Jon
For two and a half days, Jon existed in the darkness of the Jade Serpent's cargo hold, measuring time by the bells that rang above and the slow diminishment of his dried fish.
The silk bales made poor hiding, but they were the only shelter the hold offered. He'd wedged himself into a crevice between them and the hull, a space so narrow his shoulders ached from the constant pressure, and there he stayed while the ship cut through the waters of the Jade Sea. The smell of the cargo was strange—a sweetness that reminded him of nothing from Westeros, of flowers he'd never seen, and of spices he couldn't name. The Yi Tish silk was bound for markets that he would never reach.
His water had run out on the second night.
Jon had rationed carefully, sipping when his throat closed with thirst, but there was simply too little for too long a journey. By the third morning, his lips had cracked, and his tongue sat thick and dry against his teeth. He tried the breathing technique that regulated his body—drawing air deep into his belly, letting it flow through him like water—but even that gift had its limits. It could slow his need, not end it.
"You've had worse," he told himself, and it was true. The slave compound in Yunkai had taught him to endure thirst as a constant companion. But that knowledge brought no comfort, only the memories of chains and the smell of his flesh burning.
Above, boots tramped across the deck. The Jade Serpent was a merchant vessel out of Qarth, carrying silk and spices eastward to the Golden Empire. Jon had watched her for three days before making his move, studying her crew and learning her rhythms. Captain Mhagor was both Yi Tish and Qartheen, and his face resembled a map of the trade routes that his ancestors had sailed. His crew numbered twenty-four—a mix of Qartheen, Yi Tish, and men from ports Jon had never heard of. They worked efficiently and spoke little, which suited a stowaway well.
What Jon hadn't learned until too late was that the Jade Serpent carried a full cargo manifest and short rations. Every bite of hardtack was accounted for. Every barrel of water was measured and marked.
Discovery was inevitable. Jon had known this when he'd slipped aboard in Qarth's harbor, moving with the silence his training allowed, his bare feet making no sound on the deck. He'd known it as he'd threaded between sleeping sailors and descended into the hold. A ship wasn't a city, couldn't swallow a boy the way Braavos had, and couldn't hide him in its crowds and chaos. Eventually, someone would move the silk bales. Eventually, someone would find the boy curled in the darkness with his dried fish and his desperate hopes.
That someone was Tsura.
He came down on the third morning to shift cargo, a Yi Tish sailor with the dead eyes of a man who'd seen too much sea and too little shore. His lantern swung as the ship rolled, casting wild shadows across the stacked bales. Jon pressed himself deeper into his crevice, slowing his heartbeat as Marcus's training taught, becoming still as the silk around him.
But Tsura was moving the bales closest to the hull. Checking for water damage, perhaps, or verifying the count. Tsura's calloused hands found the edge of Jon's hiding place and abruptly erased the darkness Jon had grown accustomed to.
"What—?"
For a moment, they simply stared at each other. Jon appeared filthy and small, blinking in the light of the lantern. Tsura's face cycled through confusion and recognition and finally settled on cold understanding.
"STOWAWAY!"
Jon didn't try to run. Where would he go? The sea stretched in every direction, weeks of water between him and any shore. He let them drag him up the ladder and onto the deck, let the morning sun stab at his eyes after days of darkness, and let the crew gather around him like wolves circling wounded prey.
His mind automatically supplied the number: twenty-four men.Captain on the quarterdeck. No weapons visible. Rope in reach if needed for restraint.
But the knowledge changed nothing. He was eight years old, branded and scarred and so far from home that the word had lost all meaning. These men could do whatever they wanted with him.
Captain Mhagor descended from the quarterdeck with the deliberate grace of a man who understood his authority. His features were striking—Yi Tish eyes in a Qartheen face, skin the color of old copper, and a mouth that might have been kind in another life. He stopped before Jon, and his gaze was a merchant's gaze, assessing value.
"Stowaway," he said, and the word hung in the salt air like a judgment.
"Yes, Captain."
"How long?"
"Since Qarth."
"Three days in my hold. Eating my supplies." Stealing passage, I never agreed to sell it."
Jon kept his voice level. "I can work, whatever you need done. I'll earn my keep."
A sailor pushed through the crowd—Dako; Jon would learn his name soon enough. Qartheen, with the kind of face that had learned to enjoy others' pain. His eyes were small and bright, like a rat's eyes, and they gleamed with something ugly when they found Jon.
"Check him, Captain. He's marked!"
Before Jon could react, Dako's hands were on him, tearing his shirt open. The brand on his left shoulder blade caught the sun—Grazdan mo Yunkai's harpy clutching coins, burned into his flesh forever. The crew's murmur was like wind through rigging: Slave. Runaway. Bad luck.
"Yunkai mark," Mhagor said, studying the scar with a merchant's practiced eye. "You're property."
"I'm free." Jon's voice was hoarse from thirst, but he forced it steady. "Qartheen law—"
"Qartheen law doesn't apply on my ship." Dako's grin showed teeth that had grown crooked from too many fights. "Throw him over, Captain. He'll curse us all."
"Slaves bring bad luck," another sailor muttered. "Everyone knows—"
"Enough." Mhagor's voice cut through the murmurs like a blade through silk. He circled Jon slowly, studying him from all angles. "We're short-handed. We lost two sailors to fever before leaving Qarth. The boy can work." His eyes found Jon's, and there was no cruelty in them—but no mercy either. "If he works, he lives. If he slacks, over the side. Anyone who interferes with my decision answers to me."
"Captain—" Dako started.
"I decide who lives and dies on my ship. That's my right and my burden." Mhagor turned back to Jon. "You'll work harder than any man here. You'll earn every breath you take. Understood?"
"Yes, Captain."
"Good." He gestured to Dako. "Put him to work. You're responsible for him."
Dako's smile widened, and Jon felt something cold settle in his stomach. In Winterfell, he'd known men like Dako—men who needed someone weaker to hurt, who built their sense of self on the suffering of others.
"With pleasure, Captain." Dako's fingers closed on Jon's arm, digging into the flesh where Tsura had already bruised him. "Come, slave. Let's see how long you last."
The first week taught Jon that there were different kinds of slavery.
In Yunkai, he'd been properly measured, marked, and maintained for sale. The cruelty had been systematic, applied with purpose: break the spirit, but not the body. A damaged slave sold poorly.
On the Jade Serpent, he was regarded as something less than property. It was something that functioned until it broke, and if it did break, it would be thrown overboard without costing anyone a penny.
Dako started him scrubbing the deck. "Make it shine," he said, kicking over a bucket of seawater mixed with sand. "Or I'll make you bleed."
Jon dropped to his knees and began scrubbing the deck. The holystone—a block of sandstone used for scouring—tore his palms raw within the first hour. His knees bled through his trousers within seconds. The sun climbed high and hammered down on his neck and arms, turning the salt spray into burning trails across his skin.
When he tried to use the breathing technique for stamina—drawing air deep, spreading it through his exhausted muscles—it worked, but wrong. The technique required calm and a centered mind, and Jon's mind was anything but centered. Every time he reached for that clarity, memories rose instead: the branding iron heating in coals, Alya's body sagging on the cross, the compound guard's whip cutting across his back. He'd push through, gasping, and the technique would hold for a few minutes before shattering again.
"You're broken," a voice whispered. He couldn't tell if the voice was Marcus's or his own anymore. The techniques work, but you're too broken to use them properly.
By evening, he could barely stand. Dako inspected his work with theatrical disgust. "Pathetic. Missed spots everywhere. Half rations tonight."
Half rations was a cup of rice and a sliver of fish so small Jon could have swallowed it whole. He ate slowly, making each bite last, and tried not to think about the meals at Winterfell—the trenchers of meat and bread, the steaming pies, and the fresh vegetables. That life belonged to someone else now. Someone who'd never existed at all.
The next day was the rigging.
"Up," Dako ordered, pointing at the mainmast. "The sail needs mending. There's a tear near the top."
Jon tilted his head back and looked. The mainmast rose sixty feet above the deck, a tower of wood and rope that swayed with each roll of the ship. The rigging was a spider's web of lines and ladders, and at the top, barely visible, the torn sail flapped in the wind.
He'd never been afraid of heights in Winterfell. But Winterfell's towers didn't sway. Winterfell's walls didn't pitch and roll with every wave and didn't threaten to throw him into the sea at any moment.
"I'll need a needle and thread," Jon said, keeping his voice level.
"Already up there. What are you waiting for?"
Jon climbed.
His crooked fingers—broken in Yunkai and healed wrong—couldn't grip the rope properly. The rough hemp tore at his already raw palms, and salt spray made everything slick. Twice he nearly fell, saved only by instinct that told him which ropes would hold and which would give.
Beast breathing, he thought, and reached for the technique that sharpened his senses. It came easier than the others—perhaps because it didn't require strength or speed, only awareness. The sea around him, the ship beneath him, and the crew below watching with the casual interest of men betting on a cockfight.
"Three coppers say he falls before noon," someone called.
"Five says he makes it but pisses himself."
Jon didn't fall. He clung to the rigging for six hours, needle and thread in bleeding hands, mending tears in the sail with fingers that cramped and shook. The wind tried to tear him loose. The sun tried to cook him. His body tried to betray him at every moment.
When he finally descended, Dako looked almost disappointed.
"Lucky," he said. "Won't last."
By the eleventh day, Jon's body was failing.
He'd been rationing his water, trying to prove he could endure, trying to show he was strong enough to deserve his place on the ship. But the noon sun hammered down as he hauled rope, and suddenly the world tilted sideways, and the sky and the sea traded places.
He woke to water on his face. Not seawater—fresh and warm from a waterskin. Tsura crouched over him, his dead eyes showing something that might have been a concern or a simple calculation.
"Idiot." He forced more water down Jon's throat until Jon choked. "Dead men don't work. You think proving you're tough helps anyone? The captain needs workers. Not corpses."
Jon tried to thank him, but Tsura was already walking away. On this ship, keeping Jon alive wasn't kindness. It was inventory management.
"Take care of yourself," Dhara had told him in Yunkai. No one else will.
She'd been right. She was always right.
The galley work came in the third week, a brief reprieve from Dako's attention. Peng, the cook, had once been a slave—Jon could see this in Peng's movements, the careful distance he maintained from others, and the emptiness behind his eyes that resulted from building emotional walls until there was nothing left to protect.
He never spoke to Jon beyond necessary orders. "Peel these." "Carry that." "Don't touch the rice." But the portions he ladled onto Jon's plate were slightly larger than they should have been, and the fish was always from the top of the barrel, less spoiled than what Dako would have given him.
Jon noticed but said nothing. To acknowledge pity was to lose it.
One evening, Jon caught a glimpse of sunset through the galley porthole—gold and crimson painting the endless water, the sky bleeding into the sea until you couldn't tell where one ended and the other began. For a moment, the world held beauty. For a moment, Jon remembered what it felt like to be something other than meat that worked and slept and worked again.
Then Dako burst in. "Back on deck, slave. The deck won't scrub itself."
The moment shattered like everything else.
In the fourth week, Dako assigned Jon an impossible task.
"All of it," he said, pointing to hundreds of crates stacked in the hold. "Port to starboard. Balance the ship better, Captain says."
Jon knew that it was a lie. Captain Mhagor had given no such order—the cargo had been balanced in Qarth by men who'd spent their lives loading ships. But Dako's authority was absolute where Jon was concerned, and the crew looked away when he made his pronouncements.
"All of it? By when?"
"Dawn."
The hold stretched before him in the lantern light, crates stacked to the ceiling, each one heavy enough that two grown men would struggle to lift it. Jon looked at his small hands, at his bruised arms, at the body that had been pushed past breaking a dozen times and somehow kept moving.
"Yes," he said.
He started immediately, because not trying meant immediate death. He worked through the night, using the breathing technique when he could hold it, using pure stubbornness when he couldn't. His back scars split from lifting—he could feel the wet warmth of blood soaking his shirt. His crooked fingers gave out repeatedly, sending crates crashing.
Somewhere around midnight, with perhaps a third of the cargo moved, Jon collapsed against a crate and closed his eyes.
"Be free," Alya had said.
"Survive," Dhara had said.
Choose your path, Moqorro had said.
But what path was this? What freedom could exist in endless labor and eternal contempt? He was eight years old, and he'd crossed half the world, and for what? To die on a ship full of men who saw him as bad luck and cargo?
"Get up," Marcus's memories whispered. You've survived worse.
Have I? Jon asked in the darkness. Or have I just delayed dying?
But he got up. He moved another crate. And another. And another.
By dawn, he'd moved perhaps a third of the cargo. Not nearly enough. Dako descended to the hold with a gleaming smile, ready to pronounce judgment.
"Failed," he announced triumphantly. "Captain, he's useless—"
But Captain Mhagor had followed him down. He studied the redistribution with a merchant's eye, noting the neat rows, the careful placement, and the obvious effort.
"He moved a third of it," the captain said. "Alone. He accomplished this in just one night. That's... adequate."
"But—" Dako's face purpled.
"Rest," Mhagor told Jon. "Then normal duties."
It was the closest thing to victory Jon had experienced in months. He hadn't completed the task, hadn't proven himself better than Dako's malice. But he hadn't broken. That had to count for something.
That night, alone on watch while the crew slept, Jon stared at stars that Marcus Chen had studied in another life. The constellations were wrong—not the Ice Dragon or the Sword of the Morning, but stranger patterns, eastern patterns, shapes that had names in languages Jon had never learned.
A memory surfaced unbidden: a naval battle in the demon slayer world, ships burning, men screaming, Marcus clinging to wreckage as the sea tried to claim him. Was Jon remembering the battle, or was Marcus recalling it through him? The line between them had blurred so much that Jon wasn't sure it existed anymore.
"Doesn't matter," Jon decided. Just survive.
But survive for what? The question had no answer, and eventually even questions required more energy than Jon had to spare.
Mhagor
Captain Mhagor watched the branded boy from his quarterdeck and wondered what he was actually carrying in his hold.
For twenty-five years he'd sailed these waters, carrying silk and spice and passengers who paid for privacy. He'd learned to read men in that time—their fears, their desires, and their breaking points. A good captain had to know when a sailor was about to snap, when a passenger was hiding something dangerous, and when cargo was more than it appeared.
The Westerosi boy was more than he appeared.
Mhagor had seen slaves before and had transported them in his younger, more desperate years, before his grandmother's ghost had visited him in a fever dream and reminded him that their people had fled slavery in Old Valyria. He knew the look of a broken spirit, the shuffle of a man who'd learned that resistance meant only more pain.
The boy didn't shuffle. He moved like something wounded but not defeated, like a wolf with its leg in a trap, biding time. When he thought no one was watching, his eyes scanned the ship with a tactical awareness no child should possess. And sometimes—sometimes—when Dako pushed too hard or the crew laughed too loudly, something flickered in those grey eyes that made Mhagor reach for his sword.
What are you? he wondered.
But the boy worked. Worked harder than men twice his age and three times his size. He worked through injuries that should have left him bedridden, through exhaustion that should have killed him, and through cruelty that should have broken him.
"He's bad luck," Dako said one evening, appearing at Mhagor's elbow. "The men are talking. Slaves always bring bad luck."
"The men talk about everything. That's what men do."
"They say we should throw him over. Before whatever's chasing him catches up."
Mhagor turned to study his quartermaster. Dako had been useful for three years—ruthless with discipline, efficient with cargo, and loyal to coin. But there was something rotting at his core, something that fed on others' suffering. The boy's presence had brought it to the surface.
"Whatever's chasing him?"
"Look at him." Dako gestured at the boy, who was mending a net with bleeding fingers and the patience of stone. "Seven or eight years old, maybe. Branded in Yunkai. Crossed half the world alone. Either he's blessed by the gods or cursed by them. Either way, I would rather not find out which."
"If the gods want him dead, they'll kill him themselves. Until then, he works."
"Captain—"
"Enough." Mhagor's voice hardened. "I've made my decision. Question it again, and you'll swim to Yi Ti."
Dako's face went blank, but his eyes indicated that he would address the issue later. Always later, with men like him. They nursed grudges like mothers nursed babes.
I should kill him, Mhagor thought. Before his malice curdles into something worse.
But Dako was still useful, and useful men were difficult to find. So he let the quartermaster walk away and turned his attention back to the boy and wondered what he'd invited aboard his ship.
Jon
Seven weeks out from Qarth, Leng appeared on the horizon like a fever dream.
Jon had heard stories of the island in Qarth's streets—whispered tales of jade mines and strange priests, of trees that walked and women who prophesied. The Yi Tish sailors on board spoke of it with the careful reverence reserved for things that were holy and dangerous in equal measure.
Even from a distance, the awareness that Marcus's training had given him sensed something wrong. The jungle covering the island was too green, too alive, pressing against the shore like a beast straining at a leash. The mist that wrapped its peaks didn't move with the wind.
"We resupply, then leave," Captain Mhagor announced. "Fast."
The port was barely worthy of the name—rotting piers, ramshackle buildings, and people with the hollow eyes of those who'd run out of places to run. The smell hit Jon before they'd even tied up: decay, jungle rot, and something else, something his enhanced senses couldn't identify but recoiled from anyway.
"Stay on the ship," Peng whispered as the crew prepared to go ashore. It was the first real thing he'd said to Jon since the galley work began. "Leng eats runaways."
Jon didn't need the warning. He could feel it in his bones—this place was hungry. It was a hunger that had nothing to do with food.
Half the crew went ashore for supplies. Dako volunteered eagerly, which should have been Jon's first warning. Jon stayed aboard, scrubbing the deck and trying to ignore the way the jungle seemed to watch the ship. Every time he looked toward the shore, the shadows between the trees seemed different, seemed closer.
"Demons," Marcus's memories whispered. This is how it felt, standing at the edge of demon territory. He felt a prickle on the back of his neck. There is certainty that something is waiting.
But there were no demons in this world. Only men. Only cruelty. Only the endless, ordinary evil of people who'd learned to hurt others because hurting was easier than feeling.
Evening came with visitors.
Three men approached the Jade Serpent, moving down the rotting pier with the purposeful stride of hunters. Jon's blood went cold before he even saw their faces. They moved like fighters, like men who knew exactly what they were doing and had done it many times before.
"We're looking for a boy," one said to the remaining crew. "Branded. Westerosi. We were told he'd be here."
Dako sold me.
The realization hit like a fist to the gut. Of course. Of course Dako would find a way to profit from his hatred. He would sell the slave boy to slavers who would take him back into chains, pocket the coin, and never lose a moment's sleep.
"Don't know him," the duty watchman said, but his voice wavered. He didn't care enough to lie well.
"Check the ship."
Jon ran. It was the only option—up into the rigging, into the shadows where the lantern light couldn't reach. The technique that sharpened his senses told him where the men searched, when they looked up, and when they looked away. He pressed himself against the mast, becoming part of the ship's skeleton, barely breathing.
One man looked directly at him. Their eyes met.
"THERE!"
Jon's body moved before his mind could catch up. The technique for speed flooded his muscles—and immediately the flashback hit. Chains. Guards. The branding iron is heating in the coals. His muscles seized, his vision tunneled, and for a terrible moment he was back in Yunkai, back in the compound, back in the place where they'd broken him.
No. Not now. MOVE.
He pushed through the memories, forced his body to respond despite the agony in his mind. The technique held for perhaps three heartbeats—enough to leap from rigging to dock, enough to sprint toward the jungle's edge.
The slavers gave chase, but Jon had one advantage: he had nothing left to lose. When the jungle loomed before him—dark, thick, promising a death that was probably no worse than what waited behind—he didn't hesitate. He dove in.
The undergrowth swallowed him immediately. Thorns tore at his skin, roots caught his feet, and his enhanced senses screamed warnings about things moving in the canopy above. Things that weren't birds. Observing these things with interest felt almost human.
Behind him, the slavers stopped at the jungle's edge.
"Not worth it!" one called. "Boy'll be dead by morning anyway!"
Their boots retreated down the pier. Jon huddled in the darkness for hours, listening to the jungle breathe around him. Listening to things move in the shadows just beyond his vision. Listening to his heart pound in his ears like a drum.
Only when full night came did he risk creeping back. The ship was still there—Mhagor on deck, furious.
"Dako's gone," the captain said when Jon materialized from the shadows like a ghost. "Disappeared into port with his pay and whatever else he was carrying. You know why?"
"He tried to sell me."
"Thought so." Mhagor studied Jon with his unreadable eyes, and Jon couldn't determine whether he perceived him as a slave, a curiosity, or merely a problem that needed solving. "Can't have that. Undermines my authority. Bad for business."
"I understand."
"You stay on the ship from now on. We leave within the hour."
"Thank you."
"Don't thank me. You're still just labor. But you're my labor until Yin. What I own, I keep."
As Leng disappeared behind them—that hungry island with its watching jungle—Jon allowed himself to think that maybe, without Dako, things would be better. No active enemy, just the usual indifference of men who saw him as cargo rather than a person.
He was mistaken. However, he would remain unaware of that for several weeks.
The eighth week brought perfect sailing weather.
Clear skies stretched from horizon to horizon. The wind blew steady from the southwest, filling the sails and pushing them toward Yi Ti at a pace that made even the oldest sailors smile. The crew's mood lifted as the weeks of journey fell behind them. Rumors spread of land sighted by passing ships, of ports where wine was cheap and women willing.
Jon found himself planning for the first time in months. Not grand plans, not dreams of power or revenge. Simple things: where he'd go in Yin, what work he might find, how he'd survive in a land where his face marked him as foreign as surely as his brand marked him as property.
Yi Ti, he thought. The Golden Empire. I'll be the first Northman there.
It was a strange comfort, being somewhere that even his borrowed memories couldn't map. For once, he and Marcus would learn together.
But old sailors noticed what Jon's enhanced senses had been screaming for days.
"Barometer's dropping," Tsura said one morning, studying the horizon with eyes that had seen a hundred storms. "Birds flying wrong. The wind's too steady. A storm's coming."
Jon looked at the sky—clear, cloudless, achingly blue. "How do you know?"
Tsura gave him a look that might have been respect, or it might have been pity. "Because I'm still alive. You survive the Jade Sea by learning to read her moods. Currently, she's pretending to be content. Means she's about to rage."
Captain Mhagor ordered preparations within the hour. Everything that could be secured was tied down. Everything that could break was stored below. The crew worked with grim efficiency, and for once, no one made jokes about the branded boy or complained about bad luck.
The storm didn't care about luck. It would kill them all equally.
On the last night before it hit, Peng ladled out double portions in the galley. "Need strength," he said simply. "What's coming will take everything."
Jon ate in silence, looking through the porthole at Yi Ti's coast. He could see it now—a dark line on the horizon, barely visible in the fading light. Mountains rising behind it—green, mysterious, and impossibly close.
So close, he thought. Just have to survive one more storm.
He'd survived storms before. He had been on the Mermaid's Grace while crossing the Narrow Sea. He had been on the slaver ship that carried him to Qarth. He'd used the breathing techniques to endure, to help, and to prove himself.
But something told him this storm would be different. Something in the way the old sailors prayed to gods Jon had never heard of. Something in the way the sea had gone quiet, as if the water itself was holding its breath.
That night, Jon dreamed of drowning. Not in water, but in memories—Marcus's deaths bleeding into his fears, chains and demons and fire and ice all tangled together until he couldn't tell which nightmares were borrowed and which were earned.
He woke to the ship trying to stand on its stern.
The typhoon hit like the end of the world.
Jon had been through storms before—the Narrow Sea crossing as a child, smaller squalls on this voyage. He'd thought he understood the sea's violence. He'd been wrong. This time was different. This moment was the ocean deciding that everything humans had built on her surface was a personal insult.
On deck, chaos had a shape: walls of water forty feet high, wind that could flay skin from bone, and rain that hit like a volley of arrows. The crew scrambled to follow Mhagor's shouted orders, but Jon could barely hear them over the storm's roar. Every word was torn away by wind that seemed to come from everywhere at once.
A wave larger than Winterfell's great hall crashed over the deck. Three men simply vanished—there one moment, gone the next, their screams cut short by tons of water that didn't care about screaming. Jon grabbed rigging and held on, his small hands burning as the rope tried to rip free.
"Breathe," he told himself. Center yourself. Find the calm at the center.
He reached for the technique—and the memories came flooding in.
The brand. The compound. Alya is dying on the cross. Dhara's expression revealed her disdain as she told him he was nothing special. Marcus was drowning in another life and another world, with demons above him and water below, feeling trapped with no way out.
The technique shattered.
Jon clung to the rigging with nothing but muscle and will, and both were failing. He saw the mainmast crack as the ship heaved beneath him.
The sound was like the world breaking. A groan of stressed wood was followed by a shriek of tearing fiber, and then the great pillar that had carried them across the sea simply snapped in half. Tsura was in the rigging when it went, trying to descend, his face pale but determined. Jon watched him disappear beneath tons of wood and canvas, blood spreading across the deck before the next wave washed it clean.
Tsura, who'd given him water when he'd collapsed. Tsura, who'd told him that dead men don't work. Gone in a heartbeat.
Below, water poured through every seam. Jon could hear Peng trapped in the galley, screaming as the water rose. The hatch had slammed shut, sealed by pressure, and there was nothing anyone could do.
Peng, who'd given him larger portions. Peng, who'd been a slave once and never forgot. Gone.
Then came the sound every sailor feared most: the hull breaking.
They'd hit something—a reef, debris, or maybe the sea had simply decided their time was done. Water rushed through a wound in the ship's starboard side, and the Jade Serpent listed hard to port. Men slid across the deck, grabbing at anything, finding nothing. Jon saw two more go over the side, their hands reaching for rails that weren't there anymore.
"ABANDON SHIP!" Mhagor roared from somewhere Jon couldn't see. "SHE'S GOING DOWN!"
But there were no boats—the storm had taken them hours ago, torn from their davits and swallowed by waves. Men grabbed whatever would float: barrels, planks, and pieces of the broken mast. Jon seized a wooden spar just as the deck tilted beyond recovery.
He jumped.
The water was cold despite the warm latitude—the storm had churned up currents from the deep, water that had never known sunlight, water that wanted to drag him down and keep him forever. Waves drove him under immediately. He tried to breathe and got seawater instead, choking and gagging, his lungs burning.
The spar slipped from his grasp. He thrashed, found it again by pure chance, and clung to it with hands that had no strength left.
Around him, men died.
Jon saw them in glimpses between waves—faces appearing and disappearing, hands reaching for anything, nothing. A sailor he didn't know, young, probably no older than Robb, his mouth open in a scream that the storm stole. An older man, grey-bearded, his eyes already empty as the water claimed him. Bodies floating past, knocked senseless by debris, drowning without even knowing it.
Captain Mhagor surfaced once, twenty feet away. Their eyes met through the chaos, and Jon saw something in the captain's face—not fear, not anger, just a weary acceptance. This was how it ended. This was how the sea collected her debts.
Then a wave took him, and he was gone.
Jon's strength was failing. The cold ate at him, and his muscles cramped. His consciousness began to fragment, and suddenly he was unsure whether he was Jon drowning in the Jade Sea, Marcus drowning in one of his previous deaths, or someone entirely different—someone who had never existed and was dying in every world at once.
Let go, part of him whispered. It would be a breeze. Stop fighting. Stop breathing. Let the water take you, and there'll be no more pain, no more running, no more burning brands, and no more dying friends.
He wanted to listen. God, he wanted to listen. His fingers loosened on the spar, and the sea welcomed him, pulling him down into darkness that promised peace.
But then memories surfaced. Not Marcus's memories—his own.
Kerys whispered, "Be free," as she died on the cross, her eyes finding his through her agony.
Robb had said, "You're my brother," in the training yard before everything went wrong.
Even Ned's voice, distant but clear, from a night Jon had almost forgotten: "You are a Stark. You carry the blood of the First Men. You endure."
And Marcus's voice, not demanding or instructing but simply stating a truth: Water is not your enemy. It's your element. You learned to breathe underwater before you learned to walk. Remember.
Jon reached for the breathing technique with desperate certainty.
The flashbacks came immediately. Chains. Drowning. The brand. Alya is screaming. Dhara's empty eyes. The compound guards were laughing as they broke his fingers one by one.
But this time, Jon didn't fight them.
He let them wash through him like the storm, accepting the pain as the price of survival. He'd earned those memories. They were his now—not borrowed, not stolen, just part of what had made him. The brand on his shoulder, the scars on his back, the crooked fingers, and the broken trust—they weren't weaknesses. They were proof that he'd survived. Proof that he'd kept surviving, no matter what the world threw at him.
The technique clicked into place.
His body temperature stabilized. His lungs found pockets of air between waves, extracting oxygen from chaos. His muscles remembered how to work despite exhaustion, drawing strength from somewhere deeper than flesh and bone.
He wasn't fighting the sea anymore. He was moving with it, part of it. When waves crashed over him, he rode them instead of resisting. When currents pulled him down, he let them carry him until they released. When the water tried to fill his lungs, he breathed anyway, finding the life hidden in death.
Hours passed. Or days. Or years. Time meant nothing in the water. The storm gradually weakened from apocalyptic to merely terrible. The waves fell from mountains to hills and swelled.
Dawn came as a gray light through gray clouds. And through the grey, Jon saw land.
A dark line of jungle-covered coast, closer than he'd dared hope. Surf breaking on a beach that might be sandy or rocky—he couldn't tell from here, and it didn't matter. There was land. Solid ground was solid ground.
He kicked toward it with what little strength remained, letting waves do most of the work. The current was with him, a gift from a sea that had tried to kill him and failed. Or maybe a final joke, delivering him to shore just so something else could finish what the storm had started.
The final wave was almost gentle, depositing him on rough sand like a mother laying down a child. Jon crawled a few feet up the beach, coughing water tinged with blood—his lungs were damaged, but they were breathing.
He made it perhaps ten feet from the waterline before his body simply stopped. He fell face-first into sand, managed to turn his head enough to breathe, and then darkness claimed him.
"Made it," was his last thought. Land. Yi Ti?
Then nothing.
Silence fell over the beach like a burial shroud.
The storm moved on, leaving devastation in its wake. The coast stretched for miles, jungle pressing close to the shore, and along its length the sea deposited its prizes: broken wood, torn silk, and bodies. The Jade Serpent was gone—sunk somewhere in the deep water, taking her cargo and her secrets with her.
Captain Mhagor washed up thirty feet from where Jon lay unconscious. His eyes were open to the morning sun, seeing nothing. Crabs were already investigating, picking at the wounds the storm had left. He'd crossed the Jade Sea a hundred times, traded in a dozen ports, and survived pirates and fever and men who wanted him dead. In the end, the sea had collected him anyway.
Tsura lay entangled in the rigging that had killed him, his face serene now that the drowning had ended. Peng had never made it out of the galley—somewhere in the deep, fish were picking his bones clean. Twenty-five sailors, most of whose names Jon had never learned, were food for crabs and fish, their dreams and fears and petty cruelties all washed away by the same water that had carried them.
One stowaway survived.
Jon Snow lay on the beach of Yi Ti—or some nameless island near it—unconscious, hypothermic, barely breathing. His body was broken: ribs cracked, lungs full of seawater, skin torn by debris. The brand on his shoulder, the scars on his back, the crooked fingers—all unchanged. Just more wounds added to a collection that had started in Yunkai and showed no signs of ending.
The breathing technique had saved him. That gift from a dead man in a dream had kept Jon alive when drowning should have claimed him. But the cost was high. His sense of self had fractured further during the storm, with Marcus's memories bleeding into his own until he couldn't tell which drowning he was surviving, which death he was escaping.
Around him: wreckage. Bodies. Silence.
In the jungle's shadow, something watched. Eyes that could have belonged to an animal—or something else—studied the small figure on the sand. Studied the rise and fall of his chest, the blood seeping from his wounds, and the way his hand still clutched sand as if holding onto life itself.
Then the eyes withdrew, leaving Jon to the silence and the slowly rising sun.
Jon Snow had crossed the world. Fled Winterfell's hate, survived Braavos's streets, endured Volantis's horrors, was enslaved in Yunkai, was ground down in Qarth, and was shipwrecked in the Jade Sea.
And now, at last, he'd reached Yi Ti.
Unconscious. Broken. Alone.
But breathing.
The sun climbed higher, burning off the storm clouds. Waves lapped gently at the beach, as if the sea had never raged at all. On the sand, a boy's chest rose and fell in rhythm with the tide, surrounded by the wreckage of another life destroyed.