#cold winds threads

Robert's Small Council had barely warmed their seats when Robert—Emperor Robert now, Stannis reminded himself for the nth time—called for his banners. The Greyjoys were in rebellion. A wiser emperor would have been threatened by the idea. Rebellions were bad for business. But Robert was not a wise emperor. His blood still ran battle-hot, his spirit at its most vivid with his war hammer in his hand and a rain of phaser fire dogging his feet.

Before Robert could don his armor, Jon Arryn gave caution. Emperors did not fight wars.

The Imperial fleet was a skeleton at best. Soldiers were tired. The Red Keep still smelled of burned metal. Corpses littering the station had yet to be completely disposed of. They were not ready for another war.

This will not be a war, Robert had said, incensed not by the gall of the Greyjoys but by his forced inaction. This is a tantrum not worth a damn. Beat them down. Beat them all down.

Their enemies were experienced pilots. They made currency out of conquest. It fell on The North to subdue their errant bannermen, and on Stannis to command the fleet.

Days before the campaign northward, Stannis surveyed his command in the hangars of the Red Keep. While ships had been commisioned for the siege of Dragonstone—Fury, Lord Steffon, and Laughing Lord, proud sons of the Rebellion—they were untried against lightning quick raiders. This paltry fleet. He grit his teeth.

It felt as though Sansa had been packing up her things since ‘the crack of dawn’ - a sun-ring idiom that had never held much weight on the Planet of Winter with its shrunken days and living nights, but one which she felt she should, now, be prepared to use. Already the shy sun had come half-way up and gone back down again, so she knew instinctively that it couldn’t have been more than a few hours since she began and, still, she was exhausted.

Sansa had underestimated the emotional toll of such a project. She’d set the AIs to categorising her possessions but had explicitly wanted to pack them by herself, allowing her hands to pass over all the smooth fabrics and cool metals that had, up to now, made up the context of her world. The idea was that this would be a good way to review her brilliant fortunes, but instead, as she folded up yet another wolf-grey dress, she felt her heart growing heavier and heavier. 

Through the curved window of her bedchamber, Sansa could see the hazy yellow glow of Winterfell spun out below her, and the white starlight sloping across the distant ice-fields. In the sky, the dim blue outline of the Vale was visible, thumb-sized and hung among the diamond stars. She put down her things, dresses and leggings and shoes still laid out on the bed, and went toward the glass to look out. 

Even from high up in the Holdfast, she could still see the citizens walking in the snowy streets, running between lamplights to and from the mining bars and warehouses. A mule vessel lit up in the middle distance and she saw its silhouette move upward and fly out of sight. Everything in the North was similarly joyless to look upon: austere and grey, framed by a utilitarian aesthetic. Its people were grim-faced and vulgar in their knuckle-cracking humour. She’d spent her childhood dreaming of colour and sweetness and symmetry but, all the same, this was home, and all she’d ever known. 

But she was being silly, really. She would be making a new home among the stars soon, hung up in the sky like those mythical princesses that the gods had made into constellations. There would be new friends and luxuries up there, new food and music and the sparkling promise of change. She was leaving home to become a someday-empress! What was the North compared to her sweet, handsome Prince Joffrey?

Stepping back from the window, Sansa went back to work. If she set her mind to mechanical duties, she would be able to conserve her emotional energies. The last thing in the world she wanted was to board the Imperial shuttle the following morning with her eyes all red and swollen from crying. Cersei Lannister would think her some weak little child and Sansa could think of few things worse. 

The grey dress had just followed its sisters into the enamelled chest when there came a rap at the door, followed by the AI installation’s chime for attention.

“Robb Stark is at the door, Sansa,” the voice said. “Shall I let him in?”

“Yes,” Sansa answered, hurriedly, “yes!” She wiped her eyes quickly in case some tears were still clinging there. If her big brother saw that she was upset, she’d be so embarrassed. With Father leaving and Robb newly in charge, they both had their duties to rise to. She could show him she was just as brave as he was. 

The door slid back and she smiled, instantly. 

The north-folk had a bedtime story for every set of stars in the sky. Sansa had been listening to them all her life: the tales of lovers, eternally separated; of cursed soldiers, strung up by the heels; of great tigers and blue wolves that had been tricked into leaping after comets and found themselves tangled up in the heavens. She’d spent her first two weeks aboard the Red Keep trying to relocate those distant constellations and ground her perspective of the System in the static realm. But as the great station twisted and turned ever onward, she found herself waking up each morning lost anew, unable to tell up from down.

Until the Imperial standard had lifted them off and away from home, Sansa had never been off-world before. Robb had been plenty of times, and she’d always begged him and Theon to tell her what it was like to see the ground from the air. They’d drawn her a rough image, but they’d never mentioned to her how dizzying it all could be. To be surrounded by eternal stars and darkness; with days and nights passing imperceptibly into one another, beneath the diamond-studded black.

Sansa had known darkness in the North, but she saw now that it had never been a true darkness. Nights in Winterfell - those hard nights which lasted for months and more - had always shone. The clear, clear stars had glittered on the snow and silvered ice, colour-streaked winds would waltz overhead, even in the middle of the day. On the very quietest nights, Sansa could even hear those old gods singing, up high in the air.

On the Red Keep, the darkness - and the silence - were obfuscating. With the whole System and the red sun laid out beneath her, Sansa finally had a feeling for how very empty the sky had always been. Even the stars were hard to see at times, blurred and misted as the station rotated in its own heat-haze. She’d hoped, at first, that those attributes would make her feel insulated - safe, raised-up and held together. Instead, she only felt isolated.

The imperial palace was buzzing with the loud chattering and persistent noises of various machinery; beneath her feet she could feel the pulsating vibrations of the soul of the Red Keep, the wheels whirring and the fuel burning in the engines, perpetual and steady. The entire ship seemed to be alive with the expectant bubbling that preceded the beginning of a brighter day, the coronation of a new emperor, and with it the dawn of a new age.

With a quick sweep of her hand, she threw the trail of her red gown behind her, as she walked across the main hall fast.paced and purposeful, followed by two members of the White Band. Jaime was not one of them. They reached the Celestial Seat room, but walked right past it, and her steps grew quicker. The guard on her left was breathing heavily, and Cersei glanced over her shoulder to see him red in the face.

"Trant, you do not seem to fare well in that white suit."

"No, your grace. I mean, yes, your grace. I fare-"

"That was not a question, Trant."

Cersei stalked down the corridor with long strides, burdened with a destination and a proper meaning. When she saw the large door of Joffrey's chambers she slowed down, realizing soon enough those would become the emperor's chambers. For such a long time her chambers had held that title, and it felt bizarre that her son would rob her of that. She didn't dwell on that, as it would serve her nothing. No one dared to stop her when she waltzed right in: her son might be on the cusp of a coronation, but he was still a boy of fifteen, and Cersei was now the Empress Regnant. More so, she was his mother.

Inside, Joffrey was surrounded by a small crowd: three tailors, all crouched by the emperor's feet for any last-minute fixes to his outfit; the imperial smith, an old man of seventy-three who had modelled the new crown on Robert Baratheon's old one, adding a twist of claws across the branches; a counsellor, repeating the ceremony steps one by one, as if her son had any intention of listening or paying attention. There were other people too, an impressive amount of lackeys and servants of any kind. They all spread and let her walk through the human sea. 

She seized her son up and down, clasping her hands at her breast with a soft sigh; she brushed her fingers against the golden brooch on her son's chest, ignoring the annoyance on his face. He was a boy, after all, struggling and striving to get rid of her mother's grasp. It was natural, she kept repeating to herself every time he shrugged her off. It was normal.

"A true ruler," Cersei said at last.

"May I have a moment with the emperor?" she added, turning to the present company with a steely smile that promised no compromises. They swarmed like flies to the door, leaving the room in a single wave. When they were alone Cersei allowed herself one last proud look.

A choir welcomes the new Emperor not days after the former was buried. Their angelic voices floated up through the tall ceilings of the cathedral, entrancing the crowd into a false sense of security. The new ruler, just a child, and a spoiled one at that, would likely do them no better than the last.

Jaime wore white. Another new Emperor and he stood in the same spot, a loyal member of the personal guard to the boy who called himself Baratheon.

In every passing moment, with every obtuse and flamboyant gesture during the ceremony, Jaime knew more that this was everything Cersei had ever wanted. She watched on like it was her coronation, not her son's, wanting for power like their father. Jaime had never quite understood the rampant avarice; it all looked like a shitload of more work than he could ever stomach.

He couldn't blame her for wanting her husband dead. He did too. If Robert ever possessed any true charisma, enough to lead a rebellion, it had faded in his years as emperor. Careless with his money, careless with his women, and careless with Cersei, ultimately he grew too careless with his own life. (That's what the public thought, anyway.) A heavy drinker, it had not been at all suspicious that the man might have had one too many and gotten too big for his hunting britches. Even Jaime almost believed it.

But Cersei requested his presence after the funeral and pulled him to her marital bed; she hadn't just been relieved, or happy. She'd been triumphant; she'd all but told him out loud 'I won'.

Jaime was glad to be rid of the beast of a man but felt spurned that he hadn't gotten to do it himself. After all, he'd suffered for nearly two decades, watching the emperor shame his sister, force her to bed, and incessantly mock his family. If Cersei meant to kill him, she should've let him do it, and he was quite sure it'd been her.

The ceremonies eventually (thankfully) came to an end, allowing the crowd to disperse slowly to their various pods within the station. Cersei stuck out, slow to rise and draped in crimson and gold, a magnet for the eye. His eye. He closed the distance and caught up to her in the hallway, the stark white hallway that had been scrubbed tediously throughout the entire station prior to the coronation. Some of his partners in arms even claimed the Flea Level had hospital sterile navigation docks.

He took their word for it.