“Gu gu ga ga!” I barked out with all the sovereign authority my tiny, four-month-old lungs could muster.
Aenys, acting like the loyal servant and submissive elder brother he truly was, immediately scurried across the cold flagstones of the nursery to fetch my stuffed Balerion dragon toy.
It was a crude, wool-stuffed thing with leather wings and tiny glass beads for eyes, but it was currently my most prized possession in this godforsaken stone castle.
He offered it through the carved oak railings of my wooden playpen, bowing his pale silver head with a soft, gentle smile.
I reached my chubby, dimpled infant hands through the bars, snatched the dragon from his grasp, and pulled it into my lair, placing it firmly beside my knee.
Giving the future second king of Westeros a firm, solemn nod of approval, I immediately pivoted back to my primary daily assignment: staring at the wall.
At this point in my endless captivity, I was ninety-nine percent certain that I knew the exact number of stone bricks utilized in constructing this giant, brooding bedchamber.
The grand total was an astounding, miraculous zero!
That was right.
The entire room, including the walls, the vaulted ceiling, and the cold floor beneath my padded blanket, appeared to have been carved out of a single, continuous slab of seamless, fused black stone.
It was a masterpiece of Old Valyria, shaped by dragonfire and blood sorcery before the Doom ever touched the Freehold.
It was genuinely fascinating from an engineering standpoint.
How had those dragonlords managed to mold solid rock like wet clay using primitive medieval technology?
Well, at the end of the day, it was not really my concern, so I could not bring myself to care overmuch about ancient history.
However, if I ever managed to uncover the exact secret of Valyrian stonemasonry once I grew old enough to hold a quill, I would not hesitate to put it to use.
Even if mastering the craft required me to sacrifice a thousand smallfolk souls to some dark blood altar, who actually gave a damn about the peasantry anyway?
They were all destined to die in a year or two regardless, shitting their guts out into a ditch from some easily curable medieval dysentery.
A thousand human sacrifices was my hard limit for now, mind you.
I was not willing to sacrifice one thousand and one souls for a fortress wall.
That would simply be too cartoonishly evil, even for a visionary dictator in the making.
Never go full retard, oh shit copyright strike again, my bad.
Ah, being a royal prince was unequivocally the absolute best life imaginable.
Now, if only I were fifteen years older, I could actually begin enjoying my elevated social status properly.
What was the point of being a highborn dragonlord if you could not flirt with a few curvaceous serving wenches or tease the pretty handmaidens bringing wine to the hall?
For the time being, trapped inside this tiny, helpless frame, all I could do was lie on my back and stare intensely at the attractive young women who cleaned my chamber and changed my wrappings every morning.
A lion might lose its teeth in infancy, but it never lost its hunger for beauty.
Now that I actually took the time to ponder the matter, it was profoundly strange how a majority of the handmaidens and serving girls in this dreary castle looked so damn good.
What kind of medieval beauty products were they using in this era?
Especially out here on a remote, wind-scoured volcanic rock like Dragonstone?
Maybe dragon manure contained some secret, magical skin-cleansing chemical that wiped away blemishes and left their complexions smooth as Myrish glass.
It honestly would not surprise me in the slightest, considering all the absurd, magical bullshit that occurred in this world on a daily basis anyway.
Out of the corner of my eye, I caught sight of Aenys wandering back toward his cushioned stool near the hearth.
He sat down, opened a heavy parchment tome, and began quietly reading like a soft-hearted, poetry-loving milksop of a prince.
I let out a long, heavy sigh of deep disappointment.
I had spent the last three weeks attempting to teach my elder brother how to execute proper push-ups to build his pectoral muscles, but my educational efforts had yielded zero results.
When I had tried to demonstrate proper push-up form by rolling onto my stomach and grunting while pushing my tiny baby chest off the blanket, he had simply giggled and clapped his hands, clearly treating my military calisthenics as a hilarious infant performance.
Of course, swift and brutal vengeance had been delivered shortly thereafter.
When Aenys had leaned down to scoop me out of the playpen for a hug, I had instantly reached out, grabbed two handfuls of his long, silky silver hair, and yanked with all the strength my tiny infant biceps could generate.
Justice had been served swiftly in the nursery that day, and I was fairly certain Aenys would think twice before making fun of his future sovereign’s physical fitness routine ever again.
My wet nurse had chosen not to interfere during the hair-pulling incident, though she had let out a stifled chuckle at the spectacle.
It had been obvious enough to her that I was not actively trying to scalp the heir to the throne.
My eyes flickered over to the dark corner of the chamber where she stood silently, observing my every move.
The moment she realized I was staring directly into her eyes with cold, unblinking intensity, she quickly averted her gaze, smoothing down the apron of her woolen dress and pretending to watch over Aenys instead.
Hmm.
It was becoming increasingly obvious that I terrified the poor woman to a certain degree.
While being feared and respected was generally a positive trait for a future king, it was distinctly dangerous if she began suspecting I was some kind of demonic changeling or demon-spawn heathen sent from the seven hells to bring ruin upon House Targaryen.
Being quietly smothered with a feather pillow by a superstitious servant was definitely not on my to-do list for this rebirth, so I needed to dial back the unblinking psychological warfare and pretend to be an ordinary, brainless baby as much as humanly possible.
Perhaps sitting completely motionless and staring at a blank stone wall for six straight hours was not the smartest strategic decision in that regard.
Eh, I could not bring myself to care too much about her suspicions right now.
Staring at the wall was literally the only thing keeping my razor-sharp modern mind sane inside this mindless purgatory of infant existence.
All my serious physical training, jaw exercises, and vocal articulation practice were strictly confined to the night hours.
Even then, training was a nightmare because the wet nurse slept on a straw pallet right beside my wooden pen to ensure I did not choke on my own spit-up in the dark.
Despite the constant surveillance, I had managed to make remarkable progress in mastering my vocal cords.
I could already form basic consonant sounds when no one was listening.
Unfortunately, the woman had caught me red-handed a few times in the dead of night, squirming frantically on my back while trying to do infant leg raises and tummy crunches under the blanket.
From her perspective, watching a four-month-old baby perform silent, aggressive calisthenics in the moonlight probably looked horrifyingly cursed.
Aenys finally closed his leather-bound book, stood up from his stool, and walked directly toward the wet nurse, prompting another massive sigh to escape my lips.
Even after spending an indefinite amount of time cooped up in this room with him, I had not been able to straighten his soft ass out completely.
The boy was probably five years old, yet here he was, casually walking up to the wet nurse, lifting her linen bodice, and latching onto her breast for a mid-afternoon snack like a giant, silver-haired infant.
It was an utter disgrace to the dragon blood.
Alas, I would simply have to wait a few more months before implementing proper disciplinary measures.
That grotesque display reminded me to analyze our current historical timeline.
If my mental calculations were accurate, roughly four or five months had passed since my soul had been shoved into this tiny Targaryen vessel.
Combining that estimate with the hushed gossip I had managed to overhear from the handmaidens and castle guards, my dear mother Visenya and my noble father Aegon the Conqueror were currently away in the deep south, actively burning the barren desert shithole known as Dorne into a pile of scorched glass.
They had left both me and Aenys behind on Dragonstone under heavy guard, which was infinitely safer than keeping us at the mainland encampment.
Wait, did the Red Keep even exist at this point in history?
No, of course it did not.
King’s Landing was currently nothing more than a muddy, chaotic boomtown built around the crude timber walls of the Aegonfort atop the highest hill.
The whole saga of the First Dornish War and the Dragon’s Wroth was mind-bogglingly weird the more you analyzed it with a modern brain.
No amount of primitive mountain guerilla tactics should have realistically saved the Dornish lords from the combined, catastrophic firestorm of two adult, mountain-sized dragons like Balerion and Vhagar, especially when they burned every single source of food and water across the region.
My honest assessment was that George R.R.
Martin simply could not figure out a realistic, plausible way for Dorne to survive a total dragon genocide, so he slapped a massive plot armor blanket over Prince Qoren and the Martells and left it completely open without any proper explanation whatsoever.
Of course, that logical inconsistency did not mean I was going to spare those sun-baked, wannabe-Arabs when I eventually assumed command of the Royal Army in the future.
I was going to burn those stubborn, desert-dwelling lords to the ground even harder than my parents were currently doing.
The Seven Kingdoms needed to be unified under one absolute ruler, and if the Dornish tried any of their poison-and-arrow bullshit with me, I would make them feel the blinding heat of a thousand exploding suns.
It was a universally acknowledged rule among military strategists that if you were losing a war against guerilla fighters, it simply meant you were not trying hard enough.
Just bring a bigger army and burn every blade of grass in sight until there was nowhere left to hide.
Uh, okay, that might sound a little sociopathic, but you will have to forgive my manic internal ramblings.
If I remained trapped in this infant playpen for another three months without any intellectual stimulation, I was fairly certain my brain would completely short-circuit and turn into porridge.
Regardless of the future bloodshed, one absolute truth remained clear to all: the whole world shall eventually witness the incredible benevolence and mercy of King Maegor the Kind, and definitely, absolutely Not Cruel.
If a few hundred treasonous lords happened to get roasted alive along the way to peace and prosperity, well, that was entirely their own fault for standing in the path of progress.
Letting out a massive, toothless yawn, I let my upper body collapse backward onto the padded blanket, staring up at the dark, fused-stone ceiling now that I had run out of walls to count.
I needed to keep a strict, cautious handle on my developmental milestones.
It would raise massive red flags among the superstitious nobility if a one-year-old infant suddenly began speaking in complete, grammatically flawless sentences.
While I could not give less of a shit about what the medieval NPCs thought of my intellect, again, I had zero desire to get quietly strangled in my sleep by a fanatic septon or some religious zealot who believed I was a demon possessed by the Stranger.
Why did my soul have to be reborn into the useless, flabby body of a newborn anyway?
Couldn’t the cosmic gods of self-insertion have dropped me into Westeros as a handsome, sword-wielding teenager?
There was literally nothing useful I could accomplish right now, nor anytime in the near future.
I heavily doubted any lord on Dragonstone would be stupid enough to hand over silver coins to a pre-teen prince just because he spouted wild, incoherent ramblings about blast furnaces, crop rotation, and gunpowder.
Sighing deeply in profound frustration, I wiggled my tiny, fat toes in the cool air.
I grabbed my right foot with both hands, hauled my leg up toward my face, and enthusiastically began chewing on my own big toe like a savage.
Mmmm, yes.
Prime infant foot-snack.
Judging by the sharp, burning ache in my lower gums and my sudden, uncontrollable urge to bite down hard on literally anything within arm’s reach, my first set of baby teeth were finally starting to erupt out of my gums.
That meant at least four or five months had passed since my rebirth into House Targaryen.
Then again, I had never bothered to read a single textbook on infant physiological development back in my previous life, so I could be entirely wrong.
I abruptly paused my mindless toe-chewing when I noticed the wet nurse suddenly snap to attention.
She placed Aenys gently on the ground, smoothed down the front of her woolen dress with trembling hands, and bowed her head low toward the heavy oak door of the nursery.
Curious, I turned my head sideways across the blanket, peering through the carved wooden bars of my playpen to see what had caused the servant to freeze in terror.
Standing right at the entrance of the room in all her terrifying glory was none other than Queen Visenya Targaryen herself, her purple eyes locking directly onto me, who currently had a foot stuffed entirely into his mouth.