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Rating:
Mature
Archive Warning:
Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Categories:
F/MGenM/MF/F
Fandoms:
House of the Dragon (TV)A Song of Ice and Fire & Related Fandoms
Relationships:
Aerion Targaryen (Son of Maekar I) & Rhaenyra TargaryenAerion Targaryen & Jacaerys VelaryonAerion Targaryen & Lucerys VelaryonHarwin Strong & Rhaenyra Targaryen & Laenor VelaryonAerion Targaryen & Aegon II TargaryenAerion Targaryen & Aemond "One-Eye" TargaryenAerion Targaryen & Helaena TargaryenDaemon Targaryen/Rhaenyra Targaryen
Characters:
Aerion Targaryen (Son of Maekar I)Rhaenyra TargaryenJacaerys VelaryonLucerys Velaryon (Son of Rhaenyra)Joffrey VelaryonLaenor VelaryonHarwin StrongAlicent HightowerViserys I TargaryenAegon II TargaryenAemond "One-Eye" TargaryenHelaena TargaryenDaemon TargaryenRhaena Targaryen (Daughter of Daemon)Baela TargaryenCorlys "The Sea Snake" VelaryonRhaenys Targaryen VelaryonSilverwing | Alysanne Targaryen's DragonAddam VelaryonDaeron Targaryen (Son of Viserys I)
Additional Tags:
Alternate Universe - Canon DivergenceTime TravelThe Dance of the Dragons | Aegon II Targaryen v. Rhaenyra Targaryen EraI've fallen victim to the TikTok edits of twins Jace and AerionAerion Targaryen vs The GreensDragon Dreams (Questionable)Dark HumorUnreliable NarratorNo Beta We Die Like Aerion (The First Time)Dragon Dreams (Literal)
Language:
English
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Published:2025-12-18Updated:2026-07-25Words:386,215Chapters:37/?Comments:7,001Kudos:6,014Bookmarks:1,626Hits:246,098
Burn Them All
Anonymous
Chapter 8: Cut Out the Rot
Summary:
Aerion fake-cries in the king's chamber, then real-cries in Luke's sickroom. He nearly gets thrown off a ledge by a prince, slaps another prince, and ends up back in his mother's arms.
All within two hours. (It's ok. He feels better.)
Notes:
(See the end of the chapter for notes.)
Chapter Text
Dawn reached Driftmark by inches, as if the sea itself had to be convinced to loosen its grip.
Aerion had watched that light creep across the chamber wall while Lucerys slept in broken pieces. Luke's breathing came in small, careful pulls that made the bandage lift and settle. Every time the linen shifted, Aerion's stomach performed a slow, mean twist. He kept his jaw locked. He had become very good at stillness.
The pulled muscle in his thigh throbbed when he shifted his weight, a slow, stubborn ache that refused to be ignored.
Rhaenyra sat on a stool so close her knees almost brushed the bed-frame. She had Luke's hand between both of hers, but her touch was a frantic anchor, not a comfort. Her thumb moved in a ceaseless, desperate circle over his knuckles, as if she could rub the horror out of his skin through friction alone.
She spoke to him sometimes. "Hush now, sweet boy. The maester says rest is the warrior now." When her gaze flicked to Aerion, it was with the same softness. "You should drink something, Aerion. The broth is still warm."
Aerion gave her a blank face. He heard the words and let them dissipate in the acid air of his mind. To acknowledge them was to risk the dam breaking. Behind his teeth lived a torrent of things better left unsaid: You should have kept him closer. You should have done something. Your politeness is a leash, and it's strangling us. He kept his mouth a sealed tomb.
Once, Jace had leaned toward him, red-eyed and raw, and said his name like a plea. "Say something. Say you understand. Gods, Aerion, look at me." Aerion had stared at the far wall until the boy went quiet. He knew what would come out if he opened his mouth: I understand that you followed a stupid girl into the dark and brought our brother back in pieces. I understand too much.
Corlys arrived in the dark hour before dawn. He looked tired, like a man who carried the weight of tides in his bones even in sleep. He stood at the foot of Luke's bed and said nothing for a time. The Sea Snake's silence carried weight.
Princess Rhaenys came later, with the grey light. She went to Luke, brushed a strand of hair from his damp forehead, her touch fleeting and precise. Then her gaze, sharp as a seabird's, swept over Aerion. A blade testing for cracks in the façade, for the first sign of hysterics or collapse. She found none. Her lips pressed into a thinner line. She did not speak to him.
They spoke in murmurs that meant nothing. Plans. Consequences. Words.
"…demand tangible restitution, not more hollow words, the insult to our blood is…"
A maester drifted in and out like a dutiful ghost. He changed the dressings and tried to press a cup of broth into Aerion's hands. "For your strength, young prince."
Aerion's hands remained in his lap, folded. The maester retreated, his pity a palpable thing in the air.
Let them think it's grief, Aerion thought. It's safer for everyone.
By midmorning, the room smelled of old linen and the bitter tang of poppy. A servant changed the brazier, and the smoke curled into the ceiling beams in pale threads. Aerion kept his hands folded. His thigh still ached where he'd strained it. He pressed the heel of his hand against the muscle, sharpening the sensation, using it to pin his thoughts down when they threatened to skitter toward the memory of Aemond's face.
Then came boots outside the door. A pause. A soft knock that still carried authority.
Ser Steffon Darklyn stepped in and bowed toward Rhaenyra first, as courtesy demanded, then to Aerion. "His Grace requests Prince Aerion's presence."
Rhaenyra's head lifted. Her face looked carved, eyes swollen and bright. "He calls for Aerion alone?"
Ser Steffon nodded. "His Grace is in the lord's solar. He is… unwell. But he asks for Prince Aerion with urgency."
Aerion stood, with a blank face
Rhaenyra watched him warily. She had seen what Aerion did in the hall last night—how he spoke like a knife in velvet. She had also seen how he sat here, wordless, for hours, like a boy punishing himself.
"Aerion," she said.
He turned toward her and bowed. Still no words.
Her mouth tightened, then softened. "Be… careful," she managed.
Aerion bowed again, deeper. He left without speaking.
He walked out without a backward glance, following Ser Steffon through the hushed, salt-stung corridors of High Tide.
The long walk made the injury announce itself in small flashes—each turn of the hip a bite, each step a reminder that his body had limits even when his mind didn't.
The small solar sat tucked behind a bend of hall that smelled faintly of old salt and ink. It was a room made for Corlys—maps and ledgers, a desk scarred by the point of a knife, a brass astrolabe on the windowsill catching what little sun dared to enter.
Ser Harrold Westerling stood outside. He opened the door for Aerion without a word.
Inside, the air felt stale.
It smelled of beeswax and the cloying sweetness of decay.
King Viserys was propped in a heavy chair by a feeble fire, swaddled in furs despite the mild sea air. Grand Maester Orwyle hovered, fingers stained with a pungent salve. The king's robe was open at the shoulder, revealing a fresh bandage, stark white against the mottled, ruined flesh of his chest. It was a new wound, or an old one freshly split open—a weeping, physical confession to a body that could no longer contain the rot within, or the pressures without.
The maester glanced up, eyes briefly flicking over Aerion, then dipped his head and returned to his work, murmuring something under his breath as he tightened the cloth.
Viserys lifted his gaze. His face was the colour of dirty tallow and his eyes were red-rimmed.
"Come," Viserys said.
Aerion crossed the room, steps measured, and bowed. "Your Grace."
Viserys gestured to the stool near his chair. "Sit nearer. I won't shout at you." A faint, ghastly imitation of a smile touched his ruined mouth. "My throat has suffered enough from the sound of my own failures."
Then his eyes slid to the maester. "Leave us."
Orwyle hesitated. "Your Grace, the poultice must not be disturbed. The inflammation—"
"Leave."
Orwyle's jaw worked. He gathered his jars and cloths and left. The door clicked shut.
The King's gaze settled on Aerion. "You spent the night with Lucerys."
Aerion inclined his head.
"You spoke to him?"
Aerion let a pause pass. Just long enough to suggest restraint. "He slept."
Viserys's mouth tightened. "And you? Did you sleep?"
Aerion's lips parted, then closed. He chose the shape of truth that served him. "Little."
Viserys's eyes dragged over him—hair still damp at the roots from washing, tunic plain and hastily tied, the faint shadow under his eyes. The old man's gaze softened with something like pride, which made Aerion's skin itch.
"My sweet boy," Viserys murmured. It was a voice for a child who scraped his knee, and not for what Aerion really was. "Last night… in the hall. You spoke with great… skill."
Aerion lowered his gaze to the patterned rug at his feet. He let humility settle over him like a cloak. "I spoke because you commanded peace, Your Grace."
He made his voice small, dutiful. A tool in the King's hand. Nothing more.
Viserys gave a faint, joyless sound. "Peace." He looked down at his bandaged chest, and his expression twisted, as if the linen mocked him. "My realm is a house of dry straw," he whispered, more to himself than to Aerion, "and I've spent years telling myself the air smells of rain."
Aerion made no sound. He fixed his eyes on the tired lines of his grandfather's face.
"I promised you," Viserys began, each word an effort. "I said… if you had dreams, you would tell me." He paused, sucking in a thin, ragged breath that seemed to catch on the rot in his lungs. His gaze locked onto Aerion's, desperate and demanding. "Last night. Did you dream it?"
Aerion felt the thing within him engage, cold and precise. He let his lower lip tremble. He dropped his gaze to his hands, as if ashamed.
"I did. But I dreamed it differently," Aerion whispered, his voice hoarse from disuse. It sounded convincingly shattered.
Viserys leaned forward. A spasm of pain twisted his features, but his eyes burned with a feverish intensity. "Tell me."
Aerion constructed the lie with a master craftsman's care, each falsehood laid like a brick, its seams grouted with slivers of truth. "I… I saw Prince Aemond. In the dream. But he wasn't by the Bronze Fury's cove. He was on the windward beach, where the sand is soft and the dunes are high. And he wasn't claiming Vermithor." He lifted his eyes, letting them swim with borrowed tears. "He was claiming Vhagar."
He let the name hang. Viserys's breath hitched.
"The girls… Baela and Rhaena… they saw him in the night. They thought he was stealing her. Their mother's dragon." A single tear tracked down Aerion's cheek. He didn't wipe it away. "They were afraid. So they ran. They went to Jace. Because Jace is… he's good. He's the heir. They thought he would make it right."
He saw Viserys absorb this.
"In the dream, they confronted Aemond on the path. There was a fight. Aemond… he said the words. The awful words." Aerion's voice broke on a sob that was half-real, summoned from the well of his rage. "And in the dream, Grandsire, it was Jace who fell. It was Jace who… who lost his eye. To Aemond's knife."
He buried his face in his hands, his shoulders shaking. Through the cage of his fingers, he watched Viserys. The king's face had crumpled, a landslide of grief and horror. The new wound on his chest seemed to pulse in sympathy.
"I woke up screaming," Aerion mumbled into his palms, the words muffled and thick. "It was so real. The blood… it was Jace's blood. I thought… I had to stop it. I had to change it."
He lowered his hands, showing Viserys a face ravaged by a child's desperate sincerity. "I thought if Aemond wasn't near Vhagar, there would be no fight. If Rhaena had Vhagar, the girls would have no reason to be angry, to go to Jace. I… I spoke to Aemond. I told him the Bronze Fury was stronger. A dragon for a king, not a queen's mount. I nudged Rhaena toward the leeward beach. I thought I was being so clever." A bitter, wet laugh escaped him. "I thought I'd drawn a new map. Vermithor here. Vhagar there. No paths crossing. No fight."
He let the tears fall freely now, the image of a heartbroken boy who'd tried to play god and failed. "I was so sure. I went to sleep thinking I'd saved Jace. And I woke up to… to Luke being maimed instead."
Viserys was silent for a long time. A log shifted in the grate, sending up a shower of sparks that died before they touched the stone. When he spoke, his voice was old, scraped from the bottom of a well of regret.
"Oh, my boy. My brave, foolish boy." He reached out, his gnarled hand finding Aerion's knee, the grip weak but present. "Dragon dreams… they are a blessing from our blood. And a curse sharper than Valyrian steel. To glimpse the pattern is not to command the shuttle. To pull a single thread…" He shook his head, a slow, painful motion. "The whole weave can unravel in your hands."
Aerion felt the king's fingers through the cloth of his trousers. A hand that had once held a realm now trembled as if the world were too heavy to lift.
A stitch of soreness in Aerion's thigh pulled when he shifted on the stool.
He kept his face arranged.
Viserys sighed. "In all our history, since the Doom, there are only two times a dreamer truly shaped the course of fate, and lived to see it. Daenys the Dreamer. She saw the flames consuming the heavens, the earth cracking like an egg. She made us flee. And Aegon, the Conqueror. He dreamed of Westeros, a land waiting, unified under our fire. He turned his gaze west, when others would have looked east to rebuild a dead empire. They saw and then acted. The world bent."
His fingers tightened on Aerion's knee. "But for every Daenys, there are a hundred dreamers who saw a shadow and leapt from the tower to escape it. I… I too had a dream once. A good dream. A beautiful dream."
Aerion kept his face a mask of attentive sorrow, but inside, he was coiled, listening.
"I dreamed of a son," Viserys said, and his eyes were looking through Aerion. "A son with my father's strength and his mother's laugh. An heir to unite the realm. I wanted it… gods, I ached for it. I did everything. Everything a king, a man, could do to make that dream real." His voice frayed. "It led me to a knife. And a choice. And it led your grandmother Aemma to her death. My dream… my good dream… was the seed of my greatest sin. Indecision. The need to make the dream real blinded me to the cost. And the cost… it was everything."
Aerion's mind hissed, Your good dream is the pus in that bandage, and he almost smiled at the ugliness of it. The bandage on Viserys's chest, the seep of infection that never truly went away; it was his body writing the story his mouth refused to.
He didn't let the contempt reach his eyes.
He chose a careful line, gentle as a hand on a bruise. "You loved her."
Viserys opened his eyes. They shone. "I did."
Aerion let his own face soften, moulding his features into an echo of that shared grief. "My mother loved her too."
Mentioning Rhaenyra was a hook. It always worked.
Viserys blinked, returning to the room. His gaze softened, swimming with a fond, tragic warmth. "You are so like her, you know. Your mother. Not just in looks. In the heart of you. That fierce, unyielding love. It frightens people. It always has."
He was trying to find common ground in shared grief. Aerion leaned into it, sensing weakness. He sniffled, wiping his nose on his sleeve like a much younger child.
The motion disgusted him even as he did it.
Viserys's mouth worked, as if he fought a thought and lost. "And Alicent…" His voice faltered.
Aerion's skin prickled. He kept his expression neutral, attentive. "The Queen?"
Viserys's gaze slid away from Aerion and toward the maps piled in the corner, as if the sea charts could offer him a route out of confession. "Alicent was dear to Rhaenyra once."
Aerion didn't move. He didn't breathe.
Viserys's face did something complicated, a spasm of guilt and remembered pain. "They were friends," he said, the words so soft they were almost lost in the fire's crackle. "Close as sisters, for a time. Before… before everything curdled. Alicent was Rhaenyra's dearest companion. Her solace after… after Aemma was gone."
Friends.
Close as sisters.
For a heartbeat, he could not find the correct face. Anger rose, fast and bright, and behind it something that looked like disbelief wearing a smile.
His mind scrambled through the past years, all the moments he had filed away as weakness in Rhaenyra—her reluctance to speak Alicent's name with open contempt, her habit of cutting her anger short when it approached the Queen. All the flashes of restraint Aerion had filed away as softness, as stupid politeness.
It hadn't been softness.
It had been grief.
Aerion forced his hands to stay still and his mouth to remain soft.
The maester's history had contained no such footnote. It spoke of rivalry, of political factions, the Greens and the Blacks. It never spoke of two girls.
Why didn't she ever tell me? The thought was a white-hot spike. Why had Rhaenyra never said, as Aerion schemed and ranted, 'She was my once-friend'? Because the wound was too deep? Because she, like Viserys, had tried to bury the past and failed?
The fury that erupted in Aerion's chest was so immense, so incandescent, it threatened to vaporize his carefully constructed performance. He wanted to scream. He wanted to pick up the fire iron and beat this frail, rotting man until he understood the devastation he'd wrought for a dream. He wanted to find Alicent Hightower and—
"I… didn't know," Aerion said, and let his voice carry honest shock.
Viserys looked at him with something like relief, as if Aerion's ignorance excused Viserys's choices. "Few do," he murmured, a sad note in his voice. "And fewer remember. Time has a way of sanding people down. The sharp edges—the laughter, the secrets, the loyalty—they're the first to go."
Aerion thought of Luke's bandage, white and clean on the outside until it soaked through. Some things did not sand down. Some things only bled.
He swallowed. His tongue tasted like salt.
"When I married her," Viserys went on, "I clothed myself in duty. The court rustled for a queen. The realm hungered for more heirs. I told myself Rhaenyra, my fierce, clever girl, would understand the necessities of a crown." His eyes squeezed shut for a moment. "She was a girl with her mother freshly dead, and I took her dearest friend and placed her in her mother's bed. I did not think… I did not understand what I was taking."
Aerion's nails bit into his palm.
Viserys's gaze turned inward. "She tried. She tried so hard I mistook it for forgiveness."
Aerion kept the dutiful mask. Inside, something snarled.
Aerion wanted to laugh. He wanted to spit the truth like poison: She never forgave you.
He wanted to say: She learned the lesson you taught her—swallow it, smile—and now you ask why your house tastes of bile.
He did neither. He let his eyelashes dip, a show of respectful sorrow.
Viserys's voice dropped. "This is what indecision buys. A little quiet today, and a louder storm tomorrow."
Aerion held that line in his mind. See? You can see it. The pattern is clear as day to you. The cause and the effect. Viserys could be wise, in a passive, regret-soaked way. He could see the disease. He simply refused to pick up the knife and cut it out. He'd rather let the rot consume the limb, the body, the whole damned house.
Aerion pictured the histories Viserys loved to tell when he played at being grandfather instead of king—Aegon's dream, Daenys's warning, the grand sweep of fate bending under a Targaryen hand. Those tales always ended with action.
Well. If the king wouldn't pick up the knife, Aerion would hand it to him by the hilt
The moment was perfect. The king was drowning in regret, exposed, vulnerable. Aerion saw his opening, a narrow, treacherous path to the heart of the matter. He let his manufactured grief harden into something more fearful.
"There is another dream," Aerion said.
Viserys's gaze snapped back to him. "Another."
Aerion nodded, a small, hesitant dip of his chin. He made the movement speak of reluctance, of burden. I don't want to tell you this. I'm scared to. He could almost hear the king's internal coo: Sweet boy. Scared boy. Loyal boy, coming to me with his terrors.
"It comes back and back," he whispered, hugging his own arms. He made himself smaller on the stool. "I hate it. I… I hate her in it."
Viserys's brow furrowed, the loose skin gathering in deep folds. "Her?"
Aerion drew in a breath, and let it shudder. He engineered a slight constriction in his throat. When the words came, they were barely audible.
"The Queen."
Viserys froze.
Aerion pressed on, not allowing the silence to solidify into disbelief. "I see her in the Dragonpit," he swallowed hard, eyes shining. "But it's all wrong. It's full of… green light. And she has a crown in her hands. It's not yours. It's different. Sharper."
Viserys's mouth opened. A dry click, but no sound emerged.
"She places it on Aegon's head," Aerion continued, his tone soft, horribly matter-of-fact. "And Helaena stands beside him. In a green gown. And the people… They're chanting for them."
Viserys had gone as still as the stone dragons on Dragonstone. The scant colour in his face—the sickly tallow hue—drained away, leaving him the grey of a week-old corpse. The sweet-sour air of the room seemed to curdle, growing thin and desperate. Aerion watched the king's hands, where they rested on the arms of the chair, begin a fine, tremulous vibration.
Aerion lowered his gaze. He let the next part come out like something he could barely speak.
"And then… then the dream changes. I see Sunfyre." He let a genuine shiver run through him—contempt for the vain beast, not fear. "He's so beautiful. All gold. And his fire… it's the colour of Aegon's hair. And Mother is there, in black, running for Syrax…" He choked, a perfectly timed gag. "But the gold fire… it finds her. And she's… she's burning."
The effect was instantaneous, and more profound than Aerion had dared hope.
Viserys made a sound that was half gasp, half wounded animal. He jackknifed forward in the chair, his shoulders curling inward as if trying to shield his own heart from the words. His eyes went wide, the pupils swallowing the milky blue, fixed on some invisible horror in the middle distance. His lips moved, forming silent, shapeless words—denials, prayers to the Seven, a name. Rhaenyra.
For a heart-stopping second, Aerion thought he had killed the king with words alone.
But the old body clung stubbornly to its miserable spark. A ragged, wet inhale. Then another.
"What…" Viserys choked out. "What did you say?"
Aerion lifted a ravaged face. He let his lower lip quiver uncontrollably. "Alicent crowns Aegon. Sunfyre burns Mother. He… kills her."
He let the horror hang, then unleashed the final, calculated blow of a child's broken heart. "Please," he begged, his voice cracking into a wail. He slid from the stool to his knees on the rug, crawling the short distance to grasp Viserys's velvet-covered knee. "Please, Grandsire, send her away! Send her and her father away! They're horrible! They're evil!" The words were crude. Childish. Perfect. "They whisper and they smile and they want to take everything and burn it! Please, don't let my dream be true! Please!"
He was weeping in earnest now, great, heaving sobs that were a vent for an ocean of malice. He pressed his face against the King's leg, his small body convulsing.
The king's own breath began to even, not with calm, but with a dreadful, settling finality. The last of his denial, the last fragile hope that his family could be mended, shrivelled and blew away.
His arms, thin and roped with dying muscle, came up. They folded around the weeping prince. One hand came to cradle the back of Aerion's head, fingers tangling in silver hair. The other rubbed slow, shaky circles on his back.
"Hush now," Viserys murmured, his voice a dry leaf in the wind. "Hush, my boy. I am here. Your king is here."
"There," Viserys murmured, voice unsteady. "There, my sweet boy."
Aerion sobbed harder, because the King's voice had cracked in exactly the way Aerion wanted. He felt Viserys begin to rock slightly, small movements of comfort as if Aerion were younger. As if gentleness alone could rewind the years, could un-say the treason, could un-maim Luke.
"Hush," Viserys said. "You carry too much. Too much for your age."
Aerion clutched him tighter.
Viserys's fingers moved through Aerion's hair in slow strokes. The touch was clumsy and earnest. It broke something in Viserys's face; grief leaked out through the lines around his mouth and the sagging skin beneath his eyes.
"Aemma," Viserys whispered, as if the name might shield him. "Gods, Aemma. What have I done."
Aerion cranked the sobs up another notch, letting them become ragged, gasping things that stole the air from his lungs. He was a child drowning in a vision of his mother's death. "Don't let her, please, please, Grandsire, don't let her…"
Viserys bent his head, pressing his lips briefly to Aerion's crown—an impulsive, aching gesture that belonged to the man more than the king.
"I won't," Viserys whispered. "I see it now. I see the path. You have shown me." He held his grandson tighter, as if the boy's small body could ward off the future he'd described. "You have shown me the truth in the dark."
Aerion made a small sound of relief and despair braided together. He held the King as if he were the only solid thing in a dissolving world, and he kept crying.
And inside the shelter of Viserys's arms, where no one could see his face, Aerion's mouth curled.
He let it vanish before the next sob shook him, and he pressed closer, as if he needed comfort more than air.
Viserys kept stroking his hair and whispering soft nonsense meant to soothe a frightened boy.
He had him.
The air in the antechamber was thick with held breath and salt-damp wool. It smelled of spent candles and the faint, sweetish rot of the poppy draught from the next room.
Everyone was there, waiting. They had been talking. Their words stopped mid-air when he appeared.
Rhaenyra stood by the cold hearth, a silhouette carved from obsidian and fatigue. Daemon leaned against the doorframe to the inner chamber, his posture deceptively loose, a still point in the gathered tension. Corlys and Rhaenys occupied two heavy chairs, a united front of weathered stone. Laenor, his face hollow with a grief that had been explained to him in brutal, second-hand strokes, stared at nothing, fingers twisting absently around a ring. Jace was a statue by the window, his back to the room, watching the grey sea chew the rocks below.
The door clicked shut behind Aerion.
All heads turned. The silence shifted, becoming pointed, anticipatory.
He walked to the center of the worn Myrish rug. He did not look at any of them. He could feel the heat of their attention, a physical pressure against his skin.
He had not bothered to wash his face.
His eyes were raw, the lids swollen and pink.
That was the only trace he carried from the king's solar. The rest—his small sobs, his shaking voice, the way he'd folded himself into Viserys's arms like a child who feared the dark—he'd left behind as neatly as a cloak on a peg.
Or so he'd told himself.
He could still feel the king's hand in his hair.
I will set it right.
The promise had come late, after Aerion's crying had dwindled to shuddering hiccups and his body had gone limp with the performance of exhaustion.
"My boy," Viserys had said, voice raw as scraped parchment. "I am sorry." A pause. The softest break in it. "I am so sorry."
Then, quieter still: "I will set this right. I swear it."
Aerion had lifted his head and let his lashes cling together with the last of the tears. He'd given the king a nod that looked like gratitude. He'd made his hands unclench from the velvet of Viserys's robe with careful slowness, like letting go of a lifeline.
Viserys had not released him easily. The king's fingers had tightened at the back of Aerion's neck.
"Go to your mother," Viserys had murmured. "Stay by her. Stay by Lucerys. I will—" He swallowed. "I will do what must be done."
Aerion had bowed when he was finally let go. A perfect little prince, all manners and damp eyes.
The corridor outside had tasted of salt and stone. The cold air had dried the wetness on his cheeks into tight tracks.
Halfway down the hall, the mask had begun to slip.
Viserys's words kept replaying, circling the same poisoned center: Alicent was dear to Rhaenyra once.
Dear.
Friend.
Close as sisters.
Aerion felt something twist behind his ribs as if a hand had reached in and turned him. He'd walked past servants with bowed heads, past tapestries that rippled with drafts, and inside him the fury had built without sound.
"Well?" Rhaenyra's voice was scraped raw. "What did he want?"
Aerion blinked, slow. He focused on a knot in the wooden floorboard. "He asked about the night. About dreams." He lied. His own voice came out flat, stripped of the performance, all bone. "I told him the solution is to take that pious green cunt and hang her from the battlements by her own prayer beads."
A startled, choked half-laugh, half-cough escaped Daemon. He didn't move from the doorframe, but his mouth twitched.
Rhaenyra's face tightened, a ripple of annoyance breaking through her exhaustion. "Aerion. You will not use such language. It is vile and unbefitting."
Something in Aerion's spine went very straight. He lifted his gaze from the floor and fixed it on her.
"Unbefitting," he repeated. The word was ash in his mouth.
He took a step toward her. "What's befitting, Mother? Smiling while she spits on us? Praying while her son puts out my brother's eye?" His voice was climbing. "Sending polite ravens while her father sharpens the knives?"
"You are distraught," Rhaenyra said, drawing herself up. The Princess, the Heir. "We are all distraught. But we do not become animals."
"Animals bite," Aerion snarled. "We just bleed. And you let her. You've always let her."
Rhaenyra flinched as if struck. "I have never—"
"Because you were friends."
The word fell into the room like a stone into a deep well. It swallowed all other sound.
Rhaenyra froze. Her eyes widened with a horrified recognition that made her look young in the ugliest way.
Laenor's head came up. Corlys's fingers stilled on the arm of his chair. Rhaenys's gaze sharpened, cutting from Aerion to his mother.
"He told you," Rhaenyra whispered.
"Was it a secret?" Aerion's laugh was a short, ugly bark. "Should I be honored? The great, tragic secret of the realm? That the Green Queen and the Heir Apparent used to giggle together and braid each other's hair?"
"Aerion." Jace's voice was a low warning from the window. He had turned, his face pale.
"It is not your concern!" Aerion whirled on him, the motion too fast. The edge of the rug caught his heel and he stumbled. His bad thigh seized at the same time, a hot, humiliating pull that made the stumble worse than it should have been. He caught himself and hated that his body chose this moment to betray him too. The room seemed to tilt, the faces of his family blurring at the edges before snapping back into cruel focus.
The control he'd worn like a second skin in the king's solar was gone, sloughed off, revealing the raw, pulsing thing beneath. "All this time. All her sanctimony, her whispers, her knives. And you… you just frowned. You got angry. But you never ended her. I thought it was politics. But it's just… sentiment. You're clinging to a ghost of a girl who chose to become your stepmother."
"You know nothing of it," Rhaenyra shot back, color flooding her pale cheeks. "You were not there!"
"I am here now!" he screamed, and this time his voice broke on the last word, splintering into a humiliating, childlike squeak that made his face burn hotter. The sound tore at his throat, leaving a coppery tang of blood on his tongue. He must have bitten it. "I am here, and Luke is in there with half a face because you were too busy mourning a friendship to see the enemy in your hall!"
"It is not so simple—"
"It is! You are the heir! Act like it! Crush her! But you won't. You're just like him. You see the rot and you pray it'll go away on its own. You're a weakling."
Rhaenyra recoiled as if the word were a slap. Daemon pushed off the doorframe, his relaxed pose gone. "Boy," he said, the single syllable a blade of ice.
Corlys stood up, his chair scraping loudly. "By the waves, child, you go too far!"
Rhaenys was on her feet too. "Aerion Velaryon, you will cease this instant."
Aerion didn't look at them. His whole world had narrowed to his mother's stricken face. The fury in him blew its seams, spilling out in scalding bursts, spewing everything, anything, to make her feel the burn he felt.
He saw Jace take a jerky, aborted half-step forward from the window, his hand half-raised, face a contortion of fury and a desperate, helpless urge to somehow make it stop.
He was spiralling, the words coming now in a torrent, ugly and mean and aimed to maim. "Or is it more than that? Is it like Father? You can't help what you… want?" He spat the word, his young face contorted with a disgust that felt visceral. "Do you love her? Is that the sickness? After all she's done, you still love the pious whore who wants your throne and your children's blood?"
"Aerion, for gods' sake!" Laenor surged to his feet, his own anguish morphing into outrage.
"Stay out of this!" Aerion whirled on him. "You with your pretend marriage and your pretend heirs! You're part of the lie! We're all suffocating in your politeness!"
His chest was heaving. Snot and tears mingled on his chin. He was coming apart in the center of the room, a whirlwind of spit and fury and a grief so profound it had curdled into rage.
Jace made a strangled sound, his face a mask of stunned betrayal. "Aerion, stop!"
Aerion's gaze cut to him, and it softened for half a breath, which made it uglier when the softness vanished. "You followed them," he snapped. "You left me asleep and you followed them, and now you want to tell me how to speak."
Jace's face crumpled with rage and shame. He took a step forward.
Daemon was moving. "That's it."
But Aerion was spiraling, tumbling down a shaft of his own making, grabbing at any ledge to hurt, to make the internal fire external. He saw Daemon approach and rounded on him.
"And you! Don't you dare. I see you hovering. You don't care about Luke. You just want to marry her. Well, she's married! He's right there!" He flung a hand toward Laenor, who looked gutted. "So take your stupid, dragon-thieving daughters and go back to your brothels and your little wars! This is all their fault anyway! All of it! I hate you! I hate all of you!"
He didn't see the move. One second Aerion was breathing hard, shoulders shaking, the next Daemon was behind him, arm hooking around Aerion's middle just under the ribs.
Aerion jerked, startled, then went feral.
"Get off me!" he screamed, thrashing. "Let me—let me—"
Daemon shifted his grip with efficiency. Aerion's feet left the rug. The world tipped. Daemon tucked him under his left arm like a sack of grain, folding him over his forearm so Aerion's head and arms hung down toward the floor.
Rhaenyra's voice rose, panicked. "Daemon!"
Aerion dangled, head and arms hanging down toward the floor, Daemon's forearm a bar of iron across his chest, pinning his own arms to his sides. He couldn't kick. He could only writhe. He tried anyway—his legs jerking uselessly—and the strained muscle barked with a sharp, tearing warning that stole a breath from him.
"Let me GO!" The scream was muffled, furious, impotent. He bucked, his legs churning air.
"You're done," Daemon said, his voice utterly calm. He didn't even sound angry.
"Daemon," Rhaenyra's voice was a thread.
"He's fouling the air," Daemon said, not looking at her. He adjusted his grip, hefting the squirming weight. "I'll return him when he remembers how to breathe without setting things on fire."
"Let me GO! I'LL BURN YOU! I'LL—"
Daemon turned, carrying the thrashing, shrieking bundle toward the door as one might carry a sack of particularly furious cats. He nodded once, a curt, wordless thing to Rhaenyra—I have this—or perhaps, you deal with that and shouldered his way out into the corridor.
The last they saw was Aerion's silver hair, wild and upside down, and the heel of one boot vanishing around the doorframe. The sound of his muffled roars faded down the stone hall, punctuated by the heavy, even tread of Daemon's boots.
Rhaenyra stood perfectly still, staring at the space where her son had been. Her breath came in short, sharp pulls. The colour had drained from her face, leaving her looking bloodless and carved. The accusation—weak, like the King, do you love her?—hung in the air, a poison no one could antidote.
Laenor had sunk back onto the bench, his face buried in his hands, his shoulders shaking silently.
Jace stared at the closed door, his own anger forgotten, replaced by a stunned, helpless horror.
Corlys let out a long, weary breath that seemed to come from the depths of the sea.
Rhaenys walked to Rhaenyra, standing close enough that her presence was a quiet anchor in the storm. Her own face was unreadable, but her eyes held a cold, assessing light.
"Well," Rhaenys said, her voice dry as dust. "He has never been one for subtlety."
Rhaenyra's jaw worked. She seemed to be looking at something far away, her eyes glassy with a pain that went beyond Luke's injury. When she finally spoke, her voice was hollow
"He called me my father."
No one answered.
Daemon didn't slow until the antechamber door sat a dozen paces behind them and the noise of Aerion's muffled screaming had thinned into something the corridor could swallow.
High Tide's halls were long and damp. The morning light seeped through narrow windows cut into the outer wall, turning the air a cold pewter. Somewhere below, the sea kept grinding at the cliff with steady, patient violence.
Aerion bucked under Daemon's arm like a cat in a sack, boots kicking at nothing, fingers clawing for purchase he couldn't find. His words came out mangled by position and rage.
"Put me down—put me down—"
Daemon adjusted his grip without effort, a small shift of forearm across Aerion's chest that pinned him tighter. Aerion's arms went deadened against his sides; all he had left was the thrash of legs and the heat of his mouth.
"You've got a lot of opinions for someone currently upside down," Daemon said.
Aerion twisted his head far enough to spit. The glob hit Daemon's boot and slid.
Daemon looked down at it as if it were an interesting insect. Then he kept walking.
"I'll kill you," Aerion snarled. The promise was too big for his small body, which only made it uglier. "I swear I'll—"
Daemon stopped beside a window.
It wasn't a narrow slit like the others. It was wider, a carved opening meant to show off the view—the kind of thing lords built when they wanted their guests to remember how much stone they owned. The wind poured through it in a hard, cold rush. The smell of the sea hit like a slap.
Daemon turned slightly, glancing out.
Far below, the water churned dark against the cliff. White foam snapped and vanished. Gulls wheeled in slow loops, indifferent to princes and their tantrums.
Aerion felt the air shift and braced, instinct screaming.
Daemon's voice stayed conversational. "You want to kick me again?"
Aerion did it anyway—boots chopping at the air, trying to find Daemon's ribs, his hip, anything.
Daemon sighed, a long-suffering sound. "Fine."
He stepped closer to the opening and, with a smooth motion that made Aerion's stomach lurch, slid him outward. Aerion's head and shoulders cleared the stone ledge.
For a fraction of a second the world became only air and drop.
Aerion's breath punched out of him. His hair whipped straight down. The sea yawned up, too far to feel real until it wasn't.
Daemon's forearm tightened around Aerion's chest, iron and unyielding. He held him there like he was weighing a sack over a market stall.
Aerion froze.
"You wouldn't," he rasped.
Daemon leaned his head toward the opening, peering down like a man checking the weather. "I've dropped plenty of things. Swords. Bodies. Hopes." A pause. "They all make much the same sound on the way down."
Aerion's eyes flashed. "I'm—"
"A prince," Daemon finished for him, utterly bored. "Yes. A very loud, very tiresome one. The sea doesn't care. The rocks certainly won't."
Aerion's fingers scrabbled at Daemon's sleeve, finding leather, then nothing, then leather again. His grip tightened until his hands cramped.
The wind snatched the rest of his words away. His rage tried to fill the space where breath should go and failed.
Daemon gave him a small, careless bounce.
Aerion made a broken sound that he would have denied to the grave.
"Calm down," Daemon said. "Or I let go. My arm's getting tired."
A lie. Daemon's arm was steady as a stone bridge. But it worked.
Aerion's throat worked. He tasted salt. The wind had thrown it into his mouth.
His legs had stopped kicking. They hung uselessly now, trembling with the effort of holding themselves together. The air was cold enough to sting his wet lashes, cold enough to press against the heat in his chest and tamp it down by force.
Daemon waited.
Aerion's breathing turned heavy and uneven, dragged in through his nose like he had to remember how to do it. The wind smoothed him with rough hands. It stripped him bare, scouring away the hysteria until only the raw, shivering core of him remained.
The silence stretched until Aerion's muscles began to tire.
Daemon spoke again, quieter. "You done."
Aerion swallowed, a hard bob of his throat. His voice came out raw. "Put me back."
Daemon didn't move. The only indication he'd heard was a slight tilt of his head.
Aerion's jaw tightened. His pride tried to stand up and found no ground beneath it. He forced the words out anyway, slow, scraped. "I'm calm."
Daemon gave him another bounce, smaller this time. A test. Aerion's stomach lurched. His fingers clenched so hard the joints whitened.
"I said I'm calm!" Aerion repeated.
Daemon studied him for a beat, eyes narrowed as if he could see the shape of lies on his face. Then he hauled Aerion back in with one clean pull and set him down on the stone floor like he was placing a bucket.
Aerion's boots hit. His knees buckled. His thigh screamed when he caught himself, the muscle tightening into a knot that trembled with leftover adrenaline. He stayed crouched a while.
Daemon crouched a little, close enough to be a shadow over him. "Look at you," he said, almost mild. "All those sweet, polite words in the hall last night. That calm voice. I thought you were born wearing a courtier's skin."
Aerion lifted his head. His eyes were still swollen. The anger in them had dulled into something bleak.
"I was," he said hoarsely. "I just took it off."
Daemon's mouth twitched. "You should learn to keep it on," he advised, his tone deceptively light. "Takes years to tailor a good one. You'll do marvelous things in court one day, provided you don't melt it off in a tantrum first."
Aerion pushed himself upright, moving stiffly. He wiped at his face with the back of his sleeve, a rough, childlike motion that smeared damp and salt across his skin. The action felt futile. He couldn't wipe away the red rims of his eyes, the puffiness.
"Go to the Seven Hells," he muttered.
Daemon's mouth twitched. It might have been a smile in another man. On Daemon it looked like a wolf showing just the edge of a tooth. "Better," he said. "That's your voice again."
Aerion glared up at him. The glare lacked heat, which annoyed him further. He wanted the fire back. This hollow ache was just… damage. He felt scraped raw.
Seemingly reading the thought, Daemon reached out and grabbed a fistful of Aerion's rumpled tunic at the chest. He gave him a single, sharp shake, just to rattle his teeth in his skull.
Aerion's teeth clicked.
Daemon let go as casually as he'd taken hold. "Still calm?"
Aerion's hands curled into fists at his sides. His voice dropped into a colder tone. "Yes."
Daemon watched him for a moment longer, as if waiting for the boy to explode again out of spite.
When he didn't Daemon straightened. The hint of a smile finally showed. "Good."
Aerion's eyes narrowed. "You enjoyed that."
Daemon didn't bother denying it. A shrug of one shoulder. "You have a gift. You see the strings. You know how to pull them. What you lack is the discipline to not pull them when your own hands are shaking. You lost control because you care. A dangerous, and common, flaw in our line."
Aerion flinched at that.
"I was right," he said, the words coming out quieter now. "She let it fester. She let it grow."
Daemon's gaze slid toward the direction of Luke's chamber. "Your mother has been taught her whole life that patience is a queen's virtue," he said. "Some women pray. Some wait. Some sharpen."
"And some do something," Aerion snapped, the ember flaring—weakling, weakling— before he caught himself. He saw Daemon's eyebrow lift slightly. Aerion's chest rose and fell sharply. He forced the next breath to come in clean, measured, matching the rhythm of the waves below. He did not want to be a dangling, upside-down lesson again.
Daemon's eyes flicked back to him. "You want her to do something," he said. "Then stop throwing your grief at her. She'll either crumble or harden. You want hardened."
Aerion's mouth tightened. He tasted blood, faint and coppery, where he'd bitten the inside of his cheek during the outburst.
"You will go back," Daemon said. "You will look your mother in the eye. And you will apologize. You will tell her you were mad with grief for Luke. You aimed for the heart but struck like a drunken archer, hitting everyone in the vicinity. A waste of good venom."
Aerion's voice was hoarse but steady, the cold finally settling into his tone. "I'm not sorry."
"I didn't ask you to be," Daemon replied, unfazed. "I told you to say you are. Do you understand the difference?"
Slowly, pushing himself up on arms that still felt like water, Aerion got to his feet. He wavered for a moment, then found his balance. The cold air from the window had smoothed the last of the hysterical edges from his mind. The hollow chill was consolidating into a familiar, focused calm. The Brightflame was banked, the ashes cold.
"Yes," Aerion said. His voice was flat.
Daemon studied him, then nodded, satisfied. "I will tell your mother you have… cooled. And that you will return later to make amends. Do not make a liar of me, nephew. The next time I have to douse your flames, I won't use sea air."
He didn't wait for a reply. He turned and walked back down the corridor, his footsteps echoing faintly. Aerion stood alone by the window, the roar of the sea below a constant reminder. He inhaled the cold, salt-tinged air deeply, let it scour the last of the smoke from his lungs.
Aerion left the little watchroom with the sea still in his lungs.
The corridor outside felt warmer by comparison, close with stone and smoke and the damp wool stink that clung to Driftmark like a second skin. His boots sounded too loud. His hands kept trying to curl into fists, then flatten again, then curl, an argument he couldn't win with his own tendons.
Apologize, Daemon had said.
Aerion walked anyway, because standing still meant thinking, and thinking meant his mind skittering back to Luke's bandage, to the wet stain creeping. It meant hearing the things he'd said, the ugly, perfect, unforgivable words he'd carved into his family's skin, and knowing every one of them was true.
He tried to put words together for his mother.
I'm sorry.
The phrase tasted like stale water.
Forgive me.
Worse.
The truth: I am sorry you are weak. I am sorry your sentiment bred this monster. I am sorry I have to lie to you now.
He tried again, slower.
I spoke in anger. I shouldn't have—
No. His jaw clenched so hard his teeth ached.
He rounded a corner and nearly walked into them.
Aemond came down the passage with a maester at his shoulder. The boy's posture looked poured from iron. His face was a map of last night's violence: swollen bridge of nose, bruising under one eye, though the blood was gone. He held his head high anyway, as if pride alone could re-set bone and command respect.
Aerion's body reacted before his mind did.
A sharp, metallic tang flooded the back of his tongue, the phantom aftertaste of a lifetime ago. Green flame. Screaming. His own. His shoulders drew back and tightened. His throat narrowed as if the air had turned to grit.
The corridor seemed to flatten around him, the rich tapestries bleeding into dun-colored stone, the sounds of distant life in the keep muffling into a dull roar. Only Aemond remained in sharp focus, a single, vivid point of wrongness.
Without breaking stride, without a flicker of acknowledgment, Aerion changed direction. He turned sharply into a side corridor, a shadow detaching itself.
"Aerion."
The voice cracked against the stone. Too formal, and controlled.
Aerion's teeth pressed together. His jaw ached with the pressure. Don't say my name. You have no right to the shape of it in your mouth. He kept walking.
"Nephew."
Aerion stopped. He did not turn. He stared at the wall before him, seeing nothing. His hands, hanging at his sides, curled slowly into fists. He felt the ghost-pressure of a knife hilt. He saw Luke's bandage. He made himself breathe. In. Out. Stone.
His boots stayed planted. Everything else in him leaned forward, he had the distant knowledge that if he moved wrong, guards would come.
He turned slowly.
Aemond stood with his hands at his sides, fingers flexing once as if he couldn't help it, a nervous habit he'd die before admitting to.The maester glanced between them and swallowed, then tried to angle his body slightly closer to Aemond.
"My prince," the maester murmured, voice thin. "Prince Aemond should return to the Queen. His stitches—"
Aemond's eyes didn't leave Aerion. "Go," he said, and the maester flinched.
The man hesitated, then did the coward's compromise: he didn't leave, but he drifted a half-step away.
Aerion said nothing.
"It was an accident," Aemond said. He said it like he'd practiced it in his head, like he'd rehearsed the shape of accident until it fit around the memory without cutting. "They came at me. Four of them. They struck first." His voice was too level, each syllable placed with careful precision. "I drew my knife to ward them off. It was… not intended."
Aerion's face didn't change. Inside, something sharp paced in circles.
Aemond's gaze flicked, just for an instant, to Aerion's hands—checking for a weapon, maybe, or for the tremor of grief. Finding neither, his eyes snapped back to Aerion's.
"It was dark," Aemond insisted. "They were screaming. Baela hit me. Rhaena was crying. The knife was in my hand. There was shoving."
Aerion heard the words. They slid past him without catching. The only part that mattered was the image of Luke on the bench, hands over his face, small body shaking like it was trying to crawl out of itself.
Aemond's voice sharpened. "They mocked me," he said, and this time there was something real in it—hurt turned into a weapon. "All my life. That… that spectacle in the Dragonpit. The pig.… They— they could not accept that I had claimed a dragon of my own. That I was no longer the one they could scorn with impunity." His mouth twisted. "I was defending myself. They came at me. I didn't start it."
The pig?
For a heartbeat, Aerion's mind blanked. The word seemed ludicrous, a non sequitur thrown into the chasm between them.
Then he remembered: the Dragonpit. Laughter too loud, Aegon's face flushed with mean delight. A squirming pink body with brooms tied to its back. Luke's bright, uncomplicated grin. Jace trying not to laugh and failing. And Aemond, rigid, his face a thundercloud of humiliated fury. A child's prank. A moment of stupid, petty cruelty.
The Pink Dread.
A cold understanding dripped into Aerion's mind.
He did it because of a pig.
Aemond's grievance wasn't about last night. Last night was the culmination. The wound ran backward, through years of small humiliations. A boy without a dragon in a house built on dragons, forced to swallow his envy while others strutted and flew.
Aerion understood the shape of it with ugly clarity.
Aemond had been offended by a stupid prank.
And he'd answered that offense with an eye.
Aerion's stomach tightened, hard.
Aemond was still speaking, the words blurring together now, a litany of grievance. "…never a fair fight, never an honorable… they think their blood makes mockery permissible... your mother lets them run wild, lets them think the rules are not for them… "
The white-hot wire behind Aerion's eyes snapped.
He turned. Slowly.
"It was Aegon."
The words were so quiet they were almost inaudible. They hung in the corridor's damp air.
Aemond blinked. "What?"
"The Pink Dread." Aerion's voice was flat, devoid of all heat. "The mocking. The 'pranks'. The trip-wire in the training yard when you were seven. The rotten pear in your prayer book. All of it." He let the list of humiliations hang. "It was Aegon. Never Jace or Luke. Aegon."
The corridor seemed to grow colder.
Aemond's face went blank with confusion, then tightened. "Jace and Luke were there. They laughed."
"They were laughing at their elder uncle's joke," Aerion said, each word a chip of ice dropped between them. "And it was Aegon's joke. The joke was always Aegon's."
Aemond's jaw worked. The maester looked between them, utterly lost. "Prince Aerion, this is hardly the time for—"
"You know it," Aerion said softly.
Aemond's throat worked. "You don't know what you're talking about."
"You do," Aerion continued, taking a single step forward. Aemond took an unconscious step back, his shoulder brushing the stone wall. "You've always known. In here." Aerion tapped his own temple. "But you wouldn't do anything to Aegon, would you? Your mommy wouldn't approve. He's her precious firstborn. The future she prays for. The sun in her green sky. So you took the fury she lets you nurse, the nice, righteous fury at the bastards, and you spent it on the ones you could reach. The ones whose pain wouldn't cost you anything."
Aemond's cheeks flushed darker. "Do not speak of my mother."
Aerion's tone sharpened by a hair. "Your mother," he said, "would watch you gnaw your own arm off before she let you bite the hand that feeds her dreams."
Aemond's eyes went wild. "My mother is the Queen."
Aerion's head tilted. "And still," he murmured, "you only dared strike at boys you could reach. Boys she already hated. You are a coward."
Aemond stepped forward, the rigid control cracking. "Take that back."
Aerion's voice stayed low, poisonous. "You were humiliated by a pig and answered with a knife. You tell yourself it was about honor." He leaned in just enough to make the words intimate. "It was about being small. And you still are."
Rage and humiliation and pride twisted Aemond's features into something unrecognizable. "You think you're better—" He spat, and the sentence broke apart as it left him, anger turning the words into jagged pieces. "You think because you—because you dream and you whisper in the King's ear—
Aerion struck him. The twist of his hips sent a bright flare up his wounded thigh, quick as lightning.
The slap cracked across the corridor.
Aemond's head snapped sideways. His feet skidded on the stone. He went down hard, hand shooting out to catch himself. Shock lagged behind pain on his face. He stared at the floor as if he couldn't understand why he was suddenly there.
The maester yelped, then found his voice. "Guards! Guards—"
Aerion stood over Aemond, breathing steady, face blank. His hand stung, the skin on his palm already warming, but his expression didn't change. He looked down at Aemond like he was examining an insect pinned to a board.
Aemond lifted his head slowly, one hand pressed to his cheek. His eyes were bright with disbelief more than tears. He didn't expect me to hit him, Aerion thought.
Aerion bent at the waist, just enough that his shadow fell over Aemond, and his voice landed right in the shell of his ear, where he couldn't escape it.
"Your mother is a cunt," Aerion said, very calm.
Aemond's mouth fell open. A tiny bubble of blood formed at the corner of his cut lip and popped.
His voice emerged, strangled, raw. "You filthy—"
Aerion didn't let him finish.
"Your mother," he repeated, softer this time, almost conversational, "is a cunt. And you—" His gaze swept over Aemond's stunned, half-risen posture. "Are a bitch."
He straightened. His violet eyes were flat, devoid of triumph or hatred. "And you are nothing else to me."
He turned and walked away.
There, he thought, and the thought had no words, only a shape. A satisfaction, lean and mean.
He had done what his mother would not. What his grandsire could never.
He had carved out the infected part. He had named the rot and spat on it. He had made Aemond small on the floor, and for a moment, the world had felt correctly ordered.
The corridors of High Tide blurred. Torchlight smeared on damp stone.
He reached the door to Luke's chamber.
He hesitated a beat then pushed the door open.
A single brazier glowed in the corner, its heat a feeble protest against the deep, stone-bound chill that radiated from the bed.
Luke lay as he had left him, a small bundle beneath linens. Rhaenyra sat alone in the same chair, her posture curved in on itself. She held Luke's hand, but her gaze was fixed on the middle distance, seeing nothing.
Good, Aerion thought, the knot in his chest loosening a fraction. He would only have to face his mother. The others—Corlys's silent judgment, Rhaenys's piercing stare, Jace's wounded confusion, Laenor's helpless sorrow—he could navigate those later.
She heard the door. Her head turned slowly.
Her eyes found Aerion. They were red-rimmed, exhausted, but they sharpened. They took in his face, his posture, the peculiar stillness that clung to him. She saw something there. The absence of the storm that had raged out of this room hours before.
Aerion met her gaze. The cool hollow in his chest pulsed.
I can speak now, he thought. The fury was spent. The wire was gone. He had purged it on Aemond's cheek. He was empty of poison. He could now offer her something else. Something clean.
He walked to the foot of Luke's bed. He looked at his brother's sleeping face, at the tragic slope of the bandage.
He opened his mouth.
The words were there. He could feel them, lined up like smooth, worn stones. I am sorry, Mother. I was not myself. The grief… it took me. Forgive me. They were shallow words; they were empty words. They were the words a son was supposed to say.
They sat on his tongue, ready.
He looked at Rhaenyra. He saw the hope flicker in her eyes. The hope that the monstrous child who had screamed such truths was gone, and her son had returned.
He tried to give her what she wanted.
His throat closed.
The stones of those words slid, scraping against something in him that had no give. He could make himself speak to the King. He could kneel and cry on command. He could pour honey into venom. He could lie to half the realm and watch them swallow it with grateful faces.
Rhaenyra was different.
With her, the lie had nowhere to sit. It wouldn't settle. It rose back up like spoiled milk. He pictured himself saying it—Forgive me—and felt his stomach twist, because forgiveness implied he had been wrong in the way she needed him to be wrong. It implied he could be smoothed down, made safe, made manageable.
Worse: it implied he was willing to trade truth for quiet.
But he wasn't. He couldn't.
Aerion's fingers flexed once at his sides. His hands still held the memory of violence, the sting in his palm from Aemond's cheek, the dull ache in his knuckles from hours spent clenching and unclenching with nothing to strike. He could speak the apology and let the words do their little dance, but his body would betray him anyway. She would see it, the tension that never left him, the way his anger didn't burn out so much as coil and wait.
The hollow in his chest was a void. And the void had no language for gentle lies. The words turned to ash before they could reach his lips. They were foreign. They belonged to another boy in another story.
He closed his mouth.
Rhaenyra's flicker died.
Aerion saw it go. He watched her face change.
For a heartbeat, he thought she might turn away. Might retreat into the hard, distant place she wore when she had to be the Princess and the Heir and the woman everyone measured.
She didn't.
Rhaenyra stepped closer, careful, as if approaching a skittish animal that might bolt or bite. Her hands rose, then hesitated midair. Aerion didn't move to meet them. He didn't move away.
One palm cradled the back of his head, her fingers threading into his salt-stiff hair. The other arm wrapped around his shoulders, pulling him against the black wool of her mourning gown.
Aerion's body resisted out of reflex—shoulders hard, spine locked—then sagged by a fraction, as if his muscles had finally tired of holding him upright.
"Hush," she murmured into his hair. "You don't have to say anything."
A tremor, fine as a plucked wire, ran through him.
Her grip tightened, almost fierce. "I should have—" Her voice broke on the edge of it, and she swallowed. "I should have seen sooner. I should have—" She shook her head once, a sharp, angry motion meant to cut off her own grief before it turned into something useless.
She rested her cheek against the crown of his head. "I am sorry," she whispered. "I am so sorry, my fierce boy."
He didn't answer. There were no words for that, either. But he turned his face slightly, just enough to press into the dark velvet of her sleeve.
Notes:
... so many languages but bro chose to speak facts.
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