Chapter 39: The Threads of Fate

Beneath a wave of pleasure a snowy waste presented itself.

With the gusts of snowy wind buffeting me from all sides came little sounds. Human sounds. Grunts and groans and moans and whimpers. Pain? Fear? Maybe. Probably. In dreamworld the details were always inconsistent, everchanging. Like the sands of time sifting through your fingers, or a snowflake melting in your palm. The little details may have hidden some significance or meaning, but that meaning always seemed to elude me.

Nevertheless, not one of my trips into these dreams had been fruitless. They didn't grant me prophecy, per se, but rather a strange sort of emotional insight. Hidden truths, half-remembered passages from the book and scenes from the show. Predictions and theories made terrifyingly real. Once I saw the Wall crumble beneath an assault of wights, ice-dragons bursting forth from within, the unmistakeable blare of a horn above it all. Another time I saw a kraken rise from the depths, strange crab-peoples clambering up the shores to lead the Drowned God's invasions of Westeros. I saw the Others win time after time. I saw Daenerys's descent into madness. I saw Kings Landing aflame. Saw Highgarden. Saw Winterfell razed to the ground. Heard the terrified screams of the innocents trapped in the blaze, caught in the blizzard.

I had not been here even a year, and in my dreams I had seen more than I had ever expected I would - or could - ever see. It was a strange sort of torment, or perhaps a sick sort of entertainment. If one could stay detached, it was even possible to enjoy the spectacle. These weren't predictions, I quickly discerned, they were possibilities. And possibilities are, in the end, mostly meaningless.

Still, that didn't make what I saw any less real.

And right now, what I saw was an ocean of an army, an unstoppable mass of corpses rumbling onwards. Their feet kicked up clouds of snow. Behind me was the Wall, fire arrows streaking overhead and slamming into the ranks of the enemy. I kept my composure. This was a common enough dream. It even seemed optimistic. The presence of arrows meant that the Watch had not entirely fallen. Someone far up there was still left to resist the tide.

I watched them come, eerily calm. This was just a dream. The scent, the flush in my cheeks, my rapidly numbing fingers and toes, the wind brushing my hair and the sounds of human despair that came with the breeze itself. Just a dream. Just a scene in a play I'd seen a hundred times by now.

And then the scene changed.

Suddenly the snowy plain was gone, replaced by a wood. A tangle of branches caged me from overhead, the crooked white of weirwood meeting with the darker branches of other, lesser trees. Ironwood, among others. Gnarled and warped trunks hemmed me in from both sides. The blank faces carved into the weirwoods seemed to bleed from the eyes. And before me, a path emerged, a gap in the trees through which I was clearly meant to advance. Strange. Never before had I been thusly beckoned. Always I was ripped from one scene to the next, aware yet completely helpless. And now I was in control?

Warily, I took a step forwards, then another. The snow crunched underfoot, thick enough to bury me up to the knee. The air here was dead, the breeze banished, though the atmosphere still seemed to creak and moan. Crows started to appear on the branches, beady black eyes following me as I advanced. A smattering, at first, and then a veritable swarm. Every branch had one patiently perched atop it, little heads occasionally cocked in curiosity as they observed me. And then, just as suddenly as they had appeared, they would slip away in a puff of black smoke.

"Come out, Bloodraven," I ventured. Only one figure would use such imagery. Only one figure would possess the capacity to peer into my dreams.

A swarm of crows gathered ahead of me, trailing smoke, merging in some cacophony of flesh and feathers. From within the storm a man emerged with long silver hair and a single red eye and a hood pulled over his head, weirwood longbow in one hand, the Targaryen sigil proudly shown on his surcoat atop his mail. One side of his face bore the characteristic scar, angry red marring his otherwise perfectly milk-white skin. His waist was girded with a thick leather belt, an ornate dagger in it's sheath at his side. A quiver of dragonglass arrows sat on his back, the leather strap crossing his shoulder and chest.

"Why am I here, Brynden?" I asked, in a softer, less assured, less demanding tone.

"Why, indeed?" Brynden asked, his lips moving just slightly out of sync with his voice. Utterly calm, that voice. Cold. Threatening, yet tentative, uncertain. "Why would a stranger from another world invade the mind of a little bastard boy?"

I shrugged. "I don't know," I said. "One moment I was in my old life, and the next..."

Brynden's calm expression suddenly became angry, cruel. "A victim of circumstance, are you?"

A jolt of pain throbbed through my head. My breath shortened in my chest. My heartrate began a slow ascent. My face hurt, my ears rushing with blood.

"Yes," I asserted, suddenly furious. I had been uprooted from my home, my family, everything I had ever known or loved. Any other man might have collapsed into despair. All things considered, I had done reasonably well not only for myself, but for Westeros as well. An attitude of detachment may have defined my decision-making, but the knowledge of stakes was omnipresent. Ruthless action was undertaken with consideration to the lives that could be lost or saved. And maybe, just maybe, a dream of advancement undergirded everything - the last strand of hope to cling to in the most desperate times. "This world is a shithole. You should consider yourself lucky I haven't been driven mad, or simply abandoned all my responsibilities. Most you people are cunts."

"Your intervention has tangled the threads of fate, boy," Bloodraven hissed. "In your foolish quest to save us you may well have doomed us all."

I sneered. "Prophecy is, and always was, a crock of shit. Self-fulfilling in most circumstances. Luck or the gods or fate may well decide to fuck with me, but in the end I make my own future. I won't let you, or anyone else, take that away from me."

Bloodraven met my sneer with a look of scorn. "And what does that future look like, hmm?"

"It looks like peace," I vehemently insisted. "Like prosperity. Like progress. I envisage a world with abundant harvests. A world in which war is a distant memory for most, where the majority of children are fated not to lead short, miserable, brutish lives but rather long lives full of possibility. A world with happy families and faithful marriages. A world of honest and dignified labour. A world of competent governance and human freedom and honour and wealth abound. A world in which the worth of a man is not merely in his name, but rather in the strength of his character and the sweat on his brow. It's a dream far beyond my reach for now, but mayhap I can pull us all a little closer towards it. Start the slow, unceasing march forwards that may in five-hundred years or perhaps a thousand yield fruit in a better future for everyone."

Listening to myself, I was struck by how cringe-inducingly earnest my words had been. Had I always been such a naïve sap? Obviously, I knew the world could be better, but the future seemed dim regardless. This was Westeros, after all. And even in my old life, I had never been a utopian. Never one to fall for the unrealistically grand and sweeping visions of the kind that I now espoused. And that instinct had served me well. Demagogues and god-heads are, as a rule, dangerous.

But hadn't Justinian secured the future of Byzantium for centuries to come? Hadn't Aurelian averted the crisis of the third century? Hadn't Augustus initiated the Pax Romana? Hadn't Khosrau Anushirawan essentially succeeded in his quest to remake Sasanian society? Hadn't Admiral Yi achieved the impossible in beating back Toyotomi Hideyoshi's Japan? Hadn't Metternich negotiated Austria's path to power by the ruthless application of power politics alone, and all after suffering defeat after defeat at the hands of Napoleon? Hadn't Bismarck united Germany from a dozen bickering principalities? Hadn't Adam Smith fundamentally changed the world forever for the better with just his writings alone? Hadn't Abraham Lincoln held his nation together in a time of extreme stress, and ushered it ultimately to a better future through his careful stewardship?

Great men are often unreliable, yes, but when they succeed they can work genuine miracles. Maybe that makes me a hypocrite. Maybe that makes me a gullible fool. Maybe that makes me a wannabe with delusions of grandeur. Nevertheless, I did not relent, meeting Bloodraven's gaze head-on, stern.

Brynden's scorn seemed to waver for a second, but quickly resolidified on his face. "You truly are a child," he spat. "Or else a desperate, addled fool."

I let the anger leak from my breast with a long-suffering sigh, though the physical sense of heightened anxiety did not leave me. "Maybe," I shrugged, slightly dizzy, my head now pounding. "Probably. But isn't it worth a try? Isn't it worth looking beyond the Long Night at what could be? You may think me a fool for it, but I don't agree. I'm no fool. I don't think the world will ever be perfect, but I do think it could be better. If you've been observing me for any length of time you'll know I am no stranger to the cynical games of power. I don't mind assassinations, manipulations, plots or any other such things. But I refuse to play those games purely for myself. Self-interest is surely a part of it, but it is not all. If it was I would have run off with a good chunk of the treasury to greener pastures a long while ago."

Bloodraven stared at me for a long moment, silent. Nothing moved, even as the pain in my head grew more intense, my concentration wavering. "What you are," he finally seemed to decide, "is another complication. Like the Red Woman lingering at the Wall, or the like the One-Eyed Crow setting off from his islands in the west, or like the shadowbinder Quaithe in the east. For a long while your presence in the south set the world into a state of flux. Certainties became mere possibilities, and the strands of fate tangled and untangled and obscured themselves from inspection. Even now you seem to me to hide yourself behind a cloak of shadows."

"Yet unlike the One-Eyed Crow," I retorted, "you and I don't have to work at cross-purposes. Fundamentally, we both want mankind to survive and thrive. Euron doesn't. You say my presence has disrupted the strength of prophecy, fate. Well enough. But with the uncertainty this creates comes the chance for something better."

Bloodraven laughed a bitter, cynical laugh. "Everyone seems to think they are the prophesied one. Without exception. The one fated to save the world. Or perhaps the one fated to destroy it and build anew in their own image."

"I don't," I retorted, though internally I suspected that Brynden may have been more correct than I was willing to admit. "I want to be great, I won't deny it, but I don't think I'm Azor Ahai or any such rot. I'm no saviour. I'm no champion. In my old world I was nobody special. And, frankly, I don't really want to be special. Bearing the weight of the world on my shoulders sounds dreadful. But to make good changes I don't need to be a saviour. I merely need to align the interests of others towards a common goal. And in that, I think you will agree, I have been doing well."

"So not a saviour but a schemer," Bloodraven surmised.

"Much like yourself," I agreed, now feeling faint. The pain was intense, the sensations confused. Pain, pleasure, fear. "There have always been Targaryens who dreamed of things to come, since long before the conquest. But Targaryens aren't the only ones who can have dreams."

"Hmm," Bloodraven said. "Well enough. I will accept you are not my enemy, though I know not whether you ought to be an ally. I would like to stay and discuss things further. Yet your mind... It's not like any other I've felt. Alien. Strange. Clearly of another world. Strained by this simple act of talking. Yet it is also malleable. Subject to change. Perhaps to improvement. So begone, stranger, before your mind breaks and all that potential is lost. We will speak again in future."

And, just like that, the real world returned. Every muted sensation I had experienced in the dreamscape exploded into reality with a stifled scream. My vision blurred and unblurred, my nerves alight with a haze of sensations. Yet the sounds, smells and sights were undeniably those of sex. I found myself atop my wife, who was flat on her back, her wrists pinned tightly to the bed by my hands, her bare breasts heaving and slick with blood, her face contorted with terror, whimpering, her body simultaneously frozen stiff and trembling.

I felt my face twist with revulsion almost as soon as I came to awareness. I withdrew, lifted my hands off her wrists and dismounted her. "Gods." I blinked in shock, eerily calm. A quick once-over seemed to suggest that the blood was not hers. The only visible injury I could see was the hand-shaped bruising around her wrists where I had pinned her. "I didn't hurt you, did I?"

Margaery seemed on the verge of tears. She opened her mouth, but failed to produce any words. "Your Grace..." she finally managed, her voice marked by a tremor.

Blood dripped on the sheets below me. I lifted a hand to my face. My fingers came away wet with the stuff. My eyes, nose were bleeding profusely. Licking my lips revealed the tell-tale metallic taste. My face ached something fierce, as did my chest. My heartrate was only now beginning to settle, the effects of adrenaline only now beginning to abate. Muted sensations gradually grew in intensity. The white of the sheets had been stained red in many places. No wonder I felt faint. How much blood had I lost?

"What happened?" I asked her, my head spinning.

Margaery gathered some of the bedsheet up in her hands to guard her modesty, her hands trembling. "You... We had gone to bed, and then... It started nice enough, but then you seemed to lose control, Your Grace. You became stiff. It was unlike you - you're always so careful, considerate. Yet men have been known to succumb to the throes of lust before, or so I thought at first, but then..."

"Then I started bleeding," I filled in for her, wiping some of the blood off my cheeks.

"I couldn't see your eyes," she said, her voice shaky. "They'd gone all white by the time you started weeping blood. I thought about calling one of the guards, yet... The sight of you like that struck me dumb with shock. Had... it, lasted any longer I likely would have found my voice again."

I could only sigh and nod. So much for small mercies. If the guards had found me like that... Well, it probably would not have ended well for me.

Had Bloodraven tried to warg into me? Is that what had caused our meeting? Is that why my visions appeared to have started whilst I was still awake, instead of after I had gone to sleep as they usually did? Or had my exploration of the dreamworld merely intersected with his? The former seemed more likely than the latter, but I couldn't be sure. Certainly, none of my previous nightmares had led to such visible consequences. There was usually some sweating, some disorientation and some panic but until today no blood. And yet, even if that was the case, what could I do? I could only hope any future meetings we had would prove less... messy.

"Your Grace," Margaery ventured, hesitant, "you need to go see the Grandmaester."

"No," I quickly overrode her. "This stays between us. Nobody else is to know. This one was worse than the last ones, that's all. I'm sorry you had to see it, truly, but I cannot have you speaking of this."

"What... What is this?" Margaery asked.

"The gods dole out their curses and blessings how they please," I reluctantly said, summoning up a suitable explanation in my exhaustion. "Daenys Targaryen was gifted with foresight, and cursed with madness. Or perhaps the foresight was her curse, and the madness her blessing. Her escape from the horrible realities of prophecy. Nevertheless, I have a little of that same blood in my veins. Joffrey got the Targaryen madness, the penchant for cruelty. I got the dreams. The nightmares. The fits."

Margaery reached out to me, tentative, still trembling slightly, her face twisting with sympathy. "Your Grace..."

Suddenly, my mood changed at Margaery's refusal to simply let the matter drop. The mental exhaustion and blood-loss were getting to me. My mind felt frayed, as though someone had decided to stress-test it, simultaneously stretching and compressing every synapse. I needed to rest more than anything. To sleep. Irritation flooded my skull, coloured with impatience and indignation. Who was she to offer me pity? To look at me like I was some sort of stray kitten?

"Forget it," I snapped, my voice unnecessarily harsh. "None of this is your concern. You continue enjoying the privileges of being a queen. I've always dealt with such problems on my own. No need for that to change. Just don't tell anyone what you saw tonight."

Margaery reared back at my tone, as though I had just slapped her. Instantly, the irritation I felt was supplanted by guilt.

"I... I'm sorry. I shouldn't have spoken to you like that." I fell back onto my side of the bed, collapsing flat onto my back with a heavy sigh, feeling myself deflate. "My mind isn't quite right. The visions are often taxing. But don't worry, I just need to rest, to gather myself. Then I'll be all back to normal."

Margaery loomed overhead, uncertain, and I extended a little of the bedsheet for her to use to clean herself. A peace offering. These sheets would need to be disposed of. And discretely. I couldn't afford any inconvenient questions being asked by the wrong people. Margaery wiped her face with the sheet and eyed me cautiously. Much of the panic had left her by now, but there was still an underlying wariness about her. The distance of a just a few inches between us suddenly felt like a gaping chasm.

Still, to her credit, the girl nodded and lowered herself to lie uneasily beside me. "Of course, Your Grace."

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P.S. May be subject to a rewrite or edits in the future. Sorry if quality was sub-par. This one was a bit of a rush job. Will try to refine when life permits.