He Would Be A God To Them 22 (Patreon)

Dont know if what i envisioned in my head comes across well. You be the judge.

XXII

The Dragon and the Wall

Vhagar's wings beat the air in slow, heavy strokes that Laena felt through the saddle, through her legs, through the bones of her spine. Each downstroke was an event-a gathering and release of force that pushed the ancient dragon forward with a momentum. Vhagar had not been fast in decades, if she ever had been. She was something else. She was inevitable, moving through the sky the way a mountain moves through the earth: slowly, irresistibly, with the calm of a thing too large to imagine losing.

Laena loved her for it.

They had been flying north for the better part of two days, following the Kingsroad from above-the pale thread of it winding through the green and gold of the Riverlands, narrowing to a track through the Neck, emerging on the far side as a scar across the pale fields of the North. A quarter mile to the west, Meleys caught the afternoon light on her scarlet scales, quicker and more agile than Vhagar but no less purposeful. Laena could just make out her mother's dark hair streaming behind her, the forward lean in her shoulders that meant Rhaenys had already found whatever she was looking for.

They were close. Laena could feel it in the set of her mother's back alone.

The land below changed by the hour. Green gave way to grey-brown, then to the pale white of late summer snow clinging to the shaded sides of hills. The trees thinned, then thickened again with darker trees-pines and sentinel oaks, their needles so deep a green they read as black against the sky. The farms disappeared. The villages disappeared. The roads narrowed to paths and the paths faded to nothing, and the world below turned wild and old in a way the Reach and the Riverlands had never been.

Then Laena saw it.

The Wall.

It rose from the earth like a blade driven into the world-so vast, so high, so absurdly impossible that her mind refused for several long seconds to process it as a real thing. She had heard the numbers as a girl: seven hundred feet, three hundred miles, ice and magic and the labor of men eight thousand years dead. She had filed them away the way children file away all the facts they're taught-abstractions with no weight, no texture.

This had weight.

The Wall filled the whole northern horizon, and there was no single word for what it was. Not a line. Not a fortification, though it was that too. It was closer to weather than architecture-a cliff of blue-white ice that caught the pale light and gave it back in silver and sapphire, stretching east and west until distance swallowed it, as if the world simply ended at its base and began again at its top. It did not ask to be found beautiful or ugly. It was too large for either.

Laena stared.

"Gods," she breathed. The wind took the word before it had finished leaving her mouth.

She banked Vhagar toward the distant smudge of Castle Black, a cluster of dark shapes huddled at the Wall's southern foot, its towers barely visible against all that ice. As they descended, something moved through the bond. A pressure, lodged somewhere between Laena's heart and the dragon's.

Discomfort.

Vhagar had no fear left in her, hadn't for a hundred years, wouldn't know where to keep it if someone tried to hand it to her. This was older and plainer than fear: the recoil of a creature that recognized, on some level beneath thought, a line-and knew, the way stones know to fall, that the line was not for crossing.

Laena felt it clearly now, a stiffness in every turn, a reluctance in the bank, the aerial equivalent of a horse planting its hooves at the top of a hill.

Ahead, Meleys was already descending, spiraling down toward the cleared ground south of Castle Black where decades of supply wagons and marching feet had packed the snow hard. She landed with a thud Laena felt through the air, folding her wings with a snap, her long neck curving as she took in ground that smelled of nothing she knew.

Laena brought Vhagar down a hundred yards off. The impact sent a tremor through the frozen earth, cracking the packed snow in a web radiating out from each foot. Vhagar settled with a low rumble Laena felt in her own chest, her great head swinging south, east, west-and then north, toward the Wall, where the rumble deepened and her golden eyes narrowed to slits.

Laena dismounted. The cold found her at once. She pulled her cloak tight, watched her breath hang white in the air, and crossed the trampled snow to where her mother was already down, adjusting her riding gear.

"Meleys didn't want to cross either," Laena said.

Rhaenys looked at her, and there was no anger in the look, only the flat grimness of a woman confirming something she'd hoped to be wrong about. She reached out and touched Laena's arm once, briefly, before letting go.

"She felt it a mile out and pulled up," Rhaenys said. "I've flown her through storms. Over the Narrow Sea in a gale. She has never once refused where I pointed her."

She looked north, at the ice, at the vast pale hand of it.

"Whatever's on the other side," she said quietly, "the dragons already know. And they don't care for it."

Castle Black was a short walk off-stone and timber huddled against the Wall's foot like barnacles on a hull. It made no claim to grandeur. Every stone and beam had been chosen for use rather than looks: low thick walls, square towers, a yard trampled into a crust of mud and old ice that crunched underfoot.

The gate stood open. Two men waited in it.

The first was lean and scarred, black-clad, his dark hair grey at the temples. The second was heavier, dressed not in black but in the grey and white of House Stark-a lord's clothes, plain and well-made, worn the way a man wears clothes he's had on his whole life. His face was long and solemn, his eyes set deep under a heavy brow, his beard shot through with grey.

Lord Rickon Stark. Lord of Winterfell, Warden of the North-a name Laena knew from her father's stories. Lord Corlys had met him once, years past, and had come away describing the man as one who rarely spoke and meant every word he did.

"Princess Rhaenys. Lady Laena." The black-clad man inclined his head, a bow correct without being servile. "Karl Storm, Lord Commander of the Night's Watch. This is Lord Rickon Stark of Winterfell."

"Lord Stark. Lord Commander." Rhaenys nodded. "We received your raven. We came as fast as the dragons could carry us."

Lord Rickon's gaze moved from Rhaenys to Laena to the two dragons beyond them, standing in the trampled snow like something out of the oldest songs, and did not change. The North was not easily impressed, and Lord Stark had evidently made his peace with dragons some time before this particular pair arrived to test it.

"Castle Black is yours, my ladies," he said, in the low, even rumble of a man with no use for ceremony. "Whatever you need, ask. The men are at your service."

"We need to see the Wall," Rhaenys said. "Where the structure appeared. And we need to hear it from the men who saw it."

"Then we go up." The Lord Commander turned toward the wooden frame of the winch cage rising against the ice. "The structure's gone."

Laena blinked. "Gone?"

"Vanished three days past. Sank back into the ground like it had never stood." His voice was flat. "The clearing's empty. The trees it displaced went with it, near as anyone can tell. Swallowed."

They walked toward the cage. The cold deepened with every step, a different order of cold than the yard's-one that came up out of the ice itself, patient and old, and did not care that Laena had gloves on, or boots, or wool and fur wrapped three times around her throat.

The cage was iron and weathered wood, hung on chains that ran up the Wall's face to a winch at the top-not a comfortable-looking thing, the wood split, the iron rusted, the chains thick with ice. Two Watchmen worked the winch, their faces raw and red, black cloaks snapping in the wind.

They stepped in. The gate closed. The chains groaned.

As they rose, Rhaenys spoke quietly enough that only Laena and the Lord Commander, closest to her, could hear it over the wind.

"If the structure's gone, we have no proof it existed."

"My men saw it," the Lord Commander said. "Every man on this Wall saw it. Rose from the ground and stood for days, glowing, visible for miles."

"I don't doubt you." Rhaenys's voice stayed careful. "But the small council isn't in the habit of taking soldiers' word for miracles. They'll want something they can put their hands on. A tale about a glowing thing that appeared and vanished without a trace will be dismissed inside a fortnight as cold-addled men seeing things in the dark."

Lord Rickon, who had said little since the gate, spoke into the silence that followed.

"It's not the first time, Princess."

Rhaenys turned to him.

"The better part of fifty years gone," he said, "King Jaehaerys and Queen Alysanne came through on progress, north as far as Winterfell. The queen took it into her head to fly on alone and see the Wall for herself, and the king followed after her. I was a boy, hardly old enough to be underfoot, but I remember it plain. Their dragons wouldn't cross either. Silverwing balked first-she was the one who'd flown ahead-and when the king came up after on Vermithor, his wouldn't go a wingspan past hers." He looked north, toward the smoke rising out of the Haunted Forest. "I told no one south of the Neck. Who'd believe a king's bronze dragon and a queen's silver one lost their nerve on the same afternoon, for no cause a man could name? I put it down to the cold. The height. Some fool notion loose in a dumb animal's skull." His jaw worked once. "I don't tell myself that anymore."

Rhaenys was quiet for a moment. "That's a memory, Lord Stark. Not proof the council will accept. But it means this has happened before, more than once, to riders no one can call foolish or afraid. That's worth carrying home."

The cage reached the top. The gate opened. The wind hit them like a wall of its own.

The top of the Wall was a road of ice wide enough for a dozen men abreast, running east and west into pale distance. The wind up here never stopped-a constant, freezing current that tore at cloaks and hair and bare skin like something that had never once been told no. South, the world was familiar: green and brown fields, the Kingsroad, the far smoke of villages. North-

Laena walked to the parapet and looked down into it.

The Haunted Forest ran away from the Wall's foot like a dark sea-pine and sentinel oak and weirwood locked together so tightly the canopy read as a single unbroken darkness, deeper than the Narrow Sea at midnight, deeper than the caves under Dragonstone where the keepers kept their oldest secrets. It was the kind of dark that pressed back against the eye.

And it was burning, here and there. Smoke rose from a dozen points scattered through the trees-thin grey columns climbing through the canopy and shredding in the wind, each one marking a wildling camp. Not one band. Miles of fires, north and east-more free folk gathered in one stretch of forest than any man on the Wall could remember counting.

"We don't know why they're there," Lord Rickon said, beside her now, reading the smoke the way a sailor reads weather. "My own guess is curiosity, nothing more. Something rose out of the ground and lit the sky for the better part of three days. Folk want to see a thing like that with their own eyes, whatever it turns out to mean. I've had riders swear the free folk out there look frightened. I've had just as many swear they look like men crowding round a hanging, waiting to see how it ends. I couldn't tell you which they are. Neither could my own scouts, and they were closer to it than any of us."

Rhaenys stood between them at the parapet, hair whipping loose, her face set in the particular stillness Laena knew meant her mother was weighing options and finding every one of them wanting.

"I still need something for the council," she said. "Lord Stark. Lord Commander. Something they can't wave away as ice shapes and frightened men."

The Lord Commander turned and called down the ice road. "Dobbs. Poul. Wat. Front and center."

Three men came along the ice at the flat-footed, black cloaks, swords.

Dobbs led them, his right hand wrapped in a strip of cloth, the fingers held stiff, his grip on his sword hilt visibly wrong. Laena noticed it and kept it.

Poul was thinner, narrow-faced, his eyes moving over the dragons and the princesses and the lords in quick, cataloguing sweeps that never settled anywhere. A man recently frightened who hadn't found his way back to calm.

Wat was youngest-seventeen, maybe less, wide-eyed, holding himself upright through what looked like sheer will.

"These three were the first scouting party," the Lord Commander said. "Tell the princesses what happened out there."

Dobbs spoke first.

"We went into the Haunted Forest four days past. Four of us-myself, Poul, Wat, and Ser Mark. Moved northeast, toward the last place the structure had stood. Slow going. Trees are thick, ground's frozen, and the light in there-" He stopped, eyes flicking to Lord Stark and back to the middle distance. "The light's bad. We walked without trouble. Then we found giants."

Laena's breath caught. Giants.

She had read of them, the way one reads of everything north of the Neck-old stories the maesters wrote down without quite believing, the last scraps of a race that had once ranged the whole world. She had filed them with the snarks and grumkins, the Children of the Forest, the White Walkers, all the impossible things the North swore were real and the South politely didn't argue about.

"Two of them," Dobbs went on. "Twelve feet, maybe more. Came out of the trees on both sides at once. Ser Mark didn't get his shield up in time."

His voice changed-something rawer showing through.

"Hit him into a tree. He didn't get up again."

The wind kept going. The smoke kept rising.

"We ran," Dobbs said. "Poul, Wat, myself, we scattered. The giants came after. I got into a hollow between two roots. One of them found me anyway. I could hear it breathing. Smell it."

He stopped. His wrapped hand pressed against his thigh, fingers working at the cloth.

"Then it went down. Something dropped it-I didn't see what. But it went down, and then-" He hesitated, and the pause said more than the sentence would have. "Then I was pulled out of that hollow. And told to run."

"Told by what?" Her mother asked.

Dobbs didn't answer at once. Poul shifted his weight. Wat's eyes went round.

"It was the Children," Wat said, too fast, his young voice bright with belief. "Had to be. The old stories say they never really left-they've been hiding in the deep woods thousands of years, watching. One of them dropped that giant and pulled Dobbs clear and told us to run, and we ran, and when we got out the structure was gone, sunk back into the ground, and that has to be them too, doesn't it, because if they put it there in the first place, to watch over-"

"Wat." The Lord Commander's voice was quiet. Final.

Wat shut his mouth.

Dobbs said nothing to confirm or deny it. His face had gone carefully blank-the blankness of a man who's heard another version of events and chosen, for reasons that were his own, not to correct it.

Rhaenys was watching him.

"You know more than you're telling," she said.

Dobbs' jaw tightened. His wrapped hand pressed harder into his leg. His eyes-pale, watering in the wind-met hers for a moment and dropped to the ice.

"My lady," he said, very quietly. "I've told you what I saw. Past that, I-"

He didn't finish.

The roar came first, tearing through the wind loud enough to stop every conversation on the Wall at once. Every head turned up.

A dragon-yellow-scaled, lean, her wings beating in short, ragged strokes that had nothing to do with grace. She came in low and fast from the south, and she was not flying so much as fighting: fighting the air, fighting something else besides.

Syrax.

Laena knew her on sight-the particular gold of her scales, the nervous quickness so unlike Vhagar's ponderous strength. She had watched Rhaenyra fly her a hundred times over the Dragonpit, the two of them moving as if they shared a single set of instincts.

They were not sharing anything now.

"Is that-" Lord Rickon started.

"Syrax," Laena said. "Princess Rhaenyra's dragon."

Rhaenys was already moving past the Lord Commander, her face gone hard. "She was forbidden to come." Each word landed like something dropped. "I told her myself. Forbidden."

They watched the dragon close the distance, wings snapping short and fast. Rhaenyra was a small shape in the saddle, silver hair torn loose from its braid, her whole body canted forward, one fist pounding uselessly against Syrax's neck. Even at this range Laena could hear her shouting, the words lost to the wind, the fury in them not lost at all.

The dragon reached the Wall.

And stopped-wings locked mid-beat, her whole body rigid, as if she'd struck something solid in the empty air. She hung there shaking, every attempt to push forward fighting the same invisible line that had already turned back Vhagar and Meleys.

Rhaenyra's voice cracked across the ice in High Valyrian, pitched high with a child's fury at being disobeyed.

"Sōvēs! Sōvēs!"

Fly. Fly.

Syrax didn't fly. She shook-wings, neck, the great muscles of her chest convulsing in spasms that had nothing to do with the cold. She wanted to go back. Her rider wanted her forward. Two wills, locked, producing nothing between them but violence.

She rolled.

Rhaenyra's grip failed in an instant-legs sliding, hands torn from the saddle horns, her small body pitching sideways as the dragon's convulsions threw her past any hope of catching herself.

"What is she-" Laena's own voice died in her throat. There was no end to that sentence that mattered.

Syrax bucked, hindquarters snapping upward-and it did not look like an accident, not even in the moment. It looked like the one thing left to a cornered animal: throw the rider clear of a fight it couldn't win.

Rhaenyra came off the saddle like something flung from a sling.

For one heartbeat she hung in the grey air above the Wall-arms out, hair streaming, cloak snapping behind her-and then she was falling, and there was no version of what came next that ended with her alive. Laena knew it the way she knew the ground was hard and the cold was real. Seven hundred feet. No wings. No trick of wind or luck. She was going to watch a child die, and there was nothing in her hands or her voice or the whole considerable weight of House Velaryon that could reach far enough to stop it.

Then the Wall shook.

A single concussive boom that seemed to come from everywhere at once, felt in the teeth before it registered in the ears. The ice underfoot flexed-actually flexed, rippling outward like a drumhead struck by something enormous-and men along the parapet staggered or went down.

Laena stayed upright. She was watching the forest.

Something was coming out of it, faster than she had ever seen anything move-faster than Vhagar in a dive, faster than anything with wings had a right to be. It wasn't flying the way dragons flew. There was no rhythm of muscle and air to it. It simply closed distance, wobbling, overcorrecting, rising too high and dropping too far, like something using a gift it hadn't yet learned the shape of-and closing on Rhaenyra's falling body at a speed that made the arithmetic of the fall stop mattering.

It caught her.

Laena saw the moment itself: a small, dark-haired shape, unmistakably human, closing the last of the distance and folding its whole body around the princess the way a hand closes around something small and worth keeping. Whatever it was took the force of that fall into itself and let none of it through to her, curling around her so completely that for a moment there was no princess at all-only a shape wrapped around a shape.

Then it hit the Wall.

The sound broke something in Laena's understanding of what ice was supposed to do. It didn't shatter so much as give way all at once-a grinding, tearing collapse that sent cracks racing in both directions and threw chunks of the parapet down into the dark. The shape didn't slow. It went through seven hundred feet of ancient ice the way a stone goes through parchment, came out the southern face in a spray of shattered crystal, and drove itself into the frozen ground south of Castle Black hard enough that the shock rolled up through the Wall's foundations and into the soles of Laena's boots.

"Seven fucking hells," Rhaenys said, and it came out of her raw, stripped of every year she'd spent learning to sound like a woman who was never afraid of anything.

Laena didn't answer. She was looking at the crater-a steaming wound in the white ground, thirty feet across, its rim thrown up in ragged walls of black earth-and through the rising steam, something was moving.

Beyond it, on the trampled snow where Meleys and Vhagar stood, Syrax was coming down. Not panicked now. She descended in a long, unhurried arc and landed beside the crater with a gentleness that seemed wrong for something her size, head lowering, nostrils flaring at the steam, golden eyes fixed and steady.

Laena watched her, waiting for the sound dragons made when their riders died-the sound she'd read about in old histories and never once wanted to hear for herself.

Syrax made no sound at all.

"She's alive." Laena's voice came out belonging to someone standing very far away. "If she weren't, Syrax would already-we'd know. She's alive."

No one answered. They were all still staring down at the crater, at the steam, at the plain impossible fact of it.

The wind blew. The smoke went on rising out of the Haunted Forest. The Wall cracked and settled around the wound that had been torn through it.

And in the crater, something moved.