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aboutdragons · 11 months

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the thing about dragons - chapter five

in which there’s cats and blood.

Dialogues in quotation marks are in Common Westron, in angle brackets in High Valyrian, in square brackets for other. Thoughts, emotions and emphasis are in italics.

Cross-posted on

AO3: https://archiveofourown.org/works/43121373/chapters/108369012

Scribblehub: https://www.scribblehub.com/series/699684/the-thing-about-dragons/

Wattpad: https://www.wattpad.com/myworks/331546036-the-thing-about-dragons

◄○○○►

Read the Summary, Tags & Warnings as linked on the page to know what to expect.

warnings: war, blood, bad life decision, Otto Hightower, Daemon Targaryen, murder, menstrual cycle

wordcount: 9,560

Read the chapter under the cut.

The parchment crinkles under his fingers as Otto reads it, the slightly-lopsided childish scrawl, yet in oddly practiced hand, inked into words on the dried parchment. The crease on his forehead depends as he reads into it.

For a child, Daelyra Targaryen’s written words are surprisingly eloquent, and subtly threatening in a childlike way that everyone would tell him is just excited childhood babble he should not look to deeply into—or Rhaenys Targaryen’s guiding hand. He cannot be sure.

Either way, the letter is barely acceptably polite and very vaguely threatening. Nothing he can hold over the girl or Rhaenys or anyone, really. Just an upset child being upset and at least being kind enough to write him a letter about why before taking off on her massive blasphemous beast in the direction opposite than she was meant to go.

And it took Otto months to convince Viserys that the girl ought to have been sent to her mother in Runestone, where Daemon wouldn’t have wanted her, only for it all to be ruined.

Viserys was sent a letter of his own, too, and it sent him into a morose spiral, cursing the idea under his breath. And yet, just like Otto knew he would, the king had no spine whatsoever, and refused to rescind his order.

○

Otto did not think that Daelyra would want to have anything to do with her lady mother. It’s why he pushed for the girl to be sent there, to be easily monitored and away from Daemon’s heretic teachings of dragon lords and dragon gods. And yet, when barely a fortnight later, a very politely scathing letter came from Runestone, he learned better.

Lady Rhea Royce has written, in official capacity and in no uncertain terms, that Daelyra Targaryen was to remain with her father, or with the guardians appointed by her father at all times. She stated it nowhere in her letter, but the message was very clear; the girl—and her father as well—was not welcome in Runestone. And, Royal Order or no, Daelyra would be sent back.

It was Rhea’s right as her mother to override the will of her uncle, king or no, and Otto knew Daelyra’s meddling for what it was. Rhea Royce would not have known ofher daughter’s planned arrival; unless said daughter informed her in advance.

Viserys had a sour look on his face when he read the letter that effectively rendered his order moot. King or no, he couldn’t actually tell Lady Royce to keep the girl if she didn’t want her there. That was the power the lords had, after all.

“She went to the Stepstones,” Viserys says. “A girlchild of eight. Otto, she’s eight. I will rescind the order after all. She was much safer with the Velaryons—”

Otto grimaces. Daelyra and Daemon are cut from the same cloth, he thinks but doesn’t say. Daelyra will stay in Stepstones out of spite, and Daemon will let her.

Then he grimaces harder. He spent months convincing Viserys to have the girl sent to Runestone, only for the brat to do whatever she wanted anyway; and Viserys did not see the problem with her blatant disregard of royal orders at all!

He hates this family. But with Alicent for a Queen, he very well won’t have to suffer them much longer. As soon as she births and heir and pushes Daemon and his spawn further down the inheritance line, he will sleep easier.

○

“How,” Corlys says. It’s not even a question, as he looks at Lyra grinning her best grin at him as she stands next to Daemon.

“Big dragon,” she chirps cheerfully anyway, and his face sours. “And before you ask for why; uncle king was more interested in sucking Cunttower’s dick than using the half-rotted soggy bacon between his ears to make good decisions. Anyway, it was either Runestone or here.”

Corlys looks like he just bit into a lemon. “I can guess which you picked.”

“Not very hard, that.”

Corlys lets out a deep sigh, as if to say ‘this is my life now I guess’. “Very well. What now? This is a warzone, not a daycare.”

“Now, Lyra stays safe behind the back lines, and Ancalagon sometimes flies overhead burning the Triarchy mercenaries down, of course!” Daemon says, entirely too smug.

“Can Ancalagon do that without a rider?” Corlys asks dubiously.

“If I warg into him, he can,” Lyra says with a smile, and he looks down at her. Surely not—

“You can warg into your dragon? The way those with First Men blood can?”

“Yep! Did that before. Royces have a lot of First Men blood, probably got it from there!”

Corlys hides his face in his hands. He hates that this ridiculous situation and its ridiculous explanation actually makes sense in a way, he’s learned, things orbiting those two usually make sense. “Fine. Do whatever. Stay out of trouble. Both of you.”

Lyra and Daemon share twin grins and Corlys regrets.

He’s not even sure what he’s regretting exactly—except his king’s utter stupidity.

“Wait,” Lyra says as she looks up at her father. “Did you get in trouble?”

Daemon looks away. “No?”

“He took an arrow to the shoulder,” Corlys says, entirely unrepentant. “Decided it was fine to go flying without armour.”

Lyra’s dark eyes sharpen.

“Traitor!” Daemon cries as his daughter grabs the sleeve of his shirt. “It was an emergency! I didn’t have time to put armour on!”

“Keep telling yourself that,” Corlys says with a shrug.

“Kepaaaa…”

“Perzītsos, talus jorrāeliarzus—”

Lyra’s eyelid twitches, and Corlys takes his chance to evacuate and leave Daemon at the mercy of his now-irate spawn. Serves him right.

○

At least it’s not infected, and it’s healing properly.

Stupid reckless dad not wearing armour riding his dragon in a warzone.

○

Viserys revokes the order.

<Rhea must’ve sent him a Strongly Worded Letter,> Lyra muses, breaking the wax seal into tiny pieces and throwing them into fire one by one. Daemon scoffs, reading the recall over one more time.

<I’m sensing a but.>

Daemon gets up from his chair, tears the letter in half, then that in half, and again, until he’s holding a handful of parchment. He lets it fall into the open flame.

<Remember, he thinks the world truly works the way he decides it should.>

Daemon sighs. <Do you want to go back? It would be safer.>

<True,> she agrees. <But I’m safe enough here, in the back lines.>

<Gh. Yes, fine, I would want to go back. But I won’t. Because fuck that and fuck him. With a red-hot iron.>

<Careful, he might like that,> he says and cackles. Lyra makes a gagging sound and slaps his shoulder.

<Besides, I prefer being somewhere you are. I know this is no place for a child, but my case is a little special… And I missed you a lot.>

Daemon’s face softens.

<So do I, little flame,> he says and presses his forehead against hers, and everything is alright. <But I’m very serious; no frontlines for you, ever. Not until you’re a woman grown and I can no longer tell you what to do. Understood?>

<Sir, yes sir!>

○

All in all, when one is not in active warzone, the Stepstones War is pretty damn boring. Lyra can only poke at the map and ask questions so much until she knows everything there is to be known about it, and she’s not really a tactician or a general. She does have few good ideas here and there, but her playing a couple of tactical games a whole lifetime over, while it certainly puts her above a typical child in understanding of war, is mostly anecdotal, very situational, and largely useless. It quickly becomes apparent that to wage war effectively one has to either have a knack for it, or be specifically trained for it, and ideally both.

Lyra is neither.

Though, that isn’t to say she’s entirely useless. She did come in with a dragon twice the size of Caraxes that she could relatively easily direct to where Corlys pointed at the map to burn the Triarchy.

And sure, impressing the importance of Not Landing to Ancalagon took a hot minute, but he definitely learned his lesson after he took a catapulted stone to the face. Knocked few of his teeth loose, but they would grow back in soon enough; dragons were crocodilian like that.

Gave the Triarchy something to fear, too. For a bunch of fools claiming descent from Old Valyria themselves, they were awfully dragon-less.

One thing that upset the nightmarish creature (and Lyra, too) was the fact that it was simply safer for her to stay hidden away somewhere mostly safe and out of the way rather than fly him into the battle. Not only did she promise to do that, but even if the chances are low, a talented and stubborn marksman would have been able to snipe at her even on dragonback. It was a constant hassle for Daemon, who in the time they spent there took several arrows. Mostly harmless, but that was because he had a fitted plate mail he could wear on dragonback, and Lyra did not. The one time the arrow actually did damage was the one time he had foregone the armour.

He’s not done that again since, thankfully.

On top of that, Lyra found, Ancalagon minded Caraxes’ presence less and less, and vice versa. The two dragons, as capricious as they each were, were by no means friends—but they could tolerate sharing the aerial space, and even coiling on the opposite ends of the same beach. Given the strength of their respective bonds to their readers, the bond between Lyra and Daemon must have rubbed off on them, at least to a degree. It was certainly helpful, for the lack of the pissing contest between the two.

And Ancalagon, who in his two-centuries-plus of life has never had a rider certainly had a lot to learn from the Blood Wyrm. Even if his already-scarce patience was running thin, constantly tested by Caraxes’ smugness.

○

“Can you please blink?”

“No.”

“Daemon, tell your spawn to blink.”

“No.”

○

Years pass, slowly but surely, and with two dragons rather than one, Corlys and Daemon are seeing moderate to high success against the Triarchy.

Who would’ve thought that flying nuclear lizards capable of breathing superhot fire would be of help in a war effort, right?

Lyra and Ancalagon perfect their bond as she sends him to fight; sharing thoughts and senses and feelings at distances greater than reasonable, able to find one another no matter the location. She can look through his eyes when he soars and breathes green fire on the enemy encampment, and for now, it’s a good enough substitute for flying together. It’s not warging, not really. A bastardized version of it, where they each can see through the other’s eyes and direct them, but cannot direct the other past what they allow. Maybe it’s reasonable, as Lyra is more Valyrian than she’d ever be of First Men, but it’s an inheritance she values.

Corlys is pretty good at hiding his discomfort when he finds her sitting somewhere—usually their war tents, safest and closest to Daemon—eyes wide, bright green and slit-pupiled. Lyra admires this; she’s freaked herself enough that one time she caught a glimpse of it in her reflection. It was really cool, don’t get her wrong—but it was also creepy.

Soon enough, from the girl who barely survived bonding her dragon she turns into a girl who is perfectly attuned to her dragon, and him to her. They have long conversations in the privacy of their own minds, and Lyra thinks she becomes rather good at interpreting the snippets of images and emotions he sends.

There’s news from the capital, too. Of course, they are. Aegon is born and the people rejoice for a prince, and Lyra can’t help a bitter pang at the back of her throat because she knows—she knows that Viserys will neglect this boy, even though he killed Aemma for this.

Is Aegon lesser, for not being Aemma’s? For being born of a girl barely sixteen, forced to replace the woman Viserys claimed he loved but murdered anyway?

Lyra sends a polite congratulatory letter anyway, makes Daemon sign it too even though he doesn’t seem too happy about that. Sends a letter to Rhaenyra, expressing hopes the girl will see her siblings for what they are—innocent victims in all of this, whose crime is being born and nothing more. Hopes that Rhaenyra won’t hate her young siblings.

Hopes it changes things.

She knows it won’t, unless Viserys either actually begins reinforcing Rhaenyra’s position as the heir or names Aegon heir in turn. He does neither, of course, content to set his children on an express road to a civil war; an uneducated entitled daughter for an heir, a discarded wastrel firstborn son barely a spare, and nothing done to change this.

This family is already ripping itself apart, and it will try very hard to drag the country and the dragons down with it; and it’s all Viserys’ fault.

She sends a letter to Alicent, too, and Alicent—replies. So, Lyra replies in turn, and so on, and so forth. They’re each careful to not mention anything upsetting, anything about Alicent’s queendom, and reading those letters, Lyra hopes they can fool each other, however briefly, that they’re just two penpals writing to one another. No wars, no kings, no queens, no unwanted marriages or dragons flying overhead. It feels almost like a friendship; Lyra wonders idly how long it’ll last.

Until Otto learns of the exchanges, most likely.

Rhaenyra doesn’t write back to her at all. After all, how dare she advise her to try being kind to her half-siblings and her former best friend forever. They’re the root cause of all her misfortunes, surely!

Or something like that.

○

<Um, dad.>

<Yeah?>

<Oh, that’s normal.>

<Th—Wait what?>

Daemon puts a finger in his mouth and lifts his lip.

Now, Lyra never looked in his mouth, because that’s rude, but in all honesty, maybe she should have.

His canines are a bit more pronounced than normal, which is fair, some people get that. On upper and lower jaw. But the premolars being pronounced and sharp on upper and lower jaw both is—

<Uh—No? Why would you think that?>

<Because,> she looks him in the eye, <not-Targaryens don’t have teeth this sharp.>

<…they don’t?>

<No. Canines, at most,> she says, and points the teeth in question, <but the upper ones at most, typically. And premolars are never this sharp.>

<Hm.>

<No. My teeth are normal to me! Father had sharp teeth. Cousin Rhaenys does too.>

<No. But he was the odd one out for it. We, ah,> Daemon’s cheeks pinken a little, <we used to pick on him for that, when we were little. Even Aemma had sharper teeth than he. We called him a dullard.>

<Wish that was applicable only to his teeth and not his mind,> Lyra mutters quietly. If Daemon hears, he ignores it. <The more you know!>

Lyra looks at him. Daemon balks.

<True. But Cousin Rhaenys scares me… Hm.>

<Dad. No.>

<Fair.>

○

Lyra keeps up with her training in the meantime. She grows, and keeps growing, and while the growth spurts are paid for in aching bones and awkward movements as she gets used to it, a whole new world opens for her. She no longer has to climb the cupboards and bookshelves much to Daemon’s relief, and she can handle bigger weapons. Finally, proper shortswords, axes, and maces.

She needs to be careful to not overstrain her body—torn ligaments and broken bones would not be very fun to deal with in any way—but agility training is always a good idea. It’s all she can do so far; she still has several years before she can start to reasonably bulk up.

○

So apparently, potatoes grow on Stepstones as weeds. Something-something cargo ship from Essos sunk, potatoes floated up to the island and started growing there.

Lyra didn’t realize just how much she missed this crop until she chanced on some of it growing wild in the sandy soil, and she will admit, she may have fallen on her knees and cried. Baked potatoes, hashbrowns, fries, potato stew, potato starch—she missed them. And now, she will have them back.

Lyra grabs few men who are off-duty and, armed with shovels and baskets, goes to dig for the tubers. They humour her, because she’s Daemon’s daughter, and she frames it like she’s just a kid playing treasure hunt, but she can see them exchange nervous glances as, by sundown, thy have filled four baskets with potatoes.

“Um, my lady… What are you planning to do with these?” one of them asks.

“Eat them,” she tells him, face, knees, and hands covered in dirt as she holds one of the last potatoes of the day. He looks at her weirdly.

“Um. Those are…”

“Potatoes. We need to wash and cook them. They’re delicious with butter and sea-salt.”

They don’t believe her, of course. She delights in proving them wrong scantly an hour later. And potatoes really are delicious with sea-salt which, with dragons capable of evaporating large quantities of water, is abundant here. Baked potato is certainly a hit.

The cook looks at her weird when she puts them in the stew, but is also forced to stand corrected when it turns out good—and helps cut on meat.

The potatoes quickly grow popular with the deployed troops, too; they can take them on the way, raw and fresh, and just throw them in the fire in the evening, and eat them warm.

Her potato propaganda starts spreading like wildfire, and she gets her French fries, too.

Everybody wins. The knights and soldiers will no doubt take potatoes home with them, and spread them further

○

109AC rolls around. Lyra turns eleven, Laenor turns sixteen and week later he’s in Stepstones more than eager to join the war efforts because teenage boys think that war is cool. Laena comes with him, Vhagar in tow. She checks on Lyra, no doubt on Rhaenys’ orders, stays for a little but leaves soon enough. Corlys is barely okay with Laenor being there, and he looks like he’d like nothing more than chase both his children back to Driftmark. Dragons or no, those are his heirs. His legacy.

(Bar the Hull bastards, of which neither has been born yet.)

More importantly, Helaena is born, and Lyra bullies Daemon until he sends a whole congratulatory letter of his own. Helaena, of all, deserves at least this little, and it’s a good enough first step. Maybe Rhaenyra will be more amicable to a little sister? Lyra can hope.

Laena leaves eventually, but for a little while there’s four whole adult dragons in the Stepstones, three of which remain, and that turns heads.

The Triarchy doesn’t like it, of course. But what is much more important is the attention they get from Dorne. And, fuelled by Lyra’s (and subsequently Daemon’s) constant nagging, Corlys reaches out to them with a promise of alliance.

○

“Offer them a big piece in the Stepstones,” Lyra says. Corlys looks at her sharply, takes a breath. “No, no, no, hear me out.”

Daemon is staring at him as he looms behind Lyra. Corlys tries to hold his gaze, but very quickly grows uncomfortable.

“Elaborate,” he says unhappily.

“If we can sweep in and secure a good deal with Dorne, everybody benefits. You get better tariffs, they get better tariffs, Triarchy goes to fuck itself being attacked from both sides. You get half, they get half, you keep it together.”

“It’s not that easy.”

“Oh, I know. I’m no diplomat, I don’t even know what exactly would it take to parlay like that. But you need to push for an alliance that’s beneficial enough for Dorne that they don’t turn around and run to the Triarchy. If they do, you’ve automatically lost because they ill chase you out together very fast. Then, you get nothing. I don’t know, maybe I’m weird, but for me half’s better than nothing! My point is; you need to make good with Dorne and cuck Triarchy, or this whole war effort is fucked. Wasted, gone, reduced to atoms!”

Corlys sighs and puts his face in his hands. “Stop making sense, you horrible creature.”

“No,” Lyra chirps cheerfully. “Look, I get it, you hate making concessions, especially after uncle king stood your family up as he has, but concessions will be good in this case. And you’ll be able to hold a semi-alliance with Dorne over uncle king’s head. Wouldn’t that be great? Hells, you might just lay the foundation to bring Dorne into Westeros-the-Kingdom proper. Think of the legacy you’d leave behind, if it all worked out. Corlys Velaryon, the man who laid grounds for proper alliance with Dorne, after the Conquerors themselves failed even that much.”

Corlys’ eyelid twitches, because Lyra hit the nail right on the head, especially with the last one. He knows it, she knows it, Daemon knows it from how he’s smirking above her shoulder.

Corlys looks at her, his bright turquoise eyes shining with exasperation. “I told you to stop making sense, you horrid silver-tongued creature.”

“And I said no. What says you?”

Corlys looks at her, then at Daemon, then back at her. “I say, I wonder where you got your smarts from, because it certainly wasn’t your father.”

“Hey!”

Lyra shrugs. “Kepa’s not stupid. He’s just very hotheaded and forgets to think, is all.”

“Perzītsos, why do you bully your poor old father?” Daemon bemoans dramatically, swooning a little.

“For an old man, you’re awfully under thirty,” she says and pats his shoulder where she can reach. “And that’s not what I meant, Lord Corlys.”

“Fine,” Corlys sighs. “Fine, we’ll go talk with Dorne. But you’re coming with. And Daemon, and you,” he points at Daemon, “will be on your best behaviour. Laenor’s coming too, he needs to learn. Where’s that boy?”

“We should leave the dragons behind,” Lyra tells him as she hops off the chair. “Dorne and Dornish won’t have too good associations with them. It may have been a century ago, but the Conquest was rather traumatic to them.”

“It will put us in danger!” Daemon protests. “It will put you in danger.”

“It will be a show of goodwill,” Lyra argues. “Appreciate one.”

“Are you certain that courtly life isn’t for you?” Corlys asks as he picks up his maps, eyebrow quirked as he looks at her. “When you grow up and train up in diplomacy, you’ll run circles around all those od fools at court.”

“Just because I could be good at it doesn’t mean I want to do it,” Lyra says with a shrug. “Besides, I have a hard limit on how much back-and-forth I’m able to tolerate. Past that, I’ll get a tension headache and if I’m not left the fuck alone when I need solitude, I will bite.”

“Fair enough.”

Bless.

○

Qoren—

Is a hot-headed kid, barely seventeen, having found himself suddenly running his house after his father’s sudden death. Lyra is no doctor, but from the way they describe it, it sounds an awful lot like the late Quentin Martell had a stress-induced aneurysm that led to a haemorrhagic stroke. And Qoren, try as he might to act tough in front of them, isn’t nearly as good at hiding his grief as he tries to make himself be.

He looks a little like she imagined Oberyn to look, with wavy black hair and healthy tanned skin and shining honey-coloured eyes. Has that swagger, too. Overexaggerated, a dash of bravado on an otherwise lost kid. It fools most of them, she sees. Not Corlys, not Daemon, not her. But others.

He looks a lot more like a creature of fire, sun-kissed as he is, than any of the wraith-like Targaryen with their icy silver hair and cold violet eyes and pallid near-sickly skin that doesn’t tan no matter how long Lyra spends in the sun.

(Damned fire resistance strong enough to stand against Planetos’ own star, leaving Lyra looking like she’s some basemen-dwelling goblin.)

She grabs her Daemon’s hand, drags him to lean down. <Be nice to the kid,> she warns her father. <He just lost his father recently. He’s not doing well.>

<But—>

He closes his mouth, recognition shining in his eyes. Empathy is not something he’s equipped with, but they’re working on it. Soon enough, he’ll be able to compare situations others are in with his on his own. Lyra hopes he will, at least.

○

The talks—don’t go bad, in all honesty. Lyra pesters Corlys until he plays nice, mindful of Qoren’s loss, and the lack of dragons also helps. The kid side-eyes all Targaryens present, of course he does, but he’s not hostile. As eager as he is to prove himself, he’s also pretty damn smart, and while allying with Triarchy would let him triumph over Targaryens, he recognizes that allying with the Velaryon Fleet would be just more economically sensible to him, and Dorne as a whole. The Fleet, after all, controls all but two islands, and with three grown dragons, taking the last two isles won’t take much.

Qoren—unaware of the future in which the dragons vacate the isles very soon, though it’s not like Lyra is going to tell—takes the better option. It’s not quite an alliance, but it is a reasonable trade agreement for both Dorne and Driftmark. Lyra, for her part, is just happy it seems to actually be working.

○

Nobody seems to miss Qoren and Laenor’s flirting. It gets them a side-eye or two—they’re from opposing factions and supposed to be having talks of the diplomatic kind, not the pillow one—but the two hit it off quickly and get along well outside of the council tent. Lyra accidentally catches them snogging against a tree and elects to distract the guard walking their way before he notices them.

It may be sneaky and underhanded and dangerously close to a honeypot mission, but—Laenor’s happy with wooing Qoren, Qoren is happy with being wooed, and it’s very likely to net them a better deal with Dorne if Qoren is fond of Laenor. It all works out.

Corlys, of course, ever-so-mindful of his reputation, wants to stop them. Lyra, infinitely wise in her tweenage ways, embarks on a mission to stop him from stopping them.

Laenor’s gonna owe her for that.

○

“Leave Laenor and Qoren alone.”

Corlys Velaryon, the fabled Sea Snake, Master of Tides, the Head of House Velaryon, does not jump or shriek when Daemon’s spawn seems to manifest at his elbow out of thin air.

“Leave Laenor and Qoren alone.”

It’s a near thing, though, and he certainly feels his heart jump uncomfortably to this throat when the little menace sneaks up on him unnoticed like that.

“Laenor is—”

He doesn’t know what Laenor is; for now he’s just trying to breathe as Lyra cranes her head up to look at him with those wide black eyes of hers.

“Laenor’s booty call is about to make the whole deal with Dorne go a whole lot smoother if Qoren likes him,” Lyra tells the man. “Besides, you expect him to carry your house after you. Let him live a little before that.”

He winces. It is a shame on house Velaryon for Laenor to be up to his usual proclivities this openly, but Lyra is right. Corlys knows this; it’s why he’s hesitated to put a stop to it so far.

Lyra keeps looking at him, unblinking.

He thinks, for a moment, that he can see a glimpse of a slit pupil in the darkness of her irises, but it fades as she shifts ever so slightly, along with the sunlit gleam in her eyes.

“Horrid little creature,” he says in exasperation, but can’t stop the fond undertone that she clearly hears, judging by how her face softens into an almost-smile.

“I’m not going to stop making sense,” she chirps smugly, but she knows she’s won, because she turns on her heel without further ado and prances off, beaded braids bouncing off her shoulders and back.

Corlys smiles to himself as his heart calms from the scare.

Daemon is one thing, but Lyra—Lyra will make Otto Hightower’s life living hell if she so chooses.

And Corlys genuinely hopes she so chooses indeed.

○

<Dad, I’m going to need your help wingmanning.>

<What’s wingmanning?>

○

Laenor is furious, and Qoren is fuming. World, it seems, is out to cockblock them.

Lyra will not stand for this.

Their pining is unbearable.

Why can’t he just be a bit more like Daemon, making his way through every interested Dornish soldier regardless of who may walk in on them?

(Unless it’s Lyra. Which is why Daemon is very careful in sending her to the other side of the camp until he sends back for her so that he can have his fun unhindered. She appreciates it quite a bit. There are some things in this world she wants nowhere near, ever.)

○

“I know a spot.”

Laenor yelps and twirls to look at her, takes a half-step back, hand on his chest.

“Sweet Meraxes someone ought to put a bell on you!” he absolutely doesn’t shriek. “W—Wait, what do you mean, you know a spot?”

“Where you can fuck Qoren in peace. Or get fucked by him, I don’t judge.”

“How do you—Nevermind. What’s in it for you?”

“Less annoyance and potentially better agreement terms. Also, your soul.”

“You—You think I’m doing this for the agreement, or something?” he asks, cheeks already colouring in offense. “And what do you mean my soul—"

“No. But it is a side effect we’d all benefit from. Mostly, I’m just tired of your pining.”

“I’m not—!!”

“You are. You very much are.”

“…okay. Fine. So, you know a spot. And?”

“And me and dad set you up a nice picnic getaway half-hour flight from here and you take Qoren there and you’ll have a day of peace together.”

“And what do you want for it?”

“I’ll think of it.”

“Because not knowing is not scary.”

“Relax, I’m ele—one-and-ten. What could I even want?”

“A lot!” Leanor argues. “You’re one of the most sneaky and shady people I know!”

“Who even taught you to use shady to describe people.”

“You did.”

“…I used it to describe Cunttower.”

Laenor has enough sense in him to hastily retreat.

But Lyra keeps her word, and the next day he takes Qoren for a nice getaway. They come back well into the night, still all over each other but way less irritable about it.

Lyra wonders if the historians of centuries from now will write about Laenor Velaryon and his very good friend Qoren Martell, or will they actually be smart about it and avoid straightwashing history.

○

“What the fuck did you mean by my soul, though?”

“Don’t worry about it.”

“…how about I do anyway?”

○

Yes, she is having a lot of fun messing with Laenor. Sue her.

○

History, Lyra decides, seems to have a somewhat fucked up way of repeating itself sometimes.

She’s eleven years old. Laenor just came back with Qoren after a whole day they spent elsewhere—both look quite pleased with themselves too—and promptly shoves something small and fuzzy into her hands.

The thing, it appears, is a small ball of fluff, a little dirty, a little wet, but otherwise warm. And it moves; twists and turns a little in her hands, one paw, two paws, tail, ears. Two big blue eyes that are yet to darken into a proper eye colour blink up at her. White-and-tan fur, still somewhat shaggy. There’s a meow.

She’s eleven years old and Laenor just brought her a kitten.

She was eleven years old when she got Rascal.

She may very well be reading into it too deeply, but with gods and magic and dragons, this doesn’t feel like coincidence that much.

Still, she takes the cat.

“Your debt has been paid,” she tells Laenor sagely and he gives her a slightly startled look that morphs into exasperated annoyance as he reaches out and ruffles her hair.

“You’re why I don’t want younger siblings anymore.”

“You’re welcome!”

“That’s not—Ugh.”

Qoren snorts into his fist next to them, and Laenor puffs up. Lyra grins.

○

She makes it a small batch of completely unseasoned fish and egg soup of sorts, and the cat. Thankfully it’s at least a month old—closer to five weeks, if she’s remembering all the cat development videos that she watched a lifetime ago correctly—so keeping it alive is all the much easier.

If it was still eating only milk, and Lyra had no way of finding a feeding mother cat, it would have been kinder to just put it down—alternatives were to starve or, if she tried to feed it cow or goat milk, to die of the diarrhoea it’d cause. She was glad they were past the unsalvageable state.

She scratches the kitten between its ears absent-mindedly as it inhales the cooled food, contemplating.

What does she name the cat? It’s a very important decision. So important that Rascal got his name after stealing her sock on a day one. She hollered ‘you rascal!’ after him and then it just stuck.

It’s how Daemon finds her, a little drunk himself, no doubt having wooed a Dornish soldier or two himself. While Laenor is still trying to pretend to be ashamed of his sexuality, Daemon is at the age where he finally knows better and just embraces himself wholeheartedly.

<What’s this?> he asks, pointing at the crinkled-tissue-shaped creature. Lyra looks at him.

Brief silence as he shuffles about for more alcohol, throws himself onto the padded chair—way too extra for a tent, in Lyra’s opinion—and takes a swing of something that smells like it has high percentile in it.

<Yeah.>

<What’s its name?>

<Haven’t gotten that far,> she admits.

Daemon looks at the kitten. The kitten is none the wiser, too busy licking the plate of and food remnants, and Lyra doesn’t like the glint in her father’s eye.

And she’s right.

Lyra says, aghast. Daemon pouts.

<Because—I’m not naming my cat Vodka!>

<I—Uh—> she jumps to her feet and looks around a little frantically for anything of help, until her gaze falls onto the simple cinnamon-sugar cookies on the table. <Snickerdoodle!>

<How’s that better than Vodka??> he demands. <You’re just naming him after the first next thing you see!>

<Well, at least his colouring matches Snickerdoodles! What reason do I have to name him Vodka?>

He opens his hands and nods sagely. <True that. So, no Vodka the Cat?>

<No. Snickerdoodle it is.>

Snickerdoodle doesn’t much care, too busy pushing the little ceramic plate around. Lyra swipes it up before the cat can push it over the edge.

<But you’re the one taking care of it,> Daemon warns.

<Sure, sure.>

○

Daemon, predictably, likes the cat as much as she does, if not more.

It’s just how that works.

○

Ancalagon seems fine with Snickerdoodle, too. Which is good, because Snickerdoodle ends up loving flying. For now, he has a cat-sized basket affixed on the saddle just for him with a little pillow inset, but the cat keeps growing like a weed and Lyra is waiting for him to reach his maximum size before adding a permanent cat station to her saddle.

But soon.

○

They do secure the alliance. It’s not really a tug of war, since nobody actually owns Stepstones, and they both benefit from it. It really was a matter of goodwill and reaching out first before the Triarchy—and Daemon not pissing off Qoren, and Laenor wooing Qoren, and them not bringing dragons at first as a sign of goodwill. The only dragon that came close to the Dornish delegation was Seasmoke, and that was only for Laenor to take him for a ride to the picnic spot and back.

Corlys looks like he just bit a lemon the entire way to the main camp; h’s not fond of having to share Stepstones with Dorne, even if it is the smarter option, and he especially doesn’t like how pleased Lyra is with herself, and how smug and proud Daemon is. He doesn’t seem to appreciate Laenor’s starstruck mooning either.

Though to be fair, if he continues to pine it may get really tiring really fast for everyone involved.

Soon enough, though, they’re back on their bullshit in Stepstones. Between he Velaryon fleet, the Dornish fleet, and three dragons, they’re done taking over the islands within a year. And between the Velaryon and Dornish fleets, they have a real chance of keeping them, this time.

Then Aemond is born, and it seems like Lyra is the only one who cares about it, because she’s friends with Alicent—or at least she thinks she is.

And then, before Lyra knows it, it’s 111AC.

○

It’s been two years since he had done that in the canon books. Now, it’s been two years later, and here, there’s not so much as an inkling that he would. So, she asks.

<Why?>

<Didn’t you say you’re fine with just your dragon, your sword and clothes on your back?> he asks with a wry grin.

<Exactly,> he sighs and turns to face her.

<Nonsense!>

He chuckles, presses his forehead against hers. <Sense, sense.>

○

“Did you read it, Otto?” Viserys asks, almost vibrating with excitement.

“Yes, I did,” Otto says, even though it feels like he has to force it past a bile in his throat.

The Velaryons—with Daemon’s aid—have managed to secure an alliance with Dorne. Potentially, the first real step towards allying with Dorne since the Conquest.

And it was done by Daemon and Corlys.

Otto tries to be politely happy about it, but inside he seethes. Daemon expanding his influence is never anything good, and this was never meant to happen. This shouldn’t have happened.

But Corlys Velaryon is a man brilliant enough to counter even Daemon’s wild tendencies. But Corlys Velaryon is a creature built from pride that not even his greed can match. It never has.

What changed?

○

Lyra turns thirteen. Daemon throws her a nice little party, brings a shipment of all kinds of things. Even Corlys splurges a little, which admittedly is rare. It’s because she pressed for the trade alliance with Dorne, he tells her, because it’s already started paying off. Predictably, he doesn’t like how smug it makes her.

Qoren visits from Dorne, brings some gifts. He stays for a polite amount of time and then drags Laenor off somewhere more private with a basket of food in hand, and that’s the last Lyra sees them that evening.

It’s fun, in the tents, with her father and a disgruntled Corlys, unpacking gifts others have sent her from wherever they are. With the knights and soldiers that she made friends with. There’s a lot of potato dishes, courtesy of the very same cook who saw her make the potato stew that first time.

Lyra tries to have fun. She really does.

But she can feel a familiar-odd kind of sensation at the bit of her stomach that she knows, and really, truly does not like.

○

She wakes up, just like she predicted, to nausea, fatigue, general discomfort, and a patch of blood between her legs. It’s still dark outside, and Daemon is snoring sprawled on the bed not too far from her. She takes a moment to curse her body, tries to stop herself from throwing something at someone, springs from the bed without a word and goes to find an adult woman, barely bothering to grab a jacket and shoes. People, whoever is up at this our anyway, step out of her way with concern and mild shock; her disgruntlement must be showing on her face, no doubt.

She finds some women in the kitchen tent, going about meal prep. She clears her throat.

“I’m sorry, my lady,” one of them says, “the breakfast isn’t ready yet—”

“I’m bleeding.”

“It’s—Oh. Oh! Yes, um, Tilda, manage for now, I’ll go help her ladyship a bit.”

She mostly just needed to figure out a replacement for pads and tampons. Soon, she’s going to have to stalk around for herbal remedies for pain, but for that her best bet would be a midwife.

The woman—Yvonne—is very helpful. Gives her a linen cloth, tells her how to use it, gives some tips and tricks. Lyra is very grateful, if curt, but Yvonne says nothing, just sends her off on her way and returns to the meal prep.

She comes back to her tent a little lighter, throws herself on the bed with something that’s between a groan and a snarl, and just lays there, face-down on the pillow.

<Little flame, everything okay?> Daemon asks sleepily, rubbing his eyes.

<Oh. Huh. Can I help?>

<Not unless you can find me someone to kill, no,> she says grumpily and makes herself a bit more comfortable. She has no clue if she’ll fall asleep anymore today, disgruntled, uncomfortable, and a little homicidal, but she tries.

<I’ll figure something out,> Daemon tells her, and she makes a sound of agreement, kicking the blanket onto her feet. Ultimately, he has to sit up and tuck her in.

She doesn’t really sleep, but she does rest a bit so there’s that.

○

Now, when Lyra told Daemon that morning to find her someone to kill, she was mostly joking.

And yet, here they are, at noon, on the outskirts of the camp, with Daemon looking entirely too pleased with himself, two nervous soldiers, and a bound triarchy pirate between them. And while Lyra has always felt homicidal on her period, she’s obviously never acted on it before.

But that was in a different world. And this was—

She makes grabby hands at Dark Sister, and Daemon unsheathes the longsword and hands it to her.

It’s quite heavy, and still too big for her, unwieldy in her hands unused to wielding anything bigger than a shortsword and an odd mace, but it’s lighter than it looks. Light enough to wield, and she can almost hear the steel sing a mesmerizing, haunted tune.

The pirate says something; taunts her and Daemon in Low Valyrian, something about children, cowards, and not being man enough to kill him himself. She looks at Daemon, and then back at the man, and takes a step forward. She raises the sword in both hands, presses the tip to the man’s neck. He tries to inch away, but the soldiers keep him in place.

<Meleys, lady of blood, bringer of life,> she says quietly, <accept this humble offering.>

And then she plunges Dark Sister diagonally into the man’s neck using her own weight and gravity to lead the blade, in one side, out the other, right through the heart if it’s where it’s supposed to be. Bright red blood gushes out of the artery offering him a quick but bloody death. Dark Sister goes through flesh and sinew like knife goes through butter, barely stops at bone and she only has to put more on her weight on it to keep going. Blood spurts out of the man’s neck and onto her hands, and an odd jolt runs through her spine, red mist rising from the blood and curling around her fingers before dispersing.

For a second, she feels like something—someone—is looming over her, bright red hair swaying in her periphery, red eyes looking down at her from an ethereal face. It smiles down at her.

[Thank you, child.]

Then, it’s gone.

She shivers, braces herself with a foot on the corpse and pulls Dark Sister free, losing her balance minutely, and only Daemon’s steadying hand across her shoulderblades prevents her from falling on her ass. It takes her good several seconds to process what’s wrong—or rather, what’s right.

The cramps are gone. So is the bloated feeling in her insides, and she catches herself just as the last bits of fatigue vanish. More; she’s starting to feel energized and refreshed.

She looks at her bloodied hands and the bloodied sword with wonder, and then at Daemon.

<Dad.>

<Yeah?>

<…what.>

○

She opens her eyes to an ocean above and star-shaped rocks floating about, and she’s not very surprised. She’s not even surprised that it’s not the typical culprits with her in the in-between this time.

Meleys sits before her, cross-legged and somewhat amused, with bright red hair and a crown of creamy horns, and slit-pupiled red eyes. She’s dressed much more casually than Balerion or Shrykos were, in something middle-class Valryians would wear daily for work rather than any sort of ceremonial robes. Her clothes are still embossed, of course, but not unreasonably so.

[It’s nice to finally meet you, Lyra,] Meleys says with a smile, and Lyra nods. [Congratulations on your first successful bout of blood magic. We can meet partly thanks to it.]

[Because it’s your domain?]

[That, too. I’m mostly just glad I finally get to talk to you. I’ve not been this involved in someone’s life in… Millennia, at this point.]

[How so? Enabling me to be born?]

[Yes. Rhea Royce, for her health, has a weak womb unable to sustain life. I had to be directly involved until you were born. And this is also why I wanted to meet. There are… Alterations, to your body, compared to regular Valyrians.]

Lyra turns to look at Meleys sharply, her full attention on the goddess. [Elaborate?]

[You’re a homunculus,] Meleys tells her simply, as if it’s not some sort of a huge revelation. [Artificial human with more dragon blood than average. In a literal way. This is what allows you to be this attuned to dragons.]

[…I’m assuming there’s drawbacks?]

[Of course,] Meleys agrees. [One of them is a fragile mental state, but that was mostly mitigated with your soul coming in pre-formed. Of course, you pay for that remembering your death, and with all your pre-existing issues carrying over… But it should be more than enough to avoid a repeat of Maegor.]

[Mae—He was artificially made too?!]

[Yes.]

[I fucking knew it! Did Visenya make him in a cauldron or something?]

Meleys chuckles. [As a matter of fact, she did. But we’re not here to talk about Maegor. There are also physical alterations you need to be aware. I’m here mostly to explain them to you. May we get to the point? My time with you is limited.]

[Shit, sorry. Yes, physical changes.]

[Long story short, you will be stronger and bigger than average, just like Maegor was, and effectively infertile. Even if you have your moon blood consistently, it will be incredibly difficult for you to conceive—and when you do, every single child from your womb will be a dragon chimera, and will be stillborn. No exceptions. They are a blood price Valyrians pay for their magic, and you’re more magic than most.]

[That does make a lot of sense,] Lyra agrees, not particularly concerned. She never had any children in her previous life, and she wasn’t really planning on having any in this. Now she at least knew she couldn’t, at all. But… [I’m still hearing a but in there anyway.]

[Women in Old Valyria were often met with this very problem, and so a blood ritual was created to circumvent the blood price—once,] Meleys says, rising a finger. [So if you ever find yourself in the position of needing or wanting an heir, the records of it should be somewhere. In the Lost City.]

[...lovely. With other blood magic, I’m assuming?]

[Yes.]

[Hm. So might as well grab it when I go for it, I guess?]

Meleys smiles and inclines her head. [In the interim, if you feel yourself drawn to the pleasures of flesh, Moon Tea should suffice.]

[Mmkay. And period cramps? Do I have to sacrifice someone every day? Because then I’ll run out of people really quick—]

[No, just one every cycle.]

[Okay good, was worried there for a second. Thanks for checking up on me, I guess?]

[No problem. I apologize for any trouble Shrykos and Balerion may have caused you, and the responsibility they placed on your shoulders.]

[It’s—Mostly fine. Thank you for taking your time to come and tell me all that stuff!]

Meleys shakes her head. [It’s merely something you should be aware of. Be prepared; you will be naturally more inclined to grow taller and stout than women do.]

[Oh. I like that!]

Meleys chuckles. [Typically, women would be aghast about that.]

[What about my situation is typical, really?]

[Very little,] Meleys inclines her head in agreement. The world around them ripples. [I wish you best of luck on your journey. This whole conspiracy… May very well be bigger than you think.]

[I—Wait, what does that mean??]

[I cannot tell you much, for it will know otherwise; it knows whenever we invoke it too closely, even whole reality planes away. And you… You just keep changing the world. Save the dragons. Give us a fighting chance.]

[Because that’s not concerning at all! Meleys—]

The world twists, shatters into a whirlpool.

Lyra’s eyes snap open as she jolts upright on the bed, hides her face in her hands. For a moment, she just breathes.

<Fuck. Thanks for the heads up, I guess.>

<Little flame?> Daemon looks up from some papers he’s been reviewing. She shakes her head.

<Ah. Okay.>

Ah. Okay.

She just told him she spoke with a real god and his reaction is Ah. Okay.

She laughs. <Ah, dad, never change. Love you.>

○

She grips the doorknob, pale fingers wrapped around the embossed metal. She’s shaking a little, she realizes, but—she wants to do this. She has to do this. If for no other reason than to see if she can.

Parchment crinkles under her fingers, and she reads the last passage of the letter one more time.

You can do it. You can do anything, in your position, if you only take that leap. You have power; more than you imagine. Try and find out for yourself. I believe in you, and you should believe in you, too.

Be the change you want to see in the world.

Best wishes, Lyra.

She folds the letter, puts it under the cover of her book. Puts her hand back on the knob, and this time, turns it. She enters the room on silent feet, eyes sweeping over the miniature of a city long since lost.

“Husband, I wish to speak with you,” she says, and the pitiful creature that is Viserys lift his eyes up.

“Oh yes, Alicent, come in, come in, I want to show you something—”

She smiles her empty polite smile and sits down as he rants and raves about things that have been lost for centuries and will never be recovered, quiet and obedient, until he tires himself. Then, it’s her turn. Sweet, careful words, the undertone of worry, well-meaning all, on a topic that seems to press him the most these days. She brings him a solution to salvaging a crumbling relationship, magnanimous and regal and well-meaning, and not at all testing her influence over him.

And Viserys folds like a wet napkin.

○

<Lyra!> Daemon calls, running towards her. His eyes are wide and twinkling, and his cheeks are flushed. There’s an official-looking missive with a royal seal in his hand, fluttering as he runs. She can’t help but be confused—what on Fourteen’s good Planetos could have Viserys sent to make Daemon this happy?

<Uhhh… What’s up?>

<Look! Read it!> he says excitedly, pushing the parchment into her hands. It crinkles in her hands, but she reads it enough.

Something, something, by the Grace of King Viserys, First of His Name, the—

<—marriage of Prince Daemon Targaryen and Lady Rhea Royce of Runestone is hereby declared annulled,> she reads, and almost cannot believe the words she reads. She looks up at Daemon, who’s been hopping from foot to foot, hands shaking in excitement. <Holy shit dad. He did it. He actually—>

Lyra rubs her forehead. <This is probably his way of apologizing,> she says once the initial excitement wears off. <Of trying to mend your relationship.>

Daemon sighs. <Maybe.>

<Hm? Something wrong?>

<…and?>

<…fuck. You know what, fine. I owe her at least this much.>

○

“My Lady, your horse is ready for the trip—”

“Get it back to the stables,” Rhea says and sets the royal missive on the table, looking out the window. “And get me some wine.”

“Pardon? My Lady?”

“I’m finally free of those menaces, both of them,” she says, a grin growing on her lips with every word. “Postpone my trip, open the larders, call for a feast—I intend to celebrate.”

○

[Huh.]

[Something wrong, Balerion?]

[No, no, it’s just—Rhea Royce usually dies around this time. But she’s fine, with no indication of impending doom, and I’m a little confused, is all. That… Doesn’t happen. Either an unfortunate accident, Daemon, or one of her jealous relatives will always do the job.]

[Oh. What changed?]

[I don’t know, I’ll go to the tree and look back later. Anyway—you said you got some saplings from Tyraxes, didn’t you? Let me check if she didn’t slip you something poisonous.]

[It’s alright, you don’t have to! She wouldn’t hurt me.]

[Not on purpose, but she has no idea what could be harmful to human souls, past the obvious. I do, however, as I interact with mortal souls daily.]

[Oh. Okay, that does make sense. Thank you.]

[Anytime, Aemma.]

[Now put down those papers and drink your tea. Tallying souls can wait, they’re not going anywhere.]

[Yes, yes.]

#hotd #house of the dragon #hotd fanfic #hotd fanfiction #house of the dragon fanfic #house of the dragon fanfiction #targaryen oc #hotd oc #daemon targaryen #the cannibal dragon #laenor velaryon #corlys velaryon #the thing about dragons #ttad #isekai #reincarnation

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aboutdragons · 9 months

Text

the thing about dragons - interlude one

in which death really is the next great adventure.

Interludes are effectively supplementary materials for ttad. They will expand on worldbuilding and the goings-on outside of Lyra’s scope. As of right now I’m not sure if the interludes will be only about Aemma in the afterlife and the worldbuilding relating to the gods, their past, and their reason for bringing Lyra to try to change the future, or if some will take place elsewhere.

AO3: https://archiveofourown.org/works/43121373/chapters/108369012

Scribblehub: https://www.scribblehub.com/series/699684/the-thing-about-dragons/

Wattpad: https://www.wattpad.com/myworks/331546036-the-thing-about-dragons

◄○○○►

Read the Summary, Tags & Warnings as linked on the page to know what to expect.

warnings: death, afterlife, religion, gods (as speaking characters), existential musings, child loss, mental health issues, eldritch fuckeryTM

wordcount: 7,673

Read the chapter under the cut.

“You’re plotting something,” is the first thing Shrykos says as they sit down on the bench next to him. Balerion looks at them out of the corner of his eye. “I know you. This is your plotting face.”

“You make it sound like I’m about to collapse a civilization.”

“Wouldn’t be the first time!”

Balerion huffs, amused, and looks at the fractured sky above them. “Aemma Arryn will die soon.”

“Oh. You were at the Waytree recently?”

“Yes. Tyraxes was there, whatever she was doing, so I figured I’d ask a few questions. Maybe she saw things,” he shudders. “She had. Predictably centered around Lyra, like the tree wants us to follow her future now.”

Shrykos turns to look at him, eyes sad. “Don’t overdo it. Meleys is still at our tails for bringing Lyra in. And don’t encourage Tyraxes to go there!”

“Meleys worries too much,” Balerion huffs. “Sometimes the knowledge of the future is necessary to divert the worst of it; and even if not, have you tried to stop Tyraxes?”

Shrykos face sours. They tried before. All of them tried before. They shake their head.

“But Aemma Arryn won’t be influencing that future anymore. So let me ask again; what are you plotting?”

“Damn, didn’t I knock you off the topic enough?”

“Never. Speak.”

Balerion sighs. “I’m going to meet her.”

“Personally?” Shrykos jolts up, turns to look at him. “But you—Meeting souls isn’t your job? You’re only supposed to make sure everything goes smoothly—”

“I’m going to ask her if she wants to come here,” Balerion says, cutting Shrykos off. Shrykos narrows their eyes at him. “What? It’s been done before!”

“Yes, and now Tyraxes has a minion. Do you want a minion too?”

“No! I just—I want her to be happy.”

“Happy, huh,” Shrykos says with a glint in their eyes. “Very well.”

Balerion shudders. “It’s not like that!”

“Sure. Keep telling yourself that. I’ll be saying ‘I told you so’ soon enough.”

“You will not!” he protests hotly, cheeks darkening.

“Keep telling yourself that.”

○

It’s peaceful when she opens her eyes, even though she doesn’t think it should be at all, let alone be peaceful. She gets up slowly, reveling in the newfound lightness of her body, in the lack of pain that comes with it—that she thinks should come with it. She looks at her hands, only to find them translucent and faintly aglow. A dress of misty, white gossamer hugs her body and flutters in the non-existent wind, melting into the blindingly white nothing all around her.

Like this the pain seems like a hazy, half-remembered nightmare fading by the second until she’s free of it, and free of the detached sort of painful weightlessness that was her goodbye from the world.

The bitterness at the back of her throat remains.

“Hello, Aemma.”

She whirls around, feeling as if she solidifies more with the motion, to find the source of the voice.

He materializes out of the shadows that aren’t there, red, slit-pupiled eyes looking at her from blackness first, framed with thick eyelashes. Then his face, pallid and marked with a spiderweb of black veins, uncannily perfect like that of a sculpted doll, dotted with scales at the ridges, crowned with wicked horns of charred bone, and framed with glossy black hair reaching past his waist. Then, the rest of him; broad-shouldered and clad in ceremonial Valyrian funerary robes, the kind nobody uses anymore since the Doom and Aemma only knows to recognize because Viserys raved about the traditional dress enough.

She thinks she can even read the runes etched on the collar in silver thread, knowledgeable enough in Valryian script as she is, but she has to crane her head up to a very uncomfortable angle to be able to even see them, let alone look the dragon-corpse-doll man in the eye. His eyelids and lips are painted black, she notices, and it only makes him look paler, adding to the haunted look.

She thinks she should be unsettled by his appearance, but she can’t find it in herself to be.

He’s beautiful. Too beautiful, yes, but in a way so mesmerizing it’s difficult to look away.

A long, scaly black tail catches her eye, swishing among the misty white fog covering their feet. If she didn’t know better, she’d say it was wagging.

Do dragons even wag their tails?

Do gods?

“Do I know you?” she asks, though she thinks she does. She knows of him, at least. The dragon-corpse-doll-man shakes his head, and crouches down so that they’re mostly on eye-level. It’s kind of him, Aemma thinks.

“You do not know me, but you do know of me. I am Balerion; Keeper of Death and Guide of Souls. And you, Aemma Arryn, are dead.”

She looks at her hands again, almost solid now but still somewhat translucent.

She knows she’s died, but can no longer recall a single detail of how, though she thinks she also remembers the events that led to it. It’s an odd kind of sense. The terror, betrayal, and pain that she ended with, though, escape her grasp firmly. She remembers Viserys ordering her cut open, and then nothing of substance.

She knows what happened after, but she can’t recall any of it if she tries.

It’s a memory she’s glad to lose.

The context, however—

“Viserys killed me,” she says and looks up at Balerion with newfound disbelief shining in her eyes, and she feels as if it only truly sinks then. “My own husband. He claimed to love me, and he killed me. Ordered me cut open, and he knew it would kill me—”

She’s shaking now, and she doesn’t know what she feels. Shock? Anger? Disgust?

Loathing, maybe, and then all of those too. She liked Viserys less and less with each pregnancy, because he saw it kill her little by little each time and insisted on trying again, and again, and again, and she loved him (she thought she loved him, because what else was she supposed to do?) so she agreed, all for his foolish little dream even though it ruined her body, brittled her bones, blackened her blood, sapped away her very life each and every single time—

Hand on her shoulder, grounding. She blinks the haze away, cranes her head up.

For someone who looks like a haunted corpse, Balerion’s hand is very warm.

“He won’t trouble you anymore,” he says with a finality that helps Aemma calm down. He is the God of Death, after all, and the afterlife is his domain. If he says she’s free of Viserys, then it must be true. He’s the only one who can make it true. “Walk with me?”

She nods, and in a blink the vast nothingness around morphs into a forest of crystal trees and little glowing stars frozen all around them. Ocean ripples above their heads, warm sand under their feet, everything bathed in dusk.

Balerion stands up again, towering over her, and the fact that she doesn’t even reach his elbow with the top of her head makes her a little annoyed. His touch lingers, and Aemma doesn’t mind. It surprises her a little; she most often feels uncomfortable with it.

She thinks she should be feeling something stronger about this whole situation, but all she feels is peace and relief that she’s finally free, and some weightless numbness. Stronger emotions elude her in favor of a calm sense of acceptance. It must be a death thing, she decides. Makes it easier to think rationally and accept that her mortal harrowing is finally over.

Gods, she wasn’t even thirty.

But her emotions aren't gone, and they grow stronger with every passing moment. The bitter taste at the back of her throat magnifies when she remembers names and faces of those who pushed her into the role of a wife much too soon, and then shunned her for her body being too young to become a mother.

“Is this the afterlife?” she asks as she looks around. It's pretty, but in a barely-tangible, dreamlike way. For a life after life, it's rather lacking.

“No,” Balerion says. “This is the space in-between life and death, dreams and reality. Here go dreamers in-between dreams and waking world, and here go souls in-between life and passing on. Here mortals can meet the divine. We just call it Crossroads.”

“Oh. It’s… very pretty here, even with the ocean over my head. Which is a little scary. And, now that you mention dreams… I think I remember being here before.”

A woman in red who would come to her at her lowest, soothe and comfort her when nobody else would. Warm hands in her hair and soothing words in her ears as she wailed at her fate, because she wasn’t permitted to let her true feelings slip in the waking world.

It’ll be over soon.

Red eyes, slit pupils, scales on her face—

She looks at Balerion a little startled but the memory fades faster than it came.

“People typically don’t remember coming here. Though sometimes one of us will call someone here, for whatever reason.”

Balerion looks at her. He looks a little like the dream, she thinks, but with those red, slit-pupiled eyes, it feels much more like looking at Viserys’ dragon, when he still lived, but somehow��more. Different. Much smaller and shaped almost like a man, but there’s a kind of power emanating from Balerion that Aemma has never felt before. It feels like the ocean on a sunny day; calm, soothing, and seemingly infinite on the surface, and wholly capable of drowning all life underneath.

And who knows what the darkness under its surface hides at all?

This is no dragon, and this certainly is no mere man; the only thing Aemma thinks he can be, is a god.

Of this she is certain like she’s never been certain of anything else before.

Aemma thinks she should be more awed or at least surprised to find him actually real, instead of the calm acceptance she feels. She did genuinely worship the Flames, and Balerion was one of the most important out of the Fourteen with his domain over death, next to Meleys and her blood magic, Vermithor and his riches, and Gaelithox and her fire.

And yet here she is. Not very awed, and mostly annoyed at his height, if a little put off by his ghastly appearance, though she’s getting used to it rapidly.

She thinks she rather likes this sort of casual acceptance.

“Do you visit every soul that comes here?” she asks, because she has a feeling that this is a bit of a special situation.

“No,” Balerion says, confirming her suspicions. “Almost none, in fact. They go directly to the afterlife, and I may greet them there, or I may not.”

“Then why are you here with me?”

“Because I have a proposition for you.”

She cranes her neck to look up at him again. “Which is?”

“You can move on to the afterlife, as you were meant to,” he says. “Or, you can come with me to the realm of the gods, to watch over what remains of the Valyrian bloodline. Only few are ever given this chance.”

Aemma wrings her hands together, considers it.

It is a very tempting offer. Moving on means potentially meeting the souls of other people—people she’s certain she doesn’t want to meet. Chiefly among them her father, Rodrik Arryn, who married her off to Viserys at two-and-ten just after her first blood, and Jaehaerys and Alysanne who orchestrated her misery in the first place, and Baelon who scorned her for not giving his son a male heir, blind to how it slowly killed her, miscarriage after miscarriage, running her body and soul.

Not even the prospect of meeting her mother, who died bringing her into this world, could truly tempt her into going. Not under the threat of meeting any of the architects of her suffering.

Still—

“Why me? I’m… No-one special.”

Balerion stutters a bit, looks away, around. It’s—kind of endearing, actually. His tail is thumping at the sand; he doesn’t seem to notice. She giggles before she can stop herself, and his cheeks darken. It makes him look almost alive.

“You are!” he insists with almost childish fervour. “And even if you deny it—I, you—you deserve better, and that’s that.”

She stops herself from giggling anymore, but she can’t deny she’s still amused at his fumbling. It’s… Oddly ordinary, this situation, even though she’s dead, he’s a god, and they’re somewhere unspecified and magical. Cute, almost, if he wasn’t so tall and corpse-like and rather intimidating for it, but Aemma finds herself wary of him less with each passing moment as he keeps acting so personable.

More normal than most lords she’s met, in fact, and isn’t that a realization.

“Of course, should you dislike it, sending you to the afterlife anyway won’t be difficult, it’s not permanent or anything—”

“Alright.”

“And you can—Alright?”

“Yes. I… There are dead people I do not want to seat all if I can help it. I fear things might get violent if I had. There is… a lot of anger in me, I realize, because I could’ve been spared so much misery if they made better choices. I think I would punch someone. Or strangle someone, really. Several people in fact. Can the dead even hurt each other?”

Balerion cocks his head. “There are ways but it’s complicated, since souls aren’t corporeal.”

“Shame. And I do wish to watch over those who yet live. Rhaenyra, Daelyra, Daemon—I wish I could be there with them, but cheering them on from here will have to do.”

But not Viserys, who she carefully leaves out of her words. He caused her too much hurt, and she doesn’t want to darken her thoughts with him anymore. Death was meant to set her free of him, and she will see that through. Balerion will aid her in seeing that through.

And there is a certain sense of giddiness here too, that she gets to do this. Maybe because she was scarcely ever allowed to make her own choices before, and certainly none so big. She was always strung along by her family and her duty. Her wedding, her pregnancies, her life; even her dresses and hair were orchestrated by others most of the time. Even her hobbies were dictated by what Viserys wanted to do, which was build his city miniature and delve into Valyrian books

(What did she like to do? She wasn’t sure she knew.)

Balerion nods and extends his hand to her, and she takes it without hesitation. His hand is big, dwarfing hers easily, and his claws are long and sharp but she’s not very bothered by it. She’s more fascinated by just how dark the veins in his wrists are against the pallor, and the slight scaly texture to his skin that she notices; almost like a snake she saw once in a garden when she was maybe nine. It only serves to set him apart from humans further.

(She was never allowed to be fascinated by these things. Never allowed to even try for a dragon of her own. It doesn’t mean she never wanted.)

○

It feels like she’s forgetting something.

No matter.

○

The doorway leads them to a gloomy corridor made of black basalt, with pillars etched with Valyrian runes and floor of cracked diorite filled in with gold and polished so much Aemma can see herself as if in a mirror when she looks down.

It’s cold, she realizes.

Or, it should be cold. She doesn’t quite notice how she only feels it when she realizes she should.

Her feet, though not fully materialized, are bare and cold, and for a moment, she imagines them in her favorite rabbit-fur slippers, soft and warm—

And then they’re there, blue ribbons and all.

She stops, lifts her skirt up a little, and raises her leg, to look at her slippers in amazement. But those are her slippers; the very same ones Rhaenyra accidentally knocked into the fireplace last year.

“Just how—?”

“It’s one of the things you can do now,” Balerion tells her, sounding rather amused. There’s a small smile on his lips, too. She doesn’t pout at him, but she does huff. “I’ll explain in a moment, let’s get out of the Crossroads first. We get the most traffic here.”

“Very well, lead the way.”

He offers her his arm, and she takes it, and he matches his pace to hers, which is definitely quite nice. With how long his legs are, he could easily move at twice her pace.

Outside—

Aemma has no words to describe it other than utterly breathtaking. She lets go of Balerion’s arm and rushes forward like an overly eager girlchild, head whipping around and her hair with it as she tries to take in all the sights, and colors, and sounds.

In front of her is a sprawling valley surrounded by a wall of mountain ranges, towers of stone jutting out of them at an equal distance from each other, seemingly merged with the mountains at their bases; when she counts, there’s fourteen of them. Inside the valley there is a sprawling lake fed by multiple rivers running from the mountain ranges, dotted by patches of trees. That, in itself, is somewhat ordinary for someone who lived in the Vale of Arryn, like Aemma.

However, the multitude of fractured islands swaying above the lake is not ordinary at all, opalescent crystals jutting from the jagged bedrock underside, glowing and twinkling as if containing stars, with runic arrays encircling them, and oily tar-like roots wrapped around them.

It’s keeping the islands afloat, Aemma thinks, with fluffy pastel clouds floating lazily about the bedrock. Waterfalls drop from them, islands and clouds both, seemingly endless and feeding into the lake, and she can see forests and castles of ivory and colored glass on the islands; the grass is all blue and purple, little of it green.

On the biggest, middlemost island, with smaller, fractured islets floating about it, there is a tree; with black bark inlaid with sparkling amethyst veins, splintering into thousands of branches reaching high into the dark sky, crown of pallid, flowerlike pearlescent-lilac leaves upon it. The trunk of the tree is split in half, jagged, with an opalescent gem floating within the gap, tendrils of bright light originating from the gem bridging the gap in the tree like silver threads or spidersilk.

Underneath the tree, a half-exposed core of magma surrounded by the dark oily roots jutted out of the bedrock of the biggest island, pulsing as if it was a heart.

Above it all, in the place of sun, a massive, fractured crystal, its parts orbiting around themselves, all in the color of kaleidoscope and ice, floating suspended in the sky. Directly from its center, arms of shining auroras sprawl all over the vale underneath the vast star-glittering darkness of the firmament above.

“It’s beautiful,” she breathes. “Though, knowing what I know of Valyria… Not what I expected.”

“It was a joint effort, and only a refurbishment besides,” Balerion says as he comes to a stop next to her. “We call this realm home but it is not our own. We are but interlopers here, waiting for the inevitable conclusion to our story. It was kind enough to let us have our domains here.”

“What was?” Aemma says as they sail closer.

“The Waytree, which grows at the centermost island above Hallowed Vale.”

It’s the first time she hears of it, and it sounds important. Why was it left out of their mythology? She looks at the tree on the middlemost island again; blinks, once, twice. It looks… Less, like a tree, this time. Different. More sprawling, more complex, as if it shifted in the few short moments she looked to Balerion instead. It swims and sways in color she cannot describe, less perceivable the more she tries to focus on it. There’s a whispering ringing in her ears and she turns away. Relief is immediate, as she presses the heel of her palm to her eye. “What was that? Is this the Waytree?” she asks, and points vaguely at it without looking.

“Yes,” Balerion says, voice a little worried. “Are you alright? I forgot it does that to people who aren’t used to its presence.”

“Why did it shift?” Aemma asks. “I—It hurts to look at it. Why?”

“It’s a little complicated, so I’ll tell you about it later.”

Aemma huffs. “Define later, because this seems a little important.”

“When you’ve settled in, maybe over tea? First we need to find Meleys and find you a place.”

She almost says she could stay with him, since he brought her here and she knows him, and finds a sense of comfort in his company, but that’d probably sound rude. They’ve known each other for maybe an hour now, and she shouldn’t impose.

“Alright,” she says instead. “Lead the way. Can it be away from the tree?”

“Of course! Nobody lives near it, it would be too dangerous in the long run, even for us.”

○

He leads her to a small dock on a cliffside, with a small gilded ship docked next to it. That in itself wouldn’t be too odd, except for the fact that there is no water in the immediate proximity, and the ship is swaying in the air. It has sails for oars that make it look like a bird.

“I hope you have no fear of heights,” Balerion says as he helps her in the boat. The seats are padded and comfortable, and there are railings she can cling to if necessary, but Aemma isn’t very bothered by the height. In fact, she feels quite at home, as she always has. Towers and cliffsides always made her feel at ease; the higher and windier, the better.

“I’m an Arryn,” she tells him as if it explains everything. For her, it does. Balerion smiles.

“One with Targaryen blood, too,” he agrees. “Both meant for the sky.”

He’s not wrong, but it makes Aemma feel a pang of—something. It’s not quite jealousy, but she knows she should have had a dragon. Her mother was a Targaryen, and so was her husband; even if she was an Arryn by name, it was her birthright all the same.

She chases those thoughts away. No point dwelling on them anymore.

The boat sways comfortably as a translucent, robed shape appears at the steer, and then they’re sailing through the sky. Aemma grips the side and leans over ever so slightly, mindful of the height but excited with it all the same, and she notices Balerion shift ever so closer, ready to catch her should she lean over too far, but she doesn’t mind. With the wind in her hair, nostalgic enough to bring tears to her eyes with a memory of a better time, she feels as if she could fly on her own wings.

“Careful,” Balerion chides. “The fall down would be rather unpleasant.”

“I’ll be fine,” she insists. “It’s not like I can die. I’ve done that already.”

Balerion levels her with a flat look and sighs.

“Your soul is precious, don’t fray it,” he tells her instead. His eyes widen as he does, and he immediately turns his head away and coughs into his hand. “I meant, be careful. The impact would be very unpleasant… And detrimental to your overall experience…”

She thinks she glimpses a dusting of pink on his cheeks before he turns fully, but it very well might’ve been the light. Given his bashful tone and stumbling over words, though, it likely wasn’t.

Still, she chuckles, and can’t help but tease a little; “Do you warn everyone of that?”

“...no,” Balerion says, pointy ears only coloring deeper. “Just you.”

Aemma smiles. “Thank you for your concern. I’ll be careful.”

○

“Is there something on your mind?”

“You’re not what I expected.”

“And what did you expect?”

“Something less… Kind.”

“I can be many things. An old, expected friend, or the greatest enemy. A bringer of respite, or a herald of tragedy. Ultimately, it hinges entirely on the one who dies, how they perceive me. I’ve been cursed and spat at and sometimes even attacked by many who I greeted. Especially in the wake of Doom. What am I to you?”

“Escape. Relief, from the role I was pushed against my will… Oh.”

Balerion nods. There’s something sad in those red, slit-pupiled eyes when he looks at her. Aemma supposes that’s fair.

○

They get off the boat on one of the shattered isles, lush with a garden full of fruits and vegetables and mostly devoid of flowers. They walk a path fenced on each side with an orchard of trees heavy with nearly-ripe fruit, and Aemma knows most of these fruits. There’s apples and oranges and lemons, but she can’t help being drawn to a tree with serrated bark and spiky leaves, full of fruit that look like flame, pink at the core and yellow at the tips.

“What is this? I have never seen a tree like this before.”

“It’s dragonfruit,” Balerion tells her. “They grow in much warmer climates than where you lived.”

“Is—Is it actually called dragonfruit?” Aemma looks at him, confused. Surely, he’s pulling her leg?

“Yes,” he chuckles. “You want one? They’re ripe.”

“I—Uh, is it okay?” she asks, a little startled.

“Of course. She won’t mind,” Balerion says and reaches to pluck one of the fruits.

“She?”

“Meleys,” Balerion says as he digs his claws in the fruit, splits it in two. “Oh, it’s the white one!”

Aemma takes one half, and then blinks. “Meleys?”

“Don’t worry about it. If anything, just blame me. She never stayed mad at me for long,” Balerion says with a cheeky smile and Aemma can’t help but huff out a laugh. She looks down at the fruit in her hands, at the white flesh dotted with black seeds. Looks back at Balerion, who flips his half inside out to eat it, and tries to copy him, if clumsily. It’s good, the fruit. Sweet but mild, with an interesting texture. She thinks she quite likes it.

○

They find her on her knees in the dirt, elbow deep in rows of bushes full of heart-shaped red fruit Aemma doesn’t recognize. She doesn’t seem to notice them at all at first, but as they approach closer, she slowly rises to her feet, and turns to face them.

Her eyes are blood-red, though deeper and darker than Balerion’s, whose shine almost sinisterly. Hers are darker, slit-pupiled still, a little tired and a little warm. Her hair is in messy waves and just as red, held in a high bun with gilded sticks and ribbon, and on her head, a crown of short and straight creamy-white horns. Her skin is tanned, like that of someone who spends most of their time outside in the sun, with a healthy flush on her cheeks.

She’s quite stocky, with a considerable bosom and more than a head shorter than Balerion. Her clothes are quite casual, though still embroidered with gold and patterned with silk.

Still, she looks—ordinary. High-class, and not really unassuming, but ordinary. The way Aemma knew Valyrian women often would in the Freehold. There are wrinkles on her face, and some hairs are sticking out of the bun. Aemma thinks she knows her.

“And here I thought it would be Shrykos or Morhgul causing trouble. Or Tessarion, like the last time. But you?” the woman says, quiring and eyebrow. Balerion smiles, more than a little strained.

“I wouldn’t necessarily say I’m causing trouble, you know,” he says, playing with the cuffs of his robe. It looks subconscious, but also a little nervous.

“Well, at least you brought a familiar face with you. It’s good to see you in person, Aemma.”

Aemma smiles. “Likewise, Meleys.”

Balerion holds a hand up, closed save for his index finger. Looks at Meleys, then at Aemma, then at Meleys again. “You know eachother?”

“We’ve met on occasion,” Aemma says with a small smile. She feels a little smug at his confusion. “I’ve been to the Crossroads before. With Meleys.”

“Oh,” Balerion says, and pouts a little.

It’s cute.

“Don’t be a baby,” Meleys chides, and turns to Aemma. “Now, I assume you’ll be staying here for the foreseeable future?”

“I—yes. Yes, I intend to.”

“Good, good. You’ll have a place by the end of the day.”

Quick, Aemma muses. But this is no longer the mortal world governed by the mortal rules.

“What would you like?”

“Somewhere pretty high up,” she says. Fidgets with her sleeves a little. “And with a garden. And small enough I can reasonably take care of it myself.”

“No servants, even at the start?”

Aemma remembers their pitying eyes and honeyed words, their blatant disobedience in favor of Viserys, even though she was their master. She was the queen.

“No,” she says firmly. “No I don’t need help, unless—”

“Unless?”

Aemma freezes. What was she about to say?

She looks around, confused. She’s missing something. She’s forgetting something.

“Aemma? What’s wrong?” Balerion asks, and she looks at him. God of Death. Because she’s dead. Because she died, and she died—

“Did the child survive?” she asks, and her voice sounds distant. There’s a feeling of foreboding creeping up on her the longer she looks at the gods. Balerion, especially. Aemma really doesn’t like his expression, because there’s really only one way to interpret it.

“Aemma—” Meleys says gently, reaching out.

“No,” Balerion tells her, curt and honest.

“Balerion!” Meleys snaps. “That’s too much!”

“She deserves to know. Better now than later!”

“That’s cruel!”

Aemma giggles, and it sounds distant and hysterical to her. “It’s kinder than I’ve been afforded before,” she tells Meleys, because it’s the truth. Others would beat around the bush constantly and tire her out. Try to make her believe things that weren’t true, run circles around her. Balerion’s honesty, though harsh, was welcome.

She sits down on the grass, a fair bit more forcefully than she intended to as her legs give way and fold under her, knees suddenly made of cotton. The bitter taste is back in full force, and it’s all she feels, rather than a small nagging feeling at the back of her throat.

More than that, however, her chest burns from within. It’s actually glowing, an angry orange shining through her ribs and skin, beating in tandem with her heart.

“I died for nothing,” she says, and doesn’t quite recognize her voice, and when she looks at her hands, now again fading, for a moment they don’t look like her hands at all. “He killed me in the worst way, he ordered me cut open, he who said he loved me—and it was for nothing?!”

She screams. Fuck propriety, fuck the rules. Fuck that ladies of her station don’t curse and scream. Fuck the world that used and abused her, and when she was no longer useful, threw her away like yesterday’s garbage. Fuck Viserys, most of all, that selfish, cruel, wicked creature that ruined her for his own enjoyment and greed, claiming to love her every step he pushed her closer towards her doom.

She can’t hear anything past her heartbeat and breath. She can’t see past the blur. She thinks there’s a rustle as something looms over her, a displacement of grass, warm hands around hers—

Red eyes, slit-pupiled and sinisterly bright, so full of concern.

When he pulls her into his chest, she goes without resistance. Digs her fingers into the silk robe, presses her eyes against the crook of his neck, and just—wails, and wails, until the bitterness on her tongue is a bit easier to bear, and she feels a little more real. Until grief gives way to fury, until the bitterness at the back of her throat becomes nigh-unbearable fire again.

And she seethes.

“If it’s any consolation,” Balerion says somewhere above her, close, voice reverberating through the chest she still clings to like a lifeline, “Viserys will die a slow and painful death, rotting from inside, having achieved nothing and having ruined almost everything.”

It sounds like a promise and a fact both at once. It sounds like a tiny bit of justice.

“Good,” Aemma spits out. “It’s what he deserves. For me, and for all my children.”

○

“Thank you for telling me,” she tells him later, when she’s calmed down a little more. Meleys has gone back to her cottage to bring them some tea and refreshments, leaving them alone to gather their bearings. Aemma doesn’t even have the energy to care that she’s still effectively in Balerion’s lap, glued to his chest. She needs that comfort, and he doesn’t seem to mind.

“You’re welcome,” he says. “Hurtful or no, you should know.”

“But… If the child died, where are they?” she asks as Balerion shifts, putting her back on the grass. Even as he sits shoulder-to-shoulder with her, she misses the touch. It made her feel more solid.

“Returned to Soulstream.”

“Soulstream?”

He points up, to the aurora radiating above them. “It’s life energy flowing through the worlds. All souls come from it, and all souls eventually return to it.”

“But I’m here.”

“And here you’ll stay, until you’re ready to go.”

“How long?”

“It varies between souls. Your child isn’t here, because newborns don’t have souls.”

Aemma blinks. “What?”

“Everyone is born with a potential to have a soul,” he says and raises his hand. A tendril of green energy curls around his fingers, forms into a ball. Flickers, and darts off up, into the aurora. “But not an actual soul. This needs forming of self-awareness, and then needs to be settled with self-actualization. Baseline is, the more of a person you are, the more of a soul you have. Your soul is, effectively, everything that makes you, you, that isn’t your physical body. Which is why some souls have enough staying power for millenia, and some fade after a few years. But souls are also a form of energy, so the body and mind both need to be strong enough to handle proper formation of one. Typically around six to eight years of age. Sometimes earlier, sometimes later—sometimes never.”

“But my child… They didn’t suffer, did they?”

“No.”

“Then I’m glad for that, at least.”

○

“You know, in retrospect, you were incredibly lucky Lyra’s body actually survived through her awakening,” Meleys says conversationally as she steps back into the living area. Aemma is fast asleep in the guest room behind, recovering after the revelations.

“You heard us talking about souls, I take it,” Balerion sighs.

“Yes. If she weren’t a homunculus, she’d be dead.”

“Uh. Thanks… For making her extra durable? I guess?”

Meleys chuckles. “You’re welcome. Was seven years your limit?”

“Yes. You know well how limited our powers in the mortal realm are. Her true soul was bleeding in from the very start. Without my interference, the dam would have broken in half the time—”

“Seven is an ominous number,” Meleys says, and Balerion closes his mouth with a click, eyes narrow.

“Do you think it’s an omen, then? Of—that thing?”

“I hope not. But its awakening approaches more rapidly than ever, and doom with it.”

Balerion bites his lip, puts a hand on his chest, over his heart. Feels the steady thrum under his fingers, staccato almost natural enough to fool him into thinking there’s a heart there. He knows better than to fall for it. “We won’t fail this time,” he hisses, clenches his hand into a fist, the silk of his robes with it. “I swear. The future the Waytree showed us—It will not come to pass. I won’t let it.”

“You already haven’t,” Meleys says gently, and takes his hand into her own. Unfurls his fingers, whispers away the black blood and the wounds he dug with his nails. “Your and Shrykos’ insane plan is working. Have more faith in Lyra. She’s one driven creature of chaos, especially now, with that wicked dragon of hers. She will fulfill her mission splendidly, I know it. And even still, this isn’t just your disaster to stop. We’re all here, all fourteen of us, all that is left, exactly for that. None of us stands alone.”

Balerion chuckles, and it sounds a little wet. “Thank you. For looking out for me. For us. You don’t have to. Mother is—”

“Pah, I know! But even if I didn’t promise her to take care of you kids, I still would. It’s what I do.”

Balerion smiles. There’s comfort in that; that despite everything, despite all they’ve been through, Meleys remains the same. Even though she lost more than most, she still finds it in her to hold her head up high, and to lift others up.

And he? He failed to even die properly.

But if they managed to turn the tide, even his failure would have served them. He’d hold onto that hope.

○

Aemma isn’t sure what possessed her to ask for her new dwelling to look like Meleys’ courtyard the very last moment she could, but she did, and so it now stood before her; an imposing wall with blue shingled roof and a gate in the middle, pale blue wood with Arryn crest on the double door and chimes hanging from the supports.

She thought the gods would be offended for her not including targaryen sigils anywhere, but nobody seemed to mind, or even remark about it.

It’s smaller than Meleys’, of course, as per her wishes. The courtyard is accessible immediately behind the gate, fresh soil to be worked. The main building is adjacent to the gate, flanked by two smaller ones on either side. It’s pretty small; enough for one person to reasonably manage, though not so small that few guests would overcrowd it.

Rural Valyrian Courtyard, Meleys has called it. After the Doom, Valyrians from rural areas fled to Yi Ti, taking the style with them, and it’s been used there since, in common houses and grand estates.

She can barely see Waytree from here. It’s for the best.

“Do you like it?” Meleys asks as she comes to a stop next to her.

“Yes,” Aemma says, taking a deep breath. This is her home now.

Hers.

Not her fathers, not her husbands, not nobody else’s—her own, with which she can do whatever she pleases, free of rules she doesn’t herself make and influence of others she doesn’t welcome.

She’ll need a moment for it to skink in.

“Are you certain you don’t want an attendant for the first few weeks?” Balerion asks as he comes to a stop next to her. “You’re making a pretty big shift from being waited on hand and foot to living completely alone.”

“I’m certain,” Aemma insists. “I want to try, at least. I’ll tell you if I can’t make it. But I’m healthy now, and I’m sure I can keep myself fed and clothed in a clean home by myself.”

Because her servants always answered to everyone but her. Because she was never strong enough to do anything for herself, stuck between being pregnant and recovering from it.

“I will leave you to it,” Meleys says, her duty done.

“Yes, thank you so much!”

“Don’t mention it. And you should go rest.”

She’s right, of course. Despite her nap, Aemma still feels rather exhausted under all that excitement. She shakes her head.

“Soon.”

“If you’d rather rest, I can come tomorrow,” Balerion says as they both watch Meleys leave.

“I’d love to rest, but I’d like to learn more about this place,” she says. “I, uh… I’d offer you tea, but I’m… I’ve never made any.”

“I can teach you,” he says with a small smile.

“Wouldn’t it be a bother?”

“Not at all! I’m not a master at it, but I know my way around a kettle at least.”

“Then if you’d be so kind.”

○

They sit in the kitchen with their tea and some snacks from the thankfully-stocked pantry.

“What is the Waytree?”

Balerion sighs. “Starting with the heavy ones, huh?”

“When I looked at it, it felt like… Like it was burning my very mind to ashes. Why is it here? Is it dangerous?”

“Yes, it does that,” he says and shakes his head. “It’s been here forever. It predates us. Its roots keep the isles afloat, and its branches stretch endlessly into the sky, each reaching for a different future, and its leaves anchor and sift through the Soulstream. We… Ah, we don’t really understand it. It’s been here before us, and it will be here long after we’re gone.”

Aemma mulls it over for a moment. “So you don’t know anything about it?”

“Just that it’s ancient and powerful, and either responsible for the cycle of life of the world, or feeding on it. It’s a coin toss, really.”

“That’s… Not reassuring.”

Balerion shrugs. “I’m sorry I can’t tell you more about it. We don't even know how to begin describing it. Once, Tyraxes tried to channel its power. It… Changed her.”

“The Flower Maiden?”

“Yes. She—has gone completely insane. Hungry, unpredictable, violent. Grew a third eye on her forehead, and I still can’t decide if she’s creepier in a haze, or when lucid. But she’s the only one who can decipher the Waytree to any degree.”

“And what needs deciphering there?”

“Possibilities,” he says. “Future, and how to alter it.”

Aemma looks at him. “And have you?”

He nods. “For the first time, we succeeded. Tyraxes said the futures she’s been seeing these days are vastly different than before. Typically, very little changed no matter what we did.”

“And… What exactly did you do?”

Balerion smiles, half-terse and half-mischievous. “Brought a soul from another world into this one.”

“I—What? How??”

“It’s really simple,” he says. “We, Shrykos and I, I mean, opened a pathway to another world, and let a soul from there come here. Since it came from a fundamentally Other place, it didn’t join and assimilate into the Soulstream, which allowed us to instead put it into a new body from the get-go.”

“But you said that everyone forms their own soul. Wouldn’t—If you put another soul into somebody, wouldn’t that cause problems?”

“If they had a soul, yes,” he agrees. “But it’s fairly common that when a woman conceives, the child is not granted any soul energy at all. In that case, she’ll simply miscarry before she even knows she’s pregnant, and nobody is any wiser. We used one such case to house our otherworldly soul, so that this is the only soul in the body.”

“If the soul is fully formed, how does that work then?”

“Well, in this case, and in this case only because we’ve done it exactly once, the soul lay dormant with some slight bleeding of memories until it awoke, all memories of past life recovered. Sadly due to the nature of the soul, that includes the way they died in perfect clarity.”

Aemma shudders. She barely remembers flashes and that’s bad enough.

“Who is it?” she asks, curious. “I mean—You don’t have to tell me if it’s a secret, or something!”

“It’s not, not really,” Balerion shrugs. “Everybody here knows. It’s Daelyra Targaryen.”

Lyra? Daemon’s Lyra?

This—

“You said she remembered her past life?”

“Yes.”

“At… Around seven years old?”

“Yes…?”

“This… Explains a lot about her, actually. How are you planning to have her alter the future?”

“Just existing, really.”

“But past that. What is she here for?”

Balerion shifts, a little uncomfortable. “We need her to prevent the mass-dying of dragons.”

“Hm… Makes sense,” she says, and decides not to press, even though his reaction begs to ask many more questions.

She yawns. It startles her, and she covers her mouth quickly. Balerion chuckles.

“I won’t keep you any longer,” he says, and finishes his tea in one big gulp. “We will have plenty of time to talk later once you’ve settled properly. How do you find afterlife so far?”

“Very nice,” Aemma says. “Everyone is friendly and I’m not in pain, or in much danger. I don’t have to see people I don’t want to see… And I don’t have to follow strict etiquette. And uh… I meant to say it earlier, but I apologize for crying on your silk robes earlier.”

Balerion pats his chest and chuckles. “Don’t worry about it! You needed help, and that’s that.”

“Thank you.”

“You’re welcome. What do you plan to do now, if you don’t mind me asking?”

“I don’t. You answered my questions after all,” Aemma says, “For now, I should think I would enjoy some solitude. Learn to live, by myself, for myself. Find some interests that are my own. But firstly, go to sleep.”

“Very reasonable.”

“Of course, you’re most welcome to visit whenever you’d like!” she says hastily, and her cheeks color a bit. “Should you like that, of course. And—And Meleys, too,” she adds a bit lamely.

Balerion chuckles again. “I will visit soon, don’t worry. I enjoyed our conversation, and your company. But for now, you really look like you could use some sleep.”

“I did too. And yes, I will, don’t worry. Thank you again, for… Everything. Leading me here, and—”

“Don’t mention it.”

Aemma doesn’t, she just smiles at him instead. It might be a little too wide a smile to be polite, but it’s real and she thinks that’s what matters the most.

She waves after him as he retreats, and he waves back, and then he’s gone. Aemma tries to not miss his company too much.

#ttad #the thing about dragons #hotd fanfic #hotd fanfiction #aemma arryn #balerion (god)#meleys (god)#shrykos (god)

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