The rain came down hard, thick drops drumming on the rusted metal roof above me. The stench of gunpowder and burned oil had been stuck in the air for hours, as if the walls had learned to breathe it. The thermal sight showed three moving shapes in the hallway ahead. No more than fifty meters. Three figures, round heat, moving with the rush of men with little training and too much fear.
I drew a long breath. Air control. Focus on breathing, the basic lesson that never failed. Inhale for four, hold for two, exhale for six. The body understands math better than panic. The body obeys when the mind commands.
"Alpha One, you are green." The voice on the radio was low, almost swallowed by the storm, but clear enough to leave no doubt.
"Copy." I shifted the carbine on my shoulder. The familiar press of metal against my cheek was almost comforting. Almost.
Fourteen years in special forces. Missions in places that never appeared on any map. Some the world would never know had happened. Others even we were not sure had really happened. This one smelled wrong from the briefing. Improvised supply lines, too many civilians as smoke screen, people more willing to die than to talk. The kind of op manuals do not cover and consciences do not absolve.
I moved down the narrow corridor, boots hitting wet concrete with purpose. Water leaked through gaps in the roof and traced the floor in thin cascades. The first target slid into the edge of the sight, too fast for a civilian but far too slow for me. Two to the chest, one to the head. Automatic. The weapon settled as if nothing had happened. The body learns what the mind needs to forget.
The second came right after, yelling something in Arabic I did not understand. Too loud, not enough intent. A sharp kick to the side of the knee, the inevitable fall, the butt of the rifle to his jaw, then the silence that always arrives too quickly.
The third was not on thermal. He came from above.
The blast flashed and blinded me for an instant. The heat was immediate and choking, as if the air had turned to molten iron. I felt the impact before I heard the sound. Something slammed into my vest with absurd force, a fist of God shoving me backward. The pressure broke my breath in half, as if someone had flipped the switch on my diaphragm.
I stumbled and hit the wall. My fingers came back wet and red. Blood ran inside the glove and weighed like oil. I tried to inhale and the world made that clogged-pipe sound that always means trouble. It was not only the vest.
The radio hissed again, someone shouting my callsign. The sound came from underwater. I smiled. Not the victorious smile of a man who completed the mission, but the half smile of someone who knows it is over. There is a specific peace in the instant you understand there is nothing left to fix.
My body got heavy. My legs forgot how to stand. The rain blended with the distant echo of gunfire and, for some ridiculous reason, my mind decided to remember one thing. I had never finished rereading A Dance with Dragons. The book was still open on my desk, a yellow marker pointing to a chapter I always liked and never knew why.
"Perfect. I get to die without finding out how old George planned to make the Targaryens suffer even more."
I found it funny. That is how it is in the end. Men, bad decisions, good stories. I closed my eyes. Breathing turned into a bureaucratic task. Each blink pulled me deeper into the dark, like an elevator descending too slowly to a basement without a number.
Then there was silence.
No divine light, no angelic choir, no highlight reel of my greatest hits, and thank God for that. Only crushing pressure, suffocating heat, and screaming.
Not combat screaming. Birth screaming.
...
The first thing I saw was too much light. Not the tunnel light people talk about. This light was yellow and shaky, thrown by torches blowing smoke in my face, not that I was tall enough to thank them. The ceiling was stone, gray and cold, stained with moisture that drew maps of countries that never existed. The light danced on the walls and made the shadows look larger than they were.
I was small. Very small. Every fiber of my body screamed that. A sticky heat clung to me, and the air smelled of blood, sweat, and damp hay. My blurred vision caught smudges. Sweaty faces, rough hands, thick wool, poorly cured leather. Someone was breathing far too close. Someone else was trying not to faint on their feet.
A woman's voice, hoarse from effort, cut through the buzz of the room.
"He is not crying."
Of course I am not, milady. I am a little busy processing the fact that I was just reincarnated.
The words did not come out, but that was the thought. Another voice, farther away, answered in a dialect my brain had not tuned into yet. The accent was heavier and rougher, the drag of people who live in the cold. Syllables rise and fall differently when the wind decides to live inside houses.
The smell was a mix of people and stone, old iron and wet wool. The heavy clothing and, most of all, the sigil carved into the dark wood on the far wall, a circle marked with ancient lines like runes, lit a memory in me with map-clear precision. Runestone. House Royce. The Vale. High country, wind cutting your face, sea hammering cliffs, snow being stubborn in April. I had read it enough times to feel like memory.
That told me a lot. Rhea Royce. If I remembered right, her husband was Daemon Targaryen, not exactly a model of domestic consistency. The math was simple. I was in Westeros and had just been born from a political marriage with negative emotional balance.
What did that make me? A bastard? No. Legitimate, at least on paper and in whispers. Probably unwanted by half the family and watched under a magnifying glass by the other half. In Westeros, anything that breathes and has a title turns into a conspiracy thesis. Breathing is evidence and the title is proof.
The woman holding me, likely Rhea, was not beautiful in the lazy sense, but she had presence. Pale face slick with sweat, chestnut hair pasted to her temples, and a steady gaze. Not cold. Evaluation. She weighed me with her eyes the way someone judges a stone and decides whether you can raise a house with it or if it is just dead weight. The judgment was not cruel. I saw none of the disgust common in people who hate the arrangement fate forced down their throats. If there was bitterness, it was not aimed at me. I saw a quiet spark of protectiveness. Subtle, almost hidden by exhaustion, but there.
Servants moved quickly and whispered. Words rolled in like waves. "Dragon's blood." "Heir." "Eyes." One tried to step closer than she should and Rhea needed nothing but a look to make her retreat. She was not a lady of smiles. She was a lady of short orders. A house learns to obey that so it can avoid long explanations.
They wiped me with warm cloth, warm enough for their standards, and wrapped me in rough fabric that itched enough to remind me life began without negotiating comfort. The cradle they set me in was solid wood, old, the edges worn, carved with leaves and lines that probably meant something to someone once. It smelled of oil and ash. Beside it, a small brazier did its best to pretend it could beat the cold. It could not. Cold lives in Runestone and pays rent in advance.
The body was small, fragile, ridiculous in its dependence. The mind was not. A grown man was looking out from behind newborn eyes. The trick would be teaching the body that the brain was still in charge, on the inside for now. I wanted the obvious thing. Stay alive long enough for the rest of the world to notice I had arrived.
I spent the first minutes, or hours, doing what I have always done well. Observe and catalog. Voices hit the ear like rain on tile, but each drop had a tiny difference in tone that, added up, told stories. The older maid called Rhea "my lady" with sincere reverence. The younger one said it with fear. Maester Edric, I knew him by the smell of herbs and the way he looked at people like cases, repeated that the bleeding was under control and that my lady needed rest. Rhea thanked him with a curt nod, the kind that accepts an order and rewrites it at the same time.
I did not cry. Not because I was a mute prodigy, but because I saw no use for it and I wanted to measure how people reacted to my quiet. Social science applied to an absurd situation. The result interested me. Silence drew more attention than a scream would have. People stared and whispered. Respect and superstition walk together when a baby refuses to howl at birth.
I allowed myself a moment to remember the old world. Hospital lights too white for someone on the way out. A vest too heavy for someone on the way in. People I loved in my own way, women I understood better through skin than through words, promises I did not make because I saw no point in owing time a debt. Life had been an honest collection of imperfect choices. Now I was somewhere that turns imperfections into formal accusations. Westeros does not forgive misunderstandings. It gives them names, sigils, and heirs.
The door groaned long and tired, and a draft brought in the smell of the hall. Wet stone, torch smoke, leather. The head nurse, Melyne, came in to take the watch, I assumed. A middle-aged woman with strong hands and a face that only learns to laugh after the work is done. The way she picked me up was not pity. It was practice. My body fit the curve of her arm with the precision of someone who has held dozens of newborns and seen them all survive the process.
"Quiet little thing," she said, almost without voice, as if afraid of scaring away something good that had finally happened in that house.
Rhea watched her with a softness she would not give anyone else. There was an old alliance there, the kind you cannot buy with coin or smiles, only with years side by side. For a moment I thought Melyne would say my name. She did not. I stayed a pronoun. "He." Enough for now. A name is a social tool. I wanted to decode the system first.
The room slowly emptied. The maester left to write things no one would read with care. The servants cleared cloths and bowls. The brazier spat a spark and, beaten, accepted it would stay a metaphor for warmth until morning. Rhea leaned back on the bed, glanced at the ceiling for a few seconds, then looked back at me. She did something books like to dress up and I prefer to tell simply. She reached out and touched my chest with two fingertips, light, as if confirming the heart was where it has always been.
"Strong," she murmured.
It was not praise. It was measurement. In the right mouth, measurement is a rare kind of affection.
I studied the room while I pretended to sleep. Tapestries of the hunt. Deer, boars, lean hounds with watchful eyes. The art was practical more than pretty, but it told the story of a house that prides itself on filling its own table. Knife marks on the edge of a chest, proof that someone once decided the lid would do as a cutting board. Nearly hidden in the corner, a low bench worn at the edges, where a child surely learned to tie boots. Old houses store memory in the details lords forget to see.
I had time. No big moves before twelve. That was the rule I gave myself and I did not plan to break it. Influence does not require age. It requires attention. Practical ideas from my world could become quiet habits here, and habits move armies without trumpets.
I thought of boiled water. Of clean cloth hung far from smoke. Of checking drafts before lighting extra torches. Of pulling the cradle away from the outer wall when the wind came from the north. Small things no one applauds, but that cut infant mortality like a good blade cuts bad mail.
The body started to give in to fatigue. The mind wanted more, but biology beats pride. I still heard the whisper of wool and leather as Melyne set me back down. The cradle rocked just enough to tell my nervous system the world was still here.
Before sleep I did something I had not done in the hospital, in the corridor, or during the fall. I felt grateful. Not to anyone in particular. No new religion acquired at birth. Grateful for continuity. Life had not ended. It had changed maps. I have always been good with maps.
...
I woke hours later, or a day, or two. Newborn time is a thing invented by people with clocks. The world was almost the same. Almost matters. The brazier had been fed. The door was barred from the inside. A tray held a jar that smelled of herbs and honest effort. Rhea, still pale but more present in her body, wore a different face. The face of a woman who had weighed the cost and decided to walk through it anyway.
I saw the exact moment she tried to smile. Not at me. At herself. As if saying "I did not die" and filing that on the top shelf where things exist without being said.
When she lifted me again I felt the natural adjustment of her body, the way her hand supported my head without needing to think. I did not think in watercolor about mother and child. I thought in terms of a duo, the first alliance anyone learns. You breathe, I watch. You sleep, I listen. You grow, I teach. The strength of that is not in blood, no matter what Westeros insists on. It is in the silent agreement between two bodies that decide to outlast a winter together.
The voices in the corridor changed tempo. Someone mentioned Lord Yohn. Another spoke about messengers and the Gates of the Moon. The larger world knocked with names I knew from maps and lineages. It was early for outside eyes, which suited me. The longer I stayed in the shadow of Runestone's walls, the more solid my footing would be when I stepped into the winds of court.
I did not hear my name. That hammered more than I wanted to admit. Pronouns blur the future. "He" fits any story. A name pins down the outline and gives the portrait a headline. I would get mine, just not yet. Honestly, better this way. While I had no name, I could be anything silence would allow.
Melyne carried me to the hearth for a few minutes and real warmth reminded my skin what it feels like to say "alive" with conviction. In the old world, heat came with the smell of electricity and modern habits. Here it happens in the friction of old things. Wood, iron, wool, breath. The body learns the language of fire quickly when there are no switches.
The door creaked again. A man entered. Not Daemon. He lacked the theater of a man whose name arrives a second before he does. He was a Royce. Years of the Vale in the set of his shoulders. He looked at me with the wary respect reserved for inherited knives, useful but fully able to cut the owner if used the wrong way. He spoke to Rhea in a tone lower than rank demanded. Another clue, loyalty that does not need volume.
I caught fragments. Rook's Rest in one sentence, Gulltown in another. The map inside me lit up like a constellation, points connected by routes the sea allows only when it pleases. It made me want to laugh again, not at a joke but at the luxury of it. Laughing is a privilege when the air is not heavy.
I went back to the cradle. The ceiling greeted me with the same gray gravity. Torches whispered in a language the walls understood. Between those sounds, the castle breathed. Old places do that. They shift their stones for the arrival of someone who will leave them a little more tired.
I thought about women. Not desire in a newborn body. My mind has a sense of humor, not insanity. I thought about the simple fact that the body is a language when words fail. I have always read people better through touch than through speeches. I have always chosen loyalties by what hands and eyes tell me when mouths forget the script. That would not change. It might only get more dangerous. Westeros loves to turn desire into accusation. I would need to dance that with the precision of a blade.
The room quieted. The wind eased. Somewhere outside a dog barked twice and decided it was not worth insisting. Rhea dozed off sitting up, head tilted to the side, her hand still reaching toward the cradle. Melyne covered her shoulders with sheepskin without asking. The world, for a rare moment, fit inside a single unhurried breath.
I did not pray. I did not promise. I did not ask. I aligned what I knew with what I had and gave myself one small goal, the first step of any honest restart. Observe without being observed. The rest would come the way it always had, slowly to those watching, quickly to those deciding.
I closed my eyes.
In my world I faced men armed to the teeth. Here I would face dragons, kings, and lords. The difference between them is smaller than the songs claim.
The game began the moment I took my second breath.
The first was biology.
The second was mine.