Interlude III
Part II

A dozen miles thence, a curtain of giant dark clouds bigger than castles loom overhead. Their dark undersides hint at the deluge to come. The deep open expanse of the far Sunset Sea is calm by its standards—which is to say, not very calm at all. Huge waves that would upturn most galleys rise and fall everywhere the eye can see.

Next to that rippling enormity, the ship in its midst looks like a child's plaything. Yet if so it must be a queer child indeed. The first thing that sets apart this ship is the sail, showing a sigil that belongs to no known House: a great black eye, crowned in iron by a flock of crows. Only after that do you realise that the ship carves through the water with nary a ripple. It does not shake in the slightest. It glides serenely as a ghost, as if it is not there at all.

The final thing is that, in spite of the crashing waves beyond, upon the ship it is quiet. Not just quiet—there is not the slightest sound.

There is silence.

He likes it that way.

Chained and yoked with thick bonds under the carved maiden-figure prow, there is a man. His grey beard is overgrown. His nails are like talons. He is soaking-sodden so badly that his fingers and toes are black with frostbite. All that he is wearing are filthy rags soiled with his own piss and shit. And there is a gag in his mouth of some strange cloth that lets him breathe but not move his tongue…

…until a pretty slender figure leaps down from the ship's deck, hanging with one hand from the rail, and pulls it off. "Hello there, little brother."

Slowly, the grey-bearded prisoner's salt-encrusted eyelids flicker. They open. He registers the handsome young face grinning in front of him, a vision of beauty dangling in the dark.

He screams.

"Oh, that wasn't very courteous, was it?" But Euron is chuckling. "Ah Aeron." He reaches out a hand—the one that is not holding the rail, heedless of his peril—and strokes Aeron tenderly on the jaw.

His brother shudders violently. For a moment he flinches back as far as the chains and ropes will allow, despite the cold bite of the metal. Then he relaxes in his bonds and says naught of it, wilfully forcing himself not to react.

"Now that's no way to greet a brother," Euron says, disappointed.

Aeron tries his voice: a faint, hoarse rasp. "You… are no… brother." He is quiet for a few moments. These days it is hard even to speak. "What… you doing… Dagon?"

"Why, preparing him to rule. He will be a great king, as long as I advise him to be."

"Leave… him… be."

Euron laughs. "No."

"Leave… him." Aeron repeats it. He finds courage for his nephew that he cannot for himself. He tests his bonds, wondering whether he can throw himself forward suddenly enough to break the balance and throw Euron off into the sea. They are too tight.

"Ohhhh Aeron. Jealousy, is it? Did you think I am forgetting you?" He reaches through Aeron's filthy breeches and grasps him roughly as a brother never should. Aeron's breath hitches. Not again, not like this, no no no no no no. "Be not afraid, my ugliest brother. My intent for him is not of that kind. I will never leave you. You are mine until the end."

The fear that stabs Aeron then—might it be true?—is a fear sharper than swords, crueller than the salt that stings his festering wounds. "No," he cries, "no, not… forever. Not. Balon you… may… may have slain—" he heard Euron talking on his witching-mirror with Dagon, much as he would love to deny it— "but Vic… Victar… arion… won't let… you… let you rule… the Isles. Not… of all men… not you." He has to hope. It is his only hope. "He hates… you… you know… that woman. His wife… what you did… you… you know what you did. He… fight you… long… breath… in him."

"Not anymore," says Euron.

Aeron squeezes his eyes tight, shaking. He tries not to let his brother see his tears. "Liar."

"Often," Euron acknowledges, unashamed. "But not this time."

"If he… does… does not live," Aeron rasps—for he does not trust anything from Euron's mouth—"it's bec… because… you… killed him."

"Believe it or not, I did not kill him," replies Euron. "I know, I know, I know—I have slain so many of my family—I'm as surprised as you. Perhaps I would have killed him, given time. But he pre-empted me by killing himself." The Crow's Eye's voice lightens with naked scorn. "What an imbecile. Too soft-hearted to carry out the sacrifice, disturbing the middle of a powerful working. What did he think would happen?"

"Stop… your… mon… strous… witchery," declaims Aeron.

Euron laughs. "As if I would ever be so foolish as to make any plan that relied on Victarion making the clever choice. No, it didn't spoil my working. It merely stripped him of protection from it. At least I can say this for dear departed Vic: he never wavered from his life's guiding stars: stubbornness and stupidity. Sharp as a seal's arse, to the very end."

Rage burns inside Aeron. He hurls himself forward at Euron's insolent grin. The chains stop him ten inches from Euron, who still rests hanging outside the ship next to Aeron, holding onto the railing by one arm. Euron lets out a peal of laughter.

"Never… mock him," Aeron snarls, spitting in Euron's face. "You… mock us… murder us. Not now. Not him… Don't you… dare. Don't… you… dare."

"I dare whatever I please. It is why I hang here and you hang there," Euron tells him. He puts a finger to his face where Aeron spat at him, trails it sensually towards his mouth, and licks it.

On the deck above them, a man approaches on soft padded feet. He is giant, bulging with muscles, yet his stare is vacant. Like all of Euron's crew, he has no tongue. To Aeron he looks to be simple. He gazes down at the two men by the sea at the fore of the ship with innocent curiosity.

Euron notices. With a sudden snarl the big mute man starts beating himself, heavy savage blows raining down upon him from his own hands. After a minute of this, he stops and walks swiftly back to the starboard side of the ship, where he resumes rowing, gripping the oar so tight his hands are bleeding.

"Weighty matters are afoot, dear brother," Euron intones as the mute crewman weeps from the beating. "The king on the Iron Throne has bowed before my victories. He thinks to deceive me with a false surrender so that he can come back and attack the Iron Islands once he has had some peacetime to rebuild his feet. He does not know that he himself has been deceived. In a year he will be dead, murdered by his woman, and she will lead the Seven Kingdoms to civil war and ruin."

Aeron does not believe it, though the words ring with the tone of prophecy. Euron does not sound like a man talking about the future. He rarely does, when he is describing things yet to come. He sounds like a man talking about the past, already set in stone. He speaks of what man cannot know as if he knows.

Euron frowns. "Which is an inconvenience," he continues. "I approve of Robert. He is the sort of king I want there to be."

"You… like… Robert?" Aeron cannot hide his incredulity. Even for Euron this is a particularly bald-faced lie. No-one in the world has done more damage to Robert's reign than Euron has.

Euron is amused at that. "Like him? No, Robert is nothing to me. He is nothing; he was always nothing; he will always be nothing. Only one kind of man matters in this world and cockroaches like him and you are not among them. No…" he takes control of himself, "no, Robert matters only inasmuch as if he sits on the Iron Throne, no other does."

Aeron notes the dark turn of Euron's tone. "Other?"

"Another," Euron says. His usual playfulness vanishes like a thief in the night. "Robert must be weakened and diminished, not overthrown. He is an utter failure and that's as I like it. I do not desire someone who might not be to sit in his place." Then he laughs again. Euron's moods, Aeron notes, turn in moments, like the flicker of a flame. "That's the matter, you see. My father wanted a little brother to replace me with."

Nothing that Euron has said confuses Aeron as much as this. He has never known why Euron is so evil to him, Urri and Victarion until today. "You… hate us… because… Father… had more… sons?"

Euron convulses. He howls with laughter, shaking so hard that his arm holding the rail trembles and he almost falls into the sea.

"You…" Euron gasps. "You… Gods, it's too perfect. You… You really think… How can you possibly be stupid enough to think I meant you?"

After a long while, the Crow's Eye leaps back up onto the deck of the Silence in a single graceful bound. "Well, 't has been a pleasure," are his parting words. "Thank you for that. I haven't laughed so hard in a long while. Until then, little brother. I'd say 'fare well' but I don't think you would believe it."

Euron pauses, still chuckling softly to himself. He turns away and fiddles with something on his face.

"One matter remains to be dealt with. It's rude to eavesdrop, did your mother never tell you?"

He looks straight at you.

At you. But he cannot see you, surely. It is just by chance, just in this direction. You are not there to be seen. You are not even in the same world. Just in your direction…

He has two eyes. The blue smiling eye and the other. The other is not patched.

You can see his eye.

You can see his eye.

You can see his eye YOU CAN SEE HIS EYE—

Blackness.

Everywhere, blackness.

Blacker than ebony. Blacker than a moonless night, for even a midnight sky has stars. Blacker than smoke, blacker than anything… black as a sun turned black, to bring forth darkness instead of light. That black eye looking at you has swelled to cover the whole world and the world has turned to nothing.

You cannot move. You cannot flee. You cannot run. You cannot breathe. There is nothing around you. He cannot see you he cannot see you he cannot see you but he is looking at you—

"You. Yes, you."

He cannot see you. Surely he cannot.

"Yes, I can see you." That terrible eye holds you in its regard and it has become everything. "Of course I can. Did you think I didn't notice you watching me, all this time? Did you think the wall between the worlds was enough to shield you from my eyes? Did you think you were safe?"

Laughter—mocking laughter in the dark.

"Fool. I am not so limited as the weaklings you are accustomed to dealing with. My gaze spans space and time and every realm of possibility. Remember this: Whenever you are, wherever you are, whichever world you are in, you are never safe from me."

Euron Greyjoy's voice resounds around you. You try to look, to touch, to smell. You can do nothing. There is nothing. There is nothing. The world is nothing.

Gradually, you realise you are falling.

Falling, yes. That is the sensation you can feel. There is no ground beneath your feet, and though you see nothing but flat and neverending darkness you can feel somehow that it is rushing by, faster than you have ever fallen before. There is no press of air against your skin to slow you down. There is nothing. Nothing you can see. Nothing you can smell. Nothing you can feel.

There is nothing but the dark. There is nothing but the falling.

Terror comes upon you then, a terror more terrifying than any terror you have ever known. You try to grab, to hold on to something. There is nothing. Nothing. Nothing.

You try to scream, but you are falling so fast the tiny sound vanishes in an instant, miles and miles above your head.

"I admit I've delayed this moment because your stumbling blind arrogance entertains me," Euron says, and you feel his breath hot on your ear, hideously close, "but the time has come to put it to an end. I am a greenseer, imbecilic whelp. Sending the spirit beyond the body is my domain. Did you truly think I would not see you? Have you never heard the old phrase?—When you look into the abyss, the abyss looks also into you."

The abyss is more than looking at you now. It has consumed you. You are in its belly. The void around you—nothing to see, nothing to touch, nothing to smell, nothing to breathe—is all-encompassing.

You can't escape it. You can't even touch it. Every time you try, you can grasp nothing—nothing!—less than empty air.

"Then let this be a salutary lesson," Euron murmurs. "Every second you were watching me I have known it. Every second I could have torn out your spirit and confined it like this, whenever I pleased. Sending forth your soul from the anchor of your body is a useful tool… against a mortal. To spy on a greenseer? It is amazing and amusing that you ever thought you had a chance."

"Why are you saying this?" you ask. You have no mouth, but such things seem to work differently here, wherever 'here' is. "You are about to kill me anyway."

"I am not going to kill you, Stannis Stormchild."

The first surprise is that he (says he) will not kill you; what does he intend instead? The second, worse, is that he knows who has been watching him. He knows your name.

"Stormborn," Euron intones, as if reciting a poem. "Storm-reared. Storm-feeder. Storm-caller. Stormchild. Those are the names it gave you, am I not wrong?"

You do not answer. You mean to conceal the truth, but for Euron that is answer enough.

"It spoke true, then," Euron concludes, satisfied. "I thought so. Imagine my surprise when I spoke with the voice of the outpost of the Lords of the Deep and I was told there was another who had come to seek it."

"So you came second." It is unwise, mayhaps, but you cannot resist the opportunity.

"Only at the beginning." Euron's voice is a snarl. "You are getting slow, Stormchild; you have lost sight of what matters. I followed the same trail that you did, deciphered the same runes as you did, reached the same outpost of oily black stone as you did, hidden inside the Temple of the Pharakienat on the far northern shore. But afterwards, while you have played at killing weakling mortals like a child stepping on ants, I stayed on the trail you forsook."

In an instant, Euron turns from growling rage to manic glee.

"And so," he purrs, "I found what you missed."

The cruel voice roars around you from nowhere and everywhere, all-present and all-powerful. You try to move, to look at him, by instinct, but there is nothing you can touch. There is nothing you can see. There is nothing you can breathe. You are wrapped in a vast darkness that you cannot feel or see, and you are falling, falling in the dark, falling in an abyss without end.

"You've read the carvings on the walls of Yeen, haven't you? Don't bother to deny it. My eyes in the seas and the skies extend even to Sothoryos. I know you have been seeking out the outposts of the Lords of the Deep. But did you decipher their meaning? He who can open the Only Gate will be granted two boons, one of strength and one of sight: power of times long past and knowledge of times yet to come… if he can appease the power that dwells within.

"And so I alone shall go further than all the fire-witches and prophets and shadowbinders of Asshai-by-the-Shadow have ever dared to go. I will not waddle at the far edge of the Shadow on this world, as they do. At this very moment I am making my way to its heart, to dread Stygai, the centre and source of Everlasting Night. There I will pass through the black gate of Stygai and ask my two boons. I already know what I shall require."

Greyjoy is silent for a while. Hours later—or is it minutes? Is it centuries?—you find your voice, a tiny nothing swept away far above you by your fall in the bottomless dark. Your speech is so insignificant that you cannot even hear yourself.

"What?"

"I require a horn, and the knowledge to guide me to a horn."

One horn comes immediately to your mind. If he truly means to go to the Shadow Lands, it must be Dragonbinder. It is the only place in this world where dragons still dwell. They never leave the power of fire and darkness that nourishes them there. But if they could be forced to… The thought of a greenseer commanding the dragons of the Shadow Lands is fearful indeed. What other horn he might mean, you suspect, but you hope not.

Still you seek to hear more. You know not why Euron is telling you so much, but if playing the fool makes him in his arrogance tell you more, you will play the fool. "What horns?" you ask.

"Oh I think you know," Euron croons. "I am sure our father—"

"You!" The realisation comes to you suddenly. "You are the one he spoke of, when I asked if I was his first student. He said, there was another, but he failed to teach you responsibility."

"Elegant, isn't it?" Euron is laughing again. "I have to enjoy the sheer extent of failure of our father. He spent years trying to turn me into his dour slave, thinking of naught but duty, wasting my life away for the sake of ants beneath my feet. Of course, he failed. And then he looks around, and he spends yet more years teaching… you."

That old fool. You have not thought of the three-eyed crow in years. You thrust him out of your dreams fifteen years ago. You are powerful enough that he cannot touch your mind unless you will it, and you never will it.

Mayhaps this is his work, you wonder. Mayhaps Greyjoy is his unwitting servant, to punish me for my defiance.

"In any case," says Euron, "I've no doubt he would have told you of Dragonbinder and the Horn of Joramun."

Gods, no.

That tale is almost utterly forgotten by mortal men. They, in the words of the three-eyed crow, have only "their twisted tales mangled by millennia of telling and retelling. Many a truth has been lost due to the forgetting of men, the boasts of lords and the verses of singers, and many a lie invented. You will hear it differently in every holdfast from Sunspear to Thenn, and none of them have much of the truth left."

But a greenseer is not confined by space and time, and you have looked back and seen the truth of it. When the Others, the Enemy of mankind, built a great wall of ice to serve as the southernmost border of their domain, they left a way for it to be destroyed if ever their enemies were to seize it, so that it could not be used against them. While Brandon the Breaker led the daring assault that seized the Wall, his ally Joramun stole that horn with the aid of his friends the giants. The Enemy fell upon the Wall from both sides, but by then Azor Ahai had come from the far east, a great and terrible sorcerer-king of fire and darkness, bearing a sword that could not be withstood. The living dead were vanquished and their masters were put to flight, fleeing to the Land of Always Winter. There they dug themselves deep, to hide and slumber under miles of ice.

Centuries later, Brandon's clan and Joramun's fell out and turned their swords upon each other. The clan once led by Brandon, from whom House Stark claimed descent, won that war, and Joramun's clan fled beyond the Wall. (Later, the Starks invented older, supposed heroic ancestors to glorify themselves, like every other noble House. But Brandon the Builder—a mortal man who had allegedly built the hundreds-of-miles-long, hundreds-of-feet-tall Wall of ice—was entirely an invention of storytellers. No such man ever existed.) Millennia later, when Brandon the Breaker and Joramun were naught but myth, their enemy in that battle—in truth, an Other who was the commander of the Others' garrison—was reimagined as "Night's King", a traitorous man, supposedly a Stark or Bolton or some such folly. And the ancient clan-chieftains Brandon and Joramun were reimagined as a Stark King of Winter and a wildling King-Beyond-the-Wall, though the division between 'wildlings' and 'Northmen' did not exist in those days, and there were no such thing as kingdoms or kings.

But ever since that day, the Wall has been the fortress of the realm of men. And ever since that day, the Enemy have been seeking the Horn that Joramun stole from them.

Somehow you find the courage to speak defiance to the lord of the black abyss all around you even as he holds you in his thrall. "You cannot. You would not, even you. Surely you know the Others are reawakening? It would be the end of the world."

"It would be the end of mankind," Euron dismisses. "That is not the same thing at all. Ordinary men and women are naught but fodder for sacrifice. We both know this. They are no more than pigs or cattle to us—and if every boar in the farm must die to feed their master's hunger, then so be it."

The world. It is the whole world, everybody in it, that he proposes to sacrifice. That unfathomable selfishness leaves you lost for words; you can say only, "This is madness."

"If sanity is surrender and madness is survival, who is truly mad?" The vast voice that echoes in the darkness sounds genuinely curious.

"You are mad if you think the Enemy will spare you," you reply. "They hate all things but themselves. You preach survival over surrender, but your path is surrender to the Others. Their victory must be stopped; it cannot be survived."

"It cannot be stopped." Euron's voice turns from idle humour to the dire, ringing tone of prophecy. "In the Tower of Wailing the Others are gathering the host they will send upon this world. A hundred thousand corpses have been raised. More will follow. A united mankind, in these faded days, has no hope of overthrowing them. The mankind they will face—a hollow shell, bled white by its own pointless wars—has less than none. Swiftly the tide of ice will roll over our world. All lands and seas will be covered white, and night will be forever banished by the pale light of a winter's day that never ends. None shall be spared. Every city, every realm, every people of mankind will be extinguished. The age of men is at its close.

"The Others are mightier than all of us, even greenseers; I am not too pride-blinded to see that. The powers that ended their first advance are long since lost to myth and song. The endless armies of the living dead cannot be defeated in open battle. Arms and armies will avail nothing, just as they failed eight-thousand years ago. Every battle diminishes the living and grows the numbers of the dead. That is all they need.

"Don't you see? Against the Enemy of life there is no such thing as a victory. Only sorcery can overcome them; and sorcerers have not the strength we once did.

"Those are the facts," Euron utters, as certain, as unshakeable as sunset. "That is beyond our power to decide. The choice that faces us is: what are we to do about it?"

You and he are both silent for a long while. You are still falling in the bottomless dark, helpless and in terror. It is hard to gather your thoughts.

"That is the counsel of despair," you say at last. "Then why live? If all is without hope, why bother? Why do anything at all?"

"I said 'there is no such thing as a victory'," the Crow's Eye reminds you. "I did not say 'there is no such thing as an escape'."

"You cannot escape the world."

"You think not?" Euron's voice sounds like a shrug. "Mayhaps not. I will take the Horn of Joramun, bring down the Wall and rise to godhood gorging myself on the blood and despair of the end of all things."

"Or you will die screaming."

"Or I will die," Euron acknowledges.

"That does not worry you?"

"If I die, I will die in the greatest working ever unleashed. I care nothing for whether I survive it. Leap off a tower and you fly or you die, but either way, you are a legend—better than the cowards who do nothing but cling to the stone walls as the tower topples to the ground."

"The tower will not topple." Your own voice is a snarl now. "I will halt it."

Then, swift as the wind, Euron's tone turns back to glee. "I thought you would say that."

That is why he is telling me this. That is why he did not seek me out and kill me before. He wants me to try to stop him, you realise. He does not want an easy victory; it would bore him. He wants the thrill of a battle between greenseers for the fate of the world.

Or at least, that is what he wants me to think he wants.

It makes no matter. Either way, he must be stopped. The three-eyed crow in his folly has trained a man who threatens all mankind. The crow has not reined him in, so someone else must—permanently.

"Then I will go to Stygai in Everlasting Night." The vow is made in tones of steel. "I will go beyond Asshai, to the heart of the Shadow. I will pass through its Only Gate. And I, before you, will claim the city for my own."

"I will be waiting."

The black eye blinks; you seize the chance to flee. You have been dismissed.