🙋 + Castle Black
FOR SO LONG, the Wall had been a beacon of hope for Bast, a portcullis leading to another world, and he’d loomed at the edge of the Haunted Forest in its shadow wondering what adventure and opportunity laid beyond. When he was sent forth to bargain with the Lord Commander for his people’s safety, he surrendered those dreams in exchange for a gray life of discipline and regiment, a life known to only those at Castle Black. He’d known he’d been born within those walls — the cold masonry his origin, the grim sound of singing steel his inception — but he did not belong.
They groomed him as a ranger, knowing that his life among the freefolk and beyond the great Wall would benefit their inexperienced conscripts, however, echoes of The Bastard of Castle Black followed him where he went. The brothers of the Night’s Watch punished him for his obvious skill — hounding his sleep, denying his meals, forcing him from the barracks, and attacking him in great legions when the Lord Commander had turned his back. He welcomed their brutality with a grin, and never once stopped rising to their challenges. After a year of sleeping in the barbican, pilfering meals from the kitchens, and swinging his fists with abandon in the direction of any opposition, he abandoned the Wall, its aath, and his so-called brothers for whatever laid south.
Bast never longs for Castle Black, and his mind avoids the gritty year he spent there. Escaping the weight of that black cloak remains his greatest ACHIEVEMENT.