GOT: I Plunder Skills — Chapter 421 - Euron Has Come

The snap was soft.

On a battlefield filled with the crash of steel and the screams of the dying, it was as faint as a snowflake landing on ice , barely there at all.

But Victarion Greyjoy heard it.

Or rather, he felt it.

A chill shot up his spine, sharper than the frozen sea beneath his feet.

His mind, packed with bloodlust and fury, went blank.

He held his battle-axe leveled at the cliff.

The smile on the man's face up there filled his vision.

Mockery. Contempt.

Then he watched the man withdraw his hand , as if afraid the cold might bite , and shove it back into his pocket, unhurried, bored, as if he'd done nothing worth mentioning.

The rage in Victarion's chest caught fire again.

He wanted to roar. Wanted to charge up there and split that smug Northern bastard clean in half.

But he couldn't make a sound.

Because the entire world had changed color.

Blood red.

The sky , he didn't know when it had happened , had turned a deep, unsettling crimson.

On the horizon, a tiny red dot was falling. Straight down. Toward the frozen battlefield.

At first, no one noticed.

Everyone's eyes were locked on the fighting in front of them.

Then, one by one, soldiers in the middle of killing each other stopped. Lowered their weapons. Looked up.

"What... what is that?"

The red dot swelled in their eyes, dragging a long burning tail behind it.

It was no longer a dot.

It was a fireball.

A fireball that kept growing.

The air itself began to feel hot.

A shriek of splitting air dropped from the sky and swallowed every other sound on the battlefield.

Victarion finally moved.

He raised his head. Stiff. Slow.

He saw it.

A small sun, falling straight toward him.

Inside it, golden flames burned. Blood-red magma churned.

His heavy plate armor, the armor he wore like a second skin, the armor he'd been proud of his whole life, felt in that moment as thin as paper.

His axe, the one that could crack stone, felt like a toothpick.

He wanted to run. Wanted to throw himself sideways, anywhere.

His feet wouldn't move. Nailed to the ice.

He opened his mouth to let out one last roar , one final howl of defiance before the end.

The fire swallowed everything.

No deafening explosion.

Just a single, brutally muffled sound.

WHUMP!

Like a giant bringing a red-hot hammer down onto a slab of frozen meat.

Centered on where Victarion had been standing, a visible white shockwave erupted outward in a ring, and the solid ice shattered in an instant.

Ice shards and steam punched skyward, throwing up a massive white curtain across the battlefield.

The ironborn nearest to the blast were hurled through the air, tumbling, before they slammed into the ice far away. Whether any of them were alive, no one could say.

When the white curtain finally drifted apart ,

The battlefield held its breath.

Every person still standing stared at the spot.

Victarion Greyjoy was gone.

Him and the dozen or so elite guards who had been standing at his side. Gone.

A stench of burnt protein and sulfur began spreading across the ice.

At the center of the crater, something charred and nameless smoldered.

"By the Drowned God..."

An ironborn let his axe fall from his hand. His legs buckled. He hit his knees, and from his lips came something between a prayer and a moan.

His collapse was a signal.

THUD. THUD.

More and more ironborn gave up.

They knelt. They sat. Their eyes went empty. The will to fight drained out of them completely.

Their fleet commander. The mightiest warrior among them. Burned to cinders in front of their eyes by fire from the sky.

This wasn't a battle anymore.

This was divine punishment.

The Northern army's reaction was the exact opposite.

After a single frozen moment of shock, they erupted.

"The King in the North!"

"LYNN!"

Robb Stark stared at the smoking crater, then raised his eyes to the solitary figure standing on the cliff above.

He had known Lynn was dangerous. He had never imagined this.

At the very start, his own father had pressed this man to his knees and raised a sword over his neck.

And now he can do this?

Call down fire from the sky. Burn the enemy commander to ash.

Was that the kind of power a mortal could hold?

"KILL!!"

Maege Mormont came back to herself first.

She lifted her morningstar — crusted with blood and grey matter — threw her head back, and let out a roar like a she-bear defending her cubs. Then she drove straight into the ironborn who had nothing left in their eyes.

"FOR KING LYNN!!"

"FOR THE NORTH!!"

The Northern soldiers went feral.

A fire blazed in every pair of eyes.

Their king was watching.

Their god had already struck the killing blow from heaven.

What in the world was left to fear?

Charge. Charge!

What had been a battle became a slaughter.

The Northerners tore across the ice like men who'd lost their minds — gleeful, relentless , cutting down ironborn as they fled. The ironborn couldn't even organize a rear guard. They scrambled off their ships and crawled across the slick ice on hands and knees, desperate to reach land.

Robb's main force was already waiting.

Another massacre. No suspense about how it ended.

Up on the cliff, Lynn watched the battlefield below and yawned.

Just about done here.

He turned and started heading back. Little Lyanna would be waiting , she'd want to play house.

That was when it happened.

WOOOOOO,

A long, strange horn call split the air without warning.

It didn't sound like the North. It didn't sound like the ironborn.

It was older than both. Darker. As if it had been dragged up from somewhere far below the world , carrying a resonance that reached inside a person's chest and squeezed.

The moment it rang out, the slaughter stopped.

Every head turned toward the sound.

Behind the ironborn fleet, out on the frozen sea ,

A ship was coming. Breaking ice as it moved.

It was bigger than the Iron Victory. More brutal-looking. Its hull was black as a moonless night, every surface carved with blood-red runes that twisted in patterns no sane mind had designed. Black sails, bearing no sigil, no house, nothing.

And there was not a single sailor anywhere on the ship.

It moved like a ghost , cracking through ice three feet thick, gliding forward in silence, crewed by no one.

At its prow stood a man.

He wore armor black as tar, but threaded through with an eerie red gleam. A black leather eyepatch covered his left eye. His right eye burned with a light that was wrong in a way that was hard to name , mad, hungry, ancient.

A smile played at the corner of his mouth.

Crow's Eye.

Euron Greyjoy.

He had come.

He hadn't come alone.

Two warlocks from Qarth stood behind him, enslaved. Between them they carried a horn: enormous, pitch-black, banded with rings of red gold and Valyrian steel.

The Dragon Horn.

Euron looked at the smoking crater where his brother had been. He shook his head slowly, and something that might have been pity crossed his face.

"Disappointing," he said.

"He couldn't even make his enemy use a second move. Truly..." He paused. "A disgrace to the Greyjoy name."

He turned his head. His one eye crossed the chaos of the battlefield and found Lynn on the cliff , precisely, directly, like an arrow finding a mark.

What burned in that eye made Victarion's fury look small.

Greed. Envy. The need to own what he saw.

"So you're the new King in the North."

A smile spread across Euron's face. The kind of smile that made anyone who saw it want to take a step back.

"Quite a performance."

"Now." He lifted one hand and waved lazily at the warlocks behind him.

"It's my turn."

"Sound it."

His smile didn't waver.

"Let our new king hear... the roar... of the old masters."

➤ Next: But I Never Rode a Dragon