fibi

The evening swallowed the Red Keep in its black throat. Bloodraven came without knock or herald, slipping through the heavy door like a shadow that had learned the shape of kings long ago. 

He looked thin and gaunt beneath his smoke-colored cloak, the fabric mottled black as old bruises, scarlet bleeding at the edges where torchlight touched it. Milk-white skin glowed corpse-pale against the birthmark that stained the right side of his face — a ragged raven wrought in wine-dark blood, crawling from throat to cheek. His long white hair hung straight, brushed forward to veil the ruin of one eye, yet the empty socket showed anyway, a pink crater staring out like a wound that refused to close. The other eye, blood-red, fixed on Maekar with the flat patience of something that had already counted every secret in the room.

He did not sit. He never sat. Maekar had noticed this years ago and never once asked why — some instinct warning him he would not like the answer, that a thing which never rested was a thing that never stopped watching, even in the small hours when a man believed himself alone.

Maekar felt the old revulsion rise, sour as bile. Eleven years wearing the crown, and still he trusted this creature only as far as he could see him. 

"Your Grace." The voice came dry, carrying neither warmth nor judgment, only the chill weight of fact. "The keep still whispers with it. They say the punishment outran the crime."

"Let them fucking whisper.“ Maekar kept his eyes on the letters he had not read, the parchment grown meaningless under his hands. "A hand struck without cause. I took a hand. Symmetry enough for beasts."

Bloodraven’s single eye did not blink. The birthmark seemed to move in the torchflame, as though the raven took flight. "The Faith will lap it up. Septas seldom see kings so quick to bleed for their bruises."

"You did not come to discuss what the yard thinks of my justice, did you?“

"No." Bloodraven's stillness was total — not even the cloak stirred, though a draft moved through the solar strong enough to guttered the nearest candle. 

Maekar looked up at last. That red eye held him, unblinking, while the empty socket gaped beside it like a second mouth waiting to speak.

"Speak your fucking business, Brynden,“ Maekar growled, "then crawl back to your ravens."

The gaunt figure set a letter on the table, seal already broken. Of course. Everything reached the king already tasted. 

"Peake stirs in the west. Old blood, older grudges. Starpike’s lord hoards grain while crying poverty. His taxes rot unpaid. It wants eyes."

"Then put eyes on it."

"I have." A pause, precise as a cut. "But some lords grow bold when they think themselves unseen. Others grow careful when they know they are watched. A king must choose which poison he prefers." The white hair stirred as Bloodraven tilted his head, the empty socket catching shadow. "You have not been yourself today.“

"I am what I have been these twenty-four fucking years."

"No." The word fell flat and final. "Not today.“

Morning came the way it always did now — gray and unearned. Maekar had not slept. He had lain in the tomb of his bed and watched the dark bleed slowly toward dawn, telling himself he thought of nothing, which was the blackest lie of all. 

The taste had not left him. 

Copper and salt and twenty-four years, thick on the back of his tongue. He knew it should have faded, knew memory was dressing itself in false flesh, and still he dragged his tongue across his teeth again and again, licking at the phantom wound until he could no longer tell what had truly been on her lip and what his mind was freshly carving there each time he reached for it.

He lay very still with the dark pressing close and let himself have it. The weight of her small jaw cradled in his palm. The trembling give of her lip parting under his thumb. The slow drag of his tongue at the corner of her mouth.

And that sound — that wounded, desperate sound that had torn out of his own throat — a sound grief had never once coaxed from him in all these years, because grief only ever hollowed a man out. This had filled him. 

Only for a heartbeat. Only for a moment.

But his body had not stopped reaching for it since.

It was not about the girl. It could not be about the girl. She was nothing — a trembling vessel, a soft-faced septa with borrowed eyes. 

It was about a field twenty-four years gone, and a brother who had stopped being able to look back at him, and for one heartbeat in a corridor, impossibly, he had.

He fisted the sheets until the fabric tore. This was not lust. This was sacrilege. This was half a life of rot finally finding warm meat to burrow into. And still the wanting grew, sour and black and patient and he hated it. He hated himself. And it changed nothing. 

The wanting did not care what he thought of it. It only grew.

He rose before the sun found the window. Washed the last of the dried blood from his knuckles, though the split skin wept fresh when the water touched it. He watched it bead red down the basin's white stone and did not stop watching until the water ran clear, but the taste in his mouth only thickened.

He dressed himself. No servants. There were parts of him that morning no other hands could be allowed to touch.

By the time the court began to gather he had already decided, though he had not yet let the decision speak its true name. 

A septa had been struck inside his own keep. A crime against the Faith, against his hospitality, against the order of things. It required answering. It required the man found and dragged before him. It required her presence again, so that justice could be seen to.

He told himself this twice. The second time slower, the way a liar rehearses a story until even he forgets which parts are true.

Valena. 

The name turned over and over in the dark of his skull like a broken tooth under the tongue. 

He had learned everything before the realms business dragged him elsewhere — where she slept, which path she walked at first light to draw water, under whose authority she served — all of it swallowed whole while his blood went hot at the mere thought of those eyes turned toward him again. One brown. One blue. 

He told himself he was doing no more than any king does when he means to see justice served.

He broke his fast alone. The bread turned to ash in his mouth. Below him the Red Keep moved through its dull, ordinary life, and he hated every living soul in it for not feeling as though the world had tilted on some hidden axis. He envied them, viciously. But none of them had held a stranger's jaw in their two hands and felt Baelor looking back out of it.

He sent for his steward before the second bell.

“There was a septa struck within these walls last night,” he said. His voice came out scraped flat. “I will have the man responsible brought before me.”

The steward bowed, chins folding into his collar, a man built entirely of apology. “Your Grace. And the septa — shall she be summoned to give her account?”

Maekar stared at the cold remains of his bread. 

“Yes,” he said at last. “Bring her. I would hear it from her own lips.”

He let the words sit there between them, twisted and wrong, while the steward’s gaze dropped, to the split and crusted knuckles resting on the table. He said nothing, he was too well-trained for that. But the silence itself was a kind of question, and Maekar felt his temper snap taut around it before the man had even straightened.

"Get the fuck out," Maekar growled.

The steward fled the room without waiting to be told twice.

Maekar remained alone with the slow, black thing now rooted deep inside his ribs. 

The first thing in twenty-four years that wanted to live more than he wanted to die.

CERYN

The melee field opened before them like a tapestry half-unrolled, its edges fraying into the afternoon light. 

The open pavilions flanked one side of the field like bright sails caught mid-voyage, their canvas snapping and fluttering in the breeze with a sound like distant applause. Banners of crimson and azure, emerald and saffron, whipped above clusters of horses and squires, the fabric crackling as if the very wind delighted in announcing their lords' ambitions. 

The air carried the rich, earthy scent of trampled grass warmed by the sun, mingled with the sharp tang of oiled leather and sweat. Laughter rolled across the grass in waves, charged with the promise of violence to come.

Ceryn’s thighs still ached from the long ride and hunger gnawed at her edges, but as they angled toward a pavilion of gold and yellow, something in her chest loosened despite herself. 

The fabric gleamed under the sun, a molten hue she had no name for, neither the pale straw of northern thatch nor the faded yellow of ancient tapestries, but a bold, living gold that caught the light and flung it back like captured lightning. It poured over the canvas in waves, the black stag of Baratheon rearing proudly across its breadth with antlers etched in stark relief. The beast seemed almost to move, muscles coiling as the breeze stirred the cloth, its eyes sewn with threads that glinted like chips of obsidian.

She had never seen such color. It pressed against her senses, vivid and insistent, pushing the hollow ache in her stomach down into something quieter, less immediate. For a fleeting breath, the exhaustion that clung to her, got tamed by a quiet awe. 

This was no northern restraint, no careful hoarding of beauty against the winter that was always coming. This was abundance, reckless and storm-born, and it stirred in her a longing she had no words for. 

Her fingers tightened unconsciously on the hem of her tunic, the rough fabric grounding her even as her eyes drank it in, tracing the way the gold seemed to pulse with inner fire.

Antlers adorned everything, as if the pavilion itself had grown them in some wild defiance of order. Nailed onto the posts in polished bone that caught the light with a creamy gleam. The structure looked less like a tent and more like the heart of some wild beast given shelter.

As they drew near, two knights burst from within, their strides quick and confident.

"Fucking finally," called the first.

Ceryn's eyes found his sword before they found the man.

Hilt. Hand - loose at his side, nowhere near it. Stance - easy, weight back on his heels. None of it said danger.

Only then did she notice the rest of him. 

Brown hair cropped short, a neatly kept beard, red-and-white diamonds stitched across his surcoat. He wore both sword and colors with startling ease, grinning as though the whole world were an old friend.

He clapped Baratheon on the shoulder. "We were beginning to think you'd found a better use for the afternoon, my lord. Or a worse one."

The second knight lingered a half-step behind the first. Yellow caught Ceryn's eye again - not a banner this time, but the man's mustache, bright against his skin. His surcoat and armor matched it, striped in yellow and black like nothing she'd ever seen worn by a man. Lean as a spearshaft, he lifted a casual salute toward Baratheon.

"Or that Wilby had finally murdered you with a stubborn buckle. Either seemed likely."

Baratheon’s laugh boomed out, the kind that seemed to shake the air around him.

"Cunts." He spread his arms as though greeting long-lost brothers. "I was wondering which of you fair maidens would start whining first."

"our new kin" YOU DIDN'T MARRY ANYONE, they are not your kin in that sense

"You missed the bedding [...] I offered to help with the laces, as is tradition." GET HIM AWAY FROM HER, I BEG YOU I AM LITERALLY SCARED actually now that if we go after my theory, Lady DD might be angry because she couldn't get dicked down last night

literally how i looked at the screen