The Bastard Queen

The Trout Circles a Dragon

Viserys had become fond of mention how lesser of a 'true dragon' Rhaegar had turned over the years. His hair no longer shined, it rusted. His frame no longer that of a capable warrior. His mind subject to haunts and bouts of worry.

It had been happening more frequently, the migraines that plagued him for hours. A result of the illness that was taking him, slowly. Maesters could not decipher what was taking the good King, but they had become artfully skilled at masking it. He was thinner than he had been as a Prince, in his glory days, and could not fight like the man he was.

Most days he felt as those these memories he has are another's, not belonging to him in the slightest. The beckoning of the Stranger was a deep, ratifying clarity; he once thought it was prophecy, the Gods calling him to do their bidding. He now knew better. He should have trusted the sound advice Arthur had given, to put all faith in prophecies is often folly. Rhaegar had only himself to thank for the fashioning of his fate, if there ever was such a thing.

He never wanted to be his father; not that broken of a man, that vile, sick, twisted, and drowning in the milks of paranoia. His mother had shielded Viserys from most of it, but Rhaegar was older, he had remembered how things were before Duskendale. Aerys still had some of his mind then, he wasn't fed pleasure from the burning of men.

Rhaegar was a different man then, too. Galient, proud, bold, and unconcerned. Most of all filled to the brim with fantasy, sacred word he had sworn was true and his.

He had been an arrogant fool. Never wasted a singular thought of what his actions did to others. The tears his shame and abandonment brought his sweet wife. The self-loathing he'd brought unto those men charged with following his lead. The descent and chaos and death his lust bloomed in the bosom of the country.

He thinks back to Harrenhal often. What was it that made him act in such a kind? Elia had loved him, had given him a child, and was heavily so with another. And yet he passed her. Was any of it truly worth it? Lyanna had a wolfish grin and mischievous grey eyes, he remembered her weeping over his harp during the feast. Why her? Was it her jousting in defense of a friend? The rarity of a Northern beauty? The wildness of wolfs-blood? What was so wrong with his wife that was so right with her?

Elia was beautiful; he could remember the way she danced and smiled at their wedding, bright and hot as the Rhyonish sun. He remembers the pretty words he had told her that night; how similar they were to sweet whispers he'd spoken in the tower of joy. Of silver haired babes, dragons born to save the world.

He loved Rhaenys and Aegon too, but their births savaged her. Rhaenys had bedridden her mother for the betterment of a year and Aegon nearly killed her. For all that effort, they never even looked like him; no silver hair, no melancholic disposure, no aptitude for ancient texts. Ser Lewyn had once stated Rhaenys to be a near carbon-copy of how Elia had been when she was young; a dazzling smile and all the girlish giggles that followed it. Ashara Dayne had acquainted her with the beginnings of Oberyn's brood; a spiteful sentence to pride those of Sun and Spear, their seed was strong.

The ugly truth was more aligned with the health that claimed the wolf girl and fled the Dornish. Elia had proven to be fragile and even then her mother had ten years of miscarriages, stillbirths, and dead babes; her house was not a proven one with fertility. Lyanna was young and as hearty as any Northerner; the girl of ten and four had many years to give him as many sons as her mother had given Lord Rickard.

That's all it had came down to: children. A legacy, which of these only daughters would give him the best claim to prophecy.

He didn't start the war, he used to tell himself, he was just the one who ended it. Wishful thinking. Brandon Stark wouldn't have rode off to King's Landing if Rhaegar hadn't have escaped in the night with Lyanna. Rickard Stark wouldn't have melted away in the Throne Room if Rhaegar came home to settle the dispute.