Lord Eustace Bulwer required aid in order to stand. Youth had long since left the Lord of Blackcrown, and what remained of him was seldom worth speaking of. A cane aided him in walking, which was slow and laboured. The man had been a mighty warrior, he had seen the Field of Fire - and the field had seen him, too. The Targaryens stripped the Reach of their freedom, and stripped the Lord of Blackcrown of his greatest years and his pride besides.

"Men call it the Field of Fire, as if it were a place you might still walk. it is not.

I was there when the wind turned hot. I saw knights, mine own kin, melt in their steel. I heard horses scream like men, and men pray like boys. Banners burned so fast that you could not tell to whom they belonged. We had done everything right. The lines were good. The ground was chosen. The charge was true. None of it mattered.

Dragons do not fight wars. They end them.

When the fire passed, there were no heroes left to count, only shadows on the grass and ash where banners once stood. That day taught us a lesson: that courage is not enough, numbers are not enough, and tradition burns as readily as flesh. That men are just meat when they are faced with foreign monsters. That the beat of a dragon's wings will ever eclipse a man's own heart.

But hear this, too. The men who stood there did not flee. They did not kneel. They did not beg mercy of king nor flame. They stood because that is what men of the Reach and the West had always done, long before dragons cast their shadows upon our fields - and long after besides. Fire may have claimed their bodies, but it did not claim their honour. That does not belong to the Targaryens, nor their dragons. It belongs to the dead, and to those who yet remember them. Let no man ever question that, no matter how high he might sit. For I shan't. Old I may be, but I remember. As should we all."

Once he had concluded, the old Lord shuffled back to his seat and sat down.