¹ 𝐒𝐎𝐍𝐆 𝐎𝐅 𝐒𝐎𝐑𝐑𝐎𝐖𝐒 ━━ 𝐝. 𝐭𝐚𝐫𝐠𝐚𝐫𝐲𝐞𝐧

xxx. the fall of fury

✧˖° 🌑 ೄྀ࿐
━ [   SONG OF SORROWS   ] ༉‧₊˚✧
x. act one... the dragon's daughter
the fall of fury ━ ✩・*。

— WINTER, 114 A.C
THE STEPSTONES, NARROW SEA

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     BLOOD falls like tears in the Stepstones, thick and oozing and rotting, the taste of copper invading the soldiers tongues. Silver hissed and slashed down in unsteady motions, lifeblood spraying from jagged wounds and pattering onto the already sodden ground. Men in their shawls of dirty gold and brown raise hammers to the heavens, and as if fueled by the anger of the Gods themselves, bring them down upon any lump of flesh that can be caught under metal. Pirates of the Triarchy swarm the battlefield like ants, their home torn from the dirt, seeking vengeance against those that dare disturb them.

    Soldiers of the Crown weave about the earth with precision, dutifully rehearsed movements guiding their steps as they engage the overwhelming forces of the Free Cities. More men of Westeros fall than before, their nameless faces thumped to the earth as a wave of pirates descended upon them; what they lacked in skill, they gained in numbers. In a war, it mattered not if the most prowess man was alight in the fight. One sword could not parry hundreds.

    Hissing sliver, wet with blood, wove through the bronze skin of a pirate, before a metal hammer rained down and caved in his skull. A cacophony of rancorous shouts coalesced in the night sky, the constellations above weeping down starlight upon the doomed battle. Formless, the moon kept its dutiful watch on man, bearing witness to their atrocities, to the bitterness with which their swords and hammers cut and smashed. No amount of gentle moonlight could dissuade them from their own hatred, and so the moon left the sky behind thick clouds, retreating into the darkness.

    Above the disharmonious atmosphere rang out a whistle, discordant and hostile before tendrils of red fire split through the dark sky and caved men into cinders. Serpentine and red, the beast gracefully wove through the air, indiscriminate in who his fire touched. Pirates and soldiers alike screamed out in horror before the fingers of flame forever silenced them, those pleas fallen with their ashen bodies; bodies that could never be mourned, a casket with no dead, a grave without name.

    Rings of fire desecrated the battlefield as pirates began ordering retreats into the deep caves along the cliff-face. Astride the winged serpent was the mastermind behind the war, a commander of death. Daemon Targaryen had never tired of fighting, nor did he seem troubled by the death he wrought upon friend and foe alike. To many, nothing riddled the Rogue Prince with discontent.

    They, however, were wrong.

    A ghost had clung to his back for years, a poison that refused to leave his tongue no mattered how desperately he tried to shuck it from his tongue. That presence was a pulsing scar upon his back, the mocking laughter in his head. Daemon loathed it, the way in which his stomach tumbled sickeningly when memories of lost moments flickered in his head, when in the dead of night that same ghost would tickle up his spine, invading his only moment of peace to corrupt it with lust and longing. He hated when Corlys Velaryon informed him of the large banquet held in King's Landing, one that would solidify the heir to the Iron Throne as a girl come into maidenhood. He hated imagining her laughing with other men, of her being poked and prodded by hands that could not hope to contain her fire, of imagining him returning from war, only to find her clung to the arm of another man. But most of all, he hated her.