Year: 280 AC, Late Autumn
The godswood was silent beneath a pale sky, the rustle of its last leaves barely breaking the hush of morning frost. Wulfric moved through it like a shadow, slower now than before, the fatigue of too many sleepless nights pressing deep into his bones. His codex had grown by a dozen more pages in the last fortnight alone, but his body had grown thin, and the dull ache behind his eyes never left.
He came to the weirwood not out of ritual, but need. The white bark, streaked with red, was cold beneath his palm. And yet, as always, it felt… aware.
He closed his eyes.
The silence deepened.
Then a rush of snow and fire. Iron ringing on stone.
He saw the North as it had been. Not through dreams, but memory.
He stood on a battlefield where banners of white and grey clashed with sea dragons of green. He watched a Stark king, hard-eyed and grizzled, command fewer men against a mightier host. Wulfric felt the man's mind, cold, precise, order the terrain to be reshaped; trees felled to block advances, bogs flooded to trap cavalry. He saw maps drawn on animal hides, stones used as unit markers. That battle had been won by cunning alone.
Then the vision shifted, a different man, crowned and yet cloaked in fur, standing atop a stone platform beneath the aurora-filled sky. He held a scroll in one hand, a bloody dagger in the other. Before him were three kneeling figures, one man towering and massive, one shorter, skinnier with long limbs and another wrapped in furs with a bear skull draped on their head, each swearing something deeper than fealty. A pact of blood and bone. A pact to protect a secret. Behind them, a cavern mouth, sealed by rune-carved stone.
Another shift. A younger Stark knelt beside a dying wife. Her hair was red like fire, her face pale with grief. She held something out, a small wooden box, no larger than a hand. Inside, pressed in velvet, was a pendant wrought from obsidian and silver. "For the child. He must wear it for it will strengthen his bond with the gods." The man's tears froze on his cheeks as he whispered his promise.
Moments later, Wulfric stood above a council chamber, peering down unseen as ancient bannermen debated. Karstark, Bolton, Dustin, Hornwood, Umber, and dozens more, all young in face but old in name. The matter? What to do with a discovered lode of dragonglass deep beneath the Ice Fang hills. Hide it? Use it? Sell it to the south? The ruling Stark decreed it be kept secret, guarded, for the day it would be 'needed'.
A final vision, a child, cloaked in black and fur, wandering a blizzard with a direwolf at his side. They came to a grove where the snow did not fall. Beneath an ancient white tree, the child buried a book wrapped in leather. On the spine was a sigil: a wolf wrapped in thorns. Wulfric felt the sorrow in the act. The boy had failed at something, and in penance, he buried not treasure, but truth.
Wulfric pulled away, breathing hard. His fingertips tingled, and his heart thundered in his chest. He staggered back a step and sat against the roots of the weirwood, stunned. There were truths in the old blood. The North itself remembered. And now, somehow, he remembered it too.
There were names he had heard. Places he now recognized on old maps. Resources still hidden. Alliances sworn in blood. Secrets buried, not lost, but waiting.
He would find them. He would find them all.
Whispers had begun to trail him like a cloak.
At first, he thought nothing of it. He had grown used to stares. But then came the muttered tones from the baker's boy, the sideways glance from the seamstress, the sudden quiet when he entered the kennel yard.
"Speaks to trees, he does."
"They say he never sleeps. Looks like a corpse most days."
"Old gods have marked that one."
"He walks the halls like a shadow. Don't meet his eyes, lest you lose something."
"He's a curse, that one. Born in blood. Speaks of ghosts."
"I heard he touched the weirwood and spoke through it like."
The rumors grew, and with them, fear and fascination. Older stable hands crossed themselves or turned away when he passed. Some smallfolk muttered prayers under their breath at the sight of him. One cook refused to serve him directly, handing food to others to give instead.
And yet, there were those who looked upon him with something else, awed silence, cautious reverence. An old washerwoman, blind in one eye, whispered of a time when the Old Gods would choose vessels to carry their memory. She said Wulfric had the air of one touched by those forgotten spirits.
Children watched him from behind corners, wide-eyed. Some tossed him gifts of pinecones or twigs carved with crude runes, believing him a spirit of the woods come to walk among men told of in the stories of their elders.
Within the walls of Winterfell, Wulfric had become both myth and mystery. A boy half-forgotten by most outside Winterfell's walls, now remembered too much by those who feared or revered him. He had not asked for it. But he could not stop it.
Now though, most knew of the reclusive bastard of Winterfell.
It was Benjen who found him in the old rookery tower, slumped over a scroll half-unrolled across his lap. The younger Stark's face was tight with worry.
"You've barely spoken to us in weeks," he said. "I thought we were past this. This aint right wulf, what your doing to yourself..what are you even doing?"
Wulfric opened his mouth to answer and hesitated. What was he doing? Chasing ghosts? Studying dead languages for no one but himself? He looked down at his hands, charcoal-streaked, trembling ever so slightly.
"I don't know but... it's important... I feel it..." he said honestly.
Lyanna entered behind Benjen, arms crossed, scowling with all the fury of a storm.
"You idiot," she snapped. "You think pushing us away is going to help anything? You think becoming some ghost is going to do what exactly??"
She stomped over and sat beside him, pulling something from her pocket.
"We made these together," she said, her voice gentler now. "One for each of us. Benjen has his. I have mine. And this one's yours. So when you have it on, you cant abandon us. Thats a promise for all of us."
It was a bracelet, rough-spun, the thread braided with bark fiber, a carved wolf's head at the center. She slid it onto his wrist.
"You don't get to vanish from us, not without a fight."
Benjen came forward, his voice quieter. "You're practically my brother in all but name. Trust me, that's weird for me too since you're my nephew but who cares bout that. You're all I've got when Eddard's away and Brandon's... being Brandon. Don't shut me out. Don't shut us out."
Lyanna leaned into Wulfric's shoulder, and Benjen sat on the floor beside them.
For a long moment, none of them spoke. It was just the wind through the broken panes and the crackling of old parchment.
Wulfric looked at them both, at the bond they offered so freely. Something in his chest ached, then warmed.
He didn't cry. But he smiled, and it was real.
Later that week, Wulfric stole away to a neglected garden plot near the outer wall. There, under cover of dusk, he brought with him a bowl wrapped in thick cloth to retain warmth. Inside, a mixture he had brewed after weeks of meticulous reference and failed attempts. Ironwood ash, burned just enough to lose its bitterness. Weirwood sap, painstakingly collected drop by drop from a knot in the godswood where the bark bled. Crushed pine needle, both fresh and dried, for binding. River salt ground into a fine powder to preserve and stabilize.
He knelt in the brittle grass, whispering old phrases he had copied from a crumbling margin in the codex, not spells, but invocations of intent. His fingers dug into the cold soil. In the loosened patch, he traced runes with a stick dipped in his mixture, letting the earth drink in the lines of power.
Then, with care, he folded the rest of the mixture into the soil, kneading it with bare hands until his fingers were numb. He buried a seed from the Winterfell orchard at the center, one he had taken with permission from the groundskeeper.
He returned each morning before the sun rose fully. He watered it with river water infused with juniper oil and hawthorn pulp, ingredients that had surfaced again and again in the vault's mixture section.
By the sixth day, green shoots had emerged. Not wild or unnatural, but strong, defiant. Their leaves glistened under frost, untouched by rot or wilt.
His heart pounded as he bent low to study them. The bark was already firm. The veins were darker, as if carrying a thicker lifeblood.
It had worked. Truly and unmistakably worked.
In his codex, he opened a fresh page and began to copy not just this recipe, but others he had translated:
A salve made from moss steeped in mead and powdered flint, applied to deep wounds to staunch bleeding and quicken clotting.
A restorative poultice using ghostcap mushrooms and pine pitch for damaged bone and tendon, to be wrapped in heated wool.
A water mixture blessed with runes first and then willow bark to reduce fever and draw poison from infected bites.
Each recipe is always accompanied with a rune after its completion. He discovered multiple references to mystical ink formulas:
One was composed of crow's blood, ashroot, and crushed weirwood bark, intended for a spiral tattoo across the upper spine said to enhance clarity in battle.
Another used powdered moonstone and eel bile, traditionally tattooed over the heart to lend the bearer courage and resistance to despair.
A third, was tattooed over the stomach and hips in runic patterns meant to promote bodily resilience, improving strength, digestion, and even fertility.
Still others spoke of the land:
A blend of black clay, riverweed, and blood from a newly hunted stag, buried at the corners of a field to invite bountiful harvest.
Instructions for a night-time ritual involving hot stones, ancestor chants, and bark resin incense to awaken "the roots of the deep," believed to restore soil long thought barren.
A root-tincture steeped beneath the light of the full moon and scattered in riverbanks to bring forth fish and cleanse algae-choked streams.
Wulfric sat long into the night copying, translating, and revising. These were not the mad scribbles of old forest witches, they were records, trials, formulas tested across generations.
He titled the chapter:
Memory Wrought Anew.
But beneath it, in small runes traced in his own developing style, he wrote a single word:
Proof.