Chapter Text
ASoIaF: He Who Sings the Song of the Earth
Chapter 1. The Lion of Night.
The Lands of Always Winter, 302 AC
Jon
The cold had teeth, and it had been chewing on him for a long time.
He knew that much before he knew where he was, or how long he had been there, or whether “there” was even a place a living man had a word for.
The cold was the first fact of the world, arriving before sight, before memory, and before his name. It sat in his chest like a stone dropped down a well, and every breath he dragged in scraped it a little deeper.
He should have been dead.
That was the second fact, arriving hard on the heels of the first, and it should have frightened him more than it did. A man left bound in a cold like this, a cold that did not feel like weather or simple low temperature, a cold that wanted, should have stopped his breathing hours ago.
He should have stopped feeling anything at all. Jon had died in weather far kinder than this, once, with steel in his belly and back instead of ice at his shoulders, and it had taken far less time than this to still his heart.
But that had been the first time. He was different now, in ways he was still discovering, in ways that came to him only when the world tested them out of him. The cold could gnaw at him all it liked, but it wasn’t as burdensome to him as it was to other people. His current condition terrified him even more. How cold it must have been here for him to feel it?
‘Small mercy.’
‘Small, cruel mercy, to be kept alive for this.’
He tried to move, but he could only move his head.
His wrists were bound above his head and his ankles below, and the bindings were not rope or chain but ice itself, grown around him rather than tied: smooth and cold beyond cold and utterly unyielding, the way nature itself is.
He was not lying flat. He could feel the incline of whatever he was bound to, a steep tilt, so that he hung suspended rather than rested, his weight dragging down against the ice at his wrists with every breath.
Beneath him, where his back and shoulders pressed, the surface was not ice at all.
It was something else. Something black and faintly slick, like touching a thing that had been dipped in oil and left to cure in the dark. It gave slightly under his weight in a way stone never would, and where his bare skin touched it, it did not feel cold so much as wrong.
A wrongness that had nothing to do with temperature and everything to do with some deeper, darker things of the world. His skin wanted to recoil from it the way a man’s hand recoils from a snake or burning fire.
‘An altar.’
He did not know how he knew that the word was the right one, but his own position and the very wrongness of that black stone suggested just that.
He opened his eyes.
For a moment he understood nothing of what he saw, because there was almost nothing to see: only an endless dark, thick and close as wool, pressing down from above like the underside of the world had folded shut over him.
Then his eyes found the light, and understanding arrived, and understanding was so much worse than blindness.
The light was blue. It was not the blue of the sky, the sea, or any blue that a living thing had ever created. The blue was cold, aching, and unnatural, resembling the glow of something that was dying or had never lived at all. It came from two sources, and both of them terrified him in a different way.
The first was the ice itself: towers of it, spires of it, jagged frozen shapes rising up out of the dark around him like the ruins of a city built by something that had never seen a city and had only been told, badly, what one was for.
The ice caught what little light existed and reflected it back, altered to appear bluer and colder, making the shapes seem to glow from within as they emitted a slow, cold radiance.
The second source was worse.The ice held that much of him too, cradling his skull just enough to keep him facing one direction, and he understood, with a lurch of something colder than the ice, that this was not an accident.
The second source was eyes.
They were everywhere. Jon’s head would not turn far.
He was meant to see only what they wanted him to see. And what he saw, stretching out from the foot of the altar into a darkness that swallowed distance whole, was them.
Others. Hundreds of them.
Not wights. He searched for the shambling, wrong-jointed dead among the crowd and found none, and the absence chilled him worse than their presence would have, because it told him this was not a battle, not a raid. This was something else. Something with a purpose too specific for only Ice Daemons to attend.
Rank upon rank of them stood in the dark beyond the altar’s strange light, and every one of them wore the same pair of eyes: that same pale, burning, impossible blue, brighter and colder than the ice towers themselves, as if each one of them were a small dying star set into a face too beautiful to belong to anything that meant him harm.
He had seen them before, and more than once, and it had nearly been the end of him. He had never imagined an army of them. He had never imagined this many eyes fixed on one man, one bound, freezing, half-dead man, with such hunger. He groped for a kinder word than that one and hated himself for finding none.
Their armor shifted as he watched, the way oil shifts on water, colors sliding across the surface in slow, deliberate patterns that seemed to answer some rhythm he could not hear.
And their faces. Gods help them, their faces. He had spent his childhood being told the Others were monsters, and monsters they were, but nothing had prepared him for how the word “monster” and the word “beautiful” could occupy the same crystalline, ageless face at once.
Terrible and beautiful, just like winter itself, it can be terrifying and beautiful at the same time.
And every one of those faces, as far as his caged sight could carry, was turned toward him, alive, or whatever passed for alive in them, with something that looked, unmistakably, like excitement.
‘Ghost.’
He reached for the bond the way a drowning man reaches for air, and for one terrible heartbeat there was nothing there at all, only the ice, only the cold, only the hundreds of watching eyes.
And then, faint as a candle guttering at the bottom of a well, he found it. Found him.
It was wrong. It was so wrong that Jon’s own fear for himself thinned for a moment into something worse, something closer to grief. Ghost’s presence in his mind was there, but it was small, and it was cold in a way Jon had never felt from him, and it was tired. Bone-tired, soul-tired, the kind of tired that comes right before a last breath.
Jon could feel him somewhere close, somewhere in this lightless waste that no living creature should have been able to survive crossing, let alone a direwolf running on four legs and nothing else, and he understood, with a lurch of love and horror both, exactly what had happened.
Ghost had followed him. Into this. Across leagues of ice and dark that would have killed a hundred lesser animals in the first mile, the direwolf had come because Jon had gone, and that had always been reason enough for him.
‘Don’t.’
‘Don’t you dare. Not for me. Not here.’
If Ghost heard him, he gave no sign. The presence only curled tighter, weaker, and closer.
Movement, close at hand, dragged Jon’s attention back to the world of ice and eyes.
A handful of others stood nearer to him than the rest. The Others were close enough that Jon could have measured the distance in strides if his legs had been free to move. Their armor was finer than the others, more ornate, wrought in patterns that put Jon in mind, absurdly, of frost climbing a window in swirls too perfect to be accidental.
He knew them, or knew what they were, from a night he had spent the rest of his life trying not to remember too clearly.
Riders. These were the ones who came astride the enormous pale spiders, the ones whose mounts alone had broken spearlines and burned campfires to embers with the cold radiating off their bodies. He did not see the spiders here. He did not know if that should comfort him.
They spoke among themselves in their own tongue, and it was, he thought, the least human sound he had ever heard pass for language: a crackling, splintering music, like ice cracking on a lake in deep winter, beautiful the way a storm always looks beautiful from a great enough distance. He could make out nothing of it.
Then one of them turned to him.
It moved the way they all moved, that terrible fluid grace that had nothing of hurry in it and needed none, and it came to a halt near enough to the altar that Jon could see, in obscene detail, the way frost crept and retreated across its face like tides on sea.
Its mouth, beautiful and cruel and wrong, curved into a smile.
A mocking smile, unmistakably. Jon had seen that expression on a hundred human faces across his life, on lords and bullies and men who thought themselves clever, and it turned his stomach to see it fit so easily onto something that was not human at all.
When it spoke, it spoke the Common Tongue.
The words came out shaped by that same crackling ice music underneath them, every syllable cold enough to burn, but he understood them, and understanding them was so much worse than the language he could not parse.
“You have lost, Child of Light.”
The voice carried no heat, no anger. Only a vast, glacial certainty, the kind of tone a man might use to state that the sun has set or that winter follows autumn.
“Your resistance was meaningless from its very first breath. Your defeat was written long before you were born. Sealed in ice when the Kingdom of the Dawn fell.”
Jon’s mouth was too dry, his jaw too numb with cold, to answer. He was not sure he would have found words even if it had not been.
‘The Kingdom of the Dawn?’
He did not know the name. He felt, somehow, that he was not meant to. That it had been said to him the way a man might name a distant, dead country to a prisoner who could never hope to see any country again, simply to watch hope break behind his eyes.
Nothing broke. Or if it did, Jon was too cold, too frightened, and too far past the reach of pride to notice the difference.
The Other laughed.
It should have been the worst sound Jon had ever heard, and in some ways it was: a shattering, splintering peal that seemed to come from everywhere in the dark at once, as if the ice towers themselves were laughing with their master.
And yet, monstrous as it was, Jon felt something else move beneath his horror as he listened to it. A strange, unwilling recognition of beauty in it. The same beauty he had felt once standing at the top of the Wall in the dead of winter, watching a killing wind scour the ice into shapes no man could have carved, knowing it could end him in an hour and thinking, despite that, despite everything, how beautiful it was.
This was that same cruelty and wonder, given a voice.
“Do not despair, though.”
There was something almost gentle in the way it said this. In the way frostbite is gentle before the pain arrives.
“You will soon find yourself upon the winning side of this war. You will very soon receive the blessing of the Lion of Night.”
‘Lion of Night.’
Something in Jon recoiled from those words with a violence that had nothing to do with reason. Some old, buried instinct, deeper than thought, the way a man’s hand recoils from fire before he has decided the flame is hot.
He did not know why. He only knew that some part of him, some part that was perhaps not entirely new to this, understood that those words were not meant kindly, whatever gentleness had dressed them in the speaking.
The Other withdrew a step; its part in this was finished.
And behind it, out of the ranks of watching frozen eyes, another came forward to take its place.
This one was dressed unlike any of the others. Where they wore armor that shifted like oil on water, this one wore a robe, if “robe” was even the word for it, woven or grown; Jon could not say which, from what looked like tens of thousands of individual ice crystals. Each crystal was impossibly small and perfect, moving against the body of the other not like cloth but like water, rippling and reforming with every step, throwing the eerie blue light back in a shivering, shimmering cascade that made the figure perfect.
In its hand it held a shard.
Black and long, near two feet by his guess, though it was hard to judge anything in that light, and sharp along one edge.
It looked like ice. It did not behave like ice; it drank the blue light rather than throwing it back, a wrongness Jon’s eye caught before his mind could name it. The same wrongness that lived in the black stone beneath his own back.
The Other approached, unhurried, speaking again in that crackling tongue Jon could not understand.
And this time there was no mockery in the sound of it. No cruelty dressed as gentleness.
This was something else. Something that sounded, gods help him, almost like reverence.
It raised the shard before it, level with Jon’s chest, and did not stop walking.
Jon fought.
He fought with everything that was left in a body that had already spent most of what it had simply surviving the cold. He threw his whole weight against the ice at his wrists, twisted against the incline until his shoulders screamed.
Every motion accomplished exactly nothing.
The ice did not so much as creak. It held him the way the earth holds a mountain: absolutely, unhurriedly, and entirely unconcerned with his opinion on the matter.
The shard went into his chest an inch left to his collarbone, and the world went white.
He heard himself scream before he understood that he was screaming. A sound torn out of him whole, more animal than word; pain so great it seemed to arrive from outside his body rather than within it, as though someone had reached into the center of him and simply twisted it.
But even as the physical agony crested, some deeper and colder part of him understood, with a clarity that terror somehow sharpened rather than dulled, that the pain was not the worst of what had just happened to him.
Something else had come through the wound with the ice.
A presence. Ancient beyond any measure Jon owned words for, vast in a way that had nothing to do with size, pressing into his mind the way floodwater presses into a cracked door: patient, and total, and utterly indifferent to whether the door wanted to hold.
He felt himself dying. He knew the shape of that feeling now, knew it the way a man knows his own hand, because he had died once before, and some memory of it had never quite left him.
But this was not that. This death had a direction to it, a place it meant to carry him, and whatever waited for him at the end of that place was worse. Immeasurably, unspeakably worse than the simple dark he remembered from before.
Worse than forgetting. Worse than nothing.
He did not have a word for what waited. He was grateful, distantly, redly, through the haze of his own agony, that he did not.
And then, in the middle of the dying, something changed.
A presence bloomed in his mind that he knew as well as he knew his own name. Closer now, warmer than it had any right to be in a place like this, fierce and familiar and entirely unwilling to let the ancient thing have what it had come for.
It threw itself against that vast, cold pressure the way a wolf throws itself at a larger foe.
And it did not care that the comparison was hopeless. It came anyway.
Through eyes blurred by pain and tears both, Jon caught a streak of white.
It moved through the ranks of Others like a blade through smoke, and they let it.
That was the strangest part, the part Jon’s dying mind would turn over long after if he lived long enough to turn anything over again. They stood transfixed, caught in whatever rapture their ritual had wrapped them in, hundreds of burning blue eyes fixed on the altar and the shard and the dying man upon it.
Not one of them so much as turned to look at the white shape tearing through their ranks toward him.
Ghost hit the ice-robed Other like a spear thrown by a giant.
Jon felt it more than saw it. The impact. The Other’s shape was torn sideways off the platform in an explosion of shivering crystal light. The shard wrenched half-free of Jon’s chest by the same motion before Ghost’s jaws found it properly and closed.
He felt the drag of teeth against splintered black ice and felt his own ruined flesh scream in protest as Ghost tore the shard free with one violent wrench of his skull, and for one white, screaming moment the pain was almost enough to blot out everything else in the world.
Almost.
Because even through it, Jon felt the ancient presence recoil. Felt it withdraw from his mind the way a hand withdraws from a flame. Not gone. He understood dimly that it was never entirely gone. But it was interrupted and denied whatever door it had been trying to walk through.
Some small, fading, grateful part of him knew that Ghost had just taken something monstrous away from him, at a cost Jon did not yet have the strength left to understand it.
He was still dying.
That much had not changed, and no direwolf, however loyal, however impossible, could tear that back out of him with his teeth.
The wound in his chest was the size of a fist now. Black ice and torn flesh and blood that steamed faintly in the terrible cold before freezing black at its edges. His heart labored under it, torn nearly through, each beat a smaller and more desperate thing than the one before.
He felt his own head slip sideways, the last of the strength that had held it upright finally spent, and he had no will left to fight that small collapse the way he had fought everything else.
The last thing his eyes found, before the world began to close in around its edges, was not the Others. It was not their hundreds of burning eyes, still fixed and unmoving, still lost in whatever rite had just been so violently interrupted.
It was Ghost.
The direwolf lay a few feet from the altar and even in the failing blue light Jon could see what was happening to him.
He was withering.
Withering the way a plant withers when its roots have been cut. Fast, wrong, far too fast for anything natural, as if something unseen were drawing the life out of him in great, greedy pulls.
Paying itself back for what he had just torn away from the ritual, or simply taking what the cold and the distance and the dying man he loved had left him too weak to defend.
Jon tried to reach him. Tried to reach across the bond one last time, the way he had reached for it the moment he woke, and found only the smallest thread of it left, thin as a hair, fraying even as he held it.
‘Ghost.’
There was no answer. There did not need to be one.
The dark came for him gently, in the end, gentler than anything else that night had been. Closing in from the corners of his vision like a curtain drawn slow across a window, dimming the blue light, dimming the ice, dimming even the small white shape lying still upon it.
Until there was nothing left in the whole of the world but one last thought, small and quiet and entirely his own.
‘You saved me once again, my friend.’
Then the dark took him.