Three: Years Three and Four Brings Trouble To Your Door

Part Two

XIII

People say Targaryen's are closer to Gods then men. Aegon, like his half-sister Rhaenyra, will believe when he's older that it is because of their dragons. Not Alyssa, however. No. Whatever Godhood she had strayed too close to, what idol had laid a skeletal hand from a flowing cowled robe upon her crown and sanctified her in its deathly shadow, it had nothing to do with dragons.

Although she does get a dragon out of it, the dragon itself is not the root cause of her cosmic assumption.

Something else is. Something old, primordial and transcendent, that is as palpable and understandable to a mans mind as asking oneself what star stuff is made of. There is an answer, surely there is an answer for everything, but they cannot grasp it at that moment.

Trying to see the tapestry from a single thread was like trying to catch smoke in your bare hands.

Alyssa was much the same.

Older himself, Aegon will begin to understand, not fully, he doubts he will ever fully understand Alyssa, what and who and how she is, but he will appreciate her star stuff for the unpredictable bedfellow it is.

But Aegon was not older. Aegon was just a boy at the feast where it all began. A boy who was unsure of himself and desperate for his father's love, his mother's kindness, a place in his family that does not owe itself to burden.

And like most Valyrian classics, it began with an argument between siblings.

XIV

Alyssa starts acting strange the moment they begin the walk from their chambers to the Great Hall for the feast after partaking in a short rest following their journey. Mother wishes for them to all enter together, as children of the Crown it is only right they join in father's wake or so she says.

She gathers them up outside their shared rooms, collects her little ducklings, brushes lint off Aegon's shoulder, demands Helaena put her pill bugs back, smiles at Aemond's immaculate presentation that causes him to preen like a peacock, and scowls but rightly gives up when she spots Alyssa with her hair ribbons and pearls already loose and a slipper missing from her foot.

Along with the King and a small contingency of guards, they begin their walk towards the Great Hall.

It starts right here.

Father pulls Aegon close into his left as they make the short distance, braces a hand upon his shoulder, and he smiles down at him like any father would smile down at his child. Aegon laps up the attention-

Laps it up so much that he fails to notice Alyssa falling back until mother grumbles.

"Oh, Alyssa,"

She complains in a way that indicates she has said just this far too many times before, causing the small group to stop.

"Come along, now. We have no time for your escapades this eve."

When Aegon turns back, he finds Alyssa has stopped by a narrow window in the foyer. She was up on her tiptoes, though it was little help, fingers curled into brick, trying her best to get a good look out the window that faced out towards the far side of Dragonstone, towards the Dragonmont.

"Sing'in!"

Alyssa murmurs, beginning to point out the window.

Father's hand slips from his shoulder. Aegon feels the weight of it go like a blanket suddenly being snatched from him in slumber. Its absence leaves him feeling startingly cold.

"I do not hear any singing. Do you?"

The King asks the Queen, but Alicent is, ostensibly, in no mood to answer and in no mood to humour Alyssa. Passing Daeron over to Helaena, mother makes fast time in gathering Alyssa into her own arms and drawing the squirming girl away from the window.

"There is no singing. Now Aegon, keep hold of your sister's hand, will you? Make sure she doesn't wander away again."

And so Alyssa is passed to him, as she's always passed to him, plopped down at his side, hand forced in his, and because Alyssa is now between him and father, the King doesn't bother to hold Aegon again before he begins leading them once more down the corridor.

Aegon's gut cinches in, squirms as Alyssa had squirmed in mother's hold, and they manage a full five steps before the young girl is tugging on his hand.

"Egg hear sing'in?"

Father is not looking at Aegon anymore. He's walked ahead of them, back turned, attention fluttering away as capriciously as a butterfly. That's it. His father's love, his interest. A thing that leaves as soon as it comes (but Aegon doesn't understand that as a boy. He only knows he had it and then he didn't, and so he blames the closest thing to him as most children do).

"Don't be ridiculous, Alyssa."

He snaps far too harshly, perhaps the most severe he has been with his sister thus far. He drags her along with him, and he doesn't glance at her as father does not look back at him.

"Be good for once."

Alyssa does not speak again, she crams her fingers into her mouth, her nervous tick, and all is silent for the entirety of walk to the Great Hall.

Aegon feels the writhing worsen, a sickening feeling deep in his belly. He feels bad, knows he should apologize-

But Targaryens never really say sorry, do they? (But he'll apologise later. He'll say sorry, sorry, sorry like a prayer given in a Sept, and Alyssa will only giggle like the flickering flame of a candle that only ever answer a devotees chant).

XV

Father's attention comes flying back to Aegon at the feast, and Alyssa's silence is pushed to the back of his young mind. Aegon is placed right of father at the long table, just one space down, the exact same distance as Rhaenyra (and that must mean something, yes? It must mean he loves Aegon as much as he loves Rhaenyra, certainly?).

As always, in a vein attempt to keep her under control (it never works), Alyssa is placed right next to Aegon. From there, there is a slip of Greens, his mother and siblings and grandfather. Across from them, the Blacks, Rhaenyra and her husband and her personal guard (much more than that, Aegon will later realize), and further away, at the other head of the table (which said all it really needed to, didn't it), uncle Daemon and his family.

Aegon is much too busy basking under his father's attention, his little 'Aegon's been working on his numbers-' and his 'Aegon's becoming a fine swordsmen-" that he's regaling the table with to notice much of Alyssa.

She's still, and worse yet, she hasn't touched a bite of her food (which if you knew Alyssa, you would recommend a speedy trip to a Maester), and she seems transfixed with the nearest window left ajar to bring breeze into the room baked warm by a summer sun, black stone, and a kitchen below.

Yet, father teases Aegon, pushes a cup into his hand with a crinkle in his violet eye, a cup of adult wine; the rich stuff, the real stuff, not the wine that is in Aegons' own goblet and his siblings that's been watered down for their meal.

"Go on son, try it."

Son. Father calls him son. Perhaps father had called him son before. Surely he had. However, Aegon does not remember it. Typically it's 'boy', or 'Aegon', or if he truly is in trouble, 'your son' to mother.

Aegon snatches the goblet, and downs the lot in one.

The wine burns (it burns terribly). His nose curls. He nearly coughs it all back up. He hates it. Hates the bitter taste and the hurt, and the way it feels thick in his throat-

But Father laughs, father smiles, and father says-

"That's my boy!"

So Aegon swallows. He swallows it all down. His chest blooms with a warm heat, from wine or his father's declaration he cannot tell (but is it any wonder he ends up the way he does? Why he keeps chasing that feeling at the end of every cup?)

The hall laughs, and even Rhaenyra chuckles, clapping, and-

Alyssa pulls on the sleeve of his doublet.

"Egg?"

She pulls harder.

"Egg, we wake dragon now?"

Aegon snatches his arm back (he regrets that. By the Gods he regrets that). He glares too, hotly, heated with the wine. Alyssa… oh Alyssa, she's looking at him with her wide mismatched gaze, large and a little sad, but there's excitement there too, anticipation he doesn't understand. But when he glances back up everyone has already moved on from him, dipping back into their own conversations, father with-

With Rhaenyra.

Aegon, once more, is unseen.

Alyssa yanks on his sleeve again.

"We wake black dragon-"

For the final time, Aegon heaves his arm free, and he hisses at his sister something he'll regret a whole lot more than calling her silly in a few hours' time.

"Can't you just leave me alone?"

Alyssa's face crumbles in on itself, her hand snatches back as if he's burned her, and Aegon mourns his actions instantly. He opens his mouth to say sorry, perhaps even to refute what he just stated, to say that no, he is the silly one-

But Alyssa is already tumbling into her anger, tiny, indignation that hoods her eyes and purses her mouth and makes her cheeks pop a merry pink.

"Alley cat.."

He consoles, falling on a childish nickname Ser Cole has given Alyssa when it is just him and the children (older, when he too has seen the ripped eared, spitting, dog chasing alley cats of Fleabottom, Aegon will understand the epithet better, understand how good it fits), but the small child is done.

She breaks out, snatching his knife from his plate where it rested next to his venison, steals it for herself and folds her arms over her chest and turns away from him in clear dismissal. He doesn't think much about the knife. Alyssa likes shiny things, and she likes stealing things too, many things, sometimes just because she could (he should have thought about the knife. He really should have thought about that damned knife).

"'Lyssa no need Egg."

And, because Aegon is much a Targaryen as she, prideful ghastly creatures they are, he huffs and he puffs, and he mirrors the girl.

"Fine."

"Fine."

Alyssa mimics back (because she has to have the last word even at four name days old), and that is the end of that.

Until mother begins calling for her at the end of the feast.

XVI

"Alyssa-… Alyssa? Aegon!"

Aegon breaks around at his mother's voice, drawn from staring forlornly at his father sharing some such tale of Rhaenyra's youth with the woman herself.

"Where is your sister?"

His mother is frowning, bouncing Daeron on her lap, and Aegon peers down-

To find Alyssa's empty seat. Just a blank space, an untouched cushion, no sign of a child anywhere in sight.

"I… I do not know."

Mother abruptly stops bouncing Daeron, as if Aegon has somehow reached inside her and disconnected her mind from her body.

"What do you mean you do not know, Aegon? She was sitting right next to you-"

She was sitting right next to mother too, but Aegon does not mention that.

"You always know where Alyssa is."

Alicent finishes, and that's around when Aegon begins to taste the bile in the back of his mouth. Aegon does always know where Alyssa is. Where she's run to. All her hiding spots. What turns she takes to escape her Septas.

But he does not know here.

Aegon does not know. Suddenly, surprisingly, he feels terribly sick as he stares at Alyssa's empty chair, that blank space where there's never really been a blank space since mother birthed her.

Aegon always knows where Alyssa is… because Alyssa is always with Aegon.

"I do not know, mother."

Alicent hands Daeron off to a guard close by, shouting louder, eyes sweeping the Great Hall as if she expects to find a burst of red jumping out a shadow.

"Alyssa? Alyssa! Come out right now!"

His mother's cry is loud enough to draw the tables attention. When she stands from her chair, the legs squealing on flagstone as it is pushed away, and dips down low to lift the table clothe to peer beneath, Alicent earns more than attention when she pushes back up.

Pallid, white knuckled, mother looks fearful.

"Alyssa!"

Alicent lifts her skirts in those very same white knuckles, and darts around the table, checking behind pillars, corners, the windows. Swiftly, it's like the hall is a nest shaken up, buzzing, whirring with violent, waspish energy.

The King is up next, calling for the missing girl.

"Alyssa? Come out now or there will be no cake for you!"

Aegon knows Alyssa is most unquestionably not in the hall when she does not appear at the threat.

Oh no.

"How could she just… just vanish? She was right there-… Viserys, do something!"

The Queen demands, seemingly spinning in circles and unsure of what to do with herself. Turning this way and that and back around all over again. The King, however, is less spirited.

"I am sure she is fine. This is not the first time Alyssa has strayed-"

"Yes,"

The Queen cuts in sharply, a little breathless.

"At Kingslanding. At home. What if she's gone out a window? Slipped from a wall? She doesn't know the lay of the land like she does back in the Red Keep."

It is not the King who replies but uncle Daemon, a glib uncle Daemon, still sitting gaily at his own head of the table (Aegon still wonders if Daemon imagined he was the one holding court, he the one with the crown right under his brother's nose).

"The girl is what? Four name days? How far could she have gotten, truly? She is likely in the hall outside giggling over-"

This seemed to be just the thing Viserys needed to hear as he and Alicent share a look. A knowing look.

They know Alyssa. If there is a locked door, she will find a way through, and if you think she can only go a chamber over, she'll cross a whole sea.

"Kingsguards?"

The King challenges, face as stricken grave as mother's was.

"Start a search in the hall and then spread out. Check every nook and cranny you can find. Nothing is too high or too low. Alyssa is very… adept at getting into places that should be difficult to get into. I want this place searched from the Drum Tower to the Dragon Bridge. Do I make myself clear?"

They nod as one, shuffling off in a swish of gold cloaks, and any cheerfulness in the room, the jollity of the feast, the chatter shatters on the stone floor like glass.

Rhaenyra stands too, pulling her own son close as if he might vanish, but Leanor leaps into action, ordering his own retinue to aid the Kingsguard. Not to be outdone (or outshone), Daemon orders his own men with a nod to follow the Kings orders, going a step further by standing to join the search personally.

Then everyone is talking all at once, and the commotion is so raucous it bounces off the walls with the rattle of footsteps and large doors being thrown open.

Uncle Daemon asserts he will take the west of the castle, uncle Laenor the east, the King the north and Ser Cole the south, where they will meet in the heart of Dragonstone if none find the girl. Rhaenyra states she will head to the kitchens bellow to see if the cooks and servants have seen the girl go by, Alicent still calls for Alyssa, grandfather, who had ended up with Daeron in the ensuing confusion, is already ordering guards to cut the child off and have the gates in and out the castle closed.

Aegon does not, however, hear much of that.

He only hears Alyssa.

"'Lyssa no need Egg." (No. Alyssa doesn't need an egg. Not an egg at all. Not when the Stranger smiles upon her.)

That is why, perhaps, no one, not a soul, hears Helaena, still calmly sitting at the table primly skewering peas on her fork for a delicate bite.

"Two-twos for the second sister. The second egg Aenar brought on ship and sea. Two black Kings of old bleed to one red Empress. Two-twos, dear sister."

XVII

The children are steered into their guest chambers promptly, the door is shut, and Aegon is left on tender hooks. He begs father to join the search, almost stomps his foot when he is ignored (of course he is disregarded), and he spends those hours ushering in twilight roving paths between the window and the hearth.

Helaena, with Daeron, falls asleep first when stars begin to shine, and this is no surprise. She seems unbothered by recent events, unmoved by a missing sister, but this is nothing new. Helaena is a girl who is calm when fire is raining down from skies and mountains, and yet inconsolable at the oddest of things. A certain glimmer in the water, when mother offers her cheese. Aemond is swift to follow his sister, still too young to truly grasp what is going on, but he sleeps shallow, low, as stiff as a rafter board.

Mother is in the adjoining apartment. Aegon can hear her pacing through the only other door of the chamber that matches his own. He does not know what time it is when he catches voices, soft and low-slung, drifting below the crack, but it is pitch outside and the waters of the surrounding sea are black.

Creeping to the door, he presses his ear to the wood in time to hear his mother.

"Where is she? Where is Alyssa?"

There's shuffling from the other side, a click Aegon hardly catches that he thinks might be a door closing behind someone.

Father, by the answering voice.

"We have not found her yet."

More scuffling, slippers on a fur rug, feet moving with nowhere to go.

"Then why are you back? Why are you not still out there-"

"It is too dark outside, Alicent. We can barely see our own noses. We found one of her ribbons caught on a trellis. Daemon believes she might have slipped out the West gate by some means and is heading towards the Dragonmont-"

"The Dragonmont?! That is an eves walk for a fully grown man, Viserys! You cannot leave her out there in the dark and the cold where dragons slumber-"

"It is too dark, Alicent! Even with torches and fire, trying to make haste in this night would be futile. The shadow of the mount stretches too far and is too thick, and the clouds above make this night unusually black. I have never seen anything like it. We cannot track her steps when we cannot see our own, and thus we will not know what path she has chosen to get to the mount, what road she may have taken upwards-"

"So that is it, then? We leave our daughter out there… alone, cold, where wild dragons lair and search for a meal?"

There's something that sounds a little like wind, a sigh, a lament, and Aegon does not know where it comes from, who it comes from, but it is followed by heavy thudding, a rustling of cloak.

"Of course we do not, my Queen. I swear to you, as soon as dawn breaks I will be astride a horse and we will find Alyssa. Daemon is readying the men in Aegon's garden as we speak eager for morn. You must have faith as I do. Alyssa may be wild and wilful, but she is also your daughter. She has the Hightower ingenuity, the Hightower persistence. I have no doubt we will find her in some tree hollow having slept the night away from her tiring stroll out of the castle, none the wiser to the trouble she has caused. She will demand lemon cakes, and she will have them… and then I will lock her up in her chamber for the next nine and twenty name days."

A sniffle, wet sounding and choked, peppers the ensuing silence. Aegon was about to draw away from the door when his mother's voice sparks once more, the softest he had ever heard it.

"I know I am not the most… affectionate mother, Viserys, but I… I-"

Mother's voice becomes throttled, and Aegon can picture her biting her thumb, chewing at the nail until the bed bleeds.

"I love my children. I love my children dearly. Everything I have ever done is for them, even if no one but the Gods sees it. I cannot bear the thought that one might-"

"Then do not bear it. It will not come to pass, my love. We will find Alyssa. You will see."

Whatever conversations come next, Aegon cannot hear them. They are passed in whispers and whines that are stifled by the edition of a crackling fire, but he does not leave the chamber door. He stays there, like his own tiny Kingsguard, and he waits, and he listens, and he waits some more.

It is only as silence falls for too long to count does Aegon make his move.

Like he thinks Alyssa would, he climbs out his window.

They are not very high from the ground, not enough to break bone should he fall, but it is still a scary descent for the boy to make in the dead of the night, makes his heart beat so loud and so fast in his chest that he feels the echoes of it in his temples. But it feels… good too. Breaking the rules, disobeying father, going against mother's wishes.

Is this how Alyssa felt with every curse and every great flee and every ripped-up dress? If so, Aegon thinks he can understand his sisters obstinacy.

Feet in shallow grass, nightly chill pimpling his flesh, Aegon crouches down low and begins winding himself from shadow to shadow, inching towards his namesakes' garden.

It takes him longer in the dark, this unnaturally bleak night that has suddenly fallen down around them, to find the right arch to pass through the Dragon's Tail and to stumble upon the tall, dark trees, wild roses, thorny heads and cranberries. Yet Aegon follows his nose, traces the pleasant piney scent to the garden, and finds Daemon and his men finishing loading up supplies in horse drawn carts, necessities for a possibly-long expedition searching for a tiny child in the immense shadow of the Dragonmont.

Aegon steals himself behind a meaty tree trunk, waits until a guards back is turned, and then dashes into the open end of the cart himself, burying down deep between two sacks of what he thought might be food rations.

There Aegon waits for the dawn.

Alyssa may not need an Egg, but, the boy thinks, the Egg does need his alley cat.

XVIII

He is caught only a small push into the Dragonmont hollow that surrounds the foot. Some guard blindly reaches into the cart for some blanket or waterskin, and instead he pulls out some of Aegon's white-blond curls with a yelped 'Ow!' from the boy.

Promptly, he's dragged before his father sitting on stallion.

"Aegon?"

Father seems shocked to see him here, the horse trotting on the spot, steam rising from its nostrils in morning chill.

"Why-"

Shuffling between the two Kingsguard who pin him in place, still rubbing at the sore spot of scalp where he was missing a few hairs, Aegon was, for once, bold enough to cut his father off.

"I wanted to help find Alyssa!"

Father, of course, does not seem convinced.

"Turn around, we'll ride Aegon back to the castle and then set off for-"

Funny enough, it is uncle Daemon who comes to the rescue.

"If we turn back now to deliver the boy back to his mother, we'll lose light in tracking Alyssa down. She's been most… unpredictable so far, and the longer we linger here, the more distance she makes up the rocky path now. Remember, brother, the Cannibal flies these skies. A lone child on the crag will be an easy feast for the beast."

Father, gloved hands tight on reigns, leather that creaks as he twists his grip, considers this for a long-drawn moment that sees Aegon holding his own breath.

"Yes, you're right."

Father finally gives, nodding to the guards to bring Aegon closer.

"You will ride with m, Aegon. Ser Lowell? Head back to Dragonstone and inform the Queen Aegon is with me, lest she discover the boy missing too and tears the castle apart for her children."

Ser Lowell makes haste to do what he is bid, as the other Ser, a Ser Aegon does not catch the name of, slots his armoured hands underneath Aegon's armpits and then heaves the boy into the air. Father catches him on horseback, settling him between his own legs, tight to his chest and covered from the morning cool breeze by a fur cloak.

"Now let us go find your sister-"

"She's gone up to see Balerion!"

Aegon interjected, trying to keep hold of the saddle he found himself in (It was not much more comfortable than the cart).

"Balerion?"

Father questions back, frowning as heavy as the crown on his brow seemed to be.

"Why would you say that?"

"Because she said yesterday she wanted to go wake the dragon up."

Realizing this did not help his father's confusion any and only made it worse, Aegon rushed to explain.

"When we were learning about Aegon the conqueror and his sister wives with the Maesters, Alyssa only wanted to know about Balerion. She cared not for anything else. She wanted to know what he preferred to eat, and what type of saddle he liked, and who his last riders were. Like King Aegon and King Maegor, and Princess Aerea. When the Maesters told her you were the last to ride the Black Dread as a Prince and a young man, she wanted to know where Balerion was now. I… I couldn't tell her he was dead, so I said he was sleeping on the top of the Dragonmont on Dragonstone."

A beat stretches as far as a sea stretches between two shores, and father flushes hotly.

"And why did you not tell me this yesterday, Aegon?"

He sounds frustrated, upset, perhaps even a little disappointed-

But not as frustrated, upset, and disappointed as Aegon. This is the first time the boy sees his father as a man, a man with faults and shortcomings and mistakes, and not a King from the songs.

"I did!"

The boy argued back fiercely.

"I did! I tried to tell you and you said 'not now Aegon.' and you had the guards lead me, Aemond, Helaena and Daeron to that chamber where they locked the door! I tried to tell you, and you didn't listen!"

Father's face crumbles much like Alyssa's does, softly to begin with and then all at once, but unlike Aegon's unruly sister, anger does not seep into his father's eyes.

Sorrow does.

"My boy… I am sorry. I should have-"

And, obviously, uncle Daemon astride a black horse, has to make his presence known when too long has passed without attention affixed upon him.

"Balerion has been laid to rest at the very top plateau of the Dragonmont. As impressive as Alyssa's current run-around she has given us is, no child would or could make such a climb."

Now it was Aegon's turn to share a knowing look with father. In the shadow of the Dragonmont, father orders his guards.

"To the top!"

And with a cinch of his feet in the stirrups, the horse they sit upon bounds into action, leaping up the path of the mountain. A few seconds later, Aegon hears the clapping of following hooves.

XIX

The time it has taken the small child to escape the castle and work her way up to the very top of the Dragonmont to Balerion's bones, father's ride on horseback has cut the time down between the two, and by when they take the last rocky bend around the narrow path Alyssa couldn't have been there long.

Not long at all.

She stands in the middle of the plateau of the mountain face, the very top of the sorcery wrought mountain, hair undone and wild and blazing fire red in the breaking dawn, feet bare, muddy and surely bleeding from her tough climb, and she's standing before Balerion's immense skull.

Aegon's never seen anything like it.

Balerion's bones have been flesh stripped by the mountain winds, the bones blackened by the salt in the clouds and vapours from the sea, and he is so large, so great, even in skeletal form he takes up the entire plateau that caps one side of the two-sided Dragonmont spires, curled upon himself as if he really was sleeping, keeping guard of all his descendants that lair below in the hollows.

It is almost funny, how small Alyssa looks before a snout that could eat a mammoth whole. A speck of red in the black-

It would be almost funny, if not for the dinner knife Alyssa still held in her hand.

"Ah,"

Uncle Daemon shouts as he too, the second fastest, crests the corner.

"There she is. No harm, you see-"

But uncle Daemon must see, as father and Aegon do too, as his voice abruptly cuts itself off. Because Alyssa still has the knife… and she's slashed her other palm wide open with the blade. Her blood, droplets of crimson, fall to the stone floor below with an echoing plat-plat-plat that reminds Aegon of her running naked from a bath.

In the midst of all this, Alyssa grins. Wide, white-toothed.

"Kepa!"

She shouts excitedly to father, or maybe to Daemon.

"You hear sing'in too? I wake dragon!"

She waves her bloody hand, excited, innocent, as if she was trying to show them one of her favourite sticks she keeps collecting.

Father shuffles Aegon forward, slipping from the horseback.

"Alyssa, love, come here so I may see your hand and get it-"

But it's all too very, very fucking late.

Aegon should have cared about that damned knife.

XX

Father makes it three steps closer, not much considering the distance, and that is all. Alyssa reaches forward, lays her bloody hand upon the maw of a long dead dragon, and the world is flipped upon its head.

Aegon will never recall the precise words she says. Perhaps he was never supposed to. Maybe no one but Alyssa will ever understand it. He remembers it sounding Valyrian, old Valyrian, but it was scattered with a noise that was inhuman, the unnerving wyvern clacks and clicks that dragons give to each other in the pit and in the skies that is a little like snake hissing and more like scales rubbing against one another.

Then her hand falls back to her side, smearing blood on bone, and it would have been kinder if there was some sort of explosion, a flash of light, thunder and fire. If there was such a diversion, it could be hidden in. What comes next could be decried a facet of light bouncing. The confusion of commotion. The startle of oncoming danger.

There is no such comfort here.

Aegon, as his father does, as uncle Daemon does, witnesses it with their own two eyes.

Alyssa's blood seeps across the skull of its own accord, stretching further than should be possible, leaching over bones and talons and tail spines. There it fattens out, thickens in the light, pluming to deep ropes of crimson muscle veined with white tendons and streaks of fat.

Out of the bed of red, black scales rise like flowers in spring, softly slinking over wings that catch thin skin and feet with claws the size of broad swords.

A plume of black fire sparks between teeth, a snuffle of the furnace in the belly not only catching the spark but holding the flame animate.

One great red eye snaps open, and Balerion the Black Dread lives.

The ground shakes.

A winding, horned crowned head rises.

Alyssa giggles.

"Look Kepa! Dragon wakey-wakey! I'm his now! He say so!"

Next Chapter: King Viserys, Daemon and Rhaenyra have a little chat with a certain tiny menace to try and make sense of what they've just seen…

Notes on this chapter: It is my greatest HotD head canon that Balerion was laid to rest on Dragonstone (I know HotD shows his skull in Kingslanding, but I'm just going to pretend I didn't see that). It was, largely, his home, and I think it would be the most respectful way to honour arguably the last tangible tie House Targaryen has to Aegon reverently (which we know nearly all Targaryens treat Aegon the Conqueror's memory as).

I also know Balerion's skull ends up in Kingslanding in Game of Thrones, but I see that as a sort of desperate tactic instigated when Targaryen's began really losing face. By that point, the dragons are long gone, and with them House Targaryens most primal form of might (and what they originally used to keep the other Houses in order). I like to think either Aerys or a King before him (I lean towards Aerys), in an act to try and remind their fellow Houses of Targaryen's strength, shipped Balerion over to put him on a sort of 'remember how powerful we are' display (we also know Aerys loved seeing fear in people, and seeing a dragon skull that could fit a fucking mammoth in its jaw would do that to anyone).

Additionally, I think this would backfire on them massively. Instead of reminding people to toe the line because House Targaryen is powerful, it inadvertently proved they were powerful once. In turn, showing what Targaryen once had only highlighted what they had lost, just in time for a certain Baratheon and Stark to start making the rounds to convince everyone they should kick the old, demented nutter off the pointy chair for good.

Of course, this isn't super important to the plot of this fic, it's only a little side lore I'm adding, but this, dragon bones and where they are buried and why, is apparently what I get hyper-fixated on lol.

Anyhow, thanks so much for the favourites, follows and reviews! I hope you all liked this chapter, and I will be trying to get the next one out by next weekend. So fingers crossed I will see you all with some piping hot protective Balerion, Alyssa being Alyssa (goblin goober), and a poor Viserys wondering what the hell he has helped spawn into the world. Until then, stay beautiful! ~AlwaysEatTheRude21