There was an hour, that night, when the world held its breath.
It was not the tremor that precedes an earthquake, nor the strange stillness that falls over the land before a storm. It was something else. The kind of thing that finds no name in the tongues of men because men rarely live long enough to need one for it. It lasted only an instant. Then it passed.
But the world on the other side of that instant was not entirely the same.
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Quaithe was on her knees upon the black stone floor when she felt it.
Asshai lay at the edge of the known world, where the Ash River emptied into the Shadow Sea, and there was something about it that no traveler could adequately describe upon returning home. The buildings were of black stone, heavy and colossal, far too vast for the number of people who inhabited them, as though the city had been raised for a population that had never arrived or had long since gone away. The streets were wide enough for armies to march through side by side, yet silent as burial chambers, and the light that existed there was not the light of other places. Torches burned, but the darkness did not retreat. It absorbed the light, or dissolved it, or did something with it for which the Common Tongue had no verb. No animal entered Asshai. No child was born there. The Ash ran black and oily between its stone banks, and the water sustained no life of any kind, and the air above the river smelled of things without names.
Quaithe had learned not to ask about many things in Asshai. She had learned instead to tell the difference between what was vision and what was not.
Visions have edges. They have the specific taste of trance, that withdrawal of the real world that precedes the images, like the tide pulling back before a wave. What arrived that night had none of that. The stone beneath her knees remained stone, the smell of the Ash remained the smell of the Ash, the torch flame behind her continued casting its shadow on the wall. And in the middle of all of it, without warning and without frame, two eyes.
One violet. One grey.
There was no face around them. Only the eyes, looking at her with the calm attention of something that knows exactly what it is seeing and has no particular hurry about it.
Quaithe did not cry out. She had long since learned that crying out changed what you saw without changing what existed. She stayed still and let it pass, and when it passed she remained on her knees with her palms open on the stone, breathing slowly, checking in her mind whether the world around her had remained the same.
It had.
She stayed like that for a time. Then she rose and went to the table in the corner of the room.
And did something she had not done in years.
She removed the mask.
She stood in the dark of Asshai with her face uncovered, looking at the surface of the table without focusing on anything. The eyes the mask had kept were two, as all eyes are, but unequal in the way that certain rare things are unequal, not through flaw but through excess. One was dark blue, like the bottom of the ocean where light does not reach. The other was green like Wildfire itself, that impossible and vivid green that the alchemists of King's Landing kept in clay jars and that burned with an intensity no ordinary flame could match.
She stood like that for a long time, her two mismatched eyes open to the dark of Asshai, thinking about the other two mismatched eyes she had seen. One violet. One grey.
Then she put the mask back on.
In Asshai, words have physical weight. There were things better left unweighted.
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Further east, beyond Asshai and beyond the point where maps stop pretending to know what they represent, lay Stygai.
Those who mentioned it, who were few, called it the City of the Shadow. It lay in the heart of the Shadow Lands, where the mountains blocked the light and the very air seemed thicker, older. The buildings of Stygai were of black stone like those of Asshai, but older, larger, and within them there was a darkness that had encrusted itself into the stones over millennia in a way that no fire could undo and no sun could reach. Those who ventured there did not return, or returned changed in ways that made them difficult to recognize.
The main keep of Stygai had gone uninhabited for so long that the concept of abandonment had become insufficient to describe it. It was not a place that had been left. It was a place that had become something else, slowly, over generations of darkness and silence. The walls still stood. The vaults still held up the roofs. And in the stones of the walls the darkness had encrusted itself over millennia, dominating every corner of the keep, every hall, every corridor, every chamber, as though the shadow had decided to take permanent possession of the place and the place had agreed.
In the center of the main hall, on the black stone floor, there was a circular hearth roughly ten feet in diameter. Not the hearth of a home, not a campfire, but something that had been built with a specific intent, a perfect ring of stones that had been cold for millennia. The ancient ash within had petrified into something dense and dark that held the shape of long-dead embers without any of their properties.
That night, the hearth lit.
The flame that was born at the center of the ring was white and tall and clean, and it did what fire does when it burns: it gave light. The darkness that had dominated that hall for millennia retreated. Not all at once, not completely, but it retreated. And on the floor around the hearth, where the light reached with enough strength, white marble appeared.
There had been marble there. There had always been marble there, covered by encrusted darkness for so long that no living soul knew it existed. Now it was visible, white and clean and intact, as though time had not passed over it, as though it had been waiting patiently beneath the shadow for the moment when the shadow would be, at least in part, lifted.
The flame kept burning. It did not go out.
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In the Red Temple of Volantis, the sacred flame never wavered.
It was a point of pride for the priests who kept it, that eternal flame that had burned for generations without a single tremor, fed by something that was not merely wood or oil but which the priests described in their prayers as the very will of R'hllor made fire. Benerro had preached before it hundreds of times from the height of his red stone altar. He had told the slaves and the freedmen and the nobles who came to hear him that the flame was the god's promise made visible, that where the flame burned the darkness had no power.
That night, it exploded.
Not as a fire explodes, with smoke and the sharp smell of burning wood. As though a second flame had been born inside the first and consumed it and kept growing without needing fuel, without needing anything save its own will to exist. The column of fire rose to the vaulted ceiling of the temple and through it and kept climbing, and the heat was so sudden and so absolute that the priests in the inner courtyard were on the ground before they understood what had happened.
Benerro was the first. The High Priest of Volantis, who had stood before magisters and princes without letting his knees give way, went down on the red marble floor as though something invisible had shoved him. His face, tattooed from chin to crown in red and black, was bathed in the golden light of the expanding flame, and in his eyes there was an expression that Benerro would have called fear had it been anyone else looking, and which he called revelation because it was him. When he opened his mouth, the name came out before he could think it.
"Azor Ahai."
Moqorro, black as pitch and nearly as large as the column of fire, was at the observation tower when the flame rose. He did not fall. He stood with his hands open on the stone parapet and let the heat sweep over his face like wind, and there was in him the expression of a man who has worked through a long and complicated sum and sees the answer finally confirmed. His lips moved without sound. Then, in a murmur meant only for the dark sky above, he said the name too. Not as Benerro had said it, with the involuntary start of a man caught off guard. As someone confirming something he had already known but needed to see.
Melisandre was in another room when she felt it, not the eyes that Quaithe had seen, but the flame that lived in her own hands when she extended them over fire, that personal flame that R'hllor kindled in his closest servants and that normally pulsed with the regularity of a heartbeat. That night it did not pulse. It exploded, the same as the flame in Volantis, and Melisandre had to close her eyes because the light was unbearable, and even with her eyes closed she could see it, seared into the inside of her eyelids as though the fire had decided to take up residence inside her rather than in the palm of her hands.
When she opened her eyes again, her cheeks were wet.
She stood before the flame for a time she did not measure, with the tears drying on her face, and there was in her a stillness that was different from the stillness of prayer. It was the stillness of someone who finds what they were seeking and discovers they have no words for the next question.
In the courtyard of the Red Temple of Volantis, the priests remained on their knees on the cold marble long after the flame had receded to its usual size. The collective voice that had said the name hung in the air for a moment. Then the silence returned, and with it the question none of them would be able to answer that night.
What to do now.
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The Three-Eyed Crow was seated in his chair of roots when the vision came.
There were other visions happening at the same time, as there always were. The past was a large and noisy place when you knew how to listen to it, full of voices and battles and words spoken in closed rooms that no one had witnessed, or so they thought. But the Three-Eyed Crow had learned, over many years and at great cost, to separate what was memory from what was present. And what arrived that night was not memory.
It was present. It was now.
He saw a wolf.
Black as the inside of a cave the sun had never reached, with cold smoke rising from its flanks as though the air around it yielded to the temperature the animal gave off. The eyes were red, not like blood, but like embers covered in ash that still hold heat beneath, the kind of eye that promises fire even when no fire is visible. The ground beneath its paws was covered in ice, and the ice grew as the wolf moved, crystallizing the air into patterns that resembled winter flowers, slow and deliberate, as though the cold were not a weather condition but an intention.
And then the dragon.
Red as the inside of a forge, red as the heart of a flame where the heat is so intense the color changes, where orange and yellow fall away and only something purer and more dangerous remains. The eyes were black, not like the night but like the void between the stars, that darkness which exists beyond where light can reach. Its wings made the air shudder when they beat, and the ice the wolf had made retreated before the heat, but slowly, unhurried, as though both animals knew there was room enough for the two of them to exist in the same place.
They were not fighting.
The Three-Eyed Crow had seen wars in his visions. He had seen battles that lasted days and battles that ended in seconds and battles that took place in lands where no map reached. He knew what violence looked like when observed from outside of time.
This was not destruction.
The wolf moved and the dragon answered. The dragon advanced and the wolf yielded and advanced elsewhere. It was a rhythm between them, a language of movement that neither had taught the other because both had known it since before they existed, the two halves of a pattern older than any of the animals that danced it.
A dance.
The dance that had been promised before there were mouths to make promises. The dance that prophets had described without ever having seen it, that poets had sung without ever having understood it, that priests had prayed to witness and kings had feared would come during their reigns. The dance of the end and the beginning, which are the same thing seen from different sides of time.
And then the blood began.
From the nose first, then the eyes, then the ears. The Three-Eyed Crow made no attempt to stop it. He sat in the roots with the blood running down his old face and kept watching, because there were things that needed to be seen regardless of the price.
When it passed, the silence that remained was different from the silence that had been there before.
'The Last Hero' he thought. Not as hope, not as wish. As certainty, the way only things seen with all three eyes open can be certain.
The Children of the Forest around him asked nothing. They had been with him long enough to know when questions had no place. But some of them had felt the tremor that preceded the vision, that resonance which had run through the network of roots like a chord struck on an instrument buried at the center of the world, and the oldest of them, a creature of golden eyes who had seen winters that men had no words to name, drew close and stood beside the chair of roots in silence.
The two of them knew what had arrived. They did not need words for it.
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In the Patrimony of Hyrkoon, in a desert that western maps rarely represented with any fidelity, there was a woman the elders called Myrrash.
She had no name. She had given it up decades ago, having concluded that names were anchors and that anchors hinder those who need to move between what was and what will be. She lived in a tower of red brick at the edge of the desert that separated Hyrkoon from the rest of the known world, and she spent her nights observing the stars with the meticulousness of a scholar and the intuition of something older than scholarship itself.
That night, the stars stopped.
Not all of them. One specific constellation, the one the Hyrkoon named after their founding hero, ceased to shimmer in the way that stars shimmer when the air between them and human eyes distorts the light. They became still and sharp and more present than stars have any right to be, and in the pattern they formed she saw something she recognized before she understood what she was recognizing.
A face. Mismatched eyes. One the color of the sky before a summer storm. The other the color of mist over frozen fields at dawn.
"Hyrkoon," she said, using the name of her people's founding hero the way a parent uses the name of a child who has been away too long and has finally come home. With the weight of a wait that had lasted longer than waits have any right to last.
The stars began to shimmer again.
She descended from the tower and woke the elders. There was much to prepare.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
In the Basilisk Isles, the Toad Stone had been quiet for longer than any memory reached.
The natives did not go near it. It was not an explicit prohibition — no elder had declared the stone sacred or cursed or dangerous — but there was something in the angle it sat relative to the horizon that made the eyes want to look away, something that caused a diffuse and sourceless discomfort in anyone who spent too long in its proximity. The pirates who used the islands as a base learned quickly not to make camp near it. They did not explain why. They simply did not.
That night, the stone bled.
Not blood. Oil, dense and dark, running down the surface of the stone with a slowness that seemed deliberate, descending along its irregular flanks and reaching the ground, where it was absorbed into the earth without leaving any visible mark.
Only that. Only the oil, running in silence in the dark of the island, with no one present to see it.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
In Nefer, capital of N'ghai, there was a man who did not age in the expected fashion.
Not that he was young. He was old, but in a different way from how men ordinarily grow old, without the gradual degradation that time imposes on the body. He was denser. As though the years had accumulated inside him rather than upon him. The inhabitants of Nefer called him by his title. In N'ghai, titles say more than names.
That night, he was in the deepest chambers, below the level of the subfloor, where the walls were covered in inscriptions in a tongue that scholars from outside classified as predating Valyria and that the inhabitants of Nefer knew to be far older than that, when the air changed.
It was not temperature. It was not pressure. It was quality. The air of the chambers had a specific taste of stone and depth. That taste changed all at once, like a door opening, and what came after was unlike anything he had felt before, something clean and loaded at the same time, like the air before a storm that has not yet arrived but is already inevitable.
He raised his eyes.
The inscriptions on the walls were glowing. With the specific glow of letters written to be read at a particular moment, letters that finally recognized that the moment had come.
"Neferion," he said in a low voice, using the name the inscriptions gave to what had been promised, the name that N'ghai had kept in stone for more generations than anyone could trace.
The glow lasted only a moment. Then it faded.
He sat in the dark for a long time, thinking about what it meant and what it would require of him when the moment arrived.
The moment always arrived.
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At High Heart, the small old woman who had lived longer than any living thing has a right to live was dancing alone on the hill.
The ring of thirty weirwood stumps that circled the hilltop had been dry for so long that those who visited High Heart had stopped paying them any real attention. They were simply part of the place, those pale-barked trees with their melancholy carved faces, each different from the others yet all bearing that expression weirwoods have, which is neither joy nor sorrow but contains the possibility of both.
That night, all thirty began to bleed.
First one, then another, then all of them, in a slow and inevitable rhythm that had no urgency but had determination. The red sap ran down the carved eye-sockets of each of the thirty faces, down the pale bark and the trunk and onto the ground of the hill, where it darkened the earth around the roots.
The small woman did not stop dancing. She danced with bare feet on the earth darkened by the sap, arms open, her mouth singing something without words but with the internal architecture of a very old song. She danced until dawn.
When she stopped, she stood with her eyes closed. Then she opened them and looked east.
"He has come," she said. To no one, to everyone, to a world that was not paying attention.
She smiled. It was not a happy smile. It was the smile of someone who has carried a secret too long and feels the particular relief of knowing she will soon be able to begin letting it go.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
Throughout the North, and the Vale, and the Riverlands, and in other places where the First Men had planted weirwoods before the Andals came and cut down what they could cut and burned what they could not, something happened that night.
The weirwoods that still stood wept. The red sap ran down the carved faces of every heart tree in every godswood across Westeros, from the North to the Stormlands, a slow and simultaneous seeping that no waking person that hour could have explained and that most sleeping people would never know had happened.
And the weirwoods that no longer stood, those that the Andals had cut and burned over centuries of their conquest, those that had only roots still pressed into the earth, those whose stumps had rotted and vanished generations past — those answered too. From the soil above the dead roots, and in the cracks of petrified stumps, and in the places where the ground still held the memory of a tree that had once existed, small shoots appeared. Too small for any waking person to have noticed that night. Too new to seem like anything but an impossibility, born from cold winter earth without reason or season.
There was no reason for them to grow there. They grew all the same.
The animals felt it before men did, as animals tend to do.
Everywhere in Westeros, at the same hour, behavior changed. Dogs that had been sleeping woke and stood still, staring at directions that had nothing of interest in them. Horses in their stalls grew uneasy and then went quiet in a way that was not the quiet of sleep but the quiet of something paying close attention. Birds that had been sleeping opened their eyes and did not close them again for several minutes. Cats stopped wherever they were, wherever that happened to be, and stood with dilated eyes and raised ears.
And the wolves howled.
All at once, everywhere wolves existed, from the deep North to the forests of the South. A single long howl that was not the howl of the hunt or the howl of territory, but something different, something the men who heard it and were awake at that hour could not name and that stayed in their bones for days afterward. As though the wolves knew something. As though they were answering a call that only they could hear.
It lasted a few minutes. Then it passed, and the animals returned to what they had been doing, and those who had woken to the howl went back to sleep without understanding what they had heard.
In the seas around Westeros and Essos, in waters too deep for any net and too cold for any fisherman, things that lived in the depths rose to the surface that night.
There was no one to see. But in stretches of open sea, at midnight, enormous tentacles broke through the surface of the water. Not one, not two, but many, rising from the darkness below with a slowness that was not the slowness of something lying in wait but of something that simply exists at its own scale of time, indifferent to the urgency that smaller animals feel. They stayed above the surface for a moment, those dark and massive shapes dripping seawater, and then they went back down, unhurried, silently, leaving nothing behind but swells that dissipated before any vessel could feel them.
The sea kept no mark of their passing. But they had been there.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
At Starfall, the castle of House Dayne stood at the mouth of the Torrentine where it met the Summer Sea. The family tombs lay below, carved into the living rock over millennia, chamber after chamber descending in a spiral, and among them were chambers so deep and so ancient that no living Dayne knew of their existence.
The deepest of all had the dense and heavy air of depth and accumulated time. At its center stood a statue, carved from dark stone with an attention to detail that spoke of a craftsman of rare skill. A man, standing, holding a sword with both hands with the point facing down. The sword was carved in stone like the rest of the statue, but there was something in the proportions and the shape of the long straight blade that inevitably called to mind the sword the Daynes still kept in the castle above, the sword that had passed from lord to lord across generations and that shone with a light that was not the light of the sun and not the light of any torch. The stone sword in the statue's hands did not shine. It was stone. But it had the same shape, the same bearing, the same promise.
At the base of the statue, carved by the same hands:
Eldric "Shadowchaser" Dayne
Founder of House Dayne
That night, with no living soul present, the carved eyes in the stone emitted light. Purple. Magenta. The color that exists at the limit of what human eyes can name. Not strong. Not enough to illuminate the chamber or drive back the darkness accumulated there over millennia. It was the light of recognition, like the eyes of a person hearing a familiar name after too long without hearing it.
And the name at the base of the statue glowed too, with the same soft light, for a moment too brief to measure.
Then it faded. The chamber returned to dark. The statue returned to stone.
But the name had glowed.
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In the Crypts of Winterfell, where the Stark lords rested in their stone tombs with their own likenesses keeping watch over their sleep, there were corridors that the castle's inhabitants did not use. Corridors that went deeper than the others, where torches did not reach and where the cold was of a different kind from the cold of winter, quieter and more permanent. The living Starks knew they existed, vaguely, the way one knows of a room in a large house that has never been opened. No one went down there. There was no reason to go.
At the deepest level, in the oldest corridor, there was a tomb unlike the others.
Not in its elaboration, which was simple. Not in its stone, which was the same grey stone as all the rest of the Crypts. But in the statue that stood watch over it, which was larger than the others and had been carved with a different kind of attention, not the craftsman's attention that copies an appearance but the attention of someone who knew well what they were carving. The man depicted was tall and broad-shouldered, and beside his statue stood a direwolf in stone, seated, with the same quiet gravity as the man's likeness. And on the ground beside the wolf, resting as though it had been set down after long use, a stone warhammer.
At the base:
Brandon "The Builder" Stark.
Founder of House Stark
That night, at the deepest level of the Crypts of Winterfell, where no living soul had descended in time beyond the memory of any living person, the carved eyes in the statue of Brandon Stark emitted light. Grey. Pale. The color of stone made luminous for an instant, not bright enough to illuminate the corridor but bright enough to exist, to be real, to be something that had happened even without a witness.
The stone direwolf beside the statue remained still, as stone remains still. But had anyone been present to see, they might have noticed that the expression of the carved wolf seemed different in that brief moment. More alive. As though the stone held the memory of something that had once been real and which had, in that moment, briefly, become real again.
The light faded. The silence of the Crypts returned.
But something in the Crypts of Winterfell had changed that night, in a way that no instrument of measurement available anywhere in the known world could have recorded, and that any person who descended that corridor in the days that followed would feel in their bones without being able to name.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
Beyond the Wall, where the forests grew so dense that snow could barely reach the ground beneath the interlaced branches, there was a woman who made her home in a burrow dug beneath a hollow tree.
They called her Mother Mole, those who called her anything at all, and they were more than one might expect, because the reputation of a seer travels quickly among the free folk, where the difference between a prophet and a fool is often a matter of how many times the prophet has been right. She had been right enough times. Not always, not with the precision that learned men would demand, but with the irregular and unsettling frequency of things that are real.
That night she was in her burrow when she felt the ground shake.
Not the real ground. The other ground, the one the free folk had no name for but which certain women learn to feel, the ground that lies beneath the real ground, made of time and blood and every death that has ever happened across all the land that exists. That ground had shaken, briefly, like the echo of something enormous that had passed overhead without announcing itself.
She crawled out of her burrow and stood in the snow with her eyes closed for a long time.
Then she opened them.
"Listen," she said to the trees, which did not listen, and to the wind, which did not answer, and to the snow, which kept falling with the indifference snow has toward all things. "There is a man. Born this night."
She was quiet.
"The dead are coming. You know the dead are coming. You have always known, even those of you who pretend otherwise. But there is a man who will come before them, and he will lead us out of these frozen lands before the dead arrive, or we will all die here, every last one of us, and join them."
She looked north, toward where the dark was thickest.
"Follow him when he comes. I cannot tell you his face. I cannot tell you his name. But you will know him when you see him. His eyes do not match each other. As fire does not match ice. And yet they exist in the same face."
She went back into her burrow without another word.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
Beyond the Wall, where winter was not a season but a permanent and ancient condition, the Others walked.
There was no hurry in them. There never was. The cold they carried with them was not the cold of wind or snow but something older and quieter, the kind of cold that exists at the center of a stone that has never seen the sun, and where they passed the earth hardened and the air crystallized and sounds ceased to exist.
That night, they stopped.
Not all at once, not with the alarm of something taken by surprise. With the attention of something that recognizes. One by one, across the lands beyond the Wall, those figures of ice and silence went still and turned their blue eyes south, toward where human warmth still existed, toward where a man had just opened his eyes for the first time.
They stayed like that for a moment without measurable duration.
Then they moved on.
But differently. Not with the patient slowness of those who have all the time in the world because time does not exist for them the way it exists for others. With something that, in a human being, would have been called purpose. As though they knew the game had changed that night. As though they knew that the board which had been still for so long now had a new piece upon it, and that this piece was the reason they had been waiting.
Not with fear. The Others did not know fear.
With recognition.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
The Gods Eye was the largest lake in Westeros, and there was in it a quality of silence that the fishermen of the surrounding villages knew well and did not much speak of, the kind of silence that a deep water develops when it has been holding something long enough. The Isle of Faces lay at the center, visible on clear nights as a dark shape upon dark water. It took its name from the weirwoods that covered it, whose faces had been carved by the Children of the Forest in times so ancient that the First Men had not yet reached those shores, and the fishermen did not go there.
That night, the weirwoods of the Isle of Faces wept.
The red sap ran down the carved faces of every tree on the island, slowly, as it always runs slowly, and where it reached the ground it darkened the earth around the roots. The birds from the shore woke in silence and looked out toward the center of the lake for several minutes, motionless, herons and ravens and ducks side by side with the attention of something that recognizes a sign it did not know it had been waiting for. Then they went back to sleep.
The lake lay flat as a mirror for a brief moment, without waves, without the movement that water always has when it is alive.
Then it passed. The water began to move again. The birds went back to sleep.
The fishermen who went out at dawn did not fish that day. They could not say why. Only that it did not seem right.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
Somewhere between Essos and the smoldering ruins that remained of Valyria, there was an island that appeared on no map.
Not because it was too small to be charted. It was that the fog surrounding it had frustrated every navigator who had attempted to approach over the course of decades, a dense and constant mist that did not dissipate with the wind or the change of season, that existed around the island with the permanence of something that had been placed there intentionally. The rocky mountains encircling it rose from the sea like teeth of stone, and between them, in the sheltered valley the cliffs formed, there was a castle.
It was not vast. It had neither the scale of Harrenhal nor the grandeur of King's Landing. But there was in it a quality of permanence that great castles rarely possess, as though it had been built to outlast the men who built it and the kingdoms those men would serve. Every stone was intact. Every wall still stood. Time had passed over it without leaving the mark that time leaves on all things, and there was in that something not natural but which required no supernatural explanation either, only the observation that some things last longer than they should.
In the great hall, the seat of gold and steel gleamed faintly in the darkness. But the eyes of any person who entered would have been drawn elsewhere. To the black obsidian rock beside the throne, smooth and dark and deep as a bottomless well, which absorbed the surrounding light rather than reflecting it.
And thrust into the obsidian, a sword.
The blade was black as pitch, black in a way that steel is not black, black in a way that suggested the darkness was part of its composition and not merely the absence of light upon it. The hilt and pommel were shaped like a red dragon, coiled and vivid, rendered with an attention to detail that made it difficult to believe it was metal and not flesh. Only the portion of the blade nearest the hilt escaped the obsidian, and there runic markings glowed red, a red that pulsed with a regularity that was not the regularity of fire but of something alive, like a heartbeat.
The sword vibrated. Imperceptibly, almost undetectably, but it vibrated, a subtle tremor that ran through the air around it as though the blade had a frequency all its own and the air was compelled to answer.
Below the castle, carved into the island's rock with the same precision and intent as every stone above, lay the crypts.
There were not many chambers. There were few, and the last of them lay at the deepest level, where the island's rock met the sea below and the cold was of a different kind from the wind's cold, quieter and more permanent. In that deepest chamber stood a statue.
It had been painted. That was the first thing any person who saw it would have noticed, because statues in crypts are not painted, because paint does not last what stone lasts, and yet the paint on this one had lasted, with a vividness that had no natural explanation. The man depicted had silver hair that fell about his shoulders with the ease of someone long accustomed to wearing it so, and violet eyes, that specific violet that the Valyrians had taken to the grave with the rest of their civilization, rendered in stone with a precision of color suggesting the craftsman had known his subject well. He held with both hands a sword of black blade, identical to the one thrust into the obsidian in the hall above, and behind him, wings spread, a red dragon carved and painted with the same attention to detail as the man, so vivid that the scales seemed to have texture and the fire from its mouth seemed warm.
At the base of the statue, in letters carved first and painted after:
Balerion "The Lightbringer" Pendragon.
Founder of House Pendragon.