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[Impossible... absolutely impossible!]
The "Robert Arryn" kneeling in the snow, his child's face contorted with shock, muscles twisting into something vicious and utterly wrong for his age.
The Three-Eyed Raven raged inside its new vessel.
Harmonic Magic was an ancient art it had only barely glimpsed after centuries of exchanges with the Children of the Forest. Natural Magic was the ultimate secret it had purchased by merging with a weirwood, surrendering its freedom and its flesh.
Handing Lynn the "seeds" of both magics had been a vicious trap.
That vast, chaotic torrent of information was enough to shatter the soul of any mortal who dared reach for the divine.
Even if one somehow survived it intact, true mastery would take decades. More likely centuries of grueling, grinding work.
And yet.
This man standing before it.
What had he done?
He had closed his eyes.
Barely a minute.
The frozen earth beneath his feet bloomed with flowers. Light gathered at his fingertips and healed wounds. A casual hum from his throat bent souls to his will.
That level of control. That fluency.
It surpassed even its own.
This wasn't mastering the basics. This was ripping the entire temple off its foundations and carrying it home.
A thousand years.
Two thousand years.
That was how long it had taken to grope its way to its current level of power in these two magics.
And this man had done it in a minute.
Why?
WHY HIM?!
A despair deeper than any physical imprisonment, something vast and absurd, collapsed the Three-Eyed Raven's last shred of reason.
It felt like a pauper who had scraped and toiled his entire miserable life, finally saving enough to buy a house.
Then stepped outside.
And watched his neighbor casually mold an identical one out of mud. Complete with a garden.
Where the hell do you even go to complain about that?
"It seems you're not very satisfied."
"I can already smell the thoughts you're harboring about me."
Lynn's voice pulled it back from the edge.
He walked up to "Robert Arryn" and looked down at this thoroughly broken old creature.
[No... no... Master... I...]
The Three-Eyed Raven's consciousness was in pieces. It couldn't even form a complete sentence.
"There's still something inside your soul."
Lynn's voice was flat. The Three-Eyed Raven's soul shuddered violently.
"I can feel it. Hidden deep."
"Do you hand it over yourself, or do I go in and get it?"
[There's nothing! There's truly nothing left!]
Panic saturated every thought.
[I've given you everything I know! I swear it!]
"Is that right."
Lynn was done talking.
He extended one finger and pressed it gently to the center of "Robert Arryn's" brow.
"Seems you still prefer the passive approach."
"Fine. Let me make this enjoyable for you."
BOOM——!!!
A mental force beyond description crashed into the Three-Eyed Raven's sea of consciousness , like a glacier bursting its banks, carrying a will cold enough to freeze souls solid.
In that instant, it felt like its soul had been hurled into a juicer made of ice.
Every thought. Every memory. Every shred of emotion. Crushed, shredded, then filtered and sifted again and again by that merciless, overwhelming power.
[AHHHHHH, , !!!]
The shriek rang out across the mental plane.
Two thousand years of accumulated essence, and it felt like a joke. A bad one.
This was not power on the same scale.
If its mental power was an ocean, then Lynn's was an endless frozen sea large enough to swallow the entire world.
[I'll talk! I'll talk! I'll tell you everything!]
The Three-Eyed Raven shattered completely.
Not one more secret. Not one.
It offered up what it had kept locked in the deepest part of its soul , the thing it had always held back as its final card.
A method of meditation.
An ancient technique that allowed mental power to grow continuously during sleep, that kept a soul immortal through the long river of time.
This was the true source of its ability to survive for millennia. The foundation beneath everything it had ever built.
The moment that information flooded into his mind, the system panel materialized before Lynn's eyes.
[New skill detected: Three-Eyed Raven's Meditation Technique]
[Learn?]
"Learn."
[Three-Eyed Raven Meditation Technique (Beginner): 1/10]
"System, raise the Meditation Technique to Legendary."
He still had over ten thousand experience points. More than enough.
[Consume 8,610 experience points to raise Three-Eyed Raven's Meditation Technique to Legendary?]
"Confirm."
[Remaining experience points: 1,621.2]
Another massive torrent of information poured in.
But this time it felt different.
If the previous magic upgrades had been about learning how to use a tool, this was something else entirely.
This was reinforcing the soul itself.
He felt his mental world expand , infinitely, in a single instant.
An unprecedented sense of control flooded through him.
[Mental: 36 (1%)] → [Mental: 45 (20%)]
His mental power surged again.
[Three-Eyed Raven Meditation Technique (Legendary) , Peak of human capability. Restores mental power during sleep. Soul possession. Mental power application...]
Lynn opened his eyes slowly.
He looked at the Three-Eyed Raven, collapsed in the snow, its soul wrung dry, without even the strength left to beg.
This old thing had no more value.
Leaving it alive would only become a problem.
Bolton lackeys were fine to toy with. A nuisance here or there was manageable.
But the Three-Eyed Raven was different.
Lynn wasn't willing to risk it.
He drew Dark Sister from his hip.
The Valyrian steel blade gleamed with dark, cold light.
[Ma... Master...]
It felt the killing intent. One last desperate flicker of survival instinct forced a faint plea from it.
[You... you promised... you'd spare my life...]
"What I promised," Lynn said, "was to let that poor wretch living inside the wight's body survive."
A gentle smile crossed his face.
"But that was the Night King, wasn't it?"
"You're just a thief squatting inside my slave's body."
The Three-Eyed Raven's consciousness plunged into darkness the moment those words landed.
It finally understood.
This man had never intended to let it live. Not from the very beginning.
Every scheme it had laid. Every compromise. Every desperate struggle.
All of it had only helped stack another brick on the staircase he was climbing toward godhood.
How ironic.
How... pathetic.
A clean flash of black.
No blood.
The wight wearing Robert Arryn's face , its head lifted silently from its shoulders and rose into the cold air.
Then its body began to come apart, inch by inch, starting from the severed neck. Not into chunks of ice. Into something finer. Crystalline dust, barely visible, swallowed by the wind without a trace.
The ancient soul that had nested inside it for millennia went with it.
Both of them erased from the world, cleanly and completely.
The whole thing was eerily quiet.
Miranda stood to the side. She hadn't breathed once from start to finish. She hadn't made a sound.
She watched the man standing in the snow, longsword in hand.
He had conjured a miracle with his own hands, then ended something that had been close to a god with those same hands.
Not a ripple on his face through any of it.
Like he had brushed away a piece of dust that was bothering him.
Something unprecedented tangled inside Miranda's chest , reverence and something almost feverish, almost unhealthy, coiling together until she couldn't tell them apart.
To follow a master like this.
The greatest honor of her life.
Lynn sheathed Dark Sister.
He didn't look at the empty patch of snow.
A scheming old bastard who had lived for a thousand years , what, keep it around for the holidays?
Only a dead enemy is a good enemy.
He raised his head slowly. His gaze passed over Miranda's shoulder and settled on the immense, dark shape of the Wall.
"They're here."
Quiet. Almost to himself.
Miranda blinked and followed his gaze. She saw nothing. The Wall was still and silent as a tomb.
But she understood. Whatever Lynn meant by "they're here," it wasn't the Night's Watch.
The words had barely left his mouth.
"WOOOOOO — WOOOOOO — WOOOOOO.!!!!"
Three sharp, urgent blasts of a horn tore through the morning stillness of the North.
The highest alarm the Night's Watch could sound.
Wights!
Castle Black's walls erupted into chaos. Brothers of the Watch swarmed the battlements, staring in horror at the Haunted Forest beyond.
And they saw it.
At the treeline. At the edge of the world.
A white tide, vast and slow and inevitable , made of death and ice , grinding toward the Wall.
Wights beyond counting. An ocean of them, stretching to every horizon.
And at the very front of that dead sea, a tall figure sat motionless on an undead horse.
A crown of ice crystals on its head. Eyes burning with pale blue fire, fixed on Castle Black.
The Night King.
It had come.
Eight thousand years of fury and winter, riding sovereign over the world.
Every brother of the Watch who saw it felt their legs give out beneath them.
"Gods..."
"Old Gods above... what is that..."
"We're dead. We're dead. We're all dead!"
Despair moved through them like a sickness.
And then, from the shadow of the gate below the Wall, a single figure walked out.
Lynn.
He didn't spare a glance for the men falling apart on the battlements above him.
He only raised his head, calm, and met the gaze of that cold monarch across the distance.
The Night King's eyes found him.
For the first time in the pale blue fire that had burned for ten thousand years, something moved.
It could feel it. This small human before it carried a power that shared the same root as its own , and was nothing like it.
Lynn looked at it for a moment.
Then shook his head.
He raised his right hand, aimed it loosely at the sea of wights in the distance, and snapped his fingers.
Snap.
One soft sound.
The world stopped.
The roar of the wight army , the sound that could shake all of Westeros to its foundations , cut off completely.
Every single wight locked in place, exactly where it stood.
Their blue-burning eyes began to flicker. Rapidly. Erratically.
And then.
In the absolute silence.
The wight closest to the Night King turned around.
Slowly.
Its hollow eyes no longer faced the Wall.
They faced its former king.
Then the second wight turned.
The third.
Thousands. Tens of thousands. Every one of them, in perfect unison, turning.
An ocean of pale blue eyes, blazing in the dark.
All of them locked on the figure still seated on its undead horse.
The Night King.
The entire world fell silent.
On the Wall, the Night's Watch had gone completely blank. They stared at the impossibility playing out beyond the battlements. Not one of them could form a thought.
The Night King looked at its army , millions strong, turned traitor in a single breath , and something happened to its face that had never happened before.
The ice cracked.
What... is this?
➤ Next: The Weirwood Divine Bow
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