I always believed nature didn't pick sides.
It didn't care who you were, what you wanted, or how desperately you fought against it. A storm didn't spare someone because they were kind. Fire didn't hesitate because its victim had a family waiting for them. The earth didn't ask permission before it split open beneath a city.
Nature simply moved.
And, in the end, it took back everything that belonged to it.
There was something steady about that. Something honest. Nature could be cruel, but it wasn't personal. It didn't hate you. It didn't need to justify itself. It was inevitable, like a tide that never forgot the shore no matter how many walls people built to keep it away.
I could respect that.
Even if one day I ended up crushed beneath it.
Gods, on the other hand, were different.
Gods had favorites. They carried grudges. They woke up in bad moods and decided someone's bloodline needed to suffer for the next seven generations. They chose who received miracles and who became an example. They nudged one tiny piece of the world out of place, watched a life collapse around it, then called the result destiny.
And judging by how my day went, I must have pissed off more than one of them.
It started normally enough.
I was walking to the store with my hands buried in my pockets, not really thinking about anything important. The day wasn't particularly bright or gloomy. There were cars on the road, people moving along the sidewalks, and the usual distant noise of a city too busy to notice any one person.
Then the ground shifted beneath my feet.
There wasn't a warning.
No deep rumble slowly building beneath the street. No trembling windows or birds suddenly scattering into the sky like they somehow knew what was coming. The earth simply snapped, sharp and violent, as though something beneath it had grown impatient.
The pavement split open.
One side of the street buckled upward, concrete folding over itself until the road became a jagged ramp of fractured asphalt and exposed earth. Cars swerved. Someone screamed. Brakes shrieked against the pavement.
Then I saw the truck.
A sixteen-wheeler came barreling down the road, too close and moving too fast for the driver to stop. Its tires smoked as the brakes locked, but momentum carried it forward. It struck the raised section of road and launched into the air like it had been fired from a cannon.
For one strange second, everything slowed down.
I heard the engine roaring above the screams.
I heard the metal frame groaning beneath its own weight.
I saw the underside of the truck passing over me, every pipe, axle, and spinning tire suddenly clear enough to count.
Then its shadow swallowed me whole.
Instinct moved before fear had the chance.
I dropped, threw myself sideways, and rolled hard across the pavement. My shoulder struck first, followed by my hip, pain flashing through my side as loose gravel tore into my palms. The wind dragged behind the truck as it passed, ripping at my clothes with enough force to pull me another few inches across the ground.
For an instant, one of the rear tires seemed close enough to touch.
Then the truck was past me.
It slammed into the building behind me with a deafening crash.
The front of the vehicle folded inward. Glass erupted from the lower windows in glittering waves. Brick, metal, and pieces of the building's outer wall scattered across the street. The force of the impact shook the pavement beneath my hands and sent another pulse of pain through my shoulder.
Then, almost as quickly as it had begun, everything became still.
Not silent.
People were shouting. Car alarms screamed from every direction. Somewhere nearby, someone was crying. Steam hissed from beneath the truck's crushed hood.
But around me, there was a strange pocket of stillness.
I pushed myself onto one knee and stared at the wreckage.
The truck had passed close enough that I could still feel the heat of its engine against my skin. If I had reacted half a second later, there wouldn't have been enough of me left to identify.
I looked down at my shaking hands.
For some reason, surviving didn't feel like luck.
Luck was missing a bus that later got into an accident. Luck was finding money on the sidewalk or choosing the right answer on a test you hadn't studied for.
This felt different.
It felt like a warning.
The problem was that I had no idea what it was warning me about.
I should have gone home.
Any sensible person would have. I should have locked every door, closed every curtain, and stayed away from windows until the day was over. Maybe I should have called someone. Maybe I should have sat in an empty room and tried not to touch anything sharp, heavy, electrical, flammable, or capable of falling.
Instead, I brushed the dirt from my clothes and kept walking.
I told myself it was a freak accident.
A once-in-a-lifetime convergence of bad timing and damaged infrastructure.
The kind of story people told for years afterward because no one believed them the first time.
By evening, I had almost convinced myself.
Almost.
The forest wasn't far from where I lived, and it had always been the one place quiet enough for me to think. Cities never really went silent. Even late at night there was always something—a passing engine, humming electricity, footsteps in another room, pipes shifting inside the walls.
The forest had a different kind of noise.
Leaves moving against one another. Branches creaking beneath their own weight. Insects hidden under bark and soil. Wind passing between trees. Sounds that didn't demand attention because they weren't made for anyone.
I went there whenever my thoughts became too crowded.
Sometimes I walked.
Sometimes I found a patch of ground that looked comfortable enough and went to sleep.
I had a habit of passing out wherever I felt like, and for some reason, animals never came near me when I did. No insects crawled across my skin. No curious birds landed nearby. Even larger animals seemed to avoid whatever part of the forest I chose.
People used to joke that the way I slept was creepy.
Too still.
Too quiet.
They said I looked less like someone resting and more like something pretending to be alive because it had watched people do it before.
I never argued with them.
It worked for me.
Or at least, it always had.
I found a place beneath a cluster of old trees where the roots rose from the earth like crooked fingers. The ground was dry enough, and the canopy overhead blocked most of the fading light. I lay back, folded one arm beneath my head, and watched the branches sway until my thoughts finally loosened their grip.
Sleep came quickly.
When I woke, the first thing I noticed was the cold.
Not the slow cold of evening settling over the forest. This struck all at once, sharp enough to seize my muscles before I was fully conscious. It crawled over my skin and sank into my bones, carrying the wrongness of air from somewhere else.
Then came the smell.
Chlorine.
Heavy, chemical, and completely out of place.
It cut through the scent of wet bark, leaves, and soil so strongly that for one disoriented moment I wondered whether I had woken beside a swimming pool instead of beneath a tree.
My eyes opened.
My body had already gone tense before my mind caught up.
The forest was darker than it should have been. Clouds had gathered overhead, thick and churning, swallowing what little remained of the evening sky. The branches above me strained in a wind I couldn't feel at ground level.
I shifted my weight.
Lightning split the sky.
There was no flash in the distance. No warning thunder.
Three bolts came down at once.
They struck the exact patch of ground where I had been lying less than a second earlier.
The earth exploded in white light.
Heat slammed into my side as I threw myself away, and the sound hit hard enough to erase everything else. For several seconds, there was nothing but ringing. My vision blurred. The taste of metal coated my tongue.
I stared at the place where my body had been.
The soil had turned black. Roots burned beneath the surface, glowing through cracks in the earth. Small flames crawled through the dry leaves before sputtering beneath the sudden cold.
Three separate lightning bolts.
One location.
No storm I had ever heard of behaved like that.
My heart hammered against my ribs as though it were trying to escape first.
"There has to be an explanation," I muttered.
I couldn't hear my own voice properly through the ringing.
I tried to stand.
Something screamed through the sky.
The sound began high above the clouds, distant and thin, then deepened into a violent mechanical howl. It drowned out the ringing in my ears and shook the branches overhead.
I looked up.
A burning mass tore through the clouds.
Flames streamed around it in a bright orange shell. Pieces of metal broke away as it fell, scattering across the sky like sparks from a forge. It was descending too quickly for my mind to make sense of its size.
Then I realized it was coming toward me.
I moved without deciding where.
The object struck the ground only a few feet away.
The impact hit like a bomb.
The forest floor heaved beneath me. A wall of compressed air lifted me from my feet and threw me backward. Dirt, stones, splintered wood, and torn roots filled the air. Something struck my ribs before I hit the ground, and the breath vanished from my lungs.
I skidded across leaves and soil until my back slammed against the raised base of a tree.
For a moment, I couldn't breathe.
My chest tried to rise, but nothing came in. I opened my mouth and dragged at the air, panic building as my lungs refused to work. Finally, they spasmed, and a broken gasp tore its way through my throat.
The world spun.
Ash and dirt drifted through the air. Leaves burned as they fell. The trees nearest the impact site leaned away from the crater, their bark stripped and their lower branches shattered.
Through the smoke, I saw the object.
Metal panels.
A scorched communications array.
Collapsed solar wings buried in the earth.
It wasn't a fragment.
It wasn't debris.
An entire satellite sat smoking in the crater, half-buried in the forest floor as though it had been aimed there.
At that point, the excuses stopped working.
An earthquake had reshaped the road beneath a moving truck.
Three bolts of lightning had struck the exact place where I slept.
A satellite had fallen from orbit and landed close enough to kill me with the shockwave.
The odds weren't merely ridiculous.
They were insulting.
This wasn't random.
Randomness scattered things. It created patterns only after people looked backward and forced meaning onto them.
This felt deliberate.
It felt like something was placing obstacles in front of me one after another, curious to see which one would finally work.
I forced myself onto my hands and knees.
Every breath hurt. My ribs throbbed where the debris had struck me, and blood ran from a cut near my temple. My palms were raw from the street earlier, and now dirt had ground into the wounds.
I should have been terrified.
I was, somewhere beneath everything else.
But anger had begun pushing through it.
"What the hell do you want from me?"
The forest gave no answer.
Only the crackle of fire and the groan of damaged trees.
I pushed myself upright, one hand pressed against my ribs.
That was when I heard it.
A sharp crack in the distance.
Faint.
Clean.
Unmistakable.
A gunshot.
The bullet reached me before the sound fully did.
Something punched through my body with enough force to twist me around. There was no immediate pain, only pressure and a violent interruption, as if part of me had suddenly ceased to belong where it was.
Then the heat came.
It tore through my chest in a burning line. My legs gave out before I understood I had been hit, and the forest tilted around me.
I fell.
The ground rushed upward.
Above me, smoke drifted across the dark sky, briefly illuminated by the burning satellite. I tried to breathe, but my body answered with a wet, shallow sound.
There should have been some final revelation.
Some last thought about the unfairness of it all.
Maybe regret. Anger. A name.
Instead, there was only confusion.
After surviving all of that, it had been a bullet.
The sky tilted once more.
Then everything faded before I could decide whether to laugh.
—
The void didn't feel cold.
It didn't feel warm either.
It didn't feel like anything.
There was no ground beneath me and no air against skin I no longer possessed. No sense of direction. No weight. No horizon. Time existed only as an idea, and even that became difficult to hold onto once there was nothing around me to measure it against.
The void was simply there.
Endless.
Quiet.
Not peaceful, exactly. Peace implied relief from something, and there was nothing present enough to be relieved from.
If someone could have seen it from the outside, they probably would have called it empty.
It wasn't.
Small lights drifted through the darkness.
Some were faint, barely more than pinpricks. Others burned brightly enough to stain the surrounding void in pale colors. They floated without any obvious destination, moving past one another like stars that had forgotten where they belonged.
Every so often, two lights collided.
For an instant, they would flare brighter, their edges blending together.
Then both disappeared.
At the center of everything was something larger.
A massive black orb hung in the void, so enormous that distance lost meaning around it. Its surface pulsed slowly, drawing in the surrounding darkness with each movement as though it were breathing.
It never held one shape for long.
Sometimes it appeared perfectly round. At other times, its surface stretched into uneven ridges, shallow cavities, or shapes that almost resembled limbs before folding back into themselves.
Beneath the black surface, a faint magenta glow moved like blood beneath translucent skin.
Watching it gave me the uncomfortable impression that it was watching me in return.
I stopped trying to count after a while.
At first, I thought keeping track of time would help.
I counted seconds.
Then minutes.
Then hours.
Eventually, I began grouping them into days, then years, though I had no way of knowing whether any of those measurements were accurate. Maybe I counted too quickly. Maybe I stopped for centuries without realizing it.
There was no sunrise.
No hunger.
No exhaustion.
No heartbeat to mark one moment from the next.
Eventually, the numbers became meaningless.
All I truly had was awareness and whatever I chose to do with it.
So I trained.
There was nothing to survive and nothing to fight, but doing nothing felt worse than any pain I remembered. I ran through techniques from memory. Footwork without feet. Breathing exercises without lungs. Strikes performed by intention alone.
At first, it felt ridiculous.
Then repetition gave the movements structure.
I imagined weight, balance, resistance, and impact. I reconstructed every action as precisely as I could, correcting flaws I remembered making when I had possessed a body.
There were no muscles to strengthen, but my control sharpened.
There were no lungs to condition, but my focus deepened.
I repeated movements until the memory of them felt cleaner than the original experience.
Somewhere during that endless routine, I finally accepted that I no longer had a body.
There was no heartbeat.
No breath.
No blood.
Nothing physical separated me from the darkness around me.
I was thought.
Presence.
A shape of awareness that continued because it had not yet learned how to stop.
It should have disturbed me more than it did.
What bothered me was how familiar the emptiness felt.
Not comforting.
Recognizable.
Like I had brushed against it before in dreams, or stood beside it without understanding what waited on the other side.
The lights became more noticeable after that.
At first, they had been scenery—something to look at when the black orb became too unsettling. But the longer I remained there, the more I sensed something inside them.
Not voices.
Not exactly.
Lives.
Each light carried a pressure that was distinct from the others. Some felt warm and calm. Others trembled with terror, rage, obsession, or regret. Many were so faint that I could barely distinguish them from the void.
Yet beneath those differences was a connection.
A thin pull between them and me.
It was subtle enough that I could have ignored it forever.
Eventually, curiosity won.
I reached toward the nearest light.
I still had no hands, but the intention was enough.
The light stopped drifting.
Then it moved toward me.
As it drew closer, its glow expanded until it filled everything I could perceive. For one moment, I wondered whether touching it would erase me the same way the colliding lights erased each other.
I didn't let go.
The light entered me.
Everything changed.
Memories flooded through my awareness, sudden and complete.
They weren't mine, but there was no distance between me and them.
I was a boy waking before sunrise because his father believed discipline began before comfort. I felt the sting of a wooden sword against bruised fingers. I knew the frustration of losing the same fight every morning and the stubborn satisfaction of lasting one strike longer than the day before.
Years passed in moments.
Training.
Failure.
Blood.
Victory.
A battlefield churned beneath heavy rain. Friends screamed names that had once meant everything. Steel entered flesh. Bones broke. Orders were followed even after the person giving them had died.
The boy became a man.
The man became a warrior.
He fought because it was all he knew how to do, and he continued long after he had forgotten why he had begun.
At forty years old, he died with a blade through his stomach and mud beneath his knees.
His final thought wasn't of glory.
It was that he was tired.
Then the life ended.
The memories settled inside me.
They did not replace my own, but neither did they disappear. I could feel the shape of his experiences, the muscle memory of his techniques, the lessons carved into him through decades of repetition.
Something new had been added to me.
And with it came somewhere else.
My domain.
I didn't build it.
I didn't imagine it into existence.
It had already been there, hidden beneath the surface of my awareness, waiting for me to notice the door.
A mountain range stretched beneath an endless night sky.
The peaks rose like broken teeth, their slopes buried beneath layers of black ice. Forests filled the valleys, but the things growing there were not trees. They were jagged pillars of frozen darkness, branching into sharpened limbs that scraped against one another whenever the wind moved through them.
A constant blizzard swept across the land.
Snow raced sideways through the valleys, thick enough to erase distant shapes, yet none of it settled on me. The cold was merciless, but it did not hurt. It passed through me as naturally as breath once had.
From the highest mountain, a blood-red waterfall poured over the edge.
It did not freeze.
The liquid fell in a smooth crimson sheet, disappearing into the storm before striking the rocks below. From there, it formed a river that wound through the mountains, cutting across the black ice and staining the frozen land with moving red.
At the summit was a crater.
Inside it stood a single red spider lily.
It swayed beneath an unmoving eclipse, untouched by the blizzard. Its petals gave off a soft crimson glow, casting long shadows across the ice.
Near it burned a small campfire.
There was no wood beneath the flame and no smoke rising from it. The fire remained low and steady, its light weaker than the flower's glow, yet somehow warmer than anything else in that frozen world.
It should have felt unsettling.
A black forest.
A red river.
A flower blooming beneath an eclipse.
Instead, it felt like home.
I returned to the void and began drawing in more lights.
Each one carried a life.
Some were brief. Others contained more years than I knew how to measure. Their memories entered me, unfolded, and settled alongside everything already there.
Every time a light became part of me, another spider lily bloomed somewhere in the domain.
Some appeared along the banks of the red river.
Others pushed through cracks in the black ice or grew beneath the jagged branches of the frozen forest.
Each flower marked a life.
A person who had existed.
Someone who had feared, wanted, suffered, loved, failed, or simply continued until they couldn't anymore.
Most were ordinary.
Workers who spent their lives repeating the same tasks.
Parents who sacrificed more than their children ever understood.
People who lived quietly, died quietly, and left behind little more than memories inside those who survived them.
But ordinary did not mean empty.
Even the smallest lives carried something.
A skill.
A regret.
A habit.
A way of seeing the world.
I absorbed them one after another, and the domain grew.
Then I began encountering lives that did not fit.
A woman who lived in a city suspended above an ocean of clouds.
A soldier who fought machines capable of rebuilding themselves from dust.
A child born beneath two suns.
A scientist who watched her world collapse because the laws holding reality together had begun to fail.
Civilizations existed within those memories that had advanced far beyond anything from my world. Others had fallen so completely that even their names survived only in the minds of the dead.
Some used magic.
Some called it something else.
Their systems contradicted one another, yet all of them had been real somewhere.
Names, concepts, histories, and rules that should never have touched were drifting through the same void.
That was when I understood.
These lights did not come from one world.
They came from everywhere.
Different realities.
Different timelines.
Different possibilities.
Some were worlds that had existed.
Some were worlds that might have existed if a single decision had been made differently.
Others felt stranger than that—possibilities so distant from my own that they should not have shared the same definition of life.
Yet they all came here.
All of them drifted through the same darkness.
All of them passed beneath the silent awareness of the black orb.
Time moved.
Or perhaps I changed enough that movement became unnecessary.
The domain expanded until the mountain range no longer seemed to have an end. The forests thickened. The red river divided into countless branches. Spider lilies bloomed across the ice like a field of small, distant flames.
Through it all, the campfire remained at the summit.
For a long time, I ignored it.
There were always more lights to absorb. More lives to study. More techniques, knowledge, languages, and experiences to sort through.
But the fire had begun drawing my attention.
It wasn't loud.
It didn't speak.
There was only a quiet pull, so soft that I might have mistaken it for my own curiosity if it had not grown stronger each time I returned to the peak.
Eventually, it became impossible to ignore.
I stood before the flame beneath the frozen eclipse.
The first spider lily swayed beside it, its red glow mixing with the dim light of the fire.
I reached down.
The moment my awareness touched the flame, the mountain vanished.
The blizzard stopped.
The endless night folded inward, and the frozen world disappeared beneath me.
Heat replaced cold.
Sand stretched in every direction beneath a pale, empty sky.
Stone statues filled the desert.
There were thousands of them.
No—more than that.
They extended beyond the horizon, figures from different eras frozen in the middle of movement. Warriors stood beside children. Kings beside laborers. Some wore armor. Some wore clothing I recognized, while others were dressed in fabrics and designs belonging to lives I had absorbed from distant worlds.
Many reached toward something they could no longer touch.
Others knelt.
Some fought invisible enemies.
Some simply stood with their faces turned toward the horizon.
None of them moved.
Far beyond the statues, a tree rose from the desert.
It was larger than any mountain in my domain.
Its trunk glowed from within, pale light moving beneath the bark like rivers beneath skin. Its roots spread through the sand in every direction, vanishing beneath the statues, while its branches stretched upward until they disappeared into the sky.
I stared at it.
For the first time since entering the void, I felt something staring back.
One continuity point I smoothed out was the campfire. In the original, it appeared at the peak later without being introduced when the domain was first described, so I established it beside the first spider lily before it became important.
I stood there for a long time, taking it in, until something new appeared.
A woman.
She didn't arrive with any kind of warning. One moment I was alone, and the next she was there, like she had always been part of the space. Her presence carried a weight to it, something heavy and unearthly, but she wore it casually, like it didn't affect her at all.
She looked at me for a second, then snapped her fingers.
The world shifted again, and suddenly I was sitting in a gothic office, everything around me clean and deliberate in a way that made the previous emptiness feel distant.
More importantly, I had a body again.
I flexed my fingers slowly, watching them move like I had almost forgotten how it felt.
She leaned against the desk, a faint smirk playing on her lips as she watched me adjust.
"Well, that's new," she said, her tone amused. "Didn't think anyone would last that long in there without breaking."
I looked up at her, still processing everything.
"How long?"
She tilted her head slightly, like she was checking something only she could see.
"13,359,538,883 years," she said, almost casually. "Give or take a few seconds."
I stared at her for a moment, letting that settle in, before leaning back slightly.
"…Right."
She laughed under her breath, clearly entertained by the reaction.
"Your death wasn't supposed to happen like that," she continued, waving a hand as if it wasn't worth much thought. "Couple of gods got into an argument, their energy spilled over, and your planet took the hit."
"That figures."
"As compensation, you get another shot," she said, and a blue screen appeared in front of me with seven empty slots spinning slowly. "Pick what you want. Or don't. Doesn't really change much for me."
I didn't hesitate.
The slots spun faster, then slowed, finally stopping one by one. I read through them, feeling a grin slowly form despite everything that had happened.
Grindalwald magic potential + elder wand
2 valyrian steel blades
Genetic system
Random bloodline
Random magic item
2 random magic weapon blueprints
Cold magic
Yeah. I could work with this.
She noticed the look and smiled slightly.
"Good. Makes things more interesting."
Then she added, almost as an afterthought, "You won't have access to most of that right away well the magic won't be much but ill throw in a magic book as well since to be honest trying to create new spells is hard from that universe plus although your a harry potter nerd the books or movies didn't go into that much detail with the advance stuff or most of the spells anyway"
"Where am I going?"
"If im reading this right your going regain your memories 15 years from the start of season 1 of house of the dragon ," she said, already sounding bored with the explanation while reading a book that just appeared . "You'll figure the rest out."
Before I could ask anything else, she snapped her fingers again.
The world went dark.
The first thing I saw when I opened my eyes was grass.
The second thing I saw was more grass.
It stretched in every direction, an endless green sea rolling beneath the wind. Low hills rose and fell in the distance, while mountains stood farther beyond them, their dark shapes softened by haze. There were no roads, no farms, no smoke from distant chimneys. Not a single building interrupted the horizon.
More importantly, there wasn't another person in sight.
I remained flat on my back for several seconds, staring at the open sky while the grass brushed against my face. My body felt stiff from sleeping on the ground, my mouth was dry, and every muscle seemed to carry the dull ache of someone who had been walking far longer than they should have.
I had barely begun to push myself upright when the memories struck.
They didn't return gradually.
There were no scattered images or half-remembered dreams slowly fitting themselves together. An entire lifetime crashed into me at once—names, faces, rooms, arguments, lessons, humiliations, pleasures, resentments, and years of experiences that had belonged to me even when I hadn't understood who I truly was.
For several moments, I couldn't breathe.
I fell back into the grass, one hand pressed against my forehead as my mind struggled to contain two lives without tearing itself apart.
Apparently, I was the third son of Prince Baelon Targaryen, better known as Baelon the Brave, and Princess Alyssa Targaryen.
That should have made me important.
It did not.
My oldest brother was Viserys. My second brother was Daemon. Both possessed qualities the family understood. Viserys carried himself with the pleasant dignity expected of a future lord, while Daemon had been born with enough fire in him to make every knight, maid, and septon in the Red Keep nervous.
Then there was me.
I had inherited almost all of our mother's softer features.
Even as a boy, I had been delicate enough to be mistaken for a girl. My face lacked the harder angles that gradually appeared in my brothers, my lashes were too long, my skin too smooth, and my silver-gold hair framed features that looked more suited to some idealized Valyrian maiden than the third son of Baelon the Brave.
That alone might only have made me unusual.
The greater problem was that our mother died a month after giving birth to me.
No one ever proved that my birth caused her death. The maesters offered theories, changed their explanations, and buried the truth beneath careful words about weakness, fever, and complications. There had never been certainty.
My father hadn't needed certainty.
He had loved Alyssa fiercely. Once she was gone, grief demanded somewhere to settle, and I had been the last thing she left behind.
Looking at me meant remembering her.
Remembering her meant remembering that she was dead.
So Baelon did what grieving men often did when they couldn't strike the thing that had hurt them.
He blamed something smaller.
He never declared that I had killed her. He was too honorable for that, or perhaps too ashamed. He simply looked through me whenever we shared a room. He asked about Viserys's lessons and Daemon's swordsmanship, but rarely mine. When I was ill, servants cared for me. When I caused trouble, someone else handled it.
Eventually, I was left almost entirely in the care of my grandmother, Queen Alysanne.
She never blamed me.
If anything, she seemed determined to love me enough to compensate for everyone who wouldn't.
My grandfather was another matter.
King Jaehaerys, the so-called Wise King, saw little value in me.
Even without the memories of my former life, I had still been myself. My nature hadn't changed simply because I lacked the explanation for it. I possessed enough sloth and gluttony to qualify as a walking biblical warning.
I avoided lessons whenever possible.
I slept through sermons, council lectures, histories, and more than one meal. I could spend entire afternoons draped over a chair, a windowsill, or any other surface that happened to support my weight. If someone attempted to move me before I was ready, I became dead weight out of spite.
The servants hated that.
The kitchen staff feared me for an entirely different reason.
I could eat enough for three grown men.
Entire trays disappeared when I was hungry. Roasted meats, bread, cheese, fruit, pies, stews—it made little difference. The kitchens began preparing additional portions whenever they heard I was awake, and more than one cook accused me of hiding food for Daemon.
I wasn't.
I ate all of it.
That should have turned me into a round little beast barely capable of fitting through the doors of the Red Keep.
Instead, I never seemed to gain weight.
As I grew, my body remained slim and deceptively soft, with every change somehow settling in a way that only made my appearance more striking. The women of court complained that it was unfair. Some laughed while saying it. Others did not.
My grandmother insisted that I was the most beautiful child in the world.
I assumed grandmothers were required to say things like that.
Life in the Red Keep was comfortable, but it was never warm.
There was always food, silk, servants, tutors, and rooms larger than the homes of entire families. Yet affection was something rarer, offered carefully and usually with conditions attached.
Only three people regularly sought me out simply because they wanted my company.
My grandmother was one of them.
Daemon was another.
The third was Aemma Arryn, our cousin and Viserys's betrothed.
Aemma was half Targaryen through her mother, Princess Daella, though some members of the family still treated her Arryn blood as if it made her slightly less than the rest of us. Targaryens had a habit of looking down on anyone who couldn't trace every branch of their family tree back to Valyria.
No one managed it for long with Aemma.
She was too gentle for cruelty to sit comfortably around her.
Even Daemon, who could find a reason to mock almost anyone, usually softened when she entered the room. She spoke to servants as though they were people, remembered names others forgot, and had an irritating talent for noticing when someone wanted company but was too proud to ask for it.
Viserys never shared her patience with me.
He viewed me much as our father did—as a waste of a name, a title, and perfectly good Valyrian blood. He never said it so plainly, but he didn't need to. Viserys had always been easy to read when he believed himself subtle.
He considered my laziness embarrassing.
My appetite disgusted him.
The fact that I showed little interest in court, duty, or earning our father's approval seemed almost offensive to him. He believed privilege created obligation.
I believed privilege created opportunities to sleep somewhere expensive.
We rarely agreed on anything.
Daemon, on the other hand, became nearly impossible to separate from me.
People assumed it was because we shared the same interests.
In truth, I mostly pretended to share his.
I had been told more than once that I was an excellent actor, even when I wasn't trying. Mimicking enthusiasm was easy. Daemon would become obsessed with some new weapon, horse, insult, or plan for causing trouble, and I would nod at the correct moments until he decided I understood him better than anyone else.
Sometimes, I genuinely did.
Daemon hated restraint for its own sake. He despised rules that existed only because dead men had once obeyed them. He wanted to test everything—to see how far he could push someone, how much he could take, and what would happen if he stepped over a line everyone else was afraid to approach.
I understood that part of him.
It was the amount of energy he devoted to it that I found exhausting.
When I was eleven, Daemon decided I needed to see the Street of Silk.
It went badly.
I was too young, far too noticeable, and pretty enough that several people mistook me for something other than a prince. One man attempted to lead me away while Daemon's attention was elsewhere. Another seemed prepared to help him.
Daemon noticed before they made it far.
By the end of the night, one man had lost several teeth, the other had a broken hand, and I had learned that Daemon's laughter became much quieter when he was truly angry.
Nothing happened to me, but it was enough to ensure I didn't return for years.
When I was older and capable of making the decision myself, I went back.
Not entirely for the reasons Daemon expected.
I found a strange comfort among the people there. They lived outside the respectable lies of court. Lords who condemned them during the day slipped through their doors at night. Knights preached honor, then paid to surrender control. Septons denounced sin while knowing exactly which entrances could be used without being seen.
The workers of the Street of Silk understood desire without pretending it made anyone noble.
Many of them did what they needed to survive. Others did what they pleased because the world had offered them few places where pleasure belonged to them.
I respected that honesty.
In some ways, they felt closer to demons than the monsters described in sermons—not evil, but unwilling to apologize for wanting things.
They taught me more than pleasure.
They taught me how people behaved when stripped of rank and ceremony. How shame could be used. How loneliness made someone careless. How powerful men became painfully honest when they believed no one important was listening.
One woman in particular possessed an impressive understanding of control, restraint, and pain. She taught me that many of the same techniques used to overwhelm the senses could become tools of interrogation if applied without mercy.
It was an unusual education for a prince.
It was also far more useful than most of what the maesters taught me.
Swordsmanship was one of the few interests Daemon and I genuinely shared, though even there, we differed.
Daemon took naturally to the Westerosi style of combat. He liked firm footing, powerful cuts, armored advances, and the certainty of meeting force with greater force. He could fight with elegance when he chose, but there was always aggression beneath it.
I struggled with the same lessons.
The knights tried to plant my feet, strengthen my guard, and train me to trade blows as though I were built to stand inside a suit of heavy plate.
I wasn't.
My body was too light, my reach unremarkable, and I had no desire to discover whether I could absorb a warhammer strike simply because a knight considered retreat dishonorable.
For a time, everyone assumed I lacked talent.
Then a Braavosi swordmaster visited King's Landing.
I only saw him fight once.
He used a narrow blade and moved as though the ground had agreed to carry him wherever he wished. He never met strength directly. He stepped around it, redirected it, slipped beneath it, and punished every movement that carried his opponent too far.
His feet rarely stopped.
His blade seemed almost lazy until it touched someone.
I convinced him to teach me in secret.
Only a little at first.
Footwork. Balance. Timing. How to watch a man's shoulders instead of his weapon. How to move before a strike had fully begun. How to make speed matter more than strength and how to remain close enough to threaten while never standing where the attack was meant to land.
For the first time, swordsmanship felt natural.
The Westerosi knights had been trying to make me into a wall.
The Braavosi taught me how to become water.
Unfortunately, none of that explained why I was currently lying in the middle of the fucking Dothraki Sea.
That part had begun with my marriage.
I had never hated the Starks.
Quite the opposite.
Of all the great houses of Westeros, they were probably my favorite. They were harsh, stubborn people, but their harshness at least came from somewhere understandable. They valued duty, loyalty, family, and survival more than pageantry.
Their Old Gods interested me even more.
The weirwoods, blood sacrifices, sacred groves, and belief that the gods watched through carved faces reminded me of older stories from my first life. There were similarities to the Norse traditions—enough that I occasionally wondered whether the Old Gods were some distorted reflection of the Aesir or simply another faith built from the same ancient fears.
So when my family arranged for me to marry Lord Rickon Stark's niece, my objection had nothing to do with her blood or her house.
Her name was Lyarra Stark.
She was beautiful in the Northern way—dark-haired, grey-eyed, and composed, with none of the polished fragility expected from ladies raised in the southern courts. She didn't chatter to fill silence. She didn't pretend to find every prince charming. When she looked at someone, it felt as though she was deciding how much of what they said deserved to be believed.
Under different circumstances, I might have liked her.
That was the problem.
There were no different circumstances.
Neither of us had chosen the marriage.
The king saw an alliance. My father saw a use for the son he had otherwise ignored. Viserys saw an overdue acceptance of responsibility. The Starks saw royal blood tied to the North.
No one seemed particularly concerned with what Lyarra or I saw.
I wasn't ready for marriage.
I wasn't ready to have my future decided in a room where I wasn't present. I wasn't ready to smile through vows, accept congratulations from strangers, and pretend being traded between families was some sacred expression of love.
My objections were treated as another symptom of laziness.
People assumed I was trying to avoid responsibility because responsibility required effort.
They weren't entirely wrong.
But that didn't make them right.
Once the vows were spoken, tradition demanded proof that the marriage had been completed.
I was escorted to the chamber as though I might escape if no one watched closely.
They were correct.
Even the stern maid who had helped my grandmother raise me took their side. She cared for me in her own way, but she believed tradition was a wall holding the realm together. To her, refusing the bedding was not fear or anger. It was selfishness.
She stood outside the chamber and made it clear that she would know if I attempted to leave.
Lyarra looked as trapped as I felt.
That was the worst part.
I couldn't even direct my anger at her.
By morning, the court had what it wanted: a marriage everyone could declare valid, whether either of us had been willing or not.
I left that same night.
The Red Keep had more hidden passages than most of the royal family understood. Daemon and I had discovered several of them as children, usually while trying to avoid tutors or reach places we had been forbidden to enter.
I used one to slip beyond the watched corridors.
I took a cloak, food, a small water skin, and enough gold dragons to make questions inconvenient. By dawn, I had purchased a place aboard a ship supposedly bound for Braavos.
My plan was not particularly sophisticated.
Reach Braavos.
Disappear.
Decide what came next after several days of uninterrupted sleep.
The gods, apparently offended by the simplicity of it, sent a storm.
It came upon us with enough force to turn the sea black beneath the clouds. Waves struck the ship from every direction. The mast cracked before midnight. Men shouted orders no one could hear, and cargo tore loose below deck.
I remembered being thrown against a wall.
I remembered freezing water.
After that, the memories became broken.
The ship had been driven far from its intended course. Whether it sank completely or shattered against the coast, I didn't know. I woke among wreckage on an unfamiliar shore with bruised ribs, torn clothing, and no sign of anyone else.
From there, I walked.
I followed the coast until I found a road, then followed the road until it stopped resembling one. I paid for rides when I encountered merchants and hid when I saw armed men whose banners I didn't recognize. Somewhere along the way, my supplies ran low, my horse was stolen, and the last clear route vanished behind me.
Days became weeks.
The landscape widened.
Trees grew scarce.
Settlements disappeared.
Eventually, there was nothing left but grass, hills, distant mountains, and the occasional track left by horses.
The memories belonging to this life identified the place before I wanted to accept it.
The Dothraki Sea.
Not Braavos.
Not a friendly port.
Not even a part of Essos known for allowing richly dressed strangers with Valyrian features to wander around unbothered.
I sat up slowly, letting the wind move through my silver-gold hair while I tried to sort through the final pieces of memory.
The body's experiences were mine.
The resentment was mine.
The affection for Alysanne, Daemon, and Aemma was mine.
Even without the memories of the void and the life before it, I had still been present inside this body. The old me had not replaced some separate boy.
I had simply awakened to the rest of myself.
That realization should have been comforting.
Instead, it left me sitting alone in an endless field with no horse, almost no food, and absolutely no idea which direction led toward civilization.
I looked across the green horizon.
Then down at the grass.
Then back toward the mountains.
"So," I muttered, my voice rough from thirst. "Third son of Baelon the Brave, missing prince of House Targaryen, unwilling husband, former corpse, and apparently the only man stupid enough to run away from King's Landing and somehow miss Braavos entirely."
The wind pressed the grass flat in rippling waves.
Nothing answered.
I sighed and dropped back onto the ground.
"At least the grass is comfortable."
I closed my eyes for half a second before forcing them open again.
Sleeping had already caused enough problems.
Now that my memories had returned, I needed food, water, shelter, and some way to determine where in the Dothraki Sea I had ended up.
Unfortunately, knowing what I needed and possessing the motivation to stand up were two completely different things.
I used Lyarra Stark for the Northern bride and clarified that the later visits to the Street of Silk occurred only once he was old enough to choose for himself.
Here it is as one continuous, polished scene with the corrected design for Rellana's Twin Blades and a Genesis Point System panel that fits the established rules.
I turned my head, mostly because getting up still sounded like far more effort than it was worth, and finally noticed the objects arranged in the grass beside me.
My rewards.
They had been placed in a neat row less than an arm's length away, completely untouched by dirt or morning dew. Even the grass beneath them had been pressed flat into a clean rectangle, as though some invisible servant had carefully prepared the display while I slept.
For several seconds, I simply stared.
Then my eyes landed on the pair of weapons resting closest to me.
I sat upright so quickly that every sore muscle in my body immediately complained.
Rellana's Twin Blades.
Despite the name, they weren't a single double-ended weapon. They were a matched pair of light greatswords, forged to be used together. They rested partially crossed in the grass, their hilts angled in opposite directions so both could be drawn in one smooth movement.
The first was the longer and more elegant of the two. Its blade was narrow for a greatsword, tapering gradually into a sharp point rather than widening into the heavy cutting edge favored by most Westerosi knights. The guard curved outward in delicate, winglike branches, framing a deep-blue gemstone set beneath the base of the blade. Its grip was long enough to accommodate both hands, but the weapon's construction clearly favored speed and precision over brute force.
The second sword was slightly shorter and darker in design. Its guard twisted around the hilt in sharper, more aggressive curves, resembling flames frozen in metal. Where the first weapon carried the cold elegance of moonlight and sorcery, the second looked like restrained violence, something built to burn the moment it was released.
Both blades possessed the familiar rippling pattern of Valyrian steel.
Dark lines flowed through the silver-grey metal like smoke trapped beneath ice, folding over one another in patterns that seemed to shift whenever the light struck them. The markings were especially dark near the edges, where the steel appeared almost black.
My eyes widened.
"So these are the Valyrian steel reward."
I reached for the longer sword first.
The moment my fingers closed around the hilt, I felt how unnaturally balanced it was. It wasn't weightless, but every bit of its weight rested exactly where it should. When I lifted it, the blade naturally aligned with my wrist, responding to the smallest turn of my hand as if it had been forged according to my precise measurements.
Even weakened from days of wandering, I could hold it without strain.
I gave it a slow, experimental sweep through the air.
The blade made almost no sound.
There was no awkward drag, no feeling of the weapon pulling me along behind it. It stopped the instant I wanted it to, the point remaining perfectly steady.
The second sword felt just as natural when I lifted it with my other hand.
Together, they were heavier, but their balance compensated for it. Each weapon seemed designed to support the movement of the other, one threatening while the second guarded, one cutting while the other prepared the next strike.
They weren't made for the rigid stance and armored exchanges of ordinary Westerosi swordsmanship.
They were meant to move.
That suited me perfectly.
Owning even one Valyrian steel sword was enough to transform a family's standing. Great houses treasured their ancestral blades more than castles, passing them from one generation to the next as proof of lineage and legitimacy. Wars had been fought over less.
I now possessed two.
Two unique Valyrian steel light greatswords based on weapons from a world that shouldn't have existed here.
Viserys would probably suffer some form of spiritual injury if he saw them.
Daemon would try to steal them before I finished explaining where they came from.
I tightened my grip around the hilts.
Perhaps I wouldn't show him immediately.
Not because I doubted my ability to retrieve them.
I simply didn't feel like chasing him halfway across King's Landing.
I carefully placed the twin blades back in the grass. The urge to test them properly was strong, but swinging unfamiliar weapons in the middle of nowhere while dehydrated and half-starved seemed like the sort of decision that ended with me cutting off something important.
Beside the swords rested two scrolls, each bound with a thin black cord.
The material wasn't ordinary parchment.
It was thicker and smoother, almost like treated hide, but it lacked the imperfections of anything made by hand. When I pressed my thumb against the surface, faint markings shifted beneath it like ink suspended in water. Every time I tried to focus on one symbol, it dissolved and reappeared somewhere else.
I pulled the cord from the first scroll and unfurled it across my lap.
The scattered markings immediately snapped into place.
An enormous sword appeared at the top of the parchment.
Its blade was broad, jagged, and grotesque, with shapes resembling grasping limbs or half-formed bodies clinging to its surface.
The Blasphemous Blade.
I recognized it immediately.
Below the image stretched an absurd collection of instructions.
There were forging diagrams, material requirements, ritual formations, anatomical sketches, energy pathways, and layered enchantment sequences. Some sections explained how to forge the physical weapon. Others detailed how to prepare a core capable of retaining stolen vitality.
The blade wasn't simply meant to kill.
It was designed to draw life from death and return a portion of that vitality to its wielder.
Creating it required far more than metal and heat.
According to the scroll, the weapon needed a vessel capable of accepting biological and spiritual remnants without collapsing. It required seals that could distinguish between the wielder and the lives consumed by the blade, channels capable of transferring vitality without allowing foreign identities to follow, and runes powerful enough to prevent the collected energy from mutating the weapon into something uncontrollable.
There were warnings written along nearly every section.
Some described physical failure.
Others described spiritual contamination.
One entire portion appeared dedicated to preventing the sword from developing a will of its own.
I understood perhaps one word in every twenty.
The remainder might as well have been written by a god who considered readable instructions a sign of weakness.
I had knowledge of corruption and destructive forces, but that didn't make me a master blacksmith, ritualist, enchanter, or runesmith. Even the simplest seal on the page contained several interlocking layers, each one dependent on the others being placed with perfect precision.
Attempting this with my current capabilities wouldn't create the Blasphemous Blade.
It would create an explosion.
Possibly a sentient one.
I slowly rolled the scroll closed and set it aside.
The second scroll was no more merciful.
The image at the top displayed the Dark Moon Greatsword.
Unlike the warped brutality of the Blasphemous Blade, this weapon possessed a quiet, almost sacred elegance. Its long blade appeared partially translucent, as if it had been carved from frozen moonlight rather than forged from steel.
The instructions beneath it were just as complex.
The weapon required a stable connection to lunar energy, carefully constructed channels for sorcery, and a core capable of producing extreme cold without becoming brittle. The runes needed to draw power from moonlight, condense it inside the blade, and release it through projected waves without allowing the weapon to shatter beneath the pressure.
There were diagrams showing how the physical metal needed to be altered at every stage of forging.
Temperature mattered.
The position of the moon mattered.
The materials used in the furnace mattered.
Even the emotional and magical state of the person performing the ritual apparently mattered.
One mistake could weaken the blade, disrupt its connection to lunar power, or cause the stored cold to erupt through the hilt and freeze the wielder's arm solid.
I rolled that scroll closed as well.
"At least you gave me the instructions."
Death could easily have handed me two impossible designs without any explanation and called the struggle a valuable lesson.
The fact that I couldn't use either scroll yet wasn't necessarily a problem.
I had time.
Assuming nothing killed me first.
I continued examining the rewards.
That was when my heart practically left my chest.
A dragon egg rested in the grass.
I forgot about the swords.
I forgot about the scrolls.
I even forgot that I had spent the last several minutes resisting the effort required to stand.
I lunged forward and scooped the egg into both hands, pulling it against my chest before my mind had time to consider whether grabbing an unknown dragon egg was wise.
It was beautiful.
The shell was pitch-black, darker than polished obsidian, with deep-purple highlights running between the overlapping scales. The purple wasn't painted onto its surface. It seemed to exist beneath the shell, appearing only when I shifted the egg beneath the sunlight.
Each scale fit perfectly against the next. They were smooth along the lower edges but sharpened near their tips, giving the entire egg the appearance of being covered in tiny plates of armor.
A dragon.
My dragon.
Not one selected for me by the keepers of the Dragonpit.
Not one given because my father or grandfather believed it suited my position.
This egg had been given directly to me.
Then I noticed the cold.
The shell was freezing.
Not cool from resting against the grass.
Cold.
It felt like holding a piece of ice pulled from the deepest part of winter. The chill sank into my palms and spread through my fingers until they began to ache. Thin lines of frost formed where my skin touched the shell, branching across the black scales before fading.
My excitement faltered.
Dragon eggs were supposed to be warm.
Every account I remembered described living eggs as carrying heat within them, sometimes enough to make their shells uncomfortable to hold. Cold eggs were usually considered dormant.
Sometimes dead.
I turned it slowly, examining every scale for cracks, discoloration, or any sign of damage.
There was nothing.
The shell was flawless.
I held it close to my ear.
Silence.
"No," I murmured. "Don't do this to me."
I changed the angle and listened again, as though the dragon inside might have been avoiding me the first time.
Still nothing.
The cold continued seeping into my skin.
Concern tightened in my chest.
Death wouldn't give me a useless egg as a reward.
At least, I hoped not.
A being connected to death might possess a very different definition of useless.
Perhaps the cold was natural for whatever kind of dragon waited inside. The black shell and purple glow certainly didn't resemble any ordinary Targaryen dragon egg I remembered.
Maybe it was dormant rather than dead.
Maybe it needed a different method of hatching.
Heat might even harm it.
That thought stopped me from attempting anything reckless.
I lowered it gently into the grass.
It took more effort than expected to let go.
"Please don't be dead."
The egg offered no reassurance.
My gaze moved toward the final physical rewards.
A wand rested beside a large black book.
The wand was unmistakable.
The Elder Wand.
It looked simple at first glance, especially compared with the ornate weapons surrounding it. Its dark wooden shaft was long and uneven, marked by a series of rounded knots running from the handle toward the tip. It appeared old without appearing fragile, as though age had become part of its strength rather than a weakness.
I picked it up cautiously.
A faint pressure moved through my fingers.
It wasn't heat or cold. It felt more like the wand had noticed me and was waiting to see what I intended to do. There was no immediate surge of power and no dramatic proclamation of loyalty.
Considering the wand's history, that was probably for the best.
I set it across my lap and reached for the book.
It was far larger than any ordinary spellbook. The cover was made from some smooth black material that looked like leather but felt slightly colder and denser beneath my fingertips. A silver symbol had been pressed into its center: a triangle surrounding a circle, divided by a single vertical line.
The Deathly Hallows.
Of course Death had given me this.
I opened the cover.
The first page was blank.
A moment later, black ink spread across it in thin lines, forming words in a language I could understand.
The book wasn't a collection of every spell from that world.
That would have been far too generous.
Instead, it acted as a structured magical archive and training guide. It provided access to beginner and amateur knowledge from several recognized branches of magic.
Charms.
Transfiguration.
Potions.
The Dark Arts.
Defence Against the Dark Arts.
There were additional categories as well—Herbology, magical theory, enchantment principles, basic runic studies, and introductory knowledge of magical creatures—but large portions of those sections remained sealed.
When I attempted to turn toward more advanced material, the page refused to move.
Letters appeared across its surface.
Advanced Instruction Restricted
Required Condition: Increase Overall Magical Mastery
I stared at the message.
Then I smiled.
For once, I was actually pleased by a restriction.
Having immediate access to every spell, potion, ritual, curse, and branch of magical knowledge would have been tempting, but it also would have encouraged me to reach for things I had no business using.
The book required me to understand the fundamentals before advancing.
That meant I couldn't learn one beginner charm and immediately decide I was qualified to reshape souls or create immortality.
It was an irritatingly reasonable safeguard.
The beginner section contained basic wand movements, pronunciation guides, intent exercises, magical control methods, and explanations of how spells interacted with a caster's will.
The amateur section introduced more difficult charms, defensive spells, controlled transfiguration, intermediate potion preparation, counter-curses, and several darker spells marked with warnings.
I recognized some of them from the books and films of my previous life.
Others had never been shown in detail.
Each spell included far more than an incantation. There were notes on intent, magical flow, common failures, casting posture, wand movement, environmental risks, and ways to determine whether the spell had formed correctly before releasing it.
That was useful.
Knowing the word for a spell and understanding how to cast it were clearly not the same thing.
I spent several minutes comparing the written instructions to what I remembered. Some of my memories had been accurate. Others had been simplified so heavily that attempting them without the book would have been dangerous.
Eventually, I closed it.
The moment the cover shut, a small black-purple hole opened beneath the book.
There was no warning.
The book dropped through it and vanished.
I stared at the empty patch of grass.
My hands remained positioned around something that was no longer there.
"What?"
The hole closed without a sound.
For several seconds, I stared blankly at the ground.
Then I thought about the book.
A second black-purple opening appeared in the air beside me.
The spellbook fell out and landed across my legs.
I blinked.
I thought about putting it away again.
The hole returned and swallowed it.
I called it back.
The book reappeared.
There was no visible menu, chant, or complicated ritual. The space responded directly to my thoughts and appeared to be accessible only for the book.
Possibly the wand as well.
I tested that theory.
The Elder Wand disappeared into the same black-purple opening and returned the moment I called for it.
An exclusive storage space.
Probably.
There might have been more complicated rules or some profound metaphysical explanation behind it, but discovering them sounded exhausting.
"It stores the book and wand," I decided. "Good enough."
I dismissed both into the black-purple space and turned my attention toward the last reward.
The system.
There was nothing physical left in the grass, which meant this one was presumably attached to me.
I sat cross-legged and tried the most obvious commands.
"Status."
Nothing happened.
"Statistics."
The wind moved through the grass.
"Skill list."
Still nothing.
"Inventory."
The rewards remained where I had left them.
"Shop."
No response.
That was probably for the best. A magical shop would have created far more questions than answers.
I frowned.
"Character sheet?"
Silence.
"Menu?"
A bird cried somewhere in the distance, which felt unnecessarily mocking considering I still couldn't see it.
My annoyance began to build.
"System panel."
Something opened in front of me.
A translucent black rectangle unfolded in the air, its edges traced by thin lines of deep purple light. The surface resembled polished glass, yet I could see the grass and distant hills through it. Pale lettering appeared one line at a time, accompanied by a sensation similar to knowledge settling directly behind my eyes.
GENESIS POINT SYSTEM
Primary User Recognized
Soul Signature: Confirmed
Genesis Core: Active
Genome Stability: 100%
Biological Condition: Dehydrated, Nutritionally Deficient, Physically Exhausted
Immediate Fatality Risk: Low
Genesis Point Balance: 5
Natural Genesis Generation: 5 Points per 24 Hours
Stored Biological Records: 0
Verified Genome Blueprints: 0
Recorded Species Templates: 0
Active Biological Debt: None
I stared at the panel.
Five points.
Not exactly an overwhelming amount, but considering they appeared naturally every day and didn't expire, it was a beginning.
More text appeared beneath the first section.
PRIMARY FUNCTIONS
Circle of Biological Exchange — Available
Converts organic matter into Genesis Points.
Activation cost: None.
Genetic information preserved: No.
Genetic Scanning Circle — Available
Records biological and supernatural structures within the Genesis Archive.
Activation cost: Variable.
Genesis Archive — Active
Current archive status: Empty.
Scientific Genome Interface — Available
Requires recorded biological information.
Total Biological Map — Unavailable
No scanned subject selected.
Genome Simulation Chamber — Available
Requires a biological record or proposed blueprint.
Blueprint Creation — Available
Current scientific data insufficient for reliable original organism design.
A second section opened beneath it.
ADVANCED MODIFICATION FUNCTIONS
Manual Modification — Available
Requires appropriate biological data, scientific understanding, and sufficient Genesis Points.
Overall Modification — Available
Automated integration cost: Ten times the standard Integration Cost.
Magic-Gene Integration — Conditional
No Magic Gene currently recorded.
Thirteenfold Integration — Conditional
Maximum possible success probability: 90%.
Minimum failure probability: 10%.
Genome Fusion — Available
No compatible source genomes recorded.
Biological Debt — Available
Warning: Equivalent value will be taken from the user or selected subject.
The final section appeared in red.
SYSTEM PRINCIPLES
The Circle of Biological Exchange provides points but records no information.
The Genetic Scanning Circle records information but does not provide points.
Scanning a trait does not remove its reconstruction cost.
Personal magical energy may reduce operational scanning and simulation expenses.
Personal magical energy cannot normally replace the true cost of biological creation or alteration.
Every completed modification is governed by a Final Outcome Roll.
Genesis Points pay for the attempt.
Success is not guaranteed unless the displayed probability is a reliable 100%.
I read the final lines twice.
The system wasn't going to hand me power simply because I asked for it.
It would let me scan life, study it, recreate it, combine it, and change it, but every step required payment, knowledge, preparation, and luck.
The system provided the laboratory.
I would have to become the scientist.
I looked toward the dragon egg again.
The panel shifted slightly as my attention settled on it.
Unregistered Biological Object Detected
Preliminary Classification: Egg
Species: Unknown
Supernatural Density: Undetermined
Complete Genetic Scan Required for Accurate Analysis
Warning: Current Genesis Point Balance May Be Insufficient
I glanced from the message to the motionless black egg.
"Of course."
The panel made no attempt to comfort me.
I reached toward the egg and rested one hand against its frozen shell, careful not to disturb it.
Five Genesis Points.
Two Valyrian steel light greatswords.
Instructions for weapons I couldn't yet create.
A wand whose loyalty I didn't fully trust.
A magical archive that refused to let me become too greedy too quickly.
And one possibly living, possibly dormant, possibly dead dragon egg that the system couldn't identify without charging me more points than I currently possessed.
I had certainly received rewards.
Whether any of them were going to make my life easier remained to be seen.
The black-purple panel hovered patiently in front of me.
I studied the list of functions again before noticing a small line at the very bottom.
Recommended Initial Action: Perform a Genetic Scan of the Primary User
Estimated Cost: 30 Genesis Points
I looked at my balance.
Then at the recommendation.
Then back at my balance.
"You could have led with the part where I couldn't afford anything."
The system remained silent.
Apparently, even supernatural laboratories expected their users to read the instructions.
I was still staring at the system panel, far too deep in my own thoughts to notice the first warning.
Five Genesis Points wasn't enough to scan myself, much less the dragon egg. That meant I either had to wait several days or find organic material to sacrifice through the Circle of Biological Exchange. Considering I was surrounded by an endless sea of grass, acquiring points shouldn't have been impossible.
The real question was how much grass I would need.
Ordinary plant matter was worth approximately one Genesis Point per kilogram, though the exact return would depend on its freshness and biological quality. If I gathered enough, I could theoretically earn the remaining twenty-five points needed to scan myself.
The problem was that gathering, cutting, and carrying twenty-five or more kilograms of grass sounded suspiciously like work.
I was considering whether the system would accept an entire section of earth with the roots still attached when the ground trembled beneath me.
It was faint enough that I initially ignored it.
The Dothraki Sea was an enormous grassland. There could have been any number of reasons for a slight vibration beneath the soil. A distant herd, shifting earth, or some large animal moving somewhere beyond the hills.
Then it happened again.
This time, the tremor lasted longer.
The surface of the system panel rippled as though disturbed by invisible water. The dragon egg shifted slightly in the grass beside me, one of its black scales scraping softly against the ground.
I frowned and lifted my head.
A low sound reached me from somewhere behind.
At first, it blended into the wind—an uneven murmur too distant to identify. Then more sounds joined it. Repeated impacts struck the earth in a rhythm too fast and too numerous to belong to a single animal.
The ground began to pulse beneath me.
My eyes narrowed.
"That doesn't sound good."
The system panel remained open in front of me, its recommendation to scan myself suddenly much less important. I dismissed it with a thought, and the translucent black screen folded inward until the purple edges met and vanished.
Without it blocking my view, I turned toward the source of the noise.
Nothing was visible at first.
Only the endless grass, distant hills, and a low ridge stretching across the horizon.
Then a dark cloud rose behind it.
Dust.
A great deal of dust.
It climbed steadily into the sky, spreading outward in a thick brown veil. The sound grew with it—the pounding of hooves, the creak of leather, the clatter of weapons, and voices carried unevenly by the wind.
Not one rider.
Not ten.
Far more.
I placed one hand against the ground.
The vibrations struck my palm in rapid waves, each one slightly stronger than the last. Whatever was coming wasn't wandering aimlessly across the plain. It was moving quickly, and unless I had somehow developed an incredible talent for misjudging direction, it was coming straight toward me.
I pushed myself upright.
My legs protested immediately. Days of walking, little food, poor sleep, and dehydration had left my body stiff and weak. I swayed once before catching my balance, my hand instinctively moving toward one of Rellana's Twin Blades.
The elegant hilt felt reassuring beneath my fingers.
Not enough to make the situation good.
Only slightly less terrible.
I stepped around the rewards and climbed the nearest rise, keeping low until I reached the top. The grass brushed against my waist, bending beneath the strengthening wind as the approaching thunder rolled across the open land.
From there, I finally saw them.
The first riders crested the distant ridge in a scattered line.
Then another line appeared behind them.
And another.
Within seconds, the entire hill seemed to move.
Hundreds of horses poured over the rise, perhaps more, their hooves tearing into the earth and throwing dust behind them. The riders sat easily in their saddles despite the speed, curved arakhs hanging from belts or raised above their heads. Long braids streamed behind several of them, some decorated with bells that rang faintly beneath the roar of the charge.
There were no banners.
They didn't need them.
The horses, the braids, the painted leather, and the naked blades were enough.
Dothraki.
A whole fucking horde of them.
For the first time since awakening with the memories of my former life, I genuinely cursed my luck.
I had crossed an ocean, survived a shipwreck, wandered half-starved into the middle of the Dothraki Sea, received several priceless rewards I barely understood, and awakened a biological system I couldn't afford to use.
Now, before I could even gather my belongings, a khalasar had decided to ride directly toward me.
I stared at the approaching horde as the ground shook harder beneath my feet.
This was going to suck.