New chapter is live.
Settle in, take your time, and let’s see what waits in the dark 🖤 ✦ Aelor poured the gold onto his bed and lay down on top of it.
It was childish.
It was excessive.
It was also deeply satisfying.
The coins were old, many of them stamped with marks he did not recognize, but gold did not need to be fashionable to be useful.
Aelor rolled one between his fingers, then let it fall back into the glittering pile with a soft clink.
After a few moments of indulgence, he returned the coins to the bracelet and turned to the books.
The first volume told the history of House Daegaryon, an ancient Valyrian dragonlord family whose crest had been two dragons twined around each other.
The badge in the bracelet belonged to them.
Aelor read faster as the pages unfolded.
House Daegaryon had once recorded more than three hundred dragons across its long history.
At its height, sixty-seven living dragons had been kept under its name.
The spatial bracelet had been one of the treasures passed down to a chosen heir, though the book did not say how it had been lost.
The scale of it made Aelor pause.
To House Targaryen, a handful of dragons could reshape kingdoms.
To one of the old families of Valyria, dozens of dragons had been inheritance, status, and military weight measured across generations.
The Freehold had not been an empire of lone monsters and lucky riders.
It had been a civilization built around bloodlines, magic, and beasts large enough to make stone cities kneel.
The Targaryens had survived the Doom, and survival was a victory no pride could dismiss.
But survival did not mean they had preserved everything.
Aelor looked at the bracelet on his wrist with new respect.
A dragonlord family’s heirloom had crossed oceans, war, pirates, and perhaps centuries, only to end up in the Crabfeeder’s hoard and then in Daemon’s hands.
Fate had a strange sense of humor.
The other books were less immediately useful.
Some recorded alliances among dragonlord houses.
Others listed vassals, marriages, old feuds, old victories, and names that had vanished with Valyria itself.
Then Aelor found a slim volume with a title that made him sit up straight.
On the Nature of Dragons The writing was dense, but his mastery of Valyrian made the text as accessible to him as the Common Tongue.
That still felt unreal.
A few months ago, the language of old Valyria had been something he heard from dragonkeepers and family ceremonies, impressive but distant.
Now the grammar settled in his mind naturally.
The old hand, the abbreviations, even the technical notes in the margins all bent into meaning.
The System had not only given him a skill.
It had given him access.
The book did not contain the hatching method he most wanted.
It did, however, hold something almost as valuable.
That disappointed him more than he wanted to admit.
He had hoped the first useful book would hand him a clean answer, a ritual, a temperature, a prayer, anything that would turn the egg in his room from promise into life.
Old Valyria, unsurprisingly, did not make itself that simple.
Its knowledge came layered.
Bloodline, will, environment, tradition, magic, and tools all seemed to touch the bond between dragon and rider.
Aelor could already see why later Targaryens, left with fragments and custom, had treated much of it as mystery.
It described dragons not as war beasts, but as partners of blood and will.
Those who carried the blood of the dragon could form a bond with a dragon and ride upon its back.
Fire-mages of old Valyria believed dragons possessed intelligence far beyond ordinary beasts, second only to mankind in certain respects.
They lived long lives, grew throughout them, and in old age some became so immense that flight itself became a burden.
The language mattered.
The book did not say a rider owned a dragon the way a lord owned a horse.
It spoke of affinity, recognition, command, and response.
It described fear as poison and hesitation as insult.
A dragon might accept a rider’s hand, but only if that hand carried certainty.
Aelor thought of his own body, still too small, still too easily tired.
Will, at least, could grow before muscle did.
Aelor turned a page and found a passage that made him stop.
“Dragons belong to the sky and the wild places of the world.
In times of peace, a wise dragonlord allows his dragons to choose their own nests and preserves their pride.
In times of war, the far companion may be summoned by horn and blood, but never treated as a slave.” Aelor’s eyes lingered on the line.
“Summoned by horn…” A Dragon Horn.
So such things had truly existed.
The idea set his thoughts racing.
If dragons had once nested far from their riders, then the old dragonlords must have possessed ways to call them across distance.
A horn would not be a toy or a mere signal.
It would be magic, authority, and blood made into sound.
Aelor had no such horn.
But knowing such a thing had existed changed the boundaries of what was possible.
The next passage was written with even greater severity.
“Dragons are bone-and-blood kin to their riders.
To bind them in chains, to rob them of sky, to pen them like lesser beasts, is to invite a curse both slow and severe.” Aelor closed the book for a moment.
The words bothered him because they did not sound like superstition.
They sounded like a warning written by someone who had seen the consequence and survived long enough to record it.
The Dragonpit had been begun at Maegor I’s command and completed during the reign of Jaehaerys I.
The Targaryens had kept their dragons there for generations.
Balerion had known it.
Vhagar had known it.
Vermithor had known it.
Now Dreamfyre, Caraxes, and Syrax were among the dragons kept in or near its great stone hollows.
Syrax, with her yellow scales, was Rhaenyra’s pride.
Aelor had never questioned the Dragonpit before.
It was simply there, part of the way House Targaryen ruled King’s Landing.
The maesters said it kept dragons from fighting one another.
They said chains were necessary for the safety of the city and the beasts themselves.
But the maesters were guessing from the outside.
This book had been written by people who lived in the shadow of hundreds of dragons.
Aelor trusted the dead dragonlords of Valyria more than cautious men of the Citadel.
He placed the book aside with care.
Viserys needed to see it.
Not immediately.
Not before Aelor understood enough to answer questions.
But soon.
He could not simply run to his father with one ancient volume and a child’s urgency.
Viserys would listen, perhaps.
Rhaenyra would listen more eagerly.
The council would ask who had translated it, where it came from, why no one had seen it before, and why Aelor had access to Valyrian texts that were not in the royal library.
Truth was useful only when it could survive the questions around it.
So Aelor read on.
He read until the candles burned low and the world outside his window turned gray.
The more he learned, the clearer one truth became.
Taming a dragon required more than blood.
It required will.
A rider had to climb the dragon’s back and command it with certainty.
In the saddle, dragon and rider became one mind, one fury, one flight.
Aelor returned the books and gold to the bracelet before dawn, then stood before the warm cradle where his dragon egg rested.
He touched the shell with reverence.
“Hatch quickly,” he whispered.
“The sky is waiting for us.” Behind him, Ser Erryk had entered with breakfast and stopped in the doorway.
The Kingsguard’s expression was so warm that Aelor immediately felt embarrassed.
Aelor realized too late what the scene looked like: a little prince, pale from a sleepless night, whispering to an egg as if the creature inside could already hear him.
Perhaps it could.
That hope was dangerous enough to make his chest ache.
“Do not look at me like that,” Aelor said.
“It is far too intimate for this hour.” Erryk cleared his throat.
“Forgive me, Your Grace.
I merely support your ambition.” “My ambition is asleep in an egg.” “Even so.” Aelor’s ears warmed.
He turned away before Erryk could see too much of his face.
The tourney would continue today.
Degar Orlyan, the Dornishman who had made an enemy of half the crowd, was still under watch and still breathing.
Someone needed to defeat him.
Aelor had a feeling the answer might already have walked into the lists.
✦ ✦ ✦ Want to keep going?
I hope this chapter gave you another reason to stay with the story.
There’s still plenty ahead, and things are only starting to unfold.