"You're from Dragonstone?"
The middle-aged man glanced at Drogon with visible surprise before turning to Shireen Baratheon.
"Yes. And you are…?"
"I am Marwyn," the man replied calmly. "I'm on my way to Dragonstone."
That answer stunned both Shireen and Drogon.
Drogon knew the Citadel routinely sent maesters across the Seven Kingdoms—as healers, tutors, and advisors to lords and nobles.
But Daenerys had only just arrived in Westeros, and already the Citadel was sending someone of Marwyn's stature?
That… felt too fast.
Recalling the unsettling statues at the gates of the Citadel of Oldtown, Drogon couldn't help but wonder—
Were the Citadel's intentions truly as neutral as they claimed?
As if reading his thoughts, Marwyn continued,
"The Citadel didn't assign me. I chose to go."
He lifted the chain around his neck slightly.
"I'm the only archmaester here who earned his links through the study of magic and the arcane. And this—" he tapped the chain, "—is forged from Valyrian Steel."
"You can use magic?" Shireen asked curiously—voicing the very question Drogon had been thinking.
Marwyn shook his head.
"No. I study magic. That's why I earned this chain—not because I can wield it."
Shireen looked a little disappointed.
"But he can," Marwyn added, glancing at Drogon. "Dragonfire itself is magic. Dragons are magical creatures by nature."
Drogon silently agreed.
The real question wasn't dragons—it was how ordinary beings managed to wield magic at all.
"Archmaester Marwyn!"
At that moment, Samwell Tarly hurried over, having finished his work.
Marwyn gave him a brief nod and departed without another word.
Sam then led Shireen toward a cluster of small buildings on the eastern side of the Citadel.
"This is where she stays," he explained.
Inside, Gilly sat at a table, carefully tracing letters as she practiced reading. She looked up in surprise when the door opened—first at Sam, then at the unfamiliar girl, and finally at the strange creature perched on her shoulder.
After introductions, Gilly stared at Drogon in amazement.
"A… dragon?"
She couldn't take her eyes off him.
Once they sat down, Sam repeated his earlier warning.
"I really don't know how to cure greyscale," he said honestly. "You'll need to give me time to search the Citadel's records."
Shireen nodded without hesitation.
She had expected as much.
After settling her in, Drogon quietly slipped away, taking to the skies once more.
But instead of heading straight back to Dragonstone, he veered east toward the mountains.
Night fell.
The Citadel sank into silence.
Then—
A small shadow slipped through the darkness, gliding soundlessly into the Citadel's tallest structure.
It was Drogon.
He hadn't truly left.
He had long heard that the Citadel preserved countless secrets—knowledge of Valyria, the gods, and the mysteries of magic itself.
If there was anywhere in the world to uncover those truths—
This was it.
Earlier, Sam had mentioned the location of the library.
Now, Drogon found it easily.
Slipping through a half-open window high above, he entered—
—and saw it.
A towering archive spanning ten levels, lined with endless rows of books.
Even Drogon couldn't help but feel a flicker of awe.
The depth of the Citadel's knowledge… was immense.
Daenerys's academy, for all its ambition, wouldn't be able to rival the Citadel of Oldtown in accumulated knowledge for at least a century. At best, it could surpass it in scale, number of students, and influence—but not in depth of heritage.
Looking at the vast sea of books before him, Drogon even felt a fleeting urge to scoop them all up and carry them back. Of course, that was just a passing thought. If he actually did it, none of those books would ever appear in the academy—its reputation would be ruined overnight.
Though he couldn't see perfectly in the dark, the faint moonlight filtering through the high windows was enough for him to read.
He skimmed through the catalog—medicine, alchemy, art collections, histories of Westeros, genealogies of noble houses. The range was enormous.
Yet after flying up and down for quite a while, flipping through volume after volume, he still hadn't found anything that truly interested him.
For a moment, he even began to doubt whether the Citadel really held the kind of forbidden knowledge he was looking for.
Only after circling back did he notice something unusual on the ground floor: beside the main entrance, beyond a small rest chamber, there was a larger room—locked.
He landed in front of the door and tugged at the bronze lock. Solid. No chance of opening it without force.
So he changed tactics.
He slipped into what appeared to be the librarian's quarters through a narrow window, rummaged through a drawer—and, as expected, found a ring of keys.
Returning to the locked room, he inserted a key and twisted.
Click.
The lock sprang open.
Inside, there were far fewer bookshelves than in the main hall, and the collection itself was sparse—loosely arranged, nothing like the tightly packed outer library.
He opened the first book.
The title alone made his eyes sharpen:
"The Doom of Valyria and the Silence of the Gods."
After the destruction of the Valyrian Freehold, divine miracles across the world had nearly vanished—as if the gods themselves had fallen into slumber.
Only after the appearance of the red comet, the lighting of glass candles, and the resurgence of magic did scattered reports of divine signs begin to reappear.
At the same time, news spread across the grasslands: a descendant of the House Targaryen had hatched living dragons.
The red comet, the return of dragons, the revival of magic, and the reappearance of divine influence—all occurring in the same era.
The Citadel believed these events must be connected.
But how? No one knew.
Drogon set the book aside and picked up another.
This one delved into forbidden arts—blood magic, necromancy.
Every method described came at a cost: blood sacrifice, human offerings, or grotesque rituals.
Another text revealed something even more intriguing—
Magic wasn't something anyone could simply learn.
The Citadel had once investigated practitioners of magic and found a pattern: nearly all of them were devout followers of specific gods.
From this, they concluded—
Magic was a gift granted by gods to their believers.
But there was one exception.
The dragonlords of the Valyrian Freehold.
They wielded magic while commanding dragons—yet they worshipped no gods. Their prophetic "dragon dreams" were themselves a form of magic.
Why they possessed such power remained unknown.
Perhaps, the theory suggested, it was tied to their long coexistence with dragons.
At this point, Drogon couldn't help but recall Daenerys casually conjuring flames with her bare hands.
The room was filled almost entirely with records of forbidden knowledge and hidden truths. For Drogon, it was a treasure trove.
After finishing one book, he grabbed another—
"A Non-Natural History of Dragon Evolution."
This one focused entirely on dragons: their birth, hatching, domestication—and even their weaknesses.
The detail was astonishing.
Drogon even had the absurd thought that if the author had access to a dragon, he might well have become a dragonrider himself.
According to the book, dragons were not natural creatures at all—but creations of ancient sorcerers, formed through blood magic by combining firewyrms and wyverns.
Drogon frowned inwardly.
That contradicted what he knew—that dragons were first discovered by the dragonlords near the Fourteen Flames.
Where had the author gotten this theory?
Flipping further, he checked the author's name.
The same name appeared again and again across multiple works—
Barth.
Another text provided a brief biography:
Barth had served as Hand of the King to Jaehaerys I Targaryen for forty years.
Not only a statesman, but also a scholar—and even a septon.
A man deeply immersed in the study of the arcane.
Drogon narrowed his eyes slightly.
If even half of what Barth wrote was true—
Then the world's deepest secrets were far more dangerous than anyone realized.