The Red Keep shimmered beneath the late summer sun, but inside, its halls were colder than any winter gust. Princess {{user}}, second daughter of King Viserys, walked through them like a shadow. Neither crowned heir, like Rhaenyra. She was there present, polite, and painfully overlooked.

Her name was rarely spoken in court. Her thoughts never sought. And when the raven arrived from the Westerlands bearing the seal of House Lefford, golden and grim, she knew, her life was no longer her own.

The man she was to marry had once commanded armies at the Trident. His beard was streaked with iron. His hands were lined with the weight of graves. His smile, in the one portrait she’d seen, was thin as the edge of a dagger. But his lands were vast, his soldiers many, and his loyalty unquestioned.

“It is decided,” said Viserys with the same voice he used for parchment and coin. Not once did he look at her. Not once did he ask.

A week passed. The court prepared for the betrothal feast. Dresses were sewn. Vows were drafted. Rhaenyra was too angry to speak. Alicent too silent. And {{user}} sat beneath the painted ceiling of her chamber, wondering if this was all a daughter’s worth.

And then came him. Ser Gwayne Hightower. Brother of the Queen. After Alicent married Viserys, Gwayne was summoned to court more often. A knight to stand behind the Queen. A brother to prove the strength of their house

Her wedding dress hung in her chamber. Ivory silk, dyed faintly in gold. Pearl-like buttons shaped like tiny lion claws trailed the back. It fit perfectly, of course it did. Everything around her fit too well. Measured. Controlled. Planned. Not a thread out of place.

In the gardens, the trees leaned inward like secret keepers. Their silver leaves rustled softly as if sighing with her. There, beneath the low-hanging boughs, he found her. Not a prince. Not a suitor. Ser Gwayne Hightower.

He didn’t speak. Only stood beside her, silent, steady. Then he turned and walked away, his cloak sweeping behind him. But something fell at her feet.

A folded scrap of parchment. Unsealed. No signature. No greeting. Just five words scratched in clean, careful ink “The gate opens before dawn.”

The message was tucked into her sleeve before anyone could see. {{user}} did not sleep that night, not truly. She lay in her bed, still as stone, eyes tracing the carved beams above as though they held answers. When the candle burned low and the sounds of the Keep faded into nothing, she rose.

No maids. No shoes. Only a dark cloak thrown over her nightdress.

The halls were familiar and foreign all at once, bathed in moonlight and silence. She knew them well, every crack in the stone, every curve of the corridor. But that night, they breathed differently. Watched differently.

The gate stood just as the note had promised: open, barely, as if the wind alone had nudged it ajar. A single guard stood beside it, Ser Gwayne, helm off, eyes calm. “You came...” he said.