This was supposed to be an Adara POV, but the setup was too critical so I'm leaving that for the next chapter.
Aemond was never one to rest easy, be it in mind or body.
Between the trials of his daily duties of a prince - flexible as those were for a mere second son who was third in line for the throne by dint of his father and king's willful blindness, undeserved favoritism and blatant weakness - and the nigh-religious training he plunged into every day in the courtyards of the Red- to make up for his... deformity, his sleep tended to be heavy and his rousings dull and unexceptional.
This time, however, was different.
And was the case with everything that wasn't bestowed upon him out of some misguided sense of pity or that he didn't choose to take for himself, the change was nothing welcome.
The first thing he registered was the hurt, a half-numb, thrumming ache running up and down his limbs and echoing in his skull in a way that had his breath catching sharply before he ever managed to crack open his eye.
He shifted in place with a groan, but it brought him no relief. His body felt heavy and moved as though it had been dipped in tar, and when at last he succeded in blinking himself awake, it was with an accompanying quiver so forceful he nearly bit his tongue off.
Gods, but he felt wretched.
And cold.
So much so that between the shivering and the swiftly growing throbbing in his skull, it took him several heartbeats and near as many dazed blinks to realize that he wasn't in his bed, in his chambers in the Red-keep, or anywhere he recognized at all.
It was as though he lay in an abyss of darkness, no light to speak of save for a low burning open flame set into a steep pit mere feet away from where he lay sprawled against a bed of earthy soil and hard rock. The air felt cold and dry against his lungs, yet somehow carried with it the scent of wet leaves and rain and something sharper and far less familiar to his senses.
A dungeon or a cave, then, or something of the sort.
who reigned over them would he have wound up in a cave?
Had he been imprisoned? Abducted? Him?
Absurd.
Where were his guards? His family? His mother and Halaena
Panic began to rear-
Vhagar.
His thoughts faltered.
The moment Aemond thought of his dragon, and registered her presence at the back of his mind, everything came back to him with all the force of a thunder strike.
Aegon's crowning. Grandfather's orders. Storm's End and Borros Baratheon. The bastard and the storm he'd chased him into.
And then-
Vhagar had frozen, impending kill forgotten, and it hadn't been Aemond's desperate, frenzied pleading that had slated her bloodlust.
No, it had been fear, and fool that he had been in that moment, he'd not even deigned to consider that it was not his alone, too seized in the relief that he hadn't started the inevitable war to come before it fell upon them.
He barely even saw it.
Wings that blotted out the sky, crystalline teeth like spears hurtling towards him, framed in a maw so massive the bastard could have flown his mummer's farce of a dragon down its length and still had room for more.
They were driven through the clouds before Aemond even felt the horrendous clash, an uncomprehending scream strangled in his throat
And then came the cold, in a wave as unrelenting as the tides, a cold so great it burned, froze his breath in his lungs and cast him and Vhagar both from the skies and back into the storm below-
He came back to himself with a sharp inhale as the memory of the sickening fall and the abrupt blackness sweeping over him and the pain in his head went white-hot and molten.
It lasted only long enough for him to gasp out in agony before it surged back, but that was enough for his vision to blur out from the agony. That was why it took far longer than it should have for him to realize that he was no longer alone in the dark.
He went dead-still when the girl stepped into the light of the flames, slipping out of the darkness like a ghost.
She certainly looked the part, and that she looked to be even younger than he himself was only made it more pronounced.
She was pale, far too pale. Aemond was as Targaryen as they come and even his complexion didn't match that shade of milk-white, made all the more pronounced by the brilliant golden hair that framed her face and trailed down past her shoulders and sides, sleek and glinting even in the dim light that reflected off of it.
An eerie contrast, striking and impossible to miss with her sharp features and set jaw, but it was her eyes that had Aemond freezing in an emotion he refused to name. Blue like the northern he saw only when Vhagar ascended far past the clouds and let him see all there was to see across the heavens.
Aemond met those eyes, brilliant, otherworldy blue, and knew.
"It was you."
His voice was a dry, horrible rasp, rich with realization and the very start of indignant horrible fury.
Their fall. That beast that caused it. It was hers.
He didn't how he understood it for truth, but it was. The knowledge slipped into his mind like quicksand, sealing in the cracks of his incomprehension and building pressure fit enough to burst. He knew it with all the certainty of his bond with Vhagar
"It was you." He repeated, teeth barred into a snarl that sapped the last of his strength and sent him into a fit of coughs so savage it felt as though he was hacking up a lung and rending his throat bloody.
She didn't respond, her face utterly devoid of emotion or tell.
Her expression didn't even flicker.
Somehow, that was more infuriating than any insult he'd ever taken.
"Is he ready?"
When she spoke, she did so with a voice that was more a whisper of wind than a voice, faint and low and
"No."
How pathetic it was that he couldn't even turn his head to catch sight of the second speaker in the shadows.
"You told me you would wake him." The girl said, and her eyes never left him for all that she did not acknowledge him. "He is awake."
"But he is not ready."
"It has been days."
Days?
"And it will be longer still. He is not like you, none are. The winter chill has no home in his flesh as it does yours, yet it lingers all the same and he is made lesser for it. He's of no use to you as his now."
Lesser? Of no use?
The fury came to a boil.
"How dare-!?"
He managed to spit out those two words before his voice broke, fuelled as he was by rage, and he devolved into another round of brutal coughs.
And all the while, the conversation for which he had no understanding and already a great and boundless hate carried on uninterrupted.
"And the other?"
"His suffering is greater still, and he will take longer to regain his strength if he ever does at all. Your creature should not have-"
Finally, at last, the girl's expression changed.
Without warning, her expression darkened with a burst of infinitesimal wrath.
It robbed Aemond of his own just as swiftly.
"You will not fault Frostsinger in my presence."
There was a cold, stilted pause. Her eyes were lit up in her anger and the air itself seemed to quiver and shy away from her.
"I meant no offense."
"You would have been foolish to."
Another pause followed, and Aemond breathed out at last when the anger fled and her mask of emotionless impassivity returned.
"It was his own fault. That he dove after one who was undeserving of it was his own error" Her eyes flickered to Aemond, just as dismissive, and back again. "Frostsinger is not to blame for reckless stupidity."
"Foolish." the voice agreed. "Or brave, perhaps."
"They're one and the same, and just as costly." Her voice tinted with something else Aemond recognized despite himself, an old, old, bitterness that he'd lived and breathed for years and still did to this day. "I would know."
She took one last look at Aemond - whose mind had once again fallen into a helpless daze as the implications of what, of who, they were speaking of began to sink in - and then turned away as her form melted into the shadows.
"Have him on his feet by the time I return, Green One, or I'll drag him if I have to."
And then she was gone.
Aemond made to cry out, to rage against this final, humiliating dismissal, but he'd regained no strength in the moments past, and blackness was overtaking him even before unknown hands seized him and dragged him further into the dark.
The last thing he saw was a pair of yellow eyes, set into brown, leathery skin, and he slipped into oblivion even as his mouth course hands pried his mouth open and poured broth and something altogether darker down his throat.
...
When Aemond slept, he dreamt as he never had before.
He saw a silver-haired and violet-eyed man in a shirt of black scale wearing a familiar crown of Valyrian steel and studded rubies. In one hand, he held Blackfyre, and in the other, he pointed North, behind Aemond.
"From my blood come the Prince Who Was Promised, and his shall be the Song of Ice and Fire."
When he turned, he found himself buffeted by sharp winds and swirling snows.
Another man waiting for him in the eye of the storm, one who looked nothing like the last.
He was dark of hair and grey-eyed, dressed in boiled leathers and a fur cloak of purest black. A pale scar dragged across the length of his left eye, but the eye itself was undamaged, and both were fixed on Aemond with a burning intensity.
"My song is undone. I am no more" The stranger smiled, an aching, foreboding relief in his eyes. "It is your burden to bear now, oh would-be kinslayer. You and your will stand strong, or you'll not stand at all when the darkness rides down from the north and claims you all."
He turned around and walked into the snowstorm, his figure vanishing into the darkness beyond.
"Be ready."
It did not end there.
A shadow emerged from the darkness ahead and stood in front of Aemond. Tall, it was, and gaunt and hard as old bones, with flesh pale as milk. Its armor seemed to change color as it moved; here it was white as new-fallen snow, there black as shadow. The patterns ran like moonlight on water with every step it took, and take them it did even as more emerged behind it.
Ten, a hundred, a thousand, even more.
All marched forward, towards the light, towards Aemond, eyes a haunting, soulless blue.
He tried to rear back as the first lunged for him, but he could not move. Not when it seized him by the throat with one hand, and not when it drove its other through his chest and tore at his flesh without mercy.
Soon, the others came for him too, undeterred by desperate scrabble and his screams.
He screamed and screamed unto the end, but it was all for naught, for there was no one left to hear.
...
When he gasped awake and opened his eye, moments or days or even years later, he didn't have the wits to now, he found himself heaving on the same hard ground as before.
His body was stronger. His strength returned, at least in part, and the chill that had all but crippled him was gone.
But it meant nothing then, for when he looked up, he found Lucerys Velaryon standing over him, eyes wide frenzied, face mottled in fury and black frostbite burns, with a heavy rock held high above him in a furious, two-handed grip.
On instinct alone, Aemond moved-
And the rock came down.
...
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