The hour after her world was unmade and remade was a blur. Rhaenyra sat in a warm, quiet room, her mother's hand in hers, the simple reality of it a constant, grounding shock. The torrent of tears had passed, leaving behind a field of questions that bloomed in the silence.
"Were you scared?" Rhaenyra whispered, her voice still hoarse. It was the first thing she needed to know, not about kingdoms or dragons, but about her mother.
Aemma smiled, a sad, gentle expression. "Terrified," she admitted softly. "Until I woke up and saw him." Her eyes drifted to the cradle where Baelon slept, a perfect, living refutation of the tomb they'd built for him in King's Landing. "After that… I was just grateful."
Sirius, sitting with them, spoke of the Skagosi people—fiercely loyal, hardened by the north but living in a prosperity that mocked the squalor of Flea Bottom. Aemma spoke of the ships, of the nascent empire of trade and influence Harry was building under the guise of the Obsidian Hand. It was overwhelming, a flood of information about a world she hadn't known existed, a world of safety and strength that made the Red Keep, with all its power and prestige, feel like a cage of painted tin.
Later, they gathered in the heart of the citadel. The chamber was dark, dominated by a single, vast table upon which a map of Westeros glowed with a soft, inner light. It was the first true meeting of their impossible council.
Aemma looked at her daughter, her expression shifting from maternal warmth to a queen's pragmatism. "My love, you must understand what this means. Baelon lives. By all the laws of gods and men, the oaths the lords swore to you in the throne room… they are built on a foundation of sand."
The words settled on Rhaenyra, cold and heavy. "So my claim is meaningless."
"Your claim was always meaningless," Harry's voice cut through the gloom, drawing all their eyes. He stood at the head of the glowing table, and the light from the map cast his face in shadow, making him seem like a creature born of the land itself. "The oaths are words. The moment your father dies, the Hightowers will crown Aegon, and the lords will choose the path of least resistance. Your claim was never a throne. It was an invitation to a civil war that you were meant to lose."
He pointed, his finger tracing a crack in the painted land. "That is the prize they are all fighting for," he said, his voice laced with a quiet contempt. "A chair of twisted swords that forces good men to make monstrous choices. It poisons everything it touches. The goal is not to win that game, Rhaenyra. The goal is to end it."
She looked at him, then at the faces around the table. Her mother, alive and whole. Sirius, a guardian of grim, unshakeable loyalty. Her brother, sleeping peacefully, free from a destiny that would have demanded his death. This was her family. This was a power that could unmake the world and build a better one in its place. In that moment, her grief did not vanish, but it crystalized. It hardened from a dull ache into the sharp, clear point of a spear.
"What do you need me to do?" she asked Harry, and the fragile girl who had wept in the godswood was gone, replaced by a voice that held the authority of a queen.
"You must play your part," Harry instructed, his tone softening. "Return to the cage. Be the dutiful daughter and the patient heir. Listen. Watch. Let Otto Hightower spin his webs. Let the lords whisper their treacheries. Be my eyes inside the castle walls. We will let them play their game, and with every move they make, they will reveal the rottenness of the system they are fighting to preserve."
Rhaenyra rose to her feet, her spine straight, her bearing every bit the Princess of Dragonstone. "I will not swear you an oath of fealty, Lord Potter. My fealty is to my own blood." She looked pointedly at her mother. "But I will swear an oath of alliance. To our family. To the new world you intend to build. My fire and my blood are yours to command."
The journey back was instantaneous, a silent passage from one reality to another. One moment, she was in the clean, crisp air of Skagos, her heart pounding with purpose. The next, she stood alone in the godswood, the humid, heavy air of King's Landing closing in around her like a shroud. To any outward eye, nothing had changed. But within her, the entire world had shifted on its axis.
That evening, at a small council meeting, she played her part to perfection. She listened with quiet deference as Otto Hightower spoke of the challenges a female ruler would face, his words honeyed poison meant for her father's ear. She watched as her father, weary and sad, offered a weak defense of her position.
But as she looked at the faces of these powerful men, she felt a profound, almost pitying sense of distance. She was no longer a piece in their game. She was a player in a much larger one, one whose rules they couldn't even begin to comprehend.
Later, as she walked back to her chambers, she passed the open doors of the throne room. She stopped, looking in at the ugly, misshapen chair that had cost her family so much. The Iron Throne. For the first time, she saw it clearly. Not as a symbol of power, but as a butcher's bill made manifest. A relic. A tombstone for a past that, for her, was already dead.