"Crunch, crunch"—the sound of a wild dog gnawing on bones echoed from the well, snapping Dany out of her thoughts.
"Heavens above, Little White, do you even know what you're eating?" Watching Little White crouched on the ground, chewing on the charred corpse of the White Pig Rat, she sighed and pressed her hand to her forehead.
—It's delicious.
In its dragon-spirit state, Little White sent over a message laced with pleasure.
"Ugh." Dany turned to Big Black, walked up to his head, wiped the blood from beneath his crimson vertical pupils, and asked, "Do you want some too?"
"Screee—" Before Big Black could answer, Little White let out a dissatisfied screech at his biased mother.
"Big Black is injured."
"Screee—" Big Black roared at Little White and turned his head away in disdain.
"Oh, right, Dany—there's a ghost!" Aemon suddenly snapped to his senses, crying out in fear. "I just saw Mad Axe in the courtyard! He was dragging his axe and patrolling Long Night Keep, as if searching for Night's Watch brothers.
I was so frightened I cried out, and he immediately noticed me and started following me, step by step."
"Mad Axe?" Dany looked at the old man strangely. "You must've been seeing things. There's nothing in the courtyard."
Old Aemon turned back to look, naturally seeing nothing. He then cautiously stepped into the courtyard, glanced around, and even shouted loudly, "Mad Axe, I'm a brother of the Night's Watch! Come kill me!"—just like a lunatic.
Before long, the old man noticed Dany and Barristan's odd expressions. Embarrassed, he returned and said, "I really saw him! A blood-red beard dragging down to his chest, a bloodstained axe—it was real!"
Mad Axe was a "legendary" brother of the Night's Watch, a madman.
It's said that in the dead of night, when everyone was fast asleep, he wandered barefoot through every corner of Long Night Keep and silently murdered his black-clad brothers in the dark.
His terror level ranked just below the Rat Cook.
"Mad Axe died thousands of years ago," Dany sighed.
"If the Rat Cook can return, why not the ghost of Mad Axe?" Aemon protested.
"The Rat Cook is different. It never really died—or rather, it began a second life."
"What do you mean?" Aemon asked in confusion.
"Think about it—how could a cook, under the watch of so many people, murder a prince and bake him into a pie?"
"It'd be hard for an ordinary person, but if the Rat Cook was skilled enough, the prince foolish enough, and the guards negligent…" Barristan said, frowning.
"Maybe so. But that rat definitely possessed the soul of a skinchanger—one with the gifts of a greenseer. Actually, the Rat Cook wasn't the only one of its kind."
"There's more than one Rat Cook?" Aemon asked.
"I mean the gift!" Dany turned to gaze at the towering ice-crystal Wall that reached into the black sky, her eyes flashing. "The Wall is special—imbued with immense magical power. It's almost like a divine realm, similar to Asshai, capable of defying the Age of the Decline of Magic.
I suspect that before Brynden Rivers came to the Wall, even if he could control a few ravens, he was just an ordinary skinchanger—not yet a greenseer.
The Bloodraven spent a fortune training spies and informants—something greenseers would have no need for.
It must've been only after coming to the Wall that his skinchanger abilities slowly awakened and strengthened. After over a decade, he finally became a greenseer.
The Rat Cook likely followed a similar path. And so does Jon Snow."
The White Knight frowned. "Even if the legend is wrong, and the Rat Cook wasn't punished by the gods and turned into a rat—but merely possessed an animal companion and started a second life—rats don't live thousands of years!"
Dany speculated with a smile. "No doubt the Rat Cook was found out. The Night's Watch discovered the prince had been murdered.
Through their investigation, they guessed the Rat Cook was a skinchanger—and they punished him.
They killed his true body and locked the rat possessed by his soul inside a wall somewhere deep in the well—perhaps a stone wall connected to a U-shaped burrow.
When we first arrived, you all saw it too: the rats at Long Night Keep were huge—bigger than cats—and they tunneled all over the place.
The Rat Cook trapped in the well was starving and had no choice but to devour the smaller rats that wandered in—some of which might've been its descendants, just like in the story."
"Seven save us! So this is the truth behind the Rat Cook legend?" Aemon and the White Knight cried out in shock.
In fact, Dany's guess wasn't far off. Originally, Long Night Keep did have rats—but they weren't so big. Now, they were larger than cats, bolder too—daring even to spy on humans.
The Rat Cook, trapped in the burrow beneath the well, had long lost all traces of humanity. Skinchangers and greenseers who begin second lives through animals are slowly consumed by their beast nature.
The Rat Cook ate rats. Mated with rats.
The pregnant female rats bore offspring for him. Through generations of selective breeding, the rats grew larger and more bloodthirsty.
"And the Rat Cook's legend spread far and wide. Even in the most remote villages of Westeros, every child has heard the story."
In fact, the Rat Cook's tale was even told across the Narrow Sea in Essos.
It was simply too iconic, too instructive—and too real. From beginning to end, it was all a true story.
Real stories spread far better than textbook fables like The Boy Who Cried Wolf.
"Faith made him a god," Dany sighed.
"Faith means nothing to ordinary people. It doesn't help the dead either. But the Rat Cook wasn't dead—nor was he ordinary. Greenseer… the Three-Eyed Crow is definitely a demigod.
I don't know how long a demigod can live. But those warlock fragments that merged into the Undying Ones have lasted at least a thousand years.
The Wall greatly boosted the Rat Cook's power, allowing him to become a demigod. And because the Wall also suppresses evil, he turned into an evil god—trapped and unable to unleash chaos."
Dany had basically restored eighty percent of the truth behind the Rat Cook story—but she still overlooked one man: the king who ate his own son.
Before Dickon Tarly was born, Samwell was the sole heir of Horn Hill. No matter how much Randyll Tarly despised his cowardly, gluttonous son, he couldn't abandon him.
In an attempt to help Sam find the courage of a man, Randyll even invited two warlocks from Qarth to perform a ritual and banish his cowardice.
The warlocks slaughtered a wild bull and had young Sam bathe in its blood, intending to let the bull's spirit enter his body and make him brave.
Uh, that was still during the Age of the Decline of Magic.
Afterward, Count Tarly hung the two warlocks from a tree and gave them a thorough beating.
With Tarly's strong and proud personality, after feeling he had been toyed with by the warlocks, he began to loathe all witches and charlatans.
Later, upon hearing that there was a sorceress living deep in the mountains of Hornvale, Randyll immediately led troops there and burned the future great-grandmother of Robb Stark to death.
Uh, how does this relate back to Robb again?
That sorceress was none other than the Forest Witch of Lannisport—the toad-like Witch Maggy.
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When Randyll burned her, she was an ugly, short, fat woman with lumpy, rough skin. Her teeth had all fallen out, her yellow eyes gleamed with malice, and she had a pair of grotesque chins like green river stones. Her breasts sagged down to her knees.
She was the very picture of a wicked old witch—exactly how Randyll imagined such witches to be. The moment he caught her, he burned her without a shred of mercy.
But every old witch was once a "sweet little thing," just like Mirri Maz Duur, the sorceress burned by Daenerys.
Maggy the Toad was once very beautiful in her youth. She got married, had children, and descendants—she was the grandmother of Lady Sybell, Robb Stark's mother-in-law!
(Sybell carried the impure bloodline of merchants and witches, and so dishonorably betrayed her royal son-in-law—at least by the moral standards of the A Song of Ice and Fire world.)
Maggy once had a career, a family, and lived a decent life.
After her merchant husband passed away, she set up a little stall outside Lannisport, selling resurrection potions, love tonics, moon tea, and such trinkets. She also moonlighted as a fortune-teller to make ends meet.
Her simple life was carefree—she wasn't mentally disturbed and had never dreamed of poisoning any princess with a cursed apple.
But alas, the princess came knocking herself, eager to bite the poisoned apple.
Yes, it was Cersei in her girlhood who came.
Cersei loved Rhaegar—and back then, there were few girls in the Seven Kingdoms who didn't.
She sought Maggy's fortune-telling, wanting to know who her future princely husband would be.
If Maggy had been a fraud, she might have just offered some pleasant nonsense.
But Maggy's powers were the real deal—she made a living off true talent.
Everyone knows how Cersei's life turned out—not exactly a fairytale. Maggy had predicted it all, decades in advance.
She even correctly foresaw the number of King Robert's bastards.
Cersei believed one thing firmly: as long as no one else knew the prophecy, it would never come true.
That night, she murdered the friend who had accompanied her to see the witch. She wasn't yet twelve years old at the time.
What a vicious little girl!
Thus, Maggy became the only other person alive who knew the prophecy.
The moment she laid eyes on Cersei, she understood her nature. She fled that very day, not giving Cersei the chance to act.
As an elderly woman, she said farewell to her family and escaped alone to the Riverlands, hiding in the forests, too scared to come out.
She was endlessly cautious and careful, and she managed to preserve her life. Eventually, she resumed her trade as a forest witch.
She lived a few more peaceful years, but her exceptional skills eventually drew Randyll's attention.
Uh, what an unjust, tragic, and humiliating death.
No wonder Sybell and her siblings were so ruthless and ambitious. After all, in Westeros, the lives of commoners are worth nothing in the eyes of the nobility.
Alright, that was a bit of a tangent.
If Randyll could hire warlocks, then so could the Andal kings.
In fact, after the Rat Cook was captured, the king had a sorcerer place a curse on him.
The Andal king deliberately trapped the enemy's soul inside a rat's body, sealed it in a well, and forced the Rat Cook to survive by eating his own children.
The evil Rat Cook of today is entirely the result of the Andal king's own actions. In a way, Daenerys was cleaning up the mess made by her peers from thousands of years ago.
After hearing Daenerys's reasoning, old Maester Aemon thought for a moment and said, "The story of the Mad Axe is also widely known—maybe he, too, became a demigod?"
—The Mad Axe was just an ordinary lunatic. And before coming to the Wall, I'd never even heard his tale.
Daenerys kept her thoughts to herself and didn't argue further. She just said, "Ser, please accompany the old man to search. With Big Black following, I can ensure your safety. I need to go find Samwell—I still don't know where he was transported."
"Yes, yes, Sam—I nearly forgot about Sam." Aemon slapped his forehead, worried. "So much time has passed, I hope the White Walkers haven't taken him."
(End of Chapter)
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