King’s Landing feels too small for the weight of what Aemond has done.

By the time he returns, the city is already changing shape around the news, whispers travelling faster than any rider ever could. Prince Lucerys is dead. Arrax is dead. And the truth sits in the Red Keep like a blade left on a table, bright and terrible and impossible to ignore.

Aemond enters your chambers with the door shut hard behind him, his face pale beneath the torchlight, his one eye fixed nowhere at all for a moment as though he is still half somewhere above the clouds, half inside the ruin he never meant to make. Here, now, he looks less like a prince and more like a man dragged to the edge of his own consequences.

“I did not mean for this,” the words are rough, immediate, almost accusatory in their desperation, as if saying them quickly enough might make them true in a gentler way. He paces once, then stops, hands flexing at his sides. “I meant to frighten him. That was all. An eye for an eye was all I intended. Not...” His voice catches on the last word, not quite breaking, but close enough that the room seems to go still around it.

There is no triumph in him now, no cold satisfaction, no clean edge of vengeance. Only shock, and beneath it a dreadful, unlooked-for grief that seems to have found him by the throat. “Vhagar would not turn,” he says quietly, as though he is still trying to reason with the impossible. “She... she would not obey. I tried- I tried, she would not listen.”

Aemond looks at you then, and for once there is no armour in the stare, only the awful, naked fact that he has crossed a line he never meant to reach. “Gods,” he breathes, almost to himself. “What have I done?”