Chapter 1: Flesh and Filth

Chapter 1: Flesh and Filth

Year: 296 AC

The first sense to return was smell, and it was an assault. It was a thick, cloying miasma of stale urine, cheap ale, unwashed bodies, and something metallic and coppery that tickled the back of the throat: old blood. It was the smell of human misery left to fester in a dark, damp place.

My eyes cracked open, heavy as lead shutters. The world was a smear of blurry darkness, pierced by the flickering, greasy orange light of a distant torch. A groan escaped my lips, and the sound was a stranger in my own throat—raspy, weak. My head throbbed with a vicious, pulsating rhythm, a blacksmith's hammer pounding against the inside of my skull.

I tried to push myself up, but my arms trembled with a pathetic lack of strength. My hand scraped against rough-hewn stone, cold and damp. I was lying on the floor of what felt like a cell. Panic, cold and sharp, began to cut through the fog of confusion. Where was I? The last thing I remembered was… walking home. The mundane normality of it was a bitter joke. Streetlights, the familiar drone of late-night traffic, the weight of my laptop bag on my shoulder. Then, a blinding flash, a sensation of falling through an infinite, silent void, and now… this.

This cage of filth and shadows.

My eyes adjusted slowly, resolving the blurry shapes into hard reality. I was in a small, roughly circular cell, maybe six feet across. The walls were weeping with moisture, and the floor was a compacted mess of dirt and ancient straw. Thick, rust-pitted iron bars formed the front of the cell, and beyond them was a narrow corridor lit by that single, sputtering torch.

The low, rumbling sound I'd been subconsciously hearing resolved itself into the roar of a crowd. It was muffled, indistinct, but unmistakably the sound of many voices baying for something. Interspersed were sharper sounds: a wet thud, a grunt of pain, a roar of effort.

My heart hammered against my ribs, a frantic bird trapped in a cage of bone. This wasn't a hospital. This wasn't a prank. The raw, primitive nature of my surroundings screamed a truth my modern mind recoiled from.

A heavy tread echoed in the corridor. Two figures approached, their forms silhouetted against the torchlight. They stopped before my cell. They were large men, clad in boiled leather jerkins and carrying short, cudgel-like clubs. Their faces were brutal, their beards matted with grime.

"Look, the new meat's awake," one of them grunted. His voice was a low growl, and the language… the language hit me like a physical blow. It was the Common Tongue. Not English, but the distinct, slightly archaic cadence I'd read a thousand times.

My blood ran cold. No. It couldn't be.

"Barely," the other one sneered, his eyes raking over my pathetic form. I was still in my 21st-century clothes—jeans and a thin cotton shirt, now ripped and filthy. To them, I must have looked like some strange, soft fool. "The boss paid good coin for this one. Said he came from a shipwreck off the coast. Dressed funny, though."

A shipwreck. A convenient lie to explain my sudden appearance. My mind, a maelstrom of terror and disbelief, latched onto the one solid thing it had: knowledge. I was a voracious reader, an obsessive. And my magnum opus, the world I had immersed myself in more than any other, was George R. R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire. I had read the books, the companion histories, the forums. I knew the lineages, the maps, the plots, the betrayals.

And I knew the smell of King's Landing, as described in the books, was one of open sewers and human squalor. This place, this cesspit, reeked of it.

The guards' words confirmed the impossible. I was in Westeros.

"Get up," the first guard barked, rattling the bars with his club. "You're on next."

On next? The sounds from beyond the corridor suddenly made horrifying sense. The roar of the crowd, the thud of flesh on flesh. An illegal fighting pit. In King's Landing. My stomach churned, and I fought back the urge to vomit. They hadn't just dropped me into Westeros; they'd dropped me into the absolute bottom rung of its society, a place where life was cheaper than a cup of watered-down wine.

A wave of dizziness washed over me, and a strange, shimmering sensation bloomed behind my eyes. It wasn't just the headache. It felt… different. A faint, ethereal hum vibrated at the edge of my perception, a latent power I could almost taste. For a fleeting moment, the world seemed to warp, and I saw faint, gossamer-thin threads of light clinging to the guards—one a muddy, flickering red, the other a dull, sickly orange. Life force. Vitality.

The vision vanished as quickly as it came, leaving me blinking in the gloom, my heart pounding even harder. What was that? A hallucination born of head trauma and terror?

"Did you hear me, scum?" the guard snarled, fumbling with a large iron key. The lock groaned in protest as he turned it.

My survival instincts, dormant for a lifetime of civilized comfort, screamed to life. I had to think. Panicking was a death sentence. Crying, begging… they would enjoy it before they killed me. I had one advantage here, and one alone: my knowledge of this world's future. But that was a strategic weapon, useless in a tactical brawl to the death.

What year was it? This was critical.

I pushed myself into a sitting position, making myself look as small and non-threatening as possible. My voice, when I found it, was a dry croak. "Please… where am I? What year is it?"

The second guard laughed, a harsh, ugly sound. "It's Flea Bottom, you idiot. The Pit. And it's the year 296 by Aegon's reckoning. Now on your feet before we drag you."

296 AC.

The number echoed in the silent chambers of my mind, a death knell and a trumpet blast all at once. Two years. I was two years before the start of the game. Two years before Jon Arryn's death would set the whole bloody continent ablaze. Robert Baratheon was still king, fat and drunk on the Iron Throne. The Stark children were still children. Daenerys was a frightened girl somewhere across the Narrow Sea, under the thumb of her odious brother.

And I was in a fighting pit in King's Landing, about to be killed for sport.

But a new, cold thought slithered into my mind, wrapping itself around the core of my terror. It was a thought born of selfishness and ambition, a part of my personality I had always kept leashed in a world of laws and consequences. Here, there were no consequences, only survival. And if I survived…

Two years. An eternity, for a man with knowledge of the future. A chance to prepare. A chance to become something more than a victim.

And then there was that strange vision, that hum of latent power. A new, impossible variable in an already impossible equation.

The guards grabbed my arms, their grips like iron vices, and hauled me to my feet. My body was a disgrace. I was a software developer, not a warrior. My muscles were soft, my stamina non-existent. They dragged me out of the cell and down the corridor, my bare feet stumbling on the uneven ground.

The corridor opened into a larger cavern. The roar of the crowd was deafening now. The air was thick with smoke and sweat. We were behind a heavy wooden gate. Through the slats, I could see the arena. It was a circular pit dug into the earth, perhaps thirty feet in diameter. The floor was dark sand, stained with patches of a deeper, wetter black. The crowd, a motley collection of slum dwellers, drunken merchants, and a few off-duty Gold Cloaks trying to look inconspicuous, screamed and jeered from tiered wooden benches built against the cavern walls.

In the center of the pit, a man was dying. He was on his hands and knees, blood pouring from a dozen wounds. Standing over him was a brute of a man, bald and barrel-chested, with arms as thick as my thighs. He held a crude, notched axe in one hand. He savored the moment, playing to the crowd, before bringing the axe down with a sickening crunch on the dying man's neck. The crowd erupted.

My stomach heaved, and this time I couldn't stop it. I bent over and retched, spitting up bitter bile onto the filthy floor.

"A weak stomach," one of my guards sneered, yanking me upright. "He won't last a minute."

They shoved me towards the gate. On the other side, the hulking champion was roaring, flexing his blood-slick muscles. This was my opponent. He was twice my size and radiated a brutish, confident strength. The thread of life I saw on him was a robust, angry red, pulsing with vigor.

This was it. My life, my pathetic, newly-transplanted life, was about to end. Fear was a physical thing, a block of ice in my gut. But beneath the fear, that cold, calculating part of my mind was working furiously.

He's slow, I thought, my eyes darting over the champion. All power, no technique. He swings that axe like a club. He's overconfident.

It wasn't much. It was nothing.

The gate creaked open. A shove from behind sent me stumbling into the pit. The sand was soft under my bare feet. The noise of the crowd washed over me, a physical force. They were laughing, pointing, shouting insults. I was the fresh meat, the comic relief before the next real fight.

The champion, whose name the crowd was chanting—"Gurn!"—grinned, showing a set of brown, broken teeth. He spat on the sand and hefted his axe.

"I'm gonna break you, little bird," he growled, his voice carrying easily over the din.

My eyes scanned the pit floor. There had to be something. A rock, a dropped weapon… anything. There was nothing but sand and blood.

Gurn lumbered towards me. I scrambled backwards, my movements clumsy and panicked. The crowd howled with laughter. My back hit the pit wall. Trapped.

He was ten feet away. Eight. He raised the axe, preparing for an easy, cleaving blow. My entire existence narrowed to this single moment. All my knowledge of future kings and wars was utterly worthless. My life depended on the next two seconds.

And then I felt it again. That hum. That strange, internal resonance. It wasn't a vision this time; it was a feeling, a deep, instinctual certainty that washed through me, pushing back the tide of fear with its sheer, bizarre confidence. It was a whisper in the back of my soul, a nascent power screaming for release. It told me what I needed to do. It told me the price.

Kill him.

The word wasn't a suggestion; it was an imperative. It was the key.

Kill him, and take what is his.

My terror didn't vanish, but it was joined by a ferocious, desperate clarity. My gaze darted from the axe to his feet, to his eyes, to the dirty, sharpened piece of bone I'd half-buried in the sand with my stumbling foot. It must have been a remnant from a previous, more exotic fight. A sharpened rib, perhaps. Small, crude, but better than nothing.

As Gurn took another step, closing the distance for the killing blow, I did the last thing he expected. I stopped retreating and lunged forward, diving low. The axe whistled through the air where my head had been a second before, the wind of its passage stirring my hair.

I slid on the sand, my hand closing around the sharpened bone. It was slick with something foul, but it felt as solid as a divine promise in my palm.

Gurn grunted in surprise, his swing having thrown him slightly off-balance. He was already turning, recovering faster than I'd hoped. I didn't have time to get to my feet. I scrambled forward on my knees, inside the arc of his next swing, and drove the sharpened bone with every ounce of my pathetic strength into his exposed thigh.

It was like stabbing a side of beef. The bone sank in deep, and Gurn roared, a sound of pure agony that momentarily silenced the crowd. He instinctively dropped his axe to clutch at his wounded leg.

That was his mistake.

I didn't hesitate. I didn't think about morality or mercy. The predatory instinct, the whisper of the power, was in complete control. I surged upwards, grabbing the handle of the fallen axe. It was heavier than I expected, its balance all wrong, but I held it in a two-handed grip.

Gurn was hopping on one foot, his face a mask of rage and pain, trying to pull the bone from his leg. He looked up and saw me with his axe. His eyes widened, a flicker of genuine fear appearing in them for the first time.

He opened his mouth to scream, but I was already swinging. I put my whole body into it, a desperate, clumsy haymaker. The blunt, back-end of the axe head, not the blade, connected with his jaw with a sickening, wet crunch. His head snapped to the side, and he staggered, dazed, blood pouring from his mouth.

The crowd was silent now, watching with stunned disbelief. I was no longer the comic relief.

I didn't give him a moment to recover. I stepped in close, reversed the axe, and drove the sharpened spike on the back of the blade directly into his throat. It punched through gristle and flesh with a horrible tearing sound.

A hot spray of arterial blood washed over my face and chest. It was warm, shockingly so, and it smelled of iron. Gurn made a gurgling, choking sound, his eyes wide with the ultimate surprise. He clawed at the axe embedded in his neck, his big body convulsing.

And then, it happened.

The moment the light faded from his eyes, the moment his life truly ended, the power I had sensed erupted from within me. It wasn't a whisper anymore; it was a hurricane. A silent, invisible vortex centered on my soul, and Gurn's essence was its target.

It felt like I had been plunged into a torrent of pure energy. An overwhelming wave of life crashed into me, flooding every cell. The weakness in my limbs evaporated, replaced by a surge of raw, vibrant strength. The pounding in my head vanished, my thoughts becoming diamond-sharp. My empty lungs filled with air, and the fatigue from my panic and exertion was wiped away as if it had never existed.

It was more than just physical. I could feel what I was absorbing.

His vitality, the robust, angry red energy I had seen, poured into me, stoking my own life-force from a flickering candle to a roaring bonfire. It was a feeling of profound, unassailable health.

His strength flowed into my muscles. I could feel them shifting, compacting, the fibers thickening and hardening in real-time. The heavy axe in my hands suddenly felt manageable, almost light. My body, soft and untested, was being rewritten, overwritten with the physicality of a seasoned brawler.

His stamina flooded my system, a deep well of endurance that settled into my bones. I felt like I could fight for a day and a night without rest.

But it was the skills that were the most disorienting. It wasn't memory. I didn't see his childhood or know his mother's name. It was pure, instinctual knowledge. Suddenly, I knew how to hold the axe properly. I knew the balance of it, the most effective way to swing it for maximum impact. I knew how to plant my feet, how to throw a punch that would shatter bone, how to take a hit. The muscle memory of hundreds of brutal fights, of countless victories and a lifetime of violence, settled into my own nerves and sinews.

The process took only a few seconds, but it felt like an eternity of ecstatic, terrifying transformation. When it was over, Gurn's body collapsed to the sand, but it was… wrong. It looked deflated, an empty sack of flesh. The skin was pale and waxy, with a strange, sunken quality. It was as if I had not just taken his life, but consumed the very concept of it from his corpse, leaving a hollow shell behind.

I stood over the body, panting. My chest was heaving, not from exertion, but from the sheer, overwhelming rush of the absorption. It was the most profound sensation I had ever experienced. It was better than any drug, any triumph, any pleasure from my old life. It was the feeling of becoming more.

The pit was utterly silent. The crowd, the guards, the unseen pit boss—everyone was staring. They had seen a scrawny, terrified boy stumble into the pit. They had watched him kill their champion not with skill, but with desperate, savage cunning. And now they saw him standing tall, covered in blood, holding the champion's axe as if he were born to it. My posture had changed. The fear was gone from my eyes, replaced by something else, something cold and ancient and hungry.

My gaze lifted from the corpse and swept across the crowd. I saw them for what they were. Not people. Not a threat.

They were fuel.

Every single person in this cavern, from the lowest beggar to the wealthiest merchant, was a vessel of vitality, strength, skills. Each one a potential step on a ladder.

My goal, the ambition I had half-formed in the terror of my cell, now crystallized into perfect, shining clarity. It wasn't just about survival anymore. Survival was the baseline, the bare minimum. Why just survive in a world of sheep when you have the power of a wolf? Why cower before kings and lords when you can hold power they could never dream of?

The gods of this world were distant, uncaring, or perhaps non-existent. But my power… my power was real. It was tangible. I could feel it thrumming in my newly-strengthened veins. I could kill, and I could grow. I could absorb the strength of warriors, the stamina of marathon runners, the skills of master swordsmen, the cunning of assassins.

And magic. The thought sent a shiver of pure ecstasy through me. Magic was real in this world. Faint, yes, but real. If I could find a warlock, a pyromancer, a shadowbinder… and kill them? What would I become?

I looked at the desiccated husk at my feet. The first step. The first taste.

The pit boss, a fat man with greasy hair and a silk vest that was ridiculously out of place in this hovel, was now making his way down to the edge of the pit, his piggish eyes wide with a mixture of shock and avarice. He saw a new champion. A new, inexplicable source of income.

He would think he owned me. He would think I was his property, his new prize dog. He was wrong. They were all wrong. They were living in their world, playing their game. But I was from another world, and I had just been given the power to shatter their game board.

My name was Alex. And I was going to become a god. This pit was not my prison. It was my crucible. And it was just the beginning.