[Look To The Stars] Chapter 71: Starving the Dead (Patreon)

Disclaimer: This is a work of fiction and all rights for character, plots and settings belong to GRRM and George Lucas/Disney. I have no ownership.

A/N: This was a frustrating chapter to write, as I can confirm, pulled a few hairs out. But regardless, I hope I got the action right. Enjoy!

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Year 299 AC/8 ABY

Kings Landing, The Crownlands

The fire at Silk Street had grown a mind of its own. Luke reached into the column of green fire licking through the collapsed granary roof as if finding an artery in a wound while the smoke bent into a slow whirlpool overhead. The wildfire didn't care about his intent, it only wanted to spread. He stopped trying to fight it like an enemy and instead leaned his will against the leading edge where the hunger felt sharpest, starving the fire of the air it needed from the Force until it couldn't leap to the next roof. The green fire evenutally faded into a sullen, dying orange and soon there were only embers crawling along the scorched timber.

Luke's arms were shaking. The heat from the burning streets was a heavy hand against his chest, turning the sweat on his skin to grit. He held his lightsabre low. It was useless against the green fire, but it worked on the dead things pulling themselves out of the wreckage. Fire-wights, he called them, for lack of a better name. He had been watching them for fifteen minutes, though he’d felt the disturbance in the Force before he ever saw the light in their eyes.

He didn't face them alone. Amidala stayed at his flank, a white blur tearing the dead away whenever they closed in while he kept his will pressed against the fire.

No one argued the reports anymore, not even Leia. Luke turned his mind to the families trapped behind the line, carving a way out so they could stay ahead of the inferno and the things following in its wake.

A tangle of voices crackled through the comlink at his ear as the channel stretched thin across the burning city.

Han spoke first, his voice tight over the snap of a blaster. "We're getting a keep full of people to the ship, but these zombies keep popping out." Then Jon came through, flat and certain. "Joffrey is dead. I'm going to head to you—" The words became a blur as he noticed fire-wights turned the corner toward a few families trying to escape.

He answered back with a single word as he threw himself between the screaming families and the dead. "Working."

Luke cut through the pair in a flicker of green light, moving faster than their dead eyes could track, and severed the signal that kept them standing. He turned to the survivors, pitching his voice above the roar of the fire to snap them out of their shock. "This is not a time to freeze. You all need to move!"

The survivors scrambled down the lane he had cleared. Luke left them to it and reached for the next problem, a rope-maker's shop nearby where burning tar choked the air.

Leia’s voice cut through the comms, the strain of the siutation clear in her voice. "Luke, we have soldiers moving civilians out, but the dead are on them. These men aren't ready for this kind of fight."

"Do the best you can, we are tyring to take down as many of them as we can."

"The dark spell feels like Dathomir all over again, and even the twins are restless because of it."

Then, he felt the familiar drag of Robb's presence in the Force.

"I'm going to find the source. Until then, stay safe and away from the dead," Luke said, then he ended the transmission.

Robb came around the corner at a dead run with his blue blade lit and low, his arms black to the elbows with soot and his sword-hand looked cramped from hordes they have had to face. Smalljon and Harrion held the mouth of the street behind him, their axes working a knot of the drowned dead that had come up from the water like a breakwater of northern muscle set across the lane.

"Grey Wind's already taking children to the gates," Robb said, his momentum carrying him toward the rope-maker's shop before he even finished the sentence. He spat into the soot, his eyes hard. "These wights are coming up everywhere, Master, and they aren't like the ones beyond the Wall."

"I know." Luke stayed in motion, his mind already tracing the pull of the source. "But we have to put these fires out before we can follow the signal. Protect my flank while I take down the larger fires."

Robb nodded without asking for an explanation, ready to follow Luke’s lead. Curiosity had been traded for pragmatism, and while Luke felt the loss of that wonder that Robb used to show, but now was not the time for remisiniscing.

Luke reached into the heart of the next giant inferno and caught its climbing hunger, forcing the heat down and away until the flames slumped into a smolder. Behind him, Robb began to shout as wights forced the gap, their arrival met by the roar of Smalljon Umber’s steel.

Robb came to his side once the immediate threat had been beaten back. "Why do they keep naming Stannis?" he asked, looking back at the broken remains of the dead. "He couldn't be behind this... could he?"

"I don't know," Luke said, "but after what Jon told me about the shadow, I wouldn't put anything past Stannis or whoever holding the mantle of this madness."

Robb's eyes lingered on him, heavy with concern. "You’ve fought these fires alone for too long. Master, you need rest. We should pull back and regroup while we still can."

"We can't rest while people are still dying," Luke said, stripping the sentiment from his voice. "The remaining fires are small enough to outrun if the paths stay clear. Push the civilians toward the gates and protect them."

"And take Amidala with you." Luke set a hand on the direwolf's head as she pressed hard against his leg. "She'll do more good at your back than mine. Let her guard the ones who fall behind." Her ears flattened and a low growl came from her because she did not want to leave him, but when he said "go on," she hesitated but evetually padded to Robb's side.

Robb nodded in acknowledgement and signaled the Smalljon and Harrion. "You heard him. Set the perimeter!"

"Stay close and don't do anything stupid!" the Smalljon shouted, his voice booming over the crowd as he herded out of the chaos.

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With the fires on Silk Street finally suppressed, Luke turned and pushed toward he sensed Robb was.

Back from the water and sheltered by a fallen archway, the forty people Luke had sent to safety were running out of room. Septas kept the children huddled together while three gold cloaks stood their ground alongside an old woman on a stalled cart. They were pinned against the wreckage with nowhere else to go. Robb held the mouth of the pocket with his blue blade active and Grey Wind and Amidala grey-and-white blurs at his flanks. Luke felt his student's presence from across the square, sensing a cold and disciplined aggression that Robb wore like a suit of plate rather than a swinging sword.

"Hold the line!" Robb's voice cracked as it carried across the roads. "You three, shields up, you do not move from that spot if the seven hells themselves come walking! Septa, get them ready to flee!"

The smoke over the square shredded as Rhaegal dived through, a green-gold blur that sent ash and embers flying with every wingbeat. Luke was already mid-stride toward the archway, cutting a wight down as he moved, but the dragon’s roar did more than he could alone. Jon hit the stones in a drop that would have broken a lesser man, his lightsaber already out and humming as he met the wights at the archway’s edge.

With a roar that shook the ruins the Falcon dived low, its guns clearing the rooflines of the dead. It touched down just long enough to take the survivors from the archway as gold cloaks passed children into the hold. When the ship rose again and banked toward the army at the city walls, Luke knew the pocket was secure. Jon had the flank and the living were moving.

Breathing hard, Robb reached him halfway with his hand still white-knuckled on the hilt of his blade. There was nothing left in front of him to kill.

"Even with the lightsabers, they never end," Robb said with a huff. "I feel as if my arm might fall off before we can get clear."

Luke turned his gaze south toward the water, following a thread in the Force that had only tightened since he left the fires behind. "I have the source," he said. "It is near. Either they do not know I am coming, or they simply do not care."

A mirthless laugh came from Robb. "They still underestimate us, it seems."

"Keep that in mind," Luke said. "There is power in being overlooked. Now that Jon has the flank I need both of you to keep everyone breathing until I'm finished."

"We'll manage," Robb said. Luke felt the hum of Jon’s blade go silent as both brothers took their places in the archway, their presence in the Force steadying the line. It was the only sign he needed to move.

Leaving the pocket to the brothers, Luke turned his back on the archway and headed for the river.

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The thread pulled him down through the tanner's alleys, the heat falling away behind him, the smoke thinning into a cold that had no business in a burning city. That was the first wrongness. He passed a fishmonger's stall where the day's catch lay trampled to paste, a well where a body had slumped over the stone reaching for it. The living thinned with every street he took. The ones with sense had run the other way, uphill toward the gates and the fire at their backs, away from the hell hole the city has become.

Between him and the riverbank stood thirty cold points in the Force, a wall of dead cutting him off from the few flickering lives left near the water.

The first one came around a fish-cart as if it could sense him. Its jaw hung by a thread of gristle, and green fire poured out from behind its teeth like a lantern lit in the dark.

The green blade was already humming in his hand. A single wide arc severed the thing, yet the limb kept twitching against the stone, fingers clawing for a grip. Luke stepped on the hand to hold it still and kept moving. Even detached, the dead could still be dangerous.

"Take the city," it said. Or its torso did, what was left standing. "Take the city for the—"

He closed his hand and crushed the remains into silence.

Four more shambled out of a boathouse to his left. Luke met them with a shove of the Force that sent the first two sprawling into a heap of crates, then went to work on the rest. The green blade took one head and carved a diagonal path through the next torso, leaving a pair of legs to march on aimlessly while the body slumped to the stone.

A scream pulled his attention to a gold cloak pinned against a stone wall, sword ready and useless while a fire-wight dragged itself toward him on shattered limbs.

"It ain't stopping!" he shouted, at the gods who had left him behind. "I need help, I NEED HELP PLE—"

The Force answered Luke's raised hand and crushed the crawling wight into the stone before the plea could break.

"Steel won't finish it. Get up and run." Luke was already past him. "Uphill, to the others. Don't stop."

Huge white eyes stared out of a soot-masked face. "Ser—m'lord—they're coming up from the water stair. A dozen, at least." Then he ran.

There are far more than a dozen.

The Falcon cut a low pass overhead and raked a knot of the dead off a ridgeline. The guns turned them to ash and falling slate before the ship climbed back toward the walls without setting down. The living were gone from these streets now. What remained was Luke and the dead, and the dead were all leaning one way.

Luke followed the tug of the Force south toward the water stair. The wights grew sparse as he approached the river, their sudden order suggesting a deliberate guard rather than a scattered mob. He could feel the source now, a heavy pressure in the Force that rendered his sense awry. Without hesitation, he carved a path through the dead.

Time slowed to a crawl as the Force expanded. A shove sent three wights into the water to buy a moment of reprieve. As he took the legs from one lunging corpse the next tried to jump him, but Luke caught it in the air with the Force and crimpled the wight. He climbed over a low seawall of shattered stone and saw the beach.

The tide was out and it left the beach a wide grey waste of mud and shingle lit by the green glare of the wildfire. A woman stood in the receding water with her red robes soaked dark and heavy. Her arms were up and she was chanting in a tongue Luke did not recognize but the Force made the pattern clear enough. It was a binding and a summons. He felt her pouring her own life into the channel, she was spending more than she understood or maybe she just didn't care about the cost anymore.

Stannis Baratheon stood just behind her. His sword was out but he made no move to use it, his face as grey and bloodless as a cinder. He was watching his priestess turn his own dead into a weapon, and Luke could not see past the hollow horror of the man's expression to find the soul beneath.

Between Luke and Stannis, what looked liked a small battle.

A injured middle aged man swung a driftwood spar at a wight wearing a Baratheon surcoat, his two sons fighting at his side. The younger son’s waist was wrapped in a blood-soaked bandage that had begun to unravel from the effort, while the older was man trying to get the other to disengage. When a second attacker lunged for his father's throat, the elder son threw himself between them and caught a reaching hand against his own forearm. The father’s voice broke in a furious scream as he grappled with the dead.

"Down," the man barked, the command as hopeless as an order to a piece of timber. "Stay down. You're dead. Be dead!"

"Da! Devin is bleeding, we have to move," the son grunted, his voice tight with the strain of the struggle. "Either we leave now or these demons will kill us where we stand!"

"And I told you to take him and leave!" The father turned back and screamed, his face a mask of grief. "I need to end—" He broke off when he saw Luke, the fury in his eyes flickering into a startled hope. "Ser! We need to stop her, help us!"

Luke acted on the plea before it was finished. He caught the two attackers in a hard grip and crushed them, ignoring the way he was growing used to the ease of it. It was a dangerous pattern to fall into, but the cost was heavy if he didn't use it.

"WHAT IN THE HELLS!" The older son screamed.

"A Warlock?!" It was less a question than a demand for a reason not to swing. "Who in the seven hells are you?!"

"Luke Skywalker," he said, his gaze shifting past the man to the dark stain spreading across the boy’s chest. "What I am matters less than the danger you are in. Get him away from here before more are upon you."

The woman in red turned at new comotion, and as her eyes found him, the Force curdled into a snare. Something wrapped around his throat like a hand, but it didn't squeeze. It was a seductive pressure instead, a dark thought broadcast straight into his mind that he had already failed. It told him the fire had won the beach and the city and the war, and that even trying to resist was nothing but a lie.

It staggered him for exactly one step.

Then he felt it for what it was—the sensation was nothing more than a crude application of the Force, a heavy pressure disguised as a religious plea.

Luke shoved the intrusion aside and cleared his mind of the dark presence before it could take root. He had survived much greater threats.

"I—" He kept the spar raised, though he leaned back and away from a fighting stance. "I have lost too many sons to this madness to leave it now. It has to end." He looked to the younger man. "Dale, take Devin and get out of here. Move!"

"I'm not leaving you here Da!" Dale said, his voice carrying a stubbornness born of a son's loyalty.

"I can see there's no moving you and I admire that." Luke raised an eyebrow at the man's stubbornness but then his gaze moved past them, to the woman standing in the water. "But you're all injured, I rather not have to protect you while dealing with the dead. Get him behind the wall and stay low."

The older man hesitated, looking from Luke to the woman in the surf. "Can you really stop her by yourself?"

"That is why I am here. I take it she is the source?"

"Aye," the man spoke, his voice going brittle. "Melisandre bought this with the blood of a boy with King's blood. Stannis..." He took a breath to steady his hands. "Davos Seaworth. If this is the end of us, you should know I am-- was Stannis' men."

"Well met Davos Seaworth, now step back."

With a sharp nod from Davos, the older son swallowed his frustrations and hurried the youngest behind the safety of the seawall. Instead of clearing out, Davos stepped up to Luke’s side, bracing his shoulder in a silent offer of help.

The woman finally spoke and Luke felt the pull of her voice like a hook in the water, a shared seduction meant for him as much as Davos.

"He is the promised one," she cried out. "Azor Ahai shall have this city when R'hllor's fire has scoured the false king's ash away. It is a mercy—the god's own mercy you seek to deny."

Luke reached for the reason beneath her fervor, trying to make them see sense. "That isn't mercy. Any power that demands blood to answer a prayer is not a path anyone should follow. Surely you are not that blind."

The feverant belief didn't leave Melisandre's voice. "You cannot know the Lord's will, stranger from nowhere."

"It isn't too late to stop. Please. It's not too late." Luke pleaded. "You have to see what you're doing. The dark side will twist you and everyone you touch until the person you used to be is gone." He stepped into the weight of the dark, moving against the tide that ignored the mental crawl of the dark side.

She gave him no more words. Whatever she read in his expression had ended the debate and she turned her voice back to the dead.

"Protect your king!"

Abandoning their original quest, twenty or so of the dead turned from the beach to converge on Luke.

"I'll watch your flank," Davos called out, but the words turned into a raw scream as he saw Luke's green blade snap to life and jumping head first into their charge. "Wait! Stop!"

The first went down at the knee to be trampled by its own kind. Luke caught the next on his blade and rolled its momentum into the one beside it, using the dead to hamper the living. When they crowded too close for a strike he threw his weight into the Force, a shove like a physical wall that sent four wights tumbling into the tide to shatter against the rocks. He kept his feet moving to stay ahead of their reach. He carved a path through the center and let it collapse in his wake. As the green glow of his saber extinguished the last of the dead, the shoreline fell into a momentary, hollow silence.

Then he felt her dark webs spead again as the sea give up its remaining dead.

It wasn't a dozen or thirty. A hundred shapes broke the black water past the tide-line and more poured from the city gates to join them. He could cut a hundred if his strength held but the cost would buy him nothing. She would only raise the more while he worked and the hundred after that for as long as she held the thread. The dead were not the fight.

Unless he ended her now, the tide would swarm beyond the city, one wave at a time.

"Enough." The voice came behind her, halting Luke's steps. The command was weak, a hollow sound from the man standing at the wrong side of the war. Stannis had let his sword go slack as he stared at the men he had spent, now nothing but shapes in the water and broken bodies in the beach. "Melisandre. Enough. You must—"

Stannis was shaking. Luke He seemed to be fighting the dark side but for a man without the Force, it was a losing struggle. When he spoke again the tremors had stopped, yet the flat certainty in his voice was worse than the fear. "No. You are right. I am the one who was promised, and we have to complete the Lord's work." His iron grip closed on the sword and took a fighting stance.

Luke sighed as he watched another man surrender to the pull of the dark side.

Luke reached out and found the cords of power running from her raised hands. She was drawing on the dead through a vortex of the dark side, but he only needed to seize a portion of the flow to break her. He wrapped his will around the nearest hundred threads and hauled them back, forcing the energy into a single knot that gave her a choice between keeping the strain or losing her entire army in an instant.

The woman began to writhe as she felt the dead slipping from her control. She was losing the struggle to hold them, so she spent her remaining influence to force Luke’s hand before the threads snapped entirely. The corpses on the shore wheeled away from him in a single motion, turning their hunger toward Davos and the two younger Seaworths.

Davos met the first of them while barely holding on to his sword while Dale dragged a second down by the wrist into the surf, and between them they bought the seconds Luke had left them to buy.

He had to now decide between batteling the red woman's spell or saving the Seaworths, a choice his exhausted mind could barely manage. A blur of motion at the edge of his vision made the decision for him and nearly broke his concentration. Amidala surged from the city with a snarl and threw herself into the wights harrying the men, scattering the dead. Dale stood at defense at first, then saw the wolf was not attacking and joined the fray at her side.

The wolf’s snarl cleared his path and Luke sent a wordless thanks through the Force while he tightened his grip on the knot.

The knot fought him and he answered it with his will bearing down until the threads began to slip. He opened himself and let the Force pour through him until his grip was part of the current itself. Where the two opposite forces met he could taste her mind, rapture from edge to edge, the deep twisted belief of a woman who thought she held a god's own fire. The dead responsded to their battle of wills, as they simply halted in their tracks.

"Release them!" He shouted it over the crashing surf. "Let them go and this ends. You can still choose to end this."

She turned to face him with a serene, almost kind expression. "I gave you my answer, stranger. The Lord does not set down his instruments. This cannot be stopped by any mortal means. Azor Ahai, you must stop him for the Lord's will demands it."

With that command, Stannis charged with his blade high, but a simple gesture of Luke’s prosthetic hand sent him reeling back toward the surf. With the king out of the way, Luke turned the full weight of his mind back to Melisandre.

The connection fianlly snapped. Every thread of power she had spun across the city surged back into her at once, a backdraft of fire returning to the one body that had commanded it. Luke could see the ignition happening inside her and she screamed as she burned from the inside out, the fire doing to her exactly what it had done to the corpses. She kept praying even through the pain.

"R'hllor, don't... abondon... me." But soon enough, the fire did it's work and she went silent.

With the snap of her connection the darkness receded as every thread of power she had spun across King's Landing went slack at once. The dead on the beach simply dropped and the same collapse moved outward through the burned streets like a wave. Fire was the only sound left in the city now and even that was subsiding.

Stannis dropped to his knees in the surf and let his sword slip into the sand, his gaze fixed on the black water where his priestess had gone down.

Davos lowered the spar at last, breathing hard. "Is it—" His voice had gone hoarse as if he couldn't belive what he had witnessed. "Is it done?"

"She's gone." Luke moved toward Dale and Devin. The boys stared wide-eyed at Amidala, who looked far too content.

He knelt and placed his living touch against Devin's chest to read the damage through the Force. The deep reserve of healing he usually carried had been spent, leaving him with nothing but the dregs of his strength. He funneled that remaining spark into the boy's side, knitting the flesh just enough to keep the blood inside. "Your son needs a maester, and he needs one now."

"Aye." Davos got an arm under his son and hauled him up, but he froze when he saw Amidala standing before him. "Is the wolf...?"

"Don't worry, she's with me."

Davos nodded, looked back at the beach, and jerked his chin toward Stannis. "You didn't kill him."

The shift in the Force was easy to read without Luke having to turn. The king’s signal had gone thin as the fire behind his purpose died out. He was just wreckage now, a man left standing in his own failure.

"I didn't have to. He is no longer a threat, and his fate is now not for me--"

While he remained crouched over Dale, the disturbance struck. It was a massive shock rolling out of the far north that swept past the city and the shore with a sudden, immense force like a scream heard across a hundred miles.

Something enormous had moved or woken at the Wall.

The sound of boots drew his gaze from the north. Robb and Jon were coming down from the seawall, their clothes blackened by soot and their lightsabers still lit.

Jon's gaze traveled from Stannis kneeling in the foam to the dark water where the red glow had died and came to rest on Luke.

"Master," Jon said, his voice thick with exhaustion. "The wights are falling, but I-- we both felt it."

"Who do we need to fight now?" Robb asked, his posture already shifting back into a guard.

"Not a who. A what." Luke stood. "The woman's death has sent a ripple north to the Wall. I don't know what it caused, but we'll have the truth of it soon enough."

Robb’s fingers went to his temples as he let out a breath. "One problem solved only for the next one to find us."

Jon looked towards Davos as the man walked closer to the city. Something in Jon’s face went carefully and deliberately blank. "Ser Davos, right? Stannis' right hand, I remember seeing you at the parley. Give me a reason not to have you thrown into the cells."

"Your Grace." Davos didn't slow his pace and he didn't let go of the boy. He kept a shoulder under Devin’s arm while Dale held the other. "Or whatever you're called today. I've lost the count of titles. Throw me in a hole if you have to, but let me find a maester for my sons. Please."

Luke held up his hand to calm Jon. "Jon, he stood against the dead and his own king. In the end he chose the right side."

Jon deliberated for a moment. "Go," he said. He was tired enough that formality had fallen away. "The fires are mostly gone, so some of my men are coming in. Get them to guide your sons to the maester. Is he going to hold?"

"He'll hold." Davos answered. "The boy did more than a wounded child should. He pulled one of those things off my collar with his bare hands, he's got the will to pull through." He paused, a spark of pride catching in his eyes. "He takes after his brothers."

Robb's gaze had already gone past them, out to the water, to the king kneeling in it. "And him?"

"That's for Jon to answer," Luke said, turning toward Jon.

Jon understood the responsbility and walked toward Stannis. When Stannis saw Jon, he drew his shoulders up with the last reflex of a spine that would not bend. "I am the rightful king." His voice had lost the fire it held before Melisandre died. "By law. Robert's law. That does not drown with her."

"Law." Jon's voice was still level, but Luke felt something under it begin to pull. "Look around you, Stannis. Look at what your law bought tonight. Your own fleet has drowned, you priestess dead. There is no throne for you to stand on, Stannis. There is no crown left for you."

"So I am to hand it to you?" Stannis said, his lips turning to a sneer. "I ate rats. Rats and boiled leather holding Storm's End for Robert while my family threw yours down! And you want me to hand it to Rhaegar's bastard? No, the crown is mine by the laws of this realm. and no dragon's bastard takes it from me while I breathe."

"Bastard." Jon threw the word back at him. "Call me that until your tongue rots. Being a bastard was not a sin I chose. But why do not speak of your own sins, Stannis? Murdering your own brother with dark magic. Releasing this indiscriminate horror upon the living of the city of its living. They are still pulling children out of the ash. CHILDREN! And for what?" The saber hilt creaked in his grip. "For a fucking a chair made of old swords? You would have ruled cinders and corpses and you dare call it "law"."

With every punctuation, Jon's temper flared and Luke could almost hear the dark side's whispers.

"Jon—" Robb's started walking toward's Jon but Luke's arm came up across his chest and stopped him.

"Master." The words were meant to carry no farther than the two of them. "Do you not feel it?"

"He has to refuse it himself," Luke said, his eyes never leaving Jon.

"And if he can't? I can execute Stannis myself."

"Trust in your brother. Jon is more capable than you think." That didn't prevent Luke from calling the Force to his fingertips yet he held his motion. Jon had to be the one to answer this.

Stannis came at Jon with his blade held high, though the strike lacked speed or any real violence. It was the final, staggering motion of a man following his last will his body no longer had the strength to enforce.

Jon's saber ignited in a blur of green and took the king's sword at the guard, melting the blade to the hilt — and did not stop. The stroke carried through and around and came to rest a hand's width from Stannis's neck, close enough that the heat curled the grey hairs of his beard. Jon held it there. His arm was trembling.

Jon’s breath went out of him in a long and heavy rush as he drew the saber back. The shadow that had tightened around him simply let go, falling away the moment he chose not to strike.

The rigidity went out of Robb's shoulders, and Luke let his hand drop.

"There has been enough death today," Jon said. "You will face a trial before the lords and the smallfolk both, to see how far House Baratheon has fallen. You will answer for the kinslaying and for every soul you spent tonight and I will take your head then. That is more justice than you gave any of them."

Stannis went down on one knee in the wash of the tide, clutching a hilt that no longer had a blade. His fingers opened and the hilt dropped into the sand. He stayed kneeling, past the point of answering.

A ringing silence settled over the beach as the screaming stopped and the tide began to pull the dead back into the the water. Behind Luke the city was a black jagged ruin against the grey light. He looked at the slow columns of smoke and the districts burned down to their skeletons where the last of the fire still fed. There were people in that wreckage who had made it out in time but many more who had failed. The Force carried the pull of every innocent life lost to the fire and the heavy cost of the battles.

The comlink hummed in his ear and broke him from his thoughts.

"Is it finally over?" Daenerys asked. The roar of her dragon’s wings was the only sound from the sky. "I don't see any more wights crawling the streets from the air."

"I can confirm that," Han's voice crackled over the link. "A whole street of them just sat down in order and Chewie about jumped out of his skin." He tried to make it sound like a joke but the humor fell flat. "The fronts are clear now. We've cleared all the gates and we're loading the wounded as fast as Leia can triage them."

"The dark sorcery is severed," Luke said, watching the shoreline. "Stannis and his army are broken. It's over, for now."

"You still in one piece over there, kid?"

"Mostly," Luke said.

"Yeah." He let out a long breath. "One of these days we need a serious talk about how you keep dragging me into things like this. Fire-zombies in a burning city while a war going on outside the walls. Skiff. Lando won't believe a word of it."

"Not today, Han. The cost has been too high."

"I get it, kid. I'm just trying not to count the bodies yet. I'll see you on the dirt. Han out."

Eventually, the incoming soldiers helped Davos get his sons moving. They carried Devin between them with his reopened wound bound fast while Dale followed with a hand gripped tight in his father’s sleeve. Davos refused to look back at the water again. He only rested a hand on the boy’s head as they walked and did not pull it away.

Stannis offered no resistance when a pair of Tyrell soldiers hauled him up by the arms and forced him to stand. They hauled him into the city.

"I told you it would be hard," Luke said, watching Jon’s focus drift away toward the distant North. "That sweet pull toward surrender is only the dark side whispering. You chose high road instead, and I am proud of that strength. You will be a fine King, Jon."

"I—thank you, Master," Jon replied after a moment of hesitation. "But what of the North?"

Luke watched the boy, feeling the same pull of concern. "I will go and see for myself once the city is settled."

Jon nodded and reached for the dragon. Rhaegal answered the call, dropping out of the smoke over the inner city to settle onto the beach with a thud that scattered the sand. Jon climbed up and Rhaegal rose, his shadow stretched long above Luke while the last of the fires sank away into the afternoon light.