PYROPHILIA ▸ Aegon the Conqueror

22. ( Sinners Like Us )

note: there is only one chapter left. then the epilogue. then it's over.

Chapter 22 

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"Sinners like us" 

Aegon had stayed in the Eyrie for almost two months. He had claimed his work here to be unfinished and had sent about a hundred letters of apology to Dragonstone, according to the servants. A month after he came here, a letter arrived from Visenya, expressing another refusal of Dorne's side. Ronell, who had already found the idea of his arrival distasteful, had been on edge the entire time, wishing that both Aegon and his war would be gone shortly.

He stopped sleeping to her room for the following nights, clearly preferring someone else's company instead. The few nights he came to her, he would take turns around the room, as Lyarra baffled him with a million questions about his meetings with the Kings, their plans for the war, when they would leave and how long they would be gone for. Ronell's answers were always short and indifferent. I don't know. I cannot be certain. We will see. Then she would ask him what he thought of the King, of how smart he is or how brave or how willing to sacrifice everything for obtaining Dorne. The answers were not that different. After a while, he stopped coming at all, her presence probably becoming unbearable to him.

Lyarra didn't mind that at all, spending all of her time with her boy, who was growing bigger by the day, yet weaker. The long winter that had struck their land had taken a significant toll on the boy's health. His face would turn white as snow, his eyelids heavy, his body always cold, freezing. The Maesters had given an eloquent name to his state, but Lyarra had not paid attention to it. Her boy was sick, the name was just a detail she did not care about, nor needed.

She would usually sit by the fire, holding him in her arms. The warmth would be good for him, the Maesters would say. And so she would curl up next to the lodge, telling him stories of the great men that came before him, of her father mainly. She would speak of his bravery and courage, of the love he held for his people, of the tenderness of his character, of how many had claimed him unfit to rule due to his softness and yet his name was carved in the Winterfell crypts next to the greatest Kings of the North. She told him about the way he treated her mother, as if she had been his most precious treasure and she wished he one day would too treat his wife as such.

Torrhen understood little of it, asking the same questions again and again. He was only a boy of two, soon to be three were the Gods merciful, but he would speak like a grown child. He wished to know more about his mother's lands, about her brothers and the soldiers she had been raised among. He wished to hear the stories about the kingship her father had lost and sometimes, about the one Aegon the Conqueror had earned. Lyarra would stiffen when Torrhen would speak his name, like he was a man of mere knight tales, a legend whose story could not have been true, but it was. It was all true, every word of the myths around him, of the man who rode a dragon larger than King's Landing itself as if it was his pet. Not a pet, Lyarra would correct him. The dragon was him.

She had met Aegon only a handful of times after that night. He would usually cross the hall outside her son's chambers, claiming it was Ronell he was looking for, completely unfazed by the fact that her husband's corners, the room he spent most of his days in, were on the opposite side of the castle. A few of her handmaidens would whisper to her ear, laughing and giggling like girls of adolescence about how handsome the King was, how kingly, how ethereal his beauty and how unmatched in everything. They would confess their efforts to stumble onto him at night, as he would wander around – every night as they would say. Lyarra had laughed with them a few times, the thought of them praising Aegon in such an inhuman way too tempting to resist, but the smile would fade as quickly as it came. She was no different than those girls. Her thoughts were not more saint, the memories she held so dear and yet so burdensome no different than what every single one of them wished for.