They called her the Lady of the Night ─ a haunting figure who never showed herself when the sun hung high in the sky. Jon had initially heard tales of her during his first fortnight at the Wall after taking his vows. Her name was uttered between ale passed between he and Pyp and Grenn and Sam. A ghost, some called her. A temptress, others may have said. Even Ser Alliser had once claimed to see her, a woman cloaked in shadows and face as cold as ice.

Jon thought them mad with loneliness. This Lady of the Night could be nothing more than a desperate story conjured up by men who ached for the touch and sight of a woman. Such things were likely not uncommon - these hallucinations of the mind that gave hope to the weak and weary.

He would hear of her, perhaps once a moon or whenever new recruits came to Castle Black, sharing their own stories of what they had heard of her from their other sworn brothers. Jon had never seen her. He had come close once, a mere whisper of his name on frigid wind when the night drew long and his mind grew foggy. The breeze had carried her voice to him, as silky as honey and tempting as a siren's call. Though, when he had turned, he saw nothing. Nothing but snow.

Mad with loneliness.

Jon sat hunched over his desk in his chambers. The stack of paperwork seemed endless. The young Lord Commander must have been awake for hours on end; the candle atop his desk had melted down to a lump of wax, its wick on its last life as it burned. It was times like then when his mind tended to wander away from the words etched into parchment, of the dip of his quill into ink and the words he wrote down on paper. He thought ofYgritte. He thought of his father. He thought of Winterfell. He thought of home.

The loneliness that crept into his bones felt strangling, a cold hand wrapped around his throat and squeezing. With a sigh, Jon set his quill down upon his desk. Just as he was about to blow out the candle and retire for the night before his thoughts could drown him, a freezing wind swirled in his chambers. With it came a swirl of snowflakes, fluttering in a circle before they landed upon the stone floor and melted. Jon turned - just to see - and was met with her. She was as hauntingly beautiful as the stories said, tall and lithe and bathed in moonlight as she stood by the window. Her gaze was cold and calculating, and he found himself drowning in her eyes. She was as frightening as she was enchanting.

Jon swallowed, one hand clutching the back of his chair as he angled his body to face her. He would have thought himself mad, would have believed her to be his imagination, had it not been for Ghost. The direwolf had awoken suddenly from his sleep by the hearth, snow white fur standing on-end as he stared at the woman. Real. She was real. Jon swallowed. It felt as though the breath had been sucked from his lungs, his words stolen from his tongue. His hand itched to reach out for Longclaw.