# Lannisport, The Westerlands
*Three days later, dawn*
The city slept like a fat sow in mud, pink and content and utterly ignorant of the butcher's blade. Lannisport had grown rich on the Lannisters' gold, its people soft on the assumption that lions protected their own. The harbor watch spent their nights drinking and dicing, the city guard fucked whores in the barracks, and the wealthy merchants dreamed of adding another floor to their manse or buying a summer home in the Arbor.
No one dreamed of longships sliding out of the dark like knives seeking a throat.
Fifty of them came with the dawn, black sails against black water, moving in silence save for the creak of oars and the whisper of hulls cutting through the bay. At the prow of the *Silence*, Euron Greyjoy stood with both hands on the rail, his one visible eye bright with an anticipation that would have looked more natural on a man watching his first woman undress.
"She's beautiful, isn't she?" Euron said to the dawn, to the city, to no one in particular. His crew of mutes rowed in perfect silence behind him—tongueless, some said cockless too, all of them wearing the gray, dead-eyed look of men who'd learned that screaming accomplished nothing. "Fat and rich and completely fucking helpless. Like a virgin who doesn't know she's about to get split open."
Beside him, Dagmer Cleftjaw grunted agreement. The left side of his face was a ruin of scar tissue where an axe had split his jaw years ago, leaving him with a permanent sneer and a voice that sounded like rocks grinding together. "Virgins scream the prettiest. All that surprise."
"Everything screams pretty if you hurt it right," Euron replied, his smile too wide, too sharp. "That's the secret the green lands forget. They think civilization means not hurting things. We know better. We know everything *wants* to be hurt, deep down. They just need someone to show them."
The longships slid up to the docks like lovers into bed, quiet and intimate. On the *Reaver's Kiss*, Harren the Handsome—who'd earned his name by never leaving more than severed hands behind at his raids—was the first over the rail, an axe in each fist.
The harbor watch saw them too late. One guard, fat and fifty with a wine-stained beard, managed to get his mouth open to yell before Harren's left axe took him in that open mouth, splitting his tongue and smashing through his teeth in an explosion of red and white shards. The guard fell backward, axe buried to the haft, feet drumming on the dock while he gargled blood and broken teeth.
"Sloppy," Harren muttered, planting his boot on the dying man's chest. The guard was still alive, eyes rolling in terror as he tried to breathe around the steel in his throat. Harren worked the axe back and forth, wiggling it like a loose tooth, feeling the blade grind against vertebrae. "Should've gone for the neck. Cleaner kill."
"Where's the fun in clean?" Dagmer growled, stepping over the corpse. His own blade had already tasted blood—a young guard, perhaps twenty, who'd been pissing off the edge of the dock when the Ironborn arrived. Dagmer had opened him from balls to breastbone in a single upward stroke, and now the boy's intestines steamed on the dock like fresh-caught fish, purple and glistening in the dawn light. The guard was still alive, on his knees, trying desperately to stuff his own guts back into the hole they'd come from. They kept slipping through his fingers, slick with shit and blood.
"Fair point," Harren agreed. He finally wrenched his axe free with a wet crunch, and the guard's death rattle sounded like a man drowning in mud. "You always were the philosopher."
Behind them, more Ironborn poured onto the docks like ants onto a corpse. The killing started in earnest.
---
A ship's captain—Braavosi by his dress, successful by his fat belly—tried to rally his crew with a cutlass and brave words about defending their cargo. He got perhaps three words into his speech before Dagmer's sword went in through his open mouth and out the back of his skull in a spray of teeth, bone, and brain.
The captain stood there for a moment, looking surprised, sword still protruding from his face like an obscene tongue. Then his knees buckled and he fell, and the blade snapped off at the hilt as his skull hit the dock.
"Fuck," Dagmer said, looking at his broken sword with genuine annoyance. "That was a good blade."
"Was," Harren agreed. "Now it's decoration. Look at him—wearing it like a crown."
The captain's crew lost their taste for heroism after that. They scattered like roaches when you lift a stone, some jumping into the water, others running for the city. The ones who jumped mostly drowned—armor and panic are a poor combination for swimming. The ones who ran made it perhaps twenty feet before Ironborn arrows found them.
One sailor, younger than the rest, tripped over his own feet and fell sprawling. Three raiders were on him before he could rise, blades rising and falling like a farmer threshing wheat. When they stepped away, what was left looked less like a man and more like meat someone had been carving for stew—arms hacked off at the shoulders, legs split from the stumps, face so destroyed his own mother wouldn't have recognized him.
"Bit excessive," Harren observed.
"First kill makes you stupid," one of the raiders replied, wiping blood from his face with the back of his hand. He was grinning like a boy who'd just fucked his first woman. "Makes you want to keep cutting until there's nothing left to cut."
"Save some energy," Dagmer advised. "We've got a whole fucking city to work through. Pace yourselves."
---
On a Volantene trader, Harren's crew found the hold stuffed with silk—enough to clothe every whore in Westeros in finery their cunts would never earn. Also: a cabin boy, perhaps twelve, hiding behind the bales with eyes like a kicked dog.
"Please," the boy whispered in accented Common Tongue. "Please, I have—"
Harren's axe took him in the face before he could finish. The blade split his skull down to the jaw, spraying teeth and brain matter across the silk. The boy's legs kept twitching for a good ten seconds after, his body not yet understanding it was dead.
"Fucking hate it when they beg," Harren said, shaking gore from his blade. A chunk of something gray and wet fell onto the silk with a soft *plop*. "Spoils the whole mood. Like fucking a woman who won't stop crying."
"You fuck plenty of women who won't stop crying," Dagmer pointed out.
"That's different. Those are tears of pain, not sadness. Pain tears are honest." Harren kicked the dead boy aside and started examining the silk. "This is quality. The salt wives will look good in this. Make them pretty before we ruin them."
"Everything's prettier before you ruin it," Dagmer philosophized. "That's why ruining things is fun."
They loaded the silk onto longships while around them the harbor transformed into an abattoir. Bodies piled up on docks, floated in water turning pink then red then brown with blood and shit. A merchant who'd been sleeping aboard his ship stumbled on deck in his nightshirt and took an arrow through the eye, the shaft punching through his skull and embedding in the mast behind him. He hung there, crucified on his own ship, twitching as his brains leaked out around the arrow.
"Nice shot," someone called to the archer.
"Should've aimed for the cock," the archer replied. "More fun to watch them dance."
By the time the sun cleared the horizon, the harbor was a forest of burning ships and floating corpses. The screaming had only just begun.
---
In the residential districts, the real artistry started.
Euron walked through the streets like a king surveying his domain, stepping over corpses without looking down, pausing occasionally to critique his men's technique the way a master might judge an apprentice's work.
A household guard had been nailed to his own door—alive—spikes through his palms and ankles in crude mockery of some Essosi god. He was still breathing, each breath a wet rattle through a throat ruined from screaming. His stomach had been opened in a neat line from sternum to groin, and his intestines hung out like obscene decorations, steaming in the morning air.
"Artistic," Euron observed to Torwold Browntooth, who stood nearby admiring his handiwork while chewing sourleaf. "Very *artistic*. Though it seems a waste of time. We're here to kill efficiently, not to make statements."
"Cunt tried to bar the door," Torwold explained, spitting a stream of brown juice that splattered on the dying man's boots. "Thought he was tough, standing there with his sword and his duty. So I thought I'd let him stand there a while longer. See how tough he feels when he's watching his own guts try to escape."
The guard's eyes rolled toward Euron, pleading silently for death. His lips moved, but only blood came out.
"Can't argue with that logic," Euron agreed. He drew his knife—a beautiful thing, Valyrian steel with a bone handle carved from something that might have been human—and opened the guard's throat with professional efficiency. "But in future, quick deaths. We're on a schedule."
"Aye, captain."
Inside the house, Ser Daven Lannister had been less fortunate than his guard.
He'd made it perhaps five feet from his bed before an axe found his spine, dropping him like a puppet with cut strings. Now he lay in a spreading pool of piss and blood and shit—the dying always shit themselves, one of life's small indignities—his mouth opening and closing like a fish drowning in air.
His legs didn't work anymore. The axe had seen to that, cutting clean through his spine just below the shoulder blades. But his arms still worked, and he was using them to try crawling toward his wife, leaving a trail of blood like a slug's slime.
His wife was in considerably worse shape.
Three raiders had taken turns with her on the floor beside her husband's corpse—or near-corpse, since Ser Daven was stubbornly refusing to die quickly. They'd stripped her naked first, enjoying her screams as they tore the silk nightgown from her body. Then they'd held her down while the first man mounted her, pounding into her with enthusiastic brutality while she shrieked and thrashed.
"She's tight!" the first raider had called to his companions, laughing. "Never had children, I'd wager! Should we give her one? Plant a proper Ironborn seed in this Lannister cunt?"
"Fuck her harder," another raider suggested. "See if you can split her open."
By the time the third man finished, she wasn't screaming anymore. She lay in a spreading pool of blood—her own, mostly, leaking from tears that would never heal—her breath coming in shallow gasps. One eye was swollen completely shut where they'd beaten her for biting the second man's shoulder. Her teeth were scattered across the floor like dice, knocked out one by one when she'd kept trying to bite.
Ser Daven finally reached her, his paralyzed body leaving a red streak across expensive Myrish carpets. He touched her face with trembling fingers, tried to speak, managed only a wet gurgle.
She didn't respond. Couldn't respond. Her remaining eye stared at the ceiling, focused on nothing.
"Still breathing," one raider observed, nudging her with his boot. Her head lolled to the side. "Tough bitch. Most of them pass out by the second man."
"Not for long," another said. He drew his knife and opened her throat—a single efficient cut that sent blood spraying across her husband's reaching hand. She made a wet choking sound, kicked once, and went still.
Ser Daven made a sound like an animal dying. He tried to drag himself closer to his dead wife, his paralyzed legs trailing uselessly behind him, blood painting his path.
"Should we finish him?" one raider asked.
"Nah," another replied. "Let him bleed out slow. More fun that way. Let him lie there thinking about how he couldn't save her, how he couldn't even fucking move while we ruined his pretty wife."
They set the house on fire on their way out. The flames caught quickly in the silk curtains, spreading to the carpets, the furniture, the bed where Ser Daven and his wife had slept comfortably for years, dreaming dreams of prosperity and safety.
Ser Daven burned with his house, still trying to reach his dead wife, still failing with every breath that filled with smoke instead of air.
---
Aeron Greyjoy—the Damphair, wet and wild and mad with righteousness—kicked open the doors of the Sept of the Sea's Stars like a man entering a brothel he planned to burn.
The septon—old and fat and prosperous from a lifetime of accepting donations from wealthy merchants seeking divine favor—stumbled out of his chambers in sleeping robes, eyes bleary, mouth opening to demand who dared disturb the sanctity of—
Aeron's knife opened his throat before he could finish the sentence. Blood sprayed across the seven-pointed star carved into the floor, and the septon fell to his knees, clutching at the ruin of his neck while blood pumped between his fingers in hot spurts.
"The Drowned God sends his regards," Aeron said, watching the septon die with the satisfaction of a man who'd just proven a theological point. "Tell your false gods they're fucking cowards who can't protect their own priests."
The septon tried to speak, managed only a wet gurgle, and toppled forward. His blood pooled around the seven-pointed star, filling in the carved lines until the holy symbol looked like it was made of red instead of white stone.
Behind Aeron, his men poured into the sept like raiders into a rich man's vault. The sept's acolytes—young boys in robes of white silk, virgins dedicated to serving the Seven—tried to hide in the crypts below. They were found quickly.
What followed was not quick, and not clean, and not remotely merciful.
The boys were dragged up from the crypts one by one, screaming and pleading in voices that hadn't yet broken into manhood. The Ironborn enjoyed them first—some raiders preferred boys to women, found their screaming more satisfying, their tears more honest—and then killed them slowly when they'd grown bored of the sport.
One acolyte, perhaps sixteen, fought back with a heavy candlestick. He managed to break a raider's nose before three more men dragged him down. They held him while a fourth cut off his stones with a dull knife—sawing through the meat while the boy shrieked like a butchered pig—then stuffed his own balls into his mouth while he choked and gagged.
"Swallow," the raider ordered, holding the boy's jaw shut. "Go on, eat your own seed. See if it makes you a man."
The boy thrashed and gagged, trying to spit them out, but the raider kept his jaw clamped shut until he had no choice but to swallow. Then they opened his belly with a hunting knife, pulling out his intestines hand over hand like fishermen pulling up nets, watching him try to scream around the blood filling his throat.
He lasted perhaps two minutes before shock took him. They dumped his corpse on the altar and moved on to the next boy.
"The false gods offer no protection!" Aeron proclaimed, his voice ringing through the sept like a bell tolling doom. Blood soaked his robes, his hair, his holy water. "Only the Drowned God gives truth! Only salt and iron! Only death and rebirth!"
"What is dead may never die!" his men roared back, blood-drunk and grinning.
They set fire to the sept before leaving, and it caught fast—all that incense and holy oil providing fuel for flames that rose higher than anywhere else in the burning city. The boys who'd survived the initial slaughter—hidden in crypts or cowering in corners—learned that burning alive was worse than rape, worse than castration, worse than anything they'd imagined in their nightmares.
Their screams echoed through the burning sept for long minutes before smoke and flames finally choked them into silence.
Aeron stood outside and listened to them die, and felt the rightness of it settle into his bones like divine confirmation. The Drowned God was pleased. The false faith was being cleansed. All was as it should be.
---
Victarion Greyjoy carved through the eastern districts like an axe through rotten wood—efficient, brutal, utterly without mercy or hesitation.
He was not clever like Euron, not pious like Aeron. He was simply *strong*, possessed of the kind of straightforward savagery that philosophers couldn't explain and warriors didn't need to. Point him at something, and that something died. It was honest work.
A young knight in pretty armor—enameled red and gold, probably never worn in real battle—tried to rally defenders in the market square. He stood on a fountain's edge, sword held high, shouting brave words about duty and honor and defending the innocent.
Victarion's axe took him in the crotch.
The blade split him from balls to belly button in a single massive stroke, shearing through mail and muscle and bone like they were parchment. The knight looked down at his own guts with an expression of profound confusion—like a man trying to solve a puzzle he didn't have all the pieces for—as his intestines spilled out in a steaming pile of purple and gray.
He tried to catch them. Actually reached down with his free hand and tried to gather his own entrails back into his body, sword forgotten, all thoughts of heroism replaced by the immediate problem of his insides becoming his outsides.
Then his legs gave out and he fell into the fountain. The water turned red, then brown, then clogged with shit and blood and chunks of things that should have stayed internal.
"Thought they'd fight harder," Victarion observed to Harmund Sharp, his second. "Thought Lannister men had more spine."
"Rich men's sons," Harmund spat. He was cleaning brain matter from his sword with a dead man's cloak, wiping the blade with the methodical care of someone who knew rust was the death of good steel. "Grew up playing at war in training yards, probably never even gutted a pig themselves. First time they see their own entrails, they forget all that fancy footwork their master-at-arms taught them."
A woman ran past, clutching a child to her breast—boy or girl, impossible to tell, maybe four years old. Her hair streamed behind her like a banner of gold, her nightgown torn and bloody. One of Victarion's men—Rust, they called him, on account of his hair being that color—caught her by that hair, jerking her to a halt hard enough to snap her head back with an audible crack.
The child flew from her arms, hit the cobblestones with a wet crunch, and lay still. Very still. A pool of something dark spread from its cracked skull.
"This one's pretty," Rust observed, turning the woman's face toward him. She clawed at his eyes and he backhanded her hard enough to spin her around. Blood flew from her split lip in an arc of red droplets. "Got some fight in her, too. Good. I like it when they fight. Makes it more honest."
"Take her to the ships," Victarion ordered. "She's young enough to bear children, might fetch a price as a salt wife if she survives the voyage. But if you damage her too badly to be useful—break her mind or ruin her cunt—I'll break every bone in your body before I throw you overboard. Understood?"
"Aye, captain." Rust dragged the woman off by her hair, her heels leaving drag marks in the blood-slick cobblestones. She was screaming curses that turned to pleas that turned to wordless shrieks that echoed off the buildings like bird calls.
Victarion looked at the dead child—sprawled in the street with its skull cracked like a dropped egg, brains leaking out in a gray puddle—and felt nothing in particular. Children died. That was how war worked. This was war, even if the green lands hadn't realized it yet.
He stepped over the small corpse and moved on to the next street, the next killing, the next demonstration of what happened when soft people forgot that safety required constant maintenance.
---
In a wine merchant's cellar—deep underground, hidden behind locked doors, the kind of place people thought was safe—three of Victarion's men found two dozen refugees hiding in the dark.
Servants mostly, with a handful of children and elderly mixed in. The kind of people no one would pay ransom for, who had no value except as practice targets.
The raiders went through them methodically.
An old woman—perhaps seventy, hunched and white-haired—begged for mercy in a voice gone reedy with age. A raider named Fingers (he collected them) opened her throat with casual efficiency, then cut off both her hands while she was still bleeding out. He added them to the string he wore around his neck—dozens of severed hands in various states of decay, some fresh and pink, others dried to leather, still others reduced to bone.
"Ugly hands," Fingers observed, examining his prizes. "Old and spotted. But they'll do. Need to hit two hundred before winter."
A young mother clutched her baby—infant, couldn't have been more than six months—and tried to shield it with her body. A raider pulled her away by her hair, slammed her against the stone wall hard enough to crack her skull, then took the baby by its ankles and swung it against the wall like a man killing a rabbit.
The sound it made was like a melon dropping on stone. The baby stopped crying immediately.
"Waste of effort," another raider observed. "Could've just strangled it. Quieter."
"Where's the fun in quiet?"
They found a boy hiding behind a wine barrel—perhaps twelve, skinny and terrified, pissing himself as they dragged him into the light. One raider held him while another cut off his cock and balls with a fish knife, sawing through the meat while the boy shrieked until his voice broke.
"Little cunt probably never even used this," the raider said, holding up the severed parts like a trophy. "Waste of a cock, if you ask me. At least now it won't go to waste—we can feed it to the gulls."
They stuffed the boy's own severed cock into his mouth, then left him to bleed out in the corner while they moved on to the next victims.
A grandfather tried to bargain for his granddaughter—gold, jewels, anything they wanted, just please leave the girl alone. She was perhaps thirteen, gangly and flat-chested, the kind of girl who was just starting to become a woman.
The raiders took his gold, took his jewels, then took the girl upstairs while he watched, helpless.
Then they came back and split his skull with an axe.
"Should've spent less on gold and more on a sword," one raider observed, wiping brain matter from his blade. "Gold doesn't stop axes."
Upstairs, the granddaughter learned what men did to girls when there was no one to stop them. Three raiders took turns, and they weren't gentle about it. She screamed for her grandfather at first, then just screamed, then made sounds that weren't quite screams anymore—more like an animal caught in a trap, making noises that came from somewhere deeper than the throat.
When they finished, she lay in a pool of blood, breathing in shallow gasps, staring at nothing.
"Think she'll live?" one raider asked, pulling up his breeches.
"Does it fucking matter?" another replied. "If she makes it to the ships, the slavers can have her. If not, the rats can. Either way, not our problem."
They left her there and moved on.
The cellar was silent by the time they finished—two dozen corpses in various states of destruction, blood pooling on stone floors, the smell of shit and piss and death so thick it was almost visible.
"Efficient work," the lead raider observed. "Clean, quick, no one escaped. That's how you clear a building."
They set fire to the merchant's house on their way out, flames consuming everything—the wine, the carpets, the furniture, the bodies. The granddaughter upstairs burned with everything else, still breathing when the flames found her.
Her screams lasted perhaps thirty seconds before smoke took her.
---
By midday, Lannisport was a portrait of every hell ever imagined by priests trying to frighten children.
The harbor was a cemetery of burning ships, corpses floating so thick they formed rafts of dead flesh. The residential districts were charnel houses, bodies piled in streets that ran with blood and worse. The market district was gone entirely, consumed by flames that fed on grain and cloth and the accumulated prosperity of generations.
And everywhere, always, the screaming.
Women raped and murdered, sometimes in that order, sometimes simultaneously. Children split open like fruit, their small bodies impossibly fragile when steel found them. Men castrated and left to bleed while they watched their families destroyed. The elderly burned alive, too slow to flee, too weak to fight.
Euron stood on a balcony overlooking the destruction—some merchant's house, the merchant himself cooling on the floor below with his throat opened—and felt satisfaction settle into him like fine wine warming the belly.
"Is it enough?" Dagmer asked, stepping over a corpse to join him. The corpse was a woman, naked, brutalized, throat cut so deeply her head was barely attached. "Or should we burn more?"
"It's perfect," Euron replied, his mad eye reflecting flames that danced across half the city. "We came to remind them what the Ironborn are. To show them that peace is temporary, that safety is an illusion, that all their fucking gold means nothing when hard men come calling with iron and fire." He gestured at the burning streets, the smoke-darkened sky, the thousands of corpses that would be rotting by evening. "I'd say the message has been fucking delivered."
"Tywin Lannister will come for us," Dagmer warned. "Come hard, with everything he has. We've pissed in his wine and fucked his daughter and burned his city. He's not going to let that stand."
"Let the cunt come," Euron said with a smile that belonged on something that had never been human. "We'll be ready. And if he wants his revenge badly enough to bleed his army dry taking our islands, well... that's a price I'm happy to make him pay. Every dead Lannister is a gift to the Drowned God."
Below, a building collapsed in on itself with a roar like thunder, sending sparks spiraling into the sky like dying stars. Someone was still screaming inside—briefly—before the flames took them.
Euron listened to that scream cut off, and laughed.
It was not a sane laugh.
---
The retreat came with the tide, organized despite the chaos. Ironborn weren't stupid—savage yes, cruel certainly, but not stupid. They knew when to leave.
Raiders poured back toward the docks, some carrying loot, others dragging captives by their hair. The captives screamed and fought and begged, and learned quickly that none of it mattered. The Ironborn had decided their fate. Fighting only made it hurt more.
On the docks, the longships waited with holds already half-full of plunder. The raiders loaded their prizes—gold and silk and women and anything portable that had value—with the efficient brutality of men who'd done this before.
One salt wife—perhaps sixteen, pretty before the raid, less pretty now with her face bruised and her lip split—tried to throw herself into the water rather than board the ship. A raider caught her by the hair, slammed her face into the dock hard enough to break her nose, then threw her into the hold while she shrieked and bled.
"Spirited," the raider observed. "She'll break nice and slow. Those are the best kind."
Another captive—older, perhaps thirty, still fighting despite everything—managed to get her hands on a knife. She actually cut one raider before three more beat her unconscious with belaying pins. They threw her into the hold anyway, bleeding and broken.
"Might not survive the voyage," one raider observed.
"Then we throw her overboard," another replied with a shrug. "Not like we're short on salt wives."
Forty-seven longships departed Lannisport's burning harbor, holds stuffed with plunder, decks crowded with captives who wouldn't stop screaming until they learned screaming accomplished nothing.
Three ships hadn't made it—caught by defenders who'd finally organized, burned or sunk, crews dead or dying. But forty-seven out of fifty was a victory by any measure.
As the *Silence* cleared the harbor and turned northwest, Euron looked back at what they'd done.
Smoke rose in columns visible for leagues, darkening the noon sky like a bruise. Flames still danced across ruins that had been wealthy and comfortable hours ago. Bodies choked the streets—thousands of them, rotting in the heat, feeding the gulls and rats that always thrived on human weakness.
"Beautiful," Euron whispered to his mutes, who rowed in perfect silence, their severed tongues making it impossible to agree or disagree or do anything but serve. "Fucking beautiful."
Behind them, Lannisport burned.
Ahead, the Iron Islands waited.
And in Casterly Rock, Tywin Lannister was about to learn that sometimes, even lions bled.
---
# Casterly Rock, The War Room
*Hours later*
Tywin Lannister stood before his map like a man studying a corpse, hands clasped behind his back, face carved from stone and murder.
The reports had come in waves, each worse than the last. Five thousand dead. Eight hundred taken. The harbor destroyed. The market district ash. Residential areas gutted. Families wiped out. Fortunes burned. The kind of destruction that would take years to rebuild and decades to forget.
And the Ironborn had escaped.
"Tell me," Tywin said in a voice that made seasoned knights check for exits. He did not turn from the map. "Tell me about the casualties."
Ser Kevan Lannister consulted his papers with hands that wanted to tremble but knew better. "The harbor district... complete loss, my lord. Everyone there is dead or taken. The residential districts—those who fled early survived, those who didn't... didn't. The market district burned too fast for anyone to escape. We've found bodies piled three deep in some streets where people trampled each other trying to flee."
"Continue."
"The sept was desecrated. The septon and his acolytes were... tortured... mutilated... before being killed. The women who were taken..." Kevan paused, swallowed. "The survivors say the Ironborn were... thorough... in testing their prizes. Many women didn't survive that testing. Those who did probably wish they hadn't."
"Property damage?"
"Sixty percent of the city is destroyed or uninhabitable. Rebuilding will cost more gold than some kingdoms see in a generation."
Tywin finally turned. His face was too calm. The kind of calm that preceded executions and broken houses and names being erased from history.
"Mobilize the fleet," he said quietly. "Every warship, every merchant vessel we can convert. Ten thousand men within the month. We're going to the Iron Islands, and we're not leaving until every Greyjoy is dead, every Ironborn is broken, and the islands are so thoroughly destroyed they'll be finding skeletons in caves a century from now."
"My lord—"
"A month to do this properly. To gather enough force that the outcome is never in doubt. To coordinate with King Robert. To make sure when we strike, we strike hard enough that the Iron Islands never recover." He returned to the map, and his smile was the smile of a man planning murder on a scale that would echo through history. "The Greyjoys burned one of my cities. I'm going to erase their entire bloodline. And then I'm going to salt the earth where they lived so nothing ever grows there again."
Outside, the western sky glowed with Lannisport burning.
Tywin watched that glow and felt something cold settle into his chest.
The Ironborn thought they'd won.
They'd actually just bought themselves extinction.
And Tywin Lannister was going to personally deliver it, one screaming Greyjoy at a time.
---
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