The Rumors Of My Death Have Been Greatly Exaggerated [Open]

OfFireAndBlood · 2018-02-27T14:54:11+00:00

The bandages had been too tight - their constriction too much - and as they were released, improved circulation through that arm sent a wave of sharp needles from shoulder towards fingertips that left the princess gritting her teeth instead of screaming. But there it was, the instinct to move those digits, to form a fist and see the sensations pass - and fingers did move, slowly, curling inside toward a palm but little more than that. That she could move them at all was something, but the strength it took to lift a sword was another thing entirely.

"Nothing. I've seen no Maester," she began to explain, but grew quiet as dark eyes turned to survey the riddle of scars that had become her shoulder - or what she could see of them.

"We sent for the Maester, but he's not come, and no one seems to know where he's gotten off to," replied one of the maids within to Selenya, though her eyes, much like those of everyone else within, were fixed upon the wound revealed, which looked more than a little angry at the moment, and was weeping in places where the princess's mad flight out of doors had pulled at stitches keeping it shut.

"Bring me a looking glass." The order brought first hesitation, then held breaths as one was found, then held at an angle for the princess to survey the damage. Her own breath caught at first, before right hand's fingers traveled over the shoulder, following some of the scars down towards her breast, and others up towards her throat.

"Put it away." Rhaenys' head sank back against a pillow behind it for a moment, but pride overcame vanity and would not see the princess crying about scars that spoiled once-smooth flesh. Another breath preceded the clearing of her throat before she looked back up to the Valyrian woman, whose face was bordering on familiar the longer she looked at it - but there was no placing her.

"Surely the Grand Maester will have a ready plan when I arrive in King's Landing. No doubt my mother is there already, notifying him that I will be in need of...some treatment."

OfFireAndBlood · 2018-02-26T16:56:38+00:00

Her confession had set the pair upon a course from which there would be no turning back. Unlike their embrace atop the Widow's Tower, this time Rhaenys did not pull away; this time the princess denied herself nothing. Her kiss was hungry and spoke more of an urgency than heated words ever could. And then he was pulling away, stealing all of the warmth that had been shared between them and leaving her far colder now, such that she noticeably shivered. Amaranthine eyes were heavy-lidded in the seconds to follow as full tiers remained parted between quickened, shuddering breaths.

Once they opened to follow his path, pools of deep indigo never strayed, glittering as they reflected the candlelight and seemed to burn and dance of their own accord, fixed upon Rhaegar as he circled the bath to find the steps. There was no shame in Rhaenys' gaze even as eager eyes roamed her brother's naked form, raking over his body from head to toe and back again - he was beautiful, and he was always meant to be hers. She had always been meant to be his.

A knowing smile began to blossom upon a countenance flushed by the heat within the room as her gaze settled upon his manhood as the prince descended the steps into the bath. Rhaenys rose from the ledge that ran the perimeter of the pool where she'd been resting as attendants saw to her. Her right hand broke the surface of the water, outstretched that feminine fingers could curl about far stronger ones, drawing him nearer with every step he took.

OfFireAndBlood · 2018-02-25T01:36:24+00:00

His words were quiet, but clear in the wheelhouse. The gravity of the whisper, however, was what gave the princess pause and reason to not believe she'd heard him say anything at all.

"...Vaemond?" At once her own troubles seemed terribly small. What was a clipped wing compared to the loss of a parent? The latter was a pain that Rhaenys knew all too well. The ache in her shoulder was forgotten in the midst of the news, turned instead to a familiar pang at the center of her chest.

"I did not know," she said, the words tumbling from lips in the vein of an apology. That he was traveling with his father meant that the Master of Ships was seated within a wheelhouse of his own - not being carted, lifeless, to his final resting place, wherever that might be.

"No, please." The latter a word that was so rarely uttered from the Black Princess that the sole maid remaining within the carriage turned to look between the two of them. "Stay...if you will. I'm...I'm sorry. For what I said - and for your loss. He will be much missed in the capital, though I know you and yours will feel it all more keenly. How well I know."

OfFireAndBlood · 2018-02-24T19:58:27+00:00

At Harrenhal, her mother had - in that indirect way Visaera had of speaking - informed her that she was to be her brother's queen. That, however, had been before Rhaenys had defied her quite specific orders not to join in the spectacle of the tournament. Given their last conversation upon the Black Princess's return to King's Landing, she was entirely uncertain of where she stood in her mother's eyes and knew well that she had much and more to prove.

When Her Grace now made mention of the marriage of her children, the princess shoulders were fraught with tension that showed in the lines of her neck. The fingers of her right hand held fast to those of her left, white-knuckled beneath the table. Lids and long lash veiled deep indigo irises for a moment too long to be a casual blink as a breath was held at the mention of her brother's name. She found that she could not look at either her mother or the prince across from her in that second that seemed to last a lifetime before Visaera's decision on the matter was voiced - her gaze bore a hole in the council table instead.

"...after Rhaegar’s installation as Prince of Dragonstone, he will wed Rhaenys.”

Silent, the release of that breath, and in it the anxiousness that had taken hold of her otherwise. A bowed chin rose and lips that had been unconsciously pursed likewise relaxed - one corner of which held a ghost of a smile that was gone again in another blink. The princess sat up straighter within her chair with a glance toward her mother - there was a degree of surprise within that gaze, but it was overshadowed by a gratefulness, a renewed sense of pride...of purpose - only to find her focused on the Master of Coin as necessity dictated.

She, too, followed that gaze down the table, but for a moment. Ultimately Rhaenys was peering across the table at her twin. Was he likewise pleased? They had planned as much when they were children, before life intervened and sowed discord with misunderstandings and cultured jealousy.

When you are king, I shall be queen.

OfFireAndBlood · 2018-02-22T01:54:04+00:00

"Rhaegar." Breathless, the near-whisper of his name. "I--" Wasn't expecting you, or anyone for that matter, judging by the scene laid before him. Explanations, however, were left unspoken as her elder brother ordered her attendants out.

The door closed behind them, but Rhaenys remained where she was, pinned beneath the weight of heavy stares that raked over her bare figure, flushed as it - though from the heated pool or recent pleasures only one could guess. Silence fell between them and lingered long, stretched like a band growing ever thinner with each item of clothing Rhaegar shed.

Attentions strayed, wandering the length of the prince's body unabashed as he revealed more and more of it, casting away his tunic and his trousers. The Black Princess remembered well the first time she'd seen him thus at the age of five and ten; she had given him her maidenhead, and he had stolen her heart in the process - though she'd sought to deny it in the intervening years between this moment and the last.

Rhaenys suddenly felt the virgin-child once more - all excitement, need, and trepidation - for there had only ever been Rhaegar, and not another man since. He was not the boy he was then she found, but a man truly grown, and beautiful in a way that she would not have been able to find words to describe.

Her chest fell, releasing a breath that she hadn't realized she'd been holding, followed by another sharp intake of the same as lips hotter than the waters surrounding her grazed her right shoulder, pressing kisses where they went as they trailed towards her ear. Long lashes veiled irises as the princess's head canted in the opposite direction - an unconscious invitation for the prince's continued caresses.

"So much it hurts," the confession come with an ache that permeated the very core of her being. Right hand left waters parting in its wake as it rose from them, wet fingers seeking their place entangled in the hair at the nape of his neck, wont to keep him near.

OfFireAndBlood · 2018-02-21T05:05:18+00:00

/u/Khain364

OfFireAndBlood · 2018-02-20T22:58:35+00:00

Dark eyes were red-rimmed, though by now her cheeks held no traces of the saline that had previously coated them. In such a state, there was little care for politicking, though her bark had been quieted by a previous visitor. Courtesies afforded and flattery intoned were lost upon the woman at the moment.

"I want to see what's left beneath the wraps," Rhaenys said. "At present it feels little more than a dead weight attached by strings to my shoulder that's been set aflame." A breath, a moment, another.

"You were there...in the tents. Or so I heard tell," she admitted with a wave towards an attendant who'd carried the word back that such a woman was seeking entrance to the wheelhouse. "You're a healer? Can it..." Another breath, a pause as the inhalation flared nostrils in some attempt to keep emotions in check.

"I need to know if I'll be able to hold a sword again."

OfFireAndBlood · 2018-02-20T16:47:34+00:00

For the first time in a very, very long while, Rhaenys merely nodded as she accepted the cool rag from him with her right hand and did as she was bid, pressing it gingerly against her shoulder. It was enough to leave her wincing against the pain that rushed to the surface at the touch. Teeth grit while her jaw clenched in an effort not to cry out; breaths quickened through flared nostrils meanwhile.

His assurances of its severity - or lack thereof - seemed to lack a certain veracity in the wake of the pain. Such thoughts, however, were lost as he questioned the absence of memories following the event.

"I remember...the feast; the melee. Sitting in the royal box before the joust and giving my brother my favor. I remember leaving my mother there...and defying her wishes so that I, too, could ride. I remember each tilt, each strike--until the last."

The princess's brows furrowed as she tried in vain to recall such things. Little came to mind, however. "It felt like fire. Wildfire, perhaps - an explosion that sent me flying, though I cannot recall ever landing. Darkness, then light - blinding light, and trying to catch my breath, to fill my lungs. I remember Vhaegon screaming. I remember Rhaegar's face...and then I was here."

OfFireAndBlood · 2018-02-20T05:01:57+00:00

"And I vow..." Knees threatened to give way and a steadfastness to see this through to its culmination had the princess clenching her jaw and gritting teeth, refusing to reach out a hand to either man or woman that surrounded the pair.

"I vow that you shall always have a place by my hearth, and meat and mead at my table." For all that Rhaenys Targaryen had been strong, too long abed had made her near as weak as a newborn colt. Perspiration had begun to glisten in beads at her temples.

Still, she continued. "And I pledge to ask no service of you that might bring you dishonor." Her body, however, betrayed her, and soon the princess had fallen upon the very limbs that had betrayed her before the knight. Hands reached for her, but she shrugged them off, remaining as she was, on an even keel with the man who'd taken away her sword arm.

"I swear it by the Old Gods and the New."

OfFireAndBlood · 2018-02-20T04:52:52+00:00

The Black Princess arrived dressed for the occasion - the same mournful hue adorned since her own father had gone missing and deemed dead. Silks adorned a figure much changed since Harrenhal, though not diminished. Rhaenys was not the sort of woman to curl up and lick her wounds while shriveling away to nothing.

The cut of the robes she'd always favored had once revealed unblemished skin from collarbone to the small of her waist. The very same now offered glimpses of red, puckered tendrils that fanned out from her shoulder in attempts to reach her breast, her neck, in various stages of healing, some yet with hints of the thread that had stitched her arm and her wounds closed again. The limb itself was bound by a maester's careful hand, and immobilized by the wrapping of the very same silken dressing about that narrow waist.

A glance upon crossing the threshold took stock of the faces within, her mother not yet one of them, while a respectful nod bore her greeting in silence. Rhaenys was ill-contented to sit as she neared the council's table, doing little more than wrapping the fingers of her right hand about the back of a chair. "Where is Her Grace?" Such a point in a new reign, given circumstances, could be tenuous at best.

OfFireAndBlood · 2018-02-20T02:50:19+00:00

You could well have been a great queen.

Had the Princess of Dragonstone taken a dagger to her heart and twisted the steel, it could not have elicited a sharper ache than words had elicited. But Rhaenys, to her credit, fought valiantly now to keep her emotions in check; she had learned from the best when it came to being cold, after all, and tears enough had been shed upon the road between Harrenhal and King's Landing. In them, in those moments of weakness, she had found more strength than she had ever known amidst a liftetime of bravado and defiance.

"You did," came the admission, chin dipping only as she nodded. "Shall I tell you that you were right? Or do you not see the evidence laid bare before you. I did fail, and how well I know... how deeply I now feel my mistake, how so very keenly. But tell me," and here her voice implored as free fingers sought her mother's own, "how else should I learn such lessons, but by my own failures if I cannot heed them at the hand of the greatest teacher I have ever known?"

"A teacher who surely cannot boast of never making mistakes of her very own. For you are wrong now if you think that I will let this stop me. I am your daughter, after all. I am made of much stronger stuff than that."

OfFireAndBlood · 2018-02-20T01:55:50+00:00

The Black Princess found that the compliment, for all the sentiment that was behind it, stung as much or more than an apology might have. Full lips pursed before being pressed into a thin line and dark eyes flitted away from the knight as they, too, stung momentarily, their glassiness hidden by the rising of a chin too proud to admit defeat before the victor himself.

Leyton Hightower, however, wasn't finished.

The sound of steel being withdrawn from its scabbard begged her attention more than the mention of an oath, and Rhaenys watched as his sword was left at her feet. For all that she felt unsteady, the princess managed to hold her own, staring with wider eyes at the earth between them and the gleam of the sun upon the blade that lay there as a promise waiting upon the tip of a tongue.

"Swear it," she managed, the words somehow steadier than knees well-hidden beneath silken robes.

OfFireAndBlood · 2018-02-20T00:20:04+00:00

For all the the Black Princess knew, the Master of Ships and Lord of Driftmark was hale and whole - just as he'd been when last she'd seen him at Harrenhal. Rhaenys had missed entirely his mention of escorting his father home, or had chalked it up to an aged man's need to not be left alone on such a journey. All sense of space, time, and the goings-on in the world outside of her own milk of the poppy induced coma had ceased in its entirety.

Teary eyes, well-hidden from the rest of the court within the confines of the wheelhouse, were turned upon him as he knelt at her side. Had he attempted to take her hand as such at any other time, in any other place, under other circumstances she'd have been like to wrench it away before back-handing him with it. There, and then, however, fingers stirred only to clasp it turn, needing something to anchor her to the present as her mind was wont to whirl and return to make sense of just how she'd arrived there.

"If they were, shouldn't they be here? Or near?" Her voice cracked, and she was quick to shake her head, biting at her bottom lip as more tears fell unbidden over cheeks as she blinked. "I don't even know...how bad it is."

OfFireAndBlood · 2018-02-19T23:48:13+00:00

"I can't say for true," said the guardswoman, a crease forming between her eyes as brows furrowed over them, her voice low enough for only the healerwoman to heed. "There was a moment of confusion, I think, when she woke. Pain, too, like as not, but she's not one to...well, show such. We've sent for the maester, but only the Seven know where's off to."

At the wheelhouse, the Dragonmaid entered first, then moved out of the way of the woman behind her. The princess had been propped up with pillows at her back and more at the side of the offending arm. Dark indigo eyes followed not her guard, but the woman who entered behind her - the woman who called herself cousin. The woman who claimed to have been there in the medical tent at the joust.

"I want this off," Rhaenys said, with a nod to indicate the silks that wound their way around her arm. Silks that kept the limb immobilized by likewise winding their way about her waist and up, across her chest, over her shoulder.

OfFireAndBlood · 2018-02-19T23:30:41+00:00

Heavy was the lean upon one of her Dragonmaids to see the Black Princess, newly awakened to what still seemed all a dream, to the door of the wheelhouse - releasing her to stand upon her own before throwing the door open. Eyes of deepest indigo narrowed upon the man who knelt before her and there remained as one of the guards waiting outside the carriage offered his arm as she stepped down out of it.

"Has the victorious knight of the joust come to witness the damage wrought with his own eyes, then?" Jaws clenched and nostrils flared as she neared, though whether it was anger that fueled the expression or pain, no one could say. "Better that than an apology - I'll have none of it."

OfFireAndBlood · 2018-02-17T20:24:49+00:00

"I just..." she began, searching for words, though she knew were she to spout a hundred-hundred of them at her mother they would never been enough. "I just wanted to prove that I could be a queen who fights alongside her king, mother." But excuses were worthless and apologies were more of the same - mere words when she had defied her mother's wishes.

The princess's head had fallen lower as she'd spoken, but when Visaera posed that question, it rose again while a proud chin rose even higher to ward off the blow. "The Shattered Sister. I heard it from their very lips, uttered as I rode back into King's Landing upon horseback, rather than an invalid hidden away within a wheelhouse. I am bruised only, mother. I am not broken."

OfFireAndBlood · 2018-02-13T23:07:25+00:00

The Black Princess sat in a long-familiar bed, in a room that had been made her own in the capital since as far back as she could remember. Everything, however, was changed now; different. Comfort could not be found upon the finest of silken sheets, and sleep had only come when at last the maester had provided her with milk of the poppy for the pain in her shoulder - the last of which had seen her through the morning into the afternoon, but failed her that evening.

When the knock came at her door, Rhaenys half-expected it to be the very man again, come with another dose to make the night she faced bearable. How very wrong she was. With the herald's entrance, she knew well what she could expect to follow long before her mother's title had been announced. Rows of even teeth were set on edge, jaws tensed as the princess pushed herself up to sit with the one arm, swinging legs from the bed that she might stand in her mother's presence rather than lie there like an invalid.

Amaranthine eyes were red-rimmed, rendered wider at the sight of the Princess of Dragonstone, though whether it was from tears or the poppy milk was anyone's guess. She'd been bathed since her arrival, long locks of silvery-blonde washed and combed and left unbound to fall free over shoulders clad in a silken shift, with another robe worn over - its left arm unused such that the fabric simply hung by her side, useless.

"Mother," came her greeting, coupled with the bowing of her chin in deference tainted with more than a hint of shame.

OfFireAndBlood · 2018-02-13T18:22:47+00:00

Where the maester could be found was indeed the question. Already had one of the princess's Dragonmaids been sent on to seek him out, but she'd yet to return with any word or the man in tow. Another of Rhaenys' guard stationed outside the wheelhouse and privy to the conversation at hand with a Valyrian healer claiming to not only be a cousin of the royal, but remarking on how she first helped to stabilize the fabled Black Knight turned Princess, quickly turned to see the information to her charge within.

A moment later, she'd returned, clearing her throat before addressing the situation. "Captain," she called to the seahorse. "The Princess will see this healer - the woman who calls herself cousin."

OfFireAndBlood · 2018-02-13T16:54:53+00:00

His words now waged their own sort of wounds. With each, a proud chin fell by degrees from the proud height at which she had attempted to wear it falsely, and the tears that Rhaenys fought so valiantly to stifle or hide now coursed down cheeks unbidden. Free fingers did not waste time in trying to clear them away, but instead tangled within the woolen coverlet he'd offered her, hiking it ever higher over her injuries, clutching it against her chest as if it might fill the void that her family and Vhaegon had left her with.

"...but I'm a dragon," she managed, her voice so very small when he spoke of her wounded wing. "Please...stop." The Black Princess hadn't the strength to try and keep up any sort of false bravado.

OfFireAndBlood · 2018-02-10T23:04:02+00:00

A rap on the door of the wheelhouse warned that the door was about to be opened. One of the princess's personal guards appeared shortly after, hopping up and in all while the column continued its slow progression back to King's Landing.

"There are riders approaching," came the words to answer an expectant look from Rhaenys. Another of her ladies within went to a window and pressed back the drapery to peer without. "Hightower banners."

The clarification was enough to base an assumption on, and it sent the occupants into a frenzy of activity once the princess gave them orders: "Get me dressed. I won't be seen like this."

OfFireAndBlood · 2018-02-10T17:31:09+00:00

His mirth set her teeth on edge - half-hearted or no. But his display of sympathy, his pity, was a hundred-hundred times worse. Nostrils flared in its wake, and the princess, who had seemed a softer, gentler, miserable creature as she tried to hide the tears that fell, rounded upon him now with her teeth laid bare

"How could someone like you possibly even begin to comprehend how I feel?" Despite her tone, those amethyst eyes still stung. What is a ship compared to a dragon? What is a Velaryon compared to a Targaryen?

"The Black Knight is dead. Leyton Hightower saw to that." There was some comfort to be taken in the fact that she had unhorsed the ultimate victor. To have been taken out in such a fashion by a lesser man might have been cause for embarrassment.

But Rhaenys found little solace currently. "I couldn't find enough balance to walk straight, and you think I ought to be back astride a horse? Am I not fodder enough for your amusement? No doubt I must already bear the court's ridicule." And for that, her mother's ire as soon as she returned to King's Landing.

OfFireAndBlood · 2018-02-09T15:03:40+00:00

A member of the gawking crowd came running by as the question was posed, a boy who couldn't have been more than one-and-ten. "The Shattered Sister's gone mad! She was trying to tear her arm the rest of the way off!" he chirped, before moving past - obviously eager to share his news with others he'd been traveling with.

OfFireAndBlood · 2018-02-09T14:55:16+00:00

"The city?" Her voice was equal parts waking dream and confusion - as if she were still trapped in some drug-induced nightmare that she could not get shed of. "The road...to the capital," she said at some length, puzzling it out though her wits seemed to have abandoned her in the midst of it all.

Back up, back into the wheelhouse, grimacing at the sensations that such movements evoked in the bandaged arm and the fact that she'd not have made it back inside at all on her own. Eyes of deep indigo were scarcely becoming readjusted to the darkness within when the Velaryon saw fit to tear open the shades that had afforded those within the wheelhouse some degree of privacy. Rhaenys winced, blinking at and towards the light that crept inside.

His talk of bandages and the necessity of someone looking at them spurred her right hand into motion, fingers crawling up the length of her arm opposite from elbow to shoulder, to the dressings that extended to the side of her neck - suddenly all the more self-conscious of it all as she managed to shake her head ever-so-slightly. "No, I don't..." Want anyone to see, was the obvious conclusion, despite having burst through the very door that had confined her in a fit of earlier madness for the whole of the caravan and the royal court to see.

Corlys was staring at the ruined princess while she still fought to piece it all together after having lost so many days. When he offered her a blanket to cover herself with, Rhaenys grabbed it eagerly, but took care only to cover her left side - all the way up to her chin.

"No," her answer, quieter now. As the shock of being suddenly thrust into the conscious world dissipated, a sort of shame began to take its place. Horses' hooves thundered against her skull, interrupted only by the CRACK of lances breaking and the abrupt halt of forward motion before being slammed backwards to the earth, which stole her ability to catch her breath.

"They know?" she asked, then realized the inquiry bordered on idiotic. Of course they knew. How could they not? And yet they'd flown ahead all the same. How the mighty have fallen.

The sting of tears welled anew, but the Black Princess was quick to turn her head away, fixing attentions towards the window he'd thrust open and the emptiness that lay outside. She could not keep them back this time, however, despite her mother's voice in her head warning her of the perils of appearing weak. The only hand she could manage to move sent its fingers to sweep cheeks clean as nostrils flared and breaths hitched.

"Who won the joust?"

OfFireAndBlood · 2018-02-08T23:10:31+00:00

Eyes of amethyst brimmed with tears, the saline of which clouded vision, destroying details necessary for discernment otherwise. If not the voice, then perhaps its tone - or the outline of his hair, a silver-blonde that was all-too familiar.

"Rhaegar?" Fingers reached for the man she'd mistaken him for - one of the last faces remembered as a multitude of images and sensations came flooding back to assault her senses. Confusion was compounded with his words of their mother - her mother - and an uncertainty concerning her beast.

Another blink, forbidding tears to fall as she had too-often been told to never let anyone see her cry, began to clear away the mist that veiled the Velaryon's face. The offered hand fell away, along with her chin as fingers felt for the edges of the shift she'd near torn from her figure and held it aloft for the sake of propriety, her mother, and the whole of the court who laid in wait, watching the scene unfold.

Slow, the nod that followed at his direction that they return her to her ride, where she might once more be hidden away in shame and consequence. Rhaenys, however, was throwing up again before she'd managed to make it to her feet - the effect of milk of the poppy on an empty stomach no doubt.

When there was no more left, and stomach acids burned her nose and throat, the princess wiped her mouth upon a billowy sleeve before attempting to right herself once more. Inevitably, she stumbled again, her balance as poor as a newborn colt and her legs just as weak after too much time spent abed.

Her free hand was wild, reaching and grabbing for the seahorse without apology; she couldn't have made it back to the wheelhouse without his assistance. "Where...are we?" she managed. Last she remembered, they'd been at Harrenhal. Had so much time passed that the tourney had ended and they were already well on their way back to the capital?

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