READ HERE: Ever since I’ve started posting BIW, I’ve noticed how much better it is to write only one chapter a week of a story compare to two, so I’ve been trying to come up and develop a new story since then. This is one of those attempts, a story I began writing last year during my break at work and picked back up a a couple months back. Because I’ve been mostly writing it during my breaks, it’s a little choppy with its POVs and has a very dry style. 

More importantly, I will not be continuing it, as I don’t think the story has a ‘future’, per say. Still, I think it’s very entertaining for what it is, and I decided to post it anyway instead of letting it disappear into oblivion along with so many other stories.

Tldr: Wrote a new story. It’s entertaining for what it is, but won’t be continuing it. Still decided to post it here.

REPEATING: THIS STORY WILL NOT BE CONTINUED

xxx

Naruto x ASOIAF

Synopsis: Sasuke takes a different journey after the 4th Shinobi World War. Instead of roaming through the Elemental Nations, he uses the power of the Rinnegan to travel to another world and ends up on the wrong side of the Wall.

xxx

Chapter 1

“You’re really going this time, then?”

Sasuke stopped mid-step. He’d sensed him from a fair distance already, but Sasuke owed him enough to go along with this mystery meeting he wanted. 

Turning, he came face to face with the Hero of the Leaf. “You could have said goodbye at the gates like Sakura and Kakashi, you know?” 

Naruto grinned. “That wouldn’t be as cool.”

Sasuke snorted. “It still isn’t,” he told him, smirking back. “You’re the uncoolest person I know, loser. You should know that by now.”

That stupid smile didn’t falter. The wind gusted through the forest around them, blowing leaves in the air and flapping the empty sleeve of Naruto’s right arm. 

Hiding his frown, Sasuke couldn’t help bringing up a hand toward his left arm. The new one. Even after the war and everything, he had still given Sasuke the first pick of Hashirama’s arm.

Foolish and naive as he was, a man couldn’t ask for a better friend than Naruto Uzumaki.

In another time, Sasuke wouldn’t have taken that deal. He would've left the village months ago on his quest for solace and repentance through the Elemental Nations. 

He wasn’t that man anymore. Not after what the Sage of Six Paths told him in his dreams as he languished in a tiny jail cell, with eyes covered and a straitjacket wrapped around him.

Go, he had said. Your Rinnegan will lead you where you must be. Go and live. Live and learn and love. Help those who need help. That’s your penance, Sasuke Uchiha. This world will wait for you.

Given the journey he had ahead of him—though where it would take him he knew not—he would accept any advantage he could get. Arm and all.

“I came to return this to you,” Naruto said, and held his remaining arm out. In his hand, Sasuke’s old forehead protector sat scuffed and scratched, but whole. Slash through the center notwithstanding.

For some reason, Sasuke hesitated. Should he take it? Did he deserve it, after all he’d done? Frowning for a moment, Sasuke shook his head. No. The Sage said it himself. He still had his penance before he could be whole again. 

A sad smile found its way to his lips. “Keep it, Naruto. I haven’t earned the right to wear it again, not yet.” 

Naruto opened his mouth to complain, as he was wont to do, so Sasuke lifted a hand to stop him. 

“Listen, I’ll accept it from you one day, but only when you can also give me a new one too—one that’s unbesmirched.”

He frowned. “What do you mean?”

“Oh right.” Sasuke chuckled. “I forgot I can’t use big words with you.”

“Asshole!” Naruto scowled and pulled his hand back, fingers tightening around the leaf symbol. “Well now you’re not getting it anymore. Not from me, anyway. I’ll give it to one of your fangirls to keep, then. One of the loyal ones that didn’t care that you deserted. I’m sure they won’t do disturbing things with it.”

Sasuke shook his head, amused. For all they’d been through, it was nice to see some things never changed. “I meant you can give me a new one because you’ll be the Hokage, loser.”

Naruto stopped fuming in an instant. “Oh.” He coughed into the crook of his elbow. “Well, uh, yeah, I knew that. Sure, sure. As the Hokage, of course.”

Giving his best friend one last look—in which he dredged up as much gratitude as any Uchiha could, Sasuke walked up to him and gave him a pat on the shoulder. Naruto, for the first time in his life understanding the seriousness of the gesture, simply gave him a firm nod.

Then Sasuke was gone, hopping up into the trees and swiftly leaving the Leaf and his past behind. 

No. Not behind. He’d carry it with him wherever he went. It was his burden to bear.

xxxxx

Hagoromo wasn’t lying. The world would really wait for him. All around him in the forest clearing, time had come to a stop. 

Leaves and branches defied gravity, hanging askew in a wind that was no longer there. A squirrel stopped halfway up a tree. Two sparrows that had been circling each other hung in the air like wooden carvings frozen in the moment. The beehive a few feet away stood silent.

Nothing moved. Nothing breathed. Only Sasuke and the portal in front of him, shimmering in the sun, showed any signs of life. 

Unlike the times he used this ocular ability during the fight against Kaguya, he couldn’t see what manner of world stood on the other side. Even the Sharingan couldn’t bypass the dark filter that’d gone up the moment he brought the portal to bear. 

Sasuke would be lying if he said that the Sage’s ability to affect the world and Sasuke’s power, even dead and gone as he was, didn’t rankle him. The idea that he was so heavily influenced by others didn’t sit well after all the years he’d spent razor-focused on Itachi. 

How many years had he wasted from his life trying to catch up to his brother? A brother that, in the end, loved him more than anyone else. 

Shaking himself from the memories, Sasuke let out a sigh that he’d been holding ever since he decided to take on Hagoromo’s advice. That’s why he was doing this after all. He was really leaving his world behind. 

His world, his friends… his village, if he could call it that. All so that he could learn who he was—who was Sasuke Uchiha—when there wasn’t some bigger goal spurring him on: to kill Itachi, to destroy the Leaf, to kill Naruto and break the village system of the Elemental Nations.

Whatever world he found out there, he doubted it could be any more terrifying than the darkness that lurked within him, hidden behind nothing other than the words and the iron will of a friend.

Sasuke was never one for hesitating, and he wouldn’t change that now. Without waiting any longer, he plunged through the portal. Toward his future.

The Lands Beyond the Wall - 280 AC

Sasuke frowned, looking down to where his legs up to his calves had disappeared under a blanket of snow. First step into a new world and he already hated it. 

He looked around, sharp eyes taking in every detail of the landscape in a fraction of a second, and for a moment he thought the portal had taken him to the Land of Snow. 

The land was covered in white. Wind howled through the snow-covered forest, the kind of cutting gale that seeped into your bones and threatened to take hold of you. Pine trees swayed and groaned, shedding snowflakes like snakes did their skins.

Sasuke shivered under his cloak. He wasn’t a big fan of the cold. Cycling chakra through his body to stave off the icy wind, he hopped up onto the drift, walking over the snow like he would over water, and started trekking south.

For the first time since he was a child, he had nowhere to go. No big mission to accomplish. He doubted the Sage had sent him to this place without a reason, but for now it was just him and an endless winter forest. 

He would roam the land until something pulled at him, something that would help him answer the question of who he was. Learn to live, the Sage had said. 

Sasuke snorted. Easier said than done.

If nothing happened and there was no other living soul in the forest, he would simply walk until his Rinnegan allowed him to jump into another world again. He didn’t mind either way. Perhaps learning to simply walk aimlessly was a lesson on its own.

xxx

Dacey Mormont 

Mormont girls did not cry. That’s what Dacey told herself even as she sobbed silently into the collar of her coat. The wind stung her cheeks, almost freezing her tears, and she quickly wiped away at them with her sleeve. 

Bear Island was an icy island, but she had never felt as cold as she did now, being dragged by her arm by a mean-looking woman who called herself Mother Mara through a snowy forest beyond the Wall. 

Another eight wildlings travelled with them, all following the small man who wore bones over his boiled leather armor and had a small pack of dogs with him. 

Dacey had escaped her cousin’s keep to play in the forest, and after hours of running around gathering mushrooms and pretending to be one of the great heroes of old, she ended up in a village on the eastern side of Bear Island. 

Without announcing herself as a Mormont, she had been playing with some village children when the wildlings came.

She could barely remember the raid itself. The wildlings didn’t try to fight the entire village, they simply snatched the closest women and children they could find and ran back to where they had hidden their boats before the men of the village could rally. 

Dacey fought as much as she could, biting and kicking and screaming, but a hit to her head meant she passed out until they were already on the Frozen Shore. 

The trek to the place the wildlings called the Skirling Pass had lasted weeks, and one of the women and two of the children they had taken with them didn’t make it. The wildlings burned their bodies and left them behind without a care in the world. The three children that survived had cried that night as they huddled by the fire, while Tilda, who was only sixteen but was the only adult left alive, tried to comfort them. 

Dacey had cried too, but she didn’t tell anyone, just sobbed quietly like she was doing now.

Her thoughts were broken as they suddenly stopped in the middle of a clearing in the forest. The wildling woman holding her yanked her by the arm and threw her to the frozen ground next to the other children. She grunted, but tried not to show the pain on her face. She had her pride as a Mormont, even if it felt meaningless now. 

“Watch them, ya hear, ” the man with the dogs said, snarling at his companions, “I’ll scout ahead. We be only a few days away now.” 

He soon disappeared into the forest, his four dogs racing ahead of him. 

For a moment everyone else in the clearing was quiet. They were not stopping for long, Dacey knew, as the wildlings made no move to gather firewood. 

They passed around dry elk meat from a kill they made weeks ago between themselves, while one of the men gave her and the rest of the Bear Island folk some pine nuts to chew on.

The silence broke when Tilda suddenly yelped. Dacey turned in time to watch Mother Mara drag Tilda by her hair to the center of the clearing. The mean woman had her hair shorn short like a boy’s, and a large scar running from her mouth to her near bald scalp pulled her lips into a permanent scowl.

“So which of you will be man enough to take the little bitch, huh?” Mara asked.

Dacey froze in place. She was only eight, but she knew what that meant well enough. Her mother had taught her how to defend herself from men trying to take advantage of her since she could hold her training mace.

Skair, a black-haired wildling as tall as her Lord Cousin, scoffed from the side. “Leave the lass be, Mara,” he said. “Lant’s told you already, chief Ygon’ll have the girl fresh. His sons will have her after he’s done.”  

Despite the man’s words, there was a grumble of dissatisfaction between the men. 

Turning away from Skair, Mara sneered at the others. “Hav’ the Gods truly made you all craven?” she asked. “Fine piece of meat in fronts’ of ya, and you can’t find the balls to put your cocks in it.” She pointed at one of the men. “You, Karl, didn’t you capture her yourself? Are you not a free man to take what’s yours by right?”

Karl was younger than the rest and the smallest of the bunch. But he’d been groping Tilda every chance he got when the wildling leader wasn’t looking, and Dacey watched with fear as he gained a vile gleam to his eyes. 

Mara spoke before Karl could say anything. “Maybe I’m more man than you, worm. I’ll have her bloody with my axe handle if you can’t get your cock hard enough.” Her lips pulled back even more to show her yellow teeth. “Give her a nice red smile too, it’ll teach the little bitch she’s not as pretty as she thinks she is.”

Tilda shuddered under Mara, but she wasn’t a fighter. Karl growled something she couldn’t understand and stood up from where he sat, stalking toward the two women. 

“Git’ the fuck out o’ my way or I’ll show you next  if I’m man enough, bitch,” Karl snarled at Mara, but the women only laughed and threw Tilda toward him. 

The man pushed Tilda down to the ground and got on top of her. “Don’t fight or it’ll be worse for ye, girl.” Mara laughed at that as she sat next to them as if to watch. 

One of the other men sidled up to Skair. “You gon’ do something ‘bout this?”

Skair shrugged. “He’ll kill him for this, but I won’t stop him.”

With that last hope dead, Dacey did the only thing she could. She screamed. Not for rescue, for she knew they were too far away for anyone to come and save them. No, she screamed for the man with the dogs and the bone armor to come back. She screamed until Mara grew annoyed and walked up to backhand her across the face.

Even then, with her head throbbing and her mouth filled with blood, Dacey screamed.

Chapter 2

Sasuke 

An hour later, Sasuke heard a shout in the distance carried by the wind. Far. Very far, but Sasuke’s senses were sharpened into fine tools by years of training. 

He didn’t hesitate, and soon he was moving swiftly by hopping from tree to tree like he learned since his early days in the Leaf. Snowflakes blew past his face, his cloak flapping in the wind behind him.

Another shout, and as he moved closer, he realized it sounded more like a child’s shriek than the cry of an adult. 

His pace picked up. Sasuke would never call himself a hero, certainly not like Naruto. He hadn’t earned that right yet. But he had a soft spot for kids in danger. 

And being a bit more like his best friend didn’t seem like the worst thing in the world, even if it sounded exhausting just thinking about being more like Naruto.

In the distance, the child’s cry came to a sudden stop. Fearing the worst, he poured more chakra into his legs, and his next jump cracked the trunk of the pine tree when he stepped on the side of it. 

He came to a stop not ten seconds later, standing on a branch of a large willow tree, and he was glad he’d hurried. His right eye shone a deep red as it took in the scene below him. 

A man tore at the clothes of a young woman. An older woman stood over a bloody-faced little girl. Three children huddled in fear while six other men hung around, doing nothing to stop either. 

His frown deepened. 

None of the people in the clearing noticed his arrival. After Orochiamaru’s training, Sasuke was as comfortable on a battlefield as he was infiltrating a palace. His movements barely made any noise, and he knew instinctively where to stand to hide himself from the gaze of others. 

One would have to be a shinobi of Kakashi’s caliber in detection to perceive Sasuke when he didn’t want to be perceived, and these wildly-dressed people didn’t seem to be on that level.

More than that, his eyes, both Sharingan and Rinnegan, saw through all these people as easily as if they were made of water. They had no chakra. None of the power that flowed through every person’s pathways in his world, even the civilians, could be found in any of them.

The chakra pathways were there, he could see them, but they were empty. That did not mean they couldn’t have other tricks up their sleeves, but he had not been expecting that. When he first stepped into this world, he had felt chakra in the air, permeating the atmosphere like a blanket. 

It wasn’t as thick as it was in his world, but it was there, particularly coming in from the far north. He could feel it pulsing like a living heart, sending out waves of dark chakra through the air.

Something to be investigated later.

His eyes shot back to the clearing, the speed of his observations faster than the people below could move. His heart hardened at the sight.

Chakra or not, it didn’t matter. Sasuke decided his course of action in a split second. He could try being more like Naruto later. The man violating the girl would die first. 

xxx

Dacey Mormont

A whistle in the air. The kind a sword makes when it swings in the practice yard. Or an arrow leaving a bowstring. 

Dacey barely had time to register it before Karl dropped next to Tilda, his hands going up to hold a throat that had been nearly ripped out entirely. His eyes seemed to bug out of his face, disbelieving. He gasped and gurgled, legs dragging on the ground uselessly as if they were trying to run away from death. 

He failed. 

His weak convulsing stopped. Beneath him, blood gushed on the snow like a rose in bloom. No one around her even had time to move a muscle, so stunned at how fast Karl had died. 

Tilda pushed herself back through the snow, looking at the corpse next to her with a mix of terror and relief in her face. With the young woman moving out of the way, Dacey noticed a small piece of metal sticking out of the ground half-covered by the snow. Her eyes widened as she realized what it was.

Some kind of knife? she asked herself. But how?  

She looked around frantically, trying to spot whoever could have thrown it. But the forest seemed quiet all around them, no signs of track on the snow, not even a squirrel skittering out of its nest. Only the sighing of the wind brushing against tree branches.

As if snapping out of it, the wildlings exploded into action. Mother Mara growled, pushed Dacey back onto the ground as if to spite her, then swivelled around the clearing with her twin axes held before her. The rest of the men pulled their own weapons as well, stone clubs, bronze spears, and horn-wrought bows.

“What was that?” One of the wildlings asked. 

“Arrow,” another answered confidently. He had his own bow in hand and a stone-tipped arrow nocked. “I’ll show this bastard who’s got the best shot if he wants it.”

“No, not an arrow,” Skair said, nodding his head toward the strange metal blade sticking out of the ground. Holding his large war axe with both hands, he looked around cautiously. “Show yourself!” he called out.

“Aye, come out, craven!” Mara said, cackling.

Silence answered their calls. For a moment, Dacey thought nothing would happen. She had hit her head on a jutting root when Mara pushed her back down, and she was starting to think this whole situation was an illusion her weary mind had created for her.

Until there was the sound of leaves rustling, and suddenly a man walked out from the shadowed tree line toward their direction. His head was down against the wind, his collar flared up, covering most of his face, while his dark cloak fluttered behind him.

Dacey’s heart soared in hope. A brother of the Night’s Watch? Maybe even her great-uncle Jeor coming to rescue her! She opened her mouth to speak, to call out for his help.

Then the man looked up, eyes shining red and purple, and Dacey felt the words die in her mouth.

xxx

Tilda 

Tilda’s hands still shook as she stared at the lifeless man next to her. Her clothes lay ripped and torn around her, the wind biting at her exposed body. Yet she could barely sense the cold.

Some of the blood had sprayed on her chest and legs, and she could feel its warmth on her skin. Her throat felt like it was closing up. She couldn’t breathe. Couldn’t think straight. 

She knew well the fate of those who were captured and taken by the wildlings, especially the women. No woman who lived on Bear Island was ignorant of such things. They had been dealing with wildling raids for all living memory.

But things were a lot different when it happened to you. The first hours after the wildling men grabbed her from her village had been spent in full terror and crying at what future awaited her. 

The only thing that kept her from jumping out of the boat into the frigid waters of the Bay of Ice were the children that had also been taken with them. She couldn’t leave them alone, especially as the only other adult woman that had been captured caught a fever as soon as they left the Island.

She thought of fighting back that first night at the Frozen Shore, of clawing at their eyes or stealing a knife to cut their throats as they slept, but she was never much of a fighter, much to the chagrin of her mother. At sixteen, she was short and slim and not at all like the women of legend from the ruling house of Bear Island.

So she had accepted her fate of being used by horrible wildling men until her death. With luck, the best thing she had to hope for was one of them taking a liking to her and she wouldn’t have to share her bed with more than a single man. 

But despite being surrounded by almost a dozen men and that terrible woman with the scarred face, Mara, none of them tried to force themselves on her. Oh there was the occasional grope disguised as a rough push, but nothing like she feared.

And so, foolishly, she had believed that she was safe. That nothing would happen to her. That she could hope for a normal life as a free woman, even if it were to be amongst the savage people beyond the Wall.

Now, as she stared at the cooling corpse of the man who almost took her, that reality was shattered. She had simply been promised to another man and his sons already, and it clearly hadn’t stopped Karl after a bit of provocation from Mara.

Too lost in her own thoughts, Tilda only looked up from the dead body when Mara spoke up.

“Who the feck are ye?” the woman asked with a sneer.

Confused, it took Tilda a moment to realize someone else had come into the clearing. She turned to where all the wildlings were looking only to find a man striding up to them. 

No, her tired mind realized, the man is walking up to me.

Terror gripped her again. Something about the man sent shivers worming down her back. She tried to crawl away, but she found her body sapped of energy. Her arms felt weak and frozen in shock.

Then, when he stood right next to her, and she thought she would have to relive her attack all over again, the man stopped. He turned to her, and she finally saw his face.

Her heart skipped. Beautiful. That was the first word that came into her mind. He was the most handsome man she’d ever seen. Even his eyes, mismatched and colored in a way that should not be possible, didn’t take away from his otherworldly beauty.

Despite his black hair, he looked like what she imagined the famed rulers of Westeros looked. Her own Targaryen Prince, lost beyond the Wall, had come to save her.

The man’s eyes shot down toward her and she froze like a deer in the face of a hunter. 

“I asked ye a question, pretty boy,” Mara said again.

Another wildling spoke up. “Start talking or you’re getting an arrow to the face.”

The man’s red and purple eyes swivelled to the wildlings, but his face remained expressionless, as if he was a great snake looking down at maggots trying to threaten it. His mouth opened and he said something in a language Tilda had never heard.

Mara sneered. “The fuck are ye sayin’?” 

“You from Essos or something, kneeler?” Skair asked, his sharp eyes evaluating the man. “There any more of you around?”

“Tsk. Screw this.” Without waiting for anything else to happen, the wildling with the horn-bow drew his arrow, pointed at the beautiful man, and shot.

The arrow whisked through the air, and Tilda’s stomach clenched at the thought of another man dying right beside her. But before she could even gasp, the man’s arm shot up and he caught the arrow dead from the air between two of his fingers like a smoking pipe.

Her jaw gaped, and she saw the wildlings react in disbelief at the man’s show of speed. Skair’s eyes widened, and Mara let out a low hiss like a pot leaking smoke. 

“How in the gods name did he do that?” A club wielding man said, his voice shaky. 

The wildling who shot the arrow didn’t say anything, his mouth opening and closing like a fish out of water.

The man brought the arrow closer to his face as if to inspect it, then he let out a scoff. He said something else again in that language of his, and Tilda couldn’t help but notice how his voice sounded low and refined and unlike anyone she had ever heard before.

He threw the arrow up into the air as one would a stone, and before the arrow came back down into his hand, he took off his cloak and tossed it onto her exposed chest in a single smooth movement.

Surprised, Tilda caught the cloak with both hands, gasping at how smooth it felt against her fingers. She had never touched something so fine. Tears came to her eyes, and she hugged the cloak close to her, wrapping around her body like it could protect her from all the ills of the world.

When she looked back up at the man, he had the arrow grasped in his hand again. He looked up at the wildling archer and a shadow of a smirk came to his face. She didn’t know if the expression made him more terrifying or more handsome. 

Suddenly, in an explosion of movement, he swiped his arm across his body and hurled the arrow twice as fast back at the archer. The arrow cut through the air and found its home on the neck of its former owner. He died before he could make another sound.

“Shit!” The wildling with the stone-headed club said.

Skair reacted first. “Don’t let him throw anything else,” he yelled, then charged ahead toward the man.

With a loud roar, the other wildlings followed behind him. 

xxx

Sasuke 

The warriors dressed in rags charged at him with indecipherable war cries on their lips and outdated weapons in their hands. It was one thing to realize that the people of this world didn’t have access to chakra, yet it was a whole other to see that they were using stone-tipped arrows and bronze axes to attack him.

Sasuke almost felt bad for them, but the image of the little girl with the bloodied face and the half-naked young woman beneath him quickly disabused him of that train of thought.

Still, he hid a grimace when he imagined the kind of infrastructure available in this world. Though Sasuke didn’t consider himself a particularly snobby person, he was still a proud Uchiha. 

He already debased himself long enough after years of living in dimly lit tunnels and damp caves with Orochimaru. Looking back on those years, the lengths he went to in his pursuit of vengeance astounded him.

When the first attacker reached him, a tall man holding a large bronze war axe, Sasuke did nothing more than lightly step to the side. He felt a light breeze kiss his skin when the weapon sailed past his face only an inch away.

This is disappointing, he thought to himself. He was no battle junky like Suigetsu, but he enjoyed a good fight where he could push himself. He was still a ninja at the end of the day. This, though, felt more like stepping on ants.

He had decided to be extra careful whenever he jumped worlds, so he had kept both his Sharingan and Rinnegan eyes active since he first entered through the portal. That had been a waste of chakra, he realized that now.

Granted, he had more chakra than any man could ever want, especially now that his Hashirama arm had integrated with his Uchiha body. He had even managed to deactivate and conceal his Rinnegan at will. 

So with a sigh at how slow the locals had turned out to be, Sasuke’s Sharingan stopped spinning and faded into his usual black eye. He kept the Rinnegan active for now. After hearing the strange language they spoke, he realized he would soon have to make use of the more esoteric powers of his eye of Samsara.

Another man swung a wooden club down at him with an overhead strike, and he used two fingers to redirect the blow into the path of the hacking axes of the woman with a scarred face. 

Bronze axe-blades bit into the hard wood of the club, sending splinters flying in the air. The man cried and stumbled back as a sharp piece of wood cut him on the cheek. 

Angered, the woman growled as she struggled to pull her axes away from the club. She spat and let out some kind of harsh word that could only be a curse, then kicked the man in the chest for getting in her way.

Behind, one of the men stabbed at him with a stone-tipped spear, and Sasuke spun out of the way while taking hold of the spear’s shaft. He pulled on it, sending the wild man careening towards him with wide, terrified eyes, and Sasuke quickly chopped him on the neck with the same force he would use to down a genin. 

The man collapsed to the ground, eyes rolled up to the back of his head. The other locals paused at that, watching him wearily. There were still six of them standing, trying to outflank him by circling around him like wolves hunting their prey.

It made for a pitiful sight. Sasuke decided to give them a final chance to rethink their choices. 

He had no problem putting a permanent end to enemies when they deserved, and some of these people here easily made that list, but having just arrived in the world, a small showing of mercy made for a better policy than wholesale slaughter. 

He had already sent a powerful enough message by killing a couple of them. Still, in order for him to give them a fair choice to back off, one more person had to serve as a sacrifice. 

Kneeling next to the unconscious man, Sasuke put his hand over the man’s head and used the power of the Human Path to pull on the man’s soul.

A cold feeling spread to him as his Rinnegan consumed the spirit of the man. Unconscious, the man didn’t trash about or cry out in pain. He just expired while deep in sleep. Another small mercy.

It was the first time Sasuke tried the ability, and it was a strange feeling to feel all the knowledge the man once had poured into his mind like a tsunami, washing him in foreign feelings and sensations of an entire life.

He winced at the deluge of information, but he wasn’t known as a genius for nothing. His mind, augmented as it was by both his Rinnegan and his mixed Uchiha and Senju body, was a fortress as solid as bedrock. 

In the moment between heartbeats, he sorted through the man’s—Tork’s—entire life, keeping and discarding knowledge as easily as a farmer sorted bad seeds from good. Language and information of the world, that’s what Sasuke was after, and in just a few seconds, he had what he needed.

The strange locals—the free folk, as he now knew what they called themselves, didn’t seem to understand what he was doing kneeling next to the now dead man. Naturally, they wouldn’t be able to see the soul leaving the man’s body and being consumed by him.

“What are you doing to ‘im?” The scarred woman—Mother Mara, his new memories provided—asked. “Why’d he stop breathin’?”

Sasuke’s eyes narrowed. Knowing what he knew about these people and their habits now, he was less inclined to provide any more mercy than necessary. They were raiders and robbers and rapists. Scum of the highest order. 

He rose from where he knelt, his eyes now back to their natural black. Wind whipped across the clearing, sending flurries of snow all over them. 

“I grow bored of this,” Sasuke said, the words of this new language coming naturally to his tongue. “Leave the children and be on your way.”

Mara cackled. “Oh ye can speak now, can ye? Ye sound like a prissy southron more than ye look, pretty boy.” 

The man known as Skair spoke next. “This isn’t how this works, kneeler,” he said, frowning. “We stole these girls. By all the customs of our gods and the free folk, they belong to us. It be the law here.”

A spike of fury shot through Sasuke at those words. His voice came out low and steady. “At this place and at this moment in time,” he told them, “I am the only law that matters. Leave or die, those are your choices.”

For a moment, there was silence in the clearing as the locals took in his meaning. Then came the anger.

Mara’s face twisted into an ugly sneer. “Piss on that,” she spat, and got nods all around from the warriors that still stood. 

Even Skair, who Sasuke had noted was a more cautious man, didn’t seem willing to budge on the issue. The tall man hefted his large axe, then as one the group of free folk started closing in on him.

Good, Sasuke thought. These people deserved what came next.

“Wrong choice.”

Chapter 3

Even in killing, Sasuke was merciful. 

Not to the so-called free folk, or wildlings—a name people south of the Wall called them, and one he was more inclined to use. 

A thousand different ways to butcher them came to his mind. He could have sliced them to pieces with his Kusanagi. Burnt them alive with any number of fire jutsu in his repertoire. Brought down the fury of the heavens with his signature lightning dragon. 

But he was merciful to the four huddled children watching from the edge of the clearing, and to the girl behind him who had already been traumatized enough for one day. To keep them from witnessing his full might, he kept things simple.

The first wildling impatiently lunged at him from the left without waiting for any of his comrades to make a move at the same time. A costly mistake in a normal fight against a marginally superior enemy.

Against Sasuke, such things make no difference. Death was the only certainty.

The wildling’s two dirks struck high and low, aiming to punch holes in his stomach and neck. Sasuke simply stepped into his guard, using just enough speed to stun him, and launched an open-handed blow against the man’s neck.

A wet crack echoed in the clearing. The man’s eyes widened to saucers, his mouth opened as if to let out a pained scream, but nothing came out. He fell to his knees, the dirks dropping beside him. 

A collapsed trachea wasn’t as dramatic as showers of blood and burned carcasses, but it killed people just the same, and it was less damaging to young children. 

That’s something he could attest for himself. Why didn’t Itachi just do the same thing when he massacred the Uchiha? Sasuke would’ve grown up to be a less broody child if that had been the case.

A makeshift spear was already heading toward his back, but Sasuke easily spun out of the way and used his momentum to backheel his new attacker. The kick struck the man on the side of his face, and another loud crack sounded when his neck snapped to the side. 

This wildling dropped to the snow like a puppet when their chakra strings were cut, dead before he could blink. Sasuke nodded to himself. Necks it is, he decided. 

The man with the collapsed trachea was still convulsing on the ground, his face growing purple by the second. Bad way to go. Sasuke didn’t care much about the man’s suffering, but he might as well make this as clean as possible. 

He went on the offensive.

xxx

Dacey Mormont

Dacey’s eyes shone as she watched the strange man dismantling the wildlings without even using the sword at his hip.

Ever since she could walk, her mother had brought her to Mormont Keep’s courtyard to train with practice weapons and straw dummies. Even before that, Dacey’s first memories were seeing her cousin Jorah practice in the yard.

She could remember watching in awe as two Mormont guardsmen traded blows using sword and shield against her cousin. It felt like a scene from the Age of Heroes to her young mind. The clashing of steel ringing like a song. Jorah’s feet shuffling and darting back and forth like a skilled dancer.

That began her fascination for anything related to fighting and war. Usually, those weren’t pursuits afforded to ladies of the realm, but life was different in Bear Island. Land and living were rough this far north, and the women had to be cut from the same cloth.

Her mother, a warrior in her own right, had always encouraged Dacey’s fighting spirit, and most of her time was spent either watching the Mormont guards sparring or her own practice with her small training mace.

Still, despite spending countless hours watching the best warriors of her island training at arms, she had never seen someone fighting like the man with the strange eyes.

Dacey blinked as she looked at him again. Weren’t his eyes red and purple just a minute ago? She shook her head. Besides Targaryens, people didn’t have colorful eyes, no matter how wondrous they would look. 

Another wildling fell beside the man after a spinning kick to the head, a move she didn’t even know was possible. He was so much faster and more nimble than any warrior she’d seen. 

The four wildlings left seemed to grow weary as their attempt to box in the man by spreading out failed. But that didn’t seem to matter to the strange man. Instead of waiting for them to attack him again, he dashed forward toward Mara.

The woman hesitated, crossing her twin bronze axes in front of her to defend herself, only for the man to go low and throw her off her feet with a sweep of his leg. Mara fell hard on the snow, gasping, and the man didn’t hesitate to stomp on her neck in a brutal killing blow.

Dacey almost cheered out loud, but the pain in her broken nose kept her from crying out in joy. A dark satisfaction rose in her chest at seeing Mother Mara dying like a bug beneath the man’s feet. 

And so easy, she thought. One of the best woman warriors Dacey’s ever seen, even one who was a horrible bitch to her, had been taken out by the man like it was nothing. 

The rest of the fighting wasn’t anything different. 

Dacey struggled to follow his movements as he ducked a wild swing from a wooden club and came up punching the chin of a wildling, who fell down like a sack of potatoes. 

The last two wildlings didn’t try to fight. One turned to flee, but the man quickly overtook him and twisted his neck from behind before he got three steps away. The children beside Dacey gasped and cried at the loud cracking sound, turning in fear, but she couldn’t tear her eyes away even if she wanted.

Skair was the last man standing, frozen in the middle of the clearing. When the man turned to look at him, the tall wildling fell to his knees and dropped his great axe to the ground.

His face was drawn in a mask of horror. “Mercy!” he cried. “Please have mercy on me!” 

The man walked calmly toward him. He didn’t say anything as Skair kept pleading, tears streaming down his face. Dacey had never taken Skair for a coward from the few weeks she had been around him since they took her, but he showed his true colors now.

“Please, I’ll do anything! I’ll help you conquer the free folk,” he promised when there was no response. “You’d be a god here. Worshipped. I can help you! Please have mercy!”

When the man stopped in front of the wildling, Skair looked up fearfully at him, mouth opening and closing suddenly without words.

After a moment of silence, the man issued his response.

“No.” 

xxx

Sasuke

Sasuke let the last wildling fall to the ground, his neck twisted at an impossible angle. Silence filled the clearing. Only the sounds of the wind and the nervous sniffling of the children remained.

He sighed as he looked at them, most of them shaking in fear on the ground. This was the part he dredged more than any fight. Naruto would know exactly what to say to get them in a better mood. He’d probably make some stupid joke at his own expense and that would somehow get the children to love him.

Could he perhaps do the same?

He nodded to himself. Everything Naruto could do, Sasuke could do better. That was a certainty he carried throughout his life ever since he met the blond idiot in the Academy. Surely, he could handle a few brats better than him.

“Are you a brother of the Night’s Watch?” the girl with the bloodied nose asked.

Sasuke frowned. Tork’s memories provided some context for him to know what that meant. An ancient order of men dressed in black that patrolled an impossibly tall wall of ice that separated the lands beyond that wall from the southern kingdoms.

Suffice to say that the wildling he got the knowledge from was not a fan of this Night’s Watch. Everyone of the free folk hated the crows, as they were called here, with a passion that would put the rivalry between the Leaf and the Stone village to shame.

“No,” he replied. 

He thought for a moment on what to say, something that could come straight out of Naruto’s mouth and break the ice. An obvious idea came to mind.

Forcing a smile onto his face, he struck a confident pose and gave them a thumbs up. “I’m the village idiot who’s gonna become the Hokage, believe it!”

His voice came out gruff and low instead of excitable like he wanted, and the girl’s mouth gaped open. The strange smile he had forced onto his face faded as he realized what he’d said.

He wanted to slap himself. That’s not what Naruto actually said most of the time, just what Sasuke thought he heard given how stupid it was. He let out a sigh. Screw it. If there’s one thing Naruto was better than him, it was being a lovable idiot.

He couldn’t compete in that arena, nor did he want to. Five seconds of trying to portray a smiley, cheerful Naruto had been more tiring than fighting Madara and Kaguya combined. 

What was it that Nara guy used to say?

Troublesome. Yes, too troublesome.

xxx

Dacey Mormont

She watched stupefied as the man’s face morphed back into a blank mask. Somehow, that was more comforting than whatever kind of expression he had tried to put on. That had been the strangest, most strained smile she had ever seen. 

“What’s a Ho-ka-ge?” the boy next to her asked. The other children seemed curious as well. They were looking at the stranger like he was an actor in a mummer’s play.

The man let out a sigh and relaxed from the weird pose he had been holding. “Forget it,” he murmured. “Can you all walk?”

The kids nodded, and Dacey nodded with them. Her nose was throbbing and her toes felt stiff and cold, but she could walk. She was a Mormont of Bear Island. Cold was just a fact of life for her.

“Thank you,” Tilda said, slowly getting up from the ground. She was holding on tightly to the man’s cloak, her eyes looking at him the way Dacey had seen some of the maids looking at the guards. “Thank you for saving us, m’lord, truly.”

“Hn,” the man said, barely looking at the young woman.

“There’s one more,” Dacey spoke up. The man turned to her, black eyes sharp and intense. She swallowed, but managed to point behind her toward the forest. “He was leading them. He’s got bones tied to his chest and calls himself Lant. He went that way with his dogs to scout ahead.”

The man turned the way she pointed. His eyes seemed to fix on a point in the distance for several seconds, then he shrugged. “Doesn’t matter,” he said, his voice louder than before. “If he comes, he’ll die like them.” 

Dacey nodded. Somehow, she didn’t doubt that at all. Despite the pain radiating from her face, she pushed herself to her feet and readied herself to keep going. 

Without waiting for them, the men turned and started to walk south, only stopping to grab from the ground the strange knife he’d first thrown at Karl. 

The kids clambered up to their feet and started shuffling after him, and Dacey quickly followed after, her excitement growing. She had so many questions to ask him! 

xxx

Lord of Bones

The man who called himself Lord of Bones watched from a distance as the stranger left with the stolen kids from Bear Island. 

Despite the seeping cold that set his teeth chattering, a bead of sweat rolled down from the back of his neck all the way to his lower back. The man had looked at him. Somehow, through hundreds of yards and countless trees, the man had stared straight at him.

Lant, for that was his real name despite what he would like to be called, hadn’t seen the fighting go down. By the time he was on his way back and close enough to see anything, Skair was already kneeling on the ground begging for his life.

He spat on the snow. Skair had been a good follower, but his soul was that of a flea’s, weak and craven. He was still a good fighter, as was Mara and Daker with his bow. How had that man killed all of them so quickly?

Some kind of southron knight, perhaps. Or maybe there had been archers hidden in the trees that Lant hadn’t seen.

He nodded to himself. Yes, that made sense. And the man was definitely a kneeler, he knew that for sure. The dead bodies of his raiding band were left behind in the clearing for the animals to pick through. He hadn’t looted anything from the bodies, nor had he burned them before leaving.

Irritation flared in his chest. The man would pay for that. Had to pay for that. Giving the girl and the children to the clan chief would allow Lant to leave and form his own clan with Ygon’s blessing. 

Then, only then, the free folk would rightfully know him as the Lord of Bones. 

Sensing his anger, his dogs let out a low whine from where they sat beside him. He wasn’t a filthy warg, but a man’s connection to his animals went beyond the sorcery of the skinchangers. 

He shushed them, bending down to pet one of them in the head. Then he seized the animal by the scruff of the neck and pushed him down into the snow. The dog growled, a pitiful thing, and Lant growled back until the dog relented. 

After a few seconds of that, he let the dog go and started petting it again. He felt better already.

A twisted grin pulled at his lips. Didn’t matter if the man was a kneeler or not. He needed only to tell Ygon Oldfather that Lant’s band had been set upon by the Night’s Watch, and the clan chief would be more than glad to mount a hunting party.

The Lord of Bones would have his revenge. 

Chapter 4

Sasuke

“Wait, how did you do all that?” the little girl asked. “With the kicks and the punches and the red eyes?”

Sasuke ignored her and just continued to trudge on through the icy forest. They had been walking for nearly an hour and she hadn’t stopped babbling on about everything she could think of. 

If anything, Sasuke felt proud he hadn’t already snapped. Beyond the endless chatter, it was also a pain to keep the slow pace of the children, but he couldn’t well abandon them to their fate in this cold, desolate land.

“What about the throwing knife, huh?” Her voice had that nasal tone of someone who’d broken their nose and hadn’t yet set it right. He would have to fix that soon.

“How did you do it?” She kept on going. “I’ve never seen one like that before. Why is it shaped funny?”

She talked more than any of the other three children combined. It was still better than the other end of the spectrum. Walking to his left, the teenage girl who had introduced herself as Tilda kept batting her eyelashes and smiling at him.

It reminded him too much of his academy days and the fan girls he had to evade. Getting by them on his way back home had made for good stealth practice as a kid.

After another minute of continuous silence on his part, the girl finally gave up.

“Fine,” she huffed. “Can you at least say what’s your name? I’m Dacey of House Mormont, by the way.”

Tilda gasped beside him. She turned to the little girl, eyes wide. “M’lady,” she said, bowing low. “Why didn’t you say anything before? I—I could have…”

“There was nothing you could do,” Dacey Mormont said, “and I didn’t want to let the wildlings know they captured a Mormont. The gods only know what they might have done then.”

Sasuke nodded silently at the words. Denying the enemy any and all information you could was always smart. The girl sounded older than her years despite her annoying nasal voice, though it made sense. 

Given what he knew, this was also a world that forced children to wise up from a very young age.

“As you say, m’lady.” Tilda bowed her head. At least the kid was good for something. The teenage girl’s attention now was all on her. “I’m sure the whole of Bear Island will be glad to hear of your safe return when we get back.” 

“If we get back,” Dacey corrected her. “We’re still beyond the Wall and weeks away from home.”

That dose of reality seemed to cast a damper in everyone else. The children shuffled their feet tiredly on the ground, sniffling silently, while Tilda had stopped staring at him or Dacey like they were gods to simply walk beside them, watching her steps with a pensive look on her face.

He needed to reward the kid for serving as his shield against yet another fangirl.

“Uchiha,” he said into the silence. “Sasuke Uchiha.”

“Oh.” The girl perked up, then her face screwed up as if deep in thought. “Uh, I’ve never heard of House Uchiha. You’re from Essos, no? Are you a noble?”

Sasuke thought about that for a moment. Tork had never heard of Essos, so he just shrugged. As for being a noble…

If the likes of the Hyuuga, Akimichi, and even the Nara and the Yamanaka considered themselves noble clans, then what were the Uchiha? Super nobles?

“I’m no mere noble,” he said with a scoff. The day he thought himself at the same level of a Hyuuga was the day he stopped being an Uchiha.  

Dacey made an ‘oh’ shape with her mouth, but at least she stopped pestering him until they set up camp that evening beneath a large oak tree. 

Night fell quickly here, and the cold got all the more intense as the sun disappeared over the horizon. Exhausted by all the walking Sasuke forced them to do, the children quickly fell asleep bunched up in a heap around the fire he made. 

Tilda had sang them to sleep and quickly dozed off after them. Dacey Mormont was the last one to go to sleep, insisting she would keep watch with him with tears in her eyes after he had set her nose straight. But she was only eight, and soon she was leaning on Tilda’s shoulder and snoring like a drunk boar.

Then, only after they were all sleeping soundly around the crackling fire, Sasuke looked up at the source of chakra that had been following them for the better part of the day.

His eyes narrowed at the form of a crow sitting on a tree branch above their campsite. Curiously, the animal had three eyes. Sasuke had never seen a crow with three eyes, and he might have shrugged it off as a quirk of this world if it hadn’t been for the tiny sliver of chakra the creature was giving off.

It wasn’t the dark, potent chakra he had been feeling coming to the far north. That energy had a feel of its own. Dark and cold and malevolent. 

This one felt more… aged. Not older, for the dark chakra felt as ancient as time itself, but simply more tired. Nearly spent. Yet twisted in its own way.

With a thought, Sasuke’s eyes swirled into the familiar three-commas pattern of his base Sharingan. For a split second, he thought he saw the crow rear back in surprise and open his wings as if to fly away.

But then the genjutsu took root and the third eye of the crow gained the blood red colors of the Sharingan. It was past time Sasuke met whoever their stalker was.

xxx

Sasuke’s eyes swept across the cavernous hall he found himself in. Behind him, tall double doors stood closed as if to prevent his escape. A central aisle led up to a dais where a mess of twisted and bent swords formed a throne. 

The skulls of some form of creature lined the sides of this great hall, some of them as large as what he imagined the skull of Manda would look without all the muscle and scales.

And, of course, sitting on the sword throne atop the dais, the figure of a man looked down at him with a sheathed sword across his lap.

Sasuke almost laughed. The first time he did something like this, he ended up in a stare down with the Kyuubi inside Naruto’s seal. On the second, he emerged into the vile, flesh-like mindscape of Orochimaru’s body-stealing jutsu. 

Did this man really think he could intimidate him?

Smirking, Sasuke walked forward across the carpeted central aisle of the throne room. Narrow mosaic windows let in slivers of sunlight into the hall, while a hanging walkway on one side of the room served as a sort of gallery.

A thousand or more people could fit into the room, yet it was only the two of them here. Sasuke took in the sitting man as he stepped closer. A young man, pale as moonlight, tall and sharp with long hair that fell down to his shoulders white as a sheet of paper. A reddish brown birthmark stained one side of his face.

And, curiously, the man looked back at him with red eyes. For a moment Sasuke thought he’d met some long-lost Uchiha cousin of his, until he realized they were normal red eyes and not the Sharingan. The man was an albino, surely.

“Interloper,” the man’s voice boomed across the room. “You do not belong here. Leave this realm and go back to whence you came.”

Much like he did with Dacey Mormont, Sasuke ignored the man’s babbling and kept on walking. He moved closer to the sword throne and noticed a flicker of unease flash through the man’s pale face.

The sword on his lap suddenly came gleaming out of its scabbard. The steel of the sword had a rippling pattern to it that seemed to dance in the sunlight. It was no Kusanagi, but it had a certain charm to it that he didn’t mislike.

The man stood and pointed the sword at him. “Leave now, interloper, and you shall not face my wrath.”

With his voice echoing around the room, his words might have sounded scary had Sasuke’s sharp eyes not noticed the slight trembling of the man’s hands. He was having trouble carrying the burden. Not the sword, but the illusion of the throne room and his youth as well. 

Sasuke stepped onto the dais and up onto the stairs that lead to the throne.

“Stop!” The man began to sound desperate. “Leave now!”

When the tip of the man’s sword touched his chest, Sasuke finally came to a stop. “Break the illusion or I will break it myself,” he said. 

The man snarled, trying to press the sword forward to impale him. Sasuke let his smirk grow. 

“Let’s see what you really are.” Then he flexed his chakra.

Reality shattered. The throne room around them collapsed like broken pieces of glass to reveal the dirty truth underneath. Instead of giant skulls and carpeted halls, Sasuke found himself standing in some sort of cave facing a monstrosity of man and tree.

Roots criss-crossed a body that looked more corpse than living human. Even with his Sharingan, he had a hard time determining where man began and tree ended. But it was the same man from the throne room, he could tell. His chakra felt the same, and the red-stain birthmark still marred his face.

“You should not be here, interloper,” the man rasped. His voice held none of the impetus from before.

“Yet I am,” Sasuke said. “What of it?”

“You should not be,” the tree man insisted. “Your presence has already caused untold damage. You are… you are an entire symphony disturbing a single, delicate song.”

Sasuke raised an eyebrow. “And I should care about your song why?

“It is not my song! It is the hopes of this world. A world you have now put in jeopardy.”

Sasuke was well aware he held enough power to destroy a world, but that didn’t mean he was inclined to do so. “How?”

“The enemy. The cold ones. Your presence strengthens them. It has strengthened even me, to the point I could craft that illusion. And you have only been in this world for a few hours.” 

“You speak of the source of the cold chakra from the north,” he said.

The tree man gave him the equivalent of a nod. “I will show you. Please, do not break the illusion.”

With a shrug, Sasuke let the tree man take hold of reality and shape it. Soon they were flying above the icy forests beyond the Wall. The man took the shape of a tree-eyed raven while Sasuke remained as himself.

North and north they flew, until forest became jagged rock and snow turned to ice, and rivers turned into frozen blue swords cutting through the landscape, and the light of the sun could not seem to touch the ground.

“There,” the three-eyed raven said as they stopped flying mid air. A dark wing waved to some point beyond the horizon. “There, in the heart of winter, the enemy of all humanity lies. Dormant, but not dead. Your presence might finally awaken it. And worse, give it strength beyond what it already has.”

At that moment, a huge surge of chakra pulsed angrily from deep beneath the ice. The three-eyed raven squawked in fear and the illusion shattered once more. 

Back in the cave, the tree man was gasping for breath in his coffin of roots.

“Do you feel it now?” he asked in a shaky voice. 

Sasuke remained unmoved. It wasn’t a lot of chakra compared to the amounts Sasuke himself had. Nothing, really, but he could imagine how terrifying that might be to someone with as little chakra as the tree man.

“You seek to frighten me away by showing me a den of insects,” he said, “as if I could not simply step on them.”

The tree man seemed horrified by his words. “You are delusional! You don’t understand, you—”

“Enough,” Sasuke cut in. “My path is my own whether you like it or not. Do not bother me again, or you will find me a worse enemy than whatever slumbers beneath the ice.”

He closed his eyes, and when he opened them, he was back at the campsite, the fire still crackling nicely beside him. Tilda and the children were snoring and sleeping soundly. Barely more than a second had passed. 

Sasuke sighed as he felt the chakra signature of the three-eyed raven that had followed them fly away. Annoying. A half-tree man who refused to die seeking to tell him what to do. 

He could’ve reassured the man by telling him he would deal with whatever stirred from the icy anthill, but he might as well let the man stew in his fear. That would teach him to try and scare him with the most childish illusion he’d ever seen.

Still, this world was turning out to be more interesting than he expected. An enemy to fight in the future, skulls of creatures as big as Manda, and a grand throne room with swords for a throne. What else would he find as he continued to travel? 

Leaning back against the oak tree, Sasuke let himself fall into a light sleep. Above him, through the snow-covered trees of the forest, a red comet streaked across the sky. 

xxx

Quarth

Inside a gray and ancient stone ruin skulking low in the Queen of Cities, robed men with deep blue lips and pale blue flesh convulse on the ground after drinking shade-of-the-evening as they had done hundreds of times before.

Now, however, things are different.

They no longer dream of past glories and ancient power. Instead, they see a future. One of many, to be sure, but that they know not. To them, it is a future set in stone. A future where the House of the Undying returns to its former place of prestige, where kings and queens and magisters of all cities and nations come crawling on their knees for a whisper of their wisdom.

There is only one certainty in this dream. One way for them to achieve this great power. Just as they had foreseen a young girl waking dragons from stone in some twenty year’s time, and just as they had foreseen themselves draining deeply of her Valyrian power, now they must do the same to one man.

One man with eyes of blood red and royal purple.

The Neck

On a night like any other, the heir to Greywater Watch dreamed a terrible dream. 

Later, when he could no longer stand inside that terrible reality, Howland Reed woke up on his bed, cold sweat plastered on his skin. He sat up, heart pounding like the tail of a lizard lion inside his chest.

He was no greenseer, Howland knew that. But he needed no great power to have felt what he did. Anyone with a sliver of it must have felt that pulse of power spreading across the world. 

One man stood at the center of it. And worse of all, he was in the North. Beyond the Wall, yes, but he was here all the same, and the Starks of Winterfell needed to know of it. 

In the morning, when his father woke up and he could explain what had happened, a raven flew due north toward Winterfell. Soon, Howland would follow it.

Isle of Faces

The council of the order of the Green Men met under the moonlight in the center of the Isle of Faces. Around them, carved into the faces of dozens of weirwoods, the gods watched them with their wooden eyes leaking sap.

They had not needed the sight of the red comet to know the world had changed. They had felt the coming of the powerful one. Felt the slumbering cold gods shift in their sleep. Watched Brynden Rivers bumble his way like a buffoon as he was wont to do.

They spoke deep into the night, spoke of plans and futures erased, of new powers blooming and old enemies awakening. In the end, there was only one thing they could do. 

They had to meet with the men with god in his eyes and ask of him much, for their order knew the cold gods were not the only threat facing the world they had sworn to protect.

Asshai-by-the-Shadow

Inside a sweltering room deep in the bowels of a red temple, a large brazier burned like the sun. Sitting in front of it, bathed in the firelight, a beautiful woman with hair the color of blood looked into the flames with horror and wonder in her eyes.

In those flames, the woman saw it all. One man. Two sides of the same coin. Salvation and Damnation. Dark and Light. Cold and Warmth. 

She let out a gasping breath, then, as if coming out of a trance. She swayed in place, rattled by the backlash of returning from such a powerful vision, and a deep, rich laugh escaped her. She had never been so blessed by a vision as she had just been.

Yet in truth, she did not know what to do. The Lords’ visions were as certain as the sunrise, but she was only human, prone as all to failing. One thing was certain, however. She needed to meet this man, for he would either be the Prince that was Promised or the Great Other’s greatest champion.

The next day, Melisandre bought passage on a ship heading west.

On All Corners of the World

In Essos, in a village that bore no name, a woman who had long since discarded her own name sat quietly on a bed, contemplating the future. Could this be what she had been waiting for so long? A single tear fell from her eye and became lost inside her lacquered wooden mask.

In the tallest room in the tallest structure in the known world, Lord Leyton Hightower and his daughter Malora spoke in hushed tones about the red comet and the power they had felt coming from the North.

Nearby, in a dusty room atop a tower in the Citadel, Marwyn the Mage watched with wonder as the Glass Candle lit up for the first time in living history.

And in King’s Landing, in the same room where a queen quietly sobbed nursing her wounds, the Targaryen King dreamed of waking dragons from stone.