A Song Of Flayed Banners

He dies at twenty-five in a bedroom that isn't his, shot four times by a man whose wife he shouldn't have touched. The last thing Vikram Malhotra feels is the cold spreading through his chest, and then—nothing. Until he wakes up as someone else. Castor Bolton.  Twelve years old. Heir to the Dreadfort, a fortress in the frozen North where they still tell stories about flaying men alive.  His father is the kind of lord who makes people nervous just by existing. His mother is beautiful, lonely, and carries Targaryen blood two generations back—dragon ancestry that shows in silver hair and violet eyes. And Castor? He remembers everything.  Two lives crammed into one head, and he's stuck in a world he recognizes from books he read in another lifetime. Westeros. Years before the story even begins, before the game of thrones tears the realm apart. The thing is, he knows what's coming. Every war, every betrayal, every house that's going to fall.  And he's a Bolton now, in a medieval world where power doesn't answer to laws or cameras or angry husbands with guns.  Just strength.  Just will.  Just the ability to take what you want and make people believe it was always yours. The North is brutal. The Dreadfort is worse. And Castor Bolton doesn't plan to waste his second chance playing nice. He's tall, sharp-minded, better at reading people than they are at hiding from him.  He knows how to make servants loyal, how to find the cracks in marriages, how to build something dark and useful in the spaces between what people say and what they want.  No honor.  No redemption arc. No Stark-simp Just a dead man given another life, and a medieval world that's about to learn what happens when someone plays the game without a conscience... 'cause...in..the end... the VILLAIN always wins!! --------------------------------------------