The Stone That Moves

POV: Ser Harwin Stone

Location: Driftspire's outer walls and training fields

Year: Mid 285 AC

The sea wind carved through the cliffs that morning, cold and briny, carrying gull cries and hammer clangs alike. Ser Harwin Stone stood atop the new cement battlements, watching laborers haul heavy oak beams and iron pulleys into place.

Below him, men worked to assemble the great throwing engine Lord Alester had designed. They called it the long arm, or the better catapult, for none knew the Essosi word trebuchet. It loomed skeletal now: tall, brutal, alien against the foggy Vale coast.

He looked out over the gathered men on the training field two hundred guards, fifty mounted riders, and two dozen knights sworn to House Longlight. Behind them stood another three hundred militia, poorly armored fishers and farmers with sharpened poles and old boiled leather jerkins.

Harwin's knee ached with each step along the parapet. Ghost pains from the old wound at the Trident, when Robert's hammer broke three shields before striking down Rhaegar Targaryen. Harwin had been among the screaming mud stuck footmen that day, fighting for life more than king.

He descended the stone steps slowly. The men quieted as he approached, the salt wind tugging at his patched grey cloak. He leaned on his steel-capped walking stick as he looked into their faces young, lined, weathered, afraid, angry.

He waited until silence settled heavy among them.

"Listen close," he rasped, his voice deep as gravel rolled in surf. "Because there are truths a man must hear before he draws steel in earnest."

He gestured to the trebuchet frame, creaking as ropes were tightened.

"Some of you look upon that… engine… and see strength. Safety. The promise of victory. But I tell you: it is naught but timber and iron. A tool, like your sword or your piss-pot. It does not care for your prayers or your courage."

He limped forward, tapping his stick on a young militia boy's chest.

"You think war is a dance of heroes. Songs and honor and bright banners. You think death waits only for old men and cowards. But death waits for all men. And war… war is but a field of mothers' sons torn open like sacks of barley, bleeding out into dirt they never sowed."

A breeze carried silence through the ranks.

"I have seen knights beg like children for their mothers. I have seen lords piss themselves as they died, and whores take up spears to defend what men could not. I have seen brothers stand side by side for hours in shieldwalls, only to cut each other down for a crust of bread a week later."

His eyes burned with an old, quiet fury.

"War does not care for your reasons. It does not care who was first to strike or who prayed the longest. It is only killing and dying, and the man who survives is the man who understands that simple truth."

He pointed his stick at the guards, the riders, the knights.

"You are here to hold these walls. To hold your homes. To keep your wives unraped and your children unburned. That is all. There is no glory in it. No honor that lasts beyond the pyre."

He turned to face the trebuchet again, watching laborers hammer bronze pins into the pivot assembly.

"When the day comes and gods grant it never does you will not die for lords or banners. You will die for the man beside you. And if you do not, then he will die for your cowardice instead."

No one spoke. Even the seabirds seemed silent upon the walls.

Ser Harwin Stone nodded, slow and tired. "Train now. Train until your arms quake and your bellies hollow. And when you think you have given all strength, remember that life asks for more."

He limped away across the parapet, cloak snapping in the wind. Behind him, the clatter of weapons resumed, muted and solemn.

Above them, the trebuchet frame stood half-finished, towering like a gallows over Driftspire. A promise of power. A promise of death. Its massive throwing arm hung silent in the dawn, waiting only for its counterweight and the hand that would one day loose it against another man's home.