Chapter 15

The raven's scrutiny intensified at my words but I matched its gaze.

How dare it get indignant at me when he was the one invading my dreams.

After a few more moments, the bird spoke.

No, speaking was wrong, it was more akin to sound emanating from it rather than any true speech.

"You speak a title upon your tongue… A title long forgotten."

The tone was dry and gravelly but perhaps expected from a man who'd been fused to a tree so long that he may very well have not spoken a word in decades.

"Would you prefer another? Mayhaps kinslayer or the last greenseer? Hand of the King, Master of Whisperers, or Lord Commander of the Night's Watch. You've worn many a cloak in your long life, Brynden Rivers."

"You know much, much more than you should." He said, accusingly.

"Oh, people do assume that about me but I do not consider myself a knowledgable person, no. Merely bits and pieces from here and there."

If the internet was good for one thing, it was knowing useless bits of trivia.

"And yet you distinguish me at a glance."

"Bits and pieces like I said. Unfortunately for you, many of those bits concern you. An albino raven with three eyes. I can be slow at times I would say, but I am not stupid."

"Yet you see. You who are neither greenseer nor first man. How?" He demanded.

Huh.

Did I knock Bloodraven off his game or something? I was expecting the cryptic tree wizard bullshit compared to this bluntly asking.

"Nah nah nah nah nah. You do not get to come into my dreams and make demands of me Brynden Rivers. I ask again, why are you here?" I punctuated my words with a growl.

"To learn child, if you even are such. You do not understand the unforeseen damage you have wrought."

"Damage?" I question blankly, not yet understanding.

"The future is a delicate thing, ever-shifting and relentless." He said softly. "Decades I have toiled and sacrificed, all to chart a path to dawn. A slim victory, but a victory nonetheless."

When I didn't speak in reply, he continued. "Changing the future is no easy thing, yet changed it has all the same. Like a rock dropped into a river, you have shifted all that flows past you."

Now that was interesting.

And good to hear.

Maybe I should have felt bad for ruining all this dude's plans but his plans were shit. And it was confirmation that I wasn't as bound to fate as I thought I may have been. No valonqar choking the life out of me, thank you very much!

"It was Rhaegar wasn't it?" I say with sneaking suspicion. "Were you the one that turned him onto his path of prophecies?"

"There was no need, the prophecy of ice and fire would have reached him with my actions or without."

"But it was Rhaegar." Ignoring his attempts at deflection. "My words must have had some impact on him for you to grace me with your presence."

"The silver prince. The dragon prince. The last dragon. Rhaegar's destiny was seen and to be followed. Now, that path has been washed away by your blundering."

Hm.

"Is that why he's been sleeping badly?" I remembered he looked bad that day we met in the White Sword Tower but Jaime has said he's looking like that repeatedly the last few days he joined the yard. "You sending dreams at him like Bran?"

"A wasted effort." Was all he said. Neither true confirmation nor denial but I had an inkling I nailed it on the head.

Some last ditch effort to perhaps course correct the future.

"So what then? If I changed the future that is? Let it be changed then. What do you foresee greenseer? Have I doomed the world to an eternal winter?" I couldn't help but ask.

I doubted it. For all the existential threat the Others posed to the world, they were very much a problem a fully realized Avatar could deal with.

It would likely not be easy or without the loss of many lives, but it was a solvable problem.

"I no longer know." He spoke grimly. "Little can be discerned of the future, the river of time flowing so violently that none may lay glimpse what lies beneath its currents."

So… I knocked the future out of whack?

Cool.

"Hm. Well, I don't think I like your plan so much regardless. Robert's Rebellion and the War of the Five Kings. And your plan was likely doomed to failure since I have no desire to commit incest with my brother."

It was very much Cersei's incestuous actions that contributed to that whole mess. Me being me easily butterflied it out of existence.

"Indeed… You are a far cry from the woman I envisaged. That petty and cruel creature. Cersei Lannister had a role to play but you are not her. I ask you, what are you, creature?"

"How rude of you." I retort with a sniff. "I am Cersei Lannister of course. It was the name I was gifted with my birth."

"Yet you are not her." He insisted, denying my words.

"I am but I am not. You would know all about that, wouldn't you, Maynard Plumm?"

I was kinda enjoying this wheedling of Bloodraven. Now, I had the knowledge.

"Do not play coy and answer." He asked, demanded even.

I wasn't interested though.

"I don't think I will, Bloodraven," I denied him softly. "You have your secrets and I have mine."

The bird stared at me but what it was thinking or feeling, I could not discern.

Probably plotting though.

"You have such interesting dreams…" He said suddenly, shifting the topic.

"I do, don't I?" I put up a false smile, swallowing the flare of annoyance and anger at his intrusion into what should be a safe place.

"Bending," he said, rolling and tasting the world as he spoke. "A magic unlike any kind the world has seen. The first of the disturbances."

ROB or whatever being brought us into the world if I had to guess, shattering the timeline with our insertion.

"Bending." I nodded. "The key to victory for the second battle for dawn."

I hoped at least,

"Is that what you hope for creature?" He said with a harsh bark. "Yet what little I can see only shows destruction. Fire consuming the land, waves sweeping the coasts. Mountains shattering and great towers blown down. It is great power gifted to the unworthy, the unasked, and the undeserved."

Well, fuck. That's about what I expected of Westeros anyway, a place where power is to be abused and lorded over the lessers.

"Yet is that any different from your plans?" I huffed back indignantly. It's not like I'm planning this! I'm just trying to survive it was all. "A massive war on the eve of the second battle for dawn? The North utterly spent and Starks scattered. The Riverlands ripped asunder. I fail to see what your little Prince that was Promised could do against the Others in the face of that."

"You know so little!" He retorted. "The war will happen with or without my will. I merely chose a path through it."

"Well excuse me then!" I threw back. "You should be thanking me for getting rid of that future then. With the war not happening, perhaps you can figure something else out."

"Figure something else out?" He repeated in disbelief. "So much I have sacrificed all in hopes of victory. Decades of toil for naught."

"What do you want me to say, Bloodraven?" I ask with a shrug. "Sorry for existing? You found a path originally, can't you find another one?" I wasn't exactly trying to be dismissive but heck, what am I supposed to say to a dude whose plans decades in the making I blundered over?

"And yet, no such plan can be made," his voice unnervingly quiet and his next words dripped with menace. "Not while you yet wake."

Tensing, I prepared myself to fall into a firebending stance at a moment's notice. "Welcome to how the rest of the world lives, unable to see what is to come. Perhaps something better can be forged."

"Your very existence strangles any hope for the world."

I loosened my legs and dropped into a firebending variation of the Crowding Bridge stance. Where the earthbending one emphasized enduring foundation, the firebending one was more akin to a springboard, ready to launch into the relentless offense that firebending was known for.

"Nah," I meet his gaze, defiance in my eyes. "I think it strangles your hope for the world. I'll find a better way."

"So be it. Only dreamers should delve so deeply into this realm of dreams. Unfortunate for you."

Taking the initiative, two jets of fire erupted from my forward jabs and sped toward his form.

Unfortunately for me, Bloodraven was prepared for the onset of violence and both him and the world evaporated into sharp whipping winds.

Taking several moments to overcome my sudden disorientation as the world fell out from under me, I realized my thoughts were truer than I thought, to my dismay.

I was falling and tumbling from the sky, my hair whipping about around me.

With great effort, I managed to twist myself into a semblance of stability in the manner of skydivers from a lifetime ago.

Squinting and looking down, trying to see what awaited me, I saw rising and tall spires of ice, tips sharp and gleaming.

Oh fuck.

This is the fly-or-die dream Bran had.

Oh fuck, oh fuck, oh fuck.

I wasn't a greenseer nor a dreamer so I didn't have a third eye to awaken. Though looking at all the corpses impaled upon the multitude of spires, being a dreamer wasn't any guarantee of survival.

Fly or die.

Except fucking Bloodraven had taken fly out of the equation, leaving only die.

Right, well if this was some kind of lucid dream, surely I can bend it to my will?

Desperately, I tried to shift reality back into the classroom I had just inhabited. The rooms, the tables, the walls, the floor, and the people.

And yet, it was all for nothing. I was still falling and damn, those spires were rapidly rising in approach, the edges gleaming with deadly promise.

Fuck.

A hysterical thought crossed my mind, about that old saying about the skydiver with a non-deploying parachute and them having the rest of their life to figure out a solution.

Trying to think with the hammering of my heart in my chest and the blood pounding in my head all the while trying to cut through the sheer fucking all-consuming panic was only barely manageable.

Dream realm, dream realm, dream realm.

Uhhh.

Doctor Strange mirror dimension? I mustered my will and tried my damndest to perhaps shift the world sideways so that I would be falling horizontally to the ground instead of hurtling toward it.

Fucking nothing.

BRAIN! WHAT ELSE YOU GOT?!

Though if Doctor Strange didn't work, maybe Inception? I was grasping at straws but damn it, I was going to try.

I closed my eyes. Desperately ignoring the winds furiously lashing me and did my absolute best to envisage my little training chamber in Casterly Rock.

The cistern which would be filled to the brim. The familiar craters in the earth I caused. The broken and shattered walls that had undergone immense abuse under my training. The little earthen benches which I raised for resting lined the sides of the cavern. The little side chamber that was accompanied with various figurines which were utilized for practicing my control. All the details from my basic senses, I poured in. Not stopping there, I tossed in all that I could remember from my seismic senses.

The winds faded and I opened my eyes to sanctuary.

It worked, thank fuck.

"Ha!" I couldn't help but let out triumphantly.

A furious raven's caw shook the room and my fragile reality sundered. The details blurring and bleeding away like water on paint before I found myself tumbling from the sky once more, the ground ever closer than before.

FUCK.

Bloodraven had too much experience in this eldritch dream realm.

Bloodraven.

If I couldn't target the environment, could I attack Bloodraven directly and expel him from my dreams?

Looking around, it didn't take very long for me to spot the little shit flying around me.

"FUCK OFF!" I roared at him, desperately throwing my will and intentions behind my words. For him to be gone, away from here, and to leave me be.

It might have been a trick of the eye but I could have sworn his image went hazy for a moment before it solidified fully once more.

"Caw!" I didn't know a raven could sound mocking but he sure fucking nailed it.

Oh hell, I was out of time and the sharp glint of the spire was rapidly getting closer. I desperately tried to maneuver myself to the side to avoid being impaled but no matter how I juked in the air, the oncoming spire never shifted from its position of right below me.

God damn it!

I'm the damn Avatar, there had to be something I could do!

A desperate last thought crossed my mind while I was only seconds from being impaled, of joining the multitude of failed dreamers who littered the scene around me.

No time.

"RAAVA!" I screamed with all my desperation and hope, dearly praying my last gambit would succeed.

This was a dream realm and Bloodraven said I shouldn't have been able to enter here. But I wasn't the one who brought me here, that doing was Raava and if she could bring me in… Well, she could bring me out.

Yet with each second that passed, the crushing despair in my chest only rose higher.

I was going to die.

Then my world exploded into white and the crushing despair that filled me was wiped away, an all-encompassing peace settling in its stead.

Satisfyingly, I heard Bloodraven scream in agony.

Good.

Fuck him.

"BEGONE FOUL SPIRIT!" A thunderous voice rang, reality itself shaking under her demand.

"WHAT ARE YOU?!" Bloodraven screamed in pain.

"Beyond you."

A fading scream was his only reply before it dissipated entirely.

I felt myself getting sleepy oddly enough, an unnatural tiredness and weakness overtaking my body. Yet I didn't fight it, for the peace I felt in my chest indicated it was Raava's influence.

"Rest, child. It will bother you no longer. Rest." The voice was so gentle, so hypnotically calm, like a mother soothing a child to sleep, that even if I wanted to resist it, I doubted I could.

There was still stuff I wanted to ask like how he intruded in the first place and my thanks for her last-second save, but I was so so tired. With her gentle beckoning, my awareness slipped into oblivion and I felt no more.