The road was long and empty.
I followed the Kingsroad north, the hem of my cloak dragging in the damp dirt, hood drawn tight against the sun. The air was cool here, far from the furnace of King's Landing, but the light still stung when it touched skin. Beneath my clothes, I could feel the phantom burn like embers beneath flesh, a memory of fire waiting to bloom.
I kept to the trees where I could, letting the canopy dull the sun. Ravens called overhead, and once I saw a stag crash through the underbrush in panic, startled by my presence. I didn't chase it. The animal blood wouldn't help me. Not like what I needed.
Not like them.
I walked in silence. No destination. Only motion. I thought, perhaps, if I kept moving, I could outrun the ache in my chest.
But I couldn't.
The ache wasn't physical, it wasn't hunger, though that lurked beneath every heartbeat I heard in the distance. It was something else. Something broken. Something stolen.
When I slept, I dreamt of warmth. Of dirt under my fingernails, of laughter around a stolen fire in Flea Bottom. I dreamt of the moment before the change, when I still believed I would die human.
Sometimes I even dreamed of the sorcerer's face not in rage, but in awe. That was worse. That look of triumph, like I had fulfilled some divine equation in his mind. Like I was a vessel finally filled.
By the fourth day, I reached a crossroads inn, a low stone building with mossy shingles and a crooked wooden sign that read The Pale Mare. I waited until the sun dipped low before I approached. My cloak was soaked through with the river I'd crossed, and I looked no worse than any poor traveler with a story too heavy to tell.
Inside, the common room was loud with the clatter of tankards and voices. Firelight flickered across faces lined with worry and wine. A bard played a lute in the corner, his song lost beneath the voices.
I kept to the shadows and sat near the hearth, hood still drawn. The innkeep, a squat woman with wiry grey hair, brought me a bowl of broth and a hunk of bread without asking. Her eyes lingered on me a moment too long.
"You look like death walked you here," she said.
"I've been walking a long time," I murmured.
"Haven't we all," she muttered, then turned away.
The smell of the broth turned my stomach. I stirred it idly. Around me, I could hear everything, every word whispered in corners, every heartbeat behind smiles, every lie. The room was a web, and I was the spider who wanted to burn it all just to stop feeling everything.
A man two tables over spoke of wolves in the Riverlands, bands of outlaws calling themselves Stark men, attacking Lannister convoys. Another spoke of Renly Baratheon gathering banners, a host swelling in the Reach.
The world was changing.
But I didn't feel part of it. Not anymore.
I paid for the room and climbed the stairs without touching the food. In the quiet of the room, I unwrapped my cloak. The firelight from the hearth flickered across my hands. Pale. Cold. No longer mine.
I stared at them, remembering the first time they drew blood without shaking. The first time they crushed bone without hesitation.
And then I stared at the mirror above the washbasin.
Nothing stared back.
I knew what I looked like. But the mirror showed nothing now. Just firelight on wood. The absence was worse than a monster's face. At least monsters could be seen. I wasn't sure what was left of me to see.
I didn't sleep that night. I tried, but lying still in that small wooden room, with fire whispering low in the hearth and the silence pressing in like stone, my mind began to drift backward, always backward.
To the cellar.
To the screams.
To the iron cage, rusted and wet. To the vials lined in endless rows, the smell of burning herbs and blood-soaked parchment. The memory came uninvited, like so many others now. It rose in my throat like bile, thick and choking.
I sat up. My fists clenched. The inn was quiet now. All but one heartbeat, a steady rhythm from the next room over. A young man, likely the stablehand. I could smell hay and sweat on him even through the wall.
I didn't need to feed again so soon. But my body whispered otherwise.
A kind man would ignore it.
A kind man would stay still.
My legs moved before I'd finished the thought. I stood, barefoot on the wooden floor, cloak forgotten, shirt hanging open at the collar.
I pressed a hand to the wall. I could hear the boy dreaming. Something soft. A girl's voice in the dream. A name whispered.
I shut my eyes.
My fangs itched beneath my teeth. Not fully extended, but eager. And still, I did not move. The moment passed and I breathed deep. I stepped away from the wall, from the boy's warmth, and returned to the fire.
Before dawn, I left the Pale Mare behind.
The world outside was damp with morning fog, thick and clinging. Trees rose like silent sentinels along the road, branches curled like fingers above the path. I moved swiftly, barely touching the ground.
I did not know where I was going. But I knew I could not stop. There was no home for me. Not in the city of my birth, nor in the inns of men. I was something new, something terrible. A thing made, not born.
And yet I wanted to belong. Even if only to the world's sorrow.
It was midday when I found the corpse.
A young woman, no older than I was. Her dress torn, skin smeared in mud and blood. The prints in the road told the story: two men on horseback, one with a sharp heel, the other with a heavy boot. She had run. They had caught her.
They had left her in the ditch.
Her blood was still warm.
I stood over her for a long time, unmoving. The wind tugged at her hair, as if trying to lift her from the earth.
I knelt.
"I'm sorry," I whispered, though she couldn't hear me.
And then I fed, not for survival or to silence the hunger, but out of grief.
As her blood passed through me, I saw her memories, a brother's laughter, a mother's hand braiding her hair, a pale blue ribbon tied too tightly around her wrist. I felt the terror of her last moments, the sting of betrayal, the silence that followed.
And when I rose, I wept.
I buried her with my hands.
No shovel. No tools. Just earth and silence. I dug until my fingers were raw, though they did not bleed. My body no longer responded to strain as it once had. But the ache, the soul-ache was real.
When she was covered, I sat beside the mound. Not in prayer. Not in penance.
In remembrance.
That was the second person I had fed on by choice. And the first I mourned. Not because she was a stranger. But because I saw her. In those final moments, I knew her. And she, in a way, knew me.
She had not screamed. She had looked at me, even in death, with something like peace. I did not deserve it. But I accepted it.
The night that followed was silent and colder than before. I did not light a fire. Instead, I sat atop a hill, staring at the stars. They seemed too far away now. Once, I had made stories out of them. Constellations. Shapes. Now they were just reminders of how small I was. A monster hiding from the sun, chasing scraps of light.
Then I felt it, a shift in the air. It wasn't sound. Not quite, it was more like pressure. Like the weight of unseen eyes settling on my shoulders.
I turned.
No one there.
But I knew what I felt.
A presence that was subtle, ancient and curious. It did not come closer, but it watched.
And it wasn't human.
I didn't sleep. Again.
Come dawn, I walked east off the Kingsroad, cutting through fields toward the wooded ridges beyond Maidenpool. I didn't know why. Only that something was guiding me. Not with force, but with suggestion. A whisper. A tug on my mind.
I hated that I followed it. But I had no destination of my own. I passed a burned farmstead. A goat pen filled with ash. No bodies. Just bones. And something carved into the wood of the stable.
A circle.
Marked in three overlapping lines. Not a sigil I recognized. Not any house I knew. It felt… wrong.
The air here was wrong. I stood there for a long time, hand hovering over the symbol and then I heard the whisper again.
No words. No voice. Just direction.
North.
I walked away from the symbol, but I kept seeing it. In the trees. In the clouds. In the blood-spatter patterns that haunted my vision when I blinked too long.
Three overlapping circles.
I didn't know the meaning. Not yet. But it felt like a signature, a mark of something old. Older than the Faith. Older than Valyria. A whisper scrawled into the world's skin. And now that I had seen it, the whisper would not stop.
That night, I climbed a ridge above the Blackwater's upper forks and found a thicket of dead trees arranged in a half-ring, as if they had been burned or blighted all at once. They stood like a jury. Watching. Waiting.
And at the center of them lay just a single dark stone slab, carved flat and precise. The air above it shimmered faintly. Magic, I realized.
I didn't step closer. I didn't touch it, but I heard the whisper again. This time, it wasn't just presence. It was intent.
Something had seen me. And it recognized what I was. Not human. Not just monster. The thought chilled me.
The next morning, I awoke just before sunrise and stood at the edge of the thicket. The stone was gone. The trees were still dead, but the ring felt empty now. As if the thing that had lingered had moved on, or was waiting elsewhere.
I felt no hunger that morning. Only weight. The knowledge that something had taken interest in me. I did not know its name. I did not know its form but I felt, with certainty, that this path I walked was no longer mine alone.
I turned north, leaving the whispering woods behind. But I felt eyes on my back as I walked.
It wasn't hunting me.
It was waiting.