GAME OF THRONES: RISE OF THE DRAGON WOLF
BOOK ONE — PART 3: BETWEEN DEATH AND DESTINY
CHAPTER 2: THE ENCOUNTER AND THE CHOICE
He could choose peace because it was right.
Or he could choose it because going back frightened him.
Those were not the same, and he had spent thirty-six years failing to tell them apart.
Damien turned, and discovered that turning was possible now, which had not been true a moment ago.
There was a figure in the void.
He could not hold its shape.
Every time he looked directly at it his attention slid a little, the way your eye slides off a word in a language you don’t read.
Roughly a person: an outline, a suggestion of shoulders, something that might have been a face.
It gave off light that lit nothing at all — the darkness around it stayed exactly as dark, which bothered Damien more than anything about its appearance.
The eyes were the part he could see clearly, and he wished he couldn’t.
They had depth in them the way a well has depth.
Not distance.
Extent.
And there was the size problem.
The figure was standing about ten feet away and was person-sized, and was at the same time unmistakably larger than the place it was standing in, and both of those things were true, and Damien’s mind kept trying to resolve it and failing.
He had been shot at, blown up, and buried under a wall.
He found he was frightened in a way none of that had managed.
The figure raised one hand in a small friendly wave.
“Before you ask,” it said, “no, this is not Hell. The décor is admittedly not helping.”
Damien said nothing.
He was not being rude.
He genuinely had nothing.
He simply stood — insofar as he was standing — and looked at it, with the flat unreadable attention he had once turned on interrogation subjects, contractors, and second lieutenants with ideas.
The being waited.
Its hand stayed up.
Nothing happened.
After a while it lowered the hand.
“That usually works better,” it said.
And something in Damien loosened very slightly.
Because that had been a joke.
A bad one, badly delivered, by something that could apparently hold a void together — and it had landed wrong, and the thing had noticed it landed wrong, and had been mildly embarrassed about it.
Whatever this was, it was trying to make him less afraid, and it was not very good at it.
“What are you,” Damien said.
“That’s the third question everyone asks and the least useful. Ask the other two first, you’ll feel better.”
“Where am I.”
“Between.” It made a gesture that took in the entire nothing.
“That’s not evasion, it’s just the accurate word. This isn’t a place, it’s an interval. You’re in the gap.”
“And the reflection.” Damien heard his own voice go careful.
“Was that real.”
The being’s manner changed.
Whatever was standing there stopped performing.
“Yes,” it said.
“All of it. Not a comfort, not a construction, not something assembled to make you feel better on your way out. That was your life as it actually occurred, shown without the parts your fear and your age and your memory were editing out. Everything you saw happened.”
Damien took that in.
Then he started asking the questions that mattered, in the order they mattered, the way he had run every debrief of his adult life.
“The Rahmanis.”
“All four. The wall held. Samir is still working; the clinic sees about ninety people a day now and there’s a second building going up behind it. The girl is going to be a doctor, which will surprise nobody except her.”
Something in Damien’s chest that did not exist unclenched.
“My class.”
“Every one of them came home. Two of them nearly didn’t. Ochoa held that building for four minutes with nine men and a doctor’s family behind him and did not lose a single person, and he will tell you for the rest of his life that it was your building and your training, and he’s not entirely wrong, and he’s not entirely right either.”
“My body.”
“Recovered. Enough of you. Your brother did not have to bury a box and wonder.”
Damien nodded slowly.
“Marcus,” he said.
“The boy. Is that real, or was that — a kindness.”
“His name is Elías.” The being said it plainly.
“He’s eight. He is real, he exists right now, and he can find your mother’s grave without being shown the way.”
Damien did not say anything for a while.
“And I’m beside her.”
“You’re beside her.”
“He never asked. I never told him where she was. It wasn’t in the will.”
“No,” the being agreed.
“He found a fifteen-year-old receipt from a monument company in a shoebox in your closet, and drove four hours to a cemetery he had never heard of, and stood there for some time, and then made three phone calls.” A pause.
“He was extremely rude to a county clerk. It worked.”
Damien laughed.
It came out cracked.
Then he asked the question he had been circling since he understood what he was talking to.
“Is she here?”
“Not here. Not in the gap.” The being’s voice gentled in a way that sounded practiced and not insincere.
“She isn’t waiting in a dark room, Damien. She hasn’t been standing around for twenty-eight years. She went where the finished go, and she is entirely all right, and ‘entirely all right’ is the closest I can get in a language built for a species with elbows.”
“Can I see her?”
“Not yet.” A beat.
“That is not a no.”
“Are you God,” Damien said.
“Ah.” The being brightened, the way a man does when asked about his hobby.
“That question requires several definitions, multiple dimensions, and a diagram that has frightened more people than it helped.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“It’s a very complete answer. It’s just not a satisfying one, which mortals persist in treating as the same thing.” It seemed to consider.
“There are things above me. There are a great many things below me. I have latitude. I do not have authority over everything, and where I do have authority I mostly decline to use it, which is a longer conversation and one you won’t have time for.”
“So you’re — what. Omnipotent within limits, appearing at random, offering things.”
“Broadly.”
“Random omnipotent being.”
The figure went still.
“No,” it said.
“It fits.”
“It’s a label. It reduces several thousand years of extremely delicate work to an acronym, and I want it on the record that I object.” It paused.
“Also that particular acronym has been applied to me before, by people who read too much, and I have never cared for it.”
“ROB.”
“I object strenuously.”
Damien waited.
“…It is not entirely inaccurate,” the being admitted.
“The reflection. Does everyone get that?”
“Most get something. A review of some kind — it varies enormously, and most of them are short, because most lives close cleanly. The consequences finish about when the person does.” The ROB tilted its head.
“Yours didn’t.”
“Meaning what.”
“Meaning your effects kept moving after you stopped. A man you taught corrected a sergeant gently four years after you died, and that sergeant stayed in, and there are eleven people who are better off because he did, and not one of them will ever hear your name. A building did not fall down. Children in a line at a gate got old enough to have their own.” The ROB spread its hands.
“You didn’t have a life so much as a watershed. Things drained off it in directions you never saw. It seemed only decent to let you see them before we talked about what comes next.”
“So this is a reward.”
“No,” said the ROB, with some emphasis.
“That’s the thing I most want you to not think, so I’m going to be blunt about it. You are not being declared a good man. Nobody up here is applauding.”
“All right.”
“You withdrew from people who were reaching for you, and some of them were hurt by it, and a few of them never recovered the habit of reaching. You used silence as a weapon exactly twice and both times you knew you were doing it. You refused help from people whose whole intention was to give it, which is its own kind of unkindness. You hid inside duty for fifteen years and called it service. You were sure of your own conclusions more often than you’d earned. And you took on decisions that belonged to other people because it was faster, and you took choices away from them doing it.” The ROB let that stand.
“Your grandfather warned you about most of that in the last week of his life. You’d have been better off listening in the first.”
Damien absorbed it.
He did not flinch and he did not argue, because none of it was wrong and he had had a long time to think about the same list.
“Then what is this.”
“It’s balance,” said the ROB.
“Which is arithmetic, not sainthood.
The direction of a life counts for something, and yours went a particular way.
You were raised inside cruelty and did not reproduce it — do you understand how rare that is?
I watch that ledger.
Most of the time the son becomes the father.
You protected without controlling; that’s rarer still.
You were extremely good at violence and never once fell in love with it.
You created more than you unmade.
You taught, and you taught in a way that left people bigger instead of smaller.
You wrote things down so someone else wouldn’t have to learn them twice.
You accepted responsibility for failures that were yours and never once assigned one to a subordinate.” A pause.
“And you gave your life away after you’d finally decided you wanted it, which is a different act entirely from giving away a life you didn’t value. I want you to understand that I am not confusing those.”
“Neither am I.”
“No. You’re not.” The ROB sounded, oddly, pleased.
“That’s rather the point. The good you made kept multiplying after you left, and that surplus buys you something. It doesn’t buy you a crown, it doesn’t buy you a verdict, and it does not buy you the right to be smug.” It shrugged.
“It buys you a choice. Most people don’t get one.”
“The first is rest.”
The darkness did not change, but something did.
Damien could not have said what.
A shift in pressure.
A door somewhere, standing open.
“You go on,” the ROB said.
“There’s a word for it in every language you know and all of them are wrong. It isn’t sleep and it isn’t a garden and it isn’t a reward hall with your name on a chair. It’s completion. The thing that’s been running since you were born gets to stop running.”
“And what’s in it.”
“Rest. Actual rest — not a night’s sleep, not leave, not the four weeks between rotations. The end of watching. No more standing to. Nothing that needs you. Nothing that can be lost, because nothing there is held provisionally.” The ROB’s voice was quiet now.
“No pain of any kind. No duty. Nothing you have to carry for anyone.”
“And the people.”
“That’s the part I can’t render honestly. Reunion is roughly the right shape, and it’s also not correct, and both of those statements will annoy you.” It hesitated.
“The nearest true thing I can say: nothing you loved is lost there. Nothing.”
Damien stood in the dark and wanted it so badly it frightened him.
He had not known that.
He had not known there was a tiredness under the tiredness — that beneath thirty-six years of muscle and discipline and getting up again there was something that had never once been set down.
Watching every room he entered for the exits.
Listening for engines.
Assessing every stranger’s hands.
Being the man who could be relied upon, in every house he ever lived in, at nine and sixteen and nineteen and thirty-six.
Losing people and continuing.
It could stop.
That was the offer.
All of it could just stop, and his mother was somewhere in it, and Gerald and Diana were somewhere in it, and nobody anywhere would think worse of him.
“You’ve earned it,” the ROB said, watching him.
“I want that said out loud, because you won’t say it to yourself. There is no version of this where choosing rest is cowardice. You are not required to keep going. You did enough. You did, in point of fact, considerably more than enough.”
“And if I go,” Damien said.
“The other thing. Reincarnation. Would that put them out of reach? Permanently?”
“No.” The ROB said it immediately and firmly.
“That’s a mortal notion and it’s wrong. Souls aren’t filed in separate drawers. What binds you to your mother isn’t location and it can’t be deleted by a birth certificate. Going on may delay things. It does not sever them.” It paused.
“You’ll carry her either way. You have been carrying her for twenty-eight years already and you never once put her down.”
“And the second choice.”
“Another life. In another world.” The ROB straightened slightly, and its tone changed, and Damien recognized the change — it was a man reading terms and conditions he refused to soften.
“You’d retain your memories. You would not retain the body, the rank, the reputation, the friends, or the century. You would be a child again. Actually a child — small, weak, dependent, unable to do a great deal about anything for years, in a world where that is dangerous.”
“Understood.”
“You will be hurt. You will be cold, hungry, and frightened. You will be lied to by people you have decided to trust. You’ll make mistakes that cost other people, not just you. You will lose people you love — that’s not a risk, Damien, that’s a certainty, that’s simply what it is to be alive somewhere with other mortals in it.” The ROB’s voice was level.
“There is no guarantee of happiness. I’m not able to give one and I wouldn’t if I were. It’s entirely possible to be given a second life and waste it, and people do, constantly.”
“And the other side of it.”
“You could have a family. You could build a home and keep it. You could love somebody and be loved back, badly and imperfectly and for years. You could learn things nobody there knows and teach them to people who need them. You could see how far a thing you build goes when you’re actually present to build it.” The light shifted.
“And you would go into it knowing exactly what it costs to hold people at arm’s length, which is knowledge almost nobody gets to take into a life with them.”
“So it’s not reward and punishment.”
“No. It’s peace or risk. Finished or unfinished.” The ROB shrugged.
“I have no preference. I want that understood too. I am not steering you.”
Damien thought about it for what might have been a minute or a year.
And what he did, because it was the only method he had ever trusted, was interrogate himself the way he’d have interrogated a subordinate’s plan.
The afterlife was not a retreat.
He was clear on that.
Rest was not surrender; a man who had done what he’d done had every right to set it down, and the ROB was correct that nobody would judge him.
But that was the plan.
He had learned, in a long and expensive career, that the plan is almost never the problem.
The problem is the reason.
And Damien knew his own reasons the way a mechanic knows an engine that has been giving trouble for thirty years.
He knew exactly what he did when things got emotionally uncertain.
Every time — every single time — he went quiet, and went to work, and found something useful to do with his hands, and put a door between himself and whatever was going to require him to be exposed.
He had done it at nine, in a hallway, with a nurse’s hand on his shoulder.
At eleven, when he stopped asking about the letters.
In four foster homes, pulling back a week before anyone could leave him.
At nineteen, refusing to say a plan out loud.
At thirty, standing in a kitchen with an unopened envelope.
He had spent fifteen years inside a uniform partly because a uniform decides everything for you, and Gerald had seen it, and had told him so, and Damien had said yes, sir and gone on doing it for six more years.
Or he could choose it because going back out there — being small again, needing people again, loving things that could be taken again — frightened him more than anything he had ever faced.
Both would look identical from the outside.
Both would feel like peace.
And Damien Morales had made a great many mistakes in thirty-six years, but he had never once in his life allowed himself to lie about which of two motives was actually driving him.
“I know what I do,” he said aloud.
“When it gets hard, I get quiet and I find work. I’ve done it my whole life. If I take the rest — I don’t know that I could ever be certain I wasn’t just doing it again, one last time, and calling it earned.”
“That is an unusually honest thing to say to a stranger.”
“You’re not a stranger. You watched all of it.”
“That’s fair.”
Damien was quiet a moment.
“There’s another thing.” He said it slowly.
“For most of my life I thought living was something you got through. I didn’t understand what she wanted from me. She wrote it down when I was eight years old and it sat in a warehouse for eighteen years and I read it at thirty and it took me apart, and then I had about six years of doing it right.” He looked at the being.
“Six years. I was just getting the hang of it.”
“You were.”
“I don’t want to stop at six.”
He said the rest of it plainly.
There was no speech in him and he did not go looking for one.
He did not make any promises about a world he had not seen.
He did not claim to deserve anything.
“My mother wanted me to live,” Damien said.
“It took me too long to understand what she meant. I don’t want to stop now.”
The ROB was silent for a moment.
“That,” it said, “was considerably better than the speech I prepared.”
Damien looked at it.
“You prepared a speech.”
“…Several.”
“Several.”
“The first had too many metaphors. There was a river in it, and then a second river, and by the end I wasn’t sure the rivers were the same river.” The ROB sounded genuinely aggrieved.
“The second was rousing, and I read it back and discovered it sounded like a threat, which rather undercuts the offer of free will.”
“And the third?”
The being hesitated.
“The third was about a door,” it said.
“About knowing where the door is, and choosing to go through it. I thought it was rather good.” It made a small dismissive gesture.
“Then I reviewed the material and found that your mother had already used that image, to a five-year-old, on a bathroom floor, better than I did. So I threw it out.”
Damien discovered he could still, somehow, feel something press behind his eyes.
“She’d have liked you,” he said.
“She would have found me exhausting,” said the ROB.
“I’ve met the type.”
“I have to confirm it.” Its manner sobered.
“Not a formality — I’ve had people change their minds here, and it’s better they do it now. You understand that going back means grief. Again. All of it, the whole apparatus. People will die and you will be there when they do.”
“Anything worth having can be lost,” Damien said.
“That’s not a flaw in the offer. That’s just the price of the thing being real. I knew that at the clinic.”
“You understand it may not be easier than the first one. It may in fact be a great deal harder.”
“Ease isn’t what I’m choosing.”
“Then what are you choosing?”
Damien thought about it.
“The chance to live properly from the beginning,” he said.
“Ah.” The ROB’s voice was almost kind.
“No. I’m sorry — that one I have to correct, and I’d rather correct it here than let you find out the hard way at forty. You will not live properly. Nobody does. You will get a great deal of it wrong; you’ll be arrogant when you should listen, you’ll keep things to yourself that people needed to hear, and you will hurt someone you love without meaning to and possibly without noticing. Being given the knowledge doesn’t exempt you from the pattern. It only means you might catch it sooner.”
Damien absorbed that.
Then he almost smiled.
“Then the chance to keep trying,” he said.
“That,” said the ROB, “I can work with.”
The darkness began to change.
It came up around him rather than in front of him — not a screen this time but a place, forming everywhere at once, and Damien turned in it like a man in the middle of weather.
Snow.
Snow falling through black pines, mile after mile of them, older than anything he had ever stood next to.
Grey stone walls with hot springs steaming behind them.
A river valley.
A road going north.
Then a wall of ice across the entire world.
He looked up at it, and up, and kept looking up, and the top of it was in cloud.
A shape moved through the trees — enormous, low, grey, on four legs, with a wolf’s shoulders and a size no wolf had any business having.
It went past without noticing him and vanished.
Something crossed above the pines and pulled a shadow across the snow the length of a city block.
It banked, and he saw the wings.
Knights on a green field.
A siege line at dawn with the ladders going up.
A red comet hanging over a burning town.
And at the very edge of it, half-lost in a blizzard, figures walking.
He could not make them out well.
Something about the way they moved was wrong at a level below thought, and the cold he felt looking at them was not physical, because he had no body to be cold with.
Damien stared.
Every guarded thing in him came down at once.
“Is that Westeros?”
“It is.”
He laughed.
It was not the flat exhale that had passed for amusement in the War Wolf for fifteen years.
It came all the way up out of him, open and startled and delighted — the laugh of the boy on a kitchen floor who had asked his mother forty questions about wolves’ feet; who had read every history the library had; who had loved maps and puzzles and games where you built a civilization from four villagers; who had wanted, all his life, to know how things actually worked.
Nobody who had known Damien Morales before he was thirty would have recognized the sound.
The ROB, watching, allowed itself a moment of quiet professional satisfaction.
It had been trying to land something all evening.
Damien turned slowly, taking it in.
Snow coming down over grey battlements.
A wall of ice with no end.
A shadow the size of a street crossing a field.
A direwolf moving through falling snow, quiet as weather, going somewhere with a purpose of its own.
The delight in him started to settle into something else.
Because he had spent his whole life on the other side of exactly this.
Every world he’d ever walked into as a stranger had turned out to be full of people who lived there, with histories he did not know and reasons he had to earn, and the men who got that wrong got other people killed.
He looked back at the being.
“Who am I becoming?”
The awkwardness went out of the ROB entirely.
The fumbling, the bad jokes, the apologetic hands — all of it dropped away, and what stood in front of him was, for the first time, exactly as large as the room could not contain.
“That,” it said, “requires a longer explanation.”