(The Mouth of the Shuddering Gorge, 124 AC)
War in the Vale had always been a screaming affair. It was the sound of individual knights crashing into ragged lines, seeking glory, driven by bloodlust and the songs of bards.
Aeryn Royce-Targaryen did not believe in bards. He believed in kinematics.
From the back of Vermithor, hovering five hundred feet above the valley floor in a stable thermal updraft, Aeryn looked down at the machine he had built.
Below him, the Bronze Legion was on the move.
They did not look like a feudal levy. They were identical. Twelve hundred men wearing standardized breastplates of burnished bronze, grey wool cloaks, and full-face helms that erased their humanity. They moved not as a mob, but as a single, multi-jointed organism of metal flowing into the throat of the mountain.
The Bronze Legion (Mobilized Strength: 1,200)
* The Vanguard: 400 Heavy Infantry (Tower Shields and Pikes).
* The Center: 500 Crossbowmen (Braavosi-pattern rapid reloaders).
* The Flanks: 300 Shock Troopers (Halberdiers).
Aeryn adjusted the far-eye lens mounted on his saddle. He watched the far end of the Gorge. The trap was set.
The unified clans—Stone Crows, Burned Men, and Moon Brothers—were waiting. Nearly three thousand of them. They screamed and beat their chests, their voices echoing off the canyon walls. They saw a column of soldiers marching into a narrow pass and thought they saw prey.
"Look at them, Vermithor," Aeryn whispered, his voice calm over the wind. "They think numbers are the only variable. They don't understand that chaos is just friction."
He checked the wind. He checked the sun.
He pulled the signal lever. A green flare shot from the dragon's saddle, arcing high into the air.
...
(The Valley Floor)
Ser Vardis Egen, Commander of the Legion, saw the flare. He didn't shout a rallying speech. He simply raised his mace.
CLANK.
Twelve hundred boots struck the earth at the exact same millisecond. The sound was louder than a drum. It was the sound of a mountain moving.
Across the field, the "Great Chieftain" Crow-Feather roared. The clans charged. It was a terrifying sight—a tidal wave of furs, iron axes, and desperate fury, rolling down the rocky slope to crush the invaders.
Vardis lowered his mace.
"Phalanx."
The Bronze Guard didn't hesitate. The front four ranks slammed their heavy rectangular shields into the dirt, locking them together rim-to-rim. They didn't brace with their arms; they braced with their shoulders, creating a solid wall of metal.
Snap.
Four hundred pikes lowered over the shield rims, creating a forest of steel points.
The clansmen hit the wall.
It sounded like meat hitting a butcher's block. The momentum of the charge, which would have shattered a normal line of infantry, was absorbed by the mass and geometry of the phalanx. Bodies piled up on the pikes. Shields held. The Bronze Guard didn't step back.
"Volley!"
From behind the shield wall, the crossbowmen raised their weapons at a forty-five-degree angle.
Thrum.
Five hundred bolts hissed into the sky. They didn't aim for individual targets; they saturated the area. The rear ranks of the charging clansmen simply evaporated, cut down by a rain of iron.
Aeryn watched from the sky. It was a math problem being solved in real-time.
Variable: Flanking maneuver.
He saw movement on the eastern ridge. A group of three hundred Burned Men was scaling the goat paths, trying to drop rocks on the Legion's rear.
Aeryn banked Vermithor. The dragon's shadow fell over the ridge.
"Drakari."
Aeryn didn't unleash a torrent. He commanded a surgical strike. Vermithor exhaled a concentrated stream of fire that turned the narrow goat path into a river of molten slag. The flanking force wasn't fought; it was erased.
The clansmen in the gorge froze. They looked up at the monster in the sky. They looked at the wall of bronze in front of them that refused to break, refused to bleed, and refused to die.
Panic set in. The charge faltered.
Aeryn fired a Red Flare.
"Advance."
The shield wall didn't break formation. It lifted.
Step. CLANK.
Step. CLANK.
The Legion began to walk forward. They walked over the bodies of the fallen. They walked into the screaming mass of the clans. The pikes thrust in a rhythmic, piston-like motion. Thrust. Kill. Step.
It wasn't a battle anymore. It was a grinder.
Crow-Feather, seeing his army dismantled by a force that fought without emotion, dropped his axe and fled. The unity of the clans shattered. They ran back to the peaks, leaving a thousand dead on the floor of the Shuddering Gorge.
The Bronze Guard didn't chase them. They didn't break ranks to loot the bodies. They stopped on command, cleaned their blades, and waited for the next order.
...
(The Victory Camp - Sunset)
The sun dipped behind the Giant's Lance, bathing the camp in a blood-red light.
Aeryn landed Vermithor in the designated landing zone—a flat circle cleared by his engineers. The dragon was massive now, his chest heaving with the heat of his internal furnace.
Aeryn dismounted. His leg ached from the cold, but he walked with his usual stiff dignity.
Ser Vardis approached. He was covered in dust, but there was no blood on his armor.
"Casualty report," Aeryn requested, taking a cup of water from a steward.
"Zero fatalities, My Lord," Vardis said, his voice filled with a strange kind of awe. "Seven minor injuries—sprained ankles, one broken finger. The armor held. The formation held."
"And the ammunition?"
"We used forty percent of the bolt supply."
"Acceptable," Aeryn nodded. "Recover the reusable bolts from the field. Waste nothing."
He walked through the camp. The men were eating their rations—hot stew prepared by the logistics corps. They stood when they saw him.
They didn't cheer. They didn't chant his name like drunkards at a tourney. They saluted. Sharp. Precise. Silent.
Aeryn stopped by a group of young knights who, years ago, would have laughed at the idea of fighting on foot behind a shield. Now, they looked at their dented bronze plates with pride. They understood.
"You realized something today," Aeryn said to them.
One of the soldiers, the former squire Godric (who had once been sent to the mines for arrogance), stepped forward. He was older now, harder.
"We realized that glory gets you killed, My Lord," Godric said. "Discipline gets you home."
Aeryn allowed himself a very faint, very cold smile.
"Keep that lesson," Aeryn said. "Because the clans were just a test. There are bigger enemies to the south."
He walked back to his tent, listening to the sounds of the camp. It wasn't the raucous partying of a victor's feast. It was the sound of armor being repaired, weapons being sharpened, and watches being set.
It was the sound of a machine cooling down.
Aeryn sat at his desk and opened his journal. He wrote a single entry for the day:
Experiment 42: The Shuddering Gorge.
Hypothesis: Superior organization negates superior numbers.
Result: Confirmed.
Cost: 400 bolts.
Profit: Total control of the Western Pass.
He closed the book.
The Vale was no longer just a kingdom of mountains. It was a fortress of Bronze. And Aeryn held the only key.