Desires Be Damned • Aemond Targaryen

Chapter Thirty-One

Dyaena

Formless thoughts and flashes of memories melded, swirling in an indistinguishable mess of red and green, candlelight and a dagger's sheen, foreign chants and familiar screams. One's end overlapped with another's beginning, the reason for their succession as mysterious and strange as the nature of dreams themselves. Lost in her own hellish limbo, the teetering point between sleep and wake, Dyaena floated helplessly with her will to make sense of her mind quickly eclipsed by the only thing whose power could make anyone yield: pain.

The first ache to surface was a throbbing at the back of her head, pounding away at her skull like a rhythmic knocking on a drum. It was a music she despised and wished would cease at once. Where had it come from? And why was she laying down on something much softer and warmer than the cold, hard ground? The plush surface beneath her was all too familiar, as was its distinct scent amongst the smell of lit candles she'd known all her youth as she slowly opened her eyes, hoping beyond hope to see the rainwood instead of what she knew in heart would be before her.

An eye for an eye, a fair exchange. Now, let's go home. A promise that evidently Aemond had made good on.

Home, she thought as took in her chambers in the Red Keep, the pulsing behind her throbbing eyes intensifying from the sunlight pouring through the windows of her shut balcony doors. Something collapsed within her chest like a wilting flower robbed of water, and despair was far too kind a word to describe the weight pressing down on her. I let myself be captured. I'm right back to where I began. Trapped, and completely at their mercy. Dyaena immediately made to sit upright, wishing to bolt to the secret passage's door hidden beneath the tapestry next to her bedchambers, hoping that Aemond's high from vengeance forfeited the common sense to have it blocked off before she was placed here.

But there it was again: pain, though this time, it was sharper and on the surface, stinging the skin of her inner thighs and stomach. A hiss passed through her lips as more memories returned to her in a sudden flash. The blood still staining her tunic and pants was now dried stiff and brown and uncomfortably sticking to her flesh. With gentle hands--her left wrapped in gauze to cover the cut in her palm--she slowly peeled the fabric away, and remembered each and every slice that strange woman made with her blade in order to perform the spell to enact the trade, runes and markings that had been etched into her just as the cottage's walls had been with chalk.

The trade. Luke is alive. And Aemond had... Dyaena could only grimace as the sound of a blade savagely carving through her brother's flesh to take what Aemond thought was owed to him made her empty stomach clench.

Luke is alive, I know he is, Alys would have heard, would have helped. He lives, she thought in an attempt to ease her rapidly racing heart before looking down towards her belly, a small smile tugging at the corners of her mouth as she rested both of her hands on it. As do you, my little spark.

~•~

The gentleness with which his breaths passed through his sharp nose were the tell that her uncle had fallen into a deep sleep at last, a brief offer for her to make haste and do what she knew was right. From the moment she had returned to the cave, she granted him her ear, but it was hopeless from the start. With a conviction as unwavering as the mountains, and as silent as a grave, Dyaena had already decided what she was to do. Luke was her brother, a boy loved by many, one that had already begun living, one whose death would mean the cause of so much more pain and grief and untold, unnecessary consequences.

Each step she took on the dampened earth was laced with apologies towards the ember that had barely begun to glow with the fire that coursed through every Targaryen, but still, she pressed on, makeshift torch in hand to light her way.