Chapter 8: There and Back Again
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The thunderous crack of her brother's lance drove yet another competitor out of his saddle. Were he to describe the act himself, he would use the most homo-erotic language possible as a means of mocking the sport he'd spent years mastering. More years than anyone else knew. He would neither laugh nor grin while doing so, keeping his amusement to himself as he angered all those around him, their anger the source of that inner delight.
He wore today another source of familial distress. The armor came to him all the way from Qarth, from the House of the Undying, whom claimed to have paid a price to forge it they can never pay again, not just in materials, skill, and time, but in magic. The suit came to him as a boy, and he grew into it precisely by the age of six and ten, down to the perfectly articulated fingers of his gauntlets. That Aegon reached his full maturity young confused no one who'd ever seen him with his pants off, and he filled that armor splendidly.
Most preferred to look at Aegon doff the armor - the set named The Coming of the Beast - but to Helaena the sight of him hurt to bear. Though so familiar in so many ways, his beauty amongst a family of beautiful people stood out. In a family closer to gods than men, Aegon stood far closer, and the secret of that was hidden in the grotesque inlaid gold and silver that decorated the black panels of his armor to the point that it was more accurate to claim the primacy of the precious metals than the steel.
Heretical, profane, sadistic, and perverse, to the uninitiated the armor looked like a decadent display of wealth, craftsmanship, and bad taste, but to the initiated, it told a story. To her, it told his story, a story that culminated in the mural dominating the front of his cuirass. A blasphemy against her mother's house, for it depicted the Hightower, but the blaze atop came not from the legendary signal fire, but from a funeral pyre, the true focus of the section. Atop the Hightower, a pyre in multiple levels, with many people and icons bound to it, and at top larger than all the others in the blaze stood a naked man with a bear's head. In his hand he held a milk white greatsword, and in the other a baby dragon, and seven stars shown on his brow as he stood amidst the fire surrounded by women in various stages of pregnancy under a sun and moon in various stages and positions.
Oh how their mother raged against the image, she hated it all, but she hated that image most of all. Helaena tried to understand the meaning of that central piece, and thus far failed to, though through many hours of inspection and study, she'd uncovered many of the secrets of the story hidden by the spectacle of violence, not made easier by the balance of the art disrupting the flow of the narrative, balancing the many forms of slaughter, man, beast, tree, and even monster. Castles stormed, knights slain, maidens weeping as their dresses are torn away. All manner of predator and prey, as well as exotic creatures she'd needed a maester's apprentice to identify, and more besides suspected to be Valyrian monstrosities. All of it presented in the exact right amount of chaos to express such carnage. A story of the hunt and of the slaughter, nigh everything on the gold and silver inlays leaking brilliant ruby red from terrible wounds.
It took her a year of studying the fine details of the work to finally find all of what she wanted to see, so extensive and layered the relief work. The scene from the tower was the climax, but she wanted the exposition, and she found it at the end of the left sabaton. The bear headed man, not so large in this, nor as muscular, holding hands with a woman - one of only four in the entire piece not in some form of undress and grief - and that woman held in her other hand, a gauntlet.
By charting a seemingly random course across the armor, she found the woman with the gauntlet holding a bear headed baby, while the bear headed man held her, and this occurred five more times, four bear headed sons and two bear headed daughters. The woman with the gauntlet only appeared two more times. One at a feasting table by the sea and in the water a charnel scene of men hacked to pieces floating as seagulls feasted alongside the victors.
The last scene the woman appeared in broke her heart. Helaena wept for weeks in grief at the sight of the woman wrapped in funerary shroud with a crown of flowers on her head, and by her side a much smaller shrouded form, and around them family of seven bear headed boys and girls now stood at the pyre grieving as five. To her immense relief, the five remaining bears never wept again. The girl only appeared once more, this time full grown into a woman, holding hands with a merman, but the boys appeared many times, often following their father into battle, but they too appeared holding hands with women. She recognized them by their House Sigils, held in hand for objects or replacing the head for animals, but one caused her to grit her teeth in frustration, holding hands with a direwolf headed girl, who was holding hands with a man with a stag head wearing a crown around its neck and a green hat.
Ser Criston described the function of the suit as excessive as its decoration, with many redundancies in the protection due to stylistic choice, seen in the faulds, pauldrons, and bevor. The redundancies made her brother's silhouette less human, the long faulds, and the crenelation like spikes on the pauldrons and bevor which was placed further down the breastplate like a rampart, made him look more like a brutal tower on the field of battle, rather than a man. His helmet bore a pair of black steel and gold horns off the 'brow' that extended out to the sides then turned up sharply, as well as a crest of golden feathers that matched the sheepskin cloak that hung off his pauldrons down beneath his knees, that looked more like hairs of naturally grown gold rather than something dyed by human hands.
Her mother's favored Kingsguard assured her than any disadvantages in grappling the armor created didn't matter due to Aegon's arms and the skill he employed them with. The Chimera's Wail and The Dragon's Dogma, his sword and shield.
The blade, a greatsword to most, but her brother stood three hands taller than most Lords of Westeros, who in turn typically stood three hands taller than the small folk. To him, the sword from Gogossos fit perfectly as a bastard sword, those weapons between the one handed longsword wielded by most knights, and the more rare two handed greatswords, which she understood to be typically more expensive than most warriors could justify commissioning, and not useful to those with the money to due so who fight from horseback.
The blade itself undulated like a serpent, and the smoky ripples of its kind moved with it like a river of fire from hilt to tip. The quillons and guard-rings twisted and shaped to look like the coiling necks, heads, and tails of monsters -all made from Valyrian Steel - including the pommel in the shape of a scaled and clawed six fingered hand grasping a pigeon blood ruby the size of a plum. According to the gifter from Volantis, the scaly hide wrapped around the hilt bound in gold wire came from the chimera who's death wail gave the sword its name.
The shield came from Qohor, a year after the sword, which arrived a year after the armor. Made of Valyrian steel once again inlaid grotesquely with gold and silver this time showing those broken and subjugated, bearing the symbol of their House prominently in gold, which upon a green banner became Aegon's personal heraldry. The Valyrian Steel kite shield sported a serrated lead edge which her brother demonstrated the use of when he handedly won the melee in this seven day tourney held in celebration of their wedding. He caught weapons, shields, and armor, the teeth finding purchase for Aegon to yank them aside or down, and adding additional danger to his lead edge bash which he used often on opponents wary of his sword.
The sportsmanship of bringing Valyrian Steel arms and magical armor to a tourney felt questionable at best, but the many decades of interkingdom peace made the knightly participants quite savage, and deaths occurred often at these events. Aegon, surprisingly, didn't kill anyone. He didn't even maim anyone. The strongest sword arm in the Kingdoms, wielding a sword capable of cutting through steel, and each and every opponent came away bested purely in skill and grace.
It spoke volumes that it was more dangerous to face Aegon in the tilts with lances designed for safe use, than in the melee with most lethal live steel. Between her brother's strength and his magnificent zorse, the forces involved at point of impact rendered many an armored man desperately choking on their breath, flat on their backs. And she meant many, as the joust was organized in the Champion's ruleset in which the she was named the Queen of Love and Beauty at the start and given champions to defend the title, or in this case, champion, for Aegon alone rode in her name, and he allowed all comers to challenge him any number of times they may wish too, any number of times they possessed both armor and horse to ransom upon loss. Few attempted a second match with him over the course of the multi day joust, but many made the first attempt in the hopes of claiming both the massive prize money and the title of 'Strongest Knight'. Hundreds made the attempt, most of them hedge knights, or second, third, or fourth sons of knightly houses, all of them unafraid of the consequences due to her brother offering to waive the gear ransom of any knight who joined his household, and what a household Aegon now had.
The castle that now existed on the southern coast of the Reach, bordering Dorne, simply boggled the mind in every way, size, security, splendor, and most shockingly of all, secrecy. Somehow, their father completed the largest construction project since the completion of the Dragon Pit, without anyone knowing, abutting a hostile nation. The construction of Dragonsreach more than immortalizes King Viserys Targaryen, but makes him a legend, for he somehow managed to match the size of Winterfell, the beauty of Highgarden, and the decadence of High Tide, and revealed it all to a startled world as if he somehow conjured it into being by his very will, along with a jousting stadium, a melee coliseum, an archery range, and an artificial harbor, all made of blue granite. Many people remember working on the project, but there is no reasonable explanation for the accounting of it, the expense of this castle and its accomplices would drain the finances of a Free City, and they use slaves for their labor in Essos, yet the Master of Coin simply waved off the expenses as paltry compared to the earnings from decades of peace.
The look on her brother's face when he saw it, priceless, and only matched by that of Corlys Velaryon, two men who both mock her father's more modest aesthetic, though her brother more openly, as Corlys is old enough to know better, though the man can't control his facial expressions as well as the lifelong courtiers in the Red Keep. Viserys deserved god-like reverence for this feat, easily more impressive than anything built by Bran the Builder besides the Wall, and that only in sheer scale, making this the greatest dowry of all time.
Where once she was worth sheep and chickens, now she came to the marriage with the grandest keep in all of Westeros, and with Dragonsreach, Aegon became the Prince of the Reach, and Warden of the South, putting down the upstart Tyrells and for the first time in a century uniting the realm's most bountiful and populous kingdom around a ruler they can proudly support. Aegon made fast friends with the Marcher Lords in both the Reach and the Stormlands, and the few times she feasted with them along side him this week, she easily picked up on the failure of Viserys's hope that this fortress would promote peace through strength with Dorne. Instead, he'd let the fox into the hen house.
She gave it a year and a half tops for Aegon to go on a boating trip with his friends and come back with ships filled with plunder and Dornish women and children taken as thralls, insisting that he's not a slaver, he's just old fashioned. Viserys might even live long enough to see peace with Dorne established, for never in the history of mankind has there ever been a more final solution to centuries of bad blood and warfare than this man, her husband, in this life and the last.
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Normally I treat the metaphysics of these stories as a joke, and wildly ignore it, but I've noticed that there is bit of confusion as to Aegon and his nature that will never be explored in the body of the work as he has no means to explore it, and has long since simply rationalized his situation. If there is intrest in explaining the mechanics of this story, especially so after a chapter like this one where its basically all blasting the audience in the face that there is something fishy afoot, let me know and I'll explain things in the next author's note, dispelling the mystery and promoting dramatic irony.
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