TYRION

The vice king trudged wearily through the Red Keep in the direction of the Great Hall. He had the sense of things beginning to spin perilously out of control.

Yesterday evening, he'd returned home to his apartments to find his young wife Sansa sitting on the edge of her bed, grinning feverishly, dressed in a burlap sack. "My lord!" she'd cried happily at the sight of him, and he knew at once what had happened. He'd had to spend the entire night holding her, comforting her, and going over and over and over the various talking points Cersei (or Wendi Shitass Bulltits or whatever she had named herself) had brainwashed into her. The girl was a new convert to the Cult of the Author, Cersei's latest idiotic invention.

"Here's the main one though, my lord," Sansa had told him dreamily. "It's the seasons thing. Do you understand?"

"The seasons? What about them?"

"They don't make sense," Sansa explained. "They last indeterminate lengths of time. That isn't how planetary climates work. Winter and summer should flip on a rigid yearly schedule based on the tilt of the earth's axis. Lady Leary can explain it much better than I can, I think. But she's right. The fact that our seasons operate outside the laws of physics implies strongly that our reality is a story written by someone who either didn't know how seasons work or didn't think that we would know."

"Oh, pish posh," he told her reassuringly, stroking her lovely hair. "You can't trust the things you think up while you're high. And that's a highdea if I've ever heard one. Why, just the other day, I got it into my head that all dogs can secretly speak Spanish. My sweet Seven, was that a hard one to get over. It still freaks me out to lay eyes on a mutt. Never able to be completely sure it won't get all 'la biblioteca es muy bonita' on my ass."

"Okay, so what about Lady Leary? You must admit it's odd she managed to survive being flayed."

"Oh, don't worry, my dear," Tyrion comforted. "Infection will get her soon. You can't live with no skin for more than a few days."

"But she's already lived for more than a week with no medical care, and she doesn't seem to be getting sick or slowing down at all."

"Well, that's because she's such an outrageous bitch, probably." But it did get Tyrion thinking. How was Cersei still alive? How could she still speak so clearly with no lips? Why wasn't she even in pain? Her will was strong as iron, but still...

And that was by no means the end of it. That morning, on his way to court, Tyrion had been accosted by a black mutt in an alleyway between shops. He froze in his tracks. He and the dog stared at one another. After a few seconds, the dog began to wag its tail.

"Don't you fucking dare," he warned.

The dog gave no reaction, so he walked past. He was nearly around the corner when he heard a soft voice say, "Claro que si." Tyrion whipped around, fists balled and ready to fight, but the dog was gone. He shook his head. God damn, he thought miserably. I imagined it. Probably I imagined the entire dog. But of course he couldn't be sure.

He arrived late. King Joffrey, loin-clothed as usual, was hearing a new report on the Sorriness Brigades.

"The Parachutes of Sorrow have been a fantastic boon, Your Grace," explained a going-on-elderly man in a tattered golden cloak. "The scent of the shit wafts from hill to hill, heralding our arrival at each new town."

"How many apologies have you managed?" King Joffrey asked kindly.

"Oh, a great many! At least twenty or thirty by now."

Joffrey frowned. "Impressive," he said, "but still fewer than I would have guessed. Tell you what. You can easily get thirty or forty more apologies this morning alone, simply by apologizing to everyone here at court."

"Brilliant!" Grand Maester Pycelle shouted drunkenly from the back of the room as Tyrion took his seat at the foot of the Iron Throne. The ex-gold cloak shrugged. He selected a septon in the front row and shuffled over to him. The septon looked horrified, clearly having only just realized that he was well within the performance's splash zone. The ex-gold cloak fell to one knee before the septon and said, "Good King Joffrey is very sorry about everything. Really, very sorry." The septon muttered a reply, and the ex-gold cloak went to the next in line.

Court was alternately boring and frightening for Tyrion. He kept glancing at Cersei and wondering how she could possibly be alive. He kept wondering why it had been summer for more than ten years. Then he started wondering how the length of a year was even measured. Three hundred sixty-five days? All fine and well until you started to wonder where that number came from.

Okay, then, Tyrion thought, clenching his jaw and looking to the ceiling. If it's all just a story, prove it somehow.

A random man near the back of the room stood up, shouted, "It's a story," and then scrambled out of the Great Hall. Tyrion sighed, dug in his pocket for some mushrooms, and jammed a wadded fistful into his mouth. He hoped to draw a slightly better trip from the deck than Cersei had gotten, but he wasn't opposed to going completely batshit insane, either. Maybe it would be kind of relaxing.