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She didn’t wake with a gasp. Or a scream. She didn’t bellow her rage or her grief, didn’t startle at her beating heart. Her flesh not melted, her limbs not eaten.
Rhaenyra had fought and died.
She did not wish to rise again.
Eyes fluttered open, the sun only beginning to break the horizon line. She laid there for a moment, wondering. Listening to the bustle of the castle. To the spies walking as servants, the traitors inhabiting the halls. Briefly, she contemplated her mother – innocent, a victim to her husband and king’s whims. Gives a second to mourn her, to rejoice in her life, to put sorrow in a chest and lock it away. No amount of affection for anyone can stop the spinning of webs in her mind, the course her feet long to walk.
The princess does not get up until the sun is fully in the sky, refusing to rouse as long as there is a hint of darkness amongst the clouds. Nobody will disturb her for a few hours yet. She has time.
A father she loved and hated, an uncle she’d give up everything for but only getting scraps in return, a mother giving her all for the realm and crown and leaving little for her only living daughter. An extended family reaching and grasping what is not theirs, a lover tainted by secrecy and deceit – a question never asked, an answer never known. Five sons she bore and loved, nursed at her breast and damned them with her choices. A daughter never to breathe her first.
Whispers and ruin await on the path before her. Scorn and disrespect, vile rumors and indifference.
What was the point of preserving their legacy if she was the only one who willing to fight? To face them head on, to be there to take the blows and try to return them?
Rhaenyra was tired of fighting. Was it too great to ask to rest? For peace?
She looks at the girl in the mirror, young and innocent, ignorant and naïve, and hates.
Who does this-would-be-queen hate more – herself or the people around her?
A path is laid out before her, the journey long and pointless, filled with heartache and death, her Doom brought about by the hands of her family. She could change it, could alter the course and try for a better future. Could pick a different dance, a different partner, could fly away never to be seen.
Wasn’t freedom all she had ever desired?
The queen turned princess does not know if leaving the continent would be enough to erase her shackles.
Live, she can hear the ghost of a mother butchered command her. Love, an uncle who broke his vows to her time and time again pleads with her. You are my heir, a father who only defended her on his death bed, but not when he had to live with the consequences, reassures.
Rhaenyra loves her family, loves her mother, her father. Loves her cousins.
She loves Daemon.
Against all reason and common sense, she loves him.
If he loves her, she can only hope. But he does not respect her. Does not cherish her. This Daemon even less than the one she sent off to fight.
I want for you a husband who will treat you well, terrified to lose his place in your heart. Her mother’s words echo. (I want a man nothing like your father, she never says. She does not need to.)
A letter opener is in her hand, standing before the rising dawn.
There is no one in this life for me, muña.
. . .
Hours later they will find a princess with her wrists slit, cold and lifeless, only a note left behind for her loved ones.
King Viserys I Targaryen will give rise to our Doom.
I have no intention of fighting a losing war.
I’m sorry I wasn’t strong enough.
. . .
“Rhaenyra!”