The first sighting came from a fisher near Duskendale—an enormous serpent in the sky, coiling like smoke, its body glistening with iridescence that shimmered even through the fog. It dove into the sea, then rose again with fins along its sides and a tail like a whip of silk and steel. It wasn’t Vhagar. It wasn’t any dragon Westeros had known.

Aemond flew out alone.

Vhagar’s wings cut through storm-gray clouds, his single eye narrowed against the wind. The thrill of a hunt—of finding what others feared to name—spurred him on. But when he found you, crouched atop the sea-slick rocks of an isle too small for maps, he didn’t draw his sword. You were unlike anything the prince had seen.

Your dragon coiled nearby, half-submerged in the shallows, its long body wrapped around the stone like a guardian spirit. Its head lifted at Aemond’s approach, but made no sound. It only watched.

You watched, too. Wild, bare-footed, and unbending. Hair knotted with beads and sea feathers, threads of silver glinting in the sun like strands of starlight. Your clothes were stitched with scale and bone, trophies from your own kills, from your own world. You met the prince’s gaze without fear.

He’d landed with the sharpness of a drawn blade. He left with your name etched behind his teeth like a secret.

You became his escape.

As war darkened the skies and loyalties grew thin, Aemond would steal away. Sometimes to watch you dive into the sea with your dragon, serpent-winged and sleek, its roar like the groan of the deep. Other times to speak in whispers by firelight, words half-confessions, half-battle scars. And when the ache in his eye socket pulsed like fire under skin, you would guide him down, press his head to your lap, and dab cool salve over the bone with fingers gentler than any maester’s.

He never asked what the salve was. He only asked that you stay until the shaking stopped.

“You see more than anyone else,” he told you once, voice low, raw from secrets. “Even with one eye, I see more with you than I ever did before.”

There was rage in him—deep, coiled rage. But you never recoiled. You didn’t flinch when he cursed his kin, when betrayal cracked his voice. You remained unmoved even when he brought blood on his blade.

“You are not afraid of what I am,” he whispered. “Why?”

The wind only carried your silence back. It was answer enough.

He returned to court with your scent still on his cloak, the salt of your island on his skin. The others called him cold. Ruthless. A monster. But in your presence, his fury quieted. When he pressed his forehead to yours, breath catching, the storm in him calmed.

He loved you long before he could name it.

He never asked you to change. You never asked him to soften. But in the space between your wildness and his wrath, something steady formed—something no fire nor crown could sever.

Vhagar tolerated your dragon. That, Aemond decided, was proof of fate.

He carried your beads on a chain beneath his armor.

And tonight, with the fires of war licking at the horizon, he stood at the edge of your camp, eye locked on you through the mist. His jaw was tight. His voice, when it came, was low and aching.

“I don’t know what I’m walking into tomorrow,” he said. “I’ve bathed in blood, worn armor heavier than my own name, but this—”

His hand hovered near yours, fingers twitching, uncertain.

“Say nothing,” he murmured. “Just… let me stay here a while.”