~ 💎 WEEKLY POWER GOALS 💎🔥 60→1ch | 100→2ch | 200→5ch ⏰ Resets Monday! Thanks!
Ned Stark had done well. He'd thoroughly purged the rebels at the Dreadfort.
Without three thousand soldiers, the Dreadfort was an empty shell. Roose Bolton and Ramsay Bolton would never be a threat again.
Lynn felt little surprise. All of this had been within his calculations.
He'd understood these people from the moment he arrived. Their personalities, their patterns, their inevitable choices.
Ramsay Bolton, that madman. After watching Robb's army sweep the field, the Vale forces crumble, and finding himself a deserter with nowhere to run, there was only one path his mind could have taken: exploit the North's emptiness, seize Winterfell, take hostages.
It was the only move his character would ever allow him to make.
And Lynn had made it easy. Using the Faceless Men skill, he'd crafted a skin mask bearing Ned's face, then made himself visible throughout the march, especially in front of the little flayer.
The real Ned Stark had been waiting at Winterfell the whole time. A trap, baited and set, just waiting for Ramsay to walk in.
But...
Something still nagged at him.
He knew Ned's character. Even with repeated warnings, even pushed to his limits, Ned's sense of honor would have him behead the rebel leaders and imprison the rest. That was his ceiling.
Nine thousand Experience Points. Nearly three thousand dead.
Would Ned really order the massacre of three thousand soldiers who had already surrendered?
Curiosity stirred in Lynn's chest.
His mental power had broken through thirty-six points, and he hadn't used Green Sight since. This was as good a time as any. He'd see what actually happened at Winterfell.
And he'd see how far Ned Stark, Warden of the North, had come under his influence.
"Wait here for me."
Lynn said it to Arya and Jon, then walked alone into the depths of the forest.
He closed his eyes.
The world faded.
Wind, insects, the weight of Arya's worried gaze behind him. Gone.
His consciousness became something like lightning, crossing mountains and rivers in an instant, arriving at the distant North.
Blood.
The smell of it, everywhere.
He saw the battle beneath Winterfell's walls. Brief and brutal. He saw Ramsay's ridiculous madness, and then his final state, broken and wretched, like a stray dog cornered in the snow. He saw Ned Stark's judgment.
"Loose arrows."
The rain fell. Flesh and blood.
Not a battle. An execution.
In Lynn's sight, Ned's face was hidden in the shadow of his helmet. Lynn couldn't read his expression.
But he could feel it. The struggle. The pain. This old wolf who had built his entire life around honor, giving that order anyway.
And still, he gave it.
For the North. For the Starks.
He had buried the old Ned Stark with his own hands. The rigid, creed-bound man who couldn't bend.
Satisfaction settled quietly in Lynn's chest.
Good.
This was the ally he wanted. A King in the North who understood tradeoffs, who could use iron-fisted methods when his home demanded it. Not an inflexible old man who clung to honor while the world burned around him.
Lynn was about to sever the connection.
Then his gaze drifted, almost by accident, to Ramsay Bolton.
Soldiers were dragging him back from the battlefield. Chains bound him. They threw him in the snow like a dead dog.
His body shook. His mouth kept moving.
Normally, Lynn had no interest in the howling of a defeated man.
But something pulled at him. He focused his hearing.
And then he heard it.
Words that froze the blood in his veins.
"...When I get out, I'll round up every woman in your Stark family!"
"That Catelyn, I'll make her sing for me all night long, while she watches me flay her daughter Sansa!"
"And Lynn!"
"Who does he think he is!"
"A bastard from beyond the Wall! How dare he marry a princess like Myrcella!"
"Myrcella... hehe... what a beautiful name. Such beautiful golden hair... when I catch her, I'll lock her in a dog cage and let my hounds lick her every day!"
"I'll make her bear me a pack of bastards!"
"Then I'll flay her and make her skin into my finest saddle!"
"And his other women!"
"That red-headed wildling bitch, that little Stark girl... I want them all!"
"I'll make them line up to serve me!"
"I'll make them understand who the true master of the North really is!"
A sickly flush crept up Ramsay's face. His voice climbed higher with excitement, spittle flying from his lips. He was lost in it, completely submerged in his own filth.
BOOM!
Deep in the Riverlands forest, with Lynn at the center, the air temperature dropped to freezing in an instant.
Visible white frost exploded outward in every direction.
The green buds that had just begun to push through the branches withered, froze, and crumbled to icy dust. Insects still sleeping in the soil, not yet aware that spring had come, were sealed there forever.
"Lynn!"
Arya felt it first. That unnatural cold.
She drew her sword and ran into the forest. What she found stopped her cold.
Lynn was surrounded by a deep blue chill that had taken on visible weight, like something solid pressing outward from his body. Ice crystals had formed on his hair, his eyebrows, the lines of his face.
"Lynn! What's wrong?!"
She ran toward him and reached for his hand. An invisible wall of cold slammed her back.
It was bone-deep. The kind of cold that felt like it could freeze the soul.
Jon and Benjen had followed her in. Both of them went silent at the sight.
"Don't go near him!"
Benjen grabbed Arya's arm before she could try again.
"Something is very wrong with him right now!"
Lynn's consciousness was still at Winterfell.
He watched Ramsay's face, twisted with excitement, and heard every word coming out of that mouth.
Killing intent.
Pure. Total. Unlike anything he had ever felt before. It erupted from his chest like a volcano.
He had fought many battles. Killed many people. Knights on the battlefield, scheming nobles in their halls. In his eyes they were pieces on a board, obstacles on the road to victory.
Killed, and forgotten.
But Ramsay Bolton was different.
He had touched something Lynn would not allow anyone to touch.
His women.
Myrcella. Arya. Ygritte.
They were his weakness, yes. But they were also the softest, most protected thing in him. The part of himself he kept clean.
And now a stinking bug, a maggot who didn't deserve to be called a man, was sitting in the snow and defiling them with his filthy mind.
Lynn's gaze shifted.
The woman named Miranda.
She'd been captured too. She sat in a cage beside Ramsay's, not cursing, not crying. Just watching him. Her eyes held worship, obsession, and something that looked almost like heartache, all tangled together.
As if the little flayer wasn't a prisoner. As if he were a king, merely fallen on hard times.
Loyalty?
What fine loyalty.
Only, the one you're loyal to needs to change.
Lynn withdrew from the Green Sight.
When he opened his eyes, two points of deep blue flame burned in the darkness of his pupils.
The cold surrounding him pulled back instantly, vanishing as if it had never existed.
As if all of it had been a dream.
"I'm fine."
His voice was terrifyingly calm.
"I just... saw something interesting."
He turned and looked at Arya's face. All worry, no pretense.
"Don't worry."
He reached for her hand. His touch was gentle.
But what Arya felt wasn't her husband's warm palm. It was a block of ice that had never known warmth and never would.
She knew. Something had made Lynn truly angry.
"Ned has dealt with the Dreadfort rebels," Lynn said. Flat. Factual.
"Ramsay Bolton was taken alive."
"Excellent!" A flash of relief crossed Jon's face.
Lynn's next words killed it.
"Originally, I planned to have Ned behead him, burn the Dreadfort to the ground, and call it finished."
"But I've changed my mind."
"Killing him that quickly would be too easy."
Lynn's eyes went somewhere distant and cold.
He liked to play with people's minds, didn't he? He liked to watch others suffer?
He thought that woman Miranda was the most loyal thing he had?
Then I'll let him watch. I'll let him see, with his own eyes, how his most loyal dog slowly takes my shape.
I want him alive. Awake. Watching everything he values betray him, watching it all be taken by me, piece by piece.
And then, slowly, I'll take him apart too.
Lynn let the subject drop.
Some things were for him alone. No need to announce them.
He wasn't a saint. He had his own rage, his own wants. He was a living person before anything else, not a machine without feeling.
He knew Ramsay's fate was something to settle after the Vale. Right now, every drop of that fury had one purpose: fuel.
"Tormund! Ygritte! Mance Rayder!"
His voice carried through the entire camp.
Within moments, the red-haired giant-slayer, the woman with the longbow who'd been kissed by fire, and the other elite wildling leaders had all gathered in front of him.
A large map was spread across a clearing in the trees.
"Brothers."
Lynn's gaze moved across each face.
"We've crossed the Neck."
"Lysa Arryn, that foolish woman, is gathering every soldier the Vale has and waiting for us at the Bloody Gate."
"Hahaha! Then let's go smash it down!" Tormund rubbed his hands together, grinning.
"Perfect time for my big friend to get some exercise!"
He meant the frost giant sitting quietly at the tree line, still as an iceberg, wings folded around itself.
"No."
Lynn shook his head. Every eye in the clearing found him.
"Attacking the Bloody Gate is also bait."
"What?"
Tormund blinked.
The other wildling leaders blinked.
They had crossed a thousand miles of dangerous ground, risked everything pushing through the Neck, all to hit the Bloody Gate and catch the Vale off guard. That was the plan.
How was that bait now?
Then what was the real target?
Lynn's finger came down hard on a single point on the map.
No one had expected it.
Not the Bloody Gate. Not the Gates of the Moon. Not any of the Vale's fortresses.
The highest peak in the Mountains of the Moon. A castle that clung to sheer cliff face like an eagle's nest, suspended above the world.
The Eyrie.
"This... this is impossible!"
Benjen's voice cracked.
"The Eyrie sits on a cliff thousands of feet high! There's one path up, one treacherous mountain road, and three waycastles guarding it the whole way!"
"Sky, Snow, and Stone!"
"To take it, we'd need wings!"
Lynn smiled.
"Don't we happen to have exactly that?"
He looked up at Winter, resting nearby, great wings folded over its body like a blanket.
"Winter can take us up."
"But one dragon..." Jon shook his head slowly. "How many people can it carry? The Eyrie doesn't have many defenders, but it can't fall to a few dozen soldiers!"
"A few dozen?"
Lynn's gaze moved to the ten black-robed figures standing silently to the side.
"We won't need that many."
"Eleven of us is enough."
➤ Next: The Sixteen-Character Guideline