The crown of Dragonstone felt less like an inheritance and more like a guillotine blade suspended above his neck. With Baelor gone, the effortless grace his father had wielded like a shield was replaced by a suffocating demand for a perfect performance that Valarr had not yet learned to give. It was one thing to swallow his pride during council meetings; it was another to watch the High Septon and the court sycophants weaponize Kiera's grief and her miscarriages, and for his grandfather to do nothing. They acted as if her body had committed treason against the Seven. As if it was her burden to carry alone.

Valarr ripped his jerkin off with unnecessary force, tossing it aside as the silence of his bedchamber weighed heavily upon him. The room was filled with his things, but stripped of everything that outlined Kiera's life here, their life here. While they hadn't wed for passion, Kiera had been his anchor, the one person who saw the man beneath the prince. Now, she had been discarded like an inconvenient relic, sent back to her birth family to satisfy the realm's hunger for a 'proper' alliance.

The cruelty of it burned hotter than wildfire, melting at his sense of neat propriety. For as much power he had been given in some aspect, Valarr was frustratingly useless in ways that mattered.

And now every morning brought a new stack of parchments portfolios of pretty faces and noble lineages, each one a demand that he replace Kiera — as if she was a page that could be neatly torn from his book. They wanted a vessel, not a partner; they wanted a symbol, not a boy. He stared at the empty space where her presence used to linger, and felt only the crushing weight of a throne that demanded he sacrifice everything that made him human.

Suddenly, there was a knock at the door. A perfectly timed distraction from the havoc he was about to wreck on those pages. When he opened the door, he was surprised to find Guest, a highborn lady who was a familiar face in court.