[One Shot] The Dragon in King’s Landing (ASOIAF/WOT) (Patreon)

NOTE: Wrote this last year and thought some of you might enjoy it. This One Shot happens in the ASOIAF world, but you will probably only really understand it if you’ve read the Wheel of Time.  You can still enjoy it if you haven't read it though.

NOTE 2: For those who’ve read WOT, keep in mind I kept Rand as his ‘baseline’ to avoid spoiling anyone who hasn’t fully read the series or does want to read it in the future. Didn't want to spoil the literal last chapter of the final book here.

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[One Shot] The Dragon in King’s Landing (ASOIAF/WOT)

The Red Keep, 282 AC

Rand stepped into the gateway with a wolfish grin on his face and a bottle of the best vintage Mayene had to offer in his hand—an old gift from one of Berelain's great grandchildren. He was dressed appropriately for the evening too: no shirt, no shoes, no belt, only a pair of pants a bit too tight for polite company. Just the way Elayne liked it.

The moment his feet touched the other side, Rand started. 

This isn’t Caemlyn. 

He looked around, frowning. The room he traveled into had that over-the-top gaudiness he had grown used to for the past few hundreds of years visiting noble palaces and royal halls. Shining marble floors, expensive furniture, gold-lined tapestries.

Except the colors were all wrong. Instead of Andorian red and gold, the room was decked in black and red colors, with a large banner of a three-headed, blood-red creature hanging from the wall in front of him. 

The single door of the room sat to his left, iron-banded and heavily barred by thick wooden bolts. Opposite that, squeezed between a ridiculously ostentatious bassinet and a tall wooden dresser, stood a young black-haired woman, pretty and slim and well dressed in yellow and orange silk. 

A noble, to be sure. 

She looked absolutely terrified.

“And you’re definitely not Elayne,” Rand said easily, trying to lighten the mood. “At least, I don’t think so. She’s been over her glamour, role-playing phase for a while now.” 

When the young woman became even more confused but lost none of the fright, he frowned.

Alright, something is definitely wrong here, Rand thought. Why is she so scared? Who hasn’t seen someone travel in this day and age?

Before he could ask any of the questions to the pretty noblewoman cowering on the other side of the room, someone banged loudly on the door. Once, twice, three times. The woman cringed with every strike, as if she felt them on her skin. 

“I don’t suppose you’re expecting friends for tea?” he teased, though he wished he hadn’t as soon as he said it. Very insensitive on his part given the circumstances. Whoever was outside clearly wished nothing good on the woman. Nynaeve would’ve boxed his ears for that one.

The wooden bolts groaned under the blows, straining in place; but it was a dying wail, and the door burst open with the next strike in a shower of splinters. The young woman shrieked, clutching her hands over her chest, and Rand was sure he heard the smothered cry of a child coming from beneath the bed. 

The first man to barge in had not been the one to kick down the door, Rand knew. He was an ugly thing, pig-faced and beady-eyed and burly enough to be considered strong, but he would never have been able to go through those heavy bolts anchoring the door. No, the man after him was the offender. 

Rand had met plenty of long-limbed Aiel over the years, and was more often than not the tallest man in the room himself, but the beast that entered the room must have towered a foot and a half over him. Combined with his monstrous height, the man had the build of a master blacksmith who’d spent the last twenty years hammering away at an anvil. His shoulders were so broad as to scrape against the door frames as he walked inside. 

He reminded him of his old friend Perrin during the last years of the War of the Shadow, only bigger and more muscled, wearing a face so full of malice it immediately dispelled any comparisons to Perrin in his mind. 

When he had unclogged himself from the doorway, Rand could see another half a dozen or so men crowding the hallway outside.

Yet what boggled him most wasn’t the giant man and his ugly companion. No, it was what they had in their hands. Both were carrying swords, of all things, as if they were on their way to fight in Tarmon Gai’don. Now that he thought of it, they had armor on too. Boiled leather, chainmail, and half-plate.

“I dunno who ye’re, friend,” the stout, pig-faced man said. “But you pass us the Princess and her get, and we’ll let ye live all well and dandy.” His tongue darted out of his mouth with every other word. “Might be we even let you have a go at’er, eh?”

This couldn’t be real. They even spoke like thugs. Rand couldn’t help it. He burst into laughter, so suddenly the men around him startled at his loud guffaws. The giant’s face reddened in anger and he took a step forward, a sword that had to be as tall as a grown man held easily in one hand. 

“On yer head it is, then,” the pig-faced man said, then he darted past his giant companion toward Rand, holding his normal-sized sword in both hands.

Rand watched him come without moving. Even after all these years, the pattern did love to put him in the weirdest situations. He took comfort in it by now; life would be dreadfully boring without his ta’veren-ess, and it wasn’t as if he had to slay some ancient evil every day. 

When Pig-faced closed in on him, Rand breathed in.

xxx

Elia Martell

Bare chested and unarmed, facing a dozen knights and man-at-arms in armor, the wizard looked completely unperturbed. Amused, even. Elia couldn’t understand it. It didn’t seem like the arrogance of a cocky youth either. And he was young, no older than her husband, she could tell, with dark, reddish hair cut short, broad shoulders, and blue-gray eyes that watched the people around him like they were actors in a mummer’s show.

Tall as Robert Baratheon and slender as Jaime Lannister, he was like no one she’d ever seen before. Stranger still were the markings on his arms. Lizard-like creatures in red and gold twisted around his forearms, standing out against his tanned skin.

She quickly found out why he seemed so indifferent to the armed men around him. 

One moment the Lannister man had his longsword swinging down on the wizard, ready to kill Elia’s only hope of escaping with her children. Then the man was cutting empty air, his shoulder was snapping out of its socket, and the wizard had suddenly gained possession of the sword. 

The knight from House Lorch cried and fell to the ground, clutching his right arm. Elia gaped. She had watched Oberyn train countless times in Sunspear’s yard and at the Water Garden, and her brother—who men now called the Red Viper—was never that quick. No, the wizard was faster still. Ser Arthur Dayne himself at his best had never moved like that. 

The three other men-at-arms that had filtered into the room paused by the door, their expressions turning from confident to apprehensive. Even the Mountain-that-rides looked surprised at the speed with which the man moved and the brutality of his shoulder lock.

The wizard wasn’t even looking at any of them. “This brings back memories,” he muttered, testing the weight of the bastard sword with one hand then the other, before finally grasping the hilt with both. “Very well, then.” Exhaling deeply, the wizard turned to the red-cloaked Lannisters, his feet shifting into the strangest stance Elia had ever seen from a knight before. “I will show you the Dragon’s wrath.”

Elia felt her breath hitch. A loyalist, then, but who? A court wizard Aerys had hidden in his pocket for all this time? Or perhaps someone Rhaegar had sent for their protection? 

She almost laughed at the thought. No. There had been no recognition in his eyes when he first saw her. Aerys would have used a wizard like this to burn someone alive long ago so he could show the court his power and feed his fiery lusts, and Rhaegar was just as likely to drop all the prophecy nonsense he’d been so absorbed in as he was to care about Elia and their children. 

This was something else entirely.

The Mountain lunged at the wizard first, his massive sword swinging down to cleave the wizard from neck to navel. Elia scrunched her eyes shut, terrified at the thought of seeing the wizard bisected like a pig, until she heard the familiar ringing of metal striking metal.

Heart lurching, she opened her eyes to see the wizard still standing and already parrying another strike. The giant sword came down in an overhead strike, and he simply stepped to the side and angled his sword to deflect the giant blade away from him. 

Growling, the Mountain tried again and again, but each try was parried or ducked under.

A low chuckle escaped the wizard as he danced back from another wide swing. “Your form is terrible, friend. Who was it that taught you to wield a sword, an Aiel?” 

The words made no sense to her, but a smirk pulled at the edge’s of the wizard’s mouth. Beneath his helm, Elia saw the Mountain's face turn purple with anger before he roared and charged again. Instead of defending himself, the wizard stepped forward, dashing past a thrust that would have skewered him, and smacking the flat of his blade against the Mountain’s head twice in quick succession. The Mountain-that-rides grunted and staggered on his feet, nearly going down to his knees. 

“That’s it? I knew a farm boy that could put you down with a stick,” the wizard said, and this time he laughed at his own joke.

Two red cloaks tried to take advantage of the distracted wizard by rushing at him. Elia opened her mouth to call the danger out to him, but she didn’t have to say anything. When the first man-at-arms reached him, the wizard spun on the balls of his feet to dance out of his range, parried the blade of the second Lannister man, and in a single smooth movement cut through both of their sword arms.

Blood sprayed the marbled floors before the screaming began. Elia gasped. Her stomach twisted as the men fell beside their detached limbs, paling fingers still holding the hilt of their swords. The other Lannister men-at-arms stood stunned at the edges of the room, watching the scene as if they couldn’t believe their eyes.

Elia couldn’t blame them. She could scarcely believe it herself. Bile rose in her throat when she breathed in the metallic smell in the air, but she wouldn’t be sick for a pair of men who would have butchered her and her children. 

The wizard looked back at her for a moment, then gazed at the fallen men clutching the bloody stumps of their missing arms. “Ah, my apologies, Princess,” he said, giving her a crooked smile. “I will make this cleaner now.”

She frowned at his words. He could cut down every single living human in King’s Landing and bathe her in their blood so long as he saved her children. 

Gathering himself, the Mountain shook his head and adjusted his dented helm before rising to his full height. He looked down at his defeated companions and sneered. “Useless,” he grunted.

Before the giant knight could do anything his sword clattered to the ground. He staggered once again, eyes bulging out of their sockets. His face, which had turned purple in his rage a few moments before, now gained the same color as his mouth opened up in a silent gasp.

Frightened at the sudden change, Elia stepped back, pressing herself against Aegon’s bassinet.

Around the room, the commotion had spread to the other Lannister soldiers. Swords dropped from fingers as hands raised up toward their throats and chests, clawing desperate as if trying to tear away an invisible force strangling them. 

At that thought, Elia’s eyes shot to the wizard. He hadn’t strayed from the middle of the room. Hadn’t moved a muscle. Yet his eyes were sharp as they swivelled from man to man, watching dispassionately as they choked on seemingly nothing. She noticed his fingers barely twitching as he loosely gripped the sword.

Was he the one doing this? She felt like slapping herself. Of course it was. Who else but a wizard could choke the life out of seven men without putting his hands on them? 

It took a few more heartbeats until all the guardsmen lay dead in the room, then another full minute until the Mountain succumbed to the same fate. His large armored body fell to the floor in a terrible clang of metal.

A trembling silence settled over the room then. Elia didn’t know what to do. What to think. The wizard had saved her from a fate worse than death. Of that, she had no doubt. But could she trust him? Should she trust him?

Rushed footsteps on the corridor outside broke the stillness, and once again she felt her heart seize. Then the door swung close by itself as if moved by that same invisible force that had killed the Lannister men.

The wizard turned to her. 

She swallowed. “Who are you?” Her voice cracked as she spoke. "What... what are you?"

Blue-gray eyes met hers, and she felt stripped naked in front of them. As if they carried within them a storm that promised to engulf her, for good or for ill.

“My name is Rand al’Thor, Princess,” he said, stepping closer. “King of Illian to some. The Dragon Reborn to others. As for what I truly am, though... you might say I am just a sheepherder.”