The Forgotten Codex

Year: 280 AC

Winterfell's stones held warmth in the summer, but down in the vaults beneath the crypts, there was only silence and dust. Wulfric sat alone in the gloom, a single lantern guttering at his side, casting long shadows against the weathered reliefs of ancient kings. Before him, spread across the cold stone floor like the shattered skin of the North, were scrolls, slates, and scraps, half-translated, partially deciphered, and wholly maddening.

He had found the vault almost a year ago, just after his seventh nameday. Now just turning eight, he had spent the better part of a year consumed by what he had uncovered, not just the chamber of secrets and runes, but the tantalizing promise that the North remembered more than it spoke. What began as awe had twisted into obsession.

The codex had begun as a few rough pages. Notes scribbled in charcoal, sketches of the vault's sigil, fragments of words he could not pronounce. But it had grown. Slowly, painfully. His mind bent around the roots of language older than the Citadel dared teach. Three tongues twisted through the texts: the Old Tongue spoken by the First Men; a variant even older, filled with spirals and breath-markings he began calling the Norse tongue; and the gods' tongue, runic and almost pictographic, found carved into basin rims and stone pillars.

He had no teacher, no key. Only instinct and obsession.

It took months to make progress. His studies came at night, long after Benjen and Lyanna had gone to sleep. In secret corners of the library, or hidden in the shadow of the vault's carvings, he would transcribe a phrase again and again until it clicked, until a word's shape suddenly felt like place, or warning, or blood. Each breakthrough was exhausting. His head ached and his eyes burned.

Sometimes, the symbols swam in his vision long after he closed the books.

Benjen and Lyanna noticed the change before anyone else. Their games together grew fewer, their laughter more distant. Benjen tried to draw him back in, dragging him out to ride in the woods or spar with sticks in the yard, but Wulfric often made excuses.

Benjen's frustration simmered quietly. He had grown fond of Wulfric, had come to see him not as a bastard or even simply a cousin, but as a companion, a brother in all but name. He didn't understand why Wulfric was pulling away, why his eyes looked past them even when they were together. The unspoken bond they had begun to forge in the aftermath of the brawl now felt like it was fraying at the edges. He caught Wulfric once staring through him in the godswood, distracted, distant.

Lyanna, spirited and wild-hearted, was less patient. She had always drawn laughter from Wulfric with teasing and reckless dares. But now when she tried to get him to sneak away to chase the dogs or explore the stable lofts, he only shook his head and muttered something about study. Her disappointment stung more than she let on. She once found him asleep in the godswood, a scroll curled in his lap, fingers stained with charcoal. She didn't wake him, only stood there, frowning.

Later that night she whispered to Benjen, "He's slipping away into those shadows. I don't like it."

Ser Rodrik Cassel, for his part, noticed Wulfric's weariness during training. His reflexes dulled, his footing slipped, his sword-hand trembled more than it should have for a boy so focused. "You're pushing too hard," Rodrik warned, misinterpreting the cause as a youthful desire to impress. "Rest sharpens steel better than the grindstone."

Maester Walys saw the shadows beneath Wulfric's eyes and the subtle weight dragging at his shoulders. "You must sleep more, my boy," he said one morning while serving tea. "I can mix something mild, nothing strong, just herbs to calm your mind." Wulfric declined politely, mumbling that he was simply rising early to study. That was not a lie and a bad one at that.

Eventually, Rodrik and Walys met in quiet confidence and decided to speak with Lord Rickard. The boy was growing pale and stretched thin. They worried that the wound on his soul, the one left by the street brawl, had reopened in another form.

They found Rickard Stark seated in his solar, poring over trade letters and tax reports from Karhold and Bear Island. A fire smoldered in the hearth, casting the great wolf banner above his head in flickering shadows. He looked up slowly as the two men entered.

"Lord Rickard," Walys began carefully, "we come not with urgent matters of state, but concerns of the boy. Of Wulfric."

Rodrik crossed his arms. "He's not been himself. Training suffers. He hides behind the weirwood like a veil. Doesn't rest. Doesn't eat much. He's started to slip in his studies and training compared to how he was before. From how dedicated he was.."

Rickard said nothing, only stared into the fire.

Walys stepped forward. "My lord, he's driven, yes. And bright. But it's… more than that. I've known boys obsessed with stories or steel, but this is deeper. There's something he's not saying. Something he's carrying alone."

Rodrik nodded, his voice gruff. "The lad's got will, I'll grant you. Gods know he's stronger than most full-grown squires already. But he's breaking. Not from weakness, but from something else… something we don't know about."

There was silence for a moment.

Rickard's face remained unreadable. But his hands, large and calloused, had stopped moving entirely. "You think he's slipping?"

"I think he's slipping away," Walys answered gently. "From the other children. From us. From the world above."

Rickard finally stood, walking to the window that overlooked the yard. Below, the faint clatter of swords echoed in the open air. The snows hadn't come yet, but the cold was in the stone.

He didn't speak for a long time.

Then: "Let him be."

"My lord.."

"If he breaks, I'll know," Rickard said. His tone was even, but distant. "Until then… perhaps he's simply finding the shape of the wolf inside."

His eyes did not leave the window. Nor did his expression change.

Walys inclined his head, though concern still etched deep into his brow. Rodrik grunted quietly, but said nothing more. They left him to his silence.

Even Rickard's own words rang hollow in his ears. But what else was there? He had seen the fire in the boy's eyes, not madness, but purpose. And that scared him more.

The codex grew with him.

He began organizing its pages into rough categories: Places, Names, Warnings, Rites. He sketched the vault's mural in detail, noting the five wolves and the hill crowned in white trees. He found references, indirect and veiled, to a forgotten order, sworn to the North itself. Guardians, not lords. Keepers of nature itself and what the snows fell on.

One passage, barely legible, spoke of the "Five That Stood Against the Storm," unnamed protectors who "marked their flesh with blood and ash, ink and bone, to carry the old wards within."

That phrase haunted him.

He returned to the vault more often now, sometimes just to sit in the presence of the murals and let the runes settle in his mind. It wasn't magic. Not yet. But it felt like memory, waking and groggy.

On the tenth night of summer, while copying what seemed like a healing chant, Wulfric noticed that the margins of the scroll bore more than just scribbled notes. There were faded diagrams, the shapes of herbs, roots, the veins of leaves. He began sketching them, referencing Maester Walys's herbals to match names to symbols. Many didn't exist in the modern texts, but a few did, pine sap for poultices, ironwood bark for fever.

One figure showed a man kneeling beneath a weirwood tree, his chest tattooed in runes. Another page referenced ink made from soot and ash mixed with weirwood sap.

Protective ink.

Not for decoration, for warding. For remembrance and for power.

His codex now contained:

Maps of the North marked with locations long since buried or unnamed.

Lists of runes with half-translated meanings, bind, remember, sanctify, cut, awaken.

Ritual instructions involving offerings buried beneath stone roots.

Mixtures for salves that could heal wounds or quicken plant growth in dead soil.

Warnings, some poetic, some direct, against disturbing ancient graves not marked by names but by spiral runes.

Wulfric found himself tracing those runes again and again.

He no longer saw the North as just hills and forests. It was a body. Its rivers were veins. Its bones were the mountains. And somewhere beneath the snow, its treasure was kept.

He would be the one to remember it.

He hid the codex beneath his bed behind a loose stone slab. Every few days, he checked to make sure no one had touched it. Not even Benjen knew.

And still he studied. Every day he studied.

The runes no longer looked alien, they looked familiar. Like scars he hadn't earned yet.

He no longer feared the vault.

He belonged to it.