The chamber reeked of blood and wine, a disgusting sweetness soured by the metallic tang of iron.
King Robert Baratheon lay sweating on the bed, his chest rising and falling in shallow, rattling gasps. The bandages wrapped around his belly were dark with seeping blood. Torches flickered along the stone walls, their wavering light dancing across the chamber.
Eddard Stark sat beside him, heavy with a silence that had stretched long for the first time in decades.
The years had not been kind to Robert. The boy who once laughed as he swung his hammer, the man who had toppled prince and knights, was now bloated with wine and idleness. Yet, as he lay dying, his face seemed gaunt, the coarseness of his life smoothed by the shadow of death. His beard was wet with sweat, and his eyes, rather than searching the ceiling, were lost to the past.
"Do you remember, Ned?" Robert's voice was a thick rasp. "When Jon Arryn kept us at the Eyrie? Gods, we were just boys then. You with your wolf-blood, me with my hammer, dreaming only of the next feast, and the next woman to bed with."
Ned's throat tightened. He could not summon words.
Robert's hand twitched toward him, clumsy and trembling. "We had a life, Ned. A good one. Before those fucking dragons ruined everything. Before Rhaegar and his damned harp. Before Lyanna…"
Her name broke him. The great man's chest shuddered, and his eyes glistened with tears that had no strength to fall.
"If she had been mine," Robert whispered, his voice cracking like old timber. "If I had wed her as was meant… we would have been happy. Everything would be different. The realm, the war, all of it. She should have been my queen."
Ned lowered his eyes, his gaze fixed on the cold stone floor. He thought of the crypts of Winterfell, where she lay with her flowers of stone. He thought of her last words, the secret she had pressed upon him with her dying breath.
Promise me, Ned.
The words had haunted him every day since. He had broken that promise. He had failed her.
His mind drifted north, past the Crownlands and Riverlands, past the Neck and to the Wall, to a boy. No… not a boy now. A man grown. My blood, and yet not mine.
Jon Snow. His nephew yet his son, for all the world believed. The boy with Lyanna's face, who bore the burden of Ned's silence. He had sent him to the Wall, to ice and silence, to a fate Lyanna had never even had thought her brother would tie his nephew with. A betrayal, no matter how he tried to convince himself otherwise.
Robert's voice, faint, dragged him back to the present. "Tell me, Ned… did she ever speak of me? In her chambers at Winterfell, or in your quiet talks? Did she—"
Ned could not speak the lie. His lips pressed together, and his silence was answer enough.
Robert wept then. The great bear of a man, once the lord of storms, was now broken, undone not by spear or sword, but by a grief older than the crown he wore.
Ned sat with him until the torches guttered low, until Robert's breathing grew shallow and frail.
Far in the Riverlands, in a ruined hamlet blackened by fire, another man kept vigil.
Thoros of Myr wiped ash and grave-dirt from his hands. His red robes were singed, his hair matted with smoke. He had buried the dead of the village himself, stacking stones over the nameless, muttering prayers to gods he knew answered only in riddles.
Yet here, sitting at the edge of a silent field, the gods had sent him something he could not comprehend.
The boy still lay unmoving. Seven days had passed since they find this scene, since he has been unconscious. Seven days since Jon fell asleep, unmoving for a single moment. His flesh was cold to the touch, his skin and hair turning pale as milk. And yet, he did not rot.
The direwolf watched him always, silent as a carved idol. Ghost, as Jon called him. He had not left Jon's side, not for food, nor water, nor the dead around them. He only sat, watching and waiting.
And Thoros, who had drunk and whored and preached half a life in mocking jest, found himself afraid.
He had seen magic before. Glimpsed at bits of shadows in Asshai, fire-visions in Myr. He had sung the praises of R'hllor until his throat ached, believing in none of it. Yet this—this felt totally different.
Today however, as the black sky stretched cold above, Jon Snow stirred.
His body arched, his breath catching sharp as a knife's edge. Thoros felt the hair on his arms rise. The boy's eyes snapped open—no longer grey, but red, the same terrible red as the heart trees of the Old North.
The wolf lifted its head.
The sound began low, a rumble deep in its chest, and then rose, swelling, a long, shattering howl that broke against the night's silence and peace.
It carried across the fields, through forest, a cry both mournful and terrible. Thoros fell to his knees, trembling. He had seen miracles, but never this.
Jon Snow's gaze fixed upon him, strange and unblinking, the red eyes that looked like that of man and god alike.