The Landing Chapter 1: Prologue, an a song of ice and fire fanfic

The Landing

1,430 years after kings warred, dragons returned, and Ice and Fire sang, a Stark once again comes to King's Landing to investigate a suspicious royal death.

The usual disclaimer: The world of Ice and Fire is the creation, and the intellectual and legal property of, George RR Martin. I am playing in his world because I am a big fan of his work, and I do so only for my entertainment and hopefully the entertainment of others

Prologue

As soon as Father's driver opened the back door, Alys Karstark was freezing, and desperately wished she was sitting by the fireplace at home. This winter was the longest one in four generations, lasting over half of Alys' scant 6 years of life. Except for pine trees or indoor plants or the occasional green vegetable, Alys had seen very little greenery in her life, except for paintings and colorized photographs in Mother's flower and garden magazines.

She was standing in a snowed over parking lot next to Father's Old Town Model 9. The fading light of the afternoon had turned the grey, overcast day into a charcoal twilight. The Model 9 was black right down to its tinted windows, and the clanks and pings of the rapidly cooling engine made it sound like a fitfully sleeping mechanical beast. The oil field, with its derricks and pumps, looked in the twilight shadow like a city that was abandoned before it was built, haunted by the ghosts of people who never lived.

"Watch out for wights," Alys' 12 year old brother, Lars, said. "The Others like to send them to grab little kids and turn them into baby wights. You'd be perfect for them."

"You'd be perfect for them, too!" Alys retorted. She never would have dared to argue with her older brother if Father had not been there.

"Yeah, but I'm way faster," Lars replied. "Wights are too slow for me, but plenty fast for a short legged little girl kid like you!"

Alys knew that Lars was right about that. She looked at the increasingly ominous looking oilfield and wished she had stayed home with Mother, even though just an hour before she had begged Father to let her come with him. But staying home with an indifferent mother in a warm house now sounded much better than walking into a cold, dark oilfield that could be hiding rogue wights.

Alys had never seen a wight, but she had once seen two Others at one of her parents' dinner parties. They were bundled in heavy coats to, perversely, protect them from indoor heat. As Father presented Alys to them, he warned her not to touch their exposed skin, which would freeze her fingertips black even as her fingertips branded their skin like tiny and red hot irons. Nevertheless, even through well insulated gloves, Alys felt the unnatural cold of their long fingered and elegant hands

The Others were unnaturally and ethereally beautiful in a way that made them more terrifying than the most hideous monster Alys could imagine. Months later, she still dreamed of cold but glowing blue eyes staring out of the dark woods, calling her to leave the warmth of her bed and covers to be enveloped in a final, frozen hug.

"Quiet, boy," Father rumbled as he finished pulling on his gloves. He was a very large man in his long grey overcoat and fine wool hat. "Stop trying to scare your sister."

Father shoved the Model 9's door closed before the shapeless and nameless driver could do it for him. The loud sound of the slamming car door made Alys jump. She thought maybe Lars jumped a little, too.

"Yes, Father," Lars said, sounding contrite. However, the look Lars gave her from the depths of his wool hat and scarf told Alys that worse than scaremongering about wights was in her near future. She never liked, nor would she ever like, her big brother. Father was strict and could be frightening at times, but Lars was just plain mean.

Father walked through the parking lot, kicking snow out of his way with an irritated, shuffling step. The only other car in the parking lot, a space or two away from the Model 9, looked like a shapeless pile of snow. Lars and Alys followed their father while the driver remained by the Model 9. They came upon a freshly shoveled sidewalk. The sidewalk led to a small, concrete building fronted by a green metal door with one small, round, and dirty window, through which shined a dim, pale grey light. Next to the green door was a red button, which Father pushed. There was a loud buzz, followed by an angry exclamation from inside the building, and a crash. The light behind the window suddenly changed to a much brighter yellow, and the door was pulled open. The man who opened the door looked angry. His hair was long and white, and his beard was longer and whiter. He wore a long sleeved grey work shirt and blue denim pants, and he was even thicker and taller than Father.

"Who…?" the man started to ask, loudly. However, the question died on his tongue unasked as Father pulled off his hat. The man's expression instantly changed from anger to a cross between fear and embarrassment. After all, Father owned the oil field, the parking lot, the building, and therefore the man's job. Almost everyone Alys knew outside of her family were people employed by Father, or the family of people employed by Father. Everyone she knew deferred to Father.

"Excuse me, milord," the man said as he opened the door wider and stood aside. He spoke much more softly, but Alys could still hear him clearly. That was a good thing, because Father hated it when the people talking to him muttered. "I wasn't expecting company."

Father stepped past the man and entered the room, Alys and Lars followed. The heat in the building was a blessed relief.

The building was small. Along the right was a wall of grey machines with lots of gauges, levers, and dials. There was a small metal desk along the opposite wall covered in papers and pencils. A single coffee cup was perched precariously on the papers. Along the back wall, there was a small wood stove with a coffee pot. The walls were cinderblock and painted the same grey as the machines along the left wall. In the back left hand corner of the room, built out from the corner, was a small room with an open door. The open door revealed a filthy sink and an even filthier toilet.

"Would milord like some coffee?" the man asked. "I really don't have anything else to offer you…"

Father waved his hand impatiently and started asking rapid fire questions about the pumps. Alys shrank as far as she could against the wall next to the front metal door, as far away as she could get from the wall of machines, the desk, and the stove. Lars stood with his arms crossed and watched Father interrogate the man, pretending to understand Father's questions and the man's answers, even though Alys knew they were as much beyond him as they were beyond her. Lars was mean, but not very smart. Alys was little and young and a girl, which Lars liked, but she was also smart, and Lars did not like that.

The man, to his credit, answered Father's questions calmly, and he remained calm even as Father's questions went from loud, angry, and rapid to slow and quietly menacing. And even though Alys did not understand what the man was saying either, she could tell that he was keeping his answers the same. The man was not arguing with Father, not exactly, but he was still standing his ground, and that was different.

"To keep the pumps running in this cold, I need equipment, and I need help," the man kept saying.

All too soon, Father broke off his questioning and simply said, "Show me."

The man nodded and took his coat off of the coat hanger next to the door.

"Come along, children," Father said as the other man jerked open the door, and a blast of cold air followed. Alys zipped up her coat and started to follow, but Lars shoved past her and went out the door first. Father and the other man walked in a rapid pace down the sidewalk, and were soon crossing the snow covered parking lot. The snow slowed them down, but not enough for Alys' short legs to catch up. Lars was running after them and grinning at her over his shoulder. Alys started to run too. Then, just as he reached the end of the parking lot, Lars stopped and at the last minute, stuck his foot out. Alys tripped over her brother's foot and landed face first into the snow, which was not only freezing cold, but not nearly as soft as it looked or felt underfoot. The snow felt like it was made of tiny pieces of flash frozen glass. Blinded by the white, the cold, the pain, and the humiliation, Alys started to panic as she tried to regain her feet. By the time she pulled her head out of the snow, Father and the other man were walking into the field. Lars was with them. Alys wanted to yell at them to wait, but she did not want to think what
Father's reaction would be if she yelled after them, so she started to follow them as quickly as she could. Unfortunately, as she followed them, crying softly to herself, she fell further and further behind. She briefly considered going back and waiting with the driver by the car, but she almost immediately rejected that idea. Father would assume she was walking with them, and if he didn't see her, he might think she was lost. Alys did not want to think about what might happen if Father found her waiting by the car after he searched a nighttime oilfield for his missing daughter.

So Alys followed as she walked through the parking lot and into the oil field. When she saw Father, the man, and Lars turn to the left she turned with them to keep them in sight. But somewhere, she realized, they must have turned again, because she lost sight of them.

Alys stood alone in the snow, surrounded by derricks and mostly still pumps. The sun had almost completely set now, and the half moon was not yet out. The white snow was the only reason why Alys was not in complete darkness. She decided to retrace her steps and go back and wait by the car after all. But when she turned around, the snow behind her was as pristine as the snow in front of and either side of her. She turned back around, and then around again, trying to find her footsteps.

But there was no sign of them, and soon she realized she didn't even know which direction she had been going, or which direction she was facing. She was alone, and she was lost.

And then, somewhere, she heard soft laughter.

"Who…who's there?" Alys whispered.

The laughter was repeated, but a little longer, and just a little louder. Alys thought she saw a flash of white from behind a still pump. Alys decided that it was better to call out, and risk getting in trouble with Father, than it was to face whoever or whatever was laughing at her.

"Father!" Alys called. "Father! Father!"

She heard a crunch of snow behind her, and she turned, and saw, by the light of the finally rising half-moon, Father. There was no sign of Lars or the man in the grey work shirt.

Father's skin was white. There was a scarlet hole where his left eye had been, and his right eye was wide and (bright!) blue and dead. He shuffled towards her, his arms extended, and his teeth clacking.

Alys, screaming, turned and ran. She stumbled through the snow but stayed upright, screaming and running until her voice ran out, but her legs kept going. Eventually the run became a walk, but she still stayed upright, and she was no longer in the oil field, and indeed she was no longer in the Kingdom of the North.

….

She was instead walking across the endless railroad tracks of King's Landing's Northtown District. And she was no longer the little girl she had been 82 years before, she was the old woman she was now.

She continued to walk, even when she looked down and saw her thin bare legs and feet blackened by severe frostbite, and her night dress in tatters. She held up her hands in front of her face. Her fingers were also black.

But there was no pain in her hands, her feet, her legs, her lungs, her face, or anywhere at all.

Alys' pounding heart gradually slowed as she continued her impossible walk. It was cold, and there was snow on the ground, although not a lot. The meteorologist she had watched on the television had said that a cold front from the North was bringing sub-freezing temperatures with it. As was her habit, she went to bed after the forecast, she had no interest in hearing the latest handball, hockey, or indoor jousting scores. As she crawled under the covers, she reflected back on the terrible winter that dominated her childhood.

That was clearly the reason for the current nightmare, and why it started with a memory of that trip to the oilfield, taken with Father and Lars, so long ago.

Of course, Father was not turned into a wight on that day. She had not gotten lost, and had followed her tracks back to the Model 9 and the driver. The driver had given her some of his hot chocolate as they waited for Father and Lars and the site supervisor to return. Alys had worried so much about what Father would say when he found her waiting in the Model 9, but he did not say anything. Years later, Alys realized he must have told her to stay in the car, but she was too busy being tripped by her brother to hear him.