Chapter Text
A dragon lies dying before him. Behind its great scaled body, thousands more writhe on the dark ashen ground before lying still, the carnage stressing out as far as he can see. The sky presses down on Remm, clawed hands on his shoulder forcing his bones to crack. He tastes sulfur and rot.
Before his very eyes, the dying dragon’s skin peels off as if from great heat, and beneath it the blood boils inside the still-twitching muscles. From the ground, fourteen great serpents rise, each with eyes of fire and scales of gold. They coil the dying dragon and bite down into its burned flesh. A great roar of agony rips from its decaying maw as the black venom drips down from serpents’ fangs and turns into shiny, frozen gems.
Remm dares to reach out to the dragon, and all gold serpents strike him as one, and then, he burns.
***
Inside their ancestral fortress of fused black stone, lord Aenar Targaryen and his family crowd his daughter's bed as she writhes and cries in terror. The healer flutters around, confused and out of sorts. The girl seems trapped in her dream — a horrible, suffocating dream. Her skin is cold and getting colder under her father’s frantic hands, trying to hold her down from hurting herself in her sudden madness.
Daenys screams, “The flames! The flames!”, over and over again, until her voice gets soft and hoarse, until finally she falls silent, like her heart.