Chapter Text
He had lost an eye, but he gained a dragon…
And a madness that would define and portend the rest of his life.
After Lucerys Velaryon slashed open his face, there was little else Aemond knew. When he arrived back from Driftmark, the moment he stepped down from Vhagar’s saddle, what strength she leant him on her back left him entirely.
After adrenaline ran its course and the tether between him and Vhagar began to lull, Aemond's body inevitably caught up with him. Like a wave that fell over and tumbled him beneath its torrent, pain seized a hold of him, all encompassing and uncontrollable. He was left with little energy for anything else but to bear and endure as his body was tossed and battered beneath its overpowering manipulation.
Although assured he would heal, something wasn’t right.
It began as a slowpoke, a thin needle nestling beneath his flesh before it gradually dug and pierced him deeper. It was like reliving the cut of the blade across his flesh all over again, but as if the gods had reached down and slowed his nephew's hand to carve it deep and torturous to suffer on and on, and over and over...
Sometimes it grew so overwhelming, the muscles in his cheeks would twitch and spasm and all he could do not to touch his eye was to be held down. Whenever a cup was pushed to his lips, he was soothed only enough by his mother's voice to drink and would feel his face numb enough to pass back into more darkness. Through the smoke of burning bay leaves and rosemary, layers of herb-soaked bandages and salves slathered across half his face, he could faintly hear either his mother or Orwyle taking turns to sit with him while he faded in and out of a poppy induced sleep the first few days.
There were times he could blink around the room, but there was always a hand to stay his wrist when he found himself reaching for his face. Most days they belonged to his mother who sat at his bedside and would read from the Pointed Star whether she believed he could hear her or not. Sometimes Helaena would also sit with her cages of crickets chirping around him. There was even a time Aemond thought he heard Aegon hastily set his cup down on the bedside table to catch his wrists in time at a very late hour.
They all told him it was gone. Driftmark's maester had stitched his eyelids closed to combat infection, though it was confirmed to him no matter how many times he asked, the eye was lost. When Orwyle informed him during his more coherent periods of consciousness with a contrite visage that the stitches would have to be opened soon to allow them to remove the eye, Aemond turned away and did not wish to be held by anyone. Their mother urged him not to cry or else he would leak streaks of blood down his face.
That night he dreamt of flying with Vhagar above the sea just below the moon, his head pulled back and arms stretched out in complete lack of inhibition. There was no pain. No stinging, no aching, no stretching, no itching. Just the self-abandonment he felt after proving to the Queen of dragons he deserved to be in the skies upon her back, squinting against the wind in his face just the way he remembered it had been.
Fluttering passed by his right ear, then over his head, interrupting his memory he had been trying to linger in. It was not the loud flap of Vhagar's sail-like wings, but much faster, more insect-like. When another flew so close he almost thought it in his hair, Aemond looked up to see little lights scattered about the night sky that were not stars. As he and Vhagar descended through the billows of clouds illuminated only by the light of the moon, they began to see the tops of towers that were so tall they extended up like a warped, gnarled hand reaching up for them in the darkness, twisted like melting candles his mother prayed beside in the sept. The lower they flew, the more fireflies began to blink and circle them, gathering together like locusts above the castle walls and lighting up the cold night sky as little lanterns. There must have been thousands, probably more that all glowed as one and grew so bright, Aemond had never seen anything like it as the fluttering, clicking, and trilling grew so loud around them even Vhagar began to growl uneasily.
When it seemed like surely the air was too thick and perhaps even unbreathable to anyone who resided below, he startled as an actual fire suddenly arose. The castle walls steamed and glowed red-orange, towers began to sag and contort more than they already were as smoke fogged out of every window. Screams filled the night air alongside the lispy trills of thousands of fireflies until it became some horrible crescendo that Aemond had to cover his ears against.
Then a sting shot through him. It was as if Ser Criston had caught him with his morningstar across the eye. His hands flew up and held his face, trying his hardest to blink out whatever had flown in. Attempts to rub it out grew frantic, feeling whatever it was wriggling and burrowing further behind his socket as he truly began to panic. An uncontainable pain seared through his skull, that no matter how hard he pressed over it, nothing could ease its persistence as he cried and screamed aloud.
The next time he awoke, he was alone.
Slipping from under the thick cloistering blankets his mother always threw over him, he shook as he stumbled from his bed, the effects of poppy making it difficult not to stagger to the looking glass in his rooms to see himself. Willing his heavy lids to open and focus, he took in the sight of the stitches down his brow and over his eye that had swollen and distorted the whole half of his face to look like some monster or mongoloid staring back at him. Aemond's hands trembled reaching up to touch the sutures threaded through his eyelid that went all the way down his cheek, confirming they were real beneath his fingers when he felt something press back.
Practically jumping from the mirror and landing on his back across the floor, Aemond scrambled away and whimpered as he felt that same something in his eye.
Horrified that an insect from his dreams had slid between his stitches, Aemond whirled around the room in panic. Finding a pair of scissors on a table with other instruments, he almost crashed back against the looking glass as he tried to cut the first thread that held his eyelid closed. Tears leaked from one side and blood the other, making it difficult to get a grip on his skin to cut the next stitching as he groaned and gnashed his teeth together, hand still shaking with the scissors squeezed tightly in his fingers.
“Prince Aemond!”
Gasping, he hadn't realized he was sobbing until he was distracted by Ser Criston who had burst through his doors. Large hands wrapped around his wrists as the scissors were pried from his grasp and was carefully pinned back to his bed while he writhed and sobbed underneath his father's Kingsguard.
“Get it out! Please! There's something inside! I need to get it out! Please, there's something inside I need to get it out!”
Forced to drink more poppy, when he awoke again, Orwyle and his mother were there to assure him there was nothing but his dead eye underneath the stitches that had to be redone. Aemond spent the next days weeping and insisting they were wrong between their urges to drink more to soothe his maddened state, still feeling the crawling beneath his eye and the fluttering in his ears. Eventually, Orwyle would bring a glass for him to look at as they cut away the stitching again so he could see for himself, an attempt to discourage him from harming himself anymore.
It was then he saw his eye for the first time since Lucerys had swung his blade across his face.
The bright lilac of his eye was now pale and fogged over, pupil flayed open like the skin of a grape, the inside wet and gelatin.
Looking at himself directly, he thought perhaps this was a glimpse of what he would look like in death. A half dead boy, staring back at him.
Knocking the mirror away, he folded over and heaved nothing but bile until the muscles of his stomach ached. They had to help lay him back down when all he could do was shake and close his eye. The next time a cup was pressed to his lips, he drank more willingly and welcomed fading back out while his face was stitched back.
Aemond could still hear the fluttering whenever he closed his eye. His rice paper lid that was sewn back together twinged and tugged against the sutures whenever he sporadically felt the crawling beneath his skin. Sometimes it wriggled down his cheek like a tear from his eye, and sometimes it squirmed up his face and across his brow like it was trapped, looking for a way out across his skull. A fortnight had gone by this way and still no one could confirm the entity he felt scurrying underneath his flesh.
It was a terrible thing to be told he wasn’t feeling everything he could feel happening inside of him. Unlike any other wound to his body that he could hold or put pressure over to at least relieve some of the pain, he could only lay still and was consistently held back from ever touching. Unable to read or even write while he convalesced, Aemond remembered every face.
He remembered every lord, every lady. His father, Rhaenyra, her bastards, Daemon, his daughters who started the entire incident – every person who stood in Corlys Velaryon's hall and bowed their heads to the indiginites that befell him that night, and clung to a hope in the darkness. In those first days confined to his bed, he clung to hate against pain. It was so soul consuming it stole every piece of him, any light and any laughter, any generosity, and it burned like an invisible flame held against his skin.
When Aemond recovered, he promised himself he would never let himself be humiliated again.
It still broiled him with rage and indignation like a match struck to incinerate, that even after he claimed the largest dragon in the world, he was still not strong enough to stand against Rhaenyra before their father. If his heart stopped beating, Aemond suspected he would still wonder in whatever afterlife he went to if they had all gotten what they deserved. He promised himself when he arose from this pain, he would never be weak again he told Ser Criston one day.
“It is not weak to feel pain,” Cole had told him softly, apologetically at his bedside. “It is a feeling, perhaps meant to wake us. People try to hide their pain, but that is when we allow it to truly weaken us.”
Ser Criston held his shoulder with the care of a father Aemond had always longed for.
“Wear it, Prince Aemond. Feel it. Pain does not define a man, but the way he carries it will. Carry this scar Rhaenyra's bastard has given you and use it to strengthen yourself.”
So he prayed to the Smith for the might to mend his world of it's injustices. He prayed to the Warrior to strengthen his sword arm, so that one day he could defend himself and his family when he is well enough to hold one again. Aemond would have slit both his hands and offered his own blood as payment if it meant any gods would hear him. Now that it was so blatantly proven for all to see, their father would stand aside and leave them undefended against his daughter from Aemma Arryn, Aemond had to be smarter the next time he matched against Rhaenyra Targaryen.
Though despite his prayers for the fortitude to defeat his half-sister, despite all his readings about every ancient warrior, every commander, every general he ever heard from in any story he could get his hands on, it was his mother who inspired him above all others. Who would have thought the Queen capable of drawing steel with the strength of no other man in that hall, to defend him when all else failed her?
Now it was Aemond's duty to arise from behind her and pick up the dagger she'd dropped.
Infection.
It had been their greatest fear and could see the distressed looks exchanged between his mother and Orwyle. It was agony to change his bandages, and when his wound began to stink and became hot to touch as his stitches leaked pus, voices around him grew frantic. Half of his face began to throb as if he had another heartbeat that came from the side that had been slashed open. Teared up and swollen from how sweltering hot the rest of his body became, he could hardly keep even his uninjured eye open – but he could still feel it. Whatever was inside him, what everyone was telling him wasn't there, Aemond could feel skittering around like it too was in agony beneath his burning flesh
Maybe his eye wasn't dead yet , he had thought in his fevered delirium, like the whitewalkers in all the stories, if it reawakened and could move again, perhaps he could someday see with it again?
“Is it dying?” he had asked his mother while she soaked cold rags across his brow, “Is the other one dying too?”
Made to drink more poppy until he could not even move his littest finger, the last thing he heard before he sunk entirely in darkness was his mother's weeping.
Aemond dreamed of ravens lined up and flocked on a raised, high edge of a hill atop a field of blood red flowers. Arrows flew over and he felt them whip past and blow his hair around his face like gales of wind. A thousand arrows, a thousand raven eyes staring down at him. He dreamt of a lake almost crystal clear and ice cold as he waded into it's depth, blood streaming down his face to drip into the water like the trees with scarlet leaves that called to him on an island he felt afraid to swim to. More ravens cawed and flew overhead, calling him by name, a thousand pairs of wings flapping. He saw a red star bleeding and shadows fall across snow, the flap of wings in his ears as he screamed for Vhagar until he realized his mouth was full of water and he was plundering down no matter how hard he tried to untether himself.
When Aemond awoke, he thought he was entirely blind and his hands clawed around him as he panicked, sobbing and choking.
His mother's hands found him in the darkness, knowing it was her as he felt soft palms and scabbed fingernail beds. Bandages were peeled from his face and he was able to breathe easier when he was finally able to blink his right eye open. Cold fingers cradled the side of his uninjured face and he soon was able to focus on the red-rimmed, wide chestnut eyes that belonged to his mother. She looked pale, almost sickly with dark rings under her eyes while her lips trembled in relief as he blinked up at her.
Aemond's hand reached up to feel for his eye, but his mother easily caught it and shook her head sadly, placing it back at his side.
An unknown amount of time passed in and out of consciousness, but everytime his mother urged him to drink more poppy, he dreamed of looking into a fire and seeing a little girl fall from a tower, a tree carved into until it bled, he saw the dragonpit cracked open lick the shell of an egg. He saw a man with a lion across his chest sat across a Septon with ceremonial robes. He saw a young girl sat beside an old withering man and given a book to read. He watched a woman twist and writhe as she birthed a deformed reptilian child. He watched an egg hatch and produced the most malformed, worm-like creature with wings he'd ever seen before it's head was smashed from its body. They were all so vivid and frightening he began to beg and insist he rather endure pain than continue to dream.
“Please mother, the fire… ” he would sob and cough as they held his head still while Orwyle tried to trickle in a few more sips, spilling down the sides of his mouth to join his tears. “Put it out! I don't want to see — don't make me see!”
Salt and metallic dripped down his throat with more poppy until he was sedated enough to lie back in his pillows. They didn't understand, he was more distressed in his drugged and unconscious state than he was awake.
Always warm and broiling, he thrashed in his sleep and even in his nightmares he burned. In his dreams he stood before Aegon and witnessed him consumed by fire. His brother's face melted, dripping and melding into the metal armor he wore that scalded Aemond's hand when he reached out for him. Once he dreamt of Aegon and reached out to hold him, ignoring the fire around them as he clutched his brother closer and refused to let go as he caught fire with him, screaming together as one. That night it was his brother who woke him, having dragged a chair over and sat with him until he fell back asleep. Aemond always wondered if their mother had commanded it or if Aegon had come on his own because he had heard his younger brother screaming for him. Sometimes, when Aemond could tolerate no one else prodding and pestering him but was not allowed to be left alone anymore, he asked for Aegon. His brother was the only one who listened, tossing water over the room's hearth when he asked and would allow him to shake and grit his teeth throughout the night, leaving the milk of the poppy on his nightstand whenever Aemond waved it away.
Those days he wandered in and out of hot and cold, fire and snow. He walked up to a wall of ice he pressed his hand up against where a blue flower grew from a crack and blue flames roared overhead. Melting away, it all dripped down his hand until there was nothing left but an army of blue eyes staring back at him from the other side.
Aemond pretended to be asleep one time he woke up to his mother and Orwyle speaking to each other, their voices hushed and fearful.
“...fever as high as Prince Aemond's can cause hallucinations, Your Grace. I understand they can be quite unsettling, but I assure you it is only temporary and the body's natural response to illness...”
“You can't possibly…How can these possibly be fever dreams? You've heard him with your own ears Grandmaester, the things he screams, such things a boy cannot know…”
Sometimes Helaena was the only person he could find true comfort with. She was the only person who did not look at him horrified after he'd kept the entire Keep awake with his screaming at all hours of the night. The only person who did not look at him like he was disturbed when he asked her if she could see things that had begun to bleed from his dreams and could now see awake.
In his mother's rooms, while he waited for her to walk him to Orwyle's chambers, he leant on the heavy oak of her bed frame and startled when blood began to stain the middle of her sheets and seeped through the mattress, dripping thick scarlet driblets across the flagstone floor. He shouted and scrambled back to avoid it pooling beneath his feet, his mother instantly catching him and pulling him close to her breast like she would when he was a much smaller child. When she asked what it was he saw, he was so horrified she couldn't see it and could barely stutter an explanation as she stepped into the congealing puddle he insisted was there, her gown streaking it across her floors.
“My darling…I – I don't see – ” bewildered, she drew a sharp breath that sounded like a sob, her eyes bright and frightened as they searched his face...
Orwyle was summoned immediately to come to her chambers instead. The Grandmaester was also unable to see the blood Aemond insisted was there, watching as they all stepped through it completely unnerved and when his mother touched the mattress with her own hand, he flinched away from her dripping fingers that no one else could see. Even after they peeled the soaked sheets from the bed and tried to convince him there was nothing, the new ones they laid down slowly began to soak through as well.
“He is past his fever and he is still speaking like – ”
The Queen covered her face and frantically wiped tears from her eyes as her and Orwyle spoke in hushed voices from across the room, leaving him in his mother's solar closely watched by Ser Criston.
Yet through all the madness of it all, when he thought himself truly disturbed, it was Helaena who entered his mother's room, escorted by her Septa, and Aemond startled when she rose her skirts and stepped around the mess while his mother and the Grandmaester spoke – like she saw it too.
When she sat down beside him, she reached for his hand and she shook her head.
Later, when his mother was gone and it was just Helaena and him, she told him she saw the blood too.
“You've made an exchange, dear brother,” she told him, “You did not just close an eye for Vhagar.”
Aemond would never mourn the dragon he had gained, but whatever curse had come along with such a sacrifice he had unwillingly made had changed him grievously.
Aemond would come to realize the more he talked about what he saw, the more maesters came to evaluate his health and more septons were called to pray over him. His mother's face did not seem so young as it had once been, if it had ever truly been, and was more drawn and harrowed than ever as the crinkle between her brow became a crack that engraved deeper into her face. Aegon’s japes were unusually quiet, though Aemond might have actually preferred his brother's familiar callousness to the disturbed glances he sometimes shot his brother's wound if it was ever undressed. The King, who even before Driftmark had hardly deemed him interesting enough to garner scraps of attention, regarded Aemond cautiously. Although his father would ask politely how his healing was coming along if ever a conversation was forced between them, the spread of his mouth into any expression of softness, or some emotion that would suggest Viserys felt some concern for him all felt artificial and Aemond eventually learned to stop looking for it. His father was only as interested in his recovery as much as it didn't draw any more attention to the accusations he hurled at Rhaenyra's sons.
Then one morning, Larys Strong visited his chambers. With his mother gone and Orwyle distracted elsewhere, the Clubfoot visited him at the early hours of the nightingale, when the sun was only just arising and a pale pink and purple hue colored the sky outside that he caught a glimpse of between fluttering curtains after Larys opened his windows.
Aemond hurriedly sat up in his bed, bewildered at such an unannounced visit from one of his mother's supplicants.
“I apologize for such an early audience, My Prince. I thought it best to arrive before the maesters did.”
The crippled Lord hobbled so self assured and dutiful around his rooms, pouring himself and Aemond a warm cup of tea a servant brought in as he lowered himself down into a chair beside the bed. When Aemond didn't take it, he only nodded and set it gently on a bedside table to steam on it's own while Larys drank his own.
“It's nettle tea,” he explained after a sip of his cup, “From a plant most would find pleasing to look upon with bright red and yellow flowers, but with a stem that is covered in tiny stiff hairs that release stinging chemicals when touched.”
Aemond dubiously glanced at the still steaming cup he'd been offered while Larys took another drink of his own.
“If crushed and prepared properly, it is quite useful in reducing inflammation and even pain.”
“Why hasn't Orwyle given it before?” He asked, his voice scratched from having just awoken.
“Because it can also be a powerful detoxifier.”
Attention piqued, Aemond met Larys’ gaze more attentively, feeling the only eye he had left narrow.
“Do not despair, Prince Aemond, there are better days ahead,” Larys went on, “But I must warn you. The poppy may take the pain away and blur whatever it is that plagues you, but it dulls your mind. You must be careful.”
“It's all they give me,” he whispered, suddenly feeling this conversation shouldn't be heard loudly, “They think I'm mad. And I do not know if I can entirely disagree with them.”
Gaze falling to his hands, he tried not to let his fingers twitch as they urged to dig into his face where he could still feel the crawling beneath even then.
Larys leant forward on his cane perched between his legs and Aemond was momentarily distracted by the amber stone he'd never seen before. “When I was born, I came screaming into the world in the bowels of one of Harren's great towers,” he told Aemond so softly he felt himself hunching to listen closer, “My lungs were strong, but my foot…so twisted that my father named it sorcery, accusing one of our household of casting malign spells.”
Feeling his brows furrow, even as such a movement pulled at his stitches painfully, Aemond had no idea what to make of such a confession.
“But when I began to see things …people that no one else could see,” Larys’ dark, black eyes that Aemond just now realized were the same color as his nephews’ stared back deep and meaningfully, willing him to hear his words, “They thought I was mad, too.”
“I'm not,” Aemond despaired.
“And how do you mean to get anyone to believe you?” Strong prompted, silencing him when he faltered for an answer. “The more you try to explain yourself, justify your sanity, the more disturbed you appear.”
Thinking of all the deeply concerned and unsettled looks exchanged between everyone whenever he tried to explain what was happening to him, Aemond began to grow numb and listened, finding truth in Lord Larys’ words.
“If you smile too much, you will be perceived delusional, or stifling hysteria. If you do not smile enough, they will consider you despondent. If you remain neutral, you are emotionally withdrawn, potentially catatonic.”
Clenching his hands into fists when they began to shake, he considered he very well was all these things wrapped into one. “What do I do then?”
There were a few more moments of discomforting silence until Larys finally answered him.
“My brother, he couldn't see the things I saw…but he was sympathetic,” Strong said, lending an uncomfortableness to the room at the mention of Ser Harwin who was burned and buried beside their father in Harrenhal now. “He must have thought me mad too, but he was kind.”
Aemond wearily met the man's stare, his breath caught in his throat as the Clubfoot's eyes roamed the bandages across his face too brazenly for his liking.
“It was he who told me I should stop speaking of everything I saw. Ignore it , I believe he said rather simplisticly.”
Larys smiled like he was recalling a fond, amusing memory, though Aemond couldn't remember seeing the man too heartbroken about the news of his family. He couldn't remember him being gone long for the funeral.
“My brother saw the more I tried to convince our father of what I saw, the sooner he'd throw me to the madhouse.”
Picking the tea up from its ceramic tray, the man pressed the hot cup into his twitching hands.
“The things you see, Prince Aemond, see them, believe them to be true, but keep them to yourself.”
On especially difficult days, now that his nightmares haunted him in the daylight, Aemond stayed close to his sister. Although she could not always see what he did, she didn't treat him like he was completely deranged and was ever patient with him. When his face itched so terribly he dug bruises into his thighs and his arms to keep from tearing his stitches out, Helaena read to him. When his head ached him so terribly he could only lay helplessly until it passed, Aemond would mindlessly watch her with needle and thread. His sister took to embroidery, or drawing and painting; it distracted from her own dreams that she long ago stopped trying to explain and could express them no other way but with needlework or paper and ink.Though some days he found it difficult not to see flesh instead of fabric, or blood instead of paint, and asked that she not use red.
On those days, she used threads of dark olive and rich forest greens to stitch color into the dark jerkins he favored wearing. Though it wasn't to match him to their mother's house colors but to embroider Vhagar across his collars and sleeves.
So he sat with Helaena most days as she concentrated on colored threads to stab in and out of fabric, holding her sewing hoop close to her face to block out whatever came to her during the day.
Some evenings he read while she sewed and never spoke a word to each other. Even when he had to spend a few hours a day without his bandages to let his eye “breathe”, Helaena never shied from his gaping wound when she sat with him. So on certain days when she began to whisper to herself, he did her the courtesy of listening without judgement and nodded even when he couldn't understand anything she told him.
One particular evening Aemond will never forget was when they were sitting in her solar together. With Aegon and Helaena's wedding approaching, she had began to make her maiden cloak. With an arrangement such as their's, his sister had the unique position of keeping her Targaryen heraldry since she would not be changing houses, so she embroidered Dreamfyre and a beautiful patterns of beaded stars. Aemond had already seen their mother pull out the thick black cloak their father had once draped over her own shoulders on their wedding day. The Queen had also been working with her own seamstress to restitch the three headed Targaryen sigil gold.
Lounging in a chaise just a few feet from her, Aemond had been watching his sister sew pale blue dragons with silver beads on a pastel green silk in between his readings on Archmaester Sandeman's Atlas of the Human Anatomy that he had asked to read from Orwyle. After Larys Strong's visit, the Grandmaester had almost looked relieved when Aemond stopped his requests for all written records of Daenys the Dreamer and any written literature on “dragon dreams”, and turned to more rational explanations for this condition he now quietly suffered alone with. He instead combed through every textbook that might explain what was happening to him from a healers standpoint. Because perhaps he really was mad, and maybe somehow Luke's blade had severed or damaged something inside his head that was the real cause for the things he was seeing? Though even accounts of the world's most renowned healers had no solutions to offer him, no matter how many versions he requested to read from Orwyle's indices.
Growing impatient as he skimmed and flicked through a chapter that he'd already heard similar conjectures about in other volumes, he'd been so irritable with his reading he hadn't realized his sister had began to mumble to herself until she suddenly shouted out, startling him to sit up and look about the room in alarm.
“The trees,” Helaena whimpered, mouth trembling like she was struggling to form words she wished to say. Poised with her needle still in hand, she pushed it back through the silk from the other side and stared unblinkingly at the fabric in her hands.
“What did you say, Sister?”
Ser Willis who was stationed by the door, instructed to remain close by incase of another “episode” as Orwyle and his mother liked to call whatever was happening to him, also looked over in concern.
“When they cut the trees, the children wept and cursed the defiler, and every house to come after,” his sister whispered, still wide eyed and looking petrified as he approached her.
“Hel…” Aemond went to touch her hand but she only flinched away, pulling another thread.
“The dragons were never meant to bleed into a cursed house,” she went on, stabbing her needle back through the fabric, the hoop clutched tightly her chest. “From our blood comes the song of ice and fire, but no matter how much we dream we cannot change a cursed prince’s fate.”
Aemond frowned at his sister's words in confusion, Rhaenyra's bastards coming to mind.
“Mother has always said the gods would punish our half-sister's depravities,” Aemond muttered, though his eye remained on her fingers and wanted to cringe every time she pierced her needle through celadon silk.
“The Old Gods care not for vows said before The Seven,” she told him, and he jumped up from his settee when the next silver-blue thread she pulled up was suddenly scarlet and wet. “Blood is blood, and the felled weirwoods demand their payment of it.”
“Sister, stop,” he gasped when Helaena dug the needle back in, hooking it into the flesh of his sister's palm underneath and yanking up, pulling her skin with it. Aemond grabbed her hands and Ser Willis called for Orwlye and their mother before rushing over as well, but she made no indications such a thing even pained her.
“Not even the Fourteen Flames can save its last dragons from their own self-destruction,” she told him, finally looking up to stare into his empty socket, grabbing his hand back so tightly he winced.
“Helaena, stop!”
It seemed the desperate sob in his voice snapped his sister back from wherever she had wandered in her head and meant to pull her hand away until she finally saw what she’d done.
As realization came back to her, Helaena’s hands shook as she tried to pull away the fabric she had sewn to her own skin before both Aemond and Ser Willis stopped her. Hastily sifting through her sewing basket to find scissors, he cut the thread she sewed into the palm of her hand and Ser Willis carefully pulled the string loose from her skin as Aemond pressed a nearby rag to stifle the bleeding.
“What happened?” He asked her, ignoring their mother's handmaidens who gasped and covered their mouths in shock by the door at what the young princess had done. “Where did you go?”
Helaena hadn't been able to decipher in words what had happened that day to their mother, but later when he had tried to ask again, she painted a mural of towers that were aflame behind a bleeding, slashed up weirwood tree. Towers that he had seen before in his dreams – when fireflies had hovered above just before it caught fire, before something flew in his eye and made him want to claw it out.
Their mother had tried to discreetly dispose of the canvas, but Aemond was able to save it and stowed the painting away secretly in his room.
There was a debt to be paid.
Aemond clung to his mother's words. They became his only motivation to open his eye in the mornings some days. It became his purpose to eat, to walk, to blink . All things only lead him to one goal, one desire .
Revenge.
But then, even that was taken from him.
Whispers came first. Rhaenyra's son, the eyeflayer, the mutilator, the bastard had gone mad.
Confined to his rooms for weeks, they said. Ill . Aemond had scoffed, still with his socket empty and eyelids now cut away, only freshly cooled from brain boiling fever. What did that bastard know of being unwell?
Aemond would dream of Lucerys almost every night. He followed the boy through hallways of stone so dark the sconces on the walls were barely enough to see in front of him and only one set of footsteps echoed around them, as if Luke wasn't even there at all and made no sound of his own. During these dreams, he trailed behind the bastard boy and would sometimes realize it was not puddles of water he was stepping in but blood that had dripped through the hall. There were even times Lucerys would turn around before he could wake up and Aemond would see where it was all coming from.
Red welts were always scratched across the side of his face and his eyelids with trails of blood that trickled down like tears. Rhaenyra's son's fingers twitched down at his sides, nails always broken and coated in blood when he reached up to touch his cheek that was already covered in crimson smears from a dangling eye still attached, rolling across his pale, freckled face whenever he turned to stare back at Aemond following him.
He always exclaimed in horror when Lucerys reached up to rip off the rest of his eye from the sinews of nerves and flesh still connecting it.
Aemond told his mother once when she asked what he dreamt when he awoke shouting every night, but when he told her of opening a bloodied box Lucerys pressed into his hands with his eye from his last nightmare and could see this only deeply disturbed her, he started to lie and no longer disclosed what he saw to anyone, like Larys had advised.
When word officially reached them in a letter from Rhaenyra’s own hand, he remembered his mother dropped the slip of parchment and her eyes found him from across the room.
After Aemond had wept and raved when he awoke with his eye entirely gone, he had promised her one day he would have Lucerys Velaryon's debt. But it would seem, the boy had taken it for himself.
Said to have used his bare hands, the bastard had scratched out his own eye.
Although Aemond might have wished it, had dreamed of it, he knew his mother must know he couldn't possibly have had a hand in it. But when they heard Lucerys Velaryon had wrenched out his own eye, it was the first time she ever looked frightened of him. And it was the first time his dreams felt truly real and not just delusions.
His mother immediately dropped the box Rhaenyra had sent.
Enraged and rumored to refuse to leave her son's side, his half-sister had sent a letter that broke his mother's heart when she read it but only commanded such a thing be taken away and ripped it from Aemond’s hands after he tried to retrieve it. He would never even get to see the eye that should have been his. He knew he shouldn't have wanted to keep the gift that bastard had persisted be sent to him, but a part of him still needed confirmation it was all true.
The rest of the realm whispered of Rhaenyra Targaryen's demented son and for a year she kept her bastards on Dragonstone after marrying their uncle, out of all sight and any further knowledge.