PART TWO: FIERCE FIGHTS AND SWIFTER FLIGHTS I
MAY 1987: Little Whinging, Surrey; Under stairs Cupboard.
Rhaenys Potter's P.O.V
In a sealed cubbyhole, in a tiny town in Surrey England, where nothing out of the ordinary ever took place, a page crinkled beneath a fingertip, tracking the lines of ink and paint like rivers on a map. Arching over thorny spines, brushing over barrelled belly, dipping under broad wings, and sweeping over shimmering scarlet scales.
By the crack of light seeping under the bolted door, the roaring red dragon seemed to glow in a cerise inferno, belly scales of hewn gold and amber eyes glinting. Gently, with more care than the crumpled page had been wrenched free from its book, little Rhaenys Potter placed the tattered sheet on the edge of her rusted cot.
There was only four words on the page, inscribed at the bottom in a sweep of black cursive, and vowel by vowel Rhaenys savoured them on the tip of her tongue.
She had never tasted anything so sweet before.
Kilgharrah: The Great Dragon.
Dudley, her pudgy, plump cousin, was going to be angry when he discovered she had ripped the page out of his book: Camelot and the tales of King Arthur. It didn't matter if he did not read, Dudley hated reading. It did not matter that he had never picked up the book since his aunt had given it to him for Christmas, and he had thrown it over his shoulder, where it had skidded under the sofa. And it would not matter that she had damaged the book, whether he liked it or not. It was his, and Rhaenys knew, knew better than most, she was not allowed to touch Dudley's things.
Aunt Petunia would be angrier still that Rhaenys had dared gone upstairs and sullied Dudley's room with her grubby fingers. She was only allowed upstairs to collect laundry, and for the odd twenty-minute wash in a cold shower. She had to stay in her cupboard. She had to keep quiet. She definitely wasn't allowed to touch Dudley's things, and never, never, never, was she to ever break anything.
Tearing a page out a book wasn't really breaking something, was it?
Uncle Vernon would be angriest, if but she simply existed and, by a damaged book of all things, loathing reading as much as his son, he was reminded of that small fact.
Yet, none of that mattered.
Not a thing.
Not in this locked cupboard, starving, left in the dark, alone, because here it was.
A dragon.
Rhaenys Potter, with all the belief and wonder only a small child could have, with every beat of her heart and dream she dreamt, believed in magic. And if magic was real, then, of course, by logic, dragons must too.
It made perfect sense to a six-year-old Rhaenys.
She dreamt of them sometimes. Great beasts of the sky, leather and scale and talon, soaring above her head, thundering like a storm. There would be so many, swarming, just above her, that it was no longer day, but a gleaming myriad of shining hide and burning comets, a northern light of smoke and fury.
If she was lucky, very lucky, she sometimes dreamt she rode one, right into the clouds, up and up and up and up, and away and away and away and away and-
Rhaenys Potter dreamt of dragons, she dreamt and dreamt and dreamt and wanted. She wanted so bad that it hurt. Hurt more than the hunger. Hurt more than the dark damp cupboard. Hurt more than the bruises on her arms, or the scabs on her knees, or the split lip. It hurt, and she wanted, and she wanted, and it hurt.
To Rhaenys Potter, so young, too young, that was life.
Wanting and hurt.
Yet, in her dreams, in those magical few hours, there was no pain or want. There was only dragons and freedom. They were out there, they had to be, they were out there somewhere, waiting just for her to find, ones just like Kilgharrah, wild and free and untamed, and one day…
One day, Rhaenys would find them, and she would be just as they were.
No one starved a dragon. No one beat a dragon. Dragons wouldn't be so easily padlocked in a flimsy cupboard. No one yelled or screamed or snubbed a dragon. No one left a dragon, alone, scared in the dark… Forgotten. There would be no Vernon, Petunia or Dudley, no picking weeds in the rain, or scavenging half eaten scraps from the kitchen bin when her aunt wasn't looking.
One day, it would only be her, the endless sky, and a great dragon.
And chocolate. All the chocolate she could eat.
And a real blanket. Those heavy, dense ones that seemed so warm. Perhaps it would be made of fur. Thick fur of white, and she would never leave it.
And lamps, so many lamps, glass lamps of every colour, so she would never have to squat in the dark again.
Folding the page lovingly, careful and cautious beyond her years, Rhaenys stuffed it under her threadbare pillow, more case than cushion, chewed at the end to tatters by a house mouse.
It could have been a rat, but little Rhaenys didn't want to think of that.
A house mouse sounded better.
One day, she would have the thickest pillow, and she would share it with her dragon and-
The clink of a bolt sliding open. Before Rhaenys could drive away from the door, huddle in a corner, the cupboard swung open, the bright light momentarily blinding her as a bony hand, brittle and stiff and merciless, reached in, snatched her by the scruff of her shirt, and with one good yank, rooted her out of her closet.
"Get to work, girl! Breakfast, now. Don't make me ask again. And don't you dare let it burn."
With a sharp shove, Rhaenys stumbled towards the kitchen, her legs numb and shaky from sitting so long. The necklace beneath her shirt bobbed, a spine of the golden sun jabbing her hollow belly. Aunt Petunia had tried taking it from her since she could remember, snatching it from her neck, forcing her to hand it over, throwing it out the window, in the bin, burning it. However, every morning she woke up, and there it was, around her neck again.
Petunia stopped trying last week.
As she had stopped trying to shave her curls off, particularly the white streak at her temple that her aunt insisted outed her 'freakish' nature.
Petunia would take her lilac eyes too if she could, Rhaenys thought.
Stuck between the door of the hallway and kitchen, Rhaenys hazard a glance over her shoulder, to her aunt bathed in paisley and pearls. For a flash, the moment between one heartbeat and the next, Rhaenys thought of her stolen picture. She thought of Kilgharrah, the Great Dragon that sent Merlin himself running.
Kilgharrah wouldn't be shoved. Kilgharrah wouldn't be scared. She would roar, and breathe great swathes of fire and knock down the house with a beat of her wing, and-
For a moment, one mad flash of wrath, Rhaenys wanted to be Kilgharrah. She would roar at her aunt and charge, and kick and claw, and bite and scratch and scream and-
Petunia raised her hand, only an inch, palm flat: less likely to bruise Petunia had learned, fingers tense, ready to strike, and Rhaenys, little Rhaenys, did none of what she thought, not so much as a meow.
She flinched.
Flinched and scuttled into the kitchen to begin to fry the bacon, the ding of pots and pans echoing out.
Rhaenys was no Kilgharrah. Rhaenys was no dragon. Rhaenys Potter was nothing but a scared six-year-old child, with blue and purple bruises in the shapes of hands, knobbly scabbed knees, too small and too thin, in clothes ten times her size, who was terrified. So terrified.
She was a child who dreamed and nothing more.
Perhaps one day, she swore, she would have dragon. Perhaps one day she would fly. Perhaps one day, she would have fire of her own. One day, she would be free and she would have food, and blankets and the biggest of pillows. One day… One day.
Just not today.
Early 285 AC: Sunspear: Bedchamber
Oberyn Martell's P.O.V
A finger stroked over the well-worn ink, looping over vowels, snaking over consonants, and flitting over tear stains. It froze at the bottom, dared not touch, four letters that bore so much anguish.
Elia.
The slight letter was old now, perfectly loved and perfectly despised in equal measure. Battered by age, and season, and moments of passion. He loathed it. He cherished it. He never wanted to see it again. He never wanted to stop reading.
This letter, with blotches of fading ink, ripped and crisp in corners from moments where he would go to burn it, tear it apart, only to change his mind, was the last thing Prince Oberyn Nymeros Martell had received from his sister, and between the lines of words, leaking from the ink, he thought Elia's ghost smiled at him. It was only five rows long. A letter telling of his nieces imminent arrival in Sunspear ten-and-four days hence.
A letter that never came to be.
Two years had come to pass, as obstinate as time was, and no one, from Squire to Prince, had either seen Daria Sand or the Princess Rhaenys since. Those who did know of this letter, as few as those numbers where and all confined to Three-fold Gate of Sunspear, had all come to their own ending.
Some murmured the pair had not made it out the Red Keep, and their bones lay disregarded at the foot of a stairway, hooked in the first moments of their great flee.
Others whispered that the Boneway had slain them, as it did many a traveller, and the rough winds had stripped their corpses of their flesh, pecked by bird and sand fox alike.
A few muttered, the rare ones, contended they had absconded to Sothoryos, where they be still. Biding their time to return when the Baratheon King grew weakest.
Oberyn assented to none of these theories. There was too little proof of anything. Oberyn only knew the search bands Doran and he had unleashed in Dorne, so many in those first years, had barely brought back one hint.
A fisher woman in the Shadow City who, through a healthy bribe of coin, told of a mother and a babe who had rushed through her stall, knocking over a barrel of mackerel, chased by seven hooded men.
From there the trail died.
Oberyn sighed and shifted in his seat, the silk slip draped around his waist falling. A spluttering tallow candle perched at the border of his desk the only light to read by in this murky, bleak night.
A hand came from the dark, nimble fingers skulking slickly over his neck, dancing down his chest, and veering over his taut stomach to rest serenely at his hip. A head of dusky locks, as dark as a ravens wing, came to rest by chin on his shoulder, peppering his nose with the fragrance of spiced water lily and desert plume.
"By your sullen sigh, and your midnight dash from my bed, I assume the men have returned? What news do they bring?"
Ellaria Sand's voice was as bright as the candle before them, smoky and cloying, as sweet as her scent, and it brought Oberyn more comfort than he could ever speak of. Lolling in his chair, he bowed his head to press a sharp nose into her hair, seeing nought but the speckled sky of stars from his open window from over the curve of her scalp.
"As they have always done, they bring us nothing. Not even a hair."
His own hand lifted from the wood of the desk, slipping back to thread through Ellaria's, squeezing. He did not need words. Not here. Not with his love.
She always knew, his sand sprite.
She sighed, heavy and long, as she pressed into his back, her naked form pushing into his side, her rounded stomach full and beautiful as all ripe fruit are.
"Perhaps next time, my love."
Anger seized him as it could often do. Deadly. Silently. He detached himself from Ellaria with a huff, striding to his glassless window, peering deep into the night. The stars were brilliant this far south, countless surges of light. And somewhere underneath this canopy of cold light, below this very sky, his niece was, perhaps, gazing at the same stars.
He need only find her.
To do so, he needed Doran to remove the stick from his-
"There will be no next time if our Prince Doran does not reinstate the searches. He ordered their halt not an hour past. Two years, he said, is enough. If we have found nothing now, we never will, and each party we send out only raises suspicion on what we could possibly be searching for. Word spreads, he says, as if I of all people do not know this. I never knew my brother to have such frail hope. To be such a cad. How could he-"
Anew, Ellaria came to his side in a flutter of soft skin, beauty, and kindness. Kindness he, perhaps, did not deserve. She held his hand between her deft fingers, stroked thumb over knuckle, soothing his venomous temper in the way only she could.
"Mayhap he has not given up hope so much as he has turned himself wholly to it. Perhaps he believes Rhaenys will find her own way home. And if she is anything like her impetuous and impulsive uncle…"
She smirked at him.
"Then I hold no doubt she will. You need only faith, my love. She is a Martell, these are the sands of Dorne, this is her home, and if she had once made it as close as the Shadow City, it is only a matter of time before she is in these halls. Yet, careful we must all tread. If we query the wrong man, one who can piece together our inquiries, it will not be long, I fear, that word will flutter back to the Baratheon's ear. Rumour that the Martells are searching for a Princess who should be, to the King, dead, is damning in these times. Our only hope is, if this is true, and the Lannister Lord failed in his butchery that night, he is as likely as us to try and keep these rumours from his dear Stag King."
Perhaps she was right. Perhaps, though Oberyn would never admit it, Doran was right. Their many searches had turned up nothing but rumour and gossip. If they pushed much further, people would, as they always did, speak. They would let slip a question asked, and, before much could be done, word would slink back to the Baratheon King of the search for a Princess thought dead and buried in King's Landing.
The why the Stag King would inevitably ask could only lead to war.
Nevertheless, Oberyn Martell was not a man made to sit on his hands and wait. What if they-
You need only faith, my love.
Faith.
He need only faith.
Faith his sister's death was not in vain.
Faith his niece lived still.
Faith she would find her way home, where she belonged, one day.
Just not this day.
And if this came to pass, if Rhaenys walked the Water Gardens, if she truly had been smuggled from Maegor's Holdfast successfully and the crushed corpse the Lion gave the King was nothing but a mummers ploy, perhaps Elia had gotten Aegon out too, though her letter made no mention of his nephew.
It wouldn't.
If both children had been rustled to freedom, it was safer to keep their respective escapes as close to the chest as possible, so if one were to be discovered, the other wouldn't fall to the same fate.
Oberyn would put nothing passed his sweet sister, who had a sharper mind than most first believed, she was always-
Was.
Grief tangled in his chest, a squirming orb of sorrow and sadness and regret.
It was the first time Oberyn had thought of his sister as was and not is.
As gone and not here.
Past not present.
Elia… Sweet, sweet Elia was gone and-
No.
Elia was not gone. Not fully. Her daughter was out there, somewhere. Gazing at the same stars he did. If Rhaenys lived, Elia lived.
Rhaenys was alive.
Hope.
Oberyn had hope, and there was nothing in this wretched world that was more potent than that.
Sluggishly, he turned to his paramour, slipping arms around a plump waist, fingers stroking the stretch of skin much like he had the letter. There was no death to be found here, only life. Brilliant, wonderful life.
"Enough of my woes. How are you and the babe? Well?"
She positively scowled at him.
"He is well enough to kick me awake."
Oberyn grinned.
"She."
Ellaria cocked a brow at him.
"You desire a girl?"
His chuckle was as dusky and deep as the night.
"Only daughters. As a second son myself, I know what trouble boys can bring their fathers. But daughters? Yes. I can think of nothing sweeter."
A fourth daughter rang delightful, the first with Ellaria. As his hand rested on the swell of her belly, her own came up to cradle his jaw, tender and warm, dark eyes glittering.
"And we shall call her Elia, so when Rhaenys comes home, though she may not know her mother, she may come to know her namesake."
When.
Not if, when.
Ellaria always knew just what to say.
Oberyn kissed her, fast and fierce and passionate, hope burning bright in his heart like a night sky full of stars.
August 1989:
Rhaenys Potter's P.O.V
The dreams started three years ago, on the eve of her seventh birthday, and Rhaenys Potter never remembered a single one come morning. They always started the same. A dark, primal place, acres of old forest untouched for thousands of years, a gloomy castle rising around it.
Rhaenys scampered through the woods.
Tall evergreens armoured in grey-green needles, great oaks bowing, hawthorn and ash snatched at her clothes, pulling and tugging and tripping.
She shouldn't be here.
This wasn't her forest.
Where was the sand and sea and scorching sun?
Where was her home?
She always ran, and she always ended up in the very centre where she saw it. It stood there, a pale titan. She could smell it, earthy and brooding, the stench of time itself, and the red leaves of the Weirwood were a blaze of flame amongst the green.
Weirwood… How did she know that word?
North.
She was in the north.
This was Winterfell.
The Godswood.
How did she know that?
Before the Weirwood laid a pool of black water. Crisp and cool and bottomless.
She shouldn't be here. This wasn't-
A boy was sitting upon a winding root, staring into the dark pond. He couldn't be much younger than herself, perhaps a year and a half at a push, a few months in reality. He was graceful and quick, lean like an arrow, even smothered in his thick furs. His face was long, narrow too, with a pop of dark brown curls coiling around his too-big ears, ears he hadn't grown into yet, grey eyes so dark they almost looked black.
Like the dark pond.
He was a solemn boy, solemn and cautious, sullen, the type quick to sense a slight.
He looked up, right at her from across the pond, and suddenly she remembered.
Jon.
This was Jaehaerys, though he insisted his name was Jon, and she had been here before.
She was dreaming again.
She was always dreaming of this place and-
Not always this place. Sometimes it was somewhere else, somewhere hot and heavy with whipping winds, a great boat, open seas, and a boy with blue hair, kind eyes and a harp, who taught her how to tie knots and climb a mast, and would laugh and twirl her above his head as she-
Rhaenys smiled brilliantly.
Jon smiled back.
"Race you up the tree."
She was already off, darting around the pool, swift on her feet, swifter than Jon, climbing and clambering as he frowned at her back.
"That is cheating!"
Her voice echoed back from the canopy of crimson leaves.
"Stop scowling and start climbing, wolf-boy! I've nearly won already!"
She could hear his voice trailing her as he climbed.
"Pick up a sword, and say so anew."
Of course, Rhaenys wouldn't. Jon cheated in sword fighting, or so she claimed heatedly. He used his added height and weight when they played battle with the sticks on the floor as shields and blades. He was better at fighting, and hiding too, he always found her in hide and seek, but she was faster in chase and better at chess, and, apparently by the tell-tale echo of a branch snapping, climbing too.
Both were awful at swimming, unlike the boy with blue hair-
"Rhaenys play nice. Jon do not urge her on. She does not need your encouragement to fight."
Both children snapped around, wide-eyed, and there he was.
The boy with blue hair, dressed in breeches, older than them both, shirt mussed by slumber and-
"Aegon!"
The pair crowed as they dropped from the tree like ripe fruit, dashing for the taller boy, shouting over each other.
"She was cheating again! She never plays fair and-"
"I wasn't cheating! I was winning! Jon's just a sore loser who doesn't-"
"I am not! You gave me a brittle branch on purpose the last time-"
"Yes you are! You stuck your leg out and tripped me when I was winning the race around the pond-"
Before words could roll to a brawl, which, when it came to Jon and Rhaenys, was always a possibility, gentle hands were laid upon the pairs shoulders, and the two excitable children blinked up to the soft gaze of the taller boy.
"I believe you both need to cool off."
Jon, always the quietest out of the three, frowned, even now hearing the underlying promise, even as Rhaenys, forever the loudest, did what she did best of all.
Argue.
"It's not me who needs to pull their head out the snow. Jon-"
Suddenly, Aegon smiled, and it was sharp and keen and pocked with mischief. The hands tightened, wrapped in fur cloak and tatty t-shirt and, abruptly, the children were airborne, flapping in the wind like baby birds in first flight, in a shout of indignation, from Jon, and a squawking cry of laughter from Rhaenys.
The waters of the black pond engulfed their voices.
They broke the surface with a splutter and splatter.
"Get him!"
Aegon was already chuckling, plunging away into the underbrush of the forest, as Rhaenys hauled herself from the pond, bending on the bank to stretch her hand out for Jon to take as he splashed to keep his head above water.
His fingers enveloped around hers, alabaster crashing and weaving with bronze like foamed waves lapping at golden sands.
When Rhaenys awoke in her cupboard, shivering in her holey blanket, she thought she herd the faint laughter of children in the night, but-
Gone.
The dream was gone, as all her dreams were lately.
She remembered nothing.
Although, flexing her tingling fingers, she thought she felt the ghost of a hand clasping hers before, with the rise of the sun, that too was stolen.
She must have laid on it funny.
Late 294 AC: Sunspear: Water Gardens
Ellaria Sand's P.O.V
The Water Gardens were situated on the cusp of a beach seeping in from the Summer Sea, three leagues west from the bustle and blare of Sunspear and the coastal road. Gleaming pale pink in the sizzling sun from the marble paves and courtyard, the Water Garden's shimmered like a tiara nesting in silt.
And as Ellaria Sand made her way down the terraces overlooking the glittering pools and fountains, sheltered by the dense foliage of the overhanging blood orange trees, and through the fluted pillar gallery into the Gardens themselves, she thought, truly believed, there was no place more lovely in all of Westeros.
With the hot days and muggy nights, salt breeze ruffling hair and cooling sweat sodden skin, and so many fountains to admire and play in, children from all stations, bastard and trueborn alike, were sent to the Water Gardens to foster, where they played together at the beach skimming rocks or dipping waves, splashing in springs. Heavy with child as Ellaria was, with her fourth child, Elia, Obella and Dorea welcomed the chance to run free without their mother tottering on swollen ankle after them to curb their more… Reckless ideas.
However, their mother's current state did not stop them from trying to find trouble.
They were entirely Oberyn's children.
Most days she felt blessed by this.
On others, such as that day, she cursed it to the skies.
"Please! Dorea has never gone picking before, and we have! We can show her how, and we promise, we will come back as soon as our baskets are full. Mother…"
Her precious Elia begged at her knee from where Ellaria sat, plump and pinked like an overripe berry at the edge of a fountain. The palm leaf in Ellaria's hand swished like the tail of an angry cat, forming a trifling waft of hot air to lap at her clammy neck and face, gazing down to the open face of her eldest daughter.
Elia had her dusky hair braided back that day, and her dark eyes glinted under the unforgiving sunlight. Eyes identical to her fathers. She had likewise taken his wild, and occasionally haughty, temperament. Lady Lance, her sisters were beginning to call her, for the lance she used when she rode her black filly.
"Please!"
Ellaria shook her head, and even this small movement, as full as she was with babe, with this everlasting heat pressing in on her, stole what little strength she had. On any other day, she would take the children herself. Yet, the grove rose on the fringes of the Water Garden Palace, beyond the Three-Fold Gate, and Ellaria, struck by exhaustion as she was, could not make the winding walk. Neither would she let her young children go alone, despite how much they huffed and puffed and blustered.
"Perhaps another day, my love. Let us rest for a bit and enjoy the sun, yes?"
As if sent by the Seven to aid her, a voice suddenly picked up behind them, silky and salty.
"Girls, are you pestering your mother?
They whirled around, her three little girls. Perhaps, by the kicking to her ribs, soon to be four. They quickly spotted their father strolling towards them. He was a tall, slender and graceful man. Age was beginning to creep in, lining his saturnine face, though the brilliance of his black gaze was never lessened by the arched dense brows hooding them. His hair, even now, so lustrous and dark, was only speckled with a few silver streaks dappled at his widow's peak.
And he was not alone.
Obara was a big-boned woman closing in to her thirtieth year. Long legged, with close set eyes and the same rat-brown hair of her mother that she had taken to tying into a knot, she strode beside her father quickly and angrily. She was a prickly fellow. Hot-tempered, she found relief for her simmering temperament in martial pursuits. She wore a mottled sand-silk cloak of dun and gold that day, thrown over brown riding leathers and a men's calf-length tunic. Her belt of copper suns glistened hotly in the high sun.
Beside her stood her sister, Nymeria, five and ten Name Days old. She was so completely… Dissimilar to her sister. Slim and slender like a willow branch, her father's straight black hair was braided away from her scalp. She had his dark eyes too, large and glossy. Her lips were painted a wine red that morning, a wine red currently curving into a sleek smile. Though she had the beauty her elder sister lacked, she was no less deadly. Nymeria, Ellaria knew, was a vengeful woman. That dress, shimmering lilac with a silk cape of cream and copper, hid the dozen daggers she concealed on her person.
The last of the group, who brought up the rear, was a fair girl, golden haired with deep blue eyes. She had dimples blooming in the hollows of her cheeks, and when she spoke it was only ever with a gentle, sweet voice. Nevertheless, Ellaria had learned, you never took her innocent and pious persona truthfully. Tyene Sand was, perhaps, the most treacherous of them all. Though she had, seemingly, taken nothing from her father's appearance, she did have his knowledge and love for poisons. The dress she wore, a clinging pale blue gown of samite with sleeves of Myrish lace, was, no doubt, toxic to the touch.
"Father!"
Ellaria's daughters chanted as they darted past her seated form to haggle their father, squirming like a nest of snakes, Obella taking the lead, voice echoing out across the pool as Oberyn plucked her up and bounced her in the air before settling the child on his hip.
"We only wanted to take Dorea fruit picking in the grove."
Oberyn ruffled her hair languidly.
"Not today, sweet child. Your mother needs rest."
Obara cut in.
"We'll take them. It will give you and Ellaria time to rest out from under the noon sun."
Oberyn shot her a glance over the edge of the water, and Ellaria smiled cheerily at Obara.
"That would be lovely."
Obara gave a sharp nod, a quick up and down tilt of her cut jaw, before she wrangled the squirming Obella from Oberyn's hip, slinging the small child through her arm like she was a sack of flour. Obella merely laughed at her sister's rather surly treatment, flinging and kicking her little legs.
"Come, little sea snakes."
One by one, the younger girls swarmed over to their older sisters like the bees whirring around the dune daisies, tittering and giggling between them. When they left, down the winding Water Gardens path to the orange grove, Ellaria soaked in the silence. She adored every single one of Oberyn's children, she would, if it ever came down to it, lay down her own life for them, and yet…
Eight daughters were eight daughters, and may the Mother have mercy on her.
"Elia loved fruit picking. The blood oranges were her favourite."
Grief never really goes away, Ellaria found. Although there were balms to ease the ache, like Oberyn's children, it was a double edged sword for sometimes, rarely, those very children reminded him of what he had lost, of what they, and who, would never know. It was bittersweet, Ellaria thought, the kind of scars grief left on a life. As Oberyn sat beside her, as he leant over and kissed her forehead, and they reminisced and enjoyed the hot Dornish sun, she thought, in a very peculiar way, grief made everything after it a blessing.
September 1991: Hagrid's Hut, Hogwarts.
Rhaenys Potter's P.O.V
Rhaenys hand flew into the air, buzzing about her head like it was an angry wasp. Typically, even though she had only been attending Hogwarts for barely three weeks, she was never so engaged in lessons. It was not that she found them incredibly challenging, or boring, or perhaps even complicated, but…
Well, Magic was real.
Rhaenys thought she might still be in some form of shock after learning that. Magic was real, and she was a witch and… And… And Magic was real! And if magic was real, as she had believed since she was six, then that could only mean one thing. She had seen Goblins and Elves, and Giants and Pixies, and yet, there was just one thing Rhaenys Potter wanted to see.
Wanted to see so much that she was practically vibrating.
That sunny morning in the Highlands, waving her hand like the bushy-haired Granger girl, sitting with her fellow Gryffindors and Slytherins outside Hagrid's hut for their first Care of Magical Creatures lesson, when the lesson drew to a close and Hagrid asked if anyone had any questions, of course Rhaenys, for the first time since coming to Hogwarts, shot her hand up high into the sky.
Even Hagrid looked partly perplexed by her sudden enthusiasm, as he slowly nodded at her.
"What about dragons? Where are the dragons? Can we see them? Can we touch them? Oh… Can I ride one?"
From somewhere across the classroom, Draco Malfoy laughed at her, grumbling loudly to his equally daft friends, Crabbe and Goyle.
"Where are the Dragons, she asks. Idiot. Does she not know anything-"
Hagrid's sharp glare shot at the blond boy promptly shut him up. The quiet would only last as long as the lesson did, Rhaenys knew. As she knew why Draco Malfoy was angry, truly, at her, and it had nothing to do with her turning down his offered hand and preverbal friendship on the Grand Hall staircase.
It was because of the startling white stripe of hair that bled out from her temple and fringe.
Rhaenys heard the rumours whispered about school as good as anyone else. Stories that said she, Rhaenys Potter with her white, white stripe of hair, and her peculiar lilac eyes, and her strange beginnings of being found in the forbidden forest by the Potters, was, in fact, a Malfoy bastard.
It wasn't true, of course, but when had that ever stopped a good gossip?
"Very good question, Miss Potter. Very good. Ten points to Gryffindor."
Draco huffed and crossed his arms, muttering something about Giants and his father. Hagrid turned away from the boy, and faced Rhaenys. His smile was nice. Kind in a way Rhaenys had not known adults could be before coming to Hogwarts.
"Dragons exist, aye. But they be mindless beasts. Terrible things, really. Can't control them. The best we can do, to protect ourselves and the muggles, is lock 'em up in conservation camps. That's if the ministry don't kill them for-"
Spotting Rhaenys's suddenly pale face, Hagrid, not too elegantly, switched tactics.
"Well, dragons are tightly observed, and no dragon has been born or hatched in nearly a thousand years. They're dying out, we only have a handful left, and old things they are. More bone than fury or fire now. There's nothing to be scared of."
Rhaenys sagged down into her seat on the grass.
"I'm not scared."
She wasn't. She wasn't scared or concerned or even weary. She was angry. Beyond logic, or reason, or anything Rhaenys could name or put a face to, she was angry at this disclosure. The one thing, only one, she had ever wished for and… And nothing.
She should have known better.
Good things never happened to Rhaenys Potter.
Dreams don't come true.
Not for her.
After answering a few more questions, about Gnomes and curriculum and if pixie dust was really from pixies, Hagrid called for the end of the day, and as the children began filing up the hill, back to the castle, one by one, he asked for her to say behind. He only spoke when he was sure they were alone.
"Why don' ye come to my hut this weekend? I think I have something you would like to see."
Story Notes (Ignore if you wish)
So, from consensus, it's pretty split between wanting Aegon added and not. In sight of this, I've decided to just write and see what happens lol. So, Aegon might be joining the pairing, he might not be, it depends how things go. I think it will create a more natural scenario anyway, if I just write and see where it takes me rather than planning everything right down to the T. I hope this doesn't bother anyone too much, but, hey, it's just fanfiction! It's all meant in good fun.
Sorry this chapter took a while to come out, I wanted to map not only the next five chapters, but I wanted to start planning the next bit out too, so I can properly add foreshadowing into early chapters for what's coming. This meant it was a lot of work, because I couldn't publish anything because I've been constantly popping back to add a sentence or two. I do actually put a lot of effort into these strange stories of mine, because I really do wish for people to enjoy them, and I wanted certain things to be mapped out correctly. This might mean extra time between updates sometimes, but I think the end results are a lot better.
We do get some good Jon Snow P.O.V next chapter, as well as more Oberyn and Rhaenys, so I hope you are all looking forward to that!
If you have a spare moment, please drop a few words into the little box down there. They keep the muse from whining. Until next time! Stay Beautiful! ~AlwaysEatTheRude21