"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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As a child, Arthur had dreamt of flight, of soaring through the air on wings and wind, watching as the world below him ebbed and flowed like the tide below Starfall's walls.
Arthur would be like the stars that made up his family crest, skittering through the sky and skipping upon clouds and constellations as a stone did when tossed at just the right angle, he would float on invisible wings and cut through the heavens like no man before. It was a shame, his father would laugh, that Arthur was born after the time of the dragons and with brown hair instead of silver.
But that did not stop Arthur's dreaming, and when age came for those fragile and golden dreams of youth, the corrosive hands of time did little to tarnish the beauty and joy that flight ignited in him.
It was, in part, what drew Arthur to the Targaryen's; though Arthur could not truly find it in himself to believe that they were closer to the gods, it was hard to imagine they were fully human when they had mastered that which no other man before or after had., They had grasped the impossible in their hands, tamed it, and turned it into their greatest power.
But they had also seen it burn, held the torch with both hands, and set it all alight in the name of power and greed. Though sword craft had been Arthur's true passion, he had not shirked the lessons of the Dance, tales of brother against brother, dragons careening into the sea, set alight by their sister flame.
When Arthur had first met Rhaegar, it was the silver prince that he could imagine upon dragon back. He could not see Aerys in all his wild fury or even sweet Rhaella atop the scaled beasts, but Rhaegar seemed to be from a different time when the Targaryens graced the skies with their power and spent their days amid cloud cover and the stars than below on the ground.
He sometimes wondered if Rhaegar himself felt out of place in his family and Westeros, a relic from an age long since passed, destined to rot and decay alongside the rest of them.
But there was a hope Arthur had found in Rhaegar, a hope for something better and stronger. Just as the final dragons had been born weak and small, the Targaryen blood had been following in descent, yet there was strength in Rhaegar and truth and maybe even goodness.
Just as Arthur had dreamt of flight, he had also dreamt of being a knight, the kind that followed laws of chivalry and honor, who was bound by a code of morals as ironclad as oaths that chained them to their masters.
As a young man, he had been certain he would see that fantasy come to life when his white cloak graced his shoulders, shielding him just as it had for hundreds of years to better men than him. But Arthur had quickly realized that the man he served was not the righteous king from his childhood stories, but the hungry dragon gripped with fetters of avarice and greed.
What knight stood by as their king forced himself on a powerless woman? What man of honor and duty stood by and allowed a farce of justice to take place, like a mummers play that saw the innocent dead and buried at the feet of a man who used fire as his executioner?
