sapphyre | 𝔄𝔯𝔦𝔰𝔢 𝔫𝔬𝔴 𝔶𝔢 𝔗𝔞𝔯𝔫𝔦𝔰𝔥𝔢𝔡 𝔶𝔢 𝔡𝔢𝔞𝔡 𝔴𝔥𝔬 𝔶𝔢𝔱 𝔩𝔦𝔳𝔢

[ Dark Sister left a plucking sting, it's the first thing he feels when he wakes twitching on one side of his face. The phantom weight sticking him to some stony damp floor. His eye opens, drawing up the long warble-patterned shaft of the Valyrian blade towering alongside his face. Many thoughts race through in that split second, recounting the moments tallied before.

Wrestling with his riding chains as the rip-roar of wind and dragons cries spiral around. The feeling of his throat closing up as though jaws tightened around them. The light glinting off the blade and the wild look in Daemon's eyes before plunging into darkness.

His jerk into motion is unpretty, fighting himself upright to find an empty ruin. The light of day sprinkling in from a partially collapsed roof. No dragons. No Daemon. Just a familiar blade neatly wedged into the floorboard beside him. Naught a soul in the dust of empty pews.

They'd fallen into the God's eye, that he knows for certain. Perhaps plunged through it into the heavens and hells themselves? If he'd any reservations about surviving before, stepping outside the small dilapidated chapel soon enough cleared up any confusion. In all the books he'd devoured in the Red Keep, no maester had recorded a shattered land lit by a golden tree. But no maester had gone to death and back.

With every foot forward bred deeper curiosity. The light itself flirting a path marred with blood and the distant stench of corpses. A woman clad in robes he'd never seen in Westeros lies crumpled and stiffened. No answers, only more questions. Only more death in a place thought to be after death itself. From the top of the hill, he watches a patrol crossing down below that held no banners he recognized. There were no Greens nor Blacks here nor any other house. Instead of pressing further, he keeps to the shade of the grave upon the hill. Observing until the day's light begins to fade.

It's then he feels the heat on his neck begin to rise. Like a trickling of fire. Thinking now for a moment if he had plunged here, had not his uncle too?

Looking back at the lonely chapel on the shattered hill, almost expecting for someone to be standing there. There is no one, at least no one from this vantage, but the weight of an inevitability begins to haunt him. How he knows for certain, beyond the twisting in his gut, he can't explain. Instead of indulging this curiosity, he drives himself from it. Eye clamoring across the fading light in the small valley for somewhere else to go. Another ruined chapel on a hill. A fine vantage to watch the same path he'd just come through. Should anyone else awake from certain death and go down the same path, he can watch and wait for them there.]

[ The sept is cold and dark, and it has many hidden paths behind heavy, jammed doors. Outside, the wind howls, and he thinks of the Vale; from narrow windows he sees violet skies and the gold glow of strange branches, and he thinks of Quohor. Someone has moved him.

A scraping door, a descent over stairs. Men in cobbled-together armor and milk-white masks that obscure their features. He has no ears to hear them, everything sounds like faint ringing, still, and it doesn't matter if hands are reaching out to him to say Wait, brother, arisen, he is armed and he is fucking furious because he has nothing else to be—

For weeks now there has been a collapsing star in his heart, draining all fire and light, leaving him a charred, cold husk; his blood demands a future he cannot provide, no matter how hard he fights. House Targaryen has squandered its glory, splitting itself with outsider marriages and being too long complacent in a foreign land that has never fully conceded to them. The Conqueror should have eradicated the Faith of the Seven, he and his queens should have annihilated any who protested, they should have sent every dragon to the edge of Dorne and scalded a great moat of lava between their lands.

Why not. They're mortal but they aren't men. Not even gods have a say in Targaryen affairs. They've been fools to play along at peasant games.

Has he died? He thinks he saw Nettles, but he thinks he saw Rhaenyra, too. The only two certain occurrences have been driving Dark Sister through his nephew's skull - right into the decorated cavity of the eye he's been so precious about losing, eye for an eye, you were so obsessed, how's this, a son for a son - and feeling the life leave Caraxes. That had stopped him. His great friend, the other part of his soul. The dragon had managed to drag him from the lake, and Daemon lay shuddering, coughing, feeling as though every bone in his body had been broken by the fall to the water. Hands weakly scrabbling at ruined scales through the stench of blood and entrails.

No Vhagar, no Aemond. Behind them, the surface of the water churned to stillness, and with it went Caraxes, and Daemon's consciousness.

—No tension is vented in violence, and he remains as he is, hollow, devouring. One of the men had a satchel full of fingers and peeled eyeballs. The mask-wearer dies slowly. He is challenging, and yet inspires no other feeling.

When Daemon emerges into the chapel yard, black-clad and still caked in dried gore and lake water, there's red on his face, in his bone-white hair, and trailing after him. A severed head and its blank mask still wrapped around it hangs from his left hand, all of it sitting strangely in the night's uncanny illumination.

He takes deep, slow breaths. And wonders where he is. ]

[ The time spent in passing crawls by excruciatingly slow. Left to be consumed with nothing but his thoughts. Now and then it pulls from him like the tide, drawing his eye back to the paled structure beyond the trees. Sated to find nothing. His head rests back against the stony outcrop of the ruin he'd taken perch on. Still damp in the crevices under his gilded armor. Still aching. It sinks deeper into his bones the longer he stays in one place, but he does not abandon his watch.

Aemond does not know how long it takes nor how long a night passes in strange lands. His thoughts do nothing to temper the storm in his heart. Bitterness cyclones around the pieces of a game already played and the pieces left behind. While he sits no more useful than a severed arm to the family left behind.

Mayhaps that is why he is waiting, adamant on this feeling singing deep in the mire of his gut. If Daemon was here or not, if he survived or not. A man who has equally shed blood, slayed kin, should deserve to rot in the same spire. If his uncle did not show, that would mean he lived. If he didn't show, Aemond had dug himself elbows deep in the embers of the Riverlands for nothing. To have lost all for nothing.

At last, his attention crests once more to find a pale-haired figure out amongst the hill. His hands still from a long meddlesome fiddle along the scaled pommel of Dark Sister, grasping it into his dominant hand as he scales down the broken stones of his perch into the grass. Rounding about the shade of the ruins. The storm raging in his mind seems to cease, drawn into the eye of white-hot rage. He feels naught satisfaction or grief, only the prickling memory of a blade and the deepest urge to return it in kind.

An eye for an eye. A head for a head..

For all his vantages he might have at that moment, he leaves them all behind stepping plain into the open. His hair drawn back and still half wild , blisteringly bright against his blackened armor. His body screaming with every step, greaves clinking in his saunter.]

Bless the Father for his sending you here, Uncle. [ He greets, heat swelling in his chest as his blade remains aloft at his side. His eye flickers down a moment to the dripping head still clutched in one hand. ] We have matters left unsorted.

[ Perhaps in another world, the dreamy poets were right, and Daemon was gathered away from the water by his young lover. He and Nettles flew far away, past the Shadow Lands to the east, and other grand chapters of a story that's shaken free of Westeros and its kingdoms are written.

In this world, Daemon Targaryen has very much died.

Footsteps, and a voice now familiar. The severed head in his hand dematerializes in a gold shimmer that matches the light of the great tree towering above them, fracturing and turning to glowing dust, rising up from his side and into nothingness; he barely looks at it, his gaze fixed instead on his nephew and his

surprisingly intact face.

Hm.

A pull of curiosity tugs at him, but it's as if it's through layers of wool. He feels the cold, he feels the blood splattered on him, and little else seems real. The depth of his anger has split him so soundly that he's all the way back to deadly calm, the edges of his vision glassy and too-quick. For a moment he remains silent, staring at the younger prince, feeling his tangled hair shift in the frigid breeze. ]

If the Father sent us both somewhere, [ he says at last, ] isn't that quite the insult upon you?

[ Hell of a thing to do to someone who allegedly believed. His gaze scrapes over him, intense enough to be a physical touch. Horribly, he smiles. ]

Did you pull her out of your head, I wonder.

[ For a barb that should graze off him like a dull arrow tip to steel, the point of his jaw grinds forward and back to keep his tongue from lashing. Aemond's chin rises as if to scale down upon the consort of a whoring usurper.

The full weight of the world they've found themselves in had yet to fully penetrate barriers of reason, the pieces tossed up into the wind and yet to fall. There are many ways the young prince knows he has done better, but also a deep tepid knowing that he'd become no better.

He wants of justice, not absolution. It's worth the price.

The urge to propel himself forward into this gravity of anger keeps him at his heels. Though wrapped in a near absolute stillness, he itches for the moment to come. Only his fingertips dance along the handle grip of his lovingly gifted sword as though they'd been tickled under the drag his uncle's gaze.]

Would you like to learn how it feels? [ He offers, most generously. A slight sway as his weight shifts from one foot to the other. Impatience boiling low and deep for the levy between them to break. How might it feel to be on the giving end when Valyrian steel cuts through a man like warmed butter. To leave him kissed with the same infernal pounding in his head. The corner of his lip twinges upright with delight.] I'd be happy to return the kindness.

[ Information pieces itself together, but Daemon still feels like he's looking at it from afar. It is a little bit like a strange dream— a problem appearing from the mist in a surprising state, wishing to repay an unkindness. He's had such nocturnal visions now and again, but they're rare, as he is not often burdened by guilt for any of his trespasses. Beyond that, it suggests to him that he did kill Aemond (there is simply no surviving a blade all the way through the brain), and that, coupled with his own lack of shattered bones, may mean they are in the world of the dead.

Very funny that the boy has kept the sword.

Daemon has his dagger, not Valyrian steel but a well-trusted thing that's tasted more blood than Aemond's seen in his life, and a longsword nicked off one of his victims below the chapel. Both are at risk for being cut through if Dark Sister gets them at the correct angle with the right amount of force, but Daemon's been using the thing since he was sixteen, and he learned to master her against Blackfyre. He knows each intimate trick.

Hands spread, he steps back. Giving himself some space to slide the unremarkable blade from its place casually tucked into his belt. He twists the hilt in his hand, letting it spin in place.

Arms still out, as if in a mocking bow, an invitation— ]

Try.

[ It is one thing to know intimately of one's exploits, their victories in tourneys and battles. It is another to experience them first hand, to know the way they move and command their blade. Knowing how many fights Daemon has won only ever piqued a curiosity. Not even too long ago, he could have even held some sort of admiration for his father's infamous brother. But the knowledge Aemond carries is as good as dog shit here. Their last fight had been in the sky between dragons. When the blade came, he had been placed at a disadvantage. Only hollow promises that might serve to ripple his nerves if he still had something to lose. Now he has nothing.

A little noise of amusement hums in Aemond's throat. Dark Sister circling as he winds his wrist. She is a much lighter blade than he is accustomed to, a testament of the steel. The sword does not feel like an extension of himself, it feels like nothing. A feather-weight he's not used to controlling. His only choice is to learn.

It does not stop the prince from kicking forward to take point and make a swing for Daemon's head. A hit surely not to land this is how the dance begins.]

[ He watches Aemond move - if it is Aemond, and not a dream - as though it's happening slower than it really is, even though he knows that wielding Dark Sister propels one to move quicker. She's too light, between being forged for a woman and the inherent magic of Valyrian steel. The swing is competent enough, as far as opening broadsides go.

Of course, he just leans back.

Daemon is bad at tourneys, and good in real fights. A potential conundrum for an opponent trained by a knight with integrity. No inclination towards rules or forms, and reflexes honed by war and reckless living. He knows just where to move to ensure that Aemond's next press forward goes far afield, and how to knock the back of his elbow with the flat of his blade without catching anything off the return strike. A warning, and he'll find out very soon, probably, how much he regrets not just cutting his arm off, there.

Still, there's something detached about him. Daemon looks at Aemond and is angry, but can't quite focus that anger. He doesn't know where the fuck he is, or why they're doing this. If it's a dream, he doesn't care, and if they're dead—

Hah. He doesn't care, even if it's true. ]

Come now, didn't Cole teach you anything? [ Daemon circles him with leisurely paces. ] He couldn't have spent all his time crying about being rejected by Rhaenyra.

[ The response he expects is not the patronizing one he receives. Little more than a guiding tap that rubs salt into an old wound. The frustration is there, gently mounting as he falls back. A scoff shudders out of him as he falls into step, mirroring Daemon's tracing through the dirt and weeds.

The anger he feels remains palpable, pulsing. Though the anger he sees in the other man is not yet directed at him. He has somehow not earned it yet. But he is just a little boy in the training yard, not yet deserving to swing metal at anything but a cloth stuffed with hay.

You are here because of me.

His next advance comes more aggressive, though the swing of his sword remains predictable. Allowing the blades to collide, pressing further for Daemon's counter to push them together. Instead of disengage immediately, he throws himself bodily forward to throw his elbow into the other man's face. A taunt.]

I do wonder how your bitch queen is faring with you dead, [ he speaks as he draws back. Come to him, show him what it is to fight then. ] How long she may hold the throne without her latest attack dog.

As far as you and I are concerned, forever.

[ How fortunate, that they careened down while the only heir Viserys ever declared (and the only child whose name Viserys could ever remember) held King's Landing. Unless their dreamworld is infringed upon by someone from a year out, it'll remain a mystery that's solved by Queen Rhaenyra's enduring victory, and with that drunken, idiot boy defiling the Conqueror's crown slithering away to rot to death in a cave.

Daemon counters the advance, even though he can feel the way the ordinary steel of his blade threatens to give way. He slams the heel of his offhand palm into the fuse of Aemond's raidus and ulna bones when he tries to get an elbow in at him, punishing him for trying to get in close. ]

Vhagar was your cunt brother's only hope, and you've wasted her chasing after me. What's left, sweet nephew?

[ Half their army had deserted already, if reports were to be believed, and Rhaenyra has the full weight of the north bearing down for her. She doesn't need Daemon at all. She never did.

(He pretends it doesn't gut him.) ]

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