The wind beyond the Wall was always a living thing, a hungry beast with teeth of frost. Five years had sanded the edges off the man who had been Jon Snow; his King's landing silks and Night's Watch black were long forgotten. Now, he was wrapped in furs, his beard thick with ice, and his eyes—still dark, still haunted—watched the snow with a hunter's patience.
He was deep in the haunted forest, further north than the patrols had dared go in generations, a land that had thankfully begun to mend after the Long Night. Beside him, Tormund Giantsbane stomped his massive, fur-clad feet, complaining loudly about the quality of Jon's tracking.
"The King-who-left is slow today! You smell like a wet bear, Jon Snow! If we are to find that fat elk, you must move like the Ghost of an elk!" Tormund spat a gob of snow.
Jon merely grunted, scanning the ancient, spectral weirwood trees. "We're not hunting elk, Tormund. We're hunting silence."
Two days ago, while scouting, Jon and Ghost had stumbled across a strange clearing. It wasn't the work of the elements; the trees had been cut and arranged in a massive, precise circle, and the few stones remaining hinted at unnatural angles. This was a scar left by the First Men, an outpost far older than the Wall itself, and likely forgotten even by the Children of the Forest.
They pushed through a thicket of stunted ironwood. Tormund cursed when his boot snagged on something hidden beneath the deep snow. Jon knelt instantly, brushing the drift away with his gloved hands.
It wasn't a root. It was a section of smooth, perfectly carved black stone.
The men worked silently for an hour, digging with their hands and the edges of their axes until they had uncovered a sunken, circular structure—a single chamber, half-buried and protected from the elements by its own immense age.
"Old gods, old magic," Tormund whispered, awed for once into quietude. "This is the place where the real giants played, Snow."
Jon found the opening, a heavy slate door covered in runes so old they were almost worn flat. He placed his weight against the stone, and with a grinding protest that seemed to echo through the entire forest, the door slid open just enough.
A wave of air—still and profoundly cold, carrying the metallic scent of old iron and ozone—wafted out. Jon's inner skin prickled; this wasn't mere cold. It was the chill of magic.
He dropped a small, fat-fueled torch inside. The light revealed a chamber no larger than a small storage closet. The black stone walls were covered not in the runes of the First Men, but in intricate, swirling carvings reminiscent of old Valyrian sigils, though cruder, and somehow darker.
In the center of the floor, resting on a pedestal carved from the same black stone, was the artifact.
It was small, no bigger than his hand: a piece of polished obsidian, perfectly cut into the shape of a three-headed dragon, but curled in upon itself like a snake preparing to strike. It glowed with a faint, pulsing violet light that seemed to draw the warmth from the air around it.
Jon felt a sudden, familiar pull—the same strange, hot compulsion he'd felt standing before the dragons at Dragonstone, or holding the hilt of Longclaw after its re-forging. A pull toward fire and lineage.
He ignored the instinct and reached out, not with his hand, but with the toe of his boot, attempting to nudge the pedestal.
As his leather touched the stone, the dragon artifact didn't move. Instead, the violet light intensified violently, turning blinding white, and a single, deafening sound ripped through the air—a sound that was not a roar, but the distant, panicked shriek of a woman.
And then, just as quickly, the light faded, leaving the dragon still pulsing faintly.
But in Jon's mind, the sound lingered. It was a cry he knew, a memory he had never owned: the agonizing scream of his mother, Lyanna Stark, on the day he was born.
He stared at the small, glowing dragon. It was a tether to his forgotten past, unearthed in the land where he had tried to bury his identity forever.