Ros opened the door leading into the tiny, cheap room the man she was here to awaken had rented. As soon as she opened the door and stepped through it, she laid eyes on the sleeping stranger. The man was soundly asleep, silently resting, and even in the darkness of the tiny room he was sleeping in his handsomeness was obvious to the redheaded woman.

The figure was tall, tall enough that the bed could not accommodate his height. Nonetheless, the man was sleeping, comfortably if his appearance were anything to go by, on the floor. He was resting, peacefully, on the cold, wooden floor of the inn, with nothing to cover his body or to soften his sleeping area. There was something powerful about that strange reality, but that weird reality was only the beginning when it came to the curious questions that would someday surround the man.

He had a roguish face, one with a youthful, mischievous glow to it. Something about it made Ros’s heart quicken in her chest the longer she looked at the man’s youthful face. She wondered how impishly beautiful his smile would be, if the smile went all the way to his eyes. Eventually, after minutes of speechlessly admiring the man, the skilled woman mustered her willpower and drove her eyes downward.

His clothes could not hide the subtle details of his build from the skillful seductress. Beneath his warm-looking clothing, Ros could see the defined curvature of potent muscles. The latest customer to grace the inn and take advantage of the cheap prices of the place had a well-defined musculature that most of the men this far north lacked, even if the men here were physically fit. Ros had seen his men with his build before, warriors one and all, men who deftly wielded swords and shields and had survived combat.

Somehow when Ros pictured a warrior in her mind, she couldn’t picture someone so… roguishly handsome. She pictured rough, gritty-looking men with hard, bruised faces covered in mud, blood, and other, fouler things.

She struggled to imagine this handsome stranger surrounded by other warriors, with a sword and shield or even a spear and shield in hand in the middle of pitched combat. Ros, both a woman with a working libido and a skilled temptress, bit her lip as she wondered what his skillful hands would feel like on her skin, or inside of her womanly body. The woman would spend a few moments enraptured by a fantasy of her own making, before a stern voice disrupted her fun fantasy.

“Ros! Is that lad up yet? He paid extra to be woken early and fed breakfast!” The voice belongs to none other than Rickar Greensleeve, the old man who owns the Smoking Log. This voice, unpleasant as it might be, is enough to snap Ros out of her delightful daydream and compel her to do the duty she was told to go here to do.

She stepped forward, fully entering the room, and lightly touched the man’s shoulder. As she does, she is milliseconds from speaking, before the man’s eyes suddenly shoot open and startle the woman.

“By the Seven!” Ros exclaimed, as the young man suddenly began to study his surroundings.

He began his assessment by looking in the direction of the bed he was sleeping beside, and a quiet chuckle escaped his lips as he studied the thing. For the next few moments his eyes darted across the rest of the tiny room, until he saw Ros standing over him. He smiled at her, his expression as beautifully mischievous and youthful as she wondered about it being.

“Uh… Hello. I was told to awaken you in time for breakfast.” Ros exclaimed, happy to be the first person the mysterious stranger laid his eyes on after waking up. He nodded at her and smiled appreciatively at the beautiful, and desirable, woman.

“Well, thank you my lady,” The stranger replied, a confident smile on his lips. His polite remarks and confident smile only raised Ros’s impression of the young man. “May I know your name?” He asked, his violet eyes alight with mischief. Ros smiled at the man as she heard his question.

“My name is Ros. I believe that yours is Dontar? Rickar mentioned it when he was sending me up to wake you.” She asked, causing him to nod lightly at her. As he nodded at her he moved and spent the next few moments getting up and collecting himself.

Ros had been so focused on him that until he moved to collect his belongings, she did not notice how few belongings he seemed to possess. The room was virtually empty aside from a handful of things like a simple sword and a cloak the stranger smoothly draped around himself made from what Ros speculated must have been some sort of scales that surely belonged to countless serpents.

Ros also noticed that he collected a pair of items of interest, a strange necklace in the shape of what must have been a bag of some sort, and an item that looked like… a lump of metal shaped to resemble a thin branch. Dontar smoothly placed the metal within his cloak, keeping it near his heart. Internally Ros mused about how odd that pair of items were.

As soon as the stranger collected his goods, he turned to her and silently examined her for a moment. It was clear to her that he was making a theoretical mental calculation. A quiet moment seemed to stretch out for several beats as Dontar’s mind moved at a pace of a dozen miles a second, factoring in countless variables related to whatever was on the man’s mind.

Unbeknownst to Ros, Dontar was even factoring in the insights of supernatural voices that only he could hear. Eventually though, Dontar’s face became a neutral mask, and he began to speak again.

“Have you eaten?” He asked her, speaking rather abruptly and causing her to giggle and pause as she considered how best to answer his question. The two quietly gaze at each other, both of their eyes alight with the simple pleasure of each other’s company. Eventually though, Ros replied to Dontar’s query.

“No, I have not. May I consider enjoying your company for breakfast?” She asked, causing Dontar to laugh heartily.

“Sadly, my lady, I have other tasks that, in my rush to get some sleep, I must have forgotten about, so I cannot join you for breakfast. But that does not mean you have to go hungry. Take these coins and tell that old man to give you my breakfast.” Dontar replied, even as he approached her and placed a pair of halfgroots in her hand. This act caused Ros to smile at the man, and mentally note his generosity, even as the figure turned and marched out the door.

Dontar proceeded to march all the way out of the inn, only pausing for a brief moment to tell Rickar that he had given Ros some money so that she may purchase his breakfast and have it in his stead. Rickar grumbled about this, but so long as the whore had some money, he’d give her the breakfast his cook had prepared for Dontar, and the mysterious man knew this, but was gladdened to receive confirmation of it from the innkeeper himself.

Dontar, upon hearing this, quickly left the inn and found himself outside of the small building. The chilly northern air lightly touched his skin and he let out a quiet sound as he gave himself a second to adjust to the temperature. Doing so was an easy task for the young and powerfully supernatural being, made easier by the strange cloak he was wearing which began to warm up the instant its wearer wanted to be warmer.

The stranger studied his surroundings as he walked. He was not heading anywhere on purpose, merely exploring the winter town which was constructed to house the small folk who desired to live in the presence of Winterfell. As he explored the town, spending several minutes doing so, he was also mentally exploring himself.

The man was mysterious to all the lowborn people who laid their eyes on him, many of whom were working hard inside of their homes or their places of employment but were able to see him through windows as he walked by. He was a powerfully built, roguishly handsome man but internally he was grappling with something strange.

Dontar possessed a childhood’s worth of memories, any of which he could recall with a thought and the slightest bit of purposeful intention. These memories depict him being born far from Westeros and learning to hide some of his more striking features like his natural hair color or his native tongue.

The problem was that Dontar was also keenly aware of the artificial nature of those memories. He could remember them vividly, and they provided an explanation for how Dontar went from Zamettar, supposedly his birthplace; a ruined city located along the northern coast of the mysterious continent of Sothoryos, to Westeros but… the memories were clearly false.

Even a cursory examination of the memories revealed their falsified nature. Dontar could remember every day he had supposedly lived but he felt nothing as he recalled them. He had memories of learning a hundred different skills, some as specific as the horse-ridding of the Dothraki, and others as general as a frightening talent for self-defense and war, but their origins made no sense.

How would one of the feared Dothraki arrive at Sothoryos, a continent to the south of Essos, across the Summer Sea given their fear and hatred of the sea? It was almost as if the memories existed solely to provide a sort of halfway logical framework to explain how Dontar knew what he knew…

Dontar knew, beyond any shadow of a doubt, that his memories related real information to him. He was certain that the memories, fake as they were, provided him with actual information. The young man was certain that he was a skilled horseman and an exceptional archer both on and off horseback.

He was keenly aware of the politics and social structures of hundreds of societies across Planetos, and he was also aware that possessed a myriad of skills that would serve him well. Nevertheless, he was still mystified by the bizarrely fake nature of the memories that filled his mind whenever he dared to think about his childhood. This was doubly true when it came to the supernatural skills he possessed.

As he explored the winter town, he felt power in his blood. He could feel might within him, might which spread evenly throughout his body with every single rhythmic beat of his heart.

Whenever he touched the strange metal object within his cloak, he felt the thing begin to subtly pulse and vibrate whenever his heart did, almost as though the two were connected in some esoteric way. Dontar even knew that the object was a “wand”, a sort of focus for magic, but that in and of itself was bizarre.

The magic the wand offered, and conferred, which Dontar could feel inside of himself, was different from the magic that Dontar knew and could perform. He was a skilled wizard, one unlike anyone he had ever met according to the falsified memories rattling around his mind, but the wand’s rhythmic pulsing filled the back of Dontar’s mind with images of other, stranger, magic. The images revealed magic that would allow Dontar himself to turn into animals, or fire potent projectiles, or even teleport to places he had been before.

The wand’s magic was different from the magic Dontar knew of, and the young man was a learned scholar in well over a dozen fields but particularly when it came to the supernatural. The wand almost spoke, and Dontar could hear vague impressions of words in tongues he did not know whenever he allowed himself to momentarily attune to the object.

He could half hear what might have been fragments of incantations, syllables that when strung together sounded like Accio, and Lumos. His mind filled with vivid images of magic whenever a new spell etched itself onto his soul. The man was easily tempted by the whispers of the wand, and he began to relax as he explored the small settlement he has found himself in. This makes it easier for his instrument to give him the knowledge it is hungry to arm him with.

The man wanders the length of the town, occasionally giving in to the temptation offered by the wand and gently placing his hand near it. He was guided, unconsciously, by the wand as he walked and walked until he left the town altogether. The wanderer’s journey led him out of the town and onto a dirt road leading to a great, snow-covered forest.

Before terribly long the fit explorer found himself just inside of the infamous forest known as The Wolfswood, a vast forest known for its expansive and mighty population of wolves. The man’s keen senses allow him to distantly hear the loudest of the fierce animals even as he studies his surroundings. Eventually the man is satisfied by what he observed about his surroundings, and he reached into his cloak to pull out the metal wand he has been clutching onto for increasingly long periods of time as he made his way into the forest. When he pulled his hand out of his cloak he was clutching his wand.

The object in his hands was a bizarre thing. To the naked eye it was little more than a lump of metal, but in his eyes it practically outshone the sun, as it radiated intense arcane power that ordinary people could not see but that his eyes instinctively honed in on. The metal artifact felt right in his hands, and he was guided by its vibrations until he was pointing it at a heavy branch covered in snow.

The man glared at the branch as his mind continued to fill with strange knowledge of mystical incantations and strange arcane formulae. As he stared at the branch Dontar began to think about the bizarre words he knew, words that to his knowledge had no real meaning, at least to the people of Planetos.

The wand in his hand began to blaze even brighter in his eyes, though he logically knew that the wand was not glowing. Eventually, the man sighed and decided to experiment. He cleared his throat and prepared to look very silly to whatever curious spirits inhabited the forest before he opened his mouth and uttered an incantation.

“Accio!” He said, his voice powerfully exploding out of him. His wand began to glow, for the faintest of instances but still long enough for him to notice. The branch responded to his incantation and his intent by vibrating intensely, so intensely that some of the snow on top of it was violently flung off of it, but it didn’t move towards him like he half-expected and half-hoped it would. Fortunately, this was enough encouragement to compel Dontar to try again.

“Accio!” He uttered, his voice less powerful but more directed this time. Again, his wand momentarily glowed. This time the branch vibrated even more forcefully and actually flung itself into the air in his direction, but only for a moment.

This caused the man to laugh, and so he tried the incantation twice more before pausing to consider how to modify his actions. He turned inward and recalled the image that accompanied the knowledge of the incantation.

Every time he learned a new word or collection of words, he would be treated to a customized mental image. For some incantations, the images made more sense than others, as was the case with Lumos. The image that accompanied that spell was that of a young woman looking over a book while clutching her wand. The wand was glowing, a ball of light coming out of the end of the thing, shedding powerful light the witch could use to read. Dontar could tell, from context, what that spell did.

The image for Accio was not so clear-cut. In it, a young man was pointing his wand at an object, a strange, gigantic goblet, that was either going away from him or going toward him. It was a still image, so it was hard for Dontar to be sure where it was going, he could only tell that it was mid-movement.

“I… wonder if I know the full spell?” Dontar eventually muttered, after a few moments of silent introspection. He eventually refocused and decided to do something slightly different. He mentally steeled himself just in case what he was about to do resulted in the exact same outcome as his prior actions, or something altogether less impressive. After all, what he was about to do was such a slight variation on his original actions that he doubted it’d work, but he was a scholar and knew that in the right context, even slight changes could drastically alter outcomes.

“Accio branch!” He muttered, his voice quieter than ever because he was not sure if the solution could be that simple. His eyes widened in delight a second later when the branch suddenly shot off the ground and toward him. He was so overjoyed to have successfully cast the spell that he darted toward the thing and caught it in midair.

“Alright!” He roared, even as he proceeded to drop that branch onto the floor.

“A whole new branch… Maybe even whole new branches of magic.” He muttered a second after the dropped branch softly hit the snow-covered forest floor. And then he smiled at himself for making a pun about branches. A split second later he regained his composure and looked at his wand.

“Now… What are you? A wand, sure, but what else?” He asked the object, aware that its power played a role in his success just now. He stared at it for a few moments, before opting to try something new.

“Lumos.” He suddenly said, and a split second later a small orb of light materialized atop the tip of his wand. He studied it for a few moments and then chuckled. The light felt comfortably warm, and Dontar gazed at it with a pleasant smile on his face before intentionally dimming it with an act of will. The orb vanished as soon as Dontar wanted it to, responding to his will rather than needing the normally required countercharm, Nox.

Dontar, unaware of the oddities of his extraterrestrial magic, simply continued to confidently gaze forward. His mind was filled with curious speculation about the nature of his otherworldly magical abilities. The young man had no idea just how powerful he truly was.

Minutes later, satisfied by his discoveries regarding his mysterious artifact, Dontar began his walk back to Winterfell and the winter town. When he was part of the way back he suddenly heard a loud, mournful howl, and his keen eyes allowed him to spot a small murder of crows suddenly dart high into the air from some far-off location. Perhaps they were fleeing Winterfell or perhaps something roused them to part from some lonely part of the winter town he had just been in.