He Would Be A God To Them Chapter 28 (Patreon)

Was going to include first flight in this chapter but decided to fold that in a Kal PoV.

Decided to take a character from Telltale GoT game and use her in this story. I think of her as that characters ancestor.

Chapter was late cause I have been playing Zero Company-fantastic game and one of the best star wars stories.

I aim to drop the next chapter on wednesday again but the chapter after that might be late cause Blood of The Dawnwalker is coming out and the vampire baddie must be romanced.

XXVIII

What the Dark Needs Most

Sylvi stood at the edge of the marketplace - though marketplace was a generous word for what it was: a cleared stretch of packed earth between the settlement's inner wall and the first row of dwellings, where the people of Hopetown gathered each morning to collect the food the metal women distributed from the great stone-lined storehouses. The food came from somewhere inside the castle, she knew, though she had never seen where or how it was made. It simply appeared - bread still warm from an oven she had never found, dried fish salted and packed with a care no free folk hand could have managed, cheese wrapped in cloth that kept it fresh for weeks, and sometimes, on days that followed no pattern she could name, fruit. Apples and pears and small hard plums that tasted of summer even in the white breath of a northern morning.

She had eaten already - two slices of bread and a strip of dried fish, standing in the grey pre-dawn light while the settlement woke around her. The bread had been warm in her hands, and she'd torn it with her teeth and chewed and watched smoke rise from the chimneys of the dwellings, twenty-three of them now, arranged in a rough crescent around the castle's southern face, each one raised by the metal hands of the servants that walked in and out of the crystal fortress as casually as men walk through doors.

The dwellings were unlike anything Sylvi had seen before Hopetown. Stone gave them substance, warmth, the familiar texture of the earth they'd been quarried from. Crystal gave them light. By day, the panels set into the walls caught whatever sun the northern sky offered and held it, so the dwellings glowed faintly from within, warm and amber. By night the glow deepened to a soft blue-white, the same color as the castle's pulse, and the whole settlement shimmered in the dark.

The roofs were pitched steep to shed snow, and lined with a material Sylvi couldn't name - dark, smooth, warmer than ice to the touch and harder than stone. Inside, the floors were packed earth covered with woven rushes and the hides of animals the hunters brought back from the forest: deer, elk, the occasional aurochs, thick-furred and rich with fat. Every dwelling had a hearth lined in that same dark material, and every hearth burned blocks of something that gave off more heat than wood ever had and left almost no ash behind.

They weren't large, most of them - a single room, sleeping platforms along the walls, a central space for the hearth and the table and whatever few things a family had managed to gather in the two years since the settlement began. But they were dry. They were warm. The wind did not come through the walls, and the snow did not come through the roof, and for a girl who had spent years sleeping in tree hollows and under piles of dead leaves with nothing between her and the cold but her own thin body, they were the finest shelters in the world.

She wore the garment.

Every person in Hopetown did. The metal people had given them out in the early days, when the settlement was barely a clearing and its people still half-expected to wake up and find it gone. The fabric was unlike anything Sylvi had ever touched - it clung to the body without constricting, moving with her the way skin moves over muscle, and it was warm. The cold didn't creep up the sleeves or down the collar. It simply didn't reach her at all.

The garments did not tear. She'd learned that in her first week, when her sleeve caught on a branch while she was climbing a sentinel pine at the settlement's edge. She felt the branch snag, felt the fabric pull taut against her arm, and braced for the rip - the sound of cloth giving way that she'd heard a hundred times in her life. It never came. She pulled free and the fabric settled back against her skin without a mark, without a thread out of place, as if the branch had never touched it at all. She tested it after that. Dug her nails in. Dragged it across a stone's sharp edge. Pulled until her arms shook. Nothing.

The garment was hers. The first thing that had ever truly been hers - given freely, without condition, without any expectation of return.

She wore white because she was of Hopetown. The princess who'd visited once wore black and red - Sylvi had heard the story from Dobbs, who'd been there when it happened. The colors of her house, Triss-Number Four-had explained.

She was thirteen years old, with hair the white of old snow that fell past her shoulders in a tangle she'd long since given up trying to comb straight. Her skin was paler than any the free folk had ever seen on someone still breathing - so pale the veins showed at her wrists and temples like blue-green threads under skin thin as a membrane, borrowed from some more delicate creature. She burned in weak sun and freckled if the light lingered on her too long, a thing built for the dark and the cold and the places the sun didn't reach. Her eyes were the reason her tribe had cast her out: cyan, the color of a river locked under ice, of a winter sky seen through frost, a color no human eye was meant to be. Her mother had looked at those eyes with something worse than hatred. Fear.

You are cursed, her mother had told her. You bring bad luck. You bring death. She'd said it with such certainty that even now - two years fed and housed and warm and safe in a settlement that shouldn't exist - Sylvi sometimes woke in the dark with the words still in her mouth and the old fear in her chest, and had to remind herself: she was not cursed. She was not bad luck. She was alive.

She'd been seven when her mother told her to leave. Seven years old, standing in the snow outside her tribe's camp, the firelight at her back and the dark forest ahead, and her mother's voice in her ears: If you do not leave, I will kill you.

She had left with tears in her eyes.

She survived, though she couldn't say exactly how. That first month she hadn't yet learned which roots were safe to eat and which would leave her doubled over sick. She hadn't found the caves and hollows where the wind couldn't reach. She hadn't learned to move through the trees the way prey moves - listening for the snap of a branch, the shiver of a leaf that meant something large was close. She ate things she wouldn't touch now: bark, lichen, the pale grubs curled beneath rotting logs, eaten raw and wriggling, tasting of nothing but the wood they'd lived in.

She hadn't died. She'd learned. She grew hard and sharp and quick, learned to read the forest - how the birds went silent when a predator was near, how the snow lay thin over ground where the permafrost ran shallow, how the wind changed its voice before a storm. She learned to hunt, badly at first and less badly with time: snares for rabbits, small game driven into deadfalls, and once, a young elk, killed with a sharpened stick punched into its throat while it drank at a stream. She ate for a week off that elk. It was still the clearest memory she had - the taste of it.

She'd been nine when the castle first appeared.

She'd been in a tree - a sentinel pine, its branches thick enough to hold her, its trunk wide enough to break the wind - sleeping, or trying to. She was curled in the fork of the branches, arms wrapped around herself, eyes closed against the dark. She felt it before she heard it: a vibration climbing up through the tree and into her bones, a hum too low to hear but too real to ignore. She opened her eyes, and the forest was glowing.

The light came from everywhere and nowhere at once.

The castle rose out of the earth. She watched it happen - enormous, beautiful, the single most terrifying thing she had ever seen in her life.

She stayed in that tree for days, watching the castle settle and pulse and breathe, watching the forest around it change to make room for it.

Then it sank back into the earth, as suddenly as it had come.

It came back at night - late, in the deep stillness before dawn, when even the forest seems to hold its breath. Sylvi had been asleep in a hollow, curled into the warm earth, dreaming of nothing. She woke to light.

The castle was rising again.

The same way it had the first time. Sylvi stood in the clearing in her rags, lit blue-white by the glow, and felt the pulse return - the deep, steady heartbeat of the castle settling into the ground, into the stones, into her own chest.

She hadn't known, then, why the fortress rose and sank the way it did. Dobbs told her later - much later, on one of his visits - what had actually happened.

After that second rising, the free folk came.

They arrived in waves - scouts first, then war parties, then whole tribes, pouring out of the Haunted Forest in furs and bone armor, axes and spears in hand, drawn by a glow that had been visible for miles in every direction. They came because they believed a new King Beyond the Wall had risen - a man with magic at his command, who would lead them south, through the Wall, and into the green lands where the food was plentiful and the people were soft and easy to take from. The free folk had been waiting for a king like that since before the Wall was ever built. They were always waiting for one.

Sylvi watched them gather from her perch at the castle's base - dozens at first, then hundreds, then more than she could count. They made camp in the clearing around the crystal, fires burning in a ring, and they argued and boasted and postured the way the free folk always did, the strong men pushing to the front and the weak ones falling back. The talk was all of war and conquest, the Wall, and what they meant to do to the crows once they broke through it.

She kept out of it. They looked at her the way her tribe had - a ghost among the living, a thing of snow and ice walking among people of earth and fire - and some of them spat and touched the bone charms at their throats when she passed too close. She ate what she could scavenge from their camps, slept against the warm crystal wall, and watched.

And then the boy came out.

He was younger than she'd expected. Not a man. Not a king. A boy, perhaps her age, perhaps a year younger.

He looked at the gathered free folk - hundreds of them, armed and armored in bone and fur and iron, warriors and chiefs and magnars and spearwives all crowded together - and then he spoke.

Sylvi was close enough to hear. She sat at the base of the castle, back against the crystal, knees drawn to her chest.

"Your ways end here."

The noise - the arguing, the boasting, the posturing - died at once. Every face turned toward him.

"No more raiding. No more taking what isn't yours by the edge of an axe. If you stay under my roof, you live by my rule: no stealing from each other, no harming each other, no taking by force what should be given freely. Keep to that, and you'll have shelter. You'll have food enough that no one goes without."

The silence lasted three heartbeats. Then the laughing started.

It began somewhere in the back and spread forward, face to face, until the whole gathering was laughing at once - and the boy stood before them and did not flinch.

A man stepped forward, big - broader than most, with a thick beard braided through with bone charms and a face that had been broken and healed so many times it had stopped trying to heal straight. Someone in the crowd called him a magnar, a lord among the Thenns, or a clan chief, or something close to it. Sylvi didn't care which. She cared that he was big, and angry, and carrying an axe.

"You think you can tell us what to do, boy?" The magnar's voice was a low growl. "You think you can talk to free folk like some southern lord talking down to his kneelers? We're not your dogs. And you're not our king."

The boy said nothing. He stood with his hands loose at his sides and looked at the magnar.

The magnar raised his axe.

Sylvi saw the fire before she understood what it was. She was sitting twenty feet away, close enough to feel the heat of it on her face - sudden and shocking against skin that was always cold, as if the warmth had been made on purpose to reach people who never felt any. The boy's eyes changed: the blue draining out of them, replaced by something red-orange and bright, a glow that built behind his pupils and then came pouring out.

The magnar stared at his own hand. The axe lay in the dirt, its head glowing cherry-red where the beam had struck it, the handle smoking. His palm was red and raw, but whole. He hadn't been hurt. He'd been warned.

The boy's eyes faded back to blue.

"You're free to leave," he said, and this time no one laughed.

The free folk left. Tribe by tribe, in the days that followed, they packed their camps and vanished back into the forest, taking their axes and spears and their old ways with them. The ones who stayed were the ones with no tribe left to return to, or whose tribes had never wanted them in the first place. Women without husbands. Children without families. Old men whose strength had gone. Young men who'd been too soft, or too strange, or too weak for the war bands. Outcasts. Cursed ones. The broken and the left-behind, and the ones who'd been told, as Sylvi had been told, that they were bad luck and should go.

Sylvi stayed. She stayed because the castle was warm and there was talk of food and because she had nowhere else to go - but mostly she stayed because of one look. Just a glance, as the boy turned back toward the castle doors: his eyes hadn't narrowed. Hadn't flinched. Hadn't shown the fear and the disgust she saw in every pair of eyes that found her white hair and that impossible blue-green stare. He looked at her the way he looked at everyone else. The same. As if there were nothing strange about her at all.

In the days that followed, the metal servants came out of the castle. They built the dwellings, laid out the storehouses, raised the wall - a fusion of grey stone and crystal that rose fifteen feet around the settlement. Not as high as the Wall, not nearly as vast, but solid and real, warm to the touch, humming with the same low pulse as the castle behind it.

The crows came occasionally - not often, once a month, maybe less. A small party out of Castle Black, led by Dobbs or Poul or one of the other watchmen who'd been there the night the castle first rose. They came to trade: furs and meat and the small practical things, in exchange for food and the white fabric the metal servants seemed to produce in endless supply. They came to look, too. And they came, Sylvi suspected, because they were afraid of what might happen if they stopped - if the settlement beyond the Wall kept growing and growing and growing with no one south of it watching, until the day it became something that couldn't be ignored any longer.

The crows had named the settlement Hopetown. Dobbs told her that, and told her why - the symbol. The S that marked the castle's face, the garments, the chests of the metal servants, the same one the boy wore on his own chest. Dobbs had been on the Wall the night the princess fell, and he told her what it meant, too.

Hope. She hadn't known what the word truly meant back then, not the way the boy meant it. But living in Hopetown, watching him build something where there had been nothing, watching the outcasts and the cursed and the left-behind find food and warmth and shelter in the shadow of a castle that pulsed like a heartbeat - she thought she understood it now. Hope wasn't a feeling. It wasn't optimism, or some vague faith that things would get better on their own. It was a thing you carried into the dark, because the dark was exactly where it was needed most.

The Children of the Forest came first.

Sylvi was in the marketplace when they appeared, slipping out of the trees like smoke, moving in absolute silence, their small bodies barely stirring the undergrowth as they approached the settlement wall. There were seven of them - nut-brown skin dappled with paler spots like a deer's hide, large eyes the color of gold and green, slitted like a cat's and catching what little light the forest offered. Their hands had three fingers and a thumb, each tipped with a sharp black claw, and they wore cloaks woven from leaves - oak and elm and weirwood, the deep red of the weirwood leaves bright against the brown and green.

The metal servants met them at the gate. They were given an enclave of their own - a stretch of the settlement's northern edge, where the weirwood grove stood untouched by the building of the wall or the dwellings around it. The metal servants had taken care with the weirwoods.

The Children made the grove their home. They wove cloaks from leaves and bracelets from vine and crowns from flowers, and sang in the True Tongue, low and strange and beautiful. In the sheltered ground between the weirwood roots they grew small gardens of mushrooms and oats and barleycorn, and fished the stream that ran along the settlement's eastern wall. Between what they grew themselves and what the storehouses gave them besides - fish, meat, cheese, milk, dried fruit, onions - they seemed, as far as Sylvi could tell, content.

The giants came later - a small tribe of them, massive and slow and shaggy, hands too clumsy for fine work but gentle enough to lift a child without bruising it. They'd come for the same reason everyone came: the castle was warm, the food was plentiful, and the boy had said they could stay. They were given an enclave of their own at the western edge, where the ground was rocky and the trees grew tall enough to allow for dwellings built to their scale - stone and crystal like all the rest, but with doorways twelve feet high and hearths wide enough to roast a whole elk.

Each group had its enclave. The humans - Sylvi and the other outcasts - had the crescent of dwellings around the castle's southern face. The Children had the weirwood grove to the north. The giants had the western rocks. And the castle stood at the center of it all, pulsing with its steady blue-white light, the S-shield glowing on its face day and night, the metal servants walking in and out of its doors, and the boy living somewhere inside.

She'd asked one of the Children about him, once. She'd been sitting at the edge of the weirwood grove - she went there often, because the trees were beautiful and the Children's singing was the most peaceful sound she'd ever heard, and because they never looked at her the way the free folk had.

"Is he one of the Old Gods?" she asked.

The Child looked at her, a long, unblinking look from those golden, cat-slitted eyes.

"He is not of the Old Gods," it said. "But the Old Gods favor him."

Sylvi hadn't fully understood what that meant. She still didn't. But the Children called him Sun-Child.

Once, just once, Sylvi had asked Triss - Number Four - about him. She'd been sitting in the castle's entrance hall, a space of crystal and light that Triss sometimes let her visit, while Triss worked at something Sylvi couldn't identify. The boy was somewhere deeper in the castle, behind doors that didn't open for her, and she hadn't seen him in weeks. He was rarely seen outside at all, and when he was, he looked - lonely. That was the only word for it. He walked among the dwellings and spoke to people, and he was kind, his blue eyes steady and warm, but there was something behind them. A distance. A weight.

"What's he doing in there all day?" Sylvi asked.

Triss was quiet a moment.

"He is preparing," Triss said.

"Preparing for what?"

"There are lands in the east," Triss said. "Across the sea. Cities of great suffering. People kept in chains. Kal means to end it."

That was the day Sylvi learned their god's true name. Kal. Not Kallen - the name the crows used, the one that had traveled south of the Wall in song and rumor and the frightened whispers of men who'd seen what he could do.

She didn't know what to make of the east. Didn't know what cities of great suffering looked like, or people in chains, or what it meant that a boy of - what was he now, fourteen? Thirteen? - meant to put a stop to it. She didn't know how one boy could end suffering in cities across a sea he'd never crossed. But she'd seen him melt an axe with a look. She'd watched the metal servants raise a settlement out of bare ground in a matter of days. And in two years of living in Hopetown, she had learned this much, at least: the word impossible didn't seem to apply to Kal.