Jon Snow had never thought he believed in destiny or pre-determined roles before. He thought he knew himself well enough to know that. But as his tutelage with his mystical father progressed, he was finding more and more that there were aspects to himself (even aside from the heretofore unknown propensity toward fire magic) that were less than obvious from first glance.
Without his knowing it, without his realizing it, he had unconsciously accepted that as a bastard born to a noble house he would have no choice in shaping his own life; that he was a stain upon the rest of the world even if he didn't mean to be. Yet now that was changing. He had witnessed firsthand what it would mean to be a true bastard in nature instead of just birth. He listened to the advice of a god itself as it showed him his own potential and prodded him when he first made his tentative steps toward mastering the powers that had recently come into his life.
Even after more than a year under Lord R'hllor's tutelage, Jon still managed to find himself caught off guard and surprised by the mystical world his heritage made him included in.
When his father had told him that with enough practice, he could use the fire to see more than other humans, Jon had initially thought he was only referring to the vision that allowed him to see things defined by the heat they gave off as opposed to the way the light reflected off them. But his father had disabused him of that notion. He had told Jon that some of the best known followers of R'hllor's various incarnations were well-known prophets and seers simply because they had managed to see in the fire things that others did not.
"You mean to teach me to predict the future?" Jon had whispered in amazement one night while his mind wandered away from the close at hand Last Lake and what he may find there.
"No." R'hllor answered, his voice an amused whisper that sounded unlike any Jon had ever heard him use before. It was a woman's for a start, and it was also accented by a strange sense of punctuation as though its' native tongue was not the common one R'hllor was using it for. "We mean to teach you how to use the fire to see."
Jon's brow furrowed as he tried to see the difference. To see the future was to predict it was it not?
"The only thing any mortal can speak of with certainty is the here or the now." Said R'hllor in response, a slight laugh coloring his (or was it her with this new voice?) tone as he spoke to Jon. "One can see where the fire danced and guess where it may next step. But by the time you see where it goes, the wind could have shifted, the fuel could have collapsed, the fire itself could have died or grown stronger in ways you could not anticipate. And even knowing what the fire once was is uncertain. For unless you are the only one to witness the tongues as they leave ashes in their licking you cannot see the same fire another watcher may see."
Jon Snow was not slow by his own estimation, but it still took him some time to parse out a useable idea from the cryptic wording as best he could after being exposed to it for so long.
"…So, what I see…Is not what will happen…but what may happen?" Jon ventured cautiously. But even as he asked, a problem presented itself in his mind. "But then how can I know what may happen if it involves people I have never met, places I have never seen?" He asked, wanting to be sure of this idea his father was introducing.
The fire gave a small crackle of triumph.
"We who inhabit the open world may watch upon the closed world that touches our domain. We watch the fires of the day, see the torches lit in the night and in the dark. We hear the whispered secrets spoken beside them, endure the lonely vigils that are kept as they watch the light burn. But even as we see them, we can only know so much of their minds. Of what they have done. Of what they intend. And so we look. We watch. And like you who watch the sun rise and set, who plant the crops and plan the battles, we predict." R'hllor answered. There was a pause as his father appeared to be trying to think of how to phrase what he was conveying.
"They who submit to us, who place their trust in us, they are as those who stand in an open field under the sun: their every aspect but a small grounding illuminated by our power and thus our sight. They who trust another source are as a torch on a darkened night: we may see them as they move, but we've no knowledge or true foresight into their actions but for a limited amount. And those who trust no power but themselves are the most dangerous to us: for they are between the light of our power and the shadow of our second half, unseen even by they who would think to usurp us: at the edge of our sight yet able to act almost as freely as if they weren't seen at all." R'hllor explained.
Jon thought carefully about this. Having that sort of awareness of so many people around the world at once while keeping track of which kind of person was which sort of believer gave him a headache just thinking about it. But then again it seemed to tie in with what his father had explained to him of what deities were and the 'open world' they resided in. They were powerful, but unless the entirety of the human race chose to believe only in one or another, they would never truly be all powerful.
So when the gods made predictions about their own people that meant that they could only see and suppose what their own people would do. And when those prophecies were heard by those who trusted the gods, they sought to act in accordance in it: never realizing or accepting that the gods were no more able to see what would happen any more than a parent could foresee a child's future. And no matter how the gods were connected to their worshipers or their children, the children would never be able to see things as the gods did and the gods could only ever present things in a limited way that they who followed them would possibly understand.
It was a confusing mess to say the least.
Jon was given a firsthand experience of that after raiding the bandit camp. There was only one survivor who had stuck with him: a girl only a year or two older than he with plain brown hair and green eyes that reminded him of the moss that grew in the Godswood back in Winterfell. She had stuck a spear through the back of Ramsay Snow's knee when he had fought the bastard of the Dreadfort in single combat. She also had not spoken a word to Jon afterward when they were looting the smoldering site and indeed for much of their travel time together. But when she had spoken to him to tell him her name was Caralyn, it was like a small dam had started to break down. They'd progressed fairly quickly in their sense of each other as they talked and learned of each other.
And when he'd spent several weeks escorting her to White Harbor, the northern port controlled by the southern cum northern lords of House Manderly, she'd asked him if he could see the future when he offered her a glimpse of what the flames might say. He'd been unsure how to describe it, having only accessed the proper mindset twice in his traveling: having not wanted to give away too much of what he could do with the fire before he got to know her better.
The first time he had received a vision of a smoke storm, smelling of sulfur and death as it came ever closer to him. The second had been a red building, its red tapestries somewhat faded in the sunlight as a mockingbird sang somewhere atop the cracked tile roof out of sight.
But he had wanted to give her the chance none the less even as his sense of her told him that she had no natural magic to her blood, so would thus rely almost entirely on him to complete the process for her. He'd had her close her eyes so she wouldn't see him draw the visible flames to his hands, not sure whether she would trust him enough to let him touch her with burning fingers that did not burn. Instead of hurting her, the fires seemed to surround her eyes before fading into her skin: giving them a slightly tanned look, a few flecks of gold dancing at the outside corners of her closed lids. His left hand came to the base of her skull where it met her spine by instinct: his sense of his own power having long since drilled into him that most magic was generated within the body and circulated to the head for translation before it flowed outward to the body again in order to act. If he was going to give her the power of sight, he needed to be able to tell her mind that it needed to prepare to see things it hadn't been naturally equipped to see. He used his right hand to bring hers up to feel the heat emanating from their campfire, the fire enshrouding his right hand drawing into her flesh.
Jon's eyes almost instinctively activated as he watched the bloom of heat remain behind her palm before spreading through her limb into her torso before the heat began to concentrate on flowing upwards to her head. Even as it began to reach her, his left hand siphoned off a vast majority of the magically infused heat that threatened to otherwise begin cooking her beneath her own hair while allowing a trickle of it to flow through to her closed green orbs.
Her eyes had jolted open suddenly. They had darted all over the front of the clearing, plainly not viewing the world as it was at this moment in time. A few seconds later, she gasped and looked around as he carefully watched her expression and her movements to see if she had been damaged by the brief exposure to somewhat potent magic, drawing his hands away slowly so as not to spook her.
"What-What was that?!" She had asked him urgently, her green eyes finding his own grey, amazement shining behind them as the fire crackled obliviously.
"What was what?" He asked in return, needing her to explain what it was she had seen. "What did you see?"
"But, but didn't you see-" She asked, gesturing vaguely toward something in the fire's direction.
Jon understood more what his father meant now. She wasn't a magic user by nature and so wouldn't be used to it, having needed to literally piggyback on Jon's own power in order to get the glimpse she had been given. But even so, Jon himself was not privy to the vision she had seen. It had been hers alone no matter the filters that had been placed before it.
"I saw nothing." He answered truthfully, shaking his head in a negative. "Nothing but you going still as you opened your eyes for a few moments before gasping."
He paused briefly before asking her again: "What did you see?"
She obliged: describing to him a city colored all in red with golden waves cresting toward the three hills that most of the buildings lay upon. That must've been King's Landing he thought. His idea was confirmed when she described the symbols that had arisen atop them. The first had been a meteorite, glowing softly in the crater atop the hill. Jon had heard enough stories from Septa Mordane of the Seven and the tales they told of meteorite metal forged into their holy weapons to know that must be the Great Sept of Baelor. When she described the second hill as a sword stuck point first in the ground, swaying in an invisible wind with a crown balanced atop its cross guard hilt and a pommel that seemed to change shape with every shifting blow of the wind he knew that must be the Red Keep where the royal family lived. And when she told him of the great bonfire that emerged from the third hill, he figured that was the Dragon Pits that had so many years ago once housed the fearsome dragons of House Targaryen.
He tried to explain in his own stumbling way that he thought her vision might mean she wanted to go to King's Landing or simply had chosen something to believe in. Her thoughtful expression as they curled up before the last dying embers of the fire spoke to his thoughts resonating with her he thought. Though he wasn't entirely sure seeing as how he sounded an uncertain boy to his own ears.
Despite the circumstances of their initial meeting, Jon couldn't say he wasn't glad to have met and become friends with Caralyn. He was somewhat saddened when he thought of how it was likely he would never see her again once she made her way to King's Landing and then wherever she chose to go from there but knew it had been worth it to help her and know her the way he had on this strange journey when she hugged him farewell and told him he was a good man as they parted paths in White Harbor.
Jon left soon after, having picked up rumors of unusual raiding activity off the western coast near the Saltspear Inlet. When he made his way across the country, he received another shock. Somehow, his little sister Arya had awoken powers in her that allowed her to travel to him in his dreams. He never saw her when he was awake or when he slept during the day strangely enough. But when he'd asked R'hllor why that might be, his father had told him he wasn't ready to know the reason yet.
Jon was uneasy at his father's reluctance, especially since he would brook no debate or argument on the subject no matter how Jon tried to bring it up: a marked first for the fire god since he had begun speaking to Jon.
But soon enough he put it out of his mind and simply grew to enjoy being able to have his sister with him when he traveled to find what was in the stories of the raiders.
That came to an end after boarding the ship Roaring Pride. The captain was a man the crew only ever referred to as Scar. Scar was perhaps a few years younger than Eddard Stark, though one wouldn't know it just to look at him. His brown hair was liberally peppered with grey and white while his blue eyes had numerous crow's feet around it: a mark of long hours staring into the horizon or the night looking sharply for any sign of trouble or hazard to the ship that he'd been charged to get safely from one port to the next. The only possible explanation to the crew's nickname for their captain Jon had seen came from a set of two large scars that ran along the back of his right arm, as though a long sword had taken two deep swings at his arm and not quite managed to kill him.
He'd been skeptical about Jon's possible contribution to the crew's safety as they made their way from Barrowton heading down toward Lannisport with a short stop in Seagard on the path. But eventually John had convinced him that he was a simple sellsword who'd be happy to work for the ship for only a few silvers plus a small share in whatever they managed to obtain from fighting off raiders. The Captain, amused by Jon's optimistic offer, had barked a laugh before welcoming him aboard with a rhetorical: "Alright, why the fuck not."
But from there it had all gone to hell in the crone's lantern.
The days had gone by with nothing happening at first, only some minor problems with waves to speak of. And then late one night as he dreamt Arya was there with him on the deck, it happened. She had appeared as per usual, simply appearing in a strange amalgam of reality and dream that made the ship seem sleeker and somehow less distinguishable than it was in real life. (That was something of a feat considering that for its' grandiose title, the Roaring Pride stood out even less from the other ships Jon had seen in his limited experience than most others.) She'd asked where they were. As per his usual way, he told her where. That they were on a ship because that was where he was. It wasn't his fault she still didn't seem to accept that they were seeing each other inside the realm of sleep even separated by miles and miles of physical distance. But then again, she hadn't been instructed by a mystical voice in a fire for more than a year about precisely that kind of thing and told that things like this were more than possible at a higher level of control.
"What is that?" She asked, pointing at something behind him and in the distance.
Jon turned to look at it, his grey eyes widening as he took in the black smoke that was billowing angrily toward the ship. It was the same smoke from his vision. He could feel it in the way it resonated with his sense of fires. Without saying a word to Arya, he quickly jolted awake, making his way toward the captain to warn him of incoming danger. It was fortunate for him that the ship he saw in the distance soon after lit a ghostly flame to confirm his warning. The crew hurriedly tried to get the rowers to move faster, to work with the wind that was blowing in the sails even as the waves slapped at the hull with ever increasing volume.
The dark-haired demigod instinctively switched to his fire eyes, looking all around them to see what the night would not reveal willingly. His heart sank as he looked to the distance in front of them and saw two other ships closing in toward them like the jaws of an iron bear trap. Jon Snow knew instinctively that if he allowed the ships to approach unmolested, that it would spell the end of the crew. So he quickly fetched his trophy bow, stolen from the Grimwell hideout after he'd burned his original to a blackened and cracked piece of debris, from below decks. When he got back up above deck the ships were closing in fast. Without hesitation or thought he nocked an arrow, drew the string back to his ear, outstretched his left index finger as he held the bow as if to take aim while in reality creating a fire on the arrow shaft just below the head and then loosed once he was sure of his accuracy.
The arrow struck true to the mast of the first ship, illuminating a bloody dagger upon its sails. Jon however barely saw the first ship at that point as he was stringing a second arrow and firing at the second ship coming straight toward them. Both ships were soon roaring with flames, but still they kept coming. Jon cursed loudly to himself as it finally dawned on him what kind of men these must be to continue trying to attack.
'Of course it's the damn Ironborn! The only ones stupid and blood thirsty enough to keep trying to kill something after they've been set on fire!' He thought angrily, taking aim with the bow again and firing at each man he could get a decent line of sight on. The fire was starting to make it hard to distinguish the shapes of the raiders against the brightness they were atop. But still he maintained it right up until they were crashed into by the ships. From there things impossibly devolved into worse chaos. The men were fighting back with all they could get their hands on: dagger and oar and, in one bizarre case, shit-bucket. Jon and the Captain were among the only ones with any weapon larger than a knife. Jon himself wielded an axe while the captain had a sword that was nicked and visibly worn but very obviously sharp.
The fight upon the boat became fire and blood and chaos, with Jon managing to lose his axe in one of the unprotected Ironborn heads while the crew died around him: their dying cries echoing and answered by the dying cries of the men Jon and Scar fought alongside. And then even Scar's fighting ceased, leaving Jon alone to face the Ironborn on a ship that was rapidly sinking due to the ghostly fire ship that had rammed the Pride sometime between the man with the giant bird tattoo on his chest getting killed and Jon managing to regain his feet by using one of the strangely mute enemies as leverage to pull himself up.
Grabbing the shield that had fallen by the bird marked man, Jon raced on instinct for the mast of the Pride that was pointing toward the last enemy ship and his last hope of salvation from the unforgiving, increasingly volatile sea like an accusing wooden finger. His feet carried him along it swift as the heated wind that blew at his back. The shield was holding strong in front of him even as it weathered the small barrage of arrows and axes thrown at him. On instinct, he flared the fire through his arm, igniting the shield and the projectiles it had taken in his protection. As he leapt to the deck of the ship and threw the shield upon landing, he came up ready for his enemies again: dagger held in a reverse grip in his right hand, left hand in the claw that his budding practice in the martial style his father had helped him develop over the course of his travels in case he needed to strike.
Already he'd had to move to the side of a downward swing of an iron short sword, the ironborn crewman attempting to bash outward with the shield on his left arm as Jon moved to his own right. The claw caught the shield by the upper edge, pulling it toward him. It pulled the fighter off balance enough for Jon to stab the dagger into his unwittingly presented neck as an insane laughter bubbled up in the background. As the flames started to spread, the crew grew visibly worried and took a collective half step backward even as Jon himself decided he needed to get some distance from the rest, getting his back to the railing of the ship as the laughter continued.
And then he heard the voice.
It was a rich, deep, smoky voice. It thrummed in his ribs like the drum beat upon a grand field of battle: a call to the destruction and the chaos of the possibilities that lay upon the grounds soaked in blood and blessed by the cleansing scorch of flame. But such malice in it he hadn't heard even when his most vicious instincts had forcefully gouged his eyes out during his trials.
"Hello brother!" It called to him, cheerfully as though it were Robb greeting him after a grueling practice session with Rodrik Cassel.
The Ironborn crew seemed just as frightened as he, the waves crashing menacingly against his back only serving to highlight the wrongness of the man who stepped before him. His hair was blackish in the dark of the night and spray of the salty sea while his single blue eye was highlighted by contrasting the eyepatch that took up a good part of the right side of his face. They still came closer with him though, a shifting silent herd that followed this…thing as it stalked closer to him in the guise of a man.
"I wonder, did our father really think you wouldn't be found? That I wouldn't discover you?" He asked Jon sarcastically, his grin sharp and angry like a shark's. He continued speaking as the crew looked back and forth between the two of them, clearly unsure of what their captain was talking about. "But if you wouldn't mind telling me your name brother, I should be most grateful!"
"Why?" Jon asked, extremely reluctant to reveal anything about himself more than already had been aired in the open. He experimentally flexed his left hand, debating whether he should attempt to blow the burning ship out from under all their feet now. Buying for time, he attempted to fish for more information about his enemy. "Shouldn't you introduce yourself first?"
His heart sank as the creature laughed at his request.
"Oh, but its' been so long since I had a body of my own!" It said to him, a mocking tone of unsureness in its voice, as though it were worried about how it would explain a complicated concept to its dimmer sibling. "But if you must know," it continued, bringing its right hand up to the eyepatch that covered something that wouldn't be good for Jon he was sure. He was right. A blank socket was present only briefly before thick dark smoke poured out of it in a torrent, frightening the men nearby him as it engulfed them. As they clawed at the suddenly choking air around them, he continued: "I wanted your name so that when I come face to face with our father, I can tell him which of his children was claimed by the Doom of Valyria!"
Jon was horrified with the proclamation. R'hllor had fathered a being that claimed to be the direct cause of Valyria's complete destruction? As the smoke began to retreat back to the eye from whence it had emerged, Jon saw that the Ironborn crew that had immediately surrounded the creature had become desiccated husks: more mummified remains than men. But their eyes…
Their eyes remained. And they were all uniformly orange in their color, the shade of a new spark that flew off one of Mikan's heated pieces of metal while he forged. They looked fragile, almost as though they would fall apart if Jon touched them too roughly. The crew who had retreated closer to the nearby fires of the deck rather than risk the strange smoky sorcery that occurred in front of Jon were now holding their weapons at the ready: their grip steady even as their panicked eyes darted every which way to see if there was any sign of land beyond the chopping waters and the now almost entirely gone wreaks that had led to this fateful encounter.
All at once the stalemate was at an end and the world spun into motion once more.
Jon was forced to dodge a swing aimed for his neck from the right side, leaning back slightly over the railing of the ship before he spun to his right with his spine still balanced on the railing. His enemy was relentless however. As a result, Jon was barely able to see the stab coming toward him as the dagger kept flashing at the Ironborn while he used the railing to balance as he spun toward him. As the thrust came toward him, Jon pushed off the railing with his back. Even as a line of hot pain erupted across his back, the displaced northern boy moved toward the man: dagger held in a reverse grip in his right hand.
One. Two. Three. Four.
Four times Jon's dagger found itself buried in the enemy's torso, the fourth time it was right at the junction where the ribcage met and ended. Instead of taking the dagger out and letting the body fall where it may, Jon grabbed the man by his neck and spun him around in front of him just in time to take an downward axe blow aimed at Jon to the back and his upper right shoulder. Acting on instinct, Jon ran forward while pushing the body into his ambusher. The man couldn't remove the axe and stop Jon from using his crew mate as an impromptu battering ram. And so he also wasn't prepared to find himself falling over the railing of the ship, dead weight and all.
Jon spun as one of the dried out corpse men came for him mouth open in a loud and angry cry as blood dripped from its out stretched hands. It was stepping away from a body with its throat torn out, an expression of terror etched on it in the man's last moments. Jon didn't hesitate for a moment: he brought his clawed left hand toward the face in front of him and struck. His fingers managed to tear four deep gouges across the eyes, the bridge of the nose and the upper as well as lower lip. Jon spun around the still outstretched hands to its right, knife flashing up to follow through as it was now held in the forward slashing grip.
Whether through luck or adrenalin induced aiming, Jon didn't know how but his slash struck true, cutting further into the skull where his finger had carved a gouge straight through the bridge of the thing's nose. All the time the thing in a man's body that called itself the Doom of Valyria fought on: laughing as though the entire thing was one of the funniest things he had seen in some time. The Ironborn didn't know whether to concentrate on Jon or on the creatures that were once their crewmates. Their hesitation was costing them: even a moment's pause could allow the things to grab them, bite them, or strike them.
Jon ignited his left hand and thrust it toward the biggest concentration of the things he could see in the hope that it would decimate their numbers and sow further confusion. The fire erupted toward the dried out husks. It came in contact with their bodies and then everything was light and noise and confusion.
Jon couldn't see, couldn't hear, couldn't comprehend what was happening. His mind could barely register he was on his back, looking up at the night sky. The salt water splashing and slopping over the sides of the ship was what finally brought him back to himself. But when it did, his entire left arm erupted in pain. He feebly rolled onto his front, cradling his left hand close to his body: every twitch of his arm's muscles sending a screaming pain tearing through him. Somehow he'd managed to hold onto the dagger in his right hand, though he couldn't imagine why.
His instinct screamed at him to move, so Jon rolled to his right, only managing to get far enough to rest on his back like an overturned turtle before the mast collapsed toward the bow of the ship. It impacted where he'd just been recovering his wits. He looked down his own body to see what had happened. Only to have a heart sinking sight fill his vision.
As the ship burned, the man who'd proclaimed himself the Doom of Valyria stepped out of the fire: burning shards of the ship's wood work dotting his body as most of the armor he'd worn had been blasted away. More smoke emerged from the gashes and divots that leaked blood as copiously as a keg of ale whose tap had been unceremoniously smashed off.
Yet still he smiled at Jon with that demonic void contrasting with the malicious orange eye that remained in the other socket.
"I suppose you think that was terribly clever Valonqar." It remarked in a tone that implied only contempt and derision for Jon's attempted action. It spat a glob of blood as it advanced toward Jon who attempted to scramble backward, only to jostle his blackened and charred arm too quickly and fall back with a cry of pain. "How very predictable for he who believes himself a Rinitos Zaldrize to think that simply spraying fire is the answer to all his problems."
He came within reach of Jon's feet, so Jon quickly attempted to draw back his right leg and deliver a prone mule kick to the Doom's knee. His brother lifted up the right leg Jon attempted to strike before bringing his heel down on Jon's shin. A crack rent the seething air as Jon felt his right shin snap under the power of his brother's strike.
Jon screamed.
The Doom came up by Jon's head, his bloody left hand reaching down to pick up Jon by his shredded leather armor by the collar. Before Jon could try to regain his bearings a fist smashed into his mouth hard enough to make him see stars. He thought he felt himself involuntarily swallow some of his own blood and a couple of small hard things that might've been his teeth.
"But the difficulty with using fire to solve your problems Valonqar," The Doom continued, methodically bringing his fist crashing into Jon's face again. The young Snow dimly thought he felt a crack in his jaw. "Is that you can never quite control what burns in its wake!"
Jon was panicking now. Without a second thought, he brought the dagger in his right hand up into his brother's blazing orange left eye, driving the blade into his skull up to the hilt. An angry roar erupted from his brother. He then proceeded to slam Jon back first into the mast of the ship, cracking and splintering the already burning and blackened wood before throwing him bodily across the deck to impact the stern railing.
Frantic, Jon drew fire to his functional right hand and concentrated on healing his broken shin so he could at least stand against this creature. "You may be a young fool, but you are an interesting one." He heard as his shin reset itself, causing him to grit his teeth against the pain. He looked up to see the Doom stalking toward him: smoke billowing freely from beneath the dagger and from the empty socket.
"So young and already you've discovered a potential successor for the Other." He hissed, left hand tugging at the dagger lodged in his eye. "And don't bother denying it! I can sense the dark magic around you! So:" As he got the dagger out, smoke billowed out of the other socket, creating twin trails of darkness as he moved. "You're going to show me who your Other is."
"I don't know what you're talking about." Jon wheezed, sliding his left foot back so that his right side was forward and his right hand was clawed and ready for the Doom.
"I don't need you to know anything." He was in front of Jon in the blink of an eye. Jon tried to thrust his palm forward to hit his brother in the chest. The Doom's left forearm came up in front of his chest, allowing Jon's hand to grip and burn it. His right hand struck Jon's cradled left arm hard enough to break the bones.
Before Jon could scream again his brother's right hand gripped him by the neck, lifting him up off his feet. His brother was making a growling noise in the back of his throat that no human voice should be capable of making. He leaned in close to Jon's ear and whispered menacingly:
"I only need you to die for it."
As his grip tightened more and more, Jon thought he saw something out of the corner of his eye. A shadow moving toward him and the Doom. But before his gasping for air brain could decipher it, the Doom hammered its left fist into his stomach just below the ribcage before his right hand released his neck and his knee came up to hit the exact same spot.
Jon vomited onto the burning deck of the ship. In a small part of his mind that wasn't panicking and scrambling to figure out a way to prevent his imminent death, he noticed that he'd been right about thinking he'd swallowed his teeth earlier as he saw them bounce briefly across the deck along with the bloody contents of his stomach regurgitated through an almost certainly broken jaw. The burning in his stomach that resounded in his throat and his mouth brought him to his knees, his blackened left arm seemingly numb now from the overload of pain signals his screaming nerves had tried to bombard him with. Even as he remained on all fours to try and recover his breath for a moment, a kick launched him into the side of the ships solid wood railing.
He thought he heard a voice screaming somewhere. No, couldn't be. His mouth hurt too much to use and his brother didn't seem to be the screaming type. There was silence on the deck for a second as Jon hacked and coughed painfully, his body trying to get air into his seizing lungs.
He saw his brother now. Or at least, his brother's legs next to his head. He was hauled to his feet again. A fist impacted his already throbbing and swollen left eye. The air was somehow colder and harder to breathe around the Doom than it had been before. Or maybe that was just his shattered ribs talking.
"You would dare…" His brother breathed. "You would dare inflict a child with the curse of being the Other?!" His fist struck Jon's face again. Jon tried carefully flexing his damaged left hand to see if he could use it. "You would dare condemn them to exist as the death of all things?! To exist only as a shadow to be feared?! Another victim of their own oblivion?!" He hit again. Jon was pretty sure through the red covering his right eye that he was now blind in the left. He couldn't understand why the fire wasn't healing him, why it wasn't working. Was it because the Doom was affecting him somehow? Had Jon truly grown so reliant on the powers already after only a little more than a year of having them?
The Doom bent him backward over the railing so that his spine was almost folded in half. The salt water splashed over the both of them, and to Jon's surprise his brother's grip loosened.
"So, it seems you've acquired an open admirer brother." The Doom laughed. His brother faced the sea. Without warning his voice somehow became deeper, more menacing. Booming with the strength of an ancient inferno.
"You and your feeble writhing don't frighten me you toothless, silt-blooded worm!" He shouted to the air. The waves seemed to grow more violent in response.
"You thrash and you flail but you cannot disguise the smell of rust upon your iron you spineless clear-skinned impotent vermin!" He proclaimed as the burning ship was rocked by the waves: creaking and groaning with each slam against the hull but somehow remaining together.
Jon knew he would never get a better time than now to act. He leapt at his brother, left hand still held against his side but fingers stiffly stuck in the claw like shape he'd been taught. His right hand however was made into a fist. It struck true in the spot on the possessed body on the back just below the ribcage on the right side of the spine.
The Doom shouted in surprise, still human body instinctively bending sideways and away from the punch. As he did, his right hand came as an instinctive backhand toward Jon. The demigod Snow barely managed to duck it before he was inside the Doom's guard and his left hand gripping the neck. Praying that his hand would obey him, he tried to squeeze with all his might and pull the throat of his enemy out.
He succeeded.
What remained of the Doom's profusely bleeding neck wasn't so much a neck as it was a barely glimpsable spinal cord behind severely shredded meat. As smoke began to leak out of the hole in the neck, Jon brought his right hand up in a claw shape again: fire blazing away inside it. He aimed, he thrust his palm and he loosened the stream of fire. His gambit paid off. As soon as the fire contacted the smoke in the shredded neck meat, it burned quickly. The resulting explosion was slightly more contained, content to blow the body's head off into the churning frothing sea. Jon staggered toward the splintered remains of the mast as the water level rose around him from the waves. As he collapsed to his knees again, his energy spent, he heard the Doom again.
"Did…you…think…that…was…it?" The voice was disjointed, stilted. Using a voice and a language it was not accustomed to. Jon tried to haul himself up on the mast and look back. The body had collapsed and now there was only the baleful glowing orange light within the vaguely humanoid cloud shape. Without any further warning it rushed at Jon and invaded him through his mouth and the cracked blistering skin of his left arm.
Jon Snow was thrashing. Jon Snow was flailing. Jon Snow was speaking in the Doom's voice even as his body and his powers tried to eject the invader from his soul.
"I wonder how much of his 'free will' honey our father poured in your delicate ears." The voice hissed, blood dribbling from Jon's broken jaw as it moved it against the host's will.
"How much he told you of his favorite catch all excuse: Daorun Dreje. Tolvie lir Gaomagon." It continued.
"But I doubt he ever told you the truth in all this time. That for every child he bears, he expects them to take up the mantle of R'hllor. And to do it, you must be willing to sacrifice the one you love above all to become the Other. For oblivion exists only in totalities. For there to be existence there must be fire AND shadow!" It finished angrily.
"But should you attempt to question him, question his intentions or his ways, he shall punish you. This is the being that toys with the other gods: forcing himself upon young goddesses and creating competing gods simply to watch them conflict!" It ranted.
"I sought to avoid inflicting the fate of the Other upon the one I cared deeply for. But for that, I was driven beyond sanity, my home obliterated in the process! And after, I was told that my power was corrupted and that both of the worlds were now closed to me!" It revealed.
"But no more!" It declared, the smoke emerging from Jon's mouth. It felt as though it were attempting to drain his energy as it did so. "If the gods of this world are no better than the humans they are meant to be more than, than I shall simply end them all: god and human alike!"
Jon didn't wait to see what his brother was going to do when he fully emerged. So he mentally crossed his fingers and attempted to inhale the fire that surrounded him. It worked all too well.
The explosion finally finished the ship as Jon's prone body was blown from the destroyed pieces and landed upon the nearby mast. As the salt water barely registered on his virtually gone senses, his brother's voice echoed in his head one last time.
'We are kin brother. We shall both burn the world around us. But only one fire can prove the greater. And I have already been burning for centuries little spark.'
Jon couldn't hold onto the mast anymore. The water was too slippery, his body was too tired and his mind was shot: both emotionally and logistically. As he slipped beneath the churning waters that seemed at last to be settling, he could've sworn he saw Arya running toward him upon the waves.
In the distance, he thought he heard a baby crying.
His only functioning eye was switching back and forth between a view of the apparition of his little sister on surface of the water and a group of black haired people in the distance. He found that despite his efforts he could only move toward the group of black haired strangers. He also found he much preferred the sight of the strangers.
For now he was looking up beneath the water, watching as though on the other side of a shifting sheet of glass as Arya pounded on the surface to try and get to him, her fists unable to even shake the screen between them. His vision flashed back to the black haired strangers. Now he was within their midst.
He saw a black haired baby upon an alter of iron. It was crying loudly. Without thinking, he reached for the infant only to discover his hands were covered in blood. Without warning, hooded strangers were in the midst of the crowd, golden daggers in hand. They flashed in the dim light, blood spurting everywhere as the babe cried louder and louder.
Jon quickly attempted to pick up the child, his bloody hands slipping before he finally managed to cradle the precious bundle close to him. His hands had stained the child enough that it looked almost as though it were newborn. The strangers held the golden dagger menacingly pointed at him, the iron alter now stained with the blood of these black haired strangers around him. Instinctively, Jon knew the dagger was meant for the child.
But he also noticed the baby had stopped crying. As he looked down, it opened its scrunched eyes, a smile upon its red face. And as its vivid blue eyes met his, he felt an electric shock run up his spine.
The jolt forced him back into the world beneath the sea just in time to see something swimming toward him. It might've been a human at one point, but the lower half looked too thickly muscled: a tail that pushed from side to side to move it forward. The grey scales looked as though they could shred a man who touched it the wrong way, leading to three sets of tentacles on each place that might've been shoulders on a mortal. Most of all, he saw the moss colored hands and the human face.
He couldn't tell if it was meant to be male or female. Though he could see that the teeth and eyes were distinctly shark like. Just before he lost consciousness, he wondered at the irony of it all.
'Child of a fire god killed by a fish. What're the odds?'