Theon Stark rose before dawn, as he always did. His small body trembled with exertion as he finished his push-ups on the stone floor, then ran along the battlements while Winterfell still slumbered. The guards at their posts nodded with respect as he passed; they whispered the boy was blessed by the Old Gods, but Theon knew better.
Blessed? No. He was cursed.
This body was young, the flesh of a Stark, yet the mind within was something older, darker. Archer, he had been called. Counter Guardian. Wrought Iron Hero. He remembered battles without end, blades without number, and the weight of countless deaths on his hands. And he remembered what it was to die—again and again—for the sake of a world that never thanked him.
When he looked into the steaming pools of Winterfell's hot springs, he sometimes half-expected to see white hair and jaded red eyes staring back instead of a boy's face.
After bathing, he dressed with the aid of silent servants and went to the Great Hall. There, as ever, sat his parents.
Lady Gilliane Glover, silver fist of Deepwood, kind but with steel beneath her smile. She loved him with all her heart, he could feel it in every glance. That made it harder. He had not been loved so openly since Kiritsugu, and that memory still stabbed him.
Lord Rickon Stark sat beside her, brooding as only a Stark could, winter eyes cold as the snow outside. Warden of the North, head of Winterfell, a man whose every word weighed like stone.
"Good morning, Father. Mother," Theon said with the careful courtesy that came so easily now.
"Good morning to you too, Theon," his father replied.
His mother's smile softened him. "Good morning, my son."
"What will you do today?" she asked.
"I will train with the sword."
He said it flatly, without hesitation. He had been wielding blades since long before he was born into this world. His body might be small, but his hands remembered the rhythm of steel.
Both parents watched him in silence for a moment. They knew their child was different. How could they not? Since his first days, he had acted not as an infant but as something older. He had never cried without reason, never fussed, never wailed for comfort like other babes. Instead he had studied the world with quiet eyes, as though measuring it.
The household thought him a prodigy. Some whispered the Old Gods favored him. The truth was stranger: he was not a child at all, but a weary soul forced into new flesh, carrying lifetimes of scars.
Theon played the role of boy, but in truth he was a man at war with himself. When he read the tomes of Winterfell's library, he was not learning but remembering—refreshing knowledge he had once mastered in another life. Languages came easily: Common, Valyrian, even the Old Tongue of the First Men. To others, it seemed miracle. To him, it was routine.
The exercises that baffled his cousins, the early-morning drills, the push-ups and endurance runs—they were nothing more than fragments of the training he had honed across lifetimes. In another world, it had been to prepare for battles no man should face. Here, it was the only way he could endure the waiting.
When his cousins mocked him, calling his strange routines nonsense, Theon felt no sting. He had been mocked before, betrayed before, killed before. Their laughter was nothing.
In the yard, when they came at him with wooden swords, he did not fight like a child. He fought like the man he had been—fluid, precise, merciless. Dodging their clumsy blows with serpent grace, striking back with fists and feet until the boys lay sprawled in the dirt.
The onlookers gasped. To them, it was unthinkable. A three-year-old defeating boys older and stronger with nothing but bare hands. To Theon, it was expected. They were children. He was something else.
The silence of the yard hung heavy until Theon turned to his father. His gray eyes, too sharp for his age, locked with Rickon's.
"Today is the day I will begin my sword training."
Rickon studied him, face unreadable, and then gave a single nod. "So it shall be."
Gilliane wanted to object, but she had seen too much already. The boy was not like others. Perhaps he never would be.
Theon inclined his head, accepting the decision without triumph. Inside, Archer's voice whispered coldly: Another blade in my hand. Another path of steel. It never ends.
But aloud, he said nothing. He merely waited, as he always had, for the next battle to begin.
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