Haedryn moved like smoke through the tunnels beneath the Red Keep.
It was still dark above—stars sharp and cold in the sky—but down here, in the deep stone veins of the castle, there was no time. Just silence, old dust, and the feeling of breath held too long.
She walked with purpose. One hand on her wand, the other steadying the satchel at her hip. Her steps made no sound. The silence wasn't natural—it was woven around her like a second cloak, laid into the stones by quiet magic hours before.
She paused beside a crack in the wall, just outside the small council chamber. Faint echoes filtered through: the shift of boots, low conversation behind closed doors. She reached into her satchel and drew a thin shard of black-green dragonglass, etched with slivers of silver like veins of frozen lightning.
With a whisper, she pressed it into the crack. It vanished into the stone with a soft pulse of light. From another pouch, she drew a small, iron-bound book, already keyed. She touched her wand to the spine, and the pages stirred—blank now, but not for long.
The rune would listen. The book would write. No one in the room above would ever know.
She placed five more.
One behind the kitchen scullery wall. One near the Hand's solar. One beneath the maester's vaults. One at the edge of the royal wing, near Viserys's chamber. And one just outside the corridor that led to Prince Daemon's rooms. She lingered at none of them.
Each had its book. Each was secure and safe, they would write what everything they heard. Let them play the games and think themselves safe she would be aware of what was happening and the reaction of the most powerful people in the realm to her existence in the future.
Nothing would be lost.
By the time she reached her safehouse, dawn had begun bleeding into the edges of the sky.
Inside, the last of her things were already packed. The Elder Wand was stored in a wrist holster, The Resurrection Stone rested on her left hand, The Sword of Gryffindor was sheathedand slung across her back. The knowledge she had brought with her to this world was stored away and ready to be used to protect what she wished again in the future.
Everything she needed to begin again.
The house itself had been remade. Not rebuilt—just... disguised. A glamour wrapped its exterior now, making the stone look cracked, the roof half-collapsed, the door swollen and warped. It would seem abandoned to anyone without magic. But inside, the wards thrummed quietly, still tethered to her blood and to the witch's name.
A sanctuary in waiting.
She stepped outside.
The street was empty. No carts. No guards. No dogs barking. Her wards held firm.
She pulled the broom from her satchel. It was sleek, dark, slightly curved at the shaft. Fast. She traced a rune along the bristle collar, felt the core hum, and mounted.
She didn't launch from the street.
Instead, she rose vertically, slow and straight, through still air and chimney haze until she cleared the rooftops. Fog still hung over the bay. The city slept beneath her, unaware.
A spell shimmered around her — not invisibility, but misdirection. Light bent away. Eyes slid past. Even birds, passing high on the morning wind, shifted course without knowing why.
She turned north and flew.
The first day passed beneath a pale, cloud-choked sky. She stayed high — always above the treetops, sometimes inside the clouds themselves. She took no roads, followed no river. Her path was drawn through instinct and memory. She stopped only once: a burned-out tower in a thicket of pine, long abandoned, now claimed for one night's sleep. She set no fire. Ate little. Slept with her wand beneath her hand.
The second day, the land below thinned. Hills replaced towns. Snow touched the trees in shadowed hollows. The wind grew colder. She passed Harrenhal in the distance and did not pause.
By the third day, she was flying over the Neck. Fog thickened, and strange cries echoed from the swamps below. She flew faster.
The North rose around her like a slow exhale.
By the end of the fourth day, she saw the shimmer of White Harbor under starlight — distant and golden along the coast. She kept to the clouds and turned northeast, skimming the winter winds.
The fifth day was sea and silence.
When she saw Skagos at last, it rose from the water like something ancient and asleep. The cliffs were high and jagged. Snow clung to the rock like teeth. The trees were black, bent by wind. Nothing moved along the coast.
No ships. No smoke. No roads.
Just wilderness.
She circled twice at high altitude, ensuring no eyes could find her. Then she angled downward and found a ledge along the island's upper ridge — a flat, wind-battered shelf of stone ringed by frost-hardened pines.
She landed.
Her boots crunched into snow.
The cold here was different. Not cruel, exactly — but serious. Unforgiving. The kind of cold that remembered everything and forgave nothing.
She stayed still for a long time.
The air carried no sound.
No eyes met hers.
But she felt the place watching.
She would not be welcomed. That much was clear already. The Skagosi might not take kindly to a stranger shaping wards into their land, or drawing power from roots they claimed by blood.
Some would resist.
Some might threaten what she would build.
She would not hesitate.
She had killed before. She would kill again.
But not today.
Today, she was a whisper.
She walked to the center of the clearing and knelt, palm pressed against the frozen ground.
The land said nothing.
But it did not pull away.
"I'm not here to rule," she murmured. "I'm here to keep something breathing."
The wind did not answer.
----
The wind didn't rest at dawn.
It scraped down from the northern peaks like a blade, slicing through pine and stone alike. Snow blew sideways across the ridge where Haedryn stood, boots braced in the crusted ice, eyes fixed on the eastern horizon. She held her wand in one hand, a flat rune stone in the other—polished, blood-marked, and etched with a looped sigil drawn from Earth's oldest magic.
She pressed it into the snow at the cliff's edge, whispered the final word, and felt the spell lock into place.
The ward flared, invisible but real. A slow wave rolled outward, joining three others she had already placed at the island's cardinal corners. The result wasn't a barrier—not a wall or shield—but a shift. A softening of the air. The wind at her back eased just slightly, as if pushed wide. The bite of cold dulled beneath her cloak.
Not warmth. Not comfort. But control.
She exhaled once, slow and even. Then turned west.
This was the fourth point. The last. The final anchor in a perimeter she'd spent the last two days walking alone. Skagos wasn't small—at least not in hardship. But its shape was jagged and clear. Three major ridges, two natural harbors, and a single mountain range that tore through the middle like a buried knife.
With the fourth rune stone placed, her next step began.
She opened her satchel and drew out a sheet of soft dragon-hide parchment—blank to the eye, until she tapped the embedded runes with her wand. Slowly, the ink revealed itself. A living map. The coastlines darkened, cliffs thickened, ridgelines rippled. Trees flickered into shape like shadows. And, slowly, small dots of light began to glow across the land.
People.
She counted them.
The map showed approximately five thousand scattered across the island—clustered in fishing camps, mountain villages, and isolated stoneholds hidden deep in the forested valleys. No central authority. No castles. Just survival.
That was fine. She didn't want their attention.
The map shifted again—she adjusted the filter with a tap, revealing not human heat signatures but large animal patterns. Dotted along the eastern slope and southern coast were massive, slow-moving shapes that didn't fit any known beast she'd encountered in this world.
She zoomed in with a sweep of her wand.
There.
She saw one clearly now. Broad, thick-bodied. Covered in shaggy fur. Its horn was massive—twice the length of its skull and pointed forward like a sharpened battering ram.
A unicorn. Or at least, this world's answer to one.
It wasn't beautiful. It was brutal.
Built like a rhinoceros, shaggy like a winter elk, with eyes that glinted intelligent in the magical vision overlay. She watched it lower its head and crash through a tree trunk like it was tinder.
Her lips thinned slightly in respect.
Not prey. Not easily hunted. But valuable.
Unicorn horn had properties—purification, magical conductivity, stabilization in ritual work. If these were anything like Earth's, their horns could change everything.
But she wouldn't hunt them. Not unless she had to. Blood wasn't cursed in them the way it had been back home, but that didn't mean it should be spilled lightly.
No—these were to be avoided. Or, perhaps, approached later. Tamed, if possible.
The Skagosi clearly didn't bother them. The map's humanoid markers kept a healthy distance. She made a mental note of that.
She tapped the parchment again, sealing the spell. The map rolled itself into a cylinder and vanished into its pocket inside her cloak. With it came a clear sense of the island's shape, the people's patterns, and the limits of her current safety.
Now she needed to find a place to build.
She spent the next two days scouting.
She didn't fly. That would make her visible in the clear air and defeat the purpose of learning the land by foot.
Instead, she walked the edges of ravines and scaled narrow switchbacks carved into the bones of cliffs. She followed rivers until they vanished under rock. She marked stone pillars with rune-stitches. Every night, she returned to a temporary shelter and fed the map with updates, expanding her detail.
The wilderness was alive, but not cruel. Wolves howled but didn't approach. Ravens circled once and left. Snow fell, but never so heavily she couldn't work.
On the third day, she found it.
A natural rise of land near the center of the island's western ridge. From it, she could see both harbors on a clear day. Below, a valley opened into sharp rock terraces—defensible, high, with snow-fed rivers running down through narrow passes. Game trails crossed nearby. The land had been used once—centuries ago. Stone blocks sat in the weeds, half-sunk, too square for nature.
Someone had tried to build here long ago.
She would succeed where they failed.
She walked the perimeter in silence, wand trailing in her fingers like a pen across parchment. She tasted the wind. Felt how it turned through the peaks.
The frost wouldn't kill her now. Not with the wards in place.
She stood in the center of the old foundation stones and stared out toward the pines.
"I will build here," she said simply.
Not a kingdom,Not a throne.But a place.
A stronghold for the forgotten. A home for magic.
And soon, a fire would burn here again. Not one to destroy—but one to guard.
----
The mountain rose behind her, massive and dark, layered with old ice and harder silence. Haedryn stood at the cleared shelf of stone she had carved herself—warded, sealed, claimed. The cold no longer clawed at her. The wind had learned to bend elsewhere.
This would be it. This would be her sanctuary.
She had spent the last day confirming what the terrain had whispered: the slope was volcanic, the rock warm to the touch, the mountain dormant, not dead. She'd found ventlines, steam pockets, old veins of dry basalt beneath the snow.
She stood alone, her hand on the stone.
"Begin."
Her wand swept in a wide arc. Transfiguration first—layered and slow. Stone melted and shifted, not broken or displaced but reshaped, coaxed into form by force and precision. Walls grew outward from the mountain, not foreign to it, but fused into it like roots into old bone.
The main keep formed first—bastioned, angular, brutal in posture. Then the central library tower, wide and tall, its windows rimmed in black steel. Then the connecting wings: barracks, towers, courtyards, all formed from mountain stone. Not a single brick was imported. It was all of the place.
She descended then, beneath the surface.
Below the foundation, she carved deep channels for the geothermal veins. Enchanted basalt piping followed, wrapped in protective wards. Heated water and steam would flow into the castle, warming walls, chambers, and floors. She placed pressure vents along the towers and lined each system with failsafes, magically reinforced.
Then she carved further: tunnels. Interior routes for soldiers or servants, and deeper still, a single wide bore tunnel at the rear of the mountain—sealed for now, but vast. A future passage for something larger. Something scaled.
Her thoughts flicked toward serpents.
She built her laboratory next. Down the east hall, three rooms below the surface. Vaulted ceilings, racks for herbs, preserved specimens from her stores. Copper worktables, potion siphons, and a full alchemy station lined the walls. She sealed the door with a twisting chain of runes—Earth-magic reinforced.
Then the vault. She stood before the blank stone wall, pricked her finger, and pressed her blood into the ward glyph. The rock parted.
A chamber unfolded: hexagonal, layered in blackstone and cold wardlight. She emptied her bag into it slowly—gold, goblin-sealed ledgers, gemstones, uncut and pure. These had come from Gringotts long ago, when she'd understood what being Master of Death meant. She laid each item down without sound. Not a hoard. A preparation.
She moved next to the library. The main wing spanned four floors and a tower spire. She levitated out the heart of her existence: the Potter library, the Peverell grimoires, and the Black family vault volumes. Each book was placed with care—cushioned, arranged by lineage and function.
On the highest shelf she mounted the old sigil: the Peverell crest, wrought in obsidian and bound to the central ward pillar of the castle. Its three-pointed design glowed faintly as it bound to the keep.
Then came the living quarters—spartan. Her rooms bore no luxury. A stone hearth, a deep tub piped with hot mountain water, a blackwood desk. That was enough.
In the main hall she carved a long table, rimmed in granite, surrounded by stone chairs rooted into the floor. Around the edges of the hall, she began placing watch stations—small niches to serve as ready points for guards, should she ever have them. The barracks sat one level below. Empty, for now.
The final touch was the high tower. Her observatory.
She carved its peak open to the stars, then sealed it with layered charmglass. A telescope extended from the southern arch, charmed for distance and clarity. Glyphs scrolled across the edges of the circular floor, marking date and time. She would chart this world as she had charted Earth, one star at a time.
She finished long after the moon had risen. The mountain had accepted her now.
The keep loomed behind her—no banners, no lights. Just dark stone set against darker rock. The air around it felt… quieter. The wind diverted. The snow did not fall on the walls.
She walked back to the library and placed her hand on the binding pillar below the Peverell crest. The stone was warm.
She whispered no words. There was no prayer, no promise.
This was hers now.
And it would be ready for what came next.
----
The wind had changed.
Lord Haerik Magnar stood outside his hall, wrapped in a patched cloak of seal fur, staring at the eastern range with a frown buried deep in his weather-creased face. Skagos had always been cruel, its wind a blade that never dulled, but now that blade had lost its edge. It wasn't warmth—nothing on this island ever was—but the bite was gone. The sky had cleared, and for the first time in living memory, the ice hadn't climbed down from the peaks overnight.
He knew it wasn't chance.
The thing in the mountain had grown.
It had begun as a blot—shadow against rock where no shadow belonged. Then the lines came: unnatural, layered, rigid. Straight walls in a place that had only ever known curve and chaos. Now towers rose from the slopes, black and vast and fused to the stone, as though the mountain itself had curled in submission.
No rider had come from it. No smoke rose, no fire signals, no trade. But Haerik had seen faint light there at night—cool and flickering, not flame, something… older.
He had sent no men. He wouldn't risk them. Not yet.
The people of Magnar lands had seen harder times than most—salt-winds that rotted meat as it hung, famines that hollowed the bones of babes. Still, they endured. But if something—someone—had come to the island with power enough to calm the wind and still the snow, then perhaps Skagos would no longer have to starve its own to survive.
He said nothing to his sons or his sworn. He only watched the dark stone gleaming against the cliff, massive and unmoving.
"If it means to help," he muttered to no one, "let it come. But let it show its face first."
He turned back into his hall. Another day of saltfish and boiled roots. Another day of waiting.
---
Blood sang in the snow.
Cregan Stane drove his axe into the drifted ice just for the pleasure of hearing it crack. All around him, the cliffs groaned with wind, the sea hissed beneath, and his men squatted around a fire made of whale bone and pitch.
The stories were already spreading—some new keep risen in the east, a black thing of stone and silence built without hands. Sorcery, they said. A conjuring. A curse.
He didn't care what it was.
He wanted it.
Not for faith. Not for power. He wanted its walls, its heat, its food. He wanted the flesh of whatever soft-bodied thing had brought it here, the screams of its servants, the gold they had to line such a place.
"Have you seen it?" one of his sons asked. "The lights?"
Cregan turned his head. The boy had too many teeth and not enough scars.
"I don't look at lights," he said. "I take them."
They all laughed.
No riders had gone that way—none dared. The slopes beyond the gulch were said to crackle at night, like fire under stone. But Cregan had sent one man in the dark. That man hadn't come back.
He didn't mourn him. One less mouth.
The great hall behind him was half-collapsed, its rafters sagging from rot, its hearths shallow and dead. His clan lived on boiled kelp and dog flesh now. If someone had come to Skagos to change that, then he'd take them apart to see how.
"Gear the boats," he barked. "I want men in the pass before the moon turns."
"And if it's demons?" someone muttered.
Cregan just spat.
"Then we eat them too."
---
Lady Syllia Crowl hadn't spoken in days.
Not to her sons, not to her guards, not to the witch-wife who sang in the lower caves. She sat in her long hall, bones clinking in the windchimes overhead, and stared east.
It was there. All of it. She'd known before her scouts confirmed it—before the carrion birds began to fly new routes, before the storms began to thin. Something had changed the land, and not from beneath. No quake. No slide.
This was intrusion.
And she hated intrusions.
She was old enough to remember the last time the south had tried to touch Skagos—a black-sailed ship come with furs and silver for trade. She'd watched them burn from her cliffside, laughed as her brothers used their bones for firewood.
Now this.
A fortress. Great and grim, half-swallowed by stone, lit with cold blue fire. Magic, surely. But not her kind. Not the old root-chants or the skin-binding rites. This was outsider magic. Raised in quiet, planted in rock, hidden behind no name or banner.
Her youngest had suggested diplomacy.
She'd hung him from the iron hooks and left him for the birds.
The Crowls didn't kneel. They didn't ask. And if something could build a fortress in a moon's time and bend the wind to silence, then it was either a god or a target.
Syllia stood, slow and stiff.
"Gather the blades," she told the guards. "The black ones."
The obsidian. Old stone. Hard and silent.
She stared out across the snowy range.
"Let's see if it bleeds."
---
They came with clubs and crude blades, believing stone would yield like bone.
Two Hundred and Eighty strong, House Crowl descended the eastern range with howls in their throats and murder in their eyes. No banners. No horns. Just furred shoulders, obsidian axes, and teeth filed to points. Syllia Crowl led them herself, blood in her mouth from biting her own tongue in glee.
They saw the fortress rising from the rock—black as night and massive, fused to the side of the mountain like it had always been part of it. Towering walls. Silent gate. No guards. No sound.
It reeked of arrogance.
They took it as weakness.
The slopes were hard, snow crusted and packed by weeks of windless quiet. The pass narrowed near the outer wall, and Syllia sent the front lines forward, ten abreast. Behind them, others dragged siege ladders, sharpened poles, and baskets of spiked stones to hurl over the parapets.
"Kill whatever's in there," she snarled. "Bring me the heart of the builder."
They moved quickly, halfway to the wall before the first sign of resistance.
It was not a man.
It was a sound.
Low. Grinding. As if mountains were shifting.
Then they saw them—shapes coiled along the towers, stone serpents too large for carving. Dozens, all basilisk-headed, with mouths open in eternal roar. Carved jaws, barbed ridges, gemstone eyes the color of frozen fire.
They moved.
Stone slithered against stone as they came to life, not with speed, but weight.
The first dropped from the wall like a falling boulder. It landed in the center of the vanguard and crushed three men flat. Their ribs split outward, blood spraying onto the snow. Another fell behind them, coiling around a cluster of raiders and tightening until bone and iron both cracked like kindling.
Men screamed. Some tried to run.
One serpent lunged—massive head reared, then slammed forward. It broke a shield wall like driftwood. Its jaws snapped once, catching a man's torso and biting clean through.
Syllia stood frozen, watching a creature of impossible weight slam its body down in a brutal arc. It hit the ice and sent a dozen bodies airborne, limbs folding the wrong way, heads caved in like rotten gourds.
"Fall back!" she shouted.
But there was no retreat. The serpents struck again—blunt force, crushing power, nothing graceful. One curled mid-fall and rolled, flattening the second rank. Bones splintered. Blood soaked the snow. Helmets burst like eggs beneath them.
The ladders never reached the walls.
One basilisk flung its body sideways into the stack of timber and bodies, scattering them like insects.
Another serpent dropped from a turret and twisted in the air, slamming side-first into the archers on the flank. They vanished beneath a storm of obsidian and broken flesh.
Syllia tried to rally her guard, only to watch the ground itself split as one enormous construct dragged its length across the path, sweeping a dozen warriors off the cliff with its tail.
"Fight!" she screamed. "Fight, you whoresons!"
A shadow passed overhead.
She looked up.
The largest of them all coiled atop the gatehouse, its body thick as the tower itself. It dropped, jaws wide, stone fangs like spears.
It landed on Syllia and the last of her inner circle.
There was no scream. Just a crunch—wet and final—and then silence.
The fortress stood untouched. No arrow fired from within. No magic hurled from the walls. The only movement was stone returning to its perch, serpents curling back into stillness, blood steaming beneath them.
By morning, the snow had begun to fall again—gentle, quiet, red-flecked.
----
Three days after the massacre of House Crowl, their bones still littered the ice like the cast-off shells of crabs, brittle and broken. Blood stained the snow in dark streaks. The blue fires above the gate of Peverell Keep had not dimmed.
The warband of House Stane marched through that ruin without flinching. Four hundred men and women in jagged furs and leathers, armed with whale bone clubs, rusty axes, and chipped obsidian blades. Their shields were mismatched slabs of driftwood and ice-hardened hide. No banners flew. No horns announced them.
They came like a blight.
Lord Cregan Stane walked at their head, a massive brute with a mouth full of broken teeth and a gaze like carved stone. He surveyed the wreckage of House Crowl, the rotting heaps of flesh and armor.
"They died loud," he said, stepping over a ribcage. "We'll die fed."
The men laughed, a wet, guttural sound. Their breath steamed in the thin air, but there was no wind. No snow. Just the stillness of watching stone.
They approached the gate. It remained closed. The blue flames flickered, casting long shadows on the ice.
Then came the whispers.
It was a sound like breath on skin, like memories sliding under bone. A man to Cregan's right suddenly flinched, grabbing his ears. Another dropped his weapon and began muttering his father's name. A third turned his head sharply and started sobbing — great, shaking sobs that had no place on a battlefield.
"They're just tricks!" Cregan bellowed. "Press forward!"
But the whispers grew louder, folding inward, burrowing. They did not scream — they reminded. Regret, guilt, shame — every hidden thought made raw. One man turned and stabbed the warrior beside him, shrieking that he'd lied about his wife. Another flung himself into the snow, clawing at his eyes. A third collapsed to his knees, vomiting blood.
Cregan pressed on. Twelve men remained when the madness burned out. The rest lay in heaps of butchered madness.
Then the gates opened.
From the darkness stepped a single figure: a woman, tall and pale, in blackened armor. Her red hair was unbound, catching the blue firelight like spilled wine. Her eyes were calm, unreadable. In her right hand, she held a sword that shimmered with ancient runes — steel red as flame, clear as glass.
She did not speak.
Cregan roared and charged. The others followed, scrambling through the snow.
One reached her first.
She raised no wand. The snow beneath him turned to sludge, sucking him down. He screamed until his mouth was full of dirt and ice.
Two more tried to flee.
The gargoyles moved.
They did not roar. They did not screech. They slithered — vast coils of basilisk-shaped stone, mouths wide and fangs jagged as razors. One man was crushed outright, his spine cracking like dry wood. The other vanished in a blur of jaws and blood.
Cregan met her in the center of the carnage.
Their blades clashed once. Twice.
On the third strike, hers slid beneath his guard and drove up through his ribs, out his back. He staggered, breath steaming red. "Witch," he gasped.
"Lord," she said coldly.
She twisted the blade. He died at her feet.
She turned and walked away.
Only one Stane warrior still lived — barely. His leg was shattered, his side torn open by a gargoyle's tail. He crawled, dragging himself through the snow. He did not cry out. The whispers had hollowed him. His mouth bled words he no longer understood.
He crawled past the broken forms of his kin. Past Cregan's body, already icing over. Past the gates that closed behind the red-haired woman.
He crawled toward the sea.
The sun fell. The world grew colder.
By morning, his fingers were frozen to the stone. His body locked in final motion. His mouth open in a last breath that never came.
Peverell Keep watched in silence.
Unmoving. Alive.
---
The fires had not gone out.
They hissed blue and steady in their sconces, bathing the walls of Peverell Keep in cold firelight. Outside, the snow lay in silence, painted with blood, fragments of bone half-swallowed by frost. Haedryn stood at the highest point of the tower, arms crossed, red hair swept back by wind that no longer pierced her.
Three days had passed since the last scream. Still, the air tasted of violence.
She turned her back on the view and crossed to the great table. The map hovered above it—Skagos, outlined in ink and runes, alive with drifting lights. Each dot was a soul. She touched her wand to the edge and whispered, "Update."
The lights shifted.
Before, five thousand. Now, less than three thousand.
She stared at the number for a long time. The gargoyles had not hesitated. The whispers had shown no mercy. And neither had she. She hadn't needed to.
But the weight of it pressed inward all the same.
Two great houses gone, extinguished in days. Their names would not echo long. There would be weeping somewhere — not on her mountain, but in huts, behind rough doors, beneath fur blankets. Skagos had always been harsh. But this was different. This was deliberate.
She moved her hand along the map's southern edge, where settlements still blinked faintly. The closest were twenty miles off. No one had dared approach since the attack. They knew the fate of Crowl and Stane. Fear had done what force could not.
Still, fear alone would not build what she needed.
She sat.
The chair creaked under her weight as she leaned forward, hands braced on the stone desk. Her castle—Peverell Keep—was real now, fused into the mountain, heated by volcanic veins, guarded by wards and stone. Her libraries had been shelved, each tome restored to its place: Potter, Peverell, Black. Thousands of years of knowledge. Every spell and secret she'd hoarded from Earth.
But books meant nothing if there was no one left to use them.
She needed people. Not just magic-born — people. Smiths. Masons. Teachers. Farmers. Families. Lives. She could not preserve what she'd come to save by standing alone forever behind a wall of death.
Someone had to step forward.
Her gaze shifted to the map's northern coast.
House Magnar. Still untouched. Still watching.
She reached for parchment. No quill—her wand moved, and the ink wrote itself, clean and stark.
---
To Lord Haerik Magnar,
I am not your enemy.
I came to this island to build, not to burn. I came to make a place where magic could live again. Not ruled. Not hoarded. Simply safe.
Houses Crowl and Stane chose war. They are gone.
You did not. That speaks to judgment, or patience, or both. I offer this:
Come to the keep.
See what I have made. Hear what I plan. Decide what future your house wants — not beneath me, but beside what I build.
Come as you wish. Armed or unarmed. I will raise no hand unless you do.
You owe me nothing. I offer this meeting freely.
But the gates will be open.
— Haedryn Peverell
She read it twice. It was enough.
From her pocket she withdrew her wand, angled it up, and conjured a large eagle.
The great bird spread its wings and shook it's feathers as it appeared into existence
"Take this to Lord Magnar," she whispered. "Wait for his reply."
The bifd dipped its head once, took the letter in its mouth, and flew silently into the air, disappearing through a window in her solar. The snow outside did not shift.
She lingered in the tower, eyes scanning the blue-lit valley below. It was so still now. Almost peaceful.
But she knew what lay beneath that stillness. Rage. Curiosity. Desperation.
The survivors would be whispering. Telling stories. The children would ask if the mountain had grown teeth.
Let them wonder.
She turned and made her way to the library. The scent of parchment and leather welcomed her. She walked past rows of spellbooks, fingers drifting over bindings older than Westeros. She stopped at a high shelf, reached for a Black family ledger, and opened it to a marked page.
There, in fine hand, were the laws of inheritance, bloodline tracing, warding through sacred ink.
She traced the margins. These were not just her past — they were her tools.
If Skagos would become the last safe place for magic, then it would start here. In these halls. With this blood.
And soon, with others.
But for now, she waited. A letter delivered. An island holding its breath.
And Haedryn, in the quiet heart of her fortress, lit another blue fire, and watched it dance.