The Witch-King of the Vale [GoT x LotR] Chapter 12 10

Vale of Arryn. The Eyrie. 281-283 AC.

Axel Arryn / The Witch-king of Angmar.

Death, screaming, agony, and then freedom. Freedom from bondage, from a wretched shadow of life. I made more mistakes than any man alive. Committed more atrocities than I could count. On my orders cities were put to the sword, children sent to dark rituals, people used like livestock. It is foul, horrible, and repugnant. And the funniest part: I do not care. I feel nothing about any of it. No remorse for what was done, no satisfaction either, only emptiness and indifference.

When I opened my eyes, I saw, for the first ti in millennia, sothing other than grey. These were my chambers. The chambers of the heir of the Vale. My eye welled with tears, and sowhere inside a soul simply rejoiced. When a being becos a wraith, its spirit passes into the Wraith-world of the world. There are no colors there, no wind, no light, no warmth. It is a bleak place capable of breaking any man. It broke , in ti. I understood now, sowhat belatedly, that my left eye could see nothing. But the joy of being alive blots out every other problem.

Once the euphoria settled, I turned inward to take stock of myself, and what I found was an oddly amusing combination of circumstances. The Valar declared that the soul is immortal. That is both true and a lie. Yes, a soul cannot be fully destroyed, but it can be damaged beyond all recognition, and that is precisely what had happened to mine. Years of resistance against Sauron had ground it down to almost nothing. A life without emotion, without purpose, without desire, without a past or a future. I can no longer recall who I was. But it does not matter. I am Axel Arryn now, son and heir to Lord Jon Arryn and Lady Elena Royce, and the blood of the Kings of the Andals and the First n runs in my veins.

A soul has no fixed shape. It all depends on the person and on what they imagine it to be. I think of the soul as a castle that we build throughout our lives from knowledge, feeling, and action. Of my old Nazgûl soul there remained a few crumbling stones. The new one was in the early stages of construction. In ordinary circumstances, if two souls were rged, they would tear each other apart through sheer contradiction. But if you lay a small, worn fragnt of the old over an unfinished new one, everything fits together cleanly, because there is nothing for them to contradict. It is like arithtic: 1 (love for a particular group of people) plus 0 (no capacity for love at all) equals 1 (love for that particular group of people), where 1 is Axel's emotions and 0 is the Nazgûl's. And so it goes for nearly everything tied to feeling, because as a Nazgûl I had none. The fragnts of the Nazgûl settle into the spaces where Axel simply had no experience yet: no preference in weapons, no style of swordsmanship, no instinct for battlefield tactics or the conduct of war. Now there is all of that.

And so I still cannot say with certainty who I am. A ring-slave wearing a child's emotions, or a child carrying a Nazgûl's mory? My mind and my soul both insist: I am Axel Arryn. Perhaps a sowhat different Axel, but Axel still. The one who loves knights' tales and running from nursemaids.

My thoughts were interrupted by Maester Bart stepping into my chambers. When he saw , shock crossed his face, followed quickly by joy and relief.

"Axel, thank the gods, you've woken! How do you feel, does anything hurt?"

"Hello, Bart. Why do you look so worried? Nothing bad has happened."

At that the maester looked away and began to chew at his lip. That particular habit only appeared when he did not want to do sothing but knew he had to. It made tense up slightly.

"Bart, where is Father?"

After my question he grew even more agitated, and I along with him. After half a minute he finally saw fit to answer:

"You see, Axel, you were ill and lay unconscious for nearly half a year. And in that ti a great deal has hap..."

Bart kept talking, but I only half heard him, stunned by the first words.

Half a year?! That is... rather disconcerting, and Bart was still talking. I slept for half a year... What? What was that? What war?!

"Stop. Bart, what war? What are you talking about?"

He let out a pointed sigh and began his account from the beginning. None of it was good. Half of Westeros had risen in rebellion against the Targaryens. The North, the Vale, the Stormlands, and the Riverlands were all part of it, four kingdoms in arms. The Westerlands and the Iron Islands had not yet entered the fighting. The rest: the Reach, Dorne, and the Crownlands, stood for the Crown.

Rhaegar Targaryen had abducted and violated Lyanna Stark, and when Brandon Stark ca to the King demanding answers, Brandon and his entire company were thrown into the dungeons. The King then summoned Brandon's father and the other fathers. He executed them all. He burned them all. That madman burned my grandfather Robar, my uncle Kyle, and my cousin Elbert. And then he demanded that my brother Rob and Ned be handed over for execution. Father did not forgive it, and raised his banners.

All the Vale, save for the Graftons, had declared for the Arryns. There were waverers, and those who offered support in words alone, but they sat quietly and did not make themselves a problem.

After a swift assault on Gulltown, Ned sailed North to call the banners, while Robert rode to the Stormlands and, once his army was assembled, crushed the Cafferen, Fells, and Grandisons in a single day. Exactly what one would have expected of him.

The unpleasant news was that Father had been made to take Lysa Tully as his wife. I could just about understand why the marriage had happened, but what I could not understand was why Father had agreed to take that particular woman as his bride. Where was his pride? Where was the pride of House Arryn? If that fish-woman tries to give orders, she will find herself accidentally stepping through the Moon Door.

The latest news had Robert marching his army to link up with his allies. Father and Hoster Tully were storming loyalist castles throughout the Riverlands. Ned would be joining them before long.

After checking my health, Bart presented with a plain fact: while Father was at war, I was Lord of the Eyrie and of all the Vale. Beginning tomorrow I would be initiated into the governance of the Vale. I was only eight years old, but I was the son of the Warden of the East, and I had to be capable of ruling. Maester Bart, the master-at-arms Ser Creighton Redfort, and other wise n of the Vale would help in this.