Desires Be Damned • Aemond Targaryen

Chapter Fifteen

Dyaena

"Dyaena, are you sure this is what you want?"

It was the same question he had asked when they were atop Vhagar, and the answer she had given him then stemmed from judgement clouded from the throes of ardor. So caught up in the moment and blind to all reason, she had hardly put up a fight against her body's whims before nodding. But now, as she stood in his chambers with a steadier mind--though only marginally--a sense of lucidity that had eluded her earlier found its way back as echoes of memories flashed behind her eyes, as clear as they had been on that very day.

You are a princess, my love...

Wingless dragons give and take...

You will begin to feel desires...

Payment of flesh...

Desires you must not act on before or outside of your marriage...

Payment of blood...

Your virtue as a princess is vital...

One will fly...

Do not let feelings cloud your reason...

Before both will fall...

She had never forgotten her mother's lesson, but the words she had once held close to her heart and thought to be wise now left a sour coating on her tongue. Sagacious or not, they were hypocritical, and it angered Dyaena that her mother demanded that she deny her body and heart a pleasure that Rhaenyra herself had no qualms with seeking outside of her marriage to Laenor, and perhaps even before. Ser Harwin's story had certainly spiked her curiosity during his telling of it, but now that her own eyes beared witness to the affection between Rhaenyra and Daemon nearly everyday, to ignore the possibility that those two had found themselves in a similar situation back then to Dyaena and Aemond on this night would be damfool.

No, she refused to have the decision be made for her. She had craved, imagined, fantasized this moment for long enough, and now that the opportunity to seize it was within her grasp, she would be damned before she let it slip away.

To say she was completely innocent of the act would be a lie. Dragonstone's library was home to many books of varying subjects, and Dyaena often found herself within its shelves either looking for a new story to lose herself in or scouring for particular books filled with accounts written by maesters of old in order to feed her academic interests. But during a particular visit roughly one year ago after supping with her family, she found a small black book tucked away between a hefty tome of lineages and another about the healing properties of wetland plants. Normally, it wouldn't have caught her eye, but fate had it that day for the sun's rays to shine at just the right time through a window and reflect off of the silver lettering on its spine as she neared. The title read The True Telling of A Lysene Madame, and though it seemed innocent enough on the outside, what was described in detail--and sometimes even drawn out--was not. It was a recollection of an anonymous woman's life during her time as both a whore and later on as a pleasure house madame, and it seemed to not be in her nature to skimp on the details. Dyaena had only needed to briefly peek beneath its cover to know the nature of its contents, and after closing her agape mouth and pressing the explicit biography to her chest before hiding it behind the larger book about medicinal plants, she quickly made off to her chambers.

Once she began, nothing could tear her eyes away from its pages, apart from the inevitable darkness that eventually filled her room when the candles bringing her light had melted completely into pools of wax. The madame's transparency was admirable; she described in great detail what losing her maidenhead felt like and how horrible the entire ordeal was, for she had been an inexperienced child at four-and-ten and the man did not care for her pleasure as he sought his own. But as time went on and her patrons and fellow whores introduced her to the many different possibilities of hedonism, the woman had begun to look forward to sex in and outside of work.