The wolves of Castle Black - Book 2 - GoT

A matter of interpretation

Ylina watched with a gentle smile as Princess Shireen Baratheon sat in a table in the corner of the library with Gilly beside her and Embar in her lap. The wildling woman had a book in front of her while Shireen tried to teach her to recognize the letters. Every once and again, Embar would answer first, being close to his third nameday and having his mother always surrounded by books, it was no surprise he already knew a few of the letters, especially "E", from Embar. As she sat on another table with Sam, Ylina's eyes left the trio as Gilly answered correctly another of Shireen's questions and the girl smiled brightly at her. When Sam called her name, Ylina turned to face him properly.

"Did you find anything?" He asked, as Ylina shrugged, picking up the three pages Maester Aemon had given to her a few weeks before.

"I'm not sure how important it is, but I found a manuscript that described in detail how the White Walkers were created."

"How? Where?"

"I found some documents hidden away in a corner of the library." She lied. "But they are part of Daenys Targaryen's book of visions. Do you who she was?"

When Sam nodded his head, Ylina continued.

"She describes a dream she had one night." She said, looking down the scripts. "She talks about a forest, somewhere North of the Wall. She describes a big tree of red leaves, blooming in spite of the snow. She then describes this little human things, with green skin, green eyes and flowers and branches coming out of their arms and legs. In the North, we call them the Children of the Forest. My Father used to tell us a story about them... He used to say the Children were in the world far before any of the First Men. He said they used to live South of where the Wall is located today, in some lands of the North, but when the First Men arrived in Westeros, they started a war with the Children. They tried to decimate their whole kind, but the Children had something that the First Men didn't. They had magic. Daenys says that in her vision the Children of the Forest had captured a man and strapped him to the red tree. She says they seemed to be performing some kind of ritual and then, one of them picked up a shiny black blade and shoved it into the man's chest."

"Obsidian." Sam whispered, as Ylina nodded.

"Zīrtys perzys, Dragonglass. Daenys says the man in her vision, strapped to the tree and rendered helpless to the wishes of the Children, screamed, and thrashed around. She said she had never heard anything like it before. It was pain like she had never seen, she said. But then, the screaming stopped, the thrashing around stopped and Daenys said she could swear his heart stopped. She wrote: the whole forest was quiet. The Children had stopped singing and dancing. The snow had stopped falling. The birds had stopped chirping. And just like the rest of the forest, the man's heart had stopped as well. I thought he was dead. He seemed dead. He didn't breath, he didn't move. Why would I assume anything other than him being dead? But then, the Children started chanting again and all skin and flesh started to fall from the man's body. The Children didn't stop, until there was nothing more to fall off other than his bones. I had never seen such a thing in my life and it scared me half to death. I could feel a shiver up my spine and it wasn't from the cold. No, the sudden chill running through my body was because, as soon as the Children were done chanting, the skeletal man opened his eyes and from the place where once brown calm orbs suffered with pain, now bright blue eyes stared right at me with no emotion behind them."

As Ylina placed the manuscripts down on the table, Sam looked at her, rather surprised and somewhat scared. When she noticed the distress in her friend's eyes Ylina felt the need to comfort him, but how could she when she was almost as scared as he was?

"There was a last line, but there was a problem with translating that one." She admitted, as Sam frowned at her.

"Why?"