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"Lord Clay, this fellow here is Lyonel Corbray, and the one beside him is his younger brother, Lyn Corbray."
As he spoke, Christen lifted the tip of his blood-stained sword and tapped it lightly against Lyn Corbray's pale, trembling face.
The younger Corbray recoiled instinctively, struggling with all his might to dodge the touch, but it was useless. Two soldiers of House Manderly pressed down hard on his shoulders, forcing him to kneel in the mud. No matter how desperately he twisted and flinched, he couldn't escape.
As for his elder brother, Lord of Heart's Home, who had fought with fierce resolve until the very end, he was still cursing through clenched teeth despite the grievous wounds covering his body. Christen, clearly concerned that his foul language might offend Lord Clay's ears, silenced him with a single, sharp slap that knocked him out cold on the spot.
Clay didn't object to Christen's actions. He had no reason to. Prisoners, after all, had no rights to speak of. Their fate rested entirely on the whims of those who captured them, and their treatment depended solely on the captor's mood.
Yet at that moment, Clay wasn't particularly interested in the two wretched brothers kneeling in the dirt. What caught his attention instead was the longsword in Christen's hand, held out in offering as if it were meant for him.
It wasn't that Clay hadn't seen swords before. That would have been laughable. He had killed more men with swords than he cared to count.
But this one was a little different. The moment his eyes fell on it, he sensed something… unusual.
There was a faint trace of magic clinging to it. The presence was subtle, but it was unmistakably there.
Clay cast a sideways glance at Christen. The boy was a fellow witcher, after all, and just like him, possessed an innate sensitivity to magic. Even if Christen didn't fully grasp what he was feeling, it wasn't hard to tell that he, too, had sensed the sword was not ordinary.
The moment Clay looked over, Christen stepped forward without hesitation and presented the blade with both hands.
Ignoring the bloodstained scabbard, Clay took the sword and slowly drew it half an inch.
With a crisp metallic shing, the blade slid free, catching the light with a cold, steely gleam. A wave of heat rolled over him, subtle yet intense, as a faint red glow shimmered along the length of the steel, flickering like dying embers in the shadows.
"Lord Clay," came a weary voice at just the right moment, steady and low, "this is the ancestral blade of House Corbray, forged of Valyrian steel. Its name is Lady Forlorn."
Clay didn't turn around. He already knew who was speaking. By now, only a handful of men in the entire army would dare to stand this close to him.
"Ser Brynden," he asked, his gaze still fixed on the sword, "you recognize this sword?"
He let the sword rest in his hand for a moment, weighing it thoughtfully before passing it to the man behind him. Ser Brynden Tully had already wiped the blood from his chest and arms, and his armor now bore only the faintest traces of the battle just fought.
The old knight, once the stalwart commander of the Bloody Gate and known throughout the realm as the Blackfish of House Tully, looked at the sword. A flicker of wistfulness passed across his weathered face.
He nodded slowly and gave his answer.
"Indeed, I know it. I used to get along decently well with the lords of the Vale, after all. I was the one guarding their gate, wasn't I?"
"I visited Heart's Home once as a guest. This fellow, Lyn Corbray, showed me this sword back then."
In those days, the old knight had thought he would spend the rest of his life holding the Bloody Gate, watching the mountain passes until the day he finally laid down his sword and joined the gods.
He never imagined that after only a few years of peace, he would find himself riding into war under the banner of a young Northern commander, turning his blade not against invaders, but against the very Vale lords he once stood beside.
And now, after a bloody battle, the Corbray family's main host had been crushed, nearly wiped out. The two brothers, Lyonel and Lyn, had become captives.
Thinking back on it all now, it truly felt like the world had turned upside down. Back when he'd sat at their table in Heart's Home, breaking bread and sharing their salt, who could have possibly foreseen this day would come?
That was why, just moments ago, Ser Brynden had looked at Lady Forlorn with such a complex expression. Not because of the sword's value, but because of the bitter taste of fate it carried.
Clay, for his part, didn't find the blade all that remarkable — not in the way others might. In Westeros, swords like this were mostly symbols, more about proving that your bloodline stretched far into the past than serving any unique purpose.
At the end of the day, it was simply a very well-crafted sword. Just steel, forged stronger and sharper than most, but not something that would spit fire with every swing or burn through armor with divine heat.
What truly intrigued Clay was the presence of magic woven into the blade.
This magic, however, wasn't something he had seen before. Digging through his previous memories, he suspected this kind of enchantment was originally designed for fighting the White Walkers. It carried the kind of fire magic that, by nature, clashed directly with the icy sorcery that pulsed through the bodies of those creatures.
But that was where things got interesting.
Clay had seen Melisandre with his own eyes. The Red Woman, priestess of R'hllor, walked with divine fire in her veins. If anyone embodied the magic of the Lord of Light, it was her.
And yet, the fire magic he sensed within Lady Forlorn, though certainly magical, did not feel like the same kind of fire that flowed through Melisandre.
How to put it into words…?
If he had to describe it in the simplest terms, R'hllor's power felt like a wild dance in the heart of a roaring fire. It was something bright and beautiful, but fierce and short-lived, always on the verge of consuming itself.
But the magic etched into the blade of Lady Forlorn felt nothing like that.
It was gentler. Warmer. Like sunlight in the late afternoon, soft and mellow, brushing against the skin with just enough heat to make one close their eyes and breathe deeply rather than recoil.
They did not even belong to the same realm of sensation.
And that… was strange.
Both were fire magic. So which one came first? Which was the original? Which was the true flame?
If such a thing as "true" even existed between them.
In the ancient Valyrian Freehold, there had been numerous gods. Balerion of the Death, Meraxes, and even Gaelithox, the name Clay had chosen for his own dragon, were all once objects of Valyrian worship.
None of them had ever bowed to R'hllor, much less acknowledged him as a god worth mentioning.
So if you looked at it from that angle, there were quite a few threads to unravel here.
The most pressing question was this: where exactly did the Valyrian fire magic draw its power from?
In the North, all magic pointed back to the Old Gods. Beyond the Wall, the Others served a Lord of Darkness. Melisandre, wherever she went, spread her faith through the divine fire of R'hllor. Everyone had some god behind their power — except Clay, of course. He was the outlier, a stray with no divine sponsor.
But the now-ruined Valyrian Freehold had once spoken to dragons, tamed them, and ridden them to forge a vast colonial empire that stretched across continents. And they had done it not in the name of a god, but through the fire magic that pulsed within their very blood, a magic that bound them to dragons as kin.
Clay had always assumed that the fire magic flowing through Daenerys's veins must've stemmed from R'hllor. It seemed a natural conclusion.
But when he'd met Melisandre, he hadn't paid close enough attention.
It was only now, holding Lady Forlorn, that the truth finally struck him; Daenerys Targaryen's magic, the one that ran through her noble bloodline, didn't match Melisandre's at all.
Instead, it resembled the magic within this blade. The texture and feeling were similar, like two branches growing from the same ancient root.
And that meant it came from somewhere else entirely. A different source. One far removed from the blazing, self-consuming fire of R'hllor.
If Clay had not been a witcher, so attuned to magic that he could sense its presence like a shift in air pressure, he might never have noticed.
In fact, he was willing to bet there were barely a handful of people in all of Westeros who had even the faintest clue about this distinction. The maesters down in Oldtown, those chain-draped self-proclaimed stewards of all knowledge, really ought to hang their heads in shame.
Clay frowned deeply, his brows pulling tight as his curiosity swelled, nearly lifting him out of the present like a gust of wind.
But he forced himself to let it go… for now.
He was in the middle of a war, after all, and there was no time to go chasing after ancient magical theories.
Still, the abruptness of it all, the way his thoughts had been suddenly yanked aside, reminded him in a strange and vivid way of those authors in his past life. The ones on that certain online platform, always ending chapters right when things got interesting. Their skill with cliffhangers had been nothing short of wicked. Shameless, every one of them.
He took a deep breath and pushed the half-formed memories away, shaking his head as if clearing fog from his mind. There was no use getting lost in nonsense. He forced the stray thoughts from his head and turned his attention back to the Valyrian steel sword in his hand. It looked heavy and imposing, but the moment you held it, it felt almost absurdly light.
Well then. From this day forward, you belong to me, Clay Manderly.
As for whether House Corbray would see this as an act of theft and declare eternal enmity against him, Clay couldn't care less.
If they ever found the courage to truly make an enemy of him, then hey, friend, maybe you should look up how hot dragonfire burns.
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Clay didn't have time to dwell on the secrets hidden within the sword, now part of House Manderly by right of conquest and still bearing the name Lady Forlorn.
He had a battlefield to clean up!
The stench of death still clung stubbornly to the air, lingering just beneath his nose. It snapped him out of his wandering thoughts and pulled him back to the grim present, sharpening his focus.
Earlier, when he had led the final charge, the forces of the Vale had crumbled impressively fast… so fast, in fact, that one might have thought they'd rehearsed their collapse in advance.
But the roads had been too tightly packed, the passage too narrow. The delay that caused had been costly, and the final results were… less than ideal.
When the dust settled and the tally came in, the numbers spoke clearly.
Clay's own elite heavy cavalry, the core of his army, had lost just over thirty men.
Ser Brynden Tully's northern detachment, having wisely withdrawn from battle at the right moment, suffered heavier losses. Over three hundred men had fallen, a full third of his command.
But it was the southern flank, under the command of that knight from House Vance, that suffered the worst.
He had charged into battle with a thousand Riverlands horsemen at his back. And now? Even being generous and counting every man who still had breath in his lungs, only a little more than three hundred were left.
In other words, in the span of half a day, that man had managed to cost Clay over six hundred lives… six hundred trained cavalrymen Clay had regarded as precious and irreplaceable.
And throughout the battle, this knight from House Vance had racked up mistake after mistake, each more infuriating than the last.
First and most fatally, the idiot had no sense of direction. He charged ahead without even knowing where he was going. No scouting, no planning. He simply spurred his horse and rode straight into disaster.
He barreled into the opposing lane and collided violently with Ser Brynden Tully's forces, who had been moving properly on their side.
Then, still completely unaware he had made a mistake, this clueless fool kept pushing forward, ramming his way through like a stubborn mule with his foot stuck on the gas pedal. What should have been a simple case of battlefield maneuvering turned into a tangled mess that slowed everyone down and ruined any chance of a clean breakthrough.
It was only after the full brunt of the chaos hit that he finally realized something had gone wrong on his end.
But even then, he seemed to forget he was supposed to be the commanding officer of an entire military wing. A commander, responsible for order and discipline… and yet, in the heat of battle, the man panicked, froze, and utterly forgot how to lead.
What followed was inevitable.
The southern host, which had still been holding some semblance of formation, broke down completely. Their morale collapsed. The chain of command unraveled. What had once been an organized force dissolved into scattered skirmishes, each man left to fend for himself.
And in the brutal one-on-one mounted duels that followed, the men of the Riverlands, whose training and fighting spirit already lagged far behind that of the Vale knights, were utterly outmatched.
If Clay's army had not broken through the lines in time to reach them, those thousand men would have been devoured, completely overwhelmed by the very enemy they were meant to hunt down like prey.
For someone who had brought such disaster upon the army, Clay didn't care in the slightest what blood ran through his veins. He didn't need to be dragged back to Riverrun for any sort of public trial. There was no reason to wait.
Clay didn't like leaving loose ends. He gave the order plainly and without hesitation.
Execute him. Let his death appease the spirits of the soldiers who gave their lives in this battle!
The moment that command was spoken, Christen grinned, a sharp and cold smile across a blood-smeared face he hadn't even bothered to clean. Sword in hand, he led a small squad to find the knight from House Vance, who was already under guard and stripped of his command.
When Christen came striding toward him with murder in his eyes, the man still held on to a last glimmer of hope. He clung to the illusion that his noble house's influence in the Riverlands would somehow protect him. Clay Manderly, after all, was just a Northerner. Surely, he wouldn't dare strike down a nobleman of the Vance family.
And besides, they had won the battle in the end, hadn't they? So what if his side had taken more losses? Casualties were inevitable in war. And most of the men who died were commoners, unlanded and nameless. Not a single noble had fallen. Wasn't that all that mattered?
More than that… hadn't he helped? Hadn't he held off the enemy long enough for Clay to personally capture two high-ranking Vale lords? That alone should count for something, shouldn't it?
That was what he told himself.
However, the moment Christen's boot slammed into his chest and sent him sprawling to the ground… the moment he was dragged like a carcass to the edge of the camp, where the surviving soldiers of the southern army sat hunched in silence, licking their wounds… he finally understood.
Clay wasn't going to spare him.
This was real. He was going to die!
"I'm from House Vance! I'm a knight and a noble! You have no right to kill me, Clay Manderly!"
Clay didn't even look at him. Nor did he let Christen carry out the execution. No matter how much blood Christen had shed today, and no matter how loyal he was, this act was not his to perform.
Because Clay understood the rules of the world they lived in. He had built his strength carefully. His authority now reached far and wide, and no one dared question his word, but Christen, for all his skill and savagery, was still a commoner.
And in this land, a commoner killing a noble was not merely a crime… it was sacrilege.
So this would have to be done by Clay himself.
He drew the blade that had only just entered his possession, Lady Forlorn, now reborn in his name.
He raised the sword high above his head, its edge catching the last gold light of dusk.
"I, Clay of House Manderly, in the name of the Lord Commander of the coalition host, sentence you to death."
The sword came down in a single, clean arc.
The knight's head dropped to the earth with a dull thud.
And the blood that followed…it was hot!
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[Chapter End's]
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