He woke in a coffin.
Not the carved cedar of a lord, nor the rough pine of a wildling pyre, but an open stone box cold enough to bite through skin. The first breath he dragged in scraped his throat raw. His chest seized, as if his lungs doubted they could work again. For a long heartbeat, he lay trapped between cold stone and colder memory, fingers clawing at nothing, knives flashing behind his eyes.
Torches. Faces he trusted. Snow turning red beneath him.
They killed me. I felt the life leave. So how in the seven hells am I here?
He forced his hand to the coffin's rim, bracing until the tremor in his fingers eased. The dark around him felt wrong, not empty but listening. Damp air clung to his skin, heavy with the mineral tang of a cavern sealed for ages.
Shapes eased into focus as his sight adjusted: toppled stone coffins, fractured slabs, and statues flanking a grand stairway carved into the wall. Their features were eroded by time, yet their blank faces still seemed to watch him.
At the foot of the stairs, half buried in rubble, stood a sapling made of light.
Its branches shimmered with a faint gold radiance, flickering as though the little tree strained simply to exist. Shadows pooled around its roots, darker than they had any right to be. When Jon got out of his coffin and stepped closer to the tree, warmth brushed his cheek, gentle yet wrong, nothing like the clean heat of a hearth.
For an instant, he thought of the heart trees of the North: pale bark, red leaves rustling in wind no one felt, the sense of old eyes watching from carved faces. But this was no weirwood, no whisper of the Old Gods. Its glow felt alive in a different way, as if it regarded him in return.
Whatever brought me back… it hasn't finished with me yet. He raised a hand toward it, then froze, palm hovering in the air.
A sharp crack echoed behind him. Stone grinding against stone.
Jon spun, hand dropping to Longclaw, and closed around the hilt of the familiar blade. The feel of the sword steadied him more than breath.
One of the coffins shuddered.
Its lid scraped aside with a low, grating moan. A figure climbed out: armour fused to dried flesh, ribs showing through torn mail, eyes burning with twin red coals. It turned its head toward him in a creaking, unnatural motion that his hair rose on his nape.
Not a wight, he realised at once. Whatever held it upright wasn't the cold sorcery he knew. This thing moved by some other will entirely.
The thing reached for a rusted sword.
Jon moved. His stance fell into place the way Qhorin had drilled into him: knees loose, weight centred, blade held low and ready. He stepped sideways, giving himself space as shadows swallowed the edges of the cavern.
The creature rushed with a broken shriek.
Jon slipped past its first clumsy overhead swing and drove Longclaw straight into its chest. Light flared from the wound, gold and bright, spilling like embers caught in a sudden wind. The body crumbled around the sword with a cry and dissolved into ash. No frozen sinew. No splintered bone. No rotting flesh. Just light and dust, pulled apart in an instant.
Two more coffins groaned open.
They moved faster, as if the first had roused them. Jon parried a downward cut, twisted under another, letting training and instinct bind together. One spine parted under a clean stroke. The other fell when he drove his blade up beneath its ribs.
Both came apart in the same unnatural way: a rush of golden light, then ash.
Silence settled over the cavern again. Ash drifted onto his sleeve, then thinned to nothing, as if the air itself refused to hold it.
Jon crouched by the nearest broken shell of armour and touched it. The instant his fingers brushed the metal, it collapsed into pale dust. Too fast. Too perfect. Not rust, not decay. A clean unmaking.
Not anything he understood.
He rose and turned back to the sapling. Its branches swayed without wind, light pulsing in a slow, steady rhythm not unlike the phantom pulse he still felt echoing in his chest.
The warmth from it did not comfort. It invited. Or warned.
He stepped away.
There was only one way forward: up the stair, past the statues and the silent coffins.
Stone shouldn't stare, Jon thought. Yet every step felt like walking under judgment.
He checked each shadow, each crevice behind cracked pillars, as he climbed. His boots sent hollow echoes up into the dark, the sound of a living man trespassing in a place built for the dead.
Halfway up, he paused, glancing back at the stone box he had risen from. He tried to summon fear or fury or anything clean and sharp. What came instead was a steady, low dread.
He continued upward.
At the top stood a heavy ironbound door. When he put his shoulder to it, it swung open more easily than it had any right to. The hall beyond was narrow, lit only by a lingering hint of the sapling's glow behind him. Dust hung in the air. Nothing moved.
To his right, a small stone imp crouched against the wall, clutching a miniature blade. Fine grooves branched out from its eyes. A keyhole yawned inside it.
Jon studied it only long enough to decide he trusted none of it.
He moved on.
The hall led into a wide circular chamber, pillars ringed around a round stone platform, carved with runes worn down by time. Candles flickered with smoke, their flame white, thin and wavering.
Jon stepped on the platform.
It began to ascend upwards, stone grinding against stone in long, echoing waves.
The air cooled as he rose. Dust spiralled slowly around him. For a moment, he felt suspended between two worlds, neither fully living nor fully dead.
The lift stopped.
A short flight of stairs led up to a final iron gate. Jon climbed the stairs, set his hands under the gate's lower edge, and heaved. Metal scraped along stone as it lifted.
Wind rushed in.
Warm, real wind, smelling of grass and open earth.
Daylight poured over him in soft gold. It had none of winter's bite, but he still braced for cold that did not come. He stepped forward--out of stone, out of shadow--into a world that shouldn't exist.
It unfurled in a sweep of gold-washed land.
Grasslands rolled out in uneven folds, dotted with jagged rocks and low shrubs. Mist drifted along the hollows, thinning around cracked foundations and toppled arches scattered like the bones of lost keeps. Far off, a shattered bridge stretched across the valley--massive stone ribs rising in broken intervals, half-swallowed by fog. A leaning tower jutted from a distant hilltop, crooked as a spear planted by some forgotten giant.
Trees with crowns of bright yellow leaves swayed gently in the wind. Their branches flickered in the sunlight, shedding copper-hued shadows across the slope.
But Jon's gaze rose higher, pulled upward despite himself.
A vast tree dominated the sky. So enormous it made mountains seem small. Its trunk shone like polished amber, and its boughs unfurled across the heavens in shimmering strands of gold. Light cascaded from its crown in slow, rippling currents, as though the entire thing breathed.
Jon had stood beneath heart trees, felt the weight of old gods in carved faces, but even those ancient things felt rooted in the world he knew. This tree belonged to something vast and distant. "What is that?" he murmured aloud before he could stop himself.
The sight hollowed him. No god's tree should stand that high, no branches should shimmer like braided sunlight stretching into the heavens. He felt small before it in a way the Wall had never made him feel, a man staring at something built far beyond mortal reason.
A thought rose sharp and cold:
Is this where the dead go?
Not the Seven's halls, not the godswood's silence. The strangeness here was too deliberate, too bright. And something--something in the dark before waking had dragged him back. A pulse not his own. A warmth threading into torn flesh. A summons more than a salvation.
"I do not belong here," he murmured. The words felt truer beneath that impossible light.
A delicate chime pierced the air, soft and precise, like the tap of a glass bell.
Jon turned sharply.
A man stood down by the path, as if he'd always been there. White robes stained with blood. A porcelain mask, smooth as polished bone, featureless except for small shadows cast by its hollow eyes. In one hand, he carried what looked like a bouquet of red blooms until Jon saw the hooked barbs woven into its stems.
Jon shifted his balance, keeping his feet planted. He didn't draw Longclaw, but he allowed the stranger to notice how close his fingers rested to the hilt.
The masked figure dipped his head with unsettling grace.
"Well now," he said, voice bright. "A new Tarnished rises. And one with iron in his spine, by the look of you."
"A new… what?" Jon asked, the unfamiliar word scraping wrong against his ear. Whatever name the man used, it wasn't his.
The man let out a soft, pleased breath. "No need to glower so fiercely. I've no quarrel with you."
Jon watched the man's hands--his stance. A man's gait often revealed more truth than his tongue. "Then speak plainly," Jon said. "What are you?"
The man laughed, amused. "What? Why, a courteous soul, nothing more." He offered a bow. "Varré, at your service. And you, my friend, look as though you clawed free of your grave only moments ago."
Jon's jaw tightened. "You knew I'd come out of there."
"Oh, certainly. All Tarnished do." Varré tapped the side of his mask. "Dragged back from the dead like stubborn weeds. Grace summons you, as it did the rest."
For a heartbeat, Jon's breath hitched--small, sharp, an involuntary crack in the armour he tried to hold together. The notion that his death meant nothing here, that rising from a grave was as common as drawing breath, scraped against something raw inside him. He shoved it down, steadying himself with the feel of Longclaw's worn leather grip. Whatever this "Grace" was, it wasn't his god, and he would not let strange magic tell him what he was.
He didn't understand the glow, only felt its pull--wrong, insistent, like a hand closing around the back of his neck. Jon kept his expression flat, refusing to show how it unsettled him. He had no name for it, no lore to lean on, only the uneasy sense of a tether he had not chosen.
"You mentioned this… grace," Jon said carefully. The word felt foreign on his tongue. "What does it want of me?"
"Grace of Gold," Varré said, gesturing lazily toward the faint golden trail winding across the plains. "A whisper. A lure. A tether, depending on whom you ask." He tilted his head. "It urges you toward your purpose. Whether you wish it or not."
"And if I ignore this light?" Jon asked, distrust sharpening his tone.
"Then you drift," Varré answered.
Jon felt the pull of that word. Drift. As if the land itself expected obedience from the dead.
The man's posture was almost casual, yet every inch of him, every idle spin of the thorned bouquet, carried a quiet thrill for danger dressed as civility.
"Though…" Varré's tone shifted, almost pitying, though Jon sensed the mockery beneath. "You seem to be missing something rather important."
Jon's hand tightened slightly on Longclaw's pommel. "Missing what?"
"A guide." Varré gestured with the thorned bouquet, as if pointing out a flaw in Jon's posture. "Most Tarnished wake under the care of a Finger Maiden. One who interprets the will of the Two Fingers offers strength from the runes you gather, and ushers you toward the Roundtable Hold. A place of refuge, knowledge, and purpose."
He clicked his tongue softly. "But you… No attendant soul waits at your side. No blessing. No invitation." The mask turned toward him fully. "Unfortunately for you, dear fellow, that makes you what we call maidenless."
The word landed with a lightness that made it feel even more like a curse. Varré leaned in the slightest fraction. "Without guidance, without rune-craft to shape your strength, and barred from the Roundtable… well. More often than not, such souls die their second deaths quickly. And quietly. Forgotten by all."
He straightened, cheerful as ever.
"Fated, it seems, to a rather obscure end."
The word struck him harder than he let show. Maidenless. As if he were some child waiting on a nursemaid. He had stood frozen nights on the Wall, commanded rangers older than he was, faced the dead with no guiding hand but grit and a sword. Whatever this land thought he lacked, it had mistaken him for a man who needed permission to stand. Jon felt something cold and familiar settle in his chest--a Stark's refusal, quiet and unyielding. He would not be named by this place. He would not be pitied by masked men who talked of death like a game.
He tightened his grip on Longclaw. Obscure death be damned.
He straightened a fraction, enough that the porcelain mask tilted, as if reassessing him. Jon forced the tremor from his fingers. He'd been dragged from a coffin into a world that tried to name him with every breath--but he would decide what he was or die on his feet refusing.
"Where are we?" Jon said. "What land is this?"
"Limgrave," Varré answered lightly.
No recognition stirred in Jon, no matter how hard he tried.
"Once beautiful. Now left to rot." Varré gestured toward the ragged arches and distant battlements. "Stormveil broods over the cliffs. Its master, the decrepit demigod, Godrick the Grafted, rules what still writhes beneath him."
"Grafted," Jon repeated.
A warm hum entered Varré's voice. "A tasteful epithet, I think. A man of ceaseless hunger… for strength, for legacy. For…" He twirled the bouquet delicately. "Well, you will learn soon enough. All Tarnished do. Most to their regret."
Jon kept his voice steady. "You speak as though you've seen many."
"I've seen countless rise," Varré said softly. "And far more fall." He leaned a fraction closer, the giant tree's golden glow catching on the curve of his mask. "Tell me, wanderer… do you believe yourself different?"
Jon thought of coffins cracking open, light spilling from ruined armour, the strange warmth still lingering in his veins. He thought of snow and steel and the knives that had ended him.
"I'm no one special," he said. "But I'm standing."
Jon cast one more glance toward the faint golden shimmer twisting through the air. It pulsed at the edge of his sight again, as if waiting for him to fall in step. He clenched his jaw. Whatever it wanted, he didn't trust it--not yet, not ever.
Varré's hum was almost approving. "Then you'll fit right in."
"What do you want from me?" Jon asked.
"Want?" Varré sounded delighted. "Nothing at all. I merely enjoy seeing which fate a fresh Tarnished chases. Ruin or triumph." A pause. "Here, the two are often one of the same."
Jon's hand brushed Longclaw's pommel. "I'll find my own way."
"I imagine you will," Varré said. "Until something greater bends it."
The words held no threat, yet Jon's skin prickled as if one had been spoken.
The tree's light brightened behind Varré, sharpening the porcelain mask's edges. He stepped back with a graceful tilt of the head.
"Off you go now," he said lightly. "The Tree Sentinel roams nearby. I'd hate to see you trampled before your tale even begins."
Jon passed him. Varré didn't follow. He simply watched, still as a blade laid across a throat, tracking Jon's retreating shape with interest and something darker.
A man soaked in blood does not wear it by accident.
Whatever game Varré played, Jon wanted no part of it.
Not unless the man forced his hand.
He put distance between them--twenty paces, fifty--yet the sense of being observed clung to him like a cold fingertip tracing his spine. Only when the path dipped behind a swell of earth did the feeling ease.
Warm wind swept across the plain, stirring tall grass that shimmered under the glow of the giant tree above. The tree's immense boughs trembled high overhead, each branch shedding veils of pale light that drifted like falling embers. Jon slowed, not out of awe, but caution. The tree made no sound, yet its radiance felt like breath on the back of his neck.
He still had no answers.
But he had a direction.
The tug returned--faint, insistent, brushing the edge of his sight like a hand he didn't want touching him. Jon scowled at it. Nothing should be able to guide a living man like that, not without price. But standing still in a strange land was a fast way to die, and caution edged out pride. He followed, warily, through the swaying yellow-crowned trees.
Grass brushed his knees as he walked. The sky felt too enormous, the air too sharp, the earth almost springy under his boots. Westeros had known its own strange places, whispering godswoods, the Wall groaning beneath winter's weight, but those belonged to the land's own bones. This place felt… made. Shaped. Watching him decide whether to step forward or turn back.
Here, the unnatural stood boldly in sunlight.
Flickers of memory rose: the Wall's icy wind clawing at his face, Ghost trotting ahead, white fur cutting through the storm. He almost turned, expecting red eyes behind him.
Only broken stone and rolling fields stared back.
He pressed onward.
Ruins dotted the hillside, arches strangled by ivy, shattered walls leaning like ribs of some enormous creature long dead. Birds darted through narrow arrow slits in the half-collapsed chapel nearby, their wings shedding faint trails of golden dust. Vines wrapped the pillars like old wrappings left to weather in the sun.
A rabbit, white as winter snow, bolted across the weeds. Its ears gleaming with a faint golden edge. Farther off, a deer lifted its head, antlers flashing like carved crystal in the light.
They moved like normal beasts… yet the subtle glow along their outlines made the back of Jon's neck tighten.
Living things should not shine.
A broad and heavy shadow swept across the grass.
Jon dropped behind a fallen column before he'd consciously registered the danger. Stillness first. Then a slow, measured breath.
He looked up.
A rider advanced along the lower ridge, its pace unhurried. The horse beneath it was colossal, its armour a tapestry of chiselled gold plates and feathered metal fronds. The rider matched it--towering, sheathed in ornate gilded mail that caught the giant tree's radiance in blinding flashes.
The halberd in its gauntleted grip was the length of a small sapling; its blade etched with swirling patterns. The weapon rested easily across one shoulder, as if weight meant nothing to the knight wielding it.
Varré's warning returned with perfect clarity.
The Tree Sentinel.
It didn't move like a guard. It moved like a rule of the land given muscle and iron. Every step of its armoured steed pressed into the ground with the slow confidence of something that had never been forced to doubt its strength.
Jon's heartbeat hammered against his ribs. The sentinel's presence felt like a mailed fist pressing slowly, steadily, on his chest. Dangerous. He stayed motionless until the sentinel's golden silhouette disappeared over the rise.
Only then did he allow his lungs to unclench.
This realm was not shaped for men, he thought. Or whatever shaped it had done so with a cruel hand.
Keeping wide of the ridge, he angled north to avoid the sentinel. Time grew slippery beneath the unmoving gold of the sky, but the soreness in his legs and the dryness in his mouth told him hours had passed.
And the golden trail ahead still glimmered--waiting.
At last, he spotted it: a thin column of smoke twisting up from a half-collapsed structure in the distance.
Smoke meant fire. Fire meant someone living.
For better or worse.
He moved toward it at a measured pace, hand never drifting far from Longclaw's hilt. Nothing in this land had shown itself harmless, and even smoke carried its own questions. The closer he drew, the clearer the shape became: broken walls, a leaning arch, stone scattered as though the building had tried to stand upright and simply forgotten how.
The tug of golden light hovered at the edge of his vision again, angling him toward the ruin as if to say yes, this way, though Jon refused to give it that much trust. He chose his own steps, even if they happened to follow its path.
Wind shifted, carrying the warm scent of smoke, and something else beneath it. A lute string gently plucked. A human voice humming low, almost lost beneath the rustling grass.
Jon slowed on the last stretch, every sense alert.
Whoever waited inside, at least they were living.
The ruin resolved into clearer shape as Jon approached. Half a sept, half a skeleton. Stone ribs curved upward where a roof had once been, catching the drifting gold of the sky. The fire inside flickered steadily, not the frantic light of a camp occupied by soldiers or brigands. Someone unhurried tended it. Someone confident enough not to hide.
Jon kept to the shadows of a leaning pillar until the hum of the lute grew distinct. No strain in the melody. No tremor of fear. Whoever played had been here long enough to feel at home beneath broken stone.
He stepped closer, boots silent in the grass.
Inside, a man in red sat by a pot over a small fire, playing a lute. His clothes were travel-worn but mended with care; his eyes, when they lifted to Jon, were steady and discerning. A mule stood behind him; reins looped over a fallen block of stone. An avil stood in a far corner.
"You walk like someone expecting knives in the dark," the man remarked, his hands never pausing on the strings.
"Old habit," Jon said. He stopped close enough to feel the warmth on his shins. "You're alone?"
"Alone enough," the man said with an easy lean of his shoulders. "Kalé. Purveyor of fine goods."
"Jon," he answered simply.
Kalé's gaze flicked over him: the cut of the cloak, the sword, the way he held himself. "From far off," he concluded. "This land hasn't settled into your bones yet."
Jon sat on a broken stone across from the fire. "Then perhaps someone here can speak plainly."
"If I can," Kalé said mildly.
"Where am I?"
"Limgrave," Kalé replied. "Once peaceful. Now mostly surrendered to ruin."
"And who rules it?"
"Godrick the Grafted."
The word pricked now; Jon had heard it twice. It was always better to verify information. "Grafted," he echoed. "What does that mean here?"
Kalé paused. Not with fear, but with the care of a man measuring what to give a stranger. "He sews strength to himself," Kalé said at last. "Arms. Legs. Whatever he covets. Calls it his birthright."
Jon stared at him. "You expect me to believe that."
Kalé didn't flinch. "I expect you to hear it. Belief comes later."
Jon thought of Ramsay and Craster. A chill slid under Jon's ribs that had nothing to do with the warm breeze. Those nightmares had been done in secret, hidden in corners even monsters feared. But to wear such things openly? To claim it as birthright?
"There are monsters in every land," Jon said quietly.
"Here," Kalé answered, "the monsters often wear crowns."
Jon let the truth hang there for a long moment.
A soft golden light near a broken beam caught his eye. Motes of light and ash drifted there, swirling around a point in the air as if drawn by some invisible tide.
"Grace," Kalé said, watching him with a gentler tone. "A remnant of what once held this world together."
Jon stood and approached.
Being near it felt like leaning toward a hearth after days of cold, but the warmth was wrong, too clean, too eager to settle beneath his skin. When he touched it, heat slid through him in a slow, steady ripple. Relief followed… then suspicion. Power that soothed for no reason was power that wanted something, whether it said so or not.
He stepped back and returned to the fire.
Kalé nodded toward a small pot nestled in the coals. "You're welcome to a share. Stew's thin, but warm." Then, almost as an afterthought: "Food's not given freely in these parts. Hasn't been since the Shattering."
Jon stiffened. "I've nothing to trade."
"You do," Kalé said simply. "You carry runes."
Jon frowned. "Runes?"
"Fragments of grace," Kalé explained. "Folk here use them in place of coin."
Jon thought of the glowing motes that had drifted in the cavern. Of the way they had clung to him like sparks. He reached into his pocket. A warmth pulsed there, soft as a heartbeat. When he opened his hand, golden flecks gathered into a small, shimmering cluster.
Kalé nodded once. "Enough for a meal. And a bedroll."
Jon traded them without hesitation. Better to owe honest payment than accept charity in a place he did not trust.
Kalé ladled stew into a wooden bowl and handed it over. Jon tasted it--thin broth, tougher meat--but the heat steadied him. Kalé tossed him a rolled blanket as well, patched but clean.
"Keep it close," the merchant said. "Nights in Limgrave are stranger than its days."
Kalé played a slow, wandering melody that drifted through the ruin as an old story half-remembered. Night crept in, though the sky overhead refused to darken fully; the light above stayed stubbornly gold.
Then the first stars appeared.
Jon looked up and froze.
The sky was wrong.
Constellations he'd known since boyhood were absent. In their place sprawled new forms: spirals instead of spears, broken shapes instead of hunters and direwolves. The stars shone too fiercely, as though something deep in the earth fed their fire.
"That's not right," Jon murmured.
Kalé looked up as well. "Aye," he said softly. "Long ago, Starscourge Radahn halted their courses. Held their courses with might no one's seen since the Ring was broken. They've stayed fixed ever since, caught between falling and fleeing."
Jon's stomach tightened. "Magic that stops the heavens…" He shook his head. "In my home, such things come only with blood. Or prophecy."
"In the Lands Between," Kalé murmured, "it comes with war."
Jon tore his gaze away, the pressure behind his eyes beating like a second pulse. A world where the sky had been shackled. Where even the stars had been forced to kneel.
He imagined Ghost under that unmoving sky, hackles raised, watching something Jon could not name. The thought steadied him.
He leaned closer to the flames without surrendering to their comfort. "I'll have more questions come dawn."
"I expect you will," Kalé answered, a hint of wryness in his tone. "Morning makes it easier to hear certain truths."
Jon lay back on his bedroll, cloak drawn over his shoulders. The stone was hard beneath him, the air unfamiliar, the sky above untrustworthy. Yet the crackle of the fire sounded like any campfire he had ever known.
He had a sword, a path, a piece of knowledge, and the stubborn will to stay himself.
Sleep came slowly, wary as a hunted animal.
Above him, the stars stayed unblinking sentinels in a silent sky.
Watching.
---
Author's note: I thought Jon should be stubborn about Grace since he's a Stark, after all, and Westerosi logic does not map cleanly onto Elden Ring's madness.