Captain Richard Watkins was having a very odd dream.
Before his eyes stretched out an endless shining blue of a warm southern sea, like the waters of the Gulf washing upon the Southern coast he had seen in Louisiana, returning from the war with Mexico, which he had, to his immense chagrin, missed.
As he flew amongst the fuzzy white clouds, his speed far greater than aerostats or even birds, a thin sliver of darkness appeared on the horizon, rapidly turning from a hair-thin foggy crescent into a visage of land, harsh deserts and mesas, pale brown and ruddy, with a thin webbing of streams connecting the tall ragged mountains, raising sharply far ahead to the sea below. It seemed a course and hot land, but here and there interspersed by what could only be fields, clustered around oases and creeks, with tiny pinpricks of villages and fuzzy spots of orchards nestled alongside them.
The mountains beyond the desert were similar in their colours, with browns and reds rising in craggy sharp spines, tallest of the peaks covered in dazzling snowcaps. Richard was reminded of the scenes of magic lantern during his work as an engineer through the Midwest he had much enjoyed, seeing the peaks of the mighty Rockies and the far away Maghreb, with snow-capped heights of Atlas rising over ancient Berber cities.
Beyond the highest spines laid a completely different and mighty familiar scene - rolling hills slowly flowing into endless plains, covered in a patchwork of wheat, barley, sunflower and many other crop, criss-crossed by a spiderweb of tracks and small creeks, flowing into several mighty rivers, as wide perhaps as the mighty Mississippi herself.
Richard could not slow the pace of his flight as if he was pushed by a mighty wind. Below him, the mighty rivers and endless fields flew by so fast the details became smoothed together, like the flywheel in the train engine at full steam.
The endless fields soon started to change their colours, endless golden wheat replaced by corn, barley and rye, and patches of forest began to appear growing in proportion to tamed land the further Richard flew. The winds here were colder, and there were snow banks around the patches of forest.
Another wide river slipped beneath him, this one much more wild and quick, with water foaming over rapids, as it flowed from the hilly rugged lands to the left into a distant sea on the horizon, far to the right, joining with other rivers, carrying broken ice amongst the foam. At the rapid second glance, this river was much narrower than the magnificent, lazy one he had seen previous, yet it seemed just as large in his eyes, and so did everything else, the villages grew from pinpricks to matchboxes in size as he was dragged by this unseen wind over a small town, now discerning even the oddly shaped church, an ancient-looking castle tower in the centre and a medieval circumvallation around the whole place.
This dream seemed like some cheap faux-Arthurian epic, thought Richard as he was dragged further on his path, ever lower, so low in fact he could well discern farmhouses below him, passing with whistling speed, an odd castle or two passing in the distance, their squat towers of hewn stone rising above the landscape like icebergs off the Newfoundland coast.
Another one loomed ahead, larger than the common stone keep, its triangular shape rising above an island on the crux of two mighty rivers joining. Two lines of curtain walls interspersed with circular and square-based towers, all built of pinkish-gray stone, reminding Richard in their shapes of the lithography of the Tower of London he saw in one of the history books he enjoyed reading.
Despite the breakneck pace of his flight he managed to notice red and blue banners with a silver fish of some sort draped over some of the towers, sharply standing out from the snow-covered roofs, before flying into a small window in the largest of them.
Edmure Tully was seeing a queerest of dreams.
He was dreaming of being a warrior and leading a large host of men. That wasn't an odd dream to have as an heir to one of the strongest houses of the realm. The details, however, were completely alien to him.
He was not dressed in mighty castle-forged plate, nor a plate jack or scale or mail or even boiled leathers, but in naught but a shirt and a doublet of an odd cut, all cottons and linens and dark blue heavy wool. There was not a mighty host of mounted knights by his side, but lines of footmen, dressed just like him, just without ornaments Edmure knew he had on his shoulders. And not a sword was seen in sight, nor a lance or poleaxe or any other common weapon of war, not even the shabby warscythes or spear-clubs oft carried by levies of miserly and callous lords. No, each and every man held a truly bizarre implement - a long curved staff with a hollow metal tube affixed to it, banded with bronze loops. He himself had a sword, but it, too, was odd, sharpened only on one side, sleek and with a curve to it, held in a decorated scabbard, banded with polished brass.
This host was odder than even the uncle Brynden's tales about the queer customs of Essosi he had met in the war of Ninepenny Kings. The men, however, looked mainly like Andals, with light or red hair and fair skin, with only a few sporting dark and auburn hair of first men in their beards and whiskers. They all marched in a column over a road, paved with cobbles, running across the well-tilled hills crossed by low fencings of stone and wood. This was certainly a rich land, for even the great River Road ran as an unpaved track, and this seemed a simple rural path.
Above Edmure's head fluttered two flags, again reminding him of sellsword companies of his uncle's tales, who preferred banners to pennants and emblazoned shields. One of them was quite simple - a smattering of white stars over a canton of dark azure with the striped field of white and red. Another was much more complex, yellow cloth elaborately embroidered with figures of women holding up a decorated shield, with a motto underneath. Such complexity seemed beyond not only crude banners of the sellswords, but even many tapestries he had seen in Riverrun and other castles and holdfasts, comparable only to Lengi and Quarthi patterned silk cloths, so rare and sought after, one had to pay in gold, and the amounts were closer to the weight of the merchant rather than the bolt itself.
The column of men wheels left under barked orders and spreads out to a thick rectangle, now moving to crest a hill, beyond which Edmure starts hearing yells, orders, and what sounds like a thousand whips cracking, interspersed with an occasional thunderclap. As his dreamed host marched up the hill, an order rang out along it, and the men reached to pouches on their belts, pulling out daggers with odd-shaped hilts, affixing them overtop of metallic ends of their staffs.
As their formation reached the top of the hill, a valley filled with fog opened to their eyes. No, not fog, grey smoke, clouds of which appeared around the lines and blocks of soldiers, dressed in blues and greys, with a few blocks clad in hues of green and brown. One such block was formed next to a small wooden cabin, wearing greys, with a flag above them that reminded Ed of the Bolton sigil - a blue saltire over a red field.
Ed's host quickened their pace, rushing down the hill, as the grey soldiers manipulated their own queer staffs, rapidly working some sort of spike through the tubular end. Their leader - a man ahorse with a wild beard and a wide-brimmed hat, dressed, unlike the footmen, in blue, brought his arm up, and the staffs followed it, now pointing towards Ed's rushing troops like a spearwall.
The opposing leader's arm dropped and a wave of fire and smoke erupted along the grey-clad soldiers. All Edmure heard was an angry whistle before feeling a mighty punch across his chest, sending him tumbling into the wheat stalks, with world growing darker around him.
Two sets of memories collided and mixed, like two mighty rivers, trying to overwhelm each other.
The meanings of simple things went awry, the words of English and Andal boiling together, mixing and overlapping, forming damascene patterns of meaning and subtext. Histories of two worlds were now intertwined in their minds, Julius Caesar sat proudly alongside Aegon the Conqueror, Battle of the Redgrass Field slotted somewhere between Cannae and Agincourt, lockstep legions of Old Ghis marched alongside Alexander's pikemen and Justman retinues found themselves in a good company of the crusaders, Dothraki screamers rode across their endless steppes knee in knee with Huns and Saracens and Cossacks.
But there were different wars and different armies too. The great guns of Orban, Great Siege of Malta, Tilly and Wallenstein, Cavaliers and Roundheads, Maurice of Nassau and Eugene of Savoy, Turenne and Marlborough. The birth and spread of pike and shot, from the marshes of New England to the rice paddies of Japan, the wars of faith, the fall of castle and the rise of the star fortress. The defeat of the tercio system at Breitenfeld and Rocroi, and the end of the era of pike, with bayonets appearing and improving, showing their true worth at the Culloden. The siege of Ath and the slow death of the star fortress. And the culmination of the military progress - linear warfare. War of the Spanish Succession and the War of Independence and, of course, the greatest military mind of all times, Napoleon and his triumphal march of victories across the whole of Europe and the dogged defence as his empire of fear and blood crumbled under his feet.
The scant few sciences that Edmure was taught by Maester Kym were overrun by a torrent of knowledge. The boy knew his numbers decently well for a young boy, but that was dwarfed by the depths of mathematics that US military engineers were expected to know like the backs of their hands. Even further, the operations over numbers turned to operations over reality as mechanics and physics knowledge sprawled out like a web, each parcel of knowledge depending on a dozen others and itself spawning a dozen more.
Machines, machines that can make everything, machines that prepare yarn, machines that gather wheat faster than a dozen scythemen, machines that can hammer and twist and cut and punch, and work the bellows and the engines that power the machines, devouring coal and belching steam, and the machines to make the machines, and the machines that measure lengths with such great precision you can make a thousand other machines, identical to a thousandth of an inch. The clocks that can hold time for months at a time, unlike the one at the Riverrun's sept, whose heavy weights were wound upwards every noon, or those that can work at sea, no matter how stormy it was, or ones that can fit into a breast pocket or on a wrist strap. And the breast pocket as an idea was novel too, a whirlpool of completely different clothing styles was dumped on Edmure, those considered historical, some quite familiar in fact, as well as those that were thought of as contemporary.
And further and further the differing knowledge spread and mixed and fused.
He opened his eyes to blearily look at the room, cut stone of the walls covered in painted daub, with lengths of cloth draped from the ceiling, familiar and yet absolutely alien.
He remembered everything from those dreams, too real to be dreams and so screamed the man and the boy, for they were dead, but there was only one scream heard.