Vezdaryon moved like a shadow beneath the clouds, his wings silent in the northern air. Snowfall drifted lazily from above, and the winds whispered stories long forgotten by men. Below him, the world was vast and white, broken only by mountains and the black fingers of ancient, frost-split trees. This was not the North of the Targaryens or their southern maps. This was the true North the place older than language and untouched by the fire of dragons.
And it pulsed with magic. He felt it in his bones.
He had been here for many days now, sleeping on icy ledges, gliding across snowbound valleys, threading his way between peaks that bore no names. Time passed differently in this land. He no longer kept count of how long he had flown. The sun was pale and listless, sometimes vanishing for stretches that felt like days. His own fire burned steady within him, but it cast no dominance here. In Valyria, his flame made the ground hiss and crackle. In Essos, it made men bow or burn.
Here, the flame was just a flicker in the storm.
Still, he pressed on.
He passed over a frozen lake as smooth as glass. Beneath its surface were shapes — great, pale fish, larger than ships, drifting slow as if asleep. They never stirred from the deep. He circled once, curious, but did not break the ice. Even his fire felt like an intrusion here. He moved on.
Days later or what felt like days he soared down a narrow canyon lined with sheer, snow-packed cliffs. There, he saw them.
Giants.
Four of them.
Their skin was pale like bone, but furred and gnarled, clothed in the hides of mammoths. One of them walked with a massive branch carved into a club, its end studded with jagged stone. They moved slow, deliberate, trudging through the snow as if following old trails. Vezdaryon hovered above, keeping low to the clouds, his body casting a drifting shadow across the valley. The giants paused and looked up with fear, but no panic? They knew what he was, could there be something similar to me here? Their eyes were ancient and tired.
One of them raised a hand.
Not in threat.
In greeting?
He didn't understand why, but he flew on, disturbed and strangely moved.
Farther north, the trees returned. They were thicker here pine forests whose branches curled in strange patterns, weighed down by endless frost. The snow muffled everything. The air was heavy, and beneath it, he began to feel something else. Watching. Not the same gaze as the giants, or the silent presences of the ice plains. This was different.
Predatory.
He landed on a low hill thick with snow and frost-coated boulders. Beneath the trees, a shadow moved. Then another.
They were massive wolf-shapes, but not like those in the South. Direwolves. One of them emerged into view. Fur the color of smoke, its eyes a pale grey that shimmered in the dim light. It stood still as stone, meeting his gaze.
Vezdaryon did not growl. Did not flare his wings. There was no need. They were not a threat.
The direwolves watched him, then faded into the trees like ghosts. No sound. No scent.
He turned, slowly, and took to the skies again.
For miles, he followed a winding river frozen into jagged silence, its waters locked beneath layers of crystalline ice. As he passed over a rise in the land, he saw movement below fast, four-legged. Something sleek.
It leapt between boulders. Then another followed. Sleek and black, with long bodies and curved tails. Shadowcats.
He remembered them dimly ancient memories, perhaps passed down in his bones. They were hunters. Stealthy. Strong. One of them turned its head and locked eyes with him as he passed, and in that second he felt a flicker of something he hadn't felt in years: competition. Not for dominance but for presence. These creatures belonged here.
He did not.
Not yet.
As night fell again, the sky shifted above him.
The stars burned brighter, but not in constellations he knew. They swirled and turned like living things. And with the deep dark came new dangers.
They crawled from ice-cracked caverns and glacier-buried tunnels.
Ice spiders.
He had heard nothing. Seen no warning. But as he passed over a glacier, the ground below moved. Long, jagged legs, each one like a spear of ice, unfolded from beneath a frozen ledge. One. Two. Then five. Then more.
Eyes like cracked sapphires gleamed in the dark.
He flew higher at once, instinct flaring. The spiders watched him, unmoving, until one leapt — not at him, but across a chasm, vanishing into a tunnel of snow. Too large. Too fast. And completely without warmth.
They did not burn.
He made no attempt to attack.
Fire had always made him strong. A destroyer. A conqueror in the sky.
But here, it felt like a candle in a cave.
He flew hard through the night, disturbed and silent, deeper into the heart of this strange realm. And at dawn or what passed for it he came upon a place unlike any other.
The ground here was warm.
Not hot, not volcanic, but alive.
It was a basin ringed with hills of obsidian and shale, where the trees bent in impossible directions, and the sky above flickered like a dream. Lights danced in every corner. Gold mist. Blue flares. And there, at the center, lay a massive stone formation carved in perfect rings old, older than men, older than even Valyria.
He landed in its center.
And nothing stirred.
The wind paused.
His breath fogged the air.
And then… a single sound, soft, deep, and resonant.
Not from above.
From below.
He stood still.
Listening.
It came again. A thrum, like a heartbeat.
He lowered his head, eyes narrow, claws digging into the stone.
The North was not empty.
It had always been watching.
And now it was speaking back.
——-
Hope you enjoyed the chapter