Jon
A sound like iron striking iron—sharp, pure, and impossible to ignore.
Jon's eyes snapped open. For a moment, he didn't know where he was. The ceiling was wrong—grey stone instead of plastered wood. The bed was too hard—a thin mat on an unforgiving floor. The air smelled of cold and age and something he couldn't name.
The monastery. The Stone Tiger. The training.
The bell continued, three long tones that echoed off the mountain peaks and faded into silence. Each strike seemed to vibrate in Jon's chest, as if the sound was designed to reach not just his ears but his bones.
Grey light seeped through the narrow window. Dawn had barely broken, the sky outside still more purple than blue. Jon's body ached from the journey, from the thin mat, and from sleeping in a position that favored his damaged ribs. His right hand was stiff from the mountain cold, the fingers that had been broken slow to respond when he tried to flex them.
The eastern courtyard. Be there when the bell sounds.
He rose. His joints protested, crackling like dry wood. The jade wolf pendant had worked its way around during the night—he straightened it against his chest, feeling its cool weight settle over his heart.
"This is the last morning I'll feel like this," he thought as he pulled on his clothes. Tomorrow, everything will hurt more.
The eastern courtyard was smaller than the main one—more enclosed, with high walls that blocked the mountain wind. Jon's breath fogged in the cold air as he entered, his eyes adjusting to the grey half-light.
A large stone basin dominated the center of the space, filled with water that steamed gently despite the chill. The smell was strange—herbs and minerals and something almost metallic, sharp enough to make Jon's nose wrinkle.
Master Feng stood motionless beside the basin. Two monks Jon didn't recognize flanked him, their grey robes identical, their expressions as blank as carved stone. No one else was present. No audience for whatever was about to happen.
"You're late."
Jon blinked. He wasn't late—he'd come the moment the bell stopped ringing and had practically run from his cell to reach the courtyard.
"The bell is the warning," Feng said, his voice flat. "When it sounds, you should already be here."
The first lesson, Jon realized. Everything here is a test.
"Tomorrow, you will be on time. Today, we begin."
Feng circled the basin slowly, his footsteps silent on the stone. Steam curled around him like living things, parting and reforming as he moved.
"The Bone Washing cleanses the skeleton of old damage. Impurities. Weakness." His black eyes found Jon's. "The bones you have now are the bones of a slave—broken, poorly healed, and full of the memory of pain."
He stopped circling.
"We will burn that memory out."
Jon said nothing. There was nothing to say.
"Each morning: the basin. The water is infused with seventeen herbs and three mineral compounds. It will feel like fire. That is because it is fire—fire that seeps through flesh to reach bone."
Feng gestured to one of the monks, who produced a wooden paddle and stirred the steaming water.
"Each afternoon: exercises. Movements designed to stress every part of your skeleton. Controlled damage. The body rebuilds what is damaged, stronger than before."
"Each evening: meditation. The mind must guide the body's healing. Without focus, the pain is merely pain. With focus, it becomes transformation."
He stopped in front of Jon, close enough that Jon could see the individual threads of grey in his thin beard.
"The first week is the worst. Your body will fight what we're doing. It will beg you to stop. Many students quit in the first week."
A pause.
"You will not quit. Or you will, and you will leave this mountain having wasted both our time. The choice is yours. It is always yours."
The two monks approached. One gestured for Jon to remove his clothes. The other continued stirring the basin, the paddle cutting slow circles through the steaming water.
Jon hesitated. The steam rising from the basin had an acrid quality—not the gentle warmth of a hot spring, but something sharper. Something that warned of pain to come.
"The water will not harm your skin," Feng said, reading his hesitation. "Only what lies beneath."
Jon stripped. The cold air raised gooseflesh across his arms and legs, his chest, and his back. The monks' eyes passed over his scars—the harpy brand, the whip marks, the shipwreck damage—without reaction. They'd seen worse, probably. Or they'd learned not to see at all.
He walked to the basin's edge. The steam enveloped him, warm and strange-smelling, carrying hints of the seventeen herbs and three mineral compounds that would soon be burning through his flesh.
This is what I came for. This is the path.
Jon stepped into the water.
The heat was immediate—painfully hot, but bearable. He forced himself to sink lower, bending his knees, letting the water rise up his thighs, his waist, and his chest. The basin was deeper than it looked. By the time he was sitting on the stone bottom, the water reached his shoulders, lapping at his collarbone with each breath.
This isn't so bad, he thought. I can handle this.
Then the herbs began to work.
The pain didn't come all at once. It seeped. Like the water was soaking through his skin, through his muscle, finding his bones, and burning them from the inside.
His fingers first—the damaged ones, the ones that had been broken in Grazdan's compound and rebuilt by Master Zhi. Fire in the joints. Fire in the marrow. A deep, impossible heat that no water should be able to create.
Then his ribs. The old fractures lit up like someone was tracing them with hot iron, each break site announcing itself with a flare of agony.
Then his spine, his shoulders, his ankles—every place where damage hid, every weakness in his skeleton, burning.
Jon's hands gripped the basin's edge. His jaw clenched so hard his teeth creaked.
Don't scream. Don't scream. Don't—
"Breathe."
Feng's voice cut through the pain.
"Not your technique—just breathe. The pain is information. Listen to it."
Jon breathed. In through his nose, out through his mouth, the way Zhi had taught him during meditation. The pain didn't lessen. But he found a space inside himself where he could observe it without drowning. A place where the fire was something happening to him rather than something consuming him.
This is just the first morning. This is just the beginning.
The water swirled around his fingers—turning faintly pink, not with blood but with something else. Old damage being drawn out. Old weakness being purged. The color spread in spiraling patterns, carried by currents Jon couldn't feel.
He watched it swirl and tried to believe this was healing, not destruction.
Jon
The days blurred together.
Every day was the same: dawn bell, basin, morning recovery, midday exercises, afternoon rest, evening meditation, sleepless night. The schedule became a rhythm, a heartbeat that Jon measured his existence against.
The monastery's other rhythms revealed themselves slowly. The bells that marked each hour—different tones for different purposes, a language Jon was learning to understand. The monks moved through their duties in silence, their grey robes making them almost interchangeable. The meals delivered to his cell were always the same: broth, rice, and bitter herbs designed for healing rather than pleasure.
No one spoke to him except Feng. No one acknowledged him except when training demanded it.
He was alone in a crowd of grey-robed figures who treated him like furniture.
Feng's exercises were unlike anything Jon had experienced.
No weapons. No combat forms. No movement at all, really—just positions. Stances were held until muscles screamed and then held longer. Movements so slow they barely qualified as movement.
"External arts train muscle," Feng explained during one session, circling Jon as he struggled to maintain a one-legged stance. "Internal arts train structure. You will hold this position until your bones understand their proper alignment."
Jon's standing leg burned. His extended leg trembled. His arms—spread wide for balance—felt like they were being slowly torn from their sockets.
But beneath the muscle pain, something else emerged. A sense of his skeleton as a structure, as a framework. The way his bones connected and supported each other. The places where that support was weak—where old breaks had healed wrong, where damage had created gaps in the architecture of his body.
"You feel it," Feng said, watching. "The gaps. The weaknesses. Good. Now we fill them."
The nights were the hardest.
After evening meditation, Jon returned to his small cell and collapsed onto the thin mat. Everything hurt. His bones ached with a deep, persistent throb that no position could ease. His muscles were exhausted from holding poses they weren't designed to hold. His mind was foggy from the intensity of concentration the meditation required.
And the loneliness.
No Mei Ling to talk to. No garden to sit in. No Zhi to offer wisdom or distraction.
Just stone walls, starlight through a narrow window, and the sound of his own breathing.
He thought of her constantly. Her face when she said goodbye. The fierce hug. The jade wolf she'd told him to keep safe. Sometimes he caught himself talking to the pendant at night, whispering to it as if she could hear.
I'm still here. It hurts, but I'm still here.
Are you thinking about me too? At the bottom of this mountain, in some village inn, annoyed that you had to leave?
I hope you're not too worried. I hope you're practicing your sword work like you promised.
I miss you.
The pendant never answered. But holding it helped, somehow. Made the stone walls feel less like a prison.
By the seventh day, Jon's body was a landscape of suffering.
His fingers throbbed constantly—the Bone Washing was targeting his old breaks with particular intensity, as if the herbs could sense where the damage was deepest. The joints were swollen, discolored, and painful to bend.
His ribs felt like they were being slowly crushed. Each breath was a negotiation between the need for air and the cost of expanding his chest.
His lungs—his damaged, scarred lungs—ached even when he wasn't breathing deeply. The exercises required focus, and focus required breath control, and breath control required lungs that worked properly. His didn't.
Sleep came in fragments, interrupted by waves of bone-deep pain. He'd drift off from exhaustion, dream of drowning or burning or both, then jerk awake with his heart pounding and his bones screaming.
At the end of the seventh day, Feng examined Jon's hands.
His fingers were gentle—the same gentle, immovable grip he'd used during Jon's first assessment—but even gentle pressure sent spikes of pain through Jon's joints.
"The old breaks are responding," Feng said, turning Jon's hand over in his own. "I can feel the bone softening—preparing to reshape."
"Is that good?"
"It's progress. The first stage of Bone Washing breaks down what was. The second stage will build what will be."
"How long until the second stage?"
"When you're ready."
It wasn't an answer. Jon was learning that Feng rarely gave answers, only observations. Questions were things you answered yourself, through practice and pain and time.
Jon
On the eighth day, the monks added something new to the basin.
Jon noticed the change immediately—the water was a deeper color, amber instead of clear, and the smell had sharpened from acrid to almost unbearable. The steam stung his eyes when he approached.
"Your body has adjusted to the first formula," Feng explained, standing in his usual position beside the basin. "We must go deeper."
Jon stepped into the water.
The pain doubled.
His entire skeleton felt like it was dissolving. The burning reached places he didn't know could hurt—the small bones of his feet, the vertebrae of his spine, and the delicate structure of his inner ear. Every part of him that contained bone, which was every part of him, was on fire.
He didn't scream. But it was close. Closer than it had been. Closer every day.
The body's rebellion began on the ninth day.
Jon's appetite disappeared first. Food—the bland broth and rice that was all the monastery served—tasted like ash. His stomach rebelled against everything, cramping and churning even when he forced himself to eat.
His hands shook constantly now, not just the damaged right one. A fine tremor that made holding chopsticks difficult and that made the meditation exercises almost impossible.
His sleep was filled with fever dreams—formless and frightening, full of drowning and burning and voices he almost recognized calling his name.
On the tenth day, he vomited after the morning bath. His body was trying to purge what it couldn't endure, rejecting the healing that felt like destruction.
Feng watched him retch into a drainage gutter, his expression unchanged.
"The body fights change. This is natural. The question is whether your will is stronger than your body's fear."
Jon wiped his mouth with a shaking hand. "And if it isn't?"
"Then you leave. That is always an option."
It didn't sound like judgment. It sounded like fact.
The eleventh night was when the doubts came.
Jon lay on his thin mat, staring at the rectangle of stars through his window, and allowed himself to think what he'd been refusing to think.
What if I can't do this?
What if Feng was right the first time—I'm too damaged, too broken, too weak?
What if I'm destroying what's left of my body for nothing?
He looked at his hands in the moonlight. They were trembling, as they always were now. But the fingers that had been broken looked wrong somehow—swollen, discolored, the joints thick and strange. As if the Bone Washing was making them worse before it made them better.
If this doesn't work, I might not be able to hold a sword at all.
I might leave this mountain more crippled than I arrived.
The thought was terrifying. More terrifying than the pain, somehow. Pain ended eventually. Failure was forever.
On the twelfth night, Jon found himself composing a letter to Mei Ling in his head.
Dear Mei Ling,
I don't know if I can do this. The pain is worse than anything I've felt—worse than the slave pits, worse than the storm. My bones feel like they're on fire all the time. I can't sleep. I can barely eat. The monks look at me like I'm already failing.
I think about quitting every day. Every hour. Every minute I'm in that basin.
I miss you. I miss the garden. I miss being someone instead of something being broken down.
I don't know if I'm strong enough.
He couldn't send it. Feng had forbidden letters. And even if he could, what would be the point? She couldn't help him. No one could.
This was his path. He walked it alone or not at all.
Jon
The fourteenth day was the worst yet.
The morning bath left Jon shaking so badly he could barely walk. His bones felt like glass—fragile, ready to shatter at the slightest pressure. The monks had to help him out of the basin, their hands under his arms, their faces as blank as ever.
The exercises were agony. Every position Feng demanded stressed the parts of Jon that hurt most. His ribs screamed when he twisted. His fingers couldn't grip. His legs trembled under his own weight.
"Hold," Feng said, watching Jon struggle to maintain a stance.
"I can't—"
"Hold."
Jon held. For thirty seconds. A minute. An eternity.
When he finally collapsed, Feng said nothing. Just walked away, leaving Jon on the cold stone floor.
The evening meditation was a blur. Jon sat in the lotus position and tried to focus, tried to guide his mind the way Feng had taught him, but the pain was too loud. It drowned out everything else—thought, memory, hope.
When he finally reached his cell, he collapsed onto the mat and didn't move.
I can't do this.
The thought wasn't dramatic. Wasn't anguished. Just fact, clear and cold as the mountain air.
I can't do this. It's too much. I'm not strong enough.
His mind built the case.
Feng said I could leave. It's always an option. That's what he said.
If I leave now, maybe I can recover. Maybe the damage isn't permanent yet. Maybe I can find another way.
Mei Ling wouldn't want me to destroy myself. She'd want me to survive.
Surviving is what I'm good at. I can survive this by walking away.
The logic was sound. The logic was seductive. The logic offered escape from the burning in his bones, from the isolation, and from the endless cycle of pain without visible progress.
Somewhere in his memory, Alya's voice whispered, "Be free."
But what was freedom? Escaping this pain? Or becoming strong enough that nothing could chain him again?
He didn't know anymore. The pain had burned away his certainty.
The memory came unbidden.
Not a flashback—not the drowning terror of trauma. Just a memory, clear and sharp.
The training yard at Tianlei Fortress. Three seconds of impossible movement. The twin swords were blurring in his hands, cutting patterns in the air like something from a dream. For one moment—one perfect, impossible moment—he had been Arthur Dayne.
Then his body broke. He fell. He failed.
But he remembered the feeling. The power flowing through him, the swords as extensions of his will, the certainty that in that moment he could have faced anything.
He remembered Mei Ling's face afterward—terrified, yes, but also determined. Refusing to leave him. Refusing to let him lie there alone in his failure.
He remembered Sun Cao's face—shocked, yes, but also something like respect. As if the older boy had seen something in Jon's three seconds of glory that mattered more than his collapse.
He remembered Zhi's diagnosis: "You're damaged. Not crippled. There's a difference."
Is there a difference? Or was that just comfort for a dying dream?
Jon lay in the dark, his bones burning, and had no answer.
He could get up right now.
Walk out of this cell. Find Feng and tell him he is done.
The path down the mountain would be cool and quiet. No more basins. No more fire in his bones. No more isolation.
Mei Ling is waiting. I could see her tomorrow if I left tonight.
He sat up. His body screamed at the movement, every bone in his skeleton protesting.
He looked at the door.
I could leave. Right now. This moment.
No one would stop him. That was what Feng had said. The choice was always his. Always.
His hand found the jade wolf pendant.
Cool stone against his palm. Her gift. Her promise. The weight of it was familiar now, comforting in ways he couldn't explain.
He remembered what he'd told her in the garden, when he'd given her the twin swords to keep.
"When this is done—all of it, however long it takes—I'm coming back for them. And I'm going to show you what I can really do."
The twin swords. Wrapped in silk. Waiting for him.
If I leave now, I will never get them back. Not because she wouldn't give them—because I wouldn't deserve them.
If I leave now, I stay broken forever.
Jon didn't get up. Didn't walk to the door. Didn't quit.
He lay back down, clutching the pendant, and stared at the rectangle of stars through his window.
"One more day," he told himself. Just survive one more day.
Tomorrow I can decide again. But tonight, I stay.
The pain didn't lessen. The doubts didn't disappear.
But Jon Snow had survived worse nights than this. Nights in slave pits, in storm-tossed seas, and in the long, cold darkness of running alone through a world that wanted him dead.
He could survive this night too.
He closed his eyes and waited for dawn.
Sleep came eventually—not peaceful sleep, not restful sleep, but the exhausted surrender of a body that couldn't stay conscious any longer. Dreams swirled through his mind, formless and dark. Drowning dreams. Burning dreams. He dreamed of Mei Ling's face floating above him, her distant voice calling his name.
Jon. Jon. Wake up. You have to wake up.
But he was alreaDy was awake, wasn't he? He was awake and lying on a thin mat in a stone cell, with his bones burning and his will being the only thing holding him together.
The stars wheeled outside his window, indifferent to his suffering. The mountain stood as it had stood for millennia, patient and cold. And somewhere in the monastery, Master Feng Huang slept or meditated or simply waited—waited to see if the Western boy would still be there when dawn came.
Jon would be there.
Broken, burning, barely holding on—but there.
He would be there for one more day.