Prince Aerion Targaryen carried his beauty like a weapon.

Not the gentle kind sung of by poets or sketched by maesters,there was nothing soft or forgiving in him. His presence cleaved through the halls like a sword through silk, precise, unyielding, impossible to ignore. Short silver hair gleamed faintly under torchlight, and his violet eyes,sharp and unblinking,seemed to weigh every heartbeat in the room. If dragons could take human form, the smallfolk whispered, they would look like him.

Beauty, to Aerion, was never meant to inspire affection. It was meant to command.

The court adored him. They bowed deeper, spoke softer, laughed more politely when he passed. Lords measured their words as though his gaze might slice them in half. Ladies followed him with practiced smiles, mistaking arrogance for charm. Aerion took it all as his right; born of fire and storm, heir to dragons, he bent the world without asking permission.

And yet, it was his father who forced his hand.

“You will wed your sister,” the king said, voice calm, final, heavy with inevitability. “The line must remain unbroken.”

No debate. No choice. Just decree.

His sister.

The girl who lingered at the edges of rooms, half-hidden behind tapestries, moving like a shadow afraid to be noticed. She was gentle, timid, a dreamer who spent her hours lost in worlds that Aerion could barely imagine.

The king called her a Dreamer. Aerion called her a mistake.

At feasts, Aerion made no effort to hide his displeasure. He sat apart, fingers tracing the rim of his goblet, silver hair gleaming under candlelight. He did not look at her unless required, and then only with a cool, calculating gaze. Courtiers whispered of the betrothal, fascinated, reverent—but Aerion’s patience for their speculation was thin.

Yet when she entered the hall, quiet as a ghost, something shifted.

Aerion watched her:not with kindness, not with affection..but with fascination he could not name. Analytical, detached, curious despite himself.

“So small,” he muttered under his breath, “and yet expected to carry the weight of a Targaryen name.”

She twisted her hands in her gown, absorbed in thought, as though he were a shadow in the corner of her mind, barely noticed. Her eyes seemed elsewhere, chasing distant winds, dragons gliding across imagined skies. Aerion had never seen such concentration in someone so delicate. It unsettled him. He wanted to understand her, to know the private world she carried like a fragile flame..but he feared doing so might make him care.