Chapter Text
Helaena throws herself from the windows of her chamber, high in the walls of Maegor’s Holdfast, the strongest place in a keep named for the colour of its stone, but which should have been named for blood. It’s blood she sees while falling: the blood of her butchered babes, the blood of her own self, when the spikes below the Holdfast tear through her throat, when her soft, gentle body slams into impalement.
She never feels the spikes, because she never stops falling. There’s nothing but the sound of wind, and of her dragon, screaming.
(Dreamfyre will be free of her grief now, as Helaena is free from dreams. The fall will give them both that, at least.)
That fall is all she can hear, the wind and the dragon, and everything else is dark. She thinks her eyes must be black with blood, she thinks that she is clotted with it.
It is such a relief to see nothing. A life of dreams and blood, and she is so glad for it to be over.
#
Sansa Stark does not mean to fall.
She’s in the Godswood, by herself, because Beth is at her lessons and Jeyne has been called to her father and her siblings are all in the training yard, playing with weapons, and they do not want her with them, fussing over dirt and bruises. But that’s alright, because she doesn’t want to play with weapons either—the thought of using them to draw blood, to hurt someone, is something she does not like, no matter how glorious it sounds in the stories—and anyway, she isn’t really alone. She has Lady with her, and there is the dragonfly.
The only dragonfly that Sansa has ever seen hangs around her mother’s neck. It is a pretty reminder of Catelyn’s childhood home, of the years she spent playing in the pools and rivers, with the bright spray of waterfalls across her face. It is too cold in Winterfell for dragonflies, Sansa has been told, and yet there is one, hovering through the trees, above the pool, with the weirwood tree white behind it.
The dragonfly is so very beautiful. She wants to catch it and hold it gently in her hands and run to show her mother.
She slips on the side of the pool, reaching for it, and if it were only the water Sansa would not mind, because she has been taught to swim. Instead, the water does not prevent her hitting her head, from breathing in like a fish, all water and blood.
Everything is dark, and the water is loud in her ears, and Sansa can hear her: Lady in the distance, howling.
#
Fire and water and ash. Duty and honour and blood.
Winter. Winter. Winter.
The dreams mix together. Helaena’s are the stronger, for she is used to dreaming. It’s in her blood. She sees her mother, a young girl in a lonely castle, with no friends left to her and a marriage she does not want, for it frightens her with possibilities.
(Another girl, in grey instead of green, in the same red castle, with her king before her, and the same salt fear of marriage in her mouth.)
A brother and sister, come together, and three children who have the same colours, the same shared blood in their veins, and how it runs, that blood, there are no dream-hands that can staunch the wounds and keep it all inside.
(“Gold shall be their crowns, and gold their shrouds.”)
“He can keep his tongue.”
(“Promise me, Ned.”)
Embroidering a spider with tight, clever stitches. Methodical, meditative, and sewing was a comfort to her, a way to create order in the red, swimming world, to make it manageable, to make it pretty.
(“I like the wolf bit.”)
Dreamfyre shrieking in the Dragonpit, a wild thing swarmed and shattered with arrows, and Helaena gone, too far away and falling, dragonblood that died alone.
(Washing her brother’s body for burial, easing the arrows from his body.)
A choice between little son and little son. She tries to save both, and fails.
(A choice between sister and betrothed. She tries to soothe both, and Lady dies for it.)
A sword through the neck of a beloved child.
(A sword through the neck of a beloved father.)
A dragon flies, and falls.
A dragonfly, and falling.
#
Helaena’s dreams are stronger, but hers is not the only House with the possibility of sight seeping through veins. It’s in their blood, and in a place of magic, of old gods, like calls to like.
The wind becomes the sound of wings, and Helaena (Sansa) follows them out of darkness.
The girl who liked to fly, the little bird. The girl who couldn’t stand the sight of blood. She wakes in her bed, three days after her wolf drags her body out of the Godswood pool, three days after that wolf’s howls—loud as a screaming dragon—brought air and guards and a bare, uncertain recovery from drowning. She wakes from three days of dreams, with her mother beside her bed, and her mother’s devoted prayers are more faithful than wings.
Helaena’s eyes are no longer clotted with blood, but they are clouded and streaming regardless, with black water from a black pool, with water from her own salt tears. The woman sitting beside her small child body is warm and strong and has a cloud of auburn hair, and Helaena clings to her and weeps for what will never come again.
She tells her mother a dragonfly brought her out of darkness. Catelyn takes off her Riverlands necklace, the bright, delicate jewel of it, and hangs that necklace round her living daughter’s neck.
Sansa wears the necklace gladly. She never takes it off.