Jon carried on following the silent call.
Despite his expectations that the tunnel would narrow, it stayed the same width, although the walls were becoming less smooth. There were gashes in the walls, as though something enormous and inhuman had carved out this final stretch of the tunnel. And it was the last stretch. He could feel it, somewhere deep within.
The tugging was becoming harder, something close to a physical pain, even as the relief kept battering him like a promise about to be fulfilled. His fingers trailed along the grooves of the walls while the torch cast many-coloured shadows and flashes of light around him. Beneath his feet, small holes in the floor became visible, breathing steam and heat around him. Through them, he heard a faraway, contented rumble, as though from an enormous boiling pot of soup.
The tunnel bent sharply, and Jon followed the turn. A sudden pain shot through his hand and he pulled it from the wall immediately, hissing. A sharp piece of obsidian jutted from the rock beside him. Blood welled from a second cut along the palm of his hand, deeper than the mere scratch he'd managed to get himself from his meat knife at dinner. He gritted his teeth, reached down to wipe the blood on his breeches, and kept going. The tunnel bent again, and when Jon came around the curve, he was faced with a dead end.
The tunnel widened into a cave, rounded oddly and still riddled with those inhuman grooves, like wounds in the rock face. There was a strange formation at the end, like a bird's nest made all from sharp rocks. More holes opened in the floor here, and steam and fuming gases obscured his view. He carefully sidestepped them as he made his way to the nest-like structure. He climbed onto it and sat down gingerly, eyes riveted by the rocks in the centre of the would-be nest. Four strangely shaped stones lay there. They were like chicken eggs, but far larger, coloured as brightly as the caches of obsidian he had passed. They were strangely structured, as though the rocks themselves wore scales.
The tugging was nearly unbearable.
Jon did not stop to think, simply followed the foreign instinct that bid him reach out and touch. The blood of his open wound smeared along the sharp scales of the oval stones as he traced each of them. Strangely, the blood seemed to remain for only a moment before vanishing, as though the rocks themselves were gobbling it up. Somewhere in the back of his head, his good sense was screaming at him.
What was he doing here, cutting himself and likely getting the wound infected? As undignified as it was, he should be going straight to the maester, should be getting stitches and ointment and going to bed. It had to be late by now, closer to dawn than nightfall. He was not sure he had ever gone this deep before. He took a deep breath, hoping to clear his head despite the sulphurous fumes around him, and got back to his feet. He turned to leave.
His feet refused to follow his command.
The tugging in the pit of his belly picked up, becoming as painful as if it were his own stomach and not merely his palm he had cut open. He turned back to the rocks, and some unnameable instinct told him he could not leave them. Groaning, Jon unlatched his cloak and fashioned it into a satchel. Then he gathered up the rocks and put them inside, smearing more blood on their unnaturally warm, living, surfaces, and more dirt in his wound. Gritting his teeth, he heaved the satchel over his shoulder and began the slow, arduous trek back to the surface.
He could not say why he stopped to break off the piece of bright red obsidian he had cut himself on, but it ended up in his satchel as well. That was the only part of his return trek he remembered.
The next thing he knew, he was back in his chambers, sitting before the fire with the oval stones spread out in front of him. They all felt so terribly cold, outside of the heat of the catacombs. Rocks should be cold, he reminded himself, but somehow that did not seem to matter.
Something inside him cried out in protest at the cold, screamed wrongwrongwrong. So one by one, he picked the stones up and placed them in the fireplace before stoking the fire up as high as he could, never mind that he had never had much use for the fireplace at all. After growing up in the North, Dragonstone had always seemed plenty hot to him, but he needed to heat the rocks, come what may.
You are going insane, a sensible corner of his mind screamed. Jon ignored it, and turned away from the rocks, and finally his mind felt like his own again. He glanced down at his palm, grimacing at the look of the wound there. It was not quite as deep as he had feared, but certainly deep enough, and still oozing blood. Bits of rock and dirt were crusted in it. He winced, clenched his hand shut before quickly opening it back up when a stab of pain changed his mind. Already embarrassed at the knowledge of the lecture he was about to receive, he set off to see Cressen and have it cleaned up.
Even though he knew what a stupid idea it was, the tug in his gut would not be ignored, and the next evening, he stretched his hand in such a way that he knew he would break his stitches and make himself bleed again. He smeared the blood over the rocks once more, and sighed at the relief it brought, before he went to Maester Cressen to be cleaned up all over again. Three nights later, he knew he would no longer be able to come up with excuses for reopening the same wound. Besides, it was interfering with his swordplay.
Carefully, he cut open his other forearm. Instead of smearing the blood, he gingerly dripped it down upon the stones, watching at steam rose where each drop hit, before bandaging himself up and going to bed.
He never stopped to realise that the call to the catacombs that had lasted as long as he had been on Dragonstone had finally ceased.