"There they go. Whole bloody lot of them." The Hound emerged from the Winterfell crypts in time to see the last of their guests leave. They were the smart ones. The Bears. The Glovers. Quite a few Lannisters, too. Any creature with an ounce of sense was scattering like rats out into the snow. They were off to become yet another one of the disjointed armies wandering across Westeros without any clear leadership.
"You fuss like an old woman." Sansa replied, striding out of the crypts and straight onto the path worn into the snow. She was headed for the castle with a scrap of parchment clutched in her fist. Dressed in furs, leather and steel with her mess of red hair plaited and left to writhe down her back like a nest of snakes. "Our people are ready to move within the hour."
"East. You're sending them East." A few long strides brought him into step alongside the self-proclaimed Queen of the North. "Under the watch of Ned's bastard – who can barely mount a horse."
They had been exchanging verbal blows all day, with Clegane trailing her around like a dog. Their tension had momentarily exploded in the depths of the crypts where they'd screeched so loudly the force of their confrontation sent them backing against opposing walls, standing in silence for fear that they'd woken the dead. All had been quiet. Winterfell's dead kings and queens lay still.
"My husband will be with them. There is no safer place than the roof of the world. You've been to the Eyrie. You've seen how high its walls are. The dead will overrun the South. Better to climb into the skies."
Arguments about the Eyrie were nothing but a proxy war for their real conflict. Sansa refused to leave Winterfell. Clegane refused to leave Lady Stark alone in the crypts. They danced around these immoveable positions, occasionally crashing into each other.
"It's all horse shit."
Sansa shifted her gaze up to his face at the outburst. "The walls of the Eyrie…?"
Of course not. "Prophecy. House words. Empty threats lords piss off their castles."
"Winter is coming." She countered, sharply. The landscape backed her words. It was a vision of Winter and a promise of worse to come.
Upon hearing no reply, Sansa stormed on, stepping over a ridge of ice that had formed between two collapsed walls that once kept the Godswood safe. She could feel the last bones of her home breaking apart under the growing weight of snow as it pounded down through the night and then petered off into the soft veil that was still drizzling out of the sky. The scent of ash stuck in the air where the corpse of the Weirwood continued to smoulder. Winterfell's heart had been burned out.
"I am staying," Sansa hissed over her shoulder, "I've already told you – go if you will. I have no need of you."
Her reply caught in her throat when Sandor grabbed her upper arm and spun her around.
"You forget yourself, ser."
"Don't 'ser' me. They're are no kings or queens any more. Look around. Look!"
Sansa forced herself to run her eyes over the broken world. Even after the work they'd done restoring Winterfell, it remained a sad ruin decomposing into its grave. The dragon had inflicted fatal wounds upon the ailing fortress. If anyone was left alive after the Winter, they'd have to tear the whole lot down and start again. These were the times when she wondered if the people of the North were obeying her commands only because they wanted to. She wasn't game to test the strength of her words. Petyr had taught her that. Power is a curious thing, he had said, sometimes it survives on the thinnest shreds of rumour.
"Let go of my arm," Sansa insisted, dropping her voice to a whisper. "I've made up my mind and I have no stomach to fight you. Please."
"Fine. Leave the bastard Snow here. He's a Stark. He'll never rule. He'll never marry. You keep your honour to the gods or your father or whomever the fuck it is you think you're serving. What's really going on? You're not a fool. Destiny is for fools. If you stay in Winterfell you die. Lady Stark, Queen of the empty realm – why are you so keen to lay in that hole with the rest?"
She fought against his grip but he was twice her size and determined to save her from herself.
"You forget," he persisted, as her struggling drew them closer and closer to the remains of the garden wall. The ground beneath their feet was deep with snow, causing them to stumble. "I was there when you looked over the drop at King's Landing – your father's head on a spike and that cunt Lannister boy hissing. You thought about it then. The sweet darkness. I know, because I've thought about it too. You should have looked more closely at you bastard brother. The darkness is in his eyes. Snow brought some of it back into the world. A long time ago I thought there was peace in death. I believed that the gods waited for us but the gods are snakes. I saw them when I waded to deep into their world, laying there in the dust and rock with crows trying to pull pieces of flesh off me. The gods are the rats and scorpions desperate to pick our bones. That's no place for a little bird like you. You've built yourself a cage to die in. Yer think that if you die down there with them old Starks that you'll be safe from the Night King's resurrection."
"If I have, that is my business." She snapped, lifting her other hand but he caught that too. "Let me go. I am your Queen."
"And I am sworn to protect you. If I let you stay here I might as well stick the sword in you myself. Build you a pyre in the snow like those poor sad cunts the witch whispered to. You are not that mad dragon girl. She has Eastern magic and three dragons to protect her. Have you even drawn blood with your sword?"
"You're wrong," Sansa insisted. "I'm not staying to die."
"You are!" He insisted, gripping harder. "You are!"
His boot found a patch of ice – slipped violently beneath him and together they fell sideways into two feet of powder. Sandor landed on his back with the wet, freezing world rising up on all sides around him. He barely felt Sansa hit his chest but of course she did, he had a hold of both her arms. That really was, quite literally, a step too far. Immediately he released his hold and went to stand but the queen wrapped her arms around him and buried her face against his neck. Soft sobs echoed against his skin and soon he felt the hot drips of her tears. Unsure of what to do, he laid one hand on her back and remained perfectly still.
The snow continued to fall. It caught in Sansa's hair. Melted onto the back of Sandor's enormous hand. He could hear it clinking softly against the branches of the Godswood. His thinned wisps of damaged hair lifted and fell with every breath of wind.
"I know you have ter stay." He said, finally. "I've known it from the start."
"...but you had to try." Sansa murmured back, against his skin.
"I had to try."
They lashed Jon Snow to his horse. Brienne did a good job of it but made sure to remind him with every tightening of the buckle that he was a proud Northern idiot for refusing the cart. Pride should hurt. Her enthusiasm toward savagery was not caused by the pale, sickly bastard or the freezing weather that had set in over the ice field. That was only noise in the background of the troubles festering in her mind.
"Lady Brienne?"
After mounting her horse, Brienne gave it a sharp tug on the reigns to get it to turn back towards the Stark. Brienne did not reply – merely waited for the Northerner to continue. Starks spoke like glaciers, caving in one block of ice at a time while the world shivered.
"All those stories that our fathers and maesters told us about honour and loyalty," Jon grimaced, flinching toward a strap running across his thigh, "you really took them to heart, didn't you?" There was still no reply to his words. She was a hard creature – expressionless like the endless snowdrifts. Brienne's eyes were cut from the same hue as Tarth's oceans while her blonde hair may as well have been a ripple of sand. "Most of them were liars. Murders. Adulterers and bastards."
That seemed to be the end of his point.
Brienne replied, "I have no interest in the failures of lesser men." She walked her horse on, riding up along the outside of the Winterfell caravan until she neared the front where Kinvara had taken up a position beside Royce. It bothered Brienne how quickly he had agreed to abandon Lady Stark to certain death while keeping company with a fire witch and Brienne made sure that Royce felt her ire when their eyes met.
Winterfell didn't have any gates to open. When the horn sounded, everyone moved out of the shadow of the castle and onto the ice field.
They left behind them the blackened mounds of corpses, burned and collapsed into morbid tombstones. Fresh snow dusted them as if they were tiny mimics of the larger, marauding mountain ranges behind. The war with Ramsay Bolton had been completely except for a few damaged pines with arrows sticking out of their bark and a banner or two ripped and caught in their branches.
Lady Stark and Sandor were the only two left behind with the ravens. They watched from the castle's main tower. Distances were difficult to judge across featureless landscapes. It took forever for the caravan's smudge to reach the forest. When they were gone, a different sort of a chill settled over Winterfell. It was almost as if the fortress knew that its time was coming to an end. If there was any magic left in its stones, surely it was stirring now to protect the last Stark in Winterfell.
Or maybe not. Perhaps it was as cold and dead as the bones resting in the ancient crypt.
"I don't like the look of that..." Sandor drew her attention to the mountains running along the horizon. At their Northernmost point, there were gathering white clouds riding low on their flanks. It was a strange sort of a storm that moved so fast they could track its progress by eye alone.
"We should carry the last of the supplies to the crypts and lock the doors," she replied, emotionless. "The dead arrive without warning."
"Yer sure you want to hide in a crypt with a mad cunt who can raise bones on the way? I thought being married ter the imp might have given you some sense."
Sansa arched her eyebrow at the jealousy in his tone. He had never asked her about Lord Tyrion – nor had anyone else. As far as she could tell, every man in the realm was terrified of being bettered by a dwarf with a large cock.
"Starks place iron swords across the laps of the dead to keep them at peace. I thought my father's words were a sort of crude poetry but now I am inclined to believe that our ancestors used stories to pass down threads of magic. I know the crypts of Winterfell are the safest place in Westeros but I cannot prove it to you. I have no intention of dying."
"The place still gives me the creeps," Sandor muttered.
While he left to pack the crypts, Sansa found herself walking through the remains of her home. Without the constant thunder of people filling its halls, the wind was left to whistle to itself. Dry, red leaves were collected in every corner making the hallways resemble Autumn paths through the Godwood. Wolf banners caught in the wind, billowing out from the stone embrace before slapping against the rock. Doorways ached and every now and then, the old building cracked. She wondered if the castle had ever been empty over its thousands of years. The occupation of Winterfell was a fixture on the Northern landscape since the First Men. When Bran the Builder had laid the stones of the inner hall, it had been an unassuming blip on a white wilderness. Her father used to point out those old chunks of rock scattered between newer additions. If Winterfell fell and the dead took possession of it – well, maybe it really was the last Winter that Old Nan warned about. The final Winter. As Queen of the North, she'd never been intended to rule at all. No. She was simply there to close the book.
Sansa tried to imagine a Winter like that. Snow falling into walls that imprisoned the crowns of pine trees. Families frozen inside their homes, all hidden below the drifts – as silent as the sea.
The thought left her cold until Sansa could no longer bear standing inside the castle. She met Sandor down at the crypts where several of the empty tombs had been turned into liveable quarters. There was only one entrance which a new door had been fixed to. They pulled it shut, bolted it then began sealing themselves in with slabs of rock and bags of grain until they couldn't see the door any more.
Candlelight became their only source of warmth and light. The walls wept constantly while rats scampered, keeping out of their path.
"If there is no one here except us," Sandor offered, "maybe the dead cunt and his army won't bother with the fort?"
She wished rather than believed him to be right. "The Night King is a Stark. His brother was King of Winter. He built The Wall, this castle and the crypts where we stand. If there is one thing that I remain absolutely certain about, it is that he is bringing his army directly to us. That Red Witch who was here – she said that her magic was stronger at Winterfell."
"There was a dragon sleeping under it. Dragons bring magic into the world."
"Perhaps."
Clegane laid his unsheathed sword against a nearby wall. There was no point wearing heavy armour in the narrow passageways of the crypt. If he had any chance of fighting back, he'd need to be able to move. "The dead don't strike me as nostalgic."
Sansa lingered at the wall, brushing her gloved fingertips against the huge blocks of granite. They were rough. Between them sat thick lines of dirt which encouraged moss and flowering lichen to spring out at random. Their buds had been shedding spores onto the ground for a thousand years leaving a golden tinge on the floor like the dust of the sun.
"He left something here, I am sure of it." Sansa replied. "At first my thoughts were the same as yours, and that it was the dragon but Silverwing isn't old enough to be part of his story. Whatever drew a dragon to make a den of Winterfell is also pulling him toward us. Tyrion loved dragons," she amended briefly, as explanation. "When Lord Tywin commanded us to bed, he would sit there among the pillows and tell me tales about the great dragons of the Targaryen empire. He was always so good with stories." Her voice dropped fondly but seeing Sandor's expression sour, she cleared her throat and continued. "There's another thing I'm sure about – this thing that he's looking for – it's down here with us, in the dark."
They did not speak again for some time. Sandor did not mind the pitch but he hated that it was accentuated by naked flames. He walked into the crypt's corridors but most of them lead downhill and were flooded with meltwater which he could hear dripping in a million places. It was fed by the snow and for the first time Sandor wondered if they might drown.
Eventually, they both grew tired of the eternal silence of the crypt and reunited with the inevitability of planets and their moons. Sansa sat down on one of the chairs with a groan. She cupped her stomach with her hand, uncomfortable with the pregnancy. There was rarely a thought to her child. Sometimes she wondered if there was something wrong with her – something unnatural with her inability to bond with her infant but then she realised that it was for the best considering that it was almost certainly going to die before it had the chance to draw breath.
Sandor was less severe. He fussed with the dragonglass axe he'd brought, trying to get a feel for its hapless balance. There was nothing about it that he liked except its ability to kill dead things. There was barely enough light to pick out his weathered features from the darkness. Sansa watched him, her eyes black like a wolf waiting for the moon. It was in that moment Sansa realised that she barely knew the man behind the mask. The Hound was a rumour before he was a man.
"Is it all anger and revenge for you?" She asked. Her query stilled Sandor's hands. "The life you chose – did you want anything more than your brother's blood?"
He itched to escape her inquisition but there was nowhere to go. Instead, he wiped a sheen of sweat off his forehead, leaving some of his fine hair stuck to skin that had been mangled by fire long ago. "My brother stole my life," he replied. "Stole it when he shoved my head into the flames. He made me an ugly son of a bitch. Ugly cunts do ugly work. Swing a sword or starve to death." There was disappointment in his voice. "You don't ask questions when you're hungry. I picked up my sword and killed whomever I was told to for a coin. After the first fifty it's all the same. Yer feel their flesh spit and bones fracture. Their agony shudders along the blade. I sell my sword like brothel whores open their legs. It's a life."
Sansa considered him for a few minutes, watching his hands caress the imperfections in the black glass. "Your brother is dead – well," she hesitated, "he is somewhere between worlds. Killing him now would be a mercy, not revenge."
There was a very quiet, "I know..." in reply.
"If you kill the Night King," Sansa added, "it would not be a form of personal revenge – it would be the reckoning of untold thousands."
There was a certain poetic ego to it that enticed whatever was left of Sandor but he knew full well the truth. "No man can kill magic – no woman either," he quickly stammered, "before yer go getting any ideas." He was a shell of a man and he would die such, a husk for other people's revenge and a sword to set the blood of bastards on the ground. "I am not afraid of dying. It's the not dying that worries me. My brother is walking flesh. He stinks of decay. We're all walking corpses in the end but fuck, we should be in the ground where it's dark and peaceful – not murdering the living. Those Wildlings, they knew what was out there. That Craster cunt too. I think we all knew. The truth. We buried it in our libraries and tasked senile old halfwits to guard it. Even when your bastard brother sent his ravens, the Citadel sat on their robes and bickered. It was only the roar of a dragon that snapped them into life. I hear they're closing their gates. Walling their illustrious city in. They think those stones will keep them safe but they don't know snow. They don't know how it piles up relentlessly against the rock. Those old bastards will freeze to death in their crypt, surrounded by the silence of hubris. If we get out of here, I'm going to go down to their city and give every single one of them a piece of my mind."
As the last word fell on the air, the crypt trembled around them. The candle died momentarily before surging back to life.
THE WHITE KNIFE – THE NORTH
Winterfell's caravan moved at speed toward the White Knife. The fog was gathering around the edges of the horizon, blurring the detail of distant mountains into a sky that had shifted into an unusual silvery curtain. It was impossible to tell if they were storm clouds blown flat by a gale or layers of smoke. Whatever it was, it created a glare over the world which left the Northmen squinting at the approaching gash in the landscape.
The dead could not cross water and so Jon Snow had insisted that they cut across fields to reach the river. They were coming upon it now, driving their wagons back onto the Kingsroad as they approached the bridge. Crossings were rare and well manned, used as profitable tax collection points. This one was abandoned by the wars with the gatekeeper's house left as a burned pile of rubbish. A few horses roamed wild, struggling to pick anything out of the snow. The White Knife was a dark steel, almost black as it gouged a path through the farmlands. Its surface churned, immune to falling snow. A long way in the North-East, where it began in the mountains, some of its tributaries had frozen solid, reflecting the sun like pale veins upon the landscape.
Jon Snow pulled his horse out of line to stand on the icy banks. The caravan pushed in front of him, headed for the bridge. The White Knife was three miles wide – one of the largest rivers in the realm. No one could remember the last time that it had frozen. Its waters ran too deep and too fast to be tamed by the whims of Winter. The builders of the bridge across its vast body remained a mystery. There was something Eastern about it with narrow arches and indulgent swirls of decoration on the stone pylons. Northerners didn't waste their time on such things and Targaryens made sure to write their name on everything. Some travellers said that it had a touch of the Rhoyne about it – a melancholy beauty. It was beautiful. He'd ridden across it several times and paused to feel the wind on his face. Artists and traders once lined the edges while fishermen cluttered up the water with their reed boats. Those boats were dashed to pieces, pulled apart by the weather where they lay half submerged in the reeds. Now, it was guarded by water birds fishing off the rail, cleaning their wings while they waited for movement in the waters below.
Royce joined the Stark bastard. There was a layer of ice sitting over his armour, dulling its ornate embossing. "We're strapping the wildfire to the pylons as you asked. Snow..." He added, "If you do this, you close the way North. Anyone escaping behind us will have to go through the Wolfswood or attempt to push through the snow drifts. They won't make it. Food for the wolves or the crows, as they say."
Jon stared at the bridge. "I know. I sent a raven to the Queen's army telling them to come via the Dreadfort and White Harbour. They have ships and if they've sunk those, they'll have to use the coast road. If we don't close this bridge, the dead will be on our backs within days."
There was no further discussion. After the caravan was safely on the Southern side of the river, a rider waited behind, lighting fuses connected to barrels of wildfire which were lashed to the bridge. He rode his horse hard, racing toward Jon. A moment before he reached the bank, the bridge began to explode in a violent show of green fury, clawing its way up against the white backdrop. The heat from it melted everything within a mile, forcing a surge of water into the river while leaving the banks muddy, ruined wrecks littered with the corpses of previous wars that had been invisible under the snow.
The excess water broke the White Knife's banks and lapped at the edge of the caravan. Kinvara watched the firestorm with lust-filled eyes. The people of Winterfell whispered prayers to their gods, some falling to their knees on the soggy ground to beg for protection. Others prayed for their Queen, locked away in the crypts of Winterfell. They pleaded with the old Kings of Winter to rise to their feet and defend the ancient heart of the North.
Jon had no time for prayers. The horns were blown and the caravan continued South while the magnificent bridge collapsed beneath the waves where it would become another curious ruin of a lost civilisation. The Red Priestess steered her horse around the outside of the group, followed by the frightened stares of children. She worked her way over to the bastard Stark, drawn toward him by the stink of death that hung in the air.
"We are all bastards in the eyes of the gods..." Kinvara purred, bringing her horse alongside his. The animals bit at each other until Jon leaned down and gave his a gentle pat on its neck.
"You are here at our grace, priestess," Jon warned. "Fall back into line with the rest."
There was a wry smile on her lips. The bastard had power, for now, but men's power paled when the world stepped towards apocalypse. Then began the time of the gods and those who served them. "Do you know what your men whisper?" She asked, her cloak and hair caught in a North wind, pushing shards of auburn across her face. "They don't call you, 'bastard' any more. You're not a Stark and you're not a King. You're not even a Targaryen. No. They call you 'cursed'. Some wonder if the Night King sees through your eyes."
Jon's eyes were alive with malice. His instinct was to hate the witch. She unsettled him and yet honour bound him to keep her alive. Regardless of who his father was, Jon would always be Eddard's boy. "No doubt you encourage these whispers. I warn you, priestess, your gods are curious because they are new but these lands are old and the Winter coming toward us, older still. I have seen the bed where the gods lie with each other – beneath us – in the ground – in the darkness." Jon pulled his horse in front of hers, bringing them both to a sudden halt. She startled at his abruptness. Perhaps there was a flicker of dragon in his eyes after all. "Your gods are as dead as mine. Now, get back in line or I'll have one of the Thenn bind you to a tree and set it alight to keep us warm."
Kinvara's breath stuck in the back of her throat. She did not see a man before her at all. "You – wouldn't – dare offend the gods."
Jon felt warmth flooding back into his veins, every hour growing stronger. "As the whispers say, I am cursed already."
The Red Priestess fell back into the caravan, vanishing among the ground. Jon turned his face into the wind, looking North for a moment, toward Sansa and Winterfell.
He knew that he would never see either of them again.
"Your wounds will need fixing," Royce announced, nodding at the Stark bastard.
Jon looked down and saw the stab wounds on his chest had bled right through to the leathers where they had begun to drip down onto his saddle. He was leaking like a ship wrecked on the reef. He dipped his head politely at Sansa's husband.
"If you die, my wife will have my head." He added, in one of the first moments of softness he had shown. Men of the Vale were armoured in more ways than one. "Lady Stark is very fond of you."
This time, Jon laughed – holding his stomach with his hand. He had never questioned Sansa about her choice of husband. Maybe Jon was wrong and the match wasn't purely about politics. Royce was a large, strong man from an old House. After everything Sansa had endured at the hands of her last husband, a protective figure made sense. Except she is alone in the crypts, waiting for death and he is here – smiling. "It was not always so." He assured the other man. She may not hold a sword but she used to stab me with her embroidery needles when we were young."
"Over there by that tree – come on, I will help you." Royce insisted. "That enormous Tarthian lashed you to your horse so well I doubt the gods themselves could unseat you."
"Come any closer and I'll open your stomach for the dogs." Brienne warned, as Kinvara emerged after dusk. She'd been off lighting bonfires for the camp – whispering her filthy words at the flames until they rose out of their sad pile of sticks with a fresh vigour. The men were useless, enamoured by both her power and looks. It wouldn't be long before she had them all under her spell – and that was before there was any mention of magic.
"You have not been ordered to kill me." Kinvara cooed, remaining at the edge of the firelight from Brienne's tent.
"Perhaps not, but I doubt Snow has any special care for you."
That was probably true. "Red Priestesses have more than magic – we are purveyors of knowledge. What if I was to tell you that I have news of your home, Lady Brienne. Stories travel quickly through a realm at war. I hear their whispers."
"Whatever it is, I have no care to hear it from you." When Kinvara moved towards Brienne's sword, she stood immediately and fixed the witch with a violent glare.
"Pretty sword," Kinvara purred, not daring to approach further. "It is a half creature – like the moon. Who holds the other side?"
"A dead king."
Kinvara's eyes lit up. "Dead? I think not. Oh, he is close to Death – walking in the darkness with a dethroned prince. In the temples they say that Valyrian steel, once forged, is a soul. Your sword was split and its soul divided."
Brienne shivered, but it had nothing to do with night falling. Her fire ached toward the priestess with curls of flame spewing cinder like petals tossed before a monarch. Jaime's son was alive and so too was the Lannister claim to the throne. "What do you know of Tarth?"
"Only what I have seen in the flames." Kinvara whispered. "Things that have not yet come to pass. The white marbles of Tarth are to be broken into bits like shells after the tide… Your father lays at the bottom of the cliff – a collection of bones picked clean by gulls."
MOUNTAINS OF THE MOON – THE VALE OF ARRYN
There was a solitary Weirwood grown into castle where part of its wall had collapsed, falling hundreds of feet into the valley below. It left a gap behind barely large enough for a man to crawl through but certainly sufficient for all manner of gale to blow in off the tops of the ridges laced with ice and dirt. In the centre of this gaping wound grew an old bone tree. At the best of times it boasted half a dozen crimson leaves although it had been known to go for years with nothing but barren branches to sustain it – living through the image of death.
Its thin branches were no thicker than the shaft of an arrow and rattled against each other. Had it been any other plant the lords of the Vale would have removed the weed and repaired the wall but this was a god tree – growing wild, brought to their keep by a raven. No one had the nerve to remove the faceless tree.
Dacey lay on the ground beside the dwarfed Weirwood, allowing the wind to rush over her. She liked the caress of it on her skin – even its crisp edge reminded her of the years she'd spent living alone in the mountains North of The Wall. In some of her mad, long nights she had thought the gods whispered across the air but after a while Dacey realised that it was the mountain ranges themselves that spoke through the wind. Their songs were old and unknowable. She listened anyway, closing her eyes as the afternoon light picked its way around the stone room.
The drop beneath her was always at the edge of her mind. It was impossible not to envision the thin floor of stone suspended above the valley as if – at any moment – the whole of the castle might fold in on itself and die on the valley floor with the victims of the Moondoor.
Her dreams were darker than usual. It was not unusual. She had frequent nightmares as a child where she'd imagined herself as a giant spider made of ice, wandering in the endless fields of bergs that hug the Northern coast. Not a dream. Dacey tried to forget but when she was young she'd come face to face with the horrid vision of her dreams and found herself delving into its mind while her and Jorah dangled from the edge of a Bear Island cliff. Jorah. That grey-eyed Mormont prince. She wondered where he was now. With his dragon queen. He was there, sometimes, at the edge of her mind. Neither a memory nor a ghost.
Warging was a type of possession in which both minds surrendered part of themselves to the other. This time, with the ice spider long dead, it was as if Dacey's mind was searching through the darkness for another creature to latch onto. She had no control over the urge to hunt out her prey. It was a compulsion, driven by the trees. They rattled in the wind and she delved deeper into the night.
On her way into nowhere, Dacey heard the whispers of Children hissing. There were hundreds of them. Rasping. Conspiring. She followed their malice up and down the rivers of the dreamscape.
Dacey awoke inside a raven. A cricket struggled in her beak, thrashing its half-crushed body. She dropped the insect and hopped across the snow. There were other ravens around her, picking at the ground. The landscape was ruined by the shadow of an ugly tower. Torrhen's Square, she realised, recognising it from an old book. The castle was even more hideous than described – strong but unnaturally bland. There was an unreal quality about the way the stones came together into a perfect geometric rise of rock. It overlooked an equally uninteresting lake that had an artificial shape to its bank. Dacey would not be surprised if it was the mining site for the castle and then left to fill from the nearby river.
Perched beside its banks was a small group of Stark guards. Their maroon tents were pitched at the water's edge as if they'd been allowed to camp on the grounds but not permitted into the castle itself. Dacey looked again to the structure. If it was inhabited, it was by fearful men who'd locked themselves away inside its depths.
She stretched her wings, flying across the open ground to a small stand of river birch. Their branches bent down toward the water where they sank their ends into the surface, drinking. Dacey wrapped her claws around one of these – steadying herself. From here she could see a young man in a wheelchair staring over the water. Weirwood saplings grew through the marshes, sprouting out of the muddy banks with angry halos of healthy red leaves. Some of them were picked off by the Northern wind and scattered over the surface of the lake. They interrupted the otherwise perfect mirror of the sky.
Dacey was not the only raven showing an interest in the cripple. She watched them settle on neighbouring trees and even on the Weirwoods. They were the eyes of the Children. She could feel it. Their malevolent attention fixated on the Stark but unable to do anything but watch as he watched them.
A black feather tumbled down in front of Dacey, casually falling until it lightly touched the surface of the lake. She tilted her raven head up and found a large crow perched above her with three black eyes arranged on its head.
Dacey startled but the dozens of fine branches acted like the bars of a cage, trapping her on the limb as the three-eyed raven launched itself at her – claws first. She felt them dig straight into her back, gouging ruthlessly through her fragile bird body. They pierced her lungs, stifling her cries before she could make them. Now it was her feathers that littered the water below – raining off her body as the three-eyed raven pecked mercilessly at her wings until it managed to snap one at the joint.
The agony was unbearable. Dacey howled inside her mind but it hit the air as dull cries. Over and over, the claws struck her body covering the branch in thin blood. If it weren't for the fury of her attacker, she'd have fallen into the water and drowned long ago.
When the bird opened her throat, Dacey was tossed from the bird's mind back into the Weirwood network. She was beyond her depth, treading water in the endless see of darkness and murmurs. There were thousands of minds around her – flashing in and out as she moved past them.
This time she woke up in the middle of a thick fog. There were mountains either side of her – she could hear, rather than see them from the sound of the gale bouncing off their glaciers. A frozen river stretched a short distance in front until it too was smothered by the endless world of white. She was walking among shadows. They were there with her in the fog. Spectres. Ghosts.
Emptiness. It overwhelmed her. A raw and brutal smack of nothing. She tried to move but the feeling one was of total suffocation.
Then she realised.
Dacey had awoken inside a corpse. One of the dead creatures within the Night King's army.
She screamed from every corner of her mind.
Tormund used all of his strength to hold the Mormont down. He'd found Dacey sleeping on the floor of an abandoned room, high up in one of the old towers where she writhed around in agony, muttering and gasping out. He called to her, over and over but she only got worse. Now, Dacey was caught in a fit, arching her back as she tried to smack her head into the ground. It was only Tormund's strength that stopped her from doing serious harm to herself. Even then, she managed to give herself a few good knocks to the head, splitting the skin apart in gashes that bled onto the floor.
He shook her. Slapped her. Sat her up and tried to speak to her. A gust of wind rattled the branches of the Weirwood. Tormund locked eyes with the tree.
"Right, yer bastard..." He muttered.
Tormund lifted Dacey into his arms and carried her out of the room. He barely kept hold of her, but as they put a few good solid walls between themselves and the bone tree, Dacey started to mumble. He stopped, knelt on the ground and laid her back down. She had calmed, laying in his arms almost peacefully. Tormund tried to wake her again and this time Dacey opened her eyes.
For hours she said nothing. Un-shed tears formed and died without dropping. She wanted to believe that it had all been a dream but Dacey knew very well what had happened. Mance had warned her of such things – the deep dreams of those who never learned to control their powers. Some, he had told her, became lost in the branches of the Weirwood, moving between minds as their physical bodies withered away, consumed by the roots. Perhaps that is how the trees hunted – a sort of predatory mechanism.
When she finally told Tormund, his first instinct was to rip out the tree and toss it through the Moon Door. "They're cunts of a thing." He insisted. "If I had my way there'd be none of those bloody things left in the realm."
"I got too close." She insisted. "That's all. One day, we may need a way to spy on the world, as the Children do."
"While they spy on us. I tell yer we should burn it."
"The power of the trees is related to their size. This one is barely a shrub. Besides, now we know that the army of the dead is well and truly South of The Wall. It won't be long before he approaches Winterfell. How long until the armies of Winterfell make it up here?"
"In this weather? The Lord thinks it'll be the best part of a week. He had a raven from his son this morning. They've crossed the river and are making good time. So far, the roads are passable."
"That won't last."
"No, it won't but it'll last the week an' fer now that's all that matters."
"Bran Stark won't be with them."
"I know he's a Stark an' yer House's loyal kin but if yer don't mind me sayin' I don't think anyone is going ter miss his him. I've heard a lot of tavern talk about the cripple Stark – none of it good."
Dacey nodded. "You're probably right but..."
"No. Don't bloody say it."
"...but the Children of the Forest were watching him. They want something from the Stark but I don't think he knows that he's being watched."
"Send a raven then."
"Send it where? They were camping at the lake. By the time anything we sends gets there he'll have ridden off."
"Send it to his bastard brother, then. Let him go and fetch the boy."
"Someone will have to." Dacey insisted. "Whatever the Children want – it is nothing to our advantage. Yer should have heard them – the way they laughed. It was like they were hungry for blood, just like their trees."
"Yer not seriously thinking of going an' gettin' that boy yerself..."
"I'll try again tomorrow. If I can find out where he is going, we might be able to get there first."
"Warging is a dangerous business." Tormund insisted. "Plenty of Freefolk 'ave died trying to see through the eyes of the gods."
THE BRAAVOSI VAULTS – ESSOS
The air stank of Tycho. In the darkness that had followed the extinguishing of the corpse, Daario and Tommen were haunted by the sound of Ash crunching bone. Tommen gagged into his sleeve, wracked by the memory of the banker's stripped corpse. He was pretty sure that the man had been alive when the dragon set upon him, eating him before his last breaths were drawn.
Now, they were trapped wandering in the pitch. A desire to distance themselves from the horror had seen them cover a great many flat, open tunnels.
"This place is a maze." Tommen muttered, his hand trailing along the wall behind Daario. "Like something the children play in Watergardens of Dorne. My sister said they were beautiful mazes with fruit treasures hidden inside the hedges." He shook his head in the darkness. His sister had died for somebody else's revenge. Tommen was determined that no matter what happened in his life, he'd never again be a pawn. "What if this leads nowhere?"
"Then we'll die down here and I imagine that dragon of yours will feast on us."
Tommen didn't speak again for some time. A day? At least. He had gone beyond starvation into a sort of euphoria. They were drinking directly from the walls, licking moisture off the rough granite. The water tasted different now – more fresh than salt. Roughly cut steps led down into ever deeper parts of the world.
Eventually, the tunnel widened to the point that they were unable to find the other side without risking losing contact with the wall. Not wishing to get lost, they chose to keep going, leaving their minds to imagine the scale of their environment. Ash was with them. Her claws tapped on the ground while her scales shuffled against each other as she walked.
The cry of a whale throbbed through the darkness. A long moan. Pain writ into the world. Ash stopped to sniff the air. Not a whale… It couldn't be. There was no ocean here and the thin veneer of water seemed hostile to life – including their own leaving them in a drunk-like state whenever they drank. There was something else. Something living in the depths with them. Something old. A rough slide of leather against the stone-dust in the air. A scratching sound that writhed from everywhere and nowhere.
All they knew was that whatever this was, it was alive.
Daario's heart smashed into his chest. He forced down his fear for the sake of the boy. "Quietly now..." He breathed. "If there is something alive then we might be near the way out."
"We need light." Tommen muttered.
"You're the one with the dragon. The Queen can make hers burn men with a word. If you're going to keep the damn thing, you'll have to try and train it."
"It's not a dog." Tommen hissed. "You lived with the Queen. How did she do it?"
Daario stopped. One of the Queen's dragon had followed him around for nearly a year and yet their ways remained a mystery.
"You have no idea, do you?"
"Well..."
Frustration gripped the young man. He had only been in the adult world a short time and already he was certain that the realm ran on the dreams of idiots and fools. "No light, then…"
Instead they used their ears, pricking them to the unholy sounds that permeated the subterranean tunnels. At some point their wide passageway became an expansive room – they could tell by the way the sound of their footsteps echoed with a delay, bouncing off angled walls off in the distance. There was more water here too. Deeper, if the sound of it lapping along the stone was anything to go by. Eventually, it began to fill the ground beneath them. At first it was barely a smear beneath their boots but soon they were knee deep, pushing against warm, brackish water.
Mussel-like organisms grew in thick bands along the waterline, easily a foot high and two hands thick – the culmination of thousands of years. Starving, Tommen and Daario paused to eat as many as they could manage. They tasted sweat compared to the rancid air. Others contained pearls which they spat into the water. After a few hours, their strength returned.
"Where is the heat coming from?" Tommen asked. He could hear Ash swimming along beside them, perfectly happy in the water. She was chasing fresh water fish that broke the surface, leaping away from the dragon's jaws. "We're gods knows how deep underground in the darkness. We should be freezing."
"Thank the bastard gods that it's not." Daario warned. "I've been in freezing water – nearly died in it. There's noting worse than a million knives being driven into your flesh as life slips away. That is the end most who live their lives on the sea face."
The terrible whale-like sounds were muffled in the background.
"Can you hear that?"
Tommen shoved Daario's back.
"No – not that," Daario amended. "Listen."
There was another sound – a sort of roaring. Not from an animal. He could have sworn it was -
Flames.
They were rising out of the water in thin columns of spiralling blue and yellow that exploded from the bubbling surface of the water with a growl. Tommen and Daario continued around the corner, revealing dozens of the malevolent bursts of fire which, at the largest, clawed twenty feet into the air. Their light lit the black water and fragments of the underground cavern, unveiling its enormity.
"Look at this place," Daario murmured, pausing at the volcanic creation.
Their catacombs had been created out of lava tubes, laid down before the oceans of the world and then covered. Crude steps were cut directly into the rock out of necessity and, if Daario were to guess, in a hurry. They could see the filthy looking shellfish growths lining the wall of the natural cavern – vast with a bubble-like appearance. Its walls were covered in sheets of black glass while colossal pillars of dragonglass had snapped off from a ceiling – which remained beyond view – and now lay as fallen giants, half submerged in the water. These black eyes glistened with the restless flames in a horrorscape of death.
It was clear the water in the centre of the room was significantly deeper and that they had been wandering around the edges of rooms just like this for days, unaware.
"Did – did someone build this?" Tommen asked. There were traces of humanity in the catacombs but this was a scale beyond the reach of even Bran the Builder. Men could not make things with such malice bled into the stone. That came only from the gods.
"I – I think they used it."
"For what?"
"To hide. To worship. For curiosity, who knows?" Daario replied.
"What – what if they came down here looking for something?"
"There are mines in the East that have burrowed deep into the mountains chasing wealth. Their empty corpses, collapsed and full of bone, are littered around the continent. Pirates pick at the edges and the lowest of the desert traders trek into their depths, emerging with scraps of fallen empires and scars on their minds from the shit they saw in the darkness. But this?" Daario pondered their surrounds. "Aside from dragonglass, this is the wrong sort of rock for gemstones and gold."
"Not trinkets." As if to finish Tommen's thoughts, the whale-like sounds began again. "A – a god."
Daario waded through the water, this time guided by the firelight. He tried not to think of the daggers of glass suspended above where they had grown in dangerous arrangements from the ceiling of the cavern. He wondered if mages and sorceresses could see through their ashen surfaces – if they wasted their hours peering into the crypts of the gods. Those are the sights that could send dreamers mad. "The gods are not physical animals."
"Who says?" Tommen countered, following. He was shorter than Daario and the water rose almost to his thighs. Ash had ducked beneath the surface of the water and swum out somewhere to play in the hot water. He didn't bother trying to call her back. "I read-"
"-you read too much." Daario cut him off.
Tommen was undeterred. "I read," he insisted, "in the old stories, that men thought the gods were real creatures – magical – like dragons only they abandoned the realm of men long ago and returned to the depths of the ocean where they sleep, waiting for the next chapter chaos. They described them as being the size of cities with bodies that grew through the folds of rock. Even if it's not true, they believed it enough to write the stories down. An old, powerful and greedy civilisation like the Empire of the Dawn might have gone looking for them. To slay the gods, imagine it. They would have been unstoppable."
"The people from the Dawn were not stupid men," Daario replied. "If they went in search of the gods to kill them, it would have been to exact some sort of revenge – or – perhaps to end a war. Once and for all."
Daario's voice died. Tommen had a point. What if their ancestors had come down here to kill the gods. If the gods really were responsible for the great war of the Dawn well maybe out of desperation, they'd have considered such a thing. There was no greater sacrilege and no better hope of salvation than to free civilisation from the wicked dreams of indifferent gods.
"And even if they are not gods, there still might be unknown creatures left to grow to enormous proportions," Tommen continued, genuinely fascinated by their predicament – instead of being afraid, like a sensible person. "There are pirates that swear blind sea creatures ate their boats whole."
"Don't tell me what pirates say," Daario snapped.
"Did you see anything like that?"
"Not – well, maybe." Daario admitted. "None of us could be sure." The water sloshed around them. "We were travelling through a terrible storm. We'd lost several ships to the squall already. Pieces of their hulls knocked against our boats in the darkness. Rain extinguished most of the lanterns. The air was drowning in screams and the smashing wood. The sales were torn to shreds, lashing the mast with thunderous cracks. Among the waves – between the broken wrecks of boats – I thought I saw something black wrap around one of the ships and… And it drag it under the waves whole. All its men aboard." Daario shook the memory out of his head. He'd tried to drink it away long ago. If he was honest, he thought about that storm every time he stepped onto the deck of a boat. "But maybe it was just a wave."
Their giant cavern was one of many. These creations were joined together by narrow, sometimes deep passages of water. Now that they had light, it was possible to see through the crystal clear water to the traces of civilisation beneath their feet, submerged and layered with a fine silt that transformed them into white shapes.
Daario ducked awkwardly into another tunnel, bumping his head on the dragonglass which left bleeding gashes that trickled into the water. He was up to his waste while Tommen had given up wading and found it easier to swim. At the end of this archway, they could see the next room alive with even more fire than the last. The caverns were like strings of pearls, bound together by darkness and unfathomable magic.
"Wow..." Daario whispered, breathless as he emerged from the flooded passage into the room filled with firelight.
An enormous, fat column of fire burned in near the centre of the water but this one raged so fiercely that it illuminated the entire, dome-shaped cavern. Smaller fires dotted around it as if pieces of the flame had broken away like cinders tossed aside by the wind. Perfectly black dragonglass walls rose on all sides except for a single vein of white marble that cut the right hand side diagonally like a lop-sided smile. Ridges of glass had been chiselled into oversized steps that rose out of the water in semi-circles that mimicked King's Landing's Dragon pit. This room was an amphitheatre – designed for crowds to gather and watch the deep body of water lounging in front.
Daario and Tommen climbed out of the water onto these steps. Water dropped off them, echoing against the slippery surface. The thick beds of muscles grew here too, ruining the otherwise pristine ruin. They were feeding off a film of sludge that collected at the edges of the water.
"You can see straight through it," whispered Tommen, leaning down to look into the water illuminated by the fire. There we patches of a strange sort of white sand breaking up the endless black. "How deep do you think it is?"
"Eight feet – eight hundred, water like this is deceptive. I've seen it in the Islands of the Summer Sea – water that we tried to dive through to reach the bottom but no matter how close it looked we never came anywhere near it.
"There…!" Tommen leaned across Daario and jabbed his hand into the air, pointing at a perilous staircase cut directly into the stone that seemed to be leading up and out of the cavern. "You were right. There is a way out of this nightmare." He moved to leave immediately, slipping and stumbling around the curved wall of the amphitheatre.
"W-wait..." Daario muttered, barely above his breath. There was a terrible feeling of dread falling over the room and it was only now that he realised what it was. The crying, whale-like sound that they had been listening to for hours had stopped. "Wait."
Tommen did as he was told and froze into an awkward position. Ash was playing in the water, ducking and diving.
Both men adjusted their eyes at the same time, looking beyond the water and the fire to the cavern wall behind. It must have been over a hundred feet high. Instead of glass, the entire pitch surface was covered in a strange, course material that turned out to be folded tentacles. Each was as wide as a building and covered in ridges and protrusions of black bone as if it had absorbed pieces of the cave into its body. Other parts of it had grown straight through the rock, vanishing into nowhere. It was impossible to tell how many limbs it had – five, twenty? They were all caught up in each other or draped beneath the water where its body continued to spread out to unknown proportions.
This wretched thing was easily the largest living creature that anyone had dared to imagine. It could lay over a city and crumble its citizens beneath it – or move and set the world trembling in its wake. Was this, Daario wondered, what men called, 'gods'? Were gods simply larger, more malevolent entities than man?
Slowly, it was moving, unravelling itself from a thousands years of sleep. As it untangled, the long blades of dragonglass hanging from the ceiling started to sing and quiver like wind chimes. Pieces of its body emerged. There was an arched, bone protrusion along where a head might be. Squid-like, it had a similar cone-shaped appearance except all of its features were twisted into the grotesque. In the flickering light, Daario could not make out anything other than the sense of dread it spread through the world.
"Ash – Ash..." Tommen whispered at his dragon, trying to beckon the creature away from the enormous sea creature awakening behind it.
The dragon ignored him, frolicking without concern.
"There are chains..." Daario pointed to a part of the wall where what looked like Valyrian steel had been cast into thick silver rings. "What – what kind of civilisation imprisons a god?"
Tommen did not want to know. The shock had sent him pale as ice. He looked back toward the stairs leading up into nowhere then to Daario for approval – which came as a careful nod. With the beast well on its way to waking up, Tommen headed toward the stairs as quickly and silently as possible, cursing every sound his weary body made.
Daario had further to go. His progress was slower, dumbed by fascination. This thing, whatever it was, bore a striking resemblance to his House Standard. It was the same image carved onto the Salt Throne – the black, greasy chair that the waves coughed up onto the Iron Islands from a forgotten chapter in time. That is when he realised that this was the creature he had dreamed of for all those long years. The tentacles wrapping around his body, dragging him down into the abyss. This was the creature that had slumbered in his mind and fed him nightmares. He withdrew his sword, brandishing it at the fire.
How pathetic he looked. An ant standing before the moon.
It was clear what this place was. A sacrificial pit to the gods. Worshippers of the ancient world must have found one of these gargantuan things slumbering. Here it was, still alive after all this time. Chained in a prison with its guards dead and the whole world moving by above.
"What is dead may never die," Daario whispered at the god, which seethed at the sound of his voice, "that is not dead which can eternal lie, and which strange aeons even death may die..."
Daario understood the words now. Death gave way to dream – the nightmare of eternity.
The creature's moan split the air. Daario closed his eyes as the sound hit him with force. It was crying. He had an irrepressible urge to swim out into the water and find a way to cut it free but how would he even start? The chains were made of something that he could not cut and were larger than half a dozen men stacked end to end. There wasn't just one chain, there were many – one for every one of its long limbs securing it to the tomb.
It lifted the last thick tentacle lined with suckers and spines, out of the way to reveal a monstrous face. Daario wasn't sure what he had expected but this thing had two orb-like eyes, honey coloured with a shattered split of black running vertically down each one, splintering like lightning. They were certainly squid-like but soulless too, and surrounded by panels of smooth scaly skin that emitted unusual flickers of coloured light which he'd only ever seen through the stained glass window of churches of The Seven. These lights turned on and off at random but also in a form of meditation that smoothed Daario's fear.
He wasn't sure what compelled him, but Daario reached around his neck and touched the Bloodstone hanging in a cage of twine. It was as warm as the water, steaming beneath his hands.
"What are you doing – hurry up!" Tommen hissed, as loudly as he dared at the pirate. He was already at the base of the stairs leading out. Without hesitation, Tommen dragged himself up the steps. and immediately fell to his needs. He decided that if he wanted to live rather than fall off into the water on his left, he'd have to crawl up them. The glass surface scraped away his flesh, causing him to wince sharply and pull his knees away, covered in blood. Tommen could see the circular holes in the ground where there'd been a metal rail of some sort but that was long ago rusted to death and blown into the water.
"It's trapped down here." Daario lamented, transfixed by the creature.
"Which is excellent news for us." Tommen insisted, working out how to place his body so that he could survive the staircase.
"This is a living thing," Daario continued, almost in a drug-like state. He was sure that he could hear its moans inside his mind – the songs beneath the howling. It was bewitching him. Begging him. Threatening him with its majesty. "We've got to find a way to set it free or it'll – it'll continue to live out the rest of time as a prisoner. Imagine it. Aeons in the darkness. Drowning forever..." It was a fear that consumed his dreams.
"We have no idea why this thing was chained up. Maybe it was for a good reason. Not everything that happened in the past was malevolent and self serving. Who knows, this creature might have destroyed their empire for fun and this was its punishment. They could not kill their god so they trapped it, limiting the power it had over the world while bringing it sacrifices to sate its taste for blood."
Was it a god? Daario did not know. A creature of magic? Perhaps that is all the gods were – animals poisoned by the old magic of the world, born so long ago that they became one with Time. If that were true, then the Targaryens had not lied. They were gods as well, though less powerful.
One of the huge tentacles smashed into the water without warning, sending forth a wave onto the stone steps where Daario was standing. The force of the water knocked him backwards. His legs hit the sharp edge of the steps behind him while his sword clattered out of his hand. He stared in awe at the river of flame thrusting from the centre of the room which had remained untouched by the commotion. Daario coughed up the warm water and rolled onto his side. That tentacle, which now slid beneath the waves, had broken free of its chains. He could see the fragmented pieces dangling from the wall covered in viscous liquid. Who knew, perhaps in a few thousand years, it would free itself entirely and seek vengeance upon the realms of men.
The reverie broken, Daario picked himself up and began making his way around the edge of the room toward the stairs. It was extremely difficult with water several inches deep over the surface. The world beneath the Braavosi vaults made sense now. It was a prison that put to shame any that man had created since. The more he thought about it, Daario realised that the narrow passages would keep the animal trapped long after the chains failed. This place was designed to hold the god forever – even when their empire had fallen. He wondered then, how terrified those people must have been to go to such trouble and how had they captured a god?
The aquatic god became restless, sensing the two creatures trying to escape. It began testing the strength of the remaining bars, writhing and tugging against them. Daario could hear the Valyrian steel scratching against the glass walls – which was cutting into the chains, weakening them. If it got free, well, it might not be able to escape the cavern but it could certainly make a meal out of them.
"Ash – Ash!" Daario called the dragon away from the creature, not because he was worried of it getting hurt but because the dragon's presence seemed to irritate monster. Ash dove under the water again and Daario was forced to give up.
As the creature moved, the scattered miniature fires burning all over the surface of the water flickered on and off. The roar of the main fire intensified with the disturbance, becoming a deafening roar. Daario kept moving as the hair on the back of his neck pricked up with a strange tension on the air. The water bubbled more furiously, heating up and releasing additional gas which helped to bump some of the smaller flames into columns of their own. Far from injuring the creature, it relished the heat, gaining strength from the rising temperature. It moved fiercely, twisting its tentacles with such strength that the glass wall could be heard cracking.
Daario whispered long forgotten prayers beneath his breath. Prayers to the ocean and the gods that lived in the deep. If this thing truly was the god of the great waters that wrapped around the world, how foolish they had all been to think that it cared for their fears and dreams. To believe that the gods even understood the wants of man.
Daario slipped and fell off the step as the creature's free tentacle slammed down in front of him causing part of the ground to shatter and collapse into an impassable pit of daggers. He landed in the water with a splash and immediately screeched. The water was scalding. He swam awkwardly, weighed down by the sword to the point of almost drowning. His hands grasped for a hold, pulling himself up out of the water where he lay on his back – steam rising off his clothes. He could hear Tommen shouting his name from above but he needed a moment to regain his breath. Behind his head, Daario heard the tentacle sliding off back into the water, ready to strike again.
Snap!
Another one of the Valyrian steel cuffs broke apart. Waves of hot water lapped where Daario lay. He rolled over onto this knees and forced himself to stand, still railing from his scorched skin. The way ahead was a complete ruin so Daario climbed toward the wall where there was a single, narrow platform of glass – a malformed step – still intact. If he couldn't get across this way he'd have to swim through the boiling water.
High above, Tommen saw an end to the dragonglass cavern. There was a forest of crystals, the size of ships, hanging down from the ceiling on his left. Several encroached upon his stairwell, attaching themselves the wall leaving a gap that he'd have to crawl under. After that, the stairs changed into a normal stone tunnel – all of it heading in an upwards direction and mercifully dry.
"There's a way out!" Tommen shouted, no longer worried about waking the monstrous creature. Tommen looked across to the swollen column of flame churning beside him. It had doubled in size. He felt its heat on his face. The walls dripped with sweat as the steam rising off the surface of the boiling water condensed onto the cold glass. Tommen too, along with everything else in this hellish underground pit. His clothes stuck to him like a second skin.
Daario pressed himself face first and flat against the wall – arms spread in a feeble attempt to balance hugging the class as his feet tried to steady themselves on the narrow ledge. Ash crawled out of the water onto one of the creatures tentacles causing a great amount of distress. Daario shuffled slowly along the precarious outcrop, willing himself to keep moving as he approached the gaping hole of ruined glass that was partially filled with steaming water. It swirled around the broken shards, all of which reached hungrily for his body. A slip now and he'd be skewered like a head on display outside the Red Keep.
"Argh!" Daario flinched, as a high-pitched squeal filled the air. It was a frequency unknown to his ears, piercing right through into his mind – robbing him of sanity. The god was screaming as the tiny dragon dugs its mouth and claws into the flesh, eating part of it alive.
Tommen doubled over in agony at the noise with blood running out of his ears. He forced himself to keep climbing, trying desperately to put as much distance as he could between himself and the god. He could not see that the horrific sound was making the hanging crystals quiver – reverberating in sympathy. Almost immediately, one of them snapped loose and plummeted down, striking the water.
Daario could not hear or see anything other than the ringing in his head. He kept his eyes slammed shut – feeling his way along the ledge.
Another column of black crystal hit the water. Then another. Soon smaller pieces were raining down, churning up the water into a storm. Some hit the creature's tentacles sending it into a rage – the dragon forgotten. It was chaos and violence. The god picked its limbs up out of the water and forced itself to curl up against the wall, removing its body from the line of fire. Like its kin, it was dexterous, reforming itself into the shape of the room.
Realising that it was the cause of the disaster, the creature appeared to calm itself down. The whine stopped and the creature went still with only its huge eyes left blinking at the room. Just like them, it could feel pain. Perhaps it feared death and even this half-life in chains was better than the darkness that awaited.
Daario opened his eyes and saw that he had crossed the hole. He peeled himself off the wall and stumbled down the steps, racing toward the stairs with which were right in front of him. Daario started up them and immediately fell onto his knees, just like Tommen. He cursed the gods to hell.
Tommen waited where the dragonglass transformed into rock. He sat on the comparably soft step with the last, oddly formed crystal blocking part of the path beneath. Despite the obstacle, he could see Daario crawling up towards him – a bloody, dripping, soaking, stinking wreck of a human. He'd seen better looking corpses.
When Daario finally reached him, the pirate king collapsed. He panted, lips cracked from the salt while. Time was not something that they had been able to measure for many days but he was certain that he'd climbed for hours to get to this point. It was darker here, a sort of twilight with the flames far below them along with the god. Tommen was right though, there was a fresh scent on the air that might have been the promise of freedom.
Neither of them saw what Ash had been diving down through the scorching water to inspect. Clutches of Ice Dragon eggs, lain in old nests before the waters came in. Preserved. Enormous. Alive.
