273 AC, Casterly Rock.
On the stone walls of Casterly Rock's corridors, candle flames wavered uneasily in the draft.
Tywin Lannister stood outside the birthing chamber, his leather boots tapping irritably against the flagstones, each beat echoing through the empty corridor.
Something beyond his control had made him lose his composure, but he neither prayed nor showed dejection. He merely paced back and forth like a lion patrolling his territory.
His crimson velvet outer robe rustled with every turn. His fingers gripped it so tightly that his knuckles had gone pale, betraying his mood.
The Hand of the King, the king's right hand, Warden of the West, Shield of Lannisport, Lord of Casterly Rock, the lion of House Lannister-he should never have allowed himself to show weakness.
But... she was inside.
His wife, Joanna Lannister, his beloved, the only person for whom he willingly smiled in private.
The screams from the birthing chamber had continued for nearly twelve hours.
What had begun as sharp, piercing cries had gradually become broken moans, each pause longer than the last, setting hearts trembling.
At one moment, Tywin's steps stopped. His emerald eyes turned toward the tightly shut oak door.
There was no sound.
Dead silence. A dead silence more terrifying than any scream.
His breathing almost stopped as he remembered what Joanna had said, holding his hand the night before she went into labor. "Tywin, whatever happens... protect our children."
Her smile then had been like a sunset over the Westerlands, gentle and resolute. Now... the silence behind the door was like a cold burial shroud winding around his heart.
"Waaah-!!!"
A piercing cry suddenly tore through the air, fierce and domineering, filled with the raw force of life.
The guards and maids in the corridor all breathed sighs of relief. Some even smiled faintly. Just listen to that strong, healthy voice. This child would surely become a brave knight. Perhaps their lord would...
Before their joy could spread, before words of congratulation could leave their lips-
"Ah! Seven above!!! There's another! Another pair of twins!"
Maester Creylen's voice came through the crack in the door, carrying shock, disbelief, and even a trace of fear. "No! It's him!! He's the one in the wrong position!"
"Quick!! Apprentice Loomis!! What are you staring at?! Stop her ladyship's bleeding!"
"Gauze... stop the bleeding! Her ladyship has no pulse!!" Almost simultaneously with Maester Creylen's startled cry, the second child began to wail.
"Wah, wah, wah..."
But this cry was utterly different from the first, like a dying kitten's, as though it might choke off at any moment, yet it stubbornly continued.
Threaded through the cries of "Stop the bleeding!" and "My lady!", it sounded out of place, so eerie.
Tywin's hand slowly fell from the door handle. The faint upward curve that the first cry had brought to his face froze completely, becoming a coldness darker than the deepest mines of the Westerlands.
After Cersei and Jaime... another pair of twins.
The door opened. Maester Creylen emerged, his aged body stooped. The chain across his chest glinted in the candlelight. Its black iron links represented his profound learning in a particular field, yet now they seemed a cold mockery.
"My lord..." The old maester's voice was as dry as dead leaves rubbing together. "Her ladyship..."
Tywin did not wait for him to finish. He strode into the birthing chamber, his leather boots making an unpleasant sound against the Myrish carpet soaked in bloodied water.
Joanna lay there.
The face once acknowledged throughout the Westerlands, and even all Westeros, as exquisitely beautiful had lost every trace of color and was utterly pale.
Her drenched golden hair clung to her forehead and cheeks. She had bitten through her lips. Her eyes were half-open, their pupils unfocused, gazing at the splendid canopy embroidered with the golden lion of Lannister.
Tywin walked to the foot of the bed.
Joanna's eyes suddenly focused. Her wandering gaze slowly shifted toward the figure who had paced outside the door for twelve full hours.
Her lips moved slightly, without a sound.
But Tywin understood.
Ty... win...
The shape of those words held a deep, unspeakable sorrow, like a final farewell... Then her eyes closed forever.
Tywin made no move. He remembered a moment twenty years earlier.
King's Landing, the great hall of the Red Keep.
He had accompanied his father, Tytos, to an audience with Jaehaerys II Targaryen and stood, utterly bored, in the shadow of a pillar.
Then she had walked in.
Joanna Lannister, his cousin, wearing a pale green gown, her golden hair spilling like sunlight.
She had paused as she passed him, her green-violet eyes turning toward him. There was none of a young girl's shy avoidance in her manner, only a frank appraisal between equals.
"You will be my wife," he had said suddenly, only realizing what he had said after the words were out.
She had not blushed or rebuked his arrogance. She had merely raised her chin a little...
"I know."
That was all. No second exchange, no romance beneath flowers and moonlight.
A year later, they were betrothed. Three years later, she married into Casterly Rock.
The only time Tywin had bowed to fate in his life was when he engraved her name into his own surname.
And now she lay here, her golden hair no longer shining...
His hand hovered above her cold cheek, refusing to descend, as though touching her would force him to admit this was real.
Joanna, forever thirty-two. Joanna, who would never smile at him again...
Tywin stood motionless, his jaw tight as stone, his expression conveying a storm more clearly than any roar.
He slowly raised his right hand and pressed it against the sword hilt at his waist. His knuckles whitened again. The metal's chill seeped through his palm, like a kind of anchor.
"Maester Creylen."
"Yes, my lord."
"The children. I want to see them."
Casterly Rock. The sunlit hall.
Situated outside the lord's study, this hall was ordinarily used to receive lesser visitors and hold the family's morning meetings.
Now, however, it had been arranged like a court of judgment.
The precious Myrish silk had been removed from the long table, replaced with the crimson velvet that symbolized House Lannister.
Tywin sat upright in the high-backed chair at the far end of the hall, dressed entirely in black, from his informal clothes to his outer robe. He resembled a gravestone forgotten by time, his thoughts unknowable.
Morning light slanted through the tall eastern windows, illuminating golden dust drifting in the air.
Several people stood in the hall.
Maester Creylen, an old man who had served the family for thirty years, stood with his head bowed, awaiting the storm.
The young apprentice maester, Loomis, stood beside him, both hands clenched into fists at his sides.
Then the hall doors creaked open, and Tywin's fingers stopped tapping the armrest.
Two wet nurses entered cautiously.
Tywin turned his gaze toward Maester Creylen.
"My lord..." The old maester stepped forward, his voice lowered almost to a whisper. "Lady Joanna did indeed speak their names as she lay dying. Tyrion and Leon..."
"My lord, it should be Helion... Tyrion means tyrant, demon. Her ladyship could not possibly have..." Loomis's impassioned protest stopped abruptly.
Tywin's right hand hung in the air, its five fingers curling slightly, as though crushing the apprentice's unfinished words.
His gaze shifted to the two wet nurses. He beckoned with his right hand, a concise, forceful gesture formed through years of military life.
The wet nurse on the left stepped forward. She was a typically sturdy peasant woman of the Westerlands, her face still faintly flushed from recently giving birth. She walked carefully, every step as though she were treading on ice.
The infant in her arms was wrapped in coarse linen. Never mind treatment befitting a second son-even the children of the castle's guards would not have been wrapped in such rough cloth.
The infant's cries were hoarse and grating, as though he had wept all night. They rebounded through the stone hall, stirring irritation and unease.
The peasant woman reached the left end of the long table and set the infant down with trembling arms, then hurried back to the wall.
By then, the second wet nurse had also stepped forward.
She was the widow of a knight of Casterly Rock who had just died on the battlefield. Her bearing was somewhat more graceful, her steps steadier, her chin slightly raised, as though she carried something sacred.
The silk swaddling embroidered with silver thread had been sewn by Lady Joanna herself while she lived. It had once wrapped Casterly Rock's heir, Jaime Lannister.
The infant in her arms was unusually quiet, and he was not asleep. Though newly born, he could already open both eyes. They seemed to be studying the world, their pale violet appearing almost transparent in the light, like the rippling sheen of water.
The wet nurse gently laid him at the right end of the long table, as though afraid of damaging some rare piece of porcelain.
The two infants lay two meters apart. From Tywin's position, they formed a complete triangle with him, like a judge trying two criminals.
Tywin slowly rose. His black robe slid over the stone floor with a soft rustle.
He walked to the left, toward the infant who would not stop crying.
As he bent down, his tall figure shrouded the child. The crying stopped abruptly, the creature's instincts sensing approaching danger.
Tywin examined him at close range.
His enormous head was out of proportion to his scrawny body. His forehead protruded like that of some cave-dwelling creature, his features crowded together. His left eye was Lannister green, but his right was pure black...
Mismatched eyes. The "demon's eyes" recorded in the Citadel's books.
Several white patches were already visible amid his sparse, pale golden hair, like the marks of a curse of premature aging. The infant stared wide-eyed at the source of his terror, his eyes filled with primal fear and bewilderment.
Tywin's expression did not change, but anyone looking directly into his eyes would have seen something freezing and shattering deep within that emerald green.
He confirmed it, with an even colder certainty... From head to toe, this creation was an absolute insult to the Lannister name.
During her pregnancy, Joanna had dreamed of "two lions, one black and one white, fighting at the edge of a cliff."
He had dismissed it then as a pregnant woman's fancies. Now he understood... It had not been a dream, but a prophecy.
Black and white, ugliness and beauty-all were curses.
Tywin straightened and stepped back. The strike of his boot heel against the flagstones echoed through the sunlit hall.
His steps toward the right were somewhat hesitant, a kind of preparation... like a knight lowering his visor and steadying his breathing before a duel.
He bent down and saw his other son's face clearly.
The proportions of his features were so perfect they almost seemed mathematically calculated. The distance between his eyes, the length of his nose, the curve of his lips-all seemed to have passed through the most exacting algorithm.
His skin was not the pink of an ordinary infant but a pearly white, revealing delicate pale blue veins beneath it. This body seemed unlike something made of flesh and blood. His eyelashes were almost transparent in the light, each blink like the trembling of dragonfly wings.
Those eyes... pale violet.
Joanna's eyes had also been violet, but tinged with green. This child's violet was paler and colder, like ancient crystals from the far north beyond the Wall.
At that moment, those eyes were watching Tywin quietly. They lacked the usual unfocused haze of an infant and held
a strange, overly intent clarity.
Tywin met those eyes for three seconds... perhaps longer.
During those three seconds, Tywin suddenly had an illusion...
This infant was appraising him.
Like a scholar examining a specimen, like a chess player studying the board. Those pale violet eyes held only an almost divine calm.
Tywin felt a surge of cold revulsion at that inhuman perfection and scrutiny.
He straightened and took another step back, positioning himself directly between the two swaddled infants.
"Two extremes!"
"Two mistakes!"
For a moment, the temperature in the sunlit hall mingled with that icy tone, symbolizing the intertwining of ice and fire.
Maester Creylen repeated the instructions one by one, his voice dry but precise. Apprentice Maester Loomis lowered his head, the pity in his eyes hidden by shadow.
"Even... two Lannister cockroaches must have some value, even if all they do is roll dung!"
Tywin waved a hand.
At his signal, the two wet nurses each picked up an infant and left.
Tyrion began crying again, his cries still hoarse and despairing, while Leon remained calm. Only as he was lifted did those pale violet eyes quietly watch Lord Tywin.
There was no infant innocence in that gaze, no uncomprehending curiosity about the world, only an unsettling, almost adult concentration.
As though saying: I will remember this.
The wet nurse carried him out of the sunlit hall. The doors closed behind them, leaving Tywin alone.
He turned and walked to the window, looking out beyond the castle.
He remembered the nightmare the old maester had just spoken aloud. "My lord... we measured them. Both children... compared with Jaime Lannister at birth... are a full three inches shorter, and clearly shorter than a normal infant."
Sunlight now shone fully upon the sea outside Casterly Rock, the rippling waves dazzling like gold leaf.
"Joanna..."
His voice was so low that only he could hear it. "Is this what you left me... one ugly, one beautiful, two incomplete forms of light and shadow?"
In the Citadel's books, those with mismatched eyes were often regarded as harbingers of calamity, while those with violet eyes were entwined with ancient legends of the Children of the Forest and the First Men.
Now both had appeared in his bloodline at once. Was this coincidence, or some kind of omen?
Tywin gripped the window frame, his knuckles whitening. The words of House Lannister were: "Hear Me Roar."
But now, he wanted only silence...
Tywin returned to the table, gently opened a drawer, and placed the paper he had crumpled in his hand deep inside. Written upon it was Joanna's name.
"Click."
The key turned, sounding like a full stop at the end of an era. When he left the sunlit hall, his face held only absolute coldness, deeper than the layers of rock.
Ironically, just as the saying in King's Landing's Red Keep went, "The Red Keep has no secrets," neither did Casterly Rock.
The maids within the castle had already begun whispering.
A girl newly arrived from Lannisport could not help murmuring, "But... that beautiful child really did look like a little elf. Did you see his eyes? Like violet stars..."
An older maid abruptly seized her arm, her nails almost digging into the flesh. "Shut your mouth! Do you want your tongue cut out? Didn't you hear what his lordship said? They're a 'curse'! A double curse!"
The maids' conversation had already been planted like a seed in the Westerlands.
From that moment onward, the name "Elf" quietly spread among Casterly Rock's servants, through its corridors and kitchen corners.
It became Leon Lannister's first mark of identity. Beneath the Lord of Casterly Rock's definition of a "double curse," a nickname among the common folk was born, carrying subtle pity and fear.
And in a room at the top of the western tower, Leon Lannister lay quietly in his cradle, his eyes upon the high stone ceiling, the light outside the window reflected in his pale violet pupils.
No one knew that the infant called "Elf" was, at that moment, understanding everything that had just happened in a way beyond his years.
Understanding the weight of the word "father."
Understanding the coldness of the label "curse."
And understanding the extraordinary beginning to which he was destined.
In the Westerlands, the story of the twins of beauty and ugliness thus began.