notes: This feels like a cop-out to me too, but there's a lot of important things happening in this chapter that will come to light in the sequel. Read on.


"We should start back," Gared urged as the woods began to grow dark around them. "The wildlings are dead."

Viserys Targaryen did not look to be paying much attention to him. "Perhaps…" he trailed off, looking around, as though searching for reason for them to leave.

Gared knew, though, that he did not mean his words. "Dead is dead," he said. "We have no business with the dead."

Targaryen snorted. "You think they're dead, do you? Do give me the proof of it, then," he challenged.

"Will saw them," Gared argued. "If he says they are dead, that's proof enough for me."

Will had known he would be brought into the discussion sooner or later. He wished it had been later rather than sooner. "My mother told me that dead men sing no songs," he put in.

Targaryen shook his head. It was clear he put no stock in Will's mother's words. "Even dead men can teach us things, I think," he commented. He narrowed his eyes at Will then, and said, "Tell me everything you saw again. Leave nothing out."

Will had been a hunter before he joined the Night's Watch. Well, a poacher in truth. Mallister freeriders had caught him red-handed in the Mallisters' own woods, skinning one of Mallisters' own bucks, and it had been the choice of putting on the black or losing a hand. No one could move through the woods silent as Will, and it had not taken the black brothers long to discover his talent.

"The camp is two miles farther on, over that ridge, hard beside a stream," Will said. "I got close as I dared. There's eight of them, men and women both. No children I could see. They put up a lean-to against the rock. The snow's pretty well covered it now, but I could still make it out. No fire burning, but the firepit was still plain as day. No one moving. I watched a long time. No living man lay so still."

"And… Any blood?"

"Well, no," Will admitted.

"Weapons? Swords, battleaxes, bows?"

"Some swords, a few bows. One man had an axe. Heavy-looking, double-bladed, a cruel piece of iron. It was on the ground beside him, right by his hand."

"Did you see how their bodies were positioned?"

Will shrugged. "A couple are sitting up against the rock. Most of them on the ground. Fallen, like."

He had been sure they were dead. The woman up the ironwood, especially, halfhid in the branches. Will had taken care she had not seen him, and when he had got closer, he had found that she wasn't moving. Recalling the scene despite himself, he shivered.

Targaryen's eyes bore into him. "The wind, m'lord," Will explained. "'S given me a chill."

The silver-haired youth gave a small nod. He was their commander, and a good enough one at that, but Will had never been able to shake the feeling that he was somehow someone that ought to be feared. Targaryen's gaze was suspicious and unwavering, much like that of Ser Jon Connington back at Castle Black. He might even have thought they practiced the piercing gaze together, the two of them, but then again, they seemed to have some sort of animosity between them.

"You make no sense," Targaryen said to Gared. "You say they are dead, but there's nothing that could have killed them."

"It was the cold," Gared said with iron certainty. "I saw men freeze last winter, and the one before, when I was half a boy. Everyone talks about snows forty foot deep, and how the ice wind comes howling out of the north, but the real enemy is the cold. It steals up on you quieter than Will, and at first you shiver and your teeth chatter and you stamp your feet and dream of mulled wine and nice hot fires. It burns, it does. Nothing burns like the cold. But only for a while. Then it gets inside you and starts to fill you up, and after a while you don't have the strength to fight it. It's easier just to sit down and go to sleep. They say you don't feel any pain toward the end. First you go weak and drowsy, and everything starts to fade, and then it's like sinking into a sea of warm milk. Peaceful, like."

"Yes, yes." Targaryen was growing impatient. "You say it was the cold, do you?"

Gared nodded, not phased by the youth's dismissal. He was an old man, past fifty, and to him, southron lordlings such as this Targaryen had their glory in the summer and began withering away soon as winter came.

"If Gared said it was the cold…" Will began.

"You must have drawn a few watches this week, Will," Targaryen guessed. "Tell me, what did you think of the cold then? How was the Wall when you saw it?"

Will suddenly knew where he was driving at. "The Wall… it was weeping, m'lord." He frowned. "They couldn't have froze. Not if the Wall was weeping. It wasn't cold enough."

Targaryen nodded. "Precisely," he said, turning to Gared, who had pulled his hood close and looked somewhat affronted. "What say you now?"

Gared looked away. "It… It ought to have been something else that killed them, then."

"Fine," Targaryen nodded. "And if the Lord Commander asks what it was, what would you tell him, old man?"

There was no answer to that. Targaryen looked satisfied. "It is as I said. They might be still alive, the wildlings." Then he turned to Gared. "And you shall find out what happened to them."

"A - A scouting, m'lord?" the old ranger stumbled. It was clear he did not want to go. Gared had spent forty years in the Night's Watch, man and boy, and he was not accustomed to being ordered about by an exiled lordling at all. Yet it was more than that. Under the wounded pride, Will could sense something else in the older man. He could taste it; a nervous tension that came perilous close to fear.

Will shared his unease. He had been four years on the Wall. The first time he had been sent beyond, all the old stories had come rushing back, and his bowels had turned to water. He had laughed about it afterward. He was a veteran of a hundred rangings by now, and the endless dark wilderness that the southron called the haunted forest had no more terrors for him.

Until tonight. As absurd as the dead wildlings had been, there was an edge to this darkness that made his hackles rise. Nine days they had been riding, north and northwest and then north again, farther and farther from the Wall, hard on the track of a band of wildling raiders. Each day had been worse than the day before it. Today was the worst of all. A cold wind was blowing out of the north, and it made the trees rustle like living things. All day, Will had felt as though something were watching him, something cold and implacable that loved him not. Gared felt it too. If Targaryen did, however, he did not show it one bit.

"A scouting," their commander agreed. He was a year or two more than twenty, handsome and thoughtful; the last heir of the fallen dynasty that had first made the Seven Kingdoms one whole. Will had grown up hearing stories of this king and that, but he remembered how seeing Viserys Targaryen had made those stories more real. It was absurd to think that he might have been a king in another world.

"Will did one already, princeling," Gared argued.

"And I'm telling you to do another, Gared," Targaryen said coolly. And then there was nothing to be done for it. The order had been given, and honour bound Gared to obey.

"We'll wait for you at camp," Will said. With that, he watched Gared angrily make to ride away on his garron, muttering to himself.

"Don't you come back empty-handed, old man!" Targaryen called out in a warning tone. This made Gared turn back furiously. His hood shadowed his face, but Will could see the hard glitter in his eyes as he stared at the knight. For a moment, he was afraid the older man would go for his sword. It was a short, ugly thing, its grip discoloured by sweat, its edge nicked from hard use, but Will was unsure if the lordling would have been able to face it ably.

Finally, Gared looked down. "Aye," he said, low under his breath, and with that he started for beyond.

As night fell, Will and Targaryen went back to their previous night's hideout to make camp. The cold was undeniable and yet Targaryen appeared unmoved, almost bored with it. He lit the fire and told Will he would watch first, but in the end Will discovered that he was not able to sleep at all. He had his eye open for a while as he heard faint sound of eeriness in the distance and soon enough, his commander noticed.

"Do you have so little faith in me, Will?" Targaryen asked, annoyed. "Do you think I am incapable of keeping watch alone?"

"No, m'lord," Will answered quickly. In truth, it was not lack of faith that had made him sneak a look at the youth, but the fact that in the firelight so late, he looked rather… ordinary. At Castle Black, they all steered clear from him, not mentioning him unless required. Targaryen kept to himself too, spending his time in the training yard (though never with Ser Jon) or mostly with old, blind Maester Aemon who some whispered was yet another exiled prince. He lived another life almost, but now the man was just another Black Brother out on a ranging beyond the Wall.

"You need not speak lies," he grunted in response. "I am not the commander you would want out here, I know that. You'll be rid of me soon, fortunately, and I'll be rid of you lot too."

For a moment Will thought he was going to desert, but the Targaryen boy was not an honourless coward like his father had been. Whatever else, every man of the Watch knew that he had grown up a ward of Lord Stark at Winterfell, and he knew well the difference between right and wrong. Not to mention that he was a recognisable one, Targaryen was, and his attempts to run away would likely fail anyway.

As though he were reading a mind, the man before him made an irritated sound. "You need not look so shocked either, Will; I don't plan to desert. Who do you think I am? Some spoilt little lordling? In case you didn't know already, I have no choice. I serve, or I die. I wear black, or I wear a shroud. Of course, I shouldn't expect you to understand that."

Will did understand, though. Serve or die. It was his life now, as a Black Brother, but he knew the once-prince would shoot him down if he said something. So he stayed quiet until his dreams took him, the cold of the night passing slower than it had in the nights before, and it took Targaryen shaking him awake to realise that something was wrong.

"Come on, up," his commander said, graver than he had been when talking to Will before. It was the break of dawn, and looking around he saw Gared nowhere.

"He didn't get back, did 'e?" he questioned. Targaryen shook his head.

"He didn't," he affirmed. "And now we go looking for him, and those wildlings of his. As I fear we ought to have done in the first place."

Silently, Will agreed. Either they both should have gone with Gared, or the man should not have been sent at all, but Targaryen would not have listened then. Now at least, he looked to have understood his mistake.

They rode silently to the ridge Will had found the wildlings near, Targaryen deep in thought and he himself feeling rather uneasy. There was something wrong in this, he knew. Something that didn't make sense. Something in the cold

"Do we stop here?" his commander asked. They were next to the great gnarled ironwood, and he had slowed his garron to a stop. Nodding to the silver-haired youth, he dismounted.

"Best go the rest of the way on foot, m'lord."

Targaryen had an unreadable look on his face, but he slid off of his horse immediately, and unsheathed his sharpest knife. He glanced around, as though searching for something, pausing soon enough when his eyes fell on a firepit not very far away.

"I knew it," he muttered softly. Turning to Will, he asked, "That pit wasn't there yesterday, was it?"

It was hard to remember, truth be told, but he did doubted it. Will shook his head.

"As I thought," Targaryen said. "Gared was foolish last night, it seems, and likely compromised his scouting because of it. Mormont will have my hide for this."

The fire could keep some things away, he knew, but it could also bring others to you.

"No use crying over spilt milk, I suppose. Lead on."

So they threaded their way through a thicket, then started up the slope to the low ridge where Will had found his vantage point under a sentinel tree. Under the thin crust of snow, the ground was damp and muddy, slick footing, with rocks and hidden roots to trip you up. Will made no sound as he climbed, and neither did his commander behind him.

The great sentinel was right there at the top of the ridge, where he had known it would be, its lowest branches a bare foot off the ground. Will slid in underneath, flat on his belly in the snow and the mud, and looked down on the empty clearing below.

His heart stopped in his chest. For a moment he dared not to breathe. Sunlight shone down on the clearing, the ashes of the wildings' firepit, the snow-covered lean-to, the great rock, the little half-frozen stream. Everything was just as it had been a day ago, except for one thing.

The wildlings were gone. In place of their many bodies was only one, which Will could recognise easily.

Gared.

His face was upward, his arms spread out, and in one of his hands was clutched his sword - a sword that looked like it had been sliced through with something sharp as ice. No wildling axe could have done that.

He heard Targaryen suck in a breath behind him. Will knew he had seen it too.

"You were right," he breathed. "Dear gods, you were right, and Gared was right. We should never have come here."

That Will knew all too well. Targaryen had a pained look in his face, panicky like.

"We should burn the body and start back for the Wall. The Lord Commander will want to hear this, and the First Ranger as well. This does not bode well."

In time, they walked into the clearing, weapons in hand and cautious, but there was nothing there. Nothing except Gared, whose hands and feet were still and cold to touch. Will and Targaryen built a pyre for him fast as they could and rested him on it once it was done. While he made fire, his commander observed the surroundings and the remains of Gared's short sword. He frowned at it, glaring at it as though doing so would make it reveal its secret, but there was nothing there.

"There is something very out of place here," he mused to Will. "The wildlings were here, you say, but now they are gone. Gared came here, and we have his body, but there's no wound to be seen and his sword is no sword anymore. This is starting to sound like… like one of Old Nan's tales."

Will didn't know who old Nan was but he did not ask. Targaryen snorted. A single glance at him told that there was no mirth on his face. He was clearly worried about what had happened.

When Gared's body was finally aflame, Targaryen's expression faded into sombreness. He and Will together stood by the pyre and spoke the words in unison.

"Night gathers, and now my watch begins. It shall not end until my death. I shall take no wife, hold no lands, father no children. I shall wear no crowns and win no glory. I shall live and die at my post. I am the sword in the darkness. I am the watcher on the walls. I am the fire that burns against the cold, the light that brings the dawn, the horn that wakes the sleepers, the shield that guards the realms of men. I pledge my life and honor to the Night's Watch, for this night and all the nights to come... and now his watch is ended."

When he glanced up from the fire, he saw that Targaryen was still looking, but there was no longer any sombreness in him. He looked enraptured by the flames dancing up and down. Briefly he stared at it as though he had seen the Seven themselves in there, and then, suddenly, took a step back, startling Will.

"M'lord?" he inquired to his commander. Viserys Targaryen appeared to have seen a ghost in the pyre, but within a few seconds he composed himself.

"Nothing," he whispered. shaking his head. "It was nothing." But even Will could see that whatever it was, and however the youth tried to hide it, he could not remove it from his memory. And unfortunately, how much ever the distance they put between themselves and the ridge; how much ever closer they got to Castle Black, it was hard to forget that the darkness had nearly claimed them as it had old Gared.

His mother had once told him that the world would end in fire. As a green boy he had listened wide-eyed to her stories of monstrous creatures in the air and fields burning by their fire. He had been convinced that whenever the final days came, they would be by dragonsbreath and heat - heat so unbearable that he would prefer death to it. As a man of the Night's Watch, though, he was certain she was wrong. The world would not end in fire. The world would end in ice… and now, he knew, the end was near.


notes: Sorry. I know what you're thinking.

But it was essential to end with this. Coming up soon, the sequel: How the Throne Reaps, covers the AGoT timeline, starting with Daenerys I. I've been really busy for the past few months, but hopefully I can post it within the next two or three weeks at least.

Thank you for staying with me in the duration of this short prequel. I hope future installments don't disappoint. I'd love to hear about what you're excited to read about in the future, and what PoVs you want me to write, and I'll try fitting some in if possible though the broad outline was written ages ago. Do tell me what you think.

Again, thanks for all the comments and kudos and bookmarks in the past. I love writing this and I have no intention to stop before I finish. Cheers.