The weave opened before him like a wound.Eddard fell into it—not physically, not with his body, but with everything else. His mind. His will. His soul. He felt the chamber dissolve around him, felt the candles and the spiral and the faces of his friends fade into a darkness that was deeper than any darkness he had ever known. He was inside the weave now—inside Arya—and the place he found himself in was not a place at all.It was a battlefield.He could feel the infection immediately—a cold, pulsing presence that filled the space around him like water filling a drowning man's lungs. It was not a seed. It was not a parasite. It was aware. It had been waiting for him. It had known he would come.You.The voice was not a voice. It was a pressure against his mind, a weight against his thoughts, a cold hand closing around the core of who he was. It was the older threat—the thing that had been ancient before the world was made, the thing that had consumed gods and devoured civilizations, th