Author's Note
I do not own A Song of Ice and Fire.
It is cold Beyond the Wall, and Jon is unprepared for it. He wears two layers of clothing and adds more as they ride. Jojen bundles up in as much as he can, but he still looks pale and rarely stops shivering.
The strange burn inside him that started when he crossed the Wall never stops. It feels as though his blood is warmer and at war with itself, attacking his heart and veins. At night, Jon huddles far from the fire in an attempt to cool himself down. Farren, one of the household guards that accompanied him, has to take his arms and force him back to the warm tent.
Ghost loves it here. He wanders and roams, and when Jon sleeps he dreams through his eyes. One night he dreams he has found the corpse of a man in a black cloak, and he eats of the flesh.
In the morning, Ghost returns with a hand in his mouth.
"Lead us to where you found that, boy," Jon says, and Ghost does, padding through the trees like a white spectre until they come upon the remains of a man in a Night's Watch cloak. Jon fears the worst, but as Duron and Syler roll the corpse over, it becomes apparent this is not his uncle. This is an older man, balder and heavyset. Jojen makes a quick sketch of him for the Lord Commander and then they burn the body, as the ground is too hard to dig a grave.
That night a new pain begins, an itch at the back of his head like someone is driving a nail through it. Jon cannot sleep, and so he sits by the dying fire and rests his head on his knees. Ghost sits by his side and licks his neck. Jon wants to throw up.
As dawn breaks, Farren finds him asleep there, at the edges of the ashes of the fire.
#
The ache in his head never eases, only strengthening as he rides.
"Does your head hurt?" Jon asks Jojen that morning.
"No more than it usually does," comes Jojen's reply.
Jon looks about himself – and he feels a draw, somewhere deep inside him, like some long buried instinct only now rearing up to guide his path. "We continue this way," he says, and leads them northwest.
He knows the way. Some days. He feels the land around him, he feels his uncle's presence. And yet others he feels nothing but pain and a desire to fly, to burn, to explode so that the pain will end.
It's as though he has a new sense now, an instinct, and it grows inside him as they ride. Ghost ranges further and further, but Jon always knows he is close. Most nights he dreams through the wolf's eyes.
"Are you burning?" he asks Jojen.
"I'm too cold to burn," Jojen says.
#
It worsens as they continue, and Jon is glad for finding notches in the trees marked with an S. They lead the way when the fire inside him is too great.
#
Ghost snarls in the night.
The dead surround them.
They are grotesque, shambling things, some fresh, but others half-rotted and some down to the bone, their skeletal hands reaching and clawing. One tears through Jon's cloak and draws blood. They hack away limbs and lop off heads, but the things are still moving, the way Sansa's toys do except these are people, human, shuffling, stinking.
Jojen pushes one into the fire. It burns, and does not rise again.
"Burn them!" Jon shouts, grabbing a branch and thrusting it into the fire. It catches quickly and the flames brush his fingers, but he feels no pain as he stabs the burning branch into the nearest corpse. It catches and falls.
His men follow his example, but the more they burn the more that come, until Jon sees the thing on the hill, watching them. It looks like Arya sometimes does, beautiful, with icy skin and fine silver hair, eyes aflame with blue fire.
Jon takes a burning branch in each hand and cuts a path through the dead to the thing. He knows how hard Arya's skin is when she looks like this, but there must be a way to cut it down. This thing must be like Arya and Sansa both; it is animating the dead.
It smiles as he approaches and merely raises a hand to deflect the branch Jon swings at its head. Jon lets it fall and draws his sword again, but when the creature parries the castle-forged steel shatters.
Jon's blood is alight.
Someone screams his name.
The creature raises its sword of ice.
Jon burns with fear.
Someone is shouting.
It sounds like his uncle Benjen.
The blade cleaves through Jon's chest, and it burns where the ice touches him. He can't breathe. Red blood splatters the snow.
And Jon burns.