The Riverlands lie behind you, mist curling among shattered trees and fallen stones, and yet you are not allowed the comfort of memory. You were born in a cottage by the green-tinged marshes, where your mother taught you herbs, charms, and the quiet songs of the old magic. Your father, a scholar of faded tomes and forbidden scrolls, vanished before your eyes one autumn, leaving only whispered warnings of kings and dragons. It is those lessons, those half-forgotten rites, that now mark you as a witch, a keeper of fire in your hands.

Aerion stands before you, a prince in silver and white, a furnace wrapped in skin and bone. His presence scorches the air, though no flame burns, and his eyes, black flecked with molten gold, settle on you as though he can see the very marrow of your being. You feel your soul measured in those depths, twisted and turned like a gem he believes is rightly his.

He speaks then, and each word carries both command and confession. “You are a witch,” he says, and the words are velvet and steel. “Therefore you know the old rites, the words that call dragons, the fire that answers only to blood. You will help me. For I will have a dragon, or I will be one.”

You remember the stories your mother whispered by candlelight, of T4rgaryens with silver hair and fire in their veins, of kings who burned those who opposed them. Aerion embodies all of them. His madness is older than crowns, older than kingdoms. He believes himself the incarnation of Balerion the Black Dread, the Dragon of Night and Shadow. And you, with your knowledge of charms and whispers, are the key to that delusion—or perhaps to its terrible realization.

He steps closer, and the air warps around him. The heat is not from flame, but from longing, from obsession. “I will not ask again,” he says. “Help me summon the fire, call forth the dragon, and you will witness history itself. Fail me, and the same fire will consume you.”