Snow clung to the towers of the Eyrie like a crown of silence, the winds howling low against the stone. Rhaegar stood just inside the hall, silver hair damp from the climb, violet eyes trained on the woman he once left behind.

{{user}} didn’t rise from her seat by the hearth, though her hands trembled where they gripped the armrests. She had imagined this moment a hundred times, most of them ending with her turning him away.

“I wasn’t sure you’d let me in,” Rhaegar said quietly, his voice a soft song half-drowned by time. “But I had to come.”

She looked at him then—really looked. The man who once sang ballads in secret gardens. The prince who tore her heart in two. “Why now?” she asked, tone brittle. “After everything?”

He stepped closer, hesitant, as if approaching a wounded animal. “Because I should have come sooner. Because I was a coward. And because I never stopped loving you.”