Chapter Text
Jon felt like he’d finally gone mad, standing here before a cabin that, by all means, should not stand here as it did.
The winds of the Haunted Forest raged in their seemingly endless snow, battering against his face and burning his lungs with every inhale. His feet stung with the beginnings of frostbite and he knew that his fingers were blue even under the thick gloves.
The rest of his group lay safe in some distant cave, unaware of how he’d wandered so far. How far the woman had led him.
He’d been at war with himself for so long, unable to turn his mind from the kingdom many miles away as he wandered so far away. Worry clouded his thoughts, bringing to mind a new boundless imagination of everything that could go wrong or had already gone wrong in his absence. Every step from the chaotic mess of nations felt damning, even as he knew that those same steps were necessary for the free folk who put their trust in him. Seasons brought essential journeys, yet his own split priorities tore at his very soul.
He had been in a fit of insomnia when she presented herself to him. Red loose cloak and thin clothing. Bright in the darkness, bare skin showing as if the cold was a laughable threat. She stood so far beyond their camp, her shadow reaching him even in the darkness.
She had stared at him with soft amused pity and her lips had moved. A whispered promise, something like a bargain. Maybe a boon. He wondered if he was a fool for her inaudible tone to be of warmth and care.
She stood now at the entrance of the cabin, warmth leaking from its cracks and denying the winter. Her smile was mischievous and knowing, as if she could read his soul and reduce it to a triviality. Her type always could do that when they were playing with his life.
He couldn’t find himself angry when she so clearly saw him. It had been so obvious to the others his fraying mind and they knew him so well. She had the benefit of whatever mysterious curses fed her secrets.
Melisandre used to do worse to him, playing with his future by pulling from his past. It had always felt like a breach of delicate privacy, ominous and powerful sure, but at the cost of laying bare his vulnerabilities. Yet it never did him any bad, her schemes always giving much more to him than they ever took.
He couldn’t say he cared for the way their magic always found him, but its consistency gave him hope in his desperation. It defied the impossible, spitting on sense with its power. It had been one of his wild fantasies in the seasons before, imagining the ways in which Melissandra could solve his every issue.
Standing here now, he wondered if such fantasies were foolish. He stumbled in, the air roasting his skin like an oven and igniting something deeper within his chest. A power that likely already owned his life happy to see him fall into its influence once more.
It felt too welcoming for comfort, the warm coziness of the wooden temple inviting in a way that felt contrary to what he had grown to learn of this cult’s nature. He could feel the way the soft pulse of heat traveled along his body, burning away the dirt and snow in a quiet display of power.
The witch retreated into the cluttered structure, her aged body climbing over stacks of every furniture made of pine, oak, birch and even weirwood. Her cloak smoldered as it dragged against the candles carelessly strewn about, each one of them nearly melted enough to start an inferno.
“Hello Jon Snow” She whispered glancing at him, choking on the word snow as if it was poisonous to her. “Or is it Jon Stark” she pondered, having taken his coat at some inexplicable time, folding it on a quaint ebony table. It burned where her fingers searched it, but smoke choked away the concerns he was trying to speak.
She found what she was looking for, pulling a small dragonglass blade from its hiding place in the fur, long dulled from its everyday mundane usage. “Or a Targaryon”, she chuckled slightly, her voice warmer to this name than the others.
He was stuck watching her as she traced the edge of the blade, the witch caught in inspecting the jagged material as she murmured to herself. The air still seemed too thick with smog for his voice, but his impatience won out eventually enough for the necessary question.
“Why did you call me here”, the words unsure but surprisingly painless as the hot air soothed his throat.
She snickered, seemingly barely aware of his question her musings became loud enough to parse. “So many names, Lord Commander, so many roles you must serve.” She hummed to herself, angling the blade as the light reflected off of it.
Jon watched the knife mirror her reflection a thousand times, her face repeated in so many fragments across it. She shifted it to him and those faces became his, allowing him to see his own growing impatient expression repeated itself on the black surface.
He watched confused as she nodded to the images, leaving the knife absentmindedly on a haphazard collection of furniture as she shifted her focus to the search the crevices of the chaos. Her fingers would snatch an oddity from beneath a pile of lumber, before returning it with an expression of disappointment.
“Priestess?” he tried demanding, watching as she climbed stacked cabinets, finding strange idols and warped objects and tossing each to the side with continued dissatisfaction. He grew deeply concerned when she pulled a severed hand from a chest, dropping it where it rolled far too close to him. “Please give me what you promised!”, he said with no small amount of unease.
The woman was faster than he could ever describe, jumping down to stop perfectly inches from his face, still perched on a table.
“Promised?” she snarled, the shadow melting away from her features, showing off a collection of burn scars. He wondered if his beard was singed, her breath full of embers and smoke. She hung as if a second from breathing an inferno over him, before a realization came to her face like she had just understood a joke.
“Promised Prince!”, she cackled, her hands shoving something into his arms as Jon was too distracted by the way her wrinkles shifted in the light. She fell away, leaving him panting as the air lost its weight in her sudden absence. The witch once more returned to her franctic search and Jon couldn’t help but feel relief at the lack of an answer.
He found himself sweating on a nearby makeshift chair, clinging to the warm glass of the strange object as the horror of magical beings once again made itself clear. Looking down at the murky liquid sloshing within it did not help, the floating bodies of conjoined fetal creatures limp within.
A part of him hoped desperately that Ghost would find him, just as another part hoped this would come to something that wasn't his ritual sacrifice. His desperation was so much more than his survival instincts, unable to imagine coming here only to return to sleepless nights and ceaseless regret.
He could leave at any moment, but his body stayed. It was not a spell that held him there.
Finally, the old thing found her way down from her perch, stuttering with words he could barely understand as she clutched some old book. She tore its pages from its binding as she cursed, contempt twisting her face as the paper resisted her firey touch. Instead, the book began leaking a thick blue liquid, the words running as they put out every ember that tried to catch on the soggy paper.
She rolled her eyes at the reaction, like touching the literature was tantamount to handling something rotten. Still she seemed satisfied, her manic searching mood now refined into something prime and proper as her posture straightened.
“It is a crude magic, little White Wolf” she complained. Her fingers brushed over a page, staining them with the blue juice as it sizzled and burned, the paper resisting her fire. A smoke began to drift from the contact, thick and black as some battle waged with the tome and the heat. She tisked to herself as the paper glowed with embers, the places where it touched her fingertips blackening as they clenched tighter and tighter to it.
Eventually, as Jon watched limply from his resting place, whatever strange magical phenomenon ran its course. The paper rapidly dried its wet ink, steam pouring from it as blue flakes fell from the single page she held. She studied it with unblinking eyes, carefully reading it as if it wasn’t currently burning away.
She grinned crooked yet reassuring, glassy stare meeting his own fearful and tired one. The paper fell to ash in her hands, the rest of the tomb dropped in a messy clump of blue pulp.
“So many names for one man and the light can only create” she prayed, lining out some ghosting contract with him. She began to walk close to where he stood, slow and purposeful in her pressure. “My lord enjoys you so. You should feel exalted by his presence”
She gazed at him, her face warped yet beautiful as her ancient features appeared sculpted in unnatural forms. It was something he felt disturbingly recognizable, her scarlet eyes in direct contrast yet familiar. Reminding him of flowing white ice and glowing blue eyes.
He couldn’t understand how to communicate with something like that, so he nodded and hoped he wasn’t making a mistake.
Her eyes were focused more than ever and a tight smile graced her lips, satisfaction painting her face as if she had been offered a meal. He could feel something in the glass jar writhe and he couldn’t bear to witness the horror of that when this creature continued to close in on him.
“I am happy to aid the Lord in creating you once more”, the heat filling the room as every candle chose the moment to reach their tiny flames to their wooden stands, fire catching as she stood over him. Her hands, coated in ash and burning soot, were the last thing he saw before the fireplace blew. “You are lucky to have such affinity to his fire”, she croaked as the world became a bonfire.
Jon could hardly be surprised.
A white dire-wolf found them amongst a field of ash, vulnerable and confused amongst the wreckage. It had been a forest days before, empty evergreens and untouched snow. Now it held no resemblance to that natural state, the air still thankfully warm as two men lie naked on the ground.
They divvied up their clothes, the old uniform of the night’s watch left folded within their cloak, completely untouched by the inferno. Already the cold began to reclaim the area, the lingering heat swiftly dissipating. The two men were quick in preparing for the long journey back to shelter, perfectly synchronized as they tried to measure what each man would need to not freeze getting there.
Ghost peered at them, assessing its position in the strange situation. The wolf’s enormous head tilted in confusion, trying to differentiate between the two.
Jon could sympathize with his wolf, watching an all too familiar body pull on parts of his insulated leather, as he too donned his own pieces. The other kept sneaking glances at him, clearly just as put off by him, their eyes wide in reflected shock.
The strangest part was how the shock dulled, fading too quickly as they both assessed their situation. One of them would pick up one of their bundled belongings, wordlessly offer it to the other and then eventually they both separated what seemed most useful between them.
It would be a short journey with Ghost here, so they did not have to worry about splitting responsibilities. Jon could carry their meager supplies and the other could take the weapons. It felt unusually insignificant who ended up with what. Like he was just holding Longclaw in another hand, not offering it to be used by another man.
Jon oddly found himself comforted by his reflection, able to see that their bodies were untouched by the fire, just as they always were. He was so sure his skin had been melting so short ago, unable to tell if the pain had stopped because the fire had gone too deep.
Comparing this strange awkwardness, stood next to his duplicate as they carefully bundled up, it was a much more preferable outcome than what he thought would be an assured death. It was absolutely absurd, watching his twin be prodded by the snout of his wolf as it tried to figure out which is which.
Jon wasn’t absolutely sure himself. Even watching the other’s face get licked, he could practically feel the tongue on him, feeling his hands stroke Ghost in an attempt to calm him as if he were doing the action himself.
The other him- as strange as that was to think- turned to look at him, feeling the same confused sensory input as he wrestled with the head of the dire-wolf. The other Jon’s eyes made contact with his and Jon felt nauseous at the double-vision in the back of his skull, unable to tell if he was the one petting Ghost or the one watching.
The heat of the metal clenched in his hands brought one of him back to the body holding it, as the other blinked back to the large animal who wanted more consoling. The other was still watching him, trying to comprehend their current being. Jon watched his twin’s eyes travel down to the grasped object, his interest drawn in turn to the heat he could also clearly feel.
They both knew what it was. They had watched the thing be formed, molten metal surrounding the tiny body she’d fished out of the jar. It had been too bright to see, yet the fires burned the sculpture of metal and flesh in vivid colors deep into their soul.
He had been the one to carve its surface, but he was sure he hadn’t had any proper tools to do it. He had just felt the witch’s hands on his and the words had flowed from him onto malleable silver.
Now it sat in his palm, appearing mundane, if a little ghoulish. A depiction of some chimeric creature, covered in heads of which only a few could be recognized. A dragon, a crow and a wolf, all formed of ash blackened metal with perfect ruby eyes. Names carved themselves around its formless body, small and finely written in his hesitant handwriting.
Two had been scratched out, an action he remembered doing at her behest. It was easy to see them now, listing a Jon Snow and a Jon Stark as the scratched carvings bled thin trails of blue fluid.
Ghost pushed up against him as his eyes fixed on the names, too many of them swarming the object as he tried to parse what exactly that meant to him. Another hand gently stole the object from his hands, the gloves that used to be his hiding it from his line of sight.
Brown eyes and a tight grimace met his own and he could tell the other could feel his thoughts, laid out in shared dread through the both of them.
Jon wondered which of him belonged to which name. Was he the Stark or the Snow. Was the sword on the other’s belt an indication of his twin’s identity, or was there only madness in finding logic in this magic.
Ghost groaned with impatience to his human’s shared plights. Jon’s double sent a look that he returned, finding it difficult in figuring out which of them was who, a silent conversation they hadn’t even known they were both communicating. They both could feel the other slot this crisis for later.
Jon helped his double get on top of their wolf, thankful for the constant growth of the creature. It could easily hold them. They both had held out their hands in unity, neither responding to the other’s action, as if he had willed both at once.
Ghost sprinted and one of him watched the place where a cabin should and shouldn’t have been.
This would be a nightmare to explain to Tormund.