The cold still clung to him like shadowed ash. It wasn't the bite of wind or the chill of ice that chased Vezdaryon as he flew, but the memory the lingering echo of a presence not born of flame or scale, but silence and death. He pushed south, wings stretched wide over jagged ridgelines and frozen rivers, leaving the True North behind him.
He didn't look back.
Above him, the sky began to brighten just slightly the oppressive clouds of the cursed north breaking apart into bands of silver and grey. The wind warmed by a margin so small no human would have noticed, but he did. His flame stirred deeper in his chest. Not fully, not yet. But it was waking again.
He flew lower, letting the frost-laced trees blur beneath him, letting the scent of the land fill his senses snow, earth, old pine. But something else crept through the air now. It was not scent, not truly. It was a pressure. A resonance. Like a sound only he could hear.
Something ancient was ahead.
He banked toward the horizon where white mountains gave way to shadowed valleys, and in the distance, he saw it:
A wall.
A monolith of ice stretching across the world like a scar carved by gods. Impossibly tall, impossibly straight, it glittered in the thin winter light like polished crystal. Vezdaryon slowed in the sky, circling high above. He had seen great things towers of fire and broken cities swallowed by shadow but this wall held power.
And he could feel it.
As he circled closer, the air changed.
Magic.
Not fire, not the molten pulse of Valyria's deep-blood spells. No. This was colder, older, yet no less potent. It thrummed in the wind, unseen but undeniable. The very snow that fell near the wall did not behave as it should it twisted strangely in the air, caught by threads of unseen force, falling in patterns no storm could shape.
He hovered, wings still, breath misting in deep, silent clouds. He did not roar. He did not land.
He simply watched.
And the Wall watched him back.
The magic laced into its heart did not call to him like the fire of volcanoes or molten rock. It resisted him. Not violently not like the things he had faced in the far North but like a gate barred from within. As if it recognized him, saw him, and denied him passage not out of hate… but protection.
And that stirred something strange in him.
This wall was not built for dragons.
It was built for what followed them.
He lowered in the air slightly, drifting down to eye-level with the highest battlements of the Wall. Up close, the ice was clearer than any gem, layered in shades of blue and white, humming faintly beneath the surface with threads of light. There were runes in the ice he did not know the language, but he felt the meaning.
Warding.
Binding.
Ancient power wound like chains into the very ice itself. Magic that could not be forged anymore, only endured.
He hovered, his wings beating slow and powerful.
And then, a flicker at the corner of his eye a structure of stone at the base of the Wall. Crumbling, half-buried, nearly erased by time. A watchtower, long abandoned. No fires burned. No scents of men or beasts. But he could sense that men had once lived here, watched here, died here.
He landed not far from it, his great claws digging into the frozen soil. The Wall loomed above him like a god's blade driven into the earth. He paced a slow circle around the ruin, feeling the pull of memory again but this time it was not fear or pain. It was reverence.
He breathed deep.
And flame curled from his mouth, slow and quiet.
He would not test this place.
Not because he feared it but because he respected it.
This was not his enemy. This was not prey. This was… something else. A mark of the old world. A monument left by those who had known how deep the darkness could reach and had dared to stand against it.
He took to the sky again, slowly. The wind pulled at him, and behind, the Wall remained still. Silent. Watching.
As he rose above it, he could feel the magic thicken again not violently, but like passing through a veil. One side warmth, one side cold. One side old, and the other… something else.
He flew on.
And though he did not understand the full truth of it, he carried one certainty in his heart:
If the cold from the north ever came again if the walkers crossed the long dead woods and reached this wall this line of ice and magic might be the last thing standing between the world of fire and the endless dark.
And he was glad it was still here.
———-
Hope you enjoyed the chapter