Chapter Text
In centuries to come, dreamers will fear insomnia like riders fear the aging of their dragons, for it signals the same; the death of a bond, the cracking of something precious, something vital, all the magic leeching from life, leaving it brittle, vulnerable.
But she is the first, and knows no fear.
She knows only that she cannot sleep.
Dreams come to her in fragments, broken as her sleep, night after night; falling into oblivion only to jerk awake bare moments later, heart pounding and head spinning, blood-drunk. Dreams of her people, with her hair and her eyes, grown cruel and terrifying, of dragons filling the sky, blocking out the sun; of metal abominations she cannot describe hurtling towards her with screeching speed, of intricately carved wood, fur coats and beasts that speak. Of a beloved face, landing on a white beach in golden light, a ship with black sails at his back.
But none of them will coalesce. None will show her a story in full, allow her to walk through their spaces, to pass among the people there, to tease out the truth. And none will give her Jon.
In desperation, she pleads with Aed for stronger draughts, cajoling with logic and reason, and when that fails, with tears and begging, for she knows her brother well.
“You’re losing control of it, Su,” he says, frowning over vials and vessels, the alchemist in his lair. This has always been his territory, the potions, serums, and poisons with which he draws out dreams, fears, truths, controlling dragons and men alike. He eats as he works, pulling grape after grape from a bunch he’s hung overhead, left to absorb the smoke and scents of his work. “Whatever it is you’re chasing, don’t let it lure you too far.”
“I won’t.” Pacing, the hems of her skirt sweep the floor, coming away glittering with dust of gold and silver, the toes of her slippers gilded. “I have led us true thus far, haven’t I?”
He does not refute her, only bends over his vials with infinite patience, adding a drop of this, a pinch of that. Biting her lips will only keep back the words for so long. “Don’t you feel we’re running out of time?”
Her brother does not answer, instead heating the milky mixture he’s created until it first bubbles, then flushes gold. “Yes,” he says, finally, setting the tiny cork in place, testing the heat of the glass, tossing it from hand to hand before presenting it to her. “I feel it too. So does Luce.” That they haven’t asked Pete, he doesn’t bother to say; their elder brother’s feverish preparations speak for him.
“Then I will sleep while I may,” she says, kissing his cheek, and turns to leave.
“Su.” When she turns back, he tosses her a grape, his smile a shadow of its cocky self. “For luck.” It bursts between her teeth, so sweet it’s nearly nauseating, the faint smoke of magic a bitter aftertaste on her tongue.
It lingers still when she reaches her rooms, when she tips the golden thread of liquid down her throat and finally, blissfully, sleeps.
She opens her eyes to fire, and smoke, to screams and a world that trembles beneath her, the tower beneath her feet swaying like a ship on the waves.
And a presence behind her, who walks to her on silent feet, his arms enfolding her, pulling her back against him, solid and real.
Covering Jon’s hands in hers, she feels his chin rest on her shoulder, his beard tickling at her cheek. “This is my worst dream.” Flaming rocks shoot into the sky, one crumbling a platform to nothing in a shower of sparks and debris, another striking a dragon in flight sidelong, sending the poor creature tumbling from the sky, the shriek of its death throes filling their ears.
He takes a sharp breath. “The Doom.”
“Is that what you call it? Fitting.” They are doomed, whatever remnants of her people still live here in this time; the sky before her is a ring of flames, even those of the Fourteen who are peaceful giants in her time spewing smoke and ash into the sky, leaving the sun a pale, wavering orb, barely seen. This dream, she has seen to its end many times, seen the devastation, the final cataclysmic explosions. Nothing, she knows, will survive it.
“Everything you and your family built…” The rumbling of the Flames fills the trailing silence left in his wake, the pressure underlying them building to a fever pitch.
“Yes,” she says, the pale flame of her face livid with the orange flares streaking into the sky. “Someday it will all fall apart. And it will be well deserved, I think. They will stray from the path we laid for them. Nothing was made to be eternal, Jon Snow.” Turning to him, she lays a hand to his face. “Except you and I, perhaps.”
Taking her hand in his, he studies it for a moment, tracing the lines on her palm, before he closes his eyes, pressing a desperate kiss into her skin, as though he could write himself into the story told there. “What will happen to you? To you and I? I won’t lose you, Su.”
Already, she feels a thousand years old; already, she feels as though she’s entombed beneath the flames, waiting to rise again as a dragon, as the lore she’s taught their people dictates. But it isn’t true, at least not for her. Not for her siblings, and not for him, either. This much, she knows. “Jon. This all takes place thousands of years from my waking life. And you say it’s centuries past in your time. You will never see me with waking eyes.” She breathes deep, forehead pressed to his, finding his hand and weaving her fingers with his, tying them together with an invisible cord of gold. Aed’s final gift to her. “But that doesn’t mean this isn’t real. It’s always been. It always will be. And I will always find you, my love, whatever happens to you. Remember that, and in your darkest moment, I swear you will see me again.”
“Su?” He pulls back, grasping her face between his hands. “Why does that feel like a farewell?”
“Because it is,” she says. “For now.” Behind them, an eerie whistling scream grows, a hideous crackling roar, and she draws his face down, not letting him look. It’s only a dream. “I love you, Jon.”
The flaming boulder obliterates the tower that was her home, and she wakes, alone, and out of time.
Jon dies.
He dies amidst snow and blood, wounds steaming in the frozen air, because seeing the future is not the same as changing it; because some things must be as they are, to move time along its path. He dies, with an unseen phantom screaming above him, her head thrown back, howling like a wolf, as silent as Ghost.
They take his body to a room where that phantom flits about in dreams; where she kisses him, and lies in his bed, and laughs in wonder at the things he tells her, at the snowflakes dotting his hair.
And when his spirit wanders that world of dreams, walking in the thin barrier between life and death, he finds her again, her hair pale as a fall of ice, her skin white and insubstantial, his fingers passing through hers as he reaches for her, as the gold cord between then draws taut.
“It isn’t that kind of dream, Jon,” she says, and her voice sounds sad, and unbearably ancient. “I wish it was. But listen to me - this is not your end.” Her eyes hold his, blazing like the fires of her homeland; now indigo, now blue as the sea. “They will raise you back up, for your work is not done.”
He wants to protest. Wants to tell her how difficult it’s been, how tired he is, how many evil choices have stained his soul, tearing every vow to shreds. How different he is from the boy she’d known in her dreams. How he wants to stay with her anyway, and leave it all behind, all the pain and struggle and endless, bitter cold.
“I know, my love,” she says, though he hasn’t spoken, can’t seem to speak here, with no mouth to form the words, no breath in his punctured lungs. “It is hard, and it will be harder still. But you will win, because I have seen it.” Her gaze pins him there in the snow, and he listens, rapt. “And when your work in Westeros is done, you will take a ship, and sail to the west, where you will find a new green country full of wonders, and a queen awaiting you on its shore.”
Before him, her dream form flickers, and somewhere, so far distant it hardly matters, something like fire prickles over the body he’s been forced to depart. Something trying to draw him back in, by force of flame, a power he knows all too well. “I know you’re changed, Jon,” she says, and her hands hover over his head, like a last blessing. “It doesn’t matter. I will be, too. None of us remain unaltered by time.”
All around him, the quiet, cool darkness fades, overtaken by blazing flame, until he wants to scream with the searing pain of it.
“We will be real, Jon Snow,” her voice says, and then there is only the fire, and aching, stinging life.
In Narnia, a dark haired woman stirs, dreaming of a ship with black sails.
In her ear, a gentle voice calls.
“Wake up, Susan.”