"This was always going to happen. She's been dead since the beginning."
- Aeschylus
It is a child's dream to outwit fate, to somehow escape the great ending that awaits us all.
But Orianne Fernwood would burn the world if it meant a moment longer w...
Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
Mighty walls of stone, screeching dragons and flames etched into them, and a door so heavy she could scarcely move it alone was not enough to remove Arthur Dayne from Orianne.
He was everywhere.
In her mind's eye, her scarf, which was left crumpled under his hands, and the way his scent seemed to linger on her jacket, clinging to each strand of fur and loose thread. Her lips ached, and Orianne could still feel the brush of his stubble, rough and prickly, on her cheeks. His hands still seemed to run up and down her body, finding a home on the spot where her jawbone sloped into her neck.
Arthur Dayne was a ghost, a spirit that haunted her no matter how far or fast she ran. He would always manage to find her, even in the corner of her room, while she tried to scrub herself clean of him, even as she stuffed the clothes she had been wearing into the bottom of a trunk in hopes of hiding the memory of him.
But she could not erase the way her skin was set ablaze when he touched her, how air was no longer a necessity as he kissed her with a fiery passion. She could've been consumed by him in that moment, no worry for anything but him and him and only him.
Always him.
And after desire came grief, sadness so deep that Orianne could do nothing but crumple to the ground in a heap, only dressed in her thin white shift.
The tears sprung forth like spring rain. Orianne wrapped her arms around herself in a vain attempt at holding her body together with just the power in her two hands, all the while knowing it was futile.
It seemed she was made of salt water for how much she cried. Her cheeks were stained with trails of tears, and the cotton of her underdress began to dampen, collecting the water created in her sadness. Perhaps she would drown in her sorrow if just to save her from the foolishness of her own decisions. She would let the water rise and sink below without a word of protest; it was better than the alternative than having to face Arthur with the knowledge that what they had done was beautiful and amazing but forbidden. It was wrong, and their lives could be at risk because of it.
Orianne kissed him, fully aware that it would be the only passionate embrace shared by the two, and she couldn't decide if that knowledge was good or bad.
Was it better to know that it could only happen once? That the feelings they shared, the quiet touches beneath moonlight and kiss that left everything else behind, would be a tiny speck in the rest of their lives?
Or would she have preferred to live in a world of youthful naivety, a childish fantasy that allowed Orianne to imagine a forbidden love and a man that could never be hers? Would they run away together and escape from the cruelty of Westeros to some faraway land where the world only knew them as two young lovers and nothing else?
What would life be, not as Orianne Fernwood, but as no one?
Stupid, that's what it was, and Orianne refused to dwell on it any longer.
