Chapter 25: The Sun's Funeral Pyre: A Capital Erased, A Game Ended
The hour of sunset came and went, painting the sky above King's Landing in hues of defiant crimson and gold. No white flag flew from the Red Keep. No envoys of surrender crawled from the Gate of the Gods. Only the faint, desperate sounds of a city tearing itself apart in fear drifted across the plains to Robb Stark's silent camp. Their defiance, or their paralysis, was their answer.
Robb stood before his tent, Rhitta planted head-down in the earth beside him, its golden surface reflecting the dying light with a sinister beauty. He had given them their chance. They had spat upon it.
"They have chosen," he said, his voice quiet, yet carrying to his assembled commanders who stood a fearful distance away. Catelyn Stark was not among them; she had retired to her tent, her spirit broken by his cold pronouncements, unable to witness what she knew was to come. "Tomorrow, at high noon, I will deliver their sentence. And mine."
He instructed them to move the army further back, many leagues, to a series of high ridges he designated. "The destruction will be… considerable," was his only explanation. "Ensure the men are protected, their eyes shielded if they choose to watch."
No one questioned him. No one offered counsel. What was there to say to a king who spoke of unmaking cities as calmly as one might discuss the weather? They were instruments of his will, or terrified bystanders to a power that dwarfed their understanding.
The night was a torment for Robb. He did not sleep. He sat alone, staring into the darkness towards the distant, flickering lights of the doomed capital. The cold fury that had driven him through the Westerlands, the icy pragmatism of Tony Volante that had justified the erasure of Casterly Rock, now warred with a profound, bone-deep weariness and the screaming ghost of Eddard Stark's honor. Sansa was in that city. His sister. He was about to condemn her, along with half a million other souls, to utter annihilation.
A Stark must be prepared to make any sacrifice for the North, he had told his mother. The words tasted like ash in his mouth now. Was this justice for his father? Or was it merely monstrous, indiscriminate vengeance, a final, terrible surrender to the darkness that his power offered?
Escanor's pride whispered that such power was not meant to be restrained, that those who defied its wielder deserved only obliteration. Tony Volante argued that this was the only way to ensure total victory, to end the threat of Lannister and their ilk forever, to secure his kingdom through absolute, terrifying deterrence. The message must be undeniable.
When the first, pale light of dawn touched the eastern sky, Robb Stark was a man hollowed out, his grief and rage now a cold, implacable core. The decision, terrible as it was, had been made. There was no turning back.
High noon. The sun blazed directly overhead in a cloudless sky, a merciless, indifferent eye. Robb Stark stood alone on the designated hill, miles from King's Landing, yet with a clear view of the sprawling city, its great walls, the Red Keep perched on Aegon's High Hill, the glittering dome of the Great Sept of Baelor. His army was a distant line of fearful watchers on ridges even further back.
He held Rhitta aloft. The Sacred Axe drank in the sun's zenith fury, becoming not just a weapon, but a conduit, a focusing lens for an unimaginable quantum of solar power. The air around Robb ignited, not with flame, but with pure, incandescent light. The ground beneath his feet began to glow, then melt into glass. His own form was an almost unbearable silhouette against a self-generated corona that outshone the sun itself. He was no longer Robb Stark, the boy king. He was an elemental force, a small, terrible star descended to earth.
"Hear me, false King Joffrey! Hear me, Cersei and Tywin Lannister, murderers and tyrants!" His voice was no longer human. It was the roar of a solar flare, the crack of a dying star, a sound that rolled across the intervening leagues like thunder, shaking the very walls of King's Landing, causing its terrified inhabitants to fall to their knees, believing their end had truly come.
"You were offered a choice between justice and annihilation. Your pride, your arrogance, your insatiable cruelty chose for you!"
He looked towards the Red Keep, where he knew his sister Sansa was trapped, a final, terrible pang of loss and regret lancing through the cold resolve that encased his heart. Forgive me, little sister. Forgive me, Father.
"Let this be my final message to Westeros!" he boomed, his voice the judgment of a wrathful god. "Let all who witness this day, and all who hear tell of it, know the fury of the North when it is harmed! Let them remember the price of Stark blood! Let them understand that there is NO sanctuary, NO fortress, NO army that can stand against my wrath when it is roused!"
"NOW," his voice reached an impossible crescendo, "FOR MY FATHER, FOR MY SISTERS, FOR EVERY INNOCENT LIFE YOU HAVE STOLEN AND EVERY HOME YOU HAVE BURNED! LET THIS MONUMENT TO YOUR CORRUPTION, THIS CITY OF LIES AND FILTH, BE UNMADE! LET THE GAME OF THRONES END HERE, IN FIRE AND ASH!"
He gathered all his power, all the boundless energy of the noon sun, all his grief, all his rage, all his cold, calculating fury, into one, ultimate manifestation. Above his head, a sphere of light formed, growing with terrifying speed, sucking in the very light and heat from the surrounding landscape, creating an eerie, unnatural twilight around him even as the sphere itself blazed with the white-hot intensity of a thousand suns. It was larger, far more unstable and terrifying than the one that had consumed Casterly Rock. This was not a tool of strategic destruction; this was an engine of utter annihilation.
"CRUEL SUN!"
With a sound that was the tearing of reality itself, he hurled the colossal, seething star at King's Landing.
Its passage was swift, inexorable, a silent promise of oblivion.
It struck the Red Keep first.
For one timeless, horrifying instant, the ancient fortress of Aegon the Conqueror, home to generations of Targaryen and Baratheon kings, simply vanished within the heart of the man-made sun. There was no explosion of stone and timber, no satisfying crumble of walls. There was only light – an absolute, all-consuming incandescence that erased it from existence. Joffrey Baratheon, Cersei Lannister, Tywin Lannister, Sansa Stark, the entire population of the Red Keep, courtiers, servants, guards – all ceased to be, their atoms unmade, their screams unheard, their very souls scoured from the pattern of the world.
Then, the true horror began. The Cruel Sun did not dissipate. It expanded.
A wave of pure, unimaginable energy rolled outwards from the epicenter where the Red Keep had stood, a silent, incandescent tsunami of cosmic fire. The Great Sept of Baelor, with its crystal dome and ancient sanctums, vaporized in a flash of emerald and diamond dust. The Dragonpit on Rhaenys's Hill, a ruin already, became less than smoke. Flea Bottom, with its teeming thousands, the Street of Steel, the Street of Silk, the grand manors of nobles and the hovels of the poor – all were consumed, erased, unmade in an instant.
The stone walls of King's Landing, three circuits deep, offered no resistance. They melted, flowed, then vaporized. The Blackwater Rush, where it met the city, flash-boiled into a colossal cloud of steam, hissing into nothingness. The waters of Blackwater Bay itself recoiled, then rushed back in a titanic, boiling wave, only to be instantly turned to vapor where they met the expanding perimeter of destruction.
The very earth beneath the city glowed, then liquefied, then erupted upwards in a plume of molten rock and superheated gas, joining the colossal, churning mushroom cloud that now blotted out the sun, casting a hellish, blood-red twilight over the land for a hundred leagues.
The destruction was absolute. Systematic. Complete. King's Landing, a city of half a million souls, one of the greatest cities in the world, was simply… gone. Wiped from the face of Westeros as if it had never been.
Miles away, Robb's army, even at their pre-warned distance, was flattened by the psychic shockwave as much as the physical one. The heat flash was a brief, hellish furnace blast, scorching exposed skin, setting fire to dry grass. The sound, when it finally arrived, was not a single boom, but a continuous, deafening roar, as if the world itself was screaming in agony. Men went mad, clawing at their eyes, their ears bleeding. Others fell into catatonic stupors. Most simply lay prostrate, weeping or babbling incoherently, their minds shattered by the god-like, demonic power they had witnessed.
Catelyn Stark, watching from the furthest ridge, saw the city of her children's captivity, the city of her husband's murder, become a sun. Then, nothing. Something inside her, the last fragile cord that bound her to hope, to reason, snapped. She collapsed into the arms of a terrified, trembling Brynden Blackfish, her eyes wide and vacant, a thin stream of drool trickling from the corner of her mouth.
Robb Stark stood alone on his hill of judgment, the noon sun still blazing overhead, though its light seemed pale and insignificant now compared to the lingering, hellish afterglow from the west. Rhitta, in his hand, was still thrumming with immense, residual power, but its terrible light had dimmed. The cataclysmic expenditure of energy had taken a toll, even on him. He felt… drained. Not physically, for Sunshine still poured its strength into him. But psychically, spiritually. He felt scoured, as hollowed out as the crater where King's Landing had once stood.
The rage was gone. The grief, though still present, was a dull, distant ache, cauterized by the sheer magnitude of his own actions. He had done it. He had ended the game. He had slain the players. He had delivered his terrible message. Vengeance was his. The North was safe. His father's murderers were atoms drifting on the wind. Sansa… Sansa was free, in the only way he could now ensure. Free from torment, free from Lannister cruelty, free from a world that had hurt her so badly. A single, scalding tear, a testament to the last vestiges of the boy he had been, traced a path through the grime on his cheek. Then it too was gone, evaporated by the fierce, dry heat of his own internal sun.
He looked down at his hands, at Rhitta. He had the power to unmake the world. He had just proven it. The thought brought no satisfaction, no pride, only a vast, chilling emptiness. Tony Volante, the pragmatist, would have marked this as an absolute victory, the ultimate elimination of all rivals. Escanor, the Lion's Sin, would have seen it as a fitting display of supreme power, a judgment rightly delivered. But Robb Stark, the boy who had wanted to be like his honorable father, felt only the crushing weight of godhood, the terrible isolation of a power that set him utterly apart from all mortal concerns.
He had won the war. He had avenged his family. He had ensured the security of his kingdom.
And in doing so, he had perhaps damned his own soul to an eternity of remembering the day he drank the sun and made a city die.
He turned his back on the smoking, incandescent ruin that had been King's Landing and began the slow walk back towards his shattered, terrified army. He was their King. Their God. Their Destroyer. And he was utterly, irrevocably alone. The game was over. The ashes were his crown.