"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...
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Trigger warning
Blood and descriptions of death
The smooth shick of steel running over the whetstone was a welcome sound to Arthur; it was repetitive and predictable, calming the tumult of worries and thoughts that hounded him day and night.
Since the moment Orianne had stepped before him, clad in gold and staring down King Aerys Targaryen as if he were a field mouse, some part of Arthur knew that she would be both his end and his beginning. There was something about her that could not be ignored; it was impossible to look away from. Arthur felt powerless to deny the voices within him that urged him to step closer and see what it was that was so intoxicating.
Was he truly so weak?
To give into desire, a trait that ruined lesser men, and stoop so low as to risk her future and his own in some lustful tryst?
Arthur had been certain that it was just desire that connected them, some faint string that had tied many a man and woman together before. It could be easily severed, and they would go on with their lives as if they had never been there in the first place. The paths laid before them diverged, and they would follow the way set before them by fate's hand.
He gripped the blade tighter, his hand cramping as he forced it down the whetstone again and again. The skin of his palm was turning a bloodless shade of white from the effort.
But that flicker of lust paled in comparison to the wildfire that raged through him, a flame that licked and singed at his carefully crafted facade and threatened to leave his deepest truths naked before her.
And Arthur was terrified that it had already happened; the armor he had built around himself, the vow to let whatever he felt for Orianne die, the flame had done its damage, and he was laid before her completely bare. Every interaction between them had only served to make Arthur feel more and more unsteady as if those dark eyes of hers could see to his very core and read the lines of his soul. She had managed to reach deep inside him and pluck out that which Arthur preferred to keep hidden: his mother, his fears, his heart.
Did she know of her power? The way she floated into his life and razed it to the ground with the flick of her palm and a look in her eyes, and did she know that he was ready to kneel before her and thank her for it?
There were many times when Arthur had felt truly alive.
When he had been little more than a child, running along the beaches near Starfall, wind in his hair and salt spray spattering his face and clothes, in the heat of battle, when life was not promised and when death could be touched if one was not careful, Arthur knew that the beating of his heart and the pumping of his blood was the most precious gift he could ever have been given.
But by the Gods did it pale in comparison to how he felt when Orianne had kissed him. His entire body had lit up like a torch when she pressed into him. The feel of her skin under his was soft and supple, warm to the touch. She was bold and so full of life, like the sun standing before him with open arms, begging him to step closer and be consumed by her light.
