What does dying and waking somewhere else taste like?
Lyonel used to wonder.
Now he knew.
Protein.
Cheap perfume.
Sour wine soaked into someone else’s skin.
He opened his eyes to a stink that hit like a slap.
He was naked, sprawled across a damp featherbed.
Pale flesh lay crushed beneath him.
A thread of spit clung to the corner of his mouth.
His brain went white.
He looked down.
Fuck.
The hands were wrong.
The feet were wrong.
The gut was a squat, ugly barrel.
Sparse gold hair dusted a body that looked assembled from leftover parts.
He spread the fingers of his left hand.
They barely reached past the first knuckle of the hand he remembered.
Left hand.
He had been right-handed.
A candle on the stand had wept wax all night.
Clothes lay crumpled on the floor.
In the corner, a book had been thrown facedown.
Gold letters on the spine read The Noble Houses of the Seven Kingdoms.
Lyonel shut his eyes and breathed in.
Well.
Shit.
He’d crossed over.
Not into a penthouse.
Not into some chosen hero’s body.
Into a dwarf.
A dwarf who’d spent the night buying company and was still drunk enough to taste it.
He gripped the edge of the bed and stood.
His feet hit the floor and the world dropped.
The mattress sat level with his chest.
He almost went down on the first step.
He staggered to a bronze mirror filmed with grime.
The face in it was one he would have paid money never to see.
The head was too big for the neck.
The brow was a cliff.
One eye was clear emerald.
The other was ink-black.
The mouth sat crooked, like the sculptor had lost interest halfway through.
Lyonel stared for three seconds.
Then he smiled.
It was not a kind smile.
Transmigrate if you have to.
Fine.
But this?
He hadn’t even landed as a bastard with a sword and a tragic destiny.
He’d dropped straight into the joke of Game of Thrones.
His name had been Lyonel.
Bottom-rung programmer at a company that chewed people up and called it culture.
He fixed other men’s mistakes until two in the morning.
The last thing on his screen when his heart stopped was still hanging there when they carried him out of the chair.
`NullPointerException` Thirty years old.
No apartment.
No car.
No woman.
Savings that wouldn’t have bought a closet in a city that mattered.
Now even the height was gone.
He leaned into the glass.
The mismatched eyes looked back like they were asking if he wanted to file a complaint.
He stepped away and cracked his lower back on the corner of a table.
The pain was clean and real.
That was almost worse.
Tyrion.
The name rose out of the body’s memory without asking permission.
Tyrion Lannister.
Youngest son of Lord Tywin of Casterly Rock.
The monster who’d killed his mother on the way out.
The Imp.
The most famous dwarf in Westeros.
He swallowed that.
A chime sounded in his skull.
Bright.
Cheap.
Like a notification that dinner had arrived.
[Host transmigration complete.
Soul and body fused.] [Entry Superposition System activating…] [Activation successful.] Lyonel went still.
Then the corner of his mouth twitched, and the twitch turned into a grin that didn’t belong on that face.
A system.
The standard gift.
Late.
Still here.
[Novice pack delivered to inventory.
Check it, Host.] A blue panel unfolded in the air.
The letters were too sharp to be a hangover.
ENTRY SUPERPOSITION SYSTEM 2.0 Host: Tyrion Lannister (Lyonel) Current entry slots: None Daily draws: 1 (resets at midnight) Entry ranks: White / Green / Blue / Purple / Gold / Red First draw rule: Guaranteed Purple or higher.
Draw now?
“Draw.” [First draw in progress…] [Congratulations.
Purple entry acquired: Blood Resonance of Lannister] Effect: Charm +5 Initial favorability with members of House Lannister +10 (passive) Active: briefly sense the emotional state of nearby Lannister blood.
Cooldown: 24 hours.
Lyonel read it twice.
Charm +5.
He looked back at the mirror.
Big head.
Short legs.
Two different eyes.
That mouth.
Charm +5.
So he’d gone from “call the city watch” to “hesitate before you call the city watch.” He wanted to laugh.
He didn’t.
The number that mattered wasn’t the charm.
It was the second line.
Favorability +10.
House Lannister.
He shut his eyes and let the leftover memories surface.
Tywin Lannister.
A father carved out of winter.
A man who treated looking at his youngest son like a waste of good eyesight.
Cersei Lannister.
A sister who would have smiled if someone drowned him in a barrel of wine.
Jaime Lannister— Warmth moved through his chest when that name arrived.
Not his.
The original owner’s.
Resentment for the rest of them.
Something like attachment left over for the golden twin.
The pretty Kingsguard.
The best-looking man in Westeros.
The one who used to come home to Casterly Rock with gifts he didn’t want anyone else to see him give.
Plus ten on Jaime meant the one decent bond in this family got a little thicker.
Plus ten on Tywin meant the score went from zero to ten.
Still a failing grade.
But it moved the old lion from strangle him on sight to kick him out of the way.
Progress.
The panel flickered.
[Novice quest issued: Within three days, obtain one acknowledgment from your father, Tywin Lannister.] [Reward: Purple entry — Financial Mastery.] Lyonel’s pupils tightened.
The body’s memory already had the scene waiting.
Tywin had thrown him the Westerlands ledgers and given him three days to find the rot.
Fail, and he could take the black and freeze on the Wall with the rest of the realm’s leftovers.
Three days.
A ledger.
A quest.
His mind started working the way it used to when a production server was on fire.
He had been a coder.
He’d also sat through finance courses he hadn’t needed, then read medieval economic history for fun because the bug queue had been soul-killing.
A cooked set of books was cleaner work than a null pointer at 2 a.m.
He stepped back and looked at the face again.
Green eye.
Black eye.
Crooked mouth.
A head jammed onto a short neck like a lid that didn’t fit the jar.
The eyes were different now.
Empty a minute ago.
Lit now.
He smiled at the glass.
The dwarf smiled back, worse.
“From today on,” he said, very quietly, “this Imp isn’t the one they think he is.” A draft slipped through the window and slapped the book on the table open to the last page.
A yellowed map.
The Westerlands.
Casterly Rock circled in heavy black ink.
Lyonel shut it.
He stood barefoot on the boards, up on his toes, and looked at the short, ugly body that was his now.
“One step at a time.” “Home first.” He picked the crumpled crimson Lannister coat off the floor.
It was made for a taller man.
The sleeves hung to his knees.
He rolled them five times before his fingertips showed.
Belt tied.
Hand on the door.
[Ding.] [Daily draw cooldown noted.
Second draw refreshes tomorrow at midnight.] [Host emotional spike detected.
Next-day quality chance slightly increased.] Lyonel stopped on the threshold.
He looked down at the comic little figure in a coat too big for it.
Then he glanced back at the bed.
Three bodies still snored in the wreckage of the sheets.
He opened the door.
Morning light cut down the corridor and stretched his shadow out long behind him.
Long enough to look like a warning.
“Tomorrow, then,” he muttered, rubbing his hands.
He took the first step.
“Tomorrow still has teeth.”