Jon washed up on the banks of the Rhoyne like a dead thing.
The frozen raft had melted sometime in the night, dissolving beneath him as the current carried him south. He had drifted the final miles half-submerged, his ruined ankle dragging through water warm as blood, his arms too weak to swim. When the mud of the riverbank rose to meet him, he crawled.
Not walked. Not stumbled. Crawled.
His fingers dug into the muck, pulling himself forward inches at a time. His right leg kicked weakly, trying to help. His left leg—the ankle that was no longer an ankle but a mass of char and frost—dragged behind him like something dead. Every movement sent bolts of agony through his hip, his spine, and his skull. The phantom cold had spread to his chest now, and when he coughed, frozen blood came up.
System critical. Marcus's voice was barely a whisper. Caloric reserves: depleted. Hydration: critical. Core temperature: unstable. Mobility: compromised beyond field repair.
Jon laughed. It came out as a wheeze, wet and rattling.
"Tell me something I don't know."
You're dying.
"That," Jon gasped, hauling himself another foot through the mud, "I knew."
The sun beat down on him like a hammer. Volantis was close—he could smell it on the wind, a miasma of perfume and rot, spices and sewage. The greatest of the Free Cities, built on the bones of Old Valyria. Somewhere in that maze of streets and temples, there might be help. A healer. A ship heading east.
If he could reach it. If he could stand.
He couldn't stand.
Jon collapsed face-first in the muck and lay there, breathing mud, waiting for the darkness to take him.
The slavers found him an hour later.
* * *
There were four of them—hard men with harder gazes, carrying nets and clubs and the casual cruelty of people who had stopped seeing other people as human. They patrolled the riverbank daily, Jon would learn later. The Rhoyne was a highway of misery, and refugees washed up like flotsam all the time.
They stood over him, discussing his value in a language he didn't recognize. One of them kicked him onto his back. Another grabbed his chin, turning his face toward the light.
"Valyrian blood," the man said in accented Common. "Look at the coloring. Silver hair under the mud. Grey eyes."
"Crippled, though." Another man prodded Jon's ruined ankle with his boot. Jon screamed. "Can't work the mines like this. Can't serve tables."
"The freak shows, then. Or the Red Temple—they pay good coin for curiosities."
"Look at his arms." The first man pulled back Jon's sleeve, revealing the black veins that crawled up toward his shoulder. "What is this? Disease?"
"Who cares? Mark him as raw stock. Let the buyers decide."
HOSTILES DETECTED. FOUR TARGETS. ENGAGE.]
Marcus's voice cut through the haze of pain, sharp and urgent. Combat protocols flooded Jon's mind—strike points, vulnerability assessments, optimal angles of attack. His right grip twitched, trying to summon fire.
A spark. Nothing more. The flame guttered and died before it could form.
Jon tried to stand. His left leg folded beneath him, the ruined ankle refusing to bear any weight at all. He crashed back into the mud, gasping.
Insufficient resources. Caloric reserves depleted. System cannot—
A club cracked against the side of Jon's head, and the world went dark.
* * *
The cell smelled of sweat and despair.
Jon woke in chains—heavy iron shackles around his wrists and ankles, connected by links as thick as his fingers. The weight of them was crushing, designed to break the spirit as much as restrain the flesh. Around him, other prisoners huddled in the darkness: a dwarf with a bitter laugh, a woman whose face had been burned beyond recognition, and a boy younger than Jon whose gaze was already dead.
The undesirables. The grotesques. The ones who would never fetch a price on the main block.
[RESTRAINT GRADE: HEAVY IRON. LOCK TYPE: EXTERNAL PIN. KEY: HELD BY GUARDS. MOBILITY: ZERO.]
"Shut up," Jon whispered. "I know."
A soldier does not submit. A soldier finds a way—
"I'm not a soldier." Jon's voice cracked. "I'm a crippled child in a cage. There is no way out."
There is always a way out.
Jon looked at his leg. The ankle had swollen grotesquely, the frost seal cracking, the burned flesh weeping fluid that smelled of rot. Even if he could break the chains, he couldn't run. Even if he could summon fire, he couldn't fight. The magic required fuel he didn't have, willpower he had exhausted, and strength that had bled out into the mud of the Rhoyne.
For the first time since leaving Winterfell, Jon Snow stopped fighting.
He sat in the darkness of his cell and waited to die.
* * *
The tattooist came on the second day.
He was a small man with precise grips and a dead gaze, carrying a case of needles and ink that represented the final step in the dehumanization of cargo. Every slave in Volantis bore a mark—a symbol tattooed on the cheek or forehead that proclaimed their function to the world. A fly for a slave who cleaned sewers. A teardrop for one who served in the pleasure houses. A mask for fools and freaks.
The dwarf went first. He fought, cursing in three languages, but the guards held him down while the tattooist worked. When it was done, a jester's mask gleamed wetly on his cheek, and something behind his gaze had died.
Then the tattooist turned to Jon.
"This one." He studied Jon's face, tilting it toward the torchlight. "Valyrian features. Unusual coloring. Good bone structure under the dirt."
"Mark him for the freak shows," a guard said. "The crippled leg, the black veins—the crowds will pay to see that."
The tattooist nodded. He selected a needle, dipped it in ink, and pressed the point against Jon's cheekbone.
Jon's skin froze.
It happened without his willing it—a reflex, the frost in his blood responding to violation the way a wounded animal bites. Cold spread from the point of contact, racing across the needle, up the tattooist's fingers, crackling in the air like breaking glass. The ink crystallized. The needle snapped.
The tattooist screamed and stumbled backward, his grip white with frostbite to the wrist.
For a moment, no one moved.
Then the guards were on Jon, clubs rising and falling, and the world became a red haze of pain. Ribs cracked. His nose broke. The cold in his blood surged, trying to protect him, but there was nothing left to give. The frost flickered and died. The beating continued.
When it was over, Jon lay in a heap on the floor of his cell, blood pooling beneath his broken face.
"Don't mark him," someone said from somewhere distant. "Sell him raw. Let the buyer deal with whatever the fuck he is."
* * *
The auction block was a nightmare made of stone.
They dragged Jon there at dawn—two guards hauling him by the chains, his ruined ankle scraping against the cobblestones, leaving a trail of blood and fluid behind him. The market sprawled across a plaza near the Long Bridge, a vast open space filled with cages and platforms and the stench of human misery.
Thousands of people. Buying. Selling. Being sold.
The noise was overwhelming—auctioneers crying prices in a dozen languages, slaves weeping, merchants haggling over the value of human flesh. The heat pressed down like a physical weight, the Volantene sun turning the plaza into a furnace. Jon's northern blood recoiled from it, the phantom cold in his chest fighting a losing battle against the suffocating warmth.
HOSTILE ENVIRONMENT. EXTREME HEAT. DEHYDRATION ACCELERATING. RECOMMEND—]
"There's nothing to recommend." Jon's voice was a rasp. "Stop."
They threw him onto a raised platform—the secondary block, reserved for damaged goods. A crowd gathered, smaller than the ones around the prime lots but no less eager. Pit masters looking for gladiators who wouldn't be missed. Pleasure house owners seeking novelties. Red Priests in flame-colored robes, their gazes burning with fervent light.
One priest stood apart from the others. Tall and gaunt, with a face like carved bone and a gaze that seemed to hold actual fire. He watched Jon with an intensity that made the phantom cold surge in response.
That one is dangerous. Marcus's voice had gone quiet, wary. He's not looking at you like cargo. He's looking at you like a sign.
The auctioneer—a fat man with oiled hair and a voice like grinding stones—grabbed Jon by the chains and hauled him upright.
"Lot forty-seven! The Frozen Cripple!" He laughed at his own joke, playing to the crowd. "Northern stock, Valyrian coloring, one leg already ruined to save you the trouble of breaking it yourself! Starting bid: five honors!"
Scattered laughter. A few hands rose. The price climbed slowly—ten honors, fifteen, twenty.
"Come now, friends!" The auctioneer grabbed Jon's hair, yanking his head back to display his face. "Look at those eyes! That bone structure! He'd make a fine curiosity, a bed warmer, a—"
He twisted Jon's ruined ankle.
The pain was a white-hot spike driven through Jon's spine and into his skull. It cut through the exhaustion, the despair, and the resignation that had settled over him like a shroud. For one crystalline instant, everything else fell away, and there was nothing but agony and the ancient, furious thing that lived in his blood.
[PAIN THRESHOLD EXCEEDED. ADRENALINE DUMP INITIATED. SYSTEM REBOOT IN PROGRESS.]
The dragon woke.
* * *
Fire erupted from Jon's palms.
Not the weak sputters of the riverbank—this was a torrent, a furnace blast that sent the auctioneer stumbling backward with his robes ablaze. The crowd screamed. Guards rushed forward. The chains binding Jon's wrists glowed cherry-red, then orange, then blinding white.
The chains. Focus on the chains. Heat them to the failure point.
Jon grabbed the links between his wrists and poured everything into them. The iron screamed—a high, keening sound as the metal expanded, as molecular bonds strained and stretched. The heat cooked his palms, blistered his fingers, and filled the air with the stench of burning flesh.
He didn't let go.
Now. Reverse. Absolute zero.
Frost replaced fire in a single catastrophic instant. The white-hot iron went from fifteen hundred degrees to far below freezing in the space of a heartbeat. The thermal shock was devastating—microscopic fractures racing through the crystalline structure of the metal, stress points multiplying beyond any material's ability to endure.
Jon smashed the chains against the stone platform.
They shattered like glass.
The crowd went silent. The guards froze. Even the tall Red Priest had stopped moving, his fire-lit gaze fixed on the small, broken boy standing amid the ruins of his bonds.
Jon's wrist-shackles were still attached—heavy iron cuffs trailing two feet of chain from each arm. Not a restraint anymore. A weapon.
[COMBAT MODE ENGAGED. FOUR HOSTILES APPROACHING. USE THE CHAINS.]
The first guard came in with a spear. Jon spun, whipping the left-hand chain in a wide arc. Frost crystallized along its length, turning the links into a jagged morning star of frozen iron. The chain caught the guard across the face, and he went down screaming, blood spraying across the stones.
The second guard swung a club. Jon ducked—lurching more than dodging, his ruined ankle screaming—and brought the right-hand chain up in a rising strike. Fire blazed along the metal, turning it into a whip of flame that wrapped around the guard's arm and burned.
You can't run. You can't sprint. But you can pivot. You can strike. You can make them pay for every inch.
Jon fought like a cornered animal. The chains sang through the air, trailing frost and fire, painting arcs of destruction across the auction block. Guards fell. Slavers fled. The crowd scattered, trampling each other in their desperation to escape the demon that had risen from the slave pens.
A crossbow bolt hissed past Jon's ear.
Spinning toward the shooter—too slow, his leg betraying him—the man was taking aim for a second shot. There was no time to dodge. No time to block.
Move. NOW.
Jon threw himself sideways. The bolt caught him across the ribs—a grazing wound, but enough to stagger him. He crashed to the stones, the impact driving the breath from his lungs, the chains clattering around him.
The Tiger Cloaks had arrived.
Elite guards in striped cloaks, carrying spears and shields, and the disciplined formation of men who knew how to kill. Twenty of them. Thirty. Spreading out to surround the platform, cutting off every avenue of escape.
Jon struggled to his feet. His chains hung limp at his sides. The fire in his blood was guttering, the frost receding. The adrenaline that had carried him this far was fading, and beneath it was only exhaustion and pain and the terrible certainty that this was the end.
The wall.
Jon looked.
Behind him, rising two hundred feet into the hazy sky, was the Black Wall of Volantis.
It was a legend-made stone—fused dragonstone from the height of the Freehold, seamless and perfect, encircling the oldest part of the city in an embrace of ancient power. No army had ever breached it. No thief had ever climbed it. It was said that not even dragons could melt its surface.
It was also the only direction the Tiger Cloaks hadn't blocked.
That wall is unclimbable.
"Not unclimbable." Jon's voice was barely a whisper. "Unclimbed."
The structural integrity alone—
"I don't need to break it." Jon started moving, lurching toward the wall, each step on his ruined ankle a fresh explosion of agony. "I need to change it."
* * *
The Black Wall had stood for five thousand years.
Jon pressed his palms against its surface, and ancient power thrummed beneath the stone—Valyrian sorcery, woven into the molecular structure of the dragonstone itself. It resisted him. The wall didn't want to change. Didn't want to yield.
Behind him, the Tiger Cloaks were advancing.
Jon closed his lids and found the fire.
Right hand. Heat the stone. Create a pocket.
His palm blazed white-hot. The dragonstone beneath it began to glow—red, then orange, then a color that had no name, a shade of heat that belonged to the forges of the Fourteen Flames themselves. The stone softened. Began to flow.
Left hand. Freeze it. Lock the shape.
Frost poured from his other palm, slamming into the molten stone, crystallizing it into solidity before it could flow away. A handhold. Rough, smoking, but solid.
Jon grabbed it and pulled.
Again. Faster.
His right grip found a spot eighteen inches higher. Heat. Melt. His left followed. Cold. Freeze. Another handhold. Another grip.
The Tiger Cloaks reached the base of the wall.
"Bring him down!" someone shouted. "Crossbows! Archers!"
Bolts began to fly.
Jon climbed.
The world contracted to a rhythm of fire and frost, melt and freeze, grip and pull. His palms were ruins—blistered and burned on the right, frostbitten and numb on the left—but he couldn't stop. Every inch of height was a second of survival. Every handhold was another breath.
Twenty feet.
An arrow struck the stone beside his head, showering him with chips of dragonstone.
Thirty feet.
His ruined ankle slammed against the wall, and he screamed, almost losing his grip. The pain was blinding, but the pain was also fuel—the only thing keeping him conscious, keeping him moving.
Forty feet. Fifty.
The wall stretched above him, endless and impossible. The ground fell away below—Tiger Cloaks shrinking to the size of children, then insects, then nothing at all. The air grew thin. The sun beat down. Jon's vision was narrowing to a tunnel, darkness creeping in from the edges.
Keep climbing. Don't stop. Don't think. Climb.
Seventy feet. Eighty. The handhold rhythm had become automatic, his frame moving without conscious direction. Melt. Freeze. Grip. Pull. The dragonstone screamed beneath his palms, five thousand years of Valyrian sorcery yielding to the impossible demands of a seven-year-old boy.
One hundred feet.
Jon looked up. The top of the wall was visible now—a flat expanse of black stone, silhouetted against the burning sky.
Fifty feet to go. Maybe less.
He didn't have fifty feet left in him.
You don't have a choice. Marcus's voice had gone strange—not tactical anymore, but desperate. They're watching you. The whole city is watching. If you fall now, everything we've survived means nothing.
"I can't."
You can. You will. Because the alternative is dying on these stones, and I did not drag your soul across three lifetimes to watch you give up two hundred feet from safety.
Jon's grips moved.
He didn't know how. Didn't know where the strength came from—whether it was the last dregs of his own will or something Marcus had hidden away, some final reserve kept for exactly this moment. He only knew that he was still climbing, still burning and freezing, still clawing his way up the impossible wall while the city of Volantis watched in stunned silence below.
One hundred fifty feet.
One hundred seventy-five.
His grip found the edge of the wall.
Jon pulled himself over the top and collapsed.
* * *
The view from the Black Wall was infinite.
Jon lay on his back, staring up at a sky that seemed to go on forever, his chest heaving, his frame broken in ways he couldn't count. His palms were raw meat. His ankle had stopped hurting, which probably meant something terrible. The black veins had spread to his chest now, visible through the torn remnants of his shirt.
Slowly, painfully, he rolled onto his stomach and looked down at the city.
Volantis spread beneath him like a map of human suffering—the slave markets, the pleasure houses, the temples and palaces, and endless warrens of poverty and pain. The Long Bridge stretched across the Rhoyne, crawling with humanity. The Red Temple dominated the eastern district, its flames visible even in daylight.
And at the base of the Black Wall, a crowd had gathered.
Not Tiger Cloaks—they had stopped trying to follow him somewhere around the hundred-foot mark, their crossbows useless against a target that kept moving, kept climbing, and kept doing the impossible. The crowd was something else. Priests in flame-colored robes. Common people, their faces upturned, their mouths open.
They were chanting.
Jon couldn't make out the words at first—the distance was too great, the sound distorted by the height. But then the tall priest stepped forward, the one with fire in his gaze, and his voice carried like a trumpet across the plaza.
"BEHOLD! THE FIRE MADE FLESH! THE LORD'S CHOSEN, COME TO DELIVER US FROM DARKNESS!"
No. Marcus's voice was horrified. No, no, no. This is worse than chains. They don't want to capture you—they want to worship you.
Jon watched the crowd swell, watched more red robes arrive, and watched the common people fall to their knees with tears streaming down their faces. They thought he was a sign. A miracle. A messiah sent by their fire god to lead them to some glorious destiny.
A trap worse than slavery.
Run. Now. While they're still in shock. The eastern districts—there's a gate to the Demon Road. We can—
Jon didn't wait for Marcus to finish. He dragged himself to his feet—or foot, singular, his left leg hanging useless—and lurched toward the inner edge of the wall.
The descent was agony. He found a stairway, ancient and crumbling, and half-climbed, half-fell down it, his ruined ankle screaming with every impact. The other side of the wall was a different world—old money, old power, the ancestral estates of Volantis's ruling families. Guards were coming, but they were confused, uncertain, and unwilling to touch the miracle boy who had done the impossible.
Jon used that hesitation. Moving through the streets like a ghost, leaving a trail of blood and frost crystals behind him. The eastern gate loomed ahead, the arch opening onto the road that led away from this nightmare.
The Demon Road. The path to Meereen, to Slaver's Bay, to the far edge of the known world.
To Yi Ti, if he survived.
Jon passed through the gate as the sun began to set, painting the sky in shades of blood and fire. Behind him, the chanting continued, the Red Priests crying his miracle to anyone who would listen.
We're not hidden anymore. Marcus's voice was grim. The Iron Bank knew about you before. Now the Red God's faithful know. Every temple from here to Asshai will hear this story within a fortnight.
"Then we move faster than the stories."
You can barely walk.
Jon looked at his ruined ankle, at his destroyed palms, at the black veins crawling across his chest. He looked at the road stretching into the darkness ahead.
"Then we crawl."
He started walking.
The Demon Road swallowed him, and the wheel turned on