TitoVillar
patreon
GOT Chapter 108: Blood and Thunder in the Vale
🕑 Added 2025-08-30 04:21:10 +0000 UTC“Lord Kal, what’s happening? Why are we under attack?!”
Jon’s eyes were wide, his pupils contracted. Kennedy’s blood and brain still clung to his face. He wiped it away with a trembling hand, staring at Kal as he demanded an answer.
“It’s the mountain clans!”
Kal’s voice was cold, sharp, brimming with killing intent as his gaze locked on the treeline.
With no time for explanations, he left only that name, then raised his longsword and charged straight toward the forest.
He had lived in the Vale for barely a year since arriving in this world, but he knew well enough who dwelled in the Moon Mountains.
That was why he had recognized the danger at once.
The mountain clans—primitive tribes living at the foot of the Moon Mountains in the Vale.
They lived scattered throughout the Moon Mountains, hiding in countless forests both large and small. Because of this, the size, numbers, and strength of their clans were never fixed.
Their origins were complicated. These tribal clans had first formed during the Andals’ invasion of the Vale—descendants of the First Men who refused to bend the knee, retreating deep into the mountains to survive. Over generations, they multiplied in the wilderness, slowly becoming distinct clans.
Thus they retained many traditions of the First Men, their ways similar to the wildlings beyond the Wall.
They raided travelers, submitted to no rule.
They refused to recognize the authority of the Eyrie, remaining outside the Seven Kingdoms and their political and economic order, split into dozens of tribes great and small.
And as far as Kal knew, they drew no lines between men and women—women were raiders and killers all the same.
Because of this, they had almost no ties with the outside world.
Life in the deep forests was wretched. Their weapons and armor were crude, poorly made, often scavenged.
They lived by plundering nearby villages, seizing food, weapons, and women—anything they could take.
They would even attack the Lord of the Eyrie himself if he rode without his guards.
Jon and the others were still reeling, stunned, when Kal’s lone word—“mountain clans”—fell behind him. In the next breath, their commander and the Warden of the East had vanished from sight, sword in hand.
That left only Samwell, cowering in the corner against the cliff wall, trembling uncontrollably, and the rest staring at one another in shock.
Meanwhile, Kal had barely moved a few steps from where he had stood before—still on the narrow path, not yet inside the treeline—when he saw them.
Four, maybe five men burst from the woods. Their chainmail was ragged, patched together. Furs draped across their shoulders. Skulls, antlers, and claws decorated their filthy heads. Their hands clutched a jumble of crude, stinking weapons. They stank of sweat, rot, and dirt as they charged straight for him.
Perhaps they hadn’t expected such a small party to resist. For a heartbeat, surprise flickered across their savage faces.
But Kal, who had just watched a comrade crushed and killed before his eyes, had no patience for words.
His way of greeting them was simple.
As the first wild man lunged within reach, Kal’s eyes went cold. He lifted his longsword high above his head.
A flash of steel, glinting with a faint, invisible aura. In the next instant, the wild man before him was ripped apart from head to toe—cleaved neatly in two, as though torn by some overwhelming force.
The cut was smooth, clean. His trembling viscera and quivering muscles were still visible, laid bare to the air.
Before the hot blood could even strike the ground, Kal barreled through the sundered corpse, his body bursting out from between the two halves.
Blood sprayed across him, but Kal was already upon his next foe.
His gilded sword swept in a blinding horizontal arc. A streak of light skimmed across the man’s face.
Kal had already blurred past him when the raider’s head split open at the line just beneath the nose and above the lip.
Momentum carried the body forward in a few staggering steps before the upper half of the head, severed with surgical precision, toppled away.
The smooth cross-section revealed bone, flesh, and twitching tissue with horrifying clarity.
But the top half of the skull, severed and flung upward, could not keep pace with the body still tethered to it.
Carried by the gust as Kal brushed past, only the broken dome of a head—like a filthy, hair-matted bowl brimming with flesh—traced an arc through the air before gravity dragged it down to the earth.
The rest of the body, its brain gone and all control lost, staggered on a few steps. Its tongue, left untouched by the blade, lolled grotesquely from its mouth—until, like a puppet whose strings had been cut, it collapsed lifeless to the ground.
Head and body, torn apart.
But for the wrathful god of slaughter, this was only the beginning.
With two enemies already slain—one by a vertical stroke, another by a horizontal slash—Kal neither looked back nor spared them another glance.
Stepping past the headless corpse, his eyes fixed on another tribesman some 5 or 6 meters ahead. Kal’s empty left hand suddenly rose.
In his palm, a spark of blue light flared.
A heartbeat later, a streak of lightning—faster than sound—flashed forth with a sharp, crackling snap, snaking between the remaining three raiders like a silver serpent of living light.
The three had barely burst from the treeline. They had just seen their kinsmen cut down in clean, merciless strokes.
But before their throats could even form the cry of rage to warn the others behind them, a blinding flash consumed their sight—then nothing. Their minds went dark forever.
One bolt of [Lightning] magic felled three men in an instant.
Kal did not slow. As he swept past their twitching bodies, his gilded sword slashed without mercy, carving two of them into four uneven pieces.
The third, who had been struck from a little further away, his body scorched and stiffened by the current, toppled headfirst to the ground.
Before he even landed, another weapon struck: a crude club, fashioned from a kinsman’s thighbone bound with stone, flew through the air and smashed his skull apart.
In the span of heartbeats, the five who had first burst from the forest were all dead.
Kal said not a word.
Without the faintest trace of fear, he strode straight into the dense woods ahead—woods that should have been silent, but now stirred with the promise of blood.
...
From the narrow road running along the valley, one could hear only the occasional scream and the deep, muffled booms echoing from within the forest.
At times, branches shook violently, as though struck by some massive beast.
The once-quiet woods now seemed to harbor a terrible monster. Flocks of birds burst from their nests in panic, filling the sky with frantic cries as they wheeled overhead, warning and driving away other creatures of the forest.
A shadowcat leapt onto a branch, watching intently toward the place Kal had just vanished.
Its nostrils flared, catching the enticing scent of blood from the shattered bodies lying amid the trees.
But in the end, it dragged its long tail behind it and hurried away from that place.
“Urgh—”
Left behind on the roadside, Jon and the other two glanced at each other, then turned toward Samwell Tarly, who had suddenly hunched over, gagging and retching.
But none of them had the time to tend to him now.
Jon’s eyes flicked back, almost against his will, to the corpse sprawled across the path—Kennedy. His horse, spooked beyond control, had bolted down the road, leaving its master behind.
The body lay twisted, skull shattered into pieces, one eye crushed under a panicked hoof until it burst.
Jon’s heart pounded uncontrollably.
A moment ago, that broken corpse could so easily have been him.
Fear churned within him—yet alongside it, fury welled up without end.
“Kennedy… we’ll avenge him!”
With that, Jon’s gaze hardened. Forcing his trembling hand steady despite the terror, he drew Pale Justice.
He stepped half a pace toward the cliffside, lifting his eyes warily upward.
...
The mountain clan that had ambushed travelers here was not large. Counting those hidden in the dense forest, Kal had slaughtered about thirty of them.
Once he had finished off the enemies in the forest, the fury in his chest gradually ebbed. Following the trail, he returned to the place he had left before.
Now he was reeking, soaked in the foul stench of fresh blood—yet the longsword in his hand was spotless, not a speck of dust upon it.
But when he came back to the spot, he saw only scattered, riderless horses that had bolted. The others were busy gathering the bodies.
As for Jon, he was using the cloak that had once draped over his shoulders to wrap Kennedy’s body.
Kal noticed Jon bend down and pick up a piece of skull that had been shattered by a stone and flung aside. Strands of Kennedy’s hair still clung to it, along with bits of brain.
Once Jon found a proper place to set it, he turned and pried up from the mud an eyeball, crushed almost beyond recognition by a horse’s hooves.
He held it in his hand, carefully straightened it out to roughly restore its shape, then placed it back together with the skull in Kennedy’s shroud.
Seeing this scene, Kal’s anger finally stilled, dissolving into a heavy sigh.
Clumsy as Jon’s movements were, Kal could not help but reflect: compared with the panic and fear he had shown during that first bloody skirmish in the village, Jon had already grown into a true warrior.
He had learned to face the death of his enemies, to accept the loss of comrades—and even to tend to the remains of his fallen brothers without collapsing into fragility.
Looking at Kennedy—his form now set in order, wrapped in the cloak that preserved a last shred of dignity—Kal gave a small nod.
Then he slid his longsword back into its scabbard and stepped out from the trees.
Back in the fighting against the Lannisters in the Riverlands, he had only brought those dozen or so men who had first followed him. The rest had been soldiers lent by Eddard Stark.
During all that time Kal had been especially cautious with them. Under his subtle protection, though some were occasionally injured, not a single one had died.
For Kossi and the dozen companions he had trained personally, Kal had placed great hopes upon them.
They were the foundation of his strength, the roots of all he meant to build thereafter.
Yet who would have thought that a journey to the Vale—something utterly trivial to him—would take one of them away in such an absurd fashion?
To say he was not angry, not furious, would be a lie. That was why he had butchered every single wildling here without leaving a soul alive.
