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Chapter 57: High Tower


MARGAERY

After we arrived a Highgarden, Edric did his spell that hides places and made me the secret keeper. I then shared the secret with the others. I had been putting off doing this for years, sometimes using pregnancy as an excuse not to come here and do this. I kept hoping that someone else from my family was alive and would return here. But no one was here, not even the horses we sent here. The worse part was seeing my gardens, dead to the last plant except the weirwood.

After I mounted Summer, we started out for Horn Hill. That’s were we ran into an Army of the Dead besieging it. There were so many of them and they came up on us so fast, I thought they were going to kill us! It’s hard for me to move in close and block when I’m on Summer’s back. I fight a lot better up close and my valyrian weapons are daggers, so I don’t have the reach the wights do.

When we stopped to rest, it wasn’t too big a surprise that Brienne and Tormund joined with us. But when that many people are all entangled in pitch dark, it is sometimes hard to tell who you are touching and who is touching you. Often when a man tried to enter me, I didn’t know who it was until he was all the way in so I could feel the difference. When I went down on Sarella, I could tell who she was because her scent was different than Arya’s. When I did the same to Arya, I could tell by the taste of the seed leaking out of her that is was Edric’s and not Trystane’s.

After we woke and broke camp, I pulled Edric to the side to talk. I could see Brienne and Tormund were doing the same.

“I think that was their first time,” I said to Edric.

“Do you think they’ll be okay?” he asked me.

“I think they’ll be fine,” I told him. “But we shouldn’t push it. Let them be the odd couple out, unless they come to join with us.”

We rode until the dire wolves needed to rest again, and then made camp. Arya had turned herself all blonde and pale.

While the rest of us came together, we left Brienne and Tormund alone on their end.

After waking and breaking camp, we kept going to Brightwater Keep.



TRYSTANE

When we saw the castle appear out of the haze of blinding snow, Arya got off her dire wolf and we both shifted into the wereworld. Since we were able to percieve things differently here, we were scouting ahead. When we’re here, we see things l like home. In my case, it’s deserts with mesas and cacti. Ayra’s view of the wereworld is more like the normal world. So instead of blinding sandstorms, she’s seeing blinding blizzards. In the wereworld, the wights look like skeletons instead of dead men and they can be seen from slightly further away. These mushrooms that have become our main diet allow us to see the eyes of the Others from a little further away too. But we were sent ahead so we could see things even more in depth. I took my wife by the hand and pulled her even further away from the normal world. We were now swimming through what in the normal world would be solid matter. I had taken Arya deeper into the wereworld than she was capable of going her self. And as we swam through the sand dunes that would be snowdrifts in the normal world, everywhere we looked there were skeletons, lying in wait to ambush us if we entered the castle in the normal world. Still holding her hand, we swam back out of Brightwater Keep and returned to the others before shifting into their reality.


TORMUND

It had been half an hour after the two of them had vanished before Arya and Trystane appeared out of thin air.

“It’s a trap!” said Arya.

“They whole castle is full of wights,” reported Trystane.

“All right,” said Edric. “We’ll have to try for Honeyholt instead.

Trystane vanished again as Arya re-mounted her dire wolf and we started again across the snowscape. we’d still stop periodically so that Edric could do his directional magic to make sure we were going the right way. When we reached Honeyholt castle, Trystane and Arya were sent scouting ahead again, and found this castle was a trap too. So we rode away from it another hour before making camp. Edric seemed extra vigilant when he did his magic circle around the camp and even sent Trstane and Arya to scout the area of the site first.

Once we were all under the furs, the rest of them began going at it. Brienne had, by now, lost all shyness about fucking me under the same blanket as their orgy. But we both had to move away the occasional hand that strayed over to one of us.



EDRIC

We couldn’t tell we had arrived at Old Town until we bumped into the High Tower. Trystane appeared to warn us that the snow beneath us was full of wights! But we were able to find a window to enter through before they attacked. I had heard from Sarella about this place but I was not prepared for what awaited me. The aisle of books we walked through ended in an large open space with floor after floor of shelved of books! I never imagined there were this many books in the world! And all of these books had been hand written by someone over hundreds of years! There was a light dusting of snow covering every shelf.

“When this all melts, everything will be ruined!” gasped Sarella.

“So we need to save what we can now,” agreed Margaery.

“Someone needs to close all the shutters to keep this from getting worse,” said Sarella.


The two women started dragging me around to help them. Margaery knew what she wanted, while Sarella knew where everything was. Not everything was worth saving. The shelf full of diaries of High Septons was left to rot. None of the books about the Seven Gods religion were deemed important. But other things: books on science and history and literature were thought important enough to save. I would have to magically clean all the books on a shelf, while being careful to not scourgify off any of the ink the books were written with. Then I would shrink the books and put them in one of the saddlebags the dire wolves carried. There was more of this to do than could be done. Some of it was not in a readable language to any of us. We left those behind.


TORMUND

While Edric, Margaery and Sarella were working on going through the books to save them, Brienne and I walked every floor of the tower closing every window we could find. We didn’t want to start a fire so we were using my Sword as our light source, just as Edric kept calling us magical glowing deer to provide light for them. We found a locked gate with bookshelves behind it, so Brienne broke the lock and we looked around. Sarella later identified these books as the restricted section. In the back of it, was stairway, that Trystane feared to go down. Brienne and I went down, anyway. The stairs seemed to go a long, long way, much further down than ground level. At some point the stone that the walls, floor and ceiling were made of changed from white marble to an oily black stone that seemed to drink in the light cast by the Sword of Icy Fire. When we finally reached the end of the stairs, there was a room. The walls of the room were covered in carvings of some sort of writing that had long since worn away to illegibility. My gift to instantly know languages didn’t help as it was too worn away to read. But the alphabet was like nothing I had ever seen on this world. At the far end of the room was a locked bronze gate and beyond it could be seen a large circular ring covered with symbols that my power interpreted as star constellation symbols. I broke through the gate and stepped closer. The ring was well balanced and I was strong enough to turn it by hand. But it didn’t seem to have any function. I looked her direction when Brienne gasped. She was looking up, so I stepped closer to try to get a better view of what she was looking at. There, on the ceiling, had been carved a picture of two hands and a face. It looked like someone whose hands and face were sticking out of the water. The mouth of the face was open in a silent eternal scream of agony!


MARGAERY

Much of this science was crap. I skimmed a few and removed them from the save pile. But there was just too much to go through. I would have to do it later. We kept working until we tired. Then, Edric used his magic to duplicate the furs so that we wouldn’t all have to sleep together, which made me a little sad because I liked the orgies and had often been the instigator If Arya or Trystane didn’t beat me to it. But the two of them wanted some alone time and Brienne and Tormund seem grateful to be able to go off and sleep alone in one of the isles, away from the rest of us. At least Sarella was willing to share Edric with me.

In a world of eternal darkness, we based our perception of time on when we needed to sleep. But I am guessing we spent a week in the Citadel library cleaning and shrinking books to take with us. We were also taking some of the elaborate mirror devices that used to light the library before the Long Night.

All the time we were doing this, Trystane kept warning us that the Army of the Dead was crawling out of the snow and organizing for an assault on the High Tower. So when we left, it was because the Others were starting to break through the shutters and enter! Trystane estimated that there must be thousands of them!

“Our time has run out!” shouted Edric. “Everyone grab the rope!”

We did so, and the magical whirlwind whisked us off to Harrenhal.


EDRIC

Once we were safely back at Harrenhal, I made more portkeys to send Arya, Trystane, Briene, Tormund and their dire wolves back to Winterfell. Then Margaery and I back to Riverrun to check on our families. Sarella had already moved here. Sansa and I were planning to, but had not yet moved to Harrenhal. Arya and Trystane had similar plans. Margaery had no such plans and was I was going to have to provide her and Rowan with daily portkeys when the school started actually teaching.

I spent a few days with Sansa and the children at Riverrun before I moved us all to Harrenhal. All of my people who wanted to remain my followers were here now. A few of the Free Folk had wanted to stay in Winterfell and I had released them from their vow. But most wanted to continue to serve me as the people who guarded Harrenhal. I had to enlarge all the books a bag at a time and Margaery and Sarella spent a month going through them before they declared that they would not be able to finish the project anytime soon. And there were still lots more books at the Citadel that would rot if we didn’t save them before spring.

Arya and Trystane moved to Harrenhal with their children and dire wolves, as did Lyanna and Rickon.

Before we started our first school term, I went around to all the places that I had hidden under fidelitus and looked for more students. There were none to be found at Kings Landing. But I had better luck at Deepwood Motte when I brought Brienne and Tormund with me.

When the portkey stopped we were alone in Gods’ Wood. I could see that a path had been trampled down to the Heart Tree. I vanished some of the snow with my wand to make it a little less deep. When we walked out of the Gods’ Wood, we ran into a Free Folk man who, took one look at us and ran away. before we had made it across the courtyard, he had returned with a bunch of other armed Free Folk, led by the Lord of Bones, himself.

“No need to get alarmed Rattleshirt,” said Tormund. “It’s just us.”

“Oh! And what does the kneeler wizard and his pets want with us?” asked Rattleshirt.

“Pets! I’ll show you who’s a pet!” snarled Tormund.

“Tormund, behave!” shouted Brienne. “Both of you behave. We have not come here to fight!”

“Looks like you are the pet of one of the kneelers,” laughed Rattleshirt. “I just got the wrong one. So why are you here?”

“Has the magic worked out the way I promised?” I asked. “Have the Others attacked since I cast it?”

“No. Come to think of it, they haven’t” said Rattleshirt. “We ain’t seen anybody since you did your whammy and left us. We only run into them when we try to go hunting.”

“I came here because some of your people may have the ability to learn to do the magic that I can do,” I explained. “They would have to be young to learn it and they would have to go away with us to learn it. After a few moons, they will return to you for a few days, then come back for a few days before spending a few more moons with us. This will continue for several years until we have them fully trained at which time they will be returned to you. But only the young can be taught like this and not everyone can learn magic. Do you have any wargs or greenseers amongst you?”

As it turned out, they had a little girl who was a greenseer and two wargs, one of whom looked of a similar age with Rowan. The other was an old man. None of the Free Folk knew how old they were, especially since the sun and moons had not been visible for years. In some of the other keeps that had Free Folk, we found a couple more wargs that could be students. Warging had been very rare before the Long Night, but was more common in the people who had survived thus far.

I had feared that Margaery’s son, Rowan, would only other student at first. But between the children of the Free Folk wargs who served me and the Free Folk who survived in the North, we had six more students. The girl greenseer from Deepwood Motte and Rowan were the only ones that Jojen judged to have the sight well enough to be taught divination. While we were teaching these students we would also be catching Rickon and the adult wargs up in a year of remedial instruction.

I had, by now made a bunch of wands. All of them were made from weirwood. The ones that had been simply snapped off proved to work better than the ones I tried to carve. I tried a variety of cores from magical animals: dire wolves, feathers from magical owls, hair from wizards. . . . The best results came from using the hair/head leaf from a Child of the Forrest. But none of them were as good as the ones a professional wand-maker had made in my previous life. I tested everyone on Bran’s old wand. But it didn’t like anyone I tested it with.

Once everything was ready, we officially started classes. Margaery and Rowan had to be portkeyed in daily, but the rest of us were here full time.

After that first year, Rowan wanted to stay at the school with his peers so only Margaery was making the daily trips back to Riverrun. She had decided to that portkeys were safe for pregnant women and all the women from our trip to the Citadel had given birth within nine months. None of them wanted to know who had sired their children. But I sereptvisously cast the charm to find out that I had fathered Brienne’s and Sarella’s child and Tormund and fathered Margaery’s and Arya’s child. Don’t tell anyone.

After a year of intense study, Lyanna Mormont took her husband, Rickon away from the school so she could resettle Bear Island with a mix of survivors of the fall of the island, Ironborn, and Free Folk.

Rowan had been studying two years and started learning from Trystane how to dance into the wereworld, when his brother, Ash became a student. But it was when my daughter Minisa started, that the number of students really started to increase. The ability to do magic is very rare. As near as I can tell the only ones in Westeros who have enough magic to use a wand are my own children, the Starks and some of the Free Folk. Jon’s Force powers appear to be even rarer in the world. Eventually, Bran’s old wand picked his daughter, Willow, as it’s new owner. She became Jojen’s third student to learn his very rare talent of divination.