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Hidden in the shadowed depths of the world are things far more telling than what lies in plain sight, for it is often in those unseen corners that the true answers to this world are kept.
When a power from beyond breaks through the barriers of this realm and stretches its grasp toward the place it deems most fitting, it may come to realize, perhaps too late, that the choice it has made was not entirely the right one.
"A new world," a voice murmured, low and cold, "is not quite as pleasant as I had hoped."
"But it is destined to be ours," another replied.
The sound of it was strange, as if the speaker wore a heavy, unyielding mask. Beneath it, laughter rolled like distant thunder, rumbling with a weight that made the air feel creepy, the kind of laughter that crawls into one's bones and leaves a lingering chill.
Yet for now, no living creature in this world could hear their exchange.
And so, there was no fear… at least, not yet.
"We searched through this world, high and low," the first voice continued, "and in the end, only That one… the creature curled up within the shell of ice, agreed to take us in."
"Yes… this world's power is greater than that of many others we have known."
"Our gates cannot be opened in the lands of those who reject us, and that troubles us deeply."
"It matters little," the second voice said, almost amused. "That guy has already promised to work with us."
"We shall help Him wipe out the things He despises. And when His power spreads farther and farther, we will be able to conquer more lands."
"Is this then… our new home?"
"Or merely another world doomed to be frozen beneath ice, snow, and darkness?"
"Who can say?"
The laughter drifted again, fading slowly until it was gone, scattering into some far-off corner of the world where no ear could hear it.
Somewhere, unseen eyes turned northward, toward the lands beyond the Wall. That place, desolate and cold beneath endless sky, had been chosen as their first target.
Their aim was simple in design yet heavy with intent: to kill the one who guarded the gate. The creature encased in its shell of ice could not use its own magic to bring down this guardian.
But that did not matter…
For their blades could!
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Jon Snow was still climbing.
It felt to him as though he were crawling through the throat of some vast tree nymph… if such a creature truly existed in this world. The tunnel around him seemed to close in, winding endlessly upward or downward, it was hard to tell which.
A strange scent clung to the air, faint at first but growing thicker and stronger with each breath, weaving around him like invisible threads. It was not entirely unpleasant, but it was unlike anything he had ever known, carrying with it a subtle weight that pressed into his mind.
At some point, though he could not say when, Ghost had also vanished. The great white direwolf that had followed him faithfully was simply gone, as if it had never been there at all.
Jon did not even seem to notice. He had entirely forgotten that it was Ghost who had first pulled him into this cavern. All that remained now was the slow, relentless motion of his body, dragging itself deeper and deeper toward some unknown end.
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"Lord Commander, I am old now…" came a voice, rough and unsteady, "and truly, I do not know why this boy, Jon Snow, will not wake."
"My apologies. It seems the knowledge I learned at the Citadel was still far from enough. There is nothing more I can do for him."
The voice was aged and brittle, rasping like a dry twig scraping over hardened bark. Harsh to the ear, perhaps, yet in the dim chamber of the Lord Commander's Tower, no one present found it unpleasant.
The speaker was an old man whose hair was as white and soft as the snow drifting beyond the window, while his skin was furrowed and rough like the bark of a weathered tree. He sat hunched within the embrace of a heavy robe, his small, thin frame sinking into the chair beneath him. In the cloudy depths of his eyes lay resignation and quiet sorrow, the gaze of one who had seen far too much.
He was Aemon Targaryen, Maester of Castle Black. Yet in all of Castle Black, there were only a handful who knew his true family name. To everyone else, he was simply and respectfully "Maester Aemon."
He had lived for one hundred and two years, and there were those who claimed he might well be the oldest living soul in all of Westeros.
When he had first drawn breath, the Targaryen dynasty had not yet begun its decline.
Now, that once-proud line of true dragons had already fallen, its throne shattered, leaving behind only a single descendant in distant Dorne, struggling to restore the honor of their forebears.
Aemon had seen it all. Across the span of his life, he had witnessed every rise and fall this continent had to offer, and his wisdom had been the lifeline of the Night's Watch in its most fragile years. It was through his quiet guidance that the battered, weathered brotherhood had managed to cling to life here on this barren, frozen land where not even the hardiest grass could grow.
But now, when his own days were drawing to a close and the call of the gods' embrace was near, one of the young men he had cared for most had, after an ordinary, uneventful night, slipped into a strange and unshakable slumber.
There were no wounds upon him. His skin was neither burning with fever nor touched by any visible illness. And yet Jon Snow would not wake.
Some, less gentle by nature, had gone so far as to slap him—twice, hard across the face—splitting the skin at the corner of his mouth and drawing blood. But even that had drawn no reaction from him at all.
No one thought he was pretending. Jon Snow, as the Lord Commander Mormont's chief steward, had no reason to feign sleep, and certainly not in a way that could bring such trouble upon himself.
"What on earth is going on? Falling into some strange sickness in weather like this… nothing good can come of it," muttered Dolorous Edd, his face clouded with worry. As Jon's good friend, he had stayed in the Lord Commander's Tower to watch over him.
And Lord Mormont had to admit, Edd was absolutely right.
This was not the warm and gentle South, where a man could lie in a soft bed, with food and drink at hand, and sleep away his days until death took him quietly.
This was the bloody Wall… the end of the world, where the cold cut to the bone and mercy had no place.
If a man lay still for too long here, unmoving in this kind of cold, it would be a miracle if his body did not give way.
Mormont had never seen anything quite like this before.
In truth, it was partly the fault of Catelyn Tully, who had kept the news of Bran Stark's mysterious illness far too well hidden.
If Jeor Mormont had heard of such a thing then, he might have understood at once: the boy lying before him, Jon Snow, was in the very same state as his brother.
And they were both of the Stark blood!
Which made the matter all the more curious.
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Jon Snow was still climbing.
Here, in this strange and dreamlike space, time seemed to have lost all meaning. There was no sense of hours or days passing, no steady rhythm to mark the journey… only the endless motion of hands and knees against the smooth stone surface beneath him.
He felt nothing unusual in himself, no hint of alarm. The constant vigilance that a brother of the Night's Watch should have carried like a second skin had, without his noticing, quietly slipped away.
Somewhere deep inside, beyond conscious thought, he could sense something… or perhaps someone, waiting at the end of this colossal wooden passage, calling to him in a voice that had no sound yet carried an unshakable pull.
He had no proof, no evidence he could put into words, but he trusted the feeling completely.
After all, beyond the Wall, when he had stood against wildlings, faced the icy horror of the Others, and felt the unseen menace that hid within the blizzard's white fury, it had been his instincts alone that had led him to survival.
The coldness was gone now, utterly gone, replaced by a growing warmth that wrapped around him as he moved forward.
Soft lights glimmered along his path—each one shaped from the glowing fruit of some unknown plant, drifting past his ears as he crawled onward.
Jon Snow had the strange sensation that he was moving through the fabric of time itself, and that each luminous fruit was more than it seemed. They felt like tiny vessels, each holding a slice of time, sealed away in a fragile skin.
And within those slices, he sensed, were pieces of history—moments worth remembering, memories that should never be lost.
He truly believed that.
Bit by bit, he kept moving forward. If this had been the real world, the lower half of his cloak would by now be frayed to threads from the constant scraping of knees and shins against the ground.
But here, each scuff, each mark, each sign of wear simply faded away in an instant, restored by a force he could neither see nor name.
It was as though the time that belonged to Jon Snow ran on a separate course from the time that flowed in this place; two parallel rivers that would never meet!
By all reason, such a thing should have been impossible. And yet here he was, drawn onward by a power that dulled every thought of turning back, a force that seemed to exist for one purpose alone: to bring him here, to make him witness certain things.
And to charge him with carrying certain messages… message too heavy for most… to someone who could bear them.
Westeros was vast, and the realm of the living was vaster still. Somewhere, there would always be those who, when the darkness closed in, would have to stand at the very front.
At last, the winding tunnel of living wood, which had twisted and turned as though it might go on forever, revealed a sudden change ahead.
Jon saw it… a sharp turn, nearly straight down, like the mouth of a great drop yawning open before him.
And all at once, the strange, elusive sweetness that had been drifting through the air became overpowering, so thick and vivid he could almost taste it on his tongue. That faint and distant calling, which had followed him like a whisper half-heard, now pressed against him with a weight and strength that could not be ignored.
Jon Snow understood then. His destination was just beyond that steep turn ahead.
As for what waited beneath, what it was that had been calling to him… he did not yet know.
But fear had long since slipped from him entirely. Since he had come this far, since his own choice had brought him here, there was no point in regret.
Planting both hands and both legs firmly, Jon Snow shifted his weight and let himself drop into the downward shaft, the tree's hollowed heart pulling him in.
It felt almost like being a boy again, sliding down the steep slopes of Winterfell's hills, except here his body rushed swiftly through a smooth, enclosed tunnel of living wood, the walls whispering past him.
This downward passage was still long, and the fruit that clung to the walls had changed—they no longer glowed with pure white light, but had begun to take on a gentle green hue.
They streaked past his eyes, blurring together into a whirl of shifting colors, like fragments of dreams flaring and fading in an instant.
He could not have said when it began, but at some point the world around him grew hazy.
No, that wasn't quite right… it wasn't that a mist had formed around him, but rather that he had plunged headlong into a thick, rolling fog.
Yet even as the smoke-like veil closed over his sight, stripping away almost all vision, he felt no panic.
Everything he had seen so far had already gone far beyond the limits of what he once thought possible. And because of that, he knew now that fear was a useless burden, one that had no place here.
With every breath he drew, his lungs filled with air tinged with the scent of grass and leaves, as though the mist itself carried the breath of some vast forest.
Time blurred. Seconds and minutes seemed to lose their meaning, and Jon Snow could no longer guess how long he had been falling.
Then, without warning, the space beneath him opened wide, and his sight cleared in a rush—he tumbled out of the thick fog and landed hard upon a deep, rustling bed of dry leaves, their crisp layers cushioning his fall.
Almost by reflex, his hand went to his waist, reaching for the short stick he had brought with him.
Good. It was still there this time.
Some small knot of tension eased in him.
Lifting his head, Jon Snow looked around, taking in the deepest place he had reached so far on this strange journey.
He still didn't realize that all of this existed only inside his dream.
And here… this was the very heart of that strange, impossible dream-world, the place where its path ended.
Something here wanted him to see this moment.
And more than that, it wanted him to carry what he saw beyond this place, to bring the message out into the waking world.
Because for it—for whoever or whatever it was—time had already run out.
There was no time left at all…
Step by step, Jon Snow moved forward, his boots pressing down on a carpet of leaves that seemed to have only just withered, their dry surfaces giving off a sharp, brittle crunch beneath his weight.
His eyes fixed at once on his goal—the moment he lifted his head, he saw it standing in the very center of the vast space, a vision so strange it seemed like something out of a fevered dream: a thick, twisted black vine, towering upward like a column, its sheer size dominating the chamber.
The vine itself was black… so black it chilled the heart to look at it. Its midsection bulged outward, as though something hidden, something solid, was trapped and sealed within.
The surface was shrouded in leaves as black as the vine itself, clinging closely to its form.
It looked like the body of some swollen, ancient dragon, its iron scales opening and closing with the slow rhythm of breath.
Jon Snow knew, without a doubt, that this was the place his journey had been leading him toward.
That faint fragrance that had been clearing his mind and loosening the tension in his body… that strange whisper that had first been no more than a thread of sound, but now pressed against him thick and heavy like water…
Both of them had their source here—in this massive plant that seemed to bind together the upper and lower reaches of the entire space.
"I'll see for myself what you are," he murmured under his breath, his voice carrying a mix of suspicion and resolve. "Beyond the Wall… and still there are things like this."
He knew where he must be; deep beneath the Haunted Forest.
A place like this… there was no question he had to explore it fully. That was the duty of a ranger of the Night's Watch.
Holding that thought firm in his mind, Jon Snow began to walk, each step taking him closer to the towering vine.
He approached it cautiously, stopping at its base. The danger he had half-expected—the sudden attack, the trap waiting to be sprung—did not come.
Slowly, he pulled off his black gloves, the cold air brushing over his bare fingers. Then he reached out and laid his hand upon the tree's surface.
It was shockingly cold to the touch, like the surface of stone kept in shadow for centuries.
And then, the instant his skin made contact, a voice—so faint it was barely there, yet so clear it rang in his mind—suddenly rose from every corner of the space around him.
"Tell Clay Manderly…"
"Save me…"
"They are coming… and in the cold wind, there is something else… a second kind."
Jon Snow's eyes narrowed sharply, his breath catching.
He hadn't misheard. That name… he had heard it clearly.
Pressing his ear hard against the vine's trunk, he strained to catch the direction of the voice, to pin down exactly where it came from.
He began to shift, inch by inch, moving along the plant's massive surface.
And then… he saw it.
In that instant, every drop of blood in his body seemed to turn to ice.
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[Chapter End's]
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