Work Text:
The room is cold now. There is little pleasure left to it anymore, other than the single treasure she has to her name. A treasure she knows will soon be someone else’s. She will need someone to save her heart because her soul is quite quickly melting away. Although she knows her fate now, something in the back of her mind tells her to hold on for something. One thing is yet to unfold. It is so hard to remind herself of that though as the increasingly icy air grips her tight. Tighter than he ever had at least, which is plainly clear now.
The windows should be shuttered. I never thought that it would feel so terrible as this. Oh—by the gods—would that I could bring warmth to my limbs again. This cold is not like that of my home, it is the icy grasp of the never-ending winter that awaits me. Of this I know. Perhaps… he knew this would come for me too.
There is nothing more left that she can do, but knowing this intimate truth doesn’t make it any less painful. She’d always hoped to be brave when faced with her end, though thoughts like those have long disappeared now. Those proud thoughts have been replaced with regret, shame, and a tinge of emptiness from what she can only assume is due to the blood seeping from her. The sheets are turning a deep, sickly red as if they were a thirsty fool lost in the desert, stumbling upon an oasis.
Except she is the true fool, is she not? Unknowingly, she’d been cast as a jester to fate, doomed to live on as the naive, eternal girl. This is as close to growing up as she will ever attain now. She ought to be more afraid (perhaps also hateful, for what this has doomed her family and the world to reap now), but her mind is stuck on how desperately and utterly she failed. A spectacular failure indeed, one for the ages and for the songs of bards in the years to come.
Little more than a year ago, she’d have thought it all terribly romantic. More the fool, she.
He played at being a trapped songbird just like me, singing all the right things a girl would like to hear from her handsome prince. I’ve traded in one cage for another, one that’s decorated with enchanting, bold roses. The bars are still unyielding all the same.
The only moments she has left anymore are memories; times and places that will never change now that the story has already been spun. These choices are now facts and even though she was—is—so very young and naive, it’s difficult to avoid the zenith of her journey to this moment in time. This is now a tragedy, this is the newest story that will be told without consent and without nuances. She’s certain she deserves to be vilified (for it would be better than her tale being romanticized), but there’s more to her than this sliver in time. The more time that passed her by in this tower, the more she came to realize that in avoiding being the pawn of one man, the more she had become the puppet of yet another.
I allowed my strings to be pulled taut and now they’re snapping one by one. I was never a woman—though I wanted to be—and now I will forever be the silly, trapped girl that I had hoped to be bigger than.
Now though, it’s so bitter knowing that she’s been cast into her role, to be the one-dimensional character in this story. Never to be properly laid to rest, immortal in the mouths of men. It leaves her mouth tasting more like bile than blood. It’s true that some may tell it differently when it’s recounted, and perhaps someday it will be forgotten altogether in the way that time often does, but her soul will know all the same. She only hopes her heart—now separated from her person—will never know the same. Perhaps the world will be decent to him despite his treacherous maker.
Time is as ravenous as fate, constantly consuming and leaving only skeletons of people and stories behind in its wake. It comes much quicker for some, although she knows (somehow, somewhere inside) that there is one last role for her to play.
He’d been so sure of himself, so sure of what was to come. He told me we weren’t an option. We were an inevitability. All of it was by his design, but it was painted as if it was something I owned too. Perhaps he thought he had no choice in his lies, but his words left me with none as well.
Wearily eyeing the grains of sand dropping steadily down the tunnel of glass on the table beside her, she hopes whatever she feels on the horizon will come to her soon. Some wicked and unyielding part of her still yearns for him, for his game was played very well with her. She wants to hate him (and herself) for the callous way he’d gambled everything and everyone in order to do what he saw was right. What fate demanded him to do—or so he said. But he is gone now and her heart is no longer in her chest, eager to be broken.
Lyanna’s heart is on her chest now, suddenly warming her in more ways than one. Her (only hers) son’s small form rises and falls with the shallow and strained breaths she takes, eyes gently shut to the world. Eyes shut to fate. She’s never seen something so perfect as him before, and in those moments it’s so easy to forget the cooling blood and time’s crooked fingers clasping ever present on her shoulder. Soon she too will only be a memory. A character whose tender moments like these will be trampled over and forgotten.
Knowing that she has so very little time for him—to know him as she yearns to—she presses a damp, blanched cheek against him. Praying that his fate will be more kind to him, she contentedly listens to his heart beat, waiting for her own fate to walk up the stairs.