A Queer Game Indeed, Down In The Dark

Flame danced on the tip of the torch as Rhaenyra stood at the bottom of the long, spiralling staircase. The tunnel ahead was gradually swallowed by darkness as it receded further away from her, past the torchlight's reach. She waited, basking in a silence that was broken only by the occasional faint gust of air rattling through the Keep's winding, underground passages. It was just Rhaenyra, standing there, staring ponderously into the gloom, waiting. She'd had one of her handmaids slip the note under Alicent's door an hour or so after the last vestiges of activity in the Red Keep died down, when the only ones left awake were the odd servant, and a smattering of Goldcloaks trudging sleepily through the halls. The note had read as followed:

Dear Friend,
Whose Faith is Great, And Whose Virtues Are Many

If you're reading this, then you too find yourself still up and awake at this late hour. I write to you now because I feel there is some manner of unfinished business between us; I know that you were gracious enough to accept my apology already, but earlier today I still sensed a distance between us. I will not ask if you felt it too, for I'm certain you must have. We have been friends too long, I suspect I feel the **** in your eyes and sense the knots of tension in your shoulders before even you do. As we both seem to be having trouble sleeping, I would like to make a proposal, which I spent the entirety of the Wolf's Hour exploring to the best of my ability.

However, before I do, I would like to tell you something that might change your mind before you make it up. In the absence of fatigue, I went wandering the halls earlier this very night. My Furnace demanded attention, and I am not ashamed to say that I gave it what it craved. Any good fire requires fuel, and this too I confess I supplied with no small amount of relish. What fuel? Here we get to the heart of things, and I ask that you read what follows closely before you come to a decision about my proposal.

There is a personage, you see. An individual whose name I cannot divulge here on the page, but whose name I suspect is known to no one better than yourself. I speak of someone who has resided in my deepest affections for what feels like half the years I have witnessed here upon this earth, who I admire greatly, and whose admiration I have always craved in return. It was their face I endeavoured to conjure in my mind's eye during the time of my attentiveness, and in the moment of truth I found that my instincts were correct, and that it did indeed contribute greatly to the burning of my flame.

The moment came and went, dear friend, but the image of that face remained. It sustained me. I do not know why, all I know is that it happened and that it felt to me as natural as the drawing of breath. To bring this preamble to a close, what I ask of you is this; if any point, for any length of time, some part of you has experienced the feeling I have described or something even vaguely similar to it, if the words I have here devoted to describing the strange behaviours of my furnace stoke a kindred flame in yours, then I ask that you place your trust in me—as your very oldest and very dearest of friends—and wait until the top of the next hour after this reaches you. Then, leave your chambers in solitude and silence, go right from your door, and from there take the first left. Proceed along the north wall, past the draconic sconces and the hanging baskets, until you reach Visenya's tapestry. Go behind it, and descend the stairs hidden there.

I will be down at the bottom, waiting.

With Love,
The Delight Of Many (Yourself Included)

P.S. A cloak or blanket is a fine bit of garb indeed in fair Westeros, where the heat of the season is temperate indeed. However, I have heard that in Essos or the Summer Isles, in the heat of those far-off places, the custom is to wear a cloak with naught beneath it but that which the Gods saw fit to grace their peoples with.

A curious custom, but not without its merits, don't you think?

She'd been here fifteen minutes, waiting. At first, before she'd gone into Elinda Massey's chambers with the envelope in hand and woke her with a tap on the shoulder, when the ink was still wet on the page and she sat reading and re-reading it by the wavering light of a tallow candle, Rhaenyra had been most pleased with how it had turned out. The key had been ensuring there was plausible deniability, every line carefully considered and constructed with all manner of vaguaries and double-meanings. The idea was that those without the proper context would see only small snatches of the truth, like a sliver of conversation witnessed through a keyhole. Alicent would know, of course, if what she suspected was true. Of course, Rhaenyra had left a bit of mystery on the table, even for the intended recipient. The post-scriptum, for instance. Let her wonder about that part, she thought. Let her dither and fidget, and work herself halfway to a frenzy, and then watch her obey anyway. Even if she didn't, and instead came wearing a nightgown or shift, those were easily removed, and if anyone could talk Alicent out of her clothes...well, who else? Besides, even if she proved stubborn on that point, Rhaenyra supposed she could simply tear it off of her and give her a few backhands on her backside. She smiled; what a sight that would be. Terribly wicked, but damned satisfying, she imagined, pushing her up against one of the walls and correcting her with the flat of her hand...
But...no, she admitted to herself, with a sigh. I wouldn't, not really... Rhaenyra had found she quite enjoyed teasing Alicent, making her blush and squeal like that, but she wasn't cruel, and the idea of visiting such cruelty upon her turned her stomach to a swirling cauldron of sickness and uncertainty. The trouble was that she cared for her too much, enjoyed her kindness, her softness. She didn't want to make her scream or cry in sadness or pain, that would surely dim the gentle, warming light that dwelt within Alicent Hightower's eyes. I've become accustomed to that light. She sometimes suspected it was to her what the Light of The Seven was to Alicent, but she'd never have dared say as much. She would name it blasphemy, and she'd probably be right. That too would hurt her, and so Rhaenyra could not bring herself to countenance it. She was perhaps her father's daughter in that way, and it wasn't without cause that some called him Viserys The Peaceful.
Rhaenyra sighed anew, looking down at herself. She was, at present, a Princess in the altogether. The cloak she'd brought to hide her bareness on the way down from her chambers lay in a rumpled pile on the dusty, careworn floor. She'd decided it was only fair to do what she'd asked of Alicent, and reassure her that she wasn't simply playing another trick on her when she finally arrived. Rhaenyra was a brave girl, but the exposure had her slightly, slightly on edge; her heart was on the edge of fluttering whenever she heard a distant creak or thud, and every few minutes she would rub her arms nervously. Just the stone settling, she repeated for the umpteenth time, at the sound of a deep, resonant cracking from somewhere close by. All castles have a life of their own, it's just a matter of listening for their heartbeat. She stood on the balls of her bare feet, rocking gently back and forth as intermittent fingers of wind blew through the passageway and passed over her. The coolness of it had made her ghostly pink nipples hard and sent gooseflesh spreading like greyscale over the rest of her breasts, but she didn't much mind, since the night was warmer than not, and the playing of breeze on bare skin was a constant reminder of what she had in store for Alicent.
Self-consciousness was a damn nuisance, she decided, when she found herself worrying at the size of her bust yet again. She stared at them intently, and tried to take a moment to admire herself, so as to counteract the creeping doubts. Look at that tummy, she observed. As flat as a board, it was. She was thin enough that the muscles at her sides drew sharply inwards, which complimented her petite waist, and the hips that flared out from it (albeit, only subtly). A comely body, a lean, lusty thing. The whole of her being had the air of sex about it, but nowhere moreso than her sex proper. Down amidst her slender thighs, a little tuft of platinum hair clung to her mound, just above the apex of her slit. It was almost arrowhead-shaped, the point of it located at the bottom, so that it seemed to be gesturing cheekily to her lower lips. The lips in question were slightly parted, and from between them emerged a small, thin fold of delicate girl flesh from inside. Rhaenyra had hated that, once. She'd confided as much in Septa Regina, a woman who had been at once plump and also hard, solid in her corpulence and severe in her demeanour. "We'll not speak of unclean things," she'd said, tersely, when Rhaenyra had raised the issue with her. After that, it had taken her weeks to work up the courage to go around her and speak to Mother for counsel.

That day, the city had been strangely quiet. That had stuck so strongly in her mind, that and the sight of her mother in her favourite armchair, doing needlework in a pensive silence by the balcony. Rhaenyra had come to her with a face that nearly matched the red dragon of their sigil, and had said, sobbing, "I-I was made wrongly! I am not as a woman should be!" The Queen had stopped threading her needle, laid the half-finished tambour on her lap, and turned to look at her over her shoulder. "Dear child, whatever makes you say that?"
Rhaenyra had lifted her skirts to show her, and her mother had barely spared it a glance before breaking out into a smile devoid of mockery or mirth. A reassuring smile, it had been. The smile of a parent who understands things are not so bad as their child seems to think. "Everything seems in order to me," she'd said.
Rhaenyra had shaken her head vigorously. "How? How can it be? There is more of it than there should be! It pokes out like a great ugly—"
"You are as the Gods made you," Aemma interrupted, firmly. "There is exactly as much as there needs to be, no more and no less."
Rhaenyra sniffled. "But—"
"No 'buts', daughter." She had put her tambour aside and gotten to her feet, turning and moving up to Rhaenyra and placing her hands on her shoulders. "Do you know what it looks like to my eyes?"
"A big ugly banner, drooping in the wind?" Rhaenyra replied, making a disgusted face.
Aemma put a hand to her daughter's cheek. "No, not a big ugly banner, drooping in the wind. It looks to me like the Erala of The Cinders. You remember the story?"
Rhaenyra had nodded. Every girl knew the story of Erala, that fine, but lowborn lady, who had twirled and danced with a handsome prince at his gilded palace until the clock had struck the Hour of The Owl, and she was **** to flee into the night for fear he'd see the fading of the forgotten magicks of the First Men, which had gifted her a beautiful gown and slippers for the night. "You see these?" Aemma gestured to the lower lips, sandwiching the fold of pink flesh between them. "There, the castle doors, pale like a Weirwood tree. The ball is over, isn't it? And the guardsmen are trying to close them, but the lady Alan has gone right on dancing. She is dancing and dancing, even as she flees through them, and her skirts are swirling right up in front of her, do you see?" Rhaenyra had gone silent, letting out another sniffle as she'd stared down at it, trying to see as her mother saw. At first, it was just the same unsightly protrusion as before, but then it was as if it had begun to shift before her very eyes. That was when Rhaenyra had seen it, and she realised then there were some things that might not be quite so ugly as she'd thought.
A fine woman, her mother. She'd passed only a few short years after that day, and the thing that always ran through Rhaenyra's mind about it was that she wished she'd had more time with her. She had grown into herself since then without the Queen's guiding hand and reassuring words. True, she hadn't been an ambitious shaper of the realm, like Good Queen Alysanne, who had championed the plight of womenfolk as best she could and curbed the rights of Lords where their and other Men's ladies were concerned, so that thet could not so freely lay their hands upon them, but at the same time Good Queen Alysanne had outlived most of her children and by all accounts spent portions of her marriage to The Concilliator distant and estranged from him. Aemma Arryn on the other hand had been Queen in a simpler, happier fashion. She had stood by her husband The King, keeping her quarrels discreet and short-lived if she'd ever quarreled with him at all, and she'd been there to set things right, on a day when her only daughter had been ashamed and fearful of her own womanhood.

Her mother's face swam before her, faintly, as her thoughts dwelt on her for a while longer, but inevitably they drifted back to more...material concerns. The back of her hand was growing numb, since she'd cupped it protectively over her buttocks to protect them from the cold stone kiss of the wall she was leaning against. Like her breasts, Rhaenyra's rear was compact—a pair of high half-globes, smoother than silk, and as round and taut as the skin of a drum. "I can barely tell them apart from the bubbles," Daemon had said, that day in the bathhouse, at the onset of dusk, not so very long ago. He'd given one of them a squeeze for good measure, and Rhaenyra had returned the favour... But that didn't happen, did it? He'd made her swear not to even think of it afterwards, when her arse was all but spent, and silvery ribbons of his seed had drifted lazily on the surface of the steaming waters. "I...I promise," she whispered back, and then he'd smirked contentedly and bade her come under the bubbles, so he could make her cum under the bubbles. She smiled at the memory, shifting her stance. When her legs moved, they just barely rubbed against each other, and at the velvety junction of her thighs, Rhaenyra felt a moistness brewing. Enough of that, no more... She tried to think of dryer, chaster things, lest Alicent see the torchlight glinting off Rhaenyra's leaking ladyship and get the right of things too early.

Just as well. She turned her head toward the stairs at an encroaching sound; a two-step rhythm echoing down through the dark. Footsteps. They were rounding and rounding the stairs, drawing closer with each revolution. Footsteps, Rhaenyra thought. They sounded soft, closer to the slap of skin on stone than the hard clacking of shoes or boots. She was barefoot, then. With a buzz of unbidden giddiness, Rhaenyra wondered at the possibilities. If she's barefoot, what else might be bare?
She appeared from around the corner of the turret, an anxious face peering at Rhaenyra from out of the darkness; it, her feet and an understated flash of neck were all that was visible of her body, the rest hidden under a silken emerald riding cloak, drawn tight and secure around her. "My trust is placed," she said, stiffly. "Rightly or wrongly, I know not..."
Rhaenyra licked her lips nervously, then nodded down at the cloak. "Did you...?"
Alicent shuffled awkwardly on the spot. "Yes...The Maiden preserve me..." In advance of having done anything, she blushed. Shyly, she shrugged the cloak off her shoulders and, just as she was told, as Rhaenyra had hoped, beneath it she too was naked. Where Rhaenyra was all slightness and tightness, Alicent had an underlying fullness of figure; to start with, her tummy was a shade rounder, a small pouch of fat sat there under her solar plexus, and her arse was the shape of a ripe, juicy apple, and large enough that part of it could be seen even from the front. Without her dress, the eye was drawn next to a pair of childbearing hips. They had that wide, feminine shape that promised one healthy babe after another and made it easy to slip an arm round them, pull her toward you and to get down to the business of making them. The idea of being with child unsettled Rhaenyra, after all she'd witnessed her mother endure, but the sight of those hips sent a brief, mad thought jarring through her, of herself and Alicent sitting by a fireplace, surrounded by a gaggle of mischievous-looking boys with rich brown hair and little girls that carried themselves with Alicent's poise and good manners, their shiny, platinum locks and bright, pious eyes glinting in the hearthlight. And how would you make them, fool? Perhaps you'd borrow a stray cock and hold it between your legs while you plant the seeds in her highborn twat?
The vision broke against the shore of reality, and she found herself admiring Alicent's breasts. They seemed fuller than ever, the flickering half-light from the torch painting them gold and her nipples a healthy bronze, and sending shadows running over their curves. As she walked up, they moved in gentle, understated bounces in time with her footfalls; Rhaenyra liked watching them do it. "I'm glad you came," Rhaenyra whistled, "and in such finery!" Alicent gasped, scandalised, interlacing her fingers over her crotch as she came to a stop in front of her friend, but Rhaenyra had already seen what lay there: the quiet glory of a cleanly-shaven cunny—a bald triangle of mound and nude, prominent lips that pressed primly together, giving nothing away even in their own exposure, at least from this angle. Against my better judgement!" she hissed. "I walked on tenterhooks the whole way, and once or twice I was almost seen!" She gasped again, as if shocked by the idea her own words suggested.
Rhaenyra blinked, nonplussed. "But...you weren't?"
"Yes, but what would my reputation have come to if I had been? The Hand's daughter, skulking about the castle after dark in naught but a cloak!"
"You could have said you were going to see the Princess?" Rhaenyra offered, in a tone of mock innocence. Alicent scowled. "You know as well as I do that would have been worse! I'd be safer concocting some fictitious midnight tumble with a stablehand!"
"Oh, I wouldn't be so sure if I were you, the Red Keep's stablehands are famously lusty," Rhaenyra chuckled. "And besides, you made it..." she was trying to keep a straight face, but her mouth was curling upwards into a grin that wouldn't be out of place in the Seven Hells, "unmolested, didn't you?"
At that, Alicent gasped a third time. "Oh, you..." she huffed. "This was a mistake, I...I should never have listened to you." She backed away, moving toward the stairs from whence she'd come. Rhaenyra wondered why she was walking backwards for a moment, before realising that she was trying to avoid showing off her arse. Silly, really. If mine looked like that, I'd never wear clothes at all. "Alicent! Alicent, come on!" Rhaenyra lunged forward to grab her by the wrist, and she stopped, staring poutily at her. "What? What is it you want of me? You bade me come down here and I came, you bade me barely clothe myself at all, and only the Gods know why but I actually did it! You have no idea how difficult this was for me, how...how daunting! My body is private, my body is..." Redness spread across her cheeks, and Rhaenyra saw how truly challenging it must have been for her to come down here like this, with naught but the urging of some flowery words on paper and the promise of seeing a dear companion at the end of the road. She felt a small trickle of guilt, running down her spine like cold water. "Your body is precious?" she finished.
Alicent sniffed pointedly, and gave a nod. "And I do not enjoy scurrying about with nothing to protect my modesty, my...virtue!" She sighed, arranging her arms to hide her treasures. But, be that as it may, I'm here. You have me alone and you have me naked, now I would ask something of you—that you tell me what your aim was in summoning me here, at this hour, in this..." A shudder ran through her. "Condition. Is there a reason? Is there more to this? Or is it just that you delight in my... my humiliation?" She looked down at the floor, pushing her palms deeper into her crotch and raising her shoulders in discomfort. Best to come clean, Rhaenyra reasoned. She's taking it even harder than I thought she would. "Well, in truth I...I thought we might play a game."
Confused knitted Alicent's brows. "A game? And pray tell what manner of game requires a meeting in secret between two naked girls?!"
What a question, Rhaenyra mused, but at least I have a worthy answer. "Follow me," she said, standing on her toes to grab the torch out of its sconce and beckoning for Alicent to follow her down the tunnel. "This is a forgotten place," she said, trying to sound mysterious and wordly, "shrouded in a cloak of secrecy all its own. I should like to show you, and then I think you'll begin to understand what I have in mind."

[Author's Note: I always enjoy and appreciate feedback in terms of what's working and what isn't, so please feel free to like and/or leave comments!]