Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

The morning light streams through stained glass and half parted silk curtains, shimmering vague coloured shapes dancing across our chamber floor. Reds and golds and blacks, an interesting mural of sorts commissioned by my ancestor Aegon III after the dance. I've always found comfort in these patterns, in the way they remind me of who I am. Who we are. It yet also reminded me of a different time, one to avoid less we repeat the mistakes they describe. My name is Aelora Targaryen, and my twin brother has been watching me sleep again.

"Your dreams were violent last night," Aelor says, his violet eyes studying me with that familiar mixture of concern and fascination. "You spoke in... well tongues it was quite an experience."

I stretch beneath the silken sheets, dismissing his worry with a practiced wave. "All have strange dreams brother, it's in our blood."

But these dreams have been different lately. More visceral. More... prophetic, not that I'd worry Aelor about such a thing. I haven't told Aelor how I've woken with the scent of blood in my nostrils, the feeling of sticky warmth on my hands. Some burdens are mine alone to bear, even from him. Especially from him. I think he has more than enough to worry about, especially after Father's death.

"Uncle Aerys has requested our presence at court today," he states, changing the subject as he moves to the window. Morning light catches his silver-gold hair, creating an almost halo effect that makes him look otherworldly. Not that he didn't always that is. I rise and allow my handmaidens to dress me, though I dismiss them when they try to arrange my hair. That pleasure belongs to Aelor alone, as it has since we were children. His fingers work through the strands with practiced ease, our reflection watching us from the looking glass. Not an uncommon sight Aelor and I have never known distance. Where he ends, I begin. A simple fact of life.

"Shall we practice before we attend court?" I ask, already moving toward the wooden chest where we keep our dagger, Valyrian steel with a dragonbone hilt, Uncle Aerys' gift upon our wedding day. It had been especially made for said event, the steel was reforged by a Qohorik smith from a sword. Some ancestral blade of a long dead Lysian House. The hilt was specifically bone taken from one Balerion the Black Dreads horns.

Aelor's smile is mischievous, boyish. "If you're prepared to lose again."

"I never lose," I remind him, retrieving the blade. It feels alive in my hand, humming with a strange heat that feels almost comforting to the touch.

Our game is simple, we toss the dagger between us, catching it by the hilt. A child's game made we'd never stopped playing though this time the dagger wasn't wooden nor blunt. The thrill of danger makes my heart race, it makes me feel more alive than anything save Aelor's touch. I take position across from him. The dagger feels unusually heavy today. Something whispers at the edges of my consciousness... a warning, perhaps, carried over from my vague dreams.

"Aelora?" Aelor tilts his head, studying me. "Are you well?"

I shake away the foreboding. "Of course." I toss the dagger, its blade catching light as it rotates toward him.

He catches it with practiced ease, smirking as he does so. "You'll need to try harder than that, sweet sister."

He throws it back, higher this time. I reach—

Something is wrong. The air in the chamber shifts, grows heavy, like before a summer storm. The pools of colored light from the windows seem to ripple across the floor. Time slows. The dagger rotates once, twice in the air. I step forward to catch it, but my foot catches on an unseen obstacle... a slightly upturned stone on the floor. I stumble. In the same moment, Aelor lunges forward, perhaps seeing my imbalance, perhaps moving to catch me. The dagger is still falling.

Our eyes meet. His widen with sudden realization.

"Aelor!" I cry out, my hand stretching toward him, but it's too late.

The Valyrian steel finds him, sliding between his ribs as if it knows its destination. The sound it makes... gods, the sound... oh so wet and final. A final ringing sound and then the wet tear of flesh.

Aelor looks down at the hilt protruding from his chest, his expression more surprised than pained. "Oh," he says softly, almost curiously.

Then the blood comes. So much blood. It courses down his doublet in rivulets, pools at his feet, stains my hands as I rush to him, catching his weight as he falls.

"No, no, no," I'm chanting, lowering him to the floor. "Guards! Maester! Someone help us!"

But even as I scream, I know. The blade has found his heart. Valyrian steel shows no mercy, not even to dragonlords.

Aelor's hand reaches up, trembling, to touch my face. His fingers leave a smear of blood across my cheek. "Not your fault," he whispers, though we both know it is. "My sweet sister. My love."

His eyes... our eyes grow distant. The connection that has been there since before we were born, the invisible thread that has always tied us together, stretches thin, then snaps. I feel it break inside me, a physical pain that makes me near double over.

Half of my soul vanishes in an instant.

The chamber door bursts open. Servants rush in. Someone is screaming... me, I realize distantly but it sounds foreign, like a wounded animal. Hands pull at me, trying to separate me from his body. I will not let go. I cannot.

Later, they tell me I sat in his blood for hours, rocking his body and speaking in tongues. They say I prophesied doom, that I cursed the gods. I remember none of it. What I do remember is this, the exact moment I became incomplete. The precise second when Princess Aelora Targaryen, daughter of Rhaegel, sister-wife to Aelor, transformed into something else entirely. The twins of Targaryen are no more. Only I remain, and I am not whole. And when Uncle Aerys... no the King names me his heir in the days that follow, placing the burden of the realm upon my already torn and fractured incomplete soul, I want to tell him the truth... that what sits before him is merely half a person, playing at life. But dragons do not show weakness. So I blindly nod half deaf to it all, my brother's blood still embedded beneath my fingernails, invisible to all but me.

I am Aelora Targaryen, and I carry my ghosts with me.

Chapter Text

Time becomes meaningless when half of you is gone. Days blur into nights, and nights stretch into endless pools of darkness where I search for his face in the shadows. The first month passes in a haze of the maesters bizarre tinctures and dreamwine. The Grand Maester insists they will help with the "hysteria," as he calls it. What the old fool doesn't understand is that hysteria implies this an overreaction. There is no appropriate reaction to watching your twin's lifeblood spill across stone floors. For his blood to stain your very hands and seep into my clothes. No true response for your soul being shredded into two.

"Your Grace must eat," my handmaiden whispers, setting down another untouched dish. I've forgotten her name. I've forgotten many things, but never the sound of steel sliding between ribs. Never the weight of Aelor's body as he slumped against me.

The servants have removed all mirrors from my chambers. They think I don't know why. They whisper that I spent hours staring into looking glasses, speaking to someone who wasn't there. Perhaps they're right. Perhaps they're wrong. When you share a face with a ghost, reflection becomes a way of almost... speaking to the dead. A séance if you will.

---

By the third month, Uncle Aerys summons me to court. I dress in black silk, my silver-gold hair braided simply, a widows knot, nothing like the elaborate styles Aelor once wove for me. The Small Council chambers fall silent as I enter.

"Niece," Uncle Aerys says, his voice gentle as if addressing a wounded animal. "Come sit, join us."

I sit where indicated, feeling the weight of the realm pressing down on shoulders made for sharing burdens, not solely taking them. They speak of grain stores and Dornish disputes, of marriages to secure alliances and threats from across the Narrow Sea. Their words wash over me like waves against the stone of Castle Driftmark.

"Does Her Grace understand?" asks Lord Brynden, the Hand of the King and pseudo Master of Whispers. Something in his mismatched eyes... I hate it there's something not right about this man.

I meet his gaze steadily. "I understand everything, Lord Rivers." My voice surprises me, it sounds like mine again, not the hollow echo it's been since that day. "The Brackens seek advantage over the Blackwoods. The harvest in the Reach exceeds expectations. And you've placed spies in my household to monitor that I haven't completely lost my wits."

The silence that follows confirms my suspicion. I stand, smoothing nonexistent wrinkles from my gown. "I am not mad. I am grieving. There is a difference, though perhaps not to those who have never loved as dragons love."

I leave them speechless, but as I pass Lord Rivers, he whispers, "Grief and madness are not so different, Princess. Both allow us to see what others cannot."

---

By the sixth month, the dreams intensify. I no longer need dreamwine to visit Aelor... he comes to me unbidden, his form wavering like a reflection in disturbed water.

"You shouldn't linger here," I tell him one night as we stand atop Dragonstone's highest tower. The sea crashes against black stone far below, and the stars wheel overhead in odd patterns.

"Neither should you, sweet sister," he replies, his voice carrying a strange echo. "The living have responsibilities."

"I am fulfilling my responsibilities," I argue, though we both know it's only half-true. I attend council meetings. I sign documents. I am the Princess of Dragonstone in all ways except spirit.

Aelor smiles sadly. In death, he looks younger, untouched by the concerns that had begun to line his face. "You know what I mean. You hide yourself away, speaking only to ghosts and servants."

"What would you have me do?" I ask, anger flaring for the first time in months. "Smile at feasts? Dance with lords who seek only to claim what was yours? What was ours?"

"I would have you live," he says simply. "For both of us now."

I reach for him, but my hand passes through his form like smoke. The pain of it is fresh still as raw as the day it happened.

"How?" I whisper. "Tell me how to live as half a person."

But dawn breaks before he can answer, and the ghost of my twin-husband dissolves with the night. I wake in my bed, salt crusted on my cheeks, wondering if I walked the battlements in my sleep or if the whole exchange happened only in my mind. The line between dreams and reality grows thinner with each passing day. A curse, some would call it. I'm beginning to think it might be a gift.

---

In the ninth month, they begin to whisper that I speak with dragons. It started innocuously enough. I took to walking the depths of Dragonstone, where massive dragon skulls from before the Conquest rest in silent reminder of our family's former glory. Their empty eye sockets seem to follow my movements, their massive jaws forever frozen in silent roars.

"They understand loss," I explained to a startled servant who found me stroking the smooth bone of Balerion's skull one evening. "Dragons are not meant to be alone either."

The story spreads, as stories do in court. Soon it transforms... Princess Aelora doesn't merely speak to dragon skulls; she converses with them, and they answer in ancient Valyrian tongues. Princess Aelora's eyes glow in the darkness like molten gold. Princess Aelora prophesies doom and destruction.

The princess does this... she does that... I hate it.

The truth is both simpler and more complex: in the presence of these ancient remains, the veil between worlds thins. Aelor's voice comes clearer there, as do other voices.. ancestors, perhaps, or something older still, something that lived in Valyrian blood long before dragons were tamed.

"You need to return to the world," these voices counsel collectively one night. "A Targaryen alone is a dangerous thing."

I laugh bitterly, the sound echoing among ancient bones. "I am never alone," I tell them. "That's precisely the problem."

---

The turning point comes in the eleventh month, when my younger sister Daenora seeks me out in my chambers. She stands before me, trembling slightly but determined, her features softer than mine but with the same coloring.

"Sister," she says, "You must stop this haunting of your own life."

I look up from the ancient text I've been studying a Valyrian tome on the connection between twins, on souls divided and rejoined. "I am not haunting anything. I am learning."

"You are fading," she counters, bold in a way I don't remember her being before. "Aelor is gone, but you remain. And while you remain, you are the heir to the Seven Kingdoms."

"A responsibility I never sought."

"Yet one you bear nonetheless." Daenora kneels before me, taking my hands in hers. Her touch startles me... how long has it been since I felt living warmth? "The court whispers that you commune with ghosts and dragons. That you walk the battlements at night, speaking to the stars."

"And if I do?"

"Then I would ask that you use whatever wisdom they impart to guide us," she says simply. "But you cannot lead from grief."

Something shifts inside me at her words, a crack in the ice that has encased my heart since that day. "What would you have me do?"

Daenora squeezes my hands. "Begin by rejoining the living. There is to be a masked ball in King's Landing in a fortnight. Lords and ladies from across the realm will attend."

"A masquerade?"

"Yes. No one need know you at first. You can observe, remember what it is to be among the living without the weight of being Aelora Targaryen, heir to the throne."

I want to refuse, to retreat back into my solitude and my ghostly conversations. But something stops me, perhaps Aelor's voice in my memory, telling me to live for both of us.

"Very well," I hear myself say. "I will attend."

---

The journey to King's Landing passes in a blur of rocky shores giving way to the muddy banks of Blackwater Bay. The Red Keep looms above the city, a monument to Targaryen power built by my ancestors. I watch it grow larger from the deck of our ship, feeling something stir within me not quite dread, not quite anticipation. In my cabin that night, I dream of Aelor again. We stand in the throne room before the Iron Throne, its thousand swords gleaming dangerously in torchlight.

"You fear returning," he observes, his spectral hand hovering near my cheek without touching.

"I fear what I might become," I correct him. "What I might already be becoming."

His smile is sad. "We all change, sweet sister. Death changed me. Grief changes you."

"Into what?"

"That is for you to decide." He gestures to the throne. "But remember who you are, who we are. Fire and blood, yes... but also something more."

I wake as we dock, his words lingering like smoke. My handmaidens dress me in chambers prepared for my arrival, their hands gentle as they help me into an elaborate gown of midnight blue silk embroidered with silver stars. The mask they present is a masterwork of silver filigree, shaped like dragon's wings that curve around my eyes.

"Beautiful," one whispers as they secure it in place.

I study my reflection in the looking glass they've dared to place in my chambers. The woman who stares back is both familiar and foreign thinner than I once was, with shadows beneath her eyes that the mask cannot quite hide. But there is something else there too, something that has changed during these months of grief and ghostly communion. Knowledge, perhaps. Or power. Or madness. Sometimes I can no longer tell the difference. The sounds of the ball filter up from below music and laughter, the hum of hundreds of voices. For a moment, panic threatens to overwhelm me. How can I rejoin such a world? How can I pretend interest in court intrigues and dances when I have walked with ghosts and spoken with dragons? But then I feel it... a presence beside me, invisible to all but sensed in the deepest part of my being. Aelor.

"Remember," comes his whisper, though whether from memory or something more, I cannot say. "You are never truly alone."

I square my shoulders and move toward the door. Dragons do not cower, even wounded ones. Beyond lies the Great Hall, filled with masked figures swirling like autumn leaves in patterns I once knew. I descend the steps toward the glittering mass, my heart beating a rhythm finally familiar. The game begins anew.