The alarm rang.

  Rayan groaned and pulled the blanket tighter around himself. The bed was warm, too warm to leave.

  Beside him his wife sighed.

  “You’re going to be late again,” she said.

  “Five more minutes,” he muttered.

  The sunlight pouring through the window was bright, the kind that belonged to a summer morning. Yet the air was biting his skin. His breath came out in faint white clouds.

  Rayan forced himself out of bed.

  He lowered his feet from the bed and let them touch the floor.

  He froze.

  White frost covered the apartment floor. Not thin frost either—real snow, crunching softly beneath his weight.

  Behind him his wife sat calmly on the bed, wearing light summer clothes as if nothing had changed.

  Rayan turned toward her.

  And felt his stomach twist.

  Her face… was wrong.

  He could see her hair. Her shoulders. Her mouth moving as she spoke.

  But her face had no details, as if someone had erased it.

  Rayan wanted to call after his wife, but the name caught in his throat. He could not remember it.

  She had already risen and moved into the kitchen, while Rayan struggled to recall her name.

  Strangely, the morning continued.

  He dressed for work.

  He ate breakfast.

  The routine played out as if nothing had changed.

  After completing his morning routine and getting ready for work, Rayan walked to the window and peered outside.

  Snow.

  Endless white stretching to the horizon, swallowing the city.

  He turned back toward the room.

  His wife was gone.

  Someone else stood there.

  A man dressed in black.

  Long dark hair fell around a pale face. Grey eyes watched him without emotion. In the man’s hand was a sword.

  That face… it was familiar to Rayan, far too familiar, and yet the sight of it filled him with a quiet, unsettling fear.

  rayan tried to move but His legs refused, slow and heavy, as if he was walking through water.

  The man approached him step by step.

  Calm. Certain.

  When he was close enough, he spoke.

  The words meant nothing to him. Harsh syllables, cold as steel.

  Then pain exploded.

  Rayan gasped and looked down.

  There was a hole in his body.

  Empty.

  Where his heart should have been… there was Nothing.

  Rayan stared down at the empty hollow in his chest.

  His hands trembled as he pressed them to the wound, trying to feel anything.

  “Where… my heart?” he whispered, but no answer came.

  He clawed at the emptiness, but it slipped through his fingers like smoke.

  And then, the world tilted, and Rayan felt himself falling—falling into nothing.

  Jon woke with a broken shout and sharp breath.

  “NO—NO—!”

  The word died in his throat as he realized he was alone.

  The blankets clung to him, damp with sweat. For a moment he lay still in the narrow bed, staring at the ceiling above him.

  A dream… he had been dreaming.

  Jon squeezed his eyes shut, trying to catch the dream before it slipped away but Nothing came back. Not a single detail of it lingered in his memory.

  Nothing except the hollow feeling in his chest.

  “My heart…” he murmured under his breath.

  The words sounded foolish in the quiet room.

  Jon pushed himself upright and ran a hand through his hair. His shirt clung to his back.

  “Just a dream,” he muttered.

  Still, the unease refused to leave him.

  He swung his legs off the bed and stood. The movement stretched his limbs, and for a moment he paused beside the bed, A sigh escaped him. Nightmares were rare for Jon. Perhaps this damned castle was becoming harder to endure with every passing day.

  After a moment of stillness, he suddenly flexed his arm, studying it with quiet intensity.

  A thin line of muscle showed along it, It made Jon grin immediately. A good way to push the nightmare aside and feel grounded in his own body again.

  “Look at that.”

  It was barely anything worth notice, yet the sight of it always pleased him. Every morning he checked, as if the muscles might have disappeared during the night.

  They never did.

  At least something was growing the way it should.

  Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on the original website.

  Jon flexed again, then shook his head at himself.

  “Gods, I look like an idiot.”

  His smile faded when he glanced toward the window.

  The sunlight was already bright.

  Jon frowned.

  “Shhhhhiiiiit….....”

  The sun was high.

  He had overslept.

  If the servants noticed, they would complain. And if they complained, more chores would follow.

  Jon turned to grab his boots—and his eyes landed on the book lying near the corner of the bed.

  On the Mysteries of the North.

  He stared at it for a long moment.

  He remembered the moment Maester Luwin handed him the book.

  It had been a long time ago — a year, maybe two, or slightly more. Yet the memory clung to him.

  “I should burn you,” Jon muttered.

  The book had given him more questions than answers. He had read it many times already and barely understood what it said. Old stories. Half-mad theories. Cryptic passages that seemed written to confuse.

  Yet he kept coming back to it, because There was nothing else to pursue. Jon already realised that Most of the other books on magic, old tales, and legends were nonsense — empty words. And on top of that Luwin watched him like a hawk.

  He respected Maester Luwin and had grown fond of the old man over the years, yet every page Jon turned was under Luwin’s watchful eye. The maester decided what knowledge reached him.

  Jon pulled his cloak about his shoulders and slipped out into the corridor. The stone beneath his boots was cold as he moved quickly along the passage. Winterfell was already awake. Somewhere above him a door slammed, and the distant clang of metal rang from the direction of the yard.

  He took the steps two at a time and pushed through the low door that led into the kitchens.

  Heat struck him at once.

  The great kitchens beneath the hall were alive with noise and motion. Ovens roared along the far wall, their mouths glowing red. A boy turned a spit heavy with a roasting capon while a cook shouted at him. “Keep it moving, you slow-witted wretch, You want it burned on one side and raw on the other?”

  “I am moving it,” the boy muttered, giving the spit another shove.

  Pots steamed, knives thudded against wooden boards, and the smell of baking bread and onions filled the air.

  “Out of the way, lad!” a scullion barked as she hurried past with an armful of trenchers.

  Jon kept his head down and slipped between them.

  A rack of fresh loaves cooled beside one of the ovens. Jon snatched a heel of bread while the cook’s back was turned and tore off a bite as he made for the door again.

  The crust was still warm.

  Good enough for breakfast, he thought.

  He swallowed the last mouthful as he stepped back into the passage and wiped the crumbs from his fingers.

  Jon edged along the wall and started toward the door that opened onto the inner yard.

  “Snow.”

  The voice was soft, but it stopped him all the same.

  Jon turned.

  “Where have you been all this morning?”

  One of Lady Stark’s handmaids stood near the stair, her mouth held a small polite smile that did not quite reach her eyes, Her voice was soft, though the hint of condescension in it was impossible to miss.

  “Yes?” Jon said.

  “I was looking for you.” She shifted the basket slightly.

  “I’ve been about,” Jon said with a small shrug. “You were just looking in the wrong place.”

  “But I asked so many people about—” the woman replied.

  “What do you want?” Jon said, cutting her off.

  The woman’s brow furrowed deeply, though she answered a moment later. “The kennels could use another pair of hands this morning.”

  Jon's fist tightened.

  “Farlen has boys enough,” he said.

  “Perhaps,” the maid replied pleasantly. “Still, everyone would be grateful for your help.”

  Jon knew the trick well enough.

  It was always a request. But refusal had a way of traveling through Winterfell’s halls and by supper the tale would reach Lord Stark himself.

  Jon wiped his fingers on his cloak.

  “Of course,” he said.

  The maid’s smile widened just a touch. “How kind of you.”

  Jon said nothing. He turned and left.

  The kennels lay near the stables, where the stone walls gave way to wooden runs and fenced yards. The moment Jon pushed through the gate the barking began.

  Hounds lunged against their chains, tails wagging, teeth flashing. The air smelled of wet fur and straw.

  Farlen The kennelmaster stood among them with a length of leather in hand, checking the teeth of a lean grey hunting dog.

  He glanced up when Jon approached.

  Farlen said.“Morning, Jon. Overslept, haven't you?”

  Jon shifted his weight, trying to look casual.

  Jon’s silence stretched too long, and at last Farlen’s words cut through it, steady and low.

  “Grab that bucket and fill it.”

  Jon did as he was told.

  The water troughs were half empty, and the straw in several pens needed changing. Jon moved from run to run, filling buckets, tossing handfuls of meat to the eager hounds.

  Farlen worked nearby, letting one of the larger dogs loose into the yard to stretch its legs.

  Jon knelt beside a shaggy brown hound, pouring water into the trough. The dog sniffed his hand and lapped greedily.

  looking at the dogs, Jon remembered a passage from the old book, On the Mysteries of the North: skinchanging—the joining of the mind with that of a beast. A skinchanger might slip into another creature, seeing the world through its eyes, feeling with its senses. But the beast's will could not be erased; the skinchanger could only reach, touch, and hope it reached back. Perhaps it was a form of empathy, or a mirror of the mind, where one consciousness brushed against another without replacing it.

  Jon closed his eyes and for a moment the noise of the kennels seemed to fade.

  He focused, shutting out everything around him, forcing his mind to linger only on the dog—its shape, its scent, the way it moved and ate—reaching for it like a drowning man stretching toward a lifeline

  Jon felt the warmth of the dog’s body. Its heartbeat pulsed steady and strong, and somewhere close he sensed the others too—dozens of small lives moving and breathing around him.

  A flicker of something brushed against his mind.

  Then it was gone.

  The barking returned all at once, loud and sharp.

  “WOOF! WOOF!WOOF!WOOF!”

  Jon opened his eyes.

  The dog was still there, drinking noisily. Nothing had changed.

  Farlen’s voice drifted across the yard.

  “Done dreaming, boy?”

  Jon rose slowly.

  “Coming.”

  Jon got to his feet and moved toward Farlen for his next task, but a weary sigh caught in his chest , shoulders slumping—Disappointed, yet strangely resigned, He had failed too many times to even count, and the weight of it was becoming familiar.

  Hours slipped by, the sun sinking low, until darkness swallowed the world—bringing the time Jon cherished most, when he could steal a fragment of freedom for himself.

  The castle lay quiet. Shadows pooled along the walls, broken only by the faint torchlight of the last patrols making their rounds. Jon waited in a dark corner on winterfell walls. He had done this many times before, yet the tension never left him. The old rhythms of the guards’ footsteps, the slow rotation of shifts—he had memorized them all.

  When the first patrol passed and the next lingered a few moments too long near the gate.

  “Seven hells, it’s colder than a widow’s heart tonight,” one guard muttered, stamping his boots.

  “Aye,” another answered. “Better cold than stuck in the kitchens peeling turnips. Or worse—married.”

  A third snorted. “You’d need a woman willing first.”

  “Oh, they’re willing enough after a few cups of ale.”

  “Ale?” the second guard laughed. “You mean after they’ve gone blind enough not to see your face.”

  Jon could barely make out the guards’ voices.. He slipped carefully through shadows. His fingers closed on the rope he had, thin but strong, a lifeline to freedom.

  A simple tool, granting him a fleeting escape from the cage he lives in.

  He tested the knots quickly and checked the stones.

  After securing one end of the rope to the wall, and sliding it down the wall, he held on with all his strength and began to lower himself into the darkness below. The ground came softly beneath his feet. He paused, listening. Nothing.

  Just the wind whispering.

  The rope remained, coiled neatly against the wall. It would bring him back. He tucked the end under a loose stone, invisible to any casual glance. He had learned which guards to avoid, which ones might not report him. A few understood his position—half-bastard, half-prince of Winterfell’s halls—and granted him these small allowances.

  Jon set off through the darkness. At first he could scarcely see a thing, but he knew these paths well, and his eyes soon adjusted to the night.

  The Wolfswood stretched before him, black and endless. Jon inhaled the scent of pine and wet earth. Here, there were no chores, no scoldings, no silent judgments. Here, he was only Jon, a boy with the night as his ally.

  He walked carefully, his boots quiet against the soft undergrowth. Thoughts gnawed at him. How long would he remain trapped inside Winterfell’s walls? A part of him blamed himself—cowardice, the cowardice of a boy unwilling to truly leave.

  One word kept returning to Jon’s thoughts, again and again: STATUS. Had he possessed it, he would never have found himself in such a place.

  But for now, there was nothing he could do—he was still the bastard of Winterfell. For NOW.

  He knelt beside a small stream and watched frogs leap into the dark water. The night seemed alive with creatures, all of them small, alert, indifferent. Jon reached for them with his mind, attempting to warg, as he had practiced countless times. The heartbeat of the frog, the faint flutter of its mind—but it was only half there. His connection faltered, unfinished.

  He tried again with a squirrel, then a hare, but the night pressed down too heavily. He felt their presence brush against him, faint and fleeting, and he realized his mind could only stretch so far. The darkness was deep, and even here, even with his freedom, there were limits.

  A sigh left him. He rose, brushing dirt from his tunic. The rope awaited him, the castle awaited him. The night would not last forever, and neither could he. Jon turned, leaving the peace of the Wolfswood behind.

  Holding the rope and climbing silently, the walls swallowed him, and Winterfell’s stone corridors closed around him once more.