A/N: Companion piece to "The Logistics of Good Living." I decided to separate the SI POVs into their own side-story.

Delving the Occult Shouldn't Be Such a Pain (I)

"-. 262 – 265 AC .-"

They say dreams start in the middle.

Apparently, so does life.

Start, middle and life can gain very loose meanings though, when life doesn't technically end when you die. If you stay self-aware during and past the moment of death, you could claim you're just continuing your life someway else. Some call it the afterlife. Some say it's just the last misfires of the brain upon death. Some call it a dream. Some may call life itself a dream. Some may do some or all at different points in their existence. And some, like me, may manage some and most and all at the same time.

I was self-aware on and off before I even left the womb. While asleep it felt like I was dreaming dreams without the light and stars I liked to drift beside. Awake it felt like floating in a deep, comforting blackness that went on forever amidst ripples of motion and obscure voices. And in that state between awake and sleeping, it felt like trying to hold onto a train of thought too big and long for my poor little head.

Self-awareness is a fickle thing when the mind can barely hold one emotion at a time inside it. That's not even counting when it blanked completely under duress, swept aside by primal feeling. Which was sometimes a good thing, as it meant I remembered the loud, distressing affair known as birthing only vaguely and long after the fact. Other times it wasn't pleasant, as I was most often stuck on want. It was a while before I got complex feelings, and even longer before the physical mind got around to being able to form thoughts outright. More time still passed before I could form thoughts extensive enough to veer into recollection. That's when I finally started to actually remember things rather than just know and judge the here and now. The first emotion was embarrassment. The first decision was that I would never breastfeed again. The first realisation was that everything felt completely different from a lucid dream. A stark counter-point to the complacent torpor of a full grown soul that had lived its life and all its dreams of self-fulfilment in the idealistic state thereafter.

Fickle or not, though, self-awareness was a very demanding taskmaster. Consciousness arises from the mind, but that doesn't mean Consciousness doesn't have any feedback. And there was a lot of feedback being, well, fed back. So much so that my brain was driven to develop very fast. It made me eager, jittery and absolutely ravenous. In my dreams where I was fully aware of all of me, I could definitely believe a chess master uses a full workout's worth of energy during a single game. Epigenetics at its most flagrant, and that's a fact.

Truth be told, even awake I didn't mind. I was glad for any chance at a head start in my new life. It was pretty clear from the beginning that I wasn't in my time and space anymore. Well, in those rare moments when I could hold the same thought long enough for anything resembling hindsight to actually occur to me. But that didn't make for much of a demerit in my case. Not for the first few years. Compared to being born to barred apartment blocks and communist breadlines, a huge medieval castle was a definite upgrade despite the lack of technology. I'm sure I'd have felt differently if I were someone other than the son of said castle's lord and master. But I am the son of the castle's lord and master, so the point is moot and that's another fact.

When I'd been reborn was my first great dilemma. At least in my dreams where I had enough mind to care, let alone the ability to still fully correlate all the contents of my spirit and my mind. I'd have been tempted to say the Middle Ages, but several things stopped me.

For one, I didn't see a point in time travel to the past. Reams and pages and hours of lectures, reflection and debates with various people have left me firmly on the wrong side of determinism. Same with the many-worlds theory. They sounded too much like an excuse for nihilism. The latest scheme to sell off-shot comics and bad sequels to films. The latest unproven postulate for fake physicists to maintain their semblance of credibility in academia. To believe you could time travel to the past meant believing it would either make no difference, or that all time travel to the past had already happened. Which would neatly invalidate any desire to invent time travel, unless you really got circuitous in your reasoning. Maybe it wasn't impossible that I might have retroactively reincarnated into some long-dead person. But if the similarity principle has any importance in such esoteric notions, I can't imagine who it might have been. Unless I was nobody or would die young, and worrying about that would be a cognitive exercise in futility beyond even the other two scenarios.

For another, even at my earliest age I could tell that the castle would have to be among the absolute biggest that have ever existed on Earth in all of written history. In fact, I doubted there has ever been any medieval castle even a fraction of the size of my new home. That's without even counting the literal forest enclosed in its walls. The inner walls. My new mother liked to have me brought along with her on her walks and errands, so I got to see most of the castle very early on. At least after my eyes started to see things more than a couple of feet. And what I didn't get that way, I got through window views from the lord's work suite way up at the top of the main keep. My new father never did have it in him to put me down once I had a good toddler grip on his magnificent beard. Which he'd somehow grown by age eighteen. I am not ashamed to admit that over half my available wits back then were devoted to my fervent hoping that I'd look at least half as good when I was his age.

Awesome Dad aside, I didn't seem to be in the proper climate zone for a medieval castle either. As spotty as my waking memory was for the first year and half of my new life, the other year and a half saw me much more discerning. Relatively, anyway. At no point was there the change away from the relatively mild weather we seemed to be having, unlike what would have come with a temperate climate. And the local architecture excluded most places in Asia or Arabia or wherever else outside the Europe and the Mediterranean. The last also being disqualified by virtue of all the conifers.

All told, it was actually quite early on that I decided I had most likely been reborn on another planet. This did not, in fact, cause me any undue distress or bewilderment. I am a full adherent of the Randall Carlson school of human history. Which is to say, I firmly believe modern humanity isn't the first humanity to take towards the stars. Admittedly, the culture and technology level spoke of unfortunate things that may or may not have befallen whatever strain of men I was now part of. But that wasn't exactly a shock by itself either, knowing how much societal regression happened on Earth before and even during my time. I wouldn't even be surprised to learn Terran humans were re-seeded by colonists after whatever caused the great flood. Who knows, maybe Earth wasn't even the origin of mankind. Considering the cycles and time scales in Nordic or Hindu or Vedic mythologies, you could even argue that's the more likely option. How else was the cycle of ages supposed to predate dinosaurs? There was probably a reason why Midgard and its humans always came after most of the so-called gods.

But this tangent is one that only ever had any meaning while I was at rest, dreaming and remembering my past and reveries. My waking self was, I'm glad to say, too busy being an eager, jittery and absolutely ravenous little child absorbed in play and play and running all over the place at age three years and less.

Hindsight would demand this be the point where I bemoan my stupidity at not recognising my situation from everything around me. And, most poignantly, everyone. But I find myself, for better or worse, free of this particular indignity. I wasn't delivered by the Maester, and the few times I saw him was when I couldn't see more than a foot in front of my face, so I never noticed the chain. There was nothing to tell me that the wolf on our walls and banners was in any way fantastical. And I never heard the name Stark even once. Or Rickard. Or Lyarra. Or even Brandon. All for the same reason why, say, you'd have to go and research Tolkien to know that Bilbo Baggins isn't called Bilbo Baggins. His name is Bilba Labinghi. Because Arda's Westron is not English any more than the Common Tongue or Old Tongue or whatever other language down here on Planetos is.

That left the map on the wall of the lord's solar – which doesn't sound like 'solar' – as the only vector of revelation left to me at that very early age. Alas, even this one failed me for three reasons, as I would eventually conclude. One, I couldn't read. Two, I was never a particularly invested fan of A Song of Ice and Fire back on Terra. The number of minutes I actually had a map of Westeros in front of me – let alone a partial one – could be counted on one hand. Three, my father's map resembled Martin's drawings only vaguely. There were a lot more mountains in father's demesne for one. The Gift and New Gift weren't marked either. Even the Wall only warranted one, straight line. It could have meant any number of things. Like a war front or trenches left from some campaign. Or, most likely, an upper border. The same thing I'd seen on the US and Canada and African maps back in the day. So no red flag came from that direction either in the end.

Most telling, though, was that the Three Sisters and the Iron Islands were some three and fifteen times bigger than they were in George's drawings. With the appropriate coastal rearrangements to their respective seas. Which they'd have to be, I suppose, to justify an army size bigger than the total population that should be capable of living on those rocks. Except they, or the Iron Islands at least, weren't entirely bare rocks it seemed. Which was fair, if they were supposed to have the means to build ships to begin with.

All told, I never suspected anything. And in those rare moments when I could hold a thought long enough to care about implications, I never felt there was anything that I could or should do anything about. Not when I was so weak and slow and small. I couldn't keep up with my mind as it was then, let alone how it would surely be once my brain grew in properly. And truth be told, I didn't care enough to worry about it. I only understood enough of those strange half-dreams to have a point of comparison. It only really said one thing: my new life was awesome.

I was born into the literal monarchy. I was the exceptional eldest son instead of the average middle child. My mother was every bit as good as my previous one. And my father – the Good King! – was strong and wise and tender and delighted in my existence and absolutely perfect.

There was no way I could mess this up!

Then I got a brother, my life got twice as glad, and I was finally taken into the castle forest when my new baby brother's second day of naming came around.

Which is when I toddled into sight of the Heart Tree, looked at it and finally realized where I was.

It shocked my waking and sleeping minds alike into incredulous incomprehension. The sort that I'd never been less than hard-pressed to portray even in the best stories I wrote in my last life. The subsequent attempt to overcome this cognitive dissonance by trying to correlate all of both my minds' contents did not agree with my underdeveloped brain.

At all.

That said, I would have been fine if not for that accursed Three-Eyed Crow.