Theon Pastajoy croaked from cancer

Winter in Winterfell always smelled of smoke and pine needles, but on this evening, the air in the back alleys of the ancient fortress felt stagnant and sticky. Theon Pastajoy—a man whose name now signified not the shame of a lost house, but the cold proximity of the grave—wandered through the darkest corners of the castle. He passed the kennels and the forge, venturing deeper into the places where dampness had eaten away at the ancient walls. There, in a dead end behind an old leather warehouse, a rusty pipe coated in a slimy film protruded from the foundation. This was the drainage throat of Winterfell. For years, filth had flowed here; here the grooms relieved themselves, here the butts of acrid shag tobacco fell, and here the contents of chamber pots were splashed. The pipe breathed a stench: a mixture of ammonia, vomit, and something unnatural, as if the iron itself inside was rotting along with the waste. Theon, his mind clouded by a strange fatalism, sank to his knees. He pressed his lips to the icy, jagged edge of the pipe, tasting old urine and corrosion. Taking a deep breath, he blew forcefully inside, and then, yielding to a mad impulse, inhaled back everything that burst forth from the depths of those iron intestines. A cloud of invisible spores, mutated cells, heavy metals, and ancient contagion instantly settled on his mucosa. Theon coughed, wiping his mouth with his sleeve, and walked away, unaware that at that moment, thousands of dormant demons had awakened in his body. For the first few days, the illness behaved insidiously. Theon only felt a strange dryness in his mouth and a metallic tang that not even strong ale could wash away. On the fifth day, “minor” oddities began. A small dark spot on his neck, which he had always considered a mole, suddenly darkened to a coal-black color and began to bleed at the slightest touch—melanoma was the first to announce itself. That same evening, Theon discovered that his gums had become unnaturally pale and spongy, and scarlet stains remained on his clean towel after washing. Acute leukemia had begun its quiet harvest in his bone marrow. He began to cough—at first rarely, as if from road dust. But by the end of the week, the cough became dry and hacking, echoing deep in his chest. This was adenocarcinoma of the lungs spreading its first tentacles. But the most unpleasant sensation was in his abdomen: there, deep beneath the ribs, a dull, aching heaviness took up residence. Liver and pancreatic cancer had already begun to conflict for space inside him. Theon Pastajoy looked into the mirror and saw the whites of his eyes acquiring a slight, barely noticeable jaundiced tint. He did not yet feel pain, only a strange, all-consuming fatigue. He was like a castle with thousands of gunpowder charges laid into its foundation. The fuse had been lit the moment his lips touched the rusty pipe. Two weeks passed, and the world for Theon Pastajoy narrowed to the size of his bedroom in one of the cold wings of Winterfell. The castle walls, which once seemed unshakeable, now pressed down on him like a coffin lid. But this was not just a disease—it was a symphony of destruction, where every organ performed its deathbed solo. Morning began not with light, but with the realization of the new, pulsating architecture of his body. Theon ran his fingers over his skin and felt “peas,” “beans,” and “grapes” beneath it—his lymph nodes, ravaged by Hodgkin’s lymphoma, had swollen, turning his neck and armpits into clusters of alien flesh. On his chest and back, the crimson, fleshy spots of Kaposi’s sarcoma bloomed like horrific flowers sprouting through the snow. His head now weighed a literal ton. Inside his skull, in the darkest depths of his brain, a glioblastoma was ripening. It pressed against his optic nerves, and Theon’s world began to double and fade. When he tried to focus on a candle flame, it shattered into thousands of sparks, and his left ear filled with a constant, maddening hum—this was the song of osteosarcoma, which had begun to devour the bones of his jaw. “Back…” he whispered, but the sound of his own voice terrified him. His voice had become hoarse and cracked. Throat cancer was clenching its claws around his neck, turning every word into torture. Lunch brought a new portion of suffering. He looked at a bowl of broth, but his esophagus, ravaged by squamous cell carcinoma, had narrowed so much that even a sip of water felt like swallowing broken glass. As soon as the liquid reached his stomach, it was met by the fierce stabbing of adenocarcinoma. He vomited not just bile, but a thick, coffee-colored mass in which fragments of his own mucosa floated. Theon lay on the bed, and at that moment, a convulsion shot through him. The bones of his legs, riddled with myeloma, had become brittle as dry branches. It felt as if he turned too sharply, his hips would simply crumble inside his muscles. Every movement was accompanied by a dull, dry crunch. “Why did I do it?” he thought, staring at the grey ceiling. “Why did I touch that pipe?” But deep within his tortured consciousness, there was no remorse. There was a strange, perverted sense of completion. He was not merely a sick man. He had become a living encyclopedia of death. Within him lived prostate cancer, responding with burning pain in his lower abdomen; within him grew nephroblastoma, turning his kidneys into useless bags of pus; his blood, poisoned by leukemia, no longer carried oxygen but merely fermented slowly, like old wine. Theon’s emotions blunted, replaced by a constant, background horror. He felt his personality dissolving into this biological catastrophe. He no longer remembered the taste of the sea or the scent of the wind. Now he knew only the smells of his own body: the smell of decaying flesh, the scent of ammonia sweat, and the effervescent, metallic aroma of blood oozing from his pores. At night, he dreamed of that same rusty pipe. In the dream, it was infinitely long, and from it, thousands of eyes watched him—these were cells, lusting for life at the cost of his death. He woke up from his own scream, which got stuck in his throat like a bloody lump. His skin became earthy-grey, stretched over his skull so tightly that he resembled a living corpse. But this was only the beginning. The main nightmare, the agony that would unite all these tumors into one final chord, was still ahead. He felt something huge and heavy inside him—metastases intertwined into a single knot—slowly turning, preparing to finally tear him apart from the inside. For the last three days, Theon Pastajoy ceased to be human. A stench hung in the chambers of Winterfell so foul that even the seasoned direwolves howled beyond the walls, sensing the smell of flesh decomposing while still alive. The cold of the North no longer saved him—the heat radiating from his body was unnatural; it was the thermal reaction of billions of maddened cells devouring one another. Theon lay on sheets that had long since turned into a sticky shroud. His skin, eaten away by sarcomas and carcinomas, had become translucent and taut, like parchment on a drum. Through it, one could see the black knots of metastases shifting within. From his pores, like those legendary pustules whispered about in myths, a thick, grey mass began to squeeze out—a concentrate of cancer. It emerged slowly, like toothpaste, hardening on his body into foul-smelling crusts that smelled of old vomit and the rusty iron of that very pipe. The most terrifying were the teratomas. Due to the failure of all genetic codes in his body, tissues began to grow uncontrollably: clumps of coarse hair and underdeveloped, crooked human teeth burst through the skin on his abdomen and thighs. They bit into his own meat, gnawing him from the inside. Theon wanted to scream, but the cancer of his larynx and tongue had turned his mouth into a mess of bleeding ulcers and mushrooming flesh. Instead of a scream, only a squelching, whistling sound escaped his throat—his lungs, turned into a porous, rotten sponge, struggled to push air through the sludge. His skeleton no longer held him. Myeloma and osteosarcoma had turned his bones into something resembling wet chalk. When he involuntarily jerked his arm in pain, the bone of his forearm snapped with a wet sound, and a sharp, tumor-riddled shard pierced his skin. But there was almost no blood; instead, a thick, serous slush flowed out, teeming with mutated leukocytes. Theon’s consciousness flickered and faded. In moments of clarity, he felt his eyeballs bulging from their sockets due to retinoblastoma pressing them from within. The world was crimson and pulsating. He felt every tumor: how the adenocarcinoma of his pancreas was literally digesting his vitals with its enzymes, how the bowel cancer bloated his stomach, turning it into a foul sphere ready to burst. On the final night, the agony reached its peak. Every nerve ending in his body sent a signal of ultimate pain to his brain. It wasn’t just fire; it was the sensation of millions of red-hot needles simultaneously entering every cell of his being. He was locked within his own flesh, which had revolted against him. The glioblastoma in his brain began to erase his memory: he forgot his name, forgot his father’s face, forgot the taste of bread. Only the pipe remained. That rusty pipe, coated in the waste of others, which now seemed to him the threshold of Hell itself. Just before death, his body could no longer withstand the pressure. With a quiet, squelching sound, the walls of his intestines and stomach finally decomposed, and the entire contents of his abdominal cavity—a mixture of filth, cancerous masses, and semi-digested blood—surged through his mouth and nose. Theon Pastajoy drowned in his own malignancy. When the servants finally dared to enter the room, they saw upon the bed not a man, but a shapeless, grey-black mass, studded with hair and teeth, which continued to pulse barely perceptibly for several minutes after the heart had stopped. The cancer was so aggressive that the cells continued to divide even in the dead body until they had devoured the last traces of oxygen. The name Pastajoy became synonymous with an end more terrible than any imagined hell. In Winterfell, that room was bricked up and sown with salt, but they say that at night, a dry, rusty cough can still be heard from within.