peel your heart like a pomegranate
Offer it to him, palms outwards.
Say "eat"

Watch him come away stained red by you.
You're in his teeth.

He'll kiss you with that mouth

You know how this will end.

Helen knows what has been written down for her━ for all of those who have come before her. It's a tale that repeats again and again and again and again. It is something tangled into the very threads of her- their souls, a tale of divinity staining your fingertips, of hunger for ichor, of bloodstained teeth and burning flesh and screams that died alongside embers.

It's a fate written for every woman of the Zaihai's, of every one of them who can wield what can bend the threads of one's soul, of one's mind. It is a price they have to pay.

And it's cruel, it's cruel to turn into something unfathomable, uncontrollable and not be able to do something for it, not to have a choice. 

The world is not kind to women, certainly not those like her━ ones who can not be moulded, broken and bruised into something to parade around with soulless eyes and sunken cheeks. The very nature of her soul- souls go against it now. It's vicious and corrosive and rotten and it scares those around her━ those that do not understand the force in her━ and Helen knows that they'd hunt her down at a breath, just as they did the women before her.

It's cruel to know that your soul will slowly be chipped away, rotting away until you are left a shell of those before you, holding in you the rage of those before and those to come until you are all claws and teeth at the jugular until you are to burn like the women who made you.

Helen knows that what the coming days hold for her are to be nothing but cruel, calamity threading itself into the very threads of her being. But hope, hope is a cruel thing to have, it's gruesome and sinks its teeth into you and no matter how much you wish for it to let go, it does not. Helen knows, she knows and yet to let it grow, let it fester in between stolen glances and lingering touches━ even when the girl she loves gets wed to the old king, even when the girl she sees as a sister is sent away, even when the realm breaks into war.

Helen knows and yet she hopes.

You know how this will end, so why?

I can't help it.

HELEN ZAIHAI // THE SORCERESS

SER THEODORE HAWTHORNE // THE RIGHTEOUS

ALICENT HIGHTOWER // THE FORSAKEN

disclaimer.

I do not own hotd or asoiaf, it, belongs to grrm. I only own my original characters and their plotlines. Anything familiar does not belong to me, it belongs to their respective owners.

The story has been rated mature due to allusions to abuse (domestic and sexual), the use of vulgar language, blood and gore, murder, violence, misogyny, racism and other shit you find in hotd.

note.

Hello!!

Welcome to me trying to tackle a hotd fic. Honest to god, out of all the fandoms I've ever been in or even dipped my toes into, none of them gives me a worse imposter syndrome than asoiaf and adjacent and yet here I am, doing my very best to not fuck up this universe while also trying my very best to say 'fuck it' and cause chaos.

As is probably obvious from my girlie helen's last name, she is based on chinese myths and thus based around yi ti (though I do my own worldbuilding.) I partially blame my latest rewatch of till the end of the moon for the angst fest that this fic, particularly Helen's plotline, will be.

Gonna get this out of the way first: this fic is not pro green or pro black, helen is a bystander who gets dragged into this shitshow of a war and she spends her time hating on both sides.

Helen is very 'nothing new', 'you're on your own kid,' 'would've could've should've' codded. Her story is tragic to a t bc girlie goes from living her best life to being stuck in the middle of her bsfs waging war against each other and then being used as a weapon by the person she loves, which is wack. She has a whole jason todd esque arc which I am so excited to write.

There are two main pairing, which should be obvious. Very sad sapphic, right person wrong time, sweet nothing, I hate who I've become because of you type of thing and the other being a very tender, very codepndent, very twelveclara thing. tldr, helen won't catch a break.

Very much excited to write a bunch of lore of my own, and my own take on politics and the ripples that my oc causes. Have fun!!!