Nerd In the North 6-15
His home had fallen and, with it, most of the North.
The rot had spread as much as the greater growth, the second feeding the first, something Bran could feel right through the soles of his boots.
Those same boots hit the damp earth step by step as he ran for safety, his legs working better than they ever had after months of proper healing and rest. They bent at the knees as he needed them to, pushing off the ground as he commanded, and carried his weight as well as any steed.
Lord Veder’s workings had knit his broken back moons past, the shattered pieces of him whole as any proper Stark of Winterfell should be. He had legs again, yes, but what good were they when he had nowhere to rest them?
Winterfell was a ruin behind him, the floors soaked with brine and the walls splattered with blood. When Bran closed his eyes before he slept, the grey stone of the First Keep and the glass gardens did not come to him
No, he saw the squids.
Ironborn, as the monsters he had always known them, and not simple men as his father and Maester Luwin would have had him believe.
More than men with axes, the monsters pulled themselves over the high walls, taking arrow after arrow from the guards.
Shafts sunk deep into their throats and chests, the raiders bleeding seawater as they refused to die. The brine poured from their wounds, clear and salty, as they chanted to a dead God and cut down all in their path. Bran swallowed the lump in his throat, the memory going down with it as he did his best to hold himself.
A Stark doesn’t cry. Father wouldn’t cry. Robb wouldn’t cry.
He didn’t even have time for that, too busy fleeing to spare a moment for tears. Bran didn’t know how long they had been running. The Wolfswood reached up so high it swallowed the sky from where they walked, branches locked together to blot out the sun. The days were long and seemed to never end, the night a simple blink of darkness and tired whispers. It could have been a simple sennight since they scrambled through the hunter’s gate in the dark yet it could also have been a whole moon.
Bran simply couldn’t say.
A woman walked ahead of them, the servant of Winterfell that had saved them their only companion.
Osha dragged the heavy wooden handcart she had scavenged from a burned farm, the once-spearwife determined to keep both Bran and Rickon safe. The woman had taken that oath to heart and, with her determination, something had changed in her blood. Direction came to her with ease, north always in her knowledge. In the shadows, her eyes would widen and darken and she would simply know.
Even now, she dropped low to the damp earth, spear resting flat across her knees. “Salt.”
Bran crouched beside her, fingers digging into the cold dirt as a frown set across his face. But we’re far from the sea.
Winterfell was at least a hundred leagues from the Bay of Ice, and while they had made good distance since they fled, Bran strongly doubted these woods, thick as they were, were at all close to any shore.
He sniffed the air still, and found Osha’s words true. Past the smell of pine and leaves, the harsh brine stung at his throat and left him unable to doubt. “…the sea, then?”
“Nay, li’l lord.” Osha turned her head to spit quietly into mud. “Squids. Three o’ ’em scoutin’ these parts. They bring the sea with them. They don’t breathe right no more. Lungs full o’ ocean.” The spearwife had no need to search the ground for footprints and Bran found himself doubting her less and less as the days passed by, even as she couldn’t explain herself as to how she knew any of this.
Bran knew what that felt like; knowledge a curse and a gift both.
Even with Summer’s dreams touching his, he too knew more than he should.
“Will they find us?” He asked the question she could answer, his voice coming quick as the words bunched together. Shoulders forced back, Brand did his best to make the question sound like a lord asking for a scout’s report, tightening his throat as best as he could to keep the shakes out of it.
“Nay.” Osha rose up again, her hands grabbing at the cart to keep to their pace. “Downwind we are. An’ they don’t see good in t’ dark. Eyes clouded over like dead fish. We keep moving, little lord. Quiet now.”
Bran nodded, reaching back to grab Rickon’s hand.
“No!”
His brother yanked his arm away with a grunt, the boy of six wearing a scowl that belonged on the face of one far older. At six years old, Rickon was not one for tears anymore. When they first ran, he had cried for Mother but time in the Wolfwood had twisted that sorry into a rage both concentrated and feral.
He barely spoke proper words much at all, more sounds that matched the low rumbling coming from the massive chest of Shaggydog, Rickon’s direwolf pacing just a few feet away in the brush.
Bran looked at his little brother’s face, smudged with dirt and pine sap, the memory of their fifth day in the forests returning to him.
– o – o – o – o – o – o – o –
The cart had been his, Summer asleep and Rickon playing with Shaggydog as Osha scouted ahead to be sure their path was clear.
Yet it was from behind that a straggler stumbled into their camp; a desperate deserter gaunt with hunger and wearing the torn colors of some broken Northern host. The man’s eyes were sunken and ratlike, ribs showing through his tunic. Those same eyes had fallen on the sack of salted beef resting near the cart wheel, mouth open as he licked dry lips.
The notched dagger, rusted at the edge, came out and the man rushed forward.
Tully blue eyes stared, wide and open, bravery forgotten for a single moment as the boy who would have been the Stark in Winterfell realized he wasn’t even that.
Not with Winterfell gone.
No. His fingers tightened around the rough bark of a thick oak branch, stripped and sharpened by Osha for him to use as a spear. Yet, his feet refused him, almost stuck to the mud as he simply watched the man move towards them.
“Bad!”
Rickon did not freeze.
No, his brother moved a roar left his lips, the furious snarl of a cornered beast as he threw his small body off the cart directly at the man’s leg.
Teeth sharper than any man or boy sunk into leather breeches, biting straight through boiled hide and into the flesh beneath it all. The deserter shrieked like a man dying, the dagger falling from his grip in shock and pain both.
Even still, his fist rose high to strike the child clinging to his thigh.
A shadow detached itself from the cart to meet its master.
The black direwolf hit the deserter’s chest with speed and force both, the man’s scream cut short as the impact tore the breath from his lungs. Shaggydog’s dripping jaws snapped shut directly around the throat, silencing any chance of the scream returning beneath a snap that echoed through the now-quiet woods.
Legs kicking weakly, the man’s blood stained the snow around him, his last gasps unheard under the pants and growls of boy and direwolf both. Rickon picked himself up from the twitching body and stood over it, face smeared dark with lifeblood, andsmall chest heaving up and down as one with the beast at his side.
“Mine!” Rickon pointed at the dead man. “My meat! Shaggy’s!”
– o – o – o – o – o – o – o –
Bran pulled his cloak tighter around his shoulders as he walked behind in the cart, fighting off a shiver that had nothing to do with the chill. His eyes stayed away from the dark stains still dried on Rickon’s tunic but, too often, it would drift back.
I miss mother. He wanted her to smooth Rickon’s hair and tell him it was a bad dream, but there was no one to ask, no one to fix it, and Bran had to be the lord now.
To escape the terror of his brother, Bran sought the dark.
When they finally stopped for the night, beneath the massive roots of a tall weirwood, Bran closed his eyes and let himself slip from his skin, Summer next to him taking him whole and merging boy and beast with a boundary no thicker than worn parchment.
Blue eyes became gold as the cold vanished, replaced by the comforting heat of his own thick fur. The Wolfswood became a symphony of scent; the tang of fox urine, the sleeping pulse of a badger deep in its burrow, and the sour smell of the squids far to the west.
Every night — again and again — Bran would roam in a body not his own, and allow himself to forget the worst of what had happened.
But as they traveled further and further away from Winterfell, the wolf-dreams started to curdle into nightmares that Bran had no control over.
He slept against the roots to find peace in his nights and a silence to his thoughts.
What he found was noise.
The Old Gods were not silent.
If anything, they spoke with a volume that shook his head through the roots of the trees.
Through those same roots, he saw the ruins of his home. Through Summer’s scouting eyes, seeing across the leagues through the network of the old trees, he saw Winterfell. Giant rats, the size of proper hunting hounds, scuttled through the burned rubble of the First Keep, bald tails dragging over saltwater-stained stone.
Ironborn dragged the bodies of Stark men-at-arms down the spiraling steps and into the flooded crypts. His vision struggled to go any further, a voice that was not his or those of his Gods whispering in his ear.
Terrified, Bran pushed his mind deeper into the roots, fleeing the vision of his home as he sought the King in the North.
Bran sought comfort.
Bran met carnage.
No battlefield met his eyes as Robb stood in the middle of a fog as dense as any, thick to the point of stealing a man’s breath. Men stood in a circle around his brother, faces almost entirely obscured by the whispering mist, yet they smiled wide with teeth like rusted nails. Behind their backs, hidden from Robb’s view, each man gripped jagged daggers dripping with thick blood that ran free and vanished into the fog.
Above their heads, a massive banner hung visible in the fog, the sigil the sunburst of House Karstark. As Bran watched, the white sun ignited into a roaring green fire.
Betrayal. The vision tasted like actual ash and copper pennies in Bran’s mouth, choking him.
“Robb!” Bran screamed into the vision, pushing as hard as he could against the roots. “Robb! Look behind you!”
His dream shattered as the woods rejected him, spitting his mind back into his own body like a stone thrown into a pond.
Bran woke with a gasp, chest burning as if he had just been pulled from the freezing waters of the Bay of Ice. His hands were red and aching from where he had scratched against the splintered wood of the handcart in his sleep, tears running down his face as he heaved with sobs. “Robb!”
His brother’s name tore at his tight throat as Summer’s wet nose met his face, the direwolf nuzzling him in some attempt at comfort. “They have knives! The sun is burning!”
“Easy. Easy now, little lord.” Osha’s rough voice cut sharply through his panic as the spearwife’s calloused hand clamped down on his shoulder, shaking him to break the nightmare. “Breathe the air. Ye’re here. Ye’re with me.”
Scrubbing the hot tears from his eyes with the back of his sleeve, Bran took another low shuddering breath, ashamed of the wetness on his cheeks even as he wrapped his beast in a firm embrace. He wasn’t supposed to cry.
“I saw him,” The words nearly bunched up as he tried to explain. “Osha, I saw Robb. The Karstarks, they have iron teeth and black blood. They’re going to hurt him.”
“The world’s gone wrong, li’l lord.” Dark watchful eyes met his, her jaw set hard with no laugh on her face. “The trees scream in the night. If ye saw it, it’s comin’. But we can’t help yer brother from a handcart in t’ mud.”
Before the ruling Stark could argue again, Osha shook her head and stepped back, picking up the wooden handles of the cart. “We’re done runnin’ for the day. Look.”
Bran pulled himself up, chin resting on the side of the cart as he realized the canopy of the Wolfswood had finally broken and the edge of the forest stood in front of them.
And more than that, rising from the vast expanse of snow and freezing mud, was an absolute impossibility.
In a world of grey stone, rotting wood, and brown mud, the Brightfort stood with its massive walls a blinding white so bright they almost hurt his eyes. They didn’t look like they were built by masons; they looked like they had been shaped by a careless god who decided to leave a piece of the clouds sitting on the Northern earth. High towers reached up into the grey sky, clean and unbroken; the domain of Lord Veder, the magic lord who had fixed his legs.
“Big house.” Rickon stomped off the cart, Shaggydog bumping a massive head against the boy’s hip. “Don’t want it.”
“It’s safe, Rickon,” Bran said. He tried to make the statement sound solid, tightening his throat to make it true. “Lord Veder is Robb’s friend. He’s our bannerman.”
The blinding white walls shone bright and stood tall in front of them, a beacon of impossible safety in a rotting world. But as Bran stared at the massive gates, it did little to ease the terror still rattling in his chest.
– o – o – o – o – o – o – o –
Royal Procession – 250 GP
Have royalty enter the halls of your home.
ROLL: Magic Weapons – Improved (100) [Terraria] {Destruction}:
You gain two magic weapons. These may take the form of wands, spellbooks, staves, guns, or similar items that channel mana in order to produce magical effects. Your selections may be any two weapons made from a late pre-Hardmode ore, specifically Demonite, Crimtane, Meteorite, Obsidian, or Hellstone, or any two from the following list: Vilethorn, Crimson Rod, Magic Missile, Aqua Scepter, Flamelash, Flower of Fire, Space Gun, Bee Gun, Water Bolt, or Demon Scythe. It is possible, though generally not recommended, to choose a lower-rarity weapon even when purchasing at this higher tier.
Grimoire Points: 500 GP