Cael followed a few steps behind Vesper as they made their way back through the snow-covered forest, his eyes fixed on the broad set of the ranger’s shoulders.
The fight wouldn’t leave him.
Not the pain of it — that was already gone, healed and forgotten along with the wound — but the shape of what he’d just seen.
He’s a monster.
Not for strength.
Compared to what Cael was now, Vesper was ordinary — flesh and bone and a heartbeat, nothing more.
It was the skill that Cael couldn’t get past.
He replayed it anyway, piece by piece, the way you couldn’t help worrying at a bruise.
At first, waking up an Original had felt like waking up untouchable — strength enough to bend steel with a bare hand, speed enough to make the world itself seem to slow around him.
That certainty had curdled into something closer to arrogance before he’d even noticed it happening.
Vesper had taken it apart in minutes.
The man had been slower.
Weaker.
Entirely, unremarkably human.
And every single movement he’d made had been deliberate — every feint bleeding Cael into the next mistake, until the knife had found his heart and Cael hadn’t even understood the opening had been there to take.
It hadn’t been strength that nearly killed him.
It had been experience.
Years spent surviving wildlings and beasts and a wilderness that killed careless men for free had shaped Vesper into something far more dangerous than raw power alone could ever be.
Cael studied the back of the man walking ahead of him.
I have Klaus Mikaelson’s body, he thought, but not a thousand years of Klaus’s experience.
Whatever had made him this—the change, the System, whatever word fit best—had handed him power without handing him mastery to go with it.
If a single tired ranger could push him this close to the edge inside a few minutes, what would happen when he faced someone truly legendary?
The Hound.
The mountain.
Jaime Lannister, if the stories about him were even half true.
For the first time since he’d woken up in the snow with a heartbeat he no longer needed, it occurred to Cael that immortality hadn’t made him invincible.
It had only bought him more chances to survive being wrong.
He will need to train if he want to make a life in the world of game of thrones.
The thought pulled another name up behind it, unbidden.
Jon Snow.
He died with a blade through the heart too.
Cael almost laughed.
Both of them, killed by brothers of the Night’s Watch.
There was something almost funny in that, in the way history — or whatever this was — kept finding new ways to make the same joke.
He let the silence sit for another minute before he broke it.
“Have you ever heard of a bastard named Jon Snow?”
Vesper didn’t turn around.
“Snow?
A bastard of North?
No.” He snorted.
“Should I know every bastard just because I’m one myself?”
Cael smiled, a little awkwardly.
“Fair enough.”
Maybe he just hasn’t joined the Watch yet.
Jon had taken the black fairly early in the story Cael knew — but if this was truly before that, it would make sense that the name meant nothing yet.
Except it didn’t sit right.
Vesper had spent years on the Wall before deserting, and only three months beyond it.
Even if he’d never crossed paths with Jon himself, a man who’d worn the black that long should have heard the name in passing at least once.
Jon wasn’t just another bastard.
He was the only bastard Eddard Stark had ever fathered, and a man as famous for his honor as Lord Stark acknowledging a bastard was exactly the sort of story that spread throughout the Seven Kingdoms.
Cael frowned.
“Then — do you know the bastard son of Lord Eddard Stark?”
That made Vesper stop walking.
He turned back, an honest puzzlement on his face that Cael had rarely seen from him.
“Eddard Stark?”
“Lord Stark.
Of Winterfell.”
“Who in the Seven Hells is that?”
Cael went very still.
He doesn’t know Ned Stark.
Something cold moved through his chest, entirely unrelated to the temperature.
“Then who rules Winterfell?”
Vesper looked at him the way a man looks at someone who’s just asked whether snow was cold.
“Rickon Stark, of course.” He shook his head.
“You told me you’re a merchant’s son out of Qarth.
Even merchants know the name of the Lord of Winterfell before they cross the Wall.”
Rickon Stark?
The name meant nothing to him.
It certainly wasn’t the Lord of Winterfell he remembered.
Not in the story he knew.
His heart lurched before he remembered it no longer did that on its own anymore.
What’s going on.
Did I land in some other version of Westeros?
Or somewhere — sometime — else entirely?
Neither of them spoke again for a while, and the silence gave Cael room to notice something he hadn’t had space for until now.
The forest felt like an entirely different place than it had the day before.
Yesterday it had been nothing but an endless white blur, every tree indistinguishable from the last.
Today it was full of detail his old senses would never have caught.
He could hear snow sliding loose from branches somewhere hundreds of feet off.
Off to his left, a rabbit bolted beneath the snowpack, its heartbeat as clear to him as Vesper’s footsteps crunching ahead.
Far overhead, a raven landed on a frost-whitened pine, claws scraping softly against bark.
Even the wind carried more than cold — pine resin, wet earth locked under the ice, the old copper trace of some hunt long finished, and somewhere far to the west, the faint musk of wolves.
It was almost too much, and strangely beautiful in spite of that.
He found himself measuring it against Earth without meaning to.
Home had never truly been quiet — there was always a plane somewhere overhead, a road humming faintly in the distance, some reminder that people were close even when you couldn’t see them.
Here there was none of that.
Just wilderness, unbroken in every direction he could sense.
For the first time in either of his lives, he understood what silence actually sounded like.
Neither of them spoke another word until they reached the camp.
Fresh snow had settled over the clearing since they’d left it.
The shelter stood exactly as they’d built it, and the fire pit held nothing but cold gray ash.
Vesper rolled his shoulders.
“So.
What’s the plan today?”
Cael forced something like a tired smile.
“I’m not feeling well, after everything.” It wasn’t entirely a lie — his mind was still in pieces.
“I think we stay here today.”
Vesper nodded, easy about it.
“Works for me.
While Vesper went to gather the wood he’d stacked the day before, Cael wandered the camp with a curiosity he hadn’t had room for yesterday — too exhausted then, too busy simply staying alive, to notice anything past the fire and the furs.
Today every corner of it told him something.
The shelter had been reinforced with layered hides stitched together by hands that clearly knew what they were doing.
Bundles of dried herbs hung near the entrance, their bitter smell doing double duty — masking the scent of old blood as much as warding off the damp.
A crude rack held strips of venison curing against the cold.
Even the camp’s placement made sense to him now, the way it hadn’t when he’d been too hurt to care: tall pines broke the worst of the wind, and a frozen stream sat only a short walk off, close enough to matter and far enough not to be heard from a distance.
His senses filled in the rest of it in finer detail than his eyes alone ever could have — old woodsmoke soaked into the hides, leather, oiled steel, pine sap, and underneath all of it, something else.
Fermented grain.
Ale.
His nose found the scent before the rest of him decided to follow it, and he was already moving toward it through the snow.
He followed it to the southern edge of the clearing and dug out a small barrel from the frozen ground beneath.
When he carried it back, Vesper raised an eyebrow.
“Where’d you find that?”
Cael smiled.
“Looks like whoever hid it forgot where.”
Vesper looked the barrel over, then shrugged.
“Then today’s our lucky day.”
“I suppose it is,” Cael said, and meant it, though not for the reason Vesper thought.
The fire caught, and snow drifted past the mouth of the shelter while the two of them sat across from it, mugs in hand.
The first few mugs went quickly, conversation loosening along with them as the warmth spread through the camp.
Vesper talked more than Cael expected — complaints about the food at Castle Black, insisting even wildlings cooked better than the Night’s Watch ever had, and a string of increasingly exaggerated stories about brothers who’d nearly frozen themselves relieving themselves on winter patrol, laughing hard enough at his own telling that he nearly spilled his mug twice.
Cael answered with stories of his own, carefully built out of details borrowed from a version of Qarth he’d only ever seen on a screen — bustling markets thick with spices from across the Jade Sea, walls that gleamed white under the sun, merchants whose greed outran their sense.
Enough of it held together to satisfy Vesper.
None of it had actually happened to him.
As the barrel emptied, Vesper’s laughter grew louder and his words slower, the hard, watchful ranger from that morning softening by degrees into someone far easier to sit across from.
Watching it happen left Cael with a guilt he hadn’t expected.
This was a man who’d saved his life and asked for nothing back for it, and Cael intended to spend that trust on nothing more than information.
The guilt didn’t last long.
He needed answers, and this world was too dangerous a place to keep going without them.
Cael barely wet his lips each time he raised his own cup.
Vesper, meanwhile, seemed intent on finishing the barrel by himself — exactly as Cael had hoped he would.
A drunk man answered questions a sober one never gave up.
An hour in, Vesper’s face had gone bright red, his words starting to run together, his eyes losing their focus by degrees.
“You look so drunk,” Cael said, grinning, “I don’t think you remember your own name.”
Vesper burst into loud, uneven laughter.
“Hah — hah — you think—” He jabbed a finger vaguely in Cael’s direction.
“You think I don’t know my own name?”
He tried to stand to prove it, and immediately pitched sideways, catching himself hard against the log.
“…Floor’s movin’.” He narrowed his eyes at the ground like it had personally wronged him.
“Cheatin’.”
Cael couldn’t hold back a laugh.
“So?
What’s your name, then?”
Vesper puffed out his chest.
“I know.
I know.” He frowned, working through it with real effort.
“I’m — Vesh — Vesper—” He jabbed a thumb proudly at his own chest.
“Vesper Stone.” He raised his mug high.
“The Great.”
He took an enormous swallow and nearly went over backward doing it.
“All right,” Cael said.
“You remember your name.
But do you remember who sits the Iron Throne?”
Vesper waved a lazy hand.
“Eashy question.
King — Vish — Viserys—” He nodded several times, pleased with himself.
“King Viserys.
The Firsht.
Of hish name.”
Cael said nothing.
Viserys.
He kept the excitement building in his chest off his face and pushed for more.
“What year is it?”
Vesper blinked slowly, scratching at his beard.
“Wha’ year…
One hundred…
an’…
thirteen.” He paused, frowned, seemed to doubt himself, then nodded hard.
“Yesh.
One hundred an’ thirteen.
After Aegon’s Conquesht.”
113 AC.
The fire cracked between them and neither man said anything for a moment.
One hundred and thirteen after Aegon’s Conquest…
Cael silently repeated the number several times.
One hundred and thirteen…
Viserys Targaryen.
Rickon Stark.
Suddenly the pieces clicked together.
House of the Dragon.
He wasn’t in another version of Westeros at all.
He had simply arrived generations before Game of Thrones.
The creators of House of the Dragon had mentioned that the series took place around two hundred years earlier.
He couldn’t remember the exact number anymore—one hundred and seventy, two hundred, somewhere around there—but it was close enough.
That meant Robert Baratheon hadn’t even been born.
Ned Stark didn’t exist yet.
Neither did Tyrion.
Jon.
Daenerys.
He had arrived long before any of them.
He wasn’t simply early, either, once he let himself sit with it a moment longer.
He’d landed at the height of it — Targaryen power at its peak, before any of it had started coming apart.
He looked back up.
“One more question.”
Vesper waved his mug in loose invitation.
“Hic — ask away.”
“Where’s Prince Daemon Targaryen these days?”
Vesper’s face screwed up in concentration.
“Dae— Daemon—” He scratched at his head.
Dunno.
Ain’t heard nothin’ since—” He counted on his fingers, clumsy about it.
“Three months?” Then he brightened, sudden and pleased with himself.
“Oh!
Lasht thing I heard, he’d — returned to King’s Landing.
I think.
Maybe.
Haven’t heard since I deserted.”
That settled it.
There was no doubt left to argue with.
He’d landed in the era House of the Dragon covered.
Dragons still filled the sky.
The Dance hadn’t begun.
A strange, bright excitement pushed through the confusion before he could stop it.
Dragons.
Real dragons, still filling the skies of Westeros — not legends buried in some maester’s dusty history, not bones under a castle.
Vhagar, oldest and largest of them all.
Caraxes, lean and vicious.
Syrax.
Meleys.
Dreamfyre.
Sunfyre, not yet hatched but coming.
Somewhere far south of this fire, creatures the size of castles were spreading wings wide enough to blot out the sun, and they were alive, right now, under this same sky.
The excitement didn’t last.
How do they measure up against what I am now?
He had no idea, and that gap in his knowledge bothered him more than almost anything else he’d learned that day.
Then the rest of it caught up and dragged the feeling back down with it.
It wasn’t such a different problem from landing in Game of Thrones would have been.
He still knew Westeros — the great houses, the shape of the world, most of the history that mattered.
But the edge he’d counted on had shrunk overnight.
He’d watched every season of Game of Thrones, start to finish, more times than he could count.
House of the Dragon he knew far less well — only two seasons released before he died, a third barely underway, two episodes out that he’d deliberately put off watching because he hated waiting a week between them.
He’d meant to binge the whole season once it finished.
Then he’d died instead.
A bitter smile tugged at his mouth.
Terrible timing, even by his standards.
Worse than the gaps in the story itself was what he didn’t know about everything running underneath it — the witches, the warlocks, the shadowbinders and mages that never got more than a passing mention on screen.
If he’d landed during Game of Thrones, he would at least have known where to start looking: Melisandre.
The ruby at her throat had kept her young for decades, and whatever had been under it when she finally took it off had been old beyond guessing.
If anyone in this world could make something like a daylight ring, she would have been the only lead worth chasing.
Not a certain one.
But a lead.
Now she wasn’t even born yet, and wouldn’t be for the better part of two hundred years.
That door had closed before he’d ever known it existed.
Which left him one option he actually knew anything about.
Wake the wolf.
His expression darkened at the thought.
To do that, he’d have to kill someone.
His stomach turned over at the idea before he’d even finished having it — he’d stopped himself from draining the deer dry.
He’d refused to kill Vesper even with the knife still in his own chest and every reason in the world to.
He wasn’t ready to cross that line, not yet, and even if he somehow found the will to, he remembered enough from what he’d watched to know the first turn wouldn’t be gentle.
It would be agony, start to finish.
Outside, the wind moved through the trees, and clouds slid over the moon until only a thin silver wash of light lay across the snow.
Across the fire, Vesper had gone under entirely, slumped half against the log with an empty mug hanging from his fingers.
Cael sighed.
“I’ll find another way.”
He lifted the sleeping ranger without effort — a big man, but to what Cael was now, barely more than a child’s weight — and laid him down on the furs by the fire, pulling a blanket over him before stretching out on his own bedding.
He didn’t need the sleep.
His body had stopped asking for it.
He could go days without feeling the lack.
Still, some habits didn’t let go easily, and he closed his eyes anyway, because it was easier than staring at the roof of the shelter until morning.
Vesper woke with a groan the next morning, one hand pressed to his skull like he was trying to keep it in one piece.
“I swear,” he muttered.
“Never again.”
Cael hid a smile behind his mug.
After they’d eaten, he asked, as lightly as he could manage, “Do you know any witches?
Anyone who actually works magic?”
Vesper frowned.
“Magic?” He scratched at his beard, thinking it over.
“Never met one myself.
Heard stories, though.”
“What kind of stories?”
“The Shadow Lands.”
Cael looked up.
“The Shadow Lands?”
“Beyond Asshai, they say.” Vesper shrugged.
“Shadowbinders, witches, warlocks — all manner of strange folk supposed to gather there.
Never been myself.
Could all be lies for all I know.”
Cael looked east, past the treeline, past everything he could actually see.
“The Shadow Lands,” he echoed quietly.
“Maybe one day.”
He let out a slow breath.
At least I don’t have White Walkers to worry about for another two centuries.
Small comfort, but it was enough to make the wilderness feel a little less like it was pressing in on him.
Dragons were another matter entirely.
He knew, more or less, what it took to put an Original down for good — white oak, and only white oak, thanks to whatever Esther had woven into the making of the first of his kind.
Dragons weren’t bound by that spell.
But dragonfire wasn’t ordinary fire either.
It melted stone.
It turned armies to ash and castles to slag.
If it caught him, would his body simply regrow around the damage the way it did for a blade or a broken bone — or would there be nothing left of him for it to heal?
If Vhagar took him in half, did both halves grow back, or neither?
Worse, if something swallowed him whole, was he looking at an eternity trapped inside a stomach, waiting for one of them to die first?
He didn’t know.
The questions stayed with him long after the fire had burned down to nothing, and he found he wasn’t in any great hurry to learn the answers firsthand.
Far beyond the Frostfangs, the White Walker crossed the endless snow without slowing, pale blue eyes fixed unblinking on the south.
It had been walking for more than 24hours.
It would walk for many more.
It had only one purpose.
Find the stranger.