THE WALL – THE NORTH
Daenerys laid herself down on the scales armouring Drogon's neck. Pressing bloodied fingertips into their cracks, she found them set together like freshly shed snake skin. Each diamond scale was joined smoothly on all sides with only the occasional protrusion of bone marking the beginning of a spine. Drogon had less curved bones than his brothers but those he did have were thick and elegant with danger. Dany had seen swords shatter against them and stone walls give way on impact. Where his brute force failed, Drogon used fire and that was absolute. Daenerys wore him like a shield. He was her violence and she, his flame.
Named swords and forgotten bones lay in their thousands under the thick sheet of snow pressed along the edge of The Wall. Daenerys had already sent so many to icy graves flying her banners that she wondered if anyone would be left to tell her story. Perhaps it was better to let this whole sorry tale fade into the cold. Allow death to suffocate the horror. She had dreamed of it… Looking up through a veneer of glass to an endless, starless void of white. Or maybe those dreams weren't hers at all. There was another dragon soul out here – trapped between the tides of time. Their thoughts grew stronger with the coming night. When Daenerys slept, she felt herself slipping into their nightmares.
Her cheek slid against scale, wet with tears. It cut her soul to feel Drogon limp through the snow beneath her, dragging his torn wings which left smears of black blood coating the landscape.
An hour at a dead run.
An hour of the North's white tomb rushing by in a panicked blur…
Drogon laboured through his steps. Daenerys gripped hard at his spines whenever he lurched off the side of the road. It happened many times. His paws slipped from the ice and sank into the border of soft powder. Thousands of years ago the Northern roads had been well kept but the War of the Five Kings in the warm weather had marched it into uneven trenches of jagged mud – newly frozen – it formed a sort of hell beneath the snow.
Inevitability struck as Drogon abruptly cut his pace to a walk, erupting a plume of grey smoke in a sigh from his nostrils. He dipped his head. Bared his teeth. Gasped. Drooled onto the ice… Finally, he started to shake. Daenerys placed her hands helplessly on his neck. She didn't know what to do. His eyes were rolling around, half mad.
Thorne's body brimmed with terror. "We mustn' stop." He crawled forward, tugging at the cloak on her shoulders. "Yer Grace. This – we can't..."
"Listen to him!" Dany snapped, as fiercely as her child breathed. "He is like Dothraki horses. If they are run too far and fast they die where they stand in Ghostgrass graves," she finished, her Essosian accent thicker than usual.
Thorne felt like saying, 'he'll die anyway' but held his tongue. No amount of argument could compel a dragon to do what it did not wish. Instead, he focussed on the darkness which pursued them across the flat. He had watched the dead army had turn in their direction as soon as they'd spilled through the broken wall but they were significantly slower than Drogon and a few hours disadvantaged. That distance would close quickly if they kept at this pace.
"Is that the first fort?" Daenerys asked, nodding ahead where the forest overran the path and touched The Wall. Though she could not see a castle, there appeared to be slight deformations on the ice reminiscent of lifts and ladders along with the tell-tale grey smear of fires lit below.
"Yes. Another few hours, if the dragon were ter run again. This creature of yours is faster than I imagined."
"You should see him in the air..."
It was nearly sunset. Along with the darkness, Thorne noticed an unusually heavy fog gathering – blurring the horizon into a shifting landscape of ice and shadow. The sun, dark red and obscured by smoke, had sunk into a sleepy eye burning indifferently in front. It was descending so fast into the ground that they could see its girth die inch by inch.
"There are stories of the dead bringing the Winter with 'em." Thorne whispered, eyeing the mist with suspicion. It had taken on the pink hues of sunset but it was losing its blush as fast as death took colour from an infant's cheek. "Hopefully a maester's fantasy… They'd tell yer all sorts as a child. Scare the shit from yer. Lucky you were raised in the East."
"I had fears enough. How long until his army catches up with us?"
"Few hours..." Thorne repeated, ominously.
"This is not the first time I have been chased by creatures like this," she admitted. "In the Far East, there's an unnamed plague ravaging cities. They say it travels from desert to desert like a shadow on the land. Its sickness turns people into ghosts of themselves, alive but no longer able to feel pain or act with any sense other than the ravenous desire to kill. Thousands of afflicted came out of the sand one night when we were holding Meereen. You should have seen it."
It was as though she relived it now, sharply brought into focus by the horror swelling behind them.
"A huge city with strong fortifications and ancient temples. Forgotten gods living in stone prisons – none stirred. I watched the possessed bodies pile up against the city walls until they were breached. We abandoned the great pyramid. The streets screamed as we boarded ships with what we could carry. The torches along the wall were the first to vanish. Then the lights of the city went out. One house at a time until there was only darkness. We just – we left them to die..." Daenerys averted her gaze to the last embers of the sunset. "A whole city for Death to take." It had been a long time since she'd allowed herself to revisit that night. She had taught herself how to forget – like she forgot about Horn Hill. That wasn't quite true… It was a part of her clawing to escape. "I hear them – those screams. How could I have run? I was their queen..."
Unsettled, Thorne shifted. The East was rumoured to be full of untold horror and curses that the Westerosi could not conceive. It was an old place with wrathful gods sleeping beneath the ground. "What did your Mormont say?"
"That there was nothing he could do. Ser Jorah pushed me onto a boat and we sat there in each other's arms and watched the city die. By dawn, it was a memory." Daenerys shuffled down Drogon's neck, bringing herself closer to where Thorne had wedged himself between several prominent spines. "We could not stop them. The dead win. Death always wins."
"Mormont was right, Your Grace. You were not meant ter fight that war. You were born ter fight this one. At some point, you 'ave to believe. That is what we tell the men when they kneel in front o' the white tree an' say their vows. Protecting the realm is a calling. You canno' be burdened by the desire ter survive the war. There is only the war."
"You believe that I'm going to die..."
"Valar morghulis, valar dohaeris..." Thorne breathed the twin fates. "Once you know that death is inevitable, the game shifts. The gods use our fear o' the darkness against us but yer – you are fire."
"This war has been fought before, Commander. Many times. I saw the painted walls and walked over the bones. There are gruesome souvenirs standing at the edge of the world where the ground's been ravaged so long the seas have turned to sand. I've climbed those old forts – I've looked over the world from their perch. They remind me of your Northern forts except their wall, whatever it was, has died to nothing."
Thorne could not help himself. He stared at The Wall and for a moment, imagined it gone. "The Wildings say when it falls, the gods will flip a coin. They may be right."
"Why did you kill Jon Snow?"
The question came from nowhere and yet the intensity in the Queen's eyes compelled him to answer. "He acted like a king instead of a warden for our sacred order. We don' much like kings up 'ere."
A tear fell from her eye. It joined many others. She nodded. "That is the truth of all failed rulers. We forget that we are the same as you, Lord Commander Thorne – protectors of the realm, temporary custodians. The Dothraki see the world as a thing to conquer but that only works so long as you have another city to raid. When all the cities are yours, what then? Then you must rule. I finally understand my family's madness. Targaryens are as the Dothraki with no wars left to fight and so they fought their own people until the gods themselves rebelled. Fire is their wrath."
"Ice too..." Thorne murmured. "Winters so deep and dark that we remember how to fear."
Drogon slipped again, jolting Daenerys sharply to the side. She groaned at the searing heat in her broken arm. The cold numbed most of the damage but she feared she may lose it if they did not find help soon.
"Wolves and bears," Thorne assured her, "they are the opposite, brooding in one corner as the Ages come and go. The realm needs a little of both. Conquerors and kings."
"Princes too," she whispered. "For they are the future's promise." They were quiet for a while as the dragon dragged his paws. With the sun finally gone, Daenerys added, "I do not know where my bear has gone – or if he is alive."
"My father wasn' much o' a man but he did tell me this, 'yer cannot kill what is in yer heart'. That Mormont cunt well, the pair of yer are entangled like an Ironwood growin' beside a Weirwood."
The fog thickened into a roof overhead with the depth of night, refusing to sink. It gathered force into an unsettled world of grey waves twenty feet above that churned with ice and fury – rustling like dried leaves.
Thorne shuddered away from it. He had seen weather like this maybe twice in all his years at The Wall. They were creating it to conceal themselves. He told the Queen as much but his words rolled off her as if she too had scales. The fog thickened to the point that moisture dripped from his face and re-froze into his beard. Drogon's natural heat stopped the rest from freezing leaving the dragon's body glistening in the occasional fragment of light like a river stone in the dead of night.
Their world collapsed into inches. Each other's pale faces. Slivers of silver and shadow. The dragon beneath them and the odd flicker of flame from a Queensgate window. Everything else was black.
Thorne could tell that there were fires burning in the Queensgate but the fog made it difficult to guess how many or how far away the castle really was. Ice was as deceptive as a desert mirage but the night was even worse – it lied outright to those trying to pick their way through. Perhaps the dragon caught the scent of cooked meat on the air or livestock wandering in the snow. Either way, Drogon lifted up his pace to a canter and immediately a face appeared in the fog. An eyeless corpse holding a sword – its clothes torn at the chest to reveal the hollow chasm of a rib cage.
Daenerys hooked her arm around the nearest spine as Drogon twisted his body to the side to avoid a collision with the skeleton. Thorne swore as his own injuries were tested by a sudden slide and impact among the dragon's wings where he rolled before tangling around another horn. Something struck his flesh. Bone. Blade. Horn?
"Wh-wha-?" Thorne stammered, having not seen the obstacle. Before he could finish, the dragon kicked off the ground and jumped clear over another three dead soldiers who had been stalking them through the darkness. Thorne rose into the air with the motion then smashed back down onto hard scale. He spat blood.
"They're in front of us! All around us!" Daenerys shrieked over her shoulder. Her broken arm was useless as she tried to wedge her feet between the scales. The bone cracked further. Dany bit her lip to stifle a shriek but her pain reverberated off the mist, enticing the dead.
Fire swelled from Drogon's nostrils, piercing the fog to reveal watery shadows on all sides. Waiting. Watching… They were like the images in the black glass from the temple at Asshai. Terror froze Dany in place.
"This dragon has got to fly!" Thorne insisted, tightening his hold on the axe. He kicked the Queen's legs, startling her back to life. "He must fly!"
"He can't! Look – he's trying!" She insisted, as Drogon moaned.
The dragon galloped at the fog but any effort to unfurl its wings left them dragging uselessly in the snow. Death's shadows gave chase with the scratch of bone and armour grinding together in unholy chorus. They were light on the ground. Swift as death… Thorne turned his attention to the Queensgate. "If we can make it to the fort, Your Grace. The ravens." A mess of moonlight and terror nodded at him.
"The ravens," she repeated. "Tell the realm, or else they'll die with us." Dany swallowed her anguish. This was her last ride upon a dragon and these, her last breaths of unfriendly air. She lay back against Drogon and closed her eyes. Dany whispered things to Drogon that he could not hear and shed several more tears for the years that they had shared. They were children. Both of them. That was the nature of war. With an army at her heels and a wall in front, she was trapped.
Fear kept Drogon at pace. Despite his worsening injuries, the dragon could taste danger at his tail. He pulled away from the scattered legions of the Night King and veered off the road to take a shortcut towards the Queensgate that led over an open field. The speed they lost in the deep snow was countered by the dead following. They struggled to pursue – drowning in the white hell of their creation. Soon, the snow was up to Drogon's thighs but the monster of his force ploughed on.
Thorne crawled to the edge, peering down over a wing. The castle was close enough that its windows lit the entire snowy field. Its light reflected off the ceiling of fog that had pursued them. "You could lose a horse in this."
"Are they still coming?"
"Yes. Slowly. Magic seconds the North, Your Grace."
Some of the lighter skeletons were able to run across the surface before they, too, fell into deep pits of powder and thrashed around. The dragon pushed through it all, hissing and growling with his feet touching rock. Three hundred metres became a hundred.
Such a beautiful thing the Queensgate was, rising out of the ground with narrow, twisted columns of black glass. Ironwork stuck out from the snow, rusted and buckled by infirmary of what had once been the boundaries of sprawling orchids. Thorne had been here only once, many years ago and ordered its partial restoration. More men had been sent since – fresh creatures from the South without much fight, better suited to building. A dozen or so Night's Watch were left to manage them and by the looks of the amount of windows lit, some of the Queen's army had made it this far. None of them were ready for what they dragged behind them in the darkness. Thorne swallowed. He may as well be killing these men with his own hand.
The field was bounded by a submerged wall, which Drogon stepped over and back onto the road. He hesitated, unsure of where to go until Daenerys reached down and slapped his neck in command.
A pair of guards keeping warm by a fire pit spotted them. There was a moment of shock where the young Crows did absolutely nothing as a towering dragon wandered out of the darkness. Dead or dreaming? Neither, they eventually realised, scrambling for their swords.
Thorne leaned over the Queen's shoulder and barked an order down at the men, who were so confused to see their Lord Commander on the back of a dragon that they obeyed without question. Thorne instructed them to unleash all manner of violence upon the dead that pursed. Whistles filled the air as the Crows relayed the orders to their brothers stationed around the castle. Everyone outside was drawn toward the fort's towering doors. They were fashioned from Ironwood – so old and hard that nothing decorative could be carved into their surface.
Fire sprang up around them as arrows lit pools of oil, transforming the night into some kind of cursed realm where neither fire nor darkness could win. Drogon was too anxious to kneel so Thorne and Daenerys were forced to slide off into the arms of the waiting men. As soon as they were on the ground, Drogon mounted the Queensgate castle like a wyvern, with his natural instinct to seek higher ground. He dug his claws in deep and dragged himself up its tower as though it were a sea cliff, dislodging chunks of stone that struck the ground as hail. The men standing on the balcony above shrieked and vanished.
"Don't stand there bawkin' at the bloody dragon…" Thorne caught one of his men and dragged them up to his face by their black cloak. "Do the same fuckin' thing. Get yerself up on those castle walls before the damned dead get 'ere. Now!" He released the man straight into a run. Thorne turned to beat his fist on the door in frustration but they opened inwards with a strange hiss of dust and smoke.
"Your Grace..." A Crow, clearly fresh from his former life as a middle class trader in the Capital, fell to his knees at the sight of the Silver Queen. She was black with soot and dressed in the Night's Watch cloak but her long white hair and violet eyes were unmistakeable. The dragon clambering up the outside of the Queensgate probably helped to clarify… "What are you-" but the man was pushed to the side as Thorne dragged the Queen into the Queensgate and slammed the enormous castle doors shut.
"Bar this – quickly!" The odd scattering of men did as they were told, sliding a heavy Ironwood beam across the locks. Shouting and whistling continued outside along with an unnerving shudder as the dragon continued to shuffle around on the Queensgate. "Where is yer ravenry?"
"Lord Commander I – what is happening? Which army is pursuing you?"
"RAVENRY – WHERE IS IT?" Thorne loomed over the Crow casting such a shadow of fear that the man stumbled backwards into one of the many slender dragonglass pillars holding up the ceiling in the foyer.
"E-e-e-east tower." He stammered.
Outside, the shouting rose to a frenzy. Arrows picked their way through the night air followed by great gasps of flame as the oil trenches were lit. The courtyard transformed into a hell scape. Even leaderless, the dead army barely stumbled – clamouring around the fires as though they were mere irritants. The first of the corpses hit the front door of the Queensgate at speed and dug their bone into the wood tearing chips out. It was joined by others. Biting. Scratching. Stabbing. The doors bucked against their locks. Daenerys grabbed the terrified Crow's cloak with one of her pale hands, imploring him to haste.
The Crow led them up cascades of broken stone that formed staircases of varying splendour. This was a fort built to satisfy ego rather than hold back the hoards of Death. After centuries, its beauty had faded beneath decay. Images of dragons leaped out at Daenerys from every surface, each more macabre than the last. She may as well have been running over bones in her ancestor's tomb – or were they among the bodies baying at the door?
As they ventured the castle's spine, its form mocked their fear. Ice grew through most of its walls, cracking them into piles of rubble. Old wars had left their scars too and in places the grand ceiling remained open to the night. The fog that had followed the dead sank in through these gaps, settling inside the castle so that it took on the mimic of a swamp.
Reaching the East Tower took them outside onto a bridge of stone. The fires below saturated the landscape in embers and unnatural light. This was not like Wildfire. Thorne's Crows had used cheap whale oil and its violent death stank the world with thick plumes of putrid smoke. Amongst this mess, thousands upon thousands of dead men were amassing beneath as a tide washing to the cliffs. If they weren't already through the castle doors they would be soon. Forget that. With this many, they could scale the walls… It was starting. Daenerys could see small piles building up.
Drogon was above them on the Southern Tower. He wailed at the creatures below but in his deeply injured state, seemed reluctant to engage them with fire. Thorne pushed Daenerys behind a line of archers on the bridge who had run out of arrows. Dumbfounded, they started at the swarming army with no idea what to do next. What could they do but wait to die? This was a slaughter, not a war.
"To The Wall, you fools – to The Wall!" Thorne turned them in the direction of the ladders. It was not much of a chance but a chance all the same. "Run West, fast as you can. Find the Queen's army – tell them what you have seen."
"Will they make it?" Daenerys asked, as they collided with the door at the base of the East Tower. Thorne did not answer but in truth, the men had a better hope than they did.
The East Tower had been the victim of terrible violence. Its walls were in worse condition than the rest of the castle with bird shit thick on the stone, decorating holes where missing blocks had never been replaced. Inside, a simple spiralled staircase ran upwards, diverging only to open onto strategic balconies – many of which where missing or in a state of collapse.
The battle outside was muted in this narrow, vertical world. For Thorne and Daenerys there was only the climb towards the final room.
"Mostly ice holdin' this shit together..." Thorne whispered, as a rotten rail came apart in his hand. "Stay off them walls," he added, as the Queen naturally gravitated away from the central drop and toward the exterior stone wall. It looked solid but Thorne could hear the wind forcing its way through the cracks. "You're just as 'like to go backwards out that and make a pretty smear on the ice."
Feathers corrupted the barren landscape of tower's upper levels, stuck on with shit. Decades of neglect had left the ravenry and its captives to run wild but with nowhere else to roost, the crows kept to their cells for the little protection the bars offered. There was no door to the room but the Nightswatch occupying the castle had tried to clean it up enough to use. Cages of varying size were stuffed against the walls – one of which would have fit an eagle but contained a strange set of bones almost as if they belonged to a -
"Dragon..." Daenerys hissed, running her fingertips across the rusted bars. The bony growths on the skull were unmistakable. "No bigger than house cats, that's what my brother used to say. What's one doing all the way out here?"
"There's no time. Parchment – ink!" He demanded, before looking for the strongest of the remaining crows. The one he found stared tilted its head with unnerving curiosity as Thorne plucked it from its perch. It was used to being handled and allowed him to stroke his fingers through its feathers while Daenerys scratched out the message.
Clutching the bird protectively to his chest, Thorne approached the window. The air was full of foul smoke and wet fog which stuck the wretched echo of death to his skin. It was hard to see anything in the darkness aside from trenches which cut the ground like flaming scars. There was no sound of war. No swords and worse – no screams.
"Your Grace..."
The cloak fell from Daenerys' shoulders as she wrote, pressing the nib to the point of fracture. She did not reply.
"You Grace..." Thorne repeated, turning with the crow in his arms. He found himself facing across the ravenry to the empty space in the wall where the door had been. A few feathers danced in the air, never quite settling.
"Yes, alright!" She struggled to roll the message up with her damaged arm throbbing and fresh blood running over her skin. It dripped on the table, mixing with the ink.
Somewhere distant, a dragon's mournful whine quivered its way through the air. Thorne had no special affinity for the creatures but the sound was primal, digging into his flesh as though the gods themselves were stirring beneath the ground. If the Queen heard it, she showed no sign – heading directly to him with the message.
"Was that?" Daenerys asked, pulling the thread into a knot.
"I heard it, Your Grace," he breathed against her. "The dead are in the tower. Yer should hide – let me do this..." Thorne added, hearing footsteps on the stairs. He'd expected death to come at him with rolls of thunder and the plod of metal but the skeletons were light on their feet, scratching and slithering like grave worms.
Daenerys refused to move, tying and re-tying the precious note. "I don't have a sword," she added, almost idly as if the realisation amused her in some dark fashion.
"I have only this," he replied, gesturing at the axe. "It is yours, if you wish it."
"For all the good it would do," she replied, lifting her piercing eyes to stare into his for a moment.
The dead drew closer, circling around and around in the hear to the tower. A few slipped off into the centre, smashing themselves against the stone at the bottom before clawing their way back.
"You should kill me." Finished with the bird's message, she placed her hands over his.
"They would only resurrect you. These creatures are after your magic. Nothing will stop them."
"Then burn my body, Lord Commander – do as you swore. Protect the realms of man."
Thorne stared right back into the pits of her soul. "I would..." There was no doubt to his words. "But all the fire has left this place an' yer dragon has gone ter buggery." He pulled away from her, rolled the crow over in his hands and tossed it out into the night. With a flap and a squawk, it was gone.
"What is it?" Daenerys asked, as Thorne stuck his head back outside the window with sudden interest. He ducked back inside, freshly dusted in snow. "These things – dead things – they are not actually gods."
"Necromancy is not divine."
"So we hide you."
"They can sense my magic. You saw them at Castle Black."
"Only when yer were right on top o' them, Your Grace… Right. On. Top. Of. Them."
With moments left, Thorne pushed over one of the structures holding a panel of cages aloft. Like a bookshelf, the whole lot toppled across the doorway, obscuring the entrance with wire, iron and planks of wood. He was already pushing the oak table toward the pile, smashing it into the mess as hard as he could. Anything else he could reach was thrown in its direction. All Thorne needed was time. Seconds even. The space between breaths…
He staggered backwards in alarm as an arm smashed through a broken cage. Stunned, Thorne blinked dumbly at it before swinging his axe and lopping the rotted bone off amid a hail of splinters. The next one came right through to its torso with shreds of chain mail hanging over an empty rib cage. It was wearing one of the Baratheon helmets with the antler standard embossed into the nose guard. Thorne used the blunt base of the axe to take its head off at the spinal column. This did not stop the rest of its bones from writhing with the curse that possessed it. He could not help but look at those bones. They were men. Men exactly like him with lives and stories. Thorne's chest clenched in the first proper terror of his life. The events of the previous night were nothing to the threat of eternal waking death. Within the hour, he'd be among their ranks – damaged and rotten with an insatiable lust for violence. Would his soul be wrapped up in his corpse or was that at least free to retire into the black…? Fucking magic.
He gripped the axe twice as hard if only to stop his hands shaking. His sweat froze to ice in the cold while the last of the birds who'd stirred in their cages earlier, decided to take flight and abandon the ravenry until Thorne was the last living thing inside the castle walls.
The tower groaned under the weight of the creatures scrambling up the stairs. Its rock trembled, dislodging ice from the dry rot slabs layered across the ceiling above. The next wave of dead hit the pile of rubble so hard that they sent cages flying. One soared past Thorne's face and broke apart on the wall with an explosion of feather, shit and bone. Thorne backed away – three steps and he was at the stone window. Blue eyes stared out from the shadows, amassing in their hundreds. He stepped up onto the window ledge. Wood snapped and iron bent. Thriving and throbbing with steel. Thorne took another step. A ruffle of feathers grazed his cheek.
THE BRAAVOSI VAULTS – ESSOS
The charred carpet of snake corpses were long behind them. Even the scent of oil had faded, replaced by a stagnancy that was cruel and unfamiliar. Far from the ancient finery of the treasure room, they found themselves in a maze beneath the great Braavosi Vaults with walls of oily, midnight stone that appeared to sweat in the darkness. The stone had a presence about it that thieved sound from the air. Its glossy surface gave the impression of decay but as soon as the first divergence of tunnels presented itself, Daario forced himself to place his left hand on the wall.
To the questioning looks of his companions he replied, "All pirates learn this trick." Tommen and Tycho were staggered behind. Their torches danced out of step as if the flames were at war. "When you trade in the markets of Lorath, this is what the fishermen do to find their homes amongst the high-walled streets and dead ends of a thousand forgotten corridors of stone. Have you seen them? The great maze… What a thing. Reminds me of the mountains."
"Yes, I have seen it," Tycho grunted in the darkness, though he was far from enraptured. The steady drip of blood had stopped only because it had congealed in layers forming a case over his wounds. "Sends them mad, I heard. Living in that shit. Ranting fools that fuck their own kin, slit their throats and throw the rest in the harbour to burly the water for the fishing boats." He felt as though he were going mad after a few hours inside its twin. "The Maze Makers… The people without faces."
"What?" Tommen looked directly into Tycho's flame.
"That's what they call the ones who built it. They never left a likeness of themselves on the walls. No text. Either they could not write or they chose not to tell their stories."
"That is not exactly true..." Daario replied, staying ahead of the other two. With one hand on the wall and the other holding a torch, he itched to draw his sword at the darkness. Instead it hung around his waist, a dead weight. "The island of Great Moraq has mazes too."
Tycho rolled his eyes despite the pain. "Traveller's garbage."
"I have stood in them," Daario insisted. "They open out onto the Jade Sea, collapsed and weathered by storms. The forest has eaten away at the porous stone. Not like this," he tapped the black walls. "In Moraq they are made of limestone. The rivers ate away at their form, opening its innards into gaping chasms with dripping spines of mineral falling down from the ceiling."
"Was there anything inside them?" Tycho leaned in, his lust for gold glinting in the white's of his eyes.
"Scales. Fish bones. The carcass of a whale. Paintings… On every wall."
"Paintings? That's why there's nothing left in Lorath – it must have worn away. What were they of?"
"Terrible things." Daario replied, haunted. "The drawings were set in narrow, horizontal panels that seemed to tell stories. What I saw was of creatures rising out of the sea with legs, spines and fins – large round heads and black eyes. There were red-skinned people strangled in their hands with their heads torn off and the Jade Sea painted black with blood."
Tycho lowered his torch. "Gods be damned..." He breathed. "Perhaps it is for the best that the world washed away those things."
Tommen could hear Ash hunting in the labyrinth. He'd tried to keep her close but the dragon slithered off after some trapped animal. A rat, perhaps. They had seen a few already – each with white, sightless eyes and naked skin. "If those things were ever real," Tommen replied, "and not the delusions of priests, surely they are gone now? After all, the God Emperors are dead. Their kingdoms are echoes. Nothing could survive down here except rats and snakes."
"Agreed." Daario replied. "I doubt we'll survive either. Who knows how deep this maze goes or for what purpose it was built."
"I worry it's a tomb." Tycho nudged the others to keep walking.
With no sun or moon to mark the time, hours blurred. The torches dwindled to feeble, glowing embers until they were cold enough to touch. They kept them in hand as weapons against the complete unknown. The pitch was perfect and soon the abyss distilled to touch and sound. Tycho placed his hand on Tommen's back and Tommen did likewise on Daario in order to keep a hold of each other. They behaved like sailors tossed from a shipwreck, terrified that the ocean would drag them apart. Water trickled from cracks around them. They became accustomed to its approach and sucked it directly from the greasy walls. Each time left them slightly drunk.
They had a choice, to talk to each other and break down the fear or listen intently to every rustle, scratch and drip to avert awaiting death? It was a debate that ebbed both ways but eventually they settled into a rhythm where one of them would hum songs into the darkness and the others would pretend that they were walking in a dream. Daario's songs were the most beautiful, picked up in distant ports over a lifetime of spice-filled air. It made him nostalgic for the open water. He could have lived that life forever – endured its violence in trade for an endless new horizon. Tycho's murmurings were mournful. He repeated the same melancholy tune from boyhood where he would find a perch looking out over the scattered islands of Braavos and count the ships. Of the three, Tommen had the sweetest voice – not quite a man yet. His offerings were that of a Summer child and yet the notes felt bitter on his lips. The soft world of his birth lay as burning rubble. He would have to find new songs. Margaery. It was about time now for the child to come. His child. Suddenly his notes took on a Winter's edge.
The filthy walls continued to narrow with a tangible presence. They came across steps with regularity, always heading deeper. Daario had expected the rock to warm as they descended – like the fires beneath the Dragonmount but here they found a world increasingly dank and cold.
"Sh..." Tommen gripped Daario's back, tugging him to a stop by his shirt. The pirate's song died off. "Ash?"
"Could be," Daario replied, hearing something indistinct in the distance.
"What if she gets lost?"
"Dragons don't get lost in places like this," Daario assured the deposed king. "They were born in tombs and mountain throats."
"Not Ash," he shook his head. "She was born on the Hightower – in daylight."
"Your time is better served worrying about us. The dragon will be fine – Tycho?"
Tommen and Daario spun around when they heard a thud strike the ground and an unlit torch smack a wall. Their hands raked the ground, building an image out of the black. Tycho was on his side, bent double, moaning over his leg. The poor creature was shaking in a fever, barely conscious.
"We have to stop."
Daario did not challenge Tommen. Without light there was very little either of them could do for the old banker, so they huddled together. After a while trying to force sleep, Tommen realised that he had not closed his eyes. He rolled over, curling up to the wall and took himself to places of sunlight and warmth. He woke to the sound of Daario playing with his jewel-encrusted sword. Tommen was used to the metallic hiss hitting the air when Daario caught his nails in one of its details.
"How long was I…?"
"Who could know."
"Time to go?" Tommen added, his body stiff, wet and cold. He'd gone well beyond hunger into a sort of euphoria as his body turned on itself aided by whatever laced their water. "Tycho..." He reached across, feeling the banker's thigh. He shook his leg in an attempt to wake him but the older man did not move. "He's cold."
"We're all cold." Daario sneered.
Tommen insisted, pawing up Tycho's body until his hand plunged into an open chest of half-devoured organs.
The boy screamed. Daario lunged and slammed his hand across Tommen's face to snuff out the noise. A flame roared across the air, burning a foot off the ground. Darkness gave way to day as Ash set fire to Tycho's body. Her snout was bloody. It ran down the scales on her chest, legs and face. Chewed pieces of flesh lay scattered near the body, each forming misshapen pink mounds. Tycho's face had been a particular delicacy – all its skin pulled off and the bone picked clean.
"Ash – no..." Tommen whispered, as Daario removed his hand.
"I told you we should kill that dragon."
The body continued to burn and as gruesome as the sight was, the warmth it created drew the pair of survivors closer. They were forced to listen as Ash returned to her meal. She used her paws to hold Tycho down and the back of her jaw to crack the larger bones. Tommen knew that he should look away and spare himself the horror but after so long spent in the darkness the light was intoxicating.
"It's part of her nature," Tommen mumbled, fixated on Ash.
"When dragons are hungry, they eat..." said Daario. "They'd eat their own mother if the night took long enough. We stay here until she's finished the last of him. Better for us." He explained. "A meal like that would do her for a few days."
