Prologue
The blood had not yet dried when the raven crossed the gray sky of the Twins.
The Red Wedding had ended in carnage. Bodies piled high, cups overturned, jaws open in an eternal scream. And high above the banquet hall, where music and laughter had once echoed, lay Robb Stark, the King in the North, lifeless. His head had been severed with grotesque cruelty, and in its place, sewn by unholy hands, the head of his direwolf, Grey Wind, crowned his mutilated body.
The Freys laughed. The Boltons celebrated. But none knew the mistake they had made.
When the blood of man and wolf mingled, when a Stark's soul was expelled from his flesh and the wild spirit of Grey Wind was trapped, something else arrived. Something ancient. Something strange. Something… otherworldly.
From beyond time and reason, from a place where the stories of Westeros were only fiction, a mind was drawn toward that desecrated body. A mind that knew the secrets of the North, the betrayals of the South, the true enemies beyond the Wall, and the fire that had yet to awaken in Essos.
He awoke with a shriek that shook the stones. It was not the roar of a wolf, nor the cry of a man, but a savage mixture of both. Golden eyes opened in the darkness of the cellar where the body had been dumped. Nails that were no longer human tore at the wood. Bones creaked, reforming. The cold of the North embraced him like a lost son. He had returned… but not as before.
He was not Robb Stark. He was not just Grey Wind.
He was something new. Something that should not exist.
And his mind… his mind burned with impossible knowledge.
He knew Cersei Lannister would not yield the throne. He knew of the dragons' return. He knew of the Night King and the wall that would one day fall. He knew of Jon Snow, the bastard who was not a bastard. He knew of the pain, of the betrayal, of the names he must remember.
Arya… Sansa… Bran… Jon…
The whispers of old gods called to him from the weirwood trees. The blood of wolf and man boiled with power.
He was a werewolf. And he was King in the North, once more.
But this time, there would be no honor. There would be no mercy.
This time, the North would remember with claws and fangs.