R'hllor gazed upon her Love, her pale fingers tracing the brow of the babe he held in his arms.

"When the veil between the realms thins, she will be needed."

Her husband shifted the child's weight, his lips whitening as he pressed them tightly together. "She didn't ask for this. I… I just want her safe."

"She will have help."

Far away, in the depths of the Citadel, a single glass candle flickered to life for the first time in millennia.


Grey.

Everything is so fucking grey.

The man groaned as his phone alarmed, a reminder that he was running out of time to not have a miserably rushed morning. His knee joint cracked as he swung his legs over the side of the bed and ran his fingers through his curls before staring at the wane light that filtered through his closed curtains. He could open them further but knew it wouldn't make a difference, not really.

The world had dimmed at some point in his thirty-four years. Perhaps that was why he enjoyed the old stories enough to make a career out of them, and wanted to pass on tales of a time when magic mingled freely with their world. Though those days might have been perilous, existing at the whims of others with one's life constantly balanced on a sword's edge, he couldn't help but think for him, it would have been better.

He recalled his childhood being much brighter, warmer even, despite the cold comportment that had always strained his family.

Every day it became more and more difficult to draw up the colors as he remembered from his youth and he felt a pang of deep loss when one became muted even in his memory. He had wondered if childhood was a connection all had to magic before it was severed, if this was something that happened to everyone.

When he tried to discuss it with Cersei, she had scoffed and said she had no idea what he was on about. Tywin berated him for his fanciful musings and made him an appointment to see an eye specialist.

Tyrion gently suggested a therapist.

But Jaime had no organic cause for his increasing color blindness, nor did he feel numb or depressed. If anything, he felt too keenly and was frustrated that the world seemed quite content to lay down and die a cold, colorless death while he practically burned inside.

Blue had been his favorite with its varying shades, each of which invoked a different feeling… the joy of a bright sky, the turmoil of a dark churning ocean, the hope in the soft coloring of a starling's egg… It was, of course, the first to go.

Red had been the last, which amused Jaime's sense of irony, to lose its luster. The day he couldn't remember, he bought every pomegranate from his local grocer and smashed them open on his kitchen countertop, trying to wring the jeweled hue from his memory.

I'm bleeding color, he thought, looking at the sickly grey-green of his eyes. Soon there will be none left in the whole of Westeros for me to look upon.

He paused in brushing his teeth to stare at his reflection.

Well, that's not exactly true.


The first time he saw her, he had stumbled at the sight of the huddled form in the far back corner of the classroom. It took him a moment more to decide it was a woman so tall her knees had to cram under the desktop while her boot-clad feet tucked alongside the seat in front of her.

Despite the weather being rather warm, as early Fall typically was in the Riverlands, a long coat hung over her shoulders, the hem touching the floor while the sleeves partially covered pale, freckled hands.

She had not looked up when he loudly dropped the stack of syllabi on the podium, and her dull, shoulder-length blonde hair remained a thin curtain that hid her face from view.

The figure she cut was altogether awkward and he spared her a brief moment of pity before returning to set up for his lecture.

She can't help the way she was formed anymore than Tyrion.

Besides, a pretty face was no guarantee of contentment or purpose. He would know.

He spared her no further thought until he was required to hand back essay critiques a few weeks later, his lip curling into a slight sneer as he called out, "Brienne Tarth".

The author of this one had been particularly vexing, taking to task his assigned text's translation of Azor Ahai in the original High Valaryian. He spent time first looking for evidence of plagiarism from scholars in the field and when he found none, spent hours more writing cramped rebuttals in the margins of her paper.

Afterward, he was tempted to just toss the rest of the essays down his stairs and mark according to how far he had to walk to retrieve them. Still, despite his resentment over the time cost to review it, he could not mark her anything but high.

There was a screech of metal as the woman pushed out of the too-small desk and Jaime's eyes widened, realizing he'd yet to see her at her full height.

Gods, she's tall, he thought and straightened upon discovering she had an inch or two on him despite his own well above average height. And her name is Brienne.

In her shapeless, loose-fitting garb, she appeared to be a drab moving wall as she reached out her hand to take the essay. This close, he could see her features for once, despite the downcast of her eyes. The skin of her face was very fair with light brown freckles that splattered over the bridge of her broken nose to spill onto her cheekbones, with the occasional stray that hovered around the wide slash of her mouth and the corner of her full lips.

People could call her ugly and Jaime would not argue, but a near lifetime with Tyrion had taught him to appreciate things that were new and different, if for nothing but the sake of variety.

And I've never seen anyone who looks like her.

She lifted her eyes from the floor when he did not extend the paper for her to take and he stopped breathing.

They were blue, not the blue from his childhood, but instead a bright and glittering color that looked like a sapphire backlit by a star.

Her brow furrowed at his open stare and to cover his momentary startlement, he smirked and was treated to a violently pink blush that temporarily masked the freckles upon her cheeks.

Brienne Tarth, the giant who glows.

He felt his own face pull into a broad grin which only made the woman scowl and snatch the paper from his grip.

He admittedly provoked her at every opportunity from then on during the twice-weekly classes to either see the blue of her eyes or the scarlet of her blush.

He called on others, of course, but always reserved the questions with the most creative imagery for her as they got the best responses.

"Ms. Tarth, who was Rhaego Dothrak?"

"W-what?"

"You did the reading, didn't you?"

"Of course-"

"Then who is Rhaego Dothrak?"

The blush that had already started to form, turned deeper, traveling under her collar and Jaime swore he could see it peeking out at the edge of her sleeves at the wrist.

"The Stallion that will mount the world."

After he called on her to give an interpretation of Nissa Nissa's cry of anguish and ecstasy that was so great it fractured the moon, she would only respond "I don't know, sir" to further goading.

At the third occurrence of this response, he leaned over the lectern and gave her his most cutting smile.

"Participation is graded, Ms. Tarth. I will have your answer."

The glare she had graced him with was seared into his mind and he found himself recalling it every time he wanted to see blue again.

And it would not fade.

It unsettled him almost as much as his inability to stop poking at her every chance he could. In the sea of sameness that was his classroom, she stood out.

She's unnatural, something cold whispered to him in a voice that sounded much like Cersei's.

It's good the semester ends today, he thought. Provoking Ms. Tarth was starting to feel like when Cersei and he would jump from the cliffs at Casterly, the jagged rocks passing beneath their feet before they crashed into the sea below.

Yes, it ends today... but he might as well make the most of it.


"Who can tell me the Prophecy of the Evenstar?" he asked the room, the lot of them disinterested and going through the motions of the final days of a semester. He pushed from behind the podium to slowly step across the expanse of the lecture hall.

Obscure and from the Age of Heroes, it was among his favorite, a tale that promised a return of magic to the world. Thus, it was his preferred way of ending the class each year. "Anyone?" he asked when he paused in his step, having nonchalantly meandered to his very intentional positioning.

I'll have those eyes and that blush one last time, Ms. Tarth.

"Brienne," he drawled using her given name for the first time and hoping to startle a spectacular reaction, "You always have such thorough thoughts on these matters. Give us the tale if you know it."

He waited, expecting any minute for her face to redden, for her to look up and away several times before haltingly responding with an inelegant if technically correct answer.

But no blush came and when she looked up, her gaze was steady before she began to speak. Her sudden confidence was so unexpected he felt the smirk slide off his face as the energy in the room shifted. In his peripheral vision, he saw the confusion of some students and heard the startled gasps of others.

Because Brienne Tarth was reciting the prophecy of the Evenstar, word for word, in the original High Valayrian, a language he had not heard spoken aloud since his final post-grad years.

Some of the Great Houses, his included, kept the language alive as a touchstone to the past and their own histories. Long hours with tutors taught him to read and write the dying language.

Few actually spoke it. Even fewer spoke it well.

The musical and yet occasionally guttural flow of words made him think of Casterly Rock and the relics within that reached back all the way to Lann the Clever. His favorite had always been the swords, the beautiful Valaryian steel blades that were said to be forged in the fires of a dragon's breath. They never dulled, they never rusted, a bit of magic his family hoarded behind tempered glass and stone walls. Dying but not dead, much like the language of their makers.

As she finished, there was no smug twist of her over-large lips; instead, there was just a quiet certainty behind her bright eyes.

Unnatural, hissed the voice again.

Sensing he had been staring, Jaime cleared his throat and grimaced.

"Impressive Ms. Tarth, but few know High Valaryian well enough for an original reading to be helpful. In the King's English, this time, if you please."

She gave one curt nod.

"When the dragon's bones have turned to stone and the Children of the Forest's bodies seep into the Great Hearth, the Goddess of Light will bring forth her child, the Evenstar, to stand between the realms. Armed by their love, a weapon fierce and sharp, their line will protect Westeros from the darkness that will come when magic returns to the world."

Jaime quirked one brow at her pronouns and was about to quibble with the mistranslation of one word in particular, but he was distracted by a loud scoff across the room.

"Love?" asked a student. "How is love a weapon?"

The student was one of those types that made Jaime wish for a word that better encompassed 'technically a man in size and age but with the unearned confidence and bluster of a boy bragging of how his shoes could make him run faster than anyone else on the schoolyard'.

English was wholly inadequate sometimes.

He narrowed his eyes on the man-child and briefly considered asking his name before deciding he didn't care.

"Spoken as a person who has never been in love." The room tittered softly and Jaime folded his arms over his chest. It was pitiful this needed explanation. "Let me guess, you consider yourself a rational, logical being? Unlikely to be ruled by emotion?"

The student shrugged. "Yeah, I think so."

"Most men do. And do you consider yourself an overall decent human? That the good you have put out into the world outweighs the bad?"

"Sure," he replied hesitantly.

"Excellent. Is anyone a parent in this room? Particularly of a grown child, or a young adult."

A few hands raised and Jaime called on a man, an actual one this time. "And you, if the Gods stood before you and told you to kill this very logical, mostly decent man to save your child, would you?"

"Of course."

Jaime glanced back to the boy.

I would slit your throat in an instant to save someone I loved. And none are good, though I would call Tyrion decent.

"As expected," he continued. "A choice that seems completely rational to you and completely irrational to this one here. A life for a life, the only deciding factor being love. Murders have been committed. Sacrifices have been made. Wars have been waged. It doesn't matter if it is the love of family, King, or country that drives us... The things we do for love know no limit. I personally think the better question is 'what or who will the Evenstar love?' What will motivate him to stand before darkness without losing his resolve?"

He glanced at the clock at the wall and noting the time, shrugged. "We won't unravel this mystery today. Your final essays are due for submission by midnight tonight. You're excused."

He waved his hand in dismissal and resumed his post behind the lectern surreptitiously glancing at Brienne Tarth while pretending to gather his things. She appeared to be deep in thought, a pen gripped tightly in her fist, while everyone else filed out of the room.

She surfaced a moment later to quickly gather her things. When she paused before him, he lifted a brow in practiced indifference.

Her jaw clicked shut from whatever it was she had been about to say and she looked to the floor as her blush mottled her skin.

"Right," she muttered to herself before continuing onward through the double doors and out the building.

Jaime watched until the doors clicked shut.

"Right," he repeated under his breath.