The gates of Eldrath groaned open beneath a sky of slate and smoke. Columns of soldiers—some armored knights, others farm-born levies in patched mail—poured through in ragged ranks. Banners fluttered weakly in the northern wind, most of them frayed by time, ash, or moths. The crimson sigil of House Stark led the way: a crowned stag wrapped in flame, its hooves trampling a serpent of shadows.
Prince Ned Stark rode at the head, clad in black steel chased with silver runes, the weight of Ashbringer across his back. The sword pulsed faintly with unseen heat, as if it remembered the blood of kings—and hungered for more. Beside him rode Lord Eldric, grim and silent, wrapped in a wolf-fur cloak. Behind them came the vanguard: five thousand strong, though fewer than half had ever seen real battle.
The air was cold. Too cold for spring.
"It's wrong," Eldric muttered as they passed the last village on the city's edge. "The birds have gone. The trees are still. I've ridden into battle a hundred times, boy. And the world always speaks before blood is spilled. But this? This is silence. This is death listening."
Ned said nothing. His fingers tightened around the reins.
Behind him, the newly-formed Royal Guard rode in silence: Sir Joryn, a knight with skin as dark as midnight and eyes like a hawk's; Ser Halwin, the old lion of the East, his armor etched with seventy-two years of war; and Ser Kael, young and pale-eyed, said to have once strangled a wolf with his bare hands in the winter wilds.
They would reach Raventhorn in four days if the roads held. But as the sun sank on the first night, a thick fog rolled in from the north—unnatural, cloying, and strangely luminous. Campfires hissed and sputtered. Horses bucked and refused to drink from the river. One even collapsed foaming at the mouth, its blood curdled in the veins.
By the second night, the fog had eyes.
The soldiers whispered around the fires, voices low and trembling. Shapes moved in the mist—too fast, too quiet. Sentinels vanished. A scout returned with frostbite blackening his arms and lips, though the air had not dropped below freezing.
And the crows returned.
They circled the camp by the hundreds, silent now, landing atop tents and wagons without fear. Watching. Waiting. The priests called it a sign of the Watcher—one of the four nameless gods who fed on endings.
Ned stood before the men that night, wrapped in a fur cloak beneath the banners. "We do not turn back," he said, voice clear despite the wind. "We do not let fear command us. If we fall here, we fall knowing we stood between death and those we swore to protect. Our names will not be sung in taverns, but they will be remembered in the bones of the world."
Some cheered. Most simply nodded. One boy—no older than fifteen—wept silently, clutching a chipped sword.
Eldric stepped beside him afterward. "You gave them something to believe in."
Ned shook his head. "I gave them what I wish I believed myself."
By the dawn of the third day, they found their first dead village.
Wooden homes blackened and broken. Doors torn off hinges. No bodies—only smears of blood across walls, and drag marks in the dirt leading toward the woods. Inside one house, a baby's crib lay undisturbed with a single raven's feather in it.
"Not burned," said Ser Joryn, kneeling beside a shattered hearth. "They weren't killed. They were taken."
Ser Halwin crossed himself three times. "The old legends speak of this. The dead don't just rise. They harvest."
Eldric muttered something under his breath, then spat into the ashes. "On my life, I'll put them back in their graves."
They burned what remained, and kept marching.
That night, Ned dreamed of fire.
Not warmth. Not light.
But a vast sea of fire devouring forests and cities, rivers boiling dry, and the sky cracking open like broken glass. In the center stood a woman made of flame and ash, her eyes hollow and burning, four dragons circling her shoulders. She reached toward him, and when her hand touched his chest, he saw his heart—blackened, shriveled, still beating.
He awoke gasping, sweat freezing on his skin.
A whisper echoed in his ears.
You are not your father's son.
You are the end of kings.
And the gods have abandoned you.
At last, on the evening of the fourth day, Raventhorn came into view.
Or what was left of it.
The northern stronghold had once stood proud atop a hill, its blackstone walls said to be blessed by the Ash Priests themselves. Now those walls were broken, partially caved in. Smoke curled from dozens of craters. The gates had been torn inward, not out.
Corpses lined the road—some burned, some half-eaten, some still twitching. One clawed the dirt toward them as they passed, eyes black and lifeless. Eldric dismounted and drove his sword through the man's skull without ceremony.
"Scouts," Ned commanded. "Sweep for survivors."
An hour later, they found them—fewer than three hundred, holed up in the central tower, including Lord Roderic himself, his arm torn and bound in frost-covered rags.
"You came," he said weakly, slumping before Ned. "Praise the old gods. We thought you would burn the North and forget us."
Ned helped him stand. "We came with five thousand men."
Roderic laughed bitterly. "Then you've brought five thousand graves."