Chapter 1: THE MAN WHO WOKE IN FIRE
The first thing was pain.
Not the dull, familiar kind — the kind that announces itself and waits to be managed. This was total, a furnace pressed against every inch of skin, and Naelarion opened eyes that weren't his and screamed with a voice he didn't recognize.
Smoke. Thick, oily, the color of rotting teeth. Timber cracked somewhere above and a chunk of burning ceiling collapsed three feet to his left, spraying embers across a floor he'd never stood on. He was lying on planks of warped wood in a room engulfed in orange, and the body underneath him was wrong — too light, too young, the arms thinner than they should have been.
Chicago. Kedzie Avenue. February. Headlights.
The memory detonated between his temples like a flashbang. A street. Snow on the curb. The #82 bus pulling away and then light — white, massive, coming from the wrong direction. The sound of a horn and something hitting his ribcage and then a silence so complete it had weight.
He'd died.
The thought arrived flat and certain while fire ate the walls around him. Twenty-eight years old, crossing a street six blocks from his apartment after a twelve-hour shift at the firm, and a delivery truck had turned him into a statistic. Nolan Brown. Crisis management consultant. Chicagoan. Dead.
And now — this.
His hands found the floor and pushed. The body responded faster than expected, muscles coiling with a quickness that didn't match the malnourished frame. Smoke filled his lungs and barely stung. He coughed, sure, hacked and spat, but the burn that should have shredded his airways came muted, like pain heard through a wall.
A beam fell. He rolled sideways and hit a door frame, shoulder-first, and the door gave outward. Stairs. Half of them on fire. He took them three at a time and crashed through a ground-floor entrance into night air that tasted like horse shit and brine.
Cobblestones. His palms slapped wet stone and he stayed there on all fours, gasping, silver hair hanging in his face.
Silver hair.
He grabbed a fistful and held it in front of eyes still watering from smoke. The strands caught torchlight from somewhere down the alley. Pale. Almost white. Valyrian.
Then the memories came. Not his — the body's.
They crashed in like floodwater, disordered and reeking of someone else's grief. A woman's face, gaunt, with the same silver hair and hollow eyes that had stopped seeing three days ago. A name: Naelarion Waters. Bastard. Flea Bottom born. Mother dead of the same fever that took half the street last month. Father unknown, though the hair told its own story — some Targaryen or Velaryon had left his seed in a tavern girl and never looked back.
Seventeen. The body was seventeen.
Naelarion forced himself upright. His knees shook. The burning tenement behind him groaned and the second floor caved inward, sending a gout of sparks into the dark. Nobody came running. Nobody shouted for water or help. In Flea Bottom, a building fire was Tuesday.
He stood in the alley and pieced it together with the analytical reflex that had earned him six figures in another life: wrong body, wrong century, wrong world. The memories weren't just biographical — they carried geography. The Red Keep on Aegon's Hill. The Dragonpit's dome above the city. The stink of the tanneries along the river and the sound of the harbor bells at dusk.
Westeros. King's Landing.
The realization landed with the precision of a case file snapping shut.
He knew this place. Not from living here — from watching it, in another world, on a screen. A show. Dragons and succession wars and a family that burned itself to ash. The details blurred at the edges — he'd watched it years ago, casually, hadn't memorized episodes — but the architecture of the story held firm. Targaryens on the Iron Throne. A king who was dying slowly. A civil war that would split the realm in two and kill every dragon alive.
What year—
The answer came from the body's memories. The old king's first wife had died in childbed recently. The whole city had mourned for a week and then forgotten. His mother had mentioned it between coughing fits: Poor Queen Aemma.
112 AC. The Dance of the Dragons was still two decades away.
Then the text appeared.
It materialized in the center of his vision like words burning themselves into glass — gold lettering on nothing, hovering in the dark air exactly where his eyes focused. Not painted on a surface. Not projected. Inside his skull.
[TYRANT'S MANDATE — ACTIVATED.]
[HOST INTEGRATION: COMPLETE. SOUL DISPLACEMENT: SUCCESSFUL.]
[WELCOME, HOST. YOU HAVE BEEN CHOSEN.]
Naelarion staggered back. His heel caught a loose cobblestone and he sat down hard on the wet ground, staring at text that moved when his eyes moved.
[THE MANDATE IS SIMPLE. DOMINATE OR DIE.]
[FIRST DIRECTIVE: ESTABLISH DOMINANCE OVER YOUR IMMEDIATE TERRITORY WITHIN 30 DAYS.]
[FAILURE: DEATH.]
[BLOOD POINTS: 0. ABILITIES: ALL DORMANT — PHASE 1.]
[THE MANDATE REWARDS STRENGTH. THE MANDATE PUNISHES WEAKNESS. COMPLY.]
He opened his mouth to say — what? To shout at the words? To ask who was doing this?
Pain. Immediate, surgical, a spike driven through the base of his skull. His jaw locked. His vision whited out for two seconds and when it cleared the text had added a line:
[SECRECY BINDING: ACTIVE. THE MANDATE CANNOT BE DISCUSSED, DESCRIBED, OR REFERENCED TO ANY EXTERNAL ENTITY. VIOLATION: NEURAL PUNISHMENT — ESCALATING.]
He couldn't talk about it. Whatever this parasite was — system, curse, cosmic joke — it had sewn his mouth shut on the subject with a pain response that would scale every time he tried.
Options. Assess.
The crisis consultant in him clawed to the surface, gasping, demanding structure. A system that rewarded dominance. A countdown. Abilities listed as dormant. Blood Points as a currency. And a death sentence for noncompliance.
He was still cataloging when two shapes materialized from the alley's dark end.
Flea Bottom men. One tall and lean with a dockworker's ropy arms. The other shorter, thicker, a cudgel hanging from his belt. Both had the flat eyes of predators who'd learned that a silver-haired boy sitting stunned on cobblestones after a fire was opportunity, not tragedy.
"Silver hair," the tall one said.
"Targaryen bastard," the short one agreed. "Somebody'll pay for that."
They meant his hair. The Valyrian look was currency — slavery, ransom, or worse. Naelarion was already standing, and the body was already moving, and the disconnect between the two observations terrified him.
The tall one reached. Naelarion's hand intercepted the man's wrist and twisted. Not a trained motion — instinct filtered through a body that ran hotter and faster than it had any right to. The wrist made a sound like a green branch snapping. The tall man shrieked. The short one swung the cudgel and Naelarion stepped inside the arc, drove his elbow into the man's solar plexus, and watched him fold.
Both of them scrambled away into the dark, the tall one cradling his broken wrist, the short one retching.
Naelarion stood in the alley with bruised knuckles and a pulse like a war drum. The body had moved before the mind could plan. The reflexes were wrong — too sharp, too fast for a starving seventeen-year-old. Phase 1, the text had said. Dormant abilities.
Dormant didn't mean absent. It meant waking up.
He found the hovel by following memories that weren't his.
A single room above a tannery on Sow's Row. The stench was architectural — it had seeped into the walls, the floor, the single straw mattress in the corner. One window, cracked, overlooking a crooked street. A tin basin. A wooden stool. Clothes folded on a shelf with the care of someone who owned nothing else.
Naelarion shut the door and leaned against it and took inventory the way he'd been trained: assets, liabilities, timeline.
Assets: a body with Valyrian blood and reflexes that defied its malnourishment. A mind that remembered the shape of a civil war twenty years from now. A system — a mandate — that apparently intended to arm him for something.
Liabilities: no money, no weapons, no allies, no identity beyond "dead woman's bastard." A system that would kill him in thirty days if he didn't dominate a territory he couldn't even map yet. A secrecy binding that punished speech with escalating agony.
Timeline: twenty years until the Dance. But thirty days until the Mandate executed him for weakness.
He moved to the window. Across the harbor, past the squalor of Flea Bottom's rooftops and the harbor's mast-forest, the Red Keep burned gold on Aegon's Hill. Torchlight traced its towers against the black sky. Somewhere inside those walls, King Viserys sat on the Iron Throne that cut unworthy men, and his daughter Rhaenyra had just been named heir, and twenty years of choices — good and catastrophic — were about to unspool.
And down here in the sewage and the dark, a dead man from Chicago had thirty days to become something this world would fear.
The tin basin on the shelf held water, scummed and warm. Beside it, a half-eaten bowl of stew gone cold. A wooden spoon still resting in the bowl at an angle that meant someone had put it down intending to pick it up again.
Naelarion picked it up.
The stew was cold and thick and tasted like onions and grief. He ate it standing because there was nowhere to sit that didn't remind him this room belonged to a dead boy's dead mother, and the spoon in his hand had last been held by a woman who'd never hold anything again.
His hands shook. Not from cold.
Ruth. Her middle name is Ruth. 4215 North Kedzie, third floor, apartment 3B. Mrs. Okafor's jollof rice on Thursdays. The radiator that clanked every winter.
He held the details like coins, counting them, making sure none had slipped through his fingers in the crossing between worlds.
The System text pulsed once in the corner of his vision — a cold gold reminder:
[29 DAYS, 16 HOURS REMAINING.]
Naelarion set the empty bowl down on the shelf, exactly where it had been. Eighty-two beats per minute. He counted them until the number dropped to seventy, in a body that ran hotter than a dead boy from Flea Bottom had any right to, in a room that still smelled like someone else's life.
The Red Keep's torches flickered across the harbor. Gold on black, steady as a heartbeat.
Twenty-nine days. No money. No name worth speaking. And a parasite in his skull that measured the world in blood and called the results progress.
He turned from the window and began to plan.
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