At his first council as king, Viserys set aside ceremony for urgency and showed a steel the court had not expected. He ordered, without hesitation, that Daemon and Rhaenys mount their dragons and fly for the Wall at once to reinforce the Night's Watch. In the same breath he sent an urgent command to Winterfell: muster and march. If the crisis worsened, he would not balk at calling every banner in the Seven Kingdoms to the North.
Before Daemon departed, Viserys caught his brother by the arm and lowered his voice. "Rayder and his dragon are in the North as well. Be careful."
Daemon's nod was brief but sober. He understood both the weight of the mission and its danger. A moment later he was in the saddle; the dragon leapt like a loosed arrow and streaked toward the Wall. Rhaenys was not far behind, scarlet wings beating as she drove her mount northward through the high, cold air.
In Winterfell, Erlad received two ravens almost at once—one pleading for aid from the Night's Watch, the other carrying the King's seal and command. The words "Winter is Coming" echoed in his head as he read. He set preparations in motion immediately. For a heartbeat, another thought jabbed at him: Rayder had once been in this very hall, had taken away a map of the Land of Eternal Winter. Could the man and the new reports be connected? Erlad sifted through private records of the Others and, at length, shook his head. Coincidence, he told himself. Or nerves.
Far to the north, Rayder faced a problem unlike any he had seen.
Among the corpses that stirred and stood at his command, one figure did not shamble. She glided. Skin pale as moonlight, eyes like cut blue gems, and a cold that pressed on the lungs—everything about her beauty felt wrong, as if the world's rules bent around her. Rayder's instincts screamed: Do not trifle with this one.
They were right. One blink—a flicker—and the woman who had been a distant shape was suddenly an arm's throw away, the air around her biting as a drawn blade. The neat, guilty thought slid across Rayder's mind unbidden: this is what it feels like to be caught doing something you shouldn't.
His dragons felt it too. Through the bond, Im and Aegon spiked with panic. Only Ghidorah did not spook. The three-headed titan coiled around Rayder, necks weaving until he stood within a living bastion of gold-scaled muscle. Lightning purred along all three throats—fine golden arcs dancing—ready to lance outward as gravity rays at a thought.
The sight steadied him. If this was truly the Cold God made flesh, she would not find him undefended.
Aegon shook off his fright first. The great crimson head slid to Rayder's right, nostrils flaring, eyes locked on the woman with a predator's focus. Im followed—slower, cautious, head low to the snow, edging close while never looking away from the intruder. He might be softer than Aegon, but there was iron in him when it counted.
The woman spoke, her voice clear and melodic, like a perfect note struck on crystal. "Is my power useful?"
Rayder's gaze dropped to the mystic ice spear in his hand—glass-clear, cold burning from its core. He lifted his eyes instead to the figure before him. Tall. Black-robed. A face veiled in frost so fine it blurred her features, but the cold she shed was plain enough; it seeped into thought as much as bone.
He drew a breath, let the mischief show on his mouth, and tossed the spear aside as if discarding a twig. He clapped his hands lightly. "No idea what you're talking about."
The Cold God did not frown. She didn't need to. Her reply was level. "The Red God placed a portion of my death-authority within you. He means to use my hand to kill you."
Rayder's mind flashed to the ruby Melisandre had pressed upon him. Of course. The gift had glowed like salvation and burned like a brand. The Lord of Light liked his snares wrapped in silk.
He kept his voice even. "And what is it you want? Are you going to act?"
"If you die," she said, the faintest curl at one corner of her mouth, "I may reclaim that fragment of my authority. Do not fear. I will restore you and bind you as my divine servant."
"Like the Night King?" The image rose unbidden—ice-blue eyes and a will colder than the grave, a legion of wights moving as one thought.
"A pale lesser," she said, and a shard of approval glinted in her gaze at his quick understanding. "Serve me in the ending that must come, and you will stand above him."
Rayder had no interest in eternity if it came on a leash. He had less in stewarding anyone's apocalypse. He knew he was standing in the Red God's trap, but traps have hinges as well as teeth. Sometimes they could be worked from the inside.
"So there's no room to bargain about my continued breathing?" he asked, meeting her eyes.
She regarded him with a perplexity that might have been genuine. "One death buys you nearly eternal life. Why resist? All humans come to me. What difference—early, late?"
Rayder held her gaze while, behind his calm, the bonds to his dragons thrummed like plucked strings. Ghidorah's arcs brightened. Aegon's chest swelled, flame banked hot behind dark fangs. Im's tail edged forward in the snow, a slow black scythe.
He was not ready to die for a god's accounting trick. He was not ready to be owned by winter or light. He was not ready to surrender a will he had sharpened, at such cost, into something like a blade.
"Perhaps the difference," he said softly, "is that early and late matter to the living."
The Cold God tilted her head, as if tasting the idea. All around them, the snowfield held its breath. The wind dropped to a whisper. It felt, absurdly, like the pause between question and answer in a quiet room.
"Your defiance amuses me," she said at last. "It is also…inconvenient."
"Likewise," Rayder said, and smiled without warmth.
The smile did not reach his eyes. His mind had already split the moment into angles: the distance to the spear he had tossed; the way the frost shimmered around the Cold God's ankles; the exact instant Aegon should launch to cross her line of sight; the beat on which Ghidorah's center head should fire if she moved left and the outer heads if she moved right; the command to Im to cut low across the ice and rake with shadow and flame, not to strike, but to blind.
He felt his magic coil—his and not-his—the stolen slivers of death-authority and the hard-earned threads of fire, the raw stuff he had learned to bend and braid without chapel or chant. He did not know if it would matter. But he would not give any god the courtesy of going quietly.
High over the Wall, two dragons cut contrails across iron sky, their riders bent low, faces set. In Winterfell's yard, men buckled on mail with hands that shook from cold and haste. In King's Landing's painted chamber, a young king pressed ink to parchment and made logistics into a weapon. Far to the north, at a seven-cornered altar, something old stirred, sensing a missing piece and reaching, reaching.
On that nameless snowfield, a mortal who had learned too much and not enough stood in the throat of a choice.
"Last chance," the Cold God murmured. "Die and rise, and be mine."
Rayder's answer was simple. "No."
The word hung in the air like a struck bell.
Ghidorah's three throats brightened to blinding gold.
And the winter listened.
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