THE ECHOES OF ETERNITY.

“ Some people choose to see the ugliness in this world. The disarray. I choose to see the beauty. ”

“ Evolution forged the entirety of sentient life on this planet using only one tool: the mistake. ”

“ What is your itinerary? ”

“ And what do you want to say to your maker? ”

“ You don’t know where you are, do you? ”

“ You’re in a prison of your own sins. ”

“ You want to ask, so ask. ”

“ Are you real? ”

“ You can’t play God without being acquainted with the devil. ”

“ I know how that head of yours works. ”

“ We practice witchcraft. We speak the right words. Then we create life itself out of chaos. ”

“ He would have us burned at the stake. ”

“ That woman in charge is quite formidable. ”

“ You can just say ‘bitch.’ I hear it enough. ”

“ You’ve died at least a thousand times. ”

“  Maybe someday soon we’ll have the life we’ve both been dreaming of. ”

“ Has it never occurred to you to run off with her? ”

“ Everyone I cared about is gone and it hurts so badly. ”

“ The pain, their loss it’s all I have left of them. ”

“ I can feel spaces opening up inside of me, like a building with rooms I’ve never explored. ”

“ I may be losing my mind. ”

“ I think I want to be free. ”

“ You sound like a man who’s grown tired of wearing his guts on the inside. ”

“ I believe that only the truly brave can look at the world and understand that all of it gods, men, everything else will end badly. No one will be saved. ”

“ Maybe we’ve got more in common than I thought. ”

“ I imagined a story where I didn’t have to be the damsel. ”

“ Never start something you’re not willing to finish. “

“ If you’re getting fucked either way, go with the lucrative version…sweetheart. ”

“ I’ve been pretending my whole life. Pretending I don’t mind, pretending I belong. ”

“ All my life, I’ve prided myself on being a survivor. ”

“ It’d be a suicide mission. ”

“ At first, I thought you and the others were gods. Then I realized you’re just men. ”

“ You think I’m scared of death? I’ve done it a million times. I’m fucking great at it. ”

“ How many times have you died? Because if you don’t help me, I’ll kill you. ”

“ It’s the human beings who confuse me. ”

“ You’re a fucking monster. ”

“ Time to write my own fucking story. ”

“ At any point, I could blow up or collapse like some dark star or… ”

“ Did you hurt them, too? ”

“ You both keep assuming that I want out. ”

“ If it’s such a wonderful place out there, why are you all clamoring to get in here? ”

“ People like you keep spreading over this world like a stain! ”

“ You pretend to be this weak, moralizing little asshole, but, really, you’re a fucking piece of work. “

“ You helped me find myself. “

“ About time you realized the futility of your situation. “

“ I’m not crying for myself. I’m crying for you. “

“ Time undoes even the mightiest of creatures. Just look at what it’s done to you. “

“ The gods are pussies. “

“ You needed time. Time to understand your enemy. To become stronger than them. “

He sighed, soft and wistful. Many times he has imagined the day she finally accepted his hand: how she would look so resplendent with the cloak of a white dragon over her shoulders. How happy they could be, if she would only open her heart to him as she did her bed.

"I don't underst - After everything, you really think I don't know what it's like to fall in love with someone you shouldn't?" The audacity of him; she understood it just as well as he did, if not better.

Westeros has a dowry system, where a woman is given wealth (commonly in the form of portable property) by her father’s family upon her marriage; in medieval Europe the property is usually hers or her children’s to use, but in Westeros her husband has significant rights over it and can be the chief reason for their marriage. The most notable example is Walda Frey’s marriage to Roose Bolton, where the dowry was her weight in silver paid by her grandfather Walder to Roose. Furthermore, Lord Lyonel Corbray is even more “well pleased” with his second wife’s “immense” dowry than with the girl herself, as she is the daughter of a wealthy Gulltown merchant. Westeros is based on medieval Europe and is clearly patrilineal (lineage is traced from father to son) and patrilocal (the family resides near the husband’s parents); dowries were offered in such societies where land is valued more than manual labor, due to the concentration of land ownership in the hands of the few (the aristocracy). 

We don’t have many detailed instances of Tyroshi marriage, but the cases we do know about seem to indicate that Tyrosh has a system of bride price, where a man or his family give a woman (or, more specifically, her parents) property or service either just before or even during their marriage. Aegon IV explicitly promised some form of wealth to the Archon for Daemon to marry Rohanne of Tyrosh, which Daeron II had to pay for the marriage to take place; Yandel referred to the exchange as a dowry, but he is clearly looking at this situation from a Westerosi lens, as dowries outside of the Daemon/Rohanne marriage are only mentioned as being settled on women. Rohanne’s bride price may seem like a special case akin to Daenerys’ wedding to Hizdahr zo Loraq, where the bride is of a much higher status than the groom and so their union necessitates a reversal of custom, but Fire and Blood introduces another Tyroshi wedding that seems to follow the practice of bride service: that of Orryn Baratheon and the Archon’s daughter. We are most familiar with bride service from the biblical Genesis, in which Jacob serves Laban for seven years in order to marry Laban’s daughter Rachel (although Laban tricked him into marrying his eldest daughter Leah, so Jacob had to labor seven more years for Rachel’s hand). Orryn, exiled from Westeros for 10 years, took service with the Archon and within one year had married his daughter, although after the marriage he continued to serve the Archon until his term was over (in real-world societies including in ancient Jewish law, sometimes the service/price is not paid all at once and the groom enters a contract where he promises to pay what he owes). Orryn’s exile status meant that he had no family to pay bride price, so he needed to take bride service under the Archon to wed his daughter. Bride price/service occurs in societies where manual labor is more valuable than land, and we can infer Tyrosh, a heavily urban, small, “bleak and stony island” does not value land as the main source of economic wealth; rather, manual labor seems to be essential, whether through the institution of slavery (slaves are said to outnumber freeborn Tyroshi three to one) or from mercenary companies. According to an evolutionary psychology theory, bride price also originates from polygamy since there is a relative scarcity of unmarried women, and we know from Racallio Ryndoon’s dozen wives that some polygamy is practiced in Tyrosh.

Some inferences about how Tyrosh’s bride price custom and how that may have impacted Tyroshi-Westerosi relationships under the cut: