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𝐇𝐎𝐋𝐘 𝐖𝐀𝐓𝐄𝐑𝐒 𝐕𝐈. ♱ baelor targaryen.

⊹ ࣪ ˖ summary: In which a future is set.

⊹ ࣪ ˖ pairing: baelor "breakspear" targaryen x f!stark!reader

⊹ ࣪ ˖ wc: 8.5k+

⊹ ࣪ ˖ notes/content: baelor's pov (everyone cheered!), angsty as hell, insane amount of foreshadowing. This chapter took actual years off my life. Dunno what it was about it but I'm ready to put my head through a wall lol. Very plot heavy chapter ahead but necessary to set up the rest of the story, so hope you enjoy! Again, would like to take a moment to thank you all for your support, it genuinely means so so much to me. I'm so glad you're loving this series and showing such passion for it. Thank you all 💓

read on ao3. ⊹ series masterlist.

For a while after the words leave Baelor’s mouth, the solar is utterly still.

Daeron just looks at him.

No reaction, or predictable outrage, or some immediate cutting retort. Only the king—only the man—standing very still in the lamplight, one hand resting on the edge of the table, fingers splayed as if he needs the feel of solid wood to steady himself to the present. His eyes narrow, moving over Baelor’s face like a man examining a wound he does not yet understand.

Baelor realises belatedly that he is breathing too fast. His chest tightens, ribs straining against the rush of air. He forces himself to pull each breath in more slowly, to smooth the rise and fall of his shoulders until he no longer looks like a panicked boy dragged before a furious father.

At length, Daeron exhales, and Baelor hears the years on his father’s shoulders in that single breath.

“I knew,” he says quietly, “that you were fond of her.”

The word lands like a stone skimming the surface of his heart—too small, too childishly light for the depth it touches.

“I am not blind,” the king goes on. “I saw the way you watched her at supper. The way you listen when she speaks of her home. The way you came back from the Kingswood with her blood on your hands and your eyes like a man who had just crawled out of his own grave.” His mouth curves faintly, almost a wince. “I did not understand it ran quite this deep, however.”

Baelor’s hand finds the back of the nearest chair without conscious thought. His fingers clamp down hard, tendons standing out along the back of his hand. His rings bite into his flesh, a small, anchoring pain he savours.

“It does,” he says simply.

Something like sadness flickers over Daeron’s face—there and gone, but genuine while it lasts. The corners of his mouth soften, his gaze dipping for half a heartbeat as if the weight of his son’s confession has bent his neck.

“I do not take pleasure in hurting you,” he says, softer now, more strained, his voice fraying at the edges. Baelor hears the truth in his words, even if it does nothing to lessen the ache they bring. “Gods know, there are enough knives in this realm without me handing you one myself.” He falls quiet for a moment, his jaw working, then adds in the following breath, “If it were a simple matter of my own preference, Baelor—if I were some petty lord with a single keep and a quiet border—I would put your happiness first, damn the rest.”

Baelor sees it, then, the shape of that image his father paints: Daeron at the head of a humble keep, his son seated beside him, nothing more than his eldest, rather than an heir to a realm, and you, always you, right beside him, laughing and sharing your food with him. The ache that pierces his breast is so sharp, Baelor has to breathe around it.

Daeron’s gaze hardens, shutters coming down behind his eyes.

“But I am not some lordling,” he says. “And neither are you.”

He straightens a little, shoulders squaring. His father is no great warrior, never has been, but Baelor sees the king in him, then. One hand lifts to pinch the bridge of his nose, as if the weight of the crown, of duty he shoulders daily, sits there even now. He rubs at the spot once, absently, then drops his hand again, fingers flexing restlessly.

“You are to be king,” he continues. “She is heir to Winterfell. Even if I wished to wed the two of you—and gods help me, for your smile alone I would—this match is not…” his mouth twists around the word, “... feasible.”

The last word sounds bitter, even when Daeron speaks it as gently as he can manage.

Baelor’s fingers tense on the chair-back until the wood creaks. “Why?” he asks, though some part of him already knows.

Daeron’s brows draw together. “You know why.”

“Say it,” Baelor insists. His voice sounds strange even to his own ears. Too low, rougher than usual, the skin around his eyes too tight. “Humour me, Father. I am slow tonight. I would have it spelt out like I am a boy again.”

Pain, or its close cousin, flashes in Daeron’s eyes; his hand tightens once on the table’s edge, anchoring himself. Then he nods, a small, resigned dip of his chin, accepting the blow he is about to deliver them both.

“Because the realm has only one king and the North has only one Warden,” he explains. “Because the girl cannot sit in two seats at once. If she is your queen, she must live here, in the South, at your side. If she holds Winterfell, then she must be there when the snow comes to oversee her duties as those before her have. You would be asking the North to send away its leader, in name or otherwise, and trust that King’s Landing will keep it beating. That has never ended well, for any house.”

Daeron draws a slow, deep breath, his shoulders rising and falling with it.

“Because our enemies watch our every move. Because we have a traitor among us. They attacked you just this morrow, or have you forgotten?” he does on. “We have just extinguished one rebellion and will likely fight another before my bones are dust. Marrying the Stark heir to the king is a statement too large, too ripe for twisting; you know this well enough, you are no fool. They will call it favouritism, or worse. Say we mean to drag the north into our southern quarrels and leave the other kingdoms hungry.” Daeron’s eyes travel to some distant point over Baelor’s shoulder. “We need a queen whose house can stabilise more than one corner of the realm. Reach, perhaps. Or the Stormlands. Something that sends the right message.”

His arms fall open, empty of hope but full of reason that feels like a chokehold around Baelor’s throat.

“Her father did not bring her south for you,” he adds, after another beat, “He brought her for peace. For trade. For options. If I tell him now that the only way to keep that peace is to let his only daughter be queen instead of Lady of Winterfell, I might as well bring him Aegon’s old dragons and ask if he’d like to step into the Black Dread’s open maw. He will not allow it. Nor would I, in his place.”

Every word is clean, reasonable and perfectly precise. This is the type of reasoning that gave his father his title of being Good; the type of reasoning he taught Baelor from the time he could walk, with a promise that one day he, too, would be king. Yet each word sinks like strokes of a well-honed blade, cutting away at the fragile dream Baelor had allowed himself to imagine. He knows the truth of them; he has wielded similar logic himself plenty of times, sliced through other men’s selfish wishes like a maester with a neat hand.

Tonight, it feels like being peeled to the bone. Baelor’s throat feels scraped raw, as if he’s been shouting instead of standing incredibly still to keep his voice measured.

“I have given you… everything you asked of me,” he hears himself say, too quiet.

Daeron’s attention sharpens at those words. “Baelor—”

“I have,” Baelor presses on, the words gathering momentum, heavy but unstoppable once free from his tongue, saturating the tense air between them, “I took the Hand’s chain when you offered it, though I understood the burden.” His fingers tighten around the chair, and a tremor shakes his fingers, making them grip the surface even tighter. “I smoothed quarrels I did not start. I bent when you needed me to for the good of the realm.” He looks down at his own white-knuckled grip as if it belongs to someone else. “I have not asked you for anything that was not for the good of the realm. Not even once.”

Daeron’s expression goes smooth; even the little lived-in lines at the corners of his eyes seem to freeze—only his throat moves, a small, visible swallow.

“And now?” he ponders. The question comes out surprisingly gentle, rather than mocking. His voice has gone as quiet as silk.

“And now,” Baelor says deliberately, tasting each word, quiet but jagged in his mouth, “If you do this—if you send her to Maekar, to anyone but me—you will kill something in me I do not think will grow back.”

His fingers lift from the chair as he says it, the depth of his confession sinking in all at once, near dizzying. His hands hang a moment in the open air, empty, before he lets them fall back to his sides.

The truth hangs between them, naked and irretrievable now.

He does not mean it as a threat. There is no edge of or else in it. He is not sure what, exactly, he means it as—only that it is the most honest he’s perhaps ever been with anyone, even himself, and that saying it feels like tearing open his own chest and placing the contents on the table between them in offering.

Daeron’s eyes close for a moment, his mouth compressing into a thin, bloodless line of thought. When he opens them again, there’s no composed king in sight. He’s not a ruler at all, only a father gazing at his son with a look of quiet devastation plain on his face.

“I’m sorry.”

Baelor believes him. That is, in some way, the worst pain of all.

“I cannot tell you how truly, wretchedly sorry I am, my boy,” Daeron says, and the words tear out of somewhere deep inside him. “If the world were gentler, if the crown were a lighter thing, I would give you this without a second thought. You have earned it ten times over.”

He steps around the table slowly, strides measured, as if anything more sudden might spook Baelor away. When Daeron is close enough to reach out, his hand lifts in the air between them and towards Baelor’s awaiting shoulder, then falters and falls back to his side, fingers curling slightly. It’s as if he cannot quite bring himself to presume comfort he is in the very act of denying.

“But you are not just my son,” Daeron whispers. “You are my heir.” His gaze goes flint-hard again, though there’s genuine sorrow under it. “And that sometimes means you must put the realm before you and the things you want most. This realm needs stability more than it needs your happiness. More, even, than it needs mine.”

Baelor’s teeth clench so tightly his temples throb, pulsing with the blood roaring in his ears. He can feel the tendons in his neck jumping.

“So I must choose between them,” he intones flatly. “Her, or the realm.”

“You must choose to remember,” Daeron says softly, “that you are not a man who can take a wife only for himself. Whoever you wed, you marry for thousands who will never know your name except as a curse or a blessing in their children’s mouths.” His shoulders seem to sag with the weight of those words. “That is the god we serve, Baelor. Not the Seven. Not the old gods of the North. The realm itself. It is a hungry thing, and it eats us all.”

His father sounds tired. Old in a way Baelor has never allowed himself to see: the fine tremor in his fingers when he’s exhausted, the faint bloom of grey starting at his temples, the effort it takes to straighten his back after hours of bending over maps.

“I will not command you to be glad of it,” Daeron finishes with a faint sigh. “I am not that much of a hypocrite. But I will ask you to accept it. For all our sakes.”

The room feels suddenly too cold and too hot all at once. Baelor realises his nails have bitten crescents into the flesh of his own palms. He forces his fists to uncurl, loosening each finger one at a time, a conscious effort that saps him.

“I see,” he exhales, at last, something fragile embedded in his voice.

“Baelor—” Daeron begins, reaching for his shoulder again.

“I should go,” Baelor cuts him off.

He makes the words as uniform as he can manage, smoothed down so there’s no audible barbs, but there is a thin, brittle undercurrent under the courtesy that neither of them can pretend is not there.

For the first time in his adult life, Baelor turns his back on his father without being dismissed first.

He stalks towards the door on legs that feel strangely wooden beneath him. He can imagine his body belongs to another man, watching him from the ceiling dispassionately. His bad knee sends up muted flares of pain with every step; he welcomes the hurt, clings to it as something simple and clean, uncomplicated.

His vision has sharpened to a painful point of clarity. He notices ridiculous, small details he has never once seen in all his years in this room—the way a candle has guttered down to a crooked little pillar of hardened wax; the ink smear on Daeron’s thumb, dark against his skin; a hairline crack in one of the flagstones by the hearth that his boot has passed over a thousand times without noticing.

“Baelor,” Daeron calls, sharper now, the king slipping back into his voice. “Do not walk away from me like this.”

He stops with his hand on the latch. His fingers tighten around the iron, creaking, the cool metal biting into his palm. For a heartbeat, Baelor stares at the door, shoulders rigid, his back to the man who has been the centre of his world since his earliest memory. All Baelor has ever wanted is to make his father proud.

He considers turning back—smoothing this over, offering some balm, a bargain, some jest about being overtired, some promise to be more reasonable on the morrow. It is what he has always done, a thousand times over. It has been his role as much as any title: the bridge, the buffer, the son who makes things easier.

But he cannot do it. Not tonight. The part of him that would reach for that has retreated; even the most sensible vein in his body refuses to obey when Daeron asks to give up the one thing Baelor cannot imagine living without. Not anymore.

He draws in a breath, steadying, and looks back over his shoulder, just far enough to meet his father’s eyes.

“I am not fit to speak for the realm right now,” he states thinly, and the honesty in those words is as clean and as cutting as any blade. “I am… too much myself.”

Daeron flinches slightly, the words landing somewhere too tender to name.

“We will talk again,” the king says, after an edgy pause. The words sound less like a comfort and more like inevitability. “When you have slept. When you have both had time to think.”

“Yes,” Baelor answers. “When I can think.”

He hesitates.

Despite everything—despite the crack that has just opened, deep and pulsing—love is still there, stubborn as old scar tissue. It softens his next words without his permission.

“Good night, father,” Baelor says.

Daeron’s throat works, his hand curling beside him like he’s contemplating reaching out again, but knows better than to try.

“Good night, Baelor,” he replies.

There should be more, Baelor thinks through the haze of misery: some gesture, some bridge thrown across this new, gaping gap.

Neither of them finds it.

Baelor opens the door and steps out into the corridor beyond. It closes behind him with a firm, final sound that echoes louder than it should. The white cloaks on either side glance at his face on reflex and then, very carefully, let their gazes slide away again, fixing on some imaginary point on the far wall—soldiers who know better than to meet a wounded dragon’s eyes right now.

The air in the hall is cooler, but it does nothing to clear Baelor’s head. His blood still runs hot inside his veins, thrumming under his skin like something wicked is endeavouring to crawl out of him; his thoughts are a too loud snarl of want, duty and the memory of your hand in his, hot with fever, all battling for dominance.

He will be respectful. He will do his duty. He does not know how to be anything else.

But for the first time in living memory, his respect and his sense of duty are not enough to carry him cleanly through the thing his father asks. The dragon in his chest has woken fully now, prowling, restless, and logic—his oldest, sharpest, dearest ally—sits stunned in its shadow, for once utterly useless.

So Baelor walks.

Not to his own chambers. Not yet. His feet turn, almost on their own accord, towards the area of the keep he seldom visits.

Because there’s something he must do first.

Something Baelor never thought he would find himself doing.

—

The tower that houses Brynden Rivers is never truly dark.

Even at this hour, there is always at least one candle guttering in the dark, a lone brazier smouldering, one narrow window slit catching a smear of moon outside. Spies do not sleep by the same clock as honest men, Baelor knows, and the Master of Whispers keeps their hours.

Baelor’s boots sound dull on the spiral stair as he climbs. The air grows cooler and closer the higher he goes, tinged with the smell of tallow and damp stone and the faint, iron tang of raven droppings that no amount of scrubbing ever quite removes. Somewhere above, a bird gives a single, grating croak, then goes quiet, leaving an eerie silence behind.

He knocks, once.

“Enter,” Brynden’s voice calls out immediately, as if he has been standing on the other side of the door for some time, waiting for Baelor’s arrival.

Baelor pushes the door open before he can talk himself out of it.

Bloodraven’s solar is smaller than Daeron’s or even Baelor’s, more cramped, with every surface used to its fullest. The table in the middle of the room is a battlefield of parchment. Maps, letters, lists; all laid out in careful chaos. A rack of candles is burning low, and their light pools over the ink and wax, pushing the corners of the room into a conspiratorial gloom. On a perch by the far wall, three ravens sit hunched, feathers puffed against the night’s chill, black eyes bright and unblinking as they latch onto Baelor.

Brynden Rivers stands at the table, bent over a sheet of parchment so thin the ink has bled through. He does not straighten at once.

In the candlelight, his albinism stands out more starkly. Hair the colour of old, sun-bleached bone lies braided down his back; his skin is paler than papers he’s leaning over, the long birthmark that spills over half of his face livid and bright as fresh wine. One eye blinks startling red, the other, Baelor knows, was a price paid during the Blackfyre rebellion. Now there’s only an ugly, still-healing scar that slashes down one side of Brynden’s sloping face. His one good eye pins Baelor down the way birds pin bits of meat on thorns.

“Your Highness,” he says mildly. “You’ve had an eventful day.”

“Apparently, I’m not the only one,” Baelor replies, dragging his gaze pointedly over the spread of scrolls. “Unless you lay your reports out like this for the joy of it.”

Brynden’s mouth quirks ever so slightly. It’s an odd showing on a man as unsettling as him. “Joy is a stranger to this room.”

He sets his quill down, wiping the tip clean unhurriedly with a bit of cloth. Only then does he straighten fully, hands resting light on the table’s edge, taking him in with a thoughtful little frown.

Neither of them speaks, the two of them regarding one another for a tense minute.

They have never liked each other, not truly. Baelor’s mercy has always sat uneasily beside Brynden’s ruthlessness; Brynden’s affection for necessary cruelties has equally always grated on Baelor’s sense of what justice ought to feel like. They’re polite to one another, almost always, but they are rarely comfortable around one another.

Tonight, Baelor doesn’t have the luxury of comfort.

“I assume you’ve heard,” he begins, if only to break the stalemate. “About the Kingswood.”

Brynden’s gaze flicks briefly to the smear of dried blood at Baelor’s collar, then back to his face.

“I make it a point,” he says evenly in response, “to know when someone tries to put an arrow through the crown prince.”

His tone does not change, but something in the air does—a sharpening, like a knife being turned on a whetstone. Baelor threads closer to the table. His hands stay dutifully at his sides; he doesn’t reach for any of the papers. Brynden is jealous of his little nets. Best not to pluck at the threads without invitation first.

“Then I won’t waste your time retelling it,” he says. “I’ll ask what matters: do your rats have a name for the man who told them where to find us?”

Brynden’s expression tightens, just enough to be noticeable if you know what you’re looking for.

“No,” he admits curtly. “Not yet.”

It is, Baelor realises, equivalent in Bloodraven’s mouth to a shouted curse.

“Whoever it is,” Brynden goes on, “covers their tracks well. Too well for some overeager squire or drunk guard. They knew which gate you took, how many men you had with you, that the Stark heir rode with you.” His fingers drum once against the table, a soft, impatient patter. “That kind of precision takes practice.”

Irksome, Baelor thinks, is Maekar’s word. This is something far sharper. Brynden is not a man who is often thwarted, and he clearly doesn’t enjoy the feeling.

“You can fix that,” Baelor says.

It’s not quite a question, but more so a statement.

Brynden’s red eye glints in the light. “With a little effort,” he allows. “A net is only as good as the fish it has learned to catch. This one swims differently.” His mouth curves into a cruel, subtle shape. “We will reweave.”

Baelor nods once. His pulse drums hard beneath his skin, but this time there is a clear purpose to it.

“Good,” he murmurs, drawing in a breath. “I want your help. In rooting this traitor out. Completely.”

The last word stretches between them like a noose.

Brynden tilts his head slightly to one side, studying him. “You already have it,” he reassures. “I serve the same crown you do.”

Baelor shakes his head impatiently. “You know what I mean. I don’t intend to let this be handled with half-measures. Whoever this is, if they have access to the castle, if they can feed our routes and numbers to Blackfyre men once, they can certainly do it again. They might try another arrow. Or a knife. Or a cup.”

He hears his own voice and recognises the tightness in it for what it is: fear, plain and simple. Not for himself. For you, lying under southern stone with poison raging through your blood because some unseen hand thought you a convenient lever to pull. It makes him want to rip something apart with his bare teeth.

Brynden hears it too. His good eye, all blood red, narrows, interest sharpening like a cat scenting something new.

“Our approaches differ,” he notes almost idly. “Usually, this is where you remind me that not every shadow hides a traitor, not every secret demands a head on a spike.” His shoulders roll in a barely-there shrug. “It’s curious to see you set your nature aside for once.”

Baelor’s spine stiffens at the implication. “I’m not putting it aside.” The protest comes quicker than he’d meant it to. “I do not suddenly relish the thought of heads on spikes. I simply recognise that there is someone inside these walls who would rather see us dead, and I am tired of pretending that talking softly will cure this rot.”

The other man’s lips twitch, not quite a smile, not quite a sneer. “Love,” Bloodraven observes thoughtfully, “does strange things to men.”

The word rips through him like a blade, settling somewhere south of his heart. Baelor feels heat scorch up his neck.

“I am not some moon-struck boy writing bad verses in a sept,” he says, more sharply than he intended.

“No,” Brynden agrees, still peering at him without blinking. “You are not. You are Baelor Breakspear, who has spent his life putting the realm before himself so oft it has forgotten you have a self to put before it.” His voice drips in an even rhythm, but there is an odd note in it now, a faint, dry curiosity he can’t fully mask. “Forgive me if I look for the root of the change.”

Baelor sets his jaw. His hands have curled slowly into fists at his sides; he forces them to uncurl now, fingers flexing, wondering absently where in the seven hells his composure has fled.

“This isn’t about—” he begins, then stops, because lying to Bloodraven is a folly he’s not foolish to attempt. “This is about the fact that she took an arrow meant for me in the woods that should have been safe. It is about the fact that she is lying downstairs between life and death because someone inside our house opened a door for our enemies. I will not let that stand.” His gaze locks onto Brynden’s. “If you can’t stomach that because it makes me sound too much like you, say so, and I’ll find another way.”

An eternity seems to stretch with Brynden simply staring at him. Whatever he glimpses in Baelor’s face seems to settle some unspoken question inside him. The unforgiving lines of the spymaster’s face ease; not by much, but by enough.

“I did not say it worsened you,” he answers, a touch dryly. “Only that it changes your shape. Men who are careful their whole lives become something… sharper, when their heart finally finds a throat worth baring its teeth for.” His mouth twitches faintly at some private memory. “I am not insulting you, Highness. I understand its sway well enough.”

Baelor studies him in turn.

He thinks of the stories gossiped about in the halls—of Brynden’s half-open war with his own kin, of the woman with sea-coloured eyes who has always moved through court like a star with its own gravity, and the way Brynden watches her with hunger and resignation all at once. Love, in his case, has not made him softer; only more careful in where he chooses to cut, more calculated in who he chooses to destroy.

“You’ll help,” Baelor says again, a roll of syllables that sound more like an order this time.

Brynden’s red eye gleams. “I will,” he replies. “I am the crown’s servant before I am any man’s brother. This insult was to the king and to his line. I will not give it the satisfaction of hiding in my blind spot.”

He turns slightly, reaching for a different stack of parchment; a ledger of names, dates, little annotations in his thin, spidery hand.

“We’ll start with the guard roster,” he says smoothly. “Every man who knew the exact hour you left, and by which gate you went through. Then we follow their wives, their drinking companions, and their favourite places to roll the dice. We pull on each thread until something gives. Maybe we won’t find anything. Or maybe we’ll find a dozen small betrayals instead of the one we want.” This time, the curl of his mouth is sharp and dangerous. “Either way, someone will learn what it costs to loose Blackfyre arrows in my city.”

The possessiveness in my is not lost on Baelor. But strangely, it doesn’t grate as much as it usually might have.

“And when we find the one?” he asks.

Brynden raises his gaze again, but this time, there’s no softness in it at all.

“When we find the one,” he replies, “you may decide how merciful you wish to be. Until then, let me be what I am.”

Baelor nods slowly. The restlessness inside his chest uncoils, just a touch, soothed not by the promise of blood, but by the simple, ruthless competence in Brynden’s tone. Whatever else he is, Bloodraven does not let go once he has teeth in his prey.

“Very well,” Baelor says. “Cast your nets, tighten them. If any of your little birds whisper a name, I want to hear it first. Before you sharpen your knives.”

“You will,” Brynden shoots back without hesitation. “I am many things, but I am not a fool. A frightened Baelor is a rarer thing than a frightened king. I would know what shapes him so.”

The word frightened makes Baelor’s jaw lock, but he lets it pass this time, because Brynden isn’t wrong.

He turns towards the door, then pauses. “Brynden,” he voices, without looking back. “Thank you.”

The words are reluctant, but candid, and Baelor knows the other man can tell as much. They have never been generous with gratitude, the two of them, too opposed in their methods as they are.

Behind him, there’s only a faint rustle of paper.

“Do not thank me yet,” Bloodraven replies. “Thank me when the traitor swings. Or don’t. I will sleep the same either way.”

—

You dream.

At least, you think you do. The world feels too soft at the edges, colours a little too bright, sounds coming from too far away and too close all at once.

You’re standing in a courtyard you have never seen.

The stone under your feet is pale and warm, honey-coloured, worn smooth by a thousand feet striking the stone over the years. Low walls curve around you in gentle arcs, studded with narrow windows and high, open arches that let the sun pour in like water. The air smells faintly of orange blossom and roses, somewhere beneath that, a faint scent of smoke, too sweet on the back of your tongue.

Beyond the walls, green hills roll away, dotted with trees and glints of white stone. Water trickles in the far distance, a fountain, perhaps, hidden from sight.

You don’t have your furs on. You instead wear thin summer silk in red and black that makes a soft sound when you take a stumbling step forward. On your finger sits a heavy, warm ring. The metal is shaped like a coiled dragon and a running wolf, with their heads bowed and meeting at your knuckle.

“Wife,” Baelor says behind you, and the word falls over your shoulders like a cloak you’ve been waiting to don for an age.

You turn.

He looks older than he really is, but he also doesn’t look older at all. Confusion swells at the back of your head, but it’s a distant thing, difficult to grasp. Baelor is devastatingly handsome, even with a few more silver threads at his temples. There’s a little more sun on his skin, and new lines at the corners of his mismatched eyes from squinting into too many bright, happy days. He is wearing a simple outfit: a loose tunic with the collar undone and the sleeves rolled up to his forearms. No chain, no crown, no cloak. Barefoot on the warm stone, just like you.

When he takes in your face, he smiles broadly, and something soft and unguarded flickers across his features.

“There you are,” he murmurs, crossing to you in a few easy strides. His hand finds your waist with the ease of a long practice; his other comes up to cradle the back of your head, fingers sinking into your hair with the gentle greediness of a man who doesn’t need to rush but does anyway. “I woke, and you weren’t there. I thought perhaps the walls had eaten you.”

“As they are known to do,” you supply, but it comes out more breathless than witty.

His thumb strokes the line of your jaw, callused pad painfully gentle. “They’d better not. I might have to knock them down.”

“You say that as if you wouldn’t enjoy it,” you reply.

Baelor laughs under his breath—quiet, low, the sound shivering through you where his chest brushes against yours. You can feel the heat of him, the steady, familiar beat of his heart under your palm where it rests against his ribs.

“Maybe a little,” he concedes, leaning his forehead against yours for a breath. His breath fans warm over your mouth. “But only if you were here to complain about the dust.”

He tilts your chin up with a crooked finger.

“Mine,” he breathes softly, and there is no one else in the world to hear it but you. “My lady. My wolf. My wife.”

He leans in to kiss you.

You tip your face up, lips parted, your breath thin with want, your fingers curling in the fabric at his back. The air between you tightens, every nerve in you reaching for him. You can almost feel him already—the press of his mouth, the slide of his hand sound the back of your head, the way he says your name when there is no one else listening, wrecked with want—

Something warm drips onto your cheek.

You blink, startled. You raise your hand, meaning to brush it away, but your fingers come away red.

Baelor’s brows draw together, expression creasing with gentle puzzlement. “Did I—”

Another drop lands, heavier this time, sliding over the bridge of your nose, making you look up. The sun is bright overhead. There is no cloud, no trees, nothing to weep above you but clear sky.

Your gaze drops again, almost sluggish, and you see it—

Blood, seeping through his dark hair at the back of his head, thick and sticky. It wells from a place you cannot quite see, right where his skull meets his neck, and dribbles in slow, stubborn rivulets down the nape, under his collar. It drips from the ends of his hair and onto your face, your shoulders, warm as bathwater, smelling of iron and salt and something else you recognise from too many yard-accidents: the hushed, terrible stillness that comes after a hard blow.

“Baelor,” you choke out, but his name comes out wrong, too thick, distorted, tangled on your tongue.

He doesn’t seem to feel it. His mismatched eyes are clear and intent, his mouth soft, about to touch yours. Your hands, slick with his blood, slip from his shirt.

You blink—

—and the courtyard is one.

You stand in a field instead, ankle-deep in dead grass.

Fog seeps along the ground, curling around your boots, thick and white and too cold. It rolls in waves, swallowing details, blurring the line where earth meets air. The sky above presses in, flat and featureless grey.

Ahead of you, seven shapes sit on seven horses. They are only silhouettes at first, darker smudges against the pale murk of the day. Helmets, maybe. Hoods. You can’t make out faces, only the way each one holds themselves in the saddle—one straight-backed and still, one hunched and thoughtful, one lounging as if bored. They do not move. They do not speak.

You open your mouth to call out and ask who they are.

The fog thickens, lunging up like a living beast, and when you cough, eyes watering—

—you are underground.

Cold stone presses close on either side of you. You know this place, even before the shiver runs down your spine: the low, oppressive ceiling; the flicker of torchlight leaving long shadows between carved pillars; the smell of dust and old, old things.

Winterfell’s crypts.

Your hand trails along a wall, fingers numb with chill that seeps in at once. Stone wolves lie at the feet of stone kings and lords, their blank eyes staring past you into the dark. Names you know murmur past your shoulder, etched in rock for all eternity. Names you do not know yet wait in the shadows.

You’re not sure when you started stumbling, but you are, you realise distantly. Your feet catch on uneven flagstones. Your breath puffs in front of you in pale ribbons. Somewhere deeper, something drips, slow and too steady.

A raven caws suddenly.

The sound echoes through the crypts, bouncing off stone and bone. It seems to come from everywhere at once—the far end of the hall, the ceiling above, the darkness at your back. The note drags itself out, harsh and piercing, then breaks off. Another sound follows, more distant and layered, almost too low to hear at first: a roar, but not like any wolf you’ve ever heard. A deeper, older sound. Scales and wings and furnace-breath, rumbling just at the edge of sense.

You turn towards it—

—and the world tears itself apart.

You are outside again.

It’s the same place as before, but also not. The same honey-coloured stone, the same gentle rise of green hills around you. But the air is thick with heat now, rancid smoke filling your nose immediately. The sky is wrong—ruddy and choked, the sun a dim smear behind black plumes.

The keep, in all its beauty and splendour, is burning.

Flames leap from windows, orange and gold and sickly green, licking out of the high arches that once poured sunlight into the courtyard. Roof beams crack and fall, showering sparks and heat into the open air. A tower collapses inward with a deafening roar, sending a gout of smoke and cinders into the air.

Above it all, three dragons wheel in circles.

They are huge in the sky, wings beating slow but relentless, scales catching the firelight in bronze and black and dull, ancient gold. They scream as they turn, long piercing cries that shake the air clean out of your lungs. One passes right over you, an enormous, black shape, blotting out the burning sun. Ash falls in its wake, soft and grey, settling in your open palms. Heat slams into you from all sides, searing your face, your hands. Your skin feels too hot, and you take a stumbling step back, then another.

Someone shoves you from behind.

You fall.

Not onto stone, not into ash, but into water.

Cold closes over your head, shocking after the fire, slamming your breath from your chest. For a moment, there is nothing but the dark and the roar of water in your ears. Your limbs flail, skirts tangling around your legs, dragging you into the black abyss below. Your lungs clench in protest.

Then your hand hits something solid. Not rock, not weed. Cloth. An arm, thin and hard under your fingers.

You surface with a desperate gasp, dragging someone with you.

A lake stretches around you, flat and black, obsidian disturbed by your choked gasps and flailing limbs. The burning keep is a smear of light on the far shore, reflecting in the water in smeared streaks of red and gold. The screams of the dragons are distant now, muffled by distance and fog.

The body in your arms is a boy.

He can’t be more than ten. Narrow shoulders, sharp elbows, too-thin wrists. His hair is pale in the strange light—almost white, almost silver, clinging wetly to his skull. His skin is colourless. When his eyes snap open, they’re a bright, unnatural violet, pupils blown wide.

You kick furiously, hauling him towards the shore. The water clings to you both, heavy, almost viscous, trying to drag you both back down. Your arms burn from the strain, your lungs burn with them, but you grit your teeth, clinging to the boy as you push you and him towards the safety of the shoreline.

Your boots hit the muddy shallows, and you almost sob in relief. You stagger, half-carrying, half-pulling the boy onto the stony bank. You kneel beside him, hands digging into his shoulders.

“Breathe,” you rasp, though you’re not sure if you mean him or yourself.

He does as he’s told. He coughs once, water spilling from his mouth, and then he inhales in a great, shuddering drag. His chest heaves, his fingers clutching at your sleeve, surprisingly unyielding.

For a sweet, blessed moment, he is only a soaked, shivering boy, blinking up at you in confusion. Then his eyes change.

Flame catches in them. Not anything reflected, but born from within. Gold and orange bloom in the violet, licking around the edges of his pupils. Heat rolls off his skin, sudden and terrible, chasing the lake’s chill from your soaked clothes.

“No! Stop,” you cry out, instinctively and stupidly. Your hands tighten on him, jerking him closer. “You’re safe. Stop—”

Fire blooms along his arms.

It licks out from under your grip, curls up his neck, spills from his hair. It should go out in the damp cloth of his clothes, in the lake water still beading his pale skin. It doesn’t. It catches as if he were dry kindling, running greedily along every fragile line of him.

You jerk back, horrified, landing hard on your heels.

He doesn’t scream. He sits up, shoulders straightening, fire pouring off him in long, lazy tongues. His hair burns white-hot and doesn’t vanish. His eyes are twin furnaces, lit from within, and fixed on you. The flames do not touch you, but you can feel them, heat crawling over your nose and lips, drying the water on your cheeks in an instant.

“You’re burning,” you whisper, terrified, and the words evaporate in the heat.

He smiles. It’s a small, crooked thing, wrong on a child’s face, wrong on a face you do not know yet seem to know all at once. Somewhere, deep down, some awareness latches on, hooking in deep.

“Not yet,” he says.

His voice is high and light, and far, far too old.

You stare. “Who are you?”

He tilts his head, regarding you through the veil of his own demise. “You shouldn’t forget me. You promised.”

You flinch. “I don’t—”

“Know? Remember?” His shoulders jerk up in a slight shrug, flames rippling outwards. “You will. You always do. That’s the trouble.”

The burning keeps throwing sparks into the sky behind him. Behind him, the three dragons wheel past the smoke again, and you could swear they are smaller now, struggling, their cries sharper, thinner.

“What do you want from me?” you choke out.

The boy laughs under his breath, embers dancing from his lips, floating in the air around you.

“Want?” He tastes the word, ponderous, then discards it with a flick of his chin. “I’m just an echo. You’re the one who wants.” His gaze sharpens, heat flaring. “Remember this, she wolf: when the fire comes, I am the hand on the gate. You don’t have to like it. You just have to know.”

The words crawl under your skin like ants, lodging in your bones. He leans forward suddenly, close enough that you can see individual tongues of flame licking along his lashes, wrapping his wrists. The air between you shimmers.

“Don’t forget about me,” he coos softly. “If you forget me—”

You jerk back, the heat too much, too suffocating, your hands coming up to shield your face—

—and there is no boy, no burning keep, no lake. Only black, and the distant, muffled sound of someone breathing too fast. Someone is murmuring in a tongue you don’t understand. The ghost of heat in your shoulder, painful and deep, pulses with your heart.

You reach blindly into the dark, fingers grasping for anything solid. Somewhere far away, a hand catches yours and yanks.

—

You surface.

And the world rushes back in pieces, a collection of fragments you collect one breath at a time.

First: there’s sound. A quiet, continuous murmur of voices. The distant clatter of something metal. A basin, perhaps, or a dropped cup, then the hiss of someone being shushed for it.

Next: weight. Your body pulls at you like wet wool. It feels like someone has put your right arm under a mountain and forgotten to inform you. There’s a grip on your left hand that’s so tight the bones there hurt.

Last: light.

Your eyes crack open.

The ceiling is strange and unfamiliar; it’s too pale with dark beams crossing it. A thin, cool slice of muted daylight comes through a small side window. It draws a line across the floor and across the boots of the man who sits hunched over in the chair next to you.

Your father.

Barthogan Stark is not a man made to look small. He is tall, even slumped over, broad even out of his mail, grey and black hair tumbling loose around a face carved in harsh lines. But right now, folded forward over your hand, he looks… diminished. As if something has hollowed him from the inside and he’s only now feeling the lack. His head is bowed; his free hand presses against his brow. The other clamps around your fingers, rough and big and shaking a little with the effort of not squeezing harder.

“Father,” you croak wetly.

It comes out as a rasp, barely more than a stray breath, but he hears it as if you screamed it at him.

His head snaps up.

For a heartbeat, he just stares at you, not breathing. His eyes are red-rimmed and bloodshot, shadows bruised into the hollows beneath them. His beard is thicker and more unkempt. Someone has tried to smooth his hair back and failed; it stands in wild tufts, as if he’s run his hands through it a hundred times, making it measier with each pass.

You’ve never seen him look so undone.

“Pup,” he rasps, and the word breaks, just a bit.

You try to smile, but your face feels heavy, unfamiliar. Still, you force the corners of your mouth upwards, if only for him.

“Is this what it takes,” you manage, voice a croak, “for you to sit still?”

Barthogan lets out a breath that’s half a laugh and mostly just a crackle of pure emotion. Relief tears across his weathered features, so naked it’s almost painful to look at. His shoulders sag; some tight-held thing in him uncoiling with the sound of your voice. He leans forward and, with careful tenderness, sets his forehead against the back of your hand.

He doesn’t say anything at all for a while. His breath is warm on your skin; you can feel the tremor in him where his fingers brace against the mattress. His grip is fierce, some unspoken fear that if he lets go, you’ll slide back into whatever dark place you’ve just clawed out of.

You work over the dryness in your throat, feeling the pull, the thickness there.

“I frightened you,” you say.

“You always have,” he grunts against your knuckles. His voice is rough, more stone than sound. He lifts his large head, meeting your gaze, dark eyes shining. “You just usually do it from my side of the arrow.”

Your shoulder hurts, deep and persistent, like it’s been waiting for you to pay attention to it. When you shift, the bandages pull, and heat spreads along the wound and down the length of your arm. You suck in a breath through your teeth, a hiss escaping you.

His eyes turn hard immediately, and he looks you over with a quick, uncompromising expression of a soldier. “Pain?”

You respond with a croaked, “Enough to remind me I’m not dead.”

His mouth twitches. “Good. Means the masters did something right.”

He loosens his grip on your hand just a bit, brushing your knuckles with his thumb.

“How long?” you ask.

“Since the woods?” He sits back a little, though he doesn’t let go of you. “Two days. You’ve been in and out. Raving, mostly.” His stare drops fleetingly to your shoulder, then back to your face, squinting. “You talked about fire. And wolves. And something about dragons over a burning keep.” His eyes narrow, considering. “And you kept calling a name I did not know, over and over, like you were trying to drag it out of the dark with you.”

You frown, the fog in your head shifting a little, but enough. There is a smear at the back of your skull: blood, a silver-haired boy, a burning lake, violet eyes bursting into flame.

“I… I don’t remember,” you murmur, but it’s not entirely true. The specifics are dull, but at the edges, pieces are waiting to be picked up.

“Good,” your father says, too quickly. Then, more gently: “Let it lie. Dreams are only dreams.”

You’re not sure you believe that, not truly, and the way his hand tightens tells you he doesn’t either.

You lie there for a while, breathing, reconnecting with your limbs one by one. The room swims in and out of focus. You’re aware of small things—the weight of blankets over your legs; the clean, herbal tang of whatever the maesters have smeared on your wound; the quiet tick of the brazier in the corner of the room. Your father’s thumb keeps moving, an unhurried, steady motion, reassuring himself you are really here beside him.

“Are you…” You have to stop and lick your dry lips. “Very angry with me?”

He snorts; a whistling, sudden sound. “Always.”

The answer rolls out automatically; the look he levels at you afterwards is not.

“Not for this,” he adds, and there’s something hoarse and shaky under the words. “For this, I am… proud. And furious. And proud again, damn you.” His gaze goes distant for several moments, remembering something you cannot see. “You dragged a prince out of death’s path and put yourself in it instead. That’s the sort of idiocy that runs in our blood. I should have expected it.”

You manage a crooked, trembling smile. “So this is your fault.”

“Most things are,” he mutters. The corner of his mouth ticks, forming an almost smile. “You’ve never needed brothers to get into trouble. You manage just fine on your own.”

The effort it takes to huff a laugh makes your chest protest sharply, but you do it anyway. Barthogan looks at you like he’s memorising every indication of your joy, no matter how faint. There is a single moment—tiny, precarious, stretched taut—where it feels like you might both crack open. Where you might say something too soft and helpless and childlike, like I was afraid or I thought I was dying, and your father might answer with something other than gruffness and stern orders.

It passes.

He straightens when he trusts his voice again. Some of the old steel creeps back into his posture, into the stubborn set of his jaw.

“We’re leaving,” he declares abruptly.

You bink. “What?”

“The moment you’re well enough to sit a horse,” he clarifies sternly. “Or a litter, if those southern quacks insist on it. But we’re going home, pup.”

an: I could NOT write a story set in this era and NOT include the baddest bitch of them all, Bloodraven. I know this was all plot and creepy dreams (excited to see all the analysis on the dream sequence) but big old reunion next chapter (¬‿¬)

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