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284 AC – Skagos:
The wind howled as it always did on the northwestern coast of Skagos — bitter, biting, and heavy with the scent of salt and snow. Waves crashed against jagged rocks, and above them, a dozen Skagosi trudged across the black pebbled beach, hauling in half-frozen nets.
"Gods, I hate this place," grunted Harl Strongshoulder, tugging his seal-fur cloak tighter.
Then he stopped, his breath catching.
"What in the bloody hells is that?"
A thing stood on the beach — squat, limbless save for four stubby legs. Its mottled green flesh shimmered oddly, almost like the scales of a fish, but the shape… it was wrong. Utterly unnatural. A curved neck, no nose. Almost just a long, vertical body and a blank, almost offended stillness.
Harl stepped forward, his crude stone axe half-raised. "Some kind of seal-born freak?" he muttered. "Or a demon…"
"Don't get too close," warned Roff, a younger man behind him. "It ain't moving."
Harl took another cautious step.
At once, the thing turned. It had no expression but it rotated on its short legs with eerie precision and began to approach.
"It's seen us," someone whispered. "I think we should go"
"No weapon. No claws. It walks like a drunk." Harl snorted. "I ain't afraid of a lump of green shit."
"I have a bad feeling about this" said Gronkh, an bearded man who was sometimes a little too cautious.
It drew nearer — one pace. Two. Three. Harl prepared to take this wretched creature out of it's misery.
Then it began to glow.
Bright white light bloomed in its core — not fire, not magic, but something older, wrong, something that howled in the bones.
"…Run!"
The explosion shattered the vicinity.
Three Skagosi were vaporized in a thunderous blast, their bodies torn to ash and bone. Two more flew backward in arcs of blood, screaming as their skin burned from the impact.
The others scattered, howling prayers to the Drowned God, to the Old Gods, to anything that would hear them.
Nothing answered.
**Scene Break**
Far away, in a red temple deep in the Free City of Volantis, flames danced wildly in a great brazier shaped like a twisting dragon. The heat was immense, the air heavy with incense and power.
Acolytes lined the chamber, and in the center stood High Priestess Kinvara, eyes locked on the dancing fire. Her breath caught.
"What…?"
The flames shimmered — and showed a creature, green and glowing, unlike anything born of mortal womb or unnatural necromancy. It exploded — and the explosion consumed the men around it in the vision.
Others came — tall black shapes with eyes like the void, walking skeletons with bows, shambling corpses, and spiders the size of direwolves.
Kinvara stumbled back from the flames, as murmurs filled the chamber.
"Are the Others behind this?" asked one acolyte.
"No… the cold ones bring ice and shadow. These things… they have never been shown in our visions," another answered, unsure.
Kinvara steadied herself. "This is new. An enemy that walks neither in shadow nor in light. Not of R'hllor… nor of death. A third force," she whispered. "And it has entered our world."
**Scene Break**
Beyond the Wall, just south of where Hardhome had once stood, wildlings moved in the shadows of bone-trees and broken cliffs. They were many clans, long feuding, but for now huddled together, trying to reclaim old land and forgotten ruins.
The first monster came at night.
Cragjaw saw it first — a skeleton with no flesh, glowing eyes in empty sockets, clutching a bow of bone.
"Some cursed wight," he muttered.
He rushed it.
The arrow took him in the throat before he even screamed.
Then came more.
Green walking bombs, like swollen sacks of death. Groaning men with rotted skin who did not fall when stabbed. Eight-legged gigantic spiders with beady eyes and chittering screams.
Half the camp died before the others scattered.
At dawn, the fires still burned. Dead wildlings littered the coast, and only the crows dared feast.
No one had ever seen monsters like these.
And more were coming.
**Scene Break**
pov Brynden Rivers / Bloodraven
In the cold root-veins of the great weirwood beneath the snowbound hill, Brynden Rivers sat motionless, the roots had fused to his flesh. His breath was slow, as if time itself passed differently for him, but his mind never slept.
He had been watching.
He always watched.
And yet...
Something was wrong.
In the past two years, the song had begun to twist — not unravel, not snap, but twist in ways even he could not fully see. Like a bard's harp being restrung by an unseen hand. The threads still sang... but not his melody.
The girl had always been a curiosity. Lyarra. Clever. Observant. Cold and warm in equal measure. But the boy—Torrhen—he was something else entirely. A stone hurled into still water. A spear into the belly of fate.
"Too fast," Bloodraven rasped aloud, the sound like dried leaves on frost. "Too much."
He had watched the bastard of Winterfell predict the future as if he was a greendreamer after he had survived death and returned changed — not wight, not shade, but something alive and yet other. But Torrhen was clearly no greendreamer... and yet he had accurately predicted events before they came to pass.
That should have been impossible.
And yet... the world shifted around him.
The song had been changed.
Still, in the end, it did not matter. The battle that mattered was far ahead, and the melody of ice and fire endured.
Rhaegar's heir would live. Chaos would bloom. The Others would rise in due time, and Westeros would be brought to its knees — only to be saved, at great cost, as prophesied. As foreseen.
Bloodraven had begun to loosen his gaze from the twins. Lyarra had shown no new strangeness, behaving as a girl her age might: rebellious, clever, lonely. Torrhen had even begun acting… domesticated, in his own fire-forged way. So Bloodraven had turned his full focus northward, toward the frozen lands where the Night King's mind was slowly coalescing in slumber.
Until today.
Today... the song screamed.
His eye burst wide in horror as visions flooded him — not in dreams, not in fire, but through the weirwood itself.
He saw a beach on Skagos blackened with death, green-fleshed abominations that hissed and exploded with light unnatural.
He saw fire in the snow. Men shattered like porcelain. Screams echoing across the cliffs.
He saw wildlings near old Hardhome torn apart by red-eyed bonepeople firing arrows with en masse. Others slain by enormous spiders or strangled by groaning corpses that fought with no pain and no mind.
"What in the seven bloody hells are these?" he hissed.
They were not the Others.
They were not the dead, and they were not of life. They simply appeared out of nowhere. It was clear as a day that some sort of magic was responsible but he had never seen anything like it.
He watched as the wildlings adapted — crude weapons hacking spiders apart, fire torching the shambling corpses. Only the archers remained truly dangerous. The abominations could be fought… endured… studied.
He did not like that.
No, none of this was right.
None of this was meant.
And the timing…
The timing was too perfect. Mere weeks, perhaps two months, after the twins had vanished from Winterfell and mere days after he had watched them depart from White Harbour.
His single red eye narrowed like a slit across a wound. His thoughts turned cold and black.
"Everything has been going wrong lately," he whispered.
He reached into the trees, into the roots, into the hearts of ravens and deer and wolves and wind.
"No... it cannot be a coincidence."
There was only one conclusion.
"They are behind this. The boy. The girl. The… abominations."
Bloodraven's withered fingers clenched against the bark that had become his bones.
He would redouble his efforts.
They could not be allowed to grow more powerful. Not before the true war. Not before the Great Other awoke in earnest.
"I see you now," he rasped into the dark.
"And I will see you fall."
**Scene Break**
14th Day of the Second Moon, 284 ACLocation: East Coast, two leagues north of the ruined cliffs of Hardhome
We set out three days past — twelve of us, including myself, Ser Halbard, Borros the Axeman, and Old Abraxas, who's too stubborn to die and too sour to speak. Captain Marsh gave us orders clear: "Make contact with the free folk near Cragbreaker's Hollow. Trade where you can, gather news where you must, and return before the tenth day."
We brought salt beef, firesteel, and barley. Figured the wildlings might trade furs or bone weapons, maybe news of potential movements from the ice river clans. Even the other wildling tribes despised the ice river clans.
But gods… this wasn't about them.
On the second day, we found a wildling corpse near the river. Not hacked up like in battle. Burned and blasted open. Abraxas muttered it looked like he'd swallowed wildfire and died screaming. Abraxas took the black when the Mad King's burnings were at their peak so such a description sent shivers down our spines.
We pressed on.
Today, we met the green bastard.
Early morning. Mist on the shore. We were skirting a ridge of black stones when Borros spotted it.
At first we thought it was a child of the forest — pale green, waddling, with no arms and a head like a swollen toe. Ugly thing. Looked… wrong. Like a man made of slime and hate.
One of our brothers, Hallen, called out to it. It turned and hissed.
And then it walked straight toward us — slow, waddling, stupid.
I raised my spear. Abraxas, the old fool, stepped forward, muttering, "Let's poke the damn thing, see if it bleeds."
He never got the chance.
The thing glowed white like... I don't know I never saw anything like this and then—
It exploded.
I was ten paces back. Still got thrown into a tree. Three of the lads died on the spot. Hallen's guts were outside his armor, twitching like worms. We burned what was left.
We made camp early after that. No one spoke much.
But the real terror didn't come 'til nightfall.
They wait for the dark.
At dusk, the forest went silent. Not quiet like before a storm. Silent like the world forgot how to breathe.
Then came the groans.
We saw them — figures lurching through the trees. Men… or things that used to be men. Red eyes. Empty. Rotten skin. They came in dozens, moaning, wielding rusted weapons but mostly just bare hands though one wielded a fucking short sword made out of gold.
We fought. Hard. Borros's axe cleaved one clean in two and it still tried to crawl forward. You had to burn them or bash their heads to bits to make them stay down.
Then the spiders came. Big as dogs. Blacker than shadow. Hissing and leaping. One bit Wyle clean through his leather jerkin.
And the archers.
Gods help us, the worst were the ones made of bone. Just bones and bows. They moved like no man ever could — no nerves, no fear. Arrows fell like rain. That's how we lost Ser Halbard. Arrow to the eye while he shouted orders.
We held them off until the sun crept back up. And then… they vanished... well they burned first but then they vanished. Like ghosts at dawn.
We left the dead behind. Burned what we could.
I don't know what we saw. This ain't even wights. Ain't Others. The cold didn't follow them. No blue eyes. These were something else.
Something new.
I'm writing this from a cave by the sea. Tomorrow we return to Eastwatch. If we make it, I'll demand we close the gates and bar them tight.
The world's changing.
And I fear we're not ready for what's coming.
— Cotter Pyke
284 AC/ 0 AR, The Overworld:
pov Torrhen Snow
The air was crisp, fresh in a way Westeros never seemed to be, with a faint scent of grass and something faintly artificial — like the cleanest dream. Beneath their feet stretched a wide-open plain dotted with flowers, gently swaying grass, and the occasional grazing sheep. A lone hill rose in the distance, crowned by trees with impossibly symmetrical leaves.
The portal shimmered behind them, its soft glow contrasting the bright, welcoming world.
Lyarra took a shaky breath and gasped. "Oh gods… I feel like a kid again."
Her eyes sparkled as she spun slowly in place. "Torrhen… imagine everything we can do here!"
Torrhen smiled — then paused. "Uh… Lyarra?"
They both looked down at themselves.
Blocky arms. No fingers. Their legs were stumpy pillars, their torsos and heads angular and awkwardly rigid. They turned their heads and bodies slightly out of sync — an odd, almost floating sensation.
"This is…" Lyarra tilted her arms up, staring at the smooth, skin-colored cuboids. "Weird."
"I have no hands," Torrhen deadpanned. "No hands. This is going to be a problem."
Then something clicked — not in the air, but in their minds. Torrhen blinked, and in the corner of his vision, a faint grid appeared. An instinctual flex of mental focus summoned it fully into being — nine empty squares. Inventory.
"…Okay," he muttered. "This might be a bigger advantage than I thought."
"What do you mean?" Lyarra asked, blinking her inventory away and trying to flex nonexistent fingers.
Torrhen tilted his head, thoughtful. "I want to know how time behaves here. If it flows differently than in Planetos. Could be important if we're planning to build or… live here."
Lyarra frowned. "You think it might?"
He nodded. "Only one way to find out. Step back through. Wait, say, a minute on Skane, then come back through. If time moves the same, it'll feel like a minute here, too."
Lyarra saluted with a grin. "Sure thing, Torr. I'll be back," she said, lowering her voice into a gruff impression of the Terminator.
Torrhen groaned. "You absolute dork."
She stepped through the portal with a wink and vanished.
Alone, Torrhen turned to the nearest tree. "All right, let's test this."
He reached out with his awkward hand-block and… punched.
Thunk. Thunk. Thunk.
With every strike, faint cracks spread across the wood block until, after a few more hits, the entire block simply popped into smaller particles and vanished — only to appear instantly in the bottom-left square of his inventory.
"That… was extremely disturbing," he muttered. "And satisfying."
He kept going, knocking down the rest of the tree until it hovered briefly and then disappeared. Floating logs. No splinters. No aching hands. Just blocks — neat, collectible blocks.
The portal shimmered again. Lyarra returned.
"So?" she asked.
Torrhen squinted up at the sun, then at her. "I forgot to count, but yeah — if you waited about a minute, then time's probably flowing the same on both sides. That's very good for us."
"Yeah," Lyarra said with a shudder. "Don't wanna be here for, like, a week only to realize a year's passed in Westeros."
She looked around the gently rolling landscape, the square sun glinting off square-headed sheep and neat little flowers. "So… what now?"
Torrhen's grin grew wide. "We grind."
Lyarra snorted. "Of course we do."
**Scene Break**