#prince-trodden

[troublesomesnitch]

Meeting Vhagar - Drabble

Aemond x Wife!Reader

Much to your dismay, Prince Aemond insists on bringing your little son to Vhagar. Set sometime during the Dance.

Contents: Just a little practice thing... Dad!Aemond, Targaryen parenting, subtle fluff. Little bit of subtle angst too. No filth this time..

Words: 3000, and very sloppily proof read.

The carriage can only take you so far as to the Iron Gate. 

Beyond its massive doors, the Rosby Road winds North, poorly maintained and full of potholes, as it is the shortest of the main roads, and thus the least important. It is not as busy as others, and the gate is not guarded as well - clearly, as the men who should be protecting it are presently engaged in a game of cards, laid out on top of a large, flat rock.

That is where the driver will wait, but it is not your destination. 

There is another little trail. One that runs in the opposite direction, scarcely used and partially hidden, visible only to those who know it. No horse or wagon can make the journey, and there is no option but to walk - first along a narrow, trodden path, and then further still, down treacherous steps, carved into the very rock the city rests upon. Past the watchtower, and across the Northern beach, to the vast caves of Maegor the Cruel, where Vhagar has made her nest.

You walk alone, just the two of you. The prince in his coat and boots, and yourself in attire much less suited for the occasion. Fine shoes, fine skirts, and with your little son cradled in your arms. 

The gentle rocking of the carriage has lulled him to sleep. Four months old, he is, and a source of such joy that your poor heart can scarcely contain it. From his first high-pitched cry when you brought him into the world - oh, the pains of labour were all but forgotten, as was the threat of the raging war. And when the prince came to see his son, you could hardly even bear to let him hold him. 

He wanted to bring the boy much sooner, but both you and the dowager queen staunchly put your foot down against that. Children should not be brought outside the home until they have at least lived through the first perilous weeks, and possibly even their first fever. And even then, most would argue, they have no business being around ferocious animals. 

“I don’t like it,” you say, for the umpteenth time, taking the hand offered to you by the prince to help you cross a treacherous stretch. “It is mad, bringing an infant to such a beast - ” 

“Vhagar should know him,” he says, steadfast and determined. As he has done whenever you voiced your concern. 

It does nothing at all to calm your nerves. But it is his most compelling argument, and the only reason you have allowed this lunacy in the first place. So the dragon would recognise the boy as his, and as one of her own. So she would know to protect him, if - something should happen. 

You make it halfway across the pebbled beach before the prince pauses. And you do too, lifting your gaze to follow his line of sight; see what he is looking at. 

An enormous, greyish mass, some yards away, that at first you thought was a moss-grown rock, or years of washed up seaweed. But the mass makes a rumbling noise and begins to shift and lift itself, slowly and carefully, as though with much effort. Part of it becomes a leg, another part unfurls into a great wing, and the rock nearest to you becomes a head, with a mouth full of jagged teeth, and two eyes opening slowly. Amber in colour, and with slitted pupils staring straight at you. 

“She can sense me,” the prince declares, with no small amount of pride, lifting his chin and straightening his back. 

You, however, are paralysed, utterly shocked by her vastness. You have never seen Vhagar this close before, and though you knew of her impressive size, it is one thing to see her soaring across the sky, and quite another to be right next to her, unprotected and vulnerable.

It seems to you that the span of her wings could cover half the city, that entire buildings could fit in her mouth. And certainly, she could end all three of you with her fiery breath, or with a single swipe of her claw or her massive tail. One wrong move, even if accidental, even if she did not mean to - you would all be dead. 

“Come,” the prince says, pushing at the small of your back. But you stall, digging in your heels, frozen in place at the sight of her. 

“I’ve changed my mind,” you stammer. “We should go back - it is not safe…”

The prince gives an overbearing, if somewhat irritated sigh. 

“Dragons are loyal beasts,” he reassures. “Vhagar is loyal to me, she obeys me - ”

“She is a beast,” you hiss, hugging your drowsy son closer to your chest. “She cannot be trusted. It is too dangerous - I won’t let you bring him any closer - ”

Prince Aemond does not like to be challenged. He turns around to look at you coolly, his voice low and scornful as he speaks. 

“Is your opinion of me so unfavourable, wife, that you think I would risk harm to my own son?”

“No,” you respond, quietly, but truthfully. Since you were married, your opinion of the prince has only risen, slowly but surely. And it continues to do so, still - though perhaps not right now. “I don’t like it - ”

“Mhm - so you said,” your husband says dryly, all but wrenching the swaddled boy from your arms. 

He does not complain, the boy. Prince Aemond comes to visit often, at least once a day, and sometimes more. He sits with the child, reads to him, lets him fall asleep in his arms - not for very long each time, but it is at least enough for the little boy to recognise his father’s low voice and stern face as something safe and comfortable. As is evident from the way he now settles against the prince’s leather-clad chest, tangling his little fist into a lock of his hair. 

The beast remains still, pensive as her rider approaches, her serpent’s eyes fixed on the thing in his arms, on what he is bringing her. Your most precious treasure, your life’s very purpose, completely at the mercy of the greatest dragon in the world. 

You might have felt more at ease if the soft, sparse hair on his head had been silver like his father’s, but alas, it is not. It is exactly like yours, and only the bright violet of his eyes gives away his true inheritance. 

And that seems like too little a thing for such a large creature to notice. 

Prince Aemond calls out in that strange language of his, with the open vowels and the rolling R’s. It is beautiful, especially in his mouth, and the dragon responds at once, contorting herself to let him touch her wrinkled neck with affection. Which is a strange sight, but what is even stranger is the way she grumbles - as though she likes it. He speaks to her as if she was another person, in long, full sentences that are much too complicated for you to even attempt to understand. There is only one word you can make out, for the sole reason that he says it twice - yoreliatzeh, or yorelatzya, or something akin to that. You haven’t a clue as to what it means. 

Vhagar snorts once, and the prince steps back to give her room to move, to rise up onto her legs and bring her head closer, her nose almost touching his hip. While you stand at a distance, staring at the utterly bizarre scene playing out in front of you. A fearsome, vicious beast, sniffing the child like a dog would. Gently and carefully, only she is so big that each of her cautious breaths is like a small gust of wind, making your husband’s hair billow about his face. When she makes a grunting noise, he carefully unwraps some of the swaddlings, holding the child up to let her see him better, smell him better. 

He is bright, your darling boy, and curious, like all babes and children. His eyes are wide as they take in Vhagar’s scaly form, and he gives a soft squeal of surprise or wonder, kicking his little feet under the blankets. Reaching his arm towards the beast's massive head, her massive teeth -

“Aemond, please - ” you gasp, clutching your hands to your throat. 

The prince turns his head to give you a stern look, one that clearly shows he is running out of patience. And maybe this time it is justified, because your fearful outburst startles the boy, who begins to squirm unhappily in his father’s arms. Fussing and whimpering; a sound that is as painful to you as salt to an open wound. 

“Bring him to me,” you plead, “can’t you see that he is frightened - ” 

“He is frightened because you are frightened,” the prince says, as soft spoken as always, but with a hint of something sharp underneath.

He cradles the boy closer to his chest, bouncing him gently, holding his head and murmuring soothing words. Exactly as you would do, and to the same effect. It calms him down, and his big, round eyes start darting around again, taking in his surroundings. The dragon, the grey sea, the fine silver clasps on his father’s clothes. It does seem that the latter intrigues him the most. 

Vhagar lifts her neck and tilts her head just slightly, seemingly very interested in the child, in this tiny little creature; the way he moves his little limbs, and his soft coos and noises. There is an almost… thoughtful look in her eyes, or at the very least a curious one. 

It makes you wonder about the extent of her perception. Whether she truly knows that this is Aemond’s child, that it came from him, from his body, his flesh. If she can sense it somehow, through the bond they purportedly share, or if she understood it when he spoke to her. 

How intelligent is a dragon? Are they like dogs or horses, able to learn the meaning of certain words, but not the full breadth of language? Or do they think as people, with nuance and emotion, and a mind as vivid as your own. 

You do not know. You suppose no one really does. 

“Come,” the prince calls, reaching his arm towards you, beckoning you closer. However, a single glance at Vhagar, whose mighty gaze is now focused on you, is enough to inspire disobedience in even the most well-behaved wife.

“I would really rather not - ”

“She must know the both of you,” he insists. 

“Is that - necessary?” you squirm, wringing your hands, very much aware that you are not a dragon rider, that you haven’t a drop of Valyrian blood. “Vhagar has no reason to think fondly of me…”

The prince scoffs. 

“Are you not the mother of my child?” he says. “Now, come.” 

You must go to him. He is your lord husband, and he is a prince, and such is the way of things. But you are not at all glad to, and you walk with shaky, reluctant steps, gripping onto his elbow and cowering behind him like a frightened child. 

You close your eyes when the dragon lowers her head once more, bringing it towards you. A sudden, low-pitched growl makes your heart tremble, but the prince speaks a soft command. Lykirī, Vhagar. Lykirī.

It has a calming effect on you too. As does the arm he keeps outstretched in front of you - solely for your comfort, you assume, as it would make no difference whatsoever, should Vhagar decide that she does not like you. But you appreciate the gesture nonetheless.

The air is warm, this close to her, and your skirts move around your legs when she breathes, slowly and deeply, while the prince speaks to her in soft tones. That word again, the one from before, and many others. You know the words for wife, for king, for father, brother, sister, even for dragon, but he says none of those now, so you have no guess as to what he is telling her. Or if she understands. Or what he would call you, if not his wife. 

This woman is my - spouse? lady? lover?

You do have a kind of love for him, and sometimes you think he does for you, too. Sometimes. One can never be sure of anything with the prince, who keeps himself so closely guarded. Even after more than a year of marriage. Even now that you have given him a child. 

The birth went mercifully well, but your recovery was long, and he has only recently begun to come to your bed again. And so far, only a handful of times. The first time, it was so painful for you that the act could not be completed, and the second time, he finished so quickly that it barely even counts. The third was better. Pleasurable for both of you, but still strange after going so long without it - at least for you. It is both likely and possible that the prince satisfied his urges elsewhere while your body was indisposed. You do not know. Nor do you wish to. 

The ground shifts beneath your feet, and the heat around you lessens, as does the heavy smell of burned flesh and brimstone, the very same one that so often clings to your husband’s clothes. When you open your eyes it is to the sight of Vhagar, settled onto her belly, her head laid atop her claws. Calm and docile, and with a deep rumble coming from her chest - one that is probably a sign of contentment, even if it sounds utterly terrifying. 

“Touch her,” the prince commands, giving a gentle push to your back. “You have nothing to fear, touch her.” 

It is quite clear that Vhagar is unruffled by your presence, that she is resting. But with her eyes heavy and half-closed, it makes her look so menacing, so evil - even though you know that evil does not exist inherently in any beast. Only in those who train it. 

You draw in a steadying breath, gathering up your courage, reaching your hand out - only to then think better of it and let it fall. 

“I am afraid to,” you whisper.

The prince sighs. But his hand closes gently around yours, bringing it to rest on the side of her nose, first the tips of your fingers, and then your whole palm. 

It is like nothing else you have ever felt, her scales. You always imagined that a dragon’s skin would feel like leather, but Vhagar’s skin is so much tougher, so much rougher, like running your hand over little rocks. And she is warm - so warm, as though a fire is always burning somewhere in her throat. 

She does not object at all to your touch, even when the prince withdraws his own hand, leaving only yours. Only you and Vhagar. The largest, oldest being in the world. 

To think, the things she has seen. The conquest, the Dornish Wars, the very founding of the realm of the Seven Kingdoms. Dozens of castles have crumbled in her fire, and thousands of people have perished, and she has fought and won hundreds of battles; torn through stone, rock and earth as though it was boiled jelly. 

It is at once terrifying and romantic, like something from a fairytale, or stories of ancient times. A creature of such myth and legend that you almost feel as though you should bow down to her, as one does before a great matriarch.

Vhagar the Conqueror. Queen of all Dragons. 

She closes her eyes when you draw back. 

“He might ride her too, some day,” the prince says quietly. Wistfully. 

“But dragons only have one rider - ” you protest, cutting yourself off when you realise what he meant. What he left unsaid. 

This is war. The realm is at war. Death is everywhere; at the end of a blade, in the point of an arrow. And if not on the field of battle, then in tainted water or plague-ridden camps; empty bellies or festering wounds.

“You shouldn’t say such things,” you mutter, looking down at your feet. Your dirtied shoes. 

The prince does not answer. A heavy mood has settled over the rocky beach, something vast and bleak and empty, only compounded by the surroundings. The colourless sky, the sombre crashing of waves. Even Vhagar gives a doleful sigh, as though she too is weary of what is to come.

She has been the prince’s companion since childhood. He was born to the queen, but Vhagar made him what he is, made him ruthless, made him brutally ambitious. Made him Aemond One-Eye, Aemond the Kinslayer. Prince Regent, Protector of the Realm. She has known him boy and man, as well as any, and better than most. She has known him in life, and she may yet know him in death.

You push that thought away as forcefully as your mind allows. You shouldn’t think such things. 

A coo from your son breaks the tension, and his eyes turn to the sky, where a large heron is flapping its wings. The afternoon is turning to evening, and soon the bell will ring for supper - something warm and comforting, you hope. You are cold, your breasts feel sore, and you have most certainly had enough excitement for one day. For several days, in fact.

“Can we go, please,” you breathe, looking up at your husband with wide, pleading eyes. 

“She is tired,” he says, with a soft glance at Vhagar’s terrifying face, and a gentle touch to her side. “Yes, we should.”

—

You walk slower on the way back. Uphill, with sore feet, and your boy now fast asleep in your arms. Safe and snug where he belongs. 

“My Prince,” you begin, sweet and innocent. “What does… yoreliatzeh mean?”

There is a sly little smile on his face when you look at him, a self-assured look in his remaining eye.

“Jorrāeliarza,” he corrects, with an artful pause before he continues. As though to keep you in suspense. “It means dear. Or… beloved.”

If he sees the sudden blush on your face, he does not let on. 

“Jorālitzeh.”

“No,” he says. “Jor-rāe-liar-za.”

“Jor-rāe-liar-za,” you repeat, trying your very best to mimic the exact movements of his mouth, the way he gently rolls his tongue. “Jorrāeliarza.”

“Better,” he nods, and then you round a corner, just in time to see the guards hastily hide their cards away, and the driver shuffling back towards the carriage, eagerly shoving his winnings into a pocket. 

Jorrāeliarza. Jorrāeliarza. Jorrāeliarza. 

Dear. Beloved. 

You like that very much.  

Please feel free to come into my asks or DMs with critique of my fics! Constructive is preferred, but not required.

Tags. @arcielee, @targaryen-madness, @aemondsbabygirl, @qyburnsghost, @blackswxnn

I am a mess with the tagging, I'm so sorry if I forgot or wrongly tagged anyone. Let me know, I will fix it.

[daemonsversion]

Hightower Girl | Daemon x Reader

Pairing: Daemon Targaryen x Female (Hightower) Reader

Summary: Sometimes it seems like Daemon has made it his life's mission to annoy you as much as possible. However, when he learns that your father has practically arranged a marriage for you, a long hidden desire comes raging to the surface.

Content etc: profanity, slight masturbation but not really, smut (fingering, loss of virginity) I never know what to put here tbh. Sorry for any mistakes, I only read back through it once or so.

Word count: 6,935 (my first fic on this page was NOT meant to be this long help)

The air held a chill as you turned your gaze up to the sky. You were standing at one of the large windows, looking out over the courtyard as the morning light continued to grow. It was beautiful to look at, yet the chill felt similar to the one that ran through your heart.

With a sigh, you turned away and retreated down the corridor. Last night your father, Otto Hightower, had told you of his plans to marry you off to one of the lords on the small council. You would, quite frankly, rather eat your own head but when you tried to protest all he'd done was get upset with you and tell you it was long overdue that you wed.

So you had been in a downward spiral ever since, trying to decide what - if anything - you could do to get out of it. It was a feeling of powerlessness that had you in its grip as you lamented that there might actually be nothing that you could do about it. Unfortunately, in many ways, you were seen as your father's property. To effectively sell off as he saw fit.

You didn't see him at first. Your eyes were fixed firmly ahead as you walked but they were not really working as they should. You had tunnel vision, moving mainly on autopilot. It wasn't until you'd walked right into Prince Daemon and trodden on his foot that you realised he was anywhere in the vicinity.

"Ah-careful!" He hissed, though not out of real anger, just a bit of surprise and pain because you'd really stomped down on his toes without meaning to. His hands had shot up to your shoulders, pushing you away from him, holding you at arms length.

Your gazes met at the same time and he blinked, abruptly letting go of you and stepping back, his eyes looking you up and down. "Oh." Hightower girl.

You frowned at his reaction but you were not in the mood today to get into an argument with the prince of the city, though some days you almost lived for it. "Forgive me, I was not looking where I-"

"No. I daresay you were not." Daemon smoothly interrupted, causing a flash of irritation to go through you. As much as you tried to conceal it, it did not go unnoticed and his lip curled into an amused smirk.

He leaned in slightly, his eyes now full of mischief as he saw the reaction he'd drawn out of you. Very similar to the ones you often drew from him, merely by the circumstance of your birth. He had not the stomach for Hightower cunts, after all, but he had absolutely found some use for you - getting to make you scowl and want to stomp your pretty little foot was the highlight of his day sometimes.

"You know, if you wanted to be close to me, all you had to do was ask." He purred, a hand coming up to brush a stray lock of hair from your face.

Your own hand immediately came up to slap his away before he could even touch you. Daemon chuckled, straightening up and letting his eyes roam down your form once more, from head to toe. This time it felt like there was something more than just derision there... and a sort of heat started to creep through you. Once his eyes met yours again, he gave you another one of his irritating smirks and then turned on his heel and vanished as quickly as he had appeared.

With a glare, you watched him leave, ignoring the deep ache that started to gnaw at you somewhere within and then you turned away and continued about your business.

Idiot.

Hours later, your frustrated footsteps took you through the keep, away from your father's office, out into the fresh air. The expression on your face was anything but happy, the argument you had just had with Otto fresh in your mind. You had, of course, gone to him intending to have a very levelheaded conversation about all of this but as usual it had descended into madness.

'It is high time you wed and start a family of your own, I have coddled you too long. Grow up. You will marry him.'

The words were spinning in your mind as you exited and stormed out to the Godswood. Not for any reason other than the fact that you knew it would be empty of people and your main desire was to be alone.

You didn't even want to talk it out with your little sister right now because you knew Alicent would only try and defend him. Ever the little appeaser, she would probably say that Otto was only doing what he thought was best. If he wanted to do what was best for you, why not let you marry someone you wanted, when you wanted?

A large pair of hands suddenly gripping you by the waist from behind and pulling you backwards, flush up against a hard body, startled you from your web of thoughts.

"You know the Gods aren't actually listening, don't you?" Daemon's lips grazed your hair and his breath was hot in your ear.

With a squeal, you scrunched in on yourself, squirming out of his grasp, twisting around to shove him away by the chest. "Daemon!" Your tone was scolding.

He only chuckled, leaning against the nearest tree as he looked back at you. "What?" He asked innocently.

You could only frown. Usually you had no problem giving back what you got but you simply don't have the heart for any of it today.

"Oh, what?" Daemon practically sneered, his lip curling as he stared at you. "Cat got your tongue, Hightower girl?" He knew your name but he never bothered to use it, simply out of a desire to further annoy you. You only ever called him by his name and he never called you by yours.

You rolled your eyes and gave him a look but there was not as much fire in it as usual and he found that this disappointed him a little.

"I saw you leaving your father's office." Daemon continued, watching the way your jaw tightened just slightly. He smirked. "Is it your cunt of a father that has upset you, hm?"

Where he expected to see a scowl at his insult against Otto, perhaps even a little fight, you instead huffed a humourless laugh and threw your hands up in a defeated manner. Upset was an understatement, you felt so far beyond just upset.

Daemon frowned, his expression becoming more serious. Well, teasing you was no fun if you did not react in the way he had become accustomed to. It seemed that he might have hit the nail on the head here without even really meaning it - he thought your mournful look was due to his presence, though now that he thought about it you had stormed out here in something of a temper. He had followed you all the way from inside, after all, so he'd seen the swiftness of your steps.

"What has he done now?" He asked then, studying your face with a look you rarely saw on him.

"Nothing." You mumbled, looking down at the ground. The last thing you wanted to do was pour your heart out to Daemon fucking Targaryen.

"It does not look like nothing." Was all the prince said in response.

Just that, not a hint of mockery in his tone, and you lifted your head to frown at him again. He did not look his usual level of cruel amusement. He looked almost like he... actually just wanted to know. That couldn't be right.

However, something about that made you just blurt the words out. Your father had basically sold you off to one of those stupid, stuffy lords on the small council. You had no choice and you felt like you were suffocating!

After you finished venting, Daemon's expression changed again. It was subtle, barely noticeable, but you caught the slight narrowing of his eyes as he stared at you in silence. The smugness seemed to have been wiped completely from his face. You couldn't remember the last time you'd seen him without it.

"What?" You asked, confused now as well as frustrated. Why was he not making fun of you about this? Why was he not taunting you with your looming fate?

Daemon gave the slightest shake of his head, his gaze dropping away from your face slightly. He opened his mouth as if to speak and then he closed it again as if he'd changed his mind. His tongue darted out to wet his lower lip and then he turned his face, looking away over the trees.

Your gaze had dropped to his mouth but you ignored the feeling in the pit of your stomach that the glimpse of his tongue gave you and tried to focus.

"What?" You asked again, a little more firmly this time. Daemon's silence was setting you on edge.

"What do you mean, what?" Daemon practically hissed as he turned his face back towards you.

Your glare returned at his tone. That was more like it. More familiar. "What do you think I mean? What is your problem?"

"You are my problem!" Was his furious reply as he took a step towards you.

"I have never done anything to you!" You exclaimed back. It was always him! Starting an argument or saying something snide in passing. He'd started this whole thing! If you were such a problem, why did he keep seeking you out just to bother you?

"Oh, do not act as though you are blind!" Daemon said, exasperated.

"What are you talking about?" You could not understand how a discussion about your predicament had spun so out of control. Why was he so angry? He was the one who'd asked! You were the one who was being given to some random man! "This is typical Daemon Targaryen. Everything is always about y-"

"You know very well that I have desired you, do not try and deny it!" Daemon snapped.

The silence that followed was absolutely deafening. You stared at him, your expression now one of shock. He stared back, his one of anger and also regret for speaking the words aloud.

"You..." Was all you could get out before you fell silent once more. This did not make sense.

In one of the most surprising moves he had ever pulled on you, Daemon closed the remaining distance in an instant. Taking your face in between his hands, he held you in place for a moment as his dark gaze burned across your features, and then his mouth descended upon yours and you were thrown so far into shock you were not sure you would ever come back from it.

His kiss was hot and passionate and his tongue was in your mouth before you knew what was happening as you... kissed him back, the desire that had been fighting for attention inside you for years now taking control.

His hands moved from your face and took hold of your waist as his mouth continued to explore yours, guiding you backwards towards the tree and pressing you gently up against it. You would have expected him to be rough and quick but he was not. His touch was gentle and soft and your heart was practically flying in your chest.

His body pressed up against yours as he deepened the kiss and you couldn't stop a soft sound of desire leaving you. It spurred Daemon on as a hand moved up from your waist, sliding up over your dress. He groaned into your mouth at the shape of you and you felt like you were on fire.

Only when Daemon's fingers began to fiddle with the lacing at the front of your bodice did you come back to your senses, turning your face to break the kiss and the hands that had moved to grasp his shirt began to push him away. "Stop... stop..."

The kiss stopped but Daemon did not immediately move away, his nose grazing your hair and his breath now hot against your ear as he fought to get his lust under control.

Eventually, he pulled away, his hands leaving you, stepping back to put distance between you both.

You were in an absolute whirlwind. Had that actually just happened? You had kissed Daemon. Daemon had kissed you. He'd been desiring you? For how long? Why? He hated you, did he not? You had so many questions and a moment later you turned your face back so you could see him.

Daemon stood where he was for another few moments, breathing heavily as he stared at you, his expression unreadable. Then he suddenly turned on his heel and started walking off.

"Daemon!" You called, stepping after him in surprise. What? He was just going to leave? This was not finished!

The prince said not another word, nor did he turn around, simply picked up his pace and disappeared.

The night was quiet.

The hour of the wolf had come and you had still not managed to fall asleep. It was not just your marriage predicament playing on your mind this night, it was also the moment with Daemon in the Godswood.

His hands on your waist. His tongue in your mouth.

You would be lying if you tried to convince yourself that you had never imagined it before. Despite the way he often spoke to you, and the remarks or looks you sometimes even gave him back, you had always had that funny feeling around Daemon. Try as you might (because he was a complete bastard, there was no denying it) you just hadn't been able to shake it. That desire.

Desire. He'd said he had desired you. How long had he felt that way? Why had he never said or done anything? To be fair, you knew why, and it probably had everything to do with your father.

Otto Hightower was the snake in Daemon's boot.

You thought about the way he'd looked at you when you'd told him about Otto's plan to marry you off. The speechlessness you had never witnessed before. The way his anger had risen quite quickly, causing him to just blurt out these apparently hidden feelings he'd been harbouring.

Your thoughts began to wander, wondering what would have happened if you had just let him continue what he'd been doing. If you'd let him pull at the laces of your dress and go further. He'd already had you up against the tree, what would it have been like if you'd just... let him take you?

As you imagined it, an ache began to grow steadily down between your thighs. Sighing, you squirmed. It was too late for this! You needed to sleep... yet it would not go away and your thoughts would not quiet.

With a frustrated noise, you shifted and your hand slid beneath the sheets. You couldn't believe that you were about to do this. Touch yourself to the thought of Daemon fucking Targaryen. That rude, arrogant, self-centred...

Your eyes drifted closed as you pulled the hem of your nightdress up and moved your fingers where you wanted - no, needed - them.

The lightest of touches was all you were afforded before you heard the sound of soft knocking at the door. You flinched, eyes flying open again as you sat up on your elbows and stared at the door with a frown.

The hour was so late. Who could that possibly be?

"Who is it?" You eventually called out, in case it was Alicent or maybe a guard informing people of a problem - though you had not heard any activity in the halls.

Instead of receiving a reply, your heart leapt into your throat as the door was simply pushed open upon hearing you were awake and a figure slipped into the room. It took you a moment to realise it was not any old intruder.

"Daemon!" Your heart rate slowed again, though not by much. The fact he was here at all was very improper.

He did not speak but stayed standing by the now closed door, staring at you through the darkness.

His silent, lingering presence in your dark chamber unnerved you slightly. "What are you doing?" You hissed.

Daemon blinked, seeming to snap out of whatever reverie he'd found himself in. He had been staring at you in the bed, not having been prepared for the sight even though he'd known logically you would be in it. "I thought that we should speak." He said, taking a step away from the door.

You sat up even further in the bed. "At this hour? In my chambers? You should not be here."

"I could not sleep." He said simply. Even through the darkness you could see the way his gaze flickered very quickly over your sheet-covered form.

"What has that got to do with me?" You asked even though you were pretty sure you already knew the answer. Had he been thinking about it too? Had it kept him awake as it had kept you?

Daemon's slight smirk returned as he took another step towards the bed and slowly moved to sit down on the edge of it. He wanted to touch you but he refrained. You were right, it was late and inappropriate but he just hadn't been able to rest. He had been pacing a hole in the floor of his own room for the past few hours.

You shifted in the silence that followed, refusing to be the first to break it. Your eyes were glued to him.

"I would say sorry about earlier," his voice came again. "But I would not mean it."

"Why are you here, Daemon?" You asked, ignoring what he'd just said completely.

He smiled a little wryly and his gaze dropped briefly to the low neckline of your nightdress and back up to your face. The moonlight streaming in through your window was the only thing illuminating the room.

"I think you know why I am here." He murmured, lifting a hand as if to reach for you face.

As earlier in the day, you lifted your own hand and lightly smacked his away before he could touch you. "I am not one of your whores!" You snapped, offended.

"Give yourself to me and I will never take another whore again, I swear it." Daemon said simply, his voice low as he leaned in slightly, his eyes never leaving your face.

"What?" You leaned backwards but the pillows didn't let you move too far from him. You could feel that ache again... the closer he got, the more he spoke.

"I mean it, I am being serious." He stated, lifting his hand again to graze the backs of his fingers down your cheek. This time you let him. "You do not wish for your father to marry you off to that stuffy idiot." He whispered, shifting closer. "Well, neither do I." His tone had darkened a little on that, taking on an almost possessive quality that made your heart somersault. "I presume you are a maiden." It tended to be something of a good bargaining chip for arranging unions between houses, after all.

Daemon's touch travelled slowly down your cheek towards your jaw and he eventually curled his long fingers under your chin, his thumb brushing your lower lip. "Give yourself to me," he repeated. "And I will deflower you and make it known... the marriage will be over before it is even begun." He knew this particular lord well and he knew he would not want a wife who had been sullied.

You stared at him in stunned silence for a long moment, trying to ignore the tightening in your belly and the racing of your heart at his proximity and his words. "To what end?" You asked in a helpless little whisper. "I would not have to marry this lord, no, but then what? I will surely be...-" Unwanted by most, seen as ruined perhaps, used. And gods the fury of your father when he found out...

As much as you desired him you did not want to be just one of Daemon's conquests, especially when it would leave you ostracised with no options while he continued to swan around doing whatever he wanted with no consequences. Oh, to be a man, you thought bitterly.

However, you did not get to finish your thought as Daemon interrupted, with a frustrated little frown on his face as if he'd expected you to piece that together on your own. "You would marry me."

A silence followed in which the two of you simply stared at each other. You were stunned. Did he mean that or was he being annoying? Despite the frustration on his face, which was also kind of born from his lust, you got the feeling he wasn't making fun of you. Not this time.

"What?"

"I said you would marry me, Hightower girl, are you deaf?"

A small scowl appeared on your face at his response and you pulled your face from his grasp. No, you were not deaf, but it was a bit of a bloody shocking thing for him to say, wasn't it?

"I have a name you know, you arrogant-!" You cut yourself off before you could say something too terrible but the irritation remained on your face. He had never in all the years you'd known him told you off for not using a title with him, yet he had also never called you by your own name from what you could recall. No doubt he had probably long forgotten it!

Daemon smirked at the sudden rise of fire in you. You had been off for most of the day due to wallowing in your misery and fighting with you had not felt quite as satisfactory as it usually did.

"There she is." He muttered, reaching for your face again. This time he took it with both hands like he had in the Godswood and he stared directly into your eyes, amusement shining on his face as he said your name.

Something about it falling from his lips, the way his mouth moved as he spoke it, coupled with the slowly growing desire in his eyes made you cave. Something flickered in your eyes. Daemon saw it and he immediately took it as a yes and leaned in. You did not object, tilting your head slightly once his mouth came down on yours, kissing him deeply.

A moment later his hands left your face and he was tugging at you to get you to lie back down. You shifted, still reeling slightly, and lay down again in the bed. Your heart was racing. You should not be doing this.

Any further thought was momentarily ceased as Daemon slid over top of you, hovering for a few seconds as his eyes seemed to take in as much as they could of you through the dark. "You are beautiful." He mumbled, so quiet that you thought he'd probably said it accidentally. His mouth immediately descending upon your own to prevent any response strengthened this thought.

You kissed him back right away, not in the state of mind to fully think on it anyway. Your desire was rising and the ache that had kept you awake was growing once more.

You made a small sound into his mouth which made Daemon press his body down against yours a little. The contact just made you feel hotter.

His hand slowly moved up to the neckline of your nightgown and this time you did not try to stop him. You let his fingers tug at the little ties, feeling it loosen with each one he pulled free. Your heart was now hammering so hard in your chest that you wondered how you had not passed out.

This is wrong, your mind was screaming.

But if it was wrong... then why did it feel so right?

Your thoughts ceased again when Daemon's fingers touched the bare skin of your right breast, having gotten the laces at the bust undone while you were kissing. You made a sound into his mouth and then he broke the kiss, pulling back so he could look down at you, wanting to see you properly.

The light in the room was dim but his eyes were keen enough and he groaned at the sight of you, gently pulling the rest of the fabric aside.

Again, Daemon continued to surprise you. Earlier, in the Godswood you remembered expecting his kiss or his movements to be rough and demanding yet it had been soft and gentle. In bed, you had imagined (yes, shamefully, you had imagined) Daemon ripping clothes off impatiently and taking what he wanted, yet he was taking his time undressing you and he was looking at you like you were something special, not just a body he wanted to use.

There was a funny, fluttery feeling in your stomach that you ignored as Daemon's eyes met yours again. He just held your gaze for a few seconds and then his lips were on yours once more. While his tongue explored your mouth, his fingers roamed your breasts - pinching, rubbing, tweaking, caressing - until you were squirming and whining.

You felt the beginnings of one of his trademark smirks and he broke the kiss with a chuckle, pulling back and looking down at you with amused eyes. Before you could complain about his teasing, a hand reached down and began to pull the skirt of your nightdress higher up your legs.

Briefly, you tensed. You tried to hide it but Daemon, who had been watching you very closely, immediately stopped his hand.

"Tell me to stop..." He said quietly. "And I will."

You could have. You could have told him to stop. You could have pushed him off. You could have told him to get out of your room. You could have stopped this whole insane plan right there and then.

But you didn't.

Because you wanted him.

You shook your head and Daemon raised an eyebrow, still not moving. He needed more than that.

You wriggled in frustration. "Please." You muttered, a little embarrassed to seem like you were begging for it, but Daemon did not mock you. His gaze seemed to darken with desire and his fingers clawed at the fabric once more, pulling it all the way up your thighs, wanting access to you. He might not seem it but he was growing impatient. He could feel the proof of it straining against his breeches, practically screaming to be let out.

But he would not be selfish and greedy. Not tonight. Not with you.

His fingers reached your most forbidden area and your mind immediately went blank once more, a gasp catching in your throat as he began to touch you there. His eyes did not leave your face once, wanting to see every little expression of pleasure that passed across it.

Daemon let out a groan when his fingers slid up and down your centre, feeling how wet you already were for him. He could scarcely believe his luck, it took everything not to just hold you down and finally make you his.

It was all he had been thinking about for months, probably even longer. Every whore he'd fucked to try and banish the thought of you from his mind had only succeeded in lodging you deeper into his heart.

He circled your clit a few times, drinking in the way you writhed at the sensation and then he slipped a finger inside of you. Your breath caught in your throat and he felt you tense slightly once more, an involuntary reaction. He'd felt such a reaction many times before. This was not his first deflowering.

"Shh.." He soothed, leaning in to press soft kisses to your cheek and jaw. "Shh... relax."

Daemon began to move his finger slowly, to allow you to become accustomed to the feeling. He felt you relaxing in response to his kisses and his gentle movements and soon it felt nice and you were making those sweet little sounds once more. He swiped his thumb over your clit again and then inserted a second finger, moving them both in and out with a gentle rhythm.

His lips came back to yours and he stayed like this for a little while, tongue exploring your mouth while his fingers worked you, slowly increasing speed. Your body felt hot, you were shaking and moaning... and Daemon was growing more and more turned on.

When he finally drove you to climax, he could take no more and he grunted, pulling his mouth from yours and leaning back to watch you come undone on his fingers. You were almost dizzy from the stars he'd just made you see but your eyes reopened as you felt him move away, whimpering slightly as his fingers left your heat.

You heard the sound of his belt being unbuckled and your heart started to race.

His fingers were starting to becoming impatient as he freed himself of his bothersome clothing and then moved himself back on top of you. When he kissed you this time, you felt something pressing up against you that was certainly not his hand. You shuddered and moaned into his mouth.

Daemon's lips left yours and began to trail down your jaw to your neck. He let them linger there, kissing and licking your skin as his hand moved back down your body, caressing your breasts and familiarising himself with the shape of you. He gently nudged your legs apart with his knee, trying not to rush too much because the last thing he wanted to do was go too fast and ruin the experience for you, but he wanted you to badly by this point it was almost painful.

Your body was on fire and your mind was focused on nothing but him, him, him. If there had been any lingering doubts anywhere inside of you, there wasn't any longer. You wanted this. You craved it. You had craved it for a long time, though you had not fully let yourself think it.

Daemon's hand took hold of his length and he gave himself a lazy stroke as his teeth gently grazed against your neck. The scent of you and the way you were responding to him was driving him absolutely mad. He wanted nothing more than to be inside of you. For you to finally be his.

He guided himself to your cunt and began to slide himself through your wetness, not quite pressing in yet, teasing you over and over as he got you used to the feeling of him.

You whimpered desperately.

Daemon groaned, his breath hot against your neck. "Gods, I want you." He muttered. He was frustrated, almost guilty, that he had not the patience to spend more time on your body. He wanted to taste you, but he told himself next time.

"Please..." You whispered, once more practically begging him. The feeling of his cock gliding through your slick was too much, you needed more, you needed to feel him. "Please." You said again, in a whine that caused Daemon to groan again in response.

He pulled his head back and looked down at you. "Say you want me."

"I want you." The words fell from your lips easily. They were true. They had always been true.

"I want you too." He whispered, leaning back in to kiss you one more time before he pulled away again and then shifted slightly. He kept eye contact with you the whole time as he began to press himself into you, your arousal making it so easy for him to slide himself into your heat.

Gods, the slick between your thighs made you feel like such a wanton little thing. He almost growled.

Another few seconds and he was buried inside you. He gave a deep moan as he pressed his face back into your neck, dizzy on the feeling. He wasn't so far gone that he didn't feel the tension rise in you once more though and he leaned back up, his lips pressing gentle kisses to your face and jaw again.

"Shh..." He soothed once more as he heard your breath catch in your throat when he shifted his body. He had gotten you ready for him and been as gentle as he could but he knew you were hiding the fact it still hurt a little.

"Look at me." He murmured, pressing a kiss to your lips and then looking down at your face. "Good girl." He purred when your eyes met his, brushing a stray strand of hair from your face. The praise awoke something inside you and you made a soft sound. He smirked slightly, having felt the fluttering of your walls around him. "Mhm. You liked that." Daemon teased.

If your face was not scarlet before, it was when he said that. Still, all panic had left your body as you were now just focused on the pleasure of the moment. When Daemon tested the waters by shifting his hips a little bit, a soft moan left you and he could tell it was feeling better for you. So he moved again. Then again. And again.

Soon, he had built up a steady pace, thrusting in and out of you. The room filled with lewd sounds and you could do nothing but revel in it. The burn had faded and now each thrust of his hips gave you a jolt of pleasure. Daemon was good at this. You supposed it was to be expected with all the experience it sounded like he had.

He wanted to last. He really did. But he had wanted you for so long and he felt like he was about to burst with each little sound that left you, each little wriggle you made underneath him, each time your nails gently bit into his arms as you clung to him.

His movements began to get quicker and you whined as he rubbed repeatedly against a certain spot inside of you. He grunted hard as he realised the reaction you were having. Daemon, however, was slightly unhappy with something. You were not reaching release quick enough and he was worried, with the way things were going, that he would before you did. He would be damned if he left you unsatisfied.

He moved his hand back down between your bodies and found your clit again, circling the little bud with skillful fingers. It was not long after that you were trembling and then shattering as he pushed you over the edge once more.

The sounds that your release pulled from you were so hot that he pretty much fell apart there and then. He groaned helplessly and buried his face back into your neck, breathing heavily as he moved his hips a few more times, his movements becoming a little less controlled as he felt himself nearing completion. With a harsh moan, Daemon then spilled himself inside of you and collapsed on top of you.

For a few minutes, the room was filled with nothing but heavy breathing as the two of you lay there like that, tangled together, all hot and sticky. You felt utterly boneless. Your eyes were shut and your breathing was ragged, your heart racing, your body limp beneath his weight.

It was perfect.

He was perfect.

"I will speak... to my brother to... tomorrow." Daemon muttered against your neck, slowly coming back to himself. Even if Otto held any reservations after what happened, Viserys would no doubt smooth them over somehow and convince him that you marrying Daemon was the best (and only) option to come out of this.

You could only hum in response, delighting in the kisses he began once more pressing against your skin. You felt warm and content and when he eventually moved and rolled off you, you couldn't hold in a sound of disappointment. Immediately you felt embarrassed but Daemon's arms coming around you and pulling you to him distracted you from it.

Opening your eyes, you blinked at him. "You can't stay."

"We are to be married." He said simply, a small smirk on his face. "I have taken you. Everyone will find out anyway." He reminded you. That was the plan after all.

"Yes, but..." Your cheeks felt hot but hopefully he would think you were just still coming down from the high because you partly were. The idea of being caught with a man (Daemon Targaryen of all people) in your bed was too scandalous. A step outside your comfort zone. "...you..."

"I will go, do not worry." Daemon purred in your ear, flicking his tongue out lightly over the outer edge, smirking as he felt you shiver. "I only want to hold you until you fall asleep. Does that not sound nice? Hm?" He did not say that he simply could not stomach the thought of just rolling out of bed and leaving you lying here all by yourself after your very first time. He did not want to leave you alone in the dark.

You sighed, acting bothered, but it did sound very nice and you were already so comfortable. He was very warm... so you were quick to relent. "Fine. But as soon as I am asleep..." Your voice held as much warning as you could muster.

Daemon chuckled softly, nodding as he adjusted slightly, getting more comfortable in the bed and pulling you up tighter against his body. "Yes, my lady." He said it as if you had given a command and he liked the way his teasing tone made you giggle.

It did not take you long to fall asleep. Indeed, you were so exhausted, you were out in a few minutes.

Unfortunately, Daemon was also so exhausted that he fell asleep mere moments after you did.

When Alicent entered your chambers the next morning, she got quite a shock... and quite an eyeful, as Daemon had kicked himself out of the covers at some point during the night, giving the poor girl an unfortunate glimpse of his backside that did not leave her memory for the rest of her days.

Her shriek was what caused your father to come running into the room. You were not sure you had ever seen Otto quite so angry in your whole life. After the initial shock wore off, you thought he might actually be so angry he would lay hands upon the prince but he managed to somehow hold himself back.

The look of disappointment was clear as your father turned his gaze on you but Daemon, now standing, shifted in front of you the second he saw it and blocked Otto's view.

If anyone would take Otto Hightower's anger, it would be him.

"What's say you and I go and have a talk with my brother, hm?" Daemon muttered, his eyes narrowed.

Otto stared at him with barely concealed rage. The last thing he wanted was his child linked to a man like Daemon Targaryen. He had been a thorn in his side for years. And now he had... defiled one of his daughters! He tried to look at you again but Daemon cleared his throat.

Otto glared at the prince. "You may wish to put on some clothes first." Was all he said before turning and sweeping from the room, dragging Alicent out by her elbow, letting the door slam behind them.

You would have burst into tears if you were not so shocked. You watched Daemon turn to pull his clothes back on. When he looked up at you, he was smirking.

"It's not funny!" You exclaimed.

"Oh, come on." He teased, sitting down on the bed and leaning closer. "It is a little bit funny."

You turned your head so he couldn't kiss you, frowning. You had never felt so embarrassed and ashamed in your whole life. Though it would have come out anyway when Daemon told his brother and you confirmed but to have been walked in on by your father and sister was another thing entirely!

Daemon sighed, lifting a hand to your chin and gently turning your face back towards him. "I'm sorry."

"You said you would leave!"

Daemon blinked, feeling a little bit guilty because he could see this actually had been difficult for you. "I did not do it on purpose, I fell asleep!"

You scoffed. "Right."

"Hey. I mean it." He said and he looked and sounded so serious that you did believe him.

There was a brief silence and then Daemon smirked again.

"What?" You asked, half snapping at him.

Your tone did nothing to rid him of his smile, the smirk turning into a bit of a grin. "When I return," he said as he leaned in again. "You and I will be betrothed."

You could not stop your face from breaking into a smile of your own. "You seem very confident in that fact." After what he'd just walked in on, you were pretty sure your father would be vehemently against this, perhaps simply out of spite and anger.

"Don't you know by now, Hightower girl?" Daemon's eyes glinted with mischief as he closed the distance and kissed your lips once more. When you parted, he was smirking again. "I always get what I want."

[violettduchess]

chevalier and ex-lovers for the angst promt? that seems like it would be really interesting considering his route. thank you for reading this ask

A/N: With some encouragement and brainstorming (thank you @lorei-writes 💜) I finished this!

An addition to my Broken Heartstrings series

Chevalier x Reader

WC: 1.3k

The crowds that have gathered in the streets are humming like a hive full of excited bees. Some small children are pushing their way beneath elbows and through knees, trying to get to the front. Others are being hoisted up onto the shoulders of grown ups who shift their weight from foot to foot, as eager as the children to get a glimpse.

You can see them all from your spot, perched on the wide windowsill of your bedroom. Precarious as it may be, you’ve pushed open the window, leaving nothing between you and the view of the street below. It’s a joyful scene, one of breathless anticipation as the townsfolk wait for their king to ride through on this, the anniversary of his coronation. The king that you chose a year ago. The man who had challenged your spirit and won your heart.

But instead of sitting by his side, proudly looking down at all the beaming faces, you’re alone at your window, stomach in knots at the thought of seeing Chevalier Michel again, even from a distance.

Just thinking his name sends your mind down well-trodden paths of anguish and heartbreak....

What had seemed so solid, so strong, had unraveled in a single moment. You didn’t even have the chance to anticipate something was wrong. He had gone to investigate suspicious activity at the border. He had returned, white clothing running red with blood that was not his. Still, you had run to him, concern an engine that spurred you forward at lightning speed….and he had turned away, turned his shoulder towards you. And then he had told you, in a voice as chilled as winter’s edge, to leave. 

Leave, he repeated at the palace gates, his hand gesturing for you to move away.

Leave, he repeated as you stood in his bedroom, questions shooting from your mouth like wayward fireworks, bright and burning and frantic. 

Leave was all he said, his voice a blade as dangerous and final as his sword.

His betrayal of your trust was a sudden cracking of ice, a fall into freezing water that left you speechless, breathless, and utterly broken. All the possibilities for the future, all the countless daydreams. All the nights spent talking, sharing, weaving a relationship from the threads of your heartstrings snapped in a blink by silver shears, cold as the blue of his eyes when all your wild thoughts boiled down to a single question, your voice trembling like a leaf in a cruel, sudden wind: 

Why?

Leave was his only reply.

And so you fled the palace, the beautiful rose gardens, the confused and concerned questions in the eyes of his brothers. You fled the place that had become home to return to the life you had known before, except it didn’t fit as it once did. Something was missing, something that ached in the night, that chased sleep away from the spinning hurricane of your mind. A longing for someone that you shouldn’t want, someone who was willing to drive a stake into the beating heart of your love without hesitation. Or explanation.

A combined gasp and cheer rises up from the crowd as the royal caravan approaches and tugs you back to the present. The other princes ride upon their horses, smiling and waving. Well, Licht isn’t exactly smiling and something about his somber expression is so familiar, a constant in a world turned upside down, that it actually brings a smile to your lips, a sad, watery thing but a smile nonetheless. Jin and Nokto beam brightly, waving and nodding, especially to the women who meet their gazes with excited hands pressed to their hearts. Leon is every inch the prince, flawlessly dividing his attention between both sides of the street, his smile open and wide. He was always so kind.  A wave of bittersweet emotion washes through you as you remember the time he would take to explain things to you, to help you find your way, to listen,

But he is not the one your heart chose. 

And behind Leon and his black stallion rides the King on his destrier of purest snow white. The sight of him, tall and proud, one gloved hand on the reins, the other casually on the pommel of his sword freezes the breath in your lungs. Your fingers curl into your palm unbidden, nails biting deep into flesh gone numb. Beside him, Clavis is all flashy smiles and waves, golden eyes scanning the crowd to award a nod or tilt of the head to anyone he wants to feel special. His head tilts up as his gaze sweeps across the many open windows and people waving handkerchiefs, some embroidered roses, some embroidered with tigers in honor of the king’s crest.

You, still as a beam of moonlight, stand out amid the riotous cheering.

Of course Clavis notices you. In a heartbeat, your eyes lock with his and something inside you shifts as you are flooded with the memories of the many laughs, the teasing, but most of all, the way he supported you through loving his brother. He knows what a difficult path that is to walk. He has been walking it his whole life.

He offers you something no one else in the crowd gets. His face, always adept at schooling itself into whatever mask it need be, is filled with genuine emotion at the sight of you. He offers you a smile, soft and sad and real.

Somehow, even from a distance, he has still found a way to comfort you.

Your spirit is bolstered, just a little, and you manage a smile in return, raising a hand in greeting.

And then Chevalier notices his brother’s upturned face and his own head moves, his gaze rising to see what has Clavis’s attention.

There you are, up in the window, framed like a beautiful portrait, smiling, but even he can see it doesn’t quite reach your eyes, like a garden dappled in shadows. Your hand is raised, that hand he knows intimately. He knows the motion of your fingers as they delicately turn the page of a book. He knows the strength in them when you grip a horse’s reins. And he knows their softness, the tenderness with which they can touch, the feel of your fingertips as they trace the line of his jaw. The eagerness with which they press into the back of his neck when he kisses you-

Kissed you.

When he kissed you.

Because he will never know their touch again. Nor your kiss. Nor your smile. Even now, as your gaze meets his, that smile fades, your hand slowly lowers, curling against your heart like a wounded animal, seeking shelter.

And he knows he did that. He killed the warmth of you, the joy, the whispering sunshine of your love.

And he would do it again.

Because as pained as you look now, somehow he knows it would never compare to the pain of being in love with someone who could so deeply disappoint you. He learned that lesson the day he rode to the border, when he killed as mechanically as clockwork, without remorse, without regard. How easily his blade drank the blood of young and old. He saw only red, felt only the jolt of sword through flesh and turned to seek it again and again.

You claimed there was good in him, there was mercy and the capacity to love.

And for a brief moment in time, he had believed you. Until that day.

And rather than watch your love for him slowly wither as you learned you were wrong, that he was nothing more than a brutal beast, he made a clean cut. Sharp, painful but without a doubt in his mind the correct thing to do.

He could not watch the light in your eyes go out. Because he loved you.

Loves you.

Because he still loves you.

Chevalier’s pale head turns away from you and the procession continues.

Slowly, breathing against the burning ache in your chest, the broken pieces of your heart slicing into wounds that have never fully healed, you lean forward and pull the window closed. 

There is nothing left to see.

Tagging: @xbalayage @alexxavicry @queengiuliettafirstlady @bellerose-arcana @thewitchofbooks @aria-chikage @redheadkittys @tele86 @dear-mrs-otome @olivermorningstar @writingwhimsey @mxrmaid-poet @silver-dahlia @wendolrea @nightfoxqueen @myonlyjknight @ikesimpleton @ikemenlibrary @namine-somebodies-nobody @greatstarlightstarfish @cellophanediamond @whatever-fanfics @justpeachyteastea @chirp-a-chirp @got7igot7family @kookie-my-little-sunshine @mastering-procrastinating @portrait-ninja @queen-dahlia @themysticalbeing @nightghoul381 @whitelittlebunny @chi-the-idiot @bubblexly @ozalysss

[aphroditelovesu]

Hi ! can you do love letter for cardan Greenbriar? After certain someone assassinated the entire family so he's the crown prince now he want to propose reader to be his queen and refusal will have consequences maybe can you make him kind of simp for reader too? Thank you ❤

My beloved,

I hope these words reach you at a time when the pain that surrounds us can find some comfort in my presence. Since the day our destinies crossed, my heart has been held captive by the passion we have for each other. But now, with the weight of the crown on my head and the sinister shadow of the mystery surrounding my family's death, my need for you has grown into an obsession I can no longer ignore.

The loss we suffered ripped my soul apart, leaving in its place a void that only your presence can fill. The throne I now occupy feels cold and empty without you by my side, sharing the burden and glory of reigning. Every decision I make, every step I take to consolidate my power, is with the thought of you as my partner, my equal, my Queen.

I understand that our paths can be trodden with thorns and that the choices I make can have dark consequences. But, my beloved, the prospect of not having you by my side is more terrifying than any condemnation I may face. My devotion to you transcends the barriers of morals and reason, and I refuse to let anything separate us.

I know that my actions can be considered extreme, that the thirst for power and control can lead me to dark places, but know that everything I do is to ensure a future where we can reign together, as partners and indomitable lovers. I crave your love intensely and possessively, a flame that burns deep in my soul.

My dear, I am willing to face any challenge, to break down any obstacles, to have you as my Queen, no matter the price to be paid. Our union will be the embodiment of strength and determination, and there will be no one or nothing that can stop us.

May this letter be a testament to my devotion and an invitation to share my throne and my life. Embrace the darkness that burns within me and allow our destinies to intertwine in a love that transcends the boundaries of understanding.

With a love that consumes and dominates,

Cardan.

[gorbalsvampire]

on Golconda, Roads and Paths

Here's the thing about Golconda.

In the Dark Ages, it was understood that there was a Beast, and that many Roads led away from the Beast, and that at the end of every Road there was a state of being in which one was a paragon of one's virtues, as far from the Beast as any Cainite could ever be, and that state was called Golconda. A Paragon of the Road of Sin would look like a shame, a caution and a horror to a follower of the Road of Heaven or Kings, but their Beast would be mastered nonetheless.

Much that was once known was lost, in the War of Princes and the Inquisition and the Revolt and the rise of the Sabbat.

A Path is not a Road, built and tended with the authority of mind over soul. A Path is simply a route trodden by many, through a wilderness poorly understood by all.

The Sabbat is permanently struggling, and its Enlightenment begins with a breaking of the self and a submission to the Beast. Its Paths are framed by an eternal war that defines everything the sect thinks and does, against everything it can reach, against enemies vast and abstract. It is not interested in Golconda any more than it is capable of winning.

The Camarilla? They have maintained but one Road – Humanity – to the detriment of all the others. Theirs is the struggle between Beast and Man, and when a Kindred wishes to be neither, they fold their arms and say "nevertheless: choose, or be damned." The Camarilla does not believe in many things that happen to be true; it believes in you believing what you're told, and if you don't, well, you must be lost to the Beast already, mustn't you?

In the modern nights, Golconda is an accident. The Roads, well kept and maintained, are lost, and all that remains is to blunder along the Path and hope.

This is a very long winded way of saying "check out Dark Ages if you want to see what an authoritarian (Kings) or indulgent (Sin) or harmonious (Beasts) or pious (Heaven) relationship with the Beast looks like, all of those are forms of Golconda, same mechanical effects but very different behaviours to maintain them."

During the War of Princes, i.e. before the formation of the Camarilla, you have five major Roads and at least as many minor ones. None of them are presented as necessarily more important, more widely followed, or more "true" than the others. And, crucially, in the Revised era - that's Dark Ages Vampire, not Vampire: the Dark Ages - all of those Roads have an Aura attached. At a high Road rating, that is to say really living up to their personal ideals, a character radiates a palpable sense of something - authority, temptation, compassion - suggesting that they are approaching a different order of being.

After the formation of the Camarilla, on the other hand, you have Humanity presented as the default state of being for vampires. Their central moral struggle is to preserve their Humanity from the ravages of the Beast - there are very clear consequences for letting your Humanity drop, but the Aura corresponding to the Dark Ages' Via Humanitas is no longer present. Something has changed. Something about the way vampires work is not as it used to be.

Dark Ages was always a backformation - a prequel created after the core operations and tenets of Vampire were established. And those core operations and tenets have always included a sense of Humanity as "The Downward Spiral," of vampires as risking "degeneration" should they engage in behaviours presented by a "Hierarchy of Sins." The journey toward the Beast has always been more explicitly mapped out than any journey away from it. Spend XP to restore Humanity. You may reach Golconda, I guess.

This is fine, it's a solid bit of Gothic theming, core to the game, love it. Except... it doesn't gel with the Paths of Enlightenment, many of which are transhumanist in nature, and which - again, in Revised, this is where I came in - are built from a start of actively running down your Humanity and then adopting your Path and then needing to build your Path rating back up again, i.e. climbing a moral ladder away from the Beast. This doesn't really work when the Paths' morality is written, like Humanity, as a series of failure points - Sins by which you degenerate and risk the Beast. The Paths, as written, are a kind of square peg/round hole situation where you have to turn prohibitions into opportunities to progress. And there isn't as clear a mechanical reward or incentive for maintaining a high Path rating as there is for a high Road rating. No Auras here either.

So, what I arrived at, once I'd run my first successful Dark Ages Vampire game and had this distinction really brought to my attention, was a sense that vampire morality had changed between one side of the transformative events in the early modern period. And that's when I started thinking about what it meant that your characters in Dark Ages and Victorian Age occupied the same band of generations, and thought about how the Camarilla can get away with claiming there are no such things as Antediluvians when some of its founding figures have a personal memory of Antediluvians being actively involved in the War of Princes.

That's when I started taking the Inquisition seriously, as an effectively genocidal event that wiped out almost all playable vampire characters. Higher than sixth generation? Yeah, you probably didn't make it through the War and the Revolt and the Inquisition, and repopulation took a while, Tradition of Progeny and all that. The surviving elders are the ones who deliberately fabricated new social orders for vampirism - the aggressive, militant transhumanism of the Sabbat and the centralised "we hide amongst humans and Humanity is the best way to do that" principles of the Camarilla.

And that's how I arrive at my model of vampire morality.

[secretwhumplair]

The Outpost

633 words | The black prince [WT] (sequel to It's night and they escape and head for the border)

Content | Multiple whumpees, broken bones, fear, implied/mentioned: starvation, slavery, war themes

Notes | Hooray! They made it! Right.

Why am I struggling so much with titling right now sdkfaskf it's bad enough I have to name all these characters and places

Elgar had underestimated how exhausting it would be, for both of them, to stay on a horse for hours. He hadn’t even managed to get the animal to pick up a trot, but even so, he worried his companion might fall off any minute, their frail body slumped against his.

The first light of dawn was creeping over the horizon, stealing through the forest where they were following a path narrow enough it might have been trodden into the ground by wild animals only. Elgar had no idea whether the wretch knew where they were going. They only reached out to weakly tap his leg when the horse slowed down, even though Elgar himself barely had the strength anymore to encourage it forward. By now it had stopped more than once to nibble at some herbs by the wayside.

But then, the forest suddenly retreated, revealing a large clearing, and at the center of it what was clearly a fortified outpost of the Ochurian military.

Elgar’s heart sank when he saw it. The wretch might find help here—and he was glad, he was—but he? His insides squirmed. A part of him was utterly convinced he had merely exchanged one cruel master for another.

But then, if so, what difference did it really make? At least the wretch would be safe. Wouldn’t they?

When they approached, a guard called out to them in Ochurian. Elgar didn’t understand a word of it, but their rough, hostile tone was enough to make him want to cower—not that he could.

The wretch stopped the horse, or let it stop. Elgar wished they could have gone a little closer, so the soldiers could see the deplorable state they were in and perhaps take pity, or at any rate recognize the wretch as one of their own at least by ancestry.

Elgar could only reply in the Rekkshuran he had picked up during his captivity and hope that a military man so close to the border would understand at least a few words. »We come as refugees. My companion is of your people. They need a medic,« he added without much hope. »Please.«

There was some commotion, then quiet that stretched uncomfortably long. Elgar noticed he could barely feel his feet or hands after travelling through the cold night. The wretch was so immobile they might as well have died right there before him.

Finally, the gate opened. »Come,« someone called in heavily accented Rekkshuran.

Elgar cued the horse forward with all the strength he had left, and they managed to get through the gate, where a number of curious soldiers was awaiting them. Many of them gave him hostile looks, just like he had expected. There was a knot in his throat. He thought of the wretch’s hands closing in the dark of the stable: I’ll protect you. But they couldn’t speak. They could hardly move any more by the looks of it.

Now, though, they managed to raise their head and meet the eyes the unamused man approaching them—the resident big cheese by the way he, and the soldiers around him, acted.

Elgar would never forget the moment that followed: the way the commander’s face changed from stern mistrust to open dismay.

He rushed to the side of the horse. »Your Highness… my Prince.«

Elgar could only stare as the word echoed through his suddenly empty head. Prince prince prince. The poor soul he had seen as equal to his own miserable state, had casually taken by the hand, had sought to soothe with what now seemed like the most condescending phrases… a prince.

A whole new fear bubbled up in his throat like acid.

The wretch—prince—merely fell off the horse, and was caught securely in the arms of the commander.

[bittersweetarts]

Little Lamb - Aemond Targaryen x Reader (Chapter 7)

Aemond Targaryen x You –  Chapter 1 , Chapter 2 , Chapter 3 , Chapter 4 , Chapter 5 , Chapter 6

Word count: 5301 words

Summary: As a maiden of a noble house, it is your duty to wed well. But how will you manage to, with a curious and possessive Prince in the picture?

WARNINGS: Violence, misogynistic behaviour (quite sexist), dubious consent

Spotify Playlist – AO3 Page

Chapter 7: Homecoming

Although you were never too fond of traveling, hating how much time was wasted, you still adamantly refuse to ride on the terrifying she-dragon, Vaghar, against the one-eyed Prince’s demands.

“For the love of the Seven, Storm’s End is a seven-day journey.” the Prince Aemond groaned, as you sat in the chambers of Princess Jaehaera, watching over the children as they played. The Prince knew that it would be best to approach the topic of travel again with you in the presence of his nephews and niece, for your inclination towards being headstrong would be subdued.

Picking up the small Prince Maelor and setting him down on your lap, you look at the Prince, who stood above you. Sighing, you respond.

“Your Grace, as I have said before, I am not made to be on a dragon—“

“I would beg to differ.” The Prince interrupted with a mischievous smile. Rolling your eyes and ignoring him, you continue.

“Unless you intend to bring me dead to family, then I have to go by horse.” As you say the word ‘dead’, Princess Jaehaera protests the way young children do, jumping up to the side to hug you, with glassy eyes and a sharp whine.

“Nobody is dying, sweet niece.” Prince Aemond says, leaning down to pick up Jaehaera, still maintaining eye contact with you. “Tell me, Maelor, which journey sounds better: a quick flight on the largest dragon in the world, or sitting in a stuffy carriage for days on end?” Unsurprisingly, Maelor and the twins both yelled in favour of the former, reaping the wayward Prince another roll of the eyes from you.

“Why don’t you just get on your spectacular dragon in a week’s time and meet me there instead? Surely that is the best journey for the both of us.” You say irritated.

“Absolutely not. I will not have you left alone, unprotected.”

“And what of Ser Landor? Surely he would take offense if he heard how little you think of his abilities.”

The formidable Ser Landor was a knight chosen specifically by Prince Aemond, who now believed you too weak and vulnerable to threats. Now, everywhere you go, the stoic Ser Landor followed, never leaving you alone. You felt sure that if the Prince were not in bed with you at night, Ser Landor would never find time for sleep. Though the knight never disturbed, you found the middle-aged knight’s presence in your life to be an unwelcome one. You were also not very fond of the fact that your wishes of not having protection were being disregarded. You also did not fail to notice his personality, which was akin to a trodden rock, and you had a hunch that his lack of charisma was also why the Prince had chosen him as your protector.

The subject of travel has had you and the Prince bickering for days now. You knew that the Prince was adamant about escorting you, but you could not understand why. You gave up asking why very quickly, for he would not share anything, and neither did Queen Helaena, when you asked her once, during a stroll in the Gardens. Reasonably, you knew that it may have had to do with the Prince’s wish to wife you, and he may want to meet your father in person to arrange the affair. Though you thought it ridiculous, and believed that it would not happen, for surely someone would stop Prince Aemond from doing such a thing, the thought of it still made you blush. As time passed, you began imagining a life with the Prince, and felt like it was a story that you read as a child. And though you did not love the Prince, you tolerated, and even at times, liked him. You never expected to marry for love, so how was this any worse?

One aspect did make you nervous though, was that not only being wed to a Prince, but a Targaryen Prince at that. Though many people had heedless ambition, you were not one of them, and preferred the comfort of safety over the potential to advance in a game you did not care for. You want children, and you knew that having children with Prince Aemond would mean that they would always be in danger, and perhaps, even from him. This made your stomach turn.

Your travel preparations had been lengthy and involved very little from your end. On the morrow following your nameday, Prince Aemond asked you to send a letter informing your parents of your arrival (as well as that of some of the Royal Family), and that he would take care of the rest. This vexed you, especially as you knew that the Prince was withholding letters from them. You protested, he refused, the two of you bickered, then you kissed and reconciled (and wrote the damned letter). You now understood that it was a pattern and quickly became worn out.

A moon has passed since then, and you were finally about to leave, now that Prince Aemond had dealt with any matters that the King and his responsibility to the realm bestowed upon him

At first, you had expected that the Prince would not be accompanying you to your homeland without his Queen sister and her children, for surely it was improper. After visiting Oldtown, Queen Helaena had become fascinated with the idea of traveling throughout the Kingdom, telling you during supper one evening about how she now wondered whether her dragon, Dreamfyre, would be up for the challenge. Unfortunately, the King Aegon, who had been more lucid that evening, expressly forbade her from traveling without him upon hearing her enthusiasm, and you could not help but feel that it was cruel. A common trait among the Targaryen men you now understood.

“Please reconsider.” The Prince said, as he kissed you between your neck and shoulders the night before your journey. You knew that he was talking about traveling by dragon flight. That is all he talked about with you now, and it irritated you to no end.

“Aemond, I am trying to sleep.” You say, rolling away from him, feigning being sleep. You feel strong arms wrap around you tightly, pulling you close.

“Your stubbornness is arousing.” Your eyes open wide as you feel something hard press you below, and immediately jump away from him, turning to face the blonde man, so as to not have your back to him. He smiled triumphantly when you faced him, tucking a hair behind your ear. It was not the first time this has happened, nor were you naïve to the needs of men, but most of the time, you ignored it, hoping that his need for lust overwhelms his need to possess you. If he decided to go to the Street of Silk and find himself a new woman to obsess over, you would not be completely opposed to it, you thought. It has had yet to happen though.

Swiftly, the Prince got on top of you, supporting himself by positioning his elbows between you. Leaning closer, the Prince’s face hovered over yours, his eye mask so close that you could snatch it away if you wished. His lips almost touched yours, but did not, and his lower region firmly pressed against you. You felt like you were on fire.

“Aemond,” you say warningly. Not that the Prince understood, for he proceeded to start trailing kisses across your neck and jaw, humming, before whispering into your ear.

“I love it when you call me by my name.”

“Aemond,” you say again, this time in a lower tone. The Prince’s eye sharply connects to yours, and you notice his breath quicken. “… Surely your own quarters are more comforting.” You say, but your voice cracks as you. You do not give up though. “When was the last time you slept in your own bed?”

“I do not remember, but you are welcome to join me there though.” Exasperated, you try pushing him away, but he is unaffected, instead rolling to his side and pulling you against him.

“Never have I begged so much in my life. Please, my love, reconsider.” You knew that he was not asking about his chambers, but your journey. He loved wearing you down until you gave up, until you said yes, for it was his favourite game to play.

“The carriage going to Storm’s End will be at the courtyard tomorrow, you have not sent it away?” You ask, tracing your fingers against his jaw slowly, your fingers gliding towards his mouth, and then his scar.

“Not yet.”

“Good, as I would look rather foolish stood alone there with my belongings,” you kid, earning a slight turn of the mouth. “I will be in it, and so will Ser Landor. The journey is easy, and I will be safe.” You softly press your lips against his, before pulling away. “Please, do not force me, as I do not force you.”

Humming, the Prince pressed his forehead against yours. “You force me all the time, I am constantly at your clemency.” This time when you press your lips onto his, it is neither brief nor momentary.

Technically, your family does not reside in Storm’s End, but in one of the few (much) smaller castle near it. Thunder Fort was its name, and like Storm’s End, it was also situated along northern coast of Shipbreaker Bay. For centuries, your family has resided in this castle, and though your ancestors had actually sided with House Durrandon during Aegon’s Conquest, pardons were granted in exchange for unyielding generational loyalty towards House Baratheon.

Though your journey was long and dull, with your knight providing little conversation, the time passed, and you were finally at home. As you stepped out of the carriage and onto the gravel of your home, you felt yourself resuscitated, as if you could finally breath again, the wind cool and crisp. Unlike King’s Landing, the air here was fresh, satiating your breath like water does to a parched man.

It was dark when you arrived, and the castle was noisy, full of life. As the castle’s drawbridge was pulled down, allowing for your carriage to enter, it only got louder. Despite the noise, you still heard a mighty roar echo through, one that you heard in King’s Landing daily, and had become accustomed to. So Aemond is here already.

You stand here in the gravel courtyard for a moment, trying to cherish the feeling of being back home. Straight ahead, a rock’s throw across, you see beloved familiar faces sprinting towards you, and you hear your name called out by a high-pitched voice. The happiness that infected you is unlike you have ever felt before.

The first to greet you is your little sister, Liyana, who is the first to reach forward and hug you, followed by Taliya and Addysen. Triplet girls of the same age as Maelor, you perhaps longed them the most during your time away, having helped raised them from birth.

“My dear girls, I have missed you so much– oh how you’ve grown!” You cry out, taking a slight step away to observe them. Taliya, who used to be the most lithe of the triplets, had grown considerably, no longer so small, meanwhile Addysen now barely resembled the likeness of her sisters. All the girls had hair much longer now, as unruly as they appeared to have become.

“Sister, we have missed you so much more!” Professed Liyana, grabbing hold of your left hand and tugging you towards the rest of your family, Taliya doing the same to the other, meanwhile Addysen tugged against your gown. You look back to the carriage and see Ser Landor mutely taking hold your items and giving you a reassuring nod. Taking a deep breath, you finally let the girls lead you.

You were nervous beyond belief, and slightly overwhelmed by how many people had come to greet you. You knew not all of your siblings were here, as most were married, living across the lands with their new families, or just simply not living at Thunder Fort anymore, such as your older sister, Beylee, who had chosen to become a silent sister serving in the Vale (her you remember very little about, as she moved away when you were quite young). Among the small crowd, you also see a familiar blonde, smiling brightly at you as he towered over everyone else in height.

“Lady Mother, Lord Father.” You approach bowing down in a dignified manner. It has been more than a year since you saw them last, and you missed them as any child would. You felt different since you last saw them though, in a way, more mature and grown.

“My child.” Your father is the first to greet you, pulling you into an embrace. Though never an emotional man, you father seemed changed, as though distance made him become fonder. You also noticed how he looked worn out now, and worry washed over you. Forcing a smile, you return the embrace.

“Father, I am so sorry for missing Dayron’s wedding.” You mumble into him, feeling tears welt in your eyes, and the graying man proceeds to hug you tighter. “It is not your fault my sweet girl, I know it.” You force yourself to swallow the sobs threatening to burst, and you pull yourself away. Looking around, you see that Dayron is missing, and understand that he must now live with his lady wife’s family in the Westerlands.

Similarly, you greet your mother and your other siblings, receiving a tighter embrace each time, as though you had returned from war. You could not remember being this loved before and wondered whether you have been simply ungrateful this whole time. The only one who seemed unhappy to see you is your eldest brother, Tommend, the future Lord of your House.

A fiery red-haired woman approaches you carefully, which takes you by surprise. “Sister, welcome back home.” Your older sister Lauryn greets you, pulling you into her clutch with a smile. To say that you are surprised to see her here is an understatement, and eagerly return her affection.

“And you, dear Lauryn. Welcome back!” You respond, glad to see her. “And you are with child, Seven’s blessings!” She was stood, with a swelled belly, next to a brawny, dark haired man who you have met once before, during their wedding, and he welcomes you politely.

Sometime before the civil war began, your older sister Lauryn had been wedded to Brandon Stark, the cousin of the Lord of Winterfell, and has lived in the North ever since. As children, the two of you played together, as you were close to the same age, and she too possessed your independent spirit. It was no surprise that in your family, out of all daughters, you were the only ones thus far to not marry very young. This did not discourage Lauryn from deciding to have a child though, as evident by her growing bump.

As you finish greeting the last of your siblings, as well as other residents at the castle, you cannot help but feel a fervent eye watching you, and you needed no hint to know whose unyielding stare this was. After politely greeting a long-residing chambermaid, you turn around and see the one-eyed Prince Aemond, dressed in a pitch black overcoat, looking handsome as ever. Smiling, you bow to greet him as well.

“My Prince.”

“My Lady. I hope the journey was not too difficult.” He says in a knowing tone, as if you had realised your past decisions to be poor.

“Not at all, your Grace. Ser Landor kept good company and the time passed quickly.” You say, lying through your teeth, knowing full well that the knight’s reputation for being a detached character surpassed him. Yet, this earned a poorly concealed scowl from the Prince. In the corner of your eye, you can see your parents looking at you with matching worried expressions.

“Come, let us go feast, we have waited for far too long.” Your eldest brother, Tommen, declared in a commanding tone. As your father’s heir, he had a penchant for trying to control matters, and you knew that he was probably unpleased with your garnering of attention. You did not fail to notice his lack of warm greeting as well, but it did not bother you, as you were never very close.

As everyone proceeds into the castle, you begin to follow, but hear your name courteously called out. Turning back, you see the one-eyed Prince holding his arm out for you, which you feel obligated to take. Before you begin walking, his hand briefly grazes your chest, which though covered by a high neckline, had a chain over it. Thumbing the bloodstone pendant on the chain, the Prince mouth turned upright in satisfaction. His smile was so radiant that you could not help but smile back.

Though modest compared to the Red Keep, you loved the dining room at Thunder Fort. In contrast with the grandeur the architecture of King’s Landing’s stronghold, your home radiated warmth and you had many fond memories here.

Confined by gray cobblestone walls to keep the room warm, the dining table was long and palatial, with countless seats to accommodate your large family. At the head of the table on one end sat your father, the current Lord of your House, with you on his right and your lady mother to his left. On the other end, Tommen was sat, looking quite small, with his lady wife, Aymee, to his right, a slender woman from the House of Lefford. The table was lavish in its assortment of foods, and low candleflames illuminated the atmosphere, with a few servants running around replenishing the perpetually emptying plates and goblets. Unlike at the Keep, the only guard stations was Ser Landor, who stood at the doorway.

To say that you were ecstatic to be back home was understatement. However, you did not feel completely at ease being back, not only due to the unaccustomed attention you were receiving, but also because sat next to you was the wayward Prince Aemond. The Prince, though courteous, remained mostly silent, which you considered normal as this was his way back at the Keep as well; he was in a pleasant mood, which relieved you. The issue was that everyone else did not know this, and an air of intimidation hung in the room like a foul scent. This did not stop your younger siblings though from chattering away.

“Sister, is it true that that wicked children are fed to the dragons at King’s Landing? Mama constantly tells me this, but surely it cannot be true!” You laugh as Taliya loudly chimes from across the table, and many laugh along with you.

“Oh, I do not know, darling Taliya. Mayhap you should ask the Prince?”

This causes the commotion of the room to silence, as everyone turned to observe in worrying anticipation. Prince Aemond had yet to speak after seating, except to thank for the hospitality for your Lord Father and the occasional side comment to you. He had been keenly observing the affair, evidently making reserved judgments on your family, for you knew that it was an ingrained habit of his. You turned your head to watch him, and your eyes connect for a moment, before Aemond turned to face the your younger sister.

“Goodness no, although I may have to suggest your proposal during my next meeting with the King, young Lady. Truly a brilliant way to handle those who misbehave.”

As the Prince speaks, and you see his purple eye glance towards your father, which causes you to furrow your brows. The room is silent, as though no one was breathing, until your brother, Tommen, dramatically pushes his chair to stand, slamming his goblet against the table. The sound echoes through the room, and you can feel your heart race in your chest.

“Sit down, son.” Your Lord Father demands, but your brother does not listen, standing straight and staring ahead, seething. At first you believe he is glaring at you, until you realise he is actually glowering at the Prince, which only increases your confusion. You feel as though you had started reading a book from the middle, and dislike feeling so obtuse.

The room remains silent for a heartbeat, until the one-eyed Prince speaks lightheartedly.

“Are you alright, Little Lord. Perhaps you should go easy on the wine.”

Disrespect was paramount in his voice, and though he is a Targaryen Prince, the belittling pet name does not pass over anyone’s head. Quickly glancing at your brother, you seem himself barely containing his anger, with his young wife trying to calm him, holding him by his arm, while Steffon had approached to hold him back. Looking around, you see most of your siblings and servants frozen in fear.

“Aemond!” You loudly hiss, in shock, roughly setting a hand on his arm.

“You forget yourself, my Lady.” Prince Aemond swiftly turns to you, his jovial mood gone and his tone menacing.

“And you forget yourself, your Grace.” You bite back, not willing to ignore the disrespect that he had shown towards your family, which surprises the Prince, as well as others around. You may have not been close to Tommen, but you still remain loyal to your family. You open your mouth to say more, but Tommen manages to shout before you do.

“So, it is not a lie, you have whored yourself out to the Targaryen Princes!”

Your heart drops and you stop breathing, in shock, unbelieving of what you are hearing. You did not believe that your indiscretions were secret only to you, yet you were in disbelief, for your eldest brother’s words felt like a stab wound, especially as you were still a maiden after all, with your honour intact. Never had you expected your own family to shame you like this.

In the blink of an eye, Aemond practically leaps from his seat and pounces onto your eldest brother, gripping him by his shirt. As he does, a loud dragon’s roar echoes into the room, frightening most present. Any courage that your brother had previously showed had disappeared, and he faltered, meanwhile his young wife was practically at Prince Aemond’s feet, sobbing and begging to let him go. Stood by the doorway, Ser Landor sprinted to you with a hand on his unsheathed sword.

In the meantime, your mother was ushering most of your siblings out of the room. Some were stubborn though, such as your pregnant sister Lauryn, who ran to your side, trying to hold you back from approaching the brawl, as well as her husband, who was watching you closely but did not lay hand on you.

You hear the Prince say something, but do not comprehend, due to how loud the room had gotten. Lots of people were all around speaking, and you understood none of it, the words akin to an unfamiliar tongue. Then you see Tommen attempt to punch on the Prince’s face, but miss, and you cry out in trepidation. As you do, you feel yourself released, and realise that Ser Landor had pulled Lauryn away, much to the dismay of her husband, who had begins yelling at the burly knight.

“Stop this!” You beg, pulling on the Aemond’s arm.

You are the only one willing (and able) to even touch him without fear of repercussion, not that it helps, as he ignores your pleas completely. By his demeanor, you could tell that he was restricting himself from attacking your brother, and as Tomen continued cursing him out, Aemond’s patience was wearing thin.

“You have heard my daughter, she asked you to stop.” Your father’s loud yet calm voice echoes across the table. The old man had been sat wordlessly drinking his wine, observing the scene, as though he had no vested interest in the matter.

“You are a guest in my home, and my daughter has asked you to stop.”

As he repeats himself, the Prince glances in his direction, before letting go of your brother, turning to face your father. Tommen, upon release, immediately tries to strike him, but Ser Landor immediately restrains him, while the rest watch in frozen fear. However, this did not restrain Tommen’s mouth from rapidly speaking, in a venomous tone.

“Little sister, how can you even call yourself a Lady of this House, when you bring it so much shame?”

Your father shouts Tommen’s name warningly, meanwhile your eyes begin to water, which Aemond immediately notices, wrapping an arm around you after hissing at Tommen.

“Hold your tongue, Little Lord, or you will lose it.”

“No, tell me Tommen, tell me exactly what you mean. Being cowardly doesn’t suit you.”

You choke out, hurt. You always felt like an outsider in the family, and this all just confirms feelings that you had buried away since you were little. But he remains silent and calms down into silent anger.

“As far as I am concerned, you are no longer a member of this House. Go wherever the fuck you want to go, and fuck whoever you want to, you are free to do as you please.” Spitting on the ground, he tries jerking out of Ser Landor’s grip, but fails.

The knight looks at Prince Aemond, who nods in approval. Ser Landon then releases Tommen, who storms out of the room. Looking at you with tearful eyes, his lady wife trails behind him, along with Lauryn and her husband, who look at you with sympathy. The room is completely quiet, and when you look at the Prince, who is still holding you, you see that whatever anger Tommen had does not compare to Aemond’s silent fury.

“Ser Landor, leave the room.” The Prince demands, holding you tight. The knight does as he says without second thought.

Steffan is the first one to speak as everyone leaves, his speech filled sorrowful empathy. With his hand pressed against his forehead, your brother turns to face you.

“Dear sister, you must have known this would not end well… the Baratheons are our neighbours and are ones are not crossed with, so why have you come?” This only serves to confuse you.

“The Baratheons? What do they have to do with this?”

The only Baratheon that comes to mind is Lord Borros, but what did he have to do with this? Surely you could not have offended him so badly in the brief conversation you had with a few moons ago? You look at your father, but he is still mentally vacant, practically absent from the conversation. Looking at him, you realise how tired he looks now, unlike the father you left behind when you first travelled to King’s Landing.

You feel Aemond’s arm shift to your waist, beginning to guide you away, whilst addressing your father and Steffon.

“Thank you for the gripping evening, my Lords, it has been quite an entertaining night. Be that as it may, your daughter has had a long day, and I do not believe we are welcome here anymore.” The Prince declares, silencing Steffon, who was about to speak. However, you are perplexed, both by what your Prince is saying, and Steffon’s words. So, you stand your ground, and repeat.

“Steffon, tell me right now. What do the Baratheons have to do with this?”

“She does not know, does she?” Steffon glanced at the Prince, darkly chuckling, before responding to you quickly. “The youngest daughter of Lord Borros has been promised for Prince Aemond for years–” Steffon abruptly stops speaking as the Prince turns to give him a terrifying glare.

You, on the other hand, felt only more at a loss for words. Your mind was racing; suddenly, it all made sense. Why Prince Aemond hid your family’s letters from you. Why he tried to deter you from coming back home. Why no one ever came for you at King’s Landing, even for the briefest visit, to check on you.

You had become the Prince’s harlot in every sense except in the one that mattered most. Now, your family cannot forgive you. Worst of all, you were ignorant of the fact that the one-eyed Prince had been promised to the daughter of your House’s most important ally, a kind young girl you have met multiple times before, and that your carelessness has caused grievances beyond your imagination. You felt as though someone had mutilated you from the inside, and you begin feeling lightheaded and unsteady. As you involuntarily sway, the Prince place another arm around your waist, to support you.

“We are leaving, now.” The Prince firmly declares, pulling you away again. You however plant your feet to the ground.

“That is preposterous. Beyond improper!” Steffon spluttered out, his face red with silenced anger. Your older brother, Steffon, has always been the mediator in sibling conflicts growing up, and it was odd to seem him uncomposed. “Despite your demands, you do not have her hand nor our approval of your pairing.”

“Did you not hear your Little Lord declaring her no longer part of your house? It is not up to you, nor has it ever, boy.” The one-eyed Prince spits out zealously, tightening his grip around you. You now feel empty, unable to get yourself to stand anymore, let alone speak.

“Nor is it up to Tommen to say such things,” Steffon retorts back stubbornly, gaping at your father now, pleading fanatically without speech. At this, Aemond looks back at your father again, as do you. Your aged father remains as vacant as you though, only speaking after a silence lulls over the room.

“Let them be, son. Go counsel Tommen.” Unlike many of your other siblings, Steffon heeded your father’s word as the word of the Seven, and immediately left the room, though not happily.

Standing up, your father walks over to you and the Prince, his eyes glued to your waist, where the Prince held you. He looked as though he wanted to say so much but was unable to articulate any of it.

“As I have said to you many times before, Prince Aemond, we cannot bless your union nor give approval. The Baratheons are our sworn allies.”

“As would the Targaryens be, if you were not so shortsighted.” The Prince responded domineeringly, much to your dismay. You still loved your father and the way Aemond spoke to him was not acceptable, and you try to push yourself away, but failed, as your strength had diminished.

"We are no oath breakers." Your Lord Father says in a final tone.

“Why did you not tell me, about any of this?” You interrupt, your voice broken.

Looking back at you with pleading eyes, Aemond answered. “There is nothing to tell. My arrangement with the Baratheon girl was never cemented, that piggish Lord called it off the same day as it was made, long before I met you, my love.” He pauses, and you can see terrifying look pass his eye, as though a disturbing memory surfaced. “There is no promise there, because they had no want for someone like me.” Kinslayer, though unspoken, all knew. “… and House Baratheon tried to force me to uphold a promise that never was, only after my half-sister and her bastard sons perished.” Not knowing what to say, you direct your stare to the ground. Your father, similarly, felt exhausted, and had no want for anymore of this.

“The hour is late and my daughter had just returned. Stay the night, though it would be wise to leave on the morrow.” The aged man says, before staggering out of the room, leaving the Prince, and you, alone.

Author’s Note: At this point, I am literally re-writing Westerosi history (and am having so much fun doing so, sorry George Martini). Also, apologies for taking so long with this chapter, I wish I could say that it is because of work and my social life, but honestly, I have just spent a concerning amount of time watching Aemond edits on TikTok. As always, I hope you enjoyed!

– Chapter 8

Tags: girl-obsessed-with-things 404slayer404 moonmaiden1996 rosaryos  roseanimelover jovialfanatic wishfulwithwine missusnora maat-the-prescriptive  @let-love-bleeds-red​​ shnadaidas klutzyfreak mistalli pearlstiare nctma15 weepingfashionwritingplaid ihaveadogithink verycollectivecreator @thelibraperspective​ eddies-bat-tattoos marcs-luver kpopdistoyedmylife-blog

[playername-player-of-games]

hi!!! i'm exploring this concept by @phosphorus-noodles !!! (there will be. another installment. perhaps. idk. i love this idea it's never going to leave my brain sjdfklsdfj)

//

"Are you alright?"

Joel startles, whipping his head around to find- "Lizzie!"

Her smile is as warm as her hand- she slips it into his and gives it a squeeze.

"Now Joel," she says, suddenly serious, "the Mother Tree isn't going to eat you."

Joel sputters. "Wha- I know that!"

"Then why are you looking at her like she is?"

"I'm not," he insists, turning back- his eyes wander up the trunk, all the way to the branches above. He traces winding pathways, tries to commit to memory the way light filters through green leaves and purple petals. His hands are itching to paint.

Or- he squeezes Lizzie's hand before letting go and scratches at his wrist- maybe his hands are just plain itchy.

He sighs. "What do you know about metamorphosis, Lizzie?"

"Oh!" her ear fins perk up- she's the only girl in Mezalea with fins instead of antenna- "that's how Mezaleans get their wings!"

"Right," Joel answers, scratching his other wrist now, "do you know the signs of an oncoming chrysalis?"

"Sickness," Lizzie answers. She steps lightly around him so that they're face to face. She takes his hands in both of hers, "itchiness."

He's shaking. He hadn't noticed.

"Yours is soon?"

He nods- a simple, shaky, jerk of his head, but a nod nonetheless.

She smiles, warm and bright as the sun catching light on the waves of the ocean, "why are you scared of it?"

"S-scared? Who said I was scared?"

"It's written all over your face, Joel."

He swallows, staring down at their hands. His wrists feel like they're on fire- an unfortunate side effect of silk growing in.

"I'm a little scared," he admits, and she lets him go- he's back to scratching. "I'm not- I'm not ready to disappear, Lizzie."

"Who says you're going to disappear?"

"That's how it works," he nods to the cave entrance- it's down the path that leads down to the Mother Tree's roots, "you go down there, and you pick a cocoon, and then you're just- you're alone in the dark for a week and a half."

"You won't be alone," Lizzie answers.

He pauses. "I won't?"

She puts her hands on her hips. "I'm coming with you."

He shakes his head, "you can't. I'm the-I'm the prince, they won't let you."

"Well, I'm your Lizzie," she answers, matter-of-factly, "so they'll have to let me."

He doesn't know how to answer- she looks so determined, he can't help but believe her.

"Okay," he whispers.

"You'll be fine," she says again, then turns him around so he's no longer facing the Mother Tree. She loops her arm around his and starts walking them along the trodden path back to the Matral Palace, "you'll sleep for a week and a half, and you won't miss anything because I won't do anything fun without my Joel around."

He laughs, letting his shoulders drop, "thank you, Lizzie."

[slynoitrash]

A quick Renfaire!AU for Sly/Noiz just because

Sly couldn't believe the brat.

Here they were, on a perfect Saturday afternoon, sun shining and instead of being able to sleep in, Noiz had practically dragged the blue-haired man out of bed at the ass Crack of dawn so they could go to...

"A Renfaire? Really?" Sly rolled his eyes with his usual over dramatization. He clicked his tongue when Noiz didn't even react.

How he'd gotten Sly to even agree to this, he had no idea. He understood even less how the guy had managed to get him to dress up as a pirate with him, either.

Probably something to do with the cute dusting of pink on the blonde's face when he saw him in the outfit, or the way his eyes lit up with excitement talking about this stupid Faire.

It was cute. Sly wasn't going to deny it. Well - not to himself, at least. He would, of course, still pretend to be exasperated.

"This your first time?"

"First and last."

A hint of a smile touched Noiz's lips - which was the Noiz version of a wide, beaming grin.

"You won't be saying that by the end, I promise. Here, follow me." The brat grabbed Sly by his hand and led him skillfully through the throngs of people along the dirt trodden path; by large, old-fashioned tudor style wooden shops and even a fucking castle. Sly couldn't stop the way his heart fluttered when Noiz had grabbed his hand, electricity shooting up his arm the moment their fingers had met.

Yeah, maybe the real reason Sly had agreed to come to this stupid thing in the first place was because he'd had a longtimecrush on his stupid pretty best friend and yeah, maybe he liked the way Noiz looked all dressed up in leather with a puffy white shirt.

Like he was in some stupid romance novel.

But he wasn't going to tell him that. Instead, Sly swallowed his feelings down as Noiz brought him over to what appeared to be a restaurant of sorts, overgrown with Ivy and a medieval bard strumming a citar in the corner. Everyone was dressed up; fairies, princes, trolls, hell there was even a dragon and a wizard going shot for shot by the bar.

Honestly, this seemed kind of...fun.

"I'll grab us some drinks, yeah?" Noiz smiled at him, that toothy grin that made Sly lose his breath, and let go of his hand to go get in line.

Sly tried to slow the pounding of his heart. The brat really had no clue, did he? Then again, Sly was pretty good at hiding how he felt under a mask of bitchiness and rage.

[theforgottenmcrmy]

Strength ~ Part 1/2 (Ser Harwin Strong x Reader)

᯽ Please note that this is an overall part 10 of the series “Growing Strong”, the masterlist of which can be found HERE ᯽

Pairing: Ser Harwin Strong x Tyrell! Female Reader

Warnings: GOT typical sexism, canon divergence, suggestive themes, references to past character death... that’s really it for this one.

Summary: The mood in the air was one of great joy, for the Lord of Harrenhal, and his heirs, had finally returned after an absence of many years.

A/N: Don’t worry you guys, this one is like, 99% tooth-rotting fluff. I was majorly channeling the Targaryen-Family-Dinner vibes for this one. Part 2 (will be posted on Thursday 11/10), is going to have more than its fair share of angst though, so... brace yourselves.🥲

Btw, thank you guys for all the love and feedback. I don’t want to sound like a broken record, but it literally makes my day and makes me feel so humble that you guys have not only been enjoying this story, but feel compelled to let me know. You guys are the bomb.com🖤🖤🖤

“Be good to your mother, lads. We’ll visit when we can… But that may be some time.”

A few days later, you had all gathered in the Princes’ chambers. It was so early, the young boys were not yet dressed for the day. But the Lord Hand had suggested it was best for the traveling party to depart from the capital just before sunrise. Doing so meant less prying eyes, and the near-empty streets would be far easier for the horses and carriage to traverse than later on in the morning or afternoon.

As you stood beside Princess Rhaenyra, rocking Prince Joffrey gently in your arms, you looked over towards your sons sympathetically.

Derrik and Selwin, as you and Harwin had expected, were less than thrilled when you’d informed them that the family was to relocate to Harrenhal so abruptly. The news hadn’t been easy for them to understand a few days before, and it seemed no easier for them to grasp now, even though the fateful moment had arrived. Derrick and Selwin looked so solemn, standing beside their friends, already donned in their traveling clothes and cloaks. Your sons had put on brave faces, but you knew they would miss Jacaerys and Lucerys terribly. You hoped that once they witnessed the grandeur that was Harrenhal, their spirits might be lifted, if only a little.

Better for them to be upset for a little while now, than to have them ripped from your arms by the headsman later. A chill ran down your spine at the horrid thought. You quickly regathered yourself by refocusing on the small Princeling in your arms.

Jacaerys and Lucerys were having difficulties coming to terms with the circumstances as well. Luke had been more reserved and closed off over the past few days than he usually was, and poor Jace had looked blatantly down-trodden.

As the Princes looked up at your husband with sad, wide eyes, your heart wrenched. It was unfair for them to be robbed of a man whom they looked up to so much, a man who practically had treated them as though they were his own blood for as long as they’d known him. You sincerely hoped Princess Rhaenyra would be able to get some proper sense through to Ser Laenor about investing more seriously into their family. Though Harwin and your family would be gone, Jacaerys and Lucerys’ need for fatherly guidance would not simply cease to exist with Harwin’s absence.

You could tell Harwin was still torn about having to leave, and, despite the potentially deadly consequences otherwise, you were not completely settled with the decision either. Harwin cared for the Princes greatly, that was beyond dispute. But, as you and Princess Rhaenyra had come to be so close over the years, you had come to care for her sons as well. Despite who their father was or was not, Jacaerys, Lucerys, and now Joffrey, were extensions of the woman whom you viewed as your dearest friend, and you loved them as such.

“We will return… I promise.”

You knew, perhaps better than anyone else, how true to his word Harwin was. But you did not fail to notice the intentional omittance of a time frame in which his vow would need to be accomplished.

When Princess Rhaenyra’s oldest son said nothing in response, Harwin tucked his hand under Jacaerys’ chin in an effort to cheer him up. It worked minimally; the boy did not look amused, but his look eventually shifted from one of dejection to one of reluctant acceptance. He nodded, silently confirming he understood your husband’s promise.

Harwin turned to Princess Rhaenyra with a sad smile. You took that as your queue to return Prince Joffrey back into her arms. The Princess accepted him from you with an ease, and she shushed him soothingly.

Once the youngest boy was settled in his mother’s arms, Harwin placed a gentle hand on top of the boy's head. “You be good too, little lad,” he instructed the babe half-seriously. A sobering thought must have struck his mind then, for he added dismally, “I will be a stranger when we meet again.”

“You will never be a stranger,” Princess Rhaenyra assured him quickly. Her eyes flickered over to you. The look in them was severe. “Neither of you shall be.”

You gave her a melancholy smile. “Thank you, Princess.”

“We should go, lads,” Harwin suggested then, turning to Derrik and Selwin. “Your grandsire will be waiting for us.”

Despite their obvious downcast looks, Derrik and Selwin stood to attention at their father’s direction. They bowed to the Princes, and then Princess Rhaenyra. They headed towards the door, but did so slowly, and not without a few forlorn looks over their shoulder back at their companions.

Once they had left the room, Harwin bowed. “My Princess.”

“Ser Harwin.”

Your husband’s eyes lingered on yours for a moment, and a silent understanding passed between you. With one more small smile at the Princes, and the Princess, Harwin followed your sons out of the chambers and into the hall.

Jacaerys meandered over to Lucerys. Once he reached him, he crouched down and attempted to cheer him up by joining him as he absent mindedly shuffled miniature figures across the rug before the fire. You took one last good look at the both of them, as if trying to preserve the strangely tranquil scene to memory.

When you finally looked back to Princess Rhaenyra, your eyes threatened to swell with tears. But you held strong.

“Goodbye, Lady Y/N.”

“Farewell, My Princess.”

There was a moment of silence, the both of you mutually unsure as to what to say or do next.

But then, Princess Rhaenyra nestled Prince Joffrey more securely to her. Once she was satisfied, she released her hold on him by a single arm, and extended it outwards to you.

Perhaps a single tear or two fell as you took a step forward into the friendly embrace. Both of you tried your best not to squish the squirming babe between you, but the meaningfulness of the gesture was not lost on you.

You would all exchange letters by raven; that had already been agreed upon firmly, and thrice over at that. But you knew not when you would see Princess Rhaenyra with your own eyes again, and that thought troubled you. Perhaps it would only be a year… maybe two.

Though in your heart, it felt likely to be a much longer span of time than any other had been.

“Larys, there you are!”

You were just about to instruct Derrik and Selwin to climb into the carriage in front of you when your Good Father shouted across the yard.

Larys Strong hobbled down the few castle steps with a skill one could only have developed over a lifetime of practice. As he made his way across the yard and over to your party, Lord Lyonel and Harwin walked around the front of the carriage, and came to a halt beside you and your sons. The two Strong men had just been about to mount their horses when the Lord Hand’s youngest son appeared.

It was still early in the morn, though the sky was gradually getting lighter. The sun would be up soon, and with it, both the Red Keep and King’s Landing would rise for the day. You were of the same mind as your Good Father; it would be best if the party was to leave sooner rather than later, but you were in no position to rush Harwin or his father as they bid their goodbyes.

Besides, you did not mind your Good Brother too terribly. Larys was a quiet fellow, sure. And, perhaps, a bit odd at times. But you believed that only a few men would not recuse themselves to the shadows if they’d been given a brother like Harwin, whose reputation tended to precede him. Especially a man with a clubfoot.

Of course, Harwin refused to let him do such a thing. Despite the attention that he’d garnered over the years, Harwin had never been one to steal thunder from another, especially not a member of his family. Your husband loved his younger brother dearly, and in turn, Lord Lyonel loved both equally. People had different strengths. Though Harwin’s may have been in a more literal sense, every conversation you’d had with your Good Brother indicated that Larys Strong was nothing less than an extremely intelligent man.

“Forgive me, Father,” Larys apologized sheepishly, coming to a steady stop a short ways away. He shifted to bear his weight upon his cane more comfortably. “Regrettably, I am unable to move as fast as I wish I could.”

Lord Lyonel was nothing but understanding, as was Harwin.

“Never mind all that,” Harwin dismissed swiftly, easily. “You are here now, and that is what matters.”

Larys gave him an appreciative smile.

“Once your brother is settled in Harrenhal, I shall return,” the Lord Hand informed his youngest son. “Though, that may be yet a month or so from now…”

Harwin looked mildly distressed at the thought of that.

Larys was unphased. “I eagerly look forward to your return, Father.”

You had originally thought Larys might make the trip to Harrenhal with you. As long as Lord Lyonel, or Harwin, was Lord of Harrenhal, there would always be a place for him there. But the Lord Hand had already declared the trip was to pertain to business more than to pleasure, and, as he was still honored with his post by order of King Viserys, Lord Lyonel was likely to return to King’s Landing as soon as was feasible. The venture likely did not seem worth the effort to the youngest Strong son. In addition, you knew Larys had friends and other companions in the Red Keep… though you might not have known them all by name, he certainly spent time with them frequently, having opted to share meals with them several times a week.

“My Lord, perhaps you might like to visit us, after things have settled?” you suggested to your Good Brother warmly. “Your sisters have informed your brother and I of their intent to do the same. I would not speak for them, but I would dare to venture that they would enjoy your company, especially after having been parted from one another these past few years.”

The Strong sisters, Lilyan and Eyla, were now married and had families of their own. Lilyan had married Lord Cerran Leygood, whom she had been introduced to shortly after her first visit to Highgarden. Both you and Harwin were pleased that Lilyan had married another lord of the Reach- it made visits with each other far more achievable. However, Harwin’s younger sister, Lady Eyla, had wed Lord Joseth Smallwood. Unfortunately, Acorn Hall, the seat of House Smallwood, was in the Riverlands, and that meant visits with the youngest Strong sister had been few and far between over the years. However, Acorn Hall was just a short distance from Harrenhal in comparison, and both you and your husband were very much looking forward to seeing Lady Eyla and her family once more.

Surprisingly, Larys looked rather agreeable to your suggestion. “A generous offer. I shall take it under great consideration, My Lady. But for now, I shall wish you all safe travels.”

“Say goodbye to your uncle, lads,” Harwin prompted Derrik and Selwin gently.

“Goodbye Uncle!” they chorused.

“Farewell, Nephews!”

Derrik and Selwin climbed into the carriage, and Harwin offered you a courteous hand so that you could do the same. You gave him a soft smile as you took it, and then promptly followed the suit of your sons. Once the three of you were settled inside, Harwin shut the door securely behind you.

As Lord Lyonel and Harwin walked around the carriage to finally mount their horses, you dared to sneak your head out the window, deciding to take one last look at the Red Keep. Like Princess Rhaenyra, you wondered when you might see it with your own eyes again… and if you ever would. Your sights traveled from the highest peak of Maegor’s Holdfast, to the very top of the Tower of the Hand, and all the way down the many other structural elements that comprised the Red Keep. As you tried to commit it all to memory, your eyes finally fell back down to the level of the yard.

Larys was standing as he was. When his eyes met yours, you saw something in his eyes that gave you pause. Though they were nearly the same hues as that of Harwin’s, Larys’ gaze was not nearly as calming… In fact, there was something eerie in those eyes of his, you realized as they locked with your own. But, just as quickly as you’d noticed it, the look had disappeared. You blinked, and all signs of anything ingenuine on your Good Brother’s face was gone.

You quickly wrote it off to your general mood of sadness and significant lack of sleep.

As the carriage leapt forward, and the party began their departure, Larys waved you off. In somewhat of a comical gesture, he raised his cane, giving it a slight wave in lieu of using a hand.

In the rising sun, a glimmer of light struck the jewel of the unique decal that was ingrained in the pummel of the cane.

The beginning of the journey was a quiet one.

The family’s few handmaidens and the boys’ nanny rode in a separate carriage, leaving no one but you, Derrik, and Selwin in the other. Perhaps the boys would take to riding the closer you drew to Harrenhal, and would eventually join their grandsire and Harwin on horseback. But for now, as the pair of them already threatened to nod off with every passing moment, you were grateful neither Derrik nor Selwin had fought with yours and Harwin’s decision to confine them to the carriage for the first part of the trip.

“Mother?”

You looked at Derrik, who was seated across from you, with a small start. You’d thought he’d already drifted off. “Yes, My Heart?”

“Are the Princes really our brothers?”

You paled. Never had your boys given you any suggestion that they were aware of the questions surrounding the parentage of Princess Rhaenyra’s sons. But, the walls of the Red Keep did not only have ears and eyes… sometimes they had mouths, too. It was not unfathomable to believe that someone, who did not take care to mind their tongue, might have let some choice words slip in front of your sons.

When you did not answer immediately, Derrik pressed, his brows furrowed with worry, “Is Father their father, too?”

Beside you, Selwin looked up at you with wide, inquisitive eyes.

“No, my sons,” you answered firmly. “Your father is not the Princes’ father.”

“But they do not resemble Ser Laenor,” Derrick observed, his face scrunching in confusion. “Everyone can see it is so. And if it is not him, or Father, then who-”

You shushed him hastily, desperately wanting to cease this topic before it got too far out of your control. The sooner your boys were cognizant of the danger of the subject they were not so subtly hinting at, the safer they’d be for it. And the less of the truth you’d have to offer as an explanation to their relentless questioning.

“Jacaerys, Lucerys, and Joffrey are Princess Rhaenyra’s sons,” you reminded them. “They are Targaryens. Prince Jacaerys will sit the Iron Throne one day- but only after his mother. And that, my dear boys, is all that truly matters.”

Thankfully, Derrik seemed satisfied by your steadfast response. But Selwin still looked unhappy.

“So… they are not our brothers?” he asked despondently, his voice wavering with dissappointment.

You sighed sympathetically and pulled him closer to your side. You contemplated your response for a decent amount of time, unsure of how best to explain your opinion on the matter. Once you drew upon some inspiration from your own relationship with Princess Rhaenyra, the words came to you quickly.

You proposed thoughtfully, “One need not always be of the same blood to consider another a brother.”

Selwin’s eyes lit up at your words, and he gave you an understanding nod.

The traveling party must have had the gods’ blessing. The weather was fair, and just shy of a week from the departure from the capital city, the group encroached upon your destination.

The Riverlands were vast and green. Though not nearly as flat nor expansive, and perhaps a bit more damp, than your homelands of the Reach, the lands were fertile all the same. It was a drastic change of scenery from King’s Landing, but a lovely change at that.

Derrik and Selwin had done little else but chatter enthusiastically amongst themselves since the party had ridden through Harrentown. They’d peered out the window curiously, taking in the sights of the village. Meanwhile, the people on the streets had offered the traveling party nothing but smiles and the occasional cheer. The mood in the air was one of great joy, for the Lord of Harrenhal, and his heirs, had finally returned after an absence of many years.

Once the party passed Harrentown, it was not but half an hour later that the walls of the keep came into view. Beyond them, the tall, ominous towers kissed the clouds in the distance.

Derrik and Selwin’s eyes grew so big as they took in the sight of it all, you almost thought you’d have been able to see the reflection of the castle within them.

Harrenhal was the largest castle in all the seven kingdoms. Five massive towers drew the eyes’ focus first, but that quickly gave way to the many, many walls that connected to multitude of other parts of the fortress. Some sections of the stone amongst the various towers were a ghastly sight; they’d been blackened by Aegon the Conqueror and Balerion during the Conquest, and King Harren the Black had perished for it. But even the haunting sight of the damage done by legends past tended to be eclipsed by the sheer scale of it all.

Harrenhal was said to be a cursed place, but you weren’t entirely sold on the idea. A place so expansive would understandably give way to many odd creaks and moans, and the mazes of corridors inside could understandably put one all out of sorts. Harwin had insisted he had seen a few ghostly spectors roaming the halls throughout his childhood, but whenever he’d done so, it’d been with a light tone and a teasing glint in his eyes.

You’d only been to Harrenhal once before, but it had been many years ago, and the Reach had called you back shortly after arrival. In the time since, you’d been told that many internal repairs had been accomplished, largely in part to your sizable dowry from your marriage to Harwin. Derrik had been just a babe at the time, and Selwin not yet a thought.

But now, as your sons took in the castle in all its glory, they looked completely in awe of it. Your spirits lifted with the hopes that they might not be nearly as miserable here as they initially declared they’d be.

After the party entered through the castle gate, the horses and the carriages came to a halt. A few moments later, Harwin appeared through the carriage window, and opened the door courteously.

Derrik and Selwin raced to be the first out of the carriage, causing a small laugh from Harwin, as well as a few other rumbles of laughter from others whom you did not yet see. Once the boys had stepped out, you followed, your eyes flashing to Harwin as he helped escort you down and out of the carriage.

He looked a bit nervous. You decided to do what you could to rectify that, and continued to hold on to his arm, even when his assistance was no longer necessary. Harwin looked thankful for the gesture, and subtly pulled you closer to his side. You lifted your head, and took in the scene before you.

Servants, maids, and other residents of Harrenhal had all gathered in the courtyard, awaiting your imminent arrival. Most of their eyes were on Lord Lyonel, as he stepped forward to warmly greet a man dressed in a fine doublet. You could only assume the man was the Lord Hand’s steward.

While most of the attention had been diverted, a fair share of eyes still fell upon your family. Understandably curious eyes took in the sight of Harwin, who had been sparser in Harrenhal than even Lord Lyonel as of late.

Gentler eyes took in the sights of Derrik and Selwin. Some of the more elderly and matronly servants smiled warmly at them. There was a visible excitement and pleasure in the fact that young spirits had come to take residence in Harrenhal once more.

“This, my dear grandsons, is where the Great Council was held.”

The monstrous chamber room, which was several times larger than that of the throne room in the Red Keep, felt cold, and empty. But the stone walls, which reached upwards towards the sky, though nearly bare, held many secrets of fascinating history.

The four of you stood in the middle of the room, taking it all in. Lord Lyonel’s voice echoed off the walls, reaffirming the room’s magnificence.

“And this,” Lord Lyonel emphasized, directing Derrik and Selwin’s attention to the very middle of the room, “This is the very spot, where the Old King Jaehaerys, gods bless his memory, sat as he read the verdict of the Great Council. It was here, in this spot, that he decreed that our King Viserys, First of His Name, would succeed him on the Iron Throne.”

Derrik and Selwin still looked to be in great awe. Your heartstrings were pulled by their pure joy and enamourment with their surroundings. You snuck a glance at Harwin, noting that his response to your son’s enthusiasm was much the same.

Lord Lyonel smiled to himself, seemingly lost in thought. You could hardly blame him. The castle had a remarkable history, and the account of House Strong was just the latest part of it. You had learned of Harrenhal’s history during your studies as a girl, but your marriage to Harwin had kept you well versed in it. After the passing of the Old King’s sister, Queen Rhaena, King Jaehaerys granted the castle and the title of Lord of Harrenhal to Ser Bywin strong, a renowned knight.

Lyonel Strong was only the third Lord of House Strong to hold the title- after Bywin, it had passed to his son Selwin, Harwin’s grandsire, and your youngest son’s namesake. After Lyonel, it would pass to Harwin, and then, gods be good, many many years after that, it would pass to one of your sons.

“All of this shall be one of yours someday, lads,” Lyonel Strong decreed, looking down at your sons with a gleaming smile. There was undeniable pride lacing his tone. The Lord Hand was not typically a proud one; he was wise, and generally reserved. But if there was one thing Lord Lyonel allowed himself to indulge and take pride in, it was that of his family, whom he loved greatly.

Derrik and Selwin looked at each other questioningly, as if wondering who amongst them would inherit the imposing structure they stood within.

After Selwin’s birth, you and Harwin mutually decided that, as each of you were to possess titles and seats of your own right, there was more than enough inheritance to be passed down to your sons. Not only would holding both Highgarden and Harrenal simultaneously be quite difficult to manage, the great distance between the two seats made such a prospect that much more daunting.

The decision reached was an easy one, and had required little discussion. Between you and Harwin, Derrik would inherit the seat, titles, and land of whoever was first to pass. Selwin would inherit the other’s.

You still held a grudge for your cousin, Lord Garrett Redwyne. The second son of the Lord of the Arbor had left a bad taste in your mouth, and an even poorer impression on your mind following his attempt to usurp your family seat of Highgarden after the untimely demise of your brother, Derron. Ever since that day, you’d sworn to yourself that you would never allow your family to be divided in such a manner ever again. The greed of one son would not rob the other of his own birthright.

Derrik and Selwin would each have their own holding, their own lands, and their own titles. But only the gods knew whose titles they were to inherit in due time.

And if the gods were kind, it would be many years before any of that came to pass, anyway.

You looked over at Harwin, trying to gauge his thoughts. Beyond the reasons why you could have made arguments to stay in King’s Landing, you had grown to suspect there were just as many, if not more, reasons why Harwin had not wished to come to Harrenhal.

Though Derrik, Selwin, and Lord Lyonel continued to bask in the room, Harwin was looking, but not seeing, his surroundings. No trace of a smile was upon his face. He was nervous, unsure of himself. Those were traits not usually exhibited by him, but you’d bore witness to most of the few moments that his general aura of confidence and self assuredness had slipped.

Thankfully, experience had taught you that Harwin’s mind was relatively easy to placate in such a state. He just needed some support and reassurance.

You reached out and wordlessly took his nearest hand in your own. Immediately, you looked upwards at the ceiling, playing coy.

You felt the heat from Harwin’s inquisitive gaze upon you. When you finally saw a small smile threatening his otherwise stoic composure out of the corner of your eyes, you smirked upwards towards the ceiling, basking in your minor victory.

About a month after arriving in Harrenhal, you, Harwin, and the rest of your family had finally started to become adjusted to the new phase of life.

The aura of Harrenhal, all the way from the servants up to the Lord Hand, was an extremely joyous one. The castle was to host a grand feast for a few noble families of the area the following week. In preparation of the feast, Lilyan, Eyla, their lord husbands, and their children would be arriving in a few days for an extended visit.

For the first time in years, Harrenhal was bustling with life, and more importantly, family.

At present, a family dinner was being held, as it had been many of the nights before. Lord Lyonel was seated at the end of the table, with Harwin to his right, and you seated beside him. Derrik and Selwin sat respectively across from the two of you.

The Lord Hand was in the midst of a speech about the recent repairs and construction contracts for Harrenhal, a daunting task in and of itself. It had preoccupied his and Harwin’s time for the better part of the last month.

Beside you, Harwin shifted in his seat uncomfortably. You looked over at him with gentle eyes and a sympathetic smile.

Harwin was dressed in finer clothes than what he usually wore. You couldn’t say you minded; the dark blue doublet complimented him greatly. Though Harwin had never been one to dress “shabby” in any sense of the word, whilst you were in King’s Landing, you’d grown accustomed to seeing him in his armor more often than not. Even when you resided in Highgarden, when Harwin was not training Derrik or Selwin, or honing his own skills in the training yard there, he still had little reason to dress in anything particularly flashy.

But whilst in Harrenhal, he was more than Ser Harwin Breakbones, post-Lord Commander of the City Watch. He was more than the husband of the Lady Tyrell of Highgarden. In Harrenhal, Harwin was the son of the Hand of the King, and more importantly, his eldest son and heir. Lord Lyonel wasn’t the only one who expected great things of him in this regard, and Harwin had confided to you that he only thought it fitting that he at least try to dress the part.

Harwin had been concerned that his previous lack of dedicated interest, combined with his father’s time consuming engagements to the Crown, had rendered him at a disadvantage for adequately assuming the duties of his family’s seat. Perhaps it had. But yet again, you had pointed out to him that he was at no more of a disadvantage than you had been when you’d unexpectedly taken up the intimidating mantle that was Highgarden a decade prior.

But for all of his concerns, Harwin needn’t have worried. He still had the occasional self doubts- as anyone in his position would- but he was learning as much and doing as well as could be expected. He was with his father from dawn to dusk nearly every day, as the Lord Hand tried to impart on him all the wisdom he could about the intricate details of the Lord of Harrenhal’s duties. A month had passed, and Lord Lyonel was quite impressed with Harwin’s progress.

Harwin had been such an invaluable system of support for you as you’d grown into your role of Lady of Highgarden. Supporting him as he grew to assume his duties as Lord of Harrenhal was an honor and a privilege. And witnessing Harwin so clearly succeed at that task filled you with an unspeakable amount of pride.

Noting Harwin’s reluctance to the topic of discussion his father had proposed, you reached up and placed your hand overtop of his, which was resting flat upon the surface of the table. Harwin welcomed the act, and seamlessly turned over his palm so that your fingers could intertwine comfortably.

“Good Father?” you interrupted as politely as you could muster, “Mayhaps we discuss matters other than business this evening?”

Lord Lyonel cut himself short, and gave you a sheepish look somewhat akin to that of a child having been scolded. “Of course, Lady Y/N,” he assented without malice. His eyes flickered over to Derrik and Selwin on the other side of him. At the sight of them, Lord Lyonel’s eyes lit up in a way you supposed only those who were fortunate enough to enjoy the presence of their grandchildren could have… A pure love for the blood of their own blood.

Derrik and Selwin had adjusted to life in Harrenhal more smoothly than you would have imagined. But their favorite hobby as of late was wandering around and discovering the many facets of the castle. Whenever he had the time, Harwin had been more than happy to show them around. You often roamed the halls yourself, though you were almost always looking for your family when doing so. The direction-pointing of servants and laughter from your husband and sons echoing throughout the corridors tended to lead you exactly where you needed to go.

“Lads, tell me- how are your studies going?” their grandsire inquired of them. “Maester Briden tells me he’s been very pleased with your progress. And I, in turn, was pleased to hear that was the case.”

Derrik had always enjoyed learning. The moment he was old enough to leave the nursery and go under the guidance of his tutors, he’d wanted to do little else but read every book he could get his hands on. It was not unusual for the nanny to report that Derrik been up well into the night, reading by the firelight in his chambers. He smiled shyly at the Lord Hand’s praise. “Thank you, Grandsire.”

Selwin was uncharacteristically silent.

Noting this, Harwin coaxed him, “And you, Selwin?”

Selwin shrugged, and poked at the peas on his plate timidly. He was an obedient child, but it didn’t take someone particularly wise to be able to deduce that Selwin was one who preferred doing rather than reading. He’d never refused to attend his lessons, but pure joy was seldom expressed in him anywhere else but when he was out in the training yard with his father and brother. “I enjoy the history lessons, I suppose…”

“Take heart, my boy,” Lord Lyonel encouraged him readily. “Your father was not always a dedicated student either, but look at him now.”

Harwin’s attention piqued.

The Lord Hand spared a warm glance at his eldest son, before looking back to address Selwin. “Your father has made great strides as of late. He has recommitted himself to his duties and obligation to his family. He makes his House, our House, proud.”

Harwin beamed at his father’s acknowledgement, and you squeezed his hand as you attempted to dilute your own gleam of pride.

“He shall make a fine lord some day,” Lord Lyonel declared to his grandsons. “As will each of you.”

Everyone smiled at that notion.

“I would like to propose a toast,” you announced gleefully as you allowed yourself to be swept away with the cheerful mood. You lifted your goblet into the air, and all eyes were upon you as they awaited your words. You glanced briefly among your loved ones before continuing. “A toast to my Good Father, the Lord Hand. We shall all miss you dearly when you return to King’s Landing the week after next. I wish you continued good health, and safe travels.”

Lord Lyonel gave you an appreciative look. Harwin, Derrick, and Selwin joined you in raising their cups.

“I would like to propose a toast of my own,” Harwin confessed then. “I toast to my father as well… for reminding me of what truly matters.”

A moment of silence lingered uncomfortably for the briefest of moments.

“But I would also like to toast my sons- Derrik, Selwin. And my Lady Wife, Y/N,” Harwin held out his goblet to each of you. “The gods have blessed me greatly with each of you, and I fear I do not thank them enough for it.”

“Shall I propose one, final toast?” Lord Lyonel offered, though it was redundant. Harrenhal was his castle; of course the very table at which they sat was as well. Though he could have commanded their attention, everyone at present respected Lord Lyonel enough to grant it to him freely.

The Lord Hand’s eyes hovered over each of you for several moments. There was a warmth and fondness in your Good Father’s expression that reminded you so plainly of your own father, whenever he would regard you and Derron. You fought off an involuntary smile in response to the memory.

“To House Strong,” he began. “Mayhaps, these next few generations shall be the strongest of which our House has seen for many years.”

A lovely thought, you thought to yourself. The image of your sons, grown and standing tall as lords in their own right, filled your mind’s eye.

“And to House Tyrell,” the Lord Hand said then, his goblet tilting in your direction. “My Lady, with words such as ‘Growing Strong’, it is a wonder our Houses have not been joined sooner than this.”

There was a light round of laughter at his jest.

Lord Lyonel redirected, “But, to be entirely truthful, Lady Y/N, your presence has been a blessing in my life as well. My grandsons are one the few sources of pride I do not allow myself to feel guilty for. You have made my son the happiest I have seen him since he was a boy. You have been a blessing not only in his life, but in mine as well. I am happy to consider you a daughter; I am happy you are a part of this family.”

Your eyes brimmed with tears.

Lord Lyonel proclaimed, lifting his goblet the highest it had been all evening, “To family!”

“To family!”

A/N: Thank you for reading!🖤 Part 2 will be posted on Thursday 11/10. I may not be able link it here if the tags still hate me, but it’ll be linked on the series masterlist.

Part 2 is going to be a bit of a doozy, so... I’ll bring some tissues for everyone🥲🖤

[kylobith]

LotR Week - Day 1 (11th Dec)

memory | history | home

Weary is the heart that long fought

Desperately wishing for respite;

Swinging the sword without a thought,

Unwilling to be gripped by fright.

Longing for a home, it is said,

Tarnishes the knight’s iron fist

For it allows the surge of dread

And plunges his mind into mist.

To this only the weakest bow,

Recalling the eyes of a lass,

Until death comes to kiss their brow

And their hair be one with the grass.

There are some to whom home means all;

It means to laugh, never to bore,

Only ever in sleep to fall,

With always a friend at the door.

It is the warm bed of a spouse,

Bedtime stories filling the air,

In the morning with joy to rouse

To love and share without a care.

It is the embrace of a child,

Tending to a flower in bloom,

Sweet nothings that are always smiled,

Weaving happiness on the loom.

It is the bliss of sharing bread,

The delicate touch of a hand,

The planning of the years ahead,

Fiery passion ever fanned.

It is merry singing around ales,

Smoking one’s pipe in the garden,

Throwing crumbs for birds on the trails,

And sculpted clay left to harden.

It is the flavour of pastries,

Crackling fire in the hearth,

Wee buds on the branches of trees,

Never again to suffer dearth.

Home is the Hobbit who still sings,

Deadening the horns of war;

Embracing melody, of all things,

Chugging pints and demanding more.

In the morn his head shall hammer,

And yet his smile will linger, still!

He will heed to his pal’s yammer

And indulge to his every thrill.

Nobody could separate them

Although many a soul has tried;

Their friendship is a precious gem,

One he covets and deems with pride.

Home are the prince and his maiden,

Nestled in the fire’s halo,

Reading a tale with lore laden

Affection in their hearts aglow.

Forsaking swords for a garden,

Healing their harrowing sorrows

Living in woods seldom trodden,

Their love mends wounds that pain hallows.

Kissing her mane of golden hair,

On his shoulder her head repose,

Beholding his lady so fair,

He strokes the womb where their child grows.

Home is where new seeds are planted,

Where the gardener to sprouts must tend;

Little pebbles always wanted

For their safety always to fend.

When with them he has time to spend

He embarks on a story spree,

Telling them of a departed friend,

Balancing the book on his knee.

Content with the life that he leads,

He finds his soft, fluffy pillow;

He forgets his heroic deeds,

Holds the one he wed by the willow.

Home is the proud and eager head

Perched atop his horse’s saddle;

He must rule in his uncle’s stead,

There is no time to be addle.

Admiring his dear town,

Walled and unharmed upon its mount,

No longer fears its weighty crown,

Sure that on others he can count.

With a grin from his sun-kissed bride,

He feels his grief alleviate;

As long as she stands by his side,

He could not know a better fate.

Home is a white city ahead,

A golden hall on rocky hill,

In a small hole, the cosy bed,

White shores that pained hearts with joy fill.

Home is what many have fought for,

Striving to defend its shelter;

Few have their names inscribed in lore

Though their beliefs never falter.

Fortunate enough to return,

They trade the sword for sitting still;

From them, perhaps, we have to learn,

For if they do not inspire, who will?

[genmaichafan]

Hai hai request for @princeasimdiya12

For zoro x sanji (one piece) Aladdin au

It’s kinda a mix of the animated movie and the live action one and as well as some creative liberties.

Sfw. Around 2800 words.

Enjoy ^-^

Fic under the cut.

Zoro zigzagged through the streets narrowly dodging the alabastian guards. Shifting, ducking and tumbling out of the way or their swords in the less populated areas of the city and making sure to use the people in the more crowded streets to his advantage. Blending in when he could but the guards always seemed to find him and his green hair.

Zooming left he made his second mistake of the day. The first being caught for stealing food.

“Shit”

He was caught in a dead end.

”Gotcha now street rat.”

”now that we are alone i wont be afraid to take you guys on.”

”What are you going to do? You got no swords and are outnumbered three to one.”

”Well first i'm going-“ Zoro kicked the men's sword out of all their hands who didn’t realize they were perfectly lined up for the maneuver.

distracted with retrieving their swords, Zoro jumped like his life depended on the narrow lip of the house above with the help of a decrepit crate. Which crumbled benign him.

the sun scorched stone burned beneath his fingers. Causing him to wince and almost lose grip. One guard who now had his sword in his hands again swiped at Zoro Achilles tendon. Zoro swiftly crunched and then used the attacker's face as a stepping stool for the rest of the way.

”cya later suckers.”

Zoro ran off hopping roof to roof earning either cheers from the fellow down trodden or groans from those who’d wish he’d stop causing trouble.

——-

Eventually he was back where he started:at the market looking for food. Putting his hood up this time he dropped down where no one would see him and entered the crowd. This time he would not fail in scoring two pieces of bread. One for himself and one for his good friend Tony Tony Chopper which had a similar objective as him but often involved less stealing and more cute begging.

This time Zoro would try a more finesse strategy. Instead of taking and running he would try to distract the shopkeeper and take a bread or two when they weren’t looking.

This trick never really worked for him because he wasn’t the most intoxicating conversationalist but it was worth a shot.

He found a woman’s homely stand which held many decent looking bread. Luckily for him she was already distracted by a blonde man whom seemingly was enamored with her in conversation.

never seeking a more perfect opportunity Zoro tried to pass with his sticky fingers but the woman was as sharp as ever and immediately caught his wrist.

”oh sorry-“ he tried to play it off like he wasn’t even aware that he was doing it. Tone monotonous, giving the lady the impression Zoro wasn’t even sorry.

”LIKE HELL YOU ARE.” The orange haired woman yelled at him

”if you want bread you gotta pay me some berries. 50 to be exact.” The woman continued

“Forget it, I didn't need bread anyways.”

He definitely couldn’t even afford the few berries that it was, but his stomach insisted that he be embarrassed about it because it began to rumble. all the while the blonde man was watching this he just smiled under his hood.

”ill buy you some bread because no one should ever go hungry. That's what my father Zeff taught me.”

Zoro choked on his dry mouth.

“Zeff- Like the Sultan?!”

”yessir the one and only. so ma’am two buns please.”

”That's going to be 300 berries.”

”I thought they were 50 berries each.”

”they’re special breads.” The orange haired woman lied in an attempt to gouge the new found prince.

”Well I guess I can't say no to the pretty lady. 300 it is.”

Sanji handed the bread to Zoro, who was having an inner realization. No one had ever been this nice to him before in all his days of Alubarna since his parents, of which their memory was fading due to passing a long time ago.

On top of that Zoro was now beyond flustered noticing how pretty this man was. Gorgeously blonde shiny hair, a curly eyebrow and distinguishing facial hair. Robes made of the finest materials that suited his slender frame but strong legs.

”thank you your highness” he could only stutter out.

”No problem, it's only something someone with something to spare should do.”

the prince said with such sincerity that kinda pissed Zoro off that he couldn’t try to turn away his new found feeling for the man.

as the prince walked away, Zoro called out to him.

”What's your name?!”

”don't you know it's Sanji!” He waved off before disappearing into the crowds of people.”

_____

Zoro long since returned to his little thief’s den of a house but could not stop thinking about Sanji.

”heya Zoro im back!”

”Hey chopper, did you manage to get anything? If not, I got you some bread over here.”

”hehe thanks! I wasn’t successful in getting any food but I got this lamp for free. I think we Can re-sell it!”

“Hey, nice going bud lemme see!”

Tony Tony Chopper handed the lamp over to his larger and human friend. Whom examined it by blowing off the dust.

Thinking it needed a good shine he spat on it and began to rub off the dirt.

”hey I would appreciate it if you didn't spit on my house thank you.” a robust male voice called out from seemingly nowhere.

Zoro looked around.

”down here dude.”

the voice was emanating from the very lamp in his lap. The realization causes Zoro to jolt, making the lamp fall onto the floor.

”HEY HEY watch it!” And as the genie said this he emerged from the lamp. Big and blue wearing some tinted spectacles and an ornate vest. His arms were as large as barrels and his legs smoke; connecting to the lamp itself.

”a shit a genie?!”

”That's right! It’s me! Franky the genie!” Making a cool pose to show off his large and amazing form.

”this means i get three wishes right?”

”corrrrrrrect!”

“Then make me a prince!”

The genie laughed one of the most human wishes someone has ever asked him besides outright asking for loads of berries.

”okay!”

Making a grand show of it he snapped his fingers and poof Zoro was wearing the finest of alabstian silks, decorated with designs of berries.

”you are now the prince of… kin archipelago!”

”whoa sounds fancy!”

Zoro was more than pleased. surely the prince Sanji would love to go out with him now that he was a prince of kin archipelago.

_____

Zoro quickly made his way to the castle, the gate of which was taller than a giant.

“Excuse me-“ he tried to speak to the guards stationed at the door.

”get lost.”

Zoro tried to fight them on the spot, clearing his mind enough to have reason to stay in character.

”Hey, I wanna see King Zeff. I am a prince from a far away island and want to ask the king something.”

“What my friend here is trying to say is that he has a business deal to conduct with the king that could be very lucrative for the country.” A fully apperated Franky said to soften Zoro's straightforwardness.

”ohh~ why didn't you say so, no, get lost.” the guard didn't buy it

”thats it-“ Zoro attempted to fight them not before being pulled away by the genie into an alleyway.

”Listen, I think I have an idea to get you in.”

”im listening”

“ill fly you up. Past the guards. You can go straight to the king. But it’s going to be your second wish.”

This excited Zoro, the thought of quickly seeing the person of his desires.

”That's good with me.”

”alrighty~” Franky said coolly, proofing up a magic carpet. “Be good to him ok?”

the carpet wiggled in agreement. letting Zoro on without a complaint.

“Ill be right behind you Zoro.”

____

it did not take long to find a spot that was safe to land and in a place where it wouldn’t be weird for him to appear from.

Zoro did not try to hide his position because he in his head took the route of he was simply here the whole time, and it worked for now.

Zoro made it up to the king's throne room, bumping into someone on the way out.

The person seemed dejected, Their violin strings broken.

”whoa not a good sign.”

This would not stop Zoro; he was determined to meet the price again even on his life.

“Next subject!”

flustered Zoro walked in hastily forgetting to put up the princely facade for just a second.

“Oh great king Zeff-“ he could not have said more awkwardly, vein pooping on his forehead due to straining from embarrassment.

”Well boy, spit it out!”

”I AM Zoro OF KIN ARCHIPELAGO AND I WOULD LIKE TO COURT YOUR SON Sanji!

Zeff heartily laughs at the spectacle in front of him.

“Wouldn’t that be nice! Wouldn’t it!” Still laughing, a large mustache bouncing with each breath.

”Well what do you have to offer my boy!”

This question caught Zoro for a loop. What could he actually offer a prince let alone a king that had everything.

‘I got it, rich people love money right.’

”I wish to give you a mountain of money the likes of which you’ve never seen!”

nothing happened at first. Which would have worried Zoro if a huge earthquake hadn’t happened beneath. One that swelled every ten seconds not before: the large door to the throne burst open to the hinges causing a mountain of berries to spill into the room, flooding the room so badly it swept Zoro off his feet bringing him closer than most would dare to go to Zeff shoes. The Sultan's eyes nearly shot out of his head. Seems Zoro was Being quite literal.

”what i tell you old man!”

”HA well wealth i already have! But what else do you have to offer?”

That's when Franky walked in what was a human form. He looked entirely different than before: Sporting a thin frame that was well dressed in robes that belonged to an advisor of sorts. dragging in large a scroll, splaying it out on the berries littered floor.

”the Kin Archipelago- ''

Franky continued, showing a fake map of the land and began speaking about such things like the lush fruitful land could bring many healthy and tropical fruits. Rich wheat for breads and made a good home to animals which could with some care live here in Alubarna. All of which was a lie of course, Franky while powerful could not add a whole island to the geography of Pacifica.

Zoro just nodded along like he knew everything that was going on but truthfully he wasn’t even listening. Someone had caught his eye. Blonde locks caught his attention from the upper vista. Seems Sanji was watching him.

‘Damn pretty boy looks good from even here’

Zeff at this point was fully convinced.

“Prince Zoro of Kin Archipelago, you may date my son! Sanji, get down here.”

Sanji swauvely slid into the room not long after. His hand was in his pockets, posture relaxed and unbothered. wearing all black clothes this time of what was now night time.

He put his hand out for a shake. Zoro took it without hesitation, hands locking together firmly, giving Sanji a rare wide smile.

“Firm grip: good man.” Sanji wryly smiled back.

“Likewise.”

It seemed he didn't recognize him from before, which Zoro was thankful for.

It is because of the hat that was covering his signature green hair.

”Well let's get going-“ before they could plan where they were going Franky's friend the magic carpet swept them out of there by the feet which caused them to land on each other awkwardly, Zoro gripped them magic carpet while Sanji gripped onto Zoro.

The carpet once above the clouds slowed down to a comfortable pace.

Sanji let go right away. Coughing to clear the situation of stale air.

”So why me?”

”huh?”

”you know: why pick me?”

This question was out of left field but Zoro really knew the answer already.

”because you are kind, and deep down you are a good guy. Not many people in this world are.”

Sanji just laughed.

”thanks man but you don't even know me.”

”you're right I don’t really but I hear that you would never let anyone go hungry if you had a say in it or had the power to do something about it. Most royalty would let people rot. You’re different. You care.”

”and where’d you hear that?”

”a friend.”

Sanji just smiled, cool demeanor gone, looking up at the stars.

”Your friend has a good judge of character!” Sanji half jested, thousand yard stare going long past Zoro head. Something was bothering him.

If Zoro were honest he had heard things about the prince that were not quite positive. Womanizer being one of them. While he didnt know if it was true or not. He wasn’t going to speculate.

“Hey man, I have got something to show you.” Zoro pulled the carpet by the tassels, directing the carpet to a secret spot in the city only he knew about.

It was the abandoned watch tower on the east side of Alubarna. From the huge hole on the side was able to show the whole city and a good view of the sun set spraying out beautiful colors of red, orange, and purple. Of which they drank in the colors before Zoro pulled Sanji down to the ground floor.

”Uh, where are we going? For someone who’s visiting you seem to know a lot about this city.”

“I know a guy who’ll give you the best rice dish ever.”

____

It was in fact the best meal Sanji had in a long time. And reminded him of his fathers cooking, which he didn't make that much because he had servants to do it for him, but was a childhood nostalgia classic.

Zoro learned many things about Sanji's past. His childhood being an adopted prince and how he had to prove himself to his people. Then he admitted he was a bit of a womanizer in his younger days but was at least classy about it now. (Zoro wouldn’t know how you’d go about doing that but he believed him.)

They even had some drinks which were normally on the house for Zoro, but were handsomely paid this time around with some money that’d ‘happened’ to fall into his pocket when the berry tidal wave happened earlier.

“Hey Zoro!!” A boy called out in the middle of their merry making

’oh no it's Luffy.’ Normally Zoro didn't not mind Luffy's company but this time he had stuff to hide and Luffy was not the best at hiding things.

”not now Luffy-“

”Who's that guy with you?”

”i am your prince-

“Zoro YOU'RE HANGING OUT WITH THE PRINCE?!?” Luffy could not help but yell. Causing people to flock and look.

”SHHHHHH.”

”oh hey Zoro there you are i wanted to thank you for beating those guy up who were taking my money-“

”IT'S NO PROBLEM STRANGER-“ truthfully while not always being well liked he’d try to do a lot around here where he could. He knew what it was like being a ‘street rat’ and how helpless you felt sometimes so he often helped, never did anyone ever acknowledge that before today of all days when he was keeping his identity a secret.

people crowded Sanji and him asking all sorts of questions.

’how did you meet’

’why are you hanging out with Zoro’

‘Why is he (Zoro) wearing that’

”This is my date! Zoro of Kin Archipelago!

”no- Zoro from here-“ Luffy corrected the prince without even thinking different of it.

”ahahahah- sorry i am not that person you people are talking about” Zoro was being caught up in his lie. Stuck between the truth and losing his chance with the prince. Quickly he made his choice, choosing to reveal his green hair.

”jigs up sorry.” Utter dejection

Sanji paused for a second and boisterously laughed.

”Wait, you think I didn't know?”

”huh?! You knew?”

”Well yeah man, I remembered you about the time of the carpet ride. Your face is hard to forget!”

Zoro wouldn’t say he wasn’t annoyed that his efforts in the end were all for naught, but Sanji put up with him for this whole time KNOWING who he really was. At least he probably wasn’t going to be arrested.

”I guess the jig is up.”

Sanji beamed, arms resting behind his head in leisure, even leaning back a bit.

”you could say that…” Sanji trailed off but continued.

“Be a gentleman and walk your date home will you?”

Zoro perked up and smiled back.

”That I can do your highness!”

They got up and began to walk away hand and arms wrapped around each other.

There were many dates ahead of them.

[thepastisalreadywritten]

In her 13 years as creative director of the French jewellery house Boucheron, Claire Choisne’s mood boards have featured some unusual suspects.

This January, she introduced the latest high jewellery collection with a picture of Prince Philip waving at crowds during the coronation in 1953.

He’s decked out in his Admiral of the Fleet finery, decorated with military medals and orders of chivalry, white ribbons fluttering at his shoulders.

‘OK, Prince Philip is not my absolute muse – but I love this picture,’ says Choisne via video call from the Tucson Gem Show, where she is shopping for the stones that will feature in the house’s 2026 collections.

She was drawn to the unexpectedly feminine details of the late Duke of Edinburgh’s ceremonial uniform.

‘You feel the power and the strength, but at the same time, there are all these couture details: bows, ribbons, embroidery. It’s a paradox.’

She decided it was the perfect way to interpret the well-trodden high jewellery theme of ‘couture.’

‘I didn’t want to do something too girly or cheesy. I wanted to give strength to the pieces. When I saw this picture, I said to myself, “OK, now I know how to manage the creation of this collection.”’

The resulting 24-piece collection, The Power of Couture, is the latest chapter in Boucheron’s annual Histoire de Style series, which sees Choisne reinterpret designs or themes from the house’s 166-year history.

Its founder, Frédéric Boucheron, was the son of a draper and so the archive teems with diamond-set bows, ribbons and lace, with gold worked into supple-as-silk scarves.

A lace-like shoulder adornment made circa 1880 was a Belle Epoque predecessor of today’s white gold and diamond epaulettes, whose overlapping loops were inspired by a tiara made in 1902 for the Princess of Wales, later Queen Mary, Prince Philip’s grandmother-in-law.

Clipped across the shoulders, they’re a precious take on the traditional tasselled gold epaulettes of naval uniforms.

They also transform into cuffs; such versatility is a hallmark of the collection.

A set of 15 medal brooches can be strung into a bib necklace of epic proportions.

A rock-crystal and diamond bow can fasten to the shoulder or chest, or be fashioned into a multi-wear necklace, while its central diamond can be plucked off to become a ring.

A braided aiguillette can be worn military-style across the chest, draped around the waist, or disassembled into brooches and a bracelet.

‘In ceremonial attire, there are so many rules that you have to respect. For the collection, I wanted the opposite,’ says Choisne.

‘I wanted people to be able to play freely and design their own style.’

She sees the collection as a ‘kit’ with an almost infinite number of styling combinations.

Her dream, she says, would be for one client to buy the lot. Whether that client is male or female is of little importance.

‘A long time ago, the people who wore high jewellery were men. The maharajas, the tsars, the kings. The biggest and most beautiful pieces were designed for men.’

One of Boucheron’s most famous clients was the Maharaja of Patiala who, in 1928, had his guards cart some 7,571 diamonds and 1,432 emeralds from The Ritz to the Boucheron boutique, to be set into 149 extraordinarily opulent jewels – a commission that inspired New Maharajas, the house’s 2022 Histoire de Style high jewellery collection.

Sir Bhupinder Singh, Maharaja of Patiala, GCSI GCIE GCVO GBE (12 October 1891 – 23 March 1938)

'Today,' continues Choisne, 'I don’t want to do pieces for men or for women. I want to make beautiful and meaningful pieces. And I want to show that it’s beyond gender.’

She says that men do buy and wear Boucheron high jewellery, but she doesn’t know the precise proportion of male customers.

‘I almost don’t want to know exactly, because I’m sure of my idea. And maybe we have to show them that it’s a good one.’

Three years ago, Boucheron’s art deco-inspired Histoire de Style collection was photographed on male and female models – a first among Place Vendôme’s traditional maisons.

��I knew that some of the pieces were even stronger on men. But the idea of it was almost weird at that time. People asked me, “Are you sure, high jewellery on men?” And my answer was, “Yes, definitely,”’ says Choisne.

The Power of Couture collection, conversely, was exclusively photographed on and modelled by women; another deliberately defiant move.

‘When you think of ceremonial attire, you naturally think of men. So I wanted to show the opposite. It doesn’t make sense for me to choose between men and women. Nowadays we can do what we want.’

A pair of embroidery-inspired diamond ferns have an ethereal, Greek goddess-like beauty when worn as a headpiece.

But one can also imagine them pinned to a tuxedo, echoing the actor Regé-Jean Page, who wore a feather-shaped diamond Boucheron brooch at last year’s Oscars.

Although it may take a Liberace-channelling peacock to carry off a lacy diamond collar, even the most bling-averse gentleman could be tempted to affix a few rock crystal and diamond buttons to his dress shirt.

Choisne says Boucheron’s clients span the whole spectrum.

‘It’s the same for men as it is for women: some are more classical, and some are super edgy.’

Culture plays a role. ‘Maybe European men are a bit more traditional, whereas in Asia men can be more open-minded when it comes to style.’

It was important that the Power of Couture collection wasn’t too literal, says Choisne; it couldn’t feel like fancy dress.

A restrained, all-white palette of rock crystal and diamonds helps; she champions texture and detail over bold hues or glitzy brilliance.

The pieces are labelled with their carat weight along with the hours involved in their creation – many run into the thousands.

‘If you put a lot of little diamonds everywhere, it’s easy. It will shine, so you have no doubt that it’s precious,’ says Choisne.

‘But I prefer to find preciousness with purity of design and elegance, which come from the craftsmanship. It’s not about having lots of diamonds. The number of hours is what makes it high jewellery.’

The transformable Noeud bow, for example, is crafted from hundreds of individually cut lines of frosted rock crystal, threaded together through their diamond edging to evoke the texture and fluidity of grosgrain ribbon.

‘It would be much faster and easier to engrave a single piece, but I wanted it to be really flexible. So they cut every little line by hand. Each one is a different length. It’s crazy work to achieve that.’

That’s 2,600 hours of crazy work, to be precise.

Elsewhere, sandblasted rock crystal is knitted together into the flexible, five-strand Tricot choker.

’The idea was to give an illusion of knit work,’ says Choisne. ‘The unpolished rock crystal gives the feeling of softness, like wool.’

The Médailles feature grosgrain-effect rock-crystal ribbons, from which hang 15 medallions of sculpted rock crystal overlaid on to beds of brilliant-cut diamonds.

‘We cut the rock crystal with the glyptic technique – it’s much more complicated than engraving. Then we set diamonds underneath so they are a bit blurred. For me, it’s more magical.’

It’s clear that Boucheron’s craft workers relish Choisne’s technical challenges.

They are currently making the pieces that will launch in July 2025 (Boucheron presents two high jewellery collections a year), while Choisne is finalising designs for 2026 and developing her ideas for 2027.

It’s not always easy to sleep with so many different concepts buzzing around her brain, she admits.

Her approach to design mirrors the demands she asks of her atelier. ‘I don’t love it when it’s too easy.’

boucheron.com

[applestorms]

doom, aspect complements, & oppressing social systems

some kinda half-baked (literal) shower thoughts on aspect complements, particularly life & doom, with, surprisingly, not too much on the captors but a decent section on jane. this is long as fuck, shit.

TL;DR: aspect complements are nice in how they expand the meaning of each individual aspect, doom & life in particular are cool in how they have such overarching influence over the lives of characters and should really get more attention analysis-wise, ft. my own musings about how the alpha kids' lives are seeped in doom, in large part because of madame HIC herself. written in one sitting because i guess i'm insane.

the one thing i really, really like about the canon established by the extended zodiac is the way it splits aspects into complementary pairs. to me, one of the major appeals/frustrations of homestuck's classpect & lunar sway system is how vague and yet distinct the categories are, how blurry the borders are but how distinct of an Feel you can get almost instantly upon even just hearing the names of each aspect. e.g. i can say that [x] character from an entirely separate piece of media is a prince of doom, and even if you don't know jack shit about homestuck classpects on some level you can still get that, understand the implications that has on the character-- what "prince" means for how they treat others or the expectations they have for themself, the specific emotional connotations of what a person presiding over "doom" might be associated with. they play into long-established cultural categories, basically, remixed Jungian archetypes as some people might (and have) put it. still, i think homestuck has a pretty interesting way of interpreting these categories, which is part of why classpects can be so appealing.

homestuck aspects hold a lot of implicit associations that you can learn & guess at over the course of reading the comic, so setting up these complementary pairs works really well in my mind since it only strengthens the associations. take light & void, for example: light is associated thematically with knowledge, luck, and being in the spotlight. typically (at least in my own american context), the opposite of light is designated as dark-- but homestuck instead makes light's complement void, the aspect associated with nothingness, secrets, people & characters forgotten or left behind, waiting. following the logic of this video, void isn't even associated w/ the color black (typically associated w/ darkness) but rather the color white, pure emptiness, something that can't really be known, 道可道，非常道。名可名，非常名。"The Dao that can be trodden is not the enduring and unchanging Dao. The name that can be named is not the enduring and unchanging name," (Daodejing, Legge translation) or, alternatively, "A Way that can be followed is not a constant Way. A name that can be named is not a constant name," (Ivanhoe translation) and so on and so forth. light in homestuck thus isn't just knowledge about the world, it is the world. it is, period. understanding the world, being a major player within that world is equivocated with being itself though this pairing-- and, in turn, a lack of understanding is associated w/ a lack of (meaningful? seen?) existence itself.

anyways, there are interesting things you could said about all these pairings (thinking about blood & breath and hope & rage in particular), but the one i really wanna focus on right now is one set that i think often goes overlooked, which sucks because i think both aspects carry a lot more weight in homestuck than people tend to give it credit for: life & doom.

life is the side to this i have less strong feelings/thoughts about, so let's maybe start with that. we have a handful of pretty relevant life players in comic so this is perhaps the clearer side of the dichotomy: while feferi doesn't get a ton of focus after her original introduction in hivebent (and especially after murderstuck, rip), jane, meenah, and the condesce are all pretty major characters so we have a decent amount to work with for analysis. i particularly like the classpect-navalgazing summary of life as an, "aspect of affluence," life players being people that grow up with a lot materially but in turn have a lot to figure out about the emotional/empathy stuff, who benefit from a kind of "dubious privilege," that makes their homelife cushy and gives them a hefty inheritance to fall back on, but makes all the social shit more confusing.

it's that struggle against the status quo that they simultaneously benefit from that really stands out to me here, especially because the main life player that i want to talk about is the condesce-- not just meenah, but )(er Imperious Condescension herself. so, to get into that...

homestuck really functions under a systems brain, which is obvious from the start w/ all the computer science jokes (that i definitely 100% understand) but easily expands past that as the series goes on. if you've gotten this far into reading this essay, you know what i'm talking about. what's been more relevant in my mind recently, though, is not just the ways in which homestuck itself is built up through these systems, but the way it both thematically & literally portrays social systems as well, as a general concept/working force in the universe even outside of more specific social systems like racism/sexism/ableism/etc.

from all the reading/watching i've done looking at peoples' various classpecting analysis (long way of saying i forget exactly where this comes from), i've come to view rage & doom as two sides of the same coin, or more accurately, two reactions to the same perceptions: both doom & rage are acutely aware of just how much the world & greater forces around them are fucking them over, it's just that doom reacts by giving in to the Inevitability of it all, trying to work within the restraints of the system surrounding them, while rage reacts by giving a giant fuck you and trying to tear it all down.

tying this back to life, the dichotomy of life & doom as complementary again has some interesting implications, specifically in how life players benefit from the status quo while doom players suffer so heavily under the weight of it. keep in mind: just like meenah, the condesce is a thief, the only real difference being that the condesce's power extends over a much grander scale of space & time. when the condesce kills off humanity, stealing life from the planet & replacing it w/ her own faux/more desirable replicas, she is in the process dooming humanity & the planet itself (parallel to roxy: steal void, create being, steal life, create nihilistic inevitability). as one of the major villains in homestuck, really second only to lord english, the condesce is thus not just an individual person but something like a system of power itself. as dirk says to jake on (A6A3:4864)

TT: Though the Baroness made very few substantive gestures of aggression, the global fear of her looming threat would trigger all the changes she needed. TT: Governments prepared for war, as if to defend against the invading alien armies she undoubtedly commanded. TT: But of course, she had no army. She was always the only one of her kind. TT: Instead, the world powers were only setting about to build her armies for her.

thus HIC, as the most powerful iteration of meenah that we see in comic, both benefits from the status quo as it is already established and has enough power to evolve/expand upon it herself, to the point where you can really see her as the figurehead/leading innovator for oppression, both on alternia and earth in the B2 timeline.

it's because of this that i think doom has a lot more influence over the plot/world of homestuck than people give it credit for. to give a more distinct example of this, while the alpha kids' game is called a void session, i don't think it's too far off base to note the ways in which doom hangs over it as well. looking specifically at some (alpha) kids:

DIRK is probably the least directly connected alpha kid to doom, being associated more w/ void through homestuck's systems brain & his various connections to equius (& nepeta), as well as the heart/mind pairing (and jake's hope influence sneaking into everything tbh w/ BGD). still, i think it's pretty obvious to anyone that's like. read through dirk's self-hating bullshit that he has a lot of doom-related thoughts, which can in part be attributed to HIC's influence on his apocalypse world, but also, and more notably in my mind, dave's lasting legacy on him.

alongside the typical patron troll pairings of john/vriska, rose/kanaya, dave/terezi, and jade/karkat for the beta kids, we also have the (less overt/clear) pairings of which troll resembles each kid the most: namely, karkat being the "john" of the trolls, leader-ship/social position-wise, jade being associated with both nepeta & feferi, and rose... being like kanaya, vriska, and terezi, i guess?? it's less clear for the girls i suppose, and perhaps not a super strong connection in general as the trolls are pretty distinctly themselves separate from the human kids, but the important detail here is the connection between sollux & dave, as the (not at all) "cool kids" and primary besties to the main leader of their respective group. visually, they can also be loosely associated through their trademark glasses, sollux's red and blue lenses being connected to the A & B universes of the trolls & humans respectively and dave's stiller shades being connected to paradox space & the greater universe of homestuck (and problem sleuth) as a whole after passing through a black hole.

dave's biggest connection to doom however is in his connection to doomed timelines and the dead daves all of his timeline-hopping shenanigans lead to. he kind of ends up constantly skirting around the edges of doom, in a way, utilizing terezi's seer of mind help to just barely avoid his own inevitable doom. you could almost define time itself as an aspect along those terms, actually, with the stress time players are constantly under coming from the impending doom hanging over their heads that they're always just barely avoiding, like a satellite constantly falling and missing the planet as gravity pulls it along into orbit. sick imagery regardless.

sidenote: perhaps i've been staring at this dumb aspect circle for too long, but it seems notable enough to mention that doom & time connect in a line that is directly parallel to life & space's connection. ALSO, just now remembering that i wrote an entire essay on space & time and those aspects' connection to life & death (the concepts, not just the aspects) way back in like, february, that i almost entirely forgot about until literally just now. guess i'll try editing that later?? (edit: i'm a doofus. i talked about the space/time stuff mostly in my kant essay. still gonna post something about death in homestuck later, though.) carrying on.

anyways, even looking past beta dave's connection to sollux, alpha dave is a character so seeped in tragedy that i don't think i even need to say all that much to make this connection clearer. his entire life as dirk dictates it is essentially just one big fight against an inevitable end, not only for himself but the entire rest of humanity as well, and the underlying implications that even if he had lived to old age he never would've been able to meet or raise dirk only hammers this in even harder. alpha dave was doomed from the start, not just from the moment HIC landed on earth but the moment skaia took his and dirk's baby meteors and damned them to separation.

JAKE's connection to doom is similarly primarily through sollux, though it's both more direct and less obvious than dirk's. putting his connections to jade and my space/life thoughts aside for another essay, jake's main link to doom is through erisolsprite-- fittingly, in the biggest catastrophe of a doomed timeline, in game over.

the mention of erisol in general actually brings up another weird, not-quite complementary connection between doom & hope, which is another line of connection in the rectangle that is hope/rage/life/doom-- notably, i believe optimistic duelist referred to these as the mutable aspects, the most abstract of the twelve. to bring back my point from earlier, i would also say that these are the aspects with the most far-reaching, powerful influence over homestuck, whether that be in-story in the world, through the systems of power and oppression that characters live under (in the case of doom & life), or on a meta level on the story itself, particularly when it comes to what is or isn't allowed to happen/plot contrivances & coherency, etc. (in the case of rage & hope).

sollux & eridan's dynamic in A5 really establishes doom & hope as two opposing viewpoints, complacency & utter surrender in the face of a horrible fate you can never escape versus faith & imagination to the point of fucking lunacy & calling a magic wand a "science stick". in erisolsprite, it's really the doom that comes through the strongest, perhaps in contrast against jake's own pitiful attempts to hope himself through the in-game social awkwardness he wants to pretend doesn't exist. in parallel to fefetasprite's complete silence (but simultaneously, implied perfect support & friendship), erisolsprite is an asshole that can't stand anyone and especially not himself and has completely given up on any remaining semblance of hope-- kind of a thematically nice conclusion, actually, finding the middle ground of sollux's doom & eridan's princely destruction of hope after all their conflicts from earlier in the story. or it could be, if it weren't so fucking miserable to look at. point is, i think jake's hopelessness (or perhaps more accurately, his inability to access hope) later in the story becomes quite synonymous with doom, similar to dirk in how neither of them can see much of a future.

ROXY is actually probably the least doom-ridden of the entire group, which i suspect may come from the fact that she is herself a void player and thus is more at home in the context of a void session, even if all her friends are being shitheads the entire time. really, the points where roxy is the most bitter & doom-ridden occurs before they even enter the game, when she is still under the strongest influence of the condesce, like how roxy continually pushes back on even starting the game at all just as a fuck you to HIC.

fittingly, i think it's actually the absence of doom that makes roxy such a strong & great friend once she gets her shit together in-session. she kind of has an opposite arc to the rest of the alpha kids, starting off completely doom-ridden thinking that she's never going to meet her mom or her friends and constantly paranoid that HIC is going to fuck everything up, only to re-evaluate once she's physically with her buds and have more faith in the future. a good example of how life & doom are connected to social systems (or not just any specific system of bigotry, but moreso the general feeling of having greater powers outside your control that have a major influence on your life) maybe-- roxy must extricate herself as entirely as possible from the status quo, from world-wide and/or world-influencing figures' expectations, before she can start focusing on and figuring out what really matters to her and pursue those goals, e.g. getting sober.

and of course, our beloved life player, JANE. as a life player, jane's connections to doom are a lot more obvious than the previous three, but i think that only strengthens this idea of doom residing over the alpha kids' session (and homestuck as a whole, really). where you have to look more to the generally miserable, nihilistic sentiments of the other kids to see the influence of doom, jane is literally and regularly brainwashed to the values & ideals of HIC. note some of the specific orders that her tiaratop gives her (A6A1:4153):

You put on your highly fashionable UNREAL HEIRESS THOUGHTWAVE TIARATOP and flip it on. It immediately hums to life as its blazing fast processes mingle with your thoughts. It is the most efficient computing technology in the world by far, as long as you don't wear it for too long. But aside from a few migraines, you can't possibly imagine any OBEY drawbacks that CEASE REPRODUCTION could come with SUBMIT merging CONSUME your thoughts with EMBRACE YOUR CULLING experimental technology CONFORM TO SOCIAL ORDER from an STAY ASLEEP extremely powerful DIE corporation, wait what?

or, one by one, categorized loosely:

OBEY, SUBMIT, CONFORM TO SOCIAL ORDER, STAY ASLEEP: obvious implications, again ties to the idea of doom & life dictating overarching social systems/order. the last one is notable in that it also ties jane to jade's narcolepsy, which fits the whole crockertier/grimbark arc that happens later on when those two meet.

CEASE REPRODUCTION: perhaps more HIC specific, in that she hates human reproduction. i think i might address this more in that time/space essay, if i ever get around to editing/finishing that.

EMBRACE YOUR CULLING, DIE: the "DIE" part of this is pretty on the nose w/ HIC's stealing of life aka eradication of humanity, but the "EMBRACE" part of the culling one really solidifies a connection to doom.

what stands out to me is that it is unclear how much of these subliminal teachings jane is meant to internalize & apply to herself personally versus spread & share & execute in her job as an heiress & tool to HIC. it's clear from the way that jane talks to jake in the jail cell that even while in full-crockertier mode she at least in part goes against some of these teachings, telling jake on (A6A6I1:6443):

JANE: You do remember our recent agreement to have "a zillion babies," don't you, Jake? I do hope you were not planning to renege on this vow. JAKE: *Sob sob sob...* JANE: Our children will rule the empire when we are gone, which of course will be never, because we will be eternally young and beautiful and immortal and in love, for ever and ever.

clearly conflicting with the whole "CEASE REPRODUCTION" thing, though she does admittedly treat him with quite a bit of disgust at the same time that she's telling him he's doomed to be a baby making machine or whatever.

point is, as a life player, and especially as a life player under the direct influence & control of HIC, jane is in that conflicting & confusing position talked about earlier, where she simultaneously benefits from privilege & has extensive control in deciding which standards she wants to, as well as extends those expectations onto the people around her (e.g. for a more minor example, think of how she dictates the grammar of her friends when speaking to them online), but is also stuck in a position where she deals with some of the most significant negative side-effects of such standards.

jane's gender fuckery really sums this up best: she both loves & idolizes gumshoes and the traditionally masculine aesthetics and attitudes that come w/ them, but is also in one of the most obsessively feminine, stay-at-home, stuck-in-the-kitchen 1950s housewife archetypes ever. she's a girlboss heiress to a capitalist, corporate empire, a job that is itself very traditionally masculine in the inherent power it holds, but resides over one of the most traditionally feminine spheres it possibly could. jane is made of life, she was born into and built out of the status quo & social standards of the world she landed on and reaps all the benefits & consequences of such, trapped in a system that protected her, in her house by a father that loves her, and constantly keeps trying to break out even if she doesn't even understand the full magnitude of what she's doing or wants. crockertier jane is really just the epitome of this-- a form that dooms her just as much as it benefits her, wealth that cushions her ass and means absolutely nothing, a title that she cannot be extricated from, for better and for worse.

[treeofnonsense]

🖤 tridentarii

💜 kasjory

Other half of your ask! Tridentarii 🖤 (I wrote this in the student union with no shame):

“Sister dearest, won’t you kiss me?” Prince Ianthe Naberius, the Saint of Awe, ran her hand through Coronabeth’s hair. She’d had it combed and perfumed and properly moisturized just hours ago, and now it lay in rippling waves over Corona’s back like it was supposed to as she knelt beside Ianthe’s throne. Still a few tangles and split ends to be worked out, but it was quite good work from a team of skeleton servants, and, really you can’t expect much more from me can you, when you’ve been living in this horrible place for years – I mean honestly, with this humidity it’s a miracle you look this good. Between the hair, Ianthe’s nagging, and the new shimmering dress sourced from the palace of necromantic corridors, it almost felt like home back on the Third again. Corona would have sunk into the familiarity like a warm bath, except…

…except it wasn’t her leg she was leaning against, it was his. Far too thick and meaty for her waifish sister, smelling like starched fabric and tomb air instead of whatever horrible perfume Ianthe had been trying lately. When she looked up she saw a skeletal version of Naberius instead of a skeletal version of herself – and it wasn’t even a good copy! His hair was all wrong, he had bags under his eyes, and the suit was way too garish for him; the real Naberius would have pitched a fit if he saw this in the mirror. Nobody cares about Babs… but she’d never expected to look him in the eye again.

“I won’t while you’re wearing his face. It’s obscene.”

Ianthe scoffed, and all the skeletons around them twitched their heads a little. All that Lyctor power, spilling out even over lightyears; she’d always had too much, enough for two necromancers. “I come back to this miserable little planet for you, and this is the thanks I get? A fight and a stillborn revolution? What else would you have me do, you fool, come down here myself and go regally loopy?” She laughed, but Naberius’s fingernails dug into Corona’s scalp. “Maybe you would, joining your little revolution. What are they calling you now, Crown? You don’t know what a real crown looks like, not until you’ve seen the halo of a dying planet. I could give you that, Corona, if you’d just listen to me, if you’d let me stand in front for once in your life…”

At that the old habits took over, and Corona said something reassuring and saw from the tilt of Ianthe’s head that she didn’t believe a word of it. Her words never changed anything, but they’d both performed this dance so many times that the steps were trodden into their souls. And why, why? – because back on the Third it gave Corona power, because whatever Ianthe’s whining she would still keep up the act, still polish Corona’s image to a mirror shine. Because she needed Ianthe like she needed air. But this wasn’t the Third, and she knelt at her sister’s throne, and Naberius’s face made it crystal clear that Ianthe didn’t need Corona at all.

And they were waiting for Camilla, whose only crime was loyalty, and for Nona, who had once been Harrowhark, or maybe Gideon, and now was clearly something entirely her own. Because no one else had ever done what Nona had – looked straight into Corona’s halo and seen the center even through all the glare. Corona thought she loved their two incumbent visitors, in her own broken way… they certainly deserved better than this. Why couldn’t she have them and her sister? Couldn’t Ianthe play nice, just for one day?

Not on her own. She needed Corona for this, even if she didn’t know it. Corona tilted her face up and put on her best Crown Princess pout – tears were already filling her vision, so it wasn’t hard. Ianthe recognized the submission, the old pattern, and made Naberius smile. “See now, not so hard.”

“I hate this. I hate him.”

“We’ll be together soon enough.” Ianthe kissed her, and even lightyears away, in a different body, it was the same kiss as a thousand times before. Only the tears were Corona’s silent rebellion.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                        

[gorbalsvampire]

On Golconda and Paths

Here's the thing about Golconda.

In the Dark Ages, it was understood that there was a Beast, and that many Roads led away from the Beast, and that at the end of every Road there was a state of being in which one was a paragon of one's virtues, as far from the Beast as any Cainite could ever be, and that state was called Golconda. A Paragon of the Road of Sin would look like a shame, a caution and a horror to a follower of the Road of Heaven or Kings, but their Beast would be mastered nonetheless.

Much that was once known was lost, in the War of Princes and the Inquisition and the Revolt and the rise of the Sabbat.

A Path is not a Road, built and tended with the authority of mind over soul. A Path is simply a route trodden by many, through a wilderness poorly understood by all.

The Sabbat is permanently struggling, and its Enlightenment begins with a breaking of the self and a submission to the Beast. Its Paths are framed by an eternal war that defines everything the sect thinks and does, against everything it can reach, against enemies vast and abstract. It is not interested in Golconda any more than it is capable of winning.

The Camarilla? They have maintained but one Road – Humanity – to the detriment of all the others. Theirs is the struggle between Beast and Man, and when a Kindred wishes to be neither, they fold their arms and say "nevertheless: choose, or be damned." The Camarilla does not believe in many things that happen to be true; it believes in you believing what you're told, and if you don't, well, you must be lost to the Beast already, mustn't you?

In the modern nights, Golconda is an accident. The Roads, well kept and maintained, are lost, and all that remains is to blunder along the Path and hope.

This position is a synthesis arrived at from reading the Dark Ages, Victorian Age and modern nights corebooks I started out with, running games in all three, and seeing a change in how Vampire morality works on either side of some definitive lore events.

During the War of Princes, i.e. before the formation of the Camarilla, you have five major Roads and at least as many minor ones. None of them are presented as necessarily more important, more widely followed, or more "true" than the others. And, crucially, in the Revised era - that's Dark Ages Vampire, not Vampire: the Dark Ages - all of those Roads have an Aura attached. At a high Road rating, that is to say really living up to their personal ideals, a character radiates a palpable sense of something - authority, temptation, compassion - suggesting that they are approaching a different order of being.

After the formation of the Camarilla, on the other hand, you have Humanity presented as the default state of being for vampires. Their central moral struggle is to preserve their Humanity from the ravages of the Beast - there are very clear consequences for letting your Humanity drop, but the Aura corresponding to the Dark Ages' Via Humanitas is no longer present. Something has changed. Something about the way vampires work is not as it used to be.

Dark Ages was always a backformation - a prequel created after the core operations and tenets of Vampire were established. And those core operations and tenets have always included a sense of Humanity as "The Downward Spiral," (which ain't just the team's favourite Nine Inch Nails record) of vampires as risking "degeneration" should they engage in behaviours prohibited by a "Hierarchy of Sins." The journey toward the Beast has always been more explicitly mapped out than any journey away from it, which is almost an afterthought in terms of rules. Spend XP to restore Humanity. You may reach Golconda, I guess.

This is fine, it's a solid bit of Gothic theming, core to the game, love it. Except... it doesn't gel with the Paths of Enlightenment, many of which are transhumanist in nature, and which - again, in Revised, this is where I came in - are built from a start of actively running down your Humanity and then adopting your Path and then needing to build your Path rating back up again, i.e. climbing a moral ladder away from the Beast. This doesn't really work when the Paths' morality is written, like Humanity, as a series of failure points - Sins by which you degenerate and risk the Beast. The Paths, as written, are a kind of square peg/round hole situation where you have to turn prohibitions into opportunities to progress. And there isn't as clear a mechanical reward or incentive for maintaining a high Path rating as there is for a high Road rating. No Auras here either.

So, what I arrived at, once I'd run my first successful Dark Ages Vampire game and had this distinction really brought to my attention, was a sense that vampire morality had changed between one side of the transformative events in the early modern period. And that's when I started thinking about what it meant that your characters in Dark Ages and Victorian Age occupied the same band of generations, and thought about how the Camarilla can get away with claiming there are no such things as Antediluvians when some of its founding figures have a personal memory of Antediluvians being actively involved in the War of Princes.

That's when I started taking the Inquisition seriously, as an effectively genocidal event that wiped out almost all playable vampire characters. Higher than sixth generation? Yeah, you probably didn't make it through the War and the Revolt and the Inquisition, and repopulation took a while, Tradition of Progeny and all that. The surviving elders are the ones who deliberately fabricated new social orders for vampirism - the aggressive, militant transhumanism of the Sabbat and the centralised "we hide amongst humans and Humanity is the best way to do that" principles of the Camarilla.

And that's how I arrive at my model of vampire morality.