The merchant kept his word.
At Selhorys, where the Rhoyne widened into something that barely deserved to be called a river—more like an inland sea, brown and vast and sluggish—the caravan master put Jon on a boat and washed his grip of the demon-child forever.
"The current will take you to Volantis," he said, not meeting Jon's gaze. "What happens after that is not my concern."
The boat was flat-bottomed and shallow-drafted, designed for the river's treacherous shoals. Its crew were Orphans of the Greenblood—Rhoynar descendants with olive skin and dark gazes, their hair bound in elaborate braids that marked lineages Jon couldn't read. They spoke in whispers and refused to touch him. When the black veins crawling up his arms became visible, they made signs against evil and retreated to the far end of the vessel.
Jon sat alone at the prow and watched the world slide past.
River transit. Estimated time to Volantis: six days. Marcus's voice had stabilized since the incident in the wheelhouse, but something was different now. Quieter. More careful. Current speed approximately four knots. Weather conditions are nominal.
"What's ahead?"
The Sorrows. Ancient Rhoynar city, flooded during the Doom. The locals consider it cursed. A pause. Tactical assessment: unknown. Historical data is fragmentary. Recommend heightened awareness.
Jon looked downriver. The sky ahead had gone grey—not cloudy, but grey, a wall of colorless murk that swallowed the horizon. The water beneath them had begun to change too, losing its brown muddiness and turning darker. Oilier. The smell had shifted from river mud to something else, something that made the back of Jon's throat itch.
Rot, he thought. It smells like rot.
One of the Orphans—an old woman with a face like weathered leather—was watching him from the stern. Her lips moved in silent prayer, her grip clutching a wooden charm carved in the shape of a turtle.
"Mother Rhoyne protect us," she whispered. "Mother Rhoyne, we are your children. Do not let the Grey Death take us."
Jon turned away and did not ask what the Grey Death was.
* * *
The fog swallowed them whole.
One moment they were on a river beneath an open sky. The next, the world had contracted to a sphere of grey murk perhaps twenty feet across, with their boat at the center. The sun vanished. The far banks vanished. Sound itself seemed to die, muffled by the moisture that hung in the air like wet wool.
Environmental conditions are critical. Marcus's overlay was throwing warnings Jon had never encountered before. [VISIBILITY: NEAR-ZERO. HUMIDITY: 100%. ATMOSPHERIC COMPOSITION: ANOMALOUS. BIO-READINGS: INCONCLUSIVE.]
"What does that mean?"
Unknown contaminants in the air. Possible radiation leak. Possible chemical spill. The ghost-soldier's voice had gone tight. This reads like a contaminated zone. We should not be breathing this.
The vapor curled around him, wrong in a way that went beyond wetness—heavy, pressing against his skin like fingers. His blood stirred uneasily, the frost and fire both recoiling from something they sensed but could not name.
"It's not chemicals," he said quietly. "It's magic."
Magic does not register on my sensors. Marcus sounded almost frustrated. All I see is a hot zone without protective equipment. We are exposed.
The Orphans had stopped rowing. They huddled together at the stern, their faces pale, their prayers rising in a low, desperate chant. The old woman's turtle charm had begun to glow—or perhaps imagination was playing tricks in the grey murk.
The boat drifted on, carried by a current that should not have existed in such still water.
And then the ruins began to emerge.
* * *
They rose from the haze like the bones of drowned giants.
Towers, listing at impossible angles, their stones slick with black algae. Bridges, broken in the middle, their arches reaching toward connections that no longer existed. Statues, vast and terrible—gods of the Rhoyne, their faces worn smooth by centuries of water and time. A turtle the size of a house, its shell cracked, its stone sockets weeping streams of dark water. A woman with her arms raised to a sky that had not existed in a thousand years. A warrior with a broken sword, his mouth open in an eternal scream.
The city of Chroyane. The Palace of Sorrow. Jon had heard the name in stories, always spoken in whispers, always followed by warding signs.
Now he understood why.
Multiple structures. Unstable foundations. Structural integrity compromised across all visible targets. Marcus was cataloguing, analyzing, and trying to impose order on something that defied order. Tactical recommendation: maintain distance. Avoid contact with—
The boat lurched.
Jon grabbed the rail as the current caught them, pulling them sideways toward a gap between two listing towers. The Orphans cried out in their ancient tongue, fighting with their poles against a force that should not have been there.
"Mother Rhoyne, spare your children—"
They passed between the towers. The fog closed behind them like a door swinging shut.
And ahead—the same turtle statue they had passed five minutes ago.
Navigation error. Marcus's voice had gone strange. We should not be here. We passed this landmark already.
"We're going in circles."
Impossible. The current is linear. The boat has not changed course.
But the turtle was there, exactly as before—the same cracked shell, the same weeping sockets, the same position relative to the broken bridge beyond. They had traveled for ten minutes and arrived exactly where they started.
The old woman began to scream.
[ALERT: HEAT SIGNATURES DETECTED. MULTIPLE CONTACTS. BEARING: ABOVE.]
Jon's head snapped up.
In the murk overhead, shapes were moving. Slow shapes. Grey shapes. Human-shaped but wrong, their movements jerky and uncoordinated, their limbs bending at angles that suggested broken bones or no bones at all. They clung to the ruins like spiders, dozens of them, hundreds of them, watching the boat with pale orbs that glowed faintly in the colorless haze.
Hostiles confirmed. Cold-blooded. Movement patterns suggest hive behavior. Preparing for engagement.
"What are they?"
Classification: Unknown. Behavior consistent with infected combatants. Recommend melee neutralization.
The shapes began to drop.
* * *
The first Stone Man hit the deck like a falling boulder.
He had been a man once—visible in the shape of him, in the remnants of clothing that still clung to his massive frame. But the flesh had turned to grey stone, cracked and weathered, with seams of black running through it like veins of corruption. His orbs were white and blind, but they found Jon anyway, tracking him with terrible purpose.
His mouth opened. What came out was not a scream but a moan—low, constant, the sound of something that had forgotten what sound was for.
More of them were falling. Thudding onto the deck, onto the cabin roof, into the river around the boat. The Orphans tried to fight—jabbing with their poles, crying out prayers that no god answered. One of them got too close. A Stone Man's grip closed around his arm, and the man's scream cut off as grey spread across his skin like frost, turning flesh to stone in seconds.
[COMBAT INITIATED. MULTIPLE HOSTILES. ENGAGING.]
Marcus took over.
Jon's form moved without his permission—pivoting, dropping into a fighting stance, his left fist already crystallizing with frost. A Stone Man lurched toward him, arms outstretched. Jon struck.
His fist connected with the thing's jaw. Frost-enhanced strength, precisely targeted. The jaw shattered, grey stone crumbling like rotten wood.
But the contact—
[WARNING. WARNING. BIOHAZARD DETECTED. TRANSMISSION VECTOR: DERMAL CONTACT. PATHOGEN CLASSIFICATION: MAGICAL. WARNING.]
His knuckles had gone grey. Not frost-grey. Stone-grey. The color was spreading, crawling up his fingers toward his wrist.
ABORT MELEE. ABORT MELEE. CONTAMINATION CONFIRMED.
Jon screamed. Fire exploded from his grip, incinerating the infected skin before the curse could spread. The pain was blinding—burning his own flesh, cooking it to ash—but the grey stopped. The stone receded. His grip was raw and bleeding, but it was still his.
The Stone Men kept coming.
You cannot touch them. Marcus's voice was ragged. Any contact spreads the infection. We have to move. UP. Get above them.
Jon ran for the mast.
* * *
The world became vertical.
Climbing like his life depended on it—because it did. His palms found rope and wood, hauling him up, away from the deck where Stone Men were methodically slaughtering the Orphans. Their moans filled the air, a chorus of despair, drowning out the screams of the dying.
The boat was drifting beneath a massive archway—a bridge that had once spanned the river, now broken in the middle, its stones covered with grey shapes. Hundreds of them. Thousands. The Bridge of Dream, the sailors had called it in their stories. The place where the dead gathered to watch the living pass.
The dead were not content to watch.
They dropped from the bridge like rain. Plummeting onto the boat, into the Rhoyne, reaching for anything alive. The deck was a massacre. The Orphans were gone now—dead or turned, it didn't matter which.
Jon reached the top of the mast and clung there, twenty feet above the slaughter, his breath coming in ragged gasps.
The boat is compromised. You need to transfer to the ruins.
"How? There's fifty feet of open water between us and—"
Ice bridges. Freeze the vapor itself. Create stepping stones in the air.
The fog around him was thick here—thick enough to taste, thick enough to press against his skin. Water vapor. Moisture. Frost waiting to be born.
You have three seconds between freeze and collapse. Move fast.
A Stone Man was climbing the mast below him.
Jon jumped.
His left palm thrust out, and cold poured forth—not a blast but a focused stream, freezing the moisture in a line ahead of him. The vapor crystallized into a walkway of glittering frost, barely a foot wide, suspended in empty air.
His boots hit the frozen path. It held—for a heartbeat. For two.
Then it began to crack.
Jon ran.
The world became a nightmare of motion and cold. Sprinting across frozen air, each step landing on a surface already shattering beneath his weight. His left palm swept ahead, creating new bridges as the old ones collapsed. His right blazed with fire, thermal expansion blasting him forward when the gaps grew too wide.
Stone Men reached for him from every direction. From the ruins on either side. From the river below. From the bridge overhead. Grasping grips, grey and terrible, missing him by inches as he ran.
Jump. NOW.
Jon threw himself at a statue—a Rhoynar goddess rising from the Rhoyne, her stone arms raised in supplication. His palms caught her shoulder. His feet found purchase on her broken chest. Scrambling up her form like a spider, putting distance between himself and the boat, between himself and the carpet of grey death that covered the river.
Below, the vessel disappeared into the haze. The moans faded. The screams had already stopped.
Jon clung to the statue and tried to remember how to breathe.
* * *
The ledge seemed safe.
It jutted from the ruins of what had once been a palace—a balcony, perhaps, or a landing for some grand staircase. Stone walls rose on three sides, offering protection from the fog. The floor was solid, free of the grey shapes that crawled everywhere else.
Jon pulled himself onto it and collapsed.
His form was finished. The frost-bridges had drained him empty, and the fire-jumps had burned through reserves he didn't have. His palms were shaking. His vision swam. The phantom cold had settled so deep in his chest that every breath was drowning.
Rest. Recover. We'll find a way out when—
A grip closed around his ankle.
Jon's scream echoed off the stones as he was yanked backward, his fingers scrabbling for purchase, his frame dragging across the ledge toward the edge. The Stone Man had been there the whole time—pressed against the wall, grey as the stone, invisible until it moved.
Its grip was crushing. His ankle bones ground together, the chill spreading through his flesh—not frost-cold but grave-cold, the temperature of death itself.
CONTAINMENT BREACH. INFECTION SPREADING. PROTOCOL: AMPUTATE OR CAUTERIZE.]
Jon couldn't think. Vision blurred with pain. But his right palm moved anyway, closing around his own ankle, closing around the Stone Man's grey fingers.
He called the fire.
Heat erupted from his grip—not the controlled burn of the earlier injuries but a furnace blast, a white-hot torrent that turned stone to powder and flesh to char. The Stone Man's grip crumbled. Its hold released. Jon kicked free, screaming, scrambling backward—
But the grey was still spreading. Climbing his ankle, turning skin to stone, the curse racing toward his knee.
BURN IT. BURN IT ALL.
Jon grabbed his own leg with both palms and burned.
The pain was beyond anything he had ever experienced. Beyond the Titan's horn. Beyond the frozen sea. Beyond every moment of the war in his blood. His palms blazed white-hot, searing through infected flesh, cooking muscle and fat and skin into blackened char. The smell hit him—his own meat roasting—and he vomited, but he didn't stop. He couldn't stop. The grey had to die.
Ice. Now. Seal it before you bleed out.
Jon reversed the flow. Fire became frost in an instant, absolute cold flooding through his palms and into the ruined flesh of his ankle. The burned tissue froze solid. The blood vessels sealed. The nerve endings died, and the pain—
The pain went away.
Not faded. Not receded. Simply stopped, cut off like a door slamming shut.
Looking down at his ankle. It wasn't an ankle anymore. It was a thing—a mass of black char encased in white frost, neither living nor dead, preserved in a moment of transformation.
His vision went dark at the edges.
Shock. Blood loss. System failure is imminent.
He tried to stand. His leg buckled—the ankle would not support weight and would never support weight again. Crawling instead, dragging himself toward the edge of the ledge, toward the river sixty feet below.
What are you doing?
"The current." His voice was barely a whisper. "The current goes south."
You can't survive a sixty-foot fall. Not in this condition.
"Then freeze the water."
Jon reached the edge. Below, the Rhoyne stretched black and endless, the fog swirling above its surface. Stone Men dotted the ruins around him, but they hadn't noticed him yet. He had seconds. Maybe less.
He pushed himself over.
* * *
The fall lasted forever.
Wind screaming past. Grey haze parting around him. The river rushing up, black as ink, cold as a grave.
Jon reached for the frost one last time.
It came—weakly, barely a trickle of what he'd once been able to summon. But it was enough. The surface of the Rhoyne crystallized beneath him, a thin sheet that spread outward in a circle, catching him like a net as he crashed through.
The impact shattered the frozen layer. Shattered something in Jon's chest—ribs, maybe, or something deeper. But the barrier had slowed him and had turned a killing blow into merely a crippling one.
He floated.
The cold of the river was nothing compared to the cold in his blood. Jon lay on his back, arms spread, staring up at the grey sky while the current carried him away from the Palace of Sorrow. Frost formed around him without his willing it—a raft, thin and fragile, building itself from the Rhoyne that touched his skin.
The moans of the Stone Men faded behind him. The fog began to thin. Light—actual light, pale and distant—filtered through the grey.
Protocol failed. Marcus's voice was barely a whisper. We are compromised.
Jon looked at his ankle. The frost had melted slightly in the river, revealing what lay beneath—a ruin of char and cold, neither alive nor dead. When he tried to move his foot, nothing happened. The connection was gone. Burned away. Frozen over.
He would never run again. Not properly. Not without pain.
We need medical attention. The injury is beyond field treatment. Infection risk is—
"I know." Jon's voice cracked. "I know what I did."
You saved your life.
"I destroyed my leg."
The alternative was becoming one of them. Marcus paused. You made the only choice that led to survival.
Jon closed his lids. The frozen raft drifted south, carrying him away from the Sorrows, away from the grey city where the dead waited for the living. Behind him, the fog closed like a curtain, hiding horrors that no map would ever show.
Ahead, the current led to Volantis. To the Red Priests who saw fire in everything. To the slave markets, where a crippled northern boy would fetch a price measured in copper, not gold.
To whatever fate waited at the end of the river.
Jon lay on his raft of frost and let the Rhoyne carry him. His ankle throbbed with a phantom pain that the cold could not quite suppress. His palms—one burned, one frostbitten—clutched the edges of his frozen vessel.
He had survived the Sorrows. Barely. By destroying a piece of himself.
The wheel turned on. And Jon Snow drifted with it.