Maekar could navigate the tunnels without light.
He knew every turn, every low ceiling, every place where the floor dipped unexpectedly.
He moved quickly, one hand trailing along the wall out of habit rather than necessity, counting the turns in his head.
Left.
Straight.
Right.
Down three steps.
Straight again.
He could hear Ser Clement somewhere behind him, the clatter of armor echoing off the stone, slightly too loud for the narrow space, the breathing of a large man trying and failing to move quietly.
Then a turn and finally, after a very long time, Maekar stopped.
He waited.
The clattering grew louder, then closer.
“Prince, are you there?!”
The worry in Clement’s voice was real.
Maekar found he did not entirely dislike it.
“I am, Ser,” he said.
“And we have arrived.”
A long exhale from somewhere in the dark.
“My Prince, wherever we are, it is not—”
The wall moved.
It happened slowly, driven by some mechanism so old it groaned with the effort, stone grinding against stone in the darkness.
And then the light came through, warm and flickering, and the smell hit them both at once.
Heat.
Old stone.
Something ancient and alive beneath it.
Ser Clement went very still.
“My Prince,” he said quietly.
“We should not—”
“We are exactly where a Targaryen is safest,” Maekar said.
“I assure you.”
He stepped through.
The Dragonpit opened up around them, vast and shadowed, its ceiling lost somewhere far above in the dark.
Torches burned in iron brackets along the walls, their light swallowed long before it reached the upper arches.
Clement stepped through behind him and stopped.
He did not speak.
He simply stood there, head tilted back, staring upward at a ceiling he could not fully see.
“The Dragonpit,” Maekar said.
He had planned this for weeks.
Leaving the keep directly had been impossible, not with the guards and Mary’s watchful attention and Elysar’s tendency to appear in corridors at inconvenient moments.
But with Ser Clement it was possible.
And now here he was.
The guards at the main entrance stood in the distance, two small figures silhouetted against the far gates, their backs to the interior.
Unsuspecting.
Unaware that a prince and a knight had just stepped out of a wall thirty feet behind them.
Maekar turned back towards the massive staircase leading down.
Without a second thought, he walked towards them.
“We can’t.” Ser Clement hushed in a low but reprimanding tone.
Maekar stopped on the first step, turning around.
“I haven’t brought you here for my own good but for yours, Ser.
I could have gone by myself as well, and I am prepared to do that.
Either with you or alone, but I won’t leave now that you have come so far.
Trust me.”
Maekar spoke with a presence of authority.
Ser Clement bit his lip, shaking his head, before he followed Maekar, who had already advanced a few steps further.
And so they descended into the darkness below, one boy and one man.
After a minute, they reached the bottom.
It was a massive cave system, barely lit by a few lingering torches.
“Can you tell me at least what you will do, Prince, so I can guarantee your safety?” Ser Clement bickered, pressing a hand onto Maekar’s shoulder.
Maekar only smiled.
“Of course, meeting a dragon.”
Rhaenys was dreaming of something meaningful when something pulled her back.
She was not sure what it was at first.
A sound, perhaps.
A movement beneath her.
She lay still for a moment, eyes closed, reaching for the dream, and then it was gone the way dreams always were.
She opened her eyes.
The stone ceiling of the Dragonpit arched above her, vast and dark; the torches burned low and distant.
She blinked slowly, taking in the warmth beneath her, the slow rise and fall of it, the leathery texture against her cheek.
Meleys.
She had fallen asleep against her dragon’s stomach, curled between her wing and her side the way she had done since she was a girl.
It remained, to this day, the most comfortable place she had ever slept.
But why was she here?
She blinked again and it came back to her.
The fight with Corlys, long and quiet and cutting in the way their arguments always were.
Her family, as always.
The question of what she was owed and what she had been denied and how long she intended to carry it.
She had been too tired to argue any further and too angry to stay, and so she had saddled Meleys and flown through the night and arrived here without quite deciding to.
She had not even made it to a bed.
A voice drifted through the darkness.
She stilled.
It was distant, echoing off the stone walls in a way that made it difficult to place.
She waited, certain she had imagined it.
Then it came again, far too young to belong to a dragonkeeper.
“Do not fear, Ser.
She will not hurt us.”
Rhaenys was on her feet before she had finished processing the words.
She moved quietly toward the sound, one hand trailing along Meleys’ flank for direction.
Then the roar came.
It was not loud by Meleys’ standards, more of an announcement than a threat.
But in the enclosed stone of the Dragonpit, it bounced off every wall at once and drove the last traces of sleep from her body entirely.
She rounded a corner.
Dreamfyre’s head emerged from a side cavern, enormous and pale blue in the torchlight, her neck stretched to the limit of the great iron chain coiled around it.
Her crimson eyes caught the light and held it, fixed on something Rhaenys could not yet see.
But then she did.
A boy and a knight, standing in the open not three feet from Dreamfyre’s snout.
The knight had his hand on his sword hilt and had clearly decided not to draw it, which was a wise decision.
The boy stood slightly ahead of him, one hand raised toward the dragon with a patience that had no business existing in someone his size.
Targaryen features.
Silver hair.
She had only spoken with him once, but she knew the face.
Maekar.
Rhaenys stood very still, watching.
She had a hundred questions and not one of them seemed like the right thing to say.
So she watched instead, and in the moment she spent deciding, the boy lowered his hand, said something too quiet for her to catch, and turned and walked away into the dark corridor beyond, the knight following close at his heels.
Gone.
Rhaenys cursed under her breath.
She followed, still in her riding leathers, her boots silent on the stone.
They went deeper and deeper into the abyss.
A single torch was still burning in the distance.
She could see it move.
It was them, Rhaenys was sure.
But she also knew what housed so deep that no one dared to come here.
No one, perhaps, besides her cousin Viserys, who was shaken with fear every time, or so she heard.
Then the flame stopped.
Maekar could feel it in his bones.
In something deeper than his bones.
Excitement was the closest word, but it was not quite that.
More instinctive.
The air had changed.
It was warmer here, noticeably, unmistakably, and not because of the torch Ser Clement carried behind him.
This warmth came from ahead, from somewhere in the dark beyond the reach of the flame, and it moved.
It had rhythm to it, a slow pulse of heat that moved with a regularity that could only mean one thing.
Something was breathing.
Something large.
The smell reached him next.
Ash and heat.
He had known that smell his entire first life, had grown so used to it that he had stopped noticing it entirely, the way one stopped noticing the smell of one’s own home.
He had not smelled it in five years.
Behind him, he could hear Ser Clement’s breathing, careful and controlled, and the faint sound of a gauntlet tightening around a torch handle.
Maekar did not look back.
He looked forward, into the dark, and slowly parted his lips.
“Dohaeriros.”
(“Come forth.”)
Silence.
Then the ground moved.
A vibration that travelled up through the stone and into the bones and sat there.
Dust cascaded from the ceiling in curtains.
Somewhere behind him, a loose stone shifted in its setting.
Ser Clement’s torchlight flickered.
And then, from the dark…
The breathing began.
Each breath moved through the corridor like weather.
When it exhaled, Maekar’s hair swept back from his face.
He did not raise his hand to shield himself.
He stood in it.
Then the teeth appeared.
Just the teeth, first.
Nothing else.
They caught the torchlight before anything else did, curved and black as obsidian, each one longer than Maekar was tall, emerging from the dark one by one as the jaw beneath them lowered with graceful slowness.
The jaw kept opening.
Then the head followed, and the head was everything.
It was black.
Not the black of shadows or dark stone, but a true, absolute black.
The scales were the size of shields.
The horns that swept back from the skull were longer than lances.
The eyes, when they opened, were molten red, each one vast enough to swallow the whole of the torchlight.
They found him.
Found Maekar.
And stopped.
The Black Dread.
Balerion.
For a moment, boy and dragon simply existed in the same space, looking at one another across fifty years and one lifetime, and then Maekar laughed.
It came out of nowhere.
Loud and unguarded.
He was happy.
He had not known, until this moment, how much he had missed this.
“Avy ēdrus.
Yn daor, qȳbor?”
(You waited for me.
Did you not, old friend?)
The Black Dread regarded him for a long moment, those crimson eyes moving slowly across the small figure before him.
Then he moved forward.
Slowly.
Maekar stretched out his hand.
It was trembling.
Not from fear.
Closer.
Closer.
His palm met the snout.
The warmth of it went through him like a current.
He stood there with his hand pressed against scales older than any kingdom still standing, and felt something inside him go very quiet for the first time since he had opened his eyes in this new life.
Fifty years.
The same dragon.
The same warmth.
A different hand, smaller now, trembling where it had once been steady, but pressing against the same ancient hide all the same.
A quiet sadness moved through the happiness without displacing it.
Both things at once.
He had not expected that either.
Behind him, Ser Clement had stopped breathing.
“Impossible,” he whispered.
Sadness tightened within Maekar as he reached through the bond he shared with Balerion.
It was every bit as deep and powerful as he remembered.
Yet through that connection, he confirmed something he had long suspected.
Balerion had waited for him.
All those years.
The Black Dread had been ready to die the very day Maekar was born, his immense life finally nearing its end.
Yet he had endured.
When the hatchling prince first drew breath, Balerion had roared, a thunderous cry that shook King’s Landing itself.
He had recognized his rider.
Not Viserys.
Never Viserys or anyone else.
His true rider had returned to the world, and so the great dragon had lingered, refusing to surrender to death while even the faintest hope remained.
But time had taken its toll.
For years, Balerion’s strength had been fading.
His breaths had grown heavier, each one carrying the weight of centuries.
The mighty muscles that once carried him across half the world had weakened, and the fires that had forged kingdoms burned less fiercely than before.
But still, even now, in his twilight, Balerion remained the Black Dread.
His flames could still turn castles to molten ruin and reduce armies to ash.
Yet such power would belong to another life.
Balerion had something else he wished to give Maekar.
Something far more important than fire and destruction.
In the next moment, Maekar’s vision went black.
Then the world broke apart.
Images flooded his mind.
A thousand.
He saw dragons tearing at one another in the sky.
Their roars shook the heavens as flame met flame.
One fell.
Then another.
Then another.
The ground below was covered in bodies.
Targaryens.
So many Targaryens.
Killing each other.
The vision shifted.
A great dome.
The screams of dragons trapped inside.
He watched shadows swarm over them.
He heard roars turn into cries.
Then silence.
Terrible silence.
Another vision came.
The Iron Throne.
Kings sitting upon it.
One after another.
The throne remained.
But each ruler seemed smaller than the last.
Weaker.
A silver-haired king laughing as wildfire burned green beneath a dark sky.
A prince falling, his chest stained red.
The red three-headed dragon lowered from towers and walls.
Then darkness.
Cold.
Endless cold.
A wall of ice stretching into the heavens.
Dead things moving beneath a pale sky.
And then—
A young woman stepping into flames.
Three shadows stirring behind her.
Three cries piercing the night.
Victory.
Defeat.
Life.
Death.
A thousand futures colliding together.
Too much.
Far too much.
Maekar cried out as the visions finally released him.
He dropped to one knee, gasping for breath.
“Prince!”Ser Clement called out, supporting him.
Maekar’s heart hammered against his chest.
A single tear rolled down his face.
And so Balerion, the Black Dread, the largest and most fearsome dragon Westeros had ever known, drew his final breath.
The dragon once ridden by the Conqueror himself released a deep exhale.
It was powerful, a final reminder of the beast he had once been.
Yet beneath it lay something else.
Contentment.
He had given Maekar the gift he wished to give him.
Now his time had come.
Slowly, Balerion lowered his massive head beside the kneeling prince.
For a moment, neither moved.
Maekar could feel it through their bond.
No fear.
No pain.
Only peace.
The great dragon’s eye lingered on him for a final moment.
Then it closed forever…