𝐂𝐇𝐀𝐏𝐓𝐄𝐑 𝐍𝐈𝐍𝐄 - all along there was some invisible string (tying you to me)
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𝐀𝐋𝐈𝐂𝐄𝐍𝐓 𝐖𝐎𝐊𝐄 𝐓𝐎 𝐒𝐈𝐋𝐄𝐍𝐂𝐄. Not the kind she'd grown up with—the tense, watchful hush of Hewn City, thick with secrets and schemes—but a silence too clean, too still. The kind of silence that dared to call itself peace. The kind that pretended the world outside didn't exist.
Something had pulled her out of sleep. Not violently—but with insistence. Like a thread coiling around her ribs and tugging steadily until her body remembered it had weight, breath, and bones again.
Not the Weaver—not entirely. Alicent lay still for a moment, her eyes fixed on the smooth ceiling. The pull was quieter now, muffled by waking. But it was still there, humming just beneath her skin, a beckoning that didn't come with a voice or direction.
Something had reached for her in the dark. Not demanding, not cruel. Calling. Like a presence submerged beneath deep water, waiting. Not hostile—but not harmless, either. A slumbering force that recognized her, that had marked her.
She had felt something like it only once before—when she'd first touched the Cauldron's lingering power inside herself. When the blood had bent and twisted, when the marrow of her body had rearranged itself to hold more than just her soul.
This felt like that. Familiar, but...not hers. A thread not cut cleanly.
She pressed a hand to her chest as if the answer might be buried there beneath bone. Whatever had called to her in her dreams was not peaceful. It had teeth. Not like the Weaver's jagged grin—but something deeper. Ancient and raw, not fully formed. It felt...new. Or maybe newly awakened.
And it had felt her, too.
Alicent sat up in the impossibly soft bed, the sheets were silk, the pillows cloudlike. The silence wasn't just silence—it was clean. Unnatural. The kind of quiet that tried to pretend the world outside didn't exist. As if pain and grief had no place here.
She rose, slowly, as if standing too quickly might startle the thing that had tugged on the other end of that invisible string. But it was gone now—retreated, coiled somewhere just beyond sense. Still there. But waiting.
Her room was lovely. Spacious. Neat. A window let in soft light and the scent of some distant garden. A tray of breakfast—fresh fruit, bread, butter, tea—waited on a side table. It was insulting. This house didn't understand her. It thought luxury would soothe her. That safety would tame her.
She didn't know how long she'd slept, only that something had clawed at her dreams—something not quite the Weaver, but close enough to make her spine ache. A whisper brushing the back of her mind. A tug on a thread she couldn't see but knew would eventually pull her somewhere she didn't want to go.
