The first lesson Jon Snow learned was silence. Not the silence of snow muffling the world, nor the uneasy quiet before battle, but a deeper thing an expectant stillness, heavy and alive, as if the land itself were holding its breath. The hidden grove did not sleep the way Castle Black slept. It watched. It listened. It waited.

  Jon sat with his back against the trunk of a living tree whose bark was warm beneath his fingers, rough with age and slow growth. His legs ached. His cloak lay discarded behind him, his hands buried knuckle-deep in dark soil that smelled of rain and rot and life intertwined. Ghost lay several paces away, head on his paws, red eyes half-lidded but never closed.

  The Children of the Forest did not speak. That, Leaf had told him on the first day, was the point. “You come from a loud people,” she said, golden eyes unreadable. “You break the world, then shout at it until it obeys. The Green does not answer shouting.”

  So Jon sat. The first hours were easy. He had stood watches longer than this, endured cold and hunger and fear. But this was different. There was no enemy to watch for, no duty to cling to. His thoughts roamed freely, and that was the danger.

  Winterfell rose in his mind unbidden, the sound of water in the godswood, the smell of damp leaves and stone. He saw Robb’s grin, heard Arya’s laughter, felt the weight of a bastard’s name settle over it all. The memories came sharper than they ever had before, not dulled by time or pain.

  By the first week, his legs trembled constantly. Insects crawled freely over his skin. Something small and many-legged nested in the hollow of his collarbone. Jon did not move it. He remembered Leaf’s words.

  Once the land decided Jon could remain, it began to teach. He learned root-listening first.

  Leaf guided his hands into the earth and showed him how to feel not with strength, not with will, but with patience. Vibrations traveled through the soil like whispers through a wall. At first, they were meaningless noise. Too much. Jon would jerk his hands free, gasping, head splitting.

  “You listen like a man,” Leaf told him calmly. “Trying to hear everything. That is how men go mad.”

  So she taught him to choose.

  Jon learned the difference between a rabbit’s frantic scurry and a fox’s careful tread. Between water moving beneath ice and something else shifting where it should not. He learned how far sound traveled through stone, how roots carried memory of drought and flood, how old bones whispered differently than fresh ones.

  Once, without opening his eyes, Jon told Leaf exactly how many Children stood watching him, and where. She smiled then. Just a little.

  The children told him that a Green Man does not rule nature. He becomes one with it.

  Jon’s body was remade slowly and painfully. He learned to sleep in rain without sickness. Walk barefoot on frost without numbness. Go days without food, then eat raw roots and bitter leaves without vomiting

  The Children altered his diet, feeding him things no man should digest easily. Sap. Bark-paste. Fungal growth scraped from stone. Jon retched. Then adapted.

  Scars faded faster now. His breath fogged less. His heartbeat slowed when danger came. His senses sharpened until he could feel storms forming days away.

  Benjen watched this part closely. “He’s changing,” Benjen said once, low and uneasy.

  Leaf nodded. “He is becoming one with nature.”

  The Green Breath nearly killed him. He was shown some breathing exercises by the children. Slow. Measured. Timed to the movement of sap and wind and meltwater. Jon followed obediently at first, until his chest began to burn.

  Then his blood burned. He collapsed the first time, coughing dark red onto the grass. Ghost snarled, hackles rising, but Leaf held the wolf back with a raised hand. “This is expected,” she said. “Your blood is not settled.”

  The second time, frost rimed Jon’s lashes while sweat soaked his shirt. Steam poured from his mouth. The air around him warped, leaves trembling as if caught between seasons. On the fifth attempt, something clicked.

  Jon breathed, and the land breathed with him. He felt it, ice retreating a fraction beneath the soil, warmth rising not from fire but from motion. The ache in his old wounds dulled. His heartbeat slowed.

  After that, his body changed in subtle ways. He healed faster when touching earth. Cold no longer gnawed at him the way it once had. Plants leaned toward him without conscious effort, as if curious.

  Months passed. Jon learned the ins and out of the land not through lessons, but through living mistakes. The Children stopped correcting him unless failure would mean death. When he chose the wrong place to sleep, the cold crept into his bones and stayed for days. When he drank from the wrong stream, sickness bent him double until he learned to taste the water with more than his tongue. When he stepped where the ground did not want him, roots tripped him, stones rolled, branches struck his face without mercy.

  The land was not kind. It was fair.

  Leaf explained it once, as Jon limped back into the grove with a twisted ankle. “The Green does not love,” she said simply. “It remembers. And it responds.” So Jon learned to respond in turn.

  He learned when to move and when to wait. Some days the forest welcomed him, paths opening naturally, game appearing without effort. Other days everything resisted him; branches snagged his cloak, thorns tore his skin, animals fled at his approach. On those days, Leaf would shake her head. “You are forcing yourself upon it,” she would say.

  The Children taught him the broad pillars of their art. Not spells, not words, but disciplines.

  Listening came first, always. To plants, to animals, to weather yet unborn. Jon learned to sense storms days before clouds gathered, to feel sickness in a forest long before leaves yellowed. He could tell when something unnatural moved through the land by the way birds fell silent and insects fled.

  Shaping came second. Never creation only guidance. Jon learned to encourage growth where it was already possible and to deny it where it was dangerous. Thorns thickened at his passing when he wished it. Vines loosened their grip when he needed speed. Snow packed more firmly beneath his feet when he ran.

  As months turned, the training expanded beyond the grove. Jon was sent to places where the Land was wounded; burned tracts, frozen marshes, lands touched by death. He did not heal them. Not fully. He learned instead how to stabilize. How to prevent rot from spreading. How to coax life back slowly, honestly, without forcing growth that would collapse later.

  Failure was frequent. Sometimes devastating.

  Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  Once, Jon pushed too hard trying to regrow a dead stand of trees. The land recoiled violently, throwing him backward, leaving him fevered for days. Leaf did not scold him. “You tried to make the land forgive,” she said. “Forgiveness must be earned.”

  A favorite spell of his that he learned from the children which he liked for the extra defence it provided was Barkskin.

  Barkskin was not armor in the way steel was armor. It did not make him invulnerable. It made him durable. His skin thickened, darkened slightly, taking on the faint texture of bark beneath flesh. Blows glanced rather than bit. Claws tore less deeply. Cold gnawed at him with dulled teeth.

  It cost him stamina. It always did. But it did not burn like fire magic or drain like blood magic. It settled into him, steady and reliable, so long as he remained grounded.

  Benjen approved of Barkskin immediately. “Practical,” he said. “Northern.” Jon favored it for that reason alone.

  By the end of the year, Jon Snow no longer thought of the land as shelter. It was a responsibility. He could feel when something crossed its outer limits. He could sense imbalance too much cold, too much rot, too much silence.

  When Leaf finally spoke the words quiet, ceremonial, without witnesses Jon felt their weight settle into him like stone. “You are an initiate of the Green,” she said. “Not a master. Not yet. But the land recognizes you.”

  Jon bowed his head, dirt-streaked hair falling into his eyes. He thought of Winterfell. Of the Wall. Of a world burning whether he hid or not. “I won’t abandon it,” he said.

  Leaf studied him for a long moment, then inclined her head in return. “That,” she said, “is why it has not rejected you.”

  -

  Year 8 / Turn 8 - Learn Green Magic(Nature)

  The land cried to them. Jon Snow felt it in his bones. A dull, spreading ache that crept up from the soles of his feet and settled behind his eyes. The hidden grove once warm, breathing, alive with insects and quiet growth shuddered like an animal struck in its sleep. Leaves trembled without wind. The stream slowed, its clear song faltering as if choked.

  Ghost rose with a low growl, hackles lifting. Benjen Stark looked up sharply from where he had been sharpening a blade that had not needed sharpening in years. Leaf froze mid-step, her head snapping north. “They are moving,” she said. No ceremony. No fear. Just fact.

  Jon closed his eyes and pressed his palm to the ground. Death. Old, layered, patient death. The kind that walked. Wights. Thousands of them.

  The Green recoiled. Where once the land had welcomed Jon’s touch answered him with warmth or warning it now pulled away, roots tightening, insects burrowing deeper, animals fleeing south in frantic, silent waves. This was not fear. It was revulsion.

  “The Others are coming to attack the realms of men,” Leaf said.

  Benjen rose, towering and still, his breath fogging though the grove remained warm. “We should not wait for them to find this place.”

  Jon opened his eyes. “The Wall.”

  Leaf nodded once. “Yes, we will need to go to the Wall.”

  They did not travel openly. The Children of the Forest moved like shadows, rarely touching the ground long enough to leave prints. Benjen followed effortlessly, death-light and silent. Jon struggled more.

  The dead pressed against the edges of his awareness constantly; wrong, loud, invasive. Jon could feel them like splinters lodged deep in the land’s flesh. When he knelt to listen, his head rang with static and distant, mindless hunger.

  “This is why the next discipline matters,” Leaf said as Jon staggered to his feet after another attempt at root-listening ended in a nosebleed.

  “What discipline?” Jon rasped.

  “Partition.” She crouched before him, placing two fingers against his brow. “Up until now, you have opened yourself to the Green. You let it flow through you freely. That is how children survive,” Leaf said. “Not how they endure.”

  She drew a line in the snow between them. “Those more adept master separation.”

  That night, as wights howled somewhere far to the north, the Children formed a circle around Jon. No fire. No chant. Only stillness.

  Leaf explained while Jon sat cross-legged in the snow, breath slow, Barkskin already half-formed beneath his skin. “The Green is loud right now,” she said. “If you open fully, it will drown you. If you close fully, you will be blind.”

  “So what do I do?”

  “You divide.” She pressed a clawed finger into his chest. “One part of you listens. The other remains human.”

  The exercise was brutal. Jon learned to split his awareness like a blade through wood. One half of his mind sank into the earth feeling rot, frost, movement. The other clung desperately to memory. Names. Faces. The Wall. Ghost. His own breath.

  More than once he slipped. The land surged into him unchecked death, hunger, cold until Benjen dragged him back by sheer force of will, grounding him with a hand on his shoulder and a voice that cut through the noise.

  “Jon. Stay Jon.”

  By the end of the week, Jon could hold the partition for minutes at a time. By the end of the month, hours. That was when he could walk between both worlds.

  …

  They reached a stretch of forest that had already died.

  Trees stood frozen mid-collapse, bark split open, sap black and crystallized. The ground was hard as iron, frost creeping upward from below instead of falling from the sky. “This place is claimed,” Leaf said.

  Jon could feel it. The Others had passed through here recently. Their presence lingered like a stain. “What do we do?” Jon asked.

  Leaf handed him a smooth stone etched with old runes. “You learn to say no.”

  Jon knelt and pressed his hands to the frozen earth. Instead of opening himself fully, he maintained the partition; one part listening, one part remaining in the here and now. This was not shaping, not guiding. Rejecting.

  “I don’t want this,” he whispered. “You don’t belong here.”

  Nothing happened at first. Then the land pushed back.

  The frost cracked. Roots surged upward violently, snapping through ice and stone. A low, groaning sound rolled through the forest as the ground itself rejected the cold’s hold. The dead trees did not revive but the frost retreated, pulling back like a tide forced away from shore.

  Jon collapsed, gasping, hands smoking faintly with cold. Leaf nodded approvingly. “Good. You did not heal. You held the line.”

  Benjen’s red eyes glinted. “That’s a skill worth learning.”

  The wights found them three days later after what he had done.

  They came shambling through the snow in silence, dozens at first, then hundreds bodies stitched together by frost and will, eyes burning pale blue. The land screamed as they crossed a frozen stream, its ice cracking in protest.

  Jon felt it before he saw them. “Down,” he hissed.

  The Children scattered instantly. Benjen drew steel.

  Jon planted his feet and drew on Barkskin, deeper than ever before. His skin darkened, texture roughening until he looked carved from oak and scar. The cold dulled against him.

  The first wight lunged. Jon met it head-on. He did not burn them this time. Fire was loud. Fire spread.

  Instead, he denied. Every step the wights took, the ground resisted. Roots wrapped ankles. Ice cracked beneath dead weight. Vines burst from beneath the snow, thickening unnaturally, dragging corpses down into freezing water.

  Leaf’s song rose sharp, controlled while Jon anchored it, holding the land steady so it did not overreach.

  The battle lasted less than a hour. When it ended, the ford was clogged with frozen bodies, pinned, buried, immobilized. Jon sagged against Ghost, shaking. “That,” Benjen said quietly, “was real magic my boy.”

  As the Wall rose on the horizon days later, Jon felt something strange. Relief. And resistance.

  The Wall was something else. It was Ancient and Cold. Heavy with old spells layered atop one another like sediment. The land near it was muted, its voice distant and wary.

  Leaf slowed as they approached. “The Wall disrupts any magic,” she said. “It was made to.”

  Jon nodded. “It was made to keep things out.”

  “And in,” Benjen added.

  That night, as fires burned atop the Wall and horns echoed faintly, Jon stood with one hand on stone and the other pressed into frozen soil. The land whispered to him not screaming now, but pleading. The Others were coming.

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  We Hit Apprentice rank in Green Magic!

  + 1 to Learning

  Apprentice Green Man(Druid)[1/1]

  Main Spell: Barkskin

  *Progress needed for next rank, Adept Green Man[0/3]