07x01, 'Dragonstone'

Dragonstone sleeps.

Daenerys doesn't.

She's home.

It doesn't feel like it.

She doesn't know these halls. She's grown up in the harsher climes of Essos, not the damp and dreary emptiness of this echoing chamber. These halls were still adorned with the strange Baratheon sigil, the markers still littering the war table. They're gone now, but the dragons carved into the wall still seem to be alive with suspicion as they follow her with blank, obsidian eyes.

She's not sure what she'd expected this place to be. In her mind she's built it up to be grandiose and breathtaking. And it is those things—when those gates opened to reveal the winding stone steps leading up to the castle, she had felt like an awestruck child. Nothing she's ever seen compares to the regal imposingness of this place. Not the pyramid of Meereen, nor the wonders of Qarth.

But these walls don't hold any happiness for her. Fleeting moments in her family's past, perhaps, but fire and blood has reigned here for almost as long as the Targaryens did in King's Landing. The terror Queen Alyssa must have felt during the reign of Maegor the Cruel. The ill-fated reign of Queen Rhaenyra ending right on these very grounds at the hands of her brother and his dragon. Her own mother's life cut tragically short at the height of the worst storm seen in centuries, perhaps in the very chamber she is using herself. Endless sorrow. Endless pain.

She has her own personal conflicts which she daren't admit aloud to anyone, not even Missandei, who she is sure would understand her.

She'd felt a certain affinity with Essos, a kinship of sorts, an understanding of some of the customs and duties, with so many foreigners from all over the world that she had felt a little less out of place.

This is her homeland, but it doesn't feel like it.

Would Jorah still think of Bear Island as home if he saw it now? Or would it have changed so much in the interim years that it no longer felt safe and familiar?

The thought of Jorah brings a powerful ache to her chest. She tries not to think of him too often, the contents of their last meeting still so raw and painful. Anxiety gnaws at her insides like a wolf on the corpse of an elk whenever she thinks of him, for she hates the idea that he might not even be alive right now, that he has failed in her final mission for him.

She tries to reassure herself that that can't be the case. She'd know if he was no longer living, just as she'd known that he'd find her again in Vaes Dothrak. They're intrinsically linked, through fate or something else entirely, and she'd know.

She has to believe that. Otherwise she isn't sure what she'd do.

Only that the storms would rage, and she'd never be the same person again, lost to bitterness and regret.