Chapter 8: The Feast of Crows
The Red Keep did not sleep. It writhed in a fever dream of grief and fury. Queen Helaena, a ghost in her own halls, wandered aimlessly, whispering to specters, her mind shattered into a thousand glittering shards by the horror she had been forced to witness. Her dragon, Dreamfyre, mirrored her madness, shrieking and rattling her chains in the Dragonpit, a constant, harrowing lament that frayed the nerves of the entire city. King Aegon II, having lost his heir, found solace not in governance but in the bottom of a wine flagon, his sorrow curdling into a petulant, violent rage.
But amidst the grief, a harder, colder fury was taking hold. The murder of Prince Jaehaerys was a wound, but the sudden, inexplicable disappearance of the Lannister gold was a hemorrhage. The two events, striking in such swift succession, had sent the Green Council into a state of frantic paranoia.
"First, the Red Queen vanishes from the sky," Otto Hightower's voice was strained, the calm mask of the master politician cracking to reveal the anxious man beneath. They were gathered in the Small Council chamber, the air thick with smoke and fear. "Then, assassins of unparalleled cunning breach the Red Keep. And now, a king's ransom in gold, the entire treasury of Casterly Rock, vanishes from a guarded flotilla mere miles from the city. These are not disconnected events. This is a pattern. A coordinated campaign."
Prince Aemond One-Eye stood staring at the map of the Crownlands, his back to the council. His single sapphire eye reflected the candlelight with a chilling intensity. "It is Daemon," he said, his voice a low growl. "He is cleverer than we credited. He uses sorcery, whispers, and shadows. He took Rhaenys himself to sow fear. He sent his cutthroats. He found a way to sink the gold. He fights like a snake in the grass."
"A snake that can make a hundred-ship fleet disappear and spirit away ten barges of gold without a single witness?" Lord Jasper Wylde, the Master of Laws, countered nervously. "This feels... larger than one man. Even Daemon Targaryen."
"Then we force his hand!" Aemond spun around, his fist crashing down on the table, making the wine cups jump. "We stop playing his game of shadows! Lord Commander Cole is at Rook's Rest. We have their man Staunton trapped. We will make an example of him. We will force Rhaenyra to respond with another dragon, and when she does, Vhagar and I will be waiting. We will fall upon whatever she sends and burn them from the sky in full view of gods and men. We need a victory. A public, undeniable victory to staunch this bleeding."
Otto Hightower saw the folly in it. He saw the rage clouding his grandson's judgment. He felt the cold touch of a hidden hand moving pieces on the board, a hand that was not his and not Daemon's. But he was losing control. The grief-stricken king and the furious prince were united in their demand for blood. The order was sent. Ser Criston Cole was to press the siege of Rook's Rest with all haste. Aemond and Aegon, on Vhagar and Sunfyre, would fly to support him and lay their trap. They would have their battle. They would have their vengeance.
Far below the city, nestled in the stinking silt of the Blackwater, Krosis-Krif felt the decision being made. He felt the renewed surge of aggressive intent from the Red Keep, the grim satisfaction of Prince Aemond. He had processed the last of the Lannister gold, the raw elemental energy settling in his bones like a bedrock of terrestrial power. It was a different feeling from the vibrant, chaotic energy of life force; it was a cold, dense, grounding power, making him feel less like a creature of flesh and more like a feature of the planet itself. The memories he'd absorbed from the soldiers and barge-masters had given him a granular, ground-level understanding of the Greens' military structure.
He knew their main army, the force led by the formidable and arrogant Ser Criston Cole, was their primary offensive weapon. It was this army that had pacified the Crownlands and was now poised to crack open Rook's Rest. With the disappearance of Meleys, the Blacks were now at a significant disadvantage in the dragon-on-dragon calculus. They would be hesitant to send another dragon into a potential trap. This meant Cole's army was, for a time, the Greens' most potent and confident asset.
And therefore, it had to be removed from the board.
Leaving the bay was like a nightmare receding. He moved with the outgoing tide, a shadow slipping out to the open sea, leaving the frantic city behind him. He took to the air miles from the coast, ascending into a thick blanket of clouds, a ghost returning to his element. He flew west, over the patchwork of fields and forests that made up the Crownlands.
Rhaenys's memories served him well. She had flown these lands a thousand times. He knew every stream, every hill, every castle. He found Criston Cole's army with ease. It was a formidable sight: six thousand men, a sea of steel and discipline, encamped around the defiant castle of Rook's Rest. Trebuchets were being assembled. Siege towers were under construction. The black-and-silver banner of Ser Criston Cole flew beside the gold dragon of King Aegon II.
Krosis-Krif did not attack. He watched. For three days, he circled high above, a speck in the heavens, using clouds as his cover. He was a god observing an ant farm. He analyzed their patrols, the placement of their latrines, the schedule of their meals. He noted the terrain: the camp was situated in a wide, shallow basin, with hills to the north and a marshy forest to the east. Ser Criston was a master of siegecraft, but his arrogance made him predictable. His formations were tight, his command structure centralized, his belief in his own prowess absolute. He was prepared for a sortie from the castle walls. He was prepared for a dragon attack from the sky. He was not prepared for an attack from the earth itself, from a mind that saw his army not as a military force, but as a calorie count.
On the dawn of the fourth day, a thick, cold fog rolled in from the marshes, blanketing the entire basin. It was a gift from the heavens. The soldiers in the camp huddled around their fires, their visibility reduced to a few feet, their world a grey, muffled purgatory. Criston Cole, confident in his sentries and the strength of his position, felt no alarm.
The first sign that the world was ending was not a sound, but a feeling. A low, pervasive vibration in the ground, as if a giant's heart had begun to beat deep beneath the earth. Men paused, looking down at their feet in confusion. Horses whinnied and stamped, their animal senses screaming a warning their riders could not comprehend.
Krosis-Krif began his attack not with fire, but with his voice. He lay flattened against the northern hills, his colossal form completely obscured by the fog. He inhaled, his chest expanding like a smith's bellows, and unleashed the sound. The low, sub-sonic hum. It rolled down into the basin, a silent, invisible wave of pure disorientation. It was not loud, but it was invasive. It bypassed the eardrums and vibrated the liquid in the inner ear, the fluid of the eyeball, the very bones of the skull.
The effect on the Green army was immediate and catastrophic. Men were struck with a crippling vertigo, falling to their knees, vomiting. Their vision blurred. A profound, instinctual terror, divorced from any visible threat, seized them. It was the neurological sensation of pure dread. Formations dissolved into stumbling, panicked mobs. Knights were thrown from their thrashing horses. Orders were shouted but never heard over the ringing in the men's own skulls. In seconds, a disciplined army was reduced to a terrified, incapacitated herd.
Ser Criston Cole fought it. He gritted his teeth, his hand gripping the pommel of his longsword, trying to pierce the grey veil, trying to understand the source of this witchcraft. He roared for his men to form a shield wall, but his voice was a thin reed in the overwhelming tide of psychic pressure.
Then came the second stage of the attack. While the army was disoriented, Krosis-Krif used his body. He crawled to the edge of the hill overlooking the camp and pushed. Not with a gentle nudge, but with a colossal shove of his shoulder, a movement that displaced thousands of tons of rock and earth. A landslide, a grinding, roaring avalanche of mud and stone, cascaded down into the western edge of the camp, burying siege engines and hundreds of screaming men under an unstoppable tide.
From the east, he used his tail. A whip of black, spiked muscle, it lashed out from the fog, scything through the marshy forest. Trees, ancient and tall, were snapped like twigs and hurled into the camp, becoming colossal, unguided missiles that crushed tents and men indiscriminately.
The Green army was now completely broken, trapped between a landslide and a barrage of flying trees, their minds crippled by the ceaseless, vibrating hum. They were no longer soldiers. They were just meat.
Only then, when their spirits were shattered and their formations obliterated, did Krosis-Krif grant them the gift of fire. He rose to his full height, a black god emerging from the mist, a sight so monstrous it drove men to immediate insanity. He opened his jaws and poured forth a river of incandescent plasma. He did not aim at individuals. He swept the fire back and forth, methodically, like a farmer scything a field of wheat. He started at one end of the basin and worked his way to the other.
The fog vaporized in his presence. The ground melted. Steel armor ran like water. Men and horses were erased from existence in a wave of white-hot annihilation. Their screams were incinerated before they could fully leave their throats. The disciplined camp became a churning, molten bowl of death. He was not fighting them. He was sterilizing the landscape of their presence.
Ser Criston Cole saw him. For a single, eternal second, the Kingmaker, the Lord Commander, the finest warrior of his generation, met the golden eyes of the abyss. He saw the cold, contemptuous intelligence. He understood, in that final moment, that all his ambition, all his victories, all his hatred, were utterly and completely meaningless. He raised his sword, a final, futile act of defiance, before the fire took him and he was no more.
When the last flame died down, silence returned to the valley. The hum had stopped. The ground was still. The fog began to creep back in, mingling with the black, greasy smoke that rose from the molten earth. The army of the Greens, the pride of King's Landing, was gone.
Krosis-Krif descended into the basin of horrors he had created. This was the feast. He moved through the smoldering devastation, consuming what remained. The sheer volume of life force was staggering, a torrent of energy that flooded his senses. He absorbed the dying thoughts of six thousand men: their training, their loyalty, their fear, their hatred of the Blacks. He absorbed the knowledge of their commanders, their understanding of Green strategy, their contingency plans. It was a feast of bodies, but also a feast of information.
He grew. The power, so immense and varied, settled within him, reinforcing his already godlike form. He felt like a star consuming a nebula, growing hotter, denser, more powerful with every particle he absorbed.
As he fed, he felt them coming. Two pinpricks of furious energy in the eastern sky, approaching at great speed. Aegon on Sunfyre. Aemond on Vhagar. They had felt the psychic death-scream of their army and were coming to investigate, to unleash their vengeance.
Krosis-Krif had no intention of facing them. A confrontation with Vhagar was still a risk not worth taking, not when there was no profit in it. His work here was done. Gorged and incandescent with new power, he turned and melted back into the landscape, his black form disappearing into the rolling hills to the west. He was a ghost, a whisper, a bad dream that faded with the morning light.
He left the scene for the two Targaryen princes to find. He left them the field of melted glass and carbonized bone. He left them the deafening silence where their army used to be. He had ripped the heart out of the Greens' land campaign and feasted upon it. First, the Blacks' strongest dragon. Then, the Greens' treasury and their finest army.
He was not a parasite. He was the shepherd of the slaughter. And his flock was being culled with perfect, symmetrical cruelty. The war was his pasture, and he was growing fat on the harvest.