11 Lost Past

Robb walked the old road for hours, and just as exhaustion overcame him so much that his eyes began to get heavy, he heard a familiar sound.

"Water!"

Using the last of his strength he began to run towards where the sound of flowing water came from. After running a hundred meters he reached the bank of a river, the river was not deep, he could see several stones sticking out in the middle of the flow but it was quite wide. The boy calculated that it must be between seven and eleven meters wide.

"I won't be able to cross it."

Neither the width nor the depth are a problem, what makes it practically impossible to cross the river is the speed of its current.

"If I get into the river the current will drag me down and throw me against the rocks." Robb approaches the river and throws a branch at it, sees how the current drags the branch at great speed and crashes it against a rock a dozen meters below.

"I'll figure out what to do tomorrow," after drinking some water and washing his hands and face, Robb lies down in the shade of an elm tree. Using a root as a pillow the child falls asleep.

**

Robb woke up with a stiff neck and a slight headache.

"Roots do not make good pillows." he mutters sullenly as he cranes his neck.

His neck is not the only thing that hurts, his legs are killing him. The boy spent the whole day walking, something he is not used to. Ignoring the pain he gets up off the ground and screams as he puts weight on his left die.

"Ay!" He quickly sits up and takes off his boots and socks. On the sole of his foot, he sees a nasty, swollen blister filled with slimy fluid.

The boy limps to the river and puts his legs in the water, the cool water relieves his pain. He stands there wondering what to do, he doesn't have any ointment with him and can't afford to wait several days until the blister is gone.

After thinking for a while he takes his foot out of the water and using his nails breaks the blister, seeing how the liquid comes out of it he makes a face. He puts his foot back in the water and after standing there for a while without doing anything his stomach starts to growl.

He puts his boots back on and climbs a tree to get more fruit. Climbing with a blistered foot is more difficult as he has to be careful to use that foot as little as possible, luckily Robb is very experienced and has climbed in the past with a wounded foot.

After spraining his foot during training, the boy didn't wait until his foot was fully healed to climb Winterfell, something Jon scolded him for.

"Jon-" Robb grimaces thinking how worried his brother must be. But before he can continue thinking about that he sees a stone bridge across the river in the distance, all memory of his brother disappears in the back of his mind and the boy advances as fast as he can until the bridge.

As he gets even closer he sees something that excites him even more, on the other side of the bridge there is a town!

Robb examines the bridge and sees that it is in very good condition, still solid and stable. Certain that it would not collapse under his weight, the boy crosses to the other side of the river and sees the town up close.

"It looks nothing like the ruins I saw, more like parts of Wintertown during the summer."

Wintertown is the town that served as the capital of the Kingdom of the Winter Kings of yesteryear, it is located at the foot of Winterfell and is almost uninhabited in summer and spring. When autumn arrives, the peasants load their carts with their belongings and leave their farms and small remote villages. By the time winter arrives, Wintertown comes alive and tens of thousands of Northerners stroll its streets.

In summer the population of Wintertown is only about 15,000 inhabitants but in winter that number easily exceeds 60,000.

This town is not in ruins, the houses are intact.

"This town was abandoned. Men and women clearly lived here but at some point they left their homes never to return. The houses remain standing and do not appear to have been touched by the passage of time."

Aside from the weeds that grow wild everywhere this town shows no signs of ruin. The houses are built in a simple style, square or rectangular with stone walls and thatched roofs. The windows have no glass but small wooden doors.

Robb walks down the paved road and into the first house, the oak door is not rotten and the handlebars show no signs of rust.

He pushes open the door and sees inside, a room with a fireplace, several cabinets, and a table with wooden stools on either side. The boy sees several logs of wood in the fireplace and a flint attached to a nail in the fireplace hood. Robb opens the windows to let in light and opens one of the closets.

He sees iron pots and pans, various spoons and other wooden kitchen implements. In another cupboard he sees several sacks, he opens one of them and sees wheat. He takes out a handful of wheat and looks at it closely.

"Golden brown, as if they were just harvested from the field."

In other bags he sees more grains, beans, rye, corn, ... All are in perfect condition. As if they had just been harvested.

Not only that, but as he ran his finger across the table he barely saw a little bit of dust, and to his utter hallucination in one of the cupboards he saw a loaf of bread that had no mold at all.

"The food is not spoiled, there is no dust on the furniture. The buildings are intact, were it not for its architecture and wild grasses this town would appear to be inhabited. Magic, there is no doubt about it. Magic or some divine force preserves this place and protects it from decay."

The subject of the gods is very much discussed in Westeros, and in Winterfell there has been a lot of discussion about it since his father had the little sept built for his mother. Robb was never a particularly religious boy but in the last year he has become more and more sure of the existence of divine beings. He has experienced many things that cannot be explained by science, and almost all of them in one place: the Godswood.

At this point Robb can't doubt the existence of the Old Gods.

As for magic, that is something that always fascinated the child. And something he always believed in, since he was very young Robb has experienced many magical things. His dreams more than once show him distant places that he never heard of, and when he described those places to Luwin the maester asked him who told him about this or that place. Those places that he saw in his dreams are real, they are distant lands that do exist. Robb read all the books that talk about magic and at first he thought he was a Greenseer but after writing down all his dreams he saw a pattern.

All his dreams are from the present, he doesn't see the past or the future.

So he discarded that possibility and after a long investigation he found the name of his gift: Clairvoyance, the ability to see distant places with your mind. Those who possess this gift are called clairvoyant, or "the one who sees clearly".

Robb only got this information after exchanging several letters with Archmaester Marwyn, the highest authority on any magical matter in Westeros. After the boy showed much interest in this matter, Luwin put him in touch with the black sheep of the Archmaesters.

At first Marwyn was cordial but distant in his letters, he thought that this was nothing more than the whim of another noble child. But after exchanging letters for several months, Marwyn realized that Robb's interest was genuine and he became more friendly and willing to help.

The two exchanged letters about a thousand magical theories, wrote dozens of pages about their theories.

One thing that is clear to Robb is that at some point someone hunted down and destroyed any hint of magic in Westeros. Robb is almost 100% sure it was the Andals, something Marwyn agrees with.

The Archmaester told him that his position has only been around for 1,000 years, while the Citadel has been around for 6,000. As magic faded from the world, the Westerosi (Andals) began to be a little more open-minded about it, but make no mistake, just because there is a class and a specialization about it in the Citadel doesn't mean that magic is accepted. The Andals, more specifically the religion of the Seven, are still very much anti magic.

"Another reason to hate mother`s religion."