20 Years Before Conquest | The Crypts of Winterfell
Torrhen Stark (Age 10)
The cold in the crypts was different than the cold in the courtyard.
Up above, the wind bit at your cheeks and the snow melted wet against your furs. Down here, the cold was dry, still, and heavy. It was a cold that didn't just touch your skin; it seemed to settle in your lungs.
Torrhen Stark, ten years old and already tall for his age, adjusted his grip on the heavy iron torch. The pitch sputtered, casting long, dancing shadows against the granite pillars. He shouldn't be down here. His father, King Edderion, was holding court in the Great Hall, listening to a dispute regarding grazing lands near the Rills. It was boring business.
Torrhen preferred the dead kings. They were quieter.
He walked past the newer tombs first. The statues here were detailed, their faces carved with precision, the stone direwolves at their feet snarling in frozen silence. He traced a finger along the iron longsword resting across the lap of his grandfather. The metal was cold enough to burn.
"Winter is Coming," he whispered. The words echoed, bouncing off the vaulted ceiling, sounding like a dozen ghosts whispering back.
He ventured deeper.
The crypts of Winterfell were vast, larger than the castle above them. They said the castle grew upward over centuries, but the crypts grew downward. As Torrhen descended the spiral stone steps to the lower level, the air grew stale.
Here, the statues were older. The features were worn away by time, leaving faceless kings to guard the darkness. Their swords had long since rusted into red dust, leaving only brown stains on their stone knees.
Torrhen stopped before a particularly massive statue. The face was stern, the beard carved in thick, blocky ropes of stone. The direwolf beside him was the size of a pony.
Why did they all look so sad? Torrhen wondered.
He raised his torch. The flame illuminated the darkness of the tunnel stretching further down—into the collapsed sections where no one had walked in a thousand years. He felt a sudden, sharp pang of fear. Not of ghosts—Starks did not fear their own dead—but of the weight of it all.
Thousands of years of kings. Thousands of years of holding back the cold.
He was only ten, but he felt the burden waiting for him. One day, his father would lie here. And one day, Torrhen would lie here too. An artist would come and chip away at a block of granite until it looked like him, and they would put a sword in his lap, and leave him in the dark forever.
A drop of water fell from the ceiling, landing on his nose with an icy splash. Torrhen flinched, nearly dropping the torch.
The torchlight flickered violently, though there was no breeze.
Torrhen froze. The draft he had felt earlier wasn't coming from the tunnel ahead—it was rising from the floor itself.
Wisps of white mist began to bleed out of the cracks in the granite flagstones. It coiled around his boots, thicker and heavier than ordinary fog. It didn't dissipate; it gathered. The white tendrils wove together, spinning like wool on a loom, knitting into a shape.
Torrhen pressed his back against a pillar, his breath caught in his throat.
Legs formed first—thick, powerful limbs made of swirling vapor. Then a torso, ribbed with phantom muscle. Finally, a massive head lowered, snout almost touching the ground.
It was a wolf. A direwolf, larger than any living beast Torrhen had ever seen in the kennel master's yard. It had no eyes, only hollows of darker grey mist where eyes should be, yet Torrhen felt the weight of its gaze.
It let out a soundless huff—a puff of frosty air—and turned.
It didn't walk; it flowed, gliding deeper into the darkness past the line of statues where the collapsed rubble usually signaled the end of the safe path.
"Wait," Torrhen whispered.
His fear was still there, a cold knot in his stomach, but his feet moved on their own. He was a Stark, and the wolf was the sigil of his house. To turn back felt like a betrayal.
He followed the apparition, stepping carefully over loose stones. The deeper they went, the older the statues became, their features entirely eroded, just rough blocks of stone clutching rusted shadows of swords.
The fog wolf stopped abruptly at the end of the corridor.
Here, the way was completely blocked. A massive cave-in, centuries old, had sealed the lower levels. Huge boulders were wedged together, fused by time and damp moss. There was no way forward.
The wolf looked back at Torrhen one last time. Its form began to lose cohesion, the edges fraying into the darkness. Then, with a sudden lunge, it leaped.
It didn't strike the rocks. It passed straight through the solid stone wall as if it were jumping through a waterfall.
Torrhen gasped, rushing forward. He skidded to a halt right in front of the blockage, holding his torch high. The light illuminated only cold, unforgiving grey stone. The wolf was gone.
"Where did you go?" he asked the silence.
He reached out a gloved hand, expecting to feel the rough grit of the granite boulder.
His hand didn't stop.
Torrhen yelped and jerked his arm back. He stared at the wall, heart hammering against his ribs. To the eye, it was solid rock. But where he had touched it, his hand had met only freezing air.
He stripped off his glove. His fingers were trembling. Slowly, he reached out again. He pushed his bare palm against the "rock."
It tingled, a sensation like needles of ice pricking his skin. His hand sank into the stone, disappearing up to the wrist. It wasn't a wall. It was an illusion—or a door that had forgotten how to look like a door.
On the other side, through the phantom stone, he could feel a draft. And on that draft, a smell he didn't recognize: something hot, sulfurous, and ancient.
Torrhen looked back toward the stairs, then at his hand vanishing into the rock. He took a breath, squeezed his eyes shut, and stepped through the wall.
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