Categories > Books > Harry Potter > All Men must Serve
Chapter 54: The Darrys return to the Riverlands
EDRIC
We arrived at Storm’s End during a lull between attacks. The Fortress had held, but none of the lords or even knights were still living. All of the High Born had either gone north with Renly or had died here, leaving the Keep to the small folk. I cast the Fidelitus and made the blacksmith the Secret Keeper.
I had been up the road to King’s Landing from here, so we went to each of the Keeps along the way. All of them, even Bronzegate, had fallen and were empty.
TORMUND
When Brienne found out she was going to birth our big baby, the first thing she did was drag me out to the practice yard and beat the shit out of me! I didn’t dare hit her back! And she knew it! This meant she’d be unable to go scouting for survivors or even spar for a while, until the baby came. Eventually, she stopped hitting me and instead, would drag me off to bed to celebrate.
TRYSTANE
My cousins were quickly able to find husbands at Winterfell. Strangely, Obara and Tyene went for a couple of Arya’s mute Ironborn sailors. I think the appeal for them is that their husbands couldn’t complain about anything they did, no matter how outrageous. Sarella, Elia and Obella all married Riverland Lords who were in exile. Dorea and Loreza were stolen by Wildlings, but not before assuring myself that this was with their consent.
Margaery had just had her daughter, when Arya realized that she was expecting. She had thought she had resigned herself to having her children now, during the winter. But the reality was a different thing. Worse, she had gotten good enough at it that I couldn’t escape her in the wereworld when she was on the warpath!
It was her brother Bran, who showed her the advantages of her condition, as he now started traveling to Winterfell occasionally to spend the night with the two of us. Arya had gone back to her valeryan appearance for when he visited. For me, She makes herself appear Dornish. She’s also getting better at entering the wereworld and can do it on her own in a few minutes time.
MARGAERY
I was quite distraught in the last days of my pregnancy to learn of the loss of my family at Highgarden. I tried to hold out hope that they were not dead, just fled somewhere safe. But I knew I was just lying to myself.
The birth of my daughter, meant that my affair with Sansa and Edric was at an end. I suppose I could had continued to sleep with Sansa. But she refused to ‘be with me’ alone, without Edric.
From time to time, we can just barely see, almost obscured by the blinding snow, groups of wights walking past Riverrun. But they don’t attack and can’t seem to find us. Still, this means it’s still too dangerous to leave the castle.
SAM
My wife, Shae’s friendship with her friend, Cat has deepened to the point that they have agree to adopt that new fashion sweeping the neo-Children of the Forrest and add Cat as a wife. However, Cat is made it quite clear that she is only a wife to Shae, not me.
I have had to suspend publication of the Newspaper as I longer have a source of wood for the production of paper to print it on.
The people of the city are beginning to to become restless. The constant threat of death from the Others has been removed, yet they still remain a great enough threat to prevent people from leaving the city. This leaves the people of the city with a great deal of time on their hands which they fill by indulging their passions. As Master of Laws, this puts and increased amount of work on my plate as crime, especially violent crime, is on the rise.
JON
Ever since Lord Edric cast that spell that hid the city, the number of the Others outside the city has been decreasing. When before it was millions of them, now, it’s just thousands of them wandering around aimlessly outside the city. There is a limit to how far away I can feel them and I don’t know how many are just outside of my range.
Bran does not come here as often lately, but Sansa still does. Shireen enjoys her visits as Sansa will often use her magic to entertain her by transforming one thing into another. It gives me a headache when she does it, as I can feel the wrongness in the Force of what’s she’s doing. Having this distance between them has also helped reconcile Sansa and our mother. Sometimes Sansa brings her daughter, Minisa, who Shireen finds fascinating. She’s often reminds me how much she’s looking forward to having our own children.
EDRIC
With all this traveling I have been doing, I have been neglecting my magical students. Lord Robb and Rickon Stark know very little magic. The Free Folk wargs that I lured into my service with the promise of teaching them magic have plateaued. I need to become more organized in my teaching. And this ties in with my Lordship of the Twins.
With the River Frozen, the Twins are indefensible. Riverrun has the same problem of frozen rivers, but the castle, itself makes a better defense, even without the rivers flowing. And while I have been traveling, Keeping Sansa and Minisa at Riverrun has made sense. But I am thinking that when spring comes, I want to talk Bran into letting me turn Harrenhal into a school for magic. That way I can teach them all at the same location.
When I went to check up on Branwen, Sansa insisted on going along. So I side-along apparated her with me to Last Hearth. She’s married a soldier named Aldi Spear, who serves the Umbers and her husband thinks the child is his. We were very discreet in our exit and let her have her life she was building.
TORMUND
Every once in a while, someone will spot a group of wights walking past Winterfell. Looks like they’re still out there.
The blizzard is still blowing and the snowdrifts are taller than the walls of Winterfell. The wind picks it up and dumps it in the courtyard. Everyone is kept busy shoveling it back out. If we didn’t have magic to keep the Others out, we’d be fucked!
Brienne kept doing her part to shovel the snow almost until the very end. As I predicted, she birthed a very big baby. We named our son Oedi Tarth after someone I knew in a past life and her Island that she fears she will never see again.
TRYSTANE
Once Bran started visiting regularly, Arya was better able to cope with the rigors of carrying a child. We named her Joan, after her brother. It took a few months for her to recover before she was ready for us to go exploring the Riverlands, trying to help the Riverlords reclaim their keeps. We would do similar to when we went to her ship. Traveling cross country with Bran on their dire wolves, then getting Edric to do his magic to hide the place.
MARGAERY
Mycella had her daughter. She seems happy with her two husbands.
Since plants no longer grow. I’ve been working on trying to breed a strain of mushroom that can become a food staple to allow us to survive. None of the commercial varieties from my past life are nutritious enough or grow fast enough to fit the bill, so I am having to make something new. What I have thus far is bland, but fast growing. It’s also mildly psychedelic. Not strong enough to be debilitating. But it makes the blue glow of the Other’s eyes, both wights and Wight Walkers, look brighter. Bright enough that the eyes can be seen at twice the distance through the snow storms as the bodies can be seen. This made us realize that there were more of them out there walking around that we thought.
Edric is going to start reclaiming the lost keeps in the Riverlands. To faciliate this, He’s sending Bran out on Summer to find places they haven’t been before. Arya and Trystane are going along to protect him. I think I will send Meera with them too.
EDRIC
Before we do this cross country expedition, I am going to bring Lord Darry and his soldiers home. Their keep was near the Ruby Ford and while they had been away at Winterfell, the Army of the Dead had passed through and taken everything from them! All of their wives and children had been here. Now, they had new wives. Lord Darry had married Trystane’s cousin Sarella. And almost all the soldiers now had a wife who had been a lowborn woman from King’s Landing. Many of these women brought children with them.
This was intended to be our starting place before going cross country to Maidenpool. So I had sent Bran, Meera, Summer, Arya, Trystane and Nymeria there by portkey first, Then apparated to Winterfell, so I could send Lord Darry and his people by portkey after them. I rode the last portkey there.
By the time I arrived, Bran had already used his wand to vanish enough of the snow in the God’s Wood to allow the Darry men a landing spot, and was clearing a path to the central courtyard. The snow was six feet deep. I could barely see over it. And I couldn’t see very far because the blinding blizzard that cut visibility down to twenty feet and made it as dark as a starless night. A third of the Darry soldiers had torches, which provided some light, but also hurt our night vision. I helped Bran vanish the snow, creating a path to the middle of the courtyard and a space large enough to hold all the Darry soldiers and their new families at once so I could cast the Fidelitus charm. This spell requires a lot of power to cast. Only the most powerful wizards could even attempt it. And I couldn’t manage it if I was magically exhausted. I have doubts that any of my students will ever be able to cast it.
I cast the spell, hiding Castle Darry from anyone who did not know the secret. Then, Lord Darry told us where Castle Darry was, sharing the secret so we would know where we were and how to get there in the future. He had just completed sharing the secret, when we heard a sound coming from all the snow covered roofs in the castle. Looking around, we dimly saw through the haze of snowfall, the shining blue eyes of the wights that had been hidden in the snow on the rooftops! An icy javelin came soaring through the air to impale Lord Darry! I looked for the source of the deadly missile and spotted a Wight Walker on one of the rooves! Looking around, I spotted another icy javelin headed for me and just barely transfigured it into a jonquil in time! It had been thrown by another Wight Walker! From out of the uncleared snow still left around the edge of the courtyard sprung more wights that had been hidden in the snow!
Everyone scrambled for their weapons. Meera had her two valyrian steel daggers. Arya had her double headed spear, and bow tied to Nymeria’s back. But her valyrian steel sword and dagger were on her waist. Trystane had his Spear with the valyrian steel head. I had a valerian steel sword and my wand. Lord Darry and his leading men all had valyrian steel weapons and the rest had dragon glass with a third having already burning torches. With the wights leaping out at us, many of the men were trying to push their wives and stepchildren behind them. As a result, the center of the mass of people was turning into the women and children zone. Arya pushed through the men trying to work her way to the outer edge of the mass of people surrounded by wights. Meera was in the mix of men, standing her ground with her daggers drawn and not letting herself be pushed to the middle. Trystane vanished. Lord Darry’s widow, Sarella, had bent down to take her husband’s valyrian steel sword. Another ice javelin came at me from a third direction that I wasn’t looking, only to be snatched out of the air by an invisible hand! How many Wight Walkers were there?
Several of the men went down, killed by wights because they had been distracted by trying to get their loved ones behind them. The first Wight Walker threw another ice javelin at me and I have to transfigure it into something harmless, in this case, a jacket. Not having time the concentrate, I had turned it into a nylon windbreaker that blinded me when it hit, but did no other harm and was easily pulled off my face. Our people were still being struck down by wights, but we were taking them down too, led by Arya, Meera and Sarella. Some of them would go down with no apparent attacker. I assumed that was the work of Trystane, who could attack them from another dimension. I was unable to cast any offensive spells as two of the Wight Walkers were laying down a constant barrage of Ice javelins! When I dodged, they’d hit a woman or child, instead! We were tightly packed together and the dire wolves were unable to be of any help because they couldn’t move without trampling someone! We were killing them at the same rate they were killing us. But there were more of them and the situation became even worse when the wights on the rooves jumped down and joined the fight! The ice javelins paused for a second and I was able to shoot a bombarda at a Wight Walker, shattering it. But then the fallen, rose again! About half of the wights we had killed came back to life, and all of our dead rose as wights. The Wight Walker I had destroyed, reassembled it self!
Once that happened, the two Wight Walkers resumed pitching ice javelins at me and the wights that had been us, were now inside our lines. The fight had just become more chaotic as there where wights that used to be our comrades mixed in the middle us attacking anyone They could hit! Some of them were now armed with valerian steel weapons! It had become clear that this was a battle we could not win!
“Trystane, I need you to keep the Javelins off me so I can make us a way out of here!” I shouted, as I hoped he could hear me.
I stopped trying to defend myself, and started making portkeys out of people’s clothing. I would tell everyone near that person to grab their parka, so that they would be sent away with them. When I started doing this, the attacks intensified, not only from the flung ice javelins, but also from the wights. But every time a Javelin came at me, it would get deflected away by and invisible force that I assumed was Trystane! As I portkeyed away more and more of us, It became harder for those of us who were left to defend ourselves! The Wight Walkers were now starting to target, near me, instead of at me! They must be trying to take out Trystane, now, instead of me. The Direwolves were gone. I had, at one point, made their harnesses into portkeys and used them to send people away. It was down to Arya, Meera, me and three other men. I could now see that Bran was laying on the ground with an ice javelin impaling his abdomen! I made his parka into the portkey.
“Last one!” I shouted. “Grab Bran!”
Everyone was trying to fight one handed while grabbing for Bran’s parka when Trystane appeared out of thin air and grabbed the portkey just in the nick of time before it whisked us away!
I awoke to the sound of women crying. It’s no surprise that I had passed out. Casting the Fidelitus Charm takes a lot of me. And I had done too much magic after that. It’s amazing that I was able to hold it together long enough to get us out of there. I was weak as a kitten. But I was indoors somewhere. I could barely turn my head to look around. I was in the Maester’s treatment room. There were several tables with injured people on them. A woman was crying over one of them. At another table, Meera was laying on the table turned on her side, hugging Arya, who was standing bent over her. Behind her, Trystane was rubbing her back. Both the women were crying.
“What happened?” I asked.
Arya turn to me and sobbed out: “Bran’s dead!”
Note: Bran’s death was not planned. In fact, I had big plans for him. In the short term, I had planned another road trip, this one with Trystane and Meera repeatedly trying to prevent him and Arya from making a baby. I had other, long-term plans for him including, 20 years in the future, when a child would climb the broken tower and catch Bran and Ayra in the exact way he had caught the Lannister twins. Hopefully, he would come up with a better solution than ‘toss the child out the window’. But I had gotten a long way into this fight when I realized Bran was there and I hadn’t written him. Why not? Where was he? The answer is: that the Wight Walkers had gotten him when Edric wasn’t looking and in the press of people he had’t noticed until the end. At first I was going to just have him knocked unconscious. Then later, that the javelin was going to paralyze him, like in cannon. But giving characters plot armor was one of the problems with the later seasons of the show. No one should be immune. I had planned for him to survive. The muse had other ideas.
Leaf - Leaves
Hoof - Hooves
Roof - Rooves
EDRIC
We arrived at Storm’s End during a lull between attacks. The Fortress had held, but none of the lords or even knights were still living. All of the High Born had either gone north with Renly or had died here, leaving the Keep to the small folk. I cast the Fidelitus and made the blacksmith the Secret Keeper.
I had been up the road to King’s Landing from here, so we went to each of the Keeps along the way. All of them, even Bronzegate, had fallen and were empty.
TORMUND
When Brienne found out she was going to birth our big baby, the first thing she did was drag me out to the practice yard and beat the shit out of me! I didn’t dare hit her back! And she knew it! This meant she’d be unable to go scouting for survivors or even spar for a while, until the baby came. Eventually, she stopped hitting me and instead, would drag me off to bed to celebrate.
TRYSTANE
My cousins were quickly able to find husbands at Winterfell. Strangely, Obara and Tyene went for a couple of Arya’s mute Ironborn sailors. I think the appeal for them is that their husbands couldn’t complain about anything they did, no matter how outrageous. Sarella, Elia and Obella all married Riverland Lords who were in exile. Dorea and Loreza were stolen by Wildlings, but not before assuring myself that this was with their consent.
Margaery had just had her daughter, when Arya realized that she was expecting. She had thought she had resigned herself to having her children now, during the winter. But the reality was a different thing. Worse, she had gotten good enough at it that I couldn’t escape her in the wereworld when she was on the warpath!
It was her brother Bran, who showed her the advantages of her condition, as he now started traveling to Winterfell occasionally to spend the night with the two of us. Arya had gone back to her valeryan appearance for when he visited. For me, She makes herself appear Dornish. She’s also getting better at entering the wereworld and can do it on her own in a few minutes time.
MARGAERY
I was quite distraught in the last days of my pregnancy to learn of the loss of my family at Highgarden. I tried to hold out hope that they were not dead, just fled somewhere safe. But I knew I was just lying to myself.
The birth of my daughter, meant that my affair with Sansa and Edric was at an end. I suppose I could had continued to sleep with Sansa. But she refused to ‘be with me’ alone, without Edric.
From time to time, we can just barely see, almost obscured by the blinding snow, groups of wights walking past Riverrun. But they don’t attack and can’t seem to find us. Still, this means it’s still too dangerous to leave the castle.
SAM
My wife, Shae’s friendship with her friend, Cat has deepened to the point that they have agree to adopt that new fashion sweeping the neo-Children of the Forrest and add Cat as a wife. However, Cat is made it quite clear that she is only a wife to Shae, not me.
I have had to suspend publication of the Newspaper as I longer have a source of wood for the production of paper to print it on.
The people of the city are beginning to to become restless. The constant threat of death from the Others has been removed, yet they still remain a great enough threat to prevent people from leaving the city. This leaves the people of the city with a great deal of time on their hands which they fill by indulging their passions. As Master of Laws, this puts and increased amount of work on my plate as crime, especially violent crime, is on the rise.
JON
Ever since Lord Edric cast that spell that hid the city, the number of the Others outside the city has been decreasing. When before it was millions of them, now, it’s just thousands of them wandering around aimlessly outside the city. There is a limit to how far away I can feel them and I don’t know how many are just outside of my range.
Bran does not come here as often lately, but Sansa still does. Shireen enjoys her visits as Sansa will often use her magic to entertain her by transforming one thing into another. It gives me a headache when she does it, as I can feel the wrongness in the Force of what’s she’s doing. Having this distance between them has also helped reconcile Sansa and our mother. Sometimes Sansa brings her daughter, Minisa, who Shireen finds fascinating. She’s often reminds me how much she’s looking forward to having our own children.
EDRIC
With all this traveling I have been doing, I have been neglecting my magical students. Lord Robb and Rickon Stark know very little magic. The Free Folk wargs that I lured into my service with the promise of teaching them magic have plateaued. I need to become more organized in my teaching. And this ties in with my Lordship of the Twins.
With the River Frozen, the Twins are indefensible. Riverrun has the same problem of frozen rivers, but the castle, itself makes a better defense, even without the rivers flowing. And while I have been traveling, Keeping Sansa and Minisa at Riverrun has made sense. But I am thinking that when spring comes, I want to talk Bran into letting me turn Harrenhal into a school for magic. That way I can teach them all at the same location.
When I went to check up on Branwen, Sansa insisted on going along. So I side-along apparated her with me to Last Hearth. She’s married a soldier named Aldi Spear, who serves the Umbers and her husband thinks the child is his. We were very discreet in our exit and let her have her life she was building.
TORMUND
Every once in a while, someone will spot a group of wights walking past Winterfell. Looks like they’re still out there.
The blizzard is still blowing and the snowdrifts are taller than the walls of Winterfell. The wind picks it up and dumps it in the courtyard. Everyone is kept busy shoveling it back out. If we didn’t have magic to keep the Others out, we’d be fucked!
Brienne kept doing her part to shovel the snow almost until the very end. As I predicted, she birthed a very big baby. We named our son Oedi Tarth after someone I knew in a past life and her Island that she fears she will never see again.
TRYSTANE
Once Bran started visiting regularly, Arya was better able to cope with the rigors of carrying a child. We named her Joan, after her brother. It took a few months for her to recover before she was ready for us to go exploring the Riverlands, trying to help the Riverlords reclaim their keeps. We would do similar to when we went to her ship. Traveling cross country with Bran on their dire wolves, then getting Edric to do his magic to hide the place.
MARGAERY
Mycella had her daughter. She seems happy with her two husbands.
Since plants no longer grow. I’ve been working on trying to breed a strain of mushroom that can become a food staple to allow us to survive. None of the commercial varieties from my past life are nutritious enough or grow fast enough to fit the bill, so I am having to make something new. What I have thus far is bland, but fast growing. It’s also mildly psychedelic. Not strong enough to be debilitating. But it makes the blue glow of the Other’s eyes, both wights and Wight Walkers, look brighter. Bright enough that the eyes can be seen at twice the distance through the snow storms as the bodies can be seen. This made us realize that there were more of them out there walking around that we thought.
Edric is going to start reclaiming the lost keeps in the Riverlands. To faciliate this, He’s sending Bran out on Summer to find places they haven’t been before. Arya and Trystane are going along to protect him. I think I will send Meera with them too.
EDRIC
Before we do this cross country expedition, I am going to bring Lord Darry and his soldiers home. Their keep was near the Ruby Ford and while they had been away at Winterfell, the Army of the Dead had passed through and taken everything from them! All of their wives and children had been here. Now, they had new wives. Lord Darry had married Trystane’s cousin Sarella. And almost all the soldiers now had a wife who had been a lowborn woman from King’s Landing. Many of these women brought children with them.
This was intended to be our starting place before going cross country to Maidenpool. So I had sent Bran, Meera, Summer, Arya, Trystane and Nymeria there by portkey first, Then apparated to Winterfell, so I could send Lord Darry and his people by portkey after them. I rode the last portkey there.
By the time I arrived, Bran had already used his wand to vanish enough of the snow in the God’s Wood to allow the Darry men a landing spot, and was clearing a path to the central courtyard. The snow was six feet deep. I could barely see over it. And I couldn’t see very far because the blinding blizzard that cut visibility down to twenty feet and made it as dark as a starless night. A third of the Darry soldiers had torches, which provided some light, but also hurt our night vision. I helped Bran vanish the snow, creating a path to the middle of the courtyard and a space large enough to hold all the Darry soldiers and their new families at once so I could cast the Fidelitus charm. This spell requires a lot of power to cast. Only the most powerful wizards could even attempt it. And I couldn’t manage it if I was magically exhausted. I have doubts that any of my students will ever be able to cast it.
I cast the spell, hiding Castle Darry from anyone who did not know the secret. Then, Lord Darry told us where Castle Darry was, sharing the secret so we would know where we were and how to get there in the future. He had just completed sharing the secret, when we heard a sound coming from all the snow covered roofs in the castle. Looking around, we dimly saw through the haze of snowfall, the shining blue eyes of the wights that had been hidden in the snow on the rooftops! An icy javelin came soaring through the air to impale Lord Darry! I looked for the source of the deadly missile and spotted a Wight Walker on one of the rooves! Looking around, I spotted another icy javelin headed for me and just barely transfigured it into a jonquil in time! It had been thrown by another Wight Walker! From out of the uncleared snow still left around the edge of the courtyard sprung more wights that had been hidden in the snow!
Everyone scrambled for their weapons. Meera had her two valyrian steel daggers. Arya had her double headed spear, and bow tied to Nymeria’s back. But her valyrian steel sword and dagger were on her waist. Trystane had his Spear with the valyrian steel head. I had a valerian steel sword and my wand. Lord Darry and his leading men all had valyrian steel weapons and the rest had dragon glass with a third having already burning torches. With the wights leaping out at us, many of the men were trying to push their wives and stepchildren behind them. As a result, the center of the mass of people was turning into the women and children zone. Arya pushed through the men trying to work her way to the outer edge of the mass of people surrounded by wights. Meera was in the mix of men, standing her ground with her daggers drawn and not letting herself be pushed to the middle. Trystane vanished. Lord Darry’s widow, Sarella, had bent down to take her husband’s valyrian steel sword. Another ice javelin came at me from a third direction that I wasn’t looking, only to be snatched out of the air by an invisible hand! How many Wight Walkers were there?
Several of the men went down, killed by wights because they had been distracted by trying to get their loved ones behind them. The first Wight Walker threw another ice javelin at me and I have to transfigure it into something harmless, in this case, a jacket. Not having time the concentrate, I had turned it into a nylon windbreaker that blinded me when it hit, but did no other harm and was easily pulled off my face. Our people were still being struck down by wights, but we were taking them down too, led by Arya, Meera and Sarella. Some of them would go down with no apparent attacker. I assumed that was the work of Trystane, who could attack them from another dimension. I was unable to cast any offensive spells as two of the Wight Walkers were laying down a constant barrage of Ice javelins! When I dodged, they’d hit a woman or child, instead! We were tightly packed together and the dire wolves were unable to be of any help because they couldn’t move without trampling someone! We were killing them at the same rate they were killing us. But there were more of them and the situation became even worse when the wights on the rooves jumped down and joined the fight! The ice javelins paused for a second and I was able to shoot a bombarda at a Wight Walker, shattering it. But then the fallen, rose again! About half of the wights we had killed came back to life, and all of our dead rose as wights. The Wight Walker I had destroyed, reassembled it self!
Once that happened, the two Wight Walkers resumed pitching ice javelins at me and the wights that had been us, were now inside our lines. The fight had just become more chaotic as there where wights that used to be our comrades mixed in the middle us attacking anyone They could hit! Some of them were now armed with valerian steel weapons! It had become clear that this was a battle we could not win!
“Trystane, I need you to keep the Javelins off me so I can make us a way out of here!” I shouted, as I hoped he could hear me.
I stopped trying to defend myself, and started making portkeys out of people’s clothing. I would tell everyone near that person to grab their parka, so that they would be sent away with them. When I started doing this, the attacks intensified, not only from the flung ice javelins, but also from the wights. But every time a Javelin came at me, it would get deflected away by and invisible force that I assumed was Trystane! As I portkeyed away more and more of us, It became harder for those of us who were left to defend ourselves! The Wight Walkers were now starting to target, near me, instead of at me! They must be trying to take out Trystane, now, instead of me. The Direwolves were gone. I had, at one point, made their harnesses into portkeys and used them to send people away. It was down to Arya, Meera, me and three other men. I could now see that Bran was laying on the ground with an ice javelin impaling his abdomen! I made his parka into the portkey.
“Last one!” I shouted. “Grab Bran!”
Everyone was trying to fight one handed while grabbing for Bran’s parka when Trystane appeared out of thin air and grabbed the portkey just in the nick of time before it whisked us away!
I awoke to the sound of women crying. It’s no surprise that I had passed out. Casting the Fidelitus Charm takes a lot of me. And I had done too much magic after that. It’s amazing that I was able to hold it together long enough to get us out of there. I was weak as a kitten. But I was indoors somewhere. I could barely turn my head to look around. I was in the Maester’s treatment room. There were several tables with injured people on them. A woman was crying over one of them. At another table, Meera was laying on the table turned on her side, hugging Arya, who was standing bent over her. Behind her, Trystane was rubbing her back. Both the women were crying.
“What happened?” I asked.
Arya turn to me and sobbed out: “Bran’s dead!”
Note: Bran’s death was not planned. In fact, I had big plans for him. In the short term, I had planned another road trip, this one with Trystane and Meera repeatedly trying to prevent him and Arya from making a baby. I had other, long-term plans for him including, 20 years in the future, when a child would climb the broken tower and catch Bran and Ayra in the exact way he had caught the Lannister twins. Hopefully, he would come up with a better solution than ‘toss the child out the window’. But I had gotten a long way into this fight when I realized Bran was there and I hadn’t written him. Why not? Where was he? The answer is: that the Wight Walkers had gotten him when Edric wasn’t looking and in the press of people he had’t noticed until the end. At first I was going to just have him knocked unconscious. Then later, that the javelin was going to paralyze him, like in cannon. But giving characters plot armor was one of the problems with the later seasons of the show. No one should be immune. I had planned for him to survive. The muse had other ideas.
Leaf - Leaves
Hoof - Hooves
Roof - Rooves
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