Tyraxes swept his claws through the lakebed silt, shoving aside the pale curve of Quicksilver's broken ribs. A cloud of darkness surged upward, billowing like ink. When it cleared, something gleamed beneath the tangle of ancient dragonbone.
Baelon's breath caught.
There... stop. Show me.
Tyraxes lowered his head. Beneath the ribs lay an object smooth as polished moonstone: an egg, silver from end to end, light rippling over its shell like water sliding across metal.
In the hall at Harrenhal, Baelon's eyes narrowed.
"What… is that?"
Tyraxes dipped his snout toward it, brushing sediment aside with a slow, deliberate push. In the dragon's sight, the ovoid glimmered like treasure forged in a dying star. Baelon felt his pulse quicken.
A dragon egg.... Quicksilver's egg!
"Of course," he murmured through clenched teeth. "Quicksilver was a she-dragon. And when Prince Aegon first mounted her, she was already full grown... more than capable of laying an egg."
He stared through Tyraxes's eyes, his own vision swimming. Could an egg forgotten beneath cold black water for half a century still hold life?
"But after soaking in that lake for so long…" He exhaled slowly. "Can it even hatch anymore?"
Something else glimmered beside the egg, flat, pale, half-buried.
At first Baelon mistook it for a scrap of driftwood or a sliver of stone. Only when Tyraxes nudged the egg aside did he see it fully.
Not wood. Not stone. A sheet, thin, supple, strangely preserved.
Parchment, and yet not parchment at all.
If not for the egg weighing it down, Baelon realized, he would never have noticed it.
Bring them, he commanded. Both. The egg, and that… thing beneath it.
Tyraxes seized them carefully between his foreclaws, wings beating until the lake churned behind him. The bond jolted as the dragon breached the surface, and Baelon gasped as their shared sight snapped apart. For a moment the hall spun, the world swaying like a deck beneath a storm-driven ship.
He leaned back against his carved stone seat, breathing hard.
Even now, young as he was, binding his senses to a dragon demanded strength few men possessed. If not for the strange resilience buried deep in his soul, the link would have crushed him long ago.
Outside, Tyraxes banked over the Gods Eye and glided toward Harrenhal's open yard. His talons curled protectively around the egg and the pale sheet. When he landed, Baelon sent for Ser Brayden.
Brayden returned swiftly, falling to one knee before the high seat.
"My lord," he said, bowing his head as he set the items before him. "The egg Tyraxes retrieved… and the parchment."
"Well done, Brayden."
Baelon took the egg first.
Even through his gloves he felt its heat, a soft, pulsing warmth, like a living ember trapped beneath metal scales. Its shell was silver from tip to base, rough as hammered steel, uneven beneath his fingers.
"Still warm?" he murmured. "Even after all that?"
He lifted it slowly, reverently.
Truth be told, he knew little of dragon eggs beyond the superstitions: that they needed fire, or chambers heated by volcanic stone; that Dragonstone kept such places; that no man could say with certainty how long hatching took. Daenerys's eggs had been lifeless stone until fire quickened them once more.
If I ever see Dragonstone with my own eyes, Baelon thought, I will take it with me. What harm could it do? What miracle might follow?
He set the egg on the broad arm of his lord's seat. The chair, carved on a scale meant for the giants who built Harrenhal, had room enough that the egg rested securely at his side.
No Targaryen was immune to dragon-madness. Baelon least of all.
As a child, Tyraxes had curled around him every night, wings draped over him like a living cloak. No soap nor scrubbing could wash away that sharp, smoky scent. Only when the dragon grew too large for the bed did the habit break.
Even now, whenever Tyraxes nuzzled him, Baelon found himself smiling like a man reunited with an old companion. Tyraxes was every inch a dragon, fierce, proud, unpredictable, yet to Baelon he often seemed more like a great, sulking cat: tail flicking when annoyed, swishing lazily when content.
Only lacking fur.
"You've earned four warhorses today," Baelon said softly, glancing toward the courtyard where Tyraxes sprawled. "A proper reward."
Tyraxes answered with a jubilant roar that shook the rafters.
Baelon turned at last to the so-called parchment.
The moment he touched it, he froze.
This was not parchment.
The texture was wrong, smooth yet faintly ridged, resilient despite centuries beneath the lake. No animal hide endured such conditions. No paper remained untouched by time the way this had.
Whatever this was, it was something old. Something rare.
The sheet was roughly the size of his chest, covered in impossibly cramped script and curling diagrams. The letters might have been High Valyrian, or something older, a purer form, one he'd only glimpsed in fragments.
He frowned. He had never been taught enough to read this.
And then-
Something shifted deep within him. A dark corner of his mind stirred, rippling as though a shroud had been lifted.
A small, iron-black object appeared in that hidden inner realm, a trophy, gleaming faintly in the dark.
[The Past That Should Have Stayed Buried (Black Iron Grade)]
[This is the secret the Uncrowned One, Prince Aegon, sought to preserve above all else. A relic of a dragonlord ruin in Essos, containing a history long forgotten. Without your own intervention, the dragonlords' trove would have remained lost forever.]
[Reward: Mastery of Ancient High Valyrian]
A cold current swept through Baelon's skull as if someone had poured icewater into his veins. Words, shapes, meanings, all alien yet intimate, unfurled inside him like wings opening for the first time.
Mastery. Not of bastard Valyrian nor the softened courtly tongue of Dragonstone.
This was the pure speech of old Valyria. Language only the archmages and dragonlords of legend had ever commanded.
When Baelon looked back at the script on the hide, he understood every word.
The records spoke of a dragonlord house called Lus'tis, once a minor yet proud lineage of the Freehold. The sheet itself was no parchment at all but fashioned from the hide of a malformed hatchling, a firewyrm that had failed to become a true dragon.
Firewyrms burrowed through stone and ash like serpents, breathing fire though they lacked wings or majesty. Their hides, dense with strange magic, endured even the deep places of the world.
House Lus'tis had survived on two arts:
Dragon-taming. And dragonblood sorcery.
Born from bloodmagic, refined through the centuries for dragonlord lineages, it pursued a single aim:
To forge the greatest of all dragons, a Dragon-King.
But Valyria fell before their dream could breathe.
The document's contents spread before him like a hoard laid bare. Instructions for forging Valyrian steel. The crafting of weapons from dragonbone and dragonscale. Strange runes, rituals, and alchemical rites preserved from the oldest days.
One ritual dominated all others.
A rite requiring the blood of dragonlord stock, a blood-offering meant to strengthen unhatched eggs.
Blood poured upon the shell. Life offered, life taken. The egg drank it in, weaving the sacrifice into the unborn wyrm within.
Other rites followed, frightening in their ambition.
Bloodflame, a hotter, deadlier fire wrought by grafting a new organ into a dragon's body, an organ that mixed blood with flame. The fire burned hotter, truer… but consumed the dragon itself, shortening its life.
Dragon-slaves, bred for sacrifice: a draught fed to a dragonlord heir, a slave woman used as vessel, and within seven days a twisted, half-human, half-dragon creature was born, obedient, mindless, destined for death.
Lesser dragonspawn, beasts forced to drink dragonblood, the few survivors becoming monstrous and savage beyond imagining.
All of it, every rite, every horror, attempts to give birth to the Dragon-King.
Baelon lifted his head slowly. The hall was deathly still.
"This…" he whispered, voice trembling with awe,
"…this is a treasure beyond measure."
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A/N:The war begins here. If you think you know what comes next, you don't. BUT It's already waiting in the chapters ahead.
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