The cost of old actions
Author note: Warning for some true ASOIAF-themed character DEATH in this chapter. / Rogercat
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The Westerlands, Lannisport:
The summer heat did nothing to put an end to the drought that now haunted the Westerlands. No rains had fallen for months, and now reports came in that the commoners were slowly starving and many also beginning to die from illnesses, despite that Tysha and others did their best with charity that tried to help with the food situation.
"Tyrion...is it really wrong to stop those who wish to leave? If they stay, they will starve even if the rest of Westeros sends food that your father pays for, and we have no way of telling when the water will return…"
Her husband looked sadly at her with his black and green eyes, where they and Luke had just finished their nowadays very simple meal with only one dish, today a plain root vegetable dish that would never have been served at the table of Tywin Lannister, to try and make the food last until Tysha had given birth to her second child.
"I...honestly think it is better to let the smallfolk try to live in the riverlands and the North until that drought is over. If too many of them die because of the lack of food and water, then no one will end up living in the Westerlands soon."
Lord Tywin refused to let the smallfolk leave the Westerlands, but those who still had some strength to use so they could sneak away in the middle of night when the various knights and soldiers were not around, had quickly proven themselves a lot smarter than just submitting to those orders. More than once, the soldiers had been knocked out by heavy cooking pans or stones tossed at their heads, then either killed or tied up so they could not stop the smallfolk families from escaping.
"I am glad to hear that, Tyrion, for I have been worried about what is going to happen soon. Your father is paying for food and fresh water to be brought, but most of it is going to the nobles and landed knights, not those who are in most need…"
Some would have thought Tysha's thoughts strange, but Tyrion knew that House Clegane had only become landed knights when her grandfather lived and Sandor was the third generation. It was a young House for being the lowest rank of nobility, so perhaps it was not so odd that she behaved as she did. Anyway, for Tyrion, it had been something of an eye opener for how life was for those who were not of Great Houses or ancient bloodlines going back for many generations.
Back in Casterly Rock, Jaime had been in the middle of a nap but now awoke with a gasp for breath from the nightmare that he had been having. A memory from the past, mixed with the trauma of his time serving in the Kingsguard and witnessing what horrors Aerys was able to do.
"Damn Harrendal that started it all...!"
How could he have been so fucking blind at that time? Failing to see the long-term risks of his actions, all because he happened to overhear Lyanna Stark and her youngest brother loudly talk about the three squires who had beaten up one of the Stark bannermen and which one of them would try to mask themselves as a mystery knight? Young and naive, yes, still a mere boy who thought himself the best because of his natural talent for knighthood and the height of his family name.
"I was such a fool back then, angry at Aerys for not letting me stay at the tourney and keep showing everyone the skills that had earned me a place in the Kingsguard..."
The Knight of the Laughing Tree. For Jaime, who had all the training of being a knight and knowing how to joust, it had been so easy to use his own, carefully saved pocket money to buy mismatched pieces of armour and dress up like a mystery knight because everyone expected him to be on the way to King Landing to protecting Queen Rhaella and prince Viserys as per the first order he had gotten as a Kingsguard member.
"To think that I managed to escape being caught by pure luck, but that Rhaegar saw the Stark girl standing at the shield that I left behind, when she almost managed to see my face despite that I tried to dye my hair into a more common brown hair by using walnut shells as I once overheard some kitchen maids talk about when Tyrion and I was playing hide and seek near the kitchens…"
No, that had really not been one of his better ideas in the long run, Jaime thought for himself as he ran his remaining hand over his face in memory of what it would cause later. It had led to Rhaegar mistaking Lyanna Stark as the true face of the Knight of the Laughing Tree and crown her as the Queen of Love and Beauty, when Jaime had only chosen the motive on the shield in a unspoken attempt to show the two youngest Stark children that he too knew of what had happened.
"At least no one seems to know it was me, anyway…"
But Jaime had no idea how wrong he was. But to be fair, it was not like that person would have been able to come in contact with him anyway.
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Rhûn, in the Temple of Shadows:
Visenya had also been resting for a nap so she would not have to deal with the afternoon heat, but her ability to see the past had led her to see the event at Harrendal, and as a result, she had also seen who the Knight of the Laughing Tree was.
"Foolish mother. Yes, it was wrong of those squires to attack Howland Reed, but your damn insistence on justice would have a chain of reactions that you had no way of guessing…"
She did not blame Jaime Lannister for acting as the mystery knight, he too had been idealistic and somewhat naive about the cost of his actions. No, for Visenya the whole event at Harrendal was more of a insight of how idiotic both her parents had been in the past.
Just outside the northern wall of the Temple, laid a burial ground. Here, the slaves of the Temple were laid to their final rest in simple pits deep in the desert sand, with no grave goods and no gravestone carrying their names. In death, they were as nameless as they often would be in life.
"You ended up paying for your past actions, mother, and the Master showed no mercy."
In front of Visenya, was a grave marked with a carefully made wolf head made out of small stones as the sole proof of where Lyanna Stark was buried. On the day when he had acted so strange, and using the blood of Visenya to send that curse on Tywin Lannister and the Westerlands, Lyanna had been beaten to death by Khamûl with a cudgel. She had died for the second time after a long afternoon spent in the agony from her injuries and terror of the wrath from the Ringwraith, just 25 years old, nine years after the first death that she had suffered in the Tower of Joy.
"You will soon be joined in death by Father. He does not have long left to live."
No, Visenya had seen what had happened to Rhaegar after that he crossed the two worlds. How he had ended up as a male courtesan in a brothel somewhere in Mordor where he found out the hard way that no one treated him as a prince anymore and just a another sex worker selling his body for the pleasure of customers, a slave like so many others there, and then made to work in the fields because he no longer was worth selling to customers.
Perhaps she was becoming cruel in her own way, but Visenya had never been in a position to help either one of her birth parents. Lyanna refused to take her responsibility as a mother already before her daughter was born, eventually finding herself a mere slave here in the Temple while Visenya found herself better cared for by the Consorts. Rhaegar was in Mordor, and she had seen in her past visions that he would only have viewed her as a new coming of the original Visenya, when her actual personality was somewhere closer to her ancestor-queen Naerys, a religious person who followed the otherwise extinct religion that once existed in Kemet so long ago.
"I would have made a fine Silent Sister, at least, rather than a Septa. Tossing away my life as a royal bastard, born from a northern mistress who would never have accepted a feminine daughter who followed the Faith of the Seven when she herself was more close in personality to the original Visenya..."
Leaving the grave of Lyanna behind her, Visenya wondered if she would be able to give her maternal uncle Eddard Stark a good scare though his nightmares at some point in the future. Without doubt, he likely carried some guilt over not being able to save his sister but this half-Targaryen niece of his had not forgotten that the current Lord Stark refused to bury her original stillborn body with dragon-like birth defects in Winterfell beside the original body of Lyanna, but rather just made her a small tomb near the Tower of Joy, as if he wanted to forget that his sister had died in childbirth with the offspring of Rhaegar.
"Perhaps I can scare my cousins as a ghost in the crypts of Winterfell too. It is not like House Stark has been spared from their children dying at a young age, after all."
With those plans in her mind, Visenya was in a much more cheerful mood although her smirk would have been alarming for anyone who saw it because she would smile similar of the Master of the Temple somehow, back in the days when he still had a mortal body and felt pleased over killing the Númenorian invaders and destroying yet another port city in one of their colonies along the Eastern shores of Middle-earth.
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The following morning, somewhere in Mordor;
Today was one of those feared health checks on the slaves who worked in the fields to grow enough grains and other crops to feed the armies and workers. If you were found showing signs of an infectious disease that could be passed over to the other slaves, then the response was usually swift and brutal.
"Is there anyone still in the tents for sleeping?" a huge, battle-scarred orc growled, the whip at his side showing him as the overseer of this large field. One of the slaves who had just been passed the health check even if he understandable was thin from being underfed, felt bold enough to raise a hand so he could answer the question:
"That former courtesan, the pale one…"
Yes, the very slave that the orc overseer had noticed to not be standing in the line alongside the others. Barking an order to keep checking the slaves for possible illnesses, the overseer went himself towards the small group of sleeping tents where the slaves would be at night.
It did not take the overseer long to return, with a body tossed over one massive shoulder.
"Stuck down by the "nose-eating disease" from a customer or two who had been visiting some cheaper streetwalkers, huh? No wonder you were not worth selling anymore as a high-class courtesan in that fancy brothel!"
As he tossed Rhaegar on the ground, the Targaryen prince was but a mere shell of his former self not even a decade earlier. His hair was chopped unevenly with a knife, which still did not hide how tangled and unkempt it was nowadays, and four years since his last hair wash made it hard to guess his actual hair color. He was thin, but not merely from underfeeding and overworking in the fields, there was just no way to hide his pale skin covered in rashes and sores, as well that his face was slowly starting to become deformed with his nose being little more than a gaping hole now. Just as the manager for the brothel with the male courtesans had feared and was the reason he was sent to work in the fields instead, more than one of the garrison soldiers had infected Rhaegar with syphilis during the gang-rape, which had began to show itself over the past four years as he had been here in the fields.
"What...do you...want…." he tried to say, his speech uneven as a sign that the disease was also affecting his brain. But all the clear signs of him having syphilis, already marked Rhaegar for death since this sexual disease was not curable and would soon make him a burden, unable to work for the small food he was given everyday.
"Get him on the wagon with the others who have shown signs of illness."
In his froggy mind that was slowly being destroyed by the illness, Rhaegar was just barely aware of someone dragging him along the stony ground. Yet he could feel a strong heat in the air, and that feeling against his skin seemed to awake him somewhat from the mists clouding his eyes.
"Father…?" he whispered, somehow imagining himself back in front of the Iron Throne where Aerys was seated. Rhaegar could not hear what his father was saying, but the gathered pile of firewood with a stake in the middle told the meaning that he was not hearing.
"Father, no! I have not betrayed you! Lyanna Stark is pregnant with a new coming of Visenya! My children will lead Westeros against the danger that lies beyond the Wall!"
Against the orcs who pulled Rhaegar, with his hands bound on his back, forwards towards the crack in Mount Doom where he had sensed the heat from the lava, his attempts of resistance were useless. Also, his half-confused, quickly terrified-sounding pleading for Aerys to spare him was spoken in High Valyrian, a language that none of them knew. For the orcs, his prattle-sounding words merely meant that he had gone mad with terror at seeing that he would soon find himself falling to a death by burning.
"I am you son! I am your son, your firstborn….! Mother, mother, please stop him...mother!"
But the ghostly image of Rhaella in front of his eyes merely turned around, cold as ice and when looking over her shoulder, her purple eyes were filled with an emotion aimed towards himself that Rhaegar never recalled her having before. Loathing. The last Targaryen queen looked at the miserable form of her first child, and even if she had been alive instead of a ghost, she would still do nothing to help him.
You did nothing to stop my imprisonment in Maegor's Holdfast when you had the chance to do it. Nor did you treat Elia with respect and loyalty as you should have done, and desired more children than what she could give you at the time. Your children, Rhaenys and Aegon, are seeing another man as their father in all but blood, and Elia is far happier with her second husband than what you could ever make her. Now pay the final price for your selfish actions, that you tried to justify by your reading of old scrolls!
Horrified over her words, Rhaegar opened his mouth to protest, but it was too late and the ghost of Rhella vanished like she had been just a memory image in his mind. A push in his back sent him falling face down into the lava as the first one of the ill slaves to be put to death in this manner, and his screams of pain were quickly cut short when his body sunk into the molten rock to be burned alive.
In a cruel twist of irony, despite that he had been several years older than his parents by being almost 21 years old at his marriage to Elia, Rhaegar died at the age of 33 years, five years younger than his mother Rhaella and six years younger than his father Aerys. And since everyone in Westeros believed him to be dead since almost a decade ago, no one therefore knew the truth.
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Author note: Jaime as the true identity of the Knight of the Laughing Tree? YES! Because Lyanna was a 14-year-old teenage girl at Harrendal, and the Knight is mentioned to be a tall man with a deep voice. The existence of sword fighting and riding skills does not necessarily confirm the existence of jousting skills. Even if she had actual training, this would be the first real test for her skills. As a novice in jousting, her victory would be far from guaranteed. Same for Benjen, who is YOUNGER than Lyanna and would logically not even have entered puberty yet. Brandon would likely have a better chance, but could have been revealed as the mystery knight if he was called up for the next round under his real name right after, and Ned honestly does not strike as the type to do something like dressing up as a mystery knight, even with his sense of honor
You can use walnut shells to naturally dye hair into a dark brown colour, and that is what Jaime used to hide his revealing Lannister golden hair
And yes, Khamûl did kill Lyanna on that day when sending the curse on Tywin Lannister. Because Rhaenys is the reincarnation of his daughter Mara, and the vision showing the actions of Lyanna and Rhaegar, Khamûl punished Lyanna with death for nearly getting his reborn daughter killed though running away with Rhaegar, despite that it was Tywin Lannister who sent Amory Lorch and Gregor Clegane to kill Elia and her children