I was cold.
That was the first thing I knew. Not the cold of Jotunheim—that was a memory from another life, another body, another existence that felt impossibly distant now, buried beneath layers of mortal flesh and infant sensation. This was different. This was the cold of air that had never tasted breath before, the cold of a world that did not want me, the cold of a tower in Dorne where the sun should have been warm but wasn't.
I was cold, and I was small, and I was screaming.
The scream tore out of me before I understood what screaming was. My lungs—*my lungs, these tiny, fragile, mortal lungs*—filled with air for the first time, and the shock of it was so overwhelming that my body responded the only way it knew how. I wailed. I thrashed. I clenched fists that were too small to hold anything and punched at a world that had already begun to hurt me.
The hands that caught me were rough and hurried. I felt them—truly felt them, the texture of calloused skin and the pressure of fingers and the slight tremor of a woman who was afraid—and the sensation was so vivid, so immediate, that it drove everything else from my mind. The throne was gone. The tree was gone. The Endless were gone. The tapestry of realities I had spent eons cultivating was gone.
I was a baby.
I was a baby, and I was cold, and I was screaming, and somewhere above me a woman was dying.
---
Her name was Lyanna.
I knew this without knowing how I knew it. The soul I had entered was still forming, still settling, still weaving itself together around the fragment of my consciousness that had slipped into the empty spaces. The boundaries were thin. The edges bled. I was the child, and the child was me, and somewhere in the space between what I had been and what I was becoming was a woman with dark hair and gray eyes and a voice that was fading.
"My son," she whispered.
I could not understand the words. Language was a country I had not yet crossed. But I understood the voice. I understood the love in it—the desperate, aching, impossible love of a woman who had held on long enough to see her child born and was now ready to let go.
The love was a warmth that pushed back against the cold. It was a light that flickered in the darkness. It was the last gift of a dying woman to the son she would never know, and it burned.
*She loves me*, I thought, and the thought was mine, wholly mine, not the distant observation of a god watching from a throne but the raw, immediate realization of a child held in his mother's arms. *She loves me. She is dying—I can feel her dying, the blood is everywhere, the pain is everywhere—and she is still loving me. She is pouring every drop of herself into this moment, into me, into this last, desperate, glorious act of defiance against the dark.*
Her hands—my mother's hands, trembling and weak—touched my cheek.
"Aegon," she breathed. "His name is Aegon Targaryen. Promise me, Ned. Promise me you'll protect him. Promise me he'll be safe."
The man beside her was weeping. I could feel his grief, a heavy, sodden weight that pressed against the edges of my awareness. Eddard Stark. My uncle. The brother who had come too late.
"I promise," Ned said, and his voice broke. "I promise, Lya. I promise."
My mother smiled.
And then she was gone.
---
I did not understand death. I could not. I was minutes old, barely more than a heartbeat wrapped in skin. But I understood *absence*. I understood that the warmth was gone. The voice was gone. The hands that had touched my cheek were gone.
I cried.
I cried, and the tears were mine, and the grief was mine, and the hollow ache that opened in the place where love had been was mine. I had lost people before. I had lost Frigga. I had lost Thor. I had lost myself, more times than I could count. But this was different. This was the first loss. The primal loss. The wound that every other wound would echo.
*Goodbye*, I thought, and the thought was a prayer. *Goodbye, Mother. I did not know you. I will never know you. But you loved me. You loved me enough to stay alive until I was born. You loved me enough to give me your last breath. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.*
The hands that lifted me were different now. Rougher. Less certain. The midwife, still trembling, still afraid. She wrapped me in cloth that scratched against skin that had never been touched before and carried me away from the bed where my mother lay still and silent.
I could not look back. My neck was too weak. My eyes were too new. I could only stare at the blur of shadows and light and feel the cold press in from all sides.
But I did not need to look back. I would carry her with me. Her love. Her sacrifice. Her final, whispered promise.
For the rest of this life, I would carry her.
---
The days that followed were a fever dream of sensation.
I was carried through a world I could not see. I was fed by women whose faces I could not focus on. I was wrapped and unwrapped and wrapped again, passed from arm to arm like a parcel no one quite knew what to do with. The air changed—grew colder, drier, sharper—as we traveled north. The sounds changed. The smells changed. Everything changed, and I was too small to understand any of it.
But I felt it all.
I felt the jostle of a horse's gait and the warmth of a wet nurse's breast. I felt the scratch of wool blankets and the sting of cold wind on my cheeks. I felt hunger and fullness and discomfort and the brief, fleeting comfort of sleep. I felt the world pressing in on me from every side, demanding that I exist, demanding that I survive, demanding that I become something more than a bundle of needs and reflexes.
And I felt the eyes of the man who held me most often. Eddard Stark. Ned. My uncle, though I would not know that word for years. My father, though I would never call him that.
He held me differently than the others. More carefully. More gently. His hands were warrior's hands—rough and scarred and capable of killing—but when he touched me, they trembled. He looked at me with eyes that were gray as winter steel, gray as my mother's eyes, gray as my own eyes would become. And in those eyes, I saw something I recognized.
Grief. Guilt. Secrets.
*You know*, I thought. *You know who I am. You know what I am. You know that I am not your bastard but your nephew, not a stain on your honor but a promise you made to a dying woman. And you will carry that secret for the rest of your life. You will let your wife despise me. You will let the world call me bastard. You will let me grow up never knowing the truth.*
*And I will never blame you for it. Because I understand secrets. I understand the weight of them. I understand what it means to carry a truth that would destroy everything if it ever came to light.*
I reached for him—a reflex, an instinct, the uncoordinated flailing of an infant who did not yet know how to control his limbs. But my tiny fingers brushed against his beard, and he flinched as if I had struck him.
"Jon," he whispered. "Your name is Jon Snow."
*Jon*, I thought. *A bastard's name. A hidden prince's disguise. Very well. I have worn worse names. I have been Laufeyson and Odinson and Silvertongue and Liesmith and God of Mischief. I have been hero and villain and everything in between. I can be Jon Snow. I can be the bastard of Winterfell.*
*For now.*
---
Winterfell was gray.
That was my first impression of my new home. Not a thought, exactly—I was still too young for thoughts in the way I was accustomed to—but a feeling. A deep, bone-deep awareness that this place was made of stone and shadow and cold that seeped into everything. The sky was gray. The walls were gray. The faces were gray. Even the fire in the hearth seemed gray, its warmth a pale imitation of the heat I had left behind in the south.
I was too young to understand why this place felt wrong. I only knew that it did. That the air was too cold and the voices were too sharp and the arms that held me were never the arms I wanted.
But there was one face that was not gray.
She had auburn hair and cold blue eyes, and when she looked at me, I felt something curdle behind her ribs. Catelyn Stark. Lady Stark. My uncle's wife. She held her own son—Robb, my cousin, born just weeks before me—with a fierce, protective love that radiated from her like heat from a fire. But when she looked at me, the fire went out.
*She will never love me*, I thought. *She will never even try. I am proof of something she cannot forgive—a betrayal that exists only in her mind, a wound that will never heal because it was never real. But she will make me pay for it. Every day. Every glance. Every cold silence. I will grow up in the shadow of her resentment, and I will never understand why.*
Except I did understand. Even as an infant, even with a mind that was still forming, I understood. I had been the outsider before. I had been the one who did not belong. I had stood in the shadow of a brother who was golden and glorious and loved, and I had felt the cold of not being enough.
*I am sorry*, I thought, looking up at the woman who would never be my mother. *I am sorry for whatever you think I represent. I am sorry for the pain you carry. I am sorry that my existence causes you suffering. But I did not choose this. I did not choose to be born. I did not choose to be brought here. I am only a child. I am only a baby. And I deserve love as much as your son does.*
She turned away.
The cold pressed in.
And I learned, in that moment, what it meant to be Jon Snow.
---
The days became weeks. The weeks became months. The months became years.
Time passed in the strange, elastic way it passes for children—long stretches of nothing punctuated by moments of overwhelming discovery. I learned to focus my eyes. I learned to recognize faces. I learned to smile, and then to laugh, and then to reach for things I wanted.
I learned that Ned's arms were safe. That Robb's presence beside me was warm. That the servants whispered when they thought no one was listening. That the word "bastard" was spoken with a curl of the lip, even when I was too young to know what it meant.
And I learned that I was not alone.
Not truly. Not ever.
There was something inside me. Something that had been there since the moment of my birth—since before my birth, since the moment my soul began to form. It was not a voice. It was not a presence. It was more like... an instinct. A knowing. A sense that the world was larger than it seemed, that I was larger than I seemed, that the cold gray walls of Winterfell were only one small part of a story so vast I could not yet comprehend it.
I did not remember the throne. I did not remember the tree. I did not remember the seven siblings who called me godbrother. Those memories were buried deep, waiting to be uncovered, belonging to another self that existed somewhere beyond the boundaries of this fragile, mortal existence.
But I felt them. In the quiet moments. In the dark hours before dawn. When the cold pressed in and the loneliness threatened to swallow me, I felt something warm stir in the depths of my soul. Something green. Something gold. Something that whispered, without words, *You are not alone. You have never been alone. You will never be alone.*
I did not understand it. I would not understand it for years—perhaps not until I left this world and returned to the throne and remembered everything I had temporarily set aside.
But I felt it.
And it was enough.
---
Spring came to Winterfell, and then summer, and then winter again, and I grew.
The world expanded beyond the blur of shadows and light. I learned to crawl, then to walk, then to run. I learned that Robb was my constant companion, my shadow and my rival and my brother in every way that mattered. I learned that the servants smiled at me when Lady Stark was not watching. I learned that the old maester with his chain and his potions looked at me with something that might have been kindness.
I learned that Ned—my uncle, my false father, the man who carried the weight of my secret—loved me. He loved me in the quiet way he loved all his children. He loved me with a sadness in his eyes that never quite faded. He loved me enough to lie for me, to protect me, to keep me safe from a truth that would destroy me.
And I learned that Lady Stark hated me.
She never struck me. She never screamed at me. She simply... looked through me. Spoke to me in tones that were clipped and cold and utterly devoid of warmth. Left rooms when I entered them. Held her own children close and turned her back on the boy who did not belong.
I did not understand why. Not yet. But I felt it. Every day. Every glance. Every cold silence.
*I will survive this*, I thought, and the thought was fiercer than any thought a child my age should have been capable of. *I will survive the cold and the whispers and the woman who cannot stand the sight of me. I will survive because I am stronger than any of them know. Because I have my mother's blood in my veins—Stark blood, wolf blood. Because I have something inside me that will not let me break.*
*Because I am Loki, and I have survived worse.*
---
It was in my sixth year that I discovered the godswood.
Not discovered it, precisely—I had always known it was there, a patch of ancient forest within the castle walls, older than Winterfell itself. But I had never been drawn to it before. Never felt the pull of something deep beneath the roots, something that stirred when I passed too close.
That changed on a cold afternoon, late in the year, when the first snow had begun to fall and the castle was quiet with the hush of early winter. I had slipped away from the nursery while Old Nan dozed by the fire. Robb was with his mother. The servants were busy. No one noticed the bastard boy vanish into the trees.
The heart tree loomed before me, pale and red and silent. Its carved face was crude but expressive—a twisted mouth, deep hollow eyes, sap that wept red down the white bark like tears of blood. The pool at its base was still as glass, reflecting the bone-white branches and the gray sky and the small, dark shape of a boy who did not know what he was looking for.
I reached out and touched the bark.
The shock was not physical. It was deeper than that. A pulse, like a heartbeat transmitted through stone. A warmth that had nothing to do with temperature. A presence that stirred in the darkness beneath the roots and turned its attention toward me.
*You are not what you seem*, the tree whispered without words.
*Neither are you*, I thought back.
The presence paused. I felt it examining me—not as a threat, not as prey, but as something unfamiliar. Something it had not encountered before. The weirwoods were old, older than the First Men, older than the Children who had carved them. They remembered everything that had happened in the North since the dawn of days. But they did not remember me.
*What are you?* the tree asked.
I did not answer. Not in words. Instead, I let the presence feel what I was. The green. The gold. The thread of Time that ran through me like a second spine. The fragments of memory that were too vast and too ancient to belong to a child of six years. The ice of Jotunheim. The fire of Ragnarok. The balance of both, held together in a single soul.
The tree was silent for a long moment. Then, slowly, it bent toward me. Not physically—the branches did not move, the bark did not shift—but in the space behind the world, in the layer of reality where magic lived, the weirwood inclined its head.
*Welcome*, it said. *We have waited so long. The song of ice and fire. The prince who was promised. We did not know you would come in this form. But we recognize you. We have always recognized you. Welcome home.*
---
That was the day I understood what had happened to this world.
The magic was not dead. It was starving. The weirwoods were the last remnants of a network that had once covered the continent, root to root, tree to tree, a living web of memory and power that the Children of the Forest had used to shape the land itself. But the Andals came with their iron and their Seven and their fear of anything they could not control. They burned the groves. They slaughtered the Children. They replaced the old gods with a religion that demanded obedience instead of connection.
And the magic faded.
Not gone. Not dead. But diminished. Dormant. Waiting.
*You were waiting for me*, I realized. *Not me specifically. But someone. Someone who could bring the magic back. Someone who was born of ice and fire. Someone who carried the old blood and the new.*
The tree did not answer. It did not need to. I could feel the truth of it in the roots beneath my feet, in the sap that wept from the carved eyes, in the slow, patient hunger of a world that had been starving for thousands of years.
I pulled my hand away from the bark. The pulse faded. The presence withdrew. But the connection remained—a thin, fragile thread between my soul and the weirwood network, waiting to be strengthened.
I looked up at the carved face. The red sap dripped from its eyes like tears.
"Don't worry," I said aloud, and my voice was small in the silence of the godswood. "I'm going to fix this. I'm going to bring the magic back. But I need to be patient. I need to be careful. There are people who would stop me if they knew what I was doing."
The tree did not respond. But the wind stirred the red leaves, and for just a moment, it sounded almost like a sigh of relief.