Chapter Text
You’re starving.
Here’s the thing about hunger: it gnaws and gnaws and devours your bones and for just one moment you think it’s gone but it never leaves.
You will always be hungry.
Melara of Heatherlands was to be a queen.
You were to be a queen. You’d lived your whole life knowing that, moulded yourself in the shape of the crown and borne the invisible weight of it. Daughter of a Duke, ruler of vastlands. You were perfect. Well loved, well respected, beautiful, and charming, a tamed beast with a bite to be unleashed at the command of your to-be-husband.
Listen. You didn’t love Jaime. He didn’t love you either. It wasn’t needed, anyways. You thought both of you were well aware of what was to be and what was needed. The greater good, if it so pleases.
But as you watch her – Saint Cerelle, his hands on her waist, tender eyes, shining mirrors of the other, you think – well. Maybe he doesn’t. You don’t trust him enough to be cunning about the girl.
You were right.
You were right.
What more is to be said of it, truly?
Starvation is an awful death, you think. Loneliness is somehow worse. What a way to go, the most powerful woman in the kingdom, and they kill you of hunger and madness in a dark cave.
You wake up to water around you.
The dungeons – they’re flooding. No. NONO NO NONONON you hate water you hate water you’re afraid of drowning. Jaime wouldn’t do that to you – he was once your friend.
He wouldn’t.
He would.
Drowning is a miserable death, you think. Clawing at the stone walls, fingernails torn to bloody smithereens. You don’t want to drown. You don’t want to die.
This is how you die.
You wake clinging to stone, mudwaters pulling at you.
You blink through it and hear voices. Rustling wind. Someone is shouting—someone holding a hand out. You latch onto it.
“Up you get, Lady Melara. Poor girl.”
They haven't killed you yet.
Not yet.
NOTES:
Hi! Thank you for reading through till here<3. This is very short, but I just wanted to get something out after a really really bad writer's block. I'd love to hear from you!!