Learning how to swing a sword, Part 2
Jon
The next day, the greenseer refused to let Jon try again with the weirwoods.
"Do not," the greenseer warned, after Jon asked. "An uncommonly gifted warg you might be, Jon, but you lack the quality of power needed to truly walk through the trees. Just as blades can scar flesh, so too can magic scar the spirit. The weirwoods alone were trial enough, and would have exhausted any warg. A royal white walker?" The greenseer's lips thinned. "Not even I know how she drew you to that place. To their city." He grimaced, sighing quietly. "This place, and that tree in particular protected you from the worst that might have happened - and even then, it brought you to the brink."
It was true that the experience had changed him, Jon later reflected. But it didn't feel… harmful, not exactly. It felt like the exhaustion that came after a long day of sparring. Exhaustion, and then strength.
As Jon broke his fast, he tested himself on the cavern's ravens. He found it a little easier to fully grasp them, a bit faster to fully acclimatize to their strange, flittery senses. But, try as he might, he still couldn't speak through their tongue as the greenseer could.
Jon let the bird go. He exhaled, steadying his breath. He could feel the three-eyed crow's disappointment, but the lessons continued nevertheless. Jon's progress was slow, mainly in learning from the ravens, and how to not lose himself, rather than improving in his ability to see through the weirwoods.
"As a warg, you are fairly powerful by this era's standards," the crow murmured later in the day, as Jon gasped with the end of another warg dream. "But you are no greenseer. You will never feel the greensight, or embrace the depths of what the trees might offer. You will never see. I had hoped to introduce you to the weirwood's paste, but I fear that power would consume you as you are."
Somehow, the lessons of meditating with the greenseer were more exhausting than any spar. Still, the glimpses of the greenseer's power he had seen… if he could take even a fraction of that power for his own, perhaps taming a dragon wouldn't be an entirely hopeless impossibility.
"Is it possible to get stronger?"
"For most, no. The foundation of one's powers is set from birth, but…" the greenseer hesitated. "For you alone, perhaps there is a path," he murmured quietly. "The dragonlords of old were said to be able to control great magics - and the greater their bonded dragon, the deeper their connection, the greater that ability became. But for you, as you are now, this is as far as you can go."
"Then what can I do now?"
"Keep practicing. Learn. Learn how to use your gifts."
He ended up mostly practicing the sword with Acorn that day. Practicing, and mostly just being slaughtered. Even in a spar, Acorn was a terrifyingly skilled, frustrating opponent.
Two more days passed, much spent just sleeping, recovering from his wounds, from the exhaustion of the weirwood's terrible visions. Jon kept practicing warging - but on smaller scales, with animals. He dared not try to warg with the weirwoods again.
And after the two days, Jon felt that his recovery had come along… something had changed, not in muscle, but in something deeper. Warging was starting to come more easily to him. His attempts with the birds this morning had proven that much. Jon still wasn't sure what practical use the skill might ever be, but at least he could begin to talk through a raven, now, albeit at an embarrassingly childish level of competence.
The practice with warging, however much it exhausted him, only exhausted him in mind - it gave his body time to heal. Enough time that between the lessons sitting at the greenseer's weirwood throne, Jon found time to exercise and spar. He practiced with Acorn as regularly as he could, forcing himself to recover. He tried to learn how to mimic her movements, desperately trying to keep up with her speed.
She moves as fast as a white walker, Jon recalled, after yet another loss to her. The thought drove him harder and harder to heal and train. But as time passed, and as he lost to her, again and again, his frustrations kept mounting.
It was after another loss that Jon noticed the greenseer had been watching this time, his pale, ancient red eye following their movements with interest from his twisted throne of weirwood. With a groan of exhaustion, he let his exhausted body collapse by the throne's roots.
"You spar well for one your age, Jon Snow," the greenseer mused softly. "Even in my time, when I still walked - when the kingdoms were more at war - it was rare to see such swordsmanship in a boy of under twenty years."
"Not well enough," Jon grimaced, looking after the tunnel Acorn had disappeared in. Her lithe form had already disappeared into one of the many tunnels beneath the roots. She was quick, quicker than any fighter he'd ever even imagined, let alone faced, and she barely seemed winded by any of their bouts.
It discouraged him. She discouraged him. He had the impression she hadn't ever even broken a single sweat in any of these bouts against him.
Am I making progress? Or am I wasting my time by trying to train in the sword with her?
If he was making any progress, he couldn't see even see it yet. Every fight was still ending the same way; Acorn moving like a shadow, untouchable until the end, while he struggled to keep up. His losses were piling up, and no matter how hard he trained, no matter how fiercely he pushed himself - the gap between him and that child of the forest seemed insurmountable.
"How can I beat her?" Jon asked.
The greenseer said nothing, and the silence only added to Jon's frustrations. "Acorn… she feels impossible," Jon admitted, struggling for the words that felt right. "Sparring with her, it's almost like fighting the wind. I can't catch her, not even in a parry, not for minutes at a time - and then, just when I think I see an opening - I can't keep up, or I miss something in what she's doing - and then I'm dead. Dead, before I even noticed what I did wrong."
"You are too young," the greenseer murmured quietly. "Acorn is not like those you've fought before. She has trained in the martial dances of her people for centuries: she is one of the oldest and most skilled of the children who still live."
"I can't train for centuries. I have days," Jon sighed, partially in frustration, partially in awe. "Her feints, her footwork… it's perfect, all of it. Her defense is flawless. I've never met a fighter like her."
"True," the greenseer murmured. "If you threw yourself into training for an entire decade, practicing the sword day and night, all you could do is narrow some of a gap wider than you can know. But the same could be said for any man, including masters of the sword decades your senior. Do not be discouraged, and do not judge yourself by her standards."
He's trying to comfort me, but it's not helping. Jon rested his head back against the roots, eyes closing for a moment as the exhaustion of his aching body took hold of him.
Frustration gnawed at Jon's edges. He didn't need a reminder of his limitations, not here, not now - there was too much at stake to simply accept that Acorn's skill was out of reach. I fought a white walker, and if I don't want to die - again - I can't stay like this. I can't keep losing.
"Then how do I learn?" Jon asked. His voice turned sharper. "What am I missing?"
The greenseer said nothing, and the silence was even heavier this time.
"Please, you must know something," Jon said. "You were a famed sword in your time, weren't you?"
"…Men called me a master, but in truth, I preferred the bow," the greenseer said dryly, but slowly, as if considering. "Those days are long past. And yet, I wonder…" something shifted in the greenseer's expression, and his pale red eye drifted towards him.
"It occurs to me that, perhaps, you fight without understanding the nature of the dance you are being taught."
Jon frowned. "The dance? You mean Acorn's way of fighting?"
"The wood dance is a reactive style of swordsmanship," the greenseer explained, his voice deliberate now, sharper. "And in truth, one not entirely suited to humans. It is one of several of the children's ancient martial styles, each suited to a different… hm. A different philosophy of battle, perhaps. And the wood dance teaches that you will always lose if you allow your enemy to dictate the course of battle. True skill in the wood dance is not found in blind aggression. It is found in withdrawing your mind from the heat of the fight, stepping back, and observing."
What is he talking about? "But she's always pressuring me," Jon frowned. That explanation, it didn't fit with the crushing defeats he had experienced, for days now. "She's always moving. Always pressing the attack. She's… overwhelming."
"That is where you are wrong." The greenseer's voice had a real sharpness to it now, a hint of impatience. "Acorn does not press the attack. Think about your spars with her. She controls the flow of battle by allowing you to attack first, and reacts accordingly. She uses your own force against you, your own impatience. The wood dance is not about overpowering your enemy - it is about restraint. The true power of this martial form lies in its ability to observe, to let things pass, and act only when the moment is right. If you allow your enemy to set the pace, they control you."
Jon looked down at his sword, thinking over the greenseer's words. His exhaustion wasn't from defending, but from chasing a fight that was never his to lead?
Perhaps there was truth in that. Acorn's footwork had always seemed light, almost effortless, but now that he thought back on it, she hadn't always been the one pushing him. Am I overextending myself by always trying to catch her, trying to match her speed?
"You've adjusted your style to compensate for your injured leg," the greenseer continued, his eyes flickering toward Jon's bandaged limb. "But you are treating your lesser mobility as a disability, not as a pillar to base your style on. That is your mistake, I suspect. There is a reason why Acorn is trying to teach you the wood dance, when she could be teaching the storm dance or the water dance instead. She sees your potential, Jon Snow."
Jon hesitated, the realization sinking in. "I wish she'd mentioned that."
"She teaches through action, not words," The greenseer's thin lips curved into the faintest of smiles. "She is… not the most skilled in the Common. The lesson is not in what she says, but in what she does. If she is the wind, then you must learn to let wind come to you. Do not chase it. Let the wind pass, and when it does, strike."
Jon's mind raced, replaying every bout with Acorn in his head. And then he stood, cursing. I'm a fool.
He could see it now: the moments where he had pushed too hard, the openings he had left in his impatience to land a strike. The way Acorn had always been just out of reach, not because she was faster, but because she waited for him to move first. She had been teaching him to slow down, to observe like her, but he had been too focused on winning to realize it.
His legs were still shaking slightly from the strain of the fight, but there was a new determination in his heart. He couldn't beat Acorn by trying to overpower her - he would never match her speed, her agility, her experience.
But perhaps, just perhaps, he could learn to move like her.
More days passed.
The children of the forest were never quite out of sight, Jon eventually came to realize; this place was some kind of center for them, a convergence of the paths they used within the earth. They had a strange name for it in their tongue, but when Jon asked, they would only call it "the Oldest Grove." He also came to learn a little of their lifestyle - they sustained themselves on mushrooms, nuts and berries, milk and cheese from the goats they kept in their caverns, even blind white fish from the underground river. It was a healthy diet that gave him strength. But unlike him, they took no joy in the act of eating.
One time, Jon woke to find a white-haired child of the forest named Snowylocks standing over him, singing a slow, tender song to nurse his wounds.
When he asked later, she told him that Jon's leg would never be the same, but he wondered. It had been getting better every day. Something about the songs of the children, the patterns they sang seemed to help his body heal; they gave him strength, made his wounds mend faster. Jon tried to ask how it worked, but the answer had only baffled him - that the children were just motes of life that could give voice to the tiniest of notes in the silent orchestra of the earth - which was why they were called singers, from what he came to understand of them. When he asked how that 'orchestra' worked, Leaf, the most eloquent of the children, hadn't even answered - just walked off in grief.
His dreams were becoming stronger, too. More vidid, clearer. Down here, by the roots of the weirwood, ever since the greenseer had started his lessons… Jon's dreams had become full warg-dreams, visions from other bodies, visions akin to the legends he had heard whispered among the free folk.
Sometimes, Jon dreamt he was a direwolf. Those dreams were a hunter's dreams, reassuring and focused, like dreaming of an old friend. He dreamed of running through the woods, of hunting over frozen lakes, stalking prey through woods of snowy branches.
At other times, the dreams were… chaotic, beyond intense. Dreams of fury on great wings - dreams of fire and ice, dreams of far flight and high storms, and a heart that beat with the force of a mountain. And, most intense of all, there was battle - always, always, battle against the dead. Those were the dreams that caused him to wake up panting and sweating.
The wolf's dreams were calm and sound. Welcoming, comforting. The dragon's dreams felt like riding a force of nature.
After one such dream, Jon panted as he shot awake.
It was the tenth day, now.
He had been clutching Dark Sister as he slept on the uncomfortable roots near the throne, on a pile of soft, woven fabric the children had provided. The greenseer was looking down at him, almost curiously. Jon rubbed at his eyes, trying to focus. As he found something resembling wakefulness, Jon clutched Dark Sister, still held in its faded black scabbard; the sword just felt so comfortable, a reassuring weight in his grasp. To think he was now holding the same blade that had once been held by the Dragonknight…
Jon hesitated, staring at the ruby on the pommel. There had been something that had been nagging at him for a while. "You believe that I am a Targaryen, don't you?" Jon said suddenly, his voice quiet in the constant gloom.
The three-eyed crow just nodded. "I believe you have Targaryen blood."
Jon took a deep breath, trying to process it. He gave me a priceless Targaryen sword, Jon thought to himself. He said he wanted to return the sword to family. Jon's hand instinctively went to his overgrown hair - now shoulder length, and as white as bone. He was growing a white… he couldn't call it a beard, that would be too generous. Overgrown stubble, maybe. White was not his natural hair color, and it wasn't the silvery gold or platinum he'd heard tales of, but still, that color…
"How is that even possible?" Jon asked. "That means that Eddard Stark must have birthed me on a Targaryen - he was at war with the Targaryens when I was born. How?"
"I do not know," the old man replied in his low voice, but strangely, Jon didn't quite believe him. Sometimes, it seemed like the greenseer knew everything there was to know.
Jon was quiet as he thought of his mother, whoever she had been. Jon remembered the Stark's family tree. Despite a certain promised betrothal or two, possibilities that had been lost to the fires of old wars, there wasn't even a shred of known Targaryen blood in the entire Stark line.
Which meant that his mother must have given him the blood, this blood that could let him - perhaps, let him - try to command a dragon.
Could my father really have had an affair with some Targaryen princess? How many Targaryen women were even alive during the Rebellion?
Jon couldn't even say. He did not know the Targaryen's family line as he did the Stark's.
He spent the rest of the day practicing with Acorn, trying to really get a grip of the wood dance - but mostly, he was trying to distract himself from those infuriating thoughts of his parentage.
He wasn't sure if it worked.
On the thirteenth morning, knowing that he would soon have to leave this place, Jon found Acorn again.
She was, again, already waiting for him in the wide chamber the children had given over to their sparring. A wide space of rose and white flowstone, sporadically interwoven with softly glowing weirwood roots that provided the chamber with a reliable, if somewhat dim milky grey light.
Jon had stopped wondering how Acorn always knew when he was coming. Perhaps she warged the goats, or the ravens. Perhaps she didn't need to warg and could simply scry him directly - if he understood anything of that magical art the greenseer had mentioned. Or perhaps she simply came here every day, doing nothing but to wait. It was impossible to say.
All he knew was, every time he came here, here she was. Patiently waiting to cross blades, like some statue of the Warrior of the Faith's Seven himself made flesh.
He rolled his bad leg carefully as he stepped into the chamber, testing the weight. Better than it had been. Not entirely recovered, yet better by far. It will have to be good enough, he thought, setting his feet.
"I leave tomorrow," Jon said, steeling himself. "Please teach me. One last time."
Acorn stood at the center of the floor with eyes closed, her weirwood spear thrust into the ground. But those large, unsettling, inhuman eyes opened at his words. She silently watched him step forwards, observing him with that strange gold-flecked gaze that seemed to take in more than any man's.
He wondered what she saw, what she expected of him. Or perhaps she didn't expect anything of him at all? Or were such things - expectations, hopes, dreams - beyond her now, lost in the quiet, unending grief of the last of the children of the forest?
Whatever was behind those eyes, whatever Acorn might be thinking, he couldn't read her at all. She said nothing. Her face didn't so much as flicker. She simply raised her spear, settled her stance, and waited.
He drew Dark Sister. Otherwise, the cavern was silent.
Jon didn't attack first. That, at least, he had learned. He stood into a grounded stance - feet wider than his shoulders, his injured leg braced, his center dropped the way she had spent days trying to batter into him. Roots, not wings, she had said. He watched, and waited.
Acorn did the same.
For a long moment, nothing moved. The underground river's flow murmured gently in the distant dark. A raven somewhere in the higher tunnels quorked, landing to watch from a perch of pale roots.
Then Acorn shifted her stance, and she moved.
He saw her first strike coming, at a casual speed for her standards: it was a probe, just to get him moving. A jab to his core that he brushed aside with his blade.
The next came faster. A sweeping strike - a feint disguised just enough as an opening to see how he'd answer it. He stepped back, letting the tip of her spearhead pass by just in front of his chest.
Her third strike came even faster, deadly fast: it looked, at first, to be just another test - a single light thrust to his right.
But he saw through it now. He had been watching her feet - her roots - and saw it now. It wasn't a thrust to his right but a feint to his right. Her true objective was his left. She was putting just enough aggression into the feint to make it look real - her blade was aimed for his right. But everything else about her, her eyes, her footwork, her entire being - was honing in on his heart.
In that split-instant, faster than thought, he considered: he could block it; but then he'd find himself on the defensive. Hopelessly on the defensive. In every previous bout, Jon had eventually taken the bait of one her feints and openings, lunged to press an advantage that wasn't there, and then found himself swiftly beset, battered and hunted.
But this time, he saw through the feint and let it pass entirely. He let it travel through the space he had just vacated.
Then Dark Sister snapped out his response, quick as a snake.
But Acorn had the eyes of a hawk. Her spearhead came up in a rare block - an actual, true block.
The child of the forest had maybe half of his body weight. The block would have cost her, maybe sent her reeling - but she ducked and turned the block into a redirection midway through. Acorn spun away, and Jon's thrust found only air.
He didn't overcommit to it the way he would have before. He pulled back immediately, brought his guard up, watched.
Acorn paused, just for a second. She didn't expect that, he thought. Either him seeing through her feints or that last quick strike. Her pause was only the briefest of pauses, just a breath's worth - so slight that three days ago he would never have noticed it at all.
But he could see her switching tacks, recalibrating. The faintest possible adjustment of her stance. She was already looking at him differently.
"Hm," Acorn said. It was the first sound she had made.
The exchange that followed was nothing like the butcheries of the first days. Jon lost ground steadily - she was still immeasurably faster and more skilled than him - but he lost more slowly. He stopped chasing her pace of the spar and established more of his own. He only faltered when her pace accelerated to a point that he could barely even see - and yet still, somehow, he didn't fall. Her obsidian and weirwood spear seemed to be everywhere and nowhere all at once, flashing out from every angle, and yet every time Dark Sister was there to meet it - if only just.
Their previous bouts had all been exhausting in their ways, especially in his lungs and his sword arm. Now it was exhausting behind his eyes as well.
But, finally, he made a mistake when he backstepped and found Dark Sister awkwardly jarred from his grip. The blade had been loosened in his grip by his own pouring sweat. Jon saw the first strike coming and it didn't matter - there was no time to recover, no time to do anything.
She cleared his guard and tapped the obsidian tip, gently, against the hollow of his throat. Had it been anything but practice, he'd have been drowning in his own blood.
"Gods!" Jon collapsed, panting.
He couldn't say anything for a moment. His eyes were half-blinded by sweat. His lungs were burning. His bad leg was screaming at him. His hands were shaking - he couldn't even remember the last time he'd been this exhausted in a spar.
"Up, King Snow," Acorn said, spear at her side. "Up." There was not a hint of mercy in her eyes, as she waited for him to get back up. "Enemy will not give you rest. Yet you ask for rest? No."
Damnit, he complained internally. He was still helplessly splayed on the ground, hopelessly out of breath. He forced himself back up and secured Dark Sister from the floor underfoot. She is so unfair.
By his loose estimate, he'd lasted three times as long as his previous best day. And yet she still wasn't even winded.
"The… vengeance singers," he gasped once he had air enough to speak. That's what their warriors are called. He had been thinking about what the weirwood had shown him - that ancient warband of the children of the forest, pursuing a giant across what had to be the red sands of Dorne. Nothing of what he'd seen had looked anything like the wood dance. And maybe he could play for time with this. "They didn't fight the way you fight."
"Vengeance singers all dead," she said. "Dead or gone to other shores."
Jon frowned, even as he warily held up Dark Sister between them - just in case she tired of words and came at him again. "…except for you."
Acorn's eyes flickered. "Yes. Except for me. I last of all."
Jon didn't know what to say. Thankfully, Acorn spoke on after a moment. "But no. Vengeance singers not use wood dance."
"Then how did they fight?"
For a moment, Acorn was silent. Her eyes went distant - it was as if she was looking past him, at something he couldn't see. When she spoke, her voice was careful in a way it usually wasn't - as if each word in the Common had to be carried over difficult ground.
"Wood dance is dance for how to survive." She paused. "Water dance is for how to control. But storm dance, storm dance is different. Storm dance is for how to kill."
Gods. Not just one but two more martial styles that he lacked the time to learn? Regret at soon having to leave this place, at having to leave her instruction was clawing at him. But if he could at least get a glimpse…
"Could you teach it to me?" he asked anyway, knowing there was no time.
"…No." Her voice turned flat. A clawed hand clenched around the shaft of her weirwood and obsidian spear. "I will not."
Jon panted. "Because I'm not skilled enough?"
"Because," Acorn said, "I will not." Her jaw tightened, just slightly, a single crack of anger in a face that had otherwise been as impassive as the dead for these entire two weeks. "The wood dance I teach, because the last greenseer asks. The storm dance I keep." There was a darkness in her eyes now. "Storm dance is for those who risk their life for victory. To fight those greater than themselves. It is not a dance for men. I will not give it to a man to carry out of this place. Not even you, King Snow."
He should have let it go. He knew he should have let it go.
"Then teach me nothing," Jon pressed on. "But show it to me. I… want, to see it."
Acorn looked at him for a moment with those strange, gold-flecked eyes. "Why? You barely even competent in wood dance. Like baby bird asking how to fly."
Jon gave her a mirthless, helpless smile. "You said it yourself. Because men… us men are greedy creatures. I am no different. Please, show me."
She scoffed, actually scoffed, and raised her spear. "No."
He had to scramble back over his own feet before her spear reached him.
She came at him harder this time - not that he could blame her, he had asked for it. Her eyes were fully opened now, and her posture and footwork had changed - less in a reactive position and more in an offensive one. Or perhaps a controlled one. It looked like she was finally ready to be serious.
She'd made the first move in this phase of the spar, and she drove the initiative. Fast, faster than any swordsman he'd ever met she struck, her black speartip driving towards his throat. Dark Sister intercepted it, and then countered. With the inhuman speed of her kind she avoided his counter in a complicated maneuver, a response that was partially her shifting her own body down and partially investing her momentum into her own counter attack aimed at his thigh. He - barely - managed to intercept that one too.
First he blocked and stepped away from her second and third attack, survived a furious exchange that he fell back from, then managed to deflect her sixth attack. Her seventh. He gave ground an inch at a time instead of in stumbling lurches. His bad leg held beneath him, braced and planted, the way she had been trying to teach him from the first day - treating it not as the limb he'd lost but as the anchor he had.
Back and forth they returned blows. Every attack she launched at Jon would have been a fatal one if it had connected. Every attack he managed to return would have been equally fatal, if the same conditions applied. Despite the severity of the blows, despite the fact that he'd long since lost track of the number of attacks she had unleashed and he had returned in kind, the battle continued, reaching a speed and intensity he'd never known before.
Roots, he managed to remember, somewhere in that breathless pause between strikes. The wood dance was about weight, constancy and footwork, not about speed - Jon was never going to have her speed. But the greenseer's words had settled into his body over the past days, after each and every spar as he reflected on his losses and how to improve. She controls the flow by letting you attack first. She uses your force against you. So he gave her less force to use, and made each and every strike of his count, pared each response down to the smallest possible motion that would answer the threat, and do so decisively.
It was maddening to fight that way. Every instinct he had was built for aggression. Ser Rodrik Cassel had trained aggression into him. The yard at Castle Black had beaten aggression into him further. Keeping his composure while an apparently unbreakable obsidian spear every bit as sharp as Valyrian steel flew at his face felt like dancing with the Stranger himself.
But, somehow, he held.
Minutes ground past. He was pouring sweat. His lungs burned. But she was working for it. He could see it in the fractional adjustments of her stance, the way she was having to work slightly harder now to find his guard. There was something in her eyes, something in her almost liquid footwork. Some emotion he couldn't interpret. For the first time, some hairline crack in her ever-solemn features.
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Whatever she was doing, it was clearly no longer the wood dance. It didn't matter - she was still going to win. That had never been in question.
But, for the first time, victory wasn't hers to simply take at will.
At some point between the dodges, backsteps and carries, strikes and counterstrokes, there came a lull - it came naturally, both of them at the edges of their weapon's effective range, neither quite pressing. And before his mind could catch up to his own voice, thoughts he had wondered for a while tumbled out.
"I just don't understand you," Jon gasped between breaths.
The gold-flecked eyes didn't change. "What is not to understand?"
Jon straightened slightly, but kept his guard up. His hard breathing was loud in the chamber. "You have so much skill." He gestured slightly with Dark Sister, an acknowledging tilt of the blade he'd seen from some knights. "Your people have power. The legends of the singers. You have the weirwoods, all the knowledge held in these roots - more than any thousand libraries. You've survived things that ended the giants, the mammoths, everything. You survived the Long Night." He paused. "And you're content with this? Being a - a gravekeeper of a dying people?" The words came out harder than he'd meant them to, and he knew it, and said them anyway. "This is how the children of the forest end? You're content with dying out? Why not do something? Why not rebuild?"
The sparring chamber turned very quiet. Acorn went still in a way beyond even her usual quietude, her controlled readiness that she wore like a second skin.
"Why not fight?" Jon pressed, because he was tired and he was leaving tomorrow and he might never have another chance to say this to one of the children, especially to her. "Why not find a way to - to live? Where is your will, where is your hope? Why are you so different from the children who fought back the First Men? Your ancestors sang the seas into rising. You broke the Arm of Dorne. You made the white walkers, for the gods' sake - I know that, the greenseer told me. Your people had that power. Where did it go? Why are you here, in a cave, just waiting to die—"
He saw her expression distort from its usual dead calm. There was a flicker now of something else. A flash of true, clean anger.
"You want to see?" Acorn's eyes widened and narrowed all at once, focusing on him with an expression he could only describe as… terrifying. "Then see!"
And then she moved.
What happened next happened so fast it was was almost impossible for him to comprehend.
All he knew for a certainty was that he'd just died - or would have, if she hadn't stopped her speartip half a hair from his throat.
"—What was that?" Jon's voice had gone higher. His body had hit the ground again. He was gaping up at her in astonishment, staring at her spearhead's gleaming black edges, closer to his eyes than his own nose. "What was that?"
It was as if her spear had been at her side in one moment and then in the next she'd had him dead to rights, and the moment between those two things was simply missing. There had been the black line of her obsidian spear, and then - he hadn't caught the rest. One line of doom, faster than sin, straight through everything he was and out the other side - if she hadn't stopped at the last instant.
Whatever it was, it had been the exact opposite of the wood dance in every way imaginable - never in a hundred years could he train his body to do what she'd just done.
"That?" Acorn looked at him for a moment, a hint of a serious line between her thin eyebrows. There was real anger in that expression, now. "This storm dance. You try to provoke me, King Snow. You succeed. Try not to die."
He scrambled back to his feet, just in time as she stalked toward him. Her spear was almost lashing from side to side in anger, her slitted eyes widened and narrowed all at once in a manner that was at once utterly inhuman and utterly terrifying.
And then—gods!
She, again, darted in - low to the ground. Impossibly low. Her back leg thrust out for balance, not even touching the ground. Her spear licked out in front of her, her knee bent so deeply that her entire body was below his waist.
His body moved before his mind could catch up. Her speartip passed an inch under the soles of his boots - some kind of knee-severing strike that had surely been meant to bring down giants.
When he hit the ground again, ignoring the pain in his leg from jumping—
Gods! Her spear was already coming for his throat.
Jon blocked. He had no idea how. Dark Sister came up by instinct and caught the first strike, then the second, then a third that came from an angle he couldn't have predicted, and then a fourth that came from the side—
She was circling around him, from one side and then the next, attacking from every angle like some whirlwind of blades. He managed to partway block a strike that still sent the weirwood spearshaft crashing hard enough into his ribs to numb them. He gave ground and she filled it immediately. He somehow managed to block and then parry again and was dimly aware that his feet were no longer beneath him in any useful sense, that he was stumbling backward and still swinging because stopping meant dying, that the air was full of the clashing sounds of obsidian and Valyrian steel and his own ragged breathing.
When they finally finished he couldn't even say how much time had passed. It could have been minutes or entire hours. His body was a haze of aching exhaustion and pain from near-fatal blows, his mind barely even able to keep up, and Acorn's slitted golden eyes seemed to hang before him no matter which way he fought her, like the flames of some terrible star of wrath.
They'd fought on just about every surface there was in the wide chamber. Almost up against the walls. Over the blackened roots, under the twist of glowing roots, up to the edge of the threshold of the tunnels, anywhere and everywhere that he'd managed to not die as he felt tumbled about like some leaf tossed by a gale. Perhaps twenty strikes in the span of just the last five or six seconds of the fight and he'd somehow managed to block, dodge, parry, or counter them all save for the last. His hands were so slicked in sweat his own skin felt soaked.
At some point, he just collapsed. He hit the ground hard - his elbow struck stone and sent a jolt of pure white pain up to his shoulder. And once more, he found her gleaming black spearhead, but not inches from his eyes, not this time.
This time, her blade was resting against the soft white flesh of his throat. Jon kept very still.
"You don't know us," she said. He looked up at her. Her eyes were somehow even more sharply narrowed than her blade.
Dark Sister was still in his hand. He didn't know why. Possibly just stubbornness - he was in no fit state to use it. He felt like he couldn't even stand. Not that he would have - she could cut his throat in a tenth of a second like this if she willed it.
Her breathing was elevated. Not by much - far less than his - but he could see it in the slight rise and fall of her chest, and it hit him with a strange and hollow satisfaction. He had made her breathe hard. He, Jon Snow, all of seventeen years old, had made the last of the vengeance singers actually sweat - just a little.
Jon said nothing. He had enough sense left for that much.
"You look at us and see ending." She didn't raise her voice, and yet it trembled with anger. "You see us at the end of our days. The last of the last of the old world dying, and you think - why do they not fight? Why do they not rebuild?" Her jaw tightened. "You think we have not tried?"
The spear at his throat shook slightly.
"We tried, at first. When the seas fell and your 'First Men' walked across the Red Bridge, we tried - with peace, trade. Then they burned the trees. When we try to talk, they not listen. No choice but war. They burned our forests, killed our babes. We allied with kings of the giants, rallied greenseers and great beasts of the land, and still they came, bringing more war, more fire. We broke the land itself and they still came. We killed ten or a hundred of them for every one of us and still they came. We summoned the cold from beyond the stars to fight for us, and it turned on us." Her claws flexed once against the shaft, the only outward sign of what was behind her voice. "We tried. We tried and tried and tried and tried! For thousands of years we tried, King Snow - to stop the end, and all our tryings only made the ending come faster."
Jon stayed where he was, very carefully. The obsidian spearhead was cold against his back.
"The storm dance," Acorn said, "is a dance for those who try. The vengeance singers learned it to fight what was beyond us: first giants, then men. And they are gone." She paused. "All gone. Every one of them, gone." Another pause. Her ears tilted slightly upwards, some expression of body language he didn't know how to interpret. "I am not content. I am the last. I am what is left."
Jon was speechless. She just stared at him for a moment, something between anger and disgust and grief in her eyes - and then she took her spear away.
Acorn let out a long, shaking breath. "You are arrogant child, King Snow. Your sword-work still a child's. Untested. Messy. But. You're…" Acorn paused. "—good enough." The words came hard from her, as if they'd cost her something to even say. "For a human."
She turned away without waiting for a reply, picked up her spear and turned toward the deeper tunnels. Jon was certain she would simply keep walking away, like always, leaving the conversation behind her like nothing.
But, at the chamber's threshold, she paused briefly, turning halfway, giving him a last sideglance just before she departed.
"Don't chase fight," she said. "Control it. Let it come. Remember your roots. And do not die, chasing your dragon. It would be…" She paused, as if searching for an applicable word, in a language she barely knew. "Wasteful."
She disappeared into the dark, without another word.
It was always midnight in the depths of the Oldest Grove.
Sleep did not come easily, not that last evening. There was no sun to mark the hours, not even a crack of light from above. Only Jon's own stubborn counting of the days, his sporadic sense of happenings up above from Ghost, and the sense of creeping exhaustion in his own body. Only those could let him keep track of time. And by all those countings it was night now.
Every part of his body still ached from that mad spar. His bad leg was still throbbing, his sword arm felt wrung hollow. And yet he found himself too restless to sleep.
He should have persisted, forced himself to sleep anyway. It would be a long day tomorrow. Instead he rose from his small pile of woven fabrics near the greenseer's throne, took up his walking stick, and went out into the dark.
He did not mean to go anywhere. He only wanted to see this ancient place once more, while he still could.
The underground grove did not end so much as fade, cavern bleeding into cavern, root into root, until there was no more light to see by at all and a man could no longer say where one chamber stopped and the next began. Jon limped through the discernible paths of the grove, where faintly glowing roots, and sporadic runes set into the older walls gave the space a pale, dim light, just enough to walk the main paths by.
He passed by strange things along the way, and stranger sights. In one limestone chamber, he found himself surrounded by a forest of pale stone columns, a place of ancient stalactites and stalagmites so ancient they had merged into countless singular pillars of flowstone - which had then been shaped and carved in queer patterns. He looked closely at one of the columns and saw dozens of faces, of many different children of the forest. So many sad eyes, he thought, staring at…
He looked. Nothing, as far as he could tell.
He couldn't even begin to guess what the purpose of this strange, carved grove was, but there was a morbid sense to the place. Weirwood sap had so stained the flowstone over the millennia that it had become a part of it, like veins of crimson and pink that bled from the earth, staining pale white flesh of stone.
He moved on, following along a barrow-road frequented by the children. He saw none of them with certainty, but every so often, he could have sworn he saw a flash of golden eyes, glinting out from some distant shadow. Water fell somewhere ahead of him, drop by patient drop, from the long teeth of stone overhead.
At one point on the right he saw a greater shadow, a white and black necropolis of interwoven weirwood roots and dead branches where the children laid their dead, a vaguely pyramidal structure that could have been stacked with the bones of ten thousand of their kind - in stark contrast to the dozens or scarce hundreds that might have still lived.
On the left, there ran a cliff that ran down to rushing black waters far below. His feet drew him that way, and he saw a terrible path downwards, a thing of steep slopes and twisty passages, entrances and exits to deeper layers of the caverns. The path ended at dark waters mostly obscured by the gloom far below, so far down it twisted his stomach. Nearly as far down as the Wall was tall, by his reckoning of things. And the children said it was possible to go even deeper. Far deeper, to depths even they dared not traverse…
He could see little in the gloom. But he did spy glimpses of pale shapes beside the black river, which might have been watercraft, canoes or some other manner of small boat. No matter.
Resolving himself, he crossed the slender stone bridge that led over the abyss. On the far side, discovered still more passages and chambers.
Many of these were filled with sleeping trees. Greenseers of the ancient past, much like the three-eyed crow, enthroned and devoured by their weirwoods until they… died, or whatever it was that happened to greenseers when they departed from the mortal coil. Most were singers so long dead their bones had either turned to dust or disappeared into the weirwood, though sometimes he saw a scarce few larger skeletons that might have once been human. He even saw a giant's bones once or twice. A scarce few of the singers were still alive, if barely, and an even scarcer few opened their eyes as he passed them by, following him blankly, though they could move in no other way. One of them, a wizened male, even managed to open and close its wrinkled mouth as if he were trying to speak, but when he could say nothing, do nothing Jon could truly recognize as real communication, he just shook his head and moved on.
Truly, he held no envy for greenseers. Whatever powers their kind might hold… he couldn't imagine it being worth this price, not ever.
He could find no end to the caverns. Only that they became steadily older, and stranger, often holding things beyond his understanding.
In one circular chamber, so ancient that teeth of flowstone had taken over parts of it, he found a place carved to look like some ancient amphitheater, with benches of shaped weirwood roots descending in tiered rows toward a deep, sunken pit of earth roughly twenty feet below. At the center of this weirwood pit stood a tall, seamless obsidian archway, which held no sign of having ever been quarried or touched by a mason.
The arch was beyond ancient even at first glance. Its black surface was cracked and pitted with age, yet it remained miraculously upright despite having no wall to support it. Its pointed apex reached high into the shadowy chamber, giving the entire structure a strangeness that seemed of a different character to the rest of the caverns. Strange symbols were etched into its sides, things that looked almost like archaic runes but weren't, jagged and twisting and looping unto themselves in alien patterns. And from the arch's span hung a veil, a tattered black curtain that swayed gently, as though eternally stirred by an unfelt wind.
The thin, ragged fabric appeared almost insubstantial, fluttering softly in a way he could almost hear, as though whispering with voices so faint, so indistinct they were almost one with the wind. Whatever this strange construction was, he had no earthly idea what it might be. An unsettling pull emanated from it, and he retreated before touching it - whatever it was, he had the sense it was best not to linger.
He moved on, finding yet more strange things. In one chamber he came upon a carved pond of faintly glowing water, gone perfectly still - a wide, luminous pool as wide as a cottage, so flat and white it might have been polished milkglass, but for the slow rings that spread where droplets fell from above. Pale, blind fish flitted amidst the waters. And deeper still, down where the pool's bottom ought to have been, he saw roots: a whole drowned forest of them, pale and reaching and faintly glowing, sinking to gods only knew how far below.
In another, he found a hall of skulls impaled upon weirwood roots like ancient trophies, so ancient that many had fallen to dust. Skulls that looked vaguely akin to the children's own - but with gaping eye sockets that were far too big even for them, and multiple rows of tiny, sharp teeth like some queer breed of shark. Whatever breed of creature they were, or had been, he had not the faintest clue.
Further on was a hall of four-fingered handprints in rust-red clay, thousands of them. Tens of thousands, layered one atop another until the oldest were only a faint rusty haze beneath the rest. He couldn't even imagine what it meant. A tally of the dead, perhaps, or of the living, or simply the mark of those who had passed this way and wished to be remembered for having done so. By some childish instinct he pressed his own hand flat to the clay, and when he saw his own handprint - broad and five-fingered, a certain intruder's mark amidst those of all the children - he took his hand away, feeling oddly ashamed, and walked on.
Sometimes the sound of song would drift up from someplace far below. A scattered few children of the forest, singing in eerily beautiful, mellifluous, often mournful tones. Those who sing the song of earth, that was their own name for themselves, in the True Tongue that no human man could speak. Never had that name felt more appropriate, however indecipherable their song was.
He had come to this place a dead man. The children had sung over his ruined leg until it could carry him again. The greenseer had opened the trees to him, taught him to slip into Ghost's skin like a second coat and even how to wrestle, badly, with the ravens. He had seen things in these roots that perhaps no son of Winterfell had seen, down here, in the dark. Things beautiful and terrible, near and far, all critically important for the war to come. He had learned from a bladesmaster who was likely the equal or better of any knight in the realm.
All of it given freely, by a people with almost nothing left to give.
All to chase a dragon. A dragon. A beast beyond compare, that even the greenseer admitted was as likely to kill him as not. A beast being pursued by an army of the dead.
That was the part he struggled with. He was leaving on the morrow, and it was unlikely he would ever return - even if he survived. Whatever waited beyond these tunnels, it did not run back to here. Whole worlds lay beneath the world he'd thought he had known, a world of sunless seas and ancient mysteries, roads of black water bound for gods knew where, ancient pale roots all across the land, greenseers and children of the forest, and on the morrow he would leave having seen only the thinnest edge of any of it.
"King Snow. You must return," said a voice from behind him - out of nowhere, startling him. "It is not safe past here."
He turned and saw Leaf for the first time in a while. Beside her was a black-skinned, similarly golden-eyed male child of the forest he had also seen around and come to think of as Coals. They've been following me, Jon realized. He hadn't even realized. Small wonder their kind were remembered as such fierce hunters of the First Men, if they could be so silent on their feet.
His eyes didn't linger on them. Instead, they fell back on those weirwood canoes, hundreds of feet below.
"Are there truly only sixty of your kind left?" Jon asked it quietly.
Leaf was a while in answering. "Sixty and eight here, in the Oldest Grove," she said sadly. "A few dozens more, in farther groves. Sometimes we receive… couriers, but they grow rarer by the decade. The far groves wither as well, the greenseer tells us. He says there are only a few hundred of our kind left on these shores," her golden eyes followed his, down to the canoes and the black water that bore them. "These are the last of those who sing our song I know of, King Snow. The last in all the world, so far as I am able to say."
Couriers. So that was what the canoes were for. Jon stared down at them, the few drawn up on the black shore of a river flowing into a deeper dark he couldn't even imagine following.
"So far as you are able," Jon repeated. "Then there might be others of your kind out there, elsewhere?"
"There were others, long ago," she sighed. "When it grew plain to all but the most stubborn among us that this land was lost to us forever, many of my kind would not stay to die in the dark. They took to the seas, to the skies, on the backs of the great turtles, the great eagles and our other companions of water and stone and sky. They left this land to seek other shores. Kinder ones, they hoped. Lands where the trees still ruled, and no man had ever laid his axe to a root."
Curious. "Did they find it?" Jon asked. "This kinder shore?"
For a long moment Leaf said nothing at all. Beside her, Coals murmured something softly in their True Tongue, he couldn't even begin to decipher it.
"I do not know," Leaf admitted softly. "Few of them ever came back to tell us. None in recent centuries. I know of one colony, a grove on the northern shores of a green sea, but that one was lost long ago. As for the others, the kin of ours who went even farther east and west… perhaps they found their kinder shores, and dwell there still, singing under stranger stars than ours. Perhaps the sea took them. Or perhaps they found only more men, more axes, more endings, until at the last there was no one left out there to sing them down into any tree at all."
…Meaning, best as Jon could figure, the children of centuries past had made a choice - to stay, or to go. He thought of all the children who must have stood here, perhaps even where he stood right now, on the lip of this same terrible drop, and had made that same hard choice: to go, into a dark they could not see the end of, rather than to stay and dwindle here with the last embers of an old and dying world.
Unfortunately, he found he understood the impulse better than he wished to. Come the morrow, he would be making a choice not so far from theirs.
"I hope they found it," Jon said at last. He didn't know what else to say. "Their kinder shore. All of them."
Leaf regarded him with those great, ancient, golden eyes, and there was something in her small grave face that might almost have been fondness.
"So do I, King Snow," she said quietly. "So do I. Let us return. You need your rest."
Before he followed them, Jon considered the pathway down to the distant weirwood canoes for one final time. In the soft earth where the path began its descent, there were footprints. Most were typical for the children of the forest; small and light, barefooted tracks, four narrow toes to each that scarcely troubled the soil at all.
But among them, leading down toward the water, ran another entirely different set of tracks. A man's. Heavy, deep-pressed, with the hard clean edge of a booted heel cut into the ground.
Jon crouched over that track in particular for a moment, frowning. Whose? And how long since?
He could not begin to say; down here, where no wind or rain ever stirred, a foottrack might have been left a day or a hundred years past, and there was no way to tell the difference.
He stood and let the question go. The greenseer kept that cold stranger for a servant, the one who couldn't enter the caverns for whatever reason - and no doubt the old lord in the roots had other servants besides, running his errands across the far north. It was no concern of his.
Jon got back up and followed after Leaf, and not long after, was finally able to rest.
"It is time," the greenseer said after the fourteenth day, when he awoke from his slumber. The ancient lord's voice was grim. "You are not ready, but there is no choice. A darkness approaches. The dragon does not have long left."
Jon's hands clenched. "And the storm?"
"It is waning, but the journey will still be perilous."
"I will need a mount."
"That has been arranged. There is a great elk in the forest waiting for you. I will direct it for as long as I can. My ravens will join you also," the three-eyed crow - Bloodraven, Jon could still barely believe it - said in his dry, labored voice.
The thought of going back out there, where the dead and worse waited, terrified him. Jon still remembered the feeling of death's icy blade cutting through his chest.
Fear cuts deeper than swords, Jon tried to tell himself, but it was hard to imagine anything cutting deeper than the white walker's sword had.
"Am I to go alone?" Jon asked after a pause.
"Yes," the three-eyed crow said, sighing. "I have no more aid to give you, and we have too little time."
"What about the stranger. The… dead man that works for you?" He tried to stop himself from sounding craven, but the thought of travelling to such lands without any company…
"He has gone south to the Wall. There is an urgent errand he must see to there."
"And the children?"
"They cannot leave the caverns," the greenseer said, sounding sad. "The lingering magic that protects this place relies upon it."
Jon took a deep breath, trying to steady himself. He knew that Ghost was getting closer to him every day; they would probably meet up again during the journey.
Still, only one man and a direwolf, off to face a dragon and an army of the dead…
"Then there is something that I want of you," Jon said. "A final request. I left a woman behind. Her name is Ygritte - she has red hair, she is round of face, with blue grey eyes. She's around eighteen years of age. I… I don't know what happened to her when I left her." His eyes were hard. "I want you to find her for me. I want you to look after her, guide her south."
The greenseer sounded disapproving. "You cannot afford to distract yourself with such things, Jon," he warned. "The journey you are on has no space for love - you have a duty."
"I have a duty to her too. Protect her."
He paused. "Then I would take a vow from you too, Jon," the three-eyed crow said, keeping his voice low. "You must do anything and everything in your power to fight against the Long Night. No matter how distasteful, no matter the cost - you will do what you must to fight for the dawn. I want you to swear it, Jon Snow. In return for my aid, you must swear it. Swear it by earth and water, by bronze and iron. By ice and fire, swear it."
Jon hesitated. That vow… it bothered him, greatly. But my choice is made. "Yes," he said. "I swear it. I swear it."
"Good. You are a warg trained, or close enough," the three-eyed crow said softly. "Use that power. You must embrace it. Embrace who you are, and use it."
Jon's face twitched slightly. "I was once told that that sorcery is like a sword without a hilt. There is no safe way to grasp it."
"Would you rather have no sword at all?" the greenseer replied. "Yes, it will hurt. Men like us must endure the pain so that nobody else will have to. And if you don't swing it, if you don't feel its grip, then it becomes all the more painful when you finally must."
Bloodraven's single, ancient red eye focused on him. "Swing the sword, Jon Snow," he whispered. "Swing the sword and swing it true."
The next morning, Jon left not long after, very quickly after he woke. He wanted a full day of traveling before nightfall.
When he limped out of the caverns - from a different, more northern and western exit than the one he'd entered by - he saw the sun for the first time in a week. It was barely a reddish sliver over the horizon. Morning.
He felt almost like a different person to the one of a week before. Certainly, he was wearing changed clothes.
The children had stitched up his ruined leathers with earthy fibers woven from trees. They gave him furs made from a hide that Jon could not place, but he half-suspected it was made from giant's hide. He wore riding leathers, leather boots and belt that still had the musky smell of the cave, with saddle bags filled with rations and supplies for a long journey. Everything from his leathers to his furs felt strange and alien - well-built and sturdy, but also queer and inhuman, crafted in a way he hadn't seen before, made from materials that men rarely used.
Jon spent a long time staring at his cloak. They gave him a black wool cloak that might have belonged to a ranger of the Night's Watch, once, but it had been patched and stitched up with brown threads made from roots. Black with motley brown patches.
He carried a wooden staff in one arm, to help him walk with his bad leg. Jon kept Dark Sister on his hip, sheathed in its scabbard. The children of the forest had also provided a small weirwood short bow, more a hunting bow than a longbow, as well as twenty arrows fletched with dragonglass tips. Finally, he had a small jar of the healing poultice the children had used before.
"Use dragonglass or dragonsteel on the Others," he remembered the three-eyed crow's instructions. "And fire on the wights. Follow the ravens for as long as you can - I will guide you through them."
True to the greenseer's word, there was a great elk grazing in the snow at the foot of the hill when Jon left. The elk stared at him with black eyes, and a knowing gaze. As he approached, the elk even lowered its body to help Jon pull himself onto its broad back, lifting him almost seven entire feet off the ground. There was something of the greenseer in the elk, Jon realized. The greenseer used his own warging to guide the creature, but gently and finely.
The sound of cawing burst from the dead weirwood tree. A flock of ravens flew into the air, circling around in the sky. Some of them stopped to perch on the elk's antlers, while the others flew off into the distance.
It took two weeks for the stranger to carry me to the cave from the northern wastes, he thought with a sigh. This time, I'm going to have to make better time.
He kicked in his heels gently, and the elk set off in a quick trot. Back towards the mountains, and beyond.
Jon met up with Ghost on the second day after the caverns. Watching the giant direwolf lumber towards him from over the horizon was like seeing his best friend again. Ghost was a powerful predator, but for a moment he panted and whined and jumped towards Jon like he was a pup again.
They rode hard through the forests and they were already heading through the mountain pass - in what used to be Thenn territory, Jon was certain. He rode constantly through the first night, but on the second night he had to stop to give the elk time to rest.
He camped at an old ruin half-buried into the mountain. The stones looked ancient, slabs of rock that had been smoothed over by age, by countless winters; similar to the structures he had seen at the Fist of the First Men. An old ruin from the Dawn Age, Jon eventually decided, although it was hard to imagine any structure ever being built this far north. Perhaps these lands had been… warmer, once? In some distant age?
There is much history in these lands beyond the Wall, Jon thought with something almost approaching sorrow. It was a hard land, but rich in its own ways. There was a history here going back thousands of years, history that the rest of the world had never known.
And, if the Others had their way, all these lands would be lost, and their people forgotten.
The evening was a time of quiet, passing in silence. The sky was obscured by thin, icy clouds, but he could still see the glimmer of the northern lights, bright and translucent in the darkness. Jon cradled into the ruins, staring out over the mountains as he kept watch. He knew that he needed to sleep, but it was hard to even close his eyes. His mind, his body, it all felt so tense. As if his very bones knew that he was alone in a forsaken, abandoned wilderness that only the dead now walked.
Ghost slumbered quietly, draped across his legs. Jon was half an hour into his watch when he felt the hairs on the back of his head prickle. Above him, one of the ravens cawed in the sky.
His hand instinctively went to Dark Sister, but it was a different type of threat. Not the Others, Jon was certain. Ghost woke quickly, the direwolf growling as he paced in the snows.
Another growl answered the direwolf's. A deep, low, throaty yowl, almost a snarl that cut through the air.
Jon stared upwards at the rocks above him. There were yellow eyes in the dark, reflecting in the black. Unblinkingly, they stared at him from the darkness.
The shadowcat prowled on the rocks above him. It must have been trying to ambush them before the ravens cawed in alarm. It moved without a sound, flowing down the mountainside like liquid smoke.
The cat was lean, dark and muscled. Its fur was pitch-black, with white stripes that seemed to blend into the shadows easily. Its bright yellow eyes stared at Jon, and they hungered.
Most shadowcats tended to avoid men, but Jon supposed that a lone human and an elk must have seemed a tempting prize. Ghost snarled at the cat, which paused its descent from the rocks. Perhaps the shadowcat was starving, Jon wondered, or perhaps this one was just braver than most.
Jon stared at the beast for a few heartbeats, slowly moving his hand away from Dark Sister.
Swing the sword, the three-eyed crow had said.
Jon needed to learn how to use that power. He had seen the army of the undead, and he knew that he would need every weapon he could find to beat them. With barely a moment to spare for his doubts, Jon closed his eyes, focused on the shadowcat, and extended his mind.
He felt himself touch the shadowcat's presence. At once, it recoiled and yelped.
Pain hit Jon, shooting through his head. Like he had just tried to grab a cat and gotten only the claws. Jon grunted, but he tried to focus and kept pushing.
The shadowcat yowled in pain and shock, its eyes suddenly rolling as if crazed. It fell back on its haunches, twitching and yowling. It took all of Jon's concentration while it protested, thrashed and snarled.
The shadowcat felt so different from Ghost. It felt cruel, proud and vain. Sharp and barbed like a wicked dagger. Angry. Hateful. Hungry.
Jon had the impression from the cat's mind that he was intruding into its most precious territory of all. The shadowcat didn't want to share its body, it felt too fiercely independent. Instead, it scratched and it fought with every fiber of its being. It wanted him out.
Jon grimaced. Perhaps it would have been wiser to retreat, but he needed to push onwards. It was like sparring; it hurt, but he needed to overcome the pain. If I can't warg with a cat, then how am I ever supposed to handle a dragon?
He pushed deeper. The shadowcat almost howled like a wolf in its rage, but the sound was too much like a human's agonized scream. Its entire body tensed - it was about to lunge at Jon physically, but then suddenly the ravens darted down from the sky. The birds pecked at its eyes, disorientating it enough that Jon could push just a bit harder.
Jon felt the shadowcat's will crack. Suddenly, his world changed.
He was inside the shadowcat's skin, looking down at himself through the cat's eyes. Through its uncanny night vision, there was no color, but the shadows were gone and everything was a distinct, sharply contrasting white and black. Jon could feel the pain on its face as the ravens pecked at him, but then, as Jon's control strengthened, they scattered. The ravens flew away, retreating to the nearby trees.
The shadowcat stared at Jon, wide-eyed, pupils dilated with fear and hate. He could see, even smell his own body through the cat's senses. He looked and felt like any other human through its senses - weak, pungent, vulnerable, and yet, dangerous.
Kill, attack, run! Jon could feel its instincts screaming orders - subconscious patterns of action so intense that even now its body twitched, itching to obey - but Jon squashed those instincts with his will. Instead, almost hesitantly, Jon raised a paw, feeling his new body. He had to rule the shadowcat's body with an iron will - anything less than complete control and the cat would squirm free and follow its instincts. Not even Jon could say with certainty what exactly the shadowcat would do if he let slip the leash, but he suspected it wouldn't be healthy for him.
The shadowcat felt lean and strong. Smaller than Ghost, but so much faster. Sharp claws dug into the rock. Her, Jon realized suddenly. The shadowcat is female.
With an easy flex, the shadowcat jumped down to the ground. Ghost was still growling. The shadowcat wanted to run, to hide, to kill - it could choose any of the three in half a heartbeat, with an almost shocking intensity of force of spirit - but Jon ordered her body to sit.
The shadowcat fought him every single step of the way. He could feel her anger, her fear, all her emotions through the warg-sense, through the connection between their spirits. The shadowcat's instincts, emotions - the two were much the same thing in the cat - were so intense that they hurt.
To be here - on the ground, exposed in front of a human and a wolf - it caused every instinct she had to scream. It was so totally against her nature that she was trembling, yellow eyes wide. And he could, sympathetically, feel every single scrap of those instincts.
Slowly, gingerly, Jon pulled himself back into his own body. He nearly collapsed as he felt himself standing on two legs. Still, Jon couldn't afford to totally let go of the connection to the shadowcat. He wasn't staring directly through her eyes, but it was like he still had her on a leash. As if I'm in two bodies at the same time, Jon thought with a pained breath.
As Jon fully returned to his own skin, he found himself panting. This was - exhausting. Jon remembered Varamyr Sixskins, with his six different skins. Seven, including his own body. Damn, how did Varamyr ever manage them all?
Varamyr must have been born very powerful, and was very skilled besides to warg with six bodies at once. Still, from the least of what Jon could tell, the greenseer was something else entirely; capable of warging with at least two dozen creatures over a scale of distant miles. Jon was starting to realize that the three-eyed crow had a power on a totally different scale to anything he could imagine.
Ghost was still growling and snapping. "Down, Ghost," Jon soothed, all the while keeping his eyes firmly on the shadowcat. Her yellow eyes looked absolutely hateful.
Ghost backed down uncertainly. Jon approached the shadowcat, hand extended.
"Easy girl, easy," he muttered, reaching out to touch her fur. Instinctively, she wanted to bite, but Jon squashed that response. "I'm not going to hurt you, I'm not going to hurt you…"
Her whole body recoiled at the feel of his own touch. It took all of Jon's strength to force her to stay still. The shadowcat's black and white fur was thick and soft.
For a while, Jon hesitated, wondering if treating this creature like a dog or a wolf was really a wise decision. The shadowcat, its mind didn't feel... capable of affection in the same way that hounds - pack hunters, so similar to humans in that way - found instinctual. It was still trying to fight and snap back at him, but Jon was well and truly under her skin.
The cat won't be as easy to control as the direwolf, he decided.
Ghost would accept him easily, Jon knew. But he knew instinctively that this shadowcat would always have to be forced.
Jon stared into the shining yellow eyes, wondering what to do next. For a long moment, he debated walking the cat away and releasing her. He had no doubt that she would flee for the hills as soon as he allowed it.
No, Jon decided. That's useless.
He needed to learn control, and he needed to practice his newly awakened power on a hostile will. And the shadowcat was good practice. She would force Jon to exert his powers, force him to regularly test his will against an unwilling victim, and Jon couldn't even think of a better, faster way to learn more about warging. He needed to learn how long he could maintain his powers, how long the connection lasted. There was too much he needed to learn, and he could only learn through practice.
Jon wouldn't be able to practice like this on Ghost. The direwolf was a part of him, just as he was for Ghost; they were so close that there was no difficulty, no need for restraint or struggle.
Besides, Jon thought quietly, the shadowcat is useful. He couldn't think of any animal that could scout out the rocky mountain path half so well.
"I'm sorry, girl," he whispered. "I'm going to have to use you a bit longer…"
Slowly, Jon moved into position. He leaned down onto the ground, resting against the rocks, but he kept eye contact with the shadowcat at all times. He made sure to not break the link, as if there was an invisible, fragile connection running between them.
There was one thing that bugged him. The cat doesn't have a name, Jon thought. If I'm going to use her, she deserves a name.
He spent barely a moment thinking about it before one came to him. Black fur, nearly invisible in the night. "Ghost," Jon announced in a whisper. "…Meet Phantom."
With that, Jon's body slumped as he finally let himself sleep. Phantom pulled herself off the ground and quickly leapt away. Jon spent the rest of the night sleeping, while he dreamed he roamed the mountainside, climbing from one crag to the next in a shadowcat's skin.
At some point during the night, Jon cursed to himself when he realized he had forgotten to ask the greenseer about what had happened to Uncle Benjen.