DAENERYS

The first breath was the most difficult and yet the sweetest in her memory.

Clambering to her feet from the ashes, Dany felt the cool night breeze as it caressed her bare flesh. She almost fell again to the earth as she reeled in confusion, as the weight of wonder and despair pressed down on her from above. She had returned, not just to life but to this place, this unforgettable place of red dust and sparse brush. She had been reborn here before, bringing wonders into the world.

Dany snapped out of her woolgathering with the realization that she wasn't here alone. Red-garbed figures cast long shadows as they surrounded her, standing next to their lit braziers and high flames. Seemingly as one, they knelt in the dirt as she rose. All except one. For a moment she thought it was the red priestess she knew, Melisandre of Asshai, but while this woman wore the same garb and had that same ruby pulsing in its choker around her neck, her hair was raven dark to the other's fiery red.

"You have returned to us, Daughter of Fire," that woman said, offering a small genuflection in greeting.

"What am I doing here?" Dany asked, trying to sort reality from dream, to remember what had happened before everything had gone dark. "Who are you?"

"We are your servants, Daenerys Stormborn," the woman replied. "I am Kinvara, High Priestess of the Red Temple of Volantis, Flame of Truth... need I say it all, to another such as you who has as much and more titles? We came because we were called here by the Lord. We saw in the flames that the Lightbringer would return you here, to the place of miracles."

"The Lightbringer?" Confusion creased Dany's brow momentarily before realization struck. "Drogon! Where is he? What happened to him?" Panic seized her heart as she whirled around, before she spotted the familiar scaled hill that was her last child, curled up in repose and regarding her with his red eyes the reflected the light of the surrounding fires. The dragon let out a low warbling croon and blinked as he met his mother's gaze.

Forgetting for a moment that she was naked, surrounded by red priests in the middle of the wilderness, Dany ran to her child and embraced his snout, joining their warmth. "You're still here," she whispered as she stroked the onyx scales. "You didn't betray me. You didn't leave me." Hot tears coursed down her cheeks as she remembered.

Still stroking Drogon's scales with one hand, Dany dashed the tears away with the back of another and refocused her gaze on Kinvara. "Why here?"

The red priestess smiled. "When a dragon is hurt or in distress, when it is lost or confused, it returns to the place of its birth," she replied. "Yours came here urgently, without food or rest. We were prepared for the former, although only time can take care of the latter."

"That is very generous of you, priestess," Dany replied, even as she realized that she herself felt neither hungry nor tired. Weary, yes, but it was a weariness of the heart and the soul, not of the flesh. "Why did you-?" she left the question hanging in the air, unable to say the rest of it.

"The Lord of Light is not yet finished with you, Daenerys Stormborn," Kinvara answered with that same small smile turning up her lips. "You lost your way, caught in the squabbles of the winter lords, and so it fell to us to help return you to the right path."

"And what do you say is the right way, then, priestess? This place is a long way from Westeros, and my enemies - my true enemies - celebrate even as we speak, no doubt."

"Westeros is not the world, Bride of Fire," Kinvara cautioned. "Let those small men and women in their cold country celebrate. Let them believe your light has gone out and that they can curl up in comfortable darkness. They will be complacent, the Wolf Queen, the Raven King, and all the rest of them. I have seen it in the flames; they will disperse, seemingly victorious."

"And the wheel keeps turning," Dany noted, her voice flat as she smoothed down all the other thoughts that image evoked.

Kinvara shook her head. "Worse, I fear. You were deceived, brought into the quarrel between the forces of winter, and the winner will claim your seat, though no throne remains. Drogon saw that they were deprived of that much."

Scratching at its ridge, Dany stared into a red eye and the dragon cooed soothingly.

"The Raven King will ascend his weirwood seat," the priestess continued, "and he will give them the illusion of the peace they say they want, even as he offers them new chains and new lies. The Children made him for that, to bring the downfall of man. The dispute with the White Walkers was on a matter of means, not ends."

Understanding remained just outside Dany's reach, but the narration gave her the vague shape of it now. "And a lovestruck fool like me got manipulated into settling the matter for them."

"You stopped the more immediate threat, but not the more dangerous one. Once your usefulness was over you had to be discarded, but it didn't occur to them that what was part of their plans could also be part of ours."

Anger gripped Dany's heart, the fury of a dragon awakened. "Say what you mean by that," she demanded through clenched teeth, and under her hand, Drogon let out a small threatening rumble.

"Pray forgive me, for there was nothing we could do save let them think they had won," the priestess pleaded, her ingratiating smile now gone. "We knew there was no way we could keep you from crossing the Narrow Sea, and once you were over, there was little we could change. Your father, your brother... they were the culmination of the work of millennia, a weight we could not move. But now that you have returned, you are outside their reach. And you must strive to stay that way."

"So I am to remain in Essos forever, then?"

Kinvara shook her head. "No, but you must learn to conceal yourself from their gaze. Right here, right now, the Raven King's sight does not reach us, for we have cleared away all the birds and never have the weirwoods come this far yet. The night is dark and full of terrors, but the darkness concealed your dragon's path, something he'll be able to pick up again after the dawn."

"You would separate me from my last child?" Dany asked, understanding that much of the thrust of the priestess' intentions.

"I would fool the Raven King, for a time," Kinvara replied. "For you, we have proper garb and the mask of a shadowbinder. We will convey you from here on a journey again to Qarth, and from there to Asshai, where you will become a shadowbinder in truth and where your child can again join you, free from the Raven King's eyes. I have seen it in the flames: you and he must follow the Stygai to the black doors and beyond, and pass beneath the Shadow. When you emerge, the Raven King will be blind to the both of you."

It was at the mention of proper garb that Dany remembered her nakedness. She registered that the night air was cold, yet it did not chill her as it once would. Looking at her hand stroking Drogon another thought bloomed. I, too, have become fire made flesh.

That wasn't what she said aloud, though. "Become a shadowbinder?"

"The brightest lights, the hottest fires cast the darkest shadows, and no flame in this world can match yours now. The dragonlords of Valyria were powerful sorcerers and so too shall you be. You must claim your birthright; once you have passed through the Shadow, you must fly to Valyria, the Lands of Always Summer, and temper yourself among the Fourteen Flames there. Your heritage awaits you, Daenerys of House Targaryen."

Dany had returned dragons to the world and passed beyond death, and yet the priestess' narration was still surreal to her, the kind of thing she had heard from Viserys when she was a little girl and he was telling her of their heritage, what the blood of the dragon meant. So much knowledge and power had been lost to the Doom, so much that could have helped her.

Slowly, Dany nodded her assent. "Very well." Strangely, she did not have to work very hard to repress the urge to leap on Drogon's back and return to Westeros, to serve fire and blood to all of those who had wronged her. Whether it was some sorcery of the priestess' words or something else, she believed, and right now above all else she needed something to believe in.

"Let us begin, then," Kinvara replied, her smile returning. "There is much and more for you to learn, and we must ensure you are well concealed before the dawn breaks."

AUTHOR'S NOTE

This is a continuation of the tale from the end of the show, seeking to ride a dragon through the dragon-sized holes left in it all. Some book canon and characters will be invoked to fill in certain gaps here and there, but since we're living in the universe of the television series, we also get to play with all the wonderful handwaves it felt like playing with... such as Daenerys having a perfectly intact body, given the dragons can apparently fly straight from Dragonstone to Beyond the Wall without much issue.

This is absolutely, positively, never a follow-up to the books, only the show. I imagine the books will be satisfying enough to not merit this sort of treatment, if they ever come into being.