The world faded to a dull hum in Rickon's ears.
The crowd's frightened gasps, the monsters' guttural cheers, and the sickening thud that ended his father's life all faded into a hollow ringing.
He remained on his knees in the filth of the square, his body numb, long after the crowd had been dismissed and the platform cleared.
His father's empty eyes haunted him, but it was the sight of his mother, Linda, that truly broke him.
That brief, five-second connection through the horror, her sorrowful face mirroring his, her lips silently forming his name, felt like a shard of glass in his heart.
He stumbled back to Jedediah's farm, the familiar path blurred.
The other farmhands kept their distance, their usual taunts and pushes replaced by cautious looks, unsettled by the chilling emptiness in his eyes.
He dropped onto his rough, straw-stuffed cot in the barn, but sleep brought no relief.
Each time he closed his eyes, he saw the sword's flash, his mother's look of recognition, and the glowing portal that swallowed his sister.
The despair that had been his constant companion for two years was gone.
The crushing weight of grief had been burned away in the fires of the execution square.
In its place, something cold and unyielding was forged.
It sank deep into his gut, a tight knot of raw, unfiltered rage.
He lay there for a day, unmoving, his stomach a hollow pit of hunger he no longer felt.
On the second night, a figure limped over to his cot in the near-darkness of the barn. It was Silas, the wiry old farmhand with the missing fingers.
He crouched down, the dim light from the barn's single lamp catching the deep lines on his face. He held out a stale crust of bread.
"Eat, kid," Silas said, his voice, rough and low. "Starvin' yourself won't bring 'em back."
Rickon didn't move, his eyes fixed on a crack in the wooden wall. "They have my mother," he said, his voice flat, devoid of emotion. "They took my sister."
Silas let out a long, weary sigh and sat down on the dusty floor, taking a bite of the bread himself.
"Yeah, well," he mumbled through the mouthful, "they took everything from everyone. Welcome to the damn club. No t-shirts, just misery."
He paused, studying the young man's profile.
The boy who'd been a lazy sack of bones, good for little more than a whipping, was gone. The thing lying on the cot now was different. It was still. It was dangerous.
"You got that look," Silas said quietly, after a long silence. "The kinda look that gets a man killed. Or gets him to do the killin'."
Rickon finally turned his head, his eyes locking onto Silas. "How do I get stronger?"
The question was so direct, so devoid of the usual preamble of grief or fear, that it took the old man by surprise.
He let out a short, humourless laugh. "Stronger? Kid, you can't get 'stronger' than them. They're monsters. We're cattle. That's the way of it now."
"There has to be a way," Rickon insisted, sitting up slowly. The fire in his eyes was unnerving.
"Someone, somewhere, has to be fighting back."
Silas chewed his lip, his gaze darting around the sleeping barn as if the walls themselves might be listening.
He leaned in closer, his voice dropping to a conspiratorial whisper.
"There are stories. Rumours. The kind you hear from drifters passing through, the ones crazy enough to still be wanderin' the roads."
He glanced over his shoulder again.
"They talk about a place. An academy. Run by some fella who ain't from around here. Not one of them," he gestured vaguely towards the world outside, "but not one of us, either.
They say he fell from the sky like the rest of 'em, but he's here to fight back."
Rickon leaned forward, his every muscle tense. "Where?"
"Nobody knows for sure. It's hidden. Secret," Silas said, shaking his head. "And it ain't free.
The stories say the price to get in… it's enough to buy this whole damn farm. They say this man… he can teach you how to kill monsters. How to get power.
They say he pushes people through a door to another world, a place that either makes you a king or gets you dead." Silas snorted.
"Probably just a fancy way to take your coin before they stick you in a stew pot. But... it's a story."
That night, a vow was sealed in the silent darkness of the barn. Rickon would find this academy. He would pay the price, whatever it was.
He would walk through that door to hell if he had to. He would gain the power to tear this world apart to find the monster that held his sister, and he would burn the new world order to the ground to free his mother.
His family would be his again. No matter the cost.
The next morning, a new Rickon emerged.
The lazy boy was dead and buried. In his place stood a relentless machine of labour.
He was the first one in the fields before the sun even thought about rising, and the last one to leave, his body slick with sweat long after the sun had set.
Jedediah, the piggish farm owner, watched in astonishment. His laziest worker had suddenly become his best.
The lashes from his whip ceased, replaced by grunts of approval and extra rations, which Rickon often traded for coin.
He took on every job no one else wanted. He cleaned the pens of the Garons, smelly boar-like animals the farmers kept for their tough meat.
He repaired fences on the farthest, most dangerous borders of the farm, where skittering, insect-like predators sometimes lurked.
He carried sacks of grain until his back screamed and his muscles burned with a fire that felt like purification.
"Look at him," the other farmhands would mutter as Rickon silently counted his pathetic collection of coins by lamplight.
"Jedediah's little pet. What's he savin' for? A pretty new shovel?"
Rickon ignored them. Their words were meaningless noise. He worked, he ate, he saved.
He grew thin, but his body hardened into corded muscle.
The softness in his face chiseled away, leaving behind sharp angles and eyes that saw everything and revealed nothing.
The next two and a half years were a relentless stretch of sweat, blood, and unbreakable determination.
Finally, the day came. It was five years, almost to the day, since the sun had vanished.
In a small, hollowed-out space beneath his cot, he had a heavy leather pouch. He poured the contents onto his threadbare blanket.
A small mountain of grimy coins, a few crumpled notes of old-world currency he'd scavenged, and even a small gold tooth he'd pried from a corpse on a supply run.
It was a fortune built from misery. He counted it once, then twice. It was enough.
He didn't say goodbye.
In the dead of night, he slipped out of the barn, his small pouch of savings tied securely to his belt.
He gave one last look at the place that had been his prison for years, then turned his back on it without a flicker of emotion and melted into the darkness.
His journey took weeks. Following the vague directions and whispers Silas had collected for him, he navigated the skeletal remains of cities and crept through monster-infested forests.
He learned to move like a ghost, to kill silently when necessary, and to survive on whatever scraps the dead world offered.
He finally found it in the ruins of an old industrial district, a place of rust and concrete skeletons.
There was no sign, no grand entrance. Just a single, reinforced steel door set into the side of a collapsed warehouse, indistinguishable from the surrounding rubble.
A small, almost invisible camera was mounted above it.
Rickon stood before it, his heart a steady, rhythmic drum in his chest. He gave a single, firm knock.
A small panel opened at eye level, revealing a pair of hard, suspicious eyes.
"What do you want?" a voice growled from within.
"I'm here to enroll," Rickon said, his voice steady.
The eyes narrowed. "You got the fee?"
Without a word, Rickon untied the heavy pouch from his belt and held it up.
The weight of two and a half years of his life, of every drop of sweat and blood, was in that bag.
The slot slammed shut. There was the sound of multiple bolts being drawn back, and the heavy steel door groaned open just wide enough for a man to slip through.
He stepped across the threshold, leaving the ruined world behind.
The door slammed shut behind him, the sound of the bolts sliding home resonating like the closing of a tomb.
He stood in a dim hallway lit by weak bulbs. A hulking man with a scarred face and a crude automatic weapon took the pouch from him silently, weighed it in his hand, and gave a brief nod.
Rickon had done it. He was a student. The years of servitude, the lashings, the hunger, the crushing guilt. All of it had led to this moment.
He was one step closer to the power he so desperately craved. One step closer to vengeance. One step closer to them.