Rhaegar
"My king?"
Rhaegar ceased twiddling the stone and slipped it into the pouch fastened to the belt at his surcoat's waist. His hand burned faintly again, as though tiny sparks were tickling tiresomely the inside of his palm. He turned his head to see Arthur Dayne's face, pale in the light of the torch, which flickering shadow was moving along with them deeper into the cave, darting and writhing upon its wall like a thing alive. His comrade and friend looked at him warily, unsurely, almost fearfully.
Fear was so unlike the Sword of the Morning that in another time it might have left Rhaegar marveling. Now he did scarcely care. His thoughts were misty, drifting far, far away.
"Forgive my boldness, my king," Arthur went on, "but do you truly think this wise? You have kingdom to rule, its troubles to mend... Is it wise to leave the Iron Throne now, while your messengers to Stark are doubtless already on their way back to King's Landing? Should you not remain there, to hear out their tidings anon, rather than wander these ruins and caverns?"
Rhaegar smiled faintly, barely heeding his words. Bats flitted above them, their wings stirring the air like banners. He tilted his head back, his eyes following their flight. Targaryen banners, Stark banners, Baratheons' and Lannisters', Martells' and Arryns', and yet others, and others - they all fluttered whilst the rebellion, only to sink in blood thereafter, devoured by it like carrion by worms. So many graves, so many barrows, yet hers was nowhere to be found. Where is her grave?
"We have known each other far too long for you to incessantly pardon me and name me king," he said smoothly.
"Therefore?" the knight insisted. Rhaegar felt almost bored.
Who is Brandon Stark?, he mused lingeringly, as if trying to unearth the answer from the fathomless mine of his memory. Ah! He is her brother, and I have ever somehow believed in the strong North. If he so desires its independence, why should I not grant it to him as a gift?
Where is her grave? For all that lived once and died must surely have a grave somewhere.
"The Hand remains in King's Landing," he replied to Arthur at last, his tone nigh carefree, as though that single sentence resolve all matters.
"I'd not wager a groat for the loyalty of Tywin Lannister," his comrade spat with contempt. "He agreed to send his own son to the Wall without so much as a flicker of hesitation. If a man can so easily sacrifice his own blood, is there any soul left whom he would not betray when needed?"
"Yet, it is his daughter they now name queen." Rhaegar had never, not once, forced himself to call Cersei his wife, not even in the silence of his own thoughts, let alone aloud. There was something foul in that, well-nigh lothsome, like the stench of corpse left to decay. All my deeds were wicked, he repeated again to himself, his fingers clawing idly at the palm of his hand, hidden beneath the folds of his silk mantle, itching and burning.
"The king's interest is in Lannisters' interest, and the Lannisters' interest is what concerns my Hand foremost," he told Arthur. "And ask me not to pity Tywin's son. Even after years, I shall not."
"I do not," Arthur replied, albeit reluctantly. He had once borne a fondness for the boy Jaime Lannister had erstwhile been - Rhaegar knew this well - and that sentiment yet lingered in him, mayhaps. Memory is a cruel and wearying thing, Rhaegar had long believed. "I say only that never should one trust a man who has betrayed his own son. I-"
"You would never betray me, nor act against me, even now, when you deem me mad." Rhaegar glanced at his companion and smiled softly. Suddenly, for a reason unknown to himself, he felt as light as a feather, as though soaring high above the seas on the back of one of the Targaryens' olde dragons, and his heart seemed just as unburdened. "Therefore you now wander Summerhall's ruins and antres along with me, though surely you have little taste for it."
The cave's passage was drawing to an end, and from an opening shaped like a doorway with but a single, phantom wing, pale light began to come through, whiter and more veiled than the light of the torch Arthur carried aloft. There are stairs there, the very same I saw in the dream, Rhaegar was almost certain, and then, for the third time, yet less grimly now and with a flicker of something newly stirring within him, he asked himself: Where is her grave? What if he should ask me this?
"Brandon Stark sacrificed his own brother as well," he then said thoughtfully, ere they reached the top of the stairs.
Arthur Dayne raised his brows. "Brandon Stark sacrificed no one, nor anything. You gave him the North freely and for nought, before he even thought to ask for it."
Was it truly so?, Rhaegar tried to remember. Perchance. Her grave, the one that is nowhere, bound us together. Or perchance not: it bound me to the Starks. Brandon Stark it only made more angry.
"I have always believed the North should be strong," he said aloud, repeating his earlier thought, yet his voice carried such indifference that he startled even himself. How little all this stirs me. I may think only of these stairs leading down, only of them! "And it shan't be without Starks in Winterfell."
The stairs were verily there, just as they had been in his dream: stone and uneven, their steps as narrow as they themselves were broad. As he and Arthur began to descend, it eftsoons seemed to Rhaegar that the stairs had no end. Then, all at once, he began to hear sounds, and erelong he realised it was music, also this very same he had heard in dreams. Am I the one playing and she the one listening? Yet no... he thought he had never in his life listened to anything so beautiful, that there was nought beyond this music, boundlessly sorrowful and boundlessly sweet. Its mournful sweetness filled his soul, every corner of it, dispelling the emptiness. There were no thoughts left, as if he had lost the ability to think. There was only the music, all through him, so beautiful, and Rhaegar willed do anything to find its source...
Is Arthur hearing that as well? With difficulty, as though awakening, he became aware that the knight had halted upon the stairs and was gazing at him with alarm. They had halted, it seemed, yet Rhaegar remembered not wherefore.
"What do you seek here, Rhaegar?" his friend asked quietly.
"The dead," he answered simply and absentmindedly. Those promised me by the one I keep seeing in dreams. Yet whom did he promise me? Whom did I desire? Not my wife... But who was my wife, and who was not? Who was my child, and who was not?
Now a song began to be sung with the music, that same queer, childlike melody - such as only a wraith might croon over an infant's cradle, so grim and brooding was it - that Rhaegar had heard in by nights in his mind therebefore many a time:
Elf-child fled the dragon's head,
holding the glass in his hand
that echo made his brand.
The child looked once,
he saw the sun,
but the echo kept quiet
and the dragon flied by it.
The child looked twice,
he saw the star,
but the echo kept quiet
and the dragon flied by it.
So he tried it the time that was last,
and he saw himself in the glass.
Then the echo yelled
to the dragon's despair.
It was a woman's voice that sang it, yet Rhaegar might not distinguish it. Ah, why could he never, never distinguish it?
"The dead ought to remain dead," Arthur said, glancing uneasily down the stairs. "You ought to leave them their peace and take your own, holding fast to it, to live."
"Dead should stay dead, you say," Rhaegar mused. "Yet what of those who are dead while still living?"
Arthur answered not, nor did he move further. Therefor Rhaegar took the torch from his hand and strode ahead, going first now. The stairs, at last, had their end, that opened up before them into another cavern: taller, yet far smaller than the one they had traversed before. The same pale light they had glimpsed earlier now illuminated the heavy, dense air within.
Atop one of the underground stones sat a huge bat, a beast of unfathomable for its kind size, blacker than the blackest night, unmoving, its equally black eyes fixed upon them, as though it wished to pierce their souls with its gaze like with daggers. Yet ah, that gaze!.. It was not the gaze of an animal, Rhaegar was sure. The moment he thought it, the bat, in the blink of an eye, ceased to be a bat, and stood before them as a man, his hair dark and his face fair and radiant as the moon.
Arthur's grey eyes grew round as coins, and in an instant, his hand flew back to Dawn's hilt.
"Don't!" Rhaegar stopped him, smiling. "Wait!"
The first part of Rhaegar's chap to let you know I'm not dead and neither is the story :) Next part should be much sooner than the last ones! Ty for reading!