Chapter Text
The people of Dragonstone, from fishermen to the wealthiest merchants in port, watch the skies on a daily basis, and not just because their Old Dragon flies now only when he feels the rare craving to slaughter his meals for himself. The tithe per sheep is so generous many a shepherd still wish their lord hunts like he used to.
They watch because it is high time Dragonstone to start better living up to its name. Daemion Targaryen was an old man the last time anyone saw him as one, and his dragon shape just grows all the larger and more ponderous by the day.
In brothels and taverns across the island there are betting pools over which dragon shall awaken first. Visenya and Aegon's names contend as the favorites, for one is the eldest and the other the old lord's only son. Little Rhaenys has healthy odds.
Lady Valaena's low chances are not such a jest when one remembers she is half-Targaryen herself. She certainly commands better odds than her husband, Lord Aerion. Drunken sots put down his name as a cruel joke to goad ignorant sailors into doing the same, for any true child of Dragonstone remembers how his last attempt at kindling in inner fire ended.
All the island falls silent beneath Daemion Targaryen's shadow, for their dragonlord's thunderous bellow demands their attention.
Noble to dragonseed, they gape up in amazement. Most eyes water. Some, the old and the faithful, fall to their knees to thank the Fourteen Gods of the Flame.
There is Lord Daemion, old and vast. His scales, once stormy silver, have dulled to stone. Beneath his shadow wheel his heirs, all three dwarfed by his bulk.
The smallest, sleek and silver, must be little Rhaenys. Her siblings are near the other's size, for Visenya is only Aegon's elder by a year. One gleams like burnished bronze, the other like obsidian. There is no way for their people to tell which is which. In the end it matters little, only that the dragons are three.
Lord Daemion bellows once more, a thunderous sound all of Blackwater Rush shall hear. His grandchildren take up his call, high and shrill, and the morning sky once more knows the song of dragons.
That day Lord Daemion circles the island thrice, and never flies again. Mere weeks later he is found sleeping the long sleep in his cavern, his hide already growing cold.
Lord Daemion dies a dragon, as all true lords and ladies of Dragonstone do. His body is far too vast to move, so the funeral comes to him. Mourners polish his scales and trim his talons a final time, even as others burn incense to ward away the flies and a pungent rot that overpowers oven the Dragonmont's sulfurous stink. A forest's worth of timber is carried in by ship and carried by hand to stack around him. All of Dragonstone come to mourn and pray and weep before his corpse.
His family come last, as is custom. Lord Aerion comes before his sire's body shrouded in fine black silk, his hair a silver curtain. His trappings cannot hide the limp and the tell-tale color of his eyes.
His eyes are a vivid violet, deeper than Lady Valaena's pale periwinkle, for in him the blood of old Valyria runs deep and pure.
Their children had such eyes, until they kindled their inner flames. Now their eyes are dragons' eyes, citrine and obsidian and amber.
After the last rites are made, Aegon as their sire's heir is the first to shrug off his mourning garb and unfurl raven-black wings. His sisters follow a heartbeat later. Already they have grown from the size of children to look a full-grown man. Soon all three shall surpass them forever.
As one they exhale flames of bronze and black and silver-gold upon his funeral pyre. The inferno burns so intensely the human mourners shy away from the sweltering blaze. Even Lord Aerion, after a scowl bordering on snarl, eventually retreats with sweat slicking his face and the tips of his silver hair singed. It consumes the Old Dragon's form in seconds and, after hours, renders even dragonbone ash.
No Targaryen is denied a funeral in flame. The men have their ashes entombed in urns of honor beneath Dragonstone's hallowed halls, amid the fire and earth. Yet their dragons are fire made flesh, sovereigns of the sky.
All of their house, man or dragon, stand vigil until the last embers. Only then do Aegon and his sisters bows their heads, and stand as human children once more, smeared in soot.
Lord Aerion, as his sire's son and heir, his closest human kin, is given the honor of kneeling in Lord Daemion's ashes to scoop his ashes into three ceremonial urns. Each one he solemnly passes into the human hands of his children. He looks not a single one in the eye.
Tradition demands the oldest dragon lead the procession, but all awakened on the same day. So Aegon marches forth from the cavern with Rhaenys at his left and Visenya his right.
Rhaenys is the first to fly, breaking away from her elders at a running start. Flame consumes her and she rises on silver wings, the sealed urn in her talons.
Aegon and Visenya surge after her. They match each other wing-beat for wing-beat, neither able to tear ahead. Black and bronze, so too do they still rival the other in size.
With a roar Aegon is the first to shatter the urn in his claws, freeing their grandfather upon the winds and the gods on high. They commend his spirit into the skies with song and flame.
A dragon, oldest and greatest of them all, is dead. Still do dragons fly.
Lord Daemion Targaryen ruled for nigh over forty years. His people forever and always hail him as their Old Dragon, near unmatched in age and peaceful prosperity, for he burned all threats that dared threaten their shore and their waters.
Lord Aerion, for all the dragon's blood in his veins, is no dragon. His reign, utterly unremarkable, sees only a decade, scarce enough for his children to grow into themselves.
Some smallfolk whisper to themselves Lord Aerion's health had finally failed him, others that his bitterness had eaten him from the inside out while his son and even his daughters grew as he other could. Others shake their heads and sigh it inevitable that Lord Aerion should only live half a live, for half of himself had never lived.
They are mere mortals, only the fortunate able to suspect themselves dragonseeds. They have no clue how dragons are born. All that matters is that they are not, and Lord Aegon certainly is.
After commending his sire's ashes to internment, one of Lord Aegon's first actions as king is to take both Visenya and Rhaenys to wife.
Propriety always calls for a dragonlord to take a dragon of his blood to wife if possible. Should no sisters have awakened, the eldest should be his bride, as is her due by birthright.
Visenya Targaryen is the oldest child of Lord Aerion. Until Aegon's birth she was his heir. She trained her entire childhood at his side in the arts of war and law and ruling. It is she who wields Dark Sister, while he holds Blackfyre.
Yet Rhaenys is just as much a dragon, if not more so. It is she who prefers sleep in the Dragonmont's sulfurous tunnels, who dances upon the wind and weaves wonders of flame for the sheer joy of it. There is no other dragon in the world, much less of their own blood, to match her.
So Aegon weds them both before the idols of their gods. A bit unorthodox, perhaps, but well within his right as lord and dragonlord.
All of Dragonstone watch with bated breath as Aegon first rises with Visenya in their nuptial flight. Lore and hazy recollection state dragons do not dance gently, but this is no dance at all. It is a war for dominance.
Aegon and Visenya snap after each other's throats and aim for hearts with fiery lances. There are no playful chases around the sea stacks or throaty laughter, only the furious shrieks of two beasts fighting for the upper hand.
Black and bronze, the dragons still near match each other in length. Aegon is far stronger, with thick muscle cording his neck and chest. Visenya is twice as fast and twice as vicious. When the two finally lock wings and talons in a grapple, she's the one spitting sparks into his eyes.
Locked together, they plummet toward the earth, and all of Dragonstone fear their lord and lady would kill themselves before either ever admits defeat.
Mere feet away from the sea, they finally kick away from each other, rising in a spray of steam.
Snapping after tails, the dragons chase each other back toward the Dragonmont. Together, they fall once more, to ferociously claim their wedding rights in skin and scales and skin again. Having long shooed their children inside, diligent parents now plug their ears with wax to deaden the screams and shrieks beneath smoking skies.
Dragonstone expects its lord to at least take a day to sleep off his first wife. Yet no sooner does Visenya finally fall silent does Rhaenys rise. From the volcano Aegon rises as an eager shadow.
For the first time in living memory, dragons dance. At times they chase each other's tails and race the waves as if children again. Others they rise in graceful spirals and nip each other's necks in ways only the fully grown can call... playful. Aegon flies free and joyous, as Dragonstone has never glimpsed him before, despite the bloody gashes from his first sister-wife searing red scars against his obsidian hide.
In culmination, they soar into the clouds. They plummet together, tails entwined and wings holding the other in what might be a final embrace, if they don't break away feet from the ground to rise up and do it all over again. And again, and again, and again.
Dragonstone does not rest easily until the dragons at last retire from the skies and the bridal chambers of the castle echo with far more human passions.
Before the eyes of gods and men alike, the marriages are valid and, Flames willing, blessed enough to refound all Forty Families.
There are no children, not even after a bout of sickness from a sailing ship at last commends Valaena Velaryon to the pyre.
Dragonstone does not know why. Visenya visits her brother's bed only to secure her place as the senior wife. It is not an honor even a dragon can hold forever, without the promise of an heir, much less a dragon-child.
Aegon does his duties with Visenya. Even the most critical servants know he does not shun her bed when she comes calling. If not from the older sister, than certainly the younger, for it is not obligation alone that brings Aegon to Rhaenys nine times out of ten.
What good are the last three dragons in the world, if they might prove to be the very last?
Aegon's naked ambitions are plain for all to see. He desires a legacy, but not the one that matters. He obsesses over painted tables with no borders where Lord Daemion poured over lineages for brides of dragon blood for Aerion.
Aegon is a dragon because he must be. He takes wing only to go where he pleases and burn all in his way. Where even Visenya prizes a satisfying hunt, Aegon prefers slaughtering sheep and cows in the pen, to conveniently feed his ever-growing bulk.
It is not a sudden love of flight that sends him soaring across the realm to gaze upon the great cities of Oldtown and Lannisport.
When he circles the shores of Blackwater Bay, it is not an aurochs he hunts for.
Outside the shadow of Harrenhal two kings convey under the banner of parley. One claims domain over the isles and rivers, and the other the entire continent.
Harren Hoare is old and gray, but still a formidable sight in his black armor, his face cruel and cragged as the islands his line hails from. His eyes are dark and hard. His blade has run with the blood of many a rebel river lord, and his crown is iron as his heart.
Aegon Targaryen stands a head taller. His only armor is a shirt of his own black scales, for a dragon needs no more. His crown is Valyrian steel, same as the blade Blackfyre buckled at his side. He could be called a handsome man, if his obsidian eyes do not reveal him as anything but.
Gazing into those midnight eyes, it is no longer quite so hard for Harren to reconcile this pasty pretender with the black dread that circled his towers just that morning. Yet Harren is of the black blood, the seed of the Grey King. His Drowned God has slain the great Nagga, and this dragon is not even borne of the sea. Even a mighty flame is doused by the might of the sea.
Aegon's offer of peace is to confirm Harren as Lord of the Iron Islands, provided he yield his pride and crown. The terms are so generous a blind fool could see through them.
"What is outside my walls is of no concern to me," he sneers at last. "Those walls are strong and thick."
They both know not even a dragon can take Harrenhal by siege. Harren's hall is a work unmatched by any king that has and will ever rule. His line can weather the years like the isle does the storm. Well-stocked supplies not withstanding, there is room aplenty in his yards to farm his own damn food.
"But so high as to keep out dragons," Aegon intones in a voice of iron. "We fly."
All the better to put an arrow through your eye, you fucking overgrown bat.
But that is too provocative, no matter how flimsy their peace banner is.
"I built in stone," Harren sneers instead. "Stone does not burn. Try my walls until your flame goes out."
Aegon bares his teeth. Even in man-shape, they are far too sharp. "When the sun dies, so shall your line."
His voice rumbles the earth. Harren laughs in the dragon's face as he has laughed at the wrath of the Storm God. "And your skull shall watch the sunrise mounted above my throne."
The King of Isles and Rivers retreats behind his walls. He readies archers and trebuchets. Bonfires are readied along the walls, to turn day to night. His bowmen each fletch their arrows in signature colors, for the won who scores the downs the dragon shall win the riches and daughters of the rebel riverlords.
The King of All Westeros orders his men for the evening attack, to slaughter the remnants of Harren's forces like ravens upon the dying. In private his commanders beseech him to take a bevy of archers astride him, a party to give their lives for him if he's forced to land.
"I am a dragon," Aegon growls at them, "and I suffer no riders save my sisters."
The dragon-king strides forth from his tent. His Dragonguard press the men back. The black fire that consumes their king claims the entire field. When the flames resolve into their final shape, Aegon's wide wings cast distant Harrenhal in shadow.
Dragons never stop growing. At the end of his life Lord Daemion is said to have been able to have elephants ride down his gullet. Aegon is a young man, full in his prime if not his fire. He devours whole horses, the old and lame garrons pillaged from the front.
It takes an army in itself to fit this shape in armor. The black Valyrian steel is scaled like his hide. Aenar the Exile carried it with him in his family's flight from the Freehold. There is no other material world lightweight enough to adequately protect a dragon's form. Not even Aegon can commission a new suit, for the secrets of forging Valyrian steel died with its smiths and sorcerers.
When the last of the sun sinks above the horizon, Aegon spreads his wings and rises. His dark shape vanishes into the clouds.
Rivermen and ironmen watch the skies. They expect him to fall upon the walls, to rend them open for his army to let them do the dirty work of storming the castle.
Down the dragon dives. He falls upon the tallest tower, where King Harren and his sons reside. His flames, black streaked red, devour them and their defenders in seconds. When Aegon rests his bulk upon what will forever forth be the Kingspyre Tower, the melted stone shifts like molten glass.
Next he falls upon the future Widow's Tower, the Wailing Tower, the Tower of Ghosts and the Tower of Dread.
When the morning dawns, Harren's pride is a misshapen ruin. Harren himself is ashes, indistinguishable from the many, many piles of where once sons and servants and supplies.
The battle when the Kings of the Rock and the Reach unite is the only occasion the realm shall see its dragon-king and his sister-wives all take to the fire. The line of Garth Greenhand, unbroken for eight thousand years, perishes with King Mern and all his sons and nephews and cousins.
The survivors of the Field of Fire shall always remember the spectacle of an inferno that blazed molten bronze and silver-gold and blood-streaked black. So too will their nightmares echo with the screams and the roar of flames and the smell of so many men and boys cooking alive in their mail.
King Loren Lannister cannot hold in his shaking when he bends the knee before Aegon Targaryen the very day after. He cannot look his new king in the eyes, for in their black, black depths all he can see is death and dragonfire.
Loren the Last shall be the last of his line to ever bear the name, for they cannot bear the shame of his surrender. The accounts of the Field of Fire are never properly appreciated, until the Dance of Dragons creates a terrible new precedent.
Aegon Targaryen looks nothing less than a man when the High Septon anoints him in holy oils. He is garbed in ornate black armor, a wine-red cloak draped over his shoulders. So he is crowned King of the Andals, the Rhoynar, and the First Men.
With his eyes closed in reverence, none can see the color. The crowd can almost, almost fool themselves into thinking he is the Warrior made flesh, and not the form of fire.
When he accepts, forever and always, the covenant of the Seven Who Are One, for a wild moment his people believe him reborn. If he opens his eyes as the Seven's they shall be the rich violet of his birth, or blue as the noonday sky, for he would have cast aside the heathen Fourteen, the fire and blood. He will be ready to set his sisters aside and take a maiden bride, for dragons can never hope to claim dominion over faithful men and women.
King Aegon Targaryen, first of his name, opens his eyes reborn before the old gods and the new.
They are black as obsidian.
More than half a decade after Aegon the Conqueror secures his kingdom, there is a son. Dragonstone rejoices their little prince and wider Westeros murmur anxiously, until news of the babe's true condition spreads.
Those expecting an egg or hatchling must be reminded dragons are fire made flesh, and so are born in it. But little Aenys is not a robust boy that promises to one day fly. No. He is small, with spindly legs and a high, reedy cry. His eyes are pale, watery lilac, so unlike the jewel-bright eyes of his alleged parents.
The foolish decry it as obvious proof that Rhaenys has cuckolded her own king with one of the Lysene singers or mummers she so delights in. Even those that remember Aegon's eyes as rich violet doubt a son of his seed would be so pale in color, without a spark to his gaze.
None ever dare say it to their king's face, of course. Rhaenys and Aegon stand over their son as legendary dragons guard their hordes. The queen deigns nurse her son, no matter the delay of trying for her second, for a dragon's child nurses from dragons alone. The smallest shadow of assassins sees Blackfyre drawn or, for the unfortunate that try their luck in open quarters, dragonfire.
When the Silver Queen dies in Dorne with an arrow through her eye, Aenys seems ready to die with her. He will not eat, will not speak, and once more crawls like a babe... or a beast.
With Rhaenys no longer around to defend her lies, a brave courtier dares venture to their grieving king if mayhaps the god are trying to tell them something... and dies screaming in dragonfire.
Dragon-shaped, and larger now than he ever was in the war, the Conqueror calls for his son. The deep, thrumming rumble shakes the bones of servants.
Heedless of the black beast looming in the courtyard or the smoldering corpse that had once been an agent of the Reach, Aenys scrambles to his sire on his hands and knees, his tunic in tatters. His frighten maids cower indoors as their little prince clambers onto the Black Dread's back as he once did his mother's.
For the first time since news of his sister-wife's death, Aegon spreads his wings, and flies to the Dragonmont. His Dragonguard keep back the crowds from ascending it, as their fathers did in the delicate days when Lord Daemion's grandchildren first disappeared from the public eye and emerged reborn. None need much convincing, the Dragonmont smolders as it has not done since before the Conquest.
Aegon returns the next dawning. He briefly plops down the pale white hatchling riding on his back, returns to human shape just long enough to order Visenya temporarily act in his stead, and retreats to the peak once more.
The next week sees a bemused Dragonstone watch the Black Dread teach his pale, ungainly son how to fly. Frantic courtiers that desperately want to argue against his choice of regent soon beat a hasty retreat, when their king orders the little dragon to fly after them instead.
The rumors die at last when the dragons return to Dragonstone. When the black and white fires die, there is Aegon with little Aenys at his side. Once again back on two legs, the prince smiles and babbles excitedly on about flying and fire-breathing to the knight that hastily throws a cloak over his nudity. His eyes are quicksilver.
Aegon returns to his rule. His household are the one left to deal battle with the little dragon prince prone to flying away from his tutors and accidentally setting his chambers on fire.
When Queen Visenya declares herself expecting a son the following year, the same subjects that openly accept this with nods and prayers for her and her child's well-being veil their inner doubts.
Dragons never stop growing, for they grow until they die. Their life is not measured in centuries or millennium. Just as Aenys continues to grow as a normal boy in his birth form, so does Visenya's frown lines deepen into crags and her hair becomes more silver than silver-gold. Never even having announced a miscarriage before, she is now of an age where even the most fertile mothers have either already fallen barren, or stopped for the sake of their safety. In taverns men jest if she'll try passing off a stone as her egg, or a wyvern for her babe.
Some moons after her announcement, there comes Prince Maegor, hale and hearty and twice the size of his brother at birth. Within a year he goes from nursing his mother's milk to chewing his wooden toys to nubs.
At age three, when Aenys first tripped over his wings, Maegor is granted his first sword and takes to training immediately.
By then it is common knowledge through the realm that all children born of dragons may not necessarily be dragons themselves. Lord Aerion had proved that all too well.
The kingdom prays Aenys the only dragon of his generation, that he will have no brothers to spawn beastly lines of their own. Their prayers intensify when the story of Maegor butchering a cat, however true or not, leaks into their towns and taverns.
When Maegor is eight, the question of his blood is answered by the black dragon found tearing into the throat of the palfrey who had kicked him.
The stable boy who went running at the animal's screams is hauled off to the maester with half his face burned off.
Aegon the Conqueror has little need of his dragon shape in the last peaceful, prosperous decades of his reign. Only occasionally will the people of King's Landing glimpse the herds of livestock driven in to sate his rare hungers, or fall under his shadow when he flies to bask in the warm of the Dragonmont on a cold winter morning. He devotes half a year to royal progresses in the tours and maintenance of his realm. His hosts must put on brave smiles only when his wings shadow their hall, when he partakes in a feast that requires dozens of sheep, a herd of horses or pen of cattle. The rest of the visit, they need only quarters fit for a king.
Aegon's shadow stops swallowing halls. He eclipses towns.
In his sixtieth year, he makes a progress to Winterfell. Observers note not only how their homes shook with his landing, but the many beatings of his ragged wings to thrust his colossal size into the air. Those who witness know it to be his last, for the next year he sends Aenys and his family out in his stead.
The oldest souls on Dragonstone know their dragon-king in his twilight years. Having passed on the brunt of his human responsibilities, he is free to forsake his human form altogether. Most of his line do, in the end, Aenar and Daenys and Daemion and a dozen others since the Doom. They will hunt as they will, snap at the humans and meddlesome grandchildren who infringe upon their territory, and retire to their quiet caverns in the Dragonmont to dream their last.
Those who wish the Conquerer to prove himself to a dragon to the end are bewildered when sightings of his second form grow even rarer than when travel necessitated it. Their last glimpse of the Black Dread is him lumbering up the Dragonmont without bothering to fly. He lays down, spreads out his black wings to absorb every last drop of sunlight, and naps. His snores rumble like thunder, like the towers of Harrenhal when he came down upon them.
The servants of Dragonstone see no shortage of the king. They find him napping in his solar where he once planned and plotted and staring out over the sea in the direction his ancestors fled from. Most often, he has grandchildren on his knee or clambering over his like kittens or swatting at his own stick with wooden swords they call Valyrian blades.
Aegon the Conqueror does not die alone and aloof in a cave, like Lord Daemion. Nor is he Lord Aerion, who withered away on his deathbed cursing the gods and dragons and his own blood.
Aegon has his grandsons, Viserys and Little Egg, at his side. They stare down at the Painted Table, enthralled by his tales of conquest.
When his ominous pause drags into prolonged silence, they turn, bewildered to find him seemingly asleep in his throne. Such is how the Stranger came for him, quick and calm.
Man or not, Aegon still dies a dragon. So does his body go with the flame.
Little Egg, now the only Aegon, has not woken his own dragon in time for the funeral. Rather than leave the honor to his mother, he wades into the ashes himself to carefully collect.
The first goes to Aunt Visenya, who was Aegon's sister-wife, and so has double the claim. The second goes to his father, King Aenys, and then his big sister, Rhaena, who came into her own just two years ago. The fourth goes to Maegor, with a face like stone. He divides the ashes carefully, because there's only so much even a king on a pyre creates.
It is Little Eg-- Prince Aegon who finds Blackfyre first, for not even dragonfire can melt Valyrian steel. His father lets him hold the blade, while he and Aunt Visenya lead the procession onward into the sky. Holding Blackfyre is a paltry prize in comparison, where even Rhaena gets to rise on her own wings to give their grandfather to the gods on high.
He'll rise like that soon. Aegon vows it.