Chapter Text
Jory I
The ravens wheeled about the clear blue skies as they crowed their darkling song in the crisp air, and Jory shivered. It was a rare sight, such fine weather in the North; summer still held its fleeting grasp, and the snow had not fallen for many months. Yet, a coldness lingered within him.
From his vantage standing on the battlements, nothing seemed amiss, perfectly undisturbed.
Order had been put to the castle, but he could not say how well the lands beyond the immediate protection of Winterfell fared. Riders - trustworthy and grim-faced in their task - had been dispatched to all the nearest holdings for a summons to the kingdom's heart's home... and to raise their banners. No doubt, the flayed man would already be prepared. Another shiver coursed through him.
It had been four days. A somber mood, dark and heavy, had veiled Winterfell and rendered its inhabitants into a near mute existence, broken only by hushed and worried whispers exchanged on empty corridors, and the nigh inaudible laments that haunted their cold nights. The unrestrained chaos of that first night was almost preferable to Jory. This sad, quiet pall was needling. Maddening, almost.
He had died, and now he was alive, thrust back a year and a half into the past, no less. Others had lost more time; five years, a dozen, two decades. And Jory, in his heart, was glad of his manner of passing. His uncle would call him a coward, but he harbored no regrets. Better lost to a sword in battle than whatever had transpired in the years that followed.
Dread tales, he had been told; of traitors amidst them, of dragons hiding under wolf's skin, of the realm being torn asunder, of gods awakening from dark slumber and blood and war and death.
The War of the Five Kings. The Second Dance. The Long Night, and everything thereafter. The wind picked up and a frosty breeze swept by, nipping at his unshaven cheeks. He needed sleep but it eluded him. The Kingslayer's face, arrogant and golden, haunted his dreams, blood dripping from his sword—Jory's blood. He suppressed a sound of revulsion at the thought that thrice-cursed man laying hands—one hand, at least—on the Lady Sansa.
"Ser Jory!" A voice called to him, young and high pitched.
His niece stood there, a strange mix of youth and age in her eyes. He feared asking about her life after his death, the thought gnawing at him.
"What is it, Beth?"
"Lord Stark calls for you in the Great Hall. Snow—" She hesitated, unsure, then continued, "The King is awake."
Maekar III
The Dreaming had never been a place of comfort, even if one knew their way around. The slightest disturbance, a butterfly's wingbeat, could transform the ubiquitous realm from deceptively harmless to a landscape littered with horrors beyond mortal comprehension.
The Hall of Many Doors looked as it always had; timeless. It, too, was not a place he held in fond regard, despite the numerous times he would've met sure, absolute death without it. Cruelly, it refused to take any other form other than the tower where his mother had died, just as landscape around it refused to shift into anything more reminiscent of happier times besides the bare swept plains of the New Gift covered with bone-white ash (his fault, his fault).
Yet, it was here that he'd felt the edges of his frayed mind come to; pulling and twisting at the doors of death behind which he was trapped...
It had not lasted long, and he'd woken to the weak rays of a familiar Northern morning, in a room that certainly wasn't his own — not in a very long time, at least. There, besides his sickbed, were faces that he'd not seen for so many years that he feared he'd no longer recall who they'd been or put names to them.
It had worked.
"Can you hear me, Jon Snow? Beth, get Lord Stark!" A man — Maester Luwin, his mind supplied — said, old and kindly and Maekar's chest hurt. Unbidden, tears came to his eyes, and he was too weak to move so the ghosts hovering above him could not see him weep shamelessly.
It had worked and his children were dead.
****
His brothers and sisters came to him, young and untouched by the tragedies that would befall them. There'd been no words said between them; a hand on the shoulder, a tight hug, a kiss on the head. And there'd been Lord Stark, and even then he'd been too spent to talk except a weak "...later, uncle."
He'd not missed the look on the man's face—his first father, the one he'd revered to the vey bitter end. The hot needles of guilt pierced his heart again.
The ink is dry, the crow whispered in his ear, and Maekar slept.