"-. 274 AC .-"
That night he dreamed of stone buildings, cobbled streets and a butcher's cart rumbling past him down a familiar river road, five piglets in the back squealing in distress. Dodging from its path, Luwin just avoided being spattered as a townswoman emptied a pail of night soil from a window overhead, only to trip on a stone out of the dream's green glow into red sunlight. Streaks of red burned away the grey and green like a forest fire gorging on moss and fir pines. That was when the world suddenly fell from under him, or perhaps he was the one falling. Falling up into the sky as Oldtown took form around him, emerging ghostlike from the predawn gloom as winter melted into summer and sunbeams pierced the morning mists. Luwin had never seen King's Landing, but he knew it was a daub-and-wattle city, a sprawl of mud streets, thatched roofs, and wooden hovels. Oldtown was built in stone, though, and all its streets were cobbled, down to the meanest alley. The city was never more beautiful than at break of day. Luwin used to watch it from their cell's small window in the early hours, thinking it the grandest view he'd ever seen. It had nothing on the vista below him now, rapidly expanding to all corners of the world the higher he fell away from it. West of the Honeywine, the Guildhalls lined the bank like a row of palaces. Upriver, the domes and towers of the Citadel rose on both sides of the river, connected by stone bridges crowded with halls and houses. Downstream, below the black marble walls and arched windows of the Starry Sept, the manses of the pious clustered like children gathered round the feet of an old dowager.
And beyond, where the Honeywine widened into Whispering Sound, rose the Hightower, its beacon fires bright as wildfire against the dawn. From where it stood atop the bluffs of Battle Island, its shadow cut the city like a sword. Those born and raised in Oldtown could tell the time of day by where that shadow fell. Some claimed a man could see all the way to the Wall from the top. Perhaps that was why the Hightowers had built it so high up from the original fortress, that wide, squat labyrinth built of fused black stone. Or perhaps they just liked to rule their city from the clouds. If that was true, Luwin could well see why. The higher he got, the smaller things became until he was seeing just the sharp tops of white mountains and the grey pinpoints of castles. The land itself seemed to climb up the edges of the sky until they covered the heavens themselves, like the inside of a hollow world surrounding the sun that pulled him forward. And where there wasn't land, there were the seas, stretching out into the distance until even they tapered out into oily black horizons, sometimes smoothly, sometimes broken through by towering black fortresses and grey wastes filled with blight. He could even see the Wall now, and then around it to the forests beyond the closer he got to the red sun high up in the center of the sky, scorching the world below with flames that grew thicker and hotter as he plummeted upward and eastward, eastward, east-
Lightning struck him suddenly. The sky was clear but the bolt still split the heavens apart like the Storm God's own whipcord. A strong gale took him. The red haze around him was suddenly gone and he started falling back towards the ground. A distant roar sounded from the other side of the world as if screamed by an angry dragon. Then there was an eagle's cry, clawed forelimbs snatched him out of the air in a blur of feathers, and he felt himself pulled westward and northward with impossible speed until he was suddenly launched down, plummeting towards a massive keep with square crenellations and sharp towers that stuck out like spears into the sky and which he recognized on sight.
The last thing he saw before he fell below the horizon was the Hightower. The Hightower as it was before the Targaryens, he somehow knew with the certainty of the dream. Before the Targaryens, before the Andals, before even the First Men when it wasn't even called Hightower because it wasn't a tower at all. Oldtown was but scattered shipyards, the Raven's Isle was a pirate den, and the cries of newborn hatchlings reached him from the fortress labyrinth upon which roosted dragons, mighty and full grown.
Luwin came awake to the soul-deep certainty that none of what he'd dreamt had been allegory. Death was waiting for him, sitting across the pool of black water on the bone-white root of a great Heart Tree ancient beyond imagining. But even that vision was washed away under a billow of sea water taller than a hill. Luwin found himself sputtering wetly, face-down against a floor made of planks. They were laid fore and aft over beams and along carlins, their seams caulked and paid with tar. The shadows of three masts covered him, though there was no red sun looking to carry him away anywhere amidst the starry darkness of the sky. Looking up, he saw Death land cautiously on the ship's figurehead. It was a carving shaped like three small, shy, gentle-faced creatures with their hands and feet nailed to the hull, so white he didn't know if it was wood or bone. Then, footsteps came from behind him, stomp by stomp by stomp and Luwin realized the edges of the world were etched in the shape of a familiar trapezohedron.
"Let me be clear." Marwyn stepped in front of him, a sentry with the mane of a lion, his rod alight with pale fire and his whole bulk armored for war. "You will not spy on those I've claimed. You will not enter their dreams uninvited. You will use no workings on them without their consent and my consent. You will suffer these demands or you will suffer me."
Death unravelled until it blended imperceptibly with the night sky and was no longer there.
Luwin awoke in the quarters he shared with his old cellmates. Waited and watched for signs this was still a dream. When he tried to roll out of his body and only rolled out of his bed, he figured this was the waking world proper, finally. He slipped on his robe, put on the slippers the servants had provided, exited with the same amount of noise everyone else made when going to the privy, then headed to Marwyn's guest chambers as fast as he could walk.
He didn't expect Qyburn to be the one opening the door. What was inside he expected even less. There was no glass candle out and burning, no books of ancient lore scattered about, not even a gravelly voice cussing out everyone and their forebears over whatever had offended his sensibilities this time.
Marwyn sat with his back to the far wall, cross-legged on a red velvet cushion lined with gold embroidery. His ring was on his finger, his mask covered his face, and his rod rested perfectly level across his legs. Before him was a long, wooden tray bearing a steaming kettle surrounded by delicate tableware made of white YiTish porcelain painted with fractal patterns. On one side of the kettle was a steel jar filled with white crystals, while on the left was an incense burner. Three long sticks released meandering, wiry wafts of smoke that turned the air fragrant enough as to be pungent. A few breaths were enough to make Luwin feel lightheaded. Not that he noticed. His sight was entirely claimed by the wall itself. Or, rather, what was on it. A large, looming dreamcatcher resembling the web of some great, monstrous spider. Many charms, feathers and other things hung off its myriad treads, every strand so black they seemed to eat the light.
A throat cleared behind him, wrenching Luwin out of his stupor. Turning around, he blanched. "Lord Stark!"
"Acolyte Luwin."
"Yes, Luwin," Marwyn said, voice almost devoid of its usual rasp. "Stop blocking the man's way and come sit."
Luwin quietly went where indicated, at the foot of the tray to Marwyn's right. There was no cushion for him, but he recognized the setting from his studies of diplomacy and history so he decided to kneel rather than sit, directly on the ornate rug. It put him face to face with Qyburn who was kneeling on the Mage's left, keeping his head down and… brewing something?
"The custom would have all of us assume seiza," Marwyn waved at the cushion across from him, purple to his red and just as ornate. "But I know better than to ask a highborn to kneel."
With the ghost of sleep thoroughly banished, Luwin wondered at the set-up. On the surface it seemed like the YiTyish tea ceremony, but whatever Qyburn was making was not eastern green tea, and the arrangement was only vaguely similar regardless. The thought that one could ever be well served trying to import another culture in Westeros, especially the North, was also a fool's notion. So…
It's neutral ground, Luwin concluded. Marwyn wasn't acting like the petitioner here, but the one being petitioned to. Trying to assert dominance over a highborn of Westeros was a thoroughly fatal taboo, so Marwyn had designed a setting that maintained the degree of ceremony while making it as non-Westerosi as possible. Marwyn wasn't demanding authority, he was offering Lord Stark an invitation to recognize the fullness of his existing authority in his area of expertise.
The question was, would Lord Stark take it?
Rickard Stark waved his guard captain to stay outside and close the door. He glanced briefly at the white raven that had hounded Maryn's every step and was now flat on its back under the perch in the corner, twitching insensately. Then the man stepped forward to take his proffered seat.
"Long ago in Braavos I met a man called Benjen," Marwyn said, a hand over his staff and his eyes closed. "Dark hair, grey eyes, long face, twin sons not half as observant as he was of his surroundings and dealings. But when I came back from the Far East seven years later, it was he that had vanished, not his reckless, proudful get. He and his ever so farsighted nephew, never to be heard from again. In Essos at least."
If Lord Stark felt anything, he didn't show it. "Think you to have puzzled out my sorcerer's identity then?"
"Oh, I've known since Moat Cailin." He did? "The increasing frequency in the attempted visits and the easing of your own skinchanging made more than a few things clear. The rest had already come through in words and seemings. That all could speak more of my wit than anything else, though, so we can ask someone else their opinion if you wish."
Luwin carefully didn't react openly to being called upon to share the conclusion to this latest puzzle. Marwyn had only just given him the key. Was this his punishment for showing up uninvited? Or was his coming predicted after whatever that last dream had been?
"That won't be necessary," Stark said with a sigh.
Luwin was torn between relief and irritation at losing this chance to prove his competence, however unbidden.
"As agreed at High Heart, I've indulged the visitations as long as it was just me." The Mage opened his eyes. They were like bottomless pits of black behind the gleaming mask, pupils so wide there may as well be no iris around them at all. "You very carefully didn't vow to forbid or command him anything. Nonetheless, his trespass leaves us at somewhat of an impasse, if you follow me. One he is wise not to test me on. I may not be able to work spells, but in dreams I am mighty. And it's been years since I found a working I could not unravel."
"I will not apologise for putting you to test."
"You may wish to apologise to him then. Anyone else would have drained him dry with that wound of his."
Lord Stark did not reply.
"I'm honestly shocked he can skinchange at all, let alone cast his Thought so far from his Shape." Marwyn mused, not at all idly. "For a time I'd assumed the laughing pup was his fylgja, but it turns out it's not part of him at all." Fylgja. Old Tongue for follower, but in this case used to denote the attendant spirit of a person. Their totem. Marwyn had just implied Stark's sorcerer had somehow been deprived of his. Rather violently too, if the wound was as severe as he implied. Whatever it was. "You should be very grateful to whatever forebear bequeathed his hamingja unto you. Whatever it's been doing, that One-Eyed Raven is the only thing explaining why you're not drowning in miscreants." Hamingja. Fortune. The personal entity that could be split off and bequeathed on another person. In some traditions at least. "Well, that and whatever it was that asserted your will upon these lands. The difference is stark compared to when I was here previously. For that you have my sincerest congratulations. There is power in claim, and danger in infringing upon it as well. Rather like border disputes. That, at least, he and you both seem to afford the caution it deserves. There's certainly been no news from King's Landing about horses suddenly going crazy and trampling anyone important."
Lord Stark's hands clenched into fists atop his knees.
"Did you know Starks with any inkling of magic tend to disappear off the face of the earth? Across the sea at least." Marwyn lifted his rod from his lap and propped it against the web of dreams at his back. "It's good I got here first."
Lord Rickard Stark beheld the man before him, eyes like chips of ice. "What do you want?"
"I want to know you are the ruler, not the ruled."
"Is that so?" Lord Rickard seemed nonplussed. Seemed. "Is that it?"
"Well, I'd also like a patch in that glass garden of yours to grow some raspberry jam trees. I'd prefer acuminata or mimosa, maybe some koa eventually, but I'm willing to settle for what's more expedient for now." Marwyn lifted the lid from the kettle. Inside wasn't any tea Luwin had ever seen, but a hot, thick, leafy brew of smell so strong that it made Luwin shiver. "There is a hard limit on what words can convey," Marwyn poured one cup and then another. "Those with weak selves can be made to believe anything by them, but I am not so suggestible and neither are you."
Across the room, Qyburn set down the second cup of clear oil he'd made from that crushed crystal and quietly stood to leave.
"You words say much," Lord Stark said eventually. "Those you don't voice say even more."
"I suppose you could also behead me," Marwyn mused. The idle tone made a sinister combination with the black void beyond the proverbial door to his soul. "Banish me perhaps, if you don't feel quite murderous enough for that. At the least you may have to leave me behind. Actively shielding is one thing, creating lasting defences around the selves of those with no occult power of their own is quite thoroughly impossible as things currently stand. I won't move from this spot willingly. Not without your guarantee that he won't infringe on my charges again."
Lord Stark beheld Marwyn, for a time. "I begin to understand why you vex him so."
"No," Marwyn said, utterly certain. "You do not."
The nobleman blinked in surprise, but did not grow wroth. "Perhaps not."
"Quite so," Marwyn agreed, satisfied. "I take it he's rather confused."
"… Increasingly so the more he tries to dream with you," the other man admitted. "He only lost time this way once before. I don't suppose you will provide an explanation?"
"I could." Marwyn picked up the two cups and held one out. "Or you could see for yourself."
Qyburn quietly nudged Luwin from behind and ushered him out. The last thing he saw before the door closed was Lord Stark reaching out to accept the offering.
Luwin wasn't told what Marwyn and Lord Stark saw or discussed, but their party spent one whole day and extra night in Cerwyn instead of leaving that same morning as had been the plan. It left him and the rest rather at loose ends, but he didn't mind. Even if it was rather bemusing when little Lady Lyanna came over and declared him to be her chaperone for the rest of their stay.
"Old Man Rob says I need one but his picks are all boring."
The real reason was that Benjen Stark had 'called dibs' on Luwin so Lyanna resolved to snatch him first as revenge. On finding out during noon meal, the boy sulked most adorably. Then came the evening feast and Benjan Stark proceeded to mock his sister loudly and openly for not being able to win at anything without cheating. It started a sibling's row that somehow ended with Lyanna Stark vowing to 'prove' her worth by 'winning at horror stories forever.'
What strange turns of phrase these highborn children used.
"Some say the Green Emperor still lives, forever lost to time and memory in the Morning Mountains," Lyanna Stark finished her tale, making a brave bid at leaning in such a way that her face was cast in shadow. "They say he lingers between life and death, beset on all sides in the city of corpses that lies where the river of ash runs howling through a narrow cleft in the mountains, between towering cliffs so steep and close that the dark waters never see the sun. Some say he's still there, alive out of spite for those he taught and raised, who turned their backs on him and flew across seas and mountains to build their own empire out of his legacy, one which they wouldn't have to share. Perhaps he still wallows there, skulking between the caves that pockmark the cliffs where demons and dragons and worse make their lairs, more hideous and twisted the deeper in you go into the never ending darkness at the shadow's heart."
The gathered menagerie of children 'oohed' and 'aahed' appreciatively, even Rhodry who'd been swept into the little lady's groove somehow. For a girl of seven years, Lyanna Stark knew many big words. Luwin wished Lord Stark the best of luck when she tried to abscond with the mummers in a year or three.
He looked to the side where Qyburn was rapidly recording everything on the latest sheet of the surprisingly high-quality paper the North seemed to have in abundance. "Having fun, maester?"
"Most definitely," Qyburn said happily, murmuring under his breath about myths and mountains and Asshai-by-the-Shadow. "The mouth of babes has ever been a most precious treasure trove of information. I hope to meet this Old Nan soon."
Luwin didn't begrudge Qyburn's feeling of vindication. He'd been the only one who didn't take offence when Lyanna Stark walked over and declared him their chronicler on account of being the only grownup 'creepy enough.'
"Old Nan, Old Shmam!" Lyanna Stark tsked. "This story's got nothing to do with her, it's all me!"
"Your pony, more like," Benjen muttered, leading to yet another chase up and down the main hall.
It was just the first of several 'sinister' tales, but Luwin's sleep that night was undisturbed and Death did not haunt him again.