A crossover AU between House of the Dragon and The Ice Dragon by George RR Martin, because fuck Targryen politics. If you self-destructive assholes want to fight, I'll throw you a goddamn APOCALYPSE!
Inspired by the fic the Dragons Of Ice and Fire.
Before someone crucifies me for starting yet another fic on account of my terrible self-control, I'd like to defend myself and say that I had this idea for a while and couldn't get it out of my head, and then I had a really bad week and just needed to write something to get my mind of it. We'll see how it goes.
Prologue:
Long ago in a distant faraway land amidst a blistering ungodly winter storm colder and harsher than any that had come before, a girl was born.
Her father was a humble crofter, and her mother his much-beloved woman who died to birth the girl, tears freezing solid as her skin grew pale and cold and deathly, and the babe she brought forth into the world was almost no better.
Quiet, even as an infant, with skin as pale as snow, hair only a few shades darker, and eyes as bright as blue stars.
A winter child, the people of her village would whisper amongst themselves as she grew, a creature more cold than warm.
More ice than fire.
More dead than living, the cruelest of them hissed behind false smiles and closed doors, a damned life reared from a dead womb and so cursed and reviled by gods and men alike.
At first, the whispers did not matter, for in spite of his tragedy, her father's love for her was true. But it was the love of a grieving man, tainted by the shadow of loss, and it was never enough to banish the cold and the grasping specter of winter from the girl's heart and soul.
The rest of her kin fared no better. An elder sister and a brother older still who could do no more than watch and despair as the little girl grew alone, quiet and hushed, never forgotten but never welcome among the rest of their people, for what fool would risk drawing the wrath of the gods by inviting a child so clearly accursed in their eyes amongst their number?
No, best the ill-begotten plague keep to her own company unto her death and spare them all any further misery, for her mere existence was burden enough.
And yet, despite the will of the many, the girl whose name was Adara was not to be alone forever.
On the eve of her fourth year, when at last her father let her out to play among the snow and the ice lizards who carved their homes beneath frozen rock, when the cold and the dark grew great enough that all the other children had long fled home, the ice dragon came to her.
The ice dragon was a crystalline white, that shade of white that is so hard and cold that it is almost blue. It was covered with hoarfrost, so when it moved its skin broke and crackled as the crust on the snow crackles beneath a man's boots, and flakes of rime fell off.
Its eyes were deep blue and icy, mirrors to her own. Its wings were vast and batlike, colored all a faint translucent blue. Adara could see the clouds through them, and oftentimes the moon and stars, when the beast wheeled in frozen circles through the skies.
Its teeth were icicles, a triple row of them, jagged spears of unequal length, white against its deep blue maw. When the ice dragon beat its wings, the cold winds blew and the snow swirled and scurried and the world entire seemed to shrink and shiver.
The people of her village feared the ice dragon.
A creature of legend and storied power, whose mere sighting was considered a grave omen that would foretell the most brutal of winter storms, and all knew to fear it.
It was no enemy of man, but it was no friend either, for winter-made flesh cared naught for the trials of lesser beings and devastated kings and paupers alike.
But Adara was different, as she had always been from her very first breath.
She was herself a winter child, and the cold that snuffed out all warmth and heralded the harshest of seasons was as much a part of her as it was of the ice dragon.
So when the young dragon landed before her, half again the size of a mammoth and near enough to swallow her whole in a single bite, Adara did not shy away from it.
Instead, she raised a single tentative hand and pressed her palm to the mighty beast's snout as none had ever dared to before.
"Hello." The girl whispered in awed delight, hand tracing hoarfrost-sprinkled scales ever so gently. "Won't you be my friend?"
...
The girl sang to it, soft and clumsy, and told it stories that none of her kind would care to hear from her. She brushed hands along frozen scars from battles against his kin and bared both heart and soul to it as she lay against its side, content in a way she'd never been before.
The ice dragon lingered only a single night before disappearing into the ether, wings catching on northern gales as its nature called it to back to the fabled lands of always winter where not even Adara would dare to follow.
"I shall miss you." She whispered as it took flight, and the words were carried by the wind only for a moment before fading into nothing.
That should have been the end of it.
But something strange and wholly incomprehensible had been forged that night between the child and the creature of the skies, and the beast was slow to forget. Like would always call to like, and the ice dragon returned to the clearing where it'd met the child who was kin to it the very same night of the following year.
Adara was waiting for it there, and when at last it landed, she did not hesitate to run in and press herself against its snout in a gesture as warm as any she would ever make, and whisper against its scales.
"Thank you for coming back."
And so a bond was forged.
...
The dragon lingered only the one night as before, but it returned year after year, and with every return, it lingered just a little longer.
It was not until her ninth year that Adara finally mounted the dragon.
It had grown over the years, larger and stronger and fiercer than it was before, and Adara knew it was time.
She reached out and tugged at the very edge of the dragon's wing with a small hand, and the dragon beat its great wings once, and then extended them flat against the snow, and she scrambled up to wrap her arms about its cold white neck.
Together, for the first time, they flew.
At times the beating of the wings threatened to shake her loose from where she clung, and the coldness of the dragon's flesh crept through her clothing and bit and numbed her flesh.
But Adara was not afraid. She never had been.
They flew over her father's farm, looking very small below.
They flew over the village, where crowds of people came out to watch them pass. They flew above the forest, all white and green and silent. They flew high into the sky, so high that Adara could not even see the ground below, and she thought she glimpsed another ice dragon, way off in the distance, but it was not half so grand as hers.
And all the while, Adara laughed, an icy, tinkling laugh, a laugh as bright and crisp as the winter air that carried it away until nothing of it remained.
They flew for most of the day, and finally, the dragon swept around in a great circle and spiraled down, gliding on its stiff and glittering wings. It let her off in the field where it had found her, just after dusk, and vanished as it was ever wont to do.
Adara was always a lonely child, her life empty and hollow, but that day of delight and laughter and freedom was the most victoriously joyful of them all, and hers alone besides.
Perhaps it was bitterly fitting, then, that it was also the day when the path to her greatest tragedy was set in stone.
...
On Adara's eleventh year, a great enemy threatened the village.
Men armored and armed themselves, women barricaded themselves in their cottages with their children, and all the people prayed for salvation as an army of fire and sorcery threatened to march on their homes and raze them to naught but ash.
When the dragon came to Adara that year, she begged on behalf of people who had cursed and shunned her all her life as only a child pure of heart could beg.
"Please, help them."
And the ice dragon would never refuse its winter child, and when the army came to spill blood and char and salt the land, they instead met dragon breath so cold it burned, and all were broken beneath winter's fury.
After that, Adara was finally welcomed among her kin.
A hero, they called her and finally shared the warmth she'd never been allowed to long for, even as the dragon flew away once more, content in the knowledge that she was safe.
...
It was not to be.
Unyielding strength invited challenge. Challenge incited conflict. And conflict bred catastrophe and tragedy in equal measure.
And there was no greater strength than that of the ice dragon... or the one who could wield its power.
...
When the ice dragon returned for the final time, it was to a girl half dead and buried in the snow, delirious from pain and cradling the side where the betrayer's knife had slid into her flesh on the eve of her name day celebration.
And the dragon, who had grown strong and mighty and wrathful beyond comprehension raged, and the village and the villagers who had orchestrated this wailed and fled and died as winter fell upon them from above and laid waste to all they were and ever would be.
When the deed was done, the beast cradled its precious winter child in a single claw and took to the air with her once more, and flew her north as it had never done before.
Past the mountains and the hills and roiling snows, past the flatlands all the homes of man, past and deep across the lands of always winter where even his dying winter child would have suffered a chill if only she would live to see it through.
Inconsolable in its grief, the ice dragon did not stop flying until its wings would beat no more.
Exhausted, it fell from the sky and to a mountain below, amidst a storm it had no strength left to weather, and the snow and the ice and the treacherous magic of the land was quick to spread over them, to bury them beneath its bulk and claim their lives for it's own.
The ice dragon did not fight the end as it came for them both, for grief was a far more treacherous burden than any magic could ever hope to be.
And so it and its winter child vanished beneath the swiftly freezing ice and disappeared forevermore.
...
Decades passed, and centuries and millennia after that followed in time.
The dragon and his winter child remained buried, entombed within a prison of magic and ice, and would have remained so until the end of time.
But something changed.
Another dragon, one of fire and not ice, silver scaled and ridden by a queen of man, visited a great Wall.
It dared not cross the boundary even when prompted to, but unbeknownst to rider and beast alike, the damage had already been done.
For the presence of such a creature, one flame and magic and power in a long since gone from this dormant land... it was the spark that lit the blaze and reawakened the slumbering magics that surged beyond the Wall.
All of them.
It took decades more as fell things began to wake for the ice dragon to rouse and awaken in its frozen tomb that long since become a mountain and a prison. The magic keeping it bound had grown as well, so much so that
Were its strife any different, it would fallen back into its slumber until the end of time.
But it sensed the impossible.
Cradled in its grip even after all this time, his winter child stirred.
She wasn't just touched by cold anymore. She had become cold, and that was what had saved her life and done far more besides.
And the ice dragon loved her far too much to condemn her to this prison any longer.
Slowly, carefully - like the glacial shift of continents - titanic wings began to unfurl.
The prison of ice rumbled in protest. The weight of the mountain and the magic that raised it tried to keep it buried.
Tried to keep them buried.
The ice dragon would not have it.
The struggle was ruinous, but it battered forth and persisted. It yearned to be free, to take the skies with its winter child once more, and roared with all the force of thousands of years of caged fury.
The mountain cracked and the heavens themselves splintered from the force of the eruption. Boulders of ice the size of mammoths were blown up through the clouds. When at last its wings broke through the surface, they pounded and summoned forth a hurricane. The air burst with a drumbeat of thunder more ferocious than the greatest of storms.
For the first time in thousands of years, as its winter child finally gasped and opened her brilliant blue eyes, the ice dragon took to the air and bellowed its victorious cry of rebirth for all to hear.
...
A continent away, Viserys Targaryen breathed his last, and his heirs readied their mounts and prepared to dance.
Hopelessly unaware of the darkness that had been awakened far too early, and the Long Night that would soon come to claim them all.
...
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