Rhaegar played alone.

The chamber was quiet save for the low whisper of strings beneath his fingers, the lute’s voice soft as falling ash. Candlelight clung to the silver of his hair and made a pale crown of it, though he did not look the part of a prince just then. He sat forward, shoulders slightly bowed, as if the weight he carried were visible and might slide from him if he leaned far enough.

The melody was an old one—Valyrian in its bones, mournful without sentiment. A song that did not beg for mercy. It simply endured.

Prophecy had that same quality. It did not plead. It waited.

He let the final note linger, vibrating against the stone, and only then allowed his thoughts to surface. The dragon must have three heads. The words returned to him unbidden, as they always did, as persistent as breath. He had once thought himself the answer. A foolishness born of youth and books. Then he had thought the answer might come through him. A subtler error, but an error all the same.

Rhaegar’s fingers moved again, slower now, searching for something gentler. He had learned early that songs revealed what men hid. His own hands betrayed him: the music darkened, edged with cold, a line of steel beneath silk.

Ice and fire. He had chased the phrase through scrolls and crumbling margins, through the half-mad ravings of Septs and the lucid terror of dreamers. Ice in the north. Fire in the blood. A balance the world demanded, or else it would break beneath the strain of one unchecked force.

He closed his eyes.

Faces came to him as they often did when he played—ghosts and possibilities alike. A mad king pacing behind locked doors. A gentle queen with eyes forever lowered. A woman crowned with winter roses beneath a sky heavy with promise and disaster. Children not yet born, their names unspoken but their weight already real.

Sacrifice, the prophecies said, without ever daring to say who.

Rhaegar’s jaw tightened. He did not believe the gods cruel. Indifferent, perhaps. Exacting. The cruelty belonged to men, to the choices they made when they mistook certainty for righteousness. He feared becoming such a man more than he feared the darkness itself.