[The death of Jon Snow]
They called it a good morning, but morning had abandoned the world.
Cruella slipped through the underground tunnels like a shadow that refused to be noticed. The stones swallowed her footsteps; the stale air tasted of iron and old fear. She moved with a purpose that belied the message she carried a dispatch meant to announce the fall of Ground Two and the collapse of pride among the Naryans. She carried it, but she did not speak. The message felt small against the roar that rose above: cannons, the groan of tankers, men learning weapons with trembling hands.
At Ground Three, dawn wore fog like a veil. Jon Snow rode into it as if he could push the mist aside with the force of his will. The world around him stood still not for peace, but because it could not believe what was about to happen. The morning mist thickened and thickened until the sun seemed ashamed to show its face.
They were not all Naryan soldiers in that haze. Captives from Ground Two beaten, humiliated, but not broken had been taught to use their captors' guns. They had been given instruments of death and, in silence, had rewritten their pride into something else: a single resolve. Cannons that once belonged to Arian's now boomed for Naryan lines. Old enemies stood shoulder to shoulder; the learned clicks of unfamiliar rifles sounded like a new kind of heartbeat.
Commander Blackwell rode at the head of that desperate tide. He never shouted, never turned, only stared forward as if his eyes could burn a path through the fog. Beside him, Lady Gaga moved like a blade: blunt, fierce, and steady. Down in the tunnels, Ema and Daria crawled with rifles cradled, breath tight with the smell of damp earth and gun oil. None of them knew death followed; none of them knew the final step of the plan was already set.
Then the field erupted.
The first shot was not a shot so much as a verdict. A tanker detonated with a monstrous boom that threw men into the air and painted the ground with a dozen new graves. For a moment the Naryans felt surprise the taste of surprise in a war is an intimacy all its own and then they fought with the fury of those who refuse to die quietly.
Jon Snow's horse reared and collapsed as the blast swept the ground. The animal's life left it in a wet, quiet heap; Jon Snow rose, coughing, rifle in hand. He moved like someone who had learned how to carry the war in his bones. Thomas loud-mouthed, ever the joker, but now transformed by necessity became something else entirely: a whirlwind of bullets, a force that laughed at carnage. Edwin and Rowan, who had been boys more than soldiers, moved like men born in the very heart of conflict. They traded weapons, taught one another tricks, and turned the enemy's instruments against them.
Across the field, the Arian commanders were a different kind of storm. Commander Stone pressed forward with the single-minded weariness of a man unwilling to let his men die in vain. Lady Alena charged like a blade given a heartbeat she cut through bodies as one would slice rope. And then there was Commander IX: the Ninth.
In the half-light, Commander IX's armor drank whatever light there was. Black plates layered upon black plates, moving like an organism with its own terrible will. His face was a mask etched with that cold simplicity no words, only motion. He fought without mercy, a living siege engine. Beside him, Commander Knight
twin to that terror spat fire with twin short rifles and turned the line into a whirlpool of steel and smoke.
Jon Snow met him, and for an instant the field belonged to no one else.
Their clash was ridiculous and beautiful and inevitable. Jon Snow fired, and IX shrugged bullets like rain. IX advanced like a thing made to destroy: impervious, implacable. Jon Snow kept moving, kept shouting shouting not for glory, not for kingdom, but for something older and rawer: a promise he kept to himself and to a handful of ragged men.
"You were supposed to be dead," Jon Snow cried across the chaos, voice cutting through artillery and scream. "I thought you would run. I thought you would"
IX answered with a church-bell clang of metal and a single, terrible charge.
They collided. For a time the world narrowed to their breathing and the impulses of their hands. Jon Snow fired and fired. IX absorbed and charged. Around them men fell like bad weather. The fog thickened until it felt like the sky had been ripped from the world and hung over the battlefield to watch.
Cruella burst from an anthill of earth and flame to find only smoke and bodies and one impossible sight: Jon Snow, alive and laughing as if the world's cruelty were a thing he'd long since made peace with. He was not laughing for triumph. He was laughing because he had chosen, with the terrible clarity of the insane or the sainted, to stand there until the very end.
Then the bullet found him.
It was small and stupid and precise — a thing that should not have mattered in such an ocean of ruin — and yet it carried the whole of the day into nothing. Jon Snow's body stilled; his laugh fragmented into a hoarse sound; Thomas screamed his name like a man calling a god that had abandoned him. For a heartbeat everyone — Naryan, Arian, innocent, villain — felt the same hollow of loss.
IX slammed his metal gauntlet into Jon Snow's chest and pinned him like a book on a table. Up close, in the suffocating hush after the noise, Jon Snow looked absurdly human: blood, a crooked grin, and a theatre of defiance on his brow.
"I carry not your banner," he said, voice soft and cracked. "I was not born to your kingdom… but I fight — for all of you. For the ones who will live after me. So that one will stand for many. One for all. All for one. Naryans… forever."
The words tumbled like a benediction. They landed and never left.
When the world exhaled, both sides stepped back as if startled by their own hands. Men hauled their dead. Men looked at the face of the man who had never taken a banner and decided, stubbornly, that he had been a commander nonetheless. They lowered him with lungs full of smoke and heartbreak, and the field, for all its gore, grew quiet in a way that hurts: not the silence after triumph, but the silence that follows learning what you have lost.
They named the battle later. They gave it a title fit for history because history loves names when hearts are too raw to think. They called it the War of Sorrow.
Campfires burned in a way that did not warm. Thomas dragged Jon Snow into shelter and screamed until his throat was a raw strip of wood. "Wake up! Wake up, you stubborn fool!" He pounded his friend's chest with hands that had broken a thousand jokes but never broken like this. Twilight — who had known Jon Snow since childhood and practiced the art of masked indifference — could only stand and watch the ruin of a life he'd tried to shield. He felt, for once, small enough to be honest.
Lady Gaga found her pride a thin thing that night; she wrapped her face in the chest of a tree and let her tears cut quiet tracks through the ash. Ema sat with her rifle across her knees, the weapon suddenly a thing too heavy with memory to lift. Daria smiled like someone who had lost the map to herself. Edwin and Rowan stared at their hands as if they might find their courage lodged between their fingers.
That single dying voice — a commander who had refused banners, who had fought for nobody and thereby for everyone — became a contagion. The soldiers who had learned how to use an enemy's cannon now learned how to keep a memory burning. They took the heavy instruments of war and made them promise retribution, or at least meaning. They could not bring Jon Snow back. They refused to let his death be the final shape of the day.
Some Arian men who had taught their enemies to shoot were killed without mercy where they stood; others who had only followed orders lowered their eyes and let the grief hollow them. Commander Blackwell did not order the slaughter; he could not. Grief is its own command.
When the sun at last forced the fog to part, the world looked different. The field was a scripture written in blood and folded uniforms. The banners — some tattered, some never raised at all — hung limp as history gathered its breath. Stories do strange things in such moments. Old hatred can harden like winter ice; new reverence can warm even the hardest places.
People would remember Jon Snow in different ways: as madman, soldier, traitor, savior. Children centuries hence would learn his name as a lesson, or a myth. The war would continue in other places — in other mornings that refused to be kind — but for that hour the world had been united by a death so absolute it broke the shape of both sides' courage.
Cruella, who had come to carry a message, left the battlefield holding something far heavier: the knowledge that some victories cost the hearts of men. She carried it like a stone in the mouth — silent, terrible, impossible to swallow whole.
And so history folded itself around a name that did not belong to a kingdom: Jon Snow. The story of the White Snow traveled like a wound; it was passed down as a warning and a benediction. They remembered the last words he spoke — not as doctrine, but as a human thing: a man choosing what he loved more than life itself.
The War of Sorrow would be written in many languages, sung in many minor keys. But in the camps where men now sharpened their grief into resolve, his final breath lived like an ember. It did not warm much, but it burned long.