Jon
The bell sounded. Three iron tones, same as every morning.
Jon opened his eyes.
His body was a map of pain—bones throbbing, muscles aching, exhaustion pressing down like a physical weight. The thin mat beneath him felt like stone. The cold mountain air scraped at his lungs with each breath.
But he was still here.
Something had changed. Not the pain—the pain was the same. Not the exhaustion—that was worse, if anything. What had changed was simpler, quieter: the question was answered.
Last night, he'd faced the choice. Stay or leave. Continue or quit. He'd chosen to stay.
This morning, he didn't have to choose again. The choosing was done. All that remained was the work.
We are taking things one day at a time. That's all. Just today.
Jon rose. His joints protested, crackling like dry kindling. He dressed in the simple clothes the monastery provided—rough-spun, practical, and designed for training rather than comfort. The jade wolf pendant settled against his chest as he straightened his collar, cool and familiar.
He walked to the eastern courtyard.
The dawn bell was still fading when he arrived—on time, for once. Perhaps early. Feng's eyes flickered with something that might have been acknowledgment, though his face remained as unreadable as ever.
The basin steamed. The amber water waited. The two monks stood in their usual positions, silent as statues.
Jon didn't hesitate. Didn't brace himself. Just stepped forward and descended into the water.
The fire was the same. The burning in his bones, the agony seeping through flesh to skeleton, the sense of being dissolved from the inside out. Nothing had changed about the pain itself.
But Jon's relationship to it had shifted.
This is what healing feels like, he told himself as the fire spread through him. The pain is burning away what was broken.
Let it burn.
He sank deeper into the water, letting it close over his shoulders and his neck until only his head remained above the surface. The heat pulsed through him in waves, finding every damaged place, every weakness in his skeleton. His fingers. His ribs. His spine.
Let it burn.
When Jon climbed out of the basin, trembling, barely able to stand, Feng was watching him with an expression Jon couldn't read.
"Something is different today."
Jon looked up, water dripping from his white hair, his body shaking with exhaustion. He didn't know what to say.
"Yesterday, you endured. Today, you accept."
A pause.
"That is the first step."
It wasn't praise—Feng didn't give praise. But it was acknowledgment. Recognition that something had shifted in the night, in the choice that Jon had made in the darkness of his cell.
Jon nodded. He was too exhausted for words.
But somewhere beneath the pain, something unfamiliar stirred.
Hope.
Jon
The pain didn't lessen. But it changed.
The first two weeks had felt like destruction—his bones being dissolved, melted, unmade. The fire had burned without purpose, or at least without purpose that Jon could perceive. Each morning in the basin had been an exercise in pure endurance, surviving long enough for the monks to pull him out.
Now, something different.
The fire still burned. But beneath it, a sense of building. Something was taking shape where nothing had been before.
Jon noticed it first in his fingers.
The damaged right hand—the one that had failed him in the training yard, that had cramped and seized and betrayed him at the worst possible moment—felt different. The joints moved more smoothly when he flexed them. The grip was steadier when he clenched his fist.
It still hurt. But it hurt like growth, not like breaking.
During an exercise session in the third week, Jon held a stance—one leg raised, the other planted, arms extended for balance. His muscles screamed. His bones ached. The position was designed to stress every weakness in his skeleton, and it was working.
But he held.
"You have questions," Feng said, circling him slowly. It wasn't a question.
"The pain is different now. Why?"
"Because you are different." Feng's footsteps were silent on the stone, each one deliberate and precise. "The first stage of Bone Washing destroys. Old damage. Old patterns. Old weakness. Your body fought because it didn't understand."
"And now?"
"Now your body is beginning to understand. It feels like a new structure is forming. The marrow is responding. The bones are rebuilding according to proper design instead of trauma's accidents."
Jon's standing leg trembled. His balance wavered. But he held.
"A field must be cleared before new crops can grow," Feng continued. "The clearing is violent—burning, uprooting, destruction. But it serves the planting."
He stopped in front of Jon, those black eyes studying him with their usual unreadable intensity.
"You have finished clearing. Now we plant."
The exercises changed.
Feng introduced different movements—still slow, still focused on structure rather than strength, but with a different character. Instead of positions that stressed weaknesses, positions that reinforced proper alignment. Instead of controlled damage, controlled rebuilding.
Jon's body learned to move in new ways. With awareness of every bone, every joint, and every connection between one part and another. The exercises were still difficult—his body wasn't used to this kind of precision, this internal focus—but there was something almost pleasant in them.
Like stretching a muscle that had been cramped too long. Like finding a posture his body was always meant to hold but had never learned.
On the thirtieth day, Feng examined Jon's hands.
His fingers probed the bones with the same gentle, immovable grip he'd used during Jon's first assessment. Each joint, each connection, each place where damage had once lived.
"The second finger. Make a fist."
Jon did. The finger that had been most damaged—the one the guards had broken twice in Grazdan's compound, the one that had never moved right since—curled properly for the first time in years.
"Again. Harder."
Jon squeezed. Hard. Jon's squeeze was more intense than anything he had experienced before the slave pits and everything that had broken him.
No cramp. No pain. Just strength.
"The finger is rebuilding correctly," Feng said, releasing Jon's hand. "Two more weeks, perhaps three, and it will be stronger than it was before it was ever broken."
Jon stared at his hand. The tremor that had plagued him for months—gone. The weakness that had betrayed him in the training yard was fading.
It's working. It's actually working.
Jon
The bones of his hands were the most obviously damaged, but not the most limiting. That distinction belonged to his ribs.
The old fractures—from the storm, from Yunkai, from all the violence his young body had endured—had been holding him back since before he reached Yi Ti. Every deep breath reminded him of breaks that never healed right. Every rotation of his torso pulled at scar tissue that shouldn't be there. Every time he'd tried to use his breathing techniques at full power, his ribs had screamed in protest.
Jon noticed the change during meditation in the sixth week.
He was focusing on his breathing—not the enhanced breathing of his techniques, just normal breath, in and out—when he realized something was different.
He was breathing deeper than he had in years.
His ribs were expanding fully, without pain, without the familiar catch of damaged bone grinding against damaged bone. Air filled his lungs in a way it hadn't since before the storm, since before the slave pits, since before everything.
The ribs, he thought, amazement cutting through his meditative calm. Feng is fixing my ribs.
That night, alone in his cell, Jon experimented.
He tried movements that used to hurt—twisting his torso, reaching across his body, and the rotational patterns that dual-sword fighting required. The movements that had destroyed him in the training yard, that had cracked his ribs again, and that had triggered the flashback that ended his demonstration.
There was still discomfort. The healing wasn't complete. But the sharp, grinding pain was gone, replaced by something duller, something that felt like it was fading rather than permanent.
If my ribs heal properly—if they rebuild the way Feng says—then maybe...
He didn't let himself finish the thought. Not yet. It was too fragile, too precious.
But the image came anyway: two swords in his hands, moving through forms without his body betraying him. Three seconds of glory that didn't end in collapse.
Maybe.
During evening meditation, Feng spoke more than usual.
"The Golden Marrow Art is not merely physical," he said, his voice quiet in the mountain stillness. "The body and mind are not separate—they are aspects of one thing. What happens to bone affects thought. What happens to thought affects bones."
Jon sat in the lotus position, his breathing steady, his focus split between Feng's words and his own internal awareness.
"I don't understand."
"Your bones carry memory. The breaks you suffered—they left marks not just in calcium and marrow, but in how you hold yourself. How did you expect to be hurt. How do you flinch before the blow comes."
Jon thought of the training yard. The moment his hand cramped. The flashback that had followed—not to Yunkai, but to Winterfell. To the moment he'd first revealed his strangeness and seen fear in the eyes of people who should have loved him.
"The Bone Washing cleanses both," Feng continued. "As your skeleton rebuilds, the memories of damage fade. You will stand differently. Move differently. Think differently."
"I'll forget what happened to me?"
"No. You will remember. But the memory will not live in your bones anymore. It will be something you know, not something you are."
Jon considered this. The brand on his shoulder. The scars on his back. The phantom pain of guards breaking his fingers while they laughed.
Something I know, not something I am.
Was that possible? Could healing go that deep?
Somewhere around the fortieth day, the monks began to acknowledge Jon differently.
Not dramatically—they were monks, after all, trained in silence and stillness. But small things. A nod when he passed in the corridor. A hand steadying his arm after a particularly difficult exercise. A cup of tea left outside his cell door on a cold morning, still steaming.
Jon realized what it meant: they weren't ignoring him before out of cruelty. They were waiting to see if he would survive.
Now that he had—now that he was clearly going to complete the Bone Washing—he existed to them. He was no longer a temporary presence, a student who might vanish any morning.
He was one of them. Or close enough.
Jon
The fifty-eighth day dawned clear and cold.
Jon knew before the bell sounded that something was different. The light through his window had a particular quality—golden rather than grey—and the air smelled of pine and something else, something that might have been incense from the monastery's shrine.
He walked to the eastern courtyard and found the basin already prepared. But the water was different today. Clearer. The smell is less acrid. The steam rising from the surface was gentle rather than harsh.
"The final formula," Feng explained, standing in his usual position. "It seals what has been rebuilt. Completes the first stage."
Jon stepped into the water.
The fire was muted now—a warmth rather than a burning. He sank into it and felt it soaking through him, not destroying but finishing. Polishing. Completing. He was like a craftsman putting the finishing touches on a piece of work that had taken months to create.
He stayed longer than usual. Let the warmth penetrate every part of him; let it seal the changes that the Bone Washing had wrought.
When he finally emerged, his body felt different in ways he couldn't articulate.
"Solid," he thought, standing in the cold morning air as water dripped from his skin. I feel solid. Like my bones are actually holding me up instead of barely keeping me together.
Feng's examination was the most thorough yet.
He tested every joint, probed every bone, and had Jon move through a series of positions that stressed different parts of his skeleton. Each movement was assessed, each connection evaluated. The examination took nearly an hour.
Finally, Feng stepped back.
"The Bone Washing is complete."
Jon waited. There was always more with Feng.
"Your skeleton has been cleansed and rebuilt. The old damage is gone—not hidden, not compensated for, but gone. Your bones are now as they should have been had you never been hurt."
He paused.
"In some ways, better. The rebuilding has made them denser. Stronger. Your skeleton is now the skeleton of someone who has trained in the internal arts for years, not months."
Jon looked at his hands. The fingers that had been broken in Grazdan's compound, that had cramped and failed him in the training yard—they were straight now. Strong. The tremor that had plagued him was gone.
"Does that mean I can use the breathing techniques again? Without breaking?"
"Not yet. The foundation is laid, but the structure is incomplete. Stage Two—Marrow Refinement—will strengthen what we have built. That will take longer. Many months."
"But I can return to the fortress? You said—"
"Yes. You may return briefly. See your friends. Rest in familiar surroundings." A pause. "Then you will come back, and we will continue."
Feng walked with Jon to the monastery gate—something he'd never done before.
The morning sun was bright, the sky a deep blue that seemed to go on forever. Below them, the mountain fell away in stages—forest, then farmland, then the distant glitter of the sea.
"You surprised me."
Jon looked at the old master, uncertain how to respond.
"When you arrived, I saw a boy chasing a dead man's legend. I expected you to quit in the first week."
"I almost did."
"I know. The fourteenth night." Feng's eyes were unreadable, black as deep water. "I watched your window. I saw the light stay on. I saw you not leave."
He had been watching. He had seen everything.
"Why didn't you say anything?"
"Because the choice had to be yours. It always has to be yours."
They stood in silence for a moment, master and student, looking out at the world below.
"You chose correctly," Feng said finally. "That tells me something about who you are."
It was the closest Feng had come to praise. Jon felt it like warmth in his chest, spreading outward.
"Thank you. Master Feng."
"Don't thank me. Thank yourself. The work was yours. The pain was yours. The choice was yours."
"I'll come back. After I see them."
"I know you will."
Jon
The monastery gate closed behind him, and Jon began the descent.
The mountain air was the same—thin, cold, sharp with pine—but he experienced it differently now. His lungs expanded fully, drinking in the air without the familiar catch of damaged ribs. His legs carried him down the stone steps without the bone-deep ache he'd carried since the storm.
"I'm different," he realized, moving down the path that had nearly broken him two months ago. The same person, but different.
Stronger.
He traveled alone. There is no Zhi to offer wisdom and quiet company. No more Mei Ling to fill silences with chatter and laughter. Just Jon and the mountain road and the slow descent back to the world he'd left behind.
He used the time to think. To process. He sought to comprehend the transformation he had undergone.
His fingers: healed. Strong. They were flexible in ways they hadn't been since before Yunkai. He flexed them as he walked, marveling at the smooth movements and the lack of pain.
His ribs: rebuilt. Solid. No longer a cage of pain around his lungs. He breathed deep, filling his chest completely, and felt no protest from bones that had once ground against each other with every breath.
His spine: aligned. The constant low ache that he'd stopped noticing because it was always there—gone. His posture was different now, straighter, more centered.
His body: not perfect. Not unbreakable. But functional in ways it hadn't been since before the slave pits. Maybe since forever.
This is what Zhi meant, Jon thought. Damaged, not crippled. And now... maybe not even damaged anymore.
The fortress emerged from the distance on the third day of travel.
Grey stone and curved roofs, military banners snapping in the wind. Tianlei. The place that had become home without Jon quite realizing it.
His pace quickened without conscious thought.
Mei Ling.
Two months without seeing her. Without hearing her voice. Without anyone who cared whether he lived or died except in the abstract sense of a student's progress.
She'd been waiting. Like she promised.
I hope she hasn't been too annoyed.
The thought made him smile—his first real smile in two months.
The guards at the gate recognized him, but only barely. They looked twice, uncertain if the boy approaching was really the foreign student who'd left two months ago.
"Jon Snow? Back from the mountain?"
"Yes." He hesitated. "Is... is Mei Ling here?"
The guard grinned—the first genuine smile Jon had seen since leaving the monastery.
"She's been asking every messenger that comes through. Made us promise to send word the moment you appeared."
"Don't send word."
The guard raised an eyebrow.
"I want to surprise her."
The guard's grin widened. "The garden, most likely. She spends a lot of time there."
Jon walked through the gate into the fortress that had almost faded from his memory during the endless days of pain and isolation.
The garden was ahead. Their garden. The bench where she'd given him the jade wolf. The trees where cherry blossoms had fallen like pink snow.
He touched the pendant through his shirt. Cool stone against his palm. Her gift. Her promise.
I'm back. I have fulfilled my promise.
Now let me show you what I've become.
The garden was quiet in the afternoon light.
Jon approached through the side entrance—the one he and Mei Ling had used when they wanted to avoid servants and formalities. The path was familiar, worn smooth by their footsteps over months of shared meals and conversations and comfortable silences.
He stopped at the edge of the clearing.
She was there.
Sitting on their bench, a book open in her lap. Her dark hair was longer than he remembered, pulled back in a simple braid. She wore the practical clothes she preferred—not the fine silks her station demanded, but something comfortable, something real.
She hadn't noticed him yet. Her attention was on the book, her brow furrowed in concentration. She looked older somehow, though it had only been two months. Or maybe Jon was just seeing her differently after so long without seeing her at all.
His throat tightened.
I made it. I survived. I came back.
I fulfilled my promise.
He stepped into the clearing.
She looked up.
For a moment, neither of them moved. She stared at him—taking in the changes, maybe, or simply unable to believe he was really there. Her book slipped from her fingers, forgotten.
"Jon?"
Her voice was barely a whisper.
"I'm back."
She was off the bench and running toward him before he could say anything else. She hit him hard enough to stagger him—which wouldn't have been possible two months ago, when his ribs were still a cage of pain—and her arms wrapped around him with fierce, desperate strength.
"You idiot," she said into his chest. "You absolute idiot. She had gone two months without receiving a single letter. There had been no communication at all. Do you know how worried I was?"
"Feng said no letters."
"I don't care what Feng said. I was going to climb that mountain myself if you didn't come back soon."
Jon held her. His arms came up automatically, wrapping around her shoulders, pulling her close. She smelled like the garden—like cherry blossoms and summer grass and home.
"I missed you," he said quietly.
"You better have missed me." She pulled back just enough to look at his face, her eyes bright with tears she was refusing to let fall. "I've been practicing my sword work every day. Just like I promised. So don't think you can impress me with whatever fancy bone training you—"
She stopped. She observed him more intently.
"You're different."
"I know."
"You're standing differently. Taller. And your eyes..."
"What about my eyes?"
"They're the same." She smiled, finally—the smile he'd been carrying in his memory through two months of pain. "That's good. I was worried you'd come back a stranger."
"I'm still me."
"I know. That's what I mean."
She stepped back, wiping her eyes with the back of her hand—pretending she hadn't almost cried, because she was Mei Ling, and crying in front of people wasn't something she did.
"So," she said, her voice steadying. "Are you going to show me what you learned, or do I have to beat it out of you?"
Jon laughed. The sound surprised him—rusty from disuse but genuine.
"Let me rest first. I just walked down a mountain."
"Fine. But tomorrow, I want to see everything." She grabbed his hand—his right hand, the one that had been damaged—and squeezed. "Your hand feels different."
"It is different."
"Stronger?"
"Yes."
Her smile widened. "Good. You'll need it when I beat you in our sparring match."
"You've never beaten me."
"I've never seriously tried. Tomorrow, I try."
Jon let her pull him toward the fortress, toward food and rest and familiar faces. The garden fell away behind them, but he knew he'd be back. They'd sit on their bench again, in the place where she'd given him the jade wolf and he'd given her the twin swords.
The twin swords.
They're still waiting, he thought. Wrapped in silk. They were prepared to welcome me.
However, the process is not yet complete. The first step is Stage Two. Marrow Refinement. I have more months of training ahead of me.
And then—someday—I'll show her what Arthur Dayne looked like.
For now, this was enough. Mei Ling's hand in his. The fortress walls around them. He was filled with the knowledge that he had survived, grown, and returned.
He has successfully completed one step. There is still one more step to complete.
But today, I'm home.