260 AC
Varg
"Varg, listen to me!"
The voice rasped, breaking the stillness of the dim, smoky chamber. It belonged to an old greybeard, a man whose years had carved deep lines into his weathered face, now twisted in pain.
He lay sprawled across a rough-hewn bed of pine and furs, his body a frail shadow of what it once must have been.
His skin was a ghastly pale white, stretched thin over brittle bones, and his breath came in shallow, rattling gasps.
Where his left leg should have been, there was only a wound, the flesh around it blackened and festering with a wound that stank of death.
An amputation, hasty and brutal, had stolen what little vigor remained in him, and now he teetered on the edge of death's grasp.
Beside him stood a young man in stark contrast to the dying elder. This was Varg, a young man of perhaps sixteen or seventeen winters, his frame already broad and hardened.
His hair was short, in an army style, in the colour of a deep golden brown. His eyes, a piercing ocean blue, were fixed on the greybeard with a quiet intensity.
He stood close to the bed, his hands resting lightly at his sides, attentive and still, taking every old man's words.
With a sudden surge of strength, the greybeard's gnarled hand shot out, seizing Varg's shoulder in a grip that trembled with madness.
His eyes, clouded with pain and fury, locked onto the boy's, burning with an intensity that seemed to defy his broken body.
"Those whoresons killed your brothers!" he spat, his voice a venomous hiss that cracked with grief.
"They took Erin! Avenge me, son. Promise me! Enslave their women and kill all their men!"
His fingers dug into Varg's flesh, clawing as if to imprint the weight of his command into the boy's very bones. He held Varg there, his gaze unyielding, searching the young man's face for the spark of a vow.
Varg met his father's stare, unflinching.
"I will, Father,"
he said, his voice low and calm, yet carrying the weight of iron.
"I promise."
The words hung in the air, simple and sure.
The greybeard's hand lingered on Varg's shoulder, trembling now not from strength but from the strain of clinging to life.
His eyes bore into his son's, probing, testing, as if peeling back the layers of Varg's soul to weigh the truth of his oath.
Satisfied or perhaps too weary to doubt, he let his arm fall at last, the gnarled fingers slipping away. His head sank back into the furs, and his voice dropped to a gravelly whisper, heavy with finality.
"If you fail, I will haunt you, boy. Now leave me to die. You're Lord Stane now."
The room fell silent, save for the faint crackle of the hearth and the old man's labored breathing. Then, once more, he spoke, his tone softer, almost relieved, as if unburdening himself of his last tether to the living world.
"Leave me," he murmured, the words drifting like ash on the wind.
Varg stood motionless as the greybeard's chest stilled, taking the last few breaths before the end. Varg stepped back from the bed, the rough floorboards creaking under his boots, and let the weight of the moment settle, a burden shifted and a new beginning for his line.
'Finally, the old bastard is dead,'
Varg thought to himself, a grim satisfaction settling into his bones. It had been nearly sixteen and a half years since he'd woken up in this festering cesspit of a world, or more precisely, this miserable corner of it.
Varg wasn't like those sniveling fools weaklings who'd weep over being reborn, then scamper off to some sun-soaked shithole like the Summer Isles, chasing a life among a civilization of losers.
No, Varg didn't flinch at war or intrigue; he loved it, in fact, the bloody game of it all, that danse macabre he'd mastered long ago. His last life had gifted him an exquisite taste for it, c'est la guerre, as they'd said amid the screams and the smoke, where he'd once carved his name in crimson across fields of the heretics.
No, what gnawed at him, what he feared with a cold, gnashing dread, was a wretched existence as a rien, a nobody, forgotten like some peasant.
And Skagos? It ranked among the top three most godforsaken places in Westeros, no question about it.
A land of grinding poverty and relentless, shit-soaked weather. At least he'd been born into what passed for nobility here, though calling it that stretched the word thin. Skagos didn't have lords in the way the south might reckon them; it was a brutal, tribal sprawl where strength trumped law, and a man's worth was measured in the weight of his fist or the edge of his blade.
The Stanes, his father's line, were supposedly one of the three ruling houses of this rock, alongside the Crowls and the Magnars, but the Driftwood Hall "keep" was a joke. A ramshackle wooden hall down in the north of the island that'd make a landed knight in the Vale scoff and spit. Varg sighed in relief that at least it had a port.
Varg's mother had been one of his father's thrall concubines, little more than a sex slave.
By rights, Varg should've been overlooked, a bastard whelp with no claim to anything, least of all the Stane name or its pitiful holdings. But this is Skagos. No one down in the south even cares that we exist or knows what's going on here.
Skagosi have their own ancient rules and ways.
And the keep? Hah, a drafty pile of timber barely fit to house pigs, let alone a lord.
But fortune, or perhaps the cruel whims of fate, had turned in his favor.
His father, that grizzled old savage, and his pack of dimwitted, brutish brothers had gotten themselves hacked to pieces in the endless skirmishes that defined life here, yearly clashes with House Crowl and House Magnar, as predictable as the tides and twice as bloody.
Varg had been the unlikeliest of heirs, a thrall's son stepping over the corpses of his kin to claim what was left. What's left now is to finish his brother's bastards and take his rightful 'throne.'
This fic was inspired by reading 'Game of Thrones: Path of the Hungry Bear' by JManM. That fic is great! Check it out now!