He Would Be A God To Them Chapter 24 (Patreon)

Lara lied as easily as she "breathed". I was listening to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fd1yzCCTX1o specifically 1:51 when she made her appearance.

XXIV

Waiting for Whatever Came Next

Night came to the Wall. The sun did not set so much as abandon the world, sliding below the western horizon in a wash of copper and gray that left the sky the color of old iron. The stars came out hard and bright. The Wall caught what light the stars offered and held it in its ice, so that the barrier glowed faintly from within-less a wall now than something breathing.

They had not left.

Rhaenys had wanted to. Every instinct she possessed, every calculation her sharp and practical mind had been running since she watched a boy punch a hole through seven hundred feet of ancient ice, told her the proper course was to mount Meleys, collect Laena and Rhaenyra, and fly south to King's Landing with all speed. The Wall was breached. The boy had gone north over the ice like a bird tired of company. There was nothing left to see here that could not be seen from the safety of the Red Keep.

But Rhaenyra had refused.

The girl had planted herself at the edge of the crater, arms folded, silver-gold hair loose and wild, violet eyes fixed on the northern horizon.

Rhaenys recognized the look. She had worn it herself once, standing in the Dragonpit with Meleys beneath her for the first time, refusing to dismount until the dragonkeepers let her fly. She had seen it on Laena's face the first time she had riden Vhagar. It was the look of dragon's blood asserting itself, and arguing with it was like arguing with the tide.

So they stayed. Lord Rickon Stark, his expression unchanged since the boy had gone through the Wall, offered them quarters in Castle Black, which Rhaenys declined with the grace of a woman who would rather sleep on cold stone in a dragon's shadow than in a Night's Watch barracks. They made camp on the cleared ground south of the Wall, between Meleys and Vhagar, the dragons serving as living fires whose warmth kept the worst of the cold at bay. Syrax had landed beside them an hour after the fall, folding her golden wings with a docility that still struck Rhaenys as wrong-the dragon had bucked her rider off in a fit of instinctive terror, and now she sat by the crater as though nothing had happened, head low, golden eyes fixed on the gap in the Wall.

Waiting, like everyone else. Every soul on the Wall, every man in Castle Black, every dragon on the frozen ground was turned toward the same point-the dark expanse of the Haunted Forest, stretching north into a darkness that seemed to have weight and substance. Waiting for the structure to return. Waiting for the boy. Waiting for whatever came next.

It came at midnight.

Rhaenys stood on the Wall, her cloak pulled tight against a wind that had not stopped since they arrived. The cold was beyond anything she had known. She had never in her life been this far north. The cold offended her. It was the wrong climate for a Targaryen.

Lord Rickon Stark stood beside her, as unmoved by the cold as the ice beneath their feet. He had not spoken in some time-a man, Rhaenys had decided, who used silence the way other men used speech, and thought unnecessary words a form of weakness. She respected it without sharing it.

Laena stood a few feet off, violet eyes scanning the darkness. She had gone quiet since the crater. Laena's mind ordinarily moved faster than her tongue could follow; now she said little, her gaze drifting often to the hole in the Wall, her fingers pleating the fabric of her gloves.

Rhaenyra had fought sleep for hours, until exhaustion claimed her. Laena lifted her without waking her, gathering the smaller girl against her shoulder with the ease of someone who had spent years climbing on and off dragons. Rhaenyra murmured something in her sleep, brow furrowing, and Laena shushed her and held her closer.

Then the forest lit up.

It started as a glow, faint and blue-white, visible first as a pale smudge against the black canopy-the way dawn is visible first as a rumor on the horizon. It pulsed once. Twice. Then it spread, pushing outward from a central point, lighting the trees from below so their trunks and branches stood out in stark, skeletal relief.

The structure was rising again.

Rhaenys felt her breath catch. It was enormous. It rose above the treeline, its facets catching starlight and the pulse of its own interior fire, and it dominated the northern horizon the way the Wall dominated the southern: a fortress of crystal and alien geometry.

"Oh," Laena breathed. The word hung in the air, small and insufficient.

Rhaenyra woke. She stirred against Laena's shoulder, blinking with groggy confusion. She sat up, rubbed her eyes, looked around-and then she saw it. Wonder transformed her face, erasing the exhaustion and the lingering fear and the stubborn pride that had brought her here against every prohibition. Her mouth fell open.

The structure pulsed. Blue-white light ran through every crystal plane from base to apex and back, a heartbeat made visible, and the Haunted Forest lit up bright as noon in shades of sapphire and silver. The men on the Wall shifted. Someone muttered a prayer. Someone else swore.

Lord Rickon Stark had not moved. His heavy face was turned north, his deep-set eyes fixed on the structure.

He turned to Rhaenys. "Is this proof enough for the small council? For the King?"

Rhaenys did not answer at once. She was still looking at the structure, her mind working through the implications with the speed that had once made her heir to the Iron Throne. The structure was proof. The boy was proof. The hole in the Wall was proof. Any one of them, honestly reported, would bring the crown's full attention north.

But it was not the structure that concerned her.

"The boy saved the princess," she said slowly, weighing each word. "He crashed through seven hundred feet of ancient ice to catch her as she fell. He carried her through the Wall and landed hard enough to split the ground, and there was not a scratch on him. Not a scratch on her." She paused. "And he moved faster than anything I have ever seen. Faster than anything with wings or legs or wheels."

She looked at Lord Rickon. "That was proof enough. The structure is evidence. The Wall, broken, is evidence. That will bring the small council to its feet."

"He has a name."

Rhaenyra's voice cut through the cold air like a blade. Still held aloft by Laena, her small body tense, her violet eyes blazing, she looked at Rhaenys, and there was nothing grateful in the look. "My savior has a name," she said. "His name is Kallen."

Lord Rickon's eyes moved from Rhaenyra to Rhaenys to the structure, and something shifted in his expression.

Rhaenys looked at Rhaenyra. The girl's face was flushed with cold and indignation, her chin lifted at the exact angle of Targaryen defiance Rhaenys had seen in mirrors and paintings and her own reflection more times than she cared to count. She was defending the boy-not his actions, his name, his personhood. In the space of a single afternoon, she had decided he mattered to her.

Trouble, Rhaenys thought.

She turned to Laena. Her daughter's face was still turned toward the structure, the light painting her features in shifting sapphire and silver, her eyes wide and reflective. But there was something else there too- the flicker of recognition that had crossed Laena's face when the boy looked at her from the crater. She had known his name. She had shouted it across the ice with a familiarity that spoke of prior acquaintance.

"Laena," Rhaenys said, her tone calm but making clear the answer was not optional. "It's time you told us how you know the boy's name."

Laena blinked, looked at her mother, then Rhaenyra, then the structure, then back. She set Rhaenyra down gently, the princess's boots finding the ice with a small crunch, and folded her arms against the cold.

"I met him five years ago. At the Tourney at Maidenpool."

"You snuck out," Rhaenys said.

Laena had the grace to look abashed, a flush climbing her neck that had nothing to do with the cold. "I borrowed a dress from one of the servants. Brown wool, plain. I told people my father was a wool merchant."

"I remember. You could have been recognized. You could have been hurt."

Laena did not argue. "He was seven. A squire, traveling with a hedge knight whose name I don't... I don't remember."

"Tomlyn."

The name came from behind them. It came from the ranks of the Night's Watch, drawn to the parapet by the light.

Every head turned. Dobbs stood three feet, black cloak pulled tight, wrapped hand pressed to his chest. His face went white the moment the name left his mouth. His jaw tightened.

Rhaenys regarded him.

"We will get to you."

Dobbs swallowed, nodded once, and looked at the ice beneath his boots as if hoping it might open and take him.

Rhaenys turned back to Laena. "Continue."

"We talked," Laena said, her eyes on the structure now, her voice taking on the softness that entered it when she was remembering something she held dear. "He was fun. Cleverer than any seven-year-old I'd met." She paused. "He told me his name was Kallen."

"You didn't tell him who you were."

"No." Laena's mouth quirked, a ghost of the recklessness that had defined her at twelve. "I told him my name was Jeyne. My father was a wool merchant."

"And he believed you?"

She hesitated. "No. I think he knew I was lying. He was perceptive-more than perceptive. But he didn't press me either. He just let it be." She looked at her hands, then the structure. "To me he was just a boy. A normal one. Curious, kind. He never did anything that would have made me think he was other than what he seemed."

Rhaenys absorbed this. The Tourney at Maidenpool, five years past. The boy there, seven years old, squiring for a hedge knight named Tomlyn.

"Right after the tourney," she said slowly, the pieces settling into place as she spoke, "Duskendale burned."

Laena's face tightened.

"They traced the origin to an inn- the Four Swords-a room on the second floor where a hedge knight and his squire had been staying." Rhaenys paused. "Everyone presumed they died that day."

"Kallen told me. It was an accident. He didn't mean it, and he regrets it." Rhaenyra said quietly, certain.

Lord Rickon's eyes moved from Rhaenyra to Rhaenys to the structure. The Lord Commander stood very still.

"He told you that?" Rhaenys asked.

"He said it was an accident, that he didn't know what he was, didn't know what he could do. He said people died and he'll carry that the rest of his life." Her chin lifted. "He wasn't proud of it. He wasn't boasting. He was telling the truth, and if any of you had seen his face when he said it, you'd know that as well as I do."

Laena nodded. "The boy I met at Maidenpool was kind. Sweet. He wouldn't kill innocent people-that wasn't who he was." Something hardened in her violet eyes. "Besides-whatever happened between him and Prince Daemon, Kallen chose to spare him. He could have killed the prince. He didn't. That tells you what you need to know."

Lord Rickon had listened in silence, his heavy face impassive. When he spoke, his voice was low and even. "Regardless of his intentions, his regrets, his kindness-the boy can do things no man, no army, no fortress can stand against. If a creature with that kind of power ever did harm, by accident or by choice, there is nothing anyone anywhere could do to stop him."

Rhaenys could not argue, because the words were true.

The Lord Commander turned from the parapet, hands clasped behind his back. "What about the dragons? If the boy's a threat-could they stop him?"

Rhaenys was quiet a moment.

"I don't know. I don't know if dragonfire would harm him, or if claws or teeth could pierce his skin. If Valyrian steel cannot cut him, I doubt dragonfire would burn him." She paused. "And he moves too fast. A dragon's fire must be aimed-the dragon must see its target, loose the flame, hit what it aims at. By the time a dragon opened its mouth, the boy would be somewhere else. We would have to trap him first. Corner him."

"We are not going to trap him!" Rhaenyra's voice cracked across the air like a whip. "We are not going to corner him, or cage him, or fight him, or whatever word you want for hurting someone who has done nothing but help people. He saved my life. He saved people in Lannisport. He saved Dobbs and his men from giants." She gestured at the watchman, who flinched at being named. "He has never hurt anyone who didn't try to hurt him first, and we are not going to treat him like an enemy."

"Rhaenyra." Rhaenys kept her voice calm, carrying no anger. "I do not intend to harm him. I have no wish to. But we must think of every possibility. That is what those of us who carry the realm's weight do. We prepare for the worst even as we hope for the best."

"He is not the worst." Rhaenyra's voice broke, an emotion too large for her small body and her eleven years. "He is the best thing I have ever seen, and I will not let you turn him into something to be managed."

Rhaenys looked at the girl and saw, with painful clarity, the shape of what was coming. Rhaenyra Targaryen had fixed her heart on the boy, and no argument, no appeal to duty or safety, would move her from it. This was not a child's crush. It was the kind of certainty only the very young and the very Targaryen were capable of, and it would not be reasoned with.

She opened her mouth to answer but before she could speak, a watchman at the far end raised his hand and pointed north.

"What in the seven hells is that?"

Every head turned. Rhaenyra, too short to see, grabbed Laena's arm and pulled, and Laena lifted her again, and Rhaenyra's eyes found the structure.

It had changed. The blue-white pulse quickened-urgent now, the heartbeat of something waking. Figures emerged.

They rose from the top of the structure the way birds leave a nest, one after another, into the cold night air with a fluidity that was not flight in any sense Rhaenys understood. No wings. No beating at the air. They simply rose, propelled by something invisible and silent, dark shapes against the structure's blue-white glow.

There were five figures. They were man-shaped. They hung above the structure a moment, silhouetted against the stars, then flew towards the Wall. Towards them.

"Get ready," the Lord Commander said, his hand finding his sword, and around him the black cloaks shifted, hands finding hilts, bodies tensing.

"To do what?" a watchman asked, his voice thin. "What do we do against that?"

The Lord Commander had no answer. There was none.

Four of the figures converged on the wound the boy had torn through the ice.

The fifth figure came for them.

It grew larger as it neared, resolving from a dark shape into a definite form, and the details that emerged were wrong in every way Rhaenys's mind knew how to catalogue.

It was shaped like a man-broad-shouldered, taller than any man on the wall, its body rendered in smooth plates of blue-white metal that caught the starlight and the structure's glow and threw it back in shifting sapphire and silver. A cape hung from its shoulders. Its head was a tapered visor, faceless save for a single band of light set where eyes might have been, and that band pulsed in slow rhythm with the structure's heartbeat, brightening when it seemed to look at them. On its chest, set in a diamond shield, was a number: 1.

It landed on the Wall. The impact was gentle-the metal feet touched the ice with no more force than a bird alighting on a branch-and the figure straightened before them, its wrongness fully visible now.

Rhaenys moved before she thought. She stepped in front of Rhaenyra and Laena, shoulders squared, chin lifted. She had no sword, no armor-nothing but dragon's blood in her veins and the certainty that whatever this thing was, it would go through her before it reached her daughter or the princess.

Laena pulled Rhaenyra behind her own body, so the girl was shielded by both women. Rhaenyra's hands gripped the back of Rhaenys's cloak.

The Night's Watch had drawn steel.

Lord Rickon had not drawn a weapon. He stood with his hands at his sides. He did not look afraid.

The Lord Commander stood at the front of the line, sword raised. "Speak. What are you?"

The figure did not draw a weapon; it did not have one. Its head turned, slow and deliberate, taking in the ring of drawn steel, and something in the set of its shoulders eased back-an oddly human flinch from a fight it plainly did not want.

When it spoke, the voice was flat and precise, each word set down like a tool returned to its proper place, and somehow dry despite that. "You may want to lower those. This will go faster without a fight, and-no offense meant-you are all a great deal too slow to make one count."

Nobody lowered anything. The band of light across its visor pulsed once, twice, and its shoulders dropped a fraction further, small and put-upon, the posture of a servant resigned to being ignored.

Then the light changed. A point of brightness appeared where the eyes would have been on a human face-small at first, no bigger than a candle flame, then spreading rapidly upward and outward, taking shape as it spread. The light was warm now, not the structure's cool blue-white but something golden, like late afternoon sun through stained glass.

It formed a woman.

She stood in the air before the metal figure, projected from its face like a vision, her feet not quite touching the ice. She was tall, nearly as tall as the figure itself, dark hair falling past her shoulders in loose waves, skin pale and luminous as if lit from within. Her features were fine and strong-high cheekbones, a narrow jaw, a mouth inclined toward gentleness. Her eyes were a deep, vivid blue.

She wore a long gown of some shifting material, white to silver to pale blue and back, catching the light in ways no fabric Rhaenys had ever seen could match. Over her heart, in lines of soft blue light, was a symbol: a shield with an angled mark within it.

Rhaenys stared. She had seen that face before-not in life, but in stone, in paint, in every sept from King's Landing to the Wall. The gentle face. The loving eyes. The arms open in welcome.

The Mother.

It was the same face, the same features, the same expression of boundless, unconditional love that looked down from every altar of the Seven in Westeros.

And now it stood on the Wall, made of light.

Around her, few of the Night's Watch reacted. Some lowered their swords, hands trembling, faces slack with the awe. Others fell to their knees, heads bowed, lips moving in prayers they had learned as children and never expected to speak with such desperate conviction.

"The Mother," someone whispered. The word passed through the men like a current through water.

Rhaenys did not kneel. She stood with her feet on the ice, her body between the apparition and her daughter and the princess, and she did not kneel. She was Targaryen. She did not worship the Seven-she had been raised on the old Valyrian traditions, on fire and blood and the memory of a fallen empire, and the face of the Mother meant no more to her than any other carved stone in any other sept.

But she understood what its recognition meant to the men around her, and understood too, with the sharp political instinct that was her birthright, that whatever happened next would be shaped by that recognition in ways no one on this Wall could yet predict.

The woman made of light looked at them with an expression calm and measured, carrying a weight of sorrow that seemed, to Rhaenys, genuine.

"Peace." The word was clear and resonant, spoken in the Common Tongue. It settled over the group like a blanket. The men who had been praying fell silent. The men gripping swords loosened their grip. Even Rhaenyra's fingers, still bunched in Rhaenys's cloak, went slack.

"I have sent my servants to repair the damage my son has caused."

My son.

Rhaenys felt the ground shift beneath her.

The son of the Mother. The son of a god.

Around her, the whispered prayers intensified. The men who had knelt pressed their heads lower. Dobbs wept, his tears freezing on his cheeks. The Lord Commander stood with his sword at his side, his scarred face caught between the soldier's instinct to treat everything as a threat and the believer's instinct to fall to his knees beside his men.

Lord Rickon had not moved. His eyes were fixed on the woman of light, his face that of a man who did not worship the Seven and was therefore free to watch without the filter of faith. He was thinking, weighing what he saw against what he knew.

Rhaenyra had released Rhaenys's cloak. She stepped out from behind her, past Laena, into the open space between the group and the woman of light, and stood there with her hair loose and her eyes fixed on the Mother's face.

Rhaenys watched her stand there and felt with certainty, that the world had just changed in a way that could not be undone. The boy was was the son of something that looked like a god and spoke like a god and was, by every measure the men of Westeros possessed, a god.

And Rhaenyra Targaryen had decided that she loved him.

Trouble, Rhaenys thought, and the word felt too small for what it now had to carry.

The Mother stood on the Wall and looked at them with those deep blue eyes. The metal figure pulsed behind her with its slow, patient light. Beyond them both the structure glowed in the Haunted Forest, and the Wall-eight thousand years old, seven hundred feet high-was being mended by the servants of a god whose son had broken it.