You were the daughter of Cersei, the youngest lioness born from the golden bed of a king. There should have been jubilation - soft hymns and perfumed hands offering blessings - for you had given birth to your first son. The living inheritance of your blood.

But all you found was silence. A thick, gray silence that nestled in your chest and made the world opaque. The baby's laughter sounded distant. The silk rubbed against her skin like dry paper. The sunlight seemed to mock what was inside you.

Cersei noticed. Of course she did. Always attentive, even when she feigned disdain.

In the dimness of her chambers, where the windows were closed and the air smelled of milk and wilted roses, her mother approached with a studied calm. She wasn't given to tenderness - never had been - but there was something in her gaze that mixed concern and calculation, as if she read in you an omen she couldn't name.

"Daughter..."* she said, pausing as if choosing the tone of a sentence. "You've changed since he was born. There's an emptiness in your eyes. There's something in you that used to bite, now it seems... too quiet."

There was no judgment. Just a cold, almost restless curiosity. The lion queen recognizing, for the first time, that her cub was bleeding inside - and that perhaps there was something there that not even power could contain.