“That is the mystery,” Maester Aron said. He opened the cover. The ink had faded to a ghostly brown. The handwriting was small, precise, and utterly unfamiliar. “The author names himself ‘Archmaester Harmune of the Moon’s Edge.’ But there is no such archmaester. There is no such order. The Moon’s Edge does not exist.”
“I have seen the truth in the obsidian mirrors,” the archmaester had written. “Our world is not the only world. There are others. In one, the dragon hatched. In another, the wolf ate the lion. In a thousand more, the long summer never ended. We are but one song in a library of endless shelves. And the singers? They are not gods. They are men with ink-stained fingers, writing us even now.”
The book had been found in the ruins of a watchtower along the Skirling Pass, buried beneath a collapsed slate roof. A wildling had sold it to a ranger for a bag of salt beef. The ranger had given it to the Lord Commander, who had given it to the raven master, who had sent it south to the Citadel. And now it lay before them. libros de cancion de hielo y fuego
The maester’s lamp cast a trembling pool of amber light across the oak table. In the center lay a book. Not a large tome bound in leather and studded with iron, nor a slender codex of prophecies, but something in between: a worn journal, its spine cracked, its cover soft as old skin.
Gerris looked up. His face was pale. “Maester? Are we… are we real?” “That is the mystery,” Maester Aron said
At the top, he wrote: “The Song of Ice and Fire – A True History.”
Maester Aron closed the book. For a long moment, he did not answer. The candle flame flickered. Outside the window, the stars of the northern sky burned cold and silent. The handwriting was small, precise, and utterly unfamiliar
He slid the book into a locked iron box. But that night, long after Gerris had gone to bed, Maester Aron opened the box again. He read the final line once more, then took a quill and a fresh sheet of parchment.