THE MOUNTAIN
They called Ser Gregor Clegane "The Mountain That Rides." They called him "The Enormity," "The Great Dog," and once, while drunk, Grand Maester Pycelle had even called him "The Beefcastle." His many names were spoken across the land in fearful hushes, behind cupped hands. So infamous were his deeds they had to cover his name with euphemisms and insults so they wouldn't have to accept the fact of his essential humanity. The fact that Ser Gregor was a real person. No one wanted to believe that a man who was so brutal and so big might have big feelings, too.
He sat this morning on an overturned barrel, in the courtyard of a ruined castle somewhere high in the mountains, amid rays of sunshine leaking through cloud cover to paint dapples on the rotting stone and rubble. His men were milling around in search of loot and/or any possible wenches to be had, though any discovered living this high up were bound to be scrawny, stringy, and socially awkward at best. Between two enormous mailed fingers Ser Gregor delicately pinched a dandelion. He stared at it though the narrow slit in his helm. Ser Gregor creaked as he turned his head slightly to the side, so like the black dogs of his House sigil, trying to interpret the flower.
Something unusual had happened to him yesterday. He'd gone to one of the seedier King's Landing inns and set about his usual weekend routine for letting off a little bit of steam: raping all the prostitutes and the proprietor, killing some or most of them, cannibalizing the corpses, and making jewelry out of the finger bones. Just regular Ser Gregor stuff, nothing too fancy or over-the-top. But then... something happened.
An hour before Gregor had departed for the brothel, King Joffrey had offered him a small, twisted mushroom. It had tasted like grimy shit-stuffed mold, but Joffrey had seemed very insistent he eat it. Ser Gregor had thought no further about the mushroom until, all at once, he found himself in the middle of a murderous rampage doing something truly terrible.
Ser Gregor was pondering his own actions.
It occurred to him that he really shouldn't be doing this. In fact, he should never do this, or anything like this, ever again. He was horrified at all the blood and flabby blue snakes of intestines strewn about the inn. Did I really cause all this? Ser Gregor wondered, lost in a daze of ecstasy and impending doom. Am I… a bad guy?
The rest of the night had dissolved into a confused kaleidoscope of color and sound and horrific premonitions of the Others creeping over the Wall to slaughter all mankind, but it was mostly the way that mushroom had made him realize he might be a bad guy. That was the real nightmare.
All plants were now suspect. The dandelion made him want to cry. He felt trapped in his armor, trapped in this terrible curse of bigness that had doomed him to a career of malevolence and destruction in the service of the Lannisters. He wanted nothing more than to hug his brother Sandor and to weep before the flower. Just one tear, just this once.
A bloody tear rolled down the side of Ser Gregor's face.
"I'm sorry," he belched mournfully. "Please forgive me."
"The hell?" said one of Gregor's men, a stout young idiot in a halfhelm and a dirty ringmail shirt. He finished pissing on a pile of stones and tucked his organ away. "What did you just say?"
"I said I'm sorry," Gregor thundered.
"Ser, you're not sorry. You're Gregor Clegane! Lord Tywin's mad dog! The greatest slaughterhouse the realm has ever seen! Sorry?! Why on earth would you be sorry about anything?"
"THAT'S NOT TRUE!" Gregor roared. He crushed the dandelion in his fist and decapitated the man who'd spoken to him with a karate chop. "I AM SORRY!"
Ser Gregor proved how sorry he was by killing all his men, who were just as bad as he had been. The first ten or twenty fell to his longsword but he eventually sank into the joie de combat and just tore the remaining fools to pieces with his hands. When he was finished he settled onto a boulder to have a chew on one of the legs he'd ripped off and work on a new finger bone bracelet. His new career as a good guy hung just over the horizon of his mind like a golden city, a promised land, an El Dorado in Westeros. He had to get there.
It seemed to Ser Gregor that he'd ought to join the Sorriness Brigades to bring both his apology and King Joffrey's to all the mortals of the realm, but he had no idea where they were. He decided to make his way north, apologizing to whomever he encountered and righting any past wrongs that he could. Sated and sorrowful, Ser Gregor burrowed into the pile of his men's corpses, curled himself into a ball, and slept the sleep of the just.