The room was quiet.
Arrax sat upon the edge of his bed, his hands resting upon his knees as his eyes stared at nothing in particular.
The food from lunch sat untouched upon a small tray near the door, already beginning to congeal in the cool air of the chamber. The smell of it made something curl within his stomach in disgust and annoyance.
He wasn't thinking about the food.
He was thinking about the sword.
'How?'
The single word sat within his mind like a stone dropped into still water, rippling outward into a dozen smaller questions he couldn't answer.
'How did Rhaegar's wooden sword cut me when Barristan's steel bent and rusted under his teeth?'
Arrax turned his left hand over slowly, looking at the unmarked palm. Smooth. Pale. Not even the ghost of a scratch remained from the splinter that had opened him.
That at least made sense. Vampires healed. He had accepted that.
What he couldn't accept, what sat wrong within the back of his skull like a splinter of its own, was the principle of it.
'Was it intent? Was it the type of material? Is dragon blood involved somehow? Is it something about Rhaegar specifically?'
He exhaled low.
'Am I even a proper vampire or something else entirely?'
The questions were beginning to make his head ache, which was in itself annoying because he wasn't sure vampires were supposed to get headaches either.
Arrax stood from the bed and began pacing slowly.
The chamber was large for a four-year-old. Too large, really. The vaulted ceiling sat high overhead, and the furniture, the wardrobe, the writing desk, the couch, were all scaled for someone a decade older than the body he currently wore. He moved between them like a piece on a board, back and forth, hands clasped behind him.
He was mid-thought when something caught his eye.
The mirror.
It was a tall thing, framed in dark wood carved with serpents swallowing their own tails. It had always been there. He had looked into it a dozen times. He had combed his hair in front of it and confirmed with mild amusement that progenitor vampires apparently did reflect, which had made him laugh for nearly three full minutes the first time.
But now it shimmered.
Not dramatically. Not with golden light or swirling smoke like something out of a film. Just a subtle, liquid quality to the surface, as if someone had breathed across still water from behind the glass.
Arrax stopped pacing.
He looked at the mirror for a long moment.
Then he walked toward it.
The shimmer didn't stop as he approached. It continued, slow and quiet, like a pulse. Something deep within his chest responded to it, a pull without visual weight, a feeling like recognition without memory.
He stopped an arm's length from the glass.
His reflection looked back at him. Small. Pale. White hair with threads of platinum catching the light. Purple and red eyes that had no business being in the face of a four-year-old.
Arrax raised his right hand.
His index finger extended.
He watched the nail grow. It took less than a second. The soft, trimmed nail stretched and darkened and sharpened until it curved like a talon, fine as a blade and just as purposeful.
He turned his left hand palm upward.
Drew the nail across it in one clean motion.
The pain was brief and thin. Blood welled immediately, dark and vivid, tracking across the lines of his palm in a lazy diagonal.
Arrax didn't hesitate. He threw it at the mirror.
The blood struck the glass, and the shimmer exploded outward from the point of contact like a ripple in every direction at once before settling. The mirror's surface cleared, not to his reflection, but to something else entirely.
Sky.
Open grey sky with the smell of salt beneath it and the sound of water everywhere, and below, the deck of a ship.
Arrax saw it from above, a bird's angle, as if he were looking down from the height of the mast. The deck was narrow and worn. Ropes coiled like sleeping snakes. Barrels lashed in rows. Sailors moving with the dull efficiency of men doing the same task they had done a thousand times.
And sitting near the bow, half-hidden under a canopy of rough cloth, was a girl.
Small. Dark-eyed. Her hair had changed. It had always been a forgettable brown before, but now it caught the grey light with a faint iridescent quality, like the inside of a shell. Even from above, she was striking in the particular way that made men stop mid-thought.
"Shera."
The word came out of Arrax's mouth before he fully decided to say it.
The girl on the deck went rigid.
Her head snapped upward, eyes scanning the sky with the instinctive alarm of something that had not expected to be found.
"Who?"
"It's me."
A beat of silence.
The tension drained from her shoulders slowly, replaced by something more complicated.
"My prince."
Her voice came through the mirror with a slight delay, like sound crossing a distance, which it was.
"You're on a boat," Arrax stated it flatly.
"Yes, my prince."
"You're supposed to be in Essos."
"I am going to Essos, my prince."
Arrax looked at the ship. At the sailors. The way Shera was sitting, careful and contained, in a corner of the deck that kept her back to the hull and her eyes on every exit.
"Explain."
Shera shifted. Her jaw moved. Something crossed her face that was not quite embarrassment and not quite fear.
"When I left the Red Keep," she began, and her voice had steadied itself into the careful flatness of someone recounting something unpleasant from a distance, "I moved through the city. I wasn't quick enough. Or careful enough."
"You were caught."
"Yes."
Arrax said nothing.
"I hadn't fully... I didn't know what I looked like." She paused. "What do I look like now. The changes. I didn't realise how much had changed until people began to notice."
That he could understand. The vampiric alteration wasn't subtle. The skin, the eyes, the particular quality of stillness that came over a turned body in moments of calm. Shera had gone from a common girl to something that looked carved, luminous, and deeply strange.
"They took me to a slaver."
The word landed in the room as something dropped from a height.
"Within the day," she continued. "I didn't fight back. I wasn't sure what would happen if I did. There were too many. And I didn't want to..."
She stopped.
"Cause a scene," Arrax finished.
"Yes."
"And from the slaver?"
"I was sold." Her voice didn't waver much, only a fraction. "To a magister. From Lys. He had ties to House Rogare."
Arrax's eyes sharpened.
The Rogare family. Banking. Influence. Fingers in half of Essos and enough gold to make the Iron Bank partially nervous. They weren't obscure to him from his past life's knowledge of the setting. They were, or had been at their height, the kind of house that bought and sold people the way merchants bought and sold grain.
"A magister bought you."
"For what I assume was a significant sum," Shera said, and for a half second, something dry crossed her expression. "He seemed very pleased with himself."
"And you are currently on his ship."
"On a ship he owns, yes. We are sailing for Lys."
Arrax stared at her through the glass.
The anger came first.
It was a sharp and immediate thing, the kind that wanted an outlet, a wall, a face, something. A Rogare-affiliated magister had purchased Shera from a slaver in King's Landing who had grabbed her off the street within hours of Arrax sending her into the world.
He opened his mouth.
Closed it.
His hand came up and he pressed two fingers briefly against his own forehead.
'You told her to go.'
'And some slaver who shouldn't even be within the capital nabbed her within hours.'
'You sent a newly turned vampire girl who had been a servant her entire life into the largest city in Westeros alone without a coin, a cover story, or any understanding of what she now looked like.'
'...You absolute idiot.'
The anger found its proper owner and turned inward.
Arrax exhaled slowly through his nose.
"Are you harmed?"
Shera blinked. The question had clearly not been what she expected.
"No, my prince. The magister believes I am... a rare find. He has been careful with his... investment."
"How close to Lys?"
"Three days. Perhaps four."
Arrax nodded once. His mind was already moving, already pulling at threads, already asking what a progenitor vampire could do across that kind of distance with a mirror and a handful of blood.
He didn't have the answer yet.
But he would.
"Stay on the ship," he said. "Don't feed. Don't draw attention. Don't let anyone see what you can do."
"Yes, my prince."
"And Shera."
She looked up.
"This is my fault." He said it without ceremony. "Not yours."
The girl on the boat was quiet for a moment.
"Yes," she said simply. "It was."
The corner of Arrax's mouth moved.
Then the mirror shimmered once more and the sky and the ship and the grey water folded back into his own reflection, pale and small and slightly irritated, staring back at him from within the carved wooden frame.