ᴛʜᴇ ᴅᴀʀᴋ ꜱɪꜱᴛᴇʀ - House of the Dragon

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

"How does it feel like?" A deep voice asked me from behind.

I could've jump on my seat, massage the left spot on my chest there where the clothing and my own flesh and bones protected my heart. Perhaps even try to stop crying. But I did not. I simply sighed, shutting my eyes closed as if that could make him go away and leave me alone and gripped further in my hold on the sword.

The cold wind matched the even more coldness of the steel in my hand, and the only sound beside his breathing and my own was the threatening whisper of the waves ahead us.

"Heavy."

I looked up at him, searching for some sort of familiarity in his violet eyes that could fill the emptiness in my chest. But I found none. Just two purple orbes shining under the bright light of the day. It almost seemed as is they were mocking me.

He cocked his head to a side, cracking his own way of laughter as if I just said the funniest of jests, and nodded in agreement before dropping his body beside mine with a quiet complain I barely heard.

"It has to. It's not a toy."

He remained quiet, eyes following my very movement, as I traced the valyrian blade with the tip of my fingers, feeling the circles and details in a shade of dark brown above the gray of the steel under my touch. The cross resembled the wings of a dragon, curled down and detailed with gold and silver, and the pommel was orbed, with what seemed as silver scales over a black background.

"Aren't you mad I stole it from you?"

"I knew you had it."

The sun forced me to slightly close my eyes, and it almost felt as another jest. How could it be so bright, with such a beautiful view of the Narrow Sea, when it was so dark within me? How could they (the people I could hear from afar) laugh and joke and eat and drink as if the Seven Kingdoms hadn't just lost a great knight? How could they forget it was a funeral, not a feast?

My father has died! I wished to scream at them. He has died and no one here seems to care!

Aunt Laena flashed through my mind then. They had done the same thing in her funeral, hadn't they? They had a great time as if it wasn't my cousin's mother's funeral. Is that how Baela and Rhaena felt? As if they wanted to scream and hit someone or something and drown themselves in the dark blue water? As if their heart was broken in two and their soul was far from their body? As if they couldn't breath?

"Do you know who it belonged to?"

His deep voice brought me back, and the sand beneath me and the drops of salty water that hit me in the face with each strike of the waves made me sighed with relief. I was there, on that beach, with my mother's uncle sitting next to me and the valyrian steel sword in my hand. I wasn't having one of those episodes, lost in my own mind as my dear aunt Helaena when her riddles drowned her own, with the oxygen getting stuck somewhere inside of me and my own nails scratching the skin of my neck as if it could help me breath.

Daemon had rested his forearms on his knees, leaning forward and turning his entire head to look at me with frowned brows. What did he see, when he looked at me? A half orphan girl? A bastard? Someone who had lost both her fathers in such a short time? A big sister forced to grow up earlier to take care of her brothers? The poor little girl that, as her aunt, suffered and feared her own mind?

"Queen Visenya."

"That's correct."

He nodded with a little smile on his lips, the same smile I had only seen whenever he caught sight of my mother and he thought no one noticed him. Perhaps that was what he saw, a bastardy version of my mother in her youth. Wasn't that what grandsire Viserys always said? That I reminded him so much of her at my age if not for my hair?