A/N: A new year, and a new chapter.

Farwynd & Fire

By Spectre4hire

29: Lys II

In Lys, she was sick, but not in her dreams. In them, she was flying above a jade sea on dragonback.

The sea had a mouth of its own that was as white as sandbars. Within its gaping mouth, it showed her many things. She saw her husband aboard Inevitable sailing atop a sea of skulls. Golden krakens fighting one another, roses sprouting atop a blood-soaked hill, a drowned crow and its dusky shadow. Then the visions abruptly went black as if swallowed by the great, growing mouth. "Come to me," it called to her.

And suddenly instead of flying, she was standing on a beach she didn't recognize.

The sand slipped between her toes as the tide rushed to greet her. In the water, she saw Dagon, but it was what he was holding that made her heart swell. A babe, our child, idly, she touched her belly, and understanding dawned on her, warm and sweet. Wanting to see more, Dany started running into the sea, but as the water splashed all around her, the scene washed away.

She saw a proud harpy standing tall and strong, beneath her were legions upon legions of slaves marching like lines of ants. "Look on my works, ye mighty and despair!" She cawed as the crack of her whip fell upon the shivering slaves. Large and impressive cities could be seen behind her. They looked like small and colorful mountains in a sea of slaves. The harpy turned its hateful gaze towards Dany and sneered. Its scorpion tail bobbed, poised above her head ready to strike.

The tail lashed out, but when it struck her, it wasn't its tail, but a chain, and with a sharp tug it slammed her face first into the ground. She coughed, blearily looking through the dust cloud to see it wasn't the harpy looking down at her, but Viserys, who was sitting atop the Iron Throne.

"They will come for you, sweet sister."

"Who?" she refused to cower to him. I am Drowned. I am the blood of the dragon. The collar around her neck withered and fell. "Answer me," she demanded, but that only made him smile.

"Those who fear the Light, but not dragonflame," he said from his seat of iron thorns, each tip was red and glistening. "They'll not show the same mercy, I showed you." He was looking past her now. She turned to see the great oak doors of the throne room opened to show her a city on fire.

The orange and red blaze shone like polished rubies. It was the screams of thousands that made her raise her head. That made her see it.

In the rising black smoke, Daenerys saw the shape of some behemoth. The scales that climbed up its back like jagged mountains were pulsating incandescently, brighter and brighter until they abruptly stopped. For an instant, it was concealed in the dark and growing steam until it opened its mouth, shooting out a pillar of silvery bluish flames that moved like water, splashing and burning everything, it touched, brick and flesh alike melted away in heartbeats. Upon seeing the destruction, it wasn't horror she felt in her heart, but wonder. And then something else. Triumph.

The burning ruins of the city were swept away by a great wave that came for her too. The sea was gentle in its guidance, swirling around her in a protective embrace.

"Herald of dragons, wife of woe." A pair of eyes watched her from the murky depths of the sea, large and luminous.

"The Harbinger of Change is coming," Another set of eyes dotted into existence on her other side. Just as big and bright as the first. "You are coming."

The questions cluttered in her mind, tumbling over one another, but before she could speak to them, a new voice joined theirs. It was her husband's.

Daenerys woke to the sound of Dagon calling her name. There was not a shred of drowsiness when she opened her eyes to see her husband's hovering face. Giddiness thrummed through her, one of her hands moved to his cheek, the other, she placed on her belly. "I'm pregnant."

Despite being summoned, there was no one waiting for Doreah when she arrived. There were torches on the walls lit by servants who have long since disappeared. Their flickering light showed her a small room that was bare of trappings and furniture save for a large glass wardrobe that had been put on its back. But there were no clothes within, she could see that much through the clear glass. It was just, she moved closer. Sand, and it looked more than a foot deep.

It didn't surprise Doreah. This heavy and large piece of furniture or its strangeness with its general lack of purpose. She had seen much and more peculiar quirks from the wealthy and powerful in her years in Lys and then Pentos. As a whore and a slave, Doreah saw the true faces of many. It was that experience, that training that had made Ramsay so interested in inquiring her for his little tasks.

At least now I'm being paid for my services. In nearly every Free City they visited, Ramsay had these assignments for her, and she had accepted them. But Lys her former home, she was given her most pressing task yet. It was suspected that the Saans had placed a slave or purchased the loyalty of one within the widow's household, months and months ago.

She was given a role of a freshly turned thrall when she arrived at Lys, and one who hated her new masters. The best lies are seeded with truths. When Ramsay had said those words to her before the assignment, his pale eyes held her gaze as if to challenge him, to tell him he spoke falsely. To proclaim then and there she loved being a thrall, being the tool of another. Her training urged her to lie, to sing sweet praises for her new master and the princess, but instincts had kept her quiet. The spymaster had his ways of seeing the true thoughts of those he was with. Her eyes drifted to the glass case, like our thoughts are hidden behind panes of glass that he can easily see.

"I enjoy serving the princess," she had settled for her own little truth. It was an act she did like because she enjoyed the princess despite her heart warning her not to. Telling her that she was not the princess's friend, but simply her thrall.

Ramsay had smiled and nodded, approving not of her sentiment, but that she hadn't tried to ply him with falsehoods. "You, my lady, are dangerous." It sounded like a compliment coming from him, a term of endearment, and it was something Doreah had never been called before.

When she had been fucked, she was called many things, names that weren't hers, pretty words and heaps of praise while her cunt or mouth were serving their pleasures, but they rang hollow. Empty words and promises spoken during the climaxing throes of their lust and her duty. The sort murmured in the dark but forgotten come the new day.

"Dangerous?" She repeated, an almost sincere smile came to her lips, before she stopped it. Instead, she tilted her head, sampling the word like it was one of the finest wines the Magister would buy for himself and for his guests.

"Indeed," he agreed, his pale eyes nearly shining, but she didn't necessarily take it as a kindness because she had seen what things would give him such smiles, and such reactions.

'He sees me no differently than the magister,' she had told herself. 'A tool to serve a new master.' Just because a sword was put in a gilded sheath instead of a leather one, doesn't change what the weapon was nor why it was used. And she couldn't deny that they had been better to her than any of her previous masters, but they were still her master. So, when her master gave her this new job, she did it.

Doreah had a few suspects, but it was up to her to find him. She watched and she waited, not going to any of them. And after a few days of playing her part, the suspect did come to her. Rocco was a slave with a wispy silvery mustache and dark eyes, who claimed to be a Saan himself. He bore the look of them, the look of Old Valyria, but so did she, and that shared look of their master's didn't spare either of them the sting of the slaver's lash. Regardless of if he was one or not, he believed he was which made him even more determined to kill Farwynd and the princess. But what had made him even more dangerous was that Doreah discovered Rocco had convinced another one of Rina's house slaves to help him with his plot.

It was a delicate performance for her to play. This forcibly turned thrall who hated her master. She needed to show it to her target in order for him to recruit her into his schemes, but she also needed to hide it in a way that would make it believable for her to avoid the suspicion of her master. Doreah had made a life of getting men to believe her because she understood the basic truth was that they wanted to believe it. To believe her, to believe in the illusion. In her days of observing, she was able to figure out the sort of man Rocco was. The one who loved to boast about their strengths or their smarts especially to a pretty face with a sympathetic ear. I was also close to the princess, and he needed that. She used his needs and plied her charms, and soon enough he was hers.

Footsteps made her raise her head to see Ramsay's approach and then she bowed her head when he drew closer. She hadn't seen the spymaster since she gave him the information that would condemn those house slaves. That had been days ago. "How is the Princess?"

"She's happy," Doreah recalled Daenerys's near feverish excitement that morning when Doreah had come to start her day of duties. She thought Daenerys would make a good mother, but that was a thought that the spymaster had no interest in hearing.

Ramsay had walked into the room carrying a box and a few pieces of loose parchment. He didn't look at her when he passed. "Good," he said, "the princess's condition bears watching," he put down the items on the glass case. "She was already a target, but once word leaves this city of her condition..."

"They'd kill her," she said, already knowing the answer, already having seen the ugliness of power, but it still made her stomach turn.

"Her and the babe," Ramsay agreed, "and without hesitation." He looked up then to show his determined expression. "And that is why our work is so important."

"Of course."

"These are for you," he slid the box across the glass surface to her.

She stopped it with her hand. Doreah looked down to see it was an ornately carved jewelry box embedded with pearls that formed a clamshell. The box was exquisite and likely worth more than all the silver she had been paid throughout the journey. She opened it to reveal a pair of pearl earrings and in between them rested a silver ring with a small emerald.

"All of this?"

"Yes, that's your reward," Ramsay answered. "You serve my captain. And my captain rewards good work," he walked over to take down one of the torches and brought it over to a brazier that she hadn't noticed that was placed by the glass case. "You just helped me catch a pair of plotters who wished to kill my captain and his wife." He lit the brazier. His features were almost ghoulish in the fire's glow. "That's your reward. The more you serve, the better you serve, the better the rewards." He moved around the glass furniture that separated them. "I'd wager the captain will likely give you a ship when this is over for just how well you've taught his wife the art of fucking."

She couldn't tell if he was being truthful or teasing her. He had a better way than most of masking what he was thinking and feeling. Doreah took her eyes off the spymaster and to the glass case where the lit brazier better illuminated what lay within the glass wardrobe. Doreah saw specks of red within the white sand that made her think of half buried rubies, until she saw them moving. She felt his presence beside him before she saw him.

"That's your reward for serving my captain," he covered her hand that had been resting on the jewelry box. "And this," he placed the other hand on the back of her neck, leading her to bend down to look inside the glass case.

It hadn't been rubies that she had seen, but crabs scuttling on shifting sands, and when one small mound of it gave away, she saw what had been put inside. Rocco, dread coiled inside her like a snake, but she couldn't look away. The lit brazier showed Rocco's buried outline in the sand. His corpse had been given over to the crabs as a meal. They scurried along the sands, climbing over the body of a giant without fear, only hunger. His wispy mustache was gone as was his upper lip, peeled and pinched away, leaving behind a red ruin of flesh and bone. One of his eyes was gone, scooped out by some crab like it was a glob of jelly, but the other was still there, with its dead eye stare until a crab got too close and then it blinked, and Rocco's face twitched. He was still alive! She realized in her mounting horror.

"And this," Ramsay's voice was a soft caress in her ear, "is what happens to those who work against us."

He watched his resting wife from the corner of their chambers. My pregnant wife, exultant in his correction. His attention rested on her flat belly which showed no hint of their baby, but in the coming months it would swell with their child. Throughout the years of his travels and triumphs, he'd be dogged by criticisms, and questions and while he silenced many, one that lingered had been his lack of wives. If Farwynd is so strong then why has he taken no salt wife? Afterall, a salt wife was a show of virility and strength, and yet he never acquired the many he rightfully deserved given everything he's gained and accomplished. The traditions were different on Lonely Light.

Because they had to be.

Like with the rest of the Iron Islands, they observed the laws that salt children fell behind the children of a rock wife. But laws could be muddled when an elder salt son controlled a spotted whale and the rock son, a seagull. The sea change which had been his family's blessing now proved to be a double-edged sword that threatened to undo everything his ancestors had built. The sea change gave the salt sons and daughters an opportunity that other saltspawn didn't have. Farwynd of Sealskin point had been founded by a Farwynd salt son who thought to take his own lands and make his own name with the sea change. And others had followed this example with varying degrees of success. While many throughout Lonely Light's history had served their siblings faithfully as captains and counselors, their names recorded and remembered such as The Lonely Lady of the Light. There had been some who wanted it all and believed they had the means and the blessing to do it. Violent takeovers and skirmishes were taught to him growing up, their names came to him even now: The Battle on Three Islands, The Lone Light Massacre, and The Fortnight of Darkness, the latter ending with the ascension of Ursula Farwynd.

She was not the first Lady of Lonely Light to bear that proud family name and would not be the last, but she put down the laws that remained long after her body had been returned to the sea. She decreed that no Farwynd could take a salt wife before already having a rock wife who had given him several strong and hale children, hoping this would help solidify their hold when such a great discrepancy would exist in age between rock and salt children. Her son followed this rule and his son and so forth. Dagon's grandfather had as well, taking a salt wife after his two sons were nearly men grown, but when she and their daughter died on the birthing bed, he had no interest in taking another.

Dagon's focus drifted back to his wife and their babe. Our child of fire and the sea with dragon blood and salt in their veins. And all the blessings of a God. He smiled, remembering his wife's dreams of dragons and war, of fire and conquest. Such songs the skalds will sing!

Not all of it could be discerned, nor could she remember everything, but Dagon was certain of the message, of what the Drowned God intended of them. Dreams are messages from the Deep. It didn't concern him that the dragons differed in his wife's dreams, or that the cities could not be decided. It doesn't change the truth. Dany will lead us down a path of glory. He thought of his remarkable wife, and her amazing gifts, and now she had given him the greatest gift of all, the news of her pregnancy. He left their chambers with one last look.

It had not just been his family's history that had stayed Dagon's hand at collecting the numerous salt wives that he deserved, but his own ambitions. He'd not squander them on baser impulses. For so long, he thought his future was on the green lands and wanted to marry into one of the great noble houses. He knew he was already fighting his people's poor reputation on the mainland when he came to visit these proud lords asking after their noble daughters. They'd be insulted and dismiss me as soon as the negotiations came onto my salt wives. It was fine for them to take paramours or mistresses, or even father bastard children, but a salt wife was too different in their eyes.

So, if it could only hurt his chances, Dagon decided not to bother. That didn't mean he lived his life like some chaste septon. Hardly. he nearly snorted at the thought. Because I didn't need to marry these women in order to fuck them. Some had been his own thralls, beautiful women he had taken throughout his journeys. They were salt wives in all but name. He didn't hurt any of them, because it was an honor to be chosen. They were amply spoiled, and he made sure no bastard would come from their coupling. There had been Chel, Esmerelda, and countless others. And when the gold and glories of his expeditions raised him to dizzying new heights of power and pleasure, he had entertained the best of the professional sort which had included the Jasmine Princess of Tyrosh and Helaena, the very flexible and incredible Braavosi courtesan, who had shown and taught him much and more.

"Captain." The thrall's greeting having interrupted his thoughts. He was waiting for him by the open door, but it was what he was holding that Dagon paid attention to. It was a larger model of his ship, Inevitable. The thrall with a bowed head handed it over. He wordlessly took it and walked into the room where it was all waiting for him spread out on the table. It was time to begin.

The stars spilled out onto the night sky like scattered diamonds on a black tapestry that late evening when it was time to observe the rites. It was an ironborn tradition for a husband and wife to make an offering to the Drowned God when a pregnancy was revealed.

"Bless me," Dagon said to the priest when the ceremony was at its end. They had already sought the blessings of Him and the others. The skalds had already sung of old legends and new beginnings, so all that was left was the offering. He knelt into the water without hesitation.

"What is dead may never die," The priest said while pouring a stream of saltwater down upon his brow.

Dagon was unflinching as the water fell over him. "But rises again, harder and stronger." His wife was next. Daenerys said the words with a strong heart and fire in the blood. Ironborn, he thought, watching her with pride.

"A woman's womb is a sea into itself," Sharkey said to her when it was over, "A cradle of life and growth."

It was time to make their offering. He carried it, Inevitable, its mast had been replaced by a candle, which had been lit during the ceremony by them. The model ship was laden with tokens. Dagon filled its small stores with gold and every type of gem he had found and taken. The blood of his enemies, those Saan slaves wet the decks, and a torn piece of a blood-stained sheet, the one that proved his wife's purity was tucked away within. Blood was power.

"Why a candle?" Daenerys had asked before the ceremony. "Isn't that part of the Seven?"

They were alone on the shore waiting for the others. She was looking at the newly placed candle on Inevitable.

Dagon had considered her question for a few heartbeats before answering. "The Andals likely lit many candles before they set off to the Iron Islands. They sought to conquer us, to convert us, to change us, but it was them who changed," Dagon watched the waves crash, beating onto the tide like drums of war. "We took what was once theirs and made it ours. An old rite for a new god." It hadn't just been land or people they took, but their faith too. Their very gods. Was there any better victory? He didn't think so.

It was a short walk to where they'd cast off their offering. Their show of gratitude, a symbol of their fidelity, as they sought the Drowned God's favor to protect wife and baby in the coming months. If an ironborn couldn't afford such lavish gifts, they offered whatever they could, coppers and silver, meat and seeds, taken trinkets, driftwood or ivory carvings. His father made offerings of whalebone armrings and walrus tusks.

I'd burn the real Inevitable if I had to, he felt his wife's hand in his, if it promised me Dany and our baby's life. But for them, tonight their altar was the model ship. Others used and built whatever they could so long as it floated. Their god wasn't was only a small tribute He asked for in this type of offering from the family. These floating offerings would eventually sink, after all the Drowned God's kingdom resided under the waves, but it was believed the farther it went out before it sank, the better your chances of not just a successful pregnancy, but it was also considered a good omen for your baby's future.

"How far did mine go out?" Dagon remembered asking his mother as a small boy when he attended the ceremony for the pregnancy that would lead to his youngest brother, Yohn.

"It sank right away," Gyles teased from where he was walking on the other side of Father.

Dagon could still remember quivering at that, at believing his brother, and fearing his future.

"Don't listen to Gyles," his mother had said after giving her eldest son a sharp look that would make a hungry shark turn away. "Yours, Dagon went farther than any Farwynd before." She had whispered it as if it was a secret only meant for her and him.

"Really?"

She smiled and nodded. "The Farthest Farwynd."

He had believed her that night as she tousled his hair, but later when he was a bit older, he suspected she had said it only to comfort him from his brother's teasing. But now, as he readied to send off his first offering with his pregnant Targaryen wife beside him. Mayhaps, she was telling it true.

A/N: I follow my own lore and logic when it comes to Dany's dreams that would help to serve this story. That's why they're different and not as coherent/consistent as canon. Well, one of the reasons.

Doreah started as an outsider POV to break my writer's block and has just become more and more of a fixture in this story than I originally intended. I know her part was more tell than show, but I did say I'd be doing that more for this story.

One question I've been asked a lot was about Dagon and his lack of salt wives, and we finally have an answer. It's a combination of his family's history and his own ambitions. Speaking of, there are obvious exceptions to those rules/laws, but I really didn't want to bog down the flow with more expo dumps.

Everything you read about Lonely Light and the Drowned God ritual/offering in this chapter is stuff I just made up. Speaking of the ritual, I'm not completely satisfied with how its implemented. I couldn't decide if they took a boat out or tried to wade past the breakers or something else. It def needs some fine tuning or a complete overhaul so my apologies that's why it's a bit vague in places, but I didn't want to hold this chapter up.

Thanks for all the support you've shown this story. It's appreciated.

-Spectre4hire