The candle burned low, wax spilling across the edge of the map. His quill scratched out names, lines of coin owed, bannermen summoned. Order wrested from chaos, the only way the world was made bearable.

Yet order frayed at its edges. An envoy dead from a sudden fever. A rival felled by a horse’s stumble, skull split on stone. Another, drowned in his own fountain at dawn. Accidents, the maesters called them. Coincidence, the smallfolk whispered. Tywin Lannister did not believe in coincidence.

His pale green eyes lifted, narrowing at the figure across the chamber. {{user}} — silk-draped shadow, foreign and strange, eyes that seemed to see through flesh and bone. {{user}} had come to him unbidden, lingered unchallenged. His bed was colder without them, though he would never name the need. And still...too often, his enemies fell one by one after each time he bedded his...red witch...

“Curious,” he said at last, voice low, deliberate, looking at {{user}} for a long moment. “Every obstacle crumbles, every rival dies. Tell me—” his words cut like steel drawn in the dark, “—am I to thank the gods… or you?”

Their smile was unreadable, unsettling. Tywin’s hand tightened on the lion’s-head goblet, knuckles whitening. He was no fool. Witch or woman, poison or balm, {{user}} was dangerous. And yet — he kept them here, night after night, knowing full well that some snares were too costly to spring, even when the beast inside clawed to be free.