The library became my second sanctuary.
Maester Luwin's tower held more books than any other place in Winterfell—histories and geographies and bestiaries and treatises on everything from agriculture to astronomy. Most of it was useless. Accounts of grain yields and tax records and genealogies of houses that had died out centuries ago. But buried among the mundane were fragments of older knowledge. Books that had survived the Andal invasion. Scrolls copied from scrolls copied from scrolls, their ink faded and their languages half-forgotten.
I could not read them at first. I was six years old, and the body I inhabited had the limitations of its age. My fingers were clumsy. My eyes tired quickly. The letters blurred and danced and refused to resolve themselves into meaning. But I was also Loki, and I had spent millennia learning languages that would shatter mortal minds. The runes of the First Men were crude things compared to the scripts I had once known. Their grammar was simple. Their vocabulary was limited. Within weeks of stealing moments in the library, I could read them as easily as I could read the Common Tongue.
What I found was both hopeful and infuriating.
The First Men had known magic. True magic. Not the faded echoes I felt in the weirwood, but the raw, living power that had flowed through this world before the Andals came. They had used runes—not the complex, interlocking scripts of Asgard, but simple symbols carved into stone and wood and bone. Runes of protection. Runes of healing. Runes of fire and ice and wind. They had not understood the principles behind them, not truly, but they had known enough to make them work.
The Andals had destroyed most of that knowledge. The septons taught that magic was heresy, that the old gods were demons, that any power that did not come from the Seven was a snare of the darkness. They had burned the runestones. They had salted the groves. They had spent six thousand years erasing every trace of the old ways.
But they had not erased everything.
In the back of a crumbling scroll, wedged between a treatise on crop rotation and a genealogy of the Warg Kings of Sea Dragon Point, I found a single rune. It was faded and incomplete, but I recognized its shape. A protection rune. A ward against harm.
I copied it onto a scrap of parchment and slipped it into my sleeve.
---
That night, by the light of a stolen candle, I carved the rune into a small stone I had taken from the godswood. My hands were clumsy and the lines were uneven, but I put my will into the carving. I put my intent. The green fire that had once been mine to command was buried deep inside this mortal body, but it was still there. It recognized the rune. It answered.
The stone glowed—faintly, briefly, barely more than a flicker.
But it glowed.
I stared at the faint green light, my heart pounding with a thrill I had not felt since I was young and foolish and chasing glory across the Nine Realms. It worked. It had actually worked.
The magic was still here. It was starving and broken and buried under centuries of suppression, but it was still here. And I was going to bring it back.
---
The first obstacle was my aunt.
I did not think of Catelyn Stark as my enemy. She was not cruel—not intentionally. She did not beat me or starve me or throw me out into the cold. She simply could not stand the sight of me. I was the living proof of her husband's supposed infidelity, the bastard child who had been brought into her home and given a place at her table while her own trueborn children had to share their father's attention.
I understood her. I had been the jealous sibling once, watching Thor receive all the love and approval I craved. I knew what it felt like to be passed over, to be diminished, to be told in a thousand small ways that you were less than the people around you. If Catelyn Stark had been a better person, she might have risen above that feeling. But she was not a better person. She was a mortal woman with mortal flaws and mortal pain, and I was the symbol of everything that had wounded her.
The problem was not her hatred. The problem was her faith.
Catelyn Stark was a daughter of the Riverlands, raised in the light of the Seven. She kept a sept in Winterfell—a small, stone building with seven walls and seven altars and seven crystal windows that caught the light in patterns of rainbow. She prayed there every morning, alone or with Sansa, who had inherited her mother's devotion. She spoke of the Seven as if they were real, as if they watched over her, as if they would punish anyone who strayed from their path.
The Seven were not real. I had looked. I had reached out with what little power I could access and scanned the spiritual landscape of this world. There were echoes—the Lord of Light, the Great Other, the Many-Faced God—but they were Tier 5 entities at most, local powers shaped by local belief. The Seven were even less. They were not entities at all. They were ideas. Symbols. A framework of morality that had been weaponized into a political tool.
But the people who believed in them were real. And they were powerful.
If Lady Stark learned that I was studying the old ways—if she suspected for even a moment that I was doing more than the usual Northern lip service to the godswood—she would not keep it to herself. She would tell Ned. She would tell the septon. She would tell anyone who would listen that the bastard boy was dabbling in heresy. And even if Ned believed me innocent, even if he defended me, the accusation would follow me for the rest of my life.
I had to be careful.
More careful than I had ever been.
---
I began with questions.
Children asked questions. It was expected. It was normal. A child who did not ask questions was strange, suspicious, wrong. So I asked questions. Carefully worded. Carefully timed. Carefully directed at people who would not think twice about a curious boy.
I asked Maester Luwin about the history of the North. About the First Men and the Children of the Forest and the coming of the Andals. He was happy to answer—he was a teacher at heart, and I was a willing student. He told me about the runes that the First Men had carved, the gods they had worshipped, the way the old religion had slowly retreated north as the Seven spread south.
"They were not gods in the way the Seven are gods," Luwin said one afternoon, pulling down a heavy tome from his shelf. "The old gods were more like spirits. Forces of nature. The First Men believed that the world was alive, that every rock and river and tree had a presence. The weirwoods were sacred to them because they believed the old gods watched through the faces."
"Do you believe that?" I asked.
Luwin hesitated. He was a maester of the Citadel, trained in logic and science and skepticism. But he had lived in the North for many years, and the North had a way of softening even the hardest certainties.
"I believe," he said carefully, "that there are things in this world we do not yet understand. Magic was once a force to be reckoned with. The histories speak of it. The legends speak of it. But it has faded, over the centuries. Perhaps it is gone entirely. Perhaps it is only sleeping."
"Perhaps it will wake up," I said.
He looked at me strangely. For a moment, I worried I had said too much. But then he smiled, the way adults smile at children who say things they do not fully understand.
"Perhaps," he said. "But I would not count on it, young Jon. The world is what it is. Wishing will not make it otherwise."
Wishing, no, I thought. But work? Patience? Centuries of accumulated knowledge from a civilization that built cities of gold and wielded power that would make your Citadel weep with envy? Those might do the trick.
I smiled back at him, the innocent smile of a child who had learned something interesting.
"Thank you, Maester Luwin. May I borrow the book about the runes?"
---
I asked the servants about the old stories.
The smallfolk of the North still kept the old ways, even if they paid lip service to the Seven when the lords were watching. They told stories around the hearth at night—stories of the Others and the Children, of wargs and greenseers, of the Kings of Winter who had ruled before the Andals came. They spoke of runes carved into standing stones, of spells woven into the walls of ancient keeps, of magic that had once been as common as rain.
They did not speak of these things around Lady Stark. They knew her feelings on the matter. But I was the bastard boy, the one who did not quite belong, and the servants were more willing to talk to me than to the trueborn children. I was one of them, in a way. An outsider. A person who lived on the edges.
An old groom named Harwin told me about the standing stones on the edge of the wolfswood. "They say the First Men raised them," he said, his voice low and rough from years of cold. "Before the Wall was built. Before the Andals came. They say the stones can speak, if you know how to listen."
"Have you ever listened?" I asked.
He laughed, a dry, rattling sound. "I'm no greenseer, lad. I'm just an old man who knows a few old stories. But my grandmother, she swore she heard the stones singing once. A song without words, she said. A song that made her bones ache."
I filed the information away. The standing stones. The wolfswood. Another fragment of the old network, waiting to be reawakened.
"Thank you, Harwin," I said. "I like the old stories."
He ruffled my hair. "You're a strange one, Jon Snow. But you've got the North in you. I can feel it."
You have no idea, I thought.
---
The months passed. I grew stronger. I grew sharper. I learned the castle and the woods and the people who inhabited both. I planted questions like seeds, and I waited for them to grow.
I taught Robb the runes.
Not openly. Not in a way that would attract attention. But we were brothers in all but name, and we spent every waking hour together. When we played in the godswood, I showed him the carvings on the heart tree. When we studied with Maester Luwin, I asked questions about the First Men that made him curious too. When we lay in bed at night, whispering to each other across the darkness of our shared room, I told him stories.
Not the old stories. Not the Northern legends he had heard a hundred times from Old Nan. New stories. Stories of a tree that held the universe together. Stories of a one-eyed wanderer who sacrificed himself for wisdom. Stories of a thunder lord who protected the realms of men. Stories of a trickster who changed shape and walked among mortals to test their worth.
"Where did you hear those?" Robb asked one night, his voice drowsy with sleep.
"I made them up," I lied. It was not entirely a lie. I had made them up, once, long ago, in another life. They were not stories to me. They were memories.
"They're good," he said. "Better than Old Nan's. You should tell them to Sansa. She likes stories about princes and heroes."
"Sansa likes stories about knights and maidens," I said. "These are different."
"What kind of stories are they?"
I was quiet for a moment. The fire had burned down to embers, and the room was dark except for the faint glow of the coals.
"They're stories about gods," I said. "But not the Seven. Different gods. Older gods. Gods who walked among mortals and taught them magic. Gods who understood that the world was not a thing to be ruled but a thing to be tended. A garden, not a throne."
Robb was silent for so long I thought he had fallen asleep. But then he spoke, his voice barely a whisper.
"Do you believe in them? The old gods?"
I thought about the weirwood. About the pulse in the roots. About the presence that had recognized me. About the ice of Jotunheim and the fire of Ragnarok and the golden thread of Time that bound me to something older than any god this world had ever known.
"Yes," I said. "I believe in them."
"Me too," Robb said. And then, quieter: "Don't tell Mother."
"I won't."
---
I carved the second rune on a stone beneath my bed. A rune of growth. Of slow, steady, patient expansion. The stone glowed green in the darkness, and I felt the magic in the world stir in response.
It was still weak. Still fragile. A single candle in a vast darkness, guttering in the wind of centuries of suppression. But it was there. And I would feed it.
I thought about the religion I would build. Not the Faith of the Seven—that was a tool of control, a mechanism for suppressing magic and consolidating power. Not the old gods of the North—those were echoes, fragments, the fading memory of a world that had been. Something new. Something that blended the truth of what I was with the language and symbols this world could understand.
Yggdrasil. The World Tree. The weirwoods were its children, its echoes, its roots reaching through the soil of a thousand realities. I would teach them to see the trees not as gods but as doorways. As connections. As the veins through which magic flowed.
The one-eyed wanderer. Odin. The All-Father. He had sacrificed himself for wisdom, hung from a tree for nine days and nine nights. The North would understand sacrifice. The North would understand a god who suffered for knowledge.
The thunder lord. Thor. Protector of the realms. A god of strength and storms and loyalty. The North would love him. The North already loved strength. They would simply need to learn that strength could be more than physical.
And the trickster. Loki. The God of Stories. The one who walked among mortals, who changed shape, who tested the worthy and punished the arrogant. I would not reveal myself. Not yet. Not for years, perhaps decades. But the stories would spread. The idea of a god who was not distant and judgmental but present and mischievous and deeply, personally involved in the lives of mortals.
The North would remember.
And when the Long Night came, they would be ready.
---
Septon Chayle was a soft man with a soft voice and soft hands that had never held anything heavier than a prayer book. He had come to Winterfell years before I was born, sent by the Faith to tend the sept and minister to Lady Stark's spiritual needs. He was not a bad man. He was not a cruel man. He was simply a man who believed, with all his heart, that the Seven were the one true path and that anyone who walked another path was walking toward damnation.
He did not preach fire and brimstone. He did not threaten hells and torments. He simply... disapproved. Quietly. Persistently. With the gentle, unshakeable certainty of a man who had never once questioned the foundations of his faith.
I encountered him in the library one afternoon, while Maester Luwin was attending to a guardsman's broken arm. I had a book open on the table—a history of the First Men, carefully chosen to look innocuous—and a scrap of parchment hidden beneath it, covered in runic symbols I was attempting to memorize.
"Jon Snow," Chayle said, and his voice was warm but curious. "I did not expect to find you here. Do you enjoy reading?"
"I enjoy learning," I said, which was true.
"What are you learning about?"
I gestured at the book. "The First Men. The old kings of the North. Maester Luwin says it's important to know history."
Chayle nodded, his round face crinkling with approval. "History is important. But there are more important things than history. Have you ever visited the sept, Jon? Lady Stark and your sister Sansa pray there every morning. You would be welcome."
I had visited the sept exactly once. I had stood in the center of the seven-sided room, surrounded by altars to gods who did not exist, and felt nothing. No pulse. No presence. No recognition. The sept was a dead place, as spiritually empty as a room without air.
But I could not say that.
"I prefer the godswood," I said, keeping my voice neutral. "The old gods are the gods of the North."
Chayle's smile flickered, just slightly. "The old gods are not gods at all, Jon. They are spirits. Echoes. The Seven are the true gods—the Father, the Mother, the Warrior, the Maiden, the Smith, the Crone, the Stranger. They watch over us. They guide us. The old gods are... silent."
I thought about the weirwood. About the pulse in the roots. About the voice that had spoken without words.
"Perhaps silence is not the same as absence," I said.
Chayle looked at me for a long moment. His eyes were kind but searching, as if he were trying to see beneath my skin. "You are a thoughtful boy," he said finally. "That is not a bad thing. But be careful where your thoughts lead you. The road to the Seven is straight and clear. Other roads are... less certain."
"Thank you for the advice, Septon Chayle," I said, and smiled the innocent smile of a child who had learned exactly what he needed to know.
The Faith of the Seven was not merely a religion. It was a gatekeeper. A guardian of the status quo. And it would oppose me, sooner or later, when the magic began to return.
I would need to be ready.
---
The weirwood called to me again that night.
I slipped out of the castle while the household slept, my bare feet silent on the cold stone. The godswood was dark, lit only by the faint silver of a crescent moon. The heart tree loomed before me, pale and red and waiting.
I pressed my hand against the bark.
*You are planning something*, the tree said without words.
"I am always planning something," I murmured. "It's what I do."
*The magic is weak. The old ways are forgotten. The Seven have buried us so deep that even the memory of us is fading.*
"I know." I looked up at the carved face, at the red sap that wept from its eyes. "But I have seen magic return before. I have seen dying worlds reborn. I have gathered dying timelines in my arms and woven them into something new. This world is not dead. It is sleeping. And I am going to wake it."
*How?*
"Slowly. Carefully. One rune at a time. One story at a time. One believer at a time." I paused. "The Faith of the Seven is a wall. Walls can be climbed. Walls can be tunneled under. Walls can be dismantled stone by stone. But first, I need to understand the wall. I need to know its weaknesses. I need to know who built it and why and what they were trying to bury."
The tree was silent for a moment. Then: *You are not what we expected. The prince that was promised. Azor Ahai. We thought he would come with fire and fury, with a burning sword and an army at his back. We did not expect... patience.*
"I have been patient for longer than this world has existed," I said. "I can be patient a little longer."
I removed my hand from the bark. The pulse faded. The presence withdrew. But the thread between us was stronger now, braided with purpose and intent.
I walked back to the castle under the cold light of the moon, and I began to plan.
---
The years ahead would be delicate. I was a child in the eyes of everyone who knew me, and a child could not preach. A child could not lead. A child could not challenge the dominance of a religion that had held sway over an entire continent for six thousand years. But a child could learn. A child could watch. A child could plant seeds that would not bloom for decades.
I would teach Robb the runes, and through Robb, the other children. I would tell stories—carefully, casually, disguised as games and bedtime tales—that carried fragments of truth wrapped in myth. I would visit the standing stones on the edge of the wolfswood and see if they remembered. I would map the weirwood network, root by root, tree by tree, until I understood the full extent of what remained.
And when the time came—when I was old enough, when my power was strong enough, when the world was ready—I would reveal what I was.
Not a bastard. Not a hidden prince. Not even a god, in the way this world understood gods.
I was Loki. The God of Stories. The Anchor of Yggdrasil. The godbrother of the Endless. The son of ice and fire, born on Jotunheim and baptized in the flames of Ragnarok. The Prince That Was Promised, not because a prophecy had chosen me, but because I had chosen this world.
And I would make it bloom.
---
That night, I dreamed of a throne at the center of everything. A tree that blazed with emerald light. Seven siblings who waited in a garden of forking paths. A realm of dreams that I had not yet visited, and a door that was beginning to open.
The dream was not a dream. It was a summons.
Something was happening in the realm beyond realms. Something that required my attention. I could feel it through the link—a pull, a tug, a hand brushing against my sleeve. The part of me that was Loki, the God of Stories, was needed elsewhere.
But the part of me that was Jon Snow was still here. Still a child. Still learning. Still growing.
I would answer the summons. I would return to the throne, to the tree, to the family that waited in the spaces between worlds. But I would not abandon this body. This life. This world.
The link would remain.
Jon Snow would continue.
And when I returned—when the business of the Endless was concluded—I would pick up exactly where I had left off. The runes. The stories. The slow, patient cultivation of magic in a world that had forgotten what magic was.
Time was on my side.
Time had always been on my side.