THE LANDS OF ALWAYS WINTER - WESTEROS 16,000 BC
Death pealed away layers from the world. Sheets of time revealed within stretches of darkness, caressed from their slumber by the arrival of the dawn light. It started beyond the nameless ridges of ice, jagged and impossible against the Northern sky. A green hue. Aurora, rippling over its entirety like a ghost-banner without a bearer. It snapped silently, mirrored by the milkglass lake whose surface bore a face of solid metal, melted into a perfect sheet by the death throes of an ancient calamity. A star that strayed too close to the realm... An eye for the gods – unblinking. Its edges cried where glaciers died onto the steel, ending their vast lives as mounds of useless snow.
The Amethyst Empress watched her royal clothes turn to rag. Death had paid for a pale mimic of life yet she was not entirely free of her living soul. She remembered what it was to be nothing. Remembered the final breath and her blood running cold over the stone floor of Wyvern Keep. Remembered the fire die in her flesh and what it was to struggle for breath only to find her lungs limp inside their bone cage. Remembered the burn of her brother's blade. The hollow sound of gemstones bouncing across the ground and into the cracks...
Barefoot, she led the remainder of her devout creatures into the Northern extremity of the uncharted continent. Necromancers. They were all that remained of her royal court and the ship that wrecked upon the white shore months ago. The rest had perished in the cold. Their corpses were dragged across the ice by white bears who feasted then left the rest for the crows to pick at and flock to homes burrowed in the cliffs. The necromancers were half-dead themselves. A mixture of bone and magic that hissed, tugging thick hoods over their faces to keep out the eerie light.
Together they formed a hunting party, tracking the ice demons. After tearing the golden empire apart, they had retreated where no living thing could follow, encasing themselves in the frozen wasteland. Nested in the constant dark, they falsely believed themselves untouchable but she was not living and so the Empress pursued, determined to set them to pieces and finish what her brother had begun. To stop night, one had to be bold enough to chase the sun.
A red stain moved through the sky, falling endlessly toward the mountains. The Empress paused to watch it journey over the navy sheet. A bleeding star, they told her. A rarity in the heavens. The last remains of the second moon whose bones had fallen to the ground long ago. It was trapped, like everything else, in an endless cycle – born afresh every eight thousand years.
For a while the mountains collapsed into tides of ruined ice blocks. Marbled, ribbons of ash patterned them like veins. They were ever crashing against each other – growling and rearing up in war that had no purpose. Where the ground was soft, the sea sloshed beneath, flipping bergs the size of mountains with sighs that came from the world itself. The Empress and her death mongers scaled them one by one until a necromancer screeched in agony, lost its footing and found themselves sucked under a crevasse. The crunch of its corpse at the bottom woke a pale blue eye. Blinking, it shifted inside a filthy lair.
The tomb beneath the ice was part of a vast underworld of maze-like lava tubes – the veins of past fires. Some were monsters with mouths gaping large enough to swallow cities. Others were little more than cracks barely big enough for a Weirwood root to feel its way toward the warmth. A few passages stretched below the waters that bridged continents and emerged in forgotten forests on the Eastern shore. There they hung, mouths open to dripping forests and smoking waters.
Rustled from sleep, the ice dragon flexed the horned fan at the base of its skull. Its scales scraped against the stone as it dragged its belly along the ground. It pushed aside the frozen remains of tentacles, thick as a horse's girth. Bones rattled next to river stones. Feathers with bloodied quills were tossed about in the mess of death, white and black. The skulls of Children lay in their hundreds, shifting as snow. Somewhere, in the depths, water lapped at the tunnels where the Shivering Sea made inroads into the underworld.
After the maelstrom, The Lands of Always Winter calmed into a valley. Either side, ice walls rose hundreds of feet, snaking left and right like a river with no more than ten feet between its pale faces. There were seams of ash trapped in their façade. Line after line, several hands thick, every eight thousand years like the tolling of Asshai's brass bells. The ash crumbled at her touch and slipped into the wind.
At the end of this unholy passage, the Amethyst Empress found true North. The path finished in a crescent pit, carved by another, far larger fallen star. Bedrock, black and furious, peeked out in a morbid embrace of what she called the Glass Mountains for they had no stone to hold them up. Transparent and made entirely of ancient ice, they towered in a semi-circle, cutting the rest of the world from view. The aurora shone through its flanks like giant jellyfish bobbing in the Jade Sea, pulsating with unnatural light. Spikes of ice grew out from the ground in an eerie homage to a forest. The wind whistled around their sharp edges, singing songs of ice.
Finally, nestled in the wretched heart, was a shimmering city basked in demon-light.
It was unlike any construction of man. Built on a mount of black, oily rock risen from the impact crater, there were no faces, grotesques or animal forms of any kind fashioned across its surface. Instead it was bleak with nothing but the simplest of colonnades to hold its levels apart. Even they were sharp-edged, unfinished works of horror. Down one side was an unusual growth of silver that could have been the cousin of coral if it lived a different life. At the centre festered a pair of intertwined trees. Monstrosities, gnarled and indiscernible from one another, they towered over the landscape bleeding red and blue tears in the form of heart-shaped. Their roots of black and white circled the stone in a suffocating spiral that ended on the featureless ice. She had never seen living things take on such immensity. There was nothing to shadow them, not even the sweeping Curtain Figs in the jungle of Mossovy. One might imagine these were gods. Removed from Time's attrition. Separate from the rest of the desolate sheets of wandering ice.
Her necromancers dropped to their knees and prayed as one vile, hissing mass of cursed words. Their hoods fell back revealing hollow faces and the glean of bone protruding from sunken flesh. Above the Ironwood and Weirwood canopy stretched a tail of stars – the ceiling of her brother's church and how disarmingly it displayed its beauty here. Perfection elevated to the shame of the golden cities of the East. She grabbed the half-creatures by their cloaks – screamed an order and threw them forward. They waded into the expanse where daggers of ice created snow traps with powder as deep as their knees built up against the translucent spines. Hostile gusts of wind screamed around them while the city remained unmoved. Dead. The white, cursed things inside had walked over frozen seas to slaughter Essos then retreated to this extremity, thinking themselves safe. They used Winter itself as a battlement.
None of these 'other' nameless creatures emerged from their citadel. The Amethyst Empress was left standing on the final expanse in front of the silent city. There were corpses set under the ice with pieces poking through. Skeletal hands reached hopelessly where flesh ended at the wrist leaving bone exposed to the wind. A glint of armour, dulled by salt. Weapons broken and folded into the ice with blades made of sea-glass. She pulled a trident from the white hell. Three-pronged, it had pearls set into its hilt. Sad, lonely orbs that glistened like pieces of the moon. Green weed had been wrapped along its length but the prongs at the top were forged from unusual white milkglass like her brother's sword.
It was all evidence of a terrible battle had been fought upon the flat. The faces of the dead – those the ice preserved – were sunken with flat noses and slits for ears. Their hair was green like their skin and mottled with yellow spots. Their eyes, gone, left gaping sockets while their necks were adorned by shells and things from the sea. Flaps of skin webbed around their necks and, fish-like in appearance, they wrinkled like aeons of bark.
Staggered, the Empress stared at the vanished empire. These were the killing fields where the Deep Ones made their final stand. They did not vanish from the world by slinking, uncaring, into the sea – stealing women from the islands in the Shivering Sea. They were here, slaughtered and laying in pieces beneath a canopy of blind gods. Perhaps the city was theirs too, stolen by corrupted things...
It was here, at the curtain of the world that death and life, dawn and darkness, North and South – all lost their meaning. Blue eyes watched from the city. Children that had strayed too far from the forests and grown into men. They forgot their songs and worshipped the cold, scaled and frozen making patterns out of flesh instead of shell.
The Empress gripped the trident and set her eyes on the city. She would meet with these things and look upon the face of death and tear their filthy souls from their frozen bones.
The necromancers abandoned her.
They flocked to the cursed creatures, entranced by their powerful magic, pale faces and hissing language that could not be uttered by a living tongue as it danced with the wind and cracking ice. The Whitewalkers, as she came to know them, kept her foolish necromancers as pets. In time, their skin turned to ice as they taught the Whitewalkers forbidden spells from Asshai and drank Shade of the Evening. Nightmares visited their dreams. They would collapse one by one and writhe about as snakes. She tried to stop the butchery of the sacred words but they locked her in a pit beneath the twisting trees. In the darkness, the Empress climbed over black and white roots covered in sap that spilled over the ground. Instead of ice, she found rock and leaf. The decaying world forged heat, melted the ice and dripped from every surface in an unstructured symphony. There they kept her for eight thousand years, until the last of the necromancers perished and she was forgotten.
Dead. Alone. The Empress lay against the white wood of the Weirwood and let it enfold her. Its roots grew through her skin until her eyes opened and saw the world from the swaying branches of sister trees, scattered over the continent. One lived at the heart of Asshai. She looked down from its bowers at the empty plains and scorched mountains throwing fire from their lips. Rivers lit the darkness. Smoke smothered the fields of ghost grass. Her throne lay dismantled and the East, though victorious over the Northern horrors, was now a wasteland inhabited by the darkest of the city's creatures. Ash rained, thick as snow. The Empress howled at the horror. The Weirwood, bound to her, withered and died in that moment.
She closed her eyes and opened them again. Another Weirwood, young and strong, thriving among a hundred others in the depths of a swamp. Mist rose from the thick water of the Fever River. The vision flickered. Time faltered and suddenly the sapling surged into a tree, its roots swelled among the mangrove roots where a dragon, black as death, pawed its way through the mud. Its snout sniffed the wood. Nuzzled the bark. Dipped its head back – opened its throat and sang to the forest. Tears were beyond the Empress – instead crimson leaves tore from the branches and scattered over the beast.
A different tree with a view of the Whispering Sound. Barely alive, it clung to the escarpment, enduring salt and storm. There was nothing to see from its eyes except wandering ships and hungry gulls flocking to the surf.
Another, already ancient though the dawn had barely risen. Its heavy arms laid close to the ground, cracked by unnatural girth. Its sparse canopy waited for the ravens to fly in with the night and settle like a cloak. Children watched from their eyes, cawing at the world while the stone walls of a Keep were built behind. Warg Kings knelt in prayer, slicing the necks of forest things which they left to bleed into the hungry wood until even that turned black.
The bitter taste of blood touched her lips. The Empress flinched and the vision shifted. She was lost to time and place. The trees spoke to each other in a language beyond both. The next tree held a cave like hers where rows of entombed men had grown into the walls. Their eyes rolled back, white like the snow. A wolf growled and a raven startled from a dragon corpse. She closed her eyes and looked no more until a chill brushed her cheek.
Cliffs again but these were black, rising from an ice-locked bay. Across the grey water lay a sliver of white and on from that mountains which she recognised, glistening in the sun. This Weirwood flourished, opening its leaves to the months of drizzle that covered the land in carpets of moss. Pines grew thick and tall, swaying in the shallow earth full of boulders and cold streams. Bear Island was a piece of the world, snapped off and set adrift. Tiny, child-like creatures scampered through its forests with black-tipped spears and painted faces. Their chase stopped at the Weirwood. One approached, padding silently over the first flecks of snow, melting in the grass. The creature knelt at the base of the tree and withdrew a black blade. Smiling with a row of small, pointed teeth, the child burrowed into the tree's flesh. It cried tears from freshly carved eyes. The Empress screamed, clutching her eyes. Curses hit the wind, uttered from her lips. The green-fleshed child retreated from the Weirwood, leaving the gnarled wreck to live upon the cliff with only half a face.
The last of the trees was also the oldest. Squat, rotund and stunted it had taken root on a lava flow sheeted with ice. To its North lay a vast forest covered in snow and South, freezing mud for miles with sprouts of weed. Instead of looking from within the tree, she found herself standing before it, casting her gaze over its limbs. They were marred by scars. Axe marks. Grooves left by arrow heads. A stain of blood where something had been held against the trunk and slain in an act of violence. There were more Weirwoods trying to grow along the obsidian ridge. Wherever pools of ice collected, they thrust out of the stone, splitting it with their strong roots. None of them grew above her waist and rustled in the icy wind, shivering in a carpet of blood.
Then the Empress heard unfamiliar whispers. A man draped in wolf fur knelt at the foot of the tree. Dark hair, brown eyes and broad shoulders, larger than the men of the East, stooped in prayer. The first man that she had seen since landing on the frozen shore. Little more than a dream, the Empress followed the man through the eyes of the white trees. He travelled South. Over the flats of cooled lava into a thick forest of pines. Snow became rain. Ice turned to mud. The mountain range on the right rose in towering knives of dark grey with hot mist roaring up their flanks. Smoking, they shivered in the morning light then died away, trailing back into the earth as if they never were. The man waded through a river and fished the edge of a vast, green lake. The forest thickened and the trees filled with the howl of wolves. Ravens became song birds, hopping from branch to branch with bright notes. The Empress felt their feet press lightly on her skin.
At the heart of a valley, the man stopped and looked upon an ugly castle built of silver stone. Round and heavily supported by Ironwood scaffolding, Winterfell barely held back the godswood that brushed against its Eastern walls. Patches of blue leaves, deep like the seas around Asshai, hid among the green. All were overshadowed by the expanding canopy of red leaves – rusted in hue – strangling their way across the forest. Temporary structures were built in fields around the castle, most on the bank of a shallow lake that encircled half the fortress like a moat.
They've been here for a while, the Empress realised, then wondered how long she'd been trapped beneath the ice watching the world turn without a point of reference. Long enough for men to wander across the seas.
It was then that the man turned and looked directly at her. The Empress froze, believing herself free of her prison for a fraction of a moment. Then she heard the crunch of leaf litter behind and realised that the man was nodding at his brother – another enormous creature with a trailing black beard and crown of wood. A king, they called him, of Winter.
For years, the Empress's mind lingered in the godwood, watching from the branches as snow crept over the surrounding mountains and tumbled down over the fledging castle. The frosts thickened until one year the swamp grass vanished and the edges of the lake turned white. These men had wolves as large as horses by their side with thick fur and cruel eyes that seemed to see more than prey upon the ice. A few tilted their enormous heads toward the Weirwood and growled. Other men came out of the forests. Warg kings. River kings. Sand kings. Storm kings. Then came the Children. They all feared the rising tide of snow.
One afternoon the world shook. It shook in Winterfell and in the cavern beneath the frozen city. It shook in every corner of the Western continent. It shook awake things best left to slumber.
THE LANDS OF ALWAYS WINTER - WESTEROS 8,000 BC
The Amethyst Empress gasped. Eyes open, she lunged forward – tearing her flesh away from the roots that had taken hold of her body. Weirwoods fed off the living so their hold on the dead was feeble. The cavern quivered around her, shivering underfoot. She wondered if there were giants stirring deep below – creatures that should never wake rolling onto their sides, flexing claws, sniffing the rank air and twitching their limbs. Were they sightless fireworms or something worse… Something made of ice that the East had never found? It was always said that the oldest things are in the Western waters, beyond the eye of the golden city. There, beneath the ocean mist, they whispered to each other.
Dust rained from above. Light splayed through the darkness, streaming through cracks in the ceiling surrounding the Ironwood's trunk. Unlike its sibling, this tree laid benign with footholds and roughened bark, enough that she could climb toward the splinters of light.
The ice floor of the palace was shattered in several places. She pounded on its underside, beating her fist against the largest crack until pieces collapsed inwards, raining down into the pit. The Empress turned her head as large chunks followed – sailing through the abyss before destroying themselves on the ground. A hole. She reached through, hands curling around the sharp edge. Free, she hauled her body out of the pit and emerged on what remained of the fragile palace floor. It groaned ominously at her weight, threatening to shatter as she crept forward but the weight of its magic held the surface together. The vast chamber of the frigid palace was made of blue ice that towered like one of the temples in Asshai, the apex of its ceiling suffocated of light. Around the walls, weak fire burned inside milkglass holds that clutched the blue flames in twisted claws. She stumbled and the floor cracked again. The walls were not solely construct of ice. There were branches from both trees knit within, holding the structure together that played as phantom shadows and ghosts of veins.
Except for her, the city was abandoned...
The Empress moved to the doors which were each twelve feet tall – one side black, the other white. She opened them with a light press of her palm. They shifted weightless on silver hinges. Outside, a watery sun hung low, skimming the horizon as if considering vanishing entirely below its quivering lip. It lived briefly in a shallow arc. The Glass Mountains had weathered away, sinking while fresh glaciers smothered what remained. Chasms of time had passed and yet the trident that she'd brandished against the ice creatures was where she'd left it, abandoned on the ground beside the door. These things, whatever they were, barely lived in their own city.
She took the weapon and stepped into the snow. There was a cloud of Northern mist shifting through the valley – thick and desperate. It covered the world like a cloak. The Others. It had to be them, headed South toward the people she'd seen in her vision.
Months died before the Empress caught up to the demons. They were slowed by a collapsing glacier. Filthy and grey, it drowned many hundreds of the dead things the Whitewalkers had resurrected with magic taught by the necromancers.
The Empress watched the resurrected move as a single slave army, one without a will or thought of its own. These abominations had blue eyes – or no eyes at all, slime for flesh and exposed bone with sinew hanging like loose threads. Most were lifted from the field of war outside the sleeping city. Their fish-like heads and webbed hands were ill-suited to the task of violence and quickly found themselves replaced by wild looking men that lived in the Frost Fangs. Large, terrifying brutes they already wore armour made from the remains of their enemies. The Whitewalkers even turned their savaged horses which they mounted. Others took spiders and white bears.
She watched them face off against a village pitched on a narrow strip of rock backed by a cliff. It laid on the water like a discarded obsidian blade while the river smoked, heated from beneath as it twisted in front of the village in a sapphire serpent.
The Whitewalkers sent their dead things in first, wading through the water and out onto the other side. They were immediately struck to pieces by axe-wielding men – their skulls crushed but even the pieces tried to fight on. Fingers grasping at arrow heads. Leg bones rolling over the black rocks... Only fire broke the spells placed upon their corpses. Screams filled the air, hollow and rattling in their dead throats.
When the Whitewalkers tired of watching the slaughter, they headed to the bank of the Milkwater River. It froze beneath their feet, forming a bridge of ice which they crossed in pairs. They held seven foot – double ended spears made of ice which shattered the brittle steel weapons upon the softest touch. All died and were raised again. The army continued. The Empress followed.
So it was, again and again. A song of massacre and resurrection.
The army of the dead marched into a sprawling forest with roots deep in the warmth of the world. Fresh snowfalls hung on the pines. Limbs, too heavy, snapped and sent showers of white over the walking corpses. Here Weirwood grew wild. Tiny and narrow, they tangled in the bigger trees like vines strangling their way toward the light or growing as parasites from forked pine limb and sending down their roots in gnarled fingers. Ravens with many faces hopped from limb to limb, tilting their heads curiously screaming at one another. One had an extra eye set in the centre of its head. All three blinked. The Empress kept to the shadows, trailing the army. The occasional wolf sniffed at her but they soon whimpered at her unusual scent and scampered away.
There were other faces in the forest. The small, child-like creatures from her dreams in the cavern haunted it in packs. They kept their distance from the Whitewalkers but were unsurprised by their presence. Eventually one was found impaled on a man's hunting trap – a roughly cut spike through its muscled thigh. It struggled in the frost-covered leaves, screaming in high pitched, wretched calls. Its blood stained the snow beneath as it looked on in confusion at the walking corpses whose eyes glowed in the shadows of the forest. This was not their magic. Three Whitewalkers approached. The ground froze wherever they stood. Mist settled, pressing its cold onto the world. The Empress hid herself in a thicket to watch along with the curious birds. The child of the forest was pulled, alive, limb from limb – socket by socket and hung through the trees in patterns that dripped blood into the snow. The head, with its vacant eyes was left in the centre of the display. A solitary crow landed in its hair, leaned down and picked at the meat on its face. That night all the birds left their perches and flew South to spread whispers of the coming Winter. Their screams scattered until even the white ravens joined the fray of feathers in the sky.
Everything was different after the butchering. Fires were lit inside the forest by the Children. Their flames rose high, fuelled by oil-rich trees that exploded in plumes of orange light. Sparks followed, dancing as storms on the evening sky. Where they fell to earth, more fires caught and soon the entire forest ahead thickened with smoke. The heat pressed against the dead army, holding them back. Their creatures, risen from the grave, perished if they strayed to close and collapsed in useless piles of bone.
However fierce the fires burned, they could not climb the flanks of the Frost Fangs and so the army veered right and crawled onto the exposed stone. They passed onto the Western side of the continent where there were no forests or trees of any kind. Ice, simple and clean, spread all the way to the Frozen Shore and beyond that, a grey bay of water dotted with bergs. Where the ice ended, the black rocks began. Worn smooth, they were used by seals to bask in the failing light. The stench and sound of the sea mixed with that of rattling bone and swords dragged along the rock.
Across the bay sat an island. Wet, small and cursed with tall, unstable cliffs it offered precious little to the fishermen that dragged nets through the mess of waves. Sea fog clustered around its flanks, covering all but the highest jagged mountain from view. Bear Island with its smoking peak and hard people.
The Empress stood in the water. Pieces of seaweed gathered at her ankles as the tide came in and out. Fierce smoke leaked from the mountains on their left but their swollen bellies of fire were not enough to stop the procession of cold. The Amethyst Empress could do nothing as a layer of ice formed on the surface of the bay. They bring the Winter, she thought, with their magic. Without words, the Whitewalkers summoned an ancient god and it was more than happy to feed their will. A god without a name. What kind of malice, she wondered, was happy to let the world die?
In one month the Bay of Ice froze solid, dotted with monstrous chunks of ice and waves captured mid-break. All two thousand creatures and their undead walked across the surface, overwhelming the tiny island. White bears were slaughtered and re-born. The fishermen, almost all killed by the cold inside their homes, were pulled from dateless-sleep to march.
The Whitewalkers lined the beach and eyed a nearby cove opposite, across the water where the sea ended in uneven sandstone cliffs. She watched as their faces blushed in the afternoon light.
The slaughter began in earnest upon these Southern shores. It started with villages, dotted along the water who took up sword against the creatures only to be brushed aside and fed upon by starved dogs. They were left to rot for days, sometimes weeks before the Whitewalkers raised them again. These terrifying additions, with faces missing and blood-stained clothes, haunted the nightmares of any man quick enough to run.
On the other side of the Wolfswood, the Empress found the small stone castle and its godswood from her vision. An army was growing in its belly, fed by the surrounding villages that rushed to its walls for safety against the coming wall of white cloud. The king with the wooden crown stalked along the narrow walls, surveying the clutter of camps and freezing mud that formed under the feet of horses. She hid herself in the thickest part of the godswood. Aware of her alarming visage, she stole a cloak and covered the remains of her silver rags.
The king never came. He kept to his battlements without a moment spared for the gods. It was his brother that eventually picked his way through the forest and knelt in front of the Weirwood – sword across his lap. A warm pool of water steamed nearby where it bubbled from the depths of the world. She'd expected him to wail hopeless platitudes but the man simply closed his eyes and pressed his hand to the white bark. The face beneath his hand was fresh.
The Stark brother used the tree as an eye to the world. He communed with it, seeing as she did. Eyes rolled back like a pair of moons, his lips rambled unintelligible horrors. While he was distracted, the Empress inched out of the shadows, sinking into the thick snow with bare feet. She lingered beside the Weirwood's trunk. In this frame of time, seeing him with her own eyes, she noticed that he was young. Twenty – no more but weathered by the brutal landscape. His beard was as thick as the wolf fur draped across his shoulders. There were no adornments of any kind around his neck or pierced through his flesh except for a thick leather belt with a heavyset buckle. The heart of his eyes were deep brown and mottled with flecks of amber. It was only while staring into their fiery depths that she realised he had slipped from his vision and spotted her hiding under the Weirwood's bowed limb.
Brandon Stark came to the forest every night once the torches had been lit. He used one to fight his way through the darkness. At the entrance to the freshly dug crypts, he met the silver woman. Ghost-like, she waited for him, shrouded by mist. Her flesh took on the light of the moon. Her eyes shone violet and though she spoke often he could not understand the meaning of her foreign words. They hissed, like ice or the rustle of leaves. It was the Empress who learned the Stark's ways and eventually the beginnings of their primitive language. Months passed as she carved runes into the crypt walls. Then Winter fell. Ice sheets slid down from the mountains and wrapped around the castle. The godswood vanished until only the heated pool remained at the bottom of an ice well, churning steam from its solitary grey eye. Death walked over the mountains and The Wars began. Killings, she thought, as these people had no armies to compare to those that lined the hills of Asshai. These people fought among the cover of the forests and killed what they could, whenever they could. The Empress set fire to their bodies with a few whispered words so that the dead could never rise to hold a sword again. The men did the same, building great pyres in the night. They huddled under the glow with the ash of their brothers falling onto their faces. Even this, they blessed. Death was a door which they past beyond, never to open. It was something to worship. An end to their misery...
From the sands in the South came a silver-skinned warrior with white hair, purple eyes, a red fox-fur cloak and fine cut features exactly like hers. Within him flowed the blood of the Dawn kings. A remnant of her fallen empire. This stranger wielded her brother's sword but her blood and its sickly black stone hilt were both missing and so too the malice it fed.
They called this man, The Sword of the Morning. When he held the white blade aloft, men followed without question or fear. The King of Winter granted him leave to take a ranging party North where he vanished for long weeks as the snows fell harder and the crops failed in the ice-locked ground. The starving died in their beds and rose, soulless to wander the white drifts. Many of these walking corpses fell into the river and slid beneath the water. Others lined the Grey Cliffs and stared into nowhere. Mothers threw their children, alive and screaming into the pyres – then followed rather than risk waking as one of them.
The nights dragged their feet. The Empress sat by one of the great pyres and told the Stark brother stories of the Winters that had come before in a land far away. It was a cycle, she said, one that crept toward an end. Every time the ice creatures came they took another piece of civilisation from the world. It was her fault they had an army of dead things to do their bidding. She had visited this fresh hell upon these people and begged the Stark brother to let her help. He could not bear the pale woman's tearful supplication so he took her down into the crypts that he'd commissioned. The Empress walked their narrow halls. They were empty and cavernous save for a few lonely statues that held watch over the darkness.
When she asked who the statues belonged to, Bran knelt in front of them and laid a single sprig of Weirwood on the ground. "My mother," he replied, with heavy eyes, "and my two sons."
The Empress rested her cold hand upon his shoulder. He leaned his head toward her flesh. There they stayed for a moment, in the depths of the Winterfell crypts.
Eventually the Empress left Bran's side. She roamed the hallways, placing old spells upon Winterfell, infusing its grey rock with star-magic. Forbidden, it turned the stone vaults into a sickly black with oil sweating from their surface. Their poisoned veneer pushed the ice back, melting whatever it touched. Moss sprung into life, feasting as grass after the fire.
The Stark King, with his wooden crown, saw this and thought her to be one of the demons. For weeks he watched the Empress pray to the stars and sleep outside in the godswood. One morning he took her by the neck and held her against a wall – her toes grazing the snow as she struggled. The King ripped open her gown and revealed the knife wound in her stomach.
'Dead!' The King pressed his hand into the black flesh. 'You are one of Them! They are your creatures!'
Bran grabbed the King by his furs and pulled him off the Empress. They fell to the floor as a brawling pair, rolling over and over with fists smashing against skin. Bran fought his brother until they were separated by guards that came flooding into the crypts. Laying a hand on the King was death but as brothers they had been fond of each other, all through life, so the King banished them both from the walls of Winterfell.
They headed North, in search of the Southerner and his ranging party who had been missing for more than a month.
They sat upon the snow with a pack of men loyal to Bran. Pitched tents rippled in the howl of the wind while their fires struggled to raise enough heat to cook a deer. The immensity of the North overwhelmed them. They were barely more than river stones, caught in the ebb of a current.
The Empress crouched opposite her Stark, watching the way he whispered loving words to his steel blade. A great big thing, it had darkness in its steel. Its handle was made for an even larger hand than his and had suffered many brutal blows during its time. The hilt, carved into a poor likeness of a wolf, was nothing to the ornate pummels from her city. Even the lowliest of her guards were more elegantly dressed than these foreign kings. Poverty did not diminish their ferocity. If anything, it cut away everything except the truth. What need did a man have of jewels when the currency of his land was blood? He has a sword sheathed at his waist and scars to mark his conquests.
"Are they dead?" Bran asked, eyes toward the North. "You see things you should not. Have you seen their fate?"
The Empress did not know.
Mountains lounged to their left creating enormous wind traps that had begun to fill with snow. Glaciers curled through their valleys, fresh and white, snapping into pieces like twigs leaving a constant growl upon the air. Far off to the right lay another range, this one short, confined to an island but impossibly high and grey – like steel. Two of its peaks made trails of white steam which joined the clouds in their endless passage South. The winds all came from the freezing North and the sky offered nothing but snow except on rare days like this where the realms of these strange, early men saw the heavens as such a sharp and perfect blue one might think it was a second sea and the gods – all the same.
They'd made their camp in a wasteland. Sulphur left a yellow stain on the edge of a small river that fanned out in innumerable tributaries, like a jungle canopy laid flat. Its source was a pool of bubbling water and mud where the ground was too hot to approach. Passing snowfalls melted into steam before they touched the ground. Their cluster of tents lay at the fringes – close enough to enjoy the warmth.
All eyes looked North, scouring the ice beyond for something, any flicker of life.
"I see him, out there in the snow drifts..." The Amethyst Empress whispered, as she lay on the black ground. She could neither feel the warmth beneath or the cold wind across her face. "He walks alone. Searches the forests for Children but all he finds are sapphire eyes and black feathers."
Bran tossed another slab of wood into the pitiful fire they'd built in the hollow of the rock. The flames, too weak to dance, wove around the fresh offering and pealed away its bark creating large flakes of white-tipped ash. "Men should build a wall here," he breathed. "Ground is flat. The seas come in on both sides. I can see it, if I close my eyes. A great big wall of ice."
"And who could build such a thing?" She whispered back. Layered in local cloth, she looked nearly alive – save for her eyes. There had always been an ungodly light inside them.
"I could." Bran set a cup of melt-water by her side which he knew she would not drink. "That is what I do – I build things," he explained. "Before the war I travelled South, all the way to the Whispering Sound while my brother raised wolves. I see things in my dreams. Imagined buildings of immensity and beauty. So I visited the blackened ruins of an ancient structure with a view of the Sunset Sea and commissioned a light house to rise from the corpse of the old building. When it is finished, it'll be the first thing to see the rising sun and the last to watch it set."
"Why build such a thing?"
"Why do anything?" Bran countered. "Before my time is spent, I wish to leave a mark upon the realm. One that isn't shaded red. Something that belongs to me and not my brother. His legacy is our name – may his children carry it for all of time for mine are dead." There was no lingering anger. Bran spoke of his King with warmth. "I like to imagine the lighthouse growing old in the world, its limestone cracking – seagulls making roosts of the windows. Let the moss creep and the rain tear pieces of the mortar out of place. I'll still be able to see the light from its fire all the way from here." He grinned. Perhaps that was a fantasy. "If I build this wall it will not be a thing of beauty. No. It will exist as majesty. An indefinable thing that men will crawl to in years a thousand past and ask if man could make such a thing or if the gods themselves tore it from the ground."
The Empress looked through a gap in the tent to the endless expanse of nothing where this wall might stand. "And how will you build it? The mountains are too far to mine. You'll never drag the stone across the ice."
"Like any other thing." Bran replied. "From one stone until the last." Then, a smirk barely visible under his thick beard. "Except I shall use ice instead of stone. Your eyes do not believe me."
"I believe your will." She assured him. "And I believe your dreams are real. I have dreams myself but they brim with horror, not hope." This Stark had the same veracity of mind as her brother. A thought to them was little more than a dare upon the gods.
In the morning, the winds had died away and the Empress walked across the ice until she came to the exposed flats of black rock, swept clean. Though she could not feel anything, she knew they must be warm to the touch. They looked like slag, bled out from the side of a fire mountain. She searched the landscape for an offending peak but found none close enough to blame. This place was nothing to the seas of fire she had seen in the Southernmost edges of the world where they lapped against each other as vast oceans.
Bran's encampments were being consumed by the storms which gathered strength every night and blew afresh. Ice cut like glass. Support beams snapped and had to be lashed together. Still, no sign of the lost hero and his party. There was nothing in their appearance that gave the Empress hope. How could such creatures, she asked, stand against the terror of death? Were their souls resolute to the value of a hundred Asshai'i? If this builder's words were true, she could not see her way to their end.
The gaps of blue in the clouds vanished and were replaced by an eternal bank of grey. That was the last of the sun. It formed a roof over the world that dulled the sunlight during day and hid the moon and stars by night. The temperature dropped. Grey snow fell. Bran took a fistful of it in hand. 'Ash...' he whispered. Ash as far as they eye could see. It poisoned their water and killed off the last of their beasts whose final days were spent on their sides, moaning and bloated.
The camp survived on fish plucked from holes in ice where a great lake still had warm waters. The Empress told the men stories of the Eastern realm and the terrible violence that had been visited on them by the gods – of mountains that exploded with fire and the dragons that made their nests inside the heat. There were dragons in the North, the men had told her in reply. White ones that marauded over the Shivering Sea and breathed ice and death upon the fisher folk.
Sat around the fire during one of the long nights, the Empress whispered, "We live in a realm of ignorance, moored with the dark seas lapping to infinity on all sides. It was never meant that we should cut ourselves loose and voyage so far into the abyss of gods."
"Why did you teach these ice demons to raise the dead?" Bran asked, as darkness picked at their fire.
"I did not teach them," the Empress replied, "but I brought those who did. The necromancers dreamed of conquering death. It is what we encouraged in our old city where fear of sinking into the final waters drove us to pursue eternity. The Whitewalkers breathed that nightmare. In their foolish quest for validation, the necromancers hastened death upon the whole world – the very opposite of their dream. Death begets death, Bran Stark, and so too must I die when this war is done. It is not natural for us to linger past our time."
"The Children do..." Bran replied. "They live in the forests and sleep away the ages with the giants. The old songs say that they were the first to lay eyes upon the frozen ones." He hesitated, as the Empress became distracted watching a crow hop about on the bloodied snow where one of the horses had died. It pecked at the ice, chipping away bits of pink snow. "Why do you watch the ravens?"
For a long time the Empress did not reply. She waited for the bird to feast and fly off into the darkness.
"A very long time ago there was an Emperor in our land – they called him the Pearl Emperor on account of a pile of chests he found washed up on a beach at the edge of the Shivering Sea – frosted over and thick with barnacles. They were filthy things with rotted iron holds, leather made from Seal and inscriptions no one could decipher. Inside were pearls – black and white – like sand."
"A fortune..." Whispered Bran.
"A fortune's fortune…" She agreed. "So the old songs go, war forced his rule into the South and our great city was rebuilt in the depths of the jungle where rock monoliths rose hundreds of feet and bone trees wrapped root nets around their rocky throats. There were things in that jungle that the Emperor was not prepared for. People that had lived among the trees with their own gods. Monsters of god that preyed upon the Emperor's army. We learned in those first, fearsome decades, that when you take our bows, our spears, our swords and our fire – we slip down the pegs of life's ladder. We become lowly mice. Fodder and meat – mauled and chewed. Hunted in the darkness and dragged from our unstable homes with jaws sinking into our arms. That memory… We know what it feels like to linger on the line where the sun sets. We sing songs to blind us but as the edge approaches a madness overtakes – the kind of fear heard animals get when they see the butcher's knife and rear at the glint."
"And the crows?"
"The reason for the war was written on the palace walls. It was kept secret except from those with the burden of reign. Whenever a new city went up, those walls were copied. The truth was a heavy burden but the Pearl Emperor was the first called upon to test the old words. You must understand, Stark, our Emperors are gods made flesh. We cannot die in the eyes of man and so we sleep or leave or vanish into the winds..."
"But you do die..." He whispered, looking upon her pale face.
"Our first, ancient Emperor did not return to his chariot in the stars. They never called him, The Lion of Night, that came after he and his queen discovered death." When she closed her eyes, the Empress could see those distant skies aflame. "The first falling star landed over the curve of our Northern horizon. It woke these ice creatures from their lairs beneath the snow. The sky was not done. Fire rained in tails of red and green while a battle mounted. Before the Emperor and Empress left to join the front lines they told their son and heir what was coming from beyond the night."
"The Pearl Emperor..."
She nodded. "He knew exactly what he was doing when he headed South and built fortifications on the Eastern edge of the empire. He narrowed the assault to a single front in the North and returned, thousands of years later, to meet the ice demons in a calamity of violence and magic. He died right there, washed upon upon the same beach where he found the pearl chests with blocks of ice and ash falling like snow." She paused. There was ash tumbling around them now. "'Winter is coming for us again,' he pulled his son down by his armour. After that we worshipped the stars, the sun, fire and all the things that darkness hates but we never forgot the old Emperor's words. Winter is coming. Winter is coming… And it did. On the first day of my reign, the snows began and I knew They had returned."
"...but the birds…?" Stark asked again. It was as if she would not say.
Indeed the Empress fixed her eyes on the fire. "When we were small, we were told that the ravens – crows – whatever you wish to call them, contained the spirits of forest Children. That is how they escape death. They simply shift from one form to the next and live, with wings, upon the perches of the world and watch the living die."
They did not speak for some time afterwards. Bran Stark lost himself in her words. His people originally came from the warm waters of the Sunset Sea. As far as he knew, they were still there living in cities made of stone. He could not help but wonder if those cities had been old before they came – if they were relics of the world this Empress spoke of.
Then the wolves began to howl. They were chained to the ice outside the camp, keeping watch. They launched themselves into the air – snapping at the figure approaching from the North.
It was the Dayne. He fell to his knees when he saw the fires burning on the ice and wept.
The Children of the Forest had given the Dayne an old war horn. Lacquered black with silver trims, he told Bran that when the Children came over the ice flats they were to blow the horn as hard as they could. In the meantime they were to gather their number, amass on the ice and prepare for war.
Bran's party took the Dayne back to Winterfell. The banishment was forgotten and, in the depths of the Winter that had set in over Westeros, the armies of man gathered strength. They came from all corners, armed with the unusual black glass the Children had told them to mine from the Eastern caves.
When the confrontation finally came there were no Children to be found. The living and dead came at each other as a pair of waves. The slaughter writhed on the ice fields, as close to the truth North as the men dared to venture. Bran and the King fought beside their men while the Dayne stood on the crest of an unusual stone fist with a view of the battle and waited. When he finally saw the Children moving as one mass beneath the canopy of a nearby forest, he took the horn, held it to his lips and blew.
The horn let out a high pitched cry – shrieking in agony. The men on the fields beneath dropped, covering their ears as they howled like wounded dogs. The Dayne collapsed and coughed up blood from his shattered lungs. He crawled through the snow, trying to reach the edge of the rise so that he could see the battle but his body started to convulse. First it was only his limbs but then the ground itself moved. Everyone felt it – even the dead. Ice cracked. Trees shook their canopies free. All eyes shifted to the North as an unholy screech split the air. It was followed by the flap of wings and a moonlight shadow formed when the ice dragon's wings pushed the clouds aside.
The Empress withdrew her trident from a corpse and stumbled backwards.
Rolled back into its skull, the ice dragon's eyes were white – unseeing. In shadow of the forest, one of the Children lay against a Weirwood.
"It won't last, will it – this peace?" said Bran Stark, standing on the scaffolds of a new construction. The beginning of a castle fort sprawled out, while pillars of ice were breathed into life by the ice dragon enslaved to a Child.
The Empress walked along the low rise of ice. In the centre of the wall, where the fortress and ice became one, sat the giant Weirwood where the Child still lay. The hungry roots had already grown around its green-ish limbs like shackles. Its injuries were beyond repair – its fate to live within the dragon and keep its jaws from the neck of men. The North had built a pyre for the Dayne – the biggest the world had ever seen. When it was lit they could have sworn the sun were rising on the wrong side of the world.
"No..." The Empress replied. "Your wall will not stop them."
The King of Winter commissioned thirteen castles from his brother Bran, to guard the length of the great ice wall. Each one was given a Lord Commander to lead a team of guardians. The last, grandest and most horrifying of these was the enormous Nightfort built over the entwined corpses of the Child and his white tree. It was Bran himself who lifted the last stone in place, sealing the Child from the living. On the reverse side of the tree, he had the Empress carve a giant face into the Weirwood. Her blade cut so deep they thought the sap would never stop running.
While the ice grew higher, the Lord Commander and his white witch from the East conspired in their castle ways to keep the Winter from returning to the realm.
Not all men chose to live South of The Wall. Those that broke away called themselves Freefolk and crowned their own King. Joramun and the Stark King kept trade through the gaping door built into the Nightfort through which only the living could pass under the watchful eye of Bran and the Empress.
The Empress spent her days communing with the Weirwood and the Child in its clutches. Together they dreamed of things deep below the waters. The Child taught her songs and it was there, as the Child was strangled to its last breath by the Weirwood, that she saw the moment of the ice creatures' creation and how they may be undone.
And there began, in the sealed rooms of the Nightfort, unholy magic. The Empress embraced the ancient ways of sacrifice and unforgivable violence against the living to spread protective spells along the wall of ice. She fashioned them into the white roots and breathed them into the blue petals of a rambling Winter rose. It was only the beginning. The final sacrifice was one that only Bran could make.
Bran locked his men out of the fort, boarded up the windows and emptied the room of everything except a single hungry crow.
"These dreams of yours," Bran asked, as she lashed him to a stone table, "do they have joyful ends?" A dagger of black glass lay to Bran's side, waiting.
The crow panicked in its cage, sensing the rising tide of fear.
"When the sun rises in the West," the Empress whispered, tying his ropes tighter. "When the mountains blow into the sea and wash about upon the shore. When the stars touch the sun our prayers will be heard by the slumbering gods." Her brittle, pale lips smiled.
"Do it, then..." Bran breathed, as her bony fingers undid the fastenings on his shirt. Beneath his skin was nearly as pale as hers. He was older now. There was more grey in his beard than brown and even his eyes had dulled with the years.
"Close your eyes," the Empress whispered, taking hold of the obsidian knife, "and imagine yourself with wings..."
The guards of the Nightfort had been pushing back soldiers sent by the King of Winter for months. Even Joramun beat upon the great door demanding passage South. At first they'd resisted but the hellish screams coming from the sealed room terrified the men. They remembered the horrors of war and feared that the rumours were true – that their Lord Commander had given himself over to the ways of ice and allowed the witch to twist his heart. They spun untruths to the castles up and down The Wall.
When the King of Winter left Winterfell and rode out to the Nightfort to see for himself if the hideous rumours were true, he found pieces of his army slain and even more crows sitting on the scaffolds of the fledging castle. Several other Lord Commanders stormed across the area, keeping a shaky peace but even they were wavering.
In the end it was the King of Winter himself that forced the door of the Nightfort Keep in. There he found his brother – cold as death with skin like the moon and shards of black glass protruding from his chest. His heart sat in an empty bird cage. Bloody runes were tattooed over his torso. There were bowls of Weirwood sap, ink and the corpse of a child from the forest.
The white witch dropped her blood-tipped quill to plead with the King but he'd have none of her poisoned words and ordered her bound and gagged. As she was dragged from the room, a raven took fright and flew at the men, pecking and clawing.
The King of Winter approached his brother's corpse. He stood over him, a torch in one hand and sword in the other. The witch had turned him into an ungodly amalgamation. It was as if there was ice growing were his veins should be. His flesh hardened into bone – no – bark. His face looked like one of the screaming images in the forest. He slipped the tip of his sword under the ropes and cut the body free so that his men could come and take it back to the vaults of Winterfell.
As the men reached down, Bran's eyes snapped open – blue and alive with ice.
The King could not kill his brother. Against the wishes of the Lord Commanders and his own terrified men, he banished Bran beyond The Wall, into the furthest reaches of the snow. To ensure that his brother kept his promise to stay in the wastelands, the King kept the white witch as a prisoner, entombing her in the crypts where she could slumber in the darkness – alive.
Bran stepped through the Black Gate one last time and wandered into oblivion. It was only later, when he found the ice creatures in their hellish nest, that he realised that the Empress had left him a gift.
Only ghosts can guard the dead.
Joramun hiked up the stone rise and over soft piles of snow until he found a few stray rocks. He dug beside them, burrowing deep. In this pit his placed a bundle of tools and the ominous horn the that the poor Dayne had blown. Only a fool would seek to wake an ice dragon unless they had the means to enter its mind. Men blew the horn so that Children could enter the beast's mind. A pact that neither could break and one they should never make again.
