>Investigation rolls: 4 and 70

You'd nearly given up.

Each movement carved pain through your ribs, where bruises had blossomed dark and deep. Your breath still hitched from the beating days ago, and a constant ringing haunted your ears like a bell that would not stop tolling.

But there was nothing else. No strength left to barter. No time to wait for rescue. Only stone and silence, and the certainty that doing nothing meant death.

So you search. At first, it's desperation: clawing at old grout, testing loose stones, sifting through straw long fouled with filth and years. Your arms shake. Once, you slip and strike your shoulder against the wall so hard you black out. But even after that, you keep searching.

Then, under the bench, near the wall that always seemed a touch colder, your fingers find a line. A groove. Not carved, but worn. A push. A shift. A soft release of stale air.

Behind the stone: a pouch of waxed leather, small as a child’s hand. You pause, looking at it like it might vanish. Then you open it.

Inside, you find:
>Two strips of salted meat, still dense and hard, cured. Hunger makes you cautious, but you know food this clean is a treasure.
>A small vial, the liquid inside thick and bitter-scented. You recognize it at once: milk of the poppy. Old, perhaps too strong - but it could dull your pain. It could buy you clarity. Or sleep. Or silence.
>A sliver of iron, cruel and jagged, filed to a point. Not a blade… not yet. But it could be shaped. Or used. A tool. A weapon. A key, in desperate hands.

Your thumb runs over the edge. A whisper in the dark sounds out.

"Ahhh… clever fingers find clever things." He takes a pause, just long enough for you to wonder if you'd imagined it.

"He left it for the moment, not the man. That was his way. Never stayed long. Never stayed the same. Kept repeating under his breath that 'a man was Jaqen'. But I heard. I always hear."

There's a note of amusement, even pride, in his tone - like a teacher pleased his pupil has begun to see.

"You breathe his dust now. But you move forward. Yes... the current changes."

The vial is cool in your hand. The meat hard as bone. The shard of iron, crude but sharp enough to bleed. You press your thumb to the edge, testing it. It could slit a throat in silence, or pry a lock, or maybe do nothing but give you a hope shaped like a weapon. And yet… Jaqen. That name was never spoken among the Stark men, nor in the halls of the Red Keep. Not in the light, at least.

You look toward the Whispering Man's cell, though you still can't see his face. A rasp of breath. Then, almost gently:

"He said the walls remembered him. Perhaps they remember you too."

Somewhere above, a muffled sound: a door, a voice, iron-shod boots on stone. Time moves again. The Black Cells are never truly still.

Your hands close around your new prize.

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Ashes in the Dark - ASOIAF Oneshot Quest