Aegon turned away from the balcony railing in Harrenhals largest tower and walked back inside the tower chamber where the latest stack of scrolls waited on the table. The candles had burned low again. He lit a fresh one with a taper from the brazier and unrolled the newest parchment the maesters had sent from the Citadel. It spoke of a ritual performed in the days of the Freehold, one that required the blood of a king, the bones of a dragon, and a song sung at the exact moment the sun touched the horizon on the longest day of the year.
He read the words slowly, tracing each line of Valyrian script with the tip of his finger while he searched for the truth he knew must be hidden somewhere beneath thr words.
*Knock*
*Knock*
A knock sounded at the oak door.
Aegon looked up at the door. "Enter."
The door swung open and Ser Duncan the Tall stepped inside, ducking his head beneath the doorway and entering the room.
Aegon smiled despite the exhaustion pulling at his eyes. "Duncan my friend. Is everything all right?"
Ser Duncan closed the door behind him with a quiet thud and crossed the chamber. "The scrolls you asked for from the library have arrived, Your Grace. The maester said they contain every surviving on Valyria he could locate. I had them placed in the lower library tower under guard, as you ordered."
Aegon nodded while he set the parchment aside and reached for his quill again. "Thank you. That will be very helpful. I will go through them as soon as I finish this section." He dipped the quill and continued writing.
Duncan remained standing near the table, hands clasped behind his back, making no move to leave.
Aegon glanced up after a moment. "Was there anything else?"
Duncan hesitated, shifting his weight from one foot to the other. The big man looked uncomfortable in a way Aegon had rarely seen, at least not for many years. Finally Duncan spoke. "May we speak frankly, Your Grace?"
Aegon put the quill down and leaned back in his chair while he offered a small, encouraging smile. "Of course, my friend. Speak freely, as you know you always can."
Duncan drew a slow breath then began. "I am concerned about your actions of late. You have been acting... erratic. You barely sleep anymore. You spend every night locked away with these scrolls and ancient texts, reading until the candles burn out and the servants find you still at the table at dawn. You speak of nothing but dragons and Valyria. This has worried not only me but your family as well. Shaera has asked me twice this week whether you are well. Even Aerys has noticed how distant you have become."
Duncan paused then let out a long sigh. "I know you, Egg. I have known you since you were a boy running around the Red Keep pretending to be a hedge knight. I know when something is weighing on you. So I will ask you plainly... are you having the dreams? Dreams like the ones your brother used to have?"
Aegon felt the question land like a stone in still water. He tried to keep his face neutral while he reached for the quill again to continue writing. "You are looking too deeply into things, Dunk. I am simply interested in my heritage. The Targaryens ruled for three hundred years with dragons at their side. It is only natural that I should wish to understand how they did it. Nothing more."
Duncan frowned, the lines around his eyes deepening. "Egg, I know you. And I know that there is more to this than simple scholarly interest. Please. Tell me the truth. Are you having dreams?"
Aegon's grip tightened on the quill until the feather bent. He set it down again with a snap against the table and looked up at his oldest friend. "I said it is nothing. You worry too much, as always. These are merely studies. Historical research. I will not have you turning every late night into some omen of madness."
Duncan moved and leaned on the table in front of him. "You forget who I am Egg, I've known you longer than anyone else alive, I know when you're lying."
Aegon clenched his fists as annoyance once again flared up within him. "Fine! I have! Is that what you want to hear?! I have been having the dreams for months! I have to hatch dragons, if I do not then my family will be killed and the Targaryen name wiped from history."
Duncan looked at him with his jaw open, he didn't think things were that bad. "How can you be so foolish?! Have you learned nothing from your brother? Dreams of dragons destroyed him. They drove him to madness. Will you walk the same path?"
Aegon pushed his chair back and stood, the legs scraping loudly against the stone floor. "I am not my brother. I am the KING, and I will decide what is best for my house and my realm!!!"
Duncan's shoulders straightened, but his eyes remained troubled. "You are the king, yes. But you are also my friend. And as your friend I tell you this obsession will consume you if you let it. The realm needs a clear-headed ruler, not a man chasing ghosts in old scrolls and nightmares."
Aegon's temper flared. "That will be all, Ser Duncan. You have delivered your new and given your counsel. I have heard it. Now leave me to my work."
For a long moment the two men stared at each other across the candlelit chamber. Duncan's jaw worked as if he wanted to say more, but in the end he simply bowed his head.
"As you command, Your Grace." He turned and walked out, closing the door behind him.
Aegon stood alone in the chamber once more. The fresh candle flickered on the table, casting long shadows across the scattered scrolls and half-written notes. He stared at the closed door for several heartbeats, the anger slowly draining away and leaving only a hollow exhaustion in its place. Then he sat back down, picked up the quill again, and forced his eyes back to the Valyrian script.
Eventually he leaned back from the table and sighed as he pinched the bridge of his nose.
He used to agree with Duncan, he used to think his brother was mad, he used to think that a combination of excessive wine consumption and milk of the poppy had addled his mind beyond repair. For years he had held onto that belief and he had been proven right time and time again. Whether it was his brother or Daemon II Blackfyre, dreams could not be trusted. Especially when they were dreams of dragons.
That was what he used to believe.
That was before he began dreaming of dragons himself.
The nightmares had started small, creeping into his sleep like smoke under a door. At first they were only flashes... the shadow of great wings passing over King's Landing... the distant roar that shook the stones of the Red Keep.
Then they grew worse.
He would wake in the middle of the night with his heart hammering against his ribs while the sheets clung to his skin with cold sweat. In the dreams large black dragons descended on his family and city, their scales the color of midnight and their eyes like amethysts. Sometimes the dream ended with the beasts turning on him and closing its teeth around his chest and crushing the life from him in a single m crunch.
Other times a man made of fire walked through the streets of King's Landing, his body wreathed in orange flames that leaped from roof to roof until the entire city burned like a pyre. Aegon stood helpless on the walls while the fire reached the Red Keep and swallowed his children whole. In most of the dreams it ended with his death, his body broken and charred on the stones while the black dragons circled overhead.
But some of them ended differently.
In those he was saved by a large white dragon with purple eyes that swooped down from the clouds and drove the black beasts back with a roar that shook the sky. The white dragon would land beside him, lower its massive head, and fix him with those purple eyes as if waiting for something.
Then he would wake, gasping, the image of those eyes burned into his mind like a brand.
What else could these dreams mean but that dragons were returning?
He had kept the dreams to himself for a long time, though eventually the visions grew too vivid to bear alone. One night he turned to his wife and told her everything. She had listened without interruption and when he finished she had only held him closer and whispered that sometimes dreams were just dreams.
Still the dreams persisted.
To the point where he knew they were not just dreams, so he sought out the strange woods witch that his son's wife Jenny had brought to court. The woman was small and bent, her skin like old leather and her eyes sharp as flint. They met in a private chamber at Harrenhal after the evening meal, with only his wife and Jenny present. The witch listened while he recounted the nightmares, her head tilted to one side as though she were hearing music no one else could. When he finished she stared into the small fire burning in the brazier for a long time before she spoke.
"Your dreams do not mean dragons will return."
"They mean they already have."
Aegon could scarcely believe it.
In fact he considered banishing the woman from Westeros forever for such nonsense but something in the witch's gaze stopped him. He did not banish her and instead tried to ignore her warning.
But the dreams continued.
Night after night the black dragons came, night after night the man of fire walked the streets, and night after night the white dragon with purple eyes saved him. Eventually he came to accept the truth the witch had spoken.
Dragons had returned and they were not in Targaryen hands.
That was when things started to make sense.
Large black dragons devouring his family could only mean one thing.
Blackfyres.
The Blackfyres had risen again in the east, their banners still carried by exiles and sellswords who dreamed of the Iron Throne. If dragons had returned and they belonged to them, then the realm stood on the edge of fire and blood once more.
Aegon thought of the white dragon with purple eyes that had saved him in some of the dreams and wondered what it could mean.
Just a dream?
A hidden ally?
Or perhaps... a dragon of his own?
For weeks and then months afterward he had buried himself in every historical text he could lay his hands on, every scroll and tome that mentioned Valyria and dragons, no matter how obscure or fragmentary. He had commanded the royal librarians to scour the deepest vaults beneath the Red Keep and read anything that even hinted at dragonlore. At night, he sat alone in the half-ruined library tower with candles guttering around him and read until his eyes ached and the words blurred.
He read old stories of Valyrian blood rituals, of the way the dragonlords had once sung their hatchlings from stone with songs in the high tongue. He read of the Fourteen Flames and the way the priests had once offered living hearts to the fires in exchange for a dragon's first breath. He studied the accounts of the Doom itself, the cataclysm that had shattered the Freehold and left only the Targaryens alive on Dragonstone. He pored over fragments of the tomes that spoke of binding rituals and blood sacrifices and the precise alignment of stars needed for a successful hatching.
Most of it proved false or useless.
Some rituals demanded the heart of a king, others the blood of a maiden taken under a blood moon, still others required the caster to walk into the flames themselves while chanting words. Another ritual called for the sacrifice of a white bull beneath the light of a comet; he had the beast brought to the keep at great expense, slit its throat himself on the appointed night, and watched the blood steam into the grass while the stars wheeled overhead.
The eggs remained cold and lifeless.
Dead end after dead end piled up. The texts contradicted one another. One claimed only pure Valyrian blood could wake a dragon; another insisted that any man with the right words and the right fire could do it. A third scroll, half-burned and barely legible, spoke of a lost art called "the last song" that required the blood of the dragonlord and the blood of the dragon both to mingle in the egg itself. Aegon had pricked his own finger and let three drops fall onto a smooth black egg but the egg stayed inert.
It was these failures, these endless dead ends, that had driven him here to Harrenhal in the first place.
The castle had secrets.
It had been the first great seat to feel the wrath of Balerion the Black Dread when Aegon the Conqueror had unleashed his dragons on the riverlords. The stones themselves had run like wax beneath the dragon's flames. If any place in the Seven Kingdoms still held fragments of dragon magic it would be here. Aegon had come under the guise of a visit to the riverlands, but the real reason sat in his chest.
He needed to bring his family back to their true power.
The realm had grown restless. Whispers of rebellion drifted on every wind. Without dragons the Targaryens ruled by memory and tradition alone, and memory was a fragile thing when steel and ambition rose against it.
If he could hatch even one dragon he could secure the peace he had spent his entire life trying to forge.
And If it was true that the Blackfyres had a dragon then he shuddered to think who the Houses of Westeros would join if the Golden Company landed on their shores.
(AN: A bit of a shorter chapter but no less important, a lot of information that'll be vital later. Some more obvious than the others. Anyway hope you enjoy.)
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