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Aysa’s nurse sighed heavily and acceded to her charge’s insistent request (for only the hundredth time). “Ach, fine.” In a bored voice, she recited The Doom of Valyria yet again. Why in Westeros this little girl would prefer a depressing account of the death of two lovers in the worst cataclysm in the world’s history as a bedtime story was beyond her. Aysa had always been a strange child.

Satisfied, ten-year-old Aysa Snow closed her eyes in her narrow cot and listened closely with her slender fingers laced over her belly button, and after the recitation finished, she repeated: “The hills that split asunder, / And the black that ate the skies, / The flames that shot so high and hot, / That even dragons burned.” Something kindled behind her ribs, and her wide, gold eyes sought the nurse’s. “Did all the dragons die, Losha?”

“Yes, girl,” the sleepy nursemaid muttered, nodding slightly, her chin dropping onto her abundant bosom. “All except those the Targaryans brought to Westeros.”

“How do we know for certain? Has anyone been to Old Valyria since the Doom?” 

Losha snorted in derision, her eyelids barely lifting. “By the gods, no. It’s a blackened ruin that belched noxious smoke for fifty years. It’s cursed land. No one goes there.” Her answer slurred slightly with encroaching sleep. 

“But that was over two hundred years ago!” Aysa objected stubbornly. “How do we know unless we go see?” 

Losha was snoring now, pillowed on her own cleavage, oblivious. 

Aysa scowled and crossed her arms over her boyishly flat chest. “I’ll go find out for myself one day,” she promised.

Only the whistling winter wind heard.

Chapter Text

“A raven from King’s Landing!”

Eighteen-year-old Aysa looked up from the arrow she was fletching, gold eyes narrowed as her gaze followed the messenger up to the seat of the Lord of Winterfell. Cregan Stark read the missive, then slammed his forearm with its clenched fist down on the armrest of the throne that had been passed down from a time when he might have been King in the North instead of just Warden of it. Stealthy, fleet-footed Aysa slipped under a table in the hubbub as Cregan ordered everyone but his council out so she could hear what tidings the raven had brought.

“Viserys is dead,” Cregan told them. “And Aegon has been crowned in Rheanyra’s place. The new king demands a reply confirming our fealty.” The outcry was boisterous and prolonged; House Stark had sworn its allegiance to the princess when Viserys had named her heir, and they always honored an oath. 

Quietly, Aysa crept away. She knew which side Cregan would eventually take, and she had no interest in listening to the bickering of the council. She made her furtive way to the godswood; Aysa had a gift for moving about the castle unseen – cultivated over long years of practice trying to avoid the watchful eye of Lady Gilliane, Cregan’s mother, who was always suspicious of her and her supposed sister Sara. Twin girls! Cregon’s father Rickon had joyfully proclaimed to his jealous wife, who was struggling to conceive a second child after the traumatic birth of her first son three years prior. 

Gilliane had assented, albeit grudgingly, to take the babies in after they were found in the woods surrounding Winterfell. Sara had drawn a hunting party with her wailing after she kicked her blankets off in the cold, but Aysa - still tucked neatly into a homespun swaddle alongside her - had been silent, mesmerized by the leafless, creaking branches over their heads, her huge, golden eyes wide and bright with preternatural awareness. Rickon had named Sara, but Aysa’s name came from a leaf with letters burned into its underside that was tucked into her blanket. The other leaf must have blown away, Rickon had explained dismissively, when it was discovered that one infant had a given name and the other didn’t. I’ll call her Sara. He said the name reverently, his gaze soft in a way that made Gilliane’s jaw clench. The Lord of Winterfell’s preference for Sara only intensified after the death of his wife in childbirth when the twins were eight and Cregon was eleven.

As the girls had grown, Sara’s hair turned brown like Rickon Stark’s was in his youth, but Aysa’s stayed black and shiny as dragonglass. Sara’s eyes were blue like Rickon’s, too, but Aysa’s were amber flecked with bright gold: an exceptionally rare and unsettling combination of colors. it wasn’t unheard of in Winterfell to avoid eye contact with Aysa entirely; people said looking at her gave them vertigo. Understandable, Aysa had acknowledged when Sara had told her the rumor and she’d studied her reflection in a mirror; between a thicket of jet black lashes, her eyes had a bronze ring around the iris spiraling down toward the pupil like a liquid gold whirlpool. When the girls turned sixteen, different rumors started: that Sara was Rickon’s bastard daughter, and Aysa was… something else. Not Sara’s twin at all. Stories swirled through the castle like winter drafts, and while there was always some variation on a tale of a little blue-eyed, brown-haired infant left in the woods by the family of an unmarried mother who dwelt in a nearby town that Rickon Stark had often visited, there was never an origin story for Aysa. She’d apparently just appeared. So she made it her business to disappear at Winterfell as often as possible to avoid unwanted gossip and scrutiny.

Aysa darted into the deep shadows of the godswood in early spring, protected by the budding foliage. She’d always felt more at home in the woods than in the cold stone passages of Winterfell. This was the place she came to think. 

The Seven Kingdoms had known mostly peace and prosperity during the rule of Viserys Targaryen, who succeeded his grandsire Jaehaerys the Wise before Aysa was born. Other than the omnipresent threat of what lay beyond the Wall and occasional skirmishes in the North that the Lord of Winterfell had quickly put down, she’d never known conflict. But Aysa could feel something terrible brewing.

She’d tried to ignore the strange prescience that had plagued her all of her life: another oddity that made her feel out of place everywhere except the godswood. She’d dreamt of her surrogate father Rickon’s death and the simmering rebellion of his brother Bennard when Cregon came of age and his role as regent ended. She foresaw smaller sorrows, too, and good fortune less frequently. Aysa was more attuned to warnings, she supposed. Survival instinct.

Her fingers found the familiar bumps and ridges of the ancient weirwood at the center of the grove, and she hauled herself up into its sheltering branches. If anyone saw her, she’d be berated for disrespecting the sacred tree, but Aysa knew better. When she put her palms flat on its weathered bark, it hummed with a subtle murmur that she knew was welcome. Aysa had grown up in the canopy of the weirwood – the only place she was safe from her suspicious surrogate mother, her meddling “sister,” and her sharp-eyed brother. Fortunately, since Cregon turned sixteen five years ago and took on the mantle of Lord of Winterfell, he had been far too busy to pay her much mind. 

Deftly, Aysa climbed to the topmost branches and strained her eyes toward the South, as if her golden gaze alone could discern the outcome of this conflict.

None of it good, Aysa thought to herself. Both the Greens and the Blacks have dragons, and if dragons fight dragons… she shuddered with foreboding. 

Her thoughts wandered back to her old nursemaid Losha and the tales of Old Valyria, and Aysa’s eyes shifted to the east, where the ruins of the Freehold lay shrouded in mystery across the Narrow Sea. Only Balerion the Black Dread had seen that fabled land before its fall, and dragons had dwindled in size in Westeros ever since. If there were any still alive in whatever remained, Aysa wondered if one could be mighty enough to unite the divided kingdom.  

She was jarred from her thoughts by the echo of the Horn of Welcome announcing the arrival of a visitor to Winterfell. A strange cry and a fleeting shadow overheard followed, and Aysa looked up through the branches. A dragon. It felt like the beginning of the end.

Chapter Text

Aemond was flushed with searing horror even in the frigid downpour over Shipbreaker Bay. The wind was an otherworldly whistle in his ringing ears as Vhagar dove under the clouds again and Aemond fought to hold on, all his arrogance sluicing away with the driving rain. 

He didn’t even attempt to control the huge dragon beneath him: let her fly off her rage before he tried to bring her to heel. She careened through the storm faster than she’d ever flown with a rider, gnashing bones to splinters. Only instinct kept Aemond on her back, hands white-knuckled and skin blanched pale enough to nearly match his Targaryen hair.

His first thought had not been of the consequences of this dreadful miscalculation. Instead, it had been a deep, profound sadness: an empathy with the fear and hopelessness his young nephew must have felt in his last moments when Luke saw the enormous maw of the biggest living dragon materialize out of the clouds intent on destruction. This had always been Aemond's fatal flaw: not to feel nothing, as so many people thought, but to feel far too much: fear of his own vulnerability, contempt of his brother’s hedonism and debauchery, jealousy, anxiety, cynicism, bitterness, disenchantment, disgust… and less frequently tenderness, longing, maybe even love. The gentle feelings scared him more than anything else. They made him weak, and Aemond could not afford to be weak. His cold fury was his shield, but beneath it roiled a tempest of emotion that he had to suppress because he wasn't in control of it. It was a wild force as formidable and unpredictable as Vhagar. Perhaps it was why she’d bonded with him when he’d dared to present himself before her: naught but an angry, misguided, desperate boy attempting a calculated ploy to tame a force of nature. Presumptuous. 

In the isolation of the storm-tossed sky, Aemond tilted his head back and bellowed, momentarily giving his emotions as free a rein as the dragon who bore him. The force of it made his vocal cords burn. Vhagar echoed him with a roar more terrible than thunder. 

Far below, the guards in the rain-soaked courtyard of Storm’s End exchanged glances, the whites of their eyes flashing in the dark as the stones beneath their feet shook with a subtle tremor. Even after nearly a century of relative peace and prosperity, the sound of a dragon’s battle cry was unmistakable. 

Aemond let Vhagar carry him back to King’s Landing with a new wariness. The dragon was responsive to his commands again once her blood cooled, and she was not wounded; it would take more than a single gout of adolescent dragon flame in the rain to penetrate her armor of scales, yet her retaliation to this affront had been immediate and unforgiving. Aemond cringed a little, recalling his demand in the great hall of Storm’s End that Lucerys put out his own eye in recompense for the childhood brawl that had cost Aemond his. The folly of rationalizing revenge by pretending it was justice suddenly made his stomach roil, but the danger inherent in letting slights go unanswered put his teeth on edge, too. The only measure of respect and influence Aemond had ever scratched out of this miserable world came from taking what he wanted, not waiting for some imaginary cosmic balance to give him anything. 

Aemond muttered a curse as Vhagar circled the Red Keep. He leapt from the dragon’s back the moment she alighted in the courtyard and stalked toward the castle on legs made steady only by force of will. His stony expression and carefully cultivated reputation for ruthlessness was enough to prevent anyone from attempting to stop him as he sought out Alicent. His mother’s council was far more valuable to him than that of his degenerate older brother, even if Aegon was king. 

Alicent read it on her son’s face when he pushed past her guards and barged into her chamber as she was preparing to retire for the night: something irreversible had happened. Instantly, she dismissed her maids and sat heavily on a tufted ottoman near the fireplace. 

“Tell me,” she ordered grimly.

Aemond paced in front of her. As a child, Aemond had been the most loving of her children: the one who would lie contentedly in her arms for hours with no agenda other than to be close to her and who brought her bedraggled bouquets of wildflowers that he’d clumsily picked himself when fussy, demanding, and selfish Aegon had her pulling out her hair with frustration. He’d been the child that helped warm her heart to Viserys and find some genuine joy in her strategic marriage and resulting family, even if it was fleeting and conflicted. Aemond had always watched her with those bright eyes that missed nothing; her grief had been huge when Lucerys had put out one of them, but only until she observed that - even with one eye - Aemond saw more than most others. The sweet child he’d been was long gone, replaced by this tall, imposing blade of a man who stalked in front of her now like an avenging angel, his beauty terrible. Alicent had sacrificed much in her life, but the loss of Aemond’s innocence might be one of the hardest she’d borne. The world had hardened Aemond the way it had hardened his mother, though her composition made her pliant where he was brittle. Alicent straightened her spine and braced herself.

 “Lucerys Velaryon is dead,” Aemond said bluntly, his voice gruff with strain. “And Arrax along with him.”

The news was an unexpected gut-punch, and all words flew out of Alicent’s mouth with her breath. Her thoughts flew to Rhaenyra and her vision instantly swam: the loss of a son; every mother’s worst nightmare. 

Gasping, she managed to whisper, “How?”

It was the moment of truth that Aemond had been stewing over since he recovered enough to think straight. Part of him wanted - badly - to kneel at his mother’s feet, put his head in her lap, tell her the truth, and beg forgiveness for the hubris that had made him tempt fate by bringing their dragons into this feud. She’d know what to do. She’d know how to ensure he wasn’t the monster in this story.

But Aemond needed to be the monster. Because not being the monster meant he might end like his nephew Luke had. And if anyone knew that he wasn’t fully in control of Vhagar…

So he curled his lips into a sneer and said, “He dared to challenge Aegon’s claim to the throne. He came to Storm’s End begging for the loyalty of the Baratheons right in front of me. So Vhagar and I made certain there is no doubt about who rules the Seven Kingdoms.”

“Aemond!” Alicent hissed, and there was shock and betrayal in her eyes as a trembling hand hovered over her lips. 

He clenched his jaw and swallowed back his anguish with practiced discipline. 

Alicent surged to her feet, clutching her balled fists against her abdomen. “Do you know what you’ve done? What this means? It’s an act of war!” 

Aemond looked down his nose at his mother, fixed his eye on her face, and shrugged with seemingly callous disinterest. “One less bastard pretender to the throne.” 

He stood stoically as Alicent slammed her fists against his chest, sobbed once loudly with her forehead resting on his sternum, then swept past him calling for her father and an emergency meeting of the King’s council. 

When she was gone, Aemond Targaryen sank to his knees in the empty room where no one would see.

Chapter Text

Aysa kept her unsettling gold eyes discreetly on Jacaerys Velaryon as he sat beside Cregon at the head table in the great hall. She was seated to Cregon’s left, a spot that would have been occupied by his wife had she not died the year prior birthing his heir. Jacaerys sat at the host’s right in the place of honor. Beside Jacaerys, Sara, who was flirting rather unabashedly with the dragonrider even though he was fifteen to her eighteen. Neither girl had ever seen a dragon in the flesh, and admittedly Vermax had been a magnificent sight. Aysa had watched the beast circle above her head as she sat in the branches of the heart tree, but where her supposed sister had felt only awe, Aysa felt foreboding. To Aysa, Rhaeneyra’s firstborn was a harbinger of unrest, and she knew of the rumors that he was not a Velaryon at all but a Strong bastard. His utter lack of the distinctive coloring of the dragonlords seemed to proclaim the truth of it. Maybe that’s why Sara gravitated toward him, since similar rumors had haunted her all of her life. Their bent heads as they whispered conspiratorially were almost perfectly matched: chestnut brown in the candlelight.

Cregon was discussing his upcoming trip to Castle Black to accompany a band of new recruits to the Night’s Watch. He was supposed to leave tomorrow. 

“The journey is about a fortnight and not for the faint-hearted,” Cregon was telling his guest. “Plenty of time for us to discuss the North’s allegiance.” Aysa knew that what he really meant was plenty of time to assess if a southern prince has the fortitude to merit the North’s support.  

Jacaerys hesitated, no doubt daunted by the prospect of a long, cold journey on horseback instead of dragonback, but since his mission was to consolidate support for his mother’s claim to the Iron Throne and Winterfell was his last stop, he ultimately conceded. He was not about to return to Dragonstone without securing the most important ally and his men.

“And what of… your dragon?” Cregon asked, swallowing audibly. 

“Vermax will be glad of the freedom to hunt. Surely there are some lands nearby where he can range without disturbing the villages?” Jacaerys answered lightly, pleased to be reminded of the unique leverage he possessed. 

Cregon leaned back in his chair and smiled slowly. “The North is vast and wild,” he intoned in affirmation. Then he clapped the younger boy on the back companionably. “It’s settled, then. We leave tomorrow. Tonight - we drink!” He held up his goblet and Jacaerys took the hint. 

The prince is young and uncertain, but he pretends bravado reasonably well, Aysa silently acknowledged, raising her own glass when Cregon toasted the gathered company, pressing it to her lips, then lowering it after the barest sip. She slipped away when the drinking started to get heavier, retreating to her chamber. She lay on her back in her bed and closed her eyes, allowing her consciousness to slip outside of the confines of her own mind and flow over the castle like a river. Before long, Aysa noticed an unfamiliar gravity drawing all the tributaries of her roving into a single stream that sent her catapulting into an unexpected body. 

With Vermax’s eyes, Aysa blinked in shock.

Dragonsight was unlike any vision she’d yet experienced. Every detail was sharper, and there was a strange adjustment when her eyes moved from close-up focus to distant targets so virtually no visual acuity was lost over vast expanses. Every sense was alight with feedback - overwhelmingly so - a nonstop cataract of sound and smell and taste and feeling. The saddle on her back, the sweet reek of the stabled horses whose circulation she could hear, the echo of her rider’s voice in the great hall, the scrape of claws against cobbles… On her bed in a Winterfell tower, Aysa started to convulse. Then a greater wonder: resistance. Awareness. No creature she’d ever skinchanged into detected her presence, but Vermax did. He did and he rebelled.

In an instant, Aysa found herself back in her chamber, heartbeat dangerously fast. She gasped for air and coughed and nearly fell off her bed. Clutching at the mattress with balled fists, she managed not to roll off the frame onto the floor, but her mind was reeling. Outside, the dragon keened: a haunting, otherworldly sound that was almost mourning. 

Early the next day, shortly after Cregon, Jacaerys, and the fresh contingent of Night’s Watch recruits departed at sunrise with Vermax circling, agitated, above them, Aysa knocked on the old Maester’s door. He finally opened it, with much grumbling, after she knocked about twenty times. 

“What is it?” the old man demanded, inserting his bearded face through the crack. His scowl deepened when he saw Aysa.

“What do you know about Valyria?” she began.

“By the Gods,” Maester Llywelyn groaned, exhaling stale breath into Aysa’s face. He contemplated telling her to go away and never come back, but something about her request felt like a challenge. “Ask me after breakfast,” he answered after a pause, slamming the door soundly.

Aysa sighed and headed for the kitchens, both to assess when breakfast might be served and to seek out her old nursemaid Losha, who had gratefully returned to her role as primary baker after her duties as nanny to the orphaned twins were fulfilled. 

The plump, white-haired woman was red-faced, flour-dusted, and manning several ovens when Aysa marched in and sat on a countertop, munching on a slightly burned bread heel.

“Losha,” she began through a mouthful of bread. “How do the dragonlords tame their dragons?”

Her portly former nurse, whose undeniable affection for her was tempered slightly by towering annoyance, shot Aysa a withering look over her shoulder as she peered into an oven. “Do I look like a Targaryen to you?”

Aysa lowered her chin and stared pointedly at the old woman’s hair, which she frequently joked had gone white because of Aysa and Sara, but was in fact just an inevitable consequence of her advancing years.

Losha huffed and crossed her arms over her chest, temporarily satisfied that the bread she was tending didn’t need attention. “Well, I’m not. Why didn’t you ask the Velaryon prince? He’s a dragonrider.” 

“He’s gone already!” Aysa protested, petulant in her frustration.

“And what gave you the notion that I know anything about taming dragons?” Losha blew an exasperated sigh and handed her surrogate daughter a huge wooden peel. “It’s all I can do to wrangle these bread loaves. Help me.”

Aysa slid off the counter and did as she was bid, talking the whole time since she’d helped Losha enough not to need instruction. “I asked Maester Llywelyn but he told me to come back after breakfast. Do Maesters study dragons at the Citadel?” She thought furiously, trying to recall the color of the links of Maester Llywelyn’s chain. 

“Bah!” Losha waved her hands dismissively. “There’s a Valyrian steel link for mastery of ‘the higher mysteries’.” She leaned closer to Aysa like a conspirator, both eyebrows raised. “That means magic.” Then she bustled away. “But Maester Llywelyn doesn’t have that one. Few do - maybe just a handful in the Citadel. The Maesters are men of science.”

Aysa narrowed her eyes, thoroughly unsatisfied. 

“I’ll check the library,” she announced, dusting off the fine layer of flour now coating her clothing.

“You’re not allowed in there!” Losha sang out, but she already knew that nothing could stop Aysa when her will was set.

Chapter Text

Accessing the dusty old scrolls in the Winterfell library was an exercise in stealth, given that the maester and the septon frowned on women entering the library, especially the section that contained the ancient scrolls, some of which were reportedly Valyrian. The interdiction was an unwritten tradition more than an explicit rule; the womenfolk of Winterfell seldom had occasion or interest to visit the dusty Library Tower, as the Stark family tree had contained mostly boys for several generations, and their wives were often too preoccupied with child-rearing and running the castle to spend their scare leisure time reading. Aysa and Sara’s education had been haphazard to say the least, given that they were Snows not Starks, and girls besides. Sara had never shown any particular interest in schooling, but Aysa - a strange, unwanted orphan with a sharp mind and no required familial duties - found herself in the library more often than Maester Llywelyn knew. Often enough to have taught herself to read High Valyrian reasonably well, though she couldn’t speak it, lacking a tutor to help her refine pronunciation. 

For Aysa, it was a simple task to creep up the familiar, ice-slick stone steps of the twisting staircase that circled the outside of the tower and was the only means of access - a treacherous deterrent in and of itself - and into the domed space that echoed despite its collection of bound books and scrolls carefully stored in myriad leather tubes or protective boxes nestled into deep alcoves set in the stone walls like honeycomb.  

Aysa would have quiet and solitude for a few hours yet. She watched the progress of the sun on its climb into a cloudless blue sky through the tall, narrow windows as she pored over the brittle scrolls she’d never dared remove. Decoding them was slow and painstaking, and to Aysa’s immense frustration, the scrolls in High Valyrian - and there were only a handful - seemed to deliberately obscure the information she most wanted to know: the secrets of hatching, taming, and riding dragons.

When she heard the castle lurch to life far below, Aysa carefully replaced the scrolls and stole down the steps again, narrowly missing the septon as she came in from the battlements nearest the Library Tower. Maester Llywelyn, when she finally tracked him down, was similarly unhelpful, though she could hardly ask him her questions directly. His ignorance was to blame more than any deliberate attempt to be obtuse, Aysa acknowledged; when it came down to it, dragons were as much a mystery to the Winterfell maester as they were to her, despite all his learning. 

Frustrated and silently berating herself for letting Sara monopolize Jacaerys’ attention during the feast last night, she crumpled onto the battlements near the Hunters’ Gate just as Vermax returned from the hunt, circled the castle with a cry, and landed smoothly in the courtyard, unsettling the horses. 

Aysa watched the dragon stretch and pace, hissing with subtle threat at any human who came too close, seemingly agitated by the cold or the absence of his rider or both. She dared not reach out with her mind to slip into Vermax’s after being noticed and abruptly evicted yesterday, so instead she studied the smooth interplay of muscle and bone under the creature’s scaled hide, the flex of powerful wings, and the bright intelligence in his eyes which ceaselessly scanned the skies and the stone walls of Winterfell with searching intensity. His fluid grace felt strangely intimate, an echo of how it had felt last night to warg into dragonskin. Aysa wondered how Jacaerys might call the beast, if Vermax was needed when they were separated by uncounted leagues. She’d heard the prince give spoken commands in High Valyrian - she recognized that much at least, and understood enough to discern that he’d commanded his dragon to stay at Winterfell and venture out only to hunt while he accompanied Cregan to the Wall - but voices don’t carry over vast distances. 

Vermax’s probing eyes stopped abruptly on Aysa, and the answer came to her almost instinctively: the dragon would feel its rider’s need. She felt something similar as she raised her golden gaze to meet the dragon’s: a pull from behind her ribs tethering her to this creature, a communication that needed no words – as inevitable as instict. There was recognition in their mutual stare, and Aysa began formulating an absolutely mad plan.   

That night, when the castle was asleep, Aysa slipped past the guards circling the battlements on rounds she knew better than they did and stood in the shadowed corner where the empty guesthouse met the low stone walls around the courtyard. Vermax crouched on the flags, wrapped in his wings. The dragon was not sleeping, Aysa knew, only resting after returning from another hunting flight in the late evening. 

When Aysa took a hesitant step forward, Vermax was instantly alert. Slowly, he unfurled, proud head on its serpentine neck tilted just enough to keep her in his sights. Aysa’s heart was hammering so hard it felt like her bones might jar apart, but she swallowed her fear and took another step toward him. The dragon’s head came down to her level, both eyes under ridged bone fixed on her face - but he was silent, waiting.

To speak to him in High Valyrian was impossible, so Aysa stood at the dragon’s feet and let images flood her mind and yearning fill her chest: a vision of soaring up, up over the walls of Winterfell on unseen wings, over the squat roofs of Winter Town, through columns of woodsmoke from myriad chimneys, south over the Barrowlands as the sun rose and the ground turned green and verdant and gave way to sea, over the Iron Islands and the Westerlands until the outline of the Hightower and the walls of the Citadel grew large. Then the silhouette of a dragon, soaring north again as Aysa watched from the ground - Vermax returning home to his rider, his mission completed. Then the vision shifting east, over Dorne and the Narrow Sea, past Volantis as it exists only in Aysa’s imagination and the sketches in books in the Library Tower, to the Smoking Sea and the ruins of Old Valyria… where scaled eggs crack in the steaming bowels of the Fourteen Flames under the watchful eyes of wild dragons - survivors of the Doom. And suddenly, Aysa was awash in hope like a cresting wave that broke and spilled over girl and dragon alike in the courtyard of Winterfell under the wheeling stars. 

Vermax raised his head to the skies, spread his wings wide, and keened, a high, musical sound full of loss and longing that filled Aysa’s veins with silver lightning. Unthinkingly, she dashed to his side, arm outstretched. The dragon’s head snapped down again with such speed Aysa was sure she was dead, and she crouched in terror, shielding herself with her arms though she knew it was a futile defense. But instead of the agony of dragonfire, Aysa felt only the bite of cold air as Vermax’s wings crashed down with terrific force, creating enough lift to launch him directly into flight. Aysa stood just as one of his clawed feet swiped her into its grip, and she was soaring over the walls of Winterfell just like in her vision – not astride a dragon, but safely in its clawed grasp.

It worked. By the gods, it worked! Aysa was momentarily elated, but as the night stretched out before her and the reality of leaving the only home she’d ever known with only a satchel of basic supplies - flying so high that a fall would be instantly fatal at the mercy of a capricious adolescent dragon she’d been presumptuous enough to entice to carry her to Oldtown on a fool’s errand through some alchemy of powers she didn’t fully understand and couldn’t really control -  set in, Aysa grew stiff with fear. 

Above her: only sky and the impossible sight of a dragon aloft. 

Aysa tightened her arms around Vermax’s clenched claw and set her teeth in determination, trying to put her faith in the growing urgency in the pit of her stomach that might be the stirrings of greensight – to stop the coming war by any means necessary. 

No going back now.

Chapter Text

Morning broke over Blazewater Bay, a searing brightness that made Aysa feel uncomfortably conspicuous. Dragons were not a common sight this far from Dragonstone and the Red Keep and would no doubt draw unwanted attention. As if he sensed her discomfort, Vermax dove, cutting through clouds and making for the desolate emptiness of the Flint Cliffs, where narrow beaches inaccessible except by sea or air would conceal them. 

The landing was rough – for Aysa, anyway. Vermax catapulted toward a thin crescent of land alongside a sheer cliff, banked abruptly, dropped Aysa unceremoniously in the sand about six feet off the ground, and flew over her head several yards before touching down much more gracefully now that he had free use of both feet.

Aysa stood, every joint creaking as if she’d aged a hundred years in a day, and scowled at the dragon as she tried to beat the wet sand off her leathers.

“We’ll have to practice that one,” she muttered.

Vermax just gave a defiant cry and took off again over the waves, staying low as he hunted. Aysa walked along the packed sand near the surf, trying to shake the disorientation of finding herself on solid ground after a long flight. She’d heard that seafaring people like the Ironborn struggled to shake their sea legs after months on ships, and she wondered briefly if there was a dragonflight equivalent as she watched Vermax emerge from a low swoop with a large fish in his jaws. No doubt the dragon was hungry, and he’d earned his breakfast.

It was astounding that he’d flown her this far. From what she knew of dragons, they would never fly with any other human while their rider lived. Technically, Vermax hadn’t allowed her to ride him, Aysa acknowledged with a shrug - he’d carried her in a clenched claw like a sack of potatoes - but she’d take what she could get.

Aysa had no idea what she’d do if Vermax decided he’d gone far enough and left her stranded not even halfway to Oldtown. The image of herself wasting away to a skeleton on the beach - traces of black hair stirring in the wind, the only color on her bleached bones - flooded her inner eye unbidden. Then strangely, the image was overtaken, almost pushed aside, by another: a sliver of setting sun on the horizon to the right, a steep upward climb into a sunset sky, and a human figure clutched in a claw; the perspective was looking down, not up - the way Vermax would see it, not the way Aysa would. Along with the image came a feeling not unlike irritation. Stunned, Aysa froze with her gaze fixed on the silhouette of the dragon. She understood clearly, though no words passed between them: our journey is not done.  

She sank into the sand, not entirely sure her legs could hold her up. Somehow, Aysa and Vermax were communicating. It was not quite skinchanging; when she slipped into another creature’s mind, her body was left behind entirely – helpless and vacant – and the creature’s own consciousness was passive. This was something else; Aysa was not in Vermax’s skin, and he was not in hers. Vermax did not think to her – their exchanges weren’t words. But images and feelings seemed to bleed over between them. The closest equivalent was what she felt when she ran her fingers over the bark of the heart tree in the godswood and felt welcome, but far more powerful – from a mind much closer to a human one than the collective susurration of the trees. 

Aysa marveled anew at the creature skimming the waves and wondered if this was what dragonriders experienced. Behind her eyes, Jacaerys shimmered into being, and her ribs creaked with an overwhelming feeling of loyalty and protectiveness and kinship – the way Aysa imagined it might feel to have a son and soulmate and dearest friend all at once, though she had no personal experience with any of those things – but she heard Jacaerys’ soothing voice speaking High Valyrian. There was nothing quite like the unspoken exchange she shared with his dragon in the rider bond. Then, Aysa startled because she saw herself as Vermax had seen her last night: a tiny upstart, bright gold eyes flashing in a moon-white face (she had looked about as terrified as she’d felt, despite her bravado), and she felt what the dragon had felt: overwhelming curiosity and the stirring of an ancient recognition that was simultaneously foreign and familiar. The feelings and images drained away, leaving her to her own thoughts again.

Aysa did not command Vermax – he would not do her bidding with nearly the same willingness as he did Jace’s. He brought her here of his own free will. Perhaps because he shared her yearning to know if any dragons survived the Doom, or if the Westerosi dragons were the last of their kind. It stood to reason that dragons were territorial, so it would not do for a dragon to fly to the ruins of Valyria – but a gold-eyed girl with raven-black hair and strange abilities to communicate with other creatures? She might stand a chance of finding the truth. Or perhaps Vermax was helping her only because he feared for his rider in the coming war that haunted Aysa’s mind, too. No answer from the dragon was forthcoming.

All day, Aysa slept fitfully in the shadows of the cliffs, curled against the furnace of Vermax’s gleaming scales and dreaming of battles that filled the skies with fire and blood. Through the flames she saw a man on dragonback: his long, straight hair as white as bone. His pale blue, one-eyed gaze made her hum like a plucked string, and she knew that under the patch that covered his left eye a sightless sapphire scanned the North beyond the Wall.

When evening fell, Aysa stood in the surf and let Vermax snatch her off the beach with a claw. They flew south toward Oldtown and the Citadel in a flaming sunset sky.

Chapter Text

Aegon’s grief was pitiful to witness. Aemond had never had much sympathy for his brother. Aegon was a spoiled, petty hedonist who’d always had everything handed to him on a silver platter simply because he was the first-born: the long-awaited son – an unearned privilege Aegon had enjoyed lording over his younger brother at every opportunity. And as they grew, Aegon’s torments intensified, and they were not the calculated, strategic work of a master schemer, either. That, at least, Aemond could have respected. Instead, Aegon’s childish pranks were the whims of a self-absorbed twat, and after Aemond had recovered from his own naive desire to find a friend in his brother, he decided Aegon’s spiteful needling was the worst kind of condescension. The blatant unfairness of Aegon’s priority in defiance of his utter lack of character, substance, benevolence, wisdom… it was an affront to better men, and it was the first lesson Aemond took to heart. 

The world is not fair, he told himself. If you want to get what you deserve, you must be powerful enough to bend the world to your will. Virtue wins only with a sword. The lesson was as insidious as greyscale, gradually hardening every tender impulse. Aemond’s sole purpose became to methodically eliminate all of his vulnerabilities and ensure he occupied as unassailable a position as he could wrangle – a place where he could make his own rules. He was patient and rigorously disciplined. He’d studied hard and fought harder, cultivating all the skills he thought a king should have.

Then he’d claimed Vhagar, the oldest and largest of the dragons, even if it cost him an eye. 

But still he had to stand by as undeserving, petulant Aegon married, abused, and ignored their sister: sweet, touched Helaena who barely understood what it meant to be a wife, a mother, or a queen. Helaena, who spoke in riddles and seemed to exist in a misty fantasy into which the sun occasionally broke with shattering clarity. Aemond had tried to protect her, but she slipped through his fingers like so much sand, fortunately seemingly unperturbed by the worst of her lot, spinning in circles in her hazy half-life. The brutal murder of her son before her eyes barely rippled her calm surface, though Aemond could only guess what maelstrom hid beneath it. She confined in no one, and the kinship she’d shared with Aemond as childhood allies against Aegon faded into memory. 

He’d watched his mother and grandfather maneuver to put Aegon on the throne when Viserys died, and the docile Alicent he’d known all his life suddenly found her backbone; for a while, her conviction that Aegon was meant to ascend to the Iron Throne had almost convinced Aemond, in spite of all he knew about his brother and the sting of being passed over without consideration despite surpassing Aegon by every measure, even if he was not whole. 

But as his brother’s incompetent rule began, Aemond lost faith quickly – not just in the idea of fate or destiny but also in his mother’s infallibility and Otto Hightower’s wisdom, the last bastions against his encroaching cynicism. The cruelty of his siblings’ marriage was a rigid adherence to backward tradition, not a clever ploy to consolidate power. The crowning of Aegon II was a symptom of the moral rot of Westeros that his mother willingly papered over with a veneer of glory. In the deepest recesses of his mind, Aemond acknowledged that his half-sister Rhaenyra would have been the better choice for monarch, despite the questionable judgment she’d shown in aligning herself with their uncle Daemon whose simmering ambition for the throne could easily burst into an all-consuming flame and overtake them all.

The people who assumed Aemond shared his uncle’s ambition were wrong, but he left them to their assumptions. Aemond did not crave the throne like Daemon did, but he’d claim it if the alternatives were untenable – simply because he couldn’t stomach living under the thumb of people who squabbled over the scraps of power, making the lives of the lesser players and the smallfolk miserable in the process. He loathed a hierarchy where the stupid and selfish ruled and all others were merely pawns or cannon fodder or playthings for cruel whims. Aemond had lived that reality, and it was not one he would preside over. If Aemond ever sat on the Iron Throne, the biggest surprise would be that he would not close his fist around the kingdom and squeeze. Aemond Targaryen was not a tyrant in his heart.

He knew this because even though he thought he hated his brother with every fibre of his being, watching Aegon grieve his son still affected him. 

Aemond had not believed his brother capable of love. Aegon had shown no affection for Helaena, the myriad downy-haired bastards he’d fathered around Kings Landing, or their lowly mothers. He had been a demanding, sulky child who manipulated Alicent and Viserys into indulging him without any authentic filial piety. He’d tortured small animals with no empathy purely for his own amusement, heedless of their pain.  

But Aegon cried for weeks over murdered Jaehaerys, eyes alternately puffy and hollow, and Aemond heard his brother’s anguished sobs throughout his own sleepless nights. He would find no comfort from his kin; Aegon was as stunted by his strange, loveless family as Aemond: the lonely price of a dynasty of dragons. 

Aemond’s pain was intensified by the realization that he could still feel it, despite his every effort to stamp out his own humanity. He buried it deep, doubling down on his menacing, chillingly cold demeanor. He joined the Small Council, testing his ability to maintain an unflappable calm and offer dispassionately logical advice even as his brother sat sniffling at the head of the table - simultaneously a dismally incompetent sovereign and a man brought low for the first time. It was disarmingly humanizing — until Aemond began to wonder if the grief sprung more from Aegon’s full cognizance of a unique and innocent life cut short or a self-centered loss of something his brother saw as nothing more than an extension of himself, like mourning a severed limb. 

The second possibility was steadier ground; it was easier for Aemond to ignore Aegon’s sniveling if he could dismiss it as egocentric. 

This shift did nothing to diminish the crushing guilt of knowing that the attack on Lucerys was no doubt the direct cause of Jaehaerys’s death. That, too, would be Aemond’s private hell. Despite what was being proclaimed over the Seven Kingdoms to drum up outrage against Aegon’s rival for the throne - that Rhaenyra had ordered the murder of the child - Aemond knew she simply wasn’t capable of such an atrocity. Daemon, on the other hand, was truly as ruthless as Aemond pretended to be, and he was not above it. And if Rhaenyra could not rein him in, she could not reign.

It was a spiraling shitstorm that Aemond had no power to diffuse, and the one thing Aemond Targaryan hated more than anything else was feeling powerless. 

It was an impulse he was foolish to indulge – going to see Sylvi. She’d become a chink in his armor. It had started years ago, when Aegon dragged Aemond to the brothel and laughingly paid Sylvi a handsome sum to deflower his little brother. Aemond’s motivation had not been generous; he had wanted to terrorize the shy and sensitive boy Aemond once was. Sylvi had all the leverage then: an experienced, older woman with a handful of royal coin and a prince’s orders to obey, but she’d put the power back in Aemond’s hands. She’d defied Aegon and risked his rage; instead of shaming Aemond into a sexual act he found degrading and terrifying - he’d been little more than a child - she’d wrapped him in her arms and held him, then coached him silently through miming the act with sufficient theatricality to convince the soldiers that were no doubt standing guard that Aemond had become a man and she’d done her duty. As he left, she pressed a soft kiss onto the top of his head and squeezed his hand.

It was probably the most profound intimacy Aemond had ever known: the first time in his life when he’d been in a compromised position and someone hadn’t knowingly taken advantage of him. The kindness had been jarring enough to ensure he gave her brothel a wide, wary berth for years.

But when he reached maturity, the desire to speak to her again was almost overwhelming – to confirm that a person whose first impulse was not exploitation existed, and that this anomaly was a woman who’d built a fortune on being exploited - a testament to the possibility that people do not inevitably become what has been done to them. That tantalizing seduction was more pleasurable than anything physical. Aemond rarely let his desires get the better of him; his asceticism was a knee-jerk response to Aegon’s hedonism, but that first reunion had not been sexual. Satisfying men’s physical desires was not Sylvi’s only talent; she was a creature of keen empathy. Their subsequent meetings were emotional more than physical, though Aemond dutifully undressed since modesty in a brothel would draw more attention than nudity, and sometimes - long after their meetings became routine - he let her ply her trade with her mouth. She was not quite a mother and not quite a lover, but she was the only person who truly knew him. In Sylvi’s arms, Aemond’s nakedness was more than just literal. 

But she was a liability. 

He’d let it go on too long.

And of course Aegon was responsible for the cruel way Aemond ended it.

Any lingering sympathy he’d felt for his grieving brother vanished when Aegon drunkenly pulled aside the curtain sheltering the alcove where Aemond rested in Slyvi’s embrace, spent after confessing his sorrow for the death of Luke and all it had unleashed. He hadn’t dared tell even Sylvi that he’d lost control of Vhagar, but it was a welcome unburdening to share some of the weight of the deed, to hint that the sobriquet Kinslayer that was being whispered behind his back wasn’t one he took pride in.   

“I’m glad to hear it,” she’d told him as she stroked his hair. 

Aemond hoped she could understand that the unfeeling, dismissive mask he wore when he stood, naked and defiant, and told Aegon’s men they’re as welcome to Sylvi’s bed as they are to any other whore’s was just another shield. That the person beneath it, the boy who can still regret the necessity of culling all of his softness, was the real Aemond. 

He hoped she knew him well enough now to understand – because he’d never return to explain it. 

That chapter of his life was over, and he was truly alone.

Aemond bore the excision grimly and unflinchingly, as he knew he must.

Chapter Text

Daeron Targaryen was gullible. So, as a matter of fact, were most of the citizens of Oldtown and even the Maesters of the Citadel. Eighty-one years of peace under Jaehaerys the Wise and Viserys had lulled them into complacency, and they were slow to mistrust, even after news of Aegon II’s contested ascendancy reached the far western cities. For Aysa, it had been a relatively simple matter to find work in the kitchens of Hightower where she discovered the young prince, who had been sent away from King’s Landing three years ago to squire for his mother’s cousin and Lord of the Hightower: Ormund. Aysa had been shocked at first to encounter a Targaryen in Oldtown; she’d never paid much attention to the labyrinthine complexity of the dynasty, but the distinctive coloring of the dragonlords was unmistakable. Their first meeting had been an accident.

She’d seen the dragon Tessarion circling the skies above the city, and curiosity had overcome her. At night, shortly after her arrival, Aysa had snuck into the courtyard where Tessarion often rested to see if she could communicate with the young dragon the same way she had with Vermax. Daeron came upon her gently scratching Tessarion’s cobalt nose and - after he’d gotten over the shock - was instantly fascinated by the gold-eyed, black-haired girl who his dragon miraculously didn’t roast alive. Aysa did nothing to discourage what quickly became an innocent infatuation even though Daeron was three years younger than her; the prince was a dragonrider, and she could ask him all the questions she’d failed to ask Jacaerys when he was visiting Winterfell. He was a naively open book - with the unflagging confidence of a boy who’d only known privilege and deference - though one of questionable veracity.

“Only those of Valyrian blood can claim a dragon,” Daeron had told her smugly. Aysa stewed; thus far, she’d managed to communicate with dragons, but not ride one. She needed to know if Daeron was right or if he was only repeating what he’d been told. No one without Targaryen or Velaryon ancestry had ever been known to bond with a dragon, but perhaps only because none had tried. Claiming a dragon was an enormous risk – not something most ordinary people would dare attempt, especially with the Targaryens proclaiming it was not possible outside the bloodline. 

Aysa had to know how the dragonlords had first tamed the beasts centuries before Daeron Targaryen was born – and the answers could only be found in one place: the Citadel, where only men were allowed entrance.

Fortunately, Daeron was easily convinced that it would be a delightful adventure to steal into the Citadel and try to find fragments of Septon Barth’s fabled Unnatural History or the single remaining copy of Blood and Fire, a tome of dragonlore supposedly locked in a vault deep under the city. He was young and idealistic enough to resent being exiled to Oldtown while his siblings saw all the action in King’s Landing. 

He’d helped Aysa bind her breast, don boys’ clothes, and tuck her crown of braided ebony hair under a hat, then used his princely influence - greater still now that his brother Aegon II had been crowned - to open many doors. The Grand Maesters had only balked at his request to see the books about the higher mysteries, claiming the old texts were not “provocative, but unsound.”

As Daeron argued with them, piqued at being denied for what might have been the first time in his life, Aysa took careful stock of the path they took through twisting passages and managed to sidle up close to a beleaguered maester and swipe a ring of keys tied to his belt with a worn leather strap.  

Soundlessly, she slipped them into a pocket. She’d return alone that night.

“Come, my prince,” she said in a voice as artificially low as she could make it. “You have no need of ancient dragon lore. You are the master of a dragon already.”

Daeron blinked at her, startled. He was trying to decide if she was really giving up so easily after she’d needled him for days to undertake this fool’s errand. Subtly, she dropped her chin, a barely perceptible nod. Daeron drew himself up straighter. “True. I was only curious.” He gave the maester a cutting look. “But if I change my mind, you’ll be hearing from my brother, King Aegon, second of his name.” His look of stern reproach was almost comical. Aysa grabbed his hand and dragged.

When they were out of earshot, Daeron whispered fiercely, “Why are we going? He had no right to deny me!” He didn’t care about the books nearly as much as he cared about being refused.

Aysa tried not to roll her eyes, hand clenched around the ring of keys in her pocket. It was all she needed. “We’ll try again another day.”

As they hurried out of the Citadel and onto the streets of Oldtown, there was a strange disquiet in the air that only built as they approached the Hightower. Aysa dragged on Daeron’s arm again and darted into a market stall. She knew the shopkeeper; she was often sent to out with coin to secure supplies for the kitchen.

“Bren, is there news?” she demanded, ignoring the puzzled, disapproving look her strange attire elicited.

The red-headed woman looked paler than usual. She whispered, “It’s said that Lucerys Velaryon, son of the pretender Rhaenyra, has been killed along with his dragon.”

“Luke killed? Arrax, too?” Daeron barged in, overhearing. He’d grown up with Rhaenyra’s children, though the animosity between them meant the death of the boy who’d taken his brother Aemond’s eye was not unwelcome.

Bren’s eyes widened as she recognized the young Targaryen, and she dipped a quick curtsey. “Yes, my prince.”

“How?” Aysa asked urgently. It was no small feat to kill a dragon.

Bren flushed with discomfort, eyes darting between Aysa and Daeron, choosing her words carefully. “They say there was a battle over Shipbreaker Bay. Prince Aemond and Vhagar were victorious. The traitor Lucerys fell, along with his dragon.”

Aysa exhaled hard. Dragonriders fighting dragonriders. She shuddered with foreboding at what it meant for the realm… and for the future of dragons. 

Beside her, Daeron only crowed. “Fool! Vhagar is the oldest and largest dragon in the realm!” He spun and grabbed Aysa’s hand this time. “I must speak with Lord Ormund.” 

“Why?” she asked breathlessly as Daeron dragged her through the whispering crowd that seemed to share Aysa’s misgivings. 

“Ormund will know how it happened,” the prince answered, his voice tight. Then his expression darkened with memory, and he muttered, “But Luke sealed his fate the night he took Aemond’s eye.”

Aysa went cold as the image of the dragonrider from her dreams - with one blue eye and only a sapphire glowing under the patched left socket - filled her mind. Numbly, she stumbled behind Daeron until they got back to the keep at the base of the Hightower, where the prince released her so he could dash into the Great Hall seeking the Lord. Slipping unseen into the stables, Aysa collapsed on an overturned bucket and took deep, steadying breaths, resting her shaking hands on her knees.

Aemond. 

She knew very little about him, but his name resonated with a strange intimacy. He killed Jacaerys’s little brother, and his dragon along with him, she reminded herself, trying to quench the creeping flames that spread through her veins. Aysa could feel that intense, one-eyed gaze as if Aemond were standing in front of her. 

She knew only one thing with certainty: Aemond Targaryen’s path was inextricably entangled with hers.

That night, Aysa dreamt. She stood in an unfamiliar, echoing sept. At its center was a raised dais topped with flowers and surrounded by candles whose light was swallowed by the dark vastness of the space. When she approached it, grief surged like a wave, threatening to sweep her away. She circled the stone bier - small, too small - warily, following the dim glow coming from an arched doorway, a luminous island in the black sea. She jolted when she saw the outline of a man, his hands clasped behind him. Aysa knew him instantly: the leather band of an eyepatch across the back of his skull, the flow of long, bone-white hair down his back, the power coiled in his blade-straight spine. He had a name now: Aemond.

Her feet would not obey her. They carried her around his blind side till she stood beside him, looking out across the twinkling lights of a great city. Aysa’s eyes shifted from the expanse before them to the straight-nosed profile of the man beside her. He looked young yet - maybe only a year older than her. He was utterly still; she could not detect even the stirring of breath in his lungs, so she dared to look her fill. His smooth skin was broken only by a long, curving scar that started on his brow, dipped under the patch on his left eye, and emerged on his cheek.

Suddenly, his head snapped to face her, and under his remaining eye, a tear glinted in the lights of the city. Aysa reached out to brush it away with the pad of her thumb. 

On the other side of Westeros, Aemond Targaryen surged awake with a cry, and the memory of a girl with eyes like the sun and hair like night vanished as completely as ashes in the wind.

Chapter Text

Aemond sat at the Small Council table, silently observing. Silently fuming, though his face was a stoic mask.

The costs of Aegon’s incompetence were mounting. In the wake of Jaehaerys’s murder, he’d had the entire contingent of ratcatchers executed and hung around the Red Keep after the gold cloak they caught trying to sneak out of the city with the prince’s head in a bag had - with towering irony - ratted out his collaborator (and Daemon Targaryen while he was at it) in a futile attempt to save his own life. The confirmation of Daemon’s involvement had been no surprise to Aemond, nor had the discovery of things disturbed in his chamber that seemed to indicate he had been the intended target. The assassins took the young prince’s head when they couldn’t find Aemond, either on Daemon’s orders or on their own desperate initiative. In a fit of rage, Aegon had killed the gold cloak before he could confirm which it was. Ultimately, the why of it mattered little; none of it would have happened at all if Lucerys was still alive. Aemond was determined to reassert control; it was the only way to assuage his guilt.

Since most of the rat-catchers were innocent citizens of King’s Landing, Aegon’s rashness had evaporated the good will and sympathy Helaena and Alicent had dearly bought with their performative funeral procession through the city, and the smallfolk were already chafing under the effects of the Velaryon blockade of the Gullet. Food in the city was scarce and getting scarcer. 

“When princes lose their temper, it is often others who suffer,” Sylvi had told him when he’d confessed that he let anger goad him onto Vhagar’s back to chase Lucerys at Storm’s End. That was certainly proving to be true under Aegon’s feckless rule. Sylvi would make a better addition to this Council than most of the men here, Aemond thought bitterly, eyeing the circle of new Kingsguard who looked hungover, uncomfortable, and bored: Aegon’s drinking buddies, most of them, promoted because his idiot brother-king valued loyalty over skill. Aemond wondered darkly how far that loyalty - born in brothels and at the bottom of ale tankards - would take them if it ever meant their lives or Aegon’s. Meanwhile, the Green Council proper was bickering over strategy – take Rook’s Rest, or assert control in the Riverlands. 

Aemond’s attention was on Ser Criston Cole, who had been appointed Hand of the King after Otto Hightower’s angry rebuke following the ratcatcher debacle and the revelation that Cole had sent Ser Arryk on a failed mission to pose as his twin and slay Rhaenyra at Dragonstone had hit Aegon where he was weakest: his pride. Aegon’s response had been to assert the kingly authority that Hightower had insinuated that no one - not even their father Viserys, despite what Alicent had insisted the old king had wanted - felt Aegon deserved. Truth hurts, brother, Aemond had thought as he watched his grandfather depart King’s Landing.

Aemond knew that Cole was a thinly veiled scoundrel battling his own demons with the same ferocity with which he’d taught the young princes to fight. He was also fairly certain the newly appointed Hand was - or until very recently had been - sleeping with Alicent. There was a palpable strain between them that Aemond detected only because his mother strove so valiantly to hide it. Though the possibility was distasteful, Aemond knew that Cole’s disaffection was a card that he could play. How he felt about the man made no difference; Aemond had been bitterly reminded about the price of letting emotion rule. He would not make that mistake again.

So when the Council dispersed with no real resolution, Aemond fell into step beside Ser Criston in the hallway. After a quick glance around to ensure they had privacy, Aemond did not dissemble: “The blockade will cost us what little remains of the people’s goodwill.”

Criston’s eyes went wide, then narrowed. “What do you propose to do about it?”

“The Velaryon fleet controls the Gullet,” Aemond observed. “But Borros Baratheon controls Storm’s End.”

Criston understood immediately. “And we control Borros.” Aemond had bought House Baratheon's fealty with a promise to marry one of his daughters that fateful night on Storm’s End, a betrothal he was content to honor as long as it didn’t require imminent marriage.

Aemond inclined his head. “And through him, the Stormlands. Divert our trade ships to Shipbreaker Bay, then it’s only a matter of a few days’ caravan on the Kingsroad to bring in much-needed supplies,” Aemond confirmed.

Criston nodded, still frowning. “A subtler plan than blasting the Velaryon ships out of the water on Vhagar.” His skepticism was clear: since when did the kinslayer Prince Aemond prioritize the politics of power over the opportunity to rain dragonfire down on their enemies?

This next part would be delicate work. Aemond sneered. “And bring the wrath of Rhaenys and Meraxes - and probably Baela and Jace on dragonback, too - directly to our door?” He tsked. “No, we play the long game. There are ways to eliminate my sister’s dragonriders one by one. And in the meantime, we must repair the damage done by that business with the ratcatchers. We will need the adoration of the smallfolk. This is a war fought on many fronts.”  

Criston considered this, watching Aemond out of the corner of his eye, momentarily chilled. The man that the boy he’d trained had become was a dangerous combination of brutality and calculation. He wondered briefly if Lucerys was the first piece to fall in a carefully orchestrated strategy. Smartly, he nodded. “I will see it done.”

Aemond rewarded him only with a thin smile, spun on a heel, and walked in the opposite direction. Better that Cole supervised the circumvention of the blockade. Aemond couldn’t be associated with anything that might seem… compassionate.

Instead of returning to his rooms, he stood on the battlements of the Red Keep, looking out over the vast sprawl of King’s Landing. 

“For you, Sylvi,” he murmured. 

Chapter Text

“War is coming,” Aysa told Daeron, cupping his hands in hers as they stood on the quay. In truth, it was already raging in the east and in the Riverlands. Ravens came to Oldtown bearing the news of the murder of Aegon’s young son in his bed and orders for Lord Ormund to take his army and put down the stirrings of rebellion in the Reach. Daeron was commanded to stay and defend the Hightower seat. He was not happy about it. “I must return to my family in the North,” Aysa soothed. “And try to sway Cregan to your cause.”

It was a lie, of course. She had no intention of returning to the North, much less of taking sides in the Targaryen civil war. If everything went to plan, she’d find a way to stop it. 

But Daeron had believed her and pressed a purse full of coins into her hands. He’d insisted on paying her passage on a ship he thought would carry her up the coast as far as the Saltspear, where she could return to Winterfell overland through Barrowtown, where the fighting would hopefully be less intense. 

Aysa had taken his money with thanks and booked a ship bound for Sunspear instead. From there, she’d travel to Lys, and from Lys to Volantis, skirting the southern shores of Westeros, then Essos. How she would get from Volantis to the ruins of the Valyria on the Smoking Sea, she had no idea. One step at a time. The whole plan was crazy to begin with. Aysa was a child of the North; she’d never even been on a boat.

She’d taken advantage of the chaos of a brewing war after decades of peace to slip into the vaults of the Citadel dressed as a novice, and - using her ring of stolen keys - found the book fragments she’d been seeking. Deciphering the singed, faded, and sometimes bloodied High Valyrian was painstaking, but she’d absorbed all she could about blood magic and fire magic and the birth of dragons. Far more intriguing were the texts about the First Men and the Children of the Forest, who could slip into the skins of animals and sometimes saw the future in their dreams. Aysa had put those aside the most reluctantly of all when the intensifying war put the maesters on high alert and sneaking around the Citadel became impossible even for her. She’d left less certain than she arrived, and ultimately resigned herself to the reality that she would be going into this quest blind, trusting only to hope and instinct.

It was all any of them could do.

Aysa could see the sheen of fear in Daeron’s eyes, even though he put on a brave face. She’d developed a genuine affection for the pampered little princeling. He had a streak of genuine courage and fierce loyalty. And he was utterly smitten with her.

Standing at the docks to bid her farewell, he tried one more time. “Stay with me,” he whispered. “We could both protect Oldtown.” There was so much unspoken in those words: we could ride Tessarion together, we could unite our houses, we could face the coming storm hand-in-hand. Aysa could see the story unwinding behind his eyes. His idealism was charming, if impractical. His violet gaze tried to hold hers, but she looked down through a curtain of lashes, too honest to encourage him when there was no hope.

“Your family would never allow it, Daeron. I am not even a Stark, just a Snow.” 

“And I’m the third son. I’ll never see the throne,” he replied bitterly. His voice shifted, buoyant again with possibility. “Maybe I could choose.” 

Aysa ignored the whole-body tremor that threatened to buckle her knees at the nearest mention of that other Targaryen prince, the one that haunted her dreams with increasing frequency. She shook her head. “An advantageous marriage will be all the more important when the war is over,” she insisted. Then she leaned forward and brushed a kiss against Daeron’s cheek. “I will see you again.” It was the closest thing to a promise she could make.

Aysa spun and boarded the ship without looking back. She waved once and watched long enough to see Daeron walk, slump-shouldered, back toward the Hightower.

Then she turned her eyes to the east.    

The Lysene captain took a liking to Aysa immediately. 

“Was that Prince Daemon whose heart you wrenched out his chest?” he teased when they were a few days out from Oldtown, standing beside her on the bow as the sun set behind them.

Aysa gave him a withering look. “He’ll recover.”

Captain Lohar snorted. “I’m not so sure.”

Aysa changed the subject. “Tell me about Lys.” 

The captain always waxed poetic about his island. It was a place where the blood of old Valyria still ran strong, he’d said, and indeed he had the look of the dragonlords: silver-gold hair and pale eyes. His coloring was faded, though, like a Targaryen left too long in the sun, the sharp refinement blurred. Captain Lohar’s skin was deeply tanned and lined after a lifetime on the sea, but he was not unhandsome. The Lyseni were famous for their beauty, he boasted. The free way he joked about Daeron’s infatuation with her was Lyseni, too – the island’s wealth was rooted in trade and tourism, and its many pillow houses packed with nubile, ivory-haired and shameless bodies for the taking. Sex was currency in Lys, and Lohar didn’t discriminate, though he fortunately took no offense when Aysa firmly shut down his subtle advances. He clearly didn’t lack for options and didn’t begrudge her the comfortable distance she needed.

When Aysa discovered the Lyseni spoke a musical variant of High Valyrian, she insisted Lohar speak to her in his native tongue. She understood only half of what he said at first, but her fluency with the language was improving. The captain kept up a constant stream of chatter as she trailed him around the ship in the roughly ten days it took them to sail through the Redwine Straits and along the coast of Dorne, learning everything she could about Lys and the art of seafaring.   

By the time they docked at Sunspear, Lohar didn’t take much convincing to allow her to continue with him across the Summer Sea to his island.

“You don’t even have to pay me, little wolf. You know the ship well enough by now to earn your passage by helping to sail her,” he assured her, eyes twinkling. Aysa hadn’t told him much about her plans; perhaps he was hoping she’d stay in Lys. 

“Safer than Westeros,” Lohar insisted in a rare moment of seriousness. “Trouble brewing in the Riverlands. Daemon Targaryen has taken Harrenhal, and the Brackens and the Blackwoods are at each other’s throats, they say.” 

Feigning unconcern, Aysa asked, “Have the Green dragons been dispatched?” She meant Vhagar, of course, though she didn’t dare ask about her rider directly. 

“Not yet, but it’s only a matter of time.” 

Aemond rode the most intimidating dragon of them all, but she feared for him anyway. The gnawing worry in the pit of her gut was as annoying as it was persistent. Aysa resented whatever tethered her to him, this stone-faced Targaryen prince she’d never met. She didn’t understand, and she wasn’t sure she wanted to. 

After three more days at sea, they arrived on the white sands of Lys. Lohar came to stand at Aysa’s side as the prow of the ship cut through the blue-green waves and regarded her silently. 

“Where does your journey end?” he finally asked.

She answered him honestly. “I don’t know.”

“But not here.”

“No.”

His lips were a thin line that disappeared into his tanned face. Bushy silver brows knit over eyes that matched the sea. “I know most of the ship captains,” Lohar said, and Aysa realized what he was offering.

“I owe you so much already,” she admitted. Faltering fluency in Lysene Valyrian. Safe passage. Basic knowledge of the seas and stars. Friendship, too.

Lohar was studying the gleaming towers of the city of Lys, behind its towering walls. “Dragonfire can melt stone,” he said. Then he turned toward her, resolved. “Keep your secrets, little wolf. Tell me where you want to sail next, and I’ll find someone to get you there.”

The next morning, Aysa was on a ship bound for Volantis.

Chapter Text

Aemond lay in wait in the trees surrounding Rook’s Rest for whatever dragonrider Rhaenyra would send. Scheming behind the scenes with Ser Criston had forestalled the need to bring the dragons into the war thus far, but Aemond could sense the precipice nearing. Vhagar was a survivor and bloodthirsty enough for the both of them, but victory would come with a high cost. Even astride the realm’s fiercest dragon, Aemond did not have the power to do what he wanted most: restore order. He wasn’t sure if power that great even existed. So he’d fight this war, tooth and nail, as he always had, cursing the necessity but giving no quarter. You can’t wrestle the world toward justice if you’re dead, Aemond reminded himself. Small comfort.

Impatient, Vhagar stirred beneath him, her spine a mountain ridge. 

Above them – a clarion cry and the glint of unmistakable scales like a rivulet of gold against the clouds.

Aemond growled and slammed a fist against leather in anger. “Mittys!” he raged. Idiot. His foolhardy brother had finally made good on his threats to fly to battle, probably fresh out of his cups and feeling invulnerable. 

Let him learn the hard way.

“Umbās, Vhagar!” he commanded. Wait. Not yet.

The huge beast collapsed back into the underbrush resignedly. 

They waited, and Aemond stewed.

He mentally replayed the last scene around the Small Council table before he’d gone north with Cole. Aegon had been whining about how he was the king but no one listened to him, and Aemond had …put him in his place. Their power squabbles were nothing new, but there had been something different this time. 

Aegon had never wanted to be king. When Viserys died, Criston and Aemond had to drag him out of the brothels on the Street of Silk, where he’d been trying to drown his obligations. 

“I have no wish to rule! No taste for duty - I’m not suited!” Aegon had protested in drunken candor. It was nothing Aemond hadn’t thought a hundred times as he tackled his brother to the ground, grimly determined to ensure Aegon did as he himself had always done: what was necessary. But the elder brother just kept screaming for Aemond to release him; it was the most disgraceful scene, no better than a child’s tantrum. Even the memory of the shame Aemond had felt in that moment still burned. But then Aegon had taken Aemond’s face between his hands, gently, pleadingly, tears threatening in eyes that had to look up at his little brother, and said, “Let me go. Let me go, and I will find a ship and sail away, never to be found.”

It was perhaps the only time Aemond had ever seen Aegon drop all pretense.

Aemond had almost loved his brother in that moment.

Had almost let his arms comfort instead of restrain.

But then Ser Criston had joined the struggling princes and announced that their mother - and with her Aegon’s fate - was waiting. The last light went out of Aegon’s eyes as the noose finally tightened. 

He’d looked the same that day at the Council table, and Aemond realized it wasn’t delusions of grandeur that had brought Aegon to Rook’s Rest on Sunfyre’s back. It was determination. A reckless bid to earn a modicum of respect, if nothing else. 

And Aemond saw, as he never fully had before: his callous, feckless shit of a brother was desperately unhappy, too. Trapped in the same tangled web Aemond was, trying to escape it in exactly the opposite way. The crucible of their twisted family had made Aemond into a tempered blade and Aegon into a clown. A broken, cruel, and tragic one. 

“Mittys,” he repeated, all fury drained from the word this time. 

Sunfyre’s agonized cry echoed over the treetops and Aemond jolted back into his skin.

The sky burned with dragonfire, and Aemond saw the golden dragon tangled with The Red Queen. So it was Meleys and Rhaenys.

“Sōvēs, Vhagar!” he roared. Fly.

A menacing shadow stirred to life, bending the tops of towering trees in a hurricane of wings. Impossibly, Vhagar’s bulk soared into the sky, claws practically dragging over the helmeted heads of Ser Criston’s host, who were too cowed by the enormity of the dragon even to cheer. Aemond was barely a speck on her back to the gathered host on the ground. 

The panic in Aegon’s eyes yielded to relief when he saw his brother approach on Vhagar. Sunfyre’s breast was torn and dripping black blood, and Aegon was beginning to realize the enormity of his mistake. He did not hear the command - dracarys - but he saw the telltale glow build in the dragon’s maw. 

Aemond watched the elation drain from his brother’s face as Vhagar hurtled toward Aegon and his crippled mount. The gout of flame was carefully placed - it would take Aegon out, but it wouldn’t kill him. It was the only way to minimize the damage; if Aegon stayed aloft, he would just get in the way – risking his life and Aemond’s too. Meleys and Rhaenys were formidable enemies, and Aemond wouldn’t underestimate them like his brother had.

The battle was short and brutal. 

Win thoroughly enough that there is no need to fear vengeance. 

Adrenaline shielded Aemond from the harshest edges of what he’d done as he watched Meleys and her rider crash into the battlements of Rook’s Rest, clearing the path for the Green army to take the castle. 

It was easier somehow, the second time: to let Vhagar loose to win by any means.

She yielded to his order to circle the column of smoke rising up from the trees where Aegon and Sunfyre had landed. Vhagar alighted near the treeline, and Aemond dismounted with an unsheathed sword, ready to cut down any Stauntons who might have decided to finish Aegon off. 

Sunfyre’s ragged, gurgling breath was chilling. Aemond approached the steaming body of the fallen king, almost convinced it would be a mercy simply to put Aegon out of his misery. Aemond had no particular desire to add kingslayer to kinslayer.  

I’m sorry, brother. I did not let you go before. I cannot let you go now.

Ser Criston called his name abruptly, and Aemond turned slowly over one shoulder, hesitated, and sheathed his sword without explanation.

Aemond knelt in front of the ruin of man and dragon, feeling only emptiness. On the ground was the Valyrian steel dagger forged by Aegon’s namesake.

“Where is His Grace?” Criston rasped. 

Silently, Aemond pointed with the tip of the dagger, then tucked it into his belt. 

The gravely wounded king would need a regent.

Chapter Text

The return to King’s Landing was a solemn one. The Greens now controlled the northern cities of the Blackwater coast, but their victories had been dearly bought, and news came that Daemon had taken Harrenhal and was wrangling a ground army amongst the fractious tribes of the Riverlands. 

Aemond flew Aegon back to the Red Keep under cover of night, leaving wounded Sunfyre at Rook’s Rest to recover – or not. No one knew if the dragon or its rider would survive. The extent of the king’s injuries should not be common knowledge, the Council decided by raven. After Grand Maester Orwyle had done all he could, it became clear that Aegon would be in no fit state to rule - such as he did - for a long time.

Alicent assumed she’d take on the mantle of power, but the men of the Small Council abandoned her. Instead, they gravitated to the Greens’ greatest strength to lead them into war: the victor of Rook’s Rest, the rider of the fiercest dragon in the realm and a force to be reckoned with in his own right on the ground. 

Aemond took his place at the head of the Small Council table without objection, ignoring his mother’s chagrin. Her missteps had led them here, and Aemond was determined to make the best of what they had left. Even if, while he spoke and the men listened, she looked at him like he’d stabbed her in the back.

We all take our turns to twist the knife, Mother. 

Aemond knew that pain was inevitable. His only purpose was to ensure the suffering was worthwhile – that something meaningful came of it. And he was the only person he trusted to make that happen. It was what he had been training for all his life.

The heat of Volantis was oppressive, even as summer gave way to fall in Westeros. It was called one of the Free Cities, but tattooed slaves were everywhere. The great Black Walls on the east were built of fused dragonstone by the lords of Old Valyria, and the city had an air of ancient mystery despite its pervasive stink. Here, more than anywhere else, Aysa felt the presence of the dragonlords. And their namesake. 

There was not much trade between Volantis and the cities bordering the ruin of the former Valyrian Freehold. The overland route going west and south from Volantis was called The Demon Road because of its notorious danger, and the partially abandoned cities it led to were haunted by ghosts of the Doom. 

Aysa quickly determined that travel by sea would be safer and faster; news of the war in Westeros trickled into Volantis, and her urgency mounted. Her dreams, too, were full of blood and fire: gouts of flame brighter than three suns above a field of battle, and Aemond Targeryan’s grim face as he flew away on Vhagar, alone. 

The luck that had gotten her to Volantis ran out. The coins that remained in the purse Daeron had given her in Oldtown were dwindling, and no ships could be hired to sail into the Smoking Sea. Aysa crept over the quays of the port city at night, seeking a small but manageable craft that she could sail herself. After several days’ frustratingly fruitless search, she followed a slave with a figurehead tattoo on his cheek aboard a vessel bound for Tyrosh. She bought his help with the last of her coins to stealthily lower a small craft used for shoreside excursions into the sea. 

Lohar’s tutelage allowed her to raise the sail, turn the tiller east, and slip along the coast, undetected, until the sun rose. Aysa beached the boat on an empty stretch of sand the next morning and curled against part of the hull covered by stretched canvas. She slept on beaches by day and sailed by night, always keeping within sight of land on the port side. Time was a slippery thing and the journey was long; her small sack of provisions ran out, but she fished and collected rainwater to survive. She had grown lean and strong from hauling the boat ashore every morning and returning it to the sea at sunset by the time the coast vanished on her port side and the waters were clothed in a perpetual fog.

The air was acrid with sulfur, even more than two centuries after the Doom. It was no longer possible to distinguish night from day, and Aysa’s craft drifted for an indeterminate time. When she slept, she dreamt of the few wild, riderless dragons of Westeros, the echoing halls of a ruined castle, and Aemond One-Eye brooding over a map of the Seven Kingdoms. She was beginning to fear that she’d aimlessly drift until she died of thirst and hunger when the craft’s hull grated against shoreline.

Aysa pulled her boat onto a beach with sand as black as her hair and walked into the mist. The sand gave way to blackened stone like a frozen river, and still Aysa climbed. Only at a higher elevation did the air clear enough to improve visibility. She stood on the edge of a huge caldera, around which swirled a sea of churning fog punctuated with occasional blackened peaks. It was an utterly desolate place, and Aysa’s heart sank. She was not even certain that she’d be able to find her way back to her boat. Her food and water were gone.

Further down the slope, there was a dim red glow: a cleft in the earth where the leftover rage of the Fourteen Flames still simmered. She started toward it, and as she picked her way carefully over the ridge, the silence was broken.

An otherworldly cry echoed above her head, and Aysa looked up. The sun was momentarily blacked out, and the white waves of fog swirled around her as a huge dragon swept over the ridge. 

She froze and stared.

It alighted not far from her. She’d heard tales of Balerion the Black Dread, the dragon Aegon had ridden in his conquest of Westeros, whose shadow could engulf entire towns. This creature was at least his rival in size, and possibly bigger: a beast born out of the aftermath of fires of destruction that had consumed dragons and riders alike but left a few eggs miraculously unburnt, tucked away in sheltered places to hatch in the heat of aftershocks. The known world had never seen its like.

Its scales were shiny black and its wings like night. It was watching her with golden eyes the size of a soldier’s shield and in its open mouth, teeth longer than swords glistened in the threatening glow of building dragonfire, but Aysa was not afraid.

The bleakness in her chest was replaced with a soaring jubilation, because in both her mind and the mind of the beast, the image of a black-haired, golden-eyed girl astride a matching dragon flashed simultaneously. 

… And they would not be the harbingers of a second Doom brought on by arrogance and domination, but liberators of dragon and humankind alike: not rider and mount, but two halves of the same ancient magic reunited.

Before Aysa, the dragon lowered its head, and she approached to caress its smooth, obsidian scales. “Baelaxōs,” she whispered. “Hēnkirī.” Together.

Chapter Text

Daemon Targaryen paced the haunted ruin of Harrenhal at night. When he slept, his dreams were troubled. When he woke, he found himself increasingly in the company of Alys Rivers, the enigmatic healer who was half-witch, half-Maester. She was the only person who grounded him as his grip on reality faltered. 

Or so he thought.

Alys was a shrewd survivor, and Daemon Targaryen, the Rogue Prince, brother of Viserys I, uncle-husband and Prince Consort to Queen Rhaenyra, savage and sensual, was a powerful piece she could play to her advantage. 

She knew his weaknesses instantly - his ambition and his cock - so she pulled the strings of both. 

With weirwood paste from Harrenhal’s heart tree, the sole survivor of the butchered godswood, she controlled his dreams: making him doubt Rhaenyra and reminding him of his own thwarted claim to the Iron Throne. In his waking hours, she slowly won his trust. Then one night she came to him clad only in moonlight. 

In the end, the mighty Rogue Prince fell like a house of cards.

Alys fed his ambition for the throne like a steady fire, keeping him burning. While Rhaenyra and Aegon - under the regency of his brother Aemond - slowly diminished each other’s forces, Alys was cementing her control over the only man who could rival them both: a dragonrider and a soldier who’d borne being sidelined long enough. 

Even with supplies arriving daily on the Kingsroad from Storm’s End, the blockade of the Gullet was draining the wealth of King’s Landing and the goodwill of the citizens of the city. With the Ironborn allied with the Blacks, Aemond had resorted to an accord with the Triarchy. As the year drew to a close and rumors of Rhaenyra’s calls for dragonseeds to claim the wild dragons of Dragonstone and join her cause spread, his Triarchy allies coalesced. Late in 129 AC, ships under the command of Lysene admiral Sharako Lohar set sail across the Narrow Sea from Essos, bound for Blackwater Bay.

War had broken out across the Seven Kingdoms, and it raged the fiercest in the Riverlands, though it would soon spread to the Westerlands and the Reach. Old enmities had awoken, and Aemond watched his options for avoiding bloodshed on a catastrophic scale gradually dwindle as the smallfolk made the conflicts of princes their own. 

It was the same seemingly inevitable battle he’d always fought playing out at the largest possible scale: kill or be killed. And Aemond Targaryen was not going down without a fight.

On the fifth day of the year 130 AC, Aegon and Viserys, the two young sons of Queen Rhaenyra and the King Consort were aboard a Pentoshi cog in Blackwater Bay with an escort of seven warships from Driftmark, bound for the supposed safety of Pentos until the Iron Throne was secured. 

They sailed directly into the path of the Triarchy fleet as it reached the Gullet.

Prince Jacaerys and the dragonseeds took to the skies the moment word reached them that battle was joined – as a desperate Rhaenyra wrung her hands on the ramparts of Dragonstone, lamenting her lack of battle experience and the restraint of the Black Council that advised her not to risk her life to fly to the aid of her sons.

“There!” a Myrish sailor shouted, pointing at the distant dragons on the horizon, and the contingent of spear-throwers wheeled, at the ready. Some of them were even veterans of the War of the Stepstones, where they’d face the fearsome Daemon Targaryen on Caraxes. Still, the prevailing mood was one of dread as five dragons bore down on them. Already the water of the Gullet was seething with the hostilities between the assembled ships as the full might of the Triarchy met that of Driftmark. 

Chaos erupted when Vermithor swept across the Triarchy line and the ships glowed with the heat of a fallen sun. 

Suddenly, an enormous shadow cast them all into temporary darkness. Captain Morreo Lohar, who had once carried a mysterious black-haired, gold-eyed girl across the Narrow Sea from Oldtown before he accepted a generous sum to add his ship to the Triarchy forces, turned his gaze up to the sky. 

Balerion the Black Dread had succumbed to old age when he was a tottering child, but Lohar could have sworn the dragon that swept over his battered crew was Aegon’s dragon reborn. As the dragon passed, it was as if the fabric of the daytime sky above them had torn to reveal a starless blackness of impenetrable depth and impossible size.

“By the gods!” he swore, then ducked fast as a second dragon followed: this one with scales pale as pearls. 

They were the biggest dragons he’d ever seen. 

Lohar was not alone in his awe. For a few moments, time slowed as men dropped their sword tips onto decks or lowered their bows and spears to watch the massive beasts circle the fleets. Even Vermithor - second in size only to Vhagar - looked middling by comparison. 

“Whose side are they on?” a soldier beside Lohar wondered aloud.

No known dragonrider flew a night-black dragon or a silver-white one. There was simply no way dragons of this size would have escaped attention in Westeros.

“I don’t know,” Lohar breathed. 

In the air, Jacaerys Velaryon wheeled on Vermax, open-mouthed, as two massive dragons appeared out of the west and flew low over the ships. The Black dragonriders looked to him, uncertain. Jace swallowed hard, calculating. If he did not know these dragons, they must belong to the Greens. Even with five of Rhaenyra’s dragons, he was not sure they would prevail. The black beast was bigger even than Vhagar. Where had they come from?  

“Angōs, Vermax!” he ordered. Attack.

To his shock, his dragon did not obey. 

Instead, Vermax carried him higher, out of the range of the spears and deck-mounted scorpions. The rest of his contingent followed, their riders intently watching the outcome of this unexpected development. Twisting in Vermax’s saddle, Jacaerys scanned the backs of the new dragons, looking for riders.

On the sea, wonder turned to fear as the enormous maw of the black dragon began to glow with the telltale beginnings of dragonfire. Sailors on both ships wailed and ducked or dove off gunwales in a panic, uncertain which side the beast would annihilate. 

Instead of the ships of either contingent, the immense column of black and gold flame that issued from the dragon’s mouth boiled the sea between them. 

The pale dragon joined her fire with the black one - a white-hot jet of flame so bright it was almost blinding. The sea hissed and smoked, filling the bay with clouds of steam. Weaving between the ships, the dragons drove the Triarchy fleet east out into the Narrow Sea and the Driftmark forces with the Pentoshi cog bearing the princes north, effectively ending the battle.

When Jacaerys realized what was happening, he and the dragonseeds flew to escort his half-brothers’ ship back in the direction of relative safety of Driftmark, where they would regroup. As he flew, he cast his head over his shoulder every few minutes, certain he would see two massive dragons on their heels. 

They never came.

Jacaerys was shaking his head.

“No,” he reiterated firmly. “They did not attack any ships.”

“None?” Rhaenyra repeated, seemingly unable to believe it. 

The Black Council was gathered around the glowing, candlelit table in the center of the council room at Dragonstone, faces pallid in the dim light, trying to make sense of the aborted Battle of the Gullet. 

“Not ours or the Triarchy?”

“No,” Jace spat, frustrated both by his mother’s obtuseness and his own confusion.

“And did you see a rider?” Rhaenyra demanded.

“Only one, on the black dragon,” Jace reported.

“You’re certain?” She leaned across the table, her gaze intent.

Jace sighed, exasperated all over again. “Well, we were in the middle of a bloody battle, Mother, but I’m reasonably certain.”

Rhaenyra paced. “Where could they have come from? And who rides them?” 

None of the Black Council could answer, though some of the more belligerent called for a preemptive attack.

Rhaenyra scowled. “Where do you propose we direct our attack, when we know nothing about them?”

She sighed, leaning over the table again. “Well, until we can determine who controls these dragons, where they came from, and what they want, our only choice is to wait.” She scanned the table deliberately. “Report back with any whispers you hear to that effect, and in the meantime we’ll have all of our dragonriders patrol the castle in shifts.”

Jace volunteered, but Rhaenyra ordered Hugh Hammer out on Vermithor. Rhaenyra’s oldest son turned to his mother when the other Council members had gone. 

“There is something else,” he began. “Vermax,” he paused. “He… didn’t obey me.” Rhaenyra studied his troubled face as he remembered, so like his father’s that it tugged at her heartstrings. “I was worried that if I didn’t recognize the dragons, they must be some plot of Aemond’s, so I commanded him to attack.”

“But he didn’t?” Rhaenyra asked.

“No,” Jace confirmed. His brown eyes sought his mother’s. “What does it mean?”

She only shook her head and wrapped him in her arms, unsure if she felt hope or misgiving.

Chapter Text

Aemond sat brooding on the Iron Throne, awaiting ravens about the outcome of the Battle of the Gullet.

His reverie was interrupted by a red-faced Ser Criston, who burst into the Great Hall trailed by a string of Kingsguard and gold cloaks.

“There is a dragon on approach from the east!” Criston bellowed, and Aemond surged to his feet. All of the Green dragons were in the Dragonpit - except Vhagar, who would not be confined and kept to the open fields around the city wall - and as far as he knew none of Rhaeynra’s dragons were ranging east over Blackwater Bay. With his tireless accounting of assets on both sides and careful strategy, Aemond was rarely taken unawares. 

“How far?” he asked as he strode to the nearest parapet with Ser Criston on his heels, scanning the skies over the bay. He might not get to Vhagar in time.

The blue sky was empty. The Prince Regent glared at Ser Criston.

Below them, screams echoed on the opposite side of the tower, and a massive shadow covered the sun as a dragon swept over the Red Keep. Shortly after, a second one of similar size followed.

“Two. The Seven save us,” Criston murmured.

As they watched, the dragons banked over the mouth of the Blackwater Rush and landed in the fields south of the city bordering the Kingswood. The people nearby scattered like ants.

Aemond was left staring: a dragon black as midnight and another white as pearl, both larger even than Vhagar. And a solitary rider, coming down off the armored back of the black dragon by balancing on the edge of an outstretched wing. Impossible.

Criston’s expression was stricken. “Your Grace…” he began. “What will you do?”

Aemond did not recognize these dragons. But the rider had not seen fit to burn King’s Landing to the ground, even though the combined might he commanded made that a distinct possibility.

He said simply, “Ride out and see what they want.”

Ser Criston’s objections fell on deaf ears as Aemond swept through the Red Keep. Vhagar was already waiting in the only courtyard large enough to accommodate her. 

“You cannot go alone, Your Grace!” Criston called as he mounted his dragon.

Aemond ignored him, settling into the saddle as Vhagar dug deep channels into the manicured lawn and stirred up blinding whirlwinds with the force of her wings. She did not usually come to the Red Keep for a reason. Criston was calling for the Kingsguard to mount and ride through the city to the River Gate, though what he intended to do with a few whitecloaks in the face of two dragons that rivaled the size of Aegon the Conqueror’s was unclear. 

Aemond and Vhagar circled the keep once before alighting a safe distance from the unknown dragons, who raised their heads and flanked the single figure between them. Vhagar hissed a low threat, but she did not dare attack.

“Lykirī, Vhagar,” he told her. Be calm. He tried to follow his own advice. No living Targaryen had ever seen Balerion the Black Dread, but the flesh-and-blood equivalent put all the tales to shame. 

Boldly, Aemond approached. 

He had assumed the rider was male. The first surprise was that he was mistaken. 

The second was that he recognized her, somehow. It unsettled him that he could not place how: a girl who couldn’t be much older than him with long hair the color of dragonglass and gold eyes. Her clothing was torn and dirtied, but she would be beautiful even in rags.

“Aemond,” she said, softly, like it was a reunion not a greeting. The sound of his name on her lips was a caress. And – a third surprise: she knew who he was, too. He did not quibble about titles.

“Tell me your name,” he demanded. 

Her elegant brows lifted just a little.

“Aysa Snow.”

Aemond cocked his head and his single eye narrowed. A bastard of the North on dragonback? Everything about this girl defied expectation. “These dragons. I’ve never seen them. Where–?”

She cut him off, a small smile drew up the corners of her lips. “I did not come here to tell stories.”

“Then tell me why you came,” Aemond countered.

“To prevail upon your better nature,” she answered cryptically.

He scoffed. “I have none.”

Her eyes rested on him, unblinking. “You cannot deceive me, Aemond Targaryen.” Then her gaze shifted over his shoulder as Ser Criston and a small host of Kingsguard on horseback came to a stop beside Vhagar.

Ser Criston did nothing to hide his shock when he approached and saw the dragonrider. He was out of breath, his hastily buckled armor dusty. Aemond did not turn to greet him; his eye was fixed on Aysa warily.

“Your Grace,” Cole began. “Urgent word arrived from the Gullet.”

Aysa simply said, “Two unknown dragons drove the Triarchy fleet back to Essos and the Lord of the Tides back to Driftmark.”

Ser Criston’s jaw dropped, and when Aemond glanced over his shoulder to confirm this with his Lord Commander, Cole simply closed his mouth and nodded. Aemond returned his focus to Aysa.

“Who do you fight for?” he asked, low and quiet.

“Westeros,” she answered.

Aemond was beginning to understand that she was not an ally or an enemy, but something else. So he dared.

“Send word to the Triarchy to delay a second attempt,” he told Ser Criston. Then he turned to Aysa. “Join me in the Red Keep, and I will hear your proposal.” His gaze alternated between the two dragons behind her. The black one’s golden eyes matched his rider’s; the white one had eyes of deepest blue that never seemed to leave Aemond: the same color as the rough-cut sapphire in the empty socket behind the patch he wore. “The dragons?”

“They will hunt in the Kingswood,” Aysa replied, gesturing to the dense trees to the south and thinking images to Baelaxōs so he would know her intentions. She could call him if there was any danger and Syren would follow him wherever he went, even across the Narrow Sea - but Aysa had chosen to trust the one-eyed prince she knew only from dreams. He was a threat to others, but not to her. She knew it in her bones. It was why she had come to him first, and not Rhaenyra. 

As they passed Vhagar, Aysa stepped toward her, undeterred. Aemond stilled, watching her.

“Lykirī, Vhagar,” she murmured. “Raqiros.”

Slowly, Vhagar bumped Aysa’s head with the tip of her snout, and the girl ran a hand down the dragon’s weathered skin.

Then she kept walking as if it was perfectly normal to pet the fiercest dragon in Westeros and call her a friend.

Aemond watched Vhagar turn and drag herself into the skies, keeping well away from the larger dragons. He mounted Ser Criston’s horse alongside Aysa, who was already astride a horse offered to her by one of the Kingsguard. 

They made slow, plodding progress toward the River Gate. Earthbound horses felt so limited after the heady freedom of dragonback. 

“It is plain you aren’t here to ally with my family against Rhaenyra,” Aemond began.

Aysa kept her eyes trained on the walls of the city. “A war between dragons should be avoided at all costs.” Her gaze cut over to him. “Likewise, a war between kin.”

His scowl was not for her. “Once the floodgates open, it is difficult to close them.”

“Not if you divert the river.”

He fell silent, considering this. An easy thing for a girl who seemingly commanded what were now the two largest dragons in Westeros.

“Are they both yours?” Aemond asked, glancing behind them at the circling beasts.

“Dragons belong to no one,” she corrected, then relented with some sympathy for his curiosity and her admittedly ambiguous answers. “I ride with Baelaxōs. His mate Syren followed us here.”

“From where?” Aemond prodded urgently, though the names of her dragons were a mystery he still wanted to explore.

“The east,” Aysa replied vaguely, not quite ready to disclose all her secrets. She winked at him warmly in recompense. “The world is vast, Prince Regent, and Westeros is only a small part of it.”

The reminder was surprisingly jarring. Aemond had learned about all of the known world, of course, but those places were just words on a scroll. He’d been so embroiled in the conflicts of his family and the Seven Kingdoms, it had not occurred to him to cast a net wider than the Triarchy. Suddenly, he felt foolish and small-minded, but it was himself he was angry with, not Aysa. A failure of strategy for a man who prided himself on seeing the situation from every angle.

“Are there other kingdoms, then, with dragonriders?” he pressed.

Aysa’s smile was enigmatic. “Not the way you are thinking.”

Aemond’s jaw clenched. “You and my sister would get along well. You both talk in riddles.”

She tossed her head back and laughed, an unexpectedly musical sound. “Not as well as I get along with your brother.”

Aemond’s head snapped to the side and he glared at her suspiciously. “Aegon?”

Aysa met his eye, projecting calm. “No. Daeron.”

Aemond relaxed somewhat. “You were in Oldtown?”

“For a time,” Aysa confirmed.

“You know him better than I do, then.” There was a bittersweetness in his voice: a voice that carried so much subtlety, like his eye.

Aysa’s chest warmed with the memory of her lovesick friend on the Oldtown quay; it seemed another life: her days chasing down dragonlore in the Citadel with Daeron. She leaned toward Aemond a little in her saddle like she was relating a secret. “He’s terribly impressed by you.” 

Aemond hummed a low, noncommittal sound, then added, “He grew up far away.” 

It was an indictment of closeness. She empathized with that; Aysa’s own adoptive family was always safer at arms-length.

“I never knew my parents,” she told him.

“Who raised you?” 

“I grew up at Winterfell, but I am not a Stark.” 

She did not have the swarthy look of a Northerner, that much was certain, Aemond observed. And her gold eyes were not native to any of the Seven Kingdoms.

“In truth,” Aysa admitted, “I do not know anything of my origins.”

They had arrived at the wooden dock where flat-bottomed ferries could transport horses across the fast, treacherous depths of the Blackwater to the gates of King’s Landing, so by necessity their conversation ceased until they were safely on the other side.

Aemond noticed the way the dock workers looked at Aysa, dressed in ragged, dirty clothes but still oddly regal despite her small stature. She was an unexpected companion for the impeccably neat Prince Regent. 

They mounted again on the other side of the river.

“Why did you come here first, and not to Dragonstone?” Aemond asked as their horses threaded the streets on the way to the Red Keep, flanked by Kingsguard.

Aysa decided to tell him the truth. “I knew you before we met,” she said. “I dreamed of you.”

Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Aemond go rigid in his saddle. In a flash, he remembered a dream of his own: a girl with eyes like the sun and hair like night and the balm of her presence like salve on his wounds.

He did not reciprocate with honesty. Instead, he answered tightly, “I see. My father relied on dreams and portents.”

It was an answer that was almost dismissive and bitter, like she’d pressed on a wound that had not fully healed. 

“You prefer certainties,” she offered, testing.

He shook his head, an abrupt denial. “There are no certainties. I prefer controllables.” That certainly seemed to be true: his careful intensity was a study in deliberation, and Aysa suspected that he’d spent much of his life seizing control of anything he could direct with intention versus relying on the whims of fate.  

They arrived at the Red Keep, and Aysa teased. “Right now, the only thing I care to control is a bath. Could that be arranged, Prince Regent? After, we can talk more.”

Aemond inclined his head and watched Aysa disappear into the Red Keep.