The letter came to him, because he was the Maester, and thus kept the ravens of Castle Black. So he was the one who opened it, and the first one on the wall to hear the news, along with his steward, who read it tonelessly, all unknowing.

Once he'd heard the whole thing, he sat very still for a long time. It wasn't grief, though, but rage. All of them. His grandnephew Aerys, of course, but the others as well – Rhaegar at the Trident. Elia in the Red Keep. And the babes. They had murdered even the children.

The letter said nothing of Rhaella or the other children, Viserys and Daenerys.

He was angry. Not just the anger he'd felt on hearing of the war being fought to the south, but something deeper, stronger. Something of the dragon, perhaps, lingering within, not quite frozen by the ice of the Wall. But he was an old dragon, blind and decrepit, with oaths he had sworn like chains…

Aemon had been Maester here so long that very few remembered what his surname had been; it might have been Dragonknight for all they cared. None of them would know what this news meant to him. Not the Lord Commander. Not anyone.

"The gods are cruel," he murmured to the cage of ravens where he could hear them squawking and clacking their beaks. His steward, little more than a boy, shifted, uncertain.

"Maester Aemon?"

"Leave me. Best take this news to the Lord Commander as well. I don't think I'll require anything for supper tonight."

"Yes, Maester," said the steward, and left. Aemon heard the door close behind him. The ravens shuffled and rustled their feathers, though their quorking quieted, almost as though they sensed a change in the air. Aemon wondered what change that was; in him or in the world?

The Targaryens were dying. The last dragons had gone generations ago, and now their house was following. He closed his blind eyes. He did not know this Robert Baratheon; had never met Tywin Lannister. But he could hate these two men he'd never known, easily and fiercely.

Aemon sat down slowly, finding the chair through long familiarity with the room. If he were young and strong…but he was not. He was old, and all his family was dead, and he would stay here in the ice and the snow, brooding on his oaths and finding his way from anger to grief.