Chapter Text
A woman prays. A woman has prayed a lot recently. In all that time, she ran out of structured prayers, though the Seven knows she never clung particularly hard to them to begin with. She prays to the Mother the most. In the past, it was her mother, but necessity demanded it be The Mother as time went on. She prays for her children mostly.
The Mother listens to her prayers with the same devoted intensity she gives to all her children, so of course she hears it. Given long enough to ramble, someone always slips, even mothers. Especially mothers. Normally, she would turn a blind eye to this. These children who forget to be careful with their words do not mean what they say and she has no use for their accidental offerings anyway. This time is different. She may not be the Crone, but she will be someday and she knows enough to notice the opportunity that has been handed to her.
It is easy to call for the others. The Seven may be One, but these Three are each other. The Crone is here already, for she heard the Mother’s call before she spoke it, as she always does. The Maiden follows soon after, the leagues between them vanishing as her legs bound.
Together they look at their gifts. Four have been given, but the last is hazy, out of view of the giver and harder to grasp. That is fine. They are Three. They only need three.
The Crone picks first, for she saw the options long ago and knew what she would choose. She takes the one who sees how those around her live. And how they will die. The Maiden picks next without hesitation. Furious as she is, she takes the unwhole one who will give her strength.
The Mother looks at the remaining offering. She loves all these children. She despair for them also. This one is lying in a pool of her bounty, fed round with a lifetime of it. Yet in other ways starves. She sighs, so many of her children starve. She takes a moment to brush her hand through platinum hair, mourns this child and takes her due.
Helaena wakes first that day, though she doesn’t notice. The dreams won’t lift. Often they flicker in front of her in waking hours, but today they are so thick a fog that she can’t so much as see her own hands. Her ears are useless too, filled as they are with a croaking voice that tells her secrets she never wished to know.
When she finds it in herself to sit up, the vertigo of it pulls at her stomach and she spits bile all down her front. She feels, suddenly, a hand on her arm and shrinks away from her unseen assailant, skin roiling sickeningly where they touched. Helaena feels her throat vibrate with a whine that never makes it to her ears. The hand follows her, another one joining it on the other side, shaking her, though gentler than the shivers her body wracks across itself.
She sees horrors and hears how they came to be. Are coming? Will come? She couldn’t say. All the while she feels hands fluttering across her body, supporting her, moving her, stroking and cajoling. She goes limp, can’t think of what else to do in the face of their tugging. The hands seem calmer when she’s still. The sights and sounds are unaffected. She knows by the tight dryness on her tongue that her mouth must be agape as she watches them.
Someone turns her, she notices absently in a tiny nook of her mind not being overrun by knowledge. It doesn’t matter, all that matters is she feels her hand brush across woven sheets as they do so. Her body jerks alive with purpose, throwing off the hands that for all their worry touch her like glass. Her own hands twist and grasp in her sheets tearing into them to get to her goal. The threads. They fall apart from one another messy and uneven and she can’t see them but somehow she knows how to tug, unravel and reknot. Her hands barely feel like her own as they move in ways she never learned, only pausing to tear out more material.
The gentle worry of the touches turn frantic now. They grip tight and try to seize her away from her work, but her body holds firm with a strength it never had before. One of the hands strikes her shoulder, frustrated and useless. She fights against them until they’re all knocked away by something else. Someone else. These hands are familiar, she realises as shaking arms curl around her, cradling and petting. For all she hates the touch, she throws herself into comfort of this holding. She sobs and wails, trying desperately to hear herself as it hits her all over again that she can’t make out the words lips are whispering into her hair.
Her hands never stop working. At one point, the edge of a fingernail tangled in a stubborn knot of embroidery and tore partially off as she moved to pick up the next thread. She barely felt it over the pounding of her head that matched the beating of her heart, like the endless knocking of a loom. She wretched and gagged again, but there was nothing to come up.
The arms leave her, returning quickly. Maybe. She can’t say for sure. Could have been minutes. Could have been days. It was long enough to be shown the downfall of a great house, but again she wasn’t sure which house. Maybe she didn’t know the crest. Maybe she did. It was so hard to think of anything but the sights and sounds of here and now that weren’t here and now at all.
It was cradled again in those arms that she felt another touch. New hands tilted up her head and held her as liquid was poured down her throat. Too late, she had the presence of mind to swallow and she spluttered and coughed around the first trickle. She tries to warn whoever gave it to her to run and never look back, but her tongue has none of the deftness of her fingers.
After she’d drunk enough that the other hands rescinded, the comforting hold took her close and rocked her gently, chest vibrating softly. Gradually, Helaena’s staring eyes began to droop closed and the strength left her enough that she lay back again and even the lifeline that were those sheet threads slipped from her fingers. The hold eased her down and pressed lips and shuddering breaths to her hair, her forehead, her hands. The ministrations were gentle, letting her fall away into sleep.
Helaena wished they weren’t; sleep was no escape from dreams.
Aemond wakes second. He wakes to a girl’s scream and is out the door before he can so much as blink the sand out of his eye, spurred on by a sharp voice in the back of his mind. Still in his nightclothes, he races through the Keep until he comes to his sister’s door and throws it open.
He stares. Helaena is curled on her bed, their mother wrapped around her. Eyes wide and unseeing, her hands frantically twist her wrecked sheets in what look like tiny men. Men fighting, men dying, men killing. She looks terrified.
Aemond wants nothing more than to go to her, tear apart what dared scare this girl and any other, but he can’t. With the same surety that had him on his feet before he knew he was awake, he knows he can’t help. Because it’s him doing this to her. He’s sure of it. Just as he’s sure he doesn’t want to become someone who would do this, just as he’s sure he’s furious at himself that he can’t stop from becoming that person anyway.
Except, he isn’t sure of any of those things. He doesn’t know what’s happening to Helaena, let alone how he caused it. Will cause it, instinct corrects in a clarification that just makes him more confused. He’s scared, he realises and looks to his mother. She meets his eye and he feels every inch of his recent growth spurt. He towers over the two curled small on the bed and for all of it there is nothing he can do. His mother seems to realise this at the same time he does and her desperate eyes tear away from him, scouring the room for something, anything that might reveal itself as a miracle cure.
He’s failed her. He’s failed them both really, but his only protector in the world asked him for help and he couldn’t do it. He suddenly feels empty and blank, which only allows this voice of instinct to speak louder.
“Protector?” it hisses at him. “She who sold her children?”
He knows it’s talking about the betrothal. A bitter, ugly feeling rises in him, but it’s jealous and hungry rather than the righteous fury and disgust emanating from the back of his mind. That’s not him, he realises with horror. There is something else in him. He wants it out. The voice coos encouragingly but doesn’t back down.
He grips his jealousy like a sword and puts himself to trying to draw out of any scabbard. His eye fixes on Helaena in the bed. She shouldn’t be Aegon’s, she should be his, he reminds himself furiously as he pushes against the disgust. The voice in his head seems torn between helping him fight against its own invasion and the hatred it clearly feels at his thoughts.
He doubles over, gasping, as the voice brings a great warhammer of rejection on his gambit. The force of it weakens his knees and he hears himself whine lowly as the voice floods the rest of his mind with its repulsion at the idea of bedding his tiny older sister. He recognises the feeling. He recognises it from his thirteenth name day when his brother led him down the Street of Silk, only strengthened and fortified by something that he is now realising is much, much larger than himself.
He suddenly can’t bear to be in the same room as Helaena- especially not in her own room- and he stumbles backward out the door. His eye latches back to his mother, staring at him as his face twists in terror. Mother, he wants to beg, get it out of me. But what could she do?
Once out of the room, Aemond collapses to the stone ground, back pressed firm against the opposite wall as he curls in on himself. He clutches at his empty eyesocket as the pain in it thumps with every scared noise Helaena makes.
Sometime later he hears his name and looks up to see his mother standing over him. She looks concerned, but the hissing voice is back and before he knows it one hand is lunging for her. He stops, of course he stops. He’s curling back into himself before she’s even finished her startled jump.
“Aemond,” she says again, softly. She brings one hand to his head and strokes the unkempt hair on his brow. The voice is roaring now, melding into the rushing of blood in his ears until it’s all on enraged wail. He soaks in his mother’s touch for as long as he can before rising on unsteady legs, giving her a thin, tight smile and turning away. He watches him leave for a beat before returning to her daughter.
Aemond barely avoids colliding with a maester as he feels through the corridors, far more than half blind by now with mind and ears ringing with the fervour of the other thing in him. Nothing from the world makes it to him besides the irregular rush of air into his lungs until-
After the cacophony of fury, the gasp of fear breaks crisp and clear in his ear. In an instant, he switches from aimless shambling to quick, purposeful movement. Following, following until there! His vision focuses in on a serving maid backed into a corner by a man whose sword is through his own chest before Aemond realises he’s taken it.
The girl shrieks and flees, but Aemond barely notices. Finally, after all the impotence of this morning. Finally. The voice in the back of his head howls and this time it resonates with the blood in his ears into song.
Aegon wakes last. He wakes with an urge to vomit- a familiar feeling that experience tells him not to deny. Watery slop is already halfway up his throat when he’s struck with visions of vines sprouting slowly, enduring winds and basking in sunlight until they bring forth fruit. Then, so much more. Lives lived to make the worn hands that plucked that fruit, trees grown tall for the wood that carried so many miles-
He looks down at himself and realises the tacky feeling on his skin is wine. He must have knocked over in his sleep, he’s covered in it. All that effort, he realises as he rubs at his burning throat, and he’d failed before he started. Ha. That was familiar.
Mourn for what you can’t save, he thinks next, but do so without disregarding what you could. Which is a stupid thought and not one he respects enough to argue. It is strange, though, the reprimanding voice in his head sounds less like his mother than usual. For some reason, he seems to find that thought amusing.
Shivering with nausea, Aegon pulls himself up to unsteady feet. Somewhere in the process, his hood falls from his head and his hair is revealed to the candlelit gloom of the room. Someone is steadying him in seconds. That’s right, help your prince. Help your incredibly rich prince.
He turns, smirking to the whore at his side. His eyes reach her face and all he can think is-
“You look tired.” His voice when he says it is so soft, it’s barely audible past the phlegm choking his throat. The room is quiet enough that she hears him anyway. For a moment, both of them blink at each other in surprise. She recovers faster than he does, a suggestive smile spreading across her face.
“Would you like me to sleep for you, My Lord?” she asks.
Aegon studies the room blearily. It’s too dark to make out much, but still clearly unsecured. Aegon rubs a hand over the woman’s arm, absentmindedly noticing how much the training calluses that used to pepper it have faded. How long has it been since he trained? No, he decides, if someone comes in he wouldn’t be able to protect her. Maybe he could post guards if he took her to the Red Keep-
The arm under his hand is thin.
“You look hungry,” he says. She’s unfazed this time, adapting easily.
“Would you like to feed me, My Lord?” she asks, lowering to her knees.
Sullenly, he notices she’s getting his title wrong, but it’s overwhelmed by how much he- How much he loves her? It’s like ivy roots spreading and gripping into every part of his mind. The answer is emphatically yes. Yes, he wants to feed her! But not like this, his child- what the actual fuck- should never have to be on her knees for something so necessary as food.
Of course, he leers down at her, she isn’t on her knees for food. The whore smirks back at him, pulling at his trousers. He can tell by her eyes that she’s too tired for this.
The wave of despair that follows that thought is too much and his already unsteady knees give out. He crashes down to the ground once more, the clothes of his back sticking to the mess of his earlier failure. It wasn’t his fault. The back of his eyes start to burn. He didn’t even know he wasn’t supposed to spill the wine and he was either asleep or drunk when it happened anyway and-
Clever hands don’t pause in working their way under his clothes. She didn’t even ask if he hurt himself in his fall. How rude.
She’s not being rude. She’s doing her job. She must.
And I’m a sinful lecher who should be attending to my duties rather than blah blah blah, he finishes for himself. But if she so had to do her job, he had money on him still. Perhaps that was something he could help with. He tugs at her hair and she follows easily, crawling up his body until their faces are at a height. His head wails, but this is a pretty reliable way of shutting it up, he thinks as he catches her lips with his.
There’s traces of vomit in his mouth still, but she kisses him like she expects it. Like she’s kissed worse. That’s the wonderful thing about whores, he thinks to himself, no matter what you do they accept you. With a little bit of gold it’s all forgivable and they’ll love you. The pain and anguish in his head redoubles. Aegon hisses, though whether from his head or the woman’s teeth on his bottom lip, who could say.