both in his arms, holding them tightly.
"I have to leave for a short time," he told them, his voice thick with emotion. "A mission of great importance."
"Are you going to fight?" Arya asked, her eyes wide with a mixture of fear and excitement.
"Yes," Ned said honestly. "I am going to try to end this war."
Sansa looked at him, her own eyes filled with a different kind of fear. She had been profoundly shaken by Thor's words to her, her fairy-tale worldview fractured. She was beginning to see the cruelty in the Lannisters, but she still feared the monstrous power her father had allied himself with. "Will… will he be with you?" she whispered.
"Yes," Ned said. "He is the only reason we have a chance." He held her face in his hands. "Sansa, I know you are afraid. But you must trust me. The Lannisters are not your friends. They are our enemies. They are the reason we are in this cage. Everything I am doing is to protect you. To get you home."
He then entrusted their safety to Jory Cassel's cousin, a young but steady Northman named Hallis Mollen, and the last few Stark men who would remain behind. He gave Hallis clear instructions. "You will hold this tower. You will let no one in. The fear of Thor will be your shield while he is gone. It should be enough to keep the lions in their den for a day."
That night, under the light of a half-moon, the strike team assembled in the walled garden. The air was still and heavy. The men were a bundle of nerves, their new steel spearheads gleaming. They were about to step into a legend.
Thor raised Stormbreaker. "The journey will be… disorienting," he warned them. "Brace yourselves. Do not fight it. And try not to be sick on Lord Stark's boots."
He slammed the axe into the ground.
The world dissolved. It was not a door opening. It was reality being torn apart. There was a violent, wrenching sensation, a feeling of being turned inside out and stretched across infinity. Colors that had no name swirled around them in a nauseating vortex. A sound like a thousand screaming stars filled their ears. The men cried out, their senses overwhelmed. Ned grit his teeth, the world spinning into a meaningless blur of light and sound.
And then, as suddenly as it began, it was over.
They collapsed onto solid ground, gasping, retching. The air was cold and sharp, filled with the taste of salt. The sound was not the din of a city, but the crash of waves against stone. They were on a high, windswept cliff. The sky above was a brilliant, star-dusted canopy, unobscured by the smoke of King's Landing. And before them, rising from the sea like the fang of some colossal beast, was Casterly Rock.
It was more magnificent and more terrifying than any story had described. It was not a castle built on a mountain; it was a mountain carved into a castle. Its stony face was pocked with a thousand windows that glowed like embers, its towers and battlements seeming to grow organically from the stone itself. It was the ancestral home of the Lannisters, a monument to a thousand years of wealth, power, and arrogance. And they stood upon its doorstep, a dozen men who had just crossed a continent in the blink of an eye.
"By the old gods," Tobin whispered, his blacksmith's heart awed by the sheer scale of the stonework.
Their arrival had not gone unnoticed. A horn blared from a watchtower overlooking the cliffs. They had been spotted.
"The main entrance to the gold mines is half a league down this cliff path," Ned said, drawing his sword. "The garrison will be alerted."
"Good," Thor grinned, a feral light in his eyes. "It will save us the trouble of knocking."
The fight down the cliff path was sharp and brutal. The Casterly Rock garrison was not the dregs of the City Watch. They were professional soldiers, well-armed and disciplined, sworn to House Lannister. But they were a skeleton crew, with the bulk of their forces away with Lord Tywin. And they were not prepared for what was coming.
The first squad of twenty men who met them on the path were simply swept away. Thor led the charge, a whirlwind of destruction. He did not have time for subtlety. He was a battering ram, and his goal was the heart of the mountain. Ned and his Northmen fought at his back, a tight, disciplined unit of steel and courage. The new commanders, Kael and Arric, proved their worth, their movements steady, their swords finding their marks. Young Tobin fought with the fury of a man avenging his father, his hammer crushing helmets and shields.
They reached the great, vaulted entrance to the gold mines. It was a massive cavern, its mouth reinforced with iron gates and defended by another fifty men.
"They've sealed the gates!" Arric shouted over the din of battle.
"Gates are just doors," Thor roared. He raised Stormbreaker, and a bolt of pure, white lightning erupted from its head. It did not strike the gate, but the massive stone lintel above it. The ancient rock, which had stood for a thousand years, cracked, groaned, and then shattered, dropping millions of tons of stone and burying the gate and the defenders behind it in an instant, man-made avalanche.
They stormed into the cavern beyond. The air was cool and smelled of damp rock and deep earth. Torches lined the walls, illuminating a vast network of tunnels stretching down into the darkness. This was the source, the beating heart of Lannister power.
"Kael, Tobin, hold the entrance," Ned commanded. "The rest of you, with me!"
They plunged into the main tunnel, fighting their way through the last of the panicked guards. They were not just soldiers anymore; they were invaders, striking at the enemy's home, a violation of every sacred rule of Westerosi warfare.
They finally reached the great central chamber, a vast cavern where a dozen main tunnels converged. The walls glittered and shimmered in the torchlight, thick veins of raw gold running through the rock like frozen lightning. It was a sight of unimaginable wealth.
"This is it," Thor said, his voice echoing in the vast space. "This is the heart." He looked at Ned. "Once this is done, there is no going back. Your house will be legends or it will be dust."
"Do it," Ned said, his voice hard as the rock around them.
Thor nodded. He walked to the center of the cavern, planted his feet, and raised Stormbreaker. He began to chant in the old tongue of Asgard, his voice not loud, but filled with a deep, resonant power that made the very stones around them vibrate. The runes on his axe began to glow, not blue this time, but a deep, fiery orange, the color of magma, of the earth's core.
He was not calling the lightning from the sky. He was calling the thunder from the earth.
He slammed the axe into the stone floor.
The effect was not an explosion. It was a deep, groaning shudder, as if the mountain itself was crying out in pain. Great cracks began to race across the ceiling and walls. The glittering veins of gold fractured. A deep, grinding roar echoed from the depths of the tunnels as support beams splintered and geological faults shifted.
Thor struck the ground again, and again, each blow a percussive beat in a symphony of destruction. He was not just smashing rock; he was using his power to find the mountain's stress points, its hidden weaknesses, and breaking them. He was collapsing the mountain on itself, sealing its treasures away forever.
"We have to go!" Ned yelled, as dust and rock began to rain down from the ceiling. The entire cavern was groaning, threatening to implode.
Thor struck one last time, a final, cataclysmic blow that sent a shockwave through the entire mountain. Then he turned and ran, grabbing Ned and pulling him along as they sprinted back towards the entrance, the roar of the collapsing mine chasing them like an angry beast.
They emerged into the cool night air, coughing, covered in dust, to find Kael and Tobin holding the entrance against a few last, desperate guards. They had done it.
"Did it work?" Kael asked, his face awestruck.
Thor looked back at the mine entrance, now a choked, impassable ruin of stone. He could feel the deep, groaning vibrations of the mountain settling into a new, permanent state of rest. "The lions will find their vaults are empty," he said.
He raised Stormbreaker one last time. "To me!" he called to the strike team. They gathered around him, their faces a mixture of exhaustion, terror, and triumphant disbelief.
The swirling colors of the Bifrost engulfed them, and with a silent, wrenching tear in reality, they were gone.
They left behind a crippled fortress, a confused and terrified garrison, and a mountain whose golden heart had been silenced. They had not just won a battle; they had fundamentally altered the balance of power in the Seven Kingdoms. The lions had been declawed. And their roar of pain, when the news reached them, would be a roar of pure, unadulterated fury. The war had just entered its final, most desperate stage.