The Silent Keep was a masterpiece of engineering, a fortress of impossible strength. It was also a cold, echoing tomb of a place, its vast halls and chambers empty and silent save for the whistle of the wind through the battlements. The shell was complete, but it had no soul.
"A man could go mad in a place like this," Torren remarked one evening, his voice bouncing off the bare, shimmering walls of the cavernous Great Hall. We were sitting on the stone floor, our backs against a pillar, eating materialised rations that tasted of nothing. "It needs... things. Wood. Fire. Life."
He was right. I had the power to build a mountain, but Torren had the memory of what made a house a home. He became my guide, my connection to the warmth we had left behind.
"The feasting tables in Winterfell," he began, his eyes distant, "they weren't just flat planks. They were oak, thick enough to stop a blade, and worn smooth by centuries of use. You could see the history in them."
Closing my eyes, I focused on his description. I reached into the dimension, not for a pre-made design, but for the raw elements—the concept of ancient oak, the feel of worn grain, and the sturdiness of a Northern lord's table. Wood groaned into existence before us, shaping itself into a magnificent table sixty feet long, its surface not perfectly smooth but filled with the imagined character of age. We spent weeks like that. I had the power, but Torren was the artist. He would describe the snarling wolves carved into the arms of his father's favourite chair, the patterns of the tapestries depicting the deeds of the First Men, and the feel of a real wolf-pelt rug beneath bare feet. I would listen, focus, and pull his memories into reality.
Slowly, hall by hall, room by room, the keep began to breathe. We built a library with shelves of dark, unburnable ironwood that rose three stories high, and I began the slow process of filling them, transcribing the digital knowledge from the Odyssey into physical, leather-bound tomes. Histories of a world called Earth sat beside the collected lore of the First Men.
In the central courtyard, protected from the sea wind by the high walls, Torren claimed a patch of land for a garden. I enriched the soil with nutrients from the dimension, making it unnaturally fertile. He planted seeds we'd gathered from the island alongside stranger ones from my memory—hardy Northern cabbages next to rows of potatoes, tomatoes, and corn, plants this world had never seen. He tended to it with a fierce dedication, his hands in the soil a connection to the life we were fostering.
Our greatest achievement was the Great Hall. After weeks of work, it was a near-perfect echo of the one in Winterfell. A massive hearth, which burnt with a clean, contained heat that required no fuel, dominated one wall. And on the wall behind the dais, I hung our masterpiece: a massive banner, woven from threads of shimmering grey and pure white. On it was the snarling head of a direwolf. The sigil of House Stark. Our sigil.
A few more years went by. The sharp edges of being a boy smoothed out into the harder lines of being a young man. As I got stronger, creating things became as easy as breathing. Torren became one with the island, knowing all of its paths and secrets. We got into a nice routine of training, exploring, and building. The curse remained a quiet tether, but I could feel it changing. The leash was lengthening, the magic of the Children fraying with the passage of centuries. An opportunity to leave, for a short time, was getting closer.
One night, we sat at our great table, a roasted boar from Torren's hunt steaming between us. The Hall was warm and bright, with glowing sconces and the direwolf banner watching over us. The loneliness was still there, like a ghost at our feast, but it wasn't as strong as it used to be. The crackling hearth, the strong walls, and the quiet friendship we built while we were both exiled kept it at bay.
"It feels like a proper keep now," Torren said, carving a thick slice of meat onto my plate.
I looked around at the hall we had built, the banners we had raised, and the home we had forged from memory and magic. "It is a proper keep," I replied. "It's Aegis. And it is home."