Integration took time.
Not because the mercenary lacked the power to dominate the system.
But because he refused to.
For months he remained quiet within the roots of the great Weirwood tree, slowly weaving his consciousness into the ancient network that formed the spiritual backbone of Planetos.
The Old Gods of the Forest were not a singular mind.
They were thousands.
Tens of thousands.
Greenseers of the Children of the Forest.
A handful of powerful greenseers among the First Men.
And countless lesser spirits bound to the trees through ancient rituals.
Each mind was a fragment.
Together they formed a slow, patient intelligence.
It was not a god.
But it was close enough for mortals.
The mercenary moved through the system like a shadow among roots.
Careful.
Observant.
Learning the pathways.
The weirwoods connected to one another through a vast underground web of living wood and magic.
Every carved face was a window.
Every root a nerve.
Every leaf a whisper.
Through them, he could see nearly everything.
The forests of Westeros.
The wild plains of Essos.
Even distant lands most humans had never seen.
The deeper he explored the network, the more something remarkable became clear.
The weirwoods did not only exist in Westeros.
They had once covered the entire world.
Fragments of the system still remained scattered across distant continents.
Even now, faint echoes stretched as far as the jungles of Sothoryos and the shadowed lands of the east.
The realization came suddenly.
This network spans the entire planet.
Not perfectly.
There were gaps.
Regions where the weirwood roots could not reach.
But the scale was undeniable.
The mercenary pushed deeper.
Following those broken pathways.
Eventually he discovered where the network ended.
Two regions stood outside its reach.
The first lay across the far southern lands of Ulthos.
Most of its northern interior was cut off.
Not destroyed.
Simply… corrupted.
The roots recoiled from the soil itself.
The second region was far worse.
In the distant east stood the cursed lands surrounding Asshai and the dead ruins of Stygai.
There the weirwood network stopped entirely.
As if something had poisoned the very fabric of the land.
Even the ancient greenseer spirits avoided that direction.
Memories hidden within the roots revealed the cause.
Long ago—long before recorded human history—a magical catastrophe had destroyed a civilization of unimaginable power.
The legendary Empire of the Dawn.
Whatever had happened there had scarred the world so deeply that even the ancient trees refused to grow near it.
The mercenary found that fascinating.
Because disasters powerful enough to poison an entire continent were rarely simple accidents.
The weirwood network held more than geography.
It held memory.
Greenseers could look through the trees and animals of the present.
But the older spirits had something even more valuable.
The past.
Every greenseer who had died within the roots had left behind fragments of memory.
Visions.
Experiences.
Centuries of observation.
Once the mercenary learned how to navigate the network properly, those memories unfolded before him like a vast living archive.
He spent weeks exploring them.
Then months.
Time mattered little within the roots.
The first visions took him further back than human civilization.
Back to an age when the world was young.
Before the rise of the First Men.
Before the great kingdoms of men.
Back to an era ruled by older races.
The Children of the Forest were not alone in those ancient days.
They had shared the world with others.
One of the earliest memories revealed something moving through the deepest oceans.
A vast underwater civilization.
Cities carved from coral and black stone.
Strange beings with pale skin and fish-like features.
The ancient race known in scattered legends as the Deep Ones.
The weirwood spirits remembered them clearly.
They had traded knowledge with the Children long ago.
Before vanishing beneath the waves.
The mercenary stored that information carefully.
Because ancient races rarely disappeared completely.
Another vision followed.
A night sky filled with fire.
Thousands of blazing streaks crossing the heavens.
Meteorites.
But these were not ordinary stones.
Something traveled with them.
Something alien.
Something that did not belong to this world.
The greenseer memories spoke of beings that arrived inside those falling stars.
Entities so strange that even the Children of the Forest struggled to understand them.
Some of those beings were worshiped by primitive humans as outer gods.
Others simply vanished into the wilderness.
The mercenary considered that carefully.
Because he knew too well that the omniverse was full of entities that used meteor impacts as transportation.
Some benevolent.
Many not.
It seemed Planetos had never been isolated from the wider cosmos.
The next revelation surprised him even more.
The beings humans would one day call the Others had not always been enemies.
The oldest greenseer memories showed them walking openly through northern forests.
Tall.
Pale.
Beautiful in an unnatural way.
Creatures of living ice.
They spoke with the Children of the Forest.
Sometimes they even cooperated.
There were exchanges of knowledge.
Agreements.
Peace.
But something had changed them.
Something later.
Something darker.
The mercenary sensed the influence immediately.
The corruption of a greater power.
A presence humans would eventually call the Great Other.
Before that corruption, the Others had been something closer to a separate race of elemental spirits.
And in rare cases…
They had even intermingled with humanity.
One ancient memory showed a union between a human chieftain and an ice-born woman.
Their descendants carried strange traits.
Cold resistance.
Silver eyes.
Dreams of winter.
The mercenary recognized the name connected to those bloodlines.
House Stark.
He found that extremely interesting.
As he continued exploring the memories, famous figures from ancient legends appeared.
Not myths.
Real people.
He witnessed a sorcerer battling shadow creatures in a forgotten age.
A man remembered by the House Dayne as their distant ancestor.
The mysterious Eldric Shadowchaser.
Another vision revealed a towering figure overseeing massive construction along the northern frontier.
A man whose name would become legend.
Brandon the Builder.
The mercenary watched as the foundations of The Wall rose under his direction.
Magic.
Stone.
Ice.
And the assistance of the Children of the Forest.
He also saw the clever tricks of Lann the Clever, the wanderings of Garth Greenhand, and countless other legendary figures whose stories had survived thousands of years.
History was rarely as simple as songs claimed.
But the core truths were still there.
Eventually the visions reached a darker chapter.
The fall of the Empire of the Dawn.
The mercenary watched through greenseer memories as a terrible betrayal unfolded.
The rightful ruler of the empire was the Amethyst Empress.
A queen said to possess immense magical power.
Her brother, however, coveted the throne.
The man remembered as the Bloodstone Emperor.
The visions showed his rebellion.
The murder of the empress.
And the dark rituals that followed.
Forbidden magic.
Human sacrifice.
Worship of strange black stones fallen from the sky.
Those acts poisoned the world.
The mercenary watched the sky darken.
Seasons collapse.
Cold creeping across continents.
The first Long Night had begun.
He sensed again the influence of something beyond the world.
Something feeding on the chaos.
But the greenseer memories ended before revealing exactly what that presence had been.
Still, the consequences were clear.
The empire collapsed.
Its people scattered.
Some fled west.
Others east.
And among those refugees were the ancestors of a civilization that would one day dominate the world.
The final visions focused on a remote volcanic peninsula in Essos.
A harsh land where simple shepherd tribes struggled to survive.
This was early Valyria.
The mercenary watched as refugees from the fallen Empire of the Dawn arrived there.
Among them were survivors carrying the bloodline of the slain Amethyst Empress.
Their descendants would become the dragonlords.
But they did not start that way.
At first they were simple people.
Shepherds.
Farmers.
Nomads.
Then they discovered the dragons living within the volcanoes.
And everything changed.
The mercenary watched the rise of blood magic rituals.
Ancient spells designed to fuse human blood with dragonfire.
Over generations, the transformation took hold.
The dragonlords were born.
Not entirely human.
Something closer to dragonkin.
Forty great families rose to power.
Among them, one name would survive longer than the rest.
House Targaryen.
The mercenary also saw the darker side of their civilization.
Slavery.
Conquest.
Cruelty.
The Valyrian Freehold spread across Essos, enslaving entire nations.
Power bred arrogance.
Arrogance bred corruption.
Eventually that corruption would trigger the Doom of Valyria.
But that moment had not arrived yet.
It was still fifty years away.
After months of exploration, the mercenary finally withdrew from the deeper layers of the weirwood network.
His consciousness slowly condensed back into the roots of the heart tree beyond The Wall.
The knowledge he had gained was immense.
But one conclusion stood above everything else.
Bloodlines mattered.
They carried echoes of ancient powers.
And two families possessed the strongest connections to the forces shaping this world.
The first was House Stark.
Descendants of the First Men.
Greenseer heritage.
Possible ancestral ties to the Others.
And deep connections to the weirwood network.
The second was House Targaryen.
Dragonlord blood.
Descendants of the Amethyst Empress.
Heirs to the magical legacy of the Empire of the Dawn.
Ice and fire.
Winter and dragonflame.
Greenseer magic and blood sorcery.
The combination would create a body capable of containing the monstrous soul he carried.
The mercenary felt a quiet satisfaction as the plan solidified.
His path was clear now.
He slowly withdrew from the weirwood network.
The whispers of the Old Gods of the Forest fading behind him.
The frozen forests beyond The Wall stretched silently beneath the night sky.
And somewhere far to the south, in the distant volcanic lands of Valyria, the bloodline he required was waiting.
All that remained now…
Was to claim it.