THE 7TH MOON [Aemond Targaryen]

Six - Succession.

"Tis okay Laenora!"

"My father! He is dead! He's dead!"

"Laenora my sweet love..."

Rhaenyra Targaryen's heart shattered inside her chest at the sight of her eldest child. The girl was inconsolable, screaming, sobbing into her sleeves covered by sand, gripping at the bars of her windows to keep herself upright. If Rhaenyra had ever felt pain, she knew in that moment her daughter was the physical embodiment of it. She so desperately wanted to reach out to her, to touch her, to cradle her, but she was terrified she'd bite her head off if she tried. Her poor Laenora.

"Do not feed me your pity mother! He was not my blood but yet he is still mine to mourn!"

"Daughter you must listen to me."

"I wish to be left alone mother! Can't you see?"

"Laenora Velaryon! It was not I who passed this news onto you! They are false tidings!"

"False tidings?"

"False." Daemon's voice beckoned as he stepped into his soon to be step daughter's chambers. "You are the eldest and you are heir... She deserves to know."

"Your father's death does not reign true." The mother whispered, finally clutching her daughter's cheek. "He felt he had let us down, it was his true right of passage to leave us. He and Ser Qarl have travelled across the narrow sea. He will reside there until he chooses a new path."

"My father has abandoned me?"

"And one day he shall return for you."

"B-But I saw his corpse!" The Velaryon denied, "He was truly dead!"

"But a servant my dear."

"What about my grandparents? They must know! They mourn for him mother."

"And they must continue to."

"Why? Why must we be so cruel?"

"Come my sweet love. You shall see."

"But I didn't get to say goodbye..."

Dragon fire shone a flame in the sky and Laenora Velaryon stood ablaze beneath it, clutching both Luke and Jace's arms in her own, Rhaena and Baela huddled either side of them as they bared witness to their parents remarrying unto one another. 

She felt the sand beneath her bare feet and the tears still fresh upon her cheeks as she watched her mother slice her new father's lip with dragon glass, anointing him to her; Laenora had never felt so sick. Her Aunt Laena's corpse was barely cold, as was her father's bed, both Velaryon's had been cast to the wind like forgotten memories.

She watched the tears streak Baela's face and in an instant took her beneath her arm, cradling her to her chest as her newfound sibling. She too wanted to cry, she too wanted to mourn, but how could she do so unjustly to her siblings? To tell them the truth through her tears, to undo to them the same lie her mother had undone to her. It was reckless, thoughtless. How could her mother be so selfish as to murder their father in their eyes and remarry before them the same eve?

Laenora had never viewed her birth giver in a dimmer light.

"It's okay." She whispered as Rhaena came to rest beneath her other arm. The five children bound together in the marriage and blood of their parents. "It will all be okay."

But somehow as the blood dripped down the gape of her mother and father's jaws, and her eyes fell upon Aegon's blood on her own sleeve, she wondered if her truths were unjust after all.

And if she was destined to follow the same path as her mother in the end.

***

- 6 years follow -