The Shadowbinder
The Lord's temple rose high and proud within the Black Walls of Volantis, First Daughter of Old Valyria.
It used to be outside. That old sacrilege still burned her soul. Despite that it was now rectified, to please the Lord.
Her savage black dragon had flown the shrine to its rightful place, one heap of stones and brick masonry after another.
She was mistress now, where she was once born a slave.
The world was at her feet.
Gnarled and twisted, old.
It mattered not.
The sacrifice of her timeless beauty defying age was more than worth it.
Melodie had been young and pretty, with tattoos on her cheeks. A slave to the great masters of sorrowful, oppressed cities, who could ignore her existence if she was lucky, and if she were not, they could use her and dispose of her as it pleased them.
Melisandre was old and ugly, but her own. No one else's.
And mighty beyond count.
The age of fire had finally arrived.
Hers was the new Valyria in the making, and her black dragon first of many. More inanimate rocks would hatch some day from her mastery of arcane arts, learned and practised assiduously. The stones would grow claws and wings in their cold core, awakened by the whimpering breath of baby, orphan black shadows she had been forcing into life by her spells. Her powers had grown so much stronger, from the presence of the greatest living dragon who stirred profoundly the magic that always lay hidden in the world.
Poor Drogon.
He had believed he possessed liberty just because his former masters had not leashed him.
Well, he was mistaken.
Rhaegar was dead, and Daenerys dragonless. They had both reaped a just reward for inane generosity.
Had they used their birthright as was good and proper, they would have bound Drogon firmly to their will. A new race of dragonlords would have been theirs to breed and train.
But they had not. They had left Drogon go free, for her to take.
And Melisandre would never be weak again, not ever, not once in the long years of life she had left, gained by the arduous studying in the faraway Asshai by the Shadow.
The belligerent tigers and clever elephants, former nobles and slavers, once the rulers of Volantis, they all became her humble servants. Her faithful followers! From the rubble transported by Drogon, they erected the holy of holies of the Lord of Light to fulfil her bidding in the inner core of their delightful city.
Stone by stone, brick by brick arch, by arch, one piece of the old, profaned temple after another.
It took them a hundred days.
A sacred number.
The thought felt find meaning in that cypher was not a consideration she would ever make on her own.
Because Melisandre had never believed that the Last Hero, Azor Ahai, or what he did, or in how many days, was particularly holy. To sacrifice Nissa Nissa held no bravery. It was merely done. Like so many famous and terrible deeds that had gone unnoticed in the long history of men.
It shall be no different in the future.
Except for those who live to serve the Lord and offer him prayers, she told herself fervently, needing to believe, stoking the fire in her chambers. For His people, there will be justice. Much like little Melodie had become a great lady and called herself Melisandre.
She did not need the flames for comfort anymore, but only to see. The heat of one true God was inside her, keeping her safe and sound in any peril, defending her from horrors lurking in the gloom.
Yet now it felt as if the Long Night itself had become different.
Warmer.
Softer.
Less dark and full of terrors.
Her old heart nearly danced uninvited, basking in levity.
Her wrinkled skin felt almost young again, under her bony fingers.
Praised be the Lord of Light who had finally decided to deliver his followers from evil!
After a hundred days.
She did her best to hush the repetition of that alien notion in her mind, but she could not. What was wrong with her? Did she need rest? The truth was, presently she barely ever slept. For the demons of the north whispered loudly in her frozen dreams of late. She concluded that they must be sensing their impending doom: to be forgotten, after some of their own children, those named of the forest, created a race of immortal ice knights to wage their wars. The Others must have butchered all other warm-blooded creatures and conquered Westeros by now.
The time was nigh for the continent to fall to ruin.
She had foreseen it.
So why could she not stop thinking about a hundred days?
Why was she again afraid? Just like when she had stood on top of the Wall in a different era of this world, before the age of fire had begun?
The useless prayers of stupid men who still knelt before the trees and called the northern demons gods could not have soared over the narrow sea on the winter wind and sneaked into her head. Poor Westerosi. The dead white wood was only useful for feeding the sacred fires so that they would never be quenched! It would never grant their wishes!
And a hundred was merely as good a number as any for poor Last Heroes to think of, in the act of murdering their wives. She supposed they had to believe in something in order to be able to commit such atrocity.
Well, most of them.
It had not taken much convincing for Stannis to get rid of Selyse. And, frankly, it was not that difficult to see why. His queen looked worse in her early middle years than Melisandre right now as a hideous crone. And there was her sweet temper.
She stirred the fire further and looked deep into it.
Her gaze became inexorably drawn westward, where her eye did not wander for thirty, or perhaps for sixty, or just maybe for those meaningless hundred days.
There was far too much work for her to do in Volantis, for the glory of the Lord of Light, from whom all the good came to his devoted servants.
The fire in our souls and our loins.
When her gaze reached the faraway shores of the narrow sea, she expected to see the waves kissing the dark purple sunset on the place where Westeros had been.
Since she bound the dragon to her will, and Stannis, the Last Hero, failed in his sacred mission, the doom of Westeros was sealed. The Lord of Light would never allow those cold ice creatures feasting on human blood to rule the lands, even if they were useful for defeating the unfaithful peoples and their false gods.
Last time she looked, the waters were starting to rise near the Isle of earth was boiling hard in its core in the Lands of Always Winter. It would erupt unstoppably in the moment of the Night's King victory, washing the lands clean with searing flames. The sea would follow in their wake. Afterwards, only a calm new ocean would remain where the great land of men had once stood.
A pity, truly, for all those poor souls who could have recognised the Lord's wisdom and looked to him for salvation.
It was nonetheless odd that he would not send only fire, but also water to ruin them all.
The shadows dance under the sea…
The song of Shireen's fool had made her shiver when she had stood on the Wall, and Patchface hummed it obsessively. The sea belonged to another ancient demon whom some of the Westerosi adored, calling him the Drowned God, dwelling in the depths with his suite of leviathans and other monsters, some of them drowned shadows from the faraway Asshai, who had learned the hard way that the great black sea was so much more than their almost dry little river.
Where did the fool learn all this?
Besides, the Lord defeated demons. He did not make them his allies.
Maybe it was the only way to bring the dawn.
Would the Lord and his priestess have to share power with other forces?
Were they not the only true power, and thus strongest and invincible?
Those thoughts did not bear thinking.
Be as it may, the Long Night always ended, one way or another. She saw just before flying to Volantis that it could even be stopped by men, if another poor Azor Ahai put the previous one to death, and lay down to sleep for thousands of years, waiting for the next Long Night in which he would be the Night's King leading the foes of all men, and another fool would challenge him and perhaps defeat him, only to repeat the cycle.
But the Lord of Light, the one true god, could bring back the sun where man failed. He would send his sacred fires out from the entrails of the earth and purify it from all evil.
She had seen that future come to pass for this Long Night, many times over.
To her surprise, it had not occurred. The times have changed and gone by differently during the time in which she was not looking. The future was never constant, or a given. For events that were very important to her, she knew that she had to look continuously.
Her gaze drifted over Westeros, still in existence, stretching peacefully into a perfect blue and grey winter horizon, painted with long, white-washed clouds over the lazy, slowly clearing sky.
The Wall still stood, contrary to her earlier visions that it would fall.
It loomed empty, undefended. Neither conquered nor manned. Battle clamour was dwindling a bit further to the south, at the Great Lake of the North.
Not frozen.
A fleet of river boats was anchored in the middle, large as a small village. The crews played the flutes, hit the drums and strung the cymbals, performing a tender and terrible song of winter.
Or of something else?
The premonition made her soul tremble with excitement, with expectation of warmth for all men, including her own shadow-bound heart.
Lord of Light, you have helped us beyond what we deserve.
She saw Jon slaying the last white walker who attacked him. The young king remained standing in the field, sword in hand, not Lightbringer, but the mighty blade of winter, of late Ned Stark. Ice it was called, she remembered vaguely. Fitting for a walking dead. The boy looked like a man grown and hardened who could not believe his eyes.
"Dany," he called his wife, staring eastward in disbelief.
In that instant, Melisandre shared Jon's vision, as if she were next to him: above the sparsely forested, snowed-down planes, the eastern horizon became tinged in faint, peach hue.
Pink and light blue would not tardy And then the bright orange and yellow of the sun, chasing away the stars and the nightly clouds.
Daenerys ran towards Jon from between the trees, handing him a blue winter rose. He sheathed Ice over his back and embraced her. The plucked flower opened its pale, sea-tainted blossoms in their hands.
Together, they watched the break of dawn.
The battle was over.
With the first advent of light, before the men were even able to glimpse it, the remaining Others had already slowed down in their onslaught. Now they began melting, first their mighty blades, and then their gnarled bodies.
Some turned back into quietly breathing humans, resting on dirty white, trampled combat ground, after a terrible experience of being possessed by the white walkers.
And many more were already merged with old ice and snow still laying in the field. Scourged. Burned.
Vanishing or… falling asleep.
Until the next time.
The Lord of Light would not tell, would not reveal the truth of that matter to his humble servant. His creation, Melisandre included, was not worthy of all knowledge. He might show it to her in his great mercy after some time, if more sacrifices were presented to him. She swore inwardly that Volantene lords would burn with their children, one or two every day, until she knew for certain.
The dead Night's King was laid on a river boat, covered in dry leaves. Poor Last Hero, Azor Ahai, the Yi Ti unbeliever, who did not know his fate before it sloshed him in his face. For this Long Night, there were some points in time when either Stannis or Jon were fated to take his place and sleep with his future army, after restoring peace to the realm for thousands of years.
Yet this possible future did not come to pass. She could not even see if Stannis still existed, lost under the giant shadow she had grown and loosened on Westeros. The creature of darkness was now grieving for its homelands in the far East which it had never seen, roaming all the while in murderous anger over the inhospitable cliffs of the mountain clans.
And Jon looked wide awake and happy.
Will this come to pass? Will there finally be dawn?
Sometimes even Melisandre was tired of the dark, and her sacred flames could not entirely illuminate it.
Or was it the present she was witnessing?
She did not know what to make of her vision, and the fires did not tell.
Worse, the fires did not know.
The latter thought was galling. She lifted high her wrinkled chin and strove to chase it away.
The living strolled around the quieted field, embracing, kissing and crying like babes on each other's shoulders, admiring the return of those among their ranks who used to be possessed, not seeing that they were weakened and might not last long.
Jaime Lannister exclaimed in a high voice, almost like a boy, "It's gone! The ice plague is gone!"
He was clinging to his wife's long legs with fervour, avoiding her swollen belly, while she tousled his half-frozen golden hair.
"The gods are good, Jaime," Brienne whispered, sounding exhausted. But her guileless blue eyes shone brighter than the shy new dawn, she looked stronger than Melisandre would have ever thought possible, and happier than Melisandre had been when she had finally gotten her dragon.
Aegon was brushing the crumbling rests of the white walker's skin away from his body like dirt, grinning widely. Young. Beaming. His wife darted from the forest and helped him clean himself, kissing the blue grime off his face. Her dark hair mingled with his silver locks.
"I feel invulnerable now," he confessed quietly, "how could I succumb to any peril when I have lived through this?"
Aegon's wife, Jeyne Heddle had done more than that. She came back from being a wight: a sheer impossibility, recognised as such by the wise maesters and even more knowledgeable shadowbinders. Melisandre's vision was still clouded about the manner of her return.
Jeyne was among the first new arrivals who have emerged from the forest. Fighters who were late for the last battle, or simply smallfolk who survived another war and came to celebrate…
Victory.
The reality of it made Melisandre angry, irascible.
To set her growing fury aside, she continued to ponder why Aegon's peasant wife now also looked like a great lady. Jeyne Heddle did not possess the arcane arts of Asshai, yet no one would ever believe that she was born an innkeeper's daughter. Just another upstart, like little Melody.
The sky was pink and light-blue. The sun's face would soon emerge in the east, after too long absence.
The Others were gone, the living rejoicing.
Not so the wights, of course, never they.
Soon everyone began to understand that the departure of the ice monsters who had ordered them around could not help those misfortunate men, women and children to regain the life blood which had been spilled or drunk from their bodies. Fallen in snow, they were perishing slowly. The sun would burn them with its heat and bring peace to an existence knitted of agony.
The forest surrounding the lake became better visible now. Dark green. Ever-green. But not only.
Also white.
And auburn red.
The grove nearest to the lake had a face with a scornful, proud expression, Melisandre noted with contempt. She had not had enough time to burn all leering mouths of the northern demons to please the Lord of Light. She did not have to look to know that the eyes and the mouth were shut: the northern demons had turned away from their unworthy followers, abandoning them to their sort.
The bard suddenly dropped his lute, ending abruptly the tune he had been playing, letting it die out like winter.
"Look!" he breathed out in awe, sinking to his knees, that former King-beyond-the-Wall who should have been long dead according to the sacred fires, and who has seen enough atrocities for more than one lifetime.
So what is rattling you now? Melisandre thought disdainfully.
The heart tree opened its eyes and stared into her soul across the distance, through space and time.
Struck dumb, she could not meet its glare. It held a seriousness and knowledge of the past she would rather avoid contemplating, in fear that it would overburden and ruin even her ancient, many times burned soul. Tears gathered under her eyelids, but could not fall.
Unable to lift her gaze, she stared at the mouth of the tree, still closed tight.
Bearded men clad in branches and boiled leather approached immediately, falling to their knees, praying to the demons they called gods with immense gratitude, cleaning the blue blood from their blades in snow. Three wolves were with them too: a pack howling at the heart tree, the huge she-wolf and her two younger brothers. One of them, the slightly smaller, but extremely savage black one, looked exhausted from running from afar.
The last victorious howl came from much further afield. The great white beast appeared, bringing two tiny riders south, a very short, hooded, dishevelled woman and her suckling babe.
Ghost.
Jon the deadman had given his wolf a fitting name.
His mother now dismounted with her newborn babe in her arms, and headed to the heart tree. And also towards Rhaegar, dying in snow, a wight whose existence ended with the Long Night.
It might hurt more to know herself a widow for a second time, Melisandre considered calmly.
Jon started towards Lyanna, but Daenerys held him back. "Let her be. I know I would go and pray to a black demon for a miracle if you were hurt beyond help."
Jon looked embarrassed as he so often did, showing useless humbleness. "As I should have been, yet I am not," he frowned. "Others take me, but I still don't know why!" he finally exclaimed.
Why indeed? Melisandre seconded Jon in his doubts, and listened carefully to the continuation of his puzzled, boyish monologue.
"I died and I was Ghost," the young king hammered. "A warg or a skinchanger could have done so, some more and some less willingly: run and shelter from dying inside an animal. The Great Other" he hesitated, "I mean Azor Ahai, I saw him drinking my blood." he paused and continued pensively: "There wasn't much left for him though. The red trail was long behind my body, leading straight back to the Wall. Azor Ahai began to despair. Not finding the life he had sought in supposed dragonblood, he left me for worse than dead. Worthless, in his regard. A slave who would rise and follow his lead the next time the sun would set. The Ghost trembled with me, shocked at the crime. Soon Rhaegal appeared, frightening us some more, but instead of making us his dinner, he only healed the gashes on my empty body.
Afterwards, I woke in Hardhome, in my own skin. Ghost was nowhere to be seen for a while, and my memories felt no more true than a vivid nightmare.
Others take me, but I still don't know why I'm standing here next to you, Dany, with my blood all red and not black!
I've seen the dragons patch the most grievous injury with their breath, but never pouring blood into a man who has lost it all.
If they could do that, perhaps Aegon the Conqueror would still be among the living. The history of Westeros would have been different."
You would not exist, Melisandre thought, agreeing wholeheartedly with Jon.
But indeed, Jon was a cursed wight in her reckoning, due to his own reckless actions as Lord Commander. So how come that he was not? The wolf could indeed harbour his persona for a while, before it lost all humanity from running with a beast, and that was all.
"Wait for me here, my love," Dany told Jon, standing on tiptoes to kiss his cheek high, almost at the corner of one of his clouded black eyes. "I have some unfinished business to attend to." She sounded careless and infantile, but her eyes were old and full of enmity.
The madness of the Targaryens will not tardy.
"What?" he breathed out.
"Trust me," she replied, "I am still a girl who knows little and every day less of the ways of war. I won't be long. A few days at most."
In a blink of an eye, Jon was alone, gazing surreptitiously at his mother.
It seemed to Melisandre that he could not bear to look at his father.
Stone-faced Lyanna first bowed to her son as to a king, and only then gave him a look full of love. Her eyes smiled with pride for a moment, before regaining an almost dead expression. Then she knelt in front of the heart tree in silence like many other Northmen. In a while, she directed herself slowly towards fallen Rhaegar, with utmost dignity. Her steps turned wobbly just before she would reach her goal, and she let herself sink to the frozen ground next to her husband.
Her new babe gave a shriek in her arms.
"Her name should be Jenny, for Jenny of Oldstones," Rhaegar startled everyone by speaking in an ugly, broken voice that would never sing again. His eyes were black indigo, no longer unnatural darker blue. "She had foretold that I would never see my son," he looked at Jon and held his gaze. "Or my unborn daughter," he turned his eyes shyly towards the babe, and paused. "If I did not know how to die when my time came. I thought… I believed death was simple."
And it was, Melisandre agreed from Volantis. Dying, however, was a rather different business. Suffering and hurting until one was no more.
Without Daenerys to pull his puppet strings, Jon finally dared approach his parents and halted near them, mute like a tree, much like Lyanna in her pain.
"The North remembers," the Stark queen sounded as though she were passing a judgment on herself and her husband, and she was right, Melisandre knew.
Melisandre had seen it.
There was no forgetting or forgiving of certain sins in Lyanna's and Rhaegar's not so distant past. Songs had been written about them, and they were known to all, awaiting either harsh judgment or pious absolution by posterity.
"We should have known better, done better, my beloved," Lyanna claimed hoarsely.
All music at the lake stopped.
The eye of the sun emerged on the bright orange horizon which would morph into golden soon.
The living gathered around the dying scattered all over the battlefield and mourned. The night had been long, and every single one among those fortunate to be breathing with ease had loved ones among the former wights.
Melisandre would weep too: for human stupidity in showing compassion and grief.
Empathy served nothing, changed nothing. It only made men weak, easier to goad, frighten into obedience or enslave.
The world was and remained cruel.
Mance Rayder took up his lute again, and played for the dying, a thin, scattered lament of an old, dry human voice, drifting in faint, soundless wind.
The whistling of the winter gale was gone.
"Tris," Asha Greyjoy cried over a tall and handsome dying youth. In a bout of rage, she reacted as Melisandre might have if she was present in person: she took her axe and chopped at the demon heart tree, carving its closed mouth into an evil sneer, unafraid of its profound stare.
The Northmen seized her and tossed her away like a rag.
Lyanna stood up with indignation and gave her babe to Jon, who first almost dropped his sister from surprise, but then held firm in his new appointment as a wetnurse. His mother sprinted to the weirwood and the first act of northern justice in the making after the Long Night.
Her tiny, emaciated figure commanded authority. Her eyes remained haunted.
"We are not to fight each other on this day of dawn," she pronounced, touching the tree's damaged lips, bleeding sap. "Our ancestors have cut the faces on the trees. She has done nothing else."
"I am sorry," Asha said to no one in particular, and returned her eyes to Tris. "This is no one's fault except perhaps my own. He might have stayed on the Iron Islands if it were not for me. The demons could not swim..."
Tris' expression said he would not have stayed put, like most men. His eyes rested on his axe-loving girl before they would close forever, savouring the moment of being a dying man, no longer a wight whose mind had been overthrown. A man who knew that Asha grieved for him now that it was too late.
Women always loved to blame themselves for everything and nothing men did.
Melisandre had stopped with that long ago, learning the wisdom of not caring either way.
And she embraced the Lord.
Lord of Light, save us! For the night is still dark and full of terrors.
In Volantis, much more to the east, measured by the hourglass, a dark morning hour had already given way to the equally obscure night. The sun would rise in its splendour only on the next day. Melisandre looked through the great windows of her royal chambers and shivered from sudden cold.
Shuddering, she looked again into her fires, stoking it as lovers caressed each other. The warmth of R'hllor filled her heart once more.
Lyanna touched Rhaegar's silver hair with tiny hand dirty from weirwood sap. And where she did, the Ice Dragon's head shone in growing daylight instead of looking white and dead. Yet his eyes were closed, and his breathing weak.
Euron Greyjoy saw the tiny sign of life in Rhaegar, and began crawling to the heart tree with all strength left to him, against the fervent pleas of the beautiful wildling woman at his side. "Stop it," she said with quiet resignation. "The old gods will show no mercy to you."
"Why now not?" he persisted. "The seas have kept the Others on the shores of the Lands of Always Winter. Salty water was to them like f..f…"
Like fire to the wights. Melisandre thought impatiently. She ought to stop looking at the obvious: the inability of men to come to terms with their imminent, painful passing.
She had work to do in Volantis before the new day.
Euron's face was grey, his crawl interrupted at the thick white root just under the gaping, injured mouth. He could not continue. A drop of sap fell on his face, and he screamed, and rolled away from it. Then he cried bitter tears of a man condemned to die suffering. His wildling turned her back to the demon-tree. With her hand at her mouth, she sobbed. "I told you so. The reaving of our shores is remembered by the old gods."
"Weep not," Euron whispered with passion, finding his last force from seeing her, from hearing her voice, "I cannot bear to see the most beautiful woman in the world wasting her tears on me". He somehow grasped her hand and held it clumsily to his heart. Too weak for any other gesture of love or resistence, he stared at his headsman: the rising sun.
He was one-eyed now, while he used to have both eyes as a wight. Melisandre watched with amusement the iron captain's expression becoming dull and glassy in the pupil he had left.
Lyanna Stark kicked a snow drift with her boot, angry all of a sudden. The queen of northern demons calling them to order. "I painted a shield for your glory. For the old gods I believed in to guide my lance arm to do good. You were not always grim in my youth! You seemed to smile, even laugh at times. And I was yours. The Knight of the Laughing Tree, Howland had always teased me." Her anger abated as she spoke, remembering her late friend. "Not even he could have known that I was to adopt that noble title in the year of false spring and all misfortune that followed..." She closed her eyes and continued with grief, "| can't recall now how my old shield looked like. Maybe it was all a bad dream, and I will wake in my maiden room in Winterfell dreaming of yousting, and sweet, sad songs of wandering singers-" her voice broke and she had no more words. "And yet I still believe in you. For you have helped my son."
The tree studied her stubbornly as if it needed to see to the bottom of her heart.
Rhaegar's chest still moved. Lyanna did not notice, but his last look had also been for his children, after his wife.
The song resumed on the lake around the dead Azor Ahai. Nissa Nissa was laid in another boat, faring much like Rhaegar, not alive and not quite dead yet. Jon's little sister was with her, holding her hand. The faithful girl-servant of the northern demons and a cold-blooded murderer kept close to Stannis' bastard nephew whom Melisandre should have burnt if she had a chance, armed with a hammer and posing as the Sealord of Braavos.
Perhaps she could burn the boy still when he returned to the Titan of Braavos in his innocence.
A toddler boy walked to the heart tree out of nowhere, stood on one foot and fell. Then he stood upside down, on his arms, and toppled over. The corners of the weirwood mouth flattened with disapproval.
The boy flipped over, continuing to play.
"Monster, don't!" his mother, Gilly, called to him from the forest, arriving with the greasy youth, Jon's friend, now older, bearded, fatter than ever despite the cold, more of a maester, and less of a coward.
The boy continued with his mummery, ignoring his mother's reprimand.
A few Northmen laughed, not so the tree.
"Go on, son," Samwell Tarly encouraged him, "this is a happy day," he said, swallowing audibly his grief. Many of his friends in Night's Watch were wights and would not be seeing the dawn for long.
The godless dwarf approached the tree as well, and stood on all fours, allowing the boy to jump over him.
Prayers to the demons and laments for the dead slowly turned into laughter, talk, vivid songs and dance.
The flutes and cymbals were no longer mourning.
The heart tree's mouth curved with mischief and looked at Melisandre, making her feel as if she were going mad.
Then, the demon in it chuckled madly. Tears of joy sprang from its old eyes. The tree laughed, and laughed, and then laughed some more. And as it giggled and guffawed and chortled, a maelstrom of red veins became visible all through frozen ground: its roots bubbling with sap. Soon there were tiny streams of red trickling over the battlefield, touching every single dying wight.
Not only here, the tree had the grace to inform Melisandre in case she would have missed it. Everywhere in Westeros. The groves in the south were cut and burned, but the old blood and the caves remained.
Mance Rayder's lute couldn't stop trilling.
"Blood of the earth," giant voices intoned from outside of Melisandre's field of vision, with no ear for music or sense of rhythm, roaring deeply like thunder, thrumming like a quake.
"There's a pretty for you," the tall disfigured man who used to follow Rhaegar described the dissonant chant to a young woman beautiful like sin, clad only in auburn hair, red like leaves and lifeblood of those demon trees.
Jon's older sister.
"The song is beautiful, Sandor," the woman replied with enthusiasm, ignoring, or rather, not even hearing the hint of painful mockery in the man's voice. "It runs like a river, it flies like a bird."
The Hound made an ugly smile and had no heart to further contradict his wife.
The sun shone brightly over Westeros and the weirwood kept laughing.
Lyanna took Rhaegar's lifeless hand and gazed at his still handsome face with new hope.
Melisandre suffered a vision of what would come next. The accursed sap would permeate the suffering bodies and revive all those wights who had intact heads, and enough limbs and senses for continued existence after the curse that took them and enslaved them for a while.
There was only one death and it was final, there was no coming back from it to walk among the living.
Just like life was only one; a long, arduous path of growth and suffering.
The wights had never been quite dead.
Even Nissa Nissa and her child were alive. And when the people would ask Jon for her head, the life of an abomination for the sake of peace and safety in the realm, Jon would refuse it with anger, and threaten to take the heads of those who suggested it.
Angry and helpless, Melisandre screamed and stopped watching. There was no good reason for it, yet she felt defeated. And she had not seen the other dragons, she suddenly realised. Where were they? Both Jon and Jaime Lannister had been in the field-
"-Paying you a visit," Daenerys stated regally, standing in her chamber in Volantis in a grimy outfit, black, white and blue. Brave Danny Flint come to life. "Won't you offer us bread and salt?"
Melisandre turned around from the fire to face her visitor, and saw that Jon's queen had the mad courage to come alone. For a moment, she was ashamed to show her crone face to the silvery Valyrian beauty.
She wondered if it was the lame white dragon or the small green one who brought her so far, so fast.
Outside, Volantis was quiet and the dark, its moonless sky empty of stars, bats and beasts.
"Long time no see," Daenerys continued cheerfully.
Melisandre seized the sorcerous powders in her pockets but her visitor stayed her hand. "I wouldn't," she said, her voice cold, calm, calculated.
"I thank you, Melisandre of Asshai," she went on, haughty and distant, and every inch a madwoman. "For giving us the opportunity to learn what even Daenys Targaryen did not know when she wrote Signs and Portents. I pray for a long life so that I can complete her work for my children, and the children of my children."
Melisandre did not understand.
She tried to move, but she could not.
Petrified. Stiff. Held in place.
By what magic?
Lord of Light help me.
Daenerys eyed her from head to toe, and then she continued her speech with utmost tranquility, sounding like a learned, but poorly written book. "Valyria became doomed because it's precious mines were many and not all dragons were allowed to fly. Those skilled in finding ore were forced by their riders to stay underground forever. The men never learned that the ore was never exactly found. It was just that some dragons were more gifted or simply enjoyed more to use their breath for transforming bristle iron into the precious ore needed to forge Valyrian steel. As an unjust reward, they were condemned to become firewyrms. Time passed, and it was soon forgotten that they were once dragons. Underground, they kept growing and suffering in captivity, envying their winged brothers, still taking pride in making ore, but loathing the dragonlords who had obliged them to atrophy into snake-like creatures. Some died from sadness. But the others held firm and waited. They shortened the time because they still enjoyed making ore, regardless of the uses given to it by their greedy masters. And they grew for long years, hidden from sight."
Daenerys continued quizzically, "When dragons are large enough, they may break free for a short while. And even without wings they can breathe fire. They brought the doom to themselves, and to Valyria. A sad story, I know. Do you?"
Melisandre did not understand. The dragons were by nature a race of slaves. They had existed like fire mists over the seas of Valyria before shipwrecked humans helped them regain substance. The dragons became creatures, and found that they should cherish and obey their creators in return, endowing humans with a few drops of their own blood as a token of loyalty. The wretched men and women obtained the silver beauty from it, but, over the years, mishaps also happened, winged babies were born or miscarried, and death in childbed was more common for women with dragonblood than for the rest.
It was no wonder that, with such misplaced loyalty, sooner or later even people without a drop of the right blood succeeded in enslaving the beasts and putting them to good work. Some forged horns for that purpose and called themselves dragonlords. Melisandre did not need such cheap tricks.
She had her magic and Lord of Light.
But I still had to give everything to master the most imposing of those beasts since the time of Balerion the Great.
"Why are you telling me all this?" she asked Dany.
"It is appropriate to thank criminals for the good they did before passing judgment, don't you think?"
Melisandre laughed. "My person is protected." Stunned or not, she could not be harmed.
"Is it?" Daenerys wondered idly.
Then, faster than the snakes she used to call her children, Jon's queen stung her right palm with a sharp hairpin. "From the dragons and old gods as well, you think?"
Melisandres's old hand bled, a sight she had not seen in years, and she realised that the pin was made from dragonglass.
Obsidian.
"They are the demons!" she spat out.
"The demon is the creature you are serving. You may call him Lord of Light, but a deity of light would never demand pointless death and suffering. It comes too soon for most men as it is."
Melisandre prayed to the Lord who had always saved her because she had done his bidding.
A black face showed itself in her fires, holding no light in itself despite that it loved to be flattered as Lord of Light. The hungry fire demon demanded a new sacrifice.
Her own.
"But-" she tried to say she had been his most faithful servant so she should be spared.
Perhaps her dragon could burn him. She commanded Drogon to return and save her, his only mistress by the virtue of magic.
The fire demon morphed into a huge head of the black dragon and she released a breath of relief. R'hllor was gone.
Her dragon opened its maw.
Suddenly, she was no longer certain of anything. Terrible doubt and fear gnawed at her old body.
"Goodbye, Melisandre of Asshai," Daenerys announced very formally. "May you burn forever in seven hells."
The night sky of Volantis behind her window was suddenly full of dragons: there were foremost the other three who hatched, the white, the green and the small blue one, and then the whole flock of those which were somehow woken from hard rock, succeeding where she had failed, in Dragonstone.
Drogon bit her left arm off and chewed on it, and she began to scream.
Fire came next. It was churning, black, and her pain endless.
She wished she could turn back the time and knew it was too late. Her robes were already burned together with her powders.
She screamed in agony like Selyse Baratheon, in full knowledge that she might never stop.
Xxxx
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Xxxx
The Greenseer
He has lost forever the willowy river banks of his youth and cannot find them back.
No longer one with the water, he is now the air, the breeze, a dream of spring drifting over the lands. He could be at any place, in any time, tossed like a tiny, dry, yellow birch leaf which endured winter, to an unknown end.
There are no seven heavens for those who pray to the trees.
There is nothing after death, or rather, he does not know what there is. What he is. What he has become. From what he can grasp, he has no body at all, yet he is still partly himself, knowing himself, his past and his present.
And he still sees the uncertain future. Now much more clearly than before, yet not completely, never fully. For the future can always change: if the water runs differently, if the rain falls harder. If the kingfisher makes his nest under the swaying reeds.
If a man takes another turn than the one which would be expected from him.
He is the whisper of the wind in the trees. He is a ripple made by it on the water. He wishes he were the current in the beloved rivers of his home and still feel their grassy, green smell.
Sometimes he senses his wife nearby, in the same non-corporeal existence, but never his son Jojen, who must be lost to all gods, old and new, in the terrible War of Winter.
Until, one day, his vision clears for good. His wife could be next to him, he thinks, but can never be sure.
And it is then that he sees the sun, shining bright over the tall grey granite walls of Winterfell, melting the heavy snows.
The united Westerosi armies march towards the castle, approaching at a fast pace; numerous, under many banners.
And behind the castle's closed gates, the army of the stone Kings and Lords of Winter is still camped, unwilling to withdraw into the crypts with the advent of spring. Verily they refuse to return the castle to the scrawny lord in flesh who has come to claim it with his friends and allies, young Robert Stark, son of Robb, grandson of Ned Stark, Lyanna's little nephew. Riding next to his first cousin, once removed, King Jon Targaryen, First of His Name, proclaimed by some to be the second King Jon Stark of the North, the man who will always think of himself far and large as Jon Snow, and who is now flushing an embarrassed smile of well-deserved victory on his handsome face.
He carries no weapon.
And Jon Umber is carrying Ice for little Robb, under the auspices of Lady Dustin who seems to have her mind set on no longer being a widow in spring. Both ride under the watchful eye of Brynden Tully who is still not completely certain that no one present will hurt his precious great-nephew.
"Where is Dany?" Jon turns back and asks his dwarf advisor in a whisper. "Why is she not back with us yet?"
The king missing his queen, a man anxious to be reunited with the woman he thinks of as his, despite that every man or woman is and remains free, and cannot be possessed by another creature.
Except in the Long Night.
Which is now not to be for many years, and perhaps the evil in it is over for good, the greenseer knows not, but he hopes.
He hopes...
"Long distance flying is a tiresome business, Your Grace," Tyrion Stark answers cheerfully. "But fear not. White ravens from the Free City of Volantis have brought tidings of her imminent return. She shall dine with you in the castle of your ancestors, she says, without a fault."
"But the gates are closed," Robb remarks with a grave face.
The dead greenseer holds his breath with the wind, tousling Robb's hair. Gently, he breezes into the walls and bounces off hard stone: unhurt, unchanged, no longer alive, yet not quite dead. Existing, while not being.
"We knock on the door," Jon says with tenacity.
It is then that the stone captain of the dead finally commands the drawbridge to be lowered and the portcullis lifted, and he comes forth, over the still frozen moat and not a step further, accompanied by another statue of a king of old and two stone wolves. The captain's unruly, chiselled hair, floats with the wind: a masterpiece of a long dead stonemason who must have known the likeness of the first King in the North more than well.
Jon and Robb dismount.
Jon Stark greets Jon Snow and Robert Stark under the auspices of Torrhen who Kneeled embracing them as old friends. Then the three men and the boy nod only so slightly to each other, in an acknowledgment between equals. Ghost makes it to his master, sniffs the stone wolves and howls only once, towards the rising sun.
There is no danger here, and the small party of leaders slowly enters the castle, followed by as many people of Westeros as Winterfell can hold.
"Dragon, kinsman," it is Torrhen who breaks the ice, addressing Jon Snow. "You have honoured Aegon's promise," the statue almost smiles in granite disbelief. "And you escaped the peril lurking for the Last Hero in the dark of winter unscathed. This day is truly a joy to behold! It would wake us in the crypts if the Long Night had not taken care of it already."
"What do you mean?" Robb asks with the curiosity of a boy who has yet to know the world, its past and its present, before plunging into making his future.
"What did Aegon promise? And why would he make any promises to a lord who kneeled?" Jon asks with more calm, but equally eager to learn the truth of the past long gone now that he has a unique opportunity.
Torrhen sighs. "Word of Harrenhal had reached Winterfell before the dragons did. I was not afraid for myself, I think. Not excessively. I had a good life, I was neither old nor very young. But I saw no profit for my people in willingly embracing Black Harren's destiny.
Yet I did not know this young king riding a black dragon, and I expected I might have to die, regardless of my choices. Aegon might not have been pleased only with me bending the knee. He could have required a more visible show of his power for those who would survive me.
So I called all my banners and I was ready to fight or surrender, whatever would cost less lives, not knowing yet what I should choose.
The young king flew to meet me in my vanguard, alone on his dragon, fearless in his youth. He demanded allegiance with arrogance, but he also rained promises of defending our lands from all enemies even if they came from seven hells.
So I summoned the crannogmen from our ranks and asked them to play for my honoured guest a song of winter.
He listened about the Others led by their king drinking human blood and he paled. Even Balerion stopped roaring.
Yet Aegon stood by his oath. If the North was theirs, the dragons would come to defend it, even from demons from seven hells, he repeated. And he swore it by the old gods and the new.
Before such courage, my heart knelt, and so did my aging body. For I knew well that the North would need such a powerful ally as soon as the winds of winter decided to blow in earnest."
Torrhen yawns tiredly. "It is time to rest again," he says. "We tarried here for too long. The sun is rising. It is time. We must withdraw."
"Farewell," Jon Stark states, calls his stone wolf to himself and turns to leave.
"Wait!" Daenerys calls from the back, opening her way to her husband through the crowd, which now includes all Sand Snakes and granddaughters of Lord Hightower freshly arrived from the south, the latter dispatched in hope that the Targaryen king would take a second wife because his first is barren, only to find Daenerys with child. "Balerion asked something of you as well. Did he not?"
Jon Stark halts in his step and stares at her with haunted granite eyes tired of destiny.
"What's wrong with you?" Jon Snow half asks, half exclaims, offended to the core. "What are you?"
"Have you ever looked at yourself in a mirror?" Jon Stark parries. "My Danny Flint also looked like yours. Except that her hair was not silver but light gold, like the weak morning sun over the snow-laden fields and dark sentinels. With grey eyes which would only look lilac in bright daylight. But there was so little sun already when we met. The days were becoming evil and much shorter."
It is no secret for anyone that apart from the beard on Jon Stark's stony face, and the well-hidden indigo hue in Jon Snow's dark eyes, the two men look very much alike. Green sight is not required to establish the fact.
Torrhen clears his throat. "Perhaps I could explain."
Jon Stark looks down and up again, unabashed. "Do tell, by all means, if it pleases you, tell it truly and say it all," he commands. "You have my permission. I could not bring myself to repeat my follies. Word… a word is not far from deed, I have always found. I fear that I could not be responsible for my actions if I were to relive my life by telling it." His stone eyes carry a fear and an unspoken penance when he lets his gaze drift to a melting pile of snow.
Torrhen is quiet, but the whole Westeros listens.
Mance Rayder has already grabbed a parchment and a quill, nonplussed by the Sand Snakes who measure him up and even whisper to Tyene if she would borrow him for the night for them to test her man's worth. Yet his heart dances when his new love shakes her head firmly, amusing her own sisters in return. His son has gone to play with Monster and is nowhere to be seen. They will find him later, when he's hungry, no doubt.
Tyrion's wife, Tysha, an accomplished shadowbinder, uses the silence to call the large shadow from the wolfswood to herself, offering sanctuary and a ride home, to Asshai, one day, on the ship Jon will surely send to Yi Ti, with Nissa Nissa and her child. The monster shrinks in size and seeps willingly deep into the bottomless pockets of her dark blue robes, making them more dangerous than any fabricated magic powder.
Even the breeze which used to be lord of Greywater Watch has stopped blowing in order to hear better.
"Joramun, may he be one with the wind, was the true hero of the Long Night two ages of the world before the one which just ended," Torrhen finally begins with what everyone knows by now. The birds. The lizard-lions. The warm rivers of his home.
"Faced with certain defeat in his beloved lands beyond the Wall, mourning for the giants who had fought until the last one of them had fallen butchered by the Others, admiring their bravery, Joramun blew his horn in defiance and grief. The great sound had summoned the ancient brothers of the fallen, the ogres of earth, turning the odds.
And then, after a long battle, when he had finally heaved his enemy almost in two by a heavy dragonglass greatsword, with a savage battlecry on his lips, the mighty blow he had given had unexpectedly shred his own heart into threads, for he had immediately recognised the human face of the dying Night's King, emerging from under the white walker's skin.
Until that moment, Joramun had believed that his friend Jon Stark was slain by the Others when he went scouting outside Nightfort, before they could be reunited in battle.
Little did he know that his best friend and ally had embraced the curse of the while walker willingly, let them drink his blood, became their king and led them against men.
For it was not enough to kill the murderers and rapers of his brave Danny Flint by his hand, no… In his thirst for revenge Jon Stark had to ensure a fitting passing for certain brave men of the Night's Watch, a perishing too terrible to behold. It was easier than blaming himself for not taking her from the Wall as his wife as soon as they became lovers. For not stopping her mummery of posing as a man of the Night's Watch, a station she had first chosen not to suffer hunger as a poor urchin of the mountain clans, and later embraced for the love of scouting and adventure.
This was how Jon betrayed his friend, Joramun, with whom he had ridden to war against the enemy of the realm of men, and from whom he had learned all he knew about the Others and the wights. Where to find them. That they drank warm human blood. That they could resurrect corpses.
Unarmed, Jon had carried his dead love into the Haunted Forest on a winter night. And when the Others came he showed them his crown, the hard jewel of hammered bronze of the North. He swore he would lead them as one of them, and they took advantage of him, needing a man in their ranks to show them the way, to give them a purpose of conquest. He was the first one they took alive, but he would not be the only one from that day as you have seen. And before he allowed himself to be possessed, Jon asked the Others to let his love rise as a wight, against her will in the matter, I have to say, and finally became the ruler of the white walkers more than willingly,
And once he had massacred the crew of Nightfort and taken it for his high seat, he proclaimed himself openly as the Night's King, ruling the enemy of men from the Wall itself, not minding that in in his new condition he was killing the weak he had until that day protected as their king, and expanding his dominion.
Dying, Jon had told as much to Joramun and perhaps he would have asked for forgiveness if he could still speak, but he could not. His breath was leaving his body.
Joramun was struck by dull sorrow beyond measure, greater than the dreadful grief and righteous rage he felt over the fate of the giants. He began to play a sad melody, blowing gently into his horn, like wind, like silence. He had sung his best friend to sleep, and thus unwittingly avoided a hideous destiny of taking his place by a hair's breadth, by weakness of his human emotion.
Suffice to say that poor Azor Ahai was not so fortunate in the Long Night that followed. He soldiered on until it was too late, murdering first his own wife and then the first Night's King ever, only to take his place. The Others went to sleep peacefully knowing that their time would come again: they would wake under the leadership of a new ruler full of fresh hatred.
Danny Flint found peace.
But Jon Stark's spirit was condemned to wander restlessly over Westeros, unable to depart as the dead should, until one day he returned to the crypts of his home as a hundred times cursed creature, sentenced to command a stone army of dead Starks in the next Long Night on earth in order to pay for his sins.
You see, we can all return to the crypts to rest in peace with our rusting swords and stone wolves, until the next time when we may be bound to rise in order to defend our castle from accursed enemies, and we can't wander far from it.
But Jon shall never be one with the wind, never drift like a leaf. Never sense his brave Danny Flint in the fresh air of the beloved forests of his home.
Unless…"
"Unless the circle is now well and truly broken," Jon says with conviction.
Torrhen nods, falling into silence.
"Balerion understood more than you did at the time of his visit to Winterfell," Daenerys bridges the last steps that still separated her from Jon in short strides. The wings of her black dragon obscure the shy sun until he folds them, settling on the walls of Winterfell, quiet as an overgrown, sleepy cat. A flock of colourful dragons woken from stone follows his example. His big white and green brothers keep their distance, nestling in the wolfswood. The blue baby-dragon flies into the throng looking for her friends, the she-knight and her husband.
"You were right to hope that dragonfire could make a difference," she continued. "Dragons stir magic in the world while not possessing it. If stirred correctly, it might undo the evil committed by using the song of the earth to bring the Others into being. And Balerion wanted something in return. He could not speak to you in life for you had not a drop of dragonblood in you. He would not speak to Aegon. So he stuck his head into the crypts and asked for a favour in the secret speech of dragonkind from the cursed King Jon, who could hear him."
"That he did, Daenerys," Jon Stark confirms, finding his courtesies, "pardon me my behaviour whenever I see you. You-"
"I know," she cuts the stone lord short. "Jon looks like you too. But I am not her and he is not you. I am sorry."
Jon Snow looks to his wife as if he needs to hear that truth from her mouth if he is to believe it. "The Others were scourged by fire or cut down by dragonglass, and not just put to sleep," he proclaims. "And even if some of them wake many years from now in hidden places, their king put himself to the sword. They ought to be weakened. Who knows, they may even act differently. Time will tell," he finally adds with modesty untouched by kingship, turning back, smiling. , "if I am to believe the greenseer…"
The gods are good!
The dead greenseer becomes a flurry of winter gale still lingering under the sun, flabbergasted, understanding at last, finally being fully one with the wind where he had once been in love with the water. If he were rain, he would fall now, for his whole existence has just dissolved into tears he cannot shed. The wind wheezes and howls, and the breeze lingers, it weeps not, sweeping over the lands.
And tears of joy would they be, if he could let them fall. For he beholds the new greenseer, like his late father before him, carrying a white dragonbanner for the Ice Dragon and his son, the White Wolf, Jon Snow, black of hair like his mother, dear, sweet, wild Lyanna who had given up her direwolf dreams in childhood and chosen to fly instead with a white-headed eagle, searching for her destiny far away from the summer snows of her home.
A mustard coloured lizard-lion graces Jojen's green doublet, and his bright, leafy eyes steal themselves after a Southron knight who would have been an epitome of manly beauty, if he had not been scarred in some meaningless battle. Most of his injuries are now hidden from sight though, by a pretty armour covered in blue winter roses.
No, Jojen would not father children of his own, the greenseer understands at last, but he would live, and love, and teach the greenseer after him, who is yet to be born to the crannogs. He would be respected, loved and cherished.
"It is time to sleep, indeed, this time" Torrhen Stark yawns profoundly, and gives Jon Snow a granite glare. "But shall it be forever? Who is to say? Not even the greenseers see all ends."
Torrhen's sins have died with him, and when the dead withdraw to the crypts, he will fly with the wind, he and Ned Stark, and his son Robb, and all the other lords. Only Jon Stark will hold vigil, and never rest, waiting to summon Winterfell's defences, if another Long Night comes, and if the Others lure another unfortunate man to take the mantle of the Night's King in exchange of power. And if it never does, maybe one day he will have stood his watch for so long, that the gods will have mercy and let him have peace.
Daenerys doesn't give up. "What about Balerion's wish?"
"Honour it," Jon joins her, "whatever it may be."
"Do you not know?" Jon Stark asks quizzically. "Can't you tell as one of their riders? I only ever rode a horse," he adds, "and an ice spider," he chuckles darkly, caressing his stone wolf.
"Rhaegal is either unaware of the exact terms of your agreement or does not wish to pronounce them in human talk, and I… I am also a wolf who cannot grasp all intricacies of the speech of dragonkind," Jon admits. "But the dragons want it, whatever it is. And they want it fast."
"Are you certain, Jon Snow?" Jon Stark asks again. "For it may not be what you need or want to keep your crown or even your head on your shoulders."
"There has to be more to kingship than fear and power," Jon retorts with courage of young age, like a man shooting an arrow back at his attacker without thinking, acting on a reflex.
Drogon screams demandingly from the battlements of Winterfell.
"Is your queen certain?" Torrhen keeps asking.
Daenerys' face is cold ice. She answers knowingly. "Drogon begs me to allow for it. How can I deny the oldest son of mine?"
Jon Stark smirks.
Something akin to pain of understanding is born on Daenerys' face. Yet she says nothing and stands by her word.
Torrhen sighs a stone breath. "So be it. Rapidly. The wind is on the rise," he says with concern. "The sun is higher."
Jon Starks inhales deeply. "After many years we shall see, and because of you, Jon Snow, we may stand a chance," he sounds like a man rambling in fever. Faint, incredulous hope crosses his tortured stone forehead. "Shall I ever be one with the wind, and with you, my brave Danny Flint?"
The dead greenseer cannot answer the wretched creature dwelling among the living even if he knew what to say, and his son, the new greenseer, does not yet see through the green of the water into the trappings of death.
No one can see or know it all!
Jojen Reed brings forth the players among his people with cymbals, drums and flutes. A tune begins to play and the dead give it voice: the stone kings and lords begin to hum, descending back to their tombs, singing to the dragons as they pass by, one by one, first those that no one remembers. Torrhen is somewhere in the middle of a long line. Ned and Catelyn, the only woman among them who took the empty place made for Lyanna, and their son Robb, arrive at the end. Robb kisses his son, who endures the reunion stonily, without expressing the heartbreak he feels, in the courtyard of his castle.
Jon Stark is the last to enter and the only one to stay awake. Morphing into a young boy, the dark swallows him as he draws the crypt door shut from the inside.
Jon Snow looks after him, recognises the urchin who had helped him when he had ventured under the shadow in his search for Daenerys, but also the fearful presence he felt in the crypts every time he had entered them in his youth. And he knows that while it is he, Jon Snow who was strong enough in his head this time to beat this winter, it was Jon Stark who might have been giving him a helping hand, teaching him to live with his fears instead of being ruined by them, since he had learned how to walk.
Drogon roars and so do all the other dragons, with terror, and joy.
"They wished for freedom?"Jon half asks, half guesses.
Daenerys nods, immersed in her loss. "My children have left me. The bond is severed. There will be no more dragonriders."
"They won't burn us all now, will they?" Tyrion the Imp asks, and the Hound who is not far has the same question in his incredulous grey eyes.
Daenerys shrugs, and it is Lyanna's husband who answers with a broken voice, from a solitary place in the back of the throng where he has kept silent until now. "They will be gone. To Sothoryos. To find a land for themselves. Form a society. I am of the mind to sail in the same direction and found a colony of people tired of winter."
Lyanna stands next to him, with her new babe, a girl, Jenny, for Jenny of Oldstones, Rhaegar's favourite song.
"You will also leave me," Jon says cautiously, biting his lip.
"You ought to…" his mother's insecure reaction confirms his fears. "You and Daenerys must reign in your own right, free of the past and intrigues which are likely to start sooner if we stay in your Court. We should retire."
"She is right," Tyrion says, "there should be as little as possible pretenders with a good claim to the throne nearby. If we want peace. Varys will tell you the same thing if the plague did not kill him in King's Landing."
"Who's that?" Jon asks.
"A eunuch from the bastard Targaryen line, a Blackfyre," Rhaegar says.
"You would be wise to keep him on your Small Council," Tyrion advises. "It's better to have a man of his wits with you than against you, if you can help it."
Peace. Westeros has not known it for decades, the late greenseer ponders.
"I have much to learn, it seems," Jon says, and he wishes to, he truly does.
"That's why we are not leaving just yet," Lyanna adds decisively. "In a year or two, after our first grandchild is born."
"Not before we tell you everything you want to know," Rhaegar coughs, the beauty from his voice gone for good. "Or write it down in prose. I want no more songs, especially not to be sung about me. I may only sometimes want to hear the rhymes of false spring… and of Jenny of Oldstones."
"Leave that to singers, brother," the Hound tells Rhaegar, "they won't sit idle after the war."
"Will you pick up the high harp?" Tyrion teases his brother-in-law and earns a harsh though not too unfriendly tap on his twisted back.
"I forget that I have a baby brother now as well," the Hound says sardonically. "Shut up and go tend to my sister. Otherwise I will kill you before dinner is served. Best believe it."
"Sandor!" Sansa reprimands him. "That is most unkind!"
"There will be no need for violence, Lady Sansa," Tyrion bows deeply. "And if there would be, my lovely wife is more than able to chastise me herself." His mismatched eyes still after a lady in blue shadowbinder robes, who is chatting with Val the wildling and one-eyed Euron Greyjoy.
"Even my short-sighted and overly ambitious nephew Theon returned to life, just imagine," Euron says, rolling his only eye in an uncharacteristically friendly manner, "but even he no longer cares about the throne of Iron Islands, just about some girl he has been saving for most of the winter. She's called Jeyne, like Aegon's wife. Jeyne Poole. Maybe women called Jeyne drive honest men out of their mind, or all women in general have that effect-"
"Shut up," Val smacks him on the head, but he still continues with passion, giving her a loving look. "I think we will get rid of that chair since no one wants it, not even my lovely niece Asha. Every man and woman will again be just the captain of their own ship. What more can we wish for?"
The huge black dragon roars and twists his neck vehemently, and flies into the sunrise, to the east and then towards south, followed by his winged people. The baby blue she-dragon is the last one to go, after lingering like a pet on the vambrace of a she-knight, who will soon become a mother to the most beautiful twins on earth.
"They will do as they wish," Jon repeats loud the plans of the dragons resonating in his head. "They will rule themselves… they will no longer serve man."
"Unless they decide to bear one for a time of their choosing," Rhaegar says quietly. His voice is hoarse, but his whole figure radiates happiness, almost as if being alive makes him feel on fire. "There will be no more brother's war on account of the dominion of dragons," he continues, "no more conspiracy of maesters and fearful noblemen like Lord Hightower, no undue advantage among the rulers of men, no stone candles being lit or put out by force to either resurrect or kill the dragons."
"The slavery of the dragons to the men and women who helped them gain physical orm from the nebulae of fire above the Valyrian Sea, and who were given drops of dragonblood as a reward has come to an end," Daenerys whispers. "It is just."
"I can still hear their voices," she finally says. "At least that."
But not even the Mother of Dragons could command them.
And the dragons fly to the deserted, far end of Sothoryios, led by Drogon, to form a kingdom of their own in lands much too hot for human habitation.
It is said that Drogon sometimes returned and carried his Mother willingly, and Rhaegal Jon to see his parents. And Beth the she-dragon visited Tarth when she grew, and slept with twins who were born there, to Ser Jaime and his wife, acting like their overgrown blue kitten.
Only Viserion never returned, with his crippled wing,
He valued freedom above all else.
(And Beth. And the eggs she might bear one day for him to help her sit on.)
xxx
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xxx
The wind blows hard and carries the greenseer away like a leaf, further into the future.
Arya Stark receives Queenscrown north of Winterfell and empty lands adjacent to it. The abandoned fort is rebuilt for her into a small castle with the help of the giants. She and Gendry divide their time between the North and Braavos where he is still Sealord. And when they quarrel, they can spend some time apart, but never too long. Reunited, they can go together to Greywater Watch to see Bran, to Winterfell to Robb who is not so little anymore, or to Storm's End, to Rickon and Shireen Barathen. Once, when Arya is with child, she even travels to Westerlands to her sister Sansa, whose castle is full of flowers, and where the smallfolk had forgotten all about Ser Gregor Clegane and his unfortunate wives. (Her husband uses the opportunity to set sail to Sothoryos just then, to visit Rhaegar. And when he returns, he has a nephew, but also a daughter. "She'll be kind like her mother", he says full of love. "She'll be brave like her father," Sansa replies tenderly, melting into his kiss of homecoming, at long last).
Steadily one with the wind, the greenseer sees so many lives and so many new children, so many that he no longer knows who is born to whom and he surely forgets all names.
He sees immense happiness, but also future suffering, which so often go hand in hand.
Yet the hope always remains.
Several other moments stand out in the great maelstrom of time.
Xxxxx
Ten years later
Soon after the war ended, Stannis appeared on the Wall, alive and battered. Repenting for his sines, he asked to take the black. The peace in the realm dictated that the king and queen grant his wish like for most other noble criminals. Be that as it may, his daughter, Lady Shireen, refused to visit him on the Wall to make peace, burning his invitation letter, against the advice of her most faithful bannerman, Ser Davos Seaworth, that she forgive her father.
She might forgive, she said, but she would not see him or write to him.
In five years, Stannis rose to Lord Commander due to his exceptional command abilities.
And today he is killed by his brothers. The rest of the men of the Night's Watch protect the killers. Their identity will never be known, and they will never be punished, but possibly old Bowen Marsh is one of them.
Sam Tarly is elected new Lord Commander.
(It is common knowledge that he has a wife in all but name and an adopted son.)
There is mad hope among the men of the Night's Watch that he will be just in truth and not only in name.
Xxxxxx
Fifty years later
Daenerys, aged, very old, opens a door in a dark castle and sees her grandson as a man grown, silver of hair, with his Dornish wife, taking his newborn son from the cradle and repeating, or perhaps making history with his words: "He is the prince that was promised and his is the song of ice and fire."
This winter is longer than the previous one. The days are short, but not entirely gone. In the north, the ice stirs too soon in faraway places, but it could be different this time. Without a Night's King, who knows, the whilte walkers may yet learn to exist with the other races, build crystal fortresses and sing songs they find beautiful, even if no one else does. Or maybe another war will come, more dreadful than the one preceding it. Or nothing will happen now, but only after thousands of years.
Jon approaches his wife from a gloomy corridor and leads her by the hand to a balcony in Queenscrown so that they can watch the stars. Summer is beautiful in King's Landing and in Sothoryos, he has learned, but nothing beats the air in the North, just before the first snow. A cloud is hiding the Ice Dragon, but the wind will soon dissipate it.
"Do not worry, my love," he tells Daenerys about their grandchildren, or the world, or the two of them, still together, still happy after all the years. "One way or the other, it will be alright."
In one of the first days of the reign of King Jon and Queen Daenerys in King's Landing
"I think not," Rhaegar objects shyly, refusing an extended invitation to knight a boy, and, to his son Jon's unease, he gives a significant nod to Ser Jaime Lannister who has a baby in his arms. A girl. "It is your turn, I believe, Ser Jaime. You are a knight."
"I could not possibly," the lion objects, caught by surprise, "it would be ridiculous!"
"Why?" his wife asks, taking the child from him, and now she is holding both of their twins, a golden boy and girl, born shortly after the battle, when the dawn was still young.
The king and queen stay serious and silent.
"Go ahead," Jon finally says with unfeigned generosity, which surprises even himself, and the king's word is law in the land.
Ser Jaime tries his best to hide how humble he still feels before the boy he has wronged and ruined, and to appear as headstrong as ever. "Well then. Let it be done. You ought to go on one knee, Brandon Stark," he observes nonchalantly, as if he were not addressing another cripple, but a young man with full use of his abilities.
Jon's younger brother rolls out of his special saddle which keeps him ahorse. He ends up more lying than kneeling in front of a weirwood sapling planted in the Red Keep, waiting for the ceremony with the eagerness of a boy who always wanted to be a knight.
Jaime touches the boy's shoulders with Dark Sister, grappling with the greatsword in a tremendous effort to maintain the elegance of the noble gesture with his left arm.
Striving and succeeding, in part.
"Arise, Ser Brandon," he says evenly to the new knight he has just anointed, his lion's voice steady and calm in the peace of the southron godswood.
A lank boy has knelt, and an auburn-haired man rises, truly so, standing up on stick-thin legs that had not walked in years, except for a few excruciatingly painful moments which had made a difference between life and death for Ser Jaime, and Brandon himself, in one of the last and also unseen battles in the War of Winter.
Bran's forehead becomes sweaty from the effort of will to stay upright, now that he has been feeling his legs again for a few turns of the moon. But he still doesn't have enough muscles to sustain it.
Shaky, he grins, makes a step and falls face down into mud.
His brother Rickon and the greenseer's daughter are next to him in an instant, offering help.
Bran waves them gently away, possessed with stubborn determination of the Starks.
He will stand up once more and make another step. It will hurt. He will fall, bruise his knees, break his nose, many times over. It may take years of practice, but he will succeed.
One with the wind, the greenseer knows it for certain.
Bran Stark will walk again.
THE END
