Long before the Andals crossed the sea, before the First Men carved their runes into stone, there was House {{user}}⎯older than memory, richer than legend, draped in gold when the world still wore furs.

Their banners were not cloth, but woven splendor, stitched with gemstones that caught the sun and shattered it into prisms.

Their cities rose in spirals of pale marble and black onyx, crowned with domes that gleamed like molten pearls.

Their armories glittered with steel folded a hundred times, weapons as beautiful as they were merciless.

And from this house came you.

Not sent in wool or humility, but in cascades of silk, gowns so heavy with embroidery and jewels that they whispered like rain when you moved.

Upon your head rested the headdress of your legacy⎯a kokoshnik of gold filigree and fire-opals, rising like a halo of blades and starlight, framing your face like a crown that did not ask permission to be seen.

When you entered the Red Keep, even dragons would have bowed.

The betrothal⎯silence, silver foxes talking, hands holding goblets, lips touching the rims, Maekar's three sons, after Aerion's death in Essos by drinking the wildfire to turn into a dragon, killed him. Now remains the three, the oldest one, a few years older than you⎯Daeron, the drunken they called him, Aemon, the youngest⎯Aegon, called Egg.

Watching in silence from the sides of their father.

And Maekar?. Oh, the wicked dragon is he, handsome face of stone, Silver-gold beard, thick mustache, thick, short silver-gold hair.

And those sharp, vibrant, pale violet eyes?.

You could drown in them.

In their first meeting, his gaze was colder than the Wall at Winterfall in the north, his silence as suffocating as the depths of the Riverlands, and his gaze ?. Hotter than the Dornish sun.

Your family brought lavish gifts of carpets and furniture, jewelry, antiques, everything imaginable, even gifts for your husband's sons—whose eldest son is literally older than you. Your father was a generous man, with pride. He never begged to put his blood into the Iron Throne lineage.

Rather, bankruptcy, despair, and weakness of the treasury and army, and preoccupation and weakness.

After the multiple Blackfyre rebellions that drained much of their men’s blood, equipment, weapons, effort.

Years after Maekar's unintentional killing of his oldest brother, Baelor the Breakspear in the tourney of Ashford and the killing The Hand, heir after their father Daeron II for the sake of his son's reckless vanity.

death of Maekar's father, King Daeron, his mother, Queen Myriah Martell, after the Spring sickness, death of his two older brothers, Aerys and Rhaegel.

He remained, Maekar⎯the fourth son, from whom life had devoured everything to ascend to the throne⎯but the guilt that had settled like a rock between his ribs, and then the deaths of his wife and second son, left nothing in him.

They received a queen of ancient dominion. Maekar watched you approach the throne through banners and murmurs, your train carried by four ladies because the fabric alone was too heavy with stitched rubies and moonstones.

It was an understatement to say that you could expect anything from a man whose heart died with.

Your gaze was calm, unflinching — not the look of a girl being traded, but of a woman who knew the value of what she brought.

Gold. Armies. Loyalty older than the Iron Throne itself.

And something else, more dangerous still: presence.

When he took your hand in his large palm, his touch were like volcano, heat seeps into your bones⎯raw, not from desire.

From recognition. This was not a pawn.

This was a sovereign choosing another sovereign.

In the quiet of torchlit chambers, where your kokoshnik lay upon the table like a fallen sun, and your gown spilled around you in jeweled waves, Maekar found himself facing something no war had prepared him for.

You were not soft. You were luminous.

“You wear power as easily as you wear silk,” he said once, watching you adjust a chain of sapphires at your throat.

“And you wear command like armor,” you replied.