I record these words in the manner expected of a sworn maester of the Citadel, though I fear the quill trembles more from futility than cold. A maester is meant to chronicle wars, lineages, treaties, and the slow workings of governance. For most of my life, I believed such things to be the true machinery of the world, the gears upon which the fortunes of kings and smallfolk alike turned. Yet for years… mayhaps for decades… my memory adheres to dates now only loosely, like old wax to a candle stub. For a long time I warnings of something far simpler and far graver – the Others.
I spoke of them not as the
singers do, cladding truth in pretty liesso that a frightened child may sleep;
nor as the old maids do, twisting fear into fables to keep children from
wandering too far. No, I relied on dusty accounts preserved in rotten parchment
and faded ink, the sort of scholarship that kings assume carries no blood. These
were not stories. They were records, measurements, testimonies, and observations.
Dry things. Tedious things. The sort of things only maesters pretend to find
stirring. Yet I believed, with a young man’s stubbornness, that if truth were
laid bare plainly enough, even the thickest lord might at last take heed.
I spoke their warnings plainly.
I wrote treatises. Tedious, meticulous, footnoted treatises. I implored
lordlings and septons, even the Citadel itself. I spoke to any steward or
captain or hedge knight fool enough to lend an ear – but few cared to listen.
Few cared. Fewer still believed. Those who did were dismissed as fools – men
unhinged from reason, or worse, men seeking attention.
A wandering wildling would
sometimes stagger south of the Wall bearing warnings – breathless fragments
about the dead stirring, the woods whispering, the cold walking. These men had
little in the world – no property, no noble sigil, not even a name worth
recording. Their words were worth even less. They were waved away with the same
casual motion one uses to scatter crows from grain.
The North was supposed to
remember. A proud boast, repeated around hearths, embroidered on banners,
recited with the solemnity of prayer, etched into the very identity of their
houses. But remembering is not the same as understanding. They remembered the
words, not the meaning. They repeated winter is coming as one might repeat the
humdrum greeting of a passing acquaintance, never pausing to ask what winter
meant, what it required, what harbingers announced its arrival, or what winter
demanded of them.
Winter does not always announce
itself with roaring winds and white horizons. It begins subtly. A frost
lingering longer than it should. A sickness that spreads in odd patterns. Crops
that turn to grey mush before harvest. A dull haze clinging to the air, dimming
the sun to a copper smear. A strange stillness in the city.
All things I dutifully noted,
dated, compared with records centuries old. It was my duty to be dull, and I
was dutiful in it. I presented my findings before maesters far more learned
than I – men who had forgotten more than I would learn in a lifetime – they
nodded politely while their eyes drifted to more fashionable concerns – trade
fleets, naval skirmishes, the lineage of some minor house’s third son.
So winter bided its time. Then
it leapt.
It happened faster than any
chronicle could capture. Villages emptied overnight. At first one. Then three
more. Then dozens. Ravens stopped returning. The forests to the far north went
silent. When the truth could no longer be denied, the great lords sent out
their men, but swords and shields forged in the south do little against cold
that devours not only flesh but will. Steel cannot wound cold. The Wall fell. the
winds that followed were not winds at all, but something older wearing wind as
a mask.
Still I wrote. I recorded. It
is the maester’s duty. I noted the creeping chill in my bones, the dimming of
the sun, the way ink froze at the tip of the quill before I could shape a full
sentence. I wrote even when my breath smoked and vanished faster than I could
draw the next. I can hear them outside – patient, tireless, without breath or
warmth or haste. They have no need for haste.
I had believed, foolishly, that
scholarship might serve as shield. I thought knowledge, once shared, would
rouse men to action. But the scrolls gathered dust while the world burned
white. Men preferred their comforts, certainties, routines. Their markets and
their little disputes. Even as the cold thickened around them, they clung to
the familiar warmth of denial.
Some whispered, in those last
days, that this winter was unlike the others. They were correct, though far too
late in being so. Winter had not merely arrived. It had awakened.
Perhaps that is why I write
this last entry. Not for men, for there are none left to read it. But for
myself, to pretend that I once belonged to a world that believed in reason.
They are at the door.
I can feel the cold fingers
already pressing into my bones, hollowing out my bones one breath at a time.
There is no pain. Pain belongs to the living. Soon I will stand again, pale and
silent, and whatever thoughts once lived behind these eyes will scatter like
snow in a hard wind.
These are my dying words.
No human will ever read them.
No maester will stumble upon
these scrolls. No child will whisper these lines as bedtime fright. No king
will consult them for counsel. The last eyes capable of understanding this
script are the ones growing dim even as I write.
And when I rise again, I will
not remember the warnings I gave, nor the truth they carried, nor the world
that ignored them until it was far too late.
