Chapter Text
There was no more perfect name for the princess Rhaenyra than the Realm’s Delight. She was a beautiful maiden, with a smile that made lords and knights catch their breath, and a silvery laugh that captured the attention of any who heard it.
When she was young, the servants and nobles alike were charmed by the sight of her running throughout the halls, gleefully rushing to clutch at her mother Queen Aemma’s skirts or tug her uncle Prince Daemon along behind her.
As she grew, bards composed songs of her beauty and grace. Knights and lords competed fiercely in tourneys to win her favor; all clamored at the opportunity to name her Queen of Love and Beauty.
The princess was never without her jewels and silks, but Rhaenyra was still a dragon under all her finery. She had a biting wit, which seemed to grow in sharpness the more her father hosted suitors for his daughter. She held a grudge and never forgot a slight. Her trust was hard earned and she cared little for the trivial gossip and politics that so often surrounded the court.
She claimed her greatest wish in life was to ride atop her Golden Lady Syrax forever and never touch the ground again—a dream she oft bemoaned to her only lady-in-waiting and friend, the Lady Alicent Hightower.
It charmed the realm, the princess’s love for her dragon. It was softer than how her uncle paraded his dragon blood. Rather than utter threats of fire and blood, seeking a fight around every corner, the princess simply doted on her mount and adored their time together.
The youngest dragonrider in history, and she and her dragon longed for the joys of flight rather than the blood of war.
The princess was a dragon, yes, but she was a golden beast. She was elegant and effusive, full of light and bit in equal measure.
And then her lady mother was slain in the birthing bed, for a son that would die mere hours after his mother.
The princess’s screams filled the halls of the Red Keep. Her agony was palpable, felt not just by those who heard her cries, but by the entirety of King’s Landing—her Golden Lady bellowed in empathy with her rider, her firestorm and roars reverberating from the Dragonpit throughout the capital.
The people mourned for the Good Queen Aemma, for the young son who soon followed her into afterlife, but they also mourned for the daughter she had left behind. The daughter who stood fast, draped in mourner’s black rather than the proud color of her House at her mother’s funeral. Who, as her father could not as he was dragonless, ordered her dragon to light the funeral pyre. Who only allowed a slight quiver of her lip and a single tear to betray her grief while her father wept openly.
Rumors quickly joined the funeral shawls in shrouding the queen’s death. Dissent grew, dividing those who believed the king had done his duty in ordering the maester’s blade, had upheld the crown’s responsibility to produce an heir. Others grieved the queen’s death, horrified that a husband would order a maester to slay his lady wife in the birthing bed.
The Rouge Prince heralding his dead nephew The Heir for a Day did little to quiet the reminders of how unnecessary the queen’s sacrifice was.
Loud proclamations labeled Viserys a kinslayer, a monster who had given the order with malice.
A position bolstered by rumors from the Red Keep that the Lady Alicent Hightower was seeking audiences with the widower king at sundown, staying in the king’s chambers until the hour of the wolf some nights.
Perhaps the king had been looking for a younger wife.
Whispers were quieted by the king declaring the princess his heir. Rhaenyra was named Heir to the Iron Throne, Princess of Dragonstone before the lords of the realm. Viserys sat the throne behind his daughter as all of the men he’d ordered to the capital swore themselves to her.
Perhaps the king did love his late wife. Perhaps her death was a horrible tragedy, enacted by a faulty order given by a desperate man. Perhaps he sought to honor Queen Aemma by ensuring her daughter’s place in the line of succession.
Only for the king to remarry less than a year later, before the mourning period was expired.
To the Lady Alicent Hightower.
The daughter of a second son, from a liege lord bloodline with no vital keep or stronghold or lands.
Who gave him a son the next year.
Those loyal to the princess swore the babe was much too large to be the age the new queen claimed. That he had been born only seven months after the royal wedding—that the babe had been hidden within the Keep, servants kept silent on threat of death, until it had been enough time to present him to the realm.
Those who rejected the very thought of a female heir said it was only a matter of time until the king named his new son his heir.
Afterall, he gave the babe the name of the Conqueror.
Amidst all of this—the betrayal of her father and her friend, the birth of the son her father had wanted so badly he killed her mother for it—the princess grew hardened. She knew the threats encroaching on her from all sides, the peril she faced within her own home, within her own House.
But it was not until the young prince’s egg hatched that the first blood was spilt in this war of succession.
By some twist of fate, the prince’s dragon emerged even more golden than his sister’s mount. Hightower supporters touted this as an omen, as a sign that despite the prince’s Andal blood from his mother, he was just as much a dragon as his sister—as not only had his egg hatched, but had revealed a more resplendent version of Syrax.
What the realm did not know was that the prince’s dragon was sickly.
All hatchlings are wiry little things, but Sunfyre as his grandsire called it was particularly small. The dragon refused meat, both cooked and raw. Rumors carried from the Dragonpit that the hatchling ate only from the princess’s hand. He hissed at any who approached; it was a coin’s toss if he allowed his bonded prince to touch him either.
A royal hunt was held in the Kingswood for the prince’s second nameday. The Hand insisted the prince’s hatchling be brought along. He claimed that as the young prince could not yet wield a bow, he could partake in the hunt via his dragon. The court knew it was more likely the Hand wished to quiet rumors of the dragon’s sickly appearance.
Otto Hightower sent the Royal Huntsmen into the woods, ordering them not to return until they found the White Hart. They returned having found tracks. He boasted loudly of the stag’s appearance as a royal portent for the prince’s nameday.
But when the royals entered the wood, the stag was nowhere to be found. In fact, it was not until morning that the beast was sighted—ferried in on a makeshift sled affixed to the saddle of the princess’s horse. She’d been escorted into the Kingswood by three Kingsguard around nightfall, only to return before the midday meal, bloodstained but victorious.
The White Hart had shown itself afterall. Just not to the prince.
The young dragon was dead by the prince’s third nameday.
When the Small Council debated what to do with the dragon’s small body, the princess Rhaenyra would hear nothing of it.
For the second time in her twelve years, Rhaenyra ordered her dragon to light the pyre for a dead loved one.
But it was not the passing of the young, sickly Sunfyre that had the princess’s screams echoing throughout the halls of the Red Keep.
It was instead a grief set off by a feeling only Valyrians would ever be privy to. Within the magic that bonded dragon to rider and rider to dragon existed a bond. A mystical tie between the two souls that heralded back to the days of Old Valyria, of blood magic and pyromancers.
A bond that Rhaenyra had felt since she was a mere seven namedays old. A bond that had grown with her, that had seen her through the loss of her mother, the strife of being named heir, the terror that grew with the birth of each half-sibling from the Hightower Queen.
A bond that snapped on that fateful day, mere weeks after Sunfyre’s death.
The princess fell to her knees in the middle of the Red Keep, wailing with pain and clutching her chest. Her handmaids cried for her to tell them what was the matter, but she could not speak, let alone explain what she now knew to be true without seeing any proof.
For all the talk surrounding which of the two golden dragons was more radiant, whose scales were gilded in more splendor—both were gone to this world within a moon’s turn.
And the princess Rhaenyra was left dragonless, and alone.