He Would Be A God To Them Chapter 29 (Patreon)

Spend a lot of time rewriting this. I think it turn out alright but you be the judge.

XXIX

A Boy From a Dead World

The holographic projection filled the central chamber of the Last House of El with a cold, blue-white light that made the crystal walls seem to breathe.

Kallen stood before it, hands at his sides, watching.

The figure in the projection stood taller than any man Kallen had seen-seven feet, maybe more-gaunt in a way that went past thinness into something architectural, as though the body beneath the armor had been built rather than grown. Its flesh was pale as milk, stretched tight over long limbs and sharp joints, the proportions wrong in a way that was subtle and total, the wrongness of a face half-remembered from a fever dream: close enough to human to unsettle, far enough from it to frighten. Its eyes were blue, they were the blue of ice lit from within-a star seen through frost, bright and burning and utterly cold.

Its armor moved, but not the way armor moves on a man - no clank of plate, no mechanical give of joints and rivets. The surface shifted and reformed with every step, camouflaging against the snow and ice behind it, colors bleeding through in grey and white and pale winter blue, until the figure seemed less to wear armor than to wear the landscape itself: a ghost made of winter.

The projection froze on the final frame, toward the light that had been recording it, and in the instant before the image died, its eyes met the lens dead on.

"This," Lara said, "is the last image transmitted by Scout Seven before it was destroyed. The encounter occurred at the edges of the so called Lands of Always Winter."

Kallen stared at the frozen image.

"Destroyed how?" he asked.

"An ice spear." Lara's voice was measured. "Thrown with a force sufficient to pierce the drone's outer hull."

Kallen frowned. "The drones are made of Kryptonian alloy."

"Yes."

"And an ice spear went through it?"

"Through the primary hull plating, yes. The alloy is designed to withstand extremes of temperature and pressure, including the vacuum of space. A projectile of ordinary ice, thrown by ordinary force, should not have been able to scratch it." She paused. "Either the spear was not ordinary ice, or the force behind it was not ordinary force. Or both."

Kallen studied the frozen image.

"There were two of them," Lara continued. "And they were not alone."

The projection shifted.

The new image was wider. It showed the full scene: the snowfield stretching toward a horizon that shimmered with cold, the distant glitter of something vast and frozen beyond it.

They were mounted.

The things beneath them were spiders.

Kallen's breath caught.

They were roughly the size of horses, some larger, bodies made of ice. The ice moved like something alive. Each leg articulated with a precision that was mechanical and organic. Their eyes were clusters of blue-white light, faceted like broken glass, throwing the drone's beam back in fragments.

The spiders left no tracks; the snow beneath them stayed unmarked, as though the creatures weighed nothing at all, gliding a fraction of an inch above the ground on the cold itself.

"The drones tracked them for approximately four minutes before the first spear was thrown," Lara said. "They were moving south-southwest. I believe they were scouts."

“I also believe that-like us-they are not from this planet."

"What makes you say that?"

The projection shifted again. The White Walker and its ice spider vanished, replaced by something Kallen did not immediately recognize-a web of fine lines, blue and white and gold, spreading across the surface of a globe. It took him a moment to understand what he was looking at.

It was G.R.R.M-15. Seen from above, from the vantage of the orbital sensors the pod had deployed on its way in. But overlaid on the surface was something he had never seen before-a mesh of energy, wrapping the planet in a web of luminous threads that pulsed and shifted and flowed like a living thing.

"This planet has a unique energy field," Lara said. "It envelops the entire world. The natives call it magic."

She said the word the way a maester might say it-acknowledging its existence while declining to grant it the respect it demanded. The faintest edge of something that, in a human, would have been a scoff.

"It affects the seasons," she continued. "I have been monitoring atmospheric and energy data since the pod's arrival. For the majority of the planet south of this latitude, the climate has been in a state of extended summer for years. This is not natural. No planetary body with this axial tilt, this orbital eccentricity, and this atmospheric composition should produce seasons of this duration. The energy field is doing it-stabilizing the climate, extending the warm period, suppressing the cold. Something on this planet is actively shaping its weather, and it has been doing so for a very long time."

Kallen looked at the energy web. The threads were densest in the south - in Essos, in the Reach, in the lands around the Summer Sea-and thinner as they spread north, fading to ghost-lines past the Neck, to almost nothing beyond the Wall.

"We can't feel it here," he said.

"No. North of the Wall, the energy field is attenuated. Whatever is generating it-whatever source maintains the web-it does not extend with full strength into this region. The long summer has not reached the lands beyond the Wall. The winter here is the natural state of this latitude, unmodified by the field." She paused. "Which means the Wall itself may serve as a boundary-not just a physical barrier, but an energetic one. The energy field stops at the Wall. And beyond the Wall, something else begins."

"The White Walkers."

"The White Walkers," Lara confirmed. "Their energy signature is different from the planetary field. Different frequency, different structure, different origin. Whatever they are, however they came to be, they are not a product of this world's natural systems. And their energy is concentrated in the Lands of Always Winter."

Kallen absorbed this. "You think they're from somewhere else."

"I think," Lara said carefully, "that the evidence is consistent with that hypothesis. Their biology, if it can be called biology, does not match any lifeform in my database. Their armor behaves in ways that suggest manufacturing techniques beyond anything this planet has produced. Their energy signature does not match the planetary field. And they are riding spiders made of living ice." She looked at him. "Spiders made of ice do not evolve on a planet with a yellow sun."

Kallen was quiet for a moment. "What does this mean for me?"

Lara's expression did not change but something warmer crept into the cadence of her voice. Something close to concern.

"The energy field that envelops this planet, it saturates everything. Every living thing, every stone, every body of water. It is in the air you breathe and the food you eat and the ground you walk on. You have been immersed in it since your arrived, and your cells have been absorbing it for years alongside the yellow sun's radiation."

She paused. The projection shifted to a diagram-his body, rendered in wire-frame, with two overlapping fields shown around it. One was gold, the color of sunlight, dense and bright. The other was fainter, blue-white, threading through the gold like veins through marble.

"My theory is that the combination of yellow sun radiation and long-term exposure to this planet's energy field has enhanced your invulnerability beyond what either source could produce alone. A Kryptonian who arrived on this planet today - freshly exposed to the yellow sun, with no years of immersion in the planetary field-would be vulnerable to things that you are not."

"Such as?"

"Dragon fire," Lara said. "Valyrian steel. Both of these substances carry traces of the planetary energy field. Dragon fire is not ordinary combustion-it is thermally similar to ordinary fire but energetically distinct, carrying signatures that align with the planetary field's frequency. Valyrian steel was forged using techniques that, according to my historical analysis, incorporated the same energy in their process. Either of these, in theory, could harm a Kryptonian who had not been modified by long-term exposure to this planet's field."

She looked at him. "You, however, have been modified. Your cells are saturated with both the yellow sun's radiation and the planetary field's energy. The combination has produced a level of invulnerability that exceeds what either source alone would grant. That is why Valyrian steel shattered against your shoulder and why I do not believe dragon fire would harm you."

Kallen raised an eyebrow. "You don't believe?"

"I don't know for certain. This is a theory, Kal-El. A well-supported theory, based on extensive analysis, but a theory nonetheless." The faintest hint of something dry entered her voice. "I would strongly advise against fighting a dragon to test it."

"I have no intention of fighting a dragon," Kallen said.

"Good. Because while I believe you are immune to dragon fire and Valyrian steel, the same cannot be said for the energy signature of the White Walkers."

The projection shifted back to the frozen image of the White Walker-those blue eyes, that shifting armor, the pale, gaunt figure standing on the snow at the edge of the Lands of Always Winter.

"If their weapons can pierce Kryptonian alloy then I must consider the possibility that they can also harm you."

Kallen looked at the projection. The blue eyes stared back at him-ice-cold, ancient, patient.

He did not know how to feel about that.

For years-since the moment he had first understood what he was, since the first time a blade had shattered on his skin-he had carried the quiet, unspoken certainty that he could not be hurt. That whatever the world threw at him, his body would hold. It was not arrogance. It was not recklessness. It was simply the knowledge, absorbed at the cellular level, that he was unbreakable.

And now he was being told that something in the Lands of Always Winter might be able to break him.

"I see," he said. His voice was quiet.

"If you do encounter them," Lara continued, and the shift in her tone was subtle but unmistakable-from analysis to instruction, from scientist to protector-"stay at range. Use your heat vision. Their energy signature appears to be thermal in nature-they generate cold, they are sustained by cold. Concentrated thermal radiation should disrupt their structure. But do not let them close. Do not let them touch you. Do not engage in melee."

"I understand," Kallen said.

"I want to be clear, Kal-El. I am not being cautious because I believe you are fragile. I am being cautious because I do not have enough data to be certain, and uncertainty, in my experience, is the condition under which the worst outcomes occur."

Kallen nodded. "I said I understand, Mom."

She studied him for a moment.

"Good," she said. "There is one more thing."

The projection shifted.

The Wall filled the chamber. Seven hundred feet of ice, rendered in wire-frame and light, stretching east and west across the projection. The detail was remarkable.

But Kallen's eyes went to the one place that was different.

The section he had broken.

The section they had repaired.

It was cracking.

He could see it in the projection-hairline fractures spreading from the center of the repaired section outward, like frost spreading across a windowpane. The cracks were thin, barely visible, but they were there, and they were growing. The repair was failing.

"The Wall is rejecting our repairs," Lara said. "The Kryptonian crystal we used to seal the breach is not bonding with the Wall's ice. The two materials are incompatible at a molecular level-the Wall's ice is not ordinary ice. It carries both the planetary energy field and the White Walkers' energy signature, woven together in ways I still cannot fully untangle. The Wall was not built by men alone, Kal-El."

"How?"

"I do not know. The technique is beyond anything my database contains. Whoever built the Wall-and it was built-the craftsmanship is remarkable. The two energy types should be incompatible, but they have been fused, bonded at a fundamental level, creating a material that is neither one nor the other but something new. Something that has lasted eight thousand years."

She looked at the cracks in the projection.

"We can repair the cracks. The process is straightforward. But the repair will not hold. The Wall will reject the Kryptonian crystal again, and the cracks will return. That section of the Wall is now a weak point. It will require monitoring and maintenance for as long as the Wall stands."

Kallen stared at the cracks. They did not look like much. They were his fault all the same.

He had done this. He had punched through eight thousand years of ice to save a falling girl, and the Wall had not forgotten.

He did not regret saving Rhaenyra. He would never regret that. He would have done it again, a thousand times, a million times, without hesitation. But the crack in the Wall was the price of that choice, and it was a price that would be paid by the men who stood on it and the world that depended on it.

"I know that expression," Lara said. "You are blaming yourself."

"Shouldn't I?"

"You saved a child's life. The Wall is damaged. Both things are true. The first does not cancel the second, and the second does not diminish the first." She paused. "You did what was right, Kal-El. The consequences of doing what is right are not the same as the consequences of doing wrong, even when they look similar."

Kallen said nothing. He knew, probably, that she was right. It did not stop him from feeling what he felt.

The projection shifted again.

This time the image was of something Kallen had never seen before.

It was massive. The size of a tower, its barrel a long, dark cylinder of Kryptonian alloy that gleamed with a faint blue-white sheen. The base was broad and heavy, anchored to a platform of crystal and stone, and the barrel could move-tracking, elevating, rotating on a gimbal system that allowed it to cover a wide arc. Along its length, conduits of light pulsed in time with the fortress's own heartbeat, and at the barrel's tip, a focusing lens gathered the light into a point so bright it hurt to look at directly.

"I have begun designing these for the walls of Hopetown," Lara said. "The settlement's perimeter wall will be armed with six emplacements, each capable of delivering concentrated thermal radiation at range sufficient to cover the entire clearing and the surrounding forest to a distance of two miles. The energy draw is significant, but the fortress's power reserves are more than adequate. Construction has not yet begun, but the designs are complete and the Numbers can begin fabrication at your command."

She paused. The projection split-showing the weapon on one side and the Wall on the other.

"I have considered installing similar emplacements on the Wall itself. The positioning would be optimal. However, I do not know how the Wall would react. Its energy is unstable at the repair site, and introducing Kryptonian technology into a structure that combines two unknown energy types is unpredictable."

"Then don't do it. Not yet. Not until we understand the Wall better."

"I agree."

The projection shifted one final time.

Kallen's breath caught.

Its hull was a dark, oxidized black, matte and pitted, with none of the fortress's smooth crystalline elegance. It rode on four jointed limbs, drawn up tight against the body in flight, built to unfold and dig into rock or ice or a city street the way an insect's legs unfold to land. There were no wings. Only a low, armored core bristling with sensor clusters and weapon housings, veined beneath the black plating with threads of blue light that pulsed faintly, like something breathing in its sleep. It looked less like it had been built to fly than built to hunt: low, hunched, patient, the kind of design that came from a civilization that had spent a thousand years perfecting war.

There were several of them-a small fleet, arranged in formation in the projection, each one casting its own faint shadow in the crystal light.

"Combined with the small fleet of gunships we have constructed for the liberation of Essos and your own abilities," Lara said, "I am confident that we will be able to repel any force the White Walkers are likely to send against Hopetown and The Wall."

"I want to try diplomacy first," he said.

Lara was quiet for a moment.

"I do not believe diplomacy will work with the White Walkers," she said. "Everything in their energy signature, their behavior, their movements suggests a species that operates on imperatives beyond negotiation. They are not political. They are not territorial in any way I can map onto a diplomatic framework. They are-" She paused. "They are a season. You do not negotiate with winter."

"Maybe not. But I'd rather try talking before I start burning things."

"Admirable," Lara said, and she meant it. "I will continue sending drones into the Lands of Always Winter. If I can locate the source of their energy-the place where they make their home, whatever form that takes-I will notify you. Perhaps, with more information, a diplomatic approach can be constructed. I will not rule it out."

She paused. The projection faded, the gunships and weapons and the Wall and the White Walkers dissolving into the crystal light of the chamber, leaving only the low thrum of the fortress's heartbeat and the glow of the consoles.

"Your new suit is ready," Lara said. "Are you ready to fly?"

Kallen looked at her.

"Yes," he said. "I'm ready."

A pedestal rose from the floor of the chamber.

It was simple-a column of crystal, smooth and pale, rising from the center of the dais with a soft hum that Kallen felt in his chest. And on the pedestal, floating an inch above the surface, turning slowly in the faint light, was the suit.

It was not cloth, and it was not metal, though it borrowed something from both. The body of it was dark, a deep matte grey-black, like ash cooled long past the point of glowing - but it was not lightless. Fine seams ran through it: at the wrists, the hips, the ankles, the soles of the feet, threads of molten orange-red pulsed beneath the surface like lava seen through stone, a quiet echo, Lara had told him once, of the furnaces that had powered Krypton and, in the end, helped burn it down. Over where his heart would sit, the S-shield waited in the dark material-not the softer, rounder shield he had worn as a boy, but something sharper, the lines thickened, the points at top and bottom drawn long and fine, filling nearly the whole of the gold behind it, so that it read less like a letter and more like a claw, or a flame, or a word in a language no human throat could shape.

Beside the suit, folded and still, hung the cape.

Up close it had no weave, no thread-only a fine, drifting dust, dark red shot through with gold, that held its shape the way sand holds the shape of a dune: always, faintly, on the verge of losing it.

Kallen reached out his hand.

The suit reached back.

It came off the pedestal as a stream of shifting dark material, warm and faintly electric where it touched his fingers, climbing his wrist and forearm with the deliberate motion of something that knew exactly where it was going. It spread over his shoulder, his chest - the S-shield resolving out of the dark material over his heart - down his torso, his legs, his feet, until it covered him completely. Where it settled, it hardened: not rigid, but firm, a second skin that moved when he moved and breathed when he breathed. At his wrists and ankles, along the line of his hips, the orange-red seams brightened, banked embers waking to a draft. Last, the cape lifted from the pedestal and settled across his shoulders, and he felt it more than saw it-a drift of fine grit resettling against his back, ready to come apart and re-form at his word.

The suit was different from the one he had worn before. This was something else. This was him, extended. It moved with his muscles, responded to his thoughts, and when he flexed his hand the material flexed with it, and when he breathed the material breathed, and the S-shield on his chest pulsed with his heartbeat.

He stood in the chamber, encased in the living armor of a dead world, and he was ready.

He walked out of the fortress, and in the doorway the wind caught the cape and drew it out behind him, a long banner of red-gold dust unraveling and reforming with every gust, never quite settling.

The people of Hopetown stopped what they were doing. All of them-at once, the way a field of grass flattens when the wind shifts. The woman hanging washing on a line outside her dwelling, her hands frozen mid-motion, the wet cloth dripping from her fingers. The old man sharpening a bone knife on a stone, his hand still on the blade. The children playing in the marketplace, their game forgotten, their faces turned toward the fortress gate.

They stared.

Kallen walked through the settlement-through the crescent of dwellings, past the marketplace where the food was distributed, past the perimeter wall of stone and crystal-and the people watched him with expressions he had learned to recognize but never to love. Awe. Wonder. Worship.

He did not like the way they looked at him. He had never liked it. It was the look the free folk had given him when he melted the axe, the look Dobbs had given him in the clearing, the look Melisandre had given him when she knelt in the mud. It was not the look of people seeing a person. It was the look of people seeing a god.

He was not a god. He was a boy from a dead world. The sun made him extraordinary. He was not divine.

But they looked at him with that look, and he could not stop them, and so he walked through it the way he walked through everything-with his jaw set and his eyes forward and the weight of their wonder on his shoulders like a cloak he had not asked for and could not remove.

He walked past the wall. Past the last of the dwellings and the cleared ground beyond them, into the edge of the Haunted Forest, where the trees were thinner and the ground was bare and the settlement was behind him.

The people followed.

They came out of the gate in a trickle - first the children, then the women, then the men - drawn by the sight of their god walking into the forest, curiosity pulling them the way the ring had once pulled Kallen, steady and insistent and impossible to ignore. They gathered, watching, a growing crowd of white-suited figures.

Triss appeared.

"Stand back," she said, her cheerful voice carrying across the distance with a clarity that cut through the murmur of the crowd. "Whatever is about to happen, you will want to be behind the wall."

The people listened.

Kallen cleared the Haunted Forest.

The trees fell away. The ground changed-from the dark, root-laced soil of the forest to the open tundra that stretched north and west toward the Lands of Always Winter, a vast expanse of frozen grass and bare earth and grey sky that went on forever.

He walked to the center of it. He took a knee.

His fist pressed against the frozen ground. He felt the earth beneath him-felt the permafrost, the layers of frozen soil and ancient ice, the slow, deep pulse of the planet itself, turning in the dark. He felt the suit respond, the liquid metal flowing and hardening and flowing again, the S-shield on his chest flaring with a light he could feel in his bones.

The ground began to shake - a vibration that rose from beneath the tundra, through soil and permafrost and frozen grass, a low resonant hum Kallen felt in his knees, his fists, his teeth.

Dirt and rocks began to float.

Small at first-pebbles lifting from the ground, hovering an inch, two inches, drifting upward in slow, spiraling arcs around him. Then larger-stones the size of fists, then the size of heads, then chunks of frozen earth, all rising, all floating, all orbiting him in a widening ring that spun faster as the hum deepened, the ground shook harder, and the light from the suit grew brighter.

The ring widened-rocks, dirt, and ice spreading outward in a disk of floating debris thirty feet, then forty, then fifty across-while the ground beneath him split in cracks that radiated outward from his fist.

Kallen breathed in.

The yellow sun was above him. The cold was around him. The world was beneath him. And somewhere to the south, people were dying in chains, and he was going to stop it.

He launched.

A single, concussive boom cracked the tundra in a circle fifty feet wide and sent the floating rocks and dirt spraying outward in a wall of debris that fell to the earth in a rain that lasted seconds.

Kallen rose-accelerating. The suit blazed, the S-shield burning like a star on his chest, the cape unspooling behind him in a long red-gold contrail of drifting motes, as the grey sky rushed toward him and the earth fell away.

He hit the cloud layer without slowing. For an instant the world went white and formless, cold vapor tearing apart around him in ragged streamers, and then he was through it, into clear air and a sky gone hard and blue, wide open in every direction.

He banked sharply south.

The world tilted. The tundra became a blur of white and grey below him, the Haunted Forest a dark smear on the eastern horizon, the fortress shrinking to a point of pale light, then gone. The air screamed past him, parting before him, closing behind him, and the sonic boom followed-a crack of sound that rolled across the frozen landscape and echoed off the Wall and the mountains and the distant sea.

He flew past the Wall.

Seven hundred feet of ice, seven hundred feet of history, seven hundred feet of everything the world had built to keep the dark at bay-and he passed it in a heartbeat, a dark streak against the white, the S-shield blazing, the sonic boom shaking the ice and sending cracks through the snow on the parapets. The men on the Wall looked up-faces raw, eyes wide, mouths open-and saw him go, a shooting star flying south where no shooting star had ever flown before.

He flew past the North.

Winterfell blurred beneath him for a moment-the walls and towers of it small and grey and solid, the smoke of its hearth fires rising in columns that his passage bent and scattered. Then the Wolfswood opened beneath him, dark pines and darker oaks, the canopy a sea of green and black broken here and there by the silver thread of a river or the grey smudge of a holdfast.

He flew past the Neck.

The marshes of the Neck spread beneath him like a vast, green-brown stain-the slow water and the floating islands and the moss-covered ruins of the old kingdoms, the crannogmen's hidden villages invisible from above, the causeways thin lines of solid ground threading through the bog. The air changed-warmer, wetter, the cold of the north giving way to the heavy, humid air of the Riverlands.

He was laughing.

He could not help it. The joy was too large to contain-the sheer, uncomplicated, physical joy of flight, of speed, of the world falling away beneath him and the sky opening ahead.

He flew past King's Landing.

The city appeared below him-a sprawl of grey and brown and red, the Blackwater cutting through it, the Red Keep rising on its hill. He could see people in the streets-tiny, ant-small, going about their lives, buying and selling and arguing and praying, and for a moment he thought of Rosey and Myla and Aldric and Tomlyn, and the green door on the Street of Flour, and the room that smelled of bread.

He dipped low.

The Blackwater Bay opened beneath him-the grey-green water churning where the river met the sea, the ships at anchor swaying gently in the swell, the fishing boats heading out with the morning tide. He dropped until he was feet above the water, the suit cutting a line across the surface, and the wake spread behind him-a V of white water that stretched across the bay, the spray rising in curtains on either side, the boats rocking in his passage, the fishermen staring over the gunwales at the dark shape skimming the water.

He turned sharply up.

The world fell away. The bay, the city, the Red Keep, the Dragonpit-all of it shrinking, the details blurring, the colors bleeding together as the altitude built. The sky darkened around him -from blue to indigo to the deep, bruising purple of the upper atmosphere, and then to black, and the stars appeared, hard and bright and everywhere, and the sun-

The sun was there.

Unfiltered, pouring its light and radiation into space in a continuous stream. Kallen flew into it, and the suit blazed, and his cells drank it in, and the power built in him like a tide rising in a well, filling every cell, every fiber, every molecule with the energy of a yellow star.

He looked down.

G.R.R.M-15 hung in the black beneath him-a sphere of blue and white and green, the clouds swirling in patterns that looked, from up here, like the brushstrokes of a painter who had been working for a very long time. The Wall was a thread of white across the north. The Narrow Sea a ribbon of grey between the western and eastern continents. King's Landing a smudge on the western coast. And to the east-

Essos.

The vast, sprawling continent that stretched from the Narrow Sea to the edges of the known world. The Free Cities along the western coast-Pentos and Myr and Lys and Tyrosh, the Disputed Lands between them. The Dothraki Sea, a green-gold expanse of grassland larger than any kingdom in Westeros. The Slaver's Bay cities-Astapor, Yunkai, Meereen-where men bought and sold other men in chains.

He focused on Essos. The suit responded, the liquid metal shifting, the S-shield flaring brighter, and he turned himself toward the east.

His work was about to begin.