A/N : This week Goal is 500 Power Stones, For an extra chapter.
Loren Lannister hated sieges.
He’d only been in one for two days and he already knew that.
Seven hundred men of the Westerlands were holed up in the home of the High Septon, trading arrows with Targaryen loyalists.
Tywin was in the midst of a cold rage, the “council” Loren had just left just a façade for Tywin’s rage.
No one suggested surrender—though they surely were all thinking it—for fear of their life.
So they stayed, cramped in and around a massive building for the Seven, on rationed food and wine.
Loren didn’t really care much about the food, though he loved it as much as any other man; it was the limited wine that was killing him.
So it had come to be that the Drunken Lion stumbled around the darkened corners and rooms of the Great Sept of Baelor, hands shaking, stomach in knots.
Other soldiers avoided or openly mocked him, but Loren payed them no mind.
He was in too much suffering to worry over slights.
More than one had openly asked Loren how someone like him could have survived to rally to the Sept while so many other, stronger men had died.
It was a fair question.
Loren didn’t know either.
One second he’d been helping himself to the wine stores on the Street of…was it Sugar?
Honey?
Something like that.
Another Lannister, one of his numerous cousins of Lannisport, had slit the baker’s throat and was in the process of raping the man’s daughter, but Loren had been much more invested in helping himself to the wealthy merchant’s generous stores of Arbor Gold.
Before either was certain what was happening, though, a big knight had burst in barking orders, loading Loren down with the wine he’d been drinking and forcing him to haul it up a hill filled with terrified peasants.
A hill.
Loren hadn’t climbed one of those on foot in years, and he certainly hadn’t enjoyed it then.
All he wanted was a drink.
Well, multiple drinks to be exact.
So many drinks that he could pass out and not wake up until this war was long gone and he was back in his branch of the family’s mansion back in Lannisport, surrounded by Arbor Gold that he could kill the hangover with.
Just how he worked his way into the High Septon’s chamber he’d never know.
The man himself, called the Tall One or Fat One or something else Loren didn’t give two whits about, had been at a minor sept elsewhere in the city when the Lions invaded his home and Tywin had commandeered his chambers.
Whether the Seven would frown on that Loren couldn’t say, but he hadn’t been familiar with them in a long time anyway.
Loren began to turn, knowing that as much as he didn’t want to be in the Sept at all he certainly didn’t want to be in a room Tywin Lannister had claimed on his own, when his foot caught on the simple chest the High Septon used to store—well, scriptures or robes or something , Loren didn’t really know—and he fell, big belly and all, to the smoothed stone floor.
Loren lay there, stomach roiling and body shaking, wallowing in his own misery, when he saw the odd level of the floor under the High Septon’s modest cot.
Part of Loren was opposed to snooping in the avatar of the Gods chambers.
Another part of Loren was feeling too miserable to care about what he might find.
A third part wanted to get out of that chamber as quickly as possible, before a wroth Tywin Lannister came back and decided to unleash his concealed fury on the poor alcoholic sap in his room.
And that fourth part?
Well, that part of Loren was so done with life that he shoved the cot aside.
It was a trapdoor, wooden and fit into the stone of the floor, with a film of dust on top of it.
Loren stared at it for a long time, not even sure he wanted to open the door.
What could the High Septon keep under his cot?
It turned out to be a tunnel.
Loren went down the ladder, breaking through a plethora of spider webs.
The tunnel was dark, so dark Loren couldn’t make heads or tails of anything.
Going back was a clear option and probably the smart thing, but this tunnel had to come out somewhere, and Loren was so desperate for a drink he’d have fought through the Seven Hells themselves for a full horn of ale.
Whatever this tunnel was, he doubted it could be that bad.
And he surely wasn’t going to get enough to drink in the Great Sept of Baelor.
The Drunken Lion hugged the wall, breaking through more spider webs and filth than he’d ever been through in his life, tripping and falling to the filthy wood planked floor more times than he could count.
Whoever had built it clearly hadn’t used it in a while, but Loren fought on, mainly because he knew he didn’t want to be on the other end.
I’m going somewhere there is wine, be it in this life or the next.
How long he spent in that dark tunnel Loren couldn’t say, but when he finally bumped into another ladder it was all he could do to not shout for joy.
The hatch above it required all of his not-so-impressive strength to shove open, as something had been pinned on top of it.
But when it finally did break free with a crash, the things that hit his senses were the last thing Loren had expected.
While the smells may have left for a little doubt, the sounds that were greeting his ears most certainly did not.
Loren Lannister was in a whorehouse.
It took his eyes a long while to adjust to the light after being in the dark for so long, but Loren finally managed to gather his surroundings as a store room.
Foods, from sacks of potatoes to sides of dried beef, were neatly ordered in the room alongside…
Bless the Seven, could it be?
Wine, the love of his life, had been what was keeping Loren in the darkness.
The Drunken Lion forgave it instantly, pulling a bottle from a case and uncorking it without so much as looking at the vintage, putting the wine to his lips and letting the alcohol pour down his parched throat.
Utter and complete bliss.
Loren barely noticed the door to the storeroom open, barely even heard the scream or saw the exposed flesh of the naked Summer Island girl, and almost missed the sharp point of a steel sword that the burly, shirtless man the girl brought back pressed against his stomach.
“Tell Waters I found a lion,” the gruff voice came, the man throwing his hand out when the girl remained cowering behind his broad back.
” Go, girl.” The whore ran to obey, Gruff pushing the point hard enough to make Loren understand that the alcohol, however blessed it made him feel, shouldn’t be his main focus right now.
While he’d been more than willing to die for just one more bottle mere minutes ago, the refreshing taste of the one he’d just downed gave him a new outlook on life.
Pointedly, it made him realize he wanted to keep his.
“You been hiding here this whole time, Lannister scum?” The fully bearded man said, his chest covered in so much hair he looked very much like a bear.
“Drinking up the wine to try and avoid what’s comin’ to ya?”
Loren held his hands up, though he didn’t relinquish his grip on the neck of the bottle.
“If I’d had been here that long, friend, I wouldn’t be able to be talking to you right now, much less standing up straight.”
Gruff snorted in slight amusement, though the press of steel didn’t leave his stomach.
“Fair point.
But if you ain’t been in there all this time, just where you been?”
Well, that was an interesting question.
The truth was that’d he’d been in a sept, surrounded by men most likely hostile to the one currently pressing a sword to his stomach.
Many of them were members of his family, the rest sworn to it, and all of them hadn’t liked him.
That being said, he was still a Lannister, and that meant he should be loyal to the other Lannister’s whether they liked him or not, didn’t it?
Well, that family had been planning to butcher Targaryen babes.
They’d raped many women in the city and would have more if it weren’t for the Targaryen Prince arriving when he did.
They also had an aversion to giving a drunk the alcohol he needed to function, having pushed Loren down to a shaking, vomiting husk of the insignificant man he’d been before.
But wouldn’t telling this gruff bear of a man where that tunnel led and what his lords could do with that knowledge make him a traitor?
Or did that make him a loyalist, since the Lannisters were technically rebels to the Iron Throne?
It all hurt too much to think of.
These people had an abundance of wine, and Gruff was looking at the still open trapdoor anyway, his clearly uneducated but not necessarily stupid mind putting the pieces together slowly.
Loren decided to save him the trouble.
“Let me have another bottle of wine,” the Drunken Lion said, “and I’ll tell you exactly where I’ve been.”
…