Chapter Two: The Gift of Death
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The fifth year was the hardest.
Not because the magic was difficult. The magic was easy—had always been easy, from that first Lumos that bloomed from his fingertips like a flower opening to the sun. Not because the sword training frustrated him, though it did. Not because the tower felt empty, though it was.
The fifth year was hardest because he finally admitted he had no idea what he was doing.
Ignotus sat on his throne of mithril and obsidian, Ember warm on his shoulder, and stared at the painted sky. Grey clouds. Steady rain. The same sky he had woken to for five years, the same tower, the same forest pressing close around him.
He had spent five years learning. Reading every book, practicing every spell, testing every potion. He had mapped the wards, catalogued the armory, explored every corridor and chamber in this impossible tower.
He had not spoken to another human being in five years.
He had not left this forest.
He had not found a single answer to any of the questions that sat in his chest like stones.
Who sent me here?
Why?
What am I supposed to do?
Ember trilled softly, nuzzling against his neck.
"I know," Ignotus said. "I'm being dramatic."
The phoenix made a sound that might have been agreement.
He stayed on the throne for a long time, watching the painted rain. Then he stood, walked down the seven obsidian steps, and left the throne room.
He needed answers.
He just didn't know where to find them.
♧♧♧♧♧
The library had no books about his situation.
He had checked. He had searched every shelf, every scroll, every fragment of text preserved in stasis cases. There were histories of this world, treatises on magic, biographies of sorcerers and kings. There was nothing about a man from another world waking up naked in a forest with a tower that shouldn't exist and knowledge that didn't belong to him.
He was unique.
He was alone.
He was losing his mind.
The thought crept up on him slowly. Not in a dramatic moment of crisis, but in quiet moments—staring at his reflection in the obsidian floor, watching Ember preen its silver-edged feathers, lying awake in his absurdly large bed at three in the morning with no sound but his own breathing.
He had spent thirty years on Earth. He had a name there, a life, a stack of unread books beside his bed. He had friends, or at least people he talked to. He had the internet and takeout and the comforting noise of a city that never fully slept.
Now he had silence.
Now he had magic and a tower and a bird that had chosen him for reasons he didn't understand.
Now he had five years of talking to himself and waiting for something to happen.
Nothing was happening.
He needed to make something happen.
◇◇◇◇◇
The decision came to him in his laboratory.
He was brewing a simple healing draught—the motions automatic now, his hands knowing what to do before his mind caught up—when he realized he had been standing there for three hours, stirring the same cauldron, thinking about nothing.
He set down the stir rod.
"Okay," he said. "This isn't working."
Ember looked up from its perch on a shelf.
"I can't just stay here forever. I don't know why I was sent here. I don't know what I'm supposed to do. I don't even know who sent me." He paused. "But I'm not going to find out by stirring potions and talking to a bird."
Ember chirped. It sounded offended.
"You know what I mean."
He looked around the laboratory. At the silver cauldrons and crystal vials, the shelves of ingredients, the half-finished projects waiting for his attention. He had everything here. Everything except what he actually needed.
"I need to leave," he said. "I need to find people. I need to understand this world, not just read about it."
He waited for something to stop him. Some instinct, some warning, some sense that he wasn't ready.
Nothing came.
"So I'll leave," he said. "Tomorrow."
♡♡♡♡♡
He didn't leave tomorrow.
He spent a week preparing. Packing supplies, selecting which robes to wear, practicing the spells he would need to travel unnoticed. He visited the armory and finally, after five years of looking, took a sword.
It was not the grandest blade. Not the one with the weirwood wolf or the dragonbone hilt. A simple longsword, mithril core folded with steel, balanced perfectly for his hand. The scabbard was black leather, unadorned.
It felt right.
He stood at the tower's gates, Ember on his shoulder, sword at his hip. The Rainwood stretched before him, patient and ancient.
He didn't know where he was going.
He didn't know if he would ever come back.
He stepped through the gates.
The forest received him in silence.
He walked for hours, following game trails and deer paths, heading generally east. The trees pressed close, their roots rising from the earth like the limbs of buried giants. Moss hung from branches, thick and green. Rain dripped through the canopy, steady and endless.
He did not use magic. Not to speed his journey, not to shield himself from the wet, not to mark his path. He just walked, feeling the mud under his boots and the weight of the sword at his hip and the warm, steady presence of Ember on his shoulder.
He walked until the light began to fade.
Then he found a dry space beneath an overhanging rock, sat down against the stone, and waited for morning.
♤♤♤♤♤
He woke to silence.
Not the gentle silence of dawn in a forest. Complete silence. No rain, no wind, no birds. No sound of his own breathing.
He tried to move. He could not.
Panic clawed at his chest. He tried to speak, to call for Ember, to cast any spell that would break whatever held him. Nothing. His body was frozen, his voice silent, his magic unreachable.
Then the darkness moved.
It coalesced from the shadows beneath the trees, from the spaces between roots, from the hollows of ancient trunks. Not a figure. Not a form. Just—presence, gathering itself into something that could be perceived.
It stood before him. Tall. Robed in black that was not black but the absence of light. Its face was neither young nor old, neither male nor female, neither kind nor cruel.
It simply was.
And it was looking at him.
"You took longer than I expected."
The voice was not loud. Not deep. It was simply there, like the sound of his own heartbeat.
Ignotus could not speak. Could not move. Could not even breathe.
"Ah," said the figure. "Forgive me."
The pressure vanished. Ignotus gasped, his body his own again, his heart hammering in his chest. He scrambled backward, pressing himself against the rock, staring at the thing that had appeared from nowhere.
"What—" His voice cracked. He tried again. "Who are you?"
The figure tilted its head. A gesture that was ancient and patient and faintly amused.
"You have read about me," it said. "You have imagined me. You have feared me and dismissed me and, in your quietest moments, hoped that I was not real."
It paused.
"I am real."
Ignotus stared at it. At the robes that swallowed light. At the face that was every face and no face. At the hands that had reached across existence itself to touch him.
"Death," he whispered.
"Mortem, in the tongue of this world. Thanatos, in another. Ankou, Hel, Mictlantecuhtli." A slight pause. "I have many names. You may call me what you wish."
"You—" Ignotus could not form the words. His mind was racing, skittering away from the enormity of what stood before him. "You sent me here."
"Yes."
"Why?"
Mortem regarded him. Its expression did not change—could not change, perhaps—but something in its stillness shifted.
"Because you were ready," it said. "And because I was tired."
"Tired of what?"
"Watching." A pause. "You knew this world. You loved it. You mourned it before its tragedies ever occurred. You read its endings and called them beautiful and tragic and inevitable."
"They were inevitable."
"Were they?"
Ignotus opened his mouth. Closed it.
Mortem continued. "I have watched this world for millennia. I have watched its people love and hate and live and die. I have watched patterns repeat, mistakes echo, tragedies compound. I have watched and I have waited and I have done nothing."
"Why?"
"Because it is not my role. I am the end, not the beginning. I do not change; I receive." Its voice shifted, something almost weary creeping into its infinite patience. "But I am also bored."
Ignotus blinked. "Bored."
"Yes."
"Death is bored."
"I have existed since before the first world cooled. I will exist after the last star burns out. Eternity is very long, and I have spent most of it watching mortals make the same choices and suffer the same consequences." Mortem paused. "I wanted to see what would happen if someone made different ones."
"Someone like me."
"Someone who knew the stories. Someone who loved them. Someone who had read the endings and might choose to write new ones."
Ignotus was very still.
"You gave me this," he said. "The magic. The knowledge. The tower. The—" He touched Ember, warm and solid on his shoulder. "All of it."
"Yes."
"Why not just tell me? Why leave me alone for five years with no explanation?"
"Would you have believed me?"
He wanted to say yes. The word died in his throat.
"I wanted you to discover yourself," Mortem said. "To learn your own strength. To understand that the power I gave you is yours now, not mine. I could have appeared on your first day and explained everything. You would have accepted it. You would have trusted it. But you would not have known it."
Silence stretched between them.
"What am I supposed to do?" Ignotus asked.
"Whatever you wish."
"That's not an answer."
"It is the only answer I have." Mortem regarded him with those patient, ancient eyes. "I did not send you here to fulfill a prophecy. I did not send you here to save the world or destroy it or reshape it in my image. I sent you here because I was curious what you would do with the chance you had been denied."
"What chance?"
"To live in the world you loved. To touch it, change it, be changed by it." Mortem paused. "You spent thirty years reading about Westeros. Watching it. Imagining yourself within its stories. You never believed it was possible."
"No. I didn't."
"And now?"
Ignotus looked down at his hands. They were steady. They had not been steady, five years ago, when he first woke in the mud.
"Now I don't know what I believe," he said. "But I know what I want."
"Tell me."
"I want to see it. The world I read about. The people I mourned." He paused. "I want to meet them. I want to know if they're real, if their stories matter, if I can—" He stopped.
"If you can save them?"
"If I can help them save themselves."
Mortem was silent for a long moment.
"That is a better answer than I expected," it said. "Most mortals, given your power, would speak of conquest. Glory. Revenge."
"I don't want revenge. I don't want glory." He paused. "I don't even want to be a hero."
"What do you want?"
"I want to matter."
The words hung in the air between them. Ignotus felt exposed, raw, as if he had peeled back his skin and shown the beating heart beneath.
Mortem inclined its head.
"Then matter," it said. "The world is waiting."
It began to fade, its form dissolving back into the shadows from which it had come.
"Wait," Ignotus said. "My name. Ignotus Peverell. Did you give me that?"
"Yes."
"Why?"
"Because every story needs a name. And because Peverell was always your house, even when you did not know it." A pause. "The blood of Death runs in your veins now. Nothing can extinguish it. You are my son, Ignotus, in the way that mortals can be children of forces they do not understand."
Son of Death.
The words settled into his chest, heavy and strange.
"What does that mean?" he asked.
But the darkness was empty. The shadows were only shadows. The silence broke, and rain began to fall again, and Ember stirred on his shoulder with a soft, worried trill.
Ignotus sat against the rock, alone in the forest, and tried to remember how to breathe.
♧♧♧♧♧
He did not return to the tower immediately.
He stayed in the forest for three days, walking without direction, thinking without conclusion. Ember stayed close, its ruby eyes tracking his face with concern.
Son of Death.
He was immortal. He had suspected it, tested it, confirmed it with experiments he preferred not to dwell on. But knowing and being told were different things.
He was the son of a cosmic entity that had existed since before existence itself.
He had been given power beyond measure, knowledge beyond price, a tower that could move through the world like a chess piece across a board.
And he had been told to do whatever he wished.
It should have felt liberating. Instead, it felt terrifying.
On the third day, he returned to the tower.
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He stood in the entrance hall, dripping water onto the obsidian floor, and looked at his reflection. Pale skin, dark hair, glowing green eyes.
"Son of Death," he said.
His reflection stared back at him.
"Right. Okay. That's—" He laughed. It came out rough, slightly hysterical. "That's a lot."
Ember chirped.
"Yeah. I know." He took a breath. "But I asked. I wanted answers, and I got them. Now I have to figure out what to do with them."
He looked around the hall. At the marble columns and mithril vines, the diamond chandeliers, the Valyrian steel fixtures. At the door that led to the library, the corridor that led to the armory, the stairs that led up to his throne.
His tower. His knowledge. His life, stretched out before him, infinite and formless.
"I need a plan," he said. "I need to learn more about this world. Not just read about it—actually see it, understand it. I need to meet people. Make connections. Build something that will matter."
He paused.
"And I need to get good with a sword, because apparently that's going to be relevant."
Ember made a sound that might have been agreement.
"Right," Ignotus said. "Then let's start."
♡♡♡♡♡
He began with Sothoryos.
The journey took three weeks by ship from Weeping Town. He booked passage under a false name, paid in gold that appeared in his purse each morning, and spent the voyage on deck watching the grey water churn beneath the hull.
The sailors left him alone. His clothes were too fine, his bearing too strange, the phoenix on his shoulder too obviously unnatural. They whispered when they thought he couldn't hear, but they didn't approach.
He didn't mind.
On the nineteenth day, land appeared on the horizon.
Sothoryos rose from the sea like something unfinished. Jungle so dense it looked solid from a distance, cliffs of black rock, mountains shrouded in permanent cloud. The ship followed the coast north, past fishing villages and trading posts, until the jungle gave way to rolling hills and the hills gave way to cliffs.
Aretuza sat atop the highest cliff, its white towers catching the afternoon light.
Ignotus stared at it.
He knew this place. Had read about it, studied its history, memorized the names of its famous alumnae. But seeing it was different. Seeing it made it real.
He disembarked at the small port below the cliffs. He began the long climb up the winding stone stairs.
The gates of Aretuza were black iron, carved with waves and spirals. A woman stood before them, grey-eyed, grey-haired, her posture so straight it looked painful.
"You're not from here," she said.
"No."
"You're not from anywhere I know."
"I don't think I am."
She studied him. Her gaze moved from his face to Ember on his shoulder to the silver embroidery on his robes. Her expression did not change.
"The archmistress will want to see you."
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Tissaia de Vries received him in a circular study at the top of the academy's tallest tower.
She was not what he expected. He had read about her—the legendary sorceress, the woman who had shaped generations of enchantresses, whose precision and power were spoken of with reverence across the continent. He had expected coldness. Distance.
She was cold. She was distant. She looked at him with pale eyes that missed nothing.
But she was also curious.
"Your magic," she said. "It's not like anything I've encountered."
"No."
"Where does it come from?"
He considered lying. Considered deflection. But something in her expression—not warmth, never warmth, but a cautious professional interest—made him set those options aside.
"A gift," he said. "From someone who owed me nothing and gave me everything."
She studied him for a long moment.
"That's not an answer," she said.
"It's the only one I have."
Another silence. Then Tissaia inclined her head, just slightly.
"Sit down," she said. "You're making the room look untidy."
He sat.
♧♧♣︎♧♧
The years passed.
He traveled between Sothoryos and his tower, spending months or years at each. He became a familiar presence at Aretuza and Ban Ard—the strange mage in black robes who appeared without warning, shared knowledge freely, and vanished again before anyone could grow too comfortable.
Tissaia de Vries became something closer to a friend than he had expected. Their correspondence was formal, precise, filled with arguments about magical theory and occasional sharp observations about each other's methods. But she never refused his visits. Never turned him away.
He visited the witcher schools. Learned their sword forms, their signs, their potion recipes. He trained until his body remembered what his mind didn't have to direct. He would never be a witcher—he lacked the mutations, the decades of instinct—but he could defend himself.
He went to Essos in his forty-third year.
He walked through the streets of Volantis, invisible under a charm that turned attention aside like water around a stone. He stood at the back of a slave auction and watched a girl of twelve be sold to a man old enough to be her grandfather.
He did not intervene.
But he remembered.
He made money. Enchanted goods sold well in the Free Cities. He found merchants who asked no questions and paid in gold that gleamed like captured sunlight. He opened accounts with the Iron Bank under names that were not his own.
By the time he returned to his tower, he was wealthy beyond measure.
He did not care about the money. But it would be useful.
◇◇◆◇◇
The hundred and eighty-seventh year.
Ignotus stood at his diamond windows and watched the rain fall on the Rainwood. Ember perched on his shoulder, warm and familiar.
Two centuries since he had woken in this forest, naked and shivering and afraid. Two centuries since Mortem had found him under an overhanging rock and given him answers he was still learning to understand.
He was not the man who had crawled through the mud, desperate and lost. He was something else now. Something older, stronger, more certain.
He was also still waiting.
Westeros waited across the sea. The Targaryens remained in Valyria, their conquest still centuries away. The stories he had memorized in another life had not yet begun.
But they would.
He had time. So much time.
And he was, finally, ready to use it.