Full Summary: Instead of Vhagar, Aemond Targaryen's eye has been drawn to another dragon with just as vicious a history. Unlike Vhagar however, no one has managed to tame, let alone fly, the wild dragon known as the Cannibal before. Yet not all is as it seems, all that glitters is not gold, and not every dragon has always been a dragon. Targaryen!Fem!Harry, Aemond Targaryen/Fem!Harry.

One: Black Tastes

I

The creature beneath was possibly the oldest thing upon Dragonstone, as black as pitch with frighteningly green eyes. It slumbered and prowled in the dark-sharp caves of dragon glass, hidden in the obsidian, the largest and oldest of the wild dragons.

The Maester's do not know its true age, though they are more than seemingly happy to debate it amongst themselves through ravens and scholarly chronicles. The wild dragon Sheepstealer was said to have been hatched when the Old King was young -that is, early in the reign of Jaehaerys I. Yet, the oldest parchment containing information of the Sheepstealer's hatching already made mention of the horror in the dark, a worry because it had attacked the hatchery and eaten most of the eggs that moontide, leaving Sheapstealer and six others as the only surviving brood.

They call it the Cannibal, and the name sticks like oil tar from Aemond's reading lanterns.

Reading lanterns he uses in the dead of the night to light his way to the library in the Red Keep, a boy sneaking an adventure under the noses of his inattentive parents, where he first stumbles upon a book that describes the happenstance.

He spends all night hunched over the tome, has to change his reading lantern for a tallow candle and then for sunrise filtering in through the window, devouring the same inscrutable writing over and over again.

He knows what they say when they do not think he hears, knows what his brother and his sister's bastards boast. Aemond is nine, and without his own mount, and Aegon had already claimed his two years younger.

They think him unworthy. They mock his flightless existence. They poke and they prod and they snicker that Aemond will never know the rush of wind in his silver-hair or the way a cloud shimmers from not above but below.

But as a boy-

As a boy with a story at his fingertips, he dreams.

They wouldn't dare ridicule if he had a ride like the Cannibal.

II

No one has seen the Cannibal up close. All there is is hearsay and rumours and the embellishment all folklore garners. The most caught of the beast is a shadow in the sky, a menacingly dark shimmer from the corner of the eye, the bloody destruction it leaves behind in its wake and its feeding.

And feast it does. On men, one women, on cattle and dragons and anything that dares lurk just a step too close.

Some of the smallfolk on Dragonstone whisper amongst themselves, as they are prone to do, conjuring stories to ease the hunger in their bellies. The stories are as wild as the dragon itself, some claiming that the Cannibal had been around upon this very island even before Aemond's ancestors had taken root.

That cannot be the case, however, and Aemond knows this better than when he had been a child and wonderstruck by the macabre stories of the flesh-eater of the caves from the books he had read.

He still devours their stories, eats them up and gobbles them down like the Cannibal consumes its own kind.

For the Cannibal to be around before the time of Aegon, it would have needed to hatch, at the very latest, around the same time that Balerion arrived with heat under his wing and a silver-haired rider upon its back. Balerion had died of old age long before Aemond's time, at the ripe age of eight and two-hundred. The Black Dread had been the only dragon thus far to have died from old age and not a bloody skirmish, and though it was difficult to determine the lifespan of a dragon in totality, much more than that was surely not possible.

Impossible, perhaps.

Sense and reason, nevertheless, does not thwart a good story, and so it takes hold in the smallfolk's minds, around their hearths and their homes and their tilling fields, and it blooms like a terrible weed in the imposing shade of Dragonstone.

Aemond does not believe it. Not only would the Cannibal have to be extremely, particularly old, it would need to be not of Old Valyrian stock, for Aegon, with Balerion, had brought dragons to Westerosi. If not from that brood, than the Cannibal was from other blood, and that was impossible.

If not from Old Valyria, then where did it come from?

Aemond does not know, does not dare to imagine, perhaps he cannot fathom that far into impossibilities. The Targaryens are built on the backs of scales and fire, it is their birth right, their power, everything they are and can be is down to the rides they take to the sky.

If not from them, then where does that leave their dynasty?

Somewhere obscure and black like the legend of the Cannibal.

Still as a boy Aemond wonders, questions, searches for answers and finds none.

Until he does.

III

It was ill advised to ride a mount to the west coastline of Dragonstone. This is where the Cannibal nested, in the cold-hard caves that burrowed in the cliffside like a giant maw roaring out of the earth, and it was known to attack smaller, bigger, weaker, stronger-

Any dragon brave enough to come close in.

The violent fiend it was.

It is said, in the same tone it's age is whispered about, that many before Aemond's time, would-be dragon tamers high on the fire of Targaryen blood -madness, others would correct-, had made copious attempts to ride the Cannibal a dozen and more times, and that his -they call the Cannibal a he for no more reason than his fierceness- lair was littered with their shore-wind whipped bones of the poor, brave dead souls.

The Cannibal is unrideable, they all say-

Until his brother and those bastards lure him to a dragonpit with the promise of a mount and instead cart out a pink piglet with parchment wings crudely stuck to his back. Until they laugh and they snort and they hit him where it hurts.

Aemond runs away that day, from his brother and his nephews, from the dragons and the pig and the laughter-

And he swears the next time he sees them, he will have his own ride and for Aemond Targaryen, there's only ever been one dragon despicable enough for his black tastes.

Next Chapter: For the first time in over half a century, someone tries to mount the Cannibal…

A.N: Working on my other stories, I thought I would post this as I do so so you lovely readers have something to skim as I type away like the gremlin I am. It's going to be relatively short and fast paced, so buckle up.

Thanks to the House of the Dragon, apparently I have a thing for psychopaths with eyepatches now. Go figure.

Cheers for reading, and if you can, don't forget to drop a review, and I will hopefully see you all again shortly. ~AlwaysEatTheRude21