He woke gasping.
The chill air scraped down his throat like a rasp. His limbs thrashed against coarse wool blankets, damp with sweat. For a moment he thought he was still dying.
The headache. The nausea. The light blooming behind his eyes like a blooming, blood-soaked sun. But it passed.
The pain, the buzzing machines, the antiseptic stench… all gone. In their place, stone walls, a narrow slit of a window, and a rusted iron brazier where embers smoldered low.
He sat up slowly, hands clutching the blanket, knuckles white.
This isn't a hospital.
The thought was simple. The certainty behind it was not.
He rose, moving as if the air were thicker than water, and stumbled to the mirror hanging above the washbasin. Brass. Polished, dented, dulled by time.
It showed a pale boy's face. Dark, tangled hair. Darker eyes. A jaw not yet shaped by manhood. A mouth that quivered when he did not hold it still.
Jon Snow. But he remembered more than that name.
He remembered an office lit by flickering fluorescent bulbs, a desk covered in circuit diagrams, a coffee mug that read "Best Dad Ever" though he'd never had children. He remembered a funeral, the only time he'd wept in a decade, and a house empty of more than just people.
He remembered failing. Too many times. A thousand regrets, dying like embers in his chest as the stroke took him.
And he remembered something worse. He remembered the books. He closed his eyes and spoke aloud, voice rasping.
"Westeros."
It was not a dream. The names came to him unbidden. Jon Snow, bastard of Eddard Stark. Eddard, Lord of Winterfell. Catelyn, who hated him.
Robb, his brother. Arya, the wild one. Bran, who'd fall. Sansa, who'd suffer. And Rickon, too small to understand the war that would swallow them all.
The Wall. The Others. The dragons. The bloody Red Wedding.
He gripped the edge of the washbasin until his nails bit into the wood.
"Seven hells."
He had read A Song of Ice and Fire as a boy in his other life. He'd even enjoyed it, in the dry, passive way people enjoy tragedies they do not expect to live through.
And now he was Jon Snow. In this world of blood and snow and steel. He was ten. Too young to drink, too old to be coddled.
Just old enough to understand what was coming, and too weak to stop it.
Panic rose in his chest like bile. He could weep. He could scream. He could try to forget.
Or he could do what he had always done, both in his old life and in this new one. He could build.
If this is real, he thought, then it is not a book, and I am no reader. I am a player now. And players may yet shape the game.
The thought steadied him. He breathed it in like smoke and let it fill his lungs. His mind thrummed with the gift: Inspired Inventor. He could feel it, humming in the marrow of his bones.
Knowledge he had no right to know. A spark of creation that burned quietly, steadily, behind his eyes.
The world of Westeros was cruel, but it was simple. Problems were many. Solutions, few. It was the kind of world that cried out for engineers.
And he would answer.
____________________
Lord Eddard Stark came to him at midmorning, walking with the quiet grace of a man who had lived more years in battle than in peace. He was clad in a heavy cloak of wolf's fur, his face half-shadowed by the hall's gloom.
"You are awake early," Eddard said, pausing at the threshold.
Jon looked up from the paper he had borrowed from Maester Luwin's stores. It was covered in smudged graphite. Sketches of a pump mechanism, scribbled with measurements and notations in both Westerosi and a half-remembered engineer's shorthand.
"I couldn't sleep."
Eddard stepped inside. "You were fevered last night. Tossing. Muttering."
Jon flushed. "I'm sorry, my lord."
"Don't be." The words were kind. A hand reached to clasp his shoulder, rough and solid. "You are my blood, Jon. You need not apologize for being unwell."
That kindness nearly undid him.
It would have been easier if Eddard had been cold. But the truth was crueler than cruelty. Eddard Stark loved him.
Truly, deeply, and with the kind of quiet devotion men like him never gave voice to. It was that love which kept Jon here. Kept him close. Kept him hidden.
Jon stared at his sketches. "Do you ever think we could change things?"
"Change?" Eddard echoed.
"The way the world works. The way men live. So they don't suffer so easily. So the winters don't kill so many."
Eddard's silence was as long as his face and twice as solemn.
"You sound like a maester."
"I sound like a fool."
"You sound like me, when I was young." Eddard's lips quirked in something not quite a smile. "Idealism is not a flaw, Jon. But do not let it blind you. The world bends slowly."
"Then I will forge stronger tools."
"You speak like a blacksmith."
"I aim to be one."
That drew a real smile from Ned. "I will speak to Mikken."
____________________
Catelyn Stark found Jon in the godswood two days later, seated beneath the heart tree, sketching a design for a thermal vent system to heat the older wings of the keep.
She said nothing at first. Her presence was like the first frost: silent, sharp, and unwelcome.
Jon stood. He bowed. "Lady Stark."
"Why are you always lurking in here?" she asked, her voice clipped as a knife.
"The godswood is quiet."
"It is sacred," she corrected. "Not a place for idle scribbling."
He met her eyes, knowing better than to flinch. "The gods might yet bless a mind in motion."
She looked at him as one might a stray dog with a torn ear. It was neither hateful nor kind.
"I know you are fond of thinking yourself clever, Jon. But cleverness does not change what you are."
"No, my lady. It only makes it harder to ignore."
Her eyes narrowed. "You would do well to remember your place."
"I remember it every day." He gave a stiff bow. "Enjoy your prayers, my lady."
As he walked away, he heard her mutter behind him.
"You're too much like him."
He did not ask who. He already knew.
At the forge, Mikken was less poetic and more blunt.
"Boy, you ever touch this hammer wrong, I'll have your fingers."
"I'll grow new ones."
"You'll grow nothing but regret."
Despite his bluster, the man was pleased. Jon learned quickly. Too quickly. He knew the strength of iron just by lifting it.
He understood the angles of stress and shear by instinct. The first charge he spent on metalwork bore fruit within days.
By the third week, he'd drawn wire so fine Mikken stared at it as if Jon had spun gold from piss.
"You're not natural," the man muttered.
"No," Jon said mildly. "I'm educated."
"That's worse."
That evening, he dined with the other children of Winterfell. Sansa spoke primly about the stitching she'd done that day. Arya rolled her eyes and threw a pea at her. Bran talked of wanting to climb the broken tower. Rickon babbled barely decipherable words about a dream where he flew on a pig.
Robb leaned close to Jon. "Maester Luwin says you've been reading about aqueducts."
"I have," Jon said. "You would not believe how much water we waste."
"You would not believe how much you talk like a maester," Robb shot back, grinning.
Jon smirked. "Better a maester than a green boy with no sword calluses."
"I have calluses."
"Soft as pudding."
Arya leaned over. "Can you make me something? Something sharp?"
"No," Sansa said, nose wrinkling. "He'll make you a shovel or a churn. That's all he does. He's boring."
Jon chuckled. "Churns are very useful. Perhaps I'll make one to stir the air around your head."
"I'll tell Septa Mordane," she snapped.
"You always do."
Eddard watched from the high seat, saying nothing, but the corners of his mouth twitched. He raised his cup in Jon's direction.
And Jon thought:
This is my home. Whatever comes, I will not lose it.
The dreams he had that night had never been so vivid before.
Flashes of iron and smoke. Of asphalt roads beneath a sky not born of stars, but of blinding lamps and endless noise.
Fingers tapping keys, not hilts. A life of ink-stained reports, not swords. Of sweat without steel, of quiet regrets festering like mold beneath wallpaper.
Jon awoke in a sweat that the heat of Winterfell's stones worsened. His breath came short, quick, frightened. For one long, impossible moment, he thought he might be mad.
He knew who he was. Jon Snow. Bastard of Lord Eddard Stark of Winterfell. Black of hair, grey of eye. His blood as base as the frost that crept in under the doorframe of the empty room where he had taken to sleeping now that he had reached ten years of age.
But he also knew… he had died.
It was not here. Not now. Not even in this world. In a mundane, forgettable, dull life, he had been a man. An engineer, though the word meant little in Winterfell, and nothing at all to a maester or blacksmith.
He had lived in a place of concrete and glowing rectangles, a place that felt like a dream now, thin and soft as old parchment.
In that world, he had read books. One of them, thick as a brick and thrice as cruel, had been called A Song of Ice and Fire.
His hands trembled. He stared at them. Pale, callus-scarred fingers, not those of a child but not yet a man's either. They twitched of their own accord. The panic came on suddenly, as biting and sharp as the northern wind.
"Gods," he whispered, though he wasn't sure which ones he meant.
This was not a dream. He had known it the moment he saw himself in the looking-glass the day he awakened. His eyes were clear and intelligent, his posture different.
He could feel the weight of the years he had not lived, dragging behind his ribs like chains. Jon Snow, the bastard boy, had died in sleep, and something else had taken his place.
He leaned forward, head in his hands. This is madness, the thought came, jagged and real. Or a punishment. I was not a good man. I worked, I ate, I slept. I let the world pass me by. And now I am here, in a tale where heads roll and children die like flies.
His throat clenched. He saw visions: direwolves, kings, dead men with blue eyes, fire and ash and the sound of wings. The knowledge, half-forgotten and muddled by emotion, told him what would come. The Red Wedding. The Wall. The Long Night.
He thought of running. Of stealing a horse and riding South, never looking back. Of vanishing into some warm country where no one knew the name Stark. But where would he go? He was a bastard. A boy.
And worse, he was in a story. Fate here had teeth that shredded the throats of ambitious men.
"No," he said aloud, the word rasping like dry leaves. "No. I won't die a second time."
The fear broke then, like ice shattering underfoot. In its place came something colder and harder. The same resolve that had made him study late into the nights.
The same resolve that had let him build bridges on budgets that should have collapsed them. That had made him endure mediocrity without flinching.
He rose and began to dress, movements stiff but steady. There was work to be done. He had been given a second life. It was not a good life, perhaps, but a chance. He would not waste it as he had wasted the first.
He had already been in this world for three weeks. The identity crisis could no longer continue. Each moment he wasted was another moment the world spun closer to oblivion.
Survive, he told himself. Survive, and build.
He slipped from his chamber before the light had fully crept across the sky. Winterfell was never truly cold, but before dawn it felt like the world had been emptied of warmth entirely.
The great grey walls loomed silent around him, the breath of the godswood trees still and frozen in the windless dark.
Jon's boots echoed against the flagstones as he descended toward the inner yard. The castle slept, save for the servants already tending fires and the ravens clacking in their towers.
He did not wait for anyone. He turned toward the smithy. It had become his favored spot over the last moon. It was there he would continue.
Mikken was already at his forge, red light glowing across his chest like warpaint. He looked up as Jon entered, eyebrows rising beneath the streak of soot on his brow.
"You're up early, Jon."
Jon cleared his throat. "I couldn't sleep."
Mikken snorted, but Jon stood firm, his feet planted as though roots held them.
"You've gone strange," the smith muttered, scratching his beard. "Your lord father won't thank me if you burn off your eyebrows because you're tired, bastard or not."
"I'll continue to keep out of your way," Jon promised. "Just let me work."
There was a long silence, filled only by the hiss of water on hot iron.
Mikken grunted. "Continue doing what you've been doing. Mind your tongue, your fingers, and my tools."
And that was that.
Jon swept. He cleaned. He hauled ore and ash and learned the names of a hundred implements. He listened.
He watched Mikken's hands more than his face. He took in how the man worked the bellows, how he turned the steel, how he tested the heat not with instruments but with his eyes.
A charge built within him. He could feel it. It wasn't magic, not quite, but something deep and structured. As though the world itself had opened a small door and asked what he would do with the chance.
One night, he burned it.
The next morning, he carved a design into the soot-covered back wall of the smithy with a charcoal stub. It was a crude draft, far simpler than the ones he had worked on in his past life. But it was enough.
Mikken found him there, the sketch still half-finished, Jon's knuckles blackened and his hair curled from the heat of the coals.
"What's that supposed to be?" the smith asked gruffly.
Jon straightened. "A heat sink," he said. "And a venting duct. With an insulative chamber that keeps the warmth longer than a normal brazier."
Mikken frowned. "A what?"
"A better firepit."
That, at least, the man understood. "And why would you waste your time on that? You've been working metal. That has some use."
Jon looked about the cold stone room, at the heavy furs piled in corners, at the shivering scullion boys who came in mornings to heat buckets of water with trembling fingers.
"No reason," he said. "Just thought it might help."
Mikken shook his head. "You and your fancies. If it works, I'll carve your name into the wall myself. Now pass me that hammer."
It worked. Too well, perhaps.
The improved brazier burned longer and hotter with less wood. Its layered structure, simple though it seemed, trapped the heat and spread it more evenly through the room. The servants noticed first.
Then Ser Rodrik came by one day, muttered something about "clever work" and left.
By the end of the week, Jon had made three more. One for the kennels, another for the mews, and one for the stables where the wind howled fiercest.
Mikken's scorn turned to grudging approval.
Jon said little. He built. He observed. Each night, he sketched.
The castle stirred in ways small and quiet. Boots dried faster. Ravens shed fewer feathers in the cold.
The work kept Jon steady. He still awoke from dreams that left his heart racing and palms damp. Visions of wildfire and dragons and ice that walked.
But he did not speak of them. Not yet. Not until he had more to offer than warnings no one would believe.
Swords were another matter.
Lord Stark had appointed Ser Rodrik Cassel to train all his sons, and even Jon, bastard though he was, had not been excluded. Still, he had never stood out.
Catelyn disliked him outperforming Robb at anything. He'd kept his head down. At least until now.
The new Jon watched the blade with different eyes.
He saw weight and leverage, friction and torque. He noticed how Robb lunged too far, how Theon's footwork lacked balance.
When he lifted the wooden sword, it felt less like a toy and more like an extension of the self. A tool, like any other.
"Your form's improved," Ser Rodrik noted after a few weeks. "You've stopped flailing about like a half-drowned rooster."
"Thank you, Ser."
"You thinking of becoming a knight? You've the look of it."
Jon shrugged. "Mayhap. I just want to be ready."
Rodrik eyed him, beard twitching. "For what?"
Jon did not answer. The old knight only chuckled. "Cryptic answers. You'll be a proper Stark yet."
That night, Jon etched another design by firelight. A pulley-driven hoist to lift water from the well more easily. He hadn't spent a charge for it. The idea had simply come quiet, clean, complete.
The Inspired Inventor lay within him like a kindled forge. Two charges spent. Many more to come. But for now, he would not squander the gift.
He had seen what happened to those who reached too far, too fast.
The world burned.
So instead he designed the first ever stove in Westeros for the kitchen. Grates for the windows that blocked the cold without sealing off the light. Hinges that did not freeze shut in winter, and a small, whistling kettle that boiled faster and never scalded.
They were small things. Harmless things.
His charges spent on metalwork and thermal kinetics granted him a level of mastery that surpassed anything ever seen in Westeros. His engineering background in his other life buttressed that mastery.
The work gave him purpose. The work gave him time.
He would build the castle into a fortress. It would be a fortress of warmth and safety, of silent protections no one would notice until they were sorely needed.
He would make Winterfell ready. The storms were coming. And he would not go quietly into them.
____________________
Dusk was a comfort to Jon. It reminded him that time passed even when one felt lost within it. That seasons changed, and so could men.
He stood alone on the battlements, a wool cloak drawn tight around his shoulders, his hands tucked beneath his arms. Below, the courtyard was dim and quiet, the last of the kitchen smoke curling into the sky.
He could hear the soft clatter of hooves in the stables, the rhythmic clang of Mikken hammering out the last of the day's orders. Winterfell never truly slept.
But it did rest.
Jon's breath left him in a thin plume of mist. He leaned on the cold stone of the parapet and looked to the distant hills. The wind smelled of pine and ash, and the sky was a deep violet shade only found north of the Neck.
Four years, he thought. Five at most.
That was all the time he had. A few short years until the wheel turned and the tale began in earnest.
Lord Arryn would die. King Robert would ride north. Bran would fall. The tides would pull every soul in the realm into war and ruin.
He clenched his jaw.
It felt like nothing. Like trying to shore up a dyke with cupped hands. But it was time. And time, if spent wisely, could forge empires or shatter kings.
Jon had no interest in crowns. But he could build.
What can be done in four years? he asked himself for the hundredth time.
He had already made a start: small improvements, quiet devices, whispers of change too subtle to draw much notice. But they would not be enough. Not for what was coming.
He began with the castle's defenses.
Winterfell was strong, but not invulnerable. Its walls had been raised in the age of the First Men, and while they were thick and high, they bore the signs of long years.
Settling stones, moss-choked cracks, and arrow slits ill-placed by modern standards. Jon mapped the towers and wall walks in secret, counting paces, noting where the wind battered hardest and where the frost crept deepest.
In the following sennights, he reinforced a segment of the east wall with frost-resistant mortar, quietly using the pretext of "testing Mikken's latest stone mix." He noted which sentries slacked on their rounds, and left subtle reminders in their path.
Greased stones, upturned nails, harmless things that drew swift correction when found.
He replaced the pulleys in the main gatehouse and adjusted the drawbridge's counterweight to lift more easily in the cold. He kept a list, folded and hidden in the back lining of his tunic. At night, he studied it like a holy text.
Food storage: insufficient for siege over two months. Water source: internal well, unguarded. Lighting: inconsistent. Braziers vulnerable to wind. Eastern watchtower: cracks at foundation. Potential collapse under stress.
Each weakness he addressed slowly. He built redundant supports for the tower base, just stout enough to avoid suspicion. He proposed covering the inner well with a trellised arch.
He framed it as an aesthetic suggestion, though it doubled as a barricade. He overhauled the design of the grain silo ventilation system to prevent moisture rot in the lower bins.
Better grain meant better bread. Better bread meant longer winter strength. It was all in the details.
He stopped thinking like a boy. He began thinking like a planner.
If I were to lay siege to Winterfell, how would I break it? Where would I strike? What would I starve?
He turned the questions over in his mind like hot coals. And with each imagined threat, he built the answer.
The people changed, too.
Not all of them did. Most still saw only a quiet boy with a distant look in his eye. But some began to take notice.
"Always poking around," said old Hother, the kennelmaster, when Jon inquired after the pattern of dog feed deliveries. "You planning to write a book?"
"Just curious," Jon had answered mildly. "I like knowing how things work."
That was always his excuse. It worked well enough.
Some of the stewards began to nod to him when he passed. The stableboys stopped shooing him off when he examined the hoists. The blacksmiths offered small grunts of acknowledgment when he was around.
Lord Stark said nothing, but once, during supper, he looked at Jon for a long while after Robb had finished speaking.
Jon said nothing. He kept his eyes on his trencher and pretended not to feel the weight of that gaze.
By the year's turn, Jon had compiled a small library of designs. Most of them were hand-sketched on scraps of vellum, some pressed into soft clay when he ran out of parchment. He kept them hidden in a hollowed beam above his bed, away from prying eyes.
His second charge had been well-spent, and the third, when it came, he hoarded for weeks before using it. When he did, he added to his charge in thermal kinetics.
It was for something simple: a heating pipe system that could run behind the walls of the great hall, drawn through the stones by pressure valves and fed by a central furnace of his own design.
The natural hot springs kept Winterfell heated, but a better system could always be beneficial.
He tested it first in the barracks. No one questioned the improvement. Soldiers complained less, frostbitten fingers healed faster, boots dried overnight.
When he offered the design to the castellan as a "Mikken-inspired experiment," it was approved without comment. That was always reason enough.
He never claimed credit. He never asked for thanks. He only watched. Calculated. Improved.
Because winter was coming. And he would not be found wanting.
____________________
Jon had taken to spending his mornings walking the outer wall walks and his afternoons in the lower vaults beneath the castle, where few ever bothered to go. Winterfell was old, older than any stone city in the south, older than most of the houses that still ruled.
Its foundations were deep and uneven, cobbled together from generations of building and rebuilding. It fascinated him.
He traced the load-bearing pillars with his fingers. Measured the height of archways, sketched the breadth of stone ribs in the cellars. The bones of the castle whispered secrets to him when he walked them alone.
They told of long-forgotten collapses, of frost heaves and subsidence, of strength that could be greater still.
He spent his fourth charge one cold, windless morning, kneeling beneath the great hall with a half-burnt tallow stub clutched in his fingers and a piece of chalk pressed to a stone slab.
He whispered the words aloud to no one.
"Architecture."
The effect was immediate.
His breath caught in his throat. It was as if the castle had opened itself to him. Every flaw, every weight, every torque and tension line in every lintel and buttress now existed in his mind in perfect clarity.
He knew how the stones bore the hall. He understood why the eastern tower leaned ever so slightly in thaw. He could feel, with absolute certainty, that the third beam above the kitchens would fail in seventeen years under its current stress loads.
And he could fix it. He could fix all of it.
No maester had taught him this. No engineer in his former life could have. This was something… more.
Deeper than numbers. More intuitive than drafting lines on parchment. He could see how Winterfell breathed, how its shape wanted to be.
His knees were shaking when he rose. He was no longer just clever. He was something else.
He was reworking a load-plan sketch in the godswood when Robb found him.
His brother—though the name stung faintly now—wore the Stark grey over his doublet and a smile that might've been teasing or wary. Robb had grown broader across the chest over the past year.
There was command in the way he walked, a natural rhythm to how others moved aside for him without thinking.
"You've been hard to find," Robb said. "You're worse than the Maester."
Jon did not look up from the sketch.
"Books don't talk as much," he said. "They ask less of you."
"And yet you still argue with them," Robb replied. He crouched beside Jon and peered at the drawing. "That's… not a sword."
Jon gave a soft snort. "No. It's a torsion joint brace. For the western watchtower. There's a fault line in the foundation. The structure flexes slightly when it thaws."
Robb blinked at him. "And what would happen if you left it be?"
"Collapse. It wouldn't be today or next year. But in time. You don't build for now. You build for what's coming."
Robb looked at him sideways. "You've changed."
Jon set the chalk aside and leaned back against the rough bark of a heart tree sapling. "So have you."
"Not like this." Robb's voice was quiet now, thoughtful rather than accusing. "You used to spar with us. Laugh. Even Theon said you're acting like someone who's inhaled too much book glue, whatever that means."
Jon nearly smiled.
"I see things differently now."
"You dream of becoming a builder?" Robb asked. "Like Bran dreams of being a knight?"
Jon shook his head. "No. I don't dream. I prepare."
The wind stirred the red leaves above them.
"Is it because you're a Snow?" Robb asked. "Do you think you must earn a place that no one can deny?"
Jon paused. The words struck deeper than Robb could have known.
"I think," he said slowly, "that no one is owed a place. But everyone must make one, if they can."
That seemed to satisfy Robb, for the moment. He gave a short nod and stood.
"Well, if the keep doesn't fall in on itself by my next nameday, I'll thank you."
Jon watched him go, a shadow against the low sun, and wondered if this was the last version of Robb that would smile so freely.
Theon came to him the next day with a smirk too sharp to be friendly.
"I heard you've taken to scribbling in the crypts like some half-mad wizard."
Jon rolled his eyes. "Go bother Robb."
"I tried. He's chasing that kennel girl again."
Jon continued measuring the span between the outer wall and the north gatehouse. The chalk in his hand moved in precise lines.
He had already mapped a plan for a fortified arch to reinforce the corridor with concealed murder holes and inner sluices for boiling water.
Theon leaned against the stonework. "You planning to rework the whole of Winterfell before your balls drop?"
Jon didn't reply.
Theon studied him a moment longer.
"You don't laugh anymore."
Jon glanced up.
"Not much to laugh about."
"Hells, even I think you're acting strange. That's saying something."
Jon finished the line and marked it with a cross.
"Strange is just something people call you before they thank you for saving their lives."
He stood, brushing off his knees, and left Theon frowning in the shadows.
____________________
The new brace was fitted two sennights later. Jon constructed it with his own hands, using alloy adjustments that Mikken believed he had copied from a ruined Sept smithing scroll.
The brace was anchored by four stabilizing shafts and set against a shock-absorbing base made from resin-treated cedar planks. It supported not just the tower's floor, but distributed the stress evenly across two new lattice girders that Jon had embedded into the foundation a sennight before.
When Lord Stark passed beneath the tower during an inspection, he paused briefly, looked up, and narrowed his eyes at the visible reinforcement struts.
"You've been busy," he said.
Jon bowed his head. "I only want to be useful."
Eddard Stark's gaze lingered.
"You are."
Jon didn't answer. He didn't trust himself to speak.
That night, alone in the library tower, he stared at his notes by candlelight. The air smelled of parchment and ink.
He could feel another charge building in him. Another step forward.
There was no end to what he could do. He could make Winterfell an unbreachable fortress.
He could change the shape of the North. But the question was no longer what he could do. It was how far he dared to go.
And how long he could work in silence before someone began to notice that Jon Snow, the quiet, bookish bastard, was building a new world beneath their very feet.