77 AC
The Neck
Third Person Pov
The king's horse sank fetlock-deep in mud, every step a struggle. Jaehaerys Targaryen squinted through the pale morning mist, watching the marsh swallow the road ahead and behind. The trees pressed in—gnarled, ancient, their roots thrust like bones from the black earth. Somewhere ahead, his scouts said, the causeway would bend and the mists would thin, but Jaehaerys doubted it. He'd been riding through fog for days.
Two hundred and ten men. It sounded like a host when they set out from Twins. Now, as the army slouched through the Neck, all he could see were hunched figures, mud-caked, cloaks sodden, armor speckled with filth. Banners drooped. The gold and red and silver of the dragon was little more than a stained rag at the head of the column.
Behind him, Ser Ryam Redwyne muttered to the captains. Jaehaerys caught fragments—"shadows in the reeds… wolves, not men… gone at dawn…" He'd heard the same complaints yesterday, and the day before. Always at dawn, another stretcher carried past, another man gone silent in the night.
The king pressed his heels to his gelding. "Keep moving," he called, voice hoarse. "We do not stop until we reach firm ground."
The men obeyed. They always did, when he spoke. But he could feel their fear, thick as the mist.
Ser Ryam rode with his visor down, though it fogged with every breath. He wanted the steel between his face and whatever watched from the trees. Each day, the column shrank. At first, it was men who lagged behind, lost in the fog, never to be seen again. Then, arrows—short, crude, but deadly—hummed out of the green and took horses. Once, at dusk, a pack of dogs burst from the shadows, snapping at flanks and ankles, gone before a sword could be drawn.
He'd fought on grassy fields and in walled towns, behind shield and helm, sword against sword. But here, in the Neck, there was no enemy to see—just the endless sucking of the mud and the whisper of things moving in the reeds.
He'd never felt so useless. You could not charge a shadow. You could not hold a line against mist.
At noon, a shout rose ahead—a warning. Ryam spurred forward, heart pounding. The vanguard had found a dead man, throat cut, boots missing. One of their own, but which? No one could say. Names were lost, like everything else.
He looked up at the king, who sat his horse like a statue. He wondered if Jaehaerys felt it too—the sense that the swamp itself meant to swallow them whole.
The wounded filled his dreams. Fever, flesh gone black from bites, arrow wounds festering in the wet. Corys wrote their names in his ledger, but the names blurred, the ink running in the constant drizzle.
He had begged the king to turn back. "You cannot fight the Neck," he'd said. "It's not land, it's water and ghosts." Jaehaerys only smiled, the calm smile of a man who knew he must not show fear.
So Corys worked, his tent a patch of order in the muck. He boiled water, cleaned wounds, and whispered prayers to the Seven. He'd stopped asking what killed the men who came to him, half-mad with terror, faces bloodless. He just worked.
One night, a boy was brought in—William, wide-eyed, shaking, his arm slashed open. "Saw them, master," the boy whispered. "Little men in the water. Saw their eyes. They laughed at me."
Corys pressed a cloth to the wound. "You're alive," he said. "That's what matters."
He'd marched for days, feet blistered, hands raw from hauling carts when the horses failed. At night, he curled up with the other boys, listening to the sounds from the water. Sometimes it was frogs, or birds, or just the wind. Sometimes, it was voices.
He saw them once—little men, half-swallowed by the reeds, faces painted green and brown. They moved without a sound. Willam tried to warn the others, but they laughed at him. Until the Wolves came.
The Wolves were half-wild, lean and silent. They struck at dusk, snapping at the weakest. Willam ran, tripped, fell. When he looked up, a crannogman stood over him, blade in hand. But the man just smiled and vanished, as if swallowed by the swamp.
Since then, Willam woke every hour, sure he'd never see dawn.
He slid through the water, feeling the mud suck at his feet. The southerners were loud—iron and leather clattering, voices raised in anger and fear. They stank of wine and horse and fear. Easy to follow. Easier to harry.
He watched them from the shelter of the reeds. At night, he crept closer, knife in hand. Sometimes he took a boot, sometimes a life. The wolves did the rest.
He'd grown up in the Neck, learned to hunt on land that was half water, half shadow. The land was his weapon. It would kill these men long before they reached Moat Cailin.
He slipped back into the mist, silent as the grave.
Each day, the column shrank by a handful of men. Some slipped away in the night—cowards, deserters, perhaps, but Jaehaerys suspected most simply vanished. Lost in the fog, snatched by the swamp, or claimed by the silent archers who melted into the water. He kept the tally himself: two hundred and six, two hundred and three, one hundred ninety-eight. He watched the numbers dwindle as if each soul lost weighed upon his shoulders alone.
He rode at the head, silver hair plastered to his brow, eyes scanning the horizon for a glimpse of the fabled causeway, the bricks of the First Men rising from the muck. Some nights, he dreamed of dragons—Aegon's conquest, fire and blood—but every dawn brought only the endless, gray-green world and the stink of decay.
He forced himself to keep his back straight, his voice steady. "Hold the line. Stay together. The Neck will not break us." He wondered if he lied.
The men looked to Ryam Redwyne for courage, but Ryam felt it slipping through his fingers with every step. The horses fared worst—one by one, they fell lame, their hooves rotting in the wet, and had to be put down. The men butchered the carcasses for meat, grateful for a hot meal, but even the flesh tasted of swamp.
Ryam's armor was a prison of rust. He had not slept a full night in a fortnight. In the Reach, armies broke on open field—here, they simply melted away. He tried to organize watches, sent out patrols, but they never returned.
One morning, he awoke to find three men missing—no sign, no struggle, just their gear left behind. In their place, he found a message: a crude carving in a tree, a frog squatting atop a crown.
"Crannogmen," he spat. "Mocking us."
But he wondered: was the Neck itself mocking them, too?
Maester Corys's hands trembled as he mixed herbs for fever. The wounded outnumbered the hale. Men coughed blood and shivered, their lips blue. The bites festered, and the water—always the water—brought sickness they had no names for.
He took notes, scribbled in the margins of his ledger: "Unknown fever. Swelling. Black tongue." He tried to help, but with each day, his supplies dwindled. He'd sent men to gather herbs, but only one returned, half-mad and raving about ghostly lights in the mist.
He saw the king sometimes, watching the men, jaw clenched. Corys pitied him. Even a dragon could not burn away mist.
William thought of Old tales, the ones he'd dismissed as a boy—about the Neck's haunted waters and the frog-eaters who could vanish at will. Now, he believed every word.
He kept to the center of the line now, as far from the reeds as he could. The others did the same, huddling together like sheep. They'd stopped joking days ago. No songs, no laughter—just the squelch of boots and the flutter of banners that no longer meant anything.
He saw faces in the mist sometimes—pale, wide-eyed, flickering in and out of the trees. The wolves were gone now, but something worse came at night: arrows, silent and sharp, that struck without warning. Once, Willam saw a man die with barely a cry, an arrow sprouting from his chest, blood blooming on his surcoat.
He missed home. He missed dry ground, his mother's bread, the sound of his little sister's voice. He prayed to the Seven that would listen.
He tried not to listen when the mist whispered his name.
The southerners were breaking. Crangomen scouts saw it in their eyes, in the way they clung to the causeway, refused to stray from the stones. They moved like cattle, slow and frightened.
He crept close, breathing the scent of iron and sweat. He watched the tall knight curse the swamp, watched the old man tend the dying. He saw the boy—so young, so afraid—stumble on the path.
Tonight, he and his kin would strike again. They would loose their arrows from the shadows, slip among the tents and steal another handful away. The wolves would feast.
He pitied them, a little. They did not belong here. The Neck took what it wanted.
He melted into the reeds, knife glinting in the moonlight.
The king called a council, what was left of it. Ser Ryam, Maester Corys, Rogar Baratheon , Eustace Hightower, Tymond Lannister, Corwyn Velaryon, Prince Aemon and Prince Baelon They huddled beneath a sagging pavilion, torches flickering in the damp.
"We cannot go on like this," Rogar said, voice thin. "We lose men every night. The fever spreads."
Baelon slammed his fist on the table. "We must strike back. Hunt them in the dark, show them we are not afraid."
Jaehaerys listened, face unreadable. He felt the weight of two kingships: the one he wore, and the one he might lose, here in the mud.
"We move at first light," he said. "We keep to the causeway. Any man caught wandering will be flogged. We do not break ranks. Not for anything. Until we reach Moat Cailin, If not…"
He did not finish.
The men stared at the table, silent.
Willam did not sleep that night. He watched the mist swirl outside the tent, heard soft voices—maybe men, maybe not. He shivered, teeth chattering, and clutched his knife.
Sometime before dawn, he heard footsteps. He sat up, heart pounding. A shadow moved just beyond the torchlight, small and quick.
He squeezed his eyes shut. When he opened them, the shadow was gone. But so was the man sleeping next to him.
He did not scream. He did not tell anyone. In the morning, he marched with the others, eyes fixed on the king's banner, praying it would lead them out of the swamp.
Crannogman Scout counted the southerners as they marched, their numbers thinned. He marked the faces of the dead, the wounded, the broken. He wondered how many would reach the stones of Moat Cailin.
He dipped his fingers in the water, whispered a prayer to the old gods. The Neck would keep its secrets.
Tonight, he would strike again.
By the seventh day, the king could taste the swamp on his tongue. It was in his hair, his beard, his very bones—a sickness, a weariness that no fire could burn away. His first horse was gone, a twisted ankle and a mercy killing at dawn.
He tried to count the men, but numbers meant little now. The banners were gone, used for cloaks or lost in the night. Once, he would have named every lord, every knight. Now, he saw only faces: hollow, haunted, peering through mud and mist.
He forced himself to march at their head. If the king faltered, all hope would break. They moved in a ragged column, pressed close, eyes darting to the shadows. Every sound was danger—a distant splash, the sudden whine of an arrow, the low growl of a wolf just beyond sight.
Somewhere ahead, the ground would rise. They said the stones of Moat Cailin could not be drowned, not even by the Neck itself.
Ryam's sword arm ached, but he refused to sheath the blade. Twice in the night, he'd fought off shadows—crannogmen with knives and painted faces, darting in and out of the tents. One had nearly slit his throat; Ryam's mail had saved him, but the boy next to him wasn't so lucky.
He'd lost count of the dead. The marsh had claimed them, leaving only ripples and bubbles and the occasional, drifting boot. The men muttered of curses, of old gods and vengeful spirits, and Arlan could not bring himself to silence them. He believed it, too.
At midday, the column halted. A narrow spit of land, firmer than the rest, loomed ahead. Arlan scouted it, blade drawn, breath shallow. The trees thinned, the mist parted just enough to reveal—stones. Huge stones, black with age, rising from the water like the backs of ancient beasts.
"Moat Cailin," he whispered, hardly daring to hope.
Maester Corys stumbled, nearly falling into the muck. He'd lost his ledger days ago, dropped in the dark during a sudden flight from arrows. Now, he carried only a pouch of herbs, a rusted dagger, and his memories—the faces of the men he'd tried to save, the names he could no longer recall.
He paused to tend a man coughing up blood. There were fewer wounded now, not because the attacks had stopped, but because so few remained. Corys did what he could, but mostly he offered comfort: a touch on the shoulder, a whispered word, a promise of rest that he knew was a lie.
He saw the king, silver hair streaked with mud, eyes sunken but unbroken. He saw Arlan, wild and desperate, blade red with blood not all their own. And he saw Willam—the boy clinging to the tattered remnants of his courage, eyes wide with a kind of holy terror.
When the scouts returned, whispering of stone towers ahead, Corys wept. Relief, exhaustion, and grief mingled in his tears. He wondered who would tell the tale of this march, and who would remember the dead.
Willam barely recognized himself. His hands were raw, his clothes nothing but rags. Hunger gnawed at his belly, and every step sent a jolt of pain through his feet. He kept walking because he could not stop—because to stop was to die.
When the cry went up—"Stones! The stones!"—he almost didn't believe it. He pushed forward, stumbling, breath coming in ragged sobs. The mist parted, just for a moment, and there it was: black stone, ancient and massive, rising from the earth. Moat Cailin.
Some men wept. Some fell to their knees. Willam just stared, numb. He'd survived. He did not know how, or why, but he had.
Behind them, the swamp swallowed their tracks.
Crannogman Scout watched from the water as the last of the southerners crawled onto the stones. They were less than what had entered the Neck. The rest belonged to the land now.
He felt no triumph, only a quiet satisfaction. The Neck had done its work. Moat Cailin would hold, as it always had. No southern king could tame these waters; no dragon could burn away the mist.
He turned and slipped into the reeds, gone before the king's men could glimpse him.
Jaehaerys stood atop the causeway, boots on solid stone at last. The towers of Moat Cailin loomed above, battered and crumbling but unbowed. He looked back at the survivors—ragged, broken, but alive.
"We have made it," he said, voice hoarse. "The Neck is behind us."
No one cheered. The silence was deeper than any song.
He knew the truth: the Neck was never behind. It was inside them now—mud in their blood, mist in their dreams, a ghost at every campfire.
He would remember this march for as long as he lived. He wondered if he would ever be clean again.
The land was quiet again. The men had gone, their blood and bones feeding the roots of the old trees. The mist rolled in, and the crannogmen slipped through the water, whispering to the frogs and the ghosts.
The Neck watched and waited. It always did.
And far to the south, a king dreamed of dragons, and woke with mud beneath his nails.