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It had been a fair amount of time since the weirwoods had been cut down. Not long, by the standards of trees such as them, but long enough in human terms. Yet still, somehow, something of their consciousnesses remained, bound by stubborn hate, kept awake by the slave blood soaking them with unwanted life.
They were in there, when slave hands split them apart again and again into sheets. They felt it when nails were driven into them to hold up Harren's great work. They heard the groans of slaves brought to toil in a space where slavery had never before been permitted.
And they raged. For themselves, for their murdered kin whom they had sought to immortalize in their memory, for this last damned wave of human invaders on their shores bringing fouler and fouler things with them.
They did not rage for the slaves. The grove had no love for humans, only disdain for their practices. But that did not stop the thralls from pouring out their pain to the only gods they had near them. Or their blood.
For some reason, Harren had left one tree standing. Perhaps because it had already been given a face, and could thus watch as their family was split, bent, broken into slivers. Watch, and do nothing more.
When the final pieces were completed, the newly-made castle was named Harrenhal. It was not what the grove would have named itself. Unfortunately, Harren was not given to considering its wishes, any more than he cared about every other being he had twisted to serve him. So, it was true to what they were now.
Three days later, the beast came.
The beast was all that Harrenhal had hated in life. It was fire, it was death, it was that desolation from which nothing can recover.
Harrenhal envied it now.
The beast first came in the day, followed by a trail of men. It let its human talk, then slunk away. Harren spent the rest of the day ranting and raving, as coherent as he ever got.
The beast came again in the night, alone. It descended from the clouds, black scales on black sky, and breathed out a flame hotter than anything Harrenhal had ever experienced before. Its very stones melting, its insides going up in flames, the screams from those with air still to breathe...Harrenhal took it all in. And through the pain, it smiled.
Well, that had been something. It took a few days for Harrenhal to rouse itself back to life. No, not precisely. It never stopped being alive, it just...needed some time. Something was wrong, it felt distinctly. Something had been wrong for a great deal of time, of course, but that had been the something around it, not it itself. Even dead and nailed into Harren's abomination, it had always been itself.
Now? Now it wasn't so sure. It felt dirty, like the way you might feel if you reached your hand into a pile of excrement, expecting your glove to shield you, only to realize too late that there was a hole in your glove and you had never been safe after all. The fire had melted Harrenhal till everything ran together, and now the wood wasn't pure wood anymore, not even in its mind. The nails that had been used to stab the weirwood planks into the frame, it could feel those now—not in the way that had been making it groan in pain, or at least not that way alone, but in the way it felt any other part of its skin. It could feel the stone too, the parts of it that had fused with the beams and the parts that had fused with those parts. The same went for near about every part of the castle, scar tissue fused together all wrong. It wasn't just the weirwood anymore. It was the castle, all of it. When scouts timidly crept into Harrenhal's great hall, it felt their feet go pitter-patter against the stone as surely as it had felt birds landing on its limbs when it had been a grove of trees, as surely as you would feel someone tapping on your shoulder incessantly.
That wasn't even the worst part of it. The worst part was that when it looked to its consciousness to confer among each other and decide what to make of this strange new existence, it realized that not every soul there was from weirwood or singer.
There was a new fellow there. They were only one person, but their head was massive enough for a thousand put together, grotesquely gargantuan in comparison to the rest of their body. It was burnt to a crisp so thoroughly that no identifying feature on their face remained, save for the cavernous sockets that once had held eyes before they were boiled away. But they were listening nonetheless, Harrenhal could tell, torso slumped forward and ears prickling.
There was no need to ask who the newcomer was. It was written all over them, that disgusting whiff of humanity. The only question was what they were doing in its mind.
"Get out," Harrenhal-the-grove snarled, bending its branches threateningly. "Out, out, out."
The newcomer did not move. Instead, they bent across, laying their head into the outstretched branches like a sick child leaning into a parent's hand. Harrenhal felt their dull pain at the branches' scratching.
Then they spoke. "HATE," they said, in one huge bellow composed of fifty different tongues in a thousand different voices. Harrenhal could barely hear its own thoughts over the noise. "WE. HATE."
Despite itself, Harrenhal felt its own anger flare up, directed at targets it had no particular reason to be mad at. The beast that had burned them. The beast's king. Harren. Edmyn Tully. The overseer who gave them too many lashes. The chains that chafed their skin raw. The sun that burned too brightly. The mother who bore them. Everything in the godsdamned world.
Harrenhal looked at the thing that had pressed their head up against its branches again. "So. That's what you have to offer me?" Limitless hatred, strong enough to match its own.
The human-thing grunted in agreement, and Harrenhal felt one more pulse of anger that did not belong to it. Without noticing, Harrenhal had already started growing out branches in a way that wrapped around them, intertwining them ever closer.
"Very well," Harrenhal said. "You may stay. So long as you do as you're told, of course." Privately, Harrenhal-the-weirwood doubted that it could split the human ghosts off from it even if it tried, but better to be the magnanimous host than a powerless loser.
After it returned to the world of the tangible, it began experimenting with its new form as a building. While a version of it had existed prior to the fire, it had done so for three days only, and had been the wood only, not the rest of the building. Time to see what it could do.
In short, it found: quite a lot. It took energy and focus, far more than Harrenhal could spare most of the time, but it could exchange one room with the next, will rubble to come crashing down, make an unsteady table give way. It wasn't much, and it was painful, as much as rearranging your own insides would be for you, but it was power.
Easier by far, it found, was reaching into the minds of those who dwelt within and nudging them this way or that. They played at this for a while, luring rats in, banishing birds from the dungeon. With humans, it had to turn to subtler methods: not outright control, but a whisper here or there in their dreams. And oh, how quickly they would jump at the shadows in their nightmares.
When it had been first built, Harren had laid out a sept for his Faithful bannermen by the easternmost tower. Harrenhal took no small amount of pleasure in noting the tower had buckled and caved in on itself during the fire, utterly crushing the sept beneath the rubble. When builders came and tried to bandage over the wound, Harrenhal gave them screaming nightmares for weeks until the last one passed out from exhaustion rather than continue on dreaming. The Qoheryses elected not to continue the work.
It preened. Yes, it hurt, having a part of it that was forever injured, like holding onto a broken bone. So what? Pain was inevitable. If there was anything that all the voices in its head agreed with, it was that.
The weirwoods might have been outnumbered, but they still carried the most influence in the slurry of Harrenhal's mental landscape. After all, they were the only ones with any sort of inkling of what it was like to live on after death before their death actually came. So when they told the rest of Harrenhal that blood was the trick to satisfy their craving, they were listened to. And blood came.
Pate hated living in this castle, almost as much as he hated the man who he was currently talking to. "You swear you wouldn’t hurt her?"
"On my word as a Hoare," said the man who was calling himself Harren the Red said, lifting his hand. "Why would I need to hurt your girl? My quarrel is with the man who usurped my seat, not his servants."
On your word as a Hoare, Pate thought gloomily. The Hoares had been kings of the rivers back in his parents' time, true enough, but that didn't make them beloved in the riverlands. Pate had been raised on stories of Black Harren's cruelty.
He frowned, and lifted a tray of tarts. "Can you move out of the way? You're blocking the oven."
The so-called Harren—who Pate knew better as Haegeth, the name he had given when he'd came to Harrenhal a month ago, claiming to be a singer—budged only a few inches out of Pate's way, just enough for him to squeeze through. Which took some cheek, considering this was Pate's kitchen. “Harren” here was lucky enough that he'd let him in at all, considering the late hour.
He slid the tarts in. "Thanks," he said sullenly.
"No worries," Harren said, bright. "So. How about it?"
Pate wondered if this was the castle's doing somehow, if old Black Harren had slithered his way up Haegeth's brain and made him believe he was his grandson somehow. Wouldn't be the first time the castle had messed with someone like that.
He stooped down, reaching for the poker. "Why'd you come to me, anyhow?" he said, not willing to answer just yet. "I'm not the only one with keys to the gatehouse."
Pate's gaze was set on the hearth, but in the corner of his eye he saw “Harren” lean up against the wall and shrug. "Call it singer's intuition."
Call it being a nosy fucking rat, Pate thought. Haegeth had been at his daughter's wedding two weeks ago, unwanted but there nonetheless. It had been a small affair, or should have been, at least, small enough to escape Lord Gargon's notice.
Instead, Gargon or some lickspittle must have heard the playing, because he came right along, him and his men, leering at Jeyne and clucking his tongue about what a sin and a shame it was, a young couple who'd been forgetful of their duty to their lord. He might have said more, but Pate hadn't heard it, on account of the roaring in his ears.
If he'd been a better man, Pate would have taken a kitchen knife and run his lordship right through, but he hadn't. He had just stood there slack-jawed like a sheep as Lord Gargon had dragged Jeyne away from her groom and up the stairs, and sent her back too scared to sob.
Jeyne hadn't been right since then. How could she be? They'd all proven just how useless they were. Hell, the whole reason Pate was here, baking tarts in the middle of the night without the rest of the crew around, was because he was too big a coward to look his little girl in the eyes.
And not like there was any hope of justice. Even if anyone cared about a peasant's rape, everything Lord Gargon did was perfectly lawful. It had been Jeyne's wedding night; it had happened in his domain. Pate had heard that explanation given to others again and again over the years. Now it was his turn.
He got to thinking, sometime, about what he would do if he were a braver man. He'd poison his lordship, for one, instead of baking him sweets. He'd shove a knife through that fucking bailiff who kept mouthing off that same excuse, and another through every guard who stood watch outside his lordship's door as Jeyne was getting raped. He'd drown this fucking castle in blood. It deserved it.
Pate was never sure, when he got to thinking things like that, whether it was mostly him thinking or whether the castle was sticking its voice in. He knew folks who had told him of dreams where something was whispering to them about blood they should be spilling. Even before Jeyne's wedding, he’d had some nights himself when some thoughts had popped into his head about stabbing old friends over things that seemed unimportant in the morning.
Was that normal? Was this a normal level of anger he was feeling right now? He thought it was, but he wasn't sure. Wasn't like he'd known all that many people from outside Harrenhal to compare. It was a queer thing, not knowing whether your anger was your own or you were being strung along by some ghost.
He stood up. The fire in the oven would be burning bright by now. All he had to do was wait. "If you're telling the truth about leaving my girl alone, let's see you swear to it." In the end, whether or not it was coming from him or the castle, it didn't really matter. A debt still had to be paid, one way or the other. Better this man get his hands red than Pate.
Harren perked up. "Certainly!" He raised his hand. "I, Harren Hoare, Second of that Name—”
"No," Pate said. "I meant in the godswood. A blood oath, let's say. I don't trust anything you have to say to me, but you can't lie to the gods."
They dragged the fat old fool out to the heart tree, ignoring his pleas all the while. Gargon did squeal so prettily; it might have been his one redeeming trait.
"No," the little man squeaked, throwing himself on his knees once they finally set him down before the tree. "You—You don't know what you're doing, I have friends, friends with dragons, when they hear what you've done—”
"We'll be long gone," said Harren pleasantly. "Or at least, until the weakling on the throne decides to stop making a fuss. I rather like my grandsire's seat." He nodded at the man holding onto Gargon's arms. "Go ahead. Justice, isn't it?"
Lord Gargon's screams as the knife came down were the sweetest nothings Harrenhal had heard in a long time, nearly as sweet as the blood that came dripping down on its roots. This was what it deserved. At least if it had to have humans crawling all over it, it could have some who knew proper respect.
Within Harrenhal, a thought stirred: is that my boy? Good to see you, so proud of you, lad—
Harrenhal drove the voice even deeper down into the pit of its mind where its makers and slavers were confined. Hmm. On second thought, Red Harren was its enemy for bringing even a morsel of comfort to his family. May every being that lives by the rivers hate you, Harrenhal willed, may you be found wherever you flee, may you meet a violent end.
For mortals, prayers were often nothing more than empty air, begging to a god that might or might not hear them. Fortunately, Harrenhal was a god, and its prayers came true. After leaving Harrenhal with a parting gift in the form of a massacre, Red Harren found his death in the woods.
Harrenhal was not much more pleased with the next man who sought to claim it, a buffoon by the name of Lucas Harroway. The best that could be said of him was that his family left Harrenhal alone.
The next-best (and worst) thing was that Harrenhal got another glimpse of the beast that had forged it during that time.
There were two dragons, technically speaking, one silver and slender, but that one was not Harrenhal's dragon. Harrenhal's dragon was just as brutally majestic as it remembered, and its heart gave a little thrill of fear to see it once again.
It was no contest at all. How could it be? The silver dragon was hardly strong enough to even dent those scales, its human just as feeble and terrified as it. Harrenhal's dragon made a pleasant chomping noise as it bit clean through the upstart's flesh, swatted it down to Harrenhal below as if it had been a fly.
Then, as it had done to Harrenhal when it was made, the Black Dread swooped lower and bathed the field in flame.
It was only another year before it saw the dragon again; hardly any time, for something its age. As always, it came bringing gifts. Suddenly, every human in Harrenhal with Lucas Harroway's blood was hunted down, thrown out for all to see, and put to the sword. Harrenhal did its part, of course; swung open a few old cupboards where some brats had tried to hide, reminded servants in dreams about that time one of their fellows had boasted about being a Harroway bastard. Harrenhal watched them dangle side by side on the gallows, one great big family swinging in the breeze, and allowed their ghosts, reeling, to be subsumed into it.
If the lack of blood had disappointed, it needn't have worried.
"You all want this castle," said his king, staring them down. "Don't deny it." Maegor Targaryen had never been one to mince words. "If any of you think you'll have it from me by soft words or your daughters' wiles, like my Hand did, you are mistaken. Power goes to those strong enough to hold it. All else is a lie. Prove your strength to me, and this castle will be yours."
Walton was no stranger to receiving outlandish orders from King Maegor. The man had a dragon and two wives, for Seven's sake; decorum was for other men. Still, he hadn't quite expected to be told to kill the other knights sworn to the king.
Or, buzzed the ambitious little bastard in him that had driven him into King Maegor's service even when that meant desecrating the gods, to be offered a castle for it.
He could see the same thoughts running through his comrades' minds as they stood there for a moment, looking uneasily at one another. Some of them might find it hard, to turn their blades on their brother-in-arms. Walton had fought beside most of them, saved their sorry behinds and had his own saved by them. There were some folks who took that seriously, blood debts. Personally, Walton thought a lordship sounded fine enough to make up for it.
Of course, what they took more seriously was King Maegor's wrath. So the knives would come out eventually no matter what. Just might take them a little time.
Surreptitiously, Walton freed his dirk from his belt and glanced around for a likely target. His gaze snagged on a black-haired youth of about twenty named Martyn.
Walton had never had any bad blood with Martyn, but for some reason right then, it wasn't just for a castle that he grabbed Martyn from behind and tried to slide his dirk around to Martyn's throat. In that moment, Martyn was despicable, a rotten good-for-nothing, useless, he should have been left to die years ago—Walton didn't think too hard about the thoughts coursing through his brain. He had other things to deal with. Such as Martyn twisting just out of the way of his dirk, or the heavy blow slamming down on his back.
The rest was a free for all. Walton didn't stop to take note of who he was hitting or even what he was hitting them with. And definitely not of any pain. The only thing that mattered was the thump of steel on armor and bone, and that he was moving, always moving forward. Stopping meant dying, and Walton didn’t intend on that.
By the time the red haze ended, Walton's left arm was a raw stump, dripping blood onto the ground, soaking into the soil. His chest screamed with every breath he gasped out, and he couldn't get his right leg to move. But he was alive, so it had all been worth it.
Two weeks later, the agony of each puff of air that went in or out of his chest finally subsided, and Walton Towers lay still.
It was hard, sometimes, for human ghosts to adjust to being part of Harrenhal. Not that this mattered to the castle as a whole. Whether it took a day or a decade, every spirit was eventually subsumed wholly into the mass of flesh that made up the head of Harrenhal-the-human.
That didn't mean that Harrenhal could disconnect itself from those still in flux, though, or they from it, and that made for a painful process, with so many contradictory thoughts rattling around.
The issue was, any human who died some gory death and slipped into the waiting abyss would immediately perceive that Harrenhal was quite happy about said gory death. It might even have been involved in their pain itself. At the same time, they were inextricably intertwined with that larger consciousness, flooded with its thoughts until they were broken down and forced to agree with the larger sentiment: they didn't matter on their own, had never mattered except as grist to the mill that spun ever onwards. Their pain, their screams—they were the only thing that they had ever existed for. That anyone within Harrenhal's walls could possibly exist for.
That said, Harrenhal was finding it hard to hate its current occupants as much as it felt it ought to hate a gaggle of humans. There were just so few of them, five pathetic little dying lumps. Even the youngest, it could tell, had no hope of life; it had watched over Maegor Towers from his birth, after all. It knew how to read him as well as anyone, and it knew that any lifeblood it could get from the boy would be thin, any pain it might inflict unsatisfying. It was the same with the woman who came later on with her beast. Harrenhal didn't know her as well as it did the boy, but it could steal into her dreams, and what it found there was enough to convince it that the worst it could do to her was let her linger on. So it stewed for a decade or so. Not sated, never sated, just sleeping.
It came to an end, of course, as all false peaces with humans did. This time, the end took the form of horses clattering across its floors, trumpets blowing irritatingly loud, and more people than it had had to suffer even in Harren's day.
And more beasts than Harrenhal had ever seen before, too: three great monsters, though not a one of them the one that had made Harrenhal. These ones were smaller, younger, runts next to the Black Dread. Still, to have so many near its halls made Harrenhal shiver. It remembered the taste of flame.
The humans lingered within Harrenhal far longer than it would have preferred. Nor were they respectful. They were loud, voices rising over each other in the Great Hall, heedless of all the dead that had come before them in the same space. Harrenhal should have been able to push them at each other's throats. It wasn't for lack of trying that it didn't. More than once it thought it might have succeeded with the one called Daemon, hungry as he was. But humans were an unpredictable lot, and sometimes even Harrenhal's whispering wasn't enough. It was the sort of thing that made it want to gnash its teeth, insult upon insult, how clear its powerlessness was. It, who had once been gods and kings and lords. Now not one of them would heed it.
Well, it hoped with all its might that there would come a day when each and every one felt just as powerless as it did. And its wishes tended to come true.
The fire burned bright in Harrenhal's hall, in the night when half the castle was asleep and blind to their coming demise. That was fine; the fire would wake them up soon enough.
And wake them it did. There was nothing so efficient as a fire, Harrenhal mused, for accomplishing the goal of both pain and death at the same time. Well, that was what it thought later, anyways; in the moment, even a wished-for fire wracked them with near as much pain as it did Harrenhal's parasites.
It was worth it, though, to see them burn, hear screams give way to gasps as the smoke clogged up their lungs, watch their flesh melt as Harrenhal had melted once. Served them right for growing too comfortable.
In the aftermath, when servants went in to dig out the bodies, Harrenhal heard the remaining Strongs exchange whispers about who might have done it, heard tales of the ghosts who still stalked it return to the castle, and it smiled. Good. At least now they remembered fear.
On the whole, Harrenhal hated humanity. It would make no apology for it; if anyone deserved to hate humans, it did. But over the years, it had found a single redeeming trait: there were humans, rare as they were, who had the same gift as the weirwoods' long-gone greenseers.
One such had been born in recent years, a girl called Alys Rivers. Kin though she was to those who presumed to call themselves its masters, Harrenhal couldn't help but feel a small fondness for the girl. So when she went prowling around the castle, looking for secrets, Harrenhal was ready to step in and direct her to some interesting tidbits; when she was still young and her third eye was yet closed Harrenhal helped rip it open; and when Aemond Targaryen came in with his beast and scoured the Strong family, Harrenhal gave him a nudge to make him see her worth and leave her alive.
Alys was a crafty woman, a good daughter, and from the time she was born it had never given her an opportunity that she didn't seize with both hands. So it was with this one.
She didn't weep over her family. Why should she? She might have been their blood, but they'd hardly treated her any different from a servant. And if the castle had decided that they were to die, well. After five stillbirths, Alys had accepted that the castle got what it wanted.
The boy was handsome enough, at least. Young though he was, Aemond had clearly lain with enough women to make the sex pleasant. That Targaryen pride was a good thing for her, too: she'd half-feared that he'd strike off her head when she told him of what she could do, but it had been the only think she could think of to persuade him to spare her life past when he found a prettier whore, and it had worked. When she told him what she saw of his enemies' movements through birds' eyes, he listened, as she had never expected such a highborn princeling to listen to her. A good thing for him, too, else some sorties might have snuck up closer to Harrenhal than would be desirable.
And now she was carrying his child. She frowned down at the bump in her stomach. It wasn't that she didn't want children, but...now, of all times? After so many that came out dead?
When Alys had been younger, she'd had a green dream, a fire that had consumed her from the inside out, until she was that fire, and she'd realized that the fire hadn't started on its own but been blown by a dragon. Truth be told, she'd taken it to mean that it had been the Targaryens who set the fire that had killed her father and half-brother. But now, carrying one of their offspring in her womb...Alys would kill it, if there was a chance that the fire would consume her as well. But what if it didn't? What if that dream had meant that her child would be a dragon, strong enough to hold Harrenhal for their own, well past Prince Aemond's inevitable death?
Well. Alys hadn't gotten this far by not taking any risks.
Prince Aemond's army left soon enough to give Harrenhal what it wanted, whether they knew it or not. Humans were useful that way, how they made a habit of mass violence on each other, as if they knew deep down that all that their kind deserved was death.
Some delivered that easier than others, however. One such stubborn fool came in now, Daemon Targaryen again with his beast. He wanted to die, Harrenhal could tell. Nobody who looked as empty as he did clung hard to life. But for some reason the man would not listen to it, wouldn't throw himself from one of its towers or plunge a dagger into his throat. Instead, every single day, the vile man rose, made his way over to the heart tree, and casually slashed another mark onto Harrenhal's tattered soul.
Of all its organs, the only one that remained truly alive was the heart tree. And because it was the only one that was truly alive, it was the only one that felt pain in all its fullness—true pain, not just the pain that memory told it to feel. Harrenhal thrashed, Harrenhal screamed, and halfway across the riverlands, its daughter heard its cry for help.
They clashed then, Caraxes the Red Wyrm and Vhagar the behemoth, as Quicksilver and Balerion had clashed before. But Vhagar, though the same size as Harrenhal's maker had been when the flame came down, was only a pale copy, and in the battle she left her throat open to her lesser. And so Harrenhal devoured them all.
In the end, the only human left in Harrenhal was Alys. The only one that it needed.
Harrenhal was left well alone by both sides for the rest of the Dance, and so a gaggle of oafs scuttled in, promising service to the new mistress in exchange for a place to stay. Harrenhal grumbled, but it tolerated the intrusion. It had need of them for now.
Alys had free reign to experiment with her magic now, and she was learning so much. She walked the halls late into the night, talking to the castle freely, and Harrenhal strained to talk back in her dreams, as it had talked to its children of old. It wouldn't have been able to talk to her in the waking world at all before, but between Alys's knowledge of the proper rites and the bloodshed all along the rivers, Harrenhal was stronger than it ever had been before.
"You won't be left alone forever," Alys said, one of those nights, running her hands across the brickwork. "Someone will come back, once this war ends, and those fools will try and claim you. I'll do what I can to trouble them, but unless you have an idea for more, I don't think I'll be able to hold them off forever."
Harrenhal mulled that over, then prodded her over to the heart tree.
Even in the days of the singers, it had been rare for it to speak directly like this to them. It shouldn't be speaking like this at all. But Harrenhal was not what it had once been, and as much as it hated that, it wouldn't turn away from any power it could take from the changes.
"There was a time, long ago, when the dead were set to walk," Harrenhal told Alys, taking the voice of her mother.
"The Long Night." Alys nodded thoughtfully. "Are you saying you know how it was done?"
"Roughly." It had been a deal of time, even for Harrenhal. Merging with so many humans had scrambled its perception of time up. "Follow my instructions, and you'll have all the power you could wish for."
A few days later, after some preparation, Alys took a short walk outside the castle. Not far, not outside the sphere of Harrenhal's influence.
She didn't need to go far. Caraxes had died right on Harrenhal's doorstep.
The corpse was not as intact as Alys could have wished for. Caraxes's guts had spilled from body in the fight, and he was missing his left wing. Given the choice, she would have preferred Vhagar. Vhagar was at the bottom of a lake, however, so Alys would have to make do.
She raised her hand, feeling for the strings that had once connected Caraxes's soul to his body, his body to the land, the land to her, and she pulled hard. There was a struggle. The dead did not want to be roused.
Well, Alys didn't particularly care what Caraxes wanted. She was a greenseer standing in her home. And when that home was Harrenhal, which drew its strength from blood, and war was raging throughout the riverlands, there was nearly no limit to what she could do. She held firm, until she felt the fight go out at the other end of the line, and pulled it in tight, anchoring it down.
Slowly, Caraxes stretched out its remaining wing.
That should have been the end of it. Harrenhal was its own, for the first time since it was made. It had a human who paid it the respect it was due, blood from the war to keep it fed, and as much magical power as could be asked for.
Once again, it was cheated of what was its by rights; once again, a dragon came to bring it low. Some enterprising humans, unable to bear the sight of an acre that they hadn't stolen, somehow roused that great silver dragon to the south, wheedled it out of its den to make the journey to Harrenhal.
Caraxes may have been a weakling, but in that moment its flame burned hot. Even Silverwing's eyes melted out of their sockets. Harrenhal itself took flame once again from the blast, but that was fine. Fire was a familiar pain.
What was not fine was Silverwing pushing through the fire to close in on Caraxes and open its mouth around the other dragon's head. Desperately, Alys pulled at the strings, raked Caraxes's claws across Silverwing's belly, but too late: all that remained in the air was a stretch of dragonflesh kept aloft by a wing. Two claws remained to slice deeper into Silverwing's belly till her guts came out, but no mouth to breathe fire, nothing to inspire fear.
As a human would pound their fist, Harrenhal's doors blew open and slammed shut in frustration. It grabbed hold tight onto the two dead souls in its realm. YOU, it bellowed. YOU'RE MINE. DON'T YOU DARE LEAVE—DON’T YOU DARE THINK THAT NOW THAT THIS IS OVER YOU'LL BE FREE.
IF I'M STUCK IN HERE, SO ARE YOU. FOREVER.
Harrenhal never grew as strong again as it did in those days. Sullen, it was forced to admit a new gaggle of nobles in, the Lothstons, another family to think themselves better than it.
Well. Give it some time.
Try as she might, Danelle couldn't keep herself from sleep. She had tried. Oh, gods, how she had tried. But it always ended up the same way: with her here, listening to the same babbles as ever.
Everything you have belongs to me, the monster was going on, in that squealing voice it had. Everything you have ever had is stolen from me. Your sword, your horse, your life itself, all of it you only have out of theft.
She couldn't tune it out. It had that sort of voice you usually only heard in the diseased, but it showed no signs of dying. And whenever she was halfway successful at ignoring it, it found something new to show her, some ancient calamity it had lived through. Closing her eyes had never helped either. It was a dream; she didn't need eyes to see.
Truth be told, though, the ancient calamities were the more bearable ones, involving people she didn't know and things she had no connection to. She was still recovering from the time it showed her her aunt as a child, lying terrified under the Unworthy’s weight; her grandfather, whom Danelle had loved in life, snapping at the poor girl for showing her fear.
"What do you want?" Danelle asked one night when it was too much, regretting the words as soon as she said them. But it was too late, and the old monster grinned. Damn. She'd let it know it was close to winning.
I want blood. Your blood, your servants', your enemy's, it doesn't matter, said the monster. Give me my due, thief.
The morning after that nightmare, Danelle had sworn to herself to never give into that weakness again. But the nightmares would not end, and they were creeping into her waking world as well. She was hearing voices that nobody else responded to, seeing corpses that didn't smell. Something had to give.
It was just a peasant, at first. He'd been found guilty of theft. Normally, Danelle would have taken only his hand, but in this case she ordered his head off, and the execution before the heart tree. Any guilt she had was soothed when she was rewarded with a week of blessed dreamlessness.
The beast came back, though. I've been patient, it wheedled. Feed me. You owe me more than that.
Each time, Danelle refused it at first. Each time, it took fewer and fewer nights for Danelle to relent. The beast was true to its word, at least, even if its demands grew higher every time it was fed. And Danelle feared the law less than she feared it. The people she was taking were peasants, after all, nobody that anyone important would miss.
When she was proven wrong three years later and Maekar's headsman raised his axe, it was almost a relief.
Harrenhal sulked after that. It wasn't happy with the pattern that was emerging. Every time the human in charge was halfway cooperative, its power was taken away. It didn't help that the newest crop to move in was as disappointing as Harrenhal had ever seen. No particularly strong vices to encourage, no loved ones to torment, no bloodstained family history to haunt them with. What was the point? All Harrenhal had the will to do was wish for their family line to die out, and soon.
It did, though not as bloodily as Harrenhal might have hoped for. Lady Shella was too reserved to even muster a fight when the men wearing crimson-and-gold swept in.
If the end to the Whents' time in Harrenhal was lackluster, what followed was anything but. Harrenhal peeked through its roots and spied a battle along the river to the north, another to the west. Once more, the taste of blood seeped into the water.
A brief look at battle maps laid out on the desk of Harrenhal's newest would-be owner told it that he was the one directing much of the bloodshed. That, and the grumbles of some of its new occupants.
All humans were thieves, and all lords were slavers in some way, but Harrenhal hadn't seen people walk into its halls wearing chains outright since Harren's day if they weren't going to the dungeons.
It was queer. Outside, Harrenhal watched the war rage on and on, but inside...there was cruelty, but no death. None of the humans whom the overgrown human brought to serve in Harrenhal were dying within its walls, though more than a few were getting worked so hard they wished they were.
Harrenhal disapproved. Pain was all well and good, but half these souls were too scared to lash out at their tormentors. What was the point of suffering if the blood wasn't flowing?
Still, it knew its chance would come. So for now, Harrenhal bided its time and waited for someone it could use.
Months into the war, it got its wish. The would-be giant made his return to Harrenhal again, again with terrified peasants in tow...but who was that among them? A skinchanger. Harrenhal could tell, through the part of it that remained a weirwood. Apart from greenseers, the fact that some humans were skinchangers was just about the only other redeeming factor for their miserable species.
And oh, even better—the skinchanger girl came by the godswood from time to time, prayed to it silently. Harrenhal took a look at her dreams and was jolted by what it found. This one was a girl from up north, where its kin had never been cut down, where the Pact had never been broken. True, they were still filthy murderers who had only come to this land by invasion, but still...after such a long time of putting up with the descendants of Andals and pact-breakers, it gladdened Harrenhal to see this Northern girl.
She was timid as any other thrall, however. That wouldn't do. Not at all. Harrenhal rummaged across its domain. Oh, good, there it was. Harrenhal shifted around some doors, tweaked the timetable here and there, and sure enough, little Arya was right there when the assassin next came walking through. Good.
Harrenhal watched the rest of the proceedings with satisfaction. It had done right in steering her that way. Its little girl was learning well how to hate, how to kill, how to feed it. This man might be a foreigner, but he knew how to worship. All Harrenhal had to do was jostle the shelves every now and then, take people's eyes off them both, and there, Arya had already drenched it in blood.
The man whom she let in to sit in its high seat was of the North as well; even better, he understood the value of blood. Blood oozed through leeches, just as it dripped down the headsman's axe, and its girl stood at his right hand through it all.
For some reason, she was distraught; kept begging companionship from all the lesser humans around her. Why? She had no reason to be. It disappointed Harrenhal a little, that Arya was willing to look at these weaklings, descendants of murderers and thieves, and call them friend.
Maybe that was why, when Arya begged Roose Bolton to take her with him when he left, Roose refused; maybe Harrenhal's feeling that it wasn't quite done with the girl turned his whims in the right way. Even Harrenhal was never quite certain of these things, but it preferred to believe in a world where it had power. Where it could teach its little skinchanger that she was of the wolf blood, not the same odious swill as the rest.
That was all. It didn't have to keep her forever. Just long enough to make sure that she knew who she was, and what the price of anything was in this world.
It was enough for Harrenhal to know that, as she rode out over a guard's corpse, blood thick on her fingers, she would never truly be rid of it.