"The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven."- John Milton.
The skies burned and the earth tremored. Countless corpses lay everywhere, forming mountains and filling oceans. The fresh blood that flowed from them converged to form a dark, sluggish river.
He stood decked in armour that had clearly seen better days, utterly confused while trying to process the wanton slaughter he had been forced to participate in.
Then suddenly, he felt a sudden sense of wrongness. It was like a predator declaring him as prey.
No... it was worse. A presence that deemed him a threat locked its ancient, freezing gaze upon him.
Him? A threat??
He turned sharply and locked eyes with a presence. He had no words for what type of being he beheld, but its existence felt entirely wrong.
"What in God's--"
Then the ground beneath him disappeared.
The transition was not a cinematic fade to black, nor was it a sudden flash of light. It was a suffocating, violent descent. It felt like being dragged through a narrow iron pipe, the rough metal scraping away the edges of his identity until he was shoved into a vessel that did not quite fit.
When his eyes finally opened, the world was a smear of amber and charcoal.
The smell hit him first. It was a suffocating mix of burnt tallow, vinegar, damp stone, and the sour, unmistakable stench of his own sweat. He tried to draw a breath, but his lungs seized. A wet, rattling cough tore from his chest, racking a frame that felt agonizingly small and frail.
Weak.
"The fever is breaking," a voice muttered nearby. It was a slow, wet drawl, heavy with mock solemnity. "Praise the Seven. The Grand Maester's poultice has done its work."
The Seven? No...
He blinked, forcing his vision to clear while trying to take in his surroundings. The ceiling above him was vaulted stone, painted with fading gold stars that had peeled and cracked in the damp air. This was not his room. It was not his bed. The mattress beneath him was stuffed with goose down, yet it felt like a cage of silk and wool.
He lifted a hand to his face. The fingers were small, thin, and pale, the skin slick with perspiration.
This is wrong. It's impossible.
The thought was his own, sharp and analytical, the product of a mind raised in the twentieth century, trained to dissect complex systems and find the path of least resistance. But beneath that thought lay a chaotic, swirling mire of foreign impulses. There was a childish, petulant rage bubbling in his chest, an irrational hatred for the flickering candlelight, and a desperate, whimpering desire to strike out at anyone nearby simply because he was in pain.
He closed his eyes and forced the noise down. As a man who had spent thousands of hours dealing with people and predicting opponent behavior, he treated the chaos in his head like a corrupted save file. He isolated the erratic emotions, compartmentalized the foreign memories, and forced them into a far corner of his mind.
Then, the memories clicked.
He knew this room. He knew the heavy, stifling weight of the Red Keep. He knew the golden lions embroidered on the crimson canopy above him. Most of all, he knew the name that now belonged to him, a name that carried the weight of a continent's hatred.
Joffrey Baratheon.
A cold dread settled in his stomach, far colder than the fever that had just ravaged his small body. He was the crown prince. He was the golden bastard of Jaime and Cersei Lannister, the boy king destined to tear the realm apart with his cruelty and die gasping for air on his own wedding day.
But as he lay there, breathing shallowly to avoid another coughing fit, he felt something else.
It was a strange, silent vibration in the air. To a normal denizen of Planetos, it would have been imperceptible, perhaps dismissed as the chill of an early autumn. To him, it felt like the hum of static electricity on an old television screen. The air felt thin, almost fragile.
He stared at his pale hand. The heavy oak door of the chamber creaked open, admitting a gust of cold draft and the rustle of heavy silk.
"My sweet boy," a voice cried.
Cersei Lannister rushed to the bedside, her golden hair escaping its elaborate pins, her face pale with genuine, frantic terror. She flung herself beside the mattress, her rings cold against his cheek as she cupped his face. Behind her, Grand Maester Pycelle stood, his long white beard trembling as he bowed, holding a tray of steaming, foul-smelling drafts.
"He lives, Your Grace," Pycelle wheezed, his voice dripping with sycophancy. "The Stranger has been turned away from the door."
Cersei ignored the old man, her green eyes scanning Joffrey's face with a fierce, suffocating possessiveness. "Joffrey. Speak to me. Tell me where it hurts. I will have the cooks flayed if the broth was poisoned. I will have the guards hanged for letting the draft into your chambers."
He looked at her. In canon, Cersei's love was a toxic, enabling poison that nurtured Joffrey's worst instincts. Seeing her now, smelling the faint scent of wine and lavender on her breath, the reality was far more visceral. She was a desperate, paranoid woman clinging to her children as her only shield against a hostile world.
He needed to speak, but he could not use the whiny, demanding tone of the old Joffrey. He needed time to think, to map out the board, and to understand just how much the rules of this world had changed and how utterly fucked he was.
"I am tired, Mother," he said.
His voice was small, cracked from the fever, but it lacked the sharp, petulant edge she was used to. It was quiet. It was deliberate.
Cersei paused, her thumb stroking his cheek. Her brow furrowed slightly, a flicker of confusion crossing her beautiful, sharp features at the sheer calm in his eyes. The boy who usually screamed and threw tantrums when ill was looking at her with the calculating stillness of an adult.
"The fever has taken his strength," Pycelle murmured, shuffling forward. "He needs sleep, My Queen. The milk of the poppy will..."
"No," Joffrey interrupted, his voice cutting through the maester's theatrical waffle. "No poppy. Just water. And quiet."
Cersei stared at him for a moment longer, her maternal instinct warring with her sudden unease at his demeanor. Finally, she nodded, smoothing his damp hair back. "As you wish, my darling. No one shall disturb you. I will keep watch myself if I must."
"Please," Joffrey said, holding her gaze. "I need to rest alone."
It was a rejection, but delivered with a quiet gravity that left no room for argument. Cersei slowly stood, her hand lingering on the silk sheets before she turned to Pycelle. "Leave us. If the prince's fever returns by morning, I will have your chains struck from your neck and thrown into the Blackwater."
The maester bowed hastily, backing out of the room with frantic murmurs of reassurance. Cersei cast one last, long look at her son, a mixture of fierce devotion and dawning curiosity in her eyes, before she stepped out, closing the heavy oak doors behind her.
The silence of the room returned, broken only by the crackle of the hearth.
Joffrey lay back against the pillows. He closed his eyes and reached inward, ignoring the physical ache of his body to focus on that tiny, dormant spark in his soul.
He knew the storm that was coming. He knew of the potential political betrayals, the wars, the dragons, and the part that gave him a true, deep chill: the Long Night. He knew better than anyone that the Night King was not just a legend waking from the ice. He was a tear in the world, growing larger and stronger by the day.
If he was going to survive, he had to toss canon right out the window.