Chapter 138 — Wildfire!
"Targaryens!"
On Sunspear's flagship, Manfrey Martell was dragged behind cover, an arrow still buried through his thigh, blood pouring freely. His face was ghost-pale—but not from pain alone.
What terrified him was what fluttered high along both riverbanks:
the three-headed dragon of House Targaryen, snapping in the wind.
"The royal host…? Why in the Seven Hells are they here?!"
Manfrey whispered the words again and again, lips drained of all color.
He could resent Prince Doran's recent choices all he liked—but he had never doubted one thing: Doran of House Martell was a ruler ten times wiser than the madman who sat the Iron Throne.
Compared to that weak, deranged fool in King's Landing, Doran's rule in Dorne was ironclad. Unshakable.
The other Dornish lords might complain, but none would dare openly defy Sunspear.
Yet when the first volley of arrows—thousands of them—fell like a howling storm, blanketing his fleet with killing rain, Manfrey's certainty crumbled in an instant.
"No… no, impossible!
How did they get in? The Boneway— who was holding the Boneway?!
Yronwood? What in all the gods' names was Yronwood doing, to let the Targaryens march into Dorne?!"
The swarming storm of arrows left little room for doubt.
Either Yronwood had turned traitor, or the fortress had been broken—silently, swiftly.
And which was more unthinkable?
Both.
But here the proof lay, a riverbank of black-armored troops and white cloaks, and a rain of arrows that had driven his proud Dornish fleet to cower like rats.
At last, Manfrey forced the words through clenched teeth:
"We've been betrayed.
Those treacherous bastards have sold us out!"
When the arrow-storm finally thinned—nearly five endless minutes later—Manfrey, trembling, pushed himself upright.
His gaze rose to the high bank, where soldiers in black and crimson stood in ordered ranks.
And among gleaming Kingsguard white, wrapped in midnight robes,
he saw a thin silver-haired figure.
The King.
King Aerys's long black cloak snapped like a banner in the wind.
Manfrey could swear he saw cruel amusement dancing in those purple eyes, as though the Mad King savored every moment.
"Damn you… Targaryens!"
With a sudden snarl, Manfrey seized the shaft in his thigh—
—and ripped the arrow out with his bare hand.
Blood spurted down his leg, splashing the deck crimson.
But he did not flinch.
"RAM THEM! FOR SUNSPEAR!"
His guards recoiled, horrified.
"My lord—"
Manfrey shoved him aside, staggering forward, a wild fire burning in his gaze.
"We have no retreat left, you fool!
Yronwood has betrayed us! Betrayed Dorne! Betrayed the Martells!
If we turn back, we'll be butchered like cattle in an ambush!"
He lurched to the highest point of the deck, voice ragged but thunderous:
"So we strike!
Before we die, we carve our vengeance into those traitors' bones!"
His arm slashed through the air:
"RAM THAT SHIP!
Break their hull!
Shatter their hope!"
"MARTELL!"
The cry rose—not of triumph, but of men who knew they were already dead.
A dozen voices became a hundred.
The warship lurched forward, oars biting the water with reckless fury.
Manfrey's soldiers stared at riverbank and banner alike, then—
stood as one, gripping spears and lines.
His personal guard was the first to roar back:
"Sink those bloody Northerners!"
"HOO! HOO! HOO!"
The fleet surged upriver, wood groaning with the strain.
Manfrey swallowed hard—a flash of regret in his eyes—
but the fire swallowed it whole.
He did not truly know whether enemies waited behind them.
He only knew this:
On that ship ahead were Northern interlopers,
and more importantly—
Lady Mellario and infant Prince Quentyn.
If the Yronwoods had betrayed Dorne, if those two were carried to King's Landing—
Prince Doran would bow.
Would yield.
Would be shackled forever.
Better, then—
to drown them all.
Better no hostages at all
than chains around Doran's neck.
As once, long ago, Dorne united and dragged a dragon from the sky,
so too must they now cast these threats into the river's cold grave.
Manfrey's breath came ragged—
but his resolve was iron.
He would clear Doran's path.
Even if the price was everything.
---
Arrows rattled again from both banks, though thinner now—
the hidden archers clearly short on supply.
On so broad a river, the shafts wounded some,
but did not slow the fleet.
Most had already made peace with death.
Manfrey stood unmoving at the prow, one hand braced against the mast,
letting arrows hiss past him.
"Aerys Targaryen, you wretched lunatic…
Do you think a few arrows will stop me?"
His mouth twisted with bloody laughter.
"Your soldiers hold the shore—
but my ships will reach your wife and child first.
They'll sink into the Torentine's depths—
and you can fish their corpses from the sand!"
Victory gleamed in his eyes—
a twisted, ruinous joy
at the thought of Lance, the Queen, and the prince
thrashing beneath cold waters.
Just as the hull crashed through the current, picking up reckless speed—
a voice cried out:
"WHAT IS THAT?!"
Just as the doomed merchantman loomed ever closer, a shout from the riverbank snapped Manfrey back to reality.
From both sides of the Torentine, massive casks were suddenly heaved down the cliffs—
some smashed apart on jagged rocks, spilling a luminous green fluid that spread like oil across the surface of the water.
Others struck the river intact, but their lids were never sealed; that same eerie green liquid poured freely from within, drifting downstream until the entire stretch of water between Manfrey's warship and the merchant vessel glowed with that unnatural color.
Manfrey swore by the Seven, he had never seen such a substance—
yet something about that ghostly green chilled him to the marrow.
A single arrow arced downward.
Its head was wrapped in blazing pitch, burning bright as it struck the river's surface—
and vanished without effect.
"What… what is this supposed to—?"
Confusion flickered across his face—
but the answer came before he could finish the thought.
Hundreds of flaming arrows rained down from the cliffs.
The moment the first burning shaft kissed the green liquid,
time seemed to stop.
Then—
The river erupted.
Emerald fire sprang to life, crackling and leaping like something alive, racing across the water's surface in an instant.
In the stunned eyes of every Dornish soldier aboard, the Torentine transformed into a spreading sea of green hellfire, flames roaring high enough to twist the very air above them.
Anywhere the green substance had touched,
the fire followed—
devouring water, wood, flesh—
everything.
"Hel—!"
Manfrey tried to shout, to give the order to stop—
but the warship was already upon the flames.
The prow plunged straight into the burning slick,
and the wildfire surged up its hull like a starving beast,
consuming everything.
Men engulfed by that emerald blaze screamed—
but rolling on the deck did nothing.
Jumping into the river did nothing.
The flames clung to them, burning through steel, flesh, and bone alike, as though alive and hungry.
The deck filled with hideous shrieks—
a chorus of agony that echoed across the river.
"...It's over."
The realization struck Manfrey like a hammer.
The wall of living flame, the choking green smoke, the heat that seared the very air—
there would be no breaking through.
His charge—
his last gamble for Doran—
was finished before it had even begun.
Everything he had sought to protect—his prince, his family's pride, the centuries of defiance—
felt suddenly small before this mad, impossible weapon conjured by the Iron Throne.
How absurd, he thought,
that his fierce resolve
meant so little
before the insanity of a Targaryen king.
Manfrey laughed—
a short, breathless sound, half-sob, half-liberation.
Then he opened his arms wide, as if to embrace the raging emerald inferno,
and stepped forward.
In his final instant, he did not see Lance, nor the Queen, nor the child—
nor even the Mad King's cold, cruel violet eyes.
Instead—
he saw Doran.
And with a faint, almost tender smile—
"Farewell, my prince."
Then the wild green fire
took him.