The forest was gone.
Not destroyed — not yet — but left behind . Jon Snow stood on the jagged threshold of the ruin, where the ice ended and something older began. His feet rested on metal untouched by the world for ten thousand years. Smooth, cold, stained with the essence of time. The kind of place that shouldn't exist in Westeros — or anywhere this real.
Behind him, the old man was dying.
Jon could hear his lungs filling with blood, the trembling heartbeat, the resignation. It wasn't cruelty. The ruin had claimed him. The truth had scorched him. He had been a prophet for too long, and prophets burn brightest at the end.
"You are..." the man started, coughing hard, "the bridge."
Jon said nothing.
Because something in him had opened .
Not just to the warp. Not just to the ruin. But to the vastness of what he had once thought impossible — the truth behind the world .
Westeros, Essos, all the lands beyond — they were not alone. They had never been. The weirwoods, the magic, the children of the forest, the Valyrian sorcery — it was all echoes. Not separate creations, but refractions of something vaster. This world was one of many, isolated like a candle in a cold crypt, waiting to be swallowed.
Jon could see it now — not just as a dream or vision, but as reality . Threaded into every breath. He had become a lens through which the past, present, and possible collided.
Ghost paced at the edge of the ruin. Uncomfortable. Alert. His red eyes fixed on Jon, as if trying to understand the man his master was becoming.
Jon placed his hand on the obsidian arch of the ruin. It pulsed — not with heat, but with psychic resonance.
It recognized him.
More than that — it obeyed.
The warp coiled around his presence like a great serpent circling fire. It did not devour. It waited . He was no sorcerer, no daemon prince, no psyker driven mad by power.
He was something else.
A rebirth of command incarnate.
He stepped into the circle, and the world bent.
The memory came not like a dream — but like a scream across time.
Golden armor. A sword that could cleave reality itself. The cries of trillions. The Astronomican burning with the pain of sacrifice. The Emperor, before the fall — before the Heresy. Before the throne.
A mind shaped not by ego, but necessity.
Jon staggered as it surged through him. Not knowledge — experience .
He fell to his knees, gripping the ice-slick ground as stars flared behind his eyes.
"They will call it heresy. But what is heresy to the dead?"
"The truth is not a kindness. It is a crucible."
"To protect mankind, I became more than man. To protect this world, you must become more than broken."
The voice—his own, but not. Deep. Ageless. Full of agony and power.
He saw the Primarchs. Twenty. Then nineteen. Then eighteen. Brothers made not born. Sons of a war that never ended. Echoes of them drifted in his soul — and although he could not name them, he felt the loss .
"You were made not to rule — but to rebuild."
When he rose, the world was quieter.
The stars no longer screamed.
But something inside him did.
That night, Jon sat beneath a dead tree on the ruin's edge, cloak wrapped around his shoulders, sword across his knees. The blade was common — Castle-forged, Northern in make. Its weight no longer suited the man he was becoming.
He missed Longclaw.
But even that blade, Valyrian and deadly, would soon feel… small.
The fire crackled, but gave no warmth. Not because of the cold — but because Jon no longer felt it as he had before.
Ghost rested nearby, ever watchful.
The old man had died hours ago. Jon had buried him beneath a frost-covered stone, without a name. The old tongue had no word for what the man had been. He was not a maester, nor a sorcerer, nor a priest. He was something between. A gatekeeper. And the final remnant.
And now Jon was alone.
But not really.
He could feel them.
Eyes watching from the veil.
Not men. Not White Walkers.
Others.
Warp-things.
Some curious. Some afraid. Some hungry.
None dared approach.
And deep within the earth, the pylon beneath the ruin pulsed with hidden life.
Jon had seen it in the vision: a fragment of a Black Ship, cracked through reality during the ancient wars of the stars. Its machine-spirit long dead, its bones fossilized into legend. But its presence had faded into the weirwoods, into the magic, into the myths of the First Men.
It had infected the land like a forgotten god.
And Jon — Jon was its answer.
He spent the next few days in silence.
Walking the ruins.
Listening to the air.
Trying to understand the power blooming in his soul.
He no longer needed sleep, but sometimes he rested. Not to dream — but to listen . To hear the layers of thought that passed through the warp, layered like echoes in a cavern.
Some belonged to men. Some things no man had ever named.
In one such rest, he saw his family.
Not clearly. Just flashes.
Arya, sailing west, her knife a shadow of her will.
Sansa, sitting on her throne, wearing a face too old for her years.
Bran — or what Bran had become — staring at a star-map far from Westeros. Watching. Waiting .
And Tyrion, burdened, carrying his guilt like armor, whispering the name "Jon Snow" when no one could hear.
They believed him gone.
They were wrong.
On the seventh day, Jon stood at the ruin's center again.
He had felt it brewing for hours. A change in the air. A ripple in the threads of fate.
And then it came.
A storm.
But not of snow.
Of power.
The sky screamed — not with wind, but with memory .
Jon turned his gaze upward — and saw it.
A tear in the fabric of night.
Not visible to men.
But to him — blinding .
A flare of light, spearing from the stars to the north. Beyond the Frostfangs. Beyond the Shivering Sea. A place untouched by men for a thousand years.
Jon felt the warp concentrate like a lens.
Something had seen him.
Something had answered .
And it had sent a test.
They came that night.
Figures, cloaked in black, faces pale and eyes burning with hollow light. Not wights. Not walkers. Not dead.
Warp echoes . Remnants of the first contact. Half-men shaped by the ruin long ago, kept alive by warped time and ancient hate. Forgotten by the world, remembered only by the stars.
They didn't speak.
They attacked.
Jon did not raise his sword.
He raised his will .
And the forest itself broke .
The first attacker was crushed mid-stride — body folding in on itself as if gravity itself betrayed him. The second burst into fire — not of heat, but of sheer rejection. Warp-energy made manifest.
Jon stepped forward once — and the ground beneath him glowed gold.
His eyes blazed with twin suns.
He raised one hand — and spoke not a word.
The last two shadows stopped.
And fell to their knees.
Not in worship.
In recognition .
They had seen the Emperor once.
In the far distance of memory.
And now, they saw his spark again.
When morning came, the ruin was quiet again.
Jon stood at its edge.
He didn't feel proud.
He didn't feel glory.
Only purpose .
He was no longer just a man. No longer even just a Stark.
He was a fulcrum.
And the world was tilting.