Chapter Text
The world came back to him in fragments, cold, sharp, and aching, Robb Stark gasped, his lungs filling with the metallic tang of blood and the damp earth beneath him, his body was displayed of wounds, each breath a struggle, each heartbeat a hammer against his ribs. The last thing he remembered was the sting of betrayal, the flicker of torchlight on steel, the way the Freys had laughed as they cut him down. Dead. He should be dead. And yet, there was light.
Soft, silver, unearthly, it curled around him like mist, cool against his fevered skin, and for a moment, he wondered if this was the Stranger’s embrace. But no, this was something older, something sweeter. His vision blurred, then sharpened, and there she stood above him, a vision woven from moonlight itself. Her skin was pale as the winter’s first frost, glowing faintly, as if the stars had kissed her and left their shimmer behind. Hair like liquid night spilled over her shoulders, threaded with strands of silver, catching the dim light like a constellation given form. Her eyes, gods, her eyes were pools of endless blue twilight, dark and depthless, yet alight with something ancient, something knowing.
Robb’s breath hitched. He had seen her before, not in dreams, no, dreams could not conjure something so real, but in the spaces between waking and sleep, in the quiet hours when the war allowed him respite. A flicker of movement at the edge of the forest, a glimmer on the battlefield after the crows had taken their fill, a figure bathed in radiance, always just out of reach. He had chased her once, delirious with exhaustion, his boots slipping in the mud as he stumbled after that elusive glow, but she had vanished, leaving only the whisper of the wind behind. And now here she was, her fingers brushing his brow, the pain melting like snow beneath the sun. Her touch was cool, soothing, but it burned something deep inside him, a recognition, a longing.
the scent of damp earth and iron. Robb’s breath came shallow, his body trembling from the remnants of pain, though her touch had dulled the worst of it. He studied her really studied her the way the moonlight seemed not to fall upon her but to emanate from her, as if she were made of it.
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“What are you?” he asked, his voice rough but quiet, as though speaking too loudly might shatter the vision before him.
She didn’t answer at first. Her fingers lingered near the worst of his wounds, tracing the edges of torn flesh without quite touching it, as if she could mend him through will alone. The silence stretched between them, filled only by the distant rustle of leaves and the slow, steady rhythm of his own heartbeat.
“You’ve seen me before,” she said finally, her voice like the whisper of a breeze through winter branches.
Robb exhaled sharply. “Yes.” He had, glimpses, flickers, always at the edge of his vision. He’d thought her a trick of exhaustion, a specter conjured by the weight of war. But now, here she was, solid and real and looking at him with those fathomless eyes.
“Why?” he pressed. “Why do I see you when others don’t?”
Her lips parted, then closed again, as if weighing her words. When she spoke, it was with a quiet certainty. “Because I chose to let you.” A shiver ran through him, though the night was not cold.
“You were dying,” she continued, her gaze drifting over his battered form. “I knew you would. I’ve watched battles before. I’ve seen men fall. But you…I couldn’t let you.”
Robb swallowed. “Why me?”
She tilted her head, considering him. The moonlight caught in her dark hair, turning it to liquid silver. “Perhaps because you looked for me first.”
He remembered then, nights spent staring into the dark, half-convinced he’d seen something move where nothing should. The way his breath had caught when he’d glimpsed her once, just once, standing at the edge of the Wolfswood, watching.
“And now?” he asked, his voice barely above a whisper.
She smiled, just slightly. “Now, you live.”
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Robb's breath caught as she leaned closer, her silvered fingertips hovering over his wounds. A soft luminescence pulsed from her skin, like liquid moonlight spilling across his battered body. He gasped as the light seeped into his torn flesh - not burning, but cool as a winter stream, soothing where it should have stung.
"Wha—" His question died on his lips as the deepest gash across his abdomen began knitting itself together before his eyes. The skin pulled taut, weaving closed like threads of silk under a weaver's needle. The pain ebbed away, replaced by an eerie, tingling warmth that spread through his veins like mead on a cold night.
Her eyes glowed brighter as she worked, twin crescent moons reflecting in his widening pupils. "Be still, Wolf King," she murmured, her voice layered with echoes of countless nights. "The moon's touch mends what steel has sundered."
Robb shuddered as her essence flowed into him. He tasted starlight on his tongue, felt the chill of the void between stars in his lungs. The scent of frost-kissed roses and ancient parchment filled his nose, the perfume of something eternal.
When she finally withdrew, Robb sat up with a start, fingers flying to his unmarred skin. No wounds. No scars. Only the memory of pain and the lingering coolness where her hands had been.
"You're..." He stared at his healed palms, then up at her radiant form. "Not of this world."
The corners of her lips curved like the thinnest sliver of a new moon, around them, the very air shimmered with displaced power, leaves trembling without wind, droplets of blood floating upward from the ground like crimson stars returning to the sky.
"No," she agreed, her form flickering between solid and spectral. "But tonight, for you, I made an exception." A gust of wind scattered the last remnants of magic between them. When Robb blinked, she was gone, only a single silvered footprint in the mud remained, already fading like moonlight at dawn.
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The wind carved its lament through the skeletal remains of the watchtower, its voice a hollow echo of the ruin that clung to Robb Stark’s fractured spirit. He knelt in the womb of crumbling stone, fingers pressed against moss-eaten rock as if the very earth might whisper some absolution for his survival. The cold gnawed at him with the persistence of a starved beast, sinking its teeth past wool and leather to feast upon the marrow of his resolve. Outside, the wolfswood groaned under the weight of its own shadows, its ancient sentinels bowing beneath the burden of winter’s approach.
He was a specter in his own life.
The world had carved his name upon a tombstone, had draped his memory in the funeral silks of might-have-beens. Kings and peasants alike drank to his legend, to the fallen Wolf King who had bled for a dream that now lay gutted upon the altar of treachery. Only the ghosts knew the truth, that he still drew breath, that his heart still beat in time with the war drums of vengeance.
The memory of her haunted him more vividly than any battlefield phantom. He could still feel the imprint of her touch upon his skin, as though she had sewn constellations into his flesh with her fingertips. The way her voice had woven through his senses like smoke through temple rafters, sacred and suffocating. She had been a hymn sung in a forgotten tongue, a relic of something older than gods or men.
"Come back."
The words left him unbidden, raw as an open wound. The wind stole them, greedy and mocking.
The air stilled and the night held its breath.
She stood before him, her form limned in the pallid glow of a waning moon. The divinity that had once cloaked her like liquid silver now clung in tattered remnants, flickering like a guttering candle at the edge of dawn. Her hair, that river of ink and starlight, fell in disarray around shoulders that now bore the weight of gravity and her eyes, those fathomless pools that had once reflected the birth of galaxies, now held the fragile sheen of mortality.
"You called," she murmured, her voice the last sigh of a dying star.
Robb moved without thought, his hands rising to cradle her face as a pilgrim might cup sacred waters. Her skin was still cool beneath his touch, but the terrible permanence of bone and flesh beneath his palms sent a tremor through him. She leaned into his touch, her lashes fluttering like the wings of a wounded bird.
"What have they done to you?"
Her laughter was a brittle thing, sharp as shattered ice. "The pantheon does not suffer defiance lightly." Moonlight bled from her fingertips as she lifted her hands between them, the glow sputtering like a drowning man’s last breath. "They have made me finite."
The truth coiled around his ribs like a serpent. "Because you saved me."
"Because I chose you." Her fingers brushed the pulse at his throat, where his blood sang its mortal song. "The gods do not forgive such trespasses."
Robb felt the wolf rise in him then, its snarl vibrating through his veins. He pulled her against him, their foreheads touching as though they might merge into a single being through sheer will. "Then let them rage," he growled. "I will carve my vengeance into the flesh of heaven itself if they dare touch you again."
Her breath hitched, warm against his lips. "And I will weave your enemies’ screams into lullabies, my king." The kiss was both battle and surrender.
His mouth claimed hers with the desperation of a drowning man clutching at salvation. She tasted of forgotten rituals and the sweet decay of fallen stars, a sacrament that burned his tongue and sanctified his soul. Her fingers twisted in his hair like roots seeking purchase in barren soil, as if she might anchor them both against the coming storm.
Around them, the wind resumed its dirge, the world continued its indifferent turn.
But in the ruins of a broken kingdom, beneath the weeping eye of the moon, two outcasts forged a new covenant, not in ink or blood, but in the silent language of intertwined fingers and shared breath.
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The waterfall's roar filled the sacred hollow where they took refuge, its mist painting rainbows in the moonlight as it plunged into the black mirror of the pool below. Robb's hands trembled where they gripped her waist, not from exhaustion now, but from the terrible wonder of feeling her real beneath his palms. The goddess who had walked through his dreams now breathed mortal air, her ribs expanding against his chest with each unsteady inhalation.
See the pulse fluttering in her throat, a rabbit caught in a snare, her dark lashes wet with what looks like liquid diamonds.
Smell the sweat mingling with her celestial musk, moonflower and iron.
"You're shaking," he murmured against the shell of her ear, his voice roughened by the hours spent whispering battle plans to the night. His thumbs traced the dip of her hips through the thin fabric of her stolen shift, marveling at the give of flesh where before there had been only unyielding radiance.
Her fingernails scored his back through his tunic, equal parts plea and punishment. "I've never felt cold before." The admission spilled from her like a confession dragged from a heretic's lips. "Or hunger. Or—" She gasped as Robb's teeth grazed the juncture of her neck and shoulder, "this.”
Robb growled low in his throat, the wolf in him surging at her unraveling. Every hitched breath, every shudder, every mortal weakness was a treasure torn from the heavens and placed in his keeping. He walked her backward until the spray kissed their skin, until the stone wall bit into her spine.
"Tell me to stop," he demanded, though his hands were already peeling the damp linen from her shoulders.
Her eyes, still vast as event horizons, still older than the weirwoods, blazed with newborn hunger. "You dare command a goddess?"
"I dare everything," Robb swore, capturing her wrists and pinning them above her head. The waterfall's cacophony swallowed her whimper as he licked into her mouth, tasting divine wrath and mortal yearning in equal measure. "You fell from the stars for me. Let me worship you properly."
Her knee slid up his thigh in answer.
The shift tore like cobwebs beneath his battle-calloused hands. Her breasts heaved in the humid air, nipples pebbling under the moon's argent gaze, Robb dropped to his knees, his lips trailing down the quivering plane of her stomach.
"Wait." Her fingers tangled in his hair, not to pull him away, but to anchor. “They're watching."
Robb glanced up through the spray to where the stars winked between the canopy. “Let them watch. Let the gods see how thoroughly their castoff had been claimed.” He pressed an open-mouthed kiss to the inside of her thigh, grinning at her gasp.
"Then let them learn what happens," he murmured against her fevered skin, "when wolves love fallen stars."
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The waterfall’s thunder drowned all but the most desperate sounds, the ragged hitch of her breath as Robb’s mouth found the sacred dip between her thighs, the broken keen that tore from her lips when his tongue traced the very core of her newfound mortality. She tasted like winterberries and lightning, like something that had never been meant for mortal lips to worship.
Her fingers twisted in his hair, not to guide, but to survive the onslaught.
"Robb—" His name was a prayer, a curse, a plea.
He answered by sliding two fingers into her, curling them just so, as his tongue circled the swollen peak of her pleasure. Her thighs trembled around his ears, her back arching off the moss-slick stone as if the earth itself could no longer contain her. The goddess who had once commanded the tides now bucked beneath his mouth like a woman drowning.
When her climax took her, it was with a cry that rivaled the waterfall’s roar. Robb drank it down, greedy as a man starved, until her hands shoved weakly at his shoulders.
"Too much," she gasped, her voice raw with overstimulation. "It’s too—"
He rose over her, his own need a brutal weight between them. The moonlight caught the sweat-slick planes of his chest, the scars she had not been there to heal.
"Look at me," he commanded, gripping her chin.
Her eyes, still vast with the memory of eternity, focused on him, only him. He sheathed himself inside her in one brutal thrust.
Her scream was swallowed by his mouth, the stretch burned, she was tight as a bowstring, her body clinging to his as if he were the only anchor in a storm-tossed sky, Robb stilled, his forehead pressed to hers, his breath coming in ragged gusts, she was so tight, too tight, he had to take a second before he could talk.
"You feel that?" he growled. "That’s what you did to me. Made me feel like this. Made me want like this."
Her nails scored down his back as she rolled her hips, taking him deeper. "Then ruin me, take hold of me," she whimpered, her lips brushing his. "Ruin us both, make me virgin no more, no less a whore in the eyes of a God."
The rhythm was unforgiving, the stone biting into her back with every snap of his hips. The waterfall’s spray mingled with the sweat on their skin, the cold a sharp counterpoint to the inferno between them. She met him thrust for thrust, her legs locked around his waist as if she could fuse them into a single, unbreakable being.
When her second climax tore through her, it was with his name on her lips and his teeth at her throat. Robb followed her over the edge, spilling into her with a groan that sounded more like a sob.
After, as their breaths slowed and the night settled around them, he pressed a kiss to the racing pulse at her throat. Her fingers carded through his hair, her voice thick with exhaustion and something dangerously close to love. The mist curled around their tangled limbs, Robb traced the new freckles blooming across her shoulders, constellations rewritten in the language of mortal love.