Ned sighed deeply as he looked up at the ceiling, a weary look on his face.
'I hope Torrhen is okay.'
This past week had not been good for him. One one hand, he had to deal with an entire continent of lords who all wanted to waltz into his library and see what had happened, giving no small amount of stress and frustration.
On the other hand, he had a deeply worried wife that took this all personally and through some sort of seemingly profound logic believed this was all her fault and that it was the Seven above who had brought this down upon her as punishment for her wrongdoings. Something about 'not loving a motherless child' tormented her day and night, which was bad for Ned as he had to tend to her during the day and calm her down in the night. Almost every night over the past week had gone by with barely any shut-eye. Instead, he spent his nights coaxing his wife to sleep as tears stained his tunic and the sheets beneath them. It didn't help that his children, all except Rickon, were also very deeply worried about him. Robb had got Rickon to believe that Torrhen had just gone a hunting trip alone to stop the boy from crying, and he hasn't worried since.
Ned felt the need to give closure to Cat and tell her the truth about Jon and who his parents were. He knew that she felt her disregard and hate for Jon lead her to believe this was all her fault. After all, there wasn't anyone else in the castle that could really be described as motherless. But the dying face of his sister Lyanna prevented him from doing so, lest he broke the promise he made to her no her deathbed.
Caught between his honour and his guilt towards his wife,he was stuck between a rock and a hard place.
What was worse was that a faint throbbing noise could be heard from the library when all the noise in the castle died down. This wasn't heard in the day, but past the hour of the wolf ("the blackest part of night", midnight), this was loud and clear, frightening the animals and the people alike. Every morning, he saw his people getting more and more tired as they lost many hours of sleep from fear and superstition.
Some had begun to say that Winterfell was cursed, but he shrugged that off. It wasn't the first time people suspected Winterfell was haunted and cursed, and it most certainly wouldn't be the last. But something about this incident, probably his instincts, told him that everything would change if and when Torrhen returned.
====================
"Power is an illusion that resides where men believe it resides. No more and no less. A shadow on the wall, a fleeting idea of human fantasy. Yet it is as essential to all living beings as sustenance and air to breath."
After finishing his statement, Torrhen blacked out and woke up with a bad headache. It felt like he had a soldering iron pierced into his skull with how much pain he had.
He slowly got up from the floor, the taste and smell of dust filling his senses. Inspecting his surroundings, he saw a dark room lit with an eerie green light. He could see moss covering the dark stone walls around him.
Before him was a double door. It was quite grand, standing at roughly 15 feet in height from what he could gather. The whole thing was made of a shiny black wood with a shining green metal at its rims. Around the height of his stomach were two golden doorknobs shining with gold. Carved in the middle of the double door was a sort of taiji symbol with two wolves, coloured black and white. The black wolf seemed to swallow the black sun and the white wolf swallowed the black moon, both wolves resembling those of the Stark sigil. Surrounding it was a thick white border with black runes written across it
(See here: https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/09ebfc38403adbdfc6745b7dcf360e001d8c21248930f376d714d7f519468ad4.jpg)
"Where am I?" Torrhen asked himself. "What am I forgetting here?"
He took a closer look at the door before him, marvelling at the workmanship that went into so beautifully depicting the image before him. He then looked to the runes surrounding it, studying what it could be.
"Skoll is the name of the wolf who chases the bright priest into the desolate forest, and the other is Hati, Fenrir's son, who chases the bright bride of the sky...Wait, I understand this!?"
This realisation came as a shock to him. It was a great surprise to find out that he understood the runes on the door. He had never even learnt a single rune, after all.
He had the feeling that something happened between his reply to the wolf and his waking up here, but he had no clue what it was. There was a gap in his memory that nothing around him could give hints for. But something significant must have happened for him to suddenly understand runes.
Thinking further, he also realised that what he just read had a very significant importance.
"Fenrir? Hati? Skoll? What am I dealing with here? Norse mythology!? What does a being like Fenrir and Norse mythology in general even have to do with House Stark in the first place!? Old man George, I really want to kill you right now!"
He knew what the three of them were from his old life, when his name was still John Scott and studied Norse Mythology in class. No one wanted to, but with how Norse mythology was misrepresented in movies and other forms of entertainment, their history teacher took it upon himself to teach them about it properly, along with the Olympians, the Hindu gods, the Egyptian gods, Buddha and the Shinto pantheon.
According to his knowledge, Fenrir was supposed to be the wolf son of Loki, the God of lies, deception and fire, and brother of Jormungandr, the World Serpent, and Hel, goddess of the underworld. Due to being too powerful, the Aesir tried to chain him twice and failed. On the third go, Fenrir grew suspicious of their intentions even though the gods said that they were playing a game and testing his strength. He demanded one of the gods to put the hand in his maw as a show of faith. With no other gods daring to do so, Tyr, the God of War, placed his hand into Fenrir's maw. When the chains bound Fenrir, he bit off the hand of Tyr as was expected. The chain was tied to a boulder with a sword placed in his maw to keep his mouth open. The river 'Expectation' flowed from his mouth as he awaited Ragnarok, when he'd break free of his fetters and run throughout the world, with his lower jaw on the ground and his upper jaw above the sky, destroying everything and even going so far as to kill Odin, the King of Asgard and ruler of the Aesir tribe of gods.
Skoll (One Who Mocks) and Hati (One Who Hates) are supposedly supposed to chase the Moon and Sun respectively and devour the two on Ragnarok, but it was uncertain whether or not the two of them were merely other names for Fenrir, who was also described in myths to devour the Sun on Ragnarok.
'Now what the heck does this all have to do with House Stark!?'