A/N: And now it's time for a new story, in which I inflict my strange ideas and grudges on anyone charitable enough to read. Please forgive me, I know not what I do.

Be warned, there will be a certain GoT conspiracy theory in play here. I don't believe it, personally, but it's just too good not to work with. Let me know if you've guessed what it is by the end of this chapter.

So without further ado, the newest story. Read, review and above all, enjoy.

Disclaimer: Game of Thrones is not mine... thankfully.

He hadn't wanted this.

He hadn't wanted to be heir to throne.

He hadn't wanted to kill Daenerys.

He hadn't wanted to survive King's Landing.

He hadn't even wanted Tormund to defer to his orders as they'd made their way North – for he had none to offer.

He hadn't wanted any of this.

But if there was anything Jon Snow had learned in his life, it was that his own desires meant very little in the grand scheme of things, and his actions meant even less.

After all, he'd once dreamed of being a hero back when he'd joined the Night's Watch. In those heady days before he'd sunk into the mire of self-doubt, he'd wanted to be remembered in history and song as a champion of the Seven Kingdoms, a man lauded and praised wherever he went. He'd wanted to rise so far above being a bastard that the world would forget his lowly birth and sing only of his heroism.

Now he was to be remembered as nothing but a traitor, a failed King in the North and a pretender to the Iron Throne, a disgraced man of the Night's Watch exiled beyond the Wall. Thanks to a few good-humoured jailers, he'd seen the histories that the Maesters were writing during his imprisonment, and he'd heard the rumours trickling through the streets: the White Walkers were already being reimagined as a Wildling tribe that had never posed a threat to anything other than Winterfell; the Battle of the Bastards was now being rewritten as the Vale's victory over the North, with Jon their puppet king; his resurrection had been discounted as a myth; and the battle for the Wall had become a footnote in the history of the North, a brief skirmish in the leadup to Stannis Baratheon's failed attempt to unseat the Boltons. Even his Targaryen ancestry and the love he'd shared with Daenerys were both being called into question: an "easily-faked" journal wasn't enough evidence for the more respectable breed of Maester, while Daenerys' murder had made Jon look like an attempted usurper making a grab for the throne through marriage – and when that had failed, through assassination. Westeros had looked upon every deed he'd done, for good and for ill, and dismissed them without a second thought.

He might as well have never joined the Night's Watch.

But in truth, Jon would have been content with his exile, or at least as close to content as he could be: the crown had never suited him, nor his miserable existence south of the Wall; a life of hardship and rebuilding in the one place that had given him a measure of happiness would have been most welcome. He'd hoped – in his own wearied way – that he might even be able to dispel that awful sense of emptiness that had overtaken him these past few months.

When he'd seen the first shoots of green grass emerging from the snow just beyond the gate, he'd thought it could only mean a bright future for the Real North on the horizon, and his thoughts had run wild with visions of a land where the Free Folk could flourish and thrive without brutal winters or looming horrors from beyond the grave. He'd set off with something like hope in his heart and Tormund and the other Free Folk marching by his side, all of them ready for the work of building a better world.

But once again, his dreams meant nothing.

His hopes meant nothing.

His actions were worth nothing.

In the end, those tiny shoots of grass had been the beginning and the end of the Free Folk's bright future. Not long after they'd passed the long-abandoned ruins of Craster's Keep, the grass had died, swiftly vanishing beneath a fresh layer of snow, and in its place, new trees had begun to sprout at an impossible speed. Jon had instantly recognized them as weirwood trees, but never before had he seen ones like these: he'd never seen such trees with thorns, least of all the daggerlike spines protruding from their branches.

And as the trees had grown, the signature face had inexplicably appeared in each trunk, moulding itself out of the wood as if carved by an invisible sculptor… and every single bone-white face had been grinning at him as he'd walked by.

It soon became apparent that the Real North wouldn't even have the luxury of a False Spring: whilst the grass died and the trees grew, the snow had fallen harder and faster than ever before, until many Free Folk unlucky enough to be travelling on foot had come dangerously close to being buried alive. Ghost had been a lifesaver in those first few days, constantly digging children out of snowdrifts before they froze, but even that had only been delaying the inevitable. Before long, they'd seen the stormclouds on the horizon and knew that the worst was yet to come.

Jon had no idea exactly where he'd been going, but Tormund had told him of caves and underground passageways deep enough to shelter the Free Folk until the worst of the storms had passed. So, with no ideas of what else to do, he had led them onwards in search of the region where sanctuary lay; alas, it had been too far to reach in a single march, and once the weather had eased, they'd been forced to make camp – just long enough for everyone to recover from the journey and marshal their strength for the final push.

And that had been all their enemies needed.

People began to vanish in the night, often taken so silently and so swiftly that nobody even knew they were gone until the following morning, when the torn-open tents became impossible to miss. Nobody ever saw their attackers, nobody heard them moving through the darkness, and nobody had a chance to fight back. Even Ghost hadn't sensed anything.

For a time, people feared that the White Walkers had returned, but with no returning wights and no sign that the great enemy of Westeros had ever been capable of such stealth, the idea had been quickly dismissed.

Nonetheless, with twenty people missing or dead, several of the Free Folk decided to abandon the push and retreat to Craster's Keep – or even to Castle Black. Powerless to stop them, Jon had silently watched the few dozen men and women go, not knowing what to do.

Days later, a bedraggled handful of survivors returned, badly wounded and barely sane: the way to the south had been blocked by an impassable thicket of weirwood trees too dense to traverse. According to the terrified witnesses, much of this new growth had already consumed the original forest, devouring the old trees like parasites and building their new trunks around their gutted remains… and thanks to the thorns that now sprouted on each one, any man daring to climb over this barrier risked horrific injuries.

And as they circled the thicket in the hopes of finding a way through, the group found the mangled bodies of the twenty missing Free Folk, impaled on the thorns of the weirwoods for all to see. From the blood caked on the branches, they'd been alive and struggling when they'd been speared… and when the separatist folk had tried to cut them down for cremation (more out of habit than anything else), the bodies had begun to twitch: their eyes had snapped open to reveal empty sockets blazing with an unearthly gold-and-scarlet light, and from mouths flooded with weirwood sap, they had whispered unbearable truths.

The corpses had killed nobody that day, for they were not wights. If anything, wights would have been preferable: instead, more than half the deaths that had occurred that day were suicides. Everyone who'd heard what those thorned-punctured corpses had to say in its entirety went mad: most killed themselves in a matter of seconds, flinging themselves at the weirwoods and impaling their bodies on the thorns.

And so the forest of the dead had grown, each speared carcass eventually opening new eyes and adding to the nightmarish chorus of voices. Horror-stricken, the remaining separatists had turned around and began a hasty march northwards, hoping to find safety among Jon's group. But as they'd fled, their new enemy had set about them in the night, and this time the survivors had seen their attackers up close.

"Burning trees," they'd muttered. "Burning trees that walked like men."

And then Jon had seen them for himself: at a distance, they could have been mistaken for men, but their skin was stark-white weirwood bark, their faces were grinning, motionless carvings, and on the rare occasions when they charged into battle, their bodies glowed with an otherworldly light that made it look almost as if they were aflame. And though they were no taller or broader than any other man, their spindly limbs and thorny fingers could easily tear through what little armour the Free Folk possessed.

Whatever victims these Weirwood Men had claimed, dead or alive, were always dragged back to the trees and impaled on their thorns to form yet another chorus of the dead… and with the weirwood forests springing up all over the North, they didn't have too far to travel. Before long, the night echoed with the monotonous chants of unbearable truths, and the Free Folk had no choice but to flee the maddening drone.

By day, Jon and the others had hurried across the snowfields until their strength was spent; by night, they were whittled away by the Weirwood Men. And on the rare occasions when the Free Folk had managed to corner and kill the tree-men before they dragged them away, many were horribly injured in those midnight battles… and those foolhardy enough not to purify their wounds with fire soon discovered roots and creepers sprouting from their flesh, corrupting them from within and transforming them into fertilizer for the growth of new trees.

Bit by bit, the Free Folk had dwindled, men, women and children being slowly culled by the new threat.

And the night a weirwood tree had sprouted in the middle of the camp, strangling several children in its roots, the brittle morale had finally shattered: the Free Folk broke ranks and fled in all directions, leaving Jon travelling through the snow with only Tormund and Ghost for company, travelling aimlessly through the wilderness in the dim hope of finding sanctuary.

The next evening, Tormund had been dragged beneath the snow by a mass of thorny roots, bellowing and swearing at the top of his lungs as he vanished from sight.

The evening after, Ghost simply disappeared. Jon never learned what became of him, but he found scraps of blood and fur caked on the roots of the weirwood saplings he'd passed. So he'd mourned his last remaining friend and carried on, travelling on only because he had nothing left to do.

And on the morning of the third day, Jon had finally seen the cavern they'd been looking for all this time, looming out of the fog like the jaws of some long-dead monster. And because he'd once again had nothing else to do with his time or his life, he'd simply stumbled inside and collapsed against the wall, sliding down into an exhausted, near-unconscious heap. There he'd stayed, unresponsive and all but dead to the world.

And there he'd remained for the last day and a half. In the end, it had seemed like the most reasonable thing to do under the circumstances. He had no food, no means of starting a fire, no way of knowing if there was any reliable source of food in the region, no hope of rescue, and no chance of getting back to the Wall – not now that the weirwoods forests had cut off all escape routes. And he certainly didn't have any means of discovering why this calamity had befallen them, much less ending. So, with nowhere to go, what possible reason could he have for leaving?

What else was there to do but wait for the end to come?

As he lay there in the freezing darkness, paralysed with exhaustion and apathy, Jon was dimly aware that in the past, he might have been more curious about what happened to the weirwood trees.

He knew for a fact that the thorns and the hideous smiles were not natural, and if anything like the Weirwood Men had ever existed before, Bran would surely have mentioned them in his discussions of the past. Once, Jon might have set out to learn more about what was happening, to try and learn more about this new threat; he tried to find some way of rescuing the few surviving Free Folk, or even sought out some way of stopping the weirwoods from growing any further. He'd done as much and more in days gone by.

But in the last year or so, Jon had changed in some irrevocable way: he didn't want things anymore.

It hadn't happened all at once, but gradually, over the course of several months. He hadn't even noticed it until after he'd been crowned King In The North: he'd found himself growing increasingly numb to his duties, to the point that he'd been secretly relieved when the opportunity arose for him to head North to capture a wight. He'd surrendered his crown so easily in the end, but even then he'd still felt want – for Daenerys, for the North, for some hope of a peaceful life after the war was over.

But then he'd learned of his true parentage and...

It had meant nothing.

He'd spent so much of his life longing for some means of escaping the label of "bastard", whether through legitimacy, authority, or heroism, and even after he'd met Ygritte and started taking his role in the Night's Watch seriously, it had never gone away. Stannis Baratheon's offer of legitimizing him had sorely tempted him, and the idea of being a Stark by name as well as blood had thrilled him beyond imagining.

But when Sam had told him that he was legitimate and due for more recognition than he could have dreamed of, he'd felt nothing.

It just hadn't mattered to Jon. Nor had the possibility of being next in line to the throne. Nor had his relationship with Daenerys – someone he'd once wanted to be with even when he'd known the North would oppose it. Nor had Ghost. Nor had any of the pursuits he'd normally kept himself amused with. He just hadn't wanted any of it. He'd made plenty of excuses, but in the end, his reasons boiled down to not wanting any of it anymore.

Seeing King's Landing burn and having to kill Daenerys had been the last moments in his life that had truly stirred some emotion from him. After that… well, all he'd felt had been a distant stab of despair, until the very need to get up in the morning had become onerous.

He'd agreed to whatever terms his jailers offered and headed North almost without a second thought, wishing for nothing more than an escape from the terrible emptiness that was devouring him from the inside. He'd barely cared in his final goodbyes to his family, and could barely muster a sense of confusion at the curious absence in his memories of what had happened between that day and his arrival at the Wall.

One way or the other, he'd gone through the motions, hoping that the sense of apathy would fade once he was back in the real North. But it had stayed with him every step of the way, and only grown worse as time went on and the bodies had begun stacking up.

Once, he might have found the growing numbness in his mind worrying, even terrifying, but by the time he could focus clearly on it, he could scarcely bring himself to give a damn.

And now here he was, starving to death and not caring about it.

And why should he care?

His fears didn't matter.

His hopes didn't matter.

His actions didn't matter.

He didn't matter, and never had.

So in the end, he simply lay there as he grew weaker and weaker, unfeeling and uncaring. The pain didn't trouble him, nor did the cold, the smell of death, or even darkness encroaching on his vision.

He didn't want anything now.

A/N: Poor Jon; in a season, he went from an unreasonably-underdogged hero to the man who will be forever known for the words "Muh Queen" and "I dun wannit."

But here's the illogical conclusion - and part of the explanation.

(sigh)

Confession time: I used to really love Game of Thrones. The setting, the characters, the intrigue, the magic, the tragedy - all of it. Once I got around to reading the novels, it enriched the experience tenfold: I was genuinely fascinated in seeing how the show would adapt things like Euron Greyjoy, Reek's final condition, the House of Black and White, and young Griff.

Season 4 was the first inkling that something was wrong: Yara's godawful rescue attempt, Reek still being prettyboy Theon, the aggressive whitewashing of Tyrion, Shae's "hell hath no fury" crap, the "Shae shot first" moment, and... (sigh) the accidental rape scene. But it wasn't until the utterly execrable Season 5 that I really started to lose hope: the fanservice, D&D's hate-on for Stannis, the pointless bloody Sansa rape plotline, the Faith Militant being portrayed as nothing more than the Westborough Baptist Church, and the Boltons escaping repercussions for another season - meaning next season was wasted on them being the villains again when the time could have been better spent on making Cersei a credible villain - or, novelty of novelties, actually giving some development and screen time to the bloody White Walkers!

Season by season, it got worse and worse, until I was only paying attention out of morbid curiosity, as Tyrion became a joke, Arya became a psychopath, Sansa became Cersei 2.0, and Jon became Keanu Reeves' mumbling cousin. Then season 8 came along and I was only paying attention for the media furore.

As Lindsay Ellis so aptly put it, "you have to love something to hate it this much." I've been burned by a great many things I once enjoyed, but unlike Bioshock Infinite: Burial At Sea, the avalanche of effluence didn't come out of nowhere: it was always there, slowly getting bigger and bigger until even the real fanatics couldn't help but notice the nightmare Game of Thrones had become.

For a while, I wanted to make my own rewrite of the show, but that would require me working from season 4, and having to rewatch and dissect everything from then on would have only have made me more miserable in the long run, especially since I freely acknowledge that I honestly don't have the passion, the patience or the ability to make what would be at best a watered-down version of George R.R. Martin's actual work. Besides, much more talented creators have already made their own spin on what might have been in this series, most prominently Preston Jacobs.

So it's time for another "exorcise the demons" story.

This isn't a fix-fic, because I'm not fixing anything, and I don't really have the heart for a proper hate-fic. So I suppose this can only be described as miseryfic - or perhaps a shitfic - in which I take the bad ideas of this sad, sorry mess and see how much worse they could have gotten if taken all the way to the illogical conclusion; if nothing else, this is my bizarre attempt at explaining the nonsense of the series as well. Think of it as a more bitter, cynical edition of my story A Life With Vigor. Treat it as you will.

What do you think so far? Good? Bad? Relentlessly mean-spirited? All of the above? Feel free to let me know and make predictions as to what's going to happen next.