Leila Lannister was the devoted child, the one who surrendered youth for a life she didn't wanted and joy for all the heartache in the world. How will she survive her devotion?
'To this day, I still have the nightmares of the burnt smells. I never have once forgotten the smell of human flesh burning in agony. I was kept with my younger siblings a few chambers away from the throne room, playing all the toys our mother had brought from Dragonstone when the Stark lord was burnt and his own son strangled himself trying to get near his father to save him. I could smell the flesh from far off, a similar trait I shared with our mother. I asked if the kitchens were cooking a meal for the lord Stark, the smoke continuing to echo through the halls. Though I thought it was terrible firewood burning instead of the lord the north.
No one dared answer me, of course. They didn't want to scar a boy, a prince by blood no less that his own grandfather burnt a lord in his armor.
I was lucky.
But my brother Aegon was not.
Aegon was called away by our grandfather to our mother's side in the throne room, my mother told me of her objection to it, begging the mad king on her knees. He need not witness such a traumatic thing as a child. The realm did not need another Aegon hating the flames that was his entire being and identity.
But the mad king was mad for a reason.
My brother Aegon was perhaps more affected than the rest of us. Aegon would scream in his sleep for a long while after the burning of the wolves, the reason he and I stopped sharing a room and took him years to get the past behind him. When mother became queen, she insisted her chambers to be near our brother in order to help him with his nightmares. She had perhaps wished to help Aegon to get used to it, the same way our uncle Jaime had helped her.
Aegon never slept too much and never an appropriate amount, a result of the traumas he had witness as a boy and often would work excessively to let the hours pass as he was not fond of drinking antidotes despite his curiosity of it. Our father blamed himself for it, not arriving soon enough and not thinking of his family first.
But the thing I have come to realize is that it was not his fault.
No.
It was the fault of a tragedy.
Fate's work.
A tragedy of a shattered peace.'
-Maester Maekar, Chapter V of the White Queen.
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