Pilgrimage

Dante didn't mind the long walk. He felt it symbolic in a way. Monks would walk across the country to visit shrines on pilgrimage. Now Dante found himself walking across the country for his own purpose.

A warrior's pilgrimage.

His travels took him east until he found the Goldroad. Food wasn't a problem, as Dante could subsist from what he could forage. The countryside was a rumble of activity. Peasants from all over the Westerlands had been called upon as Lord Tywin Lannister rallied his banners. From what Dante had gathered, the Ironborn burned the Lannister fleet at Lannisport before they laid waste and raided the west coast.

Dante shook his head, 'War never changes.'

His trek along the Goldroad saw Dante pass through the mountains of the Westerlands. One day, while trekking mountains, a songbird caught Dante's attention, tweeting at him as if playing a trick.

Dante shrugged his shoulders and followed the songbird. It took Dante on a detour through the mountains so far that the Goldroad was nowhere in sight when night came. Opting to wait until morning, Dante found a mountain cave to retire for the night.

There, Dante sat in the cave and meditated. Closing his eyes, the next thing Dante knew was that the morning sun kissed his skin. But when he opened his eyes, Dante saw something unbelievable.

A lion, larger than any beast Dante had seen before, with fur as white as snow and a mane so fluffy that it would have made Dante laugh, were it not for the dangerous circumstances….

Dante heard tales of lions that used to roam the mountains. Still, most agreed that the wild population had reduced drastically since the days of Lord Tytos.

"Amazing," Dante said in awe as he watched the white lion majestically prowl out of the cave and stretch in the morning sun. He then took his shovel and, after waiting for the lion to leave, made his way out of the cave and back to the Goldroad.

'I'll have to return here someday,' thought Dante, taking his lion encounter as a positive sign from the Universe.

On and on did Dante walk. He saw peaks of distant mountaintops and valleys of beauty. Waterfalls and tall pines. He passed the garrison from Deep Den of House Lydden, who were already marching west to Casterly Rock and rallying with their countrymen.

Sleeping under the stars.

He walked and followed the Goldroad until the mountains began to subside, the altitude leaned downward, and the geography transitioned to fertile farmlands and villages along a great river. Dante learned from the locals that this body of water was known as the Blackwater Rush.

Dante soon started noticing supply convoys heading west along the Goldroad and laughed at the thought of all those wagons traversing the mountain roads.

In a way, the entire continent mobilizing for war was a blessing in disguise. Dante was still not in the headspace where he wanted to interact with people, and with the war, most kept to themselves. Sadly, as is with any war, it didn't take long for Dante to observe some scum riff-raff taking advantage of the times.

It happened one time when Dante was foraging. He heard screams in the distant bushes, followed by some man shouting abuse and barking sinister orders. Dante took his shovel - which had become his one and only companion during this travels - and investigated. There he saw a disgusting pig of a man, boils on his face, and skin that had not seen a bath in many moons. Crawling away from him was a girl, not even eleven years old.

The ugly man crouched down, prepared to rip the clothes from the girl and have his wicked way. But as soon as he lowered himself enough, a loud metal blow dinged the side of his head.

Lying on his back, consciousness fading, the last thing he saw was Dante towering over him, thrusting the tip of his shovel into his neck.

The girl's name was Sylvia, an auburn-haired lass with blue eyes. She thanked Dante a million times and insisted he come back home for supper. Dante enjoyed having a full belly and sleeping in a safe, sound, and warm environment for the first time in a while that night. For someone like Dante, these brief sojourns of comfort are enough to get him through thousands of winters.

There were other scumbags that Dante encountered along the way. None of them worth mentioning, only that by the time Dante reached the capital, all the loot he confiscated from murderers, thieves, and rapists had given him a modest pouch of gold. Dante profited from the madness, sure, but he wondered if all the evil he encountered was due to the recent Greyjoy conflict, or whether because that's how life outside of Passerby village normally was.

A bit of both, perhaps.

King's Landing; what a sight to behold.

Many told Dante that you could smell the shit of King's Landing from a mile away. The way everyone went on about it, you could have sworn it was the foulest stench known to man. To Dante, however, this smell was nothing. Dante had been on battlefields that smelt far worse. In fact, once upon a time, Dante had frequented so many battlefields that the stench of piss and shit and blood seemed to waft around him at all times, no matter how much he tried to wash and scrub his skin.

It took decades to rid that stench.

All in all, Dante estimated his journey to have been over 300 miles at minimum. His feet were now tough, his hands calloused from all the shovel usage, and his body was ignorant of the pains and aches that once plagued it.

<<(For my metric system readers out there, that's ~500km)>>

Furthermore, all the time spent on the road gave Dante what he needed to clear his head from the tragedy of his mother's passing.

He marched up to the King's Gate with a swagger. Olive-skinned from a life spent outdoors, his long brown hair tied in a top knot, a shovel resting on his shoulders, his green eyes dazzling with confidence.

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Next Chapter: Dante in King's Landing.

SonnyBritches: The encounter with the white lion was loosely inspired by the Tiger Cave in Krabi, Thailand. Feel free to google and check that story out, if you are about that lore/trivia life. Also, this story has no release schedule as of yet. I'm planning on writing the first 15,000 words and making a call from there.