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Each night, one had to come to the sept an hour before the hour of the wolf. Seven oil lamps, fed with the fat of innocently slaughtered lambs, were to cast their trembling shadows upon the face of the Maiden. And then — oh, moment of supreme torment! — to enter and see him: the boy whose auburn curls were the only flame worthy of worship. Ormund would freeze in the doorway, breathing in the scent of incense and wax, mingled with the fragrance of his skin — the scent of childhood, twisting his innards into a tight knot of desire.
He knew: purity is merely the anticipation of corruption. And he waited.
First came the prayer. Daeron knelt, and his voice — that transparent, glass-like voice — rose to the vaults, trembled, shimmered. Ormund listened not to the words — he listened to the vibration that penetrated his flesh, making his cock ache and harden beneath the coarse fabric of his breeches. He imagined that voice breaking. He imagined the prayer turning into a scream.
And at last, when the boy finished the "Hymn to the Mother" and, exhausted, pressed his lips to the cold stone of the altar, Ormund approached. Silently, like a confessor. His long fingers, accustomed to gripping a sword, came to rest upon the defenseless nape of the boy's neck. For a second, Daeron froze, accepting the caress, unaware that this caress was an omen.
"You prayed so fervently, child," Ormund whispered, and his voice was as soft as the silk used to shroud the dead. "The gods heard you. They sent me."
And then he tightened his fingers. Hard, until the cervical vertebrae cracked, until the first frightened whimper escaped the boy's lips. He pushed the boy down onto the altar — the very altar where The Seven-Pointed Star had lain moments before — and tore up his tunic. Daeron's skin shimmered in the lamplight like mother-of-pearl, like the inside of a seashell, and Ormund pressed his lips to it for a moment — not kissing, but tasting. Salt. Fear was already seeping through the pores.
"Pain is the gateway," he uttered the ritual phrase, heard long ago from a mad septon, and dug his nails into the tender flesh of the boy's back.
He dragged them slowly, leaving bloody furrows. Daeron screamed. That scream, echoing beneath the stone vaults, was the only true prayer, the only hymn worth raising to indifferent heavens. Ormund licked the blood from his fingers — thick, salty, still warm with the heat of a child's body — and felt his own manhood throb painfully in anticipation. Have you never accidentally tasted the blood from a cut finger? It is almost tasteless, yet it is the taste of life itself. The taste of another's life is a hundred times sweeter.
Then he flipped Daeron onto his back. The boy's eyes — those accursed, violet, glistening eyes — looked up at him with an expression of holy terror found only on icons of martyrs. Tears streamed down his temples, tangling in his golden hair. Ormund leaned down and drank them — greedily, like a traveler in the desert. Oh, that taste of betrayed love. For Daeron, even now, could not bring himself to hate his uncle. And this inability to hate was the most exquisite dish of all for Ormund.
"Do you want me to stop?" he asked, and his hand came to rest on the boy's throat, cutting off his air. Daeron wheezed, clawed at the stone.
He was so beautiful.
Then Ormund drew a dagger — a ceremonial one, its hilt painted with the patterns of the seven-pointed star. He placed it in Daeron's trembling hand, closed his own fingers over it, and guided the point toward his own chest.
"Strike," he commanded. "Strike, if you believe I am sinful. That I am the one who defiled your temple. That I am the beast who coveted the lamb. Strike, and let my blood mingle with yours upon this altar. Is this not what the gods desire? Do they not thirst for a redemptive sacrifice?"
And Daeron, weeping, shaking his head, pressed down nonetheless — just barely, just enough to part the skin over Ormund's heart. A thin trickle of blood ran down, mingling with the boy's blood on the white marble. Two bloods — dragon and human, pure and accursed — merged into a single pattern. Ormund watched this and felt an ecstasy akin to what septons must feel when they behold the face of the divine. Only his divinity was woven from pain and forbidden tenderness.
"Do you know why I must do this?" Ormund's voice dropped to an intimate, confessional whisper. He was still on his knees, pressing his cheek to the boy's bloodied chest, and his lips moved, tracing words like a branding iron. "I do this not out of cruelty. Nor out of desire — though, by the gods, I crave you more than any woman I have ever known. I do this because you are cursed."
Daeron flinched. Not from pain — from the word. Cursed. It fell into the silence of the sept like a stone into still water, and the ripples spread outward, outward, until they reached the very heart of the boy.
"You think you are pure," Ormund continued, and his palm slid slowly, almost lazily, down Daeron's thigh, pushing up the hem of the torn tunic. "You think that auburn hair and prayers to the Seven make you different. But blood does not lie, child. In your veins flows the poison of Old Valyria. The poison of lust that made brother rape sister, that made a mother take her own child to bed, from which are born the monstrous fruits of incestuous unions."
He paused, letting the words take root in the boy's mind like weeds in fertile soil. His fingers found the edge of a wound on Daeron's back and pressed — not hard, just enough to send a fresh shudder through the prince's body.
"Your ancestors coupled like beasts and called it preserving the purity of blood. But there is no purity in incest, Daeron. There is only filth. Filth passed down from generation to generation. Filth that flows in you now."
Daeron squeezed his eyes shut. Tears — hot, abundant — streamed down his cheeks, falling onto the marble altar, mingling with the still-drying blood. He did not weep openly — only silently, hopelessly, the way children weep. His eyes — those huge, pale, glistening eyes of a doe run down by hunters — flew open and fixed upon Ormund. There was no accusation in them. There was a reverent, almost religious awe.
"Uncle..." he breathed, and the word was a prayer. "What am I to do?"
Ormund nearly groaned aloud. That gaze. That defenselessness. That absolute, total faith in him — in the man who had just carved stripes into his back and was now licking his blood from his own fingers. Something dark, ancient, bestial stirred in his chest. He wanted to break this creature. Not to kill — to preserve. To break just enough that Daeron would never be able to put himself back together without his help. So that every breath the boy took would be tied to the name of Lord Hightower. So that every beat of his heart would echo with pain — and gratitude.
"I will save you," Ormund breathed, and his palm slid higher, gripping the frail shoulder, pulling Daeron closer.
His body acted on its own, separate from his mind, separate from the prayers his lips still silently formed. Ormund pressed his entire body against Daeron, grinding the boy into the edge of the altar, and his aroused flesh — hard, hot, pulsing — pressed against the prince's thigh. He began to move — slowly, agonizingly, rubbing against the fragile body. Each movement tore a ragged breath from his own chest, and from Daeron's lips — a soft, involuntary gasp, half a moan.
"Uncle, I..."
Daeron could not continue. He only shook his head — weakly, unconvincingly, denying not so much the words as his own treacherous body, which, despite his will, responded to his uncle's touch. His breath faltered, becoming quick and shallow, his cheeks flooded with a blush — the very blush Ormund had so longed to see, not from prayer, but from shame and a dark, unconscious arousal.
Ormund looked at him — at the thrown-back face, the parted lips, the wet trails of tears glistening in the light of the dying lamps — and felt a searing, almost unbearable tenderness flood through him. His boy. His beautiful, innocent, bewildered boy. Every tear on those cheeks was a jewel. Ormund wanted to keep him like this forever. To never let him grow up, grow coarse, learn the filth of the world beyond this sept. To lock him away here, like a relic in a casket where the bones of saints are kept. To come to him at night, to inflict pain and offer solace, to be everything to him — tormentor, savior, god.
"Will you stay with me?" he whispered directly into Daeron's ear, and his hips continued their rhythmic motion, pressing his arousal into the boy's body, while his hand slid lower, wrapping around his stomach, pulling him even closer. "Will you let me purify you? Will you accept this pain as a gift? Say 'yes,' Daeron. Say it, and I will never leave you. I will become your shield and your scourge. Your confessor and your executioner. You will never be alone. Never. Just say it."
And Daeron, whose body shook with silent sobs, whose fingers had gone white, gripping the edge of the altar, whose eyes stared into the void with the expression of a hunted but still trusting animal — Daeron breathed out the word. The way one breathes out the last of one's air before going under water.
"Yes..."
Ormund smiled — a smile that held neither joy nor triumph. Only an infinite, all-consuming love, black as the seven hells themselves.
"Pray, child," he whispered, unbuckling his belt. "Pray to your gods. You are about to be closer to them than you have ever been."
Daeron felt everything at once. The pain of the wounds on his back, throbbing in time with his heart. The heat of another body, searing even through the remnants of his torn tunic. The smell — blood, incense, male sweat, something musky and forbidden that made his head spin. And above it all — the weight. The unbearable, crushing weight of a man who was larger than him, broader, older. Ormund loomed over him, blocking out the light of the lamps, blocking out the faces of the Seven.
Daeron tried to raise his eyes — and could not. His gaze met the thick column of his uncle's neck, the Adam's apple bobbing as he swallowed. It was impossible to look higher. To meet the eyes of the one doing this to him was to acknowledge what was happening.
It is a sin.
It is pain.
It is purification.
He felt his own body betray him. His skin burned — not just from the wounds, but from something else, something shameful he could not name. Somewhere low in his belly, a heat was kindling, utterly alien, wrong, impossible. He should not feel this. This feeling belonged to sinners, to adulterers, to those very Targaryens his uncle spoke of with such disgust. Not to him.
Ormund was in no hurry. He slowly, almost lazily, rolled his hips, and his aroused flesh — hot, slick with the moisture that had gathered — slid between Daeron's buttocks, not penetrating, only teasing. The boy whimpered, pressing his face into the stone, but Ormund caught his chin again, forcing him to be still. He moved rhythmically, and each pass of the head over that tight, resisting entrance tore a fresh, convulsive gasp from Daeron's chest. Ormund watched him, savoring the pleasure — his own and the boy's. "Do you feel it?" he whispered, rubbing against the boy's most secret place, not entering, only promising, threatening. "Your body already knows. It wants it. It is sinful, Daeron. It was made for this." Tears streamed down the prince's cheeks, but his hips — oh, that treacherous, young, innocent body — pressed back almost imperceptibly, seeking more contact, and Ormund exhaled in triumph, feeling the head finally press against pliant, flushed, trembling flesh.
Daeron screamed — but the scream died in his throat, turning into a strangled, animal whimper. He was too big. Too much. The boy's body, which had known nothing but its own timid touches in the darkness of a bedroom, could not accommodate this invasion. It felt as if Ormund was tearing him apart from the inside — not just the flesh, but the very soul, forcing his way into some unfathomable depths of his being that even he himself had never dared to explore.
"Shhh," Ormund breathed against his temple, but his voice trembled no longer with tenderness. With something else. With hunger.
Daeron squeezed his eyes shut, pressing the back of his head into the cold stone. Crimson circles danced behind his closed eyelids. It seemed to him that he was on the verge of madness. He wanted to turn his face away. To hide. To pretend this was not happening to him — that it was happening to someone else, to that sinful Targaryen he had apparently always been. He jerked his head to the right, trying to escape, to disappear, to melt into the stone.
But Ormund would not allow it.
His palms — huge, calloused from sword drills, still smelling of blood — gripped the boy's face from both sides. His fingers dug into his cheekbones, fixing his head in place, forcing him to look — not at him, no, Daeron still could not bring himself to do that — but upward. Into the darkness of the vaults, where shadows trembled. Where there was no Mother, no Warrior, no Maiden. Only emptiness.
"Do not turn away," Ormund snarled, and it was no longer the voice of a confessor. It was the voice of a beast. "Look at me."
Every movement echoed somewhere in his spine, in the back of his skull, in the tips of his fingers clawing convulsively at the altar. Ormund pounded into him like a blacksmith's hammer on red-hot metal, and Daeron felt his body — his treacherous, accursed body — begin to yield, to take the shape his uncle was imposing upon it.
But the worst of it was the sounds.
Wet, obscene, unbearable. The slap of flesh against flesh, the squelch of blood mixed with something else his own body was producing in a vain attempt to protect itself. Ormund's heavy, ragged breathing, shifting into a guttural growl. And — somewhere on the edge of audibility — a quiet, pitiful whine that, as Daeron realized with horror, was tearing from his own throat.
It was too much.
His reason, already worn thin to the breaking point, began to tear. His thoughts tangled, layered upon each other like the pages of a book dropped into water. Fragments of memories — sunlight in the garden, his mother's voice, the taste of honey cakes — flared and died, swept away by waves of pain and shame. He felt as if he were leaving his own body, watching the scene from somewhere above, from beneath the stone vaults where shadows twisted into strange figures.
And then, clinging to the last shard of his sanity, he began to pray.
"Mother, have mercy..." his voice trembled, broke in time with the thrusts. "Maiden, protect me... Father, judge justly..."
The words were old, memorized since childhood, drilled into his memory by septons and tutors. They flowed on their own, mechanically, and in that mechanism was salvation. As long as his lips whispered the prayer, he was not here. He was just praying in the sept. Nothing was happening. Nothing.
Ormund heard. And — oh gods, no — laughed. Low, hoarse, without breaking his rhythm.
"Pray," he breathed, and his hips drove into the boy's body with every word.
"Stranger, guide me..." Daeron no longer understood what he was saying. The words tangled, turning into an incoherent stream of sounds, a glossolalia of pain and ecstasy. "Mother Maiden Warrior Father Smith Stranger Crone..."
The names of the Seven merged into one endless syllable, a mantra, a spell against reality. He clung to them like a drowning man clings to a broken mast. As long as there was prayer, there was him. As long as there were words, he would not disappear. Would not dissolve in this sea of sensation. Would not become merely a body into which Lord Hightower was pounding.
But Ormund was moving faster and faster. His fingers still held Daeron's face, not letting him turn away, and his thumb slid over the boy's lower lip, pressed down, pushed into his mouth — salty with blood and tears.
Lord Hightower felt his own reason slipping away — not the reason that demanded prayers and discipline, but a different, dark, bestial reason that knew only hunger and satiation. The power over this fragile body, sprawled upon the altar, went to his head better than the strongest Dornish wine. Ormund was drunk and regretted only one thing:
Why did I not do this sooner?
The thought flared and died, swallowed by a fresh wave of lust. All those years — years spent in prayer, in self-flagellation, in cold baths and attempts to burn out desire with fasting. What folly. What a monstrous, criminal waste of time. For here it was — his salvation and his damnation. Lying beneath him, trembling, sobbing, leaking blood and seed, and there was nothing in the world more beautiful.
His boy. His sweet, innocent boy.
Ormund paused for a moment — just to look. To truly look. The light of the dying lamps fell upon Daeron's face, and in that flickering half-light, it seemed like the face of a martyr from an ancient icon. His disheveled auburn hair was plastered to his forehead, his cheeks shone with tears, his bitten lips were swollen and red. Ormund's breath caught in his throat.
Beautiful. To the point of pain. To the point of grinding teeth. To the point of wanting to tear him apart, to devour him.
"You have no idea," he whispered, his voice hoarse and strained with the force of his emotion, "how beautiful you are when you cry. I want to see those tears every night."
Daeron did not answer — could not, even if he had wanted to. Ormund's thumb was still in his mouth, pinning his tongue, preventing him from closing his lips. But something in his gaze shifted — a shadow of understanding flickered, the realization that this would not end. Not now.
Ormund withdrew his thumb from the boy's mouth and replaced it with his own lips, crushing the tender flesh, thrusting his tongue inside. Daeron's mouth was scorching hot — like the maw of a furnace, like a dragon's gullet — and this heat seared Ormund from within, spreading through his veins like molten metal. He groaned into the kiss, and the sound was almost anguished. Their saliva mixed with tears and blood — salty, metallic, sweet — and Ormund drank the mixture, unable to get his fill.
Daeron was aroused. His own treacherous body was slick with lubrication, accepting the invasion ever deeper, ever easier, and this realization shattered the remnants of the boy's sanity into fragments. He was overfull. Overstimulated to the point where every touch — even the lightest — echoed through his entire body with a tremor akin to agony. His hands, which had lain helplessly on the altar until now, flew up, sliding over Ormund's broad shoulders, over his chest heaving with labored breath, over his neck, slick with sweat.
His fingers tangled in his uncle's dark hair. He clutched the strands in his fists and pulled — not hard, just barely, just to create some distance, just to gasp for air.
But Ormund groaned.
Loudly. Deep in his throat. Almost gratefully.
That touch — those slender fingers in his hair, that timid attempt to push him away, which felt more like a caress — pierced him sharper than a blade. The pain, so unexpected and sweet, mingled with the pleasure of the tight, hot body clenching around his cock. Ormund thrust deeper — sharply, fiercely — and Daeron arched beneath him like a bow, throwing his head back and exposing his defenseless throat.
"Yes," Ormund snarled, burying his face in that pale neck, biting, licking the bites.
He pounded into the boy again — and again, and again, and again. The rhythm became chaotic, animalistic, devoid of all control. Ormund was no longer thinking of prolonging the pleasure, of stretching out the moment. He took. Voraciously. Fiercely. Like a beast that has finally caught its prey after long years of starvation.
And Daeron clung to him. His fingers tightened in Ormund's hair, slid down his back leaving red welts, then fell helplessly to the altar, only to fly up again a moment later in search of an anchor. He was suffocating. The air in the sept had grown thick, saturated with the smell of their bodies, their fluids, their sin. The vaults pressed down. The shadows danced. The gods were silent.
"Look at me," Ormund commanded, seizing his chin. "Don't you dare close your eyes. I want to see you come. I want to see your holiness die in those eyes."
And Daeron looked. There was no fear left in his gaze, no plea. Only a black, bottomless, infinite surrender. He stopped fighting. Stopped praying. Only his fingers still clutched Ormund's hair — tenderly, almost lovingly — while his body shook in the rhythm his uncle imposed upon him.
Ormund looked into those eyes and felt like a god. Fallen, accursed, cast into the abyss — but a god. The only god this boy had.
And he could not stop. Did not want to. Would he fuck him all night? Until dawn? Until Daeron forgot his own name?
Nothing — not prayer, not power, not death itself — could compare to this. To the trembling of a child's body beneath him. To the hot mouth still tasting of tears. To the fingers tangled in his hair. To the eyes brimming with tears.
Daeron felt something building inside him. Not pain — pain had become familiar, almost dear, dissolving into the general chorus of sensation. No, this was something else. A hot, tight coil winding in his lower belly. It rose from the place where Ormund's body was pounding into him over and over, spread along his spine, struck the back of his skull, made his toes curl and sounds he had never heard from himself tear from his throat.
His own cock — small, forgotten, trapped between their bodies against his belly — was throbbing. It was leaking. Clear fluid mingled with the sweat on his skin, and every movement of Ormund's body created a friction that was too sharp, too much.
"Uncle..." Daeron sobbed, and his voice broke, turning into a pitiful, pleading whine. "I... I can't..."
Ormund heard. He heard that tone — bewildered, frightened — and his lips stretched into a smile that Daeron did not see, but felt on his skin. The smile of a priest watching the sacrificial beast thrash in its death throes upon the altar.
"Don't hold back," he breathed, quickening his pace.
Pleasure flooded the boy's body, like a wave overwhelming a drowning man — sudden, cruel, leaving no room for air. His body arched like a bow, his head flew back, a scream tore from his lips — high, almost girlish, echoing under the stone vaults. He was coming, and his seed was spilling onto his own belly, onto his chest, onto Ormund's shirt, and his body convulsed with spasms stronger than him, stronger than reason, stronger than will.
Ormund did not stop, even as Daeron, still shaking, began to writhe beneath him — no longer from passion, but from unbearable, intolerable hypersensitivity. Each new movement inside him resonated like a lash of a whip. Too much. Too much. His nerves were on fire, his skin had become one continuous wound, and even the air touching him caused pain.
"Please..." he whispered, for the first time that night uttering a plea not to the gods, but to his tormentor. "Uncle... stop... I can't take any more..."
Ormund looked down at him. Daeron was annihilated. Destroyed. Beautiful in his destruction. His auburn hair was tangled, his face flushed and swollen from tears, blood mixed with saliva oozing from his bitten lips. His eyes — the very eyes that had once looked at Ormund with reverence and trust — now looked at him with a plea. A desperate, animal plea for mercy.
"No," Ormund said softly, almost tenderly, and his palm came to rest on Daeron's belly, pressing him into the altar. "No, my sweet. We are not finished yet."
He bore down with his entire weight — huge, heavy, implacable — turning the boy's frail body into pliant flesh that could neither push him away, nor twist free, nor even draw a full breath. Daeron's chest was compressed, air leaving his lungs in short, convulsive gasps. He felt every inch of Ormund's body — the heat of his skin, the coarse hair on his chest, the hard muscles of his stomach. He felt his uncle's cock still moving inside him, slowly, deeply, mercilessly.
His hand slid between their bodies and closed around Daeron's still-pulsing, still-leaking cock. The boy jerked as if struck by lightning. The touch was unbearable — his flesh was too sensitive, too raw, and every movement of Ormund's fingers caused a pain that, in some impossible way, bordered on pleasure.
"Please, please, please..." Daeron chanted, his tears flowing afresh, soaking his temples, dripping onto the stone. "I can't... it's too much... Uncle, I beg you..."
"Shhhh," Ormund pressed his lips to his temple in a tender kiss. "You can. You can do anything I tell you. You are mine. Every part of you is mine. Your body, your tears, your seed, your prayers. And you will take me for as long as I desire."
With these words, he squeezed Daeron's cock a little tighter and ran his thumb over the head — slick, wet, unbearably sensitive. The boy screamed. His body bucked under Ormund like a trapped bird, but the weight held him pinned. He was crucified — not by nails, but by weight. Not on a cross, but on an altar. Not by men, but by the god who was his uncle.
Ormund kept moving — now slowly, almost lazily, savoring every second. He felt Daeron's inner muscles clench around him in erratic spasms, felt the boy's body trying to expel him and pull him deeper at the same time. He felt Daeron trembling — from head to toe — and that trembling traveled into him, amplifying his own pleasure, bringing him to the edge.
"Is this not what you wanted? Is this not what you prayed for? Every second of this pain is a step toward purification. Every drop of blood is payment for the sins of your line. Accept it. Accept it with gratitude."
His hips quickened, and his hand on Daeron's tormented cock moved faster, rougher, tearing moans from the boy's chest.
"Your ancestors burned in dragonfire," Ormund whispered, hammering the words into Daeron's body with every thrust. "Do you not want to be righteous and innocent, child? Tell me. Tell your god."
"Yes..." Daeron breathed, not recognizing his own voice. "Yes, Uncle... I want..."
"What do you want?"
"I want to be pure. I want you to be pleased with me." The boy sobbed and squeezed his eyes shut, as if the Seven were still watching him — not with judgment, but with thirst. For the gods are hungry, too. The gods also thirst for sacrifices.
"Good boy," was all Lord Hightower said when he finally reached the edge — when his body convulsed in one last, deepest thrust — and he spilled into Daeron with a low, guttural groan. Hot. Copious. Deep. As if pouring into the boy not his seed, but his very own perverted, all-consuming love.
"Receive it," he snarled, and it was not a word — it was an incantation. "Receive me into yourself. Into your womb. Into your soul. I am your sin, and I am your redemption. I am your god, and I am your executioner. Receive me, and you will never be alone."