"What is that..."
On the hill, the allied soldiers stared at the Giant Shadow looming through the distant dust, their voices trembling with fear they could not hide.
No one could say what that thing was.
No one could comprehend what they were seeing.
It was impossibly huge, beyond everything they understood about the world.
They had heard of dragons, heard the old men tell legends about them, but compared with the thing before them, the dragons in those stories were like a child's scribbles beside a living beast.
How could this be a dragon?
It was clearly a god.
No, not a god. How could a god be so terrifying?
It was a demon, a demon that had crawled out of the Seven Hells.
Then someone screamed, "It's coming this way!"
That scream was a fuse, igniting panic across the entire hill.
The soldiers began to retreat, first a few, then a crowd, then all of them.
Spears were dropped, shields thrown aside. The soldiers who had stood in orderly ranks moments before now surged toward the rear like a flock of frightened sheep, desperate to escape this place of terror.
Tywin stood atop a hill, watching it all.
His gaze settled on the Giant Shadow, on the three heads looming through the dust, on the golden slit pupils looking down at the earth through the haze.
His fingers clenched involuntarily, his knuckles turning white.
His jaw tightened, and veins throbbed beneath the skin at his temples.
He had heard of this monster.
Reports of the Targaryen campaign had reached him one after another, every line filled with routs, annihilation, and surrender.
He had read those letters, examined those numbers, analyzed those battles, but he had never truly believed them.
He had thought the reports exaggerated, that those lords