GAME OF THRONES: RISE OF THE DRAGON WOLF
BOOK ONE — PART 3: BETWEEN DEATH AND DESTINY
CHAPTER 3: THE GIFTS AND THE WARNING
Live fully.
— the whole of it, in two words
The ROB let him look for a while.
Damien understood, dimly, that this was a courtesy — that he was being given time to stand in front of a snowfield and a wall of ice and be amazed, before the part that mattered.
He took it.
He had spent thirty-six years being handed the part that mattered without the pause in front of it.
Then the being spoke, and its voice had changed.
“It resembles the world you remember,” it said.
“It is not the world you remember.”
Damien turned.
“Explain that.”
“You’re going to an adjacent version. A branch. Most of what you know is there — Westeros, Essos, the Wall, the great houses with the names you’d expect. Dragons. Direwolves. The things in the snow that you didn’t like the look of. A great many of the people you could name.” A pause.
“And it has run differently. In places, very differently.”
“How differently.”
“History. Bloodlines. Who married whom, and who didn’t, and what came of it. Ages — people you think of as contemporaries who are twenty years apart here. Geography in some places. Magic, considerably. Creatures that never appeared in anything you read. Alliances that never formed and alliances that never broke.” The ROB’s tone stayed flat and careful.
“People who died in the version you know and are alive in this one. People who lived, and are already dead. Events that happen early. Events that happen late. Events that do not happen at all.”
Damien was quiet for a moment.
“Give me examples.”
“No.”
“That’s not an unreasonable request.”
“It’s an entirely reasonable request and I’m refusing it. Those are surprises for you to discover.”
“Surprises.” Damien heard his own voice flatten into the register he’d used on staff officers with confident briefings.
“Let me offer a correction. A surprise is a birthday. What you’re describing is an intelligence gap in an operating environment where I’m going to be five years old and unable to run. Strategically significant unknowns are not surprises.”
The ROB considered this with what looked like genuine respect.
“You may call them classified divergences,” it said.
“That’s worse.”
“It’s more accurate to how you’ll experience them.”
“Then what is my memory actually worth?”
“A great deal — provided you understand what category it belongs in.” The being’s manner sharpened.
“It is not prophecy. It is not a script. It is intelligence, of the kind you spent twenty years handling: collected from a source you cannot verify, describing a situation that has since changed, of unknown completeness. You know exactly what to do with a product like that, because you did it for two decades.”
“Treat it as a starting point. Confirm before acting.”
“Precisely. It’ll tell you where to look. It’ll tell you which dangers are worth preparing for years early. It’ll generate very good questions.” The ROB paused.
“It will also, if you let it, tell you a great many confident lies.”
“Understood.”
“I don’t think you do yet, so I’m going to say the important part plainly, and I’d like you to carry it.”
The light around the figure did something.
The valley and the snow dimmed behind it.
“The quickest way to die will be assuming someone must behave as you remember because another version of that person appeared in a story.”
Damien said nothing.
“The people in that world are not characters,” the ROB said.
“That is not a poetic claim; it is a flat statement of fact and the most important one I will make tonight. They are as real as your mother was. They have interior lives you know nothing about, private histories, grudges, debts, loves, fears, things they did at nineteen that they’ve never told anyone. They have free will — actual free will, the same as yours, unconstrained by anything you happen to remember. A man you think you understand completely will make a decision you did not see coming, because he is a person and not a machine running a plot you’ve already read.”
“So I learn them.”
“You learn them,” the ROB agreed.
“The way you’d learn anyone. Slowly, by paying attention, and by being willing to be wrong about them. You don’t decide who they should be and then get annoyed when they fail to comply.”
Damien nodded once.
He had, in fact, spent his entire adult life walking into places where he was the ignorant party, and the men who had gotten people killed were always the ones who arrived certain.
“All right,” he said.
“Then tell me the other thing. Who am I becoming?”
The images changed.
A woman first.
Young, dark-haired, gray-eyed, with a fierce set to her jaw and something restless behind it.
She was riding, and then she was somewhere dim and warm, and then she was somewhere dim and not warm, and the last of it was a bed, and blood, and her hand closing on someone’s wrist.
A man with silver hair and a harp.
Damien saw him only in fragments — grave, distracted, oddly gentle, a person who seemed to be listening to something nobody else could hear.
Then a third figure: a man with a long northern face, coming through a doorway with dust and blood on him, and stopping.
A newborn in that bed.
Small, red, furious, alive.
And then the same shape from the northern man’s arms, moving down a long road under a gray sky, into a courtyard, into a castle of grey granite with steam rising off the pools behind it and a wolf carved over the gate.
The images broke apart and Damien stood there.
“Her name is Lyanna Stark,” the ROB said quietly.
“His name is Rhaegar Targaryen. The man in the doorway is her brother, Eddard, and he will take that child home and give him his own house’s name and let every person alive believe the boy is his bastard, and he will do it because he made a promise to his sister while she was dying and because he judges — correctly — that the truth would get the child killed.”
“And the child.”
“Will be called Jon Snow.”
Damien absorbed it in silence.
Wolf blood on one side.
Dragon blood on the other.
A boy raised in the North under a name that hid what he was.
And then the rest of it caught up with him, and he turned and looked at the being for a long moment.
“My mother,” he said, “called me her little wolf.”
“I’m aware.”
“I called her Mama Dragon. We drew a label when I was six. A wolf, and a dragon curled around it, both facing outward.” His voice did not rise, which made it worse.
“That drawing was in an evidence warehouse for eighteen years. It’s currently in a box in Virginia with my brother’s name on it.”
“I’m aware of that too.”
Damien kept staring.
“I did not arrange every symbolic coincidence,” the ROB said.
Damien continued staring.
The silence went on for a while.
“…Not every one,” the being admitted.
“There’s a detail about the body you should have in advance,” it went on, rather quickly.
“Your eyes.”
“What about them.”
“You’ll be born with Stark grey. Dark hair, a long northern face, your aunt’s bones — you will look so thoroughly like Eddard Stark’s son that no one who sees you will think to ask another question, which is the point. The wolf will hide you while you’re small.” The ROB paused.
“It won’t hold forever.”
“Meaning.”
“As you grow, violet will begin coming through the grey. Slowly. Flecks first — the sort of thing visible in strong sunlight, or close to a fire, or when somebody is looking at you from a foot away and paying attention. Later they’ll read as grey-violet in most light. By the time you’re a grown man, the violet may be the dominant color, with the grey still in it.”
“Not one or the other.”
“Not ever one or the other. They won’t be another Targaryen’s eyes; they’ll be yours. Stark and Targaryen and the soul that’s going into the body, and whatever magic you end up carrying, all in the same place.” Something in the being’s tone shifted.
“The wolf will conceal you while you are young. The dragon will become more difficult to hide as you grow.”
“On what schedule?”
“That depends upon how deeply you use what you are being given.”
“That’s another incomplete answer.”
“Yes,” said the ROB, without apology.
“One more piece of architecture, and then we’ll discuss the gifts.”
“Go on.”
“You will not arrive with all of this in your head. A newborn brain cannot hold thirty-six years of another life; it would break the child, and then there’d be no point to any of it.” The ROB made a small closing gesture.
“Your memories will be sealed. So will the system. Both will stay under until the body and mind can carry them, and then they’ll open — memories first, the system partially, along with the written notes and the starter package. From that point you can begin testing and preparing.” You are reading on novelping . com, the official source.
“Partially.”
“Partially. Full function requires territory that genuinely belongs to you. Not borrowed, not granted for a season, not a room in another man’s castle. Yours.” The being tilted its head.
“The precise conditions are in the notes. I’m not reciting them.”
“Now. Your balance permits two gifts, and they should be connected, and you get some say in what they are.” The ROB’s manner turned businesslike.
“Most people in your position ask for a body that can’t be hurt. It’s the most common request I receive and the most consistently disappointing.”
Damien did not answer immediately.
He was thinking about the courtyard with the lemon tree, and about eleven kilometers walked with a daughter on a man’s back, and about a market that was loud with life on Tuesday and not on the following Wednesday.
He was thinking about a decade of watching military victory fail to fix anything, because the arrangement underneath was never military.
He was thinking, mostly, about what he had actually learned.
That a famine is about roads and who owns them.
That public health is mostly plumbing.
That the reason a village empties is rarely the fighting — it’s the third bad harvest.
That in a world with that Wall in it and those things walking behind it, the deciding factor in whether people lived would not be one man’s swordsmanship.
An invulnerable body wins fights.
It doesn’t feed anyone through a long winter.
“Food,” he said.
“Start with food. Agriculture — growing, livestock, seed, storage, preservation. Somewhere I can experiment and fail without starving anybody while I learn.”
“And the second?”
“Everything that turns food into a place people can live.” He was working now, thinking it through aloud, which was a habit he had acquired late and at cost.
“Labor. Skilled people — actual specialists, not just hands. Builders. Construction and settlement, roads, storage, logistics. Somebody who can survey and map. Soldiers, eventually, because a granary nobody can defend is just a target with a roof.” He looked up.
“One creates surplus. The other converts surplus into civilization. Neither is worth much alone.”
Something in the ROB’s posture changed — the way a teacher’s does when a student arrives at the answer by the correct route rather than by luck.
“Then that is what you’ll have,” it said.
“A magical farming system. And a strategic system for workers, specialists, construction, and settlement.” A pause.
“You’d have gotten those two regardless. I wanted to see how you’d reach for them.”
“That’s manipulative.”
“It’s assessment. You’ve done it to four hundred students.”
“Limits,” Damien said.
“Before I accept. All of them.”
“You’ll get the exact figures in writing, and I want you to hold me to the broad shape of it.” The ROB counted them off.
“Both systems have permanent ceilings. They do not grow without bound; there is a hard limit on land, on livestock, on the number of people you can call, and those numbers do not move no matter how clever you are. Both begin partly locked. Both require work — real work, over years, with failures in it. Both improve substantially once you hold territory.”
“And what they can’t do.”
“They cannot take anyone’s free will. Not one person’s, not ever, under any circumstance. People who come to you through the system are people; they can disagree with you, refuse you, and think you’re a fool.” The being’s voice hardened slightly.
“They do not remove political consequence. Every advantage you gain will be noticed, and noticing will have effects you don’t control. They do not guarantee that you win anything. They will not make you immortal — you can be killed in that world as easily as any other man, more easily while you’re small. And they cannot replace judgment. A system will tell you what is possible. It will never once tell you what is wise.”
“And it won’t build a decent society by itself.”
“It will not,” the ROB said.
“That’s the one I’d underline if I were the underlining sort. A full granary is compatible with tyranny. It has historically been one of tyranny’s favorite conditions.”
Damien nodded slowly.
“I want the precise numbers.”
“They’ll appear as written notes when the system activates. Functions, locks, costs, limits, requirements, activation conditions, storage, farming, summoning, mapping, territory. All of it, in order.”
“Complete instructions?”
The ROB paused.
“Written instructions,” it said.
Damien almost smiled, because he understood the distinction immediately and had spent his whole life on the far side of it.
Every manual he had ever been handed had been accurate and insufficient.
The notes would tell him the rules.
They would not tell him how to use them well.
That would take testing, records, observation, failure, and revision — the same as a batch of beer, a guitar neck, or a squad.
Second attempt failed differently, which is progress.
“That’s fine,” he said.
“That’s actually preferable.”
“I rather thought it might be.”
“One feature worth knowing in advance, because you’ll misuse it otherwise.” The ROB gestured, and something like a chart hung briefly in the dark — a coastline, a river, an unfinished edge fading into blank.
“The strategic system includes a map. It records where you’ve been and keeps it. It marks what you find. It distinguishes what you’ve explored from what you haven’t, which will matter more than you expect in a world where most maps are guesses.”
“And?”
“And it shows people near you as colored points. Green, blue, red.” A beat.
“Green is care — an ally, a friend, someone who loves you or intends to protect you. Blue is neutral: undecided, indifferent, no formed intent regarding you. Red is hostile — someone who means you harm or is prepared to.”
Damien looked at it for a moment.
“That’s a very dangerous thing to hand somebody.”
“Say more.”
“Because it looks like it’s telling me who’s good.” He shook his head slowly.
“It isn’t. It’s telling me how a person feels about me, right now. That’s not the same measurement at all. A decent man who thinks I’m a threat to his family reads red. A charming monster who currently finds me useful reads green.”
“Yes,” said the ROB, with evident relief.
“Yes, exactly that. It measures disposition toward you, in this moment, and disposition changes. Green can turn. Red can turn — people change their minds about others constantly, and a red who becomes green is often worth more than someone who was green from the start. Someone who loves you can disagree with you violently and stay green the whole time.” It paused.
“It is an aid to judgment. It is not a substitute for it, and the day you start treating a color as a verdict, you will hurt somebody who didn’t deserve it.”
“Understood.”
“There’ll be a starter package waiting when the system opens.”
“Containing?”
“I’m not telling you.”
“That seems like a thing I should know.”
“Review it thoroughly,” the ROB said.
“That sounds like something people say immediately before a preventable disaster.”
“Then reviewing it thoroughly should prevent the disaster.”
Damien exhaled — or did the thing that had been standing in for it.
“Some of it’s locked, I assume.”
“Some of it’s locked until you meet conditions you haven’t met. The rest is there from the start, and there is more in it than you will initially notice, which is why I said what I said.”
“Last thing.” The ROB’s voice went entirely serious, and stayed there.
“I want you to understand what you’re actually carrying into that world, because it isn’t a farm.”
Damien waited.
“Given time, those two systems could let you shift the balance of power across the known world. Not through conquest — through surplus. Food where there wasn’t food. Roads where there weren’t roads. Storage that survives a winter. Workers who don’t starve, and therefore don’t revolt, and therefore build. Whoever holds that in a world running on scarcity is holding something that kings will notice.”
“Which makes me a target.”
“It makes you a prize. There’s a difference and you’ll come to hate it.” The ROB began listing, unhurried.
“Great lords. Kings. Merchant houses whose fortunes depend on scarcity staying scarce. Spies, professionally and continuously. Religious authorities who will need to decide whether what you’re doing is a blessing or an abomination, and who may reach either conclusion for reasons that have nothing to do with you. Slavers, who will understand your labor arrangements very quickly and very wrongly. Assassins, employed by all of the above. Things with magic older than any of it. And rivals — ordinary, ambitious, dangerous people whose plans you’ll be standing in front of without knowing it.”
“I’ve been a prize before. Not on that scale.”
“No. You haven’t.” The being let that sit.
“And here’s the part I most want you to hold. The systems will give you a foundation. They will not give you wisdom, and they will absolutely not give you the right to decide things for people.”
It said the next part slowly.
“The system can help you build a kingdom. It cannot decide what kind of kingdom deserves to exist.”
Damien was quiet.
“That’s mine,” he said.
“That is entirely yours. And you should expect that a great deal of what you consider obvious improvement will be experienced by other people as an attack.” The ROB’s tone stayed level.
“Better food threatens whoever profits from hunger. Better medicine threatens whoever holds authority over suffering. Teaching a smallholder to read threatens a system that requires him not to. New crops threaten old tithes. Every one of your improvements sits on top of somebody’s arrangement, and some of those people will be perfectly pleasant men with families who will try very hard to kill you, and they will believe they are defending something.”
“Building a better system is more dangerous than winning a battle.”
“Considerably. And slower. And it will not feel heroic while you’re doing it.” A pause.
“You spent three years getting a clinic reinforced through paperwork. It was the least dramatic thing you ever did and it kept eleven people alive. Remember that when the next version of it is boring.”
“Knowing all of that,” the ROB said, “do you still choose to go?”
An unfamiliar world wearing a familiar face.
Foreknowledge he could not trust.
Power that would make him a target before he was old enough to defend himself.
Politics, war, magic, dragons, and something walking in the snow that he had disliked on sight.
Another family to lose.
The near certainty of failing at something that mattered.
And: a childhood.
A home.
A family, if he could manage to build one.
Fields.
Workshops.
Things to learn from people who had spent their lives learning them.
Music in a place that had never heard it.
The chance to protect people before the emergency rather than during it.
The chance, at last, to do the whole thing from the beginning instead of arriving at thirty-six with six good years left.
“Yes,” he said.
“Then it’s settled.”
The ROB went quiet, and stepped back, and something changed in the dark.
Warmth came in.
Not light — warmth, the specific kind that comes off a stove in a small kitchen, and under it, faintly, garlic and tomato and something sweet.
His mother was standing in front of him.
She was not hurt.
That was the first thing, and it took the ground out from under him.
No split lip, no ring of bruises at the wrist, no bandage, no gown, no gray hospital light.
No exhaustion in her face.
None of the careful watchfulness she had worn like a second skin for ten years — the listening, the tension around the eyes, the readiness to hold a full glass without spilling it.
She looked the way she had looked on the good days.
Sleeves shoved up.
Hair coming loose.
Amused about something.
She looked free.
Damien could not speak.
Twenty-eight years, and he could not produce a single word.
Elena crossed to him and lifted one hand, and put her palm against his cheek.
He knew the touch before he had time to think about it.
It was the same one — the exact same one, from a kitchen floor and the edge of a bed and a hospital pillow — the warm hand and the slight pressure and the thumb resting just under the eye.
He leaned into it, the way he had at five.
And in that moment the War Wolf did not exist.
There was no operator, no instructor, no man with ninety-seven patches on his coffin.
There was a son, standing still, with his face in his mother’s hand.
Elena smiled at him — the real one, the one she had manufactured out of nothing on the worst nights of her life and had never once withheld.
She did not give a speech.
She did not explain death, or tell him what was coming, or repeat a single lesson.
There was, evidently, only one thing she was permitted to say, and she had known for a long time what she would spend it on.
“Live fully,” she said.
“Always and forever, my little wolf.”
“Always and forever, Mama Dragon.”
Her thumb passed once across his cheek.
Then she began to go.
It was not like the hospital.
Nobody was pulling her away from him.
Nothing was being taken.
There was no needle, no hallway, no door full of people’s backs, no sound of a machine going flat, no boy screaming that he had promised.
She was simply finished, and at peace, and going back to it.
Damien did not try to hold on.
He watched his mother leave — with sorrow, and with gratitude, and with love, and, underneath all of it, an enormous unfamiliar relief.
He had spent twenty-eight years with an unfinished goodbye lodged in him like a splinter under the skin.
This one was finished.
She was safe.
She had been safe the whole time.
Then she was gone, and the warmth stayed behind for a moment after her, the way it does in a kitchen.
The void broke.
It came apart around him and he fell — actually fell, the first physical sensation he’d had since the culvert, and it went on and on.
Pressure closed in from every direction at once.
Heat, then cold that was not cold so much as the absence of a body’s argument against it.
Sound arrived, muffled and enormous, everything at a great distance through water.
He could taste copper.
There was blood in this somewhere.
A woman was crying.
Not far off — close, all around, the sound coming through the walls of wherever he was, and it was exhausted and frightened and it did not stop.
A man’s voice, low, saying something over and over.
Damien could not make out the words.
He could hear only the shape of them, and the shape was grief, and promise, and a kind of terror held down hard.
And a heartbeat, huge, surrounding him on all sides, slowing.
Then another heartbeat, small and quick and stubborn, starting up somewhere inside him.
His.
Text moved across the dark — not seen, exactly.
Known.
Soul integration initiated.
Host confirmed.
Memory seal active.
Partial activation scheduled.
Starter package prepared.
System notes prepared.
Alternate-universe divergence confirmed.
Foreknowledge reliability uncertain.
Welcome, Damien Morales.
Welcome, Jon Snow.
He was going under.
It was like anesthesia — the same slide, the same loss of edges, thirty-six years folding down small and getting put somewhere safe.
From very far away, from the other side of everything, a voice called after him with what sounded like real urgency.
“Remember — the notes are there for a reason!”
The last coherent thought Damien Morales had, before the seal closed and the dark took him and a woman’s exhausted heart gave out above him, was:
I was already planning to read them.
Then Jon Snow was born.
END OF PART THREE