Played by @JorickName: Emmon Arryn, also called The Lord of Dust
Age: 34
House/Affilitation: House Arryn
Appearance: Image by
kir-tat on Deviantart.
Biography: Emmon Arryn was born the second child and second son of Lord Rodrik Arryn and Lady Alys Waynwood in 77 AC. He and his elder brother, Donnel, were the only children of the union before Alys passed away. Lord Rodrik remarried when his sons were both very young, and Princess Daella Targaryen died soon after giving birth to their half-sister, Aemma. Despite these early tragedies, the Arryn children managed to thrive in their own ways. Aemma was was lovely girl who learned the ways of courtly manners with ease, Donnel was always buried in a book and spouting his acquired wisdom like a would-be maester, and Emmon showed great aptitude for swordplay and charming his way out of trouble. Most would assume Emmon to be the golden child of the family for his talents in the training yard, as he would have been in most Houses of Westeros, but he always felt like the secondary child. Lord Rodrik made comments about him becoming a knight and winning glorious battles, but they were just the things one said to a young lad who liked to fight. When he spoke to Donnel, he spoke with passion and vigor about being a leader and showing the people the proper way by example, impassioned speeches that showed the truth of who their father cared for the most.
This feeling of inferiority lead to many needless squabbles, many of which ended with Donnel on the ground, but their little sister Aemma proved to be a much needed calming influence. In her presence the fights never escalated beyond snippy comments and sneers, which was at least tolerable for those around them. Unfortunately, that presence was lost in 93 AC when she was wed to Viserys Targaryen and went to live with him in King's Landing. The rivalry between the Arryn boys practically exploded in the span of weeks, and just a few months after Aemma left there was a rather ugly incident in the training yard in which Emmon disgraced and bloodied Donnel even as the master-at-arms yelled to him to stop. Lord Rodrik ordered them to never again fight, and he set about looking for ways to ensure that the fire in Emmon's blood was cooled or sated enough to prevent any further trouble. Though he never raised a weapon to his older brother again, nothing Lord Rodrik tried in the few months after the incident managed to change Emmon's spiteful focus on Donnel. Days spent being worked like a dog by the master-at-arms, trips to tourneys (in which he acquitted himself fairly well), dinner parties with prospective wives, and discreet trips to Gulltown brothels all had merely temporary distracting effects on the young man's desire to ruin his brother.
The perfect opportunity soon presented itself: Donnel found himself a marvelously beautiful woman, Lady Marcella of House Grafton, and their romance quickly became the talk of the Vale. While others in the Eyrie, their father included, became practically obsessed with all the planning and details required for a wedding, Emmon instead focused on Lady Marcella herself. At first a small part of him felt that staging an accident to kill the woman would be the best way to ruin Donnel's life, but after spending some time chatting with her and turning on the charm he found those thoughts fading away like morning mist. His plans turned instead to other matters entirely, and whenever Emmon set his mind to something he always got what he wanted. Weeks of friendly banter slowly evolved into innuendo and hinting remarks, which in turn developed into coy but mutual flirting. After that, all it took was a few glasses of wine on a night when Donnel retired early to truly begin their affair. It was a brief and fiery thing, all lust and physicality, but half a dozen nights spent together were more than enough for the damage to be done. When Marcella ended their last night together by tearfully declaring that this couldn't continue and that nobody could ever know about it, Emmon assured her that word of it would never pass his lips and that he would forget it ever happened.
While he kept his word, the latter half of the promise had of course been a lie. The memories of Marcella in his bed did what no day of exhaustion or painted whore had ever managed: the urge to destroy Donnel simply faded away. Though his elder brother would never know it, Emmon had won. There was no further need to fight, because his victory would persist as long as Marcella lived and carried those shameful memories with her, knowing that she had laid with Emmon even as she prepared to wed Donnel. The two were wed a mere fortnight after Emmon's last night with the beautiful bride, and he used the event as an opportunity to pretend to be magnanimous. He gave a short speech to apologize for his barbaric behavior and to as to embrace Donnel as a true brother now and always, which was done to much cheering and clapping, and ended with a toast to the newlywed couple calling for a long and prosperous life for both of them. Emmon was one of the very first to raucously congratulate Donnel when Marcella was soon announced to be pregnant, but in his own mind he was certain the child in her belly was actually his. A few months later, Emmon was wed to the eldest daughter of House Lychester. It was a less than admirable match made more as Lord Rodrik's gesture to an old friend than for the benefit of House Arryn, but it did not last long. The dull girl died of an accident, her head caved in by a fall from her horse while she was out for a ride with other ladies, less than half a year after the marriage.
Lord Rodrik died of the natural complications of old age as he was in the early stages of choosing another wife for Emmon, so he was luckily spared another unfortunate pairing to some old lord's homely daughter. Donnel and Marcella became Lord and Lady Arryn, to much adoration and cheering, and Emmon was able to keep a smile on his face with certain memories already burned into his mind's eye. He used that tumultuous occasion to declare his intent to travel the world a bit before properly settling down, which most interpreted as his way of avoiding another marriage after the sad ending of his previous one. In truth, Emmon simply couldn't stomach the idea of being made to marry a woman of his brother's choosing, but he was happy to allow the other interpretation to thrive. Donnel not only allowed it, he also praised his younger brother for wanting to learn more of the world, and it even came with one of those pompous remarks he'd read from some maester's book about, something about encountering the unfamiliar and tempering one's own spirit. Emmon took it in stride, and he made all the expected farewells to people of importance in the Eyrie before taking his leave. Normally he would have simply spirited away without any fanfare, but the string of tedious conversations made it seem natural for him to pay a visit to Lady Marcella and little Alyssa, the girl he was quite certain was actually his daughter. He left the Eyrie with a certain lightness in his step that he couldn't quite explain.
Emmon spent the next decade mostly away from home. He first went to King's Landing and spent a month there both to participate in a tourney (in which he got his first ever victory in the melee) and to visit with Aemma and his young niece Rhaenyra. After that he traveled the Reach and Stormlands and Dorne in a manner that mixed the rough and solitary travel of a hedge knight with the fine amenities any member of a Great House would expect, going from a place of honor at the local lord's table one night to sleeping under a tree the next, roving from one tourney to the next. It was a fun way to live, so he kept at it for a couple years and eventually earned himself a knightly name: The Lord of Dust, a name that jokingly referred to both his noble status and his clothing always being caked with dust from travel, but also the dust that rose from his felled opponents in the joust and from his own feet in his ferocious performance in melees. Once he tired of traveling the south of Westeros, Emmon returned home briefly before taking a boat from Gulltown up to the Wall. He stayed long enough to grow used to the impressive sights from the top of the wall near Eastwatch-by-the-Sea and Castle Black, then took the Kingsroad down to Winterfell to pay his respects to the Starks who ruled over the frozen shithole that was the North, and finally made his way down to White Harbor to take a boat to Essos. He paid his way through a tour of the most of the Free Cities with the winnings from his tourney performances, and it lasted quite a while thanks to the generosity of wealthy persons of Essos who enjoyed the novelty of having a Westerosi warrior-lord stay with them and attend various social functions. With money finally beginning to run low and news reaching his ear that Viserys Targaryen had been crowned, making his sister the Queen, Emmon went back to Westeros in 104 AC, after a little over 3 years spent in Essos. The second visit to King's Landing lasted about half a year, and this time he was far more intriguing to the lords and ladies of the court thanks to his new worldliness, and then he returned to the Eyrie for a few months.
From then on he mostly left his home to attend tourneys, returning after each one rather than traveling the land to get to the next, though there was one deeply unfortunate trip left to make to King's Landing. In 105 AC, Aemma died after giving birth to a child that did not survive, and this time vast swaths of the nobility of the Vale made the trip along with Emmon. It was a painfully sad affair, the end of a life marked by numerous personal tragedies, and Emmon found himself growing distrustful of and spiteful toward the Targaryens and their lackeys. Though the maesters assured everyone that Aemma's death had been unpreventable and caused by difficulties of birthing a child, whispers of murder circulated freely. Emmon lingered in King's Landing long enough to be present for the spectacle of King Viserys declaring the young Rhaenyra to be his heir, and he was content to be one of the first to swear to protect her right to the throne. It was quite an unusual affair, but the idea of a girl with Arryn blood being the first woman to inherit the throne was not at all a displeasing one. Emmon returned to the Eyrie afterward, and his jaunts abroad to participate in tourneys slowly reduced in number until he was only leaving a couple times a year for the largest and most pretigious events.
In 107 AC, a few years after Aemma died, Lord Ronnel and Lady Marcella were murdered in the Riverlands. The culprits were never found, but rumors flew like ravens to name damn near every person with influence in Westeros. Emmon himself was one such person named in rumors, but few in the Vale even entertained such notions after seeing the brothers get along for so many years. Talk of scheming Targaryens, however, perhaps one Daemon Targaryen looking to spite the Arryns for the crime of their blood relative being named heir instead of him, took root and grew well. Emmon found those rumors to be the most credible of the lot, and it further soured his opinion of the Targaryens. When it came time to end the days of mourning for the dead Lord and Lady Arryn, Emmon was gently but firmly prodded toward assuming the mantle of Lord Arryn for himself as the first male in the line of succession. He refused such pushes and would not budge an inch. Why in the world would he wish to deny the claim of a girl who he believed to be his daughter merely because she was not a boy? He cited Rhaenyra as his main argument for why Alyssa should instead be made Lady Arryn, and he supplemented it by pointing out that she'd been trained to rule while he only knew how to fight and not look like a total fool at social events. The lords and ladies of the Vale accepted this on a few conditions: that Emmon become the regent until it was determined that Alyssa was old enough to rule directly, that Emmon refrain from risking his life in tournaments until that day came, and that Emmon take the position of Castellan of the Eyrie and advise Alyssa until the lords and ladies of the Vale decided she no longer needed his guidance. He accepted these conditions, knowing that they were meant to force him into becoming the true power in the Vale with Alyssa as a figurehead, but he knew something they did not: Alyssa was not the sort of person who would allow herself to be a mere figurehead.
She proved herself very capable in a shorter time than even Emmon expected. From early on, rather than having to guide her to the correct path, Alyssa was getting there on her own with sound reasoning. The girl was smart and she knew how to read people well, a combination that was well suited to leadership. Even so, Emmon didn't bother fighting to be relieved of his position of Castellan after Alyssa was acknowledged as the rightful Lady Arryn. He has found that he enjoys the role, and he's fascinated by the unconventional direction she has chosen for the Vale. Besides, if there is to be fighting in the near future, Lady Arryn will need capable warriors at her side to help her make good strategic choices, and Emmon trusts nobody more than himself to take on such an important job.
