Nightfort | 278 AC
The previous night's fire turned to ash under the pale light of dawn.
Nella was already on her feet, tying bundles and organizing the women before most had opened their eyes. Near the kitchen hearth, Kevin boiled strips of meat over the embers. The smell of fat and dried herbs spread through the main hall. Perseus entered the castle stomping his boots, his shoulders and bearskin covered by a thick layer of fresh snow.
I chewed on a tough piece of meat, watching Nella. Tension marked the posture of her shoulders. Her fingers squeezed the ropes with unnecessary force. The north of the Wall was the only home those women knew, and even though Craster was a wretched bastard, his roof offered a corrupted form of security. The South was a blind territory, inhabited by men who considered the Free Folk mortal enemies.
I stood and walked over to her. I stopped by her side. She let go of the rope and rubbed her hands to ward off the cold. I held her hands between mine.
"Rest easy," I said, looking straight into her eyes. "Follow the laws of men and the Old Gods, listen to my father's counsel, and work hard. Nothing will happen to you. From the moment I brought you all with me, you are under my protection."
She closed her eyes. Her trembling breath escaped through her nose, condensing in the freezing air. Nella nodded.
"Thank you for everything. We never thanked you properly," she said, her voice coming out hoarse as her fingers squeezed mine back. "On behalf of all of us, we thank you and your friends for saving us from that monster and giving the children a future. Just not being north of the Wall is already a relief." A quick, unpracticed smile appeared at the corner of her mouth.
I nodded and returned the smile.
"Belzakar and Morghaz will go with you to Winterfell," I said quieter, slowly releasing her hands. "My father is already aware. When you arrive, he will find a place for all of you to stay while things are sorted out."
Nella agreed with a nod. There were no more questions to ask.
I stepped away and went to Morghaz. He was adjusting the leather straps of a pack saddle with the concentration of a man who prefers work over talk. I placed a folded paper in his hand.
"When you reach Winterfell, buy these items," I instructed, folding his dark fingers over the paper. "Tell the blacksmith to follow the instructions to the letter. Return to the Nightfort when you're done. I believe we will still be here; otherwise, I will send word."
Morghaz nodded and extended his forearm. The grip was dry and rigid. He tucked the paper inside his jacket without replying.
"Be careful on the road," I said, turning away.
Belzakar was a few steps ahead, finishing the knot on the last horse's baggage. I approached and gripped his arm.
"Take care of them," I ordered.
"Always," he answered, without taking his eyes off the rope.
I stood near the central well of the Nightfort. The women and children formed a long, slow line between the two spearmen. The column moved toward the southern trail, slowly shrinking against the white vastness. The last silhouette disappeared among the dead pines, and the wind reclaimed the courtyard.
Fenrir sat by my side until the end. When I turned on my heels to go inside, he followed me.
I found Kevin and Perseus near the ruined stables.
"We'll stay here for a few days," I announced, stopping before them. "We need meat. Hunt."
Kevin looked up at the broken towers of the Nightfort with the expression of a man weighing a bad bet. "You know this place is cursed, right?"
"Hunt," I repeated, keeping my voice flat and leaving no room for debate.
Kevin snorted and walked off. He and Perseus mounted up and rode through the gates. I was left alone with Fenrir and Hela.
'Hard to imagine this was once the main castle of the Night's Watch. It's more like a castle out of Bram Stoker's books than anything else.'
The quality of the silence in the cellars was oppressive. The footsteps echoed wrongly, distorted by the cracked vaults. The fire Kevin had lit in the main hall burned in the center, but the heat failed to reach the stone walls. Fenrir stopped dead in front of certain subterranean passages. The wolf flattened his ears against his skull, the fur on his nape bristling, and refused to take a single step into the dark.
For the entire first week, I studied the Wall.
The fissure was located in a stretch of the northern wall, in an isolated section. The ice there had an opaque hue. The floor markings weren't in the exact spot I had seen in the cave vision. Time had shifted everything a few meters, changed the angles, and swallowed the contours beneath accumulated ice, but the anomaly was rooted in the same general area.
Touching the structure barehanded was a mistake I only made once.
The cold pierced my skin before any muscular reflex could make me pull back. A dense, pulsating cold, rhythmic like the slow breathing of a sick beast. The smell hit my face a second later. A stench heavy with miasma, the same putrid exhalation of necromancy, the invasive texture of watching a corpse being devoured by maggots. My stomach churned, forcing an acidic taste to the base of my throat.
I pulled my hand back. I stared at my purpling fingers for a moment.
The exposed fissure was minimal. A diagonal crack perhaps a handspan wide between two massive foundation blocks. The original builders had sealed the gap with ancient runes, but the corrosive moisture had reduced the symbols to mere faded sketches. What escaped from it was invisible, a pressure that swelled and receded. Something on the other side was pushing against the boundary.
I brought my face closer to the stone to gauge the depth of the crack.
A woman was watching through the opening.
Her skin was white as dead snow, smooth and devoid of any color. Her eyes shone with the deep blue of the ancient ice buried beneath the Wall. They didn't blink. They didn't look away. They merely stared at me through the small fissure, silent and empty.
She was millimeters from the ice. Waiting on the other side of the wall. Waiting.
The air grew thick in the cellar, weighing heavily on my lungs. The cold increased brutally around the block, stinging the bones in my face. A rasping, measured sound leaked from within, the wet friction of a drawn breath.
The woman smiled.
The urge to vomit surged up my throat violently. I scrambled back roughly, my boots slipping on the wet stone. I slammed my back against the tunnel wall, my chest pulling in air with force while my fingers gripped the hilt of the Valyrian steel dagger.
The fissure was still there. Just a black crack.
I examined the faded runes over the following days, scraping the surface frost without ever bringing my face near the ice again.
The blocks still bore the scars of the original carvings. The grooves in the stone revealed the logic. The original seal had been laid in three layers: the first structural, binding the stone; the second exclusionary, preventing passage; the third anchoring, using blood to lock the first two in place. The third had failed. Without the blood sustaining it, the other two had slowly given way, like a tent without pegs.
'Damned necromancy.'
On the seventh day, I heard footsteps behind me. Too light to be Kevin or Perseus.
"Any discoveries, young one?" asked a familiar voice.
I spun on my heels. Leaf stood ten feet away. Her hands were hidden inside her cloak. Her golden eyes reflected the gray of the stone. Behind her, Ash kept her body weight leaning on a staff, motionless and silent.
"How long have you been here?" I asked, facing the Child of the Forest.
"Long enough." Leaf stepped closer slowly, her eyes scanning the blocks, the worn runes, the diagonal crack. "You found the problem."
"I found the problem six days ago," I replied, pointing a finger along a rune line without touching the ice. "I spent the other five figuring out why the obvious solution wouldn't work."
"And?" she prompted, blinking slowly.
"The original seal used blood as an anchor. Without it, nothing holds. I can clean the corrupted runes and rewrite the layers on the clean stone, but without the anchor, the work will unravel before it's finished. Blood acts as mortar for the spell." I turned my face to her. "If we clean the stone, rewrite the three layers, and seal it with blood, the fissure closes."
Leaf remained quiet for a long moment.
"The price," she said, her voice sounding deeper.
"I know the price," I affirmed, keeping my arms steady at my sides.
"Then you know common blood does not anchor what was built here." The golden eyes didn't blink. "To hold the third layer, it requires the blood of kings."
"Then we don't have a problem," I replied immediately. "You told me yourselves I carry the blood of three lineages."
I crossed my arms. Silence descended upon the cellar.
"The magic here is ancient and wild," Leaf warned, taking a short step forward. "My ancestors and yours forged it millennia ago. Magic is a blade without a hilt. The price might be too high even for your blood. You could die."
"The fissure is small. The work will exhaust me, but it won't kill me." I looked back at the crack and the black ice. "The miasma leaking from here is enough to corrupt everything within a radius of days of marching. Someone has to do it."
Leaf stood still for another moment. Then she pulled her hands from her cloak. The obsidian dagger appeared tucked into her belt.
"Sealing the fissure won't clear the air immediately," Leaf said in a raspy voice. "The miasma will require time to dissipate completely."
"I thought the same thing. That's why I've been working on a plan," I explained, pointing to the dark roots in the ceiling. "When water gets contaminated, we filter it through sand, charcoal, and stone. Each layer removes part of the corruption until something pure remains. The heart trees do the same. The roots drink from the earth. The faces watch. The wood absorbs memories, blood, pain, and magic. If planted in the right spots, connected by the deep ancient lines beneath the North, they can act as filters."
Leaf frowned. "Filters?" she asked, the word sounding foreign in her mouth.
"With the fissure sealed, the miasma would stagnate in the air, but the heart trees would suck it in, filtering the rot. The climate won't change overnight, but it will be fast enough to normalize in the coming years."
"An interesting theory. Perhaps it will work. But to carve the faces, you will need my help." Leaf murmured something low to Ash in the True Tongue, then turned her eyes back to me. "We will help you, as we promised." Her tone became practical again. "Furthermore, I will divide the price of the fissure with you. My blood added to yours will reduce the exhaustion. The work will remain within what we both can endure."
"You don't need to do that," I said, watching her hand rest near the dagger.
"I know." Leaf tucked her hands back into her cloak of pinned leaves. "When do we begin?"
It took another day of preparation.
Ash cleaned the blocks with a mixture of ash and weirwood sap, dissolving the accumulated ice and the wear of centuries, layer by layer. The original stone beneath the grime reappeared. The corrupted runes were scraped away with precision, preserving the outline to guide the spell.
When the surface was clean, we began to write.
Leaf dictated in the True Tongue, and I traced. The first layer bound the intention to the block. The second, exclusionary, built in three passes over the first. The third remained empty, waiting.
I looked at Leaf. She already gripped the obsidian.
I closed my hand around the blade of the Valyrian steel dagger and pulled. The cut was quick and clean across my left palm. Leaf slid the obsidian across the four fingers of her own hand, opening a dry, precise gash.
We began to recite.
The True Tongue sounded distorted in the vaulted cellars of the Nightfort. The words struck the stones and returned slightly altered, as if the Wall were answering. We ran our warm blood through the grooves of the third layer together. The movement was slow and deliberate, following the angle of each rune without interrupting the chant.
The stone drank the blood.
The ice around the fissure began to melt, water running down the rune channels as if following an ancient riverbed. The crack narrowed. Narrowed further. Then it closed. The two massive blocks settled against each other with a low thud that came from the bottom of the foundation.
I stood still, breathing loudly. Exhaustion pulled at the muscles in my legs, but I didn't buckle my knees.
I extended my left hand and pressed my clean fingers against the Wall.
Only cold. The stone was cold the way stone should be cold. The macabre breathing had stopped. The miasma pouring through the fissure vanished. Only ice, silence, and the ancient weight of the Wall operating as it should remained.
"Looks like it worked," I told Leaf, panting.
"Yes." She stepped closer and pressed the palm of her four fingers against the block. She stood like that for a moment. Then she withdrew her hand. "Yes."
A caw echoed from the floor above.
I looked up. Atop a rotting wooden beam that still held near the stairs, a massive raven was perched. Its feathers bore a metallic sheen. It possessed three eyes, the middle one red and quiet as an ember.
I held its gaze. The vapor of my breath rose in the freezing air.
"Brynden," I said low, without taking my eyes off the bird. "Looks like we did it."
The raven tilted its head. It evaluated the closed fissure with its red eye. It flapped its broad wings and vanished into the shadows of the ruins above.
"The fissure is sealed. What is the next step?" Leaf asked, wiping the obsidian blade.
"I'll finish the rune diagram we'll use for the filters," I replied, adjusting my gloves over my aching hands. "In the meantime, do what must be done."
Leaf nodded.
"Ash and I will head south," she concluded, turning her back. "There are faces that need to be carved into the weirwoods."
More than a moon passed. Time at the Nightfort crawled, marked only by the creeping frost on the walls and the progress of my studies. I had finished the rune diagrams, copying the exact matrices onto leather parchments. The fissure remained closed. The pulsation of the miasma had vanished completely.
The sound of hooves breaking the snow crust in the courtyard cut through the afternoon silence.
I walked to the kitchen exit. Morghaz and Belzakar rode through the ruined gates. The horses' flanks were caked in a thick layer of frozen sweat.
"The group arrived safely," Belzakar said, dismounting and tying the reins to the post. "Lord Stark granted space in the Winter Town. He provided some work in the castle and the rest in the village."
Morghaz walked to the packhorse and untied a small wooden box, reinforced with iron corners. He handed it to me.
"The blacksmith in Winterfell cursed for three days," Morghaz said, shaking his head. "He told me that if I wanted to use a blade this small, I should have ordered a sewing needle."
I opened the wooden lid. Inside lay a scalpel forged from polished steel, forceps, a sort of silver hook, and some silk threads.
"Thank you, Morghaz," I said, and snapped the latch shut.
Kevin emerged from the dark corridor carrying his weirwood bow. "Does this mean we're leaving?" He looked up at the black stone ceiling. "I started hearing footsteps on the upper floors last night. My patience for hunting ghosts has run out."
"At dawn," I ordered, tucking the box under my arm. "Belzakar and Morghaz need to rest from the road. Tomorrow we ride for Castle Black."
The Nightfort was left behind with the sunrise.