Darian Snow sat in the dark, the cold air of Winterfell seeping through the cracks in the stone. His breath hung in the air, a mist that clung to the corners of his thoughts. The flickering firelight from a single hearth in the hallway barely reached him, casting long shadows that danced like ghosts of the past.
His eyes were closed, but the images came anyway—fragments of a life that had never been.
He could taste the blood. It was thick, metallic, like copper and salt.
He could hear the screams. Not his own but the screams of others—the screams of the low, the ones he had once stood beside. They echoed through his mind like a song long forgotten.
The memories broke through his thoughts like shards of glass.
Darian had been born in a pit—a place where the sun had no power, and hope was something that could be bought only with death. A pit of sweat, blood, and sweat-stained labor. This world, this Winterfell, felt the same, only colder. The men of power here—the lords and their banners—were no different than the Golds he had toppled, no different than the overseers who whipped the Reds into submission. It was the same cruelty, only wrapped in fur instead of gold.
He'd known the sting of a whip, the rough scraping of chains on skin, the way a boot pressed down on a neck, suffocating breath and dignity alike. His life before had been one of unyielding suffering, but it had always been for something. He had always fought for something. The fire that burned in him now was born from the same place—the same injustice, the same hunger, the same need for something different.
He remembered the first time the sons of Ares brought him to the surface. The anger that came over him when he saw the sun. Distant and cruel, his eyes had burned as if they, too, mocked him over his ignorance and incompetence. And then came the training. He had learned the language of the Golds, their schemes, their poison-laced smiles. And as he rose, as he became something more than a Red, more than a slave, he had learned what they feared.
The lowColors. The ones who knew nothing but survival.
He learned how to lead. How to fight. How to break the chains they'd made for him.
And when the time came, Darian broke them all.
He clenched his fists, remembering the rebellion that had erupted across Mars—the blood that had stained his hands, the sacrifices made, and the vision of a world reborn that had been dashed when the fire he had ignited was doused by the same system he had fought against.
That victory had been hollow. Mars was free, but the Golds still reigned in a different form. They'd been overthrown, but not eradicated. The oppressed still struggled. The system had only adapted, not broken. Darian knew that all too well—the fight, the blood, the flame—it had been for something, but in the end, it had been nothing more than a cycle, a wave that was meant to return.
But now—here, in Winterfell—it wasn't just the remnants of the old world that haunted him. It was the people he had come to know here, the ones he had met in the halls of Winterfell, the ones who were bound by a different kind of chain.
Darian had met a boy recently, a child barely old enough to work, but already beaten down by life's cruelty. The boy's name was Oren, and his father had been a farmer who'd worked the lands just outside Winterfell. Oren's mother had died in childbirth, and the boy's father had been found in the woods one morning, his neck broken, likely the result of a lord's levy for unpaid taxes. Oren had been left alone, with no protector, no hope, save the cold stone walls of Winterfell. His fate, it seemed, had been decided the moment his father's body had hit the ground.
The boy had looked up at Darian with wide, fearful eyes one day, his voice a whisper.
"Are you going to leave me too, like my father did?"
That question had cut through him, sharper than any sword. In that moment, Darian had seen the same helplessness in Oren's eyes that he had once seen in his own. It was a look that had haunted him for years—a look he had tried to forget in the chaos of revolution and rebellion. But here, in this frozen place, he could no longer turn away from it.
He had fought for Mars, fought to break the chains that bound his people. But in this world, it wasn't just the masters who had chains. It was the children, the families, the ones who were born to serve without ever being given a choice. The lowborn of Winterfell, just like the Reds, had no hope of ever escaping the system.
And that, that was the one thing that broke him.
His hands clenched tighter, nails digging into his palms. The flames of his rage flickered to life again. The cold walls of Winterfell felt like shackles, but this time, Darian was no longer the boy he had been. He had burned once, and he would burn again. Not for himself, but for the ones who had no voice, for those who lived in the shadows and were never seen. For Eo. For Mustang.
It wasn't enough to fight the system for the sake of the many anymore. It wasn't just a matter of overthrowing the lords and the kings. It was about protecting those who had no one. It was about ensuring that children like Oren wouldn't have to suffer the same fate. Darian could not allow another boy to lose his father the way he had lost his own—lost not to death, but to a world that had no place for men like him.
He would not let the cycle repeat itself.
The system was broken. The lords, the kings—they all fed off the same corruption.
And Darian Snow? He would be the fire that tore through it all. He would raise the low, teach them to fight, teach them to burn.