The sun hung like a bloodied coin above Blackwater Bay as Aerys' fingers found the spaces between Rhaella's. The hem of her silver-trimmed gown brushed against the path's ancient stones. He studied the path's black glass surface, noting how no dust gathered here despite the constant winds. A wisp of smoke curled from Mount Doom's peak, against its deepening blue.
The path twisted upward. Rhaella quickened her pace at the second bend, tugging him forward. A lock of silver hair escaped her braid, hovering suspended longer than natural wind would permit. Aerys matched her stride, boots scraping stone worn smooth as glass.
Around them, the mountain breathed, subtle exhalations of fragrant steam that carried hints of dragon spice and hot metal, growing richer as they climbed higher until each breath felt like drinking spiced wine. Small crystalline formations jutted from the path's edge, catching sunlight in flashes of purple and gold. Her steps left momentary impressions in the stone, not footprints but briefly shimmering pools that reflected disturbed cluster of fire moths nesting in a nearby crevice, tiny creatures whose wings ignited briefly in flight before settling again to cool embers.
The air thinned and warmed simultaneously. Droplets of sweat on her neck evaporated into tiny ephemeral dragons that dissipated with each breath she took.
Aerys' fingers brushed iron cold as winter, yet unmarked by rust or pitting, each dragon head finial still hissed audibly when rain approached, though no clouds marred today's sky.
Far below, the Blackwater reflected nothing, its surface gone flat and featureless as if even water knew better than to mirror what ascended the mountain's face. Not the sun, not the passing shadows, not the three keels carved paths toward Duskendale. Their wakes remained frozen for heartbeats too long, then collapsed all at once.
Where normal tides should rise and fall, this water instead stratified into distinct layers that refused to mix, deepest azure beneath, pale turquoise above, with a ribbon of quicksilver threading between them.
A Braavosi trading vessel cut through the stillness, the sailors onboard had covered their faces with chalk-white masks, an old superstition that dragon-eyes couldn't see what had no features. Their hull rode unnaturally high, the water beneath actively repelling their presence.
A dark shape moved beneath the ship, vast and serpentine. The vessel rose three feet in the water, then settled. The sailors scrambled from one side to the other, tiny as ants from this height.
The shadow passed deeper, leaving only a trail of bubbles that didn't rise but sank.
The fish had fled days ago. Ten thousand salt-trout had left as one when Balerion had snapped his teeth in sleep atop the mountain. Only the mollusks remained, their shells now grown in strange geometries, spirals with impossible angles, conch formations that caused nosebleeds in those who studied them too closely.
"I won't offer you false comfort," said Rhaella as they rounded the next turn in the path, "but your swordsmanship has improved."
Aerys raised his brow. "You compare me to what I was as a green boy, then? Small praise indeed."
A column of black smoke rose from the mountain's peak, twisting against the wind rather than with it. The smoke moved like something alive, coiling and uncoiling as it rose. When it passed between them and the sun, it cast no shadow.
Her smile bloomed asymmetrically, higher on the left. "To feel the finesse of a keen blade once more... it brought me joy," she confided, her skin where they had gripped Dark Sister still bearing faint silver impressions of the hilt's dragon-scale pattern. "Of late I've felt years gathering upon me like dust."
The path narrowed again, his boot dislodging a stone that fell in perfect silence until striking the path below with a delayed crack.
As they climbed higher, droplets of moisture in the air hung suspended around them, catching light like scattered diamonds. Not rain, nor mist, something else entirely, unique to this place where dragons made their roost.
From the path's switchback, King's Landing spread beneath them resembled a child's scattered playing pieces, the Red Keep appeared no larger than the toy castle Rhaegar had played with as a child. A cart overturned in the Street of Flour. Market women bundled herbs the same way their mothers had taught them and drew water from the same wells their grandmothers had used.. Septons preached beneath the same trees. Three hundred pigeons erupted from the Great Sept's dome. Near the Iron Gate, a wedding procession wound through the streets, their dragon banners shifting from black to red and back as the wind caught them.
The Iron Throne waited in the Red Keep, a speck of darkness visible even from here. Forged in flame, baptized in the blood of those who'd ruled before him. Aegon had sat there, then Aemon, then Alyssa and all who followed. Now it received Aerys each morning as if no time had passed between them. Tomorrow lords would kneel as they had knelt before his father, and his father before him. Their faces changed. Their voices changed. The words remained the same.
A shelf of volcanic glass jutted from the mountainside. The surface still bubbled as though freshly cooled, though it had formed during Aegon's day. Kings lived and died, but dragons remained. Men fought and bled and burned, but the fire in Targaryen veins burned no cooler now than when Daenys first bound it to their blood.
Below, the wheel turned. Lords schemed, smallfolk toiled, maesters recorded deeds soon forgotten.
A plume of smoke from the summit traced ancient Valyrian glyphs against the sky before the wind scattered them. The mountain remembered what men forgot. Dragons remembered what even mountains could not. And the blood remembered longest of all.
Rhaella's finger traced a curve in the air. Silver light lingered where her nail passed. "Aerea's 'Meditations' grow clearer to me each year. She wrote: 'when I discover a character of fondness within the tales I read and witness their misfortunes unfold, I am moved to sorrow for their plight.'"
Ash motes suspended around them, forming the outline of a face, hollow-eyed, mouth open in silent grief.
"'Is it the projection of self into the heart of their story that stirs such emotion within?'" Her sleeve brushed a rock outcropping. The stone's surface rippled like disturbed water. Concentric rings spread outward, solidified, then shattered into dust. "'And yet, when the final page is turned, only a lingering echo of evanescent feeling remains as testimony.'"
A sudden gust swept upward from below, carrying the scent of salt and iron. Layers of volcanic stone flanked the path—black, red, violet, indigo, blue, green, gold. Each band no wider than a finger.
"'Days hence, naught but the mere shadow of sadness lingers.'" Rhaella's breath emerged as tiny crystals that chimed against each other. "'This world we inhabit is as a dream, from which I awaken each morning to the embrace of the familiar dawn.'"
She paused.
"'I look around and find all unchanged, as it ever was.'" The mountain trembled. Not a violent shake but a slow, steady vibration like a sleeping beast's breath. "'Life and death continue their unending cycle, as souls enter and exit this plane with quietude, as they have for hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands of years.'"
The last word hung in the air, vibrating until it became visible. It dissolved when he reached to touch it.
"Aerys, we live such transient lives—" Her eyes reflected something vast and winged that cast no shadow. "—only to have them slip through our fingers, vanishing into the fog of mundane reality."
Rhaella studied her hands, turning them in the harsh mountain light. "Every sorcerer in Valyria would have acknowledged my gift," she pressed her fingertip against the mountainside. The stone yielded like soft clay. Where she touched it, veins of copper appeared, spiraling outward in patterns too perfect to be natural. "Yet have I truly advanced our art?"
A scorpion scuttled across the path before them, its shell not the dull brown of common vermin but a deep violet that caught the light oddly. As it passed beneath Rhaella's shadow, it froze, then molted instantly, leaving behind an exoskeleton of what looked like hammered silver.
"I may have pushed certain boundaries," she continued, watching the creature disappear into a crack in the stone. "Yet what does it matter? Those who understand my work praise its beauty. The smallfolk see only a woman on a dragon."
"They cannot comprehend what I achieve, just as I remain ignorant of whatever wisdom they might possess." She withdrew her finger from the stone. The copper veins remained, catching sunlight. "We exist in separate worlds, as distant from each other as the depths of the Shivering Sea from the red wastes of Qarth."
"Perhaps I've been too quick to dismiss their accomplishments," she said. Her voice was soft, but it carried strangely, seeming to come from the stones around them rather than her throat. "Merely because they dwell in a realm my knowledge cannot reach, as they cannot reach mine."
Aerys planted his boots against the volcanic path, feeling heat seep through the soles. The mountain path beneath their feet was warm, almost too warm for comfort, but not for their kind. Dragon blood ran hot.
"A crown weighs the same on every head, but no two kings feel its burden alike," he said, watching how the path's black glass reflected his face but not Rhaella's. "Just as maesters see patterns in the stars that farmers never notice. They spend their lives filling chains with different metals, seeking cause and meaning, yet cannot see what we see.
His voice was quiet against the mountain's breath. The air around them turned distant King's Landing into a wavering mirage.
"Look there," Aerys said, kneeling to touch a crystalline formation where her shadow had fallen. "This crystal knows itself apart from the mountain." Blue fire leaked from his fingertips, seeping into the stone's lattice, where glowing lines traced interlocking spirals and tessellated shapes that folded inward like collapsing origami. "Yet it cannot comprehend the volcano that birthed it."
From somewhere above came a sound like metal scraping against stone, one of the dragons shifting in sleep. "The crystal's awareness ends at its facets," he said, stepping toward Rhaella. "Just as mine ends—"
The mountain trembled. The wind from the bay carried salt and smoke, making his eyes water.
His fingers brushed hers, and where they touched, both blue and violet flame spiraled upward, neither extinguishing the other. "—where yours begins."
Another bend in the path, another step upward.
Rhaella bent and plucked a fire-bloom from between the stones, a flower that shouldn't grow at such heights. The petals unfurled at her touch, turning from ash-gray to deep crimson. She twirled the stem between her fingers.
"Strange," she said, watching a petal detach and drift toward the abyss. It burst into flame halfway down, leaving nothing but a wisp of smoke. "I created this bloom." Another petal fell. Another brief flame. "Yet today it lives and dies by its own nature."
She cast the remaining flower over the edge. It didn't fall but hovered, suspended between her will and the mountain's pull.
"Look there," she said, pointing toward King's Landing. A speck separated from the Red Keep—a raven, though distance made it smaller than a dust mote. "The Small Council debates taxation of Dornish wines. Lords squabble over boundaries. The smallfolk labor their whole lives to leave something behind. A son to carry their name. A house that stands after winter. A story told at hearths." The flower rotated slowly in the air. "All believing the world fixed by laws they merely observe."
"When I sleep," she said, "the world continues without my governance." The dying sun caught her face in profile. For a moment, she looked as ageless as the mountain beneath them. Then she blinked, and was again a woman, silver-haired and violet-eyed, walking a path few would ever tread. "When my final sleep comes, will all this—" she gestured to the mountain, the distant city, the sky itself, "—continue without me? Or end with my last thought?"
"Death cannot be feared by the dead," Aerys said.
The wind brought the smell of dragonfires, though they had not yet reached the lake. There was a strange comfort in it, that familiar scent of home and hearth and power all at once.
"Your mind turns on itself, like a snake devouring its tail," he continued. "But think on this: if you dream of darkness, you remain in the light."
Rhaella said nothing. Her hair stirred in the breeze, silver-white against the darkening sky. The sun was sinking toward the western hills, bleeding red across the clouds.
"The very thought proves you live," Aerys said. "Like a man who worries he has gone blind but still sees darkness."
Their shadows stretched long behind them as they climbed, two tall figures on an ancient path that remembered the touch of dragons. Aerys watched his own shadow, thinking how alike it looked to his father's, and his father's before him. Blood of the dragon, generation after generation.
"Aerea wrote something strange in her final volume," said Rhaella. Her voice carried over the mountain's sullen rumble. "That no mind is an island."
She paused where the path split around a boulder, choosing the steeper route without hesitation.
"Her words were lost on me as a girl," she continued. "She claimed consciousness seeks consciousness. Without another to reflect it, the mind drowns in its own depths."
High above, hidden in the jagged cradle of the volcanic ridge, something massive stirred, stone cracked beneath its weight, and the distant echo of grinding scales rumbled through the smoke-choked sky. A flake of ash drifted down, landing on Rhaella's sleeve. She didn't brush it away.
"I had found them hollow. Pretty phrases without substance." Her eyes found his, violet meeting violet. "Until now."
"Yes." Aerys studied her face in the fading light.
Wind stirred the mountain path, sending pebbles skittering over the edge. Their climb had slowed. The shadow of the mountain stretched across King's Landing like a dark talon.
Three ravens circled overhead, black against the reddening sky. Aerys watched them pass, then turned back to Rhaella, to their bedchamber that morning, to their bodies moving as one beneath the black silk. To their swords meeting in the practice yard, blue flame against violet. To the first time they had flown their dragons together, when he had felt her mind brush against his own through the beasts' connection.
Not as king and queen, nor even as husband and wife. The blood of Valyria flowed in fewer veins with each generation, yet here it remained undiluted.
Two dragons from one egg. Two crowns from one bloodline.
Aerys reached for her hand. When their fingers touched, he felt what he always had - completion.
Other men knew nothing of what they shared. The Lannisters, the Starks, the Tyrells— they bred for advantage, their unions cold contracts of property and bloodline. Calculated marriages. Separate chambers. Half-lives.
Even the Dornish, with all their talk of passion, could not fathom what bound two dragons together.
The clouds parted around them. The crater opened before them, vast and ancient. The air not thinner as mountains usually made it, but thicker, heavy with minerals that coated his tongue like the residue of a copper cup left too long in the sun.
The lava writhed and folded upon itself in places clear as water with blue flame beneath, elsewhere slower than honey poured in winter and dull as lead nothing like flowing. Where it cooled against stone islands, it formed crusts that cracked and split, revealing molten gold beneath obsidian skin. Patches of white-hot gold where gasses escaped, streaks of deep purple where the heat ran hottest, whorls and spirals of gold and sliver, all churning like a massive pot of molten metal left too long on the fire. A bubble the size of a war galley rose near the center, its surface wrinkled like an old man's skin, before bursting to release a plume of yellow gas that smelled of rotten eggs and cloves.
Vhagar had wedged herself between two rock spines, her magenta body looped oddly to fit the space, tail coiling lazily, stirring eddies of brighter fire as she dreamed. The lava clung to her hide when she moved, stretching into threads that hardened and shattered, falling back into the pool as obsidian dust.
The Black Scourge floated in the lake's heart, half-submerged in liquid rock. Steam rose where the great dragon's flanks displaced molten stone. When Balerion shifted in sleep, ripples of white fire spread across the pool. Where heissnout dipped into the molten rock, small ripples spread outward, disturbing floating islands of cooling crust.
The younger dragons clumped together away from their elders. Vermithor's blue-gray length stretched across two islands, scales caked with dried ash that flaked away when his sides expanded. Syrax had wedged herself into a narrow crevice, only her pale gold tail and one wing visible. In the crater's eastern curve, Caraxes lay apart from the others. The Blood Wyrm's crimson scales had dulled to the color of rust where volcanic ash settled between them.
"Look," Rhaella murmured, pointing toward the southern edge.
Meraxes lay there, her silver length curled through currents of different heat, scales gathered light, then released it transformed that reminded Aerys of Rhaella's hair spread across their pillows.
The lava stirred where she slept. Rings spreading outward like ripples in a pond struck by silver coins. A ridge of scales broke the molten surface. Her tail twitched in some dream of sky and storm.
Rhaella knelt at the crater's edge. She pressed her palm against black stone. The rock beneath her hand cracked from something passing through it, veins of silver spreading like roots through soil.
The lava parted. Meraxes rose. Her vast head emerged first, lava streaming down scales that remained dry the instant fire left them. Where the liquid fire touched ordinary stone, it left smoking craters.
It rose toward them, trailing thin filaments of platinum that connected scale to lava before snapping like harp strings. Her eye, gold with flecks of silver, held a starburst pattern where Maiden-Made-of-Light's crystal arrow had struck but failed to penetrate during the Divine Hunt on the left iris.
"I need to leave King's Landing for a few days," Rhaella said. Her voice cut through the mountain's heat, cool and sudden as night wind.
The muscles in Aerys's neck tightened. His hands curled at his sides. "To Sunspear or Casterly Rock?"
Rhaella turned away, her fingers still resting on Meraxes's scales. The dragon's eye fixed on Aerys, unblinking.
The mountain rumbled beneath them. Down in the lava, Balerion shifted, sending ripples across the molten surface. Black scales scraped against stone.
"You know what you mean to me," she said.
"And what do they mean to you?" Aerys watched her back straight as a sword.
The last time Joanna Lannister had visited, Rhaella had missed three small council meetings. They'd walked the gardens until dawn, two silhouettes against the torchlight. Tywin had said nothing, though his eyes followed his wife as a hawk watches a hare and Aerys had found one of Joanna's golden hairpins on Rhaella's dressing table.
"Do they share your bed or your mind?" Aerys asked. "Which would be worse, I wonder."
When Princess Deria sent gifts from Dorne, it was always three: one for the king, one for the queen, one for Lady Joanna. As if they were a set to be matched.
"Go," he said.
He stepped close. His mouth found hers, quick and hard, tasting ash and something sweeter. Some trace of the girl she'd been when they'd flown their first dragons together above the smoking ruins of Summerhall.
She stepped back and turned to the crater's edge without another word.
Rhaella leapt. One moment she stood on black stone, the next she was falling.
Meraxes rose to meet her. The silver dragon broke the lava's surface in a single motion. Fire ran down her scales like water off a duck's back. Rhaella landed between the creature's wings. Where she touched dragonscale, flame bloomed, forming a saddle only she could ride.
Meraxes beat her wings. Once. Twice. The third stroke carried them south, toward red mountains, toward Dorne.
Aerys watched until they were a silver speck against the darkening sky. The sun was almost gone now, its last light bleeding across King's Landing below. Lanterns winked to life along the Street of Sisters. Tavern doors opened and closed. Men drank and laughed, oblivious to the king who stood alone above them.
His shadow stretched long against the cooling stone. The space beside him remained empty, yet warm.