The morphine had stopped working sometime around midnight.
Marcus Vael knew this the way you know a storm is coming — not because you can see it yet, but because the air changes. His body, once a serviceable if unremarkable machine, had become a prison of failing systems. Stage four pancreatic. The doctors had stopped using words like hopeful six months ago, replaced them with gentler ones. Comfortable. Quality of life. Peace.
He'd laughed at that last one. Peace. As though dying slowly in a hospital that smelled of antiseptic and quiet despair was the same as Zen meditation.
Quality of life, he'd thought, staring at the water stain shaped like a rooster on his ceiling tile. Right now my life has the quality of wet cardboard.
The pain came in waves — deep, oceanic things that started somewhere behind his sternum and radiated outward like a stone dropped into still water. He'd read once that the ancients believed the soul lived in the gut. He believed them now. Whatever part of him was Marcus was being eaten from the inside out.
No family at the bedside. He'd made sure of that. His sister, Elia, had offered to fly in from Lisbon. He'd told her he was fine, that it wasn't time yet. That had been a lie. But watching people grieve for you while you were still breathing struck him as the cruelest theater imaginable.
The monitor beside him beeped its steady, indifferent rhythm.
Beep. Beep. Beep.
Then nothing.
The white was not peaceful.
It was blinding — not like sunlight, which carries warmth and direction, but like every source of light in existence had agreed to point at him simultaneously. He blinked. Or performed the action that used to constitute blinking. He had eyes. He had a body. It felt like his old one, minus the pain, minus the tumor eating his pancreas. He flexed his fingers and was unreasonably moved by the sensation.
Fingers. Remarkable.
"You're taking this rather well."
The voice came from everywhere and nowhere. He turned and found her — or rather, found the suggestion of her, because looking directly at whatever she was produced a sensation similar to staring at the sun, if the sun were also somehow deeply, cosmically amused.
She looked like a woman. Roughly. The way a mountain looks roughly like a pile of rocks.
"You're a goddess," Marcus said.
"Observant." She tilted her head — at least he thought it was a head — and something that might have been curiosity crossed her face. "Most people cry. Or pray. Or immediately ask about their mothers."
"Is my mother here?"
"No."
"Then I don't see the point in asking." He looked around at the white expanse. "Am I dead?"
"Thoroughly."
"Hm." He considered this. "The morphine really did stop working."
The goddess made a sound like distant thunder laughing. "Marcus Vael. Thirty-four years. Electrical engineer. Read too much, slept too little, had opinions about geopolitical philosophy that were, occasionally, almost correct."
"I had a blog."
"Everyone has a blog."
He almost smiled. It felt strange on a face that had spent its last months arranged in the careful neutral expression of a man who'd decided that dignity was the only thing left worth owning. "So what happens now? Reincarnation? Heaven? Some kind of cosmic recycling program?"
She studied him. "I have an offer."
She explained it simply, the way a chess grandmaster might explain a game to someone who'd only ever played checkers. Another world. Not exactly — adjacent. A world built on the bones of stories he knew, but not identical. An alternate current in the river of possibility.
The name Aegon Targaryen fell from her lips like a coin dropped into deep water.
He went very still.
"Jon Snow," he said quietly.
"That name is a lie they'll give you. The real one is Aegon. Sixth of his name — though that distinction will feel rather academic when you're wearing diapers."
"You're sending me back as a baby."
"Did you expect to skip the childhood?" She seemed genuinely curious.
"I expected to skip the diaper portion, yes." He exhaled. Or made the gesture of exhaling. "What's the catch?"
"The world I'm sending you to — a world you know, approximately — runs on something like low magic. Faint. A candle flame in a cathedral." She paused. "Your presence will change the balance. I'll have to raise the stakes. More magic. Older things waking up. The world's ceiling will rise considerably."
"How considerably?"
The air around her shifted, and for just a moment he felt it — the impression of something vast and hungry stirring at the edges of existence. Dragons the size of mountains. Magic like artillery fire. Things older than the First Men that had merely been sleeping.
"Considerably," she repeated pleasantly.
He thought about that. Thought about the world he'd read, consumed, argued about online at two in the morning with strangers in different time zones. He knew its bones. He knew its tragedies, its betrayals, its patterns.
But a changed world. Higher magic. Variables shifted.
I'll need eyes, he thought. More than eyes.
"I want Prescience," he said.
Silence.
Not the comfortable kind.
"That," the goddess said, very carefully, "is a significant ask."
"You're raising the difficulty of the world. I should be allowed to raise my ability to navigate it." He met whatever passed for her eyes. "The capacity to see possible futures. To feel the shape of what's coming before it arrives. I know what it costs — I know what it does to a person. I'm not asking for omniscience. I'm asking for sight."
She was quiet for a very long time.
"It will not be comfortable," she said finally. "Prescience is not a gift. It's a weight. The futures will come in dreams, in flashes — sometimes clear, sometimes fragmented. And the more you rely on it, the more the present will feel—"
"Thin," he said. "I know. I've read the books."
"This isn't fiction."
"I know that too." He held her gaze. "I spent the last eight months watching my own future arrive exactly the way the doctors predicted it would, month by month, organ by organ. I know what it is to see something coming and not be able to stop it." He paused. "I'd like, this time, to be the one doing the seeing."
Another silence. This one thoughtful rather than reluctant.
"The world will be harder," she said. "Things that barely existed in the version you know will wake up. The magic will have teeth."
"Good."
She tilted her head. "You're not afraid."
"I've already died once." He straightened — that old reflex of dignity, of composure under pressure. "Let's not waste each other's time. Do we have a deal?"
The goddess smiled. He was almost certain of it.
"One more thing," she said. "The world will remember your blood. You'll have the features of your true house — not hidden ones. Silver hair. Violet eyes. They'll try to obscure them, but the bones of you will be Targaryen."
"Good," he said again. "I'd hate for anyone to miss the metaphor."
She laughed — genuinely, this time. Like she hadn't expected to.
"Aegon Targaryen," she said. "Try not to break everything."
"No promises."
White swallowed him whole.
Chapter One: The Child of Storm's End
He was three years old the first time the future visited him.
He'd been sitting in the yard — a corner of Winterfell's courtyard where the groundskeepers ignored him, which suited him perfectly — stacking stones into progressively more ambitious configurations and thinking about load-bearing principles, because apparently some habits survived death and rebirth and the complete restructuring of one's physical form.
The vision arrived without courtesy.
Not a dream. Dreams were soft things, narrative and symbolic. This was information arriving through a channel not built for it — like forcing a river through a keyhole. He felt it in his teeth first, that peculiar electrical pressure, and then the world around him — the grey Winterfell stones, the smell of horse and hay and the distant sound of Robb laughing somewhere above — all of it receded.
He saw:
A cave. Deep and cold in a way that went beyond the simple cold of the North, which was itself a different species of cold than anything his previous life had prepared him for. Ancient weirwood roots threaded through stone walls like pale fingers, and nested among them, cradled in a hollow carved by no human hand, two things lay waiting. A sword — slim and dark-bladed, old but present, the way truly ancient things are more present than modern ones. And beside it, wrapped in what had once been a velvet cloth now rotted to threads, an egg. Dark as a bruise. Threaded with veins of deep crimson that pulsed, barely, with something that was not quite life and not quite not.
Dark Sister, he thought, and the name arrived like recognition — not something he'd reasoned to but something he'd always known. Bloodraven carried her north. Of course he did. He carried everything north.
And beside it — a dragon.
The vision released him. He sat in the courtyard, three years old, blinking at his pile of stones, his heart doing something complicated in his chest.
"Jon."
He turned. Catelyn Stark stood three feet away, watching him with the expression she usually wore around him — not exactly hatred, because she was too practiced for anything so legible. Distaste, perhaps. The look of a woman who has found something objectionable in her house and cannot yet decide what to do about it.
He had, in his thirty-four previous years, been looked at with many different flavors of dislike. Catelyn Stark's particular variety was impressive in its consistency. It never quite slipped into cruelty — she maintained Tully dignity with the determination of someone who'd decided their principles were a structure they could live inside — but it never, not once, softened into the unthinking warmth she extended to Robb. Even to the baby Sansa red-faced and squalling, received something from her eyes that Jon — Aegon — did not.
He met her gaze with the serene composure of a man inhabiting a child's face.
"Lady Stark," he said.
Something flickered in her eyes. It always did when he used the formal address. Children his age said my lady or nothing at all. He said Lady Stark in a tone that was, if she were being precise about it, entirely correct and yet somehow managed to carry the faint suggestion that he was humoring her.
"Come inside," she said. "It's too cold."
He glanced at his stones. Back at her. Stood without argument, because there was a kind of power in compliance when compliance was unexpected, and because he was three years old and physically incapable of meaningfully defying anyone, which was an indignity he was simply going to have to endure.
He'd been reassessing timelines since the vision. He had time. The cave would wait.
Dark Sister waited a century in the dark already. She can wait a few more years.
He followed Catelyn inside, and she kept precisely two steps ahead of him the entire way — not enough to seem like she was fleeing, enough to ensure she didn't have to walk beside him — and he catalogued this as he catalogued everything: dispassionately, without hurt, with the cold interest of someone studying a problem they intended, eventually, to solve.
He had his father's face.
This was the fact that made Catelyn's position simultaneously understandable and irrelevant. Whatever story she told herself — and he was sure it was a clean story, a proper one, because Catelyn Stark was nothing if not rigorous in her self-narratives — the evidence of her eyes contradicted it daily. Not Ned's face. Not the long Stark face with its grey northern gravity.
Aegon Targaryen's face. His grandfather's. Old Valyria's face, transplanted into Winterfell's cold.
Ned had dyed his hair. Dark enough, carefully enough, that in low light it read as deep brown rather than silver-white. But the roots came in pale and had to be managed, and in summer sunlight the truth was visible at the edges. The eyes were harder — Ned had found no solution for the eyes, which were the precise violet of amethyst, and which no Stark had ever possessed. Catelyn looked at them as little as possible. Even Ned, who looked at them plenty, did so carefully — with the expression of a man confirming something he already knew and had not yet decided how to carry.
When he thought no one was watching, he would watch his ward — his bastard, to the world's knowing — with an expression that landed somewhere between fierce love and consuming guilt. Marcus had catalogued that too. Filed it under useful. Because Ned Stark's guilt was, in its way, the most honest thing about him, and honest men with specific guilts were more predictable than most.
He did love the man, after a fashion. Not like a father — he'd had one of those, and the relationship had been warm and uncomplicated and nothing like this. What he felt for Ned Stark was closer to respect. The specific respect you extend to someone doing an almost impossible thing with as much integrity as the situation permits.
He is keeping me alive, in a world that would kill me if it knew my name. He does not understand why I sometimes look at him like I am measuring the distance between now and a future he cannot see.
That was fine. He didn't need to understand yet.
That night, lying in his bed while Winterfell settled into its nighttime sounds around him — the wind off the moors, the distant sound of a watchman's boots on the battlement, the snoring of the boy in the next room who was Robb Stark, his cousin-brother, the person in this world he felt something closest to genuine uncomplicated warmth for — he let his mind run along the shape of things.
The cave. The cave beyond the Wall, he was almost certain, though distance was strange in the visions — compressed, impressionistic. Bloodraven had been Lord Commander once before he vanished on a ranging. He would have taken the sword. He would have taken everything worth keeping.
Dark Sister. Bloodraven's blade in the end, though Visenya had carried her first. Left in the dark beside a dragon's egg that pulsed with faint heat, waiting for Targaryen blood warm enough to remember it.
He had time. He was three. He couldn't exactly announce himself to the court of the realm and begin immediately prosecuting his claim. That was not the move. The move was patience — the long patience of someone who can see far enough ahead to know that running is slower than waiting for the right moment.
I know what's coming. He stared at the dark ceiling. Winter. The Long Night. Conflict layered on conflict. And now, underneath all of that, a world with more magic than it had before. Older things. Sharper edges.
Good.
He turned his head and looked at the faint silver at the edge of his wrapped hair in the dark. Felt the weight of a name the world didn't know yet.
Aegon Targaryen, he thought. Sixth of his name. Or first of the next empire. Details.
Outside, snow was beginning to fall.
He watched it through the narrow window until his eyes grew heavy, and just before sleep took him, a fragment of future passed through him like smoke through glass — not a clear image, just a shape. Something vast. Something patient. Something that had been waiting in the dark for a very long time and had, recently, begun to stir.
He should have been afraid.
He was, instead, interested.
Sleep now, he told himself. Kings don't get to be children for long.
He was asleep within the minute, and did not dream.