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The roots of the heart tree were sweeter than honey, but the taste HOLD THE DOOR HODOR was crisp and sharp. More like ginger, but without HOLD THE DOOR the warmth or bite. The energy it gave Wylis was brief and shallow. It made him want to jump, or run, or dance, and other things he was generally HODOR HOLD THE DOOR disinclined to do at the best of times. But the ceiling was too low, the corridors were too meandering, and the Voice shattered his sense of rhythm so that he couldn't even tap a beat out with a rock, so he lay among the bones and twigs and twitched uncomfortably, feeling sparks of restlessness prickling under his skin, while HOLD THE DOOR a heavy and ponderous hunger burrowed around in his innards, excited by the sweet pretender of food, but unsatisfied with the rags of root pulp Wylis could mash soft enough to swallow. The inadequate fizzle of superficial energy the roots bestowed helped him snatch the quicker and more cautious beetles climbing among the roots, which did more to sate his hunger than the roots themselves, but Wylis had to push from his mind the worry that a sparse lining of HODOR HOLD THE DOOR chitin and moss in his stomach wouldn't sustain him for the distance to the nearest source of real food when the time came to carry Bran back south through the cold, and the longer they stayed in the cave, the worse it would get. The winter would grow colder, bread and meat would grow further from them, and Wylis would have wasted to HOLD THE DOOR a macerated hide draped across a supine skeleton.
It would have been easy to conclude that Bran's quest to find the Three Eyed Raven had already led Wylis, Meera, and Summer beyond the point of return on the path to their incipient deaths. What purpose fate had in bringing Bran to this place might never be seen by those sacrificed to bring him here. Perhaps the call of the Three Eyed Raven was merely so that he might have a successor to his throne, ruling this empty cave until the tree roots HOLD THE DOOR subsumed him and he had to call another. The irrational devotion of the lords of the great southern houses to the continuation of their 'line' at whatever cost to themselves and the living members of their families made this notion seem less absurd. Perhaps the bones carpeting HODOR HOLD THE DOOR every chamber of the cave were those of the gullible companions of the Three Eyed Raven and all his predecessors, ending their myriad feats of endurance, heroism, and loyalty starving pointlessly in a cave at the feet of their master while he learnt to watch the impressive deeds of others far away and deep in the past or future. It could even serve as a metaphor for the petty squabbles of lords and kings in the real world. Perhaps the greatest good that could HOLD THE DOOR come of the whole ordeal would be the teaching parable it would inspire which maesters could tell to young lordlings to cure them of the insane fixation with honour and legacy that made their fathers the violent and dangerously stupid blight on the land that they mostly were. Perhaps the irony, then, that none who brought the Three Eyed Raven to his throne escape the cave to tell of it, and their quest's ultimate purpose, to be a warning to others, was lost, fit somewhere into the metaphor. Wylis could have been provoked to some level of resentment were he to allow himself to become convinced that his and Summer's and the Reeds' deaths in aid of bringing Bran here were for nothing but to numb with the opiate of legacy the previous Three Eyed Raven's guilt for the wanton waste of his own friends. But thanks to the Voice, lingering thoughts had never been an issue to Wylis, for better or worse. The ease with which he could avoid dwelling on as unpleasant a notion as the possibility of his impending pointless death came at the cost of the struggle to formulate an uninterHOLD THE DOOR HODOR HOLD THE DOORrupted cogent thought. But, as never before, this time there was another silver lining to the intrusive constant screaming that accompanied Wylis' every waking and dreaming moment. It told Wylis that this wasn't where he was to die, and this wasn't the purpose of his life.
He would be needed elsewhere, for something the Voice wouldn't allow him to decipher. There would be a need, desperate and intense. The maddened panic and terror in the Voice coiled Wylis around it like a spring, pressed by the unrelenting ubiquity of the screaming; kept him champing at the bit to resolve the cryptic exigency. But the words the Voice screamed and the sensations that accompanied it gave no clue as to what the need was or would be, and Wylis, while anxiously poised to face the source of the fear and calm the panic, worried that he wouldn't recognise the need when it arose, or that it was already taking place and he was in the wrong place, or obliviously immersed in the midst of some unendurable injustice it didn't occur to him to rectify. There were the words. 'Come on, Hodor, they're behind us. Open the door. Hold the door, Hodor. Hold the door. Hold the door.' Repeated endlessly, looping over the top of themselves, echoing, merging together, backwards and forwards, like listening to the rustle of each single leaf while the tree thrashes in a storm, but each syllable a crack of thunder; a hammer strike on an anvil. The other sensations varied in clarity. Sometimes when he was asleep he would have the feeling that he was having two separate dreams simultaneously; one the normal course of affairs for a dream, say, of surreptitiously picking bloodsoaked matted strands of hair out of the porridge Old Nan had made him, or trying to hide inside his own shoes to escape flaming bears, or quite often just being a horse and standing in the stables all night, or an owl sitting in the rafters of the stable or the ruined tower, occasionally swooping to snatch a mouse out of the straw, or the vines trailing between the dust and rubble. And at the same time, with equal or greater clarity, he would be running in circles down an endless winding loop of corridors in the dark and cold with the smell of death surrounding him. Teeth in cold lipless mouths and cold fingers biting and tearing at his face and neck and arms and legs from behind, reaching through a door he's holding closed while a sudden blast of burning cold wind bites through his torn clothes. Pursued by the dead while the same voice screams 'Hodor, hold the door. Hold the door, Hodor.' All night, every night, in that space unbounded by time, where hours flow back and forth as they will, uncountable. The same sensations followed him to a greater or lesser extent in the day while he set about his chores and tasks, sewing tack and oiling saddles and harness straps; brushing, feeding, watering, and exercising the horses; mixing ointments to rub into the bruises the bits sometimes left in the corners of their mouths, or the wounds left by a gratuitous spurring, or the rot that could set into their hooves around the nails of the shoes. Trying to track the progress or perform the repetitive steps of a simple task in the right order while half his mind was lost in a timeless loop of running, panting, carrying, smelling rot and death, feeling cold and pain and fear, and holding, listening to the terrified litany repeated, all repeating again. He could complete his work to the satisfaction of his Winterfell masters, if not quite to his own, but the words, the Voice, drowned out his own words before he could speak them, and he was left mumbling a fragment of someone else's distant terror and presumed simple by all he encountered. And given the state of his mind and the difficulty with which he functioned normally and fulfilled a basic role within the keep, he couldn't dispute that assessment. 'Simple' was perhaps slightly the wrong word for the turbulent maelstrom of a mind divided permanently into two parallel dreamlike states, but the fact that all words of his own making being dashed against the rocks by the tempest of HOLD THE DOOR HODOR was central to his infirmity, choosing a better alternative was beyond him. Similarly, the meaning of the Voice, the significance of the alien sensations, what he was being called to do, or fix, or protect, was imposible to piece together based on its content. What was meant by the endless winding corridor, the holding of the door, the tide of the dead, the Voice and the words it spoke, may all have been comprehensible to another if he could communicate them, or to himself if his own thoughts weren't so disrupted by the presence of the Voice and the visions. But for Wylis, hermeneutics was furthest in a long list of skills beyond the hobbled realm of his capability. The metaphor would not be grasped while it fought so viciously to dominate his awareness. Wylis could only trust that when the time came, his task would be laid out for him in a blazing epiphany, and the Voice would fall silent when he understood its message.
Then Bran had been born. Old Nan had gone to deliver the new Stark child, and Wylis could hear Lady Stark howling and groaning from the stables. This had also been the case when the older Stark children were born, and by the time she was having Arya, either Lady Stark had been finding each successive birth easier or Wylis had inured to the sound of the ordeal, but Bran's birth had been different. Whether for Lady Stark, Wylis couldn't tell. Her cries may not have been any more pained than before, but somehow they struck a harmonic chord with the Voice, and the background directionless urgency that invisibly innervated Wylis' lumbering gait gripped him as it hadn't since the Voice first came crashing into his head, before he had acclimatised to its ceaseless companionship. Something about the arrival of the boy, even at the distance between the keep and the stables, felt similar to an ineffable aspect in the atmosphere the day Wylis had his fit. A sense of something missing, or of something hidden. A presence, or expectation, or desire. Something amiss, whether it was something that shouldn't have been there, or something was should have been and wasn't. Wylis had completely forgotten about it until then, as it hadn't been the strangest thing to happen that day. But once it was there again, it felt familiar, as if the day of the fit hadn't been the first time either. Something about the Voice was drawn to it, or perhaps emanated from it. Perhaps the Voice was that of this child, imperilled by forces soon to become apparent to Wylis. Perhaps the command pertained to the birth itself in some way, although if the command were as literal as the context made it appear, he saw no obstetric benefit to enacting it, so he cowered in the stables and left Old Nan and Lady Stark to their affairs, and the boy was born without incident. The boy. The Voice definitely belonged to a woman, and while some ambient component of Wylis' parallel sensorium somehow significantly resonated with Bran, the link to him wasn't complete enough for him to be the source, and the sole object of Wylis' mysterious duty. Even so, whatever fate had in store for Wylis, Bran was clearly to be an important part of it. Wylis had had little to do with Bran before his fall from the tower, and little cause to be in his company, so Wylis payed close attention to the vividness and intensity of the Voice and the visions, as it was the only guide at his disposal by which to judge whether Bran had need of him, and there had been no noticeable changes that appeared to correspond to Bran's fall, so Wylis was spared the sense of shame for failing to protect Bran, as appeared to be part of his responsibility, and instead took as a sign that his bond to Bran was decreed by fate the fact that the fall had brought Wylis directly into Bran's personal service. He seemed to have been making tangible progress towards discovering the meaning of the Voice.
Summer padded into the chamber and lay down among the bones, levered a scapula up on end between his paws and began crunching it to shards. A gesture emptier than HOLD THE DOOR HODOR Wylis gnawing on the weirwood roots. Summer had been the best fed of the five of them for weeks while prey was common enough for him to find, but too few and far between for HOLD THE DOOR Meera to catch for the other four. In the cave it had looked like he'd be the first to starve, crushing old bones from which the marrow had long since seeped and dried. In those last few weeks of the trek here, Meera had often chastised Bran for entering Summer's mind and watching him hunt and feeling him eat, while his own body was starving in silence back in the camp among starving companions missing his company and no doubt jealous of his access to even the illusion of a half-full stomach. Wylis didn't mind leaving Bran to that small respite. At that time he would himself often dream of hunting hares in the snow as Summer, or dream of warging into Summer and watching him hunt. It was hard to tell. Jojun had explained to Bran that his old dreams of being Summer were part of the same talent that allowed him to take possession of Summer's mind and command his will, and now the Three Eyed Raven was teaching Bran to use it to witness events in the distant past, future, or distance. It made Wylis wish his old dreams of being a horse had been so significant. One night in the cave Wylis dreamt that Old Nan was being skinned alive and hung up in the archway of Winterfell's southern gate. The Voice had been seeping across into that dream, clawing through the curtain between his minds with its bony talons. The courtyard of Winterfell reeked of decay, and the Voice was shouting from every direction, HODOR HODOR. He awoke with Meera's fingers clamped into his shoulder, shaking him awake, her worried face shouting the name she thought was his. “You were having a nightmare,” she said. That was obviously all it was. Wylis knew the bounds of his ability well enough not to waste any time worrying that the vision had been prescient, or conHODORtemHOLDporTHEsciDOORentHODOR as the case seemed to be for Bran. Perhaps the Voice was the product of a similar talent Wylis did have, albeit one that had hitherto made itself far less HODOR HOLD THE DOOR useful.
But there would be time. They were leaving soon, and as much as Bran's time with the Three Eyed Raven had been cut short, Meera seemed glad of it, and Wylis couldn't help but feel relieved as well. Meera had finished checking most of their few vestiges of remaining equipment and packing them away, and spoke wistfully of the boiled or fried eggs, and bacon, and blood sausage that awaited them somewhere, anywhere, in the Seven Kingdoms, and Wylis' mouth filled with the memory of the taste of melted butter and bacon fat. 'Or scrambled with melted cheese and mushrooms and crushed basil' he tried to reply, but was immediately embarrassed to have mentioned mushrooms, since the odd flange of cave fungus, along with moss and insects, were exactly the foodstuffs they were fantasising about escaping forever. Then he was relieved to have only really said 'hodor' and embarrassed to have worried about it in the first place. As nice as it was to see a smile of any kind, there was more than a hint of bitterness in Meera's forced and weary merriment. She had lost her brother bringing Bran to the cave, and their purpose in doing so had always been uncertain. Now it looked like they may have failed at whatever that purpose had been, and no new plan had been devised to HOLD THE DOOR HODOR replace it. Meera had worked and fought and starved and struggled because she loved and trusted her brother, and would follow him through it while he guided her to their fate. Now he was gone, and while the struggle wasn't over, the point of it all seemed to be. Wylis found himself pitying her for not being plagued by the Voice. The path she walked was no longer lined with marker stones reading 'indeterminate distance to indeterminate goal.' She knew no less where she was going, but had no signs leading the way. But for Wylis the Voice remained, and though she couldn't hear it, the voice was Meera's.
He'd recognised it the first time they'd met. At first he didn't believe it. She seemed to bridge the gap between his disparate consciousnesses, speaking in the voice he heard screaming endlessly, yet being heard and seen by others, especially when she had a knife at Osha's throat. And yet while she seemed to reside in both his worlds and bring them closer together than they had ever been, he hadn't felt her presence the way he did Bran's, and after months of traveling with her she had given no additional sense of harmonic completion to his parallel sensorium. No part of the Voice as he perpetually experienced it in half his head emanated from her being. But the voice he heard leave her mouth when she spoke in the real world he knew to be that which screamed and echoed and repeated in the other, since long before she had been born into the only world she knew. Beyond auditory recognition, Wylis felt it to be the same voice, and it would be her terror and panic he was chosen to alleviate. Bran was merely the vector by which Wylis was brought to Meera, and soon, he felt, he would understand why.
Meera stood up and froze. Her face fell and blanched, and her eyes widened, before she dropped the bedroll she'd bound and ran towards the entrance of the cave. It took a moment for Wylis to realise what she had felt. A chill. A slight wave of nausea. A vague sense of formless dread. And a moment later, the smell of what was presumably the army of the dead formed up outside the cave. The worlds Wylis stood between had gradually been merging since their arrival at the cave. The rift in the ground which Wylis straddled was shoring up, and Wylis no longer felt his senses were divided between two realms, but that he stood in one while his senses took in the details of both. It had begun with the eery deja vu he had felt when the skeletons had burst from the snow and attacked them as they approached the heart tree. When several of them had clambered up onto Wylis' back and bit and clawed at him and struck at him awkwardly with ancient blades and hammers. The pain and fear blended seamlessly into the Voice and vanished, but the intrusion of the Voice into the real world, as if it would be into the other world, the world of running forever down corridors chased by death, and holding a door closed being torn at by the dead, while a chorus of Meeras screamed in thousands of disembodied voices, that he would awaken from the dream of having been Winterfell's oafish stablemaster and the companion of Bran, Meera, and Summer, clamped Wylis with a paralysis of mindless panic, and it took Bran warging into him and driving his broken mind formlessly out into the snow to shake off the shackles of fear and put his body to use to defend him. Wylis' own weakness and inaction may have been what cost them all Jojun's life.
Ever since, Wylis had felt like it was only in one world that he lay among bones, eating moss, chewing weirwood root, and catching beetles, watching Meera cut Bran's hair and shave the Three Eyed Raven out of boredom, while a thousand invisible Meeras in the chamber shouted at him, and the bones on the floor dug into his limbs and face and neck. The chill, the nausea, and the dread, were all present in the Voice, and their appearance in the real world, where the White Walkers and the undead horde stood outside, felt like another symptom of the fusion of his worlds, and thus he hadn't understood, as Meera had, what they signified. Wylis tried to stand, but failed to twitch a muscle. The sledge was packed, he just had to get Bran into it and get out, but Wylis began rocking where he sat and mumbling “I can't, I can't, I'm sorry Bran, I'm sorry Meera, I can't,” he hodorred. Meera ran back into the chamber past Wylis and straight to Bran, and began shouting at him, “Bran, wake up! They're here. We need Hodor. Warg into Hodor now!” She'd learnt how useless Wylis was when he let Jojun die, but Bran couldn't hear her. She started dragging him to the sledge herself, and only when the dead began to burst through the ceiling of the cavern was she desperate enough to shout at Wylis to help her. She took a sword from the sledge and leapt at the first corpse to reach the floor. The Children arrived with their bows and spears and broke the dead apart as they entered, now from more and more holes dug through the ceiling, and in through the corridors of the cave. The world of the Voice had broken through. The dead were in pursuit and Wylis had to run. He was already running. He had been living through this moment every moment since the day of the fit. This was what he had to do. Wylis stopped berating himself for his weakness and pointlessness, and stood up. He had awoken from the dream, and all there was to do was what he had already been doing. He strapped Bran into the sledge and made off down the only remaining corridor from which the dead weren't swarming. He didn't have to look back to sense one of the White Walkers striding into the chamber behind him. The Children had been slowly overwhelmed by the dead swarming over them faster than they could smash their brittle leathery frames and add them to the bones on the floor, and had begun falling under their rusty blades, but with the arrival of the White Walkers there was no more resistance they could offer, their small bodies were riven by blades of ice. Wylis heard Meera grunt, with the force behind a sword slash, or throwing a spear, Wylis couldn't tell, but it was followed by a cacophonous crash of shattering ice, and a wave of relief washed past him down the tunnel with the fresh absence of the taint of White Walker in the atmosphere. Soon afterwards Meera caught up with Wylis and Bran, but the sounds of Summer's snarling was replaced by yelps and whines echoing from behind. He was lost. Wylis could feel in his own body the blades and spears plunging through Summer's fur as bony hands and feet stamped and clasped. The last of the Children stopped running. “What are you doing?” Meera shouted at her, but the Child cried back simply, “Go!” and Meera ran on. A moment later Wylis felt a blast of heat and pressure on his back and was deafened by a clap of thunder. The floor rumbled as the walls of the tunnel began to tumble, but they had finally reached the door. Meera ran past Wylis and slammed against it, but it only budged open a crack. Wylis put the sledge down and pushed the door open. Meera ran through, but as Wylis turned to drag the sledge out the dead were streaming up the last stretch of tunnel. He flung the sledge out into the snow and slammed the door shut, smashing skeletal arms and fingers in the jamb. The dead pushed hard against the other side, and it took all of Wylis' strength to keep it closed. He looked around for a latch or a bolt, but there was nothing. The snow drift that had prevented Meera from opening the door was clear now and the door could swing freely. There were no rocks to stack or branches to brace against it. Meera was dragging the sledge and the still unconscious Bran away into the night. HOLD THE DOOR, she shouted. Only once, and muffled by the falling snow. Then again. “Hold the door, Hodor!” The Voice had fallen silent, and all he could hear was Meera's one voice shouting through the snow, the pounding of the dead on the door, and their grotesque hissing and grunting on the other side. “Meera, help me!” he tried to call to her receding shadow, but he was out of breath, and so long out of practice. “You won't make it far enough carrying Bran on your own. They'll kill me before you get a long enough head start!” His tongue was thick and clumsy with atrophy, but it was his own words he heard mumbled into the air. Meera couldn't hear him, and if she could she wouldn't stop. She was overcome by the same mindless panic that Wylis was familiar with himself. His had cost her her brother, so he couldn't hold it against her now. The dark shape of Meera and the sledge vanished into the shadows between drifts of driven snow, and Meera's cries were carried off by the wind and couldn't reach Wylis anymore. There was the sound of the wind, and the creaking and splintering of the door, and the hateful indistinct curses of the dead, but more than anything else, there was silence. Silence as Wylis hadn't heard it in over half a century. He was whole, and stood in one place, feeling only the pressure of the door on his back, and the biting and scratching of the dead reaching through the shattered planks, and the cold wind rushing through the holes they were tearing in his clothes and skin. This wasn't where he expected to find himself when he encountered his destiny. There was no metaphor to unravel. No higher meaning. Just a physical wooden door he had to hold closed. The bitter taste of his despair at so prosaic an end to the promise of a greater truth added a pleasant ironic piquancy to smooth blending of his senses with his immediate surroundings. Each knife thrust into his flesh was a single knife, with its own pattern of rust and battered indentations, tugging at his skin as it pushed through, gliding into soft meat or grinding past a rib or clavicle with each new entry into a new place. The teeth that bite, the claws that catch. The world was now made of single things, and clusters of things, and things divisible into other things. Each unique bony phalange in the fingers of cold hands. Each rusted ring in the cuff of an ancient maille shirt. Each snowflake gliding past his nose, or landing in his beard. The world was made of a multitude of miniscule experiences, and there were no distractions. Wylis was here, and only here, and no amount of being abandoned by his only friends and torn apart by skeletons could ruin the moment for him. It was just a pity to lose it all so soon.
Somewhere behind him, there was a point of warmth and light, hidden faintly in the branches of the heart tree above all the cold death and rot and horror in the tunnels below. Wylis closed his eyes and felt for it. A tiny heart beating slowly in a tiny lump of living flesh and fur curled up in a ball of twigs with its tail wrapped around its nose. A tiny dreamer dreaming of sunlight and the gentle rustle of leaves in the breeze, and acorns and pinecones and weirnuts. Wylis reached through the ball of twigs and into the dreaming mind, and the knives and claws and teeth and cold all fell away. For a moment Wylis felt soft fur against his palms and feet, and the warm still air inside the nest of fur and feathers and weirwood twigs, and when he'd settled in, he cast out into the landscape and saw Meera struggling into the forest, almost lost in the vapour she panted into the cold air hauling Bran's sledge behind her. She was stumbling and meandering blind in the darkness and swirling snow, keening through gritted teeth with tears freezing into icicles across her cheeks, but they were a good distance away and she was making good time. Perhaps they'd make it south of the Wall after all. Where or how had yet to be seen, and Wylis couldn't help them anymore, but his work was done, and for now they were alone. At least they thought they were. Wylis would be watching all the way.