The shriek of his mother still echoed in the small chamber. Jon stood frozen, his breath clouding the frozen air. The obsidian dragon, pulsing with its faint violet light, felt less like an artifact and more like a captured piece of his own heart.
Tormund's heavy hand clamped onto Jon's shoulder, pulling him back from the opening. "What the gods was that, Snow? Not a beast, not an ice demon. That was... a woman, suffering."
"My mother," Jon whispered, the words tasting like ice and ash on his tongue.
"Your mother is a fish-wife, according to the southerners," Tormund scoffed. "And a great lord's whore, according to others. Never sounded like that."
"The other one," Jon corrected, stepping back toward the opening. "The one in the tower. Rhaegar's wife. My mother."
He ignored Tormund's confusion and knelt. His gloves were thick, but he pulled them off, exposing his raw, cold skin. He had denied this identity for five years. He had exiled himself to the frozen edges of the world to be Jon Snow, the man of the North. But the artifact was a direct challenge to that peace.
He reached into the black chamber, his hand trembling, and gently closed his fingers around the dragon-shaped obsidian.
The cold was instantaneous, piercing his skin like a thousand needles. Then, it reversed. A searing, internal heat rushed up his arm, settling behind his eyes.
The world vanished. The black chamber, the ice, Tormund—all dissolved into a blinding vision of fire and warmth.
He wasn't standing in a frozen cave; he was standing in a chamber of polished red wood, lit by warm sunlight filtering through high, arched windows. The air smelled of baked bread, lemon cakes, and smoke from a cheerful hearth.
The room was grand, but what drew his eye was the woman. She was impossibly beautiful, with silver-gold hair braided with sapphires and eyes the color of a summer sea. She wore a dress of rich, dark velvet—a color Jon had never seen beyond the Wall—and she was smiling, a genuine, blinding smile that broke Jon's heart.
"Mother," he tried to say, but the word choked on the smoke of the hearth.
She turned her head, but she wasn't looking at him. She was looking at the man across the room—a man Jon recognized from the dusty scrolls and painful memories: Rhaegar Targaryen. The Prince of Dragonstone.
Rhaegar was not wearing armor. He was dressed in simple, pale linen, playing a silver harp. The melody was mournful and beautiful, echoing the quiet melancholy of the North.
"The snows will come for us all, Lyanna," Rhaegar murmured, his silver hair falling over the harp strings.
"Let them," the woman—Lyanna—replied, her voice like the chime of bells. "So long as he is warm. We chose fire, Rhaegar, but he is a creature of ice and the North. He must have the North."
The scene shifted violently. The warm room shattered into a thousand shards of red wood. Jon was now standing in a blinding, white blizzard. He heard the fierce howl of a direwolf, and then the sound of a massive iron gate slamming shut.
He was suddenly standing at the foot of the Wall, but it was pristine, impossibly tall, and unbroken. He heard a familiar, gruff voice, thick with sorrow: Benjen Stark.
"You should have stayed in the South, boy. You could have been anything. But you chose the cold."
The vision faded, leaving Jon gasping, collapsing back against the hard, cold stone floor of the chamber.
He was Jon Snow again, the banished man, covered in ice and fur, the violet-lighted dragon cold in his numb hand.
Tormund stared at him, his mouth open. "What in the seven hells happened to you, Snow? You were gone, your eyes—they were burning! Like a dragon's breath!"
Jon looked at the small dragon he held. The vision wasn't a warning; it was a revelation. His mother had loved him. She had chosen the cold for him. And the relic hadn't just shown him the truth—it had violently reminded him of the choice he had abandoned.
The North needed him. The memory of Lyanna and the words of Benjen confirmed it: his duty wasn't to Essos or the throne; it was to the cold.
"Tormund," Jon said, his voice flat, but his eyes shining with a new, dangerous resolve. "There are things in the South that belong in the North. And things in the North that belong to the past."
He looked at the dragon relic, now glowing faintly in his hand. He hadn't just found an artifact; he had found a reason to return to the world he'd forsaken.