The wind moved softly now.
Where once it screamed with steel and fury, it now whispered through the corpses, tugging at torn banners and the tattered cloaks of the dead. The sun had begun to fall, casting long crimson shadows across the slopes of the Weeping Ridge and painting the battlefield below in a rusted glow.
Brynden Rivers moved with slow, deliberate steps, his black cloak trailing behind him like a shadow unbroken. His left eye was wrapped in bandages, the linen dark with blood. From his right eye—the only one he had left—he saw them.
Daemon Blackfyre.
Aegon Blackfyre.
Aemon Blackfyre.
Father and sons lay together in death, much as they had once stood together in life. Their armor was pierced with arrows, their cloaks soaked in blood, their eyes glazed with the silence that only death could bring.
It had been his arrows that ended them.
Brynden stood still. He said nothing. His pale hair hung loose and disheveled, blown across his face by the wind. The longbow that had sung their death knell rested across his back, silent now.
Behind him, hoofbeats approached.
Prince Baelor Targaryen, tall and dark and solemn, rode up first upon his white destrier. Prince Maekar followed upon a black courser clad in iron barding. Both were splattered in blood and ash, their banners limp with exhaustion, their faces shadowed by the dying sun.
They dismounted together and came to stand beside Brynden.
Baelor looked down at Daemon's broken form.
His mouth was a thin line. His brow furrowed in sorrow.
"They were our kin," Baelor said softly. "Our blood. Daemon was once my friend… more than that. He was the darling of the court. Beloved. I remember how the Smallfolk cheered when he would ride at tourneys, golden in his armor, smiling like the gods had kissed his brow."
Maekar snorted, the edge in his voice unmistakable. "He was a traitor. No matter the smiles. He raised steel against the dragon. He died a warrior's death… He knew what price he might pay, and paid it."
"A price we all must bear," Baelor murmured.
Brynden remained silent.
He looked not at his royal half-brothers, but only at the corpses below. Aegon's young face, twisted in pain and defiance. Aemon's hands, still clutching the sword Blackfyre. Daemon's chest, where three arrows had pierced through his breastplate—the same arrows Brynden himself had loosed.
The same arrows that had ended a rebellion.
"The field is won," Maekar said to Brynden, brushing soot from his gauntlet. "Gormon Peake's men are scattered. Quentyn Ball is dead. Bittersteel fled like a coward, but we'll find him. The cause is broken."
Baelor looked to Brynden then. "You ended this. Daemon would have never yielded, not while he still drew breath. You did what had to be done."
Brynden's lips moved, but the words were quiet as a breeze. "Aye."
Maekar and Baelor looked to each other, and after a pause, they turned back to their horses. The battle was done, and there was yet work to be done in King's Landing and beyond—punishments to be meted, oaths to be reforged, scars to be counted.
They left Brynden standing alone.
The slope of the ridge fell into silence again.
Brynden knelt at last. His hand brushed the red-streaked cheek of Aegon Blackfyre, his nephew by blood, and a boy once full of laughter. He stared at the three of them, side by side in death—Daemon, Aegon, Aemon.
Tears did not come easily to him. But one did now.
Just a single tear. A glimmer from his good eye. It traced a line down his gaunt cheek, past the bandage that hid his maimed sight.
The bow that ended the Blackfyres had fallen from his shoulder and lay in the grass behind him. His white hair hung in tatters around his face.
"I told the king they would rise," Brynden whispered. "I told him… and now they lie still."
His fingers curled into the torn cloak upon Daemon's breastplate.
A gust of wind swept down from the ridge and across the field, and the banner of House Blackfyre—once bold, once defiant—fluttered once, then tore free from its staff, carried off into the dusk like the last breath of a dying dream.
Brynden did not move. Not until the sky darkened fully.