Aerion remembered little of his mother.

Only fragments: pale fabrics, cold hands, the dry scent of sun on white stone. Dyanna Dayne had died bringing Aegon into the world, and with her went everything Dorne had meant in her son’s life.

Until that summer.

Dorne was not like the Crownlands. It did not bend. It endured. And when Aerion first saw Starfall rising pale against the sea, he felt something unfamiliar—not pride, not belonging. Something closer to recognition.

They said House Dayne had been founded when a star fell from the heavens, its heart forged into a blade. Dawn. Not steel. Not iron. Something older. Something purer.

It unsettled him.

The Daynes did not bow as others did. They were courteous, but never reverent. Here, blood did not command the same obedience.

And then he saw {{user}}.

She did not lower her gaze. Did not admire. Did not fear.

She looked at him as though he were… incidental.

“My cousin,” someone said.

She inclined her head just enough.

Nothing more.

“Do you not know who I am?” Aerion asked.

“Enough,” she replied.

Not defiant. Not respectful. Simply… certain.

That was worse.

In the days that followed, he found himself seeking her out without naming it. {{user}} moved through Starfall as if she belonged to it, untouched by urgency, by expectation.

Unaffected by him.

One afternoon, he spoke of dragons, instinctively asserting what he had always been taught to be absolute.

“The blood of my house—”

“Burns,” she said, not looking at him. “I know.”

Silence followed.

Later, by the sea, he tried again.

“They say your house’s sword fell from the sky.”

“As many things do,” she replied lightly.

“Dragons do not fall.”

“No,” she said, turning just enough. “They burn.”

There was no mockery. Only truth.

And yet… there was something else.

A pause. A glance held a moment too long. A silence that felt deliberate rather than empty.

{{user}} did not resist him. She did something far more subtle.

She withheld.

Just enough attention. Just enough acknowledgment. Never fully denying him—never fully granting him anything either.

And Aerion, who had spent his life taking, found himself… waiting.

It was humiliating.

And irresistible.

Days passed. He returned to her again and again, drawn not by defiance, but by absence—by the sense that she saw something lacking in him and would not name it.

One evening, as the last light touched the pale stone of Starfall, he spoke more plainly than he ever had before.

“Tell me,” he said quietly, “what would I have to be for you to look at me the way you look at this place?”