Author's Note: This is the story of the Night's Queen, or the Woman from the Ice. I'm basing the physical description of the Others/ White Walker from the book, and not from the TV series. In this story, the Others/White Walkers are not the shriveled-looking thing in the TV series.
My Rare Pairing: OC and Brandon the Builder, OC and The Thirteenth Lord Commander
She had been a human once.
Not too long ago.
She had a family who loved her.
She had been a daughter, a sister - and perhaps one day - she would have even become a wife and a mother if the Gods had been good.
But the Gods had cursed her with a gift of sight.
And what she had seen - in this, she hoped - should never come to past.
oooOOOooo
She had the blood of the first men, until the day they transformed her, and made her into a creature with ice coursing in her veins.
oooOOOooo
The men had been warring far from their village, cutting down weirdwood trees and killing as many children of the forest as they could.
However, unbeknownst to them, unseen eyes had fallen upon those who were left behind; the women and children and elderly, the vulnerable, had been an easy prey to those with dark intents in their minds.
oooOOOooo
They came for her when she had been gathering firewood and hunting for food.
She had expected it.
She had seen it in her dreams long before her people had encountered the small children who lived beneath earth and trees.
The children had a knack of hiding themselves, covering their skin and dark hair with mud and leaves to blend well into their environment.
They had chosen her, assuming her a much easier prey compared to a full-grown man; a girl barely past her sixteenth nameday, small of stature and starved-looking.
Yet they did not know that she had made herself looked that way, carefully selecting clothes to appear harmless and weak. The clothes she wore had been large; taken from her dead brother who had died from his battle wounds. Her brother's clothes had served its purpose in covering the lean muscles and the hidden weapons she had stashed underneath.
A girl alone in the forest couldn't possibly do us harm. The children of the forest must have thought, when she had felt their eyes upon her figure as soon as she stepped into the woods.
Years of experience as a hunter - in skinning her game and learning how to knap and haft her own flint daggers and arrowheads, or any weapons made of obsidian (if such materials were to be found) - had allowed her to wield the dagger expertly as one would wield any weapon of war.
Of course, her intention had been a noble one. She had wanted to try and talked to the children first; to warned them of the dreams that she had seen. Though she had come armed with the means to protect herself if the encounter didn't go well.
But they spoke different tongues.
The children of the forest had no time to learn her language. Not while their races had been at war.
Inevitably, they had come to battle.
She should have known that it would end that way, but she had still clung to the hope that her fate could be change.
She had fought them as much as she could.
At first, she had used her bow, letting arrows fly one after the other. The children were quick on their feet, jumping from tree to tree, twisting and turning, hiding and evading most of the time. When she had emptied her quiver, she had used the dagger that she had made, and had tried to slice her way through them.
And when that too was taken, she had fought tooth and nail and had tried to run away.
Three had died in her attempts to escape. Yet there had been still more - four, to be exact.
In the end, they had overwhelmed her and dragged her to the sacred place where a huge weirdwood tree awaited her.
They had ignored her words of entreaty, of her desperate calls in the tongue that they couldn't understand.
"Please! If you do this, you will rouse a far darker force than neither your race, nor mine, can stop! You should not play with the forbidden powers that you have no knowledge of!"
They hadn't listened.
And she knew, in the end, that the children of the forest would come to regret the results of their desperate action.
In their need to destroy her kind, they had called upon an ancient, and slumbering entity that they should have never sought, and where they had no inkling on the repercussion of what they were about to unleash.
oooOOOooo
In a pale tree - bone-white it was, with a face carved upon its trunk, and red sap crusted from its eyes like blood-streaked tears while scarlet leaves formed a canopy of more than a hundred fluttering hands that swayed and danced through the sighs of the wind - the children of the forest had tied her upon the weirdwood's thick, white trunk, with vines of rope that wound round and round her torso, and wrapped around her wrists and ankles.
She could not move a limb.
Helpless as she had been, yet she had remained unafraid.
For she had seen this in her dreams, of the day she would be turn.
And of the day when the first winds of winter had come to the North.
oooOOOooo
She had watched still. Unable to move, unable to speak as the children of the forest had stabbed the dragon glass deep into her chest, at the very centre where her human heart had once beat.
She recalled the excruciating, burning agony that lanced through her when the jagged – yet deadly sharp – obsidian blade broke through her skin, sunk into her flesh and drilled through her very bones that caged her beating heart, and all she could feel was pain, pain, pain.
It had felt like her insides had been burnt to a crisp, melted like a hot dripping wax, and slowly killed her. She had felt the white-hot pain spreading throughout her body - a fire yet not fire - consuming her.
Her agonized screams were muffled by the gag in her mouth.
She had struggled as the ice enveloped her form.
And then, she knew no more.
oooOOOooo
In her dreams, she had seen the children of the forest panicking as she had been slowly encased in ice. Her ebony hair bleeding into white silk, her dark eyes radiating like a pair of captured, blue stars.
She had watched it all unfolding from outside her body.
Speaking in their garbled words, the Old Tongue, the children had scrambled away from the weirwood tree, where the ice sheet trapped her into the tree.
A whirling blizzard had appeared on a once cloudless skies.
The snow had fallen hard until the green of the lands had turned white; the ice and the deathly cold had spread.
Henceforth, it became known as the Land of Always Winter.
oooOOOooo
Fear of the unknown had forced the children of the forest to flee that part of land, leaving her there.
Alone and frozen.
Asleep.
Yet she had never been more awake.
oooOOOooo
As her body lay beneath the ice, she dreamt and saw the world changed.
And observed how the children of the forest had transformed yet another - a man this time – but had gotten something far more sinister.
It was the last sacrifice that the children of the forest had done.
Many years had past, and the children were driven to hide underground, and dug the earth to make weapons of frozen fire to stop the creatures that they had created.
They knew by then that their actions had awaken an ancient entity that had lain dormant for a millennium.
She was part of the earth, of the trees, of the roots that grew in the shadows.
She was the First greenseer, the watcher, the hundred eyes that saw through the many lives all across the world.
She was salvation.
The maiden of the light.
oooOOOooo
She was not touched by darkness like the Others that were transformed after her.
The dark, evil entity could not influence her unlike the Others.
It was unaware of her existence.
She was an aberration.
She hid among the many faces of the weirwood trees throughout the realm with her ability amplified a hundredfold.
She had seen the past, the present and the future.
She had been a thousand steps ahead of the enemy.
To the Great Other, she did not exist.
She had been no one.
Until the day HE set her free from her prison.
oooOOOooo
It had been preordained that he broke her from her icy cage.
It had to be done.
Or all humanity would perish without her intervention.
So she had guided him to where she lay asleep and waiting.
Like she had done to him throughout his mortal life.
He had always answered when she called his name.
oooOOOooo
CHOP - CHOP - CHOP
The spider web cracked appeared on the ice as an axe drove through it.
CHOP - CHOP - CHOP
Ice chips flew at each strike, and the cage that kept her on the tree slowly broke down.
Through the eyes of the direwolf that she had sent to guide him, she watched as the man worked hard to set her free.
The man's breath misting in the air, his thick, layers of fur clothes were heavy with sheets of hoarfrost, while the axe came down without a pause.
He was relentless.
This was the man she had seen grew up while she was trapped in the ice.
He had grown tall and handsome as years passed by. With steel-grey eyes, closely-cropped beard, and dark, curly locks; the features of a Stark stamped all over him, which she knew he would passed someday unto to his descendants.
He was someone she knew too well.
The man's name was Brandon Stark.
oooOOOooo
She had watched him build small ice castles when he was a toddler, construct frozen forts as he played with his brother, and captured his dreams in a charcoal and paper.
She was a dreamer while he was a builder.
He built dreams into reality.
She wanted him to build her dreams as well.
oooOOOooo
"You're - you're young," was the first, lame thing he said to her when he was done staring.
His gaze locking into her eyes. She immediately noticed how his hand tightened around his axe.
She knew what she must looked like to him; with white hair, glowing blue eyes and pale skin - he must have thought that she was one of the Others.
Though it wasn't farther from the truth.
However, she decided to ignore his hostile behavior and addressed his question.
It was true. She hadn't age at all.
Compared to him, who was a full-grown man of six and twenty, she still looked no more than six and ten.
"Of course," she began, her voice cracked. It sounded shattered, like the ice that had imprisoned her.
Considering that she hadn't used her voice for years, it's not a surprised to her.
"That's what you get for being trapped in the ice for more than a hundred years." She said, testing his language that she had only learned through her years of watching him grow and the world evolved around her.
"Where you expecting me to look like a wrinkly, old crone?" She asked, quirking one pale brow.
"No.. but I did expect you to look a bit….older," Brandon admitted, still looking wary.
She laughed, even when it sounded like the gnashing and crashing of ice.
And it felt good to laugh.
However, her laughter died down when she saw Brandon Stark regarding her intensely.
She had told herself to be careful around him.
Six years ago, she had stopped being an active presence in his life. It had broken her heart when she had watched him court someone else. That had been the time when she had slowly separated herself from him.
Brandon hadn't even been aware of her heartache, much less her existence.
How could he? When he had thought that she was just a voice in the wind, the face behind every weirdwood tree, and the fleeting shadow of a Direwolf that followed him.
To him, she hadn't been real.
But perhaps she had been mistaken.
Because when she called for him many moons ago, he followed and came for her.
"I am older," She murmured, tearing her gaze away from him. "I may not look like it, but I'm older than you, even older than your parents… and old enough to have gain more knowledge than anyone in the world."
Brandon had nothing to say to that.
He was still tensed. His axe was never far from his hand while his other hand was already wrapped around the pommel of his sword.
He didn't trust her, not when she was looking like the monsters that plagued his lands, and would someday, usher the Long Night.
She was certain he was going to kill her if she wasn't careful.
It wouldn't serve her purpose at all if she didn't find a way to change his opinion about her.
oooOOOooo
The knowledge of the future was at her fingertips and she knew that Brandon Stark would be a name remembered by many.
She would make certain of that.
Through her magic, she would help him build the Wall.
oooOOOooo
"Are you ready?" She had asked him as they began their journey back to civilization.
The cold was deadly in the Land of Always Winter, and she had done her best to make certain that Brandon survived both the journey to find her, and back to where he belonged.
She used her magic to redirect the blast of the wind away from Brandon, and kept him mostly warm. The ten Direwolves that she had sent to guide him in his journey had been reduced to only one; It had been the wolves that had provided Brandon with food and warmth, and had also protected him when wights had attacked.
"Ready for what?" She heard him asked as they trudged through the snow.
"Ready to become a legend," she responded, just as she heard the wind howling from the North, like the howls of the direwolves that had died to keep the man beside her alive.
Once Brandon became the First King of Winter, the grey direwolf on a white field would become the sigil of House Stark.
oooOOOooo
Many had wondered how Brandon the Builder constructed the Wall.
They said he built it with the help of giants and magic.
Most of the stories were true to a certain degree.
Yet many still didn't know the entire story.
She had been the one to send Brandon the giants.
At that time, the giants had never sided with men.
It was only through the use of magic that they begin to obey.
The magic had all been hers.
oooOOOooo
Many had to die to build that Wall.
Sacrifices had to be made to strengthen its foundation.
Blood had to be use to power it with magic.
And still in the stories, she had never been mentioned.
Except as the Woman from the Ice.
And even that, hadn't been entirely true.
oooOOOooo
In the stories, in the tales told by the people of the north, and passed down from tongue to tongue; from bards, old crones, travelling mummers, to nursing mothers, and even to future Kings of Winter. She was known to most as the Night's Queen or the Woman from the Ice. With eyes like blue starlights, of skin as white and cold as snow, and a heart as hard as ice.
Yet many still didn't know about her humble beginnings.
She had been transformed by the children of the forest with the purpose of helping them destroy their mortal enemy; the First Men.
The children thought she was their salvation; the one who could kill all men.
Perhaps it was fortunate that she hadn't been what they were expecting.
oooOOOooo
Valar Morghulis
All men must die, it meant.
True words had never been spoken.
For all men must die..
And serve.
Valar Dohaeris.
Author's Note: I know. The story is just...unusual? but i just couldn't resist writing this one.
EXTRAS:
"Your hair is white."
Obviously. She thought, mentally rolling her eyes.
"Yes,"
"And your eyes -your eyes..."
"What of it?"
"They're blue and glowing. They're like–"
"I'm not like the Others." She cut in.
"…." Brandon fixed her a piercing gaze.
"I'm different," She insisted.
"Then, what – I mean, who are you?"
"I'm…"
It's been a long time since she had been trapped in that ice and seeing the world through the eyes of many. But it had been enough to completely forget one's name.
So she said to him.
"I'm no one."
Brandon Stark merely stared, unconvinced.
"I'm a Stranger." She supplied.
Her companion gave her a skeptical look.
Deciding to make fun of him, she said: "I'm the Maiden-of-the-Light."
This time, Brandon frowned.
"That's not your name. You're only naming Gods from different religion." He pointed out.
Amusement sparkled in her eyes.
"But it is my name." She said, a smile playing across her pale lips.
"Because I'm the Many-Faced God."
….
The frown on Brandon's forehead deepened.
"You don't remember your name, is that why you can't tell me what it is?" She heard him say after a time.
"Yes," came her soft answer.
Trust Brandon to figure it out on his own.
"If you don't have a name, then perhaps I can make one for you?" He suggested carefully.
"What shall you name me?" She inquired, even though she already knew what it would be.
The name he would give her and would become part of the words of his House.
"Winter.."
…
In the end, he would watch and wait for her on the Wall that they had built together.
People sometimes watched him in his vigil, but only those who were loyal to him knew of her existence.
Those same people told him that she was gone and would never return.
He would always say to them: "No... She's coming...Winter is coming. I'm sure of it."
He would always wait for her.
Always.
And so does the rest of his descendants.
...
His name was Brandon Stark, a First Ranger, and soon-to-be The Thirteenth Lord Commander of the Night's Watch.
He had been traveling back to the wall after a long ranging where he had lost many of his brothers.
The cold had been merciless, killing his brothers one by one.
And it would have killed him too if he hadn't stumbled upon a cave.
In there, he saw a woman trapped in ice.
He freed her from her prison and brought her back to the Night Fort despite her objections.
She told him about the Wall, and the need to reinforce its magic.
He gave her everything she asked for, made the same sacrifices that his ancestor had done, and ensured the protection of all mankind.
But in doing so, it had turned his blood brother and his night brothers against him.
Since then, he was known as the Night's King.