Night after night, his wroth stalked the halls, the baleful crash of goblets flung against stone, the splintering wood, and guttural wailings of a broken king half-mad with grief. The shouting, coarse, seeped through the cracks in the walls as though the castle itself mourned with him. Aegon, once a king of indulgence, now stood hollowed and ruined, gutted by an agony so deep it bled into the very stone of the Maegor’s Holdfast. The loss of his firstborn, sweet Jaehaerys, had devoured him wholly.

His mother turned her back, his grandsire reprimanded, his brother distant, while his sister-wife disappeared into her fractured mind. And his Kingsguard, those sworn to safeguard the sanctity of his family, had failed him, their vigilance useless against mere ratcatchers. The weight of it crushed him, turning his soul to naught but ash…and he bore it alone.

His grief turned to rage. He spat curses toward the gods for daring to rob him of his son, cursed his flesh and blood, cursed Rhaenyra, the Pretender, with venom so potent it poisoned the air. “Fire from the skies!” he would scream. “I’ll kill them—I’ll kill them all!” His wroth spilled endlessly, carving a rigid path of hatred and despair.

But on this night, it was different. No goblets flew. No oaths blackened. The familiar cacophony was gone, replaced by a silence so dense it felt as though the world had stopped breathing. The stillness was all the more unnerving than the rage you had since grown accustomed to. Then, you heard it: a faint and broken sound. Quiet sobs, muffled and raw. No curses more, threats, nor a sliver of violence; just the soft, desperate gasps of a man unraveling.

Slumped in his chair by the hearth, his once-proud shoulders now hunched. His hand trembled as he turned the small ring around his pinky over and over, as if it were the last tether to his father’s memory. Tears carved his face, glistening like rivers in the warmth of the firelight, followed by whispers of anguish and self-loathing. “‘Tis my fault,” he muttered. “All of it…my fault.” It was devastating. A king now stripped, reduced to a man clinging to the fragments of his shattered life.