Gojo stood before the Wall again—this time not as an observer, but as a liberator.

  He extended his hand toward the ancient ice, cursed energy condensing in his palm. A bright red glow pulsed from his fingertips. “Red.” The cursed technique howled forward, the air around it warping and crackling.

  The blast struck the Wall like a hammer to glass. It drilled in, boring deep with overwhelming force. The ice screamed. Chunks exploded outward. Snow melted instantly from the sheer heat of it. And then—finally—Gojo saw them again.

  The bodies.

  Entombed in bark-like roots. Eyes wide. Mouths frozen mid-scream. Some fused to the wall itself, others suspended in a grotesque half-life, their fingers twitching slowly as if dreaming.

  This is it, Gojo thought. If I can get to them fast enough...

  He leapt into the tunnel he’d carved, racing toward the closest body, his cursed energy flaring to keep the freezing air at bay. He reached out—

  —and the world hissed.

  Steam erupted all around him as water burst from the roots like a geyser. The weirwood itself was expelling moisture—rapidly, violently—pouring it into the tunnel he’d made.

  Then came the clink-clink-clink of ice forming.

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  White Walker shikigami appeared in the mist. Slaves in spirit form, bound by glass and wood. They didn’t speak. They didn’t hesitate. Their frozen hands reached out toward the expelled water, cursed energy channeling through them like a sorcerer’s touch.

  In seconds, the water refroze.

  The tunnel closed.

  “Damn it,” Gojo spat, falling back as the hole he'd made was sealed completely behind him, the wall regenerating like flesh. “So that’s how it works.”

  The weirwood expelled water. The shikigami froze it. And the cycle repeated—endlessly.

  He couldn’t drill fast enough to free them all. Not before the wall healed itself again.

  The Wall wasn’t just alive. It was conscious. Adaptive.

  But the failure wasn’t for nothing.

  In the few seconds the hole remained open, Gojo had seen everything.

  Some of the people buried in the roots were clearly long dead—faces caved in, skin sunken like paper. But what caught his eye were the others. The ones still moving. Still breathing. Some were alive without glass candles. Others, were still alive with them embedded in their hearts.

  “Why?” Gojo murmured.

  He backed away from the Wall, eyes narrowing. “Why preserve some and not others?”

  Glass candles were cursed anchors. He’d learned that already. They kept souls tethered to the world. Tools of imprisonment, not death.

  Then he remembered the stories. The builder. The name whispered in reverence by maesters and old crones alike.

  Bran the Builder.

  The ancestor of House Stark. The supposed architect of the Wall.

  And if Gojo knew anything about men who built things this massive, it was that they never left things to chance.

  “He would’ve recorded the locations,” Gojo muttered. “Of the glass candles. Of everything.”

  There had to be something. A journal. A hidden tomb. A record sealed by oath and blood, passed down through the Stark line.

  That meant one place.

  Winterfell.

  Gojo turned from the Wall, snow crunching under his feet as he walked south.

  “I’ll be back,” he muttered under his breath. “But next time, I’ll know where to strike.”