a gambit of gods.

  A GAMBIT OF GODS / book one.
a house of the dragon & fire and blood fanfiction
2024 © hecatefuror

—— INTRO

✶                                 when has history's mouth ever parted without bile and treason frothing from its lips? it gnashes and grinds, gnawing truth down to the bone, reshaping what was into what it wants—a blade wielded by those who first pressed the steel, by the victors with red-caked hands who carve their names into stone as though the rock will not weep, as though their version of events is all the world could ever know.

lies bind to memory like roots twisting through blood-soaked earth, entangling in sinew and soil, until the truth dies strangled. and what remains is a grim fable, bent to excuse the sins of the mighty, a gilded coffin sealing away what was true. their monuments rise like hollow carcasses on the rib bones of the forsaken; their hymns ring hollow, yet so loud they swallow whole the faint echoes of the forgotten, until even the dead's silence is rewritten into their myth.

( history is no record of what was, but what they want remembered. )

    

i. rhaenys i targaryen / tyrant, butcher, bone-clad queen. that's the tale they spit, the poison they drip into open ears.

[. . . they'll say she caused this, won't they?. . .]

yes, and they'll call her a tyrant, a beast who took pleasure in the carnage. but they don't see her now, stumbling through the ruins, each step dragging her deeper into the mire. the ground drinks her weight, her footprints already forgotten, swallowed by the mud mixed with ash, bone, and something darker still. this is where they'll lay the blame—the battlefield, the blood-stained grass, the village they can never rebuild.

[. . . they'll call her a monster. . . ]

a monster, yes. they call her this because monsters don't cry; monsters don't suffer, don't break like this. she digs her hands deeper into the soil, as if by clawing through the earth she might tear down the barrier between herself and what's lost. if only she could rip herself open and empty every drop of her agony into the earth, water it with the grief they tell her is poison. but monsters don't weep for their children—monsters don't bleed grief. so they say.

[ . . . they'll call her heartless. . . ]

but if her heart is hollow, why does it throb? she hears it in her skull, a violent drumbeat as she rocks back on her knees, her breath a whisper on the still air. the shrine's only visitors are shadows, and the air is thick with the scent of damp stone and cold, bitter memory. her lips press to the ground, soft as a mother's kiss, though she's long forgotten what it is to cradle, to hold. she closes her eyes, as if in this darkness she could reach them, just once, just for a moment—her fingers stretching into empty space.

[. . .they'll call her a butcher. . .]

but a butcher? she picks up a broken sword, its edge dull, stained with rust and blood that will never wash clean, not even with gods-blessed tears. butchers carve with purpose, with a clear blade. she holds this broken weapon like a prayer, wondering if it's hers—hers, in some forgotten way, because she can't remember when she started to wield these tools of death as part of herself. a butcher's tools are sharp; hers are fragments, the splinters of a world that broke her bones and called it a swaddle.