Chapter Text

Part 1: The Cold Awakening

Cold.

Not the sterile chill of hospital air conditioning. Not the creeping Seattle damp that seeped through old windows. This was different. This was violence made physical, driving into my chest like a fist of ice, squeezing lungs that wouldn't expand.

I tried to gasp. Nothing happened. My throat was filled with something thick and wet, tasting of copper and salt, and my chest was a locked door with no key.

Breathe. Breathe, you idiot, BREATHE—

My body spasmed. A reflex, not a decision. I thrashed against restraints that didn't exist, arms flailing through cold air, legs kicking at nothing. The movements were wrong. Uncoordinated. My limbs felt like they belonged to someone else, heavy and light at the same time, responding to commands half a second too late.

Something struck my back. Hard. Pain and shock jolted through me, and suddenly air was rushing in, searing like acid down my throat. I coughed—or tried to. Fluid came up. The world dissolved into grey stone and flickering orange light, all of it blurred and swimming.

I screamed.

"Wah," I said. "Waaaaah." What came out was thin. High. Wavering. Nothing like the voice I expected.

What the fuck—

"A son, my Lord." A woman's voice, rough with exhaustion. "A quiet one, but he lives."

Lives?

I tried to blink. My eyelids were gummed shut, crusted with something I didn't want to think about. When I finally forced them open, the world was a smear of shadows and flame. No detail. No depth. Just shapes moving against grey.

I was lifted. The sensation was vertigo incarnate—stomach-dropping freefall combined with a nauseating spin. I was passed from warm hands to rougher ones, enormous and calloused, holding me like a sack of grain.

"He is small." A voice from somewhere above. Deep. Male. Bass that resonated in the chest. "Smaller than Brandon was."

The name floated past me, meaningless. I couldn't think. Couldn't process. The cold was biting at my exposed skin and I was naked, I realized—naked and wet and being handled like an object.

"He is healthy, Rickard." The woman's voice again, sharp now. Protective. "Give him here."

I was lowered into warmth. Soft skin. A heartbeat, strong and steady, thudding against what I realized with dawning horror was my ear. My ear that was pressed against flesh. Because I was small enough to be held against someone's chest like—

No.

I curled into the warmth instinctively, my body acting without permission from my mind. The scent of milk and sweat filled my nose. Lavender, maybe. Something floral beneath the organic smell of exertion and blood.

Hospital. I was in a hospital. The machines, the beeping, Sarah holding my hand—

The memory slid away before I could grasp it.

"What will you name him?" the deep voice asked.

A hand stroked my head. Enormous. Calloused but gentle. My skull felt soft under her touch, fragile, like it hadn't finished forming.

Because it hasn't.

The thought came from somewhere far away, clinical and cold. Not my thought. Someone else's thought, in my mind.

"Eddard," the woman whispered. "Eddard Stark."

The words washed over me. Names. Just names. They meant nothing through the fog of exhaustion and terror and cold. The world was narrowing to a point—warmth against my cheek, heartbeat in my ear, voices fading into meaningless sound.

I tried to scream again. Tried to thrash, to fight, to do anything except sink into the darkness that was rising up to swallow me.

What came out was a thin wail that might have been a protest or might have been a baby crying because that's what babies do.

"He has a set of lungs on him after all," the deep voice said. Amusement in the bass rumble.

The woman's hand continued stroking my too-soft skull. The warmth was pulling me under. The terror had nowhere to go—it just coiled in my chest, tight and suffocating, as my tiny body betrayed me and my eyes slid closed despite my desperate need to understand what was happening.

My last conscious thought wasn't a thought at all. Just a question, echoing in the fading darkness:

Where am I?

Part 2: Fragments

Time was broken.

That was my first real understanding. Time didn't flow anymore. It shattered into fragments—sharp-edged pieces that cut me every time I tried to fit them together.

I would surface into something like consciousness for minutes at a time, just long enough to feel the horror of my situation before the animal needs of this wrong body dragged me back under. Hungry. Wet. Cold. The hindbrain took over, and whatever remained of the adult mind dissolved like mist.

In one fragment, I'm staring at rough-hewn timber beams, dark with age and smoke. The ceiling is too close. I'm in a box—no, a crib. Wooden slats surround me.

The panic starts to rise.

Exhaustion smothers it before it can catch fire.

In another, there's a face above me. A woman. Dark hair, grey eyes, exhausted but smiling. She's singing something in a language I don't recognize—guttural, rolling, nothing like English.

I try to memorize the sounds. It's something to do. Something to hold onto.

Another fragment: Pain. My gums ache with deep, throbbing pressure. I'm gnawing on something—a carved wooden ring, worn smooth. It helps, but not enough.

Teething. I'm teething.

The absurdity of it almost makes me laugh. Almost. But this throat doesn't know how to laugh yet. It only knows how to cry.

In the quiet moments—usually at night, when the only sound was wind howling outside stone walls—the memories surfaced.

Not memories of this place. The other memories. The real ones.

They came up like bodies in floodwater. Random. Fragmentary. Not in any order that made sense.

The hospital. A woman sitting beside the bed—Sarah—her hand in mine, both of us pretending the numbers on the monitor weren't getting worse. The oncologist, with his careful, practiced sympathy. Signing the DNR because I was an engineer and I understood when a system was beyond repair.

The pain at the end. God, the pain. The morphine helped, but it made everything distant, like watching through frosted glass.

And then nothing. Just void.

And then cold, and screaming, and this.

My name surfaced one night with absolute clarity.

Michael Chen.

It felt like putting on an old coat. The fit was right, even if the body wearing it was wrong.

Age forty-three. PhD in mechanical engineering from MIT. Specialization in lean manufacturing, materials science, pre-industrial production systems.

The facts lined up in neat rows. Procedural memory, they called it. The knowledge was intact. The formula for stoichiometric combustion. The specific heat capacity of water. The process for making steel—carbon content, quenching, tempering.

All of it there. Perfect. Untouched.

Locked in a body that can't even hold its own head up.

I stared at the dark beams above my crib, running calculations in my head because it was the only thing I could do. Thermal conductivity of granite. Load-bearing capacity of timber joists. The inefficiency of open-flame lighting.

Think of it as a hardware problem, I told myself. You're a cutting-edge processor running on a system that's still booting up. Patience. It'll come online eventually.

The rationalization didn't help.

Words began separating themselves from the babble of voices around me. Sounds became language.

"Ned." They called me Ned.

"Brandon." That name came up constantly. Laughter, usually. Or exasperation.

"Lord Stark." Always with weight. Respect.

I catalogued the sounds. The patterns. The way different voices shaped the same words. There was a system here, a language, a world I didn't understand yet.

Where am I?

When am I?

The questions circled endlessly, unanswerable. The stone was wrong. The lighting was wrong. Everything smelled like smoke and animals and unwashed bodies. No electricity. No machines. No hospital.

Somewhere medieval. Somewhere impossible.

But I was too exhausted, too fragmented, to follow the thought to its conclusion.

The darkness came up again, and I let it take me.

Part 3: The Terrible Recognition

The moment of clarity came without warning.

I was being carried—not unusual; I spent most of my time being transported like fragile cargo. But this time I was awake, truly awake, not just surfacing for a few seconds before drowning in exhaustion again.

The corridors were stone. Grey granite, rough-cut but fitted with impressive precision. No mortar visible between the massive blocks—just pressure-fitting, load distributed through careful engineering. The walls were thick, eight feet at least judging by the window embrasures. Defensive architecture. Built to withstand siege.

Medieval, the engineer in me noted. Pre-industrial. No glass in the windows. No evidence of concrete. Impressive craftsmanship for the technology level.

Torches burned in iron sconces, casting dancing shadows. The air smelled of smoke and old stone and something organic—animals, maybe, or just centuries of habitation ground into the very walls.

We turned a corner.

A tapestry hung on the wall, and in my heightened clarity, I saw it perfectly.

A wolf. Grey, stylized, running across a field of white. The stitching was expert, the dyes rich even in the flickering torchlight.

Something stirred in the back of my mind. A twinge. A whisper.

I know that symbol.

We passed another tapestry. The same wolf, rampant this time, jaws open in a silent howl.

The stirring became an itch. A pressure building behind my eyes.

"Almost there, little lord," the woman carrying me murmured.

We entered a room—large, dominated by a carved wooden bed that could sleep four people. Furs piled everywhere. A fire crackled in a hearth large enough to roast a pig.

And above the hearth, carved directly into the stone:

A direwolf.

The same beast. The same sigil. And now, finally, I recognized it.

House Stark.

The word surfaced from somewhere deep—not my memories of the hospital, not my memories of Sarah or the lab or Seattle. Somewhere else. Somewhere I'd filed away as fiction, as entertainment, as late nights in grad school watching a TV show I shouldn't have cared about.

House Stark. Winterfell. The North.

My heart—this tiny, too-fast heart—stuttered.

No. No, that's not—

But the memories were coming now, breaking through whatever wall had held them back. Not Michael Chen's memories. Not my real life.

The other memories. The story memories.

A book I'd read on a flight to Boston. A show I'd binged during chemo when I couldn't sleep. A world I'd dismissed as fantasy, as escape, as fiction.

The names crashed together in my mind.

Eddard. They named me Eddard.

Eddard Stark.

Ned Stark.

The character. The honorable fool. The protagonist who didn't survive his own story.

I made a sound—not a cry, something worse. A keen, high and involuntary, torn from my throat.

"Oh, little one," the woman said, settling me into a cradle beside the fire. "What troubles you so?"

Everything. Everything troubles me.

Because if I was Eddard Stark, then I knew what was coming. Not vague, distant possibilities. Certainties. Facts. Events as immutable as the periodic table.

Brandon Stark. My brother. Wild, charming, beloved. The heir who would ride to King's Landing in a rage and demand Prince Rhaegar come out and die. The heir who would be fitted with a Tyroshi strangling device and forced to watch his father burn alive, struggling to reach a sword that was always just out of reach. Strangling himself trying to save a man who was already dead.

Rickard Stark. My father. The man whose deep voice I'd heard at my birth. Cooked alive in his own armor while his son choked six feet away.

Dead. Both of them. Dead before I would be twenty years old.

And that was only the beginning.

Lyanna. My sister, not yet born. Beautiful, fierce, doomed. She would die in a tower in Dorne, bleeding out on a bed of blood and roses, making me promise to protect her son.

Robb. My son, not yet conceived. He would wear a crown and die with a knife in his back at his own uncle's wedding.

Sansa. My daughter. Tortured. Abused. Sold.

Arya. My daughter. Lost. Forced to become a killer to survive.

Bran. My son. Crippled. Transformed into something inhuman.

Rickon. My son. Dead before he had a chance to grow up.

Jon. The nephew I would raise as my bastard, bearing the shame, carrying the secret, watching him suffer for a lie I would tell every day of his life.

And me. Eddard Stark. Executed on the steps of the Great Sept of Baelor, the last thing I would see being my daughter screaming in the crowd.

I'm going to watch all of them die.

The thought was crushing. Physical. Like a weight pressing down on this tiny chest, squeezing air out of lungs that barely knew how to breathe.

The woman—the servant, the nursemaid, whoever she was—lifted me again, rocking me against her shoulder. "Hush, little lord. Hush now."

But I couldn't hush. The horror was too complete. I was trapped in the body of an infant, in a story I knew ended in blood and fire and ice and the long dark, with perfect knowledge of every tragedy to come and no ability to stop any of it.

I couldn't speak. I couldn't walk. I couldn't even control when I pissed myself.

Twenty years, something whispered in the back of my mind. You have twenty years.

The thought cut through the flood of despair like a blade.

Twenty years before Brandon rides south.

Twenty years before Father answers that fatal summons.

Twenty years before everything falls apart.

Unless you change it.

I stopped keening. The nursemaid paused, surprised by the sudden silence.

"There now," she said uncertainly. "Better?"

I wasn't better. I wasn't anywhere close to better. But something had shifted in my chest. The horror hadn't diminished, but it had... focused. Compressed. Crystallized into something harder.

I'm an engineer, I thought. Engineers solve problems. We take broken systems and we fix them. We take constraints and work within them. We turn disasters into designs.

This body was a constraint. This timeline was a parameter. This world was a system with flaws I could see and knowledge I could use.

Twenty years to build something better. Twenty years to save them.

The nursemaid settled me back into the cradle. The fire crackled. Outside, wind howled against stone walls that had stood for eight thousand years.

I stared at the direwolf carved above the hearth. The grey beast with its jaws open, frozen in eternal warning.

I'm going to save you, I promised the carving, the castle, the family that didn't know what was coming. All of you. I'm going to change everything.

Part 4: The Knowledge Prison

The days blurred together into a grey monotony of helplessness.

I would wake in my crib, stare at the beams above me, and run through calculations in my head because it was all I could do. Thermal conductivity of granite: 1.7 to 4.0 W/m-K. Tensile strength of wrought iron: 40,000 psi. The stoichiometric ratio of oxygen to carbon in combustion: 2.67 to 1.

The knowledge was perfect. Pristine. Forty-three years of education and experience, indexed and cross-referenced in a mind that couldn't express any of it.

Knowledge prison. That's what I called it, lying there in the endless hours between feedings. I had everything I needed to transform this world—metallurgy, chemistry, agriculture, medicine, engineering—and I couldn't even ask for a glass of water.

The frustration was a constant companion. Not the sharp kind, not rage. Something duller. Heavier. The frustration of a man watching a building collapse in slow motion, knowing exactly how to stop it, screaming into a void that couldn't hear.

I learned to observe. It was the only productive thing I could do.

The room first. Nursery, obviously. Stone walls, thick and ancient—the heating channels in this wing must have silted up centuries ago, because I could feel cold radiating from them even bundled in furs. The fire helped, but the heat dissipated too quickly. No air gap. No secondary barrier.

Double-wall construction, I thought automatically. Or pack the cavity with straw. Anything to improve the R-value.

But I couldn't draw the design. Couldn't explain the principle. Couldn't do anything except lie there and catalog the inefficiency.

The castle beyond. Winterfell. I pieced it together from glimpses during my transportations—being carried through corridors, across courtyards, into various rooms. Massive. Sprawling. Granite walls eighty feet high in places. Hot springs somewhere beneath, judging by the steam that rose from certain areas. A functioning medieval settlement with all the infrastructure that implied: stables, kennels, smithy, kitchens, granaries, barracks.

Systems, the engineer in me noted. Interconnected systems. Food production. Water management. Waste disposal. Security. Governance. All of it running on knowledge that hasn't changed in centuries.

All of it improvable, if I could just communicate.

The people were harder to observe, but I learned them too.

My mother—Lyarra Stark—was everywhere at once. Managing servants, directing food preparation, settling disputes, comforting children. She wore grey and white, her dark hair often covered with a simple cloth. Her hands were never still.

She would come to the nursery several times a day. Feed me. Change me. Sing those strange songs in the Old Tongue that I still couldn't understand but was beginning to recognize. She loved me—loved this baby she thought was her son—with a fierceness that made something in my chest ache.

I'm not really him, I thought, watching her face as she hummed. I'm a stranger wearing your son like a mask.

The guilt was present. Constant. I tried not to examine it too closely.

My father—Rickard Stark—was a rarer presence. He would stand over the crib maybe once a day, looking down at me with an expression I couldn't quite read. Assessment, maybe. Calculation.

I was the spare. The second son. Brandon was the sun this household orbited. I was the moon—important if the sun went out, but not the main event.

Good, I thought. Second sons have freedom that heirs don't. Room to work. Room to experiment.

Assuming I lived long enough to use it.

And then there was Brandon.

Two years old, nearly three. A whirlwind of energy and noise. He would burst into the nursery at random intervals, usually escaping whatever poor servant was supposed to be watching him, and slam his pudgy hands against my crib.

"Baby!" he would announce.

Yes, Brandon. Baby. Your brother who knows how you die.

"Ned. Baby Ned."

He would poke a finger through the slats, trying to touch my face. I would grab it—the palmar grasp reflex, one of the few things I could do reliably. He would laugh and try to pull away.

I held on.

"My brother," he would say eventually, voice dropping to something almost reverent.

Yes, I thought at him, knowing he couldn't hear. Your brother. The one who's going to spend the next eighteen years trying to save your life.

He'd yank his finger free and run off to terrorize something else. I'd lie there, staring at the ceiling, adding another item to the mental list of things I needed to change.

Teach Brandon caution. Somehow. Make him think before he acts.

Before it kills him.

Late at night, when the castle was quiet, I would plan.

Not detailed plans. I couldn't write anything down. Couldn't diagram. Couldn't build prototypes. Just broad strokes, categories, priorities.

First: Survive. Master the body. Build credibility as a clever child without seeming unnatural. Plant seeds. Ask questions. Watch.

Second: Demonstrate. Small improvements. Things people can see and touch. Earn trust. Build a reputation as someone who solves problems.

Third: Infrastructure. Better agriculture. Better metallurgy. Better medicine. Start at Winterfell, spread through the North, build the foundation for surviving what was coming.

Fourth: Relationships. Brandon needed caution. Father needed to understand the South was dangerous. The alliances would matter. The marriages would matter. Everything would matter.

The timeline was brutal. Eleven years until the Eyrie, where I'd be fostered with Robert Baratheon. Eighteen years until Harrenhal. Twenty years until Brandon rode south.

Not enough time. Never enough time.

But it was what I had.

I stared at the dark ceiling and felt the knowledge pressing against the inside of my skull, desperate to escape, trapped behind infant lips that couldn't form words.

Patience, I told myself. This is just a constraint. A design parameter.

The body will develop. And when it does—

When it does, I'm going to remake this world.

Part 5: Six Months

At six months—or what I assumed was six months—I could sit up if propped against something. I could grab objects deliberately. I could track movement with my eyes.

I could finally see.

Winterfell was far larger than the show had suggested. The Great Keep was just the center of a sprawling complex: stables, smithies, kennels, storehouses, barracks, all enclosed within massive granite walls. And everywhere, people. Servants and guards and craftsmen and smallfolk from the winter town who came to trade or petition.

The castle hummed with activity. Systems within systems, all of them running on knowledge centuries old, all of them improvable.

One thing at a time, I reminded myself. Crawl before you walk. Literally.

I learned my family in sharper detail now that I could actually focus on faces.

Mother's grey eyes had flecks of darker grey near the pupils. Crow's feet at the corners—she smiled often. Her hands were callused on the palms and inside the fingers, the mark of someone who worked instead of just directing.

She sang to me in the Old Tongue every evening. I was beginning to pick out individual words, mapping sounds to apparent meanings. Language acquisition, the one advantage of a developing brain. I'd never been good at languages as an adult. Maybe this time would be different.

"Ma-ma," she would sound out, exaggerating the lip movements.

I tried. What came out was closer to "Ahhh-ahh."

She smiled anyway, delighted.

The guilt twisted, but I smiled back. Or tried to. Infant faces don't cooperate well with deliberate expression.

Father was harder to read. His face gave nothing away—decades of Northern stoicism carved into features that looked like they'd been chipped from the same granite as the castle walls.

He visited less often now that I wasn't actively dying. But when he came, he would lift me with those enormous hands and study me like I was a problem to be solved.

"You have the Stark look," he said once. "Grey eyes. Long face. Solemn like your grandfather."

I'm solemn because I'm a middle-aged man trapped in an infant body with knowledge of impending family annihilation.

"Brandon has the wolf blood," he continued. "He'll need a steady brother to balance him."

Brandon needs someone to keep him alive.

"Good lad," Father said, and returned me to the crib.

I watched him leave, cataloging what I'd learned. He saw me as a tool already. The spare. The balance. That was useful. It meant expectations would be different. It meant I'd have room to be strange without threatening the succession.

Second son advantages. Note for later.

Brandon came every day now, sometimes multiple times. He'd graduated from just poking at me through the crib slats to actually climbing in with me, which the servants found alternately adorable and terrifying.

"Brother," he'd say, settling beside me with the casual physicality of a toddler who hadn't learned personal space. "Baby Ned. My brother."

He would show me things. A stick. A rock. Once, memorably, a live frog that had seemed deeply offended by the experience.

"Mine," he'd declare, holding up whatever trophy he'd found. Then, reconsidering: "Ours. Brothers share."

He was wild. Fearless. Already bigger than most children his age, already showing the athletic grace that would make him a formidable warrior. The servants loved him. Father doted on him in his distant way.

And in eighteen years, he would ride to King's Landing alone, driven by rage and love for his sister, and die screaming.

"Ned?" Brandon's face appeared in my field of vision, upside down. "Why you sad?"

Because I know how your story ends.

I couldn't say that. Couldn't say anything yet. So I grabbed his tunic instead, the way I always did.

He laughed. "Grabby! Ned is grabby."

I'm not letting go, I thought, almost surprised at the absolute love I felt for this little boy, my older brother. I'm going to save you.

He pulled free and tumbled out of the crib to chase a dog that had wandered too close to the nursery.

I watched him go, already wild, already reckless.

Eighteen years to teach him caution. Starting now.

How do you teach a hurricane to be patient?

Part 6: One Year

"Ma-ma."

The word came out clear. Not an approximation. Not a babble. Actual speech.

Lyarra's face transformed. Joy so pure it was almost painful to witness.

"Ned! Oh, my sweet boy!"

She pulled me close, laughing, and the guilt crashed over me like a wave.

I'm not your sweet boy, I thought, even as my arms wrapped around her neck. I'm a forty-three-year-old man wearing your son's body like a costume. I'm a fraud. A cuckoo in your nest.

But god help me, I loved her anyway.

Not the distant, intellectual kind of love. Not recognition that she was important or useful. Real love, the kind that hurt, grown over twelve months of her caring for me when I was helpless. Feeding me. Holding me through the nightmares. Singing me to sleep in a dead language while the wind howled outside.

She was my mother. The realization of it was almost more than I could bear.

"Say it again," she urged, eyes bright.

"Ma-ma."

She hugged me tighter. "My clever boy. My Ned."

At one year old, I could walk if I held onto things. I could speak simple words. I could manipulate objects with reasonable precision.

I was finally becoming useful.

I spent hours exploring the nursery, touching everything, testing how objects worked. The servants probably thought it was normal infant curiosity.

Wooden blocks. Carved smooth. Alder or pine—light wood, easy to work. No splinters. Good craftsmanship.

Wool blanket. Rough weave. Undyed. The lanolin's still present—not fully processed. Could be better.

Stone floor. Granite, local probably. Cold—the hot spring channels don't reach this room, or they're clogged. The thermal mass is bleeding heat into the earth instead of retaining it.

Everything was a puzzle. Everything was data. I was building a map of this world one observation at a time.

Mother found me by the nursery window one afternoon, staring out at the courtyard.

"What do you see, little one?"

I pointed at the stables. "Horsss."

"Horses," she corrected gently.

I pointed at the smithy. Smoke rose from the chimney, thick and dark. "Hot."

"Yes, the forge is hot. Mikken is working."

Mikken. The name lodged in my memory. The blacksmith. Critical, eventually, for metallurgy.

I pointed at the walls, looming grey against the winter sky. "Big."

"Very big," Mother agreed. "They keep us safe."

They kept you safe for eight thousand years, I thought. And they'll fail when it matters most because you'll be fighting each other instead of the real enemy.

"Ned?" She was studying my face. "You look so serious."

I'm always serious. I'm watching my family's future murderers be born, watching the alliance networks form that will lead to slaughter, watching the clock tick toward midnight.

"See," I said instead. "Want see."

She laughed, lifting me. "Always watching, aren't you? Old Nan says you have old eyes."

If she only knew.

Winterfell smelled. That was the reality the show had never captured.

Smoke from a dozen fires—peat, pine, coal—mixing into a perpetual haze.

Animals everywhere—horses, dogs, chickens, pigs, the occasional goat wandering where it shouldn't.

Wool and leather, in various stages of processing.

Food—roasting meat, baking bread, the sharp bite of root vegetables.

And people. Bodies that bathed weekly if they were lucky, wearing wool that held every odor it had ever encountered.

It was overwhelming. It was medieval.

It was real.

Not a show. Not a book. Not a fever dream. This was my life now. These were the people I had to save.

I looked out over the courtyard, at servants and soldiers and craftsmen going about their business, and felt the weight of it settle onto my shoulders.

All of them. I have to save all of them.

No. Focus. The family first. Save the family, and the rest follows.

That night, Mother rocked me by the fire.

"You're growing so fast," she murmured. "Soon you'll be running after Brandon, getting into trouble together."

Not if I can help it. Someone needs to think in this family.

"My two wolf pups," she said softly. "Wild and watchful."

She looked down at me, and her expression shifted. Something knowing in her grey eyes.

"Sometimes you look at me like you're saying goodbye," she whispered.

My breath caught.

She can't know. There's no way she can know.

But mothers knew things. They saw things that others missed.

"Ma-ma," I said, because it was all I could say. Because words were still weapons I couldn't wield.

"I know," she said, pulling me closer. "I know, little one. Whatever troubles you, we'll face it together."

I pressed my face into her shoulder and let myself, for just a moment, feel like what I was supposed to be. A child. Her child. Safe in her arms while the fire crackled and the wind howled outside.

The moment couldn't last. Nothing lasted.

But I held onto it anyway.

Part 7: Determination

Late. Past midnight. The fire had burned low, casting long shadows across the nursery ceiling.

I lay in my crib, running through the timeline in my head.

One year down. Ten until the Eyrie. Seventeen until Harrenhal. Eighteen until Brandon rides south. Nineteen until everything burns.

The numbers were abstract. Clean. They didn't capture the weight of what they represented.

Brandon, strangling himself trying to save Father.

Father, burning alive in his armor.

Lyanna, bleeding out in a tower.

And someday, children I hadn't met yet. Children who would be mine.  

But only if my brother died.

Robb. Sansa. Arya. Bran. Rickon. Jon.

I was going to have to watch them be born. Watch them grow. Love them, really love them, the way I already loved Brandon and this mother who wasn't really mine.

And then I was going to have to save them from fates I remembered in perfect, terrible detail.

No.

The word formed in my mind with absolute clarity.

Not watch. Act. Change. Build.

I was Michael Chen. PhD from MIT. Specialist in lean manufacturing, materials science, pre-industrial production systems. I had spent my entire adult life solving problems—taking broken systems and fixing them, taking constraints and working within them, turning disasters into designs.

This was just another problem. The most complicated problem I'd ever faced, yes. But still a problem. And problems had solutions.

First: Survive. Master this body. Build credibility.

Second: Demonstrate. Small improvements. Things people can see.

Third: Relationships. Brandon. Father. The alliances that matter.

Fourth: Infrastructure. Steel. Food. Medicine. Everything the North needs to survive what's coming.

Fifth: Save them. All of them. Whatever it takes.

The wind howled outside. Winter's voice, reminding me where I was. What was at stake.

I stared at the dark beams above my crib and felt the determination settle over me like armor.

Heavy. Necessary.

I'm an engineer, I thought. I solve problems.

And this is just the most complicated problem I've ever faced.

Somewhere in the castle, Brandon was sleeping. Wild. Reckless. Beloved.

Somewhere, Father was planning his Southron Ambitions, building the alliance network that would lead to catastrophe.

Somewhere, in a future that hadn't happened yet, my children were waiting to be born, to live, to die unless I changed everything.

I closed my eyes.

I'm Eddard Stark. Second son of Winterfell.

And I have work to do.

But first, I needed a nap.

Chapter Text

Part 1: First Steps

Cold stone bit into my palms.

The floor of the nursery was granite—rough-cut, worn smooth in places by centuries of feet—and I was intimately familiar with its temperature now. I had been studying it for weeks, mapping its geography from this new vantage point: the gap between flagstones where dust collected, the slight depression near the hearth where generations of servants had stood to tend the fire, the crack that ran from the crib to the door like a frozen river.

My arms trembled. My legs trembled more.

Center of gravity, the engineer whispered. Keep your weight over your base of support. Pelvis forward, shoulders back—

My body didn't care about the engineer's advice. This wasn't biomechanics anymore. This was terror.

Fourteen months old, and I was about to walk.

I'd been practicing in secret for weeks, hauling myself up on the crib slats when no one was watching, standing there with my fingers white-knuckled on the wood, feeling my legs shake like they belonged to someone else. Which, in a sense, they did. Michael Chen had run marathons. Michael Chen had hiked the Cascades with his daughter on his shoulders. Michael Chen had never thought about walking any more than he'd thought about breathing.

Now I thought about nothing else.

The crib slat was behind me. I had pushed away from it three seconds ago—an eternity—and I was standing in the middle of the nursery floor, balanced on legs that felt like wet rope, and if I didn't move right now I was going to fall.

I moved.

One step. The stone was cold under my bare foot.

Two steps. My arms windmilled. I was a drunk man crossing ice.

Three steps.

I'm walking. I'm actually—

Four steps. The world tilted. My foot caught on nothing—on air, on physics, on the fundamental impossibility of bipedal locomotion—and the floor came rushing up.

Hands caught me before I hit.

"Ned!" Mother's voice was bright with laughter, warm with joy. She swept me up, spinning me around, and I grabbed at her dress because the vertigo was overwhelming and wonderful and horrible all at once. "You're walking! My little wolf is walking!"

The door burst open.

Brandon—three years old, a whirlwind of energy and noise even at this hour—came barreling in, having presumably heard the commotion from wherever he'd been terrorizing the servants.

"Ned walks?" His grey eyes were huge. "Ned WALKS!"

Before anyone could stop him, he grabbed my hand and tugged me toward the floor. "Race me! Race me, Ned!"

"Brandon, he just learned—" Mother started.

But Brandon was already positioning himself at one end of the nursery, bouncing on his heels. "Ready? RACE!"

He took off, circling the room at full speed, a blur of limbs and determination. I stood where Mother had set me down, wobbling slightly, watching my brother run literal circles around me.

You're going to die in eighteen years, I thought at him. You're going to strangle yourself in a dungeon trying to save Father. And right now you're trying to get me to race you.

Brandon completed his circuit and skidded to a stop in front of me, grinning. "I win! Again!"

He ran another lap. Then another. On the fourth, his foot caught the same invisible obstacle mine had, and he went sprawling. He was up instantly, laughing, already running again.

"Brandon," Mother said with fond exasperation. "Slow down."

"Can't! Racing!"

I sat down heavily—deliberately this time, letting my legs fold beneath me. The floor was cold. My body was exhausted. Every muscle I possessed was informing me that standing upright was a mistake evolution had made and I should reconsider.

But something had shifted.

For fourteen months, I had been a passenger in this body. Observing. Cataloging. Running calculations in my head because it was all I could do. The knowledge prison had walls of flesh and bone and undeveloped motor neurons.

Now I could walk.

Four steps, I thought, watching Brandon zoom past again. Four pathetic, wobbling steps.

It's a start.

Brandon skidded to another stop, collapsing beside me in a heap of limbs and panting breath. "Tomorrow," he said solemnly, "you go faster."

"Faster," I agreed. The word came out clear enough now, one of a dozen I could manage.

He grinned at me—that wild, fearless grin that I was already learning to love and dread in equal measure—and ruffled my hair before scrambling up to resume his endless racing.

I watched him go. The frustration was there, a constant pressure behind my ribs. But beneath it, unexpected and fierce: hope.

The body was coming online.

Part 2: The Watchful Child

Eighteen Months Old

The Great Hall smelled of smoke and meat and the particular musk of too many people in too small a space for too many centuries.

I was perched on Mother's lap at the high table, ostensibly being a good quiet baby while Father held court. In reality, I was cataloging everything.

The fire placement first. Two great hearths, one at each end of the hall, throwing heat and light in overlapping waves. Inefficient, the engineer noted. The draft from the main doors creates a cold channel through the center of the room. A third hearth on the interior wall would eliminate—

But I couldn't redesign Winterfell's heating system. Not yet. Probably not ever. So I filed the observation away and moved on.

The servants. A woman in grey was circulating with a pitcher of ale, moving from table to table in a pattern that made no sense. Back and forth, doubling over her own path, walking three times the distance she needed to.

Inefficiency in motion, I cataloged. Systematic serving—work left to right, or inner tables to outer—would reduce steps by at least forty percent.

The record-keeping. Father's steward sat at a small desk near the dais, scratching notes on parchment as petitioners made their cases. His system appeared to be "write everything in order of occurrence." No categorization. No cross-referencing. If he needed to find a specific record from six months ago, he'd have to read through every entry since.

A filing system, I thought. Basic alphabetization would—

"He watches like a maester."

Father's voice cut through my analysis. Low, meant for Mother's ears, but I was close enough to catch it.

"Does he ever play?"

I felt Mother shift beneath me. "He's serious," she said quietly. "Like my father was."

I made myself look at the dogs under the table, where Brandon was currently wrestling with a hound twice his size. Normal baby behavior. Distraction.

But Father's gaze lingered on me.

The hall was full of people I should have been cataloging. Minor lords presenting disputes—a boundary disagreement between two villages, a merchant seeking exclusive trading rights for wool, a man accused of stealing a pig from his neighbor. Father listened to each with the same stone-faced patience, asking questions in a voice that rumbled like distant thunder.

Politics, I realized. This is my first real exposure to feudal governance.

The boundary dispute was interesting. Both parties claimed the same stream as their eastern border, which meant either the original grant was ambiguous or one of them was lying. Father sent his steward to check the records—good luck finding them in that unsorted chaos—and told them to share the water until he ruled.

Compromise as a default. Not bad. Keeps both parties invested in a real solution.

The merchant was easier. Father granted limited rights, contingent on quality and fair pricing, with review in one year. Conditional contract, probably standard for this kind of petition.

The pig thief wept and begged for mercy. Father sentenced him to ten lashes and restitution of three pigs—one to replace the stolen animal, two as penalty.

Deterrence plus compensation. The logic is sound, if brutal by modern standards.

Brandon emerged from under the table, covered in dog hair and triumphant. He'd apparently won whatever contest he'd been engaged in. The hound trailed after him, tail wagging.

"Father!" Brandon announced. "Garron is my friend now!"

The hall's attention shifted to the heir. Laughter, indulgent smiles. Brandon basked in it, already learning the weight of public regard.

I watched. Cataloged. Filed.

He's comfortable with attention. That's good—heirs need to be. But it also means he'll never learn to think before he acts. Everything he does gets applauded.

The court session wound down. Father dismissed the remaining petitioners with promises of future attention, and the hall began to empty. Servants cleared plates. The dogs were shooed back to the kennels.

As Father passed the high table, he paused. Looked down at me with those grey eyes that matched my own, that matched Brandon's, that every Stark had worn for eight thousand years.

"You'll be trouble, I think."

The words came without preamble, without context.

I stared up at him, keeping my expression as blank as an infant's should be.

"The quiet ones always are."

It was said with something like approval. Then he was gone, striding toward his solar, and I was left on Mother's lap with the certain knowledge that Rickard Stark had noticed something different about his second son.

Too observant, I warned myself. Dial it back. Be more normal.

But that was the prison, wasn't it? I couldn't pretend to be what I wasn't. I could only hope they'd explain it as something acceptable.

Outside, the wind howled against granite walls. Winter's voice, ever-present.

Part 3: Old Nan's Eyes

The nursery at night was a geography of shadows.

Firelight from the dying embers painted orange shapes on the ceiling—dancing, shifting, never the same pattern twice. I had watched them for hours, unable to sleep, running through formulas in my head because the alternative was thinking about everything I couldn't change.

Combustion efficiency. Incomplete burning produces carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide, water vapor, and particulates. The smoke that curls in the corners is wasted fuel—

A shadow moved in the doorway.

I froze. My infant instincts, still stronger than I liked, wanted to cry out. My adult mind forced stillness, watching.

The shadow resolved into a woman. Stooped, moving with the careful deliberation of someone whose joints predicted weather. She wore grey wool—of course she did, everything in Winterfell was grey wool—and her white hair was bound in a braid that hung to her waist.

Old Nan.

She wasn't truly old. Fifty, perhaps fifty-five. But there was something ancient about her, something that had nothing to do with years. As if she'd been born old and the rest of her body was simply catching up.

She moved to Brandon's crib first. Checked on him with the efficiency of long practice—a hand on his chest to feel the breathing, a tug on his blanket to ensure he was covered. Brandon slept like the dead, mouth open, limbs sprawled in every direction.

Then she turned to me.

Our eyes met in the firelight. Grey on grey. Two Stark-colored gazes across a room that suddenly felt smaller.

"You're awake." It wasn't a question.

I didn't answer. Couldn't answer, not really—my vocabulary was still measured in individual words, carefully hoarded and rationed.

"Always watching, this one." She said it to no one in particular. Perhaps to herself. Perhaps to the gods she prayed to.

She settled into the chair by the fire, the one Mother used for nursing, and stared into the embers. For a long moment, neither of us moved.

Then she began to speak.

"The Night's King," she said, "was the thirteenth Lord Commander of the Night's Watch."

Her voice had changed. Taken on a cadence, a rhythm—the singsong of a tale told a thousand times until the words were worn smooth as river stones.

"He was a warrior who knew no fear. A man who should have been a king. But he gave his heart to a woman pale as a corpse, with eyes like blue stars and skin cold as ice."

I listened. Not to the story itself—I knew the story, or at least the version that had survived into novels and television—but to what she wasn't saying.

Pale as a corpse. Eyes like blue stars.

The Others. The White Walkers. She was describing a Wight, or one of the true Others, and she was describing them as if they were real.

Because in this world, they ARE real.

The knowledge settled into my stomach like a stone. I'd been so focused on Brandon, on Rickard, on the human tragedies I knew were coming. I'd almost forgotten about the inhuman ones.

"The Night's King fell in love with her," Old Nan continued. "He chased her through the Haunted Forest, and when he caught her, he gave her his seed and his soul and his very name."

The fire popped. Embers danced.

"He brought her to the Nightfort, made her his bride, and ruled there for thirteen years. And all the while, the children of the union—if children they could be called—"

She stopped.

In the flickering light, I saw her eyes had turned to me. Fixed. Sharp. Nothing like the glazed rambling of an old woman lost in tales.

"You understand, don't you?" Her voice had lost the singsong quality. "More than a babe should."

Shit.

I tried to look innocent. Widened my eyes. Sucked on my fist—infantile behavior, the kind of thing that had become automatic camouflage.

Old Nan wasn't fooled.

"The old gods send strange gifts sometimes," she said quietly. "Souls that remember."

The words hung in the air between us. I stopped pretending. There was no point. She saw me—not the baby, not the performance, but something of the truth beneath.

How much does she know? The question screamed through my mind. What does 'souls that remember' mean in this context? Is she talking about skinchanging? Greensight? Something else entirely?

"You're not the first," she continued. "My grandmother told me of a boy in Karhold, long ago. Wise before he was weaned. They said the Children of the Forest had touched him, given him their knowing."

The Children of the Forest. Magic. Real magic.

She turned back to the fire, and her voice resumed its storytelling cadence, as if the interruption had never happened.

"The Night's King was eventually cast down by Brandon the Breaker, King of Winter, and Joramun, King-beyond-the-Wall. Together they broke his power and stripped his name from all the records."

The tale continued. I stopped listening to the words. The questions were too loud.

She knows something is different about me. She's framing it as divine gift, not demonic possession. That's... useful? Terrifying? Both?

When the story ended, Old Nan rose from her chair with the creaking deliberation of her earlier movements. She crossed to my crib, looked down at me with those grey eyes that saw too much.

"Sleep, little lord." Her voice was soft. Almost gentle. "You'll need your strength for whatever the gods have planned."

She tucked my blanket closer, her hands warm and dry and callused from a lifetime of work.

Then she left.

I lay in the darkness, listening to Brandon's breathing, feeling the cold seep through stone walls that had stood for eight thousand years, and wondered how much Old Nan truly knew.

"Souls that remember."

Is that what I am? Or is that just the closest approximation her worldview can offer for a forty-three-year-old engineer wearing a baby like a mask?

The wind whispered through the shutters. It almost sounded like words.

I didn't sleep for a long time.

Part 4: Brandon's Treasures

Two Years Old, Early Spring

The courtyard was a mess of mud and snowmelt, the kind of transitional slush that got into everything and made everyone miserable. The servants tracked it through the halls despite all efforts. The dogs were constantly underfoot, wet and ecstatic.

I had learned to avoid the worst of it by staying inside, watching from windows, cataloging the patterns of melt and flow.

Brandon had no such instincts.

The nursery door burst open—it always burst, Brandon didn't understand gradual entry—and my brother stood there, grinning like he'd discovered the secret of eternal life. His hands were behind his back.

"Ned! I found something!"

He was filthy. Mud to the knees, something green smeared across his tunic, hair sticking up in directions that defied physics. Five years old and already showing the wild energy that would make him famous throughout the Seven Kingdoms.

Famous. And dead.

I pushed the thought away. I'd gotten better at that, over two years of practice.

"What find?" I asked. My speech was better now—not fluent, but functional. Enough to ask questions.

Brandon's grin widened. He pulled his hands out from behind his back.

The frog had been dead for several days.

My engineer's mind cataloged automatically: skin desiccated but not rotting, which meant cold storage—probably frozen in the mud, recently thawed. The color had faded from green to a murky grey-brown. One leg was twisted at an unnatural angle.

Brandon held it up like a trophy. "Preserved by magic! It's been frozen, Ned. The cold keeps things forever. I found it by the well!"

Not forever, I thought. Decomposition is merely slowed below optimal bacterial temperatures. Once the ambient temp rises above—

"Magic," I said instead. "Wow."

Brandon beamed. "I knew you'd like it. You like interesting things."

He crossed the room and, with great solemnity, tucked the dead frog under my bed.

"We'll keep it here. You're careful. You won't let the servants find it."

I'm harboring a biological hazard because my five-year-old brother thinks I'll appreciate it.

"Thank you, Brandon."

"Brothers share," he said, as if this explained everything.

He was gone before I could respond, off to find more treasures in the mud, leaving me with a carcass and a weight in my chest that had nothing to do with dead amphibians.

The treasures kept coming.

Two weeks later: a bird skull, bleached white and perfect. "I found it on the wall! A crow, maybe. Or a raven. It still has all the teeth!"

Birds don't have teeth, Brandon. They haven't for sixty-six million years.

"Teeth," I agreed. "Yes."

A month after that: a piece of colored glass from a broken window, deep blue and clouded with age. "It's like a piece of sky! I thought you'd want it because you're always looking at things."

Because I'm always looking at things.

He noticed. In his own wild, careless way, Brandon noticed that his quiet baby brother watched the world differently. And he was trying to bring that world to me, piece by piece, treasure by treasure.

"Thank you," I said, and meant it more than he could possibly know.

You're going to die, I thought, watching him carefully place the glass on my pillow. You're going to strangle yourself trying to save Father. And you're bringing me a dead frog and a piece of colored glass because you want me to smile.

The worst part was, I did smile. Genuine and involuntary, pulled from somewhere beneath the grief.

Brandon saw it and lit up like the sunrise over Winterfell.

"I'll find more," he promised. "I'll find everything."

Then he was gone again, crashing through the door, thundering down the corridor, off to wrestle dogs or chase cats or climb walls he shouldn't climb.

I sat on the edge of my bed, holding the piece of blue glass up to the light from the window.

Like the sky, Brandon had said.

Like his eyes, I thought. Like they would look when he was laughing at the Eyrie, when he was fighting in the training yard, when he was dying.

I kept the glass.

I kept all of it—the skull, the rocks, every treasure my brother brought me—hidden in a box under my bed next to the frog that had long since been disposed of by some horrified servant.

Brandon never asked about the frog. He'd probably forgotten about it within an hour of giving it to me.

But the glass I held onto.

Seventeen years, I thought. Seventeen years to save him.

The light through the blue glass painted my hand in azure shadows.

I'll find a way.

Part 5: Words and Questions

Two and a Half Years Old

The library tower smelled of dust and ink and the particular mustiness of parchment that hadn't been moved in decades.

I loved it.

Maester Walys had a desk by the window where pale northern light fell across his work. He was younger than I'd expected—forty, perhaps, with the chain of his office resting heavy on his shoulders and ink stains on his fingers that never quite washed away. The Citadel had trained him well. His mind was sharp, his skepticism healthy, his worldview constrained by what could be observed and documented.

Which made me a problem.

"Again," he said, pointing to a rune scratched on slate. "What is this letter?"

I knew every letter of the First Men runic alphabet. Had known them within a week of beginning these lessons. But I couldn't show that.

"Uhh..." I squinted at the slate, buying time. "Tree?"

"Close. It represents the sound we make at the start of 'tree.' Now this one?"

He pointed to another. I pretended to think.

"Snow?"

"Snow begins with a different sound." Patient. Measured. Walys was good at teaching children, probably because he approached it like solving an equation. "Listen: sss. SSSnow. What does your mouth do?"

"Hissy," I offered.

"Exactly. This letter—" he pointed to the first rune again "—makes your tongue touch behind your teeth. Tuh. This letter makes you hiss. Different shapes for different sounds."

Phonemic awareness instruction, the engineer noted. He's actually quite skilled at this.

"Why?" I asked.

Walys paused. "Why what?"

"Why shapes? Why not..." I searched for words simple enough to be plausible. "Why not pictures? Draw a tree for tree?"

Lead with innocent questions. Probe the edges of their knowledge without revealing yours.

Walys's eyebrows rose slightly. "That is... an interesting question for a child your age."

Shit. Too sophisticated. Dial it back.

"I like pictures," I said quickly. "Pictures are easier."

But the damage was done. I could see him filing the question away, adding it to whatever mental notes he kept on the peculiar second son of Winterfell.

We continued the lesson. I got some letters "wrong" on purpose, showed appropriate confusion, celebrated appropriate victories. By the end, Walys seemed satisfied that I was merely precocious rather than impossible.

Then he tested me.

"Let's play a game," he said, shuffling the letter tiles. "I'll point, you guess. Quick as you can."

He pointed. I answered. He pointed again. I answered.

I was halfway through before I realized I hadn't made any mistakes.

Fuck.

Walys's quill was scratching in his journal. He didn't look up as he made his notes.

"That will be all for today, young lord."

I climbed down from the stool, my legs dangling over the edge, and walked very carefully toward the door. Child-appropriate behavior. Just a toddler tired from his lesson.

"Ned."

I stopped.

"You may take one book from the lower shelves. To practice your letters."

A test. Or a gift. Or both.

I selected a volume on Northern history, full of illustrations and simple text. Safe. Expected.

Walys watched me go without expression.

That evening, I heard his voice through the door of Father's solar.

"The boy is... precocious. His speech is advanced. His questions are peculiar. I've never seen a child learn letters so quickly."

Father's reply was muffled. Then, clearer: "Is he simple? Touched?"

"The opposite, my lord. If anything, he seems to remember rather than learn."

Remember. Not learn.

Oh gods, he's noticed.

"What do you suggest?"

"Continued observation," Walys said. "He may simply be... unusual. The North has seen such children before. They often make excellent maesters. Or they die young, minds too heavy for mortal bodies."

Comforting. Very comforting.

I crept back to the nursery before I could hear more, heart pounding in my child's chest, mind racing with adult fear.

The stairs of the library tower spiraled down past narrow windows. I paused at one, looking out over Winterfell—the sprawling complex of granite and timber, the walls I would someday command, the family I was trying to save.

They're going to figure out something is wrong with me, I thought. The question is whether they'll see a genius or a monster.

Or—if I'm lucky—something in between.

Part 6: The First Optimization

The kitchens were chaos made solid.

I had found my corner weeks ago—behind the flour bins, where nobody looked, where I could watch without being trampled. From here I could see the entire operation: the great hearth where meat turned on spits, the kneading tables where bread was beaten into existence, the washing trough where scullery maids scrubbed an endless supply of pots and plates.

Gage ran it all like a battlefield commander.

He was a big man, broad across the shoulders and belly, with hands that could crush a man's skull or delicately pipe icing onto a cake. His voice was a constant presence: correcting, directing, occasionally threatening creative violence against anyone who disrupted his systems.

His systems. That was the thing. Gage thought of his kitchen as a system, even if he didn't use that word. Ingredients in, food out, waste managed. A process with inputs and outputs.

The problem is, his process is garbage.

I'd been watching for three days. Cataloging. Counting.

The water bucket was the worst inefficiency.

It sat by the door because that's where the water came in from the well. Logical, from a certain perspective. But the kneading tables were across the room, and the bakers walked back and forth constantly—to wet their hands, to add water to dough, to clean up spills. Fourteen trips per hour. Eight steps per trip. One hundred twelve steps per hour wasted.

A second bucket by the tables would eliminate sixty percent of that waste. Have someone strong fill it every morning. Done.

The optimization was obvious. Trivial, even. The kind of thing any competent industrial engineer would flag in the first hour of a factory assessment.

But I was two and a half years old.

I couldn't walk into Gage's domain and present a process improvement proposal. I couldn't explain labor efficiency or workflow optimization or any of the concepts that made the solution obvious.

I could ask a question.

I waited three more days, watching, making sure I understood the pattern. Then I made my move.

Gage was supervising a particularly complex sauce when I toddled over and tugged on his apron.

He looked down. His face cycled through surprise, suspicion, and grudging tolerance.

"What are you doing in my kitchen, little wolf?"

"Watching." True enough.

"Watching what?"

I pointed at the baker, currently crossing the room toward the water bucket. "Him."

Gage followed my gaze. "That's Wat. He's kneading bread."

"He walks far."

"Aye, bread takes water. It's a lot of walking."

I pointed at the bucket by the door. "Why is the water so far?"

Gage snorted. "Because that's where the door is, little wolf. The well's outside. The bucket comes through the door."

I nodded seriously, as if considering this wisdom. Then I pointed at an unused corner near the kneading tables.

"It could go there."

Gage stared at me. The sauce bubbled unattended.

"Could it now? And who's going to carry it there every morning?"

I pointed at the kitchen hand currently hauling a sack of flour—a boy of maybe fifteen, muscled from a lifetime of heavy lifting.

"The strong boy. He carries the flour. He's strong."

Something shifted in Gage's face. The tolerance was still there, but beneath it now, a flicker of... what? Curiosity? Unease?

"Go play, little lord." His voice was gruffer than before. "Kitchens aren't for children."

I went. But I didn't go far. Just back to my corner behind the flour bins, where I could watch without being watched.

Gage returned to his sauce. Shouted at a scullery maid for dropping a spoon. Checked on the bread. Normal operations.

But his eyes kept drifting to the water bucket by the door. Then to the empty corner by the kneading tables. Then to the strong boy with the flour.

I watched him think.

I watched him calculate without knowing he was calculating, turning the problem over in his mind the way humans do when they've been shown something obvious that they'd never noticed before.

Two hours later, Gage called the strong boy over.

"Pate. Tomorrow morning, after you bring in the flour, I want a second water bucket filled and put over there." He pointed to the corner. "The bakers can use that one instead of walking clear across the room every time they need a handful of water."

"Yes, Gage."

That was it. No fanfare. No recognition that a two-year-old had suggested it. Just a practical man making a practical improvement to his systems.

Exactly as it should be.

I ate an oatcake that one of the sympathetic cooks had slipped me, chewing slowly, watching the kitchen function around me.

One bucket. One optimization. Seventeen years until Brandon rides south.

It was pathetic. Trivial. A microscopic improvement that would save a few thousand steps per year and mean nothing at all in the grand scheme of Westerosi history.

It was the most satisfying thing I'd done in two and a half years.

This is how it starts, I told myself. Small. Invisible. Below notice.

Seeds, not harvests.

Part 7: Touched by the Old Gods

The Heart Tree watched me with eyes that wept blood.

Three years old, and I still hadn't gotten used to the godswood. The rest of Winterfell I understood—granite and timber, human construction, systems I could analyze and improve. But this place defied analysis.

The weirwood rose white as bone against the grey sky, its leaves a rustling canopy of red. The face carved into its trunk was ancient beyond measure, crude in its artistry, powerful in its presence. Sap leaked from its eyes in crimson tears, pooling at its roots, staining the dark earth.

Mother knelt before it, holding my hand, murmuring prayers in the Old Tongue.

I didn't know the words. Not yet. But I could feel the rhythm of them, the cadence that had been passed down through eight thousand years of Stark worship.

The godswood was silent except for Mother's voice and the wind through blood-red leaves.

I felt... something.

Not a voice. Nothing so clear as that. But a pressure, vast and patient, like being watched by something that had been watching since before men came to Westeros. The weight of attention from something that didn't think in human timescales.

The gods aren't real, Michael Chen whispered. This is psychological response to a liminal space combined with cultural conditioning—

The weirwood's face stared at me. The carved eyes seemed to shift in the changing light.

—or magic is real here, and everything I think I know is insufficient.

"Mama."

Mother paused her prayers. "Yes, little one?"

"The tree is sad."

The words came out before I could stop them. I hadn't meant to say anything. Hadn't planned to draw attention to the strangeness that Old Nan had already noticed. But standing here, under the weirwood's gaze, the observation felt... required. Like keeping silent would be a lie.

Mother's hand tightened on mine. "What?"

"It's waiting." I was still staring at the carved face. "For a long time. It's very sad."

Mother's face went pale. She pulled me close, pressing me against her, and I could feel her heart racing through the wool of her dress.

"Ned, why would you say that?"

Because I can feel it, I didn't say. Because something in this place knows I don't belong, and it's been waiting for someone like me for longer than human history.

Because magic is real here, and I have no idea what that means.

"Don't know," I said instead. "Just feels sad."

Mother carried me out of the godswood faster than was strictly necessary.

That night, I heard my parents talking.

Their solar was down the corridor from the nursery, and the walls of Winterfell were thick—but not thick enough to block sound entirely. I had crept to the edge of hearing, pressed against cold stone, straining for words.

"The boy unnerves me." Father's voice, low and troubled. "He speaks like a man grown."

"He said the Heart Tree was sad. Waiting." Mother sounded shaken. "What child says such things?"

A long pause. The fire crackling.

"My grandmother spoke of greenseers." Father's tone was thoughtful now, calculating. "Children touched by the old gods, who see things others cannot. The gift runs in First Men blood."

"You think Ned is...?"

"I think he's different." The words came carefully. "Whether it's a gift or a curse, the gods will show us."

I crept back to bed, mind racing.

Greenseer. That's what they'll call it. Not 'reincarnated engineer' or 'adult consciousness in child body.' Greenseer.

The old gods touched him. He sees things. He knows things.

It was wrong. I wasn't a greenseer—at least, I didn't think I was. What I felt in the godswood might have been genuine magical perception, or it might have been my pattern-matching brain constructing narrative from atmosphere. I had no way to know.

But it was useful.

Greenseer gives me cover, I realized. Explanation for the strangeness. License to be different.

And the terrifying thing is: the godswood did feel like something was watching.

I lay in bed, staring at the dark ceiling, and addressed the silence.

Are you real?

No answer. Just the wind through Winterfell's corridors, whistling between ancient stones.

Are you watching me?

The darkness offered nothing. No revelation. No divine confirmation.

But the wind through the leaves outside sounded almost like whispered words. Almost like an answer I couldn't quite parse.

I didn't sleep for a long time.

Part 8: The Knowledge Prison

Three Years Old, Autumn 266 AC

The screaming woke me.

Raw. Animal. The sound of a body pushed beyond its limits, fighting against pain that had no other outlet.

My eyes opened to darkness. The fire had burned low, casting dying orange light across the nursery ceiling. Brandon was still asleep—he could sleep through anything, always could, probably always would until the day he died in a dungeon where sleep wouldn't save him.

The screaming continued. Rising, falling. A rhythm I recognized.

Childbirth.

Lyanna. Lyanna was coming.

I was out of bed before I made the conscious decision to move, small feet cold on stone floor, hands reaching for the door.

The corridors of Winterfell were chaos. Servants rushing past with bundles of linen. Maester Walys's grey robes disappearing around a corner. Someone shouting for more hot water.

I followed the screaming.

No one stopped me. In the confusion, a three-year-old was invisible—just another obstacle to dodge, if they noticed me at all.

Father stood outside the birthing chamber.

Rickard Stark, Lord of Winterfell and Warden of the North, massive and immovable in war—now pacing like a caged wolf, hands clenched, face drawn with the particular helplessness of a man whose wife is in danger and there's nothing he can do.

He saw me. "Ned. Go back to bed."

I didn't move. I couldn't. My eyes were fixed on the crack in the door, the sliver of light and movement beyond.

"Ned." His voice sharpened. "Now."

But I was already at the crack, looking through, seeing—

The midwives. Two of them, country women with steady hands and generations of knowledge in their movements. They were good at their work, competent, experienced.

They were going to kill my mother.

Not deliberately. Not through malice. But I could see the blood—too much blood—and I could see their hands, unwashed since they'd last touched god-knew-what, and I could see the instruments laid out on a table, boiled for heat but not for true sterilization.

Puerperal fever, the engineer screamed. Childbed fever. Thirty percent mortality rate in pre-antiseptic conditions. Semmelweis proved handwashing reduced it by ninety percent in 1847 and they called him insane for it—

"The water—" I started.

Father's hand closed on my shoulder. Not gentle. "Not now, Ned."

"But they should wash—"

"He's three," someone muttered behind me. A servant, come to take me away. "Get him out of here."

"I KNOW!"

The words tore out of me—not a child's whine, not a toddler's tantrum, but three years of frustration compressed into a scream.

"I KNOW HOW TO HELP!"

Arms wrapped around me. Lifted me. I struggled against them, trying to explain, trying to make them understand—boil the water, wash your hands, clean the instruments, basic hygiene could save her life—

What came out was thrashing and shrieking. A three-year-old's tantrum, indistinguishable from any other.

"Hush, little lord." The servant's voice was kind, sympathetic, utterly useless. "Your mother is strong. She'll be fine."

You don't know that. You can't know that. The infection rate in medieval childbirth is horrifying, and every moment those midwives touch her with contaminated hands is a dice roll against her life—

They carried me back to the nursery. Set me in my bed. Tucked the blankets around me like that would make any difference.

Brandon was awake now, sitting up, watching me with wide confused eyes.

"Ned? What's wrong?"

Everything. Everything is wrong.

I know how to reduce infection. I know how to sterilize instruments. I know exactly what protocols would cut maternal mortality by an order of magnitude, and I am three years old and no one will listen.

"Mama," I said. My voice was wrecked, raw from screaming. "Mama."

Brandon crossed to my bed. Climbed in. Wrapped his arms around me with the fierce protectiveness that was his greatest gift and his fatal flaw.

"She'll be okay," he said. "Mama's strong. She'll be okay."

I let him hold me. There was nothing else to do.

The screaming continued. Hours, maybe. Time lost meaning. Just Brandon's arms around me and the distant sounds of a woman fighting to bring life into the world while her second son listened and knew, knew with absolute certainty, that he could have helped if only anyone would listen.

Finally, silence.

Then: a baby's cry.

Different from the screaming. Thin. Wavering. The sound of new lungs testing themselves.

Lyanna.

Brandon was asleep again, sprawled across my bed, one arm still draped over me. I lay there in the silence that followed the cry, feeling the tears dry on my face.

Lyarra is strong, I told myself. Lyanna will be born. This is the timeline. They both survive this.

But I didn't know. Not really. The butterflies had already started. Every small change I'd made—the bucket in the kitchen, the questions I'd asked, the observations people had noted—was rippling outward in ways I couldn't predict.

What if the timeline was already different? What if some tiny alteration had changed the conditions of this birth? What if—

Stop.

I forced myself to breathe. To think like an engineer instead of a terrified child.

You can't control everything. You can only prepare, and adapt, and try again when you fail.

The body will grow. The credibility will come. Someday—someday soon, if I push hard enough—they'll listen.

The screaming had stopped. In its place, the quiet sounds of a household settling after crisis. Servants moving. Doors opening and closing. Father's voice, somewhere distant, gruff with relief.

She survived, I realized. They both survived.

This time.

But as I lay there in the darkness, listening to Brandon breathe beside me, I understood the true horror of my situation with perfect clarity.

I knew everything.

Every piece of knowledge that could save them—hygiene, metallurgy, agriculture, medicine—was locked inside my head, perfect and useless. I could see the future in terrible detail. I could name the problems, describe the solutions, draw the diagrams if my hands could hold a pen.

And none of it mattered.

Not because the knowledge was wrong. Not because the solutions wouldn't work. But because I was three years old, and no one would ever listen to a child.

He can change nothing, I thought, watching the first grey light of dawn creep through the shutters. Not yet.

Not yet.

The words settled into my bones like a promise. Like a threat.

Somewhere in the castle, Lyanna was taking her first breaths. A sister I would love, a sister I would fail, a sister who would die in a tower in Dorne because I couldn't change the future fast enough.

Not yet. But soon.

I'm an engineer. I solve problems.

And this is just the hardest problem I've ever faced.

Chapter Text

Interlude: The Little Maester

Late 267 AC

The summons came as Walys was cataloging the winter stores, his quill scratching figures into the ledger with the steady rhythm of long practice. Barrels of salted fish. Bushels of grain. The mathematics of survival in a land where winter could last a decade.

"Maester Walys."

He looked up to find Lady Lyarra in the doorway of his study. She wore her composure like armor, as Northern women often did, but something flickered beneath the surface. Her hands were clasped too tightly at her waist.

"My lady." He set down his quill. "How may I serve?"

"I need you to come with me. To the nursery."

"Is one of the children ill?"

"No. Nothing like that." She hesitated, and in that hesitation Walys saw something he rarely witnessed in Rickard Stark's wife: uncertainty. "I want you to observe something. To tell me if I'm being foolish."

Walys rose, his chain clinking softly—iron for ravenry, silver for medicine, copper for history. The links of a life spent in rational pursuit. "Of course, my lady."

They walked through Winterfell's corridors in silence. The castle was ancient beyond reckoning. Walys had served here for nearly eight years now and still found himself marveling at the architecture—the way the builders had channeled hot springs through the walls, though centuries of mineral deposits had clogged many of the outer channels, leaving some corridors cold while others stayed warm. The impossible weight of the towers, the sense that the castle had grown from the earth rather than been constructed upon it.

"It's Ned," Lyarra said finally, as they climbed toward the family quarters. "He's... I've noticed things. Small things. I've dismissed them before, but today..."

"What sort of things, my lady?"

"I don't know how to describe it. That's why I need you to see."

They could hear Old Nan's voice before they reached the nursery door—that papery rasp that seemed to come from somewhere deeper than her throat, as if the stories she told had worn grooves in her very essence.

"...and so the Last Hero set forth into the dead lands, with a sword and a horse and a dog and a dozen companions..."

Lyarra touched Walys's arm, a gesture requesting silence. They entered quietly, keeping to the shadows near the door.

The nursery was warm, almost uncomfortably so. A fire blazed in the hearth—necessary here, in a wing where the ancient heating channels had long since failed. The light painted everything in shades of amber and shadow.

Brandon sat near the fire, seven years old and already showing the restless energy that would define him. He had a collection of wooden knights arranged in formations on the floor, and he was paying perhaps a quarter of his attention to Old Nan's tale while conducting some imaginary battle with the rest.

Baby Lyanna dozed in her cradle near the warmth, one tiny fist curled against her cheek. She was just past her first nameday, a quiet child compared to what Brandon had been—though the nursemaids whispered she had a temper when roused.

Old Nan herself occupied her usual chair, knitting needles clicking in counterpoint to her words. She was old. She had been old when Walys arrived at Winterfell. She had been old, the servants said, when Lord Rickard was a boy. Her age was a jest no one told anymore, a mystery no one questioned. She was simply Old Nan, as fixed a feature of Winterfell as the hot springs or the godswood.

And there was Ned.

The boy sat on a cushion near Old Nan's feet, utterly still. He was four—almost five—small for his age, with the long face and grey eyes that marked the Stark look. In his lap he held a slate. In his hand, a piece of chalk.

He was writing.

Walys blinked. Children of four could be taught their letters, certainly—he had begun Brandon's instruction already, with limited success—but this was something different. Ned's chalk moved with purpose, making marks that were quick and deliberate. Not the halting scratchings of a child learning to form letters. Something else.

"...one by one, his friends died," Old Nan continued, her needles never pausing. "His horse first, and then his dog. The cold took them, or the Others did. His sword froze so hard it shattered when he tried to use it. But still he walked north, into the heart of winter..."

"How many?" Ned asked.

Old Nan paused. Brandon didn't notice, too consumed with his knights, but Walys saw Lyarra stiffen beside him.

"How many what, child?"

"How many companions did he have? You said a dozen. Did they all die?"

"All but him."

"How did they die? You said the cold took them, or the Others. Which ones died which way?"

Old Nan's needles resumed their clicking. Her eyes, Walys noticed, were sharp beneath their rheumy film. "The first three froze in their sleep. They laid down to rest and the cold crept into their bones and they never woke. Two more were taken by the Others—dragged into the darkness, their screams swallowed by the wind."

Ned's chalk moved. Quick marks on the slate.

"The sixth fell into a crevasse hidden by snow. The seventh and eighth turned back, hoping to find their way home—they were found years later, frozen mid-stride, still walking south. The ninth went mad from the darkness and walked into the night singing. The tenth and eleventh..."

"What about his sword?" Ned interrupted. "You said it broke. What was it made of?"

"Castle-forged steel, the songs say."

"Not Valyrian?"

Old Nan smiled. It was a strange smile, Walys thought. Too knowing for a nursery tale. "No, child. Valyrian steel was rare even then, and the Last Hero was no great lord. Just a man. A brave and desperate man."

"Did he get another sword? After it broke?"

"The Children gave him a blade of dragonglass. Obsidian, black as frozen smoke."

Ned wrote. His chalk scratched against the slate with an intensity that seemed wrong for a child his age. Brandon's knights clattered. Lyanna murmured in her sleep. The fire crackled.

"The Children of the Forest," Ned said. "Where were they? How did he know where to find them?"

"He didn't know. He walked until he couldn't walk anymore, and then he crawled. And when he could crawl no further, they found him."

"But where? North of the Wall, but where exactly? The Haunted Forest? The Frostfangs? The Land of Always Winter?"

Walys felt Lyarra's hand close around his wrist. Her grip was tight.

"The stories don't say exactly, little lord. Only that it was far, far to the north. Beyond where men had ever ventured. Beyond where men were meant to go."

"Did anyone else ever try what he tried? Before him or after?"

Old Nan's needles stopped. For a moment, the only sound was the fire and Brandon's soft battle-noises.

"Others tried," she said quietly. "Before and since. None succeeded. None came back. The Last Hero was the last because he was the only one. He found the Children, and together they drove back the darkness, and he lived to tell the tale." She tilted her head, studying Ned with those ancient eyes. "Why do you ask so many questions, child? Most boys your age want to hear about the sword fights."

"I want to understand," Ned said simply. "What worked. What didn't. Why he lived when everyone else died."

Walys had heard enough. He stepped forward, his boots loud on the stone floor. "Young lord. May I see what you've written?"

Ned looked up at him. For just a moment—a flicker so brief Walys almost missed it—something old looked out from those grey eyes. Something that didn't belong in a child's face. Then the boy blinked, and he was just Ned again, quiet and serious and four years old.

"Yes, Maester." He held out the slate.

Walys took it. Lyarra moved to stand beside him, and together they looked at what the child had produced.

It made no sense.

The slate was covered in marks, but they weren't letters. Not any letters Walys knew, and he knew several alphabets—the Common Tongue, High Valyrian, the runes of the First Men. This was something else entirely.

There were lines of small dashes, each followed by words or fragments of words. Arrows connected different sections, curving across the slate to link concepts together. Boxes had been drawn around certain phrases, with smaller marks inside them—check marks? Numbers? Walys couldn't tell.

In one corner, something that looked almost like a map—or no, a diagram of some kind. Shapes connected by lines, with symbols at each junction.

Numbers appeared throughout, seemingly at random. Roman numerals mixed with hash marks. Quantities? Measurements?

And in the margins, question marks. Many question marks, each beside a word or phrase.

"What is this?" Walys asked. His voice came out sharper than he intended.

"Notes," Ned said. "So I remember the story."

"Notes? These aren't... this isn't writing, child. What are these symbols? These lines?"

"They help me think."

Lyarra knelt beside her son, brushing dark hair from his forehead with a mother's gentle hand. "Ned, sweetheart. Where did you learn to make marks like this?"

The boy considered the question with that same unnerving gravity. "I made it up," he said finally. "Old Nan tells good stories. I wanted to remember them. The pictures help."

"Pictures?" Walys looked at the slate again. The marks were nothing like pictures. They were systematic. Organized. Almost like... like a language he didn't know. A way of thinking he had never encountered.

Both adults turned to Old Nan.

She had resumed her knitting, serene as a grandmother in a summer garden. The smile on her face was mild, innocent, utterly unhelpful.

"Have you been teaching him this?" Lyarra asked. "These symbols?"

"I teach them stories, my lady." The needles clicked. Click, click, click. "What the little lords and ladies do with the stories is their own affair. I'm just an old woman with old tales."

"But he's four. Children don't... they don't take notes."

"Don't they?" Old Nan's eyes twinkled. "This one does. Perhaps he'll be a maester himself one day. He has the temperament for it. All those questions."

Walys studied the slate again, trying to find patterns, sense, anything familiar. The organizational structure was clear—the boy had grouped information, linked related concepts, marked areas of uncertainty. It was systematic in a way that shouldn't be possible for a child who had only just learned his letters.

But children did strange things. Invented games. Created private languages with siblings and imaginary friends. This was unusual, certainly, but was it truly so remarkable? The boy was clever—everyone knew that. Perhaps he had simply developed his own method of recording information, primitive but functional.

Yes. That must be it.

"He's imaginative, my lady," Walys said, handing the slate back to Ned. "Old Nan's stories have clearly captured his interest. He's invented a game to help him remember them—a symbol-game, if you will. Children do this sort of thing."

"Do they?" Lyarra didn't sound convinced. "Brandon never did anything like this. Nor any child I've known."

"Second sons are often different. They find their own paths, develop their own interests. Brandon is physical, martial—he'll be a warrior and a lord. Eddard is clearly more... scholarly. Contemplative." Walys offered what he hoped was a reassuring smile. "I wouldn't worry, my lady. He'll grow out of these games when he begins proper lessons. Structure and discipline will channel his curiosity productively."

Lyarra looked at her son. Ned had returned his attention to Old Nan, who had begun a new thread of the story—something about the Children of the Forest and the pact they made with the First Men. His chalk was already moving again.

"If you say so, Maester."

"The boy has an unusual mind," Walys allowed. "That can be an asset. With proper guidance, he might have a maester's temperament. That would serve House Stark well—a second son with learning and letters, able to advise his brother in matters of history and diplomacy."

Old Nan made a sound. It might have been a cough. It might have been a laugh.

"Something to say, Nan?" Lyarra asked.

"Oh, nothing important, my lady. Just an old woman's fancy." Her needles never stopped. "The little lord wants to know how to fight the Long Night, that's all. Most boys his age hide under the covers from the dark." Click, click, click. "This one's already making battle plans."

She chuckled, a dry sound like leaves skittering across stone.

"Just don't forget to eat your supper, little general. Can't fight the dead on an empty stomach."

Ned laughed. It was a child's laugh—bright, easy, innocent. Exactly what it should be.

But for just a moment, his eyes met Old Nan's. Grey met grey, young face and ancient face, and something passed between them that Walys couldn't read.

Old Nan smiled. Said nothing more.

"We should let them continue," Walys said, suddenly eager to leave. The nursery felt too warm, too close. "The children are well, my lady. Unusual is not unhealthy."

Lyarra nodded slowly. She kissed Ned's forehead—he accepted it with the patient tolerance of a child used to affection—and rose to her feet.

"Finish your... notes, sweetheart. And do eat your supper."

"Yes, Mother."

They walked back through the corridors of Winterfell, Walys and Lyarra, and the maester found himself speaking to fill the silence.

"Old Nan fills their heads with old stories," he said. "It's harmless, really. Northern tradition. The symbol-game will pass—children that age flit from interest to interest. By next month he'll have forgotten all about the Long Night and moved on to knights and dragons."

"He's not like Brandon," Lyarra said quietly. "He's not like any child I've known."

"Second sons often find their own paths, my lady. It's not cause for concern. In truth, it may be a blessing. Lord Stark will need advisors he can trust. A brother with a scholarly bent could be invaluable."

Lyarra was quiet for a long moment. Then she sighed, and some of the tension left her shoulders.

"Perhaps you're right. I worry too much. He's just... so serious. So focused. Sometimes I feel like he's looking at something I can't see."

"Children see the world differently than we do. It's nothing more than that."

She nodded, wanting to believe. Walys could see her choosing to accept the comfort, filing away her unease in whatever dark corner mothers kept their secret fears.

"Thank you, Maester. For indulging my concerns."

"Always, my lady."

They parted at the junction of two corridors, Lyarra returning to her duties, Walys to his ledgers. Barrels of salted fish. Bushels of grain. The mathematics of survival.

Behind him, in a warm nursery lit by firelight, a child of four wrote in a language no one in Winterfell could read, preparing for a war no one believed would come.

Old Nan's voice drifted through the stones, thin as spider silk, old as winter:

"...and in the heart of darkness, when all hope was lost, the Last Hero found them at last. The children of the forest. The singers of the song of earth. And they taught him the secrets that would save the world of men..."

Brandon had fallen asleep, his wooden knights scattered around him like casualties of some imaginary war.

Lyanna cooed softly in her cradle, dreaming whatever dreams infants dream.

And Ned wrote. The chalk moved in patterns that wouldn't exist for a thousand years—flowcharts and bullet points and decision trees—capturing every word, every detail, every scrap of intelligence about an enemy that was coming, whether anyone believed it or not.

Old Nan watched him with eyes that had seen more winters than anyone knew.

She smiled.

She said nothing at all.

Chapter Text

Part 1: The Morning After

Grey light pressed against the nursery window like a held breath.

I woke to silence. Not the ordinary silence of pre-dawn Winterfell, but something deeper—the absence of a sound that had been present for hours. The screaming had stopped.

For one terrible moment, I didn't know what that meant.

My feet found the cold stone before I had finished deciding to move. The nursery was dark, the fire burned to embers, and Brandon lay sprawled in his bed with the boneless abandon of a child who could sleep through sieges. I slipped past him, past the crib I'd outgrown six months ago, past the door that creaked if you pushed it too fast.

The corridor was quiet but not grieving-quiet.

A serving girl hurried past with an armload of linens, and her face was wrong for mourning. Exhausted, yes. Red-eyed. But smiling. Smiling.

I followed the path I knew, bare feet silent on granite worn smooth by eight thousand years of Starks. Past the tapestry with the running wolf. Past the alcove where Brandon had hidden two dead mice last month. The door to Mother's chambers stood ajar, and the guard beside it had fallen asleep in his chair, chin resting on his chest.

He didn't stir as I squeezed through the gap.

Inside, the room smelled of blood and lavender and the particular musk of exhaustion. The fire had been built high, casting orange light across the great bed where Mother lay sleeping. Her face was pale, the skin beneath her eyes bruised with tiredness, but her chest rose and fell in the steady rhythm of the living.

She survived. Gods be good, she survived.

Father slumped in the chair beside her, a man who commanded thousands collapsed into sleep like a puppet with cut strings. His head was bowed, one hand still resting on the edge of the bed, fingers almost touching Mother's.

And beside the bed, in a cradle I had never seen before—

A thin, furious wail split the silence.

I crossed to the cradle. My heart was beating in my throat, in my temples, in the very tips of my too-small fingers. The bundle inside was wrapped in grey wool, face scrunched and red with outrage, fists punching at air that had the audacity to exist around her.

Lyanna.

She wailed again, louder this time, a sound of pure infant fury. Not the exhausted cry of a newborn overwhelmed by existence—this was anger. Indignation. A soul that had arrived in the world ready to fight it.

I reached into the cradle.

Her eyes opened at my movement. Dark grey, almost black, catching the firelight like chips of obsidian. For a heartbeat—one perfect, suspended moment—she stopped crying. Just stared at me with those fierce newborn eyes, as if trying to determine whether I was worth the effort of screaming at.

My finger brushed her tiny fist.

She grabbed it.

The strength of her grip shocked me. This creature who couldn't hold up her own head had seized my finger with an intensity that bordered on violence. Her eyes stayed locked on mine, and she made a sound that wasn't quite a cry—something closer to a declaration.

You are going to die in a tower in Dorne.

The thought rose unbidden, and I couldn't push it away.

You are going to bleed to death on a bed of blood and roses, begging me for a promise I barely kept. You are going to love the wrong person, reach for the wrong thing, and it will destroy you. Destroy us all.

Not this time.

My throat closed around the words. My eyes burned with tears this body was too young to explain.

Not if I can help it.

"I will help," I whispered. The words barely made sound, meant for no one but her and maybe the old gods watching through walls of ancient stone.

She squeezed my finger harder, as if in answer. As if making a pact.

"Ned?"

I turned. Father had woken, straightening in his chair with the slow movements of a man whose body had locked up in the night. His grey eyes—my eyes, Brandon's eyes, the eyes every Stark had worn since the Age of Heroes—found me in the dim light.

"How did you—" He stopped himself. Shook his head. His voice, when it came again, was softer than I had ever heard it. Too exhausted for anger. "You should not be here."

"I wanted to see her," I said. The simple truth.

Father rose, joints cracking, and crossed to the cradle. He looked down at Lyanna, still gripping my finger, still staring at me with those dark, fierce eyes. Something moved across his face—wonder, maybe, or fear, or the complicated love of a man who had just watched his wife nearly die and now held the reason in front of him.

He lifted me. His arms were stronger than they had any right to be after a sleepless night.

"Your sister," he said, holding me so I could see her better. "Lyanna."

She had started crying again at the interruption, but quietly now. Testing her lungs. Learning what this new body could do.

Just like I did, I thought. Three years ago, in this same castle, learning to inhabit something that didn't fit.

Father set me down. "Go back to bed, son. You'll meet her properly when she's not so angry at the world."

I looked back at the cradle. Lyanna's wail rose again, furious and fighting, a sound that would echo through history in ways none of us could imagine.

She's already angry, I thought. Good. She's going to need that anger.

I just hoped I could teach her to aim it better than she did the first time.

Part 2: The She-Wolf's Grip

Nine Months Old, Summer 267 AC

The nursery was warm, sunlight pooling on the floor like spilled honey.

I sat at the small table where Maester Walys conducted my lessons, a slate covered in chalked letters propped before me. The runes wavered in the heat, blurring at the edges where my sweating fingers had smudged them. I was supposed to be practicing, copying the shapes until they became reflex.

Instead, I was being hunted.

Lyanna crawled like a siege engine—low to the ground, implacable, driven by single-minded determination. She had discovered movement two weeks ago and immediately weaponized it. Now she circled the nursery in endless loops, and somehow every loop ended at my chair.

Her hand closed around my ankle.

"Bah," she announced, and yanked.

I caught myself on the table. The slate clattered. Chalk dust puffed into the air.

"Lyanna." I tried to sound stern, but she was already pulling herself up my leg, using me as a climbing frame, and the indignity of being scaled by a creature who still wore linens on her bottom made sternness impossible.

I used to manage teams of engineers, I thought, detaching her grip only to have her immediately grab my tunic instead. I supervised multi-million dollar projects. And now I'm being conquered by a nine-month-old.

The door slammed open.

Brandon exploded into the room like a natural disaster given boy-shaped form. At six years old, he had mastered the art of making every entrance feel like the beginning of a war.

"Ned! Look what I found!"

His hands were cupped before him, protective and proud. Mud streaked his arms to the elbow. There was a twig in his hair that had probably been there since breakfast.

"I climbed the oak by the godswood! Martyn said I couldn't but I DID!"

He thrust his treasure forward. A bird's nest, woven from twigs and dried grass, and inside it—

Three eggs. Tiny, pale blue, perfect as jewels.

"Brandon." The word came out more worried than I intended. "Those are—you can't just take eggs from a nest."

"I didn't take the nest," he said, as if this was a crucial distinction. "The nest fell. I caught it."

He noticed Lyanna then, still attached to my tunic like a particularly determined limpet. His face flickered—something complicated passing through those grey eyes—and then the cloud cleared and he grinned.

"She likes you better than me."

"You're too loud for her," I said.

"I'm not loud!" Brandon protested, loud enough to prove my point.

Lyanna started crying.

Brandon's grin faltered. He looked at her, then at me, then back at her, and for just a moment I saw something vulnerable beneath the wildness. A six-year-old who didn't understand why his baby sister flinched from his enthusiasm.

"See?" His voice was smaller now. "She doesn't like me."

I picked her up. She was heavier than she should have been, or maybe I was just smaller than I ever remembered being. She stopped crying immediately, one fist tangled in my hair, and stared at Brandon with those dark, fierce eyes.

No, I thought at her. Don't do this. Don't choose sides. Don't make him feel he has to earn your love.

But I couldn't say that. Couldn't explain that Brandon's hurt was my hurt, that watching him feel rejected by his baby sister was another knife in the wound of knowing what would become of them both.

"She's going to be trouble," Brandon said suddenly, his grin returning. "Like me."

No. Worse than you. You'll die trying to save Father. She'll die trying to escape a cage of her own making. And I will fail you both.

"Show me the eggs," I said instead. "Are they still warm?"

Brandon's face transformed. Forgiveness was immediate, complete—the gift of a heart that didn't know how to hold grudges. He brought the nest closer, and we examined his treasure together: three pale blue eggs, perfect and fragile, still faintly warm from the sun.

One was cracked.

A hairline fracture ran across its surface, too thin to see unless you knew to look. The fall, maybe. Or Brandon's enthusiastic grip. It didn't matter. The damage was done.

"This one's not going to make it," I said quietly.

Brandon's face fell. "Can we save it?"

I shook my head, throat tight with things I couldn't say.

No, Brandon. Some things break no matter how carefully you hold them.

"We can keep the nest," I offered. "Put it somewhere safe. So you remember you climbed that high."

Brandon brightened, already recovering. The grief of a child was real but brief, washed away by the next excitement. Lyanna reached for the eggs—of course she did, reaching was what Lyanna did—and I had to quickly move them out of her grabbing range.

Brandon laughed. "She wants everything!"

Yes, I thought, watching my sister strain toward something fragile and precious. And she'll reach for something she shouldn't, and it will kill her.

I forced a smile. "Let's show Mother the nest."

Brandon was already moving, cradling his treasure, racing ahead to share his triumph.

Lyanna grabbed another fistful of my hair and made a sound of pure frustration at being denied the eggs.

I held her tighter than I should have.

Part 3: The Invisible Bugs, Part One

Four Years Old, Early 267 AC

The library tower smelled of dust and secrets.

I loved this place. The narrow windows let in pale northern light that fell across Maester Walys's desk in shifting patterns. The shelves climbed toward darkness, stuffed with scrolls and bound volumes and the accumulated knowledge of generations. It was the closest thing to a university I would find in this world—a sanctuary of learning where questions were expected, if not always answered.

Walys was teaching me letters. Or rather, teaching a four-year-old who already knew them to pretend he was learning them.

"Sound it out," he said, pointing to a word on the slate. "What does it say?"

I squinted, feigning difficulty. "Win... ter..."

"Yes, very good. And this?"

"Fell."

"Excellent. You're progressing well, young lord."

A piece of bread sat on the table beside my slate—breakfast, half-eaten, pushed aside when the lesson began. I stared at it while Walys made notes in his journal, watching the way the morning light caught the porous surface.

Yeast, I thought. Saccharomyces cerevisiae. Single-celled fungi that consume sugar and produce carbon dioxide and alcohol. The foundation of bread, beer, and approximately half of human civilization.

"Maester," I said. "Why does bread rise?"

Walys looked up from his notes. His quill paused, dripping a small blob of ink onto the parchment.

"An interesting question." His tone was the careful one he used when assessing whether I was being precocious or merely childish. "Heat expands the air within the dough, causing it to grow larger."

I nodded, filing away his answer. Wrong, but not unreasonably so. Hot air did expand. If you didn't know about yeast, it was a logical conclusion.

"But the cook leaves the dough in the warm bowl all night," I said slowly, picking each word like stepping stones across a stream. "Before the oven. It grows then, too. It breathes."

Walys's quill stopped moving entirely.

"It... changes," he said. "The nature of grain and water."

"Why does it smell sour?" I pressed, careful to keep my voice curious rather than leading. "Why does it need the mother-dough from yesterday?"

Walys's patience thinned. I could see it in the set of his shoulders, the way his fingers tightened on the quill. He was a scholar, genuinely curious about the world, but he was also a product of the Citadel—an institution that prized answers over questions and orthodoxy over innovation.

"These are questions for cooks, not lords." His voice had cooled. "Focus on your letters, Ned. A lord who reads well governs well."

I bent my head to the slate, obedient and silent.

But from the corner of my eye, I saw his quill moving again. Not grading my work. Writing in his personal journal, the leather-bound book he kept separate from his teaching materials.

He's curious, I realized. Despite himself. He won't accept ideas from a child directly, but I've planted something.

The bread sat on the table, ordinary and unremarkable, hiding its microscopic secrets.

Direct explanation won't work. I need to prove it. Need to make him discover it himself.

I returned to my letters, forming them with careful precision, and waited.

Seeds took time to grow.

Part 4: The Invisible Bugs, Part Two

Four Years Old, Late 267 AC

The kitchens at dawn were a different country.

Steam rose from boiling pots, curling through cold air that still held the night's chill. The great hearth roared with fresh-fed flames, and the bakers had already been working for hours, arms white with flour to the elbow. The smell was intoxicating—yeast and grain and the warm sweetness of dough becoming bread.

I had been watching for weeks. Cataloging. Building my case one observation at a time.

Gage looked up from his work as I slipped through the door, sliding into my usual corner behind the flour bins. His eyes tracked me briefly—the little wolf, back again—but he said nothing. I had earned my place here through persistence and the demonstrated ability to stay out of the way.

Today, I couldn't stay out of the way.

I approached him during a lull, when the morning bread was in the ovens and the midday preparations hadn't yet begun. He was checking the stores, counting sacks of grain with the automatic precision of a man who had done it ten thousand times.

"Gage," I said. "What happens if you make the dough and leave it in the cold instead of the warm?"

He didn't look up. "It doesn't rise, little wolf. Everyone knows that. Cold kills the rising."

"And if you make it too hot? Like, in the water that's almost boiling?"

Now he looked at me, frowning. "The bread comes out flat. Dense. Ruined. We learned that the hard way, once, when a new boy used water straight from the kettle."

I nodded, serious as a maester pronouncing judgment.

"So the rising only works when it's warm," I said slowly, as if thinking aloud. "Not cold. Not hot. Just warm."

"Aye..." Gage's eyes had narrowed. He wasn't a stupid man. Suspicious, yes—a lifetime of kitchen politics had made him wary of questions that seemed innocent. "What are you getting at, lad?"

The Socratic method, I thought. Lead them to conclusions they think they've reached themselves.

"Nothing," I said, letting my voice go light, childish. "I just think the rising is alive. Like bugs. And bugs die when it's too hot, and sleep when it's too cold."

Gage laughed.

The sound filled the kitchen—a big, rolling belly laugh that made the scullery maids look up from their work. "Bugs in the bread! The little lord thinks we're feeding him insects!"

He ruffled my hair, still chuckling. "Go on, little wolf. Get out of my kitchen with your bugs and your questions."

I accepted an oatcake from one of the sympathetic cooks and retreated to my corner.

But later—much later, when the day had wound down and the evening preparations were underway—I saw Gage standing by the proving bowls. The dough was rising, slow and patient, expanding in its warm nest of clay and wool.

He was staring at it with a strange expression.

Not laughing anymore.

That's two data points planted, I thought, eating my oatcake slowly. Walys has the theoretical question. Gage has the practical observation.

Now I wait. I water the seeds. And maybe, in a few years, one of them grows.

The dough rose in the warm bowls, alive with invisible life, keeping its secrets.

Part 5: The Invisible Bugs, Part Three

Five Years Old, 268 AC

The library tower again. Months had passed. I had been patient.

Walys was teaching me history—the Dance of Dragons, a conflict that had torn Westeros apart a century before I was born. Dragons killing dragons, Targaryens slaughtering each other, a civil war that proved even fire and blood could be turned against itself.

"Prince Aemond One-Eye," Walys said, pointing to an illustration in the heavy book spread between us, "rode Vhagar, the largest dragon alive at the time. But size alone could not—"

"Maester," I interrupted. "Do you know why wounds fester?"

Walys stopped. His quill, which had been making notes in the margin, went still.

"An unusual question in the middle of a history lesson." His voice was careful, probing. "Why do you ask?"

"I was thinking about the battles," I said, which was partially true. "So many people died. But the book says many died after, from their wounds. Why?"

Walys relaxed slightly—the question had a plausible origin now. "Bad air. Corruption of the blood. The maesters have studied this extensively. Wounds that are exposed to foul humors become putrid."

I nodded, letting a moment pass.

"Gage says the bread-rising is killed by heat," I said, keeping my voice thoughtful, as if making a connection in real time. "And the wound-festering... doesn't it also die when you boil the bandages?"

Walys's quill dripped ink onto the page, unnoticed. A black starburst spreading across Prince Aemond's illustrated face.

"Who told you to boil bandages?"

"No one." I had prepared this carefully. "But Old Nan says the mountain clans wash wounds with boiled water. And fewer of their warriors die of the rot."

Old Nan, I thought. The perfect cover. She knows everything, says everything, and can't be interrogated because half of what she says sounds like myth.

Walys stared at me. The silence stretched, filled only by the wind outside and the scratching of quill on parchment from somewhere deeper in the library.

"The rising in bread," he said slowly, as if testing the words, "and the corruption in wounds... you think they are the same?"

"I think invisible things make both happen." I chose my words with care, walking a narrow path between insight and impossibility. "And heat kills invisible things."

Walys's face went through a complicated journey. Skepticism. Consideration. The faint, uncomfortable recognition of something that sounded true even though it shouldn't.

"You have a peculiar mind, Eddard Stark." His voice was quiet. "Peculiar and... troubling."

But his quill was moving again, writing furiously in his journal, the leather-bound book of private thoughts that no one else was permitted to read.

"That will be enough for today," he said. "Go. I need to think."

I walked down the tower stairs slowly, savoring the moment.

It's not much, I thought. A maester who will think about boiling bandages. Who might remember this conversation in ten years when I introduce formal sanitation protocols.

But ideas spread. They grow. They become the ground that better ideas can take root in.

I paused at a window, looking out over Winterfell—the grey walls, the steaming hot springs, the sprawling complex of buildings that would someday be mine to transform.

Small victories. That's all I get for now.

But small victories add up.

Part 6: The First Soap

The scullery was a warm, soot-stained room adjacent to the kitchens, and it smelled of wet wool, stale sweat, and the particular misery of work that was never finished.

I watched from my corner as Wylla scrubbed at a tunic, her hands raw and red from the effort. She used a paste of sand and ash—the "soap" of this era—grinding it into the fabric with the kind of violence that would destroy the garment long before it got clean.

Saponification, I thought. The hydrolysis of fat by alkali. Fat plus lye equals soap plus glycerol. I learned this in undergraduate chemistry and forgot it existed until now.

I had been planning this for months, ever since the bread conversations had shown me how to approach problems here. Not with explanations. Not with lectures. With action, quietly undertaken, that produced results no one could argue with.

"Wylla," I said, approaching her work station. "Can I have the fat? The white stuff from the bacon. And the ash from the big fire."

She looked at me with the expression servants always wore around the Stark children—patient, tolerant, a little wary. At five years old, I was old enough to be trouble but young enough to be indulged.

"Making mud pies, little lord?" She wiped her hands on her apron, leaving grey streaks. "Don't let your mother see you all greasy."

"A present," I lied. "For Mother."

The lie worked. Wylla found me a wooden bowl of rendered tallow—the white, waxy fat left over from cooking—and pointed me toward the ash bin by the great hearth. I gathered what I needed and retreated to the unused corner of the scullery that had become my laboratory.

Step one: Leaching.

I mixed hardwood ash with water, stirring until the grey slurry thickened and settled. The water pulled the potassium hydroxide from the ash—lye, caustic and dangerous, the key to the whole process. I let it sit for a day, then carefully skimmed off the liquid, leaving the solid ash behind.

Concentration matters, I reminded myself. Too weak and the saponification won't complete. Too strong and it'll eat through the container.

Step two: Saponification.

I combined the lye water with the rendered tallow in a small iron pot begged off Gage, who had eyed me suspiciously but handed it over with a muttered comment about little lords and their peculiar interests. The mixture needed heat—gentle heat, sustained over time—and I spent hours tending it, stirring carefully, watching the fat transform.

The door burst open.

"Ned!" Brandon stood in the doorway, nose wrinkling. "It stinks in here! Come fight the snow giants!"

"Busy," I muttered, not looking up from my stirring. "It's science."

"Sci-ens?" Brandon frowned, testing the unfamiliar word. "Is that a spell?"

Close enough.

"Yes. A cleaning spell."

Brandon's expression shifted from confusion to interest—magic he understood—and then back to impatience. "Come play when it's done!" He was gone before I could respond, off to wage imaginary wars against imaginary enemies.

The real enemies are invisible, I thought, watching him go. The bacteria that cause disease, the infections that kill mothers and children, the rot that takes warriors after battles.

And this is how I start fighting them.

Days passed. I returned to the scullery whenever I could escape my minders, reheating the mixture, stirring, watching the transformation happen. The fat broke down. The lye did its work. Slowly, impossibly, soap began to form.

I added a pinch of salt to help it curdle—a trick I remembered from somewhere, probably a cooking show Sarah had watched—and threw in dried lavender to mask the beefy smell.

When I finally pulled the hardened mass from the pot, my hands were trembling.

It wasn't Dove. It wasn't Ivory. It was grey-yellow and waxy, rough-textured where my crude mold had been uneven, smelling faintly of lavender and strongly of rendered fat.

But it was real, saponified soap.

I brought it to Mother's chambers that evening. She was sewing by the fire, mending one of Brandon's perpetually damaged tunics, and she looked up with a smile as I entered.

"Ned. Come sit with me."

"I made something." I held out the greasy block, suddenly uncertain. It looked so crude in my hands, so primitive compared to the soap of my other life. "For you."

She took it, turning it over with puzzled fingers. "A... rock?"

"Wash your hands with it. With warm water."

She humored me—she always humored me, this woman who had somehow learned that her second son asked strange questions and should be indulged rather than corrected. She rose, crossed to the basin, wet her hands.

She rubbed the block.

Lather formed. Bubbles. Real, foaming bubbles rising between her fingers, slick and white.

Mother's eyes widened. The grit she was used to didn't foam. It scoured. It abraded. This felt different—smooth, slippery, sliding across her skin like silk made liquid.

She rinsed. Dried her hands on a cloth.

"Soft," she murmured, touching her own cheek in wonder. "How did you do this, Ned?"

"Ash and fat." The simple truth. "And patience."

She looked at the soap block, then at me, and something moved behind her eyes—the same look she had worn when I said the Heart Tree was sad. The look of a mother confronting the mystery of her own child.

That night, Father came to the nursery.

Rickard Stark stood in the doorway, the soap block in his hand, turning it over the way he might examine a new blade or a treaty proposal. His grey eyes found me in the dim light.

"Your mother says you made this."

"Yes, Father."

"The Maester says it is just a fortunate accident. That you were playing in the refuse and stumbled upon a reaction."

Of course he does, I thought. Walys can't accept that a five-year-old deliberately created a chemical compound. It would break his understanding of the world.

I met Father's eyes—my eyes, the Stark eyes, grey as winter.

"I can make more. If Wylla helps."

Father stared at me for a long moment. The fire crackled. Somewhere in the castle, a dog barked.

"Cleanliness keeps the sickness away," he said finally. "That is what Old Nan says. If this soap keeps the household healthy, we will need barrels of it."

He placed a heavy hand on my head—a gesture of approval, of claim, of recognition.

"You have a strange mind, Eddard. But useful."

Useful. The highest praise a Northman could give.

He left. The door closed behind him.

I lay in bed that night, hands still smelling faintly of lavender and tallow. Brandon snored in his bed across the room, oblivious to revolutions.

I did it, I thought. My first real creation. Not an observation, not a suggestion—a thing I made from knowledge no one else possesses.

Soap. The invisible bugs that cause disease hate soap. And now Winterfell will have soap.

It wasn't steel. It wasn't gunpowder or the printing press or any of the grand technologies that had transformed my world. But it was real. It was mine.

And when the serving girls washed their hands before touching food, when the midwives cleaned their instruments before a birth, when fewer children died of the bloody flux—

They wouldn't know why. But I would.

Small victories, I told myself. This is how you win. One bar of soap at a time.

Part 7: Brandon's Gift

Five Years Old, Late 268 AC

The nursery glowed with evening light, warm and golden through the western windows.

I sat on the floor, wooden blocks spread before me in careful arrangement. I was stress-testing an arch design—seeing how much weight the top block could hold before the structure collapsed. Brandon thought I was playing. Let him think that.

The door burst open.

Brandon stood there, seven years old now and growing like a weed, his familiar grin splitting his face. His hands were behind his back.

"Ned! I have something!"

Of course he did. Brandon always had something—rocks, bones, feathers, the occasional live creature protesting its captivity. His treasures had become a constant of my life, arriving without warning, offered without expectation.

"What is it this time?" I asked, genuinely curious despite myself.

Brandon's grin widened. He pulled his hands forward and opened them like a priest revealing sacred relics.

The obsidian caught the light and drank it.

Black glass, volcanic and ancient, sharp enough to draw blood just by looking at it. The surface was smooth where it had cooled quickly, pitted where bubbles had formed and burst. The edges gleamed with a darkness that seemed to have depth, as if the stone held shadows inside it.

"I found it in the Wolfswood!" Brandon's excitement was infectious, bouncing on his heels. "Martyn says it's dragonglass. The wildlings use it for arrowheads!"

I took it carefully—so carefully—feeling the weight of it settle into my palm. The edges were wicked sharp, capable of slicing skin without effort. A tool. A weapon.

A weapon against the Others.

"Where exactly did you find it?" My voice came out strange, and I had to force it back to normal.

"By the hot springs, near the big rock that looks like a bear. There's more! A whole pile!"

A deposit, I thought. Volcanic glass deposited by ancient activity, preserved in the North's cold earth. Dragonglass. Obsidian. The material the Children of the Forest used to create the White Walkers.

The material that kills them.

My hands trembled slightly, and I had to grip the stone harder to hide it.

"This is valuable, Brandon." The understatement of eight thousand years. "Very valuable."

Brandon beamed. "I know! That's why I'm giving it to you. You like weird rocks."

I like weird rocks. The simplicity of it almost made me laugh. He had found one of the most important substances in Westeros—a weapon against the coming darkness, against the frozen death that waited beyond the Wall—and he was giving it to me because I liked weird rocks.

The door opened again, softer this time.

Lyanna had learned to walk three months ago, and now she walked everywhere, unsteady but determined. She toddles into the room, spotted us, and made a beeline for the glittering black thing in my hands.

"No, Lya!" Brandon scooped her up before she could reach us. "It's sharp! You'll cut yourself!"

She squirmed in his arms, reaching, straining toward the obsidian with the single-minded intensity that defined her. Her dark eyes fixed on the gleaming surface, wanting it, needing to touch it.

Always reaching for dangerous things, I thought. Always wanting what might hurt her.

Brandon spun her around, transforming restraint into play, and her frustrated squirming became delighted giggling. He did it without thinking—protecting her, distracting her, turning a dangerous situation into a game. The way he would always protect her. The way he would ride to King's Landing to defend her honor and die for it.

This is who they are, I realized, watching them. This is who they'll always be. Brandon, throwing himself into harm's way without hesitation. Lyanna, reaching for what she wants regardless of the cost.

Can I change that? Should I even try?

I wrapped the obsidian carefully in cloth, handling it like the treasure it was.

"Thank you, Brandon." My voice was thick. "This is... this is the best treasure yet."

Brandon shrugged, already distracted, chasing Lyanna around the room as she shrieked with laughter. He had given me a weapon against the apocalypse and moved on without a second thought.

That was Brandon. Love without weight. Gifts without expectation.

I hid the obsidian under my mattress, next to the piece of blue glass from two years ago.

Dragonglass, I thought. The Others are real. The Long Night is coming. And my brother just handed me a weapon.

You have no idea what you've given me, Brandon. You never do.

My collection of impossible hopes grew by one.

Part 8: The Family Tree

The godswood held its breath.

Late autumn had stripped the smaller trees bare, but the Heart Tree stood unchanged—white bark, blood-red leaves, the carved face weeping sap that looked far too much like tears. We gathered before it in the dying light, the whole family together for the first time in weeks.

Rickard stood with his head bowed, hands clasped behind his back. Lyarra held Lyanna on her hip, the toddler squirming with her usual impatience. Brandon shifted from foot to foot, visibly struggling with the stillness required.

I stood apart, watching them all.

"Why do we have to stand still?" Brandon muttered. "The tree doesn't care."

"Hush," Mother said. "The old gods always watch."

Father began the prayer—old words in a tongue I was only beginning to understand, calling on the gods of earth and stone and forest to bless the stored harvest, to grant strength through winter, to keep the pack together and safe.

The old gods, I thought. Real, in this world. Present, in ways I still don't fully understand.

The feeling was there again. The pressure I had felt three years ago when I first stood before this tree, the sense of vast attention focused on something too small to merit notice. It was stronger now—or maybe I was more open to it, less armored by skepticism.

Movement caught my eye.

Lyanna had gone still in Mother's arms. Not squirming. Not reaching. Just staring at the Heart Tree with an intensity that had no place on a face so young. Her dark eyes were fixed on the carved face, the weeping sap, the red leaves rustling in a wind that seemed to touch nothing else.

"The tree is crying," she said.

Her voice was clear. Distinct. A full sentence, spoken with the careful precision of someone testing new words.

She wasn't yet two.

Mother's face went white. Father's prayer stopped mid-word. Brandon, for once in his life, was silent.

"Ned said something similar." Mother's voice was barely a whisper. "When he was small."

Every eye turned to me.

I remembered. Three years old, standing where I stood now, the words pulled from me against my will: The tree is sad. It's waiting.

"What did you say, Ned?" Father's tone was sharp, the commander demanding a report.

"I said it felt sad," I admitted. There was no point denying it. "Like it was waiting for something."

Father looked between us—his middle children, the quiet one and the fierce one, both marked by something he couldn't explain. I watched him calculate, the wheels of his political mind turning, assessing what advantages god-touched children might bring.

"The old gods mark our line," he said slowly. "Perhaps they speak to those who listen."

He didn't sound afraid. Rickard Stark feared very little, and certainly not his own children. But there was something new in his voice—respect, maybe, or wariness.

The prayer ended. The silence stretched.

Brandon broke first, of course. "Can I go now?" He was already edging toward the path that led to the hot springs, eager to escape the weight of the moment.

"Go," Father said, and Brandon was off like an arrow released.

Mother carried Lyanna back toward the keep, murmuring softly to the toddler who had fallen silent again, staring back at the Heart Tree until it disappeared behind the walls.

I lingered. I couldn't help it. The feeling was still there—the watching, the waiting, the sense of something ancient and patient turning its attention toward me.

Father noticed. He always noticed.

"You feel it too," he said. Not a question.

I nodded.

"What does it feel like?"

I considered the question. It deserved a true answer, and I was tired of lying.

"Like being remembered," I said finally. "By something that doesn't forget."

Father was silent for a long moment. The wind stirred the red leaves above us, and they sounded almost like whispered words.

"Good," he said at last. "The North needs lords who are remembered."

He walked away without looking back.

I stayed, alone with the tree.

Are you watching? I asked silently. Do you know what I know? Do you see what I see—the fire and blood coming, the ice and death, the thousand ways this all falls apart?

The wind rose. The leaves rustled. For just a moment, I thought I heard something—not words, exactly, but a pressure that might have been acknowledgment.

Or it might have been nothing. The wind in the trees. The blood in my ears. The desperate hope of a man trapped in a child's body, reaching for any connection to something larger than himself.

If there was an answer, I couldn't hear it.

Not yet.

Part 9: The Builder's Promise

Sleep would not come.

I lay in my bed, staring at the dark beams above me, listening to Brandon's snoring and the wind against the shutters. Under my mattress, I could feel them—the lumps of my treasures, my impossible hopes pressed between feathers and stone.

Brandon's blue glass. Brandon's obsidian. Tokens of a love that asked nothing in return, given by a brother who would die in seventeen years unless I found a way to stop it.

The bed was too warm. The room was too still.

I slipped out from under the covers, careful not to wake Brandon, and crossed to the window.

Winterfell spread below me, silvered by starlight. The great walls rose eighty feet of granite, built to withstand any army, any siege. Smoke curled from the kitchens where fires were banked but never dead. And on the western edge, barely visible against the darkness—the skeleton of the glass gardens, construction begun this year, not yet complete.

An inventory, I thought. Take stock. What have you actually accomplished?

The list was short. Shorter than I wanted.

Walys was thinking about invisible things that cause disease. Not believing yet, not acting, but thinking. That was something.

I had made soap—real soap that foamed and cleaned, that Winterfell would produce by the barrel now that Father had seen its value. Hands would be washed. Diseases would be prevented. Children would live who might have died.

Gage trusted me. Not much, not completely, but enough to take my suggestions, to accept me in his kitchen, to think about why bread rose the way it did.

Father called me useful. In the North, in this family, that word carried weight.

I had dragonglass. One piece, hidden under a mattress, but it was a start. Brandon had found a deposit. There would be more.

And I had my family. Still alive. Still together. Mother and Father and Brandon and Lyanna, breathing the same air, walking the same halls, bound by blood and circumstance and the terrible love I couldn't escape.

The victories, I thought. Now the failures.

No one listened about hygiene during childbirth. Mother had survived Lyanna's birth, but not because of anything I'd done. The midwives still didn't wash their hands. The next birth might not be so lucky.

Brandon was still wild. Still reckless. Still hurling himself at the world without thought for consequence. I had watched him, taught him what I could, and changed nothing fundamental about who he was.

Lyanna still reached for sharp things. Still fought against every restraint. Still carried that fierce, burning need that would drive her to Rhaegar's arms and a tower in Dorne.

I was still five years old. Still too young to be heard, too small to be taken seriously, too trapped in this child's body to act on everything I knew.

Three more years, I calculated. Three years until Phase Two can begin. Until I'm old enough to start real projects. Seven years until the Eyrie. Twelve until Harrenhal. Fifteen until Brandon rides south.

Unless I can stop it.

The timeline stretched before me, years upon years of careful planning and patient work. The siege I had committed myself to, waged in inches rather than miles.

Patience, I told myself. This is a siege, not a battle. You don't take the castle in a day.

I returned to bed, pulling the covers up, pressing my back against the treasures hidden beneath me. Brandon's snoring had settled into a steady rhythm, the sound of a boy who trusted the world to keep him safe.

In three years, I'll be eight, I thought. Old enough to start real projects. Soap production at scale—barrels of it, like Father said. Beekeeping improvements. Metallurgy basics.

Small victories for now. Bigger ones later.

Sleep crept closer, softening the edges of thought.

I'm an engineer, I reminded myself. Engineers solve problems. We take broken systems and fix them.

This is just the hardest system I've ever tried to fix.

The darkness deepened. Brandon's breathing filled the silence.

In my dreams, I wasn't a child at all. I stood in a field of green glass—gardens stretching to every horizon, warm with trapped sunlight, heavy with growing things. Lemons hung from trees that shouldn't exist this far north. Oranges glowed like captured suns. And somewhere in the distance, voices—

Brandon's laugh. Lyanna's fierce shout. Other voices I didn't recognize yet, hadn't met yet, children not yet born who would be mine to protect.

They were all alive. They were all safe.

It was just a dream. I knew it was just a dream. The future I imagined was as fragile as a soap bubble, as likely to burst at the first touch of reality.

But it was a good dream. And sometimes, when the weight of foreknowledge pressed down like a physical force, when the knowledge prison seemed endless and inescapable—

Sometimes a good dream was enough to keep going.

The wind whispered against the shutters. The fire crackled low. And somewhere deep below Winterfell, the hot springs bubbled through ancient stone, warming the castle, sustaining it, promising that some things endured.

I held onto that promise as sleep finally claimed me.

Small victories, I thought one last time. All the way to the end.

Chapter Text

Part 1: The Soap Expands

Six Years Old, Spring 269 AC

Steam curled from the copper pots like captive clouds, filling the scullery with the sharp tang of lye and the softer undertone of rendered fat. The smell had become familiar over these past months--almost pleasant now, in the way industrial processes became pleasant when they meant progress.

I stood in my corner, watching three women tend the fires and stir the pots in careful rotation. What had been my "mud pie corner" a year ago was now a small production line. Wylla directed the others with quiet competence, her movements economical, her instructions clear. She had learned the proportions, the timing, the way the mixture changed when saponification was complete.

Sixteen bars last week, I calculated. Twenty this week if the batch doesn't separate.

"Stir gently, not so fast," Wylla told one of the newer girls--Marra, I thought her name was. "You'll break the curds."

The girl slowed her paddle, face flushed from the heat. She was sixteen, maybe seventeen, and she kept glancing at me with the nervous expression servants wore around Stark children who did strange things.

Let her be nervous. Nervous is fine. Nervous still produces soap.

The door opened. Cold air gusted in, cutting through the steam, and Wylla's paddle stuttered mid-stroke.

Lord Rickard Stark did not visit sculleries.

My father stood in the doorway, filling the frame the way he filled any space--not with bluster but with the quiet gravity of a man who expected the world to arrange itself around him. His grey eyes swept the room, cataloguing everything: the pots, the women, the carefully arranged drying racks where bars of soap cured in neat rows.

"Continue your work," he said when the women started to curtsy. His voice made it clear this was not a request.

They continued. Nervously now, movements jerky, but they continued.

Father crossed to the drying racks and picked up a bar of soap. He turned it over in his hands, examining the pale surface where I had managed to create something almost smooth. The lavender scent had become standard--it masked the tallow smell and made the soap more appealing to the women who used it.

"The servants' hands are softer," he said finally, still not looking at me. "Gage says fewer cuts fester in the kitchens. The maids report their skin cracks less in winter."

He set the bar down. His eyes found mine.

"You did this."

It wasn't a question, but I answered anyway. "Yes, Father."

"Explain."

I had prepared for this moment. Not for this exact moment--I hadn't expected Father to come here, hadn't expected this direct confrontation--but I had prepared the explanation, rehearsed it until the words felt natural.

"Clean hands make clean work," I said, keeping my voice measured, childlike but clear. "The soap removes things too small to see. Things that cause sickness. When the cooks wash before they touch food, fewer people get the belly-flux."

Father was silent for a long moment. The women kept stirring, kept working, pretending they weren't listening to every word.

"Your brother will inherit Winterfell," he said finally. "Brandon is the heir. The swords, the lands, the bannermen--all of it will be his."

Tell me something I don't know. I kept the thought from my face.

"But a second son who improves our lands..." Father's voice took on a thoughtful tone I had learned to recognize--the voice of a lord calculating advantage. "That has value, Eddard. That has great value indeed."

He's calculating. Good. Let him calculate. Let him see me as useful, not threatening. Not touched by madness.

"I want to help," I said. Simple. True. "Winterfell can be stronger."

Father's hand landed on my head--heavy, calloused, the same gesture of approval he had given me months ago when I first showed him the soap. "Then help," he said. "But bring your ideas to Maester Walys first. A lord who improves his lands must document his improvements."

He left without another word. Lords did not linger in sculleries.

Wylla let out a breath she had been holding. The other women's stirring resumed its normal rhythm, the tension bleeding out of the room with the steam.

"What do you want to try next, little lord?" Wylla asked, her voice carrying a warmth it hadn't held before Father's visit. She believed now. Not in science--she had no concept of science--but in me. In the strange little lord the Old Gods had blessed with strange knowledge.

I looked at the soap pots, then out the small window toward the kennels, where I could see the rough-hewn shapes of hutches against the grey sky.

"Animals," I said. "I want to try improving how we raise animals."

Wylla laughed. "You'll need more than soap for that, little lord."

Yes, I thought. I'll need patience. And rabbits.

Part 2: The Rabbit Proposition

Summer 269 AC

The kennelmaster's domain smelled of dog and damp straw and the particular musk of animals that had never known soap. I stood before Farlen with my hands clasped behind my back, trying to look as serious as a six-year-old could manage.

Farlen was a broad man with arms like tree branches and a face weathered by forty Northern winters. His dogs loved him--I had watched them press against his legs, compete for his attention, follow his every command with eager devotion. He knew animals the way Gage knew food, the way Mikken knew metal: through decades of practice, not theory.

He was also deeply skeptical of lordlings with ideas.

"Rabbits," he said flatly. "You want to improve the rabbits."

"I want to watch them," I corrected. "Learn how they breed. See which ones make the best babies."

Farlen snorted. "Rabbits breed fine on their own, m'lord. Don't need a six-year-old's help."

I had expected this. The resistance was natural--I was challenging knowledge earned through a lifetime of experience. No one liked being told they could do better, especially not by a child.

Questions, not answers. Lead them to conclusions.

"Why do some litters have more babies than others?" I asked.

Farlen paused. The question had caught him off guard--not because it was difficult, but because no one had ever thought to ask it.

"Some does are stronger," he said after a moment. "Better mothers."

"And their daughters? Are they better mothers too?"

The silence stretched longer this time. I could see him thinking, turning the question over in his mind like a stone he'd never noticed before.

"Sometimes," he admitted. "Sometimes not."

"What about the bucks?" I pressed, keeping my voice curious, innocent. "Does it matter which buck fathers the litter?"

Farlen's frown deepened. He glanced toward the hutches--rough-built things at the edge of his domain, where wild-caught rabbits were kept for meat when hunting was poor. No one paid much attention to them. They bred, they ate, they were eaten. That was the extent of rabbit husbandry at Winterfell.

"Never thought to track it," he said slowly. "A rabbit's a rabbit."

"But some rabbits are bigger," I said. "Some grow faster. Some have thicker fur." I was walking a careful line now--too many observations, and he would grow suspicious. "What if the big ones make big babies? What if we could make more big ones?"

Farlen's eyes narrowed. I could see him calculating, trying to determine if this was a lordling's idle fancy or something else entirely.

"Father says I'm good at noticing things," I added. "Let me watch. Let me write down what I see. Just the rabbits. Your dogs are perfect already."

The flattery was calculated, but not dishonest. His dogs were well-bred--Farlen knew the value of careful breeding in hunting hounds. He just hadn't applied the same thinking to rabbits.

"And why do you care about rabbits, little lord?" His voice was gentler now, curiosity bleeding through the skepticism.

I thought of the answer I had prepared--the safe answer, the diplomatic answer--and discarded it.

"The small ones go hungry in winter," I said instead. "The servant children. When the snows are deep and the stores run low. More meat means fewer hungry children."

Farlen's face did something complicated. I had touched something real--a memory, maybe, or a fear. Every man in the North had seen children go hungry. Every man knew that winter was coming, always coming, and there would never be enough.

"You're a strange one, m'lord." His voice was rough. "Too serious by half."

"Is that a yes?"

He looked at the hutches, then back at me, then at the kennels where his beloved dogs waited. I could see the decision forming behind his eyes.

"You can watch," he said finally. "Write down what you see. But don't expect miracles, little lord. Rabbits are just rabbits."

I nodded solemnly. "Thank you, Farlen. I'll just watch and learn."

But they won't be just rabbits, I thought as I walked toward the hutches. Give me controlled breeding, proper hutches, and documentation, and I'll double your meat production.

One year. Maybe two. That's all I need to prove the concept.

Then we scale.

Part 3: Brandon's Departure

Late Summer 269 AC

Steel rang against steel, the sound sharp and pure in the morning air.

I watched from the shadowed doorway of the armory as Brandon circled his opponent, wooden practice sword held in a guard that would have been sloppy six months ago. Not anymore. At eight years old, my brother was already moving like something dangerous.

Martyn Cassel pressed forward, testing Brandon's defense with a series of quick strikes. The master-at-arms was holding back--of course he was, Brandon was still a child--but there was real effort in his attacks now, real attention. He had stopped treating these sessions as play.

Brandon parried. Dodged. Launched a counter that Martyn barely deflected.

"Better!" The master-at-arms stepped back, lowering his sword. "Your footwork is improving. Again."

From the elevated walkway, Father watched with arms crossed and pride barely hidden. This was what he had been waiting for--Brandon growing into the heir he was meant to be. The Wild Wolf, they were starting to call him. The future Lord of Winterfell, already showing the gifts that would make him formidable.

I felt the distance like a physical thing.

A year ago, Brandon had brought me treasures. Bird nests. Interesting rocks. The obsidian he found in the Wolfswood. We had shared something then--the bond between brothers, different but connected.

Now Brandon had wooden swords and training partners and glory. He had Martyn Cassel's attention and Father's pride and the promise of everything a Stark heir could want. The treasures had stopped coming. The visits to my corner of the world had grown rare.

This is what you wanted, I reminded myself. You need him to be the heir. You need to be underestimated.

It still hurt.

"Ned!" Brandon spotted me between bouts, his face breaking into a familiar grin. "Come spar!"

I approached the training yard. The morning sun was bright, the air already warming toward the rare summer heat the North sometimes permitted. Martyn Cassel handed me a wooden sword with the neutral expression of a man who had more important students to train.

The weapon felt wrong in my hands. Too heavy. Too awkward. Michael Chen had never been a fighter--I had been an engineer, a scholar, a man who solved problems with math and materials, not violence.

Brandon attacked before I was ready.

I managed to block the first strike, barely. The second caught me on the shoulder, hard enough to sting through my padded tunic. I retreated, trying to remember the forms Martyn Cassel had drilled into me, trying to make my body do what my mind knew was correct.

It wasn't enough. Brandon was faster, stronger, more natural. He moved like fighting was breathing, like the sword was an extension of his arm. Every strike I blocked cost me ground. Every counter I attempted he deflected with casual ease.

He disarmed me with a twist I didn't see coming, sending my practice sword spinning into the dirt.

"You think too much, Ned." He wasn't gloating--his voice was warm, concerned almost. "You have to feel it."

I do feel it. The words stayed locked behind my teeth. I feel every sword that will ever touch you. I feel the chains around your neck in Aerys's throne room. I feel you strangling yourself trying to save Father.

"I'll practice more," I said instead.

Brandon ruffled my hair--the gesture I had come to associate with his affection, the casual touch of a brother who loved without reservation.

"Don't worry," he said. "You'll get better. And anyway, you have your soap and your rabbits." His grin returned, bright and uncomplicated. "Winterfell needs lords who think, not just lords who fight."

It was meant kindly. He didn't know it was a knife.

This is his role, I thought as he ran back to spar with Martyn Cassel. The warrior. The heir. The one who shines.

And I am the quiet one. The useful one. The second son who improves the lands while his brother trains for glory.

Father caught my eye from the walkway. He nodded once--approval, acknowledgment, the silent communication of a lord who had already categorized his children into their proper places.

I picked up the wooden sword from the dust, looked at it for a long moment, and walked back toward the rabbit warrens.

He'll be better than me at fighting. That's fine. I don't need to beat him.

I need to save him.

The wooden sword lay forgotten where I dropped it.

Part 4: King Hopper, First of His Name

Seven Years Old, Spring 270 AC

The rabbit hutches had multiplied.

What had been three makeshift enclosures a year ago was now twelve carefully constructed breeding pens, arranged in neat rows behind the kennels. I stood before them with a slate in my hand, making notes in the shorthand I had developed--symbols for lineage, numbers for litter size, marks for weight at three moons.

Doe 7, third litter: eight kits. Six surviving to weaning. Sire: Black Buck 2. Average weight at twelve weeks: two pounds, four ounces.

The data was starting to tell a story. Patterns were emerging from the careful documentation--which bloodlines produced consistently, which crosses yielded larger offspring, which does had the temperament for multiple litters per year.

"Ned!"

Brandon's voice carried across the yard, followed shortly by Brandon himself--nine years old now, taller than he had any right to be, face flushed from morning training. He had grown into his wildness, channeled it into the sword work that consumed most of his days. But he still found time to seek me out. Still remembered that his quiet brother existed.

"What ARE you doing?" He peered over my shoulder at the slate, brow furrowing at the incomprehensible symbols. "You've got more rabbits than the cook can use."

"Choosing which ones make babies," I said, setting down the slate. "The best ones make the best babies."

Brandon's expression shifted from confusion to something approaching interest. He wasn't stupid--wild, impulsive, impatient, but never stupid. He just thought with his body rather than his mind.

"Show me."

I led him to the largest hutch, where a magnificent black buck sat watching us with the placid indifference of a creature that had never known predators. He was easily twice the size of the scraggly rabbits Farlen had started with, his fur thick and glossy, his frame heavy with muscle.

"This one's my best breeder," I said. "His kits are bigger than average by three moons old. His daughters are good mothers. His sons grow fast and strong."

Brandon crouched down to get a better look. The black buck regarded him with mild curiosity, nose twitching.

"He's huge," Brandon breathed. "Like a small dog."

"He's the result of careful breeding. Four generations of selecting for size and health."

"Four generations of rabbits?" Brandon looked at me with new respect. "You've been doing this for a year?"

"A little over. Rabbits breed fast."

Brandon stared at the buck for a long moment. Then his face split into a grin--the wild, delighted grin I remembered from years ago, when he brought me bird nests and interesting rocks.

"He needs a NAME," Brandon announced, standing up with dramatic flourish. "A proper name. If he's the best, he should be..." He struck a pose, hand on heart, chin raised like a herald proclaiming to a great hall. "KING HOPPER, FIRST OF HIS NAME!"

I stared at my brother.

The laughter caught me off guard. It bubbled up from somewhere deep, somewhere I had almost forgotten existed--not the controlled response of a man playing a child, but genuine, helpless mirth.

Brandon grinned wider, encouraged. "King Hopper, First of His Name, Lord of the Hutches, Protector of the..." He faltered, searching for the word.

"Lettuces?" I offered, the word escaping before I could stop it.

"PROTECTOR OF THE LETTUCES!" Brandon roared. "King Hopper, First of His Name, Lord of the Hutches, Protector of the Lettuces! All hail!"

We were both laughing now, the sound echoing off the kennel walls, startling a dog into barking. Brandon clutched his stomach, tears streaming down his face. I couldn't breathe, couldn't think, couldn't do anything except laugh at the absurdity of a nine-year-old boy declaring a rabbit royalty.

For a moment--one perfect, suspended moment--we were just brothers. No distance. No diverging paths. No weight of futures I couldn't change. Just two boys being ridiculous, the way brothers were supposed to be.

"Long may he reign!" Brandon managed between gasps.

"All hail the King!"

Brandon left eventually, still chuckling, heading back to the training yard where glory and swords and the heir's path waited. But he paused at the edge of the kennels, looked back at me, and smiled--a real smile, warm and present.

"Your rabbits are good, Ned. I like King Hopper."

Then he was gone, and I was alone with my hutches and my slate and my ridiculous, noble-named breeding buck.

I looked at King Hopper. He looked back at me with the serene dignity of a creature utterly unconcerned with human foolishness.

"You're going to sire a dynasty," I told him.

And in ten years, there will be rabbit warrens across the North. Children who would have starved will live because of better breeding. Because of you, and your sons, and your sons' sons.

I made a note on my slate: King Hopper - primary breeder - 270 AC.

Brandon doesn't know what he just did. He gave my experiment a name people will remember. A story they'll tell.

I reached into the hutch and scratched behind the royal ears. King Hopper accepted this tribute with appropriate majesty.

"Long may you reign, Your Grace."

King Hopper then turned around, hopped to the corner of his hutch, and peed on me.

Part 5: The Bees Awaken

Seven Years Old, Late Summer 270 AC

The beekeeper's domain buzzed with warning.

I stood at the edge of the meadow where Winterfell kept its skeps--six woven domes of straw and willow, placed far enough from the castle to avoid accidents. The air shimmered with the movement of thousands of bees, their bodies catching the late summer sun as they made their final runs before winter.

Old Wat tended the hives, had done for thirty years. He was ancient, his face weathered like old leather, his hands scarred from a lifetime of stings. The bees knew him, or so he claimed. They let him work when they would drive away any other man.

I had been watching him for weeks.

"You want to see the harvest, little lord?" Wat's voice carried the rasp of age. "It's late in the season, but there's one more taking before we close them up for winter."

"Yes," I said, keeping my voice eager, childlike. "Father says you make the best honey in the North."

The flattery worked. Wat's weathered face creased into something approaching a smile.

The process began with smoke. Wat built a small fire, feeding it with damp grass until thick white clouds billowed forth. He carried the smoking bundle to the nearest skep and pumped smoke through the entrance.

"The smoke calms them," he explained, though I already knew. "Makes them think there's fire. They gorge on honey, thinking they'll need to flee. Too full to sting as fierce."

Except that's not quite right, I thought. The smoke masks the alarm pheromones. It disrupts their communication, not their temperament.

But I nodded and watched as Wat worked.

After the smoke came the harvest. Wat lifted the entire skep, revealing the golden combs built inside. They were beautiful--organic architecture, perfect hexagons filled with amber liquid and capped with wax.

And then he destroyed them.

He cut the combs free with a knife, letting them fall into a bucket. Wax and honey mixed together, larvae crushed, the careful work of thousands of bees reduced to sticky rubble. The bees swarmed around him, confused, angry, their home violated.

"What about the bees?" I asked, watching the chaos.

"These ones are done," Wat said, already moving to the next skep. "Come spring, I'll catch wild swarms to start again."

Done. The word landed like a stone.

He was going to kill them. After the harvest, he would seal the skeps and burn sulfur inside, suffocating the colonies to harvest the remaining honey and wax. That was how it had always been done. The bees died so men could have honey.

"Why not keep them?" The question escaped before I could stop it. "Keep the bees alive through winter. They could make more honey next year."

Wat paused, knife dripping honey. "Can't harvest without destroying the comb, m'lord. And they won't survive winter without enough stores."

"What if there was a way to take honey without destroying their home?" I pressed. "A way to leave them enough to survive?"

The old beekeeper looked at me with the patient expression of a man explaining obvious things to children. "There isn't, m'lord. This is how it's done. How it's always been done."

Because no one's thought to do it differently.

My mind was already racing ahead. Top-bar hives. Movable frames. The technology was so simple it hurt--just bars of wood the bees would build comb on, frames you could lift out and replace without destroying the colony.

"Could I try something?" I asked. "An experiment. Father says I'm good at experiments."

Wat's weathered face showed skepticism, but also curiosity. "What kind of experiment?"

"Building a different kind of hive. One where we could take honey without killing the bees." I was choosing my words carefully now, walking the line between insight and impossibility. "Just one. To see if it works."

"And where did a seven-year-old learn about beekeeping?" His voice wasn't hostile, just genuinely confused.

"I read," I said simply. "And I watch. You said the bees need their stores for winter. But you're taking everything. What if we only took the extra? What if we built a hive where we could see how much was extra?"

Wat stared at me for a long moment. The bees swirled around us, their hum a living sound.

"You're a strange one, little lord. First the soap, then the rabbits, now the bees." He shook his head, but there was something almost fond in the gesture. "Your father indulges you. Let's see if he'll indulge this fancy."

It's not a fancy, I thought. It's the difference between killing your livestock for one meal or keeping them alive to feed you for years.

"Thank you, Wat. I'll speak to Father."

That evening, I found Father in his solar, reviewing accounts with Maester Walys. I waited until the maester had left before approaching.

"Father. I want to try something with the bees."

Rickard Stark looked up from his ledgers. "The bees."

"Yes. Old Wat kills the colonies every harvest. I think I can build a hive where we keep the bees alive. More honey, year after year, without needing to catch new swarms each spring."

Father set down his quill. "And you learned this from your observations?"

"And from thinking," I said carefully. "The rabbits worked. The soap worked. This will work too."

A long silence. Father studied me with those grey eyes that missed nothing.

"One hive," he said finally. "You may build one experimental hive. If it produces more honey than Wat's methods, we'll discuss expanding. If it fails..." He paused. "It fails. Understood?"

"Understood."

I left the solar with permission and a plan forming in my mind. Top-bar hive design. Simple wooden construction. Bars the bees would build natural comb on. A way to harvest that left the colony intact.

Three years, I thought, walking back to my chambers. Three years until the Eyrie. I need to prove this works before I leave.

The bees are next. And after the bees...

The list was growing. But so was my credibility.

Part 6: Benjen's Arrival

Seven Years Old, Late Winter 270 AC

The screaming had started at dawn.

I had known it was coming for months--Mother's growing belly, her tiredness, the way Father watched her with carefully hidden concern. Another child. Another sibling. Another name on the list of people I had to save.

I sat in the nursery with Lyanna, building towers from wooden blocks while the sounds of labor echoed through Winterfell's stone corridors. She was four years old now, old enough to understand that something was happening, young enough to be terrified by what she didn't understand.

"Ned." Her voice was small, trembling. "Why is Mother hurting?"

"She's bringing our brother into the world." I kept my voice calm, steady, even as another scream cut through the walls. "It hurts, but she's strong. She'll be all right."

She has to be all right. I made sure they boiled the water. Made sure they used the soap. Made sure the midwives scrubbed their hands until the skin was raw.

Lyanna's tower collapsed. She didn't notice. Her dark eyes were fixed on the door, as if she could see through it to the birthing chamber where our mother fought the oldest battle.

"I don't like it," she whispered.

"Neither do I."

I pulled her close, and she came without resistance--the fierce, wild girl who fought everything suddenly small and scared in her brother's arms. Her heart beat fast against my chest, rabbit-quick with fear.

Outside the nursery, I heard Brandon pacing. He had been ordered to Father's solar but couldn't stay still, couldn't do nothing while Mother screamed. The wild wolf, caged by helplessness.

Father was in the birthing chamber. Against all custom, against everything the maesters recommended, he had refused to leave Lyarra's side. I didn't know if that was love or stubbornness or simply the Stark inability to abandon pack.

Hours passed.

The screaming stopped.

The silence that followed was worse than the noise. Lyanna's grip on my tunic tightened until her knuckles went white. I held her and waited, counting heartbeats, counting breaths, counting the seconds until we knew.

A baby's cry split the quiet. Thin. Angry. Alive.

I let out a breath I hadn't known I was holding.

"That's him," I told Lyanna. "That's our brother."

Footsteps in the corridor. The door opened, and a serving woman--one of the midwives I had badgered about handwashing--stood there with exhaustion written across her face.

"A boy, my lord and lady. Your mother is well. Come."

Lyanna wouldn't let go of my hand as we walked. Brandon joined us in the corridor, practically vibrating with restless energy, and together we made our way to the birthing chamber.

The room smelled of blood and herbs and the particular exhaustion of labor completed. The fire had been built high, casting warm light across the bed where Mother lay propped against pillows, her face pale but alive. So alive.

Father sat beside her, one hand resting on the edge of the bed, his fingers almost touching hers. I had never seen his face so unguarded--the Lord of Winterfell stripped down to something simpler, something human.

And in Mother's arms, wrapped in grey wool, a tiny bundle squirmed and complained.

Brandon reached the bed first. "Let me see!"

Mother shifted the bundle so he could look. Brandon's nose wrinkled.

"He's red. And wrinkly."

"So were you," Mother murmured, her voice rough with tiredness. "So was Ned. So was Lyanna."

"I was NOT wrinkly!"

I approached more slowly, Lyanna still clutching my hand. Mother's eyes found mine, and something passed between us--gratitude, maybe, or acknowledgment. The midwives had muttered about the strange young lord who demanded they scrub their hands, but they had done it. The water had been boiled. The linens had been clean.

Whether it had made a difference, I would never know. But Mother was alive, and that was what mattered.

She shifted the bundle so I could see.

Benjen Stark. Tiny and furious, face scrunched with newborn outrage, fists waving at a world that had the audacity to be cold and bright and overwhelming. He looked exactly like every other newborn--red and wrinkled and utterly helpless.

Hello, little brother.

The thought rose with the familiar weight of foreknowledge.

You're going to take the black one day. You're going to stand on the Wall and watch the dead rise. You're going to fight in a war that no one believes is coming, against an enemy no one believes exists.

And I'm going to find a way to make sure you survive it.

"What's his name?" Lyanna asked, peering at the bundle with suspicious curiosity.

"Benjen," Father said. His voice was steady, but his hand had found Mother's now, fingers intertwined. "For my grandfather."

Lyanna considered this. "I like it," she declared, as if her approval was required.

I reached out and touched Benjen's tiny hand. His fingers were impossibly small, impossibly delicate, curling reflexively at the contact. Then they closed around my finger with surprising strength.

"He's got a grip," Brandon observed. "He'll be a fighter."

Or a brother of the Night's Watch. Or something else entirely. Something this world has never seen.

"Welcome to Winterfell, Benjen," I said aloud. The words came out thick, rough with emotion I couldn't quite contain. "We're going to need you."

He squeezed my finger harder, as if in answer.

Part 7: The Growing Distance

Eight Years Old, Late 271 AC

The godswood in winter was a study in silence.

I knelt before the Heart Tree, alone in the grey morning light, my knees cold against frozen ground and my breath misting in the still air. The carved face watched me with its empty eyes, red sap frozen mid-weep down the pale bark.

Two years since Benjen's birth. Two years of watching my family grow and change and slowly, inevitably, drift apart.

Brandon was ten now, spending more time in the training yard than anywhere else. He spoke of squiring, of fostering, of the future that waited beyond Winterfell's walls. When he saw me these days, it was usually in passing--a ruffled head, a quick grin, a "How's King Hopper?" before he was off again, chasing glory.

Lyanna was five, wild as the wolves she had been named for, following me everywhere with endless questions and fierce demands for attention. She had discovered horses this year and was already better in the saddle than I would ever be.

Benjen was two, a toddler careening through Winterfell with the same wild energy that had defined Brandon at that age. He had the Stark look, the Stark stubbornness, the Stark inability to be contained.

And I was eight. Still too young. Still trapped in a body that had years to go before anyone would take me seriously.

The weight pressed down.

I've been at this for eight years, I thought at the watching face. Eight years of planning and planting and waiting.

The rabbit warrens produced twice the meat they had before. King Hopper's descendants populated twelve hutches, their superior size and health documented in pages of careful notes. Farlen had stopped being skeptical and started being interested.

The soap had spread to three other castles. Northern lords who visited Winterfell took bars home with them, curious about this thing that made their hands soft and supposedly kept illness at bay. Father had begun talks about establishing a proper production facility.

Walys was documenting infant mortality rates across the North, tracking which births used clean water and soap and which didn't. The data would take years to accumulate, but the groundwork was laid.

It's not enough. It will never be enough.

The timelines stretched before me like paths through dark woods.

Brandon is ten. In eleven years, he'll ride south and die. I have eleven years to change who he fundamentally is.

Lyanna is five. In sixteen years, she'll ride off with Rhaegar. I have sixteen years to give her better options.

Benjen is two. In twenty-four years, the Wall will face the Army of the Dead. I have twenty-four years to prepare the North for winter.

The wind stirred the red leaves above me. They rustled like whispered secrets, like promises I couldn't keep.

How do you change someone's nature? How do you prevent a tragedy that hasn't happened yet? How do you save people from themselves?

The Heart Tree offered no answers. It never did. But the feeling was there--the sense of being watched, being witnessed, being held accountable by something older than memory.

"I need to do more," I said aloud, my voice small against the winter silence. "I need to move faster."

The wind rose. The leaves rustled. For a moment, I could almost believe there was something there--a presence, an attention, a weight of ancient regard focused on one small boy kneeling in the snow.

Three years. The knowledge surfaced unbidden. Three years at Winterfell before I go south. Before the Eyrie. Before I lose access to the forges, the land, the craftsmen.

I stood, brushing snow from my knees. The cold had seeped through my clothes, numbing my legs, reminding me that I was mortal, that I was small, that I was only eight years old no matter how ancient I felt inside.

Then I'd better make them count.

Part 8: The Project List

Eight Years Old, That Night

The candle burned low on my desk, casting dancing shadows across parchment and ink.

I wrote by its flickering light, the quill scratching out words I had never committed to paper before. A list. The kind Michael Chen would recognize from his engineering days--a project roadmap, a battle plan, a declaration of intent.

Year One (Now - 272 AC): Beekeeping improvements. Observation of current skep methods. Design top-bar hives.

Year Two (272-273 AC): First trials. Document yield differences. Expand rabbit breeding. Convince Father to fund larger hutch system.

Year Three (273-274 AC): Hygiene protocols for midwives. Compile Walys's mortality data. Present findings to Father. Scale what works.

The ink dried slowly in the cold air. I stared at the words, feeling the weight of them--the commitment they represented, the ambition they contained.

I'm eight years old, I thought. Eight years old, and I'm planning a revolution in livestock husbandry, apiculture, and medical hygiene.

The list was ambitious. Possibly impossible. I would be dismissed as a child playing at lordship, humored rather than heard. The maesters would resist any challenge to their knowledge. The servants would doubt any change to their traditions.

But I made soap. I doubled rabbit kit survival. Walys is thinking about invisible bugs.

Each small victory built credibility. Each credibility built trust. Each trust opened doors.

The door creaked open behind me.

Brandon stood in the doorway, rubbing sleep from his eyes. His hair was wild from bed, his nightshirt rumpled, his feet bare against the cold stone.

"Ned? It's the middle of the night." He yawned enormously. "What are you doing?"

I covered the list quickly, sliding another piece of parchment over it. "Nothing. Just... thinking."

Brandon shuffled closer, curiosity warring with exhaustion. "You're always thinking." He yawned again. "Come to bed. Tomorrow Martyn Cassel says I can use a real sword."

A real sword. The words landed with the weight of inevitability. Brandon's path, stretching out before him--swords and glory and a death in chains.

"That's wonderful," I managed. "You've earned it."

Brandon's sleepy face broke into a grin. "I know. I'm going to be the best swordsman in the North." He said it without arrogance, just absolute certainty. The wild wolf, sure of his place in the world.

"You will be," I said, and meant it.

He was already turning back toward the door. "Come on. Even you need sleep."

I followed my brother, the list staying hidden under my mattress with the blue glass and the obsidian and all my other impossible hopes. Brandon's breathing settled into sleep within minutes, the easy rest of someone unburdened by foreknowledge.

I lay in the dark, listening to the wind against the shutters, thinking about bees.

Bees, I thought. The bees are next. Father indulges my rabbit games because they produce meat. But honey... honey is gold. Honey is medicine. Honey is the Old Gods' blessing in amber form.

Skep beekeeping was what Winterfell used--the traditional method, woven domes where bees built wild comb and beekeepers destroyed entire colonies to harvest. Wasteful. Destructive. Harvests limited by the bees you killed.

Top-bar hives would change everything. Sustainable harvesting. Colony preservation. Yield increases of thirty percent or more.

But it would take time. Everything took time. Years of observation before years of experimentation before years of scaling.

Three years, I reminded myself. I have three years to prove myself before the Eyrie. And I'm going to start with the bees.

Sleep crept closer, softening the edges of thought. Brandon's snoring was a familiar comfort now, the sound of family, of pack, of everything I was fighting to preserve.

This is how you win a siege, I thought as darkness claimed me. Not with one decisive battle, but with ten thousand small victories. One bar of soap. One improved rabbit. One properly kept hive.

One day at a time. One seed at a time.

All the way to the end.

The last thing I saw before sleep was the dream--the same dream that had comforted me for years now. Glass gardens stretching to the horizon, warm with trapped sunlight. Lemons and oranges and growing things that shouldn't exist this far north. And somewhere in the distance, voices--

Brandon's laugh. Lyanna's fierce shout. Benjen's delighted squeal.

They were all alive. They were all safe.

It was just a dream. But sometimes, in the long dark of a Northern winter, a good dream was enough to keep going.

The wind whispered. The fire crackled low. And somewhere deep below Winterfell, the hot springs bubbled through ancient stone, promising that some things endured.

I held onto that promise as sleep finally claimed me.

Bees tomorrow, I thought. The bees are next.

And in the silence of the night, King Hopper slept in his royal hutch, and somewhere in the godswood the Heart Tree watched, and the seeds I had planted continued their slow, patient growth toward a future I was determined to change.

Chapter Text

Nine Years Old, Late Summer 272 AC

The smoke rose thin and white against the morning sky, curling from the clay pot in Old Karlyle's weathered hands.

I stood at the edge of the bee yard, watching him work. Three hives stood in a row before us--two traditional woven skeps, domed and familiar, and one rectangular structure of my own design. The top-bar hive looked strange beside its older cousins, its wooden slats gleaming pale against the darker wicker. A year of waiting had led to this moment.

"Ready, m'lord?" Karlyle asked without looking back. His voice carried the rough patience of a man who had worked bees for forty years and seen lordlings come and go with their ideas.

"Ready."

He approached the first skep, pumping smoke through the entrance with practiced ease. The bees emerged in confused spirals, their alarm muted by the haze. Karlyle had explained the theory to me--the smoke made them gorge on honey, thinking fire had come, too full and docile to sting properly.

Not quite right, I thought, watching the workers stumble from their home. The smoke masks their alarm pheromones. Disrupts communication. But close enough to true.

The harvest began.

Karlyle lifted the skep and set it aside, revealing the wild comb built within--golden architecture, perfect hexagons heavy with amber sweetness. Beautiful. And doomed.

He cut the combs free with a curved knife, dropping them into a wooden bucket. Honey ran between his fingers, thick and slow in the morning cool. The bees swirled around us, confused, robbed, their life's work reduced to sticky rubble.

Then came the sulfur.

I had known this was coming. Had prepared myself for it. But watching Karlyle light the yellow powder, watching the toxic smoke curl into the upturned skep where the remaining bees had clustered--

The buzzing stopped. Not gradually. All at once, like a snuffed candle.

Thousands of them. A whole summer's colony, dead for a single harvest.

"Good yield," Karlyle said, hefting the bucket. His voice held no malice, no cruelty. This was simply how it had always been done. Kill the bees, take the honey, catch new swarms in spring. The cycle, unquestioned for generations.

The second skep followed the same pattern. More golden comb. More sulfur smoke. More silence where there had been life.

Two colonies dead. Perhaps sixty thousand bees between them. All for honey I could have harvested without killing a single one.

"Now yours, m'lord." Karlyle's tone was careful, neutral. He had agreed to this experiment because Lord Rickard's strange son had asked, and Lord Rickard indulged his strange son's whims. But his skepticism was written in every line of his weathered face.

I approached my hive.

The top-bar design was simple--wooden bars laid across the top of a long box, each bar the width a bee would naturally space her comb. No frames. No foundation. Just bars the bees could build on, and a roof to keep out the rain.

I lifted the first bar.

The comb hung down from it in a perfect curtain, attached only at the top, heavy with capped honey. Bees crawled across its surface, unconcerned. I brushed them gently back into the hive with a feather--another innovation Karlyle had raised his eyebrows at--and set the bar aside.

The second bar. The third. Each one came away clean, the comb intact, the bees merely inconvenienced rather than destroyed.

"You're leaving the brood comb," Karlyle observed. He had moved closer, watching despite himself.

"They need it. The queen, the eggs, the young workers--all in there. Take the honey, leave the nursery."

His frown deepened. "Less honey that way."

"Less honey now. But the colony survives. They'll rebuild through autumn, winter on what we left them, and be making honey again come spring." I set another bar aside, this one lighter--I had left more stores toward the center, ensuring they would have enough. "Your skeps start from nothing next year. Catching swarms, building new comb, growing a population before they can make surplus. My bees are already established."

The harvest continued. When I finished, I had perhaps two-thirds of what each skep had yielded. Karlyle's bucket was fuller than mine.

But my bees were alive.

They hummed in their box, already repairing the disruption, already returning to their work. The queen laid eggs. The workers gathered nectar. The colony continued.

"Could work," Karlyle said slowly, examining my harvest. He dipped a finger in, tasted. "Good honey."

"The same honey. Just gathered without murder."

His eyes met mine, and I saw something shift behind them. Not belief--not yet. But the first crack in certainty, the first question where there had been only tradition.

"Need more summers to know for certain," he said finally. "One year proves nothing."

One year proves nothing. The engineer in me wanted to argue about sample sizes and controlled experiments and statistical significance. But I was nine years old, and patience was my only weapon.

"Three more hives," I said. "Father agreed to three more experimental hives for next year. You'll keep records? Which method yields more over time?"

Karlyle studied me for a long moment. The morning sun caught the grey in his beard, the lines carved by decades of squinting into smoke and swarms.

"Aye, m'lord. I'll keep records."

That's all I need. Data. Time. Proof.

We carried the honey jars to the kitchen together, my contribution smaller but earned without death. The taste was the same--golden, sweet, the North's liquid gold. But as I looked back at the bee yard, at the two empty skeps and the one living hive, I felt something I hadn't expected.

Satisfaction.

"Three more hives," I told Karlyle. "We'll know for certain by the time I'm eleven."

The beekeeper grunted--acknowledgment, if not agreement. Behind us, my bees hummed their ancient song, alive and rebuilding.

Year one complete. Two more to prove the concept. Two more to change how the North keeps bees.

The waiting had only begun.

Late Autumn 272 AC

The rabbit warrens had transformed.

Where twelve rough hutches had once stood behind the kennels, now forty breeding pens stretched in careful rows. The construction was still simple--wood and wire, nothing a castle carpenter would struggle with--but the organization was unmistakably different. Each pen bore a slate marker with chalk symbols only Farlen and I could read. Bloodlines. Birth dates. Weights at weaning.

Data, I thought, walking the rows. The foundation of everything.

King Hopper watched me approach with royal indifference.

He was magnificent now--nearly three years old, the largest buck I had ever seen, his black fur gleaming like polished obsidian in the autumn light. His ears stood tall and proud. His hindquarters were thick with muscle. He looked less like a rabbit than a small, very dignified dog.

"Your Grace," I murmured, unlatching his hutch. "How fares the realm?"

He twitched his nose at me. It was not, technically, an answer. But I chose to interpret it as approval of my administration.

The door to the kennels opened, and Farlen emerged, wiping his hands on his leather apron. The kennelmaster had aged in the three years since I'd first approached him with my "ideas about rabbits." Grey touched his temples now, and his walk was a little slower. But his eyes were sharp as ever, and they lit with something like pride when he saw me among his charges.

"M'lord. Come to inspect the troops?"

"Come to check on my partner." I scratched behind King Hopper's ears, feeling the buck lean into my hand; I understood the ask, and scratched his cheeks as well, pleased when I felt him “purr” almost like a cat. "Your records say kit survival is up fifty percent from before we started."

Farlen nodded slowly. "Aye. More than that, if I'm honest. The runts used to die by the dozen--cold, sickness, the does eating them when food was short. Now..." He gestured at the rows of healthy, well-fed rabbits. "Now they live. Most of them. Enough to breed, to grow, to fill the cookpots."

Fifty percent improvement in survival. Not from magic or alchemy, but from record-keeping, selective breeding, and basic animal husbandry practices that wouldn't be standardized on Earth for another four centuries.

"Other lords have been asking," Farlen continued. "Lord Manderly's man was here last month, wanting to know how we do it. Lord Cerwyn sent a letter."

"I know. Father wants me to write up the methods for distribution."

The kennelmaster's eyebrows rose. "You, m'lord? Writing instructions for other lords?"

"Who else? You understand the work, Farlen, but you learned it by doing. I learned it by watching and recording. Different kinds of knowing." I closed King Hopper's hutch, giving the royal nose one last scratch. "The write-up will have both. Your experience, my documentation. Together they make something other people can learn from."

Farlen was quiet for a moment. When he spoke again, his voice was rougher than usual.

"You know, m'lord, when you first came to me with your ideas... I thought you were just another lordling playing at peasant work. Bored. Looking for something to do that wasn't swords and horses."

That's fair. I was a six-year-old asking about rabbit breeding. What else would you think?

"But you weren't, were you?" He shook his head slowly. "You saw something. Knew something. The way you asked questions--like you already knew the answers and just wanted me to find them too."

My throat tightened. This was the danger, the edge I walked every day. Too clever by half, and they would start asking questions I couldn't answer.

"The old gods show me things sometimes," I said. The lie came easily now--I had used it so often it almost felt true. "In dreams. Patterns. Connections. But knowing isn't the same as doing. You're the one who made it work, Farlen. You and the does and the bucks and three years of daily labor."

Farlen studied me with eyes that had learned to read animals and, apparently, children who spoke like old men.

"The work doesn't need you anymore," he said finally. "You know that, don't you? I have the records now. The breeding lines. The hutch designs. I can train others, pass it on. The warrens run themselves."

Yes. The word stuck in my throat.

"That's what success looks like, m'lord." His voice was almost gentle. "Making yourself unnecessary."

I looked back at King Hopper, at his placid face and twitching nose, at the dynasty of sons and daughters and grandsons that filled the warrens around him.

You're right. The rabbits don't need me. They have you, and the system, and the records. I could vanish tomorrow and the breeding program would continue.

That was the whole point.

"Long may you reign, Your Grace," I told the buck.

His nose twitched with royal indifference.

I left the warrens with one last look at King Hopper, at the empire I had built and handed off. The satisfaction was still there, but mixed now with something restless. Something hungry.

The rabbits are secure. The bees are promising. What's next?

Across the courtyard, the smithy's chimney sent smoke spiraling into the grey sky. The rhythmic ring of hammer on iron echoed off the castle walls.

Steel, I thought. The next frontier is steel.

Winter 272-273 AC, Nine Years Old

The forge-glow painted everything in shades of orange and red.

I had spent years in this space, watching Mikken work. First as a toddler, fascinated by fire and metal. Then as a boy with too many questions. Now, at nine, I was furniture--part of the smithy's landscape, as unremarkable as the bellows or the quenching barrel.

That invisibility was exactly what I needed.

Mikken drew a length of iron from the forge, glowing yellow-white at its heart. His movements were automatic, decades of practice encoded in muscle and bone. The hammer fell in steady rhythm, shaping the metal with patient force. Sparks flew with each strike, dying in the air like falling stars.

Twelve hundred degrees Celsius, I estimated, watching the color fade from white to yellow to orange. Maybe eleven-fifty. He's working it at the right temperature, which means he has an intuitive grasp of the heat-color relationship even if he can't quantify it.

The iron became steel under his hands--recognizably a blade now, the rough shape of a dagger emerging from the formless bar. Mikken had been making blades since before my father was born. He was good at it. Possibly the best smith in the North.

He was also doing it wrong.

Not wrong in the sense of producing bad steel. His blades were excellent--hard, flexible, capable of holding an edge. Wrong in the sense of leaving improvement on the table. Wrong in the sense that I knew, from a lifetime of metallurgical engineering, that his methods could be better.

Water quenching, I thought as he carried the blade to the barrel. Fast cooling, high hardness, but also high stress. The rapid temperature change creates internal tensions that can crack the metal--especially on complex shapes, especially when the carbon content varies.

The blade plunged into the water. Steam erupted. The hiss filled the smithy like a serpent's warning.

Mikken examined the result, testing the edge with his thumb, flexing the blade slightly. His face showed satisfaction. This one had survived.

This one. How many don't? How many crack in the quench, or shatter when they shouldn't, or hold an edge for half the time they could?

"Mikken."

The smith looked up. His face was weathered like old wood, creased by heat and smoke and forty years of squinting at glowing metal.

"Aye, young lord?"

I had rehearsed this moment. Practiced the words, the tone, the careful phrasing that would make a question seem innocent rather than revolutionary.

"When the metal is yellow-white like that--" I pointed at the forge, where he had set another bar to heat "--is it hotter than when it's orange?"

Mikken's hammer paused mid-swing. He looked at the forge, then at me, then back at the forge.

"Aye," he said slowly. "I suppose it is."

"So you could tell how hot it is by the color? Without touching it?"

The question hung in the air between us. Simple on its surface. A child's curiosity about bright things.

But I saw his eyes narrow, saw the calculation happening behind them. Mikken wasn't a stupid man. He had simply never been asked to think about what he did in those terms.

"Never thought of it that way," he admitted. "But aye. Yellow-white is hottest. Then yellow. Then orange. Then red. Then black, when it's cooling."

Temperature-color gradient. The same principle that let nineteenth-century metallurgists develop pyrometry. But here, in this world, it's just 'what the smith knows.'

"What about cooling?" I pressed, keeping my voice innocent. "The water barrel--why water?"

"Because it cools the metal fast. Makes it hard."

"Could you use something else? Something that cools slower?"

Mikken's frown deepened. I had wandered into territory that contradicted generations of inherited knowledge. His father had used water. His father's father. The practice was so ancient it felt like natural law.

"Water's what works," he said. "Water's what my father used. His father before him."

And their blades cracked at the same rate yours do. And they never questioned it because questioning meant admitting the ancestors might have been wrong.

I didn't argue. That wasn't the way.

"Could we try something? Just once?" I let eagerness creep into my voice--a boy's enthusiasm for experiments, not an engineer's certainty about results. "What if you cooled the next blade in oil instead of water?"

"Oil?" Mikken laughed, but it was uncertain laughter. "That's cooking, not smithing."

"But oil is thicker. It would cool slower, wouldn't it? And you said fast cooling makes it hard. What if slower cooling makes it... different?"

The word I wanted was tougher. Less brittle. More resistant to shock. But I couldn't say that without revealing how much I knew.

Mikken stared at me for a long moment. The forge crackled. The hot bar waited, forgotten in the coals.

"Your father indulges you too much, young lord." But his voice lacked conviction. "One blade. Just to show you it won't work. And you're paying for the oil."

That's a yes.

He drew the bar from the forge and worked it into shape--another dagger, twin to the one cooling on his bench. The process was identical, the same patient hammer-strokes, the same careful attention to temperature and form.

Then the quench.

I had found the oil myself--a barrel of rendered fat from the kitchens, clarified and cooled to a thick golden liquid. It sat beside the water barrel now, incongruous in the smithy's organized chaos.

Mikken hesitated over it, the glowing blade in his tongs. I could see him fighting forty years of instinct.

Then he plunged the blade into the oil.

The result was different. No violent hiss, no explosion of steam. Just a bubbling, a shimmer of heat distorting the air above the barrel, a slower transformation from orange to black.

Mikken lifted the blade out. Examined it. His eyebrows climbed toward his hairline.

"No cracks," he said quietly.

"Can you test it? Compare it to the water one?"

He did. Bent both blades, testing flexibility. Struck them against the anvil, testing resistance. Ran his thumb along the edges, testing sharpness.

"The oil one's... different," he admitted. "Softer, maybe. But it bends further without breaking. And the edge..." He frowned. "The edge is still good. Not as sharp as the water one, but..."

"But it won't chip as easily?"

Mikken's eyes found mine. I saw something new in them--not suspicion exactly, but awareness. The recognition that his nine-year-old observer had known something he hadn't.

"Could be chance," he said. "One blade proves nothing."

One blade proves nothing. One year proves nothing. One success is anecdote, not evidence.

"Could we try a few more?" I asked. "Just to see? I'm curious what happens with different cooling speeds."

Mikken grunted--the sound I had learned to interpret as grudging agreement. He was already reaching for another iron bar, his mind turning over the implications despite himself.

"Curious lad," he muttered, feeding the forge. "Too curious by half."

But he's doing it. I settled back into my corner, watching him work. One blade at a time. One question at a time.

That's how you change a world.

Ten Years Old, Spring 273 AC

The scream echoed through the servant's quarters like a blade drawn across stone.

I had been in the library when it started, reviewing Maester Walys's mortality records--the documentation I had convinced him to begin two years ago, tracking births and deaths across Winterfell's smallfolk. The numbers were grim. One in four women died in childbed. One in three infants didn't see their first nameday.

Better than most of Westeros, I had thought, running my finger down the columns. But still barbaric by any civilized standard.

Then the scream came, and I was moving before I finished the thought.

The servant's hall was chaos. Women rushing with bundles of cloth. A man I didn't recognize pacing outside a closed door, his face grey with fear. The smell of blood and herbs and the particular terror that accompanied bringing new life into the world.

I couldn't enter the birthing chamber. A child, a lord's son, and male--three barriers that tradition made absolute. But I had prepared for this moment. Had been preparing for years.

Maester Walys emerged from the chaos, his grey robes spattered with fluids I chose not to examine too closely. His face was drawn, worried.

"The baby is positioned wrong," he said to no one in particular. "Mira is young, but strong. If we can turn the child..."

"The protocols." My voice stopped him mid-stride. "You have the protocols?"

Walys looked down at me, and I saw exhaustion warring with recognition. He knew what I meant. Knew the instructions I had given him months ago, the careful procedures wrapped in the language of religious observance rather than medical science.

"Lord Rickard's orders," he said slowly. "Yes. I have them."

"Then use them. Every step. The soap, the boiled water, the clean cloths. Everything."

The maester hesitated. In that moment, I saw all the resistance I had fought for years--the weight of tradition, the skepticism of educated men toward a child's strange ideas, the simple human reluctance to change what had always been done.

"Please," I said. "If it doesn't help, it won't hurt. But if it does help..."

If it helps, a woman lives who would have died. A child grows up with a mother. And we have one more piece of evidence that cleanliness saves lives.

Walys nodded once, sharply, and disappeared back into the birthing chamber.

I waited.

The servants moved around me like water around a stone, too focused on their tasks to question why the young lord stood frozen outside Mira's door. Hours passed. The screaming rose and fell, each silence worse than the noise before it.

Then, finally--a baby's cry. Thin, angry, alive.

I let out a breath I hadn't known I was holding.

Walys found me later, in the corridor outside the chamber. His face had changed--the exhaustion remained, but something else had joined it. Wonder, maybe. Or the beginning of belief.

"Mother and child both well," he said. "The baby was turned successfully. The birth was... clean."

"No fever?"

"Not yet. The fever usually comes in three days, if it comes." He paused, studying me with eyes that had learned to look more carefully at Winterfell's strange second son. "We'll watch her. If she recovers fully..."

"Then we document it. This birth, these methods, the outcome. And we compare it to the others."

Walys was silent for a long moment. When he spoke again, his voice was softer.

"The midwives resisted. Old Marta has delivered fifty babies. She said her hands were clean enough, that the soap and boiled water were foolishness."

"But she did it anyway?"

"Lord Rickard's orders." A ghost of a smile crossed his face. "And perhaps... perhaps I insisted more than I might have otherwise. Your ideas, young lord. They're strange. They sound like superstition dressed in philosophy. But they make a certain sense, when you think them through."

They make sense because they're true. Because invisible organisms cause infection, and heat and soap destroy them. Because germ theory works whether or not you believe in it.

"Three days," I said. "We wait three days. Then we know."

Three days passed. Four. Five.

No fever. Mira recovered fully, her baby healthy at her breast.

Walys began the documentation in earnest. Every birth at Winterfell would now be tracked--which methods were used, what the outcomes were. It would take years to accumulate enough data for meaningful comparison. Years I might not have, if the Eyrie came calling too soon.

But the framework was in place.

I visited the godswood that night, alone with the Heart Tree and the silence of the old gods.

"The Old Gods show us cleanliness in cold springs," I had told Walys, when he asked how I knew these things. "They teach us that purity of water and hand brings purity of body and soul. The rituals are old, older than memory. We have simply forgotten their meaning."

It's not theology. It's microbiology. But if calling it the gods' will makes people wash their hands, I'll preach it from every heart tree in the North.

I pressed my palm against the weirwood bark, feeling its impossible smoothness, its ancient cold.

Mother is alive because of soap and boiled water. Mira is alive because someone finally listened. How many more can we save?

The carved face watched me with its weeping eyes. Red sap traced tears down white bark, and in the silence, I could almost believe something watched back.

How many more?

The wind stirred the blood-red leaves, and if there was an answer, I couldn't hear it.

Not yet.

Ten Years Old, Late Summer 274 AC

The demonstration had drawn a crowd.

Father stood at the edge of the bee yard, his face carved from the same grey stone as Winterfell's walls. Beside him, Maester Walys clutched a slate covered in notes. Behind them, arranged in order of importance, stood a collection of household officials--the steward, the castellan's deputy, the head cook who had come to see where his honey supply originated.

And at the back, trying to look bored and failing, stood a man in Manderly colors. Ser Wylis's factor, sent from White Harbor to report on what the "clever Stark boy" had accomplished.

Three years, I thought, looking out at the bee yard. Three years of waiting, recording, proving. And now we show them what patience buys.

The yard had transformed since that first harvest. Ten top-bar hives stood in careful rows, their wooden bodies weathered by Northern seasons. Beside them, the last surviving traditional skeps looked almost primitive--woven baskets against engineered boxes.

Karlyle waited among the hives, his weathered face betraying nothing. But I caught his eye as I approached, and saw the smallest nod.

He believed now. The data had convinced him.

"My lords," I began, keeping my voice steady, "for three years we have tested two methods of keeping bees. The traditional skeps, which most households use, require killing the colony to harvest honey. My hives allow sustainable harvest--taking honey without destroying the bees that make it."

Father's expression didn't change, but I saw his eyes flick to the Manderly man. Calculating, as always.

"Show us," he said.

Karlyle stepped forward. He worked the first skep with practiced efficiency--smoke, sulfur, death. The harvest was familiar now, almost routine. Golden comb dropped into the bucket, bees dying in the toxic haze.

"Twelve pounds from this hive," Karlyle announced when he finished. "A good yield for the year. But the colony is dead. Come spring, I'll need to catch a new swarm, hope it establishes, hope the summer is kind."

He moved to my hives.

The contrast was immediate. No sulfur. No mass death. Just careful removal of honey-heavy bars, gentle brushing of bees back into their home, the quiet hum of a colony inconvenienced but intact.

"Eighteen pounds from this hive," Karlyle said when he finished. "Three harvests this year instead of one. The bees live, the queen lays, and come spring they'll be making honey while the skep colonies are still building comb."

The numbers hung in the air. I watched faces, reading reactions.

The steward was calculating--more honey meant more trade, more income. The Manderly factor had produced a small notebook, scribbling furiously. Father remained impassive, but his eyes had sharpened.

"Show them the records," I said.

Karlyle produced the slate we had maintained together--three years of careful documentation, harvest weights, colony survival rates, yield comparisons. The data told a story even skeptics couldn't ignore.

Three times the honey over time. Not because my bees are better, but because they live long enough to keep producing.

"The young lord's methods work." Karlyle's voice carried across the yard, louder than I had ever heard him speak. "I'll not go back to killing good bees. The old way made sense when we didn't know better. Now we do."

Silence. The kind of silence that follows a challenge to tradition, when everyone waits to see if the challenge will be accepted or crushed.

Father stepped forward. His boots crunched on the packed earth of the bee yard. He stopped before one of my hives, studying its construction with the eye of a man who had evaluated siege engines and army formations.

"How much oil does the wood treatment require?" he asked.

He's thinking about scaling. About spreading this beyond Winterfell.

"Two coats per season, my lord. The same treatment we use on the rabbit hutches. Gage in the kitchens can provide the rendered fat; Mikken can seal the joints."

Father nodded slowly. He turned to face the gathered witnesses--his household, his officials, the Manderly man who would carry word to White Harbor.

"You have proven yourself, Eddard." His voice carried the formal weight of a lord's pronouncement. "The Eyrie will be fortunate to have you."

The words hit me like a blow to the chest.

The Eyrie. It's time.

"You leave after the harvest moon," Father continued. "Jon Arryn has agreed to foster you alongside Robert Baratheon. Seven years in the Vale, learning what the North cannot teach. When you return, you will be a man grown, ready to serve your house."

Seven years. The number echoed in my mind, heavy with implication.

Seven years away from the forge, the warrens, the hives. Seven years of letter-writing instead of hands-on work. Seven years hoping what I've built here survives my absence.

But I kept my face still, my voice steady. "I am honored, Father. I will bring credit to House Stark."

Father's hand landed on my shoulder--heavy, calloused, the grip of a man who had already begun to treat me as something more than a child.

"I know you will."

That night, I sat alone in my chamber with a jar of honey and the weight of the future pressing down.

The jar was from my hives--golden, sweet, three years of patience made tangible. I had earned this. Proven the concept. Changed how at least one beekeeper thought about his work.

And now I'm leaving.

The Eyrie. Jon Arryn. Robert Baratheon. Seven years of Southern education, of different customs, of distance from everything I had built.

Will it survive without me?

The question gnawed at me like hunger.

Will Karlyle keep the records? Will Farlen maintain the breeding lines? Will Walys continue documenting births? Will Mikken experiment with oil-quenching, or go back to water the moment I'm not there asking questions?

Seven years was a long time. Long enough for traditions to reassert themselves. Long enough for my careful seeds to wither without tending.

One month. I have one month to prepare. One month to leave instructions that will last seven years.

I opened my writing case and began to make lists.

Eleven Years Old, Late Summer 274 AC

The godswood was dappled with afternoon light, gold and green filtering through the blood-red leaves.

Lyanna sat beside me beneath the Heart Tree, her dark hair tangled from riding, her grey eyes flashing with anger she was trying very hard to contain. She was eight now, fierce and restless, already showing the wild spirit that would define her.

"Why do YOU have to go?" The words burst out of her like steam from a kettle. "Brandon gets to stay! It's not fair!"

It's not fair. The rallying cry of eight-year-olds everywhere. And in this case, she's not even wrong.

"Brandon is the heir," I said carefully. "He stays to learn how to rule Winterfell. Second sons go to be fostered, to build alliances, to learn from other houses. It's how things are done."

"I don't care how things are done!" She pulled her knees up to her chest, hugging them fiercely. "You're my brother. You're supposed to be HERE."

I don't want to leave either, I thought. I don't want to spend seven years in the Vale while my family grows up without me, while my projects succeed or fail without my guidance, while the future I'm trying to change marches closer with every day.

But I couldn't tell her that. Couldn't explain the weight of foreknowledge, the desperate need to be everywhere at once, the grinding frustration of a man's mind trapped by a child's circumstances; I loved them.

"Lyanna." I turned to face her, making my voice as serious as an eleven-year-old could manage. "I need you to promise me something."

She looked up, suspicious. "What?"

"Think before you act."

Her face scrunched in confusion. "What?"

"Just... take a breath. Look before you leap. When something exciting happens, when your blood is running hot and you want to do something bold--stop. Just for a moment. Think about what comes next."

Think about the consequences. Think about who gets hurt. Think about the prince with the silver hair and the winter roses and the war that follows when you don't think first.

Lyanna stared at me like I had started speaking High Valyrian. "Why would I do that?"

"Because I'm asking. As your brother."

She was quiet for a long moment, her fierce eyes searching my face for something she couldn't quite name. I saw her mother in her--the same intensity, the same stubbornness. But also something wilder. Something that wouldn't be contained by duty or expectation or careful brotherly advice.

"I'll try," she said finally. "But I won't promise. Promises are for things you're sure about."

Promises are for things you're sure about. The words hit me harder than she could know.

"That's fair," I managed. "That's more than fair."

I reached into my pocket and pulled out the gift I had made for her.

The candle was small--perhaps six inches tall--but it had taken me weeks to craft. Pure beeswax from my own hives, carefully rendered and mixed with woad from the dyer's stores until the golden wax turned the pale blue of winter roses. I had poured it into a mold I had carved myself, shaping it into a winter rose, petals spiraling outward in frozen bloom. Against the godswood's shadows, it looked like frost given form.

Lyanna's eyes went wide. "You made this?"

"From my bees. Something to remember me by." I pressed it into her hands. "Light it when you think of me. Or don't. Just... keep it. And remember what I said."

She turned the candle over in her hands, examining every petal, every detail. For a moment, the fierce wild girl was gone, replaced by something softer. Something that understood gifts.

Then she launched herself at me, wrapping her arms around my neck in a hug so fierce it nearly knocked me backwards.

"I'll remember," she whispered against my ear. "I'll try."

She was gone before I could respond, running toward the stables, toward the horses, toward her wild life. The hug had lasted perhaps three seconds.

But it was enough.

I watched her go, the afternoon light catching her dark hair as she ran.

She won't change. That's who she is--impulsive, passionate, reaching for what she wants regardless of consequence. I can't change her nature.

I pressed my hand against the Heart Tree's bark, feeling its ancient cold seep through my palm.

But maybe, when the moment comes--when the prince with the silver hair offers her a crown of winter roses--maybe she'll remember. Maybe she'll take that one breath.

It wasn't much hope.

It was all I had.

Eleven Years Old, Early Autumn 274 AC

The candles burned low on my desk, their light flickering across stacks of parchment covered in my careful writing.

I had been at this for days. Not lists anymore--detailed instructions, protocols, everything I knew committed to permanent record. My hand ached from gripping the quill. My eyes burned from the smoke and the strain. But I couldn't stop.

Seven years. I have to leave them enough to work with for seven years.

For Karlyle: hive construction specifications, seasonal management schedules, swarm prevention techniques, how to split strong colonies to create new ones. Every piece of knowledge I had accumulated in three years of observation and experiment, distilled into language a practical man could follow.

For Farlen: breeding records, selection criteria, the complete King Hopper bloodline chart. Instructions for maintaining genetic diversity, for culling weak lines, for expanding production without sacrificing quality.

For Maester Walys: hygiene protocols, documentation methods, the mortality tracking system we had developed together. And a careful letter arguing for the establishment of handwashing requirements at all births attended by Winterfell's midwives.

For Mikken: notes on oil-quenching, temperature observations based on metal color, a list of questions to explore. I couldn't give him modern metallurgy--couldn't explain carbon content or phase transformations or martensite formation. But I could give him directions to experiment in, paths to follow that would lead to improvements even if he never understood the underlying science.

For whoever came after: my overall vision, why these innovations mattered, how they connected. The philosophical framework that tied together rabbits and bees and soap and steel--the idea that small improvements, systematically applied, could transform a household, a castle, a kingdom.

The door opened without warning.

Lords didn't knock in their own castle.

Father stood in the doorway, his grey eyes taking in the scene--the mountains of parchment, the guttering candles, his second son bent over his work like a maester preparing for a thesis defense. 

He crossed the room without speaking. Picked up one of the pages. Read.

I held my breath.

"You write like a maester," he said finally. "Systematic. Thorough."

That's because I was trained by systems far more advanced than anything your maesters have seen.

"But you think like a lord." Father set the page down, his expression unreadable. "These aren't just records. They're instructions for improvement. For expansion. For growth that continues whether you're here to guide it or not."

He looked at me, and for a moment I saw something beneath the lord's mask. Curiosity. Perhaps even a touch of unease.

"Where did you learn to think this way?"

The question I had been dreading since I was born.

In another life. In a world where systems theory and lean manufacturing and continuous improvement were taught in universities and applied in factories. In a world you'll never see and wouldn't understand if I described it.

"The Old Gods show me things sometimes," I said instead. "In dreams. Patterns. Connections."

Father's eyes narrowed, but he didn't challenge the claim. The North believed in such things. The Starks especially, with their weirwoods and their blood of the First Men.

"The Eyrie will test you differently than Winterfell has." His voice shifted, becoming something almost paternal. "Jon Arryn is a good man, but the Vale is not the North. The knights of the Vale worship different gods, follow different customs. You will be far from the Heart Tree, far from everything you know."

"I understand, Father."

"Do you?" He moved toward the door, then paused. "Remember who you are, Eddard. Remember where you come from. The South has swallowed Stark sons before. Don't let it swallow you."

"I won't, Father. I will honor our house."

He left without another word. The door closed behind him.

The candles continued their slow consumption, flames dancing in the draft from the corridor.

I looked at the stack of parchments. Three years of work. Seeds planted in a dozen minds.

Pray to the gods they grow. Pray someone waters them while I'm gone.

I picked up my quill and added one final page--a letter to Brandon, to be given to him if questions arose.

Brother,

If you're reading this, I'm at the Eyrie and something needs deciding about my projects. The rabbits, the bees, the experiments with steel--they're more important than they look. They're about making the North stronger, more prosperous, better able to survive what's coming.

I don't know how to explain this without sounding mad. Just trust me. Continue what I've started. Support Farlen, Karlyle, Mikken, Walys when they try new things. The North depends on it.

Your brother, Ned

I folded the letter, sealed it with wax, and set it atop the stack.

Brandon doesn't understand what I'm doing. But he trusts me. That will have to be enough.

The candles finally guttered out, leaving me alone with the darkness and the weight of everything I was leaving behind.

Eleven Years Old, Autumn 274 AC

Dawn came grey and cold to Winterfell.

I stood in the courtyard in my traveling clothes, the direwolf pin clasping my cloak, watching the household prepare for my departure. The Vale knights who would escort me south waited beside their horses--strangers in unfamiliar colors, polite and professional and completely alien.

Seven years, I thought. When I return, I'll be eighteen. Brandon will be twenty. Lyanna will be fifteen. Benjen will be the age I am now.

The weight of it pressed down like iron.

Goodbyes came one by one. Each a small wound.

Benjen didn't understand. At four years old, he knew only that his brother was leaving, and leaving seemed very wrong.

"But when are you coming back?" His voice was high, confused, on the edge of tears.

"When I'm grown."

"That's FOREVER!"

Mother had to hold him as he cried, her face careful and composed even as her arms tightened around her youngest son. She met my eyes over Benjen's head, and I saw everything she wasn't saying.

Come back safe. Come back whole. Don't let the South change you.

"I'll write," I told her. "Every moon. I promise."

"See that you do." Her voice was steady, but I heard the crack beneath it. "The North remembers."

She pulled me close for a moment--a real embrace, fierce and brief--before setting me back with the composure a lady must maintain in public.

Brandon came next.

At thirteen, my brother was nearly a man grown--tall, broad-shouldered, already showing the wild handsomeness that would make him famous. He gripped my shoulder hard enough to leave bruises.

"Don't let those southron lords soften you up," he said, trying for lightness and missing by a mile. "Remember you're a Stark."

"I remember."

"I'll hold your rabbits for you." His grin was forced, but real beneath the force. "King Hopper thanks you for the regency."

"Long may he reign."

The grin softened into something more genuine. Then Brandon pulled me into an embrace that was half hug, half wrestling hold.

"Come back soon, little brother," he murmured against my ear. "Winterfell's too quiet without you."

In seven years, you'll be twenty, I thought as he released me. Twenty years old, wild and brave and unmarried. In eight years, you'll ride south to demand Rhaegar's head. In nine years...

Don't think about it. Not now. Not yet.

"I'll come back," I said. "I promise."

Lyanna was nowhere to be seen.

I looked for her in the crowd, searching for her dark hair and fierce eyes. She wasn't in the courtyard. Wasn't on the walls. Wasn't anywhere I could find.

She said her goodbye in the godswood. She doesn't do farewells.

That was Lyanna. Everything fierce, everything immediate, nothing drawn out beyond its natural length. She had hugged me once and run away rather than face this moment.

I understand, little sister. I wish I could run away too.

Father spoke last.

In public, before the assembled household and the Vale knights who would carry tales back to Jon Arryn, he was formal. The Lord of Winterfell sending his second son to foster, as lords had done for generations.

"Serve Jon Arryn well," he intoned. "Honor our house. Return to us better than you left."

The words were ritual. Expected. What came after was not.

"Your instructions will be followed." His voice dropped, for my ears alone. "I'll see to it myself. The rabbits, the bees, the documentation--it continues. You have my word."

Father. You're giving me your word that you'll personally ensure my children's projects aren't abandoned.

The emotion that rose in my throat surprised me with its intensity.

"Thank you, Father."

He pulled me into a hug, and I leaned into his touch; after a moment, he stepped back into his role as lord.

One goodbye remained.

I slipped away from the bustle, following the path I knew by heart. The godswood was empty in the early morning light, mist rising from the dark pools, the red leaves rustling their eternal whisper.

The Heart Tree watched me approach with its weeping eyes.

I knelt before it, pressing my palm against the smooth white bark, feeling the cold seep through my skin.

"I'll come back," I said aloud. "Watch over them. All of them. Brandon, Lyanna, Benjen. Mother and Father. Watch over what I've built."

The wind stirred the leaves. They rustled like whispered secrets, like promises I couldn't quite hear.

Seven years. I'll return when I'm eighteen. Brandon will be twenty--only five years from his death. Lyanna will be fifteen--only four years from hers. The window is closing, and I'm running out of time, and now I have to spend seven years in the Vale while everything happens here.

I pressed my forehead against the bark, letting the cold ground me.

"I'll return," I said again. A promise. A prayer.

I have to believe the seeds I've planted will grow. Have to believe Farlen and Karlyle and Mikken and Walys will continue the work. Have to believe seven years won't undo three years of careful progress.

The carved face watched me with its ancient, patient eyes. Red sap traced tears down white bark. And in the silence, for just a moment, I could almost believe something watched back.

Keep them safe, I thought at whatever might be listening. Until I return. Keep them safe.

The wind rose. The leaves whispered.

If there was an answer, it was lost in the sound.

The gates of Winterfell stood open.

I sat my horse at the edge of the courtyard, looking back at everything I was leaving behind. The grey walls, rising eighty feet against the autumn sky. The smoking towers, venting heat from the springs below. The godswood's red crown, visible above the battlements like a banner of blood.

The Vale escort waited, patient and professional. The road south stretched before me, winding toward mountains I had never seen.

Behind me, the life I had built for eleven years. The rabbits in their warrens. The bees in their hives. The small revolutions in soap and steel and careful record-keeping. The family I was trying to save.

I looked back once.

The grey walls. The smoking towers. The godswood's blood-red leaves.

Home, I thought. I'll return.

Then I turned my horse south and rode toward the Eyrie, toward Robert Baratheon, toward Jon Arryn and a new kind of education.

Behind me, King Hopper reigned in his hutch. The bees tended their hives. Mikken hammered at his forge, experimenting with oil-quenching despite the strangeness of it. And somewhere in the castle, watching from a window she would never admit she stood at, Lyanna clutched a beeswax candle shaped like a winter rose.

The seeds were planted.

Seven years would tell if they grew.

Chapter Text

Eleven Years Old, Late Autumn 274 AC

The mountain road twisted upward through fog so thick I could taste it.

My horse picked his way along the narrow path, hooves scraping stone with each careful step. To my left, a wall of grey rock rose into the mist. To my right--nothing. Just white void where the world should be.

Don't look down. Whatever you do, don't look down.

I looked down.

The fog parted for just a moment, offering a glimpse of the drop. Hundreds of feet of empty air, ending in rocks that looked like broken teeth from this height. One misstep, one spooked horse, and Eddard Stark would become a red smear on the mountainside.

Michael Chen was not a mountaineer. Not even close.

My stomach lurched. I gripped the reins tighter, knuckles white against the leather.

The Vale escort rode ahead of me, their horses navigating the path with the casual confidence of men who had made this climb a hundred times. Ser Denys Arryn--a distant cousin of Jon Arryn, assigned to bring me safely to the Eyrie--glanced back and caught my expression.

"First time in real mountains, my lord?"

I forced my voice steady. "The North has mountains. But not... not like this."

The knight smiled without warmth. "The Giant's Lance is not kind to lowlanders. You'll learn to trust the path." A pause. "Or you won't, and you'll fall."

Encouraging. Very Vale.

The journey had taken weeks. South along the kingsroad, through lands that grew greener and softer with every mile. Past the Neck, where even the air smelled different--wetter, warmer, wrong. East into the Mountains of the Moon, where the air thinned and the world tilted on its edge.

The Vale escort had been professional, distant. Knights who did their duty and kept their opinions to themselves. I had tried conversation the first few days, asking about the Vale, about Jon Arryn, about what to expect. They answered politely and briefly, and eventually I stopped asking.

They don't know what to make of me. An eleven-year-old who asks too many questions and doesn't complain about the saddle sores. Fair enough. I don't know what to make of me either.

The landscape was wrong--mild where there should be cutting wind, green where there should be grey, jagged peaks that looked freshly broken rather than the ancient, weathered hills of home. Even the rocks were different colors here, striped with reds and oranges that looked like the North's granite had gotten drunk and lost a fight.

This is not the North. This is not even close to the North.

But this was where I had to be. Seven years of fostering, of political education, of building the alliance with Robert Baratheon that would matter when everything went to hell.

Seven years. Starting now.

The fog swirled around us, damp and cold but not Northern cold. Not the clean, sharp cold that cut to the bone and cleared the mind. This was a wet cold, a clinging cold, the cold of places that had never known real winter.

I thought of Winterfell. Of the Heart Tree's patient eyes. Of King Hopper in his hutch and the bees in their hives and all the seeds I had planted and left behind.

They'll survive. Father promised. The work continues.

The fog parted again, and this time I looked up instead of down.

Far above, impossibly high, white towers gleamed against grey sky. The Eyrie. It perched on the mountainside like a frozen crown, delicate and impossible, as if someone had built a castle from clouds and prayer.

"How much further?" I asked.

Ser Denys laughed. "Further than you'd like, my lord. The climb hasn't even begun yet."

The Gates of the Moon sprawled at the mountain's base--a proper castle, grey-stoned and solid, looking almost humble after weeks of anticipation.

"This is it?" The words escaped before I could stop them.

The knight's smile held a touch of genuine amusement. "This is the entrance, my lord. The Eyrie lies above. Horses cannot make the climb."

I dismounted, legs unsteady after weeks in the saddle. The ground felt strange beneath my boots--solid, unmoving, not swaying with a horse's rhythm. Servants appeared to take my mount, efficient and silent in the Vale manner.

"Everything goes up by mule or porter or cable-basket," Ser Denys continued. "You'll climb. Past Stone, past Snow, past Sky--three waycastles marking the ascent."

Three waycastles. Then the Eyrie itself. Hand over hand up a mountain.

I looked up at the path--carved steps vanishing into the rock, iron rungs where steps failed, rope bridges spanning gaps that made my stomach clench just to see.

Michael Chen was definitely not a mountaineer.

But Ned Stark could not show weakness on his first day.

"Then let's begin," I said.

The climb was brutal.

Stone came first--a fortification built into the mountainside, more stairs than castle. My legs burned before we reached it. My lungs ached with the thin air. The altitude was like nothing I had experienced, each breath feeling half-empty no matter how deeply I drew.

Just keep moving. One step at a time. Don't think about the drop.

The stairs wound upward through the rock, carved by hands long dead, worn smooth by generations of climbing feet. Some stretches were nearly vertical, requiring iron rungs and rope handholds. Others opened onto narrow ledges where the wind tried to pry us off the mountain.

At least the North prepares you for cold. Nothing prepares you for this.

Snow came next, higher and colder, the waycastle clinging to the rock like a barnacle. The name was apt--patches of white still lingered in shadowed crevices, even in late autumn. The servants there seemed surprised to see someone my age climbing on foot.

"Most lords ride the mules," one of them offered, pressing hot wine into my hands. "No shame in it."

There's shame in it if you're an eleven-year-old trying to prove something.

"I'll walk."

The porters exchanged glances. I ignored them and continued climbing.

Sky was the last waycastle before the Eyrie itself, perched at an altitude that made my head swim. The view from its walls was staggering--the Vale spread below like a green carpet, rivers threading through it like silver ribbons, the mountains rising around like broken teeth.

Beautiful. Alien. Wrong.

"Lord Arryn awaits you above," a servant said, pressing a cup of hot wine into my hands. "He's eager to meet Lord Rickard's second son."

I looked up at the final stretch--near-vertical, a combination of carved steps and iron rungs set into living stone. The Eyrie gleamed above, close now, tantalizingly close.

"Then I should not keep him waiting."

The last ascent was the worst. Hand over hand, iron rungs cold against my palms, the world falling away below me with each step up. I did not look down. Did not think about the drop. I thought about Winterfell, about the projects I had left behind, about the work waiting for me here--a different kind of work, but work nonetheless.

Then my hand found flat stone instead of another rung.

I pulled myself over the edge onto a marble terrace, and the Eyrie opened before me.

The Eyrie was beautiful.

That was my first thought. Beautiful in a way Winterfell had never tried to be.

Winterfell was ancient, practical, built for survival. Grey stone and hot springs and walls thick enough to withstand anything winter could throw. The Eyrie was built for display--white marble towers reaching toward the sky, slender spires that looked too delicate to stand, gardens somehow blooming even in late autumn.

The sky was everywhere. No horizon to anchor the eye, just cloud and void in every direction except the mountain's solid presence. Standing in the Eyrie's courtyard felt like standing on the edge of the world.

Servants appeared--efficient, well-trained, speaking with the lilting accent of the Vale. I was led through corridors of white stone, past tapestries showing falcons and moons, until we reached a solar flooded with grey light from windows that opened onto nothing but air.

Jon Arryn rose to greet me.

He was old. That was my second thought. White-haired, lean, weathered by decades of leadership. But his eyes were sharp as obsidian, missing nothing.

"Lord Eddard." His voice was measured, warm but reserved. "Welcome to the Eyrie."

"My lord." I bowed properly, precisely, the way a lord's son should. "I am honored by your hospitality."

The formalities followed--thanks for the fostering, condolences that I was far from home, assurances that I would be treated as a son. I responded correctly, carefully, with all the courtesy my station demanded.

Jon Arryn watched me throughout. Not unkindly, but assessingly. Reading me as I read systems.

"Your father wrote of your... projects." He settled back in his chair, steepling his fingers. "The rabbits. The bees. The soap, of all things. Unusual interests for a boy your age."

How much did Father tell him? And how is this being interpreted?

"The North is hard, my lord." I kept my voice even. "Anything that helps our people survive the winters is worth pursuing."

"Even soap?"

"Clean hands mean fewer fevers in the birthing chambers. Our maester has documented it." I met his gaze steadily. "The method costs almost nothing. The results save lives. That seems worth pursuing."

Arryn's eyes narrowed, then softened. Something shifted in his expression--not quite approval, but recognition. As if I had answered a question he hadn't asked aloud.

"A practical answer. Good. We have little use for dreamers here, but practical men are always welcome." He leaned forward slightly. "Your father said you see patterns. Connections others miss. He said you ask questions that make his maester uncomfortable."

Father said more than I expected. Why? What is he trying to accomplish?

"I'm curious, my lord. Sometimes that leads to useful questions."

"And sometimes to uncomfortable ones." Arryn's thin smile returned. "That can be valuable, in the right circumstances. Dangerous in the wrong ones. You'll learn which is which."

A pause. Something shifted in his expression--anticipation, perhaps.

"You'll share lessons with my other ward. Robert Baratheon, of Storm's End. Do you know of him?"

Robert. Already here. Already waiting.

"I know the name, my lord."

"You'll know the boy soon enough." A thin smile crossed the old lord's face. "He's... eager to meet you."

I'll bet he is.

Jon Arryn rose, gesturing for me to follow. "Come. Let me show you where you'll live. And then..." The smile widened slightly. "Then I'll introduce you to Robert. Try not to judge him by first impressions. He improves with time."

Or worsens, I thought, following him through the white corridors. Depending on what you're measuring.

Robert Baratheon was the loudest thing I had ever encountered.

I heard him before I saw him--a booming laugh echoing from the training yard, followed by the crash of wooden practice swords and a triumphant roar.

"HA! EAT THAT, MORTON!"

Jon Arryn led me through the castle to the yard, where a knot of squires and servants had gathered to watch. In the center, two figures circled each other--an older squire, perhaps fifteen, and a boy about my age.

No. Not my age. A year older. Twelve. Built like a young bull, all muscle and energy, black hair wild and blue eyes bright with fierce joy.

He was sparring with the older boy and winning. Not through skill--his technique was rough, all power and instinct--but through sheer overwhelming force. He hit like a man grown.

The older squire stumbled. Robert pressed forward, hammering blow after blow, grinning like a wolf.

"YIELD!" he bellowed.

The squire raised a hand in surrender. Robert threw down his practice sword and whooped, fists raised in victory.

Then he spotted Jon Arryn, and his grin somehow widened even further.

"Lord Arryn! Is this him? Is this the Stark?"

I stepped forward, reaching for the formal introduction I had prepared. "I am Eddard Stark, my--"

Robert didn't let me finish.

He crossed the yard in three enormous strides and grabbed me--arms wrapping around my shoulders, lifting me clear off my feet in a bear hug that drove the air from my lungs.

"FINALLY!" He set me down but didn't let go, one massive arm still slung around my shoulders. "Someone my age who isn't a complete arse!"

This is him. This is the man who will be king. Who will kill Rhaegar on the Trident. Who will let the realm rot while he drinks himself to death.

But what I saw RIGHT NOW was: a twelve-year-old boy practically vibrating with excitement, delighted beyond measure to have a friend his own age. The future king of Westeros had just hugged me like a long-lost brother.

"Don't 'my lord' me," he continued, steering me toward the weapons rack with the arm still draped over my shoulders. "We're brothers now. Both wards of the Falcon. I'm Bob. Or Bobby B if you want to be fancy about it."

Bob. He just introduced himself as Bob.

"I've been waiting MONTHS for you," he barreled on, barely pausing for breath. "Jon Arryn's great, truly, proper lord and all that, but he's old. Do you know how boring it is being the only boy here? The squires are all terrified of me because I keep beating them." He flexed his free arm, grinning. "They won't even arm wrestle anymore. Bunch of milk-drinkers."

"That does sound difficult," I managed, fighting down a laugh at the sheer absurdity of it all.

Bob caught the dryness in my tone and LAUGHED--a huge, delighted sound that echoed off the yard's walls.

"Oh, you're FUNNY! The quiet ones are always funny. My brother Stannis is quiet but he's got no humor at all, just grinding his teeth all day like he's trying to eat rocks. You're not like that, are you? Please tell me you're not like that."

"I try to avoid eating rocks."

"HA!" He clapped me on the shoulder hard enough to stagger me. "I knew it. I knew we'd get along. Come on, come on--" He was already dragging me toward the practice weapons. "We have to spar. I need to see what Northmen are made of."

"I'm really not very--"

"Nonsense! Here, take this one, the balance is good--"

Before I could protest further, a practice sword was in my hand. Bob had already grabbed his own, circling me with the easy grace of someone born to violence.

He's going to destroy me.

The spar was brief. Bob was stronger, faster, and hit like he was trying to knock down a castle wall. I managed to block three strikes--barely--before the fourth sent me sprawling in the dirt.

Bob hauled me up immediately, no mockery in his face. Just delight.

"You think too much! I could SEE it--you're planning your countermove while I'm still hitting you. Stop thinking and just HIT me."

The same thing Brandon always says. Do all natural fighters give the same useless advice?

"I'm better at thinking than fighting," I admitted, brushing dirt off my clothes.

"PERFECT." He clapped me on the shoulder again, grinning from ear to ear. "I'm rubbish at thinking. You think, I hit things. We'll be unstoppable." His eyes went bright with impossible dreams. "Between us, Bobby B and Neddy Stark, we'll conquer the bloody world!"

He said it like a joke. I heard it like a prophecy.

Neddy Stark. Gods help me.

Jon Arryn cleared his throat from the edge of the yard. "Perhaps you could show Lord Eddard to his quarters before conquering the world?"

"Right, right--come ON, Ned." Bob was already walking, pulling me along by the elbow. "I'll show you everything. There's this servant who makes the best meat pies, you wouldn't believe it, and I found this spot on the walls where you can piss off the edge and watch it fall for AGES before it hits anything--timed it once, had to count to fifteen before I heard it splash against the rocks--"

"Robert," Jon Arryn said mildly.

"--and there's training every morning, which is brilliant, and lessons in the afternoon, which are BORING but Lord Arryn makes us do them anyway, and I've been working on this trick where I can fart the first three notes of 'The Bear and the Maiden Fair'--want to hear?"

"Perhaps later," I managed, fighting down a laugh.

"I'll hold you to that. Oh! Did you bring a falcon? Please tell me you brought a falcon. Ser Corbray made me run extra laps yesterday--twenty laps, can you believe it, just because I accidentally broke his favorite practice sword--and I want to train a bird to shit on his head. Right when he's giving one of his boring lectures about footwork. Splat. Right in the face."

I found myself laughing. Actually laughing. Despite the weight of knowing what comes next, despite the grief that lives in my chest, despite the impossibility of it all.

"I didn't bring a falcon."

"We'll get you one. We'll train them together. Corbray won't know what hit him. Well, he will--it'll be bird shit--but he won't know WHERE it came from." Bob was still talking as he dragged me toward the castle, a constant stream of enthusiasm and plans and cheerful vulgarity. "Do you know any good insults? Northern ones? I need to expand my repertoire. The Vale knights all use the same three and they're getting stale."

"We mostly just call people craven," I offered.

"That's IT? Just craven?" Bob looked genuinely disappointed. "You Northerners need to work on your insult game. I'll teach you some good Stormlands ones. There's this one about goats that'll make Ser Corbray turn purple--"

"Please don't teach me insults about goats."

"Too late, you're learning! Education begins NOW, Neddy Stark!"

He steered me through an archway, pointing out landmarks as we went. "That's where the meat pies happen--Marta's kitchen, remember the name--and that's where Ser Corbray found the crab, and THAT--" He pointed at a particular stretch of wall, grinning wickedly. "--is where I discovered you can hear everything that happens in the guardroom below if you press your ear to the stones. Very educational. Did you know Ser Morton snores like a dying horse? Now you do."

"That seems like private information."

"Nothing's private when you snore that loud. It's basically a public service announcement." Bob's grin was unrepentant. "Oh! Important question. Do you snore? I need to know what I'm dealing with. If you snore, we'll have to work out a system. I was thinking--"

I looked back once, catching Jon Arryn's gaze. The old lord's expression was knowing. Fond, even.

He's been waiting for this too. Someone for Bob to befriend. Someone to...

"Ned! Ned, are you listening? This is important, the meat pie schedule is VITAL information--"

There was no time to think about Jon Arryn's plans.

There was only this moment. Only this ridiculous, wonderful, doomed boy who had decided we were brothers five minutes after meeting.

This is who you are, I thought, letting myself be pulled along. Before the crown. Before the war. Before everything goes wrong. You're a twelve-year-old who wants to train attack falcons and fart songs and make your friend laugh.

And gods help me, Bob, I already love you.

The dormitory room was small but well-appointed. Two beds, two desks, two trunks. Bob had claimed the one nearest the window--"for the view," he said, though I suspected it was because the window ledge was wide enough to sit on.

Dinner had been chaos. Bob talked through most of it, telling stories of Storm's End, of his brothers Stannis and Renly, of the kitchen girl he'd kissed last month ("She had these LIPS, Ned, you don't understand, soft as pillows--"), of the time he'd put a live crab in Ser Corbray's boot.

"You should have HEARD him scream. Like a maiden being murdered. For a CRAB. The man's faced actual battle!"

Jon Arryn had watched us with patient amusement, occasionally steering the conversation toward slightly less inappropriate topics. But steering Bob was like steering a river--you could nudge it, but it was going where it wanted to go.

Now, finally, our room. Bob was sprawled on his bed, demonstrating his famous trick.

The sound that emerged was less like 'The Bear and the Maiden Fair' and more like an angry goose dying.

"That was definitely two notes," Bob insisted, propping himself up on one elbow. "Two and a HALF. You're just not musically trained."

"I don't think anyone is trained in THAT music."

"They should be. I'll start a school." His grin was enormous. "The Bobby B Academy of Arse Arts. We'll have courses. Beginning, intermediate, advanced. Maybe a master class for the truly gifted."

"You've thought about this too much."

"I've thought about it EXACTLY the right amount." He tried again, producing a sound that might charitably be called a note if you were very drunk and partially deaf. "See? That was the first line! 'A bear there was--' That's a B flat, Ned. Musical genius."

"That was your intestines screaming for mercy."

Bob dissolved into giggles at that, which set me off again. He laughed so hard he fell off the bed with a tremendous thump, which only made him laugh harder.

When was the last time I laughed this hard? Actually laughed, not just smiled to fit in?

"Ow," Bob said from the floor, still giggling. "Worth it. Completely worth it."

Eventually Bob sprawled out, catching his breath, still grinning at the ceiling.

"This is going to be GREAT, Ned. We're going to have so much fun. The two of us against all these boring knights and their boring rules."

"I should write to my family." I moved to my desk, pulling out parchment. "I promised I would."

"On your first night? We just GOT here!" Bob propped himself up on one elbow. "What're you going to tell them? 'Dear family, the Eyrie is tall and I met a boy who can fart music'?"

I snorted. "Maybe not that last part."

"Why not? It's the most important thing that happened today."

The letter took shape. Safe arrival, beautiful castle, wise Jon Arryn. And then:

Robert Baratheon--he insists I call him Bob--is unlike anyone I've ever met. He's loud and funny and generous. He beat me at sparring and then hauled me up like it was nothing. He wants to train falcons to defecate on his enemies. I think we will be friends.

I asked about the projects. About King Hopper. About whether Karlyle had kept the hive records. About Lyanna and Benjen and Brandon.

About home.

"Who's King Hopper?" Bob had crept closer, reading over my shoulder with absolutely no concept of privacy.

"My rabbit. Well, not MY rabbit. The breeding program's best buck. My brother Brandon named him."

"You have a rabbit called KING HOPPER?" Bob sounded delighted. "That's the best thing I've heard all week. Does he have a crown? He should have a crown. A little golden crown for his fuzzy head."

I found myself explaining the rabbit warrens, the selective breeding, the whole ridiculous enterprise. Bob listened with genuine interest, asking questions, making jokes about forming a "Royal Rabbit Guard" and whether King Hopper had executed any traitors lately.

"Wait, wait--so you MEASURE them?" Bob sat up, fascinated. "Like, with a string?"

"With a measuring cord, yes. Weight, length, ear size--"

"EAR SIZE?" He was delighted. "You measure rabbit ears? Ned, that's the strangest thing I've ever heard, and I once watched a hedge knight try to fight a goat. Why do you measure their ears?"

"Bigger ears mean better hearing, which means they're more alert, which means better breeding stock for--"

"King Hopper has the biggest ears," Bob decided, as if this were fact. "The biggest ears in all the North. Royal ears. Magnificent."

"He actually does have rather large ears."

"I KNEW it!" Bob pumped his fist. "Long may he reign! King of Rabbits, Lord of the Fuzzy, Protector of the Warrens!" He flopped back dramatically. "This is why you're interesting, Ned. Normal lordlings talk about swords and horses. You've got a rabbit kingdom."

"It's not a kingdom, it's a breeding program--"

"RABBIT KINGDOM."

I gave up. Some battles weren't worth fighting.

"You're strange, Ned Stark," Bob said finally, his voice softer now. "Rabbit kings and bee farms and you actually WRITE to your family." A pause, something shifting in his voice. "I don't write to mine much. Stannis sends me letters that are basically long lists of everything I'm doing wrong. Renly's only four. And my parents..." He trailed off, staring at the ceiling. "Father's busy ruling. Mother's busy with Renly. They don't really notice I'm gone."

The loneliness in his voice was worse than grief. At least grief acknowledged love. This was just... absence.

"You could write anyway," I said carefully. "Even to Stannis. Even if he lectures. Tell them about the Eyrie. About training. Brothers should talk."

Bob was quiet for a long moment. The room felt different--smaller, more real. The joking boy was gone, replaced by someone older, sadder.

"Maybe." He turned toward the wall, voice muffled. "Maybe someday."

Then, lighter: "G'night, Neddy Stark."

"Don't call me that."

"G'night, NEDDY STARK."

"Goodnight, Bobby B."

Bob laughed--softer than his usual boom, but real. "See? You're learning."

I finished the letter, sealed it, set it aside for the morning ravens. Outside, the stars were vast--no trees to frame them, no hills to anchor them. Just sky stretching forever.

I lay back on my bed, listening to Bob's breathing slow toward sleep.

Seven years, I thought. Seven years with this ridiculous, wonderful boy.

In the darkness, Bob's voice came again, already half-asleep: "Ned?"

"Yeah?"

"Thanks for... you know. Coming here. Being here." A pause. "It was lonely before."

I already love you, Bob.

"Go to sleep, Bobby B."

"You too, Neddy."

And I'm going to spend seven years trying to figure out how to save you from yourself.

Ten Days Later - The Mountain

The wind cut through my cloak like it had personal grievances.

Bob scrambled up the rock face ahead of me, finding handholds with the casual confidence of someone who'd never feared heights. I followed more carefully, fingers numb against the cold stone, lungs burning in the thin mountain air.

"Come ON, Ned!" His voice echoed off the peaks. "You climb like an old man!"

I was an old man. Forty-three years of sitting at a desk doesn't prepare you for mountaineering.

"Some of us are trying not to die!"

Jon Arryn had suggested these training climbs--"A lord must know his terrain," he'd said, which apparently meant sending two boys up the Mountains of the Moon with nothing but rope and water skins. Bob had volunteered us before I could object.

The ledge we'd been aiming for was close now, a flat outcropping where we could rest before the descent. I hauled myself up the last few feet, legs shaking, and collapsed beside Bob on the narrow shelf.

The view was staggering. The Vale spread below like a green tapestry, the Eyrie a white toy in the distance. Beautiful. Terrifying.

"See?" Bob grinned, not even winded. "Worth the climb."

The mountain disagreed.

The rumble started somewhere above us--deep, grinding, wrong. I looked up just in time to see the rock face shiver.

"MOVE!"

Bob grabbed my arm and we scrambled sideways along the ledge as stones cascaded past, dust and debris filling the air. A boulder the size of a horse crashed where I'd been sitting half a heartbeat before.

Then silence. Settling dust. The echo of falling stone dying against distant peaks.

"Seven hells." Bob's voice was shaky for once. "That was--"

A screech cut him off. High, desperate, pained.

We looked at each other.

"Bird," Bob said. "Probably trapped."

The sound came again--weaker this time, but unmistakably alive.

"We should find it."

"Ned." Bob's expression shifted to something like concern. "It's a wild bird. Wild things die. That's what they do."

But I was already moving, picking my way across the debris field toward the sound. Something pulled at me--not logic, not sense, just a certainty that I needed to see.

The falcon lay half-buried under a tumble of smaller stones, one wing pinned at an ugly angle. A peregrine, I realized--slate-grey back, barred white chest, fierce golden eyes that tracked my approach with pure fury.

He screamed at me. A threat, despite everything. A promise of violence from something that couldn't even stand.

You're going to die if I leave you here.

I can't explain why that feels unacceptable.

"Ned, don't--"

I was already climbing down toward him. The rocks shifted under my feet, unstable, dangerous. The falcon screamed again, trying to mantle wings that wouldn't cooperate.

"Easy," I said, reaching for him. "I'm trying to help."

He struck at my hand with his beak. Drew blood. I jerked back, cursing.

Stubborn. Terrified. Fighting even when fighting is hopeless.

I understand that.

I stripped off my cloak, wrapped it around my hand, and reached again. This time when he struck, the fabric absorbed the blow. I closed my fingers around his body--wings pinned, talons scrabbling uselessly--and lifted.

Pain.

Not mine. His. A flash of agony that shot through my skull like lightning, so sharp I nearly dropped him. Fear and fury and the desperate need to fly, to escape, to LIVE--

The sensation faded as quickly as it came, leaving me dizzy and confused.

What in seven hells was that?

"NED!" Bob was scrambling down toward me, face pale. "Are you hurt? You looked like you were going to faint!"

"I'm fine." I wasn't sure if that was true. "Help me up."

The climb back to the ledge with an injured, screaming falcon was the worst physical experience of my life--and I'd died of cancer in my last one. Bob hauled me the last few feet, swearing creatively, while the bird shrieked murder in his leather prison.

"You're insane," Bob panted. "Completely insane. You nearly died for a BIRD."

I know. I know and I can't explain why.

The walk back to the Eyrie took hours. By the time we reached the gates, my arms were shaking and the falcon had gone quiet--whether from exhaustion or surrender, I couldn't tell.

Maester Colemon met us in the courtyard, his disapproval radiating like heat from a forge.

"You cannot keep a wild raptor in your chambers, my lord. The risk of disease alone--"

"His wing is hurt. I need to see if it's broken."

"Then take him to the mews! The falconer can--"

"No."

The word came out harder than I intended. Something in the maester's expression shifted--recalibration, the adjustment of someone realizing the child before him wouldn't be managed.

Jon Arryn appeared from somewhere, watching with an expression I couldn't read. "An eventful climb, I take it."

"Rockslide, my lord." Bob was still catching his breath. "Ned decided to rescue a bird. Nearly got us both killed."

"And the bird?"

I looked down at the bundle in my arms. Through the gap in the cloak, one golden eye stared back at me. Still furious. Still fighting.

"He's staying."

Jon Arryn's thin smile appeared. "Then I suggest you learn quickly how to care for him. Maester Colemon, provide whatever references the library holds on falcon husbandry."

The maester's jaw tightened, but he nodded and withdrew.

Later, in my solar, I unwrapped the bird carefully and examined his wing. Not broken--I could see that much--but badly bruised, swollen. He tried to bite me again, weaker now.

"I'm going to call you Arc," I told him, settling him on a makeshift perch I'd fashioned from a chair back. "For the path you'll fly again."

Or for the arc of your fall. Or for something I can't name--that flash of connection when I touched you, like electricity between two points.

Arc glared at me with eyes like molten gold. He didn't eat the meat I offered. Didn't sleep. Just watched, fierce and afraid and absolutely unwilling to trust.

That makes two of us.

Bob's voice came from the doorway: "You're strange, Ned Stark."

I didn't look away from the falcon. "I know."

"You nearly died today. For a bird that wants to kill you."

"I know."

A pause. Then, softer: "I would have done the same thing. If it was you trapped under those rocks."

I turned. Bob was leaning against the doorframe, arms crossed, expression serious for once.

"Probably not for a bird though," he added, grin returning. "Birds are weird. You're weird for liking them."

"Goodnight, Bob."

"Goodnight, Neddy Stark. Try not to get murdered by your new friend."

The door closed.

I sat in the darkness, watching Arc watch me, and tried to understand what had happened on that mountain. The flash of his fear and pain, sudden and sharp as my own heartbeat. The certainty that I couldn't leave him.

Something in me recognized something in him.

I didn't know what that meant. Not yet.

But I was going to find out.

Two Weeks Later

Jon Arryn's solar was quiet in the early morning light, the kind of quiet that came before something important.

Robert had been sent to train with the master-at-arms. I had been summoned alone.

"Sit." Jon Arryn gestured to a chair across from his desk. "We should talk."

The old lord's desk was covered with papers--correspondence from across the realm. Letters bearing sigils I recognized and some I didn't. The business of ruling a kingdom, spread out in ink and parchment.

"You've been here two weeks." His voice was measured, assessing. "What have you learned?"

It's a test.

I considered carefully before answering.

"The Eyrie is defensible to the point of impossibility. No army could take it by force. But that defense comes with isolation--the climb means slow communication, difficult resupply, vulnerability to siege if the lower valleys are held."

Arryn's eyebrows rose. "Go on."

"Robert is stronger than anyone his age and most adults. He'll be a formidable warrior." I chose my words carefully. "But he doesn't think ahead. He wins through force, not strategy. That will serve him in battle and fail him everywhere else."

Silence. I wondered if I had said too much.

Then Jon Arryn laughed--a quiet, dry sound, nothing like Robert's boom. "Your father did not exaggerate. You see clearly, Eddard Stark."

"I see what's in front of me, my lord."

"Most men don't." He leaned back, studying me with those obsidian eyes. "Most men see what they expect to see, or what they want to see. You see what IS." A pause. "That's rare. And valuable. And dangerous, if you're not careful with it."

He's warning me. About what?

"Robert likes you." Jon Arryn's voice softened. "Already, after two weeks, he talks of you as a brother. That's good--he needs someone who sees clearly beside him. Someone to temper his... enthusiasm."

"I'm honored by his friendship, my lord."

"Don't be honored. Be useful." The softness vanished, replaced by something sharper. "Robert will inherit Storm's End someday. The Stormlands are powerful, temperamental, proud. He'll need counselors who can tell him hard truths. Can you do that? Tell a friend he's wrong, even when he doesn't want to hear it?"

Can I tell a king his wife's children aren't his? Can I tell a kingdom its ruler is a drunk and a failure? Can I tell the truth when the truth destroys everything?

"I can try, my lord."

Arryn studied me for a long moment. "Good. Then here is your first hard truth: your projects at Winterfell--the rabbits, the bees, the soap--they won't survive your absence unchanged. Seven years is a long time. People forget. Traditions reassert themselves."

My stomach tightened. "I left instructions--"

"Instructions aren't leadership." Arryn rose from his chair and moved to the window, looking out at the vast emptiness below. "I've ruled the Vale for forty years, Eddard. I've seen clever men with clever ideas fail because they thought the idea was enough. It never is. Ideas need champions. They need someone to push them forward, to argue for them, to make people uncomfortable with their old ways."

He turned back to face me, silhouetted against the grey sky.

"You'll need to write. Often. Specifically. Guide what you can from here, and accept that some things will drift. The bees may thrive. The rabbits may prosper. But some improvements will fade the moment you're not there to tend them." A pause. "That's the nature of change. It requires constant pressure, or it reverts."

He's not wrong. People default to what they know. What their fathers did, what their fathers' fathers did. New ideas die without advocates.

"But also: use this time," Arryn continued. "Learn what I can teach you about ruling, about politics, about the game lords play. Your improvements mean nothing if you can't navigate the world that decides whether they spread or die. A lord who can make better steel is useful. A lord who can make better steel AND convince other lords to adopt it? That's power."

The words landed like stones in still water. Ripples spreading.

"You're offering to teach me," I said slowly. "Not just foster me. Teach me."

"If you're willing to learn." His eyes held mine. "Are you?"

This is more than I hoped for. Real education. Real wisdom. The political knowledge that will let my technical innovations actually matter.

"Yes, my lord. I'm willing to learn."

Jon Arryn nodded, something like satisfaction in his ancient eyes. "Then we'll begin tomorrow. Robert will have his sword lessons. You will have... other lessons. Both matter. Both make lords."

He rose, signaling the end of our conversation.

"Oh, and Eddard? Write to your father tonight. Tell him what you've observed. Practice putting truth into words a lord can use. Consider it your first assignment."

Two letters waited on my desk that night. The promised correspondence to Mother, and the assignment from Jon Arryn.

Mother's came easier now, after practice.

I told her of the climb, the beauty, the strangeness of a castle in the sky. I told her Bob--Robert--was becoming a friend. That Jon Arryn was wise and kind.

I asked about Benjen--was he walking steadily now? Talking? Did he remember his brother who left?

I asked about Lyanna--was she still riding every day? Still wild, still fierce?

I asked about Brandon--how went the training? Had he beaten Martyn Cassel yet?

I did not ask about myself. Did not mention how high the Eyrie was, or how the endless sky made me feel small. Did not mention that I dreamed of Winterfell every night.

Then Father's letter. Harder.

What would a lord want to know from his fostered son?

I wrote about Jon Arryn's wisdom, his connections across the realm, his approach to leadership. I wrote about Robert's strengths--the strength itself, the charisma, the fierce loyalty--and his weaknesses--the impulsiveness, the difficulty with strategy, the aversion to hard study.

I wrote about the Eyrie's defenses, its vulnerabilities, the personalities of the household.

I wrote like an engineer documenting a system. Like a spy reporting to a handler.

Is this what Father wanted? Is this what Jon Arryn wants me to learn?

The letters were sealed. Ready for the ravens.

Outside, Robert was laughing somewhere in the castle, his voice carrying even through stone walls. Probably challenging someone to an arm wrestle. Or demonstrating his fart trick. Or planning some new scheme to torment Ser Corbray.

Seven years. I have seven years to learn everything Jon Arryn can teach, everything Robert can't learn, everything I'll need when I go home.

And seven years to keep my projects alive from a thousand miles away.

I looked at the sealed letters, then at the stars outside my window. Somewhere far to the north, those same stars shone over Winterfell. Over King Hopper in his hutch. Over the beehives, quiet now in the autumn cold. Over the godswood, where the heart tree watched with weeping eyes.

I'll come back, I thought. I'll learn everything I can here, and I'll come back, and I'll use it all.

The stars offered no answer. They never do.

Three Weeks After Arrival

The Eyrie had a godswood. Sort of.

I found it on a free afternoon, exploring the castle's upper reaches. A small garden tucked behind the Moon Tower, walled in on three sides by white marble, open on the fourth to the endless sky.

And in the center, a weirwood tree.

It was wrong.

The bark was greyish-white instead of pure snow-white. The leaves were sparse, more pink than red, struggling in the thin mountain air. No face had been carved into its trunk--perhaps it was too small, too young, or perhaps the Arryns had simply never thought to honor it properly.

But it was still a weirwood. Still connected, perhaps, to whatever watched from the trees.

I knelt before it anyway.

I'm here, I thought at it. I made it. I'm beginning the work.

I told the tree about Jon Arryn's offer. About Robert's friendship--Bob's friendship, I corrected myself. About the letters I had written and the lessons I would learn.

I told it about my fear: that seven years was too long, that my projects would fail without me, that Brandon and Lyanna and Benjen would grow up strangers. That by the time I returned, Lyanna would be fifteen and I would barely know her. That Benjen would have grown from a toddler to a boy without me there to watch. That Brandon would be a man, with a man's concerns, and I would be a stranger returned from foreign skies.

I told it about my hope: that I would return ready, that the North would be stronger, that the future could still be changed. That maybe, just maybe, knowing what I know could make a difference. That Bob's friendship might be more than just warmth--might be leverage, might be influence, might be a thread I could pull when the tapestry started to unravel.

I told it about Bob. About his laugh and his ridiculous schemes and the way he had decided we were brothers before he knew my favorite color. About the loneliness hiding under all that noise. About the king he would become and the man I wished he could be instead.

Watch over him too, I thought. If you can. If you're listening. He's not yours, but he might be mine.

The stunted tree offered no response. No rustle of leaves, no sense of presence. Not like the Heart Tree at Winterfell, with its ancient weight and watching eyes.

But I felt something anyway. Not an answer--a recognition. An acknowledgment that I was still connected, still Northern, still Stark.

Even here in the sky, the Old Gods knew me.

Or perhaps I only needed to believe they did.

I rose from my knees, brushing dirt from my breeches.

The Eyrie stretched around me, all white marble and impossible heights. Somewhere inside, Bob was practicing at swords, or eating, or laughing with the servants about something crude and wonderful. Somewhere below, Jon Arryn was reading correspondence, planning lessons, shaping the boys who would help shape the realm.

And somewhere far to the north, winter was coming.

Chapter Text

Ages 12-13, 275-276 AC - The Eyrie

Part 1: The First Letter

Spring 275 AC, Age 12

Mother's handwriting hit me like a physical blow.

I stood in the rookery doorway, letter in hand, while the keeper shuffled back to his birds and the afternoon light slanted through the high windows. Six months at the Eyrie. Six months of thin air and endless sky and Bob's relentless enthusiasm. Six months of letters that said nothing important--"we are well," "the snows are deep," "your brother sends his love."

This letter was thick. Heavy. The kind of letter that meant something.

Just read it. It's probably fine. It's probably just Mother telling you Benjen learned a new word.

I broke the seal.

My dearest Ned,

Spring has come to Winterfell at last, though your father says it will be a false spring--the maesters predict another turn of cold before true warmth arrives. We endure. We always endure.

But I am not writing to discuss weather.

I have taken over the hygiene tracking from Maester Walys.

I stopped. Read that line again. Felt something shift in my chest that I couldn't immediately name.

The ladies find it easier to speak with me than with a maester about such matters. Women's troubles are women's business, the septas say, and perhaps they are right. Walys continues to document what I report to him, but the GATHERING of information--the conversations, the questions, the comparisons--that is mine now.

Lady Manderly lost a granddaughter to childbed fever three years past. She writes to me weekly now, asking questions, sharing what her midwives have learned. Lady Dustin has grudgingly begun keeping records of her own. Even Lady Cerwyn has expressed interest, though she remains skeptical of "southern methods" (she seems to think soap was invented in King's Landing, which I find amusing).

The soap itself has become something of a sensation. I have begun tinting it blue--indigo, expensive but striking--and scenting it with winter roses. The ladies call it "Northern soap," the "color of winter." They compete to obtain it. They compete, Ned, and in competing they adopt the methods that save lives.

I have enclosed a bar for you. Blue soap for my quiet wolf.

I fumbled in the package. Found it. The blue was deep, almost the color of Benjen's eyes, and the scent--

Gods. The scent was Winterfell.

Winter roses and cold air and home. I held the bar to my nose and breathed, and for one terrible moment I was seven years old again, watching Sarah pack boxes for storage while I sat in a hospital bed that smelled of nothing at all.

Get it together, Chen. You're in a rookery. Ravens are watching.

I kept reading.

Your sister rides every day, even when I forbid it. She fell from Dancer last week and climbed right back on before the blood had dried. Your father says she has the wolf blood. I say she has too much pride and not enough sense. We are both right.

Brandon won a melee against squires two years his senior at the Ryswell harvest fair. He was insufferable for a week. Then he lost a practice bout to Martyn Cassel and has been tolerable since.

Benjen asks about you constantly. He keeps the carved wolf you gave him beside his pillow. "The big brother in the sky castle," he calls you. I do not correct him.

I miss you, my quiet wolf. The castle is louder without you, somehow. Brandon fills rooms with noise, and Lyanna with chaos, and Benjen with questions--but you filled them with something else. Thought, perhaps. Stillness.

Come home when you can. Not before you are ready--Jon Arryn shapes young men into lords, and you must let him do his work. But know that Winterfell waits for you.

All my love, Mother

I folded the letter. Unfolded it. Read the part about the hygiene tracking again.

She's not just maintaining my project. She's IMPROVING it. She saw what I couldn't see--that highborn ladies share information with each other that they'd never tell a maester. She walked into that world with soap and charm and...

She's steering now. Not me.

The feeling crystallized. Pride. Vertigo. The disorientation of watching something you built roll downhill without you, going somewhere you didn't expect, maybe somewhere better.

"NED!"

Bob's voice echoed up the rookery stairs like a rockslide. "There you are! Jon Arryn's looking for you, something about a--what's that? Letter? Is it from home? What's that smell?"

He was already beside me, sniffing at the soap in my hand like a hunting hound.

"It's soap, Bob."

"Soap doesn't smell like THAT. That smells like..." He inhaled deeply. "Like ice and flowers and something cold. What IS that?"

"Winter roses. They only grow in Winterfell."

"Your family makes SOAP?" Bob looked genuinely impressed. "Fancy soap? That's--that's actually brilliant. You could sell that. You could sell that for FORTUNES."

That's exactly what Mother's doing. And she didn't need me to tell her.

"We should go," I said, tucking the letter inside my doublet, close to my heart. "If Jon Arryn's looking for me--"

"Right, right, something about mountains. I think he wants us to go hunting." Bob was already pulling me toward the stairs. "Real hunting! Not that boring riding-around-the-valley nonsense. Actual MOUNTAINS."

I let him pull me along, one hand pressed against the letter through the fabric of my doublet.

She's steering now. The project isn't mine anymore.

Somewhere inside me, the engineer who needed to control everything felt the loss like a missing tooth.

But somewhere else, something that might have been the real Ned Stark--the one who loved his mother, who trusted her--felt something closer to relief.

Let her steer. She's better at it than you are.

Part 2: Arc - Week One: The Stranger

Late Spring 275 AC, Age 12

The falcon wanted to kill me.

This was, I understood, a reasonable response. I had pulled him from a rockslide, hauled him down a mountain in a leather sack, and installed him in my solar against everyone's advice. If our positions were reversed, I would also want to kill me.

"Easy," I said, holding out a strip of raw rabbit. "Food. Good food. Delicious... rabbit."

Arc mantled on his makeshift perch--a hastily-constructed wooden stand that I already knew was wrong--and screamed at me. Not the desperate, pained cry from the mountain. A threat. A promise of violence.

I have an engineering doctorate and I'm being intimidated by something that weighs three pounds.

"He doesn't like you," Bob observed from the doorway, arms crossed, grinning like this was the best entertainment he'd seen all week.

"Astute observation."

"Have you tried NOT being so... you?" He waved a hand vaguely. "All serious and thinky? Birds don't like thinky. They like... meat and flying and..."

"Bob, please stop helping."

"I'm just saying! You're LOOMING over him. You look like you want to eat HIM."

I stepped back. Looked at the falcon. The falcon looked at me with golden eyes full of fury and fear.

He's right. You're treating this like an engineering problem. Stand here, present food at this angle, wait for behavioral response. But he's not a system. He's a terrified animal who just survived a rockslide and woke up in a castle full of strangers.

I set the meat on the edge of the perch and stepped back to the far wall.

Arc watched me retreat. His mantling eased slightly. The feathers along his spine settled from full defensive flare to merely suspicious bristle.

"That's better," Bob said. "See? Give him space. Like when Stannis is being particularly Stannis-y. Just... back away and let him be angry for a while."

I sat on my bed, fifteen feet from the perch, and waited.

The meat sat there.

Arc glared at me.

An hour passed. Then two. Bob got bored and left to find something to hit. I stayed, barely moving, watching the falcon watch me.

This is stupid. This is the opposite of productivity. I could be reading, learning, planning--

Arc hopped closer to the meat. One sideways step. Then another.

I held my breath.

He snatched the rabbit strip, retreated to the far end of the perch, and devoured it while keeping one eye fixed on me the entire time. When it was gone, he mantled again, smaller this time, and turned his back.

Okay. That's... something. He ate. He's eating.

I stayed still until my legs cramped and the afternoon light turned orange through the windows. Arc didn't move from his perch, didn't acknowledge me further, but he didn't scream either.

Maester Colemon found me there at sunset, and his disapproval was written across his face like a maester's notation.

"My lord, this is unwise. A wild raptor in living quarters--the risk of disease alone--"

"He's healing. He needs to heal before he can be released."

"Then house him in the mews, where the falconer can--"

"No."

The word came out harder than I intended. Colemon blinked, adjusting his chain, clearly recalibrating how to handle a twelve-year-old who wouldn't be handled.

"My lord, I must advise--"

"I understand the risks, Maester. I'll clean the droppings myself. I won't handle him without gloves. But he stays."

I can't explain why. I barely understand it myself. But when I touched him on that mountain, when I reached through the pain and fear and found something that felt like recognition...

He has to stay.

Colemon left, still disapproving. I stayed on my bed, watching the falcon sleep on his inadequate perch, and started making plans.

You're going to need a better perch. Proper height. Proper texture for the talons. And you're going to need to actually learn what you're doing, Chen, because Michael Chen never trained a single animal in forty-three years of life, and enthusiasm isn't a substitute for knowledge.

In the darkness, Arc made a soft sound. Not a threat. A settling. The sound of a wild thing that might, possibly, eventually, learn to trust.

It was a beginning.

Part 3: Arc - Week Two: The Engineer's Problem

Late Spring 275 AC, Age 12

The Eyrie's library was sparse by Winterfell standards--the Arryns preferred swords to books--but it had what I needed.

On the Training of Hawks and Falcons, by some long-dead Valeman. The Falconer's Art, attributed to a maester I'd never heard of. Three more volumes so old the spines were crumbling.

I spread them across a reading table and began to take notes.

Perch height: Should match the bird's natural roosting preference. Too low causes distress. Too high causes territorial confusion. The falcon should feel elevated but not exposed.

Perch material: Rough bark preferred. Allows proper grip. Smooth wood causes slipping, which causes stress, which causes aggression.

Feeding distance: Begin at maximum distance the bird will tolerate. Reduce gradually. Never rush. Trust cannot be accelerated.

I looked up from my notes. Through the library window, I could see the training yard below, tiny figures moving through sword forms. Somewhere down there, Bob was probably breaking someone's training sword and laughing about it.

You're measuring bird feelings, I imagined him saying. This is SO you, Ned.

He wasn't wrong.

But engineering IS measurement. You can't improve what you can't quantify. And right now, Arc's stress level is quantifiable: he screams when I enter the room. He won't eat if I'm closer than ten feet. He won't sleep if I'm watching.

So change the variables.

I spent the afternoon in the castle's workshop, persuading a bemused carpenter to help me construct what I called a "specialized raptor perching station" and what he probably called "the weird thing Lord Stark's boy wanted."

The perch was two feet tall, wrapped in rough-cut bark from a pine log. I added a secondary platform below for food placement, angled so the falcon could see me approaching without feeling cornered. A leather guard along one side would block drafts from the window.

Bob found me carrying it back to my solar, arms full of wood and leather, bark scraping my chin.

"What in seven hells is THAT?"

"A perch."

"It looks like you murdered a tree and made furniture from the corpse."

"That's... actually exactly what I did."

Bob stared at me for a long moment, then burst out laughing. "You're ENGINEERING a BIRD RELATIONSHIP. You're actually measuring and building and--" He wheezed, doubled over. "Oh, Ned. Never change. Never ever change."

"Are you going to help me carry this or just stand there laughing?"

"Both! I can do both!"

He grabbed one end of the perch, still giggling, and helped me wrestle it through my chamber door. Arc screamed at the intrusion, mantling wildly on his inadequate stand.

"Easy," I said, more to the bird than to Bob. "Easy. This is for you."

Bob backed toward the door. "I'll just... I'll be outside. Far outside. Where your murder bird can't reach my eyes."

I spent an hour positioning the new perch. Moving it. Testing sightlines. Adjusting the height until it felt right--not based on the books, but based on something else. A sense I couldn't explain. A feeling that this spot, at this angle, would let Arc see the window and the door and me without feeling trapped.

You're not an engineer right now. You're guessing. You're hoping. This isn't a system you can calculate.

This is trust. And trust doesn't have an equation.

When the perch was ready, I retreated to my bed and waited.

Arc watched from his old stand. The new one stood between us, bark-wrapped and waiting.

Hours passed. I didn't move.

Just before sunset, the falcon hopped down from his old perch. Walked across the floor--not flew, walked, like he was testing the new territory--and jumped onto the new stand.

He settled. Ruffled his feathers. Tucked his head under one wing.

He slept.

I watched him sleep, this wild thing I was trying to tame, and felt something I hadn't felt since arriving at the Eyrie.

Progress. Not control--I'm not controlling him. But connection. The beginning of something.

The engineer in me wanted to document the results. Record the variables. Establish a repeatable process.

The other part--the part I was slowly learning to trust--just watched the falcon sleep, and was grateful.

Part 4: Eyrie Metallurgy

Summer 275 AC, Age 12

The Eyrie's smith was named Willem, and he did not want to talk to a twelve-year-old lordling about steel.

"With respect, m'lord, I've work to do." He was a thick man, arms like ham hocks, face permanently reddened by decades of forge heat. "Ser Corbray wants his sword resharpened by evening."

"I won't take much of your time. I just want to watch. And ask questions."

"Questions." Willem's tone suggested that 'questions' was somewhere between 'plague' and 'tax collectors' on his list of preferred topics. "About what?"

"About how Vale steel differs from Northern steel. About your techniques. About--"

"You know smithing, do you? Young lord like yourself?"

Here it comes. The dismissal. The pat on the head. The 'run along and play' that I've been hearing for twelve years.

"I know enough to know I don't know enough. That's why I'm asking."

Willem paused, hammer in one hand, half-shaped horseshoe glowing on the anvil. Something shifted in his expression--not respect, exactly, but a recalibration.

"Northern steel," he said slowly. "What do you know about it?"

"I know our smith at Winterfell uses a different quenching method. Water for some blades, oil for others. The results vary--some shatter, some bend. I've been trying to understand why."

The hammer came down, sparks flying. "Quenching's the easy part. It's the heating that matters. Get the metal too hot, it burns. Not hot enough, it won't harden right."

"How do you know when it's the right temperature?"

"Color." Willem lifted the horseshoe with tongs, examining its glow. "Orange is too cool for blades. Yellow is good. White-yellow is too hot for most work, but some things need it."

Pyrometry. Temperature measurement by color. Basic stuff, but he's articulating principles he learned through generations of practice, not theory.

"Can I sketch that? The color sequence?"

Willem stared at me like I'd grown a second head. "Sketch... the colors?"

"For reference. So I can learn." I pulled a scrap of parchment from my pocket, already half-covered in notes. "I've been documenting everything I observe. Metallurgy, agriculture, construction techniques. Winterfell does things differently than the Vale. I want to understand why."

The smith plunged the horseshoe into his quenching trough. Steam hissed.

"You're a strange one, young lord."

"I've been told."

Another pause. Then, grudgingly: "The ore matters too. Vale ore's got more impurities than Northern ore. We have to heat longer, fold more times. Makes the steel harder but more brittle. Northern steel bends more but breaks less."

Different carbon content. Different iron composition. The principles are the same, but the raw materials force different approaches.

I was sketching furiously when the smithy door crashed open.

"THERE you are!" Bob filled the doorway like a small avalanche. "I've been looking everywhere! Ser Corbray wants us for drill and you're--" He stopped, staring at my notes. "Are you drawing FIRE? Is that a picture of fire?"

"It's a temperature gradient chart. Different colors indicate--"

"Are you making a SWORD?" Bob's eyes lit up. "Is Willem teaching you to make a sword? Can you make ME a sword? A big one, with a--"

"No, Bob. I'm studying metallurgical principles. Carbon content and heat treatment and--"

"BORING!" Bob grabbed my arm, already pulling me toward the door. "Come on, we're late. Corbray's going to make us run laps."

I barely managed to bow to Willem before Bob hauled me out of the smithy. But as I left, I caught the ghost of something on the smith's face.

Not dismissal. Not the tolerant amusement of an adult humoring a child.

Interest. He's actually interested.

"Can I come back tomorrow?" I called over my shoulder.

"If you don't get in the way," Willem called back. "And bring better parchment. That stuff's rubbish for notes."

Bob was laughing as he dragged me across the yard. "Only YOU would find a way to make sword-making BORING. 'Carbon content.' Gods, Ned."

"Steel is interesting if you--"

"Nope! Don't want to hear it! Swords are for HITTING things, not for STUDYING things!"

But he was grinning, and his arm was slung around my shoulders, and somewhere behind us a smith was probably shaking his head at the strange Northern boy who wanted to understand why fire changed metal.

Small steps. Plant the seed. Come back tomorrow.

Engineering isn't about having the answers. It's about asking the right questions to the right people.

I did come back. The next day, and the day after that, and the day after that.

Willem was gruff, but he was also a craftsman who had spent thirty years perfecting his art without anyone bothering to ask him about it. Once he realized I wasn't there to waste his time or challenge his expertise, the gruffness mellowed into something almost approaching patience.

"You're taking notes again," he observed on my fourth visit, as I sketched the bellows mechanism he was using to increase forge temperature.

"If I don't write it down, I'll forget."

"Most lords don't care enough to forget in the first place."

"Most lords aren't trying to understand why some steel holds an edge and some doesn't."

He grunted--the closest thing to approval I'd heard from him. "The folding. That's where it matters. Each fold doubles the layers, pushes out the impurities. Ten folds gives you over a thousand layers. Twelve folds, over four thousand."

Pattern welding. He's describing the basic principle without knowing the metallurgical science behind it. The folding distributes carbon more evenly, creates a more uniform crystalline structure, reduces weak points from slag inclusions.

"What happens if you fold more than that? Fifteen times? Twenty?"

"You burn the steel. Too much working, too much heat, the metal becomes brittle." He pulled a piece from the scrap pile--a broken knife blade, I realized, shattered into three pieces. "See here? I folded this sixteen times, trying to make it stronger. Made it worthless instead."

I examined the break. The metal had fractured along planes that were almost crystalline in their regularity.

Decarburization. He worked out too much carbon, left it with a structure closer to wrought iron than steel. There's an optimal range, and he's trying to find it by trial and error.

"Is there a way to know when you've folded enough? Without waiting to see if it breaks?"

Willem stared at me. Then he laughed--a short, surprised bark that echoed off the smithy walls.

"You're a strange one, young lord. That question's been asked by every smith I've ever known, and none of us have an answer."

But I might, I thought. Someday. When I understand this world's materials better. When I can test carbon content systematically. When I have the tools to measure what right now can only be felt.

Seeds, not harvests. Plant the idea. Let it grow.

Part 5: Arc - Week Three: The Connection

Summer 275 AC, Age 12

I stopped trying to touch him.

Three weeks of patience, of measured distance, of carefully-placed food and retreated waiting. Three weeks of Arc screaming less often, eating more willingly, sleeping through the night on his new perch. Progress, by any measure.

But not connection. Not yet.

You can't force trust, I reminded myself, sitting in the chair I'd positioned at the maximum distance Arc would tolerate. Trust is earned. Given. You can create the conditions, but you can't make it happen.

The falcon watched me from his perch, golden eyes tracking every movement. The injured wing had healed--he'd been flying short circuits around the room for days now, rebuilding strength and confidence. Soon he'd be ready for release.

The thought made something in my chest ache.

Let him go. That was always the plan. Heal him, release him, move on. He's not a pet. He's not a tool. He's a wild thing that belongs in the sky.

But when I sat here, quiet, still, just... present... something happened. Something I didn't have words for.

I felt him.

Not thoughts, exactly. Not images or sounds. More like... weather. The pressure of his emotions bleeding through the air between us.

Hungry. A sharp, hollow sensation in my gut that wasn't mine.

Alert. The prickle of attention along my spine, eyes I didn't have scanning for threats.

Curious. A tentative reaching, like a hand extended in the dark.

I closed my eyes. Breathed slowly. Let my mind go still in a way Michael Chen had never learned and Ned Stark was only beginning to understand.

The reaching intensified.

What are you? The question wasn't in words. It was in feeling, in pressure, in the shape of attention.

Friend, I tried to answer. Not in words either. In stillness. In calm. In the absence of threat.

Different. The falcon's presence circled mine, wary, fascinated. Not-bird. Not-prey. Not-threat. Different.

Yes. Different. But not enemy.

The connection deepened. For a moment--just a moment--I saw myself through golden eyes. A small figure hunched in a chair, strange and slow-moving, smelling of leather and ink and something else. Something that felt like recognition.

Then the moment broke.

Arc launched from his perch, wings beating, and I snapped back into my own head so fast I grabbed the chair arms to keep from falling.

"What the--"

The falcon circled once, twice, then landed on the perch nearest to me. Less than three feet away. Closer than he'd ever come willingly.

He tilted his head. Examined me with one eye, then the other.

I held my breath.

Slowly, fighting every instinct screaming about beaks and talons, I raised my hand. Held it out. Waited.

Arc considered. The connection thrummed between us, no longer reaching but... present. A bridge. A possibility.

He stepped onto my wrist.

His talons gripped hard enough to bruise even through the leather glove I'd taken to wearing. His wings flared for balance, nearly smacking me in the face. But he was there. On my arm. Choosing to be there.

You felt it too, I thought at him. You felt me reaching for you.

Golden eyes met grey.

Yes, the answer came back, not in words but in certainty. I felt.

I sat there until my arm ached and my legs went numb, afraid to move, afraid to break whatever fragile thing had formed between us. Arc eventually hopped back to his perch, but the distance felt different now.

Not empty space.

A bridge.

I don't know what I'm doing, I admitted to myself, rubbing my wrist where his talons had gripped. Michael Chen never did magic. Never BELIEVED in magic. And now I'm sitting here having FEELINGS with a bird.

But I was smiling. Couldn't stop smiling.

Magic is real here. And somehow, impossibly, it's mine.

Part 6: The Training Yard Disaster

Summer 275 AC, Age 12

The practice sword caught me in the ribs like a carriage hitting a pedestrian.

I went down hard. The sky wheeled overhead. All the air in my lungs decided to evacuate at once, leaving me gasping on the packed dirt like a landed fish.

"HA!" Bob's face appeared above me, grinning like a wolf that had just caught dinner. "That one CONNECTED! Did you feel it? I felt it. That was SOLID."

I tried to respond. What came out was closer to "ghhhhh."

"Come on, up you get!" He grabbed my hand and hauled me vertical with one arm, the way you might lift a moderately-sized cat. "You lasted longer that time! Almost... almost four seconds!"

"An... improvement," I wheezed. My ribs were screaming. Michael Chen was fifty-four years past his last playground brawl, and the muscle memory had not transferred to this body. "From three... seconds."

"Exactly! Progress!" Bob clapped me on the shoulder hard enough to nearly knock me down again. "Again?"

No, my ribs said. No no no no no.

"Again," my mouth said, because Ned Stark couldn't be seen backing down and Michael Chen was apparently a masochist.

We squared off. Bob assumed his stance--feet wide, sword high, grinning like someone had told him a particularly good joke. I assumed my stance--feet narrower, sword ready, already calculating how long until the next impact.

Three seconds. Maybe four. Five if I do something unexpected.

Bob lunged. I parried. Metal rang against metal with a force that numbed my fingers.

Two seconds.

He pressed forward, raining blows that I barely deflected. My arms were already aching. His weren't even warmed up.

Three seconds.

I ducked under a swing, tried to counter, and immediately realized my mistake.

Counter-attack leaves you open. Classic beginner error. Should have kept defending.

Bob's practice sword caught me in the stomach. I folded like a poorly-constructed tent, knees hitting dirt, lunch threatening to make a reappearance.

"You THOUGHT too much again!" Bob sounded almost disappointed. "I SAW you thinking! You were doing the thing with your eyes, the calculations thing!"

"Sorry... for... thinking..."

"Stop ANALYZING! Just HIT me!"

If only it were that simple. Some of us don't have the muscle memory of a lifetime of physical dominance. Some of us were engineers who sat at desks.

"Break," I managed. "Water."

We moved to the benches at the yard's edge. A servant materialized with a water pitcher--they'd learned to keep refreshments ready when Lord Robert trained. Bob drained half the pitcher in one long gulp, water running down his chin, perfectly content.

"You're getting better," he said, wiping his face with his sleeve. "Seriously. When you first got here, I could beat you in TWO seconds."

"Your faith sustains me."

"I mean it! You've got good instincts. You just..." He struggled for words, which was itself unusual. "You're fighting like it's a PROBLEM. Like there's a RIGHT answer you have to figure out."

"There is a right answer. It's called 'don't get hit.'"

"But you're trying to CALCULATE it! Fighting isn't math, Ned. It's..." He punched the air enthusiastically. "It's FEELING. You feel where the sword's going to be. You feel what your opponent wants. You don't THINK it."

He's describing intuition. Pattern recognition. The same thing I do with systems and processes, but applied to violence.

The problem is, I developed my pattern recognition over forty-three years of sedentary engineering work. My body hasn't learned these patterns yet.

"I'll try to feel more," I said dryly.

"Do or do not! There is no--wait, that's not how it goes." Bob frowned, trying to remember some aphorism or another.

"Maybe we should just admit I'm not a fighter." The words came out heavier than I intended. "Not everyone can be good at everything."

Bob's frown deepened. "That's QUITTER talk. You're not a quitter. You're the stubbornest person I know."

"Stubborn and skilled aren't the same thing."

"They're RELATED though!" He grabbed my shoulder, forcing me to meet his eyes. "Look, you're never going to be ME with a sword. Obviously. No one's going to be ME with a sword. But you don't NEED to be me. You need to be good enough to not die in the first five seconds, and then you use that big thinky brain of yours to figure out how to WIN."

That's... actually not bad advice. For someone who claims to hate thinking.

"Besides," Bob continued, grinning now, "you're already better than Ser Corbray at the important stuff."

"The important stuff?"

"Your bird hasn't shit on my head yet. Corbray can't say that."

I snorted. Then laughed, the tension in my chest loosening despite the ache in my ribs.

"Come on." Bob stood, offering his hand. "I owe you dinner. Marta made those pies with the gravy inside, the good ones. We'll eat a dozen."

"You'll eat a dozen. I'll eat two."

"Details." He hauled me up, arm already around my shoulders, steering me toward the kitchens. "Tomorrow we'll work on your footwork. Corbray's been teaching me this thing with the side-step--it's BRUTAL, you'll love it."

"I won't love it."

"You'll APPRECIATE it. Eventually. After the bruises heal."

We walked across the yard, Bob still talking, my ribs still aching. Somewhere in the castle, Arc was probably sleeping on his perch, recovering from another day of tentative connection.

I'm not good at fighting. I might never be good at fighting. But I'm getting good at this--at friendship. At being Bob's brother in everything but blood.

That might matter more than swordsmanship, in the end.

The meat pies were as good as Bob had promised. I ate two. He ate seven, which seemed physically impossible given their size, but Robert Baratheon's appetite was one of those natural forces that resisted explanation.

"You know what your problem is?" Bob asked, sauce running down his chin.

"I have a list, but please, share your wisdom."

"You're trying to be a GENERAL before you've learned to be a SOLDIER." He gestured expansively with his eighth pie, sending crumbs flying. "You think three moves ahead. That's good for chess. Terrible for swords."

"Jon Arryn says thinking ahead is valuable."

"Jon Arryn is OLD. He can afford to think ahead. WE have to survive long enough to get old first." He took another enormous bite. "Learn the basics. Get them into your BONES. Then you can think."

He's not wrong. Michael Chen spent forty years building expertise before he could improvise. The twelve-year-old body hasn't put in the time yet.

"That's... actually wise, Bob."

"I know! I'm FULL of wisdom!" He grinned, meat sauce still decorating his chin. "Mostly I just know what works because I've been getting hit since I could walk. Father believed in early education."

There was something in his voice on that last sentence. A slight edge, quickly covered.

"He hit you?"

"He trained me." Bob shrugged, the gesture too casual. "Steffon Baratheon's boys don't grow up soft. Stannis took to it like he was born for it--all grim determination and perfect form. I just... hit back harder." The grin returned, but it didn't quite reach his eyes. "Turned out I was better at the hitting than the being hit."

Childhood shaped by violence. Learning to fight as a form of survival. No wonder he defaults to force when gentler options exist.

"My father never hit me," I said. "He barely talks to me, honestly. I'm the spare. Brandon gets the attention."

"Lucky." Bob said it without irony. "Sometimes I wished Father would just IGNORE me. But he was always watching. Evaluating. Making sure I was living up to the Baratheon name." He shook off the mood, reaching for another pie. "Anyway. Tomorrow. Footwork. I'm going to teach you how to not fall down when someone swings at you."

"Can't wait."

"That's sarcasm. I'm learning to recognize sarcasm. Jon Arryn says it's a Northern thing."

"It's a survival mechanism for people who can't fight."

Bob laughed--the real laugh, the one that echoed off walls and made dogs bark in distant courtyards. "See? Wisdom! You've got wisdom too! We're a perfect team, Neddy Stark!"

Don't call me that, I thought. But I was smiling, and my ribs had stopped hurting, and somewhere outside the kitchen window, Arc was circling, sensing my improved mood through our growing bond.

Maybe that's enough. For today. For now.

We ate in comfortable silence for a while--or what passed for silence with Bob, which involved him humming through mouthfuls and occasionally commenting on the structural superiority of gravy-filled pies compared to regular pies.

"The crust holds better," he explained, entirely unprompted. "When you fill the inside with liquid, the whole thing becomes more... more COHESIVE. Like a fortress. A delicious fortress."

"You've thought about this a lot."

"I think about pies the way you think about steel. We all have our areas of expertise."

And somehow, in that ridiculous moment, with Bob's face covered in gravy and crumbs scattered across the table like snow, I felt something I hadn't felt since leaving Winterfell.

Belonging. Not the belonging of blood and duty--that I'd had since birth. But the belonging of choice. Of someone who saw me, really saw me, and decided I was worth keeping.

Bob doesn't need me the way Brandon needs me. He chose me. That's different. That's more.

"What?" Bob asked, catching me staring.

"Nothing. Just... thinking about fortresses."

"Delicious fortresses?"

"The most delicious kind."

He grinned and reached for his ninth pie.

Part 7: Arc - Week Four: Flight

Late Summer 275 AC, Age 12

Arc spread his wings.

It was the widest I'd seen them stretch since the mountain--full extension, pinions gleaming grey-brown in the afternoon light, perfectly symmetrical. Healed. Strong.

He's ready.

The thought brought equal parts pride and grief. We'd been building toward this moment for four weeks. The connection between us had grown stronger every day--I could feel his emotions constantly now, a low hum of falcon-thought in the back of my mind. Hunger. Alertness. A strange, wordless affection that felt like being recognized.

But he was wild. He belonged in the sky. Keeping him would be prison, not partnership.

"Okay," I said, moving to the window. The ledge was wide, meant for looking, not launching. But it would do. "Okay, Arc. It's time."

I opened the window.

The wind rushed in, cold and clean, carrying the scent of altitude and emptiness. Arc turned his head toward it, feathers ruffling, attention crystallizing.

Sky, I felt from him. Open. Free.

Yes. Go. You're healed. You don't need me anymore.

The falcon hopped to the windowsill. Looked back at me once, golden eyes unreadable.

Then he launched.

Wings beating, gaining altitude, spiraling up into the blue--

And I went with him.

The floor vanished. The room vanished. I was flying, ACTUALLY flying, wind rushing over wings I could feel, the world tilting and wheeling below in sharp-edged geometric precision.

The Eyrie was a white toy. The mountains were teeth. The valley was a map. Everything was VECTORS--trajectories, angles of descent, wind currents mapped in my mind like engineering diagrams.

I screamed. Or I tried to. My body wasn't listening. It was somewhere far below, probably collapsed in a heap, while my mind soared a thousand feet above in a peregrine falcon's body.

Thermal rising. Bank left. Feel the pressure differential. Catch the updraft. CLIMB.

The joy was overwhelming. Pure, animal, wordless joy--the joy of flight, of freedom, of existing in the sky as if gravity was a suggestion rather than a law.

This is what you were made for, I thought at Arc--or he thought at me--or we thought together. The boundaries were blurring. This is where you belong.

WE belong, came the answer. Not words. Certainty. A correction and an invitation.

We dove. The ground rushed up, mountains becoming teeth becoming DETAIL, every rock and tree and shadow snapping into focus with impossible clarity. At the last moment, we spread our wings, caught the air, converted lethal velocity into graceful climb.

Again, the falcon wanted. Again again again.

"NED!"

The word crashed through the connection like a thrown stone. The world splintered. I was falling--not flying, FALLING--back into my own body, slamming into flesh and bone with a force that drove the air from my lungs.

I was on the floor. My back against the cold stone. My hands clenched into fists around nothing.

Bob's face appeared above me, white as bone. "Are you DYING? Gods, Ned, are you--you were just SITTING there and then you went all WHITE and your eyes rolled back and--"

He had a pitcher of water. Of course he had a pitcher of water. That was apparently his universal solution to crisis.

"Bob, don't--"

He poured it on my head.

I sputtered, gasping, water running down my face and into my collar. "ROBERT!"

"You looked like you were having a FIT! I was SAVING you! Again!"

"I was FLYING, you--"

I stopped. Froze. Realized what I'd almost said.

Bob was staring at me, water pitcher still raised, expression shifting from panic to confusion to something dangerously close to curiosity.

"Flying," he repeated slowly. "You were... flying. On the floor. With your eyes rolled back."

Shit. Shit shit shit.

"I--" The lie wouldn't come. I was too scattered, too overwhelmed, too still-feeling the phantom sensation of wind under wings that weren't there. "It's--"

"Your bird." Bob looked toward the window, where Arc was a distant speck circling in the afternoon sky. "Your weird murder bird that you've been bonding with for a month. You were... you were IN him?"

Double shit.

"It's called warging." The words fell out of my mouth before I could stop them. "Or skinchanging. It's a Northern thing. First Men blood. I didn't know I could--I didn't mean to--"

"You can POSSESS ANIMALS?"

"Not possess. I--" I sat up, water dripping from my hair, head still spinning from the sudden disconnection. "I share awareness with him. See through his eyes. Feel what he feels. It's not control. It's... partnership."

Bob was staring at me like I'd sprouted a second head. Or possibly wings.

Then, slowly, his expression changed.

"That," he said, voice hushed with something that might have been awe, "is the COOLEST THING I've ever heard."

"What?"

"You can FLY! Through your BIRD! You can SEE from the SKY!" He grabbed my shoulders, grinning like a maniac. "Ned! NED! Do you understand what this MEANS?"

"I... honestly don't--"

"You can SPY on ANYONE! From the SKY! They'll never see you coming!" His grip tightened, eyes bright with impossible schemes. "Can you make him attack people? Can you make him DIVE-BOMB? Can you--" His grin widened. "Can you make him poop on Corbray?"

I blinked.

Of all the possible responses to learning your friend could psychically bond with animals, I had not expected this one.

"That's... that's your first question? Really?"

"It's the IMPORTANT question! Corbray made me do extra laps yesterday! The man is INSUFFERABLE!"

In the sky outside, Arc screamed. I felt his distant amusement--or maybe that was my amusement, reflected through our bond. The line between us was less clear now.

"I don't know if I can control where he... aims," I managed.

"But you'll TRY? You'll TRY to make him poop on Corbray?"

"Bob--"

"This is the best day of my LIFE, Ned." He hauled me to my feet, water still dripping everywhere, grinning like a wolf. "My best friend is a WIZARD. A bird-wizard! A sky-wizard! We're going to have SO much fun with this!"

"I'm not a wizard. And please don't tell anyone. If people knew--"

"Our secret! Brother secret!" He made a locking gesture over his lips, then immediately ruined it by continuing to talk. "But can we talk about it in PRIVATE? Because I have SO many questions. Can you warg into other things? Can you do horses? Can you do BEARS?"

"I don't know, Bob. This is all new."

"Then we EXPERIMENT! Tomorrow! Tonight! I'll find you animals and you'll try to warg into them and--"

I started laughing. I couldn't help it. The absurdity of the situation--wet, exhausted, still feeling phantom-flight in my bones, being interrogated by a thirteen-year-old who thought magical skinchanging was primarily useful for aerial bowel attacks--was too much.

"Later," I said. "Let me... let me figure out what's happening first."

"Fair enough. But the poop thing. You'll think about it?"

"I'll think about it."

Outside, Arc descended from the heights and landed on the window ledge. He looked at me, golden eyes bright, and I felt his satisfaction like warmth in my chest.

Home, he sent. Not the mountain. Not the wild.

Here. You.

He didn't leave. He could have. The window was open, the sky was infinite, and he was fully healed.

He chose to stay.

Oh, I thought, understanding settling over me like a cloak. It's not about releasing you. It was never about that.

It's about us choosing each other.

Two Days After the Reveal

"He's coming," Bob hissed from his position by the window. "Get ready!"

I sat cross-legged on my bed, Arc perched on my glove, our connection thrumming like a plucked string. Below in the training yard, Ser Corbray was assembling the morning's sword practice, his voice carrying that familiar nasal superiority.

"This is stupid," I said. "This is SO stupid."

"This is BRILLIANT." Bob's grin could have lit the Eyrie. "You promised you'd think about it!"

"I said I'd think about it. Not that I'd DO it."

"Thinking time is over, Neddy. It's DOING time."

I looked at Arc. Arc looked at me with golden eyes that might have held amusement. Or hunger. With warging, the line was getting blurrier every day.

You know what he wants, I sent through the bond.

Arc mantled slightly. He knew.

Fine. But if Jon Arryn asks, this was YOUR idea.

I slipped into Arc's mind like sliding into cold water. The world shifted--colors washing out except for movement, the training yard suddenly mapped in vectors of flesh and threat and thermal signatures.

Bob's whisper seemed to come from very far away: "There! He's standing still! Now now now!"

Arc didn't need encouragement. The dive was pure joy--wind shearing past, the target locked, every instinct aligned toward this perfect, ridiculous moment.

Ser Corbray was mid-lecture about proper guard position when nature took its course.

The splat was magnificent.

Through Arc's eyes, I watched Corbray freeze. Watched his hand rise slowly to his head, fingers coming away white. Watched his face cycle through confusion, realization, and incandescent rage.

"WHICH GODS-DAMNED BIRD--"

Arc was already climbing, wings pumping, banking toward the window where Bob was doubled over in silent, wheezing laughter.

I snapped back to my own body, gasping, grinning despite myself.

"BEST. THING. EVER." Bob could barely speak through the giggles. "Did you SEE? Did you SEE his FACE?"

"I saw everything."

"That's right! You SAW everything! Through SKY WIZARD POWERS!" He grabbed my shoulders, shaking me. "We're doing this EVERY WEEK. Every week until Corbray learns humility or goes bald from stress, whichever comes first!"

"We're doing this NEVER again. I'm not using warging for pranks, Bob--"

"You literally just did!"

Arc landed on the windowsill, looking insufferably pleased with himself. Through our bond, I felt his satisfaction. Predator. Success. Packmate-joy.

You're a terrible influence, I sent.

He ruffled his feathers and didn't argue.

Below, Corbray was still shouting.

Worth it.

Part 8: Mother's Empire

Autumn 275 AC, Age 12-13

Winterfell, Autumn 275 AC

The solar was too warm and Lady Dustin was being difficult again.

Lyarra Stark had expected this. Barbara Dustin was always difficult--it was practically her banner words. But today's difficulty had a sharper edge, the kind that came from wounded pride rather than genuine objection.

"You're saying my midwives are incompetent." Lady Dustin sat rigid in her chair, tea untouched, chin high enough to signal injury. "That's what this means, isn't it? All this... documentation."

"I'm saying your midwives aren't using the full protocols." Lyarra kept her voice level, a skill she'd developed over years of managing Northern lords who thought women's business was beneath their notice. "And I'm saying that matters."

Lady Manderly leaned forward, silver hair catching the firelight. "Barbara. I lost my granddaughter to childbed fever. My son's wife. A girl of seventeen, healthy and strong, dead within a week of giving birth because something got inside her." Her voice didn't waver. "Whatever Lady Stark is offering, I'll take it."

"You've always been too eager to follow Winterfell's lead, Margot."

"I've always been eager to see my grandchildren grow up with mothers."

Lady Cerwyn sat between them, younger than both, watching the exchange with the careful attention of someone taking mental notes. She'd arrived skeptical--"Southern methods," she'd called them, as if soap had been invented in King's Landing--but three hours of conversation had shifted something in her expression.

Lyarra lifted the bound ledger she'd been waiting to present. The cover was plain leather, unadorned, but inside...

"Forty-seven births in the past year using the full protocols," she said, opening to the first page. "Soap, boiled water, clean cloths, handwashing before and after touching the mother. Two deaths. Four percent."

She turned to the next section.

"Twenty-three births using partial protocols--soap only, usually, without the other measures. Six deaths. Twenty-six percent."

Another turn.

"Thirty-one births using traditional methods. Eleven deaths. Thirty-five percent."

The numbers hung in the air, sharp as obsidian.

"Lady Dustin." Lyarra met Barbara's eyes directly. "Your household accounts for eight of those partial-protocol births. Three deaths."

Barbara's face went pale. Then red. "You're blaming me for--"

"I'm showing you data. The same data I've shown everyone in this room." Lyarra closed the ledger. "The soap alone isn't enough. My son discovered that before he left for the Eyrie. The soap combined with clean water combined with clean cloths combined with washed hands--that's what saves lives. Any one piece alone is better than nothing, but the full protocol is what makes the difference."

Silence.

Lady Cerwyn spoke first. "Your son. The quiet one. Eddard."

"Yes."

"He designed these protocols? At eleven years old?"

"He observed that midwives who washed their hands had fewer mothers die. He asked questions. Drew conclusions. Suggested experiments." Lyarra felt the familiar surge of pride, tamped it down. "I'm the one who built them into something that could spread."

"Winter Rose Soap." Lady Manderly was smiling now, the knowing smile of someone who understood strategy. "Not just medicine. A luxury. A status symbol. Something women would WANT to use."

"Women talk, Lady Manderly. In ways men don't. What we wear, how we birth, what our rivals are doing--it all travels through networks they don't even see." Lyarra permitted herself a small smile. "I simply... redirected that traffic."

Barbara Dustin was still stiff, still wounded, but something had shifted in her posture. The defensiveness was crumbling, leaving something rawer underneath.

"Three women," she said quietly. "Three women in my household."

"Yes."

"Because I thought soap was enough."

"Because you didn't have the full information. Because no one had compiled this data before." Lyarra reached across, touched Barbara's hand. "I'm not here to blame you, Barbara. I'm here to make sure it doesn't happen again."

Another silence. Longer this time.

"What do you need?" Barbara asked finally.

"Records. Detailed records. Every birth in your household, methods used, outcomes. We compile everything, share what works, identify what doesn't." Lyarra gestured at the ledger. "This is the beginning. By next year, we'll have enough data to prove what saves lives beyond any doubt."

"And the soap?"

"I'll teach your household to make their own. Basic soap--not the winter rose variety, that's Winterfell's alone--but good soap, properly made. In exchange for your records and your support."

Barbara Dustin stared at her for a long moment. Lyarra watched pride war with practicality in her expression.

Practicality won. It usually did, with the Northern ladies.

"Fine. You'll have your records." Barbara's voice was still stiff, but the edge had softened. "And if Lady Manderly gets better soap than me, I'm starting a feud."

Margot Manderly laughed. Lady Cerwyn smiled behind her tea cup.

Lyarra felt the tension in the room release, replaced by something that might, eventually, become alliance.

Lady Cerwyn leaned forward, studying the ledger with new interest. "These Winter Rose Keepers you mentioned--how does one become one? What training do they receive?"

"They learn the protocols from midwives who've already been trained. They receive a supply of soap, clean cloths, and detailed instructions. In exchange, they keep records of every birth they attend." Lyarra turned to a section in the back of the ledger. "We track not just deaths, but also fevers, complications, recovery times. The more data we have, the better we can identify what works and what doesn't."

"Data," Barbara Dustin repeated, testing the word like it was a foreign dish. "My grandmother would have called it women's gossip."

"Your grandmother lived in a world where one in three babies died before their first nameday. We can do better." Lyarra's voice was calm, but steel ran underneath it. "My son taught me that. He asked questions no one else thought to ask, and he found answers no one expected."

"The quiet one," Lady Manderly said softly. "I've heard the servants talk about him. They say he's strange. Clever, but strange."

Strange. The word hurt, even though Lyarra had heard it a hundred times. Her Ned WAS strange--old eyes in a young face, asking about boiling points and fermentation and the life cycles of bees while other boys played at swords. But he was HERS, and she would defend him.

"Strange enough to save lives," she said. "I'll take strange over normal any day."

The fire crackled. Outside, the autumn wind whispered against Winterfell's walls, carrying the first hints of the winter to come.

"Show me the soap," Barbara said finally. "The winter rose variety. If I'm going to compete with Lady Manderly, I need to understand what I'm competing against."

Lyarra smiled and pulled a blue bar from her traveling case. The scent filled the room--winter roses, cold and sweet and impossible anywhere except the North.

"Northern soap," she said. "The color of winter. For ladies who refuse to accept that things have always been done a certain way."

We're building something, Ned, she thought, looking at the ledger she'd assembled from her son's scattered notes and her own observations. Something that will save lives long after both of us are gone.

I hope you're proud. I hope, wherever you are, you can feel what we've made.

The Eyrie, One Week Later

The letter arrived with a package heavy enough to make the raven struggle.

I opened it in my solar, Arc watching from his perch, Bob predictably reading over my shoulder despite all social conventions about privacy.

Mother's handwriting. Pages and pages of it.

She'd sent the meeting notes.

Not just a summary--actual transcripts of what the ladies had said, what arguments she'd used, what data she'd presented. The numbers from the ledger, carefully copied. Barbara Dustin's eventual capitulation. Lady Cerwyn's commitment to building her own tracking system.

And at the end:

This is your work, Ned. Your questions, your observations, your protocols. I've simply made it VISIBLE--given it the shape that lets it spread.

The ladies are competing now. Who can have the best outcomes. Who can save the most babies. They've turned survival into a rivalry, and rivalries spread.

Lady Manderly is training her household midwives as "Winter Rose Keepers." They travel to births throughout White Harbor, bringing the methods with them. She's talking about formalizing it--an organization, of sorts. Women trained in proper protocols, available for hire.

Your sister remains impossible. Your brothers remain themselves. Your father remains pleased with the silver the soap brings in, though he pretends not to notice the medical implications.

I miss you, my quiet wolf. But I want you to know: your work is alive. Growing. Becoming something larger than either of us imagined.

All my love, Mother

I set the letter down. Picked it up. Read it again.

"You're crying," Bob observed, without mockery.

"I'm not crying."

"Your eyes are wet."

"It's the altitude. Dry air."

Bob wisely chose not to push it. He sat on my bed, uncharacteristically quiet, while I processed the impossible thing that had happened.

She built an institution. Without me. Using my ideas, yes, but building something I never imagined. A network of noble ladies tracking births, competing to save lives, spreading methods through vanity and genuine care.

It's working. The project survived my absence and became something BETTER.

The grief I'd been carrying since leaving Winterfell--the certainty that everything would fall apart without me there to tend it--didn't vanish. But it eased. Shifted. Made room for something else.

Pride. Real pride. Not in what I'd done, but in what she'd done with it.

"Your mother sounds terrifying," Bob said eventually. "In the best way."

"She is."

"I'd like to meet her someday. Mothers who can make noble ladies do things they don't want to do are INTERESTING."

You'll never meet her, I thought, the familiar weight of foreknowledge settling back. By the time we return from the Eyrie, she'll be gone.

But I didn't say that. Couldn't say that.

"Maybe someday," I said instead, and tucked the letter close to my heart where it would stay.

Part 9: Jon Arryn's Lesson - Reading People

Winter 275 AC, Age 13

Jon Arryn's solar was quieter in winter. The wind's howl seemed louder without servants bustling in the corridors, without the distant clang of the training yard. Just the fire, the old lord, and a letter with a lion seal.

"Tell me about Lord Tywin Lannister."

I'd known this lesson was coming. Jon Arryn had been building toward it for weeks, teaching me to read great houses the way I read systems. The Tyrells and their ambition. The Martells and their grievances. The Greyjoys and their pride.

Now, the lions.

"Wealthiest lord in Westeros," I began, reaching for the easy facts. "Hand of the King for over a decade. Ruthlessly efficient. He ended the Reyne-Tarbeck rebellion by killing everyone, including the children. 'The Rains of Castamere.'"

"All true." Jon Arryn's voice was measured, teacher-patient. "All surface. What does Tywin WANT?"

I know what he wants. I know what he does. I know his daughter will be queen and his grandson will be a monster and his legacy will burn the realm to cinders.

But I couldn't say that.

"Legacy," I tried instead. "Lannister supremacy. Power."

"Everyone wants power, Eddard. That tells me nothing." Jon leaned forward, firelight making his lined face look older still. "Tywin's father was weak. Tytos Lannister let vassals mock him, let a mistress run his household, let the Westerlands become a joke. When Tywin came of age, he had to rebuild everything--respect, authority, fear. The Reynes and Tarbecks weren't just rebels. They were LAUGHING at House Lannister. Do you understand?"

A childhood wound. Everything he does traces back to being mocked, being dismissed, watching his father fail.

"He wants respect."

"More than that. He wants it IMPOSSIBLE to disrespect him. Every display of overwhelming force, every crushed enemy, every strategic marriage--it all serves one purpose. The world will never laugh at House Lannister again." Jon Arryn sat back, satisfied. "Understanding that tells you how to approach him. Not as an equal--he respects only those who can threaten him. Not as a supplicant--he despises weakness. But as someone who acknowledges his authority without challenging it. Someone who can be useful without being dangerous."

I turned this over in my mind. Tywin Lannister. Driven by shame. Building an empire to bury a humiliation that happened before he was born.

Is that so different from me? Driven by future knowledge, building desperately to prevent tragedies that haven't happened yet?

"The North has maintained distance from Lannister ambitions for generations," Jon continued. "That's wise. Distance is a strategy--he can't be insulted by those who aren't playing his game. But someday, your family's interests may intersect with his. When that happens, remember: Tywin can be negotiated with, but only if you understand what he actually wants."

I filed it away. Not for now--Tywin was decades away from mattering to Ned Stark. But someday.

Someday Cersei will be queen. Someday Jaime will kill a king. Someday this understanding might be the difference between life and death.

"There's another lesson here," Jon said, pulling a second letter from his stack. The golden rose of Tyrell. "For next week. Consider: what drives House Tyrell? What childhood wounds, what inherited ambitions? They're newer to greatness than the Lannisters--stewards raised to lordship, still hungry to prove they belong among the ancient houses."

I took the letter. Felt the weight of it, not just parchment but expectation.

"You're teaching me to see people," I said slowly. "Not just houses. Not just positions. The people underneath."

"Systems are made of people." Jon Arryn's eyes were sharp despite his age. "You see systems better than anyone I've met, Eddard Stark. You see connections and patterns and how things fit together. But people aren't gears in a mill. They have wants. Fears. Wounds that never healed. Learn to see those, and you can move kingdoms."

That's what Michael Chen never understood, I realized. Engineering systems is easy compared to engineering people. Machines don't have childhood trauma. Buildings don't nurse grudges. But politics...

Politics is people all the way down.

"Thank you, my lord."

"Don't thank me. Apply the lesson." The thin smile returned. "Your friend Robert will need someone who understands these things. He has many gifts, but reading people isn't among them."

No. Robert charges straight ahead, assumes everyone is either friend or enemy, and never considers the space between.

"I'll try to be useful to him."

"I know you will. That's why you're here." Jon Arryn rose, signaling the lesson's end. "Now go find him before he decides to arm-wrestle another guard. The last one is still recovering."

I left the solar with my homework and my thoughts, already composing the analysis Jon would expect next week. The Tyrells. What did they want? What wounds drove them?

The answer came to me as I walked through the white corridors, past servants who barely glanced at the quiet Northern boy.

The Tyrells want to belong. They were stewards, elevated to lordship when the Gardener kings died in the Field of Fire. Every other Great House can trace their bloodline back thousands of years. The Tyrells have been lords for barely a century. They're nouveau riche in a world that values ancient names.

So they overcompensate. Marriages into old families. Lavish displays of wealth and culture. Constant positioning to prove they deserve their seat at the table.

What do they fear? Being exposed as upstarts. Being dismissed as jumped-up servants. Losing the legitimacy they've spent three generations building.

I could use that. Someday. When the Tyrells mattered.

And they will matter. Margaery. Olenna. The Game of Thrones that nearly destroyed everything.

I stopped in the corridor, struck by a sudden realization.

Jon Arryn isn't just teaching me to read people. He's teaching me to play the game. The same game that will kill him--poison, Cersei, Lysa--because he got too close to a truth the wrong people wanted hidden.

Am I being groomed to be a player? Or a piece?

The thought was uncomfortable. I pushed it away, filed it for later examination.

This is the education I actually need. Not swords--I'll never be good at swords. Not even the technical knowledge I brought from my past life. Politics. People. The game that will determine whether my family lives or dies.

Learn it well, Chen. Everything depends on it.

But remember: the game has rules, and the rules can get you killed.

Part 10: Mikken's Letter

Winter 275-276 AC, Age 13

Maester Walys's handwriting was never warm. Clinical, thorough, skeptical--those were his modes. But today's letter had an edge I hadn't seen before.

Hesitation.

My Lord,

I write with difficult news.

I stopped. Read those words again. Felt something cold settle in my stomach.

The metallurgy experiments have encountered a setback.

Oh gods.

Mikken attempted a new quenching technique based on your notes--the oil-quench for a longsword blank. The blade shattered during the tempering, and a fragment took a piece of his hand. He will recover, but he has sworn off "the young lord's experiments" for the foreseeable future.

The cold became ice. Became guilt. Became the weight of a thousand miles between me and the people I'd hurt.

My notes weren't clear enough. I told him to control the temperature but didn't explain HOW. And now he's injured because of me.

I kept reading, but the words blurred.

Furthermore: some of the newer beekeepers are not following Jory's protocols. They have reverted to old methods because "it is how my father did it." Two colonies were lost to improper harvesting techniques.

Furthermore: Lady Dustin's household has had two childbed deaths this season despite your mother's intervention...

I set the letter down. Stood up. Started pacing.

Arc watched from his perch, golden eyes tracking my movement. Through our bond, I felt his confusion--he could sense my distress but not understand its source.

Easy, I sent him. I'm not hurt. Not physically.

Hurt anyway, came his response. Not words. Certainty.

"Yeah," I said aloud. "Hurt anyway."

The rage came slowly, building like pressure in a boiler. Not at Walys, not at Mikken, not even at the beekeepers or Lady Dustin. At myself. At the fundamental impossibility of trying to change a world from a thousand miles away.

I should be there. I should be watching, adjusting, correcting mistakes before they become disasters. Instead I'm HERE, playing at swords with Bob and learning to read nobles while my people get hurt following my half-finished instructions.

I kicked my desk. The pain in my foot was satisfying in a way I didn't want to examine.

Michael Chen would have documentation. Proper documentation. Detailed procedures with warnings and safety protocols and contingency plans. But Michael Chen had word processors and printers and standardized units of measurement. All I have is quills and parchment and the hope that my handwriting is legible.

A knock at the door.

"Ned?" Bob's voice, muffled by oak. "You missed dinner. Again. Marta's worried you're dying."

"I'm not dying."

"Then come eat something. You look like you're dying. The servants told me you looked like death when Walys's letter came. What happened?"

I didn't answer. Couldn't figure out how to explain.

The door opened anyway. Bob had never understood the concept of waiting for permission.

He took in the scene--me standing by the window, letter crumpled on the desk, Arc mantling anxiously on his perch--and his expression shifted from curious to serious.

"Bad news from home?"

"Mikken got hurt." The words came out flat. "Following my instructions. My incomplete, inadequate instructions that didn't account for the thousand things that could go wrong."

"Mikken. Your blacksmith?"

"Yes."

"Is he going to be okay?"

"Walys says he'll recover. But he's done with my experiments. And the beekeepers are ignoring the protocols, and women are dying because Lady Dustin only uses HALF the hygiene measures, and--" I punched the wall. Regretted it immediately. "--and I can't FIX anything from HERE."

Bob was quiet for a moment. An unusual state for him.

Then: "Want to hit something?"

I looked at him. "What?"

"You look like you want to break something. The wall doesn't deserve it. I, however, am excellent at being hit." He grinned, but there was something genuine underneath. "Come on. Training yard. We'll spar until you can't lift your arms anymore."

"Bob, I just told you people are DYING--"

"And you can't do anything about it from here. You said so yourself." He shrugged, massive shoulders rolling. "So either you sit here being miserable and guilty, or you come hit me until you feel better. One of those options is productive."

He's not wrong. That's the annoying thing. He's almost never wrong about this stuff.

"Fine." I grabbed my training leathers from the chest. "But I'm going to hit you as hard as I can."

"That's the SPIRIT!" Bob was already heading for the door. "Though, fair warning, your hardest isn't very hard. More like... enthusiastic tapping."

"I hate you."

"You love me. Everyone does."

We sparred until my arms shook and my lungs burned and the rage had nowhere left to go except into the packed dirt of the training yard. Bob won every round--he always won--but by the end I wasn't thinking about Mikken's hand or the dead women or any of it.

Just movement. Breath. The simple clarity of physical exhaustion.

"Better?" Bob asked, helping me up from my latest defeat.

"Maybe."

"Good. Now we eat. Then you write your letters. Then tomorrow you figure out what you CAN do from here, instead of drowning in what you can't." He clapped me on the shoulder, gentler than usual. "That's how it works, Ned. You fall down, you get up, you keep going. Works for swordfighting. Works for everything."

I wanted to argue. Wanted to point out that swordfighting and systemic change weren't the same thing, that his simplistic philosophy didn't account for the complexity of what I was trying to do.

But I was too tired to argue. And somewhere underneath the exhaustion, I knew he was right.

I can't fix everything from here. But I can write letters. I can send clearer instructions. I can tell Mikken it was my fault, not his. I can ask Mother to intervene with Lady Dustin again.

Small things. Inadequate things. But things.

We walked back to the castle, Bob's arm around my shoulders, and I started composing letters in my head.

To Mikken: I am sorry. The fault was mine. The notes weren't clear enough. The temperature ranges, the timing, the exact moment to quench--I should have specified all of it. When your hand heals, if you're willing to try again, I'll send you detailed instructions. But only if you want to. Only if you choose. The work isn't worth your hands.

To Jory: The numbers will speak for you. Be patient. The old ways feel safe because they're familiar, not because they're better. Your hives thrive. Theirs die. Eventually, the reluctant ones will see. And if they don't--if they choose to fail rather than change--that's their choice to make, not yours to fix.

To Mother: Please. Try again with Lady Dustin. The soap alone isn't medicine. It's a tool. The protocols are what save lives. If she won't use them fully, women will keep dying, and they'll blame the soap instead of the incomplete adoption. I know she's proud. I know she's difficult. But you've changed harder minds than hers.

I wrote late into the night, candle burning low, Arc making soft sounds from his perch. The connection between us was quiet now--he could sense I needed space, and he gave it without being asked.

That was partnership. Knowing when to push and when to wait.

I wish Mikken could feel what I feel with Arc, I thought. That immediate feedback loop. That sense of when something's wrong before it becomes disaster.

But humans weren't bonded to falcons. Humans had to learn through trial and error, through injury and recovery, through the slow accumulation of experience that couldn't be accelerated no matter how much you wished it could.

Seeds, not harvests. Even when the seeds go wrong. Even when they hurt people you care about.

The letters were sealed. Ready for the morning ravens.

It wasn't enough. It would never be enough.

But it was what I had.

And somewhere in that inadequacy was a lesson I was only beginning to understand: you couldn't save everyone. You couldn't control everything. You could only do your best, write your letters, trust your people, and accept that failure was part of the process.

Michael Chen never learned that lesson, I realized. He controlled everything. Micromanaged every project. And when things went wrong anyway, he blamed himself, or he blamed others, but he never accepted that some outcomes were beyond anyone's control.

Maybe that's what this life is teaching me. Not just how to change the future. How to accept the present.

The candle guttered and died.

I slept, eventually. And dreamed of nothing at all.

Part 11: The Birth Registry

Spring 276 AC, Age 13

The package from Winterfell was the largest yet.

Not just a letter this time--a bound document, wrapped in oilcloth and secured with cord. Heavy in my hands. The weight of something important.

I unwrapped it in my solar, hands trembling slightly. Arc watched from his perch, his presence a steady warmth at the back of my mind.

The title page, handwritten in Mother's elegant script:

The Northern Birth Record: A Compilation of Outcomes in the Service of the Old Gods

I turned the page.

And stopped breathing.

Documentation. Proper documentation. Births across five Northern houses, each entry recording date, mother's name, household, methods used, outcome. Different hands had written different sections--Mother's flowing script, a cramped clerk's hand that must be Lady Manderly's recorder, a bold scratch that looked like Lady Cerwyn's style.

They had built a registry. A formal, systematic, multi-household registry.

This is what I wanted. What I dreamed about. Data from multiple sources, standardized format, comparable outcomes. This is SCIENCE.

I began to read.

The numbers emerged slowly, painstakingly compiled across dozens of pages. I did the calculations in my head as I went, engineer's reflexes still sharp despite years away from actual engineering.

Full protocols (soap, boiled water, clean cloths, handwashing): Forty-seven births. Two deaths. Four point three percent.

Partial protocols (some measures, not others): Twenty-three births. Six deaths. Twenty-six percent.

Traditional methods: Thirty-one births. Eleven deaths. Thirty-five percent.

I set the registry down. Stared at it.

A four-fold reduction in mortality. Documented. Systematic. Across five houses.

This is proof. Real proof, the kind that can convince skeptics and silence critics. The kind that can spread to houses that haven't adopted the methods yet.

Mother's letter was tucked inside the front cover:

Ned,

The ladies have been competitive, as I hoped. Lady Manderly is now the champion of our methods in White Harbor--she lost a daughter-in-law to childbed fever five years ago and will not rest until every woman in the city uses proper protocols. She has trained her household midwives personally and sends them to attend births throughout the city.

Lady Cerwyn has started tracking births in her own lands. She calls it "the competition to live." I believe she intends to surpass Lady Manderly's numbers by year's end.

Even Lady Dustin has come around. After our last conversation (and the numbers I showed her), she admitted that she had been too proud to follow instructions she considered "servants' work." She lost two women to her own stubbornness, she said. She will not lose another.

The Winter Rose Soap has become so fashionable that we can barely keep pace with orders. Your father has allocated additional workers to the soap-making. We are now training midwives as "Winter Rose Keepers"--they receive soap and supplies as payment, and they spread the methods wherever they go.

This is yours, Ned. You planted this seed.

But it's ours now. The North's. Something that will grow long after both of us are gone.

Your proud mother

I read the letter three times.

She built an institution. A network of noble ladies tracking births, competing to have the best outcomes, spreading methods through vanity and rivalry and genuine care.

It's working. Not because I'm there to tend it, but because the SYSTEM works. Because the incentives align. Because Mother understood something I didn't--that good ideas need structures to survive, not just champions.

I held the bound registry like a holy object.

Forty-seven women who lived. Their children who will grow up with mothers. And next year there will be more. And the year after that, more still.

This saves lives NOW. Not in some distant future when I've changed the world. Now. Today. Because of work we started years ago.

I added my own note to the bottom of Mother's letter:

This is more important than steel or bees or rabbits. This saves lives NOW. Keep it growing.

But as I wrote, I realized something else.

The registry didn't mention me. Not once. Mother's letter credited me with planting the seed, but the document itself--the official record--listed Lady Lyarra Stark as the project's originator.

She's protecting me. Keeping my name off it so no one questions a twelve-year-old's involvement. Making it HER work so it can spread without the stigma of "the lord's strange son."

Smart. So smart. I never would have thought of that.

I set down my quill and stared out the window at the endless sky.

This is what success looks like, I realized. Not my success. Ours. Something that works because the system works, that grows because the incentives align, that will outlive all of us.

Seeds, not harvests. I planted. Mother grew. The North will reap.

For the first time since arriving at the Eyrie, I felt something like peace.

Part 12: Arc - Week Five: Partnership

Summer 276 AC, Age 13

Arc came home at twilight.

This was the pattern now--established over months of trust, of shared flights, of a bond that had grown from fragile connection to something as solid as the mountain beneath the Eyrie. He would hunt during the day, ranging miles from the castle, returning to my windowsill when the sun began to set.

I felt him coming before I saw him. A pressure at the edge of my awareness, growing closer, sharper, until the falcon was a dark shape against the orange sky.

He landed on the perch I'd built for him--the third iteration, improved and re-improved as I learned what he needed. His talons gripped the bark-wrapped wood with familiar ease. His feathers settled, ruffling once, then smooth.

Home, I sent him.

Home, he agreed.

Bob burst through the door without knocking, as Bob always did. "Ned! I beat Corbray TWICE today! Twice! He's going to make me run extra laps tomorrow but it's WORTH it!"

Arc hissed reflexively, wings flaring, then settled when he registered who it was. Even my falcon had learned to tolerate Bob's entrances.

"That's great, Bob."

"Great? It's MAGNIFICENT!" He threw himself onto my bed, still buzzing with post-victory energy. "He tried that feint he always does, the one with the shoulder drop, and I just--WHAM--" He mimed a devastating blow. "Right in the breastplate. I think I actually dented it."

"You're getting stronger."

"I'm getting SMARTER. That's the difference." He propped himself up on one elbow, grinning. "I watched him spar with Morton yesterday. Figured out his pattern. THEN I hit him."

He's learning. Not just getting bigger and stronger--actually learning. Analyzing opponents. Adapting.

"That's strategy, Bob. That's what Jon Arryn's been trying to teach you."

"Don't tell HIM that. He'll be insufferable about it." Bob's grin faded slightly, replaced by something more thoughtful. "Your bird's still here."

"Yes."

"He could leave whenever he wants. Fly back to wherever falcons come from. But he stays."

"He stays."

Bob sat up, studying Arc with unusual attention. The falcon studied him back, golden eyes meeting blue.

"Why?" Bob asked. "Not why does he stay--I know why. The magic bond thing. But why does HE want to stay? What does he get out of it?"

That's actually a perceptive question. Which means Bob is thinking more than he lets on.

"Partnership," I said, after considering. "He could hunt alone. Survive alone. But with me, he's part of something larger. He has a home. A purpose. Someone who understands him."

"Like us."

The words hung in the air.

"Yeah," I said finally. "Like us."

Bob was quiet for a moment. Another unusual state.

"We should do the Corbray thing again. That was BRILLIANT."

I laughed despite myself. The tension broke.

"Absolutely not. Jon Arryn almost caught us last time."

"But his FACE! The way he looked up and--" Bob dissolved into giggles again. "We should wait a few months. Let him forget. Then BAM. Aerial vengeance returns."

"You're terrible."

"You're the one with the magic shit-bombing bird." He was grinning again, the serious moment passing. "I'm just the appreciative audience."

Arc made a sound that might have been agreement. Or might have been hunger. With falcons, it was hard to tell.

I crossed to the perch, held out my arm. Arc stepped onto it without hesitation, talons gripping through the leather glove, weight familiar and welcome.

This is what partnership feels like, I thought. Not control. Not ownership. Choice.

He chooses to stay. Every day, he chooses. And every day I choose him back.

Bob was still talking--planning elaborate scenarios involving precision timing and maximum humiliation for Ser Corbray--but I wasn't really listening. I was feeling the weight of Arc on my arm, the presence in my mind, the bond that had grown from accident to intention.

You're not a tool. Not a spy. Not a weapon. You're my partner. My friend. The first person in this world who knows me--really knows me--and chose to stay anyway.

Golden eyes met grey.

Yes, Arc sent. Partner. Friend. Home.

And somewhere in the back of my mind, in the place where Michael Chen's loneliness had lived for twelve years, something finally began to heal.

Part 13: Letters and Brotherhood

Late Summer 276 AC, Age 13

Bob was reading Stannis's letter again.

This was unusual enough to notice. Bob usually skimmed his brother's correspondence, complained about the lectures it contained, and promptly forgot everything in it. But today he'd been staring at the same page for ten minutes.

"What's wrong?"

He startled, as if he'd forgotten I was in the room. "Nothing. Just... Stannis stuff."

"Stannis stuff that's keeping you quiet for ten minutes?"

Bob made a face but handed over the letter. Stannis's handwriting was precise, almost military--the exact opposite of Bob's enthusiastic scrawl.

Robert,

Our father has requested that you attend the Storm's End harvest festival this autumn. He wishes to introduce you to various lords of the Stormlands, as befitting the heir. I have suggested that such an introduction would be better served by your extended absence, as the lords would have lower expectations, but Father was not amused.

Renly asks about you constantly. He has decided you are the greatest swordsman in the Seven Kingdoms and tells everyone who will listen. I have attempted to correct this misunderstanding but he refuses to believe anything negative about "the big brother in the sky."

I find this aggravating.

Your brother, Stannis

I handed the letter back. "That's almost warm, for Stannis."

"The Renly part." Bob's voice was softer than I'd ever heard it. "He remembers me. I barely saw him before I left for the Eyrie. He was what, three? Four? And he remembers."

"Brothers remember."

"Do they?" Bob looked at me, something vulnerable in his eyes. "You have two. Do they remember you?"

The question hit harder than I expected.

Lyanna barely knew me before I left. Benjen was five. By the time I return, they'll have grown up without me. Changed in ways I can't predict. The siblings I remember might not exist anymore.

"I hope so," I said honestly. "I write to them. Benjen can't read yet, so Mother reads my letters to him. Lyanna writes back sometimes--short notes, mostly complaints about Brandon or horses."

"What's she like? Your sister?"

Oh no.

I kept my face neutral. "Wild. Fierce. She rides every day, even in the snow. Especially in the snow. She broke her arm falling from a destrier last year and was back in the saddle before it healed."

"A destrier? At ten?" Bob looked impressed. "She sounds like she'd be terrifying to spar against."

Don't. Don't encourage this line of thought.

"She's not old enough to spar."

"But she WILL be. Eventually." Bob's expression shifted, something I didn't want to name moving behind his eyes. "A girl who won't stay inside even when it snows. Rides destriers. Probably better at riding than most knights." He grinned. "I'd like to race her someday. See who's faster."

No. Absolutely not. You will never meet Lyanna if I have anything to say about it.

"Maybe someday," I said, voice carefully light. "When we're done fostering."

"Yeah." Bob settled back against his pillows, still holding Stannis's letter. "Someday. When we go home."

The word 'home' hung between us, carrying different weights.

"You should write to Stannis," I said, changing the subject as smoothly as I could manage. "Even if he lectures. Even if he's insufferable. He's your brother. Brothers should talk."

Bob was quiet for a long moment. The vulnerability was back--a crack in the endless confidence.

"Storm's End wasn't like Winterfell," he said finally. "Father was always busy. Mother was always with Renly. Stannis was always... Stannis. It felt like we lived in the same castle but never actually SAW each other, you know? Like we were strangers sharing walls."

I know exactly what that feels like. I spent forty-three years as Michael Chen in a world full of people and never really connected with any of them.

"That's why you should write. Because it was cold doesn't mean it has to stay cold."

Bob looked at me. Something shifted in his expression--the mask cracking further, showing the lonely boy underneath all that bravado.

"You really believe that?"

I believe that families can be saved. That the future can change. That the coldness between people isn't permanent if someone's willing to do the work.

I have to believe that. Otherwise what's the point?

"Yeah," I said. "I really believe that."

Bob was quiet for another long moment. Then he reached for parchment from my desk, grabbed a quill, and started writing.

I watched him compose the letter--messy handwriting, crossed-out words, the struggle of someone who'd never learned to express feelings in words--and felt something complicated in my chest.

He's trying. Because I asked. Because we're brothers now.

And someday that brotherhood might be the only thing standing between my family and destruction.

Or it might be what brings destruction to my door.

I pushed the thought away. Focused on the present. On Bob's scratching quill and Arc's quiet presence and the sunset painting the Eyrie gold.

Don't borrow trouble from the future, Chen. You have enough problems in the present.

But the future was always there, wasn't it? Waiting. Patient. The crown of winter roses on Lyanna's head. Rhaegar's silver hair and haunted eyes. The tower in Dorne where my sister would bleed and die, making me promise to protect a nephew who would be king.

Or none of that happens. Because I'm here now, and I'm changing things. Mother's building something that changes the North. Bob knows me in ways he never knew the original Ned. Maybe the ripples compound. Maybe Lyanna never goes to Harrenhal. Maybe Rhaegar never sees her. Maybe...

Maybe. Maybe. The most dangerous word in any language.

Bob finished his letter with a flourish, splattering ink across the desk.

"Done! I told Stannis about the meat pies. And about you. And about how we're going to train falcons to attack people we don't like." He grinned, proud of himself. "He'll hate it. It's perfect."

"You're trying to annoy him?"

"I'm trying to COMMUNICATE. If I wrote serious letters, he'd think something was wrong." Bob shrugged, already sealing the parchment. "This way, he knows I'm still me. That's what brothers need to know, isn't it? That you're still yourself, even when you're far away?"

That's... surprisingly insightful.

"When did you get wise, Bob?"

"I've always been wise. I just hide it behind the farts and the fighting." He winked. "More fun that way."

I watched him hand the letter to a passing servant, already moving on to the next thing, the next moment, the next adventure. That was Bob's gift--living entirely in the present, never weighted down by what was coming.

I can't live like that. But maybe I can learn from it. Maybe the key to surviving the future is to not let it consume the now.

Part 14: Godswood Check-In

Autumn 276 AC, Age 13

The stunted weirwood had not grown since I'd first found it.

I knelt before it anyway, as I did every week, in the small garden that passed for a godswood at the Eyrie. The bark was greyish-white rather than pure white. The leaves were sparse, struggling in the thin mountain air. No face had been carved into its trunk.

But it was still a weirwood. Still Northern. Still mine.

"Two years," I said to the tree, voice quiet in the evening stillness. "Two years gone, five to go."

Arc circled somewhere above the castle. Through our bond, I could see myself from the sky--a small figure kneeling before a pale tree, speaking to something that might or might not be listening.

It looks like prayer from up there, I thought. Maybe that's what it is. The only kind of prayer I know how to make.

"Mother's work is spreading. The birth registry has data from five houses now. Mortality rates have dropped by three-quarters for women using the full protocols. Lady Manderly's Winter Rose Keepers are traveling throughout the North, training midwives, spreading methods."

The leaves rustled in a breeze I couldn't feel.

"Mikken's trying again. His hand healed, mostly. He's more careful now--smaller experiments, better precautions. He wrote that he's found something interesting in the carbon ratios, something that might make the oil-quench more consistent. I sent him everything I could think of to help."

Information, not guidance. Suggestions, not commands. That's what works from a thousand miles away.

"The beekeepers are mostly following Jory's methods now. The holdouts lost their colonies. The numbers spoke for themselves."

I shifted, knees aching against the cold stone.

"Bob is... Bob. Stronger every day. He beat Ser Corbray twice last week--actually STUDIED his opponent before fighting. That's progress. Jon Arryn's teaching him to think, even if Bob refuses to admit it."

Can I change him? Can I give him the tools to be a better king someday? Or is the drinking, the whoring, the slow collapse--is that inevitable? Written in his blood like the wolf blood is written in mine?

"Jon Arryn teaches me to read people. Tywin Lannister wants respect. The Tyrells want legitimacy. Everyone wants something, and understanding that is the key to moving them." I paused, collecting my thoughts. "I'm starting to see the game, not just the pieces."

Politics. People. The skill set Michael Chen never developed, because engineering was safer than relationships. Easier than vulnerability.

"Arc is..." I smiled despite myself. "Arc is my partner. My friend. The first person in this world who knows me--really knows me--and chose to stay."

The falcon screamed from somewhere above, a sound I felt in my chest before I heard it with my ears.

"I miss Winterfell. I miss Brandon's bravado and Lyanna's wildness and Benjen's questions. I miss Mother's voice and Father's silences and the godswood that actually feels like home."

But I'm building something here too. Relationships that will matter. Knowledge that will help. A version of Ned Stark who can navigate the game instead of just dying in it.

"Five years to go. Then Harrenhal. Then everything changes."

I stood, brushing dirt from my knees.

"I can't save everyone. I know that now. Some seeds won't take root. Some projects will fail. Some people will die despite everything I try to do."

The admission hurt. Still hurt, after two years of learning to accept it.

"But I can plant seeds. I can build systems. I can trust the people I love to grow what I've started."

Mother with her soap empire. Jory with his bees. Mikken with his steel. All of them carrying pieces of my work forward, making it theirs, making it BETTER.

"I'm not alone anymore," I told the stunted tree. "I have Arc. I have Bob. I have a mother who turned my ideas into something that saves lives. I have a purpose that isn't just survival."

The sun was setting, painting the Eyrie gold and rose, and somewhere in the castle Bob was probably challenging someone to something inadvisable.

I turned to leave, then paused.

"Winter is coming," I said to the tree. "But so is spring. Eventually. Always."

That's what the Stark words really mean, isn't it? Not just warning. Promise. Winter comes, but it doesn't last forever. Nothing does.

Hold on long enough, prepare well enough, and spring will come.

I thought about the two years that had passed. About the boy who had climbed a mountain in terror, following an escort who barely acknowledged him, stomach churning with vertigo and dread. That boy had been alone. Carrying the weight of a future he couldn't share, knowledge he couldn't explain, grief for deaths that hadn't happened yet.

That boy was still me. But he wasn't only me anymore.

Now I had Arc, circling above, his presence a constant warmth at the edge of my awareness. Now I had Bob, ridiculous and loyal and fierce, who had decided we were brothers within five minutes of meeting and had never wavered since. Now I had Jon Arryn's teachings, slowly building the political understanding I would need to navigate the game that was coming.

Now I had letters from home that proved the seeds I'd planted were growing. Mother's soap empire. The birth registry. Mikken's continued experiments. Jory's thriving hives.

You're not alone. You were never really alone, but now you know it. Now you feel it.

And that matters. That might matter more than all the technical knowledge in the world.

I walked back toward the castle, Arc descending to meet me. His weight settled on my arm, familiar and welcome, and I felt his simple satisfaction through our bond.

Home, he sent.

Home, I agreed.

Five years remained before I would see Winterfell again. Five years of training and politics and the endless work of building relationships that might matter when the world started burning.

But for now, there was dinner to attend and letters to write and Bob's laughter echoing through the marble halls.

For now, there was this: partnership and purpose and the quiet certainty that I was no longer alone.

The Eyrie's white towers caught the last light of day, impossibly beautiful against the darkening sky. Somewhere inside, Bob was probably getting into trouble. Jon Arryn was probably reading correspondence. Servants were lighting candles, preparing for another night in the castle that had become, against all odds, something like home.

Not Winterfell. Never Winterfell. But a place where I belonged. A place where I was known.

Michael Chen died alone, I thought. Surrounded by people but never truly connected. He thought isolation was strength. He was wrong.

Ned Stark won't make that mistake. Whatever else happens--whatever tragedies I can't prevent, whatever battles I can't win--I won't face them alone.

Arc shifted on my arm, settling his wings, and I felt his agreement through our bond. Simple. Certain. The way animals understand things that humans complicate with words.

Partner. Friend. Home.

Winter was coming.

But so was I.