The sun rises in the east to bathe the Red Keep in a bloody hue and sets in the west to leave it a jagged silhouette against the sea.
Time, the only healer for a prince's pride and his skin, finally allowed Aegon to rise from his sickbed. He ventured out into the corridors of the holdfast with a precarious, stiff-legged gait. Every courtier, gold cloak, and serving wench he passed offered a bow that was just a fraction too deep, their lips twitching with the effort of stifling a treasonous smirk.
"Brother! You have returned to the living!"
Aemond's high-pitched cry of surprise erupted from behind him. Aegon winced, bracing his core and adjusting the fall of his silken trousers with a sharp tug. He turned with a mask of bored indifference.
"Returned? I merely grew weary of the view from my pillows," Aegon said, his voice level despite the fire still smoldering in his haunches. "A minor bout of weather, nothing more."
Aemond, eyes wide with youthful admiration, didn't wait for a further lecture. He lunged forward, snatching Aegon's hand in a painful grip, and began to sprint toward the Godswood.
"Helaena is waiting by the heart tree! Come, we must show her we are whole!"
The moment he was jerked into a run, Aegon's stoic facade shattered into a thousand jagged pieces. Every step was a fresh betrayal by his own nerves. Damn the boy, he hissed internally, sweat beginning to bead on his brow. When the rot has left my skin, I shall teach him the true meaning of Targaryen cruelty.
By the time they breached the iron-wrought gates of the Godswood, Aegon's face was as pale as the moon, yet his mouth remained a stubborn, bloodless line. He would not scream. He was a Prince of the Blood, and he had reached the sanctuary without a single plea for mercy.
Helaena sat beneath the canopy, her gaze fixed vacantly on the ancient bark of the heart tree. As the boys approached, she turned her head with a slow, deliberate grace. Her eyes locked onto Aemond, and a strange, knowing smile curved her lips—a look that suggested she saw the invisible welts beneath Aegon's clothes as clearly as the sun.
"What is so humorous, sister?" Aemond asked, puffing out his chest.
Helaena merely shook her head, the smile lingering like a ghost as she returned her attention to the tree.
The Godswood of the Red Keep was a dense, atmospheric grove of elm, alder, and poplar, overlooking the salt-churned mouth of the Blackwater. At its center stood the heart tree—a colossal oak draped in the crimson-berried vines of smokeberry. It was a southern pale imitation of the weirwoods of the North, but it held a gravity all its own.
Aemond, ever the restless hound, immediately began to scramble up the rough bark of the trunk, his boots finding purchase in the ancient knots. "Join me, Aegon! The view of the bay is unmatched from the high branches!"
Aegon leaned against a nearby poplar, his smile tight and forced. "Climb to the stars if you wish, brother. You are the superior acrobat; I shall remain here to ensure the earth does not move."
Aemond's ego flared, and he redoubled his efforts, vanishing into the leafy canopy. Aegon turned to Helaena. He took her small, cool hand and guided it toward the weathered human face carved into the oak's flank.
"Tell me," Aegon whispered, "can you feel the pulse of it?"
Helaena's head tilted. She shook it slowly, then gave a sharp, sudden nod.
"They say that in the frozen reaches beyond the Wall," Aegon continued, his voice dropping an octave, "there are Green Seers. Men who can slip their souls into the roots of these trees to watch the world from a thousand leagues away."
Helaena stroked the weeping eyes of the carved face. High above, Aemond's voice drifted down through the leaves. "The Grand Maester says the true heart trees are weirwoods! This is but an oak with a face scratched into its skin. It is blind!"
An oak might see three centuries; a redwood might witness three thousand. But a weirwood, if left to the silence of the earth, could endure until the end of time itself.
"I feel no blood in the wood," Helaena murmured, her fingers tracing a deep furrow in the bark. "But sometimes... I feel a shadow. An old man, tangled in white roots like a fly in a web. He watches from a throne of bone."
Aegon's pupils contracted. A cold realization settled in his gut. The Three-Eyed Crow.
"Listen to me, Helaena," Aegon said, his tone suddenly grim and urgent. "If that shadow speaks, you must not answer. If he reaches, you must pull away. He is a scavenger of souls, a spider in the dark. Those roots are not his throne; they are his cage. He is no god—he is a devil in silk."
He made a grotesque face, twisting his features to break the tension, and Helaena's eyes finally sparked with a genuine, girlish giggle.
Aemond tumbled down from the branches, landing in a heap of dry leaves. "Enough of this talk of trees and old men. Tell me of the Battle of the Five Armies again, Aegon! Tell me of the mountain and the gold!"
Aemond's obsession with the Middle-earth tales Aegon spun grew more fervent by the day. He cared little for the hobbits or the kings; his heart belonged to the dragons—to the scale and the fire.
"And Ancalagon!" Aemond prompted, his eyes bright with a dangerous hunger. "Could a beast truly be so large that his fall broke the peaks of the world? How could such a thing ever be slain?"
Aegon looked at his brother, seeing the seeds of the man who would one day burn the Riverlands from the back of Vhagar. Aemond was falling in love with "Greatness"—not the greatness of character, but the greatness of sheer, overwhelming power.
"I must return to my chambers," Aegon said, feeling the ache in his legs return. "Helaena, remember my warning. Guard your mind as you would your life."
"I know," she whispered, looking once more like the fragile, easily bruised girl the court expected her to be.
Aegon sighed, watching Aemond prepare for another ascent. I must see to Daeron's education soon, he thought. These two are brilliant, but broken in ways I am only beginning to understand.
In the annals of the future he remembered, Daeron was the jewel of the "Green" party—intelligent, polite, and humble. He lacked the debauchery of the original Aegon and the erratic cruelty of Aemond. He was the perfect second, the loyal blade. But Aegon knew he could not simply cast his current siblings aside. To face the "Black" party and the shadow of Rhaenyra, he would need every scrap of fire he could gather—even if that fire was tempered by madness and obsession.