In the year 2072, the world stood on the brink of annihilation. War, famine, and a virus of catastrophic proportions had driven humanity to desperation.
Aemond had always been an orphan. He didn’t remember his parents, only fragments of a hazy childhood spent drifting through overcrowded shelters and the cold corridors of government-run institutions. The concept of family was nothing more than a distant fantasy—From a young age, Aemond understood that the world was broken. By the time he was old enough to comprehend the horrors around him, the future was already unraveling: the virus, the famine, the wars—disasters piling one atop the other, leaving nothing but ruin in their wake.
Aemond was picked up by a group of scientists. Just the perfect candidate, they said, as Aemond passed out from hunger. The scavengers in this neighborhood had been struggling for days. They’d raided every corner by now and had resorted to killing the weaker members among themselves. Soon, Aemond might have been next. He had already lost an eye during his last raid. An invalid. You don’t have to be a scavenger to know what would be coming for him.
When Aemond woke, he was in a sterile room. It wasn’t clean as such, for sterile rooms, but it was the clean enough space he hadn’t seen in years. He tried to sit up, but his body screamed in protest, every muscle aching from hunger and exhaustion. A woman with sharp eyes and a scar running across her temple leaned over him. She called herself Vhaella, a temporal physicist. Funny, Aemond hadn’t the slightest idea how temporal physics could come in handy in an apocalypse like this.
"You’ve survived alone for this long,” Vhaella said, her voice calm but edged with excitement. “That’s rare, Mr. Aemond.”
Aemond tore into the food given to him with shaking hands, wolfing it down so fast he almost choked. He didn’t care who these people were or what they wanted—he was alive, and for now, that was enough.
“Ever heard of time travel?” Vhaella asked, watching him closely.
He stopped chewing. Time travel was the stuff of street legends, whispered among scavengers and street rats like bedtime stories no one believed.
“They say they never come back,” Aemond muttered between bites, “that they screamed as their bodies got torn apart.”
Vhaella smiled, a humorless curve of her lips. “Some things are worse than dying.”
"Why me?" Aemond asked, his voice low, as if he already knew the answer but needed to hear it confirmed. Vhaella nodded toward the soldier standing beside them, who produced a small recorder and pressed play.
A voice crackled through the static, worn and distant. It was the voice of a young man—a bit faint, but familiar.
“The plague... released the virus... I don’t have much time. Aemond... Please...”
The sound of that voice hit Aemond like a gut punch. He knew it. He had no memory of hearing it before, but the familiarity stirred something deep inside him, as though the voice had been living quietly in the back of his mind all along, waiting for this moment.
“Who... who is that?” Aemond asked, his throat tightening.
Vhaella's gaze didn’t waver. “That’s Dr. Lucerys Velaryon. We’re hoping you will be the one to find him. In the past.”
Aemond’s head swam. The voice in the recording wasn’t just familiar. It felt personal, as if it had reached across time and lodged itself in his chest. A ripple of emotion washed over him—grief, longing, guilt—all tangled into something impossible to name.
“How did he know my name?”
"That's what we are expecting you to find out," Vhaella replied, her words precise and deliberate. She adjusted the sleeve of her lab coat, as if the formality of the gesture could ground them in a conversation filled with unsettling possibilities. "Mr. Aemond, it seems you were given an important task a long time ago. And as much as I don’t believe in fate as a scientist, I believe in temporal physics. You are meant to do this for us.”
Aemond chuckled, a bitter, hollow sound. "Why would I do this?" he scoffed. "Being a scavenger keeps me alive. What makes you think I'd risk my life getting strapped to your slaughtering machine?" His gaze lingered on the cold steel edges of the time-travel chamber, his skepticism sharp as a blade.
Vhaella calmly took off her glasses, a hint of sneer glimmered there in her eyes, just enough to catch the light. She didn’t blink. "Mr. Aemond," she said quietly, almost regretfully, "you weren’t exactly alive when we found you."
Aemond’s smirk faltered, just a little, but he didn’t respond.
"When we dragged you out of that alley," Vhaella continued, her voice steady but cold, "your infected eye was rotting in its socket, and without antibiotics, you would’ve been dead in a matter of days. You know it. I know it. You were a dead man when we found you. We gave you a second chance. And we didn’t do that to have you waste it."
Aemond’s jaw tightened as anger flickered through him. He hated how right she was. He remembered the fever burning through him as the infection spread, remembered lying in that alley, too weak to move, knowing that death was just a matter of time. And then they had found him.
"If you refuse this mission," Vhaella said, her voice sharp now, each word cutting like glass, "we will stop wasting our medication and resources on you. You’ll be on your own again. Out there." She gestured vaguely toward the window, where the shattered city loomed under a polluted sky.
"Or," Vhaella said, her voice softening just slightly, "you could take the mission. Find everything you’ll ever need in 2024. Enough food, enough medicine. Enough hope to keep you going."
Aemond’s gaze narrowed. "And what happens if I say no right now?"
Vhaella’s smile was small and humorless. "Then I imagine the scavengers will find you sooner than later, Mr. Aemond. And I suspect they’d be quite happy to have a little fresh meat tonight."
Aemond clenched his fists. Every instinct in him screamed to run, to fight back, to reject this insane offer. But the cold, brutal reality pressed down on him like a vice: he had no choice. Refusing the mission meant certain death. The only question left was whether he died in the streets—or in a past he hadn’t lived yet.
He exhaled through clenched teeth. "I’m not doing this for you," he muttered. "Just for the food and meds."
Vhaella smiled that cold, satisfied smile of hers and slipped her glasses back on. "Of course, Mr. Aemond. We weren’t expecting anything different."
With that, she gestured toward the soldier by the door. "Prepare the machine. Mr. Aemond has decided to live another day."
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