A/N: Took a bit longer as I had to redo an entire POV but I hope everyone enjoys the chapter!
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Year 300 AC
Sunspear, Dorne
The raven remained silent as if deciding what to say. The talking raven. Was she dreaming? No, she told herself as she pinched her arm and the vision infront of her remained.
It stood on the parapet, and the two Unsullied at the arch had lowered their spears a hand's breadth with her gesture though their eyes never left the bird. Marwyn had called this warging, a bloodline gift among the First Men and old power that the maesters mocked by daylight and studied by candle after dark. What the archmaester's words had not covered was the ugliest part of it, hearing a boy's voice through a bird's beak while a king's grip cracked stone beside her.
When the beak moved at last, it carried two words.
"King's Landing."
Aemon's eyes changed as grey drowned under red with violet sparking through it.
"*WHAT?*" The word came from deeper than any man's chest ought to allow, a resonance that lived below the voice itself. "*KING'S LANDING?*" Copper runnels by the fountain rang against their channels while roof tiles shifted and clicked above them. "*HOW?*"
Daenerys recoiled before her mind could register why. She'd stood before Drogon when he'd been all wings and fire and fury. That was a beast's wrath but this was a man's voice with a dragon inside it. And she could still see the man.
The raven hunched and feathers lifted along its neck, but Bran held his ground.
"She is safe," Bran quickly replied. "Jaime is there and is in command."
"Does he truly hold the capital or does Cersei?" Daenerys said. And how could you even know that?
A fragment of parapet chipped away under Aemon's hand and disappeared into the dark. He forced himself through two slow breaths until the red faded and grey reclaimed his vision. Viserys had merely moved his fury to a place with fewer eyes once he'd found his control. Aemon's anger went elsewhere, turning outward at whoever had placed his sister in a city of wildfire with an army camped outside the walls.
"How long." Aemon had not moved from the railing, and when he spoke he'd stripped away his contractions, making each word a weight. "How long have you known."
"Since before you woke in Sunspear," Bran said quietly.
Aemon had spoken of Arya at the feast, at the council, and on this terrace. He had carried his sister's safety in Braavos like a settled fact, and the bird on the parapet had let him. Every reassurance Aemon had built around the thought of Arya across the Narrow Sea had rested on a lie his brother chose not to correct. This boy had lied to keep his brother still, and she was not yet certain why one would lie about their own sister.
"If Arya dies while you watch through that bird," Aemon said, "I will never forgive you, Bran. Never."
The raven's reply came flatter, then thinned midway. "I would have told you if I thought she was going to die, Jon. I would have."
There he was, the boy beneath the trick, pulled too early into powers she could barely understand.
"Speak," Aemon said. "Tell me everything."
Then the bird set its head straight and whatever child had surfaced was gone again. "By the time Jaime got into the city while avoiding the army outside, Arya was already inside, hunting her own names. Cersei was preparing to ignite the wildfire caches. Qyburn carried nightshade for Tommen. Jaime killed him before he reached the boy."
"What names?" Aemon's voice cut across the report.
"Erm… she… keeps a list," Bran said. "Men who wronged your family. Men who hurt the people she loved. She has been crossing them off since she left Kings Landing."
"A list." Aemon repeated. "That doesn't suprise me given it's Arya. But, how is she capable of crossing those names of her list?"
"By going to the House of Black and White," Bran said, flat as flagstone. "The Faceless Men trained her."
The terrace could have held a thousand men and none of them would have broken the silence that followed.
"The Faceless Men," Aemon said. The words came out so quiet that Daenerys barely caught them. Then louder, and the red flickered at the edges of his eyes again. "You sent our sister to the Faceless Men?"
"I did not send her anywhere. She chose to go… through a fateful encounter."
"You knew a little girl walk into a death cult and you said nothing to me—"
"Because she came out of it alive and sharper than anyone hunting her expected," Bran said. The boy's voice did not waver. "The Faceless Men gave her skills that have kept her breathing through things that would have killed grown knights. I trusted her training because I could see what she had become. I would not have kept silent if she was going to die."
"You keep saying that," Aemon said with frustration in his voice. "It does not comfort me the way you think it does."
Standing on a terrace in Dorne in the small hours of the morning, Daenerys listened to a king interrogate a bird about his little sister being trained as an assassin and the thought rose involuntarily. What is wrong with this family, she thought to herself.
She had dealt with warlocks and slavers, a khal who thought he owned her and a brother who thought he could sell her. She had hatched dragons from stone and flown over burning cities, yet none of it had prepared her for the Starks.
"Then Jaime reached Maegor's Holdfast," Bran went on. "He killed Cersei who was ready to release the wildfire. He broke the ignition mechanism after. Marbrand holds the garrison. About six thousand. The gates stayed closed when I last looked."
Aemon said nothing, though his set jaw told Daenerys her nephew was aigated.
Outside the city, Bran reported, tens of thousands of men ringed the walls under Aegon, if that name belonged to him at all. The Golden Company was there with Tyrell banners among them, while Cersei lay dead inside and the besiegers remained ignorant. Arya lived within the city, armed and moving freely through Flea Bottom and the Red Keep. Meryn Trant and Ilyn Payne were dead. Robert Strong had been brought down in the struggle. South of the walls in the Kingswood, Nymeria's pack held the tree line.
Daenerys spoke before Aemon could. "Why keep Arya from him?" she asked Bran. "Why let her go to Kings Landing on her own when her brother can… I want the reason."
"Because he would have flown there without thought." Bran answered without pause. "A giant dragon over King's Landing while Cersei had a live trigger would have finished what Aerys began. Jaime was sent south to stop that. He did duty, with Arya's help."
Aemon had named Jaime's mission at the feast, she recalled. To remove the queen and hold the city. But this result she had not foreseen, with a man killing his own twin and a thirteen-year-old girl carving her path through the Red Keep in someone else's skin.
"The Wall," she said. "You told him months. Given what you chose to keep from your own brother, I would like to know whether that number was true."
The raven's head tilted. Whatever boy lived behind those eyes had not expected her challenge.
"The count was true when I first gave it," Bran said. "The Wall was built to hold against what existed eight thousand years ago. What has returned is more than what was sealed away."
"We have time," Bran continued, his voice settling back to flat certainty. "Less than I first predicted but not so little that haste turns to ruin."
Aemon took his hand from the railing. Stone dust clung to his palm, and he looked down at it before closing the hand once and letting it fall to his side.
The shift came in his shoulders, in the way his gaze pulled north for a moment before he set it aside.
Sandaled feet sounded in the stairwell below, followed by the grind of wheels over stone. A spear butt struck once, hard, and Areo Hotah's voice carried up in a low command. Others followed. Silk whispered and mail brushed plaster. Someone below had heard the roar and roused half the palace.
Daenerys drew herself upright before they emerged onto the terrace. Surprise served children and fools, and a queen had use for neither.
Doran came first, blanketed against the heat and flanked by Hotah and a lamp-bearing servant, while Tyrion followed in a wrinkled shirt with one boot still unlaced. Arianne Martell and Nymeria Sand appeared next, both dressed in haste, and Marwyn arrived with Samwell Tarly and two Dornish lords whose faces Daenerys knew even if their names escaped her. One of those lords had gone pale; the other kept glancing between Aemon and the raven, trying to discern what they were witnessing.
Tyrion spoke first at the strange sight. "Your Grace. Your Grace. I see the hour has grown stranger while I slept."
Marwyn leaned forward a little, sourleaf staining his beard. "Aye, truly a strange hour. I did not think I would see a skinchanger tonight."
Daenerys gave them all one look, long enough to settle the terrace beneath her again. "My lords," she said, "you stand before Brandon Stark, brother to King Aemon… speaking from Eastwatch-by-the-Sea… through a raven."
The words hit them all different. Marwyn grinned like he'd found gold, Sam made some small nervous noise, and a few called upon the Seven under thier breath. Tyrion just raised an eyebrow, seeming the most adjusted.
The raven turned its head toward the new arrivals.
Tyrion's eyes went to the bird, studying it like some riddle that he would spend any amount of goal to answer. "Yes, through… a raven. Young Brandon, the last I saw of you, you were abed in Winterfell and your mother chasing dwarves from the room." He took a measured drink. "Now you speak through a bird from the end of the world. There is a story between those two facts I would very much like to hear."
The raven blinked once. "It's a long story."
"The best ones are," Tyrion said, with a cheshire grin.
Aemon ignored them all when he spoke. "If I fly to King's Landing now, does the city burn?"
Bran answered at once. "The trigger is broken. The wildfire lies in jars and vaults that Jaime will take care of. Your shadow above the city changes nothing now."
Aemon nodded at that. "Good."
He turned from the parapet then, and the movement alone pulled every eye after him.
"My brother comes to us with grave news," he said. "The Wall is failing faster than I told you at the feast. The time I promised you has shortened. Every man and ship, every bushel and blade of dragonglass must be ready to move before the season turns."
Doran nodded his at Aemon. "I shall send ravens before dawn," he said. "All of Dorne will hear."
"Dorne will do more than hear." Aemon had already started toward the stair, and the court moved with him because the alternative was to stand on an empty terrace. "Every grain store opens. Every spear musters. You ride for Harrenhal in person, my prince, or your daughter rides in your place. I will not hold a war council with men who sent letters instead of themselves."
Doran inclined his head as there was not much else he can do or say.
They went down from the terrace in a press of lamplight and followed Aemon who hastened through the sleeping Water Gardens where the pools held the moon in broken pieces. The raven launched from the parapet and flew ahead to a cypress. Daenerys kept pace beside Aemon, for she had no taste for trailing after any man like a petitioner. If the realm was to be hammered into one weapon, her hand would be on the haft as well.
Arianne came up on Daenerys's other side. "If Dorne empties itself north, who keeps the passes?"
"Men too old to march and boys too young to carry a spear true," Daenerys said. "The true danger lies elsewhere."
Nymeria Sand gave a short laugh. "So we leave children to hold Dorne and men to freeze in the Riverlands. A merry plan."
"It keeps Dorne alive," Doran said from behind them, his chair rattling over the paving joints. "That will suffice."
Ahead, Loras Tyrell had joined the train, each step measured against whatever his burns still cost him. Aemon's gaze found him and rested there for a breath before his eyes came to Daenerys.
He looked at her, then at Loras, and she knew the price.
"Ser Barristan," she called.
Barristan emerged from the cluster behind Sam, straight-backed even at this hour. "Your Grace?"
"Ready yourself for the journey. You fly with me and Ser Loras to Highgarden." She looked at the ruined knight who had turned at the sound of his own name. "I will take you home, Ser Loras. And I will speak with your grandmother while I am there."
Loras looked from her to Aemon. The breath he held before he inclined his head was the closest a burnt knight could come to gratitude without cracking.
"Highgarden yields, and it will yield quickly," Aemon said without slowing. "Tell Olenna Tyrell that if she delays, I will visit her myself. Grain follows dragonglass in value now. Every field, every barn, every wagon she commands points north or it points nowhere."
Barristan bowed his head. "I will be ready before dawn, Your Grace."
The raven flapped from the cypress to a wall ahead of them, and Bran's voice came down through leaves and plaster. "Dragonstone."
Aemon did not slow. "What of it?"
"The island holds enough dragonglass to arm the realm. The mines need to open now."
"Aurane Waters takes Dragonstone in our names," Aemon said. "Every miner and smith he can carry, and he begins before the week is out."
Daenerys glanced back for Grey Worm, who was there silent as a spear shadow with his helm beneath his arm.
"Prepare the Unsullied and the Dothraki to march," she said. "King's Landing first. By the time you arrive, the city will have changed hands one way or another. You enter under his authority and mine, not as conquerors. Secure the wildfire caches before anything else. Then Dragonstone, the mines will need men and order, not just ships." She held his gaze as she continued. "Discipline holds, Grey Worm. Any man who plunders answers to me."
"This one obeys," Grey Worm said.
Tyrion's brow rose in a neat little movement that said he had counted three campaigns inside one command and was reaching for ledgers in his head.
"And somewhere in that cheerful march," Tyrion said, "I shall need to locate ships, fodder, carts, smiths, scribes, and a purse large enough to satisfy armies, lords, and dockmasters. If any god loves me, he has hidden it well."
Sam almost stumbled over the hem of his black robe when Aemon turned on him.
"Samwell." The name alone straightened the fat boy's spine. "The Horn stays with you. It does not leave your hands. It does not leave your sight. You sleep with it, you eat with it, you carry it to Harrenhal if you have to walk every league on foot."
Sam swallowed and his hand flew to the pack strap across his chest. "Yes, Jo—Your Grace."
Aemon turned to Doran. "Prince Doran. Sam travels with your party to Harrenhal. He is under your protection. What he carries is worth more than every castle in Dorne, and I need the man alive with it."
The Dornish lords eyed the fat boy in black and saw nothing worth guarding, but Doran studied Sam longer than the rest before he inclined his head once, asking nothing of the Horn. A man so apt at keeping secrets knew when a new one was handed to him.
By the time they reached the lower paths where the castle opened toward the sea, salt had thickened in the air and the surf's roar drowned the wheel-grind of Doran's chair and scrape of boots. The court had stretched into a ragged file, lords muttering while servants ran ahead with lanterns, and the bird flew wall to wall, a black shape keeping pace.
They came onto the sea road at last. The harbor below lay black and silver under the moon, masts rocking like reeds in a dark marsh. Farther out, dragon-shapes bulked against water and sky. The court spread along the shore by instinct, each man seeking footing, space, and a place from which to witness departure without standing too near it.
The raven glided down from the wall and landed on a mooring post near the waterline, close enough that the surf dampened the wood beneath its claws.
Aemon went to it alone.
Daenerys stayed near enough to hear, far enough to give him the pretense of privacy.
"Arya first," he said, his voice lower now and the command-strain eased. "Then north. You know of what is waiting for me there?"
The raven bowed its head. What passed between them in that silence was theirs alone, a matter Daenerys could not unlock. She glimpsed its shape, duty put aside and a weight that could not long be ignored, but the truth of it remained between them.
His hand shot out and closed around the bird. The raven's wings beat in sudden panick against his fingers before he brought the bird up to his face.
"You will not leave Eastwatch," he said, his voice shifting as the fury banked into annoyance. "And when I arrive, we are going to have a conversation you will not enjoy, Bran."
The bird exhaled through its beak, long and resigned. "I will remain there," Bran said, his voice still monotonous. "You realize I have survived beyond the Wall for years. I think I can survive a lecture."
Aemon rolled his eyes. He opened his fingers and the raven launched hard, climbing above the harbor lamps before vanishing into the dark over the sea.
Daenerys understood that no court would ever witness this version of him, nor any council chamber. Only blood and whichever queen stayed close enough to observe would know him thus. A king capable of sundering keeps and casting cities dark rolling his eyes at his little brother's cheek. He was patient and exasperated, yes, but also amused.
For a moment no one spoke, all watching Aemon go deeper into the sea.
The surf washed over his ankles then his shins. The harbor stretched behind him in dark water and shattered lantern-light. Farther out, Drogon held watch looking between her and Aemon while Rhaegal had kept his perch on the cliffs since nightfall.
Rhaegal made a low rolling sound, deep in the chest and possessive, the same one Drogon gave whenever she turned from him to councils or petitioners. It answered the agitation Aemon had carried since the Battle of Sunspear, whatever bond had formed between them.
Wind hit the water a moment later. Rhaegal dropped from the darkness and slammed into the sand hard enough to send spray over them all causing all sort of murmers and grumbling.
Aemon walked up to the green dragon and laid a hand to his snout.
Rhaegal dipped his head immediately. The shift in him was sudden that and she recognized that submission. Drogon never gave it to any living man. He gave it to her, begrudgingly on difficult days and willingly on others, but always by his own will. Now it passed between dragon and king without a word.
Aemon pointed at Sam for Rhaegal.
"Stay," he said. "And guard him."
Rhaegal let out a softer sound of complaint, then folded himself down onto the wet sand. His head turned toward Sam, red-gold eyes fixed on the fat boy as if judging him and found him wanting. Sam's face lost what little color it had left.
Tyrion peered up at the dragon, peered over at Sam, and sighed. "Cheer up, Tarly. Most men go their whole lives without a dragon for a bodyguard."
Sam opened his mouth, shut it again, and looked as if his knees might betray him.
Aemon had already moved on.
He waded deeper until the water reached his thighs and his shirt clung dark against him. Daenerys saw his shoulders draw once and his head lower, saw the heat gather around him before the fire came.
Violet flame consumed him entirely. It burst from his skin and engulfed him in a pillar of purple and silver-white that lit the harbor like noon and cast every shadow sharp against the shore. The sea seethed where it met him. Steam rose in sheets and the air above the shallows warped and shimmered until the stars distorted.
The court recoiled, men shielding their faces with their arms as one Dornish lord dropped to his knees, but Daenerys held her gaze, peering through her fingers at the brilliance.
Through the glare she caught glimpses of the change. A shape grew beyond the limits of a man. The outline of a spine lengthened, thickened, and curved upward. Wings vast and dark even through the fire's light unfurled in jerks like wet canvas caught by a gale. The sound was worse than the light, bone and sinew and something deeper than either, a grinding that she felt in her chest.
Eventually, the fire died and the dragon stood where the man had been.
Black scales drank the moon, and water streamed off him in sheets, dwarfing every ship in the harbor. His forelimbs, which her own children lacked, dug furrows in the wet sand as he crouched, and the ground shuddered when his weight settled.
Then he launched.
He rose smoothly, beating the waves flat beneath him, and climbed north with enough force to shake the harbor from stem to stern. Drogon answered from the breakwater with one great cry thrown across the bay.
She kept her eyes on the dark until it swallowed him.
Beside her, Rhaegal watched the same patch of sky for a few breaths more, then swung his head back to Sam Tarly and resumed his guard with all the sulking dignity of a noble hound set to watch it's prey.
Doran's voice carried from behind her. "I need the maester and every scribe. Wake them, now."
Hotah barked orders and the court began to move again as if truly awoken from slumber, but Daenerys stayed where she stood.
Warm water lapped against her calves, and the stones underfoot still held his heat.
Then a voice said, "The woman in the lacquered mask spoke true."
Daenerys turned away from the sky.
She noticed the raven had not yet departed. Rhaegal spared it only a glancing look before turning away. Bran circled and touched down near her while every other face on the beach remained fixed on the sky. The bird's eyes met hers with a intelligence that should not have existed behind a beak.
Bran said, "To go north, you must journey south. To reach the light, you must pass beneath the shadow."
The raven's words took her aback. Quaithe had spoken those words to Daenerys where no one else was near enough to hear.
"You know-- who is she?" Daenerys demanded.
The raven's head cocked. For a moment the bird grew still in that particular way, she was learning, when the boy behind it was deciding how much truth to give.
"Someone who loved the last man to sit where I sit now," Bran said. "She has been watching your family longer than you know. Just think of her as... kin."
It was the ghost of an answer rather than a full one, and by the raven's unwavering gaze she knew nothing more would be forthcoming this night.
Bran turned his head toward Doran. The prince's chair had been wheeled to the edge of the wet sand with Hotah behind it like a shadow with an axe.
"You moved slowly because you understood that haste kills princes," Bran said. "But the pact you signed through Oberyn was built on a world that no longer exists. The boy you rejected was the right call. The alliance you chose instead will outlast every scheme you ever ran, if you let it."
At those words, Doran jumped slightly in his chair. He studied the raven for a long moment. "A thousand eyes and one." His fingers settled on the blanket over his knees. "Very well. I will not insult either of us by asking how."
Tyrion had drifted close enough to hear, standing with arms folded and his head tilted at the angle he used when he wanted the world to think he was amused rather than listening.
"And what does the all knowing raven have for the dwarf?" he asked, his tone light enough that only someone watching carfelly would see his nervousness.
The raven turned to Tyrion and even she was not ready for the answer. "Your mother held you before she died," Bran said. "She knew her fate but she was not angry at you for it. She loved you even in her last breath."
Tyrion's mouth opened and it looked like he was tyring to find the right words but in the end no words came out before closing again.
"I see," he said, then fell silent. At last he looked away from the raven, the sharp tounged dwarf at a loss of words.
Not waiting another moment, the raven took flight and disappeared into the same darkness that had claimed his brother.
Daenerys stood a moment longer in the shallows, cold finally finding her feet where Aemon's heat had faded from the stones. Behind her Doran was dictating grain counts, and Tyrion had not moved from where Bran's words had found him.
The Starks were going to be the death of her.
Daenerys sighed as she stepped out of the water to gather her court. She had work to do.
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Kings Landing, The Crownlands
The Dornish coast still held some heat, enough to sustain him on the first lifts, but the air grew thin and cold as he climbed north with the stars bright above and the Narrow Sea stretched black below. Night faded to grey and grey to gold as the stars dimmed. The sea beneath him turned from black to dark green, then caught the first light and reflected it in sheets of hammered bronze. The land spread beneath the rising sun in brown and green until the Blackwater appeared ahead and the city clustered around the river mouth.
He circled high and the first thing he saw of King's Landing was the smoke. Beyond the walls, cookfires sent thin plumes up into the still air, and armor caught the light along the quays. Thousands of men massed in their camps with horses in their lines and siege engines at the margins. For half a beat he took the great shapes by the camp edges for siege towers, until one lifted a trunk and turned.
So these are the famed elephants of the Golden Company. The mummer's army had come west with all its eastern tricks.
He looked towards the city and even with an army stationed outside, the people moved about their business even when standing on jars of green death.
No assault columns marched across the field, no fire fell upon the walls. Through open gates men moved in files instead of charges, with white banners hanging from the Lion Gate. Within the walls flew standards he did not know, alongside Tyrell green and gold, and black cloth with a red dragon unlike his own.
A truce or a surrender. It seemed the city had changed hands while he crossed the sea.
The Red Keep loomed as he descended. Bran's report had not detailed Jaime Lannister's exact state, but he was in there somewhere, while his sister moved through the streets below among strangers.
To the north of the Keep sat Rhaenys's Hill, the Dragonpit's ruins atop it like a broken jaw. The dome had been gone for centuries, yet the blackened walls remained in places, open to the sky and wide enough for his bulk. He dropped through the gap where the dome had once been and the ancient flagstone cracked beneath his weight, stone that had once borne Balerion himself. The shock of it rolled down the hill into the streets. Nearby buildings lost their roof tiles in a rain of shards while in the surrounding lanes, men and women scattered with the sounds of panicked animals.
He dropped his weight into the broken stone and furled his wings, the city spread out under him in the hard glare of the sun.
"*WHERE IS ARYA STARK?*" His words caused windows to rattle in their casements down the length of the hill.
The men and women stood petrified, and silence was their only answer.
He waited and let the dragon's sight do what human eyes could not, tracking heat signatures through rooftops and movement in the streets. Thousands of bodies in thousands of rooms, none of them the one he sought.
Then a figure broke from a doorway far below near the hill's base and ran. Small and quick, it wove through a cluster of soldiers who had frozen at the sound of his voice, slipped past a cart horse stamping in its traces, and took the hill road at a lung searing pace.
A broader figure followed the runner, wide across the shoulders and struggling to keep pace. A third came behind that one, slower still, robes snagging on his boots. Farther back where the road opened at the hill's base, a fourth grey shape moved on four legs, and men in golden scale pressed against walls to let it pass.
Her face came into focus, leaner and more grown than the girl he remembered. That stride was hers. That set of her jaw was hers. Those grey eyes, fixed on the dragon atop the hill without hesitation, were the same eyes that had looked at a stick and seen a sword. His chest tightened with a feeling his dragon's form could not name.
She was still streets away, ascending the long road with the sun at her back and the shadow of his wings reaching down the hill to meet her. The fire claimed him as a violet and silver-white flash erupted from his chest and engulfed the hilltop in a pillar of light that made the light of the sun pale in comparison. Those who had only just stopped screaming began anew.
The fire ate inward, and wings drew into muscle and bone with grinding force. His spine compressed and shortened, while claws sank into smoking stone, split, and became hands. His knees struck hot flagstone and he caught himself on his palms, naked and steaming. Heat still radiated from the ground in shimmering waves when he rose to his feet, leaving the hilltop a ring of blackened earth as steam rose from his shoulders.
The footsteps reached him before he had fully steadied himself.
She came over the last rise at a dead sprint and stopped six paces short of the blackened earth, chest heaving, her face hardened and unreadable, with Needle still at her hip.
He stepped off the scorched ground onto cool stone and walked toward her.
"Arya."
That broke her stunned look.
She closed the gap and struck him with enough force to push him back a step on the flagstones. He caught her by instinct, both arms circling her shoulders while her hands clenched against his chest. She felt small and rigid in his arms, trembling, and he held her closer.
"Little sister," he said softly.
Arya made a sound against his chest, half laugh, half choke. Her grip only tightened.
"I'm here," he said. "I've got you."
He mussed her hair, shorter now and hacked to a practical length. She swatted his hand.
One hand stayed twisted in his forearm, as if flesh and bone might prove him real, while she pulled back enough to look at him and wiped her nose with the back of her sleeve.
"It's you," she said. "I didn't--couldn't believe them but it's really you Jon."
"Aye."
Her eyes drifted to his chest, tracing one scar then another before traveling lower. Pale wisps of steam still rose from his skin. He stood naked in the ruins of the Dragonpit, the sun streaming through the broken dome above.
Arya blinked taking it all in.
"You came all this way and forgot breeches?"
He stared at her. Then a laugh scraped out of him.
"Dragonfire has a habit of ruining a man's wardrobe."
"Stupid." Arya said softly. "You should be carrying extra clothes with you."
Movement at the edge of his vision pulled his attention. A dark-haired young man stood at the top of the rise, broad through chest and shoulder, his bruised face slick with sweat from the climb as he caught his breath with one hand on his knee. Behind him Thoros of Myr leaned against a low wall, and at the base of the rise a direwolf the size of a destrier padded up the last stretch of road with gold eyes fixed on the pair of them.
The young man's jaw caught the light and for a moment Jon saw Robert Baratheon in his visit to Winterfell, but that was a question for later. Arya was here now.
"They're good people," Arya said, following his gaze.
He looked back at her, noting the shadows beneath her eyes, the faint white scar near her chin. "Any wounds I should know about?" he asked.
"No, I'm fine Jon."
"We have much to speak about, little sister." he said.
"I know," Arya said, not letting go of his arm. "But it can wait for a moment."
The she-wolf reached them then, pressing a cold nose against his bare hip just as Arya's hand found her scruff. There they stood together in solace, while below them the city waited for whatever was to come.
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The roar had shaken dust from vaulting that had stood since Aegon the Conqueror laid the first stone.
Connington reached the window in four strides, his gloved hand on the sill. Below him the throne room had emptied in seconds as Golden Company men poured toward the yards with swords half drawn, their discipline holding only because the sergeants were screaming louder than the men. Aegon stood behind him with breath coming fast and shallow.
The dragon sprawled across the ruins of the Dragonpit on Rhaenys's Hill, black-scaled and massive. The Dragonpit had remained empty for a hundred and fifty years, and now a dragon rested inside it once more as if the intervening century had been but a short absence.
He'd read every scrap from Slaver's Bay, memorized every word on Drogon, Viserion and Rhaegal, their size, their colors, their temperaments. This thing matched none of it. Darker than the others and many times larger, the beast had no place in any report he'd gathered through years of preparation.
But then it did something more terrifying. It spoke.
The voice came through the stone walls and the glass and the iron casements and settled in his chest. "*WHERE IS ARYA STARK?*" The words were clear enough to understand and deep enough to feel deep in his bones, and screams from the entire city told him this was all too real.
A dragon the size of the old legends had landed on the city's highest point, and its first act was to call a child's name across the rooftops.
He moved away from the window. Aegon remained still on the dais, his silver hair gleaming where the sun struck it through the high windows, hands clenched at his sides. The boy bore himself well. Connington had prepared him for shocks and surprises, for assassins and betrayals, for every danger a prince in exile might encounter, but he had not prepared him for this.
"Lord Connington." Aegon's voice was steady, which was all Connington could ask. "What… what is that?"
"I do not know, my Prince." Connington said, and the admission cost him more than any wound he had ever taken. "I have never seen the likes of this creature nor heard of any dragons that had... arms."
Then the dragon did something more unexpected, it burst into flames.
A pillar of white-violet fire erupted from the Dragonpit, its radiance climbing above the ruined walls to wash across the city. It burned bright enough to cast shadows through the throne room windows and throw shadows of the iron edges of the chair against the floor where Aegon stood. The fire lasted for a count of ten, brighter than the midday sun, and then it died all the same.
Connington pressed his face to the glass. Smoke drifted from the Dragonpit's broken dome. From this distance he could see little within the ruined walls, only scorched stone still glowing and a shape standing in the center. Too small, that shape, to be what had been there before.
Now, a man stood where the dragon had been.
The leather of his glove creaked as his grip tightened on the sill. Aegon moved one step closer behind him, then stopped.
A smaller figure topped the rise and ran toward the man on the scorched ground. At this distance the collision was easy to read, arms closing as the two shapes merged. The Stark girl had come running at a dragon's call, and the dragon had become a man to meet her.
The Kingslayer's smile at the parley table. The deflection when Varys probed. The words Jaime had spoken while Connington demanded answers came back to him. He will come. Ask him yourself.
Two decades of exile, scheming, and sacrifice. He had molded a boy into a king to preserve the Targaryen name through destitution, flight, and the greyscale climbing his arm. Now, his hands would not stop shaking. Sweat went cold on his spine and his knees threatened to buckle as the truth of the situation started to set in.
What he had just seen could not be fought by any army, or even multiple armies. If that thing on the hill decided to open its mouth, twenty thousand Golden Company swords—the finest sellsword company the Free Cities had ever known—would be reduced to kindling.
Varys had slipped into the room silently. With hands hidden in his sleeves and a blank expression, the eunuch stood by the throne's base, his stillness a sure sign that his mind worked faster than any other in the Keep.
"The Lannister knew," Connington said.
Varys did not deny it.
Connington turned to the nearest Golden Company captain. "Bring me the Kingslayer."
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