A World of Death || ASOIAF Gamer Fic

Arthur opened his eyes and the first thing he felt was pain. A deep grinding ache that ran across his ribs and up through his shoulder and settled behind his eyes in a throb that made the light feel like a blade pressed against his skull. He lay very still for a moment, breathing through it, waiting for the worst of it to pass.

When he blinked his sleepiness away he looked up and saw that the ceiling above him was stone. He looked around and saw a very familiar sight.

He was in his bed.

He was in his bed in Camelot.

He lay there and tried to assemble the last thing he remembered into something that made sense, but the memories came in fragments that refused to piece together.

He knew there had been a beach… and… yes a dragon too.

A man whose skull had a second head growing from its shoulder.

But more than that he remembered having a sword in his belly and then after that it was just darkness.

But now he was home.

“I told you.”

The voice came from the far side of the chamber, near the hearth where the rocking chair sat, and Arthur turned his head carefully on the pillow and found Mira there.

She was sitting in the chair with Lancelot cradled in the crook of her arm, the boy’s mouth working at her breast while one of his small fists gripped a fold of her gown. She was looking at him with raised brows and an I told you so expression.

“I told you that you were training too hard,” she said. “I told you a dozen times. I told you yesterday morning and I told you the morning before that and I have told you so many times that I have lost count, and now here you are, flat on your back with your ribs bruised and your shoulder wrenched because you decided that eight hours in the yard with Jory was not enough and you had to go and spar with Rickard on top of it.”

Arthur stared at her.

“Mira.”

“Don’t give me that look, Arthur Pendragon. The maester said you pulled something in your side and that you are to stay in bed for at least two days, and if you try to get up before then I will have Lunk sit on you.”

Arthur continued to stare at her. The fragments in his head were still swirling, the beach and the dragon and the sword.

“Mira. How did I get here.”

“You walked though walking is a generous term. Jory had you under one arm and Rickard under the other, and you left a trail of groaning and profanity from the training yard to the front door that I suspect the children heard and will be repeating for weeks.”

“But I was… there was a battle and there was a dragon, Mira, a real dragon, and I fought Maelys on its back and he put a sword through my—”

“You had a nightmare, my love.” Mira’s expression softened and the scolding tone left her voice. “You have been having them a lot recently remember? The maester gave you milk of the poppy for the pain and you have been asleep for nearly a full day. You were talking in your sleep for most of it. Thrashing about and shouting. Cassie sat with you through the worst of it last night because Rhaella and I could not hold you still.”

Arthur sat up.

The pain in his ribs flared and he pressed his hand against his side and hissed through his teeth, but he made himself sit upright anyway.

It felt solid.

It felt real.

None of this felt like a dream.

The sheets were linen, slightly rough, the kind that Mira preferred because she said silk was too slippery and she spent half the night sliding off the bed. The headboard was the dark oak he had selected from Harmon’s lumber stocks and carved himself during the second month on the island.

“It was not a nightmare,” he said slowly. “It was too real. I was there, Mira. I was on a beach with a dragon and I killed a man but he put a sword through my stomach and…. I should be dead… I should be dead right now.”

Mira looked at him for a moment. Then she shifted Lancelot to her other arm and stood from the rocking chair and crossed the chamber and sat down on the edge of the bed beside him. She laid her free hand against the side of his face and turned him gently toward her.

“You are not dead, Arthur. You are here. In our home. You pulled a muscle in your side being an idiot in the training yard, and the worst injury you have sustained this month is a bruise from Rickard hitting you too hard with a practice sword.”

He looked into her eyes. The same eyes he had fallen in love with all those years ago and eventually The fragments in his head settled and the beach, the dragon and the injuries drifted backward into the place where dreams went when the morning came.

“I am sorry,” he said. “You are right. I was training too hard… I’ll take it easier today.”

“You will take the two days and you will not complain about it.”

“I will not complain about it.”

“Liar.”

He laughed, though the laugh pulled at his bruised ribs and made him wince, and Mira’s hand moved from his face to the back of his neck and she pulled him forward and kissed his forehead.

“Your son wants to say good morning,” she said, and lifted Lancelot off her breast and held him out toward Arthur.

Arthur took the boy in both hands and settled him against his chest. Lancelot was six months old and built like a brick wrapped in linen, his pale hair stuck up in every direction as though he had been dragged backward through a hedge. His eyes, which were the same deep blue as his mother’s, found Arthur’s face and fixed on it.

“Good morning, my boy,” Arthur murmured. He pressed his nose against the top of Lancelot’s head and breathed in the warm baby smell. “Your mother is the smartest and most beautiful woman in the Seven Kingdoms, and she is right about everything, and I am a fool who does not listen to her nearly often enough.”

Lancelot grabbed a fistful of Arthur’s hair and pulled.

“Thats fair,” Arthur chuckled.

…

He took the two days and didn’t complain about it, though this required a degree of self-control that was arguably more difficult than anything he had ever done in a training yard. He lay in bed and read and played with the children when they were brought to him and ate the food that Dalla sent up from the kitchen and submitted to the maester’s poking and prodding with what he considered admirable patience.

On the third morning he stood at the eastern window of the lord’s chambers and looked out across the island while the first light of dawn crept over the water.

It was then he saw something strange.

A spark.

It was on the horizon. Very far away, at the point where the grey line of the sea met the pale line of the sky, a single point of light that flickered and then stopped and then flickered again.

He had no clue what it was.

It was just a spark, very bright, sitting on the edge of the world like a candle left burning in a window.

Arthur watched it for a long time.

He couldn’t help but feel drawn to it for some reason, like it pulled at something so deeply inside him that he had no clue what it was.

Eventually however he looked away, went downstairs and ate breakfast with his family and did not mention what he had seen.

…

The weeks passed and became months and Arthur settled into his life happily. He trained. He ruled. He raised his children and loved his wives and governed his island and practised his sword forms in the yard at dawn and sat with Orwin in the harbour and watched the fishing boats come in while sharing a drink.

He trained Jory until the boy stopped being a boy and became something closer to a young man, lean and strong and quiet in the way that good swordsmen were, the nervous energy of his childhood burned away by years of discipline and replaced by a confidence that Arthur recognised because he had seen it in his own reflection.

He sat with Rickard on the wall of the training yard and drank wine and argued about the proper way to hold a shield and laughed at stories from the North that grew taller with every telling. Rickard had stayed on the island after the training exercise that had bruised Arthur’s ribs, claiming that he was enjoying the weather and the company too much to leave, and weeks had become months and months had become even longer, and the big northerner had taken a room in the castle and made himself a part of the household.

Others came and went.

Tywin visited Brightwater perhaps four times a year, always briefly, always with a purpose, always carrying letters or proposals or trade agreements that he presented. They played cyvasse in Arthur’s solar on the evenings Tywin was on the island, Arthur won roughly half of them, which he suspected was more than anyone else in the world could say.

Brynden Tully came for the hunting. The Blackfish, as people had begun to call him for reasons Arthur has chosen not to comment on, arrived on Brightwater at the start of every autumn with his crossbow and his dogs and spent three weeks tramping through the forests and the hills in pursuit of deer and boar and the enormous wild goats that inhabited the upper slopes of the mountain. He brought stories from the Riverlands and news from the court and a particular Tully red wine that Arthur had developed a fondness for, and the two of them would sit by the lake in the evenings and talk until the stars came out.

What Arthur found strange however was Llewyn… he was staying too. Llewyn Martell of the Kingsguard had apparently been granted a leave of absence by the Lord Commander for reasons that Arthur had not been told, and the Dornish prince had come to Brightwater six months after the training yard incident and had not left.

He trained with Arthur every morning and ate with the family every evening and had developed a relationship with Jory that fell somewhere between older brother and drill instructor, and the sound of the two of them arguing about footwork in the training yard had become one of the background noises of life at Camelot.

Even Aerys visited.

The young prince had come ashore from a ship that was passing through the Blackwater on its way south, ostensibly to pay a courtesy call on his sister, and he had spent three days at Camelot saying very little and watching very much. Arthur had disliked him in the Red Keep and he disliked him on Brightwater, but the two of them had managed a long walk around the island on the second day during which Aerys had asked intelligent questions about the fortifications and the harbour and the mines, and Arthur had answered them honestly, and by the end of it the dislike had cooled into something closer to wary respect on both sides.

But throughout all of this the spark was still there.

Every morning when Arthur stood at the eastern window of the lord’s chambers and looked out across the water, it was there. The same single point of light sitting on the horizon where the sea met the sky, flickering and stopping and flickering again. It never moved. It never changed. It was simply there, the way the mountain was there and the lake was there and the waterfall was there, a fixed feature of the world that nobody else seemed to notice.

He asked Mira about it once, casually, while they were standing on the balcony together watching the sunset.

“Do you see that light? Out there, on the horizon. That spark.”

Mira had squinted at the sea and shaken her head. “I do not see anything, my love. Just the water and the sky. What does it look like?”

“Just a light. A small one… though it’s very far away.”

“It is probably a ship’s lantern. The trade routes pass close to the island on that side.”

“It has been there every morning for months.”

“Then it is a very persistent ship.” She smiled and kissed his cheek and went inside, and Arthur had stood on the balcony and watched the spark until the sunset swallowed it and the stars came out.

He did not ask about it again.

…

The years passed.

Arthur did not notice them turning at first because the days were full and the work was constant and the children were growing in the way that children grow, which is to say far too quickly and with a total disregard for their parents’ desire to keep them small and manageable forever.

Mordred grew into the terror that Aegon had predicted. By the age of eight he was already larger than most boys of twelve, with shoulders that strained the seams of his tunics and violet eyes that had never lost the imperious glare he had been born with.

He fought with a practice sword the way his father fought with Sunset, naturally and instinctively and with a talent that went beyond training, and the first time he disarmed Jory in the training yard the squire had stared at the weapon in the boy’s hand and then at Arthur and then back at the weapon and said, with feeling, “Oh no.”

Morgana was worse, because Morgana was clever.

She had inherited [Inventive Genius] and she wielded it the way her brother wielded a sword, with an absolute absence of restraint. By the age of seven she had taken apart and reassembled the lock on the armoury door, improved the drainage system in the kitchen garden to the point where Godric the farmer had asked Arthur whether the girl could be assigned to him full-time, and built a small mechanical device out of gears and wire that served no discernible purpose except to make a clicking noise that drove Cassie to madness.

Percival was the quiet one. Silver-haired and green-eyed and thoughtful in a way that sometimes made Arthur worry and sometimes made him proud, Cassie’s firstborn spent most of his time in the library reading books that were too old for him and asking questions that were too difficult for anyone to answer.

He had the Targaryen look without the Targaryen temperament, gentle where his siblings were fierce and careful where they were reckless, and the other children gravitated toward him in disputes because he was fair and patient and never raised his voice.

Lancelot was, as Mira put it, exactly like his father. Which was not intended as a compliment. The boy was strong and stubborn and cheerful and completely incapable of sitting still for more than thirty seconds at a stretch, and he had broken more furniture in his first five years of life than the rest of the children combined.

His [Sword Prodigy] had begun to manifest early, and Arthur had caught him at the age of four picking up a fallen branch in the forest and swinging it in a pattern that was recognisably the opening form of the Water Dancing Style, which nobody had taught him and which he should not have been able to reproduce from watching alone.

Sheira was Cassie’s daughter in miniature, dark-haired and sharp-eyed and possessed of an intensity that made grown men uncomfortable when she looked at them for too long. She had received [Arcane Script] and she used it, spending hours in Arthur’s study turning the pages of books she could not yet understand.

And Rhaegar.

Rhaegar was special.

Arthur had known it from the beginning but the confirmation had come slowly, in the small moments that accumulated over years. The boy was beautiful in the way that the old Targaryens in the paintings had been beautiful, with a face that seemed to have been designed to make people swoon.

His silver-white hair grew long and he wore it loose and it caught the light wherever he went. His violet eyes were deep and serious and old in a way that no child’s eyes should have been old, and he had a habit of looking at people, really looking at them, with an attention that made them feel as though he could see tight through them.

He had [Blood of the Dragon]. He had the Pendragon bloodline. He had been legitimised by King Aegon as a Pendragon and Targaryen with full rights and standing.

And he had dragon dreams.

They started when he was three. Rhaella came to Arthur one night with the boy trembling in her arms and told him that Rhaegar had woken screaming about a black beast in the sky and a white tower burning, and Arthur had held his son and rocked him back to sleep.

…

The years continued to pass and Arthur’s body began to show the passage of time in the small ways.

His hair, which had been blonde when he arrived on Brightwater, was shot through with grey at the temples now and the grey was spreading. His face had settled into the harder planes of middle age, the jaw heavier and the lines around his eyes deeper and the

boyish grin of his youth replaced by a more stern expression.

His body was still strong, still powerful, still capable of things that most men half his age could not manage, but it recovered more slowly now and the mornings were stiffer and the old wounds ached when the weather changed.

He was thirty-five years old and he felt every year of it.

And yet years on the spark was still there.

It had not changed.

In all the years since he had first seen it from the eastern window, it had not moved, it had not dimmed and it had not gone out. It sat on the horizon the same way it had always sat there and Arthur looked at it every morning and felt the same pull in his chest he always felt.

But the pull was getting stronger.

It had started as a whisper… a faint tugging sensation behind his sternum that he could ignore easily, but over the years it had grown into something stronger, not painful but harder to ignore. He could go hours without thinking about it. He could go days. But it was always there when he looked, and it was always pulling at him.

He mentioned it to Cassie one evening while they sat together on the balcony of the lord’s chambers watching the sun go down while children were asleep and Mira and Rhaella were in the bath.

“There is a light on the horizon,” he said. “I have been seeing it for years. Every morning. Always in the same place and it never moves, do you not see it?”

Cassie looked out at the darkening sea and shook her head. “I do not see anything, my love.”

“Nobody does. I have asked Mira and Rhaella and Orwin and Llewyn and Jory and even Horus, and none of them can see it. But it is there. I know it is there. I can feel it.”

“Feel it how.”

“It pulls at me. Like a rope tied to my chest… it’s like it wants me to go to it.”

Cassie was quiet for a moment then she reached over and took his hand and held it in both of hers.

“Are you going to.”

“Maybe…”

“Why would you?” She asked. “You are not a young man anymore Arthur, the time for adventures such as these is over.”

“I know… but I can’t help but feel the pull drawing me to it.”

She squeezed his hand. “Then let it pull… but remember you have everything you need right here.”

He kissed the top of her head and they sat together dark and watched the last of the sunset fade.

…

Years on and the house by the lake had become a school.

It had happened gradually through a combination of need and proximity and Arthur’s inability to see a problem without trying to solve it. The orphan children from King’s Landing had grown up on the island and several of them had married islanders and had children of their own, and those children needed teaching, and the teaching needed a place.

Meggie ran it.

She was twenty-six now, tall and beautiful and possessed of the same ruthlessness that had made her the commander of every childhood game on the lakeshore. She had turned the old lake house into a school that served every child on Brightwater between the ages of five and twelve. She taught them reading and writing and arithmetic and history, and Jory and sometimes Arthur taught them swordwork on the weekends, and Godric taught them farming, and Brin taught them metalwork, and Torren, who was old now and walked with a stick taught them stonecraft.

Ben had become a guardsman.

Thom had become a fisherman.

Lena had become an artist whose paintings hung in the great hall of Camelot beside the Targaryen and Pendragon banners. Jory was a knight now, knighted by Arthur himself on the boy’s twentieth nameday in a ceremony that had left both of them in a state that neither would ever admit to publicly.

Lunk was still Lunk.

The big man had not changed in any meaningful way since the day Arthur had first met him. He was older, certainly, his hair had gone grey and his movements were slower, but he still carried birds on his shoulders, still spoke in the third person and still followed Arthur and his family around wherever they went went. He lived in a cottage near the lake house and he helped Meggie with the children and the animals.

Arthur sat on the porch of the lake house on a warm afternoon and watched Lunk teaching a group of five-year-olds how to feed the chickens, which involved Lunk holding a chicken in each enormous hand and explaining to the children that chickens liked grain and did not like being chased, and the children ignoring this advice entirely and chasing the chickens around the yard while Lunk watched.

Rhaella sat beside him.

She was forty now, and the years had changed her though honestly for the better. Arthur thought she was more beautiful now than she had been at eighteen.

“You are staring at me,” she said without looking up from the letter she was reading.

“I am admiring you.”

“You are staring at me and thinking about how old I look.”

“I am thinking about how extraordinary you look.”

She glanced at him over the top of the letter and the corner of her mouth curved slightly. “Flatterer.”

“Honest man.”

“Those are not mutually exclusive, my love, but in your case they are usually the same thing.” She folded the letter and set it in her lap. “This is from my grandfather. He writes that the negotiations with the Pentoshi Lords are proceeding slowly but that he expects a resolution within the year. He also writes that Rhaegar’s application to study at the Citadel has been accepted.”

Arthur smiled. “He is proud of the boy.”

“Everyone is proud of the boy. Rhaegar has that effect on people. He walks into a room and grown men start straightening their tunics and checking their teeth.”

“He gets that from you.”

“He gets his brains from me. He gets his stubbornness from you. The combination is, I admit, formidable.”

Arthur reached over and took her hand and held it and then looked over to the horizon.

Even after all this time it was still there.

Rhaella felt his hand tighten slightly and she looked at his face and then followed his gaze out to the east.

“You are looking at it again.”

“Yes.”

“Arthur.”

“I know.”

“You have been looking at it more and more these past few years. Morgana asked me last week whether her father was ill because she said he keeps staring at the sea as though he is expecting a great kraken to burst from it.”

“I am not ill.”

“Then what is it.”

Arthur looked at the spark for a long time. The pull in his chest was not a whisper anymore and it was not a hum. It felt like a voice now, one that he could hear every time his haze fell upon it.

*Come.*

“I don’t know,” he said. “I truly don’t know, Rhaella. I see a light on the horizon that nobody else can see and I feel a pull in my chest that nobody else can feel… i don’t know why I don’t know why none of you can see it and I don’t know what will happen if I travel to it.”

“Then do not go to it.”

“I won’t don’t worry.”

“Good.”

But the pull grew stronger and the spark did not go out.

(AN: So Dragonstone turns out to be a bad dream and Arthur is back with his family. Good ending. Hope you enjoyed).

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