Chapter 18: The Empty Throne and the Coming of a Colder War
The silence in the throne room was a fragile, crystalline thing, and Jaime Lannister feared that his own breathing might shatter it. The Mad King was dead. A grotesque puppet slumped on a throne of swords, his final, silent scream forever etched onto his face. The wildfire braziers still hissed and spat, casting a sickly green pallor over the scene, making the dead king look like a drowned man. The pyromancers were frozen statues of terror, the Spider had vanished into the very shadows he commanded, and Jaime stood alone before the empty heart of the Seven Kingdoms, his sword still half-sheathed, his oath a phantom limb that ached with the weight of a duty he no longer had.
He was the one who moved first. The training, the discipline, the deeply ingrained instinct of the Kingsguard took over where conscious thought had failed. This was a crisis. A king was dead. The realm was headless. Order had to be maintained.
"Ser Barristan," he called out, his voice sounding strange and loud in the cavernous room. He heard a groan from the gallery outside and soon, the two knights he had last seen being tossed aside like dolls stumbled in, their armour dented, their faces pale with shock.
"Jaime?" Barristan Selmy's voice was strained. He saw the body on the throne and his legendary composure crumbled for a second. "By the Seven…"
"The King is dead," Jaime stated, the words simple, brutal, and world-changing. "The… entity is gone." He could not bring himself to say 'god'. "Seal the throne room. No one enters or leaves. Send word to the Lord Commander, Ser Gerold. Gather the rest of our brothers. And find Lord Varys. Now."
There was a new authority in his voice. He was no longer the arrogant, golden boy. In the space of five minutes, he had become the ranking officer at the site of a regicide, the only semblance of order in a world turned upside down. Ser Barristan, recognizing the necessity of a clear chain of command, simply nodded and moved to obey.
The hours that followed were a blur of controlled chaos. The Small Council was summoned, their faces a mixture of terror and a strange, almost giddy disbelief when they saw the King's body. Lord Merryweather, the Hand, looked as if he might faint. Grand Maester Pycelle began to sweat so profusely his robes darkened. Only Varys, when he finally reappeared from whatever bolthole he had fled to, seemed to have regained his composure, his mind already working, calculating, spinning a new web.
"He killed him," Lord Staunton whispered, staring at the corpse. "The Storm God… he simply… ended him."
"It was a judgment," Varys said softly, his voice cutting through the panic. "Not an act of war. A removal. We must be precise in the language we use."
The debate that followed was frantic, terrified. What was to be done? Who was to rule? Rhaegar was the heir, but he was gone, no one knew where. His children, Rhaenys and the infant Aegon, were on Dragonstone with their mother. Viserys, the King's second son, was a boy of seven. The realm was in the midst of a rebellion, and now the king they were rebelling against was dead, not at their hands, but at the hands of a being who could walk through walls and kill with a look.
"We must crown Rhaegar," Lord Merryweather insisted feebly. "We must send word to him, wherever he is."
"And what do we say?" Varys countered, his voice dripping with silken logic. "'Your Grace, your father has been executed for his crimes by a divine entity who has taken up residence in your kingdom. Please return at your earliest convenience to claim your unstable throne.' How do you think the Prince will react to that? How do you think the rebels will react?"
"The rebels!" Lord Staunton squeaked. "What of them? Their grievance was with Aerys! Now that he's gone…"
"Now that he's gone," Varys finished, his eyes dark, "their rebellion is meaningless. A war of vengeance with no target. Do you think Robert Baratheon will simply lay down his hammer and go home? He will see this as a sign of weakness, an opportunity. He will march on this city, and we have no king to lead the armies against him."
Jaime listened to them squabble, a profound sense of disgust washing over him. They were mice scurrying around the feet of a dead lion, terrified of the dragon that had killed it. He had stood there. He had seen it. It wasn't a judgment. It was an extermination. The being had looked at Aerys the way a man looks at a venomous spider before crushing it under his boot. There was no rage, no passion. Just a weary, final necessity.
He found himself walking towards the Iron Throne. He looked at the dead king, at his grotesque final expression. He should feel something. Horror. Relief. Something. He felt only emptiness. He had spent his entire adult life in service to this man, this monster. He had sacrificed his family, his future, his honour, all for the pristine white cloak he wore. And it had all ended like this. Not with a glorious last stand or a tragic betrayal, but with a silent, contemptuous execution by a power beyond his comprehension.
His gaze fell upon the sword at his side. Aerys had wanted him to be a kingslayer. Thor had saved him from it. But as he looked at the squabbling, terrified lords of the Small Council, a new, cold thought entered his mind. The god had killed the King, but he had left the throne empty. He had left the vipers in place. He had removed the rabid dog but had done nothing about the plague it carried.
Perhaps the god's work was not yet done. Or perhaps, he had left it for others to finish.
Thor did not return to the woods by the Gods Eye. The memory of his followers, of their desperate, pleading faces, was too raw. That place was no longer a refuge; it was a monument to another one of his failures. Instead, he flew.
After landing in the darkened streets of King's Landing, he had simply kept going, launching himself into the night sky. He didn't summon the Bifrost—the thought of returning to his empty hut in New Asgard was unbearable—he simply willed himself upwards, propelled by the same energy that had allowed him to walk on walls, and flew south. He moved like a thunderbolt across the night sky, a streak of unseen energy, leaving the chaos of the capital far behind him.
He flew until the sun began to rise, and found himself high in the Red Mountains of Dorne. The landscape here was stark and beautiful, a world of red rock and blue sky. It was dry, clean, and empty. He found a high, isolated mesa, a flat-topped mountain that offered a view of the entire world, and there he landed.
The silence here was different from the silence of the woods. It was not the heavy, damp quiet of ancient things, but the sharp, clear silence of stone and sky. There was nothing here to remind him of anything. It was perfect.
He sat on the edge of the cliff, his legs dangling over a thousand-foot drop, and watched the sunrise paint the desert in hues of orange and gold. He had killed a king. The thought was not a source of pride or regret. It was simply a fact, a stone dropped into the deep well of his existence.
He had expected to feel… something. The grim satisfaction of a soldier's duty done. The sickening self-loathing of a killer. But he felt strangely numb. He had acted. He had made a choice. He had taken a life to prevent the loss of more lives. It was the cold, hard calculus of a king, a calculus he had tried for so long to forget.
The act of killing Aerys had been easy. Devoid of passion. He had looked into the man's soul and had seen nothing there but a shrieking vortex of fear and cruelty. There was no one home. Extinguishing that life had been no different than putting out a fire.
But the act had consequences. Not for him, not directly. He could sit on this mesa for a thousand years and the world of men would turn to dust below him. But the act had consequences for them. For Anya and Finn. For the she-wolf Lyanna. For the sad prince Rhaegar. For the honorable fool Ned and the furious stag Robert. He had not freed them. He had simply broken their cage and left them to the mercy of the other animals in the zoo.
He had removed the tyrant, but he had not fixed the tyranny. He had not addressed the ambition of men like Tywin Lannister, or the obsessive folly of men like Rhaegar. He had simply created a vacuum. And he knew, with the certainty of long and bitter experience, that a vacuum of power is always filled by something worse.
He sat there for a day and a night, unmoving, a stone statue on a stone mountain. He did not eat. He did not drink. He simply watched the sun and the stars wheel across the sky, his mind a quiet, desolate landscape. He had thought that by acting, by making a choice, he would find some release from his grief. But he had only added another layer to it. The grief of the killer. The sorrow of the judge.
He had proven to himself that he was not just a drunk. He was still a king. He was still a warrior. He was still the God of Thunder. And that was the greatest tragedy of all. Because all it meant was that he had a greater capacity for failure, a greater responsibility for the worlds he broke. He had thought he could be a stone, but he had learned he was a storm. And a storm cannot control where it strikes or what it leaves in its wake. All it can do is rage, and then move on, leaving a shattered world behind it. He looked out over the vast, empty landscape of Dorne and wondered if there was any corner of this, or any, universe where he could go where his storm would not follow.
The rebel army was camped near the Stoney Sept in the Riverlands. They were licking their wounds after a brutal, chaotic battle that had almost seen Robert killed. The mood was grim, the victory a sour one. Ned Stark stood on a small hill overlooking the camp, the banners of the wolf, the falcon, and the trout hanging limply in the humid air. He was waiting for Robert to finish his meeting with Jon Arryn and Hoster Tully. They were planning their next move, their march on King's Landing.
The war had been brutal, but its purpose had been clear. Aerys had murdered his father and brother. Rhaegar had stolen his sister. Robert's claim to the throne was a means to an end. The end was justice. The end was vengeance.
A rider approached, his horse muddy and exhausted. He bore the Tully sigil. He dismounted and ran to the command tent where the lords were gathered. A few minutes later, the tent flap was thrown open and Robert Baratheon emerged, his face a mask of such utter, dumbfounded confusion that Ned's hand immediately went to the hilt of his sword.
"Robert? What is it?"
Robert stared at him, his mouth opening and closing several times before any words came out. "Aerys… He's dead."
Ned felt a jolt, a surge of fierce, triumphant satisfaction. "The Kingslayer," he breathed. "Jaime Lannister finally found his courage."
"No," Robert said, shaking his head as if to clear it. "Not Lannister." He took a deep, shuddering breath. "It was him. The Storm God. Thor."
The world seemed to tilt under Ned's feet. He stared at his friend, convinced he had misheard. "What?"
"A messenger from a Tully patrol picked up a farmer fleeing the capital," Robert said, his voice a strange, hollow thing. "The god… he walked into the Red Keep alone. He walked into the throne room and… and just killed him. Executed him on the throne. The whole city is in chaos."
Jon Arryn and Hoster Tully emerged from the tent, their faces equally pale and shocked.
"It cannot be true," Lord Tully muttered. "Some fantastic tale…"
"The report is confirmed by Varys's own agents, passed through your own men," Jon Arryn said, his voice heavy. He looked older, wearier than ever before. "The King is dead. The Iron Throne is empty."
The four lords stood on the hill, the leaders of a great rebellion, and stared at each other in stunned silence. Their war, their great and righteous crusade, had been rendered obsolete overnight. Their casus belli was a corpse on a throne, put there not by their swords, but by a power they could not begin to comprehend.
"So what now?" Robert finally roared, his confusion giving way to a surge of frustrated rage. "Do we just… go home? Aerys is dead, but Rhaegar still has Lyanna! The Targaryen line still holds Dragonstone! The war is not over!"
"But our justification for it is," Jon Arryn said grimly. "We marched to depose a tyrant. The tyrant is gone. If we march on King's Landing now, we are no longer liberators. We are conquerors, fighting for Robert's claim alone. The other houses, the Tyrells, the Greyjoys… they will not support it. They will see us as the aggressors."
"So we let the bloody god rule?" Robert demanded. "He kills a king and sits on the throne himself?"
"The reports say he left," Ned said, his mind racing, trying to grasp the new shape of the world. "He killed Aerys and then he just… left."
They stood in silence again, the implications of that simple fact washing over them. He wasn't a conqueror. He hadn't seized power. He had acted as an executioner and then vanished. He had decapitated the kingdom and had left the body to twitch.
"This changes everything," Hoster Tully said, stating the obvious. "We have an army in the field, a Targaryen prince at large, a capital without a ruler, and a god of unknown power and intent somewhere in the realm."
Robert Baratheon looked towards the south, his face a thundercloud of rage and frustration. His great, simple war of vengeance had just become a complex, terrifying quagmire. He had wanted to smash Rhaegar on the field of battle, to cave in his pretty silver breastplate with his hammer. But how could he fight a man whose cause was now arguably more legitimate than his own? How could he claim a throne that had been vacated not by men, but by a miracle?
"Find him," Robert growled, his voice low and dangerous. "I don't care how. Send outriders. Send scouts to every corner of this cursed kingdom. I want to know where this Thor is." He looked at Ned, his eyes burning with a new, uncertain fire. "Before we decide whose throne to take, we need to find out if the god who broke it is going to let anyone else sit on it."
The rebellion was over. A new, colder war had just begun. A war of politics and succession, played in the shadow of a power that obeyed no rules and respected no kings. The vacuum of the Iron Throne was pulling the entire realm into its vortex, and no one, not the stag, the wolf, the falcon, or the trout, knew what would emerge from it. They only knew that the thunder had fallen, and nothing would ever be the same.