Game of Thrones: The Road to Pirate King

Chapter 298 Cruel Fate

The massive, wrought-iron wooden doors of the throne room were slowly pushed open, making a heavy scraping sound.

Euron Greyjoy leaned against the doorframe, the two longswords he gripped in reverse were still dripping warm blood. Behind him, dozens of Red Keep guards lay dead in the corridor, their blood slowly seeping over the fine carpet.

Euron looked up and saw the white-robed figure walking step by step toward the Iron Throne, and the body pierced by a sword on the throne steps. A smile, a mixture of bloodlust and amusement, curled at the corner of Euron's lips as he broke the deathly silence in the hall: "Hey, Jaime."

Euron's voice was exceptionally clear in the empty hall. "I advise you not to touch that chair—" He tilted his head, his head flashing as the sunlight swept over the grotesque throne, forged from countless twisted blades, and chuckled, "It looks like it's prickly enough to hurt your backside more than the wildest horse."

Jaime slowly turned his head, his armor making a slight scraping sound: "I killed Aerys." His voice was calm.

Euron nodded casually, his gaze sweeping over the gradually cooling corpse on the steps, and said indifferently, "I saw it."

Jaime ignored the warnings and turned around, with an almost martyr-like resolve, slowly ascending the Iron Throne forged from countless swords. The sharp edges stung him instantly, but he only frowned slightly.

"Sitting up—it's really uncomfortable." He looked down at his hand resting on the cold blade, as if talking to himself, or perhaps asking the empty hall, "But I don't understand why so many people would go to any lengths to sit here."

Euron chuckled, a sound particularly jarring in the blood-soaked air: "Because everyone desires different things. You might crave a clean reputation, so you'll never understand those who crave power itself." He took a few steps forward, his boots making a sticky sound as they pounded in the blood. "In your eyes, this is torture; in their eyes, this is the pinnacle of the world."

Jaime seemed not to hear Euron's words. Lost in his own world, his gaze vacant as he stared ahead, finally pouring out the words that had been weighing on his heart: "I stopped him—stopped him from burning King's Landing to ashes with wildfire. I saved hundreds of thousands of civilians in the city." His voice trembled, carrying an indescribable pain. "But I am also a traitor. I killed with my own hands the king I swore to protect with my life, right beneath this Iron Throne—for whatever reason—"

These words didn't seem like an explanation to Euron; they were more like a belated judgment on himself and on this silent world.

Euron looked at the young man on the throne, torn apart by oaths and sins, and took two steps forward. Blood dripped from the tip of his sword, striking out a clear sound in the silence.

"You tyrant," he asked, his voice unreadable, whether mocking or probing, "set aside all oaths and accusations, and ask only your own heart—do you believe what you did was right or wrong?"

James's gaze remained vacant, as if fixed on a place that didn't exist. After a long silence, he finally uttered four words: "I don't know."

Euron didn't let him off the hook, his questioning like a cold dagger, precisely piercing the core of the problem: "Then, a simpler question: Is the Mad King's already insane life more important, or the hundreds of thousands of living people in King's Landing?"

James's body trembled almost imperceptibly. He closed his eyes, as if trying to hide in the darkness to seek answers, but in the end, what came out was still that weary and confused sentence: "I don't know."

Watching this once proud knight crumble under the weight of a profound moral dilemma, Euron let out a rare, soft sigh. He understood that some knots in one's heart, like rusted locks, can only be untied by the person involved from within. The words of others, whether words of comfort or condemnation, are ultimately futile, like scratching an itch through a boot.

A terrified scream, like a sharp blade, pierced the deep silence of the Red Keep.

It was a woman's desperate scream, echoing from the depths of the castle.

Euron's brow furrowed sharply, his nonchalant expression instantly replaced by wariness. He glanced away from Jaime on the throne, his figure darting out like a cheetah, twin swords in hand, transforming into a blur as he rushed out of the throne room, following the sound's trajectory.

The empty throne room was now empty except for Jaime.

Jaime remained unresponsive to the scream and Euron's departure, sitting stiffly on the Iron Throne, forged from hundreds of swords, like a soulless statue. His right hand rested unconsciously on the sharp blade of a sword on the armrest; the cold steel cut through his skin, and blood slowly trickled down the dark blade, but he was completely unaware.

Pain seemed to have no effect on his senses. James stared blankly ahead, as if piercing through a stone wall and looking into an abyss filled with fire and betrayal that only he could see.

Sir Amory Lodge kicked open the exquisitely carved wooden door of the nursery, the loud noise sounding particularly violent in the cozy room.

Under the soft bed in the corner of the room, a small figure was huddled under the bed by his mother. It was Aegon, who was less than a year old. He was tightly hugging a faded cloth dragon doll, as if it were his last refuge.

"Dragon bastard! A wild dragon at that!" Amori growled, grinning savagely, and suddenly raised his arm to grab it.

"No! My child—!"

Witnessing all this, Queen's lady-in-waiting Ariana Hoan let out a heart-wrenching scream. She frantically tried to rush forward, but Ser Salmon Stokpi grabbed her by the throat from behind. Stokpi ignored her immense pain and struggle, instead using brute force to push her down onto a nearby rugged couch—the very spot where young Aegon usually napped.

"Let me go! You beast! My son—my son—" Ariana's cries were broken and intermittent due to suffocation.

Stokpi's heavy breaths sprayed onto the back of her neck as he roughly tore at her dress with one hand while using the other to undo his own belt.

Euron swept into the room like a gust of death, his gaze instantly locking onto the woman being bullied—Ariana Hoan. He remembered her face; she had once been radiant as the original "Queen of Love and Beauty" at the tournament in Harrenhal.

Without the slightest hesitation, Euron sidestepped and delivered a powerful kick, striking Salmen Stokpi squarely in the ribs. With a dull thud as bones snapped, Salmen was sent flying, crashing heavily against the wall.

Salmon struggled to his feet, and upon recognizing Euron, hurriedly cried out, "Wait! I'm Lannister—"

Before the word "special" could be uttered, the blade flashed like a cold moon.

A head rolled to the ground, its face still frozen in shock.

Amory Lodge, seeing this, drew his sword in horror, but before his sword was even halfway out of its sheath, Euron's backhand slash had already parried his weapon, and another slash followed, severing head after head, with blood gushing out like a waterfall.

The whole process was completed in the blink of an eye, clean and efficient, without the slightest hesitation.

Euron's gaze swept over Ariana's still-terrified face, and a chilling thought slithered into his mind like a venomous snake—he had indeed changed Elia Martell's fate; the Dornish princess should be living peacefully under the sun in Sunspear right now.

But he never expected that the scales of fate would be so cruelly rebalanced. One woman's misfortune was offset, but the price was another woman falling into the abyss.

This silent substitution was more chilling than naked slaughter. Euron's lips curled into a smile no one could decipher; it wasn't a laugh, but a mockery of the business of fate.