The Tower of the Hand, Red Keep – Early Spring, 227 AC
The hour was late. The Red Keep slumbered in silence save for the sigh of the wind that whispered off Blackwater Bay and curled around the ancient stone like a ghostly breath. A pale moon hung above the city like an eye of polished bone, and all beneath it slept—save one.
Brynden Rivers, called Bloodraven by some, stood alone upon the windswept balcony of the Tower of the Hand, his pale cloak stirring in the cool spring breeze. The flames of the brazier beside him flickered low, casting shadows across the gaunt hollows of his face, the scarlet birthmark beneath his eye seeming to shift like a smear of fresh blood.
In his long-fingered hand was a letter—creased and stained from travel, sealed in black wax marked by a direwolf beneath a sword.
The raven had come from the Wall. At long last.
Brynden broke the seal and began to read by the flickering light.
Lord Rivers,Your missive has been received, and your concerns considered. I regret to report that our ranging parties, sent beyond the Wall thrice this past moon, have found no trace of unnatural happenings. No great shadows, no moving dead, no creatures of winter. Only the usual hardship and cold. One party fought off a small host of Thenn raiders, and two black brothers were wounded, but nothing beyond that.
At Castle Black, some of the younger recruits jape about the Others from time to time—especially when the wind howls or the flames gutter low. Old tales, Lord Hand. Meant to make boys quiet at night. Everyone knows the truth: the Long Night ended thousands of years ago. The Others are dust, if they ever truly were.
I assure you, if anything unnatural stirs in the far north, we will be the first to know.
— Lord Commander Orlyn LockeCastle Black
Brynden's one eye scanned the lines again and again, yet found no comfort in them.
The Others. That was what they were called. The White Walkers. The pale gaunt figures he'd seen in his vision, with their icy blue eyes and blades of crystal moonlight. He saw them still when he closed his eyes—marching through endless snow, their legions of the dead trailing behind them.
He exhaled slowly, letting the letter drop to his side.
"Dust," he muttered to the wind. "All the realm thinks them dust."
But he had flown with them. Or above them, rather. Inside the skin of the raven with three eyes, seeing with a clarity he could not explain.
Was it a dream? A vision of what is? Or what will be? he wondered. Or perhaps… what once was, returning again?
Brynden pressed a hand to his brow, feeling the headache that had dogged him for days stir once more. Sleep had grown rare since that night with Shiera. His mind wandered too often, his eyes too frequently drawn to shadows where there were none.
There were days he stood still in the corridors of the Red Keep, frozen by memory or vision, only to be stirred by voices—his nieces, Rhae and Daella, calling him back to the now.
He looked east, toward the Tower of the King, where Maekar I lay behind heavy doors, heavy with age and weariness.
The realm.
It was cracking. The long summer had ended. Autumn was short. Now winter crept in slow, and hungry. Famine stirred in the Riverlands. Lords bickered. The Blackfyres plotted in the shadows. And the King's heirs were… each more troubled than the last.
Daeron, drunk and drowning in his own japes. Aerion, lost to madness. Aemon, cloistered in vows. And Aegon…
Brynden clenched the parchment tighter in his hand.
No, he told himself.
The cold things in the dark may come in a hundred years or more, or perhaps not at all. But this realm bleeds now. And it is here that I must remain. The war of the far future must wait—until I have saved the present.
He stepped back from the balcony's edge, letting the letter fall into the brazier. The flames swallowed it slowly, curling the parchment to ash.
He turned and reentered the Tower of the Hand, the door closing behind him with a hollow sound.
Outside, the wind kept whispering.