Playing the Game Ch. 60 (Game of Thrones) (Patreon)

A/N: The Fate of the Seven is explored. Be sure to check out the Vibe Check proceeding this post as well as the closing Author's Note at the end of this chapter!

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His immediate impulse is to slaughter them both. He has, after all, faced this same situation once before. Back in Old Valyria, he’d faced down Balerion and Meraxes, the last remaining fragments of the Valyrian Pantheon. He’d found the two shades inhabiting the corpse of Tommen II Lannister, King of the Rock, and an utterly massive dragon respectively.

However, two things stay his hand for the moment. First, that situation and this one were clearly not as similar as they would appear at initial glance. Balerion and Meraxes were barely surviving and both inhabited bodies that were already long dead. The Seven Who Are Two are still divine and nowhere near the diminished shades he’d faced back in Old Valyria. More than that… he thinks their hosts might still be alive. And while he might not give two shits about Sandor Clegane, he’s willing to do quite a lot to save Arya Stark.

The other thing that stays his hand is the way that last encounter ended. Yes, he’d ‘killed’ Balerion for lack of a better word, absorbing the shade into himself and kickstarting the seed of divinity that had already rested within his soul. But he had not consumed Meraxes in the same way. He had let her live. And so, perhaps this situation could work out in a similar fashion. It had to.

It has not been often since ascending to his divinity that Jon has found himself somewhat at a loss. But in this moment, he is uncertain what to do, and his hesitation results in him pursing his lips together and shaking his head.

“… How? How did this come to pass?”

Still sat upon the Iron Throne, Sandor Clegane sneers, his eyes filled with darkness and his face twisted into a rictus of hatred.

“WHO ARE YOU TO QUESTION US?! WE ARE THE SEVEN! THE KINGS OF THE IRON THRONE HAVE SWORN TO US FOR CENTURIES! IF YOU WISH TO RULE OUR SEVEN KINGDOMS, YOU WILL DO SO AS WELL!”

The arrogance would be hilarious under different circumstances. Misplaced though it is, Jon supposes he can see where the Fractured God inhabiting Sandor Clegane is coming from. There has never been a King of the Seven Kingdoms that did not swear to the Seven. Even the Conqueror himself all those years ago had submitted to the Seven, hadn’t he? And yet…

“Who am I? I will tell you who I am. I am your reckoning.”

Jon draws upon his power then, glowing brightly. The first thing he does with his expressed divine might is make sure to shield Daenerys. At his back, his Queen’s devotion to him sings warmly, adding to his inner fire. Spreading outward from there, Jon draws upon the worship and adoration of those surrounding the city. And then even beyond that.

The pits of darkness that have replaced Sandor Clegane’s eyes widen in outrage.

“YOU DARE?!”

But Jon just laughs.

“If sitting upon the Iron Throne requires swearing myself to YOU… then I don’t want it.”

The Fractured God rears back as if struck, before clawing at the arms of his throne and sneering.

“DO NOT BE A FOOL! OF COURSE YOU WANT IT! ALL OF YOU PATHETIC MORTALS WANT POWER!”

This interaction is a telling one. And Jon can’t help but be a little… disappointed. The Seven Who Are One might have been a force to be reckoned with once upon a time. Centuries ago, when they maneuvered to bring about the Doom of Valyria and knock the old Valyrian Pantheon down from their pedestal, Jon imagines the Seven were something to be feared. And in the centuries since, he imagines they reached the height of their power too, what with most of the Seven Kingdoms worshipping them.

Even in Winterfell they’d had a small sept and a Septon. Give it a few more decades and Jon wouldn’t have been surprised to hear that the North had finally taken to wholeheartedly worshipping the Seven as well. Their reach was far and their slow but sure manipulation of the mortals who followed them was quite… insidious.

However, something had clearly gone wrong. Very, very wrong. Even before Jon had gotten to Westeros, the Seven had clearly fallen apart at the seams. He thought he might know how that had happened, but so long as the Fractured God was talking… his feminine counterpart was silent. And if Jon wanted answers, he knew he would only get them from the latter.

“And that is where you have erred. I am not mortal.”

“STOLEN POWER!”

“No. I have never BEEN mortal. I was born with this, the potential to become a God. I was created, my entire existence crafted centuries ago… by the very deities you sought to supplant half a world away. I said it before… I am your reckoning.”

With a snarl, Sandor Clegane finally jerks up out of his throne, his body moving just as unnaturally and inhumanly as Arya’s did. However, there’s something a bit more fluid and… martial to his motions, as he picks up his sword.

“WE HAD NO ISSUE DESTROYING THE GODS OF VALYRIA! WHAT MAKES YOU THINK WE CANNOT DESTROY YOU TOO, WHELP?!”

Jon smiles at that, before reaching within himself again. He is already shimmering with his power, his presence only growing stronger by the moment as he draws upon his followers all across the Seven Kingdoms. From the North to the Reach, from Dorne to the Westerlands… all follow him, all worship HIM. Plenty of them still hold the Seven in their heart as well though. The… creature before him feeds off of their misplaced worship.

But that faith is dying. Has been dying in fact for a long while now. The Seven have overstepped. The Faith Militant have not been good stewards, nor have they been very successful missionaries. Indeed, everywhere they have gone, they have either been stymied… or done more harm than good.

No wonder the Seven saw fit to inhabit mortal bodies. After a certain point, there was no one left in King’s Landing for them to see their will done through. No King. No Court. No High Septon. Not even a High Sparrow… his own people had ultimately torn him apart. King’s Landing had truly become a place of darkness under the Seven’s direct rule. A charnel pit full of nothing but pain and anguish.

But in taking Sandor Clegane and Arya Stark as their hosts, they’d trapped themselves. In Sandor Clegane, Jon could see the Father, Warrior, and Smith resided. But rather than strike at him with divine power, they raised a mortal weapon against him. It was almost sad how far they had fallen without even realizing it.

“… You seem so sure I will be your opponent. But seeing what you’ve done to yourself… seeing the shadow of your former glory that you’ve become… it only seems fitting to let her have a go at you instead.”

For the first time, the Fractured God inhabiting Sandor Clegane’s body shows confusion.

“WHO-?”

But Jon is already raising his hand. From it, Meraxes, Goddess of the Sky, springs forth. Back in Old Valyria, when he’d reshaped the shade of Meraxes into a woman, he had not completely destroyed her dragon form. Rather, he had split them apart. The shade’s consciousness had ended up in the human body he’d crafted for her, the one he’d then gone on to breed.

She had joined his entourage and been a part of his family ever since. However, he had never forgotten her massive draconic form. And… Meraxes was as much part of the seed of his divinity as Balerion had been. In the end, she would always be a part of him.

From his hand, a massive, hulking dragon arrives. Bigger even than Balerion, but most importantly… gloriously unkillable and immortal, for it was not a true dragon, but a part of his divinity instead. Sandor Clegane’s soulless black eyes widen as he raises his sword, Meraxes lunging forward at him in a snarl.

Their battle through the open-air throne room is a quick one. The Fractured God truly has diminished himself immensely by taking on mortal flesh. Jon isn’t sure what this fight would have been like if the Seven Who Are One remained as they were and stood united against him, but he does imagine it would have been quite a bit more difficult.

Instead, Meraxes soon pins Sandor in place, a flickering, almost ghostly claw punctured right through his chestplate and chest alike. As she holds him to the ground, the Fractured God squirms… but cannot escape as Jon approaches him, sword in hand. Rather than a palm upon Sandor Clegane’s face as he’d done with Tommen II all that time ago, Jon sinks the tip of his Valyrian Steel Blade right through the man’s open, screaming mouth, cutting him off into a choking gurgle.

He sups upon the divinity within the flesh puppet via that medium instead, taking the Father, Warrior, and Smith and stripping them down to their base components before pulling back.

Only then does he turn to face the young woman he’d always seen as his little sister. Technically, they were not siblings. But Arya didn’t know that. Had never gotten the chance to learn that in fact. To her, he was her big brother… and as she rises to her feet, his lips thin out.

“We… have… missed you Jon.”

Beside him, Meraxes growls but Jon shakes his head and dispels the glowing representation of his divinity with a thought. The unkillable dragon had been Meraxes enough to hate the Seven with all her heart, but in the end, she was just another part of him. And Jon… Jon did not hate the Seven. He just knew them to be his enemy.

“Does any of Arya Stark still exist in there?”

A weak smile spreads across her face at that.

“More… than existed of Sandor Clegane in the end. She is with us. As we are with her. There is no separation, Jon. Not anymore.”

A low sigh leaves Jon’s lips and he probes her with his senses to verify the truth of what she’s saying. To his mild surprise, she doesn’t fight him. The Fractured Goddess, unlike her counterpart, stands before him completely vulnerable and even submissive. It’s in that that he’s able to understand why things turned out as they did.

The Father, Warrior, and Smith had become… corrupted by their own aspects and the evil at the hearts of their followers. As things had turned into a horrifying shitshow here in the Seven Kingdoms, with everyone killing each other for power, the masculine aspects of the Seven had grown darker and darker.

At the same time, the Mother, the Maiden, and the Crone had remained pure. Or rather, mostly pure. There was still that glowing darkness in Arya’s eyes, however it was not nearly the pits of black that had overtaken Sandor Clegane.

Meanwhile, the seventh aspect, the Stranger… that was their downfall, in the end. The Stranger was not here. Or rather, it was both here and not here. The Stranger was an aspect of the Seven that always stood apart from the rest. For a mortal mind, this was easy enough to explain. The Stranger was neither feminine nor masculine. This allowed the Seven to be perfectly balanced. Three feminine and three masculine.

However, on the divine side of things… the Stranger was the lynchpin. The rest of the Seven hadn’t even realized it, but so much of their power and influence had come to rest upon the counterbalance that the Stranger provided. Remove the Stranger from the equation and you quickly developed an imbalance. Three and three were not quite so equal as they first appeared. Things… had taken a turn for the worse.

Jon couldn’t say where the Stranger had gone. After all, it still felt like it was here in this place, even though it was not. But the Stranger’s support… THAT had been undeniably withdrawn a while ago. And the Seven had crumbled without it.

“Now you see… Jon.”

He did. The Father, the Warrior, and the Smith were not just the masculine aspects of the Seven, they were the more martial aspects. Without the Stranger, they had effectively pushed the protests of their more feminine counterparts down and turned the Faith into something to be weaponized and turned against their enemies. All the while, the Mother, Maiden, and Crone could no longer calm their brothers down. They could no longer be the voice of reason, for their masculine counterparts were no longer listening.

The imbalance had gotten so bad that when it came time for the Seven to make the incredibly ill-advised decision to occupy mortal flesh, likely in response to his own existence as a deity in a mortal body… they’d ended up splitting into two bodies, rather than embodying the same one.

Not that embodying the same body would have helped them. Jon was a unique set of circumstances. Gods were not meant to inhabit the flesh of mortals. The only reason he was able to do so was because it was his OWN flesh, his own body that he’d grown up in. Even then, it wouldn’t last forever.

That all said, he had a choice to make. Arya Stark stands before him, vessel for the Fractured Goddess within her. He believed it when she said that she was as much Arya as she was the Maiden, the Mother, and the Crone.

But his purpose was clear. It had always been clear. He was Valyria’s Revenge. He was the reckoning, just as he’d named himself to the Fractured God.

Finishing off the Seven and absorbing their divinity would kill Arya, no matter how gentle he tried to be. She might still be alive, but she could no longer survive without their presence. They had effectively hollowed out parts of her, just to make themselves comfortable. To remove them now would leave her listless and barely existing, let alone living.

But was she living even now? She hadn’t chosen this. Neither she nor Sandor Clegane had. He’d put the Hound to his final rest… shouldn’t he do the same with his sister?

Jon’s lips thin out as he looks down at his sword, and then at Arya. Standing there, eyes filled with blackness, the Fractured Goddess waits patiently for his judgment. She makes no move to fight back or defend herself. She merely… waits.

At his back, Daenerys too waits. She does not counsel him one way or another in this matter. But her presence and her never-ending support feels good all the same. With her silent support, Jon knows he’s making the right decision.

Steeling himself, he moves to do what must be done.

-x-X-x-

A/N: Hey guys, if you're reading this I have to assume you're one of this story's diehard fans. I appreciate that, especially since interest in this fic is probably the lowest of all of my stories at this point.

That said, here we are at the end of the penultimate chapter and I wanted to give you all the chance to suggest things you want to see in the next chapter. It will be the Epilogue and thus I intend for it to be as long as it needs to be for the story to feel like it's reached a proper conclusion. 

So if there are any loose ends you want to see tied up, or any characters you specifically want to see one last time, consider this your opportunity to speak your piece.