"We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be."
Kurt Vonnegut
—•—•—
Valaena knew it was wrong. Wrong in the same way it was wrong when the maester said a word and then immediately corrected himself, or when a septa smiled with her mouth but not her eyes.
Babies weren't supposed to know anything.
Babies were supposed to be soft and empty-headed and full of milk. They were supposed to forget their first days like they forgot everything else: quickly, kindly, without leaving splinters behind.
And yet Valaena had always carried one strange, sharp thing inside her.
Awareness.
Not the kind grown people had. No, she didn't come out reciting histories or naming kings. It had been simpler than that and worse for it. It had been the sudden, furious understanding that she existed, and that existence hurt, and that she could not make her own limbs obey.
At four years old, she could say, That shouldn't be possible. At four years old, she could also admit that dead people had never cared what should be possible.
>~>~>~>~>~>~>
She remembered waking up in a world that was too bright. Bright like the sun had been pushed too close to her face out of spite. The air tasted different too. It was thicker. As if smoke had forgotten how to burn, and sweetness had wandered somewhere it didn't belong. There were voices. Loud ones. Panicked ones.
Newborn her had been confused. She hadn't known what was happening. She hadn't known what she was.
She had only known she didn't like it. For when she tried to move, she couldn't. When she tried to speak, nothing came out right.
Her mouth made sounds, wet and useless, and her body did what it wanted instead of what she asked of it. It felt like being trapped behind glass, watching people—who looked like giants—handle her like an object that was both precious and inconvenient.
So she did the one thing the body seemed confident about. She screamed. Then she recalled the hands that took her. Wrapped her. Something coarse, then soft. Cloth pressed against her skin.
She hated it. Then she liked it. Then she hated it again because her feelings changed too fast to hold.
A woman's voice cut through everything, rough with pain and relief twisted together.
"Let me see her."
A second voice answered - deeper, clipped, like each word cost him.
"Dyanna."
And then another fact followed right behind, uninvited, in her mind, and cold.
I died.
It wasn't a memory with a scene around it. There was no neat picture of a last breath. Just certainty, heavy and hard in the back of her skull like a stone she'd been born holding.
She remembered nothing else.
The woman's hands shook when she took her. Dyanna smelled like salt and sweat and something sharp underneath, like crushed herbs. She pressed a kiss to her forehead and the world narrowed into warmth so sudden it almost made the terror feel like it belonged to someone else.
"My sweet girl," she sighed, like the words were prayer. "My little star."
Someone else spoke, the same one who had said Dyanna's name. A voice older and worn smooth by command.
"She has golden eyes."
The room shifted. Even the air seemed to pause. They held her up, turned her, inspected her like she was a sign someone had sent. Her hair—she couldn't see it then, but she felt fingers comb through it, heard the reverent tone.
Platinum. Silver-white. Dragon blood.
The words rolled over her infant ears with no meaning attached, only weight.
She didn't care about any of it.
She cared that her limbs felt wrong. Too small. Too weak. She cared that the room smelled like iron. She cared that she could not remember her own name.
Then they gave her one.
Valaena. Valaena Targaryen.
But something within her resisted the notion that Valaena was her name. Deep down, she knew it wasn't. Yet, at that moment, she couldn't express or remember what her true name was.
The first weeks after that came in pieces, the way toddler memories did. Unorganized and messy.
Heat. Hunger. Sleep. Waking. Crying without wanting to. Being soothed by someone singing in a lilting accent. Sometimes the singer was Dyanna, hermother. That part was simply known overtime and sometimes it was another woman with soft hands who smelled of milk and sweat.
Men came and went too. Most of them blurred together into boots and belts and low voices.
One did not. One in particular always made the room feel smaller. Prince Maekar, they called him. Her father.
He had the shiniest platinum hair Valaena had ever seen and dark violet eyes that looked like they'd never learned how to be gentle. He held her like he wasn't used to holding things that might break.
The first time he looked at her properly—not at her hair nor her eyes but her—his expression did something strange. It wasn't softness, exactly. It was more like… a door cracked open by accident.
"Daughter," he said, as if tasting the word. "You'll be a different kind of trouble."
Valaena stared back. Newborn faces weren't built for scowls, but in her mind she managed one perfectly.
Trouble was fine. Trouble was honest. She could live with honest.
"She's small," Dyanna stated, her voice carrying worries.
Maekar's jaw tightened. "So was Daeron. She will live."
That name brought footsteps later, lighter and less controlled. A boy's voice. It sounded too old to be a babe, still carrying childhood in it.
"Can I see her now?" It sounded like a plea and a whine combined.
"No," her father said immediately.
"Yes," Dyanna said at the same time.
That was how Valaena met her eldest brother: Daeron, sandy-haired, who looked to be around five or six years old.
He came close, peered at her like she was an interesting problem, and then whispered something that caught her off guard.
"Do you dream as well, sissy?"
She remembered blinking at him. And gaping like a fool in bewilderment, drool sliding down her lips. Thankfully then, the adults didn't see it as anything wrong or strange. She was a babe after all.
Regardless, it was the wrong question to ask a baby. It was also the first time anyone had come close to naming what was wrong with her.
Because she did dream.
Even when she was little enough to choke on her own spit, her sleep had been crowded with things that didn't match this world.
Floating candles. Moving paintings. Dangerous plants. Toads that sang.
And always that strange sense of place; stone corridors lit by torchlight, laughter muffled by thick walls, warmth and cocoa and wool, an animal that was black and white, stitched into fabric like a promise and a symbol.
They didn't come like proper memories. They came like stories her mind insisted were true, even when she couldn't explain why. She never woke with the full shape of a life in her hands. Just fragments. Scenes. Feelings. The knowledge of how a wand should fit into older fingers. Though she didn't know what a wand was yet.
Valaena couldn't answer the boy. She could only stare back while he watched her with an intensity that made her squirm, offended and helpless.
"I hate it," he had whispered, as though he was telling her a secret.
Then, louder, safer. Towards the adults who didn't want strange things said aloud.
"She's pretty."
And her mother smiled and beamed like she'd been given a gift. Her father grunted in agreement with a twitch of a smile and tilted his chin high. As though it was only obvious and natural.
Daeron's gaze lingered a moment longer, like he wanted to warn her about something he couldn't put into words.
Then he was gone.
>~>~>~>~>~>
Valaena remembered the exact moment she realized she was a royal princess.
It didn't take long. Everyone around her called her either my princess or Princess Valaena.
Servants bowed. Knights knelt. Doors opened before she touched them.
A princess.
Her.
The fact never quite sat right. Princesses were stories — golden girls with tiaras, brave in songs and gentle in poems, girls who always knew what to say and never had snot on their sleeves.
Princesses lived in castles with Knights and maids.
She lived in castles with knights and maids, yes.
But she also lived in castles with rules that felt like hands around your throat if you pulled the wrong way.
She caught her reflection sometimes. Pale hair almost white, eyes bright gold, and thought, Oh. That is what they see.
And sometimes she could almost see the shadow of a different girl behind her own face. The one she sees in her dreams. Ginger hair. Hazel eyes.
Not a memory. Not clean. More like a painting half-scraped away.
When people bowed, they did not laugh afterward. When they said Princess, they meant it.
How lucky she was to be a princess. How strange that luck could also feel heavy.
She'd lived within two castle walls so far. The castles changed around her as she grew, or maybe she changed enough to notice.
King's Landing was stone and salt and noise, the Red Keep full of echoes and secrets and people who thought whispers made them invisible. It smelled of sweat, starvation, and unwashed bodies that made her nose crinkle.
Summerhall—when they went there—smelled like sun-warmed grass and old books and clean rain. It felt less like a fortress and more like somewhere made for living.
Valaena liked Summerhall best.
It had a library that tasted of dust and leather and candle smoke. Windows that let light in without turning it into a weapon. Quiet corners where no one grabbed her cheeks and told her she was blessed, as if blessing was something you could see in hair color.
She learned words quickly. Too quickly, some thought.
"She speaks like she's grown," a septa said once, startled, when Valaena thanked someone with the seriousness of a judge.
Maesters called her "precocious." Courtiers called her "charming." Her mother called her "my clever girl," and sounded equal parts proud and afraid of what cleverness meant for daughters.
And Valaena mostly tried to keep her mouth shut until she was sure what kind of world she'd fallen into.
Because she was learning and relearning, in fits and starts, that this was not only a new life.
It was a new kind of life.
The walls were hung with tapestries of dragons and battles and kings. The world beyond the castle was mud and horses and hunger.
Medieval, barbaric — something whispered inside her mind.
Servants spoke of bloodlines the way people in her dreams spoke of purebloods, except here it had teeth.
Gods changed depending on where you stood. The Faith spoke in sevens. The Andals and the First Men spoke of Old Gods. Her own house spoke of Valyrian gods as though they were both cradle and warning.
And the smallfolk bowed until their spines curved.
No one had ever bowed to the girl in her dreams.
No one had ever bowed to Susan Bones.
Her name came one night in sleep, as sharp and sudden as cold water.
Susan Bones.
Hogwarts. Witches and wizards.
A magical castle. Moving staircases. Strange creatures with huge eyes with short bodies. Impossible things that seemed normal. Then shouting. Green light. Screams.
A certainty as brutal as a blade: This is where you died.
Valaena had woken up sobbing, the sound small and humiliating.
Her nursemaid rushed in, thinking spider or fever. Dyanna came after, sun-kissed skin, dark hair loose, violet eyes wild with fear, and gathered her up without caring about propriety or gowns.
"Hush," Dyanna pleaded. "Hush, my heart. You're safe. You're safe."
Safe. Valaena wanted to laugh. Instead she pressed her face into her mother's shoulder and tried to breathe through the terror her own mind had handed her.
A child's mind couldn't hold a war. It spilled everywhere. Into dreams, into shaking, into the way her stomach turned at the color green.
But there were other spillovers too.
Sometimes, when she cried hard enough, the candles in her room flickered as if reacting to her. Once, when she threw a tantrum because her sleeves were scratchy, the water in her cup rippled though no one touched it.
And once, when Dyanna was worn thin after birthing her fourth child, Valaena pressed a small hand to her mother's temple and whispered nonsense; soft syllables that felt familiar on her tongue.
Just sounds that tasted like something she'd once known. And Dyanna's fatigue eased. It didn't vanish like in songs. It simply… loosened. Like a knot giving way.
Valaena lay awake afterward, very still, and listened to her own breathing.
Awareness at birth. Dreams that weren't hers but felt like they were. Strange things happened when she cried or got angry. At four years old, she didn't have the language for it.
She only had the certainty, prickling and stubborn as a thorn:
Something had come with her into this world.
And it was waking up, piece by piece, right alongside her.