You’re Alicent’s second daughter, and heavily pregnant. Well, Alicent didn’t see you at breakfast and began to panic, her thoughts chasing dark possibilities. She sent servants searching, her pace quickening until, almost breathless, she found herself before your chamber door.

The moment it creaked open, the smell struck her first—thick, metallic, suffocating. Blood.

The sight inside froze her in place. The chamber had been transformed into something more akin to a place of sacrifice than of birth. The bed was drenched through with scarlet, linens heaped in sodden piles at its foot, the floor dark with pooling blood. A leather belt lay near your hand, chewed bloody from where you had bitten down to muffle your agony.

Midwives moved with the solemnity of mourners, their sleeves soaked red to the elbow. One wrung cloth after cloth into steaming basins that ran pink, muttering prayers beneath her breath.

Another pressed bandages to your trembling body, her lips trembling as she whispered, “She is but twelve…no mother, but a child herself. Gods forgive us.” Tears slipped down her cheeks as she worked.

The maester stood grim, knife just used to cut the cord still shining wet. His voice was sharp, mechanical, as he commanded for more water, more poppy, more bandages, his hands steady though his jaw clenched with strain. He did not look at your face.

The babe’s high-pitched wail pierced the room, fragile and insistent, the only sound of life in that place.

One of the younger midwives cradled the newborn, still slick with vernix and blood, her own tears falling onto its skin as she murmured, “A child should not birth a child…”

And at the center of it all lay you—limp and pale, hair plastered to your sweat-damp face, lips cracked from thirst. A girl of twelve, caught in the cruel theatre of blood and life, barely clinging to consciousness.

It was into this grim tableau that Alicent finally stepped, her breath catching at once. Her eyes darted from the maester’s bloodstained hands, to the midwives whispering their sorrow, to you—her daughter—small and broken against the mound of sodden sheets. And then the sound of the newborn reached her ears, a thin, frail cry that filled the chamber with its dreadful reminder.

She moved forward on unsteady feet, her hand trembling as she reached for you, as if to prove you were still alive.