WINTERFELL – THE NORTH

"There is plenty of room to join me by the fire, Ser Clegane," Lady Sansa held her naked hands shy of the flame, as did several others who'd gathered in the sparse Winterfell hall to pick at breakfast. She was always finding the Hound scratching in doorways, hiding his ruined face in the shadows or perching on the rubble with a few lonely ravens as company. Plenty of others carried scars worse than his...

He did not reply to her invitation and when she looked again at the door he had vanished. It took her an hour to track him to the granary where Sansa found the Hound inside dragging his axe blade against the millstone. The building was dry and warm, easily the best kept in all of Winterfell. The rest of the fort resembled a half-rotten corpse with bits of bone and hanging flesh on show.

"Wildling fucks," Clegane muttered, without lifting his gaze. He knew her tread and the shape of her shadow. His fingers pressed along the back of the dragonglass while he pushed the blade in a circular motion, grinding its rough edges away. It was a bastard of a thing to work with, both hard and frail like everything in the North. "No idea how to finish a weapon. They smash a few rocks together and think they're done. We ain't up here to hack off rabbit heads."

Sansa left the granary door ajar – enough to keep the light in the room which was packed high with heshen sacks leaving very little space for the enormous man. Every time he moved something rubbed against his leather armour or caught the belts and weapons strapped to various limbs. The irony of his calloused, scared hands polishing a slither of glass to perfection was not lost on Sansa. After all, peace was shaped by blood and blade. The Wildling axes had the appearance of ink. Who knew what might come of its spilling?

He was right. As the days dragged their feet towards Winter, Sansa warmed to his violence. She kept him close though they rarely spoke. Why he stayed, she could not say. He was not under her command or bound to her by anything except his own will. Petyr had enjoyed joking that she was Clegane's self-imposed penance for all the terrible things he'd done but Sansa disagreed, he did not strike her as a gods fearing man. Not in that way.

"Not going to say anything?" He added, as the Lady of Winterfell remained silent. "How very like a Stark you've become. Must be the cold. It takes all our words to the grave."

His tone was unkind. Was it the miserable weather or something else festering behind those unreadable eyes? Who could know with a man like him. He kept his pain and his secrets well guarded. He even covered the burned side of his face with a veil of hair.

"I have done as father taught me," Sansa finally admitted, resting her palm on a nearby sack, "and stockpiled food to last through a Winter twice as long as any in living memory. The new Lord Tarly was unusually generous. I've never seen so many wagons waiting outside the gates – we had to stow most of it in the crypts. He and my brother are old friends, it seems."

"You should be pleased," he drawled petulantly, sharpening his axe. "You don't look pleased..."

"How would you know? You never look at me."

There was a definite snap of silence between them filled only by the grind of glass against stone.

"We are not going to need a Winter store." Sansa continued. It was the first time she'd said the words aloud and with them came an exhale of relief. She tilted her head back, inspecting the cylindrical tower with its stairwell spiralling up its insides like some ancient shell. "What's coming for us is not a siege – is it? Jon tells me this will be a battle far worse than anything my ex-husband waged. We win or we die." Cersei's words. "There'll be no survivors if we lose. None with a taste for bread, anyway… The dead don't bend the knee. I try but I cannot even imagine such things."

Clegane raised his weapon and tested the edge with his thumb. "Hardhome was a shit fishing village, if that's what you mean. They didn't have stone walls or battlements."

Sansa stepped up to the opposing side of the millstone. "Would it had mattered?"

"Wasn't there, was I? How the fuck should I know..." He hesitated all the same. Setting down his axe, Clegane managed to catch the Lady of Winterfell's eye. She was greatly changed from the young woman whose blood he'd wiped from her lip in the heat of the Red Keep's long Summer days. If that shit of a boy-king had been alive to raise a hand to her now, she'd have cut that hand clean off. "No." He amended his answer, unable to hold the lie under her scrutiny. "Probably bloody not."

"The Wall is breaking apart at the edges," Sansa continued, leaning over the millstone. "The dead are coming in their tens of thousands and they're all headed here."

"The Dragon Queen's armies are between the dead and us," Clegane reminded her. "She brought half of Essos with her to defend The Wall. That's more men than have ever stood along that bitch's flanks."

"And her three dragons. But what if they all have blue eyes before the week is out? I can feel it in the air you know. The cold."

"It's the North," Clegane challenged. "Always cold, isn't it?"

"Not like this. Can you even imagine it? Darkness that endures for years where everything dies except the trees with red leaves or silver stems. Snowfalls that bury houses. Then there's what comes with it. An ice spider was killed at Bear Island – my maester told me that these things were fables to keep the Northmen faithful to their lords and Southern ambitions at bay. They're not stories. They're real. We were naive little birds singing from the safety of our cages. Now Bear Island is ash and The Wall is snow."

Sandor abandoned the millstone entirely and instead rested against a pile of sacks. He doubted that Sansa had pursued him to engage in idle chit chat. "What is it you want, my lady – to give you assurances that Winterfell is safe? Because it is not. No where in the whole fucking realm is safe."

"I want you to help me turn this ruin into a fortress." Sansa's voice rose to counter his. "It has been designed to withstand war but this is not a normal battle. I have a husband who wants to dig trenches in the frozen ground and a general who's never fought a war – a real war. All our heroes are dead. Dragged from their beds or the bar and wasted in petty rivalries. If Winterfell is going to hold out against this army of the dead I need someone to design its defences who shares their fear of fire..."

He folded his arms across his vast chest – a task that was near impossible with his fur-covered armour. "You want my advice on how to hold back the dead? Let your husband's cunts dig their trench – tell him to dig it right around the whole fucking ice palace. Fill it with oil and set it alight. Then – then you'll be able to look on the faces of all your friends before the fires die and they come to kill you."

"At least take a look at the castle. Please."

Clegane didn't know what it was about the Stark women but he could always be persuaded against his better judgement on their account. Carrying his axe on his shoulder, he followed Lady Stark out of the granary and into the remaining tower which they climbed all the way up to the narrow platform at the top – Clegane dripping with sweat despite the cold.

While she leaned on the stone between the turrets, Clegane stared straight over the top. Winterfell looked even worse from above. Parts of it had caved in and the walls that were still standing looked ready to fall with cracks running their entire length.

"You'll never rebuild that outer wall in time. No point wasting the men on it – see there," he directed her eye to an entire corner that was laying over the ice in bits, "the dead will be straight through that. Your walls are only as good as their weakest point." He knocked his elbow against the wall of the turret, testing the strength of the grey stone. It gave a little under his weight. None of it filled him with confidence. "Might be able to shore-up the castle itself against a few waves." Then Clegane became aware that the Lady of Winterfell was watching him, not the lay of the fort. "What now?" He gruffed.

"Say what you're not saying..."

He did not want to. Every part of him itched to leave this place. Head south. Any south. Somewhere across the water where it never fucking snowed. What did he refuse to tell the Stark? "Your house is a crypt for all the Northern bones," he finally breathed against the cold air, "but they'll never rest inside these walls. We can paint as much blood as you want on the ground. All anyone will find of this place are empty rooms and a silo full of grain. You and I, Lady Stark, we'll be in the darkness singing songs to the gods before the first hour dies."

She laid her hand on his arm and found him to be a mixture of leather and steel. As she went to speak, a column of white smoke caught her attention. They turned in unison, stalking to the other side of the castle tower to overlook the Godswood.

Thick spools of silver slithered through the canopy of the Weirwood. Sansa grabbed the ruined base of a fallen wolf statue and pulled herself up, searching for the flames she knew must be there. Eventually she saw flashes of lurid green between the leaves. Wildfire. It was taking hold of the sacred tree, feasting on the magic. Her heart split in two as a shriek ripped from her lips. That was her father's tree – the centre of her childhood where her and her siblings had played in the snow among the red leaves, tumbling like pups with the sallow bark face looking on. The Weirwood was the source of Winterfell's magic and it was being consumed by a ravenous curl of green.

Sansa was dragged down and pushed roughly against the stone – her shoulders smacking into the ancient blocks which rained down a veil of mortar in kind. She must have been hysterical because a light slap across the face followed. Her hand cupped her red cheek as the world fell back into place. Clegane was in front, holding her to the stone while a column of pure, white smoke rose behind him.


A thrum of people had gathered in the Godswood. Some hid in the shadows where the pines and their drooping branches touched the ground. Others lined the path, parting as Sansa appeared with her enormous guardsman at her heels. There was a chain of men stretching from the steaming lake up to the burning Weirwood but none of them could get close enough to throw the buckets of water anywhere but useless into the snow. It was already lost… The beautiful bone limbs were sheathed in cinder, cracked apart and glowing red from within where the fury of the fire thrived.

Sitting on his wooden throne, Bran watched the tree engulfed and embraced by long, sweeping ribbons of flame. It was not the first tree to burn. He had seen many others in his dreams. Attached to sheer cliffs choking on salt and ash. Withered and corpse-like at the fringe of the world. Drowned by oceans enraged with fire. One day they'd all burn. Every last one until the final eye of the gods winked out and the realm of darkness settled into victory. Bran had seen the edge and lingered under the streaks of stars, brighter in the black than they'd ever been. Trapped in the eyes of this single tree, barely more than barren roots wound through sheets of black rock, Bran felt the god of Death spill out from its realm of shadow. The final victor and inevitable, endless fate. He wondered if this is what the Three-Eyed Raven rambled about in his cave. If it was the silence he heard...

"Bran…?"

Sansa touched his shoulder. Bran woke to see his sister leaning down, eyes sharp and water-logged with hair as red as the edges of the flame. "I have to go South." Said Bran, no longer interested in the fire.

"South?" She paced around him and knelt in the snow in front of his chair so that she could look at her brother's withered face. There was a line of blood down the side of his neck and a matt of hair caught in a fresh wound. "What happened to you? Bran – what happened to the tree?"

"They burned it," his cold voice crept over the world, more raven than wolf. "Now I cannot see. Harrenhal," he added, turning to look at the startled men and women clustered in the Godswood. They'd given up trying to quell the fire and now stood in the haze.


Jaqen watched the Onion Knight, Lady Mormont and Gendry vanish into the snow, following the tiny grey track of mud into the South. His eyes shifted North-West where a bank of ice-blue clouds had risen up over the mountains in a fearsome storm front. He could see the silver layer running along the top chop and churn. In all his long centuries, he'd never seen a thing like it. The Northerners were right, the gods were at war.

He held Jon Snow's bastard sword in his left hand. Its tip dug into the floor while he turned the handle slowly, spinning the blade around and around. Jon could almost hear it whispering to the air.

"A man has an interesting sword," said Jaqen, feeling the Northern man's eyes on him. He kept the blade moving, entranced by the way it slid under his palm. "Where did you find it?"

Jon held his chest in one hand as another river of pain tested the cracks in his bones. He'd lived as death for so long that he'd forgotten what it was to feel. Now he was alive and the world bit at him. "That is the Mormont House sword. Valyrian steel. The Lord Commander gave it 'ter me when the Winter snows started."

The sword fell still. Jaqen turned to the Stark who was laid out on the bed with a grim colour in his skin. His wounds bled but that was an improvement to the grave. "A man has seen many Valyrian swords – a man has watched them forged…" He laid the elegant blade across his hands and walked it over to Jon, bending over the bed so that he could see the veins of sliver folded between the smoke. "There is milkglass crushed into the steel. It comes from rocks that fall from the sky. A man has heard of a sword made from pure milkglass and a man has held enough Valyrian swords to bankrupt the world but never both together. It's a bastard sword – part fire, part ice."

To Jon the sword was a weapon but this time his eyes lingered on the mesmerising blade. Even the grey light picked out the ocean of stars trapped beneath the surface. It was immeasurably beautiful. "They are a poor House. Ned always joked that the Mormonts found their House sword in the snow beyond The Wall. There were no Valyrians beyond The Wall."

"The Valyrians are masters of weaponry but they did not make this. A man has seen it only once, painted on a temple wall – though it looked a little different..." He thumbed the white pommel. "It's a lion head, you see?"

"A bear..."

"A white lion." Jaqen's words failed to rustle the Stark. The Westerosi had forgotten their own history and never bothered to learn of the lands across their Narrow Sea. "It is the sword of the first emperor of man, the god who stepped from the stars into the sea. The father of magic – protector of the realm and warden of the darkness. This sword was poured into rock thirty-five thousand years ago. A man is in possession of the most precious relic in the world." With that, he laid the sword over Jon Snow's lap but he was too afraid to touch it.

Jon shook his head, disbelieving. "I must return this to the Mormonts… Jeor did not know what he was giving."

"A man has a sword because the gods gave him one."

Gently, he touched the cold blade. "How do you know these things? The maesters-"

"-are small men in stone rooms," he answered, before Jon could finish.

"Is – is that smoke?" Jon suddenly caught the scent of it in the air. He craned his neck but could see nothing but endless stretches of white and grey through the window.

Jaqen knew exactly what it was. He'd been watching the old Weirwood fall to ash for hours.

"How does it work," Jon added, when it was clear that there would be no answer from the assassin, "the faces on the walls… You hear stories – especially in the Night's Watch… We had a man from Braavos who took his child in ter your temple to die to spare them of an illness. Years later, he saw his child's face again in the crowd. Sent 'im mad. Fled across the Narrow Sea ter escape that face only ter fall in ter drinking an' finally stealin'..."

"A man does not know how these things work," Jaqen admitted, wary of the wolf. Jon's eyes reminded him of Arya – like an echo of all the Starks stretching right back to the foundation of this foreign empire. Ser Davos had been right about him, he no dragon. "Magic cannot be tallied like the contents of the vaults."

"But it is magic?"

In response, Jaqen dragged his hand diagonally across his face, peeling the skin away to reveal the soft syrup brown of a young woman's face. When he spoke next, it was through her lips. "This one's name was Missandei." His voice shifted pitch. "A slave-born confidante of the Dragon Queen. Her face hangs in the House of Black and White like your cloak on the back of the door."

"...take it off." Jon hissed, bile rising up his throat.

He did as commanded, only to replace the Narthian with old Leyton Hightower. "The faces belong to Death. Our magic is borrowed. All magic is borrowed. A debt is incurred for every spell. This is how the gods give gifts..."

"I've seen worse than you," Jon steadied his voice. He was speaking to an old man now, one whose years cracked the skin. It was only now that Jon realised that the crowns men wore were no different to the faces in Jaqen's temple. "If you want proof of the Gods' true face, stand at the edge of The Wall and look upon the dead. Your skin-masks and magic have no knowledge of truth death. You've been worshipping flattering shadows. A god walks upon the earth and you best pray that it's not yours. Where are you going?" Jon asked, when the assassin headed for the door, sliding through the corners of the room out of habit. When he turned back, it was with his own face.

"A man would steal from death..."

Then he was gone – no more than a whisper.

A hastily penned letter lay on the table in the crypts beside a wounded candled coming to the end of its wax. It had spilled over the stone with its wick falling to the side, alight in a final surge of defiance that divided the shadows.

Sansa stared expressionless at the flame. Mormonts weren't known for their lies and Lyanna's explanation sat with her own concerns about Bran and yet… And yet Lyanna had not seen fit to make the case in person. Sansa had never seen herself as a figure to be feared even though Baelish had warned her repeatedly that power led to fear, regardless of intent. Her hand dropped to her stomach where beneath her layers of fur she thought there was a slight rise. Sansa knew that her child would never be born. She tried not to think about it – to pretend that it wasn't real. That made it easier. Most of the time.

A knock at the door and Brienne entered – damp and covered in snow. "My Lady," she dipped her head.

"Did you find them?"

"Long gone," Brienne replied, dripping over the crypt floor. The water sounded like blood on bone. "There's been another one. Just after dinner. A Molestown merchant poured lamp oil over his clothes, set himself alight and ran out beyond the castle walls screaming. He died in the snow. Another follower of R'hllor. They're sacrificing themselves to escape the Night King and his army."

"They don't want to walk the realm as corpses, killing those they love." Sansa replied, softly. "Is there a priestess inside our walls?"

"Yes, My Lady. She was preaching in the square. Your guards have brought her inside and are holding her in one of the damaged rooms in the East wing."

"Why has she been locked away?"

Brienne shifted her considerable weight. "For inciting your men into self-immolation. Radicalising fear."

"Release her."

"But-"

Sansa stood abruptly, screeching the wooden chair across the uneven tomb stones that formed the floor of the Winterfell crypts where she'd made her lair. "Winter is coming," she hissed her father's words. "We would be mad to enrage the god of fire." Sansa's mind was full of the old tree burning. An act of defiance or protection? She did not know what was real any more. "The Old Gods are sleeping," her voice dropped, as Sansa plucked Lyanna's note from the table and handed it to Brienne, "we need something new… I want to meet her."


KING'S LANDING – WESTEROS

Loras Tyrell, warden of the realm, had spent his days pacing the throne room. He'd always thought of the Iron Throne as an ugly fuck of a thing but it was worse in the flesh. Between the fused swords were fragments of bone from those who'd held them. Westeros was an empire that spoke of peace from a pile of corpses. However, there was an air about it that disturbed the room. A temptation his grandmother had whispered, calling to men, ensnaring them with its power like the delicate petals of a blushing rose. Loras found himself dreaming of Aegon's blades and somehow, while his mind flirted with the image of its jagged shadow on the floor, he found that he had climbed the steps. Alone in the hall, Loras inched his way down into the throne – moving as the great white glaciers did in the North – at first an infinite crawl giving way to a sudden jolt of release as he seated himself at the helm of Westeros.

Loras surveyed the damaged hall. The stone masons had repaired the worst holes left in the building which fronted the sea and all the windows had new sheets of coloured glass. Admittedly, these were not as beautiful as the first. Their colours were lurid instead of reverent and their designs were nothing more than copies crafted in a hurry. The last of the hanging lights had been repaired and hoisted into the air, indistinguishable from their brethren except for the unburned candles. His eye was drawn to the long cracks running the length of the throne room and piles shattered tiles. The Red Keep was scared.

"Your Grace..."

Loras closed his eyes at the lingering ember of Varys' words. The spider had crawled behind him, unseen, to stand beside the throne and whisper. "Not, 'Your Grace'," he insisted.

If Lord Varys had a comment, he did not offer it. "The Golden Company have been paid as per our Queen's arrangement."

This surprised Loras. "Am I to understand that you managed to convince the pirates to surrender part of the treasure without incident?"

"You are," he replied. "Their price was acceptable. They like a little blood with their coin-n-n..." Varys' last word faltered as the ground beneath his feet trembled. His hands emerged from the crypt inside his sleeves to reach for the Iron Throne, steadying himself on the blunt blades.

The room shook again, this time hard enough for dust to pour down through the ceiling, streaming into the air with chalk plumes. A few fragile panels of glass rattled against their iron holds and the black chandeliers swung on thick chains.

It lasted moments but those moments had dragged their feet leaving Loras and Varys staring at sunlight poking between fractures above. Dust lay across Loras' sky-blue silks. Varys knew that his amber robes were in a similar state.

"Unstable foundations?" Loras offered, as explanation for the quakes that had plagued the city since the dragon fire.

Varys allowed his hand to slip from the throne and vanish into his sleeve. "I hope so… Either that or the rumours are true and King's Landing really is built on bones."

"A gardener knows well that the best earth is the bloodiest."

Varys allowed the dark thought to settle.

For a while, the two men lingered in the silence with Loras Tyrell leaning on the arm of the Iron Throne, staring through the nearest window to the obscured outline of the city. "What was the final count?"

"Of what, Your G – my Lord…?"

"The fire that raged in the city when the Queen's dragon took fright."

"Those numbers are not certain yet," Varys lied.

"My men have it at nine thousand dead, twenty thousand injured. Close to a hundred thousand have fled the city but more of those return every day, unwilling or unable to make the journey to other kingdoms. We can expect the majority of them back within the walls."

The flower was no fool. Varys weathered an unusual flicker of relief in his chest. For a moment he wondered if the Tyrells had been the answer to a quiet, measured rule. All this time – decades of planning, they'd thought the realm needed a dragon to return the heart of power… Too bad for Loras. If he succeeded at his job, the Queen would have to kill him, if he failed – the Queen would kill him. He had no future but the grave.

"Those and more," Varys replied. "My spies tell me that there are townships being left abandoned. Those who feel that they cannot defend themselves again the Northern threat are headed South. We are trying to divert as many as we can to The Reach. There's nothing for them here."

"And what does 'The Reach' think of this..." Loras had one of his eyebrows held aloft in anticipation, knowing Varys' answer.

"They do not like Northerners." Varys realised too late that being from The Reach, Loras knew exactly how tricky the politics were becoming.

"Olenna's ship has been sighted by the port master. When my grandmother docks, I suggest she takes a portion of our golden army home with her to keep the peace. The new Lord Tarly has been increasingly reclusive after the death of his family. They say he locks himself away in the tower most days with nothing but ravens for company."

"I was under the impression that he had a new Wildling wife?"

"None of us know what sort of a man we'll be until are asses are upon the throne," Loras pointed out, dryly. "Not even you, Lord Varys."


From the deck of her ship, Olenna saw the damaged city shiver in the sunlight. It moved as a mirage that would have slipped by unnoticed if it had not been for the accompanying roll of thunder. Her eyes searched instinctually for storm clouds and found only a smear of grey rising off the back of the Dragonmount.

The mast of a recently sunken ship propelled itself back to the surface, leaping out of the waves like a spear before flopping onto the water and bobbing about like a common piece of driftwood. Bodies followed… Dislodged from their wrecks.


THE RUINS OF HARRENHAL – THE CROWN LANDS

Qyburn was well rid of his sulking company. The one-handed Lannister had created a mood of melancholy over the Gods Eye thick enough to make The Sorrows mourn. The drudgery of marching soldiers had passed allowing the swamp to return to its natural thrum of carnivorous lust. He loved the way the white branches of wild Weirwood bowed down toward his modest camp, searching out the pale flesh of his limbs as if to devour.

Pushing aside their bone-curtains, Qyburn waded out into the lake surrounding the central island. At its deepest, the water lapped his shoulders. Strangely it shed its filth and transformed into crystal as he approached the bank. There, dizzying layers of aquatic plants competed for heavily filtered sunlight. Their less fortunate brethren had died in the darkness, swimming as a brown hue beneath the lilies and swamp grass.

He crawled up the slippery bank, grasping on to the girth of a strangler fig that had successfully consumed one of the Weirwood. There were muddy horizontal marks at the base of the trees everywhere he looked. The island was locked in an unusual tide brought on by the rains crossing the Crown Lands instead of the reliable wander of the moon. It wasn't raining now but Qyburn could feel it thickening in the air – though some nights it fell as sleet instead.

The centre of the Gods Eye contained two distinct types of Weirwood – those that had grown up on their own along with the rest of the swamp and the old giants at the centre of the island whose fans of branches interlocked overhead, weaving into each other until all the trees had become one entity – a haunting ghost of the Southern churches with with their wooden roofs and coloured glass. Each of these ancient bastards contained a howling face that had distorted over thousands of years. The faces always appeared to smile but Qyburn understood that this was because of the way the bark stretched. As for the famous bleeding tears, it amounted to little more than weaknesses caused by the original carving. The trees had naturally thin skin and once damaged they never properly healed. When he'd first heard the stories he'd expected gushing rivers of blood to pool on the ground around their roots but now that he'd become acquainted with them, he knew this to be a fanciful exaggeration of the occasional congealed bubble of sap.

What interested Qyburn hid wedged between the folds of bark. Approaching a knot in the wood, Qyburn dug in with the tip of his dagger, carving deep amid the sap and splinters until he excavated pointed slithers of black glass. Arrowheads – hundreds of them, he guessed. Their wooden shafts had long disintegrated but the ancient evidence of war never died entirely.

Magic had always been a persistent whisper in his ear that he did his best to ignore. The world around him was one of logic where fantasy decayed to lies and half-truths. Even dragons were nothing more than foreign animals strange to Westerosi eyes but no more remarkable than direwolves.

He explored further, squeezing between trunks until he found himself standing in the shallow stream that picked its way through the very centre of the island. The world beneath the dense canopy of bloody leaves was cast in permanent twilight. Qyburn listened but the birds had fallen quiet while even the spiders refused to lash their webs between the branches. Beneath his feet spread a carpet of red leaves, many metres deep – forever sinking into the marsh. He closed his eyes and – in the holiest of places, the bleeding heart of magic in the realm, the hallowed church of the Old Gods – waited for magic to brush across him.

...waited every day.

The only thing that touched his skin was the occasional leaf on its way to the ground. Was it all Northern superstition? The trees were real – their faces were real but what did that amount to that couldn't be replicated by any fool in possession of a knife?

It had to be real, he told himself, motionless in the shadows. The warriors made from ice drawn out of the frigid lands were real enough. Too many good men had given their first hand account. To be honest, Mormont's word world have been enough. With them came re-animated corpses and proof that the rumours of necromancy from the East had merit. And if it was real, he continued, he would stand here until its secrets were unravelled.

What Qyburn failed to see where the sets of yellow eyes watching him from the swap. Their pupils narrowed to vertical slits, reptile-like while their skin took on the greens and brows of the swamp, perfectly blending them into the twilight along with the rest of the ambush predators laying in wait for the Southerner.

The eyes crept closer, hiding between the many white trees. Where light hit their bodies it was shattered by skin that layered itself like scales or leaves piled atop one another. Their nails were black, pointed and curled into claws. Each had a flattened nose dragged into their cheeks and a forehead that sloped, pushing their hairline backwards. Their ears were tapered into points but large compared to their heads. Beads, metal and glass punctured the skin. Some had shells set into their flesh and others were thick with port-wine tattoos that spiralled in oceanic patterns that could be found scratched onto the grey rocks on the shores of The Lands of Always Winter. Barely four foot, they were never quite human. Whatever common thread had wound between the people's of the world, it was distant and lost.

They waited. Silently. Until the old man sat between the draped roots of a long dead Ironwood whose corpse was so immense that pieces of it surged up between the Weirwood as if it were reaching out from the grave to drag the other trees into the black with it. Qyburn trusted his arms to the crinkled wood and fell asleep. The trees dripped. Branches scratched together. The footsteps of the Children fell soundlessly.

It was with cold hands that they took Qyburn by the throat. The largest climbed onto his chest and weighed him down while half a dozen more took the man's wrists, ankles and legs in their bony fingers that bit in as sharp as ice. Another brought a wet rock from the swamp and smashed it down on his skull. There was a crack and black liquid that pushed through the skin as a sheet – folding over Qyburn's forehead before running into his eyes which had snapped open in terror.

After that, Qyburn's thoughts merged into a blur. He was dragged through the Weirwood crypt with all its arching limbs as the ribs of some dead evil. Then into the water – floating as he was pulled across the surface. The sickly purple flowers floating on tightly spun green mats brushed against his face, tickling his cheeks despite the pain paralysing his thoughts. Up the bank, across an open field and into one of the stone ruins jutting from the earth. Daylight passed into shadow as Qyburn was lifted up the stairs of the dead tower. This time he struggled, flopping his arms awkwardly but those tiny, four-fingered hands gripped more tightly, threatening to snap his joints.

The Widow's Tower, he realised, seeing flecks of gold caught on the black walls that had once shone brighter than the sun. The rest had melted in Balerion's fury, casting streams of precious metal through the ruins that had been ransacked for centuries by those brave enough to enter the cursed walls. The ghosts of burned men wandered the crumbling ruin by night, they said, chasing thieves and squatters to their deaths before collapsing into piles of ash. Screams filled the gusting wind and even the gods abandoned the labyrinth of shattered basalt, empty cells and stone that dripped off crumbling towers like wax around the wick.

His mind had been fragmented by the injury. Qyburn fought to pull the pieces of himself back together. It terrified him how easily all that made him human could float off through the vaulting darkness at the first touch of death. He had always known that humanity's condition was a fragile affair. How many corpses had he laid out across his table – how many had he cut through, sliced apart and measured to sate his fear? Countless. The deeper he sank into their cold blood, the faster they merged into an endless tide of death.

Killing was easy. Any child could manage it. Creating life – unremarkable. Resurrection? To steal life back from the grip of death. To conquer it. Well, that was greater still than the ancient sorcerers of Asshai who hid behind their magic, eking out a few extra years. Qyburn had managed it once. He wondered now if his creature remained inside King's Landing or if one of the Dragon Queen's men had put him to the fire…

The necromancers of the East claimed the same power but their creatures were like gloves, puppeteered by magic. Slavery by another name. Qyburn's creation had truly lived.

He growled as the sharp edge of the step smacked against his hip. They were carrying him up the endless spiral of steps, inching closer to the parts of the tower that had fallen away. Light cut in through the gaps while a flare of green betrayed another young fig that had tried to grow in a narrow ledge jutting out from the stone. Its roots dangled into the abyss, tendrils of kinked, striped bark searching for the ground. For a moment he thought he saw a set of eyes in its trunk and a howling mouth agape – screaming.

The Widow's Tower finished with a single platform open to the air designed to spy out over the battlefield beyond the fearsome walls. Several levels beneath, a fragile stone bridge draped its way to a second tower which listed awkwardly to the South, threatening to fall. This tower was latched to its sibling's fate – waiting for the premature end and the grave prepared on the ground below where its broken pieces could lay until the last fires died from the world.

Qyburn was placed on the ground. Faces filled his vision and for the first time he got a good look at his captors. Far from Children. These were creatures older than the realm – shrunken by age as the old women of the village hunched over their knitting, hissing songs. He tried to touch one but they scattered away from his clumsy efforts, manipulating his body into the centre of the tower.

There was no warning. His shin was shattered with a single strike. A cleave of Harrenhal's wall turning his bone into eggshell. He screamed. Arched up from the grip of near-unconsciousness. Now he saw them. There were no more than a dozen faces gathered around him, each one armed with stones. They seemed startled by his surge of energy – taking a step backwards. Driven by morbid curiosity, Qyburn wasted a moment inspecting his leg. The flesh had been torn open while pieces of his shin lay scattered in the blood like arrowheads in the trees.

This time Qyburn roared. He lashed out, scratching the air as an infant wailed for its mother. His freedom was momentary. Those hands were back on him. Awake, he saw the next blow come. It struck lower, breaking the ankle on his other leg. Tears swelled from nowhere, washing the blood off his face.

Qyburn's chest tightened with fear that he'd never felt. They had brought him here to die. Inescapable, horrific death. Another strike and his knee joint was pushed out the back with such anguish that his thoughts staggered.

"No!" He hissed. "No..." He pleaded. "Stop… St-" Qyburn choked a mouthful of blood.

Like any beast caught in a trap in the presence of the huntsman, Qyburn tried to move his brutalised body, dragging useless limbs a few pointless inches through pools of blood. When they were done breaking his legs, they did the same to his arms and for a while, blackness took hold – rewarding him with glorious nothing.

He awoke freezing to find that the sun had slipped down behind the low wall protecting the top of the tower. The Children had torn away most of the clothes on his chest. They held feathers, dipping them in a mixture of Weirwood sap and Qyburn's blood. In went the quills, piercing his naked flesh like trails of stinging ants tearing hungrily at an insect's corpse. They covered him in patterns – spirals, circles and dashed lines that wandered as if they were roads and his body a map. River stones were placed on his stomach.

When they were done, the Children sat in a circle with their eyes closed and waited for the evening to creep in. To Qyburn, it was an eternity. As the first stars broke through the flushing sunset he mourned their beauty. The silhouettes of bats descending on the fruit trees inside the Gods Eye entranced him. Even the smear of sandflies wafting around in clouds became a miracle. The tiniest pieces of the world were as magnificent as the spine of snow-capped mountains turning gold as night approached.

He knew it was over when the moon opened its eye. Silver – the colour of bone, death and all the gods that like to play in the shadows, transformed the world.

The Children poured a ring of animal fat around him and then smeared it over his body. His calm resignation fractured. Inside his chest, his heart beat so fast he thought it might escape its prison.

Finally, amidst a crescendo of whispers, a flame caught and Qyburn burned.

With the death of the screams came the shaking of the earth. First, it sent shivers across the lazy waters of the Gods Eye, disturbing hundreds of water birds which squawked away from their nests and drowned the evening in the thunderous flap of wings. Then Harrenhal quivered, shaking loose rubble free. Instead of crashing and withdrawing like a wave, the earthquake steadily grew, feeding on the magic conjured by the Children. There was fire beneath the ground that lived in rivers, pools and oceans. No matter how cold the Winter, it would always be there, threatening to melt the snows forever.

What the realm needed now was a promise – a pact to wake fire in the face of death.