Chapter 1: Death and Dominion
Rain slammed the windshield like gravel. The wipers screamed. They couldn't keep up.
I white-knuckled the steering wheel of my Honda Civic, squinting through the blur. The taillights ahead had vanished into nothing. Just black and rain and the occasional flash of lightning revealing empty highway.
"Seventy miles an hour is stupid in this," I told myself. But I kept my foot down. The quarterly report wasn't going to present itself, and Harrison had made it crystal clear: eight AM sharp, or start polishing your resume, Cole.
Cole Hanks. Twenty-eight years old. Project manager at a mid-tier logistics firm. Single. No pets. No plants. A studio apartment with a mattress on the floor and three monitors for gaming. That was the sum total of my existence.
My phone buzzed. Another email notification. Probably Harrison asking if I'd confirmed the conference room booking. I reached for it—
Headlights. Blinding. Wrong lane.
"Oh fu—"
The semi hit me doing sixty.
I remember the steering wheel punching through my chest. The glass becoming water, becoming air, becoming nothing. A single thought crystallized in the dark: I never finished watching House of the Dragon. Season 3 comes out next month.
And then I stopped.
Not died. Stopped. Like someone hit pause on the universe.
Blackness. Warm. Thick. I floated in it.
Time meant nothing. I could have drifted for seconds or centuries. The panic faded. The pain faded. Everything faded except a strange hum, low and resonant, vibrating through wherever-this-was.
Then light.
Not gentle light. Violent light. Blue and piercing, stabbing through my skull like someone had shoved ice picks through my eye sockets.
[ DOMINION CORE SYSTEM INITIALIZING ]
The words burned themselves into my vision.
[ HOST DETECTED: CORWYN DARKE ]
[ VITAL STATUS: CRITICAL ]
[ TOXIN IDENTIFIED: WOLFSBANE COMPOUND ]
[ EMERGENCY PROTOCOLS ENGAGED ]
I gasped. Lungs filled with air—actual air—and immediately tried to expel themselves. Coughing, retching, I rolled onto my side and vomited something dark and acrid onto stone.
Stone?
My hands scrabbled against cold rock. Rough, uneven. A ceiling swam into focus above me—curved, gray, ancient. Torchlight flickered somewhere to my left.
"Where—"
Another wave of agony ripped through my gut. Fire and glass, churning inside me. I screamed, and the sound that came out was wrong. Higher. Younger.
[ HOST DYING ]
[ ESTIMATED TIME TO TERMINATION: 4 MINUTES 23 SECONDS ]
[ COUNTERMEASURE AVAILABLE ]
[ ANTIDOTE COMPONENTS DETECTED IN ADJACENT CHAMBER ]
The blue text overlay pulsed at the edge of my vision. Translucent. Hovering in mid-air like a video game HUD.
"I've lost my mind."
No time for that. My body—this body—was shutting down. Organs failing. Poison eating me from the inside.
I pushed up onto my elbows. The room spun. Bedchamber. Four-poster bed behind me, wooden frame carved with ravens. Tapestries on the walls. A fire dying in a hearth.
Medieval.
This was medieval.
[ NAVIGATION ARROW ENABLED ]
A golden arrow materialized, pointing toward a heavy oak door.
"A navigation arrow. Like a goddamn quest marker."
I crawled. The floor scraped my palms bloody—these were softer hands than mine had been. Smaller. The muscles shook with each movement. Three minutes left, according to the countdown in my peripheral vision. Maybe less.
The door was ten feet away. It might as well have been ten miles.
I made it in two minutes and forty seconds.
The hallway beyond was dark. Torches guttering. Cold draft from somewhere. I followed the arrow, dragging myself along the wall, leaving a smear of bile and sweat on the stones.
Another door. This one ajar.
[ ANTIDOTE COMPONENTS WITHIN ]
The room smelled of herbs and mold. A maester's chamber—books stacked on shelves, dried plants hanging from the rafters, jars of something liquid catching the faint moonlight through a window.
The System highlighted three items:
[ MILK OF THE POPPY - PAINKILLER/SEDATIVE ]
[ CRUSHED MINT - DIGESTIVE NEUTRALIZER ]
[ ACTIVATED CHARCOAL - TOXIN ABSORBER ]
Each glowed faintly in my vision. The poppy was in a clay pot on the middle shelf. The mint in a mortar beside the fireplace. The charcoal—I looked around wildly—a black powder in a glass container near the window.
One minute thirty.
I stumbled to the shelf, grabbed the poppy. My fingers slipped. The pot crashed to the floor.
"No, no, no—"
But the liquid pooled on the stones, and I scooped what I could into my palm, licking it up like an animal. Bitter. Numbing.
The mint came next. I shoved a handful into my mouth, chewing through the nausea.
Forty seconds.
The charcoal container was too high. I grabbed the leg of a chair, hauled myself up, knocked the glass down. It shattered. Black powder everywhere. I raked what I could into my mouth, gagging on the dust.
[ TOXIN NEUTRALIZATION INITIATED ]
[ ESTIMATED SUCCESS: 73% ]
My legs gave out. The floor caught me. Hard.
[ HOST STABILIZING ]
The pain didn't stop. It just... dimmed. Like someone had turned down the volume.
I lay there on the cold stone, surrounded by broken glass and spilled medicine, breathing. Just breathing. The blue text flickered at the edge of my vision, steady as a heartbeat.
[ TOXIN NEUTRALIZATION: 73% SUCCESSFUL ]
[ REMAINING POISON WILL BE METABOLIZED IN 72 HOURS ]
[ DOMINION CORE SYSTEM FULLY INITIALIZED ]
[ WELCOME, HOST CORWYN DARKE ]
"Corwyn Darke," I thought, testing the name. It didn't fit. Like wearing someone else's shoes.
But then—nothing fit. Not this body. Not this room. Not this world.
The memories came without warning. Not mine. His.
Images flooding in like a dam breaking: a stern father teaching him swordsmanship, badly. A kind mother dying in childbed. The loneliness of an empty keep. The bitter taste of wine at his parents' funeral. The letter from Lord Darklyn offering "friendship." The servant who brought him the poisoned cup.
[ MEMORY INTEGRATION COMPLETE ]
[ HOST CORWYN DARKE / COLE HANKS FUSION STABLE ]
I understood, then. The why and the how didn't matter. Maybe I'd find answers later. For now:
I was Cole Hanks. Project manager. Dead at twenty-eight.
I was also Lord Corwyn Darke. Twenty years old. Lord of Duskhollow Keep. Nearly dead from poison administered by a rival lord who wanted his land.
And I had a System. Some kind of overlay, an interface, giving me information and highlighting paths forward.
"Like a game," I thought. "This is like being inside a game."
The absurdity of it almost made me laugh. Almost. Laughing would have hurt too much.
Footsteps. Quick, panicked. An old man in gray robes burst through the chamber door, lantern held high.
"My lord!"
Maester Harlan. The name surfaced from Corwyn's memories. Elderly. Loyal. Sent word to King's Landing when the lord's parents died under suspicious circumstances.
His face—wrinkled, kind, terrified—floated into view above me. Chain of links around his neck. The Citadel. Maesters. Right.
"Gods be good," he breathed. "What happened? What are you doing in here?"
I tried to speak. My throat was raw, burned by charcoal and vomit. The words came out as a croak:
"Poisoned... made... antidote..."
Harlan's eyes went to the broken jars, the scattered herbs, the black powder coating my lips. His expression shifted from terror to confusion to something approaching awe.
"My lord, you—how did you know what to mix? Who told you—"
I grabbed his wrist. Weak grip. Barely any strength.
"Not... now. Help me."
He asked no more questions. The old man hooked his arms under mine and half-dragged, half-carried me back toward my chambers. I faded in and out, consciousness slipping like water through fingers.
[ SYSTEM NOTE: SLEEP MODE RECOMMENDED ]
[ HEALING ACCELERATED DURING REST ]
"Thanks for the tip," I thought, and let the darkness take me.
THREE DAYS LATER
The sun hurt.
I opened my eyes to golden light streaming through a window I didn't recognize, in a room that smelled of old stone and woodsmoke. The bed beneath me was too soft. The body I was in felt wrong—too thin, too weak.
[ STATUS UPDATE ]
[ TOXIN LEVELS: NEGLIGIBLE ]
[ HP: 89/120 ]
[ HOST FULLY CONSCIOUS ]
"My lord? Can you hear me?"
Maester Harlan sat in a chair beside the bed, dark circles under his eyes, several days' worth of stubble on his chin. An open book lay forgotten in his lap.
I sat up. The room tilted, then steadied. The System interface hovered in my peripheral vision, translucent and patient.
"HP. I have hit points now. This is actually happening."
"Water," I said.
Harlan scrambled to pour from a pitcher. The cup trembled in his hands.
I drank. The water was cool, clean, slightly metallic. Best thing I'd ever tasted.
"Three days," Harlan said quietly. "You slept for three days, my lord. I... I thought we'd lost you."
I lowered the cup. Met his eyes.
"He doesn't know. None of them know. To them, Corwyn Darke survived a poisoning through pure luck. Or divine intervention. Or some hidden knowledge."
The truth—that a dead project manager from the 21st century had hijacked his lord's body—was not an explanation that would go over well.
"The antidote worked," I said. My voice was steadier now. Still Corwyn's voice—younger, higher than Cole's—but it would do. "I remembered something. From a book. Old Essosi remedy."
Harlan blinked. "My lord, I've never seen you read a—"
"A lot changed when I nearly died, Maester."
He shut his mouth. Fair enough.
"We need to talk," I said, swinging my legs over the side of the bed. The System flickered, new information populating in my field of view:
[ TERRITORY COMMAND MATRIX (TIER 1) UNLOCKED ]
[ BASIC MAP AVAILABLE ]
[ TAP TO VIEW DOMAIN STATUS ]
I ignored it for now. One thing at a time.
"Who poisoned me, Harlan?"
The old man's face hardened. His hands clenched on his knees.
"Lord Bryen Darklyn, my lord. I am certain of it. The cup was brought by a new servant—hired just a fortnight ago, now fled. The same Darklyn who killed your father in that hunting 'accident.' The same Darklyn who saw your mother buried before her time."
"Darklyn." The name burned through Corwyn's memories. A minor Crownlands lord with ambitions beyond his means. Duskhollow was "worthless" by reputation—rocky land, poor harvests—but its position mattered. Controlled a small cove that could become a harbor. Bordered Darklyn's territory.
A project manager would call it "strategic real estate."
A rival lord would call it worth killing for.
[ QUEST ALERT ]
[ SURVIVE AND PROSPER ]
[ OBJECTIVE: BUILD DUSKHOLLOW FROM MINOR DOMAIN TO REGIONAL POWER ]
[ REWARD: SYSTEM UPGRADES, POPULATION BONUSES, RESOURCE MULTIPLIERS ]
[ ACCEPT? Y/N ]
I stared at the floating prompt for a long moment. Outside, wind rattled the shutters. Somewhere below, I could hear distant voices—servants, guards, the sounds of a household that had nearly lost its lord.
"Accept?" The System wanted me to accept a quest like this was some kind of tutorial mission. Like building a kingdom was a checkbox on a to-do list.
But what choice did I have? Die? Roll over and let Darklyn take what he wanted?
Cole Hanks had spent eight years managing projects. Timelines. Resources. Personnel. He'd never managed a medieval domain before—but the principles couldn't be that different.
[ QUEST ACCEPTED ]
[ GOOD LUCK, HOST ]
"Luck." I almost smiled. "I'm going to need a lot more than that."
I looked up at Maester Harlan, who was watching me with an expression caught between hope and fear.
"Tell me everything," I said. "Start with how much gold we have. And how much we owe."