Work Text:
Drogon
The great black beast flew through the night bearing the body of its mother.
From the smoking ruins of King’s Landing the beast banked east across the Narrow Sea. It wished to escape from the fires of in its heart—from its grief for Mother and its slain siblings—and from the touch of the mysterious Other—The Raven King--who reached, with small fingers, for its mind.
Come back, the Other said in its voice like dark feathers. Lay down your burden and all shall be well. But the beast did not trust the soft, withered voice or the lone burning eye that flashed red in its mind. When the voice came, it tightened its claws around its burden—Mother’s small, white form going cold in its grasp--and soon the voice faded with the strange hard land that Mother had tried to conquer and which had, instead, become her tomb.
The beast could not weep but it knew sorrow, and anger as red as the rising sun.
League upon league of ocean passed, specked with boats and lone atolls and obscure island chains. Ships pushed out from the cold lands and moved east in ragged bands, fleeing the war or seeking to plunder those who had. The beast longed to breathe fire on golden sails, and on the squid ships it saw scattered and straggling below. The Great Squid had lost all his tentacles and gone mad--and blind in his single, horrible eye. Now the smaller squids doddered across the waves like the witless sheep the beast had preyed on in the hills of Meereen. It thought of cooking the squid ships out of spite, for they’d dragged down its brother before the end. But time was short, and the squids would be dealt with, if not by other men, then by things infinitely more terrible. To the north and east, at the rim of the world, the slitted sun bloomed on an ocean of blood.
The beast hungered but it dared not stop, nor expend its fires on the sea creatures beneath the waves. It flew on and on with great, mile-devouring sweeps, its flight bending south east now, to where the sea grew warm.
At last, on a night of crackling lightning when the sky had drawn close with thick, purplish clouds, the beast smelled Sulphur and felt the spray of hot vents and knew that its destination was near. Mother’s body was cold and hard in its grip as the beast’s shadow raced over the Smoking Sea. Mother’s kin—and its own—had come from here and to these stones and sunken cities they must return. A voice, much stronger than the cold Other pulled them—a voice the beast knew as it knew its own fires. Great wings flapped as the beast landed on a cracked, rocky plain abutted by steaming waters and creeping jungle. Huge claws set Mother’s body down as gently as eggshells, letting her rest among a nest of smooth, hot stones.
Like the great city of men Mother had conquered, this land had died in raging fire. Settling down to coil about Mother’s body, the beast could feel the fitful rumblings of its death throes. An unquiet land. Vanquished and blasted, yet still seething beneath with tumultuous life. The beast had hunted here before and knew no-one inhabited it but strange animals and even stranger men. The beast had caught one of the men, once: a Wrong Thing, its skin as tough as stone. The beast had spat out the Thing’s undigested flesh and left it to rot as the man’s companions gibbered in their rags.
The beast could hear them gibbering now—far off and afraid around their pitiful campfires. It spared no further thought for them but nestled down beside Mother to wait.
It was long after the hour of the bat when the beast felt the approach of other beings. It smelled them first: hot and dry and living, their slippered feet padding softly over the round, uprooted stones. Their voices came next, singing low and darkly, rising and falling like the warm sea waves. Other voices, higher pitched, insane with pleading, tangled with the metal hiss of chains.
The dragon raised its head to look at them: the ranks of mortals in their blood red robes.
It had been days or weeks, maybe months, since the beast had fed as it was meant to--yet it merely watched as the red ones came on, picking their way carefully across the uneven terrain. They moved as though the land were holy to them, as if they dared not profane it by settling too long. They bore even their mewling prisoners lightly: the grey men dangling—drugged and defeated—from poles. A dozen prisoners, perhaps—but the robes numbered near a hundred. The beast remembered their scent from when Mother was alive. He greeted them with fire. Not in threat, but in welcome of long-expected kindred.
Zaldrīzes kari, their leader said, in a voice the dragon had known before. Valar dohaeris. She made a bow. Her red skirts blew soft and silken in the wind.
Her followers, men and women alike, moved with her, mirroring her salutation. The beast thought sadly of Mother’s previous protectors: the horse-lords and the Un-Men who had kept her safe for so long. They had loved her—even those who had killed her had loved her: the Little Man and the Not-Wolf who smelled of Mother and secrets…
The dragon, looking down on its companions, banished these sad and darkened thoughts. Mother’s death had other causes than petty betrayals and the fickle, fragile hearts of men. There were other forces in the world that moved men and armies the way the wind moved flame. The Other—the Feathered King with One Eye—was one—as was the thing he sat on.
The throne.
Here now, standing on this smoking island, were forces more than equal to such power.
The red priestess rose from her stately bow and placed a hand on her breast, beneath her ruby collar. The huge gem there blazed, its ember-glow expanding until it filled a hundred eyes with its fiery light. The chanting rose along with the wailing of the prisoners, and when the priestess spoke, she spoke in the dragon tongue.
“Valar morgulis.”
“Valar dohaeris!” Her congregants cried out in ecstasy.
She regarded Mother with reverent sadness. “Place the sacrifice around her.”
A column of men as powerfully built as horse-lords stepped forth and set the ends of the poles they carried into the ground. The prisoners bound to each tried to throw off their chains, but their captors had done their work well. The poles were secured in an upright circle, the beast glaring over it at Mother’s small body within. The prisoners’ screams turned to hopeless whining and prayers as the grey men succumbed to wild despair.
“Muñus! Muñus!” the red priests cried.
The priestess faced them and raised her arms.
“I am Kinvara, Light of the East!” A hundred torches blazed to light at her words. The congregants’ hair blew back in a wind as their brands ignited with a whoosh of heat. Even the beast, crouched just beyond the circle, where the bound men gibbered and prayed in vain, could feel the scathing warmth of the torches as if some greater dragon had opened its maw.
“Here lies one who served the Lord of Light!” the priestess cried above the lapping of fire. “Azor Ahai, the Promised One! A Hero of the People! Muña Zaldrizoti!”
““Muñus! Muñus!” the priests cried back—and: “Muña Zaldrizoti! Muña Zaldrizoti!”
“Slain by traitors!” the priestess cried. Tears smoked on her pale cheeks. “But she will rise! The Promised One shall rise! Let her cross over! Let her be reborn!”
““Muña Zaldrizoti! Muña Zaldrizoti! Muña Zaldrizoti! Muña Zaldrizoti!!”
The sea of robes swirled, the men and women weeping, tearing their hair and waving their arms. The priestess turned to the beast.
“The world shall be cleansed in fire!” she said. “Lord of Light: Wake the dragon from stone!”
The dragon did not know man-speech, but it knew, as a wolf might, the colors of words. It saw in its mind what the priestess intended and heard the power of Light in her voice.
It opened its jaws and the world whitened; the bound ones turned to screaming pillars of meat. They burned and Mother burned and the nest she lay on burned, and the beast roared and snapped above the flames.
“Only death can pay for life,” the priestess intoned.
She turned to her congregation and beckoned.
From the ranks, without hesitation or fear, seven priestesses emerged and removed their robes. They were naked beneath—dark or pale or golden, some with bare virgin skin and others marked with strange symbols. They had long hair and no hair and old flesh and young and they had, in their eyes, the madness of love. The beast’s hunger gnawed at it, but before it could lunge, two priestesses broke away and approached it in offering. The beast tore at them while the other five walked into the fire, their singing slowly merging with the roaring of flame. Chunks of flesh and blood rained on the pyre as the red ones performed the service for which they had been born.
Muña Zaldrizoti! Muña Zaldrizoti! Muña Zaldrizoti! Muña Zaldrizoti!!
The beast heard the chanting in its mind. Other priests were rising, throwing themselves on the fire, drowning in it while the distant sea smoked and shrieked. The storm that had been approaching all day broke open and lit the ground with white and purple lightnings--and burning men and women scattered across the landscape, stopping in their death thrones to curl around stones. The dragon, face battered with a strange dark wind that blew counter to the onshore wind from the sea, turned where it could and loosed its flame at the runners until the night blazed and the stones cracked open like skulls.
At last, when the heat had singed the hair from the priests (all save for Kinvara who stood firm and fast before those remaining), when nothing living could breathe the scalding air without magic and the ground had liquified and reformed itself like tar, the dark wind that had gathered swept down from the stars and doused the flames and all sounds of the world.
The dragon, sated now (it had feasted well on all the red fools who had dared come near), pushed aside the burnt sticks that had once been poles and nosed gently at the ashes within the circle.
Kinvara of the East turned to watch. Only a dozen of her priests remained. Like her they wore rubies at throat or wrist—and their light pulsed red as the ashes stirred.
The woman who emerged naked from the pile of char—from the bones and the blood and the flesh of the dead--had a shower of pale, shining hair and a face as beautiful as dawn.
She glowed in the smoky light of the morning, harder and colder than she had been—and her eyes, when she opened them to the world, blazed in her face as redly as fire and blood.
Mother. Mother had returned.
Daenerys.
She was not alone.
The first dragon crawled from the wreckage of the pyre, golden and copper, with its delicate fledgling’s wings. It mewled like a kitten by Mother’s leg and she picked it up and set it on her shoulder.
“Aegar,” she whispered. She held it up to Drogon and the beast nuzzled it, overjoyed to no longer be alone. A second beast already stirred near Mother’s feet—its emerald green scales glinting in the dawn.
“Azor Ahai. Mother of Dragons,” Kinvara breathed. She sunk to her knees as Mother turned. Her red priests followed reverently, heads bowed and waiting as the new sun lit the world.
Blood of my blood.
Their voices sounded in its head and the beast launched a joyful roar at the sky.
And from every corner of the island its cry was answered as the dragons came, woken out of stone.
Fin.