mirrorwitches | (hotd) the rapture of that cruelty which yet is love (Reply)

Title: the rapture of that cruelty which yet is love
Fandom: House of the Dragon
Pairing(s): Alicent/Rhaenyra, Daemon/Rhaenyra
Rating: Explicit
Length: 35k, 1/1
Tags: Alternate Universe - Victorian, Vampires, Gothic Pastiche, Frame Narrative, Uncle/Niece Incest, Sexual Abuse, Rape/Non-con Elements, Dubious Consent, Blood Drinking, Vampire Sex, Lesbian Sex, Embedded Images, NSFW Art

Written for the Fire & Blood Kink Reverse Bang.

Summary:

Rhaenyra died when Alicent was fifteen. Now, almost twenty years later, Rhaenyra has returned looking not a day older than fifteen—and speaking fondly of something queer: bloodlust.

Content warning: the “sexual abuse” tags refers to an adult vampirically feeding on a minor—no human sex happens, but it’s an intensely erotic and eroticized act and experience that qualifies it as such; this is my attempt at a Neo-Victorian narrative/pastiche in a Victorian Era/Westeros mashup and although it’s relatively minor the general vibe contains some Orientalism, colonial mindsets, ableism, fetishization of paleness/white skin, admiration for the vanished glories of civilizations that were brutal slave empires, etc.; lastly it’s a vampire story with all that might imply about consent issues, as well as specific themes of predation/underage predation/fixation on eternal girlhood or youth etc.

Acknowledgments: Thank you to Becca for her gorgeous art and for being a lovely collaborator, and to all the event staff for their hard work that made this such a well-run event that was a joy to participate in every step of the way!

“In the rapture of my enormous humiliation I live in your warm life, and you shall die—die, sweetly die—into mine. I cannot help it; as I draw near to you, you, in your turn, will draw near to others, and learn the rapture of that cruelty, which yet is love...”

—Carmilla, J. Sheridan Le Fanu

Twenty-seventh day of the tenth month, 1875 AD

Dear Mellos,

Enclosed with this letter is the copy of an astonishing narrative related to one of my cases; the patient somehow managed to smuggle this document onto the ward and hide it under her mattress for a week before a nurse discovered it. I trust you will forgive the poor manners of the abruptness of this opening, both from your usual sympathetic friendship, and from the understanding of the degree of the shock I have suffered that sympathy will quickly form upon reading what I have sent you. I dare not discuss this with any colleagues at the hospital. I knew the good lady who wrote these words intimately—as will not surprise you upon seeing her maiden name, for so did you know her then, in your occupation of the position I replaced you in on your retirement—knew her hand by sight—can attest that it was none other than she who composed this revolting tale, as much as it pains me that my honesty, and concern for my charge, binds me to so attest.

But I do not wish to taint the reputation of a woman of true virtue and keen intelligence, as you yourself know well, who labored so tenderly on behalf of her children, nursed her husband with such devotion, and led a great household with wisdom, and it is for this reason I burden you, and trust to your discretion. These stresses, of a character as must have tried the health of even a woman of her mettle, surely account for this disturbed fiction, penned in her last days. She must have been far more ill than she had let anyone see, and the impression that her mortal sickness was very sudden an illusion. Poor woman; the burn marks on the edges of many of the pages show that some part of her resisted whatever morbid demon of the mind had taken possession of her, and she repented of what it had compelled her to write.

She did not wish her daughter, who I also know was surpassingly dear to her and much attended to (the hospital, whose management I had taken over since my friendship with the family, was chosen for the patient’s care because of our correspondence about the child’s fragile spirits) to actually be the recipient of this filth. Alas, if only her strength had sustained her to destroy it before she did! It must be this that has done for Helaena’s—that is the girl’s name—nerves. Before, to my understanding, although she was worryingly delicate, she was also a happy child, but no longer. She fought like a fiend when these pages were taken from her, and swore that her mother, dead these three years, would be back for her. That is all I shall write for now, I will not take up the time you might better spend reading that which is necessary for us to have a deeper conversation about this case which oppresses me. I take the liberty our long intimacy and my respect for your opinion I think allows me to urge you to read it with all haste, and write me when you have, so I might receive the succor of your advice.

Yours,

Dr. Orwyle Orme

You never inquired about your sister. Not once in your childhood did you glance up from your embroidery and find your attention ensnared by the portrait above the mantel in my little green parlor and lisp, “Mama, what a charming girl she appears, with those lovely, lively eyes with their striking bold look, that makes one fancy she might step down from the wall any moment—is it very like? What was she like, my sister, for I never knew her…”

Perhaps you sensed your father’s injunction, itself unspoken, that she should never be spoken of; for somehow despite the lack of an explicit order from its lord and master this prohibition lay over the whole castle with a powerful force, as if it bound the whole place in a solemn oath of silence. It was remarkable, I’d always thought, how this interdiction I felt to stop my own tongue and seal my own lips was even so absolute as to extend to explaining a discovery I once made, that such a delicious fount for the tattle of servants was apparently never tapped belowstairs.

I discovered it one blustery winter afternoon, when, several months after she’d come into my service, I chanced to dart my eyes, wearied from the rapidly fading light, up from the correspondence they strained over—letters to my family in Oldtown announcing the birth of Daeron, I seem to recall now—to ask Talya to light the lamps, and found her staring at the portrait above the hearth.

The girl was so arrested by it she’d ceased the dusting that was her task, of whatever of my poor ornaments on the mantel had survived your older brother’s depredations—a dashing bravo bowing to a masked courtesan wrought in Myrish glass, a vase from Yi Ti filled with golden hothouse roses, a painted figurine of the Mother with one child perched upon her knee clapping his fat dimpled palms together and one leaning her sweet smooth cheek on her shoulder—some of those pretty little things I had placed about the chamber in an attempt, of which some tapestries inherited from my mother depicting scenes of a springtime wood in the Reach where fox-kits tumbled on beds of new grass beneath budding trees thronged with songbirds, was a chief part, and which gave the room its name, those being the only source of decoration available for the stone walls, to brighten a gloom so pervading it was not even dissipated at the hour of peak illumination afforded by the westward windows, for there was nothing fine or delicate that was not at risk of finding a piece of itself broken off in Aegon’s careless, fidgeting hands.

Anyway, as I said, when I lifted my gaze from my task, which the gathering dusk had plunged into such obscurity I could not continue it, or finish it before supper, without adequate light, it halted upon a sight that made my blood run queerly cold. My newest maidservant stood unmoving, arms slack at her sides and the cloth she had been using spilling from the tips of her limp fingers, her eyes riveted upon the painted ones in the portrait. No, not quite entirely still, and it was this that made that bolt of ice thrill up my spine: Talya only appeared as motionless as the figure in the picture in that instant my attention shifted upward from my desk with her name upon my lips, and the vision imparted was enough to make the word die there, and the amendment which followed as my brain tried to make sense of it made my throat too dry to revive it.

Yes, her feet were stuck fast to the carpet, and her hands were not engaged in their usual flutter of tidying, pouring, folding; each individual part of her was immobile as stone, as if she had been paralyzed by some venom—but her whole frame, her body as one unit entire and greater than the sum of its parts, swayed slowly back-and-forth, as if she was a stem stirred by some impossible breeze in the closed apartment, and yet as if the stalk must assent, bend willingly, go pliant in a flirtatious dance with the wind that would lead it; or, rather—this was the unsettling thought that came first before being ordered into words, which put into my mind the unsettling, unaccounted for idea of some poisoned bite working upon her limbs—it was like the Dornish snake-charmer that we’d once seen at a fair in Spicetown.

We’d watched the man imitate the snake’s sinuous writhing as it emerged from a basket to the caterwauling of a bone flute, and it was unclear to me if it was indeed the music that effected the trick that had us tossing coins in a hat after the snake had been beguiled back into the basket again, or if it was instead its own undulations reflected that mesmerized it and forced its performance of a safe snakishness. This was at first puzzling, for what in the silence of lifeless pigment could work so upon living flesh? Then horror had me in its grip as it became not at all odd, and the only mystery was my abrupt conviction that it was the enchantment the portrait had cast on its viewer which in turn had but temporarily tranced image into holding the lines the painter decreed, with only a certain rippling flash in the gleaming pupils granting a glimpse of what had been compelled to an abeyance of a deadly strike.

“Talya! By the Seven, what do you think you’re doing? Are you blind? Do you not see how dark it has gotten? Stop dawdling and light the lamps at once!”

When my tongue finally revived those stillborn syllables, they were expelled far more harshly than I had originally intended and followed by this bilious flood, for I was pricked by an urgent need to break the air of witchery that had my nerves painfully ajangle, while also to deny it. I played the stock part of mistress scolding maid, one I had never before that day so confidently inhabited, because as a new bride and even then, married for nearly a decade and a mother of four, it was difficult for me to believe myself truly a wife, and not an overgrown child filling in, and laughably, a role once performed with effortless perfection by my predecessors.

Though my reproof was delivered in a tone of command that sounded more convincing than usual to my ear, my unease deepened almost to dread when it seemed for an awful span as if this counterspell for whatever had she at whom it was cast in thrall would not work, because for long heartbeats she did not turn at the incantation. I could not effect that magic order a woman in full possession of her powers could weave upon her domain for the felicity of all who resided within it, nor achieve the grateful submission that would counteract any weak-willed, morbid fancies, of the kind exacted by the grace and elegance of my own mother, or the warmth and gentleness which was my husband’s first wife’s gift, and I myself had observed made all hearts love her.

But even my feebler capacity had some force. After those shuddersome seconds—it could not have been more than that—where the world narrowed to the white of her unbent nape, she stepped back, but with a bizarre wrenching motion, facing away from me for a further interval before whirling around with a gasp. She blinked as if truly waking up, and unsure of where and what she had awoken to.

“Your pardon, ma’am—I am sorry, I don’t rightly know what came over me, what—?”

“The lamps, Talya. The afternoon has grown quite dark. Unless you are unwell—”

“No, my lady,” she insisted. “I’m quite well. Right away. It’s only—”

There she paused, as her head turned on the stem of her neck but did not complete the circuit, and I thought I discerned a willful halting in the way her chin dipped to brush her shoulder before she straightened up and bustled forward toward the lamps.

It was only once she had them merrily burning, distributed around the circular room in a ring—mantle, end tables, my desk—that, blowing out the match and watching herself fiddle with the dial on the last to make the flame flare brighter, she picked up the thread that I, shaken, had let her drop with relief.

(That room, or any other in the grim old fortress, could never be said to be truly cheerful, but at that specific narrow time between afternoon and evening when the lamps were lit, on an overcast winter’s day, it was as if the walls were very permeable, with its location on the top floor of one of the massive towers, thrust up into the air, suspended over the waves above, but also impressed on one the keen sense that the walls were there, and one was dry and warm and unbuffeted by the winds one heard scraping stone, brought by the luster of the lights holding back the gray mists of clouds and seafoam drawing in night.)

“Ma’am,” she began, “I’d never really taken note of it before, but I found myself wondering—who is that lady there, in that picture that hangs above the hearth?” After a start that was deliberately casual in tone, her query ended with her words tumbling over each other in a rush, and she blushed. “Pardon me,” she mumbled, “it’s quite impertinent, I know—”

“I would say it is!” I intervened sharply.

Talya had been an excellent addition to the household staff since her employment with us commenced, and I was surprised at this unforeseen display of a crass penchant for gossip, and dismayed at the brazen ill-breeding evidenced in going so far as to play at a laughable ignorance in trying to acquire it. For I truly thought that it was not feasible she did not know the identity of the sitter in the portrait, and that such a question must be low pretense. A daughter of the house, cruelly taken by death in the flower of youth—following mother and infant brother to the grave not even a year after that dual calamity—could this fail to be featured as a subject among the talk that whiled away the after dinner hour around the fire in their parlors? It was impertinence indeed, and I was icy with affront.

I perceived, from the way her complexion went from pink to red, that she was sensible of the chill in the atmosphere, but this blaze suggested the stoking of an inner heat that allowed her to bluster forth into its blast.

“It is only that I have never before served in a grand old house like this, nor even passed through the gates of one before the day I took up my service here, and to go about my work beneath the likenesses of personages from so long ago looking down upon me from their frames, sometimes it seizes my fancy, as I can’t help thinking of all the years that these walls have stood, and how those lords and ladies once walked through these halls as I do, but in the course of lives so very different from mine, so—romantic, I suppose, or so we always found them, in the kind of stories we heard when I was a girl, and I couldn’t help but wonder which one she was…”

She trailed off at the disbelief that showed plainly on my face. If I could have controlled my features, I might have admonished her that though the tales told of my husband’s ancestors were lurid, they were much exaggerated, and the portraits in their browning varnish depicted men and women who were once flesh and blood like she and I and despite the unorthodox and exotic practices they had brought with them to our shores and held on to until, admittedly, more recently than it was comfortable for many to contemplate, they had for centuries in most particulars conducted themselves like any other noble lineage in Westeros, and were not the figures of black magic and brigandage from foolish old women’s fireside tales.

(I was not confident this was true. After all, I could still vividly recollect, if not the first time I myself walked beneath those painted observers, the first time that mattered, with the powerful impression of being judged by their fierce gazes, which brought to mind a trip to the zoo in Oldtown on a visit back—a visit I could no longer remember in itself, only remember that memory which transmitted it indelibly, by the association that subsumed it—where I’d seen a creature in a cage there with the same smoldering hateful eyes. I knew even then they were only pigment, of soot and bone black for pupil and gypsum and lime for sclera and more complex mixes of azurite and cinnabar for iris, even if I had not yet been taught the names of the materials that made up the varying tints. That same trapped fire that hated its confinement in oils no less than within bars and hated me for being walking free before their imprisonment, for being alive, when they were not.

And the hot hand in mine tugging me from likeness to likeness and introducing me with a lack of any shyness, with the total familiarity one has with those which one converses with every day of one’s life, and despite the introductions featuring narratives of murder and ravishment, not only with none of my strangling terror that their hands would burst from their frames to rend her with their nails, but with a conviction that Rhaenys with her scandalously low neckline of the previous century and the beauty mark and her tumbled powdered curls and mischievous smile and her little silk slipper loose at the heel on her adorable foot, and Visenya stern in a hunting habit with a pistol at her belt, standing at a desk, one hand extended with its forefinger finger pointing toward a map and the other on her son’s head, and Rhaena with a complexion pale with grief and defilement in her widow’s weeds, if they escaped their incarceration, would reach out to pet silver hair with thin burning fingers, draw up into black-damasked laps turned yielding for this occupant…

But despite the biographies given to me that day with perfect childish matter-of-factness, the contention that his grandfather always asserted they were the equally childish fantasy created and cherished by the lower orders had been my husband’s damper on what he maintained was giddy, girlish ghoulishness.)

My mouth was, however, too idiotically agape for such a venture and could only shape itself to exclaim, “Why, you really don’t know!”

Yes, she really did not know. I asked her if she really could confuse the fashions of a decade ago with those of the past century, and moreover, did not see the resemblance with the portrait of Lord Targaryen’s previous wife which she had perhaps seen when she brought us tea in his study, which told the truth of the identity of the sitter in this one, which I now informed her of. Talya assented that yes, she could see the similarity now, and the modern make of the white dress the girl in the painting we discussed—she remembered when she was a girl, that ladies had sleeves like that—but in a tone of doubt, that suggested she was trying to convince herself of facts that contradicted whatever had cast its spell on her, something quite beyond fact, and impenetrable to it.

I was so cross with her that afternoon because she was late in her dusting that day for some unimportant reason I cannot recall. Usually at that hour I was alone, and this was by design. I had set down my pen and looked up. Typically the lamps integral to the ritual were already lit. For a matter of minutes, or up to a half hour sometimes depending on how recalcitrant or docile she had decided to be, the shifting balance of my strength versus hers, we would stare at each other. It had to happen at that time, which changed through the year, requiring calibrations that the staff struggled to keep up with, that specific thin line between light and dark. By daylight it was simply the insipidly pretty portrait of an inspidly pretty girl, amateur, painted a decade ago by yet another insipid miss under the instruction of their drawing master.

By night, it became something else. I did not know what—I made sure never to be in that room at night, under the excuse of how it became mysteriously difficult to heat adequately once dark had fallen. I only understood I had put something into this, my first and last work of portraiture, made in my fourteenth year, which I did not understand, and which could not simply be destroyed and was thus my singular responsibility, and which consigned me to wrestle it back into the slumber it seemed to struggle out of each night as the candlelight glinted a secret amusement into the eyes and made the red gem at the center of the necklace of Valyrian steel pulse like a heart.

I was born in Oldtown, chief city of that region of wine and honey, the Kingdom of the Reach, but my earliest memories were of shale and gale, because before I had reached my first year my father had relocated his family—save my elder brother Gwayne, left behind under the care of my uncle, to reap the benefits of the excellent education the famed schools there could provide, as well of those of his relation with so preeminent a guardian which was an advantage that could not at that juncture be scorned—from that scene of sophistication to be an outsider in the bleak landscape and cruder society of the Kingdom of the Stormlands. This move was done in pursuit of accruing benefit held in his own right and by his own ability, and in his own grant to bestow upon his young family, preferring this to remaining at ease and in esteem in a venerable homeland but enduring a dependence that an intelligence and pride such as his could not help but experience as intolerable indignity.

He was the younger brother of Lord Hightower, had studied law at the Citadel, the most prestigious university in all Seven Kingdoms, and put it to the use of his family for many dedicated years. He had resolved not to wed or start a family until he could support it from his own enterprise rather than his brother’s magnanimity, and he married my mother and fathered my brother and I well into his middle age. Once he had children of his own, however, he desired not only to provide for them in the present but in future, to create a legacy he could bequeath them. The Stormlands were, in those days, still a wild and more sparsely populated place, lacking the cosmopolitan cities of remotest antiquity and the heights of culture of the Reach, or even, in the same numbers, the thronging ports, and bustling market towns, and pretty villages studding the dense, old cultivation of sprawling farmsteads, that the Riverlands and the West could boast. It was not as remote or desolate as Dorne or the North, and my father guessed that though our new home was rough and undeveloped, that only meant it was ripe for development, if a man fit for the task set his will to it.

By the time I had reached the age when a child begins to grasp the circumstances of her life, I knew the facts that had made me Rhaenyra Targaryen’s special friend: my father had arrived in Duskendale, the largest town and economic heart of the Stormlands, and with his capital formed the company that built the first railroad connecting that port—which was the point of arrival for perfumes from Lys to dab at our throats and wrists, lace from Myr to adorn our hems, amber and furs from Ib to encircle our necks and arms and warm our shoulders, and whale oil to light our lamps and whale bone to sculpt our waists—to Oldtown’s, whence flowed in spices from Qarth to season our food and gemstones from the Summer Isles to bering our fingers and stud our ears, and gleaming hardwoods to plank our floors and and be carved into chests and cupboards to contain these commodities, and into ladies’ dressing tables and dining room sideboards to display those from even farther afield, jade statuettes from Leng and silk runners from Yi Ting. In the course of this endeavor he made first the acquaintance, and then the friendship, of many of the most prominent families of the realm, including the Targaryens of Dragonstone.

It was only natural that a man of my father’s ambition should seek an intimacy with Jaehaerys Targaryen, as it was that one of Jaehaerys’ make should respond with interest to the overture. He was the greatest statesmen the Kingdom of the Storm had ever seen; it was he who as Chief Minister to several Durrandon kings had sown and nurtured the seeds of progress that my father would harvest, had in concert with the influx of wealth Corlys Velaryon as Admiral and his expeditions brought taken his family’s adopted homeland—for though it had been nearly a thousand years since they arrived on that shore, still, like us, they were in some way outsiders—from a wind-wracked, pirate-plagued irrelevance to a state of unprecedented prosperity: taxes imposed; roads laid; streets paved; schools founded; levees built; canals dug; marshes drained; laws enshrined.

This miraculous transformation was matched by the one this record of service effected in turn on his family’s reputation, so that even a man as conscientious about the proprieties as my father felt no qualms about any ill-result attending a young daughter’s moral character as a result of the association. It was rather a testament to the redoubtable strength of the famed character of this patriarch that his own origins, both his ancestors’ histories in the centuries since they had claimed the isle that was their seat and the many tragedies of his own early life, were filled with such outrages as begrimed his family tree. The murderous feuds between close kin, the incestuous “marriages” that besmirched the legitimacy of all children born from them (his own marriage to his cousin—daughter of the usurping uncle that had murdered a brother and turned a sister into his illegitimate bride—was nothing uncommon): that had been consigned firmly to the past by his towering reputation for probity, duty, and virtue.

The period of this formative relationship proved brief, though far more decisive that its duration might appear to warrant. The friendship between that reverence and my father lasted only a year before death from advanced age took him. He was succeeded by his grandson. He had been plagued by heartbreak in his children, both tragedy and dishonor. Promising sons preceded him to the grave, as had most of his daughters, and the name of the one remaining to the world of the living never passed his lips. For scandal had not entirely been extinguished from his line—merely reduced to a kind that might visit its affliction on any honest man, no matter how unimpeachable the management of his household.

Jaehaerys’ heir was of a quite different character than his esteemed grandsire. Amiable, good-humored, and preferring the quiet joys of domesticity with a much loved wife to the strivings of the world, he was not completely lacking in ambition, but it was of such a moderate type that it could not overcome a lack of inclination for the forceful effort that must support the attainment of its goals, and his disposition was of such a cast that any disappointment at this was so slight as to not be much noticed by anyone with less fine a discernment of men’s natures of than my father, who noted, and had corroborated once he swiftly acquired Viserys’ confidence as he had his predecessor’s, that pangs of disquiet at falling short of the legacy he inherited with name and castle were not strangers to him, although neither could they say to be intimates. It must have been a puzzle to those who follow and comment upon these matters that my father should have maintained an equal warmth of intimacy with one who at that date could not have appeared to offer much in the way of an advancement he could not even secure for himself, and although the discovery, several years on, of the uses of dragonglass in powering steam engines amply justified this loyalty, if urged to honesty, I must admit it owes to the luck that has assisted inborn talent in the successes of my father’s career.

These were the circumstances that I was aware of, in the vague, distorted fashion of childhood, or came to be aware of, as those that had designated me as a sacrifice, in that year I fervently believed that that was what I was to be.

Strange, that I do not remember my first day on Dragonstone or its first meeting with Rhaenyra. But if it transpired the way it was told to us, as our mothers later occasionally laughed over it, it must have played its part in the surmise that was to overtake me with a conviction that I certainly did not experience as ridiculous at the time. As I, aged six, peeped out from behind my mother’s skirts, the shining petite presiding priestess of the place apparently jumped up from playing with her dolls on the rug before the hearth, came forward boldly as I would soon come to know she always pleased and hauled my timid self out, inspected me with her presumptuous palms (plucking at my pinafore, fondling my plump arms) and staring searchingly into my eyes as a smile stole over her lips, before thrusting her hands under my curls and reportedly sighing, “O, but she is beautiful! Even better than the whip…”

That was the anecdote that was fondly chuckled over, Rhaenyra’s darling daring and my adorable apprehension, but I am sure Lady Targaryen quickly tugged her daughter back and chided her for rudeness, apologized to my mother, who no doubt insisted that of course Lady Rhaenyra had caused no offense, it was only natural she would be so excited to have a new little playmate for company. Another thing it seems I had always known, for I could not say when it was I was told, and likely never was, it being the sort of thing picked up by children—who are so sharp in deciphering that which is left only to implication, for that is precisely what rules small lives—was that I was a gift my father offered up to Lord Targaryen’s daughter.

It was said, I think, because despite the rest of that introduction proving irretrievable to my conscious memory—the dolls are my embellishment, the other details reportage—I could still hear Lady Aemma’s sweet voice crying the words, “Darling, look! Mr. Hightower has brought you a friend,” perhaps because they tied themselves to other associations, as I will reveal shortly. It was all that lay behind this simple utterance that I must intuit.

That Rhaenyra had to be brought friends in her isolated abode; that she would be brought them because she was a special sort of girl; that she was in this isolation because the family did not often travel to town, and this was because her mother was often ill; that she was so often ill because she was always having a baby and the babies were always dying, so the spirit of the place was sad and the daughter of the house was too; that she had no playmates because she was the only occupant of the nursery, till I came. That I could please my father by becoming this daughter’s intimate, as my mother was meant to become its lady’s, although they never got on, quite, and anyway my mother was not at Dragonstone nearly as often as I was, with my long stays with their shared schoolroom under Septa Marlowe’s tutelage, having her duties as my father’s hostess, and as he himself had become a confidant and guide to its uncertain lord; that this might be of some benefit to him later.

Such a bosom friendship was a part of the strong threads of connection I was to help to spin, one that might be densely woven as we grew to womanhood, binding fathers and husbands and offspring in one fabric through the gentle genius of female amity, even if it was no son and heir for me to secure the infant affection of, that it might be nursed to its fuller form in maturity: for another thing I apprehended was that she, this girl who seemed so natural to the environment that had formed her, would not inherit them, that if a brother should never draw breath for longer than a few weeks it would descend, lordship and seat, to her uncle.

How often I must have heard this echo: “Darling, look at what your uncle has sent you!” And Rhaenyra would come forward, either flying forth with an excited clap of her hands, if it had not been long since said uncle’s departure, and as if despite her tantrums and sulks whenever he dared to leave her presence she was somewhere glad he did so it might enable these sign of his adoration, these offerings of homage sent back to her from afar in crates footmen must be sent for to pry open the lids of, to lift out of the straw the smaller containers that had conveyed the submitted treasure safely for her inspection, as she raised her entwined hands to cradle beneath her chin, tapping her lip with a considering forefinger; or, if he had been absent for what she determined was too protracted a duration and she demanded he present himself to worship in his person, with a sullen shuffle, a dull, resentful glare, crossed arms that rejected all attempts to pass over these additions to her hoard for her perusal, emphasized by a pout.

Up from the packing came candies in their tissued honeycombs; velvet and silk and lace for ribbons and sashes and handkerchiefs; a music box where a Lysene dancing girl forever and never whirled away her veils to a mechanical tune; to hold the emeralds and rubies and sapphires and pearls to encircle her slender neck and slight wrists, to bering her stubby fingers and stud her tiny ears; and altogether stranger gifts, or so they must have struck me in the beginning—fossilized dragon scales preserved in a slab of shale, for example; or an antique dagger (the tantrum after this was quickly removed from her possession was so frightening it had me wailing), or one of the stunted firewyrms that still lived in the Doom, brought back from the expedition, though it died shortly after (Rhaenyra’s wails so heartrending in their grief for the ugly, loathed creature it had me weeping); but more than anything there were the books, books and books and books, and the dolls, of cloth and wood and wax and porcelain.

A fellow worshiper attending the observance of this ritual might conclude that it was fitting the priestess of this bizarre cult should be a girl-child after all, because, with one or two idiosyncratic touches allowable to a child with liberal guardians who believed that an interest in history both natural and social did not go amiss in the education of female offspring, they were exactly the presents of any spoilt little girl. It was only after more sustained service as acolyte performed in the management of this treasury that the oddity of these donations—or rather, the use made of them—became clear.

A glut of gifts, profligate, with no rhyme or reason or guiding principle. As if every morning, this uncle—I imagined this before I ever met him—woke after his corrupted nights (my father had tried to find him various forms of employment to set him up in the world and give shape to his days, as he himself had yearned to do as a younger son, but he not acquit himself well, scorned my father for his assistance, resented him for the preference his brother showed to him above his own feckless self, and rejected the company of his family and residence upon his native shore to fritter away his inheritance in a dissipated restless wandering) and walked through the great cities of the world with his only thought what the brilliance of modern civilization might produce for the delight of doted upon nieces and considered the day a failure if he had not acquired at least one, but the presents that seemed most exceptional to the larger mass actually provided the key to decode a scheme that was actually the reverse: it was the glories of a past civilization, whose remnants his self-imposed exile led him to sojourn among that apparently spoke to him, endlessly, of a small girl left behind.

This passion that niece and uncle shared—or rather that he had helped breed in her from an early date—was not on its face remarkable. Enthusiasm for the study of ancient Valyria, its history and science and art and literature, was widespread in Westeros, where the achievements of that vanished empire were acknowledged to be of so towering a stature that despite the slightness of that polity’s impact on the annals of our realms in vulgar political terms, its influence on the course of the world’s destiny merited a debt of appreciation be paid by all educated men and women. It rose to what could without exaggeration be named passion, for many, to near mania in some; what had been a trickle of travelers to the Free Cities across the Narrow Sea had swelled to a tide that flowed unceasingly to deposit my countrymen and women on those shores where the more material eternity of the flowerings of its culture could be encountered.

Professorships endowed; expeditions to the Doom funded; museum wings dedicated. Highborn children copied the foreign characters out of primers and learned poetry in challenging but suddenly astonishingly comprehensible syllables by heart under the supervision of their tutors, and any child who could acquire myths retold to improve tender years from a bookseller’s stall might have their imagination stimulated by the exalted past. This being the case, it required even less explanation for why a little girl should demonstrate such interest, when that girl was a Targaryen.

They had brought the last dragons to our shores, millennia ago, where they had shortly after perished—but the last dragons (creatures whose existence was a matter of doubt, in a latter, more enlightened age, until the energies of that enlightenment had in their turn used scientific principles to prove their facticity from the bones to be found plentifully through the whole span of the world) had died on Dragonstone, claimed by the Kingdom of Storms. After this the Targaryens had sunk into relative obscurity as another noble family swearing fealty to House Durrandon, often prominent, if not always creditably so, in the affairs of the kingdom but far fallen from the dragonlords whose acts had directly and irrevocably shaped the course of human events. All that remained was the almost mystical, eerie aura of dynamic relics, of an access to what was lost conveyed physically by the silver hair and violet eyes that still bred strong from the proudly cultivated separateness that contributed its part to the mixture of aversion and fascination that made any mention of them thrum with its unique peculiar tension.

Lord Viserys, having deferred from the vigorous political life of his predecessor, devoted his days instead to the study of Valyrian antiquity. He corresponded with scholars, and scholars regularly presented themselves at the gate on the bridge that was still the only way onto the island, and were admitted regardless of their pedigree or credentials to examine whatever particular tome was the very key to their researches which could be only be found there—although only to be examined under the eagle-eyed surveillance of a Dr. Mellos Melcolm, who was in residence as physician to its delicate lady but also had assumed management of the library—as long as they could conduct an elucidating conversation on this cherished subject. For the library at Dragonstone had one of the most impressive collections of Valyrian texts in the world, and crates sent from Volantis addressed from brother to brother were also carried into the Great Hall and pried upon by footmen to reveal to their eager master fragile manuscripts to add to this already priceless archive.

The streams did not cross. Occasionally Daemon would append a note to a manuscript of particular antiquity or interest, urging his brother to show it to his daughter, and that was a great treat for Rhaenyra, to be perched on her father’s lap, Dr. Melcolm opening tome too huge to hold in the hands on the table in the library appointed for this purpose, and Rhaenyra leaning over to look at the colorful illuminations as her father carefully turned the pages, paint still bright even on browning vellum so fragile it looked as it they might crumble to pieces any moment, so conscious of this special moment of attention she was unusually heedful of the prohibition not to touch. But although a man who sent a girl of five daggers and whips as gifts would hardly have compunctions about the risk to the historical record posed by gifting her singular manuscript copies, from her uncle Rhaenyra received only printed books, and this was because her most generous devotee understood that it was not the book itself that interested her, its age or its rarity but what was inside.

From the bottom of the crate, beneath jewels and dolls, she would unearth the latest text. They were not books for children, and at that stage she could not read the ones in Volantene or Pentoshi. She would soon enough, and eagerly she consumed the words that described for her the palaces of the dragonlords, built high into the heavens from shining dragonglass, with their rooftops large enough for dragons of hundreds of years of age to land safely upon, the slave markets of Draconys, the Anogrion where the conquered were sacrificed on great altars, their blood drained caught in bowls so that the blood mages could work it into magic spells—at least in the Old Valyrian epic that was the first complete narrative in High Valyrian that we and all other school children read. In other households but this one the most exciting parts might be redacted for moral reasons, for it told the mythic tale of a decades long war with Old Ghis, written down many centuries after that shadowy conflict is estimated to have taken place, where the gods helped and hindered dragonlord heroes, one who stole away his brother’s wife (who was, of course, the sister of both) so the betrayed brother sacrificed his own daughter to have blood of the dragon powerful enough to call down a great curse…

Even before we could read that or any other, we looked at the illustrations. The reproduction of a black blood-draining bowl excavated from the city Tyria, where a scene from the poem where the sister married her elder brother, gazing back over her shoulder at her younger brother on the steps of the temple the wedded pair have just exited in fear of his longing or in her own, we could not decide, was worked in red. Hours Rhaenyra could study this: the fall of the bride’s tunic, the elaborate coils of braided hair wrapped around her head, the dragons the couple walked toward to mount for the traditional last virgin’s flight, the slave musicians strumming a lyre and beating a drum in perhaps the same bridal hymn whose remaining fragments it illustrated. Or the one of the friezes from a merchant’s mansion in the same city, which depicted the sack of a city which was supposed to be the final destruction of Old Ghis, but which suspiciously looked like the contemporary Valyrian city where the home whose dining room it decorated was located: the dragons swooping rained down flame, but almost as an afterthought to the lovely sweep of their wings as they soared across an incongruously fine evening sky, the artist obviously having desired to use up a large shipment of Tyroshi purple to flaunt his patron’s wealth, and loathing to obscure it with a humble mix of black and white for smoke.

These and other famed artworks were familiar to both father and daughter. Some of the features were sources of common perusal, I suspect: the dragons, of course, and the temples with their lurid, macabre fascination. But in an imagining of how the Anogrion might have appeared, based on extant texts, Lord Targaryen looked to the ornamentation of the pediments, to ensure the greatest accuracy in his great project, which was an immense model of the city of Valyria, recreated down to fine detail in plans he had various artists in succession draw up to his specifications, based on the research he pursued. Rhaenyra looked down below the draconic grotesques, to the line of the garments the priestesses wore as they held the knife above a bound captive on the steps. Her eyes bore into the pipes a flute girl in the crowd played, her head cocking to the side as if she listened to some inner silence hard enough, she would be able to hear its ancient rhythms.

She wished to live Valyria. The other most common gifts, the dolls, were the first clue, her first opportunity for trial, before the addition of me allowed for an expansion of her horizons—a vision of living it in herself, which needed a companion. The velvet and silk and lace, whatever their intended purpose, where made at her instruction into tunics and gowns and mantles to clothe dolls stripped of the latest crinolines they came out of their boxes in to transform them from fashionable Oldtown ladies into dragonladies, priestesses, Rhoynish captives.

One not familiar with the fate of these expensive gifts, on watching multiple of these unboxings, would begin to wonder how even such a nursery as the behemoth of Dragonstone must contain to nurture its young would have room for all of them. I wondered too, jealousy. I had no lack of toys, but even I was stricken by envy at the sheer embarrassment of riches on display. Perhaps not that first day, but shortly thereafter, Rhaenyra grabbed up one doll—one of the priestesses in her black tunic and red hooded mantle and high-laced sandals—thrust another into my arms—a shoeless Rhoynish captive in a white smock—and, evading Septa Marlowe with her usual ease, by our entwined free hands pulled me out into the sun.

On a stretch of seashore hidden from all eyes by one of the large black rocks that dotted the sand, chosen, however, for a particular black stone worn shiny and smooth by the tide when high, but revealed when it was far out as it was at this hour, the sun making us squint when flashed into our eyes from the silver pools spangling the muddy expanse.

There was a ritual, which she had worked out in fine detail during many lonely rehearsals. First, we must adore the dolls into submission, both mistress and slave. This was done by sitting on another rock, our feet dangling into one of the pools, jabbering away at nonsense childish business, pretending the dolls in our arms weren’t there, to let them know they weren’t real, as we brushed their hair, and tweaked their garments, and cradled them in our arms as we ran our fingers over their tiny, exquisite porcelain faces, and gazed adoringly into their shiny glass eyes. Anyone who has been a child, and while lying awake sleepless in the dark in a bedroom shared with dolls, or stuffed animals, or toy soldiers, or anything with eyes that might look, has hoped their daytime incantations have been sufficient, their stultifying love powerful enough to pet and kiss and stroke into a stunned daze strong enough to last the night’s terror.

Then, we must adore them back into life for us. We must stand them up in our laps, and chatter at them, and let them chatter to each other through us, and sing them little songs, and tell them how beautiful they looked, and flesh out their backstories in exhaustive detail (the dragonlady had entered the temple after being disappointed in love; she would have her revenge on her fickle brother when she had the enslaved Rhoynish princess he’d fallen in love with when he’d captured her as booty on campaign included among the next round of sacrifices). Anyone who has been a child, and on leaving their room in the morning has left behind dolls, or stuffed animals, or toy soldiers, has when returning from some outing and going to their room to change for luncheon, paused at the door to their room with their hand on the handle, hoping when they twist it open they will find anything with limbs that might move alive and busy about the doings these things we so imbue with our life must surely occupy themselves with when we are not present. Or perhaps it was the other way around—that would perhaps make more sense, but in my memory this was the formula: uneasily subdued, but qualifiedly alive.

Only then could her preferred game at that stage again. She told me in terrifying detail about the blood sacrifices that the Valyrians believed had made them master of the world, of the powerful priestesses who oversaw the slitting of the throats of hundreds of captives so the blood ran down the altars in waves, who slathered their bare breasts in it and ululated songs filled with the roars and whistles of dragonspeech in thanks for the victories that had brought these captives to them, and to call forth more victories, and yet more sacrifices for the gods. Then, called by the scent of the blood, dragons would thunder down from the sky to bathe the corpses in fire, and consume the most fortunate of the dead.

I wonder if my father found it ludicrous or obscene, when he once caught us at it while out for a hack. The first time I was roped in as a conductor to the rite, I wavered between nervous giggles and tears of terror, knowing I must smother both equally if I was to pass muster. The second time was easier, and by the third I could not have imagined feeling amusement or fear. We smashed the doll’s faces in with a solemnity and fervor that, as I picture myself as I am now, looking down on Rhaenyra and my small self, I cannot decide whether I find amusing or sickening. There was no blood. We gathered shards into a bowl secreted in a hollow of the looming outcrop for that purpose, and then dipped it in seawater warmed by the sun, and slathered our faces in it, and pretended it was blood.

This game had been her compulsive, obsessive fixation for a good while, I gathered. Once I was entered in, it expanded out. She had tunics made for herself, and me as well, and insisted upon going about in them. Even the year she died, she would often shun corsets and petticoats for this garb: tunics of gold, like fire, for a maiden of a dragonlord family, black, like smoke, for a matron, red, like blood, for a priestess. These were the only colors she ever wore even when she submitted to modern shape and line. The white gown with embroidery of the most up-to-date fashion of 1852 I painted her in, shipped in a long box from Oldtown, worn because she thought our new drawing master Mr. Cole might like it, was a rarity.

With my advent in her universe, a living doll expanded her capacities. I too would lie on the black rock, chill beneath my white tunic, and with the edge of a broken shell she would prick my chest, where an adult was less likely to take note. The greater powers of childish imagination were sufficient for the rest. I went limp, my eyes fluttered closed so the sunshine through and painted the back of the lids red with the blood in my veins, so I could see it, what she wanted me to see—the blood washing down the stone, enough blood to paint her face as red as her tunic, and my acquiescence, my entering in to her playing at power, was somehow power enough to magnify the miserly drops she dabbed at her cheeks, and scrubbed out with sea water before we returned home.

I thought this rite of blood had initiated me, but after several months, I learned there was another that I must undergo for full admission. Early in the morning, before anyone but servants laying the fires stirred, when the entire island was shrouded with thick fog, she shook me awake. She gave me a couple of fat wax candles to carry, and a book of matches for my pocket. She held the hilt of a knife that I could tell was sharper than any we were allowed to use in her fist, and our shoes swung by their laces from the same grip. She always distributed our burdens so one hand each remained free to clutch at the others. Sneaking down the stairs in our socks, out a side door where we put our boots on, shushing the other’s giggles.

The giggles vanished from her face after that, as a solemn look stole over her features. Mine disappeared as well, as the sunless morning was chill, and the smothering fog made my small form a miserably damp one within minutes, and I was pining for the chocolate we would have for breakfast, and because the walk to the destination she would not reveal was arduous, being long and entirely uphill, and my legs tired quickly as we clambered over rocks upward toward the peak that was still known as the Dragonmont, though the single generation of those creatures that had made their nests and laid their eggs there before dying out mysteriously was so far in the past.

We arrived at a cleft in the rock that it would be exceedingly difficult to find if you did not already know of its existence, obscured by a jumble of surrounding rock who I only noted because they provided a shelter from the wind. In a dry crevice, she placed the candles and the knife, and took my sweaty palms in hers. I wanted to laugh, she appeared so uncharacteristically serious, but, and even now I can’t decide if this was fortunate or unfortunate, if it doomed me or saved me, if it marks me worthy or damned. For there is no doubt in me that she would have turned back then, if I had.

She informed me that what she wished to show me was very special. That only Targaryens could see it. I nodded glumly, accepting, if peevish that her desire for my company had set me on such a pointless trek. I plopped down on a rock, quite content to wait for her, or fearful that if I gave vent to the true extent of my irritation with her she would have her revenge. In such moments, the dolls were brought out once more, and she would talk to them of me as if I was not there, saying that wasn’t it a shame Alicent insisted on being such a bore, until I had to demonstrate a sufficient spirit to win back her approval by seizing the usurper and smashing her face against the doorframe while Rhaenyra screamed murder as if she herself was victim of unspeakable violence.

When she saw my dejected, exhausted slump, she laughed, poking her tongue through the gap in her teeth as was her habit. “That is why you must become my blood sister,” she explained. This was the purpose for which she had brought the knife. On the slimy moss of the rock she laid our two skinny wrists side-by-side, and tossed the blade over to me. I shook my head in a sick panic. I tried to press it back into her hands. “You must,” she insisted. “You must cut your palm, enough to draw your blood, and then I will draw mine, and we can mix ours together, and we will be blood sisters.”

“Please, Rhaenyra,” I begged in a pitiful whine. “You do it for me.”

I was nearly in tears, nauseous with misery at how I was about to prove my unworthiness with my squeamishness. An eloquent noise of disgust passed her lips, and spurred by fear and fury—why must I do it first—I grabbed up the knife and slashed down, aiming for her palm but wild with my welter of feelings dragging it across the inside of that bared arm instead. Rhaenyra yelled in outrage so that I thought they must surely hear us back at Dragonstone and send someone to drag as back, and then laid into me, saying that I might have the rest of them tricked into thinking I was an angel who could do no wrong but she knew I was a foul little beast, and then scrabbled with her dripping arm for dropped instrument and slit me open with her own enraged hacking motion.

Then she grasped me by the hand. We interlaced our fingers and pressed our entire arms together so the slits we’d carved in each other’s fleshed kissed, smearing our blood together just as she’d prescribed, until we could have not said whose stained us where, whether our own caused the greater damage or the other’s. She had her elaborate rituals, chanting Valyrian prayers of her own devising, but for this momentous occasion apparently the blood was sufficient: the blood, all, to which the addition of mere words, even in that tongue so suited to the rites of blood, its shedding and redistribution and refashioning, would have debased it. We stared at each other as the wind whipped our unbound hair across our faces, into the salt-tracks of the angry tears had carved across our cold cheeks. She simply kissed me once and said “Haedar,” and though my grasp of the language was at that point far inferior, having started my tutelage once we had a tutor in common, and never very good, lacking in the practice she had received at such a tender age in its use as a language of everyday living, I knew of course what it meant.

We tore strips from our chemises, and plucked moss from the stone—believing ourselves far more gravely injured than we in fact were, and in need of serious measures to stanch the bleeding that was now the livid, euphoric sign of the risk we had dared in our devotion to one another—and bound our wounds, and leaving the rusting blade upon the rock retrieved the candles from the hollow. Taking the hand at the end of my stinging wrist, Rhaenyra led the way. The passageway was so narrow that even tiny girls as we were then had to go in sideways. My free palm dragged along the pitted black stone, because we quickly plunged into a profound blackness that my sight could not penetrate. My whimpers of fear echoed off what I knew with a shiver was not the stone close around us, but some immensity of darkness beyond that I could not see, any more than I could see the bright head in front of me it had swallowed up. There was no way to keep a grip on a candle, with the way we had to shimmy our way forward along the squeezing constriction that left us scraped and bruised and gasping when it finally popped us out into a vastness I could feel, a gusting breeze as some cavern of a size that, denied of sight and after the pressure of that tight damp entrance, I imagined might be another world within the mount, a mirror to the daylight world without just as large, inverted, opening out forever.

When the candles were lit, I saw the stubs of previous illumination around the burning ones Rhaenyra affixed to the rock with the wax she resoftened with the heat of the new flame, like the fragrant mass of melted tallow that formed in the Starry Sept, when we went by train to visit Uncle Hobart and my brother, the remnants of prayers for the dead. Rhaenyra fidgeted during services, pulled faces, could not remember her prayers. One girl, and yet so many visits she must have made to have formed this waxy range with its heights and valleys, to do honor to her dead.

An incredibly well-preserved dragon skeleton, gargantuan in size, its skull alone several times our heights. I squeaked when I worked up the bravery to raise my eyes from Rhaenyra’s preparations to see what they were intended to allow me to see. How many times she must have come here alone, how familiar a routine and a sight. And yet she was weeping, silently, a flow of tears from her eyes but her features quite placid, not twisted with grief. I emitted some noise of concern, and she glanced at me as she stood up. The rage and glee from earlier was gone. She did not appear sad, as I usually found her sadness: a large thing, trapped in her diminutive frame, demanding attention.

“It makes me so sad, that they are all dead, I can’t help it.” she said quietly, as if it was a despair larger than human expression, that could not be contained in her body at all, even uneasily. She must come, and weep, and do as she now did, an odd dance of her own devising, her outspread arms like wings. Thinking back from my present vantage I should be overcome with what a ridiculous sight this was, a tiny girl before the dragon skull flapping her arms about and making mournful dragonish sounds with a ludicrous solemnity. I did not laugh then; I do not laugh now.

We entered the dying of childhood, which is simultaneously the birth of womanhood, in these days a much longer span than formerly, a slow dying and protracted birth, designated girlhood. Events occured which murdered pieces of the child within us instantly, a withering of vital parts that left the whole alive but aching, twisted and ugly, and delivered us as malformed adults, incapable of conducting a productive or dignified existence. Which is to say that our mothers died.

But we were not yet women, which was a separate matter, and would not attain that state until we married. We understood we must wait for others to decide our fate, and although we had always known that was the case, and some portion of us felt our own incapacity in the dependence of our recent manglings and the irreplaceable care whose loss precipitated our predicament and made it the more urgently necessary, and yearned for guidance, our minds remained untouched, and were condemned to know that even if we must resign our keeping to others considered wiser, our own intelligences could not help but bring the force of rational analysis to bear on the arrangements in draft and our spirits revolt at the results.

Our mutinies were different. Mine, an entirely inward resentment, quickly anesthetized by temperament and habit to a soothing, dread-laced inertness besides. Hers, enraged, needling, disturbing, unburiable. It made sense this should be so. I would pass from her hands to another’s. This too we had always understood. She had been allowed to dictate our lives—at least as viewed from my petty perspective in light of what it took to be the important details, like what games we should play, and on who we should bestow the favor of our liking and who we must snub, and what colors we should wear, and whether we should confess to a wrongdoing (always vetoed), or resort to stratagems of deception and concealment, which of course followed on whether we should venture to defy a prohibition in the first place (always forced through)—when they were not of much consequence, or so the structuring theory of child rearing seemed to run for Lord and Lady Targaryen. It fell to her bereaved father as her sole remaining parent to begin to realize the error of which all the most sophisticated manuals on parenting sound children would have gladly informed him, about the poor effect worked upon the moral character of those offspring granted too much their own way.

My father, by contrast, had taken pains to make it clear to me, if not in so many words, that I was only on loan to the court of a princess of her own minute, ephemeral, and inconsequential kingdom, as maidens of old trained for their later noblemost services by their virgin thrall to a grand dame. Or I had been permitted to be her doll, safely held in store by assurance of the inanimacy of expectancy, and at the appointed hour, he would breathe the breath of life into me, vivifying me as his daughter so he might give me as wife.

The time was coming soon. Not so soon; we were only fifteen. Rhaenyra died within a year of her mother: fifteen. But we could glimpse it on our horizon—time that can be apprehended by all the senses, as autumn storms could be observed moving in out of the Narrow Sea and over the waves of the Blackwater, darkening them to slate trenches, chopping them up to white heights, toward Dragonstone, and felt in a pounding of the skull, a tightening of the skin. Time, which had seemed infinite, like the depthless blue of an autumn sky, was bounded.

Perhaps you are surprised at the account I provide, at long last, of your sister and our shared infancy. You might reasonably be assumed to expect reveries on the confession of girlish secrets and fears—while walking on a spring day in Aegon’s Garden—hearts that in the trusting whispers of youth have erected no barriers to the free entry of the other so their contents gush forth—beneath the bedclothes long after they should have been asleep—mingling their outpourings till they are as one that beats in two bosoms, a union sealed only by the passionate kisses and warm presses of hands—at the fringes of a ballroom where the churning whirlpool of dancers have cast them up together by a chance that strikes them as miraculous—that must speak the deepest affections with every part of the body. There are anecdotes I could tell, I suppose, attempting to capture and transmit her spirit and what it and mine knew together.

She wished for a little sister each time her mother was brought to bed with another child, when the entirety of keep and lord-dom included a son for Lord Targaryen in their prayers. She never said as much, but I knew she wanted a little sister because a little brother would be born as a symbol of her predestined exile. It galled, as she rode about the island in her black-and-red riding habit with the eventually acquired silver-handled whip at her belt, well-known and well-beloved by all its inhabitants, who swept off their hats and waved handkerchiefs at us from where they walked along the road, how every stony track and dusty path leading to every remote bay and rocky promontory, and every sparse wood with every green-gray glen and every hidden cave would not be hers. Daemon, known first as adored uncle before she understood him to be her future banisher, was, if not never resented, at least only victim of a fitful bitterness that manifested, when piqued by some perceived slight of the duties by her she prescribed, as pointed needling about how she longed for the day she had a brother, and they’d need not have to deal with him. She treasured, in her earliest years before the reality of the present situation was fully comprehended by her, a dream that perhaps Daemon was the way to secure her home permanently, if only like Visenya she could continue to ride about the island in a black-and-red habit with a pistol at her belt, exacting the rents, because even at that advanced date the Targaryens had held to their obscene endogamy, and she had married her brother, and been Lady of Dragonstone.

She thundered down the sands as fast and fearless as any man on a golden mare she’d named Syrax after some ghastly Valyrian goddess of strife, a wild Dornish sand steed bought by Daemon at the Rosby horse fair and brought back to Dragonstone that she’d snuck out to the stables and broke to saddle at the age of seven, and her uncle had smiled while others gasped, when she rode into the courtyard, displaying the bloody cavities left behind by two missing baby teeth in a broad grin, and at the exclamations about how it was a wonder Rhaenyra had not found herself kicked to death by the she-demon brought into their midst, laughed and said that his niece had lost nothing she would not regain, and that was another few months of moping at his swift departure and continued absence we were to endure, as he was punished for having done it on purpose.

She had a predilection for sweet things, and would have eaten only cake if left entirely to her own whims. She followed newspaper accounts of the archeological expeditions that set out from Oldtown to the Doom of Valyria and were slowly excavating to reveal the immense buried capital and surrounding heartland of the empire as eagerly as her father did, and would rhapsodize over dinner about joining them, about being the one to oversee the workers as they finally dug away the compacted volcanic ash and reveal the Anogrion itself, one of the first eyes to see the place where her ancestors had worshiped in a thousand years. I could picture her riding Syrax among the open pits revealing palaces and temples and markets, her silver-handled whip at her belt. This would be greeted by indulgent, dismissive laughter by the company, and I would watch her shrink, and wonder at the fact that no one else seemed to see a scene my mind’s eye painted so vividly.

(So, you see, in the end it must return to the dead.)

She adored me. I never could make sense of why. She enjoyed my beauty, certainly. She was proud of having such a beautiful friend on her arm, as if it was an accomplishment of her own personal achievement. That Rhaenyra should enjoy a beautiful friend, that it was a delight she in some way deserved, resolved the mystery of her enjoyment of my company—a girl known for her nerves, who wept herself sick at many of the schemes of entertainment her companion concocted, who primly scolded her for failing to do the exercises assigned us by their septa, who piously said her prayers every night before bed—well enough for most everyone’s satisfaction. Not mine. I knew it was inadequate.

I think that it was exactly this—that in the midst of dinner, with my eyes open, laughing politely along with the rest—I was painting the image of her, I was seeing it. Rhaenyra spurring Syrax in a gold flash across the black rock, reining her to a halt at the side of the pit, barking orders. Rhaenyra in her tent, a brush made of rabbit fur in her hand, loosening the caked sludge from the face of an icon by lantern light. Rhaenyra in Volantis at the museum to which much of the finds were brought, somehow sneaking her way into the chamber where they kept the dirty things, like statues of dragons with enormous phalluses and the writhing, nude forms of a humans male and female with gaping orifices, caught by the scruff in the wyrm’s jaws. I saw it. She became absorbed in the detritus on her near empty plate, mouth working, and then looked up at me, and saw me seeing. She let me see. For this I adored her.

When she died, I was not at Dragonstone. I had gone to my father, conducting business in town, to his displeasure. She had been ill for weeks, feverish and tired, sleeping a lot during the day, restless at night. But not severely, not in a way that had Dr. Mellos worried. She suddenly took a turn for the worse, her fever spiking, unable to stay awake for more than a few minutes at a stretch until finally she did not awake again at all. She kept calling for four things, over and over, in those shortening spans of consciousness: uncle, Syrax, cake, Alicent.

To speak of her truly would bring her into time. That was a cruelty and a kindness I could not find the mercy or viciousness within me to perform. I felt enough hate and tenderness to banish her from time, of such depth that it could only have been conquered by a love and resentment that shrunk in horror from condemning her to or reprieving her from it.

I can only leave with the image of her joyous despairing dances before the bones of the dead, the kinetic whirl of her living homage with her young body offered up as the adoring private testament to the dying of ages, for only me to bear witness to. They found the bones when they tore up the mountain, when they dug the mines: a donation that was the crown jewel of the wing of the museum of natural history that will bear your father’s name once completed with your grandfather’s money.

I married Viserys Targaryen at the age of eighteen. My father received a letter from our old governess Septa Marlowe informing him that Rhaenyra had died. We returned to Dragonstone, and I did not depart again as Alicent Hightower.

An understanding was reached quickly enough. Lord Targaryen was shattered by the death of his wife, son, and now daughter in such short succession. He would need a new wife—no matter what he said to me in the immediate aftermath of his wife’s burial about how he could not imagine ever marrying again, because he could not fathom finding his wife’s equal in sweetness or sense in any other of the female sex, my father told me with tinge of scorn that Viserys was not a man who could do without a woman long.

I was a dutiful girl, and this was what my father wanted for me, and my mother had instructed me on her deathbed to obey my father in all things, as he was godly and wise and her lord and guide and would do exactly as she would want for my good and happiness. I was also not a stupid girl, and understood the business considerations that made a grandson the heir to Dragonstone and its mines an enticing prospect. I liked Viserys. Although much my senior in age, I believed myself to be older than my years, possessed of a seriousness and lack of girlish charm, at least among young men, that I feared acted as an antidote to the beauty I knew I possessed in equal measure. A man of middle years and retiring habits would appreciate and honor a wife who had no taste for the whirl of society but was learned enough to follow the studies which were his favorite subject of conversation…

…but when they placed your brother Aegon in my arms for the first time, the accompanying first thought was not of the fact that I had succeeded at last in procuring what had long been the dearest wish of my husband’s heart, a son, an heir of his body for his ancient line and a worthy next master of Dragonstone, and the triumph which that ought to engender, but a conviction of failure which oppressed me so that I wept. In successfully giving Viserys a son, I had failed to give Rhaenyra a sister.

…she had infected me. She had poisoned any chance of happiness I might have had as a woman, as a wife and mother, some element in her blood…

[O.O: The preceding fragments are, firstly, a page of which the bottom half appears to have been burnt away, and secondly, two fragments from what I guess is another page nearly entirely consumed. From the way the narrative resumes on the following page, it appears a significant portion of the manuscript following this was successfully burnt.]

(Scribbled in the margins at the top and sides of the next pages, unburnt…)

I intended to tell it all, to give a full account of my life to you. To at last be honest in writing as I could never be face-to-face. To give you whatever wisdom my life might provide you for your time. I looked at you and saw a girl with hair of her shade and the texture of mine. You are very like me, and nothing like me. You are very like her, and nothing like her. The remainder is, I suppose, your self. You too evade time among your moths and spiders. So many thousands and thousands of their successive lives are lived within a span of one of ours, you told me once, so to them we would appear immortal, and on them we have a perspective of their doings like gods. She would have poked her tongue into her cheek and glanced at me sideways to see what I made of this blasphemy. As with all your statements, it did not seem to occur to you that there could be anything objectionable in saying just what you thought, as long as it struck you as true.

The table-rappers that have of late become so popular among us say the dead do speak. The soul lives on after death to learn transforming truths to impart to the living if only we might listen, and if there is one of themselves, a special person of sufficient spiritual elevation, to act as the medium for the dead to communicate through. I thought I had no need. I spoke to the dead through the gods. I was right, and wrong. I could accept no lesser medium. I could accept no medium at all. I must speak to the dead, face-to-face. I become the medium in the recording now. There are things only the dead can say. I might have thought only the living can tell about the dead or what it is like to live on after the dead have gone, but it turns out the dead can speak on that too, what it is to die past life, that they are not the same thing, and yet the living past the dead now seems to be the pale shadow of that other to me.

I began to think of girlhood again. I had never really stopped, but when you entered that most risky stage—fourteen!—it weighed upon my mind more heavily than ever. Girls were everywhere. You in the schoolroom, bent over a slate with Aemond as he helped you with your High Valyrian grammar. Aegon, who should have left it but had been sent down from school, wandering through in his boredom, smelling of the liquor the grooms returned to brewing in an empty stall each time the enterprise was busted, leaning over your shoulder and tugging at your braid, making a remark I could not hear from the door where I had flown up after him to drag him out by the ear but which I could see made your jaw clench and your hand tighten on the chalk, and had Aemond springing up shouting at his brother.

Rhaenyra—fourteen!—in her portrait.

A maid servant named Dyana—fourteen!

Cassandra Baratheon, the eldest daughter of the most prosperous knight on the island, who I invited to Dragonstone for a fortnight—to see if she might do for Aegon, as I knew I must begin attending to having you all settled, one by one, and because you had never managed to make any bosom friends—who you barely spoke three words to, and sent home less than a week into the stay because she’d fallen ill.

Dead girls. Dead dismissed maidservants. Dead girls everywhere, a mysterious wasting illness that turned them gaunt and hollow-eyed and wracked with shivers—one serving girl in the nameless inn by the wharf with the dragon statue, one barmaid at the tavern across the street. Half-dead Cassandra, so voluble at the start, leaving wrapped in furs in the carriage we were sending her back to her father in, silent. It was no wonder I began seeing your sister, twenty years dead. Behind a curtain in your father’s room as I sat by his bed reading to him, just after he’d begun to snore. At the door to the Great Hall during supper. On a bench in Aegon’s Garden when I walked fretfully of a midnight. I thought I was going mad. It had long seemed my fate, that her unburied memory would return to torment me out of my sanity.

A dead girl in my bedroom, appearing behind me in the mirror as I brushed my hair, after I’d slipped off my robe, but before I slipped between the sheets in my nightgown. A dead girl, speaking to me.

“That spring after my mother died I often had trouble sleeping, as you perhaps remember. Or perhaps not. You slept so easily, or so I believed. When my miserable thrashing disturbed you in the bed we often shared, you would swim up from your slumber just far enough to irritably murmur, “Rhaenyra, you toss and turn so…”

But it never disturbed you so much it could wrench you from whatever dreams had you so in their grip that you slipped back beneath the surface of sleep almost immediately, and you showed no signs of rousing when I sat up, and gazed down at you in the shaft of moonlight streaming through the window.

That lunar brilliance of Dragonstone, so pure and strong, made the lineaments of your brow and throat glow with a shocking brightness and leeched all color from your hair, turning your fiery curls into a dark mass writhing across your pillow, against which the familiar, beloved contours of your pretty face were turned stark and strange, and the tendrils snaking down to flow across the breast whose slight movements with your breath were the only sign you were a living girl and not a effigy carved in marble upon a sepulcher.

I watched that strangeness with a wonder that soothed the seething within me, at how night and the semblance of death made what was most known and treasured thrillingly, chillingly uncanny and terrible. I was frightened, and overcome with a desire to kiss those lips that looked both cold and luridly red at once—the sorcery of night dying cream to bone, russet to jet, coral to carmine—imagining with a shiver how those slashes of ink barring your cheek would lift to reveal eyes that were new, in what way I could not say.

The precise expression that would animate them I could not envision, but the attempt made my heart beat faster. As did the more successful mental conjuring of the smile that, when my kiss called you forth from your dreams and you recognized me, would twitch your lips into contours my mind could more easily fathom, a secretive smile like a banner heralding that ungraspable mystery in your eyes.

(For despite the anxiety what you and others termed my insolence often caused you, that was all I could fantasize daring, the lightest brush before pulling back, leaving the humid air gusting from my mouth the only caress that would venture the trespass of intruding upon that perfection by the time you fully awoke, with perhaps only a tease in the tingling sensation where my flesh had so fleetingly made contact with yours, the drowsy groping to identify what it was that had brought you hither subsiding with those last ghost-prickles.)

You appeared dead, and yet I knew you were not. It was a death you would return from, but you must return in some way changed, for the dead cannot not really return. In some way I could not know, until I had witnessed the metamorphosis, you must be made new by this death that made you so unreachable. And I shuddered at the merest intimation of the message you would bear from your depths, and I longed for it.

I was a girl who was alive, but whose mother was dead. There would be no return; she was gone from me forever, and this had prompted me to a new awareness of my aliveness, indeed to what was a new form of life, that I drew breath while my mother was nowhere. I knew new feelings, profounder than I had supposed I possessed, a helpless fury whose fathoms shocked me. I had frequently thought myself an angry girl before—or at least had been told so often I was disagreeably willful that it was an assessment I had internalized—prone to childish sulks at an omnipresent intimation I was being cheated of something, but it was nothing to the conviction of what I was deprived of now.

How you would have despaired to hear me say so, and somehow even without hearing me give voice to this, you knew—you always guessed even what I could not say, it was pointless to keep anything from you, and yet one new emotion was how much I was scared to express, how much I needed you to guess and an unprecedented, unfair frustration with how poorly you divined what I myself was wary of comprehending—and tried to impress upon me a properly Sevenian fortitude, the belief that this was but a temporary parting before promised, eternal union in the heavens.

You took me to the sept and told me my mother was not really gone, that here I could feel close to her, even communicate with her if I only put my faith in the gods. My heart swelled with love for you. Although you echoed the pious extortions to forbearance you had seen that what I really wanted was reasonable, and simple, and should be accommodated rather than dismissed: I merely wished to speak again with my mother. I saw from the way your countenance disclosed a vast serenity that it was true, that you sensed your mother near you, and a tremulous excitement suffused me as for a moment I was offered the hope that there was some use for the gods after all, if they could be messengers who delivered my love and need to my mother.

Then the betrayal, the sobs that wracked my empty frame as I realized that as always I wanted more, a more that could not be satisfied. I wanted my mother to speak back to me. If the gods did lower themselves to play messenger for a grief-stricken girl, the payment of my conditional, self-serving faith was not sufficient to cover the return trip.

I wanted too much—an infantile, preposterous demand. I did not want to politely petition the gods to talk to my mother, to meekly plead they act as go-betweens. I wanted to speak to her directly, and I wanted her to respond. I wanted her to be alive, as I was, unbearably alive! I wanted her alive so she might hear, and understand. When I shut my eyes I saw your soft smile, radiant with peace. You did not need to pout and rage and beg. You simply perceived her presence without words. You instructed me that it was only for me and the gods to know what I spoke out of my soul, but I did not want them to know. It burst from me, one inadequate, garbled part, one thing I could not say to my mother, and you replied that it was you who must approach your father when you wanted to converse with him. I could not even make myself understood to you: that I wanted to speak to my mother, not to the gods, and because I could not speak to her, I spoke to you.

It was in this state of protracted agitation that I arched over your supine form in the silvered darkness, and hesitated with my face inches from your own. The power was mine, to summon you with my touch, but I was wary lest you should, as in my heart I knew you must, wake unaltered—if there was no return, neither was there any chance of the departure I dreamed, one that would make the reunion I yearned for possible. I could picture only too well what your reaction would be. Or a bounded range of possible reactions—I could not pin you down so neatly as to be sure of which one.

You might shriek in alarm, not realizing even what exactly had awoken you, only that it had happened suddenly, as you flew upwards with your hand at your bosom and gasped, “Rhaenyra! You gave me such a fright!”

You might break into laughter and ask what by the Seven I was doing at this time of night.

You might be embarrassed at this display of the fraught nerves you endeavored with much effort to master, and managed to most of the time even with me, who did care, and be enraged that the sticky cling of unconsciousness had stolen that mastery, and shove at me, and demand what I thought I was doing with far less humor, and inquiring with a scathing sneer why I insisted on being so odd.

You might wake slowly, gradually enough that what I had done could penetrate without being overcome by the abruptness of the transition, with no hammering heart to drown out awareness of what had occured. You would have the blood to spare to blush so furiously it would show as mottled gray patches on your cheeks in those bleaching supernal rays.

You might, glimpsing my face, which in those months wore a permanent bereft expression, even—especially—when with agony I contemplated kissing you, draw me down into your arms murmuring, “O, Rhaenyra, my poor darling, kiss me again!” And I would feel from the rapidity of your heart where it beat through your breast and through my ear where it lay upon that breast, the unease you bluffed through, and how it would not slow—no, the blood could never fail to gallop through our young veins when we became giddied by such honey—as I pressed my mouth to yours, and you pressed yours back to mine, over and over, the kind of kisses we had shared an infinity of times in this same bed, our downy limbs entwined this same way, but you would go weak in my arms with relief, that it was only that, the tender kiss of friends and sisters, not a kiss like the one I could not conceive no matter that it would not let me sleep.

I couldn’t tell you any of the other things that robbed me of rest. They were all one thing, somehow, that I could not kiss you, and that I was angry at everything, and that every night I could not fall asleep because I was cold all over, cold as a tomb or a crypt, that I could not sleep because it was like being trapped in a blizzard, and becoming so tired a snowdrift became as appealing as a swansdown mattress, but you must not surrender to the temptation, must stay awake, because that was a slumber from which you would never rise—or so the newspapers hypothesizing the agonies Bennard Stark’s failed expedition to the far North must have endured would have us comfortable southron readers understand. If sleep did overpower me, I awoke aflame, the fires of the pyre licking the meat from my bones. My mother was nowhere, and yet she was somewhere, I knew exactly where. Her corpse moldered in the earth. I thrashed awake with my entrails writhing, and I fanned the flames with all I had at my disposal, fury and lust, life, rather than give into the despair that it was the worms of the gave wriggling through my womb. Better that as of old, as in another tradition my family had set aside, she be burned to ash down to the very bones by dragon’s flame.

There were no dragons. She was cold, breeding rot. If I told you this, you would comfort me by saying that she did not feel it, what rotted was no longer her as it no longer housed what mattered, the soul. All very well and good that the soul is what mattered, but it's residence in my mother’s body had made her my mother, and the loss of the body was the loss of the soul. Besides, I could feel it, in my cold, rotted belly.

If I was to be awake, I found it much less terrible to walk than to lie in bed. By night, I didn’t notice how the entirety of Dragonstone had become as cold as her corpse, as if too felt drained of her warmth. It finally appeared to me, in its limited palette of blacks and grays, to match the truth of its changed state. I had never seen her in these shadowy halls at night, and though I would have welcomed her ghost, the possibility of a visitation did not present itself with the same intensity of dread and hope as it did by sunny day, in every place she had once been and wasn’t.

Best of all was Aegon’s Garden: the moon brighter, the shadows blacker, the relentless thunder of the sea louder.

On one of these midnight hauntings, I become the restless shade, I stumbled upon a fellow spirit—just not my mother.

When I rounded the corner and received the scare of my life, my uncle was staring up at the window to my room—I knew it by the flowers he stood by, which I could look down upon from its seat. The shock at encountering someone where I expected only the rustle of the sleeping roses and night-blooming lilies lasted but an instant, and I almost ran to him before I remembered I was furious with him, and this held me back, rather than any nervous collapse. He had not noticed me, and so the pause after I checked myself granted me a rare chance to observe him without the fluster of his ever sharp return observation. A strangeness in the familiar figure struck me, though I dismissed it as the mystery of moonlight, and an unmistakable melancholy on his face that sent a pang through me before I steeled myself with the memory of his offenses, and the outrage at them present in my breast even now, months later. Perhaps it was merely the rawness of the expression on his face which I had never before witnessed, and made me wonder if this is how he looked at me, when he did not know I was looking at him, or if it was only how he looked at the window which marked an opening in the wall that hid me from him.

Recovering myself, I drew my bedgown tighter around me against the honest, refreshing chill of sea air by night, and stalked forward saying, “I do believe you are adding trespassing to your crimes, uncle.”

“A sentence of a night or two spent in gaol, added to an appointment with the hangman’s noose, is nothing to worry myself over, surely,” the interloper replied, turning toward me without a flicker of surprise, as if he hadn’t thought me in the room he pined beneath—or as if his vigil was intended to summon me to him, so there could be none. Any melancholy I’d thought I’d seen was gone so instantly and utterly I assumed the babyish mooning I was trying to quash had imagined it there, in hopes it testified to any mutuality in my missing him. “No kiss for your uncle?”

“I should start shouting for a constable,” I retorted.

“Ah, yes,” my uncle said, and despite his noting I had not approached him with my usual enthusiasm, he made no move to draw closer to me either. “An interesting question. My brother could have done with me for good and all, but the scandal! Go ahead. I would wager that encouraging me to flee across the Narrow Sea and beyond the reach of any extradition agreements between Storm and Vale is, if not ideal, far better than a trial.”

“You know what you ought to do, then. And yet you do not appear to be in Pentos.”

“I’m here. Shall you raise the alarm?”

“I should.” In a way, I suppose I should have been grateful that Daemon had, the night of my mother and brother’s funeral, insulted that dead brother in a house of ill-repute in Dragonstone Town, cheered on by the foreign mistress he had dared bring nearly to the doorstep of his ancestral home and various low companions he’d acquired in a stint in Lord Velaryon’s navy, quarreled with my father, and been forbidden from crossing his brother’s threshold again while he still drew breath. In doing so, in his absence, he had given me a concrete object for my anger, and his presence, in restoring this object to me physically, had warmed me right through. “You would deserve it. But it would be a poor way to repay you. Whatever your crimes, they mean that it is I who shall be lady of Dragonstone one day, not you lord.”

Uncle smiled at this. “The vile murder of my wife is pleasing to you because it will allow you to pop out Laenor Velaryon’s brats and be a country lady?”

My father had ejected Daemon from Dragonstone, instructing him to forswear his mistress and return to his wife to at last make an honest man of himself. We were unclear about the mistress—though she also seemed to have left the island—but he had returned to his wife, a noble lady of the Kingdom of the Vale, in line to inherit the estate of Runestone. Now it would pass to a cousin, as Daemon’s own claim would: hers because she was murdered (her skull smashed in with a rock, so the gossip went—father, with Mr. Hightower’s assistance we had no doubt, had managed to keep it from the papers), and he because the law in the Vale had declared him the murderer, and placed a price upon his head.

How easily Daemon could crush me, by voicing what I had been thinking for months, as I tried to take pride in the new respect and consideration my father showed me, when he realized that if Daemon would not inherit his title, because he was vanished and if he was found he would probably hang, and if my mother was dead without having given him a living son, his heir was now the son of his cousin Rhaenys, as the next male heir of the lordship and estate his grandfather had entailed to keep it from the clutches of a disgraced daughter.

The ancient castle and lands and title of House Targaryen would descend to a boy who was Targaryen only through his effaced maternal name, and this was a bitter twist of fortune, but an engagement to cousin Laenor (implicit if not official) would at least see a child of his body Lady of Dragonstone. My father now had me accompany him when he met with the estate agents and visited tenants, but I was stilled barred from the councils on matters of business with Mr. Hightower and other notables from the Hightower Line, a distraction from his grief that occupied increasing amounts of his time, one not available to me.

I ignored this, as always trying to hide from him that he’d succeeded in striking at me right where it hurt most. “So you admit it, then—you did kill her?”

He chuckled, a wry, bitter sound, the mood most of his vocalizations of amusement tended towards, but then he kept laughing, and laughing, and laughing, like he would never stop. I knew my first intimation of unease then, because although I could see his parted mouth, the noise did not seem to come from my uncle. It was as if the susurrus of the sea, that unceasing voice of the earth, was muffled laughter, surrounding us on all sides so no matter which way you spun about it mocked you, like the laughter in certain dreams of humiliation, and that this laughter echoed off the stones of the keep, so it was like Dragonstone itself was amused by us.

“Yes.” As he said it, he turned away from me and back toward my window and tilted his head up, so a brighter spear of moonlight that had torn its way through the thin veils of cloud across the moon hit his face and blanked it out. “My brother told me to return to my wife, and make her a true wife at last. To be a good lad and fuck some heirs for Runestone into her. I didn’t care to. I sucked her blood instead. I drained her dry.”

“Can’t you ever be serious,” I snapped, rolling my eyes to hide the fear a prickling of the fine hairs on the back of my neck instructed me I felt, as much as I tried to attribute it to the wind. I finally took the steps toward him that would close the space between us. It was shameful, that he had betrayed me by making himself a hunted fugitive, selfishly forfeiting my company all for the sake of marrying some harlot and drinking himself to death in a decaying manse in Braavos, and must add insult to injury by making macabre jokes to try and frighten me.

“Stay back,” he growled, extending his hand in warning. Although he had never spoken to me in so harsh a tone, I continued moving toward him, until the moon drew her shawls back around herself to hide her white shoulders and the gleam they threw off, and the sudden retraction of light made clear the death mask that lowered itself from my black window, and I whipped about on my heel and fled in fear.

My uncle is dead, I thought, as I crawled back beneath the coverlet beside you. He fled to Pentos after all, and caught some malarial fever, and died in his old crony the Prince’s palace. That was his ghost that wandered the garden tonight, his only return that the dead sometimes make when they wish to haunt the living.

I wept then. Not so much that he was dead—that appeared inevitable somehow, everything was death, and this exquisite agony of grief I tormented myself with was almost pleasant in comparison to the lashings my resentment had scourged me with these past weeks, imagining him and his elegant, worldly new wife, who they said was a former dancer in the Lysene Opera and thus surely far superior in every particular to schoolmiss nieces, feted at the courts of princes in the glamorous cities across the Narrow Sea—but that I had been so much of a coward that when he came back to me, not to her, to me, exactly as I’d wished my mother would, a little thing like death had locked me out of reunion.

I was red-eyed and withdrawn at breakfast the next morning, but no one noticed because at dawn my maidservant Annora had been found dead at the bottom of a stairwell. It was obscure why she should have been in that part of the keep at night, but when the constable and the coroner had come and gone the verdict was nevertheless clear: she’d tripped, plummeted down the stairs, and the breaking of her neck was what broke her fall.

The gossip this time—somehow I managed to catch a whisper of it, despite no longer having Annora to do the whispering when she drew my bath or did up my laces—reported that her skin had been a queer gray color, and that she had been cold as ice, although the coroner said she had not been dead more than an hour when she was found.

I determined I would not fail again. That night I went ahaunting in hopes that a living ghost and a dead one might have some intercourse, and that if it turned out they could not, it would not be because I lacked in bravery.

My uncle was waiting for me in the same spot in the garden, like a sentinel at his assigned post. Remembering my vow, I straightened my spine and marched boldly up to him, but when he turned and approached me so we met in the middle, I could not understand what had given me such a scare. Here he was, my horrid, beloved uncle, as I had seen him all the best days of my young life.

“So you have become some fiend who sucks the blood of the living, like those in tales about Asshai by the Shadow? I seem to recall that they were shadows. Ones that drank blood, however that works. You do not appear to be a shadow. So what are you? How did it happen?”

I pretended to myself I did not believe him, that I was indulging whatever fit of fancy had made him decide to transmute his murder of his wife into a hearthside tale meant to frighten children. I was indulging myself—willing myself to enjoy one of my uncle’s old bloodcurdling stories that got him quite in trouble with my parents when I told them to you, and kept you from sleep, and in hysterics, while I slumbered undisturbed.

“It is Old Valyria that had the strangest, strongest blood magic, niece,” he chided. “You know that.”

Three nights, I came to him in the garden, not asking why he was there, and what he meant to do about his current troubles with the law, or how he moved about Dragonstone, so small and densely populated, without being caught, or if he had killed Annora, or who he would kill next.

On each of the three nights, he told me the same thing: that he was dead, and that is why I had run from him in terror. He looked dead, unless he regularly ingested human blood. When I had seen him the previous night, he was in the middle of his cyclical gradual transformation into a corpse, and I had found him as one that could still speak and move, because it had been a good few weeks since he killed Rhea, but a month out with no replenishment would find him as motionless and rigid as stone, unable to speak or move or appear human by any measure or trick of light and shadow. And each night, he told me a different tale of how he had come to this state, a new narration of the events of his own death.

On the first night, Daemon told of how, after my father exiled him, he had not gone to his wife at Runestone as instructed. Not at first. He had taken his concubine across the Narrow Sea, where they soon quarreled and parted ways. I gathered that Mysaria (the name of his mistress, now at last revealed to me) had nurtured hopes of great benefit from her association with a wealthy lord, but in exile, that future day had appeared too far off to bear the indignities and frustrations of their present connection. Unencumbered, Daemon had joined one of the expeditions to the Doom being outfitted at Volantis as he had always spoken of doing. He described to me the otherworldly landscape, the towering spikes of obsidian rock which still smoked a thousand years after a cataclysmic force first thrust them up from the earth, that often burst apart in an explosion of molten fire that melted everything in its path and made such enterprises highly risky to their insurers.

The night he died this first death, the workmen had dug down deep enough to excavate the first structures seen by human eyes in the city of Rhyos since it had been buried by ash. It was not yet stable, the workmen said. Daemon went. When he returned from the dead city to the encampment on the black wasteland under the wheeling stars born in this quarter of the sky from the death of a civilization, he was changed.

“So,” I said doubtfully, on the bench under the cranberry bush where we sat. “The learned university man who was chief of the undertaking, and whatever young penniless baronets in hope of treasure to sell back in Volantis, and the Ghiscari workmen you all diced with after their day of digging and yours pouring over maps of Rhyos, are they all now as you are?”

“No,” Uncle said. “None of them were dragons. That is what I am, as I'm sure you’ve realized. A dead dragon.”

“Pardon?” I said.

“There were Targaryens in Rhyos, you know. In every powerful city of the Freehold. Perhaps it was their mansion where I found a small household shrine with a dragon’s skull, and a stain formed by such quantities of blood it was black on the marble altar before it even now. There we rode winged fire beneath the sun. Dragons lived for hundreds of years, longer than the span of any man. They died, but to human minds, they must have seemed immortal. They fed these immortal lives on blood. But the dragons are all dead.” Daemon had begun his recitation of his theory playfully, but his mood had changed by the time he reached the end. “The dragons are dead. They rest beneath the ground, every one of them, cold bone in the unending dark, no more to fly beneath the sun. They are dead, and so am I.”

“Perhaps we could feed their bones some hot girl blood, and the bones would pad themselves in meat and muscle and the meat and muscle clothe themselves in scale, and they would take wing once more,” I said peevishly, my patience worn thin enough I tore myself from the warm curve of his wing, his arm around me where I nestled into his side, and stomped off.

“I have some questions about your story, uncle,” I began when I returned the next night. “Despite our family’s words, dragons can not be said to feed on blood. According to the histories, and confirmed by examination of fossilized dragon stomachs which inevitably reveals some charred goat meat, they cooked their dinners with their own flame before consumption. I am also confused about why you would choose to go to Runestone, having been relieved of mortal life and all its ties, including the hated ones. On that note—how have you determined you are immortal?”

“It’s a metaphor,” Daemon said. “Why did they slit the throats of captives on the altars and let the blood pool down the drains to water the dragon skulls in the crypts beneath the Anogrion?”

“It seems the blood was quite real to me. Not metaphorical.”

“Exactly. Blood fed us, have no doubt. As for your second point, am I free of all mortal ties? I am here, am I not?”

“You could be, if you chose. You could be anywhere.”

“Do the dead usually rest far from their living homes?”

“Perhaps they would if they could.”

“No. I don’t think they would. I did not say I was immortal. But the dead do not age.”

“Or die, I suppose. I mean a second time. They do age, in their own way. They rot.”

He shrugged. “Well, I doubt I'm immortal. The dragons were not immortal. They did die. How well we know that. They only might have seemed immortal, in the greater spans of their life. The spans of their deaths—even longer. That span is to what I refer.”

On the second night, he told me that after he and Mysaria parted ways—this time, they had not even departed Westerosi waters, and Daemon abandoned their purchased passage and left her to make use of their berth alone—he went to the Riverlands. This struck me as far more fantastical than an expedition to the Doom.

“Harrenhal?” I interrupted dubiously.

Yes, he insisted. He had gone at the standing invitation of a friend of his—Harwin Strong, the heir to that seat. It was once the largest castle in Westeros, and a royal seat from which the Riverlands and the Iron Isles were ruled. It was largely in ruins and had been for more than a hundred years, gutted by a great fire which killed the last king of House Hoare and all the heirs through the paternal line. The Iron Isles had attained independence, the Kingdom of Rivers had passed in the maternal line into the hands of House Tully, who had relocated the capital to their own city at Riverrun, although then it had been little more than a village. Now, with the great mills on the Tumblestone and the Red Fork, it was on its way to being the largest city in Westeros. Harrenhal, silent on a still lake, its gray skies owing not to smog but to the rains that made the hills so green, was a testament to a past age.

He thought this would be a place containing pleasant company with whom to drink away his troubles and privacy to plot on how he might revenge himself on my father, but quickly found it uncongenial to guests. Or, as he unsettlingly began to suspect when confronted with the cheerful countenances of the well-rested at breakfast, to him as a guest specifically. He was plagued by disturbing dreams. He could not sleep. He roamed the halls late into the night, following calls in the voices of tormentors he never saw. He became convinced that the source of his unrest was a woman who lived at Harrenhal, who he could not get any clear answers about, a midwife and reputed wood’s witch (Harrenhal being the kind of place where the local folk held onto such beliefs, uncorrected by the reproval of modern science), called Alys. Harwin said she had been delivering babes in the neighborhood since he was a child—had in fact delivered his mother of him, which was impossible, as Alys appeared to be a white-skinned, black-haired woman of Daemon’s own age.

This suspicion was because on one of his nocturnal rambles—maybe on one of the same nights as mine, where I found no one—he encountered another being astir when he came upon Alys in the room where she mixed her medicines. She told him quite frankly that she was no human woman, but a barn owl that had been cursed to live in human form, and had been condemned to that state for four hundred years.

She gave him a draught to drink that she said would restore his sleep, red with weirwood paste, but when he swallowed it tasted of blood.

When he left Harrenhal, he was changed.

Again, I stormed off, angry at the core he inevitably elided in each telling, of exactly how he had come to be changed. Why should a temple turn him into a dead creature that wore his living human form and must subsist on blood, that must only wake when the sun set, under a spell of eternal darkness like all the dragons? Why should a strange woman at Harrenhal, a being of a similar make, work some magic on him so he became like an owl, who only ever flew by light of the moon?

“Why should this woman trouble herself with you?” I said the following night.

“Not a woman. An owl.”

“Owls drink blood now?”

“She said she was lonely.” His smile was so infuriatingly secretive it provoked me exceedingly, but I had not received this evening’s attempt to account for himself, and though each attempt only frustrated me, and I already suspected none would satisfy me, I was certain I would return for them for as long as I found him there to provide, and after.

“Again: and why should she wish to relieve that loneliness with you? And what a disappointment you have been, if she wanted some infernal companion for her eternity! You wear out my patience in under an hour.”

“She can wait. She’s waited four hundred years, after all.”

On the third night, he said that after quarreling and parting with Mysaria in Pentos, he was walking down a dark alley when out of the gloom his father, dead a decade, walked toward him. He looked exactly as he had the day they had nailed up his coffin in the great hall and lowered him into his grave beneath the floor of the Dragonstone sept beside the Pentoshi wife he had only brought to his ancestral home as a corpse, when he returned to the island after her death with his two young sons.

I knew the story of my grandparents well. My grandfather Baelon was in the army as a second son who did not anticipate inheriting a title, and had won distinction defeating the tyrant out of Volantis, who, after that city’s revolution to abolish that last bastion of slavery, had swept out across Essos in wars of conquest that brought all nine Free Cities under his sway for a time before setting his sights on Westeros. At war’s end, he had been recovering from a wound in Pentos when he fell in love with a noblewoman of that city, married her, and raised two sons in her native country before she died tragically young after giving birth to a third son who did not live to see Baelon return home, too heartbroken to ever remarry and seeking his mother’s help to raise his boys.

So my uncle had thought the same, too young when his mother died to remember her or his early life, or anywhere but Dragonstone. My father, nearly a decade his senior and too old to be deceived, had known the truth, and thus became another of the deceivers. This is what Daemon’s dead father revealed to him in the wine shop they had repaired to after their reunion in the street.

Daemon’s mother had not been a Pentoshi lady, but Baelon’s own sister Alyssa, whom we had always been led to understand had died young, like several of her other sisters. When her beloved brother was injured in battle—she, who had often declared she would disguise herself as a man and enlist in his regiment—went to him where he lingered near death in Pentos and nursed him back to health. There, they had consummated a love that once would have led to marriage in the sept on Dragonstone, and honorable residence in their family home. Instead she, hair more blonde than silver, with the oddity of one blue eye and one green and none purple, was able to pass as a Westerosi gentlewoman named Alyssa Storm, the illegitimate daughter of a knight, in this foreign city where none knew their real relation, and they spent some happy years. Jaehaerys, that paragon, knew—had some secrets of his own Baelon divulged but which I will not waste more time on at present—and provided them with an allowance that enabled them to live comfortably, if modestly.

In a real way Baelon did not survive her. All his happiness was utterly destroyed forever. Daemon had always been aware of this, that in addition to missing the mother he could but dimly remember, her loss doomed him to miss the man his father might have been. He bore up manfully. He returned home and became his father’s heir when his elder brother Aemon died, loss compounding loss. He raised his sons. Daemon was his favorite, when he was a child—because he had been his mother’s, and because when he was a child, before the attainment of manhood eroded the resemblance, he had looked very much like her. I knew he had been his mother’s, for my father always said so with a bitterness he tried to paper over with amused reminiscence.

“I did not know that,” I commented. “I always thought father was closer.”

“He was,” Daemon said. “When I’d grown up.”

Now, in Pentos once more, a decade after he was supposed to have died of a burst belly, Daemon’s father provided less of a logical explanation for this fantastic turn of events than my uncle gave to me. As they walked the streets of that sleepless city that disorienting night, he told his son that he had died before death—died with his sister. When his belly burst, and he woke not in the seventh heaven but in their shared tomb, he wept for joy. He took her into his arms and had the reunion he had so longed for with her bones.

“I had never seen my father happy, not truly. Not like that, talking about fucking mother’s corpse.”

But his father did not look happy that night. He realized with horror that he was dead, but not dead in the same way. He spoke to his Alyssa, but she could not speak to him. He had died while alive, so he rejoiced to find himself dead, and thus he was cursed to die without dying. He had looked for his son all this time, the only reminder of Alyssa left, to join him in his death.

“He could have found you many times at Dragonstone, even if you were away from home when he passed so suddenly,” I said, even less convinced by this account than the rest, although too strangely sad for any irritation.

“We kept missing each other, I suppose,” Daemon said. “Listen. I must leave soon—”

“Wait,” I cut in, still for the moment absorbed in this strange tale. “What happened to him, then? Where is your father, if that is the case?”

“I killed him,” Daemon said with a ghastly smile—one in which his top set of canines had grown to a great length and a razor sharpness, so they cut into his bottom lip, and appeared closer to a serpent’s fangs.

“What do you mean, you must leave?” This was my response to this shocking statement, and this physical evidence of my uncle’s transformation, as his last words finally took root in my conscious mind.

“I must leave because I am an unnatural fiend, because I am dead and you are alive. Haven’t you listened to a word I’ve just told you?”

“I don’t care about that. And you look quite alive to me.”

“I won’t for long.” He cupped my cheek with his palm. While the first night I could tuck into his side as a warm refuge from the wind, now, prepared for our long talks in the garden with a flannel nightdress, wool socks, and one of Daemon’s old hunting jackets thrown over my robe, it was his touch that was cold. “It’s already begun. I will pass for a living man for another week or so at most, and then I must feed again. I do not want to be here when that happens.”

“You cannot go!” Humiliating tears of desolation sprang immediately to my eyes. The sea chuckled it's unceasing amusement, but my uncle was silent, his face solemn. Yet tender in countenance with poor Annora’s stolen blood, in temperature I discovered it had begun to chill when I withdrew my hand from the pocket of the jacket and dared to put my thumb to the divot in his chin as I had been enamored of doing as a little child.

As when I was a little child, he picked up my hand and brought my impertinent thumb to his mouth and pretended to bite it, gobble it up with dramatic, pantomimed chewing and sighs of relish. Then he stopped at the way I had gone stiff, my eyes wide as my heart started beating faster in excitement. He had enough blood to visibly redden in shame, or some other emotion, and dropped my hand. He was about to rise from his seat, perhaps believing he had succeeded, by the disturbing new implications of this old game—the fangs glinting either side of my imprisoned digit—in convincing me that he was an unnatural fiend. He stilled when the grin broke across my face.

Daemon leapt to his feet with renewed resolve when he heard what had restored my good spirits.

It is hard to shape the sensations I experienced into words. When we had closed the door on Daemon’s bedroom to which we removed ourselves by unspoken agreement once I overcame his reluctance (he hesitated again at the outer door we had come to, one which opened on a stair which led directly to the hall outside his chambers, until I whispered, “Come—it is still your home, whatever they say!”), without thinking, I crossed over to his bed—the bedding on it fresh, from the old habit of keeping the room in perpetual readiness for the young lord’s frequent unexpected arrivals, as if the servants could no more believe in his permanent exile than I—and perched upon its edge. I did not know what I felt then, what I expected. I had no framework for the drinking of my blood. I only knew my entire body tingled in anticipation, my breath came rapidly. I only knew it must happen in a room. Not out under the moon, with the sound of the waves so loud in my ears. I went to the bed as if by instinct, and gazed up at my uncle.

When I was a small child, I wanted to marry him. Then I was lessoned that this was quite impossible, and it was intensely embarrassing to my mother and father that I had brought it up—not a charming example of childish ignorance to be laughed at and retold to embarrass that child once grown up, as it would be in another family, but a serious transgression. It could not be, and yet he was still the only man I could ever imagine willingly consigning myself to the role of wife for. This would be our marriage and wedding night in one, the sacrament where he became blood of my blood and the joining of two bodies into one soul in the dark. I don’t know if I thought this, or it is only later that this occurred to me as an explanation. He remained standing by the door, returning my gaze with an expression of longing and terror. Even after the last few nights, where I had gotten used to his changed appearance, it was still a jolt to really take him in. He was so cold, so white—monumental and yet almost transparent, immaterial. I could not bear it, my uncle so cold and so distant. I opened my arms.

He came across the carpet to me. I shivered. The night garden had been chill, and the fireless room was even more so, and when he stood before me it was as if his frame was a large column of marble emitting the essence of its azoic core. Daemon put his thumb to my neck, and I swear my blood lept up to meet it. It wanted to warm that icy hand. He rubbed it back and forth, urging on the efforts of this iron and salt fluid to irradiate what wished to freeze it over, as it battled for heat and flow to win over that cold and stillness, then kept going once a bruise had been worked into the soft flesh by the ever firmer passes, mesmerized by the hot throb he’d commanded. Then he put his frigid lips to the same spot. I cried out and bit my own lip, not hard, I would have thought, but it drew blood, as if every ounce of the liquid in my veins urged to out, to bathe the immense marmoreal body that towered over me in its ruby tide.

I twisted my head so my lips smeared some blood on his chin. The hands, which I noticed had closed around my arms in a tight grip so I was held immovably in place, dug their fingers hard into my flesh. “It is overwhelming, being fed upon.” He paused. “It’s… shattering. The first time especially. I don’t know how to prepare you for it.”

“I can take a little pain,” I boasted, not understanding.

“It is more than a little pain. But that’s not what I mean, anyway.”

It would not be till much later I realized that in all three of his stories, this moment was never described. Daemon is a man of few words, and I had rarely heard him speak at such length as I had these past nights, but nowhere in any of them had there been this.

It hurt quite badly indeed, so badly I started to cry, after I moved my hair aside, and, pressing one more kiss upon the spot on my throat he had chosen as if claim it, to apologize in advance as he would kiss his hand to my scraped knees as a girl, he sunk his sharpened canines into my flesh.

That was not what he meant.

Then I stopped crying.

I do not think I was fully aware, as I became cold, and he became warm, between ceasing to cry, and being cold. This is not to say I lost consciousness, for I don’t believe I did. But that is the first thing I can voice. I had grown cold. My teeth chattered, and I laughed, as he held me rigidly to him, head bowed backward on my neck, back arched. I was so cold, and it did not matter because he was so warm. I had made him so wonderfully warm, and I was just fine, because I could snuggle my icy nose into the side of his neck—he jerked when the chill startled him, and I cried out as his teeth in me almost ripped out of their hold in his instinctive recoil, but their sucking grip on my flesh would not let him deny me this delightful heated nest for my cold little face, and some blood escaped his mouth and stained my nightgown and I laughed some more—and throw my arms around his neck, and my legs around his waist, and cling to him. I felt him swell and soften at once, as the flesh that had frozen to marble melted into pliant flesh again. When with a enormous shudder he pulled himself free of me, he had gotten over being a big baby and hauled me into his lap, wrapped his arms around me and clutched me to him as he showered my tingling cheeks with kisses warm like summer rain, and I was happy that he was as willing to embrace such a frigid armful, as I had been, to share in return a little of the warmth I had given.

This was the proposal that my uncle assented to. I said that if he took a little blood every few nights, before the need got too desperate, he would not have to kill anyone. I knew in a vague way that this could not continue for long, that the slight frame of one young girl could not contain enough blood to truly sustain him for any real length of time. I was too happy, and willed the thought aside.

Over the course of several weeks, I grew quite ill, although I tried to hide it from everyone, and him most of all. Every night he spent with me, and every third night he fed on me. It remained a dizzying experience. A little more than a week on, in the blissful aftermath where he cuddled me and his arms and warmed me up, I started kissing him, giggling at the heat of his mouth. I was hungry, famished—for something beyond food, because each night he brought up a small feast from the kitchens (for as you have noticed, when well-nourished, we can move about nearly unseen unless we wish to be) and fed me by hand all the sweets I could want to raise me out of my stupor. He did not eat himself but would kiss at my neck again to lick up a few sluggish last drops, his need satisfied, to savor the sugar in my blood, he said.

He kissed me back. I felt where he was warmest, between his legs, and I felt the spot, the only one seemingly, where I was still warm. The source of my hunger was there, a throbbing warmth that spoke of a wider deprivation that had me shivering, whimpering needily. For it was warm, but not as warm as he. I could be warmer, if only he filled me with his, as I had filled him with mine. I thought this was only fair, and I became extremely upset when he shoved me off him and left, so quickly as if he had dissolved into the air in the instant I rubbed at my smarting eyes with my freezing hands.

I was cold. I went to my warm bed, where a warm girl slept. I went finally having learnt how I wanted to kiss you. I knew that your mouth was hot and soft, that its kisses could make mine as hot and soft as yours, and that you were hot and soft elsewhere too—”

“You were not yourself,” I at last interrupted the narrative the dead girl had begun when I spun around from my mirror, and, as she did not disappear when I blinked like all the previous times the apparition had manifested, demanded that this spirit should tell me what she wanted, that even the shade of Rhaenyra Targaryen must know I would do anything I could to lay her soul to rest, and she laughed and said yes, she was Rhaenyra Targaryen, and it was good to see me, Alicent, after all this time, and she did not know about the state of her soul but presumed it would never be at rest and thank the gods, and she was no spirit, either, that surely I could see she appeared quite solid and substantial, but she would tell me now what she was, what she had become and how. “I knew it, and now I know why.”

“An unnatural fiend,” she sighed.

“You are probably some delusion, some figment of my own disturbed mind, but of course my mind would account in some way for the suspicion that it must have been your uncle that had corrupted you.”

“You aren’t listening. I already wanted it. Giving up my blood to him only showed me how I wanted it. Or how to achieve what I wanted. Either way, you pushed me away in disgust, then raised a hue-and-cry the next day about how I looked ill. You declined to share my bed any further, in much praised consideration for my health. By day I found myself condemned to my bed, and also found I could sleep then, that all I wanted to do was sleep. I told Dr. Melcombe and Father I merely had trouble sleeping of late.

One afternoon, having slept the morning away and feeling better, I went in search of you, and found how you had been occupying yourself during my illness—at first I thought that was all it was, and it was enough to enrage me. But as put my eye to the slightly parted door of my father’s study having paused with my palm to the wood, arrested the instant before I pushed to swing it wide by the sound of your laugh, the coziness of the sight that greeted me, my father at his model Valyria, you charming in a cerulean frock, made me think, before my father’s words of praise for the comfort of your listening ear, the sweet amiability of your discourse, the surprising erudition you displayed in following his discourses, considering your youth, how it had much brightened these sad months, etc., etc., provided confirmation, that I stumbled upon a scene of settled domestic habit.”

“Rhaenyra—” I choked out, again, just as I had twenty years ago.

“Anyway,” she bullied forward. “We have been through all that. Daemon stayed away for almost a week, and I revived, and was miserable.

When he returned, he noticed the difference between my feverish, frenzied appearance last time, and said it confirmed him in his conviction that he could not continue to take blood from me. I begged, I wept. I was willing to use whatever tools I had at my disposal to win him over. I would have bared my breasts, thrown myself at him, if I hadn’t thought it would do more harm than good to my cause. I was on my monthly courses and thrust my hand up beneath my nightgown and held out my bloody fingers and that was that. He bit me beneath the pitch-black night of a new moon and I went into that darkness and I came about in darkness to the taste of blood on my tongue. He’d bit open his own wrist and held it to my mouth and I suckled hungrily as he stroked my hair, near incoherent in panic as he tried to return some of the blood he’d taken. Then he left. I did not see him again, this side of the grave. He was as good as his word this time, in his way. He could not feed on me again and so he must leave because to see me was to feed.

He left me icebound and starved. In drinking of my life, he made me into something of what he was, cold like himself, desperate for warmth. On the edge of death, hungry for life. I was angry at you. On the edge of death, needing my very own life, that was within Daemon, given back to me—and you would not give it, and sat simpering away at my father. You would consign me to death. You would smile at my father. You would smile at Mr. Cole. You would marry my father, I could see it even then, and you would continue to smile at Mr. Cole, and you were lost to me. I went to his chamber that night, our poor Dornish drawing master, who was handsome, and we could never marry, and that was part of his appeal. You would like to think of him, once you were married. There was already talk about him staying on and cataloging all the pictures about the place and working on some book of his, as has all come to pass. I laughed, these last weeks, to see both religion and Mr. Cole remain among your consolations.”

“He has been a friend these past years, the only one I possessed, and he does not deserve your opprobrium—he was tormented by his trespass, his sin. He wished to confess to someone, when he knew he could not make it right, that you would not allow him to make it right…”

“Yes, I was very wicked. I was tear-streaked, disconsolate. I started kissing him at once, starving for his warmth, freezing for his life. He kept saying, “My lady, we cannot,” and I kept saying, “We can, I don’t give a damn what anyone says, I want you.” What he meant was we cannot marry, so this was improper, and what I mean that I didn’t care, about him, about anything but pursuing the life that was being stolen from me.

The next morning, the tragedy of such inevitable miscommunications in human life was revealed, and I compounded my wickedness by not hastily agreeing to pay penance in a life of virtuous poverty with him. I awoke and one minute quite liked the idea of having a lover, and didn’t care about the consequences, and half-hoped they would be dire and ruinous, and the next sick at the thought of what you would think, and thinking again about my father smiling at you and saying how wonderful and good you were, and quite unable to use it to triumph over you in any way. Mr. Cole telling you revealed how useless that idea was, when you called me a whore.”

I could not remain silent. “You called me that,” I said with the sharp twin pricks of injury and injustice that two decades had obviously not soothed.

“At least I was honest,” Rhaenyra countered. “You looked at me like I was one, like I was as ruined as I could ever have spitefully wanted to be, but could not even compromise your superiority of virtue to stain your lips with the word.

“I recall I said a dirty word. I said you’d let Mr. Cole fuck you, and who knew who else besides. You wouldn’t even own up to it. You were a filthy liar—”

“You didn’t know that. I lied well. I once thought I could not keep a single secret from you, but I soon had you ready to say whatever was necessary to defend me should Mr. Cole go to father telling tales. You didn’t even bother. You started weeping and begging my forgiveness when I struck back and named you for a hypocrite, because you were going to let my father fuck you in my mother’s bed!”

“You’d seen me. It was quite undeniable. And I had no wish to keep it secret from you. It’s like I told you,” I pleaded once again. “If I married your father—we should never have to part—”

“I did not want you by halves.” No more cruel now than she had been then. “Then you left. Perhaps you thought that a creature so degraded as I in soul could not long sustain its habitation in a whole body. But you returned to throw yourself at my father over my corpse.”

“It wasn’t like that. You died. You died and it could never be made right!”

“I died. I got so cold. Daemon was true to his word. He did not return to feed upon me again. But I suppose it was too late. I sunk fast, him gone, you gone. My mother had abandoned me, and Daemon, and you.”

“Yet now you appear before me, and I do not think my mind even capable of the perversions detailed tonight, so you did not remain dead.”

“No, I did. I did not remain in my grave. Daemon had stayed in the neighborhood. He lifted the stone covering my coffin in the sept floor and pried open the lid and lifted me out. I awoke in a cave beneath the bones of the dragons nursing at his breast, with a dim recollection of him arched over me, about to bite into his arm to feed me of his blood, when I felt an echoing bite in my mouth, two throbbing shards of ice, and launched myself up to plunge them into him, warming them as at last with a shudder I could bury myself in his flesh, as I suckled at him, weeping, as he birthed me into death…”

Then the dead girl’s face changed, and I felt a disquiet that sheer shock had numbed activate, as the contrast of the wretched emotion that contorted it made the previous lifelessness unignorable. “Then he left me,” Rhaenyra said. She shrugged and the deadness fell back into place, shocking after the spasm of grief—more horrible for its inhumanity, the loneliness of death itself if you could see it told by human expression, as it should never be, as it should be impossible to be.

“Then you have been alone—this entire time?”

“No, Daemon returned to me eventually. But for a long time. I had to make my own family. He had given me the tools to do this, although he had scarce thought of doing so. He did not intend to kill me so I might be his alone, and also somewhere he did. I did not realize that was what I did either. I was a blank, a bleakness. First I sought out the only one of his stories of origin available to me to trace—I went to Harrenhal. I found Daemon’s friend Harwin there, and yes, Alys. She would not confirm or deny my uncle’s designation of her as the progenitor of his undeath, although with the way she kept the secrets of his whereabouts I have my suspicions…either way, she recognized what I was, and was most helpful. I did not repay her kindness very well, I’m afraid. She is quite attached to that place, that bit of earth, and all who dwell there, including the entire Strong family that are its current owners. I took a liking to Harwin, and in my loneliness forever denied him the joys of marriage or fatherhood in the traditional sense.

I departed, having worn out the true mistress of that desolation’s hospitality, but Daemon later found his own refuge there, and we have all made it up, although Alys either will not or cannot shift far from the weirwood tree at Harrenhal—I have my theories of her origins in a different but related strain of magic to one I believe Daemon called on when he transformed me through death, although again it need not detain us. Then we sought out Mysaria. Or I did, and I brought Harwin with me, for I was no such callous seducer. I did this in my pursuit of my uncle, but Mysaria had seen neither hide nor hair of him since a querulous though not entirely hateful parting, and she quickly devoted herself to me as offering the relief from the vicissitudes of life my uncle had failed to deliver. I still was not satisfied, and never would be until I had brought my uncle to heel, or until I…until my yearning for my origins, my family, had been fulfilled. To Volantis we repaired, and in Volantis we have largely remained, because that is where I found a Targaryen that could complete my dead family, restore my lost family, a family of the dead and lost: Saera, who we used to titter over when we managed to sneak under adult tables and hear their gossip…”

Rhaenyra trailed off as she rose from the reverie she had sunk into and restored the entire force of her attention to me.

“O, you are dead, dead! Do not lie, you have been dead all this time!”

There Rhaenyra Targaryen sat, looking as she had when she died twenty years past, and at first that had been the source of my horror. I knew she was dead. I had seen her laid in her coffin. What had made me want to shriek then, as the tenants of Dragonstone filed past her bier in the Great Hall to pay their respects (the black lace of my gloves thankfully allowed me ingress tear at my fingers with my nails, the familiar substitution she had so hated to see, she would prefer me to howl my grief, I knew, and I was shamed I could not) was the potent certainty my eyes offered my disbelieving devastation that she was dead, bloodless and still, that the vital spark that had animated her must be vanished forever, and between one tear-hazed blink and the next, the contrasting and equally forceful sense that she merely slumbered, that her soul had been ripped free but not extinguished, that it danced around me in flickers at the corner of my sight that had me whirling about with heart thudding, whispers just below hearing that tickled at my eardrums, brushes of hands against my skirts that had my skin breaking out in gooseflesh, and if only it could be coaxed into imprisonment within that inert casing she might sit up on her bed of red satin to peer around her in wonder and laugh the grim visages that met her returned intelligence to pieces.

Yet in all the thousands and thousands of days that made up those years, never had one passed where she was not near! I could not believe in either faith: that the dazzling spark of life that had made the structure of bone and skin we must consign to the earth its home was truly gone, never to kindle again; or that matter so frozen and lifeless could ever have burnt with the hearthfires of those eyes, or indeed that it ever had—my arm looped through hers, warm, my lap pillowing that cheek, flushed.

Eventually the flickers and whispers and brushes stopped, and I no longer jumped and squirmed and shivered so frequently, and I believed this was because that destitute spark had found a secure new habitation within me. I spoke to those Rhaenyra had spoken too, those still on the earth, at least; I looked upon what she had looked upon. When Lady Ceira called in at Dragonstone on her way back to Lannisport (having gone to Braavos for the winter with her son Tyland, and preferring to take a return ship to Westeros that made port in Duskendale and make her way home overland by train, as she was quite prone to seasickness) there was a grin of amusement that brightened the back of my eyelids on every blink, an uncharitable comment that pinged around the walls of my skull, a teasing nudge in my side that had my gaze falling on the good woman’s hand at the precise moment it snatched a cake from the platter to smuggle to the pug snoring in her lap.

They could not both exist, the Rhaenyra in my head that was her preserved remainder and this creature that had spoken the hours of the night away, sitting across my chamber from me. My wild cry came from the realization that they did not. This thing was as white and lifeless as a porcelain doll. My first disbelieving shock that somehow Rhaenyra was alive was wrong. But alive our dolls had seemed, as children, because we imbued them with life! We tried to move our mouths as little as possible as we made our dolls speak to one another, as we pretended their painted lips did the speaking. Those ashen lips did not seem to move, not as ours had failed to do, but as the dolls had stubbornly succeeded, in keeping theirs sealed. And yet they had not succeeded. We believed, we truly could speak ourselves into believing that they spoke. The words seemed to bubble up from the very air between us, from the dark itself, for not even the phantom I had allowed to possess my mind could have produced this.

“Yes,” she—it—the fiend—said with a laugh. “That is just what I have been telling you, silly. But I do look especially dead at the moment, don’t I? It’s only because I haven’t had a bit of life in such a little while. Would you,” and the disembodied voice dropped to a croon and the doll rose slowly from the chair, or rather say she was standing, my brain skipping over the act of motion as if it could not take it in, “like to see your very own Rhaenyra again? See her again, alive, just as she was? You can make me look quite alive, but you’ll have to give me some of yours.”

The she-devil stood before me, skeletal hands clasped neatly at a breast that no breath stirred, waxen bow in a small smile. I groaned. I instantly comprehended what obscenity she referred to with that nauseating, simpering sweetness. I had heard her story just now, and it was only two weeks past that I had seen it for myself. Rhaenyra alive, alive! A cruel trick it had been, I now understood, and as I had tried to convince myself then, but it was one my own eyes had aided, for I would have sworn to it had I not dreaded the swearing would make me know myself mad; had that not been what stupefied me, that there before my eyes was Rhaenyra living, not dead after all, the vibrant rogue of her cheeks, the sparkle of her gaze, the breast that throbbed with the steady beat of the heart it encased, a perception of heat, and movement, before my mind processed the blood slicking lips that under their coat of gore were petal pink, the teeth dripping the same red that her skin blushed above, and Cassandra unmoving beneath her, neck corpse-chalky beneath the startling scarlet stain and braided rope of ebon hair.

“A little life!” I cried. “Is that what you call your existence of foul murders?”

“She’s not dead. The girl. Even if you hadn’t sent her away, I would not have killed her—“

I laughed, and it sounded crazed when it echoed off the stone-idol before me. “Not dead! Unlike the rest of them, because I caught you in the act. You would not have killed her, as I suppose all the others are in fact alive and hardy!”

“O, no, I did kill them,” she said with a mad giggle, as if in reply to my own, a mirroring I had not known in twenty years, my own amusement expressed and amplified by another, a call-and-response so different from the tedious instinctive replies of polite intercourse. “But that was before. You see, I had not realized how much more divine this is. Daemon did not tell me. Draining a life down to its dregs, and then further, licking up every last drop—I know that very well. But to feed on the living, to take a little life for yourself but leave some to its original owner, to change that life but leave it preserved, to return to, to sup on again, and again: no wonder he mourned the fatal consequences of his excess!

I wondered why, after he returned to me. After all, he does so love me this way, his very own darling, always just as I was, the repository and whetstone of his overwelling and blunted tenderness! It must have been how good this is. Every night crawling into my bed, hungry for his hunger, yearning, life ebbing further from him with every minute that passed, the terrible ice in all his limbs, light-headed, and insubstantial, and so empty, and my hot little arms twining about him, my pulsing throat offered up, and suckling at that warm flood that dizzies you, makes you drowsy, and sluggish, and suffused with a profound well-being so you drop into the same wonderful dreams as the dreamer who clings to you…alas, it could not have lasted forever. Of course, if you were very, very careful, and conscious of the fact that the one from whom you took had but a little life to spare, and controlled oneself until they grew to acquire more, perhaps it could have continued. Though all know this, in their own ways. I would have had more life to spare, but it would have fed other mouths than his!”

The words came on and on in their own disorienting torrent, plunging me into the dream of the nightmare which was itself nightmare. “What are you saying?” I whispered. I could understand each individual drop, but they flowed together into a rush that swept me away, tossed me about, dashed me up against rocks that threatened to rend me limb from limb, rupturing into such great gashes that my consciousness must spill from the wounds and plunge me into the pervading dark that would never be illuminated, the dark I must now pray to the gods would not be banished.

“I had killed as much as I could in this area without attracting notice. But I wasn’t done watching you. I could not bear to depart as I had planned. I remembered that this was the precise predicament that faced Daemon all those years ago, how to sustain myself without the destruction of others in these environs—”

“Just as your uncle managed not to destroy you?” I said, scornful of even the supposed effectiveness, to her own stated pursuit of animal self-preservation, of such a disgusting solution.

Fury flashed across her face, and with malicious relish she triumphantly hissed: “So I considered feeding upon my sister! I should like to say—for I note the revulsion in your expression, the low moan of fear you could not smother just now, and how you flinch back from me, and would also like to imagine that such a display of conscience would win me some little reprieve in the shudders that convulse you, for as much as I delighted in shocking you I ever hated for you to disapprove of me, as much as that dislike did not, to your frustration, ever modify my conduct as you wished—that I chose her friend instead because I did not desire, should I find myself afflicted by the same lack of command as my uncle, to extinguish the life of your daughter, but that was in fact temptation rather than deterrent, for I hate her, I hated her from the second I first saw her—”

“You really do hate her,” I said. I was riveted by the perfect lines of her person, even as her features were twisted into a grimacing mask by loathing—the glimmering onyx of her pupil in the many-faceted amethysts of her irises in the shiny alabaster of the sclera; the glory of her hair, not woven into a gilded coronet around her brow as in her portrait but spilling into a liquid silver sheet down her shoulders; her upright graceful form with its elegant proportions, its exacting swell at bust and dip at waist, the rounded shoulders and smooth arms emerging from the familiarly strange simple white tunic—and could not, or scream, or flee. “You hate all of them, those lovely young girls in bloom, those innocent souls! Is that why you killed them, because you hate them? Why should you feed off them, if you hate them so?”

“Shouldn’t I want to kill them, if I hate them? You aren’t listening. I would not feed off her, because I hated her. And I wanted to so badly, because I hated her, and because—how lovely it would be, just so. To slip beneath her sheets, that warm nest breathing the scent of her body. She would stir, and open her eyes, and would not need me to whisper to her that it was only a dream as I caressed her, for of course such a thing—my chill palm against her burning cheek, my chill fingers stroking her argent locks, and my own hair, so like, cascading down to form a silver tent that might have been made of the moonlight itself to cocoon us in its glow, as I pressed my lips like a brand of ice against her sour mouth—is right out of dream, could only exist in dream. But too, too lovely. It would overwhelm, intoxicate. I must test my idea on the black-tressed beauty. She appeared made of firmer stuff, physically, than your star-spun fairy, and if she died…” Rhaneyra shrugged. “I do hate them. And I love them, so what a gift I would have given her.”

“A gift! You struck them down before they could ever truly live, robbed them of being wives, mothers…”

“Live!” Rhaenyra spat. “I spared them. That girl Dyana, that your Aegon interfered with—” She must have seen me startle at this affirmation that the creeping sensation of being always watched these past months was not my mind playing tricks, that confirmed, because she could repeat my shameful acts back to me, that the return of the apparition at the corner of my vision was no disturbed fancy, and made a quick corroboration in an aside (“Yes, I saw it all, as I roamed about and my eyes and ears drank up your existence, day in, day out”) ”—what life awaited her? More men to fondle her, other ladies to work for and their sons, and perhaps if she was lucky enough to catch the eye of some boy who had managed to establish himself in a trade, the one man to fondle her, and get babes on her she must feed and rock and wipe, and the squalling infants of others if not! Daemon once thought as you did—and as I did, both at once.

His views were really rather confused. That is what he wanted from me. His grandfather foiled him, in deciding we must forswear marrying among ourselves, and my father may well have frustrated fulfillment of this desire even if not, and then the change into what we now are sealed matters. Even then, when he came to Dragonstone and stood beneath my window, he had not entirely relinquished that hope, I think, and this is why he tormented himself for killing me. Me as his wife, mother of his children. Somewhere he had deluded himself into believing he could make it happen somehow. Steal me away to Volantis, where none knew us, a refuge for those of our family defiant in their sins. What nobility! He still mourned those joys for me even if it had been forever denied to him. As if I wanted it. I wanted my mother. I wanted my uncle. I wanted you.”

“A little life,” I said again, and turned my face from her.

“Yes, I am dead, so to live, I must kill. Would you rather me dead after all, Alicent?” Her tone was much changed from what it had been just now. The glee at shocking, and the disturbing practicality with which she spoke of murder, was gone. Now her voice had turned tremulous, and her doll’s eyes watered, and the tears overflowed—although it did not make her look any more alive, but like the ones that had always rather frightened me, who could be made to weep from glass eyes when you tilted their heads.

“Better dead than this! And if you must be this, why must you return, and profane the memories I held sacred?”

The tears reminded me of when, having been very brave at her mother’s funeral, she collapsed into my arms when we were alone and wept.

“Of course you preferred me dead,” she sobbed. “So you could sigh and sob over pieces of hair, and talk about how I had been taken up the seventh heaven to be cradled in the arms of our Mother Above, like all who are too pure to walk the sinful world below.”

“No,” I shot back. “I always knew you were quite a demon. Never, never did I speak of you to a godly soul, for I could not speak the truth I knew, the terrible truth I came to know in your last days. What you were, and what you dared, and that you would be the ruin of anything you touched, would do your utmost to destroy utterly any goodness that was so unfortunate as to exist in your vicinity.”

“You never thought I was bad before,” she whimpered. “Not really. It’s only because…” When she took a step toward me my breath froze in my throat. “I know how it looks. I remember how I ran from Daemon. Now it doesn’t matter. We don’t have to drink so often and when we haven’t we don’t frighten each other. Dead things get along quite well together. But you are alive, so alive…”

”But you did not run from me. You hardly seemed to realize I was dead at first. you sat there, listening to me, fixed with enraptured wonder on my dead face. I thought you would burst through that door. I considered feeding before appearing before you, so I looked alive, and would not frighten you, and you’d greet me with that tender joy I liked to imagine sometimes, that you at least would be glad to know I was not dead no matter what that made me. I didn’t because I wanted to see what you’d make of me dead. I wanted you to open your arms to love a dead thing and you did not do that because loving a dead thing is too much. But you did not run.”

“You are dead. I've known you were dead for a long time.”

Her uncle had appeared to her dead when she expected him alive. She appeared to me dead, when I knew her dead. She had looked alive when her apparition taunted me these past weeks, and that had to be a delusion of my mind, because she was dead. I’d lived my entire life with her dead to me, because she must be dead to me. Despite what I protested here, she was dead, just as I'd known her to be, so I knew it was no delusion. I had wanted her alive again, but I knew when I longed for her I must take her dead or not at all. She was right: I preferred her dead to gone. When she died, I thought I could not believe she was dead. But what I meant was I could not believe she was gone. Dead and here was another matter.

“But when you thought of me you didn’t think of me like this.” As she spoke, she came ever closer to where I stood. I had not run, could not run, but neither could I go to the bed and open my arms to this cold thing as she had done.

“Down from Syrax into the stableyard after a hard ride, pink from the wind, smelling of horse flesh and you waiting, because you only liked a nice gentle hack, and how I liked to see you there waiting for me so prettily…that’s how you thought of me, maybe. When we caught Mr. Cole unawares coming out of the library, and I’d want to do something else but you’d drag me forward to speak to him but find yourself tongue-tied, and I could feel you watching me talk to him, as bold as I pleased, and thinking how lovely I looked, my ease at talking, and it made you seethe and think I was no better than I should be and it made me determine to make Mr. Cole laugh more, so I would have some evidence that my beauty had so activated you. Or when I tore out that page about Nymeria’s ships as you nattered on about how we must study because I knew it all already and I was in a sour mood and you were so horrified you looked at me like you might cry, but then you laughed—me being so bad and so good, that’s how you dreamed of me, Alicent…”

She was so close I would feel the warm breath from her lips if she had any to expel. So close that all I had to do is open my arms and she would be in them. One arm remained rigid, my hand gripping the back of the vanity’s chair, the other stiff at my side, fist clenched in the skirt of my nightgown. Again that desolation on the still features. “I could go to her, your girl. So lovely,” she whispered in the same seductive purr, so incongruous with her appearance, that had evoked the flushed, laughing, demon-darling of my youth. “Then I would look like the one you miss. Then you’d open your arms to me.”

“Please…” I said, and I tried to raise my arm. “If you are indeed my Rhaenyra—by the love I know she did bear me, once—”

“I am her,” she pled with a new desperation. “I am. Just dead. Do not worry,” she said with a caustic laugh, and again the doll’s tears from the glassy eyes. “I don’t want them. I do like the blood of little girls. Especially here, in this place. Girls like us. But I like other things. So many things. Mysaria, Saera…such richness. That is in you, and yet also you are my Alicent yet, I know, though you are dreadfully changed. All I want is you. You will restore me this time, or no one.”

She lifted her hands. She slid the arms of the tunic from her shoulders and stepped out of it as it pooled around her feet. The arms stayed locked in their sickle moon curve, the bony fingers touching the shoulders, the silver hair only the slightest variation in the polar expanse of flesh, the glitter of moonglow on crusted snow, the two bleached drifts of her breasts and unbroken fall of her belly, the shadowy hollow of her navel, leading the eye down to where the cold light caught again at her pubic mound, every line a perfect ringing like a bell in the high frigid air. Then cold arms opened to me, encircled me, tore the nightgown from me, ripping away any last bit of feeble protection from the elements, and bore me down onto the carpet in front of the smoldering hearth, where the flame as if subject to a howling vortex from beyond the Wall in winter guttered and licked the white cheek red as it flared in its dying.

Rhaenyra had said it was hard to put the sensations experienced when first fed upon into words; I find it impossible. I can only reconstruct it now, as I suspect she must have done, from later meals, well into the future from that night. Because although each subsequent repast was more amenable to being inscribed upon my memory, or my capacity to withstand its annihilations stronger so I could then narrate it to myself, it was still a gradual process of acclimation by which the obliterating transcendence of that initial exchange faded enough that I could see it, so to speak.

For that first moment where the two descending fangs punctured my flesh was like a flash of light so white-hot it seared me blind, and each time following, although the explosion did not repeat, it was as if with each opening heartbeat where the blood surged to the surface of my skin in answer to the irresistible summons of the tongue that palpated the neat edges of the twin holes to widen its passage and better enable the cheeks that hollowed to draw it out stronger and quicker (free of my body but not to meet air, instead to be taken without mediation directly into the insides of the sucking mouth which fastened tight, wounder and seal of the wound in one) I was returned to that instant, my vision adjusting slowly as the landscape reconstituted itself, solid forms picked out in the aftermath of a cataclysm of fire so far off it did not incinerate what I struggled to make out and so near the vision if not mortal frame of a woman alone on a shore, blotted out then restored, transformed, all landmarks—the sea lapping a stony shelf, a cavern by the sea sucking in the tides over the shale—rendered unrecognizable, leeched of any color by comparison to that destroying, dazzling glare, that absolute endpoint and extermination of line and hue and texture, or as if the eruption had infused them so they glittered, not a change in themselves but in the disordered faculty of perception which tried to identify and name and fix them.

It was itself, it was a new thing. This posthumous reconstruction must refer to the framework of knowledge that was the only one available to assimilate it by, as an explorer in some remote jungle of Sothoryos might guess at the nature of some freakish creature as sharing some distant ancestor with a lizard-lion, although with further study the beast itself might be comprehended in itself, the originating referent of comprehension that enabled a bizarre arrangement of limbs among alien shades and scents and sounds to be assembled mentally into an animal remained unusurpably antecedent.

But as the monstrous reptile could only be grasped by our own lizard-lion, some ingenious functioning of that organism in an environment both analogous and unique would cast light on the adaptations of the lizard-lion to the swamps of the Neck, so the altered viewpoint permitted me, for the first time, to understand what I believed I knew but never examined too closely, as the explorer might scoff at the crannogman gentleman naturalist and his life’s work recording his humble homegrown fauna, as accruing no glory, since containing no discovery.

So I did not think it within the thing itself, but now, trying to make not only its meaning but its actuality known to myself as I struggle to communicate to you, the best I can say it was approximable to me as what I felt when I fed you at my breast.

Not Aegon. With him my milk came in slow, and in sparse, weak quantities, and then I developed a hard painful swelling in both breasts, and a wet nurse was found, and both my father and yours were relieved. I had defied their disapproval, stemming from what I considered an old-fashioned belief that aristocratic ladies should never nurse their own children as common stock best nourished hardy young for the gentle classes, proclaiming passionately on the latest medical wisdom, the new views of doctors that on the contrary it was the mother’s own milk that was most healthful for infants, and that moreover the giving of it formed a connection between mother and babe of a special warmth and intimacy, and that this would lead to transformed families bound by deeper, tenderer affections, unlike the coldness toward children that had predominated in past days. I could share with no one the revelation of the utter void that becoming a mother found in me, but thought that through this act of nurture I could ameliorate the no doubt sickening effects such a reprehensible and perverse blank would surely produce, and did. But my body stubbornly offered up nothing but the nothing it contained.

I tried again with you, and all was different. When your mouth latched onto my breast, everything poured from me into you. This is as close as I can get to what it is like, to be consumed, and still it frustrates me how far it remains from precision, even as there is a relief in finally being able to fumblingly guess at what I felt then, nursing my daughter. I would know, when I could know, a revulsion. Perhaps you were afflicted by something like the retch I fought through when I wrote the words, in the reading of them, but again perhaps not, not in the same way: feeding, repast, meal. The meat and wine of the banquet was my milk and my blood. A cannibal feast, as they once did on the island of Skagos and are still rumored to among the ice-clans in the far North, and in the far jungles the explorer of Sothoryos hacks through, one of the dangers that must be braved if he is too encounter anything truly unknown. I knew an immense peace, too, such as I have not experienced before or since. I was not nourishing, I was nourishment. There were no questions. I was not providing everything you needed, I was in myself everything you needed.

And this was a pleasure, was pleasure, the thesis of the very motivating principle of my newly found pleasure. The ordering logic, the fundamental mechanism, revealed. I had no body but what was yours, what was to sustain you—what was to reanimate Rhaenyra. Perhaps that is what immolated my consciousness in that blast. I had no body that was my own and thus no mind, pure body, or I was only mind, freed of body, and it was too much to bear.

For Rhaenyra, of course the comparison was to dream of marital joining. I might scoff at the raptures it sent her into, as the fantasies of a virgin. But the description of her body, going limp as it was voided of it’s very life’s blood, and the hazy swoon as it happened, as the pleasure filled the body in your arms, quite literally it seemed, larger and larger, swelling, heated skin bearing your cold little body down, and being satisfied that this was correct, that he should get so warm and alive from something your body gave to him, as you’d sworn your body to him as wife in sight of the gods, blood of his blood, and pleased with you, and he stroking your hair in thanks with a kindly burning hand as you shivered, and left some of that heated life, so much life, so hot within you now, had too much of it, to make more, to defy death in promise of some continuation…yes.

It was not the thing itself. The purity of the transaction—that was the difference. Rhaenyra took and took and nothing was offered in recompense for the greedy sucks of the steaming salt-stream out of my veins and into her mouth. Nothing save the pleasure of that nothing! Everything I had to give, so she might live!

(My pleasure was yours. I could feel your pleasure, which was so simple, so thoughtless, too pure a form not to become in the end something else. Fulfillment. And in fulfilling it, fulfilling and fulfillment became one. This was the better analogue, the one Rhaenyra could not have had, because she did not remember, consciously, that fulfillment, and so could not understand what was happening as she fulfilled for the first time. This was as it should be. I had given my children life, and must give my life to theirs. In that moment I knew the joy this should be so. But then you grew up, and something had been taken, and it would not return, and I would know the gap between fulfillment and fulfilling, satisfied and satisfier, fed and feeder, for I must give something to make you, and it made me almost want to scream, sometimes, when I looked at you.)

Here was fulfillment: my very own Rhaenyra, just as she was when she was alive! I had achieved this. I would have given anything, that is what I had so often thought to myself, and here I was, giving everything, and all the other offerings out of my mortal frame turned out in the end to gain their compensations for being dim reflections of what could not be gazed upon directly without blinding, the life of my own beloved one, which she took without justification, as all the rest hadn’t the decency to do. The one thing I had wanted, and never thought to have.

The wintry limbs that sprung from an ice-bound trunk were entangled with mine, and I could feel them slowly warm as she suckled at my neck with whimpering sighs. She began to squirm, to become all over labile and liquid where she once was rigid and where my hands had flown up to grasp her arms when she fixed her mouth to my pulse-point my palms became the only part of me that knew warmth—her warmth, as my blood flowed into her and heated her from the inside out. Her flesh had been stiff and dry, in addition to its chill, and so my fingertips, as they gripped at her with a moan from my lips, slid on sultry silk as they sparked, singed.

Her mewling noises emerged further apart, subsumed in a satiation that had her lashes, which had been fighting to hold themselves wide so her eyes could stay trained on my shattered face, shuttering on the unfocused haze of drunken bliss as she slurped, pausing to lap with little swipes of her tongue, blind as any newborn kitten, pinkened tip of her nose twitching, when the blood that welled up with such quickness and in such quantity that it broke the bounds of her suctioning jaws, managing to get even less into her and instead smearing it around the holes which began to throb with use, and which, when her tongue occasionally caught the edges and massaged, the neat boundaries of the perfectly circular punctures dissolving from spit, ragged and inflamed with use, and causing my whole body to jerk beneath her. The blood that escaped her licks was sent racing down my clammy neck in fiery trails, burning across my breasts which heaved with the increased expenditure of effort required of my lungs to inhale air.

I smoothed her hair back from her fevered forehead. I bestowed a kiss upon the crown of her head, now crackling like the sun-baked satiny coat of her Syrax. “There now…that’s it…” I murmured vaguely.

It could have been seconds or hours when she pulled back from me, I could not have said. Her eyes shimmered, where they had been matte, painted marble. A wind-teased ruddy glow swept her cheeks, which also appeared rounder—she had hated them, with their precious padding of flesh that she feared condemned her to babyness forever—her hunger having pared them down to bone, sustenance fattening them to an engorged bulge. Her waist-length mane rippled down around us, blocking out the room around us, any sight but her face, as it trapped the warmth that radiated from her in a diamantine tent, bathing my face and front in a sweltering atmosphere.

I glanced down her body, become the world. Her skin was now the dewy peach it got from a summer spent out of doors, like the blood that drenched her to the chin was liquid sun, the bath-balmy salt soak of the sea that inundated our throats in sputtering swallows when we stripped to our shifts to swim. That blood, shocking where it stained her, a color that was like no other, though now touching and surveying the surface it suffused from the inside I sensed that all shades owed themselves to it, that it must feed every hue of the breathing world from the golden glitter of sun-sparked seafoam to the sun-ripened syrup of cherries whose juice stickied our lips to tint Rhaenyra with such exquisite delicacy, dimension. It was suggested in the dusky rose of her nipples, as they darkened beneath my ocular inspection with just the force of the blood pounding most aggressively there, like blood injected into a pearl, its brightness blurred by the lustrous milky-sheen it flushed and fused with. A premonitory pink, for my visual mapping continued to the center, the red cleft between her legs that told the thing true, an exploded geode of glistening garnet splitting apart its silver seam of sediment, the inside becoming outside in a sanguinary slit.

“I know, darling, you’re cold now, aren’t you?” Until Rhaenyra said this, I hadn’t been aware my teeth were clacking loudly together as I shook from head to toe with tremors. “Let me warm you.”

She picked up my left hand, which prickled in her grasp, like a hand drawn out of a glove and extended toward a roaring fire in the hearth, when you’d come in out of the snow. She kissed every tingling fingertip with her hot mouth, and then she placed it palm down over the seeping wounds in my throat. I gasped. It was not her hand that burned, the blood burned, and it burned in truth when not encased in the velvet glove of her little hand. I welcomed the pain, my stiffened fingers flexing gratefully, and not needing the instruction which came then from her, to press down hard. I pressed down so the wounds throbbed against my palm, seeking their warmth—struck by the image of plunging at least my first two fingers into the openings, tearing them wide to submerge them in the slick, searing sleeves I’d made—until a few tears, another source of tangy salt heat, leaked from my eyes and washed my cheeks warm, gritted my lips.

Rhaenyra kissed those tears, but did not lick them away. Her mouth was hotter, and it made more tears fall in their summery shower. She kissed the eyes that made them—not the lids, for my eyes were riveted upon her shining form, but the very eyes themselves, until I thought they would boil in their sockets to a steaming jelly. She stroked her fingers through my hair as she kissed my mouth. The inside of my mouth—that was still warm, surely, I was alive yet, and still I shivered and moaned at the contrast the blazing brand of her tongue thrusting its way in made, cooled it as I sucked at it, hollowed my cheeks around it as she had done around the tab of flesh she pulled taut till it bruised. The wet of my mouth, water to cool the sword of her tongue hot from the fire I’d fed.

My left hand did not move from its position sealing my throat, although it was tempted—with each kiss I pushed it down, for the way it made my body buck up against the one that arched over me, and I found myself regretting the way the my hand no longer burned, the flow of blood slowing to a trickle, and struck by the image of my fingers toying with the holes until the bright beads burst up once more. But now she snatched up my right hand from where it had dug its nails into her upper arm, viciously enough that I saw with a jolt that it had torn five bloody wounds into the sweet, supple flesh there, as if my hand without my being conscious of it wanted to rip her open, to find my blood where it gloriously saturated her, to get at the essence of her beauty. She smiled, that beam that was equal parts tartness and sugar like the lemon confections she preferred, and kissed every bloody fingertip, and then placed each on the unfurled coral carpet of her tongue, to lead them into the cavern of her mouth where she sucked them clean, returning even that regained liquid back to its rightful home.

“Better, hm? It can be better still. Let me show you where I’m warmest.”

Then, fingers encircling my wrist, she guided my slack hand to her sex.

As her warm skin was nothing to the heat of my blood which warmed it, my blood was nothing to what it heated in her. Even at this stage, I might have expected that my reaction to such a thing would be to yank my hand back. I could not—it was too wonderfully warm, a warmth that throbbed, as if I held a still-beating heart in my palm when I buried my fingers in the silver fur that covered muscle which clenched and contracted with the life that pulsed through it, concentrated to boiling, transmitted strongly through flesh so fine and fragile.

“Do you feel that?” Rhaenyra whispered. “That’s you, Alicent, your blood. You’ve done that to me.”

Slick—engorged—inflamed—my middle finger, as all my fingers dug inward, seeking, caught on a hole, a fitted glove wet as if with blood, my blood that made her slippery, tightened her around me as it pulsed strong and swift through her silken walls.

“You always have, of course,” she laughed as she pried my clamped hand off my throat and replaced it with her mouth, moaning, fluttering around me more quickly, harder, as her tongue made contact with the bottomless hole she’d made with the protruding fangs that had me wincing when they caught on snags of whole skin, a tentative trickle of blood welling up as she did not suck, was apparently full, but simply enjoyed the way it made me cry out and clutch at her with my bloodied, freed hand. “I used to get like this—”

“—seeing you so lovely at a dance, your breasts swelling your bodice, your gorgeous curls framing your perfect doll’s face and spilling down to burnish your creamy shoulders, and your lashes so modestly downcast with shyness that performed nicely for meekness, only to flicker up and your dark, deep eyes meet mine and out of them to flash all your wit and wickedness, just for me—or when Daemon and I raced each other down the strand beneath the crumbling curtain wall on Caraxes and Syrax, and I won, because perhaps he could jump higher, and gallop longer, but no one could beat my golden girl for speed, and I reigned up and felt the power of that sleek body between my thighs, so entirely in accord with my will the littlest twitch of my heel to her side could turn her around or send her flying again as I wished, and my uncle grinning at me, his hair disheveled by the wind, seeing his superb seat on his mount as if he was born to it, and knowing he felt that power too, this pitiful remainder of what once was our greater birthright that made us laugh with joy and weep with loss—or when Mr. Cole bent over me to redirect my hand on my sketchbook, very aware of his breadth above me, the heat of his breath against my cheek, which felt overwhelming somehow, for a man might touch you handing you out of a carriage but one permitted close enough so you could feel the breath from his mouth was shocking, and his frequent distraction from the motions of my pencil and the sloppiness of line they inevitably produced as his gaze found itself caught on my face, or my shoulder, and the way it would make his own practiced grip lose the steadiness of skill—”

“—I would feel that heat, concentrated to a blaze at my core. Under my skirts as some bore whirled me about, finding a responding heat in the shift of Syrax’s muscles hard against it as she danced through the waves and something that was both relief and a heightening of my agony as I rocked with her in my saddle, as I shifted on my chair so my pencil juddered and quite ruined whatever improvements his dedicated tutelage had managed to achieve.”

“I didn’t know why: why my head swam, and I felt a thudding beat in a part of myself that I did not even have a name for, not until I was dead. Then I learned that it was blood all along. When I have no blood, when I have not had my necessary draught of life, I am dead. It is not even that I feel hunger, for that takes blood too. Everything recedes, everything living—intention, thought, need. I am an empty vessel that understands only it was made to be filled, and that I hold the vessel and must fill it. The first spurt of blood across my lips awakens a ravenous hunger in me. The blood fills me, takes the perfect shape made to hold it, and then I’m no longer an empty vessel, or a vessel at all. I am the one who satisfies my thirst from the vessel. Then I want everything again. I am fed and watered and the blood gifts all my hungers back to me. I have satiated the hunger off the young and the old, and with their life thrumming through my veins, feasted on more. My uncle has fucked me with the rich blood of Lysense courtesans who claim to bathe in honey and subsist off only pearls dissolved in wine stiffening his cock, the blood of Volantene virgins who would have sworn they could trace it back to before the Doom has ended frothed by Mysaria’s tongue at my cunt. But none has ever been as sweet as your blood making my cunt quiver, your blood letting me chafe your clever fingers with my clenching cunt…”

Twisting tendrils of blood were pulled tight around three of my fingers that had found their way within, trapping them in a squeezing vise as she trembled above me, groaned, and collapsed atop me with her breasts two heated hillocks smushed to my front. “Yes,” she giggled, “I did leave enough of that divine substance for you, didn’t I? You are cold all over because you’ve lent me much of your heat, and the rest…”

I could no longer ignore it. The blood pooled in my sex: I had given her so much, but it was as if what remained was desperate for her to take it too, from the way it pulsed toward her, pressing my flesh down where it split apart together so tightly I ached as every beat of my heart circulated whatever blood remained to me through a span of skin that felt too small for it. “Take it,” I moaned. “Take it, please…”

Rhaenyra smiled at me, and spit dripped off her fangs as they drooled their eagerness for more blood off their tips, and they left little pinpricks in the wake of their ardor across my breasts and belly as she kissed her way down my body, so I realized I had blood everywhere, still, somehow enough for both of us at least this once, enough to make my nipples twitch, my navel contract.

“I can show you where you’re still warm,” Rhaenyra said. If I could have offered anything in reply to this but the litany I could not stop (take it, take it all, please), I would have responded that I did not need her to show me, I knew, at last I knew! I was still hot with life, though I had never known it until I discovered it speaking its rhythmic code, there, about to pound me apart at the seams, and I did not even know it then, before her tongue, oiled by my blood, instructed mine in a language of slow swipes at the fringed gash that had my hand at my throat once more to pet at the holes she’d made to slake her thirst.

There was no more blood. It followed her rapacious mouth, and her mouth followed the blood, which compacted itself ever further, swelling the nub that strained toward her, beat its wordless language against her silent, eloquent tongue as she drew it into herself, and I gave it over to her, and words were necessary after all because it continued to pulse within me, and I cried, “Take it all, every last drop, drain me dry!—why, darling, didn’t you spare me?”

She broke the kiss of tongue and bud where they trembled against each other. In a snarl of rage, she said, “You want me to kill you? Suck your life away, and leave you with a dead cunt? This is what you’d ask of me?”

Wasn’t that what she had done? I could not have said which I meant: why hadn’t she killed me, and spared me a dead cunt, or why she had brought that dead cunt alive, which did not spare me the sustained knowledge of death in the revival?

“Why didn’t you kill me?” I sobbed. “Why did you not take me with you?”

“Why didn’t I kill you!” The fury was gone, and I could not identify which emotion it left behind as she trapped my clitoris between thumb and forefinger and lowered her head, and with extraordinary delicacy pricked the hood and sucked the blood-soaked pearl into her mouth to drink it clean.

I screamed. There was no way I could have silenced the scream that wanted to tear from my throat, and yet nothing in the night around my room stirred in response, and you did not wake. The black spots that had swum at the edges of my vision ran together, swept in, swallowed sight. My extremities were very cold, and I swooned away. (A great loss of blood, doctor, that would be my diagnosis.)

When I came to, I was still cold, still naked on the rug before the hearth. Blood still flowed in my veins—I knew this from the way that bruises that had formed around the wounds on my neck ached, the way my cunt was a wound, and a bruise. Rhaenyra was still warm, her head upon my shoulder, and her arms around my waist. I lifted my hand and rested it on the back of her head. She turned her face upward toward me. She was no longer the fiend, the reanimated doll. My very own Rhaenyra again, alive, just as she was, even with my blood grisly on her mouth and chin, which simply rendered her as she’d look when we passed a berry patch on a walk through the woods on a summer day and she’d gorge herself sick. The text of her face was as readable as it ever had been to this practiced student of its moods and tenses. Unsure, mournful.

“Will you really ask it of me?” The uncertainty in the words, the sadness, was simply translation.

“Why didn’t you?” I said despairingly, but from the way my hand had been caught up by Rhaenyra’s so she might press it to her mouth, I knew she had read the pain that lanced through me in my features. The comforting touch of her lips, the heat on my cold fingers, was a spark to an ember of rage in my own breast. “Selfishness! Your eternal self-absorption! You had no thought for what it would do to me, left to believe you were dead—”

“I am dead,” Rhaenyra said quietly, with the calm that she often achieved when she had succeeded in provoking me.

“—what it would do to all who loved you—to your father—you still do not think of him—”

“My father is dying too. He has mourned me for twenty years.”

“Dying, not dead! And I left to nurse him! Dutiful Alicent, not exciting enough for your—your harem, as you selfishly—”

Although she had laughed a little as I stuttered and blushed—she’d left enough blood within me to see it color my cheeks as she’d liked of old—this made her spring to her feet, gnashing her teeth in a fury so the fangs tore at her own lips.

“Selfishness! You accuse me of selfishness! You have no idea of the selflessness I discovered myself capable of, in not returning here to you before now! To leave you your little life!”

“Yes, what a life,” I spat, leaping to my feet as well, heedless of my nudity. “Why did you return then?

“I had to see what you made of it,” she whispered hollowly. “Your life. That’s why I came back.”

“Well, I hope you enjoy gloating. You have seen it. Here it is. My dissolute son, playing nursemaid to my own husband, my tedious, trite flirtation with your discarded leftovers. You, in your Volatene mansion—among the wonders across the Narrow Sea you claimed you yearned to see—with your uncle, indulging your lusts with famed courtesans—”

“I do not gloat.” Once again she was weeping. “I mourn to see it. You were beautiful—brilliant—a life of promise ahead of you—”

“What else could I have done?” I said, too full of wonder for further anger. “What other life could I have lived? You knew this. What other meaning did you intend to impart, when you spoke of your womb of worms, death you gestated like your mother—“

“I feared dying like my mother. O, you’ll never understand. You’re alive. You could have done anything. I could have done anything. I could have had five strong sons by now, growing away—”

My laughter was incredulous. “That is your anything? That is what you wished to have your own little life for? Rhaenyra Targaryen, mother of five strong boys? As if that would have made you happy—“

“You’re right. It wouldn’t have. I’m much happier being dead. But it isn’t about happiness. It is about being alive,” she shot back before walking over to the window, hugging her arms to herself. “When I was a child,” she said as I came up behind her, watching her face reflected in the pane, “I did not want to study the bones of dragons, the ruins of temples. I wanted to have ridden them to conquest. I dreamed of leading believers in worship in those temples. You know this. It broke my heart to turn to dreaming of digging them up out of the ground. And how much I wanted to bring them up out of their tombs, and have it be written in the papers that in such-and-such year, Rhaenyra Targaryen had made such-and-such discovery, a lady archeologist on the lecture circuit, and how much I wanted to make Dragonstone into a living Valyria again, where you would not even know the year because we all went about in our tunics, with our hair unbound and free, and it looked as Valyria looked and we sounded as Valyria sounded…you don’t understand,” she finished softly, meeting my eye in the glass. “I see I can not make you understand—not this side of the grave. How I want you to understand. How much I never want you to never understand.”

I couldn’t understand it. I could not imagine minding being dead, if I was dead with her. In my little life, I had fantasized about it. I remained stubbornly healthy when I returned to Dragonstone with my father for the funeral, and stayed on, despite how I thought I might die of a broken heart. Girls might treasure the bright shorn locks of their bosom friends, weave that gold into a circlet to wear over their heart or chain their wrist, but did not typically die of broken hearts, and I did not. But I could imagine that—as I could not really imagine what could be beyond a bosom friendship in life—being so heartsick over the loss of my darling, dearest friend that I died, and that everyone knew it, whispered, Her heart simply broke, when Lady Rhaenyra went into her grave, we’ve never seen its like.

But there were things she did not understand, being dead, about life.

“You will not,” I agreed. “But that was not what I was going to ask of you. Take it—take it all, because I give it to you. You gave me my life, and you took it. You left me to live your life for you, so let me give it to you, let me live it for myself, for the first time—for you.”

It was Rhaenyra’s turn to stare at me in disbelief, still through the mediating substance of the mirrored glass. “You can’t be serious!”

“Why not? You said it earlier,” I insisted. “To return to—to sup on again—and again—”

If she had killed me then, I would not have known this. Perhaps she would have fed on me, killed me slowly as Daemon did her, so I knew it and knew the loss: was that what she regretted, as she guessed her uncle did?

“What of your children, Alicent?” Rhaenyra demanded, still in wonderment.

“I had them—for you!” That is the horrible truth, my darling. I condemned myself to time, and you, for the girl who wished to escape it. I revenged myself on her through time, by giving birth to the children who would continue the line she passed out of without leaving any trace. “I lived my life for the both of us, or a life that should have been yours, or a life that should never have been ours. They shouldn’t exist.”

I put my hand on her shoulder and gently turned her about. If her features were a well-loved text, I read it now as one who returns to a novel treasured in youth with the wisdom of years, recalling with the vividness impressed by an entirely undiscerning pleasure the thrills and tears and tendernesses induced by characters and circumstances of excitement and interest, how I had watched her expressions with pangs of agony as I tried to determine what way the power its possessor had over me would be wielded, and how I might best wield my power over her—whether she was pleased with me or cross, loved or hated me, was happy or miserable—but also with a tolerant amusement for such heights of feeling, slightly abashed that such obvious tricks had played my emotions so expertly: for here was nothing more or less than a bereft little girl, forever slightly less than a year out from losing her mother. I had given life to this face with its forehead collapsing into wrinkles of woe, this mouth pursing against tears, no matter that fangs stained brown with my blood pierced it as she bit at those lips trying not to cry.

I drew her head down onto my breast. She trembled in my arms. She was my very own Rhaenyra again, but I was not quite her Alicent. I had lived much life she had not—in that moment I realized how right she was. I had lived it, I had failed to live it. It was my little life to make of it what I would. I had failed her before, when I was too young to know better. If I had not, if I had done differently, who knows what her life might have been, or mine?

A tempting idea. I had failed her when I went to her father on the instruction of mine, for I failed myself, the life that was mine. And I could not have done otherwise then. I was correct in that. I could not have lived another life. Rhaenyra was correct too—I was alive.

“My poor little girl,” I said, stroking her hair.

She sobbed then, the sobs of a heartbroken child. She looked alive, for I had given her some of mine. I had some to share. I had always had some to share.

“I’ll kill you, you’ll die,” she wept.

“Perhaps,” I agreed. “Perhaps not.”

To never have to give it up, making her so wonderfully warm, feeling her swell and soften at once, as the flesh that had frozen to marble melted into pliant flesh again…

“You don’t mind that I kill? That I have killed countless little girls?”

I minded. I thought of her sliding into Cassandra Baratheon’s bed under this roof, that untouched girl with her unmarked skin blinking awake and smiling fuzzily at the dream, doll, demon who caressed her softly, as she opened up her warmth, to make her a girl again, a girl with her with their limbs entwined, warmed through by a warmth shared.

“You won’t have to again, now that you have me.”

Surely I could nurse this strange child who would never cease needing it.

“You will make me good?” Rhaenyra laughed, as if she caught my thought up from my mind. But she was already shaking her dead. “It is a dream. It can not sustain. Daemon knew this. If you come with me, if you are ever before me, I won’t be able to resist. I will kill you.”

“Not if you feed off other girls. You do not have to kill them, you can feed, a bit from one, a bit from another…” My brain whirred, thinking it through. I would find a girl in a street in some far city, gazing in a shop window. I would bring her back to that mansion, wherein cold women reclined on their silken couches, and I would bring her up to the youngest, and she might be nervous at their cold faces, and surprised that the slightest and most doll-like was their chief. I would lead her by the hand, and tell her not to be afraid, for it was wonderful…I would hate her, as she knelt by Rhaenyra’s chair and I guided her through bending her head back to bear her soft neck, and I would be giving her a gift, and after I would lead her out again, weeping in joy and relief and grief, into her little life…

“No. I must kill you.” She kissed my breast under her head, sucked at one of the tiny pinpricks by my nipple and, teasing the hardened peak into her mouth, urged forth a few drops of blood with her suckling. She stared up at me through her lashes with glazed eyes, as I began to sway in place, woozy, steadying me with her hands at my waist before I fell, and then guiding me back onto the bed and covering me with her warmth. My nose in the side of her neck, so she jerked, laughed. “You won’t understand it till I have. I will kill you, I must. We can try to make it last for as long as we can. Perhaps as long as we like. I will give you as much life as I can, but then I must kill you.”

“I don’t understand,” I murmured, as I began to sink down into a fevered sleep, wracked by chills, sweating beneath the covering that drew itself over me.

“You won’t.” It was her turn to stroke my hair. “But, mother, let the one who will become your mother once she births you into death tell you a story to soothe you to sleep. Let me tell it in a slightly different way. Let me provide one moral. My uncle’s heart broke to kill me, because he loved me. Because he loved eating me, too, it must be said. He mourned when I became one of the eaters. He only knew me as one of the eaten. This is what allowed him to leave me. He had loved me enough to want to let me live. But, O, once I knew what it was, to drain a body to the dregs, and now I know what it is, to return to sup, again and again, from love, and to loathe it must ever cease, and that too from love, for you see, how grateful in the end he loved me enough to kill me—how much I love you, enough to kill you—”

illustrated by wineofcourage

for the Fire, Blood, & Kink Reverse Bang

(hotd) the rapture of that cruelty which yet is love

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