Chapter One — The Cold That Knows
The cold in Winterfell always finds a way in, even with the hearths and the hot water pumping through the walls. Doesn't matter how many furs you wear or how close you stand to the hearth. It always seeps under the skin, creeps into the bones, it whispers... but maybe that's just Bloodraven fucking with me.
It's not the kind of cold I grew up with.
Not before I woke up in this body.
Back then, snow was weather. A nuisance. An excuse for city shutdowns and missed deadlines. Now? It's part of the architecture. The North breathes it. Eats it. Wears it like a second skin.
I tighten my grip on the training sword and step into the courtyard.
Ser Rodrik calls my name, his voice rough like a worn whetstone. Across from me, Halder waits. Bigger than me. Older. Stronger. But dumb and predictable.
"Your turn, Snow," Rodrik says.
I nod and step into the circle. I've been here before—hundreds of times. Halder's strong, but he overcommits. Too much shoulder, not enough hip. Wide swings. Poor recovery. No balance.
He's a builder's son, not a fighter, not yet at least when Rodrick is done with him, he will be a man-at-arms of House Stark.
I lower my stance slightly. Left foot angled. Right knee loose. Keep the center of gravity mobile. I tighten my grip just enough to keep control without wasting energy. Most of the others here don't even think about their grip. I have come a long way for an engineer.
Halder charges first, like I knew he would.
He brings the blade down in an overhead arc—telegraphed from the moment he moved. I don't meet it, it would be pointless he I just too strong for me to try. I slide sideways, just outside the line of attack. Let his momentum burn itself out. His sword crashes down where I was a second ago, the tip bouncing off stone with a dull crack.
He tries to recover and swing back.
I'm already moving. My practice sword snaps forward—first a jab to his sternum, not hard, but enough to disrupt his breath it hits a bit lower than intended. Then a pivot on my back foot and a clean horizontal strike across his ribs. Thwack.
He grunts, staggers.
I could end it there. But I don't.
"Two points for Snow!" Ser Rodrik shouts, loud enough to bounce off the courtyard walls.
The boys around the circle groan or cheer, depending on who they're backing. Strange how things can change in a couple of years, they always wanted the bastard to lose before. I step back, my sword lowered, and I give it a couple of twirls. Showmanship is important after all. Halder recovers his stance, face red from the blow—more from frustration than pain.
Rodrik raises a gloved hand, signaling a pause. "Hold."
He paces slowly across the yard, his white whiskers fluttering slightly in the wind. "That's two clean strikes—ribs and stomach. You let him inside your guard, Halder. Again."
He's frustrated now. I can see it in his eyes—too wide, breathing too fast. He tightens his grip. That's his second mistake.
"Come on, Halder," someone yells. "Don't let the bastard dance around you!"
I ignore them. Always ignore the crowd.
Halder swings again, a fast diagonal meant to catch my shoulder. I drop my weight and duck beneath it, sliding to the side and swatting his blade off-line with mine. A classic bind-and-deflect. The kind they'd teach in any fencing club back on Earth—though they'd call it something in French, and everyone would wear masks and foam. Safety equipment in Westeros is lacking.
Halder spins, trying to keep me in sight. Too slow.
I'm behind him now.
I don't strike. I tap his back lightly with the tip of my sword. A quiet message: you're done big boy.
Halder turns, red-faced and panting. I meet his eyes—not to mock him, but to make sure he knows it wasn't luck. That I chose not to humiliate him.
He nods once. Respect. Frustrated, but not angry. That's something, the boy is quick to anger most of the time, at least when he is not fighting Robb, you can't show disrespect to your future lord after all.
Ser Rodrik clears his throat. "Match to Snow."
Robb claps, laughing. "Well struck, Jon! That was… quick."
Arya's eyes are wide from the balcony. Bran's practically hanging off the railing. Even Luwin, up on the battlements, leans forward a little.
But Lord Stark isn't here, he rarely is. When he is—when duty or courtesy compels him to stand at the edge of the yard, arms folded beneath his dark cloak—he watches in silence. No cheers. No scoldings. No nod of approval. His eyes follow every movement, but they never rest on me for long. Maybe it's better that he isn't here today.
At least then I don't have to pretend this distance doesn't bother me.
Truth is, we barely speak now.
Not unless it's something official—something cold and clean and practical like the North as a whole. Most weeks it's updates on the shipments from the Blackworks, the metalworks on the Snowmelt the White Knife's fork than runs west of Winterfell. Lord Stark let me construct it. Trusted me with it. That's the closest we come to conversation these days—iron quotas and tool weights, construction and designs…
But before, it was different. Before I asked the question.
"Who was my mother?"
His jaw clenched. His eyes shifted to the flames. And then came the lie.
"I will tell you when you are older Jon, it does not matter."
But it did. It does. And I told him so. I said I deserved to know the truth, it spiraled out of control after that. We haven't spoken truly since. Not about family. Not about blood. Not about who I am. Just steel shipments, progress reports and the occasional nod in passing.
For fucks sake you are not a boy craving approval stop it!
I roll my shoulder and step back, letting the wooden sword rest against my leg. My breathing's steady. I'm not even winded.
It's not just skill. It's calculation.
Every move in that fight came from a database of experience this world doesn't have, martial arts, physical conditioning, stretching. In a real fight, with steel? Halder would be bleeding out before he knew he'd lost.
And I'd still be walking away.
"Jon The Builder!" the others cheer.
"Will you ever tell me where you learnt to move like that?" Robb asks, slapping my shoulder.
I give him a small smile. "Practice makes perfect Robb."
"You and our sayings." He laughs, looking at me with mirth.
It's easier than explaining the truth. Than saying I used to teach martial arts on weekends. Than confessing I remember YouTube videos and physics lectures more vividly than I remember my mother's voice. Both my mothers' voices…
We fall into casual talk, the boys of Winterfell laughing, sweating, jostling one another like pups. I let them have it. Let myself smile, just a little. But my eyes are already scanning the walls, there is work to be done even if martial training can't be skipped.
Maester Luwin stands above, watching, hood drawn. Tonight, we'll meet again. Another "experiment." Another lesson. He thinks me a genius, he tried to convince me to go to the citadel a few times, even tried to convince Eddard, to no avail of course. Gifted. I let him think that. I feed him half-truths wrapped in plausible wonder.
Blueprints for reinforced storehouses. Adjustments to the granary insulation. He calls them brilliant. I call them basic survival. Because winter is coming. And next time, the Wall won't be ready. Unless I make it ready.
I watch Arya sneak a snowball into her sleeve. She's clever and sneaky, probably going to throw that to Sansas' face knowing her. Bran climbs the fencing post to get a better view. He's fearless. And I know what's coming for him. I'm going to stop it, fucking Lannisters.
I turn away from the training yard as Rodrik calls the next pair forward. The air bites my face. My boots crunch against the stone and snow. A thin frost clings to the walls of Winterfell, whispering of the cold to come. Summer snows, they call it. As if naming it makes it less absurd. Snow in summer. Sunlight and sleet in the same day. The maesters say it's just the way of things, that the seasons don't obey reason even if they try to rationalize it and make a cosmology around it. They follow no pattern, no calendar. A summer can last a decade. A winter, a generation. Crops die. Rivers freeze. Families starve. And people—people forget.
They talk of seasons like weather. But seasons are war. Seasons kill. The North knows that more than anyone. Old men going out one they and not coming back so they are not a burden, even if a lot of my projects and plans are to change the way of things.
This isn't just the North. This is the world. And the world is wrong.
No one understands that but me.
Spring, summer, autumn, winter. Order. Balance. But here the gods — or the Others — spin a crooked wheel and no one knows where it stops, even if the last winter was when I was much younger…
Fourteen years, almost five and ten.
Fourteen years of waking up in this body, playing the long game, adjusting small levers of fate. I don't know why I was brought here. Or how. But I do know one thing:
I won't waste this life the way Jon Snow did.
I'm not here to fight for honor or names or the love of ghosts.
Even if the memories of my first life feel distant and cold I will make use of the knowledge they bring.
I'm here to prepare.
And when I go to the Wall – when The Fall of Man approaches - it won't be as a bastard running from shadows. Not as some shamed boy desperate to belong.
But weapons ready and plans in motion. A crown on my head and Seven Kingdoms at my back.
Not as a bastard running from shadows. Not as some shamed boy desperate to belong.
Because I won't just be Jon Snow, the bastard of Winterfell. I will be Daemon Targaryen first of my name, Lord of the Seven Kingdoms, King of the Andals, the Rhoynar and the First Men, Protector of the Realms of Men.
And hopefully a Dragonlord… if I don't manage to get myself eaten by them.
I meet Arren outside the old stables. A sharp young man of twenty, once a blacksmith's apprentice in Torrhen's Square. Quick hands, quicker mind. He bows his head when he sees me—he still hasn't gotten used to notcalling me "m'lord" and it's been 3 years since he started working for me.
"Everything's ready," he says. "We've got the new batch of pig iron cooling and the bellows working better than ever."
"Good," I nod. "Let's see it."
We ride west, past the market road and the frozen fork that connects to the White Knife further south, where the river splits like a trident. On the far fork, nestled between two ridges, the Blackworks hums with heat and noise. Smoke rises in steady plumes, but it's no chaotic forge—it's a system now. A rhythm.
Steel is the future of the North, even if food is what is needed, we will need steel to survive the inevitable war that is coming.
Arren talks as we ride. He's excited, and I let him ramble. I like hearing it through his eyes—what we're building here. What he thinks we're building.
"We've got three new molds ready," he says. "Ingots, spadeheads, and those bars you drew for the… the pressure supports."
"Struts," I correct softly.
"Aye. The blast holds longer now. Nearly double what we had last month. Still warping the tuyere ends too fast, though."
"We'll fix that. Clay's too fine. We need coarse sand and ash mix, like in the hearth bricks. Tell Garrick."
He nods eagerly. "Right away." As he scribbles on his note book.
From a distance, the Blackworks don't look like a forge at all.
Not in the way a traveler would expect, anyway—not with the clatter of horseshoes and open fires, not with smoke rising in choking black coils from a soot-caked roof. No, from the hill above, it looks more like a little fortress grew out of the bones of the river side. Angular. Stone-bound. Heavy with purpose.
The outer yard is rimmed with stacked cordwood and iron carts groaning under the weight of raw ore, pig iron bars, and broken castings waiting to be smelted again. Heavy pulley arms swing from reinforced beams overhead, lifting buckets of coal and limestone to catwalks built into the walls. Waterwheels line the stream like giant teeth sunk into the river's edge, turning steadily, endlessly, each one feeding motion through hidden shafts beneath the stone. They rise and fall with perfect timing, pounding ingots with a deafening tempo. A second set of wheels drives the bellows—massive leather lungs—feeding a constant breath into the furnaces. No more waiting for winds or men to stoke the flames. This place breathes on its own.
And at the center of it all, behind a row of iron grates and pulleys, stands the egg.
A furnace unlike any in Westeros. Round-bellied, smooth-lined, fireproofed with layers of lime and hard clay. A dozen clay tuyeres—narrow nozzles—jut from the lower rim, channeling bursts of air directly into the heart of molten pig iron. The heat is staggering, the roar like a caged dragon.
Inside, impurity dies and steel is born.
The others still call it a miracle. They don't understand the method, only that it works.
The Bessemer Process. The Jon Snow Process now. Or the bones of it, anyway.
My proposition to decorate the egg with scales was turned down, wonder why…
Around it, men move carefully, faces hidden behind leather masks, lifting crucibles and pouring slag off the top. The heat is immense, even from the catwalk above. The roar fills your bones.
This is no forge. It's a refinery. A prototype Bessemer converter made by candlelight and stubbornness. I remember reading about Henry Bessemer and the revolution he sparked for my material science test. Now I stand above a miracle that shouldn't exist for another thousand years, or ten thousand seeing how slow Planetos advances.
We step onto the catwalk that rings the egg. Beneath us, molten pig iron glows bright orange, swirling slowly, impurities rising to the top in dancing patterns of darker slag. One of the foremen uses an iron rod to stir, guiding the bubbling surface toward the pour spouts.
"How long's it been cooking?" I ask.
"Thirty minutes," Arren answers without missing a beat. "The air pressure held steady. We've got nearly a ton ready."
I exhale slowly. "Faster than last week."
"Cleaner, too. Garrick says it cuts easier on the mill."
That makes me smile.
Faster. Cleaner. Stronger. This is more than weapons. This is rail, chain, rebar. This is gates that hold, bridges that don't collapse, watchtowers that rise overnight. This is steel for cities...or armies.
"Did the insulation hold during the test pour?" I ask.
"Better than expected. The lining only cracked once near the south tuyere. No breach."
"Good. Patch it with wet clay and volcanic ash. Then cure it slower this time. Two days."
Arren nods and scribbles the note down in his slate.
Below, the slag begins to cool on the trenchline, glowing in a pale arc of wasted impurity. What's left in the furnace will be stronger than any blade forged in King's Landing, Lannisport, or Oldtown.
But the Blackworks was never just about swords.
That's what people assume, of course. Lords think of forges and picture knights in gleaming plate, hammering steel into blood. But I didn't drag an engineer's soul into this world just to make better blades. War is only one kind of power. Wealth builds another.
Inside these walls, we make hinges and locks, nails and rivets by the bucketful. Lanterns to be fitted with glass panes from a partner I have near White Harbor. Still can't figure how to make clear glass, at least that project has been kept a secret, I don't want a Myrish assassin to cut my throat while I sleep. Ploughshares stronger and lighter than anything the world has ever seen. Hoes, shovels, scythes—all cut from our steel, polished to a mirror's edge. We press iron bands for barrels, fittings for carts, braces for timber frames, even fine needles and fishhooks sharp enough to shame a Myrish craftsman.
And people buy them. Gods, do they buy them.
Our shipments ride west to Barrowton and the Rills, south to Torrhen's Square and east to the port at White Harbor, where merchants are already whispering of a new standard in northern steel and its unheard-of quantity.
I step through the heavy doors into the overseer's chamber—more of an office carved into stone than a room, with parchment-littered tables and a wall-mounted chalkboard scratched with columns of figures and symbols only a handful of people in the North could decipher. And most of them work here.
Seren stands at the center, grease on his sleeves, eyes bright behind round lenses we ground ourselves from Myrish glass. A lowborn genius from a fishing village near the Last River, he had a mind made for numbers and the stubborn patience of a man who knew what starvation looked like, while Arren helped me keep my schedule and keeps tract of half a hundred projects all over the place, Seren helped me administer them, he was a —Gods— send.
"You're late," he says, not looking up from the ledger.
"I'm the lord of this operation," I say. "I can be late."
"You say that, but last week you chewed out Garrick for misplacing half an hour's pig iron schedule."
"Garrick doesn't know the difference between a crucible and a piss pot." I mutter, looking at the papers in the desk.
He laughs at that, poking fun at Garrick — the chief blacksmith — a fan favorite around the blackworks. He finally looks up. "We're behind."
My jaw tightens. "By how much?"
"Seven hundred weight of raw billets. We had a clay tuyere crack in Furnace Three, and the bellows team on Wheel Two snapped a gear shaft. I've got a blacksmith and two apprentices reworking it, but the delays ripple."
I nod, already shifting gears.
"What's current daily throughput?" I ask.
"On the newer furnace line? With full airflow and continuous feed, we're running near five and a half tons a day. But only when the river holds steady." More than two thousand tons of steel a year if it held steady 365 days of the year.
"And the water?"
"Snowmelt is still strong. Might push six tons with wheel four if we upgrade the cam track."
I tap the edge of the ledger with my knuckle. "That's still not enough."
He blinks. "It's not?"
"No. Not if we're going to keep filling the orders from Barrow Hall, Saltpans, the grain lords of the Green Fork, and White Harbor's new contracts in Essos."
His brows rise. "You signed those already?"
"I sent a raven yesterday, the orders from Braavos are massive." I say, folding my arms as I study the draft. "We might have to keep the bloomery furnaces running at night. Hire more men and start double shifts. The strain will crack the crucibles. The bellows will give out. And then we'll rebuild them stronger."
Seren grimaces. "They'll keep breaking."
"And we'll keep repairing them," I reply, my voice firm, trying to keep frustration from my voice, everything just kept breaking. "Until they don't break anymore… or until some Ironborn fuck burns it all to the ground." I pause. "Speaking of that."
I tap the map— south of barrowtown on the river on its journey toward the sea, cutting between pine-clad hills, the three long rivers on he western shore of the north citing deep into the north in the map, the Stonemelt, the Rills River, and the Barrowflow.
"The chain is almost set up on the mouth of the Barrowflow," I say. "Lady Dustin will be happy."
Seren snorts. "As if she ever would be happy with us."
I don't smile. "She's not in this for happiness. She's in this for leverage. The Barrowlands depend on the new fortifications for coastal defence. The river runs right past her lands—if the Ironborn ever sailed up again, it would be her cattle they'd steal, her villages they'd torch. She knows what this chain and towers mean." It's the main reason the Dustin and Ryswells had accepted the funding of the fortification on the mouth of the rivers, fortified towers and steel chains.
"Still odd, her warming up to House Stark after all these years," Seren says carefully.
I shrug. "Gold talks louder than old feuds. We're paying her levies to help man the tower foundations. Her coffers swell with every shipment of steel parts sent through the ferry point. She gets roads. Her people get jobs. And she gets to feel like a queen of something again." Its not going to bring her husband back but its something, hopefully enough so that she sends more than a token force when war comes.
His gaze lingers on the map. "And the coin for all this? Steel doesn't smelt itself."
I grin. "The gold's coming. More than I dreamed."
And it was. The trade in refined steel alone had tripledHouse Stark's income in the past three years. Cast ploughshares were selling as fast as we could ship them to White Harbor. Tools, hinges, saw blades, even steel reinforcements for carts and pulleys—every holdfast wanted them. And not just in the North.
"Moat Cailin's western ramparts have been stabilized," I continue. "We're rebuilding the south tower from the foundation. Soon it won't be a ruin guarding the Neck—it'll be a fortress again, we've expanded the docks at White Harbor. Built a grain granary outside Deepwood. And we've three engineers drawing plans for a high bridge across the Last River near Last Hearth—one that won't collapse every spring thaw. New sluiceworks near the Long Lake. A proper timberyard in Wolfswood with pulley cranes. The rice fields near the Moat have been doubling in size for five years straight."
Once, the North was quiet. Not peaceful—just quiet. Cold and proud and sleeping under its own weight. But no longer. Roads are being laid where there were none. Old keeps breathe again. It wasn't easy, convincing Lord Stark. And I was worried he would take the project from me after that fight. But he is a pragmatic man, and he sees how all this is helping his people, the tide is too strong to stop now.
I gave him numbers. Charts. Letters from distant traders willing to pay silver and gold for Northern steel. Diagrams of the bellows and the turbines. Proof, not dreams. I made him see the North not as it was, but as it could be—rich, strong, proud, and self-sufficient.
He listened. He gave me coin. Gave me men. Gave me a chance.
And I didn't waste it.
They see only the iron and the gold. I see what comes after. I see ships built from our own lumber sailing three times faster than any other, bound with our own nails, taking steel, glass and a dozen other products all over the world. I see the day the North feeds itself, arms itself, trades on its own terms. Prepared for the storm…
The wind is colder today.
Twilight bleeds into the sky, casting long shadows over the pines. Winterfell rises, timeless and grim against the darkening sky. Familiar. Impenetrable. Home, though never wholly mine. Winterfell was a fortress in name, but that word didn't do it justice. It wasn't a castle like those of Earth — not even close. Not like the clean-cut stone keeps of Europe, the symmetrical châteaux of France, or even the towering strongholds of Japan or the crusader castles scattered across the Middle East.
Winterfell was gigantic, absurd even. Probably the second largest castle of Westeros. There were twocurtain walls — the inner, high and black with age, and the outer, nearly a hundred feet tall and wide enough for five men to walk abreast on the ramparts. It would be very hard to build siege towers that high, and even then, you would have another wall to take after it, you would need fifty thousand men and three years to take a fully manned and stocked Winterfell with a competent commander.
I'd read somewhere once upon a time that the largest castle on Earth by land area was Malbork Castle, in Poland. It was impressive. Huge, even. It could swallow a city block. But Winterfell? Winterfell would swallow Malbork whole and still have room for dessert.
And yet, the show version I remembered — the one from HBO — had always struck me as… smaller. Cinematic. Neat. Built for camera angles, not snowstorms. That version had one gate, a handful of towers, and yards that felt like a school courtyard. It looked like a high-budget Earth castle. Something you could walk across in ten minutes.
This Winterfell? It took half an hour just to walk from the East Gate to the stables near the godswood, and longer if snow had drifted over the southern walk. From above, the whole thing must look more like a stone city than a castle — a city fortified by generations who knew that the cold wasn't just a season, it lasted years and it was the enemy.
This keep, these stones—they've seen kings come and go, banners rise and fall. But now, for the first time, I wonder if it's ready for what's coming.
A Nights Watch deserter has been caught. I know what it means.
The lion stirs. The hawk is dead. And the stag will come north.
Robert Baratheon, King of the Seven Kingdoms, Usurper, is on the road to Winterfell.
And he's not just coming for old friendship's sake. He's coming for Ned. For his loyalty. For his blood.
For his daughter.
At least I will get to see Cersei Lannister, George kept raving about how beautiful she was in the books...