Winterfell, 9th Moon, 287 AC
The morning air bit sharp enough to make my lungs ache, but it was a clean ache, nothing like the chemical burn of hospital vents. I padded barefoot across the inner yard, the flagstones still slick with overnight frost. Winterfell woke in layers: first the clang of the smithy, then the lowing of oxen from the stables, then the shouts of guards changing shifts on the battlements. Smoke curled from a dozen chimneys, carrying the smells of baking bread, horse sweat, and hot iron. Somewhere a raven croaked, hoarse and impatient.
The training yard lay just past the armory, a wide rectangle of packed dirt ringed by wooden racks of blunted swords and straw-stuffed dummies. Ser Rodrik was already there, barking at two lanky stableboys who'd clearly never held a blade before this morning. Robb stood off to the side, swinging a practice sword in lazy arcs, his breath puffing white. He spotted me and grinned.
"Thought you'd sleep till noon, snow."
"Thought you'd still be picking your nose," I shot back. The words came out in Jon's piping voice, but the rhythm was mine—Alex's—dry and quick. Robb laughed and tossed me a wooden sword. It was heavier than I expected; my six-year-old wrists wobbled.
Ser Rodrik clapped his hands. "Pair up! First to three touches buys the loser a turn mucking the kennels."
We lined up. I ended up facing Jory Cassel's youngest, a freckled kid named Harrion who had three years and two stone on me. He smirked. I let him. The first swing came high and wild; I stepped inside, tapped his ribs. One. The second caught my shoulder—hard enough to sting. I hissed, spun, and smacked the flat of my blade across his knee. Two. The third never landed; I ducked, swept his legs, and poked his chest while he flailed in the dirt. Three.
Ser Rodrik's eyebrows climbed toward his hairline. "Beginner's luck," he muttered, but his eyes lingered.
I kept my face blank. Inside, the 10,000x Learning Skill hummed like a plucked string. Every shift of weight, every twitch of Harrion's wrist, had burned itself into muscle memory. I could draw the exact arc of his last swing in the air if I closed my eyes.
The rest of the morning blurred: sword forms until my arms shook, then archery where I nocked, drew, and loosed beside Robb. My first arrow thunked into the outer ring. The second split the first shaft. Robb whooped. I shrugged, cheeks hot, and missed the next three on purpose. Chores came after. I hauled water from the well with the other boys, the yoke biting into my shoulders.
Lunch was black bread and salt beef in the great hall. I sat at the lowest table with the other bastards and smallfolk children. The high table was empty—Lady Catelyn had taken her meals in her solar since Ned marched south. I chewed slowly, ears open. Gossip flowed like ale: the ironborn heads rotting on pikes outside the Sea Dragon Tower, the king's bastard girl at Storm's End, the price of salt fish tripling since the fleet burned Lannisport.
Afternoon meant more chores. I helped Old Nan carry bundles of dried wolf's bane to the glass gardens, the greenhouse heat thick with the smell of turned earth and rosemary. She pinched my cheek. "Growing like a weed, Jon Snow. Mind you don't sprout too fast, or the old gods'll think you're a tree and root you to the spot."
By dusk my body ached in places I'd forgotten existed. I slipped away while the others wrestled in the yard, ghosting through side passages until the castle's noise faded behind me. The crypts lay beneath the First Keep, reached by a narrow stair that spiraled down like the inside of a nautilus shell. I carried no torch; the darkness was a friend, cool and quiet. My bare feet found each step by memory—Jon's memory, sharpened by the boon until I could navigate blindfolded.
The air grew colder, damper. The scent changed from smoke and straw to wet stone and centuries of candle wax. Iron sconces held stubs of tallow, long extinct. I trailed my fingers along the wall, feeling the grooves where generations of Starks had carved their names. The passage widened into the main vault.
The crypts of Winterfell were not a graveyard but a city of the dead. Rows of stone kings sat on stone thrones, their direwolves curled at their feet like faithful hounds. Swords lay across their laps, rusted now, the iron pitted and black. Some faces were worn smooth by time; others stared out with startling clarity, as if the sculptor had caught them mid-breath. The oldest wore crowns of bronze and garnet. The newest—Brandon and Lyanna's father, Rickard—still had sharp cheekbones and the Stark look: long face, dark hair, gray eyes forever open.
I moved deeper. The pull started then, a tug behind my sternum like a fishhook caught in bone. It wasn't the pocket library; that felt like reaching for a book on a shelf. This was older, blood-deep. My footsteps slowed. The air thickened, carrying the faint perfume of winter roses—blue petals, Ned had planted them above Lyanna's grave.
Her statue stood apart from the kings, smaller, carved with a gentleness the others lacked. Lyanna Stark, barely twenty when she died. The sculptor had caught her mid-laugh, head tilted, hair tumbling over one shoulder in a braid thick as my wrist. Her stone eyes looked past me, toward something I couldn't see. At her feet lay a spray of dried petals, brittle and brown.
The pull sharpened. I knelt, palms brushing the base of the plinth. My fingers found a seam, invisible to anyone not looking. A section of stone no wider than my hand slid aside with a soft click. Inside was a hollow, lined with oilcloth gone stiff with age.
First came the papers. I unfolded them carefully, heart hammering. Letters—Rhaegar's handwriting, elegant and looping; Lyanna's, bold and impatient. A marriage certificate, witnessed by Ser Arthur Dayne and a septon whose name had been scratched out. A lock of silver hair tied with blue ribbon. Proof. Enough to burn the realm twice over.
Next, the sword. Dark Sister, the Valyrian steel blade of Visenya Targaryen, missing since Daemon Blackfyre's rebellion. The hilt was dragonbone, worn smooth by generations of hands. The blade itself drank the faint light, rippling like smoke over water. I lifted it reverently; it weighed nothing and everything.
Last, the egg.
It nestled in a bed of velvet gone to dust, no larger than a goose egg but heavier than sin. Crimson, not the dull red of garnets but alive—shifting from blood to ruby to the heart of a forge depending on how the shadows fell. Scales overlapped like plate armor, each one etched with faint gold veins. It was warm, warmer than my own skin, and beneath the shell something moved. A pulse, slow and deliberate. A heartbeat.
I cradled the egg against my chest. The call was a song now, wordless but clear: Come. Wake. Burn. My arms prickled with gooseflesh. I wrapped it in the oilcloth, tucked Dark Sister beneath my arm, and left the papers where they lay. Some truths were safer buried—for now.
The climb back was harder. The sword's scabbard knocked against my hip; the egg's warmth seeped through my tunic like a promise. I slipped through a servants' door, dodged a yawning scullery maid, and made it to my chamber without meeting another soul. The room was dark, the hearth cold. I barred the door, set Dark Sister in the corner—she hummed faintly, recognizing Targaryen blood—and placed the egg on my pillow.
It glowed. Not brightly, but enough to paint the walls in shifting red. I sat cross-legged, staring. The shell was flawless, yet I could see the dragon inside: long-necked, sinuous, wings folded tight. Caraxes reborn. My fingers traced the scales. Heat bloomed under my touch, and the song grew louder, threading through my bones.
I knew what came next. I had read the books, watched the show, argued on forums until my eyes burned. Robert's reign crumbling into debt and drunkenness. The War of the Five Kings carving the realm into bleeding chunks. Daenerys across the sea, dragons hatching in fire and blood. The Long Night returning with winter winds and dead men walking.
In my first life I'd raged at the page, at Ned's honor, at Robb's mistakes, at Sansa's naïveté, at the Red Wedding's cruelty. I'd wanted to scream warnings through the ink. Now the ink was in my veins.
I had eleven years until Robert rode north. Eleven years until the king's party crossed the Neck with Cersei's golden children and a wagon full of secrets. Eleven years to grow a bastard into something the realm had never seen.
Outside, Winterfell slept under a thin blanket of snow. Somewhere beyond the walls, the real world turned—Balon Greyjoy licking wounds on Pyke, Tywin Lannister counting gold in Casterly Rock, a boy named Joffrey learning cruelty from his mother's knee.
I pulled the furs over my shoulders and curled around the egg. Its warmth chased the chill from my bones. The song settled into a lullaby, fierce and tender.
Tomorrow I would be six-year-old Jon again: quiet, watchful, unremarkable. I would scrape my knees and burn the porridge and let Robb win at swordplay. I would bide.
But tonight, in the dark, I was the blood of the dragon and the wolf both. Tonight, I made a vow to the old gods and the new, to the weirwood and the harp strung with Lyanna's hair.
This time, the song would end differently.