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POV: Arthur Snow
Location: Rimehall – Half-Fort, Half-Cairn
They reached Rimehall by midday.
The old fortress sat like a dying tooth on the northern slope—its walls crumbling into the snow, its tower sheared open by time and wind. Once, it had held off raiders. Now it barely held up its own gate.
But it wasn't abandoned.
Arthur saw the signs before they reached the arch. Footprints smoothed out with cloth. Stones moved subtly along the edges of the road. Tracks wiped clean near the main door.
No guards. But eyes.
He stepped forward alone, his company hanging back at the tree line.
Inside the courtyard, a single man stood beneath the shade of the ruined tower.
He wore a long robe of grey wool, patched and stained. His beard was pale, and his face thin—drawn, not weak. His hands rested on the top of a walking stick carved from stormwood, the grain warped like wind-bent bone.
He looked at Arthur like a man seeing something he had imagined too many times.
"You came," he said.
Arthur stopped a few paces away.
"You were expecting me."
The man nodded once. "I've been expecting you for ten years."
"What's your name?"
"I am Maelen. I once took the black. Now I serve no oath but the one I saw in sleep."
Arthur studied him. The man did not carry steel. His voice held no threat.
"You sent the rumors."
"I did. About deserters, about Free Folk gathering. I whispered them into places they'd reach the right ears."
"Why?"
Maelen's eyes were sharp despite their weariness.
"Because the dreams said you would come. And if you did… it would mean the world still had time to change."
Arthur remained still.
"What did you see?"
Maelen exhaled slowly, like dragging the memory back through fog.
Flashback – Maelen's Vision (Dreamseer's Memory)
He saw a boy kneeling alone in the snow, surrounded by the broken blades of kings and lords. No banners flew. No name was spoken.
But behind him, armies knelt.
Not in loyalty—but awe.
And before him, the land cracked—not in ruin, but renewal—as if the ground had remembered how to breathe.
In the dream, fire and frost circled each other, unable to touch.
Until the boy moved.
And then the world broke again—but this time, forward.
End of Flashback
Maelen returned to the present with trembling hands gripping the cane.
"I've had the dream seven times," he whispered. "Each one clearer. More violent. But always the same shape: you, Arthur Snow, not wearing a crown—but dragging the world behind you like a plow through stone."
Arthur said nothing. He didn't flinch. But something flickered in his eyes—not doubt. Something else.
"You don't know what you are," Maelen continued, "but you will. And when you do, the world will kneel—not because it must, but because there is no other direction left to face."
Arthur looked at him. "You sound certain."
"I am."
Arthur asked, "What do you want from me?"
Maelen smiled faintly, almost pained. "Only to walk behind you. To see it happen. To witness the moment the old world shatters."
"I don't need a seer."
Maelen stepped forward—not too close. His voice dropped low.
"You don't need prophecy, I know. You are prophecy."
Silence stretched.
Arthur turned his head slightly, back toward the trees where the others waited.
"Then come," he said. "If you believe in this, walk. But keep your madness quiet."
Maelen bowed—not deep, but absolute.
"I am yours. Until the end."
From a broken arch above, a raven sat watching. Its eyes were unnaturally still.
Far away, past snow and night, a man in tangled roots stirred. Not fully awake. Not fully dead.
The raven beat its wings and flew.
North.
The Raven Beneath the Roots
Far north of Rimehall, beyond frozen rivers and the Wall, where light no longer falls in straight lines and memory weeps like water, a man who was no longer a man stirred in silence.
Beneath him, the roots groaned.
He sat still, his body swallowed by the tree, his eyes half-lidded.
But his mind burned.
He looked. He searched. As he always had.
He watched the paths.
Thousands of them.
And then—
a break.
A ripple in the branch of time where none should be.
Where once there had been a clear strand—a child born of winter, shaped by exile, walking the road of frost and wolves—there now stood a shadow too dense to see through.
Arthur Snow.
Born of no name. Bearing no title.
Not touched by fire. Not kissed by ice.
But moving forward.
Unwritten.
Wrong.
The man in the roots leaned deeper into the dream.
He tried to see beyond the boy's path—into the valley of coming wars, the echoes of kings, the old thrones cracked with frost.
But the vision frayed.
The branches collapsed.
The boy had no destiny.
He snarled—not aloud, but within the wood.
This is not how it was meant to go.
In the distance of his mind, a boys name flickered like a dying flame:
Still close. Still… pliable.
The roots tightened.
The winds howled in the dark of the beyond.
And somewhere beneath that twisted sky of memory and fate, the voice of the greenseer echoed not in words, but in thought:
If the boy cannot be seen…
Then perhaps... he must be worn.
The raven flew.
Its wings beat like the cracking of bone.
Northward.
Ever northward.