Being able to fly an utterly surreal, mind-bending experience.
Of course, it was not as though I had sprouted leather wings and launched myself into the stratosphere, nor had my mother tossed me off the battlements of Dragonstone for daring to disrespect her mount.
It was the beast herself doing the flying: none other than Vhagar the bronze menace.
Or itself, considering the biological reality of Targaryen dragons was an absolute mess of conflicting maester theories and Valyrian blood-magic ambiguity.
I was fairly certain Septon Barth had not been exactly right when he asserted that dragons were as changeable as flame, shifting their sex at whim.
Then again, I was merely operating off half-remembered internet theories, forum debates, and my own gut instinct.
Perhaps these giant fire-lizards could indeed swap their genitals whenever the mood struck them, though I frankly did not care enough to go inspect Vhagar’s undercarriage to confirm the mechanics of dragon reproduction.
Vhagar, however, was a magnificent, terrifying sight to behold up close.
She was simultaneously far larger and surprisingly smaller than I had anticipated based on my memories of television adaptations and fan art.
She was considerably smaller than the mountain-sized beast I remembered from the House of the Dragon series, which made complete logical sense given that she was roughly a hundred years younger at this point in the timeline, and dragons supposedly never ceased growing so long as they had open sky and endless cattle to gorge upon.
Yet, even in her relative youth, my tiny, four-month-old baby body was roughly the size of one of her golden-green eye sockets.
Which brought me to another fascinating dilemma of medieval biology: if dragons truly never stopped growing until the day they died, was there a physical tipping point where a beast grew so impossibly massive that its wings could no longer support its crushing weight?
The square-cube law of physics seemed to dictate that at some point, the sheer metabolic energy required to lift a city-sized reptile into the clouds would outpace the amount of meat the dragon could physically digest in a day.
I vaguely recalled reading obscure fragments of Valyrian lore back in my previous life regarding the Freehold deploying truly gargantuan, ancient land-dragons during their wars with the Ghiscari Empire.
Massive, wingless beasts that functioned as living, biological siege tanks, hauled across the continent on massive iron chains to vomit streams of liquid dragonfire into enemy fortresses.
I could not recall whether that particular snippet of lore was actual canon or just a fever dream from a fifty-chapter self-insert fanfiction, but it sounded completely badass regardless.
The icy sea wind whipped savagely across my bare face as Vhagar beat her massive, leather wings, hauling her heavy bronze body upward at a steep, dizzying incline.
The shear force of the ascent pulled at my cheeks, stretching my soft baby skin backward like a jet pilot braving high altitudes.
Fortunately for my frail infant neck, Visenya had constructed a surprisingly sturdy, makeshift harness out of soft velvet padding and boiled calfskin straps, securely binding my chest to the front of her steel-scaled breastplate like a medieval front-facing infant carrier.
Visenya leaned her head down into the gale, her silver-gold braid whipping wild behind her, and opened her mouth to speak over the thunderous roaring of the wind.
“Gēliñakes, ñuha gevie, ao daor rhaenagon issi mēria tubīs, zokla hen vūjītys,” [I am sorry, my beautiful one, you must endure but a moment more, above the clouds.]Visenya’s soft, melodic voice whistled toward my ears, almost entirely swallowed by the deafening rhythm of Vhagar’s wings carving through the sky.
For a split second, I genuinely wondered if the rushing air had turned my infant hearing into complete mush, because the sounds coming out of her mouth sounded like complete gibberish to my modern ears.
I could not help but scowl in frustration, leaning my heavy baby head back against her leather-armored chest and praying that the sickening turbulence would end before I vomited breastmilk all over her royal Targaryen riding gear.
A heartbeat later, Vhagar crested the dark gray sea fog, leveling out her massive wings and gliding smoothly into the bright, blinding sunlight above the clouds.
The bronze dragon let out a low, vibrating hum that rumbled straight through Visenya’s saddle and into my spine as she assumed a stable cruising posture.
Letting out a massive sigh of relief, I wriggled slightly against my leather harness, attempting to peer down over the edge of the saddle to see just how high into the heavens we had climbed.
It proved to be an immensely difficult physical task, mostly due to my short, fat infant neck, my lack of upper body strength, and the sheer, absurd width of the dragon’s scaled back.
After a few seconds of frantic wriggling and squirming, Visenya noticed my struggle and gently cupped her gloved hand beneath my chin, shifting my position so I could look down past her stirrup.
The view below us was nothing short of breathtaking.
It was not entirely mind-blowing in the sense of absolute novelty, given that I had flown on commercial airliners dozens of times in my past life, staring out tiny double-paned glass windows while eating stale pretzels.
But experiencing flight on the back of a living, breathing predator was an entirely different beast altogether.
Far below us, the dark, icy waves of the Narrow Sea lapped gently against the jagged black cliffs of Dragonstone, which looked like a tiny, burnt pebble floating in an endless sea of blue velvet.
The midday sun hit the clouds beneath us, turning the fog into a vast sea of white foam.
Perhaps the simple fact that I was riding atop an actual dragon made the entire experience feel deeply magical and surreal.
Naturally, my hyperactive brain immediately supplied an intrusive thought: what would happen if I somehow slipped out of this velvet harness and plummeted ten thousand feet down into the freezing water below?
Splat.
Instant infant soup on the surface of the sea.
Luckily, I was fairly certain that was not going to happen today, as Visenya had tied the leather buckles with double-knotted martial precision.
Vhagar had surprisingly not reacted violently to my playful infant smack across her snout earlier in the courtyard.
The gargantuan bronze beast had merely let out a warm, sulfurous huff of air that had blown my silver hair straight back and covered my face in dragon snot.
Even my mother had been taken aback by my brazen audacity, letting out chuckle of amusement at the sight of her four-month-old babe trying to physically assert dominance over a dragon.
Who knew these fire-breathing monsters possessed such subtle intelligence?
Staring directly into Vhagar’s massive golden eyes had been a deeply unsettling experience, not simply because she was an apex predator capable of swallowing an ox whole, but because those eyes held a strange, ancient, calculating intellect.
It sent a cold shiver sliding down my spine.
The only thing I could compare it to from my previous life was staring into the eyes of a wild chimpanzee or a massive timber wolf; you could tell there was a conscious, thinking mind behind those pupils, evaluating you with cold precision.
“Bīka dāria, issi daor?” [It is beautiful, is it not?] Visenya’s soft, musical voice drew me out of my internal monologue once again.
Once more, I found myself frowning in deep irritation, wondering if I was suffering from some strange ear infection.
But no, the weather up here was tranquil, the flight was smooth, and there was no wind noise obstructing my ears.
My mother was definitively speaking in an entirely different language.
It took me a few seconds of narrowing down linguistic possibilities to reach the obvious, frustrating conclusion: she was speaking High Valyrian.
That was supremely annoying.
In the castle nursery, I had gotten comfortably accustomed to everyone speaking the Common Tongue, allowing me to easily overhear every scrap of castle gossip without raising suspicion.
Nobody ever filtered their words around a four-month-old infant because everybody assumed babies were mindless, uncomprehending lumps of squishy flesh.
Visenya let out another quiet, raspy laugh, a sound so entirely alien on her stern face that it creeped me out far more than anything she had done till now, “Ah!
Hāros vāedas, adere zūgus?
Ao rōbris demāris gaomagon syha hen vali,” [Ah!
Why do I even speak to a simple babe?
Though you seem far wiser than other children I have seen.] I stared up at her sharp, sculpted jawline, wondering if she was normally this talkative when she was alone.
Probably not.
Queen Visenya was famous for her ice-cold demeanor, stern discipline, and martial paranoia.
But up here, ten thousand feet above the mortal world with no guards, septons, or maesters around to observe her, she clearly felt safe enough to drop her formidable guard for a fleeting moment.
“Keos ry, ao issi ñuha,” [That is because you are mine.] My infant frown deepened as she pulled me closer against her leather-wrapped chest, burying her cheek against my soft, silver-haired head.
I was deeply annoyed at my inability to comprehend her High Valyrian words.
Couldn’t she just speak in plain, simple Common Tongue like a normal person so I could figure out what kind of mother she actually was?
You would not believe the disgusting, sexual, outrageous and terrifying all at the same time secrets those wet nurses spilled to one another when they thought no one was listening.
It helped pass the agonizing hours of crib-captivity, but occasionally the dark, medieval gossip made me shudder.
May the gods protect me from the madness of bored servant women.
Still, my modern brain was already hard at work cataloging the specific phonetic sounds and repeating words Visenya had just uttered, trying to cross-reference them with my limited knowledge of High Valyrian grammar from pop culture.
I was not making much progress, and I could not help but wonder how the hell actual historical babies managed to pick up complex languages so effortlessly without the benefit of a fully developed brain.
“Aegon was at the castle a few nights past,” Visenya suddenly murmured, her tone shifting drastically as she abandoned High Valyrian and lapsed into the familiar, crisp cadence of the Common Tongue.
“He received a sealed parchment from the Prince of Dorne, brought by the hand of Princess Deria herself.
A single letter, yet it contained something that made him halt the entire war without a word of explanation.” Thank the heavens!
God had clearly smiled upon me!
The glorious Common Tongue was back!
English superiority wins again!
The GOAT!
Wait, what was she talking about right now?
A sealed letter from Dorne?
My infant mind instantly snapped to high alert.
Oh right!
That letter!
The infamous, mysterious Dornish letter from the First Dornish War!
By the sound of Visenya’s bitter, venomous tone, she was profoundly furious about the entire incident.
I craned my short neck upward, staring at her face.
Her high cheekbones were tight, her full lips were pressed into an unyielding line of pure rage, and her gloved hands were gripping Vhagar’s leather reins so tightly that the metal studs were groaning under the strain.
“It irks me far more than it should,” Visenya spat, her dark purple eyes flashing with cold, suppressed fury as she stared out over the clouds.
“No, I have every right in the seven hells to be enraged!
We fought this bloody war side by side!
We burned their castles together!
He had no right to keep the contents of that parchment secret from me!
After everything I have sacrificed for his crown, after Meraxes was pulled from the sky at Hellholt…” She exhaled sharply through her nostrils, a puff of warm white condensation escaping her lips into the freezing air before she fell silent, staring bitterly into the horizon.
I felt a small pang of sympathy for my scary dragon mother.
Here she was, a warrior queen who had spent years roasting Dornish fortresses to avenge her sister Rhaenys, only for her king-husband to suddenly sign a peace treaty because of a private letter he refused to share with her.
Deciding to offer her some comfort, I reached up with my tiny, fat hand and clumsily patted her cheek.
I would have preferred to pat her shoulder, but the physical angle was completely wrong for my stubby, four-month-old arms, leaving me no choice but to awkwardly rub my sticky baby palm against her cheekbone.
Visenya flinched in surprise at the touch, looking down at me.
Her furious expression softened by a fraction, and she let out a long, weary sigh, resting her gloved hand over my tiny fingers.
Her rant had reignited my own obsessive fan theories regarding the contents of that legendary Dornish letter.
Back in my previous life, many fans had spent over a decade endlessly debating what Princess Deria had written to Aegon the Conqueror to make him abandon his bloody crusade.
Georgie R.R.
Martin had intentionally left the detail completely ambiguous in the Fire & Blood history book, likely because he could not come up with a realistic, logical geopolitical reason for the Dornish to win the war, so he resorted to a mysterious plot device.
But evaluating the historical facts through my analytical lens yielded a few compelling theories.
Given that Aegon had sliced his own hands open on the blades of the Iron Throne upon reading the letter, before flying straight to Dragonstone and agreeing to a peace treaty the next morning, the contents had to be deeply personal.
The popular theory that Rhaenys had survived the crash of Meraxes at Hellholt and was being brutally tortured in a Dornish dungeon seemed plausible, with the letter offering her a merciful death in exchange for peace.
However, the three-year gap between her crash and the letter made that timeline somewhat shaky, and it was quite impossible to keep something like a secret for so long.
The other theory of her leaving everything for someone in Dorne never made much sense to me either, because why would a queen who loved her husband and child abandon them for now reason.
The only theory that made sense to me however, was that the Dornish had preserved Rhaenys’s body and offered it up to Aegon as a sign of peace.
Of course, those were all just speculative theories.
A Game Theory!
“Go go ga ga, ga go go!” I babbled aloud to Visenya, waving my chubby infant arms around in wild, theatrical gestures to properly illustrate my brilliant geopolitical breakdown of the Dornish conflict.
Naturally, I possessed the vocal control to speak basic English words at this point, but revealing that factual reality right now would be absolute suicide.
Superstitious medieval nobles would immediately declare me a demon, lock me in a dark tower, or call a septon to perform an exorcism.
So instead, I fully committed to delivering my complex historical thesis in passionate, loud baby babble.
Wait a second, my paranoid brain suddenly interjected.
Wouldn’t it look extremely suspicious if my infant babbling only consisted of the exact same two syllables repeated over and over?
Any perceptive warrior queen like Visenya might notice the uncanny repetition and deduce that I was faking it!
To throw off any potential suspicion, I threw in a chaotic mix of random consonants, wet raspberries, and dramatic grunts, concluding my grand speech with a satisfied huff.
Phew.
Expressing such complex geopolitical theories through the medium of infant gibberish was genuinely exhausting work.
My eyelids were already growing heavy, and my baby biology was demanding an immediate nap.
Visenya stared down at me with a look of mild bewilderment, clearly having understood zero percent of my brilliant historical analysis.
Instead of taking my tactical advice to heart, she simply let out a quiet laugh, reached down, and affectionately pinched my fat, pink cheeks with two leather-clad fingers.
How utterly humiliating.
I was a reborn visionary dictator, not a squishy plush toy for her amusement!
Just as I was about to give in to the overwhelming fatigue and close my eyes for a mid-air nap, something caught my attention.
I froze, narrowing my eyes to peer past Vhagar’s bronze shoulder into the far distance.
High above the white cloud cover, a distinct black speck was carved into the pale blue sky, carving through the atmosphere at a terrifying speed and heading straight toward our position.