Nerd In the North 5-7

Jon Snow woke with the weight still on his chest, accompanied with the same silence that stayed too long after dreams. Violet eyes drifted to his feet, the fire down to coals and scant embers. The shelter he’d built—bent branches, hide stretched tight, with packed snow at the edges—had done a great deal in keeping the wind off his face, but not much more.

The cold had yet to bite him in moons, simply settling on his body like a cloak of its own. He still wrapped his cloak close, still checked his hands for frostbite out of habit, yet the pain never came. 

Truly, that was in its own way worse.

No matter how much ice a Stark had in his blood, the cold should have remained a constant, familiar thing. It was all there was to remind a man of the North of their limits, of nature, of the possibility of death. Without it…

The bastard son of House Stark shook his head.

The dream lingered as it usually did, into his waking moments, refusing to drift away, as if smoke caught in his chest. Vast wings, a sky split by fire, and wind that wasn’t wind, but breath that could shudder entire trees. He didn’t flinch at waking, didn’t gasp either despite the dream and its contents.

No, the bastard son of Eddard Stark simply opened his eyes and held still, like maybe stillness could keep it from following.

Ghost was already watching him, red eyes seeming to catch the light of the dim sun with a shine to it that seemed more than normal.  Jon smiled his partner’s way and rubbed his hand into the furt atop Ghost’s head, the wolf silently huffing back at him.

Jon moved past Ghost as he rose, slow and deliberate, and pulled the furs aside, before checking the sky through the narrow slit of branches. Dawn. 

Or near enough, at least this far North. The sun would not truly rise for quite a time, but it was near enough that he knew when it would have been dawn by Winterfell’s reckoning. The snow outside sat fresh, a white covering soft on the pine-needles, as Jon took a breath that refused to show in the air.

The sword lay at his side, scabbarded in worn leather, castle-forged and unremarkable. It hadn’t changed shape or weight. But sometimes when he held it, he felt heat on the hilt.

A heat he chose not to question.

He’d stopped asking questions. There weren’t any answers to be found up here. Just trees and wind and the thing that pulled him north.

His limbs lacked the stiffness expected of both cold and travel, even after many days beyond the Wall and a great deal of both. He moved like he had since he crossed the Wall, steps quiet and purposeful as Ghost strode beside him, taller than he’d been even last week. His limbs moved with weight, not effort. Jon didn’t know when the change had started, only that it hadn’t stopped.

It had been moons, three, maybe four, since he’d left Castle Black. Since he’d taken nothing but the sword, the pack, and the silence that had begun in his bones before the fire ever touched his skin.

And that was where it began.

The dreams had started before he crossed the Wall. At first, they came with sleep. 

Then they followed him into waking. 

The more he walked north, the louder the pull became. A weight in the chest, a hum in the marrow, like something old wanted to see what he’d become.

He packed quickly. It didn’t take long. He kept little. 

Soon, he moved like a soldier without a war as the white wolf moved like he knew the shape of the empty trail, Jon following alongside him. Some part of him didn’t know where they were going. Another part always had.

By midmorning the trees had thinned, the snow deeper where wind hadn’t cleared it. He and Ghost moved without speaking as they often did, all the while Jon felt the dream gnawing at the back of his teeth again. 

Wings above him. 

Fire in the sky. 

And words in a language he could not understand but somehow knew all the same. 

Those same words made his heart shudder in his chest, Jon nearly completely silent since the second moon of travel, maybe longer. There hadn’t been anyone to hear, and even if there had, what would he say? 

That his eyes had gone purple, that his dreams flew over mountains no map marked, that he no longer feared fire but felt it waking under the skin.

His hand rested on the sword hilt, thought pausing, as Ghost stopped.

Jon’s body moved before his thoughts did as weight shifted to the balls of his feet and his grip tightened around leather-wrapped steel. 

The air ahead had gone more than still; dead.

Then came the scream.

It was a woman’s voice, rougher than most, but a woman still. Raw terror in the throat, and little strength behind it. The sound was not far. That was worrying on two fronts; he hadn’t realized how close he was to Wildlings, for one, and a Wildling screaming like that meant other Wildlings were attacking.

Despite himself, Jon was already moving, higher thought forgotten as he gave way to instinct and pull. He may have been raised a Northman but Eddard Stark had raised his blood with more honor and goodwill than almost any Southern knight could claim and that had yet to fail, even for Wildlings. 

Ghost flanked him, white blur against trees. They moved fast, faster than should be possible, but the forest parted for them now.

Or maybe it just didn’t try to stop them.

Branches tore at him. Snow cracked beneath his boots. The cold didn’t slow his breath and failed to touch the sweat already cooling on his back.

The clearing came sudden, like falling into silence.

The edges of the camp were torn with tents on the border caved in, a flimsy wall of wood breached as blood soaked into packed snow, dark and quiet.

The bodies weren’t still.

He soon stopped short, his sword half-raised as breath stilled in his chest.

They were moving despite clearly being dead, no natural life to their bodies as they jerked wrongly forwards.

The name rose slow in his mind, or it may have been that the world was moving too fast as he tried to reconcile what he was seeing. Old Nan had told many stories about the North and its past, from the Age of Dawn to the Age of Heroes.

Wights.

He’d heard the stories.

But the blue eyes burning bright with cold light, flesh rotting yet still moving, made his stomach clench.

The snow held blood, splatters and pools of red deep on white where limbs laid free. Tents had collapsed in on themselves, sagging under the weight of snow and whatever horror had passed through before. Smoke twisted faintly from a fire too old to warm and too weak to warn, curling past shredded hides and shattered stakes.

In the center, wildlings still fought as if desperation counted, with all the fury one expected of any man of the North in defense of their home. 

A redbeard of a brute swung an axe big enough for an Umber’s pride, bellowing like a gored auroch. The axe struck home, Jon’s eyes going wide for a moment as a dead thing split in two at the waist; the wildling only with a grunt and a curse on his lips as he moved onto the next. A girl near him, young, fast, and hair as deep a red as the man’s beard, ran in with a spear, arm moving like she was born with it n her hand. 

Still, it wasn’t enough, not with those two alone as the others fled. 

Jon stood at the tree line, sword at his hip and breath steady in his chest. Wildlings. 

He had gone moon after moon without having to face a single one. He’d seen a good many but hidden behind Ghost’s white fur, he was as unseen as a winter rabbit against the show. 

They were raiders, killers, thieves; a great deal worse than Theon’s people and the Iron Born were slaving pirates. They were exactly the sort the Watch was made to keep out, the kind the old oaths were for.

His fists clenched around the hilt of his blade.

But Jon had yet to take any of those.

Ghost moved before he did, the direwolf rushing forward as if he knew Jon’s thoughts. A white blur trampled across the snow with jaws wide open. Almost before Jon could take five paces, a rotted neck was torn in half before the wight had time to turn. 

Jon followed, just as silent and nearly as deadly. 

Steel cleared leather, nothing fancy in the draw as he struck the first one with a hard slash, spine to stomach. It turned. Dead eyes, blue as anything beyond the Wall, fixed on him as if sight still mattered. Its hands twitched forward, fingers like branches stripped of bark. Jon stepped back just once.

Fire. They burn. Not a story anymore. 

Heat ran the length of his arm, muscle to knuckle, pulse to edge and for a second, a single breath… the blade caught it.

When the wight lunged, Jon met it, the fire surging as the sword hit bone and refused any resistance. The dead creature screamed and dropped.

Jon could not spare the time to watch it die.

He turned and struck again, refusing to ease up until every dead thing in front of him returned to its rest.

With each and every swing of his sword, the fire grew inside him, a burning in his belly that made him want to scream through gritted teeth. “Nggh!”

As the sound left him, something else did as well.

Atop his sword, a full roaring flame burst to life on castle-forged steel. Jon didn’t give it thought, the sight and sensation as natural as anything else as he swung out again. Ghost stayed near, carving a path alongside him as they moved as one; master and beast in blood, breath and motion. 

Hands closed on him from behind, harder than dead things ought to manage. Jon twisted but couldn’t pull loose. “Nghrrh!”

The fire didn’t come this time. 

No, ice did.

His free hand burst open, palm against rotted chest as frost bled outward like it had been waiting there for his call. It spread across the thing’s arm, its shoulder, its throat. When Jon tore free, the creature shattered with a noise like frozen stone breaking beneath an axe. He turned, not to stare but to strike.

The flame still rode the edge of his sword, hungrier now, as Ghost circled him; the center of the fight pulling them both in.

More dead than living. That was clear.

The red-bearded man still held the line, axe rising and falling, no rhythm to it even as blows from his free hand sent wights flying back with strength more than a man should have. The flame-haired girl was still with her spear, each thrust sharp and sure, and when Jon drew close, they turned to face him.

Their eyes found his sword, then his wolf, then him.

“Behind you, crow!”

Jon had turned before the sentence finished from the spear-girl’s lips, violet eyes wide at the sigh before him.

The thing in the trees wasn’t a wight.

Tall, taller than men should be, armor of unnatural make gleaming with a strange stillness. It didn’t reflect light so much as bend it, a shimmer that slid sideways from its form. Its skin was the blue of fresh-frozen ice, with a face that was near-featureless in its beauty, mouth a pale suggestion, nose aquiline and ears unnaturally long and slender.

Its eyes burned without flame. Blue—not the blue of frost or sky or even the ice of its skin, but of something older. Something so cold it had forgotten how to melt.

It carried a sword, the blade of ice and crystal long and thin but curved subtly as if one of those Essosi blades. 

Jon didn’t move, the fire in him and on him refusing to waver.

The Walker’s head tilted, a clear confused interest on the thing’s face. Its mouth opened, and the sound that came wasn’t words. It was breaking, cracking, the sound of a frozen over lake giving way under a foolish man’s feet. But Jon understood it all the same.

You do not belong here, warm thing. Neither Ice nor Fire, yet you carry both. Abomination, you are. Remnant of your dead ancestors and foolhardy betters, and nothing more.

The cold should’ve taken him in that moment. The fire should’ve burst outward, burned him hollow. Instead, Jon stood taller.

“I belong where I choose.” His grip didn’t tighten around the hilt of his blade. There was no need.

The fire gathered, sword pulsing in his grim

“Monster.”

Ghost snarled low in his throat, hackles bristling like a ridge of snow-driven pines. The direworld was no small beast, standing as tall as a small horse now, and a threat to all that stood in his way. Yet beside the figure of ice, even Ghost looked diminished.

With the stillness of something ancient, the thing’s gaze passed through the living without interest. Until it found Jon.

Then it moved.

Without warning or ward, it moved.

Ice met steel as Jon’s blade rose without thought, flame flaring where they kissed. “Ngggh!”

Monster. The sound was not steel on steel but hissing frost and the whistle of steam as both the fire and cold staggered back a pace. 

The White Walker stared back at him, confusion marring curiosity as a twitch of shock and surprise entered the monster’s face.

Jon Snow had no time to think further as he stepped forward again, the fire in his blood rising sharp and hot as he moved with knowledge he knew not where from. Fire flickered atop his blade in light that flickered from gold to red and the White Walker’s blade lifted again, elegant and ancient, but slower now.

Caution, not fatigue; Jon wasn’t foolhardy enough to believe otherwise.

Boy and demon circled each other as they fought in silence, broken only by the crash of their weapons and the hiss of flame meeting rime. Each strike carved steam into the air, each blow met with heat that turned the ground to slush beneath their boots, snow melting in jagged lines where fire licked and ice sliced.

Each movement chipped away at the breath Jon didn’t realize he was holding. He could feel the strength in the Walker, inhuman, but his own limbs didn’t falter and his blade didn’t break.

It burned.

The next strike came too fast but Jon parried high with speed more than man should have and caught the blow flat on his blade. The Walker twisted under, moving even faster, as the ice blade flicked low.

Ice kissed him.

Blood spotted Jon’s side before he registered the cut, a slice too fast to see that slid beneath his guard. It wasn’t a slice. That sword was no simple ice and Jon knew that like he knew his name as he felt the chill cut into his being , cold he hadn’t felt in moons sliding past flesh like a poision as it aimed for bone and heart both.

The bastard son of House Stark felt his breath catch—but didn’t freeze. The heat inside surged up like a tide crashing against the cold.

Ghost lunged from the side, jaws clamping around the creature’s sword arm. His boy made a noise, pained and whimpering, as something else sounded off in Ghost’s body like ice cracking under weight, before the direwolf was flung away like a sack of dried meat. Wood splintered under Ghost’s weight, part of a collapsed structure giving out with a groan.

Purple eyes shone bright as rage burst through his focus, all pain forgotten in the moment.

The fire didn’t climb. It spilled from skin, from breath, from grip, and flooded into his blade as the sword ignited in truth. Not flaring with flickers, but wreathed in true flame—a light so bright and heat so intense it bent the air around it. Jon Snow’s feet moved without command, rage in his bones, the same as the flame in his hands, overwhelming and powerful.

The Walker raised its blade. Jon didn’t falter.

And neither did his blade as he struck through it, ice shattering like old glass. The sword didn’t stop. It plunged into the creature’s chest, flame blooming inside the wound.

Oh.

Jon understood that, the single word the Walker let free  looked down at the steel in its heart, cracks already spreading from the wound like spiderwebs catching light.

A sound Jon had never heard — a sigh like the shattering of a great glacier, too loud and too deep — left the mouth of the greatest Enemy of Man.

Then it broke.

Shards fell, gleaming, melting before they hit the snow as the heat from his blade eliminated even its remnants.

Jon stood in the middle of it, the sword still raised amidst the sudden silence, fire flickering lower with every breath. One by one, the wights collapsed like broken puppets, blue light snuffed from their eyes as the dead became what they should be.

“Wot in ‘e frozen fokking ‘ells was that?”

Jon turned, violent eyes blinking.

The red-bearded man, axe dripping gore, watched with his mouth half-open. The woman with the spear had not lowered it. Her knuckles were white on the shaft, though her stance had shifted, as she pointed an accusing finger his way.

Jon meant to answer. Or at least open his mouth. 

But his side burned at the edges and froze at the core, his wound suddenly returning to his attention. The fire, whatever had held it, began to falter along with his strength, his legs buckling without permission. 

Jon’s blade slid from his grip, fire guttering before it hit the snow.

Then nothing.

– o – o – o – o – o – o – o –​

Jon dreamed of ice and fire.

He stood atop the Wall, but it wasn’t the Wall he remembered. This was older, rawer, carved directly from living ice with no wooden structures to mar its perfect line. Below him stretched a landscape of white.

Untouched by human hands, a true wilderness of ice and snow as far as the eye could see, trees growing far on the horizon as tall as mountains as they rose even higher into the sky.

And yet, he burned. Heat coursed through his veins like molten metal, like summer lightning. It should have been agony, but it felt right. Necessary. As if the fire had always been there, waiting to be acknowledged.

Above him, vast wings beat against an iron sky. He couldn’t see the creature they belonged to—only the shadow it cast upon the snow, large enough to swallow villages whole. But he knew what it was.

Dragon. 

– o – o – o – o – o – o – o –​

Violet eyes shuttered open, Jon’s right hand moved before the rest of him did, reaching for the sword that wasn’t there. What…

The weight of furs clung to his chest, smoke in the air, musk of hide and meat clinging to his throat. A tent, but not the one he’d built; far too big and well-made for it to be his. 

Nggh. Jon held his side as the ache in his ribs sat deep, old, but dulled. 

Too dull for something so fresh.

“Thought Tormund had the right of it,” a girl’s voice cracked across the silence. Jon turned his head to see exactly that crouched in front of a tent flap, red hair catching a thread of firelight from the outside. “Some thought you dead, crow.”

Young, younger than him maybe, but only just. Maybe four and ten with a knife in her hands, but not raised. Dangerous.

That much was obvious.

But that wasn’t important.

Jon’s throat worked before his voice did. “Wh-where’s my wolf??”

Her grin came fast, nearly as sharp as the knife. “Out there.” She flicked her chin toward the tent-flap. “Growled at any bugger who tried coming close.”

Good boy. Jon nodded at the thought of it, barely even thinking as he tried sitting up. His muscles didn’t argue much, a sudden awareness of that making him… pause.

The White Walker… It had stabbed him, its blade reaching him in the ribs, far deeper than skin. Like it wanted to settle in the marrow and make its home.

“You heal quick,” she said, studying him like a puzzle she half-understood. “Too quick for a boy that bleeds. But then, boys don’t make swords burn, do they?”

Jon stared back at her, silent for nearly one and ten breaths. “Who are you?” 

“Ygritte.” Her tongue curled around the name with a rolling burr. “And you’re a crow.”

“I never took the oath.” He meant it flat, meant it to be a shield, but it cracked at the edges despite his intention. He had wanted nothing but the Watch, even after his arrival at the Wall and seeing the men, dealing with Ser Allister. 

But the dreams had clawed that from him. He’d left before the sworn words could ever leave his tongue.

“Still North of the Wall, aren’t you?” She sniffed, the back of her hand wiping away a trace of blood from her bruised face. “But you fight better than most kneelers I’ve seen.” Ygritte stretched and stood, the knife vanishing somewhere into her furs that Jon couldn’t quite follow with his eyes. “Tormund wants to talk. Says any man who kills a Walker ought to get a drink before we gut him.”

He moved to stand and, once again, the pain didn’t stop him. 

His sword leaned beside the hide wall, the thing just steel and memory with no flame to it. Jon picked it up anyway, the thing warm in his palm.

Outside, the wildling camp moved like ants after a flood; tents still crooked, bodies still lining the snow. Children carried buckets. Men hammered stakes. One woman sharpened a bone-bladed spear with red still drying at the tip.

Yet they all stared as he left the tent, Ghost padding toward him. The direwolf stood at his side, shoulder nearly even with Jon’s own. 

“That beast of yours,” Ygritte said behind him, “left and brought back a buck the size of the fat bear-fucker. Split the thing in half with his jaw and scared the right piss out of two lads.”

“Direwolf.” His answer was as simple as necessary, voice still rough from misuse.

She eyed him, not mocking. “And you’re not a common crow, then, are you?”

Another voice broke in before he could answer her or even tell her he was no ‘crow’, a voice loud enough to shake snow from branches.

“Not by half, ‘e ain’t!”

The red-bearded man who approached looked like he’d fed on bear fat and little else for all his years. Not nearly as tall as Walder, the wildling in front of him had much greater helft than Winterfell’s gateman. Laughing loud, the redbeard thumped his chest and grinned like a man about to tell the best tale you ever heard.

“Tormund Giantsbane.” His introduction made as much sense, a strong name for a man with the blows of a giant. “Tall-talker, Horn-blower, Breaker o’ Ice, Husband to she-bears, Mead-king o’ Ruddy Hall, and once—or so they say—lover to a frost-maiden with teeth like spears and breath like winter’s arse.”

Jon blinked once. “Jon Snow.”

Tormund laughed, full-bodied and loud. “Snow, is it? That a name or just the first thing ye thought of?” He circled once, inspecting. “You’ve the look of a southron, that’s plain. Too pretty for summat else. But you don’t carry yourself like a green boy. And you’re no simple crow.”

Jon didn’t answer, the memory of flame in his hands too near, the shatter of the Walker at his hands a constant presence.

Tormund scratched his beard. “Well, we’ll see what you are soon enough. Killing a Cold One with a flaming sword?” The big man spat into the snow and gave Jon another grin as wide as he’d ever seen. “That’s a tale worth a drink.”

Tormund led him to the fire at the center of the camp, where shadows danced long and the smoke clung low. 

The flames were high, fat logs snapped down the middle, hissing sap and heat and sparking with warmth that made Jon more comfortable despite not feeling the cold. Tormund pointed to a log, and Jon dropped to a seat, Ghost curled at his side like a pale sentinel. 

A horn pressed itself into Jon’s hand; the thing filled with a sloshing thick, white liquid that steamed. The smell turned his stomach before the taste had the chance.

He drank a quick gulp, swallowed the mouthful whole at one, and tried not to cough.

It burned like sourwine laced with grease and rot. Or worse. Gods, what is that? His throat tightened.

“Ye kill a Cold One?” Tormund’s laugh rolled out again. “But southron belly still too soft for proper drink, eh?”

Jon drank again but didn’t flinch this time as he let the burn settle behind his ribs.

Tormund lowered himself across from him with the grace of a falling tree, grunting like Theon in a whorehouse. “Now then, crow,” he said, leaning forward, elbows on knees. “How’s a black brother end up wandering past the Wall, burning Walkers to ash like a bloody legend out of old songs?”

Jon let the fire fill the pause, let it crackle while he chose the shape of what truth he could give.

“I’m not a brother.” His voice came low and raw, unable to fight the pride at making a decision for his own freedom and will rather than that of honor. “I never swore.”

Ygritte, crouched nearby sharpening flint-tipped arrows, snorted. “Clever. Can’t hang a man for breaking vows if he never made ‘em.”

Tormund’s eyes didn’t leave Jon. “Why’d ye leave, Snow?”

Jon stared at the fire. “Dreams.”

The word didn’t echo but it somehow sunk between both him and Tormund.

“Wings,” he added. “Dark wings. Fire and shadow. Something calling.”

Across the circle, an older woman with grey eyes and braids tight as bone lines spoke without turning her head, voice like wind through dry branches. “Blood calls to blood.”

“What do you mean?”

“The old songs stir again. Ice. Fire. You hear them both,” the old woman said much and said little, sounding like any woodswitch he had ever met.

Jon followed her eyes to the fire, unsurprised as the flames leaned toward him; not wildly, not high but off-center all the same.

“I don’t understand it.” The words didn’t come with confusion, oddly enough. I’ve been waiting to say that.

“It started with the dreams. Then the cold stopped biting. Then came the heat. Then…”

“Then fire answered.”

Jon met the eyes of the redbeard once more. “And ice.”

The older woman nodded once, as if this told her everything. “Both.”

Tormund scratched his beard, rubbing the skin beneath his thumb. “Your blood runs hotter than a campfire, Snow. I’ve known men with gifts. Ygritte could shoot the eye off a winter hare with her eyes closed if she wanted. Me, I get strong when the blood’s up. But you…”

Jon didn’t answer as he stared down at his hands; one having frozen a wight solid. The other had burned through a blade of ice like it was straw. Both. Always both.

“Have you heard,” he said slowly, “of a dragon? Past the Frostfangs. Or something, anything old? Hidden?”

The shift in Tormund’s face was instant. “North of the Frostfangs is death.” His voice wasn’t mocking now. “The cold there bites deeper than steel. The Others don’t hide. They rule. No man lives past that line. Not for long. No dragons, either. Not anymore.”

“I have to try.” The words surprised even him.

He thought Tormund might scoff. Might laugh again. Instead, the wildling leaned back, arms folding across his chest like the words needed shelter to settle.

“You and that beast of yours killed enough dead to fill a pyre,” he said. “And you slew a Walker. I saw it.” He nodded once. “You might just make it.”

Jon didn’t speak.

“We head north,” Tormund said. “Not all the way. Just far enough to reach Mance Rayder’s camp. He’s gathering the free folk. Every clan. Every banner. To fight the White fuckers before they can take us all into the Long Night.”

Jon looked up. “And what does your king want with me?”

Tormund laughed again, but it didn’t carry the same ease. “What he wants?” He grinned. “Boy, when Mance hears a crow killed a Walker with a burning sword, he’ll either name you brother or burn you for luck. Might be both.”

“I’m not a crow.”

Ygritte’s voice slid in sharp, the girl pausing the sharpening of her arrowhead. “What are you then, Snow?”

What am I? Ice in his veins, fire under the skin, and eyes he refused to think about. 

“I’m Jon Snow.” It was a less an answer as much as it was a tether to all he knew. “And I’m going north.”

Tormund stood, brushing snow from his knees. “North it is. We leave at first light. The dark don’t like the sun, but it don’t fear it either. Keep your blade close, Snow.”

The others drifted, Ygritte the last to leave as she looked at him with silent eyes.

Jon didn’t move from the fire as Ghost pressed against his leg, the flames flickering and flaring his way once again.

In his mind, vast wings beat against an iron sky.