Disclaimer: I own none of these characters, I just like to torment them and see how they react.
to view the aesthetics for this story, follow the link in my bio to my imgBB board
or
aesthetics are included in chapter if you read this on ao3, penname: Tebby_Sweet
If you're here because you're following A Timeless Light, don't hate me! Chapter 13 is coming! But the last couple of months were completely ruined by Game of Thrones for me and I finally just had to get it out, I couldn't move on past it so I had to jump in feet first and write. What started as a small fix it fic quickly spiraled out of control and left me with this beast. So here we go, my second epic in the making, a complete AU retelling I had no business starting.
Also, be warned now that while this story is mostly based off the books, which I have read and prefer, I will be mixing elements from the show as I see fit. Yes, the books are better and S7/S8 were trash, but since that's the only ending we have at the moment, this story assumes that ending and all previous events as canon. What I write will then be a mixture.
Please understand up front that as an author I refuse to tag every single aspect of my story. For the sake of not giving away important plot points ahead of time, and I would never expect a book I picked up off the shelf to do so either. Also please note that just because something seems obvious at first and you assume I have mistagged or purposefully mislead readers, I do know this story in it's entirety, as opposed to what the readers have read. I may refuse to slap 75+ tags on it but what tags I put are there for a reason.
Bran
King's Landing was hot. Stiflingly so. A lifetime of harsh Northern winds had left him ill suited to the humidity of the capitol city. Brick and stone seemed to sweat here, the heat rising off in shimmering waves, leaving nothing but the smell of sweat and the bright glare of the sun.
Much of the city was still in ruins. Towers, walls, houses, shops, none had been spared the dragon's rage. Piles of crumbled rock as tall as the buildings that had once stood there, unrecognizable streets and districts. What little remained was scorched black and stained red with old blood.
King's Landing was little more than a scarcely closed wound. Far from healed, badly sewn, barely cleaned before the bandages were applied.
He could see it, far from now, how it might look again. Gleaming white and gold towers, markets bursting and plentiful, the towering Red Keep magnificent once more against the backdrop of Blackwater Bay.
Or perhaps he was seeing it as it had been, in a time long past.
It was hard to say sometimes. He was the Three-Eyed Raven and he saw both everything and nothing at all. It was all there to be seen, if he could only understand what he was looking at.
They wheeled him across the bumpy path that had been haphazardly cleaned in preparation for today. Steep piles of debris lined both sides but not much could be done about the deep gouges in the earth where once there had been pavement. Whispers followed their slow procession all the way, furtive glances of the common folk as they made their own weary way about the wreckage, fierce glares from the remnants of two of the greatest armies Westeros had ever seen.
None of it bothered him so much as the heat.
The sun was high and the air thick with humidity when they finally reached their destination. Of all the places in Kings Landing to have survived the queen's wrath, the Dragonpit seemed to have endured without so much as a stone out of place. Of course, considering the ruin it had been before the battle, he supposed that wasn't saying much.
He was pushed to the top of the elevated platform and placed underneath one of the raised canopies that had been erected between them and the sun. His sisters took their places beside him, silent and cold as the lands they called home.
Bran knew what was coming.
He had seen it months ago, perhaps longer if he were being honest with himself. But seeing and knowing were two different things and it wasn't until he had returned to Winterfell that he allowed himself to know the inevitable.
They would name him king here at this council of the last left standing, and it was the last thing he had ever wanted.
As the Three-Eyed Raven he would have been most content to be left alone to ages past.
As Bran he had wanted to be a knight, bold and brave and as far from lordship as he could ride.
As the king he would have neither of those things.
And that was acceptable. Little truly troubled him anymore, and what did was all in the past where nothing could be done.
Well, except for the heat.
The council commenced and played out exactly as he'd known it would. When Tyrion was brought before them to speak, wisdom born of experience and mistakes poured forth. He would be a good Hand of the King, even though he did not want it.
Perhaps it was the ones who truly did not want power who were best suited for it.
Perhaps all it did was corrupt and it was meant for no one at all.
It had certainly never done anyone he knew or cared about any good.
His father was long dead, victim to a deadly game he had refused to play, and his mother and brother had followed, two sides of the same cursed coin. Rickon died almost before he'd had a chance to live. Arya was alive and stronger than ever, but separate and alone in her knowledge and skills. Sansa was cold as ice and hard as the North itself but Bran had seen and understood each and every loss. Her innocence, her friends, her protector, it was all gone and nothing but the queen remained. And Jon was even now rotting away in some undisturbed room of the Red Keep, as close to a cell as Greyworm could find after the castle's dungeon had collapsed in on itself. Nothing they did to him could ever compare to the pain and rage he felt after killing the Dragon Queen, however, and his sorrow at her death would live in him until he died.
Power had done nothing for the Lannisters or the Baratheons, the Martells or the Tyrells. Not a single person Bran had ever known had been capable of turning power into prosperity and he wondered if any of them going forward could. The future was an open book before him but it's words were a confusing language he would always be learning to read.
The past was easier.
There, Bran could see everything that had happened and understand exactly where it all went wrong.
It was a blessing and a curse, to be able to see but not change, though Bran mostly felt it a curse.
When the council named him Bran the Broken, First of His Name, King of the Andals and the First Men, Lord of the Six Kingdoms and Protector of the Realm, he almost sighed at the ridiculous inevitability of it all.
How had it come down to this?
Later, when he was back in the Red Keep and the sun had mercifully sunk below the horizon with only the promise of an equally unbearable tomorrow, Bran sat alone in the throne room. Whatever former glory it may have possessed was no more, hidden under broken rock and a fine layer of ash that never seemed to go away. The towering, arched ceilings were all but gone, only a few charred beams left behind, exposing the room to the humid night air. The Iron Throne that so many people had fought and died for was nothing but a black stain on the ruined stones.
Bran sat facing it but his eyes were on another stain. The blood had soaked through rubble and dirt and dried in the remains.
A queen had died here.
A king, too, though he would never be crowned.
It was all such a waste.
How many others had died here in this room, in this same spot? He thought of the grandfather and uncle he had never known, thought of the Mad King executing them here for protesting Prince Rhaegar's kidnapping of Lyanna Stark, yet another event that could have prevented Robert's Rebellion if it had just been... handled differently.
The Mad King, they had called him. It was said he'd heard voices no one else heard, saw things no one else could see. Bran could almost sympathize with him. He too was tormented by everything he couldn't change.
Lost in thought, eyes fixed on Daenerys's blood staining the ground, Bran didn't notice at first when the world around him began to fade to white, reforming around him as stone walls stood tall once more and the Iron Throne rose before him, immense and terrible.
It wasn't until the screams started that he jerked his head up to see Aerys Targaryen himself atop the throne, pointing at the bloodstain between him and Bran, the bloodstain on smoothly polished stone that did not belong there, not in this time at least. The King was screaming incoherently, eyes wild and bulging, screaming at something only he and Bran could see.
"Your Grace, please, what is the matter? Your Grace, pray, tell us!" A man was begging the Mad King to the right of the throne and Bran tore his eyes away from Aerys to see a man he had never met but recognized from his trips to the past. Lord Varys, master of whisperers. The king did not answer him as he continued to scream and gesticulate wildly. Bran regarded him with a queer sort of pity. He was certainly not a good king, but he also seemed to be quite justified in his madness. If he saw the blood here on his stone floors that belonged to a time many years away, who knew what else he saw? Before consciously realizing what he was doing, Bran began to speak.
"This all could have been prevented, you know."
The Mad King went silent, waxen face white as bone as he stared at Bran at the base of the throne, not a cripple in the past but a man standing tall.
Could he see him?
"All of it. The rebellion, the death, the secrets. So many lives ruined for love and a throne. Your own daughter, dead at your feet. Don't you see the blood?"
The Mad King was still as death and Bran knew he heard every word.
What did it matter anymore? The king heard many things, Nothing Bran told him could make him less mad, and he strongly doubted Aerys could become any worse.
"So many chances to prevent it. Rhaegar and Lyanna, before they ran off together. My uncle and grandfather, before you executed them. Even my father, if someone had just told him what truly happened. He might have killed you but he would never have hurt Lyanna, he might have tried to stop Robert before he killed Rhaegar. So many secrets and they didn't save anyone!"
The more he spoke, the angrier he felt. It had been a long time since Bran had felt anger. A long time since he had felt anything at all.
All this death and misery and him left to put the pieces back together to a puzzle he hadn't broke.
"You could have stopped all of this yourself! You and Rhaegar, you both made choices and you chose wrong!" He was screaming now, screaming at the Mad King who no longer looked mad, only frightened. It was Bran who felt mad now. What was the point of any of it? His powers let him come here, let him see the puzzle before it broke but they didn't let him stop anything. He could only scream at a mad king who no one would listen to and watch it all happen again and again.
"The past is already written. The ink is dry."
He wanted to rant and rave, to rip it all to pieces, burn it all down and start again.
Was that how Daenerys had felt?
He would never know, would never have the chance to ask her.
The world was full of injustice like that.
"The past is already written. The ink is dry."
Was that Bloodraven speaking in his memory or was it him? Bran could no longer tell the difference. On the Iron Throne, the Mad King cowered, hands over his ears as the things he heard tormented him and no one could save him from his own mind.
If the past was already written, Bran wished he could burn the book. If the ink was dry, he wished to rewrite it, to change everything that had gone wrong and make a new book, one better than the one he had read.
But he didn't have the power to change the past, and the Mad King who crouched before him and heard his words was too mad to do anything with them.
As quickly as it had come, Bran's rage vanished. He was tired in a way he couldn't remember being in a very long time, resignation and defeat tiresome companions. He looked away from the king to observe the throne room around him, and that was when he finally saw the gruesome scene that must have played out moments before his arrival. An unseen and yet familiar sight, one he had heard about many times as Bran Stark, the young lord of Winterfell, but had yet to glimpse in the past.
The black remains of a body, still in armor, hung from the high rafters, swinging grotesquely in the air above a pile of smoking wood that Bran knew had born wildfire. A great longsword was buried in the charred bones of that wood, and inches away lay a dead man, arms and fingers outstretched towards the sword he could never have reached. The ropes around his neck were so tight that the flesh of his face and neck bulged and swelled around them, turning the skin purple and black and causing the blood vessels in the eye sockets to burst. The ropes were connected to a long pole that had tightened them more and more the harder the man struggled against them to reach the sword and save his father.
The charred man was Lord Rickard Stark, and the strangled man was his eldest son, Lord Brandon Stark.
"The past is already written. The ink is dry."
"Nothing I can change. Nothing to be done," Bran said to himself now, weary all the way to his bones. He'd had enough of the past for one day. He closed his eyes to warg back into his real body in the ruined throne room.
He opened his eyes.
Nothing was changed.
He was still standing at the foot of the Iron Throne, the bodies of his uncle and grandfather lay behind him, the Mad King cowered before him, and the blood of Daenerys Targaryen soaked into the stone between them.
He closed his eyes. Tried again.
Nothing.
What was happening? Why couldn't he leave this cursed place he had never meant to come to? Was there something more for him to see? Some new horror to bear witness to and take back with him?
Lost in his thoughts once more, Bran didn't see Aerys rise shakily to his feet, stumble down the steps toward him. It wasn't until he felt thin, bony hands grasp his shoulders that he jerked his head up in shock. How could the king touch him?
The king was shaking him now, screaming, spit flying from his mouth as he raged. Bran tried desperately to free himself from his grip but the king was stronger than he looked and Bran felt blood well up in his shoulders where the kings nails dug through clothes and into skin. He fought back, panic building inside him.
Suddenly, the king was wrenched away and Bran stumbled back, losing his footing and falling heavily to the ground. He felt pain in his palms and looked down, eyes widening in both amazement and horror. The skin was bloody and raw, tore from the rough stone.
How could he be hurt here? It shouldn't be possible. This wasn't his time. He was nothing but a specter here.
Except he wasn't, not anymore, at least not to the Mad King and the cold floor beneath him. Aerys was being pulled back by armored guards, being spoken to soothingly by Lord Varys and a Maester Bran didn't recognize, but his crazed eyes never left Bran, the young man sprawled on the floor of his throne room with bloody palms that only he could see.
They pulled the king from the throne room and his screams echoed back to Bran through the long halls of the Red Keep.
He had no idea how long he sat there, shocked and unmoving before the Iron Throne. Guards and servants moved past him, sometimes through him it seemed, but they never noticed him there. The bodies of Rickard and Brandon Stark were removed and all traces of their deaths cleaned and scrubbed away, but the stain of Daenerys Targaryen's blood remained and Bran's palms bled and scabbed. He lost count of the number of times he tried to warg back into his body unsuccessfully.
It wasn't until hours later, still seated unseen where he'd fallen, that a commotion behind him roused him from his mind and to his feet.
Aerys was striding back into the throne room, dressed for travel, the manic look still in his eyes but a determined set to his old, thin face. He stopped just past the massive double doors to stare at Bran, almost exactly where he'd left him. The Mad King stared at him in silence as the moments stretched on, and Bran stared back. Then without a word, Aerys turned on his heel and stormed from the room, haggard guards and confused servants trailing behind him.
This time, Bran followed.
Into the outer yard, where armored knights were waiting on horseback, servants leading mules and caravans loaded with supplies. Bran watched from the steps of the Red Keep as the king was helped onto his own horse, a splendid white and gray mare who seemed to be of a blessedly more docile temperament than her rider. She waited, patient and still as the old king fumbled onto her, yanking at her bridle and gripping her harder with bony legs than was necessary.
Bran felt a mounting confusion coupled with a growing unease as he observed the scene before him.
He had been no scholar in his youth at Winterfell, but neither was he ignorant of the histories of Westeros, particularly the tales of the Mad King who had died only a few years before Bran himself was born. Aerys hadn't left the Red Keep in years before Lord Tywin entered the city during the rebellion and Jaime Lannister drove a sword through his back. He had holed himself up as tight as possible, seeing betrayal and murder in every shadow.
So where was he going now? And why?
In all the tales Bran had ever heard of the Mad King, he had not stirred from his keep during the rebellion, not even when his son, Prince Rhaegar, was killed by Robert on the Trident. He wondered briefly if perhaps he had been misinformed... but no. Something was happening. Aerys had touched him and his hands were bloody, he couldn't return to the present and the Mad King was taking one last look at him across the yard before riding out of the Red Keep like the ghosts of hell rode on his heels. And perhaps, to Aerys, they were.
"Where is the king going?" Whispered a servant to his right.
"I heard the guards saying he's going to find Prince Rhaegar." Answered another.
Bran turned to face them, though they did not see him.
"What for, do you reckon? Think he's gone to execute him, like the Stark lord wanted? For kidnapping the girl?"
"Why would he kill them first for treachery if he was gonna ride off and kill the prince anyway?"
"Why does he do anything he does? He's mad, ain't he? You heard him screaming like he'd seen his own ghost, right there in the throne room."
The whispering servants cast furtive glances about the yard before continuing.
"You reckon Prince Rhaegar really took the Stark girl?"
"Doubt it, the prince is good, better than... well, anyway, he's already married to Princess Elia, and two kids on her. He could have had the Stark girl without running off with her and causing such a fuss."
"Still, they say Starks don't like to lie, and that's a big one, saying the prince kidnapped the girl. They died for it, too."
Before they could continue their gossip they were ushered away by an older servant, scolding them in tense, hushed tones for discussing such things so openly. Bran watched them go as his unease rose to new heights.
With no one to see him, he sat again on the steps, cross legged, and closed his eyes.
With his own time seemingly locked to him, he searched instead for the future. He looked for Robert's Rebellion, for Prince Rhaegar dying on the Trident, for Lyanna entrusting Jon to Ned Stark as she lay in a pool of her own blood in the birthing bed, for Jon growing up a bastard at Winterfell and Ned traveling with King Robert to the capitol and losing his head, the years of war and bloodshed and winter that followed.
Bran looked into the future and no longer saw any of those things.
Instead, he again saw a future that was plain to the eye but difficult to understand.
He was flying over Westeros and he saw fire and blood, stretching on for years. He saw the seven realms cracked at the borders and turned on their neighbors. He saw Targaryen colors, reds and silvers and dragons flying in the North, fire and ice. Baratheon and Lannister banners flew together and the sky thundered and broke over the Stormlands without end. Direwolfs in the West and South, running alongside hounds. A girl with Tully looks and the Stark fierceness, dressed in Lannister colors, alone with no family to protect her. Dragon crowns in Kings Landing and direwolf crowns in the North, and a great, terrible cold creeping from beyond the wall, turning everything to ice in its path. And a man with a dragon crown and white direwolf at his side, Valyrian steel in hand, standing between the cold and the rest of the world.
Bran flew across all of Westeros, once, twice three times, looking for any sign of the future he remembered. But that future was gone now, burned away in the flames of war, of dragon fire, it was impossible to tell the difference anymore. The realms shifted and groaned and cracked beneath him and he plummeted to the ground, fast and hard as his body once had as a child. Just before he hit the earth, his body jerked and his eyes opened. The outer yard surrounded him still, dark and ominous and all too real around him. He could hear Bloodraven in his mind, over and over again, and he tried to tell himself this wasn't possible, couldn't happen.
"The past is already written. The ink is dry."
But the future was changed, the board reset, the book being rewritten. Bran climbed shakily to his feet, watched the world around him move and take no notice of him.
All he could do now was watch the new story unfold.