The World That I Only Know

He spent his life failing to become anyone. Then he died — and woke up as the man he'd invented instead.

Eighteen years before the War of Dragonstone, a nameless, unremarkable young man dies with nothing to show for himself. He wakes up seven days old, in the body of Sky Dragonheart — the protagonist of the novel he never got to finish, never got to publish, never got to prove himself with. His mind is fully adult. His body is an infant's. And the family watching him is one he already knows the shape of, because he wrote them.

He has three arcs of foreknowledge and nothing past that. He knows an emperor is running a decades-long test on his own sons. He knows an uncle wants him dead and doesn't know it yet. He knows the throne is a machine that uses people, and that the story he wrote was never kind to the boy wearing his face.

This is not a power fantasy about becoming great. It's about a man who never had anyone believe in him, given a body built to be everything he wasn't — and having to find out, one political maneuver and one failure at a time, whether that's healing or just a different kind of trap.