#prince king undying

[dearest-alexander]

'FOR THE FIRST TIME' is Best 50 songs of 2023 in the Billboard charts

and I strongly believe it's 95% because of Halle, Alan, and Lin while the other 5% was because they saw Jonah's Eric entering the frame like this—

—Like the fckng disney prince he is.

Best part is I don't think he knows the chokehold of this gif would have on me for the rest of my Eric-less life. 🥲🙃

gif by @jonahhaeurking

[theriverbeyond]

i think if John had shown Harrow baby sensory videos on his tablet instead of making her drink tea she obviously didnt enjoy and eat biscuts that she so clearly did not want to consume everything might have been different 😔

[lwde-encrusted-sideblog]

To Close out Mermay, I just have one question.

[rottingsoftly]

The way John tells Harrow he sometimes wishes she were his daughter in htn and then later finding out he *does* in fact have a daughter but she's nothing like Harrow but he still tries to connect with her and share his culture with her and gives her what she wants (I bet she was the one who decided to go fight on the frontlines because it used to be her dream and she was still bitter and hurt over Harrow) but she's still not what he wanted and they both know it and oooouough aurgh eck

[g00seg1raffe]

Can i share something that happened to me last year

I'm minding my own business and this guy who I kind of know but wouldn't really consider myself friends with (trauma bonded on a school trip last year and haven't spoken since) comes up to me like hey, what are you doing? And I say: world-building the ancient history of Lord of the Rings. And then I proceed to tell him all about the various genocides of the first age, with a side note on Maedhros' Quenya name, which literally means 'the hot redhead who's third in line for the throne', with his mother name meaning 'hot damn', his father name meaning 'third of the king's name' and his nickname meaning 'redhead'. Then I explain that loads of elves get nicknames, like Gil-Galad and other people who I can't remember.

And he goes cool, can I have an elvish nickname? And I say sure, what do you want it to mean?

And he goes: big daddy

and I don't know what's more embarrassing: a) he thought that, b) he asked that, or c) I could translate that off the top of my head.

[radioactivepeasant]

Snippets: Jak and Daxter Thursday Part 2

(As promised, the Less Angsty Part.)

The onlookers all seemed to think Jak had slipped out of the Precursor craft at the last moment. That was just fine with him: it meant no one had seen him teleport out, carrying Damas into the tower. Leaving him there had been terrifying -- even if the monks in the Convalescence Ward had believed him to be a Precursor himself, and vowed to care for Damas with a reverence that made him sick, it was hard to trust his father's care to others. But he had appearances to keep up, just as his other self had warned him. All he could do was focus on his next steps.

Sig had taken the throne as interim regent in Jak’s place, as while he was more than capable of satisfying the battle requirements of a Spargan king, he wasn't yet of age. That was a mercy, but Jak knew Sig loathed the role. Damas had been like an elder brother to him from the moment he staggered through the gates of Spargus seeking refuge. Sitting in his place felt as wrong for him as it did for Jak.

Jak turned a tired smile to Daxter, who met it with a knowing look. Tess raised her brows at Daxter, but he tiptoed to whisper in her ear that he'd explain later. Jak clapped a hand to Keira's shoulder in camaraderie as he passed, and she returned it in kind with a light squeeze.

There was a pain in her eyes Jak remembered too well. Everything had come out in bits and pieces from the moment Haven had traded Jak to Damas, and Keira almost regretted digging for answers. Learning that a beloved parent was capable of such thoughtless cruelty to someone else's child "for the greater good"- well. They'd had their fights, but Jak wouldn't have wished that feeling on her even if she'd joined the Krimzon Guard.

"J- sorry, Mar."

Jak managed a bittersweet smile. "For you, I can still be Jak."

Keira bit her lip and looked skyward for a moment, blinking rapidly until she had her facial expression under control.

"...okay. Jak, I'm...I'm going to denounce him. To think that all that time, he knew- I. I don't think I'll ever- it's like I woke up and someone replaced my dad with a complete stranger."

"We never blamed you for any of it," Jak answered earnestly. "Spargus won't hold it against you if you don't denounce him. We all answer for our own choices."

Keira blinked hard again, and nodded. "And this is my choice. I'm choosing you and Daxter this time. Like I wish I had before."

Jak reached up to squeeze her hand. "...thanks, Keira. We...I missed you."

"I missed you too, Jak." Keira let go to fold her arms across her middle. "Can we start over?"

Swallowing down a lump in his throat, Jak nodded. "I- yeah- yeah we- that sounds good."

Keira offered a wan smile, then let him go. It felt like torture, climbing the last few platforms to the balcony. Sig was there, but so was Samos. And so was Onin. And while Jak knew they were only there because Sig wanted them within firing range if they tried something, it made him hesitant to continue forward. He didn't want to be anywhere near the people who had known about Veger's plot and blithely co-opted it for their own uses.

"Jak, m'boy! Well done!" Samos chortled merrily, wearing that grandfatherly air Jak had always fallen for before.

Not anymore.

"I'm not "your" anything." Jak stepped past him in a hurry. He didn't trust himself not to snap if he remained within arm's reach of the sage.

Sig rose from the throne and held an arm out to him with an understanding look.

"Mar," he said softly.

He clasped arms with Jak, and nodded solemnly.

"I'm proud of you, kid. Your- Your father would be proud."

"He is," Jak answered softly. Then he pulled Sig down to his level by the shoulder to whisper in his ear, "Dax is going to take over the diplomacy stuff down here. Meet me in the C-Ward upstairs."

Sig straightened and frowned down at him. "What'd you do, cherry?" he murmured.

The smirk Jak gave him in reply was so grim he could have sworn it was Damas who stood before him once more.

"I shaped my own fate, like my father taught me."

For a long time, Sig just looked at him. Then he shook his head. "Boy, if I didn't already know you did impossible things-"

The Convalescence Ward was a hive of activity the instant Jak stepped through the door. He frowned. The light eco should have rewound the crushed bones and organs almost perfectly! Doubtless his father would be sore a while, and Jak hadn't been able to fully repair the broken leg before running out of eco, but that wouldn't warrant this much fuss, would it? He opened his mouth to ask what the problem was, and a senior monk rushed to him.

"Young prince! Your father-! He- he-!"

Irrational thought it was, anxiety twisted in Jak’s stomach. "What about my father? What are you talking about?"

The old woman took him by the hand, a slightly disturbed awe wavering in her voice.

"He lives! Your father lives, Mar!"

Relief washed over him, and with it, the events of the last 48 hours that he'd been shoving to one side.

"Let me see him," he said urgently.

"I...must warn you first, Mar," the monk cautioned, and Jak's stomach flipped again.

"He is...changed. The Precursors returned him from the edge of death -- by hand! No mortal can experience such a thing and remain unaltered."

Ah. Just the normal "Mystical Whooo Crap", as Pecker called it.

"I've seen that kind of thing before. I'm not afraid," Jak assured the monk. "Please. Just take me to him, Ruma."

Damas was awake now -- he hadn't been when Jak had seen him last. One leg -- the still broken one -- lay propped up where monks could splint it. Dark blue shapes twisted and curled under the skin, as if lights were shooting through his veins. The rest of him looked strangely normal for having just been yanked back from the edge of death. The monks not splinting his leg quickly backed away from the bed as Jak approached.

It had worked. The timeline was closed now, and Damas lived.

Like a puppet with its strings cut, Jak dropped to sit in a heap on the edge of the cot. He fumbled for Damas’s hand and held it to his chest as he let out a shaky breath.

"You're here," he croaked.

"I'm here," Damas repeated, almost confused. Then his face split into a wide smile. "I'm here."

Jak blinked. Something wasn't quite right about his father's face. Something about his eyes was a little brighter than he recalled. And the teeth...Too many? Too few? Too sharp? His mind couldn't decide for a few seconds before the bones in question seemed to settle into a fairly standard -- if unusually sharp -- set of human teeth.

A memory of his own face, saturated with both light and dark eco, rose to Jak’s mind, and an uncomfortable thought followed on its heels.

Had he altered his father's physical form by healing him in the Precursor craft?

Further speculation was cut short when Damas pulled his hand free to tap playfully against Jak’s cheek.

"You once pushed a chair in front of the door -- a toddler's chair, mind you now -- because you thought it would keep me from going to work without you. You never could stand being left behind, could you?"

He sounded like he wasn't certain whether he was more amused or annoyed.

So much pain, so much loss, and here they all were at the end of it all, still standing. So to speak. The exhilaration of not being the only one left to tell the tale filled him with a heady feeling he would later come to recognize as joy.

With a giddy laugh, Jak threw himself forward and into Damas’s chest.

"We did it!" he crowed, "We did it, we did it!"

Damas’s arms folded over his back, and his chest vibrated with a soft chuckle.

"So it would seem! Though how I'm to explain this, I'm not certain."

"So just don't explain," Jak snorted, "and let them come to their own conclusions."

He ducked away from the hand tweaking his ear with a laugh.

"And let someone start some crackpot theory about our already bizarre bloodline?" Damas feigned offense. "That sounds like a terrible idea!"

"Terribly clever, I agree."

Damas lightly thumped Jak over the head. "Impudent little- When I get out of this cast, I oughta-"

Finally seeing an opportunity, a monk gracefully interrupted. "My lord, your leg requires time and watchfulness to heal correctly. You must leave it immobile for at least two weeks until we know what the eco is doing in your bloodstream."

She turned and nodded respectfully to Jak. "I trust you will keep the injury well tended-to?"

Jak slid over to occupy the space between Damas and the small nightstand. He leaned back against the wall beside his father and nodded back.

"Don't worry, he's not going anywhere. I'll make sure of that."

"This is elder abuse," Damas complained, just as lighthearted and almost giddy as his son. "You can't make me stay in bed! That's mutiny!"

"No," Jak retorted with a broad grin, "That's what happens when Sig gets here and finds out you're alive!"

"Argh, you're right!" Damas slipped an arm around Jak’s neck in half a hug, half a headlock. "And then I'd have to contend with Daxter!"

Jak gently poked Damas in the side with a smug grin. "Daxter? No no, Tess is the one you should be afraid of."

Damas flung his other hand into the air in mock exasperation. "Rot me, it's a conspiracy! I'm outnumbered!"

When the monks had finally taken the hint to leave the pair alone to catch up, Damas sobered slightly. "You know we'll probably have to make a plan for if the Precursors choose to retaliate for this."

Jak's eyes danced with mischief. "What're they gonna do without their technology? They're as powerless as Veger!"

Damas raised a brow -- no, Jak hadn't imagined it, there was something weird about his eyes now. The pupils weren't supposed to have little points of light like stars, were they? Not for humans.

"Alright cub, what did you do?"

"What did Daxter do," Jak corrected, deciding to deal with the possibility of his father gaining a Light Form later. "He confiscated the old one's staff, and then made them drop the ship with the Precursor we hatched from the Stone last year. Because they weren't being responsible with time and space."

Considering the young Precursor had been sitting on the beach that would one day hold Sandover Village, happily building elaborate sandcastles in lieu of blueprints, Jak had a feeling the new owner of the time machine would have fewer agendas to push. And given how the glowing being had greeted them as "My friend Mar" and "little Scout-brother", perhaps subsequent timelines would be kinder to his family. The other ottsels' horror and chagrin boded well, anyway.

[c-rowlesdraws]

" "Why did you ascend to be a Lyctor?" "Ultimate power-- and posters of my face." Fair. "

-Harrow The Ninth by Tamsyn Muir ⸻ Ianthe Tridentarius Ianthe the First, Prince Ianthe Naberius; Lyctor, Eighth Saint to serve the King Undying, Tall Hot Glass of Skank. A girl who'd tell you she's gotten everything she ever wanted—and you'd almost believe her.

I thought of drawing her propaganda poster as a closer likeness, but decided it was funnier if it was obviously retouched to look more healthy and saintly.

(process pics from sketch to final artwork available to see on patreon! This one had a longer journey than some of my other illustrations.)

[whereserpentswalk]

Reblog to give the creature power. Like to befriend them.

[astrolovecosmos]

The 5th House + Romantic Themes/Tropes

Aries in the 5th House: Knight or hero saving their damsel in distress, competitor suitors, "bad boy/bad girl" with "nice guy/girl" dynamics, queen/princess saving the king/prince, a hard to catch chase, red roses and red lipstick, athlete or warrior connected love story, second chance love stories, couple vs. nature or unknown as they pioneer a new frontier, lingerie, things move fast, "no one else like you", fated lovers, lover's quarrels, innocent love, first loves, love at first sight.

Taurus in the 5th House: Worshipping each other's bodies, making love in nature, paradise themes, fancy venues, luxury, secret prince/billionaire stories, Cinderella-like stories, seduction, sensuality, aphrodisiacs, massages, the fastest way to their heart is through the stomach, willpower, ugly duckling themes, silk and cashmere, kisses on the neck, serenading, rose petals on the bed.

Gemini in the 5th House: Friends to lovers, pretend relationship tropes, sexting, online dating stories, pen pal lovers, long distance relationships, romantic academia, coffee dates, study dates, eloquence, unexpected softness, talking dirty, rivalries to lovers, Kama Sutra, twists and turns, love letters, vocalness, teasing, arguments.

Cancer in the 5th House: Old friend or flame love stories - maybe similar to second chances, parent trap themes, moonlight, waterfalls, ocean waves, baths, intimacy in the shower, cuddles, feeling wanted or needed, private or secret lovers, waterbeds, remembering and celebrating important dates like anniversaries and birthdays, sentimental love, nurturing their lover back to health themes, pearls and silver, traditional love themes, Romeo and Juliette, Titanic vibes, homecooked meals or lunches, long hugs.

Leo in the 5th House: Holiday romances or flings, everyone else can see how fated or good they are with someone - but they themselves are oblivious, wine, dance floors, flattery, adoration, gold, luxury, sex on the beach, roleplay, hot-blooded passion, romance that involves royalty, center of attention, turns heads, strip tease, mirror on the ceiling, professing undying love, great adventures, drama galore or a love worthy of the stage.

Virgo in the 5th House: High School sweethearts, devoted lover who does a service or keeps a promise for a dead partner, defending someone's honor or being defended, saving their lover from a bad partner or ex, loyal servant and royalty loves, light tracing, tickling, taking care of someone or nurturing them back to health, sexy outfits, plenty of praise and appreciation, couple's spa day or massage, attentive, caring, the details in love matter.

Libra in the 5th House: Love triangle stories, masquerades, balls, Parisian love stories or themes, opposites attract, wedding related romances (meeting at a wedding or stopping a wedding), lovers against the odds, love potions, star-crossed lovers, matchmaking, sunsets, pastels, clouds, rivals or enemies to lovers but with grace or focus on making peace, sensual moments, biting lips, charm counts for something, perfume, candles, oils, flower petals, champaign, strawberries or cherries, feathers, cliche seduction, inspirational love, love and art, love songs.

Scorpio in the 5th House: Enemies to lovers, dark romances, horror and romance, forbidden love, secret romances, "if I can’t have you, nobody will", vampires, magic or the occult, Phantom of the Opera, passionate kisses and touch, lingerie, naked, bondage, power, vulnerability, jealousy or possessiveness themes, leather, being by or in water, strong taste and fragrances, avenging your hurt or dead lover or being avenged, dark fantasies, secluded romantic places, overcoming fears or challenges together, psychology, villains and heroes, transformative love stories.

Sagittarius in the 5th House: Lovers from very different cultures or backgrounds, eloping, loveable rogue themes, fish out of water stories, deep thoughts and discussions, speed dating, daredevils and calling bluffs, adventure, "I can show you a whole new world", exotic romantic places, escaping with your lover, hotel rooms, casino or game nights, learning together, discovering something new about their lover frequently, lucky to find each other, free-spirited love, surprises and passion.

Capricorn in the 5th: Force proximity stories, love that grows or takes time, time-travel romance, historical romances, secret romances, age gap themes, gothic themes, consistency, lotion and oils, romantic music, power dynamics, fine wine, wealth and luxury, secret prince/billionaire stories, earthy and erotic, punishment and submission themes, respect and grace, powerful libidos, leather, antique or fine jewelry, beautiful crystals or gems, great smiles or teeth, unique bouquets, careful lovers.

Aquarius in the 5th House: Sci-fi romance themes, unconventional dynamics or roles, time-travel romance, beautiful minds and/or beloved geniuses, light touch, substances to enhance experiences or feelings, incense or candles, anything goes, the unexpected, unique gifts or romantic gestures, romance that shows how much their lover knows them, rebel lovers, acceptance, deep talks, mind melds, fetishes, spiritual and/or mental challenges, unique beauty, each partner doing their own thing, their lover being the only one to arouse passion in them or vice versa.

Pisces in the 5th House: Running to catch up to their lover at the airport, amnesia related love stories, hopeless romantic, poetry, daydreaming, soulmates, finding a muse or being one, kissing in the rain, foot massages, love songs, satin sheets, skinny dipping, oysters, champagne, roses, making fantasies come to life, eternal promises and fidelity, loving life and love, overly idealistic love stories, fairytales, healing themes, intuitive lovers or psychic connections.

[ni-kisno1fan14007]

forbidden

pairings: hopeless romantic prince!riki x maid!reader

warnings: suggestive, smut, fingering, size kink, unprotected sex, mild hair pulling.

He was the crown prince of the Far East, the future king of a people known for following their hearts, seeking romance and love no matter the consequence. They were the beacons of love and lust, the hopeless romantics of the bleak world they lived, lovers of poem, art and love itself. So it was no surprise when Prince Nishimura's eyes caught the sight of a maid, a simple common girl that scrubbed the floors of the castle and served royalty. From your thick dark locks, to doe eyed gaze, to your small frame, everything made him more and more smitten with you. He wanted you, he wanted to show the true meaning of love, spoil you with all the affection a girl could only dream of and show her a life that would put fairytales to shame.

Oh how he dreamed of you, how he desired to feel you lips against his as he tossed and turned in his bed every night, wanting to feel your body against his, in every waking moment until the end of his days. He was ready to drop everything.. everything for you, his title, his birthright.. he pined over you since the moment he laid his eyes on your face. He had to have you, have all for himself. His heart ached for you, bleeding itself dry in moments of longing that had him questioning his sanity for being so infatuated with a commoner.

He stared up at the ceiling, before finally deciding to head off to find you, to confess his undying love that had his mind spinning, he wants to hear your voice.. no he needs to. His footsteps were quiet as he made his way to the servant's quarters, finding the door to your small room, and gently tapping on the door twice. Dressed in a thin white chemise you open your door, confused at who would be looking for you at the time where the moon reigned the skies. Your eyes widen at the sight of the crown prince wearing a simple white shirt that was buttoned down exposing his toned torso, and some pants that hung low on his waist. "My lord-", "No! no more of that, I need you my dear, my heart aches as if it only beats for you, as if my entire being is fuelled by your existence, my body craves your touch as if I might burn away if your fingers do not caress me!, I love you dammit!, I love you so damn much!' he exclaims. You simply stand there, your mouth agape, brain short circuiting at the sight of the crown prince confessing his love to you, a man that had any woman at his feet, now looking down at you with infinite hope.

Before you could even answer, his lips crash against yours, arms wrapping around your waist, and all you could do was give in, melt into his touch as he kissed you like a man starved. His foot pushing the door close as one of his hands lifted up your chemise exposing your thighs to him. "You have no idea how much I have craved you my dear, please let me have you.." he whispers against your lips gently pushing against small bed at the corner of the room. He pins you down, his knee between your thighs rubbing against your intimate area in a slow pace that had your mind melting, fingers digging into his arms. "My lord-", "no, please call me Riki, I need to hear your voice moan my name'", he asks almost begging as his lips touch the soft skin of your neck, making your mind lose its sanity. "Y.. Yes Riki..", whisper out softly, the name still foreign on your tongue.

You let out a gasp as his rips down your dress, exposing your breasts to him, the sigh was better than what he had imagined, an image he had conjured up during his lonely nights of shameful pleasure where he touched himself to the thoughts of you. He couldn't help but groan at the sight of you bare for him, displayed right in front of his eyes, breasts round and moving with each breath you took, down to your hips and thighs rubbing together in anticipation, god he needed you so so badly.

He spreads your thighs wide open, exposing your most intimate area to his eyes, slick and gushing out arousal from the tiny tight entrance as its walls clenched around nothing. He couldn't help but smirk, ego elating at the fact that you wanted him as much as he wanted you. His fingers gently touch you, rubbing circles around your entrance making your legs twitch in pleasure, small sparks of bliss coursing through your body at the contact. Your can't help but moan out as he pushes two fingers inside, making your eyes roll back in pleasure as he stretches out your tight hole, he had to make sure you were prepared to what he had in store for you. He loved you so much, having you at his mercy begging for release was something straight out of his wet dreams. Tight, gummy walls clenching around his fingers, greedily sucking him was intoxicating for him, his pants growing tighter by the second, his member straining against the confines of the fabric. He needed release.. and he was going to get it.

He manhandled you into position, with your ass in the air, face stuffed into the pillows, intimate area dripping with slick sliding down your thighs, all needy and eager for him. He slid down his pants and aligned himself against your entrance, fingers tangled in your hair.. as he slowly pushed in.. all you could do was let out a muffled scream into the mattress as his huge size split you in half. His hold on your hair tightening as he pushes in deeper; the tip kissing your cervix. He groans unable to hold himself back from the feeling of your tight warm walls wrapped around him sending him to an abyss of pleasure that he has only dreamed of. All he wanted right now was you, to take you, and that’s exactly what he did as he pulled his hips back before snapping his hips forward, making you let out a scream of pained pleasure. He moved frantically, thrusts sharp and unforgiving bruising your insides, but you took it.

His movements were uncoordinated, mind hazy while finally receiving the pleasure he has only dreamed of experiencing for the past months, once he could only imagine the sounds you would make as he made love to you, how you would cry out his name with each brink of ecstasy he brought upon your body and mind, and now he has it, all in his hands with his member buried deep inside the girl of his dreams.. he was over the moon. He could care less of that what he was doing was forbidden, a prince being intimate with a servant girl, but he couldn’t care, he didn’t care, he had you now, and that’s all that mattered to him as he had you twitching in his arms after reaching you high, taking in his brutal pace like the good girl you were.

He reaches his high, thick warm release spilling into your womb as he groans out, feeling your walls squeeze him for all his worth. Riki collapses next to you, pulling you close, strong arms wrapped around your small frame, keeping you safe right where you belonged. In his arms in his forbidden embrace.

[frownyalfred]

Re: Jason being the pacifist

1. "I will follow you forever because you killed him." Endlessly devoted Jason my beloved. If you give him one (1) positive attention he will light himself on fire to keep you warm. I love him so much. Self destructive king.

2. I’d assume here that DITF would be way closer to how Arkham Knight played out??? (I mean. That’s what he’s becoming right. Swearing fealty to the Arkham Prince) Unless like? He just comes crawling out of the Asylum’s totally not haunted graveyard crying for his dad…which maybe he could. They might not have even checked if he was properly dead before putting him away. Or maybe Gotham just says no.

3. Giggling at the idea of Bruce barely holding himself back from ripping the Jokers head off because “no Jason probably wouldn’t want me to kill this guy??? Right??? He’s all about not-murder” Only for Jason to come back and say “no fuck that guy actually” anything for one of his jailbirds

Bruce earning Jason's undying loyalty because he was the one to finally fuck up the Joker and punish him for what he did to Jay in Arkham...you would have to separate him from Bruce with a knife, after that. Maybe Bruce came into Arkham and saw what was happening and Jason asked him for this one thing, this one favor -- and Bruce was furious with Joker as is, this was just another affront.

Bruce asked him what he really wanted -- and Jason asked for blood, so Bruce gave him the Joker's head. It's an inversion, like we discussed, of Bruce refusing to kill the Joker in canon, no matter how much Jason asked -- now, he kills the Joker the second Jay asks, Jason who will follow him around Arkham forever, who will be his bodyguard and informant and will hold to his loose pacifism after that (loose being the key word there).

[jacespookiebear]

ೃ࿐ 𝘿𝙖𝙧𝙠 𝙋𝙖𝙧𝙖𝙙𝙞𝙨𝙚

summary : you’re the younger twin sister of jacaerys velaryon, heir to the iron throne. possessing an undying love for your brother and promising yourself that you would do anything to protect him.

pairings : jacaerys velaryon x dark!twin!reader

warnings : suggestive themes, violence, self-harm, incest, sexual content, teen pregnancies, dark tendencies, toxicity, angst?

For as long as everyone could remember, you and your twin brother were attached to the hip since you were born. From a young age, you were already showing signs of being rather protective of Jace. Rhaenyra always passed it off whenever Alicent would point it out. She was extremely upset during an situation where you scratched Aegon’s face after he teased Jace, even when to as far as to complaining to Viserys and wishing for you to be punished but your grandsire was entirely on your side.

You surely knew how to get away with everything, you were your mother’s only daughter afterall. Of course she would defend you no matter what troubles you brought for yourself and your siblings.

As much as your brother seems to love and care for you, he wasn’t as blind like your mother, he knew how much a cold person you were towards others who weren’t your family, you would never hold your tongue about your uncles and step-grandmother. “If I could, I would have them all beheaded just for how they speak of you, dear brother.” laying by your side on your shared bed with him, having you in his arms as he listens to you speak about wanting to commit kinslaying before dozing off to sleep.

It wasn’t like it scared the boy, but it made him concerned. What if the wrong person heard you say those things? You would be punished heavily for it. So that’s why he made you promise that you would never speak so filthy ever again.

While you all still lived in King’s Landing, you used most of your time watching your brothers train in the courtyard with your uncles, usually right by your grandsire’s side, who was always happy to spend time with his favorite grandchild. Always chanting your brothers’ names to show your support for them and to that it would be Aegon teasing Jace and Luke about you. It pissed you off after witnessing him completely be rough and harsh with Jace during a session until was forced by Ser Harwin to be pulled away.

The next night, you decided to pull a prank on Aegon by filling his chamberpot with rats. The aftermath left you having to lie and say how sorry you felt but really you wanted to do worse than that to the lousy Prince, he was always left unscathed whenever he bullied your brothers, you were only doing justice. But with enough tears in your eyes, you were quickly able to learn that you could manipulate your grandsire and mother to let you off the hook easily.

“He hurt you, brother!” you profusely shouted for Jace to understand, he had started to ignore you for awhile and it left you crying for his attention. “That scoundrel deserves worse.”

With just enough tears, he gave in and pressed a kiss on your forehead to make you happy again. But he knew you would never stop acting so cruel, Jace began keeping you away from Aemond and Aegon for couple of weeks before you all had left to move to Dragonstone. After hearing about how Rhaenyra tried betrothing Jace and Helaena, and you with Aegon, you couldn’t help but develop some annoyance towards her for it, started to ignore her kisses or affections for awhile, your mother was growing concerned for you.

After the arrival, you practically begged your mother to continue letting you have shared chambers with Jace, reluctantly she agreed, afraid to know what else you would have done if she disagreed but it made you warm up to her once more. Although your twin had wished for privacy, you came to agreement to having separate beds facing opposite to each other but that did not stop you from sneaking in his bed to hug him as he’s asleep.

Your younger brother, Luke, would always question why you always prefer Jace’s company, you sympathized with your sweet brother and started spending some time Luke as a way to pay for all the times you had shut him away. During these times together, you always read the histories of the conquest to him and even talked about how it is Targaryen customs to wed family.

During the funeral, you stayed by your siblings’ sides until Aegon had whispered foolishness in your ear about how you could’ve been married to him right now, was he always this stupid? you thought, looking around to find your brother, wanting to be away from the scoundrel they called a Prince but instead you saw him holding hands with your cousin, Baela. While you knew she was only grieving for her dead mother, the scene had you in tears in a quick instant and immediately you ran back into the Driftmark castle, shoving guests out of your way while Aegon laughed from the sight. Jacaerys saw from a distance, wishing he could chase after you.

As much as you wanted to be angry at your twin, when you were tousled out of bed and into the hall, your anger and rage disappeared at the sight of your brothers bruised up and bloodied, you tried leeching towards Aemond for what he did, “How dare you lay your filthy hands on my brothers?! I’m glad your eye was taken! You freak! You should be blessed by the Gods that I was not there to end your life!” you shouted, having to be restrained by the knights as Alicent stared at you with terror and disbelief that you would threaten the Prince, “My King, your granddaughter is a spawn of evil! She should be punished as well!” Alicent cried as Rhaenyra threw you and your brothers behind her to protect you, you began holding onto Luke who quietly wailed while Jace held the both of you.

After Alicent had cut your mother, it was you who ended the silence that covered the room. Wishing for her head, you seethed, you were tired of how she and her family had always looked down upon your family. When court and the lords around the Seven Kingdoms had heard what was said and went down, you were seen as the Heartless Princess, to extent they begun saying you were a Kinslayer in the making.

As you began getting older, the more beautiful you had grown, though many lords would never fight for your hand after what was said during the funeral of Lady Laena but you did not care, not one bit. It even relieved you. You were a believer of the Valyrian Gods and intended to stay true to Targaryen customs by marrying within the family, your love for your twin brother had only grew and you had even begun to lust for him.

You had hope that Jace could see your devotion for him clearly, as he also had become older, you noticed how drastically and. well defined he had become, he was a true gentleman— had always driven himself to work harder and prove that he is fit to be King, and he was fit. He knew his house histories, he knew how to speak High Valyrian, knew how to wield a sword, and knew how to fly with his dragon. Your adoring older brother, now a man.

Everything about him now just makes you yearn for him even more, as you pleasure yourself every night— your thoughts were only of Jacaerys. Wishing your fingers were his, moaning his name under the piles of sheets as you hoped you get caught by him one day. While these nightly self-pleasuring continued, your brother was asleep only a few feet away, snoring and nearly falling off his bed, or that is what you assumed as you continued thrusting your digits out of your soaked cunt, letting out soft whimpers and moans that were easily heard by Jace. Hearing your angelic voice, the squelching noises that came from your side of the room had your brother hard every night.

Jace had tried to restrain himself, you were his sister afterall, his cruel sister yet so sweet like a goddess in his eyes. Hearing your continued moans and mewls, Jace moved his hand down to fist his cock, head already leaking through his breeches while he used your voice to get off. Fantasizing taking your maidenhood, burying his cock deep inside of you, soon having you carry his children, the thought that you both could be wedded. The endless thoughts racing in his mind had him finishing in his hand, spurts of hot cum on his hand and landing on his sheets.

Forgetting where he was at the moment, he let out a harsh moan. Coming back to reality, still hazy from his high, “Jace? Are you alright?” Your voice had Jace immediately realizing what just happened, trying to fix himself quickly— not wanting you to become worried. “I-I’m fine, sister. It was only just a nightmare.” Thinking of what to say at the moment, mentally slapping himself across the face for the answer he gave you, already knowing you would be worried for him for having a nightmare. Hearing footsteps approach the side of his bed, he tried to fix his breeches until you pulled the sheets off his body, witnessing his leaking cock and smeared cum all over his stomach.

Jace feared what you were going to say, “You dirty pig!” or “You were touching yourself while I was near?!” But instead you gave him an amused smile, scooting in his bed to lay beside him, taking your finger to swipe of his cum before licking it off, tasting him before you driven your lips to kiss him. A desperate kiss that you had longed for, making sure your brother knew of your desires as he took your maidenhood that night. There was no rest, you both had wanted to make up for the long times, you whispered to your brother, “I always wanted you, brother, to have no man but your cock in me. My cunt will only remember the shape of yours until I die.” Filling your tightened cunt with his fat cock until the Sun had arise, pounding into you so mercilessly as you let out moans slip from your swollen lips. You swore the handmaidens from the halls had heard you both that early morning, from the whines and skin slapping echoing through the chamber walls.

You both couldn’t be away from each other for more than a second afterwards, you continued these pleasures throughout Dragonstone. In the great library, in the study hall, right by the gardens and the shore of the sea. It was great when you both would take your lovemaking at the shores, during night, you were allowed to express your love for your twin vocally without a worry of getting caught, mewling and moaning as loud as you wanted while you ride Jace’s cock, eager to please him as his hands laid on your waist, sometimes cupping your heavy breasts that would bounce with each rise. Your hands resting on his chest as you leaned closer to place a wet kiss on his neck, noticing you started to grow tired from having to do most of the work. Jacaerys rises to reposition himself, directly facing you now as his bare chest pressed against your breasts. You were centimeters away from his face, ghosting your lips from his, placing your hands to hold onto his shoulders.

His arms moved to press you closer into his embrace, caging you as Jace took control, thrusting upwards of his hips. The pleasure coming back to you, completely had your body surrendering to him entirely as your brother started pounding up into your wet cunt with no desire of stopping, you moaned and whimpered. As it was just you two, you had always submitted yourself to him with obedience, letting your brother control you and having you turn into a full squirming mess whether you were underneath him or on top.

“Jacaerys! I want you..to ruin me!” Continuing to lose yourself, you had aimed to keep your eyes on him the whole night but you couldn’t help but shut them with your mouth hanging open once Jace started suckling at your breasts, harshly suckling before bringing his fingers to rub at your sensitive bud to bring you more pleasure. “My sweet, little sister..so good to me..I love you..” you widened your eyes at your brother professing his love to you, how you longed for this for years. You wrapped your legs around his torso, beginning to unravel. Jace had always made sure to have you cum before he did, feeling your wetness around his cock had only made him plunge inside you faster, slipping out a couple of groans as he spilled inside you, filling you up with his cum.

You swore you were seeing stars in your vision, Jace continued to thrust his seed into your cunt, you tiredly peppered wet kisses all over his face— wanting to stay in this position forever but to your disappointment, he pulled you off him and had you laying on the makeshift bed that was on sand, you both laid there naked right by each other’s side, “Eminna muña wed īlva, emili iā uēpa Valyrīha dīnilūks hae ao va moriot jeldan” (I’ll have mother wed us, we will have an old valyrian wedding like you always wanted.), turning to face your brother as he spoke, you lazily smiled and placed an open mouth kiss on his lips. You couldn’t wait to finally marry the man you always loved.

With Jace’s convincing and his way with words, he had the support of Daemon who was on board with the betrothal, Rhaenyra had finally agreed, believing it was only right and fair since it was an marriage of love. You expressed your gratitude to your mother and step-father with a hug and immediately began to plan the wedding that had happened after only a few days of the betrothal. During your wedding night, you and Jace could not leave your chambers. For days that continued, you had not left your chambers, the entire island surely heard it all, day and night. Your younger brother, Luke, was disgusted whenever he walked past your chamber doors since you were always loud.

Before it was even a month in your new marriage, you fell pregnant with your brother’s child, no one was surprised but Rhaenyra was rather upset with Jace for impregnating you so young, though you were rather contented and had only wished this wouldn’t be the last pregnancy. After your first labor with your firstborn son, you promised Jace that you would bring him more children than Queen Alysanne ever could.

With the years going by, you were blessed with three children and another on the way. Aelor, Daenaera, and Rhaella. The children surely favorited both you and your husband’s looks, no one could say they weren’t Jacaerys’, they certainly had his dashing looks too. But once they all gotten older, becoming the age to start bonding with their dragons that hatched in their cradles, you became much more protective with them. Striking a knight who dared laid his hands on the future King’s heir and ordering knights to take him to the dungeon to be tortured before walking away in hand with your sweet son.

Your lover was rather grateful to know that you would never act so vulgar in front of your children, they all turned out to be very kind and genuine. Your sweet Aelor possessed a kind soul, never resulting to violence as answers during his lessons. Daenaera had a passion for becoming a warrior and was allowed to participate with in training lessons with Aelor and Joffrey. As for your little Rhaella, she usually stayed in your shadow, clinging to you wherever you went and liked to sleep in your shared bed with Jace.

You often spent your time by Jace’s side with the children occupying themselves with books or toys. Reading your favorite to the children, Aegon’s Conquest, while their father was translating old texts nearby. “With Aegon riding on the Black Dread, Balerion, his sister-wives, Rhaenys and Visenya, joined him by his side on Vhagar and Meraxes..” you read out loud to the children who huddled by your feet to sit and listen, you rubbed your growing stomach with affection. Everything seemed to be perfect, you all were spending time with one another. This was all you could have asked for.

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

Guys I’m sorry I didn’t update young and beautiful I promise I will!! But I was just in the mood to make dark reader content cus there’s barely any and I love it when reader is dark than Jace 😭 but wow that was a lot I might do a part 2 later lol

For @a-anselina hi pookums🤭

[mothmimic]

Suffocating

‣ pairing: Legolas x Maid/Healer!reader

‣ words: 1639

‣ content: basically childhood friends, unbalanced power dynamic, Legolas is a littleee jealous and petty (as in like… a lot), Legolas being too clingy and a little questionable, suggestive near the end, pleading men <3

──────────────────

‣ summary: Legolas had chosen you to be by his side from first glance. Even before he could wield a bow, he saw through your status and deemed your soul the same as his. However, his affection for you can be a bit… suffocating.

· · ─────── ·𖥸· ─────── · ·

Legolas had claimed you before he even knew your name. Call it fate if you will, but something indescribable had seized him the moment you were presented to his father. Like a ripe fruit you had been plucked from your cozy orphanage and displayed in front of the king. At the time you were not sure why you were in this place, a grand castle decorated with exquisite, flourishing fauna and marble cleaned so well it glinted in the sunlight, yet the prince very well knew. A nobody you were— simply an Elven child of mixed blood who had been found abandoned in Mirkwood’s forests— yet your excellence had soon shown itself in your healing. With a few whispered prayers and hands delicately placed, a wound could vanish within minutes. This is why you were here.

Mirkwood was exceptionally skilled in archery, but what was gained in one area was lost in another. The kingdom had healers, like many, yet none that could heal a wound with their own hands. So it was a surprise that you, an unassuming child, had been blessed with the gift of life. It did not take a council to decide that your gift must be fostered and taken care of like the most delicate sprout.

Although your skill was doted on, you, however, were not. You were an elf of mixed blood— the classic story of a rebellious Elven man who had seduced a human woman before vanishing for The Undying Lands was not unique. The story between an elf and human royalty was one that was respectable, yet this was not yours.

Although your royal guidance was intended to help you grow in your healing abilities, it became increasingly obvious your current job was not to heal the innocent. Instead, you were frequently assigned the task of assisting the prince after his rebellious endeavors. From healing his scraped knee after he hurled himself off a tree to even pouring his tea, you were practically his maid at this point.

However, Legolas did not see it as this— you did a lot for him, yes, but he found himself frequently getting into trouble and calling upon your help purposefully, simply longing for your care and attention. He did not have many other young elves to involve himself with, and you were perfectly fine as company. He even admired you, in fact, especially as he watched you use your healing gift on him. You both were taught basic skills such as how to wield a bow and how to analyze Elvish texts, yet you were oftentimes dragged away for additional training in your healing. Times like these he wondered if he was too dependent on you.

And now the prince, far past his coming-of-age ceremony, still wondered the same as he scanned the halls for your presence. His boots could be heard clicking against the pristine floor from even a man on the other side of the castle as he paced the area. Elves from Rivendell had arrived to discuss matters on the group of dwarves headed to reclaim their home from Smaug, and you were nowhere to be seen. Embarrassed to make his affection for you so obvious, he excused his worry as simply making sure you were not late to greet the guests.

“Y/N! Y/N, where in Middle-Earth have you wandered off to now?” He shouted, perhaps to himself. The maids rushing down the hallway did not give him a mere glance. His worry for you was not only typical, but also a frequent point of gossip. He let out a loud sigh and turned, frustrated, finally giving up in his search. He would definitely receive a scolding from his father at this point. Perhaps it would be worth it if only to share the burden of being late between the two of you. He hurriedly retraced his trail to the entrance of the castle, hoping the guests would still be there, yet he abruptly stopped as laughter floated through the halls.

He peered around the wall and outside into the garden, which held the source of the sound, and scowled at the sight he saw. You and one of the Rivendell elves— pale-skinned with hair various shades of hickory, undoubtedly one of Elrond’s sons— sitting on a bench and chatting— No, flirting. It was obvious with the way he was leaning into you, your face lit with joy at the jokes he charismatically threw. The sight was enough to make Legolas seethe with jealousy.

“Y/N.”

The unexpected sound of your name prompts you to jump a bit before looking towards the blond elf. You smile at the familiar face. “Legolas! Where have you been? The guests are already seated.”

“Well, that I would not know. I have been looking for you since I noticed your absence,” Legolas makes his way towards the two of you, eyeing the dark-haired elf as if he were goblin trash. “I see you have acquainted yourself with one of our dear guests.”

You rub the back of your neck apologetically, oblivious to the stare-down happening between the two. “Ah, I apologize. I was at the entrance long before they arrived, although I should have noticed you beforehand to ease your worries.”

Legolas is the first to break the glare, quickly changing his expression to one more gentle, more suitable to one as pure of heart as you. He crouches down to provide you comfort. “Of course. My worry for you is natural, yet it’s nothing to burden yourself with. May I?” The Elven prince takes your hand and holds it firm before you can even respond, almost as if the other may rip you away.

“Yes, but—“ You begin to protest as you look back towards the Rivendell elf, but he is the one to speak next.

“No worries, it is time we all join each other in the dining hall.” He huffs, clearly defeated. It is the prince of the kingdom he is visiting, after all.

And with that, Legolas guides you with him to the dining hall. The other merely trails behind in surrender.

With the rest of the night, Legolas is strangely distant. As you make your rounds offering tea to each elf, Legolas holds his hand over his teacup without so much as a simple “No, thank you.” Instead of contributing to the council like a respectable prince, he stays oddly silent and tightens his jaw in what seems to be annoyance. After a considerable time of him being obviously troubled about something, you follow his incomprehensible glare across the lengthy table to the elf you were speaking to earlier. You observe from the sidelines, expecting his glare to waver, yet it lingers. The other elf just seems to uncomfortably avoid eye contact. Even Thranduil notices enough to make an occasional irritated side glance at his son.

You simply excuse it as a harmless quarrel between princes.

⋅•⋅⊰∙∘☽༓☾∘∙⊱⋅•⋅

As the moon exudes her care across the darkened kingdom, Legolas can not seem to quiet his mind as he lays down to rest. His eyebrows tense and his chest tightens at the image of the Rivendell elf practically courting you, and you enjoying it. The thought of you being carried away back to Rivendell by this elf seemed none other than a nightmare. And perhaps it was still possible— the Rivendell group had settled for staying in the guest chambers tonight— perhaps he was making his way to your chamber at this moment. He would knock on your door, gently, as to not startle you, the way Legolas had done so many times before— you would answer, dressed in silk, hair ruffled by your pillowy sheets. In a heartbeat he would confess his attraction from the moment he saw you. You would fall into his arms and he would hold you, softly, as if the dream could break. You both would join lips in a passion, and soon enough you would be his.

And soon enough Legolas is making his way to your door— not too far of a journey, considering your chambers are right next to each other. He pauses for a moment, and two, before he gathers the courage to lightly knock on the wooden door. He awaits your presence, a burning inside his core threatening to swallow him whole. As he waits, his mind trails to his previous nightmare. Perhaps he is too late, he thinks, perhaps this is a mistake—

And soon enough you are there, in front of him, dressed in silk and your hair ruffled from your pillowy sheets. He stands there for a moment, silent and flustered.

“Well?” You sigh sleepily, rubbing your eyes at your interrupted slumber, “Are you alright?”

He sighs. With eagerness or longing you cannot tell. “Tell me you do not want him.” He bluntly states, his mouth moving faster than his brain. He grips both sides of your doorway, leaning towards you, keeping himself from joining you into an embrace. You can see his knuckles nearly turn white.

Your eyes are wide now, confused. “Who— sorry?”

“The Rivendell elf. You do not want him. He is an adventurer, he knows no home. He is not right for you, I assure you, he knows nothing about you. You are just a pretty face to him, but I— I…” He pauses, gasps for air as if he has almost drowned, and completely stops at a loss for words.

You stare at him a moment, his eyes wild and pleading. From the soft gazes he’s given you when teaching you how to correctly hold a bow to the seething glare you saw from him last night, this is unlike anything you’ve seen.

“Legolas…” you begin, but words cannot fathom what you want to say. Instead you lift your hand to tuck a strand of hair behind his pointed ear, gazing at him with newfound vulnerability. The back of your hand trails down his neck before resting on his chest. “He is not the one I want.”

· · ─────── ·𖥸· ─────── · ·

ok dang it’s like 1 am now. anyway sorry for cutting it off so abruptly I was starting to cringe a little and I just couldn’t do it. also thinking about adding 2 more parts to this but idk if I’ll have the motivation 🤕

[asoiaffan]

Aemond Targaryen…who would henceforth be known as Aemond the Kinslayer to his foes…returned to King’s Landing, having won the support of Storm’s End for his brother Aegon, and the undying enmity of Queen Rhaenyra. If he thought to receive a hero’s welcome, he was disappointed. Queen Alicent went pale when she heard what he had done, crying, “Mother have mercy on us all.” Nor was Ser Otto pleased. “You only lost one eye,” he is reported to have said. “How could you be so blind?” The king himself did not share their concerns, however. Aegon II welcomed Prince Aemond home with a great feast, hailed him as “the true blood of the dragon,” and announced that he had made “a good beginning.” Fire & Blood

[katakaluptastrophy]

One thing that has me gnawing on the metaphorical drywall is that Abigail Pent apparently never learned just how awful Jod is.

There she is, in the River, murdered by one of god's fingers and gestures, having been invited to the First so that she could kill her husband and eat his soul and...she's triggering Harrow by exclaiming that "The King Over the River is good!" when she learns some people survived.

Having worked out that there is something fundamentally, practically, metaphysically wrong with the River she...just assumes poor old god doesn't know and could do with some Cliff Notes.

And then there's the battle with the Sleeper. She's hiding from a mad, gun-wielding ghost, her husband shot in the stomach on the other side of the room, and her carefully planned exorcism in pieces, and Ortus begins to recite the Noniad. And realising the impossible thing he wants her to do, Abigail - who pages earlier expressed her doubts about god's omnipotence, prays: “Oh, God... God, please help me” (which makes her the only character who isn't a literal priest or member of a religious order who we see praying).

When she describes her childhood bedroom to Harrow, everything she mentions sounds like something of significance to her: her grandfather's bones, her desk, the bed where her brother sometimes slept, and "a pretty chroma of the Prince Undying, but a little cockeyed." (think mass produced 1950s Sacred Heart picture and you're probably not far off...)

Despite having formative memories of having weird devotional art in her bedroom, Abigail is miles away from that other enjoyed of Jod pictures in their living space, Silas Octakiseron. She's open about her heterodox views, and clearly has the knowledge to back them up (including, it should be noted, at least one degree taken on the Eighth). And she clearly has form with going off on a heterodox tangent, as Magnus seems to have a well-rehearsed pattern for bringing her back to an acceptable line. And while she's happy to acknowledge that her views aren't orthodox, she's not being pointlessly controversial: she doesn't mind being a heretic, but she's rather upset by the idea that Marta might think her a mad one.

Marta, meanwhile, is one of several characters who show us that Abigail's intensity isn't just the result of living in a theocracy: “No. The Second House doesn’t overthink the River...If we did we’d just have to fill in forms.” Meanwhile, Ianthe is clearly thinking about dogma with an eye less to worship than replication.

And maybe it's because I know a lot of people who are devout but heterodox, and in relationships only tenuously accepted in their tradition (or only in their specific bit of the tradition)...but I just have a lot of feelings about Abigail here. Someone who's willing to be frank and informed about the complexities inherent in her belief system, but who seems to be committed to her faith. She seems so willing to think the best of Jod, to pray to him even when she's intellectually aware it may not be quite that straightforward and...he doesn't give a shit. He isn't god. He's a stupid little man who looks down on the humanities and I wish Abigail Pent got the chance to say something devastating to him.

[barbieaemond]

The King of Qarth II

Pairing: Aemond Targaryen x Qartheen f!reader (use of third perspective)

PART 1 | SERIES MASTERLIST | MASTERLIST

Warnings: mentions of child sexual abuse, mentions of child bride, p in v, oral sex (f receiving), fingering, grinding, handjob, knife kink if you squint, self indulgent use of sorcery

Word count: 11k

Author's note: Aemond and the Salt Queen gets to know each other and do some good ol' bonding on shared trauma(s).

English is not my first language.

Taglist: @zae5 @arcielee @multyfangirl @zaldritzosrose @succnfuccubus @kckt88 @venmondiese @mariahossain @miraclealignertlsp369 @ilikechocolatemilkh @credulouskhaleesi @bunbunbl0gs @alphard-hydraes-blog @gemini-mama @freyaniobe @toodlesxcuddles @youngestxhearts @helen06dreamer

“Don’t run from me, kori” he screamed as she ran into the night “Please! Come here!”

He tried to chase her but her feet were faster, barely touching the ground as the nine-year-old girl ran away from the Palace of Dust.

She felt she could run forever, that she could not stop, not until she had forgotten what she had seen. What were those invocations? Why was that woman naked and screaming? Why was her father slaughtering animals on a stone altar and drinking their blood?

“Knowledge comes with a great cost.” was all Fydor repeated when the jarring rumors about what was being done in the House of the Undying reached her young ears and her mother, when the Shadow of the Evening had already stained her father's lips and fingernails blue for good.

“What does it mean, Father? What knowledge?”

“Any kind of knowledge, kori. Everything that was, that is. Everything that could be.”

But she did not want to know. Knowing had cost her her mother. She just wanted to run, but the black-barked trees with blue leaves seemed to envelop her like shadows in flesh, a labyrinth changing its thousand deceiving paths with every step she took.

For a moment she turned, her father was running after her but he was far. Until he wasn't.

She went crashing into him as the other Fydor continued to run behind her. He had done this before, all the Warlocks of Qarth did, appearing in several places at once.

White as a sheet, she watched her father lower himself toward her in that strange embroidered tunic like one who performs a ritual. Even in the darkness of that labyrinthine wood, the blue stood out on his lips and in the sclerae of his eyes.

“You don’t have to be afraid...but why? Why did you come here?”

“I heard the screams.” the little girl said with her lower lip trembling “When is Mother coming back?”

“She won’t, kori. It’s only you and me now.”

It was the first and only time she set foot in the Palace of Dust. Visits to her father were rare, although he longed to see her. Sometimes she could swear she could hear him talking in her head, telling her that the shadows protected her, that he protected her through them. Other times she would give in and invite him to the Palace of Salt, almost glad to see him but not quite.

There were always two opposite grooves in her lips when she looked at him. He was the man who avenged her and lost his tongue for it; he was the man who drove her mother to flee, abandoning their daughter.

She felt like that right now as she walked away, as she ran away from him, just like when she was nine. She could hear him echoing in her eardrums, as she left the courtyard with Prince Aemond, with the voice of the past, as if he had regrown his tongue.

“What did he say?”

“Trees wail…leaves are bleeding…” she hears, not the Prince speaking.

Aemond pulls her arm and feels her tensing at his touch, blinking at him as if she wasn’t there up until now. “What?”

“Your father. What did he say before we left?”

"Nothing of your concern.” She says lightly and resumes her walk. He stands still for a moment, sure, as he is sure of the noble blood in his veins, that whatever the warlock said through his hands, did concern him.

Unfortunately, he’s forced to set that thought aside as they leave the Palace; Aemond halts his stride, narrowing his eye at the strange wheelhouse waiting before him. A wheelhouse without wheels, and not even a carriage; more like a bed waiting to be moved, with veils and curtains on each of the four sides. A palanquin, he recalls the word from some book he read. This is how aristocracy moved in the East.

He turns his head as air shifts behind him, and a moment later he’s almost growling at one of the Sorrowful Men, bold enough to lay hands on him. “What do you think you’re doing?”

The Salt Queen rolls her eyes and walks to him. “Leave it. I’ll deal with the Prince. He’s already accustomed to having my hands on him, am I right?” she says with a tight, luscious smile, and oddly enough, but perhaps not so much, he doesn’t flinch as she starts to search his blue silks for any weapon.

Her hand slips beneath the soft fabric, gliding on his bare skin, chest and ribs, and she stares at him deliberately, just like him. “Perhaps your Highness just couldn’t wait to get her hands on me again.” he retorts with the ghost of an obnoxious grin.

She says nothing, staring at him as she searches his waist and then through the blue folds underneath. “Ah.” she tuts at one point, slowly drawing his faithful dagger. “And here I thought you were just pleased to see me. You won’t need this.” she says, keeping the blade. “Unlike you, I don’t bite. Unless asked of course.”

He hears the stretch on the word asked and nods slowly, plastering a fake, chastened frown. “I see. My deepest apologies. I didn’t think I had to ask since you have been throwing yourself at me at every corner. Speaking of which, your husband seemed quite proud of your performance earlier at breakfast. Will you be rewarded for your noble services?”

She only blinks at his vitriolic remark, but there is not a trace of outrage on her face. “Someone might say it is not wise to insult someone, especially a woman, when she is armed.”

“Why, do you know how to use that?” he asks, lowering his gaze and tilting his chin to point at the blade.

“No, but how difficult could it be considering how little it takes me to get you to let your guard down? Just like any man, I might add.”

He has no time to bite back, annoyingly moving his jaw at being deemed an ordinary man who crumples at a woman’s touch, while she turns her back and moves the curtains aside to enter the palanquin.

Aemond follows and finds himself cursing internally as he tries to adjust inside that odd, restricted transport. He wouldn’t even call it that. It’s nothing but a mattress with soft cushions on it.

Were Qartheens accustomed to doing everything lying on those damn cushions?

He might just sit, but he is too tall, and the canopy of the litter is too low, greeting his head with a slight bump. The Queen stifles a smile, already settled on the cushions with her legs tucked under her, and she watches him sigh deeply, resigning himself with clear annoyance to lie down on the cushions, holding onto one elbow.

Aemond tries to look at ease, not bothered by the woman and how much she's close to him, as close as if they were to confide a secret to each other, and just as he thinks he has settled down, the Sorrowful Men are lifting the litter, and he is jolted forward, slightly on top of her.

She lifts her arm to hold him by the shoulder, and in that split second, Aemond ties his hand around her arm to keep his weight off her. She tenses, just as before, just as she did the night before in his room. To her misfortune, she is now the one who suffers from too much proximity, or rather, a total lack of space. She feels the long single braid dangling on her, tickling her chest. She can see the specks of blue in his iris, the small cleft on the tip of his nose, the way that vicious mouth flaunts a perfect shape.

If only she could actually read minds, she would know that that last thought mirrors in his head.

He shouldn't care, he shouldn't even linger on that thought. This woman has done nothing but trample on his pride, has done nothing but mocking and taunting, and she seems quite adamant on keeping doing so. But perhaps it's because her mouth is close now, and for once silent, slightly open; an offering hiding a thousand more. And he had not taken it. In the throes of rage and pleasure, he had not kissed her. And he wishes. He wishes to know. Would she taste sweet? Tart?

Would she taste like salt?

The thought slips to the back of his mind as she clears her throat and straightens up, forcing him to distance himself, although they are still uncomfortably close. With one hand she knocks twice against the canopy, and the Sorrowful Men start walking.

Aemond leans better on his elbow to curb the swaying of the litter, and sighs glancing at the woman beside him. “Never heard of horses in this part of the world?”

“Horses barely survive in the desert, ask any Dothraki. Besides, what you Westerners do with those poor beasts is barbaric.”

His eyebrow is raising, ready to rebut, but as he opens his mouth, she offers him a small plate full of dates and dried figs. He moves his hand to dismiss it, causing her to frown. “Do you ever eat?” she takes one fig between her fingers and bites. “You should try one. Perhaps it’d make you less…bitter all the time.”

He glares at her but in doing so, he stumbles upon her mouth and the saccharine juice pasting her lips. She reads this as if he is reconsidering, so she stretches the half-bitten fig, and given their closeness, it takes her little to bring it to his mouth.

Aemond tilts his head back to decline and sighs. "Do you always think about eating here?"

"God no, we have much more pleasant pastimes." she says, chewing the other half of the fruit. "Would you like to hear about some of them?"

Aemond is not looking at the woman, and yet he can feel her luscious smile like something vivid, prickling his skin. "I can imagine."

"Can you? It doesn't seem so."

"What's that supposed to mean?"

"Well, perhaps our intimate encounter misleads me, but...you seem that kind of man who fucks his wife only on all fours, to feel in power and all those manly excuses."

"I am not." he hisses.

"Really?” She tilts her head curiously and looks at him closely. “Ever let her be on top? Ever been tied up? Blindfolded?"

He looks away at that, scoffing. "So, it's either eat or fuck."

Aegon would have thrived here, he thinks dimly.

"Fine. What should we talk about then?"

"Why do we have to?"

"The war? I, for instance, think it's only your father's fault. He wanted a son, right? And he had three. People unfit to take a decision should not be allowed to rule, if you ask me. On the other hand, though, what your mother did upon his death—"

"Keep my mother out of your mouth."

She hears the threat in the hissing way the words come out of his mouth, so she hushes, and turns her head toward the bustle of the city blurred by the veils and curtains of the litter. “Silence it is.”

And silently, he thanks the Gods for a moment of peace, free of this constant enquiring and teasing. That same silence though, only makes him think of Alicent. Is she still in chains? Is she wondering about him day and night or did she choose to banish him from her mind as he banished her?

Perhaps now that he is in a rather civil city, he could send word to her? Let her know he’s alive and that he was…what was he doing here?  

But even if he did know, he could not trust any of these people.

“What is exactly your husband’s plan now?”

“What do you think? You promised them dragon eggs. They won’t let you go until they have their little lizards to play with.”

Aemond scoffs, glancing distractedly beyond the curtains “Do you think you can fool me? Speaking of them as if you are not into it as well.”

“I am not. We may have different customs, but even here women are pawns in the hands of men. Men choose what we shall do, who we shall marry…how they shall fuck us.” He drags his eye back on her at this, watching her as she adds “But I have no interest in keeping you here, or having a creature spitting fire as a pet. I prefer cats, if you must know, or snakes.”

“I see. So, you just follow his orders? He tells you to fuck whoever is housed under your roof, and you obey?”

“I fuck who I wish to. And if you don’t want to taste how sharp your dagger is, you might want to stop addressing me as a whore.”

“Who you wish?”

“Yes.” She catches a glimpse of his eyebrow raising in a rather boastful way and looks away, huffing. “Quit it, dragon prince. You might be handsome, but it wasn’t that special.”

“Why? It was hard to tell in the midst of all that begging.”

“Because I don’t like to feel like I’m ten again.”

The smug expression on Aemond's face disappears as quickly as the Salt Queen speaks those words, wrinkling his forehead as he grasps their meaning. But she looks at him with a passive face, and she speaks of this person, herself, and yet another, with the distant tone with which one speaks of the dead.

“I was raped when I was ten. Bent over my small table while I was painting seashells.”

Aemond looks genuinely startled, and why wouldn’t he? He is not sure he can trust this woman’s word, but something in the back of his mind, namely the way she was tensing like steel as he took her from behind, tells him she’s speaking the truth. After all, it seems her tongue is made of nothing else.

“Don’t look at me like that.” she says “I’m not telling you to make you say you’re sorry. Everyone knows. There is no such thing as secrets here. It helps the trades, makes for more honest negotiations.”

The litter stalls as Aemond barely registers they must have reached the walls, but he doesn’t move, staring at the woman, cautiously, enquiringly, as something unfolding right before him.

“And what are we trading?”

She was starting to move to get out of the palanquin, but she halts at his question, raking his half-lying figure with her eyes, the long slender hands laced together on his abdomen, the little smooth portion of chest peeking from the blue silks. “It depends on what you are offering…”

They share a long earnest look, unwavering on both parts, until the curtains are moved. “Your Highness, we have reached the walls.”

The woman blinks and takes a light breath. “Let’s go, shall we? Before your lizard starts chewing the walls.”

She barely moves and he’s seizing her wrist, drawing her eyes back on him instantly. The Queen witnesses something new curling his features, cracking his mouth open and then shutting it back—a reluctance, almost a regret that does not settle well on that ever-so-strict face; it seems unwanted, rejected, and yet it keeps coming back, twitching his mouth twice. “Had I known…I would’ve behaved differently.” He says staring down, whereas she stares right down at him, at the grimace twisting his lips, as if tasting salt. “I know how it is…to feel—”

“Powerless?”

In more ways than one.

He doesn’t utter the words, but the way his eye pierces through her is nothing but a confession. 

“You could have stopped me.”

“Yes, I could. That’s what troubles me.” She says in a hushed tone, and now she’s the one staring down, grimacing. “I didn’t want to.”

Being a dragonrider, one might think Aemond should be used to deal with strange creatures. And yet, his brow is furrowing steeply as soon as they’re out of the city walls. There are some men waiting for them, common men dressed in dark robes, acting as keepers for a four-legged animal that Aemond has never seen in his life. A camel.

The Salt Queen fakes a frown upon reading the confusion on his face and says “Surely you didn’t think we would walk in the desert.”

“Because it’s hot or because it goes against all the lying around you do here?”

She bursts into a short laugh, drawing his eye to her, and says “It seems you have found your humor. I’m glad. I like men who can make me laugh.”

It was not really his intention, rather a mere observation, but he says nothing, lingering for a moment on her lips curved up, before returning to look at the creature before him, slowly ruminating something as it stares at him with two dark, waning eyes.

“I don’t know how to ride this—thing.”

“Ah, it’s a bit tricky. You see,” she goes to stand right beside him, leaning against him so that he feels her bare shoulders against his arm, and as she gestures towards the camel, she says “You have to get on it and keep yourself balanced on the hump with one knee. Very dangerous, I must warn you. Most men die by merely trying.”

She turns to look at him with her lips cracking in amusement, but as she sees the earnest, not at all amused, face he’s wearing, she sighs deeply. “And it’s lost again.”

“It’s just a bit slower than a horse.” She explains taking a step away as one of the Sorrowful men hands her some blue fabric, like a scarf. Aemond sees her handing one to him and she speaks before he asks about it. “For your skin. To shield you from the sun if you don’t want to peel your face off because of burn blisters.”

He grabs the cloth, unfolding it between his hands as, out of the corner of his eye, he sees the Queen wrap her own around her head, leaving only a crevice for her eyes. He tries to mimic her gestures, but his braid gets stuck, so she walks to him raising her hands, and without a word she helps him, wrapping his head and face in blue.

“Come. Since it’s your first time, you’ll ride with me.”

Then, she moves towards the camel, while the armed men will follow on foot, dragging the cart of dead pigs and goats. With silent relief on his part, Aemond finds out that it seems even easier than riding a horse. At first.

The camel kneels on the sand on his four legs, and Salt Queen straddles it, sitting in the saddle. She swings each leg on both sides of the creature, her silks gliding like water, effectively baring her skin from the ankles to her thighs; she makes room for him, turning her head to beckon him to sit behind her and, inevitably, she sees him staring down at her bare legs. “So, you found something else to stare at other than my breast. Good.”

Aemond looks up and then away, moving to get this over with. He sits on the saddle, behind the woman, their bodies barely touching, at first. As she grabs the reins, she slightly turns her head saying “Follow my lead.”

She pulls at the reins and since camels stand up with their back legs first, Aemond is jolted forward, colliding against the Salt Queen who promptly instructs him. “Lean back…”

He does so, and she does too, resting her shoulders against his chest. “And now forward.” She adds when the animal gets onto its front legs. Aemond lurches forward, and having no handhold, he grips her left side not to crash his body on her.

“Pigaí.” She says in Qartheen and, slowly, the camel starts walking. Aemond briefly looks behind, watching the Sorrowful Men move accordingly, four of them dragging a wooden cart full of carcasses, but soon he finds himself too occupied with keeping balance to spare a glance behind.

A camel’s walk is nothing like the gait of a horse. It’s odd, irregular, jerky; it keeps jolting him backward and then forward, each time forcing him to bump against her back, to hold onto her, sometimes her arm, sometimes her hip, her thigh even, like a toddler who's just learning to walk.

Hearing his short and clearly annoyed sighs, the Queen smiles behind the tajel, keeping her gaze fixed on the dunes at the horizon, and softly shakes her head. “Always so rigid…”

“What” he asks without even intoning the question, because the camel and this hiccup-like swinging is getting on his nerves, not to mention the heat, sticking the silks on him, or the woman's body which, for all the right reasons but rather inconvenient under the circumstances, is making his blood flow down too fast.

“You are too rigid.” She says, slightly raising her tone. “You have nothing to prove to this poor beast, or me.”

She takes his hand that he held like an iron clamp on her side and turns her head a little, enough to catch his eye. "Let yourself sway, don't fight it."

Keeping his eye on her, his grip lessens, just as all the stiffness in his body. She feels him sway, brushing naturally against her without tensing every time their bodies touched. And yet her throat stiffens as he keeps swinging against her, and she’s glad she’s giving her back and wearing a tajel, so he cannot see her lips parting as air hitches in her mouth.

The camel’s hooves avoid human and animal remains in what is nothing but a Garden of Bones; the sun is scorching, the air so humid, heavy, it feels like cotton when swallowing. But fortunately for them, she is not late to come into view amid those white dunes.

"By all the Gods..." The Queen cries out in disbelief, widening her eyes as she sees a huge black spot in the middle of the yellowish-white desert; a mountain, of flesh and fire.

The camel must sense her agitation, or perhaps he’s wise enough to know what he is up against. He starts to flail, to paw, and the Queen is forced to pull on the reins, unbalanced back and forth. Aemond holds her by the arms with his eye strained on Vhagar, but the quadruped seems to have no intention of staying there a minute longer.

He screeches to the point that both Aemond and the Queen are thrown from the saddle, landing on the sand, one on top of the other. The camel flees, despite one of the Sorrowful Men attempts to catch him.

That little cackle, however, awakens the dragon, or perhaps she simply sensed her rider. Vhagar raises her huge head from the cat-like crouched position she was in, her amber eyes wide as well as her giant wings. Aemond is barely in time to stand and help the woman do the same when the earth beneath them shakes as if in an earthquake.

The Queen of Salt whitens like a sheet as she sees that terrifying beast advancing from a distance, a distance that drastically runs out because each stride of the dragon covers miles.

She freezes on the spot, her mouth wide open, because the dragon keeps advancing, and for a moment she seriously thinks she is breathing the last breaths of her life.

Aemond shields her with his body, and Vhagar stops, opening her mouth wide and roaring so loudly that the queen has to cover her ears. Even Aemond scrunches his face under the scorching gust that sweeps over him, so scorching that the glimmer of flames ignites at the back of her jaws. She's not happy to see him. Or rather, she's not happy about being abandoned to starve in the desert, even for one day. Ageing makes even beasts more irritable.

“Lykirī, Vhagar!” the Prince shouts “Lykirī!”

But she does not listen, not immediately at least. She continues to roar, intent on voicing her disappointment. Then, finally, she closes her jaws. The Queen looks at her with wide eyes, her chest rising and falling quickly, her hands laced firmly around Aemond's arms. Vhagar lowers her head toward him, still showing her fangs, and flares her nostrils, smelling something, someone, foreign.

“What is she doing?” the Queen asks in a whisper.

“Hush.”

She tilts her head back, looking at him from behind and still whispering, says “Need I remind you my father is a warlock? If your dragon eats me, I will come back to haunt you.”

He doesn’t bother to retort, even more so because Vhagar makes a sudden movement, turning her head sharply as her nostrils smell what she has been craving for too long. Aemond follows her gaze, barely having the time to register the Sorrowful Men on the right, at a good distance but not far enough for a starving dragon.

“Get away from there!” the Prince warns them “Move!”

As soon as that last word leaves his mouth, Vhagar moves with impressive speed, given her size and age, but hunger quickens her limbs. Her head sinks on the cart as the armed men scurry away without logic, raising a cloud of dust and sand as her fangs pierce wood, flesh and bone.

She perches on the sand to enjoy her much-needed meal, which disappears by the second under the gaze of Aemond and the Salt Queen, still pale as a sheet and stunned by what she's witnessing, flinching every time she hears jaws snapping and bones cracking.

“Where are you going?” she asks as Aemond tries to take one step.

He turns, glancing at her hand gripping his arm, and looks at her for a moment before raising his eyebrow “Scared, are we?”

She gives him a flat look as if he has just informed her that the sky is blue. “Self-awareness is not cowardice.”

Aemond moves, circling the beast, and the woman dims it wisely to never leave his side, keeping a constant eye on the beast, unaware she’s still gripping his arm as she moves. The Prince stops somewhere near Vhagar’s left wing and the Queen watches as he seems to inspect it closely. Out of curiosity, she does the same, spotting a large wound toward the right end, healed but not quite. Aemond places one hand on the scales but as soon as he does that, Vhagar turns her head sharply, blood coating her jaws and fangs, and growls, clearly still annoyed with him or maybe just unhappy to be bothered during her meal.

“She’s just like you, isn’t she?” the Queen remarks “Sour and petty.”

Aemond ignores her, taking a step back, momentarily resigning not to tend to his dragon, as long as she’s in that mood. “Perhaps you could stop gripping me so hard now.” he says at one point, feeling the Queen’s nails digging through the silk.

She looks lost for a moment, and then withdraws her hand, looking away. She finds though that all she can look at is Vhagar, her giant dimension blocks her view entirely.

“How did you manage to tame such a monster?” she asks at some point, eyes full of dread, and yet wonder.

“She is not a monster.”

“No, of course not. She’s as sweet as a kitten.”

She observes the beast, her green and bronze scales, battered in several spots and frowns. “Correct me if I’m wrong, and I rarely am, did not dragons take decades to grow? She seems very old and you...” pausing, her eyes scan him from head to toe “you don’t look older than twenty-five?”

Aemond keeps his gaze fixed on Vhagar as he answers, that empty egg made of nothing but stone lost somewhere in the back of his mind. "My egg didn’t hatch. I claimed her when I was ten.”

"Ten?” she asks, disbelief and awe running together on her tongue.

He turns his head and tilts his chin down, and then up, as only pride can do. "Ten.”

She looks at him, not able to hide a righteous gleam of admiration, but then she’s crinkling her forehead, in that peculiar way of hers.

 "Was it worth it?” she asks, upon acknowledging that new piece.

"What?”

"The exchange. Was it fair? Your eye for a dragon.”

Do not mourn me, Mother. His mouth twitches as he remembers, almost relives it. It has been years and yet, he can almost feel the right side of his head numbed with too much pain, the stench of his own dead flesh. The needle going in and out but not actually stitching anything back together.

“How did it happen?” she asks, and her tone is different now. That constant veil of mocking in the way she phrases her questions is nowhere to be found.

“Do you want me to believe you don’t know yet?”

"I told you twice. I cannot control this…power, it comes and goes. I must admit though, it is coming quite often in the last few days…I wonder why…”

Aemond looks at her, sees her search on him a mystery to which he has no answers in the first place. He learned this from Alys.

Magic repels answers, it must live and thrive on mystery.

On chaos, you mean.

And what’s the difference? That’s what you really yearn for. Chaos.

He sighs to cast her out, and says “My nephew took it with a knife.”

"And you killed him. This is why they call you Kinslayer, is it not?”

She cannot see his expression behind the tajel, only his good eye, still, cold and unwavering, like a star, and beautiful in the most cruel way.

"We may have shared blood but he meant nothing to me. And he got what he deserved.” he said, trying a flat empty tone, but she hears the edges quivering, crumpling, like salt eroding rocks.

"And what about that boy? Did he get what he deserved?”

"What boy?”

"The ten year old you.” His eye seems to glow with new light at her words, like the sun catching the flashing steel of a blade, and even with the blue scarf hiding his face, she knows his teeth are grinding.  "I was never one for revenge.” She concedes, turning her head to the desert. "It may be the sweetest morsel, but somehow it never leaves you sated.”

"It sounds like you have tasted it.”

"Yes.” She admits, turning to look at him. "But it’s stuck in my throat.”

Aemond doesn’t need to ask, because as she said, there are no secrets in Qarth.

"You must have wondered why my father cannot speak.” she tells him, looking away, dredging up from her mind, from her memories, traces of a child who is no more. “There’s an ancient tradition here, when a wedding takes place. It’s called the sacred exchange. The bride and the groom can ask each other for one favor, anything, and they cannot refuse.” She returns her gaze to him, and says “My husband asked for my father’s tongue as my sacred gift.”

“Was it him?”

"No, not him…the night before our wedding, Irryo, Xavos’ brother, came into my room to give me his wedding gift. The purest silk I’ve ever seen. He made me wear it, stripped me bare with his own hands…said he wanted to see how I looked...”

She doesn’t need to utter the words. Aemond sees a little girl, a child, painting seashells, unfinished, falling from the table in a clatter of tinkles and choked cries.

"The wedding took place in a hurry an hour later. I said my vows with my silks still stained with blood. They were scared of my father’s wrath, you see. But it came anyway. Irryo died during the wedding feast. His eyes burst into his skull.”

“Your father’s doing.”

“Perhaps." she shrugs "I didn’t know what to make of it at the time, as I don’t know what to make of it now. I didn’t ask him to avenge me. All I wanted was for him, anyone, to say they were sorry for what had been done to me.”

Did he not want the same?

Apart from punishment, and then revenge, did he not want just one word of kindness from his father? Some sort of regret from Lucerys? 

She feels his eye on her, even if he’s not really looking at her, perhaps at some ghosts locked in his mind, so she glances at Vhagar, quite contented after her meals and currently resting on the sand. “We should go back to the Palace before it gets too hot out here. I will give orders to save more dead beasts for your dragon.”

The journey back to the walls is a silent one. It spreads, silence, like an oil stain as they climb back onto the litter; each of them has caught something of the other, something similar, different cracks etched with the same cruelty, and matching.

Their gazes match, as they remove the tajel from their heads, as she hands him some water. She looks around distractedly, but the curtains are closed and even if they weren’t, the sound of water rushing down his throat brings her eyes on him, and then closely, she watches his tongue flicking outside for a moment, she watches a drop of water running down his chin. And wishes to lick it off with her tongue.

Somehow, it’s like he can hear what she’s thinking, locking his eye on her. They don’t speak, it’s almost as if both of them are waiting for something.

"Your braid needs to be redone." She says at one point, and he turns, not looking at her face, not at first. She sees his eye trailing slowly over her until he speaks.

"Is that your offering?"

Closely, she rakes her eyes on his chiseled features, and she is not even aware she is imperceptibly leaning closer. A moth to a flame, they say. But she has always been the flame. And now, she finds she’s the one willing to bathe in the light, or burn.

“If you wish."

It comes out like a whisper, drawing his eye on her lips, unearthing that same desire from earlier, the thirst to know what she tastes like. "What If I wish for something more?"

“Such as?" she asks, raising one hand to touch his braid and undo it, smoothly, as if she had done this countless times before.

"Don't be shy now. Everything is a trade in Qarth. Even pleasure."

Swiftly, he clamps his hand around her wrist, stopping her, drawing a slight wince beneath her skin.

"Pleasure is not something to be traded.” He says, and it’s the flame now that is moving. “Only taken."

The short intake of air she breathes on his mouth is a seal. His lips meet hers abruptly, they part instantly and ravenously, like a starved man tasting a morsel, and then loosening to taste it, to taste her. Perhaps it’s desert, perhaps it’s herself, but she does taste like salt. She’s bitter on his tongue, in his nostrils; she muffles his ears until he hears only her sweet sighing in his mouth as he slips his tongue inside.

And he wants more of that, just as she wants more. He feels her unfolding beneath him as he towers over her, so differently from the previous night. She’s not tense. She’s loose like water, he feels her seeping in everywhere, around his neck and shoulders, in his mouth when her tongue darts in, in his blood when she softly rubs against him. His breathing becomes heavy, from lack of air, from hardening, and maybe he shouldn't, maybe this isn't really the right place. They could wait until they get back to the palace, but then she lies back on the pillows and reclines her head, offering her neck. Without thinking, he lowers himself down on her, in fact lying on her, and she instantly makes room for him by spreading her legs wide.

She gasps softly as he trails wet kisses on her neck, growing greedy as he travels down, to what he’s been secretly coveting since the first time he unapologetically landed his sight on.

Cupping her bare breast with his large hand, he holds it firmly, humming pleasurably as he takes the hard nipple into his mouth. Accordingly, she bucks her hips against him, feeling his hardening tease her center through that thin layer of silk. Between that and the swirling of his tongue, hot and wet around her nipple, she is panting, spreading her legs wide to cage his hips and push him against her, desperate for more friction.

Despite his ache for the same and more, he glances up, still torturing her nipple, hard and slick at this point, watching her as he grazes his teeth over that darker spot of skin, forcing a choked, loud whimper to escape her mouth.

“Careful, your Highness” he teases “lest you want to give your peasants a show.”

“What do you think these curtains are for?”

“You want me to fuck you here? Now?” he asks with a playful scorn in his voice, but she can hear his breath creaking, his tone lower and throatily.

She raises from the cushions, holding on one hand while the other slips between them, hovering on his groin, brushing feathery. “I believe you want to.” She breathes on his lips, parting as soon as he rocks his waist to catch her palm.

“We could wait to be in the Palace but…” she takes his hand and brings it between her legs, on that thin layer of silk, damp again his knuckles. “Would you be so cruel and leave me like this, for so long?”

He swallows something close to a growl upon feeling how wet she is for him, how her cheeks are barely flushed as she exhales heavily, her face scrunched lustfully for the little, shallow pleasure she finds from his fingertips.

Curtains or no curtains, Aemond is deaf and blind to anything else around him. With his fingers, he moves the fabric and twists his wrist, so that his palm is straight against her pulsing core. She sighs hoarsely as her wetness coats his hand, arching just as slightly, goading him to do more. She has been watching and coveting his fingers once too many times, the thought alone of having them inside her crumples her face in a pleading way, and she has no shame in voicing it. “Please, Aemond…”

Upon hearing his name, spoken in that exotic and alluring way, he bares his teeth and harshly slips not one, but two of his slender fingers inside, watching her tilt her head back, her mouth open and out of breath, but she’s looking at him and she’s quick to regain air, barely curving her lips up. “So you do know how to use your hands…”

“You never shut up, do you?”

“Well, make me.”

His cock twitches on its own at her words, and he kisses her, roughly, flexing his hand to start pumping his fingers in. She moans loudly on his tongue, lacing an arm around his neck, still holding herself onto the cushions with her other hand, angling her back so he can reach that special spot more easily.

“Oh God—yes---” she moans when he does, rocking her hips to meet his deft fingers in a sweet lewd sound that muffles any other coming from the fuss outside that litter. Her breath grows short and labored, mewling obscenely every time he curls his fingers, his gaze on her fixed and focused like on some holy mission.

He desperately wants to bury himself inside her, right there; he’s almost thankful for the much more loose clothes they wear here instead of the constricting breeches he was used to, even though he feels his flesh on fire, and he’s practically panting on her pleasure; his own is of no concern to him right now, not when she’s so close, not when he can watch a little more of her face distorting with wanton abandon, her neck lumped with sweat, the way her breast swings with her motions.

But she, on the other hand, seems eager to end this torture, and start another. The tensed muscle in her arm gives away, making her back fall on the cushions once more, but the other is still tied around his neck, so she drags him down with her and then she’s rummaging through the blue silks, eager to free his length, but he grips her wrist and holds it firmly above her head. “No…I have a score to settle with you.”

“What? You proved quite enough you know how to use your hands.” She says breathlessly, cracking half a smile “I swear on all the Gods, yours and mine, I won’t doubt you again.” 

Aemond is just about to retort but suddenly the palanquin stops, and they are abruptly brought back to the reality just outside those curtains. They hear a male voice and he looks enquiringly at the Salt Queen who visibly rolls her eyes and says something in Qartheen which, given her tone, Aemond is sure is some kind of curse.

She fumbles with her thin gowns, covering her nudity while he takes some distance, returning to lean on one elbow with once more clear annoyance, this time much more justified. And once more, he’s thankful for the loose silks, able to hide his otherwise plain arousal.

The Queen sighs deeply, to keep herself together, to stop the ringing in her ears and the aching stir below her navel; then she opens the curtains and smiles warmly. “Syradhor! I thought I recognized your voice.”

The man in yellow silks, with several sapphires embroidered in the fabric and worn on his fingers, bows for a moment saying, “Your Highness.” He takes her hand that she promptly offers and lightly kisses her knuckles, trailing his eyes on her with two eyes blind with admiration. “Any man who finds himself in the presence of such beauty can count himself as the luckiest in the world. What a blessing for me to be granted such fortune once more.”

Aemond is staring at the man, unimpressed, doing all he can not to scoff at the love sonnet-like speech, and a rather dull one. “Prince Aemond. A pleasure to see you again.”

Aemond recalls the man as one of the Merchant Kings who greeted him at the walls two days prior, but his face is all he remembers. “Which one is this?” he deadpans to the Salt Queen, evidently not happy to have been interrupted. She hears the annoyance in his voice and stifles a smile saying “This is Syradhor, the Ore King.”

The Prince barely tilts his chin down to greet him and the man in yellow takes a step forward, addressing the Queen. “Your Highness, since you are here, I am gladly extending my invitation to you as well.”

“Extending?” she asks.

“I—Yes, I was expecting Prince Aemond today, to formally receive him in my Palace.”

“Were you?” he drawls.

The honeyed benevolence leaves the man's face like a summer storm, because that's the way he is, as eager to please as he is quick to anger. “What is meaning of this? Did Xavos not inform you?”

“Of course.” Of course not, is what she means to say. But before she can utter another word, Aemond speaks. “Well, I’m afraid we have to delay this formal reception.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Syradhor.” The Queen steps in “you must understand, the Prince is new to our customs. He’s not aware of our welcoming traditions. As it happens, that was precisely what the Prince and I were discussing before you interrupted us.”

“Were we?” he says lifting his eyebrow.

She flashes daggers at him and continues with a broad smile. “I told him not to delay his visit to your Palace, for if ever a foreigner refused to visit one of the Thirteen—" she looks directly at Aemond, informing him at that very moment. “It would be considered the highest of insults.”

Aemond looks at her, unblinking, before sighing deeply, and deciding to play along. “Yes, I do recall now. Her Highness was quite vocal on the matter.”

She keeps smiling, for reasons entirely different from what the Ore King might think, and then he raises one hand towards the crowded street. “Please. My Palace is just around the corner.”

Aemond comes out of the litter, being careful to let the silks fall over all the right places.

“I hope you have a good time, my Prince.”

He whirls his head watching the Salt Queen stay still on the cushions and the Ore King looks just as stunned. “Will you not delight my Palace with your presence?”

“I am afraid I can’t, Syrhador. I was just asking the Prince for advice on some urgent matters I desperately need to attend to.” She pointedly looks at Aemond with a ghosting smile and then she shrugs, lightheartedly. “I suppose I shall take those urgent matters into my own hands.”

Her words and what they mean, stir something within him, more annoyance at the mere thought of wasting time with this little man —his shoulder reaches just above Aemond’s ribs— when he could be fucking her senseless on that litter, on his bed, hers, he’s not picky at this point. And more giddiness, making his blood boil at mere thought of her chasing her pleasure with her own hands.

But then she’s shutting him out, shutting the curtains, and ordering her men to move.

The sky is of a delicious pink-red shade when he returns to the Palace of Salt.

Four hours, that was the torment he had to endure in the presence of Syradhor and his family. Four hours in which he barely opened his mouth, and when he did, all that came out were monosyllables uttered from time to time in a manner closer and closer to snarling.

The Ore King had embarked on a soliloquy about alum, a precious mineral useful as mordant for dyeing wool, embalming animals and human bodies, and making wood fireproof. It would’ve been interesting for a former scholar as Aemond was, but it was difficult to think straight amid the chattering, duck-like squawking of Syradhor’s daughters, and even more difficult when he had brought the cup of wine to his mouth and sensed her intimate sweet-tart smell stuck on his fingers, awakening all the wrong thoughts.

In the end, he was so sick of the whole affair that he had curtly refused to be escorted to the palace of Xavos on another litter, and the Ore King had sent four of his guards to walk with him, along the streets of Qarth.

His spirits when he crosses the threshold of the Palace of Salt are at an all-time low. If only he didn't have to face another litter trip lying on cushions after spending four hours sitting on those same fucking cushions, he'd go straight to Vhagar. He's always been a solitary creature, just like her, and all these talks and pleasantries, fake or true, were like pouring a barrel of water into a narrow vase. He was toppling over.

Surprisingly though, as soon as he sets foot in his chambers, his foul spirits seem to instantly improve as he finds his room lit with candles, and not at all empty. The Salt Queen is sitting comfortably in an armchair, with her legs dangling graciously over the left armrest; a little book is clutched in her hold.

“My Prince.” She greets him as he lingers on the door, lifting her gaze from her reading.

Aemond closes the door, never tearing his gaze off her. It betrays nothing, only the faint irritation for the four hours wasted, but not the way his lungs swell upon seeing her.

“Did your Grace have fun?” she asks with sheer curiosity, closing the book with a light thud.

“Fun?” he repeats, as if she had just suggested she had proof unicorns from Skagos were real.

“Surely it was not that bad? I mean, yes, Syradhor is boring and yes, he has that annoying habit of touching you as he talks, but he has a great collection of wines. I should have told you. There’s no other way to survive him.”

“He has a litter of daughters” Aemond sneers, walking to her “each of them duller than the other.”

“Well, that happens when you fuck your relatives. You, above all, should know that.”

He looks at her questioningly and she leans forward to place the book on a little table, the soft fabric of her lilac gowns slips on her skin just as his eye slips on her bare thighs, glowing as gold under the candlelight. “His wife is his niece.” She says, looking up and catching his staring.

His eye trails slowly over her until locking her eyes. “What are you doing here?”

“You forgot this.” She says, raising her hand with his dagger held between her fingers.

Aemond stops before her, raising an eyebrow as he looks down at her “You were waiting for me, to give me back my dagger?”

She takes a good amount of time, while looking at him, feeling his eye, darkened due to the dim light and boring into her, to utter a simple “No."

“Then why?”

She rises, handing the blade, and says “I believe we had a score to settle.”

Aemond takes the blade from her hands, nodding slowly, and then circles her to go sit where she was a moment ago, placing the blade on the armrest, along with his hands. “And what was it?” he asks with a faint smirk. If she’s keen on playing games, he will let her play this one. “Somehow, it’s eluding me now.”

She watches him cross his long legs, tilting his head as he awaits, and she says “Your braid needs to be redone.”

“Hmm.” Aemond looks around, almost amused, and sees his bed, not exactly in order as it was when he left, but slightly crumpled.

Did she lie on his bed? Did she touch herself and peak, writhing on his sheets? The thought alone tickles his spine, but still, he betrays nothing, only the faint tapping of his fingers against the armrest. “You’ve been here all this time to give me back my dagger and redo my hair.”

She watches his fingers moving and she’s moving. She would like to take his hand and pick up where they left off, but she just sits on his lap, forcing him to uncross his legs, and spread them a little to make her room. “I deeply cherish my guests and their welfare under my roof.” She jests, although it’s partially true.

The only difference is that she never spent hours waiting for one of her guests, or any man, nor fantasizing about all the ways that man could take her, not as fervently as she did as her hand moved relentlessly between her legs, finding but a mere flicker of the pleasure he had just started to spill from her.

“And did you…” his tone is coarse, so he pauses to swallow. He hates that his voice is coming out so low, he hates that this woman can reduce him like this in a matter of minutes, that his cock is already stirring. “Did you eventually take that urgent matter into your own hands?”

She takes a long lock of silver hair between her fingers, running them through it while she quietly answers

“Twice.”

“Here?”

“Yes.” She looks at him, while her fingers start to work on that lock, making a little braid using only one hand. “Disappointing.”

“The room or your hands?”

“Oh, the room was quite fine.” she lets the little braid rest among the other locks and trails her fingers on his chest, and a moment later underneath the silk, like tentacles. “I only wished I had your hands inside me.”

Her touch licks flames on his skin, on his chest, collarbone, and neck; she touches him with intent, as if she wishes to know what he is made of. “You could have come with me.”

“I didn’t lie, I had some matters to attend to. Besides, coming with you would have left us in quite a situation.” She reasons with diplomacy, not making a blink as her other tentacle slides over his stomach, disappearing underneath. “Sneaking around the Ore Palace to find a place to fuck.”

Aemond exhales heavily as she takes hold of him, parting his lips as she palms him thoroughly.

“Did you think of that while you were with those pretty girls?” she asks, watching his eyelid flicker “I know they’re pretty. Dumb, but pretty.”

He has no idea who she’s talking about. He rests his head against the armchair and opens his mouth as her ministrations grow cadenced and yet unbearably slow.

“Did you think of me?” she asks, softly panting along with him for the mere sight “of taking me in some hidden corner? Of putting your hands on me if I had been there?”

His nails dig into the armrest, around his dagger, until his knuckles go white. Truth is that he did. Sipping that cup of wine, the smell of her on his fingers only made him think of her, and how she would squirm if he touched her right there, under the table. How she would bite her lower lip to swallow her moans as she came all over his fingers.

“I did.” She admits with almost religious honesty. “I came twice thinking of your hands.”

Not a moment later, they are both growling with need as he slams his mouth on hers in a mess of tongues and teeth, and then she gasps, because his hand is on her core, moving already, gathering her wetness and spreading it. “Did you think of this? Hmm?” he croons, watching her closely, rejoicing upon seeing her face scrunching just as it did earlier, wantonly, pleading.

“No…” she mumbles.

“What do you mean no?”

Her hand slips behind his neck, in order to keep his head firm and his face glued to hers. “Inside…” she cooes urgently “I need them inside.”

It’s almost shameful for a proud man like him, how swiftly he obeys, but even if he didn’t want to, she’s so wet for him, dripping and coating his palm, that his fingers would’ve eventually slipped inside.

He sticks them all the way in, flexing and curling, hitting that spot and spilling a loud moan from her, who instantly sinks her hips down, rocking to goad him to start moving. He grants her this other little mercy, pumping nimbly with a squelching sound, going rock hard as she arches on top of him, keeping one hand clamped around his neck and the other on his knee, to find the right angle.

“There you go…” he rasps, watching his fingers disappear inside, feeling her spongy walls hot and squeezing “’Tis what you wanted?”

She is too occupied with trying to catch a puff of air to be bothered to answer, but he wants one. He stops altogether, winning a whine of protest and a flashing glare before her face wrinkles with desperate need.

“Not talking now?” he mocks and then swiftly, he is curling his fingers in a cruel way, drawing a choked whimper out of her throat.

“Yes. Yes, it is what I wanted.”

“Hmm. Go on, then. Take it.” And he spreads his legs a little more to give her room “Fuck my hand.”

Exhaling a small breath of air, she talks almost to herself. “A woman must do everything these days.”

“You won’t be saying that later.”

“Why, what happens later?”

“I’ll fuck you until you can’t walk.”

“That sounds a bit pretentious.”

“And you should have learned by now not to doubt my word.”

And doubt him she won’t, not now. She starts to move, swaying her hips and arching her neck as soon as pleasure washes over her. She would like to savor it, to take this slow, as she likes it, but her low muscles are so tensed and aching; she feels the peak near and can't do anything but run towards.

Aemond watches with labored breath as she rocks and grinds on him desperately, growing frantic by the moment, feeling her arousal down to his wrist, dampening his own silks, spilling a faint unbearable pleasure from the way her flesh grinds against his cock. And he finds himself moaning out of pleasure and pain as she draws near to her peak, gripping his neck hard, pulling at the roots of his hair while emitting a string of short and sharp cries next his ear, until she’s trembling all over, coming with a free and loud moan on his hand.

She tries to regain some air, panting in his ear as she rides the last throes. This, this is what she’s been fantasizing, even dreamed of it. No man has ever made her feel like this, a pulsing heart pounding in every inch of her body, a living flame bathing in fire.

Slowly, she tilts her head back and he takes his hand off her hot, pulsing flesh. She looks down, at her pleasure wrinkling his fingertips, and then up, straight into his turbid eye. He brings his fingers to his mouth to clean them, to taste her, but she snatches his wrist and, staring at him, she engulfs his index with her lips.

He’s tempted to look away, and not wonder how her perfect lips would close around his cock, but he keeps watching as she keeps tasting herself, on his middle finger, and then the ring one.

“How do you taste?”

“Me? Oh, this is not me.” She draws close until she nudges her nose against his and says “Pleasure tastes like the ones we desire.” She kisses him, slowly, darting her tongue in his mouth until he’s humming, tasting bittersweet. “This is your doing.”

A moment later she gasps, holding onto his shoulders because he rises abruptly, lacing his arms around her to hold her and take those few steps that separate them from his bed.

They fall on the soft mattress and her hands fly to his silks, willing to tear them apart until he’s bare. And he helps her, moving his lean shoulders to let the slippery fabric fall. She had thought Qartheen silks suited him perfectly, but now she thinks she’d rather have him like this all day. Her eyes roam freely on his lean body, dented in a few spots by burns and scars of war, a soldier’s body and yet not burly: he’s all refined and graceful, like a sculpture. It makes her mouth go dry, pushing her eyes down, on the thin waist and the prominent v-shape of his muscles.

Willfully, she grasps the soft belt cinching his waist, but he stops her wrists.

“Do you know what this is?” he asks with short breath, and the candles around catch the flashing steel of his dagger, held in his left hand.

“Valyrian steel?”

“The sharpest blade in the world.” and deftly, he twirls it.

It catches her eye for a moment, but then she drags her gaze back on him, relaxing on the sheets with an ounce of challenge in her eyes. “You will have to show me.”

Something wild bursts in his eye, wide and piercing. “Are you offering?”

She cracks a half heated, half cunning smile and says “I’m demanding.”

Aemond lies beside her, holding himself up on one elbow, and with bated breath, she watches his other arm move, bringing the dagger, and its pointy end, to the lilac woven shielding her torso. Slowly and cautiously, he slips the steel under a stripe of silk, locking his eye on her as she startles from the coldness of the blade. He flicks his wrist up, and the steel cuts the silk instantly and smoothly. But he doesn’t stop there, dragging the blade down, cutting all, unraveling her body, and not missing the way her stomach jolts, her breath hitches, and not out of fear.

He trails his eye all over her body, glowing under the candles, lingering on the soft patch of hair below her navel; his mouth goes dry and his mind blank. He lets the blade go and drifts down, grabs her legs and forces them open, hardening impossibly more upon seeing her previous peak still coating her cunt in a glistening veil.

She sees him hovering right on her center, anticipation quickens her breath but perhaps also a faint reluctance for what he’s about to do. She would complain about it with Dora, saying most of her lovers just sat there lapping at it like some thirsty dog in the desert. Once, she had even opened a book while having a man’s head between her thighs.

It is therefore with great shock that she abruptly gasps, out loud, when he slams his mouth on her cunt, raising his eye to watch her. She tastes sweeter than he’d expected, and he’s not one for sweet tastes, but this one, he wants it all.

His tongue swirls up and down her folds, circling slowly, making her back arch, her  jaw slack open. “Oh God—” she moans once, and twice, unconsciously pushing her hips against his face, feeling the sharp bone of his nose nudging her bundle.

“If you have to sing my praises, then do it properly.” he rasps against her flesh, stopping, but not quite. He brings one hand on her apex, circling it with his thumb, torturing but not as she wants. “Please—” she begs freely, writhing beneath him.

“Please what?” he teases, licking his lips “You like to talk, don’t you? Then use your words.” He presses his thumb deeper and faster, and she whines, in pleasure and protest. “Please—with your tongue”

“Please…?”

“Aemond—”

“Again.”

He has half a mind to make her say his name until she loses her voice, but at the second time she utters it, her vowels even more open given her debauchery, he caves and grips her thighs harshly to keep them as spread open as he can. What happens next is a string of cries and choked moans as his tongue licks and sucks and pierces inside; he eats her thoroughly humming with sheer delight and occasionally groaning as, without being able to avoid it, he grinds against the mattress to gain some relief. 

Pleasure coils in her belly as it never did before. She’d never been able to reach her peak like this, whether the occasional man was not that good at that practice or maybe because she’d never longed for anyone as she longs for the Prince. She’s not able to control her voice as she comes straight into his mouth, she’s not able to control her muscles shaking all over, nor her hand, flying into his hair, pulling and pushing him against her as she practically rides his face in the last spasms.

She lies there for a moment, ears numb and heart pounding like a hammer, but she has little time to come to her senses; he moves, leaning on top of her, mouth and chin slick. It makes her strangely proud to see it. This time, her hands are free to roam, discarding the last silks until he’s completely bare. Aemond slips between her legs, hissing at feeling her moist flesh against his. He cannot wait any longer, as he moves to angle her hips and bury himself inside her, she grabs his face, forcing him to look up.

“Show me.”

It takes him barely a moment to get what she means. He freezes on the spot, and looks down with a grimace.

“You saw mine.” She says sofly. And it’s true. Even if he didn’t know, he saw, he touched, her wound.

And maybe it’s because he did, and he knows it to be true that this time there’s no reluctance, or rejection choking down his words. “I am sorry.”

“It doesn’t matter, you couldn’t—”

“No. Not about last night.”

All I wanted was for him, anyone, to say they were sorry for what had been done to me.

Air hitches in her throat as she stares at him with wide eyes. He has that unwavering stone-like look on his face and she knows he means it. No second purpose could ever force his tongue into saying that, because he doesn’t have any. He had her already, and he would have her again, whether he had spoken those words or not. But he means it. He chooses all his words too carefully to waste them on lies.

All she knows now, is that she wants him. A foreign, fierce willing like the one that possessed her the night before, urging her to stay right where she was, to goad him to take her harder, instead of begging him to stop.

She grips his neck and surges to kiss him, moaning with liberation into his mouth, swallowing his soft growl as her hand slips between them, grabbing him and guiding him against her entrance. He pushes in ever so easily, and she throws her head back on the sheets, gasping at the stretch while he rests his forehead on her chest, struggling to breathe as he buries himself inside her.

The bushes pierce through his feet, bleeding on the ground, a pain he is well accustomed.

One must walk barefoot in the Wood of Shadows.

The long blue robe rustles in the wind; it is loud in his ears, wailing, as it does nowhere else.

He stops next to a black barked tree and leans his ear against it. Glancing up, a mantle of dark leaves wave in the sky, bleeding blue.

He hurries up, resuming his path. His right hand trembles incessantly as it always does next to it. Fortunately, he holds the little vial in his other hand, safe.

The Palace of Dust is covered in dark, not even a torch lighting the way. They say there are no walls or ceilings there. They say there is no such thing as time in the House of the Undying.

He opens one door and enters a round room, clothed in dark, except for one, faint white light coming from a hole in the ground. A water well, translucent; soft waves curl the surface, rippled by no trace of wind.

There is only one man standing in the light, looking into the water. The others are scattered around the room.

“Is he Seeing?” asks the man with the trembling hand.

“Hush. Did you bring it?” answers another, coming into view under the faint white light.

“Here.” He hands over the vial. “I’ve never seen so much of it. Leaves are bleeding as we speak. It’s like an awakening.”

“It is awakening.” says the other, his eyes barely visible under the cloak.

“But why?”

He receives a long scornful look. “You are weak. That is why you’re reduced like that.” the other says, glancing at his hand “You cannot bear it.”

“We are awakening.” Says another voice from somewhere “We awaken in the presence of the most ancient and powerful magic.”

“Fire?” tries the trembling man.

The one with the vial turns his head, nodding. “And blood.”

He walks to the man standing before the well. He is looking into the translucent water. He doesn’t blink. Seems like he’s not even breathing. But there’s a strange curve on his blue lips, hardly visible. Almost a smile, a fond one.

“Fydor.”

Only then, the man blinks and turns his head.

“Freshly collected.” the other lifts his arm, showing the little vial. Under the well’s light, the liquid shines with a vivid blue.

The mute warlock takes it and swiftly lifts the cap. The other hurries to take a step back, while the one with the trembling hand widens his eyes with almost dread. His fingers start to shake maniacally, as he watches the man in the light drinking the Shadow.

All the others, at once, seem to emit a choked snarling sound, as thirsty men in the desert upon seeing a pool of water.

The empty vial falls to the floor, breaking in little pieces, the water in the well moves as rippled by an opposite wind, and Fydor makes a choking sound; his eyes rolls over like in a seizure, and then they stop.

The pupil is gone, all is left is the white, but it is not white, not anymore. Too much Shadow of the Evening. His lips, nails and white of his eyes are blue for good.

At times, it lasts for hours. Others, it’s barely a minute. But there’s no time in the House of the Undying.

When it ends, it could be morning outside, they do not know, and they do not care.

“Fydor?” the same one asks when the warlock’s pupils are back in their place. 

The man looks at him for a moment, and then starts moving his hands jerkily. “It is time.”

“Time for what?”

“Time to act.”

“What about your daughter?”

For a moment, Fydor looks into the well. “Kori is on her own path now. I cannot interfere. She won’t let me. But seeds must be sown.”

“What do you want me to do?”

Keeping his blue eyes on the water, transfixed, he moves his hands. “What do you do with an old forest so new trees can grow?”

“Burn it.”

The man with the trembling hand looks between the two, warily. “What does it mean?”

Fydor turns, slowly, a shadow falling on his face. “It is quite simple, acolyte. For there to be order, there must be chaos first.”

thank you so much for reading!! 💕💕