When Luke awoke - truly awoke at last - he did so with the lingering remnants of cold agony clinging to his frame.
His skin felt raw and flayed. His muscles ached and his bones creaked with every ragged motion, and his skull felt brittle and hollow, like an eggshell on the verge of snapping. A monstrous chill seemed to have dug its hooks into his flesh and left him painfully cold and desperately craving warmth he couldn't find.
Shivers and shuddering breaths wracked and rattled his lungs long before he gathered the strength needed to blink his eyes open. When he finally managed that much at last, the gods proved that their cruelty remained unsated with his past suffering, because the first sight he caught was enough to have him stifling a painful scream.
Separated from him only by a low, steady flame blazing from a shallow pit just ahead, bound and slumped on the ground against a wall of earth rock was his wretched one-eyed plague of an uncle.
Aemond's skin was a shade paler and sallower than it ought to have been, and his face looked gaunt and stretched thin. His hair was disheveled and matted with dirt, and he'd lost his eye patch, leaving that cursed sapphire glinting lowly in the light of the flame from where it had been set into his hideous trench of a scar.
His one good eye was focused on Luke with sure and certain hate.
"Bastard."
Of course.
His voice was a weak, hoarse rasp, more fit an old man on his death bed than a prince in the prime of his miserable life, but of course he had the strength left to voice that poisonous gods-damned word.
Rage burned through his veins and he would have made to fling himself at Aemond, for all the good that would have done - the memory of him trying and failing came to him right as he made to move - but only when he tried to stagger to his feet did he notice that he to was bound nearly hand and foot.
There were lengths of crisscrossing rope wound tightly around his body, pinning his arms behind his back and his hands to one another in a rough, heavy-bound knot tight enough that he could hardly feel them. Another length of frayed material was circled around his ankles, the knot pinning them together even through the leather of his boots.
Grimly - and more than a little fretfully, though he valiantly refused to show it - Luke thought that he was hogtied not unlike a pig for slaughter. The closeness to the almost visibly rabid Aemond, no matter how similar a bound he was did nothing to lessen the effect.
Especially given that, from what last he could remember, he had just barely escaped death by Vhagar's cavernous maw.
Even the mere memory of it was enough to send a jolt of cold dread lancing down his spine, his breaths growing sharper and more uneven.
Luke had quite literally seen his death coming, and had only a moment to realize that he and his dragon would be torn out of the ear and eaten like animals before Vhagar's maw abruptly slammed shut and sent them careening away instead.
And then the clouds had parted and the thing that was almost to Vhagar what the hoary old bitch had been to him and Arrax had carved through the cloud cover and descended on the queen of all dragons like a demon out of the seven hells before locking its claws with hers and dragging them both back down into the storm.
Luke had made to dive after them when he should have fled instead - for what god's forsaken reason, he couldn't hope to rightly say - and then there was nothing else for him to remember.
And now here he was, Arrax nowhere in sight, Aemond his only bitter company, the pair of them trapped in the near-absolute darkness and stale air of what he could tell was some kind of cavern and not one clue as to how or why he had come to be here.
"Where are we?"
His voice cracked and stretched in a way that would have had his mother ordering maester Gerardys to ply him with tea and honied remedies had she been present to hear it.
A part of him wished that more than anything that she had been.
"Where are we? Who's done this to us?" He said again, forcing himself to meet Aemond's half-blind gaze. "Where are the dragons?"
His mother's allies wouldn't treat him so, and his usurper uncle's wouldn't dare do the same to Aemond - and for all he could faintly feel Arrax's pulse thrumming beneath his own ribcage, it was slow and alarmingly muted.
Something was wrong.
"Fuck you, you bastard son of a whore."
The words were said so flatly and so quickly that it took Luke a moment longer than it should have to understand them. When he did, he snarled in outrage, a fresh wave of anger helping him fight past the weak uncertainty and the fearful revulsion he felt every time he looked at the smug cunt.
"You-!"
"Enough."
Luke froze just as Aemond went very, very still.
A girl had just stepped out of the darkness behind Aemond, likely of an age with Baela and Rhaena and striding towards the pair of them with a measured gait and stern, impatient frown on her face.
The sight of her was vaguely familiar, and that in itself was strange because Luke could not fathom ever meeting and then misremembering anyone with skin that pale, hair that golden and eyes that burned with a light that put even Aemond's vaunted sapphire to shame.
"Are they ready?" She called in a loud voice as she rounded Aemond and came to stand between them, the flame at her back. "Are they strong enough for it?"
"Yes, Winterchild."
Luke startled almost violently. He craned his neck to the side, trying to glimpse the second speaker but found nothing but shadows and darkness behind him.
The knowledge that he was being watched by a figure he could not see, a figure who could very well be mere steps away for all he knew filled him with even greater unease.
What exactly was happening here?
"Good."
When he turned around, he found the girl towering over Aemond, her back to him as she looked down on him with an expression he couldn't see.
"Aemond Targaryen." His uncle startled at the sound of his own name, rage dulling with wariness as he glared up at the girl. "Brother to the would-be king."
"So you're aware of who I am." His chin jutted up pointedly. "And the danger you've tempted by striking me down."
"Not at all."
The offended expression on his face would have probably made Luke laugh meanly had the girl not immediately rounded on him and forced the sound to die in his throat.
"And you are the other one." She looked down at him impassively. "The son of the would-be queen. Lucerys... Targaryen?"
He swallowed roughly, a thousand questions burning at the tip of his tongue, yet not one of them made it past his lips as he stared up at her.
"Velaryon." He said at last, pausing only to wet his chapped lips and inhale steadily. "My name is Lucerys Velaryon."
"Liar."
He flinched and bristled when Aemond broke out into loud, cruel cackles, and felt a vicious burst of satisfaction when they broke into rasping coughs.
The girl did not so much as glance at him.
"Good. Let's finish this then."
Luke and Aemond both tensed at that, a sudden silence overcoming them at the words and the unknown implications behind them, but they needn't have bothered.
Without another glance at either of them, she turned and stalked off into the darkness, calling out over her shoulder "Bring them."
That was when the second stranger stepped into the light before them, and his heart stuttered in his chest.
They were small in stature, nearly a head shorter than Luke, with brown, leathery skin and pale yellow-slitted eyes. Their features were rough-hewn and eyrie, at once familiar yet also not, with hair-like intertwined branches and too-small ears beneath them.
When they stepped forward, they did so with bare legs undaunted by the stone and the dirt beneath them and reached for him with small, clawed fingers.
"What are you?"
The words erupted out of him in a whisper, too dazed to be afraid and too overwhelmed to be silent.
"An Earthsinger." The creature - for it was no man at all, it couldn't be - spoke softly. Its claws flashed and snapped through his restraints like a hot knife through butter, though Luke made no effort to move even with his freedom regained. "Though most of your kind know us as the Children of the Forest, if they ever deign to learn of us at all.
The words meant nothing to him, but Aemond inhaled sharply, overcome with sudden wonder.
"Impossible." He breathed in stunned disbelief so unlike the ordinary venom that spewed past his lips that Luke almost turned to gape at him.
Almost.
"I would suggest you not linger on it, oh prince of dragons." The self-proclaimed Earthsinger murmured as it moved to undo their bonds. "For you'll soon find that in the grand scheme of fate and what is yet to come, that word means very, very little indeed."
...
By the time Luke regained his wits and some semblance of sense, two more Earthsingers had already arisen to guide them through the dark passageways of the cave system ahead and out into the world above.
When they emerged in a grove of trees, the air tinted silver with the light of the full moon shining down through the canopy of scarlet leaves and came face to face with a weirwood of such massive proportions it dwarfed even the great Heart tree in the gardens of the Red Keep, his disheveled unease returned with a vengeance.
The girl was there, waiting for them blanky, and as soon as the two of them were manhandled before her she turned her back to them and instead focused on a branch of the great weirwood.
On the very tips of that branch, regarding them with glimmering, beady eyes, was a raven.
"Show them." She... she spoke to the raven. Undaunted by the madness of the action. "As you showed me. Show them all of it."
"Sacrifice." The raven croaked sharply. "Sacrifice! Sacrifice!"
The girl grimaced.
"Naturally."
Parting the folds of her cloak with a practiced movement, she withdrew a blade from her belt and ran its edge along her open palm. Blood welled from the wound, crimson and glowing in the moonlight, and she stepped forward and reached as though to smear it across the Weirwood.
Rather abruptly, that was when Aemond burst.
"Who are you?!" His uncle snarled, eye wide and frazzled. "You ride the largest, most unnatural dragon I have ever seen! You struck down and absconded with a Prince of the seven kingdoms and the son of a rival claimant, and even now you covert with creatures that have no right to exist beyond myth and legend!"
Aemond stepped forward, either unaware or uncaring of the way the Earthsingers tensed around him in warning.
"Who. Are. You?"
Luke did not expect her to answer. He doubted even Aemond did.
One came all the same.
"I am Adara, daughter of Goren, of the White Plains." Her lips pulled with something bitter. "And I'm here to tell you a tale."
With that, she turned and pressed her still-bleeding palm against white bark.
And.
Luke.
Fell.
...
He blinked, and found himself in the Throne Room of the Red Keep, staring down a ghost.
"Grandfather?"
Viserys Targaryen did not acknowledge him.
"Long ago," The king began to speak "When man was young and this world was not so small and petty, a great line of would-be emperors founded a great dynasty.
So great in fact that their rule spanned much of the known world - but their ascendancy was not to last.
The last reigning emperor passed, and by all rights his throne should have passed to his eldest daughter, much loved and much respected across the realm.
But it was not to be, for in the years after her birth, the emperor had sired a son, cold and cruel and everything the rightful empress was not, and he would not be denied a throne.
On the eve of her coronation, he struck down and slew his sister, claiming the realm for his own.
His reign did not last, for he brought too much strife and suffering to be borne to survive.
In the end, one of his own descendants plunged his burning sword deep into his heart and ended his wretched life once and for all.
But the Usurper was cunning and vengeful, and with his dying breath so cursed the world that had spurned him, and unleashed a great evil upon his own lands.
A final depravity, an army born of vile blood magic and a covenant that should never have been made.
And so the Others were born, marching out of the broken Dawn's mists and bringing forth with them a Darkness fit to end the world.
So they came, and so they went, and so they come again, and with them the shambling hoards of the enslaved dead and far, far worse things besides.
And now, the end shall be heralded with a terrible winter, drifting down from the distant North and reaching for all."
There was a thunderous groan, and Luke turned around just in time to catch sight of the throne room doors being blown asunder.
Gales of cold wind and snow and liquid darkness poured in, and with them, something all the more terrifying, heralded by blue eyes.
And then the dead came.
Luke screamed.
He screamed when they reached for him, milky pale flesh grasping and blue eyes burning with greed and cruelty and hate, and he screamed when they dragged him into their midst and screamed all the more when they clawed and tore at his flesh as only monsters could.
And then teeth closed around his throat, and his screaming ended in blood as it was ripped free and filled with hoarfrost and death.
...
Luke staggered back and collapsed to his knees, heaving.
"W-what?" He whimpered in horror when at last he regained his breath, shaking hands reaching for his throat and finding only smooth, unblemished skin. "What?"
"The truth of what awaits the world" Adara whispered solemnly, eyes lost very far away. "Or a part of it, at least."
No.
"That's impossible." He tried to argue, voice and words alike shaking like leaves in the wind. "It was a trick. A lie of some kind."
"No it isn't. And you know it."
He did.
Gods help him, but he did.
Slowly, she looked from him to Aemond, uncaring of his inner torment. His uncle was pale and still, blank-faced but for the horror reflected in his eye.
A mirror of Luke's own.
"What do we do?"
"Return home."
Both of them their gazes snapped toward her.
"Your dragons are recovering. Soon, they'll regain their strength." Something like hope flickered in Luke's chest, though it died very quickly as the memory of what gave rise to it was recalled. "When they do, fly home and speak to the would-be king and queen."
She glared at them both.
"There can be no war between your kin. You will each of you tell them what you saw here, what is to come and summon them all atop their dragons to this isle. It is the only way to prepare for the end of all."
"That is impossible," Aemond said lowly, but his voice might as well have been a peal of thunder for how well it carried in the near-silent grove. "This war is the culmination of decades of enmity."
"Not even we could stop it," Luke whispered.
It was telling that Aemond offered no disagreement, no scathing insult or bitter poison.
He didn't even look at Luke.
Adara, on the other hand, turned to glare at him.
"Make them," Adara said - no, commanded - with frigid finality. "Go to your mother and ask her of the Song Of Ice and Fire."
She turned to Aemond.
"Go to your brother and tell him to toss your father's dagger upon an open flame - he'll know the one. Show them, tell them, do whatever you must. But know this." She titled her head in a deadly challenge. "If the dragon lords of your house are not assembled within seven days and brought here, then you need not fear the Long Night to come. For I will come for you in its stead."
Looking into those eyes, after everything else he'd seen and heard, Luke did not dare doubt even a single word of it.
...
Two days later:
The Earthsinger known as Redgrass stood silently, eyes watching the titanic green dragon disappear above the clouds ahead as little more than a speck.
The younger princeling had left hours before, a precaution the Winterchild had insisted upon.
And so it began
"Ready me a pack." The girl in question said as she stood to his side " I need to fly North."
For a moment, Redgrass thought - nay, hoped - that he'd misheard.
Then he caught sight of the resolute look on her face, and true fear gripped his heart.
"You cannot-"
"There is nothing I cannot do should I have the strength for it, and I have plenty to spare." She cut him off sharply.
"The Raven-"
"I don't care." The girl said flatly, and Redgrass paled in as much as "I am tired of being fed crumbs and ordered about like an obedient pet. This might be the worst of them yet, but it is not my first war. I learned something in that vision - something I need to see for myself."
She turned and began to stride away.
"If the Raven is as all-knowing as he would have me believe he is, then he will have known of my choice before I made it. If he did not and is not, then I see no reason to bend to his whims and act as though he is. Either way-"
Her fists clenched sharply.
"I am no one's pawn."
And with that, the board was well and truly set.
...
Next Chapter: The Daring
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