Dean's mind kicked into overdrive.
'Think. Think. Think.'
He ran through every detail he could remember about this scene. Stark would arrive any minute. The guard had left more than half an hour ago, and the Lord of Winterfell was not a man known for keeping people waiting. Whatever Dean was going to do, he needed to figure it out now.
After roughly a minute of frantic mental calculation, he had narrowed everything down to two options.
The first was to talk his way out.
Specifically, to use his knowledge of the past and future as leverage. Frame it carefully and reveal it as a divine blessing. A vision from the old gods. Something Ned Stark could not simply dismiss.
And the critical question was whether that angle could even work on a man like Eddard Stark.
Dean believed it could.
The Starks were not followers of the Faith of the Seven like much of the south. They worshipped the old gods, the nameless ancient powers of the north whose faces were carved into weirwood trees. This was not casual tradition or cultural habit. It ran bone deep in them.
Ned Stark himself prayed before the heart tree of Winterfell regularly, seeking counsel in silence the way a truly faithful man would. His children were raised the same way.
The northerners as a whole had maintained the old ways for thousands of years, long after the rest of Westeros abandoned them. They believed sincerely that the old gods watched through the eyes of every weirwood, that the forests themselves listened.
A man claiming to carry a message or a warning from those gods would not be laughed away. Not here. Not by these people.
It was thin. It was a gamble.
But it was workable.
The second option was the exchange ability built into Shadow Extraction.
Once every twenty-four hours, he could swap positions with a shadow soldier across a maximum distance of one mile. If he had a shadow soldier positioned far enough away, he could vanish from his current spot in an instant, leaving the soldier behind while he appeared a mile out, free of the shackles and out of reach before anyone could react.
However there was an issue with this path.
He had no shadow soldiers.
Shadow Extraction only worked on corpses he had personally killed. He was bound at the wrists and ankles, standing between two guards, surrounded by armed men who had not given him a single moment alone since his capture. There was no opportunity to kill anyone, no opportunity to extract anything, and absolutely no chance of performing any of it without everyone present watching him do it.
That option was dead before it even began.
Dean exhaled slowly through his nose.
'First option it is.'
The frustration of having only one real path forward, and that meant placing his life in someone else's hands and their decision, sat sourly in his chest. He had an ability that could make him genuinely formidable in this world, and right now it was completely useless to him.
He dropped his gaze toward the ground, staring at the ground while organizing his thoughts, trying to shape the words he would need to say to Ned Stark without sounding like a desperate madman.
'Huh?'
His eyes narrowed.
Something was moving in the grass near his feet.
A thin line of small dark shapes moved slowly through the grass. They were unhurried despite the cold. Dean stared at them for a moment before realizing what they were.
Black garden ants. Lasius niger, if he was thinking about it correctly. Common across the northern reaches of Westeros.
Stubborn little creatures that remained active well into the colder months as long as the ground had not yet fully frozen.
Ordinarily he would not have given them a second glance.
But Dean's eyes lit up slowly as he stared at them.
'My babies,' He nearly choked with joy and had to control himself to not scream out loud.
Controlling his emotions and subtly shifting his weight, he adjusted his right foot and brought it down firmly on the ants.
A flicker of guilt passed through him.
'Why do I even feel bad about this,' he thought, genuinely puzzled at himself. 'They're ants.'
The guilt remained anyway.
Two of the guards glanced over at the small movement. Dean looked up and gave them an easy, unbothered smile.
"Ants," he said simply, nodding downward. "Were trying to get into my robes."
The guards stared at him for a moment with the flat, unimpressed expressions of men who had escorted far more troublesome prisoners than this. Then they looked away, completely disinterested.
Dean exhaled and casually pressed his foot down once more, confirming the result.
He looked down.
The neat line of ants was broken. Scattered. Seven or eight small bodies lay completely still in the wet grass, no longer moving.
The guilt came again, however he ignored it and continued with the next step.
'Arise.'
He gave the command quietly inside his mind, keeping his expression neutral and his posture unchanged.
What followed was so small that Dean almost missed it himself. No dramatic eruption of dark energy. No visible surge of power. Just the faintest, barely perceptible tremor at ground level, so subtle it was less than the disturbance a falling leaf would make. Five tiny shadows peeled upward from five small bodies and stood still, waiting.
Shadow ant soldiers.
Dean looked down at them for a brief moment.
He could feel their presence without even looking at them. And he understood instinctively, through whatever information the transmigration had wired into the back of his brain, that they would follow any instruction he gave them. Simple or complex. It did not matter to them.
He organized his thoughts fast and began issuing orders.
He sent one of them beyond the hill where fog covered the area completely as it was the best place to escape quietly.
However they were still ants. Becoming shadow soldiers didn't change their physiology afterall.
With their small legs and slow pace, he had no idea about how far they would get in a short amount of time. But the exchange ability needed a destination, and a destination even two hundred meters away was better than nothing. He wanted options. He was keeping every door open that he could.
He sent the second one to the place where the horses of these guards were parked
As for the other two, he directed them carefully toward the guards holding him on either side. Low to the ground, hidden beneath the grass, slipping toward the boots of the men who had no idea anything was happening near their feet.
The last one he sent up the slope.
The terrain was divided into two natural levels. Dean stood on the lower ground with seven guards around him. Two guards gripped his arms to keep him from moving. Up the hill, five more guards waited near the execution spot where everything had already been prepared.
The last ant after receiving the commands, moved towards that location.
Dean straightened up and returned his gaze forward, while on inside he focused on the ants who were zooming at maximum speed towards their respective destinations.
To anyone watching, he looked like a bound deserter standing quietly in the cold who was waiting for the lord who would pass judgment on him to arrive.
Inside, he was already moving pieces across a board that none of them could see.
Then a distant sound reached his ears.
Multiple hooves pounding on the ground.
The guards around him straightened almost in unison. The two gripping his arms tightened their hold slightly without thinking about it. A reflex of men snapping back to formality in the presence of their lord.
A few straightened while others looked on the direction of the sound.
Dean raised his head.
Through the light fog he could see several riders approaching.
And at the front rode a stern man in dark armor.
Eddard Stark.
The man who would decide whether Dean lived or died.
☩ ───── End of Chapter ───── ☩
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