While Dragonstone thrummed with industry and ambition, the Red Keep festered with a different kind of energy. King's Landing was a pot perpetually on the verge of boiling over, and King Viserys I, the well-intentioned potter, was too busy applying bandages to feel the heat.
His problems were manifold, a hydra he could never quite behead. The city itself was a tinderbox. The influx of poor and desperate from our recruitment drives, while strengthening Dragonstone, had not gone unnoticed. Otto Hightower, ever the viper, whispered in the king's ear that the "flight of the smallfolk" was a sign of the prince's destabilizing influence, a subtle drain on the capital's vitality. The crime in Flea Bottom festered, and the Gold Cloaks, once under Daemon's brutal but effective control, were now riven with corruption and ineffectiveness.
Viserys's true torment, however, was domestic. The birth of his sons by Alicent—Aegon, and now the recently arrived Helaena—should have been a blessing. Instead, they were a curse made flesh. Every time he looked upon Aegon's silver-haired head, he saw the ghost of his brother Baelon, the son he had failed to produce with Aemma. It was a constant, agonizing reminder of his guilt. Alicent, seeing this, weaponized his pain. She swaddled the boys in green silks and presented them not just as her children, but as the future of the realm, the true heirs who could continue the male line he so desperately craved.
Otto Hightower's fears were no longer whispers; they were the bedrock of his policy. Dragonstone was no longer a forgotten rock. It was a rival court. The Cannibal's taming was a story that grew with each telling, transforming me from a bitter boy into a mythic, fearsome figure. Our trade empire was a slap in the face to Oldtown's commercial interests, and the rumors of my dealings with the North and the Vale via Lady Jeyne were a direct threat to the Crown's authority. Otto saw a shadow conspiracy forming on the horizon, and he was determined to counter it.
His strategy was twofold. First, he worked tirelessly to isolate Viserys from any reminder of his first family. He flooded the Small Council with his own loyalists, men who spoke only of Aegon's potential and Rhaenyra's "unfitness." He positioned Alicent as the devoted, wronged queen, the mother of the king's precious sons.
Second, he began to lay the groundwork for the future. He spoke of the "unwisdom" of a female heir, of the Great Council of 101 that had established precedent. He planted the seeds of dissent in the hearts of lords great and small, always framing it as concern for the stability of the realm, never as naked ambition. His greatest terror was not war; it was irrelevance. He feared a world where the Hightower name was overshadowed by a half-Arryn girl and her monstrously ambitious brother on his demon dragon.
Alicent, for her part, was evolving from a pawn into a player. Her love for her children was genuine, but it was twisted by her father's poison and her own growing resentment. She saw Rhaenyra's freedom and my power on Dragonstone as a personal affront. Every rumor of our success was a thorn in her side. She began to hold her own court, a green oasis of sympathy and shared grievance for the ladies of the court who felt sidelined by Rhaenyra's bluntness. She poured her anxiety into her children, especially the dreamy, strange Helaena, whose babbling about "beasts beneath the boards" and "threads of green and black" were dismissed as childish nonsense by all but her fearful mother.
The court became a fractured mirror. On one side, the Hightower faction—green, growing, and nursing its grievances, clustered around the cribs of the male heirs. On the other, the few remaining loyalists of the "old guard" who remembered Prince Baelon and Queen Aemma, who whispered support for Rhaenyra but were too fearful of Otto's influence to speak openly.
And in the center of it all sat Viserys, the great unifier who had united nothing. He sanded the sharp edges off model Valyria, trying to create a perfect, beautiful past because the present was too painful to manage. He sought peace at any cost, blind to the fact that the cost was the very future of his dynasty. He appeased Otto to keep the peace on the Small Council. He acquiesced to Alicent's requests to keep peace in his bedchamber. And in doing so, he gave them everything.
He was a king sowing dragons' teeth, watering them with his own weakness, and wondering why an army of armed men was sprouting from the soil, ready to tear his kingdom apart. The dance floor was being polished not in the open, but in the shadowed corridors and whispered councils of the Red Keep, and the musicians were tuning their instruments for a symphony of blood.