Chapter Text
Benjicot Blackwood came into the world screaming and bloody, the same way his mother left it; Lady Beatrix Blackwood took her last breath as her infant son took his first. Lord Samwell looked upon the birthing bed and wept, for the love of his life had succumbed to what he most feared, and he would have to raise their son completely alone.
“I’ll see you again, my love, I promise,” Samwell told her, cupping a hand to her cheek; but Beatrix was already dead,
Little Benjicot was squalling in the maester’s arms, demanding sustenance. With Lady Beatrix gone, the maester went in search of another woman, another mother, who might sustain the newborn in his own mother’s eternal absence. He found what he was looking for in the master armorer’s wife.
Anora Forrester had given birth not even a day before. Her daughter—her second-born—was named Juna after her eyes, which were colored the deep blue of the juniper berry. Despite her fatigue, Anora welcomed the little boy to her arms, nursing him the same care she did with her precious Juna.
From that day forward, Benjicot and Juna would become inseparable.
Benjicot was six when he first had a raven dream. He’d drifted off to sleep in his feather bed like normal, drunk on sweetcakes and the sound of his bestest friend’s laugh. He closed his eyes then opened them again, and found that he was not in his bed at all; he’d somehow woken up outside, where the ground beneath his feet was covered in some white powder.
Only he didn’t have any feet at all.
When he looked down, Benjicot discovered sharp, black talons. He cried out, afraid, and when he reached down to grab hold of them he found that his hands had morphed into feathers. He screamed.
He awoke—for real, this time—with his father’s concerned face looming over him.
“What’s wrong, Benji?” Samwell asked, gripping him by the shoulders. Benjicot felt scared, for he’d never seen his father look so worried, and he promptly forgot about the raven dream. He began to cry, and his father wrapped him up in his arms, promising him that everything was alright, everything was okay, because he was here and he was safe.
The next night Benjicot had the same dream, only instead of being afraid he decided to be brave, and before he knew it he was flying. He laughed as he swooped through the grey sky, delighting in the feel of the cold wind beneath his wings.
Below him sprawled a massive stone keep with round towers. That white stuff was still on the ground, but he couldn’t figure out what it was. He was attracted to a flash of red amongst the desolate landscape, so he soared towards it, and was surprised to find a weirwood. The only weirwood Benjicot knew was the one in the Godswood of Raventree Hall, but that one didn’t have any leaves. This one did.
As he swooped low to inspect the branches, he woke up abruptly, and found himself teetering on the edge of his balcony, stocking feet clutching the stone railing of the balustrade like raven’s talons. His hands were free, flapping in the air as he tried to regain his balance. The ground looked awfully far from here.
“Benji!” someone shouted, and soon there were Blackwood men aplenty in the courtyard below him, yelling at him to step backwards into the safety of his room. His father appeared behind him and lifted him from the armpits, then dragged him back into his bed.
“I was flying, father!” Benjicot tried to tell him, but Samwell wasn’t listening; he lay in Benjicot’s bed beside him and held him tight, demanding he promise to never do that ever again, and the seriousness in his voice scared Benjicot, so he agreed.
In the morning, he sought out Juna, and told her of his dream.
“I was a raven!” he said excitedly, shoving a honeycake into his mouth. June was his best friend in the whole world; he knew she’d love a story like this.
But Juna didn’t believe him.
“You can’t be a raven,” she scoffed. “You’re a little boy. Boys can’t be ravens.”
“Can so!”
Juna folded her arms and stuck out a lip. “You’re lying.”
“I’m not lying!” he protested, but Juna still didn’t believe him.
Benjicot soon found that no one believed him: not his father, not the old maester, not even his other friends. The more he spoke of his raven dreams the more strange looks he received, so he decided to stay silent.
The raven dreams were a wonderful secret to keep. Benjicot felt special; nobody else had raven dreams, nobody else got to fly! Each night he went to his room joyfully, for he knew that when he drifted off to sleep, he got to take wing and soar above the land.
After some weeks he’d become accustomed to the grey keep, and all its turrets and towers and curtain walls. He quite liked to fly into the Godswood, where he could admire the brilliant crimson of the weirwood leaves and the ancient face carved into its bark.
As time progressed and the moons cycled, Benjicot began to dream of people.
They were strong and graceful, all with the same hard jaw and grey eyes the color of stone. They knelt beneath the weirwood tree and murmured things, prayers, he thought. He watched them get married and he watched them die. He laughed as a fair maiden pressed a kiss to the lips of a proud warrior, then cried as the man plunged a blade into her heart. There was a family, some with hair the color of flames and some with the dark brown he associated with most of the weirwood’s visitors, all accompanied with a squealing wolf pup. Sometimes he saw a girl that reminded him of Juna, other times a woman he thought might be his aunt Alysanne. Most, though, were dark and lithe and strong, and Benjicot wondered who they were. He wanted to meet them.
Then his dreams began to move away from the grey keep and its beautiful weirwood, and Benjicot became truly afraid. They came in flashes, like bursts of lightning he could not control.
There were battlefields stained crimson. He flew above them as a raven, ever the watcher in the skies. There was a lake so vast it might have been an ocean, with softly lapping waves colored dark scarlet. There was fire, so much fire, and on one of those nights Benjicot awoke so hot that he had to strip his clothes off and lay in bed naked in fear of overheating. He didn’t like these dreams.
They soon began to overtake his thoughts in his waking hours. He spent his days in a stupor, miserable at the prospect of returning to his bed. In protest he stopped sleeping entirely, but after three days of this torment and after a nasty fall from one of Raventree Hall’s staircases, his father told him if he didn’t sleep then he’d get the maester to drug him. Benjicot relented, but often spent most of his nights in a nervous half-state, eyes heavy from fatigue but heart pounding relentlessly from anxiety, for he knew if he closed his eyes again he would see the battlefields and the fire and the blood. He longed for the simplicity of his old raven dreams, the ones from the dawn of his childhood. He celebrated each name day with despair, knowing that as he grew taller and smarter and stronger his dreams would only get worse, that the amount of carnage and death he saw would increase tenfold as the moons whirled across the sky, waxing and waning and waxing again.
He saw less and less of his friends. Children he’d once played with become wary of him, of his sullen demeanor and dark eyes. He trained with the blade and the bow, determined to become better than all of them. Employing fighting techniques he’d seen from his raven dreams, he impressed even the master-at-arms. Benjicot soon discovered that the more fatigued he was from practice the less vivid his dreams were, so he pushed himself to the limits of his exhaustion. He often found himself battered and bruised and bloodied, but his dear friend Juna—who was becoming rather skilled in healing herself—was always there to stitch him back together, to wipe the blood from his face and, in those rare moments, the tears from his eyes. She was growing into someone strong and capable, and he found he admired her for it.
Benjicot was eleven when his first raven dream came true. He emerged from the carnage in a daze, his dagger slick with someone else’s blood.
Later, the maesters would call it the Battle of the Burning Mill.
After the adrenalin of battle wore off and he realized the extent of what he’d done, he hid behind a tall spruce and vomited until his throat was raw.
Juna found him there, and she held him while he cried. In his despair, he still found it within himself to cover her eyes with his hand so she wouldn’t see the field of corpses. But her arms were stained to the elbow with blood and her dress was in tatters; she told him she’d torn pieces off of it to form bandages for the injured and dying. She’d seen what he’d seen and suffered what he’d suffered, yet she was the one holding him. He decided from that day on that he had to be strong for her. They returned to Raventree Hall arm in arm.
He still couldn’t recall the exact manner in which he’d found out, but in the later hours of that evening he discovered that his father had been slain. Juna once again held him as he cried, and it was hours before he allowed himself to leave her side.
The next months were a bloody haze. It seemed that each day brought a new battlefield, a new way for yet another raven dream to come to fruition. He felt no satisfaction at the invasion of Stone Hedge, no pleasure at killing the Brackens he found there. He and the Tully brothers soon became fast friends, and while he was away from home on campaign their obnoxious optimism was one of the only things keeping him afloat; that, and the locket Juna had given him, within which she’d pressed a juniper leaf.
“Don’t forget me,” she’d said, and pressed a featherlight kiss on his cheek; he was only eleven but she made him feel much older, much more worthy of his newfound status as Lord Blackwood. On the particularly bad days, when he lost count of the number of men he’d slain, he’d hold the locket in his hands and whisper prayers into it, hoping she could hear him.
His permanent exhaustion kept the raven dreams at bay, but at the cost of experiencing them in his waking hours. The locket was his savior, a constant reminder that somewhere, way out there beyond the bounds of his vision, good truly did exist in the world.
The war ended and he aged, and as the years passed he grew into a man. His raven dreams continued to plague him at night, but he’d discovered a miracle: sweetsleep. A pinch allowed him a night of calm, dreamless sleep. Any more and he’d be dead. Sometimes, he wondered if that wouldn’t be such a bad thing.
As his duties as lord became more pressing, he grew further and further apart from Juna Forrester. He knew she was there in Raventree Hall, the same way he knew the stars speckled the night sky when he was safe in his bed chambers. Her duties as apprentice to the maester—the new maester, that is: her brother had returned from the Citadel and taken the position after their old maester had died—kept her just as busy as himself, so he only saw her in passing. He never took the locket off. He still prayed to it when he was afraid, hoping that wherever Juna was, she could hear his plea.
For his twenty-first name-day, his men decided to take him out on a hunt—and that is where our story begins.