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."
...
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