The Tenfold Lord
Chapter 1: A New Life in Stone
The first sensation was cold. Not the clinical, detached chill of the room he remembered—a memory already fading like a photograph left in the sun—but a deep, gnawing cold that seemed to emanate from the stone beneath him and seep into his very marrow. It was a damp, living cold, thick with the smell of wet rock, stale sweat, and something acridly herbal that pricked at the back of his throat.
His last clear thought had been one of sterile silence, punctuated only by the rhythmic, indifferent beep of a heart monitor. A final calculation of assets versus liabilities, a life summed up on a balance sheet found wanting. He had been Alex Vance, a man who had built an empire from nothing, only to have it stripped away by a mutiny of his own cells. He had died in a private room, the air filtered and odorless, his existence reduced to a faint electronic pulse.
This was not that.
This was a violent, chaotic assault on the senses. The blanket covering him was a coarse, scratchy thing, likely wool, and it did little to ward off the chill. His body ached with a profound weakness, a weariness that went beyond muscle and bone. He tried to shift, and a groan escaped lips that felt cracked and foreign. The body was a flawed asset, damaged goods. It was young, he could feel that much—a wiry strength coiled beneath the atrophy of sickness—but it was not his.
He forced his eyes open. The world swam into view through a feverish haze. He was in a small, circular room, the walls rough-hewn grey stone, weeping with condensation. A single arrow-slit window, unglazed, let in a sliver of bleak, grey light. The ceiling was low, supported by thick, dark wooden beams. The air was heavy, stagnant. He was lying on a cot, a simple wooden frame with a straw-stuffed mattress that rustled feebly beneath him.
Panic, cold and sharp, tried to rise, but the mind of Alex Vance was not built for panic. It was built for analysis, for data acquisition and control. He suppressed the emotional response and began a systematic diagnosis. Coma-dream. Hallucination induced by medication. Neurological event. He tried to catalogue the sensations, to file them into a known category, but the raw, primitive reality of his surroundings defied his logic. The cold was too real. The smell of the chamber pot in the corner was too distinct.
With a surge of effort that left him trembling, he pushed himself up. His limbs felt like leaden things, disconnected from his will. He swung his legs over the side of the cot, his bare feet meeting the shocking cold of the stone floor. He was wearing a simple, long-sleeved tunic of undyed wool. It chafed his skin. He stood, swaying, his hand braced against the damp wall.
Across the small room, propped against the wall, was a sheet of polished steel, its surface wavy and imperfect but reflective enough to serve as a mirror. It was a luxury, he thought, oddly out of place in this squalor. He staggered toward it, his breath coming in ragged bursts.
The face that stared back was not his.
It was the face of a stranger. A boy, really. No older than eighteen or nineteen. Gaunt from illness, his cheekbones sharp and prominent, his skin a waxy, unhealthy pale. Dark, lank hair clung to his forehead. But it was the eyes that held him. They were a startling, clear grey, the color of a winter sky, and they were filled with a terrifying, alien intelligence. They were his eyes, his consciousness, looking out from a mask of flesh he did not recognize.
The diagnosis shifted. The impossible data had to be accepted. This wasn't a dream. This was a hostile takeover. He, Alex Vance, was inhabiting someone else's body.
A sound at the door made him turn. It creaked open, and two men entered. The first was old, stooped with age, his face a roadmap of wrinkles. He wore a long, grey robe, and around his neck hung a chain of many metals, each link a different color and shape. A maester. The second man was younger, perhaps in his mid-forties, with a hard, weathered face and a clipped, grey-streaked beard. He was dressed in boiled leather and carried himself with the quiet authority of a man accustomed to giving orders.
"Lord Kaelan," the old maester said, his voice thin and reedy, but filled with genuine relief. "By the Seven, you're awake. And on your feet! A miracle."
Kaelan. The name was a foreign sound, a label on a product he'd been saddled with. Kaelan Coldwater. Lord of… this.
The harder-faced man, the castellan, remained silent, his eyes narrowed. He was not celebrating the miracle. He was assessing the situation, his gaze sharp and suspicious. He was the COO who had been running the company in the CEO's absence, and the CEO had just returned from the dead acting like a stranger.
"My head…" Kaelan began, his voice raspy, unfamiliar. He seized on the most plausible excuse. "The fever… I can't seem to recall…" He let the sentence hang, a deliberate lure for information. This was a negotiation, and he was starting from a position of absolute ignorance.
The Maester, Aethan, shuffled forward. "That is to be expected, my lord. A fever such as yours can burn away memories like a candle burns wax. It is a mercy you are with us at all. For a time, we feared the Stranger would claim you."
"How long?" Kaelan asked, his mind already shifting into audit mode.
"You have been lost to the fever for the better part of a moon's turn, my lord," Aethan supplied.
The castellan finally spoke, his voice a low rumble. "We've held the holdfast, Lord Kaelan. As you commanded." The words were respectful, but the tone was a subtle challenge, a reminder of who had been in charge.
"Harlon," Kaelan said, testing the name. He didn't know how he knew it; it was a ghost of a memory from the body's previous owner, a piece of residual data. "Report. The fever has left my mind… unclear. I need to reacquaint myself with the state of my lands." He framed it as a personal failing, a weakness, to disarm them. It was a classic corporate tactic: feign incompetence to make your opponent underestimate you.
Harlon's eyes flickered with something—distrust, perhaps even contempt for this sudden frailty in his young lord. "There is little to report that has changed, my lord. The autumn chill came early this year. The harvest was poor."
"Quantify 'poor'," Kaelan said, the word slipping out before he could stop it. It was the language of his old life, the language of spreadsheets and quarterly reports.
Harlon blinked. "My lord?"
"How much grain do we have in the stores?" Kaelan clarified, softening his tone. "How many people must it feed? For how long?"
The castellan's expression hardened. This was not how the boy Kaelan Coldwater spoke. The boy was prone to moods and flights of fancy, not cold, hard numbers. "We have three hundred and seventeen souls within these walls, my lord, counting the guard, your household, and the villagers who sought shelter. The stores… they are low. Enough for a month, perhaps, if we are frugal. Two, if we eat rats by the end of it."
A month. The number was a death sentence. Kaelan's mind raced, calculating depletion rates, burn rates. This wasn't a failing business; it was a company in the final stage of liquidation.
"And our treasury?" he pressed.
Harlon gestured to a small, iron-banded chest in the corner. "What remains is in there. A few silver stags, a great deal more copper pennies. Barely enough to buy a cart of grain from a passing merchant, if any were foolish enough to travel these roads so close to winter."
"The men?"
"Twenty men-at-arms fit for duty. Their arms are old, their mail rusted. The best of our strength was levied by Lord Stark for the war in the south," Harlon said flatly. He was referring to the War of the Ninepenny Kings, a conflict Kaelan knew from the books was a bloody affair that had just concluded on the Stepstones. It had extinguished the male line of the Blackfyres and seen the death of Lord Ormund Baratheon. For Stonecreek, it meant their able-bodied men had been sent to die for a king's quarrel far away, leaving them defenseless.
"I need to see it," Kaelan declared, his voice gaining a measure of strength. "All of it. I will walk the walls."
Maester Aethan fussed. "My lord, you are too weak! You need rest."
"I need to understand the full scope of our liabilities," Kaelan muttered, then corrected himself. "I need to see my home. Now."
The command brooked no argument. Harlon gave a curt nod, his suspicion warring with his duty. He was the man responsible for the castle's administration, its garrison, its very defense. This sudden inspection by a lord he no longer seemed to recognize was an unwelcome intrusion.
Leaning on the old maester for support—a calculated display of weakness—Kaelan stepped out of the lord's chamber and into the heart of his inheritance. The bailey was a small, muddy expanse of churned earth. A handful of people moved about, their motions slow and lethargic. He saw it immediately: not just poverty, but the systemic effects of malnutrition. A depleted workforce. Their clothes were thin, patched, their faces hollowed out by hunger. They looked at him with dull, incurious eyes, their lord's miraculous recovery just another strange event in a life of hardship.
He was a businessman, and he saw his situation in those terms. He had been installed as the CEO of a company on the brink of total collapse. The infrastructure was failing, the workforce was demoralized and unproductive, and cash flow was non-existent. The market—the harsh, unforgiving North—was hostile, with winter threatening to wipe out what little remained.
His tour was a grim exercise in due diligence. He ran a hand along the main gate, its wood soft with rot. He peered down the shallow well, the water level disturbingly low. The smithy was cold and silent, the blacksmith a gaunt figure who could do little more than sharpen blunted tools for lack of iron or charcoal. The pens where livestock should have been were empty, save for a few scrawny chickens pecking at the frozen mud.
He insisted they climb the narrow stone steps to the top of the curtain wall. The wind was sharper up here, a biting cold that sliced through his thin tunic. From this vantage point, he could see the entirety of his domain. The holdfast itself, Stonecreek, was a small, crude fortification, barely deserving of the name castle. It was nestled in the foothills of the great Northern mountains, a vast, jagged spine of grey peaks that dominated the western horizon, their tops already dusted with snow.
Below, a few miserable-looking fields lay fallow, their soil thin and stony. A swift, dark stream—the Coldwater Burn, he presumed—cut through the land, its water looking black and frigid. Beyond the fields lay the edge of a vast, dark forest, the wolfswood. The land was beautiful in a brutal, unforgiving way, but Alex Vance's mind didn't see beauty. He saw poor land utilization, inefficient resource allocation, and a complete lack of a sustainable economic model. The entire enterprise was fundamentally bankrupt.
This was not a kingdom. It was a tomb. A minor house like Coldwater was at the bottom of the feudal pyramid, sworn to a greater lord who was in turn sworn to a great house. In canon, House Coldwater was a vassal of House Royce in the Vale. But here, in the North, they were sworn to the Starks of Winterfell, a position that offered little in the way of immediate aid. They were insignificant, a footnote in the grand ledger of Westeros.
"The land is hard, my lord," Harlon said, his voice devoid of emotion. "It gives little, and winter takes much."
"It is the land the gods gave us," Maester Aethan added piously.
Kaelan ignored them both. His mind was a flurry of calculations. He needed capital. He needed resources. He needed a competitive advantage in a market where survival itself was a luxury. He had knowledge—the memories of a 21st-century education and a ruthless business career, plus the meta-knowledge of the books he'd consumed as a hobby. He knew about crop rotation, sanitation, basic engineering, and political futures. But knowledge was useless without the means to implement it. He was a brilliant strategist with no army, a master industrialist with no factory.
He was trapped.
Back in his chamber, the full weight of his predicament settled upon him. The brief surge of adrenaline from the tour faded, leaving behind the bone-deep weakness of the fever and a cold, stark despair. It was not a despair for the starving people outside. He felt a detached pity for them, the way a CEO might feel for a factory being shut down. His despair was for himself. He, Alex Vance, who had clawed his way to the top of a cutthroat world, was now a penniless, powerless lordling in a primitive backwater, fated to starve to death with a few hundred peasants in a crumbling stone keep. It was the ultimate failure.
His supper arrived, brought by a silent servant girl with fear in her eyes. It was a small wooden bowl containing a thin, watery gruel, with a few lonely oats floating in the greyish liquid. He sat at the crude wooden table that served as his desk and stared at the bowl. This was his P&L statement. This was the sum of his entire lordship.
He picked up a single, dry oat, rolling it between his thumb and forefinger. It was a pathetic, insignificant thing. A single unit of a near-zero inventory. He stared at it, a storm of frustration and impotence raging within him. All his knowledge, all his ambition, reduced to this. To a single, useless oat.
His mind, honed by decades of relentless focus on growth, on multiplication, on turning one dollar into ten, fixated on the tiny grain. The thought was not a wish. It was not a prayer. It was a command, born of pure, undiluted will. I need more. I need capital. I need to turn one into ten.
And then, it happened.
There was no flash of light, no clap of thunder, no scent of brimstone. One moment, a single oat rested in the crease of his palm. The next, there were ten.
He froze, his breath catching in his throat. The ten oats were identical, perfect copies of the original. They were solid, real, with the same weight, the same texture. He let them spill from his hand, clattering softly onto the rough wood of the table.
His mind, which had been spiraling into despair, snapped into a state of sharp, cold focus. The emotional response was purged, replaced by the thrill of discovery. He had a new asset. A proprietary technology.
He began to experiment, his movements precise and methodical. He picked up a splinter of wood from the floorboards. He held it, focused his will, pictured the duplication. Ten. Instantly, his palm was full of identical splinters.
He reached into the small leather pouch at his belt and pulled out a single copper penny. It was worn smooth, the flayed man of House Bolton barely visible on one side—a grim reminder of the North's bloody history. He closed his fist around it, the cold metal pressing into his skin. He concentrated, pouring his intent into the coin. Ten. A soft clatter as nine more pennies appeared, falling onto the table to join the oats and splinters. They were perfect copies, down to the last scratch.
He looked around the room, searching for new test subjects. A fly buzzed near the window. He focused on it, trying to replicate the mental effort. Nothing happened. He tried to duplicate the entire bowl of gruel. Again, nothing. The effort was a strange mental pressure, a feeling of pushing against a limit.
He sat back, his heart hammering not with fear or wonder, but with the cold excitement of a scientist who has just made a breakthrough. He began to deduce the rules through logical iteration.
* Target must be a non-living object.
* Target must be a single, discrete item.
* Physical contact is required.
* There is a limit. The mental pressure he felt suggested a finite number of uses per day. He had performed the action three times. He tried again with another splinter. It worked. Four. He kept going, duplicating a small stone, a loose thread, a drop of water. After the tenth duplication, he tried again. Nothing. The mental well was dry. The power, whatever it was, was gone.
Ten times. Ten uses per day. The tally reset at dawn, he guessed. He would test that hypothesis tomorrow.
He looked at the small, pathetic pile of duplicated items on his desk. Ten oats. Ten splinters. Ten copper pennies. A handful of stones and threads. To the boy Kaelan Coldwater, it would have been a strange, frightening parlor trick. To the lords of Westeros, it would be dark sorcery.
But to Alex Vance, it was everything.
It was seed capital. It was leverage. It was a production line that could create value from nothing. It was a secret, proprietary process that gave him an absolute, insurmountable advantage in this primitive market.
The despair was gone, burned away by the cold, thrilling hum of pure calculation. The game had changed. The rules were his to write. He was no longer a prisoner in this world, a victim of circumstance.
He stood and walked to the arrow-slit window, looking out at the dark, dying land under a sky the color of slate. The wind howled, a lonely, mournful sound. The problems were still immense. The winter was still coming. His people were still starving. His castellan was still suspicious.
But now, he had a tool.
He was the Tenfold Lord. And he was about to launch the most ambitious, the most ruthless, the most profitable enterprise in the history of Westeros.
A slow, cold smile touched the lips of the boy in the mirror.
Let the audit begin.