The hearth-fires of Dragonstone did not warm the drafty stone of the Painted Table chamber; they merely cast long, jagged teeth of orange light across the damp masonry.

Outside, the narrow sea beat its chest against the jagged cliffs below, a rhythmic, violent reminder of the isolation that cradled House Targaryen long before a single crown was hammered from melted swords.

Aegon stood over the massive oaken table, his heavy hands planted flat against the carved relief of the Valyrian peninsula. The silver-gold fall of his hair, thick and untamed as sea-smoke, swept forward over his broad shoulders, catching the firelight.

He did not look up when the heavy oak door groaned on its iron hinges, but the drop in the room’s temperature—the quiet, absolute stillness that followed her entrance—told him precisely who walked the floor.

You stood in the threshold, cloaked in heavy green velvet that seemed an intentional, venomous insolence.

Green. The color of the Hightower. The color that had bloomed across the southern horizon of your girlhood dreams, miles away from the salt-cracked towers and dragon-breath of your ancestral roost.

"The wind is rising from the south," you said, your voice low, a thin wire stretched to the point of structural fracture. You did not approach the table; you remained anchored by the arched window, looking out into the impenetrable blackness where Vhagar and Meraxes slept, their great scales catching the pale ghost-light of the moon. "A good wind for flying. Or a good wind for slipping away."

Aegon straightened slowly. At well over six feet, his muscular frame seemed to swallow the flickering shadows. His deep violet eyes—unblinking, heavy-lidded, and unnervingly quiet—fixed upon you with the terrifying gravity of a tide that had already decided to devour the shore.

"There are no southern winds tonight, sister," Aegon replied. His voice was a deep, gravelly baritone that vibrated through the floorboards, carrying no anger, only the flat, crushing certainty of granite. "There is only the storm I command, and the walls I have built around you."

"A cage," you whispered, your chin lifting, your jaw tightening into a line of pure, unadulterated rebellion.

"You call it a kingdom. You call it dynasty. It is a cage of iron and old bones, and I am sick of the taste of dragon-meat and ash. I wanted the Reach.

I wanted the scent of summer lemons and stone that has never smelled of blood. I wanted the Hightower." The name dropped between you like a severed limb.

Aegon did not flinch. He did not roar, as lesser men might have when faced with the outright rejection of a queen. Instead, he simply began to walk around the massive table, his boots striking the stone with measured, devastatingly calm cadences. Every step narrowed the distance between your defiant stance and his unstoppable mass.

"Gwayne Hightower," Aegon said softly, the syllables tasting like poison on his tongue. "A boy with a soft mouth and softer hands, who reads septons' tracts by candlelight while his father kisses my boots in Oldtown. You wept for him when the raven brought news of his betrothal to a Fossoway. You tore your silks to ribbons."

"I loved him," you spat, stepping forward to meet him, your chest heaving, the green velvet rising and falling with frantic, furious breath. "He was flesh and blood that did not smell of sulfur and madness.He looked at me as if I were a woman, not a breeding mare for your ambition. And you—you murdered his future with a stroke of a pen and a threat of dragon-fire, just because your vanity required every piece of Valyrian blood locked safely inside your fortress!"

"He was mine!" you cried, your hand flying up to shove against the hard, unyielding wall of his chest. It was like striking the flank of Balerion himself; he did not budge a fraction of an inch.

"I was never yours! I am your sister by name alone, a child you dragged to the altar because Visenya whispered of purity and Rhaenys smiled and let it happen! I looked at you and saw an older brother who stole my childhood, not a king!"