The Wall was larger than it had any right to be.
He had known this in the abstract — dimensions cited in texts, comparative references, the superlatives applied to it by everyone who had ever written about the North — but standing at its base for the first time was a different category of knowledge. It rose seven hundred feet above the frozen ground and stretched east and west past the limits of sight, and the cold that came off it was not the cold of winter but something older and more fundamental, a cold with intention in it, a cold that had been gathered and preserved for purposes that had nothing to do with weather.
He stood at its base and felt it against his face and thought: something on the other side of this is aware.
Castle Black was everything the stories made it and also smaller — a working fortress rather than a monument, its grandeur in what it held against rather than in any feature of its own construction. Benjen Stark was First Ranger by then, lean and spare as all the Night's Watch became, with the quality of the moors in his face. He greeted his nephew's ward with warmth that the Wall hadn't stripped from him, and they sat across a fire that first evening with the ease of two people who had always understood each other quickly.
"You're different," Benjen said, looking at him.
"I've been told."
"No. Different from before. Different from Ned." He turned his cup. "You were always unusual. Now you're something else."
He did not ask what that something else was. People rarely did when they could see it clearly enough. He changed the subject to the ranging he'd heard Benjen was planning, and listened carefully to what the First Ranger said about what lay north — not the known things, the wildlings and the cold and the old ruins, but the quality of it lately. The feeling.
"Something's changed beyond the Wall," Benjen said quietly. "In the last year or two. The rangers come back different. Some of them—" He stopped. Began again. "Some of them don't come back."
He sat with that. He already knew it. He had seen it in the Heart Tree's deep memory — the stirring, the long patience ending, the things that had been sleeping beginning to move again. He had been calculating timelines around it for two years.
He stayed three days. He spoke with the Lord Commander — a careful, probing conversation in which he asked questions as though curious and listened to the answers as though receiving new information. He walked the Wall's top in the grey morning cold and looked north into the white distance and felt the world's changed texture pressing against the backs of his eyes.
On the fourth night, when the Watch had settled into its nighttime rhythms and the torches burned low in their brackets, he packed the small pack he had prepared before leaving Winterfell and left his room without a sound.
He left no note. That was a choice. Notes could be read by the wrong people, and the truth of where he was going and why was not something he was ready to explain to anyone who might follow him or report him south.
He went north.
He had known where to go since the vision in the godswood nine years ago — the cave, the weirwood roots threading through stone, the dark blade and the darker egg. He had spent nine years refining the knowledge: cross-referencing the Heart Tree's spatial impressions with everything the texts told him about Bloodraven's ranging, about the geography north of the Wall, about the places where the old magic ran closest to the surface.
It took him three days to find it.
The cold was absolute — the kind that stops being a sensation and becomes a fundamental condition, like gravity or light. He moved through it with the methodical conservation of energy that years of morning running had made automatic, keeping his pace steady, keeping his heat expenditure calculated. He encountered nothing living. The silence north of the Wall was not the silence of an empty place but of a watched one, and he moved through it with the awareness of something being observed by things that had not yet decided whether to act.
He found the cave on the third morning, exactly where the visions had always told him it would be.
The weirwood roots were vast inside it — not the modest threading he had imagined but enormous pale structures that had grown through the rock over millennia, filling the cave's upper reaches like the ribs of some incomprehensible creature. The air was different in the cave: colder than outside, somehow, and carrying a quality he associated with the Heart Tree at its most active, the feeling of something listening with great patience.
Dark Sister was where he had always known she would be. The blade lay in a natural hollow in the wall at roughly chest height, held in place by weirwood roots that had grown around it slowly over decades. She was smaller than he had expected — a longsword, lean, the blade dark as a winter sky — and when he touched the hilt the sensation was not warmth but the opposite: recognition. A note struck at a frequency that he felt in his chest rather than his ears.
He took her carefully. The roots released without resistance.
The dragon egg was beside her. Wrapped in the remains of cloth long since rotted, it lay in a bed of weirwood roots that had, over the course of what must have been a century, woven themselves specifically around it. It was dark as deep water, veined with crimson that pulsed once as his hand neared it — a single, slow pulse, like a heart in very deep sleep.
He held it in both hands. It was warm. Genuinely warm, carrying heat from some source that had nothing to do with the cave's temperature.
He stood in the cave for a long time, in the silence of a place that had been waiting for exactly this, and then he put the egg into his pack with the care of someone handling something irreplaceable and began the walk back to the Wall.
He did not know that behind him, in the deep roots of the cave, something that had been watching through the trees for nine years was satisfied.