In which Annalys Baratheon is arranged to marry Robb Stark and when her 'father' dies, she is forced to side with the North in the Five War of the Kings to save herself from being killed by her psychotic younger brother. What she didn't know was tha...
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Weeks had passed since then. Annalys tried her best to act as if she weren't dying inside, but in reality, she was. Her brother was dead. Tommen was dead. All of her siblings were dead. Tommen, Myrcella, even Joffrey. They were all dead. Out of the four children her mother bore, she was the last one living. She was the eldest, but the most estranged out of her siblings, and somehow, she ended up being the last one alive in the end.
She had killed thirty-two Frey men just two weeks before and came back to Winterfell as if nothing happened. Her ruthlessness was becoming far worse than it had ever been before, that was for sure.
Her mother was queen of the Seven Kingdoms now. Annalys wanted to be happy about the fact that her mother became queen after decades of wanting just that, but she couldn't help but feel worried and uneasy as well.
Her mother, in all honesty, didn't have the traits and attributes it took to be a great queen. She was impatient, impulsive, reckless, and as much as she claimed to be just as skilled with politics as her infamous Tywin Lannister, she wasn't. She wasn't as clever as she believed herself to be either. She relied on the people around her to get away with things and to deal with most of her problems.
That was the difference between Cersei and her daughter. Annalys was clever like her uncle and grandfather when she needed to be. She was also far better than her mother at military strategies and politics, even if she wasn't a true master at it just yet.
For nearly seven years, Annalys had survived all on her own with no one's help. It wasn't Robb keeping her alive during the war, Annalys was doing it on her own. She chose to believe Oberyn would have been the one to save her from King's Landing, but in the end, Annalys did it on her own by manipulating her father. She shed a few tears, knowing it would make him pity his daughter and it ended up working.
She killed Tywin on her own and as much as she felt bad for Tyrion being the one getting blamed, she was able to avoid execution all on her own because of it.
Annalys herself was the only reason she survived so long, unlike her mother, who depended on other people, no matter how much she tried to deny it.
The only reason Cersei was considered more powerful was the fact she didn't love anyone enough that it created a weakness. Annalys allowed herself to get close to people and that caused her to form a weakness. Any time someone wanted to break her or force her to bow down to them, they only had to threaten someone she loved.
Cersei wasn't the same in that aspect. They could have threatened Jaime and she wouldn't even think about bowing down to anyone. That was the main difference between Cersei and Annalys, both of which happened to be Queens in Westeros at that moment in time.
Annalys sat with Jon, Sansa, and Davos at the great table at the front of Winterfell's Great Hall as they spoke to their Lords and Ladies of the Vale and the North about the White Walkers, "Annalys and I want every northern maester to scout their records for any mention of dragonglass," Jon announced loudly, "Dragonglass kills White Walkers. It's more valuable to us now than gold. We need to find it, we need to mine it, we need to make weapons from it."
