Jon was led further up North by a child of the forest named Leaf.

  They moved north and east, away from the hidden grove, into lands where even the trees grew thin and twisted, their roots clawing at frozen stone like fingers seeking warmth that no longer existed. Snow returned in force, deeper than before, crusted hard enough to cut skin when the wind drove it sideways.

  Ghost padded silently at Jon’s side, white fur nearly invisible against the drifts. The direwolf never strayed far from Leaf, though Jon could feel the tension in him, a low, constant wariness. Ghost did not trust this land. He did not trust what watched it.

  Leaf walked barefoot. Her small feet never slipped, never hesitated. Frost gathered on bark and stone but parted for her like water around a rock. Where she stepped, the snow seemed thinner, less hostile, as though the earth remembered her.

  “This is the old way,” she said at last, her voice light but tired. “Before men. Before walls. Before the sky learned to freeze.”

  Jon pulled his cloak tighter. “How far?”

  Leaf glanced back at him, golden eyes reflecting the pale light. “Far enough that turning back will no longer feel possible.”

  That, Jon thought grimly, had already happened.

  Days and weeks blurred together.

  Sometimes they walked beneath open sky, the aurora burning faintly green above them like the ghosts of dead stars. Other times they passed through forests so dense and ancient that daylight never touched the ground. In those places, Jon felt watched with the trees seeming to know him.

  Once, they crossed a frozen river where the ice sang underfoot, deep and hollow. Leaf paused at its center and pressed her palm to the surface. For a moment, Jon swore he saw shapes moving beneath the ice; faces, reaching hands, frozen mid-scream.

  “Do not look too long,” Leaf warned.

  They moved on.

  They were not attacked by anything. The only thing that greeted him was old battlefields half-buried in snow: shattered spears of obsidian, rusted iron helms split cleanly in two, bones too large to be human tangled with those too small to be anything else.

  “The First War,” Leaf said when she saw him staring. “One of old battlesites. We stopped counting.”

  They were soon close as the cold changed. It grew sharper, cleaner, as if stripped of noise. Jon’s breath felt thin in his lungs. The snow here did not crunch, it whispered. Even Ghost moved more cautiously, ears flat, tail low.

  They climbed. Not a mountain, not exactly. A rise of stone and frozen earth that jutted up from the wilderness like a broken tooth. The ascent took hours, then a full day, then another. Jon’s legs burned. His hands went numb. Several times he thought he saw movement in the storm, tall shapes pacing them from a distance but when he looked directly, there was nothing.

  At night, Leaf kindled no fire. Instead, she hummed. The sound was low and strange, not quite a song, not quite a prayer. The wind bent around it. Snow fell more gently

  They came upon the last obstacle, a great ravine. It split the land open like a wound sheer black stone plunging down into mist and darkness. A narrow stone bridge crossed it, no wider than a cart, slick with ice and age. No guardrails. No markings. Just old stone, cracked and uneven.

  Jon stopped at the edge. Ghost growled softly. Leaf did not slow. She stepped onto the bridge without hesitation. “Wait,” Jon said. “What’s down there?”

  Leaf looked back, eyes reflecting something older than fear. “Everything that falls and does not rise.”

  Jon swallowed and followed. Halfway across, the wind rose suddenly, howling up from the depths. Jon staggered, catching himself on a jagged outcrop. He glanced down and wished he hadn’t.

  The mist parted. He saw a forest upside-down, roots hanging like claws, faces half-formed in bark and stone, mouths open in silent screams. He saw shadows moving where no shadows should move. He saw something enormous shift, slow and patient, far below.

  Leaf’s voice cut through the wind. “Do not look.”

  Jon tore his gaze away and forced his feet to move. When they reached the far side, Jon collapsed to one knee, shaking. Leaf studied him. “You are still whole,” she said, almost surprised. “That is… impressive.”

  Jon breathed in weakly. “You say that like it’s rare.”

  “It is.”

  Beyond the ravine, the land changed again. The trees returned but wrong. Pale trunks twisted together, bark white as bone, branches interwoven so tightly that the forest formed walls instead of paths. Faces stared out from the wood, half-swallowed by growth. Some looked peaceful. Others screamed silently.

  “This is his domain,” Leaf said. Her voice was quieter now. “He watches from many places, but he dwells here.”

  “Who is he?” Jon asked.

  Leaf paused. “Once, he was a boy,” she said. “Once, he was many boys. Now… he is a window.”

  Jon frowned. “A window to what?”

  Leaf met his eyes. “To everything that has been. And many things that should not be.”

  They walked for hours through the bone-white forest, until Jon’s sense of direction failed entirely. Up felt like down. Time stretched. His thoughts felt… thinner, as if something were gently brushing against them, testing.

  Then the trees parted. And Jon saw it.

  A massive weirwood rose from the earth ahead, its roots spreading like a frozen crown, its trunk split and hollowed by time. Red leaves hung motionless despite the wind, each one carved with a thousand tiny faces, all watching.

  At the base of the tree, a cave mouth yawned open, dark and deep. Leaf stopped. “This is where I leave you,” she said.

  Jon’s heart began to pound. “You’re not coming?”

  Leaf shook her head. “He does not call to us.”

  Jon hesitated. “What does he want?”

  Leaf’s expression softened. “He will ask you to look.”

  “And if I don’t like what I see?”

  “Then you will understand why so few return unchanged.”

  Ghost pressed close, growling softly at the cave. Jon drew a slow breath. He had walked through death, through time, through lands no man was meant to see. He would not turn back now. “Thank you,” Jon said.

  Leaf inclined her head. “Remember,” she said softly. “Whatever he shows you…no one else must know.”

  Jon inclined his head slowly. Then he stepped forward, into the dark, toward the Three-Eyed Raven and the roots of the world closed behind him.

  +2 Prowess!

  …

  Jon stood alone. The air beyond the threshold was colder not with winter’s cold, but the absence of warmth entirely. Like standing in the shadow of something vast enough to eclipse the world. He went on.

  The cavern opened suddenly, vast and cathedral-like. A forest had grown inside stone. Enormous white roots burst from the walls and ceiling, intertwining, fusing, forming pillars thicker than great chains.

  At the center stood the weirwood. Its face was immense, crude, asymmetrical, the eyes far too large for any living thing. Thick rivulets of dark red sap ran constantly from them, pooling at the roots like spilled blood that refused to freeze.

  Beneath it sat a corpse. Or rather what remained of one.

  The body of old man was no longer separate from the tree. Roots speared through his chest, wrapped his limbs, pierced his skull. His mouth hung open as if in a silent scream that had ended centuries ago. One eye was gone with a root growing through it. The other opened.

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  Jon’s vision collapsed inward. He felt it then a pressure, like a vast intellect pressing its face against the thin glass of his mind. “You are not the broken child I was promised.”

  The voice did not come from the corpse. It came from the roots. From the stone. From Jon’s own memories. The red eye focused on Jon fully now. “You were not meant to be here. You should be languishing at the wall.”

  Jon froze. “You called me.”

  “No. I called him. The wolf with the broken legs. Those stupid children brought me the wrong vessel.” The air distorted. Jon saw it then faintly, horrifyingly a gap in reality beside him. A version of events where Bran Stark wheeled forward by a young woman who looked to be a crannogmen. That future collapsed.

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  The Raven’s voice sharpened. “I do not know how but you broke the line.”

  “Who are you?” Jon Snow asked, getting the suspicion that this alien thing did not have the best of attention.

  The thing considered before saying, “This current vessel is known as Brynden Rivers.”

  Jon stared at the corpse-root-thing in the heart of the weirwood, breath shallow. “Brynden Rivers,” he repeated slowly.

  The name rang like a struck bell in his skull. He recalled his lessons with Maester Luwin. Bastard of Aegon the Unworthy. Hand of the King. Sorcerer. Kinslayer. Lord Commander of the Night’s Watch. Disappeared beyond the Wall over a century ago.

  Jon’s eyes widened despite himself. “That’s not possible,” he said. “You’re… you’d be over a hundred years old.”

  The red eye did not blink. Roots tightened, creaking softly, as if the tree itself were adjusting its grip. “That is correct. That is why this vessel is now decrepit.”

  A chill ran down Jon’s spine. “You’re not Brynden Rivers anymore,” Jon said quietly.

  The roots shuddered. For the first time, something like irritation rippled through the presence filling the cave. “Names are handles,” it replied. “They exist for the convenience of men.”

  Jon swallowed. His mouth felt dry as old bone. He was starting to connect the dots. And Jon felt the pressure increase becoming more insistent. Like fingers pressing against the inside of his skull, searching for seams.

  “So you take them,” he said. “Greenseers. Wargs. Children with the sight. You hollow them out and wear them.”

  Silence. Then a low vibration through the roots, through the stone, through Jon’s bones. Laughter. Not sound. Recognition. “Crude phrasing,” the Raven said. “But not inaccurate.”

  Jon’s stomach clenched. “You planned to do that to my brother.”

  The pressure spiked in his mind. The cave dimmed. The weirwood’s red leaves darkened, as if steeped in fresh blood. “Bran Stark was suitable,” the Raven replied. “Young. Open. Unformed. Easy to grow into.”

  The Raven considered him. “You will serve as a suitable substitute.” The word landed with weight.

  Jon wanted to ask what it was, what it truly was but that was when it finally decided to stop playing with its food and went on the attack. The Raven fell into him and Jon’s vision shattered.

  The cave, the tree, the corpse-roots all peeled away like rotting bark, and something ancient uncoiled itself inside his mind. He felt the shape of it at last, and the understanding was worse than fear.

  This thing was not a man. Not even a creature. He could not even find the words to properly describe it. All his mind could do was recoil in absolute horror and terror as this hunger, this thing that learnt to feed on minds the way fire fed on wood tried to take over him.

  The roots tightened around the corpse behind him, anchoring the Raven as it reached not with hands but vast intellect. Jon screamed and the world ended.

  …

  He stood beneath a sky that had never known stars.

  The sun was young and white-hot, harsh and enormous, burning through a thin, raw sky. The land was broken and unfinished, mountains like jagged teeth thrust up from steaming seas. Forests stretched for leagues; true forests, vast and endless, trees so large they dwarfed castles, their leaves broad and dark, their roots drinking from the bones of the world with continents drowned in green.

  Jon staggered, clutching his head. ‘This is not my memory.’

  “No.” The Raven’s voice came from everywhere now from the sky, from the ground, from the space behind Jon’s eyes. “This is mine.”

  Image:

  He saw them then. The Children.

  Not the dwindling, careful survivors he had met, but legions thousands of them moving through the green twilight of the primeval forests. They sang as they walked, voices weaving magic into the land itself. The trees bent toward them. Rivers changed course at their passing.

  Then he saw them, so massive they were hard to miss as they bloated out the sky. They were like pillars of reality that rose from the skin of the world, their trunks able to fit a city, their crowns vanishing into cloud and light. They spanned great landmass, their roots threading through oceans, mountains, and stone alike.

  He knew them right away somehow, World Trees!

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  Then he felt them, the Old Gods descending on the large city spanning trees which the Children gathered around and prostrating themselves, voices rising in reverent joy and devotion.

  Jon felt them brush past his awareness; immense and alien consciousness. Some were distant things of stone and storm, some vast and slow as continental drift. Others were sharp, clever, and hungry.

  That was when he spotted it, far away in some corner of the young world, a small and sickly twisted tree yet it made Jon’s skin crawl more than all the rest.

  Its trunk was twisted, warped, as if grown in pain. Pale as bone. Wet. Its roots writhed above ground like exposed veins, tangled with blood and entrails

  The tree was taller than a mountain, yet it felt stunted, hunched inward, as though trying to make itself look larger than it truly was. Its carved face loomed from the trunk with eyes too deep, mouth too wide, features locked in an expression that was not rage but spite.

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  “They would not feed me.” The Raven’s voice slithered through the vision, no longer pretending to be merely a guide. “They knelt to the others. They sang to them. However they called me cruel.”

  The memory sharpened. Jon saw the Children avoiding it as they were fearful, disgusted. He saw them refuse it and keep away from it.

  The twisted tree’s leaves darkened. And then the unspeakable.

  Jon tried to look away. The Raven did not let him.

  He saw the first bindings. The first thefts. The thing was small, jealous, weak compared to its kin reaching into the Children’s magic and twisting it. Turning memory into chains. Turning sight into possession.

  Greenseers screaming as roots pierced skulls. Not communion. Consumption.

  Then he watched the Children of the Forest come for it, for its vessel upon the material plane. They were waving a song which Jon never heard before, not the gentle shaping of rivers and roots. This was older. Sharper. A judgment-song, discordant and heavy, sung only when something had gone so wrong that the world itself demanded correction.

  The Children did not act alone. Jon felt them then, the other Old Gods. They were backing them and they had their permission. Their vast attentions isolated the twisted thing, cutting it off like a limb gone black with rot. The air around it grew thin. The sky dimmed. The land itself rejected it.

  “You are unworthy,” came no single voice, but a pressure, a law impressed upon reality.

  The hungry tree thrashed. Its roots tore through stone, flinging gore and splinters into the air. Its carved face split wider, the mouth stretching into something that could no longer be mistaken for a smile. “I am a god,” it shrieked, its voice raw and shrill now, stripped of its earlier certainty. “You cannot kill me.”

  However in the end it was killed. Then in punishment he watched as its kin trapped it forever more inside a bird’s body, a raven which had been always perching on its tree branches. A long supplicant which worshiped it.

  The bird fell to the smoldering earth and landed atop its ruined trunk, wings twitching.

  Forever it would remain there, cursed and confined, a watcher over the world, hunger and spite trapped in feathers and bone. The song of judgment faded, leaving only the quiet weight of vigilance.

  …

  “That was my fate,” the Raven hissed, its voice splintering across a thousand roots at once, “to be forevermore trapped in this wretched world. To watch it. To guard it. To be its protector and guide.”

  The red eye burned brighter. The cave shook. “And in that watching, I learned. I planned. I waited.” Roots twitched. Tightened. “They will regret what they did to me. They will pay dearly.”

  Jon’s teeth clenched as something lunged inside his mind. He felt the roots peirce his body, trying to make him part of it.

  He felt hands that were not hands clawing through his memories; Winterfell’s godswood, Ghost’s first howl, Robb laughing, steel biting into his flesh at Castle Black. The Raven forced itself deeper, trying to hook into him the way it had into others.

  Take. Bind. Wear.

  The single red eye burned brighter. “You will not refuse me,” the Three-Eyed Raven said, its voice no longer amused, no longer curious. “I have eaten kings. I have worn prophets. You are only flesh.”

  Jon screamed. But the scream did not break him. Something answered.

  Heat flared in his chest; fire, sudden and defiant, like a dragon’s breath igniting in his blood. At the same time, a cold deeper than the Wall surged up from his bones; ice, ancient and unyielding, iron and winter-born.

  Fire and ice intertwined. The roots recoiled. “What—” the Raven snarled, its voice cracking for the first time. “No. No. No.”

  Jon dropped to one knee, gasping, but he was still himself. The thing could not get purchase. There was no hollow space to claim.

  “This is why I had you languished at the Wall,” the Raven shrieked, fury tearing through its false calm. “Child of prophecy. Chosen of the Gods. Hero of the Ages. You protagonists are annoying pests!”

  Jon forced himself upright, Longclaw blazing faintly in his hand as if answering the fire in his blood. Ghost who could only helplessly watch this whole time snarled beside him, a sound that was more than animal; old, loyal, lethal. “I am not yours,” Jon said, voice raw but unbroken.

  The cave erupted. Roots burst from the walls like spears, stone splitting as pale tendrils lashed toward him. They scraped his armor, wrapped around his legs, clawed for his throat. Faces in the bark screamed silently as the Raven howled in rage.

  Jon ran. There was no way honestly he could stand against it with all his false bravado. It was a god, yes one trapped on the mortal plane and that lost all its powers, but a god nonetheless. He did not know how it withstood its possession all he could do was counting his luck stars and get out.

  He tore through the cave as roots chased him, snapping inches from his heels. The weirwood screamed. The red leaves fell like blood. The ground buckled, trying to drag him down into memory and bark and bone.

  Ghost leapt ahead, leading him through collapsing tunnels, past grasping roots that burned where they touched Jon’s skin. Fire scorched them black. Ice shattered them apart.

  Behind him, the Raven raged, trapped in its old decrypt body of Brynden Rivers furious and starving. “You cannot escape the wheel!” it shrieked. “You are bound to it!”

  Jon burst out into the blinding white of the world beyond, lungs burning, heart hammering. And for the first time since entering the roots of the world, the Three?Eyed Raven did not follow.

  Jon did not know if it could not leave this place and he couldn’t help himself calling out to it in taunt, “You picked the wrong Stark.”

  -

  Profile: Three-Eyed Raven(The Hungry Tree)

  Type: Old God Remnant

  Main Attributes: 75 Learning

  Vessel: Brynden Rivers(Bloodraven)

  Info: It used to be one of the Old Gods, cruel and weak, before it was struck down and made to languish on the mortal plane for its crimes. It preys on young boys with the gift of greensight, misguiding them, usurping their bodies, causing strife upon the world, and continuing its masterplan.

  Powers & Abilities: Green Magic(Nature), Warging, Greensight

  Weaknesses: ?

  Personality: Manipulative, Jealous & Vindictive, Arrogance, Obsessive, Cruel.

  Patreon: https://pa treon.com/abdirah