Year: 279 AC
The snows of Winterfell came early that year, curling down from the mountains like the breath of sleeping giants. The air was knife-cold and clean, the ground sheathed in frost even in late autumn. Smoke curled from the towers, and the clang of iron echoed faintly from the yard. Within that harsh rhythm, Wulfric Snow resumed the life that had nearly been broken.
His training began again before the sun rose.
Ser Rodrik Cassel, master-at-arms and grizzled as any wolf in the mountains, waited in the frostbitten yard. Wulfric approached with a quietness that unnerved even the guards. The boy had grown leaner, not softer. He bore his scars like heirlooms, silent, unashamed. Scars across his knuckles and palms, along his growing body and the scar that started it all, an angry reminder from top to bottom along his face.
Rodrik handed him a sword first. Not the clumsy wooden ones he'd started with, but a dull-edged blade of real steel, small enough for his still-growing arms. Wulfric gripped it with familiarity. He had spent more hours than most boys twice his age with the sword in hand. His footwork still stuttered, especially on slick frost, and his strikes lacked the flourish of seasoned squires. But there was something else, an instinct for weight and distance. He could read the blade's movement before it finished.
"Your feet will betray you," Rodrik muttered after a missed counter. "But your eyes, they've already seen the end. Make your weakness nonexistent and uour strength far reaching boy and you'll live longer than most."
Next came the axe. Too heavy for a child, but Wulfric had returned to it every night since his first lesson a year ago. He practiced slow, deliberate swings at thick logs behind the forge, mimicking the posture and grip of older guards. The bearded axe edge bit differently than a sword. Less finesse, more fury. Rodrik noted how Wulfric compensated with clever angles, using momentum instead of brute strength.
"Still too raw," the knight said, watching him adjust his stance. "But the axe remembers your hands."
The spear, however, frustrated him. Its balance felt unnatural. He held it too high, then too low. The point wavered with each lunge. Rodrik corrected his grip again and again, patience tempered by steel.
"Trust your reach," he said. "The spear's no sword. It wants to keep death away, not bring it close."
Wulfric tried again and again. He mimicked the guards during their sparring matches, copying the rhythmic hop of their feet, the way they jabbed without overcommitting. It took time and effort after that first few months but now he could land a thrust against a practice dummy with something like precision.
Then came the throwing knives. He'd been drawn to them from the moment he saw the scout Joss practicing on wooden targets beyond the kennels. Joss moved like the cold wind, calm and sudden. Wulfric shadowed him from a distance, memorizing every twitch of muscle.
At first, his knives clattered off the wall. They hit the dirt. They flew wild, but he adjusted. He watched his breath, his wrist, the subtle tension before release. After days of quiet struggle, one knife stuck, then another, and he smiled softly.
He did not celebrate though, no.. celebration was earned after victory and he was far from his sought out victory.
The shield, broad and cumbersome, challenged him the most. Too wide for his young frame, it pulled at his stance. Yet he practiced, not just blocking, but watching the way guards turned defense into offense. He saw how they led with the shield, slammed into their foe, then followed through with a quick strike.
Wulfric imitated these movements slowly, watching himself in the mirrored surface of a frozen trough. He learned to pivot, to lower his center, to brace.
Rodrik, watching him from across the yard, narrowed his eyes.
"He mimics like a mirror," he murmured to one of the guards. "But sharper, he learns what hasn't been said."
The guards began to whisper a growing fevered voice. "The boy moves like he's twice-watched the world. He doesn't talk much, but he watches, learns, and recovers."
Some started to call him battle born or the little frost giant. No matter what they called him though, all looked forward to his growth.
-
The crypts called to him in the quiet.
It began not in the darkness below, but in the archives above.
One snowy afternoon, Wulfric sat across from Maester Walys, his nose deep in brittle parchment filled with ancient census records. They were dull, almost painfully so, but within the margins, Wulfric noticed a half-faded notation penned in a different hand, older and scratchier:
"Survey results of the eastern ridges, preserved beneath the stones of the third tier. Do not disturb, records sealed under the Watcher's Tomb."
It struck him as odd. Wulfric had wandered the crypts more than once, but he'd never heard of a Watcher's Tomb. Walys, when asked, shrugged the question off with a mutter about old myths and lost names.
"If it's buried that deep, best to let it rest," the maester said with a tired sigh. But the remark only sharpened Wulfric's interest.
That night, with a lantern and a steady pace, Wulfric descended the narrow stairs into the crypts. Past the kings and lords he knew by name and into the third tier, where names were worn smooth and the chill turned sharp. He passed a half-cracked column, then stopped.
The stone to his left bore no name. Just a carving, barely discernible, of a face with hollow eyes and a crown of thorns. The Watcher.
Behind the tomb's base, a loose slab gave way. Inside the hollow space was a brittle oil-wrapped ledger.
The writing was faint, the language archaic, but Wulfric had studied enough to read pieces. It wasn't a personal record or family genealogy, it was economic, geographic, almost like a surveyor's report.
One phrase returned to him each time he opened it:
"The Forgotten Hill remains untouched, its gate sealed in cold stone. May its watchers never wake."
Next to it, a sigil he didn't recognize, three weirwood branches forming a triangle, ringed by five wolves.
He spent three nights pouring over it by candlelight. When he returned to Walys's archives, he found no mention of the sigil or the hill. Nothing in the volumes on geography, or old keeps, or land grants.
The deeper he searched, the more questions bloomed. Walys's shelves held hundreds of books, yet all were written after the time period referenced in the ledger. The oldest scrolls had been recopied and edited over generations. Any direct ties to the "Forgotten Hill" were missing, as if erased.
And that absence spoke louder than answers.
Wulfric turned the sigil in his hands again and again, sketching it over and over. It haunted him, three branches, five wolves. It wasn't a house sigil. Not one any living lord would carry. Yet it felt Northern. Ancient.
Something older than castles or swords.
He thought to ask Walys again but hesitated. The maester had already dismissed it once. And deep down, Wulfric didn't want words that would shrink the mystery. He wanted truth, untainted by fear or forgetfulness.
So he returned to the crypts, not to search tombs, but to listen to the stone.
Somewhere deeper, beneath the weight of centuries, the North was still whispering.
Wulfric was curious and so Wulfric went deeper.
The tunnel that led him deeper still was narrow and rough, barely tall enough for a grown man to stand upright. He followed the whisper of instinct, dragging his torch through cobwebs and bone-cold silence. It was a wrong step that guided him, a slip on wet moss, a tumble against carved stone. He hit the ground hard with a bone rattling thud. Blood from his palm smeared across the floor in almost greedy delight.
The ground groaned with trembling pressure.
Where his blood had touched the stone was a runic circle, so faint it might have once been mistaken for simple chisel marks. But as the blood soaked in, the symbols flared. Not with light, but with feeling, a low tremor in the air, as if the crypt itself exhaled.
A section of wall rumbled inward.
The dust that poured from it tasted of old iron and ash. Wulfric rose slowly, cradling his bruised side and tender hand, and stepped through the new opening.
The vault below was massive, ever encompassing stretching beyond what he could perceive.
It opened like the ribcage of a sleeping beast. Tall stone arches curved overhead, etched with the spiral motifs of weirwood branches. Roots, bleached and smooth, wound their way down from the stone ceiling like gnarled fingers, clutching the air. Vines thick as wrists crept along the walls, some twisted into forgotten runes, others coiled protectively around stone thrones.
The air was heavy with the scent of ancient iron and something darker, old blood, worked into the very stone. It was not unpleasant, merely potent, like the breath of the earth itself. A low hum seemed to emanate from everywhere and nowhere at once, vibrating in the bones more than the ears.
Each tomb was shaped not as a simple grave, but as an altar, guarded by statues of wolves whose eyes were carved with unnerving precision. Some of them seemed to watch him. Some of them seemed to breathe.
Scrolls rested in stone cradles, wax long since dried and cracked. Maps stretched across slabs like the skin of some great beast, painted in pigments now faded but no less vibrant. They showed rivers no longer flowing, forests now fields, and symbols that had no name in the histories he knew.
The mural at the far end grew more vivid the closer he drew. It showed a hill crowned in bone-white trees, five wolves circling it beneath a storm-wracked sky. The trees bled crimson from their eyes, and in the center of it all, a basin.
Not quite an altar. Not quite a throne. It was carved from a single slab of black stone, veined with crimson so dark it shimmered only when the torchlight passed over it. Along its inner lip, more runes had been etched, some darkened by the blood of eons past.
Wulfric stood in awe. His hand shook. His scar itched like fire.
He stepped forward, one foot in front of the other as his hairs stood on end.
The humming deepened, resonating through his chest. His heart pounded. He reached out, not to touch the basin, but to steady himself on the stone frame nearby. He felt warmth, faint but pulsing, like a heartbeat. His own? Or something older?
This place, this vault of memory, had been sealed. Not buried, not forgotten, but guarded.
Wulfric stared at the five wolves in the mural again. He understood now, they weren't beasts. They were guardians, Watchers, Wardens over whatever this was.
He turned, slowly taking in every tomb, every carving, every whisper that seemed to linger on the air.
He had not stumbled into a secret.
He had been called.
And the The North was the caller.
He spoke to no one of what he saw, not to Rodrik, nor Benjen, nor Maester Walys. He spoke to no one about what happened or what he found. But something had changed.
That night, he returned to the archives. He found a tome on dialects of the North. Then another, on the runes of the First Men. Then one more, about the unspoken tongue of the Old Gods.
Each night after, long after the fires dimmed and the keep fell silent, Wulfric studied.
He studied the old tongue. The Norse tongue. The gods' tongue.
The vault below had been waiting. Now, he would be ready to understand it. Now he would be ready to embrace its secrets...