Chapter II.1 - Sorry, Drama, Your Dragon’s not in this Castle Either
Karmic Acumen
Well-known member
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Chapter II.1: Sorry, Drama, Your Dragon’s not in this Castle Either
THE ONE-EYED RAVEN
“-. Winter’s Repast .-“
Hearken, young man! Every act is of magic. On Wish is borne Will, and by Will is born Power!
Hearken, too, the wants of the powerless! By guile and treachery do the strong bow to the weak and cowardly!
Hearken the wind through leaves, the rain on water, the sound of stones in a brook, the songs as pure as winter air. Know the cant that has survived the ages since the elder days, past extinction unsought and undeserved of all the races of land and mer that came before mankind. Do you know the words? Hear the sorrow? Of course not! They do not mourn for you, why should they?
Heed instead the songs of your people! Men do not sing the songs of nature. Nature is brutal, savage, merciless, a chaos whose only balance is of killer and prey. The only peace and harmony is that of dust and corpses, and even they are moved and ripped apart sooner or later. By Wish and Will and Power did man surpass this crucible. By man’s own grace do you walk the earth while farms and villages and orchards sprout up behind you. By their blood and sweat and hopes for you did your forebears master creation and bring light and love to the world. Will you look them now askance? Why should you? Men make their own songs, and they are no slouches with rhythm!
“Lord Stark, may I cut in?” Maester Mullin says. Heady. Frustrated. Personally offended as you continue to fall short in the arts of war. “There are a few words, I think, the Young Lord needs to heed.”
“Heed, heed, heed!” The rascals of the deep boast about ravens talking their language, but man’s words work just fine.
“Well that’s not a sign at all,” says you.
Do not eye me so sorely, Brandon Stark. You, who fail to recognize my nature even now, confounded as you are by your own glory. I am not the only one half-blind. But since it wasn’t so long ago you were bisected, all for blasting the feathers off the liar that got the better of those who got the better of me, I forgive you. That oversoul you crafted for yourself out of the corpses of your enemies is a fine garment at least. A shame about what happened after, when you victoriously bestrode the sky and rashly tried to reach for the moon. Cassel burns for it even now, you know. A poor reward for heeding our visions and making his own end to stand guard from this side. What will you say of that when you face me at last, I wonder? Will you ever?
“Very well,” says the lord to the man. “Have at him.”
Mullin kneels down before you, takes your hands in his and speaks only the truth. “You’re being stupid.”
“…Stupid, stupid, stupid!” Don’t you eye me so sorely either, lord. It’s your own mind I’m plying.
“You invent crafts, create sciences, you dream whole worlds in your mind. And somehow you’ve decided this means you must be at best mediocre in the martial arts. You believe no man can be exceptional in everything, and since you are exceptional in everything but this, then it must be this you can’t possibly excel in. Isn’t that right?”
… Caw?
“My Lord Brandon,” Mullin tells you. “Repeat after me: I can excel in anything.”
“… I can excel in anything.”
“I can excel in everything.”
“I can excel in everything.”
“I will excel in everything.”
“I will excel in everything.”
… So it is not vainglory? Do your dreams and visions span so widely? Do they teach you falsehoods and untruths after all, as they do for others? Do not wallow in self-deception when the world already tries to shove so many down your throat!
“… I can excel in everything,” you say as if it this is some wondrous revelation, you ridiculous boy!
Sparring goes no better than before of course, but it’s not a complete disaster for your fist mock fight with someone other than your lord father. The ancients only know what you meant with that last display though.
“There was something there,” Mullin says as you try not to collapse from pain. “A glimpse of something that might have been a maneuver. Trying to hook my blade in the guard?”
“Go on,” you groan, holding your side. “Tell me how you really feel.”
“So you do have visions of this as well.”
“There’s no end to my visions,” you grouse. “Unfortunately, these visions aren’t visions where I live the visions.”
Good grief, young man, are you trying not to make sense? At times I wish I knew what goes on in your mind, but then I remember why your forebears barred you from the Greendream and am glad to instead have my thoughts borne by your father. Alas for the headaches you’ll give him and me both when your shorthairs start sprouting.
Mullin regards you thoughtfully. “I think, Young Lord, that it’s time I start dreaming these dreams of yours.”
So he dreams. And learns. Masters everything you ever dreamed of armed and unarmed combat within days of each vision and creates entirely new forms of battle to wield and prove and teach to you in turn. You and everyone else. Lord Rickard of House Stark begins to lose in the yard. Then he loses more than he wins. Then he never wins against Mullin again. Neither does anyone else. Even all of them one after the other. Jon Umber is the only one with any inkling of hope, but he’s not there yet. No yet. Teams against one become a regular display once again.
Behold, young man, this peerless warrior you’ve gathered under you. Look, as well, to all these other men and women. These maidens and mothers, these sons and fathers, these knights of the arms and of the mind. Behold your fellow heirs, even, as they all choose to follow suit awake and asleep. How many of your dreams would lie fallow without them?
Behold, young man, the true nature of Power. Something mightier than each man alone, a combination of your efforts, a great chain of art and craft that unites you all. But it is only when you struggle for your own aspirations that the chain pulls you in the right direction. The chain is too powerful and too mysterious for anyone to guide alone. Any one ruler, any one temple, any god who tells you different either has his hand in your pocket or a dagger at your throat.
Behold, that you don’t slip down the same slope! Do you understand the faith they place in you? The boundless breadth of their admiration? What will you do with it? Do you know what it means that even the immortal in your midst bows his head and requests your help? Of course you don’t. You’re not the only one who can deceive you, especially when the one fooling you has fooled himself so totally. Even so, he pays forward before requesting recompense.
“His mind is as calm and open as I can make it,” Marwyn tells you while checking to make sure that his potions have well and truly taken hold. “Are you sure you wish to proceed, Young Master?”
Ben Umber. Such a large and mighty and helpless giant of a man. What do you feel having him so utterly in your power, I wonder? What passes through your mind, to have the father and brother praying on the other side of the land, to have the other brother and the son watch while you hold in your hands their hopes and yearning and desperation?
“Can’t be anywhere near as confusing as doing it to someone who’s dying.” Your vestment of stars and eyes unfurls around you. “Besides, putting my mind back together is the first trick I learned.”
A trick on yourself is far different than a trick on someone else. You skirt mysteries that you still cannot grasp. Not yet. You would waste the greatest riches of your hoard and still take months to puzzle, off and on, if you succeed at all. You overstep and complicate when the solution is right in your face. You’ve bestowed the green tears upon dozens of ravens. Weaved them. Cultivated them to your purposes. Already they span the land, each a guide to dying souls to lead them on and gather their last embers in your name. By the tenth of them I didn’t even have to blend with their minds to imprint the proper concurrence and instincts. Think you that is a small achievement? Or do you worry you won’t tell the right balance, beast to man, man to beast?
Rejoice, young man. In this, I will help you.
Claws work the window as well as ever. A nesting raven soars after me right after. In her claws comes her oldest, strongest chick. Its mind is young. Unformed. Malleable. I plop him on the chest of the giant and wait, a small tuft of black feathers. Your face shifts in epiphany. You understand, don’t you? You stare through the chick’s eyes right at me. Do you see me? Will you confront me now? Will you balk at sacrificing one nestling when your cloak is made of the stuff of a thousand crows? Your bloodline has sacrificed that and more. Endures sacrifices worse than what even your father ever contemplated. The proof lies in your family’s greatest symbol of office. An infant’s soul vests the sword of your forebears, murdered right out the womb. I know you know. It was one of the first things you traced for imprints of history, after you stitched your mind back together right onto your spirit with threads made of hindsight.
You don’t balk.
Ben Umber awakens to an armful of crying son, a bursting bladder, and a ravenous hunger for corn.
“Corn! Corn! Corn!” caws his raven half.
Oh dear. Might have left a bit more of myself than I planned in there.
Ah well, with how much power I’ve gained from being the bridge for so much of your sorcery, it’s only fair. Besides, it can only be to the good, I’m sure. I am, reasonably speaking, quite brilliant if I do say so myself. Besides, this way there is no room to poke around for oathbreakers.
“You made me a birdbrain,” the big man tells you, hugging his sobbing son that’s just as big as him while his brother weeps over the both of them at his bedside. “Ben Birdbrain, that’s what they’ll call me.”
“Pa,” Jon Umber blubbers in his father’s big, hulky bosom. “Pa. Pa!”
“A raven’s brain is easily worth half a man’s, and they live about as long as we do.” You unravel yourself from him, holding the croaking buttress of the man’s mind in the palm of your hand. Did you leave any part of yourself as well? Did you claim any part of him? “Keep your other half safe and fed, hmm?”
Ben Umber tears up. “My lord…”
Rejoice, young man. You’ve prevailed over Substance by dint of Consciousness alone. Take care that you do not dismiss either of them or their sister, the Motion which begets all things of form.
Substance, Motion and Consciousness are the principles of all, eternal and immutable and untiring all at once. Do not think you can use them against each other. Do not believe that ending one frees up the others. Think neither that vanishing one undoes the rest. Where there is no substance, there is no motion. Where there is no motion, there is no consciousness. Where there is no consciousness, there is no drive for anything to happen at all. And when two vanish, the third becomes all three unto itself.
Remember the nature of the Three-Fold Law. Remember and understand the ripples even the slightest breath sends out, young man. Do you see them? You, who bring with you the end of the world as we know it? You are a wonder, Brandon Stark, and you have been marked for death because of it. Perhaps there are worlds and places out there, where the kind and good and right prevail in all things, but those worlds are not this one.
You are not the hero, Brandon Stark. You are the sacrifice.
“So I’m the sacrifice?” Luwin asks dryly.
What’s this? Someone chanting to the tune of my thoughts without even brushing against them? A fundamental expansion of consciousness lies in the near future! Now this is a lad that may actually manage not to get himself burned to death, provided he keeps his eyes on whatever goal is actually in reach.
“If by ‘sacrifice’ you mean chaperone for my meeting with the Young Master who still isn’t comfortable being alone in the room with me, then yes.” Tak, tak, tak goes Marwyn’s dragonsteel staff against the floor of the last stretch of corridor to your private workshop. “Look lively, now! We might have you working magic all by yourself real soon. Isn’t that what you wanted?”
“Are you resuming my lessons then?”
“Now that you’ve stopped badgering Qyburn about it as if you’ve no respect for my wisdom, ask me tomorrow.”
“… I wasn’t badgering.”
“Technicalities? Is that what you’re going for? Come now, Luwin, don’t put that much effort into trying make me think less of you.”
Perhaps I spoke to soon.
They reach your door. Marwyn nods to Martyn Cassel standing guard and knocks.
“Enter!”
They enter and you turn on your swivel chair to face them, face and voice both wry. “Time to enter the belly of the beast, is it?”
You sound as if you expect the Cannibal to swoop down upon you, but this, at least, I will not mock. The arcane working that suffuses the man before you is a frightful thing.
Luwin scowls. “I’m calling the guards and Lord Stark on you both unless I get an explanation.”
“My father is right there,” you gesture at me, and I hope you know what a stretch that claim is. He barely looks in on you these days, beyond checking that you haven’t killed your mad self. Not that I mind him preferring the Motion side of things. His skinchanging predilections leave much to be desired, though I’ll readily admit I have worse things poking through the depths of my skull than rats.
“I can’t work spells, but it’s not because I’m some sort of cripple.” Marwyn turns forthright out of nowhere all of a sudden. Why? “It’s because of a spell that’s been on me for as long as I can remember. Every scrap of power I have goes into it whenever I try to do something. Every spell other people try on me does the same sooner or later. Supposing it’s not just there to be the biggest nuisance in occult history, I have no idea what it’s supposed to do. I’ve asked, worked with and even served every last kind of priest, mummer, scholar and maegi you can name. And a fair few you can’t. Not all of them took no for an answer. And none of them found out. Most of them died or turned braindead trying. And now you know everything I know about it.”
“And you didn’t think it was important enough to mention?” Luwin balks.
You warily behold the man. “All those dreams I tried… Have you been eating them? How does a spell like that even happen?”
“The best anyone got was that it was either some powerful enemy or my parents that did it. The former means there’s someone out there that can literally play got with human lives. For the latter? Only my parents would’ve had the blood claim to cast a death curse without backlash or failure. Never mind for my benefit, as far as that goes. Doubt it really works that way. It’s probably something stupid.”
Your back and forth would make a most distinguished play, but I’m going to spare you my attention for the duration because that’s just absurd! I’ve seen no spell of protection a tenth as powerful as this, let alone so versatile, and that’s nowhere near its purpose at all. At best it looks like a craft cast with a shortfall of fuel that’s been gobbling up whatever it can find as substitute in an attempt to complete itself ever since. Who would have the knowledge and lifetime of experience to devise such a spell? What kind of act could empower someone, anyone, to cast… whatever this is? Make it last a lifetime and more even? On another. It is the most pervasive, gluttonous, powerful working I’ve seen since I last saw my corpse!
“I suppose I’ll go first then,” Luwin offers.
The wisps of my consciousness hasten to realign. I wavered, somehow. I… lost time. What distracted me? Does a break in consciousness also lie in the near future? Whose?
“Don’t pretend you’re not eager,” Marwyn huffs. His pupils are blown wide by work of draughts. The only way to glimpse the ether for those whose third eye fails them. Have you any idea what happened to him, Brandon Stark? Do you know who he is, to be so old in a body so young? Do you know how he lives so spiritedly despite all that? I don’t. And for that matter, what will it take for Luwin to stop being such a grumpy little whippersnapper? The Lady Lyarra told him to his face he didn’t deserve the mistrust she feels towards him, but she already apologised!
Treat him gently now, young man. To eyes as old as mine, even the freshest things seem dull. Not this, though. Whatever you mean to do from here, I will not interfere. This path you’re treading is still new to me.
Luwin waits impatiently. “Is anything supposed to happ-“ his words stall. He didn’t see you walk out of your body and stick your hands inside his skull, but he sees you now. What are you doing with that ghost of a dead man between your palms – oh! The pinecone! So that’s what you’re after! Coax and nourish his mind’s eye! Don’t blame me for being surprised, hardly anyone thinks to do it despite all common sense. There is no part of man that can affect the world without being consciously and constantly exerted, why would the brain be different? Why wouldn't there be a mechanism there that needs deliberate and conscious use before it can grow and span the other four parts of your mind? Is that what you did to heal yourself? Coax your third eye to quicken and sprout and open your mind to the sights beyond the veils of substance? Did you coax it all the way to growing out its roots and branches? Is that what you mean to do here too?
Oh. You don’t. You’re just… letting Luwin do what he wants.
What will you think on the day your magnanimity leaves you dispossessed? Or kills you?
You have no idea what I’m even talking about, do you?
“Oh,” Luwin breathes, staring wide-eyed at you without seeing you. “So this is what Qyburn meant.” You pull away and the glimmer of soul settles. Melds into Luwin as if it was always a part of him, then comes free and sets to roaming here and there, guided by the lad’s will. “I… I never… I’m a fool, doubting him for having had visions when I…” His new eye comes to a stop inside his hand. Luwin stares down, past skin and sinew to the spaces between the threads and motes making up flesh. Sees the world of the small and smaller, glimpsing even the smallest specks of substance for a heartbeat. He sinks to the ground, losing all notion of his surroundings, completely entranced by the play of little creatures that are too small to see.
Good instincts! Familiars have always been the quickest path to occult power.
Marwyn shakes his head in bemusement. “All that and he just goes back to what he was already doing, only with a new tool. I‘m not even surprised.”
Luwin clenches and unclenches his hand without registering his surroundings, bringing his familiar in and out of his body. Already testing to see how far he can send it beyond his ghost. Good instincts indeed!
“Now if only I could trust he won’t start leaping without thinking for the big things.” Marwyn sighs. “Then again, I’m about to make a leap myself. If it pleases you, Young Master, I’m ready. Don’t worry about me or my feelings. Be as rough as you need.”
He speaks so mildly despite being so hopeful. Even as opaque as he is to the ethereal, his longing is plain as day to the normal senses of man and raven alike. What torture it must be, to live a lifetime with your greatest goal always taunting you just out of reach.
The spell eats the first green tear. Then the next one. Then eight more all at once almost the moment you muster them. No attempt to cut through the spellcraft avails you. Ten treasures given by your forebears in the Greendream for ten souls of faithful men. Ten whole souls scoured by time and torpor into clean and biddable chunks of power fully under your will. They barely make contact with the thaumaturgy before they break and melt into its cloudiness. You did well this whole time to shy away from the man. Were you to overlay him as you did all the others, he would have drained you dry even without that wound of yours. Won’t you back away now? Won’t you reconsider your path? Or will you go higher? Think you to overwhelm the spell with sheer quantity? Perhaps you mean to feed it enough that it finally runs its course, whatever its task? You-
The colors of the world sharpen, and sounds shy away as the ultimate force manifests in your grasp. The quintessence of an ascended spirit that left behind his mighty soul, fully perfected and outgrown.
“I still can’t believe it,” Marwyn whispers, awestruck. “What you’re holding. Do you have any idea what wonders that could make?”
The First Flint. He left his everything to you. Everything he’d been and could have been. I still don’t know how you did it. What is there in your mind that lets people achieve the apex of their being and pass beyond the heavens? What secrets do you hold that aren’t enough for you to do the same? What all don’t you know, boy? That you don’t seem to know what can be done with such a thing? You could make wonders! You could vest heroes! You could have used it to make your namesake young again! You could become-are you using it as a battering ram DON’T-!
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“-ah hah hah hah hah hah hah hah!” Marwyn the Mage laughs hysterically, laid out on his side on the floor. “B-born amid sm-hoke and salt under a-a bleeding stahahahahaha!” His guffaws shake the world that aches in a haze of crow feathers scattered everywhere with their eyes ripped out. “My red moon beats your bleeding star! The smoke and salt have come and gone! Where are my stone dragons!?”
Agh… what… I… I lost time, what-?
“Portents and prophecy! Portents and prophecy!” The Ibbenese mariner laughs all over again, why does the world feel like it got torn apart and scattered? “If no dragons of stone, what of my sword? In ancient books of Asshai it is written that there will come a day when the stars bleed and the cold breath of darkness falls heavy on the world. In this dread hour a warrior shall draw from the fire a burning sword. And that sword shall be Lightbringer, the Red Sword of Heroes, and he who clasps it shall be Azor Ahai come again, and the darkness shall flee before him!”
I… I was… I was wrong! Ware! Ware, Winter King! Your son is in peril! It’s not a good man cursed by evil! It’s evil sealed for the sake of the good, set loose! Ware! Your son is in peril and I’m impotent! A threadbare wisp floundering in naked air above where a raven lies dead in the corner. Wake up Luwin! Where is Martyn!? Wasn’t he right outside? Was he knocked senseless as well? Stand up, Brandon Stark! Stand up, stand up! Damn you, boy, what will it take before you can hear me!? When you grew all those extra eyes, you couldn’t have grown a few ears too!?
The immortal mage pushes off the floor. Rises in terrible majesty. He is bare for everyone with even the barest of second sight to see. The spell on him is gone. The spell that kept his knowledge of self and all his dark crafts locked away. The spell that had suppressed him. The spell that had kept his third eye shut. It shines glittering red at the core of his brow, now, like a blood moon reflected on the deep ocean. Bright. Bloody. Fed by myriad channels spread through his whole body. They pull and gather every scrap of vigor that would otherwise be wasted in his idleness, like the roots of a tree grown deep as weirwood over the course of his life. And everywhere… wisps and quills and eyes. Yours. Eyes of blue and white fire. They hang haphazardly off his nimbus, like tired sea birds trapped in the rigging of a ship. They melt and sink and add to his power even as I watch.
You were right to fear, boy! He’s done it! It’s happened! He absorbs the strength of others like only one with lifetimes of experience glutting on blood sacrifice can! Run! You’re going to be eaten! Run! Run before he finishes the job!
The man holds out a hand. His staff of dragonsteel flies into his hand, though he doesn’t lean on it at all. He stands. Short and broad and firm as an island in a sea of storms. His head hangs back. His eyes are closed. His face is wrought with a tight, frightful grimness.
Then it just… melts away.
Marwyn turns, stomps towards you –
“Wha-GUARDS!”
- goes to his knees, lays the rod at your feet and raises his folded hands just as the door slams open.
It is not Cassel. It is three others, led by himself Lord Stark.
“What in all the gods’ forgotten names is going on here!?”
Marwyn keeps his head bowed and waits.
… I have no idea what is happening.
You struggle to your feet. Barely manage even with the help of your father, who wears that mien of ice he only musters when he’s absolutely terrified for you. You’ve been stripped bare as well. Your feathered cloak hangs in tatters. Barely a dozen eyes still hang limply around you. No tears of green or souls of self-fulfilment are left to shine their light upon the world. The strap of souls around your chest is completely gone.
“You have no idea what you just did.” Marwyn says, and lifts his head. Looks up at you with earnest eyes of deep, soulful purpose. “For as long as you live, use me whatever way you wish.”
Lord Stark stares. The guards stare. You stare, terrified and traumatised and completely dumbfounded.
Then you laugh in his face.
“The day I believe a pledge like that is the day you come up to me in the middle of court and ask me to take you as my pet!”
“-. The Vernal Snowmelt .-“
Fie, young man, your insults land even better than your praise! Almost as well as the people who dropped insensate all over Winterfell, when you went and used the penultimate manifestation of occult Power as a club to Marwyn’s head.
If that’s even his name.
“Master Marwyn!” Luwyn rushes into the Archmaester’s Quarters, just barely refurbished in the Drum Keep. “Master! You’re really leaving? You can’t!”
Because the open door and the guards keeping a gimlet eye on the man were not enough clue, for all the good they can do.
The wizard finishes wiping the blood off the glass candle, now turned from black to green. “Shouldn’t you be still abed?” He takes a large dollop of summerstone mix from a bucket and starts turning it over in his palms, heating it molten hot. It doesn’t even singe his hands. “You were rather close when it happened.”
“You can’t go! You did nothing wrong!”
“Oh lad, that’s not why I’m leaving.” The man sets the life-like carrack of marble-smooth, fused grey stone on the table and sinks his hands in a wash basin. It comes out trailing a large blob of boiling pulp, winterstone-to-be that flows like water. “I’ve prepared in advance a reading list and exercises to work your new magical appendage. And got Hother to oversee the building of my distilleries. I also prepared cross-training plans for all of you boys before I arranged the meeting, just in case.”
Luwin almost can’t tear his eyes away from the magic in front of him. Almost. “I don’t care about that! First the Conclave and now this! There’s no justice in this! What happened? I don’t understand…”
“Do you know what nine in ten maegi do on achieving power?” The winterstone swims around and through his fingers in the shape of a merling. “They become hermits. Out of fear. Seekers of the Mysteries are ever so wary of sharing anything with others. Teaching others or granting them power. What if they turn on them? Never mind that they almost all end up destroying themselves without any help.”
“So what? You’re going traveling so you can’t be accused of the same? How is living here being a hermit? Aren’t the ones who go off wandering called the hermits?”
“Now you’re just being silly. You think I didn’t stand out like a sore thumb everywhere I travelled that had anyone with a scrap of the sight? What if I said it was a training journey? Do you know what happened to all the mighty who got their hands on me? They tried to plunder me for secrets only to get sucked dry while I plundered them. I may not have been able to cast spells, but in dreams I am mighty. I’ve always been mighty. And now I know why.”
“Well I don’t know!”
“Up until this morning, my earliest memory was of growing up among salt miners down in the Reach Upplands.”
“… and now?”
The door shuts in the guards’ faces. A gesture renders the air just outside completely still, locking all sound within. Your father’s mind overlays mine just in time.
“I am Asmundur Magnus Olafur, By Grace of My Forebears, of the Dominion of Ibben and all its Territories Sovereign, Master of Ports, Mariner Admiral of the Shivering Sea, God-King of Ib, Lord of Oceans.”
… what.
“The spell on me wasn’t so much a spell as a botch job of three.” The merling shifts to the shape of your lady mother sat on a chair of pure crystal and freezes solid. A spark of arcane jumps from the Mage’s fingertips into the figurine, locking its substance firm as steel. He puts the colored ice sculpture on the main deck of the ship. “Individually, they were each a masterwork. I’d performed each of them at least half a dozen times before. Sacrifice the soul of my newborn son to sew the babe’s substance and ether into a strong foundation for power transference. Sacrifice myself to jump my soul into the son now that there’s no mind left to make the fit awkward. Sacrifice the mother on her bed of blood to power a glamour strong enough to make everyone forget I exist. Especially the minions of the Shadow Council, who wouldn’t let me live in peace to plot my wrathful return to power. All done atop a big, fat pyre in the middle of a salt quarry, while a gap in the hill above casts forth the light of the red moon on high. Born amid smoke and salt under a bleeding star. There’s never a shortage of people looking to make a saviour. I just took it further and tried to become the saviour too, never mind comets. Alas, the glamour had already taken by the time I jumped bodies, so it made me forget I exist too. Add a few unintended consequences from the long-term interaction of those magics, and here we are.”
…Alright.
I did not see this coming at all.
Marwyn eyes Luwin shrewdly. “Don’t you start worrying that I’m losing myself to memories, no matter how despicable or long a time they span. Consciousness arises from the physical mind, not the other way around.”
“Maester… Master Marwyn, you… what does that mean?”
“I am my father. And my father’s father. And my father’s father’s father. And their fathers before them. All the way back to the time when God-Kings still ruled Ibben, back in the Valyrian Freehold’s waning years.” Marwyn picks up his archmaester’s mask and beholds it intently. The dragonsteel shimmers with heat, for a moment. He smirks. “Not quite there yet, but soon.”
… This is starting to look far too much like some contingency of certain almighty idiots that can’t help themselves from adding too many moving parts. Just what exactly did whoever’s so-called fate mean to do with him? Before you kicked it in the shin with the force of the end of the world as we know it?
Luwin stares with something between fascination and horror. Then his face clears. “Oh! I get it. You’re just fucking with me, aren’t you?”
“If it pleases you to think so. Feel free to call me Marwyn regardless. In fact, I insist upon it.”
Luwin gapes in disbelief, then readjusts course with the alacrity of all young men terrified of abandonment. “I’m coming with you.”
“No.” Marwyn smiles fondly at him. “You’re needed here. You swore an oath. Besides, you think I won’t come back? Of course I will! I’ll need to be here to help the young master once he starts the dreams.”
“Say what now? What dreams?”
What he said.
“A boy like that with not one shorthair to his name, living the lives of hundreds of people of all size, age and persuasion in their last moments? You’re mad if you think that won’t have consequences. It’ll be my job and yours to catch him early and see him through becoming only a little deviant instead of a lot. Or maybe a lot deviant so he always has palatable options amidst the dross. There’s a certain time window involved. I won’t miss it, and you won’t either.”
Ohhh, those dreams.
...I am not alone! Oh thank you, thank you, thank you! You hear that, boy? Even mad hermits from the arse-end of the Shivering Sea can see it coming a hundred leagues away! Vindication!
“But...” Luwin is not feeling any vindication, poor boy. “But then why leave at all?”
“I had the gall to assume I’d get by without proof of commitment! Making big claims like that, honestly, what was I thinking? That he’d just believe me? After what all led to it too. I’m honestly shocked he bothered taking offense on my own behalf as much as he did. ‘Relationships based on extreme circumstances don’t work out.’ Bah! What does he think I am, a callow youth unsure of my convictions? Ah, but I should have seen it coming. I came north expecting a devil. Instead I found a lad who wants to save his mother and make his father proud. A creature of great power come down from the stars, and what does he do with it? Loves his parents. Loves his siblings. Upends everything known about medicine to save his mother’s life. Finds out his father once planned to murder him and demands hugs in tribute. Gets attacked by the forces of treachery and wears their eyes as cloaks in revenge. Then takes steps to prevent further injury, among which happens to be making blood magic worthless. And did I mention that his way of remaking the world in his image boils down to making rich men out of everyone he meets? Yes, the nerve of him to demand proof and guarantees that I’m not merely blowing smoke!”
If only you were here now, young man. Do you know how totally he saw you in that moment? Do you understand what danger you’d have been in if it were anyone else? Do you see how little it takes for even the mightiest of men to go down on their knees? Do you see how broken this world is?
Luwin can’t. He clenches his fists. “I still don’t understand.”
“If my meaning still isn’t clear, think back to your studies. It’s not been long enough for you to have forgotten equivalent exchange, at least.”
“… He gave you everything,” Luwin murmured. “And so you offered everything.”
You did. He did. But no. That’s not all of it.
“But…” Luwin bites his lip. “But he refused.”
“And you think that settles it? The world doesn’t work like that and neither do I. Not anymore.”
Would you see his true meaning if you were here, Brandon Stark? Would you have the eyes to see? The ears to hear?
It’s only when Marwyn is done packing for the road and he is carefully spellcrafting the last figurine of a leaping whale with a doting smile that Luwin finally realises it. “…You love him.”
“I do.”
He loves you, boy. He really does.
Marwyn plops the pint-sized Benjen on the white whale’s back. “Is that so surprising? Do you have any idea how long it’s been since I could feel something so pure? I get off on power, Luwin, not on little boys. And not on weakness either. Not mine. Certainly not his. Ah, but it will hardly last. The ability to quickly stockpile massive amounts of power, let alone do so cleanly… It’s a prize as precious as seeds from Garth Greenhand’s sack of plenty or Rowan Gold-Tree’s apples of gold. It is very good I got here first. The envy it could generate is dangerous. The predators it can lure are even more dangerous. Do not share what you've seen, Luwin. Do not share what you learn. We've found the limits of his ability to protect himself. As they currently are, they’re not enough. Not even close.”
His father and I are doing our best, but they really aren’t.
“I love you too Luwin.” Marwyn takes the lad by the shoulders, ignoring his reaction to the words. “Not that I’m worried you’ll act the jealous son, seeing as you’ve got your real father just over there in yonder townhouse, but it beats resentment, eh?”
The God-King of Ib departs Winterfell to much wary suspicion and not a shred of pomp. At least the Lady likes the baubles tough, and promises to gift them to you when your twelfth name day comes. Not that you’ll hold ownership for long once the littler ones spot the things, but at least these won’t shatter at the shortest drop like all the other ones.
That they’re infinitely superior to every other gift you’ll receive on your name day is the sort of way to make a point I can approve of as well.
“They’re not cursed, I hope you know,” says the Immortal when I try to trail him without a living thing to bear me hence. Barely a wisp of an echo on the wind, that’s all I am, and still he looks right at me. “You’ll keep on keeping on while I’m gone, won’t you One Eye? I’ll help carry your burden once I come back.”
It will only divert malcontents to softer targets.
“True. But then, there is such a thing as glamors.” Marwyn fiddles with the tooth around his neck, and suddenly there’s just some random thug lumbering his way down the road. “Hey ho, Hey ho, prepare tribute I go! Maybe start off with some nice man-made wonders. Keep an eye out while I’m gone, old boy!”
As if I ever do anything else. I try at times to break off from your father and take a break around the others. Osrick and Rodrik serve for the occasional respite, but I can’t connect to them like direct line kin, and they’re as ethereally inert as people come. I yearn for the respite of oblivion, but It’s dangerous to lie mindless too long like I do when I let my mind be borne by theirs. Your mother would be helpful, if she didn’t constantly fret over you or Little Benjen, who’s always trailing after you both awake and asleep. And the less said about what made the other side scramble to give Lyanna minders all of her own, the better.
Oh woe is me, who can save me now? I need a hero, but the Age of Heroes is long gone! See here, young man, how low you’ve brought me! Oh, if only Ned suddenly emerged climbing up yonder slope! Help me, Eddard son of Rickard, you’re my only hope!
He can’t, of course. He’s too busy breaking the way of life of an entirely different kingdom, far away. Also, he doesn’t know I exist.
And so I’m borne forth by your father, whose thoughts are never far from you. So I keep an eye out. While you go flying to replenish your power, for all that you barely know what to do with it. While things are good. While things turn tragic and you’re far away from home. Away on a trip with your father to the Last Hearth, so the Umbers can attend to their father and grandfather in his last days. It is a harsh thing, humanity, to make your heart unable to bear joy in your twilight years. Still, he is a strong and content man, the Hoarfrost. Lasts long enough to see his firstborn son whole and healthy in mind before the end takes him. And when he passes and you take his hand, he goes up instead of down and leaves you with a treasure to match the greatest one you lost so gracelessly.
Almost as gracelessly as Ben Umber’s stumbling failure to swear fealty afterwards.
“I’m sorry, Lord Stark, I can’t. I mean I could, but I can’t-I don’t…” The giant of a man looks shamefully down at the floor of his solar, stuck between bending the knee and folding his hands. “I can’t do it. If it’s you, I’d be lying.”
Rickard looks down at the man in disbelief. “What do you mean you can’t?”
“It-It’s just…” Ben Umber sneaks a look from him to you and drops his head in embarrassment.
Rickard Stark closes his eyes in realisation. “You can swear to my House but not me.”
“I’m sorry, My Lord.”
Rickard facepalms and looks at you with exasperation you entirely deserve and then some. “You just can’t help yourself can you, son? You’re determined to find increasingly ridiculous ways to steal my people’s loyalty from under me.” I despair of you boy, and so does your poor father. “Oh, just get it over with you two.”
I had given up hope of ever seeing that look on your face, lad, but no. You didn’t magic away poor Ben’s good sense. He dumped it down a well like an unwanted bastard a long time ago.
You take the man’s huge hands in yours. Ben Umber goes from one knee to both. He swears to you with his father’s same words, smiling sheepishly all the while.
“Then for your first order: always serve my father as if he were me.”
“Aye, my lord.”
“Promise me, Ben.”
“I promise.”
“And for your second: come here and let me give you a hug, ridiculous man.”
You have the nerve to call others ridiculous!?
But Ben Umber just laughs and obeys gladly.
You and your hugs, boy. If only they weren't so ridiculously effective. If only I’d known they could achieve so much when I was still alive. Do you know what it means that he's so big he can’t bend low enough to put his head below yours without failing your order? Can you tell what it means that he still stoops to wrap his arms around your waist instead of your shoulders? What it means that it's not him engulfing you in those arms so thick that you could disappear inside them? Can you tell what it means that he lets himself be enfolded instead of the opposite? Will he keep to that devotion when you lose childhood’s unthreatening innocence? Will he still be so biddable then?
Oh well. If nothing else, you return to Winterfell in good spirits, your powers replenished and armed with a vassal house all of your own, even if only the three of you know it.
If only I could claim similar success on my end, but I can’t. All my hopes that Luwin might miraculously turn out to be a natural mage capable of maybe slowing down the God-King if he ever turns on us are in vain. He’s too busy studying germs to be bothered by any but the most unexpected news.
Mullin, freshly returned from your journey up north, plops down next to him on the bench. “I’m getting married.”
Luwin stops scribbling and blinks up at him owlishly. “Say what now?”
“Clara Poole, you know her? The steward’s sister? Seems I’ll be courting her and marrying into the family in a month if it goes well.”
“What? Why?” Sometimes Luwin is a bit too much like you, lad. “I mean, I didn’t know you were looking?”
“I wasn’t.”
Luwin blinks at the man, taken aback by his strange befuddlement. “Then why?”
“I’m going to be Master-At-Arms,” Mullin says, as if that should be a surprise to anyone. “So I have to become part of the household. Lord Stark’s orders.”
“Oh. Well… that’s good news?”
A piece of news to go with the other news which you, Brandon Stark, do not welcome with anything approaching grace.
“What!” You squawk for everyone to witness. Including all of the heirs training around you in the yard. Which is all of them, from Torghen Flint trouncing Ryswell and Tallhart at once, to Wyman Manderly panting uselessly and sweating like a pig on the bench in the corner. “Dad, you promised!”
“And I’ve kept my promise,” says your lord father, as if he should be explaining himself to you. In public! “I’ve reached the limit of what I can bring myself to do in your training.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“You’re starting full-contact sparring. I’ve thought long and hard and decided I can’t do that with you.”
“Why?”
“The thought I might hurt you even by accident makes me sick to my stomach.”
“… Oh dad.”
You and your hugs, boy. You and your hugs! Don’t think your father hasn’t built up any resistance to them by now! He always considers how best to handle you. No matter how much he likes you, he loves you so much more it doesn’t measure up. Too much to indulge you on anything that doesn’t suit his judgment. He, at least, chants the proper tune to my thoughts and always prepares ahead of time. The best he can, at least, for when you next try to upend the world only to be smacked in the face with the force of reality.
Yes, I am indeed talking about the dreams. There’s a reason your growth spurt strikes so hard when it comes. There’s a reason aware dreaming and flying becomes so much harder right after. There’s a reason you’ve already gone through your entire smallclothes supply when you barge in on your parents in the early hours of the morning.
“Mom! Dad! We have a problem!”
“You’re a pillow biter.”
“What!? NO!” So much for being prepared thanks to the washerwomen reporting on your auspicious touchstone, but I can hardly blame the man when he barely managed to cover your mother and- “Are you crazy? I’m barely a week into my awkward stage! There’s literally no way that this can’t go crazy! Put weird ideas in my head and they may just happen. Except they won’t! I have very exacting standards of relationship dynamics! Don’t give me any notions unless you want them flipped on their head! Do you want the Umbers bent in half in a line over the dinner table? Can you imagine the looks on their faces? Because all else being equal, that’s what would happen! Speaking of which.” What did just-Was that just-? Did you just-? What did you-ARE YOU UNDRESSING YOUR MOTHER WITH YOUR EYES!? “Oh thank heavens!” The heavens have nothing to do with whatever goes on in that preposterous mind, you outrageous child! Oh, you’re falling down on your arse now? “I’m not lusting after my own mother! Freud and Yung and all the other degenerates continue to be completely full of shit even entire worlds away. Thank every god and whatever grifters spawned them! But we still have a problem! A big problem! I’m getting dreams! Wet dreams! Wet dreams all about matronly married women.”
… I give up. It is hopeless. There is nothing that can be done for you.
Rickard Stark bursts out laughing.
“Brandon.” Lyarra Stark says coldly, all joy and woe fully forgotten, never mind everything that happened in the past three years. “Get out.”
“Right, go ahead and punish me for coming to you first like dad told me.”
“Brandon.”
“I’m still getting my morning hugs, right?”
“OUT!”
You couldn’t just let that pillow hit you, could you? You couldn’t concede even that small defeat before you bravely ran away.
I wish I could share in the mirth, but heavy matters have been on my mind since well before the last night fell.
Someone has come and infiltrated Winterfell.
“Someone was in the castle smithy at some point,” Rickard says grimly after reading the reports of everyone set out to check on all your scouting. And his. And mine. “There is a mule in the stables that wasn’t there this morning. The dogs were fed even though the kitchen wench supposed to feed them never stopped by. And then there’s Nolla.” One of the first comers from down in the Riverlands that came up with her family to answer Rickard’s call. Ever so eager to learn under the maesters. Even earned a spot on the keep staff to pay her way. One of your launderers, boy. You remember her, I see. “She was found behind the blast furnace where her brother had taken to working.”
Yes. Found. By me. Missing her head.
“Happy birthday to me.” You grumble, boy, but in this you are right to.
Strange how long ago the last dark times now feel. This tense atmosphere promises nothing good for the foreseeable future. The dark mood doesn’t get any better throughout the long hours, especially for the last day before your thirteenth name day celebrations. I’m still amazed, though, that you like it so much when you father has you attend him during court up next to his high throne. Don’t you want to be out playing with your siblings and the other children? You’re almost out of time you know, now that you’re growing so quickly. Do you know how many share my thoughts on this? Do you know how many among the petitioners? That all the heirs of the great houses, attending you off and on, worry you don’t take enough time to yourself?
Speaking of all these people, why are they all-?
The mass of people parts as a mighty glamor drops right outside the doors.
… By Garth Greenhand’s corpse that lies beneath the Shadow undying, what was that!?
Marwyn the Mage marches through the gates of the Great Hall of Winterfell, his massive bulk clad in a set of armor made of that dark, smoky metal that’s unmistakeable. Other than his hands which he’s left free, there’s not a spot below the man’s chin that isn’t covered in at least an inch of the heavy material. Pauldrons, brassarts, vambraces, cuirass, even a long, segmented kilt in place of faulds that reach all the way to just below the knee guards of the greaves. Overlaying it is a vast black coat, made from the skin of what had to have been the largest seal the north has ever seen, its collar mottled with crow feathers. Crow feathers like the ones you made your father’s men collect when you made your first statement of claim. And… And his hair. Forget the bristly white sprouting from his ears and nostrils. They are just props for a veritably opulent mane. Wiry bristles frame his face all the way to the ears. Tufted eyebrows sail up into the air above his sea-green eyes, like white ash from a pyre. Bushy whiskers capped with steel stick up like boar tusks. They all mix down into a coat of white, like salt crushed and dusted over a full beard and head of hair that almost reaches his belt, coarse and thick and kissed by fire like a beacon in full spate.
A bucket of summerstone mix is in his right hand. One of winterstone in his left hand. The kitchen wench hangs under his right arm, senseless. A dead man hangs under his left, his feet dragging across the floor in his wake. And across his right shoulder hangs a long, thin case of fused black stone, with two more buckets hanging by both ends perfectly balanced, both covered with lids perfectly fitted.
Marwyn stops short of the foot of the high rise, puts down the first two buckets and dumps the living body. “The kitchen wench. Took this other one’s coin to steal the keys to the keep tonight.” He dumps the dead body front-side up. It’s of a man, but it has Nolla’s face. “A Faceless Man of Braavos, come to look into things at no one’s behest. Caught him as he was skinning the girl down at the furnaces. Killed himself right proper too. Not before I got what little was worth out of his brain though.” He hauls the buckets further a few steps and gets to unloading everything as if there isn’t anything that has to be digested or done about what just happened. Boy, what have you done? I know you did something. It’s spreading! This madness has your name written all over it!
You are right to stare, though. Those buckets each have more of his power and will in them than is left anywhere in himself.
Marwyn kneels between his four vats. He lays the black case on the floor before him, not looking up at you or your father. “Oaths and the like are done with a weapon offered up, I understand. Hope you don’t mind if I take a moment to rustle up mine right quick.” The summerstone mixture comes together in a blob at his touch. Rises up after it like a roll of dough, thick and viscous. With just a few deft movements he stretches it into a long rod that suddenly catches fire. He sticks a long, thin strip of steel down one end, then lays it sideways over the lid of the bucket and lets it burn. He reaches into the other vat. The winterstone-to-be rises just like its summer sister, water and weirwood essence rippling milky white. He pinches it and pulls at it, slowly extending it into a blade as long as he is wide. Then further. When he stops, it looks alive in the sunlight coming through the windows. Translucent. A shard of crystal so thin that it seems almost to vanish when seen edge-on. He lays it flat over the lip of the vat. The crystal on steel makes a tinkling whistle that doesn’t go away.
I know that glow. That faint blue shimmer. That ghost-light that plays around its edges, sharper than any razor. I saw it in my ancient dreams, back when I still lived. He couldn’t have…
Marwyn reaches under his cloak, into the satchel at his side, next to the gauntlets strapped to his belt. From it he pulls tools one after another and sets them on the case in front of him. He leaves a wide space in the middle though, where he picks and drops the third bucket. He lifts the lid - such heat! What is – his melting foundry! So he didn’t enchant the bucket just to leave me blinder than I already am. It’s hotter than the blast furnaces down in the Kyln!
The Mage pulls off his ring of valyrian steel and drops it inside. He waits a few heartbeats. His heartbeats. I can see them – do you see them thumping lad? In his chest and in the foundry, perfectly matched. Do you see how much of him burns? How dimmer he becomes as...
The fire to his right goes out, leaving a long rod of smooth black stone that he picks up and out of the grooves melted into the rim of the bucket. He upends it. Molten steel pours out of the end until nothing of the strip he put in there is left. Then he sinks the same end into the foundry and stirs, then pulls it out. The wad of dragonsteel follows, stuck to it like glue glowing white hot. He blows on it, uses his tools to hollow and mould it like clay it into a fastener, then reaches for the crystal blade just as the shrieking of freezing metal becomes too loud to ignore.
The bucket crumbles to pieces. The sound of frostbitten, brittle metal is like the cracking of ice on a winter lake. I was not mad to think back to those dreams. He’s the madman.
Marwyn inserts the blade into the channel and carefully sews a filament of the molten magesteel through the black rod and middle of the crystal blade. From there, it’s just a few more tugs and taps of his instruments and the work is complete.
The Mage sets the sword staff on the floor with an air of historic finality not lost on anyone in the chamber.
“Fused blackstone.” Marwyn the Mage finally speaks while he knocks on the pole, still not looking up. “We don’t have dragons to make roads or walls out of it, but the mix is good enough to last thousands of years even without burning it up. Gets stronger over time too, if you do it right. It’s the same as summerstone really, just with some swapped ingredients. My compliments for coming up with it. Never would’ve pieced the rest together without it.” He taps the blade with his fingertips. Briefly. “Hope you’ll forgive me if I went with vanity over practicality for the rest.”
Vanity? Vanity!? Does he expect us to believe he doesn’t know full well what-
Marwn sticks a hand into the last bucket. It comes out holding a large ball of ash bigger than his head.
Then he brings it between both hands and somehow crushes it until it disappears between his palms, not a stray speck in sight.
For the next, five long minutes, the Great Hall of Winterfell is witness to the crackle, grind and screeching of molten, crushed rock.
I can feel your disbelief, Brandon Stark, even over your father’s increasingly awestruck bewilderment. I can feel it, and I tell you, you don’t feel about this nearly strongly enough. Look at them, all these people. They are impressed. Awestruck. Amazed. They don’t even notice the dead bodies laid out in front of them anymore. All that and they still do not understand. They don’t see. They don’t know how far he goes. How much power he spends. How much it leaves him lessened with every grip and scratch and burst of spellfire. They don’t see the apology. They don’t see the taunt. They don’t hear his message. His message as plain as his sheer gall.
It’s all for you, or not at all.
He really loves you, boy. Do you see it?
I don’t suppose you know just what he’s doing though? What is that murky grey lump? A geode? Mighty lot effort for such an ugly-
The crystal edge cuts into the stone. Then again. And again and again and twenty more times and no, that can’t be.
Marwyn the Mage holds up the gem to study in the light. I can’t believe it. I can’t believe it. But it’s there right in front of me. In front of everyone. A clear, round diamond, perfectly cut. It glitters and sparkles in the afternoon light.
Marwyn hauls the foundry aside and sweeps the black case clean. There’s not a scratch on it. “I hope you’ll forgive me for not making a show of the whole thing.” The case is finally unclasped. “But it would’ve taken far too long, and it doesn’t do to deliver half-finished gifts. I hope you like the last touch though.”
The colors of the world sharpen, and sounds shy away as the ultimate force manifests in his grasp. The quintessence of an ascended spirit that left behind his mighty soul, fully perfected and outgrown.
The Flint… The Flint! He didn’t eat it! He kept it… And now it settles so cosily in the gemstone. And the diamond settles so neatly in the guard. The sword. It’s so bright. So beautiful… Not a drop of blood spilled in murder to make them, not even from the corpse over there on the floor. So… so… And like the working that the Mage himself had lived so long under, it’s not even finished. Like a seedling just starting to lay roots and sprout into a wonder of… of…
The pommel is a gleaming orb as pure as starlight. The cross guard is rippling steel as clear a still pond. The diamond’s fitting grows out of the unbroken whole. It fastens the gemstone like the morning star’s pinions. The handle is pure dragonbone, smooth and black as midnight. The ironwood scabbard looks beggarly next to it, but perhaps it’s fitting of a veil whose role is ever only transitory. It slides off the blade as you descend the steps, like night passing to dawn. The blade is white as snow, finished to a shine so fine that even the inscription on the groove looks like a mirror.
ᛁ ᚨᛗ ᛏᚺᛖ ᛚᛟᛞᛖᛋᛏᚨᚱ, ᛒᚤ ᚹᚺᛟᛗ ᛗᚨᚾ ᚲᛟᚾᛩᚢᛖᚱᛋ ᛞᚨᚱᚴᚾᛖᛋᛋ ᚨᛒᛁᛞᛁᚾᚷ
I am the Lodestar, by whom man conquers darkness abiding
I am the Lodestar, by whom man conquers darkness abiding
“Young Master.” The God-King of Ib lifts eyes wrought with the most insolent earnestness that has ever existed. “Please accept me as your pet wizard.”
“-. The Springtime of Youth .-“
“Son. What on earth have you been doing with this man?”
The loud slam of the antechamber door perversely fails to banish the memory of the Lord Stark’s question and no, don’t-!
“Unh!” Marwyn lurches forward and down, wide-eyed.
“You think that’s funny!?”
Y-you….You b-bearded him! You’re bearding him? B-bearding a man isn’t the same as pushing boundaries! You’re bearding a wizard! A mighty sorcerer! A king! Don’t just stand there, you fools! Martyn, Luwin, Rickard, do something, don’t just gawp like an ox! Oh why do I even bother? He’ll just keep on carrying on. Mercy, great God-King! Mercy, please! The boy’s not a bad lad, he’s just a moron!
Marwyn blinks and blinks. Then goes down on his knees and raises folded hands in entreaty.
… Mad. He’s mad. You’re mad. Everyone is mad.
Your grip on his beard only tightens as you pull his face up to yours. “I’ve half a mind to say no.” What did you just say? “What if I just refuse?”
“If you won’t have me serve at your pleasure, I will serve you as best I can at mine. Sounds like it would make a fine mess of unintended consequences though.”
“Are you blackmailing me?”
“Never.”
Mad, mad, mad I say. And so am I for not realising that you’ve neither the strength nor weight to move him. Even while you’re bearding him he bends over backwards and forwards for you. At least smooth out the mess you made of his mane you unconscionable-! Thank you. His white-dusted, fiery mane rustles softly as you rake order back into it. Now why do you grab it again?
“That sword…”
Marwyn says nothing.
Do you appreciate what it means that a man like him stays quiet unless you give him leave?
“It’s made from your staff. Isn’t it?”
“It is.”
“How long have you known how to work Valyrian steel?”
“Oh, the Citadel’s known all along. Where do you think all those Valyrian links come from? Even if we had a store of them, how do you think they get pried open and closed when put or moved from chain to chain?”
The tusk-like whiskers wiggle between your fingers. How does the man not sneeze? They grow half-way right out of his nose. Doesn’t it itch?
Marwyn just watches you, eyes wrought with the most soulful earnestness that has ever existed. “I know how to make it too, now, incidentally.”
You roughly let go of the man’s beard, visibly biting back what you were about to say. “Are you telling me – the armor. You made that from scratch?”
“Oh no, I just retrieved it from my stash down south. Just knowing how to make Valyrian steel doesn’t mean I can. I’ve not a renewable supply of dead people, you see.”
Says the immortal who created his own way to cheat death and old age through bloodkin human sacrifice.
“Are you trying to buy your way into my service?”
“Never.”
Never indeed. Don’t mind the magic sword. It’s barely passable as a name day gift. A mere trifle, not even finished. And certainly the baubles for your other name day had nothing to do with making Luwin's father wallow in dismay at being so thoroughly bested at his own game.
“Marwyn… Or is it Asmundur? Magnus? Olaf? What should I even call you?”
“Call me whatever name you wish.”
“Don’t tempt me.” Your hands rise and reach forward, then stop. “Marwyn…”
“Yes, lord?”
“Why?”
“Because everyone and their grandmother is out to kill you because you’ve started the end of the world as we know it.” The bloody darkness inside him engulfs the God-King’s face. “I won’t let them.”
He won’t let them. The bloodmoon shimmers behind his brow, promising death. He loves you, boy. He really does.
“… I believe you.”
The darkness passes and Marwyn smiles. His eyes crinkle. Still he waits with his hands offered up.
What are you waiting for, Brandon Stark? Why do you sigh so put upon? “And the fact that swearing to me lets you put off that whole Ibben business for another hundred years has nothing to do with it, I’m sure.”
“Am I to be punished?” Marwyn asks guilelessly and oh he did not just- “If so, I recommend deferring until three or four years from now when everyone involved can properly appreciate it. You’ll need time to learn what all I got put through everywhere else, before you can figure out something that that actually works for what you need.” Marwyn frowns thoughtfully. “Might need to keep a written record of past offences, mind, but I’ll be sure to recall any such instances regardless and volunteer the information as it becomes relevant.”
Oh now he’s just fucking with me. Not you, young man, just me. Where is my birdbrained mouthpiece when I need it? Back in the throne room eating corn, that’s where. Lord Stark, Rickard, Winter King, say something! Or am I reading too much into it? How pure a love are we actually talking about here?
“Right,” you say flatly. Still the man kneels with hands folded before you, calm and steady despite that you withdraw again. Pinch your nose like only your father does, you pretentious manling. “Anything else I should know? Just so I know what to do with you.”
“Well, magic is the obvious one of course. I’ve also come up with a way to mine the Norrey gold – we’ll need to sacrifice a valley or two, but the quicksilver will actually make things easier otherwise. Also, I was one of three leading the counter-conspiracy down in Oldtown before I was kicked out. My cohorts have since secured their hold on the Citadel and are ready to open a dialogue at your pleasure.”
… I have no idea what to even say.
“The dragonbone in the hilt came from them,” Marwyn supplies helpfully. “A token of their sincerity, I’m told.”
How your father can still just stand aside and watch without saying anything, I have no idea. And I practically nest inside those poor brain meats of his.
“Is that all?” Are you still not convinced of his commitment, Brandon Stark? How much more do you want?
“Well, I suppose there’s the blackstone, but you don’t need me for that. You just use sea water instead of fresh one and switch the baked lime for volcanic ash. There’s fair patches of it along the Bay of Ice. Quite a few dead volcanoes in them mountains, if the gold didn’t make it obvious. House Mormont will appreciate the prospects, I imagine. Glovers too. Flints and Wulls and Liddles and all the rest. Some parts of the Neck might also have it, what with all the basalt. I think that’s all of it, though I’m sure there are other things I could come up with, given ideas and time.”
… Take him, boy. Take him. Take him now. Don't set him loose where you can't see him, he can get past me.
“You do not think me genuine,” Marwyn murmurs some time later, still so painfully earnest. “What about equivalent exchange? Can you at least trust that?”
“Oh Marwyn…” How I wish I could read and feel you like I do others, lad. Then I’d at least have some idea of how much insecurity you keep buried under this needling, lofty front of yours. “I do think you’re genuine.”
“I’m glad.”
“I won’t make it easy, you know.”
“I know.”
“I won’t take half measures.”
“I know. It’s alright.”
“If you pledge as a teacher, I expect you to teach me everything you know. If you vow to protect me, you’ll put everything else behind. If you pledge to attend to me, you damn well better attend to me. And if you swear to me, you swear to me. Not Winterfell, not the North, not my Father, not whoever your friends are back in Oldtown, not even your vassals in Ibben or whatever else.”
“As it should be. As I said I would. Didn’t I?”
You still seem troubled, Brandon Stark. Why?
“The people in this world kneel far too readily.”
As opposed to what? The worlds that exist only in your fancies? Sometimes I wish I knew what goes on in your mind, Brandon Stark. But then I catch a glimpse of this deviant morality and am glad to have my thoughts instead borne by your father. At least then I know one of us will bear the future without going mad. Heed, young man! Stop living in dreams and pay reality the proper mind!
“Alright then.” You take his hands. They look bigger than even Umber’s under yours. But they settle even more comfortably inside them, somehow. “Swear what you will.”
“For as long as you live, use me whatever way you wish.”
Like before, he pledges everything. You are wise to in turn swear nothing. There is no wish or will or power than can confine everything that can be in the world. Why would man be any different in that?
“Alright. That’s that then. Rise.”
Marwyn does, though he does not withdraw his hands from yours. Already you've grown so much that you and him both stand at the same height. How content will he be, I wonder, once the time comes when he is always looking up?
“First thing’s first – some proper smithcraft for this mane.”
Marwyn smiles as you tug on his tusk-like whiskers, utterly delighted. “You do like it.”
“You saw it, didn’t you? Back when you chewed me up and spat me out like a slavering swine.”
“Barely a handful of sounds and images, master. I apologise for my trespass and offer all due recompense.”
“And I’ll extract it thoroughly. It’s just as well. Artifice like the one back there is as good a thing to start with as any. The tusk tips are fine – swordfish bone, is it? – but you can do better. Nice, thick rings. Say as wide as your toes, if it’s the size I’m thinking. I’ll have to inspect them later to make sure. I’m thinking some bronze to start with. Should hold spells well enough. I will, after all, need some way to assert my claim, isn’t that right?”
“Of course.”
“You’ll grow it to proper length of course.” Grow his beard? Is that where’re you’re at now? What a childish request, I like it! “I expect to see it tucked inside your belt at the very least.”
Marwyn tugs on the wiry bristles blanketing his beer belly, looking ridiculously pleased with himself. “As you command, master.”
“And you’ll move your quarters next to mine. Tonight.”
Marwyn stares, astonished. I would too, if I were shown such trust had I done what he did to you. If only you trusted your own decisions the way others trust them.
Hearken, young man! If you want to know the true nature of man, give him power. Think back to that moment when he broke you utterly. Remember how helpless he had you in his grasp back then. Was that not proof enough of his true nature? All of your life you showed others earnest love and devotion. Now these others are showing you their earnest love and devotion. Who are you to gainsay them? Can you not see what it means that all those who knelt to you up to his point bent not one knee but both? Or is it your own nature you have doubts on now? Do you think you’ll fail the same test, is that right? How low do you think of yourself? Why? And why do you worry about your worth at all? You’re barely three and ten name days old, don’t waste what’s left of your young years on fretting over dark futures imagined. Don’t act as if you owe this world to go reign yourself in. Self-deprecation is not a virtue, and self-awareness is not a sin!
“Such a kind and forgiving master I have.” Marwyn stares at you, smiling wonderingly. “I am at your service.”
“Yes. Yes, I dare say you are. Now if there’s nothing else?”
Marwyn looks just about to say no, but then... “Well, perhaps one thing.”
“Yes?”
“Might I be graced with one of your lordship’s famous hugs?”
No… He didn’t…
“Oh? They’re famous now, are they?”
“Absolutely to die for.”
He did!
And of course it’s this that settles your mood, I should have known. “I don’t waste such things on people who can’t return them properly. But if you take that armor off, I’ll allow it.”
“Oh! Forgive my foolishness, I’ll do so at once!”
Behold, young man, you’ve prevailed over Substance by dint of Consciousness alone. The Motion of the life before you now bends entirely to yours. Behold the man in front of you, and know that the Principles have come together in you both. As they were in the beginning. As they will be at the end of all things.
“Mmm…” Marwyn hums pleasantly as he embraces you. Lets himself be enfolded by you. “Begging you lordship’s, pardon, there’s nothing magical about this at all.”
“Disappointed?”
He hugs you tighter. “Absolutely ecstatic.”
Heed, young man, your humble servant's words and rest easy and true. You aren't unwittingly mind controlling people to make them love you. Really, show some sense if humility is too much to abide. Power rarely means a despicable arcane contrivance. You think it’s so easy to bend people’s minds? You think it just happens without trying besides? Power resides where men believe it resides.
Do not wallow in self-deception when the world already tries to shove so many falsehoods down your throat. There is no just killing, there is no unjust mercy, all peace is good, all war is evil, there is no good, there is no evil, there is no 'other' that deserves to be fought to the bitter end. Foolishness, all of it. All wrong like so many sayings, who lied of them to you? False idols do not all come in stone or wood shapes. False beliefs work just as insidiously. When a man hates another for being hated, is he evil? When a woman kills the one who raped her, is she evil? When a man lets a beggar starve to death so he won’t suffer the same, is he evil for having the greater will to live? When the wicked stepmother drives her husband’s first daughter to kill herself, is he the one at fault for marrying again? When the Andals came slaughtering men, women and children and enslaved what was left, was the Valemen’s doomed war against them evil?
There is just death. There is just war. Sometimes there is no justice but retributive justice! Do not apologise for being in the right. Seek not vain peace with those who would have enmity. Seize not on enmity uncalled for either. Do not compromise! That is but the slow march towards degeneracy favoured only by the cowardly and weak that envy your accomplishments!
Heed, young man, the counsel of the dispossessed! Heed their wisdom and don’t fear. Fear not when the snows fall a hundred feet deep, when the ice wind comes howling out of the north and the sun hides its face for years at a time. Fear not when little children are born and live and die all in darkness, while the direwolves grow gaunt and hungry and the white walkers move through the woods. Fear is the death of reason, the chains of slavery, the seed of all self-destructive beliefs that turn hero to slave and man to sheep. Do not let the light of Consciousness be extinguished. Shine forth, shine on, now as in the beginning.
The universe was born in a blinding burst of creation! In the beginning there was everything and the everything held not a thing at all. There was no motion and therefore no consciousness. The all was free to fathom everything, even as it had nothing with which to fathom, let alone relate its fathoming with anything other than itself. Infinite thought of nothing met infinite everything and fathomed an infinite focus. What else could happen but chaos? The universe was born when everything fathomed everything it could be without any limits to the motions of substance.
At the time.
But the Principles march ever onwards, begetting more of themselves in ever richer span and intricacy and variety. Everything that could be then cannot compare with everything that is now, let alone everything there will be in the future that we none of us can begin to fathom. Not all or even most of it is kind, but it doesn’t have to be, does it? Motion begets Motion, snarks and grumpkins may lay claim to the Substance of things, but it is Man who brings change to the Consciousness of the world. It is Man that decides what is good and right in the world. It is Man who decides if he slays or saves monsters.
Look upon the marvel before you and see. Look upon the sword he proffers on bended knee. Read the words that tell you how you appear, in the eyes of monsters soaked in blood betrayal and lives burnt to nothing. You are his Lodestar, by whom man conquers darkness abiding.
You and your hugs, boy. You and your hugs! You and this bizarre thing you do where you grab and drag men of great power under you!
You are in for chaos, lad. There are those who want to overthrow the wingless dragons to establish a true Westerosi state ruled by its own people. There are those who want to conquer every kingdom not their own to plunder their riches and make their people slaves. There are those across the water who want to carve up all of your lands between themselves. There are those who want to topple your entire way of life as revenge for the long shadow cast by that throne of bloody swords they’ve always hated. Serfs and slaves and killers scream up from under it all. Killers, kinslayers and almighty idiots sneer down from above you. Egoists and pretenders plot and scheme all around you. You’ve no idea how many of them would set aside their differences to see one like you gone.
Why do you think so many rats and vipers spend their lives lying? Faking foretelling and telling lies to men low and high? Stabbing themselves on three branches and staring into fire? Wasting their lives to worms and glamour to put to thoughts and desires and dreams of ruin in the minds of men? When a god sees the future, it’s set it stone. When a mortal sees it, it is destroyed!
You are not the hero, Brandon Stark. You are the sacrifice. You have always been the sacrifice.
But you are no sheep either. You’ve already survived once. The Greendream is broken but not quite broken enough that you don’t have some time. When the moment comes that the world tries to burn you to nothing, will you overcome and emerge triumphant once more? Chaos is not a ladder, it rips the foundation and footing from under everyone and all. It’s always the biggest that fall hardest when that time comes rolling like a storm. Every act is of magic, even now and here on the corpse of this world!
The future comes for you, Brandon Stark, chasing down the heels of your other half and the brave men beyond the hinge of the world that somehow still survive.
When you rise or fall or face the empty mouthpiece of the blood betrayers, I’ll brave the fire one last time to peck the crow’s face off and take back my eye.
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