Dragonstone was quiet by the time Daemon returned.
Rhaenyra stood alone at the painted table, one hand resting flat against carved wood shaped into a kingdom she was no longer certain she’d ever hold.
The stillbirth was still fresh in her — hours old, no more — her body hollowed out in ways no crown could touch.
She had thought, standing there, that grief had already taken everything it meant to take from her that day.
She was wrong.
She heard him before she saw him.
Boots on stone, slow, deliberate — Daemon never walked slow unless he was carrying something he didn’t want to arrive with.
He crossed the hall to her without a word, and something in the silence of it made her chest go tight before he’d said anything at all.
He took her hand.
She didn’t pull away.
She didn’t ask.
Some part of her, some old and tired part, already knew — the way a body knows a wound before the mind catches up to the pain of it.
Daemon leaned close, and whispered.
Four words.
That was all it took.
Rhaenyra didn’t move.
She didn’t cry out, didn’t collapse, didn’t do any of the things a mother was supposed to do in the space where her son used to be.
She simply turned her head, slow, toward the fire burning low in the hearth, and watched it the way a person watches something very far away.
Lucerys.
Her second son.
Sent out with words of peace, because she had wanted, foolishly, to believe peace was still something the realm had room for.
Gone.
She thought of his face when he was small, stubborn in a way none of her other children had been.
She thought of him climbing into Arrax’s saddle, small hands sure on the reins, so proud to be trusted with something that mattered.
She thought that she had sent him.
• • Luke woke up screaming.
Not from pain — there wasn’t any, not anymore.
From the dream still burning behind his eyes, teeth and dark and the long endless fall, Arrax’s name torn out of him before he’d even fully surfaced into whatever soft, unfamiliar bed he’d woken up in.
“Arrax—” He sat bolt upright, chest heaving, and the sob that came after the scream arrived without his permission, ugly and immediate.
His dragon.
His dragon.
He could still feel the exact shape of the moment Vhagar’s jaws closed, could still feel Arrax simply stop existing beneath him.
Three faces were watching him from a few feet away, wide-eyed and silent.
“…Hey,” said the boy with orange hair, cautious, like he was approaching something that might bolt.
“You’re okay.
You’re safe.” Luke didn’t feel safe.
He felt like he was still falling, just in a room now instead of open sky.
“Where—” His voice cracked.
“Where’s my dragon.” Nobody answered that right away, and something in the silence told him everything he didn’t want to know.
The girl — small, pink-haired, staring at him with unblinking directness — climbed up onto the end of the bed without asking.
“You cried a lot,” she informed him.
“Anya heard you.
Woke everyone up.” “Anya,” the boy with the scar on his forehead said, mild reproach, before turning back to Luke.
“I’m Harry.
That’s Naruto, that’s Anya.
You’re in Void City.” “Void City,” Luke repeated, like the words meant nothing, because they didn’t.
He went quiet for a moment, something surfacing slowly through the fog still sitting behind his eyes.
“There was a light,” he said.
“Before.
When I was falling.
I thought — I don’t know what I thought.
I grabbed it.” “That’s the invitation card,” Harry said.
“It’s how all of us got here too.
It just — shows up.
Right when you need it, I guess.” “I thought it was the gods,” Luke admitted, quiet, almost embarrassed by it now.
“Yeah, most people think that at first,” Naruto said.
“But Ari-sama is not a god.
Just…
don’t underestimate her either.
Nobody here’s afraid of her, but everyone respects her.
That’s different.” • • He ate without tasting much of anything, surrounded by strangers who all seemed to already know each other, all of them treating his presence with the same easy welcome they’d apparently given each other days ago.
By the time Mary gently suggested he visit the Exchange Center — “purely informational, at your own pace” — he’d stopped crying, at least on the outside.
The crystal read him in silence, the same way it had read everyone before him.
[Guest: Lucerys Velaryon] [Valyrian Bloodline — 8,500 Void Points.] [Dragonbond Affinity — 1,200 Void Points.] [Total Assessed Value — 9,700 Void Points.] “Close to Harry’s,” Mary observed, glancing between the numbers with quiet interest.
Luke didn’t much care about the number.
He cared, distantly, that whatever made him worth anything at all had a name attached to blood he’d never asked to carry, from a family that had just cost him the one thing that had actually been his.
• • He spent the points without much thought for what he was buying, mostly Health Pills and Vitality Pills in quantities well past what any one person needed — enough, he told himself, for a war that hadn’t stopped happening just because he’d been gone a few days.
He barely looked at the rest of the shop.
He was turning to leave when something caught his eye anyway.
[Sky Dragon — Juvenile, Bonded Companion — 4,000 Void Points.] The listing showed a small, silver-scaled creature, wings still too big for its body, eyes an unsettling, luminous blue.
Luke stared at the listing for a long time.
He bought it before he’d fully decided to.
The moment it curled into his arms, small and warm and blinking up at him with those strange blue eyes, a name came to him without much effort at all — something that had nothing to do with fire or war.
“Halcyon,” he said, testing it out loud.
The dragon chirped, as if in agreement, and that settled it.
• • Shipbreaker Bay.
Rhaenyra had not waited for an escort.
She had not waited for anything, walking down through wet sand with her skirts soaked to the knee, past soldiers who fell silent and stepped aside rather than meet her eyes.
Arrax lay in pieces along the shoreline — scale and bone, torn wing dragged half into the surf, the violence of what had happened to him written plainly across every broken length of him.
The tide came in slow and patient, pulling at the wreckage like it meant to carry the rest of him away too, given enough time.
Rhaenyra knelt beside what was left.
Her hands found a piece of cloth first — small, torn, dark with salt water rather than blood, though she couldn’t have said whether that made it better or worse.
She knew the fabric.
She’d had it made herself, chosen it herself, watched Luke pull it over his head that morning with the restless energy of a boy proud to be trusted with something that mattered.
She held it in both hands like it might still be warm.
It wasn’t.
Something in her chest, already hollowed by grief that morning, opened wider still, and this time there was no fire to stare into, no measured stillness to hide behind.
There was only sand and salt and the broken shape of her son’s dragon, and Rhaenyra Targaryen — Queen, heir, mother — folded forward over the wreckage and wept the way she hadn’t allowed herself to weep in years, raw and undignified and entirely alone with it, the sound swallowed by the wind coming off the water.
She stayed there long after the sobbing had stopped producing tears, long after her knees had gone numb in the wet sand, long after the soldiers behind her had quietly given up pretending not to watch.
Grief had worn itself down into something duller by then, something closer to exhaustion, and she knelt in the last of it with the piece of cloth still clenched in both fists, staring at nothing, waiting for a feeling she didn’t have a name for to finish arriving.
She did not hear anyone approach.
“…Mother?
Why are you crying?” She went still.
For one long moment she didn’t move at all, certain grief had finally cracked something loose in her mind for good — that she had imagined the voice entirely, conjured it out of sheer want, the way the drowning sometimes claim to hear singing.
She turned her head anyway.
Luke sat there in the sand beside her, whole.
Not a mark on him.
A small silver creature curled against his chest, wings tucked tight, and both arms full besides — a bundle of clothes that weren’t his, small bottles rattling faintly against each other.
Rhaenyra didn’t scream.
Didn’t sob.
Didn’t do anything the moment seemed to call for.
She simply stared at him, breath caught somewhere she couldn’t reach, one hand still closed around a shirt that had, until three seconds ago, been the last thing she had left of him.
“You’re—” Her voice didn’t work properly.
“You’re here.” “Yeah.” He glanced down at himself, uncertain, then at the dragon curled against him, as if checking that all of it was actually real.
“I don’t — I don’t really know how to explain where I was.” Rhaenyra reached for him before he’d finished the sentence, pulling him against her hard enough that the dragon let out a small, startled chirp between them.
“Mother, you’re squeezing kind of hard—” “Don’t,” she said, voice breaking apart entirely now.
“Don’t you dare finish that sentence.” He didn’t.
He simply let himself be held, silver wings twitching against his chest, a fistful of another world’s medicine crushed between them.
When she finally let go, Luke turned toward the wreckage still scattered along the shoreline, and something in his face went quiet in a different way.
He walked to it on his own, knelt down beside a torn piece of wing half-buried in the sand, and pressed his palm flat against the cold scale.
“I’m sorry,” he said, very softly, to the only part of Arrax the tide hadn’t taken yet.
“You didn’t deserve that.” He stayed there a long moment, shoulders shaking, quiet in a way that asked no one to comfort him for it.
Then he wiped his face with the back of one hand, stood, and let his mother lead him home.
• • Daemon was waiting in the yard by the time they reached the castle, and whatever composure he’d managed to hold together through the worst of the morning fell apart the moment he saw the boy walking beside her.
He crossed the distance in a few long strides and pulled Luke into his arms, hard, wordless, none of his usual restraint left in it.
Halcyon let out an indignant chirp, squeezed between them, and neither of them let go fast enough to spare him the trouble.
• • Dinner that night was smaller than usual — no council, no advisors, just Rhaenyra, Daemon, Jace, and Luke seated close together, Halcyon curled asleep in Luke’s lap like he’d always belonged there.
“Start from the beginning,” Daemon said.
“All of it.” So Luke did.
He told them about the storm, about breaking through the clouds and thinking, for one full breath, that they’d made it.
He told them about the shadow that came from the side, about teeth closing around Arrax before there’d been time to so much as scream, about falling with nothing beneath him and no reins left in his hands.
Jace had gone pale beside him, one hand gripping the edge of the table.
Then Luke told them about the light.
About the voice that asked him a question he hadn’t understood and answered anyway, because there hadn’t been anything left to lose by saying yes.
About waking up in a city built outside every world he knew, healed whole by a woman everyone there called City Lord.
“A city outside the world,” Daemon repeated, flat, clearly deciding whether to believe any of it.
“I know how it sounds,” Luke said.
“I didn’t believe it either.
But I’m here.
And I’m not hurt.
So.” He reached into the small satchel he’d brought with him and set its contents out on the table — bottles of pills, carefully labeled in a script none of them recognized, and folded lengths of dark, unfamiliar cloth.
“These cure most ordinary sickness,” he said, nudging the Health Pills toward his mother.
“And these are supposed to help with — I don’t know, just general wear and tear, I guess.
And the fabric doesn’t burn.
Or tear.
Or stain, really.
I thought it might be useful.
For the war.” He hesitated, then added, quieter, “I brought enough for all of you.” Rhaenyra turned one of the bottles over in her hands, still not entirely willing to let go of the disbelief sitting behind her eyes, though her fingers had gone gentle around it all the same.
Luke watched her for a moment, then allowed himself the first real, crooked grin since he’d woken up screaming.
“Also,” he said, “I should mention — I kind of spent every point I had.
All of it.
On this stuff, and him,” a nod toward the sleeping dragon, “so if anyone’s looking for a good investment opportunity, I’m now formally requesting a royal allowance.” Jace let out a startled laugh, more relief than humor, and even Daemon’s mouth twitched despite himself.
“You nearly died,” Rhaenyra said, “and your first order of business is asking your family to subsidize you.” “Priorities,” Luke said, entirely unrepentant, and reached down to steady Halcyon as he stirred against him.