Jon edged closer to the arch, Longclaw low, breath loud in his own ears. Wind funneled through the gatehouse in a long, hollow groan. The silhouette above shifted, just a twitch, a weight rolling forward.
Stone dust trickled from the ledge.
A chime pierced the air.
Jon barely had time to look up.
Something fell.
It dropped from the cliff like a boulder given life, slamming into the ground with such force that the earth jumped under Jon's boots. Dust billowed. Pebbles rattled from the archway. A warped, sprawling shape unfolded from the crouch where it landed, rising by degrees as if remembering how to stand.
It was tall. Taller than any man should be.
Its limbs were wrong, too many joints, lengths mismatched, bending at angles that made Jon's stomach tighten. Pale flesh stretched over a frame built by someone who knew the idea of a body but not the rules. Metal jutted from one arm: a broad, slab-like shield fused to the limb as if grown there. In its other hands--hands, plural, Jon realized with a slow chill, gleaming slender blades like the bones of some predatory bird.
The thing tilted its head.
Jon stepped back, breath tightening. His fingers clenched around Longclaw's hilt until his knuckles burned.
The creature charged.
Not like a man, more like a starving wolf lunging downhill. Its first strike carved a crater into the dirt where Jon's chest had been a heartbeat earlier. He rolled aside, ribs screaming, and the creature twisted toward him with a fluid, boneless grace that made the air itself seem to recoil.
Jon kept moving. He had no hope of matching its speed; survival lay in spacing, angles, and reading the weight behind those unnatural limbs. The monster overreached--every blow thrown with the brute confidence of something that didn't fear breaking itself.
He backed toward a fallen column, forcing it to follow through rubble. Its left arm dragged for a heartbeat, thrown off by mismatched length. He didn't name the opening. He simply knew it, felt it the way a veteran feels a recruit shift wrong before a strike.
The creature lunged.
Jon stepped aside, just enough, and cut along a joint that didn't belong to any one body. A shallow slice, but it hit something vital. The monster shrieked like metal shearing apart. It slammed its shield at him in a wild, snapping arc. Jon ducked; the rim smashed the pillar above him, showering them both in grit and sparks.
The force of it rattled Jon's teeth.
He staggered back beneath the broken arch, where chunks of fallen stone offered uneven cover but little real shelter. The archway no longer tightened the ground into a choke point--centuries of ruin had opened the space wide--but shattered blocks of masonry created a ragged maze that slowed movement and forced close work.
The creature followed with a scraping shriek, its bulk dragging along a collapsed support beam as it forced itself between the fallen stones. One blade scraped free with a shower of sparks. Its shield arm caught for the smallest moment on a jut of broken wall--just long enough for Jon to act.
Half a heartbeat was a gift.
Jon stepped in, blade low, and slashed at the knotted tendons of its nearest leg--tendons that didn't match, as if stitched together from different corpses. The cut held. The limb buckled.
The creature dropped to one knee, but its upper body thrashed, blades carving desperate, snapping arcs. Jon barely slipped aside as one blade clipped his shoulder, slicing through cloak and grazing skin. Pain burned bright and sharp.
It surged upward again--off-balance but still deadly. Jon felt the shift in its stance, the way its crippled leg dragged weight in the wrong direction. Monsters bowed to simple truths: a limb that couldn't bear weight was a fault line begging to be broken.
He feinted left, drawing its remaining strength into one reckless swing.
A whisper of movement flickered at the edge of his vision.
A hooded woman stood there, born from the mist, not entering through it. A single gold eye regarded the battle with eerie calm, a blade of pale, curling light formed in her hand.
For an instant, Jon froze--magic, unmistakable, curling pale around her hand. Not the fire-bright sorcery of red priestesses, nor the cold whispering power of the weirwoods. Something stranger. Older. It set the hairs on his arms standing upright.
She stepped forward, precise as a resolve sharpened over years. With no wasted motion, she plunged the spectral blade beneath the creature's ribs.
"Now," she said, voice steady.
Jon didn't hesitate.
He charged as the creature convulsed, its limbs thrashing in frantic, broken patterns. A flailing arm nearly caught his throat--he dropped under it, rolled, and rose inside its guard. His breath tore in his chest, but he planted both hands on Longclaw's hilt and drove the blade upward through the creature's twisted torso with every shred of strength he had left.
This time, the creature didn't strike back.
It collapsed onto him with the weight of a falling tree, crushing the air from his lungs. Jon gasped against the pressure, vision darkening.
Then the body shuddered.
Light burst through its seams--not warm, not holy, but brittle and cracked, like the last glow in the heart of something long-dead. Its limbs unraveled into dust. Its torso caved inward. The mass pinning him dissolved into drifting motes that vanished on the cold draft beneath the arch.
And suddenly Jon was alone.
Silence claimed the gatehouse. A silence that felt earned, not given.
He stayed kneeling, breath ragged, Longclaw trembling in his hands. His ribs screamed. Blood trickled down his cheek. Every muscle quivered from the effort of surviving something that did not move as any living thing should.
He had fought wights, wildlings, Thenns, mutineers--creatures of malice and men stripped of mercy. But nothing had ever looked at him with such hollow certainty, as though his death were a task it had been built to perform.
He should have died. By rights, the archway should have been his grave.
Whatever governed this land obeyed rules he did not understand--and that ignorance gnawed at him more fiercely than the pain.
The woman watched him, still as the stone around them. Her spectral blade faded into nothing.
"You learn as you fight," she murmured. "Few do."
Jon forced himself upright, breath ragged. "You were watching."
"Yes." No apology, no justification, merely fact.
"I am Melina."
Her name settled strangely in the cold air, soft but carrying weight. She extended her hand slightly. A shimmer in the mist thickened into two flasks: one red, one blue. "For your wounds."
Jon hesitated, then drank from the crimson one. Heat flooded through him, knitting torn muscle, clearing the shaking from his legs. It was not pleasant, more like standing too close to a forge. He exhaled hard. "Feels… wrong. Or nearly."
"Life often does," Melina murmured.
Jon wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. "You said you wanted something of me."
He wasn't steady yet; the healing warmth had sealed his wounds, but his breath still came thin. For the first time since waking in the stone coffin, he felt the edge of something he hadn't let himself name--fear. He was outmatched in this land. Alone, he would die again and likely stay dead.
"I offer an accord."
The wind shifted, stirring the edges of her cloak but not her stance. She met his eyes--not demanding, not pleading, but with the steadiness of someone who had walked through too many endings to bother hiding the truth.
"Have you heard of the Finger Maidens?" she asked. "They serve the Two Fingers--guiding those who bear Grace. They offer strength… and purpose."
Jon felt the faint pulse of that unseen force again, the one that had tugged him across this land like a hook behind the ribs. He kept his hand carefully off Longclaw's hilt. "And what does this have to do with me?"
"You are without such a guide," Melina said. "Without a maiden. Alone, you will not grow strong enough to survive what waits in these lands."
Jon bristled at that. "I've survived plenty alone."
"And yet," Melina replied softly, "you nearly died moments ago."
The Stormgate felt suddenly narrower.
She continued, her voice steady but not cold. "I can take the runes you claim, the strength you draw from what you defeat--and shape them within you. Not as a master shapes a servant, but as a smith works iron already tempered by fire."
Jon stared at her. "Why help me?"
She did not look away. "Because I must reach the foot of the Erdtree. There is purpose waiting there. Something I must do." Her gaze flicked to the drifting dust where the Scion had dissolved. "But I cannot cross these lands in my state. Not alone."
Jon's first instinct was refusal--pride, stubborn as winter stone. But the memory of the Scion's weight crushing him returned sharp and cold. He could fight men and beasts. He could fight death itself, once. But he could not fight a land whose every shadow hid a new horror. Not alone. Not without someone who understood its laws, even half-spoken as they were.
And she had saved him without hesitation.
A pause. A choice left open.
"If you walk with me," she said, "I will offer you strength. Guidance. And the means to stand against those who would see you undone. All I ask is that you take me with you. To the foot of the Erdtree."
Jon looked at the blood drying on his cheek. At the faint prints of his boots in the dust. At the cliff walls where the Scion's fragments had clattered before they vanished.
He thought of the hanged men in the forest. The camp at the ruins. This strange land with its false sky and stranger laws.
Whatever lived in Stormveil was worse than what he had just fought.
He couldn't reach it alone.
And she had saved his life once already.
He thought of the hanged common folk in the forest. Of Stormveil looming somewhere ahead like a rotting crown. Of how this land chewed through the helpless and unprepared. If he was to survive long enough to do anything that mattered, he needed more than a sword and stubbornness.
He nodded, once. "Aye."
Something in the air eased between them.
Trust was too strong a word for what stood between them, but necessity had its own bond. The kind forged on cold walls and killing fields--the kind that said: live and decide the rest later.
"Then let us leave this place," Melina said. "Your wounds may be closed, but you are far from whole. The merchant's fire will serve you better than these stones."
She turned, and Jon followed. Together they stepped back into the widening light.
The gorge seemed to breathe behind them, exhaling its mist as if disappointed to lose its prey. The fog thinned into drifting threads around Jon's boots. The wind softened from a cutting shriek to a weary sigh rolling toward Limgrave's open plains.
Jon didn't look back.
The memory of the creature--its frantic limbs, its empty eyes, the way it had come down from the cliffs above the gate--pressed at the edges of his thoughts like a bruise. Whether it had fallen, leapt, or been cast from some unseen perch, he couldn't say. Only that it had descended with a purpose sharp enough to cut.
Melina walked beside him, though "walked" seemed too solid a word. She moved lightly, as if the ground itself chose to support her only when needed. The wind shifted her cloak, yet the fabric barely stirred. Once, he blinked, and for half a heartbeat she appeared a step ahead instead of at his side, as though she'd forgotten to remain tethered to the place her body occupied.
Jon had questions piled like stones behind his teeth. He chose the smallest one.
"You knew that… thing was waiting."
Her hood dipped slightly, the gesture as controlled as everything she did. "I knew the road ahead would test you."
"That wasn't a test," Jon said. "That was a killing set before it began."
"A test and an execution differ only by outcome," she replied.
Jon huffed a breath, not quite a laugh. "I'd rather know when the next one is coming."
Melina's gaze remained forward. "There are many roads in this land. Some are predictable. Some are not. But death is certain enough that warning you of each danger would fill every hour we have."
Not a reassurance. Not cold, either. Just truth, delivered without decoration.
They crested a rise where the air opened wide again. Limgrave's plain spread before them--rolling grass, ruins like broken teeth, the sky an impossible wash of gold. The Erdtree towered on the horizon, its branches shimmering as though stirred by a wind only it could feel.
Halfway down the slope, Jon paused. Something pulsed beneath his ribs--warm, steady, neither pain nor comfort. He pressed a hand to his chest. "Something's changed in me."
Melina studied him. "A remnant of the creature you felled. Its strength lingers."
Jon stiffened. "A curse, then? Or some taint from the beast?"
"Not a curse," Melina said. "Power must go somewhere when its bearer dies. Here, it seeks shape."
Jon didn't like the sound of that. Sorcery in his world never came without cost, and gifts given freely were the ones to fear. But the warmth inside him built and built, refusing to be ignored.
"Do what must be done," he muttered.
Melina lifted her hand and held his, and the warmth unfurled through him in a slow surge.
Melina's golden eye brightened faintly.
The runes awakened.
A pulse swept through Jon, sharp enough to stiffen his spine, warm enough to ease it a heartbeat later. It wasn't a flash. Not sudden. It unfurled slowly, like new heat rising from a forge stone. His muscles tightened, then loosened; the world sharpened slightly, the colors deepening at the edges.
Strength seeped into his limbs, not as a gift but as recognition.
His stance changed almost without thought, feet grounding instinctively, breath falling into a steadier rhythm, balance settling lower and tighter. Skills drilled into him at the Wall felt… clearer, as though he'd finally remembered the parts he'd once forgotten.
Melina watched without comment.
The warmth faded into stillness.
Jon straightened, breath slow and controlled. "I feel--" He paused, searching for something sensible. "--more solid."
Melina inclined her head. "Runes shape the Tarnished, as fire shapes iron. You take them into yourself, and you grow."
He let the words sit. They weren't comforting, but they weren't frightening either.
Small golden motes drifted up from the grass around them, caught in a breeze that didn't exist. The sky above remained stubbornly bright despite the hour, its false night rolling in with a sheen like beaten gold.
Jon slowed.
Night settled strangely. The heavens did not darken so much as shift--colours bending where they should have dimmed, constellations sliding into shapes Jon did not know. Spirals where there should be hunters and direwolves. A smear of cold red where the Seven-Pointed Star ought to be. Nothing felt true.
He forced himself to look away.
Melina glanced at him. "The night troubles you."
Jon stared upward, throat tightening. "Only gods move the heavens. And even then, only in stories," he said quietly.
Melina didn't correct him. "The sky has been… held. Bound in place."
Jon shook his head once, sharply. "A man cannot command stars."
"In this land," Melina replied, "men have tried."
Jon tore his gaze away. The weight in his chest wasn't fear, exactly--more the sensation of a man who had stepped onto a ship and realized the sea beneath him ran deeper than he had imagined.
They continued across the open plain. The sound of insects began to hum--soft, tentative, unsure whether to trust the false dusk. Grass brushed Jon's boots. The faint tug of Grace flickered at the edge of his vision, whispering direction. He ignored it.
After a while, he asked, "What was that thing?"
Melina did not slow. "A Grafted Scion."
Jon frowned at the name. It meant nothing to him--too neat a title for something that looked cobbled together by madness.
"A name won't make sense of it."
"No," she agreed. "Not yet. But it is the name the land gives it. You may use another, if that suits you better."
Jon grunted, considering the thing's twisted limbs, the way its parts had not belonged to one body. "Aye. I'll hold to the one with too many arms for now."
Melina, at least, did not pretend her vagueness was kindness.
They walked in silence for a time. The Church of Elleh rose in the distance, its broken walls streaked red by the low light, its ruined arch catching the glimmer of fire within.
Melina's voice came softly, almost separate from her steps.
"You asked why I chose to help you."
Jon touched the half-healed gouge on his cheek. "Aye."
"You looked upon the hanged dead in the forest," Melina said. "You did not avert your eyes. You did not grow numb to their suffering, nor did you try to justify it. That is not the habit of a cruel man."
Jon stared ahead. He'd seen too much to call himself pure, but cruelty had never been his way.
"And?" he asked quietly.
"And you refused the path Grace laid before you," she said. "You doubt what others would worship. You question what others obey. You are not ruled by power, nor by fear."
Jon didn't know what to do with that, so he kept walking.
Melina added, "Such a man is dangerous to tyrants."
The wind picked up, rolling long waves through the grass. The firelight from the church flickered, steady and warm.
Melina did not move ahead or fade away this time. She stayed beside him, silent once more, a presence neither entirely flesh nor entirely spirit, but something caught between.
The ground began to slope gently downward toward the ruin.
Jon tightened his grip on Longclaw.
Whatever tomorrow held, tonight he would at least have answers, warmth, and a place to sit where the sky could not drag him into itself.
He followed the path toward Kalé's fire, and the strange, shimmering night closed quietly around them.
The last stretch of the walk settled into a hush that wasn't quite peaceful. Jon felt it in his spine, the quiet of a land made not out of mercy, but expectation.
The ruined Church of Elleh rose from the grass in pieces: broken arch, splintered rafters, a half-collapsed wall leaning like a drunk trying to remember how to stand. Smoke curled from the small fire inside. The scent of it, woodsmoke, resin, something roasted, hit Jon like the memory of Winterfell's courtyard.
Kalé sat exactly where Jon had left him, legs folded, lute across his lap. The tune he picked was slow, wandering, almost too gentle for a place that had shown Jon such violence. When he looked up and saw the pair approaching, his fingers stilled on the strings.
"By the Erdtree…" Kalé breathed. "You've returned."
Jon stepped into the circle of light. The heat from the small fire soaked into his chilled skin. "Barely."
Kalé's sharp gaze flicked over him, at the dried blood on his cheek, the torn edge of his sleeve, the bruised way he held himself. Then the merchant noticed the second figure.
Melina lingered just beyond the fire's reach, her shape more suggestion than presence, the light clinging to her shoulders like a cloak of its own.
Kalé inclined his head. "A rare visitor to my humble fire."
Melina answered with a small, measured nod. "Your flame is steady. It is enough."
Kalé accepted that without question. He set the lute aside. "You look like you've crawled through the belly of a troll, Jon."
"Close enough." Jon eased himself onto a fallen block of stone. The ache in his ribs sharpened, reminding him that the healing flask had saved his life but hadn't erased the memory of the Grafted Scion's weight crushing him into the rock.
Kalé rummaged through a small bundle and produced a strip of dried meat and a hard heel of bread. "Eat. You need more than firelight and stubbornness."
Jon accepted the food without protest.
Melina slipped into the ruin, moving like a shadow given the courtesy of shape. She didn't sit. She didn't hover. She simply existed near the door, watching the plains as though expecting the land itself to shift.
Kalé cleared his throat. "Whatever was in the Stormgate… it wasn't a common beast."
Jon swallowed the last of the bread. "A twisted thing," Jon said. "Too many limbs, moving like it had forgotten how a body is meant to hold together. I've never seen it's like."
Kalé's eyes narrowed at Jon's description of the creature. "Stormveil breeds its own nightmares these days. Soldiers sent in whole don't always return that way. Some lords twist strength till it snaps."
"He made them like that?" Jon asked, voice low. "Men aren't meant to be pulled apart and stitched back wrongly."
Kalé's mouth tightened. "He calls it, 'claiming his birthright'. The rest of us call it folly."
Jon looked toward the cliffs where the hills hid their dead secrets. "Stormveil sits over all this?"
"Aye," Kalé said. "A keep turned inward. More grave than a fortress."
Jon let that settle like a stone in the gut.
The wind slipped through the broken rafters. Something about it carried the scent of distant rain.
Jon looked to Melina. Her hood lifted just enough for him to catch the faint gleam of her single golden eye.
"You said I wouldn't cross these lands alone."
"I did," she replied. "And I meant it."
Kalé's brows rose slightly. "An accord, then?"
Melina did not confirm or deny; she just watched Jon.
Jon met her gaze. In it, he saw no promises. No riddles. No prophecy. Only the steady truth of someone who had seen far more than she ever voiced. Jon breathed out slowly. When he spoke, it came with the heaviness of a man remembering every oath he had ever sworn.
"We walk together," he said at last.
Melina inclined her head, the smallest easing in her stance--as if some tension he had not seen finally released.
Kalé leaned back, exhaling. "Then your odds improve. Marginally. Perhaps."
Jon almost smiled. "I'll take marginal."
Kalé's expression softened. "Rest here tonight. Stormhill is no place to wander at night."
Jon lifted his eyes toward the broken roof. The stars still burned with that unnatural brilliance, colours wrong, shapes fractured. A path of pale green lights drifted slowly across the heavens like a river of fireflies learning how to be stars.
He looked away.
He did not trust a sky that could choose new shapes for itself.
Jon lay back on his bedroll, cloak pulled tight around him. Melina settled near the doorway, watching the plains as if listening for something Jon could not hear. Kalé plucked a low tune on his lute again, melancholy, but steady, like the heartbeat of an old home.
The fire crackled. The night deepened.
Jon closed his eyes.
He was not safe.
He was not home.
But for the first time since clawing his way out of the dark beneath the Cavern, he didn't feel entirely alone.
---
Author's note: I'm sorry but it's a right of passage to have the Grafted Scion as a first boss, now I know we usually die when we first encounter it but I wanted Jon's deaths to be more impactful so I'm keeping them in reserve. I changed the troll and soldiers to the spider because I thought it'd be cooler. Also Melina appears! I don't know if you liked my version of her but ngl I prefer her being there in the fight rather than being a ghost. Also Jon's gonna use his smarts to get allies and will not be soloing bosses anytime soon. Sorry for anyone expecting him to be Let Me Solo Her 2.0.