Chapter 10: Blood and Fire Beneath Snow
The dream clung to Cregan like wet wool.
He woke breathless, heart pounding, fingers curling around invisible chains. The boy's voice echoed still—clearer now, louder. Desperate. The sword, the pact, the burning blood that must not claim the North.
Outside, the courtyard shimmered with pale dawn light. A crow perched on the windowsill, staring.
Cregan rose. There was no waiting today. No idle pace between simulations or whispers behind the walls. Today, something had shifted. He felt it in the marrow of his bones.
[Simulation Ready]
Choose a Simulation:
Search the weirwood grove for physical traces tied to your visions.
Interrogate your dreams through guided meditation.
Follow the raven's path to a forgotten tower.
He picked the third.
[Simulation Running...]
The raven caws and takes flight. You follow, winding through quiet corridors and up frozen steps few tread anymore. The tower is half-collapsed, its roof eaten by wind and years, but something lingers here.
A circle of soot marks the center of the floor. Old, but not natural. You kneel. Ash sifts through your fingers.
Runes burned into wood. Old tongue. A ritual, incomplete.
You touch the center—and fall inward.
A voice fills your mind.
Not the boy. Someone older. Angrier.
"You wake the dead. You stir old debts. Do you know what price was paid for silence?"
You see:
A Stark lord kneeling before a shadowy figure beneath the weirwood, offering blood for peace.
Fire and ice clashing in the sky.
The chained boy, screaming as his blood seals something deep below.
Then darkness.
[Simulation Complete]
Knowledge Gained:
The Stark pact was forged not in alliance, but in fear.
A child of the bloodline was once sacrificed to seal away something older than even the First Men.
That seal weakens now.
Trait Gained: Ancestral Echo – In places tied to your blood, echoes of memory and sacrifice may appear more clearly.
Accept outcome? "Accept."
When Cregan opened his eyes, he was back in the ruined tower. The soot was still there. So was the circle.
But something had changed.
In the center of the soot, untouched by his hand, lay a single iron coin. No face. No mark. Cold as death.
He took it.
That evening, he returned to the hall. The Boltons were preparing to leave—but not the woman. She approached Cregan privately, beneath the flickering torchlight.
"You've seen it, haven't you?" she whispered. "The chained one. The sword."
He said nothing.
Her eyes narrowed, not with anger—but hunger.
"When the blood door opens," she said, "you will wish you had given it to me."
She turned and vanished into the stairwell.
And the coin in his pocket grew colder still.