a short story by Sean T. Collins, 1/4/25

How it started. Can’t say I remember much of what happened after, but how it started? Yeah, I can tell you that. It was me, Kyle, Bryan, Eustace, Jenny, Eleanor, Tom of course, and it was cold. We were in the Green Dog, which was our regular then, and we were a couple drinks in, all of us. Bryan was smoking his pipe, it was new, he was showing it off like. Eustace had such a thing for Eleanor and all of us knew it but her. Kyle and me, we were talking about that year’s Games. Kenny, he owned the place, he had the fire going strong as he could, but we were still all bundled up. Jenny tied her hair back so she could lean in toward the candle on the table, even. It was cold. 

I think it was Jenny who noticed first because I saw her turn white as a sheet while the rest of us were still having a laugh. There was a lull in the noise and then we heard the sound of footfalls, and they were heavy like, and you could hear the scrape against the wood floor.Then I realize it had gotten so cold because the door had opened — like I said, we’d been drinking, things weren’t coming to me quickly — and I turn to look.

He was man height — peasant, not aristo, I mean, but still taller than all of us. He had on a scratched grey chest plate and dark leather armor, which you could see was ripped and stained black in a bunch of places. Ears like a bat and skin the color of, you know, an old bruise, that purple-yellow flesh tone. Big red eyes the size of a human’s mouth. Teeth the size of human fingers that stuck out even with his mouth shut. He had these big bony feet with hard yellow toenails that scraped against the ground when he walked, just these big grippers slapping the floor. When there’s an orc in your regular, you notice these things. Makes an impression like. 

Tom, he didn’t say much on a night out usually. He stands up and he says, and I mean loud, “What do you want?” 

So that kills whatever conversation was left in the place. 

The orc doesn’t even look in Tom’s direction, just sits down at the bar. Then he goes, and I’m not gonna do the voice so you’re gonna have to imagine it, he goes: “I’m here to test the hospitality of the halflings, renowned in story and song.” 

Everyone starts Tom looks real angry. Jenny’s scared as hell, you can see. Eustace is just staring into his drink. 

The orc sighs like. “I am unarmed and I wear no sigil,” he says, real tired like. “Would you turn a poor traveler away?”

Kenny behind the bar, his bald head is gleaming with sweat now, and it’s cold like I said. He looks over to Tom who I can see give him this little head-nod back. 

It took him like three tries but finally Kenny gets out “What’ll it be.” 

“Ale,” the orc says. “Keep it coming. Cut me off after a few if it makes you feel safer, I don’t care.” And Kenny pours him an ale just like that. The orc takes this big long sip and lets out this ahhhh sound only it’s more of a hiss when he does it. Like I said, I can’t do the voice.

I’m watching this so close that I don’t even notice Tom get up. Next thing I know he’s sitting down next to the orc at the bar. Now normally if he does this people know what’s coming, but this orc, he’s new, what does he know.

“Hey friend,” he goes. Tom’s tall, four feet, and he’s all muscle. He’s not scared of this guy. “Hey friend. You a veteran?”

“Aye,” says the orc and takes another drink. 

“I’m a veteran too,” Tom says. Kenny starts to say something and Tom just shoots him a look and he shuts up again. “What campaign, brother?” 

“Azh Khabad was my last one,” the orc says. He’s just staring into his drink, like Jenny.

“Yeah, that was a lot of people’s last one,” Tom goes. “Especially on your side.” The orc just grunts and drinks again. “Where’s your sword and sigil at, brother?”

“Lost ’em,” he says. “In the last campaign.”

“Gotcha,” Tom goes. Then he kind of tilts his head and looks right at the orc and says in this weird loud voice, “Threw them down in the retreat, this one did.”

The orc lets out another one of those hiss-sigh sounds again, puts down his beer. “Yes, I threw them down,” he says. “They would avail me no more.” Finally he turns and looks at Tom, those red eyes, you know. And he says “Why do you stare? Have you never seen a soldier weary from war?”

“I’ve seen plenty, brother.”

We’re all exchanging nervous looks now, and Eustace is whispering something in Eleanor’s ear. Eleanor reaches out and grabs Jenny’s wrist and Jenny jumps and her beer falls over but Tom and the orc don’t notice.

“You’ve killed people,” Tom says. Eleanor squeezes Jenny’s wrist tighter and tilts her head towards the door. I look around and see a lot of folks looking in that direction.

“Probably I have,” the orc says. He’s turned back to his beer already. “But what soldier hasn’t?”

Tom’s drinking an ale of his own now, I didn’t even see him order it or Kenny give it to him. It’s like it materialized in his hand. “Totally fair,” he says, “totally fair. I know I have.” 

He pauses and takes a drink. Eleanor is dragging Jenny toward the door, fast, that’s the last I saw of them that night.

Tom puts his mug down. “But you served an evil cause, brother,” he says, staring right at the orc.

“Probably I did,” the guy says. He takes his own drink, then he moves his head real slow to look back at Tom. “But what soldier hasn’t?”

So Tom, man, he does not like that. He slams the mug down and yells “Those who follow the One True King!” After that you don’t hear a sound in that room except people heading for the exit.

The orc doesn’t miss a beat. “My Lord said he was the One True King. And where I come from, when he speaks, you don’t argue.”

Tom’s just getting madder now, you can see the flush creeping into his face. His fists are all balled up like. “So you were forced into war, is that it?” he asks the guy. “You were forced to fight? You were forced to kill?” All that kind of shit. 

The orc says “No. No, I wanted war. I wanted to fight. I wanted to kill. And when the time came I enjoyed it. But that time is over now. I’m tired.” He starts looking around the room as he talks now. “And I will harm no one so long as I am within these walls, as long as no one tries to harm me first.”

Now Tom, he only gets madder now for some reason. “Oh I’ve tried to harm you already, brother,” he says. “Your armor — you’re a Wolfrunner, yeah?”

And he goes, “Yeah.”

“So you were there,” Tom says. “You were there on the Plain of Sellema when the Paladins of Frodost brought the Early Dawn.” Me and Kyle and Bryan and Eustace had heard this one before and we all kind of looked at each other like. 

The orc goes “I remember the Plain of Sellema, yes.”

Tom’s, well, he’s not the smiling type the way he used to be but you can hear it in his tone of voice now and then and you could hear it now. “So, the vampire knights burning in their thousands, the trolls turned to stone that we used to build a monument to our glorious dead. You remember that, brother?”

The orc’s getting quiet. “Yes.”

“You remember the Werewolf Legion? One second they were rampaging through our front lines and the next they’re just a bunch of naked men on a battlefield. You remember how that ended? Remember them falling to the Silver Axes of Nar-Gurru?”

He doesn’t wait for a response this time. “You know who was in the Paladins of Frodost? Can you guess, brother? I’ll bet you can guess. Go ahead, take your time.”

Another hiss-sigh. He turns and looks Tom right in the eyes again. “You?”

“That’s right!” Tom is crowing now like. Me and the boys are up on our feet, real quiet. “I was one of the halfling paladins who slaughtered your Dark Armies, brother. It wasn’t personal, it was just that all those vampires and werewolves and trolls needed to go.” He gets up in the orc’s face. “Sometimes people just need to go, would you agree, brother?”

“Like the people of Sellema?” he says back. “That was not our doing.”

Tom’s says, “They made their choice. You don’t get to volunteer to be one of the Black Sword’s slaves. That’s just not an option for people to take, unfortunately.” 

Bryan whispers to me “He’s drunk” and I’m realizing suddenly he’s right. 

The orc finishes his drink and goes “What’s done is done, I suppose.”

“Almost,” says Tom.

He must have gone for his gem at that point, it was hard to see from my angle, but the next thing I know his arm is on the floor. His whole arm! The orc just bit it right off at the shoulder. Tom, he passes out, and his face lands right in the palm of his own hand, I swear on the Great Tomb of Atar.

There’s blood everywhere now, and I mean everywhere. A candle on the wall sputters and goes out from the spray, that level of blood. Kenny drops behind the bar and that’s the last I see of him. Most everyone in the bar is making a run for it. But me and Eustace and Kyle and Bryan, well, we just kind of collectively decide we’ve gotta do something about this. We’re pissed about Tom and we’re all drunk. 

And it’s the weirdest thing. The orc, he looks at us coming, Tom’s blood is all drooling and dripping from his mouth. And he goes “Hello, friends. Is any among you a veteran?”

We’re embarrassed like. Only the Wielders could serve in the High King’s army, and only Tom was a Wielder. On the other hand look where it had gotten him. 

So when no one says anything, the orc just says “That’s good. Very good indeed.” 

What were we supposed to do? 

I go first and I bring my mug down hard on his bruise-colored head. The black blood stings on your skin, I didn’t anticipate that even though I knew it was the case, you learn this stuff. Kyle goes in swinging, Bryan too. Eustace I think is backing out but then I see he’s reaching behind the bar for the club Kenny was afraid to use. He grabs it and swings hard, right into the orc’s face, which just explodes. Like I didn’t know you could do that to a living thing’s face and have it still be alive afterwards.  

It took a long time. Like I said, I don’t really remember much.

Anyway they erected a statue to Tom at the Old Bridge, and the orc they fed to Kenny’s pigs, on account of it was his place that got busted up and this was his getback. But all Kenny did was serve the orc a drink so I don’t feel bad his pigs got sick and died after that. Serves him right like. 

The deputies cleared us of course, since orcs aren’t people and you can only murder people, something like that. Bryan has been fine since except for his marriage. I haven’t talked to Kyle in a bit. Eustace did something that Eleanor isn’t speaking to him anymore, don’t know what that’s about. Jenny’s fine, and me and her have been going together since harvest, and we have a new regular. Anyway it’s funny you asked about this, because I just had the craziest dream where the orc says — well, that’s not important. I don’t think about it that much anymore is the main thing. That war ended a long time ago now.

The Boiled Leather Audio Hour is back! For our 200th episode (!!!), Stefan and I tackle the big one: The Red Wedding. The longest-running A Song of Ice and Fire podcast on the internet, baby! Listen here or wherever you get your podcasts!

After a persistent technical issue kept us apart, Stefan and I are back! He and I speculate on the nature of dragonkeepers in the latest Boiled Leather podcast — subscribe and listen!

Spectacle is the language through which art communicates when the vocabulary of the everyday fails us. Fantastic fiction, an inherent trafficker in the unreal, says as much through spectacle as any art form this side of musical theater, in which excesses of emotion transcend dialogue and emerge through the eruption of song and dance. That Act Two showstopper speaks to us (or rather sings to us) because we recognize what it is to be so in love; so enraged, so bereft, so drunk on the possibilities or vicissitudes of life that mere spoken words could never capture it. Only an explosion of sound and movement will do.

So it is with genre. The dragon, the android, and the vampire embody fears and dreams either too delicate or too overpowering for realism to express. Ratcheting up the scale and stakes of ideas and imagery like these to the level of spectacle renders them capable of handling even more intense feelings and fantasies. A trip beyond the infinite, a monumental horror-image like a wicker man aflame, a last terrible battle between good and evil: Such spectacles describe our desire and capacity as people to do things so great or terrible—or so great and terrible—that they stagger the mind.

Before they assayed updating a country’s biggest pop-cultural icon and helming the first large-scale battle on what was rapidly becoming television’s biggest show (respectively), Hideaki Anno and Neil Marshall were past masters of this technique. Anno’s Neon Genesis Evangelion pitted giant robots against increasingly bizarre godlike beings in battles that directly reflected the titanic scale of its protagonists’ adolescent angst. Marshall’s The Descent plumbed the depths of its heroine’s grief in a literal bloodbath.

Importantly, they each recognized the role of beauty in such spectacularly grim visions. From Anno’s awe-inspiring animated angels to the firelit scarlet of Marshall’s subterranean charnel pit, the gorgeousness of it complimented and enhanced the terror rather than canceling it out. Beauty is the sea salt in the caramel of horrific spectacle.

Both filmmakers applied these lessons to the biggest assignments in their careers. In 2012, “Blackwater,” his directorial debut on David Benioff & D.B. Weiss’s blockbuster fantasy series Game of Thrones, Marshall depicted the horror of war with an explosion that beggars anything seen on television before, and most of what has come since. In 2014, Anno and co-director Shinji Haguchi’s satirical but harrowing update Shin Godzilla destroyed Tokyo with an alien dispassion that reignited all the majesty and menace felt by filmgoers when the king of the kaiju first emerged decades earlier. And despite their differences, the techniques used by each to convey the magnitude of these unnatural disasters and the people they befell are strikingly similar.

I wrote about Hideaki Anno’s Shin Godzilla, Neil Marshall’s “Blackwater” from Game of Thrones, and the horrible beauty of spectacular violence for Blood Knife.

Speaking of Lanfear, did you have any idea that she was going to get this kind of reaction from viewers?
Yes, we have been stanning Lanfear since the writers’ room; there’s one writer in particular who would do her best Lanfear all over the room. As soon as Natasha O’Keeffe got to Prague and started playing the character, everyone could tell that something really special was happening. On set, we use the drag-queen dial. I’ll be like, “You’re kind of like 80 percent drag queen in this scene right now, and we need you dialed down to a 70.” That’s the shorthand we use for Lanfear.

But Natasha can deliver all of the layers of Lanfear at once. “You’re in bed talking about your past relationships, but you were actually in love with him 3,000 years ago and he broke up with you, and that’s why you joined the Dark, so you’ve always hated him, but you still love him.” She could do all that and make it feel simple.

I interviewed The Wheel of Time showrunner Rafe Judkins about the show’s exceptional second season for Vulture.

It’s these human moments that make The Wheel of Time compelling television. Think also of the complex enmity between Egwene and Renna; Moiraine and Siuan, torn between love and their secret duty; Rand and Lanfear, each playing with the other’s emotions while knowing their own aren’t safe; Mat and his bone-deep conviction that he’s a no-good piece of shit; Nynaeve finally realizing, despite her ego, that Elayne’s really a better commander of their mission than she is; Ishamael’s relatable desire simply to close his eyes one day and never open them again, with the cycle of reincarnation ended forever. From Game of Thrones to Foundation, the best science-fantasy spectacles on television know that prophecies and sorceries only get you so far. Human desire is the real magic here.

I reviewed this week’s episode of The Wheel of Time for Vulture.

Obscenity in art is a powerful thing. Not cussing and fucking, though they’re pretty great too, and thankfully in some abundance during this season of The Wheel of Time. True obscenity — the profaning of the sacred, the desecration of the holy, the soiling of the pure — is a powerful thing when you want to depict what evil really looks like.

Think of the Avatar movies and how gross and vile it feels when the human soldiers destroy that big Hometree or slaughter that poor mother whale. They’re not just committing a crime against some blue aliens but against life itself. They’re making a mockery of what we hold dear. It feels more than wrong — it feels filthy, like we’re seeing something disgusting that should never have happened. An obscenity.

That’s how I felt watching the Seanchan commander, High Lady Suroth, command her new Ogier slave Loial to “sing.” This is no mere command performance for the courtiers; this is profound magic, an obviously sacred and meaningful sonic ritual through which the Ogier can persuade the earth’s plants to grow before our very eyes. To Suroth and her cronies, it’s a party trick, like bringing a toddler out to recite the alphabet or making your dog sit with a Milk-Bone on his nose. It’s one of the most beautiful uses of magic we’ve seen so far, and they laugh at it like it’s a mere amusement. To Loial, it’s clear he couldn’t be more humiliated if they’d forced him to whip his dick out. It’s grotesque, shameful, obscene.

I reviewed this week’s brutal episode of The Wheel of Time for Vulture.

Which is good, because TWoT is at the point now where, after two very good episodes, a merely decent episode like this one feels like a step in the wrong direction. In part, this is because of the decision of the filmmakers (the episode was written by Rohit Kumar and directed by Maja Vrvilo) to stage half the episode at night, when the show has demonstrated approximately zero capability of making nighttime scenes look anything other than dim and lifeless. Not even the big fight scene between the Children of Light and Perrin and Aviendha, which is too rapidly edited to really convey the physicality of the battle, can overcome this handicap. It’s really wild: I was watching today’s episode of Billions, which at various times turns Manhattan alleyways into portals of danger and mystery, and wondering, “How the hell can a financial drama about Wall Street make the night look brighter and more magical than a megabudget fantasy spectacle?”

I reviewed this week’s episode of The Wheel of Time for Vulture.

A bird’s eye view of the city of Tar Valon spread out in all its splendor around the great White Tower. A vampiric being of an ancient evil called back from beyond the grave while while dripping Hellraiser quantities of blood from her nude body. Moiraine Damodred futzing around in her childhood room, the ghost of a smile on her face as she remembers who she used to be. The ornate latticework covering every column within the tower of the Aes Sedai, a simple design flourish that communicates their beauty and skill on the one hand, their preoccupation with ritual and their decadent splendor on the other. The attempted murder of a demigoddess.

There are many things, large and small, that I could single out as the highlight of this episode of The Wheel of Time, the second very strong one in a row. You know what I’m going to go with, though? A’Lan Mandragoran, the handsome and tormented Warder, pissing on a tree trunk.

I reviewed The Wheel of Time‘s second terrific episode in a row for Vulture.

Whoa. Where did this show come from?

Far and away the best episode of The Wheel of Time yet, this third and final installment of season two’s initial batch of three bears out the wisdom of that release schedule. After watching this teeming hour-plus of television, bursting with big ideas, memorable dialogue, and committed, witty performances, it’s hard not to want to see where the Wheel turns next.

I reviewed the third episode in The Wheel of Time‘s three-part Season 2 premiere for Vulture.

There’s poetry there, right? Potentially, anyway. A neutralized wizard bids farewell to her warrior protector. A messiah can’t be with the one he loves, so he loves the one he’s with. A young student makes a new friend at the potential expense of the old. These are the kinds of relationship dynamics a show can really dig into — and should, if it knows what’s good for it.

I reviewed the second episode of The Wheel of Time Season 2 for Vulture.

There are times when the show that results from all this business feels less like a story, like a lived-in world, and more like a very large box purchased at the cost of a few hundred million dollars into which various story — and lived-in-world-shaped objects can be dropped. I’m a big partisan of the ornate White Tower as a set and location design; its pristine snow-colored latticework filigrees mark it as a place too powerful to be touched and sullied by the wars its residents constantly wage. The show has a kind of ostentatiously poly-couple sex positivity that distinguishes it from the pack, if nothing else. Pike and Henney are transcendently attractive. The Trollocs are perfect monsters under the bed. Beyond that, I’m not sure we’re getting anything here we can’t get more of, or better, elsewhere.

But sometimes that’s enough, you know? I tend to see The Wheel of Time through the eyes of my 12-year-old, a fantasy nerd to whom live-action epic fantasy is still so novel that virtually anything corresponding to that description is a home run. I’d be lying if I said there wasn’t still enough of a 12-year-old fantasy nerd left within me that I myself didn’t react that way to the show, at least part of the time, even if Jordan’s books weren’t part of my personal repertoire. Sometimes you just wanna see people in tunics fire waves of magic at people in monster suits, maybe with some swords thrown in the middle. The Wheel of Time gives you that, and if you like that sort of thing, it’s the sort of thing you’ll like.

The Wheel of Time is back and so am I, covering it for Vulture. It’s mid, but in a basically good way? Here’s my review of the Season 2 premiere.

Our series on A Song of Ice and Fire’s Greatest Hits continues with a new Boiled Leather Audio Hour podcast on the Hound’s origin speech from A Game of Thrones, available here or wherever you get your podcasts!

I’d read, and loved, a lot of fantasy novels before I made my way to Cook, and I applied many of the life lessons learned therein to my own life. (Not to mention my body: I have the White Tree of Gondor tattooed on my left arm and the war cry of the Golden Company on my right.) Cook’s revisionist tendencies are of course influential to and present in the work of George R.R Martin, while I see a lot of Robert E. Howard’s earthy affect in Cook in turn. (Superhuman martial and coital prowess notwithstanding, Conan is nothing if not the original just-some-guy fantasy protagonist.)

But until I encountered Croaker and Company, I had never imagined that my own experience working for wizards, or for any of my other shitty bosses, could be captured in fantasy fiction.

The Taken, with their outsized personalities, unforgettable idiosyncrasies, and total lack of scruples? They’re Upstairs: the people who run the show, oblivious to the lives of those beneath them when they aren’t busy trying to make those lives worse. They all work together when they have to and do a terrifyingly good job of it, too, as awful people in our own world so often do. But when that need passes, they’re at each other’s throats, as awful people in our own world so often are. And no matter what, we’re forced to go along with their lunacy to earn a living, if not stay alive.

For my Blood Knife debut I went long on how Glen Cook’s Chronicles of the Black Company reflect the universal human experience of working for horrible bosses. (If you’ve ever been curious about my time at Wizard, this one’s for you.)

In my most recent appearance on the Boiled Leather Audio Hour, my co-host Stefan Sasse and I continue our “Best of ASoIaF” series with a look at Bran’s dream from A Game of Thrones—available here or wherever you get your podcasts1

Oh man, I’ve been looking forward to this one for a long time. The Boiled Leather Audio Hour podcast’s “Best of A Song of Ice and Fire” series resumes as Stefan Sasse and I take a look at Septon Meribald’s monologue from A Feast for Crows, my favorite passage in the whole series. Listen here or wherever you get your podcasts!

The final iteration of my increasingly enormous House of the Dragon character guide is up at Vulture. This takes you all the way through the entire first season. Thank you for playing along!

We experienced technical difficulties, but now the latest episode of the Boiled Leather Audio Hour is up! Listen to Stefan Sasse and I discuss the season finale of House of the Dragon right here or wherever you get your podcasts!

Much of the finale’s storytelling is conveyed through largely silent close-ups of people’s faces, particularly Rhaenyra’s. What was the thought process behind that?
I think about the amount of craft and hard work that went into getting that set built and those costumes made and those wigs put on everybody’s heads, just to get to a space where I can have two people talking to each other at a table or by a fireplace. Those moments are a testament to everyone’s work.

I tell the actors to take their time and live in those moments of silence, to not feel they have to rush through those scenes. I call it “the mud” — those complex, human, partner-on-partner scenes. I cut my teeth in network television, and I think silence scares people; I appreciate a show where the silences are deliberate choices to make it more cinematic and emotional.

One of my favorite moments is when Rhaenyra comes in and she’s just been crowned queen. Emma and I talked about this: “Sit and wait until you feel you have something to ask or say. Think about your dad: What would he do? Look at all those faces looking back at you. Where do you start? What are your first words as queen? Just be there until the line wants to come out.”

I interviewed Greg Yaitanes, the director of House of the Dragon‘s excellent season finale, for Vulture.

That seems to be the case most specifically with Prince Daemon. Much of the fandom wants to see him, as you put it, wearing a white hat or a black hat, to the point that many of them criticized Sara Hess, a writer and executive producer on the show, for her less-than-glowing assessment of Daemon. Did you see this coming?

I’m having trouble understanding it. We established right out of the gate, in the pilot, that Daemon is a fascinating guy, but he’s not Ned Stark. So I didn’t see it coming.

To me, Daemon is the antihero of this story. He’s a character with a real darkness to him, who’s dangerous and charming in equal parts. I knew people would be fascinated by him and latch onto him, but I figured they’d do it in the way they did with Jaime Lannister or Bronn or the Red Viper. I did not think they would oddly apply this sort of super-fandom to him and try to justify every single thing he’s done as being intrinsically heroic. It simply isn’t. It’s not the case. Nor will it be in the future.

Nobody in the show writes in a vacuum. I’m the lead writer; I oversee everything that happens on the show; every choice comes through me. If it’s on the screen, it’s because I either wrote it or approved it being written. Sara Hess and I wrote 85 percent of Season 1 together. We did not set out to write villains and heroes in this. We set out to write interesting humans and complex characters who are hopefully compelling, but compelling doesn’t always mean heroic or unimpeachable.

I see Daemon as having heroic aspects to him, and I understand why people would. I mean, he’s incredibly charismatic, he’s handsome, he looks great in that wig, he rides a dragon, he has a cool sword. I totally get it. But if you’re looking for Han Solo, who’s always going to do the right thing in the end, you’re in the wrong franchise, folks.

I interviewed House of the Dragon co-creator and co-showrunner Ryan Condal for the New York Times.