116 AC, Location Unknown
Helaena Targaryen was not born the first of her name, but she knew she would be the last. What good would another Helaena be, when the last was doomed from the very start? The realization came to her when she was four years old and she knit together her dreams into something manageable for the first time and she was able to read the fabric of her own future.
Every night – asleep or not – a new thread of spider silk presented itself to her.
Sometimes she didn't want to pull.
What good could come from it, when the very first time she did she saw her own doom?
But the spider threads seemed inclined to pull on themselves and try as she might to ignore them, they dug a permanent place into her mind, choking other pieces of herself out before she even knew they were missing.
Perhaps she never had them in the first place.
Aegon and her mother certainly seemed to think so, although neither seemed to care enough to say it aloud. But there was no need. Helaena knew who she was and what she could do. She knew that when others dreamed of pleasant thoughts and pleasant places, her mind took her under and showed her the future.
Grim though it may be, it was hers and she would meet it when the time came.
That night – warm, even for King's Landing – she slept in nothing on her balcony. Her maids would admonish her, when the morning came and they discovered her, and tell her mother that her madness had overtaken her once again. How long would it last, they would ask. What strange, incomprehensible words would slip from her lips, they would whisper.
What a shame she was to her family name, they would tut.
But she was not ashamed.
And she was not deterred.
And when she slipped off her clothes and allowed herself to pull on the threads of her mind once again, she was rewarded for her troubles.
Helaena assumed she was in the North. She could not be certain, of course. She had only ever been in King's Landing in her seven years, but her mind had taken her much further. Her little cousin Ophaella has more well-traveled than the rest of them combined and even she had not been further than the south of the Vale. The ground was cold and hard beneath her feet, unforgiving like the stones of the Red Keep, and she struggled to grab hold of something.
It always took her a few moments to get her footing – to remember how to walk, to remember how to breathe – before she was confident enough to start to move forward. Where she was meant to go, she never quite knew until she started, but she always ended up somewhere.
Somewhere in the future.
Somewhere in the past.
Somewhere with a touch of destiny about it.
This time was no different and she wanted to get all she could from it before she woke up. Pulling herself to her feet, Helaena turned around in place, eyes dancing back and forth.
It was certainly the North – the ice hanging off the trees and the snow crunching beneath her bare toes told her that well enough – but not as she had ever read about. Aemond was more the reader in their family, but she still had to attend her lessons and she still read enough books about the Seven Kingdoms to know that this was not the North as it was or is or would be.
Helaena walked forward, trusting that her feet would take her where she would need to go.
The snow, cold like Valyrian steel, soon gave way to a sticky slick. A bit of mud, she thought, turned to sludge in the bitter cold. When she tried to look down, she found her neck frozen in place just as her feet continued to pull her forward.
Tonight, her sight knew where it needed to go.
There would be no exploration, no tipping and tumbling through the vision until she was ripped from it by the first speck of morning light.
Helaena stopped in the middle of a clearing. There was no sky to speak of, no ground on which she was meant to stand, only the circle of Weirwoods that now seemed to appear from the very aether.
Seven stood before her, each gnarled and twisted in their own way.
The first, with a face so fine it could have only been carved by the Gods, stood taller and prouder than all the rest. Its leaves were the deepest red – tinged with the faintest hint of gold - and its bark the purest white. But its roots had begun to rot and the ground beneath the tree was sick with something that would be the death of it.
The second was just as tall as the first, but it had no leaves and the face that once stood out prominently in its bark was obscured by overgrowth. The longer Helaena stared at the more she felt like she was seeing something that was from a different age – a creature forgotten by time and left to only itself for company.
The third and fourth, a twin pair that seemed to grow inwards, shared roots. So intertwined with each other they were, Helaena knew that one would not be able to live without the other. Even now, with the slimmer of the two dropping towards the earth, the other was pulled with it. Soon, the smaller would be consumed by the earth and the other, unable to stand on its own, would be taken with it.
The fifth stood in the middle. It was the largest of them all, unusually wide for a Weirwood, and seemed libel to choke the life out of all the others with the size of its canopy. The sixth tree was nestled close to it, kept safe in the great canopy of leaves.
Safe.
But also choked of life, hidden from what little light there was, and cut off from the greater world above. It suffered for it, its own leaves wilted and turning to brown.
Helaena stepped back, chest tightening. She wanted to look away, to wake up, but whatever pulled her here in the first place would not relent.
Instead, she was forced to continue.
It wanted her to see what was coming.
The seventh and final tree held Helaena's gaze the longest. Unremarkable in the face save for the large spider perched on its wooden nose. It crawled down, pausing just above its mouth. She tried to step back, the ache in chest growing and spreading. Seven pairs of eyes turned towards her, suddenly alive in the bark, and Helaena realized who she was looking at just as the spider crawled into the mouth and disappeared.
Something tickled the back of her throat.
The eyes began to weep.
A drop of red that soon became a flood.
The ache in her chest engulfed her, as she gasped for breath. She sank to the ground, clawing at the red stained snow.
She began the long process of knitting together the threads of the vision, committing it to memory before it slipped away.
And the spider in her mouth made itself at home just as her dreams did.
Head full of prophecy and mouth full of spiders, Helaena Targaryen knew that, while there had been other Helaenas before here, there would not be one after.
116 AC, Dragonstone
"Wake up!" Ophaella hissed, shaking her father as hard as she could. It was at least two hours before, she imagined, but she couldn't very well sleep with the mist rolling in the way it was. It was so hard to tell anything this side of Crackclaw Point and the Bay of Crabs. It was warmer than she expected, for so early in the morning, and the mist seemed to linger.
Like dragon's breath.
Her father swatted her hand away, seemingly perfectly content to keep sleeping. He had found a rock to use as a pillow at some point during the night, clearly quite happy with their red, wormy guard. The dragon in question was already awake and had been for several hours. He stared at her when she first woke up, inky eyes obscured in the dark, and turned away when he was certain she wasn't going to pull a knife and shove it underneath his chin.
The mist continued to roll in, cloaking them completely until Ophaella could hardly see her own hand in front of her face.
"Father!" She said, shaking him a little harder.
"What?" He finally said, opening his eyes only when she smacked his shoulder.
"I thought I heard something," She said, feeling a little foolish now that she was really thinking about it.
"We are outside, I would expect you did," He said, holding up a hand to wipe the sleep from his eyes.
"Something something," She tried to emphasize, feeling the foolishness building at the perturbed look on his face. To make her point, she gestured out towards the ocean. Her father followed the line of her arm, pale eyebrows raised. He finally sat up, keeping his veneer of calm save for the hand he set on the hilt of his sword.
The mist pressed up the rocky coast, blocking over the bright light of the waning moon.
Her father stood up, pulling her with him just as the mist seemed libel to choke them out entirely.
"Is it Grey Ghost?" She asked, grabbing the back of his coat and twisting it between her fingers. Perhaps it was unseemly to be so excited at the prospect, but her simmering shame and embarrassment at her dragonless prospects had only grown over the last year. She was still young, barely six, but if her mother was riding and hunting and hawking at her age, she thought she could find a dragon without much fuss.
Daemon peered back at her, sparse eyebrows raised.
She schooled her face.
"You will run if I tell you, do you understand?" Her father said and she was alarmed to hear just how serious he was.
Where, exactly, was she meant to run to that could escape a dragon?
Whatever idea might have come to her was quickly erased when a great black mass of scales and flames emerged from the mist and bore down on them both. Her father leaned back, back pressed to her front, narrowly missing a jagged claw as it swung down. His sword clinked against the underbelly of scales, but it did very little.
Except, perhaps, making the great beast angry.
Ophaella threw herself to the side, arms crumpling underneath her. Her face skid in the muck, mouth catching everything from sticks and mud. She thought she ever felt a small spider, but she hardly had time to ponder it. She rolled, throwing her arms above her face like it would do even the tiniest of things.
Dragon fire was hardly particular and it would cook with her arms in front of her face just as easily as it would without.
Still, she kept her face protected as she began to crawl like a worm.
It was only the sudden indignity – the absolute absurdity of it all – that gave her pause long enough to remember the entire reason she was there, risking life and limb and being cooked in her leathers.
She was meant to find a dragon.
And it looked like the Gods had provided.
Ophaella flipped around to her back and sat up, hurriedly wiping away to mud to see clearer.
Her father sprinted past her, covered in mud himself, and positively fuming. His own clothes were split from naval to nose, blood dripping down, although he hardly noticed. He was too singularly focused on his own dragon currently lumbering to meet him halfway. He paid little mind to the other dragon currently circling around above their heads.
It turned towards them, eyes the color of the purest emeralds and opened its mouth.
Whether it meant to eat them whole or cook them where they stood, Ophaella did not fancy sticking around to find out.
"Ophaella!" Her father called, pointing to the cliff where they sat the night before. He turned his back to her the moment he reached Caraxes, trusting her to understand his meaning. When she showed no signs of moving, frozen in place by her fear at the sight of the Cannibal bearing down on her, he shouted again. "Hide, you daft looby!"
Whatever his meaning, she couldn't very well stand there out in the open. Slipping in the mud, she started to run towards the cliff. It only occurred to her at the last moment, when her feet had already given out from underneath her, that it was at least a fifty foot drop to the ocean below. She panicked at the last moment, much like she did when she attempted to escape King's Landing, and her arms went flailing.
But there was no railing to slam into this time.
And there was no Aemond to stop her before she did something stupid.
She slipped over the side of the cliff, her own screams mixing with the sounds of Caraxes and the Cannibal snapping at each other.
Ophaella closed her eyes, fully expecting to keep tumbling and tumbling until she slammed into the violent water below. The stop came too soon, and was the cold hard embrace of fifteen feet of sodden earth instead of icy water.
A coat of mud for her back to match her front, it would seem.
And no dragon to speak of, save for the one currently trying to kill her less than careful father.
Ophaella laid on the ground, staring up at the earliest signs of morning creeping down at her through the black and the mist.
Somehow, she had imagined this whole process differently. She imagined holding out her hand and speaking the few words of High Valyrian that knew and a dragon – Grey Ghost to be specific – would see in her what she had so far failed to see in herself. A dragon should not cower on the side of the cliff while others did the dirty work for her. Then again, perhaps she was never meant to be a dragon.
She was of Runestone.
She was of Rhea Royce.
Carved from earth and runes and roughhewn stone.
Ophaella Targaryen might bear their faces and their names, but she was now more a dragon than all the Royces that came before her. A year in King's Landing would not change that.
Perhaps she should not hope to fly so high when she was born from something so low.
But then again, perhaps she should not sell herself short.
She was of Rhea Royce.
And she would not shame her mother with her own cowardice. She flipped over, ignoring the moaning and groaning of her muscles, and pulled out the only sharp object she had. Her mother's rune knife. She opened her palm and stared at the old scar, memorizing the lines of it just as she had done a thousand times over, before she made the exact same shape on her other hand.
She bit her lip to keep from crying out as she dug the knife in deeper.
It sliced through skin and muscle and fat.
She would be reminded of who she was with blood.
And fire.
Ophaella shoved her hands into the dirt and closed her eyes. She had ignored the gifts the Gods had given her a year ago when she left Runestone, lived far beneath their Eyes and out of sight for too long. The Seven had never been her guide, as much as she tried to look to them, and she felt a great welling of shame. She remembered her mother's words and repeated them over and over until it was all she could hear.
Not the great thundering from above.
Or the shouts of her father.
Or the crash of waves just beneath her.
We Remember, We Remember, We Remember.
Her sight slipped backwards, traveling down her spine, and into the earth. It felt just as foreign as it had a year ago, but she found a certain comfort in the action, and was determined to use it longer and more effectively. She felt nothing at first, save for the vibrations of the earth. It had a heartbeat of its own, just as the sky and the sea did, and for a moment it was all she felt and heard. Three more appeared after a moment, each distinct in their own way.
Her father's, steady and calm despite all the trouble around him.
Caraxes, louder and faster than any drum she had ever heard.
And the Cannibal. It came and went every time the beast landed on the ground. She tried to focus on one at a time, pushing out all distractions and sounds save for the heartbeats. It became harder and harder the longer she tried. It made her head ache and her hands harden. But she pushed forward, cutting through it all as she focused in on her target.
They both had a bit of the old blood in them, even if it came from opposite ends of the world.
When Ophaella opened her eyes it was not a bank of mud she was staring at, but the back of her father's head as he soared on the back of Caraxes. She felt her own mouth open – no, not hers- and the heat begin to build at the back of her throat. A moment longer, and her father would be dead.
Her head pounded and her heart raced as her mouth opened wider.
She screamed, desperate for her father to hear her, but nothing came.
Nothing.
Nothing.
Nothing.
The heat spread and Ophaella felt herself slipping back into her own body. She felt the cold mud and the sting of a fresh cut on her bloody palm. She felt something crawl across the tender flesh - a spider, perhaps – its legs dancing across the open seam of her skin just before she tipped forward, face down in the mud, and saw no more.
116, King's Landing
"Who are the Seven?" Maester Mellos asked, tapping the front of the table with his cane, clear frustration showing in his voice. They had been at it for hours already and Aemond was certain flinging himself off the side of Keep would be preferable.
They were Targaryens, it was a disgrace that they even needed to know the Seven, let alone worship them.
It was not a Targaryen that ordered this lesson, but a Hightower, and if word reached said Hightower that he wasn't doing his lessons it would be far worse for him. Aemond sighed and leaned forward, finding the pot of tea. He wrapped his hand around it, palm pressed against the side that was fresh from the fire.
"The Father, the Mother, the Warrior, the Smith, the Maiden, the Crone, and –"
"The Stranger," Aegon finished for him, boredom seeping from every syllable. "Why is Helaena not here? She never has to attend these lessons."
"The Princess is ill. Seems she had a bought of night terrors and is still abed. Now, Prince Aegon, starting with the Father…"
Aemond ignored them, unable to stomach the idea of listening to Aegon snark his way through the Seven once again. They had done this every single week for the last three years and every single week, it was the same. But Helaena was usually there as well. Ophaella too, before his Uncle Daemon spirited her off in search of a dragon.
Or in search of a way to be rid of her, as Aegon said.
But Aegon was an idiot and Aemond had learned long ago to ignore most everything he said. A second son he might be, but he did not have to suffer his brother's cruelty in the comfort of his own mind.
He still worried, however, and was not ashamed to admit that he had had night terrors of his own.
Aemond gripped the tea pot tighter and tilted his gaze down, staring at the open book in front of him. It was covered in spider silk after being left alone for too long. Illuminated with gold and written in the flowery language of the most pompous of Maesters, he truly could not imagine a worse way to learn about history. The best books, the ones he had taken to collecting at the back of the library, were the ones written in haste. On scraps of paper as the battle raged on, through the words of women who saw the terror unfold, and from the mouth of babes who's Houses were destroyed.
The Citadel favored the words of the victors, but it was through the losers than Aemond knew the most could be learned.
So he attended his lessons and he learned the histories he was meant to.
And he waited for the day that it might be something more.
Aemond moved his hand along the side of the tea pot, embracing the warmth.
"Prince Aemond!" Maester Mellos cried, reaching forward to grab the pot and pull it from him.
It hissed when it touched his skin and the old man let out a wail of pain as the pot burned his delicate skin.
Aegon jumped to his feet at the sudden commotion, tiny smile at the chaos barely hidden behind his hand. Aemond rushed towards the Maester and grabbed the pot, cradling it against his chest, only just now realizing how hot it still was. Aegon stopped smiling, eyes moving away from the wailing Maester to his brother's hands.
The metal burned bright red.
And Aemond, still a second son, knew that he burned right along with it.