The Department of Mysteries was silent. It had been silent for seventeen years.
Harry Potter stood before the Veil, watching the tattered black curtain ripple in an unfelt wind. Behind him, the stone amphitheater stretched empty and dark. Dust motes drifted through shafts of pale light that filtered down from cracks in the ceiling—cracks made by bombs that had fallen decades ago, when the Muggles finally tore themselves apart and took the magical world with them.
His robes were patched and faded, stained with things he'd stopped trying to wash out. The Elder Wand hung loose in his right hand, almost forgotten. The Resurrection Stone pressed cold against his chest beneath his shirt, and the Invisibility Cloak draped across his shoulders like a burial shroud.
Master of Death. The only master left.
"Hello?" His voice cracked from disuse, echoing off ancient stone. "Anyone?"
The whispers beyond the Veil answered, as they always did. Soft. Inviting. The voices of everyone he'd ever lost.
Harry laughed, and it sounded like breaking glass. "Right. Stupid question."
He'd tried everything. Every spell, every ritual, every desperate mad scheme he could devise. He'd used the Stone so many times the shades it summoned barely looked human anymore—just gray suggestions of the people they'd once been, staring at him with hollow disappointment.
*Let go*, they seemed to say. *Why won't you let go?*
Because he was Harry bloody Potter, and he didn't know how to quit. Even when there was nothing left to fight for.
He'd watched London burn from the top of the Astronomy Tower. Watched the mushroom clouds bloom on the horizon like obscene flowers, one after another, until the sky itself seemed to catch fire. The wards around Hogwarts had held—barely. He'd survived in the castle for five years before venturing out, hoping against hope.
Nothing. Ash and silence and bones bleaching white in poisoned rain.
The magical communities had fared no better. Blood purists and Muggle-borns, Light and Dark—all equal in death. He'd found Hermione's body in the ruins of the Ministry, still clutching her wand, still fighting to the last. Ron he never found. Maybe that was worse.
Twelve years alone after that. Twelve years of wandering through a tomb of a world, talking to himself, talking to ghosts, talking to the empty sky. Twelve years of searching for survivors that didn't exist. Twelve years of slowly, inexorably going mad.
"I was supposed to save everyone," Harry said to the Veil. His hands were shaking now. They always shook. "That was the whole bloody point, wasn't it? The Chosen One. The Boy Who Lived."
*Lived.* What a joke. He'd survived Voldemort, survived Grindelwald's last followers, survived the Death Eater insurgencies and the Magical Wars and every other damned thing the universe threw at him. Became the youngest Head Auror in history. Trained an entire generation to be better, stronger, more prepared than his had been.
And when the bombs fell, none of it mattered.
Magic couldn't stop a nuclear weapon. Oh, he'd tried. When the first missiles launched, he'd apparated to their silos, cast every shield and counterspell he knew. Might as well have tried to stop an avalanche with his bare hands. The Muggles had finally achieved mutually assured destruction, and they'd been thorough about it.
Harry raised the Elder Wand, and for a moment considered snapping it. But what was the point? There was no one left to claim it. No one left to misuse it. No one left at all.
"I could go back," he whispered, staring at the rippling curtain. "Try to fix it. Change something. Warn someone."
But Hermione had explained time travel to him a hundred times. You couldn't change what had already happened. The timeline was fixed. And even if he could go back—back to before the bombs, before the war, before any of it—what then? Convince the Muggles to see reason? He'd never managed to understand Muggles even when they weren't hell-bent on annihilation.
No. There was only one door left unopened.
Harry climbed the stone steps of the amphitheater slowly, like an old man. He was only sixty-three, but he felt ancient. Felt like he'd lived a thousand years. Maybe he had. Time stopped meaning much when you were the only one left to measure it.
He stood at the archway's edge, close enough to feel the strange pull of it. The whispers grew louder, more insistent. He could almost make out words now. Almost recognize voices.
*Sirius.* That was definitely Sirius, calling him like he had that night so long ago—the night Harry had been too slow, too stupid, too young to save him.
*Remus. Tonks. Fred.*
*Mum. Dad.*
"I'm sorry," Harry said, and tears tracked down his weathered face. "I'm so sorry I couldn't save you. Couldn't save any of you."
The Stone was warm against his chest now, almost hot. The Cloak rustled though there was no wind. The Elder Wand hummed with power, responding to his wild grief, his fury, his desperate loneliness that had curdled into something dark and jagged.
He'd killed so many Dark Lords. Brought down so many who'd threatened innocent lives. And in the end, humanity had destroyed itself without any magical villain needed. Just hate and fear and fingers on buttons and the certainty that if we're going down, we're taking you with us.
"I can't do this anymore," Harry said simply. "I can't be alone anymore."
He thought about leaving the Hallows behind. Some distant, rational part of him whispered that it might be dangerous, taking them beyond the Veil. But that part was very small now, drowned out by seventeen years of screaming silence.
Master of Death. What a worthless title when Death was the only companion left.
Harry stepped forward.
The Veil reached out like welcoming arms, and the ancient curtain wrapped around him. The last thing he heard was the whispers becoming a roar—a thousand thousand voices crying out at once—and then he was falling, falling, falling into darkness and light and something else entirely.
Somewhere else.
Somewhen else.
The amphitheater stood empty once more, dust settling where he'd been. The Veil rippled one final time, then stilled.
The last wizard was gone.
And in a world of knights and dragons, in a body about to be broken, something ancient and terrible and desperately, dangerously lonely opened new eyes for the first time.
—
The world came back in screaming color.
*Pain*—white-hot fire lancing through his ribcage where something had cracked. The taste of copper flooding his mouth. Sand grinding between his teeth, mixing with blood. The roar of thousands of voices crashed over him like a physical wave, and underneath it all, a sensation that made his breath catch:
*Magic.*
It sang in his veins, wild and hot and *alive* in a way it hadn't been for seventeen years. The Elder Wand pressed against his spine beneath armor that rippled and shifted like liquid shadow—*the Cloak, transformed*. And there, on the pommel of the sword at his hip, a stone that pulsed with impossible warmth.
The Deathly Hallows. Still with him. Still *his.*
But none of that mattered because he was on his hands and knees in bloodstained sand, and someone was standing over him with murder in their eyes.
"For the Queen's honor," a voice snarled, cold and furious.
Harry's head snapped up just as the morningstar began its killing arc.
*Move.*
Seventeen years of Auror combat training, decades of fighting Dark wizards and monsters and things that had no name, every survival instinct honed by apocalypse—all of it screamed through neural pathways that weren't his but responded like they'd always been waiting for him.
He threw himself left. The morningstar came down where his skull had been a heartbeat before, and the impact sent a geyser of sand and pulverized stone exploding upward. Chips of rock peppered Harry's face. The spiked ball had cratered the ground three inches deep.
*That would have been my head.*
The crowd's roar changed pitch—surprise, confusion, bloodlust shifting to uncertainty.
Harry rolled to his feet, and the sheer *power* of this body staggered him. He'd been fit in his old life, had kept himself in fighting shape even as the world died around him, but this was something else entirely. The muscles responded like coiled springs, strength flooding through limbs that felt too large, too strong, too *everything*.
Through the chaos of adrenaline and foreign memories bleeding into his consciousness, Harry caught flashes:
*Harwin. My name is—was?—Harwin Strong. Breakbones. Lord Commander of the City Watch.*
The man above him—dark-haired, handsome in a sharp, cruel way, white armor chased with green enamel and gold—was already winding up for another swing. Harry's borrowed memories supplied a name with a surge of recognition and hatred that wasn't entirely his own:
*Criston Cole. Kingsguard. Dangerous.*
But there was something else. Something that cut through the confusion and the pain and the sheer wrongness of being in a body that wasn't his.
Harry's eyes tracked left, and his new heart nearly stopped.
A body lay fifteen feet away in the sand. Young man, maybe twenty, with red-gold hair matted with blood. His face had been caved in on the left side, eye socket crushed, cheekbone shattered, brain matter leaking into the sand. One arm was twisted at an impossible angle. His surcoat—blue silk with seven green apples—was soaked black with blood.
The borrowed memories shrieked a name: *Joffrey Lonmouth. Good man. Loyal. Didn't deserve—*
Dead. Murdered in the sand while the crowd cheered.
And this bastard Cole had been about to do the same to him. To Harwin. Would have split his skull open and called it honorable combat, another body in the dirt—
Rage exploded through Harry like fiendfyre.
Not entirely his rage—some of it belonged to the body he wore, to Harwin Strong's fury at seeing a friend murdered. But most of it? That was pure Harry Potter. Seventeen years of watching good people die. Seventeen years of being too late, too weak, too *useless* to save anyone.
The Elder Wand burned against his spine. Magic crackled along his nerves, begging to be released. One word and Cole would be *gone*—Reducto to turn him to red mist, Bombarda to scatter him across the tourney grounds, Avada Kedavra to drop him like a puppet with cut strings.
But Harry had killed with magic before. Had killed so many people, Dark wizards and Death Eaters and in the end, when the bombs fell and the desperate survivors turned on each other, he'd killed to survive. Killed until the spell-casting became mechanical, until he couldn't remember their faces anymore.
No.
This bastard had beaten Joffrey to death with his *hands*, had made it personal and brutal and *intimate*.
Harry would return the favor.
Cole's morningstar came whistling toward his ribs in a sideways arc meant to shatter bone and rupture organs. Harry stepped into it—closer than any sane fighter would go, inside the swing's optimal range where the weapon lost leverage.
His left hand shot up and caught Cole's wrist.
The impact jolted through both their arms, arrested momentum translating to kinetic shock. Cole's eyes widened—he was strong, had the grip strength to wield a morningstar one-handed, but Harwin was *stronger*. Harry felt the bones in Cole's wrist grind together beneath his fingers as he squeezed, felt the knight try to pull back and fail.
"Not so easy when they fight back, is it?" Harry snarled.
His right fist drove up into Cole's elbow with surgical precision—a joint destruction technique he'd learned fighting Fenrir Greyback, who'd kept coming even with limbs half-severed. The elbow hyperextended backward with a wet, meaty *crack*, ligaments tearing, the joint folding the wrong way.
Cole's scream was beautiful.
The morningstar fell from nerveless fingers. Harry caught it left-handed—it was heavy, fifteen pounds of steel and hatred—and reversed his grip on Cole's wrist, yanking the knight forward and down while sweeping his legs.
Cole crashed into the sand face-first. His ruined arm bent beneath him, and he screamed again as broken bone grated.
The crowd's roar became cacophony. This wasn't how tourneys went. This wasn't the elegant dance of noble combat. This was a brawl, brutal and ugly and *real*.
Harry dropped onto Cole's back, knees driving into the knight's kidneys with all of Harwin's considerable weight. Two hundred and forty pounds of muscle and fury. Cole's breath exploded out in a whooping gasp.
"You killed him," Harry said, almost conversationally, as he grabbed a fistful of Cole's dark hair and slammed his face into the ground. Sand and blood sprayed. "Beat him to death while everyone watched."
*Crunch.* Cole's nose shattered against packed earth.
"For *what*?" Another slam. Teeth cracked, scattering like dice. "Because he was inconvenient? Because you *could*?"
Cole was trying to fight back—bucking, twisting, his good hand scrabbling for a dagger at his belt. Harry caught the hand, bent the fingers back until one snapped with a sound like a breaking twig, then two, then three.
More screaming. Music to ears that had heard nothing but silence for too long.
"HARWIN!" A woman's voice cut through the chaos, high and commanding. "HARWIN, STOP THIS!"
Harry ignored it. Grabbed Cole's head with both hands now and bounced it off the ground again. The white enamel of his helmet cracked. Blood pooled beneath Cole's face, turning the sand to crimson mud.
"Guards! Someone stop him!"
Hands grabbed at Harry from behind—multiple sets, strong men trying to drag him off. He felt them like distant annoyances, gnats buzzing around something vast and terrible.
One guard got an arm around his throat. Harry drove his head backward, felt the crunch of a broken nose against his skull. The guard fell away, cursing. Another tried to grab his arm. Harry twisted, broke the grip, and backhanded the man hard enough to spin him around.
*So strong. This body is so gods-damned strong.*
More guards piled on. Five, six, seven of them, all trying to pin down Harwin Strong while Cole lay semi-conscious in the sand, making wet gurgling sounds through a ruined mouth.
The Elder Wand *screamed* for release. Magic boiled in Harry's blood, seventeen years of stored power and fury begging to explode outward. He could feel the spell forming: *Bombarda Maxima*. It would scatter these guards like leaves, would probably kill half of them, would definitely—
*No. No magic. Not yet. Not for this.*
Because magic made it too easy. Too clean. And Harry wanted Cole to *feel* this, wanted him to understand what Joffrey had felt, helpless and broken and bleeding out in the sand.
Harry surged to his feet with seven guards clinging to him. For a moment he stood there, a mountain of muscle wrapped in living shadow-armor, dripping blood that wasn't all his own. Then he shook himself like a dog, and guards flew in every direction.
One landed badly, arm bending wrong. Two more scrambled away, eyes wide with fear. The others formed a loose circle, hands on sword hilts but not drawing—not yet, not against someone, not without a direct order.
"ENOUGH!"
The voice cracked across the tourney grounds like thunder, and even through his rage, Harry felt the *weight* of it. The authority of a king, even a dying one.
He looked up at the royal box, panting, trying to make sense of what he was seeing through the double-vision of borrowed memories and his own confusion.
A man stood gripping the railing—older, balding, the left side of his face marred by some creeping disease that made the flesh look half-melted. His crown sat askew on his head. *King. Viserys. Dying.*
Beside him, a younger woman with auburn hair in an elaborate braided style, wearing green. Her face was pale with shock and fury. *Queen. Alicent. Dangerous somehow.*
Behind them, lords and ladies in a rainbow of colors. Harry's borrowed memories couldn't make sense of them all—too many names, too many faces, too many political entanglements he didn't understand.
But one figure drew his eye like a lodestone.
A young woman—girl, really, couldn't be more than nineteen—half-risen from her seat, white-knuckled hands gripping the railing. Silver-gold hair streaming in the wind, violet eyes wide with shock and something else. Something that made Harwin's heart clench in his chest.
*Rhaenyra. Princess. Gods, Rhaenyra—*
The memories slammed into Harry like a physical blow. Love. Desperate, doomed, terrified love. Secret meetings. Stolen moments. A night six months ago when everything changed. Her laugh. Her smile. The weight of her trust like a crown he didn't deserve.
But they weren't *his* feelings. Weren't his memories. They belonged to a man who'd just been shoved aside in his own body by a grieving wizard from a dead world.
*Sorry,* Harry thought to the consciousness he'd displaced. *I'm so sorry. I didn't ask for this.*
"What is the meaning of this barbarism?" The king—Viserys—demanded, his voice breaking halfway through. He coughed, pressing a hand to his chest. "This is a *wedding celebration*! And you—you turn it into a *butcher's yard*!"
Harry looked down at himself. He was covered in blood—Cole's blood, spattering his armor in arterial sprays. His knuckles were split, bone visible through torn skin. The Cloak-armor rippled and shifted, trying to clean itself, but the blood was too fresh, too plentiful.
At his feet, Cole had rolled onto his back, gasping. His face was unrecognizable—nose broken and flattened, both eyes swollen shut, jaw hanging at an odd angle. Blood and sand had mixed into a paste that filled his mouth. At least six teeth were missing. His right arm lay at an unnatural angle, clearly broken in multiple places.
Not dead, though. Harry could see the rise and fall of his chest, hear the wet, labored breathing.
He could have made it permanent. One stomp to the throat. One twist of the neck. So easy.
The Elder Wand pulsed against his spine, as if disappointed.
"Well?" The queen's voice was sharp as broken glass. "Answer your king, Ser Harwin!"
Harry met her eyes. Saw calculation there, fury barely contained, and something else—*fear?* The borrowed memories supplied context: *She hates Rhaenyra. Fears for her children. This man—Cole—is hers somehow.*
"Your... champion," Harry said slowly, still trying to piece together the political landscape through fragments of Harwin's memories, "just murdered a man. Beat him to death with that morningstar while he lay helpless. I watched him do it."
He pointed at Cole. "Watched him cave in that boy's skull because—"
*Why? Why did he do it?* Harry scrambled through Harwin's memories, trying to understand. Something about a confrontation. Words spoken. A threat, maybe? To protect someone?
"Because he could," Harry finished. *Close enough to the truth.*
"Lies!" Alicent's face flushed red. "Ser Criston would never commit murder! He was defending himself in honorable combat—"
"There's the body." Harry gestured to Joffrey's corpse. "Ask anyone here. Ask the other knights."
Viserys looked around wildly, seeking confirmation. Several knights nodded, faces grim. A silver-haired man in the royal box—*Lord Corlys, the Sea Snake, father of the groom*—looked murderous. And beside him, a younger man with silver hair was staring at Joffrey's body with an expression of absolute devastation.
*Laenor. The groom. And Joffrey was—oh. Oh, gods.*
More memories clicking into place. The wedding. Rhaenyra marrying Laenor Velaryon. A political alliance. And Laenor loved Joffrey. And Rhaenyra loved—
Harry's borrowed heart clenched again as his eyes found the princess. She was staring at him with an expression he couldn't quite read. Concern? Fear? Relief?
*This is such a mess,* Harry thought distantly. *I've landed in the middle of someone else's life, someone else's loves and loyalties, and I don't even know the full picture.*
"Ser Criston was... overzealous," one knight called out reluctantly. "The Lonmouth boy yielded, but..."
"But he kept swinging," another finished. "Beat him past yielding. Past mercy."
"And was about to do the same to me," Harry said flatly. "I was on my knees, disarmed. He was going for the killing blow. So I stopped him."
"Stopped him?" Alicent's voice rose to a shriek. "You nearly *killed* him! You beat a knight of the Kingsguard like—like a—"
"Like he beat Joffrey?" Harry interrupted. *At least I've got his name right.* "Funny how it's only barbarism when it happens to your people."
The silence that followed was deafening.
Viserys swayed, and several attendants rushed to steady him. He waved them off irritably. "Lord Lyonel," he said weakly. "Your son... what am I to do with your son?"
A big man stepped forward—going gray, powerful build, grave expression. *Father. My—Harwin's—father. Lord Hand.*
"Your Grace," the man—Lyonel—said carefully. "It appears both men erred. Ser Criston's conduct in the melee was... excessive. But Harwin's response was disproportionate. I recommend—"
"Disproportionate." Harry tasted the word like poison. Felt the weight of the Elder Wand against his spine, the Resurrection Stone warm at his hip, the Invisibility Cloak rippling around him in the guise of armor.
Master of Death, standing in a world that didn't know what that meant.
He'd watched his world end. Had tried to save it and failed. Had spent seventeen years alone with nothing but ghosts and madness for company. And now this—dragged into a new world, a new body, new lives and loves and conflicts that weren't his—
And the first thing he'd witnessed was another senseless murder. Another good person killed for someone else's reasons.
Some things, apparently, were universal.
"I'm done here," Harry said.
He turned and started walking toward the exit. Guards moved to intercept, hands on sword hilts, but Viserys raised a hand to stop them. The king looked exhausted.
"Ser Harwin!" A woman's voice—the princess. Rhaenyra. "Harwin, please, I—"
Harry stopped. Looked back at her. She was standing now, one hand outstretched, and there were tears on her face. Harwin's emotions surged through him—love, devotion, fear for her safety, desperate need to protect her—but they felt distant. Like echoes of someone else's feelings.
*I'm sorry,* Harry thought again, to both the girl and the man whose body he'd stolen. *I don't know what I'm doing. I don't know what any of this is.*
"I'm sorry, Princess," he said quietly. "I need... I need a moment."
Her face showed confusion and hurt, but Harry was already moving, pushing through the crowd. Lords and ladies scrambled out of his way. No one tried to stop him.
The Resurrection Stone pulsed warmth against his hip. The Elder Wand hummed with barely contained power. The Invisibility Cloak wrapped around him like a promise.
The Deathly Hallows. His only companions. His only constant.
As he left the tourney grounds behind, he could hear the chaos erupting—shouting, accusations, someone demanding justice, the king calling for maesters, the sound of sobbing.
And underneath it all, barely audible, the wet, labored breathing of Criston Cole, alive but ruined.
Harry didn't look back.
He didn't know what he was walking into, didn't understand the politics or the stakes or even fully grasp whose body he was wearing.
But he knew one thing:
He was alone. Again. In a strange world with strange rules and strange people who thought they knew him.
And somewhere in his borrowed memories, he could feel Harwin Strong's consciousness—pushed aside but not gone, watching in horror and confusion as a stranger took control of his body.
*I'm sorry,* Harry thought for the third time. *I didn't mean to do this. I just wanted the pain to stop.*
But sorry didn't fix anything.
It never did.
—
The tent was large—befitting someone important, though Harry's scrambled understanding of Harwin's memories couldn't quite piece together all the details—but felt suffocating anyway.
Harry stumbled through the entrance, ignoring guards who snapped to attention, and let the heavy canvas flap fall shut behind him. The sounds of the tourney—muted now, but still audible—filtered through: shouting, the clatter of armor, someone screaming for a maester.
He stood in the center of the tent, swaying slightly, and looked down at his hands.
*Wrong. All wrong.*
They were massive—easily twice the size his own hands had been. Scarred knuckles, calluses from swordwork, thick fingers built for breaking things. Blood crusted under the nails, drying in the creases of his palms. Cole's blood. Some of it was starting to flake off.
Harry's breathing came faster. The tent seemed to spin.
*Not my hands. Not my body. Not my—*
His eyes found the mirror.
It stood in the corner—polished bronze, expensive. Harry walked toward it like a man approaching the gallows.
The face that looked back at him was a stranger's.
Brutally handsome—that was the only way to describe it. A face carved from granite and violence, all hard planes and sharp angles. The jaw was square and powerful, shadowed by neatly trimmed dark stubble that somehow made him look more dangerous rather than refined. His nose was strong and straight—somehow never broken despite what must have been years of fighting.
But it was the eyes that stopped him cold.
Light green. Not the bright emerald of his mother's eyes, the eyes he'd inherited and been reminded of constantly. These were paler, more haunting—the color of spring leaves or sea glass, striking against tanned skin and dark features. They stared back at him with an intensity that was almost predatory.
And the hair. God, the hair.
Long dark curls fell past his shoulders, wild and untamed despite being pulled back in a leather tie. A few strands had escaped, framing that brutal face, softening it just enough to make him look less like a statue and more like a man.
*This isn't me.*
Harry pressed his hands against the mirror, watching the stranger mimic his movements. He could feel Harwin somewhere in the back of his mind—a presence, confused and terrified, trying to understand why he couldn't control his own body.
"I'm sorry," Harry whispered to both of them—himself and the man he'd displaced. "I'm so sorry. I didn't know this would happen. I just walked through the Veil and—"
And what? Stolen someone's body? Shoved aside their consciousness? Become a parasite wearing someone else's skin?
The Veil had been supposed to reunite him with the dead. Or kill him. Or *something*. Not... this.
Harwin's memories were there, but they came in disjointed fragments. Harry could remember a father—Lyonel Strong, Hand of the King. A brother—Larys, something wrong about him, something twisted. A castle called Harrenhal, cursed and massive. Service in something called the City Watch, whatever that was.
And her. Rhaenyra. The princess with violet eyes who loved him, who trusted him, who was about to marry someone else for political reasons.
*This is such a mess,* Harry thought, slumping against the tent pole. *I don't know these people. Don't know their politics or their world or what I'm supposed to do.*
The Elder Wand burned against his spine, demanding attention. The Resurrection Stone pulsed warmth from his sword's pommel. The Invisibility Cloak rippled around him, still maintaining its disguise as armor.
Magic. He still had magic. Still had the Hallows.
But what good did that do him when he didn't know where—or when—he was? When he was trapped in someone else's body, with someone else's responsibilities and relationships and life?
*Think, Potter. What do you know?*
From the fragments: This was a kingdom. Probably medieval or close to it, given the tourney and the armor and the technology level. There were nobles—lords and ladies with complex politics he didn't understand. A dying king named Viserys. His daughter Rhaenyra, who was supposed to inherit but there was conflict somehow. A queen named Alicent who hated Rhaenyra.
And dragons. He'd caught flashes in Harwin's memories of *dragons*. Real ones. Fire-breathing, flying, massive dragons.
*Okay. Different world. Magic exists but differently. Dragons. Medieval politics. And I just beat the queen's champion half to death in front of everyone.*
That last part was probably going to cause problems.
A sound outside the tent—footsteps, hesitant and uneven. Harry straightened, one hand dropping automatically to the sword at his hip. The movement was pure instinct, muscle memory from Harwin's body responding before Harry's mind could catch up.
"Lord Commander?" A voice, thick with tears. "Ser Harwin, may I... may I enter?"
*Lord Commander?* Harry latched onto the title, another piece of information. *Commander of what?*
"Come in," he said, his new voice still sounding wrong to his own ears.
The tent flap opened, and a young man stumbled through.
He looked destroyed. Silver hair—*like the princess*—disheveled and tangled. His fine clothes were askew, face blotchy and red from crying. His eyes were swollen nearly shut, lips trembling, hands shaking.
Harwin's memories supplied a name: *Laenor Velaryon. The groom. And Joffrey was his—*
"Ser Harwin," Laenor said, and his voice cracked halfway through. "I... I wanted to thank you."
Harry blinked. "Thank me?"
"For Joffrey." Fresh tears spilled down Laenor's cheeks. "For making Cole pay. For—" His breath hitched. "Everyone else just watched. They watched him kill Joff and they did *nothing*. But you—you stopped him. You hurt him. You—"
His legs gave out. Harry moved without thinking, catching the younger man before he hit the ground. Laenor was light, surprisingly so.
"Easy," Harry said, helping him to a chair. "Sit."
Laenor collapsed into the seat, burying his face in his hands. His shoulders shook with silent sobs. Harry stood there awkwardly, completely out of his depth.
He'd been good at many things. Combat. Strategy. Protective magic. But comforting grieving people had never been his strong suit, and that was before seventeen years of isolation had made him forget how human interaction worked.
"He was supposed to be safe," Laenor whispered through his fingers. "The tourney—it was supposed to be *fun*. And now he's dead. Dead in the sand like he was nothing."
Harry thought about Joffrey's broken body. About Cole's casual brutality. About how the crowd had *cheered*.
*Same as it ever was,* he thought bitterly. *Good people die. Bad people get away with it. And everyone else just watches.*
"I'm sorry," Harry said quietly. "About your friend. He didn't deserve that."
Laenor looked up, red-rimmed eyes searching Harry's face. "You don't... you don't understand. Joff wasn't just my friend. He was—" His voice broke. "And in three days I have to marry the Princess. Stand in front of everyone and pretend to be happy while he's—while he's—"
He couldn't finish. Just folded in on himself, arms wrapped around his middle like he could physically hold himself together.
Harry watched him and felt something twist in his chest. This boy—this prince—was trapped just like Harry was. Forced into a role he hadn't chosen, performing for an audience that didn't care about his pain.
*At least you know who you are,* Harry thought. *At least this is still your body, your life. I'm just a ghost wearing someone else's face.*
But that wasn't fair. Laenor's grief was real. His loss was real. And Harry had failed to save Joffrey just like he'd failed to save everyone in his own world.
"I should have been faster," Harry said. "Should have stopped Cole before—"
"No." Laenor shook his head violently. "You *tried*. That's more than anyone else did. More than I did. I just stood there, frozen, useless, while he—"
His voice broke again.
They sat in silence for a moment, two people drowning in separate griefs that somehow felt the same.
---
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