seed of resurrection
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seed of resurrection
Bride of the Dragon King
[Sylus/Reader ★ 17.3k words ★ Masterlist ★ BOTDK Masterlist ★ AO3] "My beloved, do you still love me?" INDEX — Prelude A/N: 👉👈 Did I write like 80% of this in 2024? Yes. Was I supposed to have been editing it in 2025? Also yes. 🙂
(I am waiting to meet you again, my beloved.)
The morning light streamed into the room, passing the narrow cracks of the wooden blinds. You slowly opened your eyes, hearing birds chirping outside and people bustling around the courtyard. It felt like you had been asleep for a very long time, lost in a dream you didn’t want to leave from.
The dream…
There was a man—or, at least he appeared to be a man. That much you knew. He didn’t seem to be completely human. There was an ethereal beauty about him, a certain grace that you did not see around here—not even from nobility.
His eyes were as red as ruby, his stare so piercing and cold, but the moment they rested on you, his gaze softened, filling you with such warmth and peace. You turned in bed, eyes closed again as you moaned softly in frustration. You couldn’t remember much else from the dream other than the feeling that you may have had similar dreams before. It seemed lately you had been having such dreams and waking up only retaining fragments.
You sighed as you heard your name being called by your handmaiden, Tara. Silently, you sat up just as she entered your bedchamber with a familiar look of frustration etched across her youthful feature.
“Are you still lounging, Miss?” There was a hint of exasperation in her tone, even though she herself should be used to your languidness by now. After all, Tara had been assigned as your handmaiden and companion since you two were just mere children. In all honesty, you viewed Tara as more like a close friend—perhaps, even as sisters—than a servant. She had been by your side for so long, your only companion growing up, and you and she have shared so many secrets throughout the years, it went beyond a relationship between master and servant.
“I’m up, I’m up,” you said, your own vexation heard loud and clear.
“If it were up to me, I would not care if you waste the day away in bed, Miss,” Tara said, tsking, as she rummaged through your wardrobe for fresh clothes, “But Madam has been questioning your whereabouts all morning. I can only fib for so long before she gets wise.”
“Yes, yes,” you said unenthusiastically. You looked at Tara, curiosity brimming in your eyes. “Wait, Grandma has returned from her trip already?”
“She has,” Tara answered, smiling as she pulled out a delicate pink hanfu. “She is running some errands in town for a bit, but she said she will be back this afternoon.”
You frowned. “She’s just got back and she is already busy running around town?”
“She said something about needing some last-minute ingredients,” Tara mumbled offhandedly. “Now, now, Miss, hurry up. I have your morning tea prepared in the garden.”
“Yes, yes,” you answered back half-heartedly as Tara helped you changed.
It was a lovely early summer morning, the weather still in between slowly transitioning from the brisk spring air to that warm summer breeze. You had been idly describing bits and pieces of the dreams you had been having lately to Tara, though the scattered fragments left both of you confused by the meaning or overall picture.
“So, what happened next, my lady?”
You looked to your handmaiden as she set a tray of mid-morning snacks on the round stone table in the garden. You stared into your teacup; the warm floral scent of lotus wafted in the air. You tried to recall more of the dream you were telling her, but it was all just mismatched puzzle pieces. You sighed helplessly.
“I woke up.”
“And you say there is always the same man in your dream?”
You nodded. “I believe so,” you said, “He was… tall, has long white hair… really piercing red eyes… and… and…”
“And?”
“He was so…”
“So what?”
“Ethereal.”
Tara laughed. “Miss, you are blushing.”
“Ah—am I?” You covered your face in embarrassment. You sulked. “I am not. The sun is just a little warmer today.”
“Uh huh,” Tara answered with a disbelieving smile.
Before you could respond, you heard light chirpings in the air. You smiled as you saw two little identical gray sparrows landing on the table. They hopped around, observing the array of snacks with gluttonous interest.
“Oh, shoo—”
You quickly stopped Tara. “Wait. Don’t. It’s alright,” you said, smiling. “They can have a little snack.”
Tara looked puzzled as you broke off small pieces of the osmanthus cake and scattered it on the table. The two birds happily pecked at the crumbs. You laughed.
“I was wondering when you two would show up today,” you teased, reaching out to lightly stroke the top of one bird’s head. It chirped happily.
Tara looked at you curiously. “Miss, have you been feeding these birds lately?”
You nodded. “They have started showing up… I think three weeks ago? Almost always around this time,” you explained. You held out two fingers and the second bird flew up to perch. You gingerly caressed its head with one finger, smiling as the bird seemed to enjoy your gentle ministration. “They don’t appear to be scared of me, or maybe the cakes I have to offer is too enticing to ignore.”
You laughed when the two birds seemed to chirp loudly in indignation at your implied accusation.
“Alright, alright,” you said, smiling, “You two are not little gluttons. Oh—”
You looked up in surprise when the two sparrows took off, flying away from the garden. You smiled resignedly. “I think they’re peeved at me now.”
Tara hummed thoughtfully as she cleaned up the leftover crumbs. “Speaking of sudden arrival… Did you hear that someone has moved into the manor on the lake?”
You looked at Tara with interest. The manor in question, for as long as you could remember, had always been vacant, but peculiarly even without anyone living there for decades, it remained in a pristine state, as if it was resistant to the corrosion of time. Located on the outskirt of town, surrounded by a lake filled with lotus, you rarely ever saw anyone venturing near it. You wondered who the new master of the manor could be.
“Do you know who it could be, Tara?”
“Hmm,” she pondered as she sat down next to you. “I believe Madam Josephine said the young master’s name is Shin.”
“Shin?”
She nodded. “I believe the manor has been in his family’s ownership for generations.”
You picked up your teacup and swirled it around thoughtfully before you took a sip, the warmth and soothing fragrance calmed your nerves. You eyed Tara suspiciously. “Grandma is not planning something, is she?”
“About that…”
You slammed the half-empty cup down on the table and droplets of tea splattered on the surface. “No, I am not going to be part of another matchmaking scheme of hers!”
You stood up and Tara looked panicked. “Oh, Miss, wait—”
“What do you mean ‘Miss’?” you looked at her, tone changing. You feigned confusion, the sudden behavior change making Tara squirmed uncomfortably in place. You continued speaking with a suggestive undertone in your voice, “Miss Tara, are you perhaps, confused? Maybe you should… go inside… and rest.”
Tara frowned at you helplessly. “Miss, I cannot masquerade as you again! Last time, Madam nearly had me beaten!”
“Grandma would never,” you said, scolding her. “Don’t get caught this time then.”
“Wait, wait, Miss!”
Tara followed helplessly after you as you raced for the garden wall. You climbed a plum tree and then over to the stone wall that fenced the property. You sat atop and looked down at your anxious maid with sympathy.
“I’m sorry, Tara,” you said sincerely, “It’s not that I want to put you into this position…”
“Then why are you?!” she demanded, losing her polite demeanor momentarily.
You smiled. “I know Grandma is trying to find me a good husband, but…” You grimaced as you recalled all of the men who had shown up to your home in the last year alone. “I want to be like those two sparrows… and fly away from this place.”
“Miss…”
“I won’t let Grandma beat you,” you promised, adding, “I’ll be back this evening. I promise. Just stay in my room for a few hours.”
“Miss—"
As you started to jump off the wall, you noticed belatedly another figure standing beneath. At this point, you were already falling, and in a panicked voice, you cried out to the person below:
“W-watch out!”
Your eyes squeezed shut, bracing yourself for the inevitable hard ground.
It never came.
Instead, you found yourself landing into a pair of strong arms. You looked up cautiously, gasping when you saw ruby red eyes. You blinked once and looked again.
They were brown.
For a moment, you were confused before you realized what had happened. A blush crept across your cheeks, and your nervous stammer only heightened your embarrassment by the current situation. “I-I’m so sorry! I did not mean to land on you like that—”
You winced when you heard your grandmother yelling your name in frustration as she and a group of house servants raced out the gate to you and this sudden visitor.
The man chuckled and you looked up sheepishly.
“I… can you… let me down?”
He raised a brow at you.
“Please?”
He shook his head in amusement, his chuckles barely restrained. He spoke cordially; his voice deeper than you expected. “Well, since you asked so nicely, my lady.”
As you were lowered to your feet, your grandmother’s approaching footsteps forced you to redirect your attention from the man himself to the current awkward situation. She quickly scolded you before turning to the stranger, bowing and apologizing profusely, “I am so sorry, Master Shin! I had no idea my troublesome granddaughter would do that.”
You blinked.
Master Shin?
You looked at the man in question. Long, dark hair that went down to his waist. He dressed in an all-black hanfu, his appearance and demeanor exuding the grace of nobility.
“Come, come,” Josephine ushered you both into the manor, and as you followed in after Shin, you yelped when your grandmother swatted your bottom. As you rubbed your sore buttocks, she whispered to you harshly, “Do not mess this one up, darling.”
You grumbled in the back of your mind, but outwardly, you gave your grandmother an obedient smile.
As your grandmother and Shin chatted, you sat between them at the low square table, serving tea. You poured a cup and politely offered it to Shin. He smiled as he took it from you, seemingly unable to take his eyes off of you. The complete attention from this stranger made you squirm, but a barely subtle warning cough from your grandmother had you straightening your posture again.
“I am still unfamiliar with the town,” Shin said suddenly, his eyes still hovering on you, “Would the young Miss be so kind as to be my guide and escort and help me familiarize with the place?”
You wanted to protest, but one sharp glare from Josephine had you smiling stiffly and agreeing reluctantly. “I would be… pleased to accompany you, Master Shin,” you said through half-gritted teeth and a forced smile. You noticed out of the corner of your eye your grandmother trying to maintain her composure with even breathing. She gave you another glare and you instinctively straightened your posture once more.
“Splendid. Let’s schedule for the day after tomorrow,” Shin said, apparently not noticing the silent exchange between you and your grandmother. “There are still some businesses I have to take care of around the manor.”
You nodded in understanding. The time passed as Shin and your grandmother made small talks. You took this time to observe him, your head tilting a little in curiosity, feeling a peculiar familiarity about him. Although the hair and eye colors were different, everything else about him seemed to almost remind you of—
“Do I have something on my face, Miss?”
You startled, broken out of your daze. You flustered in embarrassment, realizing you had been staring at him for far longer than you had intended. You heard your grandmother coughing again and clearing her throat. She gave you another barely discreet warning look.
“I apologize, Master Shin—”
“No need for formalities,” he interrupted, smirking, “Shin would be fine.”
“I—I couldn’t. It wouldn’t be proper—”
Your words were cut short as Shin smiled at you. “I think if we are to be wedded, we should familiarize ourselves better, wouldn’t you agree, Madam Josephine?”
Your grandmother immediately perked at his inquiry. To your chagrin, she immediately sided with Shin.
The hours passed with various small talks, though you remained mostly silent, opting out of the conversations almost entirely. It didn’t really seem like Shin or your grandmother even noticed your lack of contribution, their talks continuing merrily despite your glum mood.
When Shin left later in the afternoon, your grandmother pulled you aside. With her arm looped through yours, you walked together through the garden making idle talks.
“Young Master Shin is a good man,” your grandmother commented.
“What do you know about him?” you inquired, unpleased, “We have only just met today. He seems… odd.”
“Darling, do not resist this match,” your grandmother continued, “I will not be around forever to take care of you. I wish to see you married off to a good man. I will not be able to rest easy until I know you will be taken care of.”
You felt an uncomfortable knot in the pit of your stomach. You reached up with your free hand to pat your grandmother’s. You forced a smile on your face. “What are you talking about, Grandma? You are going to live to be a hundred. You’ll probably even live longer than me—”
“Hush,” she chided you, “Do not say such ill words.”
You bit down on your bottom lip, feeling a tightness in your chest. Quietly, you leaned your head lightly against hers, and in that moment, she stroked your hair in comfort, an act reminiscent to many other moments during your childhood under her care.
“I’m sorry, Grandma.”
“Hush,” she said again, “Everything will be alright, darling. Grandma will take care of you.”
You hummed softly, your shoulders relaxing, and the walk continued in peaceful silence.
On the outskirt of town, a large manor stretched far and wide. Its large stone walls fenced the property, keeping trespassers out. Inside the walls, magnolia trees surrounded the property, and only recently did they started transitioning from their pink blossoms to green leaves. In the center of the courtyard, a large pond was situated, and a lone magnolia tree bearing red flowers, stood grander than the others, overlooking the body of water filled with koi fish of various colors and unique patterns. Around the courtyard were different buildings and housing—all vacant.
The manor had long been abandoned with no master in sight and no servants to serve. Decades after decades, the manor stood in silence, appearing just as new as the day it was erected. Not a crack in the buildings, nor corrosion in the stone pathways, the manor remained pristine, as if it was in its own realm.
Today, however, a new master had come to stake claim on this forgotten manor, seizing back what was always his.
“Master Sylus!”
Sylus looked up from viewing the koi pond, seeing two little sparrows descending, engulfed for a brief moment in a black mist. When the mist dissipated, two identical men dressed in all black were knelt on the ground, bowing respectfully to their master.
“Luke, Kieran,” Sylus spoke up, acknowledging the two men, “And where have you two been?”
“We were just returning from the young Miss’ manor,” Kieran answered, standing up alongside his twin.
“Funny,” Sylus quipped, unamused, “I was just there myself and did not see you two anywhere on the property.”
Luke and Kieran froze. Luke cleared his throat and stuttered, “Well, you see—”
Sylus sighed. “I have asked you two to monitor her, and instead, you have been indulging in little cakes these past few weeks.”
“It’s not our fault the young Miss likes to feed us,” Luke protested.
“I mean, I suppose we could visit her when it’s not teatime…”
“Quiet—”
“Never mind,” Sylus interrupted. “In any case, our introduction was made today.”
Luke and Kieran looked at Sylus curiously.
“So soon?” Kieran questioned.
“Not soon enough,” Sylus responded, “I will not let her slip away this time.”
(When this is all over…
Your heart pounded in your chest as you took in the wasteland before you. Your body felt weighed down by the heavy armor you wore and in your hand was a hefty sword, stained with the fresh blood of so many men. All around you was the dying groans and warring cries of soldiers on both sides.
Crimson blood flowed like a river to your feet, the stench of death hung heavy in the air. If there was a Hell on earth, you were sure this was it. You breathed in sharply and then cried out, “Raise the shields!”
Soldiers echoed your cry and in quick successions, iron shields were raised to block the oncoming volley of arrows from the opposite side. You held out under the protective barrier, gritting your teeth as you listened to the successive barrages of arrows hitting metal.
“Move forward!” you ordered, and immediately your comrades followed the command and barreled down the enemies with the shields, crushing them under the weight of heavy boots. As soldiers fell from exhaustion and enemy attacks, you moved forward, your hands gripping your sword and slashing down enemies one after another with quick reflexes.
You panted, feeling your muscles burned and ached, but rest was the furthest thing from your mind in this moment. Your eyes focused on the citadel you needed to seize for your kingdom. You raced forward and struck down many more oncoming enemy soldiers.
“Raise the shields!” You cried once more, and as one by one, soldiers obeyed your command, you leapt atop and ran nimbly across the shields, deflecting the oncoming arrows with your blade. As you closed in on the wall, soldiers beneath you propelled you upward with their shields and you leapt over the wall, determined eyes zeroed in on the opposing commander, his shocked expression reflected in your eyes.
Immediately, you ruthlessly brought your sword down, the sharp blade meeting flesh and a sharp cry ripped from the man’s throat. You inhaled quickly and pulled your sword back out, dodging his retaliation before his own weapon could slice your side. You quickly countered the oncoming attacks, the din of metal against metal reverberated in the air. With each step back, you found yourself stumbling, falling down the wall to the sea of raging soldiers beneath.
“Catch her!” Soldiers below you cried out and you felt your fall broken by your loyal men catching you. You were lifted and you bounced back to your feet, your determination unwavering.
When it is all over… When there is peace again in our kingdom… We will be together again… In this life… We will be together…
The promise you had made to him rang in your mind. His look of resignation was still etched in your memory, as was his voice, so firm and unyielding:
Commander… I will follow you straight to Hell.
You rushed forward, yelling until your throat was raw. Adrenaline masked your exhaustion as you struck down men after men, the number of lives you had taken rapidly climbing higher. Closer and closer, you could feel victory within your reach. You would bring honor to your men, to your emperor, your kingdom—your family. The future you yearned for, the peace you wished for the children you would have, the life with him—everything you had ever desired would be yours after this day. Almost… Almost—
You staggered, choking.
“Commander!”
“She’s been struck!”
“Commander, watch out!”
You looked at the arrow that pierced through your deteriorated armor and into your chest, and before you could even register what had happened, you felt a deep, sharp pain, feeling a sword plunging straight through your stomach. You gagged and then choked out some blood. Your scream resounded in the barren land as the sword was pulled out without mercy.
As you fell, you heard your name screamed out. You lay on the ground, bleeding out and panting, your vision growing weaker. Through your blurred vision, you could see the enemy sword about to be swung down again. You closed your eyes, and waited.
You heard another scream, and then a dull thud and the clatter of a sword hitting the ground.
You slowly opened your eyes, your heart pounding as you saw a head laying opposite of you, the man’s eyes still wide open in horror. It was an enemy soldier. It was… your attacker.
“Stay with me. You will be alright.”
You felt your body lifted, pressed closer to another’s. You looked up and you whimpered, scared. You didn’t think you had ever felt fear before in your life. You were always so reckless, so headstrong, so bold, but now… you felt fear. Felt remorse. Felt… ashamed.
“Sylus…”
He stared back, his breathing heavy. “You will be alright,” he repeated, almost sounding more like he was speaking to himself.
You shakily reached up and touched his cheek. “I’m… I’m sorry…”
He looked shocked. “What?”
“My… promise…”
He shook his head. “This time it will come true… This time—”
Your breathing was ragged and you felt trickles of tears flowed down your marred cheeks. “…I… you…”
“Stay with me, stay with me—” he said vehemently.
“I’m… I’m… sor…”
As your eyes closed, your breathing slowing and consciousness fading away, you heard a deafening inhuman roar and the terrified screams of men on both sides.
Long after the battle ended, silence followed the annihilation.
Within the wasteland, the wind whistled, and one lone man sobbed as he cradled his fallen lover—his screaming curse ignored by the heavens.)
You woke up screaming, your face covered in cold sweats. You felt your body shaking, your heart pounding against your chest. Fresh hot tears ran down your face as your mind was still reeling from what you had just dreamt. This was the most lucid dream you have had yet, and for once, you wished you could forget this vision.
Shaking and gasping, you could hear that damning whistle of the wind piercing through a silenced battleground. Eyes closed, you heaved, trembling almost as if you could feel that sole surviving soldier’s arms around you.
You had not expected Shin to arrive at the house so early in the morning. After the dream—nightmare?—you had, you could barely fall back to sleep. Or rather, you were afraid to fall back to sleep, too scared that you could revisit that same dream all over again. Even now you could still hear the deafening groans and cries of dying men.
You could even… see him.
Sylus? You repeated the name experimentally in your mind. It seemed so foreign, and yet, very familiar, as if you had said his name so many times before in your life. How peculiar.
“Miss, Miss, please wake up! Master Shin has arrived and is awaiting you.”
“I don’t care,” you mumbled back sleepily, still caught somewhere between dream and reality. Your mind continued to wander back to that soldier. That man who cradled you in his arms, his face etched with utter despair and… anger.
Barely conscious, you were dragged out of bed by Tara, who fussed and chided you nonstop as you continued to sleep. You allowed her full control over your morning grooming, her personal compliant doll to dress and style as she saw fit.
“Honestly, Miss, will you continue to laze like this after becoming Master Shin’s wife?” Tara sighed as she brushed your hair.
Eyes still closed, you mumbled sleepily, mildly irritated, “Who said I was marrying him…”
“Madam Josephine,” Tara answered, not missing a beat. She rolled her eyes and intentionally brushed your hair harder, stirring you awake when she yanked out strands of your long hair.
“Ow!” You looked behind you, glaring. “Whose side are you on?”
“The one that feeds and houses me,” she continued with a smug smile.
“Hmph, some friend.”
“I am merely concerned about your future, Miss,” she said, brushing your hair more gently again. “Miss…”
“What is it?”
“Will…”
You looked behind you expectantly, sensing Tara’s hesitancy. “Go on,” you urged with a gentler smile.
“Will you allow me to continue serving you after you become the young master’s wife?”
You were shocked by Tara’s words, taking a few seconds longer to process them. Slowly, you smiled, your hands gripping hers. “Is that even a concern?”
She smiled. “You best hurry along, Miss. The young master is waiting.”
You rolled your eyes. “Then let him wait—”
Your grandmother’s voice rang from across the manor, and you winced at the sound of your name. You looked up just in time to catch Tara stifling her snickers. “Yes, yes, Madam Josephine,” you half-muttered as you stood up, straightening your clothes. You didn’t get far from your room when you heard Tara’s cheerful voice behind you:
“Miss, have fun with your future groom!” Tara teased with a wave, and you turned around, shooting her the dirtiest look you could mustered.
It was nearing midmorning when you and Shin walked through town together. You showed him the local businesses and eyed the many stands and stalls that lined the streets. The current situation had you feeling a little unnerved, unused to being alone in a man’s presence for this long. You could feel your throat drying, sure that your voice was trembling and cracking as you spoke. It didn’t help that you kept catching him staring at you with such keen interest, and instead of looking away in embarrassment at being caught, he smirked.
This bastard…
You wondered if all men were as shameless as him. To freely gaze upon a maiden, and in public no less.
“What’s going on over there?”
“Huh?” You looked in the direction Shin was gesturing and noticed a large crowd had formed. You perked up. “Oh, there is a performance happening. Let’s go watch.”
You and he walked over, joining the excited crowd. Shin stood a head taller than everyone, easily seeing the performance from his vantage point while you yourself was struggling to glimpse in between shoulders of the people in front of you. You gasped suddenly when you felt a hand on your arm, grabbing and pulling you to the side. You looked up in annoyance, freezing when you realized it was Shin. He motioned back to the play with a tilt of his head, and you realized he had found you a spot to comfortably watch. You smiled sheepishly, but nodded in gratitude.
The performers were acting out a story: Long ago, the mortal realm was ravaged by a monster—a dragon, to be precise. He ruled without remorse, demanding fair maidens to be his brides. Villages in the surrounding areas offered their most beautiful maidens in order to appease this beast. Once spirited away to be brides to the Dragon King, the young maidens were never heard from again.
One day, a young warrior decried the atrocities, unwilling to see the maiden he loved betrothed to a monster. He traversed alone up the mountains to where the Dragon King lived and with his wit and bravery, he plunged his sword into the dragon’s chest, carving out the heart to bring back to his village as proof of his heroics.
The crowd watched with rapt attention, gasping as they watched the hero slay the dragon and witnessing the beast succumbing to death. Loud cheers erupted and applauses sounded as the hero was praised by the onlookers.
You yourself cheered with glee, clapping and laughing in joy at witnessing such a moving and heroic act. Expecting the haughty young master to be impressed with the play, you wanted to catch Shin in a moment of defenselessness, so you stole a glance. You paused mid-clap, startled to see his expression blank, almost icy even. He wasn’t moved by the storyline of the hero wanting to save his lover. He didn’t seem impressed by the hero’s act of bravery. There was no emotion on his face, and yet, you wondered if you were misreading him, but you were almost certain, you could discern a gleam of complete contempt in his eyes.
You barely knew Shin, but in the hours that you had spent listening to him conversed with your grandmother so politely and jovially, and the entire morning spent making idle talks, you had only seen this carefree and affable side of him. This sudden demeanor change was unexpected. You wondered what could be going on in his head—wondered why this mere performance could evoke such a feeling of disdain from the young man in your company.
From the corner of your eye, you could see staff members from the acting troupe walking around holding out a woven basket to receive money for their performance. Coins jingled as people deposited their money into the basket, praises for the play heard all around. Children were already laughing and reenacting the scene of the hero slaying the dragon.
As you were reaching for your own coin purse, Shin immediately grabbed your wrist, pulling you away from the crowd. You gasped from the feeling of his large hand wrapped so tightly around your wrist. “Do not waste your money on such lies, Miss,” he said calmly, but the edge in his voice was palpable. He dragged you away, not looking back, and you struggled with his quick pace. You stumbled along, your eyes staring at his tensed, broad back. His grip tightened even further.
“Sh-Shin! You’re hurting me!”
He stopped suddenly and you nearly collided into his back. Slowly, he turned around, offering you an apologetic look.
“My apologies, Miss,” he said, letting go immediately.
You rubbed your sore wrist, unsure if you should question his sudden demeanor change. He appeared distracted, his body still tensed, almost as if he was trying to stay in control of his emotions. You wondered why he was so provoked by such a harmless play, but you decided it didn’t seem appropriate to question someone you barely knew with such curiosity.
In that moment, you caught sight of a vendor selling confections on the side of the road. Delectable little treats lined his quaint stall as he tried to entice passersby.
“Let’s… let’s eat some mung bean cakes,” you said instead, hoping to return to the earlier light atmosphere you had shared with Shin that morning before the play.
“Mung bean cakes?” He looked down at you, his head tilting in confusion. It seemed this worked, you thought with relief, sensing his mood was already more relaxed than it was seconds ago.
You smiled and nodded. You dragged him over to the vendor and ordered several. You paid and thanked the seller as you receive your paper bag of sweets.
As you walked down the busy street with Shin, you reached into the bag and pulled out one little round cake that was formed in an intricate mold. Some had delicate filigrees impressed atop as a pattern while others formed a fully blossomed flower.
You handed one to Shin, smiling. “Look. This one is so pretty. It looks like a flower.”
He took the offered confection. He held the little cake in his hand, confused. You frowned.
“If you don’t want it, then I’ll eat it—” As you attempted to swipe back the cake, Shin easily held it above you out of your reach. You cursed his astounding height. A futile attempt, but you still tried to jump and grab it back.
“I never said I didn’t want it,” he argued, poking you in the forehead.
“Ah—what was that for?!” You placed a hand over your forehead, glaring at him.
“How dare this greedy young miss tried to take back what she had given away,” he said teasingly. He leaned his face in closer to yours, his smirk returning, his voice carrying heavy shades of mischievousness. “Once you give someone something, there are no takebacks.”
You huffed, and he laughed, taking a bite. “Delicious,” he said, his deep voice making your heart quickened and your belly flipped and flopped. You could almost feel your cheeks warming up at the sound of his laughter. He held the half-eaten confection toward you. “You should try some, Miss.”
“This isn’t proper,” you scolded him, reaching into the paper bag for a new cake as he finished the one he held. You continued, “There are many more in the bag. We do not need to share—”
You gasped when his large hand wrapped around your wrist again, and with one firm tug, you were pulled to him. Before you could react, Shin took a bite from the mung bean cake you held in your hand. Your face really did burn up this time as you looked at him, shocked. Meanwhile, Shin responded with a playful grin, licking his lips. “Just as I had thought. This tastes even more delicious from your hand, Miss.”
“Young Master!”
“Shin,” he corrected you, “I want you to use my name, Miss.”
You gritted your teeth, glaring at his face still so close to yours. You could almost sense the scandalized eyes on you both and it just made your face burned hotter. “Shin,” you said slowly, annoyed, “This isn’t proper behavior for a young man and woman to display in public.”
“Why not?” he challenged you with a smirk, “We are to be wedded, are we not?”
Not! you held the word back, almost certain that the moment you spat that in his irritating face, your dear grandmother would appear out of thin air to make you grovel for her mercy before she sent you to meet your maker.
“Nothing has been determined,” you said as evenly as you could.
“Yet,” he said, adding haughtily, “Miss, I always get what I want.”
You gasped as he held your chin, pulling you closer to his face. His voice grew softer, more alluring, “And what I want is you.”
You weren’t sure why, but you instinctively squeezed your eyes shut, nervous and scared. A moment passed, and nothing happened. You slowly opened your eyes, your cheeks now red with mortification, as Shin laughed and reached into your paper bag to retrieve another mung bean cake. He took a bite, smirking in amusement at the rather pathetic sight of you.
“Y-You…!” You unconsciously raised your fist at him. Politeness be damned, you thought in that moment, not caring if Grandma Josephine did appear from around the corner to hurl a sandal at your head. You were going to give this man a piece of your mind!
“Ah—Shin!”
You fumbled, not expecting him to suddenly grab your face in his large hand. Shin held your face, squeezing tightly. He laughed. “It is like two little baos,” he teased, gesturing to your round cheeks.
You gripped at his arm, whining, “Shin, it hurts! Stop it!”
He gave you another squeeze before letting go, amused by the glare you directed at him. He dragged you into his arms, his cheek nuzzling against yours. “You are so cute,” he murmured, his breathy voice making you shiver. “I feel like I just want to eat you up.”
You felt your stomach doing flips again, his tone while still playful had heavy seductive undertones. You inhaled sharply. “Don’t tease me like that,” you said, pulling away, embarrassed by his behavior and mortified that passerby kept whispering and eyeing the two of you in disapproval.
He looked amused, not caring about others’ reactions like you were. His eyes only saw you. “Why not?”
You blushed and looked away, feigning annoyance. “It is indecent.”
“Improper… impolite… indecent…” he said almost mockingly with a laugh, “My, my, Miss, you are much more of a prude than I would have expected.”
You glared again. “Or rather than me being a prude, you are too much of a scoundrel.”
“Is that so?”
You started to walk away with a huff. “I have never met a young master as ill-bred such as you, Shin.”
You paused, startled when he easily caught up to you. He stood before you, his smile unwavering. He leaned down and reached for your free hand. He held it to his lips and with a tilt of his head, he whispered, “Then I am honored to be seen as unique in your eyes, my bride.”
You could feel your cheeks turning pink. You tried to act indifferent, scoffing, “Delusional.”
He laughed, and you wondered why it warmed your heart so much to hear such carefree joy from him.
(Win the Emperor’s favor and you will know of riches beyond your wildest dreams.
At merely eighteen, those were the final words your mother had said to you before you departed for the Palace alongside many other maidens within the country who wished to be chosen as the Emperor’s concubines. Within your town, you were regaled as the fairest. Men sweettalked, unashamedly placing you within the same plane as celestial maidens and fairies. Women eyed you with envy, their compliments like acid, but you always smiled back, matching poisonous wits with even the greenest of them all.
You would have no problem surviving within the dark, manipulative royal court, and you would certainly have no issue stealing the Emperor’s heart.
Or so you thought.
The Emperor did not deign choosing concubines as worthy of his fleeting, precious time. Lined up outside the Royal Palace in the courtyard, young maidens from all regions stood tall, dressed in the finest of silk and groomed their absolute best, as they waited with bated breath as eunuchs walked down the line, surveying the young women, looking for ones to fit their unknown list of criteria.
You stood near the end, and you had seen many women—all graceful beauties—passed with a look of disdain. You held your breath, feeling doubts settling in, your confidence shaken for the first time in your young life. When the eunuchs stopped in front of you, their eyes traveling up and down in observation, you felt your heart stilling, waiting.
It could have been merely a few seconds, but to you, it felt like time had stopped. When one of the eunuchs nodded in approval, noting your name on the scroll he carried, you let out the breath you held. You bowed in respect.
“It will be my honor to serve my Emperor,” you said, keeping your voice steeled and steady, though inside you could feel your heart pounding.
Time passed since you were chosen. You received your own quarter in a forgotten area of the palace ground. For an inexperienced concubine, it was a comfortable living quarter with plenty of foliage to keep your mood uplifted as you waited for the Emperor to call upon you.
There were many maidens chosen that day to be part of his harem. It wasn’t unusual that he did not call you your first night.
Or the next.
Or even the following.
You had enough servants to tend to you. You were dressed exclusively in finery and served delicious food prepared by the royal cook. You told yourself that this was a good life. You knew no hardship and you were expected little. Your days were filled with idle entertainment as you waited.
You played the guzheng, or rather, you played one song on the guzheng, over and over again. A melody had come to you in your dreams. It was melancholic, bearing the heavy weight of loss, yearning, and desperation. You could never finish the song, having always woken up before you heard the ending, but you still played day after day, night after night. In a forgotten corner of the palace, beneath a magnolia tree outside the sleeping quarter, a guzheng could be heard, the song playing calling out, a plea to be seen and heard.
You waited.
Some days you would pick up a brush, your graceful inked strokes always creating the same image, or to be precise, the same person. You didn’t know why, but your chest tightened with pain as you stared at the man on paper. You didn’t know him. He was merely someone from your dreams, but oh how you yearned to stay in the land of unconsciousness, where this silvery-white haired man embraced you like a lover, showered you with kisses, and lavished you with sweet murmurs of affections.
Next to his portrait, you carefully wrote out the characters, My beloved.
You stared at the delicate characters, chest throbbing, your breathing coming out in short gasps. Droplets of tears fell on the paper. You could hear his voice, so rich and passionate. Your name always sounded so heavenly when he said it, always spoken with such revere and devotion.
You yearned for him. For a man who didn’t exist.
You crumbled the paper, like you always did. The Emperor could come at any moment. It would be indecent and punishable to find another man’s portrait in your room. You crumbled the paper even further, and threw it into the hearth, watching with pain as it burned and turned to ashes.
You waited.
You had your maids bring you books, anything to fill your endless time. Your eyes skimmed over the characters one word at a time, reading of handsome heroes who saved fair maidens from demon kings or of star-crossed lovers who only have one night together before they were to be separated by the heavens, completely at the mercy and manipulation of the cruel hands of fate.
As you lounged beneath the magnolia tree, your mind wandered. You always pictured the man from your dreams. It was never intentional, and the first time it had happened, you had felt embarrassed by your foolish behavior. When it happened again, you allowed yourself this little indulgence. You let him filled your fantasies as you read your books, let him become the dashing hero who would whisk you away from this isolating life of monotony.
Sylus.
The name had first come to you in a recent dream, and from that moment on, you let it consumed you. You tested the syllables on your tongue, felt your heart skipped and your cheeks pinked as you heard his name spoken by your voice. You felt happy.
And then you remembered. The Emperor could seek you out at any moment. Any day now. It would be indecent and punishable to have a concubine call out the name of another man.
So, you closed your books, and you buried his name deep in your heart.
And you waited.
You waited.
And you waited.
And you waited.
It would be a year since you arrived at the Palace before you stole a glimpse of the Emperor on a morning walk. Your maids had always made sure you were presentable. Dressed in the finest silk and hair brushed and styled with beautiful ornate decorations and flowers, you were like the celestial maidens and fairies men from your town would often say.
You bowed respectfully, your head remaining lowered as the Emperor paused in front of you in question.
Your heartbeat skipped. You had powdered your face, painted your cheeks rosy and your lips scarlet. You were so sure your beauty would ensnare the Emperor now that he had laid his eyes on you.
He acknowledged your presence, a courteous nod and a polite expression.
And he moved on.
In the distant, you heard the callous giggles of the other concubines who had witnessed your shameful encounter. Your cheeks burned with embarrassment, but you steeled yourself as you straightened your posture. You maintained your grace, your expression unreadable, and you continued your walk with your faithful maids trailing behind.
You heard their comforting words, listened to their reassurances, but they mattered little to you.
Perhaps you had always known, always suspected, but this humbling experience forced you to face reality: you were just one pretty flower among a meadow of others.
You returned to your quarter, to your secluded little haven within the palace ground.
Your days returned to lazing under the magnolia tree. You would play your guzheng, always chasing after the ending that would never come. You would paint the same portrait again and again, and you would burn it again and again. You read books after books, fantasizing the same man who would spirit you away, to free you from the confines of this lonesome palace life, but you would always cry when you reached the last page.
Sometimes the lovers would be together, and you envied them, wishing for this fantastical romance you could only dream of. Other times, the lovers were separated, and you empathized, feeling a hollowness inside you, wishing for the tender touch of someone who didn’t exist.
You dried your tears, and chided yourself once. You were still the Emperor’s concubine. He could still call for you whenever he desired. It wouldn’t do to have a pitiful maiden longing for another man.
So, you waited.
And waited.
And waited.
You watched the seasons passed, stealing your youth first, and then before you knew it, your beauty.
One day, many, many hollow seasons later, the Palace fell into mourning. The Emperor had passed in his sleep. He was seventy-four.
You sat under your magnolia tree and you cried. You didn’t cry for the Emperor. You mourned him as was expected, as was the custom, but you grieved for your lost life. You had witnessed over half a century of the magnolia tree blossoming, always hopeful, always loyal. You had waited, as patiently as you could, and now that he was gone, now that you were grayed and wrinkled, you realized everything was for naught.
You never learned of the riches your mother had so long ago described. You never even learned the touch of a man—of a lover. You did everything you had thought was right, practiced patience and grace rivaling monks, and you were rewarded with nothing.
A life unlived, you stayed in your corner long after the Emperor had passed and his successor had risen. You would always have a place within the Palace, but few would even remember you.
The seasons passed. You watched the magnolia tree blossomed in spring, the delicate pink flowers promising youth and innocence. When summer arrived, the green leaves offered shelter from the hot sun. Autumn ushered in a feeling of nostalgia and melancholy, and winter stripped the tree bare.
You watched this cycle happened year after year until your mind was no longer quick. You were forgetting things more often now. You made many mistakes. Sometimes, you couldn’t even discern reality from the dreams you longed for.
One late night, the moon was bright and full, looming high in the dark sky.
You opened your eyes when you felt an extra weight on your bed.
A young man sat near you, his long hair as silvery-white as the moon in the sky cascaded down his back. He looked so regal and elegant, more ethereal than the Emperor ever was, and more divine than any of the royalty that had visited the Palace over the years. The young man cupped your cheek, his smooth, youthful skin a stark contrast to your wrinkled, leathery flesh.
“I am sorry, my beloved,” he whispered, his deep voice so familiar. As they should be, you thought, having heard it in your dreams every night for the last decades.
“You are late,” you said. You didn’t even know if you were dreaming at this point, or perhaps your mind was wandering again. You had loved this man from your fantasy for all of your life. You had painted his portraits so many times, memorized his features by heart. His very being, his entire essence, was engraved into your soul.
This was him.
“Sylus.” You hadn’t said his name in decades. Your voice no longer carried that youthful lilt. You were too old now. It seemed so shameful to even speak his name. You cried.
He wiped your tears away, his apologies filled the silence, but it did not ease your heartache.
“Stay with me,” you pleaded, voice weak and gravelly, “I’m scared.”
“Don’t be,” he said, brushing the gray strands out of your face. “It will be over soon.”
You believed him. He held your hand in his, the soft, sweet murmurs you had always longed to hear lulled you back to sleep.
You knew when you closed your eyes tonight, they would never open again in the morning, but you were no longer scared. You let go of the regrets that weighed you down. Nothing else seemed to matter in this moment.
Only him.
As you closed your eyes again, your breathing steadying, the warmth of life slipping away, you heard a cry from a beast. It was low and sorrowful, carrying a heavy weight of remorse and despair and anger.
Just as you had lived, even in death, no one remembered the elderly virgin concubine. After that night, the kingdom fell to ruins. The ground shook with an unearthly force and houses tumbled, crushing and claiming thousands of lives. Lanterns had fallen, flames erupting, setting the once peaceful capital ablaze and lighting the night sky in a crimson glow. Entire family lines were wiped out, new brides were widowed, children orphaned, and parents grieving for surviving as they cradled their dead child—young and old.
No one left unscathed. Fate could not discern from hungry beggars or the gluttonous wealthy upper echelons. The capital burned, lives ruined and taken freely, the screaming cries unheard by the heavens.
The ones who had managed to survive spoke of seeing a white serpent-like creature moving in the night sky, its scales glimmering in the moonlight before it disappeared within the clouds. Many believed it was a dragon, but rather than bringing fortune to the mortal realm, they wondered if their empire had incurred his wrath.)
You sat in bed, your knees pulled to your chest as you heaved and sobbed. You felt like your heart was ripping, unable to stop shaking as the fragments of your dreams lingered, forming this heartbreaking image of loss.
It was the same man from your previous dream. It was the same look of despair.
“…Sylus, Sylus…” you sobbed his name over and over again, wondering why the dreams all ended the same way: you forsaking him.
“…I’m sorry, I’m sorry…”
In the middle of the night, in the dark silence of your room, you continued crying out his name, every utter tearing you apart inside.
In the following days, extravagant gifts were sent to your manor. Luxurious jade, aged liquor, finely crafted porcelain potteries, and the finest fabrics in all of the lands were brought in one by one to awed delight.
“It seems Master Shin is smitten with you, Miss,” Tara teased as she held out the beautiful crimson fabric with golden embroidery of cranes and magnolia flowers. She sighed blissfully as she felt the beautiful silk. “None of the previous suitors had ever sent gifts as fine as these.”
You tried to appear indifferent, but even you couldn’t help but felt flattered by such attention. “Well, now, perhaps I could entertain the thought of being the young master’s wife if this is how I will be treated.”
“Oh?” Tara eyed you with suspicion. “You are suddenly compliant. Are you feeling unwell, Miss?”
“How rude,” you quipped. “Grandmother had just… asked me to consider this match, so I am.”
Truth be told, you haven’t been able to shake Shin’s expressions from the other day out of your mind. He was attentive one moment, listening intently to your explanations as you guided him through town. After watching the play, he seemed to have shut down completely, his expression cold and full of contempt. You had thought it was a sweet storyline—feeling admiration for the hero’s bravery—but Shin seemed irked by it all.
You had managed to turn his foul mood around. Just as quickly as he had changed, he had returned to his earlier soft demeanor, and it was puzzling how you had witnessed the two sides of the same man in such a short amount of time.
Shin was such an enigma. The man left you with more questions than answers, and you wondered what his intentions could be. He seemed particularly keen of you, his eyes seeing only you, his attention devoted to you. Just you.
You knew nothing of him, and he of you, but the way he behaved would have one thinking he had fallen in love with you so many lifetimes ago.
You blushed, and chided yourself. Enough silly thoughts, you silently reprimanded yourself again.
“Oh, Miss, we have guests!”
You looked up in surprise when Tara called out to you from the courtyard. Curious, you walked outside, surprised to see two young identical men dressed in black, waiting with even more gifts. You greeted them politely.
“It is a pleasure to make your acquaintance, young Miss. My name is Kieran,” the man greeted you with a bow and then gestured to his companion, who responded in the same way, “And this is my twin brother, Luke. Our master has asked us to make sure his gifts have arrived safely to you.”
“Master?” you questioned with confusion.
“Master Sy—Master Shin,” Luke clarified. He quickly added, “As you will be our master’s wife, we are to serve you as well, Miss.”
“Please use us as needed,” Kieran added.
You smiled uncomfortably. “Thank you, but that will not be necessary.”
Luke and Kieran exchanged looks, appearing startled and confused. Luke smiled at you, his expression coming across as roguish. “Miss, the Master insists. We are under orders to serve and protect you.”
“Protect me? From what?”
“Just in general,” Kieran explained vaguely. “Master Shin values your safety. You do not even have to consider us bodyguards.”
“Whatever you need, we will serve you, Miss.”
“But—”
“Oh, Miss, quit acting so modest,” Tara cut in with a grin, “You need to get used to this kind of treatment since you will be Master Shin’s wife!”
You glared at Tara.
“Weren’t you the one who said earlier how you could get used to the Master’s attention and care?”
Luke and Kieran seemed to exchange another look, grinning in amusement, while you flustered and stammered, “N-not in those particular words…”
“Besides, it would be nice to have you boss someone other than me around,” Tara added with a feigned pitiful look.
“Hush,” you scolded her with a light glare. You sighed, and turned back to Luke and Kieran, conceding, “Very well. Send your master my thanks. These are lovely gifts.”
“And, Miss…” Kieran approached you with a small lacquered wooden black box that had magnolia flowers painted in gold on the exterior. You eyed the box with curiosity, watching as Luke approached and helped his brother open the top. Nestled on a plush brilliantly red cushion was a round gold pendant with an outer border made of jade. The characters for ‘beloved’ was carved in the center, and when you picked it up, you realized on the back was an engraving of an ascending dragon with wisps of cloud beneath him.
“How… exquisite,” you gasped, mesmerized. You were almost afraid of holding it, for fear that you could damage this beautifully crafted piece of jewelry. There was a peculiar familiarity as you caressed the pendant, your expression thoughtful as you admired the beauty in your hand. It was almost akin to a feeling of déjà vu, as if you had seen this pendant somewhere before.
“Miss, that will look lovely on you,” Tara said with admiration, unknowingly breaking you out of your spell. You smiled back.
“There is more jewelry in these boxes,” Luke explained, gesturing to the array of unopened gifts in the courtyard, much to both yours and Tara’s shock. “But it is the Master’s wish that this particular one reaches you personally.”
“Do not feel pressured to wear it, Miss,” Kieran added, “The Master simply wants you to hold onto this.”
“I…” You looked down at the pendant in your hand, your finger tracing the characters thoughtfully. You smiled serenely. “Please let Master Shin know… I will cherish this gift from him with all of my heart.”
(Deep in the mountains, away from the lively towns, there was a quaint village. Once able to boast of a small but respectable, population, its now lone occupant was a little girl, no more than seven. Silently, a deadly plague had snuck in, taking down one villager at a time. It had started with a cough. Very innocuous, very deceiving. Within a few days, a fever would break out. Burning flesh and violent chills would take over, and by this point, it was too late. The one physician in town had already worked himself to death trying to save everyone.
There was no medicine. There was no cure. The only relief from this unknown illness was death’s cold embrace. One by one, men, women, and children succumbed to this plague until there was only one person left waiting.
“Sylus, I’m cold,” you told him, shivering. You looked at the man in front of you, face feverish.
He placed a cooling hand over your forehead, his lips hardened into a straight line. He retrieved a wooden cup and knelt next to your bedside. “Little one, drink some water.”
He helped guide the cup to your mouth, and as you drank, water dribbled down your chin. You started coughing, choking on the liquid. He immediately patted your back gently before helping you lay back down in bed, the cover pulled up to your chin.
“Sylus… am I going to die?”
He inhaled sharply, and paused, unable to answer your question.
“I’m not scared…” you told him. “Mama and Papa are waiting for me, right?”
He was silent, unable to fathom the brave smile on your face.
“Mama… and Papa… sent you to find me, right?” you asked him with a trickle of hope in your young voice, “So I wouldn’t be alone…”
He lowered his head, a soft chuckle escaped, but there was no joy in his laughter. He nodded once, and whispered softly, “Yes, little one, I am here so you would not be scared and lonely…”
You started coughing again before you looked back at this man next to you. “Will you tell me a story?”
He smiled helplessly. “I don’t know any stories.”
“Not one?”
He shook his head. “What if I am bad at telling stories?”
“I won’t mind… I think you would be good at telling stories…”
“You have such confidence in me, little one.”
“Please?”
He relented, unable to deny you this simple request. Not when he knew you did not have long left in this world.
“There once was a dragon,” Sylus began hesitantly, “He fell in love with a beautiful mortal maiden.”
You smiled, and that seemed to have given Sylus the confidence to continue.
“They were deeply in love… until one day the woman stopped loving him.”
You frowned, your voice soft with worry. “Why?”
Sylus smiled sadly, and brushed his hand over your hair in slow strokes. “Because she had forgotten about him,” he said, “It wasn’t her fault, but it happened anyway. And then one day, she was gone from this world, and the dragon grieved deeply.”
Tears started falling down your eyes. Sylus immediately brushed them away with his thumb, shushing you gently.
“He would find her again when she is reborn, but it would never be like before.”
“Sylus…” Your breathing started to get shallower, your body weakening with each passing second. “…Sy…lus…”
He held your hand in his, his caresses tender. As he spoke, his deep voice held a tinge of nostalgia, a glimmer of a memory seemed to reflect in his eyes, “Sometimes he would find her too late…”
You closed your eyes, your breathing gradually slowing, your hand in his growing limp. Sylus watched, seeing you take your final breath. Resigned, his own scarlet eyes closed, his heart dropping, and he continued, hushed, to the silent room:
“…and sometimes he would be too early.”)
“Miss? Are you alright?”
Your head snapped up when you heard Shin’s voice calling for you. “I’m sorry,” you apologized, realizing you had fallen behind him as you two were walking through town together again.
Shin walked back to where you stood. He looked at you with concern before responding, “It’s quite alright. Is there something on your mind? You seemed distracted since we departed earlier.”
You shook your head.
“Liar,” he said, pinching your cheek.
“Ah—don’t!” You whined, swatting at his hand, annoyed.
He smiled, amused by the glare you directed at him.
“You are such a… a…”
“A…?” he prodded you with another insufferable smile.
You opened your mouth to speak, but then you saw Grandma Josephine’s glare in your head, hearing also her firm scolding echoing. You clamped your mouth shut, swallowing the particular words you wanted to call him.
“What’s this? The young miss is silent again.” He lightly tilted your chin up, making you meet his gaze. His thumb barely brushed against your lips, his eyes lingering where he had caressed before he looked up. “Speak. Why are you so despondent today?”
You pulled back. “It’s nothing,” you said, “I’ve just been… having some bad dreams.”
“Care to talk about it?” Shin walked over closer to you, but he did not touch you this time. “It might help to relieve your burden.”
“I don’t know…”
“What? You don’t trust me?”
“Not one bit,” you answered, not missing a beat. He laughed.
“Fair,” Shin conceded. “What can I do to make the young miss more trusting of me?”
You crossed your arms, seemingly in deep contemplation as you pondered his inquiry. His eyes seemed to twinkle with amusement as he watched you.
“Maybe I could entice her to like me more if…” His eyes wandered to a nearby vendor on the street. “Perhaps some warm roasted chestnuts… there’s also some roasted yams…”
You smelled the roasted treats from the seller, your interest piqued, but you shook your head firmly. You tried to ignore the slight grumbling in your belly.
“Maybe some steamed dumplings?”
You frowned. “Am I a glutton to you or something?”
He grabbed your hand, already leading you away to a nearby tea house. “It is almost lunchtime,” he quipped, “A good meal should put you into a better mood.”
“Ah—” You stumbled along, barely able to keep up with his easy long strides as you protested, “but what about—oh!—your calligraphy brushes you wanted to find?”
He paused and you fell into his embrace, blushing crimson as you looked up, meeting his fond smile.
“I lied,” he said, leaning down, his face closer to yours, “I just wanted an excuse to be with you today, Miss.”
You frowned, face still red.
“As red as a tomato,” he teased.
“As vexing as a fly,” you bit back.
“A fly, am I?” he questioned, amused. His eyes drifted lower, and you gasped when his finger trailed along your neck, gently hooking under the chain you wore. He raised the necklace, his eyes resting on the jade pendant. He smirked as he tilted his head, his eyes focused in on your rapidly reddening cheeks. “This vexing fly’s gift looks lovely on you.”
You couldn’t seem to stop blushing now. The effect he was having on you was unlike any other man you had met in the past. He seemed to be the only one capable of making you flustered.
“I—that is…”
“Have you accepted my engagement then?”
You sulked at him. “Grandma has a say in this. Not me.”
“I suppose,” he answered noncommittally, “However, I will not force you into marriage, Miss, and also… I seem to recall specifying to Luke and Kieran to make it clear that you are not required to wear this necklace if you do not desire.”
You looked embarrassed.
“I ask again,” he said patiently, letting the necklace fall. He tipped your chin up with one finger, his face close to yours.
“Have you accepted my engagement then?”
You thought of your grandmother once more, remembering your previous conversation with her. You didn’t realize your face had dropped as you remembered the worried creases on the elderly woman’s face. You quietly answered him, “…Yes…”
You had expected Shin to look pleased, but there seemed to be a flicker of dissatisfaction in his eyes. You looked at him questionably.
“I said yes…”
“I heard,” he answered. He cradled your cheek with one hand, but it was only for a brief moment before he pulled his hand back to his side, and you felt oddly saddened by the sudden loss of warmth. He just nodded once and turned away, resuming the walk through town. “Come then… Those calligraphy brushes…”
You looked at his back confused, recalling his earlier words that this was just a ploy he had come up with to invite you to town. His mood seemed to have changed again, but rather than anger or disdain like before during your first visit to town, he seemed dejected.
Shin turned around, looking at you pointedly as you remained in your spot. You fumbled, embarrassed that you had gotten distracted by your own thoughts. You quickly walked forward to his side. As you continued through town, the once amicable, joking atmosphere disappeared, being replaced by an uncomfortable silence.
You guided Shin to a vendor specializing in the art of calligraphy. An array of brushes from cheaply-made to the most prestigious lined his shop, along with ink bottles and papers readily available for sell. You stood quietly near the entrance, watching as Shin conversed with the seller. As expected, Shin sought only the highest quality of tools and materials. You watched as he tested out a brush, his profile startling you briefly as you noted a sudden familiarity that you hadn’t paid heed to before.
You fingered the pendant around your neck, your mind drifting back to earlier.
I said yes…
He had looked sad when you had said it. You looked down at the pendant, and caressed the characters with your thumb.
Beloved.
You had agreed to marry Shin for your grandmother’s sake. To most, it was astounding you even had a voice in the matter, but Josephine, as scheming as she was when it came to her granddaughter’s future marriage, was also empathetic. To be shackled to a man who would only beat and berate you was a fate she did not want to inflict on her one and only granddaughter.
So, she had allowed you the freedom to reject any suitor you found unfit.
With Shin, however, Josephine seemed keen, patiently but also strongly encouraging you to ponder more deeply before you rejected him. So, you had.
He was charismatic, able to charm your grandmother during that first meeting. The way he had conversed with her was lax but also respectful, his quick wit a refreshing change from past suitors whose arrogance or passiveness made the conversations felt like torture.
He was attentive, you recalled. When he was alone with you, you were the only being in his eyes, almost as if you were the only person in his world. You had never been treated with such regard. Other suitors viewed you as more of a decoration, something to have as an accessory to show off to other affluent men, hoping to fill their hearts with envy.
You exhaled slowly.
I said yes…
“Miss?”
You looked up, surprised to see Shin staring down at you confused.
“I had called you four times,” he said, brows furrowing, “Are you alright?”
I should be asking you the same thing, you thought. You forced a smile and nodded. “Sorry, I was… remembering something.”
“I am finished here,” he said, “Let us leave.”
You departed the shop with Shin, and that earlier stifling silence returned, but this time it was only brief. You tried speaking with him again, making small talk.
“Did you find what you were looking for?” you asked, though again, you couldn’t help but silently quipped to yourself about how he had mentioned he was lying earlier about needing new calligraphy brushes—only to then lie about… not lying? You mentally groaned, confused by Shin’s behavior.
“I did,” he answered, seemingly unaware of your internal struggle.
You swallowed, bracing yourself before you blurted out, “Did I offend you somehow?”
You both stopped in the middle of the street. He turned and looked down at you, puzzled.
A wave of embarrassment washed over you, but there was no retreating now. You continued in spite of the growing warmth in your cheeks. “I… I thought you would be happy if I had said yes, but… Shin, I don’t understand you.”
“I am happy,” he answered calmly, “I am very, very, very happy.”
You hesitantly looked up, meeting his gaze. Your voice was barely audible as you spoke, “You are not acting like it…”
“Because I had wondered if maybe you would be unhappy with me?”
You stilled. You felt like you needed to look away, but your eyes remained locked on his, peering deeply into those earnest orbs, seeing yourself reflected back, face shocked and confused. “Shin…”
Before you could even speak further, there was an eruption of applauses nearby. You both turned in the direction of the explosive noises, hearing cheers and praises resounding in the square.
Shin tsked, annoyed.
It was the same performers from your previous visit to town, and just as before, they were finishing that very same play from that day. The same old story about a tyrannical oppressive dragon stealing away young girls to be his bride, only to die in the end, slain by the heroic man who wanted to save his lover from her fate.
It was a timeless tale among the villagers. A fiendish dragon slayed by a hero. The hero worshipped for his valiancy, and in the end, peace was restored to the land.
How tiring.
Shin’s eyes followed a group of children who mimicked the performers, reenacting the climatic scene of the sword plunging into the dragon’s chest, its beating heart carved out as proof of the killing.
“Where I am from,” Shin murmured quietly to you, his tone neutral, “dragons are revered.”
You both continued to walk through town. There were many shops and vendors hawking their wares, but you both continued to pass on by, unswayed by the attractive items displayed. You observed Shin’s demeanor, noting he wasn’t as impish as before, but he also didn’t seem to be in a foul mood either. It was almost as if he was apathetic, a bit condescending even toward this town.
You frowned.
“Where is that?” you asked as you both passed by a vendor selling wall scrolls depicting dragons as ominous demons. You were used to such imagery, but that didn’t mean you held the same belief as your fellow townspeople. Shin’s words had piqued your interest.
“A land far from this place,” he answered vaguely, making your frown deepened, more annoyed this time. Shin huffed in amusement at your vexed expression. He continued, unperturbed, “You would love it, Miss.”
There was a curved bridge looming over a tranquil river that separated the town with the nearby forest. You and Shin paused at the center, the two of you leaning over the railing and staring at the water below. Occasionally a fish would bob its head up in an attempt to catch passing insects.
“The flowers are always in bloom,” Shin continued, clarifying, “My hometown.”
“Surely you jest,” you responded, doubtful, “How can flowers always bloom? Do you not have autumn or winter?”
He smiled, shaking his head. His expression and words were cryptic. “They always bloom,” he insisted, adding softly, “Especially for their queen.”
Your face softened. You smiled at his wistful expression. “How poetic,” you murmured, “Does this kingdom of yours revere their queen deeply?”
It wasn’t long, but there was a noticeable pause before Shin spoke again. “She has been gone for a long time,” he answered, his smile looking bitter. “The kingdom mourns her absence, as does its king.”
“Oh, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to—”
Shin shook his head, interrupting you, “You didn’t know.”
He looked down at the river below, both of your reflection rippled in the water as a family of ducks swam through down the center between you both. He huffed in amusement when a lone duckling straggled.
“The queen will return,” he said, hushed, “Her king will bring her home.”
You were confused now, not understanding Shin’s words anymore. You wondered if the two of you were even having the same conversation anymore. Although there were people bustling and passing by behind you both, heading to and from town, it didn’t do anything to ease the persistent stifling silence that returned once again.
“Tanghulu,” you said suddenly, surprising Shin. When he looked down at you, confused, you quickly clarified, pointing down the road to near the entrance into town. “There’s a vendor who sells tanghulu over there. They’re quite good. You’ll enjoy them.”
“Doubtful,” he responded with a soft snort. His lips quirked in amusement. “I don’t particularly care for sweets.”
“You’ll like this one,” you insisted, beaming brightly at him. “If you have a little something sweet, your mood will be uplifted.”
“Is that so?” he laughed. “Then I must follow the young miss’ words of wisdom, shouldn’t I?”
He let you guide him, your small hand barely wrapped around his much larger one, but it was only for a few steps from the bridge before he paused, making you stopped as well. Confused, you were about to look behind you when he tugged gently, easily pulling you back up against him. Your back rested against his chest. Shin leaned down, his warm breath tickling your ear as he whispered:
“Maybe there is some truth in your words, Miss, because this sweet young miss does lift my mood tremendously.”
You blushed, reaching down to touch his arm as you stammered, “Shi-Shin…! I had meant…”
He laughed and kissed your cheek. “I know what you had meant,” he interrupted with a roguish grin, “but I think I would find you more delectable than these confections.”
“Always teasing me…” you murmured, sulking.
He laughed again, delighted. “Do I displease you?”
You remained silent.
“If you do not answer me,” he continued, his tone light and flirtatious, “I might accidentally believe you have grown fond of me.”
You opened your mouth, but no sound came out. You moped.
He turned you to face him, peering down at the sweet pout in front of him.
“Sincerity is hard to come by,” he murmured, letting his hand gently cradled your chin. His thumb glided over your bottom lip, the faint tingle lingered, extending to your cheeks. Unwittingly, the softest of gasps managed to slip through, your heart beating faster.
“You must know, Miss, I adore you,” he said, “There is no love purer than mine.”
“How can you love someone you’ve only just met?”
His head tilted a little in amusement at your inquiry. His eyes drifted down to the pendant around your neck.
“Only just met,” he repeated your words thoughtfully, “It seems like it’s been several lifetimes.”
Baffled, you didn’t even get a chance to respond when Shin continued almost immediately: “Tanghulu.”
“Tanghulu,” you repeated after he had let you go and started to walk back to town. You stared after him, watching his figure grow smaller the further he walked away from you. You peered down at the necklace you wore. You touched it, tracing the characters, a habit that had formed when you least expected.
Several… lifetimes…?
Weeks passed and it seemed every other day you were accompanying Shin either on walks or through town for errands, though you wondered if these supposed ‘errands’ were just little ploys he used as an excuse to see you. You had questioned what he did for a living to maintain the luxurious lifestyle he seemed to have, but all you received were cryptic words and vague smiles.
As it were, you also learned that Shin was fond of gifting you presents for no apparent reason. It had started out small with a flower here and a poem there, but in time, it was common to receive jewelry and other luxuries from your betrothed. You suspected that if you asked him for the world, he would give you the universe instead.
You couldn’t help but felt flattered by such attention, but more than that, you also couldn’t help but noticed how Shin often looked at you with such devotion, his attention completely yours. You found yourself growing curious of him, perhaps even fond of his presence, as he seemed to see you as a person rather than an accessory to be had.
Without realizing it, you had begun to look forward to the days when you would see him. You hid your growing fondness for him behind a mask, allowing the familiar banters to cloak your feelings.
It had started as another normal stroll through town, passing the same merchants hawking their wares as before, but on this day, you couldn’t help but picked up an unusual energy in the air. It made you uneasy, though you could not pinpoint the exact reasoning or cause. Instead, you found yourself gravitating to Shin’s side, his presence calming your nerves.
“That’s strange,” you said softly, eyeing the woman who had just glared at you. “She’s normally very sweet to me. Maybe she’s having a bad day—Shin?”
You were surprised when you noticed his glare. He seemed to be scrutinizing something. He pulled you by the waist closer to him, murmuring softly, “Stay close to me.”
“Is something the matter?” you looked at him worriedly.
He inhaled sharply, seemingly hesitating about how he should answer you. At the sound of your voice again, he sighed. “It is nothing,” he said finally, though you couldn’t help but felt that he was withholding certain details. “I just had an uneasy feeling.”
“Uneasy?” you wondered aloud, looking at his profile. Like you, he seemed troubled, but almost as quickly that instance of anxiety disappeared, his features returning to normal.
“Come,” he said calmly, his hand held out for yours, waiting. “We still have to pick up a few items for your trip in three days, correct?”
The inquiry startled you. You wondered if this was his attempt to distract you from the seemingly ominous aura looming over the town, but rather than addressing his deflection, you looked at his hand, unsure at first, before you took it willingly. You smiled and chatted with him again, the moment calm and peaceful just as before, though Shin’s earlier words remained lingering in your mind.
A distant relative was to be wedded within a week. Alongside your grandmother and faithful handmaiden, Tara, you had departed town early in the morning to start the lengthy four-day trip via a horse-drawn carriage.
It was supposed to be a normal trip—like many others you had taken in the past—passing through dense forests and unfamiliar towns, but some hiccups along the way interfered with the plan to make it to the closest town before nightfall, and now it was completely dark outside, the only lights were from the two lanterns on either side of the coachman.
Strange how this first day seemed counterproductive—as if you had been lost in a labyrinth making no progress on your trip.
The steady ride through the late night, and the rhythmic trotting of the horses had long lulled you to sleep, but it didn’t take much to stir you out of your light slumber. Disoriented, you yawned, your head raised from resting on Tara’s shoulder earlier. She, too, also perked up as did your grandmother on the opposite side.
The three of you heard unusual sounds from outside the carriage, and a feeling of dread reflected on all of your faces.
The carriage had suddenly stopped, and you heard the horses acting restless and uneased. The driver could be heard trying to calm the animals, but then you heard many other unfamiliar voices outside. Josephine had already peeked outside, her face paling.
“Whatever you do, do not come out,” Josephine ordered you before she exited the carriage. You started to protest, but Tara pulled you back in.
“Miss, we have to stay quiet!”
“But Grandma—”
Your eyes widened when you heard a scream, the voice you recognized instantly. “Grandma!”
You pushed Tara aside and rushed out of the carriage, covering your mouth in terror as you saw your grandmother laying on the ground bleeding out from her neck. You rushed to her, but was grabbed from behind by a man. Before you could react, you heard Tara screaming, seeing men dragging her out of the carriage.
“T-Tara!”
“Miss, Miss, help me!”
You struggled against your attackers.
“Feisty, pretty little thing, isn’t she?” one man sneered, grabbing your face. You spat at him and was immediately slapped across the face, the sting immediate.
“Mi—”
You screamed out Tara’s name, watching in horror as blood seeped through her clothes. She clutched her side, her eyes glazing over. “Miss… I… I don’t want to… die…”
You started screaming again, feeling a large hand covered your mouth. You immediately bit down, bracing yourself for the inevitable retaliation, but it never came.
Two little gray sparrows flew past your attacker, distracting him. As the birds turned around and began to descend, a black mist enveloped them, taking shape. When the mist cleared, the birds were gone and in their places were two identical men.
“Luke…? Kieran…”
Within a flash, Luke and Kieran silently dispatched all of the surrounding bandits, their movements faster than your eyes could follow. Your heart stilled as you heard another voice from behind, the growl unlike any beast you had ever heard.
“Let. Her. Go.”
Before you could look to the owner of the voice, Kieran intervened, prying you from your attacker. He turned you and pressed you to his chest. “Just close your eyes, Miss,” he said softly, “It will be over soon.”
Your breathing ragged, your heart pounding, you felt a chill ran down your spine as a blood-curdling scream was ripped from the man’s throat. You squeezed your eyes shut, hot tears streaking down your cheeks as you trembled in Kieran’s arms, a desperate prayer repeating over and over again in your mind.
Please wake up. Please wake up. Please—!
(A vicelike pain gripped your heavily rounded middle and you screamed into the folded cloth shoved in your mouth.
“Quiet, quiet, child,” you could hear a woman whispering to you frantically.
Sweats dripped alongside your face, and you sobbed, the hot tears rushing down your cheeks as you held onto the rope made of thick cloth suspended from the ceiling. You pulled harder when the pain returned tenfold.
“On the next pain, push, child,” the woman urged, “It will be over soon.”
Your heart pounded. You could feel something dropping lower in your pelvis. You screamed again and bore down.
“Almost, almost,” the woman whispered frantically.
You didn’t know for how long you were pushing, but eventually you felt relief, felt a heavy weight exiting your body. The cloth was taken out of your mouth, and you stared at the woman with more sweats running down your reddened face. You panted, your heart pounding.
“…The… baby?”
“It’s for the best,” the woman said solemnly, and you watched as she carried a wrapped bundle away. You had never heard a cry.
You let go of your hold on the rope and collapsed on the bed, exhausted and lightheaded. You felt so sore, too weak to even sit upright.
“…For… The best…” you repeated, shutting your eyes in pain. You could barely stay conscious.
That was right. It was for the best. You were never supposed to have fallen pregnant with this child, this unwanted babe.
You didn’t want this baby.
Neither did your master. Nor his wife.
“Child, let’s get you cleaned up—child? Dear god…!”
There were frantic voices. What were they saying? The voices slipped in and out of your consciousness, your breathing growing more ragged.
“She won’t stop bleeding! Call for a physician!”
“Just let her die then. It’s for the best.”
“Mistress, Mistress, please, she’s just a young girl!”
“She’s a harlot. This is her punishment for seducing my husband.”
“She was raped!”
There was a piercing slap, the sound echoed in the room, and mere seconds later, a shaky sob followed.
“She is just a servant girl. No one will miss her.”
“Mistress…”
You felt relief. Just let go. It would be over soon. You were safe now…
“Know your place, or do you wish to follow her in death as well?”
“…Yes, Mistress…”
A flash of lightning startled the two women.
“Now dispose of this wretched whore—”
Bloodcurdling screams traveled across the manor, sending chills down the two women’s spines. They looked at one another in shock, unsure and fearful.
“An intruder!” a man cried out.
“The master has been killed!” the words of another made the women paused, horrified.
Thunder rumbled in the sky, shaking the ground. Another flash of lightning made the women flinched. When they looked up, a man in black stood at the door, expressionless. He was covered in blood, but they quickly realized it wasn’t his.
“Who—who are you?!”
The man looked at the young girl bled out on the bed. His crimson eyes narrowed.
A gust of wind wiped out the lamps, extinguishing all of the flames in the manor. The ground continued to rumble, and when lightning struck again, the women screamed in terror, the shadow of a draconic beast was the last thing they witnessed before everything turned dark, their cries drowned out by thunders and a wrathful roar.)
You awoke, gasping and crying.
Another… dream?
“Easy, easy now,” you heard Shin’s voice and you realized he was sitting next to you.
You stared at him in shock, your mind clouded as you slowly took in your surroundings. You gradually realized you were in an unfamiliar room… in an unfamiliar bed… with… this man seated by your bedside. You looked at him again, eyebrows furrowing in complete confusion as you attempted to recall your last memory, but your mind was still clouded by the recent dream you just had.
The dream—
Your hands flew to your middle, feeling flatness. You started to calm down.
“Miss, are you alright?” Shin looked at you questionably, confused by your behavior just now.
You struggled to find your voice, hearing an unfamiliar hoarseness as you attempted to speak. “Why… Why are you here… Shin?”
“This is my home,” he explained, “You have been unconscious for four days, Miss.”
“F-four days?”
He nodded. “Merchants had found you in the forest and they had brought you to town,” he continued patiently, “I was in town when I saw you being carried to a physician, so I intervened and had you brought here instead.”
You took in his words, mulling over his explanation, but in your weakened, distorted state, you didn’t know whether to believe him or not. You looked at Shin again, meeting his patient gaze. “You… have been watching over me?”
“I have checked in on you from time to time,” he clarified, adding, “I was beginning to worry you would never wake.”
“Never… wake?” Your eyes widened as pieces of that night started to come back to you. “Grandma! And… and… Tara…”
You froze at Shin’s solemn expression. He apologized softly, “I am sorry, Miss. You were all attacked by bandits. You are the only survivor.”
You sat there in shock, your mind going over his words again. You suddenly laughed, the sound bearing more resemblance to crying. “That is a lie,” you said, “Shin, why are you lying to me? I… This is a joke. This is… This is…”
He stared back at you, his expression unwavering.
“…not true.”
“I am sorry, Miss,” he repeated. He handed you a handkerchief, but you swatted it out of his hand in anger. He remained unaffected by your hostile action. Instead, he spoke calmly, “I know this is a lot to take in. I am sorry to be the bearer of bad news.”
Your chest tightened and your head lowered as tears fell one by one onto the comforter. You were barely registering his words as pieces of that horrific night started to come back to you with disturbing clarity. You wondered if you had taken one single different action, would the course of that night had changed? Would Grandma be here right now scolding you for still lounging as lunchtime rolled around? Would Tara sneak you an extra tangerine and share secrets with you after dark?
“When can I go home?” you asked suddenly, not looking at him.
“This will be your home,” he answered. “It is best you stay here instead.”
“What?” You looked up shocked, not expecting his words. You shook your head. “N-No… I have to go home. Grandma’s manor will need to be taken care of… I have… my belongings… and… Grandma’s… and—”
“I will send for your things,” he said patiently, “But it is best you do not return to that place.”
You glared at him, angry by his callous words. “Who do you think you are telling me I can’t go back to my home? I am leaving now—”
Shin immediately pressed you back into bed, gently but still firm. He stared down at you, his expression hard but not heated. His voice was even, but there was an icy edge to it. “It is best you listen to me, Miss. I am merely looking out for your wellbeing.”
You glared up and shoved his arm away. “I didn’t ask you to!”
“Hn.” He looked at you unaffected, and then said calmly as he walked to the door, “Miss, I will have a servant bring you a meal.”
“I am not hungry!” You couldn’t stop yourself from lashing out at him. You felt so many tumultuous emotions raging inside you. Shin didn’t do anything to you, but right now in this moment, he was the only person available for you to direct your anger. Your anger at the bandits who murdered your family, your anger at the heavens for forsaking you, your anger… at yourself. For your incompetence… For… surviving.
“You have not eaten for four days,” Shin said calmly from the doorway, unaffected by your outburst. “It will be a light meal. Easy on your stomach. Try to eat a little.”
“Shin…” You felt angry… at yourself. He was still so calm, so patient with you, and you were behaving like a petulant child. Fresh tears fell, and in your heart, you knew Shin did not blame you for your hostile actions and words. Your whole world was stolen from you in one night, and now you were alone. You behaved in a way only to be expected.
“I will also send a servant girl to assist you,” he continued, “Her name is Simone. I will have her prepare you a bath and some fresh clothes as well.”
“Shin—”
He paused and looked at you patiently.
“Can I… bathe alone?”
He looked at you confused.
“It’s just… I have only ever been used to having Tara assist me…”
“I understand,” he said, nodding, “Simone will still be yours. Use her as needed.”
As the door closed, you lay back down in bed staring up at the ceiling in quiet contemplation. After a brief moment of reflection over that night and your conversation with Shin, you allowed yourself to cry and grieve freely.
For as long as you could remember, Tara was your only friend and companion since childhood. She didn’t deserve what had happened to her. She didn’t deserve to have her life taken like that.
I’m sorry… you thought, remembering all of the instances where your mischievousness had gotten her into trouble. You remembered all of the times you made her follow along to your shenanigans and foolishness. You mourned for the life she would have lived.
I’m sorry…
Simone was a nice girl, albeit, very chatty. You had mostly tuned her out, your thoughts still lingering on your slain family and the state of your home.
“Master Shin had explained what had happened, Miss,” Simone said, leading you to a bathhouse. “I am truly sorry for your loss.”
You followed behind her down the veranda, your eyes scanning the surroundings of the property. It was the first time you were able to lay sight on the interior of the mysterious manor, but your curiosity and excitement were long gone. You were only interested in finding a way to escape so you could return home.
“Miss, we are here.”
Your head snapped up, and you smiled politely at Simone. “Thank you,” you responded, “I can bathe myself. Do not trouble yourself further.”
“It will be no trouble to me, Miss,” Simone said, smiling, “Please do not hesitate to seek my assistance.”
You simply nodded and entered the bathhouse. There was a large wooden tub filled with warm water, the steam coming from it created such a humid atmosphere. You breathed in slowly and waited for the sound of Simone’s footsteps leaving.
When you were sure you were alone, you opened the door a crack, peeking out to glance around for signs of people. It was daylight, but the manor was quieter than you were used to from your own home. Perhaps it was because the manor was only recently occupied, there hadn’t been many people staffed other than the few you had met.
You exhaled again, calming your anxious heart. This worked out well for you then, you noted, as you left the bathhouse, feeling a little bolder now that you were certain there wouldn’t be many people around the place. You quietly retraced your steps from earlier, ducking and hiding in unoccupied rooms when you heard voices.
Eventually, you found yourself in a vast courtyard where there was a large magnolia tree looming over an equally impressive koi pond. You didn’t have time to admire the beautiful landscaping. Your only thought was on the large door that led to the outside world.
Before you could make a dash for the door, you heard voices, and you quickly backed up against the wall, hiding in the shadow. You saw Luke and Kieran walking across the courtyard conversing quietly. Their voices were low, but you heard a few words here and there:
“…tree…”
“…wine… almost ready…”
You didn’t pay heed to their conversation any further, waiting instead with bated breath as they disappeared into one of the buildings. You glanced around again, making sure there was not another person nearby before you made a run for it, your heart pounding with every footstep until you made it to the door. You panted softly, your hand holding onto the heavy iron door handle as you took one last glance at Shin’s manor.
You quietly apologized to him, feeling a brief moment of guilt for dismissing his generous hospitality. You made a decision to apologize again more formally once you had settled things at your home. For now, you quietly slipped out and made the trek back to your own manor.
As you made your way down the familiar road, passing through town, you couldn’t help but sensed eyes on you. You subtly glanced around, noticing townspeople were looking at you before turning away. You could hear hushed whispers all around.
That girl is still alive?
Why is she still here?
Don’t go near her. She’ll only bring misfortune to you.
Your steps slowed briefly, your brows furrowing in confusion. Were they talking about you? None of what you had heard made sense.
“Ah-!”
You cried out when someone bumped into you.
“Oh, I’m sorry—oh, it’s you. Watch it, wench.”
You stared in shock at the man who passed by, confused by the rude attitude. There were more mutterings here and there.
She should have been the one who died, not Josephine.
Your breath hitched. Grandmother…
Thunder rumbled in the distance. You looked up, seeing dark clouds passing by. You flinched when you felt the first droplet of rain. Getting to your feet, you winced at the sharp pain from your scraped palms and the dull throbs in her knees.
More droplets fell from the gray sky.
You quickened your pace, hurrying back to your home. You tried to tune out the callous words, tried to ignore the disdainful glares. Why was there so much animosity? You knew these people. These people knew you, so why did it seem like they now hated you so much? It was like something had changed in the last couple days while you were unconscious.
Rain poured down and you tried to shield yourself the best you could as you ran faster.
“H-hey! What are you doing?! Put those back!” You yelled out as you approached the entrance of your manor. You gasped as you watched unfamiliar men hauled out items from your home. Furniture, pottery, clothing, everything was being taken away before your very eyes.
“Hm? Oh, Josephine’s granddaughter, I presume?” A man appearing in his fifties approached you. He held up a scroll. “We are here to collect Josephine’s debts.”
“D-debts? What debts?” You took the scroll from the man, your eyes rapidly going over each word. “When did she… Why didn’t she… tell me…”
“Listen, girl,” The man started, taking the scroll back from you, “I’m truly sorry for your loss. We are just following orders.”
“But… this is my home,” you protested feebly. “The—the other servants—”
“They’ve all left. There are other homes willing to employ them.”
“N-No, you can’t take those! Put them back!”
You tried to push your way into the manor, but the man blocked you, his demeanor worsening.
“Girl, don’t make this any harder than it needs to be,” he warned, but you stubbornly continued to fight back. Annoyed, he shoved you, showing no remorse when you landed in a puddle. He turned away, mumbling, “Tsk, that’s what I get for trying to be nice to a cretin like her…”
Grandmother was… She was trying to…
All of those men that came to the house. All of those prospective matches, Josephine had laid her hope on securing her granddaughter’s future. She had wanted to make sure her granddaughter would be taken care of, cared for when the old woman would pass and everything would be gone.
“But… This is… my home… Mine… Mine… Grandmother’s…”
You sat up, sobbing as you furiously wiped the mud off your face. Everything you knew—or thought you knew—came to a grinding halt. The people you loved—Grandma, Tara—were all slain in cold blood before your very eyes, and now, you had no one left in the world and no place to call home.
The world was cruel indeed.
The rain stopped, or so you thought. You opened your eyes and stared at the pair of men’s shoes before you, your eyes slowly lifting to meet the owner’s gaze.
Shin?
He stood there, holding an umbrella over you, shielding you from the cold rain. His other hand was held out to you, his expression sympathetic. He didn’t appear angry at you for running away. He had every right to be upset with you, after all, to be offended by your lack of respect for his gracious hospitality. He had sacrificed so much of his time and resources for you, and you had left without a word and now he had found you alone in the rain, muddied and disheveled. No longer a refined maiden of class, you looked like a pitiful homeless peasant, a sore sight to be seen.
You almost wanted to laugh in defeat at the cruel joke only you could understand. You didn’t look like a pitiful homeless peasant. You were one. Your home was taken, your wealth gone, your title meaningless. You wished Shin would avert his eyes, to turn away, like everyone else had.
The whole world was against you, and yet, he wasn’t.
“Let’s go home,” he said, voice low enough for your ears only.
“I don’t have a home,” you answered back, looking behind you at the closed door.
“My home,” he clarified with great patience.
You looked down, unsure. You wondered if you were embarrassed by your pitiful situation, or perhaps if you were in vain trying to hold onto the last shred of your pride, but you spoke feebly, “I… I’m not a charity case.”
“Good,” he replied evenly, “I am not offering charity either.”
He knelt down to your eye level. He used his sleeve to wipe your face clean as he spoke, his words careful and measured, “I am here to take my bride home with me.”
You stared into his eyes, confused. “I do not have a dowry to give you anymore.”
“I do not desire a dowry.”
“I… have no honor to my name.”
“I am not seeking honor.”
You teared up again. “I… will only be a burden.”
Shin shook his head, his smile gentle. “I do not view you as such.”
You looked around, seeing scornful eyes from passerby, all glaring at you, looking at you with utter contempt and disdain. Such hatred. Did these people always hate you? Did Grandma shield you from this cruelty, raised you in blissful ignorance so that you knew no pain or heartache?
You felt fresh tears streaming down your cheeks. You heard the similar hushed whispers as before.
Josephine was a fool. Look where it has gotten her.
She should have sold that girl to a whore house the first chance she got.
Is it any surprise? She was the reason her parents died.
That girl will only bring misfortune to our town.
She should have been the one killed.
Your breath hitched. Shin appeared to grasp the handle of the umbrella tighter, his breathing sounding stiff and forced.
“Let me take you away from this place,” he murmured, “My bride.”
Nothing left in this world, no one holding you back, you took his offered hand without another thought, gasping as he dragged you to your feet and straight into his arms. You stuttered, embarrassed, “My clothes are dirty—”
“I do not care,” he answered, his grip tightening around you. “Stay close to me.”
He led you into the waiting horse-drawn carriage, shielding you from the scornful stares. You closed your eyes once the carriage began to move. You didn’t even resist when Shin wrapped his arm around you, pulling you back into his embrace.
He feels familiar, you thought, the heat of his body warming you through your wet clothes. You unconsciously leaned closer, a heavy fatigue washing over you as you allowed yourself to lower your guard around him.
As you doze off, you thought you heard a pleased hum from him.
Tag list: @hesperisms @lavlynyan @mangooes @zhongtar @yourfavbabigirl @sylusfluffymeow @unheavenlypacked @luminaryorbit @sinister-044 @boinkboinkkitten @deathkat657 @trishiepo0 @nezuswritingdesk @lunar-alden @yourstrulysylus @xxfaithlynxx @failedaethercore @idkwhatimdoing27 @certainduckanchor @qyuin @alfredosaws @valkyyriia @callilypso @natimiles @yourlocalcatscammer @likewhyareyousoobsessedwithme @qyuin @lalaluch @littleapplle @animegamerfox @deepspacenova @starshinedusk @madamecorbie @lamogliedizayne @marinenox @himekino2000 @raendarkfaerie @zayniacforreal @kingraspberry12-blog @miahsmama
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[ Prelude ★ BOTDK Masterlist ★ AO3 ★ Part 2 ]
Giorno has a tendency to refer to his darling by their name, with a 'my' preceding. There goes my so-and-so. Since he mainly speaks the language his darling understands the most— either English, Italian, or Japanese— they should have no issues understanding his intentions. He's not one for using terms of endearment in public, but often refers to his darling by animal-based pet names in privacy. It's entirely dependent on his darling's personality. His doggy, his kitten, his bird in a cage. Oh, don't listen to him. Just suggesting.
Bruno has an inclination towards more traditional Italian terms of affection, always using 'my' when he can. He emphasizes the 'my' by saying it last, cara mia, topolina mia (or a more fitting animal, most likely), and so on and so forth. He also strikes me as a 'my better half' type of man. I'm not sure why. Should his darling not particularly understand Italian, it... depends on his mood should he clear it up. He teases by not mentioning the fact that he publicly calls his darling his "little mouse," but absolutely clarifies that he just claimed them as his spouse.
Leone usually refers to his darling as 'brat' until proven otherwise. He adopts the term 'sweetheart' quite naturally after that. He cycles through various kind-of-sweet, kind-of-mean terms until he finds one that lands. Usually, at least in the beginning, they're terms that point out a.... let's call it sizable age gap between him and his obsession. Anything to make Leone look worse than he is. Even if it's only by a few years, Leone acts like he's a decade older. Kid. Rookie. New person. You. What a charmer! Once he's more comfortable with his darling, he swaps to "dear," "sweetheart," and the occasional "spoiled rotten kid in my life." (Whose fault is that?) While he does speak Arabic, he reserves those terms of endearment for when his darling is cross with him. It's a plea to show that he cares. He's just crazy. Forgive him for his transgressions, his soul.
Pannacotta has tried a great many times to refer to his darling as any sort of pet name, but has never worked up the nerve to. Even when he knows that they won't understand him, he still chokes. He could be taking advantage over the fact that he speaks a handful of languages that his darling probably does not! What is wrong with him! Why is love so hard!! He doesn't understand how casual some people can spit out terms of endearment— it makes him irate just thinking of every time Guido has casually dropped a "babe," "sweetheart," or a "pretty little lady" in his vicinity. He's getting a migraine. Panna.... would kill to be able to play with his darling, to call her a silly girl, to kiss her cheek and pretend to be exasperated by calling her "dear." One day.
Guido's pet names do not stop at "babe," "sweetheart," or "pretty little lady." No, no, no. He's got more. Way more. He couldn't be more ecstatic to be in his person's presence! Of course he's gonna shower them with praise and affection and love! When you love someone, you bombard them with affection. He doesn't make the rules, he's just a devout follower. (Cuteness aggression is getting the better of him.) He does his best to pick names that actually suit his most beloved, but has a tendency to play it safe in the beginning by using more common ones. "Babe" is a big one initially, and so is "baby," but he drops it immediately should his person not like it. He swaps to something other than Italian or English to find something that they'll like— is it a formal thing? He could go way more formal! He'll figure it out.
Narancia only speaks Italian, and really hasn't thought of the need to refer to his darling as anything special. Heeee... supposes he calls them his bitch sometimes? Pannacotta has already done this poor soul a favor by smacking Narancia upside the head. Nana doesn't really get pet names, they're kinda, like, for old people. Or Bruno. And he's not really Bruno. If anything, he just shortens his darling's name, or makes it more 'cutesy.' Can you call him Nana? Or something cute? He's always wanted a girl to call him something cute. This whole dating shit rocks.
Family, Fire, Scales
Aerion Targaryen x fem!Reader (House Tully) x Maekar Targaryen
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summary: Riverrun hums with colour as House Tully hosts a long-awaited tourney to celebrate peace and the royal house it once bled for. You move through it as Lord Axel Tully’s beloved kin, a riverlord’s niece raised on Family, Duty, Honor, doing your part as hostess and banner in one. Knights ride for merriment rather than glory, and the visiting Targaryen princes seem only another piece of pageantry, until Aerion Brightflame rides into the lists against your brother at the last moment, a single small choice that sends invisible ripples of consequence out across the realm—and forces his father, Prince Maekar, to shoulder the cost.
Read it on AO3
tags/warnings: AERION · violence against animals/animal death · mature · toxic love · emotional abuse · implied incest/targcest · suggestive · slow burn · enemies to lovers · angst · age gap · canon divergent · ESL
WC: 20k
a/n: Animal abuse is a one time thing in the very beginning, and I'm not going to ever bring it back into the fic. Concept here. This fic is a gift for my dear friend @marmita-tuga who is a House Tully loyalist! This story will affect the trout population. P.S: I believe Maekar passed his mommy issues down to Aerion like an Olympic torch, and their teeth and gums are going to itch from the mere acidic awareness of Tully!Reader’s motherly instincts and family values. They will suffer in ways even Satan himself could not have invented. This work was massive for me and I finished it through full exhaustion, so forgive me for any possible mistakes!
The banners had gone up at dawn.
By midday, the fields below Riverrun were a patchwork of colour: tents in house hues, pavilions with streaming pennons, horses cropping trampled grass between rows of spear-racks and cooking fires. The first day’s tilts had come and gone in a blur of splintered lances and cheering; wine was flowing, wagers were being recalculated, and the lists crew were already mending fences for the morrow.
Aerion slipped away as the sun began to lean west.
His first tilt was a clean success, a perfect run: his lance shattered with visible precision, and he accepted the polite applause with a smirk. Knights and squires still talked about the last pass—the way he’d taken a shield just so, the way the other man had gone out of the saddle in a hard, stunned drop. Aerion’s prowess with the lance shone through in every joust he took part in—undeniable.
He now strolled through the pavilions, a route he favored for the enjoyment it brought him. Upon seeing him, people parted ways as if it were the most natural thing in the world. Little ripples of space, a path opening through the loose, colourful press as if he carried a blade in each hand instead of nothing at all. Some bowed, some didn’t, but their bodies moved the same way: aside, aside, as if something hot might brush against them if they did not. Aerion observed it covertly, feigning disinterest: the way a lady drew her skirts in, a hedge knight shifted his weight, the way conversations faltered in that half-second as he passed and then resumed, forced bright.
It pleased Aerion. A yearning he couldn’t explain drew him away from the main camp: a hunger of sorts, for something that mere jousting, which he grew bored with, could not satiate. The need to be seen, looked upon, taken in. He desired to be an eternal flame that could save even the most rugged northerners from a cold demise—to be that much craved by the faceless crowd.
Or to see what else the day had to offer, now that the first work was done.
He climbed the low rise beyond the last line of tents more out of boredom than intention. The noise dropped with each step—less clangour, more wind and bird songs. Beyond the ridge, the field sloped down toward scrub and trees, the wild edge of Tully land where the ordered world of pavilions gave way to hedgerows and rabbit holes. That was where he saw it.
A dog, wire haired and black as spilled ink, trotted up out of a dip in the field with something limp and long-eared in its jaws. It was a well-cared-for hound indulging in one pleasure: a shiny coat, a sturdy leather collar, and the visible play of lean muscle under its skin. The hare dangled from its mouth, ears flopping with each step. Blood had smeared the dog’s muzzle into a glistening wet mask; a red line snaked down its chest, bright even against its black fur.
Aerion stopped at the top of the slope.
The dog saw him.
It paused, its front legs splayed for balance, its head tilting up ever so slightly. The hare’s body swung once. Wind ruffled the fur along the dog’s spine. Its eyes, sharp and intelligent, studied him with the cautious gaze of a creature familiar with human forms.
Aerion liked the picture of it: hunter and prey; blood and grass. A small, private violence carried out while the rest of the world cheered over painted shields. With a slow descent down the slope, Aerion paid no mind to the possibility of startling whatever lay below.
The dog stood its ground.
Closer, he could see the hare properly: the way the neck had broken cleanly under the jaws, the way the dog’s teeth held the weight without effort. There was a neatness to it. A competence. He felt, absurdly, a little kinship.
“Good,” he said softly. “Look at you.”
He held out a hand.
The dog growled at once—a low, warning sound, deep in the chest. It shifted its weight; the hare swinging a little as it adjusted its grip, ears flattening.
Aerion smiled.
With the same unquestioning certainty he held about himself, he felt animals ought to know him. That dragons lurked somewhere in his blood and that all lesser beasts would feel it if they were close enough. That they would bend or break.
He extended his hand further.
“Easy,” he said, as if soothing a horse.
The dog’s lips peeled back from its teeth. The last warning.
He saw the decision happen—the reflex snap that comes from instinct, not malice. The hare dropped from its jaws, landing with a soft, heavy thump in the grass. In the same movement, the dog lunged, jaws closing around the hand he’d offered.
A sharp, white-hot pain surged through Aerion. Its teeth sank in properly, not a warning nip but a full, committed bite, the kind that says this is mine, stay back. Its body weight drove into his arm; its claws scrabbled for purchase in the dirt.
Aerion hissed, more surprised than anything, a short, shocked exhale.
Without conscious thought, his remaining hand stirred. He caught the collar. Leather under his fingers, hard and slick. Aerion jerked.
The dog made a choked noise as its feet left the ground. Its weight pulled on its own neck; the bite tore as its jaws scrabbled for purchase and lost it. Aerion’s bitten hand came free with a hot rush of blood; he barely felt it.
He had the dog now.
It hung from his fist, suspended by that good, strong collar, body twisting. Its hind legs kicked in empty air, muscles bunching and failing to find anything to push against. The growl turned into a strangled sound, half-snarl, half-choke.
Aerion watched.
He could have dropped it.
He didn’t.
The first flail was almost comical, the paws paddling at nothing. Then the movements changed—less coordinated, more desperate. The dog’s eyes rolled, white showing in the corners. Its tongue lolled, a flash of pink against a bloody muzzle. The weight of it dragged at his bitten hand, making the wounds throb, but the ache was distant, abstract. All of his attention had narrowed to the line of the throat under the leather, the way the skin stretched, the way the convulsions ran through the body and then… slowed.
The field around him compressed into the small, swinging shape at the end of his arm, the sharp hiss of his own breath filling his ears. The distant, muffled roar of the tourney grounds on the other side of the hill sounded like a world away.
When the dog finally stilled, it did so in increments: the legs went first, dropping from frantic scrabble to occasional twitch; the chest last, the rise and fall flattening out to nothing; the eyes stayed open with the tongue tumbled out. Aerion held it a moment longer, as if testing whether there was anything left to squeeze out, then loosened his grip.
The body fell.
It landed in the grass with a dull thud and rolled once, collar twisting. The hare lay nearby, limp in the same way now, both kills caught in the same patch of flattened green.
Aerion looked at his hand. Teeth marks had already bloomed there, crescents of broken skin, blood welling in neat, bright beads. He flexed his fingers experimentally—they worked.
The sting pleased him.
He wiped his palm absently on the side of his tunic, smearing red into darker cloth. The dog lay sprawled in his peripheral vision, its head tilted at an odd angle, a sliver of tongue peeking between its teeth.
It felt right; something had bitten him, he had answered. The world made sense again.
From beyond the rise, a burst of cheering drifted up—someone’s successful pass, a banner raised. The ordinary noise of men pretending at war. Aerion rubbed his knuckles once more, feeling the bite and the memory of the collar in the same hand, and turned back toward the tents.
There would be people there. Faces. Laughter. Something interesting.
He walked, and the grass closed over the spot behind him.
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The skin on his knuckles throbbed with a satisfying ache, a light soreness from where teeth had nipped and bone had collided with fur, flesh, and sheer power. He flexed his fingers as he walked back toward the Targaryen tents, feeling the ghost of the dog’s last jerk against the improvised club. It had been a beautiful little animal, but snappish and overindulged. He hadn’t meant to hold it up for so long. He hadn’t meant not to, either. It had bitten him. His body had answered.
The howl had been satisfying.
Aerion smiled to himself, closing his fist into the ache. The faint smear of blood on the cuff of his sleeve was a private badge. No one had made much fuss; some lord’s hound had gone for a prince and paid the price. Someone’s son in the lists had been more amusing, anyway. That bright, shocked moment when Aerion’s lance had gone not for the shield but for the man beneath it—perfectly angled, perfectly timed, perfectly legal—and the boy had toppled like a felled tree. Two minor corrections. Two reminders. The world around him needed those.
Aerion was in an agreeable mood until he saw Valarr. His elder cousin stood just outside the main pavilion, half in the shade of the open flap, half in the dappled afternoon sun. He was laughing. That in itself was unusual; Valarr hadn’t laughed often and easily, just like his father—they were too composed for their own good.
What made Aerion’s mouth go dry was the fact that he wasn’t laughing alone. There was a lady with him. And it was you.
You stood angled toward Valarr, an easy lean that said you’d already been speaking some time. The bliaut dress you wore should have been modest—a decent Riverland make in Tully colours, good wool cut well, dyed a deep, soft trout-blue and picked out with fine silver embroidery at neck and hem. The flowing angel sleeves fell from above your elbows in elegant lines, and beneath them tight red silk undersleeves hugged your forearms, the flashes of crimson threading through your movements like the silk strips braided into your Tully-colored hair.
It should have been demure.
On you, it wasn’t.
The dress sat snug and exact over the natural thickness of your curves; the smooth wool fabric followed the shape of your breasts and the gentle inward pull of your waist before spilling over your hips. A double-wrapped belt—soft leather, dyed Tully-reddish-brown and edged in silver—circled you twice, once at the narrow of your waist and again lower, tied just below it so the knot rested over the slight swell of your lower belly. It revealed nothing; it suggested everything, the two bands of leather tracing and exaggerating the line from rib to hip, insinuating the full curve beneath the fall of the skirt. The fabric pooled from there in a way that made a small, private hollow at the front of your body, as if the dress itself understood what it was shielding.
Aerion’s appetite sharpened the instant he saw you.
It was not a gradual appreciation; it was a jolt. One moment he was pleased with the echo of his own violence in his hand, the next he was aware of his mouth, his breath, the heat settling low in his abdomen in waves. Maidenly attention had always been a pleasant background hum at tourneys; suddenly he wanted it. Yours. The idea of you turning that body toward him, that face, that laugh, made his fingers curl.
And Valarr wanted it too.
Aerion saw it in him as clearly as he saw lance angles: the way Valarr’s lips parted slightly when his gaze flicked, quick and ostensibly casual, down to where the lower belt crossed your hips. The way his eyes lingered half a heartbeat too long on the line of your waist before he dragged them back up to your face. The hunger was well-bred, restrained, but it was there.
It made Aerion’s own hunger double.
Your face—
He’d encountered countless pleasing faces before, with the royal court a veritable sea of them, teeming with elaborately made-up ladies: from the sharp-featured and striking women of Dorne to pale Valyrian kin with hair mirroring his own. This was not that. There was a firmness to your mouth, a directness in the set of your eyes, that didn’t belong to the simpering, fluttering girls who angled themselves toward dragons and titles.
Your laughter, a genuine sound, poured out as Valarr spoke, your head tilting back slightly, the tension easing from your soft shoulders. With your laugh, your entire face became more defined yet gentler. There was wit in it, and enjoyment. Valarr looked down at you with that easy and gentle, sun-warm smile of his, the one that made people feel chosen rather than collected. He said something else, low. You shot Valarr a quick, covert glance from beneath your lashes, the smallest, easiest glimpse, and it did something vicious in Aerion’s chest.
He stopped in the shadow of a tent-post. The ache in his knuckles vanished under a different pulse. Aerion felt, all at once, absurdly young. Not in the sense of being closer to boyhood than manhood—he had outgrown that a long time ago. Young in the sense of being on the wrong side of an invisible line. Outside a joke. Watching people who had slipped naturally into a scene he had not been invited to.
Aerion’s eyes roamed your body again. The way the material draped over you highlighted your shape in a way that felt authentic; the fabric gracefully hugged your form and enhanced it by the garment’s expertly tailored design. The gown hinted without advertising everything fully—only where it was inevitable: the suggestion of breast beneath the heavier fall of wool, the angle of your waist between sleeves, the sweep of hip where the belt lay. That belt bothered him more than exposed flesh would have. It drew the eye to the place it circled, the soft, vulnerable space at the front of your body, and guarded it—not with metal, not with leather, just with the fragile symbol of propriety.
It made his teeth itch.
The innocence of it, the unconsciousness of it, the way the knot of it rested right over a place that, in his mind, was precisely where he wanted his hand—his mouth—his anything—lit a different kind of heat in him than the dog’s bite had.
Aerion wanted to ruin that innocence.
Not in the crude, grabbing way of soldiers in alehouses. That would have been beneath both of you. Aerion wanted to devour it, to take the delicate, private knowledge of what lay under that fall of cloth and wrap it around himself, to make it part of his own story. To own the exact moment when that knot came undone, and the fabric slid. Like a dragon dipping its muzzle into a pot of gold.
Valarr made it worse.
Of course, it was Valarr. It had always been Valarr.
Valarr, who had met you first. Valarr, who had said whatever that made you laugh like that. Valarr, whose shoulder you stood so comfortably close to, whose glances you stole as if by accident. Valarr, whose hand hovered, easy and unassuming, just inches from the soft blue of your sleeve, as if it were the most natural thing in the world that he might touch you and you might not mind.
Aerion’s jaw stiffened.
It wasn’t just jealousy—it never had been just that. Things were complicated. A knot of feelings so tight he could no longer tell which thread was which. He admired Valarr. Hated him. Wanted to be him. Wanted to beat him. Wanted to see that effortless smile falter just once when the room’s attention slid from him to someone else.
To Aerion.
He had always been in Valarr’s wake. Beautiful, they said, but in a dangerous way. Charming, they said, but in a way that made mothers move daughters two steps further back. Valarr got the songs, the serious glances, the long looks laden with futures. Aerion got whispers and grins and the thrill-seekers who thought they could tame a dragon.
You stood there, laughing at Valarr’s remark about some trivial thing—the food, the tents, the way a knight had fallen in the lists—and Aerion felt the shape of a new directive click into place with alarming velocity.
He wanted that laugh.
No—that was too small. He wanted that look. The one you gave Valarr when he said something that landed cleanly with you. The look that said, You are clever. You are safe enough to be funny. I like listening to you. He wanted it aimed at his own face. Wanted to feel it hit him like sunlight instead of watching it from the cold.
More than that, he wanted to deepen it.
Aerion wanted to fill it with something else. To take the easy innocence in it and darken it. To make those same eyes widen not in polite astonishment but in clear want. To see that mouth open on a sound that was not laughter. Aerion sought to extinguish the tender, familial warmth Valarr drew from you, and ignite a new fever that had his own name in it—his personal mark.
Desire, jealousy, competition, arrogance—all of it braided tight.
Was he struck by your beauty? Yes. Any man with a pulse would be. The line of your neck, the way you held yourself without the boneless droop of courtiers, the intelligence in your gaze when you weren’t laughing—those things went in and lodged. And the sheer noble stance of you, your posture.
Was he moved by some flicker of affection? Perhaps, in his way. You intrigued Aerion; he would even say you tempted him just by existing before his eyes. You were not flat like a painted surface—gods, absolutely not. Not dull either. You were a person of volume, something he caught himself thinking when listening to you laugh and watching you move your hands.
That laugh, in your particular voice, caught him off guard the way a little trout jumps out of the current and specks your face with cold pearls of water: a startled wave of wet and surprise at first, then intrigue and the sudden desire to see the shimmering scales again, to catch it and watch the overflow of colour.
Of course you were a Tully. He could have seen that even if you’d been covered in black and not in blue, red, and silver. The openness and careful feminine attention you exuded and turned toward Valarr hooked his ribs bloody in a way he wasn’t prepared to recognise. Like countless tales before, it speaks of a motherless boy who yearned for maternal affection from any source he could scavenge.
Was this, in part, about Valarr?
Of course.
Aerion wanted to be where Valarr was standing. Wanted to slip into that space as if it had always been his by birthright. He was curious to witness the swift alteration in your eyes, from the innocent glow of familial appreciation to a look brimming with darker intentions. If Valarr could make you laugh, Aerion would make you forget to.
Was this about himself?
Always.
He needed you to see him. Needed you to fix that same concentrated attention on him that you had just given his cousin. Needed to be recognised not as the mad, cruel, beautiful one people whispered about, but as the centre of your gravity. He craved the soft, effortless grace that seemed to pour off you toward Valarr, and he needed every drop for himself. Your effortless charm drew him in, prompting him to shift his hips nearer.
He watched your hand move as you spoke—a small, unconscious gesture, fingers tracing an invisible line in the air as you described something in the lists. His gaze tracked the motion down, to where your sleeve fell back just enough to show the inside of your wrist. Narrow, vulnerable. The same part of him that had reacted with excitement to the dog’s sharp yelp and the boy’s tumble now felt a similar thrill at the mental image of grasping that wrist. Not to break. To hold. Tight enough that you could not ignore it. Tight enough that you would have to decide, in that moment, what he was to you.
Aerion rubbed his bitten knuckles with the thumb of his other hand, feeling the sting throb in time with a different ache low in his belly.
Your eyes, drawn away by Valarr’s comment, swept over Aerion lurking by the tent-pole, and the utter lack of recognition struck him like heated metal.
You hadn’t even noticed him.
A raw, fierce emptiness bloomed in his core then, eclipsing the visions of dragons and his wicked nature.
All right, he thought.
I will fix that.
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The rest of the afternoon arranged itself like pieces on a board.
Tents flapped in a mild Riverlands wind, their bright colours rippling. Laughter drifted from cookfires; a pair of minstrels tuned lutes somewhere near the Tully pavilions. Knights in half-armour strolled or slouched, easy and familiar, trading boasts about the morning’s passes and wagers for the next day. It was, for Riverrun, almost domestic—family sport as much as spectacle. Tully boys faced Tully cousins, laughing as they tried to knock one another into the dust; bannermen tilted to prove their worth to their lord, not to claim grand prizes.
They jousted, as they did most things, out of love. Of the game, of each other.
Aerion watched it all from the fringe, where dragon banners snapped above the Targaryen pavilion.
He had already ridden once that day—enough to remind everyone his lance had bite and to feel steel bite back into his hand where the dog’s teeth had gone in. His fingers began to ache, a numb tightness he ignored as he flexed them, determined not to show any weakness.
He remembered, as he watched a pair of Mallister men take the field, that someone had mentioned the distinct glint of Tully knights’ armor appearing in the lists later that afternoon. Brothers, cousins. They liked to knock one another about. Family bonding, Riverlands style.
Any Tully would suffice. But he must choose the right one.
He thought of the lady he’d just seen with Valarr—the way she’d laughed, the way her hand had moved when she talked about some minor detail of the tourney. The way she hadn’t noticed him at all.
The way you ignored him.
He thought of the dog.
Of the way its teeth had sunk into him without hesitation, aiming for his sword hand. Of the way its body had gone wild and then slack in his hand.
Aerion went to the lists quietly. There was no formal challenge, no trumpet fanfare. He spoke to the master of the games in a low voice, close to the man’s ear, a prince making a request he knew would not be refused. The man looked surprised, then wary, then bowed.
A change was made.
By the time the herald’s voice carried over the yard, most of the stands were only half-attentive. Lords and ladies glanced up between sips of wine, expecting another pairing of minor houses.
“In the next tilt,” the herald called, voice cracking with the force of it, “Prince Aerion of House Targaryen… against Ser Tommen Tully, of Riverrun!”
That made heads turn.
As you started to speak to a cousin, the sound of your brother’s name cut through the air. Your eyes immediately darted to the field, imagining him on horseback, ready to clash with some young Stormlander.
Instead, you saw blood-red on black.
Aerion’s massive warhorse, a creature of coal-black hue, dwarfed any horse from the riverlands, its armor adorned with red and black scales and spikes. His armour matched—custom-forged plates that suggested scale more than they showed it, subtle ridges along shoulders and arms catching the light like the edges of a dragon’s folded wings. His helm was an ugly, beautiful thing: a snarling metal skull crowned with stylised flames, iron tongues licking back over the dome. A deep crimson velvet cloak with silver patterns streamed from his shoulders, heavy and impractical, making him look less like a knight and more like something out of a septon’s imagined hell. Even the lance he carried seemed more weapon than sport. The shaft gleamed, the point glinting cruelly in the sun despite the blunted tip. When Aerion leveled it for the salute, the whole line of his horse and body screamed a single message: I am here. Enjoy.
It was a little distasteful in your mind
It worked.
You stared, frowning, as your brother guided his more modest mount into place opposite. Tully colours, Tully trout on the shield, a man built for strength and steadiness, not show. Though a prince jousting with a host’s son or nephew wasn’t entirely unprecedented, it was peculiar given the prince had already competed and that the Tullys had clearly stated their participation was for affection, not for glory.
“Why would he…” you murmured.
Your uncle, at your side, was already scowling. “Perhaps he thinks we haven’t seen enough of him today.”
Below, the horses pawed and snorted, impatient. Aerion’s destrier tossed its head, teeth flashing white, enjoying the bit, the weight, the waiting. The prince stroked its neck with his free hand, languidly, as if savoring the moment.
He made a point of letting his helm stay off for a breath longer than necessary. Aerion lifted his face toward the stands, as if idly surveying the crowd, and happened to find you.
You had just turned, seeking your brother’s eye to wish him luck. Instead, for a heartbeat, your gaze locked on the Targaryen. Aerion saw the flicker of surprise there. The narrowing of your eyes as you registered who he was, who he was riding against. The first shadow of worry tightened your mouth. Yes, like this, he thought, tongue moving to the corner of his mouth.
His heart knocked once, hard, in his chest. He let himself acknowledge you with a small, princely nod and a smile—not wide enough to be a grin, enough to say, I see you. You exist. I will grant you that.
You looked from Aerion to your brother, who lifted his lance in salute, steady and unconcerned. Then back to Aerion, searching his face, as if you might read something there.
His visor was up, a smooth expression visible. He affected a sort of mild boredom, as if this were nothing more than another pass to fill the afternoon.
Inside, though, everything sharpened.
He noted how your shoulders tightened when you looked down the length of the list and the way your hand curled on the railing. The care in your eyes when they rested on your brother’s back in his saddle. The impossibility, now, of ignoring him.
Aerion’s chest felt too tight in his armour. His hips shifted in the saddle, unconsciously seeking a more comfortable seat and finding instead the solid, maddening friction of leather against his thighs. His bitten hand prickled around the lance.
Perfect, he thought.
The signal was given.
They rode.
The first pass was clean.
Two horses thundering toward one another, lances leveled, shields up. Dust kicked up from hooves, cheers rising from the stands. The impact rattled through Aerion’s arm, familiar and welcome; both lances shattered in bright sprays of splinters, shards flying.
Neither man fell.
You exhaled slowly, not realising you’d been holding your breath. They wheeled, returned to their ends.
New lances. Salutes. Again. Equal speed, equal strength.
The second pass was harder.
Aerion felt his bitten hand more keenly now. The dog’s teeth had gone in deep; the bruised flesh had been buzzing all afternoon, but now, under repeated shock, the numbness spread. His fingers didn’t quite want to close the way they should. He tightened his grip regardless.
They met in the perfect centre again, wood slamming into wood. With a crash, the lances broke, scattering thin splinters that formed a cloud of wooden dust. The sharp crack of the impact caused the crowd to gasp as one, a sound tinged with both wonder and worry. Aerion kept his seat with a small, vicious smile. Tully did the same. The stands roared; Tully bannermen slapped one another’s shoulders, pleased by their man’s showing against a prince. This moment served as a pure and uplifting exhibition of the genuine spirit of jousting, uniting the entire kingdom under the Tully roof. With a look of immense pride and recognition, Maekar watched his son, the unspoken message clear: “You’re finally becoming the son I always knew you could be.” Perhaps, the court speculated, Aerion had entered the lists again to atone for his previous mistakes and fight with integrity, thus restoring his reputation.
Aerion’s hand burned.
He rode back to his mark, flexing his fingers around the shaft. The leather of the glove felt slick, not from sweat. The skin beneath had split properly now; he could feel the warm seeping of blood, the faint slide of it between palm and wood. He looked up, almost involuntarily, toward where you sat. You were on your feet now, along with half your family, eyes fixed on the field. Your lips moved—words he couldn’t hear, meant for the man at the far end of the list. A prayer, a warning, an encouragement. You had forgotten to be still.
Aerion could not lose. Not in front of you. Not here.
Not to a trout.
A Tully. Of all people. A fish on a horse. Absurd.
He set his jaw.
The third lance was the last.
They lowered them in unison. The world narrowed: horse beneath, weight of steel, length of ash, target ahead. The thunder of hooves rose, then smoothed into a single, rushing line as they closed.
His hand gave out on him halfway down the list—a sudden, unforeseen betrayal
The numbed fingers slipped.
It was not much. A fraction of looseness. It was enough.
The lance shifted in his grip, a tiny tilt that threw the line of it off. Instead of aiming true for shield or shoulder, the point slithered sideways along the angle of Tommen Tully’s forearm and dropped a fraction. He felt it as if from far away—the wrongness of the contact, the way the impact jarred up through his own bones, the twist of wood, the flooding warm wetness in his glove.
From the stands, there was only the collective intake of breath.
Aerion’s point slammed into Ser Edmyn’s right arm—the arm that held his own lance.
Wood, bone, steel—all met in one ugly instant. The Tully knight’s cry cut across the yard, high and shocked. His grip collapsed; the force of the blow twisted him in the saddle.
They went down in a tangle—both horse and rider.
The courser stumbled first, front leg buckling. Its bulk crashed sideways into the fence, splintering rail, rolling. Your brother came free of the saddle too late; the fall wrenched his body at an angle no human joints were meant to take. He hit the ground hard, shoulder and hip taking the worst of it. The scream that followed was hoarser, more human, laced with a pain that made men wince in sympathy. The lists exploded into sound.
Gasps. Shouts. Someone cursed the gods aloud. A lady covered her mouth with her hand. A riverlord half-rose as if to vault the rail and then remembered himself.
Aerion pulled his destrier up at the end of the run. For a moment he just sat there, breathing hard behind his visor, the taste of dust in his mouth. His bitten hand throbbed in time with his heartbeat. He flexed it experimentally around the haft of the lance.
Had it been deliberate?
The question brushed his mind like a moth’s wing. He pushed it aside.
He knew what the stands had seen: a prince whose grip had slipped, whose lance had ridden up or down or wrong, whose opponent’s arm had taken the blow and whose fall had been worse than most. Accidents happened. Men broke bones in the lists all the time. Horses went down.
His pointed precision on earlier passes made this one look ambiguous.
Aerion did not dismount. He turned his horse in a slow, controlled circle to face the centre again. The crowd.
Below, chaos had found its pattern. Squires ran to the fallen horse, cutting straps, dragging the saddle free. Maesters hurried from the tents with chests and boys bearing bandages. The whole row of trout stood up, including you. A frown creased Maekar’s brow, mouth contorted; Baelor twirled his rings in anxiety and looked at the crowd. Valarr shook his head. Your brother lay sprawled in the dirt, his right arm at an angle that hurt to look at, his hip twisted under him, helmet still on. Tommen was breathing. He was screaming.
You moved.
You did not give a graceful, controlled rise from your seat. You jerked up, knocking your knee into the bench. Someone exclaimed as you pushed past them, skirts catching on boots, apology forgotten.
You ran.
Down the stand steps, across the trampled edge of the field, through the gap in the fence where the horse had broken it. Your shoes sank into churned earth, mud splashing up the pale blue of your gown to mid-calf, spattering the fabric Tully seamstresses had smoothed and pressed that morning with care.
You didn’t slow.
You slid the final distance, collapsing to your knees with such force that bruising was inevitable. Your skirts spread in the muck; dirt and blood soaked up into the wool without resistance. You barely noticed.
“Brother,” you uttered. You were already reaching for his helm, fumbling with the straps, hands clumsy with urgency. A maester tried to caution you—“My lady, we must examine him first, we must see—” but you ignored him. The buckle came free; you lifted the metal away.
Tommen’s face was white and slick with sweat and teeth gritted against the pain, jaw clenched. When he saw you, some of the tension in his mouth softened.
“It’s bad,” you whispered. You could see it. The way his bloodied arm lay, the line of his hip. You had seen enough accidents to know.
“We will overcome this,” you affirmed, as if verbal pronouncements could physically repair bone.
“I saw what he did,” you added, voice shaking, anger pushing through the shock. “I saw—”
“It was an accident,” Tommen cut in, breathless. “His arm was bad from the start. I noticed in the tents. He held his cup wrong. I was aiming to wear him down.” He sucked in air against a spike of pain. “The gods had their own way. He is strong and fought well.”
You made a sound, half-sob, half-protest. Tommen had always been this way: kind, forgiving, full of integrity. Too forgiving.
Despite your efforts to suppress them, the tears emerged, hot and embarrassing. They slid down your cheeks and fell onto his; they looked like his, in that moment, like he was weeping through you.
“Don’t you dare,” you said thickly through your gritted teeth.
He laughed, a mangled, pained little bark.
“Sister, I’m not leaving you so soon. It’s just a scratch.”
He made you laugh through tears—his unmistakable trait that had helped you both go through shared grief. His left hand, freed of glove and useless lance, lifted with effort to touch your cheek. His fingertips were clumsy and numb, but the gesture was old habit. Tommen wiped away a tear with the pad of his thumb, like he had when you were both smaller and nightmares had smaller teeth. You took his hand with both hands; your grip was so tight that your knuckles went bloodless, as if you could heal him by force. The maesters murmured about splints and hips and careful movement. You hardly heard them.
A shadow fell over you.
You looked up.
Aerion.
A giant omen of death, you’d think later. Pitch black against daylight. The horse’s barding loomed; the iron skull of the helm tilted down, hollow eye sockets staring. The metal flames along the crown reached up toward the sun, catching light on their sharp edges.
Your stomach lurched. Your face went hot and wet, eyes blown wide, and you said nothing even as disdain and anger washed over you the instant he stepped into your line of sight. Whatever Tommen might have said did not matter. Aerion had hurt him. There was nothing you could force past your teeth that wouldn’t shatter in your throat. You were a heartbroken little thing, standing tiny beneath a dragon’s looming cold shadow, where neither light nor warmth could reach.
Aerion looked down and saw it all.
The way your brother’s head rested in your lap, dust and sweat and torn grass grinding into the delicate wool of your gown as if the cloth meant nothing next to him. The way he looked up at you, pale and grinning through his pain, trying to reassure you while you held his arm and hunched over him, your whole body curved like a shield. The line of your breast beside his cheek as you bent close, the flush high on your face, the tremble in your mouth as you swallowed whatever scream was clawing its way up. The knot of your brows, dragged tight in helpless, pleading fury, as if you’d bargain with gods or men or dragons if it would ease him.
Aerion had sisters, in name. Little things still in the nursery, more concept than people. Nothing like this. The sight struck him deeply, like a blow to a hardened, ancient part of his being, peeling away old layers to expose a feeling that was both familiar and entirely novel.
If he had been born in another time, another Targaryen generation, he would have had a word ready for it. Sisters were not just sisters then. They were a promised future, flesh to bind dragon to dragon. Love had teeth in those stories. Somewhere within him, that script still lived and ached against his chest.
He wanted, with a sudden, vicious clarity, a sister like you.
Older, younger—it didn’t matter. A sister, a mother, an aunt—all folded into one person who would touch him the way you touched Tommen. Someone who would kneel in the mud without a second thought if it meant catching his head before it hit the ground. Someone whose first instinct, at the sight of his blood, would be to put their hands on him, not pull away, even if it meant to ruin a perfect gown. He wanted that hand at the back of his neck, those fingers on his cheek, that worried crease between brows aimed down at him. He wanted your tears to fall on his face. Even the hair would do, he thought absurdly. Tully shade instead of Valyrian silver. Trout eyes instead of dragon’s. If it came with that look—furious, desperate, mine—he’d take it.
It all went through him like a spike.
It was not clean—it had never been with Aerion. The ache that opened in his chest, low and hollow and aching for something like family, tangled at once with the hot, crude pull of his body. The curve of your body over your brother, the glimpse of throat, the line of your breast, the way your hands moved over his face and arm—too tender, too intimate—not meant to be sexual in the slightest, but his hunger did not understand that. Tully love was simple. Brother and sister. Family. No stain in it.
Those wires had never fully separated in Aerion. For him, loving a sister meant wanting, protecting, possessing, devouring. The stories he’d been fed, the blood in his veins, had never drawn a firm line between the woman who soothed and the woman who warmed a bed. To want someone to be “yours” was to want all of it at once.
Watching you with Tommen, a surge of protective affection and unmistakable lust coursed through him, intertwined. The craving to be your brother and the urge to have you coiled into one tight knot, throbbed in him: his palm, his throat, behind his eyes, down in his thighs.
He shifted his weight in the saddle, just a fraction.
It did nothing to ease it.
And your eyes.
Gods, your eyes.
They were huge in your face, darker with tears, fixed on him because there was nowhere else to look. You weren’t asking Aerion for anything—no favour, no mercy—but in that moment everything in you hung on his lance, on the simple fact that his slip, his choice, had done this. You were just a mortal staring up at something that felt eternal, asking it for what it had never learned to give: mercy, forgiveness, protection, love, anything that might turn the day back by even a single heartbeat. Aerion felt his fingertips tingle. Behind the visor, his smile returned, unseen and huge.
Yes, he thought.
More.
Tommen? Ah, yes. A terrible accident. These things happen. It’s a joust, not a dance. Men break. Horses fall. Nothing out of ordinary.
You, though. New and enticing, like a ripe succulent fruit bright against the greenery, your novelty heightening his desire to taste you. You hung, claimed by no hand, too high to be picked, catching the sun’s first rays in the leading rows, to be the first to greet it. How would you taste? Sour, sweet? Not bitter—never you. Perhaps that sharp, bright sourness with a thread of sugar running through it, the kind that wakes the tongue and makes the mouth water. Or else a deep, engulfing sweetness, the kind that fills every corner of the mouth, that tickles the cheeks and gums and lingers at the back of the throat until he swallowed and still wasn’t rid of you.
How much warm juice would spill if he pressed just a little, testing your skin? Would it run over his tongue and escape him anyway, overflowing past the corners of his mouth, slicking his lips, smearing up to his nose as he chased it, sliding down the line of his throat to pool at his collarbones, marking a slow, sticky path over his chest? And how much would stay stubbornly locked inside, held tight until he used more weight, a harder squeeze, a firmer hand, working you with the patient cruelty of a greedy tongue determined to drag out everything till the last drop. The thought alone made him lightheaded, almost giddy with want.
Aerion could stand here forever, drinking in the way your grief and rage and desperate care all pointed at him. He was your centre of gravity now. Every line in your body led to the man on the black horse who had done this.
Something in him uncoiled in recognition.
There you are, it said.
Aerion didn’t have a name for it yet and couldn’t tell where desire ended and obsession began: where competition with Valarr and your brother shaded into this need to be the axis around which your world spun. He only knew that the feeling had teeth, and that it had just tasted blood.
Then and there, Aerion Brightflame realised that whatever this was—this sharp, dizzy intoxication at the sight of your eyes wet because of him—he would chase it.
Like a dog after its own tail.
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The merriment bled out of the yard like colour from a washed banner. Where there had been easy laughter, there was now a strained hum. Tully men who’d been shouting wagers a moment before stood with their arms folded, faces tight. Ladies murmured to each other behind hands, eyes cutting toward the fallen knight, the maesters, the black-armoured prince turning his horse away.
Even among the dragon banners, there was discomfort. Valarr’s jaw was set; Aemon’s eyes had gone distant and troubled. The king’s men shifted, exchanging looks that said again without words. No one quite knew what to call what had happened, but everyone knew they had seen too much.
Aerion left the paddock at an easy walk, letting the destrier’s hooves thud slowly over the packed earth.
Maekar was waiting in the shadow of the stands.
He stood half in darkness, half in the slanting light, as immovable as the stone pillars behind him. When Aerion drew near and swung down from the saddle, his father stepped forward just enough to block the path.
Aerion stopped.
The icy disdain usually etched on Maekar’s face was absent, replaced by a different, unreadable expression. There was intent in it now, a focused, flinty look that made Aerion’s skin prick.
“Show it to me,” Maekar said.
Aerion blinked. “What?”
“The hand,” he snapped. “Your right.”
There was no point in pretending not to understand. Maekar had broken rebellions with those hands. He had seen men maimed on a hundred fields; he knew what a rider’s body did when something went wrong. Maekar had watched Aerion’s last pass more closely than anyone.
Aerion hesitated a fraction too long. “It’s nothing,” he said, forcing a careless shrug. He pulled his glove off with his teeth and held out the hand, palm up. A thin, red layer of blood coated his palm, with some of it having already dried between his fingers.
Maekar took it without the slightest regard for the fresh pain of the movement. Aerion had held a lance for the past hour with this hand, so the pain was not an issue. Maekar’s grip was iron; thumbs turned the hand this way and that, indifferent to the way Aerion’s fingers twitched. The bite marks were obvious now under the smeared salve: crescent indentations, skin puffed and reddened, the broken places seeping through hastily wrapped linen. The swelling around the knuckles, the faint tremor in the tendons, told their own story.
“You won a tilt,” Maekar said. “Why did you re-enter with a hand like this?”
Aerion’s mouth curved.
“Against a fucking Tully of all people? To deny them what? Fun?”
Maekar’s eyes sharpened, probing Aerion’s face for the smallest sign of unease or deception. Up close, the violet was almost black.
“Do not play clever with me,” he added, his voice rumbling.
The pressure on Aerion’s hand didn’t increase; it didn’t need to. The weight of Maekar’s gaze was worse. Aerion had lied to many people in his life with ease. His father was not one of them. Not when he interrogated like this, body half-angled, shoulders coiled, as if he were pinning an enemy’s wrist before driving a sword through their palm.
Aerion’s jaw flexed.
“I’m here to joust,” Aerion said at last, the humour thinning out of his voice. “It’s a jousting tournament. And I happen to be a jousting knight.”
Maekar’s lip curled, baring one canine in something too sharp to be a smile.
“How did this happen?”
He did not say, Are you hurt? He did not say, Does it pain you? For Maekar, this was care: questions, hard and precise, mapping the danger.
“Don’t tell me you chased some rabid stray.”
Aerion snorted.
“No. It was some lord’s dog. Ill-behaved. I handled it.”
Maekar’s eyes flicked to the punctures again, then back up.
“That I see.” There was a pause, weighty. “Where are they. Whose dog.”
The words were flat, but Aerion heard the point beneath them. Not that Maekar intended to storm a tent and demand satisfaction. He simply did not like not knowing about risks, grudges, or who might now have reason to hate his son.
“No idea. I saw it beyond the hill. I didn’t see heraldry on the collar.”
It wasn’t entirely a lie. He hadn’t gone looking. Maekar’s jaw worked once, and he let it go. This time.
“Don’t put your sword hand in some dog’s mouth without knowing its character. That stupidity almost cost you a hand. A joust.” His gaze cut briefly back toward the lists. “The Tully knight paid for your sloppiness.”
He let Aerion’s hand drop.
“You will go check on him when he’s taken to his tent,” Maekar went on. “Do not apologise. Just show concern. At least pretend.”
Aerion bristled.
“Fath—”
“Not a word, boy,” Maekar said.
He turned on his heel and went back up the stone steps toward the high seats, cloak moving stiffly around his legs. He did not look back.
Aerion flexed his bitten hand once, feeling the throb, and went the other way.
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Evening lay soft over the tourney field. Torches and lanterns bloomed one by one, scattering gold across canvas and armour. Music threaded through the camp, pipes and drums and fiddles trying to drown out the memory of the day’s sharper noises. Men drank. Women danced. Laughter came back, but with a crack in it.
The Tully pavilion was the heart of the revel. From the outside, the main tent was a beacon of light, its sides bulging outward from the sheer number of people packed within. The air inside was heavy with the oppressive heat, the murmur of conversation, and the savory aroma of roasted meat mingling with the sharp scent of wine. A minstrel in one corner strummed a harp, soft enough not to hurt the man in the bed. It remained a mystery why such a crowd had gathered; perhaps it was a mix of joyous celebration, simmering frustration, whispered gossip, or all of it rolled into one.
Tommen lay propped on pillows on a low pallet near the centre pole, hip and arm swaddled in bandages and splints. One arm lay strapped to his side, the other was free; he used it to drink, to gesture, to ruffle the hair of the child-cousin who had crept too close. The crowd buzzed with admiration for Tommen’s exceptional jousting, his steed a blur of motion, as strong and swift as a royal warhorse.
Your weariness was visible, yet you sat by his side, offering a gentle smile. You hadn’t left since they’d carried him in. Someone had found you a different gown—a softer, darker fabric that felt exquisite against your skin, better suited for the evening and resting. Your hair had been quickly rebraided. There was still a stain of dirt under your nails that you hadn’t fully scrubbed out.
Lord Tully loomed at the foot of the bed, goblet in hand, face still tight but easing as the maester reassured him.
“You were good,” he said to Tommen. “Better. It’s a shame the princeling fought without dignity. I hope that was the last of his tricks.” He took a drink, grimacing. “Gods, I have never wanted someone to leave as soon as they came so much.”
A ripple of laughter passed through the tent.
“Don’t fret, little one,” a cousin told you, clapping you gently on the shoulder. “Your brother is good. He will heal. It will take time, but he’ll walk. He’ll fight.”
“I forbid jousting,” you said suddenly.
The tent went quiet for half a heartbeat, everyone unsure if you were serious.
“With everyone except our own,” you finished and smiled, a small, worn thing, and squeezed your brother’s good hand.
The tent laughed properly this time.
“No Targaryen prince will ever come close to him from now on,” one of the uncles declared, raising his cup. The laugh continued.
“Prince Aerion Targaryen!” The herald’s voice sliced through the warmth.
The tent flap stirred. Conversation snapped off. Music stuttered to a halt. Heads turned in a single, rolling wave toward the entrance.
Aerion stood there. Different.
Gone was the full plate and barded horse. In their place, a blood-red velvet jacket, richly made and trimmed, was worn over fine chainmail that softly glinted in the candlelight. Black leather boots climbed to his knees, chased on the sides with small silver scales that gleamed when he moved.
Aerion clasped his hands.
His hair, a wild white halo that spiked around his head and neck, seemed to possess its own eerie luminescence, even in the dim light. The famous Targaryen purple of his eyes muted here; in the half-dark, the irises obscured, the pupils wide, leaving only small, sharp glints of light that made it hard to tell where he was looking until he turned his head.
Predatory was the word that came to mind. Not wolf. Not cat. Something not from here. Even the minstrels forgot to pick their tune back up.
Now you saw Aerion fully. Handsome was not the right word. That belonged to other men—the bold Baratheons with their black curls and thunderous laughter that could sweep any lady off her feet; the Tully cousins with hair like autumn leaves and eyes like lake water, whose easy, sincere smiles and laughing lines could disarm a whole table.
Aerion was beautiful.
He owned too many words: alluring, bewitching, captivating, dangerous. He wore them not like jewels, but like another skin. Not like a vain Lannister preening in his own reflection, but like a creature whose sole purpose was to enthrall by existing. A bird of paradise that also had teeth. A dragon.
“Prince Aerion,” Lord Tully said, raising from his seat.
“Lord Tully,” Aerion answered and half-nodded.
The air in the tent felt dense as they regarded one another, a silent understanding passing between them. Aerion’s gaze slid, unhurried, over the assembled faces.
It halted on you.
Of course you were by Tommen’s side. Aerion almost scoffed at the obviousness of it—he had expected nothing less.
You had not moved; a hand still lay tucked into Tommen’s, thumb tracing absent, calming patterns over his knuckles. Aerion was both disgusted and seething with envy at the sight of it.
Ugh, Tullys.
Your head turned at the sound of your name echoing in the herald’s cry and in Aerion’s eyes. You stared at him, and a small, fierce flare of satisfaction pooled low in his chest, a feeling as sharp as a newly struck match.
Fixed it, he thought, with an almost innocent correctness.
Aloud, he said, “I came to make sure you’re faring well, Ser Tully. That was a terrible fall.”
No apology. No mention of the lance’s angle or the slipping grip. He kept his wounded hand covered and never acknowledged it. In that moment, all of House Tully received only the bland courtesy of a victor making a polite call on the man he had crippled—as if Aerion had merely been passing and thought it convenient to look in. The tent heard it as an insult. They remembered how he had ridden out at the last moment, for no good reason anyone could name; how his armour had looked like war in a field set for games; how his lance and shield had clearly not been made for play. His entrance now, unannounced, wrapped in rich red and black, only rubbed salt into the wound.
“All is good, Prince Aerion,” Tommen said, voice a little hoarse but steady. “Forgive me, I cannot stand. I won’t be able to for a long time, but it will heal.” Tommen was smiling, no bitterness in his tone.
“I will bow for you,” you whispered.
You stood, smoothing your skirt automatically, the new gown’s fabric flowing in the candlelight; you then dipped in a proper curtsey, head bowed, hands holding the cloth just so.
“Prince Aerion,” you said, voice level. “Forgive my brother for not greeting you properly. I will greet you for him.”
Oh, it should have been nothing.
A formality, the least courtesy owed to a prince of the blood under your uncle’s roof. But the sight of you doing it—your spine straight despite the exhaustion, your deference offered not for his sake but for your brother’s dignity—braided new fine things under his skin.
Those damn Tully maidens, he thought, a flicker of almost fond contempt. Of course she would.
For Aerion? Or for him? He hoped the first. It had to be the first. And the only.
“Please,” he said aloud, “no offence taken. You are in good spirits. Good. That will make the healing faster.”
Tommen glanced at his splinted arm.
“How’s your hand, Your Grace?” A sincere question.
For a beat, Aerion’s teeth clicked together behind his polite smile.
How dare you, he thought, absurdly. Betray my weakness in front of her.
“It’s nothing,” he said, lifting the bandaged hand a fraction. “Just a bite. The maesters tended to it already.”
You glanced at the wrapped palm. Something in your expression shifted, like a stone that had turned over in your mind and not yet revealed what lay under it.
“Take care of it,” Tommen added. “It’s the working hand. All men need it. For jousts, battles, and what not.”
The tent seized on the line with relief. Laughter burst out, too loud, too eager. One of your cousins slapped his thigh. Someone repeated the “what not” with a waggle of brows. Tommen shook his head, grinning despite himself. You flushed and tried not to laugh, eyes wide with horrified amusement.
Tommen turned his head, all that masculine bravado dropping away like a discarded helm.
“Forgive me, sister,” his eyes found yours in the candlelight, steady and soft in a way Aerion had never seen between siblings in his own family. Tommen lifted your hand and pressed his mouth to your palm. You chuckled once, a small sound, and covered your mouth briefly with your fingers.
Nothing coy or lewd in it; no courtly show. Just a small, instinctive gesture from a brother who had always soothed his younger sister that way, as if to say I didn’t mean to shame you.
Aerion felt it like a slap.
It wasn’t intended to be sexual, a fact his subconscious, which still accurately filed away details, recognized. But his body interpreted it in its own language. The intimacy of it—skin to skin, lips on palm, shared laughter that turned at once into a quiet apology seen only by the two of you—went in sideways. The unbearable warm look of a brother as his head cocked up and searched for the forgiving light in his sister’s eyes.
The easy, unthinking affection between you, the unquestioned place you held in each other’s lives, felt like mockery. Not of him personally, perhaps, but of everything he’d never had and had taught himself he did not want.
Aerion wanted to wince. Such a blatant display of your bond might have been a comfort to anyone else. To him, it was an insult. A sense of overwhelming alienation washed over him, the one that had been by his side his whole life—the one he had always distracted himself from. He felt like a stray dog, his breath fogging the windowpane as he yearned for the comforting heat within, a warmth that was denied to him.
It burned.
He wasn’t sure where to put that burning: whether it was envy of Tommen for having that piece of you, disgust that you could give such tenderness to a man he had just injured, or a deeper, uglier jealousy that anyone touched you at all where he had not. All the sentiments ran together—resentment, want, competition, the selfish, hungry need to be the one you smiled at like that—into one indistinguishable knot under his ribs. Aerion smoothed his face. He let the faint, polite curve of his lips stay in place, as if none of it had touched him at all.
“I will leave you to it, then,” Aerion said. “Have a good night.”
He inclined his head to Lord Tully, to the room at large, but his eyes were on you as he half-turned toward the flap. They travelled, unhurried, from your face down the line of your neck and shoulders, then back up. A slow, deliberate inventory. His tongue pressed briefly against the back of his teeth, a small, unconscious movement behind parted lips. There was something too keen in it to be courtly.
It unsettled you.
When Aerion stepped out, the tent seemed to exhale. People let out breaths they hadn’t known they were holding. The minstrel found his strings again. Conversation surged back, louder, as if to fill the hole his presence had punched in the air.
“Has anyone seen Chara?” you asked into a lull.
“Charcoal, the dog?” someone said.
“Yes.” You tried to keep your tone light. “I lost sight of her, but she always comes back.”
“Haven’t seen it since morning, my lady,” a cousin said. “She’ll come back.”
She always did.
You looked toward the tent flap where Aerion had gone, then back down at your brother’s bandaged arm.
Please, you thought, with a sudden, irrational tightness in your chest.
Come back.
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The morning fog hadn’t burned off yet. Low mist clung to the ground beyond the tourney field, softening the edges of tents and trees, making the pavilions look like toys half-sunk in milk. Men were already moving—grooms at the lines, squires hauling water, cooks coaxing fires to life—but the noise was muted, as if the world were speaking under its breath.
Tommen slept heavily, sedated by the maester. Your uncle, Lord Tully, had finally let exhaustion drag him down into a chair beside the bed. You could not lie still—the canvas walls felt too close. There was something tugging at you, something small and black and overdue.
Charcoal should have found you last night. She always did. After feasts, after hunts, after you stayed too long in stables or halls, there would be the soft click of her claws at your back, the push of her head against your hand, the comfortable, doggish certainty of her. You hadn’t seen her since yesterday’s morning. You told yourself, as you walked out into the pearly light of the morning, that she was hiding from the noise and chasing small game. That some kindly stable boy had given her bones, and she’d fallen asleep under a cart. That she’d trot up to you, muzzle bloody and pleased with herself, tail flagging.
You followed the path she’d liked yesterday. Up the slight rise beyond the last row of tents, where the noise of people thinned, and the land sloped down toward rougher grass. Mist brushed your skirts, dampening your shoes. Your breath made small ghosts in the chill.
“Chara,” you called quietly. “Charcoal. Come on, girl.”
Nothing.
You crested the little hill.
The hare came first into view—or what was left of it. It lay a few yards down the slope, half-eaten, the white of its belly turned to the sky, stiff paws reaching. Blood had darkened the grass around it into a rough circle. Beyond it, in the same flattened patch, was the dog.
For a heartbeat, you didn’t recognise her. She was on her side, black against green, collar still snug around her neck. The tongue hung a little out of her mouth. Her eyes were open. The way she lay was wrong—not the comfortable sprawl of sleep, not the wary crouch of watching. There was a stiffness in it that your bones recognised before your mind did.
You stopped.
“Chara?”
Your voice sounded small in the open air. As you descended the slope, each footfall carried the familiar, unwelcome sensation of retracing steps you wished to avoid.
Up close, there was no room left for pretence or bargaining.
The dog’s body was cold and hard under your touch. Heavy in a way that living things never are—the total weight of the body just releasing into the ground below. The fur on her chest and muzzle was stiff with dried blood—not just the hare’s, you realised now, but hers. The whites of her eyes showed too much, rolled up and fixed on nothing.
Someone had left her here.
Not brought her back to camp. Not buried her. Just let her lie where she fell.
Your mind rejected the truth of the scene, making it impossible to discern. After a few more moments, you made a sound you did not recognise. It scraped out of your chest, raw and low. Your knees went without asking you, hitting the damp grass hard, hands already reaching. One slid under her neck, fingers curling in the fur they had stroked a thousand times. The other went to her side, to the place where her ribs should have moved up and down, where her heart should have beaten.
Nothing.
“She’s cold,” you said aloud, absurdly, as if there were someone there to answer. “She’s… she’s cold.”
The world tilted.
This was your sister’s dog.
She had been your sister’s shadow first, the pup that barreled after her through Riverrun’s halls, paws skidding on stone, ears too big for her head. The one who slept every night at the foot of her bed, nose tucked against her ankles, who woke and howled when they carried your sister’s body out wrapped in Tully colours and never quite slept the same way again. She was the only part of that room that did not go still.
When the river ran red and they sent you north for safety, Charcoal went with you—awkward and grieving and too-small, a warm, breathing scrap of the people who did not make that journey. She smelled of home when everything else smelled of snow.
When your parents died, you still had Charcoal. When your sister died, you still had Charcoal. When you finally rode south again with your brother, your grief, and almost nothing else, it was Charcoal who loped beside the horses, black against the road, as if she were the last stubborn thread stitching all your lives together. You had watched her grow grey at the muzzle, slower in the mornings, just as you and your brother had grown into new shapes around the hollow places.
Now she lay in the grass with her neck at an angle that told you this had not been clean.
A breath broke.
You collapsed over her, chest folding, arms going around her as if you could shelter her now when you had not before. The sob hit you like a blow—huge, tearing, dragging half your life up with it.
You wailed.
The sound that erupted was far from a lady’s soft weeping; it was the raw, guttural cry of a child whose essential world had just been ripped apart with no adult to offer solace—with no one to intervene. It poured out of you in heaving bursts, bending you over the still black body, fingers digging into fur that no longer warmed. You might have stayed there, swallowed by it, if not for the other thing that rose up under it.
Revulsion.
Sharp, cold, clarifying.
It came in with the memory of yesterday—the bandaged hand, the offhand “Just a bite,” the way he’d held it up in your tent as if it were nothing. You saw, all at once, the shape of it:
A dog, proud with its kill.
A hand reaching where it shouldn’t.
Teeth doing what they were made to do.
A man whose instinct was not to step back, but to punish.
You saw the hill you were kneeling on, the blood-smeared grass, the hare. A strangled dog with its game nearby, left to rot. A prince walking away, flexing his stinging fingers, pleased.
You connected the dots.
Aerion’s hand. “A bite.” The way his pupils had blown when he looked at you, when he’d spoken of the “bad fall” as if the only thing that mattered was the story it made for him.
Something behind your ribs solidified. Why would a guest insult his host like this? For mere entertainment? Why?
You laid Charcoal down carefully, as if she could still feel it, as if she might bruise. You smoothed her ears back, adjusted the lie of her collar. The small, pointless gestures people make for the dead.
“I’m sorry,” you whispered into fur that could not hear. “I love you. Forgive me. I am so s-sorry, my dear girl.”
Then you slid your arms under her, one beneath her neck, one under her haunches, and lifted. Chara was heavier than she had any right to be. Your muscles screamed at the strain. You didn’t care. You staggered, found your balance, and started back up the slope.
Your thoughts ran ahead of you, ragged and single-minded.
He will answer. I will make him answer. I will make him pay. For everything.
For your sister. For your parents. For the dog. For your brother’s health. For the way he had ridden out like war at a feast. For the way he had walked into your tent afterwards, all red velvet and easy words, as if he hadn’t just tried to break what little you had left.
You knew the stories.
The horses he had wounded and brother he’d tormented. The boys who’d limped away from his “games” different than they’d come. You had seen the look on his face when Tommen lay broken with his head in your hands.
His very sight in your memory disgusted you.
The way he had mutilated your brother for entertainment, then paraded to your tent afterward, rubbing it in Riverrun’s face under the guise of courtesy.
You were somewhere else now. Far away from the softness of the mist, the murmur of camp, the weight of the dog in your arms. The part of you that thought about consequences, about lords and alliances and the cost of striking a prince, had gone silent.
Only the muscle remained.
It moved you.
Down the hill, across the dew-slick grass, onto the main path between pavilions. Canvas rose on either side in bright, blurred blocks. Men and women turned at the sight of you, of the dark bundle in your arms, of your face.
You barely saw them.
A bright red blotch of color irritated your blurred vision.
Aerion stood in the middle of the path, speaking to some lord of the Reach, his posture loose, head tilted at that arrogant little angle that made his hair fall just so. He was laughing—of course he was. The sound drifted across the morning like something obscene.
You walked toward him.
He turned at the motion in the corner of his eye. For a heartbeat, he didn’t recognise you either.
Aerion didn’t see the composed lady from last night, in her evening gown, blushing at little jokes about working hands. You were a basic iteration of yourself, hair falling free in areas, gown out of place from the pressure you endured, and a face exposed.
You stopped three paces from him. Everyone along the lane stilled, the way they had done for him before, but this time for you. Conversations broke off mid-word. A serving girl froze with a jug in her hands. A knight halfway through lacing his vambrace let the strap dangle.
Slowly, you set the dog down.
With careful kneeling, you set Charcoal down on the packed earth near the prince, arranging her with the same gentleness you’d used to pick her up, much like laying someone to rest.
You straightened. Not a word. Just a look.
I know it. Now look at it, with everyone to see.
Your mouth trembled, eyebrows drew up and in, that ugly, helpless shape grief makes of a face. The wave came back all at once—the same one that had broken over you on the hill, now with witnesses.
You did not stop it and let it show.
Aerion watched. He saw the dog, black and small and dead. He saw you. You had tears pouring from your eyes again, steady and unstoppable, tracking down cheeks already raw from earlier weeping. Your hands, once neat and well-kept, were filthy, nails packed with earth and now dotted with old blood. Mud stained the hem of your gown. Your whole body shook.
He faced the truth of the scene, and a surge of excitement ignited within his chest. The world narrowed to the circle of ground between your feet and his boots. To the line of your gaze, dragging up from the dog’s body to his face as if pulled by hooks. To the raw, naked hatred and hurt there.
Aerion’s mouth fell ajar, tongue pressing against the inside of his cheek, slow and thoughtful. There was pleasure.
Not petty delight, not simple amusement. A sincere, deep satisfaction, the kind a craftsman feels when something he has been working at in pieces finally clicks into shape.
That’s it. See me.
He was your sun in that moment—burning too bright, drawing tears from the blinding light. The centre of the orbit of your grief. The cause and the answer, and the target.
Aerion could taste it. Your agony failed to resonate with him in the way it ought to have. It ran over him like water over oiled leather. What soaked in was the knowledge that he had put it there.
The trout had leapt straight into the dragon’s mouth.
All he had to do was close his jaws.
You searched his face. You gave him a chance.
If there had been even a flicker—of surprise, of regret, of understanding—you might have read it. If he had said, It was an accident, or I did not know whose it was, or even I am sorry, you might have found, somewhere under all that hurt, a scrap of something to cling to and work around it.
Aerion smiled.
Small at first, then a shade wider. A curve that said plainly, Yes. I did it. You are too smart for your own good. Impressive.
A ravenous light drowned his eyes. There was no confusion there, no shame—only fascination, and that soft, almost reverent gleam he wore whenever something new and sharp slid neatly into his collection of sensations.
Against all wiser instinct, you caught it: a flicker of proud accomplishment there, almost a quiet, inward victory. That was the last straw. You felt something inside you snap cleanly in two and then burn away, incinerated into nothing.
Your face changed.
The agony did not fade; it only dropped its mask. You were no longer a Tully maiden at a pleasant tourney, smoothing over rough edges and making sure every guest left praising Riverrun’s hospitality. As your eyes darkened, a shift occurred within you, transforming you into something primal. With a determined set to your jaw and your shoulders rising, you adopted a posture of defense rather than grace. There were no thoughts left.
No careful weighing of lords and oaths. No sense of what this would mean for your house, your brother, or your own life. A brother crippled. A sacred memory cold in your bloody hands. Only the oldest part of you remained: if something hurt my own, I hurt it back.
You strode ahead, chest puffed out and elbows kinked, ready for whatever came next. You went like a spell-caught thing, each pace harder and wider than the last, fists clenched so tight your nails bit your own palms.
With absolute stillness, Aerion tracked your every move, the spark in his eyes never leaving you. He knew what you were about to do. The flare in your eyes, the way your body aligned itself around that intent. He could have stepped back or called the guards.
But why would he?
Aerion stood where he was, hands loose at his sides, as you closed the last of the distance.
You hit him.
You didn’t hesitate or aim for the safer places; your hands went straight for his face, fingers hooked into claws. Your dirty nails dragged over the skin his helm hadn’t covered the day before, ripping back through half-healed scratches to find new flesh beneath. He felt the sharp sting, then the warm, familiar slide of blood breaking loose again.
“I will slaughter you!”
Your words roared and tore out of you on a broken pitch that made people flinch.
You drove your fists into his chest, again and again. Small hands, fragile bones meeting leather and mail beneath his jacket in a frantic flurry, never once considering how the chain would throw each strike back into your own bones. You didn’t feel it. Not yet. That pain would come later. For now, every blow landed with more will than weight, more fury than force—and the imbalance only delighted Aerion further. You hammered at him without counting, each strike a wordless syllable of rage that had tipped over into something close to madness.
Aerion swayed under it, more from surprise at the intensity of your efforts, from the sheer, reckless ferocity behind them. The composed, careful Lady Tully of Riverrun had vanished; in her place was someone pouring everything she had into him, unfiltered, raw, burning hot. All that frenzy, all that hurt, aimed at no one else in the world but him.
His breath left him in short bursts—not from injury, but from something like exhilaration. Aerion grinned.
You reached for his neck.
Fingers dug in on both sides, just under the angle of the jaw, nails biting into the thin skin there, trying to rip out anything you could pinch. You must have remembered what it had felt like to hold your brother’s head, to feel the vulnerable places. You found those again now, but with a different intent.
Your nails carved angry red crescents into his throat.
“I will kill you,” you uttered again, lower now, more promise than threat.
Aerion let you. He stood and took it.
At some point, as your blows grew wilder, he lifted one arm and wrapped it around your back, not to restrain but to steady you. His hand spread between and slightly below your shoulders, holding you upright, keeping you from falling forward, giving you something to push against. It grounded you just enough that your hits found him more cleanly instead of flailing at the air.
You might have hated him more for that, if you’d noticed.
Aerion was euphoric.
His pupils had blown wide, swallowing almost all the colour of his eyes. The world had gone into that strange, slowed clarity he sometimes reached on the very edge of a fight—heartbeat loud in his ears, breath dragging hot in his chest, time stretching. Aerion didn’t mind the pain. He had taken worse from steel and fire and brothers’ fists.
Your nails, your small, frantic paws, were not an assault.
Intimacy.
Connection.
A kind of foreplay he’d never had the imagination to invent and now would never be able to forget or live without.
Aerion could feel his own blood now, hot and slick where you’d opened him along cheek and neck, lip—the sting turning into a low, steady thrum. He could feel another heat too, lower, heavier and pressing, the way your total, public fixation on him—this girl he had marked, shaking and furious and unable to look anywhere else—twisted through his body and set it alight.
You were sobbing and snarling and saying the same words over and over; he was breathing hard and beaming, one arm a bar against your spine, keeping you in place.
Around you, the camp finally broke out of its stunned paralysis.
“Lady—Lady Tully!”
“Guards—!”
“By the Seven—”
“Someone!”
People had already gathered. White cloaks moved.
The Kingsguard came at a run from the edges of the lane. Steel flashed as hands went to hilts, then checked; they could not cut you without cutting him. They grabbed your wrists instead. Hard, practised hands closed around your forearms, hauling you back, breaking your nails’ purchase in his neck with a small, unpleasant tearing feeling. You jerked against them, trying to get one more hit in, one more rake of your fingers across the face you despised.
Aerion let his arm fall away, finally, and watched as they dragged you down onto your knees, arms wrenched out to either side.
A fiery sting on his skin, the comforting warmth of his blood, and the rapid thudding of his heart made him feel alive, inevitable and, by paradox, invincible.
A fiery sting along his skin, the snug warmth of his own blood, the rapid, hard thud of his heart; together it made him feel vividly, savagely alive—inevitable—as if, by some perverse logic, it made him invincible.
Aerion licked the copper from the corner of his mouth, tasting himself on his tongue, and smiled.
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The crowd had already made a ring by the time Lord Axel Tully of Riverrun broke through.
He could tell before he saw you that it was you. The way the air in the yard had changed—gone thin and high-pitched, full of shock and the low roar of people trying not to be caught staring. The Kingsguard only ever moved this fast when it was a king or a prince, and there was only one prince in the castle who could pull this kind of sound out of a gathered court.
“Move!”
Lord Tully’s commanding bark echoed, and the men shifted, not solely out of deference to his rank, which was considerable, but more so because the sheer intensity on his face compelled them to.
The circle opened.
For a heartbeat, his mind refused to make sense of what his eyes were telling him: his niece was on her knees in the dirt.
They had you stretched—one white cloak on each side, each man’s gauntleted fist clamped around a wrist, your arms wrenched straight out until your body made a narrow, shaking T. Your shoulders strained, elbows locked, muscles jumping with the effort to keep from being pulled apart. It was a hold meant for brawling sell-swords and drunk hedge knights, brutal in its efficiency, not for a maiden of Riverrun—not for his niece. Your gown was torn where they’d seized you, fine cloth bunched and ripped at the seams; your hair had come half out of its pins, braids ragged around your face like the last remnants of dignity hanging on by threads.
Your face—
He had never seen it like that.
You were panting, chest heaving, lips drawn back not in ladylike distress but in something that lived between sobbing and snarling. There was blood on your skin, drying in streaks across your cheek and throat. More on your hands, smeared dark into the fabric at your waist, up the sleeves. It soaked the front of your gown in a stiff, ugly bloom.
At your feet lay the dog. Lord Tully’s eyes widened, a look of disbelief mirroring a sailor’s terror at the sight of ghosts on the cliffs.
Chara looked small like that, curled in on itself in the dust. Someone’s clumsy hands had tried to drag the dog’s body aside—two furrows in the dirt, a smear of red—but you had not allowed it to be moved far. The body lay just in front of your knees, like an offering. Or a shield.
Aerion stood a few paces away. A charming, scratched-bloody mess: all dishevelled grace and tousled hair, looking for all the world like chaos loved him. His doublet was ripped from collar to mid‑chest, gaping to show the scrape along his collarbone where your nails had scored him. Blood had stamped itself into the links of his chain mail in a dark, uneven print—your blood, his blood, you couldn’t tell—which hit like a gut‑wrenching realisation that the ugliness between you had already marked him, and he seemed to revel in wearing it. Four long scratches raked down one cheek in livid parallel lines on his porcelain skin; a thread of blood had trickled from his nose or lip and dried at the corner of his mouth. He had not wiped it away.
Aerion’s eyes were beaming.
That was the first thing Tully registered. Not pain, not outrage. Brightness. The wild, fever-lit pleasure of a man who had just got exactly what he wanted and was already thinking about how to get more. The Lord’s stomach twisted into a knot.
Aerion wasn’t pacing or shouting—he simply stood there, arms a little away from his sides, chest rising faster than it should have, lips parted as if he’d forgotten to close them. His tongue flicked out once to catch a smear of blood at the edge of his mouth. The movement was swift and reptilian. Aerion looked, Lord Tully realised with a sudden, cold clarity born of long experience, not shaken or ashamed at all, but aroused.
“Uncle,” you choked.
Your voice dragged Tully’s eyes back to you.
You were fighting them but not with wild thrashing; that would have earned you a knee in the back and a face in the dirt. No, you were fighting with everything you had learned about control. Muscles straining, shoulders set, chin high despite the tears tracking clean lines through the blood on your face. The Kingsguard holding your arms were doing their duty, of course. They were keeping a girl who had just clawed a prince’s face from clawing more of him. They were also, Tully saw with a flash of helpless rage, grinding your joints into the wrong angles—out of habit or enjoyment he couldn’t tell. Your elbows would be agony already. If they held you much longer like that, something would give.
“Enough,” he snapped.
They didn’t release you. They looked instead to the white-cloaked man at their head, a senior knight with the habit of obeying the crown first and everyone else second. The knight’s eyes were on Aerion.
Aerion made no sign that he’d heard anything at all.
“Highness,” the Kingsguard captain said. “Your injuries—”
“I am fine, Ser,” Aerion said. His voice carried clearly across the ring. “Lady Tully is… spirited. I am sure we all admire such passion in defense of a pet. I admire it even.”
The word landed like a slap. In that one instant, Aerion sealed his fate, ensuring you would never forgive him.
You made a thin, strangled sound and surged against the grip on your arms. The Kingsguard tightened, hauling you back down onto your knees before she could lunge again. Her face twisted; Lord Tully saw the exact moment something in your shoulder twinged wrong. Your breath hitched in pain.
He moved without deciding to.
“Release her.”
“Lord Tully—” the captain began.
“Release. Her.”
He took another step into the ring. In some distant, unused corner of his mind he registered the watching eyes—lords and ladies, squires and servants with trays gone still—forming a thick, unbroken wall of flesh around them. The king was not here, neither was his Hand. For this thin, dangerous moment, the only authority in the yard belonged to him and the prince his niece had just attacked. From beyond the press came shouted questions, the quick drum of boots on packed earth as more bodies hurried toward the tightening circle.
Lord Axel Tully of Riverrun would not be the one to bend first.
The Kingsguard captain’s jaw worked. He looked again at Aerion.
For a heartbeat, Aerion let them all hang there: you kneeling in the dirt, arms stretched to pain; your uncle advancing like a storm front; white cloaks anxious with anticipation; the ring of nobles holding their breath.
Then he smiled.
“Let her go,” he said lazily. “Everyone made their point. The lesson is learned, I assume. Yes, Lady Tully?”
He surveyed you from above, his head tilted down to meet your gaze; his expression satiated, though he knew it wouldn’t last forever.
The hands fell away from your wrists. Your arms dropped at once, heavy and useless as blood rushed back in pins and needles, then folded in toward your chest on reflex. You rocked forward, balance gone, catching yourself with one hand in the dirt while the other curled tight against your ribs. Your shoulders gave a single, sharp tremor—pain, rage, and something rawer tangled so closely together you couldn’t tell which was which.
“Up,” Lord Tully said, crossing the last paces to you. His voice gentled on that single word in a way he would have denied if anyone had remarked on it. You reached for his hand with the arm that still worked cleanly. When his grip closed around yours, he felt how hard you were shaking—a full-body, after-battle tremor, the kind men got when the adrenaline left and the cost arrived. He helped you to your feet.
The dog’s body remained on the ground between you and Aerion. Tully put himself between you and the princeling without thinking about it, angling his body so that the fall of his cloak hid as much of her torn gown and blood-streaked skin as it could. You stood close enough that he could feel your breath against his shoulder, fast and shallow.
“What happened?” Lord Tully asked through his teeth. Before you could speak, another voice cut in.
“Lady Tully took offence,” Aerion said. “Her hound sank its teeth into my sword hand when I was admiring the Riverland scenery just beyond that hill.” The proof was there for all to see: his wounded hand, the lance that had slipped a fraction the day before. “That, I fear, led to the jousting mishap you all had witnessed. I sought to protect myself. The rest,”—his gaze flicked to you, to the dead animal, to your brother’s absence—“is before your eyes.”
He sounded amused—almost indulgent.
Lord Tully looked at Aerion, knowing how much of it was a lie.
“Before my eyes,” Tully repeated, the words coming out flat as hammered steel. The murmur at the edge of the crowd thickened; people edged closer, drawn in despite themselves. The story was already running ahead of the facts: Lady Tully had flown at Prince Aerion with her bare hands, he had killed her dog, he had ridden at her brother as if it were war, not sport.
He thought of Tommen and felt his gut clench.
“Is Tommen still asleep?” he demanded of the servants clustered near. No one answered at once; then a voice from the crowd called, “Yes, my lord.”
Lord Tully took a step toward Aerion. The ring tightened instinctively. Kingsguard shifted, hands straying to hilts without drawing. Lesser lords watched with the avid, horrified attention of men who could sense a line about to be crossed and were secretly hungry to see it. Tully felt his own face change, the world narrowing to a target, his body falling into old habits—the awareness of his own weight, the set of his shoulders, the measured space between his feet. Aerion was barely out of boyhood—he could break him in half with his bare hands right then and there. But Aerion did not back up; he straightened. For a moment, with his lip bloody, his eyes bright, and his chest lifting in deep breaths, he looked older than his years—not a weedy, vicious youth, but something harder, honed, mad. Aerion didn’t reach for a sword—he wasn’t even wearing one—but there was a coiled, unhinged readiness in him that made the air taste faintly of metal.
“Careful, Lord Tully,” Aerion said softly, almost a slither. “You’re very close to forgetting yourself.”
“Am I?” Tully said, locking his eyes onto him.
His hand twitched, not toward his own weapon, but toward you, reassuring himself that you were still there, still upright.
“Uncle—”
He ignored the plea in her voice.
“You maimed my nephew on the field,” he said, each word slow and measured. “You killed his sister’s dog in cold blood. You stand in front of all these riverlords and speak as if this is sport. And you, a second son of a fourth prince, tell me to be careful?”
The muscle in Aerion’s jaw jumped. Around them, the packed crowd went still, eyes darkening at Tully’s litany; whatever their houses, in that moment they agreed with every word.
“I did what any man would do,” Aerion said, unbothered. “A dangerous beast bit a royal hand; The hand defended itself. Your nephew chose to ride; I met him in fair tilt, under the eyes of the same gods you pray to. If the riverlands have grown too soft to stomach the risks of honest sport, perhaps you should confine yourselves to—”
“WHERE THE FUCK IS HE?!”
The new voice cut across the circle like an axe. A low, rumbling growl that rolled through the packed yard so every tent and fire heard it clearly. It wasn’t loud, but it carried the particular weight of someone used to being obeyed in war, not just in halls.
Maekar stepped into the ring, and the crowd parted in front of him as if he were a bar of heated steel and they bare hands. He took everything in as he walked: the wall of bodies hemming them in, the sharpened, hungry look in the riverlords’ eyes, the white cloaks with hands on hilts, your torn gown, the dead dog in the dust, his son’s scratched, blood-marked face. And, above all, Lord Axel Tully. He knew that look better than anyone; in Tully’s place, for his own kin, he might have done worse. Maekar’s expression did not change. That, somehow, was worse than open outrage.
He moved like a man in armour, even without it—straight-backed, shoulders square, every step landing with his weight perfectly centred. Maekar wore only a plain dark tunic and a sword-belt, all he’d clearly managed in the hurry of an early morning like this, but the blade at his hip sat there more naturally than any jewel ever had. The crowd shifted almost without realising it to make room, bodies adjusting around him the way they did around a looming piece of siege timber. In heartbeats, the ring had two centres instead of one. He came to a stop opposite Tully.
They looked at each other.
For a heartbeat, no one breathed.
Maekar was taller by a hair, heavier and wider through the shoulders, built on that unforgiving northern scale that came not from Riverland stock but from Valyrian bone and too many hard campaigns. Tully was no small man himself; the Riverlords ate well, trained hard, and he’d earned his mail the honest way, in mud and blood beside the very formidable prince he faced now. They stood like two men on the verge of closing and testing each other’s edges again—only this time, not against a common foe, but for the sake of the kin behind them. No weapons were drawn, for the threat in the air didn’t need steel. The sight alone was enough to make grown men shiver: the Anvil, the most feared hammer the crown had ever swung, squared off against the Lord of Riverrun who had once held the line with him in Rebellion, now forced into opposition by the damage Maekar’s own blood had done.
Lord Tully knew exactly what kind of fighter Maekar was. Not the laughing, shining tourney champion who waved to the stands, but the other kind—the one who broke sieges stone by stone and never flinched from the ugly work that didn’t make it into songs. The Anvil. The man you hit and hit and who only grew more solid under every blow.
Maekar saw, in the set of Tully’s jaw and the way his hand hovered just behind your shoulder, exactly who he was facing. Not a man who would barter his kin’s hurt away for favour, but his brother‑in‑arms, an old comrade whose steadiness he trusted more than half his own blood. The sight of Axel Tully standing there because of Aerion’s cruelty pained him in a place armour did not reach. An offence against a man he could forgive; such things happened between soldiers. An offence against an innocent maiden—brought to breaking in her own yard by Maekar’s son—brought a shame that would not wash away, not even if blood were spilled for it. And in Maekar’s eyes you were innocent; he’d connected the dots in the first few heartbeats after stepping into the circle. He knew his son well enough to read the shape of his cruelty in the wreckage he’d left behind.
And he knew Lord Axel Tully of Riverrun the way he knew himself: this was a lord who would bleed his house dry on principle and call it a fair trade.
The knowledge passed between them in that long, silent look.
Behind Maekar, a Kingsguard shifted, starting to step forward.
Maekar lifted one hand slightly, without taking his eyes off Tully.
The white cloak stopped.
The gesture was small, but it was clear.
I take over.
“Lord Tully,” Maekar said finally.
“Prince Maekar,” Tully returned. You stood at his shoulder, with breath still ragged.
Maekar could feel your eyes on his face, weighing every smallest shift in it. It took all his will not to look back at you—the wreckage in your gaze was something he did not trust himself to bear and still stand where he was.
“You see what your son has done,” Tully said, the words thrown like a knife meant to stick deep. It wasn’t a question. There was strain under the words, an old hurt:
I bled for your family, and now you let yours bleed mine in return?
Maekar’s gaze flicked once, briefly, to the dog’s small body, to the dark smear of its blood on the trampled ground, to the first bruises blooming at your wrists where the Kingsguard had pinned you. He avoided your eyes. His jaw locked.
“I see that my son has been attacked. In public. By a lady of your house.”
The words sounded wrong in Maekar’s mouth; both men knew exactly what had happened and exactly how each was required to answer with so many eyes watching. Saying it felt like gutting his ally with a dull knife. There was no fire in his tone, no true paternal outrage—only something flat and heavy and grinding, like stone on stone.
Tully’s mouth twisted.
“Is it a constant that in every generation there’s a Targaryen,” he waited, letting his words hang in the air, “who takes pleasure in harming those defenseless against them?”
The words dropped into the ring like a thrown gauntlet—and like a curse laid on his whole line. A murmur rippled through the onlookers: sharp breaths sucked in, someone swearing soft and helpless under their tongue, a few faces going visibly pale. One lord near the back shifted as if to step away from the blast radius, as if expecting fire.
Maekar’s chest rose, once, too sharply.
It was the first true crack in the armour. Every instinct in him, honed on battlefields and border skirmishes, screamed to answer—to snarl, to deny, to shove the words back down Tully’s throat. His hand twitched a fraction toward the sword at his hip and stopped.
Maekar did not reach for it, did not lunge. He stood exactly where he was, spine a drawn line, shoulders broad, chin lifted like a man bracing for a blow he wouldn’t dodge. The muscles in his throat worked once as he swallowed back everything that wanted to come roaring out—shame for his son, fury at the insult, the sick knowledge that Lord Axel Tully of Riverrun was not wrong. It was the complete opposite—he was absolutely right.
The silence didn’t last. It never did, in a yard full of men who trained for war and lived on stories of gods and heroes. The tension between Lord Tully and Maekar hung there for a heartbeat too long, and the crowd’s nerves bled out into sound.
“They’re guests,” someone muttered from the second rank. “And this is how they treat the host’s blood?”
“A princeling maims a lady’s brother and kills her hound,” another voice said, louder, “and no one lays a hand on him—until she does.”
“Lady Tully, of all people, didn’t deserve this.”
There was no sympathy in the murmur for Aerion. Faces turned toward him held more curiosity than concern; a few, unmistakably, held dislike. No one had liked him much before this. Now they had a reason.
“No wonder she flew at him,” a knight from the Riverlands said, audible now in the hush. “Seven hells, I’d have done worse.”
You felt it gathering—the ugly, restless energy of a yard that has seen a line crossed and is now, collectively, deciding to be offended, emboldened because the overlord has finally given the feeling words.
Maekar stood and listened. Time dragged for him; every heartbeat a beat too long. He didn’t snap at them, didn’t whirl on the men who were, in truth, accusing his house of dishonour to his face. He simply absorbed it one muscle at a time, jaw clenching, eyes fixed on Tully, his old friend he felt he had betrayed, because he no longer trusted himself to be the one to steer this back from the brink.
Baelor, where the fuck are you, pulsed at the back of his skull.
Aerion, for once, said nothing. The moment Maekar had stepped into the ring, he had gone very still; the bright, feverish delight in his eyes cooled to a hard, glittering watchfulness. Whatever pleasure he had taken in your restraint was banked now behind a single, consuming need: to read his father.
Lord Tully heard the crowd, and his face said plainly: Do you hear them? I do.
This is who you are, that look said. This is what they see. We are not alone in this anger. We will not let it go.
Behind him, Tully men shouldered their way to the front.
The Riverlords who knew your father, the sworn swords, the boys who’d trained beside your brother in mud and rain, pushed through the ring in a rough, determined wedge. Their faces told the same story—shock curdling into disgust, resentment simmering just beneath the skin. They all knew you; knew how you’d come to their halls with more ghosts than family, a dead sister at your back and a brother you clung to like a last branch. All of them knew what that dog had been—more than a pet, well‑mannered and gentle, a living echo of the girl you’d lost. They knew what your brother on a litter, his leg shattered, would mean for the rest of his life.
The anger surfaced in them like something breaking through melting ice.
“I’ll fight for her,” Lord Tully’s youngest brother said, his voice cut clean through the noise. “Trial by combat.”
A ripple of gasps went through the crowd.
He stepped up beside his lord, his brother, hand on his sword hilt, eyes on Maekar, on Aerion beyond.
“No,” another Tully man snapped at once. “You cannot go; you’re still an heir of House Tully. I’ll go. I’m not of the main branch.”
“I’m a spare son,” the younger brother shot back. “My elder lives, my lord lives. She’s my dead brother’s daughter. I go.”
Voices rose—cousins, sworn men, all talking over one another. Lord Axel Tully didn’t even attempt to interrupt them.
“Let me stand.”
“He’s mine.”
“I’ve seen him tilt; I know his tricks—”
The argument had the wild edge of people offering their lives on impulse and meaning it. It rolled through the ring, gathering names.
“Keep your lives, lords,” another voice cut in, flintier. “The Blackwoods will fight for you.”
A man stepped forward from the cluster of Riverland banners—a young Blackwood, scarred across the face in the way of men who stood too close to axes and didn’t duck. His hand had already half-found the knife at his belt by instinct, fingers curling around the hilt before he seemed to remember there was no blade drawn yet. He looked at Aerion as if the prince were just another Bracken he ought to slay before dinner.
Somewhere in the thickening noise, someone shouted, “A trial of Seven!”
It caught like dry grass.
“A trial of Seven,” someone repeated.
“Name your men. We’ll name ours.”
“A trial of Seven!” another Riverlord echoed. “Get your Kingsguard, get your son, we’ll meet you at dusk.”
“Yes,” someone else—Mallister colours at his shoulder—called. “Let the Gods decide what we cannot”
There were more offers than there were places. Tullys, Blackwoods, Pipers, Mallisters, and half a dozen minor houses sworn to the trout—all their voices rose into the swell. Seven names were already there without being written: the hardest, most renowned swords of the Riverlands, eager to answer an insult they felt had been dealt to all of them at once. Others pressed forward, arguing to be counted, arguing for the right to wager their lives on a girl of their blood who had already tossed her own onto the scales without a blink—for her family. The Kingsguard shifted as one, white cloaks stirring, hands settling more firmly on the hilts at their sides. White cloaks lifted in a restless ripple, eyes flickering from Maekar to Aerion to the ring of angry riverlords. The word trial had sharp teeth in it. Once spoken, it bit deep. Even dragons had to respect it.
Maekar watched like a man holding a bucket of water while wildfire raced through a dried forest. The sheer speed of it hit him harder than any shouted threat. One insult, a moment of cruelty from his son, and now seven of the Riverlands’ best were offering to spill their blood in a formal, Gods‑witnessed challenge—men from houses that mattered, beneath banners no king could afford to slight. Maekar knew, with a cold, precise certainty, that a single wrong word from him now could set it all in stone.
And Baelor was not here.
He felt, absurdly, like a man in full plate on thin ice. Every step a risk. The leash on his temper, on his duty, felt very much like the one he kept on Aerion—fine, taut, ready to snap.
Maekar said nothing, nor did Lord Tully. They both knew their next words would decide futures and fates, neither of them wanted the right to shape.
Baelor, Maekar thought again, the name like a prayer and a curse.
He could not be seen to quail, and he could not be seen to embrace it either. So Maekar stood—the Anvil in the centre, taking each blow of shouted oath and outrage without flinching—and listened as men volunteered to die against his son with the fervour of zealots signing their names to a holy war.
Lord Tully observed him with an arm firm around your shoulders, drawing you in against his side like a wall. His eyes did not leave Maekar’s. The crowd, the offers, the shouted “Trial of Seven”—all of it washed around him without moving his focus.
Do you see? – that stare said.
This is what you get for hurting my family.
The yard had tipped past murmur into scowl.
Faces were hard now, no longer shocked but set. Agreement moved through the press in nods and low, grim affirmations. This would not be forgotten. This would not be soothed away with pretty words and a polite apology over a high table. And all of it might have been diverted in the damp, private chambers of Riverrun—behind closed doors, without the crowd’s sudden hunger for righteous violence against the royal house they had grown tired of.
Aerion watched it all with an odd, abstract detachment, like a child who has knocked over a lantern and is now fascinated by the pattern of flame.
Baelor came.
He arrived at a run, cloak thrown back over one shoulder, breath fogging in the cooler air of the yard. For a heartbeat, he simply stared, all polished composure stripped away in an instant. He saw Maekar and Lord Tully squared off in the centre, a knot of hardy rivermen around them offering their lives for a Trial of Seven. Maekar tore his gaze from Axel at last and met his brother’s dumbstruck eyes.
Do something, a plea only Baelor would recognise in that otherwise stone-hard face.
Baelor Breakspear, heir to the Iron Throne, took one long, stunned look at the scene and realised, with a sick drop in his gut, just how fast Aerion had dragged all of them to the edge of a cliff.
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They did not speak on the walk back.
Baelor sent the Kingsguard away with a look; the white cloaks peeled off reluctantly, like hounds called off meat. Maekar took Aerion by the arm—hard enough to bruise—and steered him into a side passage, up one flight, down another, into a council chamber whose door shut with a heavy, echoing thud.
Aerion opened his mouth.
Maekar hit him.
The slap cracked across the room like a misfired bolt, all the pent‑up fury and humiliation from the outside finally given a target. Maekar had been holding himself together out there—swallowing Tully’s words, the riverlords’ rage, his own shame until it sat in him like a stone—and the first step inside four walls gave that restraint somewhere to go. His hand moved before reason could catch it, a broad, calloused arc that had broken men on battlefields and now came down on his own son.
Aerion’s head snapped sideways; his body turned with it, shoulder slamming into the panelled wall hard enough to rattle the wood. For a heartbeat he just stayed there, one hand braced against the panelling to keep himself upright. Stars bursted behind his eyes in a dizzy, disorienting spray.
“You—”
Maekar snarled, a deep, coarse sound that seemed dragged up from somewhere under his ribs. His voice shook with anger when he spoke—an unfamiliar, ragged edge to it that Aerion, in all his life, had never heard turned fully on him. For a moment Maekar looked almost feral, hair fallen in a white curtain across part of his face, chest heaving from the effort of not hitting him again.
Aerion’s expression—the naked, startled fear there, the way his pupils had blown wide—not with excitement now but with the animal knowledge that his father might truly hurt him, cut through the red haze. Maekar’s offensive stance shifted. Baelor saw it happen: the small loosening around Maekar’s eyes as the furious squint eased, lids lifting in a flicker of shame and dawning regret.
Baelor didn’t move to stop it. He only closed the door more firmly, leaning his back against it for a second as if to bar the whole howling camp out.
Aerion straightened slowly. The side of his face was already reddening over the thin tracks of your nails. Blood from his lip welled fresh where the force had reopened it. His eyes glittered.
Maekar closed his eyes and straightened, drew in the deepest breath he could take. He opened his eyes again with a stark shift in his expression, as if someone else had just stepped into the conversation.
“What have you done?” Maekar demanded. The fury in his voice was leashed now, cold. It vibrated in every syllable.
“Why?”
Aerion’s mouth curled.
“She—”
“To dishonour yourself and your family like that,” Maekar cut across him. “The joust was enough. Then you murdered a lady’s dog?”
He spat out the last word as though it tasted foul and ridiculous on his tongue, and yet too heavy to ignore.
“I was told that hound was the only remaining memory of her dead family,” Baelor said quietly.
They both looked at him. Maekar’s eyes widened.
Baelor’s face was grey with fatigue; grief carved fine around his mouth. He had spoken to people in the yard on his way through; it showed. Baelor always collected stories as he moved.
“The sister,” he added. “The one who died after her parents. It was hers first.”
Maekar made a sound that was not quite a word. It lived somewhere between a curse and a groan.
“My gods,” he said, and sat back on the edge of the table behind him as if struck by sudden vertigo.
Maekar dragged a hand over his face, fingers grinding into the bony ridge where eyelids met brow before he shut his eyes. His thumbs dug hard in under either side of his jaw, as though he could press the whole mess back into shape by sheer force. “This cannot get any worse.”
“It can,” Baelor said. “And it will, if we mishandle it.”
“No matter how trained you are, Aerion,” Maekar said, turning back to his son, “you will be mauled to death by those men.”
Aerion’s eyes flashed.
“I won—”
“You will not,” Maekar snapped. “Did you not hear them out there? Blackwoods, Mallisters, men who’ve been swinging steel in rain since before you were off a rocking horse. And that scarred Blackwood boy has stood in real shield walls. You have stood in tourney lists.”
Maekar rubbed the bridge of his nose, trying to calm himself after the heavy words he’d just spoken.
“And if you fight for him, brother,” Baelor said, voice very thin now, “it will be worse.”
“I know.”
The admission came out like dragged iron.
“The sheer sight of him cowering behind my back,” he went on with disdain on his face, staring at Aerion as if measuring him for armour and for a grave at once, “while I disgrace myself with the fact of fighting instead of him. And I will, because I will not watch some unhinged fucking riverlord kill my own blood and not act.”
Aerion’s jaw jutted.
Baelor sighed. “The Trial of Seven is much worse. Too much death, and not the kind we need right now. Every man who bleeds in that yard will be a name spat in our faces for a generation.”
“I refuse to fight them,” Aerion said with full confidence.
The words dropped into the room with a thud. Maekar and Baelor both turned their heads toward him slowly, as if they had misheard.
“You cannot,” Maekar said. His voice took on a new, strained quality, thin with astonished indignation. “Refuse.”
Aerion stayed determined. “She attacked a prince. Her side gets punished, not ours. That is how it works.”
Maekar’s eyes closed for a second. He looked, bizarrely, like a man trying to ride out a blow to the head.
Baelor stepped in before his brother opened his eyes again.
“Accuse or not accuse,” Baelor said, his hand coming to rest, anchoring, on Maekar’s shoulder, “they’ve thrown down the gauntlet first—they’re the accusers now. No matter what sort of trial we chose, they would have met it with a ferocious charge. They are not afraid to spill blood—their own or ours.”
Maekar sighed.
“We must respond regardless. The gods don’t care who shouts first in the yard. It’s either trial by combat or a trial of Seven. And they have already chosen the latter.”
Maekar took another deep breath.
“Even if we win,” Baelor continued, eyes on Aerion, “the deaths of those lords will not be forgotten.”
Maekar’s fingers went to his temples, pressing hard as if an arrow had just gone in through one side of his skull and out the other.
“There’s also a third way,” Aerion said with a hint of mischief.
The room went still. Maekar lifted his head.
“Speak,” he said warily.
“She can make them withdraw the accusation.” Aerion let his words settle. “We take her as a political prisoner. Everyone lives. It’s a common practice.”
For a heartbeat, there was only the soft rasp of Maekar’s breath. Then he laughed almost hysterically. It was a harsh, incredulous sound, entirely without humour.
“Are you fucking kidding me?” he said, turning on Aerion as if he had suggested burning the Great Sept of Baelor. “You wish to rub salt in her wound and then force a finger into it? What the fuck are you talking about, boy?”
Baelor opened his mouth. Maekar didn’t wait.
“Her brother lies broken because of him,” he went on, jabbing a finger at Aerion without looking at him. “Her dog—a child’s remembrance, the last thing she had of dead kin—is cold in the yard. She throws herself at a dragon with her bare hands because she has nothing else left, and our answer is to drag her into our den as some final cruel jest? Instead of resolving it like men, by trial?”
Baelor’s jaw tightened. He didn’t flinch; he never had when Maekar spoke. But his gaze slid, just once, toward Aerion.
Maekar followed it.
They saw it then.
Just a flicker. A glint under Aerion’s lashes. The smallest twitch at the corner of his mouth, quickly smoothed.
Enjoyment.
Not of the politics or the cleverness of the solution. Of the idea of you, under their roof, under their guard, where he could see you and you could not leave.
Maekar’s stomach turned.
“You cannot be fucking serious,” he looked at Baelor, then at Aerion. His voice had gone low and dangerous. “Is this what it’s all about?”
Aerion didn’t answer. He didn’t need to—his face did enough. He had single‑handedly saved the crown in one swift argument and secured something for himself as a consolation prize, even though the whole mess had been caused solely by him. Aerion had always been as sharp as he was beautiful. The slight quirk of his mouth showed it all, and the hungry, restless brightness in his eyes had nothing to do with fear.
Baelor dropped his gaze, his throat working.
“Say something,” Maekar snapped at him. The shout ripped out of him raw.
Baelor looked up again, and the grief there was its own kind of answer.
“I am afraid it is,” he breathed. “And yes, it is… a good idea. Even if it pains me to admit it.”
Maekar made a disgusted sound, halfway between a scoff and a groan. He turned away, pacing a short, violent line from table to hearth and back again, as if he could walk off the shape of his own failure.
Aerion smiled more to himself than to them. The redness spread on his cheek where Maekar’s hand had struck him only made it more obscene. His fingertips lightly grazed the sting on his face, almost contemplative, as his gaze drifted, lost in a vivid daydream—as if playing out some future scene in a different room.
“I cannot talk to her, I will not go,” Maekar said hoarsely, waving in denial.
Baelor’s mouth curled. “I will, brother.”
Maekar closed his eyes, pressing them shut, hoping the absolute dark might somehow alter the reality of what had transpired. He opened his eyes, and the look on Aerion’s face sent a wave of nausea through him. It wasn’t his madness in that moment so much as calculation. He understood his son’s intentions, having learned to navigate them with a clenched jaw. Aerion’s suggestion aimed not just to escape judgment, but to keep you close—to turn your suffering into a new, private game.
At that moment Maekar realised, with the sharpness of Valyrian steel going clean through his gut, that he would have to do everything in his power not to let Aerion do that—the very least he owed Lord Tully, your father and you, for failing to protect you from his own son. A debt he could never pretend was anyone’s responsibility but his.
Sweet mourning maid
The Hound x Handmaiden reader one shot
Summary: Angsty one shot. Really this is just my little foray into what our beloved Hound and handmaiden reader feel after Ned Starks execution.
He couldn’t find you.
Everywhere he’d looked turned up empty. Not tucked away somewhere in the Kitchens chopping herbs or washing pots. That little mousy friend of yours didn’t know where you’d slunk off too. Cook didn’t know. Your rooms empty as a discarded steel helm. Twice as echoing.
Perhaps it’s because you didn’t want to be found.
He knows where to look when that happens. A dog with a bone.
He’d warned you not to go. He hadn’t spotted you in the bubbling, roiling crowds. Seething with hate. Smallfolk of Kings Landing that spit fury like a nest of riled snakes when they brought out the traitor, Ned Stark.
That doesn’t mean you listened. Of course you’d been there. You’d snuck out the castle with the thronging crowds of servants who’d attended. You hid at the back with a shawl over your hair. You watched everything.
Rage and agony boiled in your chest. Watching a mighty man bought low by that wretched gold cunt of a boy king. The way he’d sneered like a skeletons smile. The way he promised mercy. But chose death.
The last thing Ned Stark heard was his daughters ear-splitting screams for mercy, and the rabid crowds chanting his name to the tune of treason.
You wanted to look away. Your mind screamed too. Your eyes burned. But you couldn’t. Not even when they held his head aloft by his hair for people to spit and curse at.
The dishonour of it. The cruelty. It made your skin crawl. Sansa’s screams stayed with you. Followed you. The sight of proud Ned’s severed head. Joffreys smirk. It all dug under your skin like maggots and festered. Feasted. The way crows feasted on those who swung.
You could scarce speak to anyone when you came back. You stole a half drunk flagon of ale off the side in the kitchens. Sure enough it tasted like piss froth, but it was better than naught. And then you hid.
Not well enough it seems.
He followed a torch light path through the gardens. The air hanging verdant and petal sweet over him like a vulture. So many precious, sugary blooms surrounding him. Greenery swilled with heat from the pond where lillies sat spread on the waters surface.
He trudged a weary path. Eyes hunting in the dark. Feet falling powerful in the dark. Sinking into mud and over gravel. Seeking the shape of you.
He didn’t find you til he came to the very edge. In more ways than one.
The nook under a small gazebo where the cliff overlooked the sea. A secluded place wedged between gardens and the sea, where there was leas fear of the walls having eyes or ears. Except the shrubbery had many places for birds and spies to lurk unseen.
The place ladies came to natter to their handmaidens. Drink lemonade, sew, and eat fancy lemon cakes. Or whatever the hell else it was that highborn ladies did all day. Fucked if he knew.
He almost missed you at first glance. But then his eyes sunk into the proper shape of you.
The way the sea spray of the wind from the waves pushed your hair and skirts back. The blue that swallowed your skin from the midnight hour and the shade of the tide. Hunched in on yourself on the cold stone seat. Posed facing outwards. Back to any danger. Eyeing the sea like you wanted it to eat you whole.
There was a flagon at your hip. Overturned. Empty. Its contents in your belly.
Silver light slithered off the sea in bouncing waves, cast its fingers over all it touched. You, by extension. The night roamed its light through your swaying hair in silver. Made you like a dragon queen.
You heard his footsteps, singular heavy tread whose pattern you knew intimately, click of plate armour you knew the tune of, yet still you didn’t turn.
It was no use. For you were stuck in the realm of the dead.
“Shouldn’t be out here.” Came his rumbling warning. The way distant storms warn you of their impending violence: thunder grumbling low. That’s how his voice always sounded.
“Didn’t want to be under that fucking roof.”
The same roof as houses the killers, the bastards, and the liars. Tonight they could all rot in seven hells for all you cared.
His steps thudded to slow. Gravel and grit under boot as he closed the distance. Flower petals swaying in the wind. Lapping at his boots as he pushed through them.
“Should come back inside. Suppose you’re missed.”
“Fuck that.” You decide quietly. Staying anchored where you are.
You needed space and solitude. He more than anyone should understand that. The way he goes chomping through life with a bark forever suspended ready to snap and growl in his teeth. Clinging to shadows and believing himself monstrous. Needing space and giving no quarter to anyone else’s wants.
“You were there today.” He states slowly. Accusatory.
“Of course. Half the fucking kingdom was there.”
“I warned you not too.” An edge snuck in his growl. All sword edges and steel. He near begged you not to go this morning.
You turn over your shoulder and blast him a cold look. Colder than he knew you capable of. Like your eyes held sea and storms. Intent on washing him away.
“I’ve never been very good with warnings.” You bit out. Misery took your voice. Made it glum.
“Even if it’s to spare you pain, you dumb bitch.”
You let his harsh words roll down your skin. Like rain off a birds wing.
Calmly peer back round to watch the waves again. You cross your arms. Skin cold. Rest them in front of you. Slot your chin down on your wrist.
“My pain is nothing. Compared to the pain I saw on those steps today.”
He can’t argue with that.
“It was foul. No last words. No plea. No last drink. To not even warn that poor girl they’d kill her own father right in front of her.”
You sob. Tears burst again. Quietly trickle to your cheeks. Drop onto your dress.
No warning. No goodbye. No sympathy. That wasn’t the actions of a king. That was a spoilt brat child playing at crowns. Calling a slaughter merciful. If that was what the south called mercy, you’re glad your bones are northern.
“Is the king having a jolly banquet and feast to celebrate the dead starks? Don’t stay on my account. I’m sure you’re missing some excellent wine.” You snark. Half turning back as you sneered your venom.
Don’t throw me in with them. I’m a dog, remember.
Who holds your lead, Clegane?
He marched a step closer. “You think I like any of this?”
“I think it’s easy to stand to one side. To rest easy. With your comfortable rooms. Paid Lannister coin, steel in your hand, and comfort yourself with the fact it wasn’t you who lost your head today.”
“It wasn’t my will. Red. It was the King’s.” He pointed out harshly.
“To bring such a mighty man so low. To revel in his indignity. Aye. You’re right. That’s the southern cunt Lannister style alright.” You seethe.
You wanted to go and tear down their golden walls of this place with your bare hands. If you could. You’d wrench it down brick by rotten brick. Only it’s no use. They’d sunk their lion claws deep into the throne. No shaking it loose.
You meet his eyes, finally. They look near black as molasses in the dark. Tender and stuck to you. The moon hasn’t reached him. He’s in his shadows again. Where he finds comfort.
“You know I wouldn’t be sat here today if it werent for Ned Stark.” You add softly. Anger filtering away.
A shift of metal. A grizzled sigh moving through an ornery chest.
“I know.” He supposed quietly. Looks to his feet.
He edged in behind right you now. Past the chairs and tables. So close now the moonlight threaded itself in his hair. Down the bumped scars on his face. Skin glossy and twisting like new silver in the light.
He reached over. Uncertain. Wondering if you’d welcome his touch or scorn him. The way storm clouds take your eyes, the way poison is lashing off your tongue. He wonders if you’ll let him come close. A wild thing ready to scar and bite.
He rubs his thumb across one little scar on your back. A raised indent where tooth had torn you long ago. The touch calms you. Your skin was icy cold. Smooth as.
“He took mercy on me. He didn’t see me swing in a noose. He pardoned me and gave me work, when any other fat greedy lord would have buried me in the snow in a shallow grave…”
“Ned Stark was a good man. Maybe one of the best men out there.” He ceded.
You sniff. Wipe your nose with the back of your hand. “I think that’s the kindest thing I’ve ever heard you say, about anyone.”
You look back. Tilt your head up at him. His is tilted down at you.
“I may be the King’s dog. Doesn’t mean I like any of what they do.”
The crickets chirp around you. The waves roll and breaks to dashing salt on the rocks. The night air tugs your skin and clothes. Wraps you in coolness you don’t feel. There were more iron heavy words you weren’t saying. Eventually you give them shape.
“It’s not just that…” you supplied.
He knows there’s more words ready on your tongue. You only need find the bravery to speak them.
His fingers climb higher. Warm fingers come to rest on the round of your shoulder. Hand dwarfing you as they always did. He urges“Tell me.”
“That death means war. Sandor. The whole north will rally and march for revenge.”
“Aye.” He supposed grim.
Thunder breaks over the black water. Distantly, but sure enough. It’s deep drums hide behind the clouds. Rolling across the sky. Coming for the capital.
You lean back. Bracing yourself on his strong chest where he stood. Slide your fingers up to join his shoulder.
“Sansa?” You asked.
You both knew she wouldn’t be returning home.
“Will they marry their golden boy to a traitors daughter…”
He grumbles. Not knowing what to say. Casting his eyes across the bay where you were looking. The wrinkles by his eyes come up as he tries to spy the storm clouds coming your way.
“Her fate doesn’t look good.” He mumbles. Glum.
“What of Arya?” You ask. Softly. You both know full well that her fate is as ill as her sisters. What of the little one.
“She’s missing. No one can turn up the little wolf.”
“It’s a kindness if she escaped. She won’t find any mercy within these walls.”
“You think the world out there is going to be any kinder. Red.”
You hold his hand. Lean around. Nuzzle your lips to his knuckles. Lips soft against his war scarred skin. He always smelled of sweat, salt and metal.
“Anywhere’s kinder than here.” You cry. More tears drip over your cheeks. Salty as that ocean before you.
The thunder crashed over the bay. Loud as a battle. Churning clouds.
“I hate this fucking place.” You whispered. Hoping the harsh words would be carried away in the wind. Taken elsewhere. Maybe to your cold north. Where troops would be soon mobilised to march on these inbred golden cunts.
He leans down to brush his lips against your hair. Nuzzling his mouth to the crown of your head so he could find that sunny yellow jasmine oil you used.
“Aye love. Me too.”
Tagging some Hound babes - @konigslittleliebling @first-edition @catsteeth @castieltrash1 @terry2227 @justagirlwholikesadam @auxmodi @proseandpretrichor @novaursa @jxckerbxtch @mydearviserra @slut4thehound @yeyinde @jaimesrighthand @daydream818 @poisonousrain222 @slowlikehoney-stronglikemusic @itisjustwhatitis @hauerhoetime @siredskies @broadsdrinkwhisky @melmightwrite @nalitali @redeadbucky @crimsonxcobra @shyloudpanda @uselessnewt @urmomdotcom131 @abirdinthehouse @perkqularkreashions @mistershotz @morri-draws @pamurpamur
Wildflowers in Caldera
Chapter Two: Bird in the Hand
Chapter Tags/Warnings: flustered Zuko my beloved, author who can't keep a succulent alive tries to describe how to take care of plants
Chapter WC: 7,723
A/N: Ty for the likes/comments/reblogs on the last chapter! Hopefully my portrayal of Zuko doesn’t disappoint.
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You wake to the sound of birdsong and the soft warmth of sunlight on your face. It takes you longer than you’d like to admit to remember where you are, but when you do, a strange mix of relief and disappointment washes over you. You don't know why, but a part of you was worried you'd wake up and discover last night was a dream. Or maybe that it wasn't a dream, and that Zuko was going to kick you out, or worse, drag you in front of the magistrate himself.
But no, it was real. You're really here, in the palace, and he's really not going to make you leave. You're safe, for the time being.
The thought brings with it an unfamiliar sense of calm, and you take a deep breath, savoring the moment. The birds are singing, the morning sun is streaming in through the balcony doors, and you have nowhere to be, nothing to do, for once. It's nice.
You're half-tempted to burrow deeper into the soft pillows and drift back off to sleep, but a gentle knock at the door interrupts the fantasy. You push yourself up on your elbows, frowning. Who would be knocking at your door this early?
Another knock, more insistent this time, and you can hear a muffled voice from the other side of the door. "My Lady? Are you awake?"
You sigh and sit up, rubbing the sleep from your eyes. "Come in."
The door opens, and the servant from dinner the night before enters, a breakfast tray balanced expertly in her hands. She's dressed in the same red-and-gold uniform as before, and her hair is done up in a neat bun, a few stray wisps escaping to frame her face.
"Good morning, my Lady," she says, bowing her head. "I hope you slept well."
"Good morning," you say, forcing a smile. You don't want her to feel bad, not when she's only doing her job. "And yes, I did. Thank you."
She sets the tray down on the table near the balcony doors, the porcelain dishes clinking softly as she does. You’re relieved to see it’s a simple spread, just tea, congee, and a bowl of fruit. Though the flower in the tiny vase is an unexpected touch.
"Lord Zuko thought you might like breakfast," she says, adjusting the vase and fussing with the arrangement of the dishes. "He sends his apologies for not being able to join you, but he has a meeting with the trade council this morning."
"That's fine," you say, trying not to feel disappointed. You didn't expect him to take the morning off, not for you. "What time is it, anyway?"
"Just after eight, my Lady," she says as she smoothes out an invisible wrinkle in the tablecloth. She steps back and gives the arrangement a satisfied nod, before turning to face you again. "If you'd like, I can draw you a bath. Or a hot towel, if you prefer. And the seamstress will be here in an hour to take your measurements."
"Seamstress?" you ask. "For what?"
"For your wardrobe,” she answers, gesturing to the closet you’d perused yesterday, where your threadbare clothes hang next to the array of silk and satin. "The Fire Lord mentioned you didn’t bring much with you. He’s taken the liberty of providing you with a few things. But the seamstress will need your measurements to make any adjustments."
"He… what?" you sputter as the words finally sink in. He's having a whole new wardrobe made for you. A whole new wardrobe of clothes that you have no intention of wearing. You're here for a few days, a week at most, and you're perfectly happy in your own clothes.
You know, though, that this is one battle you're not going to win. He’s already gone to all this trouble, and you don't want to hurt his feelings. Again. So you'll just have to grin and bear it. You'll let the seamstress take your measurements, and you'll try on the ridiculous clothes, and you'll pretend that you're not completely and totally out of your element.
"Okay," you say, your voice tight. "That's... fine."
A small smile breaks through her formal mask. "Great. I’ll send for her."
She gives you a quick bow, and then she's gone, leaving you alone with your thoughts and a breakfast you're no longer hungry for. You pour a cup of tea and take a slow sip, trying to ignore the knot of unease tightening in your stomach. You’re being ungrateful. You know you are. He’s just trying to be nice. He’s just trying to take care of you, in the only way he knows how.
But it’s too much. It’s all too much.
You stand up and walk to the balcony, the morning sun warm on your skin. The city below is starting to come to life, the streets filling with people and the sounds of a new day. You watch them for a while, trying to lose yourself in the rhythm of their lives, in the simple, everyday act of living. You need to get out of here. You need to get some fresh air, to feel the earth beneath your feet, to be somewhere you're not a charity case. You need to be somewhere you belong.
But you can't leave. You're trapped. Not by the walls of the palace, but by your own stupid, stubborn pride. You don't want to disappoint Zuko. You don't want to hurt him. But so far, you’ve only done both, and you’re not sure how to stop.
A soft knock on the door pulls you from your thoughts. You take a deep breath and brace yourself.
The door opens, and an older woman with silver hair pulled back in a severe bun enters. She's carrying a large, leather-bound book and a narrow box, and she has the same no-nonsense look as the servant who’d brought your breakfast. You recognize her from your brief tour of the palace as the head seamstress, and your stomach sinks.
“My Lady,” she says, her head bowed. “I am here to take your measurements.”
“Right,” you say tightly. “Of course. Let’s just get this over with.”
She sets her things down on the table and opens the book, revealing a dizzying array of fabric swatches and design sketches. She looks at you, her eyes narrowed, and you have the sudden, unnerving feeling that she can see right through you, through the threadbare cotton of your nightdress and the flimsy armor of your good humor. You look away.
“If you could just stand here, my Lady,” she points. “And hold your arms out to the side.”
You do as she asks, your movements stiff and awkward. You feel like a bug pinned to a board. She wraps a measuring tape around your chest, your waist, your hips with quick movements. She calls out the numbers, her tone flat and clinical, and you try to ignore the heat creeping up your neck. You’re used to being looked at, but this is different. This is... invasive.
“You have a strong frame,” she says, and you’re surprised by the note of approval in her voice. “Good, solid bone structure. You’ll be able to carry the heavier fabrics without it looking… costume-y.”
“I… thank you?” you say, not sure if that’s a compliment or an insult.
“The Fire Lord’s orders were very specific,” she continues, unspooling the tape and moving to your arms. “He wants you to be comfortable. But he also wants you to look… presentable. To be an ambassador for the new Fire Nation.”
“He said that?”
“He did,” she confirms without looking up. “He thinks very highly of you, my Lady.”
You don’t know what to say to that, so you just stand there, your arms outstretched, and you let her work. You try to process her words, to make sense of the strange, warm feeling that’s spreading through your chest. He thinks highly of you. Of course he does. You’re friends. But the way she said it made it sound like something else.
She finishes with the measurements and closes her book, a satisfied look on her face. You watch as she moves to the closet and gathers the finery hanging beside your own clothes, holding each garment up to the light before she folds it and places it in a large wicker basket.
“These will all be altered to fit you,” she says, gesturing to the basket. “I’ll have my girls work on them today. They should be ready by tomorrow morning.”
“Tomorrow?” you repeat. You’re sure you must have heard her wrong. “You can have all of this done by tomorrow?”
“We can,” she says with a proud smile. “We are very good at what we do.”
She picks up the basket and turns to leave, but she stops at the door and looks back at you, her head tilted to the side. “Lord Zuko also mentioned you might enjoy something a little more… practical. For your daily activities. We have some lovely linens and cottons, if you’d like to see them.”
“I… I would,” you say softly. “I would like that very much.”
She gives you a small nod, and then she’s gone, leaving you alone to stare at your single outfit still swaying on its wooden hanger.
The morning passes in a blur of activity. You bathe in the massive tub with jasmine oils. You explore the study, finding a collection of scrolls on horticulture and agriculture, and you spend a pleasant hour reading about the cultivation of fire lilies. You even venture out onto the balcony to do your katas before the feeling of being a caged bird returns with a vengeance, and you retreat back into the gilded safety of your rooms.
By the time your guide returns to lead you to the royal gardens, you’re buzzing with a nervous energy you can’t quite shake. You're looking forward to seeing Zuko, but you're also dreading it. Every interaction with him feels like a minefield now, and you're afraid you're going to say the wrong thing, do the wrong thing, and ruin the fragile peace you've found.
You follow your guide through the winding corridors of the palace, trying to keep up with her hurried pace. The halls are bustling with courtiers and officials, all of whom stop to stare as you pass. You can hear their whispers, feel their eyes on your back, and you straighten your shoulders, a defiant tilt to your chin. You refuse to let them intimidate you. You’ve faced down firebending warlords and vengeful spirits. A few nosy nobles are nothing.
Zuko intercepts you just as you reach a set of grand doors, propped open to let the spring breeze flow through. He’s wearing a brocade robe of black and gold, crown nestled on his topknot, and he’s frowning at a scroll in his hands. He doesn’t notice you at first, and you take a moment to study him, to see the Fire Lord instead of your friend.
He’s changed. The years have carved new lines and shadows around his eyes, and the stoic set of his jaw is more pronounced than you remember. There's a gravity to him now, a weight of responsibility that sits heavy on his shoulders. He looks older, tired. But he also looks… settled. At peace with himself in a way he never was when you were younger.
He looks up then, and his frown melts away when he sees you. A genuine smile spreads slowly across his face, and the guards standing at attention nearby visibly flinch in surprise. You have a feeling they don't see that smile very often.
“There you are,” he says as he rolls up the scroll with a flick of his wrist. “I was starting to think you’d gotten lost.”
“It was a near thing,” you grin. “This place is a maze.”
“Tell me about it. I still get lost sometimes, and I live here.”
Your guide steps forward to take the scroll from him, and Zuko surprises you by removing his heavy robe next. The fabric drags on the ground for a moment before the servant can catch it, stumbling slightly under the weight. He’s left in a simpler tunic and loose trousers, an outfit you’ve seen him wear a hundred times. He moves more freely already, the tense set of his shoulders relaxing as he rolls the stiffness from his neck.
“These can go back to my study," he tells the woman. "And we’ll be in the garden. No interruptions.”
The guide bows, her eyes wide. “Of course, my Lord.”
“Let’s go,” he says, turning back to you with that same smile. “Before someone finds another ‘urgent’ matter for me to attend to.”
Zuko doesn't offer you his arm this time, but he walks close enough that your knuckles brush against his with every other step. The simple, accidental contact sends a jolt of awareness through you, and you have to fight the urge to pull away. You haven't felt this awkward around him since the early days, when you were still trying to figure out if he was going to try to kill you in your sleep. You don't understand why it’s happening now.
The guards who had been flanking him peel away and stand just outside the doors as you step through them, into the warm afternoon sun. The smell hits you first, a rich, loamy scent of damp earth, blooming flowers, and freshly cut grass. It's so different from the sterile, perfumed air of the palace that you stop for a moment and just breathe, your eyes roving over the vast expanse of color before you.
You’ve seen some of the most beautiful places in the world, but this… this is something else. It’s a carefully curated, meticulously maintained slice of paradise, and it’s breathtaking. Despite the obvious effort to order the wildness of nature, the sheer, untamable life-force of it all is a relief. You can feel the thrum of the earth beneath your feet here, even more than in the city. This is better. This is a place you can understand.
“It’s something, isn’t it?” Zuko asks from beside you.
“It’s beautiful,” you breathe out, your eyes wide with wonder. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”
“My grandfather had it designed,” he says, a wry note in his voice. “He had a thing for dragons.”
You follow his gaze and see them, then. They’re carved into the stone of the pathways, long, sinuous bodies twisting through the beds of flowers. They're in the metalwork of the benches with wings spread in flight, and they’re in the fountains with all-seeing stone eyes. A silent, imposing reminder of the power and the pride of the Fire Nation, everywhere you look. Your nose wrinkles.
“Well, they’re no turtleducks.”
He snorts a laugh. “No, they’re not. But they have their charms. This way.”
He leads you down a winding path, past beds of lupines and fire lilies with blooms as big as your fist. The air is buzzing with the drone of bees, and the sun is warm on your skin. You feel the last of the tightness in your shoulders finally dissolve, and your earlier enthusiasm returns, bubbling up inside of you like a spring from where your feet touch the ground.
You can't resist. You stop, pressing your palm to the earth, and you let a small tendril of stone rise up. You shape it with your fingers, coaxing it into the rough likeness of an hibiscus growing beside you. It's crude, and a little bit lopsided, but it has a certain charm, if you do say so yourself.
You turn to Zuko, expecting an eye roll or an exasperated sigh. Instead, you find him watching you with an amused smile, his arms crossed over his chest.
"Neat trick," he says. "Can you make it a komodo rhino?"
"It's a flower," you say with a laugh. "It wants to be a flower. You can't force these things."
"Right," he says, a thoughtful look on his face. "The earth gives you what it wants to give you."
"Exactly," you smile, letting the flower crumble back into dust. "It's a conversation. You can't just… tell it what to do. You have to listen."
You're not sure if he understands what you mean by that, or if he's just humoring you, but Zuko doesn't press the issue. He just nods and leads you further into the garden, and you walk beside him, your hands swinging at your sides. You fall into an easy rhythm, the silence between you comfortable, companionable. You feel like you could walk with him forever.
You’re so caught up in the beauty of the gardens, in the simple joy of being in his company, that you almost forget the nagging questions that have been plaguing you. But as you round a corner and a stunning collection of bonsai trees comes into view, you find yourself asking before you can stop yourself.
“How’s Mai? She didn’t want to come with us? I bet she’d love the peacocks.”
You say it casually, but you’re not feeling casual. Your stomach is in knots, and your heart is beating a little too fast in your chest. But you have to know. You have to know if the life he’s built for himself includes her, the way you always assumed it would.
The thought sends a sharp pang of something that feels an awful lot like jealousy through you, and you push it down, hard. You just need to know he’s not alone in this palace, that’s all.
Zuko looks at you like you’ve sprouted a second head. Now your stomach hurts, and you’re confused.
“Mai? Oh. She’s fine, I think,” he says, and the casual dismissal is so unlike him that it makes you frown. “She’s in Jonduri. And she hates birds. All birds. She thinks they’re…messy.”
“Oh,” you say, your brow furrowing. That explains why she’s not here, but not why he’s talking about her like she’s a distant acquaintance, not the woman he’s supposed to be in love with. “It must be hard, having her so far away.”
“It’s fine.” He shrugs. “We send letters sometimes.”
Letters? Sometimes? You stop walking. This isn't right. This isn't the Zuko and Mai you remember. They were always so intense, so wrapped up in each other, so dramatic. You remember the charged silences and the meaningful glances, the way they were always touching, even when they were fighting. This… this is nothing. This is… friendship. And a lukewarm one, at that.
You open your mouth to ask him what’s going on, but he’s already moving, turning a corner and nearly disappearing behind a hedge of vibrant, pink bougainvillea. You quickly jog after him, shaking your head.
“Here we are,” Zuko says as he stops in front of a simple wooden gate. “This is what I wanted to show you.”
You look from him to the gate, a frown still set on your face. You want to press him for more information about Mai, to demand to know what he's not telling you, but his expression stops you. His earlier awkwardness has returned, and he's shifting from foot to foot, his hands clasped behind his back like he’s waiting for a verdict.
Zuko takes a deep breath and pushes open the gate, gesturing for you to go inside. You give him a questioning look before you step through, and what you see when you emerge stops you in your tracks.
It's a garden. But it's not like the rest of the manicured, ordered gardens you’ve been walking through. This is wild, chaotic, and teeming with life. It’s a riot of green and brown, with a few splashes of color from the flowers that have managed to stake their claim among the weeds. A trickling stream meanders through the middle of the plot, and a small, rickety-looking bridge spans its width. There’s a wooden shed in one corner, roof sagging and windows caked with dirt. You spot a citrus tree struggling under the weight of its own fruit, and a small patch of what looks like tomatoes with vines spreading in all directions.
It’s messy. It’s overgrown. It’s perfect. And in the middle of it all, a single, stubborn fire lily pushes its way through the hard packed soil.
“Zuko, this is incredible,” you breathe out, moving to inspect the cabbage roses that have escaped their neatly trimmed beds. They’re twice the size of any you’ve ever seen, and you find yourself checking the stems for signs of pests. You find a few, but not enough to cause any real damage. You'll need to mix a soap spray, but it can wait until tomorrow.
“I’m glad you think so,” he says, and you can hear the relief in his voice. He follows you as you move to the citrus tree, frowning at the yellowing leaves.
“It’s getting too much water,” you say, more to yourself than to him. You check the soil around the base of the trunk, your fingers sinking into the rich, dark earth. “And it needs to be fertilized. Have you been using the compost?”
“I… have not,” he admits. “I wasn't sure how.”
“Of course,” you mutter as you walk to the wooden shed, pulling open the door. Your nose is immediately assaulted by the sharp, chemical smell of improperly aged fertilizer, and you wrinkle your nose in disgust and slam the door. “Oh, Zuko. This is a mess.”
You turn to face him and find him standing there, hands tucked into his pockets, a helpless look on his face. He looks so out of place among the weeds and the overgrown plants, and you have to fight the urge to laugh. He’s the Fire Lord. He commands armies and negotiates treaties, but he’s defeated by a pile of compost.
“Don’t you have gardeners for this?” you ask, a teasing note in your voice. You gesture to the garden around you. “Surely they can handle a few weeds and some fertilizer.”
His face falters, and he looks away, crossing his arms over his chest. “They were ordered not to touch it. This used to be my mother’s garden. After she… after she left, no one was allowed to come in here. And it just… fell apart.”
Oh.
His mother's garden. Of course. You look around again, and you can see her influence in the choice of plants, in the layout of the paths. It’s a place of beauty and peace, a sanctuary, and you can understand why he would want to keep it safe. Why he would want to keep it exactly as she left it. But it's not a sanctuary anymore. It's a tomb. And you know, better than anyone, that tombs are no place for the living.
“I’m sorry,” you murmur. “I didn't know.”
“It’s fine,” he says, but it’s not. You can hear the pain in his voice. “I tried to take care of it for a while, after I came back. But I… I’m not very good at it. And I didn’t have the time.”
“You were a little busy,” you say gently. “Fixing the world and all.”
A faint smile touches his lips. “Something like that.”
Zuko straightens, stuffing his hands back into his pockets. “But I was thinking,” he continues, his gaze fixed on the lone fire lily in the middle of the garden. “That maybe you could… help. If you wanted to.”
Your eyes widen, and the caged bird of your heart beats its wings against your ribs. This is what he was so nervous about? This is the secret he was keeping? He wasn’t asking you to be his ambassador. He was asking you to be his gardener. And it's the most thoughtful, most perfect thing anyone has ever offered you.
“You want me to… fix your garden?” you ask, just to be sure. He's the Fire Lord. He has an entire staff of gardeners at his disposal. Why would he want you?
“I want you to bring it back to life,” he corrects quietly, finally meeting your eyes. “I think my mother would have liked that.”
A slow smile spreads across your face, and you can feel the joy bubbling up inside of you, bright and effervescent. You could learn so much from this garden, and you could create something truly special, something that would honor his mother and bring him joy. You could help him, actually help him, in a way that matters. In a way that you understand.
You let out a happy whoop and launch yourself at him, wrapping your arms around his neck and nearly sending you both careening into the lemon tree. Zuko lets out a choked sound of surprise as you hug him, and for a moment he just stands there, stiff and awkward, before he hesitantly pats your back. You bury your face in the crook of his neck, breathing in the familiar scent of smoke and spice.
“Is that a yes?” he asks, his voice hoarse.
“Of course it’s a yes,” you murmur against his skin. “It’s a definite, absolute yes.”
You pull away, your hands still resting on his shoulders, and look up at him. His face is flushed, and there's a dazed expression in his eyes. “Good,” he says, a little breathless. “That’s… good.”
You can’t help but grin at his flustered state, and you lean in closer. “You’re going to regret this, you know. I have very high standards. There will be no chemical fertilizers. No pesticides. We’re going to do this the right way.”
“I wouldn’t expect anything less,” he says as a genuine smile finally breaks through. His hands come up to rest on your waist, and he gently sets you back on your feet. “I’ll have my people draw up a contract.”
“Oh, you will not,” you laugh, letting go of him and turning back to the garden, your mind already racing with ideas. “This is a pro-bono gig. My payment is the satisfaction of a job well done. And unlimited access to the royal compost piles. And you have to help.”
“Me?” His eyes widen. “I have a country to run.”
“Not all the time,” you say, pointing a finger at him. “And I’m sure you can spare an hour or two a week. It’s good for you. Fresh air, manual labor. Builds character.”
You’re already walking, already moving, already planning. Zuko trails after you, a bemused look on his face, as you circle the garden , your hands clasped behind your back. You’re talking to yourself, muttering about soil quality and crop rotation and companion planting, and you can feel his eyes on you, but you don’t care. For the first time in days , you feel like you’re in your element, like you’re exactly where you’re supposed to be.
“—and we’ll need to build a proper compost bin, something with three sections so we can turn it properly, and we should get a rain barrel for the shed, and do you have any seeds? We’ll need seeds. We could order some from Makapu, they have the best—”
You stop, turning to face him, and he’s just standing there, a smile playing on his lips, his hands tucked in his pockets. He looks happier, lighter, than you've seen him since you arrived, and the sight makes your heart ache in the strangest, sweetest way.
“What?” you ask, your hands on your hips. “Am I boring you?”
“No.” He shakes his head. “Not at all. I just… I like seeing you like this.”
“Like what?” you frown. “Dirty and sweaty and bossing you around?”
“Enthusiastic,” he corrects quietly. “It’s nice.”
The warmth that spreads through your chest at his words is entirely unfamiliar, and you have to look away, a flush creeping up your neck. He’s right. You are happy. You’re happier than you’ve been in a long, long time, and he’s the reason. He brought you here, to this place, and he gave you this gift. This wild, messy, overgrown piece of paradise.
Your gaze falls on the single fire lily in the middle of the garden as you struggle to find the words to fill the silence, to push back the sudden surge of confusing, unwelcome feelings he's stirring up in you. You’re a nomad. You’re a wanderer. You don’t stay in one place for long. You don’t get attached. But you already are. You were attached the moment you met him. Even when he was trying to capture Aang, even when he was your enemy, you were attached. You saw the good in him, the person he was trying to be, and you held onto that. You’ve been holding onto it ever since.
"Right," you say, a bit more subdued. "Well, I'll need to assess the soil, and make an inventory of what's already here. And then I'll need to draw up a plan, and get your approval, of course. And then we can start."
"Of course," he agrees. "Whatever you need."
You nod and try to ignore the way your stomach flutters at the simple, trusting generosity in his voice. This is a bad idea. A terrible, wonderful, horrible idea. You should say no. You should thank him for the offer, pack your bags, and leave before you do something stupid. Before you ruin the best friendship you've ever had.
But you won't. You know you won't.
"So," Zuko starts with a cough, breaking you from your spiral. He points his thumb over his shoulder. "Now that that's settled, do you want to see the peacocks?"
You turn to him, a grin spreading across your face. "I thought you'd never ask."
You spend the rest of the afternoon in the gardens, Zuko trailing after you as you stop to examine the plants every few feet, your hands moving over leaves and stems, your brow furrowed in concentration. He doesn't say much, just watches, and you find that you don't mind. It’s comforting. Like having your own personal, very handsome, very quiet shadow.
The komodo peacocks are, as expected, ridiculous. They strut around like they own the place, their iridescent tails fanning out in a display of vanity. You laugh until your sides hurt, especially when one of them takes offense to Zuko’s shiny shoes and tries to peck them.
The sun is setting by the time you make it back to the palace, painting the sky in vivid, swirling hues of red and gold. You're buzzing with a nervous energy, a mix of excitement for the project and a healthy dose of fear for what it might mean for your friendship, for your life. But you’ve never backed down from a challenge before, and you’re not about to start now.
"So, what do you think? Can you work with this?" he asks as you walk.
"Oh, absolutely," you nod, a skip to your step. You’re on his arm again, and he lets you pull him along without complaint. "This is a dream come true. I've never seen anything like it. The potential is just...wow."
“I wasn’t sure if you had the time,” he admits. “I know how important your work is.”
“My work will still be there when I’m done,” you say, waving a dismissive hand. “And the world needs more beautiful things. Don’t you think?”
You look over at him, and he’s already looking at you, a soft, fond smile on his face. Your breath catches in your throat, and you have to look away, your cheeks flushing. He’s been doing that a lot today. Just looking at you. You don’t remember him being so… watchful, so attentive. Maybe you never noticed before.
“Plus, it’s for you. Of course I’d make the time,” you add, squeezing his arm in a way you hope is casual.
His steps falter, just for a moment, and you feel the muscle in his arm tense beneath your touch. “You don’t have to do that,” he says quietly.
“I know,” you reply. “But I want to. You’re my friend, Zuko. I’d do anything for you.”
You can feel the tension radiating off of him as he processes your words, and you're not sure what to make of it. You were just being honest, but it seems to have hit a nerve. He's quiet for a long moment, his jaw working as he stares ahead, and you're about to ask him what's wrong, when he finally speaks.
"I... I appreciate that," he says, his voice tight. "More than you know. And I'm glad you're here. I've...I've missed you."
Your breath catches, and you look up at him, your heart swelling with affection. You've missed him, too, more than you'd like to admit. There's been a hole in your life since the war ended, a space that used to be filled with laughter and adventure and the easy camaraderie of your friends. You've kept in touch, of course, but it's not the same. It's not the same as being here, with him, in this strange, beautiful, overwhelming place.
"I've missed you, too," you say, and you give his arm another squeeze, trying to convey all the things you can't say. "But I'm here now. And I'm not going anywhere for a while."
"Good," he murmurs. "I'm glad."
You're back inside the palace now, and a servant is waiting to lead you to the dining hall. You can't help but notice the way they glance at Zuko's arm, still linked with yours, and you feel a flash of self-consciousness. You quickly pull away, not wanting to cause any more gossip, and you wrap your arms around your middle.
Zuko frowns, but doesn't say anything. Instead, he just leads the way to the dining hall, his back straight and his hands clenched into fists. You follow him, wishing you could take back your hasty movement. You don't want to make things awkward between you, but you can't help but be aware of the rumors that could start, the whispers that could follow you. You're not here to cause a scandal, and you're definitely not here to break up the Fire Lord and his girlfriend. Even if she's in another city, and they only "sometimes" send letters.
You reach the dining hall, and the same servant from this morning is waiting for you. She’s a little less stiff than she was before, but you can still see the curiosity in her eyes as she looks between the two of you. You give her a small smile, hoping to put her at ease, but she just looks away, her cheeks flushing. Great. You're going to be the talk of the palace before the day is out.
Zuko pulls out your chair for you with a jerky motion, and you murmur a quiet "thank you" as you sit down. He takes the seat next to you, and the two of you sit in silence as the servants bring out the food. Tonight, the spread is much simpler, just a few dishes of rice, fish, and vegetables, and you feel a wave of relief. You’re not sure you could handle another feast.
As you eat, you try to make small talk, asking about his day and the council meeting he'd mentioned earlier. He’s quiet, his answers short and to the point, and you can tell that something is bothering him. You have a sinking feeling that it’s you, but you can't for the life of you figure out what it is.
Finally, you can't take it anymore. "What's wrong?" you ask, your voice a bit sharper than you intended. "You've been staring at me all night. Did I spill something on my shirt?"
“What?” His head snaps up, and you realize he must have been miles away. “No. No, you didn’t. I was just… thinking.”
“About what?” you press, setting your chopsticks down. "Is it about the garden? Because if you're having second thoughts, you should just tell me. I won't be upset."
He shakes his head, his brow furrowed. "No, it's not that. I'm not having second thoughts. I want you to do it. I just... I have a question, and I'm not sure how to ask it."
"Well, you can ask me anything," you say. "We're friends."
“Then why do you keep pulling away from me?"
You blink at him, taken aback by the hurt in his voice. You were expecting a question about the garden, or the council, or the state of the Fire Nation. You were not expecting this. You were not expecting him to call you out, to lay your insecurities bare on the polished mahogany of the dining table.
“I… I don’t know what you’re talking about,” you stammer, and Zuko scoffs.
"Yes, you do," he insists. "You did it yesterday, in the hallway. And you did it again today. I'm not an idiot, I know we're being watched, but I don't understand why you feel like you have to act like we're strangers."
Your mind races as you try to come up with a plausible explanation. You can't very well tell him you're worried about people getting the wrong idea about the two of you. That would make things even more awkward, and you'd have to explain why you care so much about rumors. You're not even sure why you care, to be honest. You've never been one to worry about what other people think.
But the thought of being the subject of palace gossip, of being the other woman in a story you don't even understand , makes your stomach churn. You don't want to be that person. You don't want to be a complication in his life.
"I'm just... trying to be respectful," you finally settle on, and you can hear the weakness in your own voice. "You're the Fire Lord, and I'm your guest. I'm not sure what the rules are."
"The rules are that we're friends," he says as he leans in closer, his elbows on the table. "And that we can act like it. I don't care what anyone else thinks."
Easy for him to say. He's the Fire Lord. He doesn't have to deal with the whispers and the sideways glances. He doesn't have to worry about being seen as a gold-digging trollop who's trying to worm her way into the royal bedchamber.
"I care.” You look down at your plate, pushing a piece of fish around with your chopsticks. "I don't want to make things difficult for you. You have enough to deal with without having to manage a scandal."
A silence falls between you, thick and heavy. You risk a glance up at him, and you see a whole range of emotions cross his face. Confusion, frustration, and finally, a dawning realization. Some of the tension leaves his shoulders, and he lets out a slow, careful breath.
“You’re not making things difficult for me,” he says, his voice quieter now, more measured. “You’re making them better. Just by being here.”
You want to believe him, you really do, but a nagging doubt lingers in the back of your mind. You can't shake the feeling that you're in over your head, that you're playing a game you don't know the rules to. And you're afraid of getting hurt, or worse, hurting him.
"Okay," you say, your voice small. "I'll try to remember that."
"Good.” Zuko reaches across the table, taking your hand in his. His palm is warm, calloused from years of sword-fighting, and your fingers curl around his on instinct. “Because I really… I really want you to stay.”
The sincerity in his voice is your undoing. You look up at him, and your heart aches at the hopeful, vulnerable look on his face. He's not the Fire Lord right now. He's just Zuko. Your friend. The boy you watched grow from an angry, lost child into a strong, capable man. And you can't say no to him. You never could.
"I'll stay," you promise, and you give his hand a squeeze. "For the garden, of course."
The relieved smile that spreads across his face is worth more than any treasure in the world. He squeezes your hand once, fingers trailing across your knuckles before he lets go, leaving the skin tingling in their wake. You quickly pull your hand back, a rush of heat flooding your cheeks, and focus on your food.
You finish the rest of your meal in a comfortable quiet. Zuko tells you about the new trade routes he's trying to establish with the Earth Kingdom, and you tell him about a new irrigation system you helped design for a village in the Si Wong Desert. It’s easy, this. Falling back into the familiar rhythm of your friendship, the shared experiences and inside jokes that have bonded you together over the years.
Before long, your heads are bowed together, eagerly trading ideas for the garden. Zuko calls for parchment and charcoal, and you sketch out a rough plan right there on the table, your hands flying across the page as you describe your vision. A space that is both productive and beautiful, a place where his mother’s spirit can rest, and where he can find some peace from the pressures of his new life. One with plants not just from the Fire Nation, but from all four nations, a true symbol of the world he is trying to build.
He listens intently, asking questions and offering suggestions, and you’re so caught up in the excitement of it all that you don’t notice how dark it’s grown in the chamber until a discrete cough from the doorway interrupts you mid-sentence.
You look up to see Zuko’s grand chamberlain, Shoji, standing in the doorway, a scroll clutched in his hands and a pained expression on his face. Zuko, however, doesn’t look up at all.
“Just a minute, Shoji,” he says, waving a dismissive hand, before turning back to you. “And we could put the pond right here, by the bridge. The stream could feed into it.”
You nod, adding a few quick lines to the sketch and a note in the margins. “There are a few bioluminescent species of lily that grow on Jasmine Island. They would look incredible at night. Like a patch of stars.”
Zuko leans in closer, his head bent next to yours as he studies the drawing. “That’s… that’s a great idea.” His voice is a low murmur, and you can feel the warmth of his breath on your cheek, the scent of tea and spice. A shiver runs down your spine, and you quickly pull away, putting some much-needed distance between you. You clear your throat, a little too loudly, and focus back on the drawing.
You can feel the weight of Shoji's stare on you, and you know you’ve overstayed your welcome. You’ve kept the Fire Lord from his duties long enough.
You start to gather your things, but Zuko puts a hand on your arm, stopping you. “Don’t go,” he says. “We’re not done.”
“Lord Zuko,” Shoji interjects, his voice strained. “The Admiral is waiting. He’s been waiting for over an hour.”
An hour? You shoot a guilty look at Zuko, but he just waves Shoji off again. “He can wait a little longer. I’m in a meeting.”
“With whom, my lord?” Shoji asks. You can hear the unspoken question in his voice. That creeping feeling of being a problem returns, settling uncomfortably in your chest. You’re an interruption. An inconvenience. You’re keeping him from his responsibilities, from doing the work he was meant to do.
“With my head gardener,” Zuko answers without missing a beat.
Your head whips around to stare at him, and your heart gives a lurch in your chest. You’re not sure if you like the sound of that. It sounds official. Permanent. It sounds like something you can’t just walk away from when the whispers get too loud.
The look Shoji gives you confirms your fears. His thin lips press into a tight line, and his mustache seems to quiver with disapproval. He doesn’t believe you’re a head gardener. He thinks you’re something else entirely. Something much, much worse.
You have to get out of here. Before you do any more damage.
“Right, well, I’m exhausted,” you announce, standing up so quickly that your chair scrapes against the floor. “All that garden-planning has really taken it out of me. I should probably go to bed. Big day tomorrow. Weeding. And… soil analysis.”
Zuko looks up to you, his brow furrowed. He can probably tell you’re lying, but you don’t care. You just need to get out of this room, away from Shoji’s judgmental stare and Zuko’s intense, unnerving focus. You’re starting to feel like a cornered animal, and you need to run.
“But—” he starts, but you cut him off.
“I’ll see you in the morning,” you say, already backing away towards the door. “In the garden. Bright and early. Don’t be late.”
You turn and flee before he can say another word, almost running into Shoji in your haste to escape. You give him a wide berth and a tight smile, but he just stands there, a silent, disapproving statue. You can feel his eyes on your back as you hurry down the hall, and it makes you walk faster.
When you reach your room, you shut the door behind you and lean against it, taking deep breaths to calm yourself. Your heart is pounding in your chest, and you can still feel the phantom warmth of Zuko's touch on your skin. You're overreacting, you know you are. He's just being friendly. He's just happy to have a friend here, someone who knew him before he was the Fire Lord. Someone who doesn't want anything from him.
But you can't shake the feeling that things are only going to get more complicated from here on out. You’re no longer just a friend visiting. You're the "head gardener." And in a place like this, where every action has a consequence and every word is dissected, that’s a title that comes with a lot more baggage than you're prepared to carry.
taglist: @scaraenthusiast1 @witchbybirth @chubbyhedgehog @seppys-return-to-madness @vaderxvibes
devoted, archfiend!sylus and his dearest, mage!wife tw/cw: talk about blood, bruising and torture / a bit inaccurate to include the twins
the sound of sylus' steps could be heard from down the corridor as he entered the dungeon. the smell of copper filling his nostrils, and the amber light from the flames lighting his way. it had been a few days since his royal guards, luke and kiernan tracked down the bastard that had been leaking information to other kingdoms.
he loathed the idea of wasting his time down here on this lowly scum when there were far more important matters to tend to. but alas, all must be made right, especially when it came to crossing the infamous archfiend.
"he's in here, my lord." kieran gestured into the cell as luke went to unlock it. he was hoisted up by chains taut from either side of the wall. his face was barely recognizable, bruises and blood painting his features. the red tendrils of sylus' evol danced around the prisoner's face as he commanded his face forward.
"i really hope it was worth going behind my back." the prisoner let out weak chuckle, trying to smirk despite his swelling lips.
"everyone else may fear you, but i surely do not." he rasped. sylus' eyebrow quirked, a low hum leaving his lips— half amused by his words, half impressed that he could even speak.
"well that's just fine. i'm simply here to check if you were still alive." already bored of the conversation, sylus began to pick dust off his sleeves. "it's not me that you need to be afraid of." his eyes finally falling upon the informant. "my beloved wife will be down shortly."
this time the prisoner let out a guttural laugh. just the thought had him choking on his blood from how hard he was laughing. sylus' gaze darkened, he loved that. people always mistook you for the soft and gentle type, but compared to sylus? he was the merciful one. he felt like a child with a secret that no one knew about, a giggle waiting to erupt at any moment.
only time would tell.
"speak of the devil, and she shall appear." sylus could sense your presence from a mile away. the sound of your heels approaching were soon heard descending down the dungeon steps. your foot steps were light and airy in comparison to sylus' heavy, solid ones.
luke opened the gate as you approached, bowing his head respectfully (as did kieran). sylus took off his glove, wanting to feel your touch as he reached out his hand out to you. he laid the a kiss to your knuckles as he gazed upon you with utter adoration. "you're late, my love."
"my apologies, darling. i got caught up talking to our little bird friend." you almost forgot the purpose of your journey, ready to tell him about the conversation you had until the chains rattling from behind your husband pulled focus. your gazed instantly sharpened, now with an evil, mischievous glint to it.
"now who do we have here?" with the flick of your finger, you shifted the prisoner's face in all directions. "is this the man who has been giving away our trade secrets?"
"yes, my lady. we apologize it took us so long to fetch him. he was under protection of another kingdom.. or so he thought." luke responded with a snicker.
"nonsense, you did fine work. thank you." you smiled sweetly at the two boys.
"tch." the prisoner spat. "as if i would be threatened by a woman who speaks to birds."
"silence." your voice commanded. your eyes glowed a dark amber color as his lips were completely sealed shut, unable to utter another word. it was now that he finally began to feel the gravity of his actions. he was ready to be killed by sylus, that was easy. but he never anticipated that you would be the one to deal his punishment.
"now, if you gentlemen would leave us alone... i believe i have to teach this vermin what happens when you betray my husband." as you approached, he was finally able to get a good look at your eyes. they gleamed with a certain.. madness that made his blood run cold. your gaze was affixed to his. you smile grew wicked as you thought about the many ways to make your new bird sing.
"go easy on him now, won't you beloved?" sylus was now behind you, his lips hovering by your ear. "i know how much you love to make men scream." he said with a smirk matching in wickedness.
"no promises, dear." your hand now gripping the informant's face.
"i know he's caused you much trouble." your nails dug into his cheeks. he let out a muffled groan from behind his sealed lips, his gazed now flickering between the both of you.
"and i know how much you hate trouble, my lord." a gleam of excitement flickered in your eyes as you began to draw blood. your voice was so sickeningly sweet that it even made a chill go down sylus' back.
"as you command.. but i'll be awaiting your return." sylus placed a kiss to your temple before gazing down at the man.
"best of luck." his voice darkened. "you're going to need it."
sylus lead the three of them out, using his evol to close the gate behind luke and kieran. he began his ascent up the stairs, humming whatever tune came to his mind only for it to be interrupted by a blood curdling scream a few moments later. your giggles filling the halls like music to his ears.
"what would you say, my lord? ten minutes?" kieran asked. the archfiend halted his steps, only to have soft pleas fall onto deaf ears.
"mm, ten is gracious. i'd say three at most. she's been telling me about all these spells she's been wanting to try and nobody to test them out on… pity." he smirked. "knowing her, she'll try them all until he croaks." he began to make his way to the wash room, knowing that you'd need a bath once you've finished.
"she really is fated to be wife isn't she, my lord?"
i've had this concept stuck in my head since the myth came out but now only found the inspo to write it hehe. enjoy!!
choosing violence, because I’m gonna give my ranking of the campaign 4 pcs so far. please note this is all based on MY VIBES, every single player is impeccable and putting their whole ass into it and I love them, and I AM actually interested in all of them as a whole, but this is just. whomst I jive with. in ascending order!
13. this might actually be a surprise to people who follow me because I dunk on another character so much more often, but: teor. I’m so sorry my lion guy I just do not have a lot of investment in you yet, you’ve mostly just been running around doing fairly normal paladin stuff. I AM curious about your oath and your vibes, but so far you are like… weirdly the most okay person in the campaign and therefore I have the least interest. go pile on seventy eight more character flaws and we’ll talk.
12. in much less surprising place: azune. I’m sorry dude I just don’t like a cop. I also find his particular approach of basically jumping straight to ‘this is the only correct action and plan and you will do it because I have decided this’ to be very irksome. and he’s just like. the specialist special boy with his mysterious powers and his fancy eyes and shit, and it’s a little grating to me. however I am REALLY FUCKING CURIOUS to know what the fuck is going on with his background, and also luis is giving a masterclass in acting at all times with him. plus, fanart pretty.
11. I’m so sorry I’m so sorry I’m so sorry: hal. my beloved theatre dad. my sweet traumatized man. it’s not your fault I love your not-wives and amazing kids more. you are going through some shit and I respect that but I don’t want to watch your adventures. I in fact just want to tuck you in somewhere so you can get a goddamn break.
10. vaelus. listen girl, your aesthetic is on point and your bird hell yuri is legendary, but I know NOTHING about you. flashback vaelus? love that girl, crazy little elf kid doing stupid shit. current vaelus? idk babes, you are following around a dead kid and his dead fox on a hope and a dream and that’s cool, but i need to see more.
9. the bursar herself, murray mag’nesson. listen, girl. aesthetically? ON POINT. every part of this character design (except for the gag boobs) is perfection. combat utility? impeccable, those portent rolls are doing WORK and she’s making some clever moves on the battlefield while not getting her squishy ass stomped. personality wise? I kind of want to punt her across a table half the time. there’s a lot of narratively interesting choices and story beats happening, but she grates on me. also please. please stop mentioning the boobs. PLEASE.
8. wicander halovar. MY BROTHER IN CHRIST LEARN WHEN TO STOP TALKING. I am so intrigued by his storyline and struggle but he is also the quintessential spoiled rich kid who doesn’t realize people hate him, which is fucking HILARIOUS but also aaaaAAAAAGGHH.
7. kattigan. oh my fucked up drunk-ass ranger guy out here breadcrumbing lore like a champ. we are prying your traumatic backstory out of you OR DYING TRYING. the dynamic with tyranny is also so goddamn peak. we have so many fucking dads in this campaign, this is Forest Dad.
6. thimble. our lady of murdering people with weapons made out of literal toys. so much trauma and grief in a four inch tall package. all the faerie lore and shit, all the thjazi lore and shit, and all kinds of badassery. tinkerhell out here living for the goddamn vibes. throwing rocks at people who annoy her. she is who I aspire to be.
5. the living mask himself, bolaire. he’s such a cunt I love him. I don’t even think he knows anymore what his primary objective is other than ‘make hal stop being mad at me and also make the nobles stop touching my fucking museum.’ he hosts the best parties. he’s deeply fucked up and a little bit of a serial killer. he’s literally a thing that helped kill a god. he’s adopted a wizard roommate who’s slowly driving him insane. I don’t know what he’ll do at any given moment and I find that fascinating.
4. thaisha. oh there is SO much complicated bullshit going on in this druid! girl has so many problems and zero ways to solve them that do not involve talking shit, killing them with fire, or a ballista. she bullied literal demons. she tried to frost ray one of her fellow druids out of the sky. she’s threatened to kill all of her party members at LEAST twice and caused a full-grown knight of the barrowguard to have an absolute crisis (oh kerzingblad). she brought her not-son back from death and is now wondering if that was a good idea. she’s amazing and I love her.
3. aramán’s sluttiest soldier, julien. LORD I want to put this man in a jar and fucking shake him. he’s a bisexual disaster. he’s a lush and a reprobate. he’s oddly actually really invested in his barrowguard duty and seems actually good at it. he gets hasted and nukes a whole-ass zombie horde. he’s on a murder spree. he’s got daddy issues. he’s going to punch primus tachonis to death. I’m going to eat him.
2. tyranny. she is ancient and formless. she is six months old. she is learning a moral code in real time but fucking LOVES stealing shit. she has the most wholesome dynamics with several people while being a literal fucking demon. she’s seeing visions in a knife. she’s the daughter of the prince of suffering. she’s doctor finger. her family is absolutely the funniest shit we have seen. she has SO much potential for growth and change and also to shed some light on some SHIT. and she’s so. fucking. CUTE!
1. no surprise I’m a basic bitch, but it’s my body horror beloved occtis. listen, he had me with the undead fox made of other foxes. but also I feel like he is VERY much a linchpin character in a similar vein to wick: very large parts of the story are connected to both of them, and they are the sole members of each of their houses that are involved in what’s rapidly becoming the rebellion. plus, I just ACTIVELY want to see occtis get creepier and more inhuman as the campaign goes on. he’s deeply entrenched in his family’s fucked-up ways and he’s not just going ‘they’re BAD and I’m the only GOOD one,’ he’s going ‘well, they have a point, but this shit’s a bit fucked.’ he intimidates politely. he’s had his intestines fall out in an alleyway. he’s literally an unknown variable as far as magic in aramán goes, he’s being hunted down by his family and others, and he still has a fucking thesis due. yes, I love the goth nerd, and I have no shame in that.