Disclaimer
This is a fan-created work. I do not own any characters, settings, or intellectual property related to Game of Thrones or Age of Empires. All rights belong to their respective creators and current rights holders. This story is written purely for entertainment purposes and not for monetary gain.
Part 2 — The Encounter
Segment 1
The breaking did not end cleanly.
There was no point at which grief exhausted itself and left behind something orderly. No final sob, no last convulsion of sorrow after which the mind could say, there, now the worst has passed. What Damien experienced in the void did not behave with that kind of mercy. It came in waves, but not predictable ones, and each wave seemed capable of carrying within it the whole of everything he had lost, misunderstood, and wasted. His mother's letters, the birthdays that had not been empty but had only been made to seem so, the gifts destroyed before they could ever become memory, the unbearable tenderness of words he had never been meant to hear and yet now knew by heart—these did not simply hurt. They reordered him. Every wall he had spent a lifetime constructing had already given way, but what followed the collapse was somehow worse, because the open space left behind did not fill with relief. It filled with truth.
He had been loved.
The fact should have comforted him. Instead it devastated him anew each time it moved through his awareness, because love discovered too late has its own cruelty. It does not merely tell you what was real. It reveals what your ignorance cost you. It shows you not only the tenderness that existed, but every decision you made because you believed it did not. He had mistaken protection for abandonment, distance for rejection, solitude for inevitability. He had treated his own emotional starvation as proof of the world's honesty. And now he knew that the world had lied to him only in part. The greater lie had been the one he built from the fragments: that because love had been hidden from him, it had not existed at all. That conclusion had shaped everything. It had made him efficient. It had made him formidable. It had made him alone.
If he had still possessed a throat, it would have been raw by then. If he had still possessed lungs, they would have ached from the repeated violence of sound. But the void allowed him no body with which to spend himself. There was only awareness and the sensation—if it could be called that—of being flayed inwardly by revelation. He could not curl around the pain. Could not bury his face in his hands. Could not even choose to look away, because the memories came not as images before him but as realities within him, total and inescapable. His mother in a cheap rented room, writing by weak lamplight. His mother folding paper with tired fingers. His mother choosing gifts for years she would never witness. His mother calling him her little protector in words that should have reached him when he was young enough to need them most. The repetition of it all hollowed him out until he no longer knew where the grief ended and the self began.
It was in the midst of that ruin, when he had ceased trying to impose any shape upon what he felt and simply endured the collapse as one endures weather too vast to resist, that something in the void changed.
Not dramatically at first. There was no thunder, no burst of impossible light, no immediate declaration that the nature of reality had altered. The change was quieter than that, and perhaps for that reason more unsettling. The void had so far possessed one quality above all others: indifference. It had held his suffering without reacting to it, revealed truth without softening it, existed without concern for whether he could bear what it showed him. That indifference had been almost pure in its totality. So when it began to recede—not vanish, but lessen, as though some of the absolute silence of the place had drawn back by a fraction—Damien noticed at once.
At first he thought, absurdly, that he was imagining it, though imagination required a mind with enough stability to invent distraction and he no longer believed himself capable of anything so gentle. But the sensation persisted. The endless uniformity of the void remained, yet no longer felt entirely empty. There was an intrusion in it. A difference. Not sound. Not movement exactly. More like the awareness one gets in a room when another presence enters behind you and the air itself seems to acknowledge it before the eyes do.
Damien did not calm. Calm was no longer available to him in the form he had once known. But some older discipline stirred nonetheless, not enough to suppress what he felt, only enough to let him focus through it. His grief did not disappear. It shifted aside by the thinnest margin, creating just enough space for attention.
Then the presence appeared.
If appeared was the word.
It did not emerge from one direction or another, because the void had no directions. It did not step into being, because there was nothing to step upon. It was simply not there, and then it was, occupying a locus within the formless expanse in a way that defied every rule Damien had spent his life trusting. Had he been forced to describe it with a human vocabulary, he would have failed first and only then begun. It resembled a figure only in the loosest sense, if one defined figure as a central coherence of shape around which attention naturally arranged itself. There was no identifiable gender to it, no face in any human meaning, no body made of flesh or fabric or even light exactly. It was as if someone had taken a fragment of deep space—true space, not the empty black imagined by the unscientific, but the impossible color and motion of a nebula seen through instruments not meant for human eyes—and persuaded it to hold roughly humanoid form without ever requiring it to become human. Stars burned within it, not fixed in place but drifting through layers of translucent cosmic cloud, points of hard white and cold blue and distant red moving through swirls of violet and midnight silver. It should have been beautiful in a way beyond language. Instead, the first thing Damien felt was irritation.
Not because the being had done anything.
Because its existence came with timing.
Because he had just reached the deepest and most humiliating collapse of his entire existence, and the universe—or whatever lay beyond it—had apparently decided that was the appropriate moment for an audience.
The presence regarded him.
Again, regarded was inadequate, but the sensation of being seen settled over him with immediate clarity. Not examined. Not tested. Seen. Entirely. The being's awareness moved over him without movement, and Damien knew with the same certainty with which he had once known the angle of incoming fire that there was nothing hidden from it. Not his death. Not the letters. Not the child in the kitchen. Not the soldier on the floor beside a hospital corridor. Not the man who had spent decades building himself into something useful because he had not known how to become anything gentler.
When it spoke, the voice did not travel through air. It existed directly within the space of meaning, somehow both inside and outside him, clear enough to be heard and yet detached from sound. It carried no identifiable age, no gender, no accent that belonged to any single place, and yet it had tone—casual, dryly amused, faintly exasperated, as if the being had arrived to find Damien in exactly the kind of emotional state one finds mortals in far too often.
"Well," it said, "this is awkward."
For a moment Damien did not respond.
The line was so absurd in the context of the void, of his mother's last letter, of the ruin of everything he had believed, that his mind simply failed to engage with it. He might have preferred a herald of cosmic judgment, or a silent god, or even nothing at all. What he had not anticipated was a nebula-shaped being sounding mildly inconvenienced by the timing of his existential breakdown.
The presence tilted—perhaps. The stars within it shifted in a way that suggested posture without actually conforming to one. "In my defense," it added, "I would have preferred to catch you before the complete psychic collapse. Cleaner entrance. Better atmosphere. Less weeping."
"I am not weeping," Damien said automatically.
The response came from him before thought could interfere with it, and the instant it did, he recognized the stupidity of what he had chosen to deny. If anything in existence knew exactly the state he was in, it was the being before him. Yet the reflex remained. Even destroyed, some habits survived the fall.
The stars in the being's chest—if it had a chest—brightened by a degree that somehow conveyed amusement. "Of course not. You are engaging in a highly dignified metaphysical disintegration. Entirely different phenomenon."
Something in Damien, broken though it was, almost recoiled from the levity. Another part of him, smaller and stranger, recognized what the being was doing. The tonal shift was deliberate. Not mockery exactly, though there was an edge of it. More like intervention by contrast, a hand applied not to soothe but to interrupt. He had been drowning in revelation, and this thing had just kicked a hole in the wall of the room and commented on the décor.
"What are you?" Damien asked.
There were a thousand better questions, perhaps, but it was the first one that emerged with any coherence.
The being seemed to consider. "Ah. The classic. Always nice to start with tradition." A ripple of color moved through its form, dark blue folding into silver. "The short version is that I am what your species might call a Random Omnipotent Being, which is a terrible label, but unfortunately a sticky one. I didn't choose it. Mortals never give elegant names to things vastly beyond them. They either overcomplicate or trivialize. Sometimes both."
Damien stared at it.
The being sighed without lungs. "Yes, I know how that sounds."
"You're omnipotent."
"Close enough for this conversation."
"And random."
"Only from your perspective. From mine, I'm operating under a series of perfectly sensible criteria, thresholds, anomalies, and opportunities. But if it comforts you to imagine me as an absurd cosmic interruption, I'm willing to be generous."
Had Damien still possessed a heartbeat, it might have stuttered then—not from fear, but from the sheer difficulty of fitting this exchange inside any stable model of reality. He had died. He had broken apart in a void outside time. He had learned that his mother had loved him all along. And now a being made of living nebulae was speaking to him in a tone halfway between dry amusement and professional courtesy.
He almost laughed.
The impulse shocked him more than the being's appearance had.
It passed before becoming sound, but not before the being noticed.
"There we are," it said, with unmistakable satisfaction. "Much better. I was beginning to think you'd insist on suffering with complete solemnity. Very exhausting to manage, the solemn ones."
"I didn't ask you to manage anything."
"No, but you did qualify for intervention, which creates obligations. Some cosmic. Some procedural. Some merely personal curiosity." The being drifted—again, perhaps—slightly closer, though there was no real measure of distance. "You are, for the record, unusually difficult to categorize. I appreciate that in a dead man."
The phrase dead man should have struck harder than it did. Instead it landed almost clinically, perhaps because the being said it without malice, and perhaps because death itself had already become less immediate than regret. Damien looked at the drifting stars within the being's shape and asked the more pressing question.
"Why are you here?"
The being's answer came at once, stripped of flourish. "Because you did not dissolve."
Silence followed.
Damien understood the words individually. Together they opened something much larger.
The being seemed to sense that and, for the first time since appearing, let a little of the levity fall away. "Most human consciousness, once separated from bodily existence, follows a comparatively straightforward trajectory. There are variations, naturally. Context matters. Belief systems matter more than people expect. But by and large, the process is not… this." A faint gesture with one luminous hand indicated the void, Damien, the wreckage of emotional revelation, perhaps existence itself. "You did not merely persist. You reconstructed."
The words struck with peculiar force because they aligned with what Damien had already begun dimly to understand about the void's responsiveness. "Because of the letters."
"In part."
"Because I learned the truth."
"In part."
The being's form shimmered with a slow pulse, like distant starlight seen through water. "Because you were forced into full confrontation with your own life, and instead of fragmenting permanently, you reassembled with different intent. Pain can break consciousness. So can truth. In your case, both occurred simultaneously, which is generally rather final." It paused. "You were inconvenient enough to survive it."
Damien should have objected to being called inconvenient by a cosmic entity. Instead he found himself focusing on the content. "Survive," he repeated. "I'm dead."
"Yes, which is why I said inconvenient instead of impressive. Please keep up."
This time the laugh almost escaped him for real. It came no farther than a dark, disbelieving shift in his awareness, but the being caught it anyway and seemed pleased.
"Good," it said. "If you can still manage irony, the situation is salvageable."
There was something surreal about the exchange, something so completely at odds with the gravity of everything that had preceded it that Damien might once have rejected it as impossible on aesthetic grounds alone. Yet impossibility had long since ceased to be a meaningful objection. More importantly, beneath the being's tone, he could hear structure. Not in words alone, but in the way information was being layered, the way absurdity covered precision. The humor was not the absence of seriousness. It was a method of carrying it.
"What happens now?" Damien asked.
The being became still.
The stars within its form slowed, their drift tightening into patterns that somehow conveyed attention. When it answered, the voice remained casual, but the beneath-layer of it sharpened.
"Now," it said, "we discuss your options."
The void seemed to quiet around the words, though quiet was all it had ever been. Yet the sentence introduced a new kind of gravity, one Damien felt immediately. Options implied agency. Agency implied consequence. And after everything he had just learned—after the destruction of his old life, after the revelation of what he had missed and what he had become—consequence meant more to him than it ever had.
Still, he did not answer at once. He found himself looking—not literally, but with the full focus of his awareness—at the being before him and trying to understand the scale of what sat between them. This was no hallucination born of death. No comforting projection. No religious symbol arriving to reward or condemn. It was something stranger, broader, and somehow more procedural than any god of childhood imagination. It knew him already. Knew everything, perhaps. And yet it had chosen not to begin with judgment. It had begun by noting the awkwardness of emotional collapse.
"You already know what I'll ask," Damien said.
The being made a low, almost musical sound that might have been agreement. "Yes."
"Then why make me ask?"
"Because being given an answer is not the same thing as choosing to hear it." A mild pause. "Also because if I simply monologued at you from the outset, you'd distrust me more than you already do."
"I don't trust you."
"Yes," said the being pleasantly. "I gathered that when you demanded a species-and-function identification thirty seconds after I materialized out of interdimensional nothing."
Damien might have felt embarrassed if embarrassment still worked properly in him. As it was, he only said, "That was reasonable."
"Entirely." The being brightened faintly. "Suspicion is one of your more coherent traits. I wouldn't remove it even if I were inclined to meddle excessively, which, for the record, I am not. Well. Not often."
That medium layer of meta-awareness entered there—not enough to break reality, but enough to suggest realities beyond his own were not abstractions to this entity. Damien registered it and filed it away instinctively, despite the fact that filing things away belonged to a version of him now partially broken open. Some patterns survived even truth.
"What are my options?" he asked again.
The being did not answer immediately this time. It looked at him—or the sensation of being looked at intensified—and when it spoke, the humor remained present but muted, like starlight under cloud.
"One path," it said, "is peace."
The word entered the void and remained there.
Peace.
Damien found that he hated how much it affected him.
Not because he wanted it—not yet, perhaps not at all—but because he understood its seduction instantly. Peace meant no further struggle, no more regret sharpened by action, no more opportunities to fail the love he had now finally recognized. Peace meant the ending of pressure. The ending of becoming. The ending of the terrible, unfinished work of being a self.
The being went on. "Not oblivion, if that's where your newly wounded soldier's mind went. More a… release. Completion. The laying down of all weight. No more pain. No more striving. No more loss."
"And the other?"
At that, the being's stars shifted again, brighter now, movement returning to its cosmic form in slow spirals of color.
"The other," it said, "is considerably more complicated."
That was where the first segment of the true encounter ended—not in answer, but in the held breath before it. Damien felt the shape of decision begin to loom at the edge of him, not yet fully formed, but near. The grief was still there. The love was still there. The ruin of what he had misunderstood remained the ground beneath everything. But now, for the first time since the void had taken him, another element entered the equation alongside truth and regret.
Possibility.
And possibility, he realized, was more dangerous than pain
Segment 2
The word peace did not fade after it was spoken.
It lingered in a way nothing else in the void had lingered before, not because it echoed—there was no sound to echo—but because it attached itself to meaning. Damien understood it too well, perhaps better than most. Peace was not merely the absence of conflict. It was the absence of demand, the removal of pressure, the quieting of every force that required a response. It was the end of vigilance. The end of readiness. The end of becoming. For a man who had lived his entire life in reaction to something—violence, instability, structure, war—the idea of an existence that required nothing from him carried a weight that was both alluring and deeply unsettling.
He did not answer immediately.
That restraint was no longer habit, no longer the controlled delay of a trained soldier measuring risk before action. It was something else now, something born from the awareness that this decision could not be reduced to efficiency. There was no optimal path defined by survival probability or mission success. There was only consequence, and consequence here extended beyond anything he had previously encountered.
The being watched him—again, the word was insufficient, but the sensation remained accurate. Its presence did not press upon him, did not demand a response, but it was attentive in a way that suggested it understood exactly where Damien's thoughts had gone. The stars within its form shifted slowly, patterns forming and dissolving in a rhythm that felt almost like patience.
"You're considering it," the being said, not as a question.
Damien did not deny it. "Yes."
"Good," the being replied, with a faint note of approval. "It would be concerning if you dismissed it outright. People who reject peace without reflection tend to misunderstand what they're rejecting. They think it's weakness. Or surrender. It's neither. It's… completion."
The word settled differently than the others had. Completion implied finality, but not in the way death had once implied it to him. Death had been an end imposed from outside, a termination of function, a cessation of process. Completion suggested something internal, something achieved rather than enforced. It suggested that a life—or whatever followed it—could reach a point where nothing more was required.
"And that's it?" Damien asked. "Just… done?"
The being tilted slightly, the nebula within its form folding inward and outward in a motion that conveyed mild consideration. "That's a very human way of framing it," it said. "But yes, in essence. No further progression. No further conflict. No unfinished threads demanding resolution. You would not forget who you were, but you would no longer be bound by it. No regret. No pain. No need to become anything else."
Damien let the words settle.
No regret.
The phrase struck deeper than the others, because regret was the one thing that had defined his existence in the void. It had reshaped him, broken him, forced him to confront everything he had avoided in life. To exist without it—to be free of that weight—should have been the most appealing outcome available.
And yet—
Something in him resisted.
Not violently. Not instinctively. But with a quiet certainty that had begun to form only after his collapse.
"If there's no regret," he said slowly, "then there's no correction."
The being's stars brightened slightly, as though amused by the direction of his thought. "Ah," it said. "There it is."
"There what is?"
"The part of you that refuses to accept resolution without action." The being's tone carried no judgment, only observation. "You're not wrong, by the way. Peace removes the need for correction. It doesn't provide the opportunity for it."
Damien understood that immediately.
Peace meant he would no longer feel the weight of what he had missed, but it also meant he would never address it. His mother's hope—that he would learn to live differently, that he would allow himself to love and be loved—would remain unfulfilled, not because it was denied, but because it would no longer matter.
That realization settled into him with a quiet finality.
Peace was not failure.
But it was—
An ending.
"And the other option?" Damien asked.
The being's form shifted again, the movement more pronounced this time, as though the question itself carried energy that altered the space around it. The colors within the nebula deepened, darker hues folding into brighter ones, stars aligning in patterns that felt more deliberate, more structured.
"Reincarnation," the being said, with a tone that suggested both simplicity and complexity layered together. "Continuation, but not in the way you understand it. You would not return to your previous life. That path is closed. Instead, you would enter a new existence, in a different context, under different conditions, with the awareness you've gained intact."
Damien focused on that.
"Intact," he repeated.
"Yes."
"That includes everything."
The being gave a soft, almost amused response. "Everything is a broad term, but in this case, yes. Your memories, your understanding, your… recent emotional developments." A faint flicker of humor passed through its form. "You don't get to conveniently forget the difficult parts."
"I wouldn't want to," Damien said, before he could stop himself.
The admission surprised him, but it felt correct the moment it left him. The pain he had experienced in the void—the regret, the realization of what he had missed—was unbearable, but it had also been transformative. To lose that understanding would be to return to the same incomplete version of himself that had lived and died without ever fully grasping what mattered.
The being seemed to approve. "Good," it said. "That simplifies things."
"It doesn't feel simple."
"It isn't," the being replied. "But your intent aligns with the option, which reduces complications. You'd be surprised how often people request a second chance and then immediately attempt to avoid the very growth that made them eligible for it."
Damien did not respond to that.
Because he understood the implication.
This was not a reset.
It was—
A continuation with consequence.
"What about the world?" he asked. "You said it wouldn't be the same."
The being's form shifted again, this time with something that resembled interest. "Ah, yes. Context. That's where things become… more interesting."
The void around them seemed to change—not physically, but in a way that suggested expansion, as though something beyond their immediate interaction had been brought into consideration. The being raised a hand—or something that approximated one—and the space around it responded.
Images formed.
Not memories.
Not projections.
Something else entirely.
A landscape.
Vast.
Untamed.
Stone structures rose from the earth, their design unfamiliar yet grounded in a logic that spoke of history and function. Cities spread outward, not with the uniformity of modern planning, but with the organic complexity of places that had grown over time, shaped by necessity, conflict, and survival. People moved within those spaces, their lives intersecting in ways that formed systems Damien could recognize, even if the details differed from anything he had known.
He saw armor.
Not modern.
Not manufactured with precision.
But forged.
Worn.
Used.
He saw banners.
Symbols of allegiance.
Of power.
He saw conflict.
Not distant.
Not abstract.
Immediate.
And then—
The sky.
Something moved within it.
Large.
Massive.
Alive.
The image sharpened, and for a brief moment, Damien understood what he was seeing with complete clarity.
Dragons.
The word formed without hesitation, not because it aligned with reality as he had known it, but because it aligned with what was presented. These were not metaphors. Not symbolic constructs. They were real within this context, existing as part of the world being shown to him.
The image held for a moment longer, then shifted.
Different locations.
Different structures.
Different conflicts.
A world.
Not his.
But real.
The images faded.
The void returned.
The being lowered its hand.
"That," it said casually, as though it had not just presented something that defied every rule Damien had ever lived by, "is one of many possible destinations."
Damien processed that.
"You're saying there are multiple worlds."
"Yes."
"And I would choose one."
"Correct."
The simplicity of the answer contrasted sharply with the magnitude of its implication.
Multiple worlds.
Multiple realities.
Each with its own rules, its own systems, its own conflicts.
"And you're offering me one of them."
The being tilted slightly. "Offering is a generous term. Facilitating, perhaps. You meet the criteria. The option exists. Whether you take it is entirely up to you."
Damien remained silent for a moment.
Then—
"Why?"
The question came without hesitation, not because he expected a clear answer, but because it needed to be asked.
"Why me?"
The being did not answer immediately.
For the first time since it had appeared, there was a pause that felt deliberate, not casual, not dismissive. The stars within its form shifted more slowly, their movement less playful, more measured.
"Because you didn't stop," it said finally.
Damien frowned slightly.
"I died."
"Yes," the being replied. "But that's not what I meant."
The words carried weight now, more than before.
"Most people," the being continued, "reach a point where they can no longer process what they are. Their identity fractures, their awareness dissolves, and they move on without… restructuring. You didn't. You broke, certainly, but you also rebuilt. You confronted your life in full, without deflection, and chose to become something different rather than remain what you were."
Damien absorbed that.
"That's not normal."
"No," the being said simply. "It isn't."
The silence that followed was different.
Not empty.
Not neutral.
Weighted.
Because everything had now been laid out.
Peace.
Or continuation.
An ending.
Or a new beginning.
And for the first time—
The decision was not abstract.
It was—
Immediate.