Embers in the Sand || Book I

ii. A Dragon's Lair

———————————HER HIPS moved with the fluid, serpentine grace of a snake, while her Rhoynish brown skin glistened in the fiery glow of the surrounding torches. As her legs pounded the floor, they matched the rhythm of the drums that sang, whose steady beat fueled the mesmerizing dance.
The dragon stared at her in admiration, its eyes swelling with nothing but desire.
Entranced by her rhythmic movements, it seemed to feel the pulse of her dance deep within its own ancient bones.

Finally, turning captive to her poisonous fangs.

       "A Dance Between Serpent and Dragon"
— Unknown

When she had woken up nearly 300 years in the past, just after Aegon's Conquest.
Elia Martell did not know how she should feel.

After all, the world around her was steeped in a dreamlike haze, familiar yet unsettling in its differences. She had been reborn into her house once more, raised within a lineage that took  pride in the blood of its ancestors.

However such pride did not make her forebears likable, nor did it ease the burden of belonging to a family that history had painted in both glory and shadow.

The Dornish were  stubborn, unyielding, difficult to subdue even under the looming threat of Targaryen dragons. Elia loved her family and her bloodline, but she had been destined to be a queen, a servant of the people, a protector, and a caretaker.

In the future, Dorne had been a united realm, where every man and woman considered each other brothers and sisters, their unity a fortress against the storms of conflict.

Without that unity, there was no Dorne; it was as simple as that. But here, in this past, pride seemed to outweigh the lives of their people.
The resilience of her people, so praised in the future, could not erase the countless innocents who had perished because of that resistance. Elia had never been a coward, and perhaps that was her greatest weakness.

If she had swallowed her pride, if she had taken the coward's path and fled when she had the chance, maybe the price would not have been so steep.

She loved her blood, loved it so fiercely she would bleed for it—but she could not ignore the distaste that curdled within her when she looked at her siblings and parents in this life. They were far removed from the ideals she had once held dear.

This timeline, this history, was different from the one she had known. Her ancestors were not what she had expected, and to her shock, they had lost the war. The Martells had been bent by the dragonlords, and, ironically, Queen Rhaenys—another ancestor of hers—had survived.

She hadn't understood the cause of this change, though it gnawed at her thoughts. Was it the gods meddling once more? Or was it her existence, an anomaly in the river of time, that had altered the course of history?
Elia had not been given the luxury to consider her circumstances deeply.

Thrown to the wolves—or rather, to the fire-breathing dragons—for the sake of her people, she found herself in a situation that was far from ideal. Summoned to serve as a "handmaiden" to one of Aegon's queens, it was clear that this was nothing more than a hostage situation cloaked in formality.

At three-and-twenty, Elia was nearing the age where society would begin to see her as a spinster, a label that carried with it the weight of judgment and dismissal.

The expectation was clear: she should be seeking a suitable husband, perhaps one of the few remaining unmarried or widowed lords paramount. Although, Elia had already made a firm decision—she would no longer allow herself to be used as a bargaining chip in the political games of men. She had done her duty to her family and the realm in her past life, and how had they repaid her? The bitterness of that betrayal still stung, though she saw no point in dwelling on the details.