Chapter 123 – Sardin
Sardin was born in Oldtown, into a carpenter's family.
From the moment he could walk, he followed his father from house to house, helping craft furniture for the people of the city. Their clients ranged from common folk to wealthy merchants, from knights to the greatest lord of the region.
His father was a master craftsman. Having learned the trade from his own father and worked it for decades, he was well known throughout Oldtown and the surrounding towns. His reputation was such that almost everyone was willing to give him business.
But Sardin never had the chance to inherit that skill.
When he was ten years old, his father—once strong and healthy—suddenly died of a lung illness, leaving behind only Sardin and his mother.
That was the beginning of the collapse.
With the family's pillar gone, their small household crumbled quickly. The house, the silver-plated cutlery, even their litter of domesticated mountain cats—everything painstakingly accumulated over the years was sold off piece by piece. Money drained away, yet poverty only tightened its grip.
In the end, his mother collapsed from exhaustion.
To pay for her treatment, Sardin chose a path no ordinary boy would ever consider—a path that paid well, paid fast, and was unspeakably filthy.
He sold his body.
Though Oldtown was the heart of the Faith of the Seven, forbidden things often thrived best in the shadows. In corners unseen by respectable society, male prostitutes—condemned by the Seven-Pointed Star—still existed.
After the initial humiliation and despair, Sardin gradually adapted.
But cruelly, even with money, his mother could not be saved.
With both parents gone and nowhere else to go, the brothel became his home.
From then on, he never spoke of his past. When asked, people simply assumed he had been born there—some nameless bastard with no lineage.
Blessed—or cursed—with good looks inherited from his parents, he survived without wanting for food or shelter.
Then, during a visit to the market, he made the mistake of offending a young wastrel from House Hightower.
From that moment on, his life unraveled.
He was ostracized, beaten, reported. Eventually, he was framed for murder.
Given the choice between losing his head or taking the black, he chose the latter—though it was hardly a real choice at all.
He was swiftly sent north.
The journey was anything but peaceful. The Reach and the southern lands were embroiled in war with Dorne, and since the Crown had lost its armies at King's Landing, the southern lords were in dire straits, suffering defeat after defeat.
Ironically, after returning home, they began protecting followers of the Seven and passing travelers alike, acting far more benevolently than before. Thanks to this, Sardin's journey southward was bearable.
That changed when they approached King's Landing.
Compared to the pious yet tolerant southern nobles, the newly risen militant orders in the capital were terrifying. They were not merely devout—they were fanatics.
Fanatics who worshipped the Seven with burning zeal, enforcing the doctrines of the Seven-Pointed Star without mercy.
Sardin lived in constant fear.
Though he believed in the Seven, his very existence was a sin. If discovered, punishment was certain—perhaps even death by fire.
He passed through King's Landing carefully, and by sheer luck, the Sparrows never uncovered his secret.
The Riverlands, slowly recovering amid the chaos of war, brought him a measure of relief—but there he heard rumors that the North was at war with the Iron Islands, and fear gripped him once again.
The soldier escorting him paid no mind to his anxieties.
Fortunately, by the time they reached the North, the war had already ended.
"They say a god descended upon the battlefield," a merchant who had just returned from the North said at an inn outside Torrentine. "Every invader was turned into a corpse."
"Killed them all?" the escorting soldier asked, confused.
"No," the merchant repeated, his expression just as puzzled.
"Turned them into the dead."
What was the difference between being killed and being turned into one of the dead?
Sardin didn't know. But the northerners who told him the story repeated that phrase over and over—slowly, deliberately, with pointed emphasis.
So, carrying that lingering confusion, Sardin resumed the journey north with the soldier escorting him.
Ajji was not a man with a pleasant temperament, which was precisely why he had been assigned this duty. Along the way, he alternated freely between curses and blows. Still, in all fairness, he wasn't truly cruel—at least not to the extent of the Hightower scion back in Oldtown, who had been vicious for no reason at all.
"She liked me. I didn't like her. Why make such a fuss?"
Every time Sardin thought of his fate, resentment welled up inside him. But in an age this unreasonable, what choice did he have?
The cold of the North was deeply unwelcoming. Fortunately, with Duke Stark and the northern armies returned, order had mostly been restored. Still, along the road, Sardin constantly heard words like god descending, messengers, sorcery, terror.
To him, every northerner seemed strange—feverish, fearful, suspicious. Their faces never looked normal.
All of that faded the moment he reached the Wall.
From afar, the Wall was breathtaking, like a vast curtain of frozen light, shimmering with impossible brilliance. Sardin found himself staring again and again. But once he stood beneath it—before the black wooden fortress at its base—that sense of wonder vanished completely.
Up close, the Wall's beauty was lost. Looming overhead like an endless ice cliff, it cast a shadow that made him feel like an ant. What he felt wasn't awe—but cold, merciless oppression.
Life as a new recruit in the Night's Watch was no better.
Endless physical training. A notorious, hideously scarred drillmaster. The pointing fingers and whispered comments once others learned his background. And at night, the suffocating chorus of snores echoing through the barracks.
As a southerner, Sardin found nothing here tolerable—not the climate, not the drills, not the food, and certainly not the snoring.
But life was like this. No matter how much one resisted, reality crushed all objections.
It'll get better, he told himself again and again. Once I survive long enough to become a veteran…
That fragile hope shattered the moment he "won" the draw.
He was to be sent to participate in a special duel against the wildlings.
When he had first heard about it, the idea had seemed absurd, even laughable. He never imagined he would be the one dragged into it.
"I'm going to die here, aren't I?"
Sardin wept and wailed, looking back over a life that seemed utterly devoid of good fortune. Now he was nothing more than a sacrifice.
A sacrifice.
Living on after being beheaded?
Only a fool would believe that.
Yet that was the rule of the duel.
A rule proposed because of a single person.
Sardin knew of House Stark's heir and the arrival of that mysterious sorcerer. When they entered the castle, he had even watched from afar more than once.
He had never imagined his life would intersect with such a figure.
Back in Oldtown, a city steeped in learning, he had dismissed all those stories as tricks—illusions, sleight of hand, exaggeration.
Now, he desperately hoped they were true.
---
"L-Lord… I won't really die, will I?"
Dragged into the man's tent by his fellow brothers, Sardin trembled as he asked the question. The young man before him looked scarcely older than himself.
"Of course not," the man replied with a gentle smile.
Those black eyes—so unlike anyone else's—were deep and warm. His handsome face was calm, even comforting.
And yet, what he was doing was horrifying.
He was crouched beside another unconscious man, calmly bleeding him dry—methodically cutting open wrists and ankles with a dagger, his expression utterly unchanged.
The unfortunate soul had already been lying there when Sardin was brought in. Beneath him was a circular diagram carved with intricate, alien patterns.
At first, Sardin had been curious.
That curiosity turned into sheer terror when soldiers forced him down onto an identical diagram.
I won't be bled too, will I?
The thought flashed through his mind—then faded. Compared to what awaited him later, bleeding almost seemed merciful.
That was when the cold blade touched his skin.
Pain flared in his limbs. He felt his blood draining away, a strange hollowing sensation spreading through his body. Sardin shook uncontrollably.
Then he heard it.
A low, eerie chant—dark, rhythmic, inhuman.
"M-m-mercy—"
His sobbing plea was muffled as a cloth was stuffed into his mouth. He struggled wildly, but the ropes binding him held fast.
It didn't last long.
As the chanting continued, the ground beneath him grew colder and colder. His thoughts slowed, as though his very mind were freezing solid.
His vision blurred. The world seemed to move in slow motion.
Then he saw it—
A swirl of gray mist surged up beside him, rolling over his body.
And after that, darkness.
He knew nothing more.