“Gods.” A Silverblood soldier stared at the thing emerging from the rubble.
“What is that.”
Segmented bodies wrapped in rock-like shells.
They squirmed out of the ruins like giant worms, but they had lizard heads.
Needle teeth ground together with a sound that split the skull.
Where eyes should have been, blood-red flames burned.
Grotesque.
And yet, to Lancel and his men, there was a strange beauty in it.
Raymond, shielded by his brothers, thought of a creature he’d studied.
Before he could speak, the monsters surged forward.
“Unsullied, form up!” Silver Scorpion dropped his visor.
The Unsullied snapped into a single rank.
Javelins flew in unison at the accelerating worm-things.
No pause.
Aslan Londer and Amos Fazer pulled the surviving Silverbloods into line, long axes raised to cover the Unsullied’s throw.
“Don’t get drawn in.” Lancel stepped into the formation.
“Fall back inland.” He had activated a blood magic he called blood-sense.
It read danger through the pulse of external blood.
Together with his ever-active prophetic blood, which warned him through temperature shifts in his own veins, it kept him alive.
The worm-creatures bled liquid hot as magma.
Blood, all the same.
He could feel it.
Armor, the household steward called Longwing, raised his long-hafted battle axe.
Seven feet tall, a giant, he kept his eyes locked on the worms.
The first volley told.
Several worm-creatures were pinned to rubble and stone.
The rest slowed, sensing trouble.
Only a few larger ones kept coming.
Javelins stopped working.
The rock shells were slicker and harder than they looked.
The biggest worm dodged the last volley and opened its mouth.
A blast of blood-red fire roared at the Unsullied line.
Smaller worms shot through the flames, ready to break through once the big one burned the soldiers down.
They were disappointed.
The Unsullied’s armor glowed silver and red.
The fire washed over them and did nothing.
Beside Lancel, the red priest Malach finished his working.
The tattooed flames on his face ignited.
He spread his arms and pushed.
The fire halted, then reversed.
The nearest small worms caught flame and rolled shrieking on the ground.
Silver Scorpion raised his spear.
The Unsullied thrust as one.
Silver-red light flared along the spearheads.
They punched clean through rock shell.
The Silverbloods’ axes followed, hacking the serpentine worms apart.
Magma blood sprayed, raising black smoke.
The worms thrashed in agony, pinned by Unsullied spears.
Lynn and Argo stepped forward together.
Lynn struck the body.
Argo took the head.
Longsword and arakh fell almost as one.
The worm sensed death and rolled, spewing fire in every direction, not caring what it hit.
The fire stopped.
Argo’s curved arakh split the hard shell of the lizard head.
Lancel’s Valyrian steel gave it the last stroke.
The head hit the ground, lifeless.
The party pulled back behind the Unsullied screen.
In the distance, more worms of the same size raised their heads.
Farther still, a shape like a mountain range began to move.
Lancel focused, clenched his fist, and triggered the magic in their blood.
“Scatter!
Rally at the hills!” He and Valar split the group without a word and ran.
The red priest threw a curtain of flame over their retreat.
The mountain raised its head.
It looked around, almost puzzled.
Then it opened its mouth, revealing a throat like a dark red sun.
A worm-creature magnified a thousand times.
Black fire burned on its colossal lizard head.
Beside its breath, the smaller worms had been candles to a volcano.
The black fire ignited the ruins.
Countless worm-creatures writhed and burned to ash.
The great beast shook its head, confused, and settled back into place.
Only then did the men peer out from behind the hills.
“What was that?” Valar stared at the still-burning ruins.
Lancel was thinking further back.
Valar and Raymond didn’t know he had seen a living dragon.
He’d been young then.
His mother was still alive.
Raymond hadn’t been born.
But he was already learning to manage the family’s affairs under his father.
That was when he saw the dragon that resembled today’s monster.
The same long neck.
The same head full of teeth.
The same overwhelming fire.
But that blood-red dragon had possessed true beauty, not the twisted beauty of the worms.
The Blood Wyrm, Caraxes.
Mount and companion of Prince Daemon Targaryen of the Sunset Lands.
At the time, the prince was feuding with his brother, King Viserys I.
The disgruntled prince and the Sea Snake, Corlys Velaryon, raised an army and carved out a kingdom in the Stepstones, stopping by the Free Cities to collect tribute from the magisters.
His father had been no exception.
He invited the prince to the family estate in Volantis, in Princess Senira’s name, and offered great wealth and two hundred elite soldiers.
Lancel didn’t know what his father and Prince Daemon discussed in private.
But the prince was kind to him before he left.
He even gave Lancel personal instruction in swordplay and showed him the Valyrian steel blade Dark Sister.
A fine, elegant sword.
Much prettier than his own Black Widow.
Later, after his mother died giving birth to Raymond, Prince Daemon flew in on dragonback to pay his respects.
But soon after returning to King’s Landing, the prince, briefly reconciled with Viserys, fell out again with the court and the king.
He was exiled permanently.
In those bitter years, he visited the Valezeth estate often, enjoying its hospitality.
That lasted until he married Lady Laena Velaryon and settled in Pentos.
Lancel’s father sent wedding gifts.
Afterward, Prince Daemon and Lady Laena visited Volantis together and stayed at the Valezeth estate.
Nor did he see Lady Laena’s dragon, Vhagar, the largest in the world.
The estate that had hosted a dragon and a prince had since been sold.
Lancel suspected his father’s secret pact with Prince Daemon involved dragons.
His ultimate goal was to claim a dragon and fulfill his family’s dream.
But he also understood that House Targaryen, which held a monopoly on dragons, would never allow an outsider, an insufficiently close outsider, to possess one.
Jaehaerys the First, the most extreme on the matter, was dead.
House Velaryon still had dragons.
But the risk remained.
Yet the prophecy said he must return to Westeros.
As a bloodmage who wielded supernatural power, Lancel understood one truth deeply.
On the board where gods played, mortals were only pieces.
Defy fate, and it would still find another way to happen.
Unless he could use that fate to leap up and slap the gods across the face.
He could only hope his father’s long-ago preparations would bear fruit.
He wasn’t without his own plans.
If this expedition succeeded, if he found a dragon or a viable egg, his contingencies would activate.
He hoped it all went smoothly.
As he thought, an Unsullied soldier toppled backward, rigid.
Silver Scorpion raised his spear and held everyone back.
“Stay away.”
Silver Scorpion remembered.
In the fight, a dying worm had bitten this man.
The Unsullied lay silent as his flesh rotted, smoking like charred meat.
Lancel tried to activate blood magic to save him.
There was no blood left in the body.
Only boiling fire.
Particles shifting under the skin.
Pop.
A pustule burst.
A fleshy, miniature worm-creature squirmed out.
The red priest Malach reached out and clenched his fist.
Fire bloomed inside the dead Unsullied, burning the things beneath the pustules.
They shrieked.
“Fire wyrms!” Raymond shouted.
“I read about them.
They’re fire wyrms!”
Lancel understood at once.
Fire wyrms were creatures recorded in Valyrian history.
They lived underground or inside volcanoes.
They breathed fire and grew larger with age.
After the Doom, some scholars who believed dragons were magical creations theorized that dragons might be related to these monsters.
“But fire wyrms are supposed to live inside volcanoes or underground,” Lynn said.
“Look.” Hoffer, the golden-eyed boy, tugged Lynn’s armor and pointed past the hills.
“Is that… a dragon?” Lancel’s eyes went wide.
Beyond the hills lay another vast ruin.
Toppled buildings.
Cracked earth.
Black fog and rivers like magma.
Beside a fallen tower in the ruins, half-buried in rubble, was the skeleton of a great dragon.
Only then did they notice what was wrong with the ruins.
Newer things surrounded the dragon’s bones.
“We may have found what we came for,” Valar murmured.