Work Text:
"XVI. The Tower- Misery, distress, indigence, adversity, calamity, disgrace, deception, ruin. It is a card in particular of unforeseen catastrophe." -A.E. Waite, The Pictorial Key to the Tarot
The storm was the worst that had struck Westeros in living memory, according to the servants who grumbled through the halls of the Red Keep. It was long past midnight, but even the dead could barely sleep with the racket of the shrieking wind and pounding hail assaulting the roof of the castle. Anyone with able hands was swiftly put to work battening shutters and bailing rainwater from the floors, a task that proved ever more futile as the storm’s fury increased.
Aemond dodged the servants and their buckets with a swordsman’s swift ease as he bounded from his quarters toward the staircase that led to the top of the highest tower. He felt the thunder in his bones, each peal strong enough to shake the stone walls, and he wondered if this was how the fall of Old Valyria had sounded, nature’s rage indistinguishable from a dragon’s roar. He swore he could hear Vhagar’s bellow above the din, though, and that was what sent him leaping up the spiral stairs two at a time, his oiled cloak snapping behind him. He had to behold the largest dragon in Westeros—his dragon—careening among the storm clouds in a dance whose like might never be witnessed again.
When he burst through the door at the top of the tower, he discovered he wasn’t the only Targaryen who had been drawn there. The sheets of rain shrouded Helaena’s figure and plastered her white nightgown to her body, and the wind whipped her loose silver hair into a chaotic halo above her head, the elements conspiring to make her appear like a specter looking out over the crenellated wall. Aemond blinked, and when the vision of her didn’t disappear, his surprise was quickly usurped by worry.
“Helaena, come inside!” he called, trying to make himself loud enough to be heard over the booming thunder but not so loud that he’d startle her. “You’ll catch your death out here!”
Whether she heard him or not, she didn’t acknowledge him until he approached her and placed a hand on her arm. Then she looked at him with violet eyes wide and haunted and said in a whisper that would have been carried away on the wind had he not been standing right beside her, “I’m going to fall.”
His brow furrowed. “You won’t if you come away from the edge,” he insisted. He tugged her arm to pull her back toward the door, but she planted herself where she stood with a strength that belied her slight form. She cast her eyes downward, toward the courtyard below. “Can’t you see my body all broken and twisted on the cobbles?” she asked, her voice louder now, desperate and quavering.
Wondering what in the Seven Hells she could possibly mean, he peered over the wall, but the rain pelted past him so violently that all he could see below was mist and darkness. A shiver went through him that had little to do with the sudden chilly gust that tried to topple them both from their post. He flung his cloak around her and gathered her to him, and she steadied herself with frail arms wrapped around his middle; he willed his body’s warmth into her, for she was cold as a corpse.
“It’s only a nightmare,” he assured her as he smoothed a hand over her sopping wet hair. He hoped to the Stranger his words were true, that what she saw was a mere nightmare and not one of her prophetic dragon dreams. She shook her head, but the words she murmured into his chest were lost in the roar that erupted in the sky just above them.
Aemond looked upward and saw silhouetted against the clouds a spread of wings so large they could only belong to one dragon in all the Seven Kingdoms. Vhagar soared above them, riding the furious wind as if it blew only for her, and at such speed that before the lightning’s flash faded, she was out over the Blackwater. She furled her wings against her back and plunged toward the choppy surface, and as she plummeted downward, Aemond saw a vision that turned his blood to ice.
Vhagar had a rider on her back—impossible, as Aemond was the only man in Westeros bold enough to ride her. Even more impossible, Aemond realized in a haze of waking terror, the rider was himself. He could see his own face as plain as he did in the mirror each morning, his own hair streaming back from his face in the merciless wind, his own patched eye socket pierced through with a sword, his own blood streaking over his skin in rivulets with the streams of rain.
Vhagar flung her wings wide just before she could crash into the bay, waves roaring upward magnificently around her as her claws grazed the water, and with another flash of lightning, her rider was gone. Aemond felt his body begin to tremble violently. Was this how Helaena felt after one of her dragon dreams? Small wonder she was so shaken as she clung to him.
The wind lulled just enough that he was able to discern at last the words she sobbed over and over: “Don’t let me fall, Aemond, please, don’t let me fall!”
Amid the cold horror that gripped him, he managed to find his own tongue. He pressed his lips firmly against the top of her head and clutched her closer, as if by holding her tightly enough, he might protect her from both their fates.
“I won’t,” he replied doggedly. “I promise, as long as I’m living, I won’t let you fall.”