New post on Second Time Around!

“[Red Pen Reads] A Game of Thrones – Eddard”

Ned is flying high on “milk of the poppy.” We all know what it means when a character is injured, unconscious, and medicated: it’s dream-sequence flashback time!

(The role of a dreamscape’s shimmery border is here played by italics.)
Ned is accompanied by six people, but the only name we need to bother remembering is Howland Reed. He’s facing three enemies, knights of Aerys’s Kingsguard, and we don’t really need to care about any of them except maybe Arthur Dayne. Even in his dreams, Ned is on top of his favourite high horse — honour and duty! — and questioning the knights about their absence from the Battle of the Trident, the slaying of Aerys in King’s Landing, the Siege of Storm’s End, and Ser Willem Darry’s flight to Dragonstone with the pregnant queen and little Viserys. The knights are fairly certain that Ned’s mother was a hamster and his father smelt of elderberries. Ned apparently took offense, because a skirmish ensued, and at some point before, during or after, Lyanna was wailing her brother’s name and Ned was promising her something.