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Chapter 684
🕑 Added 2025-01-29 18:29:58 +0000 UTCThe sharp blast of horns cut through the chaos of battle, accompanied by the rise of a stark black banner. Like a tide of midnight, the armored warriors who had instilled fear into nobles and slave masters alike surged forward, flowing through the gaps between formations toward the embattled southeastern corner of the battlefield. A wave of sheer, unshakable confidence swept across the Queen’s forces in their wake.
“Deploy the Unsullied! Fill the gap! Replace the southern second phalanx!”
For a fleeting moment in this desperate struggle, the Reach cavalry had its moment of glory.
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The battlefield was a mess, and the Queen’s forces were momentarily on the back foot. But Aegor felt no panic. As long as his forces held firm and the momentum of the enemy charge burned out, the cavalry—once their speed hit zero—would be nothing more than stationary targets, waiting to be butchered. And he still had moves left to play.
Emotionally, Aegor wished his men could stand as unyielding as the cliffs before the sea, shattering the crashing waves and sending them recoiling. The Unsullied might have been capable of that. But his was not an army of thirty thousand of the world’s most disciplined warriors. He commanded a mixed force, soldiers of varying quality drawn from all corners of Westeros.
To maintain command and control while avoiding weaknesses in his wedge formation, Aegor had spent the entire march from King’s Landing carefully reorganizing his troops, refining the infantry’s positioning and composition. By ensuring a balanced distribution of skill and equipment across his nine infantry phalanxes, he had created an army that—while not perfect—held a relatively even level of combat effectiveness.
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He could have deployed the central phalanx of the wedge to reinforce the southeastern corner. But the banners, the formations, and the sheer force of the enemy’s charge all screamed one thing: This is their elite.
Sending an equally matched force against them would have been a grave mistake.
The Gifted Men were veterans, battle-hardened and fearless. But they were mostly Free Folk. They had no experience fighting cavalry. With that in mind, Aegor had only one real option.
The rate of cannon reloading had a hard limit. Facing three consecutive waves of cavalry, the Queen’s army had two choices:Fire on the first and third waves, enduring the second without artillery support.Hold fire, saving everything for the second wave—but allowing the first wave to turn their feint into a real attack, forcing his infantry to endure two, possibly even three waves without cannon support.
The wedge formation had many strengths—battlefield control, artillery coverage, and overlapping fields of fire—but it had its weaknesses. There was no room for retreat. No space for a secondary defensive line. If the outer layer was breached, there would be no time to reorganize before disaster struck. Swapping units in and out of the frontline would create a brief moment of vulnerability—if the third wave of Reach cavalry exploited that gap, the situation could spiral into catastrophe.
The grapeshot had devastated the first wave, exactly as planned.
But Garlan Tyrell’s staggered, rotational charge—advancing from the southwest on a diagonal approach—turned out to be an accidental masterstroke. By splitting his cavalry into distinct groups, he had inadvertently limited the spreading panic that artillery usually inflicted on large formations. Moreover, the slanted charge direction meant that if his forces faltered, they could veer away rather than crashing into their own ranks.
And so, despite suffering heavy losses, the second wave remained intact and deadly.
Aegor had opted to fire on the first and third waves, letting the second hit his lines head-on. Now, he had to watch his infantry pay for that choice.
A deep, rolling tremor shook the battlefield as the second wave of cavalry—shining like a flood of silver and green—slammed into the Queen’s gold-and-red infantry line.
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Faced with this moment of crisis, Aegor did not hesitate. He committed his reserves.
Garlan had divided his cavalry into three waves to improve command and prevent bottlenecks. But in practice, this also minimized the cascading panic that a single massive charge might have suffered under cannon fire. The staggered approach, combined with their diagonal charge path, allowed each wave to reposition and recover if things went awry.
Nearly eighty percent of the Reach’s cavalry had been placed under Garlan’s direct command—a force that naturally outclassed peasant levies and common infantry. But he had gone further, carefully segmenting his riders into distinct tiers.
His second wave—the one now bearing down on Aegor’s forces—was composed of his best knights, clad in full plate, their horses armored and trained for war. At the very front, he had placed his most elite warriors, forming the spearhead of the assault.
Through this meticulous structuring, Garlan had engineered a temporary, localized advantage—a scenario where his heavy cavalry faced Aegor’s standard infantry in direct combat, neutralizing the defensive edge the Queen’s forces had built.
As the second wave smashed into the lines, the sound was a chaotic symphony of steel, flesh, and death.
The final layer of ranged defenses had already played its part—grenades, arrows, and cannon blasts had done their work.
But in the end, physics cared nothing for tactics.
No matter how disciplined Aegor’s troops were, no matter how well they had prepared, the sheer kinetic energy of a cavalry charge dictated the outcome.
Momentum was king.
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And yet, there was one force that never wavered.
They had no fear. No hesitation. No instincts to override, no doubts to suppress.
The Unsullied.
Garlan’s cavalry had undergone desensitization training before the battle, learning to endure the deafening roar of cannon fire and explosions. And to some extent, it had worked. The Reach knights had adapted to the chaos of war, and their second wave had weathered the bombardment better than expected.
A few grenades were no longer enough to shatter their charge.
But Aegor had planned for that.
His army was a carefully balanced force, each element positioned with purpose. The Unsullied, the Gifted Men, the cavalry—none had been deployed carelessly. They had been held back, waiting for the moment when they would make the greatest difference.
Now was that moment.
For all the Reach’s brilliance, for all Garlan’s tactical foresight, he had made one crucial mistake—he had underestimated the true elite of Aegor’s army.
The Unsullied moved with inhuman precision, shifting into the breach without hesitation. The moment of vulnerability—the single instant where the Queen’s forces might have buckled—vanished as if it had never existed.
Aegor could only shrug at his enemy’s misfortune.
Standing atop a makeshift watchtower constructed from a repurposed wagon, he surveyed the battlefield with cold detachment. His aerial scouts had long since reported the division of the Reach cavalry into three waves, but there had been no way to know which wave carried the true elite. Even if he had known, what countermeasure could he have prepared in a matter of minutes?
Now, it no longer mattered.
The Queen’s infantry had held, but at a cost. The sheer force of the cavalry’s impact had physically warped the battle lines—what had once been a clean, organized formation now bore a deep concave indentation, a brutal mark left by the crashing tide of horse and steel.
The weak points between phalanxes trembled, the seams threatening to tear apart.
And yet, they did not break.
Aegor had been ready to witness the Unsullied's legendary discipline in action, eager to see them push back against the knights of the Reach.
But before that battle could fully unfold, something else—on the western front—had gone terribly wrong.
