#the world is ugly is so beautiful ironically lol

[xo8ball]

growing up is understanding conventional weapons is a banger of an album

[joesalw]

And did you think I didn't see you?

There were flashing lights

At least I had the decency

To keep my nights out of sight

Only rumors 'bout my hips and thighs

And my whispered sighs

- Taylor’s own words

These lyrics are soooo ironic to me lol considering SHES the one who’s going out on staged pap walks every night with her “girl squad” (made up of ugly wags and sexual abuse apologists btw) and gross football jock bf meanwhile her ex (basically husband/fiance) of 6 years has been doing nothing but minding his own business and living his life in private. He is stable and confident in himself so i have no doubt he’s content with his life (not to mention the utmost respect i have for his recent speaking out and political moves, which honestly make me love him more and Taylor less). So who’s decent now, Taylor? The one who’s been shitting on the man who “saved you” and you thought you were going to marry or the one who’s paraded two downgrade rebounds for the entire world to see and purposefully making herself the center of all attention?

It’s so clear she’s unhappy with herself and has completely gone back to the mess of a person she was in the 1989 era. Everything is so staged and inauthentic and she just screams insecurity, heartbreak, and narcissism to me. I really loved her and even considered her as my favorite person and lifesaver at some point. But that beautiful, genuine, and talented person that i thought she was is not there anymore. I really saw myself in her at some point and really believed she was a gift to this world with the happiness she brought to people and how she was unapologetically herself, from the intimate fan interactions and public vulnerability and need for privacy she showed compared to other celebrities. The person she is now is unrecognizable and it makes me really sad. I hope she can find herself again for her own sake but i think this is just who she is. Damn I really thought she was one of the only celebs who hadn’t let the fame and money go to her head! It’s clear that there’s a common denominator when looking at the good person she’s been the last 6 years. He humbled her and loved her and gave her what she needed and this is what he gets in return. I just feel sad for him. He’s so deeply misunderstood and he deserves better from the world. I hope Joe is always having a great day ❤️

Sorry didn’t mean to write this much but i had to rant ❤️

loved reading this because i can relate so much to you anon

[wheresmymilliondollarman]

heyyyy🫶🫶 for something quick, do you have any hc of certain AUs for warner? also good luck with prom dress shopping!!💗💗

-🪷

omg hi 🪷!! thank u for the luck i need it cus im sewing some of it and im still a beginner LOLL

for au’s i do have a few that have crossed my mind recently, im sure i can do more that this if i put my mind to it

so i had this idea i scrapped before i even wrote the ferrars! reader hcs and basically its a tangled inspired au (ik super ironic bc kenji is the one tangled obsessed)

reader was hidden away at a young age because of her powers and the restablishment uses them to control the word (like how they utilized emmaline basically) so you live in this secluded tower away from sector 45

so aaron is finds you accidentally when he’s on a mission and he gets separated from his soldiers for a bit and sees the tower

then he climbs up and scares you so you hit him with a pan (LOL) and then you explain that you lived there forever but leave out your gift

aaron reintroduces you to the world and secretly keeps you at the base to hide you from his father (once he learns about what you can do)

then for your birthday he takes you to a festival thing but then your both caught by aarons dad

the rest isnt that planned out but rough synopsis of my idea

and then i often think more abt aaron and reader in present times like

imagine reader and aaron going to the met gala (aaron is ur stylist no one tell me otherwise)

or just any red carpet event, you both tend to match

paparazzi pics of you both

being rumored to break up every week or “cheating” scandals

you both arent really into social media but both def have a pinterest / instagram / maybe twitter

your instagram feed is just pictures of aaron, places, and friends and occasionally yourself

aaron’s feed is literally only pictures of you. he posts like once or twice a month. but his stories are active because he likes to post his outfits or yours.

if you post on any media platform aaron is ALWAYS the first to like & comment no matter what

people constantly asking aaron if he can fight (he always responds he can)

kenji’s the type to make u both participate in tiktoks or prank u with current trends

also you have a group chat with juliette, kenji, nazeera, and adam (he was added by accident but then stayed there)

aaron sends you random pictures of things that reminds him of you. anytime your not tigether he’s going to message you a bunch.

sugar daddy! aaron warner is literally the dream. this one is set in modern era

you are a college student struggling financially, and if you dont get money for tuition you can go to school/will be kicked out. your parents kicked you out for following your own dream, so you have no one to turn to

aaron is a ceo, happens to find you at your job as a barista. he immediately thinks tour the most beautiful person ever and wants to know you. so he shows up almost everyday to the place even though its out of his way to work.

you two get to know each other a bit and you let your financial situation slip out, so aaron offers you money, but you decline and such.

you think thats it, but then you later get an email to let you know your tuition is covered.

you feel bad and offer aaron anything to let ypu repay him in some way, so he bargains that you let him take you to places and basically date him.

so that starts your arrangement.

buys you quite literally anything — even if you dont say you want it. if you glance at it in a store, you’ll see it on your bed the next day.

you even get to move into his apartment because he hates the idea of you in those ugly small dorms, and i’ll be easier for you both to see each other. (he’s clingy)

you go with him at any event, he literally never went to any before he started seeing you now he wants to take you everywhere in pretty dresses

even when your officially dating he won’t stop buying you things, if anything it doubles.

this ones dark so TW but with the the hype of the scream movies going around it got me imagining ghostface! aaron warner working with ghost face! kenji (i imagine this set in the 90s type era bc 1st scream is so iconic)

in this au aaron’s abusive childhood enabled him to have psychopathic tendencies so he starts off with random killings then later gets into the ghostface thing after wanting to get revenge on juliette for cheating on him with adam.

aaron enlists kenji because kenji’s the one that figure out it was him, but he’s doesn’t want him to turn aaron in, he wants to help. but kenji is kind of easy to manipulate so aaron is the master mind.

aaron makes the calls and kenji does most of the killing.

aaron and you are already dating when the killings start happening

you were originally meant to be killed bc you’re bffs with juliette but then aaron fell in love with you so now he protects you (#couplegoals)

if anyone messes with you or a guy gets too close with you, they’re gone. if a person is involved with you then aaron is likely to kill, especially if he already doesn’t like them

adam is the first to go (LMAOO), then its brendan, ian, nazeera (queen was a fighter im sorry

your so oblivious to it all and very scared that ghostface going after you next. and aaron thinks that’s so cute. so much that he calls your house as ghostface just so you can call him all scared and run into his arms for protection.

and if you somehow figure it out he’s just going to kidnap you and lock you somewhere you can’t escape and leave him <3 (i’m insane for wanting that)

[istumpysk]

Operation Stumpy Re-Read

ADWD: Victarion I (Victarion II) [Chapter 63]

My little bozo! 🥰

The sea was black and the moon was silver as the Iron Fleet swept down on the prey.

They sighted her in the narrows between the Isle of Cedars and the rugged hills of the Astapori hinterlands, just as the black priest Moqorro had said they would. 

There was no one, even in her order, who had her skill at seeing the secrets half-revealed and half-concealed within the sacred flames. - Melisandre I, ADWD

Let's see.

+1 for Moqorro.

+.+.+

The man spoke no decent tongue but only a guttural Ghiscari, full of growls and hisses, as ugly a language as Victarion Greyjoy had ever heard. Moqorro translated the captain's words into the Common Tongue of Westeros. The war for Meereen was won, the captain claimed; the dragon queen was dead, and a Ghiscari by the name of Hizdak ruled the city now.

Victarion had his tongue torn out for lying. 

Hizdak, lol.

Harsh but fair punishment. You shouldn't lie.

Victarion seems to be trying to emulate Euron throughout this chapter. He's now cutting out tongues.

+.+.+

Daenerys Targaryen was not dead, Moqorro assured him; his red god R'hllor had shown him the queen's face in his sacred fires. 

+2 for Moqorro.

+.+.+

The captain could not abide lies, so he had the Ghiscari captain bound hand and foot and thrown overboard, a sacrifice to the Drowned God. "Your red god will have his due," he promised Moqorro, "but the seas are ruled by the Drowned God."

Only a cultured man would honour the traditions of others.

+.+.+

"There are no gods but R'hllor and the Other, whose name may not be said." The sorcerer priest was garbed in somber black, but for a hint of golden thread at collar, cuffs, and hem. 

Rude.

Be a Victarion, not a Moqorro.

+.+.+

There was no red cloth aboard the Iron Victory, but it was not meet that Moqorro go about in the salt-stained rags he had been wearing when the Vole fished him from the sea, so Victarion had commanded Tom Tidewood to sew new robes for him from whatever was at hand, and had even donated some of his own tunics to the purpose. Of black and gold those were, for the arms of House Greyjoy showed a golden kraken on a black field, and the banners and sails of their ships displayed the same. The crimson-and-scarlet robes of the red priests were alien to the ironborn, but Victarion had hoped his men might accept Moqorro more easily once clad in Greyjoy colors.

Bad guy? Show me a villain who feeds, clothes, and houses a man in need.

Moqorro wearing Greyjoy colours is hilarious. Dam-phair is having a fit somewhere.

+.+.+

He hoped in vain. Clad in black from head to heel, with a mask of red-and-orange flames tattooed across his face, the priest appeared more sinister than ever.

Sometimes the text misleads you, and sinister looking people aren't always what they seem.

This is not one of those times.

+.+.+

But Moqorro knew these strange shores in ways the ironborn did not, and secrets of the dragonkind as well. The Crow's Eye keeps wizards, why shouldn't I? His black sorcerer was more puissant than all of Euron's three, even if you threw them in a pot and boiled them down to one. The Damphair might disapprove, but Aeron and his pieties were far away.

So Victarion closed his burned hand into a mighty fist, and said, "Ghiscari Dawn is no fit name for a ship of the Iron Fleet. For you, wizard, I shall rename her Red God's Wroth."

Such a touching gesture!

More trying to emulate Euron.

+.+.+

The next day a sudden squall descended on them. Moqorro had predicted that as well. 

+3 for Moqorro.

+.+.+

The iron captain had no time to wait for laggards. Not with his bride encircled by her enemies. The most beautiful woman in the world has urgent need of my axe.

Antagonist where? All I see is a prototypical romantic hero.

+.+.+

Besides, Moqorro assured him that the three ships were not lost. Each night, the sorcerer priest would kindle a fire on the forecastle of the Iron Victory and stalk around the flames, chanting prayers. The firelight made his black skin shine like polished onyx, and sometimes Victarion could swear that the flames tattooed on his face were dancing too, twisting and bending, melting into one another, their colors changing with every turn of the priest's head.

When the cliffs of Yaros appeared off their larboard bows, he found his three lost ships waiting for him, just as Moqorro had promised. Victarion gave the priest a golden torque as a reward.

+4 for Moqorro.

The chanting and flames dancing, twisting, and bending is very Mirri Maz Duur.

+.+.+

"The black priest is calling demons down on us," one oarsman was heard to say. When that was reported to Victarion, he had the man scourged until his back was blood from shoulders to buttocks.

Find yourself a man who doesn't stay quiet in the face of racism.

+.+.+

This time it was a Myrish cog named Dove, on her way to Yunkai by way of New Ghis with a cargo of carpets, sweet green wines, and Myrish lace. Her captain owned a Myrish eye that made far-off things look close—two glass lenses in a series of brass tubes, cunningly wrought so that each section slid into the next, until the eye was no longer than a dirk. Victarion claimed that treasure for himself. 

Who wouldn't love a man with such intellectual curiosity?

+.+.+

"Grey skies and strong winds," Moqorro said. "No rain. Behind come the tigers. Ahead awaits your dragon."

Your dragon. Victarion liked the sound of that.

The tigers control Volantis now.

After a century of war, Volantis found herself broken, bankrupt, and depopulated. It was then that the elephants rose up. They have held sway ever since. Some years the tigers elect a triarch, and some years they do not, but never more than one, so the elephants have ruled the city for three hundred years. - Tyrion IV, ADWD

I have a Volantis prediction.

+.+.+

The crew had taken to calling him the Black Flame, a name fastened on him by Steffar Stammerer, who could not say "Moqorro." By any name, the priest had powers. 

"No. Hear me, Daenerys Targaryen. The glass candles are burning. Soon comes the pale mare, and after her the others. Kraken and dark flame, lion and griffin, the sun's son and the mummer's dragon. Trust none of them. Remember the Undying. Beware the perfumed seneschal." - Daenerys II, ADWD

It's time to open your heart and let R'hllor in Daenerys.

+.+.+

"The coastline here runs west to east," he told Victarion. "Where it turns north, you will come on two more hares. Swift ones, with many legs."

And so it came to pass. 

+5 for Moqorro.

Calling it now. Melisandre is bush league compared to this.

+.+.+

And like the captain of the Ghiscari Dawn, the captains of the galleys repeated the lie that Daenerys Targaryen was dead.

"Give her a kiss for me in whatever hell you find her," Victarion said. He called for his axe and took their heads off there and then. Afterward he put their crews to death as well, saving only the slaves chained to the oars. He broke their chains himself and told them they were now free men and would have the privilege of rowing for the Iron Fleet, an honor that every boy in the Iron Islands dreamed of growing up. "The dragon queen frees slaves and so do I," he proclaimed.

"No. Your Grace, forgive this one her outburst. Your slave's name is Missandei, but . . ."

"Missandei is no longer a slave. - Daenerys III, ASOS

x

There will be more if we remain. The slaves are weak from the march."

"Freedmen," Dany corrected. "They are slaves no longer." - Daenerys V, ASOS

x

"Your slave Missandei." Jhiqui had a taper in her hand.

"My servant. I have no slaves." Dany did not understand. - Daenerys II, ADWD

x

"How kind of my old friend to help with the digging. And how very unlike him. Is it possible he was given no choice in the matter? No, surely not. You have no slaves in Meereen."

Dany flushed. "Your friend is being paid with food and shelter. - Daenerys III, ADWD

+.+.+

The galleys he renamed Ghost and Shade. "For I mean them to return and haunt these Yunkishmen," he told the dusky woman that night after he had taken his pleasure of her. 

Is that a clue? Vic renaming the ships Ghost and Shade when he might be the walking dead is funny.

+.+.+

He wondered if this was how his brother Aeron felt when the Drowned God spoke to him. He could almost hear the god's voice welling up from the depths of the sea. You shall serve me well, my captain, the waves seemed to say. It was for this I made you.

But he would feed the red god too, Moqorro's fire god. The arm the priest had healed was hideous to look upon, pork crackling from elbow to fingertips. Sometimes when Victarion closed his hand the skin would split and smoke, yet the arm was stronger than it had ever been. "Two gods are with me now," he told the dusky woman. "No foe can stand before two gods." Then he rolled her on her back and took her once again.

I looked into it and the indestructible smoking hand thing is not typically experienced by people who are alive.

Anyway, this is so refreshing coming off an Asha chapter where Stannis is too little of a man to be a multi-faith king like Vicky.

Not only that, Vic is also capable of having sex with a woman.

+.+.+

Now he had a choice to make: should he risk the straits, or take the Iron Fleet around the island? The memory of Fair Isle still rankled in the iron captain's memory. Stannis Baratheon had descended on the Iron Fleet from both north and south whilst they were trapped in the channel between the island and the mainland, dealing Victarion his most crushing defeat. But sailing around Yaros would cost him precious days. With Yunkai so near, shipping in the straits was like to be heavy, but he did not expect to encounter Yunkish warships until they were closer to Meereen.

What would the Crow's Eye do? He brooded on that for a time, then signaled to his captains. "We sail the straits."

Stop asking yourself what Euron would do! Ask yourself what Vicky Godhand would do.

Being trapped at Fair Isle while enemies descend from both sides must be coming up for a reason.

+.+.+

"Where is this Dothraki sea?" he demanded. "I will sail the Iron Fleet across it and find the queen wherever she may be."

The fisherman laughed aloud. "That would be a sight worth seeing. The Dothraki sea is made of grass, fool."

Shut your mouth. Be quiet. Nobody say a thing to me.

+.+.+

He should not have said that. Victarion took him around the throat with his burned hand and lifted him bodily into the air. Slamming him back against the mast, he squeezed till the Yunkishman's face turned as black as the fingers digging into his flesh. The man kicked and writhed for a while, trying fruitlessly to pry loose the captain's grip. "No man calls Victarion Greyjoy a fool and lives to boast of it." When he opened his hand, the man's limp body flopped to the deck. Longwater Pyke and Tom Tidewood chucked it over the rail, another offering to the Drowned God.

Appropriate. That's what should happen to bullies.

+.+.+

"Your Drowned God is a demon," the black priest Moqorro said afterward. "He is no more than a thrall of the Other, the dark god whose name must not be spoken."

"Take care, priest," Victarion warned him. "There are godly men aboard this ship who would tear out your tongue for speaking such blasphemies. Your red god will have his due, I swear it. My word is iron. Ask any of my men."

The black priest bowed his head. "There is no need. The Lord of Light has shown me your worth, lord Captain. Every night in my fires I glimpse the glory that awaits you."

I suspect the priest in talking with tongue firmly planted in cheek.

+.+.+

Those words pleased Victarion Greyjoy mightily, as he told the dusky woman that night. "My brother Balon was a great man," he said, "but I shall do what he could not. The Iron Islands shall be free again, and the Old Way will return. Even Dagon could not do that." Almost a hundred years had passed since Dagon Greyjoy sat the Seastone Chair, but the ironborn still told tales of his raids and battles. In Dagon's day a weak king sat the Iron Throne, his rheumy eyes fixed across the narrow sea where bastards and exiles plotted rebellion. So forth from Pyke Lord Dagon sailed, to make the Sunset Sea his own. "He bearded the lion in his den and tied the direwolf's tail in knots, but even Dagon could not defeat the dragons. But I shall make the dragon queen mine own. She will share my bed and bear me many mighty sons."

This Dagon history lesson sounds a lot like current events.

+.+.+

The sea was green and the sky was grey the morning Grief and Warrior Wench and Victarion's own Iron Victory captured the slaver galley from Yunkai in the waters due north of the Yellow City. In her holds were twenty perfumed boys and four score girls destined for the pleasure houses of Lys. Her crew never thought to find peril so close to their home waters, and the ironborn had little trouble taking her. She was named the Willing Maiden.

Victarion put the slavers to the sword, then sent his men below to unchain the rowers. "You row for me now. Row hard, and you shall prosper." The girls he divided amongst his captains. "The Lyseni would have made whores of you," he told them, "but we have saved you. Now you need only serve one man instead of many. Those who please their captains may be taken as salt wives, an honorable station."

I adore how much he loves clowning his own dumbass fanbase.

+.+.+

The perfumed boys he wrapped in chains and threw into the sea. They were unnatural creatures, and the ship smelled better once cleansed of their presence.

She hates perfume too!

I wonder if Vic knows about Euron, Urrigon, and Dam-phair.

+.+.+

For himself, Victarion claimed the seven choicest girls. One had red-gold hair and freckles on her teats. One shaved herself all over. One was brown-haired and brown-eyed, shy as a mouse. One had the biggest breasts he had ever seen. The fifth was a little thing, with straight black hair and golden skin. Her eyes were the color of amber. The sixth was white as milk, with golden rings through her nipples and her nether lips, the seventh black as a squid's ink. The slavers of Yunkai had trained them in the way of the seven sighs, but that was not why Victarion wanted them. His dusky woman was enough to satisfy his appetites until he could reach Meereen and claim his queen. No man had need of candles when the sun awaited him.

Hey, I think I remember a few examples of candles attempting to replace the sun in this story.

Too bad he's chasing the moon.

+.+.+

The galley he renamed the Slaver's Scream. 

How can you not love this POV?

+.+.+

A great cry went up at his words. The captain answered with a nod, grim-faced, then called for the seven girls he had claimed to be brought on deck, the loveliest of all those found aboard the Willing Maiden. He kissed them each upon the cheeks and told them of the honor that awaited them, though they did not understand his words. Then he had them put aboard the fishing ketch that they had captured, cut her loose, and had her set afire.

"With this gift of innocence and beauty, we honor both the gods," he proclaimed, as the warships of the Iron Fleet rowed past the burning ketch. "Let these girls be reborn in light, undefiled by mortal lust, or let them descend to the Drowned God's watery halls, to feast and dance and laugh until the seas dry up."

Near the end, before the smoking ketch was swallowed by the sea, the cries of the seven sweetlings changed to joyous song, it seemed to Victarion Greyjoy. 

Hard to not be deeply affected by this.

Granting those girls the privilege of entering into those cleansing fires, so their spirits might rise free and pure to ascend into the light. Beautiful.

+.+.+

A great wind came up then, a wind that filled their sails and swept them north and east and north again, toward Meereen and its pyramids of many-colored bricks. On wings of song I fly to you, Daenerys, the iron captain thought.

The man is a poet.

+.+.+

That night, for the first time, he brought forth the dragon horn that the Crow's Eye had found amongst the smoking wastes of great Valyria. A twisted thing it was, six feet long from end to end, gleaming black and banded with red gold and dark Valyrian steel. Euron's hellhorn. Victarion ran his hand along it. The horn was as warm and smooth as the dusky woman's thighs, and so shiny that he could see a twisted likeness of his own features in its depths. Strange sorcerous writings had been cut into the bands that girded it. "Valyrian glyphs," Moqorro called them.

That much Victarion had known. "What do they say?"

"Much and more." The black priest pointed to one golden band. "Here the horn is named. 'I am Dragonbinder,' it says. Have you ever heard it sound?"

"Once." One of his brother's mongrels had sounded the hellhorn at the kingsmoot on Old Wyk. A monster of a man he had been, huge and shaven-headed, with rings of gold and jet and jade around arms thick with muscle, and a great hawk tattooed across his chest. "The sound it made … it burned, somehow. As if my bones were on fire, searing my flesh from within. Those writings glowed red-hot, then white-hot and painful to look upon. It seemed as if the sound would never end. It was like some long scream. A thousand screams, all melted into one."

"And the man who blew the horn, what of him?"

"He died. There were blisters on his lips, after. His bird was bleeding too."

I'm not sure how to expand on these thoughts, but it feels like we're talking about Daenerys.

+.+.+

"A true tale." Moqorro turned the hellhorn, examining the queer letters that crawled across a second of the golden bands. "Here it says, 'No mortal man shall sound me and live.' "

I see loopholes!

No mortal man, but what about a dead man or a woman?

+.+.+

Bitterly Victarion brooded on the treachery of brothers. Euron's gifts are always poisoned. "The Crow's Eye swore this horn would bind dragons to my will. But how will that serve me if the price is death?"

"Your brother did not sound the horn himself. Nor must you." Moqorro pointed to the band of steel. "Here. 'Blood for fire, fire for blood.' Who blows the hellhorn matters not. The dragons will come to the horn's master. You must claim the horn. With blood."

I'm pretty sure Moqorro uses Victarion's blood to claim the horn in TWOW.

They left him one by one. The three thralls, and then Moqorro. Victarion would not let him take the hell-horn.

"I will keep it here with me, until it is needed."

"As you command. Would you have me bleed you?" - Victarion I, TWOW

It's impossible to make sense of any of this when you can't trust a thing Moqorro says or does.

Final thoughts:

Vic finally gets a chapter with his name! Couldn't tell you why.

Remind me to look for evidence of him sleeping or eating in TWOW. Nothing so far.

-> return to menu <-

[howhow326]

So, I don't really like the Fairy lineage so I made my own Fairy homebrew race lol

Gentry, 5e homebrew race

Bayonetta demon masquerade form, belongs to Platinum Games

History

In ages past, the Gentry were fairy nobility that were much taller than normal and wielded powerful magic. Eventually, one of their highest members convinced all of them to travel to the material plane in pursuit of a land not dominated by the Archfey. They were successful, at the cost of their powers and immortal lives.

 In modern times, the Gentry are a material race like any other, but their culture still clings to their former glory. While most Gentry spend their whole lives in their secret meadow villages, a few become adventures.

Physical Description

The Gentry appear as humanoid, wingless butterflies from far away. Up close, their chiton bodies look almost skeletal in their thinness, with regular sized heads. Their faces have large compound eyes and lipless mouths.  They have thin, curly antenna where eyebrows would normally be. The average Gentry has a black body and monocolor eyes, but there are some with different colorations. Most adult Gentry have the ability to manifest vibrant butterfly wings.

Society

The Gentry live in secret villages located in meadows far away from industrial civilization. Most of these Butterfly folk spend their entire long lives in harmony with nature and their communities, taking only what they need and sharing what they can.

Instead of Good and Evil, the Gentry believe in Beauty and the Ugly. All things symmetrical, colourful, and pleasing to the eye are to be preserved and protected at all cost. Likewise, all things imperfect, grey, and revolting ought to be destroyed. This worldview causes conflict between the Gentry and most other material races, who believe good is not skin deep.

Like in most other cultures, the Gentry who become adventures are mostly outcasts who long for more than their boring life. Some do it to learn more about the world they live in, either seeking a kind of enlightenment or just broadening their horizons. Others for a sense of wanderlust and freedom outside of the community. But most leave for the sake of increasing their power; all the stories say they are this world's Archfey, so why not embrace their destiny?

Gentry Names

Male: Narcissus, Hyacinth, Gladiolus, Lupin, Snapdragon

Female: Rose, Iris, Lily, Jasmine, Plumeria

Gender neutral: Oleander, Foxglove, Hemlock, Cornflower, Nightshade

Gentry Traits

Ability Scores: +2 Cha; +1 Wis

Languages: Common, Sylvan

Creature type: Fey

Alignment: Adventures are usually Chaotic. Villagers are true Neutral.

Lifespan: Gentry age at the same rate as Elves.

Size: Medium. Average height for men and women is 6 ft.

Speed: 30 ft

Skills: Persuasion

Fey Ancestry: You have advantage on saving throws against being charmed, and magic can’t put you to sleep.

Fairy Form: Starting at 2nd level, you can use your action to tap into your magical Fey blood, manifesting incorporeal butterfly wings on your back. Your transformation lasts 5 minutes or until you end it as a bonus action. Your flying speed is 30 feet.

After the transformation ends, you can't use it again until you finish a long rest. You can't use your flying speed if you are wearing medium or heavy armor.

Cold Iron: As the most banal thing in existence, metal in all of it's forms is anathema to Gentry. As such, they are unable to wear metal armour and use metal shields. Additionally, Gentry take +2 damage when struck by metal weapons.

Fairy Dust: Your fey magic gives you the ability to influence the minds of beings around you. You know the Friends cantrip. Starting 3rd level, you can cast Charm Person by expending a level 1 spell slot once per long rest. Starting 5th level, you can cast Crown Of Madness by expending a level 2 spell slot once per long rest. Your casting ability for all of these spells is Charisma.

I am going to cry myself to sleep because I don't have any sessions planned. I guess you guys are free to use this but don't make any money off of it or else Hasbro will kill you.

[madamevirgo]

$12.95

A/N: This is based on a dream I just had, although this is 50% less chaotic. I just had to write it lol. Let me know what you think. Also, It’s reading week and I have lots of free time, so I think I’ll start writing again/more. Send your requests :)

Summary: a broke college student walks into a coffee shop and sees a pretty barista. Gay ensues.

Warning: none

Pairing: Wanda Maximoff x reader

Words: 963

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You were having a bad day. Although to be completely fair, most of your days lately have been bad, today seemed like a culmination of them.

You had just finished your last class of the day which happened to be a discussion group, of course, you hadn’t done the readings so you pretty much stayed in a corner, imposter syndrome showing its ugly face once again. But that was over now, and you so badly wanted to forget it ever happened. You stepped out of the building and breathed in the cold, crisp air of winter. The sun was just starting to set, it was about dinner time.

You weren’t ready to go back to your dorm room yet, being alone was the last thing you wanted. A snack was the first. You made up your mind, quickly walking towards the building where your favourite coffee shop was located, trying to escape the cold air. Once inside, you walked around trying to find something that could satisfy not so much your hunger, but rather your need for something sweet. After some time, you finally settled on a pack of oatmeal and raisin cookies with a bottle of chocolate milk, your undergrad budget not giving you much option. You made your way towards the cash register, but seeing that the line was long, you decided to sit and wait it out. The weight of your thoughts and responsibilities seemed particularly too heavy for you to carry this evening. Or maybe it was the iron deficiency. You were so lost in your own world that you didn’t notice the line clearing up and the barista staring at you.

But when you did - oh when you did. She was beautiful. You were on a first-name basis with all of the baristas that worked here, with how often you indulged in this coffee shop’s delicacies, and yet you’d never seen her before. You would have remembered. Standing up, as if in a dreamlike trance, you made your way towards the counter, trying to remember how to walk and breathe at the same time. Nothing else mattered, except getting closer to where she stood and exchanging if only a ‘hello’ with this ethereal being. And then she spoke. You only noticed because you were staring at her lips, and you watched as she stared at you with an amused smile. It took everything in you to get your brain motor to start working again and speak.

“I’m sorry?” you briefly thought you must have looked like a moron, standing in the middle of the shop, mouth agape looking like a fish out of water.

“I was just saying that I’d probably need those if you’re thinking about buying,” she said, that smirk never leaving her face as you furrowed your brows in confusion, and followed her fingers to where she was pointing. Only to find the two articles you were planning on getting.

“Oh. Right,” you quickly made your way back to the table with your entire body burning up in embarrassment before handing her the things.

“Rough day?” she asked as she scanned the items, still with that goddamn heart-stopping smirk.

“Something like that, yeah,” you answered, with what you hoped was a smile and not a grimace. The last thing you wanted, is for her to think you were having a stroke. “I’ve never seen you before. New to the job?” you desperately wanted the conversation to keep going so you could hear her smooth velvety voice.

“I take it you’re a regular? And no, I’m usually doing paperwork in the backroom. And your total is $12.95. You winced slightly at the total before reaching for your cardholder in the right pocket of your coat. Except it wasn’t there, what you did find, was a hole. The barista giggled when she saw your finger coming out on the other side of your coat and the crestfallen look on your face.

“You’re kidding,” you whined pathetically, making her giggle some more. At least your despair seemed to amuse her.

“Definitely a rough day for you,” she said shaking her head

“More like a rough life really, at this point,” you said with a sigh. “I can just put these back where I found them,” you said picking the items, aiming to do as you said. A hand on your wrist stopped you.

“Don’t be silly, it’s on the house.” she smiled

“I couldn’t. I wouldn’t want to get you in trouble with your boss,” you say quickly

“I don’t see how I could get in trouble with myself,” she said with a laugh, while you looked at her in shock. “I’ll tell you what, give me your number, and I’ll add this to your tab; and if you don’t pay me by the end of the week, I’ll spam you relentlessly.”

You hesitated for a second before writing your number down on the piece of paper she had given you for that purpose. She smiled at you, and before you could do anything else, a customer was demanding her attention. You slowly made your way out of the coffee shop and into the library across from it.

As you settled down in one of the study rooms, you felt your phone - thankfully still in your pocket - vibrate.

‘Hey $12.95, I didn’t get a name.’ - Wanda

You smiled and quickly typed back your answer.

‘That’s gonna cost you a coffee date.’

Before you could put down your phone, it vibrated with an incoming text.

‘What an expensive name you have.’

You smiled before replying.

‘I have $12.95 to spend, might as well get my money’s worth.’

Today was a good day, you thought to yourself with a smile as you sipped on your chocolate milk.

[bumbleklee]

philocaly (kaeya x reader)

masterlist | 1k prompt masterlist | discord server

★ ironically this came to me in a dream last night lol. it’s also 4 in the morning so please excuse anything that makes no sense <3

★ summary: you have the worst nightmare of your life but thankfully kaeya is there to calm you down

★ content warning: there’s a very quick, very vague sex scene that isn’t detailed at all but just so everyone knows. major angst but also major comfort so do with that what you will. also reader was written as female but its pretty vague so feel free to imagine them as whoever you want

philocaly

(n) the love of beauty 

The first thing you noticed when you opened your eyes was the intoxicating smell of gasoline that surrounded you. Your body felt sticky and wet and it didn’t take long for you to realize you were drenched in petroleum. You felt dazed and when you tried to look around, your eyesight blurred and you stared into a cloudy abyss.

A voice began speaking and you jolted up, trying to find the source only to find absolutely nothing. You didn’t even know if you were sitting in a chair.

“So naive…”

Your breath caught in your throat when you recognized the voice as Kaeya’s. But your mouth wasn’t moving. You thrashed around but it was like your arms were being held down by invisible bonds.

“Don’t panic, pretty,” Kaeya said. His voice echoed around the room and finally the clouds started to dissipate. Your beloved boyfriend stood feet away from you, wearing a brilliant white tuxedo. “We’re just going to talk. For now.”

Out of thin air, Kaeya pulled a chair in front of you. He sat down in it backwards, leaning his head on his arms. He had his signature smile on his face but his eyes were dull and emotionless. Suddenly your feet hit something hard and you glanced down, seeing a polished wooden floor beneath your shoes.

“Tell me, Y/N,” Kaeya purred, looking at you in a way that made you shiver, “Do you really think you amount to anything in this world?”

His words stunned you. What was going on? You gaped your mouth to speak but no words came out. You didn’t know what to say.

“It would solve a lot of problems if we just got rid of you right now, don’t you think? I would finally be free to find someone worth my time and the rest of Mondstadt would be happy to have such a burden lifted.”

You felt like your throat was on fire. You couldn’t believe Kaeya was saying these things to you but he really was. Tears streamed down your face and you sharply inhaled, your chest aching in pain. You prayed that this was some sick joke.

The gasoline that was poured on your head before started to run down your face, sliding between your eyes and burning your nostrils when you breathed.

“You’re crying now? How pathetic,” Kaeya laughed. He shoved his hand into the pocket of the tuxedo jacket and pulled out a pack of matches. Your eyes widened and you felt yourself stop breathing momentarily. He hummed casually and stood up from the chair, “I can’t wait to find someone so much better.”

You tried to scream, defend yourself, but no sounds came out. It was like your voice box had been ripped away. Your eyesight was blurry again from your tears but you couldn’t even wipe them away. A gloved hand reached out and gripped your jaw, pulling your face upwards. Kaeya was in front of you now, his eyes even more sadistic than before. He cocked his head at you and rubbed his thumb along your bottom lip.

“You always had such an ugly face.”

And with that, Kaeya ripped his hand away and lit a match. He threw it at you carelessly and turned on his heel. As soon as the tiny flame touched the gasoline, it was like an explosion. The flames crawled up your legs and surrounded your body. You had never felt this kind of pain before and it was unbearable. Once again, you tried to scream but only silent heaves escaped your throat. The last thing you saw was Kaeya’s long ponytail being thrown over his shoulder before the flames consumed you.

You shot up in bed, your hands clutching your nightgown like never before. You heaved and erratically inhaled, trying to catch your breath. While you couldn’t feel the flames anymore, in that moment they felt so real. Never before had you had such a horrendous nightmare and you didn’t know how to handle it.

Kaeya’s words rang through your head over and over again. You couldn’t stop the tears falling from your eyes, only this time you could reach up and wipe them away. Hands crawled up your shoulders and Kaeya, the real one, rubbed them slowly.

“You’re drenched in sweat, Princess,” He mumbled, “What happened?”

Your blood grew cold as your dream replayed. You choked back a sob and managed to twist your body so you were facing Kaeya. “I’m okay,” You lied, your voice hoarse and quiet, “I’m just a little shaken up.” Kaeya raised an eyebrow at you. He had seen you shaken up before and it was never this extreme. He opened his mouth to speak but you surged forward, pressing your lips against his. “I want to do it. Right now.”

“What?” Kaeya mumbled between desperate, rough kisses. Normally he wouldn’t be opposed to a spontaneous midnight session but you were clearly in distress.

“Please,” Your voice cracked. You needed to be intimate with Kaeya right now, you needed to feel his body flush against yours. You needed to know that he still wanted you.

Kaeya only nodded and let you push him back onto the bed. You inhaled sharply again and rubbed your cheeks. You slung a leg over Kaeya and wasted no time in kissing down his neck. You placed wet kisses on his skin and Kaeya’s hands grazed your hips. If this was going to make you feel better right now, then he would do anything you wanted.

You inched backwards so your crotch was over Kaeya’s and you pulled down his pants quickly. He was still soft but you didn’t care, lifting up your nightgown and lowering yourself onto Kaeya. He didn’t make his usual sound of pleasure when he entered you but you paid no mind, placing your hands flat on Kaeya’s stomach so you could move your hips and back forth. Your movement was erratic and, honestly, didn’t feel good at all but you needed this intimacy now.

When you and Kaeya made love, it was gentle and sensual. He treated you like glass and his touches made you feel like you were on cloud nine. But this didn’t feel right. You weren’t feeling loved and beautiful this time. You could only think about what Kaeya said in your dream and maybe he was right.

You started crying again and Kaeya’s heart ached. He hated seeing you like this and he knew that having sex wasn’t what you needed right now.

“Alright, we’re done,” Kaeya said softly. His hands tried to lift you off of him but you only ground your hips down and let out a sob.

“No!” You cried, “We have to finish. We have to.”

“No, we don’t,” Kaeya countered. He suddenly overpowered you, lifting your hips off his and moving you beside him in bed. He pulled his pants back up and pulled your nightgown back down. This time, Kaeya leaned over you and boxed your head in with his arms so you couldn’t roll away. “Tell me what happened.”

At this, your cries turned into uncontrollable sobs. You couldn’t breathe and inaudible words floated out of your mouth. You tried to explain your dream but your wails only drowned it out. Kaeya waited patiently for you to stop crying. He hated seeing you cry but knew you needed this and wasn’t going to push you to stop anytime soon.

He stayed perfectly still until your sobs eventually died out. You were still a teary, sniffling mess but at least you could form coherent sentences now. You shakily explained your dream, repeating what was said to you by the love of your life. Kaeya listened and felt sick. His nose brushed against yours.

“None of that is true,” Kaeya said firmly. His eyes stared intensely into yours and your bottom lip quivered again, “You know that, right?”

“I’m so in love with you,” You started, “So in love that a nightmare about you not loving me is more painful than getting stabbed fifty times. I want to be enough for you.”

“You are enough for me.”

Kaeya’s hands brushed through your hair gently, his thumbs rubbing circles in your temple. Your eyes felt heavy and stung from your hysteria. You snaked your arms around Kaeya’s waist and managed to maneuver your bodies so you were both lying on your sides. Kaeya pulled you close to him and you found solace in the crook of his neck. Kaeya pressed soft, warm kisses all over your face and kissed away the rest of your tears.

“I love you, too,” He whispered.

Your eyes fluttered closed and Kaeya waited until your breathing was normal again to close his own. His hand found yours and laced your fingers together and in that moment you realized that this was the intimacy you were longing for so deeply. Your dream that night would haunt you probably for the rest of your life but as long as you could bring yourself back to reality, back to Kaeya, you would be okay.

Kaeya pressed a final kiss to your temple and spoke one last time before sleep overcame you both. Quoting your favorite book Kaeya said, “I’m in love with you, and I know that love in just a shout into the void, and that oblivion is inevitable, and that we’re all doomed and that there will come a day when all our labor has been returned to dust, and I know the sun will swallow the only earth we’ll ever have, and I am in love with you.”

a/n: did i just quote tfios? yes <3

[a-tale-of-legends]

*sigh*

Lysandre is too obvious for my liking. Especially given how it was supposed to be a big reveal near the end.

His initial introduction is actually really good! He seems friendly, if not a bit passionate, and seems to be willing to help the player. But his conversation with Diantha is too obvious. If you want to set up him being the twist villain,first off, don't have him wear what he's wearing initially. Maybe put him in a lab coat similar to Sycamore. Make him wear glasses, have his hair tied back ( he's a barista lol). Make him not look like an obvious twist villain. Secondly, if you want to hint at him being the villain with his beauty speech, you could at least make it a bit more subtle, imo. Of course, I can see it being the point of that showing how deep he is in his beliefs, so much so that even if Sycamore did intervene, it would be too late.

But consider this: it's obvious that Lysandre holds Sycamore in high regards. Maybe, at one point, Sycamore does talk to Lysandre about his behavior. Now Lysandre isn't going to back down from his ambitions. Obviously. But he can sure as hell mask them to keep Sycamore from worrying / gaining suspicion ( which probably ends up futile, but you get my point).

Plus! Giving Lysandre the initial perception of being a good friendly guy who would make you tea or coffee or whatever you want and have a pleasant conversation with him makes him more sympathetic. Cause like. If it weren't for those pokemon evolutions shorts, I would have zero remorse for Lysandre. It makes things more tragic, imo. Lysandre wants to preserve a beautiful world, a better world, but he fails to accept other ideals of the world ( those that he call ugly, which ironically or unironically also means the poor), thus disrupting the harmony that goes with it. Kalos, the world, is flawed, yes, but perfection doesn't exist. Lysandre fails to see that, and I feel like that could have been handled so much better than it was in game.

[burnedbyshoto]

seven

Rich and powerful men can marry seven different women in a wild attempt to produce the perfect heir. Todoroki Enji is one of these powerful men, and you’re his seventh bride.

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pairing: todoroki enji (endeavor) x fem!reader

warnings: edo period!endeavor (king henry viii inspo), forced marriage, alcohol consumption, 18+, smut, non-con, dub-con, size difference, breeding kink, rough-sex, pain, degradation, & mind break

word count: 5,750

a/n: fuck that family who started the fire in socal. my campus is literally raining ashes up in oregon. im so tired. two exams monday. im going to be going on meds for anxiety and adhd soon, so thats new. uh,,, this is like LOL its a bit bad,,, but I really, really lust over asshole enji who only wants to breed bitches and thats it. this is for the bnharem fantasy au collab, i wan’t that creative sorry see ya later skaters.

PLEASE CAREFULLY READ THE WARNINGS. PLEASE CAREFULLY READ THE WARNINGS. PLEASE CAREFULLY READ THE WARNINGS.

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One.

Fate: Spared.

Two.

Fate: Executed.

Three.

Fate: Died during childbirth.

Four.

Fate: Spared.

Five.

Fate: Executed.

Six.

Fate: Executed.

Seven.

Fate: Unknown.

Silks and expensive cloth held a scent that was irreplicable.

The smooth smell of the layers upon layers of fabric wrapped around your body did nothing to quench the building layer of ice in your stomach.

You were scared.

Rightfully so.

Six women came before you, and if you wanted to live, you would have to do better than them.

Marrying the Todoroki Clan head was something that most women could only dream of accomplishing in this day and age. The Todoroki’s, after all, are strong, rich, powerful, undefeated. They held the real power in this age, more influential and notable than the emperor that repeatedly begged the family for support, be it in power, strength, or money.

But, it was also known knowledge that the man who sat at the head of the clan, who held the power of the Todoroki name and future, was a man not to be trifled with.

Todoroki Enji was an endeavor of a man.

There had always been whispers about the head of the family, how he stood eight feet tall, and how his body was not lean like most warriors, but thick and savagely sturdy. His hair was red, blessed by the sun some claimed, or cursed by the devil others alleged. His temper and barbaric nature on the battlefield were, of course, rumored by the people on your lands, who had been indebted by the Todoroki Clan because of their protection and profits. 

Todoroki Enji was not a man to be trifled with.

Especially not if the rumors were true.

He was painted as a demon by everyone. Still, Enji was no demon, he was human, and if he was to allow the Todoroki Clan's legacy to continue, he needed an heir… but since he was human, he was aging.

Six women.

You knew that it was six women because you had been alive to experience five of them.

You remember the newly married couple being paraded through the streets.

Todoroki Enji remained hidden within his vehicle's confines while his new wife, doe-eyed, smiling, effervescent, would greet the gathered crowds. You often wondered what they thought when you would conjure in respect for the man who ensured your childhood and adolescence were not corrupted by thieves and horror.

You wondered what she thought when promising the village elders that she would produce a strong, male heir. You raised an eyebrow at the thought that maybe, just maybe they believed that they would be different -- be able to birth a strong, capable male heir.

Six wives.

Twenty children.

Two weak, sickly boys.

A whole clan of girls.

Were they idiotic, blind, or batshit insane to ever believe that they would be different?

You undoubtedly didn’t know.

Three of the six had been executed.

Three of six had been proud to state they would produce a strong male Todoroki heir, noting that his two sons -- Touya and Natsuo -- would be removed from the family as soon as their strong son was born. 

One of those three birthed a weak, sickly baby boy. She passed in childbirth and took him with her one day after.

Another of those three birthed four girls, two sets of twins because, of course, they were given two chances. She was executed on treason.

The final of those three had simply pissed him off; rumor had it. Her pussy was too tight, unwilling to sheath the thick massive cock that belonged to him… no point in breaking something that wouldn’t bend when there was more pussy out there (you remember she had been ugly too).

But what you didn’t expect was for his clan members to come through your village's streets with an announcement in hand.

Of the six women before you, three had held significant political power -- the three that survived.

Of the remaining three, there was a poet, the other a woman soldier of his, and the last being a clan member.

You had never known what the decision process was, not even a little bit, so when men dressed in dark robes with the Todoroki sigil and katana’s strapped to their sides infiltrated your village, you were on edge.

“All women who are fertile and beautiful, line up, and no, we don’t care if you’re married,” was the short, almost taunting order, and you had never felt sicker.

You were among the seventy females in your village that matched the requirement they demanded. 

Your sight was almost glued to the floor as they walked through you all, your fists grabbing your light blue kimono as the men groped the women in line, teasing the breasts of the pregnant women, rutting their poorly concealed cocks through the valley of asses, shoving between some girls thighs with loopy, proud smiles on their faces, beating any man who attempted to protect any one of their honors. 

But you were towards the end of the line, standing where they decided to save for last, and you were helpless to it all. You watched knowing that of the sixty-something women ahead of you, none of them remained. 

The whimpers, cries, and whines grew louder by your ear, your spine rigid and sore with its tightness as the girl beside you dropped to the floor in her fear. You couldn’t bother looking at her as the parting of their robes seemed to be akin to gunpowder going off in your ears. The horrified squeal on her tongue being silenced when a cock slammed through her lips, the tears pouring down her face useless, if anything, only encouraging their roughhousing. 

Your lip curled at the sound of her pathetic whining, the incessant need of her to tell them that she was not okay with this was nails on an iron plate. It annoyed you, it pissed you off.

“Look at this one,” the snickering laughter of a man breathed by your ear, instantly stilling and freezing the anger that was once radiating like fire from your chest. “She doesn’t look ashamed… she looks like she’s jealous. Maybe these common bitches do have someone good enough for Boss.”

Spluttering gasps and hiccuping cries came from the ground, and you couldn’t even bother glancing at the woman you had known all your life laying on the floor, kimono ripped open, and white, sticky cum dripping from her mouth.

“Well, there’s nothing like taking her out for a test run,” came a sleazy smile, and when two hands gripped at your clothed breasts, you didn’t so much as raise a brow at their perverted actions.

You had won in the end against them. Each perverted, twisted intention they placed against you, dirt crusted fingernails digging into your arms, purpling, throbbing cocks pressed into your backside… it hadn’t mattered.

You didn’t budge.

You didn’t cry.

You didn’t make a noise.

A simple smirk remaining on their faces at your inevitable victory against the other women in your village -- against the crying, cum stuffed women who stared at your victorious and stubborn form without a clue on how you managed.

And where did that land you?

In a room with only one window too high up for an average person to reach, white silks and fabrics adorning your body, and ceremonial ornaments in your hair.

Six women came before you, but today, you would become the seventh.

With you, there would be seven women to have wed Todoroki Enji, but you weren’t scared because you feared the fate of the six before you. No, you were much better than them; you already knew that for a fact.

The anxiety that coursed through your veins created that ice pit in your stomach came from one place and one place only.

Your cunt already sobbed at the thought of even attempting at taking his thick, veiny cock you knew was the size of your thigh later tonight.

A virgin like you had no chance of survival.

The doors to your room soon slammed open, and your back stiffened at the sight of a familiar face of an escort you had. His eyes didn’t meet yours; they were focused at the wall, his face tense and tight.

“It’s best we leave now, y/l/n, Todoroki-sama doesn’t like waiting.”

The weight of the white silk on your body felt like a brick when you stood up from your position, and you wondered if the sweat from your pits and palms would damage the kimono -- if it was noticeable. But you had a duty, and as number seven, you had no motive to be executed before even getting the chance to prove yourself.

You knew how wishes worked; the secret was in being silent about your desire… never reveal what your wish was, or the world wouldn’t grant it.

Or at least, that’s what you told yourself every time you heard the all too familiar words of: “I’ll produce a fine Todoroki heir,” through the lips of the dead and the divorced. They had spoken it to the universe, acknowledged what they needed, and the cruel world failed them each and every time.

You were so wrapped up in your thoughts, so consumed by the idea of what would happen tonight, you hardly realized that with the heaving puffing breathes you took to keep up with the man’s ridiculous strides, that you had made it to the shrine that you had been brought to wed.

But you couldn’t even take in the beauty of the shrine to your left because you were more interested in who was standing in the pathway towards the shrine.

Todoroki Enji.

He stood on the stone-paved path, his bulky, beefy arms folded across his chest, the fabric of his kimono taut and tight against his flexed muscle, and a sour frown on his face. It was as the rumors had spoken, you realized when you stopped mere strides away from your future husband, he was a man that looked both godly and cursed.

Bright red hair glistened like copper pans under the sunlight, waving and flickering like a raging fire with every small burst of wind. He stood at almost eight feet high, maybe eight feet, you had no idea. All you knew is that as your feet stumbled when getting near to this man, you were dwarfed, feeling like a child next to their father as you gazed up at his unmoving, scarred face. His eyes didn’t look down at you, but even you could see the clear, sharp blue in them, and for the first time, you questioned reality.

Was this man truly human? Was he genuinely Japanese?

Seeing him before you made your knees buckle in fear, arousal, and anticipation.

You wanted to see what had made the sixth scream to stop.

You wanted to see just what he was hiding behind the ridiculously tight fitted kimono, but your thoughts were yanked away when his hand -- no doubt bigger than your head -- pressed to space between your shoulder blades and pushed you.

“We’re on a tight schedule,” he merely growled, his eyes burning at something a million miles away, and with a small, pitiful whimper, you allowed him to lead the way.

The wedding ceremony was… odd, to say the least.

While you had never been married, you had attended a few weddings within your lifetime already, and never once had it felt so disturbing dead and raw as it had today. This Shinto ceremony, typically doused with symbolism and motifs for the greatest possible outcome for the union between you and Todoroki Enji, was stripped from the shrine walls, leaving the walls barren and cold as both he and the priest proceeded through the ceremony at breakneck speed.

It wasn’t something Enji wanted; you realized that clearly the moment he refused to meet your gaze; his blue eyes remaining on the priest.

Everything the both of you performed together was done haphazardly, the lack of symbols you had always wished to see in your wedding ceremony forgotten, undoubtedly seen as a farce by a man like Todoroki Enji, but still, your heart ached.

You hadn’t noticed when the ceremony had ended; Enji never once allowing you to move, or do anything for that matter, by yourself. There was no use in fighting against a man who’s entire hand fit around your forearm, his thumb even resting against his fingernail -- oh yes, this man was huge.

There was no telling when he paraded you through the streets of his territory, allowing you to numbly speak to the village elders, to allow your parents to press their sweaty palms to your cheeks because god, please, please survive this, their touch practically sobbed. You smiled at them, eyes numb with the reality of what this was going to be for you, but the cheerful tone on your tongue remained optimistic and bright with every passing word. 

The scornful thoughts of the sixth woman being too weak to handle Enji had dissipated, and you wondered just what the other five did to survive what you knew was a massive fucking cock hidden beneath the shrowds of his black kimono.

You would survive, you would survive, you would survive.

But far before you were ready to, you arrived back at the Todoroki front, the wooden estate standing sturdy and strong, the air of power and aura almost tangible. The samurai and clansmen who had undoubtedly awaited for you and your now-husband (that was still odd to think about) to return. Pairs of warm, weathered hands helped you from the carriage, and without so much of a whisper of thanks, they escorted you away, heads bowed at the mercy of their leader.

Once more, you were abandoned in your room.

The window no longer allowed the streaming setting sunlight in, your room was in the eastern part of the estate, and with the nighttime coming, the setting sun was merely a memory to you.

And in that room, the tiny, unspacious room that seemed much more for a prisoner than the seventh wife of Todoroki Enji, you tried not to cry.

The door slamming open hours after you had fallen asleep had taken you by surprise.

Enji had left you to your own entertainment, and long after you were served dinner, and informed that no, Todoroki-sama would not be visiting you right now because he was busy, you had sat on the bed in your silks and robes, numbly looking at the star-filled sky. Sleep was the only thing you could do, and with the last servant visit being past midnight, you took to sleep.

Except that you forgot a sparing, important detail.

This was Todoroki Enji’s world, and you were merely his legal fuckhole.

The heavy footsteps of Enji entering the room echoed in your ear, and the door closed behind him, solidifying the end of the beginning of what you once knew. 

“Seven,” he growled into the night, and your spine snapped straight.

He loomed above you, the tatami mat suddenly feeling like a brick wall against your side, and you swallowed pathetically at the way his deep, raspy voice sent shivers down your spine.

This had been the first time you had heard him speak, all other forms of communication between him and the priest and he and his clan members had been nonverbal, solely told through those piercing blue eyes that only let you dream of what he sounded like -- of what he was demanding. But you lay confused, your eyebrows scrunched at just why he had called out the number seven?

Seven what?

You twisted where you lay, your eyes meeting his own, and despite the lack of light in the room, you could see the cold, distant glint in his eyes.

“Oh good,” he mocked, his voice low and dangerous, eyes squinted in his apparent lack of approval. “You can hear.”

“S-Seven what?” you stammer, your elbow pressing into the mat, pushing you up so that you could look at your husband, uncertainty and discomfort scorching every nerve in your body. 

You didn’t know what to do.

Then, it hit you. The bitter, numbing smell of alcohol coated in a fine layer around his skin, the small puffs of angry air from his mouth letting you know that your husband was inebriated, and your throat clenched when he began to dismantle his kimono.

“T-This isn’t a good idea!” you stammer, the white silk robes you were still dressed in because they refused to allow you a set of sleeping clothes because the marriage needed to be consummated, felt stiff and not protective enough. “You won’t produce a proper heir if you’re intoxicated.”

Enji raised an eyebrow at you, and your thudding heart failed to cease as his robes hit the floor with an unceremonious thud. 

Whiskey dick wasn’t something foreign to you; the countless men you had sucked off in your time, the numerous sex stories you had been shared with always had some instance of a man getting drunk and being able to get their cock hard, but this…?

If this was Enji’s whiskey dick, you weren’t sure what to expect of his sober cock.

His cock was already hard, the veins in his cock large, plentiful, and bulging in many areas. It was thick, without a doubt thick enough where it would take both your hands to circle around his cock, and it was long, the swollen weeping tip leaking against his abdomen. His cock was magnificent yet deadly, and your pussy spasmed in fear of having that monster all twelve plus inches shoved into your virgin cunt.

“The fuck are you doing, seven?” Enji snarled, his powerful naked legs moving toward you, his feet pressing into the mat, and his hand reaching out to you. “I didn’t marry you for you to just stare at my fucking cock like some piss-shit baby.”

There was no time to panic, protest, or even prepare yourself for the sudden sharp, dull ache in your jaw when he pressed his monster cock past your chapped, chewed lips. 

Immediately, it was overwhelming.

The engorging cock had barely passed your lips, but you were already gagging against the unwelcomed size, the horrid ache sending spilling tears down your cheeks, doing nothing but annoying the man before you. His hands gripped your hair, his eyes not even bothering to look at you as he fucked your mouth.

“Stop fucking resisting,” Enji snarled, his hips coming to meet your mouth in a vicious, unpleasant snap, the head of his cock pressing down your clenched throat, and so much of his cock still remaining far from your mouth. “Take my cock like the fucking whore I know you are, seven.”

You gasp for air, but with his cock ramming further and further down your throat, the scalding heat emitting from his skin burning your throat, making you gag and choke around him in your fear. You couldn’t breathe, you realized in a panic, and your eyes widened in fear, drool and spit spilling down your chin pathetically as Enji hums contently.

“Don’t feel so scared, seven,” Enji cruelly smirked up at the ceiling, his hips lazily, sloppily, yet powerfully delivering his cock into your bulging throat. “I heard what you did to my men, how you let them fuck you however they saw fit, how you scoffed and scowled at the other pathetic weak bitches who couldn’t handle a little groping… I thought you would like this? What is it? Never had a real fucking cock before? A little whore like yourself only gotten shitty little cocks?”

Wordlessly, you begged to be shown mercy, your vision blackening as he choked out all forms of oxygen, his war weathered body unbothered by your clawing fingers on his thighs. No, you were too weak for it to hurt him.

His hands left your hair, and you collapsed back onto the bed, gasping for air, choking, and coughing for oxygen that only burned all through your system, sitting unpleasantly in your lungs while tears and saliva mixed on your throat.

“Where the fuck are do you think you’re going, seven?” Enji barked, his body suddenly looming over yours, and you felt trapped, unable to move as the mountain of a man trapped you between his sturdy arms and legs. His cock, warm and sticky with your spit and his precum, sat heavily on your stomach, the size difference between the two of you even more pronounced when the tip of his cock rested at the bottom of your ribcage. “All you did was lube up my cock for your stupid, tight pussy. Don’t think I was satisfied with that childish blowjob -- next time, if you want to cry, make sure it’s loud enough that I feel it against my cock.”

You pathetically moan at his words, the tears still falling from your eyes because your throat and jaw hurt. It hurt, it hurt, it hurt.

“Please,” you gasped as his cinder hot hands pressed to your breasts against your kimono, he quickly enveloped your tender flesh in his hands despite the fabric. “Please, no more.”

“I don’t remember this marriage being about you,” he mocked, and with no more of a glinting snarl of his mouth, he tore the kimono straight off your body. The horrified scream that left your lips was silenced by the echoing slap across your face.

Pain blistered at the side of your face, and the resulting tears couldn’t be felt against your numbed skin as Enji continued his conquest, his fingers pulling and ripping any and all fabric pressed against your body.

“Get away!” you weakly whimpered, body trembling and twisting as you attempted to escape the man looming above you, finally ridding you of all dresses, hands pressing to the back of your thighs to push you into a position that he liked. “Leave me alone, leave me alone…”

There was no fire in your words, nothing but the aching fear and undeniable terror.

But the words did nothing to Enji, who continued to move you so that your tight, virgin cunt lined up with his throbbing, red cockhead. Even like this, your face was pressed into his chest. His body unworldly larger than yours, incredibly goliath compared to you.

“You know, seven, if you keep trying to escape me and you keep trying to save yourself, then why are you so fucking wet with everything I’ve done?” he growls down at you, his piercing blue eyes staring straight through you, the tears falling down your face doing nothing but encouraging him because he was right… your cunt, just like his cock, was wet, dripping with the undeniable pleasure of this all. There was a fire, a shameful fire, in your pussy, throbbing in time with the stinging pulse in your face that begged for Enji’s cock despite it all. “You fucking tiny little slut… I can feel just how my actions -- how my words -- affect you, getting you off like a bitch in heat! Your efforts to hide it are pathetic, fucking useless.”

Pain.

If you thought you knew what pain was before right now, you had to be wrong. 

Enji’s girth was overwhelming, nearly splitting your shuddering tight walls while he buried his cock entirely within you. Nausea builds in the back of your throat, a soundless shriek breaking past your bleeding lips, your hips bucking in their relentless attempt to adjust to the way that he was splitting your walls in two, and your face flushed in pain and lust press into his chest, the only part of him you could touch. 

Fuck, fuck, “fuck!” you cried, fat and painful tears pushing past your eyes, dripping down the apples of your cheeks while Enji sighed at the feeling of your hot cunt against his cock, blood seeping out of your pussy in such a pretty way he couldn’t help but smile.

“You’ve got a really tight cunt,” he observes, his hips slamming against you without warning, his mind only caring about him, setting off another round of painful screams while he situates within you. “Mhm, this is nice. A tight, young pussy always means a good womb, you’ll give me the heir I need… I’ll make sure to fuck you full of my cum.”

His hips then begin to thrust upward into you, the tip of his cock unable to reach the beginnings of your walls that he seemed to attempt to get to with each powerful blow. But it was his girth that had your body tensed, back arched in pain, eyes clenched in nothing but pain.

Pain.

Pain.

Pain.

“Hey.” SLAP. Your head snapped to the side, a burning, stinging pain on your cheek, alerting you that your eyes were closed. Your piqued breathing spluttered and so spaced between it was as if you were having some sort of asthma attack. Enji looked down at you, blue eyes burning demonly down at you (you wondered if this was the same look those who survived to see him on the battlefield claimed he had), his lips curled into an unapproving snarl while his hands pushed at the bottom of your knees. You pressed further into the tatami, the angle of penetration only furthering with your desperate screams to be gentler. “Shut the hell up, you’re annoying me with all this fucking screaming. Don’t waste my time.”

You whimper loudly, the feeling of his forcibly moving hips not becoming any easier on you, no longer a wave of intensive horrifying pain, but still a throbbing pain than had your fingernails cutting into his skin. “You have to be gentler! Be gentler, please be gentler! You’re so much bigger than me!!! My pussy can’t… my pussy can’t handle this!”

The fabric of the kimono under your body seared with heat when Enji shoved you further onto the mat, your legs twitching almost pathetically around his waist while your sight nearly blackened with his next action. He slammed your knees into the mat, increasing the angle of his penetration by a tenfold, sending you into another round of howling pain and pleasure as his cock slammed into your cervix -- bruising and scalding your puffy, sensitive walls with every powerful thrust. With his drilling hips and snarling speed, your screams and shouts of pain and pleasure and fear were cut off by an enormous fist around your neck, and his voice echoed from above you.

“Didn’t your dad teach you fucking whore to be quiet, seven?” Enji hisses, his thick hand clenching around your neck. Oxygen refused to flow to your lung, you went light-headed and limp, choking noises emitting from you while he continued to slam his cock in you, your clenching and splitting walls unable to keep up with the speed of the esteemed nobleman of Japan. “You’re my breeding whore, do you understand? You have no value to me except to be breed, to be full of my cum, to carry my child. You are nothing more than an object. Do. You. understand?”

Your head throbbed, the blood forcibly kept in your head, and the lack of oxygen made your world spin. 

“Y-Yes!” you choke on your tongue.

“Repeat it!”

“I’m your breeding whore! Fill me with your cum, I wanna… fuck, I w-wanna carry your children! I’m your object, I’m yours, I’m yours, I’m yours!”

“There we go,” Enji sighs contently, his broad chest pressing your thighs further into the bed, cutting off what limited oxygen you had left, and increasing the jabbing pleasure within you by a tenfold.

“Shit, such a filthy fucking cunt you have,” he groans, your walls spasming against him with his wild, obscene thrusts. He moves his hands further up your legs so that they press against your knees, your legs then wrap around his body, shaking as he makes no effort to slow in his advances, your finger drawing blood from where they raked down his back because he was burning an outline of your body into the mat. Your strangled scream goes unnoticed by Enji, a desperate plea for him to be softer.

But he wasn’t someone who cared.

You were only here to be bred, to give him a son, the strongest son the entire country of Japan -- nay, the world -- has ever seen.

Pathetically, your hips attempt to rise up to meet him, a prayer that it would ease this brutal force he was using. It was too much -- his cock easily overpowering your throbbing cunt.

The sounds of his cock slamming into your sopping pussy created loud wet noises that made you cry in embarrassment. Your face felt like it was seconds from popping out, Enji’s weight crushing you on top of the abhorrent position he was fucking you in, but he found it as an excuse to speed up. His rugged grunts are warnings in your ears as his cock finally hits your cervix with consistency that makes you wail. The stretch he gave you was boggling, and you were progressively less cognitive aware as he drilled in harder. His slams were so hard that the sound of his thighs hitting your ass let out a continuous and loud slap.

His fingers gouge into your skin, and you cry his name like a hopeful prayer as he is fueled by your appraisal, your breath hot and sticky between the valley of his chest. Your tongue pressing against his skin akin to some infant looking to suck their mothers tit.

The force in which Enji slammed his hips to meet yours. Above your ear, the growling pants that mocked you for enjoying this demeaned you for thinking you were anything more than his breeding whore sent a liquid fire that could never match the heat of a conflagration to your core. When your head smashed against the mat because you could no longer keep your head up. 

“That’s fucking right,” he laughs, drool pouring past your lips with your mindless babble, your eyes fluttering closed. Pleasure drowned in pain sobs expelled from your lips, invigorating something powerful within the entire family who watches on with impatient stares at the sight of your squeezing cunt around Eniji’s cock. “Take my fucking cock, bitch, don’t fucking pass out yet, we’re far from over.”

Enji was raw power, destruction, and strength. He pistoled into your sobbing core with the intent of getting his sperm into your cunt, to get his sperm that would get him a son into you, other than that, he was uncaring, unmotivated by your pathetic whining and crying. Your thrashing and wailing do not stop Enji, nor do they lessen the pace and the force he’s settled in as the floor begins to creak with every powerful thrust.

“I needa — holy shit, r-right there! M-More, more, more, more--”

“What? Do you need to come already, seven?” Enji mocks you pushing up off you so his back is curved, and your body so small underneath him. “Do you really think I’ll let you cum before me?”

Your eyes can no longer stay open as the only noises leaving your mouth are whines and begs for more. You forcibly clench around him to stir a reaction from him, but all he does is snarl quietly as he continues his rutting force. The pounding is rhythmic. His balls bruising your ass where he hits you. The feeling of Enji’s cock entering and leaving you draws your eyes to the back of your head as you pathetically whimper his name, his thighs hitting your ass at bruising force, only adding to your pleasure. 

Each powerful snap of his hips sending your back arching to the heavens, the balls of your feet digging bruisingly into his back. In and out he goes, your cunt nothing more than a cocksleeve for him, and your wanton screams and mewls taking him further and further.

Enji all but laughs into your ear, his hand moving from pressing onto the tatami mat and pushing into your opened mouth, pressing onto your tongue. “Suck my fingers like a good whore, show me that you’re not gonna disappoint me. Suck my fingers.” you sob in the thought, not because you’re fearful of disappointing the man, but because the feeling of his fingers in your mouth makes your cunt throb ludicrously, your tongue desperately wrapping around the appendages, pushing through the space of his fingers. “I’m going to fill you up so good, breeding whore. You’ll be leaking my cum for days. I’m going to make sure you carry the Todoroki gene, and I hope that it’s my son you carry.”

The words incite clenching heat in your core, your lips unable to form anything but a weak, pitiful moan because the thought of being filled to the max with Todoroki cum makes your mind spin. More, you want to milk them all dry. You want nothing more than that. With a ragged breath, a consecutive full thrust that sends his cock slamming against your cervix, Enji cums fully within you. His load is long and heavy, your belly feeling like it’s bulging when he finally emerges from your cunt. His once hard cock limping in his hands while you lay there defeated, his and your intermixed cum spilling from your pulsing cunt. 

Your mouth opened, sobbing at his absence, a need for him to return despite your core's undeniable tremor and ache. He’s off your body as well, and oxygen floods your lungs in dizzying and shallow pants, your vision fuzzies out, and you stare almost brokenly at the window painted with the rising morning sun.

Your room was in the east wing, after all.

You didn’t even protest when he pressed a smooth wooden plug into your cunt to “ensure you were bred to succession.”

He would soon leave your room, stumbling out with a drunken hiccup, leaving you to lay on a once white kimono… a once white kimono drenched in cum, blood, sweat, and tears.

You wouldn’t know until two weeks later, but Todoroki Enji had succeeded in breeding you, and you would eventually lay in a birthing room with blood and sweat and tears soaking your skin as a silent baby boy was placed in your arms.

“And what will his name be?” the midwife asked, her eyes wide with joy for you and Enji.

“...Shouto.”

[lovelybarnes]

berlin- b. barnes

pairings: bucky barnes x reader

warnings: mentions of blood and dying, fighting, weapons, avengers stuff, it’s not fluff

about: a challenge “berlin in the cold/ all that fighting/ all that snow” for @sventeen-daybreak

a/n: i hope this is good! it’s only 1k words or so, so i hope that’s enough lol i'm also so sorry for any mistakes, after reading it for like the third time, every word i read was just horrible so i stopped reading lmao

also i am currently working on the loki part 2, so i'm hoping it'll be out by thursday (aka my normal posting day)

"berlin in the cold,"

the cold air is nipping at your uncovered skin, numbing your nose and your cheeks, but you don’t seem to notice. your evening breaths are visible, swirling in front of you as white puffs. your fingers are tapping slowly against the leg of your suit, staining the color with the dark red on your fingers. you can still feel the wound they pressed on, the thick vermillion coating your fingers while you struggled to keep it in. you can still hear the whimpers and the screams, and the eyes that stared up at you, pleading for you to do something you were unable to.

the snow you’re standing in is pure white, a stark contrast to the carmine colored you can still see. very little of it is yours, but it’s a meaningless comfort with the reminder of the pain heavy, and it’s barely noticeable that the avengers came to help with so much death.

your legs still ache from the excessive use, thighs sore from squeezing heads so hard, the bodies belonging to them fall to the ground; dead or passed out, you didn’t bother to tell because you’d cracked their necks already. the weapons you used sit uselessly in the pockets of your suit: bloodied or chipped knives, broken tasers, and guns emptied of ammo.

you can still see the bodies, both human and alien, and a few in between, strewn across the white, but your face remains expressionless, the hate for the things that caused the destruction loud and clear as it runs in your blood, making your fingers reach out to take the lives you’ve already taken, not that you’d be able to with how exhausted you are now. the evidence of that, though, is nonexistent, and will be until you’re in the compound, free to pass out as you please in the confines of your own bed.

the presence behind you- familiar and comforting, a striking change from the ones you’d been encountering for the last hours- gently reminds you it isn’t your bed only anymore, but yours and bucky’s to share. the thought draws a relaxing sheen over your thoughts, the thought of hands and touches that don’t bring with them murderous intent a large enough relief to let your shoulders drop a little.

just a little, though, because even if you close your eyes, the metallic smell of blood remains, burning in your nose, appearing on your tongue, and the still bodies are still there, all life drained away.

“you’re cold,” bucky says quietly, and you don’t mind it; his voice is always soft, gravelly in a way that should shatter the war-ridden silence, but it doesn’t, only makes it tremble, as if he’s handling it with the same tender hands he handles you with- only light touches, as if you aren’t the opposite of the most delicate thing in the world.

you don’t respond, but you don’t need to, bucky has already slipped his arms from the coat you made him take, draping it over your shoulders. the only reason he doesn’t turn you around and puts it on you correctly is the eerie silence there rarely is when you’re around him, and the complete lack of your touch. you’re always at his side, hidden under his arm while you ask him if he’s okay because you always are.

you aren’t this time, he recognizes, watching you absentmindedly scratch at the dried blood on your thumb, the red speckles harshly interrupting the bright white as they land. “i don’t understand why they came here like that.” you think out loud, voice soft yet cracked. you mean suddenly, without the warning usually given and taken advantage of by arriving earlier, stopping most of the chaos and coldblooded murder.

“they’re aliens,” bucky points out dumbly, because he doesn’t know what else to say. he doesn’t understand either. this is something he asks you, and you answer with something true and honest because that’s what you are. you blink, not moving from the place you stand, watching the ruins of what was once a home. “but if we got here sooner-”

“you know what thinking like that does,” bucky interrupts carefully, and you do. you’ve seen the tears that tinge his eyes red and roll down his cheeks, the nightmares that limit his rest to only a few hours. yet, you can still only remember the little girl, whose blood possibly wouldn’t be caked on your hands if you’d gotten here earlier.

she was so little, you think, sniffling. “you’re cold,” bucky repeats, attempting to ease you into the quinjet where the rest of the avengers wait, friday doing her job stitching up natasha’s wounds. the stinging on your calf reminds you that you should probably be there too, but you remain still. “it was so pretty here,” you whisper, remnants of the place it used to be still floating in the air like a shadow. you wanted to take bucky here one day, show him how beautiful the cold could be; but the scarlet covering hides the beautiful, the bodies smearing the illusion, only confirming bucky’s views.

the snowflakes that fall from the sky mask the devastation with a sheen of peace, landing gently in yours and bucky’s hair in a way that makes him look angelic. it’s nearly ironic, with his gun shoved in his holster, bloodied and used. he’s still on your side, bright blue eyes staying frozen on you.

you’re standing in snow up to your knees, the ice unkind to your raw skin. the flakes only continue to fall, and you know that everything you can see will be covered by a new layer by tomorrow. it makes you upset, hand curling into a tight fist, sticky with blood. “why hasn’t anyone picked them up?” you ask.

“too much snow. shield didn’t have enough manpower to get them all,” bucky replies, staring at the alien carcasses that remain, shriveled and ugly, one caught in mid scream. you shake your head, “i don’t mean that,” you state, voice slightly raising, nearly breaking your facade. “i mean them, they don’t deserve to- to lie there with their murderers.”

“y/n…” bucky begins, your breathing catches, murmuring a no under your breath, “they didn’t deserve for their last memories to be fighting. they don’t deserve to be buried under so much snow.”

you turn to bucky, finally moving. “they didn’t deserve that.”

“i know,” he responds, voice hushed while he comes closer to you, wrapping his arm around your shoulders and waist. “i couldn’t help them,” you snivel, letting yourself fall against bucky completely until he’s practically carrying you, his body enveloping yours till you aren’t visible anymore, safe in his embrace.

“you did everything you could, you helped so many people,” bucky murmurs, pressing his lips against the crown of your head, “not enough,” you counter, cold tears bleeding into his shoulder. “so much, y/n. people are alive because of you.”

your arms finally go around his back, pulling him closer, “then why does it feel like i did nothing?” bucky shakes his head, squeezing his eyes shut at the sound of your broken words. he didn’t know how to make this better. seeing you cry was new to him, it was always you comforting him, hugging him tightly and whispering loving words in his ear until he calmed down and clung to you as you ran your fingers through his hair.

“you did everything you could,” he repeats quietly, rubbing small circles on your back. “i really hate being an avenger sometimes,” you mumble into the ripped material of his suit. “i know. i do too,” he nods, kissing your head repeatedly. his body heat is melting the cold off of yours with each second that passes by. if you close your eyes, you can pretend you aren’t where you are, and the liquid coating your fingers isn’t what it is, but something less gory. not a heavy reminder of what happened.

“i don’t want to be here anymore,” you start, “i want to go home with you and never see anything like this again.” your words are unrealistic, and both you and bucky know that, but he nods anyway, pulling away from you and tugging the coat tighter around your body.

you walk next to him towards the quinjet, the snow you used to love stained with the ghost of the decimation that had just taken place.

"all that fighting; all that snow."

[imalemonthatrants]

Color Association with One Piece

My friend and I once again were talking about the colors some peeps in One Piece represented. It spurred from our disagreement on Sanji being blue or yellow, by the way. LOL my friend feels that they've got a trace of synthesthia to them. I don't think I do, but I do associate characters, more so than real life people, with colors.

Luffy is, hands down, simply red for us. No discussion necessary.

Kid is displayed as blue often (in fanart) due to Law being yellow and luffy being red, but both of us agree that Kid is definitely also red. A darker red than Luffy, and that definitely makes sense to me because Kid is a more edgier version of Luffy to me. One with like two more braincells as well.

Law is and still is yellow in my eyes, though I can see him as black as well. In our disagreement on sanji being blue or yellow, I stated that if they saw Law as yellow, Sanji can't be yellow! (Proceeds to shoot myself in the foot because Kid is red, but Luffy HAS to be red) but they stated that they redelegate Law to black as his color then. To my friend, Law is a softer sort of yellow, like sweater yellow. To me, Law would either be annoying florescent light yellow like that shade of yellow that ugly lightbulbs kind of project onto white walls or a dull yellow, tending to border onto beige kind of yellow, like dried and old wheat.

Killer, my friend associates with a very soft baby blue. Mostly because he wears blue fairly often, but also because soft blues makes them think that Killer gave great fucking hugs and he probably does. I saw Killer as a secondary color, like orange or purple, but also visualize him as yellow. He's a yellow dyed by the presence of Kid in his life, his captain so ingrained into his soul, that It's changed his color, hence my ideas of orange. Purple, because baby blue thing and Kid dying his color to make it the way it was but also because purple is dignity, and how Killer throws away his pride, his dignity, all for his captain in such a way, yet still, he preserves it due to his actions.

The controversial person, Sanji. Sanji is blue to me. Blue visually and by association. After our discussion, my friend admits that they visualize Sanji as yellow, probably because of the Fandom, but associates him with blue. To my friend, if Law was a soft, comforting sort of yellow, then Sanji was a bright and sunflower sort of yellow. I strong disagree on Sanji being yellow. Sanji is not the sun, not the brightness to my life or the peoples' world. He does not burn you if you come to close, make you fall to the depths or is equal to his harshness amongst all that yearn for his kindness. That is Luffy. Luffy is the sun, and Sanji cannot replace that in my eyes, ever. Not even close.

Sanji is blue. Blue like the oceans, mysterious and deceptive. He's the blue of the skies that are colored like freedom just as much as Sanji yearns it. He's the blurred blue horizon of the sky and the ocean surface meeting together, of the view he saw with his own blue eyes on the rocky prison that showed how simply beautiful the sky and the ocean was, but also how its beauty was a deception to the pain that they can bring. I also like the character idea of "kindness kills", or "hurting people with one's kindness" as a character flaw for Sanji, and it fits with my color idea of him.

Finally, my favorite man in the series, Zoro. Zoro is green, visually to me and due to the green, by association. Ironically, despite Zoro being my favorite character and me associating him as green and seeing him as green, I hate the color green. Mostly, I hate anything that stems from yellow in a way (yellow, green, orange are low on my likeable color list. What can I say? I hate yellow.) (But even more ironic, I do actually like Law! And I ship lawzo as much as I ship other zoro pairings. Lol) But I picture Zoro, often times, as a mint green, probably because what appealed to me the most about Zoro was the softer, less noticeable parts of him, where he doesn't try to stand out, yet still he does. Sometimes, I think of Zoro as a seafoam green as well, maybe because I was a zosanzo shipper for years, and the blue has bled into the green. I also can see matcha green. Because liking Zoro means you got a sophisticated sort of taste (in my eyes, lol), but also the bitterness of matcha is the way Zoro forces people to face the harsh reality of life sometimes, where he is strict not only to himself, but on the people around him, but he strongly believes that the people around him will meet or surpass his expectations.

My friend brought up a deep, dark, forest green and I was like DAMN, how could I have not seen that? They said like the protective and safe comforts sort of green. And that definitely made sense to me. That is Zoro. So I think of evergreen green Zoro. Where despite the frigid winds, the snow bleeding the colors away from the world, Zoro stubbornly refuses to let go of his colors. His green standing out starkly amongst the white and grays of the world. My friend also visualizes him as blue sometimes, mostly because skypeia zoro in that blue tank top is unforgettable. Sometimes, I visualize zoro as blood red, but that may be because Zoro covered in blood is low-key a kink for me.

Those are the only ones we discussed during my friend's thirty minute work break, but obviously, I got colors for most other characters in the series. Let me know what colors you relate one piece characters to and why! I do enjoy seeing other people's color theory opinions. And am down to seeing people disagree on my colorizing with their own opinion. Broaden my horizons, you know?

[luminois]

Song: Mona Lisa by The All American Rejects

SKZ member: Felix

PS this is a cool idea, and congrats on all your followers!!

thank you for this ask bub!! this song gave me major zombie apocalypse vibes for some reason?? like it doesn’t talk about that at all lol but i couldn’t stop imagining two people in love with each other having to fight in a dystopian world the walking dead style

———

you’re breathing so hard you can’t hear the inhuman screams coming from outside the camper, and you’re grateful for it. you close your eyes to forget, at least for a brief moment, the way your muscles are pulsing with exertion, the dried blood making your skin crawl, and the horrors you’ve lived through so far constantly replaying behind your eyelids, plaguing the days and not making you sleep during the cold nights.

if you could, if you were braver, you’d stop fighting. you’d let them find you and put an end to all the suffering surviving is causing you. life has lost all of the things that made it beautiful enough to endure. all, except one.

felix entwines his fingers with yours, squeezing them with purpose, and you open your eyes again to look at him. sweaty and dirty, with his eyes blown wide and shining with fear, he’s the only precious thing you have left.

you found each other after the world had already begun to come down and you’ve been hanging off of each other like a lifeline ever since. you’ve watched people come and go, changed groups according to the situation and your necessities, lost friends and benevolent strangers. regardless of anything and anyone else, every day that ends is a successful one as long as you still have each other after the sun sets.

it’s brutally ironic how your first love blossomed during a time where everything on earth does nothing but wilt. people older than both of you, survivors that had lost hope, have broken down crying in joy witnessing the tender way you and felix act together. they said you represent hope, that not everything is lost if in such an ugly world something so wonderful still manages to exist. you’ve wanted to tell them just how hard and heart wrenching being in love like that is, but you’ve never find it in you to.

now, with monsters trying to kick down the camper’s door and surrounding you on all sides, you and felix stare into each other’s eyes like it’s the last time you’ll ever be able to do so. it might as well be, you think, and that’s why you lean forward and kiss him deeply, savoring the taste of his lips until you feel a knot at the back of your throat. he tastes sweet despite everything.

[autisticchicc]

Autism and Love

TW: Mentions of physical and emotional abuse, drug-related metaphor

Love and obsession, for me, are separated by a very thin line. Even if I weren’t autistic, I know I would still love fiercely, but I also know that autism has a profound effect on the way that I feel and express love.

In my life there have been numerous occasions where I thought I was in love, and I often still debate with myself about whether I have ever been ‘in love’. Nowadays I tend to take the view that love is something very personal, and just because it doesn’t last doesn’t make it any less valid. Being someone who is still on good or even great terms with all of my ex partners, I’d say I absolutely loved them at one point in my life. Maybe I still do love them, but I live a strictly categorised life. That love is now a purely a platonic love that comes from knowing and trusting someone for a long time. That ability to categorise so strictly is something some of my exes have had a hard time coming to terms with, I am quick to move them into the platonic love category and keep them there. Once someone has been placed in the platonic category, they do not leave. I don’t get back with ex-partners, and I don’t actually think its possible due to that strict categorisation.

My very first boyfriend sent me a message the other day asking if I ever still think about him. I replied honestly and said that I do not. I think that this comes from the strict categorisation too. If you are my friend, I think about you, but not that often. I have a lot of things happening in my head at all times, a sensory cornucopia that is exhausting to sort through, a conscious stream of five or six trains of thought, and my special interests. Special interests are a really intriguing factor in the context of autistic love, because I believe that the intense focus and adoration we treat our interests with absolutely translates to the people we fall in love with.

Anyone who has been close friends with me while in a relationship knows how insufferable I am when I love someone. I talk about them at any given opportunity, for longer than the other person probably cares to hear about it at times. When I love someone, they become a source of great inspiration, I find the characters I write resembling them, I could spend hours editing pictures and videos of them, my artwork is littered with their image. Love, for me, is an all-encapsulating thing. It invades every aspect of my life, consciously or subconsciously. They become the most beautiful person in my eyes, I drink in their image as though dehydrated. Curiously, even things I perhaps did not like about them before suddenly become things I look at fondly. Something about that shift from like to love, it is a very powerful shift for me.

Ironically, I’m not very forthright with my expressions of love. After mulling it over for years, I’ve realised that I’ve been conditioned to believe that love and pain go hand in hand. When you love someone, you must expect them to hurt you. At least, that’s what I thought until I deconstructed why I thought that. I had become accustomed to people weaponising my love for them, using it to blackmail me emotionally or to excuse physical abuse. As such, although I feel so deeply for the people I love, I am always very anxious about showing it in ways that can be used against me. I don’t show them the story or the art that I created inspired by them, for fear that they might think me obsessed for spending so much time on something pertaining to them.

I get very embarrassed when performing acts of service for my partners. I enjoy tidying and cleaning a lot, and I often want to do it for my partners to make their lives easier, but I get scared that they will think I’m being subservient and that they can take advantage of me. When I see my partner enjoying something or fostering a talent, I desperately want to invest in it, buy them tools and find resources so that they can develop it further, but am scared that they will think me strange and over-enthusiastic. I’m the kind of partner that loves extremely hard, and wants to express it as such, but I cannot quite get over the shame.

I have only recently been able to engage in non-sexual physical touch without flinching. Learning that touch is your love language when you have been shying away from it for years is a strange thing. It almost feels like a betrayal of sorts. Why was I denied this thing that I love for so long? And the reality is, it was a part of that fear. I have to be vulnerable with someone in order to allow them to touch me. Vulnerability has never come easily for me, although I always desperately wanted it. Finding someone that I can entangle limbs with, that I can kiss and hug on a whim, that I can show physical affection in my ‘weird’ autistic ways with has been very therapeutic for me. For the first time, I feel like I can have vulnerability and touch without it being thrown back in my face. It feels desired and reciprocated, not only do I want to touch and hold this person, but they want to touch and hold me too.

Another lesson within that has been ensuring that while I maintain my tough, outer visage, I am honest about needing to be soft and fragile sometimes. I have always been forced into being strong and resilient, it was never a conscious choice that I made for myself. I was forever pushed to be strong for other people, constantly making sure that those that needed me didn’t have to see me struggling or breaking under pressure. I never had someone I felt I could truly cry in front of, ugly, drunken sobbing type of crying. At least not without feeling judged or treated like a flight risk. Having someone I can be unapologetically sad in front of and they don’t force me to be strong for their own comfort feels so alien to me, but the relief it fills me with is immense. I am no longer pretending, and I am no longer embarrassed to be fragile. I can break down in front of this person and they will never question my strength.  

While crying and vulnerability are certainly an obvious hurdle for plenty of people in relationships, for autistic people there is the added stress of getting used to unmasking in front of a partner. I didn’t get diagnosed for a very long time, which will tell you just how good I am at masking. As a Hispanic girl, a lot of my behaviours weren’t reprimanded too much. Being loud and aggressive is normal in Spanish culture, and oftentimes isn’t even interpreted as aggression the way it is in the UK. Conversely, I did terribly with the tactile nature of social interaction in Spain and among Hispanics. I didn’t want to kiss strangers or even family members on both cheeks, I didn’t like having my cheeks squeezed by old women, and I didn’t like people touching, grabbing, or shaking me. But I was unfortunately forced to do it for my own survival. I don’t know if the sentiments around disabilities have changed in Spain, but the way I remember it in the part I grew up in was that they weren’t talked about. I didn’t even know what disabilities were until I came to the UK.

In England, pretty much every aspect of my behaviour was reprimanded; my loudness, my ‘aggression’, my opinionated disposition, my lack of a filter, my inability to understand my classmates’ feelings… The list goes on and on. At a certain point, I learned to just hold in a lot of my personality until I got home. What I didn’t realise that I was actually holding in some instinctive behaviours in privacy as well, I would flinch and stop if I noticed myself stimming, my face would go red when I couldn’t verbalise properly, and I often found myself practicing facial expressions in the bathroom mirror because I was self-conscious that I wasn’t doing them ‘correctly’. I started my own personal journey so to speak about a year ago to completely unmask, alone. I still cringe when I catch my arms pulling up into ‘t-rex’ form or if I start verbally/physically stimming, but I’m slowly becoming less ashamed of myself.

Consequently, unmasking in front of someone else has been incredibly nerve-wracking. The ‘issue’ (I say issue but it’s quite the opposite) is that I’m so comfortable in my partner’s home that I unmask without even realising it. Something I’ve noticed however, is that half the time they don’t. When my fingers twist and rub against each other, I glance up nervously to see if I’m being watched. No one has even glanced at me. I stammer and mess up my sentence, or my mouth fails halfway through, and yet even then no one laughs or looks at me strangely, they just wait for me to rectify or finish the sentence. I wonder if part of me still thinks I’m under the ultra-critical gaze of my secondary school peers, expecting to be torn to shreds verbally over my quirks as I always was, but it never happens. I have to constantly remind myself that I am well liked here, and my quirks are something people are fond of now.

Overall, love as an autistic person is intense and difficult, but an experience that is so all-consuming it feels almost like you’re on some kind of drug. I’m a very logical, science-based person, but love is one of the few things that still feels remotely magical to me. It can draw me out of my cold, black and white world and into an illogical whirlpool of emotion. I rarely act on emotion alone, but love is something that certainly has the power to make me do so. It embarrasses me a lot, it makes me feel out my depth, it makes me behave in ways I normally wouldn’t, but I’ll endure those feelings any day for the reward. I still have a long way to go before I can properly express myself to a partner, but one day I’d really like to be able to show them all my projects inspired by them, and the true level of sappiness I’m capable of (lol).

[aboveallarescuer]

Dany and Jorah’s relationship

This is a list of all the passages from the books featuring key moments in Dany and Jorah's relationship.

Thanks to that show, a lot of people misunderstand Jorah's character and the nature of his relationship with Dany. 

In the books, he is a predator trying to groom a teenager who is three times younger than he is. In order to do so, he undermines her authority, tries to make her distrust other men and violates her boundaries several times (e.g. forcing a kiss on her, looking at her breasts, etc).

In the show, he's a Good Guy who we are meant to empathize with; as Benioff describes, "part of Jorah's tragedy is that he was in love with a woman who couldn't love him back".

That change is pretty disgusting, and look how it shaped the general audience's opinion:

I think Dany is ultimately selfish and unfeeling. I'm not sure she actually ever loved Jon at all, and her affection for Ser Jorah Mormont strikes me as more utilitarian than compassionate. Dany is concerned with herself and her dragons and little more. If she doesn't back Jon despite his superior claim to the Iron Throne, that's all the proof I need that she is rotten to the core. (x)

~

What would Jorah (Iain Glen) think of Dany's turn? Would he love her still? Would he have been able to do the deed? In a sense, I wish it had been him instead of Jon. Jorah has loved her for so much longer. But he died defending his queen, and perhaps he would have forgiven her even this atrocity. (x)

~

Her charm, beauty and overall skill in luring people to her cause, whether genuine or not, has always been about creating a facade, someone you wouldn't mind seeing win even if they lose the plot and go crazy. And everyone Dany's recruited along the way has been nothing more than a pawn.

Just look at how she sent away her lover, Daario Naharis, for fear he'd stunt her march on the throne, or exiled Jorah for being a spy. (x)

~

28 Reasons Jorah Mormont Was The Best Man In Westeros (x)

Thankfully, for all his faults, I think GRRM is framing the story the way it should be:

“Will Jorah ever get out of the friendzone?” (side-eyeing the person who asked this). GRRM: “I would not bet on it.” (x)

I really want to get a tattoo of this response, lol.

A Dance with Dragons

ADWD Daenerys X

Daenerys Targaryen was no stranger to the Dothraki sea, the great ocean of grass that stretched from the forest of Qohor to the Mother of Mountains and the Womb of the World. She had seen it first when she was still a girl, newly wed to Khal Drogo and on her way to Vaes Dothrak to be presented to the crones of the dosh khaleen. The sight of all that grass stretching out before her had taken her breath away. The sky was blue, the grass was green, and I was full of hope. Ser Jorah had been with her then, her gruff old bear. She’d had Irri and Jhiqui and Doreah to care for her, her sun-and-stars to hold her in the night, his child growing inside her. Rhaego. I was going to name him Rhaego, and the dosh khaleen said he would be the Stallion Who Mounts the World. Not since those half-remembered days in Braavos when she lived in the house with the red door had she been as happy.

~

Meereen would always be the Harpy’s city, and Daenerys could not be a harpy.

Never, said the grass, in the gruff tones of Jorah Mormont. You were warned, Your Grace. Let this city be, I said. Your war is in Westeros, I told you.

The voice was no more than a whisper, yet somehow Dany felt that he was walking just behind her. My bear, she thought, my old sweet bear, who loved me and betrayed me. She had missed him so. She wanted to see his ugly face, to wrap her arms around him and press herself against his chest, but she knew that if she turned around Ser Jorah would be gone. “I am dreaming,” she said. “A waking dream, a walking dream. I am alone and lost.”

Lost, because you lingered, in a place that you were never meant to be, murmured Ser Jorah, as softly as the wind. Alone, because you sent me from your side.

“You betrayed me. You informed on me, for gold.”

For home. Home was all I ever wanted. “And me. You wanted me.” Dany had seen it in his eyes.

I did, the grass whispered, sadly. “You kissed me. I never said you could, but you did. You sold me to my enemies, but you meant it when you kissed me.”

I gave you good counsel. Save your spears and swords for the Seven Kingdoms, I told you. Leave Meereen to the Meereenese and go west, I said. You would not listen.

“I had to take Meereen or see my children starve along the march.” Dany could still see the trail of corpses she had left behind her crossing the Red Waste. It was not a sight she wished to see again. “I had to take Meereen to feed my people.”

You took Meereen, he told her, yet still you lingered. “To be a queen.”

You are a queen, her bear said. In Westeros. “It is such a long way,” she complained. “I was tired, Jorah. I was weary of war. I wanted to rest, to laugh, to plant trees and see them grow. I am only a young girl.”

No. You are the blood of the dragon. The whispering was growing fainter, as if Ser Jorah were falling farther behind. Dragons plant no trees. Remember that. Remember who you are, what you were made to be. Remember your words.

“Fire and Blood,” Daenerys told the swaying grass.

A stone turned under her foot. She stumbled to one knee and cried out in pain, hoping against hope that her bear would gather her up and help her to her feet. When she turned her head to look for him, all she saw was trickling brown water ... and the grass, still moving slightly.

 ADWD Daenerys IX

Dany had once eaten a stallion’s heart to give strength to her unborn son … but that had not saved Rhaego when the maegi murdered him in her womb. Three treasons shall you know. She was the first, Jorah was the second, Brown Ben Plumm the third. Was she done with betrayals?

 ADWD Daenerys VI

Three treasons will you know. Once for gold and once for blood and once for love. Was Plumm the third treason, or the second? And what did that make Ser Jorah, her gruff old bear? Would she never have a friend that she could trust? What good are prophecies if you cannot make sense of them? If I marry Hizdahr before the sun comes up, will all these armies melt away like morning dew and let me rule in peace?

 ADWD Daenerys V

Afterward, Ser Barristan told her that her brother Rhaegar would have been proud of her. Dany remembered the words Ser Jorah had spoken at Astapor: Rhaegar fought valiantly, Rhaegar fought nobly, Rhaegar fought honorably. And Rhaegar died.

~

Daario should be here, and my bloodriders, she thought. If there is to be a battle, the blood of my blood should be with me. She missed Ser Jorah Mormont too. He lied to me, informed on me, but he loved me too, and he always gave good counsel.

 ADWD Daenerys III

“Barristan the Old, did you say? Your bear knight was younger, and devoted to you.”

“I do not wish to speak of Jorah Mormont.”

“To be sure. The man was coarse and hairy.”

~

“You heard Xaro make his offer?”

“I did, Your Grace.” The old knight took pains not to look at her bare breast as he spoke to her.

Ser Jorah would not turn his eyes away. He loved me as a woman, where Ser Barristan loves me only as his queen. Mormont had been an informer, reporting to her enemies in Westeros, yet he had given her good counsel too.

 ADWD Daenerys I

Dragons are fire made flesh. She had read that in one of the books Ser Jorah had given her as a wedding gift.

~

The Undying of Qarth had told her she would be thrice betrayed. Mirri Maz Duur had been the first, Ser Jorah the second. Would Reznak be the third? The Shavepate? Daario? Or will it be someone I would never suspect, Ser Barristan or Grey Worm or Missandei?

 A Storm of Swords

ASOS Daenerys VI

The way before her was fraught with hardship, bloodshed, and danger. Ser Jorah had warned her of that. He’d warned her of so many things ... he’d ... No, I will not think of Jorah Mormont. Let him keep a little longer.

~

Dany shifted uncomfortably on the ebony bench. She dreaded what must come next, yet she knew she had put it off too long already. Yunkai and Astapor, threats of war, marriage proposals, the march west looming over all ... I need my knights. I need their swords, and I need their counsel. Yet the thought of seeing Jorah Mormont again made her feel as if she’d swallowed a spoonful of flies; angry, agitated, sick. She could almost feel them buzzing round her belly. I am the blood of the dragon. I must be strong. I must have fire in my eyes when I face them, not tears.

~

Ser Jorah cleared his throat. “Khaleesi ...”

She had missed his voice so much, but she had to be stern. “Be quiet. I will tell you when to speak.”

~

“I will admit you helped win me this city ...”

Ser Jorah’s mouth tightened. “We won you this city. We sewer rats.”

“Be quiet,” she said again ... though there was truth to what he said.

[...]“You helped win this city,” she repeated stubbornly. “And you have served me well in the past. Ser Barristan saved me from the Titan’s Bastard, and from the Sorrowful Man in Qarth. Ser Jorah saved me from the poisoner in Vaes Dothrak, and again from Drogo’s bloodriders after my sun-and-stars had died.” So many people wanted her dead, sometimes she lost count. “And yet you lied, deceived me, betrayed me.”

[...] The other will be harder. When Ser Barristan was done, she turned to Jorah Mormont. “And now you, ser. Tell me true.”

The big man’s neck was red; whether from anger or shame she did not know. “I have tried to tell you true, half a hundred times. I told you Arstan was more than he seemed. I warned you that Xaro and Pyat Pree were not to be trusted. I warned you—”

“You warned me against everyone except yourself.” His insolence angered her. He should be humbler. He should beg for my forgiveness. “Trust no one but Jorah Mormont, you said ... and all the time you were the Spider’s creature!”

“I am no man’s creature. I took the eunuch’s gold, yes. I learned some ciphers and wrote some letters, but that was all—”

“All? You spied on me and sold me to my enemies!”

“For a time.” He said it grudgingly. “I stopped.”

“When? When did you stop?”


“I made one report from Qarth, but—”

“From Qarth?” Dany had been hoping it had ended much earlier. “What did you write from Qarth? That you were my man now, that you wanted no more of their schemes?” Ser Jorah could not meet her eyes. “When Khal Drogo died, you asked me to go with you to Yi Ti and the Jade Sea. Was that your wish or Robert’s?”

“That was to protect you,” he insisted. “To keep you away from them. I knew what snakes they were ...”

“Snakes? And what are you, ser?” Something unspeakable occurred to her. “You told them I was carrying Drogo’s child ...”

“Khaleesi ...”

“Do not think to deny it, ser,” Ser Barristan said sharply. “I was there when the eunuch told the council, and Robert decreed that Her Grace and her child must die. You were the source, ser. There was even talk that you might do the deed, for a pardon.”

“A lie.” Ser Jorah’s face darkened. “I would never ... Daenerys, it was me who stopped you from drinking the wine.”

“Yes. And how was it you knew the wine was poisoned?”

“I ... I but suspected ... the caravan brought a letter from Varys, he warned me there would be attempts. He wanted you watched, yes, but not harmed.” He went to his knees. “If I had not told them someone else would have. You know that.”

“I know you betrayed me.” She touched her belly, where her son Rhaego had perished. “I know a poisoner tried to kill my son, because of you. That’s what I know.”


“No ... no.” He shook his head. “I never meant ... forgive me. You have to forgive me.”

“Have to?” It was too late. He should have begun by begging forgiveness. She could not pardon him as she’d intended. She had dragged the wineseller behind her horse until there was nothing left of him. Didn’t the man who brought him deserve the same? This is Jorah, my fierce bear, the right arm that never failed me. I would be dead without him, but ... “I can’t forgive you,” she said. “I can’t.”

“You forgave the old man ...”

“He lied to me about his name. You sold my secrets to the men who killed my father and stole my brother’s throne.”

“I protected you. I fought for you. Killed for you.”

Kissed me, she thought, betrayed me.

“I went down into the sewers like a rat. For you.”

It might have been kinder if you’d died there. Dany said nothing. There was nothing to say.

“Daenerys,” he said, “I have loved you.”

And there it was. Three treasons will you know. Once for blood and once for gold and once for love. “The gods do nothing without a purpose, they say. You did not die in battle, so it must be they still have some use for you. But I don’t. I will not have you near me. You are banished, ser. Go back to your masters in King’s Landing and collect your pardon, if you can. Or to Astapor. No doubt the butcher king needs knights.”

“No.” He reached for her. “Daenerys, please, hear me ...”

She slapped his hand away. “Do not ever presume to touch me again, or to speak my name. You have until dawn to collect your things and leave this city. If you’re found in Meereen past break of day, I will have Strong Belwas twist your head off. I will. Believe that.” She turned her back on him, her skirts swirling. I cannot bear to see his face. “Remove this liar from my sight,” she commanded. I must not weep. I must not. If I weep I will forgive him. Strong Belwas seized Ser Jorah by the arm and dragged him out. When Dany glanced back, the knight was walking as if drunk, stumbling and slow. She looked away until she heard the doors open and close. Then she sank back onto the ebony bench. He’s gone, then. My father and my mother, my brothers, Ser Willem Darry, Drogo who was my sun-and-stars, his son who died inside me, and now Ser Jorah ...

“The queen has a good heart,” Daario purred through his deep purple whiskers, “but that one is more dangerous than all the Oznaks and Meros rolled up in one.” His strong hands caressed the hilts of his matched blades, those wanton golden women. “You need not even say the word, my radiance. Only give the tiniest nod, and your Daario shall fetch you back his ugly head.”

“Leave him be. The scales are balanced now. Let him go home.” Dany pictured Jorah moving amongst old gnarled oaks and tall pines, past flowering thornbushes, grey stones bearded with moss, and little creeks running icy down steep hillsides. She saw him entering a hall built of huge logs, where dogs slept by the hearth and the smell of meat and mead hung thick in the smoky air.

~

She found herself reading the same passage half a dozen times. Ser Jorah gave me this book as a bride’s gift, the day I wed Khal Drogo. But Daario is right, I shouldn’t have banished him. I should have kept him, or I should have killed him. She played at being a queen, yet sometimes she still felt like a scared little girl. Viserys always said what a dolt I was. Was he truly mad? She closed the book. She could still recall Ser Jorah, if she wished. Or send Daario to kill him.

~

Distant torches glimmered red and yellow where her sentries walked their rounds, and here and there she saw the faint glow of lanterns bobbing down an alley. Perhaps one was Ser Jorah, leading his horse slowly toward the gate. Farewell, old bear. Farewell, betrayer.

 ASOS Daenerys V

The eunuch wrenched the blade loose and parted the hero’s head from his body with three savage blows to the neck. He held it up high for the Meereenese to see, then flung it toward the city gates and let it bounce and roll across the sand.

“So much for the hero of Meereen,” said Daario, laughing.

“A victory without meaning,” Ser Jorah cautioned. “We will not win Meereen by killing its defenders one at a time.”

“No,” Dany agreed, “but I’m pleased we killed this one.”

~

“...Already we’ve had reports of sickness in the camps, fever and brownleg and three cases of the bloody flux. There will be more if we remain. The slaves are weak from the march.”

“Freedmen,” Dany corrected. “They are slaves no longer.”

~

“Then what do you advise, Ser Jorah?”

“You will not like it.”


“I would hear it all the same.”

“As you wish. I say, let this city be. You cannot free every slave in the world, Khaleesi. Your war is in Westeros.”

“I have not forgotten Westeros.” Dany dreamt of it some nights, this fabled land that she had never seen. “If I let Meereen’s old brick walls defeat me so easily, though, how will I ever take the great stone castles of Westeros?”

“As Aegon did,” Ser Jorah said, “with fire. By the time we reach the Seven Kingdoms, your dragons will be grown. And we will have siege towers and trebuchets as well, all the things we lack here ... but the way across the Lands of the Long Summer is long and grueling, and there are dangers we cannot know. You stopped at Astapor to buy an army, not to start a war. Save your spears and swords for the Seven Kingdoms, my queen. Leave Meereen to the Meereenese and march west for Pentos.”

“Defeated?” said Dany, bristling.

~

“Ser Jorah, you say we have no food left. If I march west, how can I feed my freedmen?”

“You can’t. I am sorry, Khaleesi. They must feed themselves or starve. Many and more will die along the march, yes. That will be hard, but there is no way to save them. We need to put this scorched earth well behind us.”

~

And Daario Naharis made her laugh, which Ser Jorah never did.

Dany tried to imagine what it would be like if she allowed Daario to kiss her, the way Jorah had kissed her on the ship. [...] Could I love Daario? What would it mean, if I took him into my bed? Would that make him one of the heads of the dragon? Ser Jorah would be angry, she knew, but he was the one who’d said she had to take two husbands. Perhaps I should marry them both and be done with it.

~

“I had a look at the river wall,” Ser Jorah started. “It’s a few feet higher than the others, and just as strong. And the Meereenese have a dozen fire hulks tied up beneath the ramparts—”

She cut him off. “You might have warned me that the Titan’s Bastard had escaped.”

He frowned. “I saw no need to frighten you, Your Grace. I have offered a reward for his head—”

“Pay it to Whitebeard. Mero has been with us all the way from Yunkai. He shaved his beard off and lost himself amongst the freedmen, waiting for a chance for vengeance. Arstan killed him.”

Ser Jorah gave the old man a long look. “A squire with a stick slew Mero of Braavos, is that the way of it?”

“A stick,” Dany confirmed, “but no longer a squire. Ser Jorah, it’s my wish that Arstan be knighted.”

“No.”


The loud refusal was surprise enough. Stranger still, it came from both men at once.

Ser Jorah drew his sword. “The Titan’s Bastard was a nasty piece of work. And good at killing. Who are you, old man?”

“A better knight than you, ser,” Arstan said coldly.

Knight? Dany was confused. “You said you were a squire.”

 [...] “I have told you no lies, my queen. Yet there are truths I have withheld, and for that and all my other sins I can only beg your forgiveness.”

“What truths have you withheld?” Dany did not like this. “You will tell me. Now.”

He bowed his head. “At Qarth, when you asked my name, I said I was called Arstan. That much was true. Many men had called me by that name while Belwas and I were making our way east to find you. But it is not my true name.”

She was more confused than angry. He has played me false, just as Jorah warned me, yet he saved my life just now.

Ser Jorah flushed red. “Mero shaved his beard, but you grew one, didn’t you? No wonder you looked so bloody familiar ...”

“You know him?” Dany asked the exile knight, lost.

“I saw him perhaps a dozen times ... from afar most often, standing with his brothers or riding in some tourney. But every man in the Seven Kingdoms knew Barristan the Bold.” He laid the point of his sword against the old man’s neck. “Khaleesi, before you kneels Ser Barristan Selmy, Lord Commander of the Kingsguard, who betrayed your House to serve the Usurper Robert Baratheon.”

The old knight did not so much as blink. “The crow calls the raven black, and you speak of betrayal.”

“Why are you here?” Dany demanded of him. “If Robert sent you to kill me, why did you save my life?” He served the Usurper. He betrayed Rhaegar’s memory, and abandoned Viserys to live and die in exile. Yet if he wanted me dead, he need only have stood
aside ... “I want the whole truth now, on your honor as a knight. Are you the Usurper’s man, or mine?”

“Yours, if you will have me.” Ser Barristan had tears in his eyes. “I took Robert’s pardon, aye. I served him in Kingsguard and council. Served with the Kingslayer and others near as bad, who soiled the white cloak I wore. Nothing will excuse that. I might be serving in King’s Landing still if the vile boy upon the Iron Throne had not cast me aside, it shames me to admit. But when he took the cloak that the White Bull had draped about my shoulders, and sent men to kill me that selfsame day, it was as though he’d ripped a caul off my eyes. That was when I knew I must find my true king, and die in his service—”

“I can grant that wish,” Ser Jorah said darkly.

“Quiet,” said Dany. “I’ll hear him out.”

“It may be that I must die a traitor’s death,” Ser Barristan said. “If so, I should not die alone. Before I took Robert’s pardon I fought against him on the Trident. You were on the other side of that battle, Mormont, were you not?” He did not wait for an answer. “Your Grace, I am sorry I misled you. It was the only way to keep the Lannisters from learning that I had joined you. You are watched, as your brother was. Lord Varys reported every move Viserys made, for years. Whilst I sat on the small council, I heard a hundred such reports. And since the day you wed Khal Drogo, there has been an informer by your side selling your secrets, trading whispers to the Spider for gold and promises.”

He cannot mean ... “You are mistaken.” Dany looked at Jorah Mormont. “Tell him he’s mistaken. There’s no informer. Ser Jorah, tell him. We crossed the Dothraki sea together, and the red waste ...” Her heart fluttered like a bird in a trap. “Tell him, Jorah. Tell him how he got it wrong.”

“The Others take you, Selmy.” Ser Jorah flung his longsword to the carpet. “Khaleesi, it was only at the start, before I came to know you ... before I came to love ...”

“Do not say that word!” She backed away from him. “How could you? What did the Usurper promise you? Gold, was it gold?” The Undying had said she would be betrayed twice more, once for gold and once for love. “Tell me what you were promised?”

“Varys said ... I might go home.” He bowed his head.

I was going to take you home! Her dragons sensed her fury. Viserion roared, and smoke rose grey from his snout. Drogon beat the air with black wings, and Rhaegal twisted his head back and belched flame. I should say the word and burn the two of them. Was there no one she could trust, no one to keep her safe? “Are all the knights of Westeros so false as you two? Get out, before my dragons roast you both. What does roast liar smell like? As foul as Brown Ben’s sewers? Go!”

Ser Barristan rose stiff and slow. For the first time, he looked his age. “Where shall we go, Your Grace?”

“To hell, to serve King Robert.” Dany felt hot tears on her cheeks. Drogon screamed, lashing his tail back and forth. “The Others can have you both.” Go, go away forever, both of you, the next time I see your faces I’ll have your traitors’ heads off. She could not say the words, though. They betrayed me. But they saved me. But they lied. “You go ...” My bear, my fierce strong bear, what will I do without him? And the old man, my brother’s friend. “You go ... go ...” Where?

And then she knew.

 ASOS Daenerys IV

Yet Dany could not bring herself to abandon them as Ser Jorah and her bloodriders urged.

~

“I will like the taste of your tongue, I think.”

She could sense Ser Jorah’s anger. My black bear does not like this talk of kissing.

~

“To be sure, I am only a young girl and know little of war. What do you think, my lords?”

“I think you are Rhaegar Targaryen’s sister,” Ser Jorah said with a rueful half smile.

“Aye,” said Arstan Whitebeard, “and a queen as well.”

~

“My sword is yours. My life is yours. My love is yours. My blood, my body, my songs, you own them all. I live and die at your command, fair queen.”

“Then live,” Dany said, “and fight for me tonight.”

“That would not be wise, my queen.” Ser Jorah gave Daario a cold, hard stare. “Keep this one here under guard until the battle’s fought and won.”

She considered a moment, then shook her head. “If he can give us the Stormcrows, surprise is certain.”

“And if he betrays you, surprise is lost.”

~

Ser Jorah Mormont lingered. “Your Grace,” he said, too bluntly, “that was a mistake. We know nothing of this man—”

“We know that he is a great fighter.”

“A great talker, you mean.”

“He brings us the Stormcrows.” And he has blue eyes.

“Five hundred sellswords of uncertain loyalty.”

“All loyalties are uncertain in such times as these,” Dany reminded him. And I shall be betrayed twice more, once for gold and once for love.

“Daenerys, I am thrice your age,” Ser Jorah said. “I have seen how false men are. Very few are worthy of trust, and Daario Naharis is not one of them. Even his beard wears false colors.”

That angered her. “Whilst you have an honest beard, is that what you are telling me? You are the only man I should ever trust?”

He stiffened. “I did not say that.”

“You say it every day. Pyat Pree’s a liar, Xaro’s a schemer, Belwas a braggart, Arstan an assassin ... do you think I’m still some virgin girl, that I cannot hear the words behind the words?”

“Your Grace—”

She bulled over him. “You have been a better friend to me than any I have known, a better brother than Viserys ever was. You are the first of my Queensguard, the commander of my army, my most valued counselor, my good right hand. I honor and respect and cherish you—but I do not desire you, Jorah Mormont, and I am weary of your trying to push every other man in the world away from me, so I must needs rely on you and you alone. It will not serve, and it will not make me love you any better.”

Mormont had flushed red when she first began, but by the time Dany was done his face was pale again. He stood still as stone. “If my queen commands,” he said, curt and cold.

Dany was warm enough for both of them. “She does,” she said. “She commands. Now go see to your Unsullied, ser. You have a battle to fight and win.”

When he was gone, Dany threw herself down on her pillows beside her dragons. She had not meant to be so sharp with Ser Jorah, but his endless suspicion had finally woken her dragon.

He will forgive me, she told herself. I am his liege. Dany found herself wondering whether he was right about Daario. She felt very lonely all of a sudden. Mirri Maz Duur had promised that she would never bear a living child. House Targaryen will end with me. That made her sad. “You must be my children,” she told the dragons, “my three fierce children. Arstan says dragons live longer than men, so you will go on after I am dead.”

 ASOS Daenerys III

Afterward she called her bloodriders to her cabin, with Ser Jorah. They were the only ones she truly trusted.

[...] Ser Jorah soon joined her by the rail. He is never far, Dany thought. He knows my moods too well.

“Khaleesi. You ought to be asleep. Tomorrow will be hot and hard, I promise you. You’ll need your strength.”


“Do you remember Eroeh?” she asked him. “The Lhazareen girl?”

“They were raping her, but I stopped them and took her under my protection. Only when my sun-and-stars was dead Mago took her back, used her again, and killed her. Aggo said it was her fate.”

“I remember,” Ser Jorah said.

“I was alone for a long time, Jorah. All alone but for my brother. I was such a small scared thing. Viserys should have protected me, but instead he hurt me and scared me worse. He shouldn’t have done that. He wasn’t just my brother, he was my king. Why do the gods make kings and queens, if not to protect the ones who can’t protect themselves?”

“Some kings make themselves. Robert did.”


“He was no true king,” Dany said scornfully. “He did no justice. Justice ... that’s what kings are for.”


Ser Jorah had no answer. He only smiled, and touched her hair, so lightly. It was enough.

 ASOS Daenerys II

“They might be adequate to my needs,” Dany answered. It had been Ser Jorah’s suggestion that she speak only Dothraki and the Common Tongue while in Astapor. My bear is more clever than he looks.

~

Ser Jorah Mormont she had left aboard Balerion to guard her people and her dragons.

~

She made herself smile. “I have my own bear on Balerion,” she told the translator, “and he may well eat me if I do not return to him.”

“See,” said Kraznys when her words were translated. “It is not the woman who decides, it is this man she runs to. As ever!”

~

“Then leave this place before your heart turns to brick as well. Sail this very night, on the evening tide.”

Would that I could, thought Dany. “When I leave Astapor it must be with an army, Ser Jorah says.”

“Ser Jorah was a slaver himself, Your Grace,” the old man reminded her. “There are sellswords in Pentos and Myr and Tyrosh you can hire. A man who kills for coin has no honor, but at least they are no slaves. Find your army there, I beg you.”

~

He has a good face, and great strength to him, Dany thought. She could not understand why Ser Jorah mistrusted the old man so. Could he be jealous that I have found another man to talk to? Unbidden, her thoughts went back to the night on Balerion when the exile knight had kissed her. He should never have done that. He is thrice my age, and of too low a birth for me, and I never gave him leave. No true knight would ever kiss a queen without her leave. She had taken care never to be alone with Ser Jorah after that, keeping her handmaids with her aboard ship, and sometimes her bloodriders. He wants to kiss me again, I see it in his eyes.

What Dany wanted she could not begin to say, but Jorah’s kiss had woken something in her, something that been sleeping since Khal Drogo died. Lying abed in her narrow bunk, she found herself wondering how it would be to have a man squeezed in beside her in place of her handmaid, and the thought was more exciting than it should have been. Sometimes she would close her eyes and dream of him, but it was never Jorah Mormont she dreamed of; her lover was always younger and more comely, though his face remained a shifting shadow.

~

Ser Jorah Mormont stood waiting for her. “Your Grace,” he said, bowing his head. “The slavers have come and gone. Three of them, with a dozen scribes and as many slaves to lift and fetch. They crawled over every foot of our holds and made note of all we had.” He walked her aft. “How many men do they have for sale?”

“None.” Was it Mormont she was angry with, or this city with its sullen heat, its stinks and sweats and crumbling bricks? “They sell eunuchs, not men. Eunuchs made of brick, like the rest of Astapor. Shall I buy eight thousand brick eunuchs with dead eyes that never move, who kill suckling babes for the sake of a spiked hat and strangle their own dogs? They don’t even have names. So don’t call them men, ser.”

“Khaleesi,” he said, taken aback by her fury, “the Unsullied are chosen as boys, and trained—”

“I have heard all I care to of their training.” Dany could feel tears welling in her eyes, sudden and unwanted. Her hand flashed up and cracked Ser Jorah hard across the face. It was either that, or cry.

Mormont touched the cheek she’d slapped. “If I have displeased my queen—”

“You have. You’ve displeased me greatly, ser. If you were my true knight, you would never have brought me to this vile sty.” If you were my true knight, you would never have kissed me, or looked at my breasts the way you did, or ...

“As Your Grace commands. I shall tell Captain Groleo to make ready to sail on the evening tide, for some sty less vile.”

“No,” said Dany. Groleo watched them from the forecastle, and his crew was watching too. Whitebeard, her bloodriders, Jhiqui, every one had stopped what they were doing at the sound of the slap. “I want to sail now, not on the tide, I want to sail far and fast and never look back. But I can’t, can I? There are eight thousand brick eunuchs for sale, and I must find some way to buy them.” And with that she left him, and went below.

~

There was a soft step behind her. “Khaleesi.” His voice. “Might I speak frankly?”

Dany did not turn. She could not bear to look at him just now. If she did, she might well slap him again. Or cry. Or kiss him. And never know which was right and which was wrong and which was madness. “Say what you will, ser.”

“When Aegon the Dragon stepped ashore in Westeros, the kings of Vale and Rock and Reach did not rush to hand him their crowns. If you mean to sit his Iron Throne, you must win it as he did, with steel and dragonfire. And that will mean blood on your hands before the thing is done.”

Blood and fire, thought Dany. The words of House Targaryen. She had known them all her life. “The blood of my enemies I will shed gladly. The blood of innocents is another matter. Eight thousand Unsullied they would offer me. Eight thousand dead babes. Eight thousand strangled dogs.”

“Your Grace,” said Jorah Mormont, “I saw King’s Landing after the Sack. Babes were butchered that day as well, and old men, and children at play. More women were raped than you can count. There is a savage beast in every man, and when you hand that man a sword or spear and send him forth to war, the beast stirs. The scent of blood is all it takes to wake him. Yet I have never heard of these Unsullied raping, nor putting a city to the sword, nor even plundering, save at the express command of those who lead them. Brick they may be, as you say, but if you buy them henceforth the only dogs they’ll kill are those you want dead. And you do have some dogs you want dead, as I recall.”

The Usurper’s dogs. “Yes.” Dany gazed off at the soft colored lights and let the cool salt breeze caress her. “You speak of sacking cities. Answer me this, ser—why have the Dothraki never sacked this city?” She pointed. “Look at the walls. You can see where they’ve begun to crumble. There, and there. Do you see any guards on those towers? I don’t. Are they hiding, ser? I saw these sons of the harpy today, all their proud highborn warriors. They dressed in linen skirts, and the fiercest thing about them was their hair. Even a modest khalasar could crack this Astapor like a nut and spill out the rotted meat inside. So tell me, why is that ugly harpy not sitting beside the godsway in Vaes Dothrak among the other stolen gods?”

“You have a dragon’s eye, Khaleesi, that’s plain to see.”

“I wanted an answer, not a compliment.”

“There are two reasons. Astapor’s brave defenders are so much chaff, it’s true. Old names and fat purses who dress up as Ghiscari scourges to pretend they still rule a vast empire. Every one is a high officer. On feastdays they fight mock wars in the pits to demonstrate what brilliant commanders they are, but it’s the eunuchs who do the dying. All the same, any enemy wanting to sack Astapor would have to know that they’d be facing Unsullied. The slavers would turn out the whole garrison in the city’s defense. The Dothraki have not ridden against Unsullied since they left their braids at the gates of Qohor.”

“And the second reason?” Dany asked.

“Who would attack Astapor?” Ser Jorah asked. “Meereen and Yunkai are rivals but not enemies, the Doom destroyed Valyria, the folk of the eastern hinterlands are all Ghiscari, and beyond the hills lies Lhazar. The Lamb Men, as your Dothraki call them, a notably unwarlike people.”

“Yes,” she agreed, “but north of the slave cities is the Dothraki sea, and two dozen mighty khals who like nothing more than sacking cities and carrying off their people into slavery.”

“Carrying them off where? What good are slaves once you’ve killed the slavers? Valyria is no more, Qarth lies beyond the red waste, and the Nine Free Cities are thousands of leagues to the west. And you may be sure the sons of the harpy give lavishly to every passing khal, just as the magisters do in Pentos and Norvos and Myr. They know that if they feast the horselords and give them gifts, they will soon ride on. It’s cheaper than fighting, and a deal more certain.”

Cheaper than fighting, Dany thought. Yes, it might be. If only it could be that easy for her. How pleasant it would be to sail to King’s Landing with her dragons, and pay the boy Joffrey a chest of gold to make him go away.

“Khaleesi?” Ser Jorah prompted, when she had been silent for a long time. He touched her elbow lightly.

Dany shrugged him off. “Viserys would have bought as many Unsullied as he had the coin for. But you once said I was like Rhaegar ...”

“I remember, Daenerys.”

“Your Grace,” she corrected. “Prince Rhaegar led free men into battle, not slaves. Whitebeard said he dubbed his squires himself, and made many other knights as well.”

“There was no higher honor than to receive your knighthood from the Prince of Dragonstone.”

“Tell me, then—when he touched a man on the shoulder with his sword, what did he say? ‘Go forth and kill the weak’? Or ‘Go forth and defend them’? At the Trident, those brave men Viserys spoke of who died beneath our dragon banners—did they give their lives because they believed in Rhaegar’s cause, or because they had been bought and paid for?” Dany turned to Mormont, crossed her arms, and waited for an answer.

“My queen,” the big man said slowly, “all you say is true. But Rhaegar lost on the Trident. He lost the battle, he lost the war, he lost the kingdom, and he lost his life. His blood swirled downriver with the rubies from his breastplate, and Robert the Usurper rode over his corpse to steal the Iron Throne. Rhaegar fought valiantly, Rhaegar fought nobly, Rhaegar fought honorably. And Rhaegar died.”

 ASOS Daenerys I

Yet even so, it was noted that none of the pit dragons ever reached the size of their ancestors. The maesters say it was because of the walls around them, and the great dome above their heads.”

“If walls could keep us small, peasants would all be tiny and kings as large as giants,” said Ser Jorah. “I’ve seen huge men born in hovels, and dwarfs who dwelt in castles.”

“Men are men,” Whitebeard replied. “Dragons are dragons.”

Ser Jorah snorted his disdain. “How profound.” The exile knight had no love for the old man, he’d made that plain from the first.

~

“A warrior without peer ... those are fine words, Your Grace, but words win no battles.”

“Swords win battles,” Ser Jorah said bluntly. “And Prince Rhaegar knew how to use one.”


~

“...A change in the wind may bring the gift of victory.” He glanced at Ser Jorah. “Or a lady’s favor knotted round an arm.”

Mormont’s face darkened. “Be careful what you say, old man.”

Arstan had seen Ser Jorah fight at Lannisport, Dany knew, in the tourney Mormont had won with a lady’s favor knotted round his arm. He had won the lady too; Lynesse of House Hightower, his second wife, highborn and beautiful ... but she had ruined him, and abandoned him, and the memory of her was bitter to him now. “Be gentle, my knight.” She put a hand on Jorah’s arm. “Arstan had no wish to give offense, I’m certain.”

~

Ser Jorah watched with a frown on his blunt honest face. Mormont was big and burly, strong of jaw and thick of shoulder. Not a handsome man by any means, but as true a friend as Dany had ever known. “You would be wise to take that old man’s words well salted,” he told her when Whitebeard was out of earshot.

~

“Sit, good ser, and tell me what is troubling you.”

“Three things.” Ser Jorah sat. “Strong Belwas. This Arstan Whitebeard. And Illyrio Mopatis, who sent them.”

Again? Dany pulled the coverlet higher and tugged one end over her shoulder. “And why is that?”

“The warlocks in Qarth told you that you would be betrayed three times,” the exile knight reminded her, as Viserion and Rhaegal began to snap and claw at each other.

“Once for blood and once for gold and once for love.” Dany was not like to forget. “Mirri Maz Duur was the first.”

“Which means two traitors yet remain ... and now these two appear. I find that troubling, yes. Never forget, Robert offered a lordship to the man who slays you.”

Dany leaned forward and yanked Viserion’s tail, to pull him off his green brother. Her blanket fell away from her chest as she moved. She grabbed it hastily and covered herself again. “The Usurper is dead,” she said.

“But his son rules in his place.” Ser Jorah lifted his gaze, and his dark eyes met her own. “A dutiful son pays his father’s debts. Even blood debts.”

“This boy Joffrey might want me dead ... if he recalls that I’m alive. What has that to do with Belwas and Arstan Whitebeard? The old man does not even wear a sword. You’ve seen that.”

“Aye. And I have seen how deftly he handles that staff of his. Recall how he killed that manticore in Qarth? It might as easily have been your throat he crushed.”

“Might have been, but was not,” she pointed out. “It was a stinging manticore meant to slay me. He saved my life.”

“Khaleesi, has it occurred to you that Whitebeard and Belwas might have been in league with the assassin? It might all have been a ploy to win your trust.”

Her sudden laughter made Drogon hiss, and sent Viserion flapping to his perch above the porthole. “The ploy worked well.”

The exile knight did not return her smile. “These are Illyrio’s ships, Illyrio’s captains, Illyrio’s sailors ... and Strong Belwas and Arstan are his men as well, not yours.”

“Magister Illyrio has protected me in the past. Strong Belwas says that he wept when he heard my brother was dead.”

“Yes,” said Mormont, “but did he weep for Viserys, or for the plans he had made with him?”

“His plans need not change. Magister Illyrio is a friend to House Targaryen, and wealthy ...”

“He was not born wealthy. In the world as I have seen it, no man grows rich by kindness. The warlocks said the second treason would be for gold. What does Illyrio Mopatis love more than gold?”

“His skin.” Across the cabin Drogon stirred restlessly, steam rising from his snout. “Mirri Maz Duur betrayed me. I burned her for it.”

“Mirri Maz Duur was in your power. In Pentos, you shall be in Illyrio’s power. It is not the same. I know the magister as well as you. He is a devious man, and clever—”

“I need clever men about me if I am to win the Iron Throne.”

Ser Jorah snorted. “That wineseller who tried to poison you was a clever man as well. Clever men hatch ambitious schemes.”

Dany drew her legs up beneath the blanket. “You will protect me. You, and my bloodriders.”

“Four men? Khaleesi, you believe you know Illyrio Mopatis, very well. Yet you insist on surrounding yourself with men you do not know, like this puffed-up eunuch and the world’s oldest squire. Take a lesson from Pyat Pree and Xaro Xhoan Daxos.”

He means well, Dany reminded herself. He does all he does for love. “It seems to me that a queen who trusts no one is as foolish as a queen who trusts everyone. Every man I take into my service is a risk, I understand that, but how am I to win the Seven Kingdoms without such risks? Am I to conquer Westeros with one exile knight and three Dothraki bloodriders?”

His jaw set stubbornly. “Your path is dangerous, I will not deny that. But if you blindly trust in every liar and schemer who crosses it, you will end as your brothers did.”

His obstinacy made her angry. He treats me like some child. “Strong Belwas could not scheme his way to breakfast. And what lies has Arstan Whitebeard told me?”

“He is not what he pretends to be. He speaks to you more boldly than any squire would dare.”

“He spoke frankly at my command. He knew my brother.”

“A great many men knew your brother. Your Grace, in Westeros the Lord Commander of the Kingsguard sits on the small council, and serves the king with his wits as well as his steel. If I am the first of your Queensguard, I pray you, hear me out. I have a plan to put to you.”

“What plan? Tell me.”


“Illyrio Mopatis wants you back in Pentos, under his roof. Very well, go to him ... but in your own time, and not alone. Let us see how loyal and obedient these new subjects of yours truly are. Command Groleo to change course for Slaver’s Bay.”

Dany was not certain she liked the sound of that at all. Everything she’d ever heard of the flesh marts in the great slave cities of Yunkai, Meereen, and Astapor was dire and frightening. “What is there for me in Slaver’s Bay?”

“An army,” said Ser Jorah. “If Strong Belwas is so much to your liking you can buy hundreds more like him out of the fighting pits of Meereen ... but it is Astapor I’d set my sails for. In Astapor you can buy Unsullied.”

“The slaves in the spiked bronze hats?” Dany had seen Unsullied guards in the Free Cities, posted at the gates of magisters, archons, and dynasts. “Why should I want Unsullied? They don’t even ride horses, and most of them are fat.”

“The Unsullied you may have seen in Pentos and Myr were household guards. That’s soft service, and eunuchs tend to plumpness in any case. Food is the only vice allowed them. To judge all Unsullied by a few old household slaves is like judging all squires by Arstan Whitebeard, Your Grace. Do you know the tale of the Three Thousand of Qohor?”

“No.” The coverlet slipped off Dany’s shoulder, and she tugged it back into place.

“It was four hundred years ago or more, when the Dothraki first rode out of the east, sacking and burning every town and city in their path. The khal who led them was named Temmo. His khalasar was not so big as Drogo’s, but it was big enough. Fifty thousand, at the least. Half of them braided warriors with bells ringing in their hair.

“The Qohorik knew he was coming. They strengthened their walls, doubled the size of their own guard, and hired two free companies besides, the Bright Banners and the Second Sons. And almost as an afterthought, they sent a man to Astapor to buy three thousand Unsullied. It was a long march back to Qohor, however, and as they approached they saw the smoke and dust and heard the distant din of battle.

“By the time the Unsullied reached the city the sun had set. Crows and wolves were feasting beneath the walls on what remained of the Qohorik heavy horse. The Bright Banners and Second Sons had fled, as sellswords are wont to do in the face of hopeless odds. With dark falling, the Dothraki had retired to their own camps to drink and dance and feast, but none doubted that they would return on the morrow to smash the city gates, storm the walls, and rape, loot, and slave as they pleased.

“But when dawn broke and Temmo and his bloodriders led their khalasar out of camp, they found three thousand Unsullied drawn up before the gates with the Black Goat standard flying over their heads. So small a force could easily have been flanked, but you know Dothraki. These were men on foot, and men on foot are fit only to be ridden down.

“The Dothraki charged. The Unsullied locked their shields, lowered their spears, and stood firm. Against twenty thousand screamers with bells in their hair, they stood firm.

“Eighteen times the Dothraki charged, and broke themselves on those shields and spears like waves on a rocky shore. Thrice Temmo sent his archers wheeling past and arrows fell like rain upon the Three Thousand, but the Unsullied merely lifted their shields above their heads until the squall had passed. In the end only six hundred of them remained ... but more than twelve thousand Dothraki lay dead upon that field, including Khal Temmo, his bloodriders, his kos, and all his sons. On the morning of the fourth day, the new khal led the survivors past the city gates in a stately procession. One by one, each man cut off his braid and threw it down before the feet of the Three Thousand.

“Since that day, the city guard of Qohor has been made up solely of Unsullied, every one of whom carries a tall spear from which hangs a braid of human hair.

“That is what you will find in Astapor, Your Grace. Put ashore there, and continue on to Pentos overland. It will take longer, yes ... but when you break bread with Magister Illyrio, you will have a thousand swords behind you, not just four.”

There is wisdom in this, yes, Dany thought, but ... “How am I to buy a thousand slave soldiers? All I have of value is the crown the Tourmaline Brotherhood gave me.”

“Dragons will be as great a wonder in Astapor as they were in Qarth. It may be that the slavers will shower you with gifts, as the Qartheen did. If not ... these ships carry more than your Dothraki and their horses. They took on trade goods at Qarth, I’ve been through the holds and seen for myself. Bolts of silk and bales of tiger skin, amber and jade carvings, saffron, myrrh ... slaves are cheap, Your Grace. Tiger skins are costly.”

“Those are Illyrio’s tiger skins,” she objected.
“And Illyrio is a friend to House Targaryen.”
“All the more reason not to steal his goods.”
“What use are wealthy friends if they will not put their wealth at your disposal, my queen? If Magister Illyrio would deny you, he is only Xaro Xhoan Daxos with four chins. And if he is sincere in his devotion to your cause, he will not begrudge you three shiploads of trade goods. What better use for his tiger skins than to buy you the beginnings of an army?”

That’s true. Dany felt a rising excitement. “There will be dangers on such a long march ...”

“There are dangers at sea as well. Corsairs and pirates hunt the southern route, and north of Valyria the Smoking Sea is demon- haunted. The next storm could sink or scatter us, a kraken could pull us under ... or we might find ourselves becalmed again, and die of thirst as we wait for the wind to rise. A march will have different dangers, my queen, but none greater.”

“What if Captain Groleo refuses to change course, though? And Arstan, Strong Belwas, what will they do?”

Ser Jorah stood. “Perhaps it’s time you found that out.”

“Yes,” she decided. “I’ll do it!” Dany threw back the coverlets and hopped from the bunk. “I’ll see the captain at once, command him to set course for Astapor.” She bent over her chest, threw open the lid, and seized the first garment to hand, a pair of loose sandsilk trousers. “Hand me my medallion belt,” she commanded Jorah as she pulled the sandsilk up over her hips. “And my vest—” she started to say, turning. Ser Jorah slid his arms around her.
“Oh,” was all Dany had time to say as he pulled her close and pressed his lips down on hers. He smelled of sweat and salt and leather, and the iron studs on his jerkin dug into her naked breasts as he crushed her hard against him. One hand held her by the shoulder while the other slid down her spine to the small of her back, and her mouth opened for his tongue, though she never told it to. His beard is scratchy, she thought, but his mouth is sweet. The Dothraki wore no beards, only long mustaches, and only Khal Drogo had ever kissed her before. He should not be doing this. I am his queen, not his woman.

It was a long kiss, though how long Dany could not have said. When it ended, Ser Jorah let go of her, and she took a quick step backward. “You ... you should not have ...”

“I should not have waited so long,” he finished for her. “I should have kissed you in Qarth, in Vaes Tolorru. I should have kissed you in the red waste, every night and every day. You were made to be kissed, often and well.” His eyes were on her breasts.

Dany covered them with her hands, before her nipples could betray her. “I ... that was not fitting. I am your queen.”

“My queen,” he said, “and the bravest, sweetest, and most beautiful woman I have ever seen. Daenerys—”

“Your Grace!”

“Your Grace,” he conceded, “the dragon has three heads, remember? You have wondered at that, ever since you heard it from the warlocks in the House of Dust. Well, here’s your meaning: Balerion, Meraxes, and Vhagar, ridden by Aegon, Rhaenys, and Visenya. The three-headed dragon of House Targaryen—three dragons, and three riders.”

“Yes,” said Dany, “but my brothers are dead.”

“Rhaenys and Visenya were Aegon’s wives as well as his sisters. You have no brothers, but you can take husbands. And I tell you truly, Daenerys, there is no man in all the world who will ever be half so true to you as me.”

 A Clash of Kings

ACOK Daenerys V

Ser Jorah would sooner have tucked her inside her palanquin, safely hidden behind silken curtains, but she refused him. She had reclined too long on satin cushions, letting oxen bear her hither and yon. At least when she rode she felt as though she was getting somewhere.

~

But where am I to go? Ser Jorah proposed that they journey farther east, away from her enemies in the Seven Kingdoms. Her bloodriders would sooner have returned to their great grass sea, even if it meant braving the red waste again. Dany herself had toyed with the idea of settling in Vaes Tolorro until her dragons grew great and strong. But her heart was full of doubts. Each of these felt wrong, somehow ... and even when she decided where to go, the question of how she would get there remained troublesome.

~

“The dragon has three heads,” she sighed. “Do you know what that means, Jorah?”

“Your Grace? The sigil of House Targaryen is a three-headed dragon, red on black.”

“I know that. But there are no three-headed dragons.”

“The three heads were Aegon and his sisters.”

“Visenya and Rhaenys,” she recalled. “I am descended from Aegon and Rhaenys through their son Aenys and their grandson Jaehaerys.”

“Blue lips speak only lies, isn’t that what Xaro told you? Why do you care what the warlocks whispered? All they wanted was to suck the life from you, you know that now.”

“Perhaps,” she said reluctantly. “Yet the things I saw ...”
“A dead man in the prow of a ship, a blue rose, a banquet of blood ... what does any of it mean, Khaleesi? A mummer’s dragon, you said. What is a mummer’s dragon, pray?”
“A cloth dragon on poles,” Dany explained. “Mummers use them in their follies, to give the heroes something to fight.”

Ser Jorah frowned.

Dany could not let it go. “His is the song of ice and fire, my brother said. I’m certain it was my brother. Not Viserys, Rhaegar. He had a harp with silver strings.”

Ser Jorah’s frown deepened until his eyebrows came together. “Prince Rhaegar played such a harp,” he conceded. “You saw him?”

She nodded. “There was a woman in a bed with a babe at her breast. My brother said the babe was the prince that was promised and told her to name him Aegon.”

“Prince Aegon was Rhaegar’s heir by Elia of Dorne,” Ser Jorah said. “But if he was this prince that was promised, the promise was broken along with his skull when the Lannisters dashed his head against a wall.”

“I remember,” Dany said sadly. “They murdered Rhaegar’s daughter as well, the little princess. Rhaenys, she was named, like Aegon’s sister. There was no Visenya, but he said the dragon has three heads. What is the song of ice and fire?”

“It’s no song I’ve ever heard.”

“I went to the warlocks hoping for answers, but instead they’ve left me with a hundred new questions.”

 ACOK Daenerys IV

“What power can they have if they live in that?”

~

Ser Jorah Mormont gave the merchant prince a sour look. “Your Grace, remember Mirri Maz Duur.”

“I do,” Dany said, suddenly decided. “I remember that she had knowledge. And she was only a maegi.”

~

Ser Jorah Mormont knelt beside Dany in the cool green grass and put his arm around her shoulder.

 ACOK Daenerys III

Ser Jorah she had left behind today, to guard her other dragons; the exile knight had been opposed to this folly from the start. He distrusts everyone, she reflected, and perhaps for good reason.

~

Xaro’s flowery protestations of passion amused her, but his manner was at odds with his words. While Ser Jorah had scarcely been able to keep his eyes from her bare breast when he’d helped her into the palanquin, Xaro hardly deigned to notice it, even in these close confines.

~

Ser Jorah Mormont came to her as the sun was going down. “The Pureborn refused you?”

“As you said they would. Come, sit, give me your counsel.” [...]

“You will get no help in this city, Khaleesi.” Ser Jorah took an onion between thumb and forefinger. “Each day I am more convinced of that than the day before. The Pureborn see no farther than the walls of Qarth, and Xaro ...”

“He asked me to marry him again.”

“Yes, and I know why.” When the knight frowned, his heavy black brows joined together above his deep-set eyes.

“He dreams of me, day and night.” She laughed.


“Forgive me, my queen, but it is your dragons he dreams of.”

“Xaro assures me that in Qarth, man and woman each retain their own property after they are wed. The dragons are mine.” She smiled as Drogon came hopping and flapping across the marble floor to crawl up on the cushion beside her.

“He tells it true as far as it goes, but there’s one thing he failed to mention. The Qartheen have a curious wedding custom, my queen. On the day of their union, a wife may ask a token of love from her husband. Whatsoever she desires of his worldly goods, he must grant. And he may ask the same of her. One thing only may be asked, but whatever is named may not be denied.”

“One thing,” she repeated. “And it may not be denied?”

“With one dragon, Xaro Xhoan Daxos would rule this city, but one ship will further our cause but little.”

Dany nibbled at an onion and reflected ruefully on the faithlessness of men. “We passed through the bazaar on our way back from the Hall of a Thousand Thrones,” she told Ser Jorah. “Quaithe was there.” She told him of the firemage and the fiery ladder, and what the woman in the red mask had told her.

“I would be glad to leave this city, if truth be told,” the knight said when she was done. “But not for Asshai.”

“Where, then?”

“East,” he said.

“I am half a world away from my kingdom even here. If I go any farther east I may never find my way home to Westeros.”

“If you go west, you risk your life.”

“House Targaryen has friends in the Free Cities,” she reminded him. “Truer friends than Xaro or the Pureborn.”

“If you mean Illyrio Mopatis, I wonder. For sufficient gold, Illyrio would sell you as quickly as he would a slave.”

“My brother and I were guests in Illyrio’s manse for half a year. If he meant to sell us, he could have done it then.”

“He did sell you,” Ser Jorah said. “To Khal Drogo.”

Dany flushed. He had the truth of it, but she did not like the sharpness with which he put it. “Illyrio protected us from the Usurper’s knives, and he believed in my brother’s cause.”

“Illyrio believes in no cause but Illyrio. Gluttons are greedy men as a rule, and magisters are devious. Illyrio Mopatis is both. What do you truly know of him?”

“I know that he gave me my dragon eggs.”

He snorted. “If he’d known they were like to hatch, he would have sat on them himself.”

That made her smile despite herself. “Oh, I have no doubt of that, ser. I know Illyrio better than you think. I was a child when I left his manse in Pentos to wed my sun-and-stars, but I was neither deaf nor blind. And I am no child now.”

“Even if Illyrio is the friend you think him,” the knight said stubbornly, “he is not powerful enough to enthrone you by himself, no more than he could your brother.”

“He is rich,” she said. “Not so rich as Xaro, perhaps, but rich enough to hire ships for me, and men as well.”

“Sellswords have their uses,” Ser Jorah admitted, “but you will not win your father’s throne with sweepings from the Free Cities. Nothing knits a broken realm together so quick as an invading army on its soil.”

“I am their rightful queen,” Dany protested.

“You are a stranger who means to land on their shores with an army of outlanders who cannot even speak the Common Tongue. The lords of Westeros do not know you, and have every reason to fear and mistrust you. You must win them over before you sail. A few at least.”

“And how am I to do that, if I go east as you counsel?”

He ate an olive and spit out the pit into his palm. “I do not know, Your Grace,” he admitted, “but I do know that the longer you remain in one place, the easier it will be for your enemies to find you. The name Targaryen still frightens them, so much so that they sent a man to murder you when they heard you were with child. What will they do when they learn of your dragons?”

 ACOK Daenerys II

My great bear, Dany thought. I am his queen, but I will always be his cub as well, and he will always guard me. It made her feel safe, but sad as well. She wished she could love him better than she did.

~

“Ser Jorah, find the docks and see what manner of ships lay at anchor. It has been half a year since I last heard tidings from the Seven Kingdoms.[”] [...]

The knight frowned. [...] “My place is here at your side.”

“Jhogo can guard me as well.[”] [...]

Reluctantly, the exile nodded. “As you say, my queen.”

~

“Khaleesi,” the knight said when they were alone, “I should not speak so freely of your plans, if I were you. This man will spread the tale wherever he goes now.”

“Let him,” she said. “Let the whole world know my purpose. The Usurper is dead, what does it matter?”

“Not every sailor’s tale is true,” Ser Jorah cautioned, “and even if Robert be truly dead, his son rules in his place. This changes nothing, truly.”

“This changes everything.”

~

“The high lords have always fought. Tell me who’s won and I’ll tell you what it means. Khaleesi, the Seven Kingdoms are not going to fall into your hands like so many ripe peaches. You will need a fleet, gold, armies, alliances—”

“All this I know.” She took his hands in hers and looked up into his dark suspicious eyes.

Sometimes he thinks of me as a child he must protect, and sometimes as a woman he would like to bed, but does he ever truly see me as his queen? “I am not the frightened girl you met in Pentos. I have counted only fifteen name days, true ... but I am as old as the crones in the dosh khaleen and as young as my dragons, Jorah. I have borne a child, burned a khal, and crossed the red waste and the Dothraki sea. Mine is the blood of the dragon.”

“As was your brother’s,” he said stubbornly.

“I am not Viserys.”

“No,” he admitted. “There is more of Rhaegar in you, I think, but even Rhaegar could be slain. Robert proved that on the Trident, with no more than a warhammer. Even dragons can die.”

“Dragons die.” She stood on her toes to kiss him lightly on an unshaven cheek. “But so do dragonslayers.”

ACOK Daenerys I

The knight’s face was grey and exhausted. The wound he had taken to his hip the night he fought Khal Drogo’s bloodriders had never fully healed; she could see how he grimaced when he mounted his horse, and he seemed to slump in his saddle as they rode. “Perhaps we are doomed if we press on . . . but I know for a certainty that we are doomed if we turn back.”

Dany kissed him lightly on the cheek. It heartened her to see him smile. I must be strong for him as well, she thought grimly. A knight he may be, but I am the blood of the dragon.

~

“There are ghosts everywhere,” Ser Jorah said softly. “We carry them with us wherever we go.”

Yes, she thought. Viserys, Khal Drogo, my son Rhaego, they are with me always. “Tell me the name of your ghost, Jorah. You know all of mine.”

His face grew very still. “Her name was Lynesse.” “Your wife?”

“My second wife.”

It pains him to speak of her, Dany saw, but she wanted to know the truth. “Is that all you would say of her?” The lion pelt slid off one shoulder and she tugged it back into place. “Was she beautiful?”

“Very beautiful.” Ser Jorah lifted his eyes from her shoulder to her face. “The first time I beheld her, I thought she was a goddess come to earth, the Maid herself made flesh. Her birth was far above my own. She was the youngest daughter of Lord Leyton Hightower of Oldtown. The White Bull who commanded your father’s Kingsguard was her great-uncle. The Hightowers are an ancient family, very rich and very proud.”

“And loyal,” Dany said. “I remember, Viserys said the Hightowers were among those who stayed true to my father.”

“That’s so,” he admitted.

“Did your fathers make the match?”

“No,” he said. “Our marriage . . . that makes a long tale and a dull one, Your Grace. I would not trouble you with it.”

“I have nowhere to go,” she said. “Please.”

“As my queen commands.” Ser Jorah frowned. “My home . . . you must understand that to understand the rest. Bear Island is beautiful, but remote. Imagine old gnarled oaks and tall pines, flowering thornbushes, grey stones bearded with moss, little creeks running icy down steep hillsides. The hall of the Mormonts is built of huge logs and surrounded by an earthen palisade. Aside from a few crofters, my people live along the coasts and fish the seas. The island lies far to the north, and our winters are more terrible than you can imagine, Khaleesi.”

“Still, the island suited me well enough, and I never lacked for women. I had my share of fishwives and crofter’s daughters, before and after I was wed. I married young, to a bride of my father’s choosing, a Glover of Deepwood Motte. Ten years we were wed, or near enough as makes no matter. She was a plain-faced woman, but not unkind. I suppose I came to love her after a fashion, though our relations were dutiful rather than passionate. Three times she miscarried while trying to give me an heir. The last time she never recovered. She died not long after.”

Dany put her hand on his and gave his fingers a squeeze. “I am sorry for you, truly.”

Ser Jorah nodded. “By then my father had taken the black, so I was Lord of Bear Island in my own right. I had no lack of marriage offers, but before I could reach a decision Lord Balon Greyjoy rose in rebellion against the Usurper, and Ned Stark called his banners to help his friend Robert. The final battle was on Pyke. When Robert’s stonethrowers opened a breach in King Balon’s wall, a priest from Myr was the first man through, but I was not far behind. For that I won my knighthood.”

“To celebrate his victory, Robert ordained that a tourney should be held outside Lannisport. It was there I saw Lynesse, a maid half my age. She had come up from Oldtown with her father to see her brothers joust. I could not take my eyes off her. In a fit of madness, I begged her favor to wear in the tourney, never dreaming she would grant my request, yet she did.”

“I fight as well as any man, Khaleesi, but I have never been a tourney knight. Yet with Lynesse’s favor knotted round my arm, I was a different man. I won joust after joust. Lord Jason Mallister fell before me, and Bronze Yohn Royce. Ser Ryman Frey, his brother Ser Hosteen, Lord Whent, Strongboar, even Ser Boros Blount of the Kingsguard, I unhorsed them all. In the last match, I broke nine lances against Jaime Lannister to no result, and King Robert gave me the champion’s laurel. I crowned Lynesse queen of love and beauty, and that very night went to her father and asked for her hand. I was drunk, as much on glory as on wine. By rights I should have gotten a contemptuous refusal, but Lord Leyton accepted my offer. We were married there in Lannisport, and for a fortnight I was the happiest man in the wide world.”

“Only a fortnight?” asked Dany. Even I was given more happiness than that, with Drogo who was my sun-and-stars.

“A fortnight was how long it took us to sail from Lannisport back to Bear Island. My home was a great disappointment to Lynesse. It was too cold, too damp, too far away, my castle no more than a wooden longhall. We had no masques, no mummer shows, no balls or fairs. Seasons might pass without a singer ever coming to play for us, and there’s not a goldsmith on the island. Even meals became a trial. My cook knew little beyond his roasts and stews, and Lynesse soon lost her taste for fish and venison.”

“I lived for her smiles, so I sent all the way to Oldtown for a new cook, and brought a harper from Lannisport. Goldsmiths, jewelers, dressmakers, whatever she wanted I found for her, but it was never enough. Bear Island is rich in bears and trees, and poor in aught else. I built a fine ship for her and we sailed to Lannisport and Oldtown for festivals and fairs, and once even to Braavos, where I borrowed heavily from the moneylenders. It was as a tourney champion that I had won her hand and heart, so I entered other tourneys for her sake, but the magic was gone. I never distinguished myself again, and each defeat meant the loss of another charger and another suit of jousting armor, which must needs be ransomed or replaced. The cost could not be borne. Finally I insisted we return home, but there matters soon grew even worse than before. I could no longer pay the cook and the harper, and Lynesse grew wild when I spoke of pawning her jewels.”

“The rest . . . I did things it shames me to speak of. For gold. So Lynesse might keep her jewels, her harper, and her cook. In the end it cost me all. When I heard that Eddard Stark was coming to Bear Island, I was so lost to honor that rather than stay and face his judgment, I took her with me into exile. Nothing mattered but our love, I told myself. We fled to Lys, where I sold my ship for gold to keep us.”

His voice was thick with grief, and Dany was reluctant to press him any further, yet she had to know how it ended. “Did she die there?” she asked him gently.

“Only to me,” he said. “In half a year my gold was gone, and I was obliged to take service as a sellsword. While I was fighting Braavosi on the Rhoyne, Lynesse moved into the manse of a merchant prince named Tregar Ormollen. They say she is his chief concubine now, and even his wife goes in fear of her.”

Dany was horrified. “Do you hate her?”

“Almost as much as I love her,” Ser Jorah answered. “Pray excuse me, my queen. I find I am very tired.”

She gave him leave to go, but as he was lifting the flap of her tent, she could not stop herself calling after him with one last question. “What did she look like, your Lady Lynesse?”

Ser Jorah smiled sadly. “Why, she looked a bit like you, Daenerys.” He bowed low. “Sleep well, my queen.”

Dany shivered, and pulled the lionskin tight about her. She looked like me. It explained much that she had not truly understood. He wants me, she realized. He loves me as he loved her, not as a knight loves his queen but as a man loves a woman. She tried to imagine herself in Ser Jorah’s arms, kissing him, pleasuring him, letting him enter her. It was no good. When she closed her eyes, his face kept changing into Drogo’s.

[...] She had heard the longing in Ser Jorah’s voice when he spoke of his Bear Island. He can never have me, but one day I can give him back his home and honor. That much I can do for him.

 A Game of Thrones

AGOT Daenerys X

“Princess ...” he began.

“Why do you call me that?” Dany challenged him. “My brother Viserys was your king, was he not?”

“He was, my lady.”

“Viserys is dead. I am his heir, the last blood of House Targaryen. Whatever was his is mine now.”

“My ... queen,” Ser Jorah said, going to one knee. “My sword that was his is yours, Daenerys. And my heart as well, that never belonged to your brother. I am only a knight, and I have nothing to offer you but exile, but I beg you, hear me. Let Khal Drogo go. You shall not be alone. I promise you, no man shall take you to Vaes Dothrak unless you wish to go. You need not join the dosh khaleen. Come east with me. Yi Ti, Qarth, the Jade Sea, Asshai by the Shadow. We will see all the wonders yet unseen, and drink what wines the gods see fit to serve us. Please, Khaleesi. I know what you intend. Do not. Do not.”

“I must,” Dany told him. She touched his face, fondly, sadly. “You do not understand.”

“I understand that you loved him,” Ser Jorah said in a voice thick with despair. “I loved my lady wife once, yet I did not die with her. You are my queen, my sword is yours, but do not ask me to stand aside as you climb on Drogo’s pyre. I will not watch you burn.”

“Is that what you fear?” Dany kissed him lightly on his broad forehead. “I am not such a child as that, sweet ser.”

“You do not mean to die with him? You swear it, my queen?”

“I swear it,” she said in the Common Tongue of the Seven Kingdoms that by rights were hers.

~

She nodded, as calmly as if she had not heard his answer, and turned to the last of her champions. “Ser Jorah Mormont,” she said, “first and greatest of my knights, I have no bride gift to give you, but I swear to you, one day you shall have from my hands a longsword like none the world has ever seen, dragon-forged and made of Valyrian steel. And I would ask for your oath as well.”

“You have it, my queen,” Ser Jorah said, kneeling to lay his sword at her feet. “I vow to serve you, to obey you, to die for you if need be.”

“Whatever may come?”

“Whatever may come.”

“I shall hold you to that oath. I pray you never regret the giving of it.” Dany lifted him to his feet. Stretching on her toes to reach his lips, she kissed the knight gently and said, “You are the first of my Queensguard.”

~

“Ser Jorah, take this maegi and bind her to the pyre.”

“To the ... my queen, no, hear me ...”

“Do as I say.” Still he hesitated, until her anger flared. “You swore to obey me, whatever might come. Rakharo, help him.”

~

Ser Jorah was shouting behind her, but he did not matter anymore, only the fire mattered. [...] She heard the screams of frightened horses, and the voices of the Dothraki raised in shouts of fear and terror, and Ser Jorah calling her name and cursing. No, she wanted to shout to him, no, my good knight, do not fear for me. The fire is mine. I am Daenerys Stormborn, daughter of dragons, bride of dragons, mother of dragons, don’t you see? Don’t you SEE?

~

When the fire died at last and the ground became cool enough to walk upon, Ser Jorah Mormont found her amidst the ashes, surrounded by blackened logs and bits of glowing ember and the burnt bones of man and woman and stallion. She was naked, covered with soot, her clothes turned to ash, her beautiful hair all crisped away ... yet she was unhurt.

The cream-and-gold dragon was suckling at her left breast, the green-and-bronze at the right. Her arms cradled them close. The black-and-scarlet beast was draped across her shoulders, its long sinuous neck coiled under her chin. When it saw Jorah, it raised its head and looked at him with eyes as red as coals.

Wordless, the knight fell to his knees. The men of her khas came up behind him. Jhogo was the first to lay his arakh at her feet. “Blood of my blood,” he murmured, pushing his face to the smoking earth. “Blood of my blood,” she heard Aggo echo. “Blood of my blood,” Rakharo shouted.

And after them came her handmaids, and then the others, all the Dothraki, men and women and children, and Dany had only to look at their eyes to know that they were hers now, today and tomorrow and forever, hers as they had never been Drogo’s.

 AGOT Daenerys IX

Ser Jorah Mormont lifted her in his arms and carried her back to her sleeping silks, while she struggled feebly against him. Over his shoulder she saw her three handmaids, Jhogo with his little wisp of mustache, and the flat broad face of Mirri Maz Duur. “I must,” she tried to tell them, “I have to ...”

“ ... sleep, Princess,” Ser Jorah said.

“No,” Dany said. “Please. Please.”

“Yes.” He covered her with silk, though she was burning. “Sleep and grow strong again, Khaleesi. Come back to us.”

~

“I want Ser Jorah,” she said, standing.

~

Ser Jorah and Mirri Maz Duur entered a few moments later, and found Dany standing over the other dragon’s eggs, the two still in their chest. It seemed to her that they felt as hot as the one she had slept with, which was passing strange. “Ser Jorah, come here,” she said. She took his hand and placed it on the black egg with the scarlet swirls. “What do you feel?”

“Shell, hard as rock.” The knight was wary. “Scales.”

“Heat?”

“No. Cold stone.” He took his hand away. “Princess, are you well? Should you be up, weak as you are?”

“Weak? I am strong, Jorah.” To please him, she reclined on a pile of cushions. “Tell me how my child died.”

“He never lived, my princess. The women say ...” He faltered, and Dany saw how the flesh hung loose on him, and the way he limped when he moved.

“Tell me. Tell me what the women say.”
He turned his face away. His eyes were haunted. “They say the child was ...”

She waited, but Ser Jorah could not say it. His face grew dark with shame. He looked half a corpse himself.

“Monstrous,” Mirri Maz Duur finished for him. The knight was a powerful man, yet Dany understood in that moment that the maegi was stronger, and crueler, and infinitely more dangerous. “Twisted. I drew him forth myself. He was scaled like a lizard, blind, with the stub of a tail and small leather wings like the wings of a bat. When I touched him, the flesh sloughed off the bone, and inside he was full of graveworms and the stink of corruption. He had been dead for years.”

Darkness, Dany thought. The terrible darkness sweeping up behind to devour her. If she looked back she was lost. “My son was alive and strong when Ser Jorah carried me into this tent,” she said. “I could feel him kicking, fighting to be born.”

“That may be as it may be,” answered Mirri Maz Duur, “yet the creature that came forth from your womb was as I said. Death was in that tent, Khaleesi.”

“Only shadows,” Ser Jorah husked, but Dany could hear the doubt in his voice. “I saw, maegi. I saw you, alone, dancing with the shadows. “

“The grave casts long shadows, Iron Lord,” Mirri said. “Long and dark, and in the end no light can hold them back.”

Ser Jorah had killed her son, Dany knew. He had done what he did for love and loyalty, yet he had carried her into a place no living man should go and fed her baby to the darkness. He knew it too; the grey face, the hollow eyes, the limp. “The shadows have touched you too, Ser Jorah,” she told him. The knight made no reply. Dany turned to the godswife. “You warned me that only death could pay for life. I thought you meant the horse.”

“No,” Mirri Maz Duur said. “That was a lie you told yourself. You knew the price.”

Had she? Had she? If I look back I am lost. “The price was paid,” Dany said. “The horse, my child, Quaro and Qotho, Haggo and Cohollo. The price was paid and paid and paid.” She rose from her cushions. “Where is Khal Drogo? Show him to me, godswife, maegi, bloodmage, whatever you are. Show me Khal Drogo. Show me what I bought with my son’s life.”

“As you command, Khaleesi,” the old woman said. “Come, I will take you to him.” Dany was weaker than she knew. Ser Jorah slipped an arm around her and helped her stand. “Time enough for this later, my princess,” he said quietly.

“I would see him now, Ser Jorah.”

 AGOT Daenerys VIII

“Khaleesi,” he said, “the Andal is come, and begs leave to enter.”

“The Andal” was what the Dothraki called Ser Jorah. “Yes,” she said, rising clumsily, “send him in.” She trusted the knight. He would know what to do if anyone did.

Ser Jorah Mormont ducked through the door flap and waited a moment for his eyes to adjust to the dimness. In the fierce heat of the south, he wore loose trousers of mottled sandsilk and open-toed riding sandals that laced up to his knee. His scabbard hung from a twisted horsehair belt. Under a bleached white vest, he was bare-chested, skin reddened by the sun. “Talk goes from mouth to ear, all over the khalasar,” he said. “It is said Khal Drogo fell from his horse.”

“Help him,” Dany pleaded. “For the love you say you bear me, help him now.”

The knight knelt beside her. He looked at Drogo long and hard, and then at Dany. “Send your maids away.”

Wordlessly, her throat tight with fear, Dany made a gesture. Irri herded the other girls from the tent.

When they were alone, Ser Jorah drew his dagger. Deftly, with a delicacy surprising in such a big man, he began to scrape away the black leaves and dried blue mud from Drogo’s chest. The plaster had caked hard as the mud walls of the Lamb Men, and like those walls it cracked easily. Ser Jorah broke the dry mud with his knife, pried the chunks from the flesh, peeled off the leaves one by one. A foul, sweet smell rose from the wound, so thick it almost choked her. The leaves were crusted with blood and pus, Drogo’s breast black and glistening with corruption.

“No,” Dany whispered as tears ran down her cheeks. “No, please, gods hear me, no.”

Khal Drogo thrashed, fighting some unseen enemy. Black blood ran slow and thick from his open wound.


“Your khal is good as dead, Princess.”

“No, he can’t die, he mustn’t, it was only a cut.” Dany took his large callused hand in her own small ones, and held it tight between them. “I will not let him die ...”

Ser Jorah gave a bitter laugh. “Khaleesi or queen, that command is beyond your power. Save your tears, child. Weep for him tomorrow, or a year from now. We do not have time for grief. We must go, and quickly, before he dies.”

Dany was lost. “Go? Where should we go?”

“Asshai, I would say. It lies far to the south, at the end of the known world, yet men say it is a great port. We will find a ship to take us back to Pentos. It will be a hard journey, make no mistake. Do you trust your khas? Will they come with us?”

“Khal Drogo commanded them to keep me safe,” Dany replied uncertainly, “but if he dies ...” She touched the swell of her belly. “I don’t understand. Why should we flee? I am khaleesi. I carry Drogo’s heir. He will be khal after Drogo ...”

Ser Jorah frowned. “Princess, hear me. The Dothraki will not follow a suckling babe. Drogo’s strength was what they bowed to, and only that. When he is gone, Jhaqo and Pono and the other kos will fight for his place, and this khalasar will devour itself. The winner will want no more rivals. The boy will be taken from your breast the moment he is born. They will give him to the dogs ...”

Dany hugged herself. “But why?” she cried plaintively. “Why should they kill a little baby?”

“He is Drogo’s son, and the crones say he will be the stallion who mounts the world. It was prophesied. Better to kill the child than to risk his fury when he grows to manhood.”

The child kicked inside her, as if he had heard. Dany remembered the story Viserys had told her, of what the Usurper’s dogs had done to Rhaegar’s children. His son had been a babe as well, yet they had ripped him from his mother’s breast and dashed his head against a wall. That was the way of men. “They must not hurt my son!” she cried. “I will order my khas to keep him safe, and Drogo’s bloodriders will—”

Ser Jorah held her by the shoulders. “A bloodrider dies with his khal. You know that, child. They will take you to Vaes Dothrak, to the crones, that is the last duty they owe him in life ... when it is done, they will join Drogo in the night lands.”

Dany did not want to go back to Vaes Dothrak and live the rest of her life among those terrible old women, yet she knew that the knight spoke the truth. Drogo had been more than her sun-and-stars; he had been the shield that kept her safe. “I will not leave him,” she said stubbornly, miserably. She took his hand again. “I will not.”

~

“No? You say me no? Better you should pray that we do not stake you out beside your maegi. You did this, as much as the other.”

Ser Jorah stepped between them, loosening his longsword in its scabbard. “Rein in your tongue, bloodrider. The princess is still your khaleesi.”

~

She saw Ser Jorah Mormont, wearing mail and leather now, sweat beading on his broad, balding forehead. He pushed his way through the Dothraki to Dany’s side. When he saw the scarlet footprints her boots had left on the ground, the color seemed to drain from his face. “What have you done, you little fool?” he asked hoarsely.

“I had to save him.”

“We could have fled,” he said. “I would have seen you safe to Asshai, Princess. There was no need ...”

“Am I truly your princess?” she asked him.

“You know you are, gods save us both.”


“Then help me now.”


Ser Jorah grimaced. “Would that I knew how.”

~

An arm went under her waist, and then Ser Jorah was lifting her off her feet. His face was sticky with blood, and Dany saw that half his ear was gone. She convulsed in his arms as the pain took her again, and heard the knight shouting for her handmaids to help him.

[...] “Come here. Fetch the birthing women.”

“They will not come. They say she is accursed.”


“They’ll come or I’ll have their heads.”


 AGOT Daenerys VII

Slaves, Dany thought. Khal Drogo would drive them downriver to one of the towns on Slaver’s Bay. She wanted to cry, but she told herself that she must be strong. This is war, this is what it looks like, this is the price of the Iron Throne.

“I’ve told the khal he ought to make for Meereen,” Ser Jorah said. “They’ll pay a better price than he’d get from a slaving caravan. Illyrio writes that they had a plague last year, so the brothels are paying double for healthy young girls, and triple for boys under ten. If enough children survive the journey, the gold will buy us all the ships we need, and hire men to sail them.”

Behind them, the girl being raped made a heartrending sound, a long sobbing wail that went on and on and on. Dany’s hand clenched hard around the reins, and she turned the silver’s head. “Make them stop,” she commanded Ser Jorah.

“Khaleesi?” The knight sounded perplexed.


[...] Jorah Mormont spurred his horse closer. “Princess,” he said, “you have a gentle heart, but you do not understand. This is how it has always been. Those men have shed blood for the khal. Now they claim their reward.”

[...] “I will not have her harmed,” Dany said. “I claim her. Do as I command you, or Khal Drogo will know the reason why.”

[...] The knight gave her a curious look. “You are your brother’s sister, in truth.”

“Viserys?” She did not understand.

“No,” he answered. “Rhaegar.” He galloped off.

~

Each time Dany reined up, sent her khas to make an end to it, and claimed the victim as slave. One of them, a thick-bodied, flat-nosed woman of forty years, blessed Dany haltingly in the Common Tongue, but from the others she got only flat black stares. They were suspicious of her, she realized with sadness; afraid that she had saved them for some worse fate.

“You cannot claim them all, child,” Ser Jorah said, the fourth time they stopped, while the warriors of her khas herded her new slaves behind her.

“I am khaleesi, heir to the Seven Kingdoms, the blood of the dragon,” Dany reminded him. “It is not for you to tell me what I cannot do.” Across the city, a building collapsed in a great gout of fire and smoke, and she heard distant screams and the wailing of frightened children.

 AGOT Daenerys VI

“My princess. How may I serve you?”

“You must talk to my lord husband,” Dany said. “Drogo says the stallion who mounts the world will have all the lands of the earth to rule, and no need to cross the poison water. He talks of leading his khalasar east after Rhaego is born, to plunder the lands around the Jade Sea.”

The knight looked thoughtful. “The khal has never seen the Seven Kingdoms,” he said. “They are nothing to him. If he thinks of them at all, no doubt he thinks of islands, a few small cities clinging to rocks in the manner of Lorath or Lys, surrounded by stormy seas. The riches of the east must seem a more tempting prospect.”

“But he must ride west,” Dany said, despairing. “Please, help me make him understand.” She had never seen the Seven Kingdoms either, no more than Drogo, yet she felt as though she knew them from all the tales her brother had told her. Viserys had promised her a thousand times that he would take her back one day, but he was dead now and his promises had died with him.

“The Dothraki do things in their own time, for their own reasons,” the knight answered. “Have patience, Princess. Do not make your brother’s mistake. We will go home, I promise you.”

Home? The word made her feel sad. Ser Jorah had his Bear Island, but what was home to her? A few tales, names recited as solemnly as the words of a prayer, the fading memory of a red door ... was Vaes Dothrak to be her home forever? When she looked at the crones of the dosh khaleen, was she looking at her future?

Ser Jorah must have seen the sadness on her face. “A great caravan arrived during the night, Khaleesi. Four hundred horses, from Pentos by way of Norvos and Qohor, under the command of Merchant Captain Byan Votyris. Illyrio may have sent a letter. Would you care to visit the Western Market?”

Dany stirred. “Yes,” she said. “I would like that.”

~

“If you would pardon me for a time, I will seek out the captain and see if he has letters for us.”

“Very well. I’ll help you find him.”

“There is no need for you to trouble yourself.” Ser Jorah glanced away impatiently. “Enjoy the market. I will rejoin you when my business is concluded.”

Curious, Dany thought as she watched him stride off through the throngs. She didn’t see why she should not go with him. Perhaps Ser Jorah meant to find a woman after he met with the merchant captain. Whores frequently traveled with the caravans, she knew, and some men were queerly shy about their couplings. She gave a shrug.

~

She did not realize that Ser Jorah had returned until she heard the knight say, “No.” His voice was strange, brusque. “Aggo, put down that cask.”

Aggo looked at Dany. She gave a hesitant nod. “Ser Jorah, is something wrong?”

“I have a thirst. Open it, wineseller.”

The merchant frowned. “The wine is for the khaleesi, not for the likes of you, ser.”

Ser Jorah moved closer to the stall. “If you don’t open it, I’ll crack it open with your head.” He carried no weapons here in the sacred city, save his hands—yet his hands were enough, big, hard, dangerous, his knuckles covered with coarse dark hairs. The wineseller hesitated a moment, then took up his hammer and knocked the plug from the cask.

“Pour,” Ser Jorah commanded. The four young warriors of Dany’s khas arrayed themselves behind him, frowning, watching with their dark, almond-shaped eyes.

“It would be a crime to drink this rich a wine without letting it breathe.” The wineseller had not put his hammer down.

Jhogo reached for the whip coiled at his belt, but Dany stopped him with a light touch on the arm. “Do as Ser Jorah says,” she said. People were stopping to watch.

The man gave her a quick, sullen glance. “As the princess commands.” He had to set aside his hammer to lift the cask. He filled two thimble-sized tasting cups, pouring so deftly he did not spill a drop.

Ser Jorah lifted a cup and sniffed at the wine, frowning.

“Sweet, isn’t it?” the wineseller said, smiling. “Can you smell the fruit, ser? The perfume of the Arbor. Taste it, my lord, and tell me it isn’t the finest, richest wine that’s ever touched your tongue.” Ser Jorah offered him the cup. “You taste it first.”

“Me?” The man laughed. “I am not worthy of this vintage, my lord. And it’s a poor wine merchant who drinks up his own wares.” His smile was amiable, yet she could see the sheen of sweat on his brow.

“You will drink,” Dany said, cold as ice. “Empty the cup, or I will tell them to hold you down while Ser Jorah pours the whole cask down your throat.”

The wineseller shrugged, reached for the cup ... and grabbed the cask instead, flinging it at her with both hands. Ser Jorah bulled into her, knocking her out of the way. The cask bounced off his shoulder and smashed open on the ground. Dany stumbled and lost her feet. “No,” she screamed, thrusting her hands out to break her fall ... and Doreah caught her by the arm and wrenched her backward, so she landed on her legs and not her belly.

The trader vaulted over the stall, darting between Aggo and Rakharo. Quaro reached for an arakh that was not there as the blond man slammed him aside. He raced down the aisle. Dany heard the snap of Jhogo’s whip, saw the leather lick out and coil around the wineseller’s leg. The man sprawled face first in the dirt.

A dozen caravan guards had come running. With them was the master himself, Merchant Captain Byan Votyris, a diminutive Norvoshi with skin like old leather and a bristling blue mustachio that swept up to his ears. He seemed to know what had happened without a word being spoken. “Take this one away to await the pleasure of the khal,” he commanded, gesturing at the man on the ground. Two guards hauled the wineseller to his feet. “His goods I gift to you as well, Princess,” the merchant captain went on. “Small token of regret, that one of mine would do this thing.”

Doreah and Jhiqui helped Dany back to her feet. The poisoned wine was leaking from the broken cask into the dirt. “How did you know?” she asked Ser Jorah, trembling. “How?”

“I did not know, Khaleesi, not until the man refused to drink, but once I read Magister Illyrio’s letter, I feared.” His dark eyes swept over the faces of the strangers in the market. “Come. Best not to talk of it here.”

 AGOT Daenerys V

“Where is my brother?” Dany asked. “He ought to have come by now, for the feast.”

“I saw His Grace this morning,” he told her. “He told me he was going to the Western Market, in search of wine.”

“Wine?” Dany said doubtfully. Viserys could not abide the taste of the fermented mare’s milk the Dothraki drank, she knew that, and he was oft at the bazaars these days, drinking with the traders who came in the great caravans from east and west. He seemed to find their company more congenial than hers.

“Wine,” Ser Jorah confirmed, “and he has some thought to recruit men for his army from the sellswords who guard the caravans.” A serving girl laid a blood pie in front of him, and he attacked it with both hands.

“Is that wise?” she asked. “He has no gold to pay soldiers. What if he’s betrayed?” Caravan guards were seldom troubled much by thoughts of honor, and the Usurper in King’s Landing would pay well for her brother’s head. “You ought to have gone with him, to keep him safe. You are his sworn sword.”

“We are in Vaes Dothrak,” he reminded her. “No one may carry a blade here or shed a man’s blood.” “Yet men die,” she said. “Jhogo told me. Some of the traders have eunuchs with them, huge men who strangle thieves with wisps of silk. That way no blood is shed and the gods are not angered.” “Then let us hope your brother will be wise enough not to steal anything.” Ser Jorah wiped the grease off his mouth with the back of his hand and leaned close over the table. “He had planned to take your dragon’s eggs, until I warned him that I’d cut off his hand if he so much as touched them.”

For a moment Dany was so shocked she had no words. “My eggs ... but they’re mine, Magister Illyrio gave them to me, a bride gift, why would Viserys want ... they’re only stones ...”

“The same could be said of rubies and diamonds and fire opals, Princess ... and dragon’s eggs are rarer by far. Those traders he’s been drinking with would sell their own manhoods for even one of those stones, and with all three Viserys could buy as many sellswords as he might need.”

Dany had not known, had not even suspected. “Then ... he should have them. He does not need to steal them. He had only to ask. He is my brother ... and my true king.”

“He is your brother,” Ser Jorah acknowledged.

“You do not understand, ser,” she said. “My mother died giving me birth, and my father and my brother Rhaegar even before that. I would never have known so much as their names if Viserys had not been there to tell me. He was the only one left. The only one. He is all I have.” “Once,” said Ser Jorah. “No longer, Khaleesi. You belong to the Dothraki now. In your womb rides the stallion who mounts the world.”

~

Ser Jorah had made his way to Dany’s side. He put a hand on her shoulder. “Turn away, my princess, I beg you.”

“No.” She folded her arms across the swell of her belly, protectively.

 AGOT Daenerys IV

After the day in the grass when she had left him to walk back to the khalasar, the Dothraki had laughingly called him Khal Rhae Mhar, the Sorefoot King. Khal Drogo had offered him a place in a cart the next day, and Viserys had accepted. In his stubborn ignorance, he had not even known he was being mocked; the carts were for eunuchs, cripples, women giving birth, the very young and the very old. That won him yet another name: Khal Rhaggat, the Cart King. Her brother had thought it was the khal’s way of apologizing for the wrong Dany had done him. She had begged Ser Jorah not to tell him the truth, lest he be shamed. The knight had replied that the king could well do with a bit of shame ... yet he had done as she bid.

~

“I pray that my sun-and-stars will not keep him waiting too long,” she told Ser Jorah when her brother was out of earshot.

The knight looked after Viserys doubtfully. “Your brother should have bided his time in Pentos. There is no place for him in a khalasar. Illyrio tried to warn him.”

“He will go as soon as he has his ten thousand. My lord husband promised a golden crown.”

Ser Jorah grunted. “Yes, Khaleesi, but ... the Dothraki look on these things differently than we do in the west. I have told him as much, as Illyrio told him, but your brother does not listen. The horselords are no traders. Viserys thinks he sold you, and now he wants his price. Yet Khal Drogo would say he had you as a gift. He will give Viserys a gift in return, yes ... in his own time. You do not demand a gift, not of a khal. You do not demand anything of a khal.”

“It is not right to make him wait.” Dany did not know why she was defending her brother, yet she was. “Viserys says he could sweep the Seven Kingdoms with ten thousand Dothraki screamers.” Ser Jorah snorted. “Viserys could not sweep a stable with ten thousand brooms.”

Dany could not pretend to surprise at the disdain in his tone. “What ... what if it were not Viserys?” she asked. “If it were someone else who led them? Someone stronger? Could the Dothraki truly conquer the Seven Kingdoms?”

Ser Jorah’s face grew thoughtful as their horses trod together down the godsway. “When I first went into exile, I looked at the Dothraki and saw half-naked barbarians, as wild as their horses. If you had asked me then, Princess, I should have told you that a thousand good knights would have no trouble putting to flight a hundred times as many Dothraki.”

“But if I asked you now?”

“Now,” the knight said, “I am less certain. They are better riders than any knight, utterly fearless, and their bows outrange ours. In the Seven Kingdoms, most archers fight on foot, from behind a shieldwall or a barricade of sharpened stakes. The Dothraki fire from horseback, charging or retreating, it makes no matter, they are full as deadly ... and there are so many of them, my lady. Your lord husband alone counts forty thousand mounted warriors in his khalasar.”

“Is that truly so many?”

“Your brother Rhaegar brought as many men to the Trident,” Ser Jorah admitted, “but of that number, no more than a tenth were knights. The rest were archers, freeriders, and foot soldiers armed with spears and pikes. When Rhaegar fell, many threw down their weapons and fled the field. How long do you imagine such a rabble would stand against the charge of forty thousand screamers howling for blood? How well would boiled leather jerkins and mailed shirts protect them when the arrows fall like rain?”

“Not long,” she said, “not well.”

He nodded. “Mind you, Princess, if the lords of the Seven Kingdoms have the wit the gods gave a goose, it will never come to that. The riders have no taste for siegecraft. I doubt they could take even the weakest castle in the Seven Kingdoms, but if Robert Baratheon were fool enough to give them battle ...”

“Is he?” Dany asked. “A fool, I mean?”

Ser Jorah considered that for a moment. “Robert should have been born Dothraki,” he said at last. “Your khal would tell you that only a coward hides behind stone walls instead of facing his enemy with a blade in hand. The Usurper would agree. He is a strong man, brave ... and rash enough to meet a Dothraki horde in the open field. But the men around him, well, their pipers play a different tune. His brother Stannis, Lord Tywin Lannister, Eddard Stark ...” He spat.

“You hate this Lord Stark,” Dany said.

“He took from me all I loved, for the sake of a few lice-ridden poachers and his precious honor,” Ser Jorah said bitterly. From his tone, she could tell the loss still pained him. He changed the subject quickly. “There,” he announced, pointing. “Vaes Dothrak. The city of the horselords.” ~

“Your brother had part of the truth,” Ser Jorah admitted. “The Dothraki do not build. A thousand years ago, to make a house, they would dig a hole in the earth and cover it with a woven grass roof. The buildings you see were made by slaves brought here from lands they’ve plundered, and they built each after the fashion of their own peoples.” Most of the halls, even the largest, seemed deserted. “Where are the people who live here?” Dany asked. The bazaar had been full of running children and men shouting, but elsewhere she had seen only a few eunuchs going about their business.

“Only the crones of the dosh khaleen dwell permanently in the sacred city, them and their slaves and servants,” Ser Jorah replied, “yet Vaes Dothrak is large enough to house every man of every khalasar, should all the khals return to the Mother at once. The crones have prophesied that one day that will come to pass, and so Vaes Dothrak must be ready to embrace all its children.”

~

As each rider swung down from his saddle, he unbelted his arakh and handed it to a waiting slave, and any other weapons he carried as well. Even Khal Drogo himself was not exempt. Ser Jorah had explained that it was forbidden to carry a blade in Vaes Dothrak, or to shed a free man’s blood. Even warring khalasars put aside their feuds and shared meat and mead together when they were in sight of the Mother of Mountains. In this place, the crones of the dosh khaleen had decreed, all Dothraki were one blood, one khalasar, one herd.

 AGOT Daenerys III

 “I warned him what would happen, my lady,” Ser Jorah Mormont said. “I told him to stay on the ridge, as you commanded.”

“I know you did,” Dany replied, watching Viserys. He lay on the ground, sucking in air noisily, red-faced and sobbing. He was a pitiful thing. He had always been a pitiful thing. Why had she never seen that before? There was a hollow place inside her where her fear had been.

“Take his horse,” Dany commanded Ser Jorah. Viserys gaped at her. He could not believe what he was hearing; nor could Dany quite believe what she was saying. Yet the words came. “Let my brother walk behind us back to the khalasar.” Among the Dothraki, the man who does not ride was no man at all, the lowest of the low, without honor or pride. “Let everyone see him as he is.”

“No!” Viserys screamed. He turned to Ser Jorah, pleading in the Common Tongue with words the horsemen would not understand. “Hit her, Mormont. Hurt her. Your king commands it. Kill these Dothraki dogs and teach her.”

The exile knight looked from Dany to her brother; she barefoot, with dirt between her toes and oil in her hair, he with his silks and steel. Dany could see the decision on his face. “He shall walk, Khaleesi,” he said. He took her brother’s horse in hand while Dany remounted her silver. Viserys gaped at him, and sat down in the dirt. He kept his silence, but he would not move, and his eyes were full of poison as they rode away. Soon he was lost in the tall grass. When they could not see him anymore, Dany grew afraid. “Will he find his way back?” she asked Ser Jorah as they rode.

“Even a man as blind as your brother should be able to follow our trail,” he replied.

“He is proud. He may be too shamed to come back.”

Jorah laughed. “Where else should he go? If he cannot find the khalasar, the khalasar will most surely find him. It is hard to drown in the Dothraki sea, child.”

Dany saw the truth of that. The khalasar was like a city on the march, but it did not march blindly. Always scouts ranged far ahead of the main column, alert for any sign of game or prey or enemies, while outriders guarded their flanks. They missed nothing, not here, in this land, the place where they had come from. These plains were a part of them ... and of her, now.

“I hit him,” she said, wonder in her voice. Now that it was over, it seemed like some strange dream that she had dreamed. “Ser Jorah, do you think ... he’ll be so angry when he gets back ... She shivered. “I woke the dragon, didn’t I?”

Ser Jorah snorted. “Can you wake the dead, girl? Your brother Rhaegar was the last dragon, and he died on the Trident. Viserys is less than the shadow of a snake.”

His blunt words startled her. It seemed as though all the things she had always believed were suddenly called into question. “You ... you swore him your sword ...”

“That I did, girl,” Ser Jorah said. “And if your brother is the shadow of a snake, what does that make his servants?” His voice was bitter.

“He is still the true king. He is ...”

Jorah pulled up his horse and looked at her. “Truth now. Would you want to see Viserys sit a throne?” Dany thought about that. “He would not be a very good king, would he?”

“There have been worse ... but not many.” The knight gave his heels to his mount and started off again.

Dany rode close beside him. “Still,” she said, “the common people are waiting for him. Magister Illyrio says they are sewing dragon banners and praying for Viserys to return from across the narrow sea to free them.”

“The common people pray for rain, healthy children, and a summer that never ends,” Ser Jorah told her. “It is no matter to them if the high lords play their game of thrones, so long as they are left in peace.” He gave a shrug. “They never are.”

Dany rode along quietly for a time, working his words like a puzzle box. It went against everything that Viserys had ever told her to think that the people could care so little whether a true king or a usurper reigned over them. Yet the more she thought on Jorah’s words, the more they rang of truth.

“What do you pray for, Ser Jorah?” she asked him.

“Home,” he said. His voice was thick with longing.

“I pray for home too,” she told him, believing it.

Ser Jorah laughed. “Look around you then, Khaleesi.”

But it was not the plains Dany saw then. It was King’s Landing and the great Red Keep that Aegon the Conqueror had built. It was Dragonstone where she had been born. In her mind’s eye they burned with a thousand lights, a fire blazing in every window. In her mind’s eye, all the doors were red.

“My brother will never take back the Seven Kingdoms,” Dany said. She had known that for a long time, she realized. She had known it all her life. Only she had never let herself say the words, even in a whisper, but now she said them for Jorah Mormont and all the world to hear.

Ser Jorah gave her a measuring look. “You think not.”

“He could not lead an army even if my lord husband gave him one,” Dany said. “He has no coin and the only knight who follows him reviles him as less than a snake. The Dothraki make mock of his weakness. He will never take us home.”

“Wise child.” The knight smiled.

“I am no child,” she told him fiercely. Her heels pressed into the sides of her mount, rousing the silver to a gallop. Faster and faster she raced, leaving Jorah and Irri and the others far behind, the warm wind in her hair and the setting sun red on her face. By the time she reached the khalasar, it was dusk.

 AGOT Daenerys II

“Best we get Princess Daenerys wedded quickly before they hand half the wealth of Pentos away to sellswords and bravos,” Ser Jorah Mormont jested. The exile had offered her brother his sword the night Dany had been sold to Kbal Drogo; Viserys had accepted eagerly. Mormont had been their constant companion ever since.

~

Ser Jorah Mormont apologized for his gift. “It is a small thing, my princess, but all a poor exile could afford,” he said as he laid a small stack of old books before her. They were histories and songs of the Seven Kingdoms, she saw, written in the Common Tongue. She thanked him with all her heart.

~

Dany sat there uncertain for a moment. No one had told her about this part. “What should I do?” she asked Illyrio.

It was Ser Jorah Mormont who answered. “Take the reins and ride. You need not go far.”

 AGOT Daenerys I

“Those three are Drogo’s bloodriders, there,” he said. “By the pillar is Khal Moro, with his son Rhogoro. The man with the green beard is brother to the Archon of Tyrosh, and the man behind him is Ser Jorah Mormont.”

The last name caught Daenerys. “A knight?”

“No less.” Illyrio smiled through his beard. “Anointed with the seven oils by the High Septon himself.”

“What is he doing here?” she blurted.

“The Usurper wanted his head,” Illyrio told them. “Some trifling affront. He sold some poachers to a Tyroshi slaver instead of giving them to the Night’s Watch. Absurd law. A man should be able to do as he likes with his own chattel.”

“I shall wish to speak with Ser Jorah before the night is done,” her brother said. Dany found herself looking at the knight curiously. He was an older man, past forty and balding, but still strong and fit. Instead of silks and cottons, he wore wool and leather. His tunic was a dark green, embroidered with the likeness of a black bear standing on two legs.

She was still looking at this strange man from the homeland she had never known when Magister Illyrio placed a moist hand on her bare shoulder.

[ko3ak-archive]

@cndice​ said: 002 006 009 019 025 026 027 035 044 051 067 078 089 096 100

002. Do they do anything to celebrate their birthday? 

At present he hasn’t revealed it to anyone, so no. But in the past when he was in his ice hockey team a teammate’s mama or babushka will always bake him a birthday pie filled with sweet fruit filling. Apparently it’s a thing in Russia to have a birthday greeting carved upon the crust and the first slice is given to the brithday boy/girl!

006. What sense do they most rely on? 

I’d wager it’s his sense of sight. In extremely tactile sports like ice hockey he always has to keep his eye on the puck, understand the play-style of his opponents. In a heist he has to be very observant and he always reads the energy of the room before putting on the mask. 

009. Do they believe in happy endings? 

Took all the strength in my body not to make a wisecrack there, but no, he doesn’t. But he believes it’s possible for someone to make peace with themselves. 

019. If they could have a superpower, what would they choose? 

Invisibility.

025. What do they consider beautiful in others personality-wise? 

He appreciates kindness. Someone who’s willing to spare someone a break when things get tough. You know, empathy.

026. What do they consider ugly in others personality-wise? 

Pride. Arrogance. But ironically it’s something he has a lot of.

027. What is their idea of perfect happiness? 

He’s careful on what he wishes for now. A normal life is at the top of the list. 

035. What is the most important rule your character lives by? 

Well, to not skimp on doing anything and giving his all.

044. What disgusts them? 

Answered here!

051. If they knew they would die tomorrow, what would they do today? 

He’ll call home. Maybe spend the rest of his life wrapped around a lover. 

067. Does your character believe in fate or destiny? 

Sounds an awful lot like coincidences to him...

078. How emotionally stable is your character? 

He’s generally pretty chill for someone whose blood is like 70% alcohol? Jk haha but when worked up he can be blinded by rage BUT it’s a very rare occurrence. Tends to take it out on those around him :/ 

089. How vocally expressive is your character? 

He’s very chatty in Russian! But given that his English is limited he doesn’t really talk a lot, only if he's confident in what he’s saying or has a joke to share. 

096. How do they move and carry themselves? What energy do they project? 

In my mind’s eye he reminds me of a jock at the top of the food chain in high school LOL. Broad shoulders, stocky, confident, with a teeny bit of swagger but really I’m sure it’s the bulk of those muscles talking like he’s got the world in the palm of his hand... but out in the field or the rink and he’s very nimble and dexterous! Peak Mary Sue energy I suppose! 

100. Does your character dream? If so, what do they dream about? 

These days he only sleep comes in installations of power naps. But when he does, it’s usually like an extrapolation of the day’s events featuring people he’s seen that day. Nightmares aren’t scary, but just him being placed into unsavoury situations that feel a little too real. 

[aremewkiddingme]

20-30

020. What are their hobbies?

She likes to weave baskets, to play the harp, and to make pottery.

021. How do they display affection?

Openly, though level of politeness depends on mood. Also she does acts of service a lots.

022. What is the most beautiful thing they’ve ever seen?

As far as things that have affected her. Signless. She thinks darkleer is v hansom though)

023. What do they consider beautiful in others physically?

Long necks, long hair, big man-tiddies. Scars. She likes smooth curved horns, and she likes a nice smile.

024. What do they consider ugly in others physically?

I don't think she considers people to be ugly.

025. What do they consider beautiful in others personality-wise?

Answered!

026. What do they consider ugly in others personality-wise?

Just like... An unwillingness to change. Cruelty that reaches beyond what may be warranted. Disrespect. A general 'you get what you get' attitude.

027. What is their idea of perfect happiness?

I don't know if she's ever been so romantic and fluffy headed as to think that exists. But in an ideal world, she would say just... Everyone able to be themselves and still be loved.

028. What makes them laugh out loud?

Watching darkleer's brow furrow in confusion. Watching Psii tear into someone. Watching someone get their ironically deserved desserts. Nonsense makes her smile, even if it also confuses her.

029. What sort of sense of humor does your character have?

A bit dark, a bit vindictive. But she's also drawn to comfortable jokes, now, and things that make her feel like she belongs.

030. Do they believe in the afterlife?

Hard not to, considering she was dead a while and didn't Stop lol