Game of Thrones Tales: The Ultimate Game:Book I-Back to the Throne Room

Game of Thrones Tales: Back to the Throne Room... Part XVIII

Game of Thrones Tales: Back to the Throne Room...

Summary: There's only one solution when Tyrion and Sansa have found the new King as mad as the Mad Targaryen and cynically evil, once on the throne, as Joffrey. So evil he's happily allowed the world to be invaded by unspeakably hideous creatures from some little planet out on the spiral rim of the Galaxy, to secure his reign of terror.

Part XVIII...

King's Landing...The Compound...

The United Kingdom of Westeros' Ministry of Defense, a rather pleasant former temple, desanctified due to its having been seized by Stannis' fanatical priestess and her followers for their services during the brief period of Stannis' Revolt...

Ser Leyd had entered, passing through the last of the ID checkpoints, again pleasantly discussing his sword and armor with the Dirter soldiers in place.

Interesting that "our" Ministry of Defense should guarded by Dirters with a handful of us as tokens, but...Ser Leyd sighed to himself...It was, hardly, ours...

And yet, within...There was in fact a true Ministry of our own, for the Defense and Liberation of the realm, the world. A task, young as he was...Vain and foolish he might seem to some, including his well-meaning but hopelessly out of date nominal superior, Ser Halys...He'd dedicated his life to, ever since the Dirters had revealed themselves after the fall of the Lannister/Baratheon dynasty. All the more so since the slaughter at Pentos...Brave Pentos...Shattered Pentos...And the massacres at Kings Landing during the all too brief rebellion.

When these smiling gods had stripped off their masks and all their mouthings of friendship, liberty, that mysterious word "democracy", and justice were exposed for what they were...Exposed by the bodies of tens of thousands of slaughtered women and children, lain out for all to see as opposed to the growing numbers being worked to death in what amounted to simple slavery.

A task and a man...A true and lion-hearted commander...Shrewd as a fox, wise as a serpent...A true Lannister, however much he might wish to deny that, but a Lannister melded onto to a Stark soul. In reality as well as in his own flight of fancy, Leyd thought, rather fondly. Two in one, really...And there were those who viewed Lady Sansa as the dominant of their two-headed/-hearted leader. But they didn't know Tyrion, except by rumor and oft ill-intended tales of the buffoonish dwarf who'd somehow...Like that Dirter emperor, in the Dirt history he'd read...Claud? Claudius...Bumbled into survival and figurehead leadership in the new government. Lady Sansa was in her own right a noble and worthy leader, but she would be the first to acknowledge Tyrion's greatness. With love...

A love that, surely to Tyrion Lannister's surprise, was steadily, if generally more platonically, growing amongst many of those whom he stealthily and steadily recruited, thoroughly and at times ruthlessly, if fairly, vetting each one.

Of course he'd roll with laughter at such praise, Leyd thought...But no man deserves it more. When all was lost and all ready to give in to despair, even accept slavery and likely extermination...When many were ready to die with Stannis, all hope gone...He'd pulled us together, forced us to our feet, kept us men and women, not dogs waiting to die. He'd guided the increasingly clearly unbalanced Aegon, so fine an example of the Targaryen dynasty, skillfully to achieve the best possible peace under the circumstances, leaving us some independence, if only in theory, so that we could maintain some self-respect and pass it to our children. He played the Dirters masterfully, forcing them to follow their own rules of the Game, learning with amazing speed the ins-and-outs of their jargon...Their laws and the creeds they so blasely claimed to hold dear...Freedom, democracy, justice, sentient rights...All that. No other man could have done it, practically alone, but for his dear Lady...He'd made these near gods draw back and gently nursed their puppet King, saved from a realization of his true status only by his Targaryen madness, into acting like a responsible and moderate ruler, even leading him to wish to be seen so, by his people.