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In the banquet hall, blades were drawn from every direction, gleaming steel leveled at Roose Bolton, cutting off every escape route.
The North's soldiers didn't hesitate. Not even a flicker of it.
One word from Lynn and they would chop the Lord of the Dreadfort into pieces.
Yet facing a trap with no exit, Roose Bolton's ashen face slowly curled into a smile , something deeply, wrongly amused.
He had lost. In every game of scheming and strategy, he had lost completely.
But he hadn't lost everything.
He still had his final card.
He still had the power to flip the table.
"Lord Lynn."
Roose Bolton rose from his chair, unhurried. He smoothed the front of his plain pink cloak with a steady hand, adjusting it with the same composed elegance he might have shown at a feast.
"You are clever. Far more clever than I expected."
"But you made a mistake."
"A fatal one."
"You were too arrogant. You never should have... let me bring them inside Winterfell."
He clapped his hands once.
"Come in."
The words had barely left his mouth when the sound of clanking armor rose from beyond the door.
Every head in the banquet hall turned at once.
"What's happening?!"
BOOM!
Before anyone could react, the heavy oak door exploded inward. Whatever hit it from the other side struck with a force that shattered it into splinters, wood chips scattering across the floor like thrown dice.
Ten figures walked in through the wreckage. Tall. Silent.
They wore black chainmail identical to the knights at Roose Bolton's back. Iron masks covered their faces, hiding everything except their eyes.
But those weren't human eyes.
There was nothing in them. No anger, no hunger, no calculation. Just a flat, dead cold.
Each figure gripped a curved blade, the steel etched with a dull black radiance that seemed to eat the candlelight around it.
Their armor wasn't metal. It was leather , dark red, oiled to a waxy sheen. Up close, the surface showed faint ridges, like the grain of muscle beneath skin.
Because that was exactly what it was.
Not animal hide.
Human skin.
At Roose Bolton's gesture, they bared their chests , flayed open, raw and ruined, a bloody mess. Yet no blood dripped. Not a drop.
One of them reached up and removed its mask.
Sunken eye sockets. Pupils loose and unfocused. Its mouth had been sewn shut, leaving nothing but a warped, puckered seam, like something was still trying to scream from behind the stitches.
"What are they..."
Ramsay was already on his knees. The moment those ten figures stepped through the door, his whole body began to shake , deep, convulsive tremors, the kind that start in the bones. Raw terror flooded his eyes.
He didn't know what they were. Even he didn't know.
Lynn tilted his head toward his soldiers.
"Go ahead. Get a feel for them."
"I'll cover you if anything goes wrong."
He wanted to know the gap between a normal soldier and whatever these things were. Whether they were worth understanding.
"Kill!"
One of the Northern soldiers took Lynn at his word, steadied himself, bellowed, and charged with his sword raised.
The blood guard didn't bother to look at him properly. It swung the curved blade once, loose and casual.
A streak of black light.
CLANG!
The officer's fine steel longsword snapped in half. The soldier lurched back, stumbling, staring at the hilt in his hand.
The room went still.
"That's impossible."
"That was tempered steel."
Lynn watched carefully. He saw what the others missed , it wasn't the edge of the blade doing the cutting. It was the black radiance around it, threaded through with something that felt like death.
Interesting.
The blood guards didn't wait for anyone to finish being shocked.
They moved.
No wind-up. No wasted motion. They simply were still, and then they weren't , shadows bleeding through candlelight, pouring silently into the ranks of Northern soldiers.
Every swing brought a slash of black light. Every flash of black light left a soldier disarmed, his weapon sheared away, his armor ripped open.
No pain. No hesitation. A soldier's sword found one of their bodies and pierced through , the blood guard didn't even flinch. It kept moving. Kept cutting.
These battle-hardened Northern veterans fell apart like something that had never been trained at all.
In under a minute, the hall was chaos.
The only reason any of them were still standing was Lynn , ice magic thrown in at the last instant every time a killing blow came down, buying them time they wouldn't have had otherwise.
Now the survivors clustered in a ragged half-circle in front of him, still trying to hold a line.
Lynn raised his hand and waved them back.
"That's enough. I have what I needed."
"All of you did well. I'll see you're rewarded."
"You're not their match. Step aside — it's my turn."
Lynn moved forward.
"Ha... hahahaha!"
Roose Bolton broke. Laughter poured out of him, cold and fraying at the edges, bouncing off the stone walls of the empty hall. The laughter of a man who had been kneeling over a grave and suddenly realized the grave was someone else's.
"Lynn! You see now!"
"This is my trump card! This is why I dared set foot in Winterfell!"
He fixed his stare on Lynn , the man who had not moved, had not flinched, had not changed expression once through any of it.
"You won? You planned for everything?"
"Your schemes are nothing in front of real power. Nothing!"
"Now it's my turn!"
"Kneel. Beg me. Do it now."
"Perhaps I'll do your skin more carefully than the others."
"You'll make a fine addition to my collection."
Roose Bolton's face had gone somewhere past fury, past triumph , somewhere sick and blazing and wholly his own.
The ten blood guards turned as one and fixed their dead eyes on Lynn.
Lynn didn't bother with Roose's raving.
He looked up slowly, gaze moving across the ten silent figures without urgency.
Deep in his eyes, too faint for anyone else to catch, a flash of green.
[Green Vision]!
Images crashed into his mind all at once.
He saw Roose Bolton in a lightless chamber beneath the Dreadfort, seated across a table from several men in black robes, their faces crawling with tattooed runes. A deal being struck in the dark.
They called themselves warlocks. They had come from the Shadow Lands.
They brought knowledge , the darkest and most wretched kind. Necromancy.
Roose Bolton hadn't wanted anything to do with them. He didn't believe in magic. He believed in leverage and betrayal , in things he could understand and use and discard. Not this.
But Lynn had risen too fast.
Fast enough to reach into something deeper than calculation and pull out fear.
One month.
Not even a full month.
In the space of that single month, this young man had closed his fist around the chaotic Riverlands and the leaderless Vale as though they were nothing. His army of giants. Three dragons.
It was beyond what Roose Bolton had frameworks to explain.
Traditional war meant nothing against something like this. That was when he understood it. That was when fear made his decision for him.
He paid in his family's savings , generations of accumulated wealth. He paid in things he refused to look at too closely, costs that left marks he'd carry the rest of his life. And he got his warlocks.
He turned the Dreadfort's dungeons over to them. The strongest men. The most brutal. Death row.
The warlocks killed them with methodical cruelty, and then they used the bodies , stitched together with dark materials carried from the Shadow Lands , to forge ten things that didn't hurt, didn't fear, and didn't stop.
The blood guards.
Roose Bolton's final gambit. His deepest secret.
Lynn followed the thread of the warlocks' memories east. Across the Narrow Sea. Across the vast breadth of Essos.
To a land where light had forgotten to come.
Asshai.
And east of Asshai , past the edge of every map, past the places cartographers simply left blank , the Shadow Lands.
No sunlight reached there. The sky stayed black, always. Twisted mountains of black stone clawed upward into clouds that never broke. Black rivers ran through the valleys, slick and oiled, carrying no fish , only pale, eyeless things that drifted in the dark water. Along the banks grew black grass that fed on flesh. The air tasted of rot and something older than rot, something that had been decaying since before anyone was alive to name it.
Ancient cities lay ruined everywhere, vast and gutted, like the ribcages of creatures too enormous to imagine. Silent. Standing.
They said this was where dragons were first born. The root of all dark magic.
Even the shadowbinders of Asshai — the most powerful practitioners on that continent — didn't walk those lands without reason to. The cursed ground repelled even them.
And these warlocks were from there.
They weren't independent. They were a scouting party , sent ahead to probe Westeros, to measure its depth and resistance. Behind them, something larger waited. Something Lynn didn't have a name for yet.
The vision ended.
Lynn pulled his gaze back to the room.
His expression hadn't shifted. But somewhere in the depths of those dark eyes, something that hadn't been there before now burned quietly.
So that's it.
Necromancy. The Shadow Lands.
This world was finally getting interesting.
"Lynn! Are you deaf?!"
"I told you to kneel!"
Roose Bolton's shout dragged him back.
Lynn looked at the man — the Lord of the Dreadfort, lord of nothing left, shaking with the kind of desperation that had curdled into madness , and smiled. Not with contempt. Something closer to pity.
"Roose Bolton."
"You think a handful of tricks imported from the Shadow Lands is enough to challenge me?"
"That's the absolute power you've been saving?"
Lynn's voice was quiet. Which somehow made it worse.
Roose Bolton's certainty cracked. Damn it , how does he know about the Shadow Lands? The warlocks hadn't arrived until after Ramsay fled. Only a handful of his most trusted men knew any of this. Was there a traitor? Had there always been one?
And Lynn still wasn't afraid. He wasn't calculating, wasn't stalling.
Does he have something else?
"Stop trying to work it out, Lord Bolton."
"Let me show you today."
"What real power looks like."
Lynn rose from his chair without hurry.
He didn't draw a weapon. He didn't glance at the blood guards surrounding him.
He simply extended his right hand.
HUM!
A wave of energy detonated outward from Lynn at its center, vast and sudden and wrong in the way a thunderclap inside a room is wrong. The air seized. The entire banquet hall seemed to hold its breath.
Every candle died at once.
Total darkness.
In it, two things still gave light: the ten pairs of blood-red eyes belonging to the blood guards, and the blue glow rising steadily in Lynn's own.
"What... what is that?"
The fear in Roose Bolton's voice was no longer something he was managing.
He could see it. In the palm of Lynn's extended right hand, conjured from nothing, a cluster of blue ice dust swirled and pulsed , dreamlike, crystalline, barely the size of a fist.
The temperature in the hall plummeted.
Lynn could use magic too.
➤ Next: Fatherly Kindness and Filial Piety
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