Chapter Text
Death does not come gently at the Gods Eye.
But then again, nothing in Aemond Targaryen’s life ever has.
It comes as ice-cold water sharpening as it floods torn lungs; as pain blooming too late to matter; as the sky—dark as the day at Storm’s End—folding inward upon itself. The kinslayer knows the exact moment he dies, because the pain stops before it should. Vhagar’s roar is cut short. Daemon’s blade never finishes its arc.
Instead—
silence.
His life unspools around him in fragments, not as mercy but as inventory. Memories scatter like shattered glass across black water. Battles. Blood. A boy’s face in the storm—pale with terror, frozen in disbelief. The eye. The sky. The sound of dragons screaming, as if they already know what extinction tastes like.
For one weak, humiliating moment, Aemond thinks—
If I had been given another chance.
What if all of this could have been different?
The thought barely finishes forming before the dark rejects him.
He opens his eye to the light.
Not the blinding radiance of the Seven, nor the violent fire of dragonflame—but something older, something quieter. Something is wrong in a way he cannot name. Aemond’s amethyst eye must readjust nonetheless, burning as it takes in a false sun too bright for a body that has already died once. He realizes he is standing. The once prince regent of the Targaryen throne stands at a crossroads that does not belong on any map. Pale grass stretches beneath his boots, brittle and colorless. Bare trees rise on either side of the paths, their branches stripped naked, unmoving. The wind passes through them without sound, carrying neither warmth nor cold—only the hollow absence of both.
And waiting for him—
Luke.
Lucerys Velaryon stands where the paths intersect, whole and unbloodied, as if storms have never touched him at all. He looks older than the boy who died above Shipbreaker Bay, yet not grown—caught somewhere between what he was and what he was never allowed to become. Untouched by time. Untouched by fear.
He is smiling.
Not wide. Not mocking. Just that quiet, infuriating smile that once made Aemond bristle without knowing why.
The little prince is wearing the same clothes he wore the day Aemond took his life. The memory strikes sharp and immediate—salt wind, rain, the flash of lightning. And yet there is no fear now. No resentment. No accusation burning in those andradite eyes as they look back at him. Luke’s hands are clasped behind his back, posture loose, almost casual—like someone who has been waiting a long time and is simply relieved to see that the wait is over.
“You’re late,” says the prince beloved by the realm, the one who was gone too soon.
The Kinslayer’s hand moves to his sword out of habit, muscles remembering what his mind has not yet caught up to. But there is none.
“You’re dead,” Aemond says, the words rough in his throat.
Luke tilts his head, considering him. “So are you.”
That should end the conversation.
It does not.
Both brown eyes of his nephew drift past him, down the roads Aemond cannot see the end of. The boy’s eyes linger there—too long for comfort—as though watching events unfold beyond the limits of sight. When he speaks again, his voice is softer, weighed with something unfamiliar.
“I waited,” Luke says. “I saw what happened next.”
Something twists painfully in Aemond’s chest.
Happened?
He turns his head, trying to follow Luke’s line of sight, but the paths stretch on into nothingness. No destination. No horizon. Just a possibility suspended in silence.
“What is the meaning of that?” Aemond asks.
Lucerys answers him with a smile that hurts more than anger ever could—the kind of smile a wise man wears on a battlefield he knows he is losing.
“Walk with me, qȳbor.”
Uncle.
The little prince does not wait for permission.
Luke steps forward, passing him, his body still forever four-and-ten, boots brushing the pale grass without leaving a mark. Aemond watches him go, uncertain why the sight unsettles him so deeply.
Then he realizes his feet are moving.
The older prince does not remember choosing to follow. There is no decision, no command—only the sensation of being drawn forward, as if gravity itself has shifted, pulling him down a path he no longer controls.
“The dragons go first,” Luke continues, almost gently, as he steps farther into the crossroads, where the pathway divides cleanly into two. His voice does not echo here; it settles into the air as if the world itself is listening. “Not all at once. Just… fewer. Smaller. Until people stop believing they were ever real.”
Aemond clenches his jaw.
He follows the little prince’s movement without meaning to, watching the boy’s boots pause at the threshold where the paths diverge. The pale grass bends beneath his weight, yet springs back untouched, as if even the land refuses to remember.
“And then the house falls,” Luke says. His andrandite gaze looks toward the sky. The false sun burns bright above them—but not for them. Its light does not warm. It does not bless. “Not with fire,” the prince continues delicately. “With memory.”
The words land heavier than any blade.
“The Targaryen dynasty fades into ruin,” he says, calm and certain. “Not conquered. Not destroyed. Just forgotten.”
With every single syllables utters out from his nephew, the One-eyed Prince feels something cold coil around his spine.
“For the only thing that could ever tear down the House of the Dragon,” Lucerys adds in High Valyrian, turning back to him at last, “was itself.”
Silence stretches between them.
The wind moves again—directionless, indifferent—as if the world has already accepted the truth of it.
Aemond feels rage bloom—hot, familiar, grounding.
Not the wild fury of battle, nor the blind wrath of grief, but something deeper. Older. The kind that settles into bone and refuses to leave. He sees it all at once: years of blood spilled in the name of banners and bloodlines; brothers turned against brothers; mothers teaching sons where to place the knife. Greens and Blacks tearing at one another as if the crown itself were worth the cost. As if power were not already slipping through their fingers with every strike.
All of it—for nothing.
To be told that it does not end in fire, nor conquest, nor even glorious ruin—but in forgetting—that the House of the Dragon does not fall to enemies or prophecy, but simply erodes into dust—It is unbearable.
What was the point, then, of sacrifice? Of loyalty? Of losing an eye, of burning cities, of mounting dragons into storms that screamed their names? What was the worth of his mother’s prayers, of his father’s failures, of Daemon’s blade in his death eye?
To fight so viciously over a future that dissolves anyway feels like a mockery. Like the gods themselves laughing at their desperation.
The silver-haired Targaryen prince’s jaw tightens until it aches.
If the end is ash regardless—
Then it should have been earned.
And if memory is the weapon that destroys them, then he will not allow it to be wielded so quietly. He will not accept a world where everything they bled for fades without consequence.
Rage sharpens into resolve.
“Then let me stop it.” Aemond ‘One-Eyed’ Targaryen vowed.
The bastard prince’s smile widens, just a fraction.
It is not a triumph. Not satisfaction. It is something quieter—and far more unsettling. The expression of someone who has already seen this moment arrive, who has been waiting for the words to be spoken aloud.
“That,” Luke says, softly now, as if careful not to disturb the fragile thing his uncle has just placed between them, “is what I wanted to hear.”
There is no gloating in it. No challenge. Only relief—gentle and unmistakable.
The young prince exhales, a slow, steady breath, as though he has been holding it since before the newly-dead arrived. His shoulders loosen. The tension Aemond had not noticed in him until now eases, and for the first time, the boy looks his age—not a ghost, not a vision, but a child who has carried knowledge too heavy for small hands.
Pain slams into Aemond without warning.
Not physical—not entirely.
It is as if his bones remember drowning, as if his soul remembers falling through black water that never ends. His knees buckle. Breath tears from his chest in a ragged gasp, the world lurching violently around him.
Lucerys reacts instantly.
He steps closer—not hurried, not panicked—but with purpose. His gentle hand lifts, hesitates for the briefest moment, then settles against Aemond’s arm, steadying him as though this, too, had been anticipated.
“I know,” the nephew murmurs.
The words are not an apology. They are not an explanation.
They are acknowledgment.
Luke’s grip is light, grounding rather than restraining, his expression unbroken by fear. There is sadness there, yes—but also resolve. As if he has already accepted the cost of what comes next, and has chosen it anyway.
“You feel it now,” the boy says quietly. “That’s how you know it’s real.”
And somehow, impossibly, it is Luke who stands firm—while the man who has ridden the largest dragon in the realm struggles to remain upright. The pain, almost unbearable now, drags Aemond’s body to its knees. The little prince kneels with him, holding his uncle to the last shred of consciousness he has left. Both amethyst eyes are on the younger boy now, as if Aemond is trying to demand an explanation without words.
“The Old Gods are listening,” Luke says. “They were going to give this chance to me.”
The uncle laughs, sharp and broken. “Of course they were,” he says.
There is no doubt the Old Gods would have chosen a boy beloved by the tides and the heavens, gone too soon. They would not have been pleased with Lucerys’s ending—one taken by Aemond’s hand, without any god’s permission.
“But I gave it to you.”
That stops the thought.
Luke’s voice stays calm. “I won’t remember anything. Not the storm. Not this place. Not you. But you will.”
Aemond’s eye burns.
Not from pain alone, but from the sheer wrongness of it. From the way the world seems to have turned itself inside out. This was never meant to be his burden to carry. This mercy, this choice—it belonged to Lucerys. Prince Lucerys Velaryon, Next Lord of the Tide, who was loved without effort. The ‘Sweet Boy’, who should have been the hero of this story, the boy spared by the gods and returned to set things right.
Why me?
Why give it to the one who broke everything?
He has lived his life as consequence, not absolution. As blade, not blessing. To place this power in his hands feels like mockery—or worse, faith he does not deserve.
His breath comes sharp. “Why?”
“Because you could do more than I,” The little prince says, simply.
The answer does not soften the blow. It deepens it.
“So come find me,” Luke continues, still smiling. “And maybe—try to stop me from being such an asshole to you. And in return,” he adds, laughing gently at the end of the sentence, “try to be kind to me this time.”
The audacity of it snaps something ugly and alive in Aemond’s chest.
“You think I deserve this?” he snarls. “You think I’m the hero here?”
For all his life, Aemond has lived in the shadow of almost. Almost worthy. Almost remembered. The second son, the spare, the one who was meant to be there only in case the first failed. He learned early that love was conditional, that praise was rationed, that survival meant sharpening himself into something dangerous enough to be noticed. Every time he reached for greatness, it came with a cost paid by others—an eye taken, a bond broken, blood spilled where he had sworn control. He does not save things; he ends them. Even when he tries to do right, the world bends his efforts into cruelty, as if violence were the only language he is fluent in. To call him a hero is to misunderstand everything he has ever been, everything he has ever touched.
“I’m no hero.” He roars.
The younger prince shakes his head. “No,” he resumed, “But nobody comes down here to be one.”
The word lands softly. Definitively.
“And because you won’t waste it as I do,” Lucerys continues, “—villain or not, conqueror or slave—no one should be denied a second chance.”
Aemond crouches forward, head resting into his nephew's chest. “What if I do?” His voice cracks with fury. “What if I go back and weaponize it? What if I break everything like I always do best?”
Luke’s smile does not falter.
“You won’t.”
The certainty in it is unbearable.
The light begins to fade. The paths blur. The world pulls apart at the seams, unraveling like a dream that can no longer hold its shape. Luke’s body is pulled from Aemond’s grasp; he reaches out, but he does not catch him—not on the day of Storm’s End, not today.
The Kinslayer shouts after him, furious and desperate. “Why do you trust me?”
Luke’s voice drifts back, almost amused.
“Because you’re trying very hard not to.”
And then—
Black.