Gasp!!!!
Edrin tore up from the pallet like something had tried to drown him in his own sleep.
The hut was still a hut. Crooked rafters blackened by smoke. Damp thatch. A sting of cold that lived in the boards and crawled up through his feet. Somewhere close, peat hissed in a low fire, and the air tasted of ash, sour wool, and old breath. Wind worried the gaps in the wall like a hungry animal.
His heart would not slow.
Snow. Blood. A horn like bone scraped on stone. Men screaming into a white wind that did not care if you were lord or leash-boy. A Stark's eyes; iron and duty, locking on him as if deciding whether a gift was a blessing or a knife.
"What the fuck," Edrin muttered, voice hoarse.
The ninth.
Nine dreams since he'd "woken" in this godforsaken place. Nine dreams that did not feel like dreams. Not the messy nonsense of sleep, not the soft blur of a mind airing itself out.
These were… runs. Routes. Paths taken and paths refused.
Every time he opened his eyes after one, it felt like someone had shoved a memory into his skull that hadn't happened yet and expected him to do something useful with it.
He pressed a hand to his face, trying to wipe the battlefield off his skin. There was no blood there. No ice. No mud. Just grime and the faint ache of hunger that never fully left.
He looked down at his hands. Fifteen-year-old hands. Scarred, callused, rough from wood and cold work. Not the hands he'd worn in those other lives; older, harder, certain.
Okay, he told himself, forcing the panic into a box. Step one: I'm not insane. Step two: I'm in Westeros. Step three: I still don't know what year it is.
That part was the worst.
He knew the world the way a man knows a story he's read too many times. Wolves and weirwoods. The Wall. The Night's Watch. Old Gods in the dark and new gods in septs. Dragonlords in old songs. Lords who smiled while they sharpened knives behind their teeth.
But the timeframe?
Hollow didn't help. Hollow knew nothing. Hollow cared about the next storm, the next hunt, the next belly filled.
This was the Hollow village, as the folk liked to call it, because it sat in a shallow dip between pine-choked ridges, half-hidden from the worst of the wind. Hidden from the realm, too, most days. People came here when they wanted to disappear. Passersby. Rogues. Men with bounties. Women with bruises. The kind of folk who didn't want their names spoken in the same breath as "lord."
Who would've guessed there were people in the Gift at all? The maps made it look like empty, dead land. But Hollow lived. Barely. Stubbornly. Like a splinter the world had failed to pull out.
From the scraps Edrin had pried out of tongues, overheard mutters by a cookfire, a half-drunk trader's complaint he guessed this was "earlier Targaryen" years.
Not which earlier.
No one here could tell him who sat the Iron Throne. Most of them didn't care. The realm was something that happened far away to people who had the luxury of caring.
They did know the Watch, though. They always knew the Watch.
Black brothers sometimes passed at a distance, hunting deserters or trailing wildlings that slipped too far south. When the wind was right, you could hear a horn from the deep woods and feel every spine in Hollow go tight.
So the Wall was real. The Watch was real.
And if that was real, then the rest of it--
Edrin let out a slow breath and tasted smoke.
They called him bastard here. Not with noble disdain; Hollow didn't have noble disdain to spare but with the blunt, practical cruelty of poor people who needed categories. His mother had come here like the others, half-dead and running. She'd died birthing him. That was the story the old women told.
He didn't feel much about her. That guilted him sometimes, until he remembered why.
Because he hadn't been born as an empty babe.
He'd been… moved.
He had been twenty years old, college, history, novels, games, the comfortable arrogance of believing the world ran on rules you could learn. Then one day, on the way home, lightning had come down like a god's finger and erased him.
He remembered the flash.
He remembered the sensation of being unmade.
And then this part always came back like a fever image, he remembered being pulled toward a presence that felt like laughter wrapped in indifference. A lazy goddess, he'd called it in his head, because his mind needed a shape for the impossible.
She had said it was an accident. Practice. Mistake.
She had said she'd "redeem" it by throwing him back into life, randomly.
Maybe that had been real.
Maybe it had been his dying brain trying to comfort itself with bullshit.
Either way, he'd woken here.
Hollow.
The Gift.
A bastard's body.
And fifteen years of cold work that were not a story, not an adventure, not a noble montage. Just survival.
He grew up like the others did. People with heavy pasts, living shoulder-to-shoulder because the woods didn't care who you used to be. There were beasts. There were wildlings sometimes. There was winter that came early and left late. Everyone did what they could.
Edrin's job was scouting. Into the trees, day after day, eyes on the ground for edible plants and eyes on the snow for the trails that meant something hungry had passed.
That was how he'd found it.
The weirwood.
Deep in the forest, where the pines grew close and the air went still in a way that made your skin prickle. He'd wandered too far, chasing a trail, thinking he was clever. Then the trees had opened on a clearing that felt wrong to breathe in.
A giant heart tree ; white as bone, leaves red as fresh-torn meat.
A face in the bark.
Watching.
He should have run.
Instead he'd touched it.
And the world had… shifted.
That was when the weird dreams started.
Dreams of him grown different ways, living different lives, choosing different kinds of power. Dreams that weren't random scenes, but long stretches, years compressed into something he could swallow in a single night.
Before the first dream, he'd been just a bastard boy in a cold place with half-memories that didn't fully fit. After it… memories from his past life surged hard, like a dam breaking. Everything clicked. Westeros. The Watch. The Old Gods. The shape of history like a blade laid on a table.
And with that click came the thought that refused to die:
Golden finger.
He hated the term. It sounded stupid. It sounded like a joke.
But the dreams weren't jokes.
They were possibilities.
And now--
He rubbed his arms, trying to chase off the cold. The hut's shadows wavered with the firelight. Somewhere outside, wind moaned through bare branches like a creature denied its kill.
Edrin stared at the dark and tried to force the question into something he could answer.
How do I use this?
He didn't have an army. He didn't have a lord's name. He didn't even have a clean date to hang the world on.
All he had were these dreams and the taste of a future that kept changing when he blinked.
"None of this makes sense," he whispered. "How the hell do I--"
A sound rang inside his skull.
Clean. Bright.
Unmistakable.
DING!
Edrin went still.
The hut did not change. The fire still hissed. The cold still pressed in.
But something in him felt… addressed.
Words formed behind his eyes, sharp as carved stone. Not his voice. Not any voice he'd heard in Hollow. Not the Old Gods' silence either.
Just there.
[ CHOOSE THE SYSTEM ]
And then, as if the thing presenting it couldn't be bothered to dress it up prettily:
[ 1. THE RELATIONSHIP SYSTEM ]
[ 2. KINGDOM BUILDING SYSTEM ]
[ 3. THE ... ]
[ ... ]
[ ….. ]
Edrin stared, jaw tightening.
His chest felt tight in a different way now; not panic, not cold.
Decision.
So the systems were real.
And the dreams--
The dreams had been previews. Practice runs. Warnings. Temptations. A way to show him what happened if he picked one shape of power over another.
A laugh tried to claw its way up his throat, half relief, half hysteria.
He swallowed it down.
"Huh," he said softly, because he didn't trust his voice to be steady if he spoke louder. "So I get to choose."
He looked at the half-formed list, the unfinished third line, the emptiness hanging after it like a threat.
And for the first time since the lightning, since Hollow, since the heart tree and the nine dreams,
Edrin felt something that wasn't just survival.
He felt the weight of a lever under his hand.
"These systems," he murmured, eyes narrowed, "they're the ones my dreams were about. Different possibilities. Different routes."
He breathed in smoke and cold.
Then, very quietly, like he was speaking to something that could hear him through bark and root and blood:
"Alright. Let's see what you're really offering me."