Two: Drawing Even.
I
"I see you've found Helaenys's Ossuary."
It sits on an unremarkable table, in the oldest room of the castle, a modest bone box easily looked over amongst the other trinkets collecting dust. Rhaenyra's oldest son, Jacaerys, startles at his mother's voice drifting from the open doorway, snatching his hand back from where it had been moments from brushing a carven panel.
"Mother-"
He squeaks, sounding as much as the curious child he is, his face rinsing to a ruddy flush.
"I was just-"
"Curious."
Rhaenyra finishes for her son, in place of the pretext he was going to try and use on her, forgetting she had once been a curious child too and knew all the tricks and secrets to getting into places she shouldn't have been.
"Calm. All is well, Jace. I was around your age when I first discovered it, and much like you now my father found me here and span me the tale of it."
The boys attention, like the wings of a sparrow, flutter back to the bone box before him, and Rhaenyra can see the questions he has bubbling in his blood, that insatiable Targaryen hunger for the unknown.
"Helaenys like aunt Helaena?"
The name of her sister, that is those it was connected to, makes the smile on Rhaenyra's face pull taut like the bindings of her evening dress, though she stubbornly clings to the act of placidity.
Her son is too young to understand the lines being drawn in the sand before them, but he is not so old enough to have outgrown the lure of a good fable.
It is these years Rhaenyra treasures most.
"My sister was named after her, yes. Do you know who she was?"
Jace shakes his head, so fast his dark curls glisten and bounce in the low light of the chamber they stand in. Rhaenyra reaches over and strokes them when she strolls close enough, fingers lithe in the waves of the hair that Jace does not have in his blood.
A Velaryon in name and nothing else, though Rhaenyra dares not ever voice it.
"She was Aegon's youngest child from his third wife, the sorceress known as a Lily. They called her the people's Princess."
As Rhaenyra was once called the Realms Delight. Another thing Alicent had tried to steal from her, snatching Helaenys's name for her own child as greedy as a welp at a teat. Rhaenyra does not begrudge her youngest sister for her name, but she does resent Alicent for trying to take all Rhaenyra was for her own children.
"Isn't she the one who disappeared?"
Slipping her hand from her sons curls, Rhaenyra nods, squeezing along the slope of his small shoulder, side by side before the bone box.
"So you have done your lineages with your tutor, then?"
"Ser Ogun says Maegor the Cruel killed her."
Another squeeze, and Rhaenyra dips down onto her haunches, bobbing where she stands so she could be eye to eye with her son, voice dropping low and long like a clandestine romance hung onto her every word.
The best kind of voice for a story.
"Ah, but that is where the Maesters and the Ser's have the wrong of it. You see, Helaenys had inherited her mother's gifts, and when she came home from the land over the Veiled sea-"
There was no such thing as the Veiled sea of course, as any Westerosi map could attest. Yet, it is how the story goes, adding flavour and colour to the words on the page, and so Rhaenyra sprinkles her own retelling with it, just as her father had done before her and his before his.
"After facing a dreadful war, her long lost family was there to greet her. Things went well for a time, as it always does, until Aegon died and Aenys became King. Maegor wanted the throne from his brother, you might know already. He thought himself the better man, and yet he also knew Helaenys held the common heart, and there was already word that should Aenys die that Helaenys would be the one to hold the throne until her nephew became of age."
"So he killed her first to pave the way?"
Rhaenyra's answering smile was small and sad, and so she reaches for her son's hand, holds it in her own, warm and alive and unaware of the lengths men will go to in the name of victory or love.
"No."
Rhaenyra denies.
"He thought of it but could not bring himself to do it. Against the odds, he and Helaenys were close-"
Close enough that, according to the Chronicles, Maegor had once petitioned for her hand-
A hand Helaenys herself had denied giving.
Perhaps another part of the sordid, sorrowful tale to come.
"So he did something much worse."
"Worse?"
Jace asks innocently.
"What could be worse than dying?"
finally, Rhaenyra relinquishes her son's hand to stroke lovingly at his face.
"She was a rambunctious girl, adored and as at home in the Fleabottom as she was in the throne room-"
Which reminds Rhaenyra of her own uncle, Daemon, and all the tangled, thorny feelings which come from this thought. She had not seen him since his exile, had not heard word-
She wonders, idly, if she would have done the same as Maegor once had if it meant keeping her uncle near, keeping her own throne, and does not have a clear answer to placate herself with.
"Maegor, recognizing he would lose the throne to her when Aenys died-"
It strikes Rhaenyra then, like a viper at the breast, the similarities of her own fate to her ancestor who had barely been ten and eight when this all happened. How men would go to lengths unseen to stop a woman ascending a throne.
"He turned to the blackest of magics his mother, Visenya, supposedly knew."
Rhaenyra's hand fell from her sons face.
"One dark and stormy night, with an employ of Essos magi, as Helaenys laid sleeping, grieving the loss of her other brother, Maegor struck. He bound her to her own magics, and though we do not know what he had done, Helaenys was missing come the morn. All that was supposedly left of her was the last echoes of a lullaby of which Maegor took to place in this Ossuary he had made. He kept it close until his dying day, never allowing anyone near it, to see it, to hear the last of the lullaby and kept it in his own chambers-"
The very room mother and son stood within.
"And Helaenys Targaryen was no more."
Then came the war between uncle and nephews, the six years of a Cruel reign, all for naught for Maegor died upon the thrones, wrists slit and blood unworthy.
But that is not how the story finishes, and so with a grin, Rhaenyra matches the beats her father once struck in this very chamber with her no higher than his knee.
"But it is said, should the bone box ever be opened, should the song inside ever be set free to fire, then-"
SMACK.
Jace jumps anew, under the throttle of his mother's high-bright laughter as she clapped her hands suddenly, loudly. Huffing and puffing like a little angry kitten at the joke Rhaenyra had played just as her father had.
It felt good to think back on these memories, memories of an innocent time for an innocent girl, and not have them tinged with the pain and anger of now, the worries over lines of successions and the Hightower quest to see her disinherited.
"Helaenys will return, and when she does…"
"What, Mother?"
Jace edges, tugging impatiently on her skirts, swept up in the tale as she had once been.
"What will happen?"
"Then she will not be late for supper like a certain boy I know who I found riffling through things he shouldn't be thumbing through."
The diversion does the trick, and Jace's excitement turns to timidity, grip dropping from skirts to nervously wring his hands together before his velvet doublet Rhaenyra had sown herself just for this feast.
"Am I very late?"
Rhaenyra begins ushering the boy out the room, towards the corridor and the hall they were due to be in a time ago already.
The Hightowers would surely taken offence to their lateness, but, perhaps petulantly, this only made Rhaenyra a little spitefully pleased.
If her father wished to drag them all to Dragonstone for a family feast as if nothing was wrong, then Rhaenyra would take her own joys where she could.
"Only a little, but we best not keep your Grandsire waiting too long. He is not-"
He is not well.
He is not well at all, but Rhaenyra will not say it, cannot say it, as she will never speak of her sons dark hair and dark eyes and his lack of sea legs.
If she does not speak of it, then she can pretend all is well, just as she had told her son.
"Not known for allowing bad manners. Come, let us eat and drink."
II
Aemond sees his chance and he steals it. The feast is in full sway, lutes and lyres purring in the air even as conversations turn tersely from one side of the table to the next. Rhaenyra is late, dragging her bastard along with her, and the verbal arrows are knocked from Alicent's side to his half-sisters.
Rhaenyra retaliates every barely concealed barb with her own, because of course she does.
She's already taken Aegon's rightful throne, why would she let them keep their dignity too?
This is an old dance, and Aemond uses it to his advantage.
No one notices as he slips from the chamber, intent burning in his chest and his eyes on the shore he knows lays just outside the castle walls. Helaena has escaped the stifling celebration too, though neither child is missed much, sitting by a window with a spider dancing on the back of her hand.
"Still beating, still warm, she'll eat his heart whole. Still beating, still warm, she'll eat his heart whole "
Aemond pays her little mind as he glides on past, heading for the great doors to the outside. Even if their mother was to notice two of her children missing from the feast, Helaena wouldn't rat on him.
She never does, and maybe that's why he loves her most.
"One day you're going to have to decide."
Helaena's voice is like gossamer threads, glass panes and crystal lamps. Something half there and half unseen. No one really pays her much attention, no one really heeds her-
But Aemond is not everyone, and he knows to listen when his sister speaks in the intangible way she does. Half here and half unseen.
He halts down the hall, barely glancing back.
"Decide?"
From the corner of his eye, he watches as Helaena prods and pokes the spider, playing gently with its long legs.
"On whether you want the dragon or the girl. You can't have both. One day you will have to decide… and it will kill you."
Aemond listens to his sister, but that does not mean he hears her.
No one truly does.
Still, he does not question how his sister knows where he is going, what he is about to do, he is not, perhaps, even surprised she knows at all.
He just doesn't understand what she tries to tell him.
"A dragon is where my heart lies."
Aemond replies with all the purpose and determination a boy of ten-and-two can have. It is so clear to him, as clear as the crystal of Helaena's voice, to the skies is where he belongs.
"You say thus now…"
Helaena lifts the spider up from the back of her hand, coaxing it onto her pale fingers, holding it up to her face to watch its many eyes flicker in the moonlight at her back.
"But it won't be so easy when the time comes. You'll cram her back into the box and the black scale and the dreamless sleep, and she'll hate you for it. Oh, how she'll hate you for it. You'll have to choose then. Girl or dragon, dragon or girl. You can't have both. Still beating, still warm, she'll eat his heart whole."
His sister laughs here, and it's not so much crystal but smoke. Hard to grasp and choking in its thickness.
"You'll sing a lullaby. You'll sing it so pretty for all the wrong reasons, and away with the girl with the green eye goes. She eats her own kind, Aemond. Don't ever forget that. She eats her own kind and you are a Targaryen. Still beating, still warm. Chew it up to a mangled mess and swallow it down for her own. Blood on teeth, lullaby on a lip, a soul in a bone box trapped in the echoes of a forgotten song and a forgotten life. Find the lyrics, find the latch. Open and close, out and in, black scale and silver hair. Dragon or girl. Choices. Choices. Choices. Bad ones. Good ones. Dead ones."
His sister does not make sense, she never does, and she's rambling in that way she's prone to, not at all and then all at once, until her words bounce around your skull like bramble weeds, sticky and spiny.
And as you do with weeds that stick to breeches, Aemond shakes them off.
"Good eve to you too, sweet sister."
He turns for the last time, but Helaena hasn't gotten her last lick in.
"Still beating, still warm, she'll eat his heart whole."
Helaena's voice echoes, and it follows Aemond out the doors of the corridor, out into the night, out to the shores, out to the dragonglass caves.
III
Aemond stands at the edge of the cave, peering into the dank, deep dark as the salt hair blisters his cheeks rosy red. He can't see much inside, can't hear anything either, and the stagnant air that rolls in from the breeze doesn't smell of anything, truly, just cold.
Scorching-ice cold.
He hesitates here, lingers on the threshold, the before and the after.
If there is to be an after for him and not the end of a short life punctuated in dragons fire and the resting place of the Cannibal's starving belly.
He takes one breath, he takes one step, and he's spent in the black.
IV
It takes a long while for his eyes to adjust, and when he does all Aemond really sees is dragon glass glinting off the high arched walls of the overhang cave.
Not all.
He wanders in further, through the warrens and the burrows that make up the cave system, and something crunches under boot. He lifts the limb and peers down, finds a cracked bit of bone that had, if he squinted in the dark, might have once belonged to a human skull.
It's black and charred, broken before the slam of his boot, and Aemond's heart leaps into his throat.
Chewed. It had been chewed.
He is not scared, even as a boy he's not so easily frightened, an issue his mother wishes desperately to fix, but he is particularly aware of the danger he faces.
How quickly and how badly this could go wrong.
He doesn't let his reservations stop him, instead he focuses on his brothers laughter, those bastards glee, the pink pig snorting at his feet.
Aemond wanders in even further, searching every bend and every corner, and he comes up short.
The cave is empty. No sounds, no scale, no sight.
The dragon is not here.
He curses himself and that book he had found in Maegor's Holdfast library so long ago.
It must have been a story-
Just a story, and like every other child, he'd believed, assumed a book would not lie, that there was anything ever owed to rumours, and he feels the fool.
His brother was going to laugh at him, and the bastards would pester and giggle and-
Thud.
Aemond stills where he stands, frozen in the cold air of the cave. He waits, holds his breath-
Thud.
He turns then at the noise, the noise coming from behind him-
Only to find the cave as empty as it had been coming in. There's no wind, no wing, not a glimmer of fire or fang.
He begins to sag in disappointment… until a shard of dragonglass comes falling down, crashing into the pitch of the rocky shore that came in from the mouth of the cave. It must have been knocked loose from the cei-
Aemond looks up, and up, and up-
Just as something came down, and down, and down.
The dragons neck is long and thick, serpentine in its black grace, and the head it was attached to was as big as it was fierce, as dark as the shadows that clung to the cave with two startling, terrifyingly green eyes.
The neck twists itself to get a better view of Aemond. Small, poor Aemond, tiny in the cave, so small compared to the visible head and neck. And that was when Aemond realized his mistake, the blunder other would-be-riders had stumbled into just like him.
Aemond had thought the cave empty, and so had come in deeper in search of what was supposed to be there… but it had not been barren. Not at all.
The Cannibal had been lurking on the invisible ceiling of the dark cave, laying in wait for its supper to unwittingly come stumbling into its den, allowing the prey to open up their backs to its ravenous gaze.
Green eyes stare at him in the dark, the terrible mouth opens, teeth the size of lances and so big a man on horseback could ride straight down its gullet, and there, in the back of a black mouth, green flames alike which Aemond has never seen begin to flicker.
Aemond tries to dive out the way, to find shelter around the bend he'd come around, shouting, slipping in his fear to his native tongue.
"Umbagon!"
He cries. Wait!
The Cannibal doesn't listen, as Aemond didn't listen to Helaena.
V
Aemond gets around the bend just as the wildfire comes, green and blinding and so hot, even guarded by the safety of the dragonglass he cowers behind, it scorches the side of his doublet to ashes.
He cowers and croons at the flare of searing heat, but it does not burn him. He's a Targaryen, and it would take more than a passing proximity to hurt him.
Though he doubts he'd survive a full strike of the green fire.
"Keligon! Nyke nūmāzma daor ōdrikagon!"
Halt! I mean no harm! But the Cannibal doesn't listen. It's wild and wrothful, and does not obey orders like the dragons from the pit do, reared on them from cradle to holding cell, until they bend to the will of their riders.
The Cannibal will not bend. The Cannibal will only break what searches to control it.
There's an almighty crash from behind him, so large and powerful it sends Aemond sprawling like a scarf snatched in the wind, knocked over and bowled over, the Cannibal descending from the ceiling.
He does not need to look to know the dragon is big, perhaps as large as Vhagar, perhaps even edging towards Balerion's immense once size. He can feel it in the way the earth shatters under its plunge, the tremble of the cave, and Aemond realizes it must have made a nest here for no other reason that it's the largest site on Dragonstone, a cave that works its way throughout the entirety of the castle above its head, the only place that could hold such an enormous creature.
He sees the snout of it coming around the corner, the glint of teeth so sharp and so strong, and Aemond knows there's nowhere to run, nowhere left to hide.
This is it.
The head will snake around the bend any moment now, its mouth will open wide, and Aemond will die in wildfire. The worst of all.
Aemond thinks of running, perhaps if only to do something, possibly even beseech the beast in his native tongue, but he doesn't. He sits where he lands, and he closes his eyes, and he thinks, loosely, gently, just the way Helaena had played with the spider, I nearly had it. I could have won. I could have been everything my brother was and more.
"Nyke mērī jeldan naejot sagon hae Aegon."
I only wished to be like Aegon.
To once not be in his brother's shadow, to once be a Targaryen his hair and eyes proclaimed he was. To not be the fool of the family, a Targaryen with no dragon, where even Rhaenyra's bastards could get away with demeaning.
Snap.
The noise is close and clear, the gnashing of teeth the size of swords, and for a moment, the briefest of seconds, Aemond believes he's been eaten. But no pain comes, and the darkness is just his closed eyes, and when he dares to peer them open-
It's to find the Cannibal looking right at him, mouth now shut, staring, glaring-
Watching.
It takes even longer for Aemond to understand what has happened.
"Gaomagon ao shifang se brōzi Aegon?"
Do you understand the name Aegon?
And it does, clearly it does, because its head… well, its massive head uses what little space there is in the nook Aemond had flung himself into to get away from the fire to cock itself, turning like a curious puppy.
It is almost funny.
Almost.
Yet, it can't know he'd been speaking of his brother, doesn't seem to understand much more than the name, a hazy intellect hiding in its sleepy green eye, a spark of a dream maybe.
Aemond shuffles in the sand and the pits of bones, and he dares to raise his hand towards the muzzle-
A scaled lip curls, and a growl comes tearing through the cave, so loud and terrible the dragonglass around them shivers in the walls.
"Gīda! hae Aegon's ānogar iāragon rȳ ñuha nyke, kesā gaomagon hae nyke udrāzma!"
Calm! As Aegon's blood flows through me, you will do as I command!
The beast catches on the name again, though he is sure it does not understand the other words he uses, it is enough to ease its anger, to belly its wrath.
The snarl sinks like the sun over a sea come evening.
Aemond feels brave then, bold and reckless in a way he never has before. A Targaryen. He feels like a Targaryen, for the first time in his life.
And Targaryen's do not huddle in the sand cowering, they stand and they fly.
So Aemond gathers himself, and he comes to his feet, and the Cannibal is watching, waiting, and the boy takes his first step closer. He takes another too, steals a third, and soon the palm of his outstretched hand is meeting scaled, black snout.
The dragon is hot underneath his palm, so hot Aemond fears he might be burned and branded, and in a way he is. His heart is breaking so fast behind his ribs he can hear it thudding in his ears, and the blood in his veins is singing so shrill it's a wonder he can focus on anything else ever again but the feeling of this, but the dragon is there, the dragon he holds, the dragon he strokes down a massive snout, over the flares of its defensive spikes, down a serpentine neck as age old bones break beneath his boots.
It fights him when he tries to climb, you have to climb so high just to reach its back, its side, onto the base of his neck, but this is normal, common.
The first test of a bond between a dragon and a rider. The first mounting. Dragons fight it, and riders must fight back harder, prove they're worthy, prove they are capable.
Aemond holds on without seat or reigns, even as the Cannibal heaves and goes to shake him off, and he barks out another Calm! And this time…
This time it works.
The Cannibal settles, and there's another word it seems to understand as well as Aegon. Sōvegon.
Fly.
The world trembles as the beast tears out of the cave and into the sky.
VI
They must hear the noise from the flight, the first big battering of wings, because suddenly people are looking out and up, and seeing a black dragon in the blacker skies.
They know then.
They must know.
The Cannibal, no longer hidden in the shadows, no longer lurking in the corner of a terrified eye, no longer shrouded in clouds.
It's there for all to see-
With Aemond Targaryen laughing on its back.
They circle Dragonstone once, twice, whine higher and wider, into the moonshine.
He lands what feels like hours later, when sunrise is only just cresting on the sea, and his mother greets him at the doors of the castle, Cannibal resting out in the open by the waves, and she frets over him, demands to know what he's done-
But his father is proud, Aemond can see it in his eye, proud and a little wonderstruck and the King claps him on the back and says my son.
My son. A Targaryen.
His mother eases off then, perhaps because of the delight of his father, but possibly due to the worry and indignation etched on Rhaenyra's when Aemond's older sister learns of what happened.
He has a dragon now, one of the worst in the world, two for the Greens and the Blacks have two too-
Drawing even.
VII
Perhaps that is why the Velaryon bastards corner him two days later, along with their lickspittle cousins Baela and Rhaena, just shy of the families retirement back to King's Landing.
Perhaps that is why he argues back when they all try to pick a fight, accusing him of using dark magics to get a dragon, of feeding souls to the Cannibal so he could fly because that is the only way someone like Aemond would ever earn wings.
They think they can still get away with it. Think he still the boy he was a moon ago. Think they can pin him down and belittle him and bully him as they had their entire lives.
But Aemond is a Targaryen now, tried and true unlike Rhaena or Baela who'd yet to claim their own dragons, and that meant respect was due.
It doesn't stay as an argument with words. Aemond can't remember who throws the first punch, but someone does, and soon it's a free for all of children out for blood.
He doesn't hold back. Aemond refuses to hold back any longer, so many years taunted and jeered at and they still cannot allow him this one victory, and so with his fists he also brings the truth no one else is willing to say.
He tells the Velaryon boys that they'll die screaming in flames just as their father did. Bastards.
Aemond doesn't know where Lucerys gets the dagger from, when exactly he pulls it out, but it is the last thing his one eye ever sees.
Two hours later, men come to say the Cannibal has devoured Arrax, leaving behind nothing but a torn off wing. It is perhaps the only reason his mother doesn't demand retribution.
An eye for an eye.
A.N: sorry if i haven't answered any questions in reviews or pms I'm still on holiday and I'll answer any o have when I get back home.
sorry for any spelling mistakes or formatting issues. I'm posting from my phone lol.
thank so much for all the follows and favourites and the lovely reviews! I hope you all liked this chapter! -AlwaysEatTheRude21