GAME OF THRONES: RISE OF THE DRAGON WOLF
BOOK ONE — PART 4: AWAKENING THE SECOND LIFE
CHAPTER 1: THE BOY WHO WOKE TWICE
You have power over your mind — not outside events.
Realize this, and you will find strength.
— Marcus Aurelius
The stone was cold through his boots, and that was the last ordinary thing.
Jon stood at the edge of the smaller courtyard with his hands tucked into his sleeves for warmth.
The morning had that grey northern light he liked, the kind that made the walls look older than they were.
Somewhere behind him a servant hauled a bucket, the wooden handle creaking with each step.
Two guards traded low words by the gate.
From the training yard came the flat knock of wooden swords, one boy learning a lesson the hard way, and the smell of smoke drifted down from the kitchen chimneys and settled over the mud.
He was five years old, and none of this belonged to anyone but him.
It was only a morning.
He had been waiting for Robb to finish his lesson so they could look for the litter of barn cats the stableboys had mentioned.
Then something turned over inside his head, quiet as a key.
The first fragment was a kitchen.
Not any kitchen in Winterfell.
Yellow light, a low ceiling, a woman’s hands cracking eggs into a bowl while she hummed a song with no words he knew.
The hands were sure and quick and he loved them, he ached for them, and he had never seen them before in his life.
Jon blinked hard.
The courtyard was still there.
The woman’s hands were still there too, laid over it like a second picture on the same window.
The next one came faster.
A truck in a driveway, engine ticking as it cooled.
He knew the sound of that engine the way he knew his own name, and the knowing filled his chest with a cold that had nothing to do with the North.
Then a road at night.
Then glass.
Then a smell he had no word for, sharp and chemical, and white lights above a bed, and a voice saying stay with me, mijo, stay with me —
He put a hand out to steady himself on nothing.
They stopped coming one at a time.
They came all at once.
A garage that smelled of oil and old coffee.
A big man’s laugh.
A woman setting down a plate heaped so high it embarrassed him.
Cold rooms with strangers’ names.
A field at dawn and men in a line and someone counting cadence.
Heat.
Dust that got into the teeth.
A crack that was not thunder.
Another boy — grown, laughing, gone.
Letters in a careful hand, read so many times the creases had gone soft as cloth.
A room full of the sick and the small.
A young woman holding a baby against her shoulder, the baby’s fist closed around a finger.
A man walking toward him too fast in a crowd where no one walked fast —
— and then nothing, and then a dark with no floor and no sky, and a voice that was not a voice offering him something impossible, and snow, and cold, and a wall of ice that went up forever, and a grey castle, and a stern man’s face, and a woman who looked at him the way you look at a stain, and children, so many children, five years of them, five whole years of being Jon —
Two lives struck the same small skull and tried to fit inside it at once.
His body could not hold them.
Neither could his mind.
The sounds arrived last and worst.
The bucket’s creak became a scream of wood.
The guards’ quiet words became shouts against his ears.
The knock of the practice swords cracked like the thing in the desert that was not thunder.
The light doubled, brightened, whited out the walls.
Every smell he had ever known and every smell he was smelling now poured in together — horse, mud, smoke, eggs, blood, dust, oil, wet wool — with nothing to hold them apart.
His heart slammed.
His stomach turned over.
The ground tilted, though he knew, some cold clear part of him knew, that the ground had not moved at all.
Assess, said a voice inside him that had done this a thousand times.
Where are you.
What’s the threat.
Where’s the exit.
The five-year-old brain beneath the voice could not answer.
It only broke.
Jon’s knees folded.
He heard someone call his name from very far away — his name, both of his names, he could not tell which — and then the cold stone came up to meet his cheek, and the grey light narrowed to a point, and the point went out.
Hands lifted him.
He knew that much, in the dark.
There were voices over him, and hands under him, and the world moved in a way that meant he was being carried.
A woman’s voice said his name close to his ear, Jon, Jon, can you hear me, and it was frightened, and the fright was for him.
Some part of him noticed that and held onto it without understanding why it mattered.
Another voice, a man’s, said something about his head, had he struck his head, and someone’s fingers pressed under his jaw as if searching for a beat.
Run for the maester.
Tell Lord Stark.
Careful with him, careful, he’s only small.
The dark took him again before they reached wherever they were going.
For three days he did not truly come back.
He knew it later only as pieces, the way you know a fever from the far side of it.
There was heat, first, a heat that lived in him and would not leave, that pressed behind his eyes and turned the blankets to weights.
There was cold under the heat, deep and wrong.
His own breath went strange in his chest, fast and then slow and then fast again, and he could not fix it because he was not there to fix it.
He talked.
He knew he talked because now and then his own voice would surface through the murk, saying things.
Some of it was in the common tongue of the North.
Some of it was in a language no one in that room had ever heard, the language of the yellow kitchen and the letters and the young woman with the baby.
He said a name that meant mother in a tongue with no place in Westeros.
He gave orders to men who were sixteen years and a world away.
He asked, once, very clearly, whether the boy had made it, and no one in the room could tell him, because no one knew there had been a boy at all.
Water touched his lips.
Someone tipped his head back, gentle, a hand cradling his skull, and let a few drops slide onto his tongue.
Swallow, the woman murmured.
There’s a good lad.
Swallow for me.
He swallowed.
When he did not, she stopped at once and only wet his mouth and his cracked lips and waited, and tried again a little later.
It happened many times.
He understood, from very far down, that this was keeping him alive, and that whoever was doing it was tired, and had not stopped.
By the third day his body had begun to eat itself.
He did not see it, but he wore it.
His cheeks had gone hollow.
His face had turned the color of old candle wax.
His lips split.
His skin drew tight over the small bones of him.
The fever was weakening at last, but the boy under it looked worse than ever, thinned to almost nothing, so light in the bed that the woman tending him kept touching his chest to be sure it still rose.
And through all of it, more than once, another voice came into the room.
Lower.
Careful.
A voice that held itself very still, the way men do when they are afraid and cannot be seen to be.
How long has he been like this.
Has the fever moved at all.
Someone will stay with him.
Someone will stay with him at every hour, do you understand me.
He is not to be left alone.
Jon, buried under two lives and a fever that would not break, heard that voice and turned toward it.
Just the voice a child knows.
Somewhere beneath Damien’s thirty-six years and all their grief, a five-year-old boy who had waited his whole short life for exactly this heard his father sit down beside his bed, and was not alone, and slept.
On the third day he woke all at once, and it was the wrong kind of waking.
His eyes opened on a low wooden ceiling and firelight, and every one of them was wrong.
The ceiling should have been white.
There should have been machines that beeped.
The light was fire, actual fire, an open flame in a room with the sick, and some professional part of him recoiled from it in pure alarm before the rest of him could ask why.
Where was he.
The clinic.
He was in the clinic and the crowd had been too fast and there had been a man walking wrong and he needed to get Nadia and the baby out, he needed to move, why couldn’t he move —
No.
A hospital.
He’d been hit.
They had him strapped down after, they always strapped you down, and Marcus would be in the next bed over telling him to quit being dramatic —
No.
The dark.
The endless dark with no floor, and a voice, and it had lied, it had put him in a box, they had trapped him in something small, his arms were wrong, his hands were tiny —
His breath came apart.
It went fast and then faster and then he could not find the bottom of it.
His chest pulled and pulled and got no air.
Pins and needles ran up his hands and over his lips and into his cheeks.
His heart was a fist beating to get out.
He knew what this was — some cold clerk in the back of his mind was already naming it, this is panic, this is only panic, the body is lying to you — and it did not help at all, because he was five, and starved, and did not know which world he was dying in.
He pulled at the blankets.
He tried to rise and got halfway and his arms gave out and dropped him back.
Hands came toward him and he struck at them, weak, his knuckles glancing off a wrist.
He called out names.
Elena.
Nadia.
He called for Marcus.
Not one of those names belonged to anyone within a thousand leagues, and the people in the room, a guard and the grey-haired woman who had not left him, only heard a starving child screaming for ghosts.
They caught his wrists.
Not hard.
The woman gathered him against her so he could not throw himself from the bed, and the guard held his thin arms so he could not tear at his own skin, and they were not cruel, they were only afraid he would break himself.
Easy.
Easy, now.
You’re safe, you’re in your bed, easy —
But hands closing on his wrists were the wrong thing to do to him, in either life.
Straps.
The dark box.
A crowd holding him back from the people he had to save.
The panic climbed past anything his mind could hold.
The room went bright and thin and roaring —
— and then, mercifully, his body reached the end of what it had, and gave out, and dropped him back into the dark.
He surfaced again a little later, not enough to move, only enough to hear, and there were two men in the room now.
“—the fever’s mostly broken,” the older voice was saying.
Measured.
Tired.
A healer’s voice choosing its words.
“His breathing is steadier than it was. That much is real, and I’ll not pretend otherwise.” A pause.
“His pulse is still weak. And that fit just now — the thrashing, the calling out for people who aren’t here, striking at his own carers — my lord, I have to tell you plainly what it might mean.”
“Tell me, then.” The lower voice.
Held very still.
“A fever this deep, this long, in a child so young.” The healer let out a slow breath.
“Sometimes the mind does not come back whole. He may wake and not speak as he did. He may not know your face, or his brothers’ and sisters’. He may be… altered. His nature changed. I don’t say it will happen. I say you should be ready for it, so it does not take you unprepared.”
The room was quiet.
The fire spoke to itself.
“He is five,” the lower voice said.
That was all.
Three words, and Jon, floating just under the surface of himself, heard everything folded inside them.
Not an argument against the maester.
Not a command.
Just a man setting down the whole helpless weight of a thing he could not fix, in the only place he had to set it.
“I know it, my lord,” the healer said gently.
“I know.”
Jon meant to say something.
To tell them he knew exactly whose face that was, that he knew his own name, both of them, that his mind was not broken but only very, very full.
The words did not come.
The dark came instead, but it was a different dark now, softer, and he went down into it without fear.
The fourth day he slept, and in that sleep something in him began, at last, to sort itself.
It was not a dream.
It was more like a room being set right after a storm has been through it.
The fragments that had struck him all at once in the courtyard stopped fighting for the same space.
They began to lie down in an order.
This one first.
This one after.
The yellow kitchen went into its place, and the truck in the driveway went after it, and the garage and the plated meals and the field at dawn, the letters, the heat, the crowd, the dark, the voice — each found where it belonged, and stopped bleeding into the rest.
By the time he woke he understood the shape of it, even if he could not yet have explained it to anyone alive.
Damien Morales had been his first life.
All of it — every year of it, every face, every grief — had happened, and was his.
Jon Snow was his second life.
Five years of Winterfell.
A stern man’s guarded kindness, a lady’s cold eyes, a brother close in age, small sisters, servants who slipped him bread.
That had happened too, and was also his.
He was not two people wearing one boy.
That was the thing he had been most afraid of, in the parts of the fever where he could be afraid of anything.
He was one person.
One person who happened to remember dying, and being offered a strange mercy in a place with no floor, and waking here.
The grief of Elena and the wanting of a father he already had — both belonged to the same chest.
The discipline of thirty-six hard years and the raw hurt of a five-year-old bastard — the same skull held them both.
He woke into that understanding quietly, and did not fall apart.
He opened his eyes on the same low ceiling, and this time it did not frighten him.
Firelight.
A wooden beam.
A window shuttered against the cold, grey light leaking through the seams.
His own small hands on the blanket, thin as a bird’s feet.
Everything wrong, and all of it exactly right.
He was weak in a way he had felt only once or twice before, in his first life, in bad places.
His head throbbed with a deep, even ache, a drum behind the eyes.
His mouth was a desert.
His stomach had gone past hunger into a kind of hollow silence.
But his breath was his own.
His heart kept a steady, if faint, time.
And the panic did not come.
So he did what the oldest part of him always did first, when he was too weak to do anything else.
He assessed.
Physical condition.
A five-year-old body, and no arguing with that fact, however much of a man lived inside it.
Severe weakness from fever and days without food.
He flexed his fingers, one hand and then the other, and both answered.
He shifted his feet under the blanket.
Both moved.
No paralysis, then. The source of this chapter is g.com.
No dead limb.
Strength gone to almost nothing, a headache that would make thinking a chore, dehydration he could taste.
But nothing broken.
No immediate threat to his body but his body’s own frailty.
Location.
A chamber.
Small, private, his own.
Winterfell.
The North.
That much he knew from five years of knowing it.
The exact year he could not yet name, and he made a mark in his mind against that gap and moved on.
Personnel.
Someone breathing softly in the corner — the grey-haired woman, asleep in a chair, her chin on her chest, still here.
He felt something turn over gently at the sight of her, and did not push it away.
Guards beyond the door, he judged, from the once-in-a-while shift of weight in the corridor.
A maester in the castle who knew his trade and had, whatever else, kept him breathing.
And the man with the low still voice, who had told the healer he is five as if the number were a wound.
Ned Stark, worried down to the bone.
And, remembered rather than present, a woman with a lady’s face and eyes like the first frost.
Catelyn.
The one who looked at him the way you look at a debt.
Strategic reality.
He lay still and let that column fill itself in, because it was the important one, and because it was too large and too strange to rush.
He was Jon Snow.
He carried Stark blood, and — if the story he half-remembered held true here — Targaryen blood beneath it, though he set that thought down carefully, unproven, in the pile of things that might not be so.
The Others existed; that one he did not doubt, because it had not come from any story.
It had been confirmed to him personally, in the place with no floor, by the being that had sent him here.
A Long Night was coming.
The system existed — the strange gift, the private power, waiting.
And it remained wholly unexplored, because he had not so much as reached for it, and would not, not yet.
Not with his head full of broken glass and his hands shaking from hunger.
A man did not test an unknown weapon while he was too weak to aim.
That left the last item, and it was the heaviest.
His memories of the story — of Game of Thrones, the tale a man named Damien had once known as a tale — were not prophecy.
He made himself write that across the front of his mind in letters too big to ignore.
He remembered another Westeros.
He did not live in it.
He had proof of that already, though he could not have said yet where the first crack would show.
The ROB had warned him in plain words, standing in the void: It resembles the world you remember.
It is not the world you remember.
Names might belong to different people.
Events might come early, or late, or never.
Geography might shift.
Magic might run deeper.
And treating any of it as certain could get him killed as surely as a blade.
He turned that over until he was sure of it.
Then he let it settle.
There was time yet before the woman woke, and he spent it going carefully back through five years — his five years, Jon’s years — the way you walk a room in the dark, hands out, learning it by touch.
He remembered Ned’s affection, real but guarded, a warmth that never quite let itself be spoken.
He remembered Catelyn’s cold, the small daily reminders that he was a thing tolerated rather than loved.
He remembered Robb, near his own age, easy and open in a way Jon had learned not to be.
A small sister who cared for pretty things.
A smaller one still, hardly more than a squalling bundle, who someday — if this world ran anything like the other — might matter to him more than any of them.
Servants who had been kind when kindness cost them something.
And underneath it all, threaded through every memory, the same quiet fact: that Winterfell belonged to the Stark children, and Jon lived in it the way a guest lives in a house he may be asked to leave.
The man in him, the one who had buried a mother and outlived a brother and carried thirty-six years of hard lessons, said clearly that a boy should not need a stern lord’s approval to know his own worth.
That he had already had a father, in a garage that smelled of oil, who had loved him without one drop of shared blood.
And the child in him wanted Ned’s approval anyway.
Wanted it with an ache that no amount of grown wisdom could argue away.
He did not try to silence either one.
He had learned, dying, that a man could hold two true things at once and be broken by neither.
He held them.
The fire had burned low.
Beyond the shutters, Winterfell was waking — he could hear it, the yard coming to life, buckets and boots and a distant voice calling for someone.
He was too weak to rise, too weak even to want to.
So he did the only work left to a body that had nothing else in it.
He lay still, and he listened, and he thought.
He did not open the system.
He had decided that, and he did not go back on it.
His mind was not steady enough to trust with something he did not understand.
His body was not strong enough to survive a mistake.
Whatever it was, it would keep.
It had waited five years already.
Instead he gave himself a briefing, the way he had given a hundred of them in a life that was over.
Known.
He was Jon Snow.
He was five.
He had survived the waking — the collapse, the fever, the days in the dark — and come out the other side with his mind whole and his memories his own.
The Long Night was coming, sixteen years off or near it, if the shape of the story held.
The strange gift existed, real and waiting.
And it would only fully answer to him on ground that was truly his own — not Winterfell, not any borrowed corner of another man’s keep.
His own.
Unknown.
The exact year.
How far this world’s history had bent away from the one he remembered.
What, precisely, was different, and where the differences would cut.
What the gift could and could not do.
Who, in this whole grey castle, he could ever afford to trust.
And where, in all the wide North and the world past it, a bastard boy might someday stand on land that belonged to no one but himself.
That was a great deal of unknown.
It did not frighten him.
It had frightened Damien once, being handed the part that mattered with no map to it.
It did not frighten him now.
A man with a list of what he did not know was a man who at least knew where to point.
He closed his hand slowly around a fistful of blanket, testing the weak grip, and made himself a rule.
The first rule of his second life.
He set it above every plan he did not yet have, above Ignareth he had not yet heard of and dragons he had not yet dreamed of and every enemy whose name he thought he knew.
Assume nothing.
Verify everything.
The old story was a map drawn by someone who had never walked this ground.
He would walk it himself.
He would touch every wall in the dark before he trusted it to hold his weight.
In the corner, the grey-haired woman stirred, lifted her chin, and saw his open eyes.
She came up out of the chair so fast it nearly tipped, one hand pressed to her mouth, the other reaching for him.
“Oh — oh, you’re awake, you’re truly awake, thank the gods, thank the old gods and the new —” Her fingers found his forehead, feather-light, checking the heat that was finally, finally gone.
Her eyes had filled.
“You gave us such a fright, little one. Such a fright. Lie still. Lie still, now, I’ll fetch the maester, I’ll fetch your lord father —”
She was already at the door, already calling down the corridor.
Jon lay still, as told, and let his weak hand open and close on the blanket, and looked at the grey light coming through the shutters — the light of a world that wore a familiar face and was not, underneath it, the world he knew.
He had died once, and lived a whole life to get there.
Now he was going to have to learn this one from the beginning, and take nothing on faith, and trust nothing he had not seen with his own eyes.
He found that he was ready to begin.