Chapter Text
The pain came first.
Not the fight, nor the shouting that had led to it, but the pain itself, sudden and absolute, forcing everything else aside before it had time to take shape.
Memory followed in fragments.
Raised voices, sharp and overlapping. Movement in the dark. Baela’s and Rhaena’s anger, unchecked. One of the girls stepping forward, certain of herself in the way only someone who is letting their emotions get the better of them, who had not yet learned restraint.
And Lucerys- Lucerys with the dagger.
That moment remained clear in Aemond’s mind. The flash of steel, uncertain but real. The shift, abrupt and irreversible, from fists to something far more dangerous. Then the strike, quick and clumsy and devastating all the same.
A line of heat across his face.
After that, nothing held together.
The world returned to him without order. Hands upon him, too many to fight. Voices speaking somewhere above him, calm in a way that felt misplaced. The faint scent of herbs. Fabric beneath his back, unfamiliar in its texture.
Someone was holding his shoulders.
Another his arms.
Aemond drew in a breath, unsteady and shallow, just as something cold touched his face, followed by a sharper intrusion that left no room for thought.
The needle.
His body reacted before he could stop it, a sharp, instinctive movement that achieved nothing. The grip on him tightened at once, firm and unyielding, forcing stillness upon him whether he would have it or not.
“Hold him.”
The words were not unkind.
They were simply unconcerned.
The needle pierced his eyelid again, and this time the breath left him entirely, the tension in his body breaking into something far less controlled. His eye watered as his thoughts struggled to keep pace with what was being done to him.
He tried to focus on something else.
It did not work.
The maesters continued without pause, their voices low and measured as they spoke to one another, noting what they saw, what must be done, how best to proceed.
Not once did they address him.
Not once did they hesitate.
Aemond understood, distantly, that this was skill. Precision. Perhaps even care.
It did not feel like it.
To them, he was no more than the wound they worked to close.
His jaw tightened, more from instinct than intent, and even that small movement sent another sharp protest through him. For a brief, unwelcome moment, he thought he might cry out.
He did not.
The thought lingered longer than he would have liked.
Time lost its shape after that.
There was only the sense of it passing, marked not by moments but by the steady continuation of hands that did not falter and voices that did not rise, as though nothing of consequence were occurring at all.
It was only when something was pressed to his lips that the pattern broke.
“Drink.”
Aemond did not argue.
The liquid was bitter and thick, unpleasant enough under other circumstances that he might have refused it outright, but now he swallowed without hesitation, caring for nothing beyond what it promised.
For a moment, nothing changed.
Then, gradually, the sharpest edges of sensation began to recede, not gone but dulled, as though placed at a distance. The tension in his body eased despite himself, his limbs growing heavier, less responsive.
The voices around him seemed quieter now, though he could not have said whether they had lowered or if he simply lacked the focus to follow them.
Even the hands upon him felt less insistent.
Aemond let out a slow breath, the effort of holding himself together slipping from him before he could decide whether to resist it.
So this was mercy.
Late, but not unwelcome.
The ceiling above him refused to remain still, its edges softening as his vision faltered, darkness creeping in where light had been only moments before. He tried, briefly, to hold onto it, to fix his thoughts on something solid, but it slipped away all the same.
His body no longer answered him.
His thoughts soon followed.
The last thing he noticed was the absence of urgency, where before there had been nothing else.
Then even that faded.
For a while, there was nothing.
Then there was something.
Not sound, not quite, nor light as he understood it, but the absence of emptiness, a shift so slight at first that it might have gone unnoticed had there been anything else to compare it to.
The darkness did not break. It changed.
Aemond became aware of warmth.
Not the searing, devouring heat he knew from dragonfire, nor the restless flicker of torchlight, but something steadier, contained, existing without urgency. It moved before him, if movement it could be called, slow and deliberate, its shape never quite fixed, its color unfamiliar, neither red nor gold nor anything he could name with certainty.
It did not burn.
That, more than anything, set it apart.
Aemond watched it in silence, his thoughts slower than they should have been, as though whatever held him here had dulled more than pain alone. The fire circled, unhurried, neither approaching nor retreating, as if waiting for something he had not yet done.
For a moment, he considered whether this, too, would pass without meaning.
It did not.
The space around him shifted, not with the abruptness of waking nor the clarity of memory, but with a quiet inevitability, as though one state had simply given way to another.
He was no longer alone.
The boy stood with his back straight, his bearing unmistakable even in a place that made little sense to Aemond’s eye. The garments were foreign, the setting stranger still, yet neither obscured what mattered.
A Prince, that much required no explanation.
They stood within a great chamber, though not one Aemond recognized. The walls bore markings he could not read, and the armor worn by those present was shaped in ways that suggested some kind of purpose, formed of materials he did not recognize, neither wholly metal nor cloth. Giving it an appearance that seemed… almost comfortable.
A table stood at the center, covered in a map unlike any he had seen, its lines too precise, its markings too ordered. Men gathered around it, speaking in measured tones that carried the weight of command.
‘A council, then.’
At first, Aemond did not understand them. That, more than the strangeness of the place, drew his attention.
Their words were unfamiliar, the sounds shaped differently than any tongue he had heard at court or in the training yard, lacking the cadence of High Valyrian, the roughness of the common speech, or any variation between. It should have been meaningless.
And yet... he understood.
Not slowly, not through guesswork or gesture, but at once, as though meaning had been placed directly into his thoughts without passing through his ears at all. Each word came to him whole, complete, requiring no effort to grasp.
Aemond frowned slightly.
‘That was… not possible.’
The voices continued, unchanged, and with each passing moment, the certainty remained. There was no delay, no sense of translation, no distance between what was said and what he knew it to mean.
He did not question it further.
Not because it made sense.
‘Because nothing here does,’ Aemond thought.
His attention shifted instead to the boy within the room.
The discussion moved quickly, though not with clarity. Strategy, positioning, the movement of forces toward a place that, even without full understanding, seemed to hold little worth when measured against what it would cost to take it.
The boy spoke.
His voice was not controlled, cutting cleanly through the others in a way that demanded attention with its intent. He questioned the plan, not its structure, but its purpose, the lives it would spend for so little gain.
Aemond found himself watching more closely.
The response came swiftly.
Dismissal, though not outright. Not crude, not careless, but shaped and turned, his words taken and made into something easier to disregard. What had been reason became defiance in the span of a few sentences.
The boy did not yield.
That, more than the argument itself, seemed to matter.
The challenge followed.
Aemond expected the man he had opposed to step forward, to answer the slight as was proper. Instead, the boy turned, and his face morphed into one of fear when he faced his father.
Something in Aemond stilled.
The man approached without haste, his expression unreadable, his presence alone enough to quiet the room. There was no need for raised voices, no display of temper.
Authority did not require it.
His hand lifted, resting briefly against the boy’s face, a gesture that might have been mistaken for reassurance, had it not come when it did.
Aemond knew, even before it happened.
The fire answered.
Not wild, not uncontrolled, but directed, deliberate, brought forth with the same certainty as any command. It struck the boy’s face, and whatever composure he had held broke at once, his body reacting as any would under such force.
Aemond flinched.
The pain was not his.
It did not need to be.
For a moment, the distance between them ceased to matter, the memory of his own injury rising unbidden, sharp enough that his breath caught despite the absence of any true wound. The boy staggered, the sound he made stripped of restraint, a scream full of agony. Not just from the pain, Aemond suspects, but from who it came from.
Then the moment passed. The chamber dissolved, its edges giving way before they could fully settle into memory.
The boy remained.
Older now.
The change was not sudden, but neither was it gradual, as though time itself had been folded, the space between moments compressed until only what mattered was left behind.
A ship cut through dark water, its path steady despite the unrest beneath it. The boy stood at its edge, his posture unchanged, though something in him had shifted, something less certain, more contained.
He was not alone.
The man beside him was older, his presence quieter, lacking the rigid authority of the one who had come before, yet no less firm for it. He watched the boy with a patience Aemond found difficult to place, neither expectant nor disappointed, but present in a way that did not demand anything in return.
The voices changed with the setting.
The understanding did not.
Different men, different tones, different words, and still they came to him whole, without pause or confusion, as though he had always known them.
Aemond did not dwell on it.
He found, to his quiet displeasure, that he could not decide whether that made it better or worse.
The boy failed, and the pattern revealed itself quickly.
Not once, but again and again, each attempt bringing him close enough to grasp what he sought, only for it to slip from him at the last moment. Plans unraveled. Alliances proved insufficient or false. Choices led not to resolution, but to further complication.
It should have ended there.
It did not. Instead, he continued.
Not blindly, not without hesitation, but without stopping, each failure acknowledged, if not understood, before the next step was taken.
There were moments, brief and difficult to grasp, when the understanding came before the sound itself, as though Aemond knew what would be said a heartbeat before it was spoken.
He stilled at that.
Then let it pass.
There was a moment when the boy turned away from the one who stood beside him, choosing another path, one that led him back to where he had begun. Towards those who made it known that he does not matter.
It did not bring him what he had expected.
That, too, was clear.
The change, when it came, was not marked by a single moment.
It settled.
Slowly, unevenly, shaped by what had come before rather than replacing it entirely. The boy stood again before his father, though not as he had been. There was no hesitation now, no uncertainty masked as defiance.
He spoke.
Aemond did not hear the words.
He understood them all the same.
Lightning followed as the answer to the boy’s words. Sudden. Precise. Unforgiving.
It should have ended him.
It did not.
What had been given was returned, not in anger, but in something far more deliberate, the force redirected rather than resisted, turned back upon its source with a certainty that left no room for doubt.
Aemond felt the shift as though it had occurred within him.
Not triumph.
Not vengeance.
Something else.
Recognition, perhaps.
The visions did not cease, but they no longer pressed forward with the same urgency. The boy, no longer a boy, continued, his path now clear, more certain in the way he walked it.
Where he had once been driven, he now chose.
Where he had once reacted, he now decided.
Not perfectly.
Not easily.
But differently.
The fire ring has returned.
It circled him once more, slower now, its movement no longer distant, but near enough that he could feel its warmth without effort. It did not demand; instead, it waited.
Aemond studied it, the silence between them no longer empty, but filled with something he could not yet name.
‘This is no dream.’ Aemond realized. ‘Dreams did not hold together like this. They did not return to themselves, did not build upon what had come before.’
Still, if it were offered, then it could be taken.
He reached out.
The flame met his hand without resistance, its warmth immediate and unmistakable, not burning, not consuming, but present in a way that felt entirely too real to dismiss. It did not remain at his fingertips, but moved beyond them, drawn inward as though it had always belonged there.
Aemond’s breath caught.
The warmth settled in his chest, steady and unyielding. And then the place disappeared, and Aemond woke up, his remaining eye opened only slightly, because of which none who surrounded him noticed the golden hue that quickly turned back to the blue.
Voices reached him before anything else.
Not words, not at first, only sound, sharp and uneven, breaking against one another without form or meaning. It pressed in from all sides, too loud, too immediate, dragging him upward before his thoughts had the chance to follow.
“…he attacked them-”
“They were defending themselves-”
“My son has been maimed!”
Familiar. Too familiar.
Aemond did not open his eye again. He did not need to, at least for now.
The world returned slowly, and not all at once. Sensation came first, dull and distant, the weight of his body pressing against something firm beneath him, the faint pull of bandages where his skin should not have felt them.
Then the pain returned.
Muted, dulled to something almost manageable, though no less present for it, lingering at the edges of his awareness rather than consuming it outright.
Different.
Aemond drew in a slow breath.
For a moment, he remained still, not from weakness, but from something else, something quieter, as though movement required a decision he had not yet made.
The voices sharpened.
“…beyond reason-”
“…children, Viserys-”
“…this is an outrage-”
He opened his eye.
The chamber swam briefly before settling into something he could recognize, though the clarity of it felt distant, as though he were looking at it from farther away than he should have been.
Too many people who made too much noise.
His mother stood near the center of it all, rigid with anger, her voice cutting through the others with a sharpness that made itself heard whether they wished it or not. Across from her, Rhaenyra stood composed, or near enough to it, her restraint no less deliberate for the tension beneath it.
His father sat above them. Watching, but not intervening.
Aemond’s gaze moved, slow and deliberate, taking in what it could without drawing attention to the act itself.
Aegon stood to the side, awake for once, though whatever amusement he might have found in the situation was notably absent. Helaena remained near him, quiet as ever, though her eyes moved more than usual, following the motion of the room in a way that suggested she saw more than she would ever say.
‘The Strong boys’... Aemond’s jaw tightened, though only slightly.
He looked away.
The voices continued, rising and falling, circling the same arguments without resolution, each speaker more intent on being heard than understood.
And yet it felt distant. Not unimportant, but distant, as though he stood apart from it even as he lay at its center.
“…sharply questioned,” Rhaenyra said, her voice cutting cleanly through the noise.
The words settled.
Aemond stilled.
For a moment, the room seemed quieter, though he could not have said whether it truly was.
Sharply questioned. An interesting, yet well-known way to say it. His gaze shifted, not quickly, but with quiet intent, settling on her as though weighing something he had not needed to consider before.
His mother moved at once, her anger sharpening into something colder, more dangerous.
Aemond lifted his hand.
The motion was small, unsteady despite his effort to control it, but enough. His fingers brushed against her sleeve. She reacted immediately, her hand closing around his.
Aemond drew in a breath.
“That seems… excessive,” he said, the word catching slightly before he forced it smooth, his voice quieter than he intended, though no less sharp for it.
The room stilled.
Aemond shifted against the bed, a flicker of discomfort crossing his expression before it was pushed back into place.
“I am the one who was injured,” he continued, more firmly now, though the strain beneath it had not entirely faded. “And I was alone.”
A brief pause.
“Against four.”
The words came out flatter than he meant them to, though that only made them land harder.
“I had no blade,” he added, his gaze sharpening as it turned, unable to fully hide the edge there now. “Yet, one was drawn against me.”
His eyes flicked, just for a moment, toward Lucerys, then away again, as though looking longer might have led to something he refused to show.
“I would ask,” Aemond went on, his tone tightening despite himself, “whether it is now expected that we come armed to a funeral.”
A pause, shorter this time.
“Or if that was… a decision made only for me.”
The last words were quieter, but heavier.
Aemond exhaled slowly through his nose, as though forcing something back down before it could rise further.
He did not look away this time when his gaze returned to Rhaenyra.
“If so,” he said, more evenly, though the effort behind it was now visible, “it was a poor one.”
Silence followed.
Not complete, but enough.
Rhaenyra did not falter, her face twisted into this mask, one that seemed to be mocking you.
“Well?” Viserys said, impatience creeping into his voice. “Where did you hear such… rumors?”
Aemond held his gaze. There were a dozen answers he could have given. Sharp, angry ones. Words that would have struck harder, that would have drawn blood even without steel.
They rose easily.
Too easily.
Aemond drew in a slow breath.
“I speak only of what I have seen,” he said at last, the words simpler than the ones he had first considered, though no less deliberate.
That was enough.
The attention in the room shifted again, settling on him in a way that felt different from before, weighing and measuring.
‘Good, they should.’
Aemond looked at his father more closely. There was no anger there, but no real concern, either. Only expectation.
“Well? Surely you must have those blatant lies be told to you for you to fall for them,” Viserys insisted, as if they were blind.
The answer mattered less than what would be done with it.
Aemond exhaled quietly.
He could tell the truth. That everyone knew. That the court whispered it openly. That denying it had long since become a formality.
He could.
It would change nothing; worse yet, Rhaenyra may use it against his mother. His gaze shifted slightly, finding Aegon. Their eyes met, just for a moment. Aemond made his choice.
“I heard it from Aegon.”
It was not entirely untrue.
Aegon blinked, clearly not expecting to be drawn into it, but to his credit, he recovered quickly enough.
“Everyone knows,” he said with a careless shrug, gesturing vaguely. “Just look at them.”
There it was. The reaction came at once.
Shock. Offense. Denial.
Voices rose again, louder now, sharper, the fragile structure of the room giving way to something far less controlled. Aemond watched it unfold.
‘Predictable.’ Aemond scoffed to himself.
His gaze lowered slightly, not in submission, but in thought.
There were more things he could add, press further, push where it would hurt most, unravel what little restraint remained until something finally broke. It would not be difficult.
The thought came easily.
Acting on it did not.
Aemond’s fingers tightened slightly against the sheets.
The memory lingered, not fully formed, not something he could name, but present all the same, steady in a way that felt… unfamiliar.
A pause.
Then, deliberately, he let it go.
“An eye is a fair price for a dragon,” he said at last. The words cut cleanly through the noise. Silence followed.
Aemond kept his gaze steady, though his head throbbed faintly with the effort.
“I do not require further compensation.”
That was not entirely true, but did not need to be.
The tension in the room shifted once more, though not evenly. His mother remained rigid with anger, Rhaenyra no less dissatisfied, though there was something else there now, something sharper, harder to place.
His father was relieved, of course. Of course. He would have peace, no matter the cost. If he thinks Aemond will forget what was done to him, he would be proved wrong... but maybe Aemond should hold back, until he is older and understands more what consequences his revenge may bring about.
Aemond allowed his eye to close briefly.
The voices resumed, though they no longer concerned him.
Not truly. This had never been about justice.
That much… was clear.