Dany found fat Sam curled up and wailing in a patch of withered yellow grass. He seemed to have landed on a rock, which had jabbed his belly, and now he was bawling with tears and snot streaming down his face.
"Sam, are you alright?" Maester Aemon asked with concern.
"My stomach hurts," Sam whimpered hoarsely.
Barristan walked over and pulled the fat man to his feet. After checking him carefully—mail, leather, and underlayers all intact with no sign of blood—he said, "No serious harm. Probably just got the wind knocked out of him. He'll be fine once he catches his breath."
"Sam, stop crying already. Look, you've even alarmed the Rat Cook," Dany said, glancing toward the stone tower across the way. In its pitch-black doorway, a pair of faintly glowing red eyes stared out. More red eyes shifted deeper in the shadows, creeping toward the entrance.
"Rat Cook?!" Sam looked around in confusion, but soon spotted the red eyes inside the door. Upon closer inspection, he realized it was a group of gray rats—each larger than a cat.
"Ahhhh—" he let out a bloodcurdling scream, "The Rat Cook! Those are the Rat Cook's descendants!"
"Seven hells, why are the rats here so big?" Barristan exclaimed in shock.
"Squeak squeak squeak." Noticing they were being watched, the rats began to retreat.
"They're not that big. The roasted rats sold at the docks in Qarth are only slightly smaller," Dany remarked casually.
"Drogon," she called out to the black dragon.
"Screeeech—" Drogon roared to the heavens, his dragon might radiating with his cry. Instantly, the sound of a thousand stampeding creatures echoed from every direction—within the towers, the underground cellars, and the tunnels that connected them. Countless rats fled in a crazed panic, their chittering sending chills down everyone's spine.
"I never imagined the Nightfort would have this many rats," Aemon murmured, rubbing the goosebumps on his arm, his teeth on edge.
"The Rat Cook—they're all the Rat Cook's descendants," Sam declared loudly.
"I'm starting to wonder if the Rat Cook legend is even real," Dany said calmly as she glanced around. "Maybe the rats here were just always this large and numerous, and the bored Night's Watch brothers started making up stories about them, which eventually turned into the Rat Cook legend."
"No, the Rat Cook was real. The Nightfort's library contains historical records of the incident, with the king's name clearly listed: Tytos Lannister II of Casterly Rock, and his eldest son, Tyrion Lannister," said Maester Aemon solemnly.
"Uh… so this Tyrion got eaten by his own father?" Dany twitched at the corner of her mouth.
Aemon paused, then chuckled as he caught her meaning. "The Targaryens had many Aegons, the Starks countless Brandons, and as for the Lannisters—there have been plenty of Tyrions. In the future, you'll likely have many descendants named Daenerys too."
Dany looked a little awkward and turned to Sam. "Lead the way."
"That place… only the Night's Watch are allowed to enter," Sam protested.
"You know," Dany said with a light smile, "the more you say things like that, the more curious I get. A door that can consciously recognize who belongs to the Watch? I can't wait to see it for myself."
"What door?" Aemon asked in confusion.
"There's a tunnel hidden within the Nightfort that connects both sides of the Wall. This fat one entered the Wall through a hidden gate," Dany explained.
"That's right—Sam didn't return through Castle Black," Aemon realized after her reminder.
"Maester, Your Grace, I swear I'm not lying. There really is a tunnel in the Nightfort. There's a gate. The Black Gate. But the man warned me—he said never to tell anyone about it, or it might bring irreparable harm to the world. So please, don't force me. I can't talk about it!" Sam cried as he buried his face in his hands.
A grown man, with a pale, doughy face, squatting on the ground wiping away tears—he looked pitiful.
But Dany felt no sympathy. Instead, she grew angry and scolded, "You're basically accusing us of being villains.
Even if we knew the Black Gate's secret—do you think I, Ser Barristan, or Maester Aemon would do anything to harm this world?
Why do you think I came out here in the dead of night? I just wanted to make sure that tunnel doesn't pose a threat to the North.
And now you're making it sound like we're the ones trying to cause destruction?"
"Sam, Her Grace is right. The Nightfort is completely desolate—there's not a single Watchman left. If the secret tunnel were discovered by wildlings—or worse, White Walkers—it would be a catastrophe," Barristan added with a furrowed brow.
Maester Aemon patted the fat Watchman on the back and asked gently, "Sam, you said someone warned you not to speak of the Black Gate. Who was it? Was it Lord Commander Mormont?"
"No, we called him Coldhands. Gilly and I ran into Small Paul, Qythe, and Hake at Whitetree Village. They were dead—wights—and I couldn't fight them. The red-eyed raven saved me."
"A raven?" Dany's eyes lit up. "Tell me more—where did the raven come from?"
Sam stopped sobbing, a look of recollection appearing on his face. "At the center of the village stood a great weirwood, so large it would take several men to circle it. Its bark was bone white, its leaves red like bloody handprints.
It was covered in ravens—thousands of them. Black ravens on red leaves, with a white trunk carved into a snarling old man's face.
Gilly held the baby beneath the tree, surrounded by ravens. I burned Small Paul, but Qythe grabbed me by the throat—I was about to die.
The raven that had followed me—oh, that was the one Lord Commander Mormont raised—it suddenly screeched and flew at Qythe's face, pecking out strips of pale flesh.
Then all the ravens on the tree swarmed in. They tore at Qythe's blue eyes. They smothered him like flies. They pulled brains from Hake's shattered skull.
There were so many ravens, they blocked out the moon."
Dany and Aemon exchanged glances, both thinking the same thing: The Three-Eyed Raven.
But the Three-Eyed Raven sure had a taste for the grotesque—eating wight flesh, drinking brain matter…
Still, why did the Three-Eyed Raven care so much about this fat man?
He even fed him with his own body!
Could it be… protagonist plot armor?
Hmm, there's a theory that Samwell is actually the true protagonist of Game of Thrones—always turning danger into safety, misfortune into blessings. While everyone else suffers miserably, he achieves both career success and romantic happiness, living joyfully until the very end. He's practically a plot-hacking character.
For example, Daenerys exhausted herself and went to great lengths just to kill one White Walker. Yet Sam, with nothing but a dragonglass dagger and laughably bad sword skills, managed to stab one to death early on.
Yes, Sam was the first to land a kill—Sam, the "White Walker Slayer"!
"Who was that Coldhands?" Daenerys asked.
"He wore black like a brother of the Night's Watch, but his skin was pale like a wight's, and his hands were pitch black, as cold as obsidian."
"Wight!" Barristan and Aemon exclaimed in unison.
Daenerys's eyes lit up. She recalled that in Game of Thrones, there was also a Coldhands—Benjen Stark, transformed into a magical weapon by the Children of the Forest.
"No, his eyes didn't glow blue, and he could speak," Sam replied, shaking his head.
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Daenerys tilted her head, looking at the broken crescent moon in the sky, and said, "The White Walkers were magical beings created by the Children of the Forest from the First Men, but the experiment failed. The Walkers became an uncontrollable catastrophe, bringing about the Long Night—that's the legend of their origin."
"Is it possible that not all of them lost control? That some retained their reason and humanity, becoming effective magical weapons?"
Just like in The Terminator, where some rogue machines are sent to kill the protagonist, but others—like Schwarzenegger—are sent to protect humans.
"We could ask Brynden," Aemon suggested.
"Not until I've mastered my powers," Daenerys shook her head.
"Brandon? You know Bran? Why would we ask him?" Sam asked in surprise.
The names "Brynden" and "Brandon" sound very similar, easy to mix up. "Brandon" is also a prominent name—Bran's full name. Sam had misunderstood.
When Brynden Rivers first heard the name "Bran," he even joked that it must have been given in honor of Lord Bloodraven. After all, "Blackfish" Brynden Tully was named in a similar fashion. (A Song of Ice and Fire has a naming tradition of honoring famous figures—for instance, House Frey even has a "Rhaegar Frey.")
"You…" Daenerys looked suspiciously at Sam's uncertain gray eyes. "You met Jon's brother, Bran Stark?"
Sam froze. Realizing his slip, he shook his head frantically and denied it over and over, "I don't know him. I've never met him."
Of course, Daenerys remembered how Bran had crossed the Wall in the show—with Sam's help, through a tunnel beneath a ruined castle.
But after arriving at the Wall herself, she realized that was impossible. All tunnel gates along the Wall, except at Castle Black, had been sealed. They were packed tight with ice and stone—impossible to open in just a few months.
Shadow Tower and Eastwatch didn't even have tunnel gates. Only by sea could one travel between beyond the Wall and the North.
Otherwise, why would the wildlings fixate on Castle Black?
"Boy, you let something slip," Daenerys sneered. "So that Stark boy stayed at Nightfort for a while, met you as you came out of the Black Gate, and then went through it himself to go beyond the Wall. The wildlings and northerners all know about the Black Gate—yet you didn't tell me."
Her eyes burned with a soul-pressing intensity, as if physically weighing down on Sam. She shouted, "What are you hiding? Are you planning to rebel?!"
Thump—Sam's legs gave out, and he collapsed to the floor, tears and snot flowing freely. He sobbed, hiccuping, "Your Grace, I never meant to rebel! I swore an oath—not to tell anyone about the Black Gate or Bran—not even Jon. Please don't force me!"
Daenerys nodded toward the White Knight. "Ser, search the area for signs that anyone may have stayed here recently."
Sam's struggle was in vain.
Daenerys conjured a fireball the size of a washbasin and sent it hovering ten meters above, lighting up the area for hundreds of meters around. The White Knight easily found traces of a campfire on the stone floor of what had once been a kitchen.
It was an octagonal stone house, partially collapsed at the dome. In the center stood a well, beside which a gnarled weirwood tree had pushed its way through the stone floor, stretching up toward a hole in the ceiling.
Under the silvery-gray moonlight, the pale, bone-like branches reflected an eerie and chilling glow.
"This is where the Rat Cook chopped Tyrion into pieces, isn't it?" Daenerys walked along the row of scarred, stained butcher tables lining the wall.
Rust-covered meat hooks still hung from the rafters above, filling her with a surreal sense of witnessing history.
Of course, the meat hooks weren't six thousand years old. But the butcher tables, made of stone, were part of the ancient stone house.
If the Rat Cook legend were true, then on some night thousands of years ago, this place really had been the scene of a murder.
(End of chapter)
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