"You know who I am."
Rhaegar's hand moved before his mind had finished deciding to let it. His fingers closed around the pommel of the sword at his hip. Blackfyre, still there, still real, its cold grip the one thing in this place that felt real.
The man's red eye tracked the motion without alarm. A small, thin smile crept onto his face.
"Wars were fought over that sword," he said. "Oh. Pardon me." The smile did not waver. "Wars were supposed to be fought over that sword."
Silence stretched between them, filled by nothing but the cold wind. Rhaegar studied the man for a long moment, weighing the words, weighing the smile, weighing the strange, deliberate correction he had made of himself. Slowly, he let his hand fall away from the pommel.
The man watched him do it and nodded.
"You are not supposed to exist yet," Rhaegar said.
The man considered him with that single eye. It was an unnerving thing to be looked at by such a sight. Everything about the man before him felt both real and a figment of his imagination at the same time.
"Neither are you," he said. "Rhaegar Targaryen was not to be born for centuries yet. There is to be one man who bears that name. The first of his name." He paused, and his red eye sharpened in its gaze. "And you are not him."
"That is not an answer," Rhaegar said.
"It is not." The man turned away, back toward the railing, back toward the vast white nothing stretching out beneath them. "But it is the only thing that matters now. The only thing that has seemed to matter since your birth."
There was a pause before he continued. "You ask who I am. I confess I wished to ask the same of you. Though I fear even you do not know the whole truth of it."
"Where is this?" Rhaegar asked, though he already knew the answer; he had known it the moment the cold first hit him.
"You know where you stand," the man said. "You have always been quicker than most at knowing where you stand, Rhaegar Targaryen." The man said, without turning. "It is where you are going that you seem determined not to look at."
Rhaegar let out a short, humourless huff of breath. "I shall have you know that I find no pleasure in riddles, Lord Brynden."
Something almost like a smile touched the man's face at that. It did not reach the scarred hollow where his other eye should have been.
"The flame across the sea could not place you," he said. "It searched, and searched, and found only a hollow shape where a boy should have been. It named you an abomination. A thing outside the song." The red eye did not blink. "It was not wrong. But it was not entirely right, either. Fire sees flame. It does not see roots. And you, Rhaegar Targaryen, have roots that reach further back than any flame has ever been permitted to burn."
"Riddles again," Rhaegar said, and he very nearly rolled his eyes. "It is the greatest riddle to me why everyone across this world seems intent on speaking only in riddles."
"Because it is the only honest way left to speak of what is to come," the man said. "A plain telling would break the mind of any common man who heard it whole."
Rhaegar huffed again, patience wearing thin against the cold wind and the endless, circling non-answers. "You still have not told me why I am here."
The man turned to face him fully.
"You are afraid of me," he said.
"Why?"
Rhaegar's voice cracked with something closer to frustration than fear. "Just answer the fucking question."
The man's expression shifted to something almost gentle in its nature. "Fret not, Prince Rhaegar. This meeting of ours is not to be of some great consequence."
A smile crossed his ruined face then. A genuine one, if Rhaegar dared to speculate.
"I wished only to speak to my murderer."
"Murderer?" Rhaegar asked, genuinely puzzled.
"Indeed." Bloodraven's voice was even, almost gentle in its certainty. "What else would one call the man responsible for erasing their birth?"
Rhaegar went quiet.
Bloodraven nodded slowly, as though the silence itself were answer enough. "I see you understand what I mean." He let silence fill the space between them for a moment before continuing. "I know you understand that every action beckons a consequence."
A long pause stretched out. Rhaegar nodded at last.
"But you fail to imagine the magnitude of the consequence, Prince Rhaegar."
Rhaegar drew a slow breath. "I have known, long since my birth, that should I live long enough, many things in this world would be different. Whether of my own will or not. Whether I fail or succeed." He met the man's remaining eye without flinching. "So no, Lord Brynden. I do understand the magnitude of the consequences my actions shall entail."
Bloodraven let out a short, dry chuckle, more sigh than laughter. "You think you do."
Rhaegar closed his eyes, drawing in a long breath to smother the anger rising in his chest at the man's endless puzzling answers.
"I will ask you for the last time, Lord Brynden," he said, opening his eyes again. "Please. Speak plainly of what you wish to say."
Bloodraven turned to look at him fully and gave a slow, half nod. "Come." He beckoned toward the railing.
Rhaegar hesitated only a moment before stepping forward to stand beside him. The moment he did, Bloodraven raised a hand and pressed it flat against Rhaegar's back.
Rhaegar tensed instantly.
"Calm yourself, Prince," Bloodraven said, unbothered. "You should know by now that I wish you no harm."
Rhaegar grunted something noncommittal and allowed the tension to bleed slowly out of his shoulders.
"Brace yourself for what you are about to see," Bloodraven said.
Rhaegar glanced at him sidelong, puzzled, but Bloodraven only pressed his hand more firmly against his back.
"Calm yourself," he said again.
Rhaegar breathed and nodded.
"Now. Close your eyes."
Rhaegar closed them.
"Now. Open them."
He did.
And he saw.
He saw a sight that would haunt him for as long as he lived, however long that proved to be.
Corpses. Corpses piled as high as the tallest mountains he had ever laid eyes upon in either of his two lives. Mountains of the dead stretching out across the whole of the frozen expanse ahead of him, further than his eyes could follow, further than the light of the sun seemed to reach.
Rhaegar froze. Frozen in body. Frozen in mind. Frozen before a sight of horror too vast for him to understand.
He began to see two sights at once. One of the pile of dead bodies and the other of what seemed like a summary of the lives of many who lay in that pile. In a minute, a second, an instant, he saw the lives of what felt like countless thousands.
He saw them. Men, women, children. Lowborn and Highborn. Of every culture, every race, every region. But their lives seemed to be told backwards, from death to birth. The cries and laughter, joy and tragedy, kindness and insult, justice and betrayal, loyalty to treachery, greatness to insignificance. Their tales were told from their twilight to their birth, and then nothing. They were nothing. And he saw it all at once.
Blood began to flow from every opening in his face at once. From his nose, his ears, the corners of his mouth, welling at the rims of his eyes until the entire world before him took on a deepening tint of red, as though the vision itself were bleeding along with him.
His legs gave out beneath him. He clutched at his own chest, at the indescribable pain that rose from his heart; his head hammered against his skull in a way that made his vision spin without direction, his breath refusing to come no matter how desperately his body screamed for it. Veins rose dark and swollen along his temples and his throat, bulging visibly against his skin.
He was going to die. Something told him with a terrible clarity. His body, or perhaps his mind, was failing him.
And in the moment he felt certain of his death, he felt a warmth spread against his chest.
Bloodraven had laid his hand over Rhaegar's heart.
The change was immediate. Rhaegar felt it happen, felt his heart slow and steady itself beneath that hand, felt his lungs remember, all at once, how breathing was meant to work. The blood stopped its erratic flow. The veins along his neck and temples eased back beneath his skin, the pressure behind his eyes receding, bringing back his vision.
Rhaegar lay there afterwards, gasping at the cold air as though he had never once breathed before in his life.
He did not know how long passed before he found the strength to rise again. Seconds, minutes, hours, he could not have said. He stood with his eyes still shut, and only with great effort did he force them open, to find nothing before him now but the same white, serene snow that had greeted him at the very start.
He did not need to turn to know Bloodraven stood beside him still. He could feel it.
A few moments passed in silence.
"What…" Rhaegar's voice came out cracked, barely his own. "What was that?"
Bloodraven took a slow breath before he answered.
"Only one of the many consequences."
Rhaegar turned to look at him, and found the red eye waiting, patient and unbearably calm, exactly as it had been from the start.
"They are the souls that shall never be," Bloodraven said. "As a consequence of you."
"Because of me?" Rhaegar asked, half-dazed, more to himself than to the man beside him.
"Yes," Bloodraven said as if he cared not for the weight of the affirmation he gave. "And I am to join them."
Rhaegar did not answer. He stared out at the white expanse, at the place where the corpses had been and were no longer.
And that was when he realized, he could not remember them. Even though he had seen it just then. He could not remember the bodies, their lives, the visions. Even though he remembered that he had seen them. Remembered that he had seen the mountains of corpses. He could not remember what it looked like. Not even in the vaguest sense.
Rhaegar slowly turned to the man, with some idea of what he had done to him to save him from death. Silence stretched between them. A minute, perhaps. Perhaps longer. Time did not seem to hold its usual power here. Wherever, and whatever here was.
"Can it be undone?" Rhaegar asked at last, and hated himself for asking it, because he already knew.
Bloodraven turned his ruined face toward him. "I had thought you better than such naivety, Prince."
Rhaegar brought a hand up to his face. He pressed his palm against his brow, forcing himself to regain composure.
"What do you want from me, Lord Brynden?"
"There is nothing I want from you, Prince Rhaegar." Bloodraven's voice did not change. It never seemed to change. "But the world? The world wants everything from you."
Rhaegar looked at him and said nothing.
"You owe it a debt," Bloodraven said. "A debt that is, perhaps, impossible to repay in full. A debt for the souls you have damned before they ever drew breath. A debt for the threads you have cut before they were ever woven. A debt for the song you have shattered before its most beautiful verses could be sung."
Rhaegar did not speak. He found, in that moment, that he could not.
"A victory for the living has been lost, perhaps forever," Bloodraven continued, and there was no cruelty in his voice, which made it crueller still. "All so that the might of our dynasty might be protected a while longer. All so that our blood may continue placing monarchs, each more incompetent than the last, upon a poisoned throne, of a broken kingdom, for a few centuries more than was meant to be."
The cold winds had stopped. No, the world itself seemed to have stopped.
"Then what was I to do?" Rhaegar's voice, when it finally came, was low, and rough, and entirely unlike the voice he was known for. "Ignore it all? Run? Sit idle while everything I came to love burned? Watch myself, and everyone I hold dear, bleed and die fighting for a throne we already sat upon? For what? So the dragons might go on to die? So some mysterious prince, no one knows who, can be born centuries later? So that he could wage his war against the foolishness of some ancient nameless imbeciles? And I have to lie down and take the punishment like a good little boy for it all to happen?"
Bloodraven said nothing. His silence was not agreement, and it was not denial.
"If that is truly what this world wanted-" Rhaegar's voice cracked, and something in his chest that had been holding for fourteen years finally broke. "Then why the fuck am I here? Why must I suffer these tragedies if all it ever wanted was for me to follow some mummer's script written by men long dead? Why must I taste power that was never meant for me? Why must I bear these bonds - my father, my brothers, Rhaenys, everyone I have come to love in this cursed life - only to lose them anyway, to a fate I had no right to suffer in the first place? WHY?"
He growled the last word, his voice tearing raw with anger, and it echoed over the endless white snow below them.
"That, I do not know," Bloodraven said. "But we do not have long, so I would suggest we do not lose ourselves to the vice of rage."
Rhaegar glared at him, his chest still heaving, and took several long breaths before the fire behind his eyes calmed.
"Then speak, Raven," he said. "You have called me here for a reason. And I know it was not merely to show me the calamity of my own existence. And this time, speak plainly."
He said the last words through gritted teeth.
Bloodraven let out a slow breath. "Fine, my prince." He said, with a weariness to his voice. "I have three things to say to you."
Rhaegar looked at him and gave a single nod. "Speak."
"First." Bloodraven's gaze drifted, briefly, beyond the railing, toward what lay past the white nothing north of the Wall. "The enemy beyond this wall is no longer my duty. No longer my concern. It is a burden of the living now, and I am stripped of life." His red eye returned to Rhaegar. "It is yours. Yours to plan for. Yours to face. Without a path laid before you. Without a song to guide your steps." He paused. "How you will do it, or if you will do it at all, I do not know."
Rhaegar said nothing for a long moment. He nodded slowly, unsure what he was truly supposed to do about it.
"The second is advice," Bloodraven said.
Rhaegar raised a brow.
"Do not be careless, nor hasty, in your appetite for an empire." Bloodraven's voice took on the cadence of an old saint. "Do not reach to eat a fruit you have not plucked yourself, after the labour of the climb. A fruit already lying upon the ground may look glorious enough from a distance. Golden, ripe, easily taken. But look closer, Rhaegar, and you may find it is already rotten. Already crawling with maggots beneath its skin."
"Are you speaking of Volantis?" Rhaegar asked.
Bloodraven did not answer that.
Rhaegar rubbed his eyes and let out a long, exhausted sigh. "What is the third?"
"I am not yet finished with the second."
Rhaegar stared at him, then motioned with his hand for him to continue.
"Do not be too eager," Bloodraven said, "nor too careless, in your ambition to tear down the one thing that managed, against every odds, to hold together a continent of squabbling, small-minded warlords for almost three centuries."
There was a pause. Rhaegar's eyes widened, just slightly.
The faintest ghost of a smile touched the corner of Bloodraven's mouth. "Oh, yes, my prince. I know well enough why you do not lust after the Throne." His red eye glinted. "After all, why would a man lust after the very thing he seeks to destroy?"
"I do not seek to destroy it," Rhaegar said.
"Not in the literal sense. No." Bloodraven tilted his head. "But you do seek to strip it of its deference. To hollow it out until it is little more than a striking, insignificant monument. Do you not?"
Neither of them spoke for a long moment, the wind the only sound between them.
"What is the third?" Rhaegar asked.
Bloodraven drew a long breath and turned his gaze back out toward the white expanse below.
"The third is a warning."
Rhaegar studied the side of the man's ruined face.
"If you have chosen to disregard everything I have told you thus far," Bloodraven said, "do not make the same mistake with this."
"What is the warning?"
Bloodraven did not look at him. He kept his eye fixed on the falling snow, and when he spoke, his voice had dropped to something tense and grave.
"It is not only we who play the game of thrones. And you, Prince Rhaegar Targaryen, have bloodied the game of many. And they are not yet done counting what you have cost them."
There was silence after that. And then, without warning, Bloodraven turned and began to walk away.
"Lord Brynden." Rhaegar took a step after him. "I asked you to speak plainly."
There was no reply. The man only kept walking, slowly disappearing into the falling snow.
"Hey," Rhaegar shouted, chasing him. "What is that supposed to mean?"
Still nothing. The distance between them stretched, and stretched, though Bloodraven's pace never seemed to quicken at all.
Rhaegar understood, with a sinking certainty, that he would get no further clarity from the man tonight. He stood there a moment, debating with himself whether to ask the question that had come to his mind. In the end, he asked it anyway.
"Will we meet again?"
Bloodraven stopped. He turned, just enough that Rhaegar could see the profile of his ruined face against the white.
"No. My duty ends here," he said.
"Do not be a fool. Do not be a martyr. Do not be a hero. The time for heroes has long passed. Be a monster." Bloodraven said with enough venom that it almost startled Rhaegar. "Use your knowledge, use your ambitions, use your House you so adore. They are the only weapons you and this world have left."
And he turned back and kept walking, his shape growing smaller and smaller against the endless snow, fading completely at last.
Rhaegar's own eyes began to grow unbearably heavy. His eyelids fluttered without his permission, his legs buckled beneath him without warning, and he collapsed.
He woke with a gasp, and found himself tangled in his own sheets, exactly where he had fallen the night before.
His body was slick with sweat, and his head felt as if it was about to split in two. He dragged himself to sit upright with some effort and looked out toward the balcony. The light outside suggested it had been only a few minutes past sunrise. He had slept only a handful of hours since the middle of the night.
His mind and body both felt as though someone had beaten him senseless with a stick.
He collapsed back against the pillows, dragging both hands over his face, and lay there a long while, breathing heavily.
"Fuck."