Beneath the Frozen River
Silence fell over the Trident.
What had been a battlefield was now a grave of glass and smoke.
Underneath, the current whispered through cracks of crystal ice carrying two bodies.
Job Snow and Althea drifted in the dark like fallen stars.
Their hands, still clasped, glowed faintly blue.
Their lips did not move, yet the water trembled with their pulse.
Bran's voice came from everywhere and nowhere.
"The gods wrote their end," he whispered.
"But the song does not end until the echo fades."
The roots of the Weirwoods reached down through the water, wrapping around Job's arm, Althea's waist not to hold, but to remember.
For the first time in centuries, the Old Gods wept.
Their tears froze into runes of light each one a memory of every Stark, every Northern king, every soul bound to the cold.
Then a crack of thunder beneath the ice.
Job's eyes opened, glowing white.
Althea's lips parted, releasing a breath that became mist.
The current surged upward and the river broke.
They rose together from the Trident, gasping, water cascading from them like molten snow.
The air bent around them, refusing to touch.
"We died," Job murmured.
"No," Althea said softly, her voice echoing with a thousand others. "We were rewritten."
The Fire Beneath the Ruins
Far to the south, the Red Keep burned again.
But this time, the fire did not fade.
From the blackened stones where the Iron Throne once stood, a figure crawled out of the molten pool.
Skin blistered. Hair aflame. Eyes gold and hollow.
Lily Lannister screamed a sound so raw it made the dragons in the sea stir.
Her crown had melted into her skull, veins glowing with green wildfire.
The air twisted above her, forming a shape the shadow of a woman with wings of fire.
"You begged for power," the shadow hissed.
"Now burn with it."
Lily's bones cracked, her blood igniting from within.
She fell to her knees, trembling, as flame licked her skin not destroying, but transforming.
When the blaze cleared, she stood reborn.
Her gown reformed from the smoke itself, her hair now a river of gold fire.
Her voice, when it came, was not human.
"I was a queen," she said.
"Now I am the pyre."
The Iron Throne reassembled itself from molten slag, reshaped by her will.
It pulsed faintly alive.
She smiled faintly.
"Let the North have its ghosts," she whispered.
"The South will have its goddess."
The Convergence
In the North, snow fell upward.
In the South, fire fell like rain.
The sky between the two realms cracked a thin, bleeding line of light.
Bran sat beneath the Heart Tree, eyes milk-white.
Through him, both realms pulsed in rhythm frost and flame, love and ruin.
"Two gods, born of one sin," he murmured.
"And the sky that breaks must decide which survives."
He saw them both Job and Althea beneath a frozen moon, their breath forming spirals that shaped new stars.
Lily beneath the burning ruins, her laughter echoing like bells through ash.
And above all a third presence stirring, vast and unseen, older than gods or dragons.
"The Dreamer wakes," Bran said.
"And when she opens her eyes, the world will choose its ending."
Frost and Fire
Job and Althea stood among the dead.
Everywhere around them were statues of ash and ice the fallen soldiers of both sides, preserved in the moment of their deaths.
"Are we still alive?" Jon asked.
"Alive enough to finish what began," Althea answered.
She touched one of the frozen soldiers.
It cracked and instead of blood, light spilled out.
"They're not gone," she whispered. "They're part of us now."
A distant roar answered not dragon, not man.
Something ancient was crossing the sky.
Job turned, eyes narrowing.
"She's awake."
"Lily?"
"No," Job said. "The fire behind her."
The Queen of Embers
Lily stood upon the balcony of her new throne room what remained of the Red Keep's bones.
Beneath her, wildfire burned in the shape of wings.
"The gods made me their
monster," she said to the fire.
"Let me make them mine."
She raised her hand and the wildfire obeyed, climbing the air like serpents.
She saw visions within the flame Job and Althea holding hands, their frost dimming her light.
Jealousy returned but colder now, sharper.
"You'll bow, both of you," she whispered. "Even the dead kneel to fire."
The Red Keep's shadow stretched northward the first sign of the Crimson Eclipse Bran had foreseen.
The Broken Sky
Storms gathered above Westeros.
One half black with smoke, the other white with snow.
From the North, the risen host marched the Dead bound to the Frost King and Queen.
From the South, Lily's flame-born army advanced every ember carrying her will.
And above them, a light cracked the heavens.
The broken sky screamed
as if the world itself could not bear two gods at once.
Closing Image
In the midst of that storm, Bran's voice whispered through every flame and flake of snow:
"Fire remembers the shape of desire.
Frost remembers the weight of loss.
But love, love remembers everything."
The screen of reality rippled.
For an instant, both sides frost and fire stood reflected in each other's eyes.
And in that reflection, something new began to move neither ice nor flame, but the beginning of a third dawn.