Game of Thrones Workbook

House of the Undying: Treasure Map

I can’t believe my parents are making me clean out the attic on such a perfect day. The sun is shining, a light breeze is blowing; it’s the perfect opportunity to hang out with friends down at the lake, or to go for a hike in the foothills. But no, instead I’m stuck inside our dusty, stuffy attic, going through boxes of old keepsakes and nicknacks. Why this needed to be done today I’ll never know, although I suspect it was more of an excuse to keep me around the house than it was a chore that desperately needed to get done today.

I coughed and sneezed as I kicked up a small cloud of dust reaching for one of the boxes in the very corner of the attic. I had already inspected and inventoried the easy-to-reach boxes nearest to stairs leading down to the house; now I was digging through the really old stuff. The boxes that hadn’t been looked at by anyone in years, maybe decades.

As I rooted around in the box, I realized this wasn’t anything of mine or my siblings. It wasn’t even anything that belonged to my parents, or my grandparents. It appeared to be a box of personal effects from my great grandfather, the patriarch of our family who had built this old house himself three generations ago and had passed it down to his son, and his son had subsequently done for his son, and my father would presumably do for me one day.

My great grandfather was born during the Reconstruction Era following the Civil War. The popular rumor around town was that my family had made a modest fortune helping build inroads between the divided North and South. My great grandfather had always told his family stories about how the family fortune was actually quite vast and that he only used a fraction of it to build the house and set his family up for everything they could ever need, but most of the people in our family and around town just dismissed these claims as the tall tales of a man who enjoyed entertaining people with his stories.

The box didn’t appear to contain anything all that valuable. Some old clothes of my great grandfather’s, a couple of faded photos that I set aside to bring downstairs because my dad would probably get a kick out of them, and a book with a simple faded leather cover. Opening the book and thumbing through, it appeared to be my great grandfather’s journal. I set that aside too; it might be fun to read the entries with my family around the dinner table some day.

As I leafed through the pages, a folded piece of paper tumbled out and onto the floorboards of the attic. It was brittle and yellowed like the paper of his journal. I delicately unfolded the paper and was amazed to see a fairly detailed map of the area, or at least what I assumed this area of the world probably looked like to someone in the late 1800s, and my great grandfather’s handwriting etched along every margin and open space that wasn’t covered by cartography.

It took me a while to decipher his tight, cramped scrawl, but as soon as I got the hang of it, I gasped. This wasn’t just a run-of-the-mill map of the region... it was a treasure map my great grandfather had drawn revealing the location of the rest of the fortune he always claimed was our family’s legacy.

So many questions were swimming around in my head. Is this real? Would there really be a fortune at the end of the journey if I followed the map my great grandfather had laid out? Would any of the landmarks or clues he laid out still make sense in our radically different present-day world? And how could I convince my parents to let me get out of cleaning the attic so I could go on this adventure?

(664 words)