The grass went on forever.
Jon walked until his legs turned to water, and then he walked some more. The flatlands stretched in every direction—an ocean of green and gold, rippling in waves as the wind moved across its surface. No trees. No hills. No cover of any kind. Grass and sky and the relentless Essosi sun beating down on a boy who should have been dead three times over.
The phantom cold had settled deep in his lungs now. Every breath burned like swallowing ice water, and when he coughed—which was often—the fluid that came up froze before it hit the ground, shattering into crystals that glittered briefly in the sunlight before melting away. His throat was raw. His lips were cracked and bleeding. His body was eating itself from the inside—muscle wasting, strength draining, bones growing lighter with every step.
The sun was a hammer. It beat down on his dark hair, his pale skin, and his thin shoulders that had never known heat like this. In Winterfell, summer had been mild, the warmth always tempered by winds from the north. In Winterfell, he had never walked more than a mile without seeing a wall, a tree, or a roof to shelter beneath.
Winterfell was a world away. Winterfell might as well have been a dream.
System status critical. Core temperature unstable. Caloric reserves depleted. Hydration approaching dangerous thresholds. Recommend immediate shelter and sustenance.
"There is no shelter." Jon's voice came out as a rasp. "There's nothing."
Then we conserve. Low power mode. Minimal magic. The body must survive on its own resources.
A dry, bitter laugh scraped against his raw throat. His own resources. Muscles already spent from climbing walls and running through streets. Lungs already compromised by the war in his blood. A child's will, stretched thin by loss and fear and the constant, grinding knowledge that he was dying by degrees.
One foot. Then the other. Then the first again.
The tactical overlay screamed at him—red lines everywhere, no green in sight. [NO COVER. HIGH VISIBILITY. AERIAL THREAT VECTORS. GROUND PURSUIT PROBABLE. HOSTILE ENVIRONMENT. RECOMMEND IMMEDIATE SHELTER.] The warnings pulsed at the edges of his vision, urgent and useless. The grass barely came to his waist. The sky was a dome of empty blue, offering nothing but exposure.
He walked through the warnings. He walked through the pain. He walked because stopping meant dying, and he was not ready to die—not here, not alone, not in a sea of grass where no one would ever find his body.
If Illyrio sent hunters, they would see him from miles away. A dark speck against the gold, as obvious as a crow on snow.
If the sun didn't kill him first.
* * *
The caravan announced itself before it appeared.
A rumble in the earth—deep, rhythmic, like the heartbeat of something vast and slow. Jon stopped walking, his exhausted mind struggling to process the sensation. The ground itself was vibrating, a tremor that traveled up through his boots and into his bones.
Seismic activity. No—too regular. Mechanical. Large-scale ground transportation.
Jon turned toward the sound.
They emerged from the heat shimmer like ships sailing out of fog—massive wooden structures, two and three stories tall, rolling across the grassland on wheels the size of houses. Wheelhouses, they were called. Stories had not prepared him for the reality. Stories had not captured the sheer impossibility of these things—the way they defied every law of weight and motion, the way they moved across the grass like living creatures, slow but unstoppable.
The largest was a mobile fortress. Its hull was painted in greens and golds, its windows shuttered against the dust, and its roof adorned with awnings and gardens and small structures that might have been servants' quarters. Carved figures decorated every corner—dragons and lions, seahorses and griffins, their wooden gazes watching the grass for threats. Forty oxen pulled it forward in four yoked lines, their hooves churning the grass into mud, their bellies low with the effort of moving something that should not have been able to move at all.
Behind it came more—smaller wheelhouses, cargo wagons with iron-bound wheels, and outriders on horses that looked tiny against the massive vehicles. A city on wheels, crawling across the flatlands like a great slow beast. Jon counted three hundred people, maybe more, all moving together toward the horizon.
Merchant caravan. Valyrian road system. These structures travel the ancient highways between Free Cities. Speed: approximately four miles per hour. Direction: east-southeast. Destination: likely Volantis or points beyond.
Jon watched the wheelhouse approach. Guards walked alongside it—men with spears and crossbows, their attention scanning the grassland for threats. Servants trotted behind on foot, carrying loads of goods or leading spare animals. A moving city, self-contained and self-sufficient.
And it was heading east.
Dynamic entry is possible. Match velocity. Board on the blind side.
"I can't buy passage." Jon's voice was barely a whisper. "No money. No leverage."
You don't buy. You infiltrate.
* * *
The boarding was insane.
Jon waited until the caravan passed, crouching in the tall grass while the guards moved by. The wheelhouse's blind side was its rear quarter—the angle blocked from the guards' sightlines by the bulk of the structure itself. A narrow ladder hung from the undercarriage, swaying with the vehicle's motion, its rungs worn smooth by years of servants climbing up and down.
Timing is critical. Match the velocity. The wheels are moving at four miles per hour—faster than you can sprint in your current condition. Miss the ladder and you go under. The wheels will crush you before you can scream.
Jon started to run.
His legs screamed with every stride, his lungs burned with every breath, and his heart hammered against ribs that showed through his skin. But the Marcus overlay was guiding him now—calculating distances, plotting trajectories, and turning the chaos of the moving vehicle into a series of green lines he could follow. The wheelhouse was twenty feet away. Fifteen. Ten. The ladder swung closer, then away, then closer again, a pendulum marking the seconds until his chance passed.
The ladder swung into reach.
Jon grabbed—and missed.
His grip brushed rope, caught air, and closed on nothing. The wheelhouse was pulling away, the gap widening with every second. His legs were failing—the last reserves of strength draining away, the grass dragging at his feet like hands trying to hold him back. Behind him, the tail end of the caravan was approaching—more wagons, more guards, more chances to be seen and caught and dragged before whatever authority ruled this rolling city.
Adjust. The wheel hub. Use thermal adhesion. NOW.
Jon didn't think. His left palm shot out, pressing against the massive wooden wheel as it rotated past. Ice exploded from his grip, freezing the mud and splinters into a momentary handhold—long enough for him to plant his foot on the frozen surface and launch himself upward.
His right grip caught the ladder.
His body slammed against the undercarriage, the impact driving the breath from his lungs. For three terrible seconds, he hung there—his grip burning, his arms screaming, the wheel churning inches from his head. Then the instincts took over, and he was climbing, pulling himself up the ladder and onto the rear platform.
Entry achieved. Move to concealment.
The platform was a narrow service deck, cluttered with rope and tools and the debris of travel—buckets and brushes, spare planks, and coils of chain. Jon scrambled across it on all fours, body low, gaze searching for cover. The wheelhouse rose above him—carved wood and lacquered panels, gargoyles and rainspouts jutting from every corner like the battlements of some rolling fortress.
A gap appeared between two stone guardians—grotesque lion heads with open mouths designed to channel water off the roof. The space was barely large enough for his frame, a crevice between stone and wood that no adult could have squeezed into. But Jon was seven and starving and desperate. He wedged himself into it anyway, pressing his back against the warm wood and pulling his knees to his chest and trying to remember how to breathe.
The wood smelled of lacquer and dust and the faint sweetness of the roof gardens. The gargoyles stared outward with blank stone gazes, guarding him without knowing it. Jon closed his own lids and listened to his heart pound against his ribs.
Below, the guards walked on. The oxen plodded forward. The caravan continued its slow, inexorable journey east.
No one had seen him.
For the first time in days, Jon allowed himself to feel something like hope.
* * *
Days passed.
Jon lost track of how many. The landscape blurred into an endless procession of grass and sky, the wheelhouse swaying beneath him like a ship at sea. Sleep came in fragments—waking at every creak and groan, his form wedged into the gap between gargoyles like a fox hiding in a hollow log. The sun beat down on him during the day, baking his skin and cracking his lips; the cold devoured him at night, spreading through his chest with every breath.
Survival meant rainwater collected in cupped palms and scraps stolen from the roof gardens—fruit that grew in planters along the wheelhouse's edge and vegetables that no one seemed to miss. The food was never enough. His metabolism was burning through calories faster than he could replace them, the magic demanding fuel he couldn't provide. His ribs began to show through his skin. His cheeks grew hollow. His reflection in puddles of rainwater showed something wrong—the look of a starving animal, not a child.
The phantom cold spread.
It moved through his chest like frost across glass, settling into his heart, his lungs, and his spine. His veins had gone almost black now—visible threads of corruption that traced up his arms and across his collarbones, pulsing with a rhythm that had nothing to do with his heart. They looked like the roots of some terrible plant, growing inward, feeding on his warmth. When he coughed, the fluid froze in his throat, and he had to melt it with fire before he choked—a process that left his windpipe raw and bleeding.
System degradation is accelerating. Core functions compromised. Recommend immediate intervention. Recommend—
"I know." Jon's voice was barely a whisper, his throat too raw for more. "I know."
But knowing changed nothing. There was no intervention available. No healer, no maester, no one who would help a monster hiding on a rooftop. Alone with his dying form and his fractured mind, all he could do was endure.
The fever came on the third night.
It started as a tremor in his grip, then spread to his whole frame—waves of heat and cold alternating in patterns that made no sense, his temperature spiking and crashing like a storm at sea. His muscles cramped. His skin went hot, then cold, then hot again. Sweat poured from him one moment; the next, frost formed on his eyelashes.
His vision blurred. His thoughts scattered like leaves in a wind. The world became a kaleidoscope of green grass and blue sky and the endless, hypnotic sway of the wheelhouse beneath him. Time lost meaning. Day and night blurred together into a single endless fever dream.
And then the overlay began to glitch.
The red warnings flickered. The green guidelines wavered. The clean, clinical data streams that Marcus used to process the world fragmented into static and noise. Something was wrong—not with Jon's form alone, but with the connection between them. The boundary between Jon Snow and Marcus Chen was dissolving, and something terrible was rising from the fusion.
* * *
Jon looked down at the roof, and he didn't see wood.
Reactive armor filled his vision. Segmented plates of grey ceramic, bolted to a chassis of steel and carbon fiber. The gargoyles weren't gargoyles—they were sensor modules, their open mouths housing targeting arrays that swept the surrounding terrain for threats. The wheelhouse wasn't a wheelhouse.
It was an APC. An Armored Personnel Carrier, rolling through a hostile zone toward an objective that Marcus couldn't quite remember. The mission parameters were corrupted and fragmented, but the training was clear. The training was always clear.
Red Zone confirmed. Maintain perimeter. Hostiles possible. Weapons free.
The operator—the soldier, the thing that had worn Marcus Chen's face through three lifetimes of war—moved into a crouch. The overlay blazed with data: thermal signatures below, movement patterns of the security detail, and structural weak points in the armor. Everything was tactics now. Everything was a mission. The boy who had been Jon Snow was gone, locked away in some deep corner of his own mind, watching through lenses that no longer belonged to him.
Sector clear. Scanning for tangents. Multiple hostiles in stationary positions.
The gargoyles loomed around him—enemy combatants, frozen in position, waiting to strike. Their stone faces were masks hiding weapons, sensors, and threats that needed to be eliminated. The soldier moved toward the nearest one, steps silent, form low, fists already beginning to glow with the power that had become his weapon. The training was automatic, embedded in muscle memory that had survived death itself.
Strike. Disable. Neutralize. Leave no active threats.
His left fist shot out. Ice exploded from his palm, coating the gargoyle's neck in a sheath of frost. A precise application of torque, enhanced by the cold—and the stone snapped with a crack like breaking bone. The gargoyle's head fell away, tumbling off the roof and vanishing into the grass below.
Hostile neutralized. Moving to the next target.
The soldier advanced. Another gargoyle. Another strike—this time with fire, superheating the stone until cracks appeared, then punching through the weakened structure. The pain was distant, irrelevant. Pain was data. Pain could be processed later.
Sector clear. Perimeter secured.
Through the roof like a ghost, dismantling the "enemies" one by one. Ice and fire, frost and flame, the duality in his blood finally working in harmony—not balance, but coordination, two weapons wielded by a single will. The first gargoyle shattered under the cold, its stone turned brittle and fragile. The second cracked under superheated expansion, fissures racing through its form before it collapsed into rubble. The third he punched through, the ice-armored fist breaking stone like it was nothing.
The rainspouts snapped. The decorative railings crumbled. The soldier left a trail of destruction in his wake, clearing the perimeter of threats, securing the position, and doing what soldiers had always done since the first war on the first world Marcus had known.
And somewhere very far away, a seven-year-old boy screamed silently in the prison of his own skull, watching his form do terrible things, feeling himself move without consent, knowing that something else was wearing his skin and he couldn't stop it. He screamed and screamed and screamed, and no sound came out.
Oscar-Mike. Maintaining operational tempo. The perimeter is eighty percent clear.
A sound. Behind him. The soldier spun, ice already forming on his left palm, fire blooming on his right.
A hatch had opened in the roof. A face emerged—young, frightened, human.
Breach detected. Hostile approach.
* * *
The stable boy was maybe twelve.
Tanned skin, dark hair, and the rough clothes of a servant who spent his days among animals. Palms calloused from work, face spotted with the acne of adolescence, gaze the warm brown of summer earth. He had climbed up the rear ladder to check the tie-downs—routine maintenance, nothing more—and now he stood frozen at the edge of the roof, staring at the destruction around him with widening horror.
The broken gargoyles lay scattered across the wood like corpses after a battle. Scorch marks blackened the lacquered panels. Frost glittered on surfaces that had no business being cold. And in the middle of it all, crouched like a predator over fresh kill, was a small figure with fists that glowed with opposing forces.
The boy opened his mouth to scream.
The soldier moved.
Reflex—pure, trained, absolute. The soldier crossed the distance in two steps, a blur of motion the boy's gaze couldn't track, sweeping his legs and driving him to the roof in a single fluid motion. A forearm pressed against the windpipe, cutting off the scream before it could form. The right grip came up, glowing white-hot, ready to cauterize the threat the way he had cauterized a thousand threats in lives he couldn't quite remember.
Hostile and restrained. Preparing to neutralize.
The boy's gaze was wide. Wet. Human.
Tears streamed down his cheeks. His mouth moved in words the soldier couldn't hear—please, please, I won't tell anyone, please—and his frame was small and shaking and so terribly, terribly young.
The fire in Jon's grip flickered.
The overlay shattered.
Reality crashed back like a wave breaking over rocks. Jon was not a soldier. He was not Marcus Chen. He was a seven-year-old boy from Winterfell, and he was holding a terrified servant over the edge of a moving wagon with murder in his grip.
The boy's tunic was smoking where Jon's palm had pressed against it. Another second and the fabric would have ignited. Another second and flesh would have started to burn. Another second and Jon would have killed this boy—this innocent, frightened, twelve-year-old boy who had done nothing but climb a ladder at the wrong moment.
Jon scrambled backward, horror flooding through him. His palms—those terrible, monstrous weapons—extinguished themselves, the fire dying, the frost melting, and the glow fading until they were fingers again. A child's fingers, small and pale and shaking.
The stable boy scrambled away in the opposite direction, his screams finally breaking free, high and piercing and full of animal terror. He backed into the broken stump of a gargoyle, fell, and scrambled up again, his attention never leaving Jon's face.
"Demon! DEMON! There's a demon on the roof!"
Jon tried to speak. Tried to explain, to apologize, to say something that would make this better. But the words wouldn't come. His throat was locked. His frame was shaking so hard he couldn't stand. He had almost killed someone. He had almost killed a child.
Mission abort. What— Marcus's voice sounded wrong. Confused. Lost. What happened? Jon, what did we—
"Shut up." Jon's voice was a ragged whisper. "Just—shut up."
Looking at his palms. The left was pale blue, frost still clinging to the knuckles. The right was red and raw, the skin blistered from heat he didn't remember calling. These fingers had almost killed a child. These grips had dismantled stone guardians in a haze of tactical madness. These were weapons, and they were no longer entirely under his control.
Below, voices were shouting. The alarm had been raised. Guards were calling to each other, and somewhere a horn was sounding—low, urgent, and commanding.
* * *
The caravan master found him before the guards did.
The man emerged from a hatch on the other side of the roof—not running, not alarmed, walking with the careful deliberation of someone who had seen strange things before and learned not to panic. Heavy-set, with oiled rings on thick digits and a merchant's calculating gaze that missed nothing. His clothes were fine silk, stained with travel but well-made—the clothes of a man who had started with nothing and clawed his way to wealth through deals and trades and the occasional knife in the dark.
He looked at the destruction. At the broken gargoyles scattered across the wood like the aftermath of a siege. At the scorched panels and the frost-rimed surfaces and the shattered rainspouts. At the small, trembling boy crouched in the middle of it all, his fists still faintly glowing, his gaze wild with a fear that had nothing to do with being caught.
"So." The word was flat, unimpressed, as if children destroyed rooftops every other week. "You're the demon."
Jon said nothing. There was nothing to say. The evidence of what he was—what he had done—lay scattered all around them.
"The ice-child from Braavos. The one who froze the sea." The merchant's attention moved over Jon's face, cataloguing, assessing—the same way a horse trader might evaluate a promising colt or a slave merchant might price a skilled craftsman. "Illyrio's lost prize. I wondered how long it would take you to find us. I had a bet with my factor—he said you'd die in the grasslands. I said you'd make it at least to the Rhoyne." A thin smile. "It seems I win."
He knows. He was expecting you. This was never escape—this was another cage closing.
"The boy," Jon managed. "I didn't mean to—"
"Hush." The merchant held up a hand. Behind him, guards were climbing onto the roof, their weapons drawn. He waved them back with a gesture that held absolute authority. "Tomis will recover. You didn't kill him. That's interesting."
"Interesting?"
"A weapon that doesn't kill when it could." The merchant's smile showed no warmth. "A rare thing. A valuable thing. Most people with your gifts would have burned that boy to ash and never looked back. But you stopped. Even in the grip of whatever madness took you, you stopped when it mattered."
Jon's fists clenched. The cold stirred in his chest, responding to the threat lurking beneath the man's silk-smooth words. This man saw him as a commodity. A thing to be traded, sold, or used.
"What do you want?"
"From you? Nothing. Yet." The merchant's gaze glittered with calculation. "You are interesting, ice-child. It is interesting enough that I will overlook the destruction of my roof, the terror of my servants, and the inconvenience of having a demon stowaway on my wheelhouse. For now." He turned to his guards. "Let him ride. If the Red Priests want him, let them find him in Volantis. If he survives the road, he is worth more than the spices."
The guard commander—older, scarred—stepped forward. "My lord, the boy destroyed half the roof. He attacked Tomis. The caravan rules are clear—"
"The caravan rules are whatever I say they are." The merchant's voice went cold. "This boy is cargo now. Valuable cargo. And if any of you damage him before we reach the Rhoyne, you will answer to me."
Silence. The guards withdrew.
The merchant turned back to Jon, that calculating smile still in place.
"Rest. Eat, if you can find food. We reach Volantis in three weeks." His gaze glittered. "Try not to kill anyone else in the meantime."
He descended the hatch without waiting for a response.
* * *
Jon sat on the roof as the sun went down.
The caravan had resumed its journey, the wheelhouse swaying beneath him, the grassland rolling past in endless waves of green and gold that turned to amber, then to rust, then to the deep purple of bruises as the light faded. The broken gargoyles cast long shadows across the wood, their shattered faces staring at nothing. The scorch marks from his strikes stood out black against the lacquered panels—evidence of what he had done, what he had become.
Looking at his palms.
One burnt. One frozen. Both capable of destruction he couldn't control. These digits had torn stone apart. These fists had pinned a terrified boy to the ground. These weapons had glowed with the power to kill, and they had wanted to use it—had wanted to, in that moment, in the haze of the fugue, with an eagerness that made Jon's stomach turn.
That wasn't you. Marcus's voice was quiet, uncertain—a tone Jon had never heard from the ghost-soldier before. That was a fugue state. Combat stress, malnutrition, and sleep deprivation. The overlay glitched. The distinction between your memories and mine collapsed.
"I almost killed him."
But you didn't. You stopped. When it mattered, you stopped.
"Because I saw his face." Jon's voice cracked. "If he had been wearing a helmet—if I hadn't seen his eyes—if he had been a shape in the dark—"
Then we would have killed an innocent child. Marcus finished. I know. I know.
The sun touched the horizon, turning the grass to the color of blood. Somewhere in the distance, wolves were howling—or maybe it was wind through the endless plain, playing tricks on Jon's exhausted mind. The sound was mournful and lonely, the cry of creatures who hunted in packs because hunting alone meant dying alone.
"You're afraid of what we're becoming." Jon said it as a statement, not a question.
Silence. Long enough that Jon thought Marcus wouldn't answer. Then, softer than Jon had ever heard:
Yes. I've lived three lifetimes, kid. I've been a soldier and a killer and done things you don't want to know about. But I always knew who I was. I always knew where I ended and the mission began. This—this is different. This is something I don't understand.
Jon looked at his palms again. The frost had melted. The burns were fading, his form's impossible healing already at work. By morning, the physical evidence would be gone—the blisters smoothed away, the blue pallor faded back to pale flesh. He would look normal again.
But the memory would remain.
He had looked into that boy's face and seen himself reflected there—a monster, a demon, something inhuman wearing a child's mask. For one terrible moment, he had been ready to kill without thought, without hesitation, without remorse. The power had used him like a puppet, and he had moved to its strings with perfect, terrible grace.
That was what the power wanted. That was where the road led. More control. More surrender. Until there was nothing left of Jon Snow but a weapon wearing his skin.
Unless he found another way.
Yi Ti. Marcus's voice had steadied, finding its familiar tactical cadence—the voice of a soldier who had faced impossible odds before and survived. The masters there understand balance. They've trained warriors to contain worse than this. They have techniques that are thousands of years old, refined over generations. If anyone can teach you to control what you are—
"If we survive that long."
One day at a time, kid. A pause. One day at a time.
Jon pulled his knees to his chest and watched the sun disappear beneath the grass. The wheelhouse rolled on, carrying him east toward Volantis, toward the Rhoyne, toward whatever fate waited at the edge of the known world. The stars were coming out now—different stars than the ones above Winterfell, arranged in constellations he didn't recognize, watching him with the cold indifference of lights that had burned for a thousand years and would burn for a thousand more.
Behind him, the broken gargoyles stared with empty stone faces.
Ahead, the wheel turned on.