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𝖙𝖍𝖊 𝖍𝖆𝖚𝖓𝖙𝖊𝖉 𝖉𝖗𝖆𝖌𝖔𝖓
zero. — the strangers price!

'  the birth of daella targaryen was shrouded in the strangers shadow. the princess and the prince were pulled from their mothers cold body as she laid dead in the birthing bed. the stranger was not satisfied with only the soul of the kind queen and took from the king the son he had prayed relentlessly for. leaving him with the daughter marked for death. her birth was her first brush with the stranger, but was certainly not her last — a string of desolation following her through the years. '
— Septon Eustace, The Reign of King Viserys, First of His name, and the Dance of Dragons That Came After

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THE RED KEEP WAS no stranger to screams. Screams of vengeful and dying dragons echoed through the halls and time itself. In 105 AC, the screams of Queen Aemma Targaryen rang in the air, and yet the guttural sounds did not startle the maesters or maids. Bloodied linens and the carcasses of malformed dragon heirs who would never have become a staple in the poor queen's life.

On that day, however, something in the air was different. A panic spread from each body in the room as Aemma struggled and laboured relentlessly, the sheets below her saturated in sweat and blood.

The babe would not come.

King Viserys sat at his wife's bedside, his hand gripping hers so tight as though that would tether her to him and make everything right again. Giving her hand a lingering squeeze, he stood and turned to the maester.

"Mellos." His voice was quiet, almost pleading in a most unkingly way, as he turned to the man for a solution.

Grand Maestor Mellos' wrinkled face was grave as he spoke softly over the wails of the queen, "Your Grace. If you would during a difficult birth, it sometimes becomes necessary for the father... to make an impossible choice."

"Well, speak it."

"To sacrifice one... or to lose them both. There is a chance that we can save the child," he paused, letting the implications of his words hang in the air for a moment, "A technique is taught at the Citadel that involves cutting directly into the womb to free the infant. But the resulting blood loss..."

"Seven Hells, Mellos." He ran a hand through his white, thinning hair and glanced towards the woman he loved—the one he had promised before the eyes of Gods and men to protect. Viserys let his eyes roam her pained face before travelling to her engorged stomach. "You can save the child?"

"We must either act now or leave it with the gods."

The next moments were ones that would never leave the king or anyone in the room. How could Viserys ever forget Aemma's accusing eyes staring into his own? How were the maids who were told to pin the thrashing woman down ever to forget the animalistic screeches? The scent of blood hung heavy in the air around them, fermenting in the room for many moons to come.

All at once, the noise came to a halt, and the room was bathed in the silence of the Stranger.

As the Grand Maester ripped into the no longer moving queen, he seemed more akin to a vulture picking at a carcass than a healer. His red-stained hands pulled a squirming babe from her body, handing the crying child to one of the maids as his brow creased in confusion and he reached back inside. To his shock, he pulled out another babe, smaller than the first and worryingly quiet. Handing it to another maid, he took the first, now swaddled, into his arms and approached the mourning king.

"Congratulations, Your Grace." Rocking the new heir in his arms as he started to cry, he watched the king lift his head from where it had been resting on the cooling body of his wife, "You have a son. And a daughter. Twins—a blessing from the Gods."

"It's a boy?" Viserys' voice held a hopeful tone that was almost smothered by the heartbreak.

"A new heir, Your Grace." Mellos stepped closer. "Had you and the Queen chosen a name?"

"Baelon." Viserys' looked across the room where the smaller bundle was being fussed over by maids, her silence deafening. "And Daella." As his head collapsed back onto the bed, his grief clouding his mind once more, he missed the small choking noises that escaped his son's lips and the maester's worried looks.

In the span of a few hours, the lives of the gentle Queen Aemma and the short one of Prince Baelon had been snuffed out. In the months to come, many claimed that the Stranger was lingering in the Red Keep, waiting to claim the frail princess as the Maester's all but declared her a lost cause. Too slight and too sickly, they had no hope for the child.

Yet the princess continued to live. She was certainly small and quiet, but her heart continued to beat. Although this news should have sparked joy within the melancholy king, he was never found in the same room as his infant daughter, and there was gossip circulating around the castle that he must have thought the child cursed. Kissed by death twice over.

But that did not mean the princess was alone; her older sister and heir to the throne, the Princess Rhaenyra, and her companion, the Lady Alicent Hightower, could be found with the child constantly in the months following her birth. In the first few months, when Daella was considered too frail to leave the nursery, the two girls could be found there with the small bundle tucked in her sister's arms as Alicent read stories to them both. Strange as it was, the three girls had become an odd sort of family, often found basking in the sunlight by the weirwood tree when the babe was considered well enough to venture outdoors. It was a beautiful thing to behold, the hope that surrounded the girls for just a moment—life was okay. They were three motherless children, but they had each other.

Yet six months after Aemma's death and Daella's birth, the hope that surrounded them burst with the announcement of a wedding. King Viserys would be taking a second wife, Lady Alicent Hightower.

Rhaenyra closed herself off, a heartbreak she could not fully comprehend blooming within her every time she saw her father and friend together. While Alicent became Daella's goodmother at only ten and five, her new husband was still unwilling or unable to look upon the child, leaving Alicent to raise the babe. When her first child, Aegon, was born not long after her marriage, the two shared a crib and seemed to warm to each other immediately. In their earliest years, one was not seen without the other, though their features were different; Aegon inherited the pure Valyrian features of his father, while Daella's colouring matched that of her grandmother, Alyssa Targaryen, sporting one green eye and one purple with a mane of golden curls that may have better suited a Lannister. Alicent was constantly dressing the two infants in matching outfits, as the two were almost identical in size due to the troubles of Daella's birth, which left her smaller than she should have been.

Over the coming years, tensions between Rhaenyra and Alicent fluctuated between moments of contentment and a vicious resentment that could not seem to be quelled on either side. Daella found herself in the middle of the two more often as she grew older. Though she loved both women—the sister who would always sneak her an extra lemon cake at dinner, and the only mother she had ever known who raised her as one of her own—it was exhausting for the little girl.

She learned quickly to dislike both the colour green and the red and black of House Targaryen. She was often given different gowns in said colours by the two women in the guise of a gift, although she knew it was done to infuriate the other. By the time she was eight, Daella had begun refusing to wear those colours and instead had gowns of blue and white made to represent her mother's house.

Daella Targaryen had remained a quiet girl growing up, learning to slink into the shadows whenever her father was near and how to smile pleasingly at the lords and ladies of the court. She was a dutiful princess who never outwardly bemoaned the way her egg had never hatched or the unfairness of her father's ire.

She kept all her anger at the injustice of life bottled up tight inside her, where not even she could see it. And with each year that passed, it grew and grew inside her, hidden in the corner of her placating smiles.

Nobody, not even Daella, could have foretold the consequences it would sow.

authors note!
short introductory chapter — the next one should be following from around the events of the princess and the queen episode but i wanted to touch on some of the dynamics of the family first! and ofc we'll be getting some family flashbacks later.

i would also like to forewarn now i'm typically a horror/gothic writer outside of fanfic so... my writing tends to be a bit visceral and graphic so this is sort of a glimpse of that if you don't like that sort of thing feel free to click off!

hope you guys did enjoy this!! let me know you did by voting, commenting and or sharing loves <33

—summer