At times when Daenerys wakes up, she wakes up angry.
Tyrion Lannister, Jon Snow, Varys.
Sansa Stark. Arya Stark.
She sees their faces so vividly even with her eyes still closed, like she just left a dream they inhabited, even if her memory is a dark, blank room of night terrors and fury.
Those days she will carry the anger with her, breath in, breath out, through her whole daily routine.
It is easy, when everything in the temple makes her to feel like all her triumphs and the battles were washed away.
The clergy and the devotees are respectful and at times reverent of her, of course. They call her Queen, hero, bride of fire.
She is fed, assigned guards of the Fiery Hand, led through rituals to cloak her existence from the new usurper, the three eyed raven.
She is given fine dresses in Targaryen black and red, jewels that they swear are drenched in protective and healing magic.
She receives the visits of initiates that want to fill her with questions about what she remembers of the ' other side' and discuss eagerly holy scriptures with her.
Kinvara, who has the benefit of being an exceptionally intelligent, charismatic and perceptive woman with a steadying firmness of character, says it is a good sign she remembers. That only the pure can return from the death and still withholding some shadow of what lies behind.
That she is favored in the light of their Lord.
Daenerys listens, even accepts a few invitations to witness the rites, allows herself to be educated while she waits for Greyworm, who was warned of her resurrection through shadow magic, so her survival can be kept a secret until she is protected again.
After her sad experience with Jon, she dares not to contact Daario when she is so vulnerable.
She cut her hair, honoring the Dothraki custom, to remind herself of how far she fell.
She was so close to have her whole life work completed and now... she is back to exile, to relying on the protection of strangers, to start over from nearly the scratch.
She has heard Daario had put down an uprising from a few slavers families as soon as the rumour of her assassination spread. That even now the Targaryen banners stand over Dragons Bay.
Daenerys wonders if the people who called her mhysa cried for her, or have already forgot her.
If public favour is not fickle only among the Westerosi.
She has asked her guards to teach her to fight, despite her condition.
The vulnerability of her unarmed body scares her now- she wants never again to be so defenseless that a man needs only to get close enough to kill her.
Still, the Fiery Hand warrior discipline is of a brand that allows not to separate the spiritual practice from the physical, and her pregnancy is not something she can risk with strenuous labour.
So she is tasked with meditating in a room full of perfumed smoke, most of time, to train her senses to open and discern her surroundings in the fine nuances of sound.
She is taught to scry flames for answers, to make herbal oils by boiling recipes to protect the body and tinctures to poisoner knives.
She is taught to hide small blades in her clothing, to aim at a target with sure hand from varying distances to aim to knees and joints when sparring to make the opponent to fall down before disarming him.
A great part of the Fiery Hand fighting technique seems to be based on anticipating enemy moves and find the right angle to break knees or ankles so your opponent will be forced to the ground and made vulnerable to kill or disarm.
She is somewhat abysmal at everything for now, but she likes to keep her body and mind busy.
It keeps the memories away, and the grief for her fallen from filling her heart.
When she is not angry, she is sad nowadays, a melancholy so deep and unshakable it would will her to sleep the morning, the evening, the whole day away, if she was not to fill her schedule with things to do to the brim.
At times when she thinks of her child she feels a distrust she can't quell, and at times she feels only the anticipation to meet him, to hold him, to love him.
Finally she is going to have a piece of family, a heir, to call all hers.
It feels nearly too good to be true, in the middle of all this ruination and yet... last time she thought something too good to be true, with his father, it had turned into a nightmare so quickly.
She instinctively recoils at the idea of living through something like that again, but then the sensible part of her speaks out, reminds her it is only a child, innocent, her blood, who will depend on her for love and safety.
It is hard too, to think this pregnancy was paid for with Viserion's blood.
It makes her to feel guilty at the elation she feels at night, when her fingers will trace the curve of her stomach in wonder, and rest there as if she hopes the child can feel her too and reach back.
And then there's her living nightmares, the flashbacks she will occasionally get through the day of herself on dragonback, spurring on Drogon as he chases gaunt, dirty women and children through narrow and filthy alleys.
She feels awful about that now, even if anger was all she had place for at the time.
She wanted vengeance, had not felt like the surrender was enough, was deserved relief. Not after Missandei.
She had wanted to see that cursed city and everyone in it to disappear to dust and ash, and this was exactly what she had pursued.
And what about the peace she had felt afterwards?
She is not sure how she can reconcile with herself what she felt and the image of children burning.
It feels like there should be a divide there, like she should have not found any satisfaction so soon after that sort of price was paid.
But King Landing and Westeros in general has made nothing to make her to feel like those people were her people, and that abrupt divide in the end had proved fatal.
She had seen only enemies to destroy, where Tyrion and Jon had seen countrymen and countrywomen, lives to be spared as much as it was possible.
And maybe this should be telling her something, is it?
While she still blames those two for their treachery and hypocritical rationales, she has to admit that divide lingers in her heart even now.
Westeros is a pit of corruption she had planned to cleanse throughly, but she feels such a revulsion to the concept of ever returning there again. Truly, even when she had thought she had won the throne her first thought was for Essos.
To use the Westerosi militia to take the free cities, to end slavery everywhere.
Her vision for the future had returned to her, for the first time from her nothern experience, and that alone had calmed her.
If only the fantasy of setting foot again in Essos had made her to feel like home was a breath away, maybe she never should have left.
That thought too, came with too heavy remorses - so many of those close to her had lost their lives for the restoration of her legacy, and it was all for nothing, it was maybe something it should never have happened at all.
When she is most full of doubt, Drogon is her greatest consolation.
He flies never too far away from Volantis now, like he fears she might be snatched away if he does not check on her often enough.
Their bond is stronger than has ever been, and he seeks her affection and petting like he did not since he was small and new to the world.
She wants to ride him again, fly with him over the open sea, feel the closeness of him having the space to call her palace his home.
She feels the love between them like a tether, constant and strong and pure and fierce, grounding her down in her misery, melting away the shades of her fear for the future.
They made it through disaster together. He saved her from final death bringing her here, guarded her body - his loyalty alone brought this miracle forth, and she is is humbled, grateful.
The priesthood of the Red God might be devoted to her for their own beliefs, but Drogon's only reason was filial, enduring, stubborn love.
He alone did not fail her, of those who were with her before.
They grieve his brothers together, when she kisses his huge muzzle and cuddles against his scales in the evening hours, their minds so attuned her remembrance and his own move so in synch she can't tell who started them down the memory lane.
That moment of clarity after her taking of King's Landing, the sensation of purpose settling over her like a protective cloak... the solidity of having her future open and bright before her... she wants them back.
Now all there is uncertainty.
She forces herself to have patience, and hope.
Greyworm is going to rally her blood riders, and come back to her.
She is going to have her child.
Someday she and Drogon will live in a new castle, and she will have the throne room open on a side so he can curl up beside her if he wants , near the throne while she holds court. Her throne won't be made of swords, and she will have gardens full of lemon trees to walk beneath.
She will fly with her son when he is old enough, and she will have a bunch of stories to tell him about the which she does not need to be ashamed over.
He will love her back, and she won't think of his father as she holds him.
She will forget Jon Snow, who turned to be weak when she needed him , believed him to be strong.
She will forget Varys and Tyrion, who spoke big speeches but were in the end small men, reaching only for a puppet ruler they might control.
She will obliterate the memory of the Stark sisters, whom she does not even believe intelligent enough to realize it was wrong and foolish to use her armies and demand to give nothing in exchange, to her own face.
She won't leave those days she allowed her saddened soul to forget its pride to haunt her forever.
She will make strength out the ashes of this treachery and a brighter beginning from this ending.
She will prove herself to be stronger than *them*.
She won't feel so sad or so angry forever, and the fear that lives in some corner of her mind, she will vanquish somehow.
If she has made mistakes, she won't languish over them. She will atone instead, and for every child she has burned she will deliver a better future to a thousand children.
She will forge herself into a good mother and a better queen.
She is not the same woman who left Essos but there are also parts of herself she did not knew herself before.
Before, she was so focused on building peace, redeeming her house, restoring it, proving herself to her people, to her allies.
She wanted their respect and that stopped her hand at times when if she had not listened, she would have secured important victories.
Today she knows those who truly understood and supported what she stood for never had any need of persuading.
Today she knows herself to be a thing of destruction, turned to an higher calling. She understands with an entirely new clarity that her idealism has a dark side: there are lives she won't ever consider worthy being, much less sparing.
Her willingness to do what it takes to reach a new world can be her strength or her downfall, and that will depend partly on how wisely she picks her court, and partly on how well she will know to balance out the scales with compassion and benevolence.
Robert Baratheon 's indulgences bred corruption, the cruelty and selfishness of the Lannister regime allowed it to fester.
Her one moment of lacking empathy resulted in mostly purposeless genocide.
Those are all points where she can guard herself from falling on the same sword, in the future.
She does not fear this new usurper- Stark dutifulness and near omniscience are going to be almost necessarily a poor substitute for a genuine vision of the future, or a sincere vocation toward ruling.
It reassures Daenerys that she still feels those things within herself, despite everything.
THIS is because she thought she was going to be a great queen, when she was given the chance.
Not because of her lineage or dragons, but because she had this love within her for a world that did not yet exist, a world she wanted to bring forth. Jon and Tyrion had not taken that from her.
She can see it more clearly than ever.
She used to think Jon was like her, because she had seen his struggles to always do good by his people, his rigid and uncompromising attachment to duty and honor, so apparent when he had refused to lie even to Cersei when they needed.
But that rigidity, in hindsight, had turned into exactly the reason he had failed to understand her.
He has to have looked at her and seen only someone as power hungry as those conniving beasts of the south ( so like his sister Sansa, amusingly enough, a fact he was willingly and enduringly blind to) in those last weeks after she asked to keep his silence over the truth of his birth.
He could have worn a crown with some grace, and did what he thought he was right by the realm, but in the end he lacked the interest and the passion to understand the intricacies of ruling, and handling the power of it.
It occurs her now she has never truly known what he truly wanted out of life, outside of his propensity to allow responsibility to determinate its course.
Their romance had flared powerfully and passionately to life during that boat voyage, and she had felt caught in that beautiful sensation of finding finally a match where she was equal to her partner on near every level. She had seen in him a man who was good, and treated her with the utmost respect as queen and as woman without fearing to challenge her when it was necessary.
She had thought of the world of his integrity, considered him so uncompromisingly honest to be above betrayal and perceived what was blossoming between like a rare flower, pure and untainted.
The world had looked like a better place because he was in it.
But as soon as he set foot to his frozen homeland, most of the qualities and the closeness she had so valued faded like some fanciful illusion.
He seemed indifferent to his own sisters or friends slighting her openly, and so worried with keeping the favor of his own people and family he was careless or indulgent.
He dismissed her concerns, verbally slapped her with the revelation of his birth parents at the less opportune moment and acted with utmost indifference to what that secret meant to her identity and dreams of the future.
Her pride had demanded she did not show any care for his own feelings over the matter in return.
Maybe in another life she would have enjoyed sitting with him in her chambers by the fire, making him to share in the history of their house and inspire some belonging in him.
She would have liked to not be last Targaryen, found some comfort in the idea he could have children at least, and their house did not need to die.
Instead her heart had rebelled the very idea he would snoop in and take everything that was hers- marry another, give her Targaryen children to sit on the throne she had sacrificed so much for.
She had looked down on how dismissive he was of the whole thing and thought he did not deserved the claim or the bloodline.
Maybe if she had set the pride and the anxiety aside and forced him into one honest conversation over the matter, things would have turned differently.
The Jon she thought she knew would have not... told her he would keep the secret just to break his promise as soon he could - she thought he would have either refuse to promise anything of the sort or kept his mouth shut after he had promised.
He would have not put a blade in her heart neither, after telling her he was loyal.
Or... had she seen in him only a reflection of something she wanted?
Was he so fickle or two faced he could be two men if occasion presented itself?
Or maybe in truth she had never known him for real , and the honorless hypocrite who had stabbed her was his true self.
Well, he gave her a child, if anything else.
Daenerys wanted to think she could move past it all because of that alone.
She had a child she never thought she could have, and she had to focus on the fact without Jon Snow and the war against the dead she would have lived without that particular blessing.
Jon Snow would apparently live out his days at the wall, and if the gods were good she would have no reason to see him again.
She could let go the dream of him like a price she had to pay to get here, even if she would have preferred do without the renewed usurpation of her throne or the assassination.
The only path was forward, and the past held no definitive answers, only more questions.
If I look back, I am lost - she thought with a certain irony.
The trick was, as always , to keep moving.