The reality of her situation was, frankly, absurd.
If one were to look closely at the scene within the armory, past the roaring flames and the billowing smoke, they would not see a seasoned blacksmith. They would not even see a strapping young apprentice. They would see a toddler standing on a sturdy, reinforced wooden crate just to reach the lip of the granite anvil.
She was barely three name-days old.
Her reincarnated mind, sharp and adult, was trapped within a body that had barely outgrown its swaddling clothes. The only reason her mother's horror at the high table made perfect, rational sense was because the Lady of House Royce had watched her infant daughter drag a wheelbarrow of coal across a muddy courtyard.
The only reason her tiny, developing bones hadn't snapped under the weight of the three-pound shaping hammer was the gift of the ROB. Total Concentration Breathing. By drawing massive, hyper-oxygenated breaths, she forced her toddler muscles to perform far beyond human limits, operating with the proportional strength of an ant. But the toll it took was immense. She slept like the dead, and she ate enough meat to sustain a grown hound, relying entirely on Cullen to smuggle half-eaten chickens and meat pies from the kitchens to fuel her monstrous metabolism.
Today, however, she was not calling upon Horus from the rafters. She was not freezing time, nor was she slinging webs. Today, her father stood in the doorway of the forge, his arms crossed, demanding proof that her previous success hadn't been a fluke of the "ancestors."
She was going to forge a normal sword. No magic. No runes. Just steel.
She closed her eyes, standing on her wooden crate, and let her Expert Item Construction gift take over. It didn't grant her magical fire; it simply gave her a flawless, supernatural intuition for the material.
She inhaled deeply, the vapor curling from her small lips. With both tiny, calloused hands gripped tightly around the heavy tongs, she hauled the glowing billet of steel from the hearth.
Hugh stood in the corner, his jaw slack, watching a three-year-old heft glowing iron that weighed almost as much as she did.
CLANG.
She brought the hammer down. Her small stature meant she had to put her entire body weight into every swing, pivoting on her little leather boots. But guided by her construction gift, every strike was placed with atomic precision. She knew exactly when the carbon was distributing evenly. She knew exactly how many times to fold it to drive out the slag from the mountain ore.
For hours, the rhythmic ringing echoed through the courtyard. Sweat plastered her fine, wispy hair to her forehead. Her tiny arms trembled with the exertion, the breathing technique pushing her infant biology to its absolute breaking point.
When it came time for the quench, she used the flax oil, her eyes calculating the exact temperature drop.
When it was finished, she wiped it clean with a rag and held it out with two hands. It was a standard, double-edged arming sword. Unadorned, simple, and deadly.
Her father stepped forward and took it from her small hands. He tested the balance, his thick fingers wrapping around the hilt. He swung it in a tight arc, the blade whistling sharply through the heavy air of the forge. He then walked over to the bracing block and struck the flat of the blade against the granite.
It sang a perfect, clear note. Not a single chip in the edge. No fractures in the fuller. It was a masterwork of mundane metallurgy, crafted by a child who barely reached his knee.
Her father looked down at her. His eyes were complex—a mixture of deep pride, lingering confusion, and a pragmatic, lordly calculation.
"You will need a taller crate," her father finally rumbled, handing the sword to a stunned Hugh. "Have the carpenter build her a proper platform. I want a dozen of these for the vanguard by the end of the moon."
And so, the bizarre, grueling rhythm of her new life was established, setting the stage for the years to come.
The next four years became a blur of soot, steel, and secrets. As she grew from a toddler into a young girl, her routine cemented itself into the very foundation of Runestone.
Mornings belonged to Andar and the shadows. Long before the sun rose, she would meet her older brother in the muddy training yard. Sparring with an opponent who was a fraction of his size and armed with an adult's intellect was a terrifying experience for the heir of House Royce. She used her web-slinging to trip him, yanking his boots out from under him with invisible threads. She used brief, split-second bursts of time manipulation to dodge his heavy swings, appearing behind him like a ghost. By the time she was five, Andar was the fastest, most paranoid swordsman in the Vale, his reflexes honed to a razor's edge by a sister who fought like a teleporting spider.
Midday belonged to the misery of the solar. Her mother, refusing to entirely concede defeat, enforced a strict, agonizing compromise. If she was to be the House's secret weapon in the forge, she must still maintain the facade of a highborn lady. She was scrubbed raw by the maids, wrestled into fine wool and silks, and forced to sit with Septa Vane. She learned her letters, the histories of the Seven Kingdoms, and the intricate politics of the Vale. Her Expert Item Construction gift, surprisingly, made her terrifyingly good at embroidery—she intuitively understood the tension of the threads and the weave of the fabric—but she despised every second of it.
But the evenings... the evenings belonged to the fire.
The armory became her true domain. The wooden crate was replaced by a sturdy, iron-wrought platform. Hugh, entirely broken of his pride, effectively became her massive, bearded assistant, hauling the heaviest ingots and managing the bellows while she commanded the anvil.
In the dark rafters above, Horus grew alongside her. The ROB's familiar matured from a large falcon into a massive, terrifying raptor, his icy blue feathers shimmering in the gloom. The castle guards whispered that a demon bird haunted the forge, and they learned to keep their distance. Together, she and Horus secretly imbued a select few weapons for her family, hiding his freezing breath beneath the guise of the ancient Runes of Winter.
Seasons turned. The bitter winds of autumn gave way to the deep, freezing snows of a long winter, and eventually melted into the mud of spring.
By her seventh name-day, she was no longer the waddling, absurd toddler dragging coal.
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The news of Lord Jon Arryn's death did not arrive with a scream, but with the exhausted, rhythmic beating of wings. The raven that landed on the stone crenelations of Runestone was a dark blotch against a sky the color of a bruised plum.
To the inhabitants of the keep, the bird was merely a messenger. To the girl standing in the shadow of the forge, her chest expanding in a slow, whistling Total Concentration breath, the bird was the first falling pebble of an avalanche.
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POV :Hugh the Blacksmith
Hugh didn't need to see the scroll to know the world had shifted. He saw it in the way the girl stepped off her iron-wrought platform. She was ten years old now, her limbs lean and corded with the kind of dense, functional muscle that came from thousands of hours spent fighting the resistance of hot iron.
She didn't look like a child of ten. She looked like a statue carved from basalt.
"Bank the fires, Hugh," she said. Her voice had lost its high, childish lilt years ago, replaced by a calm, level tone that never wavered, even when the furnace roared. "The Lord Father will be calling for the heavy plate. The traveling sets. Every piece of bronze-clad steel we've finished this season needs to be oiled and readied."
Hugh wiped a glob of grease from his forehead, his massive, soot-stained hands trembling just a fraction. He had worked beside her for seven years. He had watched her "sing" to the metal, carving those jagged, ancient runes that seemed to hum with a life of their own.
He didn't know how she did it. He had stopped asking. He simply knew that when she traced the symbol for Winter onto a blade, the air in the room grew cold enough to see his own breath. When she etched the Rune of the Clock, the very light in the forge seemed to stutter, as if the sun itself had tripped over a stone.
"The bells haven't even rung, My Lady," Hugh grunted, though he was already reaching for the heavy tongs. "How do you know the Lord calls for travel?"
She didn't answer. She was looking toward the Great Hall, her eyes fixed on something Hugh couldn't see. He watched her hand twitch—a strange, fluid motion of her wrist—and a heavy leather smith's glove that had been sitting on a bench ten feet away suddenly snapped through the air as if pulled by an invisible tether, landing perfectly in her grip.
Hugh crossed himself, a quick, furtive motion. He had seen her do that a thousand times. The "Runes of the Spider," she called it. To Hugh, it looked like the world itself obeyed her whims.
"The messenger's horse is lathered in the courtyard, Hugh," she said finally. "And the bells are about to toll."
Two seconds later, the first heavy clang of the funeral bell rolled across the stone ramparts. Hugh dropped his hammer. The sound was a death knell for the peace they had known.
POV: Andar Royce
Andar Royce stood at the high window of the Great Hall, watching the raven-keeper take the bird. Behind him, his father, Bronze Yohn, sat at the massive weirwood table, the letter from King's Landing crumpled in his fist like a piece of worthless parchment.
"Jon is dead," Yohn rumbled. The sound was like a rockslide. "The Eyrie will be a nest of vipers now. Lysa Arryn is flighty, and the boy... the boy is sickly. The Vale needs a steady hand, and the King will be looking to the North or the West for a replacement."
Andar didn't look at his father. He looked at his own hands. They were scarred, calloused, and faster than any man's had a right to be. For years, his sister had been his secret trainer. She had "blessed" his blades with the ancient scripts of their house.
He remembered the morning she had given him his current longsword. He had been fourteen, she had been four. She had stood on her little crate, her eyes ancient and unblinking, and told him that the steel would "wait for his command."
He hadn't understood then. He understood now. In the heat of a sparring match, or the chaos of a mountain raid, the world sometimes seemed to slow down for him. He thought it was his own reflexes, his own Royce blood catching fire. He didn't know she was the one holding the leash of time.
"We must ride to the Eyrie," Andar said, turning to face his father. "If the Hand is dead, the King will come North. Or he will summon the Great Lords to the capital. We cannot be caught unprepared."
"The girl," Yohn said suddenly, looking up. "Your sister. What has she finished in the forge?"
"The vanguard's mail is reinforced," Andar replied. "And she... she has been working on something for you, Father. A breastplate. She says the runes are 'heavy' on this one."
Yohn nodded, a grim, prideful look entering his eyes. "She has the gift. The ancestors speak through her hammers. If war is coming, the bronze of House Royce will be the hardest thing in the Seven Kingdoms."
Andar felt a flicker of the old unease. His father saw a prodigy. The servants saw a living saint of the Old Gods. But Andar... Andar saw the way she looked at the world. She didn't look at people; she looked at structural weaknesses. She looked at the world as if it were an unfinished blade that needed to be broken and refolded.
"I will go to her," Andar said. "She'll be in the ash."
POV: Lady Royce
Lady Royce sat in the solar, her embroidery hoop trembling in her lap. The funeral bells were still tolling, a rhythmic, maddening sound that seemed to vibrate through the very floorboards.
"She didn't cry," Lady Royce whispered.
Septa Vane, standing by the hearth, looked up from her prayer book. "My Lady?"
"My daughter," Lady Royce said, her voice thin and brittle. "When the bells began, I went to find her. I thought... I thought a girl of ten would be frightened. The Hand of the King is dead. The realm is in peril."
"And?" the Septa asked.
"She was in the solar for her lesson. She didn't even look up . She just... kept breathing. That whistling breath. She told me that death is merely a change in the state of the metal." Lady Royce shuddered, pulling her shawl tighter. "She is ten years old, Septa. She should be playing with dolls. She should be weeping for her uncle Jon."
"She is a Royce," the Septa said, though her own voice lacked conviction. "The Lord Yohn says she is 'touched.' That the blood of the First Men has woken in her to protect us."
"It doesn't feel like protection," Lady Royce said, looking at a tapestry on the wall.
It was a piece her daughter had finished a year ago. It depicted a spider's web glistening with morning dew. It was so realistic, so intricate, that Lady Royce sometimes felt as if she might get stuck if she touched it.
The girl was a master of construction. Everything she touched—silk, steel, stone—became something perfect and terrifying. She didn't have friends. She didn't have pets, save for that monstrous, freezing falcon that haunted the rafters. She had only her work.
"I feel like a stranger in my own home," Lady Royce whispered. "And I feel like she is the one who built the walls."