How to train your dragon, part 3…
Jon
On the twentieth day, near the end of the third week of this ranging, Sonagon woke strongly - almost hungering to make good distance southwards.
They were nearly past the mountains now, and the lands beyond offered food, shelter. They could all sense it. The dragon easily walked across the highland hills and forests for several hours. They made a good time and pace, clearing at least eight leagues.
Their path was an almost constant descent now as they put the central spine of the Frostfangs to their backs. The lower mountain pass opened into hills and highlands, as the landscape changed around them - still harsh, but almost gentle by comparison to the hellscape they'd just survived.
Jon noticed the gentler cold first, as the path ahead brought them to new, lower lands. In the deep Frostfangs there had been nothing but ice and black rock - glacier upon glacier of ice, ice that had never been liquid in living memory. But here, the first thin trickles of true liquid began to appear. He noticed it when they reached the lower pass and saw a frozen waterfall over to the right, hanging down a cliff's face; there was a core of liquid in there, dark water still flowing somewhere inside.
He studied it for a moment. Water, he thought in relief. Finally.
It should have been a small thing, finding liquid water: it wasn't. Procuring a continuous supply of liquid drinking water in the high mountains had been a devil of a task at times, especially with how difficult it often was to set fires. Warming waterskins with his meager body heat - like Sam had done a few times in their trainee days, which still made him smile on remembering how stupid that had been - would have been the death of him up there.
He was still riding atop Hullen. The last two weeks had cost the mountain goat greatly, and he worried for the poor, stupid beast's strength. But there was nothing for it - his bad leg was still paining him, and he had to keep up his strength. Phantom lingered in the high pass behind them, watching for enemies. He'd seen few ever since the near-miss of the greenseer's intervention at the mountain vale, and none coming from the north, but the shadowcat's watch would continue for now.
Later, he told himself. All those concerns could wait. Firstly, food. The dragon needed feeding. The mammoth had helped, but still - Sonagon had gone hungry far too long. Centuries under the ice, being hunted by white walkers for an entire month, to fleeing on foot for two weeks now with only the scarcest meals aside from that one mammoth. And countless wounds, slowly healing. The dragon needed as much food as he could possibly give it, as quickly as possible.
I have to do what I can. Jon closed his eyes and slipped into Ghost's skin, and then he set forth to begin the hunt.
He knew Sonagon had trouble feeding himself. On the ground, the dragon was out of his element - dragons simply weren't meant to hunt from anything but the sky. And in Sonagon's case in particular, he was too large; he would scare away almost any prey before he could so much as lay eyes on them. And only the biggest of game could be worth a dragon's time to hunt.
However Sonagon had survived this long, for the entire month and some he had spent being hunted by the Others, Jon suspected that there had been few chances for the dragon to hunt mammoth or elk. He must have been surviving by eating their wights, Jon thought. But I doubt wights make for an appetizing meal. The dragon needed good, real food, now.
Sonagon's sense of smell was impressively powerful, but the dragon was also unfamiliar with the environment. Sonagon's nose could smell the ocean, for example, from at least a hundred miles away, but even if the dragon could smell its prey, it lacked the knowledge to find them amidst the trees, had difficulty distinguishing the prey's scent from all the rest of the forest's scents. It had never hunted from the ground before, and Jon suspected the dragon was far more accustomed to hunting over open plains than forests.
However, Ghost could hunt in the forest. The direwolf was a natural tracker and hunter in the far north. After seeing to his own food needs, and Ghost's, he returned to the hunt: he made camp at an earlier hour than usual, took advantage of the direwolf's senses, and ranged throughout the forest after dark as his body slept, using the moonlit night to focus his efforts.
Jon prowled in Ghost's skin all night, searching for food.
The morning of the twenty-first day, Jon opened his eyes knowing precisely where to go.
"This way!" Jon ordered, swatting Sonagon sternly on the neck to wake him. The dragon stirred slowly - Jon honestly wasn't even sure if the dragon noticed. "Food. Let's go eat. Food!"
There was a low growl from Sonagon, and Jon grimaced but retreated a safe distance. The dragon was hungry, and he had long-since figured out that a hungry dragon was an irritable dragon. He kept on trying to stir Sonagon by reaching out with the wargsense, but it was only after an hour when he specifically tried to force into the dragon the impression of food and prey that he finally got the dragon to stand up. It still took another while, and another round of attempted wargs to convince the dragon to follow him - but the promise of food seemed to motivate Sonagon like no other cajoling had ever managed.
Soon enough, they were on the move once more. Jon mounted Hullen, careful to keep the dragon behind him.
Even the dragon perked up slightly when they got close enough to recognize the smell Jon and Ghost had found in the night. A scent that any other animal of the far north would have fled from - but to the dragon, the scent registered as nothing but prey.
They headed down to a snowy valley, and eventually Jon saw the tracks: massive, plodding tracks, each larger than his entire head, leading towards a small cave hidden in the rocks. A great snow bear's tracks.
He had seen the snow bear through Ghost's eyes. It was a large, impressive beast - at least thirteen feet tall when reared up, as large as the one Varamyr Sixskins had ridden on as a mount through Mance's camp.
Ghost could smell the bear's fear. It was awake, far in the back of its cave, cowering. It had felt the dragon's coming. Of course it did, Jon thought. The dragon's steps were like earthquakes in the forest.
In this forest, the snow bear should have been the top predator by far - perhaps aside from entire packs of direwolves. But it had never met a dragon before.
The bear cowered as far into the back of its cave as it possibly could as Sonagon approached, but it was useless. Sonagon didn't even bother to claw it out: the dragon just took a deep breath and breathed a gout of frostfire straight into the cave, no doubt instantly killing everything within.
The result, to Jon's eyes, was like a terrible sort of explosion. The cold breath left the rocks cracking, send shards of rock and ice scattering for hundreds of feet. The mouth of the cave was left surrounded by a ring of outwards-facing icicles like swords.
Then the dragon started clawing at the rocks, digging into the cliff. Before long it had widened the cave's entrance by multiple times, shattering tons of stones in its way. Then Sonagon reached in with its claws and grabbed the frozen snow bear, which had now turned into a frozen statue of flesh and fur - a statue that broke apart into pieces while the dragon dragged it out.
Jon watched with quiet amazement. The scene made Jon shiver. The dragon's sheer power was unbelievable.
It was over almost instantly. The snow bear was a large creature, a good meal even for Sonagon, but the dragon still gulped it down quickly, crunching through icy meat. The dragon growled in satisfaction after what felt like scarce seconds, and trotted away, leaving nothing behind for them at all.
Jon could sense Ghost's irritation. He felt some as well. They had spent the better part of both day and night, working together, in a frozen wasteland, hunting down and delivering a thirteen-foot bear to a dragon who had then eaten it in under a minute without sharing a single scrap of meat.
He wasn't sure what he had expected from Sonagon. Gratitude, perhaps. A look of acknowledgment. Something. The dragon had not even deigned to share. Ghost wanted some of that meat, Jon cursed quietly.
He scratched his direwolf behind the ears. Soon. We'll find more prey, Jon thought, letting Ghost feel his thoughts. We'll hunt more right now.
Sonagon went back to sleep at the next valley. It took a few hours before he could rouse the dragon to move again, but after that, Jon was pretty sure that the dragon, maybe, had started to follow him more easily by choice. Between the mammoth and now the bear, he suspected the dragon had started to realize that Jon could lead him to more food.
They kept on moving, heading east over the Frostfangs for as long as Hullen could manage. Jon took care to change direction regularly, trying to throw off any pursuers. Perhaps it even worked, because the greenseer's ever-following crows did not see fit to warn him of any more threats the rest of that day or night.
On the twenty-second day, Jon left Sonagon alone and followed a trail on his own. Ghost led him straight to a large deer foraging in the woods. Jon shot at it with his bow and managed to get it in the flank - not enough of a wound to kill the deer outright, but Ghost eagerly chased it down afterwards.
After the kill was done, Jon used his sword to carve the deer, cutting off two legs - one for him to roast and the other for Ghost to eat. After a moment's pondering, Jon skinned the kill but left the rest of the meat alone.
This time, Sonagon came eagerly. The dragon happily responded to Jon's warg, and then gobbled up the remainder of the deer in a single bite. Later, Sonagon rested peacefully, allowing Jon to stay close while he slept. Jon stitched the deer's hide to create a makeshift bandage, for the deepest and worst of Sonagon's wounds.
Later that night, the wights finally tracked them down again. Jon saw them coming through Phantom's eyes, and he moved to ambush them. Four wights this time, coming from the east.
It seemed the greenseer truly had succeeded in cutting off the enemy's northern route, at least for now. Good.
He waited for them to arrive from above and around a pile of rocks along the trail, cooperating with both the shadowcat and his direwolf.
Like some overgrown, horrific treecat, Phantom jumped down onto the wights in the pitch black of night. Ghost immediately charged out and brought down the second one, and then he charged in himself - his sword sliced the third wight's eyes out and skull open, then he twisted around and cut its spine.
After that, with a torch in one hand and Dark Sister swinging in the other, he brought down the fourth, then moved to finish off the ones his animals were wrestling with.
"My dragon is sleeping," Jon growled, as he burned the bodies. One of the heads was still staring at him, and from the heavy presence in those blue eyes, Jon knew one of the Others was staring out through it. At him. Rotten blood splashed through the air as Phantom ate a severed thigh, and blue eyes burned to ash in the darkness. "Please don't disturb him."
It was getting easier to kill the wights. Twenty five days into this journey, somewhere in the southern ridges of the northern highlands, Jon now believed he had properly learned how to fight them.
Wights were powerful opponents on the face of it, fast and strong, without fear and any conception of pain or self preservation. A single wight had killed five sworn brothers in the Lord Commander's tower some months ago, including Ser Jaremy Rykker, the acting First Ranger his uncle Benjen's disappearance. However, those sworn brothers had never seen a wight before, and had treated this new foe as they would any other mortal man.
Jon knew better now. There was a technique to it, to maximize efficiency.
A wight could easily take even a skilled fighter off guard with their sheer strength and endurance: the trick was to go for the limbs first. Completely killing them wasn't necessary - a good sword could sever their legs and then they would be useless, just writhing in the snow like worms.
Generally, the wights left themselves wide open for attack - they had no skill in battle, no conception of defending themselves. The only difficulty was dealing with their inhuman strength for long enough to put them down. Standing strong against their strength was not how it was done - the wights were inhumanly strong. But they were slow and stupid, graceless. A faster fighter with a sharp enough blade who knew how to put them down had many options in battle.
The spine was the key. Severing the spine enough times would always kill a wight. But Jon tried to take out their eyes first, so the white walkers couldn't coordinate their thralls as well, and so the broken ones he left behind couldn't see the direction in which he went. His hope was that the white walkers would have more trouble tracking, then.
He took care of the creatures quickly - cutting off their arms and legs and leaving their possessed bodies to squirm. Two of them were rotten black, but one of the bodies was good enough for Ghost and Phantom strip the cold meat off the bones. The wights were foul meat that Jon refused to touch, but when hungry enough his second skins had no such qualms. Out of curiosity, he tried warging with the shadowcat one time while eating, and was horrified to feel how the meat still wriggled slightly even as the shadowcat chewed it. Phantom did not care.
A pattern emerged. Jon could control Hullen by day to carry him, and he controlled Phantom by night to hunt down wights. The challenge was keeping the shadowcat and the goat separate. Ghost tended to Jon's call constantly.
By day, Jon waited for Sonagon to walk, trying to learn the dragon's habits. It was slow going out of the mountains, but they made do. The greenseer's crows and ravens still guided the way, saving Jon's life more than once. Jon changed routes constantly, trying to throw off the wights that he knew were following them. He could only pray that if any white walkers were still chasing him, and some of those five surely were, they would never catch up.
Jon scouted out the path ahead, and when the dragon was ready Jon would simply gently push him - like Jon was simply extending out an invitation for the dragon to follow.
The route through the mountains was slow, and exhausting. Jon was working on less than two hours sleep most days, with little time to rest. He was too busy tending to the dragon's wounds, following the dragon, tracking down prey for the dragon, even protecting it from wights that tried to pursue the dragon.
"…You wouldn't be able to survive out here by yourself, would you?" Jon muttered, glancing to the dragon. "You're big and strong, but you wouldn't be able to hunt or avoid the wights without me. I don't think you would have lasted this long without me." He took deep pants, feeling the cold ache in his bones. "…I think you need me, and I think you're starting to realize that too."
He took a few laboring steps, before sighing. "…Then again," Jon conceded. "…I wouldn't have survived out here by myself either."
In the fourth week, the mountains began to grow smaller. After he and the dragon cut across one final glacier and broke southwards through a mountain pass, the route turned into a descent, bringing them down, down, down.
He passed into the southern highlands hills south of the Frostfangs. The very verge of livable territory in the far north, Ygritte had once told him. And here he started to see signs of life again.
No people, but signs of their past presence all the same. He passed by disused trail markers, hunting stands built into trees or above outcrops, cairns marking the graves of hunters who had gone too far north. The trail he took down from the mountains slowly widened into something that could have almost been called a road, though he was the only one to walk it. Phantom encountered another shadowcat once, and Ghost came across a giant clan's footprints while ranging. Jon walked past caves that might have once been occupied by cave dwellers, but had all been abandoned by now.
The sky continued to be as grey and overcast as ever, the snows laggard but unceasing, unending. The sun was only a weak circle in the sky, but still strong enough to illuminate the southern valley his trail had finally descended towards. Even after descending from the heart of the Frostfangs, he was still deep in what would be considered highlands territory. He had no high expectations for whatever he might find, not for a few days or weeks as yet.
As the sun began to set and turn to a red disk on the horizon, he found a small, wind-gnarled weirwood. Not a heart tree, but a weirwood all the same, with various sentimental offerings and mementoes set into the weirwood's twisted crags of bark. No doubt left behind by hunters long gone from these lands, never to return.
Sonagon curled up around the weirwood, and Jon rested against the dragon's flank, Ghost near at hand while Phantom kept watch. As for Hullen, the weakening mountain goat took what rest he could, after Jon slightly relaxed his leash and allowed him forage around the weirwood.
And he dreamed of dragons flying through the sky above a bright blue sea, all converging on a warm, cruel land that knew only summer.
On the thirtieth morning, the wind carried an unusually heavy scent through the highland woods.
Ghost's ears pricked fully upwards. The direwolf sniffed at the air as they roused with the dawn - at first curiously, then with increasing certainty.
Deer, or something like deer. Moose, perhaps. Not far.
Those were the general impressions he sensed from Ghost. Many impressions, too; this probably wasn't some lone bull, the scent was too heavy, too… multitudinous for that.
To better understand the picture, Jon slipped fully into Ghost's skin for a moment, sharing in the direwolf's sharper senses: and immediately, there was the scent of many, many furry bodies on the move, leaving behind hundreds of piles of scat and countless other heady scents, coming from somewhere upwind.
There was more. Ghost's sharp ears could pick up on the distant thunder of hooves, muffled by powder. Bleating, and overshadowing it all, a sound that shouldn't have been there, loud enough that Jon could faintly hear it with his own ears - a high-pitched bugle.
Uncomfortably reminded of how empty his stomach was, Jon set into motion. Sonagon was still sleeping where he lay coiled against a rocky outcrop. The dragon had eaten little since the snow bear, and hunger made him irritable and slow to rouse. Jon roused him anyway.
"This way!" He let out a shout. "Food! Plenty of it!" Jon reached out with the strongest warg he dared, sending impressions to the dragon - his memory of Ghost's strong scent of the herd, the sound of distant prey. It wasn't a command, but an invitation, one thick with the promise of hot blood and full bellies.
It was barely any time at all before the dragon's black eyes opened, and Sonagon's hungry, rumbling growl vibrated through the ground. "Move, Sonagon!" Jon shouted some more, happy that for once barely needed to put in any effort to rouse the dragon. "Food! Come on," he laughed, "Move! You great lazy lizard!"
Sonagon snapped lazily at him, then started sniffing with some enthusiasm at the air. Jon mounted Hullen gingerly, minding his leg, and they set off. Ghost ranged ahead, while Jon encouraged Sonagon to follow - slowly. It wouldn't do if the dragon's movements warned their prey of their coming.
Ghost came upon the migration one valley over. Through the direwolf's eyes, Jon saw a bowl of a valley open up past the trees, illuminated by the weak sun shining white over the land. He hurried on, catching up to the direwolf.
When he made it to the ridgeline himself with his own body, he got off Hullen and limped his way up on his own, proceeding the last few yards on his belly so as not to spook the herd.
And there, grazing on whatever grass was under the snow, was their quarry.
Elk. Enough elk that they flowed like a living tide. Hundreds upon hundreds of them, their breath steaming in the cold, enough of them that their hooves were swiftly churning the snowdrifts to slush. A full migration, probably heading south, Jon realized.
Ygritte had told stories of these movements, the great seasonal trek of beasts that the wildling clans of the northern valleys had followed for generations beyond count - including her own clan. There was no better source of food in winter than this.
His eyes were immediately drawn to the bulls minding the herd's perimeter, many with antlers wider than a man's outstretched arms. The females and calves were pressed in deeper, protected. It was a sight that would have made any hunter's heart quicken - enough meat to feed an entire host.
Still, the herd was smaller than he would have hoped. Hundreds, rather than thousands of animals. But they're likely having a hard time this winter as well, Jon supposed. No living thing north of the Wall could escape the harshness of this season, not even the animals.
It was a fortunate boon all the same. Over the past days he had begun to fear that he would find no further food for Sonagon at all - except if the greenseer chose to intervene again. Certainly this herd was more than sufficient for their needs.
Then he noticed a pack of actual wolves, trailing the herd. Jon's guard went up as he stared at them carefully.
The wolves couldn't see or smell him from here, downwind from them as he was. They were unawares, acting like ordinary dogs right now - or so it seemed, as several of them nipped at eachother playfully, younger ones wrestling in the snow. But he noticed quickly that the pack's doglike behavior was only an apparent seeming.
A few of the older animals were alert, watching the herd of elk and clearly waiting for their moment. And when that moment arrived - some small separation between a few of the elk and the greater herd - the wolves would pounce, instantly and ruthlessly picking off the youngest and the weakest stragglers of the herd. Or so his instincts of the situation told him.
It isn't only wolves that follow herds like this, Jon thought, as his attention shifted from the wolfpack to the treeline itself. There might be men as well. Warily, he watched and waited - but after several minutes spent observing the distant scene, he saw and heard nothing, and the same went for his second skins.
There were no obstacles here, he was all but certain now. Only prey in vast numbers, grazing in the snow.
It's time, he urged Sonagon. Hunt. Kill. Eat.
Sonagon's reaction was immediate. The dragon, still several thousand feet distant as it lumbered slowly through the woods, picked up the pace, and then Sonagon was moving, fast, faster, heavy steps shaking snow from the trees.
The elk sensed doom descending and bolted in a bleating panic. The wolves scattered, yelping. The valley erupted into chaos as the herd splintered in every direction.
And Sonagon crashed through the treeline and gave chase with a pure, terrifying joy.
Jon watched the pandemonium from a safe distance. In a flash, massive white jaws snapped out to engulf up a full-grown bull elk in a single bite, antlers and all. A lethal sweep of tail broke the bodies of another dozen elk, sent a few flying. Another leap, and claws descended on two more with a massive crash, even as another two vanished down his gullet. The terrified herd scattered wildly, leaping over one another, crashing, tripping through the underbrush, but the dragon's blood was hungering for slaughter. A long burst of frostfire chased the thickest clump of elk into the underbrush, killing more than Jon could even count.
It was a scene out of nightmare. The ground trembled. Trees splintered and fell where they impeded the dragon's great white-and-red body. Bleats and cries of dying elk echoed off the valley walls, cut short by wet crunches and the wetter sounds of swallowing.
When it was over, Sonagon had gorged himself on perhaps thirty of the beasts. The dragon watched him from where he lay in a wide swathe of bloody snow, lazily licking blood from his claws. Jon just stared for a moment, completely in awe despite knowing exactly what was going to happen.
There was no gratitude in the dragon's dark eyes, not truly, but Jon felt something nonetheless. A faint acknowledgment that, perhaps, this partnership brought rewards. Which was why the dragon had - graciously, in its mind - left a few of the kills for his use. The first time it had been willing to share.
Jon approached cautiously - but Ghost, starving, darted forward eagerly, tearing into a warm flank. Jon built a small fire with what dry wood he could find, using his knife to carve thick steaks from another kill. It wasn't long before he had half a dozen steaks roasting in the fire's outer coals, the fat sizzling and filling the air with a smell that made his stomach ache with need. Even Hullen was allowed to graze nearby, unmolested for once.
As he ate, considering Sonagon's happily sleeping form and the wide swathes of blood spread across the valley that - until not too long ago - had been an entire migration of elk, he remembered Ygritte.
Her clan was from these northern valleys, he recalled. Wanderers who ranged the Frostfang's highlands. He remembered being foolish enough to ask her where her clan lived - if they had a keep or a holdfast at least. And he remembered how she'd laughed at him.
"Hah! You know nothing, Jon Snow. My clanfolk never had some fancy castle, and look at us - roaming as we please, freer than any king. Because all the north is our home. When the elk move, we move with 'em. Follow the herds long enough and you'll never starve. The Hornfoots know it best, and the Nightrunners too. There's power in it, following the great beasts instead of trying to master 'em like you southrons." She had laughed at his southern notions of settled fields and granaries, paddocks and barns. "You kneelers plant your little plants in the dirt, pray for rain like weaklings, and maybe you get a bit of bread if you're lucky. We hunt as free folk were meant to, and we eat like kings."
Her voice had been as much laughing as it was mocking, shared just between them under the furs as they lay together.
"I hear that you southrons hunt much less than us, that you mostly just starve when the winter comes hard. That your babes die in the cold, and no wonder - young'uns who grow up on bread grow up weak. We free folk feed even our little ones meat, and that's why they grow up stronger than you kneelers." She'd elbowed him then, grinning. "Might say I'm half an elk, what with all of 'em I've gone and eaten. Something to think on, eh? What do you think about laying with an elk girl, eh, Jon Snow? Eh?"
He'd let her know exactly what he thought of that, together beneath their furs. But afterwards, he hadn't stopped asking questions, wanting to know more about her clan. She'd told more stories, then. She'd even spoken of wargs, more than once.
"A warg feeds his clan same as any hunter, better than most," she'd admitted, tracing idle circles on his chest. "He can tells the clan where the herds are running, same as any scout, only he don't need his own two legs to look." She'd shrugged, "a lot of them coward southerly clans give their wargs a wide berth, it's true. Superstitious folk, or stupid, or scared, or all three. But my clan? We reckon it's a gift from the old gods same as any other. Only a fool spits on a gift that good."
She'd told tales of one warg in particular, a name spoken not just by her but others, with equal parts awe and derision around Mance's camp. A madman who had declared himself the king and protector of all elk, ranging around the far north with a crown of antlers, battling those who hunted 'his' herds.
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"Drunarr Elkking, now there's a proper king for you, Jon Snow," he remembered how Ygritte had laughed. Calls himself king of the elks and means it. Half the free folk laugh at him, half wonder if he's not got the right of it, abandoning all men as he has."
Apparently, he had refused Mance's summons outright, saying the free folk needed no pretender king when they could simply run away from the dead for as far as the land might go. A patriarch of a small clan that had ranged high in these northern valleys. He claimed the beasts themselves as his kin, him and his sons warging into their bulls to lead a vast herd.
The thought of a king of elk, of all things, brought an amused smile to Jon's cracked lips. Even in the midst of his current… rather necessary, and rather disgusting chore of waterproofing his blacks and furs with his small pot of rendered-down elk fat, even surrounded by nothing but cold, Ygritte's memory never failed to bring him warmth.
Even in the end times, the wildlings of these lands cling to their pride. He wondered where that particular madman was now, wherever he'd fled to. Far more so, he wondered, not for the first or the last time, where Ygritte was now. If she'd survived. If his sacrifice hadn't been for nothing. Or if she'd died there in the mountains… possibly even at his own fool hand, in pushing her off a cliff while trying to save her.
That thought brought him too much pain to linger on. He finished cutting off another few dozen steaks to dry over the fire through the night. Then he tucked himself against the dragon's flank, and at last allowed himself to rest.
On the thirty-fifth day, he finally began to see an end to the highlands.
Real trees began to appear in the forests, proper ones, strong and fat and tall, not the poor wind-twisted specimens of the highlands. He saw thick red mosses on underhanging stones that hadn't yet been covered by snow, tiny brooks and streams that continually flowed under a sheathing of clear, dripping ice. The land was still frozen, but it was getting warmer with his descent.
After cutting down through yet another pass between hills, he had his suffering goat climb to the top of a tall rise to get eyes on the vast landscape that lay below. And what he saw from atop Hullen's back, he never could have expected - he had never even realized this place would be along his southwards journey.
Is that… Jon stared, squinting into the far distance down and below and southeast of him. He couldn't believe what he was seeing. That's Thenn, isn't it?
It was almost unreal, completely outside of what he might have imagined: a sight he had never expected to see in the lands Beyond the Wall. A walled town that sat next to a great frozen lake, resting in the bowl of a great valley. It stretched for over a mile at the upper head of a wide, gentle valley miles across, entirely denuded of trees, walls curling around the lake's shores. A town that overlooked a great swath of tens of miles of clear land - surely farmland judging from the periodic stone walls, oft dotted with smaller villages all up and down the valley.
Jon's heart surged. People. Food, shelter. He was still distant, far above and at least five or eight miles away from what had to be the home of the Thenns - but he could still pick out so many details. It looks as large as Barrowton, perhaps even larger. And distance-wise, it wasn't so far off.
How to get there? The town was set into the northern end of this great, sweeping valley that he was overlooking from a northwestern rise. He could already see a switchbacking path ahead, one that could bring him down into the valley proper. Yes, I can use that.
The town drew his eyes again. To think that wildlings had created such a place was unbelievable. It would have been a respectable settlement even south of the Wall.
Many sworn brothers had not believed the Thenns to even exist, or believed the tales of them greatly exaggerated: their biases against wildlings were powerful. Few had believed that any wildling clan could create a structured society with laws, lords, even a degree of metallurgy. Only some of the farther-going rangers had thought otherwise. And until Jon had met Styr, their 'Magnar' and warchief in Mance's camp, he had been skeptical himself. Who in southerly lands would have ever believed there were wildlings advanced enough to mine for tin and copper, and then smelt and forge them into bronze weapons and armor? Wildings were considered thieves and rapers, at best. Monsters in human skin more usually.
And yet, before he had sworn his oaths and gone to the far north, he himself might have thought something similar - and then until he had seen the Thenns and their martial might for himself. They had been far and away the most dangerous of the clans that had followed Mance Rayder to the south. The oldest clan as well, some had said.
Jon shifted to a better position atop the rise, tightening his furs against the clifftop promontory's cold wind as he tried to pick out more details of the scene below him. The town's walls looked almost as mighty as those of Torrhen's Square. Astonishing.
But, as his eyes traced the outlines of the town, a creeping unease settled in his chest.
The fields, which should have been alive with grazing animals or the last efforts of a late harvest, lay barren. He saw no hints of smoke curling upwards from the chimneys of the homes scattered across the valley, not a single one. No figures moved along the walls or through the streets. He didn't even see livestock in the fields.
The home of the Thenns was unnaturally still, out to the farthest limits of his vision. Why? But he couldn't be certain of anything from this distance. He had to inspect more closely.
…Yes, Styr had gone south with his son and many of their people, but they surely hadn't abandoned their lands entirely, right? This seemed a land worth defending - perhaps not to Jon's eyes, as these defenses paled before those of the Wall - but he hardly expected wildlings to show such judgement. Especially wildlings who had settled this valley for perhaps ten thousand years. Of course they would be attached to it. Any people would be.
Ghost shifted at his side. Jon looked down and saw the direwolf's hackles were raised in a silent snarl. Never a good sign. But Sonagon was sniffing at the air curiously, intrigued by something. Jon reached out with a tentative warg, and the dragon for once easily accepted it.
And then Jon's own mouth started watering. He withdrew the warg quickly, unwilling to linger for longer than necessary in the powerful, roiling storm that was dragon's mind. Perhaps a day would come when he could warg for longer with the dragon, but that day was not today. And in any case: food.
That was the sensation he'd gotten from the dragon. Somewhere down in that valley, there was something the dragon found delectable. Sonagon's nose was even more sensitive for these things than Ghost's, or at least more powerful in the sense of smelling from long distances. Ghost had a finer nose for discernment between types of prey and hunting after small things.
But Jon just stared at the silent town uneasily, becoming increasingly certain in his judgement by the minute. "Something's wrong," he whispered to himself, suddenly wishing he had a spyglass, something to observe the land with.
One of the greenseer's ever-present crows suddenly descended and alighted on his shoulder. It met his eyes with its stare. Giving him a calm, unwavering look through beady little black eyes.
"Fine," Jon sighed. He had long grown used to how closely the greenseer was doubtlessly observing him.
He closed his eyes and reached out to the bird, and after another period of uncomfortable struggle in which he had to fit himself into this small, flittery skin, he set forth across the sky.
The crow's eyes were different from a man's. Sharper, clearer. He soared over the valley, the wind cutting through the bird's feathers, but the crow hardly minded. Jon, warging into the bird, wasn't fully controlling it as he had to with Hullen - this was closer to being a passenger in the bird's mind, something he never could have done without using one of the greenseer's own well and thoroughly trained birds. It was easier this way.
In the bird's eyes, the valley was a portrait of vastness, sweeping to either side and behind - the bird's eyes worked differently from a man's, could take in the sides and peripheral vision far better. It was an awesome sight, but the further he descended into the valley, the more his unease grew.
Jon urged the crow lower, so he could observe the land from only a few hundred feet up rather than thousands. And what he saw, what he didn't see…
…What happened here? Jon wondered soberly.
Indeed, as he'd suspected, all the fields lay empty. The villages dotting the valley were all abandoned. No movement stirred in the paths leading from one village to another. He saw no animals grazing, no ice fishermen plying the frozen lake's waters. No evidence of smoke from any fires, no evidence of any footprints outside of the homes. He saw nothing at all but a vast abandonment, a silent tragedy covered by entire feet of undisturbed snow.
Jon urged the crow even lower, and soon he was skimming over the rooftops of the homes just outside of Thenn itself. The town's stone walls loomed closer as he soared over the last of the fields, and then he passed over the walls and was within the town itself.
It was just more of the same. The homes of Thenn were darkened, oppressively silent. He saw countless waxpaper windows either shuttered over or blown open by the wind like hollow eyes in a skull. No smoke rose from any chimney, no livestock roamed the pasture of the village commons. The pens and stables were all emptied.
He soared past the villager's buildings and circled around the Magnar's castle at the heart of the town. An actual stone castle, but cruder than those he knew - blocky and squat, square-shaped, nothing like Winterfell's rounded towers. Its gates were wide open open, unguarded and partially filled in by snow. The courtyard below was a sea of untouched snow, utterly unmarred by footprints.
Whatever had happened here… the Thenns are gone to the last man, woman and child, aren't they? He released the crow and snapped back into his own body with a shudder. "We're going down," he said firmly to Ghost, despite the knot in his stomach.
Perhaps there was no point in speaking, it didn't matter. It was more for his own encouragement than anything else.
There had to be useful supplies left behind, things he could use. Furs, blankets, possibly even dried foodstuffs if he was lucky. And he had seen no sign of enemies, at least from the air.
Besides, Sonagon had scented something he considered delectable down there. The dragon always needs food, Jon thought with a faint sigh.
With a firm tug on Hullen's mind, Jon began the descent. Ghost padded silently at his side, sniffing at the air.
Sonagon walked ahead casually; even the dragon's slowest pace was far greater than anything Jon's mountain goat could ever manage. Phantom stayed behind at Jon's firm direction, watching for enemies that might follow from behind through the pass. If there were none in the next day or two, he would summon the shadowcat back to him then. After her recent failure, he'd be watching that shadowcat more closely.
After the descent into the valley, it didn't take long to reach the town. But the closer they got to Thenn, the more pronounced the silence covering the land like a blanket became. The road widened as it neared the town's gates, but the gates themselves hung ajar, creaking faintly in the wind. As he had expected from his aerial scouting, no guards stood watch, no voices called out in challenge at his approach.
Jon's boots crunched on the snow as he stepped through the gates, Ghost close at his heels. He heard nothing else at all.
The streets beyond were empty of life. The homes all lay darkened in abandonment. Shutters were closed everywhere he looked, though a few hung open, some broken by the winter winds, left to sway in the breeze. A cart lay overturned in the middle of the road, its contents long since scattered and mostly covered by snow.
Jon's grip tightened on Dark Sister's hilt as he moved deeper into the town. If there were ever going to be any surprises here, they would come soon.
He peered into a house whose door lay ajar, but there was nothing worth mentioning within. All goods had been taken away, apparently. It was the same with the next four homes he checked. That wasn't the behavior of the dead, but of the living. So the town was evacuated, Jon became increasingly certain. The people of Thenn consider their Magnar more god than lord, he recalled. Perhaps I shouldn't be surprised. No other chieftain could have ordered such a complete evacuation of wildlings from a land this fine.
But if they had evacuated before the threat of the dead, then where was the enemy? Where are the dead?
Sonagon couldn't fit through the town's gates, but that scarcely mattered. After a brief mental nudge from him, the dragon tore them down along with the walkway bridge overhead. It took only seconds.
Jon stepped through, and passed into the town's streets. Sonagon followed. After entering the town, the dragon's head swiveled about here and there, nostrils flaring. He senses the same wrongness Ghost does, Jon realized.
Ghost's teeth had been bared into a silent snarl ever since entering the town. The direwolf's hackles were raised.
Something is here, Jon was certain. But where?
Jon's eyes fixed on the squat castle at the far end of the town, which was a wide wooden hall set on a raised platform, with four rounded drum towers that vaguely reminded him of Winterfell's First Keep - though much smaller in size. The castle's gates were open, the courtyard beyond blanketed in feet of untouched snow.
Careful, now, Jon thought. As he crossed the threshold into the yards, a sudden movement caught his eye. The snows shifted, then erupted. He drew his sword with a shout.
Wights. Over twenty of them erupted from the drifts. Damnit.
Their unnaturally pale blue eyes all fixed on him, instantly - not on the dragon. They're being controlled. Ambush. Many of them clutched rusted weapons in decayed hands. They advanced as silently as the truly dead, staggering toward him through the snowdrifts, picking up speed.
"Back, Ghost!" Jon shouted. "Back!"
Twenty was too many by far. He had to flee, make some space. But before Jon could even act, Sonagon roared.
A blast of searing frostfire erupting from the dragon's jaws overhead. The wights all instantly disintegrated, collapsing into statues of broken ice and bloody splinters. Without a moment's pause, the dragon lunged forward and snapped up the frost-charred remains in his massive jaws, devouring the undead thralls with a ferocity that made even Jon step back in alarm.
Ghost bared his teeth but did nothing, made no sound. The direwolf just stayed close to Jon's side, staring warily at the dragon.
It was over in seconds. Jon glanced at the scene warily, searching for more of the dead, but Sonagon only sniffed at the ruined courtyard in his own search, clearly finding nothing before snorting audibly and laying down to rest.
At last, Jon sighed. He stared at the castle above and before them, raised on its own hill. The heavy doors were already open, and within, from here, he could see only darkness. Hopefully it's safe now.
He approached the castle's great hall and found that snowdrifts stretched over fifty feet past the open castle gate and threshold before thinning out. He entered the castle of the Magnars of Thenn, and it took a moment for his eyes to adjust to the dim light.
When he could properly see what lay spread out before him, Jon hesitated. What is this place?
It was halfway between a great hall, a throne room, and a grotesquerie.
He saw a cavernous, wooden great hall almost as large as Winterfell's Great Keep, lined up and down with dozens of long ironwood tables, and above them, at the hall's far end, rested an empty throne atop a raised dais. Banners displaying runes of the First Men hung tattered on the walls, their colors mostly faded and beyond his ability to interpret.
The rest of the walls were adorned with scores of savage trophies from all manner of beast. The skulls of giants, mammoths, snow bears, great eagles, giant boars, moose, unicorns, direwolves, shadowcats and great elks, even a few skulls from the children of the forest… and something larger, something he had never seen before.
It was above the throne itself, and it vaguely resembled a shadowcat's skull, but was far larger. The bone of the skull was thicker and broader, and the snout ended not with cat's teeth, but with a ferocious-looking beak that might have been an eagle's… but for the fact that the beak was three entire feet long.
Is that a griffin's skull? Jon thought in wonder, inspecting it from up close. Yes, it has to be. He rocked back and stared some more, stunned. I thought they were only myths out of the Dawn Age, or perhaps the Age of Heroes at best.
He had never even heard of solid, confirmable examples of griffins outside of those legends: they had been the chosen mounts of the Griffin King of the Vale of Arryn, according to the stories, or the servants and symbols of that pagan god of the First Men, the Storm God who had been worshipped by the pre-Andal invasion Stormlanders and Iron Islanders. Even to the First Men, those would have been old stories.
A griffin's skull, here. Did that mean that there were living griffins somewhere in the north? He couldn't even begin to say. The skull might be generations or even centuries old, he considered, looking at it more closely. The skull did look rather ancient, even compared to all the rest. And it had been preserved with a layer of wax besides, which had no doubt been resealed however many times.
Jon paced in front of the skull of a creature out of legend, utterly fascinated and equally confused. This castle is thousands of years old, almost certainly. The skull's age might not just be a matter of centuries, he determined, settling the matter in his mind before he moved on.
He went to inspect the throne itself and could only recoil, disgusted. The throne of the Magnars of Thenn was a testament to sheer savagery, a primitive thing of beaten copper and tin, bronze and silver and gold, all gilded atop the interlocked bones of giants. Half a dozen gold-plated giant's skulls rested atop the headrest, impaled by golden spikes.
A throne made of the bones of giants, Jon thought, disgusted but faintly impressed - if only by the Thenn's sheer commitment to such a display of savagery.
He moved through the rest of the Magnar's castle, and a castle it was, if a primitive one: but he found very little. Just a few ratty-looking furs of indeterminate make left behind, which he could at least stitch together and convert into a rather poor blanket. Almost everything that hadn't been literally nailed down had been taken, doubtlessly by Styr and his most trusted people.
There truly was nothing else at all, not even in the towers or in the larders - the castle had truly been looted to the last. Nothing unusual worth noting except for a sole heart tree in the back of the castle, surrounded by a small grove of smaller weirwoods and ironwoods. There was nothing else here, and no one to find. Nothing but an empty throne for an empty castle, all abandoned by their lord and people.
He stood on a crude balcony on the castle's third and highest level, overlooking the empty town of Thenn, just taking it all in.
The Thenns, the proudest and strongest of the wildling clans, had fled. But to where? And why? The wights were a clue, but not an answer. He didn't know if these dead had been all that remained of the last of the Thenns, or if they were an unrelated remnant left behind by the white walkers - a trap to ambush and slay less prepared travelers than himself. He knew for a fact that only the Thenn's warriors and some of the smallfolk had gone with Styr to serve Mance. Where were all the rest of them?
It doesn't matter. Whether directly or indirectly, the Others had driven the people of Thenn from their homes, and now they were all fled or dead or worse. There's nothing for me here.
Ygritte's face flashed before his eyes. The last of the First Men, he thought, standing amidst the ruins. She had described the people of Thenn as such, but now, he wondered if the First Men were truly dead.
For lack of any better option, Jon returned to the courtyard… where Sonagon should have been waiting.
The dragon wasn't waiting there.
Jon's momentary alarm passed when he saw Sonagon's footprints. The dragon had gone elsewhere, somewhere out and behind the castle. He followed the dragon's footprints, which swiftly veered towards a hamlet slightly north and eastwards of the castle.
When he arrived, he found Sonagon happily chasing down every member of a terrified sounder of pigs. Actual, living pigs, not wighted ones. The dragon was walking at a casual trot, snapping up each and every pig in his jaws across the abandoned snowfields. Even at a walk, the pigs could never outrun a dragon of such size in the snow.
Jon stared at the scene, faintly amused by the dragon's enthusiasm for the task. Several dozen pigs. Perhaps they had escaped from their enclosure during the Thenn's abandonment of their valley and no one had bothered to recapture them? He couldn't say. But it sounded likely.
It wasn't long before the dragon had hunted down just about all thirty and some of the pigs. Ghost managed to bring down one of the ones left over, a fat sow that he and his direwolf shared in the abandoned castle as the sun set, as day passed into night.
And in the morning, he left the abandoned town of Thenn behind.
Nothing changed for the next four days. He trekked south through the entire length of the valley of Thenn, passing by at least twenty villages and hamlets of variable size, and he saw not a single living soul.
South of the valley, where all its waters emptied, Jon came upon a lake that he suspected to be the headwaters of the Milkwater. Standing along its mostly-frozen shore, staring over the plane of ice, he briefly considered the merits of the route. The Milkwater was the longest river in the haunted forest, cutting along the entire eastern length of the southern Frostfangs, flowing southwestwards until it drained out into the Bay of Ice. There would be food and people to be found along that route - eventually.
The problem was, following that route would bring him westwards to the Gorge and the Shadow Tower, not eastwards to Hardhome as he wanted. It was too risky, far more exposed to the white walker threat.
No choice but to abandon the river and continue on south and eastwards through the forest. Jon thought, resolving himself. And then he moved on, leaving the river behind him.
Another week passed as he followed a great forested valley between the mountains, heading down a gentle slope towards an endless lowland expanse of grey-green forest. The northern haunted forest, he estimated, looking over the dark forest that stretched to the ends of this elevated horizon. Or at least its peripheries. It didn't matter. I'm finally beginning to leave the highlands.
There could be no doubt of it, according to his memories - almost fifty days into this journey, he was beginning to pass into regions that the ranger's maps did cover. However falteringly.
Apart from the changing nature of the forest, the stone too had changed: the cliffs in this region weren't the hard grey granite and blacker basalt of the upper mountains; these cliffs were made of soft limestone, perforated seemingly endlessly with caves. Presumably these were the lands of the cave dwelling tribes who were said to reside in the valleys above the haunted forest, but if so, he saw none of their residents, no sign of their presence.
He refused to investigate the caves to confirm his suspicions of the resident's fates - Ghost's nose alone was enough to put his senses on edge. There was a faint scent of death hanging over this valley, as pervasive as the snow blanketing the world. These lands too were empty, of that there could be no doubt. The war of the dead had come to this place, and the living had lost.
He stuck to the main path of the descending valley. Thankfully, he saw no wights. Along the path, Ghost hunted down several more large creatures that had somehow managed to survive, with Jon's faltering assistance: a pair of elk, three deer, even a moose. It was too much for him and Ghost to eat, and he left almost all of it for the dragon. But for the most part Sonagon acted as if he hadn't even noticed Jon's efforts. Like the dragon simply expected Jon to serve it.
Dragons are worse than cats, he thought with a grimace. They expect servitude instinctively. The dragon had quickly grown perhaps too accustomed to Jon leading it towards food.
Then, one day, when Hullen was out foraging and Jon was too exhausted to walk over the rough terrain proved too hard for his bad leg, Sonagon halted suddenly. Jon stared, but the dragon had stopped moving hundred feet ahead. Its head snaked back to stare at him, and Jon felt a distinct sense of impatience radiating from Sonagon.
He's waiting for me to catch up, Jon realized. It was one of the first outward signs that maybe the dragon - perhaps - appreciated his efforts.
Later in the week, Sonagon didn't even object when Jon tried to climb up its neck again. It was the first time Jon had tried to mount Sonagon since their escape from the Others. The ice dragon was almost (not quite, but almost) patient as Jon clambered upwards to grip its horn. Jon's heart was in his mouth, clutching onto Sonagon's horn as the great dragon lumbered through the forest, destroying lesser trees with his sheer hulking mass as he pleased.
That day, Jon left Hullen behind. The goat was hungry and tiring, it was for the best to leave it to forage in the woods in peace while Jon rode on Sonagon's head. He could summon Hullen later.
The journey was easier, too. Sonagon walked slowly for a beast his size, and thrashed his head less than usual to account for Jon's presence. Jon could only stare, mouth agape as he watched the rocky landscape drift by from the top of the dragon's head. Even at a casual trot, the dragon's pacing and speed was as good as a galloping palfrey. If the dragon truly chose to run as it had when first escaping from the Others, no horse in Westeros would have been its equal.
He could see the hills and valleys breaking more and more into flatlands and pine forests as they headed south. More and more trail markers, abandoned structures, abandoned villages.
They were inevitably getting closer to people.
More weeks passed, and the days became easier. Still rough, and colder, but more regular. Jon would scout, hunt and plan ahead as the dragon was resting, but while when they were moving Jon was allowed to climb on as Sonagon would carry him. He rotated between Ghost, Phantom and Hullen, using each animal whenever he was indisposed.
I've survived in the wilderness with no human contact for almost three months now, Jon mused. It was a feat that even Qhorin Halfhand would have been proud of.
He was truly in the northern haunted forest now, with the last of the highlands far to his back. The mountains had not been an easy journey, their terrain every bit as fearsome as the legends of them had said, and it had taken a direwolf, a goat and a shadowcat, and plentiful supernatural assistance from a greenseer and his crows to keep him alive. But they'd done it.
And yet still, he saw no sign of the living. He passed by several abandoned deepwoods hamlets, even small villages he suspected had once belongs to either Hornfoots or Nightrunners, but he still saw not a single living soul.
The days ticked by into weeks of slow, rough movement alternating with bursts of speed through the forest, when the dragon had enough energy and was willing to be mounted. Weeks of constant movement as a whole, and rough living. There was more prey here to hunt, more signs of life. He was getting stronger, could almost spend a day walking entirely on his own now.
As far as he knew, the Others were still chasing him, but whatever means they had to scour the land were less effective in the haunted forest - these woods were the largest on all of Westeros, the rangers had said, larger than the wolfswood, larger in their own right than some of the more southerly Seven Kingdoms. Thousands of dragons could have hidden in the deep haunted forest, let alone his single one. There were times he could go for hours without seeing the faintest glimpse of the sun - the trees here were thick evergreens, pines and soldier pines, blocking out all light.
Every time he could, at every free moment, Jon closed his eyes and tried to connect to the dragon. Sonagon was constantly suspicious each time that Jon extended the warg, but he forced himself to stay patient, non-threatening.
And slowly, very slowly, Sonagon let Jon slip under his skin.
Every time he did, it took his breath away.
Sonagon sees the world on a different scale, Jon came to realize. He sees colors in terms of hot and cold, he can smell wind currents and storms from entire horizons away. The dragon's senses were like no other beast Jon had ever encountered.
During the dreams, they connected more and more. Jon saw visions, vague, blurry old memories, of flying over warm seas and unfamiliar lands that could not have possibly been any part of Westeros. Endless deserts with sand that flowed like water, smoking seas that belched fire, rivers with delicious turtles the size of skiffs, jungles with apes - apes - the size of cottages. He remembered dueling in the sky over an endless green wild with creatures that weren't dragons, but didn't look so far off either - smaller, scaled creatures with barbed tails and vicious fangs.
And one time, during one particular dream, there was a feeling of immense noise, a gathering of hundreds of roaring dragons at the top of a mountain of fire - and then the ground quaking, splitting apart, and great eruptions of fire rising upwards from the earth…
He shivered. Whatever that dream had been - he'd seen only flashes - his skin tingled with the memories of being licked by fires like shadow, shadows that hungered.
Sonagon's memories. I can see the dragon's memories.
"The Doom," Jon said aloud, to the empty night, and to the dragon staring at him. "You were there, at the Doom of Valyria."
There was no reply. The darkness of the dragon's eyes was nearly pitch black. Jon's vision roamed aimlessly, and he stared at the dragon's great hide. White on red. His scales are white with red veins. Jon thought about the memories, and the visions from Sonagon's dreams.
"The greenseer said that dragons are creatures of magic," he muttered. "The Valyrian dragons were creatures of fire, and they burnt in the Doom…"
He met the dragon's eyes, almost inspecting the dragon for any reaction to his words. He was almost certain the dragon could understand, at least in some small part. "But you weren't always an ice dragon, were you? That's how you survived. You turned from fire to ice."
He thought about it for a while. The greenseer had said that dragons fed on magic, yet they were also shaped by it. Jon pictured Sonagon's white dragonfire and he wondered if it had always been cold.
"Red. You used to be a red dragon," Jon said. He tried to picture what Sonagon would have looked like with red scales instead of white. Absentmindedly, he touched his hair. "And then you turned to feed off cold instead of fire - you froze, your scales became white, your fire became cold, and you became an ice dragon."
There was no reply. Sonagon's eyes were like pools of pure, beady darkness.
Jon kept on thinking about the dragon's memories, trying to remember all he had seen, committing what he could to memory.
Occasionally, Jon just started to talk himself. He would just talk to his dragon about his own memories.
First, Jon would talk about Winterfell, about his family and his childhood. He could describe his brothers and sisters, although it had felt like so long that he wondered if they even looked the same. He described Robb, Bran, little Rickon, and wild Arya most of all. Then, he started to talk about Ghost and proudly tell stories about the direwolf. Then, he started to talk about his black brothers and the Night's Watch, even mentioning Ygritte and Tormund once or twice.
Later, when they camped for the night, the stories wouldn't stop. Sonagon wouldn't make a noise, but his black eyes were staring at Jon intently.
He's listening, Jon thought, and the realization sent shivers down his spine. He's listening to what I'm saying now.
Jon didn't know how he was so sure of this… but he was sure. Sonagon was intelligent - the dragon was listening to the words. Really listening. There wasn't a human's intelligence behind those eyes, not exactly - Jon didn't think the dragon could actually understand the stories, but something about him made Jon suspect that the dragon understood more than one might think. Perhaps even more than Jon was guessing.
The thought made him smile softly. The air was quiet and still. No campfire, no noise, nothing except a cold night. Jon bundled up in furs as he stared into the great dragon's eyes.
Jon struggled to think of more stories to tell. Strangely, the only one that came to mind were Old Nan's tales.
"Once, long ago, thousands and thousands of years ago," Jon said slowly, his voice feeling strangely frail in the quiet. "A winter fell that was cold and hard and lasted beyond all memory of man. Winter came, the snows fell a hundred feet deep, and then in the Long Night, the sun hid for years. Children were born, lived, and died in darkness. That was when the white walkers moved through the woods…"
Jon had heard the tale before as a child. He had never imagined, not even in his wildest nightmares, that he would end up living it.
"…that was when the last hero set out to seek the children of the forest. He set out into the dead lands with a sword, a horse, a dog and a dozen companions, searching for the children of the forest in their secret cities…" Jon paused in a moment of quiet reflection. "…One by one his friends died, and his horse, and finally even his dog, and the cold touched his sword so deeply that the blade snapped when he tried to wield it against his enemy. And the Others smelled the hot blood in him and came silent on his trail, stalking him with packs of pale white spiders big as hounds…"
The story had always frightened him as a child. Now, he recited Old Nan's tale word for word, and he felt nothing. Reality had eclipsed these old children's tales by far. There were longer versions of the story, many of them, but here and now, this was enough.
The words faded into the wind. Sonagon didn't make a sound.
Jon finished the rest of the tale, threadbare as it all seemed now. The fight against the Others - the duel between the last hero and the Other's King, with the fate of the world in the balance. How the last hero won, how the Night's Watch was founded, and how they defeated the forces of night in the Battle for the Dawn. For some reason, Jon didn't quite believe that part of the story.
Old legends get muddled up, that cold stranger had said.
"The last hero ended the generations-long winter and sent the Others into retreat," Jon finished. "And then Bran the Builder raised the Wall, hundreds of feet tall, to forever protect against the cold and the Long Night. And the sworn brothers kept building, generation after generation, raising the Wall ever higher. They say it's now seven hundred feet high." Jon cocked his head at Sonagon in the dark. "And that's the part where I think history has forgotten a bit or two. Because I think I know how Bran the Builder actually built the Wall."
Jon smiled softy, thinking about the great Wall. A wall three hundred miles long and seven hundred feet tall. It was one of the greatest mysteries of the world how any man, even a legendary one, could have ever moved enough ice to build a wall that size. Later generations of Lord Commanders had added to it, true, but the main mass of the Wall had always been there.
"I think that Bran the Builder must have used ice dragons to build the Wall," he said. "I think that it must have taken the breath of an ice dragon - hell, maybe several - to make a Wall of ice that big. How else could it have been done? How else could it still be here today? So, I think that for thousands of years something built by ice dragons has protected the realm of man."
Sonagon stared unblinkingly with dark eyes. He has black eyes, Jon noted. In Old Nan's fanciful tales of ice dragons, the ice dragons would always have blue eyes, and were made of ice. Were they ever real? Jon wondered. Or is Sonagon what a true ice dragon looks like?
"…and I can't help thinking…" Jon continued, his voice barely a whisper. "…that thousands of years ago, ice dragons might have helped stop the Long Night. And, now, when the cold and the dead are rising again, the final ice dragon appears too. That means something. It has to."
Jon met the dragon's eyes with a gentle smile. Sonagon is winter, he decided.
Winter, with all its different layers of meaning. Sometimes the dragon was as fierce and as vicious as the worst winter storm. But then, at other times, he was a soft and as mellow as those crisp, comfortable winter days, where the cold and snow didn't bite, but instead wrapped around you like a cloak. Those days when the air was so clear and soft that it was like the world itself had gone to sleep. Jon was reminded of his old memories of winter - of massive snowball battles with Robb and the winter town boys, and long treks through the snow…
Jon closed his eyes and tried to share those memories with Sonagon too.
"…I think you're going to save the world, Sonagon," Jon whispered.
They sat, Jon talked and Sonagon listened, for a long time before they both finally fell asleep.
They both dreamed of flying.