With all that out of the way... in the first year of his life, the child born of Lady Rhea Royce and her estranged husband, Prince Daemon Targaryen, grew beneath the shadow of Runestone’s runes and shields of bronze.
He was called Ronan...
And through the mouths of courtiers and smallfolk alike, a designated last na clung to him far more readily... which is none other than Stone.
Instead of Royce or Targaryen.
For all Lady Rhea’s insistence that her son was born of lawful wedlock, the realm had turned its ear to the Prince’s denial.
And so the boy, who had entered the world amid cold winds and cruel whispers, was made to wear the mark of being a bastard as other babes wear swaddling cloth.
Yet within the Royce seat, there were those who treated him not as a stain but as kin.
Though rarely present due to his duties at the Eyrie, Lord Yorbert Royce himself saw proper to the child’s welfare and treatnt... granting nurse and maids, and allowing Lady Rhea her peace within the bronze-walled keep.
Ever since the discrediting of her claims, the helpers of Runestone said she seldom smiled, save when the boy reached for her hair or clutched her finger with his tiny hands.
By the moon of his sixth month, baby Ronan’s sparse hair began to grow... black as jet, with not a single thread of Targaryen silver.
To so who paid attention to the drama, this was proof enough of Daemon’s claim.
The gods mark true blood and the dragon’s blood is marked by silver, which is what so say.
But others, more kind or cautious, murmured that the color of a babe’s hair was a poor asure of his parentage.
Supposing that the babe's grey eyes which has hints of purple as support.
Be that as it may, the gossip reached even to King’s Landing, where courtiers jested of the Bronze Bitch’s black-haired whelp.
Principle of which is the Prince Daemon himself, who was said to have laughed, saying only that... the seed of the dragon does not root in disloyal bronze.
Still, Runestone endured.
Lady Rhea raised her son among her people, singing him the songs of the Vale and reciting the nas of the runes carved in her hall’s pillars, as if the babe would even care.
Though she could not change his na in the eyes of the realm, she gave him all else that might belong to a trueborn son... love, learning, and lineage.
But outside of Runestone, the realm continued to be unkind.
At so point, missives bore tidings of a Great Tourney, proclaid to celebrate the fiftieth year of King Jaehaerys’s reign.
Knights from across the Seven Kingdoms descended upon the capital, bearing banners bright as fla, and the streets swelled with revelry.
The tourney was said to be the grandest since the Conquest itself... with an established prince of rogueness favored to win the lists, and the royal dragons wheeled above the city in slow, burning majesty.
To the common folk, it was a testant to the unbroken strength of House Targaryen.
However, the spectacle did baby Ronan no favors.
The more the singers praised the silver-haired princes and the splendor of the dragons... the more the gossip of the dark-haired bastard of Runestone curdled into scorn.
By the year’s end, one can only hope that the realm forgot him, save for those within his ho.
There, under the watchful eyes of runes and the echo of strong winds through the Vale, Ronan Stone passed his first naday... a child denied by dragons but cradled by the mountains that et the sea.
Growing in a castle of runes and stones.
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