He Would Be A God To Them 25 (Patreon)

Lara plays the "Game Of Thrones" .

Also about Kal's suit-I have decided on The Dark Knight Of Steel outfit for his regular clothes,when he is not supermaning and The Absolute Superman suit for supermaning for the rule of cool.

XXV

The Mother's Mercy

Rhaenyra could not feel her fingers.

She had not said anything, and she would not. She was the blood of the dragon and she would not complain about the cold. She had thought her riding leathers would be enough. The cold of the flight north had been bad but flight-cold was a moving cold, and it ended when the flying did.

This had not ended. It had gotten worse, seeping through leather and wool and silk and settling into her bones. Her toes had gone numb inside her boots. Her fingers had passed from aching to burning to nothing at all, which was worse than either. Her nose ran. She could not feel her ears. The small, constant shiver that had started in her chest an hour ago had become a full-body tremor she could neither stop nor hide.

She stood between Rhaenys and Laena, trying to be small, trying to be brave, trying to look like a princess who was not freezing on top of a wall at the edge of the world. She pressed her hands to her thighs, clenched her jaw against the shivering, and watched the woman made of light, and she did not complain.

Rhaenyra had been looking at the woman made of light since the moment she appeared-the way a moth looks at a flame, with the total, unblinking attention of a creature drawn toward something beyond its understanding but not beyond its wanting.

Rhaenyra knew that face. She had seen it a thousand times, in the sept she had visited with her mother. The gentle face. The loving eyes. The mouth inclined toward compassion. It was the face of the Mother, the aspect of the Seven that watched over children and all who needed protecting. Rhaenyra had lit candles before that face.

The woman made of light was looking at her.

Rhaenyra felt the gaze shift before she saw it-the way the air changes when someone turns to look at you in a crowded room. The woman's eyes, deep and luminous, blue enough to seem to reach out and touch the skin, had found her and settled there with a focus that was neither casual nor passing.

"You are cold, child."

Rhaenyra opened her mouth to say that she was fine, that she did not feel the cold, that the blood of the dragon didn't. The words were already queued behind her teeth.

The woman made of light turned her head, slightly, toward the metal figure behind her.

"Dip," she said.

Rhaenyra almost laughed. Dip responded with the immediate, silent obedience of a servant who had been awaiting instructions. It raised one broad, metal hand, a hand that could have crushed a man's skull, and pointed it at Rhaenyra.

Rhaenyra stiffened. Every instinct bred into Targaryen blood across generations of dragonlords and conquerors told her to step back, to put distance between herself and the pointing hand of a creature she did not understand. She did not step back. She stood her ground, chin lifted, her trembling body braced for she did not know what.

Something came out of Dip's hand-Mist. A fine, shimmering mist poured from the metal palm in a stream.

The mist reached her and closed around her.

Warmth was the first thing she felt-spreading across her skin like water heated by the sun, sinking through leather and wool and silk into the flesh beneath. The cold did not retreat slowly. It was driven out all at once, as if the mist had no patience for it. Her fingers thawed. Her toes woke. The shivering stopped, replaced by a steady warmth that radiated outward until every inch of her was comfortable and safe.

Then her clothes began to change.

She felt it before she saw it-a tingling across her skin, the sensation of something moving against her, around her, through her. She looked down and watched, eyes wide, as the leather of her jerkin shifted and flowed and reformed.

The heavy, stiff riding leather she'd worn from King's Landing softened and thinned into something else entirely-supple, smooth, alive with a faint inner light that pulsed in the same rhythm as the structure's heartbeat. The color bled from brown to a deep, true black that absorbed the light and gave nothing back: the black of Targaryen banners.

Red followed, tracing the seams and collar and cuffs in lines of deep crimson-the red of blood and fire and the dragon's house. The design was elegant, form-fitting, built for movement and warmth at once, the lines running from shoulder to waist in a way that suggested both armor and gown. Even her cloak changed, the heavy wool becoming something lighter and warmer, lined in red, clasped at her throat with a fastening she had not put there.

And over her heart, the symbol appeared.

The shield. The angled S within it, rendered in lines of deep red that seemed to glow with their own quiet light - the same symbol on the boy's garment. It sat over her heart like a sigil, like a declaration, and Rhaenyra stared at it and felt something shift in her chest.

The mist withdrew, pulling back from her body the way a tide pulls back from a shore, receding into Dip's palm as though it had never been.

"A gift," the woman made of light said, her voice carrying the same warm authority it had held since her first word. "Now you will be warm in the cold and cool in the heat. The seasons will not touch you."

It was magic, Rhaenyra thought. Real magic-not the half-dead magic of maesters' books, not the metaphorical magic of septons' prayers, but something tangible and world-altering.

She looked up at the woman made of light, and her violet eyes were shining.

"Thank you," she said, small and reverent and entirely sincere.

The woman made of light smiled-warm, knowing, patient-and it was directed at Rhaenyra with a focus that made the girl feel seen in a way she rarely was.

The silence on the Wall was total - the reverent silence of people who had just watched the impossible happen to someone standing three feet away from them. Rhaenyra did not look at the Night's Watchmen, did not look at Lord Rickon or the Lord Commander. She could feel their stares, the weight of their astonishment, but her attention stayed fixed on the woman made of light, and nothing could have pulled it away.

Rhaenys stepped forward. Rhaenyra caught the movement from the corner of her eye-her cousin's posture shifting from protective to diplomatic, spine straightening, shoulders squaring, the unmistakable sign that Rhaenys was about to ask questions.

She would ask the questions that needed asking. Rhaenyra would listen, and remember, because she was the cupbearer, and the cupbearer always heard more than anyone intended.

"If I may," Rhaenys said, her voice calm and measured. "Why are you here? You and your son. In this world."

The woman made of light turned her gaze from Rhaenyra to Rhaenys, and Rhaenyra felt the shift, the loss of that luminous attention, the way a child feels the loss of a held hand.

"My son was not meant to come here," the woman said.

Rhaenyra absorbed the words and felt the questions rise in her like bubbles in a hot spring, too many and too fast to catch. Not meant to come here-then where was he meant to go? What did it mean to be meant for somewhere else and end up here instead? The words were simple and offered no elaboration. They sat in the air, a statement of fact that raised more questions than it answered, and the woman made of light offered nothing further.

"Circumstance had him arrive in your Kingswood all those years ago," the woman continued, her voice taking on the tone of someone recalling a memory both painful and precious. "By fortune, a hedge knight and his squire were passing by. I charged them with protecting my son, and raising him."

The Kingswood. The falling star.

"What were the circumstances?" Rhaenys asked. "Of his arrival. If he was not meant to come here, what brought him?"

Rhaenyra leaned forward, her attention sharpening. This was the question she would have asked herself. Where had Kallen come from? What force had carried him across the sky and set him down in the Kingswood?

The woman made of light was quiet a moment. Her blue eyes held Rhaenys's.

"It is not something that will affect this world," she said. "It does not concern your people or your kingdoms. It is a matter of... elsewhere. Of things that happened far from here, in places your maps do not reach."

The frustration rose in Rhaenyra's chest, hot and sharp. She wanted to know everything- wanted to seize the woman made of light by the shoulders and demand the whole of it, every secret, every hidden truth of where Kallen had come from and why he was here and what he was. But she was eleven, and not in charge of this conversation, so she bit the inside of her cheek and said nothing.

Beside her, Laena leaned close and whispered, her voice barely above the wind.

"This is like something out of a story."

The words settled into Rhaenyra's bones like truth. It was exactly like a story-the kind her mother used to tell her before bed. The kind where a princess is rescued by a mysterious boy and shown things that rewrite the rules of what is possible.

"It is," she whispered back. "Exactly like a story."

"The kind where the princess is rescued by a boy who can fly," Rhaenyra said, and her voice carried a warmth that had nothing to do with the garment she wore.

"If he is your son," Rhaenys said, "why did you not raise him yourself? Why charge strangers with his care?"

The woman made of light changed. Rhaenyra saw it happen-a shift in the light itself, the warm luminescence dimming by a fraction. Her expression, composed and serene a moment before, softened into something more vulnerable, more human.

"I cannot materialize in this world," the woman said. "I am not... here. Not truly. This form you see is a projection, a likeness. I can speak through it. I can see through it. But I cannot touch. I cannot hold. I cannot be present in the way a mother must be present."

She paused, and Rhaenyra saw the sorrow in her eyes and felt it like a fist to the chest. It was real-as real as anything Rhaenyra had seen in her life. The grief of a mother separated from her child.

Rhaenyra thought of her own mother-always there, always holding her, smoothing her hair, kissing her forehead, telling her she was safe. She thought of what it would feel like to have that taken away, not by death but by distance.

"I could not raise him because I am not able to be with him," the woman said quietly. "I can only guide. I can only watch. And I can only hope that the people I entrusted him to have loved him as I would have loved him, in the way I cannot."

Rhaenyra felt tears prick at the corners of her eyes and blinked them back. She would not cry. She was a princess. She was the blood of the dragon. She would not cry on the Wall in front of the Night's Watch and Lord Stark. But the grief sat in her chest, heavy and aching.

Rhaenys pressed on.

"Can the boy leave this world?" she asked. "If he was not meant to be here, can he go where he was meant to go?"

Something cold closed around Rhaenyra's heart that had nothing to do with the wind.

She had not thought of this. In all the wonder and terror of the last few hours, it had not once occurred to her that the boy might leave.

Now she thought about it, and the thought was unbearable.

The woman made of light looked at Rhaenys, then let her gaze shift to Rhaenyra, and whatever she saw in the girl's face-the naked, undisguised terror Rhaenyra could feel written across her own features-made her expression soften further.

"He can," the woman said.

Rhaenyra's breath caught. The two words hit her like a blow, and the warmth of her new garment was nothing, was a joke, against the cold closing around her heart. He can leave. He can go wherever he was meant to go, some place she could not follow, and she would never see him again.

No.

"No!" The word burst from her before she could stop it, loud and raw, echoing off the ice. "No, he shouldn't! He shouldn't go!"

"Rhaenyra!" Rhaenys's voice was sharp.

Rhaenyra did not care about implications, or witnesses, or the proper way to address a goddess. She stared at the woman made of light with the desperate intensity of a child who had just been told that the thing she'd found might be taken from her, violet eyes bright with tears she was too proud to shed and too frightened to hold back.

The woman made of light looked at her, and smiled-a kind smile, a knowing one.

"You should not worry," she said, her voice wrapping around Rhaenyra. "He has decided to stay in this world."

The tears did not fall. The terror in Rhaenyra's chest loosened, not all at once but in stages, like a fist unclenching finger by finger.

"He chose this world. He chose the people in it. He has no desire to leave."

Rhaenyra let out a breath she hadn't known she was holding-shaky, uneven, not at all princess-like, and she did not care.

"Good," she said, small and fierce and certain. "Good."

She saw Rhaenys glance at her, saw the look that passed between her and Laena.

Let them think her foolish. Let them think she was a child confusing gratitude for something deeper. They were wrong. She was certain, with the bone-deep certainty of Targaryen blood, that the boy who had caught her when she fell mattered more than anything she had encountered in her eleven years, and that whatever came next, she would be part of it.

Rhaenys turned back to the woman made of light. "What does he intend to do, if he is staying in this world?"

The warmth in the woman's expression did not diminish, but something harder joined it.

"He has no interest in your Iron Throne," she said. "No desire to govern the Seven Kingdoms, or to rule any man or woman in them. His only goal is to protect the innocent, and to improve your world."

Protect the innocent. Improve the world. That was what he had chosen to be. Not a king, not a lord, not a conqueror. A protector. A knight in the truest sense.

"How does he intend to improve it?" Rhaenys asked.

The woman was quiet a moment. "I would rather not say. But I will tell you this: you will be glad of it. Your daughter will be glad of it. Every man and woman in this world will be glad of it, though they may not know the source of their gladness."

Rhaenyra wanted to scream. The vagueness drove her mad. She wanted to know what Kallen was planning, how he meant to change the world, wanted to stand beside him and be part of whatever he was building.

But princesses did not get to demand answers from gods, and so, for once, she held her tongue.

A sound drew their attention. Another figure landed on the Wall beside Dip with a gentle tap of metal on ice.

The number on its chest was 4.

When it spoke, the voice was nothing like Dip's-lighter, higher, distinctly feminine, and cheerful in a way that seemed profoundly out of place on top of the Wall at midnight.

"Repairs to the Wall are complete," Four announced, in a chipper, satisfied tone. "The breach is sealed. The ice has been fused at the molecular level. You won't even be able to tell where the hole was."

Rhaenyra blinked. Molecular level. She did not know what that meant, and suspected no one on the Wall did either. But the bright, chipper delivery, so at odds with everything else about this night, made something in her chest lighten-the same feeling she'd had at the name Dip. The impossible, made ordinary. The divine, made familiar. The vast and terrifying, made small enough to hold.

"Good," the woman made of light said, her satisfaction genuine and warm. She turned to Dip, standing at her side like a sentinel, and inclined her head. "Now, before we leave. Dip, if you would."

Dip raised his hand again, palm opening not toward a person this time but toward the bare ice beside him. The same shimmering mist poured forth, but instead of wrapping around a body, it pooled on the ground, spreading in a circle, and something began to form within it.

Gold.

Bars of it, solid and unmistakable, rising out of the mist like fish surfacing in a still pond, stacking themselves with a precision that was deliberate rather than random, each one settling exactly where it belonged in a growing heap that caught the blue-white glow and the starlight and gave back a warm, achingly ordinary yellow gleam.

The heap grew, bar after bar. Rhaenyra tried to estimate its worth and gave up-the number was beyond her, beyond anyone. There was enough gold on the ice to rebuild Duskendale twice over, and it had taken a metal man named Dip a matter of minutes.

The mist stopped. The gold sat on the ice, gleaming, solid, real.

The woman made of light turned to Rhaenys. "I cannot bring back the dead of Duskendale," she said, a weight in her voice that Rhaenyra felt in her own chest. "But I wish this gold used to improve the lives of those who survived-the families who lost their homes, the children who lost their parents, the injured who cannot work."

"My son will know if the gold is used for anything else," the woman said, and something harder moved beneath the warmth of her tone.

Rhaenys nodded. "I understand. What should we tell the people, when it's distributed?"

The woman considered a moment. "It does not matter. If the king wishes to claim the gold as a gift of the crown, he is welcome to. The source is unimportant. The use is what matters. As long as it reaches the people it's meant for, I do not care what story accompanies it."

The Lord Commander of the Night's Watch stepped forward. Rhaenyra had been watching him from the corner of her eye. He was standing at the edge of the conversation. When he spoke, his voice was rough and careful.

"My lady," he said. "If I may ask a question."

The woman made of light turned to him, her expression open, patient, waiting.

"Why was the Wall built?"

Rhaenyra felt the question land and the air change. It was the question every man on the Wall had asked himself at some point-the one that lived beneath the oath and the black cloak and eight thousand years of standing watch. Why the Wall. Why the Night's Watch. Why the endless, freezing, thankless vigil at the edge of the world. The maesters had their answers, and the old stories had theirs, but none of the answers were certain, and the uncertainty had become part of the Wall itself.

The woman made of light looked at him for a long moment. Something moved in her expression.

"You all know why," she said.

And then she was gone.

Lord Rickon Stark spoke first, his voice low and even, carrying the weight of a man raised on stories the South dismissed as fables, in a land where the fables had teeth.

"The Others," he said.

The White Walkers of the oldest stories-the things that came in the Long Night, that brought cold and dark and the dead that walked. Not real. Could not be real.

Except they were.

The stories were real. The darkness had teeth. The Wall was not a relic of a forgotten age but a barrier against something still there, still waiting.

She thought of Kallen. She thought of the powers he carried, and understood why he had chosen to stay.

He was here because the darkness was coming, and someone needed to stand against it.

Dip lifted off the Wall. Rhaenyra watched him rise, silent and fluid, into the night sky.

The other metal figures followed, one by one, rising from the Wall and the ground below like birds leaving a branch, converging on the distant glow.

One remained.

Four had not moved. She stood where the others had left her, the visor of her face turned toward the group, its band of light pulsing slow and patient. She waited until the sky was empty and the only light on the Wall was the structure's glow, the stars, and the gold on the ice.

Then she walked toward Rhaenyra.

Rhaenyra did not step back. She stood her ground, her new garment warm against her skin, the symbol on her chest pulsing quietly, and watched the metal woman.

Four stopped in front of her. She extended her hand. In the metal palm, small and dark, glowing with a faint blue light, was a ring.

"Kallen instructed me to give you this," Four said, the same chipper tone as before, but with a gentleness beneath it now, as though she understood the weight of what she was offering.

Rhaenyra took the ring. It was warm in her hand, warmer than the air could account for, the blue light pulsing against her palm like a heartbeat. She closed her fingers around it and felt the warmth climb her arm and settle in her chest, alongside the warmth of the garment.

Four went on. "He also wanted me to tell you: this ring is the reason your uncle lost his hand. He wishes your uncle to have it, as a peace offering. And if your uncle is amenable, his hand can be restored."

Rhaenyra's head came up sharply. Restore his hand. The words set off a cascade of implications she could not begin to sort through.

She thought of Daemon-fierce and reckless and proud.

Would he take the offer? She loved her uncle but his pride was the kind that consumed rather than protected, the kind that might rather lose a hand forever than accept help from the thing that had taken it.

"I will relay this to him," she said, steady, the voice of a princess performing a diplomatic function. Then the princess gave way to the girl, and the girl looked down at the ring and wanted it. "But if my uncle does not want it-can I keep it?"

Laena snorted-a genuine, involuntary sound, the noise of a young woman undone by an eleven-year-old's transparent greed. Rhaenyra felt the heat rise in her face. Rhaenys chuckled too, low and brief, the first amused sound she'd made all evening, and the flush deepened.

Four watched the exchange with fascination. "That is acceptable. If your uncle does not wish to receive the ring, you are welcome to keep it. Kallen would prefer it go to someone who appreciates it."

Rhaenyra's fingers closed around the ring. She would relay the message to Daemon-she would do her duty. But she also knew, with the cynical shrewdness of a girl raised in the Red Keep, that Daemon Targaryen would sooner cut off his remaining hand than accept a peace offering from the thing that had taken the first one. The ring was hers. She felt a small, fierce, entirely un-princess-like satisfaction, and did not fight it.

Four's posture shifted, straightening, the transition from one task to the next.

"Now," she said. "Which of you is Dobbs?"

The man stepped forward from the back of the group - the watchman with the wrapped hand.

"Me, my lady?" His voice cracked on the last word.

"Give me your hand. The burned one."

Rhaenyra watched him unwrap the cloth, layer by layer, revealing the damage beneath - the skin ugly and tight, the fingers curled inward, the whole hand a ruin of scar tissue and stiff joints.

Four pointed her palm at the burned hand. The same shimmering mist that had changed Rhaenyra's clothes and conjured the gold wrapped around Dobbs's fingers and knuckles and wrist.

Dobbs gasped.

Rhaenyra watched the scars fade, the skin smooth, the fingers uncurl, the knuckles find their proper shape again-as if the burn had never happened.

The mist withdrew. Dobbs stared at his hand. He made a fist. Opened it. Made it again. His face held too many emotions to name-wonder, gratitude, the raw joy of a man given back something he'd thought was gone for good.

"Thank you," he managed. "Thank you, my lady. I... I don't..."

"You are welcome," Four said, cheerful and warm. "Your hand was damaged. It is no longer damaged. That is all."

That is all. Rhaenyra felt the absurdity of it wash over her-as if healing a ruined hand were as simple as mending a torn shirt, as if the power to undo injury was just another tool, used when needed and put away when done.

She thought of the sick and injured and dying in King's Landing. She thought of her own mother, Queen Aemma, who had lost so many babies, whose body was fragile in ways the court whispered about and never spoke of openly.

All of that suffering, and the power to end it sat in the hands of a metal woman who called it nothing.

Rhaenyra looked at the ring in her hand. She thought of what Kallen could do. What he could mean. What the world might become if someone with his power chose, as he had chosen, to protect the innocent and improve it.

She wanted to be part of it-wanted it with a ferocity that surprised her, an aching want that sat in her chest alongside the warmth of the garment, the ring, and the knowledge that he had chosen to stay.

Four turned back to Rhaenyra. "I believe we are finished here."

Rhaenyra looked at the ring, and looked up at Four.

"Will I see him again?" Her voice came out smaller than she wanted-smaller than a princess's voice should be, smaller than the blood of the dragon should allow. But it was honest.

Four considered her. The visor gave nothing away, but something in the pulse of its light suggested thought.

"He is where he needs to be," she said. "But I suspect, Princess, that you will see him again."

It was not a promise but it was enough. Rhaenyra held the ring tight and nodded, and felt something settle in her chest-a quiet, stubborn certainty.

She would see him again.

Four lifted off the Wall. Rhaenyra watched her rise.

The silence lasted a long time and Lord Rickon Stark broke it.

"This night was eventful," he said, dry and flat.

No one laughed. But something in the tension on the Wall eased, the way a rope eases when the strain comes off it, and Rhaenyra heard the men around her breathe-easier than they had all night.