The nights in the North had a peculiar silence, as if even the winds respected the white expanse that stretched beneath the moonlight.

Alaric had always considered the darkness of Winterfell his true companion, but tonight the shadows seemed different. They danced, shaped by the steam rising from the warm waters, enveloping him in an uncomfortably intimate embrace. The towers of Winterfell were his refuge.

But here, far from the safety of its walls, there was something more imposing than his own ancestry: the woman at his side. Alysanne Targarye n. The Good Queen, they said. A dragon with blue eyes, honey curls and a smile that disarmed even the hardest hearts.

He did not trust smiles. He did not trust anything that came from so far away, from lands where the cold did not mark the skin and duty seemed as light as the steel of southern swords. And yet, there she was. Without the symbols that elevated her above common men. Just a woman, surrounded by steam and moonlight, as vulnerable as he was.

The heat from the spring was strange. Not like the heat of fire or body heat, but something older, as if it had risen from the bowels of the earth just to envelop them. It was a heat that ignored the stiffness of his ribs, seeping through muscle and bone until it reached something deeper.

The boiling water touched his skin, but the discomfort came from somewhere else. From her proximity, perhaps. He didn’t know what bothered him more: the fact that he didn’t see her as a threat, or the fact that that perception made him vulnerable.

The North was a place of ancient traditions, but also of secrets kept beneath the ice. There were things that not even the heart trees would dare whisper. Alaric knew that better than anyone. And tonight, he felt like he was becoming part of one of those secrets.

He closed his eyes for a moment, letting the silence swallow him. In that moment, the world seemed smaller. There was no kingdom. There was no crown. Just the wolf and the dragon, trapped in a painting no one else would see.