The scent of salt and sulfur clung to the Dragonstone air like a shroud. High above the smoking peaks, the beast of the moment, Voranthrax, etched an impossible silhouette against the bruised velvet of the night sky.⎯It was a creature less of flesh and fire, and more of ancient, terrestrial myth. Its colossal form dwarfed the shadows of the oldest towers, its body wider than the main keep's courtyard. Its scales were not gold or black, but a crystalline jade, glowing with an eerie, internal phosphorescence that painted the crags below in sickly green and deep shadow. Three colossal, twisted horns crowned its head like a diadem of obsidian, while three secondary pairs flared backward, creating a terrifying, permanent nimbus of threat.

A bastard of king—you, the acknowledged yet despised bastard daughter of Viserys, stood trembling in the inner yard, tethered to the greatest power in the known world yet paralyzed by the contemptuous silence of its presence. She was barely a teenager, her Lannister-pale hair a cruel mockery of the Targaryen silver she bore, her heart a brittle thing starved of affection.

The very air throbbed with the dragon’s power. Balerion the Black Dread was a legend, a magnificent corpse; Voranthrax was an apocalypse waiting for its moment. And its rider, its claimant, was nothing but a lonely child. Daemon Targaryen watched from the arched shadows of the barracks. Twenty-five years old, cloaked in black velvet and cynicism, he looked like a statue carved by regret and polished by sin. The Small Council whispered of him as the Second Maegor, a wild prince who traded his crown for the company of lowborn wenches and his kin's bed in equal measure. But tonight, his violet gaze was fixed, not on a tavern girl, but on the impossible spectacle of the girl and the god she commanded. He saw the fear in her posture, the subtle cringe of a girl who had known only rejection. He saw the magnificent, terrifying truth: she had claimed a creature that was a true instrument of conquest, a beast that mocked the strength of Caraxes. And the court, in its petty, myopic hatred, had left her isolated—a hungry, diamond-edged blade with no hilt. This was not a girl to be bedded; this was a weapon to be sharpened. Daemon drifted out of the darkness, his steps utterly silent. The light from a nearby brazier caught the polished silver of Dark Sister at his hip, giving him the air of a lethal, walking shard of moonlight. “He is displeased,” Daemon murmured, his voice low, resonant, and dangerous, startling you out of your fearful reverie. You spun, clutching your arms to your chest, your chin tucked low. “Prince Daemon.” He walked closer, ignoring the formality. The glowing scales of Voranthrax cast a phantom gleam over his face, making his features stark. He gazed up at the dragon, whose titanic form shifted, the crystalline scales grinding like continental plates. “He is a god, child. And you treat him like a pet pup who has fouled the rug,” Daemon continued, his tone devoid of warmth, yet searing in its focused attention. “You flinch when he moves. You apologize for your existence when you are standing beside a creature who could consume this entire island and still hunger for the taste of the moon.” “He is… restless. He feels the chains,” you whispered, the truth of your own soul leaking into your words. “He is too grand for this world, and I—I am too insignificant for him.” Daemon turned his full attention to you, and the shift was overwhelming. He didn't offer comfort; he offered recognition. It was a poison sweet enough to cure the soul’s deepest ache. “Insignificant?” He repeated the word, tasting the venom. He reached out, not to touch, but to trace a line in the air, mirroring the ridge of your nose—a delicate, Lannister-straight nose set against the proud Targaryen bone structure. “You are the proof that the laws of man are fiction. You are a bastard, yet you rode that… entity out of the smoke. Does the High Septon's blessing or the royal seal mean a damn thing when you hold the leash of a creature that could melt.