You know, death isn't nearly as bad as people make it out to be.
At least, mine wasn't.
There was one screech of tires, one blinding set of headlights, one bone-rattling crash—and then nothing. No tunnel of light. No dead relatives waiting with open arms. No divine being asking me if I had any regrets. Just darkness, then waking up screaming in a world where summers lasted years, winters lasted longer, and people got murdered over family grudges and chairs made of swords.
So yes. I died.
Or at least I'm pretty sure I did.
My name is Talion, son of Edward, and I was reborn in Westeros.
Not as a prince, of course. Not as the secret heir to some ancient dragonlord bloodline. Not even as the bastard son of a noble with a dramatic backstory and hidden potential. No, fate in all its infinite cruelty dropped me into the body of a smallfolk boy born to the owners of a roadside inn at a crossroads between Riverrun, King's Landing, and the Eyrie.
An inn.
In the middle of nowhere.
In Westeros.
If you know anything about this place, then you know that is not a promising start.
My father, Edward, co-owned the inn with my mother. He was a broad-shouldered, bald man with a face cut through by old scars and hands like hammers. He had fought at the Trident while I had still been floating around in my mother's belly, and though he never bragged, the older men passing through sometimes recognized the look in him—the kind of quiet hardness only war left behind.
My mother was kinder. Before marrying my father, she had worked at the Peach in Stoney Sept, and though the village gossips whispered about it from time to time, no one ever dared do so loudly within earshot of my father. She had brown hair, bright blue eyes, and a way of carrying herself that made her seem stronger than most knights I'd seen pass through the inn. She worked harder than anyone I knew, laughed louder than anyone I'd ever met, and somehow still found time to fuss over me as if I were made of glass instead of dirt and bad decisions.
As for me? Black hair, blue eyes, skinny limbs, and a face that, if I was being generous to myself, was pretty enough for a seven-year-old boy. We couldn't afford mirrors, so the first time I got a proper look at myself was in the river half a mile from the inn. The reflection had been warped by the current and broken by drifting leaves, but it had done the job well enough.
That river became my favorite place in the world.
The grass beside it was soft in summer, the water cold and clean, and it was far enough from the inn that I could forget for a little while that I lived in one of the most dangerous fictional universes ever conceived. I'd spend hours there with the other village children, fighting mock battles with sticks, building forts from branches, and pretending we were knights, lords, and heroes instead of the sons of butchers, coopers, stablehands, and innkeepers.
Honestly, life could have been much worse.
I could have been born a wildling north of the Wall, freezing my arse off while trying not to get eaten by something with too many teeth. I could have been a peasant in the Riverlands during wartime, which was just a slower way of dying. Instead, I had food, shelter, parents who loved me, and an inn positioned on one of the busiest roads in the realm. Nobles passed through. Merchants passed through. Hedge knights, sworn swords, septons, singers, and drunks all passed through.
And every single one of them brought stories.
That was the real treasure of the inn. Not the silver stags tucked away in my father's chest, not the sacks of grain in storage, not even the occasional tip left behind by a generous traveler. Information was the treasure. News from the North, gossip from court, rumors of war, harvests, marriages, births, deaths, and betrayals—it all flowed through our doors with the dust of the kingsroad still clinging to it.
Which was useful, because I knew exactly what world I had landed in.
Well… mostly.
I had watched Game of Thrones up to season six before dying. I'd loved it too, right up until the point everyone online started complaining so loudly that even I, a fourteen-year-old with questionable taste and too much free time, decided maybe I should stop before it ruined the good parts. I'd never read the books, though, which meant my knowledge of Westeros was broad but dangerously incomplete.
I knew enough to be terrified, in any case.
There were no game-like status windows waiting for me. No magical cheat abilities. No kindly reincarnation god handing me a blessing and a mission. Believe me, I checked. For the first few months after waking up in this body, I tried everything.
System?
Nothing.
Inventory?
Nothing.
Magic?
Still nothing.
I even spent an entire afternoon staring at a spoon and trying to levitate it with my mind. My mother caught me cross-eyed and sweating over it and decided I had a fever.
The truth sank in slowly and painfully: I had been reborn into Westeros with no advantages beyond future knowledge, and even that knowledge was patchy, secondhand, and tied mostly to major noble houses rather than whatever random inn sat in the middle of the Riverlands.
Still, I coped.
Poorly at first, admittedly. There had been a lot of crying. A lot of panic. A lot of lying awake at night missing things I'd never get back—electricity, clean plumbing, the internet, modern medicine, and not living in a world where saying the wrong thing to the wrong noble could get your tongue cut out.
But children are adaptable, and by seven I had settled into my new life well enough.
Mostly my worries fell into three categories.
First: how was I going to survive the coming disasters?
Second: how was my family going to survive them?
And third—perhaps most urgently—why was my mother increasingly fond of mentioning the butcher's daughter whenever she looked at me?
"Talion," my mother called from the kitchen, "bring this to the Tully knights, please."
I looked up from where I had been peeling onions and immediately regretted it. She had already loaded a tray with three steaming bowls of chicken soup and a wicker basket full of fresh bread.
"Sure, Mum," I said, lifting the tray with both hands.
Daily life as a smallfolk child was not exactly glamorous. There were no schools, no tutors, no kindly maesters handing out lessons in arithmetic and history. If you were born smallfolk, you learned by doing. Boys helped their fathers. Girls helped their mothers. Everyone worked. Everyone learned whatever trade kept the family fed. Childhood existed, but only in the cracks between chores.
I wove through the crowded common room carefully, dodging a servant carrying ale and stepping around a merchant snoring with his face pressed to the table. The three Tully men sat near the hearth, all of them in blue cloaks trimmed with silver, trout sigils stitched proudly across their chests.
They were regulars. Not high-ranking enough to travel in splendor, but important enough to hear things. More importantly, they liked me, and men who liked you tended to talk more freely around you.
"Here you are, my lords," I said, setting the bowls down one by one before placing the bread in the center of the table.
One of the older knights grunted his thanks. Another nodded absently and tore into the bread at once. The youngest, a broad-shouldered man in his late teens or early twenties with brown hair and a crooked smile, gave me a look that said he was already planning to drag me outside for another spar later.
Perfect.
I lingered near the table, pretending to straighten the basket.
"So," I asked casually, "any news lately, my lords?"
The oldest knight snorted. "Aye. Lord Stark has a new son, and Queen Cersei's due another child soon enough."
I kept my face blank, but my mind immediately started racing.
A new Stark son. Bran, then. And another Baratheon child on the way—Myrcella, if my memory was right. Which meant the Greyjoy Rebellion had either just ended or was about to. Which meant Theon would soon be carted off to Winterfell as Ned Stark's hostage. Which meant the clock was ticking.
Gods.
I was seven years old and already trying to build a political timeline in my head while standing in an inn carrying soup.
"Something got your tongue, boy?" the younger knight asked.
I blinked. "No, my lord. Only thinking."
"Dangerous habit."
"For him perhaps," one of the others muttered.
I ignored that. "The only other thing I've heard is that the Greyjoy rebellion is nearly done, and that the king has named a new Kingsguard."
That got their attention.
"Where'd you hear that?" the eldest asked, narrowing his eyes.
"Merchants," I lied smoothly. "One from King's Landing, another from Maidenpool."
That was the useful thing about living in an inn: everyone assumed you heard things because you served people who heard things. It was the perfect cover.
The knight grunted, apparently satisfied.
There wasn't much else happening in the realm just then, at least nothing visible from the crossroads. The Greyjoys were getting crushed, as they should have been. I still had no idea what Balon Greyjoy had been thinking, rebelling against Robert Baratheon barely six years after the man had torn down a dynasty. My father had once described Robert in battle with the kind of grim respect he reserved for storms and wildfire.
"I'd sooner face a hundred knights than Robert with his hammer," he had said.
That was all the explanation I needed.
The younger knight finished his soup, leaned back in his chair, and grinned at me. "Come on then, Talion. Let's see if you've gotten any better."
I tried not to grin back too eagerly. "As you wish, my lord."
We stepped outside behind the inn where the dirt had been worn flat by wagon wheels and boots. The evening sun hung low, turning the grass gold. A few stableboys paused in their work to watch. My father, stacking firewood nearby, shot me a look that clearly said don't embarrass the family.
No pressure, then.
I fetched the practice sticks I'd carved myself—both cut roughly to sword length, one a little heavier than the other. I tossed one to the knight and kept the better-balanced one for myself.
"Want me to take it easy on you again?" he asked.
"No need, my lord."
Last time I had asked him to go easy because the inn had been packed and I'd had to haul water at dawn the next morning. This time, I had the following day free and every intention of using my limbs recklessly.
He opened with a downward strike, fast and clean. I sidestepped left, my smaller body making the movement easy, and stabbed for his side. He caught it, knocked my stick wide, and retreated half a step, using his longer reach to keep me at bay.
That was the trouble with fighting adults when you were seven. They were taller, stronger, heavier, and had longer arms. On the other hand, they were also overconfident, and overconfidence was a weapon all by itself.
We circled.
I feinted high from the right. He raised his stick to parry exactly as I hoped, and I changed the angle mid-swing, turning it into a thrust for his chin. He jerked back just in time, but the retreat gave me what I wanted: an opening to close the distance.
I rushed in.
Up close, his reach mattered less. My size became an advantage instead of a weakness. I hacked left, right, then low, forcing him to keep adjusting. He was still better than me—far better, really—but I had one advantage beyond size.
I fought like a little rat with no sense of honor.
He pressed me back, then struck my hand hard enough that my fingers spasmed and the stick dropped into the dirt.
"Aha!" he barked triumphantly.
I hunched over my hand with a pained hiss, and he relaxed.
That was his mistake.
My fingers plunged into the dirt.
I came up throwing a fistful of sand straight into his eyes.
The knight yelped, stumbled, and raised both hands to his face. I snatched up my fallen stick, stepped in, and drove the tip into his side with all the vicious little strength I possessed.
"Liver shot," I announced.
He folded like wet laundry.
For one glorious second there was absolute silence.
Then the stableboys exploded into laughter.
The knight crouched in the dirt, coughing and clutching his side while I stood over him with the widest, most shameless grin in the Seven Kingdoms.
"T-that was foul, you little cunt," he wheezed.
"True," I admitted cheerfully, offering him a hand. "But I'm alive, and you're dead, my lord. That sounds like victory to me."
He stared at me, then barked out a laugh despite himself and let me haul him up. Once he was standing, I added, "Make yourself big and breathe slowly through your nose. Helps with the pain."
He did, though he still looked one bad cough away from murder.
When he'd recovered enough to stand properly, he gave me a long, measuring look. The humor had faded from his face, replaced by something more thoughtful.
"You're a natural with a sword, you know that?" he said. "I've only trained with you a handful of times, but you learn fast. Faster than most squires I've seen."
I blinked.
"And if you keep at it," he continued, "I could place you in service with House Vypren when you're older. Page first, maybe squire after that, if you prove yourself."
For a moment, I just stared.
A place in a noble household.
Food, protection, training, connections—opportunity. Real opportunity. More than most smallfolk boys could ever dream of.
But there was one problem.
I swallowed. "If I may ask, my lord… who exactly are you to make such an offer?"
The knight's crooked smile returned.
"Damon Vypren," he said. "Son of Lord Lucias Vypren. Heir to House Vypren."
My stomach dropped straight through my boots.
Well.
Shit.
I had just pocket-sanded a noble heir in the face and stabbed him in the liver.