Mid-280 AC, The Wolfswood, Near Winterfell.
Cold was the first thing he felt.
It was not the gentle chill of morning, but a deep, biting cold that clawed at his bones. It felt as if winter itself had wrapped skeletal fingers around his spine. The second sensation was pain, sharp and blinding, everywhere at once.
Aurelian Stark gasped.
His eyes flew open to a sky filled with grey clouds and branches of ancient pines swaying slowly above him. Snowflakes drifted lazily down, melting as they touched his face. His breath came out in ragged white puffs.
I'm... alive?
The thought was not his own.
Memories crashed into him like a storm tide. Two lives collided, one ending and the other beginning.
Aurelian Stark, the last descendant of a forgotten Stark lineage, had died here.
The original Aurelian had travelled from the distant isles of Umor, lands far beyond the Sunset Sea, where Brandon the Shipwright was said to have vanished centuries ago. Against all legend and doubt, Brandon had lived and founded a new branch of House Stark, sworn not to Winterfell but to survival at the edge of the world.
That line had dwindled due to war, storms, and isolation.
Now, it faced extinction.
On his journey to Winterfell, hoping to rejoin the main Stark bloodline, Aurelian's horse had slipped on ice-hidden stone. His body had struck the rocks below. Internal bleeding and crushed ribs followed.
Death had come quietly, alone, beneath the trees of the Wolfswood. And into that cooling corpse,
He had arrived.
Aurelian groaned and tried to move. Agony flared through his side, confirming what the memories had already told him: the injuries were real, severe, and untreated.
But his mind was clear.
Westeros. Game of Thrones. Mid–280 AC.
He knew this world.
He knew what was going to happen in future.
Every event in the canon of Game of Thrones and A Song of Ice and Fire
Robert Baratheon was still a lord, not yet a king. The Mad King sat on the Iron Throne, paranoid and burning. Rhaegar Targaryen had not yet disappeared with Lyanna Stark, but the shadows of that tragedy were already stretching long.
Winterfell stood nearby.
Starks were there.
That single fact grounded him.
Aurelian Stark, twenty years old, male, healthy before the fall, trained in sword and sail, forced himself to roll onto his side. He bit down on a scream as pain tore through his ribs.
Blood soaked into the snow beneath him, dark and steaming.
"Damn it…" he rasped, his voice unfamiliar and oddly accented—not quite Westerosi. A relic of Umor.
He could not die here,
not now that he had got another chance to live.
Not with everything he knew.
Through clenched teeth, Aurelian dragged himself toward the faint trail he remembered from the dead man's memories. Each inch felt like crawling through broken glass. His vision blurred. Darkness nipped at the edges.
If I pass out again, I won't wake up.
A wolf's howl echoed somewhere deep in the forest.
Fitting.
A Stark dying alone in the Wolfswood.
Aurelian laughed weakly, but the sound turned into a cough wet with blood.
"No," he whispered.
"Not dying. Not today."
He tore a strip from his cloak, binding his side as best he could. His hands shook from blood loss.
Winterfell's walls were less than half a day away.
If he could reach the road...
If fate had dragged him into this body, into this forgotten name, into this brutal world...
Then he would carve his survival with his own hands.
To be continued.....