The moon ate the sun, and Jon Snow woke screaming.
Not a nightmare's sharp cry. This sound came from deeper—torn from the base of his spine, where fire and ice were being born together in the same instant. His blankets were soaked with sweat that had already begun to freeze in patches, crackling when he moved. The air in his room tasted of copper and char, though nothing was burning.
His left hand had gone numb. When he raised it, frost glittered on his fingernails—delicate as lace, spreading toward his wrist like a living thing. His right palm blistered, skin tight and hot, steam rising where tears struck it. The sheets beneath that hand had begun to smoke.
Seven years old. He was seven years old, and his body was tearing itself in half.
A flash—not memory, not dream. Desert heat. Blood pooling in cracked sand. A sword form he had never learned, muscle memory that belonged to hands twice the size of his own. The weight of armor he had never worn. The smell of incense and gunpowder and something else, something sharp and medicinal that made his eyes water.
Jon clutched his skull, gasping at the shock of cold against one temple and heat against the other. The vision shattered like ice on stone, leaving fragments: burning rope, the weight of a blade too large for his grip, and a woman's voice screaming a name he did not recognize. And beneath it all, rising like smoke from beneath a door—
Panic kills.
The voice was inside him. Not his own. Deeper, older, weary in a way that made his bones ache with borrowed exhaustion. It spoke without words, without sound—a pressure behind his eyes, a knowing that arrived fully formed.
Breathe. You are not dying. You are changing.
Understanding was beyond him, but obedience was not. One breath, ragged and wet with tears. Two, steadier. Three. The fire in his chest receded like a tide pulling back from hot stone. The frost on his hand stopped its crawl toward his wrist, though it did not retreat.
Through the window, the eclipse blazed—a ring of white fire around a disk of perfect darkness. The Day of the Blind Sun. Servants had whispered about it for weeks, making signs against evil whenever they thought Maester Luwin was not watching. The maester himself had explained it as a natural phenomenon, the moon passing before the sun, nothing more. He had set up a darkened glass in the courtyard so the household could observe it safely.
But Jon had not watched through darkened glass. He had been asleep when the eclipse began, dreaming of a place with two suns and no winter, and when he woke screaming, the light that poured through his window was wrong—neither day nor night but something between, something that made shadows behave strangely and colors shift like oil on water.
Old Nan had called it an omen. Said the last time the sun went dark, the Long Night followed, and the dead walked the earth for a generation. Said the Children of the Forest had sung songs to bring back the dawn, and the First Men had paid a price in blood. Said some doors were never meant to be opened, and some seals were never meant to be broken.
Jon had laughed at that story once. Just three nights ago, in fact, sitting by the fire with Robb and Arya while Old Nan's needle clicked through her knitting. Arya had thrown a boot at him for laughing. Robb had called him a craven for flinching.
Now Jon stared at his mismatched hands—one frosted blue, one red with heat—and knew the old woman had been right about omens.
Outside, somewhere in the castle, a dog began to howl.
* * *
Three days later, Jon stood in the training yard with a practice sword that fit wrong in his grip.
He had asked to spar with Robb. Had practically begged, in fact, cornering his half-brother after breakfast and pleading for normalcy. If they could just cross swords like they used to, if Jon could just prove he was still the same boy who had always been one step behind Robb in everything—perhaps the whispers would stop. Perhaps the servants would stop making signs. Perhaps he could pretend the last three days had been a fever dream, nothing more.
The hilt was too thick for his fingers, the balance awkward—a tool made for boys of ten or eleven, not a bastard barely past his seventh nameday. His arm trembled from the weight before Robb had even raised his own blade in salute. The morning cold bit through his leather jerkin, but the cold inside him was worse—a constant pressure in his chest, like swallowing ice water that never warmed.
Beyond the fence, Theon Greyjoy lounged against a post, smirking at something only he found amusing. Ser Rodrik stood with his arms crossed, his great whiskers bristling in the wind. A handful of servants had gathered to watch—the same servants who had been whispering about Jon for three days now, who fell silent when he entered a room and made signs behind his back when they thought he wasn't looking.
"Ready, Snow?" Robb called, his breath misting in the morning cold. His smile was forced. Jon saw the worry beneath it—Robb had been watching him strangely since the eclipse, asking questions Jon could not answer.
Ready. The word meant nothing anymore. Three days Jon had spent hiding the frost that crept across his bedsheets each night, waking before the servants to scrape it away with his fingernails. Three days of pressing his palms into snowbanks behind the armory, trying to normalize the cold, trying to convince himself it was natural. Three days listening to a stranger's voice whisper instructions in a language of breaths and forms his child's body could not reproduce—techniques that existed complete in his mind like memories of things he had never done.
The voice had a name. Jon did not know how he knew this, but he knew it: Marcus. A soldier's name, foreign and sharp.
Robb charged.
Jon's body moved before his mind could follow. Not faster—differently. His feet shifted into a stance he had never been taught, weight dropping through his hips in a way Ser Rodrik had certainly never demonstrated. The world slowed, or he quickened—he could not tell which. He saw the angle of Robb's blade, the set of his shoulders, and the slight overextension of his leading foot.
He caught Robb's blade on an angle that sent the force sliding past him like water off stone. A counter-cut followed—muscle memory from a life he had never lived, from fingers that had gripped a thousand swords—and Robb stumbled backward with wide eyes, his practice sword nearly torn from his grip.
The yard went silent.
"How did you—" Robb started.
The technique was there, complete and perfect. But Jon's seven-year-old muscles could not hold the follow-through. His wrist buckled beneath the weight of the wooden blade—not weakness exactly, but a mismatch, like trying to pour a river through a reed. Pain lanced up his forearm as the sword clattered to the stones, and he collapsed to one knee, clutching his arm and gasping.
Across the yard, Theon's laugh cut through the cold air like a knife. "The bastard trips over his own feet! Did you see that, Robb? One moment he's dancing like a water dancer, the next he's eating dirt like a fishwife's boy."
The servants tittered. Someone whispered something about "the witch-boy."
Heat surged through Jon's chest. Not anger—something that lived deeper in his blood, something that wanted to burn. His right hand clenched around empty air. The wooden sword lying in the dirt beside him began to smoke, thin wisps rising from the handle where his palm had gripped it. The leather wrapping blackened and curled.
"Jon." Robb's voice had changed. Careful now. Frightened. He was backing away slowly, the way men backed away from wounded wolves. "Jon, your hand."
Frost crept across his left palm in spiderweb patterns, spreading up his wrist, crackling as it grew. His right hand glowed with impossible heat, the skin flushed red as if he'd held it over a forge for hours. The practice sword had split down its length where the two forces met—half frozen solid, the wood white with ice crystals; half charred black, still smoking, the grain cracked and blackened.
Silence fell over the training yard like a physical weight.
Ser Rodrik's weathered face had drained of color. His hand moved to his sword, then stopped, as if he did not know whether to defend or attack. Gage's boy dropped the bucket of water he'd been carrying, the crash loud in the stillness. A serving girl made the sign of the Seven and fled toward the kitchens, her wooden clogs clattering against the flagstones.
Theon had stopped laughing. He was backing away, one hand on his belt knife, watching Jon the way men watched wolves that had slipped their chains—the way Robert's men had watched Targaryens, in the stories Old Nan told.
"Get Maester Luwin," Ser Rodrik said, his voice hoarse. No one moved. The old knight drew his sword—a real sword, not a practice blade—and the steel sang as it cleared the scabbard. "Now. And someone find Lord Stark."
Jon stared at the naked blade. Ser Rodrik had taught him to hold a sword. Had corrected his grip a hundred times, praised him when he did well, and cuffed him gently when he forgot to keep his shield up. Now the old knight was looking at him like he was something to be put down.
Robb reached for him, his voice cracking. "Jon, wait—"
Jon ran.
* * *
Catelyn Stark found her husband in his solar, staring at a practice sword split down the middle.
She did not ask what had happened. The whispers had reached her before she'd finished her prayers in the sept—rushing into the sacred space like a cold wind, scattering her devotions to the Seven. Half the servants were packing their belongings; the other half were demanding double wages to stay. Old Nan had taken to her bed with a cup of dreamwine, muttering about signs and portents. Gage's boy had already fled to Winter Town, telling everyone who would listen that the bastard had conjured demon-fire in the training yard.
By nightfall, the story would reach the Kingsroad. By week's end, it would be in every tavern between Winterfell and the Neck. By month's end, it would reach King's Landing.
"How long?" Her voice was steady. She had practiced it on the walk from the sept, counting her breaths like beads on a prayer wheel, reciting the names of the Seven to keep her hands from shaking.
Ned did not look up from the ruined sword. His thumb traced the line where heat and cold had split the wood—a perfect bisection, as if the sword had been cleaved by the gods themselves. "Three days. Since the eclipse."
"And you said nothing."
"I hoped it would pass." His voice was hollow. Defeated. "I hoped it was just—a fever. A child's imagination. Something that would fade with time."
Catelyn moved to the window, her skirts rustling against the rushes. Below, she could see the godswood—that heathen place where Ned prayed to gods she had never understood, gods with faces of blood and eyes of sap. Somewhere in those red-leafed trees, the bastard was hiding.
Her children played in those trees. Robb climbed them, swinging from branch to branch like a young squirrel. Arya chased squirrels through the underbrush and came home with leaves in her hair. Bran had taken his first steps beneath that heart tree, reaching for its blood-red leaves while she held his hands and Ned watched with tears in his eyes.
Now there was a monster in those woods. A monster wearing her husband's grey eyes.
"He cannot stay." The words came harder than she intended, but she did not soften them. For seven years she had swallowed her pride, pretending the knife in her heart did not twist every time she saw those grey eyes in that long Stark face. Seven years of silence, of courtesy, of playing the gracious lady while the bastard ate at her table and trained with her son and called her husband "Father."
Seven years of silence, and now this.
"Ned, you saw what he did. Half the castle saw. The word will spread. It always spreads."
"I know."
"Robert will hear of it." She turned from the window to face him, her voice dropping. "The Lannisters will hear. They will come with questions we cannot answer, and if we try to lie—" She stopped and steadied herself. "You are Robert's Hand in all but name. What will he think when he learns you've been harboring a sorcerer? A fire sorcerer, Ned. The Targaryens called fire their birthright. Robert killed Rhaegar on the Trident for what he did with fire and blood."
Ned's knuckles whitened around the broken sword. Something passed across his face—guilt, perhaps, or grief, or something older and deeper that Catelyn did not recognize.
"Send him to the Wall," Catelyn said. "To foster elsewhere. The Free Cities, if you must. Anywhere. But get him away from our children before—"
"Before what?" Ned's voice was quiet. Dangerous.
Catelyn met his eyes. She had loved this man for seven years. She had borne him five children. She had never feared him—not once—until this moment.
"Before he burns them."
For a long moment, Ned said nothing. The fire crackled in the hearth. Wind rattled the shutters. Somewhere below, a servant dropped something metal, and the clang echoed through the keep like a warning bell.
Then Ned set the broken sword on his desk, and Catelyn saw something in his face she had never seen before.
Defeat.
"There is a man in the Neck," he said slowly, as if each word cost him blood. "Howland Reed. He knows things. About magic. About blood. About things that should not be possible."
"Then send the boy to him."
"I will." Ned's hand moved to the broken sword and traced the line where heat and cold had split the wood. "Tonight. Before word reaches the Kingsroad. Before Robert hears."
"And what will you tell people?" Catelyn asked. "When they ask where your bastard has gone?"
"That he has gone to foster with my bannermen. That his health required a warmer climate. That he has gone to seek his fortune across the Narrow Sea." Ned's voice was hollow. "Lies have always come easily where Jon is concerned."
The bitterness in his voice surprised her. For a moment—just a moment—Catelyn wondered what other lies he had told about the boy. What truths he had hidden, not just from her but from everyone.
Then she pushed the thought away. It did not matter. What mattered was protecting her children, her true children, the ones she had carried in her own body and brought screaming into the world.
Catelyn should have felt relief. Instead, watching her husband's shoulders bow beneath a weight she did not understand, she felt only the cold creep of premonition—as if the eclipse had not ended at all but merely retreated behind clouds to wait.
* * *
Jon pressed his back against the heart tree and tried to disappear.
The weirwood was cool against his spine—not the biting cold of his left hand, but something gentler, like spring water rising from deep stone. The bark was smooth where generations of Starks had leaned against it to pray, worn down by centuries of shoulders and backs and grief. Its carved face watched him with red eyes that seemed, for the first time in his life, to actually see him.
The black pool at the tree's feet reflected nothing—not the red leaves, not the grey sky, not the boy curled among the roots with frost on one hand and fever in the other. It was as if the water itself had turned away from him.
A sob escaped him. Then another. He was seven years old and crying in the dark because he was a monster now, and monsters did not get to have brothers or fathers or sisters who chased them through the snow demanding sword lessons. Monsters did not get to sit at the table during feasts, not even the bastard's seat at the end. Monsters did not get to dream of the Wall, of black cloaks and brotherhood, of proving themselves worthy despite their birth.
Monsters got sent away.
The tears froze on his left cheek in tiny crystals that stung when he tried to wipe them away. On his right, they evaporated before they could fall—hissing into steam that rose toward the blood-red leaves like prayers he did not know how to speak.
Stop. The voice. The stranger inside him—Marcus, the soldier's name, the foreign name. Grief is a luxury. You have work to do.
"I don't want work." Jon's voice cracked like thin ice. "I want to go home."
You are home. And you are dying.
Jon went still.
Your blood is at war with itself. Ice and fire, fighting for dominance. If you cannot learn to balance them, the battle will tear you apart from the inside. Weeks. Months. Perhaps a year, if you are lucky.
"How?" The word was barely a whisper. "How do I stop it?"
No answer. Only a flash of memory that was not his own—a cup of water on a stone table in a room with white walls and strange light. A hand hovering above it, fingers spread. The ghost of a sensation: cold called, cold answered. Heat called, and heat obeyed. Not control exactly, but conversation. Negotiation.
Jon looked around the godswood. Found a puddle among the roots—melted snow, grey with leaf rot, barely a handspan across. He reached out with his left hand, not knowing what he expected—
The water froze. Not gradually, but all at once, crackling into solid ice beneath his palm with a sound like bones breaking. The cold sang through him, bright and clean and his in a way nothing had ever been his before. Not the bastard's portion, not the seat at the end of the table, not the name that was half a name. This belonged to him.
Jon stared at the frozen puddle. Then, hardly daring to breathe, he reached toward a different patch of water with his right hand.
Steam rose. The water hissed and boiled, evaporating in seconds, leaving only a dark stain on the earth and the smell of hot stone.
He tried again. Found a third puddle, larger than the first two. This time he used both palms, hovering them over the water at the same time. The left hand called the cold. The right hand called the heat. The puddle did not freeze or boil—it churned, ice crystals forming at one edge while steam rose from the other, the two forces pushing against each other like wrestlers grappling for position.
For a single, perfect moment, balance.
Jon laughed—a strange, wild sound that startled a crow from the branches above. He was terrified. He was amazed. He could do things. Real things, not just suffering them. Perhaps he was not a monster. Perhaps he was something else—something that could be controlled, directed, and used for good.
Then the duality surged, both forces rising at once like two wolves fighting over the same carcass, and pain lanced through his chest like a spear of frozen glass. Jon collapsed against the heart tree, gasping, his vision going white at the edges. The brief triumph shattered into black spots and the taste of copper on his tongue.
The puddle he had been balancing on exploded. Ice shards and boiling water sprayed in all directions, hissing where they struck the earth, leaving scorch marks and frost crystals scattered across the roots like the aftermath of some miniature battle. The weirwood's carved face seemed to watch him fall, its bloody tears unchanged, its red eyes offering neither judgment nor comfort.
Jon lay among the roots, cheek pressed to cold bark, shaking like a newborn colt. His breath came in ragged gasps. His palms throbbed—one burning, one freezing—and he could not make them stop.
He had thought, for one perfect moment, that he could control this. That he could learn. That he could stay.
Now he understood. The power inside him was too great for his body to hold. Like pouring a river through a reed, like asking a child to lift a mountain. He had the knowledge—fragments of it, at least, echoes of a soldier's training from a world he could not remember—but his flesh was too young, too weak, too small.
When the world stopped spinning, when his heart slowed and his vision cleared, when the war inside him retreated to its usual cold stalemate, the voice spoke again.
Control comes later. The voice was quieter now, almost gentle. For now, survive.
* * *
They put him in a turret room that had belonged to a dead septa.
Jon learned this from the servants who brought his meals—the brave ones, anyway. Septa Mordane had occupied this room before moving to larger quarters near Sansa's chambers. Before her, a septa named Alarra had died here, alone, in the winter of the false spring. The servants said her ghost still walked the corridors at night, praying to the Seven with a voice like wind through cracked shutters.
Jon had never believed in ghosts. Now he was not so sure.
Most servants left his tray in the corridor and fled before he could thank them, their footsteps echoing down the stone stairs in frantic retreat. He did not blame them. The walls of his room were covered in frost now, spreading outward from his bed like a frozen tide—white and glittering in the morning light, beautiful and terrible. Every day it crept further—across the floor, up the stones, reaching toward the window like fingers grasping for the sun. Intricate patterns formed in the ice, fractals and spirals that looked almost deliberate, almost like writing in a language Jon could not read.
At night, when the fire-dreams came, the frost retreated and scorch marks appeared on his blankets. Once he woke with his pillow smoldering, smoke rising toward the ceiling in lazy spirals. Once he found handprints burned into the headboard of the bed—his own hands, he knew, though he could not remember making them.
On the fourth day, his father came.
Ned Stark stood in the doorway, looking at the frost on the walls, the scorch marks on the bed, and the way his son's breath misted in the air even though the brazier still burned. His face revealed nothing—it never did—but Jon knew him well enough to see the tightness around his eyes, the way his hand flexed at his side as if reaching for a sword that could not help him here.
"Father." Jon's voice cracked.
Ned crossed the room in three strides and pulled him into an embrace. The contact was dangerous—Jon felt the power stirring, drawn to his father's warmth, wanting to claim him the way they claimed everything now—but he did not pull away. He buried his face in his father's shoulder and breathed leather and woodsmoke and home.
For a long moment, they stood like that. Father and son—or what Jon had always believed was father and son—holding each other in a frozen room while the world they knew crumbled around them.
Then Ned spoke, and the crumbling finished.
"I'm sending you away."
The words should have hurt more. Jon had known they were coming since the training yard, since the moment he saw the fear in Robb's eyes and understood that some things could not be taken back, some doors could not be closed once opened.
"The Wall?"
"No." Ned pulled back, gripping Jon's shoulders. His grey eyes—Jon's eyes, the eyes everyone said proved the bastard's Stark blood—were bright with something Jon had never seen in them before. Not anger. Not disappointment. Fear. Not of Jon, but for him.
"Somewhere you can learn to control this," Ned said. "Somewhere no one will—" He trailed off.
"Hunt me?"
Ned's silence was answer enough.
"There are people who know about things like this," Ned said at last. "In the east. Beyond the Narrow Sea. They can teach you what I cannot."
"What is happening to me?" Jon asked. "What am I?"
Ned's face twisted with something that looked like pain. "You are my blood," he said. "That is all I can tell you now. The rest—the rest you will learn when you are ready."
"I am ready now."
"No." The word was gentle but final. "You are seven years old, Jon. Some truths are too heavy for a child to carry. When you have learned to master what you are, when you can stand on your own two feet without burning or freezing everything you touch—then you will be ready. Then I will tell you everything."
Jon wanted to argue. Wanted to demand answers. But the look in his father's eyes stopped him—the grief there, the guilt, the love that had always been real even if nothing else was.
"How far?" he asked instead.
His father's hands tightened on his shoulders. "Very far."
Jon thought of Robb, who would look for him at meals and find an empty seat. Arya, wild and fierce, who would rage at his leaving and never understand why. Even Sansa and little Bran had never looked at him the same way that Lady Catelyn did. He thought of the godswood, the crypts, and the smell of snow on stone that meant home in a way no word could capture.
He thought of the frost spreading across his walls, reaching for people he loved.
"When?"
"Two days. A man from the Neck is coming. Howland Reed is one of my bannermen and an old friend. He knows something of these matters."
Two days. Forty-eight hours to say goodbye to everyone he had ever known. Forty-eight hours to memorize faces he might never see again.
"Will I come back?"
Ned Stark—who had never lied to him, who had raised him as his own despite everything, who had touched Jon's shoulder in the godswood once and not flinched at the cold of the monster his son was becoming—looked away.
"I don't know."
* * *
The Great Hall went silent when Jon entered.
He had asked to take his last supper with the family. A mistake, he understood now, watching the servants press themselves against the walls like they expected him to burst into flames. The guards gripped their spears tighter. Even the dogs had retreated beneath the tables, whimpering. The great fire in the hearth seemed to flicker and lean toward him, as if drawn by the heat in his blood.
Mistake or not, he would not turn back.
Robb half-rose from his seat, face pale, mouth opening to speak. His hand reached toward Jon across the empty space between them. "Jon—"
"Sit." Lady Catelyn's voice cut like a blade. Her hand closed on Robb's arm, pressing him back into his chair with a grip that must have hurt. "He is not to come near you."
Jon stopped. The cold inside him pulsed—not in anger, but in something worse.
Acceptance.
Arya was crying silently into her trencher, her small shoulders shaking with sobs she would not voice. Sansa stared fixedly at the tablecloth, her face carefully blank, refusing to meet his eyes. Little Bran watched with that grave Stark look, his wooden horse clutched in one hand, too young to understand why everyone was afraid but old enough to know something terrible was happening.
At the head of the table, Ned Stark sat rigid, his face a mask carved from northern granite. Only his eyes moved—finding Jon's, holding them. Saying what words could not. I am sorry. I love you. Go.
"I came to say goodbye," Jon said.
Lady Catelyn's grip on Robb tightened until her knuckles went white. Her Tully Blue eyes were bright with something that might have been triumph, fear, or grief for the son she had never claimed but had watched grow regardless. "You said it. Now go."
Jon bowed—a bastard's bow, lower than was necessary, the way he had learned to bow before he learned to walk—and turned his back on the only family he had ever known.
The walk to the door seemed to take forever. His footsteps echoed in the silence. The fire crackled. Somewhere, a dog whined. He could feel their eyes on his back—Catelyn's cold, Sansa's averted, and Bran's confused. Robb's gaze was still reaching across the space between them.
And Ned's. Always Ned's.
Behind him, Arya sobbed his name. The sound was raw, broken, and full of all the questions she would never get to ask and all the sword lessons they would never share.
He did not turn around.