The door didn't open with a click this time... it groaned under the weight of a heavy shoulder. Rhaegar didn't flinch as the bolt he had painstakingly slid home was forced back by the sheer persistence of the palace guards. Queen Rhaella entered first, her face a mask of grief carved from winter ice. Behind her, a procession of servants carried the morning's necessities: basins of warm water, fresh linens, and a tray of broth that no one in this room would ever taste.

“She does not wish to get up yet, Mother” Rhaegar mumbled, his voice sounding as though it had been dragged through gravel and grief. He didn’t look up, his gaze anchored to the frozen perfection of your face. He reached out, his fingers tracing the line of your temple with an obsessive, rhythmic slowness, smoothing the silver strands of your hair as if you were a painting he were merely touching up. “Take the child and go. Just… give us a moment more.”

Rhaella did not move. She stood at the foot of the bed, her gaze drifting from Rhaegar’s sunken eyes to the terrifyingly pristine arrangement of the body. The sight of the fresh linens meticulously tucked, the skin scrubbed raw and white had not brought a smile to the Queen's lips. It brought a shudder of recognition. She knew this kind of devotion; she had seen it in the eyes of men who had lost everything and decided to build a palace out of the ruins.

Rhaella stepped forward, the silk of her gown whispering against the stone. She didn't reach for Rhaegar, she reached for the infant. Daenerys’s wail broke off into a wet, shuddering gasp as she was lifted from the bench, her tiny fists flailing against the air. The silence that rushed back into the room was heavier than the noise had been. Rhaella looked at her son, seeing the way he clung to your hand, his knuckles white, his grip desperate, as if he could anchor your soul to the bedsheets by sheer force of will.

Rhaella’s voice didn’t break, it had become something forged and cold, a blade meant to cut through the fog of Rhaegar’s delusion. She held the infant close to her breast, the child’s frantic hunger manifesting in a series of jagged, rhythmic whimpers. "Your daughter is starving, Rhaegar" she said, the words landing like stones in a still pond. She watched him, her violet eyes scanning the way he refused to let go of your hand, the way he looked at your pale face as if waiting for you to blink. "Do you not want to please your sister? To honor the memory of the woman who gave everything to bring this child into the world?"

“Do not talk as if she is dead” Rhaegar snapped, his voice cracking like a whip in the oppressive stillness of the room. He jerked his hand away from yours, not to release you, but to shield you, his body curving over yours like a living shroud. “She is only weak. From that… that thing. The labor. The struggle.” He looked up at his mother, his eyes wide and shimmering with a dangerous, frantic light. “She is merely exhausted. The maesters said the shock can leave a person hollow for days. She is resting, Mother. She is merely resting.”

"We have had this conversation, Rhaegar" Rhaella whispered, her voice a ghostly rasp that seemed to drift from a distance. She didn't look at him...her gaze was fixed on the way the light caught the unnatural, waxy sheen of your forehead. With a slow, deliberate movement, she shifted the squalling infant into the waiting arms of a trembling maid. "Go. Feed the child. Now."

The maid scurried away, the infant’s cries fading into the corridor, leaving a silence so profound it felt like a physical weight pressing against the walls. Rhaella stepped closer, the scent of old roses and medicinal salts clinging to her. She didn't touch him...she knew the volatility of his grief, but she leaned in until her shadow fell across your pristine, pale face. "Tell me, my son" she murmured, her eyes narrowing with a terrifying clarity. "What will you do when the bloom fades? When the air leaves the room and the rot begins? What will you do when her skin falls from her body in your arms, and you are still whispering to a ghost?"

Rhaegar didn’t answer. He didn't even blink. He simply leaned down and pressed his forehead against yours, his eyes closing as if to shut out the entire world and its brutal insistence on truth. He stayed there for a long time, his breath hitching in a ragged, uneven rhythm that sounded like a dying bird. When he finally spoke, his voice was a hollow echo, stripped of all the melodic grace that had once defined him.

"I will keep her" he whispered, the words barely audible over the thrumming of his own heartbeat. "I will keep her exactly as she is."

"She cannot stay here, Rhaegar." Rhaella’s voice was no longer a blade; it was a slow-moving tide, inevitable and cold. She stepped closer, the hem of her gown brushing the edge of the bed. "The air is turning. The servants whisper of a sweetness in the halls that is not perfume. You cannot hold back the earth, nor the rot."

Rhaegar’s eyes snapped open, the violet depths churning with a sudden, violent lucidity. He didn't look at his mother...he looked at the window, where the grey light of the morning was beginning to turn a bruised, sickly yellow. The "sweetness" Rhaella spoke of was already there, a cloying, floral rot that clung to the back of his throat, masquerading as the lavender soap he had used to scrub your skin. It was the smell of a closing door.

“I have given you a full night to say goodbye to her, Rhaegar” Rhaella whispered, her voice finally fracturing. The cold mask of the Queen slipped, revealing a mother who had spent the last twenty-four hours watching her son hold a conversation with a ghost. She knelt beside the bed, the heavy velvet of her skirts pooling like a bruised cloud on the stone floor. With a trembling hand, she reached out to brush a silver lock from your forehead, her fingers lingering on the skin that had transitioned from the warmth of life to the stillness of marble. A single, crystalline tear escaped and traced a path down her cheek, dripping onto the white linen. “Let the Silent Sisters ready her for her final journey.”

Rhaegar didn't move. He remained arched over you, a living canopy of grief, his fingers still laced through yours. The invitation of the Silent Sisters was a summons to a reality he refused to acknowledge. To him, the mention of a "final journey" was a betrayal, a sudden theft of the peace he had meticulously curated in the dimness of the room. He felt the air shift as Rhaella stood, her presence retreating, leaving him in a vacuum of his own making.

The sound that escaped him was not a human noise, it was the sound of a structural failure, a beam snapping under a weight it was never meant to carry. Rhaegar’s chest heaved, his lungs fighting for air that felt like powdered glass. He looked at your face...so still, so unnervingly patient, and the wall he had built of delusions and lavender oil finally crumbled.

His heart didn't just break... it shattered into a thousand jagged shards that tore through his insides with every shuddering breath. He leaned down, pressing his forehead against yours one last time, his voice a ruined whisper. "I-I'll… I'll wrap her myself" he gasped, the words punctuated by a ragged, visceral sob that shook his entire frame.

The silk of the burial gown was a cold, silver thing, sliding over your skin with a whisper that sounded like a final goodbye. Rhaegar’s hands, usually so steady when plucking the strings of his harp, were trembling violently, fumbling with the delicate fastenings at the shoulder. He paused, his vision blurring as he looked down at your fragile frame, and a sudden, jagged laugh escaped his throat, a sound halfway between a sob and a giggle.

He remembered you at seven years old, standing atop a velvet footstool in a room filled with the scent of beeswax and lemon oil, little legs already trembling from your frail sickness. You had been fighting a stubborn lace collar on a gala gown, your small face twisted into a fierce, concentrated frown. When he had stepped in to help, his larger hands gently guiding the fabric into place, you had pushed his wrist away with a strength that defied your wavering legs. "I'm not weak… I can do it, Rhae!" you had declared, your voice a tiny, defiant roar. You had looked up at him then, your violet eyes flashing with a stubborn pride that had always been the strongest thing about you.

He choked on a sob, the memory of your childhood defiance colliding with the absolute stillness of your chest. He smoothed the silver silk over your ribs, his touch lingering on the place where the life you had carried had once kicked. He remembered the look on your face when you had told him the baby was a girl...the certainty, the secret knowledge you had brought back from a dream. You had been so sure. You had fought for her with every remaining breath, treating the child not as a parasite, but as a promise.

He wound the silver silk around you with a meticulous, agonizing slowness, as if the fabric were a spell that could bind your soul to the room for just one hour more. He tucked the edges beneath your shoulders and across your waist, creating a shimmering cocoon that mirrored the moonlight you had always loved. But as he reached your throat, his hands faltered. The linen stopped there, leaving the elegant curve of your jaw and the pale, frozen serenity of your face exposed to the biting chill of the room. He could not bring himself to cover the only part of you that still looked like the girl who had laughed in the godswood.

Rhaegar leaned in, his movement jagged and unstable. His face was a ruin of salt and grief, his eyes swollen and bloodshot, his skin flushed a deep, raw crimson from hours of suffocating sobs. He pressed his lips to your forehead...a kiss that felt less like a farewell and more like a desperate prayer. He lingered there, his forehead resting against yours, his hot tears spilling over and wetting your cold, marble skin. He stayed for a heartbeat, then ten, then a minute, his breath hitching in a rhythmic, guttural sound that echoed the breaking of a world. He tried to pull back, but his muscles locked; he was a man drowning in the shallow end of his own devotion.

When he finally withdrew, his fingers trembled so violently that he could no longer hold the silk. He let the fabric slip from his grasp, the silver cloth pooling like a fallen star beside the bed. He could not finish the shroud. He could not be the one to erase the sight of you from the world. With a low, broken moan, he stepped back, his legs buckling as he collapsed onto the stone floor, leaving the remaining task to the Silent Sisters. They entered the room like shadows, their faces veiled and their footsteps nonexistent, their presence a cold reminder that the time for delusions had ended.

The scent of cedar and myrrh fought a losing battle against the sudden, violent roar of the pyre. Rhaegar did not wait for the first spark to catch the silver silk, nor for the heat to bloom into a gold rimmed hunger. The moment the torches descended, turning the twilight air into a screaming orange void, he pivoted. He turned his back to the flame with a visceral, physical jerk, as if the sight of the fire were a blade cutting through his chest. His eyes snapped shut, but the orange glow still bled through his eyelids, searing the image of your stillness into his retinas. He stood there, shivering despite the sudden warmth radiating behind him, his fingers trembling with a rhythmic, jagged intensity that made him feel as though he were shattering from the inside out.

Then, a warmth that had nothing to do with fire pressed against his palm. Elia’s hand, small and steady, slid into his, her fingers locking with his in a grip that was surprisingly firm. With her other hand, she held young Rhaenys, whose wide, confused eyes were fixed on the towering wall of flame. Elia didn't speak... she didn't offer hollow comforts or platitudes about the cycle of life and death. She simply anchored him. She stood as a living bridge between his collapse and the crushing reality of the smoke, her presence a quiet, enduring strength that kept him from falling to his knees in the ash.

The heat from the pyre was a physical blow, a wall of shimmering gold that turned the evening air into a furnace. Rhaegar didn’t move for a long time, his body stiff as a salted pillar, his eyes locked on the horizon where the grey sea met a bruised, purple sky. He could feel the crackle of the silver silk igniting behind him, the sudden, violent roar of the flames consuming the physical remnants of the only world he had ever truly wanted. The smell of cedar and myrrh was quickly replaced by the scent of searing heat...a dry, electric aroma that felt like a cleansing of the soul.

The first week was not a passage of time, but a stagnant pool of grey. Rhaegar did not leave the chamber... he simply became a part of its architecture, a ghost haunting a room where the only other ghost was no longer there. He refused to let the servants touch a single thing. The basin of water you had used in your final hours remained, the surface filmed over with a thin, iridescent skin of dust, the half-empty carafe of honeyed water sat on the nightstand, the liquid separating into a sugary sludge. He moved through the room with a tentative, reverent fragility, stepping around the void where you used to be as if the air itself were made of spun glass that might shatter if he breathed too hard.

Every night, he crawled into the center of the bed, his body curling into the exact indentation your weight had left in the mattress. He pressed his face into the pillow, inhaling the fading, phantom scent of your skin...a lingering trace of lavender and the metallic tang of the sickness that had claimed you. He slept in the hollow of your absence, his arm flung across the space where your waist should have been, clutching the sheets until his knuckles turned white. In the suffocating dark, he would whisper to the silence, recounting the day's trivialities, convincing himself that if he just spoke softly enough, he might hear the ghost of your laughter answering him from the shadows.

The door to the bedchamber didn't so much open as it did exhale, a slow creak of hinges that admitted Queen Rhaella and a tray of lemon cakes and chilled wine. Rhaegar didn't look up from the pillow he was clutching to his chest. He was counting the remaining threads of your scent, terrified that if he blinked, the last lingering note of lavender would evaporate into the stale air. His mother’s footsteps were soft, but to him, they sounded like thunderclaps in a cathedral of silence. She set the tray on the bedside table, the silver clinking with a clinical precision that felt like an indictment. He didn't want the honeyed bread or the sweetness of the wine; he wanted the weight of you, the specific, fragile heat of your hand against his jaw, the way your breath had sounded like a secret whispered only to him. He remained curled in the hollow of the mattress, a shipwreck of a man anchored to a ghost, treating the room as a sanctuary and a cell all at once.

"She is crying for you, Rhaegar" Rhaella said, her voice devoid of the sharpness that had defined her during the funeral. Now, it was only tired. "She is only a week, and she has a father who has become a phantom. She does not understand why the man who promised to love her has vanished into a room of dust."

Rhaegar’s grip tightened on the pillow. The mention of the child—the thing that had stolen you, the miracle that had cost him everything, sent a jolt of conflicted electricity through his spine. He had not seen Daenerys since the pyre had cooled. He had spent the last seven days convinced that to look upon her face was to look upon the murder weapon that had killed his heart. He feared that if he held her, he would see your eyes in hers and be forced to remember that you were gone; or worse, he would see that you weren't entirely gone, and the surge of love for the child would feel like a betrayal of the woman he still tried to conjure from the air.

“Don’t...” Rhaegar whispered, the word barely a vibration against the fabric of the pillow. “Don’t ask me to be a father when I am still a widower.” He let out a long, shuddering sigh that seemed to empty his lungs of everything but grief, and then he buried his face deep into the linens, hiding from the light, the world, and the demands of the living.

Rhaegar didn’t move, but the bed groaned as his mother shifted her weight, the fine silk of her gown rustling like a secret. She didn't command him this time. Instead, she sank onto the edge of the mattress, her presence a steady, grounding warmth against the chill of the room. Slowly, with a tenderness that seemed to defy the hardness of her royal mantle, she reached out and began to stroke his silver hair. Her fingers moved in slow, rhythmic arcs, brushing the tangled locks away from his forehead...the same way she had comforted him when he was a boy frightened by the thunder of a summer storm.

“What of Elia and your children with her?” Rhaella’s voice was a soft friction, a gentle sanding down of the edges of his isolation. She didn't ask it as a reproach, but as a reminder that the world had not stopped turning simply because his had crashed into the sea.

Rhaegar shifted, the silk sheets rasping against his skin like a dry confession. He didn’t look at his mother, instead staring fixedly at the empty space beside him where the indentation of a body had finally begun to smooth over. "From the start, I only ever wanted her" he whispered, the words breaking midair, followed by a wet, shuddering sniffle that sounded like something snapping inside his chest. He curled tighter into the void, his voice dropping to a raw, guttural register. "I got Elia instead… and she is… she is everything a man could wish for. She is grace, and she is kindness, and she is the steady hand I need when the world shakes."

He paused, his breath hitching as a single tear escaped and soaked into the pillow. "I do love her..." he added, the confession sounding like a plea for forgiveness from a god who wasn't listening. "But I don't think I can ever love her like I did… her." He didn't name you... he didn't have to. The silence that followed was heavy with the ghost of your presence, a third person in the room who occupied no space but filled every corner with an unbearable longing. Rhaella didn't interrupt; she knew the specific, agonizing frequency of that kind of love...the kind that burns through a person until there is nothing left but ash and appetite.

Rhaella did not push for a confession or demand a timeline for his healing. Instead, she reached out and hooked her arms beneath his shoulders, pulling him upward from the depths of the mattress with a firm, maternal gravity. Rhaegar resisted for a moment, a stubborn anchor in his own misery, before he finally succumbed to her strength. He sat up, his posture slumped, his shoulders shaking with the effort of simply existing. Rhaella reached out, her palms warm and smelling faintly of rosewater, and cradled his face. She held his jaw with a tenderness that bordered on the sacred, her thumbs brushing away the salt-stains on his cheeks. His eyes were raw, the rims a swollen, vivid red, and though the great storms of sobbing had passed, tiny, involuntary tears continued to leak from the corners of his lids, tracing silver paths through the grime of his grief.

Rhaella’s gaze didn’t waver, her violet eyes reflecting a depth of ancestral sorrow that made Rhaegar feel small, like a child lost in the corridors of the Red Keep. "Love is not a finite resource, Rhaegar" she whispered, her voice a soft anchor in the swirling dark of his mind. "It does not subtract from one heart to give to another. You do not betray her by loving the life she left behind. In fact, to turn your back on that child is the only betrayal that would truly be irrevocable."

"How can I love something that killed the one thing I love?" Rhaegar whispered, the words barely escaping his lips, sounding more like a prayer to a dead god than a question. He looked at his hands...the same hands that had held her as she faded, the same hands that had failed to pull her back from the edge, and saw them as clumsy, useless things. To him, the infant was not a miracle...she was a thief. She was a tiny, breathing thief who had stolen the light from the room and the breath from a pair of lungs he had adored above his own. He imagined the child as a parasite that had drained every ounce of vitality from the woman he worshipped, leaving behind a hollow shell for him to bury.

Rhaella’s expression softened, though a flicker of maternal sternness remained in the set of her jaw. She let out a sigh that seemed to carry the weight of the entire dynasty, her hand lingering on his cheek for one last, grounding moment. "You speak of theft, my son, but nature is not a thief... it is a trade" she murmured, her voice regaining a hint of its usual melodic warmth. "Your sister did not lose a battle to that child. She fought a war and chose the victory she left behind. I hope you soon realize that Daenerys did not steal her life...she was the only piece of it that the gods allowed us to keep."

With a sudden, deftness that broke the oppressive tension of the room, Rhaella reached toward the silver tray. She plucked a lemon cake from the porcelain plate, the yellow crumb light and fragrant, and held it to his lips with a playful, almost insistent nudge. "Now eat, sweet boy" she commanded, her tone shifting from the gravity of a queen to the tenderness of a mother. "Grief is a ravenous beast, but it cannot be fought on an empty stomach."

The silence of the room had become a physical thing, a thick, velvet curtain that Rhaegar drew around himself to keep the world at bay. For fourteen days, he had existed in a state of suspended animation, his world reduced to the rhythmic clicking of a silver chain against his thumb. He sat in the dim light of the afternoon, obsessively polishing a locket, a delicate piece of craftsmanship Rhaella had commissioned for the immediate family. Inside, nestled behind a sliver of moonstone, lay a pinch of fine, grey ash, the only physical remains of the woman who had been his sun and his moon. He traced the filigree with a trembling finger, his eyes vacant, listening to the ghost of her voice in the spaces between his own heartbeats.

The sudden, violent percussion of footsteps shattered the stillness. Rhaella did not enter the room so much as she invaded it, her silk slippers stomping against the stone floor with an indignity that bordered on rage. She arrived like a storm surge, her face flushed and her eyes flashing with a maternal fury that brooked no further excuses. In her arms, wrapped in a bundle of cream-colored wool, was the living legacy he had spent two weeks avoiding.

Rhaegar flinched, the sudden intrusion of light and noise acting like a physical blow. He looked up, his gaze sliding from the locket to the bundle in his mother’s arms. The infant was awake, her tiny face crumpled in a silent scream, her small, flailing arms fighting against the wool. In the dimness of the room, those luminous violet eyes seemed to pulse with an accusation that Rhaegar could not bear. He felt a surge of nausea...not out of hatred, but out of a longing so acute it felt like a blade twisting in his gut. He couldn't look at the child without seeing the void she had left behind.

"Look at her, Rhaegar!" Rhaella’s voice wasn't a request; it was a summons. She stepped into his personal space, the scent of the nursery...milk and warm linen, colliding with the stale air of his mourning. "You will hide in this tomb of a room until the girl is walking? Until she asks why her father is a stranger who smells of old grief and unwashed silk?"

Rhaegar recoiled, pressing his back against the headboard, his hands clutching the locket as if it were a shield. "I cannot" he gasped, his voice a dry rattle. "Mother, please. Every time I look at her, I see the moment the light left her eyes. I see the price that was paid."

"Your sister died for her! For your child!" Rhaella roared, her face flushed with fury and grief. She strode forward, the tiny bundle squirming in her arms wrapped in cloth white as snow. "And you sit and ignore her these past weeks!? Hold her! " Without waiting, she thrust the infant forcefully into Rhaegar’s unprepared hands. He gasped, instinctively clutching the sudden weight. A choked sob tore from his throat as he finally looked down.

The baby was impossibly small, skin translucent as parchment over delicate bones. Wisps of silver hair, finer than spider silk, crowned her head. Her eyes were open and wide, unfocused pools of Targaryen violet, blinking slowly at the sudden shift in light. She didn't cry. She simply stared up at him, her tiny mouth working silently. Her fingers, miniature and perfect, curled instinctively around the edge of his velvet doublet.

"My…" The word was a choked whisper, barely audible over the crackling hearth. His thumb, trembling, traced the curve of her cheekbone, impossibly delicate beneath skin like thin silk. Her violet eyes, wide and unfocused, blinked slowly, catching the firelight. They held no accusation, only a profound, unknowing stillness. "My sweet sister…" The phrase tumbled out, thick with grief and bewildered wonder. He stroked her face again, the gesture clumsy, reverent. "…died for you." The truth of it settled upon him like ash.

Daenerys let out a small giggle at the air...at nothing at all.

"What are you looking at, little one?" Rhaegar murmured, his voice thick. He glanced back towards the corner again, seeing nothing but shifting shadows. A sigh escaped him, heavy with exhaustion and lingering grief. "Ghosts?"

The days that followed were not marked by a sudden erasure of grief, but by a slow, painstaking negotiation with the living. Rhaegar began to carve out hours of fragile peace in the solar, a space where the sunlight filtered through the stained glass in pools of amber and bruised purple. He spent these hours in a state of suspended animation, cradling Daenerys against his chest while she slept, her small, rhythmic breaths the only clock that mattered. He held her with a terrified sort of reverence, as if she were a piece of porcelain that might shatter if he breathed too hard, his gaze drifting between the infant’s sleeping face and the empty air beside him, still half-expecting a ghostly hand to brush his shoulder.

Across the room, the silence of his mourning was punctured by the chaotic, joyful symphony of his other children. Elia moved through the sunlight with a patient, luminous grace, her laughter a soft chime that grounded Rhaegar whenever his mind began to drift back toward the void. She was the center of a swirling storm of childhood energy. Aegon, plump and determined, was currently engaged in a losing battle with gravity, letting out high-pitched shrieks of delight as he attempted to crawl across the polished weirwood floor. He would lunge forward with a burst of effort, only to collapse onto his stomach with a soft thump, giggling as Elia scooped him up and kissed his chubby cheeks.

He wanted to smile, a genuine curve of the lips that reached his eyes, but his heart felt like a stone submerged in cold water. As he watched Elia cradle Aegon, the boundaries of his perception blurred, flickering like a candle in a draft. For a heartbeat, the image shifted...it wasn't Elia’s warm, olive skin and dark curls, but your pale, ethereal glow. He saw you there, sitting amidst the sunlight, not confined to the bedsheets and the suffocating scent of medicinal herbs, but strong. He imagined you laughing, your voice no longer a fragile whisper but a vibrant melody, holding a healthy, thriving child against your breast. In the theater of his mind, he replaced the living woman with the ghost of the one he had lost, grafting the joy of the present onto the tragedy of the past.

It was not a sudden eruption of joy, but a slow, agonizing thaw, as if a frozen lake were cracking under the weight of a thousand silent winters. For weeks, Rhaegar’s face had been a mask of marble, carved from the very stone of the crypts he longed to inhabit. He had forgotten the physical mechanics of a smile—the way the muscles in the cheeks must lift, the way the eyes must crinkle to let the light in. He had lived in a world of grey echoes and violet ghosts, where every breath felt like a borrowed thing and every touch was a reminder of what had been stripped away.

Then, Daenerys reached out.

The infant’s hand was a tiny, frantic star of motion, her fingers curling around the heavy silver embroidery of his doublet with a surprising, desperate strength. She didn’t just touch him; she anchored him. With a sudden, sharp tug on the fabric, she pulled his gaze away from the shimmering ghost he had been crafting in the sunlight. Rhaegar blinked, the image of the lost princess dissolving like mist under a midday sun, leaving him staring instead at the vivid, breathing reality of Elia. She was leaning toward him, her dark eyes brimming with a quiet, knowing tenderness, her hand resting gently on the small of his back. The transition was a physical jolt, a reminder that the living did not possess the ethereal perfection of memories, but they possessed warmth, scent, and a love that demanded he remain present.

The ring was a cold, silver circle that never left his finger, a constant, metallic reminder of a bond that death had failed to sever. It sat heavy on his hand, the metal absorbing the warmth of his skin only to reflect it back as a chill, a perpetual anchor that kept him tethered to a ghost. By the time Daenerys reached her first name-day, Rhaegar had not so much moved on as he had simply learned to navigate the ruins of his own heart. He had claimed the princess’s former chambers as his own, not out of a desire for luxury, but because the air there still felt thick with the residue of her presence. He slept in her bed, surrounded by the lingering scent of old parchment and dried jasmine, drifting in a twilight world where the boundary between the living and the dead was as thin as a veil of silk.

He became a man of shadows and ink, retreating into the heavy silence of his studies and the demanding duties of the Crown Prince. The world continued to spin...the court whispered, the seasons turned, and the Red Keep exhaled its endless stream of secrets, but Rhaegar moved through it like a sleepwalker. He was a ghost inhabiting a living man's shell, his laughter a rare, brittle thing that broke before it could ever truly bloom. He lived in the intervals, the quiet spaces between his obligations, where he could allow himself to remember the specific way she used to tilt her head when she was thinking.

The shadows of the Red Keep didn't just fall, they pooled, filling the corridors with a heavy, velvet darkness that tasted of old stone and extinguished torches. When the last sliver of amber light retreated from the nursery walls, Rhaegar stepped inside, his presence a quiet ripple in the room's stillness. With a soft, dismissing nod, he sent the nursing maid away, the heavy oak door clicking shut behind her and sealing the world outside. He was alone with the child...a tiny, breathing miracle of silver and violet who looked less like a babe and more like a fallen star wrapped in linen.

He sat her down on the plush rug, her babbling a chaotic, melodic stream of nonsense that filled the gaps where silence used to scream. Rhaegar reached for the lyre, the polished wood cool beneath his fingertips, and felt the familiar tension of the strings vibrating against his chest. He cleared his throat, the sound raw and jagged, as if his voice had been dormant for a lifetime. "Your mother was a fan of music" he whispered, the words barely a breath, "though she preferred the songs that whispered of things that couldn't be, rather than the ones that told us what we were."

"She often had me play something for her on her own nameday" he hummed, the vibration of the low note rattling in his chest like a trapped bird. He shifted the lyre, his fingers finding a chord that felt like moonlight captured in gut-string. "A tradition of sorts. She would lean her head against the windowpane and tell me that the music made the stars dance, though I suspect she simply liked to see me struggle with the more complex progressions."

The first note was a tentative shimmer, a silver thread cast into the deepening gloom of the nursery. Daenerys froze, her small hands pausing mid air, her violet eyes widening as the sound rippled through the room. Rhaegar watched her, his heart hammering against his ribs with a sudden, frantic intensity. He hadn't played for her...not truly played since the night the pyre had roared. To play was to feel, and to feel was to acknowledge the jagged edges of the hole she had left behind.

The music didn’t so much end as it dissolved, the final chord hanging in the air like a question that no one knew how to answer. The silence that rushed back into the room was suffocating, tasting of cold wax and the distant salt of the Blackwater. Rhaegar stared at the silver-haired child, seeing for a fleeting second not the babe, but the ghost of the woman who had shared the same luminous gaze. The melody had been a bridge, but crossing it had only reminded him of the depth of the chasm that now lay between him and the only person who had ever truly known the shape of his soul.

The last chord lingered, a ghost of a sound that refused to dissipate, vibrating in the marrow of his bones. Rhaegar let the silence stretch, his fingers still resting on the strings, feeling the dying pulse of the music. He looked at Daenerys, whose tiny face was alight with an expression of profound, instinctive curiosity, as if the melody had unlocked a secret door in her mind. With a slow, shuddering sigh that seemed to deflate the tension in his shoulders, he set the lyre aside. The instrument clattered softly against the rug, its purpose served.

He reached down, his large hands disappearing into the folds of her cream colored swaddling as he hoisted her upward. She let out a piercing, joyful squeal...a sound that was less a cry and more a celebration, and flailed her arms, batting at his cheek with a clumsy, uncoordinated energy. For the first time in months, the smile that touched Rhaegar’s lips didn't feel like a mask; it was a fragile, genuine thing, born from the sudden warmth of her small, frantic body against his chest.

"You look so much like your mommy" he whispered, his voice cracking as he pulled her close, pressing his forehead against her soft, velvet brow. "I love that. Gods, I love that so much."

The nursery door creaked open just a fraction, admitting a sliver of torchlight and the soft, rhythmic chime of Elia’s jewelry. She didn't enter fully, standing in the threshold as if afraid that a sudden movement might shatter the fragile equilibrium of the room. She had watched from the hallway, listening to the low, melodic thrum of the lyre and the subsequent, raw confession of Rhaegar’s voice. In the dimness, she saw her husband...the man who had spent weeks as a hollowed-out shell, clutching the infant to his heart with a desperation that was almost visceral.

“And your dearest stepmother arrives” Rhaegar murmured, his voice a velvet rasp. He pressed a lingering, tender kiss to Daenerys’s velvet cheek, his lips lingering for a heartbeat longer than necessary, as if he were kissing a reflection of the woman who was no longer there.

Elia stepped fully into the room, her presence a soft, golden light that pushed back the oppressive shadows of the nursery. She reached out her arms, her expression one of intuitive grace, knowing exactly when to offer her strength and when to offer her silence. Rhaegar looked at her...truly looked at her and felt the familiar, grounding pull of her devotion. He had wanted this evening to be a sanctuary of solitude, a private vigil to mark the anniversary of the day the world had gone grey. He had longed to drift in the silence of his own sorrow, to let the date pass in a haze of ink and memory.

But the gods, in their cruel and poetic irony, had ensured that the day of his greatest loss was also the day of his greatest regret. The anniversary of the death was now inextricably tied to the celebration of a birth. He could not mourn in peace because the evidence of his sister’s final victory was currently babbling in his arms.

With a small, fragile smile that didn't quite reach the depths of his tired eyes, Rhaegar leaned forward and passed the infant over to Elia. The transition was slow, a reluctant surrender of the only physical piece of the princess he had left. As Elia settled Daenerys against her breast, the baby let out a contented sigh, her tiny hand brushing against the dark silk of Elia’s gown.

"Take good care of her, Elia" Rhaegar whispered, his voice thin and strained. He paused, his gaze lingering on the child’s violet eyes...eyes that were a mirror of a soul he had loved more than his own. "Take good care my sisters babe."

Elia’s gaze lingered on the infant, her chest rising and falling in a slow, heavy rhythm. She looked at the same violet eyes that had just haunted Rhaegar’s expression, seeing the ghost of a girl who had been both a secret and a tragedy. A sigh escaped her, a sound of profound exhaustion mingled with an enduring, selfless love. "She is yours too, Rhaegar..." Elia began, her voice a soft, guiding current intended to pull him back from the edge of his isolation. "Not just a memory, not just a price paid, but a daughter who—"

The words were cut short by the sudden, definitive click of the heavy oak door.

Elia looked up, the sentence still hanging unfinished in the air, only to find the space where Rhaegar had been completely empty. He had vanished with the swiftness of a shadow retreating before the dawn, leaving behind nothing but the lingering scent of old parchment and the fading vibration of a lyre. He had not waited for her comfort... he had simply dissolved back into the corridors of his own grief, unable to bear the weight of a love that required him to be present in the same room as the living.

The moon cast a jagged, silver splinter across the floorboards, cutting the room into halves of light and obsidian. Rhaegar did not move. He sat perched on the edge of the bed, his spine a rigid line of tension, staring at the portrait that leaned against the wall. It was an unfinished work, a sketch by a master who had grown frustrated with a subject too frail to remain still... the princess's face was rendered in exquisite, haunting detail, but her shoulders faded into a wash of unworked charcoal. She looked as if she were dissolving into the paper, a ghost even in oil and pigment, her eyes holding that particular, faraway gaze she had worn during her final weeks, the look of someone already listening to a song only the dead can hear.

The moon cast a jagged, silver splinter across the floorboards, cutting the room into halves of light and obsidian. Rhaegar did not move. He sat perched on the edge of the bed, his spine a rigid line of tension, staring at the portrait that leaned against the wall. It was an unfinished work, a sketch by a master who had grown frustrated with a subject too frail to remain still, the princess's face was rendered in exquisite, haunting detail, but her shoulders faded into a wash of unworked charcoal. She looked as if she were dissolving into the paper, a ghost even in oil and pigment, her eyes holding that particular, faraway gaze she had worn during her final weeks...the look of someone already listening to a song only the dead can hear.

His fingers were locked around the silver locket, the metal biting into his palm. He didn't open it; he didn't need to. He could feel the minute, gritty weight of the ashes inside, the physical residue of the only soul who had ever truly mirrored his own. In the oppressive silence of the midnight hour, he brought the locket to his lips, pressing the cold metal against his mouth with a desperation that bordered on the feral. He kissed the silver, and in doing so, he kissed the ash, a closed-loop of devotion that required no one else's permission.

"I shall love her..." he whispered, the words scraping against the dryness of his throat. He wasn't speaking to the room, nor to the painting, but to the void between them. "Your babe… I will love her for as long as she reminds me of you."

"Tell us again" Visenya was saying, her tone stripped of its usual mockery, replaced by a clinical, urgent intensity. "Who brought you food? Which servants? Did Father visit you in the nights, or only the days?"

"Is… is Aegon okay?" Your voice was a fragile thing, a thin thread of sound that barely reached across the room. It carried a tremor of genuine, unshielded concern that seemed to vibrate through the very air of the chamber.

The effect was instantaneous. Aegon didn't so much wake as he did erupt from his stupor. He lunged forward with a sudden, violent desperation, his coordination failing him so completely that he tumbled from the edge of the bed. He hit the flagstones with a heavy thud, but he didn't stop. He practically crawled across the stone, his breath coming in ragged, starving gasps. His fingers clawed at the floor, dragging his body toward you as if you were the only solid point in a world made of water. He didn't care about the dignity of a lord or the bruising of his knees...

he only cared about the proximity of the voice that had haunted his dreams for three winters.

The suddenness of his movement was like a predator springing from brush. You shrieked, the sound thin and piercing, and scrambled backward with a clumsy desperation, your bare heels skidding on the cold stone. Beside you, Visenya’s hand flew to the hilt of her dagger, her body coiling into a defensive spring, her eyes flashing with a reflexive instinct to strike. But Aegon didn't see the blade or the danger...he saw only the silver-gold blur of you retreating into the shadows of the room.

"No… no, no, don't be afraid" Aegon pleaded, his voice a broken wreckage of the command he had spent years perfecting. He didn't reach for your hand or your waist, instead, he collapsed forward, his forehead pressing against the rough fabric of your hem as he clung to your leg with a shaky, desperate sigh. He held on with a grip that bordered on bruising, his fingers curling into the cloth as if he were a drowning man and you were the only piece of driftwood in a violent sea.

You froze, your breath hitching in a small, jagged sob. The sensation was overwhelming...the heat of his forehead through the thin cotton of your gown, the trembling of his broad shoulders, the sheer, suffocating weight of a grief that had finally found its target. For three years, you had been a secret kept in a stone box, and now you were being claimed by a man who felt less like a brother and more like a storm that had finally made landfall.

"Uhm…" The sound was barely a breath, a small, pitiful vibration in your throat that seemed to ripple through the heavy silence of the room. You looked down at the man clinging to your ankle, his knuckles white and his breath hot against your skin. He didn't look like the formidable Lord of Dragonstone... he looked like a child who had found a lost toy in the wreckage of a fire. When he finally tilted his head up, his eyes were brimming, wet, bloodshot, and wide with a raw, unfiltered hunger for confirmation. He wasn't looking at you so much as he was searching for the evidence that you were solid, that you weren't a trick of the light or a cruel hallucination born of too much wine and too much loneliness.

Visenya was the first to break the spell. With a sigh that was more an admission of defeat than a sign of irritation, she stepped forward and gripped Aegon by the shoulder. Her hold was firm, a practical anchor designed to pull him out of his spiral. "Get up, Aegon" she commanded, though the usual bite in her voice had been replaced by a strange, muted softness. "You're frightening her. You look like a starving hound." She hauled him upward with a sharp tug, forcing him to find his footing, though he remained unsteady, swaying slightly as if the world were still tilting on its axis.

Rhaenys didn't wait for him to steady himself. She collided with you in a blur of silk and lavender, her arms wrapping around your neck with such force that it knocked the wind from your lungs. She was sobbing...not the delicate, performative tears she used to get her way, but deep, racking heaves that shook both of your frames. "You were here" she wailed into the crook of your neck, her voice muffled and wet. "You were right here in the walls, and we didn't know! How could we not know?" Her grip was suffocating, a desperate attempt to merge her body with yours, as if by sheer pressure she could make up for the three lost years.

You stiffened for a heartbeat, your muscles locking in a reflexive flinch born of years where the only touch you knew was the clinical brush of a maid or the cold air of a locked room. Rhaenys felt like a wildfire, too hot, too fast, smelling of expensive oils and desperation. For a second, you weren't sure if this was another prayer dream or if the walls had finally decided to swallow you whole. Then, the familiar scent of her skin—that sweetness that always reminded you of crushed berries had pierced through the fog. This was Rhaenys. This was the sister who used to steal your ribbons and whisper secrets about the kitchen staff.

Your lower lip trembled, a rhythmic, fragile twitch that felt like the only thing moving in the room besides the sobbing. You looked from Rhaenys’s tear-streaked face to Aegon’s hollowed eyes, the shock of their presence colliding with the memory of the man who had turned the key in the lock. A small, jagged sound escaped your throat...a whine that belonged to the twelve-year-old girl who had first entered the room, not the fifteen-year-old who had emerged from it. "Father said you knew" you whispered, the words slipping out like a bruised secret. "Daddy lied! He said you wanted me here… that you were all waiting for the evil to leave before I could come back."

The silence that followed your words was not a void, but a physical weight, pressing the air from the room until the torchlight seemed to dim. Aegon flinched as if you had struck him, his face twisting into a mask of raw agony. The revelation that Aerion had not only imprisoned you but had weaponized their love to ensure your compliance, stripped away the last remnants of his composure. He let out a sound that wasn't a cry, but a jagged, guttural noise of hatred directed at a dead man.

Aegon didn't speak, but the silence he carried was heavy, vibrating with a frequency that seemed to rattle the very stones of the chamber. He moved with a sudden, fluid precision, reaching out to peel a sobbing Rhaenys away from you. He didn't do it with aggression, but with a quiet, absolute necessity, as if he were clearing a path for something sacred. Rhaenys stumbled back, her eyes wide and glistening, leaving a sudden, yawning void between you and the world.

Then, he was there.

He didn't just embrace you... he enveloped you, his arms locking around your frame like the closing of a vault. He pulled you flush against his chest, and for a moment, the world disappeared, replaced by the rhythmic, thunderous drumming of his heart against your ear. You felt him shiver, a violent, subterranean tremor as he buried his face in the crook of your neck. He inhaled deeply, a long, starving draw of your scent...skin, old dust, and the faint, lingering sweetness of the rosemary Lila had used to bathe you.

When you finally let out a small, broken sniffle and your arms tentatively wound around his waist, clinging to the rough linen of his tunic, Aegon let out a sound that was half-sob, half-prayer. He tightened his grip, his voice dropping to a low, honeyed rumble that vibrated through your very bones.

"There is no evil, sweet one" he whispered, his lips brushing the shell of your ear. "Father was a troubled man… a man lost to his own delusions."

The admission felt like a heavy stone being lifted from the room, though the space it left behind was filled with a shimmering, fragile grief. He pulled back just enough to cup your face in his large, calloused hands, his thumbs sweeping away the tears that had carved tracks through the grime on your cheeks. He looked at you not as the Lord of Dragonstone, but as a man who had just found a missing piece of his own soul. He searched your eyes, tracing the way the innocence had been replaced by a haunted, wide-eyed caution, and a flicker of something dark and protective ignited in his gaze.

You clung to him then, your fingers knotting into the fabric of his tunic with a strength that belied your fragility. The world outside that room had been a series of locks, lies, and the suffocating silence of stone; now, Aegon was the only solid thing in a shifting landscape. You pressed your face into the heat of his chest, the scent of him...leather, salt, and the fading ghost of Arbor gold, becoming your only horizon.

A sudden, sharp thought pierced through the reunion... had Lila known? Had the woman who brought you bread and brushed your hair been a silent accomplice to your erasure, or merely another prisoner of the estate's payroll? You looked up at Aegon, your eyes searching his for an answer, but the trust you felt for him was a blind, instinctive thing, a tether pulling you back from the edge of madness.

Aegon didn't answer your desperate looks with words, he answered with a devotion that felt like a physical weight. He began to kiss your face with a rhythmic, desperate tenderness, his lips pressing against the side of your head, then the curve of your cheek, and the tip of your nose. Each touch was a reclamation, a way of marking every inch of you to ensure you were real, that you were here, and that you were finally his. You leaned into him, your eyes closing, the sensation of his warmth washing away the chill of three years of isolation. You were innocent to the hunger in his gaze, the way he looked at you not just as a sister, but as the singular center of his universe.

Then, his lips shifted, landing softly, lingeringly, on the corner of your mouth.

The air in the room shifted. The sound of a sharp, dry throat-clear echoed off the vaulted ceiling, Visenya, her arms crossed, her expression a complicated mask of duty and distaste. Beside her, Rhaenys remained frozen, her wide eyes darting between the two of you, her breath hitching in a way that suggested she was witnessing something she didn't quite have the vocabulary to name. The kiss had been a sliver of a thing, a ghost of a touch, but in the heavy silence of the room, it felt as loud as a shout.

The world beyond the circle of Aegon’s arms ceased to exist. The stone walls, the flickering torches, the heavy breathing of his sisters...all of it dissolved into a blurred periphery, leaving only the scent of him and the frantic drumming of his heart against your cheek. Aegon tightened his hold, pulling you closer until there was no air left between you, as if he intended to merge your two bodies into one single, unbreakable entity. He began to mumble into your hair, the words fragmented and wet, a low, desperate litany of "My sweet, my sweet girl" and "I searched every shadow..." and "Never again."

He pressed his lips to your temple, then your brow, then the shell of your ear, his breath hot and shuddering against your skin. Each kiss was a frantic prayer, a desperate attempt to anchor you to the present. He breathed you in, inhaling the scent of old dust and faded rosemary as if he were a starving man finally finding a feast. In that suffocatingly tight embrace, the years of silence and the coldness of the east wing were burned away by the sheer heat of his desperation. For a few timeless moments, the universe had shrunk to the size of his chest, and the only sound that mattered was the ragged, uneven rhythm of his voice whispering how much he had missed you, over and over, until the words became a song of possession.

The sudden intensity of his grip became a physical weight, a crushing tide of affection that left you gasping for air. As he leaned into you, his strength was an overwhelming force, his palms pressing your cheeks together until your lips puckered and your vision blurred. You stumbled backward, your heels catching on the uneven stone, but Aegon didn't let go, he simply shifted with you, his body a looming wall of warmth and desperation. Your hands flew up, fingers splaying against his wrists, grasping frantically to pry his palms away from your face.

"Aeg…" you managed to choke out, your voice sounding like a rusted hinge. You gave a small, reflexive scrunch of your nose, trying to nudge his face away from yours. "I’ve missed you too, but… you are squeezing me… to death."

A low, rumbling vibration started in Aegon’s chest, a sound that hadn't echoed through the halls of Dragonstone in years. It wasn't the practiced, booming laugh of a lord, but something raw and private, a soft huff of amusement that broke through his desperation. He didn't pull away; instead, he leaned in, the movement fluid and instinctive. He brushed the tip of his nose against yours in a quick, playful nudge, a ghostly remnant of the games you had played in the gardens before the world turned to stone and locks. For a fleeting second, the suffocating weight of the last three years vanished, replaced by the ghost of a childhood where the biggest tragedy was a fallen lemon cake.

Aegon’s grip shifted, transitioning from a desperate crush to a possessive cling. He didn't let go of your hand, instead, he laced his fingers through yours with a strength that suggested he feared you might evaporate if he loosened his hold by even a fraction. He stepped back, but only just enough to give you room to breathe, his shoulder remaining glued to yours as if he were a shield protecting you from the very air of the room. He was a man tethered to a lifeline, his eyes never straying from your face for more than a second, his gaze searching for any sign that you might vanish back into the shadows.

Visenya and Rhaenys moved through the drafty corridors like twin ghosts of efficiency, their voices low and urgent as they coordinated the reclamation of your old chambers. The room had not been entirely vacant, Aegon had frequently retreated there in the dead of night, seeking the lingering scent of your childhood or the ghost of a memory to soothe his fractured sleep.

Because of this, the space was tidy...stripped of the dust that usually claimed abandoned places but it lacked the warmth of a lived-in sanctuary. It was a sterile museum of who you used to be, awaiting the breath of a living soul to make it a home once more. The sisters whispered of fresh linens, the scrubbing of hearths, and the immediate summons of a maid who could handle the delicate task of restoring a wardrobe that had sat frozen in time for three long years.

The door clicked shut, leaving you in a silence that felt heavier than the locks of the east wing. Being back in your own room didn't feel like a homecoming… it felt like stepping into a ghost's skin. The air was thick with the scent of cedar and dried lavender, a preserved memory of a girl who had ceased to exist the moment the door had bolted three years ago.

You walked across the plush rug, your footsteps muted, feeling like an intruder in your own life. You reached for a dress draped over the vanity, a pale silk thing with intricate lace and held it up. It was a fragile, shimmering shell, far too small to contain the woman you had become. You were a stranger to your own wardrobe, a creature grown in the dark, now standing amidst the relics of a childhood that had been stolen and curated, though anyone could see you had not matured in mind, only in body.

You wandered toward the toy chest, your fingers trembling as you reached for a doll nestled among the velvet scraps. It was a crude thing, carved from pale birch and dressed in a miniature gown of silver thread...a likeness of yourself that your father had spent a winter crafting. The doll’s painted eyes stared back at you with an unnerving, frozen innocence, a mirror of the girl who had once believed her father’s lies.

A soft sound of breathing vibrated behind you. You turned to see Aegon lingering in the doorway, his frame nearly filling the frame. He wasn't touching you now, but his gaze was a physical weight, anchored to your every movement. He watched the way you held the doll, the way your thumb traced the carved line of its jaw. A slow, genuine smile tugged at the corners of his mouth, softening the hard lines of grief that still marred his face.

"That one was always my favorite" he murmured, his voice a low, melodic rumble that seemed to vibrate in the small space. He didn't specify if he meant the doll or the girl who had played with it.

"You're silly" you giggled, the sound bubbling up from your chest like a long forgotten spring. It was a fragile, airy sound, untainted by the years of silence, and it seemed to act as a beacon, pulling him toward you. You could hear the rhythmic thump thump of his heavy leather boots against the polished wood, closing the distance with a predatory grace that you mistook for simple eagerness.

The warmth of his presence arrived before he did, a sudden shift in the air that smelled of salt and old leather. Then, you felt the firm, steady pressure of his hands settling on your hips. He didn't pull you close so much as anchor you to the spot, his touch heavy and possessive through the thin fabric of your shift. He bent a little behind you, his chest brushing against your back, and peered over your shoulder to get a better look at the birch doll in your hands. To you, it was simply the familiar weight of a brother’s protection, the kind of closeness you had craved in the suffocating silence of the east wing.

You leaned back into him with a soft sigh, your head resting against his shoulder, entirely blind to the way his breathing hitched or the way his gaze lingered on the curve of your neck. You saw only a sanctuary...you did not see the hunger in the depths of his eyes, a silent, simmering want that had grown from a sibling's love into something far more consuming and dangerous during your absence.

"If you like my doll, you may have it" you mumbled, your voice still sounding thin and ghostly in the quiet of the room. You held the birch figure out to see it better, your fingers brushing against the coarse grain of the wood. "But I wish to see it still… it reminds me of Father."

The words were a gamble, a fragile bridge built over the memory of the man who had betrayed you, yet in the sanctuary of Aegon’s arms, the betrayal felt like a story happening to someone else. You didn't notice the way his gaze shifted, sliding from the wooden toy to the pale, pulsing vein in your throat. You didn't see the way his pupils dilated, drinking in the sight of you like a man who had spent a lifetime in a cellar and had finally stepped into the sun.

Aegon didn't answer immediately. He dipped his head, his breath a hot, sudden ghost of a touch against the sensitive skin of your neck. He inhaled deeply, closing his eyes as if he were memorizing the very chemistry of your existence, the scent of soap, salt, and something uniquely you that no amount of isolation could erase. A low, guttural vibration hummed in his chest, a sound of absolute claim. "Keep it." he murmured, his voice sounding like crushed velvet. Then, with a slow, deliberate precision, he pressed a lingering kiss to the curve of your shoulder, his lips warm and heavy. "I have no need for a wooden likeness now that the living version has returned to me."

The sudden shift in his tone, the raw vulnerability in that low rumble, sent a jolt of curiosity through you. You tried to twist in his grip, your body instinctively seeking the sight of his face to gauge the depth of his emotion, but Aegon’s hold was an iron velvet. His arms tightened, not to stifle, but to anchor, pinning you gently against the solid heat of his chest. He didn't let you turn. Instead, he buried his face deeper into the crook of your neck, his forehead resting against your skin with a heavy, shuddering weight.

Another kiss followed...slow, lingering, and desperate, tracing the line of your collarbone with a tenderness that felt almost sacred. "Can we just… stay like this?" he whispered, his voice fracturing. "Just for a moment. Just a few more."

You felt the dampness of his breath, and then, the unmistakable warmth of a tear landing on your shoulder. It was a revelation that made your own heart stutter. Aegon, the Lord of Dragonstone, the man who commanded servants with a glance and bore the weight of a crumbling legacy, was trembling. He sounded small, stripped of every title and pretense, reduced to a shivering wreck of a man by the simple fact of your proximity. "I am a weak, weak man, sister" he mumbled against your skin, the words blurred by a sob he was fighting to suppress.

"You are very strong, Aeg..." you mumbled, your voice thick with a sleepy, confused sort of fondness. You frowned, the expression small and tentative, as he continued to press into you. He wasn't just holding you anymore, he was leaning his entire weight against you, a mountain of muscle and desperation that drove you forward. Your feet skidded on the polished floor, and with a sudden, jarring thud, your lower back collided with the edge of the mahogany vanity.

The impact shuddered through your spine, knocking the breath from your lungs in a sharp, sudden gasp. Your palms flew out by instinct, bracing against the cold, polished mahogany of the vanity to keep from sliding to the floor, the wood biting into your skin. "Ow—" you huffed, the sound more of a startled puff of air than a cry of pain, but the protest was swallowed almost instantly.

The protest died in your throat as Aegon’s hand found the nape of your neck, his fingers splaying wide to tilt your head back with a gentle but absolute firmness. The sudden shift in posture left your throat exposed, a pale line of vulnerability in the dim light of the room. You started to huff, the sound a small, indignant puff of air, but it was silenced by the wet, trembling press of his lips against your jawline. He wasn't listening to your protests… he was listening to the frantic, erratic drumming of your heart, a sound that seemed to synchronize with his own labored breathing.

"I missed you so, so, so much" he murmured, the words blurring into a rhythmic chant against the sensitive skin of your jaw. His voice was no longer the command of a lord, but a ragged plea, stripped of pride and polished into a raw, aching need. "You were here all along… just a few walls away… my poor, sweet girl."

Your lower lip remained jutted out in a stubborn pout, your brow furrowed as you processed the lingering throb in your hips. Being shoved against the mahogany vanity was hardly the royal welcome you had imagined after three years of solitude, and you shifted your weight indignantly, trying to reclaim your balance. Yet, as Aegon’s lips continued their slow, desperate pilgrimage across your skin, the irritation began to dissolve into a familiar, hazy warmth. You remembered the way your mother would cup your face after a failed embroidery lesson and press a soft, fragrant kiss to your cheek to soothe your tears. Your father, in his rare moments of softness, had done the same, his beard tickling your skin as he murmured an apology for some forgotten promise.

In the blurred geography of childhood, a kiss was simply a kiss...a universal currency of apology and affection. Whether it landed on a cheek, a forehead, or the side of the neck, the meaning remained the same... I am sorry, and you are loved. Aegon had been the same when you were small, raining clumsy, exuberant kisses upon you during games of hide-and-seek or pressing a quick peck to your temple before he left for his lessons. To your innocent mind, this sudden torrent of affection was merely an extension of that old language. He was simply saying sorry for the vanity, sorry for the years, and sorry for the silence, in the only way your childhood heart knew how to translate.

“I can stay with you tonight, if you wish it” he mumbled, the words barely escaping his lips, sounding more like a prayer than a question. He pressed one last, lingering kiss to the hollow of your throat, a ghost of a touch that felt like a brand before his hands shifted, gently guiding you around until you were finally forced to look at him. For a heartbeat, the room fell silent, save for the crackle of the hearth. You looked up at him, your eyes beaming with a mixture of raw affection and the lingering fog of confusion, your heart swelling at the sight of his ruined expression. The sight of him, so broken and yet so desperate, made you feel a sudden, fierce protective instinct, as if the roles had reversed and you were now the one shielding him from the world.

"I can sleep on my own now, Aegon" you giggled, the sound light and airy, cutting through the heavy, suffocating tension that had filled the room. You gave his chest a playful, dismissive shove, the kind of gesture that belonged to a girl who had just discovered she was no longer a prisoner and felt the sudden, intoxicating urge to reclaim her space. You spun away from him, your shift swirling around your ankles as you began to bubble around the room once more, your energy returning in a frantic, scattered burst. You drifted toward the window to peek at the darkening sky, then pivoted to inspect a dusty jewelry box, your movements erratic and wide eyed. "I'm not a babe in arms anymore! I can handle the dark."

Aegon remained frozen for a moment, his arms still curved in the shape of the embrace you had just slipped from, his chest heaving as if he had forgotten how to breathe. The sudden shift from his desperate intensity to your carefree lightness left him momentarily adrift, his expression a mixture of longing and bewildered adoration. He watched you dance from one side of the room to the other, a small, fragile bird finally released from its cage, unaware that the cage had simply been replaced by his own unwavering gaze.

The door clicked shut with a finality that felt less like a separation and more like a gentle boundary, leaving you alone with the scent of cedar and the fading echo of Aegon’s labored breathing. For a long time, you simply stood in the center of the room, your skin still humming where his lips had touched, feeling as though you were floating a few inches above the polished floor. The silence of the room was no longer the oppressive, heavy void of the east wing, but a soft, welcoming blanket. You felt a lightness in your chest, a shimmering sense of wholeness that you hadn't known existed since you were a child.

You lingered in the center of the room, your toes curling into the plush rug as you watched the last slivers of amber sunlight bleed out of the sky and surrender to a bruised purple dusk. The silence was no longer a predator, but a companion, and as the shadows lengthened, you felt a sudden, grounding need to anchor yourself to something larger than your own fragile liberation. You drifted toward the heavy oak bedposts, the wood carved into twisting vines that seemed to shiver in the dimming light and sank slowly to your knees. The floor was cold through the thin fabric of your shift, a sharp contrast to the lingering heat of Aegon’s embrace, but the chill felt honest.

Folding your hands over your chest, you bowed your head, your voice dropping to a rhythmic, melodic whisper as you began the prayer to the Seven. You started with the Mother, thanking her for the warmth of a brother’s arms and the sudden, blinding light of the sun; then to the Smith, for the strength of the walls that had finally broken, and to the Maiden, for the innocence that had somehow survived the dark. As you spoke, your eyes drifted shut, and for a moment, you could almost hear the soft, collective sigh of the gods agreeing that the nightmare was over. You prayed not for forgiveness but for the simplicity of a dreamless sleep, one where you wouldn't wake up to the sound of a turning key.

The prayer finished, the silence of the room felt not like a void, but like a canvas. A sudden, electric surge of mischief sparked in your chest, an impulse that had been dormant for three long years, locked away behind a door of grief and dust. You stood up, the prayer’s solemnity dissolving into a beaming, wide-eyed grin that felt foreign on your face. The room was yours again. The air was yours. The very silence of the castle seemed to hold its breath, waiting to see what the girl who had returned from the dead would do.

The silk sheets felt abrasive against your skin, a luxury that felt like a lie. For three years, you had mastered the art of the solitary existence, you had learned to find company in the rhythmic drip of damp stone and the humming of the wind through the eaves. You had become a creature of silence, a ghost haunting your own life, and you had grown accustomed to the hollow space where other people should have been. But now, the silence of your own bedroom wasn't a sanctuary...it was a vacuum. The sudden influx of Aegon’s desperate warmth and Visenya and rhaeny's sharp, grounding presence had acted like a torch in a dark room, illuminating exactly how cold you had actually been.

The sheets were too crisp, the silence too heavy, and the air held a stillness that felt less like peace and more like a vacuum. You tossed once, the silk sliding against your skin with a sound like a secret, and then twice, twisting your body into a knot that mirrored the turmoil in your chest. Sleep, which had once come as easily as breathing in the dim corners of the east wing, now felt like a distant shore, unreachable and shimmering. You huffed, a sharp puff of annoyance that echoed in the cavernous quiet of the room, your eyes snapping open to glare at the pink canopy above. The bed was a gilded cage of luxury, and you found yourself suffocating in the perfection of it.

Then, a realization flickered through the haze of your restlessness...the door was not locked.

The thought hit you with the force of a revelation. For three years, the sound of a bolt sliding home had been the punctuation mark at the end of every day, a definitive signal that you were a thing to be stored away. Now, there was no iron bar, no heavy key turning in a rusted lock, only a sliver of space beneath the door where the hallway light bled through. With a sudden, frantic energy, you kicked off the heavy blankets. You slid your feet into a pair of plush, oversized slippers that swallowed your heels, and with trembling fingers, you lit a single tallow candle. The flame danced in your eyes, a tiny, defiant spark in the gloom, as you padded toward the door, the soft thump of your footsteps sounding like a heartbeat against the polished floor.

The heavy oak door groaned on its hinges, swinging open into a hallway swallowed by velvet shadows. For a heartbeat, the silence was absolute, and then you saw it: a silhouette, draped in a heavy, charcoal colored cloak, standing motionless in the flickering amber glow of your candle. The figure looked like a phantom, a remnant of the very darkness you had just escaped. A primal, reflexive fear surged through you, a remnant of the years spent jumping at every unexpected sound. You didn't think; you simply inhaled a sharp, jagged breath and let out a piercing, guttural scream that tore through the stillness of the corridor.

The reaction was instantaneous. Before the sound could fully echo off the vaulted ceiling, a calloused hand flew forward, clamping firmly over your mouth. The grip was tight, smelling of brine and old wool. In one fluid, practiced motion, you were hoisted backward, your heels skidding on the floor as you were shoved back into the sanctuary of your bedroom. The door slammed shut with a heavy thud, plunging the room into a suffocating dimness, save for the candle you had dropped, which now sputtered on the rug. You trembled violently, your chest heaving against the intruder's chest, your heart hammering like a trapped bird against your ribs.

Then, the pressure on your mouth vanished. The figure stepped back just enough for you to breathe, and with a slow, deliberate movement, the heavy wool hood was pushed back.

"Hush, you silly girl" a voice whispered...a voice that was a familiar melody, worn smooth by years of whispered secrets and shared meals.

Lila.

"Lila? You scared me to death!" The words erupted from you in a frantic shriek, your voice cracking as the adrenaline finally broke. You didn't just speak, you practically vibrated with a mix of terror and sudden, soaring relief, your hands coming up to clutch at the rough wool of her cloak. You wanted to hit her for the fright and throw yourself into her arms all at once.

Lila didn't laugh. Instead, she leaned in, her finger pressing firmly against your lips in a sharp shush that smelled of beeswax and anxiety. Her eyes, usually so placid and dutiful, were darting toward the door with a frantic intensity you had never seen during your years of isolation.

"I am sorry, my lady, truly" she whispered, her voice a hurried, jagged thing. "But we must hurry. Your brother has been coming to your door every hour since the sun dipped. He does not enter, but he lingers. He listens. He stands there like a sentinel guarding a tomb, waiting for the slightest sound of your breath."

"He only worries for me" you mumbled, the words feeling heavy and slow, as if you were still half submerged in the dream of your own bed. You tried to smile, a small, sleepy expression that sought to normalize the image of Aegon haunting your threshold. To you, his vigil was the ultimate proof of his devotion, a physical manifestation of the guilt and love that had nearly broken him in the hallway. You imagined him there now, leaning his forehead against the oak, perhaps whispering the same fragmented promises he had murmured into your skin.

But Lila didn't share your sentiment. Her grip on your hand tightened, her fingers cold and trembling, and she cast a sharp, terrified glance toward the sliver of light beneath the door. "It is not worry, my lady. It is a fever" she hissed, her voice barely a thread of sound. With a sudden, desperate urgency, she began to tug you toward the exit, her movements frantic and jagged. "We must leave. Now."

The sudden pull snapped the last thread of your lethargy. As Lila tried to haul you back into the shadowed corridor, you jerked your hand away with a violence that surprised you both. The sound of your skin slapping against hers echoed like a whip in the quiet room.

"What? No!" you cried, your voice rising into a panicked register. You backed away from the door, your heels catching in the plush rug as you retreated toward the center of the room. The walls, which had felt like a welcoming embrace moments ago, suddenly seemed to lean inward, their shadows stretching like grasping fingers. "I am not going back! I will not go back to a locked room, Lila! Not today, not ever!"

"Not the room, my lady! We must leave Dragonstone entirely!" Lila’s voice was a frantic, hushed rasp, her eyes wide and shimmering with a terror that didn't match the safety of the bedchamber. "I promised your father… I gave my word that if the time came, I would spirit you away from this rock before the madness took hold." She reached out again, her fingers clawing at the air as if trying to snag the hem of your shift to pull you back into the shadows.

You recoiled, your back hitting the cold mahogany of the vanity once more. The memory of Aegon’s warmth was still a ghost on your skin, making Lila’s desperation feel like a sudden, freezing wind. "Father?" you spat, the word tasting of copper and old dust. "Father was a liar! He wove a shroud of deceit and called it protection, and now I see that you are merely the final thread in his tapestry!" You stepped back further, your voice rising in a crescendo of newfound defiance. "You seek to keep me from my family! There is no evil here Lila, only a brother who loves me and sisters who found me. Why are you trying to steal me away again?"

Lila froze, her arm still outstretched, her expression crumbling from frantic urgency into a look of profound, heartbreaking pity. For a moment, the only sound in the room was the dying hiss of the tallow candle on the rug, its flame flickering one last time before plunging the corners of the room into deep, ink-stained shadow. She didn't try to grab you again... instead, she let her hand fall limp at her side, her shoulders slumping under the weight of a secret that seemed to age her ten years in a single breath.

"Your brother is no good—" Lila began, her voice a fragile thread of warning that seemed to vibrate with a truth you weren't ready to hear.

The words hadn't even fully formed before you reacted. With a sharp, instinctive jerk, you slammed your palms over your ears, pressing so hard that the world dimmed at the edges and the only sound left was the thundering roar of your own blood. You squeezed your eyes shut, physically shoving the sentence back into the void from which it had come. To hear Aegon spoken of as a threat after the years of silence, after the crushing weight of his embrace and the salt-tear on your shoulder felt like a desecration.

"Do not!" you shrieked, your voice cracking with a fierce, protective desperation. "Do not slander my family!"

You dropped your hands, your chest heaving, and stepped toward her with a sudden, regal rigidity that belonged more to Visenya than to yourself. The fragility of the girl in the silk shift vanished, replaced by a searing, white hot loyalty. You didn't see a servant trying to save you; you saw an intruder attempting to poison the first drop of happiness you had tasted in an eternity.

"You have been my only companion in the dark, Lila, but you will not be the voice that slanders my family." you declared, your finger pointing sharply toward the heavy oak door. "Either you live in this castle with me or you leave it entirely! I will not have my sanctuary turned into a courtroom for your suspicions!"

Lila’s composure didn't just crack... it disintegrated. The distance between you vanished in a blur of charcoal wool as she lunged forward, not with the grip of a kidnapper, but with the frantic, clumsy desperation of a drowning woman. Her hands, calloused and smelling of the soap, she used to scrub your floors for years, flew up to cradle your face. Her palms were shaking, the vibration transferring into your own jaw, as she forced you to look at her.

"I am trying to protect you, sweetling" she mumbled, her voice a broken slurry of grief and terror. She squeezed your cheeks slightly, her thumbs brushing against your skin with a tenderness that felt suffocatingly intimate. "Please, don't do this. You… you are like a daughter to me. Do you think I enjoyed the silence? Do you think I liked watching you wither in that wing like a flower in a cellar?"

"My only mother is dead" you whispered, the words coming out as a cold, hard blade that sliced through Lila’s desperation. You didn't pull away from her touch this time, instead, you leaned into it just enough to make the rejection feel more intimate, more final. "And you shall be my second...my second mother, my second guardian...dead to me, as well, if you do not stop following my father’s ghosts and let me be free here with my family."

Lila’s hands dropped as if scorched. The silence that followed was different from the ones you had shared in the east wing; it wasn't a shared secret or a mutual endurance of loneliness. This was a void of your own making, a chasm opened by a few cruel words. She looked at you...really looked at you, and for the first time, you saw a flicker of something other than pity in her eyes. It was a mourning. She wasn't mourning your imprisonment, but the girl you had been before the walls had bent your spirit into something that mistook possession for protection.

Lila stepped back into the deepening shadows of the room, the charcoal wool of her cloak swallowing her silhouette until she seemed less a woman and more a smudge of ink against the mahogany. A ghost of a smile touched her lips...a sad, knowing thing that didn't reach her eyes. "Very well" she whispered, her voice regaining a steadiness that sounded like a death knell. "If the blind wish to walk into the fire, who am I to pull them back from the heat? I shall watch you from afar then, my lady. I will be the shadow in the corner, the breath in the curtain. But know this... I do love you. More than the gods love their prayers."

She paused at the threshold, her hand resting lightly on the doorframe, the wood groaning beneath her touch. "And when the gold turns to lead" she added, her gaze piercing through the gloom to lock onto yours, "when you realize your mistake and the walls of this family feel smaller than the ones your father built… I will be waiting. And then, I will run with you. Anywhere the wind takes us, far from the reach of lords and their legacies." With a final, lingering look of profound sorrow, she vanished into the hallway, the soft click of the door echoing like a closing book.

"Lila…" you started to cry, the word fracturing in the middle as the regal posture of a princess collapsed into the shuddering heap of a frightened child. The silence that followed her departure was not the welcoming blanket you had imagined, but a sudden, freezing vacuum that sucked the air from your lungs. "Lila!" you shrieked, the sound raw and desperate, as you turned and stomped your foot against the polished floor with a rhythmic, childish fury. "I—I command you to return! Lila!"

The minutes didn't pass so much as they dissolved, leaving you anchored to the doorframe in a state of shivering wreckage. You sank to the floor, the silk of your shift bunching around your knees, and let out a sound that wasn't a cry so much as a rhythmic, guttural keening. Your forehead pressed against the cold grain of the oak, your breaths coming in jagged, snotty heaves that made your entire frame shudder. You stayed there, curled into a ball of salt and grief, sobbing until your throat felt raw and your eyes burned like embers. For half an hour, you were nothing but a pulse of misery in the dark, mourning the loss of the only person who had seen you when you were invisible.

When you finally managed to pull yourself upright, your face felt swollen and tight, the skin puffy and blotched from the torrent. You wiped your nose with the back of your hand, a reflexive, ungainly gesture from childhood, and slowly pulled the door open. The hallway was a yawning throat of shadow, and for a moment, the emptiness felt like a physical blow. Your first instinct was a frantic, clawing need for Rhaenys. You could almost feel the ghostly memory of her small, warm arms wrapping around you, the way she would pull you into a tight, protective huddle when the two of you had been caught stealing sweets from the larder or chasing cats through the library. You wanted to bury your face in her neck, to be held until the world stopped shaking.

You took a tentative step toward her quarters, your bare feet slapping softly on the stone, but as the image of Rhaenys’s comfort solidified, another presence surged forward to eclipse her. Aegon. The thought of him was a sudden, grounding weight, a mountain of certainty in a sea of chaos. He was the one who had wept for you, he was the one who had haunted your door like a ghost of devotion. He wasn't just a brother, he was the shield, the sentinel, the protector from all things...even from the crushing loneliness that Lila had left in her wake. Your path shifted instinctively, your body pivoting away from Rhaenys and toward the direction of his chambers.

You moved through the corridors with a desperate, frantic speed, your breath hitching in your chest. The castle, once a labyrinth of fear, now felt like a gauntlet you had to run to reach the only sanctuary that mattered. Every flicker of a torch, every distant echo of a servant's footstep, felt like an obstacle between you and the warmth of his presence. By the time you reached his door, your shift was dampened with tears and your hair a wild, tangled crown around your puffy face, but the sight of the heavy door brought a sudden, sharp clarity to your heart.

The door didn’t just open, it surrendered, swinging wide on silent hinges to reveal a room bathed in the amber glow of a dying hearth. Aegon was there, sprawled across the linens of his massive bed, the light catching the sharp line of his jaw and the focused intensity in his eyes. He looked like a scholar of sorrow, perched atop a mountain of silk, scribbling feverishly into a leather bound journal. The scratch of the quill was the only sound until the click of the latch reached him. With a practiced, almost reflexive motion, he tossed the journal to the side, the heavy book landing with a muffled thud against the velvet duvet.

"Visenya, I said I’m going to sleep—" he groaned, his voice thick with a mixture of exhaustion and mild irritation. He didn't even look up, his eyes closing as he assumed the intrusion was merely his sister coming to lecture him on the morning's itinerary or the state of the castle.

The change in him was instantaneous. The irritation vanished, replaced by a sharp, electric alertness. Aegon shifted, his arm winding around you with an instinctive, possessive strength, pulling you flush against his chest until there was no air left between you. He felt the dampness of your cheeks against his ribs, the rhythmic hitching of your breath, and the raw, ragged quality of your silence.

"Why are you crying, my sweet love?" his voice dropped an octave, turning into a low, humming vibration that seemed to echo through your very bones. He didn't ask for an explanation...he didn't demand to know who had hurt you or what had happened. He simply tightened his hold, his fingers digging slightly into the soft flesh of your shoulder, anchoring you to him as if he feared you might dissolve into mist if he let go.

You didn't answer him, the words were still trapped behind a wall of sobbing breaths and the lingering sting of Lila's warning. Instead, you simply clung to him, your fingers curling into the fabric of his tunic with a grip that bordered on bruising. You ignored the question entirely, choosing instead to burrow deeper into the scent of him. Aegon didn't mind the silence or the lack of an explanation. In fact, a low, rumbling sound of satisfaction vibrated in his chest, a purr of possessive triumph. He loved that you came to him in your wreckage... he loved that the world had broken you just enough to make him your only destination.

"Poor baby" he whispered, the words barely a ghost of sound against the salt-damp skin of your cheek. His lips lingered there for a heartbeat, a soft, searing brand that seemed to cauterize the wound Lila had left in your spirit. Then, with a fluid, heavy grace, he shifted. The world tilted as Aegon rolled over you, his weight descending like a warm velvet curtain that shut out the rest of the castle, the ghosts of your father, and the terrifying warnings of a servant.

He didn't just move, he claimed the space, sliding between your legs with a slow, deliberate precision that felt less like a gesture of comfort and more like a territorial marking. The friction of his linen trousers against your bare thighs was a grounding heat, an anchor in the storm of your dissociation. As he settled, his hand rose to your temple, his fingers weaving through the tangled knots of your hair, stroking the strands away from your forehead with a tenderness that felt dangerously absolute.

"You're okay… you're safe. You're always safe with me" he whispered, the words grazing the shell of your ear like a warm summer breeze. The vibration of his voice was a physical thing, a low frequency that seemed to synchronize with the frantic hammering of your heart until the two rhythms merged into one. Then came the kiss...a soft, lingering press of his lips against the sensitive curve of your earlobe that acted as a final seal on the world outside.

In that singular, searing moment, the warnings of Lila and the ghost of your father’s betrayal faded into insignificance. You felt the immense, sheltering weight of him, a fortress of muscle and devotion that blocked out every shadow of the castle. Your puffy eyes fluttered closed, and for the second time that night, your mind offered a silent, fervent prayer to the Seven, thanking them for returning you not just to your home, but to the only person who truly knew how to hold the shattered pieces of you together.

Yet, as your breathing leveled into a deep, rhythmic lull, Aegon did not settle. He remained a storm of kinetic energy beneath the surface of his skin. You felt him shift against you, a slow, restless adjustment of his hips that pressed him more firmly into the curve of your thigh. Then he shifted again, a subtle, searching movement, as if he were trying to find a geometry of proximity that didn't yet exist. His breath, once a steady hum against your ear, became a jagged, uneven thing, hot and hurried.

A low, vibrationally deep hum started in Aegon's chest, a sound of absolute contentment that echoed through your ribs as you drifted toward the edge of sleep. He watched the way your eyelids fluttered, the heavy surrender of your limbs, and a flicker of something dark and triumphant sparked in his gaze. He breathed in the scent of your salt-stained skin, silently thanking whatever gods presided over his desire for the blissful naivety that kept you blind to the hunger in his touch. To you, this was the refuge of a brother... to him, it was the slow, methodical claiming of a territory he had long ago decided was his alone.

A low, resonant hum vibrated in Aegon’s chest, a sound of primal satisfaction that seemed to synchronize with the slowing rhythm of your heart. He watched the way your lashes finally stilled, the heavy veil of sleep descending over your eyes, and a predatory sort of tenderness flickered in his gaze. You were drifting, floating in the warm wake of your own exhaustion, unaware that the sanctuary you had sought had become a gilded trap. To Aegon, your vulnerability was a masterpiece, and your trust was the key that unlocked a hunger he had spent years refining in the silence of his own longing.

The air in the room grew thick, heavy with the scent of dying embers and the oppressive sweetness of musk. Aegon’s touch changed... the protective embrace of a brother shifted into something more exploratory, more deliberate. His hand, warm and slightly calloused, began a slow, searing journey upward, gliding along the pale expanse of your thigh with a lightness that made the fine hairs on your skin ripple. It was a touch that didn't just seek comfort, but mapping as if he were tracing the boundaries of a kingdom he had finally conquered.

With a sudden, fluid motion, he reached further, his fingers curling around the soft, sensitive hollow of your inner knee. He didn't pull away. Instead, he guided your leg upward, folding you into him with a possessive grace. His hand slid further down, his palm cupping the arch of your foot in a grip that was firm and grounding. He held you there, pinned and pliable, while he shifted his hips into you once more. A soft, ragged sigh escaped him, a sound of profound release that vibrated through the mattress and into your very marrow.

The first touch had been a mere probe, a question asked in the language of skin and warmth. You drifted in that liminal space where the world becomes a blur of amber light and velvet shadows, your consciousness fraying at the edges. You were falling, sinking deeper into the mattress as if the bed had become a warm sea, and for a heartbeat, the sensation of his hand on your inner knee felt like nothing more than a phantom limb, a remnant of childhood games. You could have stirred; you could have shifted your leg away or murmured a sleepy protest, but your mind was a soft, unlit room, too clouded by the residue of your grief to recognize the shift in the current. You didn't even know what he was doing.

Sensing your total surrender, Aegon’s grip tightened. He pressed his thumb firmly into the arch of your foot, a sharp, grounding pressure that acted as a tether, ensuring you remained anchored to him even as your mind sought the void of sleep. Then, with a slow, rhythmic deliberation, he pushed again, sliding his weight forward until the friction of his body was a searing line of heat against your own. It was a claim made in the silence, a physical insistence that you were not merely his sister, but a possession to be curated and held.

"Sister…" his voice was a low, sandpaper rasp, vibrating against the shell of your ear. You stirred, a languid, half conscious ripple of movement, your mind still swimming in the thick syrup of oncoming sleep. "Lift your other leg over my hip, okay? Just like this."

You obeyed without thought, your movements heavy and clumsy, governed by a half dreaming trust that bypassed any sense of caution. Your leg lifted, sliding over his hip with a slow, languid friction that felt like a warm current of honey. The shift in position pulled you tighter against him, erasing the last slivers of air between your chests. You felt the hard, rhythmic thrum of his heart beating against your own, a frantic galloping thing that mirrored the sudden, inexplicable spike of heat blooming in your gut.

His thumb began a rhythmic, kneading motion against the arch of your foot, a slow, circular pressure that mirrored the way he used to soothe your temper tantrums when you were barely old enough to walk. It was a ghost of a memory, a tactile echo of childhood that bypassed your adult defenses and whispered that you were safe, small, and cherished. The tension that had coiled in your spine since the confrontation with Lila began to unravel, thread by thread, as he worked the tension from your heel and toes. Then, with a gentle but firm guidance, he hooked your second leg over his hip, locking you into a tangle of limbs that felt less like a hug and more like a knot.

As he settled, his hand migrated upward, his fingers grazing your temple with an aching softness. He brushed a stray, damp lock of hair away from your forehead, his touch lingering as if he were smoothing the creases of a crumpled piece of parchment. "I'm going to help you relax, okay?" he murmured, his voice a low, hypnotic vibration that seemed to settle the frantic drumming of your heart. "Just like I do with Visenya… when the weight of everything becomes too much to bear."

The fabric of your shift, a thin slip of translucent silk, began to gather and bunch beneath his palm, the material resisting and then yielding as he shifted his weight. He didn't pull it away with any urgency, instead, he worked the cloth upward in a slow, rhythmic bunching, the silk sliding against your skin with a soft, shushing sound that felt like a secret shared between the two of you. You let out a small, fractured sound...a half muttered protest that was more a sigh than a word, your voice thick with the heavy fog of sleep.

Aegon paused, his gaze softening as he looked down at you. Your eyes were barely open, your expression a mask of drowsy confusion, and the sight of you...so fragile, so utterly undone by the night's trauma, sent a jolt of fierce, possessive tenderness through him. He leaned down, his lips grazing your cheek in a series of light, fluttering kisses that tasted of warmth and salt. A small, private smile tugged at the corners of his mouth, his eyes darkening with an affection that bordered on hunger.

The kisses were no longer mere brushes of affection, they became rhythmic, insistent pulses of heat that mapped the distance from your jaw to the sensitive hollow of your throat. As he leaned into you, Aegon’s focus shifted, his body acting on an instinct that bypassed the cautious boundaries of brotherhood. He began to shift his hips in a slow, undulating motion, a tentative grind that pressed the coarse linen of his trousers against the thin, yielding barrier of your small clothes. The friction was a sudden, searing current, a slow motion collision of heat and pressure that sent a jolt of confusing electricity shooting up your spine.

A sharp, strangled moan broke from his lips, the sound vibrating directly against your cheek. It wasn't a sound of comfort, but a raw, visceral expression of a need that had been coiled like a spring for years. The sound seemed to startle even him, and in a sudden surge of overwhelming intensity, he abandoned the kisses and buried his face deep into the crook of your neck. He inhaled sharply, his breath hot and ragged against your skin, as if he were trying to drink the very essence of you, anchoring himself to the scent of your salt damp skin to keep from drowning in his own desire.

You lay there, pinned beneath the immense, radiating heat of him, your mind a kaleidoscope of half formed thoughts. The sensation of his weight...the heavy, rhythmic press of his hips had felt like a tide coming in, slow and inevitable. In your sleep heavy state, the feeling didn't register as a threat, instead, it felt like the ultimate form of closeness.

You felt the way his muscles tightened, the way his grip on your waist became almost bruising, and you mistook this desperation for the same fear you felt... the fear of being alone again. You arched your back instinctively, a subconscious invitation for more of that grounding heat, and felt Aegon shudder against you.

"Aeg… is it supposed to feel funny?" you mumbled, your voice a thick, grainy slurry, weighted down by the residue of your tears and the heavy fog of drifting consciousness. You didn't open your eyes, the world was a blurred smudge of amber and shadow, and the darkness felt safer than the truth. Your legs, which had been locked around his hips in a desperate, instinctive knot, began to slacken, threatening to slip away as your muscles succumbed to the crushing gravity of sleep.

Aegon froze. The question was a fragile thing, a sliver of curiosity that threatened to puncture the carefully constructed bubble of his fantasy. He felt the slight slackening of your grip, the way your muscles began to dissolve into the mattress, and a surge of panic shot through him. He couldn't let you drift away now, not when the proximity had finally reached this fever pitch, not when the line between familial comfort and romantic hunger had blurred into something he could almost touch.

Aegon froze. The question was a fragile thing, a sliver of curiosity that threatened to puncture the carefully constructed bubble of his fantasy. He felt the slight slackening of your grip, the way your muscles began to dissolve into the mattress, and a surge of panic shot through him. He couldn't let you drift away now, not when the proximity had finally reached this fever pitch, not when the line between familial comfort and romantic hunger had blurred into something he could almost touch.

"Can I keep going while you sleep?"

The question drifted over you like a heavy velvet shroud, his voice a low, resonant vibration that seemed to hum not in your ears, but in the marrow of your bones. He didn't wait for an answer, he didn't even acknowledge the confused query you had whispered moments before. Instead, Aegon moved with a sudden, fluid precision, his hands gripping your thighs and hoisting your legs back into that tight, locking knot around his hips. He did it with a territorial firmness, resetting the geometry of your bodies until you were once again pinned, a captured bird in a cage of muscle and linen.

He began to move again, a slow, rhythmic undulation of his hips that felt like the tide of a warm, dark ocean. It was a steady, grounding friction, a deliberate grind that pressed the heat of him deep into the yielding softness of your center. To your sleep drunk mind, the sensation was an extension of the comfort he had always provided...a lullaby of pressure and warmth that promised you would never have to wake up in a cold, empty room again. You let out a long, shuddering sigh, your head lolling back into the pillow as the tension in your spine finally snapped, leaving you pliant and open.

"Okay…" you murmured, the word barely a breath, a soft surrender that dissolved into the heavy silence of the room. It wasn't a conscious agreement, nor was it a reasoned choice, it was simply the sound of a soul too exhausted to fight the current. As the fog of sleep finally claimed you, your body continued to react to the rhythmic heat of him, your subconscious clinging to the sensation of being held. A series of small, fractured moans escaped your lips...unbidden, airy sounds of half remembered comfort that vibrated against the space between your skin and his.

The sound hit Aegon like a physical blow. His hips stuttered, the rhythmic grind breaking for a heartbeat as a surge of raw, electric hunger crashed through his composure. Those sounds weren't the cries of a sister... they were the music of a surrender he had craved since he was a boy, a sonic confirmation that he had finally bridged the distance between them. The stutter was brief, a momentary lapse in his control, before he redoubled his efforts with a desperate, focused intensity. He pressed deeper into you, his breath coming in ragged, shuddering hitches that mirrored the erratic beat of his heart.

To Aegon, you were no longer a person... you were a fixation, a living altar at which he had spent years praying in secret. In the heavy, amber lit silence of the bedchamber, the boundary between brotherly devotion and a starving hunger had dissolved completely. You were adrift in the velvet void of sleep, your consciousness a distant shore, yet your body remained a traitor, responding to him in a language you didn't even know you spoke. Even as your mind wandered through the haze of exhaustion, your throat produced those small, rhythmic sounds...pretty, fractured noises that vibrated against his skin like a siren song.

He watched the way your lips remained slightly parted, a soft, invitationally raw aperture that mirrored the vulnerability of your spirit. His gaze fixed on the delicate curve of your mouth, and a sudden, electric impulse surged through him. His fingers twitched with a desperate, starving curiosity that he longed to reach out and brush the velvet warmth of your lower lip, to feel the damp, sliding heat of your tongue against his skin, confirming that this proximity was not a dream born of his own madness. To him, your sleep was not a barrier, but a canvas upon which he could finally paint the depth of his possessiveness.

Aegon did not reach for your lips with his fingers... instead, he surrendered to the gravity of the moment and descended. His mouth found yours not with a tentative question, but with the crushing weight of a decade of suppressed longing. It was a kiss that tasted of salt and desperation, a heavy, searing collision that seemed to steal the very air from the room.

You stirred in your sleep, a soft, confused sound humming in the back of your throat, your body reacting to the sudden intensity with a reflexive arch of your spine. To you, it felt like a dream...a blurring of boundaries where the line between a brother's embrace and a lover's hunger became a smudge of warmth and scent.

The kiss deepened, a slow, drowning tide of heat that seemed to pull the very oxygen from the room. In the depths of your slumber, the sensation was an anchor, pulling you from the void and back into a reality that felt shimmering and surreal. As the pressure of his lips grew more insistent, a sudden, electric jolt shot through you, colliding with the rhythmic friction of his body. At that moment, Aegon’s composure fractured and a sharp, guttural sound escaped him...his frame shuddered with one final, violent thrust against the thin barrier of your smallclothes.

The shock of it acted like a splash of cold water. Your eyes snapped open, pupils dilated and dazed, blinking against the amber flicker of the dying hearth. For a heartbeat, you were suspended in a vacuum of confusion, the weight of him pressing you into the mattress and the lingering taste of him on your lips. The intimacy was too heavy, too deliberate. With a frantic, clumsy motion, you jerked your head to the side, breaking the contact. Your breath came in short, jagged gasps as the fog of sleep cleared, leaving you staring at the velvet canopy of the bed with wide, searching eyes.

Aegon felt the sudden, cold dampness clinging to his thighs, a visceral reminder of the release he had barely managed to control. He cursed silently, the frustration of his own lack of discipline warring with the sheer triumph of the moment. He looked down at you, expecting a flicker of shock or a panicked retreat, but instead, he saw a strange, vacant kind of calm. You weren't reacting to the friction, the grinding pressure, or the invasive weight of his body... to your sheltered and sleep worn mind, those sensations were merely the chaotic architecture of a hug gone wrong. You were adrift in a sea of innocence, entirely oblivious to the biological reality of what had just occurred between your thighs.

It was the kiss, however, that had finally breached the surface of your consciousness. As you lay there, blinking up at him, your chest heaving with a sudden, sharp intake of air, the memory of his lips on yours felt like a brand. In the rigid social order of the estate, you had only ever seen such intimacy between married couples...the sweeping, romantic gestures of lords and ladies that were reserved for the sanctuary of the marriage bed. The Seven taught that such passion was a sacred bond between husband and wife, a fire not to be lit between siblings. The realization crashed over you not as a wave of disgust, but as a profound, confusing dissonance.

"Why…" Your voice was a fragile thread, barely audible over the crackle of the dying fire. "Why did you… we aren't…"

Aegon didn't miss a beat. He shifted his weight, not pulling away, but instead leaning in closer, his expression softening into a mask of practiced, protective tenderness. He let his hand slide up to cup your cheek, his thumb brushing away a lingering tear with a gentleness that felt almost holy.

Your voice trailed off, the words dissolving into the heavy air of the room. The ghost of his lips still burned against yours, a sensation that felt like a transgression against the very laws of the Seven. In your mind, you recalled the sight of the High Septon joining hands and lips in the Great Sept, the way the nobility of the realm spoke of the 'sacred fire' reserved for husbands and wives. Such a kiss was a seal of ownership, a promise of lineage...it was a language of passion and partnership that had no place in the quiet, familial bond of a brother and sister.

Aegon didn't flinch. He didn't pull away or offer a clumsy apology. Instead, he tightened his hold on you, his thumb tracing the line of your jaw with a slow, hypnotic deliberation. He let a small, knowing smile tug at the corners of his mouth, his voice dropping into that low, resonant frequency that always made you feel small and protected.

You were searching his eyes for a sign of hesitation, for some flicker of shame that would signal he knew this had crossed a boundary. "Aegon, the kiss… the way you… we aren't married."

Aegon didn’t blink. He didn't recoil or offer the clumsy apology of a man caught in a transgression. Instead, he leaned in closer, his forehead resting against yours, his breath warm and steady. He let out a soft, melodic chuckle...a sound of gentle correction, as if you had merely misread a page of a familiar book.

"My sweet, innocent girl…." he murmured, his voice sliding over you like silk. "You have spent too much time listening to the Septons and their rigid laws for the common folk. Do you truly believe the blood of the dragon is bound by the same mundane rules as the sheep in the valley?" He shifted his weight, his hand sliding from your cheek to the nape of your neck, anchoring you to him with a firm, possessive pressure. "Our ancestors—the lords of Old Valyria—they understood that the bond between siblings of the highest blood is the purest form of devotion. To them, a kiss was not a contract of marriage, but a seal of kinship, a way to keep the dragon's fire concentrated within the family."

"Will it… will it help me finally get a dragon to hatch for me? Or even be claimed?" you mumbled, the words thick and slurry, drifting through the haze of your remaining sleepiness. You searched his eyes for an answer, your heart hammering against your ribs with a sudden, desperate hope. For years, the stone cold egg in your chamber had remained a silent, dormant thing, mocking you with its stubbornness. You had watched others in your lineage command the skies, while you remained earthbound.

Aegon let out a low, humming sound of affirmation, the vibration rattling through his chest and into your own. He didn't answer with a simple yes... instead, he leaned in, his lips brushing against the sensitive shell of your ear, his voice dropping to a hypnotic, conspiratorial whisper. "Mhm… perhaps not the egg, my love" he murmured, the words tasting of salt and secret promises. "But the bond… the bond is everything. This closeness, this sharing of breath and skin… it strengthens the fire in your blood. It makes you more than just a sister... it makes you a part of the very soul of the dragon…My dragon."

He paused, his hand sliding down to press firmly against your heart, as if he could feel the frantic drumming within. "And Balerion..." he continued, his voice growing thick with a dark, magnetic intensity, "he has missed you. He feels the shift in you, the way you are finally surrendering to the heat. If you stay here, in my arms, locked in this circle of devotion, you will find a strength the others can only dream of. You won't need a hatchling of your own when you have the Black Dread."

A spark ignited in the depths of your gaze, your eyes practically sparkling with a newfound, hungry ambition. The hesitation that had held your breath captive vanished, and you felt a surge of warmth bloom in your chest that had nothing to do with the hearth. You looked at Aegon...not as the brother who had protected you, but as the conduit to a power that felt ancient and inevitable. If the blood of Old Valyria demanded such a closeness to preserve its purity, then you would give it. You would kiss him a thousand times over. You would kiss him forever if it meant the fire of your house would never dim, and if it meant you would finally soar above the clouds, bound to the Black Dread by a bond that no mortal law could sever.

"Be with me forever, sister" he whispered against the sensitive skin of your nape, his breath a warm, humid brand that sent a final shiver racing down your spine. The words weren't a request... they were a decree, a velvet shackle that locked the door behind you and threw away the key. He didn't give you a moment to process the gravity of the vow before his lips found yours again, not with the tentative exploration of before, but with a sudden, bruising intensity. This kiss was an erasure, wiping away the last vestiges of your doubt and the distant, fading memories of Lila’s warnings, replacing them with the singular, suffocating reality of his presence.

The world narrowed down to the rhythmic thrum of Aegon’s heartbeat against your ear and the heavy, grounding weight of him pressing you into the mattress. As the fire in the hearth succumbed to ash, casting the room into a velvet gloom, you felt the sudden shift in his posture...the predatory tension finally bleeding out of his muscles. He didn't pull away, but the frantic, searching heat of his body cooled into a protective stillness. He settled over you like a great, warm cloak, his face buried in the crook of your neck, inhaling the salt and sweetness of your skin with a long, shuddering sigh of contentment.

As the room surrendered to a heavy, velvet dark, you closed your eyes and let the weight of him settle over you like a living shield. The rhythmic friction had ceased, replaced by a stillness that felt thick and expectant. Aegon didn't move to distance himself, instead, he tucked his face into the curve of your neck, his breathing slowing into the deep, rhythmic cadence of a man who had finally captured the thing he most desired. He remained there, draped across you, his chest a warm furnace that seeped through the thin silk of your shift, inhaling the salt damp scent of your skin as if it were the only air left in the world.

You closed your eyes, drifting toward the edge of a heavy, velvet sleep, but as the darkness pressed in, your mind instinctively reached for a tether. You did not call out to the ghosts of Old Valyria, nor did you offer a prayer to the nameless fires of the Freehold that Aegon so fervently championed. Instead, in the quiet, panicked sanctuary of your thoughts, you whispered a plea to the Seven. You prayed to the Mother for a grace you weren't sure you deserved, to the Smith for a strength to withstand the gravity of this new world, and to the Crone, seeking a lamp to light the path back to a version of yourself that knew where the boundaries of blood ended and desire began. It was a silent, desperate rebellion, a tiny candle of faith lit against the overwhelming shadow of the dragon.

The words didn’t come from the air, but from the deep, echoing vault of your own memory, playing back like a ghostly recording in the silence of the early morning.

Forgive me for kissing family… but you must understand… it is not romantic… my Valyrian blood will cancel out the sin.

You could hear the cadence of your own voice, though it sounded strange to your ears...hollow, as if it belonged to a version of yourself that had already surrendered. It was a mantra you had begun to whisper to the shadows of the bedcurtains, a desperate theological shield forged from Aegon’s words to protect you from the crushing weight of the Seven's judgment. You were convincing yourself that the heat in your veins wasn't a transgression, but a biological imperative, a chemical reaction of ancient blood recognizing its own kind.

The chamber door groaned open before you could answer, a sound that normally would've sent you scrambling for your discarded shift, but Visenya's grip tightened on your hip, holding you in place. Aegon stood frozen in the threshold, sunlight glinting off his gold chased armor, his gaze raking over where Visenya's fingers disappeared between your legs. You felt the exact moment his shock curdled into something darker, his nostrils flared, his knuckles whitened around the door handle but Visenya just stretched like a well fed dragon, her smirk widening. "Brother" she purred. "You're interrupting."

"You're Grace! I was just leaving—" You scrambled backward, sheets tangling around your legs as you collided with the carved bedpost. The words tasted like sawdust on your tongue, hollow and absurd given how thoroughly Visenya had unraveled you mere moments ago. Your knees hit the cold marble floor before you'd even registered moving, the impact shuddering up your thighs as you bowed your head, too late to salvage dignity, but perhaps early enough to avoid execution.

The discarded maids' uniform hit your knees like a slap, the coarse linen rough against your bare skin. Aegon's boots scraped against marble as he turned away…deliberately, pointedly, as if you were nothing more than a chair he'd sidestepped. His gaze never left Visenya's face, though his voice was tight with something that wasn't quite anger. "You'd let a servant call you by name?" he asked, flicking a hand toward you without looking. The motion sent his cloak swirling, the embroidered dragons rippling as if alive.

"She calls me ‘my lady’" Visenya drawled, the words rich with amusement as she swung her legs off the bed, utterly unbothered by her nakedness in front of her brother-husband. The sunlight gilded her shoulders as she bent to press a kiss to the top of your head… chaste, almost tender, if not for the way her fingers lingered at the nape of your neck, possessive even in the act of helping. "Even now…" she murmured against your hair, "when she's tasted me deeper than any other ever will." The dress she pulled over your shoulders was plain servant's linen, but her hands smoothed it down your sides with slow, deliberate strokes that felt more like a claim than an afterthought.

Aegon's jaw twitched. You saw it from beneath your lashes, the way his fingers flexed against the hilt of Blackfyre before forcing stillness. "You let a maid touch you?" His voice was too even, the kind of calm that preceded wildfire igniting. Visenya just laughed again, the sound like a blade being unsheathed, sharp and bright and dangerous. "Oh, she doesn't touch me" she corrected, stepping back to admire her handiwork with a smirk. "She worships me. There's a difference."

"Maids are beneath you" Aegon groaned, his voice thick with something between disgust and fascination. His gaze lingered on you a heartbeat too long…long enough for you to catch the flicker of hunger in his violet eyes before he jerked his chin toward the door. "Leave." The command came out rough, edged with a tension that had nothing to do with anger.

"She's cute, right?" Visenya swooned with a smirk as she stood to dress herself, the silk shift sliding over her hips like liquid silver. She didn't hurry, every movement was a performance, the arch of her back as she reached for her leather corset, the deliberate flex of her thighs as she stepped into her riding boots. Aegon's gaze tracked her like a hawk circling prey, but Visenya only laughed, low and throaty, when his eyes flickered back to you still kneeling on the floor. "Admit it" she purred, lacing the corset tight enough to make her breasts strain against the leather. "You've never seen a maid blush so prettily."

Aegon groaned, the sound thick with something between exasperation and arousal, his gaze dragging over Visenya’s half-laced corset like a man starved. The leather hugged her ribs just shy of cruelty, forcing her breasts to swell above the edge in a way that made his jaw tighten. He rolled his eyes, too practiced, too deliberate before turning on his heel with a sharp flick of his cloak. "You're insufferable" he muttered, but the words lacked heat. The door shuddered in its frame when he slammed it behind him, the echo bouncing off the marble floors like a challenge.

The week that followed was hell…if hell was made of silk sheets and Visenya's teeth dragging slow, deliberate patterns along your inner thigh. You laid sprawled across her bed now, fingers twisted in the sheets as her tongue pressed against you with a familiarity that stole your breath. "You're shaking" she murmured against your skin, the words vibrating through you like a plucked harp string. Her fingers dug into your hips, holding you still as if she knew you'd try to squirm away, not from displeasure, but from the sheer impossibility of staying sane under such attention. The citadel bells tolled noon outside, marking the third time this morning she'd called you from your duties.

You shuttered against her tongue with a gasp that bordered on a sob, fingers twisting in Visenya's silver hair as she drank you down with the reverence of a woman receiving communion. Her lips left a burning trail up your trembling thighs…slow, worshipful kisses that lingered just long enough to make you squirm before her teeth grazed the delicate skin of your stomach. "I" she murmured against your hipbone, the word vibrating through your oversensitive flesh, "have" another kiss, higher now, just below your ribs, "so" her tongue flicked out to trace the dip of your navel, "so much" you whimpered when her nails skimmed your sides, "love” her breath ghosted between your breasts, hot and uneven, "for you" her teeth closed lightly around your nipple, not biting, just holding, "such a sweet" her palm slid between your legs again, fingers slick with your own arousal as they circled your clit in slow, teasing strokes, "girl."

Her words threw you off guard…a hand going to her hair as you bit your lip, hard enough to taste copper. You liked her, gods help you, you did. But she was the queen, and love had to be out of the picture. It was one thing to let her unravel you in the privacy of her chambers, another entirely to let her carve your heart open with a single sentence. "My lady" you whispered, voice cracking like a dry branch underfoot, "you shouldn't—"

Visenya's laughter cut through your protest like Valyrian steel through silk. "Shouldn't?" She pressed a kiss to your sternum, right over the frantic rabbit-beat of your heart. "Tell me, sweet girl, when have I ever done what I should?" Her fingers slid deeper between your thighs, slow and merciless, curling just the way she knew would make your breath hitch. You arched off the bed with a gasp, fingers tightening in her hair…not pushing her away, never that, but clinging like a drowning woman to the only solid thing in a storm tossed sea.

The citadel bells tolled again…three sharp strikes as Visenya finally pulled away, wiping her mouth with the back of her hand in a gesture that was somehow both obscene and regal. Her lips glistened in the midday light, swollen from use, and you couldn't help the way your thighs clenched at the sight. "You're thinking too loudly" she murmured, pressing a kiss to the inside of your knee. Her voice was rough, edged with amusement. "I can hear your little heart racing from here."

Your thighs tensed beneath Visenya’s weight as you tried and failed to shift her off your legs. "I should... get back to work" you mumbled, biting your lip hard enough to sting. The words tasted like a lie even as you said them, your fingers tangled in her silver hair betraying your reluctance. Visenya chuckled against your inner thigh, her breath hot and damp where she’d left a constellation of bruises the night before. "Work?" she echoed, dragging her tongue along the sensitive crease of your hip. "You are working." Her teeth grazed the same spot, sharp enough to make you jerk. "Quite diligently, I might add."

Outside, the distant clatter of armored boots echoed through the corridor, the changing of the guard, signaling midday. You tensed, fingers tightening in Visenya’s hair. "The laundry—" you started, but she cut you off with a slow, open-mouthed kiss just above your knee. "Will still be there" she murmured, lips brushing your skin with each word. "Unlike this." Her fingers slid higher, teasing the damp curls between your legs with a familiarity that made your stomach flip. "Tell me" she purred "do you want to go?"

The door groaned open again before you could answer. That same dreadful, unoiled hinge from three mornings prior, but this time Visenya didn’t tighten her grip. Instead, she exhaled a slow, irritated breath against your thigh and turned her head toward the intrusion without lifting it from your skin. You craned your neck to see Aegon leaning against the doorframe, one gauntleted hand braced against the carved wood, his gaze lingering on the way Visenya’s lips glistened with your arousal. His jaw worked silently for a moment before he managed "We have petitions."

Aegon's fingers flexed against the doorframe, the leather of his gauntlet creaking under the pressure. The midday light caught the sweat beading along his temple, though the solar was cool and his discomfort had nothing to do with heat. Visenya didn’t bother to lift her head from your thigh. "Petitions can wait" she murmured, lips brushing your skin with each word. Her thumb circled your clit lazily, just enough to make your hips twitch but not enough to grant relief. "Can't they, brother?"

Aegon groaned, the sound thick with something between frustration and reluctant arousal as he dragged a hand down his face. You scrambled backward across the silk sheets, cheeks burning as Visenya's fingers slipped from your thighs with a slow, deliberate drag of her nails. The bed felt suddenly too vast, the air too thick, and your legs tangled in the rumpled fabric as you tried...and failed to put distance between yourself and the queen's smirking mouth.

Visenya caught your ankle before you could retreat fully, her grip firm but not unkind. "Oh no you don't" she murmured, thumb pressing into the delicate bone with just enough pressure to make you gasp. Her gaze flicked to Aegon, sharp with amusement. "Brother, you're making her nervous." She said it like an accusation, like he'd personally offended her by existing in the same room as your naked thighs.

Aegon's jaw twitched. You saw the way his fingers flexed at his sides, the way his gaze lingered on the bite mark blooming just above your knee...purple and unmistakable against your flushed skin. "Nervous?" he repeated, voice low and rough. "Or embarrassed?" His boot scuffed against the marble as he took a single, measured step forward. The sunlight caught the gold in his hair, the sharp cut of his cheekbones, and for a breathless moment, you understood why they called him the Conqueror.

"Perhaps both. I don't care—Aegon, get out" Visenya groaned, rolling onto her back with the languid arrogance of a dragon settling onto its hoard. Her fingers never left your ankle, tracing idle circles around the protruding bone as she stared up at her brother through half lidded eyes. The sunlight caught the sweat drying along her collarbones, the marks your teeth had left last night standing out like brand new tattoos against her pale skin.

Aegon just made a face before looking to you and scoffing, "She's a distraction." The words hung in the air like smoke from a dying fire...acrid, lingering, but lacking real heat. His fingers twitched at his sides, betraying the tension in his shoulders as he deliberately avoided looking at where Visenya’s thumb still circled your anklebone with lazy possessiveness. "You’ve missed three council meetings" he added, sharper this time, though his gaze flickered to your parted thighs for half a heartbeat before he wrenched it away. "Over a maid."

"She's tempting, cute…needy—oh come on, you act like Rhaenys never kept you from council most days" Visenya countered, rolling onto her side with a groan when she caught your flinch at being discussed like a piece of furniture. Her fingers tightened around your ankle, a silent apology or perhaps just another claim, you couldn’t tell anymore.

Aegon’s nostrils flared, his grip on Blackfyre’s hilt white knuckled. "Rhaenys was my wife" he ground out, as if that explained everything. The unspoken and this is just a servant hung between you like a blade. You curled your toes against the silk sheets, suddenly hyperaware of the sweat drying between your thighs, the way Visenya’s thumb kept circling your anklebone like she was memorizing its shape.

"Just a maid" you thought to yourself, the words carving through your chest like a dull knife as you scrambled off the bed. Silk sheets slipped from your thighs with a whisper, catching on your knees as you lunged for the discarded maid's uniform crumpled near the footboard. Visenya's fingers grazed your hip... too slow, too late, as you twisted away, fabric rustling like a startled bird taking flight. The door slammed behind you with a violence that rattled your teeth, leaving only the echo of Aegon's unspoken judgment ringing in your ears.

Visenya stared at the shuddering door, her lips still swollen from your thighs, her silver hair a tangled mess across the pillows. Slowly, she sat up, the sheets pooling around her waist as she turned that dragon's gaze on her brother. "Great" she deadpanned, rolling her shoulders in a shrug that did nothing to hide the tension in her jaw. "Now I have to deal with that later." Her fingers flexed against her bare thigh, nails leaving crescent moons in the skin.

Aegon scoffed, deliberately leaning Blackfyre against the bedpost, close enough to grab, far enough to pretend he wasn't considering it. "Deal with what?" he asked, voice dripping with false nonchalance. "Your maid remembering her place?" The way his gaze lingered on the damp spot you'd left on the sheets betrayed him.

Visenya stretched like a cat in sunlight, rolling onto her stomach and propping her chin on folded arms. The sheets clung to her sweat-slicked thighs as she regarded Aegon with a smirk that had melted kingdoms. "Yeah, sure she forgets her place sometimes" she purred, kicking one leg lazily in the air "but she's a good fuck." The crude words dripped like honey from her tongue, deliberate in their vulgarity. "I like her, Aegon. C'mon, let your wife have a little fun."

"You can have fun and still tend to responsibilities" Aegon sighed, the words bitten off like he'd rehearsed them in the mirror a dozen times before managing to say them without his voice cracking. He turned on his heel, the embroidered dragons on his cloak snapping with the motion, but paused at the door, one hand braced against the frame like he might change his mind. "I'll deal with her, Vis." The nickname dripped with forced casualness. "No more distractions."

Aegon found you that night, a knock to your servant's quarter, you couldn't even light the candle before he busted in and startled you.

The candle you'd been fumbling with rolled across the floorboards as Aegon shouldered through the door, his bulk swallowing what little light trickled in from the torches in the corridor. You scrambled backward on the narrow cot, knees knocking against the wooden frame as his shadow stretched across the wall like some great winged beast.

He shushed you, raising his hands as if to not startle you further, a gesture absurdly gentle for a man who still smelled of dragon fire and conquest. The torchlight caught the silver in his hair as he groaned, "Visenya…has grown attached to you." His voice was rougher than you remembered, like he'd been shouting orders all day. "I do not see why" he admitted, flexing his fingers as if grasping for an explanation in the air "but I'm moving you from her service."

The words hit like a slap. You clutched the scratchy wool blanket to your chest, your heartbeat loud enough to drown out the distant clatter of the night watch changing shifts. "Your grace—" you began, voice cracking like dry parchment.

Aegon's gauntlet scraped against the doorframe as he leaned in, the torchlight carving shadows under his cheekbones that made him look more dragon than man. "You'll serve in my chambers" he said, each word measured like a blade being drawn. "Where I can keep you from…" His jaw worked for a moment before he settled on, "distracting my wife."

The wool blanket scratched your bare thighs as you stared up at Aegon, his violet eyes reflecting torchlight like polished dragon glass. His words hung between you, not a reprieve, but a rearrangement of chains. You swallowed hard, tasting the metallic tang of fear. "Your chambers?" The question came out smaller than you intended, barely more than a whisper as he shifted.

"You don't have much wit, do you?" The torchlight caught the edge of his smirk...sharp enough to draw blood. "Yes. My chambers." He repeated it slower, as if speaking to a particularly dull child. "I cannot see why Visenya wants you around." His gaze raked over your hunched form, lingering on the way your fingers twisted in the wool blanket.

The torchlight flickered when Aegon exhaled through his nose, the sound rough with exasperation. You watched his shadow ripple across the ceiling beams of a dragon stretching its wings before he reached down and grabbed your wrist. His grip was firm but not cruel, the calluses on his palms scraping against your pulse point as he hauled you upright. "Come" he commanded, already turning toward the door without checking if you followed.

The days were more Aegon keeping you out of Visenya's sight, he was happy for his sister wife was finally back to her duties though quite sulky.

The first week in Aegon's chambers passed in a blur of misplaced armor and hissed reprimands. You learned quickly, things like how he liked his wine , how he preferred his boots arranged, the way his jaw twitched whenever you lingered too close to the door leading to Visenya’s wing.

Aegon hated himself for the twitch at the corner of his mouth when you tripped over Blackfyre’s scabbard...again...your arms flailing like a startled pigeon before catching yourself against the armor stand. The metallic clatter echoed through his chambers as you froze, wide eyed, waiting for the inevitable reprimand. But what came out was a choked noise halfway between a cough and a laugh, one he disguised by turning sharply toward the window.

You paused and grimaced, turning with a small frown moving some hair from your face. "You found that funny, your grace?" The question slipped out before you could stop it, braver than you felt with your knees still trembling from nearly face planting into his breastplate.

Aegon's shoulders stiffened beneath his tunic, the fabric pulling tight across his back as he deliberately kept his gaze fixed on the horizon beyond the window. The morning light caught the silver threads in his hair, turning them molten. "No" he lied, voice rougher than gravel. His fingers flexed against the windowsill, knuckles whitening. "You're incompetent."

The sound of Aegon’s sword clattering onto the dresser made you jump…a habit you couldn’t seem to break no matter how many times he tossed his armor aside with that same careless violence. You caught the way his nostrils flared when you flinched, the way his jaw tightened as if your nerves personally offended him. "Stop that" he muttered, stripping off his vambrace with more force than necessary. "I don’t beat my servants."

"Of course not, I'm sorry" you mumbled, nervously fiddling with your fingers before reaching to help him ready for bed. Your knuckles brushed the warm leather of his gambeson as you fumbled with the clasps, the scent of dragonfire and sweat clinging to the fabric. Aegon exhaled sharply through his nose but didn't pull away, his stillness more unnerving than any reprimand.

The steam curled off the copper tub in lazy tendrils as you turned toward the door, your fingers already brushing the latch when Aegon’s voice cut through the humid air like a blade. "Stay."

Your shoulders tensed beneath the roughspun of your dress, the single word lodging between your ribs like an arrowhead. His tone held none of Visenya’s playful command...this was the voice that had ordered cities burned, clipped and expectant. The buckles of his pauldrons clicked as he shrugged them off behind you, the sound unnervingly intimate in the quiet chamber.

"Of course, your grace" you mumbled, turning just in time to see Aegon slide into the copper tub with the lethal grace of a predator entering its territory. The water sloshed against the sides as he settled back, his violet eyes tracking your every movement with an intensity that prickled the hairs on your neck. Then, unexpected as a summer storm...his lips twitched. A smile broke across his face, sharp and fleeting, before he extended a dripping hand toward you, offering the sponge like a knight presenting a favor.

The sponge slipped from your fingers into the tub with a wet plop that echoed absurdly loud in the sudden silence. Aegon's gaze pinned you where you stood, steam curling around his bare shoulders like ghostly fingers as he leaned forward. "You know…" His voice was deceptively casual, the way a cat's tail flicks before pouncing. "I've been wondering about you and Visenya." Water dripped from his forearm as he reached for the fallen sponge, the droplets tracing the ridges of his muscles. "My wife likes you, yes. But did you like her?" His violet eyes burned brighter than the candlelight. "Do you like men, or just women?"

Your mouth went dry as the Dornish desert. The question hung between you like a blade balanced on its edge...too dangerous to touch, impossible to ignore. Behind Aegon, the bathwater rippled as if agitated by some unseen force, distorting his reflection into something monstrous for a heartbeat before stilling.

"I…like her yes…but I also like…men" you mumbled nervously, the sponge back in your hand and moving to scrub his arm before he stopped you. Aegon's fingers closed around your wrist, not roughly, but with enough pressure to still your trembling. The water dripped from his forearm onto yours, tracking warm paths between your fingers as his grip tightened fractionally.

Aegon exhaled sharply through his nose as he released your wrist. "You're terrible at this" he muttered, snatching the sponge from your grasp with a splash that soaked the front of your dress. The sudden dampness clung to your skin, the thin fabric turning nearly transparent where water darkened the linen. His gaze lingered there for a heartbeat too long before flicking back up to your face.

"At…washing you?" you mumbled, fingers twitching uselessly against the damp hem of your dress. The confusion must have been written plainly across your face because Aegon's lips curled...not just a smirk, but a full, startling smile that crinkled the corners of his violet eyes. His laugh rumbled through the steam filled chamber, rich and unexpectedly warm, like sunlight breaking through storm clouds.

A wet hand rose from the bathwater, droplets tracing the veins on his forearm as he reached toward you. You flinched instinctively, but his fingers merely brushed a loose strand of hair from your forehead, tucking it behind your ear with a gentleness that belied his reputation. The gesture left your nose damp, his fingertips lingering just long enough for you to catch the scent of dragonfire and soap clinging to his skin. "You may go" he murmured, the command softened by the way his thumb grazed your cheekbone before withdrawing.

The door clicked shut behind you with surprising softness, the sound swallowed by the thick stone walls of Aegon's chambers. You stood frozen in the corridor, fingertips pressed to your cheek where his thumb had lingered, the ghost of his touch still burning like dragon flame. Torchlight flickered across the tapestries lining the hallway, the woven dragons seeming to writhe in the unstable light as your pulse hammered against your ribs.

The next morning, you nearly collided with Visenya in the corridor outside Aegon's chambers, her silver braid swinging like a whip as she spun to face you, her lips already curling into a predator’s grin. "There you are" she purred, crowding you against the cold stone wall before you could stammer an excuse. Her fingers traced your collarbone through the rough linen of your dress, her touch deliberately light, teasing. "I've missed you." The words were molten honey dripping over steel.

Your back hit the wall with a muffled thud as Visenya crowded closer, her thigh sliding between yours with practiced ease. The morning sun caught the mischief in her violet eyes, darker than Aegon's, sharper, like twin blades honed for flaying souls. "Missed me?" you breathed, fingers curling into the stone behind you. The words tasted like a challenge even as your hips pressed forward of their own accord.

Visenya's teeth flashed white against the torchlight as she leaned in, close enough for her breath to ghost across your lips. "Terribly" she murmured, dragging a fingertip down the center of your chest...slow, deliberate, stopping just above your navel where your dress gaped loose. "My brother's been hoarding you like a dragon with its gold." Her smirk widened when you shivered. "Selfish, isn't he?"

You stammered, heat crawling up your neck, half convinced she could see the way your thoughts had strayed to Aegon in the quiet dark of night, his hands replacing hers in your most private imaginings. But Visenya just groaned against your mouth, her teeth catching your lower lip in a punishing kiss that tasted like wildfire and stolen wine. "He is hiding you, so I'm not distracted" she murmured, pulling back just enough to watch the way your lashes fluttered. Her thumb swiped across your kiss-swollen lips, smearing the wetness there. "I suppose I understand." The admission came out begrudging, edged with amusement as she pressed her thigh harder between your legs.

The words curled against your ear like smoke...warm, intoxicating, impossible to ignore. Visenya's fingers laced through yours with the certainty of a queen accustomed to being obeyed. "Come to my chamber…" Her thumb traced slow circles over your knuckles, the touch deceptively gentle. "I miss you." Her frown was barely visible in the torchlight, but you felt it in the sudden tension of her grip, the way her nails bit just shy of breaking skin.

Your gaze flicked involuntarily toward Aegon's door...heavy oak banded with iron, still slightly ajar from when you'd delivered his evening wine. The flickering candlelight from within painted a golden stripe across the corridor floor, taunting. Part of you...the part that still remembered the weight of his gaze in the bath, ached to cross that threshold instead. But Visenya's fingers tightened, her smirk sharpening as she caught your hesitation. "Sweet thing" she murmured, pulling you closer until her lips brushed your earlobe. "Do you truly prefer my brother's tedious chores to my bed?"

The accusation burned your cheeks. You opened your mouth to protest, but Visenya was already turning on her heel, dragging you down the corridor with the relentless grace of a storm pulling a ship into its depths. Her braid swung like a pendulum counting down the seconds until disobedience became treason. You swallowed hard and followed.

The furs scratched your bare thighs as Visenya pinned you beneath her, her teeth dragging across your collarbone with possessive precision. Your moans came hollow, forced...too breathy where they should have cracked, too measured where they should have shattered. Her fingers twisted in your hair, tugging just shy of pain, but your mind floated somewhere beyond the canopy of her bed, beyond the citadel walls, beyond the scent of her sweat and the rhythmic creak of the mattress.

You gasped when Visenya’s teeth grazed your inner thigh...too sharp, too quick, but the sound was hollow in your own ears. Her nails dug crescents into your hips, and you arched obligingly, pressing your lips together around a moan that tasted like guilt. It wasn’t until you squeezed your eyes shut that the fantasy took shape: the weight above you shifting, shoulders broadening, silver hair darkening to silver-gold. Visenya’s laugh melted into Aegon’s groan, her teasing fingers morphing into his calloused grip.

Visenya's fingers dug into your hips hard enough to bruise...too sharp, too sudden, and the gasp that tore from your throat wasn’t for her. Not really. Not when your eyelids fluttered shut and suddenly it wasn’t her silver hair tangled in your fists but strands of gold-tinged silver, not her lithe frame pinning you down but broad shoulders blocking the candlelight. The fantasy hit like a well placed arrow... Aegon’s calloused palms replacing hers, his low groan vibrating through your ribs where Visenya’s laughter should have been. You bit your lip hard enough to taste iron, hips stuttering against her thigh as the lie of your pleasure crested into something dangerously real.

The pleasure coiled tight beneath your ribs like a dragon ready to strike, too much, too fast, Visenya's clever fingers dragging you toward a precipice your body craved but your mind couldn’t surrender to. Not like this. Not with his name caught between your teeth instead of hers. Your thighs trembled, muscles taut as bowstrings, and then...snap.

You moved before thought could catch up, rolling Visenya beneath you with a growl that sounded foreign even to your own ears. Her surprised laugh melted into a gasp as you straddled her thigh, the rough friction of her riding leathers against your bare skin drawing a ragged moan from your throat. Your fingers dug into her shoulders, nails scraping the silk of her tunic as you ground down hard enough to make her breath hitch. "Fuck—" she started, but the curse dissolved into a groan when you sank your teeth into the meat of her shoulder, hips rolling in desperate, uneven circles.

Visenya's hands flew to your hips, not to guide but to feel, her palms scorching through the thin fabric of your shift as you rode her thigh with a hunger that bordered on violence. The chamber spun around you, candlelight streaking gold across your vision as pleasure built like a storm surge, each roll of your hips dragging you deeper into the riptide. You barely registered the way her fingers tightened, the way her breath came in sharp, delighted bursts against your temple. All you knew was the heat, the pressure, the delicious friction that finally...finally felt like yours to take.

Somewhere beneath you, Visenya chuckled, the sound vibrating through your chest where you’d collapsed against her. "There you are" she murmured, dragging a hand up your spine to tangle in your hair. Her grip tightened, pulling just enough to arch your back, to expose the frantic flutter of your pulse beneath your jaw. "Took you long enough to take what you wanted." Her free hand slid between your bodies, fingers dipping beneath the damp hem of your shift to find the slick heat you’d been denying her. The first brush of her fingertips had you crying out, your hips stuttering against her thigh as pleasure lanced through you like lightning.

Your thoughts snapped back into focus like a bowstring released, leaving your skin prickling with shame. Visenya's lips traced lazy patterns across your collarbone, her fingers still tangled possessively in your hair, oblivious to the guilt tightening your throat. The scent of her... something uniquely Visenya clung to your skin, but all you could picture was Aegon’s thumb brushing your cheekbone, the rough pad of his finger lingering like a brand.

The citadel bells tolled midnight when Visenya finally slipped from the bed, her bare feet silent against the marble as she crossed to the balcony. Moonlight carved her silhouette into something sharp edged and dangerous, all lean and coiled tension. You watched from the tangle of sweat-damp sheets as she braced her hands against the balustrade, her shoulders rigid beneath the thin linen shift.

The door groaned open before dawn, its protest echoing through the chamber like a wounded beast. You jerked upright, sheets pooling around your waist as Aegon’s silhouette filled the doorway, broader than it should have been at this hour. His gaze swept over the rumpled bed, the discarded shift on the floor, your bare shoulders gleaming with sweat despite the chill.

The sheet rasped against your thighs as you yanked it upward, fabric catching on sweat damp skin. Visenya turned from the balcony with a slow arch of one silver eyebrow, her gaze flickering from your white-knuckled grip on the linen to the flush creeping up your neck. But before she could speak, Aegon cleared his throat...a sound like a blade being drawn from its sheath.

"You're up early." Visenya leaned against the balcony archway, her shift clinging to every curve in the dawn light. She didn't bother crossing her arms, didn't attempt to cover herself. The fabric was near transparent where the rising sun caught it, outlining the swell of her hips, the dark peak of her nipples.

"Don't you look wrecked" Aegon hummed, his voice rough with sleeplessness and something darker as he raked his gaze over Visenya's disheveled state. The dawn light carved shadows under her eyes, caught the bite marks purpling along her throat, marks that hadn't been there yesterday. His jaw tightened before he turned to you, jerking his chin toward the door. "Up. Now."

You moved faster than you'd ever moved for him before, scrambling from the sheets with a haste that made Visenya's lips curl. Her fingers twitched against the balustrade as you snatched your uniform from the floor, fabric whispering against your thighs as you dressed with trembling hands. Aegon didn't look away, not when the laces of your bodice tangled in your haste, not when the linen clung damply to your sweat-slicked back. His violet eyes burned brighter than the rising sun, tracking every flinch, every uneven breath.

"Start a bath in my chamber" Aegon muttered, his palm pressing between your shoulder blades with the barest hint of pressure, more suggestion than command, yet unmistakable in its intent. The heat of his hand seeped through the thin fabric of your dress as he guided you toward the door, his fingers flexing once before withdrawing. You stumbled forward, the ghost of his touch lingering like a brand. Behind you, Visenya scoffed, the sound sharp enough to cleave stone as you walked out the chamber in a rush.

"You can't be serious." Her voice dripped with venom as she stepped into Aegon's path, her bare feet planted wide, the hem of her shift riding high on her thighs. Dawn painted her silhouette in gold and shadow, the fabric clinging to every curve where the night's sweat hadn't yet dried.

Visenya's fingers curled into fists at her sides, her shift clinging to her thighs where the night's sweat still glistened. "You steal her because she's a distraction to me" she hissed, stepping closer until her bare toes brushed Aegon's armored boots. The dawn light caught the wildness in her eyes, the same wildfire that had burned Harrenhal to its foundations. "You don't want me fucking her—" Her gaze dropped pointedly to the way his grip tightened on Blackfyre's hilt. "—but you yourself look like you want to fuck her."

Aegon stood there before a smirk came, slow and deliberate as dawn creeping across the battlefield. He shifted his weight just slightly, the movement making his armored boots scrape against the marble floor with a sound like unsheathing steel. "I want to fuck her?" His voice dropped lower than the rumble of Balerion's growl, the words curling like smoke around the space between them.

Visenya’s nostrils flared too sharp, too quick, her pulse hammering visibly at the base of her throat. She opened her mouth, but Aegon was already turning away, his armored boots striking the marble with deliberate finality. The rising sun gilded the edges of his silhouette as he paused at the threshold, one gauntleted hand braced against the doorframe.

The copper tub steamed in the center of Aegon's chambers, the last bucket of hot water sloshing as you poured it in. You straightened just as the door groaned open, his broad silhouette framed against the torchlit corridor. "Your bath is ready, your grace" you murmured, wiping damp hands on your apron.

Aegon's smile hit you like a blade between the ribs...slow, deliberate, dangerous. He circled the tub with predatory grace, fingertips trailing along the rim. Water droplets clung to his calluses as he lifted his hand, examining them with curious intensity. "It's not for me..." he said at last, voice rougher than the dragon scale armor discarded by the wardrobe. His gaze pinned you where you stood. "It's for you. Get in."

"I shouldn't—" you started, hands knotting in the rough fabric of your apron. The protest died as Aegon stepped closer, his shadow swallowing you whole.

"I want you to." His voice was lower than you'd ever heard it, rough as Balerion's scales. "Clean." The word came out clipped, edged with something that wasn't quite anger but burned just as hot.

The bathwater scalded your skin as you lowered yourself into the copper tub, the heat a sharp contrast to the chill creeping up your spine. Steam curled around your shoulders like a lover’s embrace, thick with the scent of lavender and something darker, dragon’s blood resin, the kind Aegon used to polish his armor. You kept your gaze fixed on the rippling surface, afraid to look up, afraid of what you’d see in his eyes.

The water rippled as you curled your knees to your chest, steam rising in slow spirals between you and Aegon’s unblinking stare. His shadow stretched across the bathwater, warped by the copper’s curve into something monstrous. You reached for the sponge...then froze when his boots hit the floor getting closer.

You stared when he squatted beside the tub, the muscles in his thighs flexing beneath the leather of his breeches. Water sloshed over the rim as he dipped his hand in, his gaze never leaving your face while he flicked droplets at you with deliberate precision. They hit your collarbone like tiny brands. "I've let you distract Visenya far enough." he hummed, his voice deceptively soft... like the way Balerion purred before igniting a city.

His wet hand rose, calloused fingers catching your chin before his thumb brushed over your parted lips. The touch lingered, smearing water across your mouth like a crude baptism. "Bed her again..." he murmured, leaning close enough for his breath to ghost hot across your damp skin, "and I'll have you hanged in her chambers."

The threat coiled around your ribs like a vise, his thumb pressing harder against your lower lip though not enough to hurt, but enough to make your pulse flutter wildly beneath your skin. You swallowed against the dryness in your throat, the taste of lavender and dragon's blood resin thick on your tongue. Aegon's pupils dilated, his violet eyes darkening as he tracked the movement of your throat. His free hand settled on the edge of the tub, fingers drumming against the copper. "Do you understand?" he prompted, voice dropping to a rasp.

Your nod came too fast, a jerky little motion that made the bathwater slosh against your collarbone. Aegon's smile widened...not warm, but satisfied, the way a dragon might smile at a particularly clever sheep before devouring it whole. Then he moved. One moment his thumb was pressing into your lower lip, the next his mouth crushed against yours with the same careless brutality he used to break training dummies. The kiss tasted like iron and victory, his teeth scraping your bottom lip hard enough to draw a whimper you barely recognized as your own.

He pulled back just as abruptly, rising to his full height while you gaped up at him, bathwater dripping from your parted lips. Aegon wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, the gesture disturbingly casual for a man who'd just cracked your world open like an egg. "Good" he murmured, already turning toward the door as if nothing had happened. His boots left damp prints on the stone floor, each step measured, unconcerned. The door groaned shut behind him with finality, leaving you alone with the echo of your own ragged breaths and the fading scent of dragonfire clinging to your skin.

The sponge hit the water with a hollow splash as you dropped it, fingers trembling against the copper rim. Aegon's kiss burned brighter than dragonfire in your memory...the scrape of his teeth, the bruising press of his lips, the way his breath had shuddered against your mouth like a storm held at bay. You pressed shaking fingertips to your swollen lips. Seven hells, what had you done?

"Fuck" you cursed under your breath before letting your body slide fully beneath the water's surface, the heat swallowing you whole. Lavender oil stung your eyes as you squeezed them shut, bubbles escaping your nose in frantic bursts. You counted heartbeats...one for every time Visenya's hands had traced your ribs, two for every smirk Aegon hid behind his wine cup, three for the way your traitorous thighs still throbbed from imagining his weight instead of hers.

The water had gone cold by the time you climbed out, skin puckered and raw from scrubbing. The linen towel scraped against your thighs as you dried yourself with mechanical precision, your mind still caught between the memory of Aegon’s kiss and Visenya’s nails digging into your hips.

The knock startled you...too soft for Visenya’s imperious rap, too hesitant for Aegon’s usual demand. You barely had time to clutch the towel tighter before the door creaked open. Not Aegon. Not Visenya. A serving girl, wide eyed and trembling, her arms laden with folded garments in Targaryen black and red. "His Grace sent these" she whispered, gaze fixed firmly on the floor as she edged inside. The fabric she deposited on the bed smelled faintly of smoke and something achingly familiar...Aegon’s scent clinging to the weave.

The silk whispered against your skin like a secret as you ran your fingers over the dress...fine enough for a lady, though the cut remained simple enough for service. The scent of dragonfire clung stubbornly to the fabric, curling up from the folds when you lifted it. You hesitated, the towel still knotted tight around your chest, before the servant girl cleared her throat. "His Grace said…you're to attend him in the solar. After." Her eyes darted to the discarded maid's uniform puddled on the floor, its roughspun stark against the polished marble.

The crimson silk whispered treacheries with every step, the unfamiliar weight of House Targaryen's colors draping your body like a stolen crown. You kept your shoulders hunched, as if the black embroidered dragons might leap from the hem and denounce you to every passing courtier. The corridor stretched endlessly, each torch flickering in mockery as you passed.

Visenya's silver braid flashed at the far end of the hall like a blade unsheathed. She froze mid stride, her gaze raking over you with the precision of a butcher assessing a carcass. The apple in her hand that had been half-eaten, glistening had paused halfway to her lips. You watched her throat work as she swallowed, her violet eyes darkening with something between fury and amusement. "How quaint." she murmured, the apple's crisp crunch punctuating her words like a breaking bone. Her slippered footfalls quickened past you, close enough that her shoulder brushed yours...a calculated collision that left the scent of citrus and steel in her wake.

The solar’s heavy oak door groaned under your hesitant knock, the sound swallowed by the thick tapestries lining the walls. Inside, Aegon lounged in a chair too small for his frame, Blackfyre resting against his thigh like a lover’s hand. His gaze snapped up the moment you entered...not the slow, assessing look Visenya wielded like a blade, but the sharp focus of a dragon sighting prey. The silence stretched, broken only by the hearth’s crackle and the distant screech of a hunting hawk beyond the windows.

Aegon's smile curled at the edges like parchment catching flame...slow, deliberate, dangerous. His fingers dragged across the polished surface of his desk, scattering a handful of wax seals and a dagger still crusted with dried blood from yesterday's hunt. The wood groaned beneath his palm as he tapped it twice, an imperious command disguised as invitation. "Sit" he murmured, nudging aside a half-empty wine cup with his knuckle. The vessel wobbled, sending ruby droplets splattering across a stack of unread scrolls.

You stared, tilting your head as you studied the way Aegon's fingers drummed against the desk...impatient, but not angry. There was a looseness to his posture you'd never seen before, the usual rigid control softened by the late afternoon light bleeding through the stained glass. Slowly, deliberately, you moved past the offered chair and perched on the edge of the desk instead, your legs swinging just shy of brushing his thigh. The wood groaned under your weight, scattering a few more wax seals across the surface.

Aegon's fingers froze mid drum. The air between you crackled like parchment held too close to flame. You watched his pupils dilate...black swallowing violet as your knee brushed the outer seam of his breeches. His exhale hitched, fingers curling into the desktop hard enough to make the wood protest. "Cheeky" he murmured, the word rougher than gravel under wagon wheels.

Your knee bumped his thigh again...awkward, nervous, and you instinctively tried to shift away, but Aegon’s hand clamped down on your calf before you could retreat. His fingers burned through the thin silk of the dress, the pressure just shy of painful as he dragged your leg wider along the desk’s edge. The fabric hissed as it rucked up past your knee, exposing a stripe of bare skin to the solar’s flickering firelight.

"Still fidgeting" Aegon murmured, his thumb stroking the hollow behind your knee in a mockery of gentleness. The calluses from his sword grip rasped against your sensitive skin, each pass deliberate, measuring. His other hand remained splayed on the desktop, the tendons standing stark beneath his pale skin. "Like a spooked mare." The insult landed softly, undercut by the way his gaze darkened as your breath hitched.

The desk groaned as Aegon slid from his feet to his knees with the fluid grace of a predator descending upon prey. Your fingers scrabbled against the polished oak, nails catching in a whorl of grain as his breath ghosted hot against your inner thigh. "I don't enjoy stealing toys" he murmured into the crease where silk met skin, his words vibrating through muscle and bone, "but you…if you managed to capture Visenya's heart…" His teeth grazed the tender flesh above your knee...not biting, just testing. "You must be something special."

The squeak that escaped your throat sounded embarrassingly small when his palms skated up your calves, pushing the crimson silk higher with deliberate slowness. Dragonfire couldn't have burned hotter than the path his gaze traced as fabric pooled around your hips, exposing you to the solar's amber light. When his head dipped beneath the gown's hem, you arched so violently the inkpot toppled, black spilling across unfinished treaties like a night without stars.

"Your grace, I don't—" The protest dissolved into a squeak as Aegon wrenched your leg over his shoulder with the same effortless strength he used to swing Blackfyre. The silk tore at the seam with a sound like parchment splitting, his teeth finding the quivering muscle of your inner thigh before you could gasp. Your fingers scrabbled against the desk's edge, sending wax seals skittering across the floor like frightened mice. "Wait—"

Too late. The humid puff of his laughter against your damp skin sent shivers radiating outward as his calloused thumb hooked into the waistband of your smallclothes. The linen gave way without protest, the snap of elastic popping against your hipbone loud as a whip crack in the solar's silence.

You arched violently enough to send an inkwell crashing to the floor when his tongue found you, not the teasing flicks Visenya favored, but broad, hungry strokes that mapped your folds with the same meticulous attention he gave battle plans. The desk groaned beneath your convulsing grip, wood splintering where your nails dug in. Aegon responded by biting the meat of your thigh hard enough to make you yelp, his hands cinching tighter around your hips to keep you from bucking away.

His tongue dragged a wet line upward with deliberate slowness...too slow, too thorough, the flat of it pressing against your most sensitive flesh with unbearable precision. You choked on air, thighs trembling against his shoulders as your hips jerked involuntarily toward that devastating mouth. Aegon rewarded the movement with a low hum that vibrated through your entire body, his fingers digging bruises into your hipbones to hold you steady.

The solar blurred at the edges, tapestries bleeding into streaks of crimson and black as Aegon’s tongue worked you open with ruthless precision. Every flick sent sparks skittering up your spine, every suckling pull drawing ragged sounds from your throat that didn’t sound human. His grip shifted, one hand sliding up to splay across your stomach, pinning you to the desk while the other dipped lower, a single finger circling your entrance with mocking gentleness.

The finger breached you with a twist that stole your breath...not hesitant like Visenya’s teasing, nor delicate like the maidens’ tales whispered in the kitchens. This was conquest. Your spine arched off the desk as Aegon’s knuckle pressed ruthlessly against that inner ridge, his tongue never faltering its rhythm. When you spasmed around him, he merely chuckled against your flesh, the vibration wringing another broken sound from your throat.

Your vision whited out when he crooked that finger...just once, hitting a spot so deep you saw dragonfire behind your eyelids. The solar’s vaulted ceiling spun above you, the Targaryen banners blurring into streaks of red and black as your hips jerked uncontrollably against his mouth. Aegon’s free hand slid up to clamp over your stomach, holding you down with the same unyielding pressure as a sword pommel pressed to a defeated foe’s throat.

The solar's thick tapestries muffled your choked gasp as Aegon added a second finger without warning, the stretch bordering on painful. His lips sealed around your clit with sudden suction, tongue flicking in merciless counterpoint to the relentless curl of his fingers inside you. Your thighs trembled violently around his head, caught between the instinct to clamp shut and the desperate need to grind harder against his mouth.

Your eyes squeezed shut, nails splintering the desk's edge, but then the heat vanished. They snapped open to find Aegon standing again, his fingers dragging across his glistening mouth with the casual arrogance of a man who'd just tasted victory. The wet smear of your arousal on his chin caught the firelight as he tilted his head, studying your trembling thighs with detached interest.

"A-Aegon—" you started, but he shushed you with a laugh that made your thighs clench involuntarily. The sound vibrated through you... utterly intoxicating. "I'm not going to leave you all wanting" he murmured, his smile sharpening as he swept a forearm across the desk behind you. Scrolls, inkpots, and wax seals clattered to the floor in a chaotic symphony of falling objects.

"I was only savoring the taste" Aegon hummed, his tongue dragging across his lower lip with deliberate slowness. The leather belt slithered free from his breeches with a hiss that echoed through the solar, metal buckle clattering against stone. "I see why Visenya loves it." His fingers worked the laces with hurried precision, not the fumbling of an eager boy, but the lethal efficiency of a warrior disarming before battle.

The desk shuddered when he shoved you backward, your spine arching over scattered parchments as his knees knocked yours wider. Firelight gilded the sweat-slick plane of his abdomen where his tunic rode up, revealing the taut muscles flexing beneath pale skin. His scent of steel and smoke and something muskier, flooded your senses as he braced himself above you, the heat radiating from his body like a forge.

"I don't think—" you squeaked, the protest dying as Aegon's calloused fingers shoved past your lips with bruising suddenness. The taste of your own arousal flooded your mouth...salt and musk and something faintly metallic from where you'd bitten your lip earlier. His laughter vibrated through you, dark and delighted, as his fingers pressed down on your tongue in mocking mimicry of what was to come.

You barely had time to gag before he withdrew, those same slick fingers circling your entrance with torturous slowness. "You're ready" he murmured...not a question, but a verdict before plunging into you with a single devastating thrust that stole the breath from your lungs. The stretch burned, your body clamping down around him in instinctive protest as your nails carved half-moons into the desk's surface. "See?" Aegon's voice dropped to a rough whisper, his hips rolling in a slow, deliberate circle that made you whimper. "Feel that?"

The words dissolved into a groan as he dragged nearly all the way out before sheathing himself again, the glide smoother now that your body yielded to his. Firelight caught the sweat beading along his collarbones, the cords of his neck standing taut as he fought to maintain that torturous pace. His hands anchored your hips to the desk with bruising certainty, preventing even the slightest retreat from the relentless penetration.

"You take me so well." Aegon growled, the praise laced with something perilously close to wonder as his thrusts gained momentum. The desk shuddered beneath you with each snap of his hips, wood groaning in protest as scrolls and inkpots tumbled to the floor in chaotic disarray. His fingers dug into the meat of your thighs hard enough to leave marks...marks you knew Visenya would notice later, would trace with her nails while demanding to know how you'd earned them.

The desk's edge bit into your lower back with each snap of Aegon's hips, the pain blurring into pleasure as his rhythm grew erratic. His fingers splayed across your ribs like brands, fingertips pressing into the spaces between bones hard enough to make you gasp. When your nails scored down his forearms in retaliation, he rewarded you with a particularly vicious thrust that sent the desk skidding half an inch across the stone floor.

The moans tore from your throat unbidden...high, broken sounds that echoed off the solar's vaulted ceiling. Aegon's breath hitched in response, his hips stuttering mid-thrust before he slammed a calloused hand over your mouth. "Quiet..." he growled, though his own ragged breathing betrayed him. When you whimpered against his palm, he chuckled darkly and replaced it with two fingers shoved between your teeth, the taste of salt and sweat flooding your tongue as you bit down instinctively.

His thrusts grew punishing, each snap of his hips driving the desk legs screeching across the stone floor. The fingers in your mouth pressed down harder, silencing your cries as he bent low over you, his breath scorching against your ear. "That's it" he murmured, the words vibrating through your skull like dragonfire. "Take it." His free hand slid between your bodies, thumb finding your oversensitive clit with ruthless precision. White-hot pleasure arced up your spine, your vision fracturing into shards of firelight and shadow as your back arched clear off the desk.

The solar's stained glass window fractured the afternoon sun into jagged red shards across Aegon's shoulders...dragon scales carved from light. His hips jerked in three final, stuttering thrusts before he stilled above you, his breath hot and uneven against your collarbone. You felt him pulse inside you, his fingers tightening reflexively in your hair as he bit off a groan against your skin.

The next week passed in a haze of stolen moments...Aegon's hands on you in the armory between inspections, his teeth at your throat behind the tapestry lined corridors, his hips pinning you against the war table while scouts' reports fluttered to the floor. Always the same brutal rhythm, always the same shuddering finish buried deep inside you with a possessiveness that left your thighs trembling for hours afterward. You learned to recognize the particular flex of his jaw that meant he'd decided to take you, the way his nostrils flared when he caught your scent after riding drills.

The silk nightgown slithered against your skin like a living thing...too fine for a maid, too soft against the calluses you'd earned scrubbing floors. You kept your back to the door when it groaned open, fingers twisting in the black satin sheets as you anticipated the familiar scrape of boots against stone.

The dagger clattered to the floorboards as you sat up...a sound like broken armor, like a knight falling in battle. You barely had time to register the glint of Valyrian steel before Visenya crashed to her knees, her forehead pressing into your thighs hard enough to bruise. "You left me for this?" Her voice cracked like a whip, frayed at the edges in ways you'd never heard before. "To be his whore?" Her nails bit through the silk nightgown, clawing at your skin with the desperation of a drowning woman. "You know what you are now—you sit pretty until he wants to fuck you—" A ragged inhale. "I love you."

"Visenya…" You mumbled her name with glassy eyes, the word thick as honey on your tongue. She shook her head violently, keeping her face buried in your thighs, her fingers digging into the silk hard enough to tear seams. When her hand scrabbled for yours, you jerked away, only for her to seize your wrist with strength.

"It was not love, Senya…" Your voice cracked like winter ice underfoot. "We lusted—"

Visenya reared back so fast her braid whipped your collarbone. "We loved!" The words tore from her throat raw as a battlefield scream. She surged upright, towering over you with her shift gaping open to reveal the pale stretch of stomach where Aegon’s gauntlet had left bruises yesterday. "At least I did." Her breath hitched...a sound like a sword breaking, before she wrenched your chin up with trembling fingers. "You lust Aegon. Not me. Not us."

The silence between you stretched taut as a bowstring, Visenya’s grip on your chin trembling with barely contained fury. Moonlight caught the unshed tears in her eyes...not the soft silver of sorrow, but the glint of steel before a killing blow. Her thumb pressed into the hollow beneath your jaw, right where Aegon’s teeth had marked you hours earlier.

"Visenya, please—" you mumbled, scrambling backward as the chamber door groaned open. Aegon paused in the threshold, riding gloves halfway off, his brow furrowing at the scene before him. The scent of dragonfire and leather clung to him as he stepped inside, tossing his gloves onto a nearby chair with deliberate calm. His gaze flicked between Visenya's hunched form and your trembling hands clutching the torn silk.

"You knew." Visenya spat, her fingers tightening around the dagger still embedded in the floorboards. "Knew this one was different...knew, and still you took." Her laughter was sharp as shattered glass, her hips swaying with deliberate mockery as she stepped back. Aegon barely flinched when she shoved him, the heel of her palm connecting with his chestplate hard enough to send him staggering half a step. "Pathetic" she hissed, already striding toward the door. Her slippered foot caught the discarded dagger, sending it skittering across stone with a screech that made your teeth ache.

Aegon clutched his chest like a wounded knight from a mummer's farce, his groan overly dramatic as he flopped backward onto the bed. The mattress dipped violently beneath his weight, his forearm pinning your hip before you could scramble after Visenya. "Sweet one" he sighed, fingers toying with the torn hem of your nightgown, "be a doll and rid yourself of these silks." His other hand was already working at his belt, the leather sliding free with a whisper. "Then help me as well."

"I should check on Visenya—" you mumbled, twisting under the weight of Aegon's forearm. His fingers tightened around the torn silk of your nightgown, the fabric rending further with a sound like parchment splitting.

Aegon groaned, the vibration rattling through your ribs as he yanked the ruined garment clear over your head in one fluid motion. "She's fine" he muttered into the hollow of your throat, his breath scalding against skin still damp from his earlier attentions. The nightgown fluttered to the floor like a wounded bird, its delicate embroidery catching on the buckle of his discarded belt.

The chamber door slammed with enough force to rattle Visenya’s exit as violent as her entrance. You flinched at the sound, but Aegon only chuckled darkly against your collarbone, his teeth scraping the fresh marks he’d left there hours earlier. "She’ll be back by dawn" he murmured, fingers tracing the bruises circling your wrists, bruises Visenya had pressed into your skin moments ago. "She always comes back."

The door remained shut, no silver braid flashing through the gap, no dagger sharp footsteps returning down the hall. Just the heavy silence of stone and the humid puff of Aegon's breath against your throat. You swallowed thickly, fingers tightening in his hair as his teeth found the pulse point beneath your jaw.

His laughter vibrated through your collarbones when you arched into him, a sound dark as dragonfire smoke. "Fuck..." he growled into the hollow of your throat, his hips rolling against yours with deliberate slowness. The ridge of his breeches pressed against your bare thighs, the coarse fabric dragging sparks across oversensitive skin. "I love touching you." His palm slid up your ribs, thumb brushing the underside of your breast in a way that made your breath hitch. "You always take me so well."

The possessive edge in his voice sent heat coiling low in your belly, your thighs instinctively tightening around his hips. Aegon rewarded the movement with a sharp grind that had you gasping, his fingers digging into your waist hard enough to leave marks. "Wanna give you my bastard" he murmured against your ear, the words rough with want. "You'd love that, won't you?" His teeth caught your earlobe, tugging just shy of pain. "My seed taking root in your belly—"

The memory of Visenya's face all tear-streaked and twisted with something too close to grief had flashed behind your eyelids when Aegon's hips finally connected with yours. It should've made you hesitate, should've soured the moment with guilt, but then he groaned against your throat, hot and ragged, and your thoughts dissolved into wildfire. His weight pinned you to the mattress like a sword through a surrender banner, his breath scalding the shell of your ear as he murmured filth in High Valyrian too vulgar for court.

The youngest sister—barely twelve and already shedding childhood like a snake sheds skin had lifted her lopsided flower crown toward the light. Sunbeams caught in her silver hair, turning the strands to liquid mercury. Aegon's breath hitched audibly. Across the yard, Rhaenys smirked and leaned close to whisper something that made their youngest sister giggle, the sound like water over smooth stones. Aegon's straw snapped between his fingers.

Visenya lunged at him then, sword flashing with a move that would have drawn blood had Aerion not stepped forward with a warning growl. "Enough..." the Lord of Dragonstone commanded, his voice cutting through the thick summer air. Visenya lowered the blade with a scoff, but Aegon? Aegon didn't even flinch. His gaze remained fixed on the way his youngest sister's skirts pooled around her like spilled cream, how her fingers that were still soft with childhood had brushed Rhaenys' wrist as she passed her the half-finished crown.

Aerion's fingers dug into Aegon's shoulder like talons, hauling him upright with a grunt of exasperation. "By the gods, boy, you're not even pretending to train." he growled, shaking his heir until his silver hair tumbled into his eyes. Aegon's lips curled into that infuriatingly lazy smile, the one that never reached his violet eyes...not truly. Those remained fixed somewhere over his father's shoulder, where petals fluttered from careless fingers onto sun warmed stone.

"I wish to not hurt my betrothed." Aegon drawled, flicking a glance toward Visenya as she drove his stolen sword into the training dummy with unnecessary force. The straw head lolled sideways, decapitated. Aerion's jaw tightened. Even at seventeen, his eldest son wielded sarcasm like a dagger, sharp enough to draw blood if one wasn't careful.

Visenya snorted, wrenching the blade free with a twist of her wrist. "As if you could" she shot back, tossing her braid over one shoulder. The motion sent sweat flying, but Aegon didn't flinch, though a droplet landed on his cheekbone. He merely swiped it away with his thumb, eyes sliding past her again like water over rock.

"Should you not be weaving flowers with our lovely sisters instead of swinging swords?" Aegon drawled, plucking the blade from Visenya's grip with a lazy flick of his wrist. The steel glinted between them...too sharp for idle hands, too cold for the honeyed afternoon. Visenya bared her teeth, but Aegon merely twirled the sword once before driving it point first into the dirt, where it stood quivering between them like an accusation.

Rhaenys' laughter bubbled up from the shaded stone bench where she sat with their youngest sister, a sound like wine poured too freely. "Oh, he's got you there" she teased, plucking a daisy from the half finished crown in her lap. Aegon didn't look at her...couldn't, when the youngest sister's fingers stilled mid weave, her head tilting just so to catch the sunlight through her lashes. The flower crown slumped forgotten in her lap, petals crushed beneath her restless thumbs.

Aerion groaned, rubbing his temples as Visenya delivered a sharp smack to the back of Aegon's head, the sound like a whipcrack across the training yard. His eldest daughter squinted up at the merciless sun, her braid swinging as she stalked off toward the shade of the arched colonnade, leaving Aegon blinking after her. The moment her back turned, he was already moving, his boots kicking up dust as he crossed the yard with the lazy grace of a stalking cat. Rhaenys barely had time to set aside her half-woven crown before Aegon's fingers closed around her wrist, hauling her upright with a chuckle.

But when he turned to you, his grip shifted. His fingers curled beneath your elbow with a gentleness that bordered on reverence, his thumb brushing the delicate skin of your inner arm as he lifted you. You stumbled, laughing, into the warmth of his chest, and his other hand came up to steady you for a heartbeat too long before he swiped his thumb over the bridge of your nose with a teasing grin. "Let us be done for the day, father" he murmured, his breath stirring the loose strands of your hair, "before the sun marks such precious skin." His words were light, but his touch lingered, thumb tracing the curve of your cheekbone where the sun had painted you pink.

Aerion's fingers tightened around the pommel of his sword as he watched Visenya fling her sweat stained gloves onto the cobblestones with careless precision...right where some poor maid would have to scurry later to retrieve them.

Rhaenys knelt nearby, gathering fallen petals with the same delicate focus she reserved for her embroidery, her skirts pooling around her like spilled wine. But it was the scene just beyond them that made his jaw clench…

Aegon's nose brushing against yours with a laugh that was too intimate, too warm for siblings who should have been pulling braids and trading insults by now.

You giggled that bright, oblivious sound that had chased away storms since you were knee-high, and nudged Aegon's nose right back with your own. The gesture would have been sweet if Aerion hadn't noticed how his eldest son's breath hitched, how his fingers flexed against your waist for half a heartbeat too long before he theatrically groaned. "Must you grow so swiftly, sweet one?" Aegon murmured, his thumbs tracing the sharpening line of your jaw like a man memorizing stolen treasure. His voice dropped to that velvet rasp reserved only for you, the one that made Visenya roll her eyes and Rhaenys whine about not getting the same treatment. "Yesterday you fit in the crook of my arm, and now…"

Now you were all coltish limbs and summer dresses that clung to curves you hadn't noticed forming. Now Aegon's gaze lingered when he thought no one was looking, when he helped you mount your pony, when he handed you cups of honeyed milk with fingers that brushed yours just so.

"My love, come here, time to go inside." Aerion's voice cut through the thick summer air, his call sharper than the sword still lodged in the training yard's dirt. You barely paused in your laughter...that bright, chiming sound Aegon hoarded like dragon gold, before scrambling after Rhaenys' already retreating skirts. The half crushed flower crown tumbled forgotten from your lap, petals scattering across sun-warmed stone like broken promises. Aegon's fingers twitched at his sides as he watched you go, the muscles along his jaw tightening when your small hand, still sticky with flower sap caught Rhaenys' waiting fingers without hesitation.

Aerion waited until the colonnade shadows swallowed your silver hair before rounding on his heir. The Lord of Dragonstone moved with the deliberate grace of a man who'd spent decades sheathing violence beneath courtly manners. "You will bathe..." he said, each word measured like arrows nocked to a bowstring, "and then you will attend me in the solar." The unspoken 'alone' hung between them, heavier than any sword. Aegon's smile didn't falter...if anything, it grew sharper, that lazy curve of lips that never reached his eyes. He bowed with exaggerated flourish, sweeping one arm wide enough to make his sleeve brush the discarded flower petals at his feet.

The bathwater had cooled to lukewarm by the time Aegon dragged himself from it, his skin still pink from scrubbing. He toweled off with the languid movements of a man delaying the inevitable, fingers lingering along the ridges of his collarbones where droplets clung like reluctant tears. Outside, the evening cicadas had begun their symphony...nature's cruel joke, serenading him toward what promised to be an excruciating lecture.

Aegon was halfway through lacing his boots, one loop deliberately loose, just to irritate his father when the knock came. Three sharp raps that made his jaw tighten. Not Visenya's impatient hammering nor Rhaenys' playful staccato, but the polite, practiced rhythm of a servant sent to fetch.

"What if I said I was not here?" Aegon called through the door, his voice dripping with that particular brand of petulance that made maids blush and stewards sigh. He cracked the door open just enough to reveal one violet eye and the damp silver hair clinging to his temple like seaweed.

The servant girl...Lila, her name was Lila, though Aegon pretended not to remember, had curtsied so low her apron brushed the flagstones. "M'Lord, your father—"

"—wishes to see me in the solar, yes, yes." Aegon flicked water droplets from his fingers at her, grinning when she flinched. "Tell him I've drowned. Or better yet—" He leaned forward, letting the door swing wider to reveal himself fully clothed, "—tell him I'm indecent."

Lila's gaze dipped to his loosely laced tunic, where the fabric gaped to expose the hollow of his throat still beaded with bathwater. She swallowed audibly. "M'Lord, he said—"

"Ugh…fine, I'm coming" Aegon muttered, shoving past Lila with enough force to make her stumble back. The door slammed behind him with a crack that echoed down the stone corridor, rattling a nearby sconce. He yanked his laces tight with sharp, practiced tugs...not bothering to hide his irritation as the fabric bit into his skin. The servant girl scrambled after him like a startled rabbit, her shoes whispering against the flagstones. "Run along now" he tossed over his shoulder without looking back, "before I decide to make you deliver my excuses in verse."

The solar door groaned when he shouldered it open, revealing Aerion bent over a parchment strewn desk, his quill scratching furiously. Moonlight bled through the stained-glass windows, painting his father's silver hair an eerie blue. Aegon leaned against the doorframe, arms crossed, one boot propped against the stone. "You summoned, oh mighty lord?" The words dripped with enough sarcasm to curdle milk.

"Your sarcasm grates my nerves, Aegon." Aerion sighed without looking up, the quill in his hand continuing its relentless march across the parchment. Moonlight caught the silver streaks in his beard as he jerked his chin toward the carved chair opposite his desk. "Sit."

Aegon's smirk didn't waver as he slouched into the seat, sprawling with deliberate insolence, one leg hooked over the armrest, fingers drumming against the dragon head finial. The chair groaned under his weight, a sound eerily similar to his father's exhale. "Shall I fetch you some milk, father?" he purred, tilting his head just enough to let damp hair curtain his eyes. "You seem… tense."

Aerion's quill scratched one final, decisive stroke before he lifted his gaze, the parchment forgotten. Moonlight caught the silver in his beard as he studied his son, the way Aegon's fingers stilled mid-drum against the chair's dragon head, the flicker of something unreadable behind those violet eyes. "Tell me what you think of your sisters" he blurted, the words sharp as a blade drawn too swiftly.

Aegon's boot slipped from the armrest with a thud. "What—"

"Start with Visenya." Aerion cut him off, leaning forward until his shadow swallowed the parchment between them. The solar's fire popped, casting jagged light across his clenched jaw.

Aegon stared at his father for a full minute before making a face that would have sent septas into fits. He sat up with exaggerated effort, the carved chair creaking like an old man's bones. "Visenya?" He pushed silver hair back from his forehead, fingers lingering on the damp strands. "My wife-to-be" he groaned, rolling the words around his mouth like sour wine. "Very manly for such a pretty face. Hits harder than Father's lectures, and that's saying something." His grin flashed sharp in the firelight...all teeth, no warmth.

Aerion ignored his comments before waving his hand with the weary motion of a man swatting at gnats. "Now Rhaenys" he said, the words scraping out like a blade dragged across stone.

"Father what is this—" Aegon began, fingers tightening around the dragon-head finial of his chair until the wood groaned in protest. But Aerion just shot him a lookl...the kind that could silence a war council mid-battle, and Aegon's mouth snapped shut with an audible click of teeth. The solar's firelight flickered across his father's face, carving shadows deep enough to hide secrets in.

Aegon's fingers loosened around the chair's carved dragon-head as he exhaled through his nose...a slow, deliberate breath that did nothing to ease the tension coiling between his ribs. Firelight caught the silver in his hair as he tilted his head, considering. "Rhaenys" he murmured, tasting the name like stolen honey. His thumb brushed absently over the chair's wooden scales, "She's… girlish. Sweet. I don't know… kind?" The words stumbled out half formed, clumsy as a squire's first sword thrust.

Aerion sighed, rubbing his temples as Aegon's answers grew shorter than a dagger's edge. The dread coiled in his gut like a sleeping dragon when he finally spoke your name...the one syllable that made his son's spine straighten like a sword drawn from its scabbard.

"And what do you think of her?" Aerion's voice was ground stone against parchment.

Aegon's fingers, which had been picking at the dragon-head carving, stilled. His entire body shifted subtle as a tide turning until he sat upright, knees knocking against the desk edge. Moonlight caught the sudden flush creeping up his throat. "Sweet" he breathed, the word soft as petals crushed underfoot. His hands fumbled together, fingers tangling like eager suitors at a maiden's dance. "She's…innocent. Pure as—" His throat worked around something unseen, eyes darting to the solar window where your laughter still seemed to linger in the evening air. "She needs me to protect her. Did you know she sings when she thinks no one's listening? Not those dreary sept hymns—real songs, the kind that make the kitchen girls weep into their bread dough. Last week she—"

Aerion's exhale cut through the torrent of words like a whipcrack. He'd heard enough. The boy was listing your virtues like a lovesick squire cataloging his lady's favors, your habit of humming while braiding flowers, how you still tucked your feet beneath you when reading, the exact shade of pink your cheeks turned when the summer sun kissed them too long. Aegon's voice had dropped to that dangerous register, low and rough, as if each syllable about you was a stolen treasure he'd smuggled past the guards.

Aerion's quill snapped between his fingers, the sound like a bone breaking. Ink splattered across the parchment...dark as the thoughts coagulating in his chest. His son's voice had taken on that particular cadence reserved only for you, half prayer, half obscenity, each word dripping with the kind of reverence men reserved for sacred texts.

"—and she still tucks her knees to her chest when it storms" Aegon was saying, fingers sketching the shape of your curled form in the air between them. Firelight caught the silver in his hair as he leaned forward, his elbows pressing into the desk with the fervor of a man confessing sins. "Like she's trying to make herself small enough to fit inside my—"

"Enough." Aerion's voice cut through the humid air like Valyrian steel. He watched the word land, how Aegon's mouth snapped shut with an almost audible click, how his fingers curled into fists against the desktop. Moonlight bled through the stained glass, painting the sudden flush on his son's throat an eerie violet.

The moon had crawled past midnight when Aerion finally gave up on sleep, his fingers digging into the mattress like talons. The canopy above his bed swayed slightly in the humid breeze, ghostly fingers tugging at embroidered dragons that suddenly seemed childish. Seventeen. The number scraped against his thoughts like a dull blade. Seventeen was barely more than a boy...old enough to swing a sword, yes, but still young enough to confuse hunger for love.

"You should have seen him, Valaena." Aerion's fingers curled around the goblet of summerwine like talons around prey. Moonlight carved hollows beneath his eyes as he slumped against the chambers window seat, the leaded glass cool against his temple. "Talking about her—it was—" His voice fractured like shale underfoot.

Valaena's hands stilled on his shoulders, her rings catching firelight as she kneaded the tension coiled there. The scent of night blooming jasmine drifted through the open window, thick as the silence between them. "Innocent" she finished softly, her lips brushing the silver-streaked hair at his crown. The word landed like a pardoned sentence.

Below in the courtyard, a lone servant doused the torches, each extinguished flame sending up ribbons of smoke that curled like desperate fingers toward the stars. Aerion watched them dissipate, his throat working around the confession lodged there. "Aegon's tended her since she could toddle" he muttered, the wine swirling dark as old blood in his cup. "Carried her when she scraped her knees, wiped her tears when storms frightened her…"

The first time Aegon held you, you were still bloody from the birthing bed, a squalling, purple-faced thing with fists like crumpled rose petals. He'd been five years old, not tall enough to peer over the midwife's shoulder, but when your tiny fingers wrapped around his thumb with a grip that belied your size, something in his chest shifted. Visenya had laughed when he refused to hand you back, calling him a nursemaid in training.

By the time you took your first steps, Aegon had perfected the art of hovering, close enough to catch you when you wobbled, far enough to let you think you'd done it alone. Your giggles when he pretended to stumble after you echoed through Dragonstone's halls like wind chimes. He'd press his lips to your scraped knees after every fall, his breath warm against your skin as he murmured Valyrian endearments too soft for anyone else to hear.

"Visenya did the same thing with him" Aerion sighed, catching Valaena's wrists to press a kiss against her knuckles. Her rings glinted in the firelight as he turned her hands over, tracing the delicate blue veins beneath her skin, the same hands that had once clutched at straw dolls instead of wine goblets. Valaena's smile bloomed slow and knowing, like moonflowers unfurling at dusk. "Why must you see this as a bad thing?"

"He…he looks at her like he wants…" Aerion's fingers clenched around the goblet until the silver dented under his grip. Moonlight carved the words from his throat, rough and jagged. "Like he wants to fuck her."

Valaena's rings clicked against the windowsill as she straightened. "No he doesn't—"

Aerion's goblet hit the stone floor with a dull clang, summerwine splashing across his boots like spilled blood. "You're blind" he growled, scrubbing a hand over his face where the moonlight carved deep shadows. "Or willfully so."

Valaena sighed, her fingers stroking the silvered hairs along Aerion's jaw with the same tenderness she'd once soothed their children's scrapes. The summerwine stain spread across the flagstones between them, dark as old blood in the moonlight. "If he does anything that frightens you" she murmured, thumb brushing the tense line of his throat, "we'll move her chambers to the maiden's wing. A place where only women may enter." Her rings clicked softly against his beard, cold metal against warm skin, a contrast that made Aerion shudder.

below in the courtyard, a watchman's torch guttered out with a hiss. The sudden darkness seemed to swallow Valaena's words whole. Aerion's fingers found hers in the gloom, squeezing hard enough to make her moonstone dig into his palm. "You don't understand" he rasped, his voice frayed at the edges like torn parchment. "It's not—" His breath hitched when she pressed closer, her lavender-scented hair tickling his cheek. "Gods, Valaena, have you seen the way he looks at her?"

The words hung between them, trembling like a blade balanced on its tip. Valaena's fingers stilled against his jaw, her wedding ring pressing into his skin like a brand. Moonlight caught the silver threads in her braid as she tilted her head, considering. "I've seen how she looks at him" she countered softly, her breath warm against his temple.

Valaena's fingers traced the rim of her untouched goblet, moonlight catching the delicate silver. "She looks at him like he hung the stars" she murmured, "but not the way you fear." The wine trembled as she tilted it, watching reflections dance across the surface. "Our sweet girl follows her Seven like a duckling follows rain...all quacking piety and splashing in puddles." A soft laugh escaped her. "Yesterday she lectured Rhaenys about the Maiden's virtues while braiding flowers into her hair."

Aerion learned the rhythm of his son's obsession by the third day...how Aegon's boots scuffed outside your chambers exactly one hour past dawn, how his fingers twitched toward the small of your back every time you stumbled on the uneven steps to the sept. The Lord of Dragonstone counted these transgressions like beads on a prayer rope, the brush of Aegon's thumb against your wrist when passing you honeyed figs, the way his breath hitched when summer winds pressed your thin gowns against budding hips.

Aerion was halfway down the corridor when the flicker of movement caught his eye, just a shift of silver hair in the torchlight, but enough to make his boots still against the stone. The journal in Aegon's hands was familiar, its leather spine worn smooth from years of handling. Aerion had gifted it to you last nameday, bound in Myrish blue and stamped with tiny, laughing dragons along the edges. Now his son's thumb traced those embossed figures with absent devotion, his knuckles brushing the cover like a man petting a favored hound.

The crack of your door was narrow enough to show only a sliver of lamplight from within, but Aegon's head tilted at an angle that suggested he could see far more. His breathing had gone shallow, lips parted just enough to mist the journal's edge with each exhale. Aerion's own breath clogged in his throat as he watched his son's free hand rise...not to knock, but to hover near the doorframe, fingers flexing as if imagining the weight of the wood beneath his palm.

"Aegon." Aerion's voice cracked through the corridor like a whip, sharp enough to make his son's shoulders jerk violently. Torchlight caught the guilty flash of silver as Aegon spun, the journal pressed tight against his chest like stolen goods.

Aerion watched the way his son's throat worked, that visible swallow like a man forcing down poison before his gaze darted back to your door. Just a sliver of lamplight escaped beneath it, painting his boots gold where he stood too close. "Should you not be training around now?" Aerion stepped forward deliberately, boots scraping stone loud as an executioner's axe being drawn.

Aegon's fingers whitened around the journal's spine before he cleared his throat with a sound like gravel dragged over silk. "Of course…" His smile flickered, nervous as a candle in a storm, as he tilted his chin toward the door once more. "She just…left her book in the library." The lie dripped from his lips honey-slow, sticky with false innocence. "I'll return it later."

Aerion's knuckles popped as he clenched his fists. The journal's embossed dragons smirked up at him from between Aegon's fingers...your dragons, your book, your private thoughts now held hostage in his son's grasping hands. Moonlight through the high windows caught the sweat beading along Aegon's hairline, the way his pulse rabbited beneath the delicate skin of his throat.

Aerion forced a rough chuckle, clapping Aegon's shoulder hard enough to make his son's knees buckle. "Off with you then" he muttered, watching the way Aegon's fingers spasmed around the journal before he tucked it against his ribs like a wounded bird. The boy moved too quickly, boots scuffing stone in his haste to retreat, silver hair catching torchlight as he vanished around the corner without once meeting his father's eyes.

The corridor air still hummed with the ghost of Aegon's presence when Aerion turned toward your door. His knuckles hovered over the carved wood...hesitated...then curled into a fist at his side. The lamplight leaking beneath the door painted his boots gold where he stood, close enough to smell the lavender soap you favored. His breath fogged the wood as he leaned in, pressing one eye to the narrow crack.

Aerion recoiled from the door as if burned, the scent of lavender and soap flooding his nostrils. Through the sliver of lamplight, he'd seen you perched on the edge of your bed, wrapped only in a towel, your wet silver hair tumbling down your back like molten moonlight. Your maid stood behind you, brushing through the damp strands with careful strokes. You were laughing at something she'd said, that bright, chiming sound that made Aerion's stomach twist...completely unaware of the violation just beyond your door.

His boots scraped stone as he stumbled back, fingers digging into his palms until the crescent moons of his nails bit flesh. How many times had Aegon stood in this exact spot, watching through this same crack? The journal clutched to his chest like a lover's token...had it been an excuse to linger here, drinking in stolen glimpses of you?

The Lord of Dragonstone pressed his spine against the cold corridor wall, breathing through his nose like a man scenting blood. Torchlight flickered across his face, casting shadows deep enough to hide the tremor in his jaw. Below, the courtyard remained quiet...no footsteps, no voices, just the distant crash of waves against Dragonstone's cliffs. Yet Aerion could hear it still: the phantom whisper of Aegon's breathing against this door, the rustle of his sleeve brushing wood as he leaned closer—

Aerion's boots hit the floor like hammer strikes, each step echoing down the corridor with enough force to make a passing servant press herself flat against the stone wall. He didn't slow, didn't glance at the wide-eyed girl clutching her broom...just wrenched Valaena's chamber door open so violently it rebounded off the wall with a crack like splitting timber.

Valaena startled upright from her embroidery frame, needle flashing silver as it arced through the air. Moonlight through the open window painted the startled curve of her lips blue, her half-finished dragon writhing in her lap like a gutted thing. "Aer—"

Valaena's embroidery needle clattered to the floor as Aerion's shadow swallowed the moonlit rug whole. His boots left damp prints where he paced...three steps toward the hearth, a pivot sharp enough to crack stone, three steps back...a caged dragon wearing grooves in the Myrish carpet.

"You'll wake half the keep" Valaena murmured, fingers plucking at the twisted silver threads of her abandoned embroidery. The half-stitched dragon in her lap bled scarlet where she'd pulled the needle too sharply.

Aerion's fingers raked through his hair, dislodging silver strands from its tie. "We must move her—our baby—we must!" The words burst from him like a ruptured wineskin, too loud for the hush of midnight chambers. Somewhere below, a hound bayed at the sudden noise.

Valaena's hands stilled. Moonlight caught the tremor in her rings as she lifted her gaze. "To where? The Maiden's Tower is still—"

"—being repaired, I know." Aerion's boots scuffed the Myrish rug raw as he pivoted. "But the east wing has those empty chambers near the sept. Only the silent sisters pass there at dawn." His voice dropped to a rasp. "And Aegon must be wed—this week if possible."

Valaena's embroidery slid forgotten to the floor as she rose, silk skirts whispering against the rug. The moonlight caught the sudden sharpness in her eyes...not fear, but something colder, more calculated. "You think wedding him will solve this?" Her fingers brushed Aerion's wrist, light as a dagger's edge resting against pulse. "Men don't stop wanting what they want just because they're wed. If anything—"

"She is our baby and don't say want—" Aerion groaned, waving his hand as if swatting away the very word. His fingers trembled where they hovered in the moonlight, casting spiderweb shadows across Valaena's face. The summer air clung thick between them, heavy with jasmine and salt from the cliffs below. "Aegon and Visenya will wed…this summer…" The words tasted like ashes in his mouth, each syllable dragged forth like a confession. He turned abruptly toward the window, gripping the stone sill until his knuckles bleached white. "And she will be moved to a chamber no one but you and I will know of…"

"Aegon does not want her in that way, Aerion!" Valaena's voice sliced through the solar's tension like a blade through silk. The embroidery needle trembled in her grip, its silver tip catching firelight as she jabbed it toward her husband. "He feels the need to protect...he's like that with all his sisters, even Visenya!"

Aerion's laugh was a dry, brittle thing, cracking apart against the solar's stone walls. He dragged a hand down his face, fingers catching on the week's worth of stubble. "Protect?" His thumb brushed the dirk at his belt...an absent gesture, but one that made Valaena's nostrils flare. "Is that what we're calling it now? When he watches her bathe? When he steals her journals?"

Valaena's embroidery needle snapped between her fingers with a sound like breaking bone. "He does no such thing" she hissed, the broken silver glinting in the lamplight like accusation. Moonlight pooled around her feet as she stood, her shadow swallowing Aerion's trembling form whole. "You're seeing monsters where there are none—"

"You see it!" Aerion's fist crashed against the solar's table, sending inkpots skittering across parchment like startled birds. "You choose blindness because you still swaddle him in your mind...he is a man grown, Valaena!" The last words tore from his throat raw as a fresh wound, his breath coming in ragged bursts that fogged the cold night air between them.

Valaena's embroidery hoop clattered to the floor, its half-finished dragon unraveling in a tangle of scarlet thread. The firelight painted her knuckles bone-white where she gripped her skirts, but her voice was steel wrapped in silk. "And you choose cruelty because you fear what stirs in his heart." Her moonstone rings clicked against the chair's armrest as she leaned forward. "Tell me, husband...when was the last time you held him without anger? Without suspicion?"

Aerion recoiled as if struck, the ink-stained parchment beneath his fists suddenly fascinating. Moonlight painted the dried ink veins black as old blood. He remembered...of course he remembered the last time he'd touched Aegon with tender love. The boy had been seven, trembling after a nightmare, his small hands clutching Aerion's sleep tunic like a drowning man to driftwood. He'd carried him to the nursery where you slept, your tiny form curled around a stuffed dragon. "Watch over her..." he'd murmured into Aegon's hair, still damp from terror-sweat. The boy had nodded solemnly, clambering into your bed with the gravity of a knight taking his vows.

Valaena's fingers traced the cracked embroidery hoop, the broken dragon spilling scarlet threads across her lap like an open wound. "You planted this seed yourself" she murmured, lifting her gaze to where Aerion stood silhouetted against the moonlit window. "You made him her guardian before she could walk. Who else would he become?"

News of Aegon and visenya wedding sooner than expected had spread like fire. The castle corridors pulsed like a living thing, servants darting between noble retinues with the frantic precision of ants before a storm. Silver platters of candied fruits wobbled past, nearly colliding with a cluster of Velaryon ladies whose laughter peeled like bells above the chaos. Someone had strung summer roses along the rafters,their petals already browning at the edges, crumbling like old parchment onto the upturned faces below.

"You are to marry Senya within the week—the Seven says sin!" You giggled, darting behind the ancient oak with its gnarled roots erupting from the earth like dragon's claws. The petals clutched in your hand scattered as you pressed your back against the bark, your breath coming in quick, childish bursts. Sunlight filtered through the leaves above, painting dappled patterns across your flushed cheeks and the white linen of your summer dress.

Aegon caught your wrist before you could flee again, his fingers pressing into the delicate bones like a man testing ripe fruit. The oak's rough bark scraped your shoulders as he crowded closer, his shadow swallowing the dappled sunlight that had kissed your skin moments before. "Sin for following our house traditions?" His breath warmed your temple...lavender and steel, the scent of him so familiar it made your pulse flutter like a trapped bird. "You know, sweet sister, following the Seven is against everything a Targaryen stands for."

The oak's bark dug into your spine as Aegon leaned closer, his free hand coming to rest against the tree beside your head, caging you in. His thumb brushed a stray petal from your hair...slow, deliberate...letting it catch on his callouses before drifting to the ground. You could count his eyelashes from this distance, silver-gold in the sunlight.

"Aegon—" You twisted your wrist in his grip, the movement sending crushed petals spiraling to the moss below. The oak's bark bit into your shoulder blades as you pressed back, your pulse rabbiting where his thumb stroked the delicate blue veins. "We are not in Old Valyria." The words came out breathless, too high, the way they always did when he crowded you like this—half protest, half plea. "We're in Westeros now, and I believe we should try to fit in. Marrying a sibling is against all the gods stand for—"

His laughter cut through your stammering like a blade through silk. "Since when do you care about gods this much?" Aegon's free hand came up to tuck a wind tangled strand behind your ear, his fingers lingering against your jawline. Sunlight filtered through the leaves above, painting his smile in fractured gold...all sharp edges and dangerous warmth. "I know you asked mother and father for a septa but you cried when the septas made you memorize the Maiden's prayers."

Aegon's fingers twitched empty where your wrist had been, the warmth of your skin lingering like a brand. "I am growing up" you'd laughed...bright and breathless, already darting away through the sun-dappled glade before he could reply. The words echoed in his skull, twining with the rustle of your skirts as you fled, slippered feet whispering through summer grass like secrets.

The words lingered between them like a half-thrown gauntlet—I am growing up—dangling in the air with all the peril of a blade balanced on its edge. Aegon watched your retreating form with an intensity that would have turned milk sour, his fingers still curled around the phantom warmth of your wrist. The petals you'd crushed fluttered to the moss like broken promises.

Aegon stood motionless for three heartbeats, long enough for the petals you'd crushed to settle in the moss like bloodstains, before the smile slid across his face, slow as a dagger being drawn. It was the same smile he'd worn at seven when promising to scare monsters from under your bed, at twelve when swearing to duel any boy who made you cry. "Wait for me!" he called, the laughter in his voice polished smooth as castle forged steel. His boots tore through the petal-strewn grass with the same reckless abandon as when you were children playing chase, though now his strides measured twice the length of yours.

The branch snapped beneath your foot with a crack like breaking bone, sending you sprawling into the sun warmed grass. Petals exploded around you in a flurry of white and gold, sticking to your damp cheeks and tangled in your hair. The scent of crushed mint rose from where your palms had slapped the earth, sharp and green and startling.

Aegon froze mid-stride, his shadow stretching long across the grass toward your crumpled form. Sunlight caught the sudden tension in his shoulders, the way his fingers twitched at his sides before curling into fists. A sniffle escaped you...small and wet and terribly childish and his breath hitched audibly.

Aegon was kneeling beside you before the last petal settled, his hands already pushing up the hem of your dress with a frantic urgency that tore the delicate fabric at the seam. The summer grass bent beneath his knees as he leaned in, his breath warm against your scraped skin.

"It's okay sweet sister…just a scrape. I promise" Aegon murmured against the reddened skin of your knee, his lips lingering too long, wet and warm like summer rain on sunbaked stone. His thumbs circled the scraped flesh, pressing just hard enough to make you whimper. "Don't cry…" His fingers slid up your bare calf, tracing the delicate blue veins beneath your skin with the reverence of a scribe copying sacred texts. "I'm always here to protect you." The words curled around you like smoke from a censer, thick with something that tasted darker than devotion. "I alone will keep you safe…okay?"

You nodded quickly, sniffling and burying your face against him with a soft "love you" as he held the back of your head, his fingers tangling in your wind-knotted hair with a possessiveness that made your breath catch. The scent of him flooded your senses...steel and summer sweat and the faint lavender oil Visenya teased him for using, as his heartbeat thundered beneath your cheek. His other hand still cupped your bare knee, thumb stroking the scraped skin in slow, deliberate circles that felt less like comfort and more like marking territory.

The same night after dropping you off at your chambers he himself got a journal, the first page he scribbled on was a promise more than a thought "I will always protect her" your name sitting pretty right under as he scribbled a doodle of flowers you loved.

The journal's spine cracked open with a sound like breaking promises. Moonlight bled across the first page...virgin parchment beneath Aegon's restless fingers, as he pressed the quill deep enough to leave furrows. Ink pooled around your name where he'd written it three times already, each iteration darker than the last, the letters bloated with devotion. His thumb smudged the still wet ink when he traced the curve of the letters, leaving a fingerprint over your name like a brand.

The journal slid into the hidden compartment of his desk with a whisper of leather against wood. Aegon exhaled sharply through his nose, fingers lingering on the edge of the drawer as if sealing away something sacred. Moonlight bled through his chamber window, painting silver streaks across the half finished sketches of you that littered his desk...your profile captured mid laugh, the way your hair caught sunlight during morning prayers, the delicate dip of your collarbone above your gown's neckline. He'd drawn them all from memory, each stroke of charcoal a devotion pressed into parchment.

Outside, the wind moaned against Dragonstone's ancient walls, carrying with it the distant crash of waves against black cliffs. Aegon's jaw tightened. So many dangers lurked beyond these stones, storms that could dash ships to splinters, men who'd leer at the curve of your neck, even the gods themselves who might decide to pluck you from this world simply because they could. His fingers twitched toward the dagger at his belt, its weight suddenly insufficient against the inventory of threats scrolling through his mind.

The morning of his wedding dawned with the kind of clarity that made the world feel freshly painted, every blade of grass jewel bright with dew, every stone in Dragonstone's courtyard sharp edged beneath a sky scrubbed clean by dawn. Aegon stood at his chamber window, watching servants scramble like ants below, draping garlands of winter roses across the sept's weathered stones. His reflection in the polished silver mirror showed a stranger... doublet of black velvet stitched with rubies like droplets of blood, hair braided back with silver threads, the very image of a lord about to be wed.

The rubies at Aegon's throat caught the dawn light as he turned from the window, each droplet pulsing crimson like a warning. His fingers brushed the dagger at his belt, its pommel warm from hours of restless handling. Beneath his boots, the stone floor still thrummed with last night's storm, a restless energy that matched the quickening of his pulse.

The sept smelled of crushed rose petals and beeswax, the cloying sweetness clinging to Aegon's throat as he waited at the altar. Visenya approached like a storm given form...silver haired and sharp edged, her bridal cloak rippling behind her with each stride. But Aegon's gaze slipped past her, hunting for the flutter of your pale blue sleeves where you stood among the bridal attendants.

The wedding was Valyrian in tradition...blood red cloaks clasped with rubies instead of gold, vows sworn in High Valyrian's liquid heat rather than the stilted Common Tongue, but held within the sept's chalk-white walls because you had begged for it. Who was Aegon to say no?

You grimaced when their lips met...not the chaste brush of Westerosi weddings, but the wet, bloody press of Valyrian tradition. Visenya's fingers curled tight around Aegon's wrist, their mingled blood smearing crimson down their joined hands like melted rubies. The sept's incense clogged your throat as you looked away, but not before Aerion caught the twist of your mouth...not jealousy, but visceral discomfort. Your fingers plucked at your Seven Pointed Star pendant, thumb rubbing the engraved Maiden's face raw.

"Odd little thing" murmured Lord Celtigar beside Aerion, his breath reeking of sour wine. "To flinch at our ways while wearing our colors." His gaze lingered on your silver gold braids, the Targaryen sigil embroidered on your sleeve...all the trappings of a dragon wearing a septa's conscience.

Aerion said nothing. He'd watched you recoil when Aegon licked the blood from Visenya's palm during the binding rite, your blue sleeves fluttering like a startled bird's wings. You'd been the only one not cheering when the pyre flames roared higher...standing stiff backed while others gasped at the spectacle, your lips moving in silent prayer to foreign gods.

The feast's torchlight caught the rim of your wine goblet just as Visenya leaned over, her lips curling into the smirk that always preceded trouble. "Five coins says our pious little dove says something unbearably sanctimonious before the roasted boar arrives." Her elbow jabbed into Aegon's ribs hard enough to make his wine slosh over the rim.

Aegon's fingers tightened around his cup, his gaze sliding toward you with the predatory focus of a hawk sighting prey. The ruby droplets at his throat pulsed in the firelight as he murmured, "Ten says she quotes the Seven Pointed Star before the mead makes its second round."

The serving boy had just placed the honeyed figs between you to lean forward, your smile sickly sweet. "I shall pray to the gods to forgive you two…" Your fingers fluttered in a perfect imitation of Septa Marla's blessing gesture, "…for your marriage ways."

"All I'm saying is my septa—" Your pious objection died in a muffled squeak as Aegon shoved a honeyed bread roll between your teeth with practiced precision. Crumbs dusted your lower lip as you blinked up at him, the protest still forming behind your widened eyes.

"Try this, sweet one" Aegon murmured, his thumb lingering to catch a fleck of sugar on your chin. The torchlight painted his smile golden...all sharp edges and indulgent warmth while Visenya smirked into her wine goblet across the table.

Aegon's fingers twitched against the stem of his goblet as you chewed the roll with exaggerated slowness, lips pursing in that familiar pout that made his pulse stutter. He leaned toward Visenya and Rhaenys, his voice dropping to a low growl that carried only to their ears. "Must you two always bully her when she opens her mouth?"

The feast hall's torchlight flickered across Aegon's face as he watched you pick at your sleeve, your nose scrunched in distaste when the roasted boar arrived glazed in honey and blood...a Valyrian tradition you'd never acquired a taste for. Across the table, Visenya leaned over to murmur something in Rhaenys' ear that made them both snicker into their wine. You hadn't noticed...your fingers were busy tracing the Seven Pointed Star pendant at your throat, lips moving in silent prayer over the steaming meat.

The torches guttered low as Aegon lifted your hand to his lips, a beat too long, his breath hot against your knuckles while his thumb traced the delicate bones beneath your skin. Visenya's kiss landed on your cheek like a brand, her teeth flashing in the dim light as she smirked down at you. "Don't wait up, sister pious" she murmured, her fingers digging into your shoulder just hard enough to make you sway.

"Aegon can't tuck you in tonight" Visenya purred against the shell of your ear, her breath hot with spiced wine and victory. The jest landed like a poorly thrown dagger, clumsy and obvious, but sharp enough to make your shoulders stiffen in confusion. Before you could retort, she'd already swept past, pressing identical theatrical kisses to Rhaenys' cheeks and Aerion's stubbled jaw. Aegon followed like a shadow, his lips brushing each family member's skin with mechanical precision, though his fingers lingered longest when he cupped your chin, thumb swiping across your lower lip to catch the phantom sweetness of honeyed bread that had long since been swallowed.

"Do not fret, sweet one" Aegon murmured against the crown of your head, his breath stirring the loose strands of your hair where they escaped your braids. The corridor torchlight painted his face in fractured gold, catching the too-bright gleam in his eyes as his fingers tightened around your shoulders. "Tomorrow it will go back to normal." His thumb brushed the pulse point beneath your jaw...once...then twice, a rhythm like counting prayer beads. "I can tuck you in snug, protect you from any monster…"

"Okay, that's enough...off you go" Aerion growled, reaching to haul Aegon away by the scruff of his doublet. Valaena's fingers closed around his wrist like a manacle, her nails biting into his pulse point as she rolled her eyes skyward.

Aegon seized the hesitation, three quick kisses pressed to your cheekbone, each one punctuated by the hitch of Aerion's breath. The third landed perilously close to the corner of your mouth, his lips lingering just long enough to taste the salt of your giggle. Rhaenys' hand received a single perfunctory brush of his lips before Visenya hooked her arm through his with a yank that nearly dislocated his shoulder.

Aerion's hand on your shoulder was warm and rough, like sunbaked leather. His fingers pressed just shy of painful as he steered you down the corridor, away from the fading echoes of Aegon and Visenya's footsteps, away from the honey-scented chaos of the feast hall. The torchlight painted his face in flickering shadows, deepening the lines around his mouth as he spoke. "Come, sweet one." His voice was softer now, almost gentle in a way that made your pulse stutter.

You stumbled when he suddenly took your hand, his calloused thumb brushing over your knuckles in a gesture that might have been tender if not for the urgency in his grip. The stones beneath your feet blurred as he guided you toward the east wing..a part of the castle no one had ever visited, where the air smelled of dust and dried herbs instead of salt and smoke.

The door groaned open on hinges stiff with disuse, revealing a chamber bathed in the pale gold of late afternoon. Dust motes swirled in the slanted sunlight, settling on the sparse furnishings, a narrow bed draped in homespun linens, a writing desk scarred by generations of quills, a single stained-glass window depicting the Maiden with her hands outstretched. Aerion's grip on your elbow gentled as he guided you across the threshold, his boots leaving dark prints in the centuries of accumulated dust.

The stained glass Maiden's face fractured into prismed light across your lap when you shifted to sit on the bed, her benevolent smile warped by the uneven panes into something mournful. Aerion's fingers trembled where they smoothed your hair back from your forehead, the callouses from years of swordplay catching on the baby fine strands. "You can have fun decorating" he murmured, too loud for the hush of the chamber. His gaze darted to the empty shelves, the bare walls, as if already seeing them filled with whatever trinkets might placate you. "I'll bring you things...new dresses, curtains, sheets…" The words tumbled out in a rush, each promise landing with the weight of a shackle.

His palms framed your face suddenly, rough thumbs pressing into the hollows beneath your eyes. "Even built a little sept for you...still needs those candles" he continued, jerking his chin toward the alcove where a crude Seven Pointed Star carving had been hacked into the stone. The hurried chisel marks still wept pale dust when the afternoon light hit them right. You could smell the metal tang of his sweat beneath the lavender oil, the scent of a man who'd been working through the night. "Now the thing is…" His grip tightened fractionally, enough to tilt your head back until your eyes met his. The whites were webbed with red, the same way they'd been after Mother's last stillbirth. "You can't leave." The whisper gusted across your lips, sour with wine and sleeplessness. "You are my youngest child…and you must be protected."

Somewhere beyond the thick stone walls, a dragon cried. The sound twisted into something almost human as it echoed through the chamber...a child's whimper, a woman's wail. Aerion's thumbs stroked your cheekbones in time with your rabbit-quick pulse. "Evil is after you" he rasped, and for a wild moment you thought he might name it. His gaze flicked to the door, where the heavy iron bolt gleamed dully in the dim light. "This room is the only thing that can keep you safe."

Your fingers curled into the scratchy wool blanket, too tight, knuckles blanching white as you swallowed the childish tremble in your voice. "I want to stay in my own chamber, Father…this one is scary." The words tasted like spoiled milk on your tongue, too sweet and cloying for the way Aerion's shadow loomed over you, his silhouette swallowing the fractured Maiden's light whole.

"Not after you decorate…I promise…" Aerion's voice cracked like dry parchment as he knelt before you, his large hands engulfing yours. The scent of sweat and iron clung to his sleeves, mingling with the sharp tang of crushed mint from where you'd crushed the herb between your fingers moments before. Tears plucked at the corners of your eyes...fat, trembling droplets that caught the stained-glass light and fractured into prismed colors across his weathered knuckles.

You were a child still, despite the flowering curves beneath your gown.. Naivety clung to you like the scent of milk and honey that still lingered in your hair from childhood baths. When Aerion's calloused thumb brushed away your first fallen tear, you leaned into the touch instinctively, as you had when skinned knees needed kissing and night terrors needed soothing.

"A maid will come stay with you" he continued, the words tumbling out too quickly,like a man reciting lines rehearsed in the mirror. His gaze darted to the heavy iron bolt on the door, then back to your face. "She'll bring you anything you want...new embroidery threads, those sugared violets you like, whatever books you desire—" His grip tightened suddenly, fingers pressing into the delicate bones of your wrist. "As long as you never leave this room. You promise me?"

Somewhere beyond the thick stone walls, waves crashed against Dragonstone's cliffs, a distant roar that seemed to shudder through the very foundations of your new prison. The sound mingled with the rapid flutter of your pulse where Aerion's thumb pressed against your wrist. You wanted to ask why, wanted to demand answers the way Visenya would have, with fire and steel in her voice. But you were not Visenya. You were the child who still hid behind tapestries during thunderstorms, who whispered prayers to gods your family scorned.

Aerion smiled when you nodded, that slow, satisfied curve of lips that never reached his eyes. The kiss he pressed to your crown lingered too long, his breath stirring the loose strands of your hair like a phantom touch. When he stood, the floorboards groaned beneath his boots, the sound echoing in the hollow chamber like a coffin settling into earth. At the door, he paused, hand resting on the iron bolt. The torchlight from the corridor backlit his frame, casting his shadow over you in a elongated smear across the straw-stuffed mattress.

Your hands clasped in your lap...small, white knuckled, the Seven Pointed Star pendant digging into your palm where you clutched it. Tears tracked silently down your cheeks, catching the fractured light from the stained glass Maiden, painting your face in prismed sorrow. Aerion’s jaw tightened as he watched one droplet splatter onto your folded fingers. For a heartbeat, his grip on the door trembled. Then the bolt slid home with a finality that reverberated through the stone walls.

The morning sunlight bled through the high windows of the great hall, glinting off the empty silver goblet where yours should have been. valaena, Aerion's wife, was the first to notice, her spoon froze halfway to her lips, the honeyed porridge dripping back into the bowl as her gaze swept the table. "Has she not been awoken yet?" Her voice was too loud for the hush that had settled over the hall, the clatter of cutlery stilling as all eyes turned to Aerion.

Aegon's knife scraped across his plate with a violence that made Visenya's eyebrow arch. Rhaenys fidgeted with her braid, the silver threads woven through it catching the light as she glanced toward the doors as if expecting you to come tripping in late as you often did, skirts askew and apologies tumbling from your lips.

Aerion took a deliberate bite of his food, chewing slowly before tapping the table with one calloused finger. "I sent her to ward a lord's wife." The lie settled over the table like a shroud. No raven had come, no retinue had arrived. Valaena's spoon clattered against the porcelain, her lips parting, but Aerion's glare silenced her before she could speak.

The bread in Aegon’s fist crumbled to dust between his fingers. Across the hall, Aerion’s knuckles whitened around his goblet, the lie still hanging thick in the air between them.

The chair legs shrieked against stone as Aegon launched upright, his knuckles whitening around the table's edge. The morning light caught his face at an angle, one side molten gold, the other plunged in shadow as his breath sawed through clenched teeth. "Where?" The word tore from him like splintered wood. "Why would you—"

Aegon's plate shattered against the wall with a crash that sent servants scattering like startled birds. Porcelain shards skittered across the flagstones, catching the morning light like jagged little teeth. "Sit down—" Aerion's sigh was more exhausted than commanding, the words fraying at the edges like old rope. But Aegon was already halfway across the hall, his boots tracking wine dark footprints from an overturned goblet.

"You told me to protect her!" The accusation ripped from Aegon's throat raw as a fresh wound. His fingers twitched at his sides, empty where they should have been gripping your shoulders, tucking you behind him like when you were children hiding from summer storms. The morning light carved harsh lines across his face, turning his pupils to pinpricks of black in wildfire green. "How can I keep my vow if you—"

Visenya's dagger thunked into the table between Aegon's splayed fingers, the blade still vibrating from the force of her throw. "Husband" she drawled from her seat, one eyebrow arched as she lazily twirled a second blade between her fingers. "You're tracking plum sauce everywhere." Her smile was all teeth, the kind that made even Aerion hesitate. "And you're upsetting the servants."

"It's okay, Aegon..." Valaena murmured from her seat, her fingers tightening around her untouched wine goblet. The smile she offered him was thin, the kind stretched too tight over unspoken truths. Her eyes flickered toward Aerion for half a heartbeat, a silent promise glinting there like a hidden blade. The hall held its breath, even the torches seemed to gutter lower in their sconces.

The dagger quivered between Aegon's fingers like a living thing, its edge kissing the wood grain in a lover's caress. He didn't pull it free. Instead, his palm came down hard on the pommel, driving the blade deeper with a crack that sounded like a spine snapping. "Where is she?" Each word dripped with the syrupy menace of a wound slowly festering.

Aerion just stared, not at his son’s trembling fists or the wine dark fury mottling his cheeks, but at the half eaten boar on his plate, its glazed skin split open like a wound. The silence between them was a living thing now, thick as the incense curling from the sept’s censers. Aegon’s breath hitched audibly. "Father..." he whispered, the word cracking like a whip in the suffocating quiet. "Please."

"I just want to protect her—" Aegon's voice cracked like overstrained leather, his fingers spasming around the edge of the table hard enough to splinter the polished oak. The morning light streaming through the high windows caught the sweat beading along his hairline, turning the strands clinging to his temples into liquid silver.

Aerion didn't rise from his seat. His head moved in a slow, exhausted arc before settling back against the carved high chair. "You want more than that." The words fell like stones into still water, each syllable rippling outward to lap against the silent lords and ladies frozen mid-bite. "Anyone with eyes can see it." His knuckles whitened around the stem of his goblet. "But you? You hide behind this… need to protect like a coward hides behind his shield."

Valaena's chair legs shrieked against stone as she stood abruptly, her embroidered sleeves brushing a pitcher of honeyed milk. It wobbled, toppled, spilled across the table in a slow, sticky wave that seeped into the cracks between flagstones. "Enough." she hissed, her voice fraying at the edges like torn silk. But Aegon was already moving, snatching Aerion's half eaten plate of roasted boar and spiced apples, hurling it against the wall with a crash that sent servants scattering.

"You know nothing!" Spittle flew from Aegon's lips, his chest heaving like a dragon after its first fiery breath. The shards of shattered porcelain glittered at his feet like fallen stars. "Nothing of what I—" His words died as Visenya's hand clamped around his wrist, her nails biting crescent moons into his pulse point.

The hall held its breath. Even the torches seemed to gutter lower in their sconces, as if wary of igniting the tinder dry tension. Aegon wrenched free, his boots tracking plum sauce and crushed rosemary across the rushes as he stormed toward the doors. The heavy oak slammed behind him with a finality that shuddered through the castle stones.

Aegon's quill snapped under the pressure of his grip, splattering ink across the parchment like spilled blood. The ruined letter joined the growing pile in the corner, each one a variation of the same desperate plea to lords great and small, each reply dripping with polite confusion. "No, my prince, no highborn maid matching that description has sought refuge here." The lies tasted bitter as gall on his tongue. Someone was hiding you. Someone would burn for it.

The ravens returned empty clawed, week after week, until Aegon stopped counting the days.

The ink smeared across Aegon's fingers as he sketched the curve of your wrist, the same delicate angle you'd used to lift your Seven Pointed Star pendant during feasts, lips moving in silent prayer. Moonlight pooled in the hollows of the parchment where his quill had pressed too deep, the paper puckering like scar tissue. Outside his chamber, Dragonstone groaned under another winter storm, but Aegon barely heard the wind's howl over the rustle of turning pages. His journal had swelled to the thickness of a sept's hymnbook, its spine cracking with each new entry.

The seasons turned without you. Winter clawed at Dragonstone’s cliffs, spring thawed the blackened fields, and summer baked the stones until they burned barefoot intruders, all while Aegon’s ink stained fingers traced the same looping script in his second journal. Day 317: Still no word. The quill snapped between his fingers, sending a spatter of ink across the page like a blackened teardrop. He hadn’t realized he’d been counting.

Visenya’s shadow darkened the doorway at dawn, her silhouette sharp against the bruise colored sky. "You’re needed in the training yard" she said, not unkindly, but with the weariness of a woman repeating lines to a distracted actor. Their marriage bed remained unstirred, the sheets crisp as parchment where he refused to sleep. Duty was performed with mechanical precision, his lips on hers at feasts, his hand on the small of her back when lords watched but his gaze always slid past her shoulder, hunting for silver gold braids that never appeared.

Rhaenys had taken to wearing her hair coiled tight at her nape, the style too severe for her soft features. It didn’t stop Aegon’s eyes from catching on the slope of her neck when she bent over her embroidery, the way sunlight gilded the baby-fine hairs at her temples. For her fifteenth name day, he’d gifted her a dagger with a pearl inlaid hilt "For protection" he’d murmured, fingers lingering too long as he folded her hand around it. She’d thanked him with delight, blissfully ignorant of how his pulse had hammered at the warmth of her skin.

He had spent his eighteenth nameday without you but when your thirteenth name day came, the library smelled of parchment and crushed violets, the latter from the sachets Rhaenys had taken to tucking between the pages of her favorite books. Aegon's fingers trembled as they traced the spine of The Seven Pointed Star, its leather binding worn soft from years of your devout fingers turning its pages. Outside, the feast for your thirteenth name day raged on without you, the distant clatter of goblets and laughter muffled by the thick stone walls.

"Father won't even say her name anymore." Rhaenys' voice was a whisper, her breath stirring the dust motes dancing in the slant of afternoon light. She stood on tiptoe to reshelve a volume of Valyrian histories, the movement stretching her gown tight across shoulders that had grown coltish in your absence. When she turned, her braid caught the light, a ripple of silver gold that made Aegon's throat constrict.

He moved before thought could catch up, his boots silent on the Myrish carpet. One hand cradled the back of her head, fingers tangling in the familiar silk of her hair as the other gripped her waist. The kiss landed clumsily, half on her lips, half on the corner of her mouth, but Rhaenys didn't pull away. She stiffened for a heartbeat, then melted against him with a sigh that tasted of honeyed wine and childhood summers.

That same year his mother died birthing a still born son. He loved his mother so deeply, her death pushed him further from the carefree teenager he was. His eyes getting colder yet still sweet to his sisters alone, Visenya his wife and Rhaenys his desire, though none knew of that, even you were still deeply in his heart despite your absence. He wondered how or if you knew of mother.

It seemed death was always near, for another year flew by and news came to Dragonstone of a ship Aerion had been on had sank.

The storm swallowed Aerion's ship whole, no wreckage, no bodies, just the hollow echo of the Dragonstone bells tolling through the mist as dawn broke blood red over the cliffs. At nineteen, Aegon stood on the wet rocks, salt spray stinging his eyes as the last of the search ships returned empty. The lords muttered behind his back, their voices carried away by the wind like the ashes of his father’s pyre that would never be lit.

Aegon had become the Lord of Dragonstone at nineteen.

The silence pressed against your eardrums like seawater when you first noticed, no footsteps in the corridor, no scrape of the bolt sliding back at dawn. Fourteen summers old and already forgotten. You counted seven empty meals left outside your door before curiosity overrode fear. The iron handle was colder than you remembered, its resistance unnatural when it refused to yield under your trembling grip.

Your nightgown pooled around your ankles as you sank to your knees, fingers tracing the thin line of daylight beneath the door where no shadow had passed in seven days.

"Daddy?" Your frown deepened as you huffed against the heavy oak door, still locked, still silent. The wood smelled faintly of salt and iron, worn smooth where your palms had pressed against it daily. Ten days since his last visit. Seven since the last time anyone had slid the bolt back.

"Lila?" Your voice cracked against the silence of the chamber, too loud against the absence of footsteps in the corridor. When your maid had not answered you pressed your ear to the door...no rustle of skirts, no clatter of bath pails. Only the distant groan of Dragonstone's ancient timbers settling deeper into the cliffs. "I've finished praying…"

The prayer beads slipped from your fingers, scattering across the flagstones like fallen stars. You knelt to gather them, your nightgown pooling around your knees. The seventh bead that was carved with the Maiden's face had rolled beneath the bed. Your fingertips brushed cold stone instead of polished wood. "I wish to have a bath..." you tried again, pitching your voice toward the door's iron grate. "Lila? Daddy? Someone!"

No one came until nightfall. The scrape of the iron bolt startled you from where you'd curled against the door, your knees drawn to your chest like a child awaiting punishment. The maid's lantern swung wildly as she stepped inside, casting elongated shadows that made the stained-glass Maiden's face stretch grotesquely across the far wall.

"My lady…" The servant's fingers trembled against your shoulder, not the brisk shake of duty, but something gentler, maternal.

You blinked up at her through the crust of dried tears, your nightgown sticking to your skin where salt tracks had dried. "I apologize for my absence…" Her voice cracked as she helped you stand, your legs numb from hours on cold stone."It's your father. His ship—"

Lila's hands smelled of rosemary and grief when she gathered you against her chest that night. You buried your face in the rough homespun of her bodice, inhaling the ghost of lavender soap beneath the sweat and sorrow. Her fingers trembled as they carded through your unbound hair, catching on the snarls left by days of restless turning. "My sweet girl" she murmured into the crown of your head, her voice fraying at the edges like old parchment. The endearment was stolen, the same one your mother had crooned when tucking you into bed, now reshaped by Lila's peasant accent.

The tears came then... great, heaving sobs that wracked your body like summer storms. Lila's arms tightened around you, her calloused palms pressing into the knobs of your spine as if she could physically hold your broken pieces together. Her heartbeat thundered against your ear, too fast and too loud in the hushed chamber. You realized dimly that she was crying too, silent tears dripping onto your part line, seeping into your scalp like sacramental oil.

"I want to go out now…with my siblings" you mumbled into Lila's shoulder, but the maid shook her head, the motion stirring the stale air between you. Her fingers tightened around your arms like iron manacles.

"Your father told me I was never to let you out" she whispered, her breath warm and sour with sleeplessness against your temple. "To not leave you alone." The words landed like stones in the hollow of your chest. You could feel her heartbeat through the rough fabric of her dress...rabbit quick beneath the linen, betraying her own fear.

The words tasted of sea salt and rusted iron on your tongue. "I have no mother… now father… and I cannot have my siblings." Your voice cracked like thin ice over Dragonstone's black ponds, each syllable fracturing into smaller, weaker pieces until only whimpers remained. Lila's arms tightened around you, a peasant's embrace where a fathers should have been, a servant's pity where a sister's laughter ought to have echoed.

They days went, and all you ever did was pray and play.

you prayed

and prayed

and giggled with Lila...your only companion in loneliness

A doll in a room that was lifeless.

You had turned fifteen, hair braided into a crown and still as childish as the day you entered this room, twelve and scared of an evil that has not came.

The cake smelled of lemons and honey, its golden crust still warm from the oven when Lila set it before you. Steam curled from the knife cut wedge, carrying the scent of summers long past...of stolen treats from the kitchens when you were small enough to hide under flour-dusted tables. You stared at the doll slumped beside the plate, its porcelain face too smooth, its embroidered gown too fine. It looked like the ladies at court, all empty smiles and vacant eyes.

"Your brother has thrown a feast in your name" Lila murmured, fingers brushing your shoulder as she nudged the plate closer. A raisin eyed smiley face had been carved into the cake's surface, the knife strokes uneven...too deep on the left, as if the baker's hand had trembled. "Aegon's to wed Rhaenys come spring."

"What?" You gasped and stood abruptly, your dress dragging against the floorboards as you scrunched your nose in disbelief. "He is already married to Senya! A sin itself, and now—" The words caught in your throat like fishbones. Lila's hands fluttered toward you then stilled, her knuckles whitening around the serving knife.

Lila's look lingered with that particular tilt of her brows that meant she was weighing how much truth your childish heart could bear. You frowned deeper, fingers twisting in the embroidered hem of your dress until the threads groaned in protest. "I shall pray for them" you muttered, sinking back onto the bed with a huff that made your braids sway. The mattress sighed beneath you, straw shifting like whispers. "He is nice to throw me a feast…" The words tasted of spoiled milk—sweet curdling into bitterness as you added, quieter, "…that I cannot even attend."

You scowled at the doll's vacant smile, its glassy eyes reflecting your own pinched expression. "They feast while I rot...they sin and all marry one another!" you muttered, plucking at the doll's silk gown with more force than necessary. A seam gave way with a soft rip...the sound oddly satisfying. Lila's calloused fingers stilled yours before you could do more damage, her touch gentle but firm.

"Sin or not, they remember you" Lila chided, smoothing the doll's ruined sleeve. Her knuckles brushed your wrist...a fleeting warmth against skin gone pale from years indoors. When you huffed again, she merely chuckled and straightened, her skirts whispering against the rush strewn floor. "Shall I sing so you may dance, my lady?"

The cake knife trembled in your grip. Not from fear but from the unfamiliar weight of rebellion simmering beneath your ribs. "I don't want dancing" you said, and marveled at how the words didn't shake. You pressed the blade deep into the lemon cake, severing the raisin smile clean in half. "I want to know why Aegon is marrying Rhaenys when he already has Visenya."

"I hear it is a marriage for love" Lila said, smoothing her apron with hands that still smelled of lemon zest.

You scrunched your face, setting the knife down with a huff that sent cake crumbs skittering across the wooden tray. "Of course he loves her…she is family. We all love our families!" Your fingers tightened around the doll's arm, the porcelain cool against your palm. "The septas say we must love our siblings."

"You may love family but never marry them!" The Seven Pointed Star pendant swung wildly as you stamped your foot, the chain biting into the nape of your neck. Lila ignored you as she always did when theology tangled with your Targaryen traditions and stood with a rustle of homespun skirts. Her calloused fingers closed around yours, already humming the lilting riverlands tune she'd sung every name day since your confinement began.

Your feast was grand and Aegon enjoyed the wine, a habit on every single one of your name days since his father sent you away.

The torchlight guttered drunkenly in its sconce as Aegon swayed down the corridor, one hand trailing along the stone wall as if the castle might tilt beneath him. "This hallway..." he announced to no one in particular, his words slurred with Arbor gold and something darker "is entirely too gray." His boot caught on an uneven flagstone, sending him lurching into Rhaenys' waiting arms. She caught him with a muffled grunt, her embroidered slippers scuffing against the stones.

Aegon's fingers trailed along the cold stone walls, his nails catching on rough-hewn edges where centuries of salt winds had gnawed at the masonry. "Look at this" he slurred, pressing his palm flat against a damp patch of wall as if it might yield beneath his touch. "No tapestries. Just—" His hand slid downward, leaving a faint streak of sweat on the stone, "—gray. Endless fucking gray."

Aegon's drunken fingers tangled in Rhaenys' braid as she tried to steady him, the silver threads glinting like trapped minnows in torchlight. "You smell like her" he murmured against her temple, the words slurred and hot with wine. Rhaenys stiffened...not at the accusation, but at the way his thumb traced the shell of her ear with terrifying precision, as if mapping terrain from memory.

"I threw this feast for her and still she does not show…sent ravens to every stupid kingdom." Aegon whined against Rhaenys' neck, his breath hot with Arbor gold and the sharper bite of something darker...distilled despair, perhaps, or dragon dreams gone sour. His palm struck the wall beside them with a crack that echoed down the corridor, fingers splaying wide against the damp stone as if trying to claw through to whatever lay beyond.

Rhaenys felt the wetness seeping through her gown before she heard the ragged hitch in Aegon's breath...the muffled, animal sound of a man who'd forgotten how to weep openly. His forehead pressed heavy against her collarbone, his fingers clutching at the back of her dress like a drowning man grasping at driftwood up until the door he hit had caught his attention.

Aegon's fingers danced over the iron bolt like a bard plucking harp strings...too loose, too playful for the way his breath hitched wetly between giggles. "Look, Rhaenys" he slurred, thumbing the mechanism with drunken reverence. The torchlight caught the tarnish where countless hands had slid it home, the metal worn smooth in the center like a secret rubbed raw from overhandling. "This door… it locks from the outside." His laughter curdled into something jagged as he leaned his forehead against the wood, his next words muffled by the grain. "Isn't that funny?"

Rhaenys' lips parted, ready to snap back at Aegon's drunken rambling when a sharp gasp sliced through the corridor's torch-lit haze. Both heads turned toward the sound. There stood Lila, frozen mid step with a bundle of embroidered silk clutched to her chest like a shield. The dress spilled over her arms in a waterfall of blue and silver thread, its hem brushing the flagstones where she'd clearly been hurrying before stumbling upon them.

Lila's breath hitched audibly, her fingers tightening around the silk gown until the embroidered dragons snarled in her grip. The torchlight painted her face in wavering streaks of gold and shadow, catching the sheen of sweat along her upper lip. "M-my lord… my lady" she stammered, her voice too loud in the hushed corridor, "what—what are you two doing here?"

Aegon's forehead thumped against the door with a hollow thud that reverberated through the woodgrain...right where your sleeping cheek pressed unknowingly against your pillow on the other side. "These halls..." he declared, fingers splaying wide as if measuring the door's width through touch alone, "need tapestries." His breath fogged the iron-banded oak in quick bursts, each exhale carrying the cloying sweetness of fermented peaches and crushed mint. "Not gray… never gray again."

"My brother wishes to redecorate this wing in the hour of his drunkenness" Rhaenys muttered through clenched teeth, her nails biting into Aegon's wrist as she tried to pry him away from the door. He slumped heavier against it instead, his temple pressing into the woodgrain with the devotion of a pilgrim at a shrine. Behind that door...unseen, unheard...your breath stirred the embroidered edge of your pillowcase in sleep-soft sighs, utterly oblivious to the storm brewing in the corridor.

Lila's fingers twitched against the silk gown, the fabric whispering as it slid between her clenched fists. "Should I help you get him to bed, my lady?" The offer tumbled out too quickly...a peasant's instinct to clean up noble messes before they stained the stones irreparably.

Rhaenys shook her head sharply, her braid whipping across Aegon's flushed cheek where he now clung to her like a shipwrecked sailor to driftwood. "No" she hissed, twisting her body to block Lila's view of the door. The movement made Aegon groan, his forehead knocking against her shoulder with the dull thud of a poorly hung shield. "Return to your duties."

Lila's bow was too deep...the kind of exaggerated deference servants gave when they wanted nobles to forget their faces. She kept her forehead lowered until Aegon's uneven footsteps faded around the corner, until Rhaenys' hissed admonishments dissolved into the castle's ever present groan of stone. Only then did she exhale, her fingers finding the bolt with practiced ease. The iron was warm from Aegon's lingering touch.

The door groaned shut behind Lila like a beast settling into its den. Her slippers whispered across the flagstones...too fast, too frantic, as she rushed toward the bed where you lay curled beneath embroidered silks. Moonlight striped your sleeping form through the barred window, painting your cheekbone in liquid silver. Lila's fingers trembled as they hovered over your shoulder, caught between waking you and preserving this fragile peace.

Lila's hands hovered over your sleeping form, catching moonlight like spiderwebs before pulling back. The pillowcase still bore the damp imprint of your cheek, the embroidery frayed from years of restless turning. She inhaled sharply, not at the sight of you curled like a child, but at the memory of Aegon's drunken fingers tracing the door's ironwork with terrifying intent.

Silently, she moved through the chamber like a thief. Your favorite book went first...the Seven Pointed Star's spine cracking softly as she tucked it into the oilcloth. Then the doll with the ripped sleeve, its glass eyes flashing accusation in the dim light. The bundled mint leaves from your last name day, now brittle as old bones. Each object landed in the growing pile with a whisper of finality.

Outside, Dragonstone groaned under another storm. Lila paused mid-step, head cocked toward the corridor where Aegon's laughter still echoed faintly. Her fingers tightened around your embroidered shift, the one you'd outgrown years ago but still slept in for comfort. The fabric tore along an old seam with a sound like a stifled sob. She had to comfort you during storms to get you to sleep, something you needed because Aegon would sit in a chair beside your bed to protect you from a storm's horror.

"My lady" Lila whispered, her calloused fingers brushing your temple with the lightness of a moth's wing. The scent of rosemary and woodsmoke clung to her sleeves as she settled onto the mattress beside you, not the brisk jostle servants used for nobles, but the tender rocking mothers used for feverish children. You stirred with a soft murmur, your face pressing blindly into her palm like a kitten seeking warmth.

The torchlight caught the silver threads in your unbound hair as you blinked up at her, eyes still soft with sleep. Lila's throat tightened at the sight...you looked younger like this, the way you had that first night when she'd found you weeping on the flagstones. Her thumb traced the curve of your cheekbone before she could stop herself, wiping away a nonexistent tear. "You must wake now, sweetling" she murmured, though the words tasted like ash.

Her lips brushed your cheek...dry, cracked things that tasted of salt and urgency. "It is not safe here" Lila whispered, pressing the words into your skin like a secret. The torchlight caught the tremor in her fingers as they tightened around yours, her callouses scraping against your knuckles. "Trust me."

The iron bolt slid home with a finality that vibrated through Lila's fingertips. She pressed her forehead against the door's cold wood for three rapid heartbeats, just long enough to hear the rustle of your blankets as you turned in sleep before forcing herself away. Her slippers whispered against the flagstones as she fled down the servant's stairwell, the hem of her skirt catching on uneven stones where centuries of hurried footsteps had worn grooves into the stone.

Aegon's fingers traced the curve of Rhaenys' cheekbone with drunken precision, his thumb catching on the delicate fan of her lashes where they fluttered against skin still flushed from feasting. The bedchamber smelled of spilt wine and crushed mint, the latter from the garlands Visenya had torn from her hair hours earlier in a fit of pique. "Do you think she would have liked the name day feast?" His whisper slurred against Rhaenys' temple, his breath hot with Arbor gold and something darker, more metallic.

Visenya groaned from the adjoining dressing chamber, the sound muffled by the silk shift she was yanking over her head. Moonlight limned the angry red marks on her shoulders...fresh scratches from Aegon's restless fingers earlier that evening. "By the gods, let the girl go to sleep" she hissed, her voice sharp enough to cut through his drunken haze. The bed curtains rippled as she shoved past them, her bare feet slapping against cold stone with deliberate loudness.

Aegon only groaned, a pathetic whine following as he rolled off the bed and laid there instead. “Do you think she would have liked all the pink? The fabric is rather rich” he mumbled, half of his words slurred.

It was then that Visenya realized her brother-husband had not been talking about Rhaenys but their youngest sister… and what her thoughts would have been on the name day feast he had thrown for her.

“You spent quite a lot on it, we won’t ever know seeing as she does not want to return—” Visenya started but Aegon stumbled to stand and shook his head quickly. “Visenya.”

Rhaenys sighed, knowing the two would bicker…they always did on your name day. Visenya was not fond of the fact aegon wished to marry Rhaenys as well, but she also knew they often fought of him spending coin still looking for their lost sister who obviously did not wish to come home…at least that was what she thought.

“Father is dead! If she wished to come home…nothing is stopping her. Look around Aegon..do you see her?” Visenya raised her voice and Rhaenys quickly stood to try and defuse the growing argument, but Aegon just stared before stumbling to his desk and taking his journal out with a huff. “You are an idiot if you think she is staying away willingly.”

“She is considered a woman grown now. She is probably under some man as we speak—” Visenya blurted and that made Aegon instinctively reach for something…a nearby dragon figure, just barely missing visenya’s head as his chest heaved.

“Don’t…don’t say stupid things…” he stumbled over his words and clutched his journal while stumbling to the door “Don’t ever say that again…She would never…she’s a good girl.”

"Visenya!" Rhaenys' voice cracked like a whip across the chamber, her fingers closing around Aegon's wrist with surprising strength for someone so delicate. The vein in his temple pulsed violently beneath her touch, his skin fever-hot from wine and wrath. "We all know she was pious as can be" she continued, softer now, her thumb tracing circles against his racing pulse like a priestess smoothing altar cloth.

The dragon figurine lay in shattered porcelain pieces near the doorframe where Aegon had thrown it, its gilded wings snapped clean off. Visenya didn't flinch, just lifted her chin higher, the way she always did before battle. "She's fifteen now, Aegon. Not a swaddled babe anymore."

The journal's leather cover squeaked under Aegon's white-knuckled grip as he staggered into the corridor, its pages flapping like wounded bird wings against his thigh. Behind him, Visenya's mocking laughter chased him down the torchlit hallway—sharp as a dagger between ribs. "Run to your maps again, brother! Plot another useless search while she spreads her legs for some—"

Aegon's shoulder slammed into the stone wall with a wet smack of sweat damp linen meeting damp masonry. He didn't turn back. Couldn't. The image burned behind his eyelids...his sweet sister, his perfect girl, pressed beneath some nameless lord with her braids coming undone. The journal trembled in his hands, its spine cracking as his fingers dug deeper into the leather.

"You were cruel to her" he whispered to the empty corridor, his breath fogging the cold stone. The words tasted of sour wine and older, fouler things...the dregs of childhood resentments left to ferment. His boot scuffed against a loose flagstone, sending it skittering ahead like a thrown dice. "Both of you."

The realization struck Aegon like a blade between the ribs, so sudden he stumbled against the solar's locked door, forehead pressing into cold iron bands. His breath fogged the metal in quick bursts, each exhale carrying the cloying sweetness of fermented peaches and crushed mint from the feast. Protection. The word unraveled in his mouth like rotten silk, revealing the bitter core beneath...Possession.

Aegon's fingers trembled against the journal's worn leather, his thumb tracing the embossed dragon sigil like a blind man reading Braille. The pages fell open to a sketch of you at twelve...your braids looped too tight, your smile too wide, forever preserved in charcoal smudges and ink stains. He'd drawn this the night before your leaving, when you'd still laughed at his jests and trusted his hands to lift you onto tables so you could see feasting halls better.

Aegon stood in the empty solar, the firelight guttering low as his fingers traced the edges of your sketched face...not the hesitant strokes of charcoal from years past, but the fevered inkwork of recent months. Pages warped where wine had spilled, your likeness blurring at the edges like a ghost fading into mist. He'd drawn you older here...cheekbones sharper, braids longer, though he'd never seen you past twelve.

The hearth crackled, casting jagged shadows across the journal's warped pages. Aegon's thumb lingered on a sketch of your hands...small and delicate, clutching a figure with the same absent minded affection you'd once shown his sleeve when trailing after him in the gardens. He'd drawn them from memory a hundred times, each iteration more desperate than the last. What was love? Visenya was duty, her spine straight as a sword, her kisses perfunctory as a sworn shield's salute. Rhaenys was desire, soft sighs and stolen touches in shadowed alcoves, all honeyed submission and lavender scented hair.

But you...his fingers spasmed against the page, you were the ember in his marrow. Your absence ached like a phantom limb, your name on his tongue both balm and blade. He'd watched lords' daughters simper at feasts, their giggles like birdsong after years of your rasping coughs. None of them made his pulse stutter when they entered a room. None of them left him staring at maps until dawn, quill snapping under the pressure of plotting another fruitless search.

A draft stirred the ashes in the hearth. Aegon's gaze flicked to the portrait above the mantel, your twelve-year-old face captured in oils, the artist rendering your smile too sweet, your eyes too bright. The gilded frame gleamed dully in the firelight, its lower edge worn smooth from years of his fingers trailing along it as he passed. Sometimes when the wine ran thick and the castle slept, he'd press his forehead to the painted cheek and breathe deep, as if the pigments might still carry traces of lemon soap and childish sweat.

oh, how he missed it. Missed you. LOVED you.

The dream came again that night...the one with the iron throne wrapped in dragon flame, the crown of Valyria burning white hot against his brow, the cold night...a song of ice and fire. Aegon was awoken from the sun and dream with a gasp, the sheets twisted around his legs like chains, his chest sheened with sweat that smelled faintly of salt and sour wine. Beyond the balcony, dawn bled across Blackwater Bay in streaks of gold and vermilion, the exact hue of melted dragon scales. He'd seen this sunrise seven hundred times from this window. Seven hundred mornings he should have been sailing west.

The maps still lay scattered across his solar floor where he'd left them—parchment corners weighted down by candle stubs and empty cups. Narrow sea routes spiderwebbed outward from Dragonstone in frantic red ink, every island and coastal village circled and recircled until the vellum tore. Aegon's bare foot scuffed against a half furled scroll of the Stormlands as he stumbled toward the washbasin. The water was tepid, yesterday's. He plunged his hands in anyway, watching the ripples distort his reflection into something monstrous...a king who'd traded conquest for a girl's ghost.

You awoke humming, fingers brushing through hair that had grown past your hips...longer every second spent in this gray walled prison. The morning chill crept beneath your nightshift, ghosting over bare legs that hadn't felt sunlight in years. Your toes curled against the rush-strewn floorboards, waiting for Lila's promised return. The maid had whispered of relocation last night, her rosemary scented hands trembling as they bundled your few treasures into oilcloth.

You set the brush down with a hum, pushing hair back from your shoulders, just as the lock clicked.

"Lila, I've brushed—" The words died in your throat as you stumbled back, bare heels skidding on cold stone. Where your maid should have stood, three men in rough spun tunics gaped at you, their faces slack with the same stunned silence that gripped your lungs. The hairbrush clattered to the flagstones between you, its silver handle ringing like an alarm bell.

One of the men, thick-necked, smelling of sawdust...swiped his cap off and clutched it to his chest. "Seven hells" he breathed, eyes darting to your bare feet, your unbound hair, the childish nightgown hanging loose on your frame. Behind him, his companions exchanged glances sharp as dagger thrusts.

"My lady—" the thick-necked man started, but you snatched the candle from its sconce with a violence that sent hot wax splattering across your wrist. The flame guttered wildly, casting jagged shadows up the walls like grasping fingers. "Where is Lila!" Your voice cracked on her name, the words bubbling up through a throat suddenly tight with tears. The men exchanged glances over your head, silent conversations passing between them in the flickering half light.

"I know nothing of a Lila, my lady…but I know you." The thick necked man's voice cracked like dry parchment as he took another step forward, his workman's boots scuffing against the threshold you'd never crossed. The candlelight caught the sweat beading along his temples, painting his face in wavering streaks of gold and shadow. "Your brother Aegon found us last night—instructing us to remodel this wing more lively. And you—" His Adam's apple bobbed violently, "—you've been missing."

The candle's flame flickered wildly as your fingers spasmed around the brass holder. Wax dripped onto your bare toes, the sudden sting barely registering through the numbness spreading through your chest. Missing. The word echoed strangely in your skull, its edges too sharp against the soft reality of Lila's nightly visits, of meal trays left by unseen hands. Had Father not told them where you were?

"My…my siblings know where I am" you sniffled, shaking your head so violently that unbound hair lashed across your cheeks like a whip. The candle trembled in your grip, wax splattering across the flagstones in Rhaenys' favorite shade of sunset pink...the exact color of the dress you'd worn when Father last saw you. "Father told them! Daddy told them!"

The thick necked man took another cautious step back, palms raised toward the trembling candle in your grip. Wax splattered across the flagstones between you like bloodstains...Rhaenys' favorite pink, the exact shade you'd worn when Father last saw you. "Easy now, my lady" he murmured, jerking his chin toward your white-knuckled grip on the brass holder. "From what I hear, your brother's been going mad looking for you…three summers already. I could fetch him—"

The candle guttered violently as your breath hitched. Behind the workman, his younger companion gaped at you with the slack-jawed awe of a peasant seeing his first dragon. The third man...older, with salt-and-pepper whiskers merely stared at your bare feet with a frown deepening the furrows of his brow.

"Get me my brother then! Get out!" you screamed, the words tearing from your throat raw as freshly flayed skin. Tears fell in hot streaks down your cheeks, splattering against the flagstones where Lila had knelt just yesterday, scrubbing imaginary stains with her usual peasant diligence. The candleholder clattered to the floor, rolling toward the thick necked man's boots with a metallic whine. "I want him to tell me of your lies!"

The workmen recoiled as one, their shadows lurching across the tapestries like startled deer. The oldest made the sign of the Seven across his chest, his lips moving silently. You barely noticed. Your entire body trembled with the force of your next scream... "NOW!"

The thick-necked man stumbled backward, his bootheel catching on the discarded candleholder. He went down hard, elbow striking stone with a crack that echoed through the chamber. His companions hauled him up by the armpits, their faces gone ashen beneath their sunburn. They fled without another word, their workman's boots skidding on wax-smeared flagstones.

Aegon's fingers trembled around the goblet of watered wine, his third attempt at breakfast hydration, each sip tasting vaguely of shame and last night's Arbor gold. Across the table, Visenya methodically dissected a pear with her dagger, the blade's edge catching morning light with each precise slice. Rhaenys pretended not to notice the way his knee bounced beneath the tablecloth, her own hands folded neatly around a cooling cup of mint tea no one had seen her drink.

The silence stretched like a frayed rope until Visenya's dagger thunked into the wood between them, pear juice oozing dark as a wound. "If you're going to vomit" she said without looking up, "do it in the privy this time."

Aegon opened his mouth...whether to protest or retch remained unclear, when the solar doors burst open with a crash that sent his goblet clattering across the table. Three workmen tumbled into the room smelling of sawdust and panic, their rough spun tunics damp with sweat. The thick-necked one clutched his elbow like a broken wing.

"My lord—the wing you asked remodeled—" the thick-necked workman gasped, clutching his injured elbow. Aegon furrowed his brows, fingers pausing midair where they'd been massaging his pounding temples. "Remodel a wing? I don't recall—" The protest dissolved into a groan as last night's Arbor gold surged bitterly up his throat.

Rhaenys' giggle tinkled like shattered crystal across the breakfast table. "You were quite drunk" she chimed, her slippered foot nudging Aegon's ankle beneath the tablecloth, a practiced gesture that once meant shared secrets, now just another leash. Her pearl-pink nails flashed as she plucked a grape from Visenya's untouched fruit platter. "Don't you remember? Gray walls, gray stones...you said it was depressing as a septry."

The workmen exchanged glances sharp as dagger points. The youngest, pockmarked and gap-toothed had stepped forward with the eager terror of a squire reporting battle. "There's something you'll really want to see!" His voice cracked on the last word, eyes darting between Aegon's bloodshot gaze and Visenya's freshly sharpened dagger still embedded in the table.

"Anything is better than here" Aegon whispered to the half-drained wine goblet trembling in his grasp. The dregs at the bottom swirled like a miniature storm, black as the circles beneath his eyes. He stood so abruptly his chair screeched against the flagstones, making Rhaenys flinch. The workmen recoiled as he brushed past them, his silk sleeve snagging on the youngest one's tool belt with a sound like tearing parchment.

"I wish to come too—" Rhaenys whined, her fingers plucking at Aegon's sleeve with the same practiced persistence she'd used since childhood. The silk stretched taut between them, a fragile tether that could snap with one wrong step. Visenya stood without waiting for permission, her dagger still dripping pear juice onto the breakfast table as she hummed, "I want to see what's so important." The words landed like a challenge, her spine straight as a sword between her shoulder blades.

Aegon ignored the pair but mentally rolled his eyes as he continued to follow the men. Their footsteps echoed through the vaulted corridor, mingling with the distant drip of condensation from Dragonstone's porous ceilings. The thick-necked workman kept glancing back like a nervous hare, his Adam's apple bobbing with each stumble over uneven flagstones. Aegon's fingers twitched toward the dagger at his belt, not to threaten, but to steady himself against the creeping sense of unraveling control. Every torch they passed made the shadows leap grotesquely across the walls, twisting familiar tapestries into monstrous shapes.

Aegon's finger trailed along the edge of your hall portrait as they passed, the carved wooden frame worn smooth from years of similar absent-minded touches. The procession of workmen's worried faces blurred in his periphery, their furtive glances and bitten lips bored him more than breakfast's stale bread and lukewarm wine. He knew every brushstroke of this painting by now: the way your childish braids caught the light, the slope of your nose, the embroidered hem of your dress where you'd picked at the threads during the sitting.

The workmen stopped before a door Aegon had passed a thousand times without thought…one of countless nondescript chambers in Dragonstone's labyrinthine halls. The thick-necked man wiped his palms on his tunic before pressing them flat against the wood. "My lord, we found—"

"It is better if he sees!" another man cut in and swung the door open with a force that sent the hinges screaming. The chamber yawned before them, a gaping maw of stale air and flickering torchlight. Aegon's breath hitched as his gaze snagged on the scattered remnants of a life interrupted: a hairbrush crusted with silver strands, a doll's glass eye winking from the shadowed corner, the silver hair falling down a back at a vanity…fingers clasping a bracelet with the maidens face engraved.

Rhaenys gasped behind him, her perfume…lavender and something darker, more metallic flooding the threshold as she pressed against his shoulder. "Gods be good" she whispered, her fingers digging into his sleeve like talons. The bracelet clattered to the vanity as the figure whirled…your face emerging from shadow with the slow horror of a corpse surfacing in still water.

"Aegon…" Your voice sliced through the ringing in his skull…high and clear and impossibly young, just as it had sounded the day you disappeared. The workmen's panicked shouts dissolved into white noise as Aegon swayed forward, his bootheel catching on the uneven flagstone where centuries of footsteps had worn a shallow groove. His eyes traced each tear in your eyes.

Had you been here all this time? Had you been alone and scared while he walked this very hall?

The light behind you pulsed brighter…not torchlight, but something purer, harsher…the kind of radiance that turned the edges of your silhouette to molten gold. Your lips moved again, forming Rhaenys' and visenya’s name this time but the words dissolved into the deafening rush of blood between his temples.

He tried to step forward. He wanted to get to you so badly.

His knees buckled instead. His head pounding and fingers grasping to reach you.

The last thing Aegon saw before the darkness swallowed him was your fingers outstretched…not in welcome, but in warning…worried while the frayed edges of your sleeve fluttering like a banner torn loose in a storm. Beautiful.. blurry…the same features..

His perfect girl, silver hair hair far too long now and blocking that perfect face as you seemed to rush to his aid before everything went black.

you had been sent from the heavens…

Sent back to him.