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Visenya was eight and her world was Dragonstone, her brother and the sea.

She loved to play-fight Aegon on the rocky strand below Dragonstone’s keep, where the waves shattered themselves into pearls of spray. They named the tide an army, the gulls their heralds, the slick brown kelp a slain serpent rolling in its death throes. They fought for glory, for songs, for the right to boast all the way up the long switchback path to the castle.

Their mother watched from a smooth rock above, Rhaenys drowsing in the crook of her arm. Now and again the little one wriggled free, toddled into the spray to swat at her siblings and squeal, then retreated to the cove of their mother’s skirts. She was not made for mud, not like them.

“Careful, Aegon!” their mother called. “Don’t strike your brother so hard, young lady!” And then, the mortal threat every day ended with: “If you don’t come back with me right now, neither of you will have any supper!”

They obeyed in their fashion: by sprinting. The two of them flew up the path, scraping shins, elbowing the other. Visenya would not let Aegon win without a fight. Aegon would not let her win at all. They were mirrors, flint and flint, and every time they struck sparks. Too alike, people said, with pride and dismay both. 

Her mother said it too. “Stubborn,” she would mutter while tugging tangles from Visenya’s braid. “Too competitive. Too much.” Then, softer, “You’ll marry him when the time comes. Learn to be a wife first and a mirror second.”

Old law, old blood. The eldest son takes his elder sister, the line is the line is the line. Visenya pretended not to care, but she lay awake that night listening to the sea outside, trying the words on her tongue: husband, brother, rival, refuge. She didn’t know if the feeling in her chest was dread or something stranger.

✣✣✣

Visenya was twelve and the day smelled of smoke, salt, and old bone.

She had hunted the green She-Dragon from cave to cave, scraping her knees, ruining her leathers, discovering how many edges the island possessed that could skin a girl alive. The sun slid west and her stomach growled angrily. Somewhere behind her, she imagined, torches were being lit for a search.

In the end she found Vhagar in a cavern the sea had hollowed out and then left, the dragon’s breath smelled like smoke and power. Two eyes opened and watched her silently: green, lidless, old

Visenya’s heart raced. She stepped forward anyway, holding out a trembling arm. A girl’s hand. A conqueror’s hand, if the dragon allowed it. The scales were colder than she expected and the dragon’s low hum thrummed up her bones, coming to rest in her chest.

That evening she came home on dragonback. Torches bloomed along the causeway; men ran up and down. Her mother swayed at the sight (Visenya would later swear she fainted) and then Aegon’s laugh was in her ear.

“Congratulations, Senya!” Aegon hauled her off Vhagar’s back with a victory whoop, sweat and soot sticking them together. She loved his hugs: that warmth, the certainty that she was safe for as long as those arms held her. Once married, perhaps she might ask for them whenever she pleased. No, not ask, simply take. When he is my husband, I’ll steal these whenever I like.

“I suppose I’ll have to tame one of my own now,” he said into her hair, half boast, half oath. “Can’t have you take all the glory.” He was smirking when he let her go. Too alike; victory tasted like the same ripe fruit on both their tongues.

“Take me up! Please?” Rhaenys tugged at the hem of her shirt, eyes turned to stars.

“One day soon,” Visenya told her, bending to kiss her hair. “Up there the world turns small and true. You’ll see.”

✣✣✣

Visenya was sixteen and her body refused the clockwork of other girls.

Her moonblood did not come. It did not come in spring when the cliff flowers opened, nor in summer when the sea turned warm as a bath, nor in winter when the keep smoked and creaked. Her mother prayed to seven faces with seven different voices, candles guttering in their little lakes of wax. Give my daughter her flowering, she begged. Give her the chance to bear. 

Seven faces, seven hopes, seven doors for a blessing to come through, and none of them opened. 

When fever found her mother, it was greedy. The last days turned her into something weightless and hollowed-eyed. The sickness burned away propriety, burned away pretense, burned away everything Valaena Velaryon had been. Visenya sat by the bedside day in and day out, with cool cloths and whispered comforts. At the end her mother started begging the gods again; not for her own life, but for Visenya’s womb. But the gods, it seemed, were either deaf or busy elsewhere.

✣✣✣

Visenya was eighteen on the morning she became a bride.

The mirror gave her a stranger: a woman clad in rich silks, with steel at the corners of her mouth, hair coiled with golden dragon pins. Visenya wanted to laugh and cry and shout and ask whether duty and desire could ever be made to lie down in the same bed and sleep. The mirror-girl in silk did none of those things. 

A month earlier, their father had called them all. He wanted his son married while he could still lift a cup to bless the union. And he wanted that son to take Rhaenys. Tradition be damned.

There were reasons, Dragonstone was full of them. “Visenya is barren.” “Her womb is winter.” “She’ll waste you.” “Aegon Targaryen smiles with one, not the other.”

“I will take them both,” Aegon had answered. “I vowed to marry my elder sister; that vow is my duty. I will also wed Rhaenys. That is my desire.” He had glanced from one sister to the other, then back to the man who had made him. “And Rhaenys shall carry my heir.”

Visenya felt something loosen under her ribs. It might have been relief or dread, love or pride; she could not name it. Perhaps all of them at once.

✣✣✣

Visenya was twenty-eight and a queen with her hands full of maps.

In a handful of swift years, six kingdoms had bent the knee. Dorne kept its knives, but time would file even those. And yet, whispers gathered at court; no heir, no future. The realm had followed dragonfire, it would not follow smoke.

Aegon tried, the king spent most nights in Rhaenys’s bed. When he came to Visenya’s, it was more often with Rhaenys between them, and she learned the shape of their bodies together, learned the shapes their breathing made, learned how love can be a braided thing between threes.

No seed quickened. When the maester dared to name the possibility that the failure might be Aegon’s, blood seeped from his lips before the sentence finished. Visenya and Rhaenys found the old man bleeding and the king on the floor, eyes red and cheeks wet. Rhaenys knelt and spoke balm. Visenya did not speak at all. She did not tell him she understood him because she was him, turned a fraction to the left. 

✣✣✣

Visenya was thirty-six and an aunt, at last.

Aenys was soft like his mother, his hand curling around Visenya’s finger. Rhaenys had labored a whole night and just past the hour of the owl, she had brought forth a son with her eyes and her hair. Nothing in his tiny face betrayed the truth of his making; that somewhere in Lannisport, a lowborn player of mummers’ parts had left a lock of his blood in the royal cradle. 

Nothing in Aenys’s face belonged to Aegon. Nothing but the claim. Visenya held him anyway, loved him anyway, loved him perhaps more fiercely because he was not Aegon’s. Love is a thing that makes space for lies when it must.

“I am naught but a whore,” Rhaenys sobbed into Aegon’s shoulder, she did not hold the boy just yet. “There is a hell for me.”

“No,” Aegon said, kissing her brow, her closed lids, the corner of her shaking mouth. “You did this for the realm. For our house. For me. I love you. And I love our son.”

He had never done that to Visenya and perhaps he never would. They were too alike.

✣✣✣

Visenya was forty and understanding hardened into decision.

Rhaenys was gone, and her son drooped like a flower locked in a cellar. He ate little and what he ate he lost. He tried to smile for his aunt on days when even water would not stay, but the truth was plain. The boy was dying. 

“Take another wife,” Lord Hightower suggested one day in the throne room. “Be fruitful. Be practical.”

Aegon’s laugh had no mirth in it. “Lord Hightower,” he said, “no disrespect to your daughters, but I wouldn’t touch an Andal cunt with a ten-foot pole.” The court flinched; Visenya smothered a smile with her hand. She could never quite decide whether she admired or despised that part of him. Perhaps both. Too alike.

And yet, there was much truth in Hightower’s words. If the line failed, the realm frayed. Visenya had always collected stories and now one wouldn't let her go: As a child she had read of Asshai and its shadow-scholars, of red priests and lifeblood made prayer. As a woman she now searched those books for what could be turned into act. She read until dawn. She sent men across narrow sea. She learned the shapes of sigils the way other ladies learned needlework.

So one storm-lit night, she and Aegon flew to Dragonstone and dismissed every servant from the castle. In the belly of the keep, where their ancestors had once plotted in shadow, Visenya now set iron bowls upon the floor. She had prepared everything in the weeks before; knives blessed in moonwater and dragonflame, a draught brewed from ingredients that had cost her half the royal treasury and three men's lives to obtain.

“Are you certain?” asked Aegon. He looked younger in the candlelight, almost like the boy who had raced her up the castle path.

“When have I ever been anything else?” She drew the first blade across her palm, watching her life blood drip into the bowl. Her brother followed her lead, his blood mixing with hers until it swirled darker than before. With her own fingers, she drew sigils across Aegon’s chest and he copied other shapes upon her lower belly. The draught they made was foul, tasting  like liquid copper mixed with rotten fruit. It burned going down and kept burning, spreading through her chest and limb. Aegon’s face twisted as he drank his portion, but he drained the bowl clean.

When they lay together afterward it was the first time since Rhaenys died, and she realized she had missed not only the act but the feeling of being chosen.

She wished (foolishly) that he would say he loved her. He did not. The spell did not need the word. In some calmer life, she would have asked for it anyways, but in this one, all she asked for was a son.

Weeks later, back in King’s Landing’s court, she stood before courtiers who loved gossip more than banners and said, “I am with child. A boy.” She laid a hand over the curve that had not been there a month ago, that seemed to have been there forever

Her belly made a liar of the calendar. It rose as if months had been stolen and smuggled into her overnight. The boy inside her kicked again, insistent, as if he had already chosen her ribs as a worthy first enemy to test. Stubborn, she thought. Too competitive. Too much. Like me. Like Aegon.

Too alike by half.

✣✣✣

Visenya was sixty-five and alone in the world for the first time since she could remember.

The Iron Throne sat empty this morning, waiting for a king who would never fill it as his father had. Aegon was gone twelve days, his pyre still smoking on Dragonstone, and already the realm felt different. Smaller. More breakable.

Many lords and ladies had gathered for Aenys’s coronation. Her nephew knelt before the High Septon with his thin shoulders shaking. The crown was too large for his head. It slipped and had to be adjusted twice. He will not hold them, she thought. They smell weakness the way wolves smell blood.

The courtiers cheered because they were supposed to, but their voices seemed hollow. They knew what she knew: Aenys was balm where Aegon had been blade, water where his father had been flame.

Behind her, she heard the heavy footsteps she had been expecting. Maegor had arrived late, as always. At twenty-five he was everything Aenys was not; broad, sure. Too much like her, perhaps. Too much like Aegon in his youth, before kingship had worn the edges off his rage.

“He will not last,” her son said quietly, watching his brother stumble through the coronation oaths.

“Hush,” Visenya chided, but she did not disagree. She could see the future clearly: rebellions, pretenders, the realm fracturing into half a dozen kingdoms again. Aenys would try to rule with love and law, and both would fail him. The throne demanded fire and blood, 

She thought of Aegon in his final days. He had held her hand and whispered Rhaenys’s name. She would’ve laughed if it hadn’t been so sad; even at the end, she had been second, even decades after Rhaenys died, she had been second.

The ceremony ended. Lords filed out to feast and make their plans. Aenys smiled at her from his great iron seat, and she inclined her head graciously. There was nothing of Aegon in his face.

✣✣✣

Visenya was seventy-three and dying.

The sun was setting beyond her windows, painting the sky in shades of red and gold that reminded her of dragon fire. She lay in her bed at Dragonstone, having come home to die (though she had not told anyone that was why). Let them think she was merely tired of court, tired of watching her son’s reign grow bloodier with each passing moon.

Her breath came shallow now, leaving Dragonstone’s old maester puzzled, speaking of lung fever, of the weakness that comes with age, but she knew better. Maegor’s conception had demanded its price; not all at once, but slowly, year by year, trading her and Aegon’s vitality for the miracle of Maegor’s birth. She had been dying since the night she bled into those iron bowls, dying so slowly she had almost forgotten to notice.

Through her window she could see the rocky shore where she had played as a child. If she closed her eyes, she could almost hear their voices on the wind: Aegon’s war cries, Rhaenys’s laughter, their mother calling for them to come home. “Careful, children! Don’t strike each other so hard! Come back to me now, come back safe!”

I tried, Mother, Visenya thought. I tried to keep us safe. But there was too much flint, not enough gentle tinder. We struck sparks until the world caught fire.

Perhaps if she had been gentler, like Rhaenys, Aegon would have loved her as he loved their sister. Perhaps if she had been softer, her son would have inherited something besides steel and fire and the need to conquer.

But then again, perhaps not. Perhaps some people are born to be flint, to strike sparks against whatever they touch. Perhaps some loves are meant to burn rather than warm.

A seabird cried outside her window. It was the same cry she had heard all those years ago when she first found Vhagar. The same cry that had been there during her childhood, her youth, her long years of duty and sacrifice and the terrible price of getting what you wished for.

She thought of her mother, watching from her smooth rock while her children played at war. How Valaena must have known, even then, what they would become. What they would cost each other.

The tide was coming in now, she could hear it against the rocks. It would keep coming long after she was gone, long after Maegor was gone, long after the last dragon had died and the last Targaryen had fallen.

And now she was going home, back to where she was eight again, and her world was Dragonstone and her siblings and the endless, eternal sea.

Her breath went out like the tide, and did not come back in.