117 AC, King's Landing
A gasp ripped through Helaena just before dawn. It tore through her muscles, pulling her painfully from what had been a pleasant dream by all accounts. So rare was such a thing, that she had to fight to not cry as her peace was torn from her grasp well before it should have been. She considered it a successful night when she did not wake with the words of the dead still fresh on her lips, but such sleeps had started to become few and far between as of late and her nights had grown long just in time for the days to grow short.
She gripped the edges of her balcony chaise, breathing through the pain that wracked through her like a thousand knives, tilting her head chin up towards the night. The weather had turned unseasonably warm in the last few days, a Fool's Summer the common folk called it, and she had taken the opportunity to sleep outside under the stars while she could. She would need to return inside before her maids caught her, as they always seemed to do as of late, and wash her face clean of any dirt and grime.
So high in the sky, she was more likely to be hit with stray bird droplets than she was by a speck of dirt here or there. But her skin had grown even paler as of late, and her once milky skin and hair had become borderline translucent. Her mother would likely know, even if the maids did not tell her, and she would be punished for her insolence. They were meant to be honoring the Stranger in the morning, donning masks so that they might not see their faces and spare them his presence for another year. It was grim way to end the year, to be sure, but a fitting one.
During the day, Helaena wore the face of a princess and was subject to all its trappings and traps.
For what use was she to her family, if her face was not clean and her countenance not comely?
If she had been born common, no one would have noticed.
If she had been born common, she might not have been so plagued.
It was only at night that she could ponder such questions openly, free from her obligations - already so heavy for someone so young – and the pinning stares of her mother. Her attention had grown pointed in the months since Aemond left, her once soft as silk words turning harsh. She welcomed the freedom the night brought her, when she could peel back her face and reveal the truth within.
Helaena pulled her legs up underneath her, grimacing at the ache. The skin of her heels was rough and pulled against the fabric of her dress, causing her to pull back the hem and look down. She expected to see her feet as they always were – pale, unremarkable, uninviting. Instead, she was met with the sight of her toes turned completely black.
But it was not rot.
At least, not of the kind she was used to dreaming of.
She tried to wiggle them, pulling her nightgown up even higher as she leaned down low. Despite the warm weather, a chill seeped into her the moment her skin was revealed to the night. It was of an unusual sort, the sort that came from deep within the earth and seemed to steal the very life from everything it touched. It was the sort that came to her in a dream, so long ago that she had nearly forgotten it, and embraced her like a hug from the Stranger.
Helaena moved to stand up, scowling when she met just the tiniest bit of resistance. If she could not plainly see her own legs, she would think they had been wrapped in a tangled mess of gown and sheets.
She tried again, straining against the invisible forces pulling her down.
It was only when she felt a hand grasping her own, bone meeting flesh, that she realized she would find no peace for the rest of the night.
She tried to pull against it, crying out as the hand clamped down harder. More joined it, grabbing at pieces of her clothing and holding tight. They pulled in tandem, like a hive of dedicated hornets. Harder and harder they pulled, dragging her down through the plush chaise. She had enough sense to hold her breath, but it was all but fruitless. She gasped for air all the same, lungs burning and mouth dry.
The hands relented.
Releasing her and leaving her to her own devices now that their purpose had been served.
But they lingered all around her, frozen in place in the hard ground still attached to their owners. The bodies had been piled together, some face down, some half-dressed, some with their mouths stuck open in forever screams. All discarded, left to rot together in the frigid cold.
Helaena sat up, wrapping her arms around her to try and fight off the cold.
She was back in the North again, that much was clear.
Why, she could not fathom.
But she learned to recognize the signs after her last visions.
If they could be called as such.
It was a silly word and it made her feel silly to even think it, but it was the only word that would do it justice. It had been nearly a year since then, a year since her mind pulled her from her bed and dropped her down in the middle of a patch of weirwoods. She dismissed it at the time, hoping that it was a fit of madness – a momentary pique, an aberration in what was meant to be an ordinary life. But then they kept coming.
Little whispers at night.
Words spoken to her from voices long in the past and far in the future.
They all plied her with riddles, trusting that she would understand their mysteries. But they had far more confidence in her than she did and the words had done nothing but mix together in her mind and turn to mush. If she ignored them for long enough, she could almost forget. She could go back to the dullness of her life and wear the mask of a princess and pretend like she was screaming with everything in her to get out.
Helaena stood to her feet.
She would need to follow what the vision was trying to show her if she had any hope of getting out of it.
It was hard to keep her balance atop a pile of bodies, but she did her level best. She ignored the feeling of the limbs she had to use as anchors to climb down from the top. Why or how there were so many was unfathomable to her and she would rather not think about it. To keep her sanity, what little might still be left of it after over a year of fragments and pieces and spider webs that couldn't be put together. For every piece of progress she made, she lost ground tenfold, and it was not long before the ground seemed leagues away. The cold, nothing more than a chill when she first landed, intensified. Her fingers stiffened and her legs began to ache from the struggle of staying balanced atop a pile of ice-rotted bodies. She struggled for what felt like hours, forced down to hall fours as it steepened.
She was meant to learn something from this, just as she was meant to learn something from all her visions, but she could not even begin to think while her muscles and bones and skin turned to ice.
Helaena stopped for a moment to catch her breath, collapsing back against the boney limbs like they were furniture.
"You're early."
She did not scream, for she held no fear of what her visions held for her any more.
But she pulled back all the same, searching the bodies for the one that still had enough life left in it to speak. The lifeless bodies remained frozen in place, melding in to one another and becoming a lifeless mass. All save for one. The boy laid prone next to her, face turned towards her. His legs were buried beneath the pile, leaving just his back exposed. He found no peace in death - his back torn open and ripped apart by wild animals. The skin that still clung to his bones was charred and puckered.
"I am right on time," Helaena said, turning her head to mirror the boy.
"No. You are not supposed to be here."
"Where is here?" Helaena watched the boy, committing his sweet face to memory. He had hair like an ink spill, black and curly, and intensely blue eyes that seemed to glow. She imagined his cheeks must have been rosy when he still lived and she felt herself mourning for this boy before she even knew his name.
"Crofter's Village."
"The North?"
"North of somewhere, to be certain. But still south."
"Do you have a name?"
"I did, once." The boy lifted his hand, looking at his boney fingers. "Rickon, I think. It does not matter anymore. Another will have my name. And another and another and another."
"So you say," Helaena said, watching his hand as he moved it up to his face. He placed once hand over his eye and continued to stare at her. "Do you know what killed all these people?"
"A white shadow, thought long dead."
"I do not kno-"
The boys hand shot out, grabbing her own in a vice grip that burned like fire.
"They are coming."
"We should leave her."
"Mother said we were to fetch her for supper."
"And we did. It can hardly be our fault she is such a fool that she slept through it."
Helaena found herself on her chaise, ripped back to the present like knife rips through flesh. Her brothers stood over her – the brothers left in Westeros, that is – each sporting entirely different expressions. But they were not their own and just when she thought she might know their faces as she always had, they flickered in and out, becoming the boy in the North.
The state of his injuries were starker in the clarity of the real world. His eyes, so pleasantly blue against so much rot and filth, now appeared unnatural. His cheeks, pale. His hair, dull and sucked of all life.
She saw him for what he was.
A dead boy who spoke of things to come.
She would be wise to head his words.
Helaena blinked, trying to clear the image of the boy out of her head so she could focus on the present.
"You ripped off all your clothes again," Aegon said, unkindly, though his expression did not match his words. His eyes were narrowed, looking her up and down, as his lips tightened into a thin line. Her hand trailed down to the sheet that covered her modesty, pulling it just a little bit higher until it brushed the underside of her chin. "Mother would have a litter if she saw. I have half a mind to tell her, just for the trouble you've caused."
Helaena rolled her eyes and sat up, clutching her sheet to her chest. Her night dress had been discarded on the ground, threads sticking out at odd placed like she had ripped it off. Daeron, her littlest brother and the one she knew the least about, stuck close to Aegon's side. Tessarion clung to his small shoulders, almost too big now to ride the boy's shoulders. Soon, she would need to move to the Dragonpit and join the larger dragons. For now, she pressed in close to Daeron, blue scales shinning in the dim light from the moon.
She had slept the entire day away. Perhaps more.
Helaena could never be certain. Her mother tended to prefer she stay away from large celebrations. Better to let the world think she was what a Princess should be, rather than let the reality take hold.
"Look, Hel, what Tessarion fo-"
Helaena screamed, pulling her arm back just as Daeron touched her skin.
Tessarion flared her wings, letting out a roar that was no louder than a cat's. A little blip of smoke swirled out of her mouth, though it was quickly lost in the breeze.
"What? What did I do?"
Daeron tried to reach out again, face flushing as his eyes filled with tears.
"I don't…" She trailed off, looking at her skin. It looked no different than normal but it felt like it burned from within. "They…"
"I told you, Daeron, she is nothing but a freak. Mother told us to fetch her and fetch her we did. Leave her, before her strangeness rubs off on us." Aegon threw open the door to her room, trusting Daeron to follow. The boy lingered, rubbing his eyes to push away the tears that had yet to fall. Sweet though he may be, she knew he would not choose her over the greater allure of Aegon. But he stayed long enough, gripping his hands tightly in his lap as he looked over her face.
He did not know much of her dreams or visions, surely only what Aegon sneered when he bothered to spend enough time with him.
And now she feared she had forever poisoned him in that regard.
She longed so desperately to reach out and comfort him – to pull him close like an older sister was meant to do with a younger brother. But just as she tried to reach out to him the pain in her arm returned and she was forced to reach back entirely. Like an invisible hand had wrapped around her and griped her tight. And just like dragon fire, the touch burned straight through her, setting all her nerves alight.
She should have taken the opportunity while she had it.
Helaena would never touch Daeron again.
She knew would never touch anyone again without such unimaginable pain. A gift for the Stranger, most like.
She should have never pulled on that first thread of spidersilk.
It would only spell doom.
"It smells of cunt in here."
Alys Rivers was the picture of misery.
Mysaria tolerated her presence out of a curtesy, but her patience had grown thin as of late, and the waning days of the Stranger had set her on edge. Alys did not respect the Stranger any more than she respected any of the others and she made her disregard known. But she still did them the favor of gathering all the same.
Mysaria wished she wouldn't.
She would just as soon be rid of that damnable woman and her love of nauseating shades of green. But Melisandre insisted on her presence, as she had for over two decades, and Mysaria had learned long ago to not press an issue when Melisandre made that face.
The one with the pinched lips and wide eyes.
The one she was making at that exact moment as she turned around to face them both. Her focus has been skyward, towards the Keep and on, what Mysaria assumed, was the only remaining Targaryen child left to them. She was dressed for the occasion, though they were in a whore house and it did, in fact, smell of cunt, with her brilliant red hair curled down her back and her red dress threaded with gold. Alys was impervious to shame, however, and just as Melisandre turned her anger on her, she blazed on ahead.
Dressed in her green rags.
Foul demeanor the worst of it all.
"This is grim state of affairs. And entirely pointless." Alys pulled out a rolled bit of fabric, intending to smoke whatever it was and make the room smell worse than it already did.
It did smell horrendous, though Mysaria would never admit to such.
Men tended to want to meet the Stranger between the legs of a woman, even if that woman had kept a dozen other men company before them. Better to die pleasured than to die in misery, though that was a perspective that Mysaria could not understand.
To live, was to be in misery.
To die, was to be free.
"And why is that, Alys?" Mysaria asked, indulging Alys's bad mood in the vain hopes that it might move the evening along. They could return to their own affairs after, free of each other until the Maid's Days, and they did this nauseating dance once again.
"Because the boy has crossed the Narrow Sea," Alys said, as if it was the most obvious thing in all of Westeros. "And this girl has turned to madness."
"Madness is simply a gift that is not yet understood. I have been called mad more than enough to know the truth of it."
"Helaena has her purpose, Alys." Mysaria watched the woman in green, glowering as she began to pace around the room. "Just as you have yours."
"I'm to assume you did not mean such comparisons as some sort of offense."
"You may assume all you like."
"Wh-"
"Enough. Both of you." Melisandre's tone was sharp. "We have a purpose for this gathering, as we always do."
"It certainly is not honoring their gods."
"Their Gods are the reason we can exist without scrutiny. They are not ready for the truth."
"Fuck off, you fiery twat. Enough of your cryptic nonsense. Speak your words and tell your truths so that we may be done with this entirely and we can all return to our real purpose."
"Which is?" Mysaria asked, pouring herself a heavy glass of wine. "Asking for more money to pay your spies in Braavos?"
"They are not spies," Alys snarled, rounding on Mysaria.
"Faceless men, who lack the honor to do you bidding out in the open."
"And what of your little birds? A whore who became a whoremonger turned matron of the lost and the weary. They should build statues in your honor on the Street of Silk. Where would those souls be without you filling their bellies with your food and their minds with your bile?"
Mysaria gripped the delicate stem of her glass.
A bit tighter and she could snap it in two.
It would make quite the fetching knife if paired with the delicate skin just above her jugular.
"I speak for the common folk. You did as well, for a time. Or have you forgotten where we found you?"
"You did not find me, Worm. Melisandre did and I have played my part faithfully for years. I demand your respect."
Mysaria scoffed. "You will not have it. You are a kitchen witch, plucked from obscurity and gifted with glory beyond your ken. The boy is yours. If you are so stricken by his absence, then by all means, follow him to Essos. Perhaps there you will find your worth and see that it is little."
"You let her speak to me like this?" Alys turned her fury on Melisandre, lips pulled back like a boar.
"I let you both speak how you wish. We all have our parts. What does it matter if barbs are passed between us as long as we play them?"
"Your girl is across the Narrow Sea as well. Do you not worry for her? She owes you five more deaths."
"And I will have them when the time comes."
"That is not good enough! All this waiting and waiting and waiting, it is likely to drive me mad. Just as the two of chittering back and forth about spiders and rocks and runes. None of this matters. The boy is the one who holds the key, just as Aegon did."
"It has always been three. Just as it was with Aegon, Visenya, and Rhaenys, so too has the time come again. We are not to interfere." Melisandre spoke with finality, though Alys seemed little inclined to heed it. "Watch the boy as you like. Mysaria will tend to Helaena and I will see to Ophaella. We will speak no further of it this night. We must adhere to the Stranger."
"Helaena can pull on her silk all she wants. The power to change the future lies with the seed, not in spider eggs or the blood of the mother."
Mysaria felt the heat her blood before she registered the snap of the glass.
But she set it aside and prepared herself for a night of reverence. She was not as impertinent as Alys and thought she may not hold to the Gods of these lands, she held to its people and she would not tempt the Stranger to lays its gifts at the feet of one of her little birds.
She would see to Helaena in the morning, when the shadow had passed and she was rid of Alys Rivers once again.