100AC.
The cold grey sea stretched out before them, restless and ancient. Hadrian stood at the prow of the foremost ship, his black cloak stirring like wings in the wind, his pale eyes fixed upon the mists ahead. Behind him followed two more vessels—smaller, but burdened no less heavily, their hulls deep in the water from the weight of what they carried: dragonbone and gold, rune-forged steel, the deathless knowledge of a fallen empire.
They had left Valyria with little more than cinders and ash behind them—but with riches that could drown kingdoms.
As dawn broke, Skagos rose from the sea like a ghost reborn. Cliffs of white and grey, jagged and cruel. Pines clinging to the slopes like black scars. The morning fog curled around the peaks, reluctant to give up its secrets.
And there, at last, was Norhold—the city by the sea, carved of black stone and shadow, its towers still tall and unbent. A city raised by Hadrian's own will, with sorcery drawn from the deep veins of the world. The docks were cold and quiet beneath its looming walls, as if the stones themselves held their breath.
But above Norhold, on the cliffs that once belonged only to snow and wind, sat Norhall—Hadrian's fortress, his creation, his crown.
It had been raised in haste, born of need and forged by spell. Strong and dark, its walls thick as Storm's End, its central tower high and burning, like the Hightower of Oldtown—if stripped of its faith. It had withstood every winter wind, every southern whisper, and every shadow sent from across the sea.
But now, it was not enough.
Hadrian watched the fortress emerge from the fog like an old wolf sniffing at the wind. Grim. Hardened. Ancient. But not yet worthy.
Beside him, Riff and Toff stood quiet. The storm-haired twin and the pale-eyed one. Brothers, once elven, now bound to a darker fate. They looked up as he did.
Hadrian's voice came low, as if speaking not just to them, but to the bones of the land itself.
"It was built to weather the world," he said. "But now it must be shaped anew."
Before ever a rope was thrown or a plank lowered, Hadrian raised his hand.
"None are to set foot in Norhall," Hadrian said. "Not man, nor horse, nor shadow. Let all who dwell within it descend to Norhold. Let it be emptied—not abandoned, but prepared."
He did not shout. He did not need to. His voice held the weight of spellcraft and certainty, and it carried across the cliff face and down to the harbor like thunder in the bones.
Riff and Toff nodded without a word, already turning. Regulus drew his hood up and strode toward the inner gates. They did not summon guards or call for carts. They did not bark orders. Instead, they moved through the keep with calm purpose, their footsteps echoing through the stone halls of Norhall for what might be the last time.
In the tower libraries, in chambers long sealed and ringed in warding glyphs, they found books, scrolls, records, and fragments of old tongues, some written on human skin or bound in iron. Toff ran his fingers along the spines and whispered a word only the old folk of the stars once knew. The air shimmered faintly—and in the next breath, the entire shelf shrank to the size of a coin, hovered for a heartbeat, and vanished into a glimmering ring on his finger.
In the laboratories, where Hadrian's strange experiments had once danced with fire and forgotten science, Regulus laid his hand upon the tables and whispered in Valyrian touched by another age. Beakers, constructs, metallic limbs, and rune-etched stones shrank and folded in on themselves, drawn into a black gem he wore at his throat.
Weapons, too—racks of Valyrian steel and blades of curious make, spears with heads like fireglass, and axes of meteoric iron. Riff passed through the armory like a wraith, touching only the hilts. Each weapon pulsed once and vanished. The walls wept dust where they had hung.
Furnishings, tapestries, portraits, statues—every object not bolted to the soul of Norhall was made light, then gone. Elven craft, subtle and sure, now worked through mortal hands. What they had once shaped in moonlight and song they now worked in silence.
None who watched truly understood.
To the common folk below, it seemed as if the castle was unmaking itself from the inside out—yet nothing was broken, and no laborers stirred. By midday, not a chair remained upright, not a nail out of place. Even the hearth embers were gone.
Only bare stone remained—clean, cold, expectant.
Norhall had not been abandoned. It had been cleared, its history folded away into rings, gems, and charms, each heavy with meaning, each known only to the three who bore them.
By nightfall, the once-proud keep stood hollow, stripped of memory.
Above it, the sky began to change.
And below, Hadrian waited at the cliff's edge, his staff struck into the earth like a banner, his eyes on the bones of his creation—ready to breathe it back anew.
And then the people gathered. All of Norhold came to watch, standing along the harbor walls and the sloping cliffs that faced the heights. Children on rooftops, old women at windows, fishmongers and smiths and farmers wrapped in fur. Watching. Waiting.
A platform had been raised at the edge of the harbor, its timbers black with age and carved with spiral runes. Upon it stood Hadrian, draped in midnight and bone. His staff—twisted, ancient, capped with a gem that pulsed like a dying star—was in his hand.
Riff and Toff stood behind him, silent as wraiths.
The winds stilled.
The sea went flat as a mirror.
The sky above held its breath.
Hadrian spoke—but not in the tongue of Westeros. The word he said was older than Valyria, older than the First Men, older than trees. It struck the air like a hammer.
Then he brought his staff down.
The earth shook.
At first, there was only silence.
Norhold held its breath. Men and women stood rooted to their places on rooftops, on ledges, in the hollows of the city's narrow stone streets. Children clung to their mothers. Dogs howled and then fell silent. Even the sea seemed to withdraw from the cliffs, its waves slowing, as if the world itself were waiting.
And then, with a sound like distant thunder and cracking bone, Norhall began to change.
The old black walls of Norhall shuddered, groaning like beasts roused from ancient slumber. Their surface split along fault lines unseen, veins of fire glowing in the seams. Mortar turned molten, seeping like blood through the cracks.
The fortress did not crumble. It expanded.
Massive slabs of stone slid outward with grinding cries, widening the curtain wall. From the ground beyond the original perimeter, fresh towers erupted like teeth from a dragon's jaw—spiral-shaped, ribbed with pale fluting, each bearing glyphs of power that shimmered and spun before setting in place. They rose in near silence, though the wind howled and the crowd below moaned as if in pain or awe.
The black stone—which had once been pulled from Skagos's depths, dead and cold—blanched under a flood of sorcerous light. It began to change as a man might change in fire: first darkening, then glowing, and at last pale and white as bone. It drank in the morning sun until it seemed to give off its own faint radiance.
Where once Norhall had been a squat and brooding thing, now it began to shine like the bark of a weirwood in spring snow, but stranger still—there was life in it now. A heat beneath the surface. A silent humming in the stone.
As the towers rose and the walls grew, the runes came next—shimmering into being across every surface. At first, they blazed golden, a blinding lattice of light and geometry.
But Hadrian spoke again, low and commanding, and the gold darkened—shifting shade by shade until each rune glowed a deep crimson, the color of weirwood sap, or dried blood on snow.
These were not just wards or charms. They pulsed with meaning. Protection. Power. Memory. Every line held history. Every curve echoed some magic forgotten by men. And they were not still. The runes moved. They crept slowly along the walls like ivy, settling into new patterns as the fortress reshaped itself.
The roofs followed, melting and reforming, as if painted by invisible hands. Domes that had been dark and unremarkable flared into reds deeper than rust and brighter than wine—crimson, scarlet, carmine—their hues ever-shifting like a flame caught in still air. On the highest towers, the red gleamed like lacquered fire.
From tower to tower, bridges arched into being, growing like branches of some vast, bone-white tree. Their sides were carved with twisting roots and burning eyes, and beneath their arching spans, the wind whispered with ancient voices.
Each tower was no longer a thing alone. The fortress had become a living whole—a structure bound together like sinew and spirit. A tree of stone. A flame made strong.
Within the walls, the courtyard gave a last gasp—and then it, too, began to transform.
The paving stones split and shifted, reshaping themselves into perfect smoothness, a pale mosaic of white and faintly glowing grey. Between them, cracks yawned, and from those cracks burst trees—not like the pines of Skagos, but slender-limbed, red-leaved, blooming in a moment where none had stood before.
The air smelled of sap and snowmelt and something older still.
From the bare earth, barracks formed—sleek and runed, long and warm. Beside them, bakeries, with chimneys already smoking. Forgehalls followed, their anvils hot before the first hammer was lifted. Armories, stacked and ordered, with runic locks and strange carvings.
These were not built stone by stone, but grown—willed into being by Hadrian's magic and his vision. Coral from a reef. Bone from a leviathan. There was artistry in every wall, but also intention, and a sense of something beneath it all, half-sleeping.
To the east, the glasshouses brightened. Their iron-bone ribs flexed, their crystal panes gleamed with condensation, and already within them, green things stirred—winter wheat, strawberries, cloudberries, even lemons, blooming despite the frost. Steam curled like incense into the cold morning air.
Life was blooming in stone's shadow.
And at the center of it all, the great tower—the heart of Norhall, its crown and its spine—began to rise anew.
Higher and higher it climbed, coiling in on itself like a serpent of ivory and ash. Windows opened where none had been. Runes etched themselves along its spine like scales, glowing with red light.
At its peak, the crimson brazier burst into flame.
It was not fire as men knew it. It did not flicker. It did not smoke. It burned steady, a watching flame, crimson and ceaseless. It cast a red light across the cliffs and down upon Norhold below.
Some whispered that it watched them.
Some whispered that it saw more.
In the reflection of the harbor's waters, Norhall's new form shimmered like a dream: a fortress shaped like a tree and a flame, carved of white and red, towering over the black-stone city at its feet.
Hadrian stood still upon the harbor platform, his staff planted beside him. The magic coursed through him still, humming in his bones, whispering in his blood. Riff and Toff stood behind, eyes wide as boys again.
The people of Norhold fell to silence, for there were no words. Only awe.
The sorcerer-lord looked upon what he had made.
"Now," Hadrian said, "it is worthy."
At the heart of the new Norhall, the godswood stirred.
Not with rain or thaw or the slow churn of seasons—but by magic.
It was no longer a quiet grove tucked away behind stone walls. As the last of the fortress reshaped itself and the red flame burned steadily atop the Tower of Flame, the godswood answered the call. The air within the walls shifted. Warmer. Older. Charged like the air before lightning.
The earth split in silence, and the roots of the great weirwood pushed outward—not as roots do in nature, but all at once, unfurling like the fingers of a waking giant. They tore through the white paving stones without shattering them, lifting them gently aside as if the earth itself bowed in reverence. New soil formed where there had been none. Red grass, dark and dewy, spread in thick waves.
At the center stood the ancient weirwood, planted by Hadrian's own hand years ago. Then, it had been no taller than a man and Hadrian then too had made it age and grow faster, but now.
Now it grew.
Doubled in size in the span of a breath.
Its trunk thickened, its bark white as milkglass, veined faintly with pink like living flesh. Its limbs stretched skyward, clawing at the sky with ghost-pale fingers, its shape both beautiful and terrible. The leaves rustled—not from wind, for none stirred—but as if the tree itself were breathing.
They were red—a deep, visceral red, as if dipped in blood. Fresh blood. The color of sacrifice.
Beneath its branches, no shadows fell. Only stillness.
The carved face upon its trunk—placed there by Hadrian himself in the old way—had changed. Its eyes had once been hollow and open. Now, they wept sap like tears, thick and slow, the same color as the runes burning in the walls.
Only when the last leaf had stopped rustling and the final rune had gone dim did Hadrian turn from the godswood, his face unreadable.
"Now," he said, his voice carrying without effort. "Unload the ships. Bring back all that was taken from the keep. Regulus, Riff, Toff—you will know the rooms. You know where each piece belongs. The others you can bring our treasure from Valyria into the new Vaults."
There was no shouted order. No horn. No crowd to cheer or weep. The harbor lay still, its people already gone about their day, their part played. The remaking of Norhall had become a thing of silence and sorcery, no longer a spectacle but an act of purpose.
Now that the fortress stood transformed—white as bone, crowned in crimson, runes pulsing like slow heartbeats—its soul was ready to return.
There were no caravans, no heaving wagons drawn up the steep road. Only the essential things remained: the treasures and furnishings, relics and tomes, all of them removed with care before the transformation, and now returning, piece by piece, to the castle that had become a different thing entirely.
They did not return by ship or labor.
They arrived with a breath of wind and the soft sound of boot on stone.
The former elves walked the halls once more—Regulus, Riff, Toff, Tilly, Elphie, Nobby, Mippy. They appeared inside Norhall, not with flash or fanfare, but as if they had always been there, walking the corridors of a home remembered in a dream.
Their magic told them where each thing belonged.
In the high library, the shelves stood bare—but not for long. Regulus raised a finger, and a glimmering spiral of light danced out from the ring on his hand. With a quiet exhale, the entire collection of Norhall's knowledge—scrolls, tomes, grimoires—appeared in midair, shrunk and nested inside a sphere of magic, then expanded as they drifted to their rightful shelves, exactly where they had once been... but re-ordered to match the new design of the keep.
In the solar, tapestries unfurled themselves, guided by Riff's outstretched hand. One blink, and the crimson drapery of the old hearth reappeared, already mounted. Chairs settled themselves into corners, pillows fluffed themselves, mirrors hovered, then mounted flush against new walls with not so much as a whisper of dust.
In the armory, Toff laughed softly to himself as each weapon shimmered into place—racks of gleaming black steel, a shield from far Asshai, the axe with the sapphire head—all arranged with care. The runes beneath each bracket pulsed once, affirming: correct.
There were no shouted orders, no blueprints. The castle itself seemed to remember. And the elves, though shaped now in flesh and blood, had not forgotten how to listen to stone and space.
Tables reappeared in the great hall already set. Banners unrolled above them like leaves turned in a breeze. Statues stepped gently into alcoves. Even the high chandeliers rose on invisible threads and caught the light of the new brazier's red flame.
When the last chest—a squat black thing bound in silver and set with twelve locks—crossed the threshold of Norhall, the gates closed behind it without a sound.
The moment they did, the walls pulsed, just once, with crimson light. The runes on their surface flared briefly and then faded, like eyes closing in satisfaction.
Norhall no longer resembled a fortress in the north. It was no keep, no castle, no holdfast of grim lords and mountain clans.
It was something else entirely.
A place of power, and memory, and will.
A spell made stone.