Chapter 1 : NEW PLAYER
The last thing he remembered was headlights.
Not poetic. Not cinematic. Just a white-bright flash cutting through rain on a Philadelphia highway, the crunch of metal folding where metal should never fold, and a pain so brief it barely registered before everything went black.
Twenty-eight years. Gone in a blink of high-beams.
Then—
Air punched into lungs that weren't his. Edric Thorne bolted upright in a bed he'd never touched, in a room he'd never entered, and screamed into a fist he pressed against his mouth.
Wrong hands. Too young. The calluses were in the wrong places — not from a keyboard, but from gripping leather reins and writing with a quill. His body was lean where it should have been soft, shorter by an inch, and buzzing with a vitality that a man who'd eaten fast food three times a week had no business feeling.
Candlelight. Not a lamp. Not LED strips. A tallow candle guttering in an iron holder bolted to a timber wall.
His breath came fast. The room was small — a rented chamber above what sounded, from the noise bleeding through the floorboards, like a tavern. Straw mattress. Wooden shutters. A ceramic pitcher of water on a stool.
"I'm dead."
The thought arrived with the certainty of a door slamming shut. He was dead. He'd died on I-76 in the rain, and now he was—
A sound inside his skull. Not a voice yet. A vibration, like a tuning fork struck against bone.
[BINDING SEQUENCE INITIATED]
[HOST DETECTED — VITALS CONFIRMED — NEURAL BRIDGE FORMING]
The words burned across his vision in pale gold script, hovering in the air like someone had written on the inside of his eyelids. He flinched. Swatted at nothing.
[PLEASE REMAIN CALM. INVOLUNTARY DEATH IS DISORIENTING. VOLUNTARY DEATH IS WORSE.]
"What—"
[I AM THE SHADOW THRONE PROTOCOL.]
The voice arrived fully formed now, speaking directly into the center of his mind. Smooth. Cultured. The tone of a man who found the suffering of others mildly entertaining and occasionally educational.
[SOME MIGHT CALL ME A BLESSING OF THE OLD GODS, OR A CURSE FROM THE LORD OF LIGHT. WHAT YOU CALL ME MATTERS LITTLE.]
Edric's fingers dug into the straw mattress. His heart — this new, unfamiliar heart — hammered against ribs he didn't recognize.
[WHAT MATTERS IS THIS: I OFFER YOU A LADDER. CHAOS IS THAT LADDER. THE CLIMB IS ALL THERE IS. WOULD YOU LIKE HELP CLIMBING OVER THE BODIES?]
"Old gods. Lord of Light. Chaos is a ladder."
His stomach dropped three floors.
"No," he whispered. "No, no, no—"
He threw himself off the bed, caught his foot on a chamber pot, crashed into the wall, and staggered to the window. Fumbled with the latch. Threw the shutters open.
King's Landing spread below him like a wound.
Torchlight dotted the hillside in amber constellations. The stink hit first — shit and woodsmoke and something sour underneath — then the view resolved. Thatched roofs. Muddy lanes. And there, crowning Aegon's Hill like a fist raised against the dark, the Red Keep.
Not a set. Not CGI. Stone and mortar and centuries of accumulated power, lit from within by a thousand flames.
[THE SEVEN KINGDOMS OF WESTEROS. SEASON ONE HAS NOT YET BEGUN. APPROXIMATELY SIX MONTHS REMAIN BEFORE THE HAND OF THE KING DIES AND THE BOARD IS SET IN MOTION.]
Edric gripped the windowsill until his knuckles went white. The wood was rough. Real. Splinters pressed into his palms.
[YOUR PREDECESSOR — THE ORIGINAL OWNER OF THAT BODY — DIED OF A FEVER THREE DAYS AGO. THE INN HAS NOT YET NOTICED. I TOOK THE LIBERTY OF KEEPING THE LUNGS BREATHING UNTIL A SUITABLE REPLACEMENT ARRIVED.]
"A suitable—" He turned from the window. Caught his reflection in the water pitcher. Brown hair, cropped short. A forgettable face with watchful eyes.
[YOU DIED ON A HIGHWAY. I RETRIEVED YOU. THE DETAILS ARE PROPRIETARY. WHAT MATTERS NOW IS FUNCTION.]
The golden text reformed, expanded. A translucent panel materialized in his peripheral vision — there and not there, like a thought he could see.
[SHADOW THRONE PROTOCOL — STATUS]
[HOST: EDRIC THORNE] [CLASS: NOVICE SCHEMER] [LEVEL: 1 | EXP: 0/500]
[PRIMARY ATTRIBUTES:] [CUNNING: 10 | PERCEPTION: 8 | INFLUENCE: 5] [COMPOSURE: 7 | NETWORK: 3 | CONTINGENCY: 6]
[CORE FUNCTION UNLOCKED: SCHEME WEAVING — DESIGN, TRACK, AND EXECUTE MULTI-LAYERED PLOTS] [LATENT ABILITY: SHADOW STEP — LOCKED (EMERGENCY TRIGGER ONLY)]
[ULTIMATE OBJECTIVE: CONTROL ALL SEVEN KINGDOMS FROM THE SHADOWS]
[NOT AS KING. AS THE POWER BEHIND EVERY THRONE.]
Edric sank onto the edge of the bed. The straw creaked beneath him.
The System — because that's what this was, he'd read enough web novels to recognize a System when one crawled inside his brain — waited with what he could only describe as patient amusement.
"Scheme Weaving," he said quietly.
[THE CORNERSTONE ABILITY. EVERY ACTION SHOULD SERVE AT LEAST THREE PURPOSES. IF IT ONLY ACCOMPLISHES ONE THING, YOU HAVE WASTED AN OPPORTUNITY.]
"And Shadow Step?"
[A SPATIAL DISPLACEMENT FUNCTION. CURRENTLY LOCKED. IT WILL AWAKEN WHEN YOUR SURVIVAL DEMANDS IT — OR WHEN YOU BECOME INTERESTING ENOUGH TO WARRANT THE INVESTMENT. WHICHEVER COMES FIRST.]
He pressed his palms against his eyes. Drew one long breath. Then another.
He was in Westeros. In a dead man's body. With a voice in his head that sounded like Littlefinger and Varys had a baby and raised it on manipulation and wine.
[I PREFER 'CULTIVATED STRATEGIC ADVISOR,' BUT I WILL ACCEPT THE COMPARISON.]
"It reads my thoughts."
[ONLY THE LOUD ONES. YOU THINK VERY LOUDLY. WE WILL WORK ON THAT.]
A knock at the door. Edric flinched hard enough to bite his tongue.
"Oi," came a gruff voice through the wood. "You alive in there? Thought I heard a man dyin'."
The innkeeper. Edric's — no, the original Edric's — fragmentary memories offered a name: Willam. Fat. Suspicious. Owed two nights' payment.
"Fine," Edric called back, pitching his voice to match what little he could pull from the host's memories. Rougher than his own. A Crownlands accent. "Bad dream."
A grunt. Footsteps retreating.
[TUTORIAL QUEST ASSIGNED]
[GATHER 3 PIECES OF USEFUL INFORMATION WITHIN 24 HOURS]
[REWARD: 75 EXP, SYSTEM MAP ACCESS]
[THE GAME BEGINS WITH KNOWING THE BOARD. WHO ARE YOU? WHEN IS THIS? AND WHO IS ALREADY WATCHING?]
Edric's stomach growled. Loud. Insistent. The body hadn't eaten in three days — apparently being dead and then un-dead burned calories.
He dug through the host's belongings. A leather pouch held three copper coins. Worn traveler's clothes. No weapons. No letters. No clue who Edric Thorne actually was beyond fragments: third son, minor house, King's Landing, disappointment.
"Great starting position."
[I AGREE COMPLETELY. NO ONE WATCHES THOSE AT THE BOTTOM. THAT IS WHERE EMPIRES BEGIN.]
He dressed. Went downstairs. The common room was half-empty — a handful of merchants nursing cups, a woman arguing with her husband over the price of candles. Willam the innkeeper stood behind the bar, wiping a mug with a rag that only redistributed the grime.
"Stew," Edric said, dropping a copper on the counter.
Willam grunted, ladled something thick and brown into a wooden bowl, and slid it across.
Edric carried it to a corner table. Sat with his back to the wall — an instinct that wasn't his, pulled from the dead man's muscle memory.
The first bite hit him like religion.
Mutton. Carrots. Some root vegetable he couldn't name. No preservatives, no chemicals, no flavor enhancers needed because the ingredients were actual food grown in actual soil. The broth was rich with rendered fat and herbs.
He ate like a man who'd forgotten what eating was. Scraped the bowl with his fingers. Licked them clean. Willam watched from the bar with the bored contempt of a man who'd seen worse.
[BIOLOGICAL NEEDS ADDRESSED. DISORIENTATION FADING. COGNITIVE FUNCTION IMPROVING.]
[A SUGGESTION, HOST: THE MERCHANTS AT THE FAR TABLE ARE DISCUSSING TRADE ROUTES. THE WOMAN NEAR THE FIRE IS COMPLAINING ABOUT HER LORD'S TAX COLLECTOR. BOTH CONVERSATIONS CONTAIN INTELLIGENCE VALUE.]
[INFORMATION IS CURRENCY. AND YOU ARE VERY, VERY POOR.]
Edric set the bowl down. Wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.
Six months. Six months before Jon Arryn drank his last cup of poisoned wine, before Robert Baratheon rode north to beg Ned Stark into a death sentence, before a golden-haired boy pushed a child from a tower and set the world on fire.
He had six months to become someone who could survive what was coming.
[WHEN YOU PLAY THE GAME OF THRONES, YOU WIN OR YOU DIE. THERE IS NO MIDDLE GROUND.]
[YOUR MOVE.]
Edric stood, picked up his empty bowl, and walked toward the merchants' table with a friendly, forgettable smile already forming on his face.