He Would Be A God To Them Chapter 17 (Patreon)

Unfortunately I have become important at work at the moment,which is not good. Anyways here is the next chapter.

XVII

The Last House of El

The fire had burned down to embers.

It cast a faint orange glow across the small clearing-a pocket of warmth carved out of the vast darkness of the northern woods, where the trees grew taller and the canopy above was so thick that stars were visible only in fragments, scattered pieces of silver caught between branches like coins at the bottom of a well. The air carried the crispness of late summer in the North.

They had made camp in a hollow between two massive sentinel pines, where the ground was soft with fallen needles and the trunks broke enough of the wind to keep the fire lit.

Kallen sat cross-legged by the fire, hands on his knees, watching the embers pulse and fade. His face was lit in fragments-one cheek warm, one eye catching the glow-and in the uncertain light he looked both older and younger than his ten years. Older in the set of his jaw. Younger in the softness that still lingered around his mouth, the last remnants of a childhood slipping away faster than any of them wanted to admit.

Tomlyn lay on his bedroll a few feet away, propped on one elbow, picking at the remains of their supper-a heel of bread, a strip of dried meat too tough to enjoy-and watching Kallen.

"Out with it," he said.

Kallen looked up. "What?"

"Whatever you've been chewing on for the last two hours. You've got that look."

"What look?"

"The one you get when you're thinking about something you don't want to say because you know it'll start a conversation you're not sure you want to have." Tomlyn bit off a piece of dried meat and chewed it. "We've got nothing but time and tough meat, and one of those improves if you start talking."

Kallen was quiet. He looked at the fire, then at the trees, then at Tomlyn.

"How are we going to get past the Wall?"

The question fell into the clearing like a stone into still water. Tomlyn stopped chewing.

"The Night's Watch," Kallen continued, his voice careful, the voice of someone who had been building this argument for a long time and was now laying it out brick by brick. "They garrison Castle Black, Eastwatch, and the Shadow Tower. Three forts with gates through the Wall, all of them manned. They don't let anyone through without a reason. They barely let anyone through with a reason. They're not going to wave through a hedge knight, a red priestess, and a ten-year-old boy because we asked nicely."

"We speak to the Lord Commander. Explain-"

"Explain what? Kallen's voice wasn't mocking-it was genuinely puzzled. "Even if we told them the truth-which we can't-who would believe it?"

Tomlyn had no answer. He sat with the meat forgotten in his hand and looked at the fire.

"I don't know," he said finally. "We'll figure it out."

"That's not an answer."

"It's the only one I've got." Tomlyn met his eyes. "We always have."

"But not tonight. We've got enough to worry about between here and Winterfell without borrowing trouble we haven't reached yet."

Kallen looked at him. The firelight caught his eyes, and for a moment the blue seemed deeper-touched with the quiet sadness of someone who already knew the answer and was waiting for everyone else to catch up.

He didn't say what he was thinking. What he was thinking was that the answer was already inside him, had been inside him for weeks, patient and certain and waiting for the right moment the way the ring's pull was always waiting-steady, directional, impossible to ignore for long. He didn't need to get past the Wall. He could go over it. He could go over it tonight, alone, in the time it took Tomlyn to turn over in his sleep. The Wall was not the problem. The Wall had never been the problem. The problem was the man sleeping three feet away who had promised to follow him anywhere and meant it, and who would spend every mile of the road to the Wall sick with worry if Kallen was gone, and who would be furious and frightened and stubborn and brave about all of it in equal measure, because that was who Tomlyn was, and Kallen loved him for it, and it made everything harder.

"Okay," he said.

"Good. Now sleep. First light tomorrow-I want to reach Winterfell before nightfall."

A faint smile crossed his weathered face. "Goodnight, Kallen."

Kallen closed his eyes. The fire crackled. The horses shifted. Somewhere in the forest, an owl called-a long, descending note that hung in the air like a question-and was answered by silence.

He was asleep within minutes.

He woke to darkness.

He lay still. His eyes adjusted-faster than they should have, the darkness resolving from black to grey to a silvery clarity that let him see every needle on every branch and every root on the forest floor. Tomlyn lay a few feet away, rolled onto his side, one arm flung out.

He was snoring magnificently.

A deep, rattling, rhythmic sound that seemed to originate somewhere in his chest and exit simultaneously through his nose and mouth-a symphony of obstructed breathing that rose and fell with the regularity of tides.

Kallen sat up. The movement was silent, his body instinctively aware of how much space it occupied and how much sound it made.

Melisandre was awake. She sat against the pine trunk exactly as she'd been when he fell asleep.

They looked at each other across the dead fire while Tomlyn snored on, vast and unhurried and completely indifferent.

Kallen looked at the ring on his finger. In the dark its glow was brighter than ever-the blue light pulsing with a steady, insistent rhythm.

He could feel it. The pull. Stronger at night, when the world was quiet. A physical sensation-a tugging behind his sternum, deep in his bones. North. Always north.

He could be there in seconds.

The thought had been patient, waiting weeks for a moment like this. He could feel the distance the way he felt sound-not as abstraction but as physical reality, a quantity he could simply cross. He could move faster than anything alive. He could leap it; he was certain of this the way he was certain of his own heartbeat.

He could leave right now. A blur in the darkness, there and gone before anyone glanced up.

And then what? The voice in his head was Tomlyn's-patient, practical, stubborn. What's on the other side? You're going into the unknown alone.

But the ring knew. His mother had given it to him and said it would show him the way. The way was north.

"You're thinking about leaving."

Melisandre's voice was barely above a whisper.

"How did you know?"

She tilted her head slightly. "I know your face, Kallen."

"Don't," she said then-and there was no weight behind it. Just the raw, honest request.

He said nothing.

"But if you go," she continued, her voice steady in the way of things that have been broken and put back together, "I won't stop you. I couldn't even if I tried. I'm only asking you, as someone who loves you, to reconsider."

Kallen stared at the cold ashes. "If I go, Tomlyn follows. He'll ride to the Wall and find a way through and spend every mile of it furious and alone, because that's what he does." He paused. "He can't hear danger coming. He can't see through walls. He's just a man with a sword and a broken nose and more stubbornness than is good for him. If something happens to him because I wasn't there-"

"Something could happen to him whether you're there or not. You can't protect everyone you love from everything." A beat. "Not even you."

Tomlyn's snoring hitched-a sudden, startling snort like a pig being stepped on-then resumed, louder. Kallen and Melisandre both looked at him, and something that might have been a smile crossed Kallen's face. Brief. Bittersweet.

"I have to do this," he said quietly. "Whatever my mother left for me is beyond the Wall, and I've been walking toward it for three years and I'm tired of walking. I'll find it, and I'll come back, and I'll tell you everything." He met her eyes. "But I have to do it alone."

Melisandre was quiet for a long moment. In the darkness, Kallen couldn't see her hands, but he heard the soft sound of her palm pressing flat against the pine bark behind her-holding on to something solid, something that wasn't going anywhere.

"Be careful," she said at last.

"I will."

"I mean it. Whatever is beyond that Wall-whatever your mother left-it has been waiting a very long time. And things that wait in the dark are not always what they seem."

"Neither am I."

Something passed between them then-understanding, acknowledgment, the silent contract of two people who had traveled a long road together and were standing at the place where it split.

"Go," she said. "Before Tomlyn wakes up. Because if he wakes up, neither of us will hear the end of it, and he will try to follow you on that mare, and she is not fast enough, and he will be furious, and I will have to listen to it for weeks."

Kallen almost laughed. "Tell him I'm sorry."

"I'll tell him you're an idiot. He'll understand."

He looked down at her-at this woman who had crossed the world for him, who had knelt in the mud and called him a prince and then spent three years learning to simply call him a boy, who had worn an apron and cooked his meals and hovered at the edge of his life with the fierce, quiet devotion of someone who had found the thing she was meant to protect and would not be turned aside from it.

"Thank you," he said. "For everything."

"Thank me by coming back."

He nodded. Then he turned north, and the ring blazed once-bright, brilliant, a flare of sapphire light-and Kallen of the Street of Flour took a breath and was gone.

The world became a blur.

The forest, the clearing, the dead fire-all of it simply ceased to be visible, replaced by smears of color and shadow that had no shape and no stillness. The wind was a wall against his face, a force that should have torn the breath from his lungs but didn't. His feet found the ground in a continuous drumroll-stone and earth and root and moss, each stride covering what a horse would need an hour to cross. The trees parted around him like water around a blade.

The forest gave way to scrubland. Scrubland to moor. Moor to marsh-the beginning of the Neck, that vast sodden expanse separating North from South-and he crossed it in the time it took to draw a breath, his feet finding solid ground where none existed, the bog and the standing water nothing more than texture beneath him.

The Neck gave way to the barrows of the First Men. He passed them in a flash-grey stones older than memory, the shoulders of buried giants rising from the earth. Then the Wolfswood, pines and oaks whose branches interlocked overhead in a canopy so dense that moonlight barely touched the floor. He moved through it like a ghost, silent, his feet barely disturbing the needles.

Then the trees thinned. The ground rose. The air changed-colder, sharper, something ancient.

Kallen crested a ridge and stopped.

The Wall.

It rose from the earth like a blade driven into the world. Seven hundred feet of blue-white ice, luminous in the moonlight, stretching east to the sea and west to the mountains-a barrier of frozen water that had stood for eight thousand years. It was not smooth or uniform. It was scarred and ridged by centuries of weather and the hands of men who had maintained it, a thing built and rebuilt across ages, marked by every generation that had trusted their lives to it.

He stood at its base and looked up, and felt what every man who had ever stood here must have felt: smallness. Eight thousand years of men looking north and wondering. Eight thousand years of cold and dark and fear, and the Wall standing between the world and whatever lived beyond it.

He crouched. His legs coiled beneath him. He felt the strength gather and compress into a single moment-

He jumped.

The ground vanished. The air rushed past him vertically now, building toward something that was not flight but was close enough that the difference hardly mattered. The Wall's surface streamed past in a blur of ice, and he was rising, the world falling away below-

And then he was at the top, and he stopped.

Just for a moment. One breath.

Seven hundred feet above the world, the wind tearing at his hair and his clothes, the moonlight pouring down without obstruction for the first time since he'd entered the Wolfswood. He could see everything from up here-the gift of the North stretching away ahead of him to a horizon that curved with the shape of the earth itself, pale and vast and silent. Behind him, the Wolfswood was a dark sea. Below him, Castle Black huddled against the Wall's southern face like something seeking shelter, its torches small and orange and very far away. The men on the Wall were tiny figures on the ice, slow in their patrols, breathing steam into the cold air, watching the dark to the north with the dull vigilance of men who had stopped expecting anything to appear in it.

None of them looked up.

Kallen stood on the roof of the world and breathed, and for one suspended moment he let himself feel it-the height, the cold, the immensity of what he was about to walk into. The lands beyond the Wall were pale and still and enormous, lit by a moon that seemed larger up here, closer, as though the sky itself was a different thing on this side of the ice.

His mother had come from somewhere out there. Or something like out there. Something further still.

He breathed out. The steam of his breath caught the moonlight and was gone.

He descended in a controlled fall, swift and sure, and his feet found the frozen ground on the far side without a sound. The impact dissolved into his body the way it always did-the force absorbed, redistributed, gone.

He straightened and looked north.

The landscape was the same: scrubland, scattered trees, distant hills. But the air was different. Colder and sharper, carrying a quality he couldn't name but could feel the way he felt sound-as a pressure, a weight that pressed against his skin and his mind and whispered, in something that was not quite a voice: you are not welcome here.

He pushed it aside.

The ring was warm against his finger. Warmer than it had been south of the Wall, alive in a way it hadn't been before, as if crossing the ice had woken something in it. The blue light was steady and bright and pulling east, and beneath the pull he felt something else now, something new: a faint answering warmth, like a fire sensed through a wall. Like something that knew he was here.

He turned east and ran.

The landscape streamed past-scrubland into forest, the trees growing thicker and older with every stride. These were not the sentinel pines of the Wolfswood. These were ancient things, ironswoods and weirwoods and trees he had no name for, their trunks wide as houses, their branches interlocking overhead until the moonlight was completely blocked and the world became absolute darkness that even his eyes struggled to read.

He slowed. The ground was uneven, laced with roots and the remnants of long-fallen trunks rotted into the earth. The air was still and cold and heavy with moss and ancient wood and something else-clean and metallic, like the sky before lightning.

The ring pulsed. Brighter. Faster. The warmth in it was stronger now, concentrated, directional-not pointing anymore but pulling, his hand drawn forward as though something on the other end of an invisible thread had begun, gently but insistently, to reel it in. His pace changed without him deciding to change it, his body responding to the summons before his mind had finished processing it.

He pushed through a screen of branches into a clearing and stopped.

It was small-perhaps fifty yards across, a rough circle of moss-covered ground ringed by the ancient trees. Moonlight found it through a single gap in the canopy, falling on the center like a spotlight on a stage.

The ring blazed. Blue fire poured from the symbol on its face-the shield, the angled S-until Kallen's entire hand was bathed in sapphire light and the clearing was lit as clearly as noon.

Then the ground moved. The moss and soil and stone sliding aside like a curtain being drawn, revealing something beneath.

A structure emerged from the earth.

Slowly, with the smooth deliberate precision of something designed to do exactly this. It rose through the soil and the roots of trees that had grown over it for centuries, their trunks falling away like broken matchsticks as it displaced the earth around it.

It was made of the same material as the pod, but where the pod had been dark and closed, this was the opposite-crystalline, translucent, catching the moonlight and fracturing it into shards of blue and white that scattered across the clearing like light through ice. It grew rather than rose, the way a crystal grows, each new plane and facet appearing with geometric precision, as if the earth were not releasing it but making it, drawing it upward out of the cold ground the way winter draws frost across a window. It was enormous. Its shape was something between a crystal and a fortress-faceted and angular, each plane meeting the next at angles that suggested purpose.

The ring's light dimmed. The structure pulsed once-a wave of blue-white light that ran through every crystal plane from base to apex and back again, illuminating fissures and facets Kallen hadn't seen before, the whole thing briefly alive with interior light like a struck match held inside a block of ice-and then settled into a steady, breathing glow.

Kallen stood at the edge of the clearing and stared. His mouth was open. His hands hung at his sides.

Home.

The word arrived in his mind without invitation, without explanation. The same thing a salmon must feel when it smells the river it was born in-deeper than memory. Written into the architecture of his cells.

The door was enormous-a single great slab of crystal set into the face of the Fortress, taller than any gate Kallen had ever seen, taller than the gates of King's Landing, taller than anything built to admit a man rather than a god. For a moment nothing happened. Then the symbol came alive.

It covered almost the entire surface of the door-the diamond shield, the S within it, the same mark that burned on Kallen's finger-and it blazed, not blue but white, brilliant and clean and total, the way the sun blazes when you look at it directly and cannot look away. The light poured out across the clearing and threw Kallen's shadow long behind him and turned the ancient trees silver. And then, without a seam, without a sound, the door simply opened- swinging inward in one piece, the white light of the interior flooding out to meet the night.

From the light, a figure emerged.

It walked on two legs, moved with a slowness that was not hesitation but care. It was blue and white, the colors of ice and open sky, its surface the pale luminous finish of polished alloy that caught the Fortress's glow and gave it back warmly. Behind it, the blue cape it wore caught the air from the open door and lifted slightly, settling again as it cleared the threshold, the fabric deep blue and real-not decorative, but worn, the way a uniform is worn by something that takes its purpose seriously.

It was large. Not threateningly so, but large the way a thing is large when it was built to carry heavy things and do hard work and not break under the weight of either. Its face was smooth and rounded, without the sharp angles of a weapon-a broad, pale surface that nonetheless gave the unmistakable impression of attention, of focus, of a thing looking at him and seeing him clearly. Light moved beneath the surface of its face in slow pulses, blue-white, like a lantern behind frosted glass.

On its chest, centered on a diamond-shaped shield, was a number: 1.

And around the number, framing it, the shield itself-the same shape as the symbol on Kallen's ring, the same angled lines, the same proportions. The ring blazed in answer. The warmth against his palm became heat, became recognition, the S on his finger and the shield on the robot's chest speaking to each other across the clearing in a language older than Westeros, older than the Wall, older than any name Kallen had ever been given.

It stopped a few feet away. The blue light framed it from behind. The forest was utterly silent-the birds, the insects, everything still, as if the world itself was holding its breath.

Then it spoke.

"Welcome home, Kal-El."

The name hit him like cold water.

He stood very still. The blue light pulsed. The symbol on the metal chest and the symbol on his ring breathed together, in and out, the same rhythm, and something in Kallen's chest-in the place behind his sternum where the pull had lived for as long as he could remember-went quiet for the first time in his life.

His eyes were burning. He didn't know when that had happened.

He looked up at the featureless face, the light moving beneath its surface, and did not trust himself to speak. So he didn't. He just stood there in the clearing, in the blue light, in the silence that was not the silence of the haunted forest but the silence of something completed, and let the name settle into him like water finding its level.

Kal-El.

That was who he was. That was who he had always been.

He took a step forward.

Then another. His legs moved before he'd decided to move them, the same way his pace had changed in the forest without him choosing it-his body understanding something his mind was still catching up to. The robot-Number One, cape settling around its broad shoulders, face pulsing its slow patient blue-stepped aside to let him pass, and Kallen walked through the door of the Last House of El for the first time.