2 days after death
The first thought that she has when she opens her eyes again is that it's hot. The air is sticky, her hair is sticky. It smells like flowers, a maester's oily balm and the leathery skin of a dragon. Her hand goes to her heart as if by instinct, and she screams.
4 days after death
On the fourth day, she rises from her bed, finally strong enough to stand up and take stock of what has happened to her. The Red Priestesses have dressed her in a gauzy gown to help with the unbearable heat, and to not disturb her healing wound. She revels in the coolness of the stone beneath her bare feet.
They tell her that the Lord of Light had instructed them to place her body upon a stone table, adorn it with the feathers of a peacock and set it alight.
"Why a peacock?" She wonders.
"The flesh of a peacock is not affected by death. When the Lord of Light created the bird, he thought it too beautiful to allow to go to waste. And so he thinks of you."
They also tell her that the fire raged for nearly 5 hours before it settled in the embers at her feet. And then they waited for her to wake.
As the sun begins to set, she feels a terrible pain, spreading across her back in pulses and waves until it settles in her pelvis. The Red Priestesses beg her to lie down, believing that she's pushed herself too much, too soon. She finds herself gasping for breath, and clutching to the sides of her bed so tightly that her knuckles begin to go white. She feels the hot trickle, and then a gush of blood seeping down her leg, staining her gown and the bedding underneath. Her eyes fall closed in disbelief, then open and desperately look around the room for somebody to assure her that this is not happening to her. Again.
She spends many hours purging the life within her and then sits and weeps quietly.
"You are strong, My Grace," the main Priestess, Kinvara says encouragingly, "you can survive this."
"I know," Daenerys acknowledges, "that's the hardest part."
If she looks back, she is lost.
3 weeks after death
"Drogon will take me to Valyria," she tells Kinvara as they sit, side by side on a stone bench as the sun begins to set.
"There is nothing there but lost souls and dragons," Kinvara observes but Daenerys notices a distinct lack of objections.
"Then it sounds even more perfect than I imagined," she tells the Red Priestess and walks back to the small, simple house next to the temple around which the city of Volantis spreads like tentacles of a sea creature.
Inside, she strips down and examines her scar. It is healed but exceptionally ugly. Her left nipple ripped, not quite in half, but almost, not by way of the dagger but a long journey across the sea, and the way the skin has rejoined has left it slightly asymmetrical. At least I don't ever have to put an innocent baby to this breast, she thinks. When she stretches upon waking, the scar burns feverishly as if it were still fresh. If she lifts her left arm all the way up over her head, it feels like the skin of her chest is stretching and about to come undone at the seams. Thee scar is completely healed so she wonders if this is all in her head, and that makes it that much worse. Because it by definition will not get better as long as she lives. In perpetuity, she remembers.
When she bathes she sinks into the water and lets it do the work so that she doesn't have to touch herself. When she dresses, she does so quickly and methodically, never looking down below her neck.
She wonders if the Red Priestess will be the last person to see her stripped down to nothing.
8 weeks after death
She wakes every night, after the moon has risen to the highest point in the black sky. Her body is drenched with sweat. Her chest is tight. She can still feel the pain, as if somebody's hands reached in and squeezed her heart like they were wringing a wet cloth, until every drop of blood was gone. There was ringing in her ears, and the whoosh of blood coursing wildly through her body and out of it. Her hands and feel felt cold and then she was gone. Every night, she relives that moment, she recalls how she knew that she was dying and can't remember her other thoughts. She'd always wondered about a person's last thoughts – would they be filled with regret or pride or nostalgia even? But now she knows that death is just a primal act, unaccompanied by philosophy.
She finds a few scattered villages where the majestic city of Valyria once stood. None have more than 40 or 50 people in them. The inhabitants are strange, for the most parts. Some of them appear to have magical abilities; one day she sees a boy of no more than 5 or 6, levitating a small stone in the air, directing it with his hand. Nobody but her sees it as strange. Another day she observes a door materialize in the solid wall of a house and an old man stumbles through it, then the door disappears. As if it were a trick of the eye.
The villagers are in awe of her and the enormous dragon who is never far. They welcome her as if she belongs with them, on the basis of her own unique nature. Her High Valyrian is not as proficient as theirs and on occasion they laugh at her accent, but not unkindly. She has always been exceptionally good at mastering languages and sees this as a new challenge.
She asks a kindly elderly lady to help her cut her hair very short but the lady begs her to leave it. It's a sin when you look the way you do, she reasons. Instead, the woman gives her a small jar of a rusty red paste.
"Otizje," she says by way of explanation, "the married women of Naath rub it in their braids, butter and oil and red ochre." At the mention of Naath, Daenerys wants to crumble, but then thinks, maybe it's a sign, maybe it's a way for her to stay connected to Missandei. She has her hair braided in dozens of braids cascading down her back and rubs the paste over them. She is almost unrecognizable.
Within the first few days, Drogon takes her to the edge of a cliff overlooking a narrow canyon with a river running down the middle. The riverbanks are grassy and lush in stark contrast to the barren reddish stone cliffs above and that's when she sees them. Another dozen dragons or more, flying in loose formation from the bottom of the canyon towards her. They land around Drogon. They are not quite his size but are not that much smaller. They study her curiously and unthreateningly. Drogon roars and they approach her, gentle but proud. They are all unique: one is such a dark, shiny jet black, that he appears blue in the right light, one is a dusty grey, a couple of others resemble Rhaegal and Viserion. Are these his children, she wonders? From the time that he was gone?
The dragons follow her down to the nearest village and the people there fall to their knees. It's a scene she's seen many times over. She isn't filled with the same exhilaration she used to feel but it does make her feel more like her old self.
The dragons stay nearby and in the coming days she flies with them, studying the lands and expansive coastline around the islands. They take her to one cave, then another and another, lined with eggs, waiting to be hatched. She understands then that she'll never be alone again and that soon there will be so many of them that she could rule the entire world with ease.
But it does nothing to take away the night terrors and soon they start to spill into the day. She dreads her meals because they are quiet and lonely affairs which allow her mind to wander and then she feels sick to her stomach and reflexively gags on her food. She was always thin, but now she worries that she's little more than skin and bone. She is unsettled, and has episodes where she feels like her breath is seizing, her heart is fighting its way out of her chest and she can't think straight. They pass, but she lives in fear of the next one coming. It is an "attack of the mind and spirit," a local witch tells her and offers a tea to calm her nerves. Daenerys declines, thinking that a heart that hurts is at least a heart that beats.
When her dragons breathe fire, it feels like every tiny hair on her body stands up, taking her back to that terrible day. When people look at her, she feels compelled to smile often, no matter how tedious. If she is unfriendly, they could turn on her. If she is angry, they might start plotting against her. If she is moody, they might think her mad. She feels paranoid, but mostly she feels afraid, all the time.
