hightowertargaryen

the quartet is complete 🐲

Princess, you must make this choice as well—else the scales are tipped, and justice is undone.

Neither heaven nor hell can grant you or me any solace. There is only ourselves, small, alone, cruel, and ravenous with ambition, set against one another. We pray to no gods but ourselves; we kneel before our own will. Knowing the pain, we still offer flesh and blood all the same. And do you, as I do, possess such resolve? Would you pay the same price?

Some of the characterizations are carried over from the original work：Fire and Blood

I like that, in the original work, Alicent can to some extent be said to treat her children as tools in her own struggle for power—pushing Aegon to claim the throne, sending Aemond to negotiate with the Baratheons, and so on. Rhaenyra, by contrast, is much more reluctant to throw her children into the war.

𝐗𝐕𝐈 𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐓𝐨𝐰𝐞𝐫

Your children all fell to ambition—yours, and their own, though theirs was for the most part born of you. Only this set you apart: You perished before them. You will never know whether they came to regret it, or whether that knowledge would have tormented them. Yet now, none of it matters. With your own hands you consigned them to The Warrior, and the merciful Father consigned you to The Stranger. Before long, He will lead your son and daughter to stand before you as well.

Seen thus, it may be counted a mercy of fate: that a father should perish before his own creations, spared the sight of all that followed.

Inspired by:

-𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘎𝘳𝘦𝘦𝘯𝘴-

[ book version]

𝐵𝑜𝑜𝑘𝐷𝑎𝑒𝑚𝑦𝑟𝑎 𝑎𝑛𝑑 𝐵𝑜𝑜𝑘𝐴𝑙𝑖𝑐𝑜𝑙𝑒

𝑫𝒂𝒆𝒎𝒐𝒏 𝒂𝒏𝒅 𝑹𝒉𝒂𝒆𝒏𝒚𝒓𝒂

Eustace, the less salacious of the two, writes that Prince Daemon seduced his niece the princess and claimed her maidenhood. When the lovers were discovered abed together by Ser Arryk Cargyll of the Kingsguard and brought before the king, Rhaenyra insisted she was in love with her uncle and pleaded with her father for leave to marry him.

Yet hardly had Ser Otto arrived at the Red Keep to take up the Handship than word reached court that Princess Rhaenyra had remarried, taking to husband her uncle, Daemon Targaryen. The princess was twenty-three, Prince Daemon thirty-nine.

𝑨𝒍𝒊𝒄𝒆𝒏𝒕 𝒂𝒏𝒅 𝑪𝒓𝒊𝒔𝒕𝒐𝒏

Queen Alicent did not share his displeasure, however; soon after, she asked that Ser Criston Cole be made her personal protector.

season of the witch.