twin flames | daemon targaryen

twenty-nine

Rhaella stared numbly into the dark waters of the Blackwater Bay. She could hear the sounds of mourners gathering and milling about behind her in the courtyard of High Tide, but she could not hear them, too focused on the roaring waves that now contained her two best friends.

Laenor's funeral was held a week after his death. All those who had left High Tide following the funerals of Laena and Rhaella's sons earlier in the month had returned to the seat of House Velaryon to grieve the loss of the future Lord of the Tides.

Whispers flooded High Tide and the rest of the Seven Kingdoms over the heavy losses of House Velaryon.

They whispered that the gods were merciless, depriving Corlys and Rhaenys of their only biological children. One could only imagine the pain the parents were going through. Parents were not meant to bury their children.

They whispered that the gods were cruel, stealing Rhaella's heart straight from her chest. The Peaceful princess had lost her cousins and her children in just a few weeks. All had known the bond shared between the three cousins and the vast amount of love Rhaella held for her children, and all pitied the princess. There was only so much a person could take.

If Rhaella had previously been hanging by a threat following the deaths of Laena and her sons, the thread had long since snapped. She stayed in her chambers, wallowing in her grief for the losses she had suffered. She had grown pale, her cheeks sunken and amethyst eyes bloodshot as her body struggled with the emotional trauma she endured. She looked like a shell of herself.

Her mind was no better at handling it. Her dreams were running as rampant as they had been in her youth. During the early years of her marriage with Daemon and through the births of her children, she was offered some semblance of peace by the gods compared to what she had suffered in her youth. Now, no more.

Each night, she heard Vhagar's cry as the ancient she-dragon fell into a lake. She heard the roar of Meleys as she fell from the sky in a great ball of fire. She would see a loom standing in the corner of her mother's old room in the Red Keep, blood pooling underneath bloodied sheets as they had been when Rhaella had visited her mother's room hours after her death. Red, black, and green yarn were running hastily through it and a spider crawled along the top, staring at the yarn with keen interest and a cloudy gaze.

The scene would change, and Rhaella would be back on the beaches of Driftmark. Her sons stood before her, their bodies covered in horrible burns and scars. They stared up at something in the sky and Rhaella would look up. Bright blue eyes stared back at her from the heavens, the orbs clear and cold as ice.

The cries and shouts that left Rhaella as she dreamed repeatedly woke the inhabitants of High Tide. They all assumed the sounds to be that of a grieving mother and went back to sleep, unknowing that they were the cries of someone under the burden of a gift of the gods.

Daemon tried his best to ease her suffering, holding her gently in his arms, murmuring to her soothingly in High Valyrian until her breathing evened out and she drifted back into the world of dreams and gods.

When Rhaenyra and her sons arrived just two days before Laenor's funeral, Rhaenys had taken it as another slight. She wondered to Rhaella in the privacy of her chambers how Rhaenyra could come so late following the death of her husband and the supposed father of her children, especially with the rumors that were circling. It was unseemingly, it was disrespectful, and it was yet another insult to House Velaryon.

Rhaella had agreed with the older Targaryen women. Even from her chambers, she had heard the rumors that were spreading like wildfire regarding what had happened that fateful night in High Tide.

Was it truly Ser Qarl who had killed the son of the Sea Snake? As drunkards in various taverns would ask, was Qarl a lover scorned, troubled and driven mad with jealousy? Or, as was asked within the shadowed corners of keeps and castles, was the murder of Ser Laenor cold-blooded? Was his death the outcome of a plot to protect the Heir to the Seven Kingdoms and her interests?