263 AC
The first thing he knew was cold.
Not the cold of winter, not the cold of death he had somehow cheated, but the cold of a world that did not care whether he lived or died. It wrapped around him like a shroud, and he screamed. Not in fear, not in pain, but in sheer, incandescent fury at the unfairness of it all.
Ten billion years.
He had spent ten billion years building a civilization from nothing. He had dragged humanity from the stone age to the stars. He had solved problems that had plagued mankind for millennia, watched empires rise and fall like waves upon a shore. And this was his reward? To be reborn as a squalling infant in a world of mud and shit and medieval stupidity?
The scream faded to whimpers as exhaustion claimed him. He felt warmth pressed against his skin. Another body, small and writhing like his own. A twin. The thought drifted through his consciousness like a leaf on slow water. He had a brother.
And then, because he was, after all, still an infant, he slept.
When he woke again, the world had resolved into shapes and shadows. A woman's face hovered above him, pale and exhausted but beautiful in the way that only a mother's face could be. Her hair was dark, her eyes grey as winter storms, and she smiled at him with a tenderness that made something in his chest ache.
"My little wolf," she whispered. "My quiet one."
Quiet. Yes, he supposed he was quiet compared to the other. The brother who had been screaming since the moment of birth and showed no signs of stopping. Through the fog of infant perception, he could hear that scream still, a constant reminder that he was no longer alone in his own mind.
The woman lifted him gently and pressed him to her breast. The warmth of her body, the rhythmic thump of her heart, the softness of her skin. These things spoke to something deeper than memory, deeper than the ten billion years of scientific knowledge that still rattled around in his oversized skull.
He was a baby. He was a baby with the mind of a god, but a baby nonetheless.
And so he nursed, and slept, and grew.
Lyarra Stark had known fear only once in her life. The day her firstborn had come into the world, a difficult birth that had nearly taken her. But this second son, this quiet one who had slipped out so easily after his brother's dramatic arrival, he frightened her in a different way.
Not because of anything he did. He was a perfect child, healthy and strong, if unusually placid. But his eyes. Those green eyes, so like her own, held something she could not name. They followed her with an intensity that seemed far beyond his months. They watched the world with a hunger that made her think of old stories, of the children of the forest, of things that should not be.
"You worry too much," Rickard told her when she voiced her fears. He sat beside their bed, Brandon sleeping in the crook of his arm, his face softened by the firelight. "The boy is healthy. That is all that matters."
"He watches, Rickard. He watches everything."
"As do you, my love. It is a Stark trait." He smiled, but she saw the flicker of uncertainty in his grey eyes. He had noticed too. He simply would not admit it.
She let it go. What else could she do? The boy was hers, flesh of her flesh, blood of her blood. Whatever strangeness lived in him, she would love him through it.
She named him Kaelen. An old name, Rickard said. From the First Men. It meant "truth" in the old tongue.
She prayed it would not be a burden.
The first year was a blur of sensation and frustration.
His body was weak, useless, a prison of flesh that refused to obey his commands. He wanted to walk, to speak, to do something. But his muscles would not cooperate and his mouth could form only meaningless babble. The sheer indignity of it would have made him weep, if he were not already weeping constantly for reasons he could not control.
But he watched.
Oh, how he watched.
His eyes tracked everything. The movement of servants through the great hall. The flicker of torches on stone walls. The way the maester's chains clinked when he walked. The pattern of light through the high windows, telling him the position of the sun, the passage of hours, the turning of days.
His brother, Brandon, was everything he was not. Loud where he was quiet. Demanding where he was patient. Red faced and furious where he was pale and calculating. They were two sides of the same coin, and already he could see how the world would treat them. Brandon the heir, Brandon the beloved, Brandon the wolf with all the wolf's fire.
And him? They called him Kaelen. Truth.
He would give them truth. He would give them so much truth that the world would bend around it.
But first, he had to learn to walk.
Rickard Stark was not a man given to introspection.
He was Lord of Winterfell, Warden of the North, and his days were filled with the business of ruling. Taxes and tithes, disputes between lords, preparations for winter, the endless dance of politics that came with his position. He had little time for quiet contemplation, and less for the kind of careful observation that marked his younger son.
But even he could not help but notice that Kaelen was different.
The boy did not cry as much as Brandon. He did not demand attention, did not scream for food or comfort or the simple warmth of human contact. Instead, he watched. Those green eyes of his, so unlike the grey of the Starks, followed everything. They tracked Rickard across rooms, followed servants through halls, fixed on the maester with an intensity that made even the learned man uncomfortable.
"Your son is unusual," Maester Walys said one evening, when Rickard had come to discuss a matter of ravens and messages. "I have never seen a child so... observant."
Rickard grunted. "He takes after his mother's side. The Karstarks are a clever lot."
"Indeed." Walys paused, his chains clinking softly. "But there is clever, and there is something else. He asked me today why the sun rises in the east. Not content with the simple answer, he wanted to know why. He wanted to know about the motion of the heavens, about the turning of the world. He is not yet two years old."
Rickard frowned. "Is that not a good thing? A clever son is a blessing."
"A clever son is a blessing, yes." Walys's voice was smooth, measured. "But too much cleverness can be dangerous. Especially in times like these. The world is not always kind to those who see too clearly."
Rickard looked at the maester for a long moment. There was something in the man's words, something beneath the surface, that he did not like. But he could not quite name it.
"See that my son is not harmed by his cleverness," he said finally. "That is your duty as maester."
"Of course, my lord. Of course."
But as Rickard left the tower, he could not shake the feeling that he had missed something important.
The first word Kaelen spoke was not "mother" or "father" or even the "Brandon" that everyone expected.
It was "why."
He was two years old, sitting on the floor of the great hall while servants bustled around him. He had just watched a man drop a wooden cup. The cup had bounced once, twice, three times before rolling to a stop against the wall. Simple physics. The coefficient of restitution of wood on stone. The angular momentum imparted by the fall. The friction of the floor surface. But the servant had cursed and blamed the gods. His mother had laughed and said such things happened. His father had not even looked up from his conversation with the maester.
"Why?" he asked.
The servant stopped. His mother turned. Even his father glanced over, one eyebrow raised.
"What did he say?" Rickard asked.
"The boy said 'why,' my lord," the servant answered.
Kaelen pointed at the cup. "Why did it bounce? Why did it not break? Why did it roll that way and not that way?"
Rickard looked at his second son with an expression that might have been surprise or might have been concern. "The gods willed it so," he said after a moment.
Kaelen considered this. In his previous life, he had heard such answers a thousand times. Gods did this, gods did that, the gods moved in mysterious ways. It was the refuge of the ignorant. The shield of those who could not or would not understand.
But he was two years old. Two year olds did not argue with lords.
"Oh," he said, and returned to watching.
But Rickard's gaze lingered on him a moment longer, and Kaelen filed that away too.
Maester Walys was a man of the Citadel, which meant he was a man of chains and learning and, as Kaelen would slowly come to understand, a man of the South. His links clinked when he walked. Bronze for astronomy, iron for ravencraft, silver for healing, gold for economics. He was tall and thin and spoke with the soft accents of the Reach, and he looked at the North with the barely concealed disdain of a man who believed himself surrounded by savages.
He also looked at Kaelen with an interest that made the boy's skin crawl.
"Your son shows remarkable intelligence, my lord," Walys said one day, when Kaelen was three. They were in the maester's tower, where Kaelen had been brought for his first lessons. Though really, he had only wanted access to the books. "His questions are unusual for one so young."
Rickard nodded, pleased. "The boy takes after his mother's side. The Karstarks have always been clever."
"Indeed." Walys's eyes flickered to Kaelen. "Perhaps too clever. The Citadel has records of children with such precocity. It often fades as they age."
Kaelen said nothing. He had learned, in his three years of second life, that silence was his greatest weapon. Let them think him merely bright, merely curious, merely a child who would grow out of his strangeness. Let them underestimate him.
It would make what came next so much easier.
His mother was his anchor.
Lyarra Stark was a woman of the North in every way that mattered. Her grey eyes saw clearly. Her hands were steady. Her heart was as warm as the hot springs that heated the castle's walls. She alone seemed to understand that there was something different about her second son, and she alone did not fear it.
She smiled and brushed the hair from his forehead. White, always white, from some quirk of birth that had left him pale where Brandon was dark. The old women of Winterfell whispered that it meant the blood of the First Men ran strongest in him, that the ancient kings of winter had sometimes been born with hair like snow. They crossed their fingers and muttered prayers to the old gods when they saw him.
Lyarra did not pray. She kissed his forehead instead.
Lime dust from his earliest experiments had only made his hair whiter, until it gleamed like fresh snow even in the dimmest light. Brandon teased him about it, called him "old man" and "snow head" and laughed until he could not breathe. But Brandon also defended him when outsiders stared, when visiting lords whispered behind their hands, when the maester looked at Kaelen with those calculating eyes.
"You have the old blood in you," Lyarra told him now, for perhaps the hundredth time. "The blood of the First Men runs strong in the North, but in you it runs strongest of all."
"What does that mean?" he asked.
She smiled again, and for a moment her grey eyes were sad. "It means you see things others do not. It means you ask questions others never think to ask. It means that when the world tells you something is impossible, you wonder why."
"Is that bad?"
"No, my little white wolf. It is a gift. The rarest gift of all." She kissed his forehead once more. "Use it wisely."
He wanted to tell her everything. He wanted to explain about ten billion years and stone age beginnings and a world that had never existed except in the fevered imagination of a Japanese storyteller. He wanted to tell her that he was not her son, not really. That he was a stranger wearing a child's skin, an intruder in her life.
But he was four years old, and he loved her, and he could not bear to see the look in her eyes if he told her the truth.
So he said nothing, and let her love him, and loved her in return.
Brandon Stark was everything a firstborn son should be.
He was loud and bold and fearless. He climbed walls that made grown men dizzy. He rode horses before he could properly walk. He fought with wooden swords and pulled maidens' hair and howled at the moon with such fervor that the old godswood seemed to shake. He had the wolf blood, everyone said. The wildness of the Starks that had sent so many to early graves.
And he loved his strange, quiet brother with a ferocity that surprised everyone.
"You are no fun," Brandon declared at age five, throwing a wooden sword at Kaelen's head.
Kaelen caught it without looking up from the rock he was examining. "Clumsy. Your stance is too wide. You are telegraphing your throws."
Brandon's face scrunched up. "What is tele... tele..."
"Predicting. You might as well send a raven ahead to tell them where you are aiming."
"I will show you predicting!" Brandon launched himself at his brother.
What followed was less a fight and more a lesson. Kaelen, for all his lack of interest in combat, had spent countless hours watching the guards train. He had calculated angles, velocities, pressure points. He did not have the muscle yet. That would come. But he had something better. Pattern recognition.
Brandon ended up on his back, staring at the sky, wondering how his bookish brother had tripped him into a bale of hay.
"How?"
"Physics." Kaelen offered him a hand. "You always lead with your right shoulder before you charge. It is a tell."
Brandon grinned, accepting the help up. "Teach me."
"To read?"
"To fight. Like that. With the fiz... ics."
Kaelen considered this. His brother, his twin, was loud and impulsive and about as subtle as a rampaging mammoth. But he was also fiercely loyal, quick to laugh, and the only person in this entire backward world who looked at Kaelen's strangeness with delight rather than suspicion.
"Deal," Kaelen said. "I will teach you to think before you fight. You teach me to... what is the opposite of that?"
"To have fun!"
Kaelen blinked. "Define 'fun.'"
Brandon's grin widened. This was going to be the best game ever.
The glassworks began when Kaelen was six.
It started, as so many things did, with a question.
"Why is our glass green?" he asked the head gardener, a grizzled old man named Hother who had been tending the glass gardens since before Rickard was born.
"Because that is the color glass is, lad. Always has been."
"But why?"
Hother shrugged. "The gods made it that way."
Kaelen considered this. He knew, of course, that the green tint came from iron impurities in the sand. Specifically from iron oxide, which was common in most sand deposits. He knew that clear glass required sand with minimal iron, or the addition of manganese dioxide to counteract the green. He knew that the Romans had made clear glass two thousand years ago, and that somehow, in this world, that knowledge had been lost.
"Where does the sand come from?" he asked.
"The riverbank, mostly. The White Knife has good sand."
"Can I see it?"
Hother laughed. "You want to look at sand, little lord? There is a whole world of it out there. Go ahead."
Kaelen went.
The sand was, as he suspected, full of iron. He could see the rust colored streaks in it, the dark grains that told him exactly why the glass was green. But there were other sources. He had read about them in the maester's books, though the books themselves were maddeningly vague. White sand from the shores of the Bite. Pale sand from certain riverbeds. Sand that might, with careful selection, produce something better.
He needed help. He needed someone who would not laugh at a six year old's questions. Someone who would take him seriously.
He needed Harry.
Harren Stone was a bastard.
Everyone said it like that, as if the word itself were an explanation. Harren Stone, the bastard. Harren Stone, whose father had been a minor lord and whose mother had been a servant, and who had been left to find his own way in the world at an age when most children were still clinging to their mothers' skirts. He was fifteen when Kaelen found him, already a man by the standards of the North. He worked in the stables and the forge and anywhere else that needed a strong back and a willing pair of hands.
He was also, Kaelen discovered, brilliant.
"You are the little lord," Harry said when Kaelen appeared in the forge one day. He was sharpening a plow blade, his movements efficient and precise. "The quiet one."
"Kaelen."
"I know your name, little lord. Everyone knows your name." He did not look up from his work. "What do you want?"
Kaelen considered the question. What did he want? He wanted to change the world. He wanted to drag the North out of its medieval stupor and into something resembling civilization. He wanted to build things. Glass and steel and concrete and engines and a thousand other wonders. And he needed help.
"I want to make clear glass," he said.
Harry's hands paused. "Clear glass?"
"Like this." Kaelen held up a shard of something he had found. A piece of sea glass, worn smooth by waves, pale and almost transparent. "Better than this."
Harry looked at the shard, then at Kaelen. "That is not glass from the gardens."
"No. It is from the sea. The waves ground it down, but look. It is clearer than anything in the glass houses."
Harry took the shard, turning it over in his calloused hands. "How?"
"I do not know yet. But I want to find out." Kaelen met his eyes. "I need someone who knows fire and stone and metal. Someone who will not tell me I am too young or too strange or too whatever. Someone who wants to build things."
A long silence. Then Harry laughed. A real laugh, surprised out of him. "You are a strange one, little lord."
"So I have been told."
"All right." Harry set down the plow blade. "All right. Let us see what we can build."
The first kiln was a disaster.
They built it in a corner of the forge, using stone and clay and Kaelen's vague memories of how such things should be constructed. Harry did the actual work while Kaelen directed. The result was a lopsided, drafty monstrosity that cracked on its first firing and collapsed on its second.
"Told you," Harry said, not unkindly. "We need better clay. And a proper design."
Kaelen nodded, already recalculating. He had expected failure. Failure was how you learned. The trick was to fail better each time.
They tried again. Better clay, sourced from a different riverbank. A more careful design, with Kaelen sketching in the dirt and Harry translating his crude drawings into something real. A slower firing, a longer cooling, a hundred small adjustments that turned failure into progress.
On their seventh attempt, they produced a sheet of glass that was only slightly green.
Kaelen held it up to the light. Through it, he could see Harry's face. Distorted, yes, but recognizable. A start.
"We need purer sand," he said. "And something to counteract the iron. Manganese, maybe, or..."
He stopped. Harry was staring at him.
"What?"
"You are six years old."
"Seven, almost."
"You are seven years old, and you just built a glass kiln and talked about manganese like you have been a glassmaker for twenty years."
Kaelen considered this. He had been careful, he thought. He had tried to seem merely clever, merely curious, merely a child who asked good questions. But Harry was not a fool, and Harry had been watching him for months.
"I read a lot," he said.
Harry laughed again. That same surprised laugh. "You read a lot. Right." He shook his head. "I do not know what you are, little lord. But I am in. All the way in. Let us make your glass."
The first clear glass came when Kaelen was eight.
It was not perfect. It had bubbles and streaks and a faint yellowish tint that he later learned came from sulfur. But it was clear. Clear enough to see through. Clear enough to read through. Clear enough that when Rickard Stark held it up to the light, he went very, very still.
"What is this?"
"Glass," Kaelen said. "Better glass. Clear glass."
Rickard turned it over in his hands. He was a big man, broad shouldered and grey eyed, and he looked at his second son with an expression that Kaelen could not quite read. "How?"
"The sand. I found a source with fewer impurities. And we controlled the temperature more carefully." He shrugged, as if it were nothing. "With a better furnace, we could make more. Sell it. The South pays well for glass."
Rickard was silent for a long moment. Then, slowly, he smiled. It was not the smile he gave Brandon. The proud, easy smile of a father watching his heir grow. It was something else. Something like respect.
"You are eight years old," he said.
"Yes, Father."
"You are eight years old, and you have just invented something that could make our house rich."
Kaelen considered pointing out that he had not invented glass, merely improved upon it. But he sensed that now was not the time for pedantry. "I had help. Harry Stone did most of the work."
"I know about Harry Stone. I know you have been spending all your time in the forge with him." Rickard set the glass down carefully. "Why did you not come to me sooner?"
"I did not know if it would work. I did not want to waste your time."
Rickard nodded slowly. "Wise. But now that it does work. What next?"
Kaelen had been waiting for this question. He had prepared for it, rehearsed it, refined it over months of work. "We build a proper glassworks. We train workers. We produce enough to supply the North first, then the South. We use the profits to fund other projects."
"What other projects?"
"Better steel. Better roads. Better everything." Kaelen met his father's eyes. "The North is poor because we do not use what we have. We have timber, iron, stone, water, people. We just need to use them better."
Rickard stared at him for a long moment. Then he laughed. A real laugh, deep and warm, the kind of laugh that Kaelen had only ever heard directed at Brandon.
"Gods above," Rickard said. "You are going to be trouble, are you not?"
"I hope so, Father."
The glassworks grew.
Slowly at first, then faster. Rickard assigned men to help. Workers who could be trained. Guards who could protect the valuable product. Harry became the foreman, overseeing the day to day operations while Kaelen planned and designed and experimented. Within a year, they were producing enough glass to replace every cloudy pane in Winterfell. Within two years, they were selling to other northern houses.
And with money came power.
Kaelen watched it happen with the cold satisfaction of a scientist observing an experiment. The glassworks brought gold. The gold bought influence. The influence bought security. Every lord who bought Stark glass owed the Starks a small debt. Every merchant who traded in northern goods spread the word that something was changing in the North.
But it was not enough. It would never be enough.
Because Kaelen remembered. He remembered fire and ash and a mad king who burned people alive. He remembered a father strangled trying to save his son. He remembered a sister who died in a tower, and a brother who carried her son home, and a war that tore the realm apart.
He did not know if those memories were real. He did not know if this world would follow the same path as the one in his dreams. But he knew one thing with absolute certainty.
Winter was coming.
And when it came, he would be ready.
From the Journal of Maester Walys, 271 AC
The boy Kaelen continues to concern me. His intelligence is beyond anything I have seen in a child his age, and his questions grow more pointed with each passing year. He asked me yesterday about the properties of iron ore, about the differences between ores from various mines, about the temperatures required to smelt them. These are not the questions of a curious child. These are the questions of a mind that seeks to understand, to manipulate, to control.
I have sent word to the Citadel. They have not yet responded, but I know what they will say. The boy must be watched. He must be guided. If he cannot be guided, he must be managed.
The North cannot be allowed to grow too strong. The balance must be maintained.
I will do my duty.
The pack survives.
It was a saying in the North, old as the Starks themselves. The pack survives. Wolves together were stronger than wolves alone. Family was everything. Blood was everything. The pack was everything.
Kaelen sat in the godswood, watching the red leaves of the heart tree dance in the wind. Brandon was beside him, for once quiet, for once still. Their mother had brought them here to pray, to think, to be together. It was a ritual she insisted on, and Kaelen had come to love it.
"What do you think about?" Brandon asked. "When you sit here. What do you think about?"
Kaelen considered the question. He thought about many things. About glass and steel and concrete. About the future and the past and the strange collision of worlds that had brought him here. About fire and ice and the long winter that waited somewhere ahead.
But he could not say any of that. Not yet.
"I think about the pack," he said instead. "About us. About family. About how we survive."
Brandon nodded slowly. "The pack survives."
"Yes." Kaelen looked at his brother, at this loud, wild, wonderful boy who had somehow become the center of his world. "The pack survives. That is what matters."
Brandon grinned. "Good. Because you are stuck with me forever."
Kaelen almost smiled. Almost. "Forever is a long time."
"Good." Brandon leaned back against the heart tree. "I am glad."
And for a moment, just a moment, Kaelen let himself forget about the future. Let himself forget about the memories that were not memories, the knowledge that was not knowledge, the weight of ten billion years pressing down on his shoulders.
For a moment, he was just a boy. Sitting with his brother. Watching the leaves dance.
It was enough.
It would have to be enough.
That night, a raven left Winterfell bound for the Citadel. Its message was written in a code that only the maesters knew, a code that had been used for centuries to pass secrets across the realm.
The boy grows. His influence spreads. The glassworks have made the Starks richer than they have been in generations. He speaks of steel, of roads, of things that should not concern a child. I fear what he may become.
Instructions requested.
Send help.
In his chamber, Kaelen Stark lay awake, staring at the ceiling. Beside him, Brandon snored softly, already lost in dreams. Through the window, the stars wheeled slowly across the sky, indifferent to the small dramas playing out below.
He thought about the maester. About the way Walys looked at him. About the ravens that came and went at all hours, carrying messages he could not read.
He thought about his mother's words. The old blood. The gift. Use it wisely.
He thought about the future. About fire and ice and all the things he had seen in another life.
And he made a decision.
He would build. He would prepare. He would make the North so strong that no enemy could break it. Not the lions of the south. Not the dragons of old. Not the cold that waited beyond the Wall.
And he would watch the maester. He would learn his secrets. He would be ready for whatever came.
Because the pack survives.
And this wolf would not be caught unaware.
Coming in Chapter 2: The Wolf's Blood
New alliances form. Old enemies watch. And in the forge, something new is born.