The road to Harrenhal was littered with the dead.
Ser Amory Lorch, the bannerman of House Lannister, rode with confidence. He led a scouting force of two hundred heavy cavalry. His orders from Tywin were simple: find the Stark van, harass them, and bleed them.
Lorch saw the enemy column ahead. They were marching in the open across a flat plain. No shield wall. No pikes. Just men in grey coats walking in lines.
"Look at them," Lorch sneered. "They march like sheep. No spears to stop a charge."
He raised his lance.
"Form up! We will ride them down and be back in Harrenhal for supper!"
The Lannister knights cheered. They spurred their horses into a trot, then a canter.
They were four hundred yards away. A safe distance for any medieval army. An archer might get lucky at two hundred yards, but four hundred was impossible.
But the grey lines did not panic. They did not form a circle. They simply stopped and turned to face the charge.
"First Rank! Kneel!"
A shout drifted across the field.
The front row of the Northern soldiers dropped to one knee. The second row stood behind them. Five hundred rifles were raised.
Lorch frowned. What are they doing? They are too far.
"Fire!"
CRACK-CRACK-CRACK-CRACK!
It sounded like dry wood snapping in a bonfire.
A cloud of white smoke obscured the Northern line.
Four hundred yards away, the air hissed.
Amory Lorch felt a punch to his chest. He looked down. A hole the size of a coin had appeared in his breastplate. He coughed, and blood sprayed onto his saddle.
How? he thought as he fell.
He was dead before he hit the ground.
Around him, the charge was annihilated. The Minié balls, spinning like drills, punched through steel plate, chainmail, and horseflesh. At this range, they retained deadly velocity.
Fifty knights fell in the first volley.
"Second Rank! Fire!"
CRACK!
Another fifty fell.
The surviving knights pulled up their horses in terror. They were three hundred yards away, and their leader was dead. They couldn't see the arrows. There were no arrows. Just invisible death humming through the air.
They broke and ran.
Andar lowered his telescope.
"Reload," he ordered calmly. "And march on. We are late."
Harrenhal was a monstrosity.
It rose from the shores of the Gods Eye lake like a melted black candle. Its towers were impossibly high, twisted by dragon fire three hundred years ago. Its walls were sheer cliffs of stone. It was big enough to house an army of a hundred thousand.
Tywin Lannister stood on the battlements of the Tower of Dread.
He looked down at the Northern army assembling on the plain. They looked like toy soldiers against the scale of the castle.
"They are setting up tents," Kevan Lannister noted. "Stark plans a siege. He is a fool. We have supplies for two years. He has supplies for two weeks."
Tywin watched the black cannons being unlimbered.
"Those guns," Tywin murmured. "They broke the Twins. But the Twins are small. These walls are thirty feet thick. He can shoot at them until doomsday and he will only scratch the paint."
Tywin turned away.
"Let them freeze in the mud. Double the watch. And send a raven to King's Landing. Tell the King to send the fleet up the Trident."
Down in the mud, Andar was not looking at the walls. He was looking at the elevation.
"The walls are too thick to breach," Andar admitted to Robb. "Tywin is right. If we use solid shot, we will just make noise."
"Then what do we do?" Robb asked, looking at the ominous black towers.
"We ignore the walls," Andar said.
He walked to the artillery line. The twenty Napoleons were lined up wheel to wheel.
"Gunners!" Andar shouted. "Maximum elevation! We are not shooting at the castle. We are shooting over the walls."
He held up a shell. It was a hollow iron sphere filled with gunpowder. A wooden fuse was stuck in the top.
"Cut the fuses for ten seconds," Andar ordered. "I want airbursts. I want them to rain shrapnel into the courtyards where the men are sleeping."
"Ten seconds!" The sergeant repeated. "Load shell!"
Inside Harrenhal, the Lannister army was relaxed. They felt safe behind the massive stone curtain. Men were cooking food in the Flowstone Yard. Horses were tethered in the Hall of the Hundred Hearths.
Then they heard a distant thumping sound.
Thump. Thump. Thump.
They looked up.
Small black dots were arcing high into the sky. They looked like birds.
They reached the apex of their flight and began to fall toward the inner courtyards.
"Arrows!" A soldier shouted laughing. "They are shooting heavy arrows!"
The first shell fell into the middle of a group of men playing dice.
It hissed for a second.
BOOM.
The explosion was contained by the stone walls, amplifying the sound.
The shell fragmented into jagged iron shards. The men playing dice were shredded.
Then the rain began.
BOOM. BOOM. CRUMP. BANG.
Twenty shells landed in the crowded courtyard.
Panic erupted.
The horses, terrified by the noise and the smell of sulfur, broke their tethers. They stampeded through the camp, trampling soldiers. Tents caught fire.
"Where is it coming from?" Kevan Lannister shouted, ducking as shrapnel pinged off the stone wall above his head.
"The sky!" A guard screamed pointing up. "The sky is exploding!"
Another volley came in.
This time, Andar mixed in Incendiary Shells. These were filled with pitch and chemically treated cotton.
They burst on impact, spraying sticky liquid fire over the wooden stable roofs.
Within minutes, the Flowstone Yard was an inferno. The smoke was trapped inside the high walls, turning the castle into a chimney.
Tywin watched from his tower. His face was a mask of fury.
He watched his disciplined army turn into a mob. They were trapped like rats in a burning bucket. The walls that were supposed to protect them were now keeping them inside the kill zone.
"My Lord!" A captain ran up, soot covering his face. "The men are breaking! They say the castle is cursed! They say Harren the Black has returned!"
Tywin looked at the chaos below.
He realized he had made a fatal error. He had fought a 19th century army with 12th century tactics.
"Prepare to march," Tywin said, his voice cold and hard.
"March? Now? In the night?"
"If we stay here," Tywin said, watching a shell explode near the granary, "we will be cooked in our own armor. We leave the wounded. We leave the baggage. We march for King's Landing."
He looked out at the distant line of grey coats.
"The Wolf has sharp teeth," Tywin whispered.
At dawn, the shelling stopped.
The gates of Harrenhal stood open. Smoke billowed from the towers.
Robb Stark rode into the castle. He covered his nose. The smell of burnt flesh was overpowering.
The courtyard was a ruin. Dead horses and Lannister soldiers lay everywhere. The mighty walls were untouched, but the army inside had been gutted.
"He is gone," scouts reported. "Tywin slipped away in the confusion. He is heading southeast."
"We chase him!" The Greatjon roared.
"No," Andar said, riding up on his horse. He looked tired. The artillery barrage had lasted six hours.
"Let him run," Andar said. "He is running to King's Landing. He will arrive just in time to meet Stannis."
Andar looked at the map.
"We have cleared the Riverlands. Now we secure our borders. And we wait."
"Wait for what?" Robb asked.
"For the Kings in the South to destroy each other," Andar said. "And while they die, we build."
[Quest Complete: The Fall of Harrenhal]
[Enemy Army Status: Routed]
[Casualties Inflicted: 4,000 Lannisters]
[Your Casualties: 12 (Accidents)]
[Strategic Objective: The North is Secure]
Andar looked at the black towers of Harrenhal.
"Burn the dead," Andar ordered. "And salvage the iron. We need every scrap of metal for the railway."
The war of maneuver was over. The war of attrition had begun. And Andar had just proven that stone walls were obsolete.
.…..
Author Note
Hi guys! Thank you for reading my fanfiction.
I wanted to let you know that I'm releasing bonus chapters for Power Stones. Here are the goals:
25 Power Stones: 1 Bonus Chapters
50 Power Stones: 1 Bonus Chapters
75 Power Stones: 2 Bonus Chapters
100 Power Stones: 2 Bonus Chapters
Thanks for the support!