A fourty-something named Anna, drinking coffee and fangirling through games, books, fanfiction, films, History and a bit of politics. she/her, NO fascists or TERFs.
Summary: Baelor teaching you High Valyrian while he braids your hair.
Warning: NONE. (OMG CAN YOU BELIEVE IT)
"Perzys hen ūnogon," he corrected.
You sighed, letting your forehead fall against your hand. "It’s not my fault your ancestors put too many s’s in their speech. Every word sounds like hissing."
Being married to Baelor was easy. Bearing the title of Princess of Dragonstone proved less daunting than you had anticipated. Even sitting upon the high bench to watch knights batter one another bloody in the yard was simpler still.
Mastering Valyrian, however, proved to be something else entirely. A language that had bested you where swords and courtly politics had failed. Every strange sound twisted itself around your tongue until speaking felt more akin to sparring than conversation.
"You will be queen one day," Baelor said. "Queens ought not require translators."
An hour earlier, the two of you had sat side by side in a quiet nook of the library. As your focus began to wane and the text blurred before your eyes, he pulled you between his legs. His broad thighs penned you in, leaving little choice but to continue the lesson.
"Again," he said from behind you.
Before you could protest, one large hand settled at the base of your neck. A soft sigh escaped you.
His thumb pressed slowly into the tense muscle there, working in small circles. The pressure was firm enough to ease the ache that had gathered from hunching over old books all evening.
You felt your shoulders loosen almost immediately. "Baelor..."
His hand moved lower. "Read, my love."
The broad span of his palm slid across your shoulder, kneading carefully through the stiffness he found there. The lesson was quickly losing its battle for your attention.
You sighed in surrender. "Perzysss—" The word died on your lips once more.
"The s is not to be pressed, my dear." His voice settled warmly against your back. "Valyrian is not a force. The sound comes from lower."
Two fingers came to rest against the hollow of your throat. "Here."
You swallowed at the touch, but it lingered for only a moment before he withdrew.
Then his hand slipped into your hair. Slowly, he spread the strands apart, untangling each knot. His fingertips skimmed your scalp as he worked, never pulling when he met resistance. Instead, he separated each tangle until your hair slipped like silk through his hands.
When a loose curl escaped beside your ear, he caught it immediately, brushing his thumb along your cheek before guiding it back into place and folding it neatly into the plait.
Those scarred hands, marked by countless years in the yard and large enough to encircle a man's throat, moved through your hair with astonishing gentleness.
After a while, he smoothed your hair down your back and divided it into three sections. One strand crossed over another, then the third, and the braid slowly began to take shape.
You tried to focus on the page before you, but every gentle pass made the words blur a little further.
"It's almost supper, Baelor," you sighed. "Can we go now?"
“Almost.” He paid your words no mind, working in silence. With each movement, his hands continued lower as the braid formed, gentle pulls following every weave as he crossed and wove the strands into place.
He worked the braid to its end, fastening the final twists before reaching for the silk ribbon upon the desk. He tied it off and let it cascade over your shoulder.
"There you go." His lips brushed against your ear. "Gevie," he whispered.
At the word, you turned slightly. He was close enough that you could count the dark lashes framing his mismatched eyes.
"I know that one. It means beautiful."
A smile softened his features. "Yes." He pressed a kiss to your cheek, then another to your temple. "Now read, ñuha gevie dāria. Then we'll head to supper."
His strong arms wrapped around you, drawing you flush against his chest. And you found yourself hoping that if death ever came for you, it would find you like this; safe in his arms, his warmth surrounding you, the last thing you would ever feel before darkness took you.
I just logged onto an intimacy writing class from Inkers Con and was treated to this slide on busting sex myths.
The first bulletpoint was hilarious because she was like, we put a man on in the moon in the 60s but we couldn't map out a women's pleasure source until 2005.
Also the penis size thing is absolutely fantastic because I'm reading about 9-11 inches in romance books and being like... isn't that almost the size of a subway sandwich???
I think this is a great, honest look at sex for those that have grown up on fanfiction/romance books and may have unrealistic expections. (also a complete relief because if someone takes off their pants and I discover I'm dealing with an anaconda situation, I'm probs backing away as I know I don't have the throat, hands, pussy to deal with that - trust me sir that will certainly not fit without a trip to the hosp afterwards.)
‘bread is bad for you’ ‘rice is bad for you’ sorry im not subscribing to the idea that staple grains that have been integral to cultures for centuries are evil. i love you carbs
The White Washing of Rhaenyra is peak Pettiness on a Scale Unseen in Adaption.
For people who didn't read Fire and Blood.
After the Battle of Tumbleton the main reason that Daeron and the Main Green Army didn't march on King's Landing despite smashing the Main Black Army to splinters - slaughtering the Starks and the Riverlords to the man - was that Rhaenyra was holding the entire city hostage. She was using the Smallfolk and Alicent as human shields so that Daeron would not attack the city.
The fear of being human shields to Daeron's retribution after the Butcher's Ball and the murder of Maelor was so palpable that when Helaena dies, the Smallfolk revolted against Rhaenyra out of both Love for Helaena, justice or her children, and fear of Daeron's revenge after the absolute tear he went on when Maelor was murdered and the Black Army showed up with Criston's head on the main Royal Standard at Tumbleton.
Now Sara Hess is taking that storyline and flipping it to White Wash Rhaenyra. Claiming that Ormund and Daeron are holding the population of Tumbleton hostage is a malpractice of writing that should be prosecutable.
They're literally stealing plots from the Heroes of the Greens like Daeron and Helaena to make Rhaenyra something she never was in order to own George R.R. Martin and "The Chuds" by ruining the 'naysayers' favorite characters as a middle finger to fans and the author of the fucking lore.
Bro, this is just pure childish immaturity that I'm kind of embarrassed second hand from watching.
do you guys ever like forget you're interested in something until you start engaging with it again and you go "oh wait i'm like crazy crazy about this yeah"
it's amazing (actually very unsurprising) how the Dragon Age fandom manages to be racist about Seheron and Rivain even though Thedas does not even have "race" or colonialism / systems of imperialist extraction of resources that are based on geography in any way that resembles reality
it's an entirely alternate universe with an entirely different history, customs, languages etc. and yet you people are still just like "the air of Seheron smelled exotic, like spices" ugh fuck off you are so boring
correct me if I'm wrong but to my memory we have no evidence at all that Rivain or Seheron ever exported spices to Fereldan or the Free Marches, no evidence that a conceptual divide between "North" and "South" (this would be analagous to Earth's "East" and "West") was ever created, no evidence that Seheron and Rivain were ever reduced to stereotypes of themselves to drive a market for "exoic" goods that imperialist powers of the South exploited them for
we know that Orlais conquered Fereldan and that Fereldan gained its independence, and that Tevinter and the Qunari both fight for control over Seheron and are resisted by its native population—but there's nothing at all in the history that should give somebody from Fereldan (as Hawke is) the idea that Seheron is the "land of spices" in the way that India was to the English
and yet Hawke gets to Seheron and is all "the warm breeze wafted the smell of spices yada yada" just because you, the writer, have decided that Seheron is basically fantasy SWANA. fuck offfffff
Not at all trying to defend fandom - fandom is super racist. However, this is a case of racism being passed back and forth between the developers and fans, not just fans coming up with it on their own.
The concept of "race" absolutely does exist in Thedas, as has been confirmed by dev comments out of game, written in World of Thedas vol. 1, and in-game dialogue. Darker skinned people in Thedas canonically suffer from colourism/racism. This is a choice the devs made because I guess they couldn't possibly imagine a fantasy world where that doesn't exist.
The entirety of Thedas is colonized... but even after human colonization, we have a plethora of examples of human-run nations colonizing other human-run nations. Mostly from Orlais and Tevinter. And in terms of specifically colonizing for the purpose of extracting - well, Kirkwall is right there, with its history of being nothing but a mining colony for Tevinter. We don't even know what happened to the people who lived in the area known as Kirkwall prior to this, other than that they existed, because we're just not supposed to think about it I guess...
There is indeed canonical confirmation that Seheron exports spices. From Hard in Hightown: "They say you can buy anything in the Lowtown Bazaar. It's mostly true. On the right day, you can find vendors hawking spices from Seheron..." And the writers have indeed thrown around the word "exotic" to describe Rivain (and Rivaini themselves) especially.
The "smells of spices" probably stems specifically from this line of dialouge from Sten in DAO: "I miss the smells of Seheron. Tea and incense and the sea. Ferelden smells of wet dogs."
@/icewa1ker has gone into greater detail about what a mess of orientalism BioWare has inserted into the games when it comes to Rivain especially. Really great posts.
I just think it's important to note that Dragon Age itself came up with these very racist lore choices first. But does that mean fans have to go along with it? Absolutely not. Many fans are if anything, only furthering this problem.
GIF by @/jagiellonczyk / Dividers by @/saradika-graphics
↪︎ they sing their dearest songs directory
SUMMARY: the grief he carried alone for years finally had somewhere to go — straight into a family he never let himself imagine
Pairing: Adam Dalgliesh x f!reader
Chapter 3
He came home at half past nine.
You were on the sofa with the Hardy manuscripts spread across the cushions and the lamp on and the radio playing quietly, and you had not even pretended to consider going to sleep early, because you had said you would be awake and you had meant it.
When his key turned in the lock you looked up and he came through the door and his tired eyes found you immediately, the way they always found you with that immediate and complete arrival. Tonight, however, there was something else in them, something that had been sitting in him since the office and had not, you suspected, fully resolved.
He discarded his long coat and suit jacket along with his shoes and crossed the room to sit beside you. His arm came around you and you leaned into him, letting his body frame yours in his warmth. His chin came to the top of your head, nestling there as it had done countless times before.
You stayed like that for a while. His breathing slowed and matched yours in pace. His hand moved at your waist in the slow, absent circles that meant he was present but still working through something, the last of the day's weight burning off in the warmth of the flat and the quiet of the radio and the simple fact of you beside him.
Then his hand stilled. And then, slowly, he turned his head and pressed his lips to your temple. Your cheekbone. The corner of your jaw. Not urgently, but with a slowness that was deliberate, that had a quality of intention behind it, each one placed with the seriousness he brought to true things.
You turned your face toward him.
He kissed you properly, and this time was different from the office, different from the usual warmth of greeting, deeper and slower and carrying something that your earlier conversation that day had opened and not yet closed. His hand came to your jaw and he kissed you with the focused entirety of a man who was trying to say something that words had not adequately covered.
You kissed him back and let him say it.
When he drew back his eyes were on yours and the look in them was the open one he barely let out, the unmanaged one. Underneath the gladness and the warmth was the remnant of the afternoon sitting there not as accusation but as need. The quiet, enormous, undemonstrative need of a man who had spent the last several hours reminding himself of what he had and finding the reminder insufficient against the actual presence of you.
"Come here," he simply murmured.
His hand at your jaw turned your face back to his and he kissed you again, and this time the slow quality of it had an urgency underneath — not demanding, but present. The urgency of someone who needed this specifically, tonight, for reasons that had been articulated in an office at afternoon and had not ceased to be true simply because they had been addressed.
You understood. You climbed into his lap.
Adam received you with both hands at your hips, drawing you in with that quiet sureness, and you settled over him and his hands moved up your back and his face was against your neck, his breath was warm and slightly uneven against your skin.
"I have been thinking about you," he pressed to your neck, "since you left."
"Have you," you let out a breathy laugh at the feeling of his lips caressing your sensitive neck.
"About what you said." His lips moved to the column of your throat. "About choosing." The word landed with its full weight. "About it going both ways."
You drew back to look at him. His face was very close and the lamp threw its warmth across the planes of it. The severity softened, the tired eyes darker than usual, the expression in them something you had no precise name for except that it was large and unguarded and entirely directed at you.
"I want—" he began. Stopped. His hands on your back pressed in. "I need you to—" Another stop. The precision deserting him in the way it only did when the feeling outran the available language. "I need to show you. I can't only say it." His mouth returned to your throat.
You put your hands on his face and brought him up to yours and kissed him with the same seriousness, the same completeness, and felt him come into it fully. You could feel the last of the day's careful management releasing all at once, his hands moving over you with a new quality, something that had been held at a slight distance all evening and was now simply present.
The radio played to itself, indifferent and Adam undressed you slowly. There was, however, a certain immediacy in his hands. Not urgency in the frantic sense, but a different kind of urgency, the need to see you, specifically and completely, to attend to every part of you with the focused entirety of his attention, as though the act of looking were itself a form of proof.
He pulled your jumper over your head — his jumper, the grey one — and his hands moved immediately to your skin, your waist, your ribs, learning the warmth of you with open palms, goosebumps flaring across your ribcage under his long fingers.
"You are—" he began, and stopped.
"Tell me," you said.
His hands moved up your back to the clasp of your bra and undid it, drew the straps from your shoulders, and his eyes moved over you in the lamplight with an expression that was not performance and not simply desire, something more careful than either. It was the expression of a man looking at something he had been afraid of losing and was finding, in the looking, that it is still here.
"Mine," he said. Quietly. The word arriving not with the quality of possession but of relief, as though saying it were less a claim than a prayer finally answered.
His hands cupped your breasts and his thumbs moved over them slowly, feeling your nipples harden under his touch, and he watched your face while he did it with that complete and undistracted quality that had always been the most devastating thing about him. You felt it everywhere, the touch and the watching simultaneously, the sense of being attended to entirely.
"Adam—" you gasped at a particular pinch of one of your nipples.
"I've got you," he said. Quietly. "I've got you."
His mouth replaced his hands, warm, wet and slow, his tongue moving over one nipple with a patience that made your fingers tighten in his hair, a sound leaving you that you didn't bother to contain. He took his time. That was always how he did this. He always took his time in a way that communicated, more clearly than declarations could, that there was nowhere else he intended to be.
You discarded his tie with warm urgency and worked his shirt open while his mouth was on you, pushing the fabric from his shoulders, running your hands over the warmth of his chest. He let you pull it off entirely and then his mouth was back at your breast and your back arched into him.
His hands moved to the waistband of your trousers.
He looked up at you, a brief, direct look that was not his usual questioning, but more of a certainty born by the necessity his hands seemed to show. You lifted yourself enough to let him draw them off, and your underwear followed, and then his hands were on your bare thighs and he looked at you in his lamplight, in his flat, in the space that had been his alone and had become yours as well, and the expression on his face was not quite the same as all the times before.
It was more urgent than those times. Less managed.
"I need—" he started and paused to kiss your neck again. "After today I need to—" another kiss, another lick of his tongue, almost as if he couldn't stay away from your pulse point for more than a few words at a time. "I need you to know—" this time he shook his head, correcting his words, and looked at you. "I need to show you that I know how fortunate I am."
"Show me then," you lost yourself in the depth of his gaze and replied.
He drew you down against the sofa cushions with the careful attention that was always his — the Hardy manuscripts displaced somewhere in the process, slipping to the floor unnoticed, neither of you attending to them — and then he was over you, his weight on his forearms, and he kissed you again deeply, slowly, with the quality of someone who had been away for longer than four days in every way that mattered and was only now coming back.
His mouth moved down your throat, your collarbone, the curve of your breast, the plane of your stomach, and lower still. When it found your throbbing pussy he made a sound against your skin that was low and entirely undisguised, the sound of a man arriving somewhere he had wanted to be.
He used his tongue with the focused intelligence that was simply how he inhabited everything — knowing what made you gasp and returning to it, his hands flat against your inner thighs, unhurried in a way that was not teasing but thorough. You had one hand braced against the back of the sofa and one in his hair and you were making sounds you were not monitoring because monitoring was not available to you.
When he added two fingers, pressing into you with a curving precision that found the right place immediately, your hips moved against his mouth without instruction.
"Adam—"
He made a sound against you that was affirmation and want in equal measure, the vibration of it moving through you, and his fingers pressed deeper and curled and his tongue moved in reverence against you over and over again. You came with his name in your mouth and his hair tight between your fingers, his tongue accompanied each of your tremors and his mouth drank you up entirely.
When you came back to yourself he was looking up at you with dark eyes and his expression had the quality of a man who has been waiting for something all day and has found it exactly as he remembered. The radio was still playing its patient, indifferent music in the room, neither of you registering its tune.
He pressed his lips to the inside of your thigh. Then he moved back up the length of the sofa, unhurriedly, and you reached for his trousers and he helped you, and then he was bare against you and the sight of him — lean and warm and entirely present, his cock hard — had the same quality it always had, that private shock of him.
Your hand wrapped around him and stroke his length unhurriedly, just as you knew he liked; as you knew it drove him mad with desire.
The sound he made was low and immediate, his forehead dropping briefly to yours, his elbow braced against the sofa cushion beside your head. "I've been—" he said, against your mouth, cut short by a deep moan. "All day. Every hour since you left the office." His hips moved fractionally into your hand. "You walked out of my office and I couldn't think about anything else."
"Tell me," you said, barely above a whisper. Stroking him slowly, watching his face as it contorted in pleasure in the warm lamplight. "Tell me what you thought about."
"You," he said. His breath uneven. "Just you. The way you — fuck — the way you looked at me. What you said." His jaw tightened. "I don't want to go four days without properly seeing you again. I don't want to come home after you're asleep and leave before you wake. I want—" He stopped. His hands on you, gripping. "I want you with me. Properly. Every day."
"I'm here," you said, increasing the pressure of your strokes at the head of his cock. "I'm right here."
"I know," he answered, roughly. "I know that. I just—" His hand came to yours around his length, not stopping you, simply holding, accompanying. "I need you close tonight. I need—"
"I know what you need," you said and released him from your grip momentarily.
He shifted his weight and you moved with him — the logistics of the sofa negotiated with the ease of two people who knew each other well enough to manage without discussion. You took his cock again and guided him to your entrance, dripping wet with your arousal. When he pushed in, the warmth and fullness of it, the sound he made was not controlled in any way whatsoever.
His weight settled partially over you, partially braced on the arm of the sofa just above your head, and his free hand went to your face, his palm against your cheek, tilting you to look at him directly in the eyes.
"Look at me," he said, his tone nearing a whimper. "Please. Look at me."
You looked at him and began to match his thrusts with your hips, his hand slid from your face to your hip and gripped, and the rhythm you found was the one that was simply yours — specific to you, the rhythm of people who had learned each other thoroughly — except that tonight it had the quality of the afternoon in it, and something about that made it different. More necessary.
"You are mine," he said, low and serious, watching your face in the lamplight. Not a question. Not a demand. A statement tendered with the same care he gave to true things.
"Yes," your breath hitched at the possessiveness of those three simple words.
Something moved through his expression, a brief and total undoing, quickly gathered. His grip on your hip tightened.
"Say it," he said. His voice rougher now, the precision burning off. "I need to hear you say it. Please."
"Yours," you said, without hesitation. "Only yours, Adam."
He groaned, low and long, his head dropping briefly to your neck, and his hips drove deeper.
"And I'm yours," he said, the words arriving with a fervency that was entirely new from him, stripped of all management, from the place where the real feeling lived. "All of me. Everything." He readjusted his weight and settled on his knees, taking your thighs in his hands and pulling you closer to him, his cock driving deeper within you. "I am entirely, completely yours. Do you understand that? Do you—"
"Yes," you whimpered, breathless, your hands reaching for his chest. "Adam—"
"Say you're mine," he said again, and the repetition was not insecurity — it was need. "Say it again for me."
"I'm yours," you said, holding his eyes in the warm light, nails scratching the hard plains of his chest, earning a deep groan from him. "I have been since the bookshop. There is no version of this where I am not yours."
He dropped his forehead to yours and kissed you hard, warm, with the full and desperate need of someone who required the confirmation in every available language simultaneously.
The rhythm lost its patience after that.
The sofa was warm beneath you and his weight was warm above you and his hands were everywhere — your breasts, your hips, the curve of your waist, finding every available surface of you with the focused and unmanaged attention of a man who had been conducting himself with great discipline for four days and had arrived, finally, at the end of it. The sounds he made were not managed at all, low and continuous and entirely his, and you felt the urgency in him building, felt the last of his restraint falling away degree by degree until there was nothing left of it and what remained was simply him, wanting you, having you.
"I'm not—" he said, against your throat. His rhythm shortening, the arm braced on the sofa cushion flexing. "Tell me — fuck — tell me I can—"
You moved your hand to the small of his back and pressed firmly, clearly, without ambiguity, and felt him understand.
He buried himself inside you and held there and the groan that left him was the most unguarded sound you had heard from him in a while, long and low and completely without remainder, and he came inside you with his face against your neck and your name in his mouth and his hands holding on with the quiet, complete desperation of someone who had needed this specifically and was only now, finally, getting it. The feeling of his hot release deep within you was enough to drive your already overstimulated core over the edge, your hands gripping hard at his back.
He stayed close, as if glued to you, while you both readjusted your breath. He did not move away, did not rearrange, simply held on with his arms around you on the narrow warmth of the sofa, his face still at your neck, breathing.
After a while he shifted carefully, making room, drawing you to straddle him again, cocooning you in his chest, his arm around you, your legs at each side of him. The Hardy manuscripts were still on the floor. Neither of you moved to retrieve them.
"Four days," you said, into his chest.
"I know," he acknowledged. "I'm sorry."
"Don't be sorry about the case," you murmured against him. "Just—" You paused. "Come home when you can. Or let me come to you."
"Yes," he said. Without qualification.
One of his hand was in your hair, the other at the small of your back and tracing up and down, up and down your back. The slow absent movement of it resuming, the movement that meant he was here rather than somewhere interior, present rather than processing.
"I meant it," he said, after a while. "What I said."
"Which part?"
"All of it," he answered against your temple. "All of me. Yours." He said it the way he said the things he had decided were permanently true, with the quiet certainty of someone who has found the accurate word and has no intention of revising it. "I want you to know that. Not only because of what happened earlier."
"I know," you kissed right on top of his heart, claiming its incessant beating for yourself. "I've always known."
"I know you have," he said. "I wanted to say it anyway. In that particular way." A pause. The slight, dry quality arriving beneath the seriousness. "It appears I had feelings about the afternoon that required a specific form of expression."
You laughed — a real one, sudden and warm, into the skin of his chest. He pressed his lips to the top of your head and held them there.
"Yes," you said, when the laugh had settled. "I quite noticed."
Adam only responded with another kiss to the crown of your head, the to your temple, to the edge of your brow... His arms tightening around you and his face finally settling on the crook of your neck, breathing you in.
The lamp held its warmth over the room, over the two of you on the sofa, over the Hardy manuscripts on the floor and the radio still playing and the wine on the counter that had been forgotten entirely. The sofa was narrow underneath you as it had been for the past half hour, but neither of you moved to go to bed because this, the specific, cramped, warm of it all was exactly sufficient.
➳ 𝐏𝐚𝐢𝐫𝐢𝐧𝐠 | Baelor Targaryen x Dragon Dreamer Niece!reader
➳ 𝐒𝐮𝐦𝐦𝐚𝐫𝐲 | A lifetime of Dragon Dreams has taught you one terrible truth: the visions always come to pass. When those dreams begin pointing toward Baelor’s death at Ashford Meadow, you are forced to watch the man you love walk willingly toward a fate you cannot stop.
➳ 𝐖𝐨𝐫𝐝 𝐂𝐨𝐮𝐧𝐭 | 13,276
➳ 𝐖𝐚𝐫𝐧𝐢𝐧𝐠𝐬 | Mature Content-Explicit Descriptions Of Sex | Canon typical violence, Targaryen incest, Typical Targaryen family dynamics, Prophetic dreams, Major character death, Heavy angst, Tragedy and grief, Anxiety and mild insomnia, Established relationship, Age gap romance(Reader is in her 20’s Baelor lates 30’s), Devoted Baelor Targaryen, Smut: PIV sex, Manhandling, Oral(fem!receiving), Fingering, Multiple orgasms, Crying, Emotional sex, High Valyrian dirty talk, Comfort kink(???), Porn with feelings.
➳ 𝐀𝐮𝐭𝐡𝐨𝐫'𝐬 𝐍𝐨𝐭𝐞 | This is so sad but there's also smut?? Season three of House of the Dragon being out has me in an Asoiaf mood, and I’ve wanted to write something for Baelor since I watched Akotsk so here’s this!
masterlist
THE DRAGON WAS DYING AGAIN.
Or perhaps it wasn’t. The distinction had become increasingly difficult to make after so many years spent wandering the ruins of futures that had not yet arrived. Your dreams did not concern themselves with such mortal certainties. They offered symbols and fragments. Glimpses torn from some greater tapestry and scattered at your feet like shattered glass, leaving you to bloody your hands trying to piece them together.
Death, life, grief, triumph—all of it came tangled together until one became nearly indistinguishable from the other. The dream did not make sense until it happened in the waking, and it always happened.
Dust swirled beneath a bright summer sky.
It drifted across the field in pale golden clouds, rising under the thunder of hooves and the restless movement of bodies packed shoulder to shoulder below a forest of banners. Their colors bled together at first. Crimson and black. Amber and white. The heraldry shifted whenever you attempted to focus upon it, elm trees becoming dragons, dragons becoming stags, and stags dissolving into little more than streaks of color dragged across silk by an unseen hand. Somewhere, a crowd roared.
The sound reached you as though from underwater, distant and distorted, carrying none of the joy it ought to have possessed. Instead, it settled within the dream like a warning.
You knew this place. Not because the dream informed you of its name, but because Dragon Dreams seldom wasted time with such trivialities. Knowledge simply existed inside them, fully formed and unquestionable until you woke up.
Ashford Meadow stretched before you exactly as it stood beyond the stone walls of Lord Ashford’s castle, yet transformed by that peculiar dream logic that rendered familiar places strange. The sunlight shone too brightly. The colors appeared too vivid. Every shadow seemed to conceal something waiting patiently to emerge like a serpent readying to strike.
And somewhere amidst the shifting sea of faces stood Baelor.
The certainty of it struck you with such force that relief flooded through your chest before you had even found him. You felt his presence long before your eyes looked upon him. An intimate thing. You had spent half your life seeking him in crowded halls and empty chambers alike, discovering him almost naturally amongst hundreds of others or when it was simply the two of you. Some childish part of you had once convinced itself this meant something. Some divine tether stretching invisibly between your souls. Age has done little to cure you of such romantic foolishness.
When at last you saw him, he stood precisely as memory insisted he should. Broad-shouldered and firm amidst the chaos surrounding him, his dark hair caught sunlight in bronze highlights inherited from the mother whose Dornish blood had forever marked him as different from the silver-haired brothers standing beside him.
Even from a distance there remained something reassuring about the sight of him. Baelor possessed that quality like no other. The ability to make disorder appear temporary. To stand in turmoil and convince others that reason would prevail in the end.
You tried to move toward him, but as dreams often did, the vision altered itself without warning. He disappeared; one moment he occupied the space before you, and the next he simply didn’t.
Panic rose immediately as you searched for him amongst the multitude, your gaze darting desperately from blurring face to blurring face as the crowd thickened around you. Voices merge into an incomprehensible murmur until the pitch ascends into ear piercing screams.
The dream continued to unravel around you.
You glanced to your feet; beneath your soles a dragon banner dragged through the dirt. Its threads had been torn somewhere along its length, the black fabric stained dark with something that might have been mud were it not for the way it glistened beneath the sunlight. Nearby lay a helm half-buried in dust, the back grotesquely caved in. The sight of it filled you with inexplicable dread. Your gaze lingered there only a moment before another image demanded your attention. A spear, its shaft nearly split through the center. Broken. You didn’t know why it horrified you, only that it did.
The crack came a heartbeat later. A violent sound that echoed across the dreamscape with enough force to rattle through your very veins. Steel striking steel rang sharply in your ears, the splintering of bones hidden beneath it.
The crowd fell silent then, and the sunlight dimmed.
And somewhere beyond the dust, banners, and deafening screams, a dragon fell shrieking through the sky.
You woke with a start, your pulse hammering against your ribs. The faraway sound of screams still ringing in your ears as your hands fisted the thick covers.
The darkness of your temporary chambers greeted you slowly, reality reassembling itself piece by piece around the lingering fragments of the illusion. Heavy curtains stirred faintly in the predawn breeze. A candle guttered upon the bedside table, its flame reduced to a tremble, drowning in its own wax. Next to you, still lost to his own much simpler dreams, lay Baelor. The tight coil around your heart loosened just slightly at the sight of him.
Beyond the stone walls of Ashford Castle came the distant sounds of a waking tournament camp. Horses, wagons, voices; ordinary noises belonging to an ordinary morning. Yet your vision remained, as always, like a specter of smoke.
You could never remember them like one would a memory. They faded soon after you woke, dissolving into phantasm spells you were never certain you dreamed at all. What lingered the most was the feeling and the brief flashes of blurry images. The conviction that something had been placed into your hands without explanation and you were expected to make sense of it.
Your journal waited within reach like it always did. As though some part of you understood long ago that there would never come a morning when you did not require it.
Carefully, so as to not wake your husband, you inched yourself off the canopied bed. By the time your fingers closed around the worn leather cover, you were already reaching backward through the fading dream, grasping desperately at the details before they escaped forever.
Dust in sunlight.
Screams.
A helm caved in.
A broken spear.
A dragon shrieking as it fell from the sky.
The phrases assembled themselves beneath your quill in hurried strokes, joining hundreds of others recorded across years of restless nights. Some of them had proven insignificant, mere occurrences that held no darker meaning, but enough had proven true to terrify you. At the moment, one in particular rang like a bell through your skull.
The dragon was dying again.
Somewhere beyond the castle walls the first rays of dawn spread across Ashford Meadow. Though you could not have said why, a terrible certainty settled heavily into the hollow space under your ribs. And that apprehension only grew in strength as you gazed at your husband’s sleeping form. Something was coming. Not today, perhaps, but soon.
Soon enough that you could almost feel the shadow of the Stranger moving toward you through the darkness, patient and inevitable as fate itself. And what else was the fate of every living thing but to die?
For a long while you simply sat there, the journal resting open upon your lap as the ink dried in uneven slants across the page. The words already seemed strangely detached from you. Urgent enough to drag themselves from your sleeping mind only moments before, yet now they sat trapped on parchment. Stripped of whatever terrible significance they had possessed in the dream.
Beside you, the bed shifted. The movement was slight, yet after years spent sharing chambers with him, you recognized it instantly. He woke slowly, unlike you. There was never anything abrupt about him. Even his consciousness seemed to arrive with deliberate purpose.
One arm reached across the sheets, no doubt seeking your warmth in the morning air. When he did not find you, he rolled onto his back, two-toned eyes blinking against the dim sun filtering through the curtains in rivers of light.
You watched and waited as his gaze found you. You saw him trail his eyes over you, taking in your sleep-mussed form with a domestic kind of affection. Next he found the journal, and alert understanding followed immediately.
It was always astonishing how quickly he knew. The realization streaked across his face like a shooting star in the sky. No questions were necessary, no explanations demanded. After so many years together, the sight of that book in your hands meant only one thing.
Baelor pushed himself upright, the blankets gathering around his waist as he sat against the headboard, one hand dragging absently over his head of dark hair. Even now, with age and responsibility carving themselves into the planes of his face, there remained something reassuringly familiar about the sight of him half-awake and rumpled by sleep. Something that never failed to ease the swirling panic your dreams left behind.
The kingdoms knew Baelor Breakspear as a prince, a warrior, and the heir to the Iron Throne. You knew him as this. The man who reached for you in his sleep. The man who made you sick with longing when he wasn’t around. The man who woke every morning and looked for you before anything else.
He murmured your name softly, concern already threading through the roughness of his voice. “Is all well?”
The question settled heavily between you. Not because you lacked an answer, but because you possessed too many, and none of them held any sense. Instinct urged you toward dismissal as it always did. A lifetime of skepticism and sideways glances had trained the reflex into you long ago.
You ought to have been well practiced at deception by now. Yet it never worked where your husband was concerned. Perhaps he knew you too well. Perhaps some stubborn part of you had never truly wanted to hide anything from him.
"It was nothing," you said anyway, lowering your eyes to the journal. The lie lasted less than a breath.
His silence met it with all the patience that had made him both your greatest comfort and your most infuriating adversary. He did not challenge you, nor did he point out the obvious falsehood. He simply waited as though he knew you would tell him eventually. As though he understood that whatever walls you attempted to build between the two of you would always collapse under their own weight. And predictably, they did, as easily as the moon changes its shape.
You exhaled softly as your fingers drifted across the edge of the journal before closing it. “I dreamed,” you murmured, the same admittance you owned a dozen times over.
His expression softened by what he already knew. "What did you see?"
"There was a tournament,” you began slowly. Already the details felt uncertain beneath your tongue.
“Ashford?” Baelor asked, trying to help clarify the missing pieces.
“I think so,” you sighed, the doubt frustrating you. Moments ago the images had seemed so vivid. Now they scattered like seeds in the wind whenever you attempted to examine them directly. You frowned as you tried to bring forth more. “There were clouds of dust and━” The cries that had split your skull returned with a violent jolt, reminding you of the panic mounting in their wake.
Reaching forward, you clutched Baelor’s hands with trembling fingers. He gripped them with a silent comfort, his thumb brushing along your knuckles. With wide fearful eyes and parted lips, you continued, “There were screams and I was afraid.”
His brow knitted slightly. “Afriad of what, my dear?”
“I don’t remember,” you chafed, voice sharpening more than you intended. The admission left behind a bitter taste. It was the same answer you had been giving since childhood. The same helpless lack of knowledge that haunted every vision. If the gods intended Dragon Dreams as gifts, they possessed a cruel sense of humor, for they offered revelation without understanding and expected gratitude in return.
“I cannot remember now,” you repeated more calmly, “but I was scared, and there was a dragon banner torn in the mud. And a helm.” The recollection of its gruesome destruction made your stomach churn. “The back of it was crushed inward.”
He brought your still quivering hands to his mouth. A kiss was pressed to the top of each as he willed you to keep going. The feel of his lips and the warmth of his breath a grounding solace. “Is there more?”
"There was a spear as well. Broken almost completely through the middle." Your gaze drifted downwards to the sheets where the morning light had begun spreading across the bed in pale ribbons of gold.
“The screams, Baelor,” Your cadence faltered as the ghost of them echoed in your mind. There were no words; you were not able to recognize them by voice. They were merely filled with anguish, raw and terrible anguish.
“It felt like death.” You swallowed, a tear you hadn’t even known had welled fell down the swell of your cheek. “When I woke, it was as if The Stranger himself stood over our bed.”
Your husband shifted closer until the warmth of him wrapped around you like a flame of endearment. One arm settled over your back as he drew you to him. The other came up to wipe away the stain of tears, the pad of his thumb a tender sweep across your skin. He cradled you against his chest, rocking as your unsteady palms clutched at him.
"The dream frightened you," he said gently, but you could hear the frantic underlying distress packed beneath his legendary composure. He was well versed in aftermaths like this, but you both knew each other well enough by now to pick up on one another’s tells.
As much as the dreams pained you, seeing you like this troubled him just the same.
You deepened your breath, tilting your face up to meet his. “That seems an understatement,” you whispered begrudgingly.
A faint smile tugged quickly at his mouth before disappearing again. “Then let us begin there.”
A soft groan escaped you before you could stifle it, and despite the heaviness of the morning, something almost resembling amusement flickered across his features. It never lasted long on mornings like these, though. Not when your pulse still raced beneath his hands and the remnants of the illusion clung to you like cobwebs hanging from rafters. Even so, he seized upon the opening with the same determination he always did. As though any crack in the wall of your fear was worth widening.
Others sought to ‘soothe’ your visions through denial. They dismissed them outright or treated them as symptoms of a maddening affliction best ignored.
Baelor had never done either. Perhaps because he had witnessed too many of them unfold precisely as you foretold. Perhaps he had been there often enough to watch you wake trembling from dreams that later manifested in the waking world with dreadful veracity. Whatever the reason, he had long since developed a different strategy. He approached your fears not as delusions of a mad woman but as puzzles to be examined carefully and methodically. He separated what you knew from what you feared. In doing so, he widely succeeded in making the terror manageable.
“As I recall,” he said after a moment, his voice muffled against your hair. “Three months ago you dreamed of the Red Keep being overtaken by the sea.”
You narrowed your eyes suspiciously. “Yes?”
“The sea in question turned out to be water from the garden fountain splashing when Rhae dropped her castle toy into it.”
“That is true,” you sighed, “but when I dreamed of flames swallowing the stables, Aerion set a stable boy on fire the next day.”
A dark shadow passed over his face. “He did,” your husband conceded with a nod.
Grasping the front of his shirt, you looked up at him with worry-stricken eyes. “I dreamt of my mother dying hours before the gods took her. Only I did not know I did until it was happening.”
“My dear,” he started, hand smoothing over the back of your head.
“I know,” you interjected sharply, “what it feels like when I’ve dreamt of a death.”
Baelor’s hand did not still where it rested against your hair, nor did he immediately offer the reassurances that hovered so often on the edge of his tongue. He regarded you with the same grave attentiveness he had worn from the beginning of the conversation. Allowing the weight of your words to make home between you rather than rushing to sweep them aside.
Of all the cruelties your dreams inflicted, this was the worst. Not the visions themselves, or even the fear. It was the uncertainty that bled slowly into truth as you watched it become reality.
His gaze drifted toward the journal lying forgotten on the bed beside you. The worn cover looked almost ordinary in the birthing daylight, betraying none of the years of sleepless nights contained within its pages. Thousands upon thousands of predictions, warnings, nonsense, and tragedies. Entire futures reduced to disconnected phrases and broken observations.
When he spoke again, his voice carried a thoughtful weight that told you he was choosing his words carefully. “I know what it’s like when you’ve dreamt of death as well.”
When you drew your eyes back to him, his expression had softened into something melancholy. “There is a look you wear afterwards.”
“What look?” You asked, frowning.
A weary sort of affection touched his features. “As though you must wait for the sword to fall.”
The observation struck with uncomfortable accuracy. He was right. You spend so much time trapped inside your own mind that it was easy to forget how thoroughly he knew its workings. Easier still to forget that he watched you just as closely as you watched him.
“I don’t know what it means yet,” you said, lowering your gaze, “but something horrible is coming.”
“My girl,” he consoled, bringing you to sit within his lap.
Your head rested upon his shoulder as his hands dragged up and down your back. Quiet words were spoken between you while the sun made its journey in the sky. In muffled voices Baelor tried to help you untangle your vision, offering theories of what the pieces might mean.
Eventually the demands of the morning intruded on the conversation. Servants arrived, clothes were selected, and water was brought for washing. The habitual act of preparation slowly reclaimed the chamber as the day strengthened beyond the windows.
You allowed your ladies to fuss over your hair while Baelor dressed nearby, fastening belts and buckles with soft clinks that reminded you too much of the sound of steel against steel. You listened, though, as he spoke of the day’s events. The tournaments being held, which lords would no doubt request an audience, mundane concerns belonging to the waking world.
And for a short time the gentle lilt of his voice settled you. The dream retreated farther and farther away, and the panic subsided to a dull throb in the corners of your mind.
Yet as you caught yourself staring at Baelor as he adjusted the cuffs of his doublet, sunlight lancing briefly across the dark bronze tones of his hair, a phrase returned with maddening persistence.
The dragon was dying again.
THE SPECTERED SMOKE OF THOSE WORDS FOLLOWED YOU THROUGH THE DAY. They lingered in every conversation and smile offered in passing, bleeding into your thoughts like wine clouding through water. No amount of reason could entirely banish them. Baelor’s steady reassurances had dulled the sharpest edges of your fear, but they had not removed it. They never truly did. The comfort he offered functioned more as an anchor. Something solid to grasp while the storm lashed around you.
Perhaps that was why you loved him so much. Though love felt absurdly inadequate even now, after a few years of marriage. The truth was both simpler and infinitely more embarrassing. You had worshiped him long before you ever loved him.
As a child, there had been no distinction in your mind between your uncle—Prince Baelor Targaryen—and the heroes who populated the stories told by your septa. He had seemed larger than life in those days. Noble where others were cruel, patient where others grew frustrated. Stable in a family renowned for volatility. While your younger brothers wielded wooden swords and provoked each other with tempers inherited from generations of dragonlords, you had wandered through the Red Keep corridors like a ghost.
While you were a child, you idolized your uncle. As you grew into a young lady, that glorification flowed into admiration. Which became an almost all-consuming love as you reached adulthood.
You remembered it with painful clarity. The way your heart leapt whenever he greeted you. The ridiculous care with which you had chosen your dresses for dinners. The countless hours spent lingering wherever he happened to be, pretending coincidence while desperately hoping for his attention. At the time you had not recognized those feelings for what they were.
You had simply known that his presence soothed something restless inside you. He made the world seem less frightening when he occupied it. That unlike nearly everyone else, he listened to you.
When you realized the depth of your devotion to him, the longing almost drove you to the madness you’d been accused of your whole life. For a niece to be fond of her uncle was one thing. For her to be sickeningly in love with him was something else altogether. You had yearned for him. It tormented you, and there had been moments where you genuinely believed yourself afflicted by it.
Marriage prospects came and went with increasing frequency as your reputation spread through the Seven Kingdoms. Noble lords feared your dreams and what they implied. A few merely found you strange. Meanwhile, your heart had already chosen its ruin.
Not that he made matters easier. He should have dismissed you; any sensible man would’ve, but he did not. He remained a grounding solace. The one person who never looked at you as though madness lurked beneath your skin, never reducing your visions to hysteria. Over time he had become your refuge so completely that you scarcely noticed it happening.
Looking back, it seemed almost inevitable. A tragedy years in the making or a love story to be told generations to come. The distinction depended entirely upon who was telling it.
After your marriage to Baelor, you became less plagued. The dreams remained as they always would, but their aftermath no longer consumed entire weeks of your life. He helped gather the scattered pieces when you could not. He listened when panic threatened reason. He stayed beside you through every sleepless night.
In many ways he had become the barrier standing between you and the abyss.
You suspected that may be why the most recent dream unsettled you so profoundly. Because somewhere within its tangled imagery lay the unmistakable sensation of losing something irreplaceable.
By midday Ashford Meadow had transformed into the spectacle everyone expected. Knights crowded the lists in armor polished to mirror brightness. Nobles filled the stands draped in fine fabrics and jewels. Banners snapped proudly overhead while merchants shouted from cramped stalls lining the tournament grounds.
The entire meadow seemed alive with movement and noise, a celebration unfolding under cloudless skies. To anyone paying attention, it appeared a perfect summer day.
Yet unease continued prickling at the back of your neck. You found yourself searching the crowds repeatedly. Looking for signs from the vision, or whatever devil had birthed it.
Baelor noticed as he noticed everything. Several times throughout the day his hand found the small of your back as he sought to ground you. Once he leaned close enough to quietly ask whether you were well.
You brushed it off, and he pretended to believe you for the time being. The arrangement would suit both of you until you said otherwise. Unfortunately, the gods had never shown much regard for mortal arrangements.
The afternoon deteriorated steadily thereafter. Each passing hour carried with it another small irritation that accumulated under your skin until everything seemed to vibrate with tension. The atmosphere began to sour around you.
You remembered watching your brother ride that afternoon. Aerion’s armor had gleamed darkly beneath the summer sun, every inch the image of a dragon prince. The crowd cheered when he entered the field. For a moment, he appeared precisely what he should’ve been. Then he reminded everyone who he truly was.
You had been seated beside Baelor in the royal viewing box when your brother deliberately angled his lance downward at the last moment. The strike had not been aimed at Ser Humfrey Hardying, but at the man’s horse.
The poor animal had screamed, a horrible sound. The horse’s leg had tangled under it as momentum carried both rider and mount violently into the ground. Ser Humfrey had been thrown with such force that the crack of breaking bone echoed all the way to the royal seats.
The crowd grew angry. You had watched outrage spread through the spectators like wildfire consuming dry brush. Voices multiplied rapidly until the entire meadow seemed on the verge of erupting. The Kingsguard had been forced to intervene before that outrage transformed into something uglier.
Even now, hours later, you could still remember the expression on Aerion’s face as he removed his helm. Smug, amused, and utterly pleased with himself. As if crippling another man for sport had been a clever jest.
The memory left a bitter taste in your mouth.
Which was why, when the chamber doors burst open shortly after sunset and a Kingsguard entered with visible urgency, your first reaction was to cringe and wonder what fresh hell had descended now.
Your father sat near the hearth with the rigid posture of a man perpetually prepared for disappointment. Though, you said he had every right to be irritable, as Daeron and Egg had still not been found. And he had likely wasted an entire day looking for them. Baelor occupied the chair beside him, quietly discussing the day's events with Lord Ashford. You were working distractedly on a piece of embroidery that had long since ceased receiving your attention.
The arrival of the Kingsguard shattered the mood in the Great Hall.
“Your Grace, my prince,” he addressed your husband and father at once. "There has been an incident involving Prince Aerion."
A muscle jumped in your father’s jaw. The poor man looked neither surprised nor alarmed, merely exhausted. “Of course there has,” Maekar muttered.
The Kingsguard hesitated before continuing. As the details emerged, a dreadful picture began assembling itself before you. There had been a puppeteer, a Dornish girl. Aerion took offence to the show and reacted as he always did, with cruelty and humiliation. A hedge knight named Ser Duncan had intervened, striking your brother many times.
“Also, my prince,” the Kingsguard directed at your father. “The prince Aegon was present.”
“Egg has been found?” you perked up, speaking for the first time.
“Yes, Princess,” the Kingsguard nodded. “The boy was with the hedge knight.”
You felt a fraction of relief where your youngest brother was concerned. He was alive and well and had apparently gone on some sort of adventure.
“Take Ser Duncan to the castle cells,” your husband ordered. “Ensure Aegon is seen safely inside.”
You watched him from your seat, seeing as he had already begun piecing together the shape of the disaster before it arrived. The firelight painted a warm cast across the hard lines of his face as he leaned forward, forearms resting upon his knees. Ever the thoughtful and composed heir. Entirely unaware that every time you looked at him your stomach twisted.
The dragon was dying again.
The words whispered through your skull as you forced your gaze away.
What seemed like an eternity later, you were seated at the table of a hastily put together trial board in the castle study. Your husband, as heir and Hand of the King, presided over the group made up of Lord Ashford, Tyrell, and your father. Aerion was in attendance as well, seated at the end of the table cracking nuts with the hilt of his knife.
The repetitive noise grated on your already frazzled nerves.
You sat tensely beside Baelor, your hands folded in your lap as you observed the proceeding. Though no one suggested you leave, you suspected Lord Ashford and Tyrell wondered why you remained. Women rarely attended such matters. Then again, people rarely possessed prophetic dreams either, and your family had long ago ceased expecting you to conform to ordinary customs.
The chamber door groaned open, and Ser Duncan was escorted inside. The hedge knight looked even larger in the confined space than he had seemed from the recounting of the attack. Broad shouldered and towering in his simple clothing. Despite his intimidating size, though, there remained an almost endearing awkwardness about him.
It was silent for a moment, the only sound being your brother's irritating consumption of walnuts. Ser Duncan quickly darted his eyes over the gathering at the table before stuttering, “T-Trial by combat. That is my right.”
“I refuse,” Aerion said immediately, his tone petulant and childish as he continued to chew.
Your father let out a slow breath through his nose. The sound every bit the mark of a man losing his patience. "You cannot refuse,” his voice rumbled.
“Any knight accused of a crime has the right to demand as such.” Baelor calmly pointed out, turning to face your brother. “Unless you withdraw your claim.”
Aerion just smiled. It wasn’t a pleasant grin or even a subtle one. It was the smile he wore whenever some fresh cruelty occurred to him. “A trail of seven,” he declared. “That is my right, I do believe.”
Your father spoke something, sharp and perplexed, but you could not hear him. Even when Baelor began explaining something, the words did not rise above the sudden roar inside your skull.
Dust clouded around you as screams split your ears. You heard the splintering of broken wood and the metallic clang of steel on steel. The image of the falling dragon blinked in and out of your vision. It all came on so violently that your breath snagged in your throat. Something painful lurched inside your chest. The sensation was so powerful you forgot where you were, and the words escaped before you realized you had spoken.
"The dragon is dying again."
The sentence emerged scarcely louder than a whisper. Yet somehow everyone heard it, and heads turned as your stomach dropped. You wanted to disappear into your own embarrassment while Lord Ashford and Tyrell abruptly became fascinated by random objects in the study. Poor Ser Duncan simply looked utterly bewildered.
The same could not be said for your family, though. Baelor's head snapped toward you immediately; concern darkened his features. Your father frowned at you. Aerion laughed with unmistakable delight at your expense.
"The dragons are already dead, sister," he said lazily. "Have been for some time now." His violet eyes gleamed with familiar malice. “Or did it slip your simple mind?”
The words landed exactly as intended. Your brother had spent years finding inventive ways to mock you. Madness, your dreams, your reputation, and marriage—nothing remained beyond his reach. Ordinarily you would have ignored him. Tonight, however, the dream sat too close to your skin. Dust still swirled in your eyes, and you could still hear wailing.
At the same moment your father reached across and struck Aerion sharply across the back of his head. The crack echoed through the hall. Aerion jerked forward with a curse.
"Enough," Maekar growled.
Under the table, Baelor’s hands sought yours, warm and protective. You had not realized your hands were trembling until his fingers closed gently around them. He had done this very thing hundreds of times, but tonight it only served to make matters worse. The instant his skin touched yours, another image flashed through your mind. The damaged helm, steel caved in like jagged teeth.
You sucked in a sharp breath, yanking your hand from his.
He battled with his urge to reach for you again. He knew to crowd you in such a state would do no good, though. “My love?” he softly called instead.
You could hear him, but focusing became increasingly harder. The study blurred around the edges. The walls seemed farther away than they ought to have been, and the air felt suddenly difficult to breathe. You pushed your chair back, the legs scraping loudly along the stone floor. Every eye in the room returned to you.
“Excuse me,” you said, voice strained.
Baelor was halfway to his feet before you had finished speaking. The worry on his face only worsened the panic. "I will escort you,” he offered.
"No,” the word came out sharp as a dragon's tooth. You regretted the clipped tone instantly. “I only need a moment,” you assured him.
He nodded reluctantly, allowing you the dignity of retreat.
You gave hurried apologies to the room and gathered your skirts before turning towards the door. The moment it closed behind you, the careful mask of composure started to crack. The corridor lay empty and silent, glowing with flickering torchlight. Your footsteps echoed as you rushed to your chambers, one hand pressed tightly against your ribs as if it might contain the dread building there.
Again and again and again. You were plagued by the damnable phrase.
The dragon is dying again.
BY THE TIME YOU REACHED YOUR CHAMBERS, YOUR PULSE WAS THUDDING SO FIERCELY YOU COULD FEEL IT BEHIND YOUR EYES. The door closed behind you with a heavy thud as silence followed quickly. At first it felt like relief. Too soon did it become its own kind of torment.
You crossed the room aimlessly and then crossed it again. The restless fuzz beneath your skin refused to settle. It felt as though your body understood something your mind had yet to grasp. Every instinct howled that danger approached while reason struggled desperately to identify from where.
Stopping in front of the hearth, you peered into the flames. Amber light danced wildly across rough stone like a ballroom of cinders. Ordinarily the sight might soothe you. Fire possessed a peculiar intimacy for those descended from the destruction of the Doom. Something ancient lingered within it. A reminder of old blood and older histories.
You thought of Valyria, of dragons, and the death of both. You wondered if this was how Daenys had felt. Pondering if the Dreamer had spent days upon days within the Freehold pacing chambers much like these. If she too had been haunted by fragments she couldn’t fully understand. Whether she spent sleepless nights plagued by images of fire and death.
The histories spoke only of certain facts. Daenys foresaw the Doom, and her father listened. The Targaryens fled, and Valyria perished. Simple and neat, the sort of story people preferred telling generations later. You doubted reality had been so accommodating, seeing that dreams never were.
You pressed trembling fingers to your temple, trying to cast out the endless torment. But the conviction remained. You knew it with the very same instinctive knowledge that came with every true dream you experienced. Something was wrong. Something was terribly, irrevocably wrong.
Sinking into a chair near the fire, you tried forcing yourself to breathe evenly. You mused over the pieces of the dream that would not leave you be. The thought that perhaps the business with Aerion and Ser Duncan might be the root of it. You dreamed of a tournament, a destroyed helm, and a broken spear. All things that would be present in a trial by combat or trial of seven; whatever they had agreed upon. But that would mean someone must die because when you feel death in a vision, that’s always the case.
The Stanger does not make mistakes.
A crack split your heart at the thought of anyone dying, even Aerion, cruel as he may be. Restlessness drove you to the window overlooking the darkened grounds. The land had become little more than a sea of shadows writhing in the moonlight. Here and there isolated torches glowed among the encampments like fickle beacons of hope.
The sound of the door opening nearly made you jump. You turned immediately as Baelor entered the chamber. The moment you saw him, some part of the panic eased. Not much, but enough to remind you why his presence had always felt like coming home. You wanted to rush to him, throw yourself into his arms until all your troubles ran away frightened from your brave husband. But your shame from your earlier episode kept you riveted to the stone.
He closed the door quietly behind him before looking across the room to you. He regarded you with tender heed as if he expected to find you in this exact state.
“My love,” he greeted gently so as not to startle you.
“I am alright,” you said immediately, the lie sounding pathetic even to you.
Baelor sighed, and though you knew it wasn’t from irritation, the young girl in you wanted to weep at the notion of vexing him.
“My dear wife,” he murmured, low and affectionate. “I love you too greatly to believe that.”
Slowly, he crossed the floor until he stood before you. His gaze studied your expression as he reached for you in case you might pull away again. When you allowed him to grasp your hands, he smiled gratefully as he eased your body to lean into his. “I take it the dream still ails you,” he remarked, thumbs smoothing along your hips.
Your eyes burned unexpectedly with the tears of a dozen fires. “I cannot stop thinking about it,” you admitted, the vulnerability impossible to hide.
“What frightens you the most?” He asked, his eyes softening around the corners.
Everything.
The answer sat precariously close to the edge of your tongue. You were afraid of everything. The dream, the omen of death, the inexplicable feeling that he himself was in danger. The anguish clawing at your ribs with talons that felt as if they were shredding you from the inside.
“I keep seeing a dragon dying.” You say instead, swallowing back your emotions. Baelor listened without interruption even as you took a long moment to gather the rest of your words. “I fear… I fear that it means someone in our family will die. I thought perhaps Aerion giving the business with that hedge knight, but—”
Your throat closed up with the revolting things you were about to say. “There is a dark cloud hanging over you, my love.” When you finished speaking, silence settled thickly between you.
“My heart,” he murmured, drawing you closer to press you into an embrace. There was a sort of desperation in his hold that surprised you. As if some great sorrow had claimed him while you were separated. “My precious girl,” he continued, “I am not going anywhere. I am here; right here.”
The fabric of his ebony doublet rubbed against your face as you buried yourself into his chest. Your hands fisting the material as you tried tirelessly to believe him. The Stranger’s shadow still draped over you, though, imposing and demanding.
“You have spent a lifetime enduring the weight of dreams that would break most people,” your husband spoke again. “You are stronger than most men, but you don’t have to bear it alone.”
“You say that now,” you whispered into his warmth.
“I have said it for years,” he countered, fingers threading through your hair.
Lifting your head, you gazed at him thoughtfully. "Because you are impossibly patient."
“That may be true,” he smiled.
Despite yourself, a weak laugh bubbled over the turmoil. His grin widened at the sound of it.
“There she is,” he softly celebrated. “I have longed for your smile all day.”
The affection in those words hurt almost as much as it comforted. Because all you could think was that your dream wanted to take him from you. But you banished the thought with a violent internal shake of your head. That was the one thing you could not bear. If the gods snatched him from you, that would truly rid you of the last of your sanity. You were not certain you could live without him anymore.
Baelor noticed you spiraling. Without hesitation, he cupped your face in his hands, pulling you into him once again. His lips stamped along your jaw in small grounding kisses. Eventually he reached your ear, planting one more to the shell of it before he spoke.
“You need sleep.”
You giggled faintly as his breath tickled your skin. “I think sleep may be the problem.”
"Perhaps,” he mused, his hand moving slowly down your back. "But exhaustion has never improved a prophecy."
After several more minutes of coaxing, he finally convinced you to surrender. You allowed him to settle you beneath the blankets before climbing in beside you. You were drawn together immediately, his arm wrapping around your waist. You shifted in as close as you could get, back resting fully to his chest, his soft breaths ghosting along your neck.
His embrace and the low glow from the fire caused your eyes to finally grow heavy. The last thing you remembered before sleep claimed you was the sound of Baelor's heartbeat beneath your ear.
AT FIRST THERE WAS ONLY DUST.
Golden clouds of it that rose from tournament grounds beneath pounding hooves and booted feet. It whipped like a storm through shafts of sunlight, suspended within the summer air like motes of brass.
You stood in the middle of it all. The dust wrapping itself around your ribs, cloying to tissue as it dragged you deeper within it. Your pulse sounded in your ears like the striking of a smith’s hammer upon the anvil. Turning frantically, you searched the field, panic simmering in your blood.
Men thundered across the land in armor as horses squealed. The splintering of wood scattered through the air as lances shattered on impact. Steel flashed blindingly in the sun while shouts of pain and exertion blended over one another. A crowd erupted into gasps and cheers as the horrors persisted around you.
You knew he was here somewhere. The same way you always knew things inside your dreams. You caught sight of him in the blurring sunlight. The three-headed dragon worked into his breastplate, unmistakable even through the haze of dust and movement. The sight of him was like taking breath after nearly drowning.
The vision continued, and the gods, in their infinite cruelty, finally granted you the clarity you had been begging for. The fragments that had tormented you suddenly began fitting together.
The dust, the broken spear, the helm, and the falling dragon. All of it finally joined in a single horrifying picture.
Everything around you faded away as it happened. All you could see was him and the mace that came down upon the back of his head with a sickening impact. He stumbled, a hand going to his skull. The fingers came away bloody. He seemed confused at the very notion. Baelor fell to the ground, his back hitting dirt with the jarring sound of finality.
You cried out, a raw and gut-wrenching noise that startled you. Sometimes you could scream until your lungs bled and no sound would emerge.
The dream broke around you, and with your own cries splitting your ears, you knew he was dead.
You woke up shrieking. The sound tore from your throat so violently it left your chest burning. Your heart pounded so hard it rattled your teeth. You choked around your tears, air refusing to enter your lungs like a stubborn mount resisting the reigns.
Strong hands caught your shoulders. “My love—”
You fought against your husband without truly meaning to. Panic had consumed every rational thought in your mind.
“No!” The word broke apart around a sob. "No, no, no—"
He spoke your name sternly, one of the only times he would ever address you in such a tone.
His voice reached through the deluge of terror. A gasp of relief so strong it all but sliced open the flesh of your throat spilled out. You twisted toward him so quickly the blankets tangled around your legs. The solace of his presence struck so hard it became agony.
Before you realized it you were clutching handfuls of his nightshirt with both hands, holding him as though you might hold together his very blood and bones.
"My heart," he murmured, pulling you closer. "Easy now."
You buried your face into his shoulder. The panic refused to release you, causing your limbs to shake with the strain. Every time you closed your eyes, you saw him falling again; his copper coated fingers.
“Hush now,” he consoled, hands rubbing soothing circles on your back. “It is alright.”
Those words felt almost laughable, or maybe you were simply that deep into a state of hysterics. But how could that possibly be true? How were you supposed to tell the man you loved more than your own life that you had just watched him die?
It took a long while before you could speak. Longer still before the frenzy loosened enough for coherent thought to return. And Baelor remained with you through it as your tears soaked his shirt.
Eventually your breathing slowed enough that he gently tilted your chin upward. He regarded you with the same tender heed as before. “What happened?” he asked softly.
The question cracked what little composure you had managed to recover. Fresh tears flooded your eyes.
“I saw it,” you whispered, voice trembling. “It is clear now.” You had to gather every ounce of courage to even allow the next words to make it out into the air. “You… you died.”
Confusion flickered briefly across his face. “What do you mean?”
You swallowed hard against the bile that wanted to spew from your mouth. “You were there,” you said unevenly, your fingers tightening on his sleeve. “On the tourney field fighting in the trial.”
A shadow passed over his features like a storm cloud. It was more than enough to have dread immediately coil stricter inside your stomach. You suddenly felt very cold, as if you’d trudged through northern snow in nothing but your nightgown.
“Baelor…” His name was spoken with thinly veiled agitation. Had you been in a sounder mental state, you would have felt guilty for it. “Why would you be fighting?”
The silence that followed seemed to stretch forever. Your husband would not look at you, and that wasn’t like him. The pit in your stomach deepened.
When he finally spoke, his voice carried the tone of a man choosing his words with great deliberation. "I intended to tell you tomorrow."
“No,” you shook your head so fiercely it hurt. You leaned away from him as fear replaced every drop of blood in your veins.
"The hedge knight is unlikely to find six men willing to stand beside him,” he reasoned, reaching to bring you back to him.
You flinched away, and you saw the hurt blink in his eyes, but you could barely think. It felt as though a butcher had strung you up and began dismembering you for a feast.
“He defended an innocent against cruelty,” Baelor continued with overflowing gentleness. “Whatever else may come of this, Ser Duncan acted honorably.”
You stared at him, unable to think or breathe. “You cannot be serious,” you accused. Horror surged through you at the mere thought of him in that battle. “Baelor—”
“It is not yet decided,” he assuaged. The words were meant to console, but they only made something inside you splinter farther.
As though there remained doubt. As if you had not just seen it with your own eyes. As though the gods had not ripped open your skull and forced the vision into it.
“But you intend to do it.” Your voice sounded strange, thin and fragile.
Baelor’s expression softened further, which somehow only worsened the ache clawing your chest to ribbons. “If Ser Duncan cannot find the men he needs, then yes.”
The room seemed to tilt as if you were falling down some great hole that you would never find your way out of again. You stared at him, certain your eyes held the violence of a dragon flying to war.
“No,” you said. The word emerged like a plea and a command all in one.
“Listen to me—”
“No,” you argued, pushing away from him entirely this time, scrambling across the bed to put several feet between you.
The movement startled him.
Good. You thought.
He needed to be shaken. You wanted him frightened, anything that might make him understand the sheer magnitude of what you saw.
“You cannot fight,” you insisted.
He raised his hands in front of him, meaning to pacify you. "My love—"
“You cannot!” Your voice cracked around the wail. The tears had returned entirely now, streaming freely down your face. Why didn’t he understand? Why was it now when he chose to disregard one of your dreams?
“I saw it,” you said, hands coming to clutch together at your chest. “I saw you die.”
The words echoed through the darkness of the chamber.
“Ser Duncan defended an innocent,” Baelor said carefully. “If honorable men abandon him now, then what becomes of justice?”
The words struck you like a slap. They were far too reasonable, and reason had no place here. It couldn’t save him. It couldn’t change what you had seen.
“You are not listening to me,” you cried. The desperation in your voice was becoming unbearable. You could hear it, the edge of full delirium taking over. “You will die.”
“I know what you saw,” he murmured, tilting his head. The look he gave you was solemn enough to send your heart racing more than it already was.
“No, you don’t,” you said, shaking your head. “If you did, you would not still be entertaining such an absurd idea.”
You rose from the bed so abruptly your legs nearly fell out from under you. The need to move was strong, the tremors wracking your body deeming it impossible to remain still. “I saw you fall. I watched you die, and you’re speaking to me of justice?”
Baelor stood slowly with a great deal more grace than you. He approached you like one would a frightened animal. It made you want to scream.
“I must do this, my love,” he said. There was a sorrowful tone to his voice. It only served to heighten your distress.
You laughed, a horrible sound that was sharp and wet with tears. The breaking of a dam overwhelmed by floodwaters. “You must? Must!”
“Honor demands—” he tried, but you interrupted him.
“Honor?” The word burst from you as your hands flew up helplessly. The gesture was wild and frantic. Every bit the crazed princess half the realm already believed you to be. You did not care. Dignity felt utterly meaningless when compared to the prospect of losing him. “What honor exists in dying for a man you've met twice?”
The question pierced the room with the force of a thrown dagger. Baelor did not hesitate, though. Steadfast in his resolve to forfeit his own life, it seemed. “The honor of doing what is right.”
A nearly inhuman noise tumbled from your throat. “And what of me?”
You saw the guilt flicker through his eyes. He took a quick step towards you, but you retreated further into the room. You could see the visible pain your withdrawal caused him. But he persisted, moving for you again. He reached toward you, the gesture coming from his instinct to comfort you. Under any other circumstances you would have fallen into it instantly.
Instead, when his fingers grazed your arm, something inside you finally snapped. Your hand moved, swift like lighting a match, and cracked across his cheek. The force caused his head to whip to the side as your palm stung. The silence that shadowed was absolute. You both froze, and for a daunting moment neither of you breathed.
You hadn't meant to. The strike had been born from desperation rather than true anger. Regret chilled over you as you brought that same hand up to cover your mouth. “I—”
His head turned slowly back to face you. A red mark had already begun appearing against his skin. He looked more determined now than he had the whole argument. That somehow made everything worse.
He reached for you again. In your fractured state, you shoved him, both palms pushed on his chest. It was not enough to move him. Nothing ever moved Baelor when he decided to stand his ground. Still, you shoved him again. The effort was pathetic and childish. Entirely born from the helplessness that had haunted you your entire life.
For as long as you could remember, the dreams came and people died. There was never anything you could do to stop it. You had learned to live with it the best you could. But this time the Stranger was coming for the man who held every breath you took in his hands.
“Enough.” He caught your wrist before you could push him again. The motion swift and firm as his voice rumbled with steel-backed command. “Enough, wife.”
You couldn’t protest when he pulled you forward into him. Every ounce of fight vanished as your body went slack against his. A torrent of sobs tore through you. Your forehead struck his chest as your knees threatened to buckle.
Baelor wrapped both arms around you, their solid strength the only thing keeping you upright.
You clutched handfuls of his nightshirt, your nails digging desperately into the fabric. As though enough force might keep him anchored to the world; keep him alive.
“Please,” you begged, the word dissolving into a wail. “Please.”
His embrace tightened and you felt his nose nudge into your hair. His lips brushed your temple, and still you cried and shook. Still you clung to him as if he was bleeding out already in your arms.
Eventually his hand slid beneath your chin, patient and soft. He tilted your face up, forcing you to look at him. Moonlight spilled across his face. Those familiar mismatched eyes and the features you knew better than your own.
“You cannot leave me,” you whispered. A doomed bargain offered to uncaring gods.
He stared at you, something raw and aching unfurling in his eyes. Slowly he nodded, as though he believed he could keep that promise. Then, with all the reverence he held for you, he leaned forward and kissed you. It was a hard press of his mouth to yours, the sort that said words not meant for the open air.
“The gods themselves could not tear me from you,” he rumbled. The sound coming from deep in his chest, enveloping your trembling frame with the warmth of his breath. He pulled away only an inch, just enough to permit himself to breathe you in.
Your blood still sang of the atrocity to come, but your heart thrummed hard in your chest for an entirely new reason. Your lungs expanded in quick, short breaths, not due to fear but all encompassing desire.
“But my vision—”
“Shh,” Baelor urged. “We will discuss it, but let me care for you, my sweet wife.”
As his lips descended on yours once again, you could do nothing but fall into him.
His hands came to rest on your waist, his thumbs digging into each of your hipbones. Your mouths move together as his tongue finds the seam of your lips, begging entrance. You part for him, and he licks into your mouth, the heat pouring from him to you and from you to him. The blood of the dragon mingling and mixing.
You edge closer to him, tipping up on the points of your toes. Baelor, knowing your needs so well, perceived what you wanted. He hooked his hold around the backs of your thighs, hoisting you into his arms. Hands fly to his shoulders to find solid muscle to grip. Your legs circled his waist, tightening around him as he carried you to the bed.
His two-toned eyes stoked the fire building in your core as they met yours once he settled you on the sheets. He knelt at the foot of the bed, pulling his nightshirt over his head. The slow reveal of his skin was a teasing torture, the dark salt peppered hair on his chest tempting your composure. The garment was lost to the floor once he was free of it.
You surged forward, palms sliding and exploring the planes of his chest. A hiss leaves his kissed red lips when your nails dig into the flesh of his pectoral, some of your earlier discontent breaking through.
He captures your hands with quick movements, binding your wrist as he pushes you back down to the mattress. The skirt of your nightgown rucked up in the descent, the soft warmth of your thighs now bare for his hungry gaze. Releasing your wrists, his hand ran up the side of one leg, drawing it up to bend at the knee.
“Baelor,” you gasped, breathless, fisting the sheets beside you.
He positions your other leg before making home between them, his shoulders bearing the weight of them. The thin gauze of your nightgown is bunched completely at your ribs, your stomach quivering as his breath tickled. He kisses the plush flesh there, moving steadily downwards.
“Baelor,” you whine again.
He hushes you, fingers soothing along your hip. “Tell me,” he says, adding another kiss right above your core. “I won’t deny you anything; you need only tell me what you want.”
His touch continued to tease with light brushes across sensitive skin. He knew full well what you craved, but he wanted to hear you say it. He would not take you unless you voiced your desires. It stemmed from his need for consent but also the guilty pleasure he found from hearing such words from your sweet lips.
A shiver ran through you as his head dipped lower to bend towards the junction of your thighs. You took in an uneven breath, gathering the words in the back of your throat.
“Please, husband,” you pleaded. “Your mouth… I need you.” Your hips rose just slightly, urging him to close the distance. “Banish the dream from my mind.”
“Gladly,” he rasped, the scruff of his beard burning your inner thighs as he parted your folds with his tongue. “It has been too long since I’ve tasted you, my love.”
Gods, it had been quite long. The journey to Ashford and even some time before that. Too long had you gone without the heat of his tongue feasting on you.
You whined as his mouth pressed deeper into your warmth. His strong hands gripping the pliant flesh of your thighs, his tongue teasing your entrance. Warm and wet, it licked a path up to that swollen bundle of nerves at the apex.
He groaned into you, the sound a heavy vibration against your core. “Sīr dōna, ñuha ābrazȳrys.”(So sweet, my wife.)
His arms drew you closer, a moan clawing up his throat as he lapped at your arousal. He opened you to him with a desperation that convinced you he truly was trying to dispel the vision from your thoughts. He was nothing if not devoted to you, especially when he was between your legs.
Your hands flew to his head, nails piercing his scalp when his lips wrapped around your clit. He sucks it into his mouth, lathering the tip of his tongue over it in maddening strokes. Each caress of it has your lungs seizing, breath stalling, as little moans escape from you. You can feel the tension building inside of you, low in your stomach. You cry out when he pulls away, relief and frustration threading together.
He moves back down to your entrance, dripping with spit and slick alike. He eases the tip of his tongue inside, and your head falls back into the pillows as your thighs close around his head.
“Baelor,” you gasp his name into the writhing shadows.
His warm breath ghosts over your aching core as he pulls away. Untangling himself from your limbs takes several minutes, but once he does, he’s quick to pry your legs back open. He does nothing at first. Pleas and a thousand begging words are ready to spill from your mouth, hips bucking towards him.
“If you want my mouth, wife, you must keep your legs open,” he orders, voice firm and grounding.
They shake as you widen the space between them, but mercifully he returns. His lips find you again quickly, his tongue plunging inside you before you could react. It curls up, pushing deeper within your walls, and you moan, hips jumping closer to his sweet torment.
His nose nudges against your clit as he grunts, tugging you further into him. Both his arms coiling strong around your thighs, hips lifting off the bed while he buries his face into your cunt. He groans again, and the tremor of his deep lilt seeps through your stomach to the place where the knot of your pleasure grew tighter.
It is too much and not enough all at once. Your hands grapple at his shoulders, fingers unsteady, as you search for something to hold onto. The scratch of his beard as he brings you to the edge sends small sparks of pleasure dulled pain down your spine.
He must feel it in the quiver of your body because he speeds up the motion of his tongue. The muscle thrusts and flicks rapidly as you clench around it. Your hips rocked into him while he pushed as you pulled.
“Come for me, my love,” he urged, the sound of it muffled where he was pressed against you. His thumb finds your clit, rubbing it in quick circles.
“Please— oh gods,” you spoke into the air, a whimper accompanying the words as your peak crashed over you. Heat spreads from your core up through your veins, your body shaking through the release. He guides you through it, tongue slowing its movements as it subsides.
“That’s it, sweet girl,” he soothes as you slowly relax back into the sheets. Kisses are stamped across the expanse of your belly. His lips, slick with your arousal, gave offerings of his love for you. As he paid his homage upwards, he rested his head on the sweat-slick skin of your chest, grazing your breast with his mouth.
He gazed up at you, beard and chin covered in your essence. His eyes shimmered with the reverence of a thousand disciples. “Not even death could take me from the honor of seeing you like that.”
Fresh tears welled up in your eyes as your hands ran up the length of his back, trying to remind yourself that he was still here. He hushed you softly when he saw, lips moving to your face to make his expedition across the flushed skin. His hips rocked into yours, his cock sliding along your sensitive folds. Your breaths grew more ragged with each kiss of his mouth as your legs bent to cradle him.
His lips found yours again, covering your mouth in a deep kiss that tasted of the intoxicating mix of him and you. Your teeth knocked together as he leaned his body to cover you, close and safe and warm. He kissed the last traces of tears away, putting in their place the joining of you both. He drank in your gasp when his fingers slid down, dipping between your slit. Two fingers spread you open, teasing your already soaking entrance.
“Baelor, please,” you beg, drawing back to take in a few short breaths.
He coos at you softly, his eyes burning your flushed skin with their heat. A smile graces his features as he watches you, his fingers moving up to circle your clit. The pressure is heavy and firm, making your thighs tense on either side of his hips.
“I’ve got you,” he soothes, his free hand coming to smooth back your hair. His head falls to your neck where his tongue swipes across the sweat beaded on your collar bone. A low groan rumbles in his chest at the taste. He continues to lick along your skin, lips stamping searing kisses here and there. His digits shift from your clit downwards to play at your opening. You barely have time to steal a breath before those two thick fingers slip inside. You gasp around a moan, the stretch of them welcome and familiar.
They move, sinking to the knuckles before curling up. Your walls clench around them as they find a steady pace, surely meant to bring you to another pinnacle. The warmth of that promised pleasure traveled over your skin like fire as he pumped them in and out.
“Sīr bāne, sīr ȳrda syt nyke,” Baelor murmurs into your throat. (So warm, so tight for me.)
“Oh gods,” you moaned at his words, head tossed back into the pillows. You clutch at him, nails digging into the tanned skin of his back. You feel the flesh break when he nudges that spot deep within you, your eyes screwing shut against the mounting tension. It was happening quickly, your second climax sneaking up on you while your husband drove it closer and closer.
Your limbs tremble as he works, your blood all but singing in your veins. The wet muscle still at your neck is scorching, as if he intended to brand his possession there. When he raises his face, his eyes watch with rapt attention as your lashes flutter and your lips part with your impending release.
“Let go for me, my heart,” he orders, fingers quickening their relentless pace, pressing hard against that magical spot at the end of you. “Māzigon syt aōha valzȳrys.” (Come for your husband.)
A high-pitched whine slips through your lips as his words send you over the edge. It climbs higher and higher until it finally peaks with rushing heat. Your back arches with a cry of his name loud enough to reach the dark halls and any specters lingering in them. The exquisite feeling of clenching around his fingers rolls through you, the digits curling up a few more times as he helps you through it a second time. He gazes adoringly at you, thighs shaking, chest heaving, your slick running down his wrist.
“Beautiful,” he whispers as he removes his fingers. You bite back a quiet sound as your release drips from you like sweet syrup.
You meet his eyes as he sits back for a moment. He looks distraught, sick with need, and longing. You almost want to weep again at the sight of him. The stress from the day past and the way in which he took you apart ignited your already frazzled nerves. “Valzȳrys—” (Husband.)
He hummed, cutting off your whimper of his one of many titles. Draping his body back over yours, he thumbs under your eyes, ridding your waterline of unshed tears. “None of that,” he insists gently.
There was no space between you as he peppered soft kisses to your cheek and down by the corner of your mouth. “You are so good for me,” he breathes, elbow bracing by your head so as not to crush you with his weight. “My pretty wife.”
“Baelor, I…” You barely manage the words, your body and mind heavy with exhaustion.
“It’s alright,” he reassured, “I know.”
He leans away just slightly, his hands covering your thighs once more, caressing the soft damp skin. Palms splay out around the backs of them, spreading you open for him. The cool air hits and you shiver as he hauls you down closer to where he wants you. You do not have the strength to fight his direction, not that you would want to. Giving into him was one of the easiest things you had ever done aside from loving him.
The length of his cock rests on your thigh as he settles back between them. He takes it in his hand running the tip up and down your folds. You whine softly, head reeling, already humming with overwhelming sensation. Your breath grows heavy when he lines himself up with your entrance, the broad head parting your cunt so he might slide the rest of the way in.
He eases the length of it inside slowly, chest swelling with deep breaths. His brows were heavy set as he guided you through taking each inch, always so careful with you. He huffs out a low groan of your name once you reach the hilt, the hair at the base tickling your swollen clit.
“There we are, dōna riña,” he murmurs. (Sweet girl.)
His hips roll with the first thrust, shallow and testing, before he pulls almost all the way out. He enters you again with a deep drive that knocks the air from your lungs. Wrapping your legs around his waist, he angles your hips to take him deeper. The pace he sets is near obsessive worship, sliding you along the sheets with each plunge.
“Oh,” you cry out as his cock nudges against that perfect spot inside you.
Fire dances along your body everywhere his hands touch you. A taut knot of pleasure tightens in your stomach, seeping into the very marrow of your bones. All you can feel is him, the solid pressure of his weight atop you as he savored every gasp and moan you gifted him. You can hear how wet you are and feel it dripping from you as it welcomes his cock inside you.
You want only this for the rest of your life, him alive and with you. The mere thought of it being taken from you made your lips tremble and your arms throw themselves around his shoulders. You tugged at him until he came down to meet you.
“My love,” he rasps, his eyes glimmering with his own need.
Without warning, your husband flips you, sitting up as he settles you into his lap. You gasp with the momentum, palms steadying yourself on his shoulders. His chest presses against your breast, warm and heavy. His cock remained inside you, your cunt sucking him deeper in this new position.
Every drop of air leaves you in a rush. His hands go to your hips, pulling you into him, rolling your body with his as he thrust upwards. The deep drag of him pulled keening sobs from your throat as your eyes began to burn. You could feel him in your womb almost, each ascending drive of his cock fervent and devoted to bringing you pleasure.
“On me,” he demanded, forehead coming to rest on yours. “Think of nothing else hae mazeman ao apart va ñuha orvorta.” (as I take you apart on my cock.)
No other words were spoken as he rocked your hips into his. It was a slow, agonizingly deep grind that turned your body to liquid heat. You felt boneless as he tilted his hips upwards, meeting you with a languid press that seemed to reach the very center of your being. Your breath came in heavy pants against his mouth as your arms coiled tighter around his shoulders, hands going to rest over the crown of his head.
The thick heat builds in your belly, growing as it spreads to your core, gushing like blood from a fresh cut. You can feel his cock twitching inside you when your walls clench around the length.
“One last time, ñuha jorrāelagon,” he manages through heavy breaths. (My love.) He was nearing his end; you could tell in the way his chest heaved and his sounds of pleasure flew more freely. “Can you do that for me?”
You nodded frantically as the feathered mattress bounced on the creaking bedframe. “Yes, please, Baelor,” you whine, nails piercing his scalp.
His movements, still deep and aching, struck up against that toe-curling place again and again. The pleasure came over you like a fever, hot and all-consuming. Tears threatened to fall as a sharp gasp tore from your throat. A ringing takes over your hearing once that knot of molten fire shatters. Your legs tremble with the force of your release, cunt spasming around his cock, your back arching, pushing your breast more firmly against his sweat-slick chest.
“There we go, take it,” he moans, jaw clenching with the oncoming of his own climax. His thrusts grow sloppy, his hands tighten at your hips as his breaths become interrupted with deep sighs and groans. You can feel the desperation clawing at him, the need to fill you up impossible to ignore.
His head falls to your chest, face buried in your breasts as he fills you with his cock. A deep, drawn out moan of your name leaves his lips when he spills himself inside you. Hips jumping up until they slowed, the warmth of his seed spreading inside you making you whimper.
You stayed just how you were for a time, Baelor’s hands stroking lines up and down your back as you both allowed your pulses to return to normal. Your cheek rested on his shoulder, and your finger had traced the same freckle numerous times now. You never wanted to move again. And you would not have if it weren’t for your husband deciding for you.
Lifting you off his lap slightly, he freed himself from you before laying you back among the pillows. He stretches out beside you, quick to pull you into his arms. He gazed down at you, eyes heavy and lidded, as he placed a single kiss to your forehead.
Tiredness crept up on you, your eyes growing droopy as your head lay on his chest. You could feel his fingers playing with your messy hair, undoing the tangles while a thick cover of the unspoken settled over you. It prickled at the back of your mind, but you couldn’t gather the strength to bring it to voice again.
“Sleep, my love,” Baelor urged, his fingers in your hair and the slow strokes up your back lulling you further into the rest. “I am here.”
As the hand of sleep pulled you under, you held on to the sound of his breathing. A quiet prayer sent out to any deity that would listen that the fates had gotten this one wrong.
THEY BURNED HIM BEFORE SUNSET.
The pyre stood alone within an open field beyond Ashford’s walls, where the summer grass bowed softly beneath the afternoon wind. It seemed unsuitable for a prince of the realm. Entirely too unassuming for the remarkable man he had been. Dry timber had been stacked carefully according to ancient custom. Baelor lay at the center of it, wrapped in white linens much like the sheets you woke up alone in this morning.
For a single blissful, arrogant moment you had thought all had turned out well after all. But then your hand had drifted across the bed in search of him, only to be met with the chill of absence. He had been gone for some time before you woke, the blankets long since void of his warmth.
The realization had struck with nauseating force. He had left you sleeping as he went to the place where you had seen his death.
Your knees ached from where you had fallen as you threw the blankets aside so violently they had tangled around your ankles. Dignity had become a luxury you no longer possessed since you had darted from the chamber in nothing but your nightgown, your hair still loose and messed from the pleasure of the night before.
The guards and servants populating the halls had been startled. You could not blame them. You surely looked quite shocking, but even now, afterwards, you had no will to care.
The castle had been a blur around you; every corridor felt impossibly long. You had rounded a corner at a near sprint when you collided with something solid. The impact stole the breath from your already overworked lungs as strong hands caught you by the shoulders to stop you from falling.
When you looked up, you had been met with the face of your father. He still wore his armor, the steel smeared with dirt and dust. A shallow gash crossed one cheekbone, dried blood tracing its way toward the edge of his jaw. Another cut marred his brow where sweat had washed crimson into thin rivers across his temple.
Grief had been hiding in his violet eyes, so concealed you might have missed it if you didn’t already know what had happened. He didn’t need to say anything, didn’t need to give voice to what you had seen with your own eyes. The strength had vanished from your legs, and you collapsed. Your father caught you, his arms closed around you, though you felt the slight hitch in his breathing as your weight struck him.
Perhaps for the first time since you had been a little girl frightened of storms, you had clung to your father without hesitation.
He had been awkward in his comfort, but he gave it nonetheless. Now, as you glanced toward him at your side, you thought maybe he needed consoling in the moment as well.
The pyre caught slowly. Flames licked hungrily at the lower logs before climbing higher, consuming dry wood with soft crackling sighs. You tried not to think too hard about your husband within those flames being eaten away by their heat as smoke rose high to the heavens in slow, twisting ribbons.
Dragonlords returned to fire as they always had. Even now when the dragons have been gone from this earth for decades.
The Septon’s words reached your ears without meaning. You felt nothing as you stared into the fire, the sorrow too vast to comprehend. It had hollowed you from inside until there seemed little left besides the aching cavity where your heart had once lived.
Yesterday you had wondered whether Daenys the Dreamer had felt the same as you had, carrying the burden of prophecy. Now you wondered whether the gods granted such visions for any purpose beyond cruelty.
You had seen his death because they had deemed it. You had begged and wept until your throat bled. You surrendered every scrap of dignity before the man you loved in hopes of changing what was to come. None of it mattered. Fate had listened to every desperate plea and answered with silence. You didn’t know who you were angrier at: Baelor and the gods.
The flames rose higher as heat washed across your face. You couldn’t look away even when those in attendance began to leave. You remained because you knew once you left you would never again be in the presence of him. You couldn’t bear to walk away yet because beyond that fire laid the man who had taught you that your dreams need not be faced alone. Yet he had left you to suffer them without him. After promising he would never part from you, he had left you utterly by yourself.
This is a long one so if there's any mistakes I missed, forgive me.
pairing(s): baelor “breakspear” targaryen x wife!reader
summary: You wear Baelor's shirt to bed. He is very normal about it.
words: 2.4k
cw: explicit, smut, piv sex, unprotected sex, fingering, somnophilia, (mild), prone bone, headlock, biting, possessive behavior, reader called 'girl’, yearning, this is quite simply just baelor jumping our bones, i love arm, mildly edited, not beta read
a/n: this is not officially a sequel to my other baelor fic but it can be read like that since i characterized him the same. i rly just want that old man to fuck me in his shirt idk
ALL MY WORKS ARE 18+ MINORS DNI. I BLOCK AGELESS BLOGS.
Baelor has been standing at the foot of your bed for… much longer than he intended to. There's a tilt to his head, seventy-six degrees and counting, and a rise and fall to his chest that seems to be getting slightly faster with each passing exhale.
You do not see it. You are, as it is, asleep.
You're wearing his shirt. This is what has him still as stone, drawing his eyes over you in slow drags that he just can't seem to put an end to.
It's not an elaborate shirt. It's not even one of his best ones— the royal seamstresses have laden him with shirts of silk and fine woven cotton, embellished with hours of needlework or, in some horrifying cases, even beading. He has shirts of every color and shade, shirts of damask and velvet, shirts for summer and shirts for winter. Tunics from Dorne. Doublets from the Reach. Myrish robes. Qartheen samite vests.
You have chosen none of those. The one you have chosen is as simple a garment as he would choose on any given day, to wear against his skin beneath his doublet. White linen gauze, unembellished, unadorned. Its sleeves almost as billowing as its body, coming to plain rectangular cuffs. A simple collar, a sturdy yoke across the shoulders, double-stitched to keep it from unraveling. It is, in a word, efficient. Standard.
He knows, without having to ask you, that you chose to wear this shirt specifically because it is standard. Because it is one that he wears often. The cuffs have gone slightly soft with the wear, the neckline just a bit stretched along the bias. The felled seams are coming undone just a touch at the hem, a fact that he always sees but hasn't brought to the attention of his attendant, because it would mean a week of waiting to have it repaired. It is unfussy. But it is his.
And you are curled up in it like a kitten, asleep in his bed, your leg thrown over a pillow that you had moved toward his side of the bed in his absence. He has spent too long at his work, he knows. You spent too long waiting for him— long enough that you removed your nightgown and donned one of his shirts, and you fell asleep like that. Alone. In the bed you are meant to share with him.
Baelor feels a tightness in his chest that is ringed with fondness, an aching longing for you that hadn't stopped after your wedding, and doesn't seem like it will any time soon. He is too taken with you, too in love and consumed by it for that intrinsic sense of need for you to fade. It is a tender thing, tied around his heart in an intricate knot, with a tail that you hold the end of. You twirl it around your little finger and he buckles like a man who has never seen combat, who doesn't know what it is to stand his ground.
Baelor sighs as he undresses, but he keeps one eye on you all the while, as though you may disappear if he moves too far away. But you don't move. You don't even stir, when his belt hits the stone floor, or when his breeches follow. You are caught up in a world of dreams, unaware of what the sight of your sleeping form is doing to your husband, bringing him to the brink of something he has never quite been able to put a name to.
You do not stir when his hand presses into the mattress.
You do not stir when his weight dips the bedding and he moves slowly, purposefully, over you.
You do, however, stir just the smallest bit when his fingers dance over the curve of your hip through the fabric, feeling its drape over the soft plush of your skin. The meat of your ass, the swell of your thigh. Baelor feels, smoothing and caressing with a languid stroke that is not intended to rouse you, although he knows very well that it might and he does it anyway. Your fingers flex on the pillow that you clutch instead of him.
He finds himself, at that moment, inordinately envious of a pillow. A lump of fabric and feathers in your hands, between your thighs.
His hand grows bolder, a broad stroke over the small of your back, into the dip of your waist. You make a small noise in your throat, twitching the slightest bit as he passes over a particularly sensitive area.
"Shh, my sweet girl," Baelor whispers quietly, a lulling murmur in the darkness. Everything about you is soft— your skin, the fabric of his shirt as it lays over you, your hair, the expression on your face, the candle light on your sleeping body. It overwhelms him. It turns him into something that he's not normally, unless he is with you: a man. Not a Prince, and not the Hand of the King or heir to the throne. Not a warrior and not a subject of songs and poetry, myths and stories. With you, in this bed, he is simply a man in love with his wife, devoted beyond measure.
By the time his hand reaches your nape, your eyes are fluttering open the barest amount. Your face is still pressed slightly into the pillow, but you shift, a perking of your head as awareness returns to you. "Baelor?"
"It's me," he tells you, his voice low enough to not even constitute words.
"Mm. Waited for you," you mumble, confirming what he already knew.
His eyes crease at the corners, his smile overly tender. "I know. I'm here now."
Even as he says it, his hand is finding the hem of his shirt draped over your thigh, its frayed edge tickling against the smoothness of your skin. You hum quietly, dropping your eyelids against the feeling of his warm hand, burrowing between pillow and fabric and skin to find you, bare and wet and waiting for him.
"Oh," you sigh when his fingertip draws a slow circle around your clit.
"I know," he reassures you again, pressing a chaste, sweet kiss to the back of your neck. "I know, my love."
You turn your head further into the pillow beneath you, letting out a small whine at the feeling, your hips arching into his touch. He responds in kind, laying his weight flush to your back, his hand pinned between you and the pillow below.
"You're wearing my shirt," he remarks, his fingers finding your entrance and sliding in, stretching you open quick enough to make you keen softly. He gives you a few shallow strokes, feeling you grind back into the press of his cock against your tailbone. "My beautiful wife, wearing my clothes."
"W-Wanted to— to feel you— mm." Your voice is still slightly slurred with sleep, the heat of his body and the slowness of his movements doing nothing to rouse you more. You are still somewhere between awake and dreaming, pleasantly lulled, drowsy in your responses to him. Still, you moan at the curving of his fingers. "Wanted you… close to me…"
"Then let me be close," Baelor whispers, dragging the wilting fabric of his shirt up over your hips. He puffs a sigh through his nose, the ghost of it breezing against your neck. "What am I to do with you, hm?"
You make a pathetic noise when he moves your thighs apart to fit himself between them, his chest pressed to the curve of your spine, the thin fabric of his shirt separating you. He kisses you beneath the ear.
"You can sleep, darling," he tells you quietly, a whisper into your ear as his cock settles heavy between your thighs, the head sliding hotly against your cunt. Even though his voice is low, it booms through you like a thunderclap. "You need rest."
"I need you," you retort, but your own voice is far off, dipping towards the fogginess of sleep already.
Your eyes flutter shut, a gentle sigh of relief leaving you when he enters you slowly, stretching you open around him. Pressure on your back, pressure between your legs, pressure where his hand is pinned and lifting your hips from the front, angling them back towards him. Baelor's arm comes up to brace beside your head, and the scent of him surrounds you— the same scent that always drives you crazy, juniper and peppercorn, and something slightly like the salt of a raging sea.
You breathe in deep, exhale on a contented, fulfilled hum. Your entire world is Baelor, your mind and body consumed by him completely. His body spanning the length of you, bone to bone, naked skin to thin, ineffectual fabric.
You clench around him, and Baelor makes a noise as though you've punched him. So close to your ear, the headiness of it is echoed tenfold. Then he shifts his weight, dropping his hips ever-so-slightly, and then just grinds into you. His cock nestles into the deepest part of you and you groan, your mouth dropping open and face turning towards the breadth of his arm beside you.
"Baelor," you whimper, soft and broken, slurred from the recesses of sleep. Your hand finds his bicep, drawn taut from the muscle holding him up, keeping him from crushing you completely. Your fingers dig in, pull. A silent plea, a command that he follows like a dog on a leash.
Baelor fits his forearm under your head and lifts, letting you rest your chin there against the crook of his elbow, getting you into a loose headlock. Your hand wraps loosely around his upper arm, your body lax, letting him rut his hips shallowly into yours.
"My beautiful girl," he breathes into your ear, and you feel his teeth, bared with intent. His nose pressed to the shell, his beard scraping rough against your cheek. "My heart. My soul."
His arm tightens. Just a tad, but just enough. You mewl like a wounded animal, stretching your limbs so that he can move closer in, can fit his mouth to the curve of your throat, while he throbs somewhere deep in you that makes your head spin and your breath stick in your chest. His weight on you turns full, crushing, an all-over press that pins you flat to the bed, the pillow tucked beneath your stomach.
You are no longer asleep.
"Say it," he tells you, a primal rasp to his voice that wasn't there before. Low, smoky. A dragon. It's dragged from the pit of him, from some hell that lurks deep inside his body. His groan slinks down your spine and pools as raw energy right above where his cock hollows out and reaches the end of you. "Say that you're mine."
"M'yours," you murmur into his arm, breathing in the hot air that radiates from him. "Baelor. M-My heart. My soul—"
A guttural sound leaves you, your open mouth muffled by the bite you take of his bicep when he pulls his hips back and ruts into you hard, hard enough to shake the bed. Baelor's breath in your ear is shaky, stilted with the desperation of his movements, the purpose for which he collects himself.
"Gods above," he groans, his face turned into your neck just as yours is turned into his arm. With great effort, he loosens his hold on you. He presses an apologetic kiss to the curve of your shoulder. "I'm sorry. So sorry, my love."
You make a short noise, shake your head once. "Do it again."
Baelor does as you tell him. He pulls back slowly, letting his cock drag through your walls just before rushing back in with a jolt up the bed. Soft hair grinds against the plush of your ass, his mouth open and heaving with gasps against your shoulder, covered in the fabric of his shirt.
You can taste his need in the salt on his skin, beads of sweat forming in the crook of his elbow, fiery heat pressed flush to your back. "I need to— to wear your clothes more often."
"Yes." The word is hungry. It leaves no room for defiance. "You will."
The hand pinned between you and the pillow moves, snakes down to find your clit again. You are blinded with white light behind your eyelids, your breath gone still in your chest. Then, you pant like your air has no place to go, your hand tightening on his bicep, his arm tightening around your throat.
"Mm. There." The sound of his voice in your ear, while he fingers at your clit and his cock makes you so full that you can barely think, undoes you. Tremors take over your body, and you feel him smile as he continues to work at you. "That's what you get. I want you shaking."
"Baelor." You cum around him, with his full weight holding you down with nowhere to go. You are held hostage to it, to the slow, seductive movements of his hips, the lazy strokes of his finger against your clit.
"That's it. My good girl," Baelor purrs into your ear, and you sob as you clench around him. "My good, sweet, beautiful—"
He runs his tongue lightly across the nape of your neck and groans, ducking his head as he cums. His moans are muffled by his shirt on your back, his body curled over yours like fog. He presses his hips hard against yours, as though he can become a part of you if he gets close enough, deep enough.
"Oh, my love." His whisper falls upon your ears like a dream, like you may wake up and not remember it. But he's real, and he's there on top of you with his heart pounding against your back, and his fist in the fabric of his shirt, the one that started all of this.
He stays there for a breath, and then two. His hips are still flush to yours, but he's stopped moving, stopped the slow grind and the desperate, cloying attempt to get as far inside of you as he possibly could. He simply holds there, with his arm still around your throat, but not pressing in anymore. Just holding. Just cradling.
"I don't know if you noticed," Baelor says after a moment, his voice tremulous and padded by a wad of fabric between his teeth, at the nape of your neck. He releases it. "But I quite like it when you wear my clothes."
You huff a laugh, and press a kiss to the inside of his elbow. "If you do that every time, I may never get any sleep."
Baelor hums. "The chances are very slim, indeed."
Even so, you wear the same shirt the next night. And the one after that.
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