This is a slice of life story. If you are looking for a darker theme this story is not for you. This story happens approximately 15 years before the start of the series and the characteristics of each person may be different. This is the story of a man who arrived in King's Landing in the third moon of 283 AC with fifty gold dragons, a gift that allows him the ability to shop from his original world, and a note from someone he had no adequate name for that said: live as you please. He was a mathematician before he was a cook. He was British before he was Westerosi. He was thirty years old when he died in one world and twenty-five when he arrived in another, which is the kind of arithmetic that resists conventional analysis and which he had the good sense, after a brief period of adjustment, to stop trying to analyse. He found a building on Tanner's Row and he built something in it. What he built was a restaurant. What the restaurant became is more difficult to describe, because it became — over years, four floors,a network of suppliers and orphaned children learning to read in its upstairs kitchen, a garden on a hill three streets over and a table permanently reserved for a reform-minded Hand of the King and another for a queen who came on Thursdays — it became the thing that certain places become when they are built with the right intentions and maintained with the right attention. A place where the room asks nothing. This is not a story about the game of thrones. The game of thrones happens around it — in the margins, in the arriving and departing of great figures who come through the door and sit down and, for the duration of a meal, stop playing. The game is real and its stakes are real and the people who play it carry the weight of its consequences into the room with them. The room does not pretend otherwise. But the room is not the game. The room is the bread and the braised pork and the gramophone playing Debussy at a volume calibrated to be present without announcing itself, and the man behind the kitchen sight line watching his room with the specific attention of someone who came from elsewhere and found, in the building and the feeding of people, the thing he was supposed to do with his second life. He is not a hero. He had no sword and no house words and no particular interest in acquiring either. He had a set of knives and a ledger he kept meticulously and a notebook he wrote in every night, at the fourth floor kitchen table, in two hands — one for the facts and one, in the margins, for the truth of the facts. The chapters that follow are drawn from that record. He called the restaurant The Four Seasons. Reincarnation SI. Slice of Life. Slow burn romance. This is the second story I am attempting to write. There will be use of AI in help writing the story as English is not my first language.
