Chapter Text
Prologue
The night was clear enough to see every star strung over Dragonstone, and Daenerys stood at the edge of the cliffs where the castle met the sea, because sleep had not come and she had grown tired of waiting for it.
Tyrion would tell her this was foolishness, standing alone in the dark with the wind off the water cutting through her cloak. He would be right, as he so often was. But there was something in the old stone under her feet, in the black rock of this place her ancestors had carved into a fortress out of nothing, that made her want to be alone with it a while longer.
Below her, past the castle walls, the Dothraki had made their camp along the shore the way they made camp anywhere –fires strung out across the black sand, horses picketed in restless lines, the low constant murmur of a people who did not sleep easy on ground with no grass and no horizon. They had crossed the poison water for her. She did not think any of them would ever call this place home either, whatever else it became.
The Unsullied kept no fires. Thousands of men standing their watches in perfect silence, and not one of them needed the light. Somewhere along the wall Grey Worm would be walking the lines even now, checking the dark for threats that weren't there, because it was easier than sleeping. She understood that better than she let him know.
An army at her back, obedient and vast, and still she'd stood on the beach three days past landing feeling something crack open in her chest at the sight of black sand under her boots for the first time.
Home. She had said the word to Tyrion when they made landfall, as if trying it in her mouth for the first time, and it had not fit right. This was not home. Home was a word for people who had never had to leave.
A star broke free above her and streaked toward the horizon, brief and burning, and she thought of the tales Ser Willem used to tell her when she was small enough to believe every word. That a falling star was a wish waiting to be spent, if you were quick enough to claim it before it died. She had not thought of him in years. She had not let herself want anything so foolish in longer than that.
But the star kept falling, and the sea kept moving beneath her, and she was so very tired of standing on ancestral ground surrounded by tens of thousands of people who would die for her and not one who shared her blood.
I wish I were not the last of my house, she thought, before she could stop herself. I wish there were Targaryens beside me for what is coming.
The star died somewhere past the water. The wind did not answer her. She felt foolish almost at once, a woman grown playing at a child's game, and she pulled her cloak tighter and told herself it was only the cold that had put water in her eyes.
"My queen."
She had not heard Missandei cross the courtyard, light-footed as she always was, and did not turn at once – only let out a breath she hadn't known she was holding, watching it catch on the wind and disappear.
"You should be asleep," Daenerys said.
"So should you." Missandei came to stand beside her at the rail, close enough that their shoulders nearly touched, and did not ask what had kept her. She rarely did. "Grey Worm sent me to look for you when your chambers were found empty. I told him I would."
"And now you've found me."
"Now I've found you." A small smile, there and gone in the dark. "Come inside, Your Grace. It's cold, and there is nothing on this cliff that will still be here in the morning if you leave it a few hours."
Daenerys almost laughed – nothing that wouldn’t still be here, when the whole point of standing here was that everything else was gone, her whole house down to her alone with a foolish wish and a dying star. But there was no unkindness in it, only Missandei's steady patience, the kind she'd worn since Astapor, since before either of them had any right to expect kindness from the world at all.
"A moment more," Daenerys said, and Missandei, wise enough not to push, only nodded and drew her own cloak tighter and waited.
They walked back together across the black stone, past the torchlit gate, and somewhere behind them Grey Worm finished his circuit of the wall and found it, as it always was, holding.
She did not think of the star again until the next evening, when Drogon screamed from somewhere above the castle and she ran out onto the cliffs to find two unknown dragons crowding her sky.
Aegon had not stopped to change out of his mourning clothes.
He supposed that was fitting. His father was three hours dead and he was still in the black he'd thrown on when Otto's man had come to fetch him, and Sunfyre's saddle was cutting into his thigh through fabric never meant for flying, and none of it mattered because if he did not reach Dragonstone before his mother's council finished congratulating themselves, there would be a war before nightfall.
I don't want it, he had said to no one, to the empty corridor outside his father's rooms, before he'd gone straight to the dragonpit instead of the throne room. I don't want it. Rhaenyra can have it. Someone has to tell her before this goes any further.
He was not flying to Dragonstone for Rhaenyra's sake alone, though he suspected no one in King's Landing would believe him if he said it. He was flying for Helaena, for his children asleep somewhere in Maegor's Holdfast, for his mother whose fear had curdled into certainty, for Aemond racing after him through the dark because duty would always matter more to him than comfort.
He was flying for a house that had spent a century and more ruling the Seven Kingdoms only to arrive at this moment, poised to tear itself apart over a chair made of swords. If there was still time to stop it—if there was still time to keep dragon from turning on dragon and brother from turning on sister—then he had to try.
Sunfyre climbed hard over the bay, gold catching the last of the light, and for a moment Aegon let himself believe he might actually get away with it.
Then Vhagar's shadow fell over him.
He didn't need to look back to know it was Aemond. No one else flew like that, low and fast and furious, wringing every last length of speed out of the old she-dragon like he meant to run her into the ground. Aegon leaned into Sunfyre's neck and did not slow.
"Aegon!" His brother's voice, thin with distance and wind. "Aegon, turn back!"
He didn't answer. There was nothing to say that Aemond would hear as anything but treason, and he did not have the strength today, of all days, to be called a traitor to his face by his own blood.
Vhagar closed the distance anyway.
"Mother sent me." Aemond was close enough now that Aegon could hear the strain in it, both dragons banking hard over open water, wind screaming between them. "Turn back, Aegon, I am not asking -"
"Then don't ask!" The words tore out of him, raw. "Go home, Aemond.”
"You don't have a choice, you were never given a choice, none of us were -"
"Then let me make one anyway!"
Vhagar screamed, sudden and furious, veering hard enough that Aemond nearly lost his seat, and for one wild second Aegon thought his brother meant to fly Vhagar straight into Sunfyre's path and force the issue, the way he'd forced everything his whole life.
Then the sky simply wasn't there.
There was no cloud to explain it, no storm they'd flown blind into – only a seam of white-gold light tearing itself open across open air, silent, vast, close enough that Aegon felt it before he understood he was seeing it, a pressure behind his eyes like the moment before a scream.
Sunfyre shrieked and folded his wings against it on instinct, too late; Vhagar roared something ancient and furious that might have been fear.
Aegon had time to think, absurdly, this is not what dying is supposed to feel like –
– and then there was only light, and wind that smelled of nothing he recognized, and the ground was so very far below and coming up so very fast.