Chapter Text
Aemond
The rain had been falling for so long that Aemond had stopped hearing it.
Maybe that was what made him feel like he was floating outside of time, more than the cold or the exhaustion, like the storm had always existed and always would, not caring about anything happening below it. It ran down his face, stuck to his eyelashes, slipped under the leather of his collar and onto his skin. His fingers, numb around the reins, barely felt like his own anymore.
The weight of his soaked clothes should have bothered him. But up on Vhagar's massive neck, none of it felt real, like it belonged to some other guy, in some other body, far away from this storm.
Beneath him, the old dragon cut through the storm like she barely noticed it was there. Every wingbeat hit the air with a quiet, almost arrogant force, like she'd always flown this way and nothing, not the wind, not the lightning, not the black sea flickering in and out of view far below, could actually change how she moved.
Aemond put a hand against her scales. Even in the rain, they were warm. Maybe that stubborn warmth, in the middle of all this cold, was what brought him back to himself.
"Dohaeras" he muttered through clenched teeth, without much hope. He already knew the word would get lost in the noise.
Vhagar answered with a low growl he felt in his bones. But she didn't slow down. She never fully obeyed. Not him. Not anyone. He'd given up expecting anything else from her a long time ago.
Ahead of them, Arrax was struggling.
The young dragon kept disappearing behind sheets of rain. Every time lightning lit him up, it was only for a second, just long enough for Aemond to catch the pale blue of his wings before the dark swallowed him again. From here, Lucerys was barely more than a shape strapped into his harness, tiny against the size of the sky and the sea. And still Aemond's eye kept drifting back to him, over and over, like he couldn't help it.
Then lightning split the clouds, closer this time, and for one second the whole world went white.
Storm's End flashed behind his unique eye, sharp enough that he might as well have still been standing there: the high halls lit by torchlight, the yellow banners with their black stag, Borros Baratheon's booming laugh bouncing off stone walls. Then it was gone, all at once, and there was nothing left but the black sky, the black sea, and the memory of Lucerys Velaryon, enough on its own to twist something tight in his chest.
For years, Aemond had kept his anger close, almost like it was sacred, feeding it, protecting it, keeping it intact the way other people keep relics. Every memory of Driftmark, every look exchanged in the halls of the Red Keep, every night the ache where his eye used to be had woken him before dawn, all of it had gone into keeping that fire alive.
But at Storm's End, something hadn't fit. Something refused to line up with the memories he'd worked so hard to hold onto.
Because Lucerys wasn't a kid anymore.
He'd expected to find the boy from Driftmark again. Round cheeks, too quick to laugh, the one who'd pulled a dagger in the dark and changed his life in a single moment.
But that wasn't who'd walked into the great hall.
Time had moved on without asking anyone's permission. His features had sharpened, the softness of childhood was gone from his face, and there was something in the way he carried himself now, a confidence that was still a little awkward, like the years hadn't quite finished smoothing it out.
A young omega.
That alone was enough to irritate Aemond, and he looked away toward the horizon while the rain kept hammering his face.
He remembered a time when none of this had felt set in stone. A time when they'd grown up together, the same hallways, the same lessons, the same meals. In his earliest memories, Lucerys hadn't been a rival or an enemy, just one of the many kids running around the galleries of the Red Keep. What Aemond remembered most from those years was being lonely. That constant feeling of getting left behind while everyone else moved on without him.
Aegon had Sunfyre. Helaena had Dreamfyre. Even Rhaenyra's younger sons had dragons. And he had nothing. Just the jokes, the awkward smiles, the pitying looks he hated more than open mockery ever could.
Someone had given him a pig once. Pink, fat, with little wings clumsily strapped to its back.
The boy with no dragon.
For a long time, he'd believed that the anger born that day was what had made him who he was.
Then Driftmark happened. A cold night, sea wind cutting across black sand, and that dizzy, almost unbearable happiness when Vhagar lifted off under the stars, so brief, so complete, that he'd kept it tucked away inside himself ever since, somewhere he hardly ever opened up.
And then, the chaos.
The screaming.
The pain, sudden, brutal, like his whole face had caught fire at once.
Even now, his body sometimes remembered before his mind did, and he'd wake up reaching for the eye that wasn't there, hearing the distant echo of screams in Driftmark's great hall, watching blood run between his fingers while his mother screamed and his family tore itself apart around him.
The Lucerys he saw in his dreams at night was still a little kid. But the one he'd glimpsed in the great hall of Storm's End, just hours ago, wasn't that kid anymore.
Lucerys had walked in soaked through, dark hair stuck to his forehead, still too young to get how easily fear shows on a face, and yet he'd stood up straight in front of Borros anyway, chin up, proud and stubborn in a way Aemond recognized without being able to call it anything but Targaryen.
His riding gear fit close to his body, the leather belt cinching a waist that was surprisingly slim, and every now and then the torchlight caught the pale silver thread stitched into his doublet.
None of that should have grabbed Aemond's attention. And yet his eye lingered there anyway, with an irritation almost as sharp as the unease underneath it.
The hall went quiet when he walked in. Then the Baratheon girls started whispering. Murmurs first, then looks, that particular cruel curiosity of young noblewomen who'd been locked up too long in a castle hammered by storms.
"He's quite pretty," one of them breathed, and Lucerys went red instantly.
Aemond saw it. The color rising slowly under his damp skin, and with it came that faint trace of nervousness mixed with the natural sweetness of a young omega's scent, something between sea air and citrus, impossible to ignore in the closed in air of the hall.
The gods handed out genders with about as much thought as they handed out storms, he thought, the kind of thought that always surfaced, and that he'd never quite managed to shake.
Most men were born betas and went through life without thinking much more about it. Among regular folk, alphas usually ended up as soldiers or captains, while omegas found their place caring for kids, looking after the sick, or working in pleasure houses. Among the nobility, though, centuries of turning these differences into politics, and generations of marrying alpha heirs to omega heirs, had blurred blood and gender together until they were almost impossible to separate in the great houses.
Aemond knew that shift well, because he'd lived it himself.
When he'd presented as an alpha, the reactions had followed all the same unspoken rules: the satisfied smiles from courtiers, the congratulations to Alicent like her son had just won a battle, the arms masters suddenly paying way more attention, and the way people's eyes on him had changed. Heavier. More calculating. Like his presentation had finally confirmed what everyone had been waiting for from a Targaryen prince since the day he was born.
It was strange to think that Lucerys had ended up becoming exactly what the nobility wanted most.
His mother was an alpha. So was Jacaerys. And for his whole childhood, everyone had assumed he'd follow the same path: a future Lord of Driftmark, a dragonrider, maybe a warrior.
Then came his presentation, and with it that nickname Aemond had always found ridiculous, the Pearl of Driftmark, like Lucerys Velaryon had ever had anything in common with some treasure locked away in a box.
Luke had finally looked at him.
And that was a mistake, because Aemond had never really stopped thinking about him since Driftmark, since the night a shaking kid had torn his eye out of his skull while dragons screamed overhead.
Borros kept talking. But Aemond couldn't hear him anymore. Just blood, pounding in his ears.
---
A bolt of lightning tore through the clouds.
Arrax got knocked sideways by a brutal gust of wind.
For a second, the young dragon seemed to lose control before steadying himself, struggling, while far below, the waves smashed against the cliffs in bursts of white foam.
Vhagar let out a growl.
Aemond felt the vibration of it run through his body before he even heard it, and he put a hand against her scales again, warm despite the rain, rough, scarred in places older than most noble bloodlines in the realm.
Aemond knew Vhagar better than any living thing.
At least, that's what he'd believed for a long time.
In his early years, he'd figured the bond between a dragon and its rider was something like obedience, a reward handed out to the blood of old Valyria, and he'd spent years fighting the dragon the way a kid might fight a storm, trying to wrestle it into submission.
Their first flight had nearly ended in disaster. Vhagar had dropped into a brutal dive toward the water, less interested in killing him than in testing his nerve, and he could still remember the taste of salt in his mouth the second he thought he was actually going to fall.
Then came the injury, months away from the Dragonpit, months spent scared she'd forget about him, and when he'd finally come back to see her, thin and pale under his bandages, Vhagar had just looked at him with those enormous eyes and breathed out a wave of heat. Like nothing had changed at all.
It took him years to figure out why she'd accepted him. At first he'd thought it was courage, or rage, or the blood of Valyria.
He'd been wrong.
After Laena, Vhagar hadn't wanted a calm rider. Or a satisfied prince.
She'd picked a mind that couldn't rest, a wounded kid looking at the world with a hunger big enough to match her own. Older than the walls of King's Landing, older than most of the bloodlines in the realm, Vhagar carried memories that stretched back to what people already called History, and Aemond could steer her, suggest a direction, share an intention, but he never really controlled her.
Targaryens liked to say they were the masters of dragons. The dragons probably had no clue that's how the story went.
Some nights, feeling the enormous heartbeat of the dragon under him, Aemond got the distinct feeling the two of them had made some kind of deal, except neither of them actually knew the terms.
Vhagar's anger wasn't his.
He got proof of that a second later, when Arrax suddenly pulled up in a flash of lightning and a small burst of flame shot from his mouth. Tiny, almost pathetic. A single jet of fire lost in the size of the storm.
For Vhagar, that was enough.
The old dragon roared and dove.
"No!" Aemond shouted, yanking on the reins. Too late.
The world dissolved into a mess of wings and scales. Massive jaws snapped shut in a flash of white, and a scream cut through the storm, swallowed instantly by thunder.
Vhagar pulled up.
For a few seconds Aemond couldn't see anything. His heart hammered against his ribs as he scanned the clouds. The storm had swallowed everything behind them, until another flash lit up the sea and showed Arrax falling, one wing hanging at a weird angle, his body rolling through the air like a ship that had lost its mast.
Even from here, Aemond could see dark streaks on his blue scales. And still the young dragon kept beating his wings, stubbornly, and Lucerys was still there, still strapped to the harness.
The dark swallowed them again. It felt like forever.
Then another flash showed the coastline, the cliffs of Storm's End rising out of the night like the walls of some forgotten kingdom, and between two slabs of black rock stretched a narrow strip of sand, getting pounded by waves.
Arrax hit it.
The impact threw up a wall of water and sand, and Aemond flinched without meaning to.
The young dragon lay still for a second, his shape almost lost in the rain. Then, slowly, he lifted his head.
Still alive.
A shape slid off his back. Lucerys dropped to his knees in the wet sand, waves breaking against his legs while he fought to catch his breath. Even from here, Aemond recognized the way he pulled himself up. That same stubbornness. That same refusal to stay down. He watched Arrax fold his injured wing around himself, struggling with it, while the boy pressed a hand against his neck.
For a few seconds they just stayed like that. Tiny under the storm. Almost swallowed by the size of the cliffs and the sea.
Alive.
Aemond watched them without really knowing what he felt.
For years, Lucerys had taken up a huge amount of space in his head, becoming more than a cousin, more than a rival, the container for every humiliation, every injustice, every bit of anger Aemond had refused to let go of. And yet, looking at that distant beach, no victory came. The night swallowed them for good, and Aemond kept staring at the horizon for a long time, but the storm gave him nothing back.
He finally looked away and laid a hand against Vhagar's neck. She kept flying north with the same calm power as before, like nothing important had happened, like two lives had just disappeared behind them without the world already starting to change.
---
Vhagar cut through the storm clouds with that huge, unhurried ease that only belongs to creatures who don't fear anything in the world of men.
Below them, Blackwater Bay kept disappearing under sheets of rain before flashing back into view, black and choppy. The cold wind pressed Aemond's hair flat against his forehead, but his mind kept drifting back to the beach. To that shape kneeling in the wet sand. To Arrax folding his injured wing.
He clenched his jaw and looked away toward the horizon.
The war had been coming for months. He'd wanted it. Prepared for it. And yet something about tonight felt off, like the world had quietly shifted under his feet.
Vhagar gave a low growl and changed altitude, and the last clouds thinned out ahead of them.
King's Landing showed up.
Aemond sat up straighter in the saddle, and a small wave of relief passed through his chest, brief, almost embarrassing, and it didn't last, because the closer they got, the more something refused to match what he expected to see.
There were too many lights.
The bay was still his. The hills too. But the city seemed to have spilled past its own edges. Whole districts now stretched out where he remembered fields. The docks looked twice as wide. The streets denser. Like King's Landing had grown while he was gone, without asking his permission.
The familiar smell drifted up to meet them. Burnt wood, fish, forge smoke, the river. And yet something here too refused to match his memories.
His gaze drifted toward Rhaenys's Hill, then stopped.
The hill was there. The slopes, the walls, the paths, everything seemed to be in place. Except the Dragonpit. It was just gone.
Where that huge dark stone dome used to stand, there was nothing left but broken walls, shattered arches, foundations swallowed by darkness. Houses and workshops had been built between the ruins, packed in among the stones, like the place had never belonged to dragons at all.
Aemond didn't move.
He pictured himself as a kid, climbing the steps of the Dragonpit, feeling the heat rising up from the tunnels, the sharp smell of fire, hearing the muffled roars behind the bronze gates and the clink of the keepers' chains echoing through the underground halls.
Those memories, at least, he knew by heart.
And none of it was left.
Vhagar slowed down and circled the hill, a wide arc, once, then again, and through their bond Aemond felt something unfamiliar in her. Not fear. Something quieter. The confusion of a creature running into absence where there should be presence.
Vhagar had watched dragons come and go through those vaults for over a century. She knew this place better than any living man. And now she, too, found nothing there.
Aemond put a hand against her rough neck and didn't say anything.
A city grows, he thought. Neighborhoods shift. Buildings fall and others take their place. That happened. That was just how things went.
But the Dragonpit didn't just vanish for no reason. Not without something huge happening first.
The thought pushed itself forward before he could stop it.
War.
Rhaenyra.
Had she taken the city while he was gone? Had the Blacks won?
He didn't like the idea. And yet it explained things. If King's Landing had fallen, the Red Keep could be occupied, and the men guarding it might not be his anymore. He had no intention of showing up at its gates before he understood what had happened.
Vhagar was already tilting east, and Aemond followed her gaze. Beyond the walls, where the last houses used to give way to wooded hills, a faint glow now traced rooftops and lanes. He frowned. That was where she usually landed when they stayed in King's Landing, an open hill, a few paths, bare rock. Now houses covered the whole slope.
"Ūndegon. Sōvēs ūndegon. Daor iā ābrar morghūlilaks vēzos" he said quietly. Higher. Fly higher. Don't let anyone see us.
The dragon answered only with a warm breath against the back of his neck. But she obeyed.
They circled slowly above the city.
One thing was for sure. He wasn't landing Vhagar in King's Landing. Not tonight. Not before he knew who was running things behind those walls.
His eye swept the lands north of the capital, where dark woods still stretched down toward the Blackwater, past the last houses. That would work.
He pulled on the reins, and this time the dragon obeyed without resistance, leaving the city lights behind.
A few minutes later, they were flying over a stretch of black trees getting tossed by the wind, branches gleaming with rain. No lights. No village. No road. Just forest, and quiet.
Vhagar picked the clearing herself, narrow, on top of a wooded hill, and branches bent under the force of her landing as the ground shook under her. For a moment, the only sound was her breathing.
Aemond stayed in the saddle.
Through the trees, he could still see the distant glow of the city, flickering in the rain like the fires of some massive camp.
Too many lights, he thought. Too many things that didn't look like anything he knew anymore.
He climbed down.
His boots sank into the wet ground, and the smell of soaked leaves replaced the smell of the sea, while behind him Vhagar slowly folded her wings.
"Kesīr umbās" he murmured. Wait for me. Stay here.
The old dragon had already settled into the clearing, a massive dark shape barely visible under the branches, only her eyes glinting faintly in the dark as she watched him walk toward the trees.
If he went into King's Landing, it would be on foot. Like a guy looking for answers. Not like a prince showing up on dragonback in a city that might not even recognize him anymore.
---
He went down the hill without looking back.
At first the forest felt as foreign as the city had looked from above. Paths he didn't recognize. Others that had just disappeared. Then the trees thinned out, lights showed up between the branches, and the first houses appeared out of the dark.
Aemond slowed down.
The woods used to stretch a lot closer to the walls. Now rows of buildings covered the slopes, workshops, sheds, small yards fenced with wood, and even this late, a few windows were still lit. He stopped in the shadow of a tree and waited, but no one seemed to be paying attention to anything. The rain had cleared the streets.
The houses smelled like wet wood, smoke, and cold wool. A line was strung between two buildings, and clothes were still flapping in the wind despite the weather. His eye landed on an old dark wool cloak. He grabbed it without making a sound and checked it over: damp, but still warm in places, like someone had hung it out not long ago, hoping for nothing in particular.
He threw it over his shoulders, and the hood swallowed his silver hair instantly.
Then he kept walking.
The houses got denser, the streets narrower, the noise louder, and King's Landing swallowed him up layer by layer. Lanterns flickering above doorways. Voices spilling out of taverns. A dog barking somewhere down an alley. Further off, a cart creaking over wet cobblestones.
Aemond walked without rushing, his head slightly down under the hood, and every street felt familiar and strange at the same time, like a half-remembered dream of the city he used to know, drawn by someone who'd never quite gotten the shape of it right.
Where small noble houses used to stand, he found nothing but buildings crammed up against each other. Swollen from years of wear and poverty. Some towers were just gone. Others leaned dangerously over muddy lanes, and the whole city seemed to have grown without any plan, choking under its own weight.
What hit him even harder was an absence he couldn't put into words.
King's Landing had always lived under the shadow of dragons. You'd walk out of a tavern and look up. You'd hear a distant roar over the river sometimes. Kids would play games guessing which royal mount was crossing the sky, and no one really thought twice about it, because it was just there, like the sun or the tide.
Now people kept their eyes on the ground. Their clothes, the way they carried themselves, even the way they talked, none of it reminded him of his King's Landing. His eye scanned every sign, every face, looking for banners, weapons, any sign of war. He found nothing. No black patrols, no green guards. Just an ordinary city living an ordinary night, indifferent to everything else.
He finally stopped in front of a tavern built into the side of Rhaenys's Hill, its wooden sign creaking in the wind, a red dragon painted badly, its neck twisted like a poorly dried eel. Warm light leaked through the half open shutters, along with laughter and the sound of a harp.
Aemond went in.
The heat hit him right away, thick with beer and smoke. Sailors filled most of the tables, a few women moved between the benches carrying jugs, and no one looked at him for more than two seconds. He sat down in the back, where the shadows ate up the candlelight, and let the noise of the room close back over him.
Standing on a table, a guy in his fifties was singing, short, lean, wearing a red coat worn out at the elbows, his fingers moving over the strings of a beat-up lute with a precision that didn't quite match the rowdiness of the rest of the place.
Every eye in the room was on him.
Two merchants at the next table were talking quietly. Aemond didn't try to listen, but bits of it reached him anyway.
"The Hand herself went south. Half the court with her," said one.
"The crown prince too. Him and his sons," the other answered.
Aemond's eye lifted slightly toward the blackened beams above him.
The crown prince. His sons.
Aegon had still been alive when he left King's Landing. So had Alicent. Daemon, Rhaenyra, their whole generation still crowded into the halls of the Red Keep and Dragonstone like lions locked in the same cage.
So which princes were they talking about? Whose sons?
Further into the room, a drunk sailor burst out laughing.
"Heard the drunk prince ran off with his brother again."
"Which one?"
"The youngest. Passed out somewhere in Flea Bottom with the singers and the whores, I'd bet."
A few men laughed. Aemond said nothing. Names he didn't know, in a line that was still supposed to be his.
The bard switched songs then, and the room slowly quieted down as he plucked the first slow notes.
"And Daemon Blackfyre raised the black dragon..."
A few heads lifted.
Aemond sat still, listening to the singer tell the story of a rebellion the way people tell old tragedies. Brothers torn apart. Bastards. Bloody battles. A black dragon facing off against a red one. Some of the patrons mouthed along with a few lines under their breath.
Blackfyre.
Aemond knew the history of his own family inside out. He'd read pretty much everything the library of the Red Keep had to offer. And yet he'd never read anything about that name.
When the song ended, a kid shouted from the other side of the room.
"Sing the dragons!"
A few men agreed. The bard smiled with a kind of quiet sadness.
"Ah. The dragons. You all love your old stories." He tuned his harp more slowly this time, then started. "The Dance of the Dragons. Over a hundred years ago..."
Aemond recognized the first lines. His father. The king. The start of the conflict. Then everything that followed drifted from anything he actually knew.
Rhaenyra became the Cruel One, eaten alive by ambition and rage.
Alicent got reduced to nothing but a green snake poisoning her king from the shadows.
Aegon II barely showed up. A few lines. Almost nothing.
Aemond felt his jaw tighten at these crooked songs sung for drunk men, at the way an entire generation had been flattened into court caricatures. He didn't move.
Then came his own name.
"And the One-Eyed hunted through the storm..."
A few patrons laughed before the line even finished, but Aemond kept his eye on the flames, not moving, and the rest of the song poured around him like cold water. By the end, neither side really won. Not the Blacks, not the Greens. Just fire, then blood, then silence.
"And so the dragons died."
The room stayed quiet for a moment. Even the drunkest guys seemed to listen to the last notes fade up toward the rafters.
Then a kid, sitting on the floor near the hearth, looked up.
"But how did the war start? Why did they all hate each other so much?"
The bard shrugged, the way someone does when they've answered the same question a hundred times.
"You remember Prince Aemond? The one eyed prince? And Rhaenyra's second son, Lucerys? Some say they died over the Gods Eye. But they never found the bodies. Not theirs, not their dragons'. Truth is, the war really kicked off the day those two princes disappeared. Each queen blamed the other for having them killed."
A few stifled laughs followed, and Aemond felt something go cold and tight in his stomach.
The two princes.
Him. Lucerys. Gone.
The world had already decided their story was over. And then the bard added, almost casually, retuning his harp again.
"Others say the princes just followed their gut and took off together somewhere in Essos. Free to live their lives, far from all of it."
A murmur of agreement ran through the room. Someone laughed outright, and the anger rose in Aemond's chest so fast he had to press both hands flat on the table to keep from standing up.
He waited.
He let the noise of conversation rise around him again, let the heat and the smoke go back to being just heat and smoke. Then he stood without a word and walked out.
---
The rain had stopped.
Between the black rooftops, the moon kept showing up behind torn clouds, throwing cold, broken light across the wet stones. Aemond made his way slowly through the lanes toward the northern gates.
He looked up at Aegon's Hill. The Red Keep still stood above everything, its towers cutting black shapes against the dark, a handful of windows still glowing behind the walls, the rest lost in shadow.
Aemond stopped for a moment.
He could see the red stone corridors again, the wind-swept galleries, the courtyards where he'd run around as a kid, his mother's rooms at the end of a hallway he could've found with his eye closed.
The fortress was still there.
Everything else was gone.
Around him, the city kept living. Laughter still spilled out of taverns. A door slammed somewhere. And no one looked at the fortress. No one looked at the sky. Maybe that was the hardest part to accept, in the end. Not how strange the world had gotten. How completely indifferent it was.
The city had just kept going, like an entire generation of princes and dragons had only ever been a brief pause in a much longer story.
He started walking again, faster this time.
"You walk like a ghost."
The voice was faint, almost lost in the wind, and Aemond stopped.
Under a low stone archway sat an old woman, surrounded by candles burned almost down to nothing. Her eyes, clouded white with age, seemed fixed right on him. Not on his clothes. Not on his face. On something only she could name. A necklace of small bones hung around her neck, ticking softly in the draft.
Aemond almost kept walking without answering.
Then she murmured, without raising her voice.
"I didn't expect to see a man from the old days still walking these streets."
He froze. The sounds of the city suddenly seemed farther away, like something around him had quietly shifted.
"What did you just say?"
The old woman didn't answer right away. She let the silence stretch between them with the patience of someone who's not in a hurry for anything anymore. Then she gestured vaguely with a wrinkled hand toward Rhaenys's Hill, half lost behind the fog over the rooftops.
"Dragons remember," she said. "Cities don't."
Aemond felt his hand close around the hilt of his dagger. A useless move. He knew that. But his body hadn't asked for his permission.
"The dead are restless tonight."
Somewhere in the night, a dog barked once and went quiet. The old woman raised her wrinkled hand and ran it slowly through the air in front of her, like she was running her fingers over invisible cloth.
"Time is a river," she said. "Men think they cross it. Sometimes, it's the river that carries them away."
Aemond blinked.
A cart rolled past between them, wheels grinding over the wet stones, just for a second. When the street cleared again, the old woman was gone. The candles still burned under the archway, their flames perfectly straight in the still air.
He stood there for a few seconds, staring at the empty space. Then he looked away and headed for the northern gates again, the bard's song coming back to him whether he wanted it or not, like a wrong note he couldn't stop hearing.
The two missing princes.
Him. Lucerys.
A story already finished in everyone else's mouths, reduced to a few crooked verses to keep a room of drunks awake. He walked faster, hands buried in the folds of the wool cloak, not entirely sure where he was going.
He needed to find Vhagar again. The warmth of her scales.
The low rumble of something alive that still knew who he was.