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123 AC, Haunted Forest, Beyond the Wall
Leaf stared at her kin and shook her head, making the elderly woman gain a mixture of pride and grief on her face. "Then ask your questions, Stranger. I will answer what I can."
Cregan Stark knew, from the way Harry's head moved forward in anticipation, that the coming conversation would be as interesting, if not more so, than what the Corpse Queen claimed the previous day. It truly was baffling how much of his worldview shifted in just a few days, starting with seeing another facet to the Others, mankind's greatest enemy, followed by facing the true threat in the North after battling a time-travelling Greenseer. And now, an elderly Child of the Forest, which Cregan inwardly dubbed as The Elder, would answer Harry's questions, answers that were older than the Long Night itself. Even Ghost seemed interested, given the way he perked up his head, staring at the speaking Child of the Forest.
He could only wonder if the world had always been this mad, or if it was the Potters making it so. Things were far simpler when he had a usurping uncle to deal with, not a potential wilding outbreak or the second coming of the Long Night. Still, Cregan couldn't help but feel curious about the answers that the Potters had been chasing, ones they fought against a giant dragon that was more powerful than anything House Targaryen could ever hope to match.
Finally, after what felt like an eternity of silence, Harry spoke up, "As far as anyone knows, history began in this continent when the First Men came, while your kind was here. We both know that there's a lot more that happened beforehand, so how did it all really start?"
The elderly Child of the Forest, whose name Cregan still didn't know, spoke up, "How it all began… I suppose that everything began, as everything was meant to, with a forest, or more accurately, a single tree."
Cregan could barely react as he felt something touch his arm. He turned towards it and saw a root touch him, and the very world changed around him. It looked… strange. He was outside in a desolate world, one devoid of any greenery or life. There was not even a sun or moon, yet he could see everything around him, not that there was much to see, aside from a small sapling growing from the ashen ground.
He saw the rest of his companions looking around, with the Potters being interested in everything that they saw. The Elder's voice echoed across the world around them, "The Great Tree, we call it, the first tree in our forest, born in a world of chaos. Some say that the First Dragons, the Old Ones, blessed it with a spark of divinity; others debated that it was but chance, or perhaps, fate, that deemed it so. That matters little, in the end, for it grew and learned."
He saw the world move around it as the sapling glowed with power and started to grow into a beautiful tree with white bark and crimson leaves, bringing colour into an empty world, and the Elder continued, "Yet the world was filled with dangers and darkness, wishing nought but to snuff out the life brewing within it. And so, from its very self, it birthed a protector, one that could stave off the chaos of the world around them."
Cregan saw a darkness try to envelop the world, and the tree's bark opened and released a Child of the Forest. It looked different, less refined than the ones he had met so far. If he had to describe it, the creature looked more akin to a living plant, its skin less smooth, more akin to bark than anything else, though he could not deny the power he felt the creature held. For he saw the creature sing and move the very earth as if it were water, creating walls against the encroaching darkness that wished to swallow the tree.
"The First Who Sang the Song of the Earth protected the Great Tree valiantly against the horrors of the world. Alas, one day he failed. He protected the Great Tree with his very life, but the tree was injured, a small cutting having fallen onto the earth. The First One, with his dying breath, took the cutting and sang, and so the first forest grew, with him having joined it forevermore."
Cregan saw the injured Child of the Forest stumble down, grabbing a cutting of the Great Tree, and singing a mournful song as he perished. From his body, a tree grew from the ground, one that still had the First One's face on its bark. From it, other Children of the Forest were born, until the trees spread, enveloping the horizon.
Cregan couldn't help but feel awed by the story. He had often prayed to the Old Gods, but they felt distant, even to the Lord of Winterfell. He had never thought about why the Children of the Forest carved faces into the Heart Trees, and in many ways, this story, true or not, was a small window into his legacy, into that of his ancestors, even, about the gods that they worshipped for thousands of years.
Leaf was enraptured by the story, which he found strange. Had she never heard of it before? Cregan had many questions, but he did not dare interrupt the Child of the Forest. Harry and Daphne thankfully did not, letting her continue, "It is but a story, a song, true or not, but we treasured it, always. I, myself, was born to a world drenched in war, for that was our purpose. Each of our kind is born with a purpose bestowed by the gods, etched into soul and song. We give our lives to it, and even our deaths. For we were protectors of our forest and the destroyers of all who sought to harm it."
Leaf gasped in shock at that, her previous expression of awe having disappeared completely, "Hunt down?"
The Elder did not allow Leaf to continue, making the world shift once more. This time, it was different. Cregan felt the very world shift backwards before him, with him as a passenger. He was in the sky watching the entire continent, and he couldn't help but feel anything but awe. Finally, he noticed the number of forests slowly growing as they went further in time, until… until he felt something suddenly shift, more akin to a barrier that was broken, and the world changed suddenly.
The skies looked almost crimson, and Cregan froze as he realised that it was raining blood from invisible clouds. He turned around and saw a group of Children of the Forest wearing wooden armour, and using Weirwood bows to rain Dragonglass arrows on an encroaching horde of giant spiders.
It was a gory scene, especially given the blood, both crimson and black, that the Children were covered in. They then opened their mouths and sang alongside one another. It was not the peaceful sounds of nature that he heard Leaf uttering, but wrathful ones. It was hard to put them into words, but it made him shiver despite it being nought but a scene.
A wave of Earth appeared around them and flattened a horde of giants made of stone, holding immensely sized clubs. They sang once more, and power was released from their corpses, raining fire on a giant serpent that tried to attack them. He wished that he could deny the horrors that he was witnessing, but the world looked more… real than it had during the Elder's story of the First Child of the Forest. He could not even deny the scenes that he was beholding, nor the sheer ruthless faces of the creatures that he once thought to be peaceful ones.
He instinctively turned towards Leaf, who had knelt down, staring at her kin in horror. Aside from the noise of the battle, they stayed completely silent, which the Elder finally broke, "It was a very different time. Dreadful creatures roamed the world, swarms of monsters who devoured all that they could, giant creatures that breathed mists that would devour everything that they could face, vengeful spirits who hid in the shadows, and wished to do nought but shed blood for its own amusement, and that was only during my lifetime, for I was born near the end of the conflict, one that spanned for eons."
With each word she spoke, the world shifted into another battlefield, another horror that the Children of the Forest battled, and the sea of blood that they spilt. Cregan had never thought that he would ever see so much blood on any battlefield, for he knew that he could not count the number of deaths that he had witnessed in these small moments that spanned to an eternity.
However, he would have been completely at ease if only monsters had been slain. A few times, he glimpsed eyes widening in fright, pleading for mercy. He heard screams of rage and grief in the distance that echoed every few seconds and pierced him utterly.
While he was disturbed by the sight, it was Leaf that was the most hurt by the attack, staring at the image of her kin with so more betrayal in her tearful gaze than Cregan had thought possible.
As if wishing to answer Leaf's unasked question, the Elder's voice echoed once more, "We were not kind, but then again, the world had not been kind either, for the world was in chaos, and even mercy had a price we could ill afford. For we were creatures of the Earth, of nature, and nature was at risk. We naturally forged an alliance with the First Dragons, the Old Ones, who sought to bring order to the world. They empowered our forest with their unhatched young, allowing us to grow quickly and more powerful, and in exchange, we hunted down those who would drench the world in chaos, whose existence was a risk to the world that we forged, even if they did not know it yet."
Leaf's gaze had grown empty at that, and Cregan couldn't help but release a whisper, "You killed them all"
The elder did not let her finish, "No, not always, though we often grew to regret it. We allowed the Deep Ones to escape to the ocean, and to this day, they bring nought but suffering whenever they come to shore. Our ancient allies, the Mazemakers, who shaped the cursed stone, dearly paid the price for this mistake, though that was before my song came into being."
Cregan saw queer misshapen creatures that had scales for skin, and webbed hands, slowly flee into an almost blackened ocean, only for them to slay dozens of large hairy and humanoid creatures, and she continued, "The giants had been our enemies once as well, though in the face of the horrors, we offered them sanctuary in our forests, in exchange for their help protecting it, and thus an alliance that spun for aeons was born, and it still remains to this day."
Harry gave her a peculiar look for a few moments before nodding, "That explains a lot. I always wondered how the Elder Dragons were involved. I'm guessing that they were focused on any potential divine or demonic invader and empowered you enough using their eggs to fight off whatever physical beings managed to slip into the Materium."
Cregan would admit that he knew very little about the Children of the Forest's history, though the arrival of the First Men painted them as defenders of their lands, of their people. The oldest accounts of Westeros had the Earthsingers living there in peace alongside the Giants, before the First Men's conquest drove them to use violence and fight back. It was a tale that every child of the North knew before they even learned to walk.
He had never considered what occurred before, what could have possibly allowed a people to spread across an entire continent. In many ways, they had done the same as mankind, hadn't they? They conquered the land with force, hunting down their enemies, until they wiped it out entirely.
Leaf seemed to have finally been brought out of her haze of shock, "Our Forest was grown from blood? How could you hide this from us, from our very Dreams?"
For the first time since the visions began, the Elder's being appeared before them, though she stared at Leaf with melancholy in her voice, "After the Old Ones brought order into the heavens, after we had our treasured peace, after we witnessed hundreds of our kin grow with nought but songs of peace in their souls, we realised the weight of what we had done. I will never regret the peace that we achieved, but most of us were strangers in the world that we helped bring into being. Many of us chose to rejoin our kindred in the Weirwood, but I chose to remain as a reminder of our history, or perhaps, to protect you from it. You asked us why I kept this from you, why I hid the truth of our being from our forest, and the truth was that I was afraid. I was afraid of you becoming burdened with the truth of our past, that your hearts would be weighed by it. My song was ending, but yours… yours were just starting, filled with wonder and beauty. Your generation learned to listen to the streams, to feel the breath of the leaves, to speak with the roots as kin. Ours learned how to survive. There is no shame in either path, but they do not walk the same soil. And so, we chose silence. Perhaps it was the wrong choice, but it was the one that we made and that I have respected for thousands of years."
Leaf's expression went tight, her hands trembling with something caught between grief and fury. Cregan did not know what she would do, only that he was very thankful that Harry interrupted her, "And did the Others exist before this peace?"
The Elder released a loud sigh, and the world shifted around to show creatures more similar to the Corpse Queen than it had the creatures of ice that he had seen in Hardhome. They seemed… gentle, with none of the harsh features carved into their faces, nor the cold malice he had come to associate with their kind.
It was strange to see mankind's greatest enemy looking like this, but it did fit the Corpse Queen's description of her kin.
The Elder spoke as they all stared at them, "I remember them. I was young when we fought them, but I remember it to this day. The Cold Ones in the North, we called them. We were surprised when the Old Ones asked us to slay them, as they claimed that they were a danger to what we built. We could not do it, for they were peaceful creatures whose survival we considered to be a miracle. That proved to be a grave mistake, for while we had fought violent monsters, thrown demons out of our forest, I do not think that any of our enemy caused as much devastation to the world as the Cold Ones in the North."
The world suddenly changed, and Cregan stared at it from above and watched as a giant snowstorm enveloped the North of the continent. First, he thought little of it until the scenes changed, showing frozen Children of the Forest and Giants, followed by giant floods, endless storms that seemed to envelop a side of Westeros, which he recognised as the Stormlands, giant waves and winds that cut through entire chains of islands, and an endless downpour raining down in the middle of the continent.
"In a great act of magic, they created a storm unlike any other, one that brought nought but ice, snow, and death. It spread from the North, froze out forests nearby, and killed many of our kin, but that was but the beginning of what this act created, for its remnants still plague the world to this day. The world was drenched in chaos that even the most monstrous beasts that we faced had never been able to achieve."
Harry looked almost pensive as he spoke up, "A sudden shift in temperature in such a large area would have caused a disaster, especially in an unstable time period of this world, enough to even leave traces all over the continent. I assume that you fought back then."
The world shifted with the Children of the Forest attacking the White Walkers with their arrows, slaying them without mercy, despite the snowstorm that rendered very little visible to the human eye. A few of the White Walkers tried to resist, tried to create spikes of ice or walls to protect them, yet they all fell too.
The Elder's voice was impassive, with an almost enraged tint, when she answered, "We had no other choice. They were not warriors, not truly, nor were they monsters that preyed upon everything around them. Yet, they fiercely refused to undo their magic, no matter the consequences that it brought. Eventually, we called to the roots beneath the world and asked them to move. The cost… The cost was high, but we destroyed their settlement, and it took centuries to be able to reverse the damage that they had caused. We thought them gone, never to be seen again…"
As she finished, Cregan heard a booming sound in the distance and felt the earth shaking, before snow and dust swallowed everything. He flinched instinctively, only to find himself back in the cave he once stood in.
While his shock slowly abated, Cregan thought that what he had witnessed matched the Corpse Queen's testimony. The White Walkers were dying and sought to survive by bringing an endless winter. However, that accidentally had more consequences than they anticipated, and threatened the Children of the Forest's survival. As neither would relent, it ended with a war that the Children won, which pushed the White Walkers to resort to more drastic measures.
It was… sad and complicated. The young Stark did not expect much when he set foot North of the Wall. Instead, he expected to battle enemies of legend, which he had, but he did not expect to question everything he thought he knew about the Long Night, not that he knew more than stories and basic theories.
Daphne continued the elder's sentence, "Until they came back."
The Elder nodded, and for the first time, her voice turned solemn, "It was after the Old Ones brought peace to the unseen world, after the monsters stopped coming, after the First Men came to our lands, after our pact. They came from the North, and they were… different. The cold they brought was unnatural, wrong, reeking with death. The beings that came from the North held no life and seemed to do nothing but bring death to everything in their path. They used the very bodies of our fallen as puppets to fight against those who once called them kin. What remained of the Cold Ones was something Other, creatures, far more terrible than anything that I had witnessed even during the Age of Strife."
Her eyes looked almost distant as she continued, "They knew how to battle us, especially. In fact, they relished in it, perhaps as a remembrance of what we once cost them. They attacked the unhatched Old Ones, knowing that they were both a responsibility and a source of power to us. We joined Men in their battle against them in a war that lasted generations, where the world was almost swallowed in an endless night. Even now, you can see remnants of the war for the Dawn, scars in the very seasons of the world. Despite this, our victory meant very little for our kind, for we had lost many of our numbers, and many unhatched Old Ones perished to the Cold Ones' touch, weakening the Weirwoods even further. Fewer of us were born with every age, until our numbers became what they are today."
Cregan took a slow breath, trying to absorb the explanation. Harry, however, was already moving on to another question, "I think I have enough, but I have one last question. What do you know about the Heart of Winter?"
Immediately, chills spread inside the cave, as if they had appeared with the mere mention of the name. Even the Elder seemed unsettled by these words: "I confess that I have not heard of these words before."
"But you know what I'm talking about," the sorcerer commented confidently.
"When the Cold Ones came from the North, we felt the Weirwood dying out slowly, with it spreading towards the South, and it all began from a single place."
Harry's eyes narrowed. "So, there is something there."
"We believed so for some time," she admitted, "It mattered very little in the end; no one survived a trip to tell the tale. What we know, at least, is that the Cold Ones always came from a single place, deep in the land of endless ice, and that they returned to it when they retreated. Even the few Greenseers who attempted to see what was beyond had all gone mad with what they had seen. It is a place of death and madness, one that we learned to avoid, lest we invite devastation."
Cregan remembered the Corpse Queen claiming that a place called the 'Heart of Winter' had been where the rest of her kin were sleeping while the Others conquered the land for their sake. It would make sense that they would protect it, given what occurred to it before.
"Care to tell us where it is exactly?" Harry suddenly asked.
"You mean to go there?" The Elder asked with shock in her voice.
The sorcerer did not answer, just stared at her with a small smile on his face, and she spoke up, "I know not of its precise location, but I would guess that you will likely find it where their ancient settlement lay, the ones that we destroyed long ago."
"That's not a location," Daphne commented.
The elder inclined her head slightly. "It is not. But I can tell you this: if you reach it, past the frozen mountains, you will recognise it. Even before the Cold One's second coming, no one who ever set foot in the frozen lands mistook it for anything else, at the very least. And that is all that I can offer. The rest lies beyond my sight… and beyond any song that remains in this age."
Cregan felt the world settle fully back into the cave. The visions vanished like mist at dawn, leaving only the hollow echo of what they had witnessed. Leaf looked shaken, pale even for one of her kind. Ghost huffed uneasily, fur bristling.
The Elder's gaze swept over them, lingering on Leaf last, and perhaps it was his imagination, but he saw a flash of sorrow in her eyes. She lowered her staff, the roots that once grabbed their hands receding, "I would answer more were the hour kinder. But the Cold Ones stir sooner than the omens foretold, and we have no Greenseer to slow them down. I must call to the sleepers beneath the bark and bind what little strength remains to us."
Her tone had a sense of finality to it, and no one asked anything else. Harry gave a short nod and headed toward the cave entrance. Daphne followed, and Cregan moved after them, grateful to step into clearer air even if the cold outside was sharper.
Leaf stayed behind for a few moments. When Cregan turned back, he saw her approach the Elder, speaking quickly in the True Tongue. He could not understand the words, but the tone was unmistakable. Leaf's voice was tight and angry. The Elder's replies were steady, almost resigned. The exchange ended abruptly, with Leaf storming away and joining them outside while still shaking from the revelation that she had spoken.
She joined them outside a moment later. Her hands were still shaking.
"I will accompany you to this 'Heart of Winter'," she said as soon as she reached them.
Harry stopped, "You do know that this will not be a safe journey. If you didn't notice, your Elder didn't exactly paint a nice picture of the place."
"A child of the First Men walks toward the source of this. One of the singers should witness it as well. This is owed."
Daphne didn't argue, though Harry considered it for a moment, met his wife's gaze and then nodded. "If you're sure."
"I am."
They set off again, leaving the cave behind them. The snow was deeper here, and the wind colder, but no one commented on it. For they had a new destination now, the Heart of Winter. Cregan could almost feel it, that this would also be where his journey would end. After all, he had come North of the Wall to help prevent a second Long Night, and that was worth far more than any danger he might be in.
And so, he walked, following the Potters and Leaf into the deep North, toward a place no sane man had tried to reach in thousands of years.
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AN: I'm not sure about this chapter, to be honest. I tried to make the origin of the Children of the Forest and the White Walkers a bit different. I found it interesting to have the conflict stem from a semi-realistic history between two magical races, each with its own interpretation of what started it all. Anyway, things should pick up a bit in the next chapter, where they're finally going to the Lands of Always Winter. As usual, please let me know what you think and if you have any suggestions.
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I tend to upload drafts of early chapters on there to get people's opinions on them, so you can read up to 20 chapters ahead as a bonus.
Thank you guys for your support in these hard times.