All Dwarves Are Not Created Equal (V)

"-. 274 AC .-"

Damn every last tree root in the world! Could he not go more than two slopes without stumbling over one like a drunk simpleton forever doomed to crash arse-over-teakettle in the mud?

"Alright down there, boy?" The greybeard asked with the well-worn tone of an elder well used to herding the clumsy spawn of everyone else's even clumsier spawn.

Luwin felt the burn of humiliation wash over his face. Whoever decided those damned board shoes could be used year-round should be flogged and hanged. It was hard enough to ride the things in the snow, but skiing over detritus? Through a forest? In summer? Madness!

He angrily kicked off his skis. When that didn't work, he set about stumbling to his feet with an even hotter feeling of humiliation. The little grey eyes laughed at him from where they bounced around the man's feet in his shadow.

"Careful now," the man was suddenly there, yanking him away from the nearby stream that the sun shone out of. "What'd I tell you? Stay out of the red light."

They resumed their trek, but the only reason Luwin didn't crash into more shrubs and trees was because he merely lumbered all the way to the bottom of the wooded hill, pushing his sticks deep into the ground with every step. The little grey eyes laughed at him childishly the whole while, flitting from shade to shadow every time he looked away.

Of course, then came another hill to climb and descend from and everything started again.

"Spread the tips of your feet a bit more," Marwyn the Mage said from where he followed their guide right next to him. "Now push off – that's right. Left, right, left, right, good. Feel the difference in the arms?"

"Some," Luwin huffed. The end of the hill couldn't come fast enough. "Not as much as you, I'm sure."

"Just a bit more practice and you'll be flying across the highlands."

"You mean a lot of practice."

"Hardly. A couple hours and you have the basics down."

"Not all of us are freaks of nature that can pick up a skill after seeing it once."

"And you think I can? Who do I look like, Mullin?"

Well he'd certainly played out his part word for word, of that conversation Luwin had with the other acolyte when they left Oldtown. It felt like a lifetime ago, now. Luwin huffed.

Marwyn glanced at him knowingly, as if he knew what had just gone through his mind. Disgustingly amused at his expense too. Luwin couldn't even guess why. The Mage had been looking at him that way since he first faceplanted in the leaves. Whatever happened to his grunting cantankerousness? He was never this cheerful!

"I'm starting to wish we'd left by ship," Luwin grumbled. It only drew another bout of childish laughter from the little grey eyes. It tinkled from one weirwood leaf to the next as unseen paws skittered over the pool of black water.

A strange canter reached their ears then, buoyed by the sound of some whimsical whistling that-

"Everyone hide!" their guide hissed suddenly, literally tackling Luwin into a butterfly bush.

Luwin tried to balk. The greybeard roughly covered his mouth with a hand. Luwin froze. The childish eyes landed near his head and closed, disappearing without a trace. Marwyn appeared on his left, kneeling to hide as told.

Then they all lied still and watched through green leaves and purple flowers as a girl rode by on a white pony, no by your leave, no nothing. Young. Spry. Cheerful as a bird. She hummed as thunk and clank and clatter went the shoeless hooves upon the forest floor. Then she disappeared amidst the trees as fast as she'd appeared, taking her pride and joy and the whistling of some unseen voice with her.

"For Builder's sake, again!?" the greybeard groaned as he climbed off of Luwin. "Guess this is where I do a runner. Good luck you two. I swear, when I find her minders…"

Luwin watched blankly as the greybeard hurried off after the girl, muttering threats and promises of doom all the while. A great shadow passed over them in his wake, flying after the man. Luwin couldn't distinguish much through the thick canopy, but he knew a hawk's cry when he heard it, even if he'd never heard one so loud. Or long.

"Tell me, Luwin," Marwyn said. "Do you remember how you got here?"

"What?"

The childish eyes were suddenly in his face.

"GAH!"

Luwin gasped, slipped backwards and toppled up into the water.

He flailed and sputtered and drowned without drowning, then a familiar enormous hand grabbed him by the arm and dragged him onto solid ground again. He coughed, flailed and spluttered the whole way, then fell when the grip loosed. He kissed the dirt. Or would've, but winter had returned. The snow felt coarse against his face. Coarse and freezing after the warm pool. He rolled to his back, gasping for breath through a raw throat. Snowy pines filled his sight. The branches of fir trees mixed with red leaves shaped like hands. They hung off boughs white as bone even where snow didn't reach. Above and beyond them all, the sky. It wasn't green as grass anymore, somehow. It was a pale, greying thing now, thick with milky fog and the largest snowflakes he'd ever seen falling from the dreary clouds beyond. They looked like silver stars falling through gaps in an old, worn net growing more tattered and threadbare with every day that went by.

Luwin thought a day might come when he could hate all laughter. He turned his head aside to glare at the damned anklebiter. The eyes. They looked human. Grey. But also blue, now that he thought about it. They glowed like ice where white should be. Or was it a trick of the light?

Heavy footstomps next to his head made him turn the other way.

"Still here? I'm impressed. Usually the first time jolts the heart all a fret."

Marwyn looked different. Luwin didn't know how he only now noticed it. The man was still short and squat, but it didn't seem unnatural now. The bulk packed into his chest and shoulders and even his hard ale-belly somehow complemented it, perfectly filling out the heavy plate he now wore. A segmented armor made of some dark, smoky metal. There was not a spot below the man's chin that wasn't covered in at least an inch of the heavy material. Pauldrons, brassarts, vambraces, gauntlets, cuirass, even a long, segmented kilt in place of faulds that reached all the way to just below the knee guards of the greaves. Overlaying it was a vast cape made from the fur of some great beast. And… And his hair. Forget the bristly white sprouting from his ears and nostrils. They were just props for a veritably opulent mane. Wiry bristles framed his face all the way to the ears. Tufted eyebrows sailed up into the air like white ash from a pyre. Bushy whiskers capped with steel stuck up like boar tusks. They all mixed into a coat of white, like salt crushed and dusted over a full beard and head of hair that almost reached his belt, coarse and thick and kissed by fire like a beacon in full spate.

Luwin stared up at the man, astounded. "You're Ibbenese!"

Marwyn looked down at him like he was mad.

Immediately, Luwin felt foolish. That was hardly the most memorable thing. There was a shroud around the Mage too, dark where he was bright and red as blood. It smelled like embers amidst smoke of salted pork fresh off the fire.

"Maybe not as lucid as I thought." The Mage scratched his chin. His hand passed through his fiery beard as if it wasn't there. "It's far too early for you to be projecting your delusions unto others, lad. Ibbenese indeed!" Shaking his head, the man stomped off.

Luwin climbed to his feet and stared at the man, gaping. Mad? Him!? Change the color of his hair darker and he looked just like one! How had no one seen it before? The height. Those enormous hands. The heavy, broad-shouldered, broad-chested stature. That beetle-browed face with shadowed eyes and massive jaw. Great square teeth. The grunting, rasping manner of his speech. By the Gods, even his veins seemed to spring out of his skin here and there, like water trails in a ship's wake. And those scars. Two scar tattoos etched in his skin. They criss-crossed over his sloping brow from eye to temple, looking almost like birthmarks midst those heavy ridges.

"Don't dawdle, boy!"

Luwin stumbled after the man as well as he could. The snow seemed to grow ever thinner the further up the mountains they went until they had to give up the skis and snow shoes entirely. It only made the forest floor more treacherous the farther on they climbed though. Black ice worked against his footing when it wasn't rocks making a bid at the same, dark as night and oily. There was never a plant or critter to be seen near them, even where the ground was bare as spring. Ahead of him, Marwyn walked without leaving any more sign of his passage than the green light trickling up through the cracks in the mountainside. Luwin tried not to gawk at him. Tried not to resent him either. He did his best to ignore the mirthful eyes pouncing around them too. They left no paw prints and then abruptly shot ahead of them both and closed and disappeared just like they'd-

Marwyn the Mage suddenly leap back and landed where Luwin was about to step, one arm held out protectively. The world caught flame at the edges. Spinning. Tilted too, somehow. It blurred the corners of his eyes like see-through, blue-white rims of a shining trapezohedron.

What could have startled the Mage so?

Looking ahead, Luwin saw Death. An unlined outline cut into the shape of a hooded cloak made of one and one thousand eyes of blue and white fire. In front of it, a man. And a bear. Old. Tired. Starving. Bloody, the both of them. Fighting. Wrestling with the last of their strength in the snow at the mouth of a cave. Then the man seemed to summon some mighty burst of strength. Hauled himself forward by the broken spear shaft sticking out of the bear's chest. Jumped on its back. Locked his brawny arms around its head before viciously snapping its neck with a loud, savage cry of pain and exultation.

They collapsed together. For a moment, Luwin thought they both were dead. The man crawled away though. Dragged himself by his chin, then with his hands, then he staggered to his feet. Drunkenly, almost. Clutching an arm around his midriff. He'd been disembowelled, Luwin marvelled, yet still he wanted to die on his feet. And he did. Limped, staggered and stumbled away from his kill while reaching out blindly but didn't fall again. Not until Death reached out as well and took his hand in its own.

The body fell in a pool of its own guts. Its blood streamed forth like springmelt, red and fiery upon the steaming snow. The man himself stood easy, though. Straight. Solid, almost, like the mountain it had ruled his whole life. Hither came the Magnar. Hither came the Flint, grey-haired, long-bearded and jolly-eyed. A man, a hunter, a lord of the mountain with towering melancholies and towering mirth, to tread the sparkling snow under his booted feet. Hither he came. Walked one step after another, then fell to his knees and looked up at Death reverently, both hands latched onto its own. The hands of a warrior and hunter and father they were, strong and rough but gentle as they grasped the other, small and black as midnight.

Death overlayed him entire, somehow, that his blind grasping need be blind no more. The two thought together then. For a lifetime between one moment and the next. Of sense and reason and knowledge dreamed into the world from beyond the stars and everything the man did throughout his life that meant something. It was enough to enlighten even the poorest lackwit that never saw full age, but barely any of it found a point of purchase. The Flint was a gladsome but perceptive greybeard. What care did he have for wondrous crafts he'd never wield? Great works he'd never see? What did he know of cultured ways, the gilt, the craft, the lie? Him who was born in a naked land and bred in the open sky? The silver tongue, the trickster's guile, they failed when the axe swings. Let kings and merchants dream about grand crafts and kingdoms. Let maesters and mages brood over questions of magic and reason. He'd lived, he'd loved, he'd known the bliss of warm arms, he'd raised his daughters and sons, he'd slain foes and beasts alike. Made a good show of his last hunt, even. He'd led his clan and left them better off then they'd been when he was young. Hadn't he done well?

He had, Luwin knew with all the certainty of the dream. He was a worthy lord and father and kin to kings.

Death agreed with him. That was why it was here to greet him after all. It would even bring him before the face of his gods if he wanted, but wasn't there anything he wished he'd done before all that?

The Flint laughed boisterously and kissed the hand of Death, then crawled forward on his knees to embrace it. His trunk-like arms disappeared beneath the cloak of fire while his face nestled near its heart like a child. Or a lover. A father even. A nuncle clinging to the goodson that taught his boys their letters but whom he'd never got to meet. He didn't regret it anymore that he did the rest of his life though. If he longed for anything, he would that he had died in summer. He would've liked to enjoy life longer. He would've loved to fly.

Death returned the embrace and its garb unravelled around them. The great cloak of feathers unwove itself. The eyes unbraided from runes to flares and then floating fires scattering like stars at midnight. The black sky melted down through the clouds above them, then lower until it seeped all the way through the branches. The speckled void overlayed the boughs. The eyes and stars interposed where the leaves once were. And as the night sky swallowed them all, the ground seemed to fall away and they passed up through the firmament on the wings of some grand, mighty music played by voices and instruments that were out of this world.

Abruptly, Marwyn whirled around, grabbed Luwin around the midriff and literally crashed them out of the spell, down through the firmament and back into the world from whence they'd flown away. The starry void burned out of his sight as they fell, hot and fiery and stretching behind them like a red star's trail.

Luwin crashed awake with a gasp. Back among the living. Back in the Mage's hut of snow that the Stark's guards had raised around the second widest stump of Weirwood at High Heart. The glass candle was still there in the middle of it. Luwin looked at it in a daze. He didn't even think before he focused back on it. He wanted to go back there. Back to where he was going before Marwyn had… why would Marwyn do that? There was no harm done. The sky… The firmament was so wondrous. So beautiful and vast. So wonderful and full of knowledge he had never even thought to grasp. No more than the old chieftain had. He could see the Flint even now, drinking rapturously from whatever was that revelation, growing more than he was with each star that passed until he shed himself of himself entirely.

Luwin watched, awestruck, as a simple mortal man left his soul behind like he'd done his body before that. Shot upwards into some new life, past stars and moons and planets like a star unto himself. Suns adrift, suns in cages, suns and moons made of bright fruit. And everywhere… worlds. Small and large, barren and alive with small men and big men and cat men and talking lizards and a shining prince with golden hair that bestrode a world all his own while waging a one-shovel war against encroaching baobabs and was looking curiously right at him-

Marwyn cursed, yanked him away from where he'd crawled forward and jumped between him and the candle, breaking his line of sight.

The last thing Luwin glimpsed before the flame went out was Death raising up the soul left behind, bright and endlessly colorful and mighty.

Then there was only Marwyn the Mage barely outlined against the darkness as he stood there with his back turned, glaring in the spot where the glass candle had once burned.

"A pox on every highborn who ever thought they had a thought worth the hot air in their empty skulls! To think I'd gotten my hopes up after the grey rats! Here I am wondering about sorcerers and R'hlorrists and warlocks and the Black Goat fuckers and every other cult in the world that the North might have taken in, but no! They somehow do one better! And I'm sure Stark will make a solemn affair of this whole 'meeting' and how our pact is settled and I'm free to go on my way if I wish! Even though I'm the one who demanded a meet with his pet sorcerer in the first place! Why I oughta… Bah!" Marwyn's faint outline looked terrifying in the darkness, like a rabid dog slavering at the mouth. Somehow though, Luwin didn't have it in him to feel afraid. Or feel much of anything. The mage then turned and Luwin didn't need to see his face to know he wore a glare. "And you! What the hell were you thinking, child!?"

Oh, he was talking to him now? Luwin's thoughts skittered over his brain, like spiders. "Death was rather short for Death, wasn't it?"

Wait, that hadn't come out right.

"Bugger this on an Other's icy prick." Marwyn turned, tossed some firewood into the hearth along with a splash of his belly-melting firewater. The flame roared to life, casting the snow hut and the angry face of its owner into stark relief. The Mage then sat on the edge of the weirwood stump and went about checking Luwin's health like he had back in Oldtown, twice as angry but no less careful.

Still addled by everything he'd undergone, Luwin blurted out the next thing that came to mind. "Was that a Child of the Forest?"

"Because height surely counts most in a magic vision, clearly," Marwyn sneered derisively. "Why should the starry void of the long night matter? Tell me what all you remember. Don't try to find a beginning, just talk about what stood out most and go from there."

Luwin ended up starting from the beginning anyway. Not that his undignified bath in that black pool was the beginning, but it was a beginning. When he reached the end, though, and told Marwyn about the last glimpses of the other side before he cut the flame off, Luwin stopped. He thought he'd get assailed with questions. Maybe scolded some more. Marwyn didn't do that though. Instead, the Mage served him a bowl of baked walnuts and a cup of sage, peppermint, basil and rosemary tea right off the fire. They cleared his mind and lit his insides with the warmth of home and hearth. Softened the longing he still felt for the stars. Not all, but some.

Didn't really help him recall the earlier dream any better though. Which he wasn't all that broken up over, truth be told. Bad enough he was barely competent on those skis in the waking world, he didn't exactly relish dreaming about doing even worse. The rest, though… The greybeard with his hammer leading them around. The forest and its marvellous lights, and the red that streamed upwards from pits and waters. The green sky high above the clouds, like moss and grass set in the heavens. Luwin had no idea what to make of any of them. Then there was that little anklebiter that lured them down through the roots into the green to begin with, only to play tricks on him. Pounced unseen and laughed the whole time until they fell back out through the pool of black water.

Come to think of it, that one-eyed raven from back at the Citadel had been watching from the background too, once they passed into winter again.

When Luwin finished, Marwyn watched him for a time, not saying anything. The flickering flames cast half his face in shadow and the other as if alight with its own fire. The Mage looked like a fell spirit as he sat there. A king come forth straight from some barrow or cave far away. A god upon his throne, even, judging him from his hall of ice and stone and wood as white as bone.

"Was that really Death?" Luwin asked. He didn't know what else to do.

"You think that's what you saw?" Marwyn growled, spitting to the side. The glob of phlegm was smaller than usual and more pink than red. The pall upon them broke and Marwyn looked like his usual, uncouth, dangerous mortal self once more. "The only clean death I saw was of the bear, but how can you know it was real? Or are you asking about that creature? You don't think it could have been a man? Or a woman? You dream whatever you fancy, would you have me think you never dreamed of playing god? And if it really was some god, what then? What if I told you it was the Stranger? R'hlorr the Red? The Black Goat of Qohor maybe? Do you want me to decide for you which gods are real? You follow the Old Gods of Many Faces, would you have me think they suddenly ring false to you because of one strange dream? A man's gods are his own business."

Not according to the Faith of the Seven and every other cult you just named. Though feeling chastised, Luwin nonetheless couldn't contain himself. "That was nothing like any dream."

"Nothing like any of yours, perhaps, but how do you know it was yours at all? You didn't work any of this magic, how do you know whose dream it was? What if it was mine? The greybeard's? What about that little pup that aggrieved you so much?

Luwin didn't know. "Was it?"

"Maybe it was neither. Maybe it was all of them. Maybe we passed through all their dreams at different points. Say we saw the dying dream of that old clan chief, whose dream did we pass through to get there? What does it say when a childlike spirit leads you to watch a soul being harvested by whatever that was, laughing all the way? Maybe we should tie jingling bells to our coffins and get it over with, hmm? Or maybe the whole thing was dreamed up by whoever lit the candle from halfway across the world and we saw only what he made us see, did you think of that?"

He hadn't. He wasn't thinking about a lot of things, it seemed.

Marwyn hauled himself off the stump, went to his pack and pulled out a leather-bound tome which he held out for Luwin to take. "Go sit and stop thinking about any of it for a while. After that, write down everything you remember. Only what you remember. Don't try to guess. Don't try to wonder. Don't interpret anything. And for the sake of all the Gods and Others, don't speak to anyone of anything you saw and heard today."

"… Alright?" What was he going to do, say no?

"Sorcerers, warlocks, shadowbinders, they'd all demand your sworn vow, Luwin," Marwyn said, voice dark and sharp as salt on a wound. "They'd use their arts to enforce their will once you submitted yours. They'd feel it their right to exact price in blood and will and life if you then broke it. I don't make a habit of such demands, but I hope you'll heed the gravity of my words regardless. Now let's get you back to the others. The camp will be abed soon and you could use some normal dreams, I reckon."

Marwyn ushered him out, walked with him part of the way through the camp until he could find the rest of the way by himself, then stomped off to find Lord Stark.