Selyse Florent was "escorted" into the hall by two black-armored soldiers. She clutched her daughter Shireen's hand so tightly that her fingertips turned white.
Shireen hid almost entirely behind her mother, revealing only a pair of blue eyes wide with terror. The scales covering her left cheek looked even duller in the dim light.
The moment they crossed the threshold, an invisible, suffocating pressure struck them.
It was neither a sound nor a smell, but a sheer presence, cold and hard, laden with scrutiny and judgment. Selyse's breath caught, and she nearly stumbled.
Selyse forced herself to raise her head. At the sight before her, her heart nearly battered through her ribs.
Along either side of the hall stood what seemed like two silent walls cast from flesh and steel.
The soldiers on the left wore dark red cloaks and cold, rigid armor. They stood perfectly straight and motionless, their gazes piercing the air like shards of ice from behind their visors, pinning her in place.
The soldiers on the right wore pitch-black cloaks. Their ranks were less orderly and forbidding, but their fierce, savage menace, as though they had just crawled out of mountains of corpses and seas of blood, filled the air even more openly.
At the end of those two "walls," above several cold blackstone steps.
A figure sat there.
He sat upon a throne carved from a single block of dragonstone, its hard, rough lines a symbol of supreme authority here.
His pitch-black armor swallowed the light. A dark red cloak fell from his shoulders like a pool of congealed blood.
His long silver hair shone cold and dazzling in a shaft of light that slanted through a narrow arched window high above, its shape traced by floating dust.
His head was tilted slightly, one hand