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There is a presence in the Red Keep. Egg can feel it in every room, every corridor, every courtyard. There is no escape from it, not even in sleep. It’s a harsh, undeniable thing and unyielding to any pleas for mercy. It seeks to punish and mold in its image. He knows he’s not alone in feeling it but sometimes he wonders if he’s the only one who realises quite how cruel it really is.
It’s the Iron Throne. He knows it, just like everyone else does, just from the way the presence feels so all-consuming and commanding in the throne room.
It dogs him everywhere in the castle in a way that makes him feel like an animal being hunted, more than Aerion ever has. It wants him for whatever scheme it has in mind and he dreads what it will be. Does it want him dead or all the others to be? Does it want him mad? Does it want to drive him from here?
He doesn’t know and he doesn’t want to.
He’s just a boy. He should be chasing Aemon through the gardens of Summerhall, unaware of this clawing beast at the edges of his mind. He should be running across tourney grounds beyond King’s Landing, they have to be beyond King’s Landing, too busy carrying lances and horsetack to even consider what it is that keeps trying to pull him up to that mass of swords.
He heard that it cut the rulers it deemed unworthy.
Is this what they felt? Did they feel something else? Did they have the small blessing of feeling nothing at all?