1. The Flamebond Echo**
Three nights after the ritual, Jon began to change.
Not visibly — not at first. But his dreams became fractal. Memories that weren't his played in charcoal and flame: a forgotten king carving spells into the hull of time… a dragon swallowing stars… a woman in black whispering, *"Burn it all to remember who you are."*
He awoke sweating and burning from the inside out.
Magic flared in his lungs like it was trying to escape. His skin pulsed with ancient glyphs — not Valyrian, but something older.
Wanda was already beside him. Her chaos magic lit like a heartbeat when she touched him.
"Your bond is synchronizing," she whispered, climbing atop him to calm the trembling in his bones. "You're not just connected to us — *you're starting to feel* through us. Through our fears. Our needs. Our desire."
She kissed him slowly, full of spell-etched heat.
As she arched beneath him, murmuring spells between sighs, Jon wondered:
When do love and legacy stop being gifts and become chains?
### **2. Sersi's Arrival — A Reminder of Eternity**
Later that morning, a new energy breached the helicarrier's detection grid.
She didn't arrive by ship or portal, but through song — harmonics dancing through the molecules of the air, rearranging carbon into beauty and light.
When she stepped onto the deck, the women reacted before Jon even turned.
Midnight hair. Gold skin. Eternity in her eyes. Draped in emerald threads and cosmic grace.
**Sersi of the Eternals.**
Wanda lowered her hand toward a spell ring.
Mystique raised a subtle eyebrow.
Daenerys narrowed her gaze.
Sif reached for her sword before grunting: "She's not hostile. Just... *old*."
Sersi smiled with the serenity of galaxies. "Peace. I didn't come for seduction — yet."
Jon stepped forward. "You know what I carry."
"I sensed it before time learned your name," she said, touching his bare wrist. "The First Flame isn't a weapon. It's a *guardian*. And you —" she smiled softly, eyes watering, "— you're not the first Snow it tried to choose."
Jon flinched.
"What?"
Sersi tilted her head. "You had a sister, didn't you? Fierce. Detached from the world even as she protected it."
"...Arya."
Sersi nodded.
"She walked between shadows. She carried death in her step. What you hold — the Flame — once marked *her*, in another world. Briefly. But she refused it."
Jon went cold.
"Where is she?"
"She still stands," Sersi whispered. "Not in your world. But one close… and crumbling."
### **3. Bond Fractured**
After Sersi departed the briefing chamber, the silence between the women thickened.
Wanda glared at Daenerys. "You didn't tell me the Flame is multiplexing inside him."
"You never asked," Dany fired back.
"It's syncing our thoughts."
"And our emotions," Sif added. "You think I *enjoy* knowing you dreamed of bleeding him dry in a bath of stars last night?"
Mystique looked between them, casually sipping wine. "Jealousy ruins the flavor of prophecy, darlings."
Daenerys stepped forward, her voice sharp. "If you're here just to mock loyalty, Raven, you can go."
"I'm not mocking," Raven purred. "I'm observing. All of you want different things from him. Wanda wants salvation. Sif wants battle. Daenerys wants an empire reborn. I just want him *alive*."
Jon entered then — slowly.
Everyone went quiet.
He stripped off the upper half of his tunic again, runes crackling beneath translucent skin.
"You're all part of me now. I can't outrun that. But if you turn on each other, we lose more than power. We lose each other."
He walked past each queen — pressing his palm to their chest, their shoulder, their cheek.
"Don't make me choose," he said finally. "I already lost too many I loved."
Silence followed.
Then Sif stepped forward and kissed him cleanly.
Then Wanda pressed her forehead to his.
Dany curled a hand around his neck.
Mystique smiled — and left first. But not without giving him a lingering gaze loaded with promise.
### **4. The Whispered Bargain**
That night, something cracked.
A whisper rode through the lower decks of the carrier like fire slipping across oil.
Jon couldn't sleep.
He wandered out alone into the meditation hangar, where Sersi's crystals still glowed.
There, the whisper became a presence.
A voice — not a scream like Dormammu — but a breath, like a lover behind him in bed.
"You want your family back."
Jon turned. Alone.
"No more choosing. No more blood."
A flickering figure stepped from the shadows of his mind. **Arya.** Thinner. Older. Wearing a blade made of starlight and bone. Her eyes were not her own — but part of them still remembered.
"Come find me," she whispered. "The worlds are breaking. I can't hold the shadows out forever."
His scar pulsed.
The Flame inside him surged, panicking — not because it didn't believe her — but because it *did*.
### **5. Love in the Eye of the Rift**
Jon didn't sleep.
But he **touched** each of them before the dawn.
Wanda, curled in blood-colored silk, let him kiss her palms and hold her bruised heart. "When you leave, take me."
Daenerys, bronze and gold in her sleep, pulled him into her heat with quiet tears in her eyes. "If you die again, I'll burn this world."
Sif sat at the edge of bed, upright, already armored. She kissed him fast and hard. "Don't come back small."
Mystique, who never pretended sleep, wrapped her limbs through his and whispered: "Bring her back or bury her gently. Either will make you whole again."
In the end, they let him go.
Because they knew they had become his strength — and his test.
## **End of Chapter 8 – "The Flame That Remembers"**