The Prince and His Flower

E I G H T E E N

Aemma sat up in bed as she heard someone sprinting through the halls.

"Guards! Someone!" He called. Aemma quickly exited her room to see the commotion.

"What is it?" She called out.

"It's Ser Laenor! In the hall! Ser Qarl has attacked him!" The man appeared to be a squire or a servant of some kind. Aemma frowned and ran towards the direction of the hall, her anxiety quickened as she began to worry for her father.

Aemma stopped dead in her tracks as her eyes fell on the figure in the hearth. 

"F-Father?" She asked nobody in particular. She felt as if her whole world was going to implode as she spotted her father's boots on the body in the fire.

"NO!" Aemma ran forward as she took in the sight of her father's charred upper body resting in the fireplace. She smelled burned flesh, his skin crackling like meat pulled fresh from an oven.

"Help me! Someone help!"  Her voice sounded strangled as she grabbed her father's shoulders and slowly pulled him from the hearth, screaming as the flames licked her hands.

"Father! Father!" She screamed over and over again as she pulled with every ounce of strength in her tiny body. Her hands were burned, the skin cracked and oozing blood as she fell backward after he father came unstuck from the fireplace. Aemma crawled towards his head, or what remained of it, and she sobbed, a deep animalistic sound coming from her throat. 

Corlys and Rhaenys both let out strangled gasps as they took in the sight before them: Aemma, her hands burned and bleeding as she screamed in front of their dead son.

"No! No, no, my son!" Rhaenys cried and dropped down beside Aemma as they both sobbed uncontrollably. Aemma shook as she sobbed, her heart felt like it was ripped open and left to bleed out. She prayed to the Gods, any God that would be kind enough to listen, to bring her father back. 

"How could you let this happen? In my own fucking hall?" Corlys grabbed his guard and shook him fiercely before pushing him aside and kneeling next to Rhaenys, who shoved him away from her as she wailed for her son.

"Fetch the maester! Now! Or I will have your head on a spike." Corlys screamed in fury, before pulling Aemma towards him, who simply sobbed and screamed like a dying animal. 

Outside, Terrax and Meleys, who both felt their rider's pain, circled the island, letting out roars filled with so much anguish and pain. 

"Father! Father! Please, no!" Aemma screamed as her grandfather simply held her to his chest as he silently wept. Her hands felt as if they were burning from the inside out. Aemma wondered if that was what her father felt. She had never felt more broken in her life as she sat there in front of her father's body. 

When the Gods didn't answer her prayers to bring her father back, she begged them to take her too.

Laenor Velaryon's funeral was an empty affair. All of the nobles and the Royal Family had already departed, and it would have taken too much time to have them turn their ships around. Aemma preferred it this way, just their family. Her eyelids had scabs on them from how much she had cried, and her hands constantly felt as if they were still burning. Her head pounded from all of the crying, her voice hoarse and sickly from the hours of her wailing into the night. She had barely slept the last two days, for every time she shut her eyes, all she could see was her father, burning in the fire. Her eyes had dark circles under them, and she was sickly pale. Her hands remained wrapped tightly under layers and layers of bandages, which the maester would soon remove in order to peel back the charred flesh.