The first three years of my life were, by any honest measure, deeply boring.
I ate. I slept. I cried when something hurt and made noise when I wanted something and gradually, over the course of months that felt like geological epochs, I got better at both. My body figured itself out before my mind registered, then sitting, then standing against the wall of my crib while my legs shook with the effort and I gripped the wood so hard my knuckles went white. Walking came at around the normal time. Talking came faster than that, which the maids noticed but didn't remark on, at least not to me.
The room I lived in was small. Not cruel-small, not dungeon-small, just the ordinary smallness of a chamber that was assigned rather than chosen. Two windows. A hearth. A crib that became a bed. Tapestries on the wall that I stared at for so long I memorised every thread of them a hunting scene on the left, a map of something on the right that I couldn't read yet but traced with my eyes regardless, learning the shapes before I knew what shapes meant.
My world, for three years, was that room and the three maids who rotated through it.
Mira. Betha. Lorra.
I knew their schedules before I knew their names. Mira came mornings she had a quick step, and she always smelled faintly of the soap they used on the linens. Betha came afternoons, slower, with a soft voice she used the way some people used furniture, to fill up empty space. Lorra came evenings and said almost nothing at all, which I respected.
They were kind to me. I want to be clear about that. They fed me properly, kept me warm, answered when I made noise at night. Not one of them was cruel. But kindness is not the same thing as warmth, and warmth is not the same thing as love, and by the time I was old enough to understand the distinction I had already learned to stop expecting the third thing from anyone in that room.
My father never came.
Not once. Not on my first name day, not my second and not my third. I want to say that surprised me but by the time I was old enough to be surprised by it I had already absorbed it as a fact of the world, the way you absorb the fact that stones are hard or fire is hot. He was a prince. I was an inconvenience he had been made to acknowledge. The acknowledging was done. The rest, apparently, was optional.
The queen came on my name days.
Queen Alysanne. I recognised her before I had the language for it, the white hair, the steadiness of her hands, the particular way she looked at me like she was calculating something. She never stayed long. She brought small things sometimes, a carved wooden horse one year, a book of pictures the next that I couldn't read yet but stared at for weeks. She asked the maids questions about my health and my development in a voice that made clear she expected honest answers. Then she left.
I wasn't complaining. She was the only one who came at all.
The maids were my news service, which tells you something about the quality of my intelligence.
I couldn't leave the room for the first years. Not a formal restriction exactly nobody sat outside my door with a sword, but I was a very small child in a castle I didn't know, and the one time I crawled past the threshold into the corridor at around fourteen months I was immediately retrieved, scolded mildly, and deposited back inside. The message was clear enough. I was housed at the Red Keep in the same way you'd house a piece of inconvenient furniture present, technically provided for, not really part of anything.
So, I listened.
The maids talked to each other the way people talk when they've stopped noticing they're being listened to. Not carelessly, they were castle servants and they understood discretion, but in the way of people who'd decided, reasonably, that a toddler couldn't follow adult conversation.
They underestimated me, which was their mistake and my advantage.
This was how I learned that a boy named Viserys had been born in 77 AC, about a year after me. I gathered he was a prince because the maids spoke his name with a certain careful deference they didn't use for anyone else's children. A legitimate prince, then. Trueborn. I filed the distinction away without much feeling about it. Prince Baelon son, technically my cousin. He wasn't my cousin, bastards didn't get cousins, the word didn't apply. He was just a name in the air, attached to a person I'd never meet.
I thought about that a lot in those early years. The vocabulary of blood relation that apparently didn't include me. I had a father who was a prince and a grandfather who was a king and I was still just Aerion Waters, which was the name you gave someone when the actual name wasn't being offered.
I wasn't angry about it. That surprised me, a little, I'd expected to feel something sharper. But anger takes energy and I was a child in a small room and I had already decided, in whatever passed for my decision-making at age two or three, that I wasn't going to spend what I had on things I couldn't change.
I should say something about what I remembered. What I actually knew about myself before this life.
Not much. That's the honest answer.
I had been someone. A person with a name I'd lost, in a world that had cement and electric light and deadlines that followed you home from the office. I had been a civil engineer, I was fairly sure, the kind who worked with structures and materials and the stubborn physical reality of things that had to hold weight and not fall down. I had been an orphan. I'd had a girlfriend whose face I could almost remember, a few friends I'd drifted apart from and back toward the way people do when work gets heavy. I had been tired, mostly. Tired in the specific way of someone who is behind on something permanent.
I hadn't read fantasy novels. Hadn't watched much of anything beyond what you caught on a screen while eating dinner alone. I had no map for this world, no cheat sheet, no secret knowledge of what was coming.
My third name day.
The queen came as she always did. She brought a small bronze mirror this time, plain and practical, the kind a servant might use. I understood the message she wasn't spoiling me, she was giving me something useful. I looked into it for the first time and saw what I actually looked like.
I had known about the hair. The maids mentioned it often, usually in the tone people use for things that make them slightly uneasy. Silver-gold, like someone had taken moonlight and spun it into something that grew. It was strange. I knew it was strange because nothing about the maids' hair looked anything like it, they were various browns and blacks and one gingery red, the full ordinary range. Mine sat wrong in that range like a wrong note in a song.
The eyes were purple. Not dramatically purple, not glowing or anything ridiculous, just unambiguously purple, the colour of something old and expensive. I looked at my own reflection for a long time after the queen left, trying to work out what it meant, and the conclusion I came to was: Targaryen, a name I have heard the maids mention quite often. Whatever that family was, whatever it signified in this world, I was one. Or half of one. The blood was in my face and I couldn't hide it if I tried.
The same day the queen left, the system activated.
[System activated]
[Status][Quest]
[Name: Aerion Waters]
[Str:3]
[Agi: 1]
[End:2]
[Men: 10]
[Talent(s)]
[Exceptional mind]
[Exceptional body]
[Medium fire resistance]
[Blade genius(dormant)]
[Skill(s)]
[Quest(s)]
[Main Quest: Create a noble house of your own: Rewards: ???]
[Side Quest: ???]
I stared at it for a long time.
The reward is question marks. That was what got me. Not the quest, fine, extremely ambitious for a three-year-old with no land and no name worth anything, but fine, the reward. Whatever presence had handed me this system, it had looked at my situation and for the reward column put down question marks. As if to say "we'll work it out". As if that was motivating.
The fire resistance I'd half-noticed without understanding it. Betha sometimes held me near the hearth to check if my food had cooled and I'd never flinched the way she seemed to expect. I'd assumed that was just how I was. Apparently, it was something else.
The blade talent being dormant was the frustrating one. Dormant meant nothing until someone put a sword in my hand, which meant I couldn't use yet.
The mind talent I'd already suspected. The way words came fast, the way I remembered exact conversations from months back without meaning to. I'd thought I was just paying attention. Maybe paying attention came easier than it should.
The world outside my room kept moving without asking my permission.
Prince Daemon was born in 81 AC, I was five by then, and the news reached me through Mira who'd heard it from someone in the corridor who'd heard it from someone else. Another prince. Another name attached to another person I'd never meet. I registered it, added it to the list, moved on.
I want to say the years between three and seven were eventful. They weren't. I walked the room. I watched out the windows I could see a courtyard from one of them, and sometimes knights trained there, and I watched them for hours, wacthing their footwork and the way they held their practice swords and the difference between how the good ones moved and how the bad ones moved. I had no name for what I was watching yet. I just watched.
I went outside once, at age five, when one of the maids took ill and the woman who substituted didn't know the routine and I slipped out while she was distracted and made it halfway down the corridor before someone retrieved me. It was enough to establish that the Red Keep was much larger than my room, which I had known intellectually but not physically. The ceilings were high. The stone smelled like old fires and damp.
The news came on the morning of my seventh name day, while I was sitting at the window watching the same courtyard knights I'd been watching for two years.
Mira delivered it the way she delivered most things, no particular ceremony. The king had made arrangements. A Maester Alester would come to instruct me in history, language and geography while A Ser Gareth Waters would oversee to my physical training.
The first people who would actually teach me something, now that was something interesting.
I had been in this room for seven years. I had eaten food and worn clothes and stared at their tapestries and listened to the servants talk and learned everything I could from the fraction of the world that leaked through into my small room. I had a mind that retained everything, a body that apparently had talents for things it hadn't been given yet, and a quest with no reward specified that asked me to do something I couldn't begin to attempt from where I currently stood.
"When?" I asked Mira.
"A fortnight," she said, already moving to straighten the bedclothes.
A fortnight. Fourteen days.
I turned back to the window. The knight in the courtyard was drilling footwork, advance, retreat, pivot, repeat. He was decent, not exceptional. I had watched him enough to know the left side was slower than the right and he telegraphed his cuts with his shoulder before his arm moved.
83 AC