Dragonstone, Hidden Stairway
Daemon looked at his son’s shocked face — expected enough, as Gaemon had never known about this hidden chamber.
But Daemon, and every other Targaryen who had visited Dragonstone more than ten times, knew of it.
Daemon picked up the torch he’d set down and shook Gaemon to draw him out of his musings.
“Let us make haste.
I can’t wait to see what awaits us on the other end,” Daemon said, his excitement leaking into his tone.
Without waiting for a reply, Daemon turned toward the stairs that stood between him and the lost knowledge of his house, and was already moving to skip the step that hosted the trap.
Before he could, Gaemon yanked him back by a hard fistful of his tunic.
“What are you thinking?” Gaemon asked, half-startled and half-angry.
“What do you think I’m doing?
I’m about to skip that cursed step and move past it to descend the stairs.” Daemon said, his own anger rising at being stopped and made to waste time they could have spent descending, time that stood between him and the hidden chamber he’d always wanted so badly to find.
“That is not how it works, Father.
This is a magic trap; it could very well be designed to do the same for every step after it, if we don’t deactivate it before moving forward.” Gaemon said as he stepped forward and pressed down on his finger.
Daemon watched in silence as a single drop of blood welled up, dripped onto the stair, and was drunk into the stone.
“They’re all traps for those not of Targaryen blood, I think.
She designed them so no intruder of foreign blood could enter this hidden stairway, or reach whatever lies below,” Gaemon murmured.
“Well, the Valyrians were masters of blood magic, so the bitch had no better option than tying these traps to our house’s blood,” Daemon said as he tentatively set his left leg — the one with its boot still on — onto the step.
There was no heat this time, no melting leather.
Daemon nodded and made his way forward, his son in tow.
“Keep your eyes open.
They’re the only thing standing between our deaths down here and the treasure we’ve set out to dig up.”
“I am keeping them open, but you’re making too much haste.
This whole corridor is soaked in so much potent mana that I need time to pick out the traps laid into the walls and the steps.” Gaemon said, his footsteps ringing behind Daemon.
They encountered many traps after that, but Gaemon caught every one before it could do either of them harm.
All of them tied to heat and wind, Daemon noticed.
Gaemon pointed out the Valyrian glyph for fire, then sketched another on the wall for Daemon to recognize — the one for wind.
One trap nearly slipped past them.
Gaemon had grown weary enough that his warning came late; Daemon’s foot was already hovering over a step that looked no different from any other when his son’s hand shot out and seized his shoulder.
“Stop.” The word came sharp and breathless.
Daemon froze mid-stride, weight held awkwardly on one leg, and looked down.
To his eyes there was nothing — only worn black stone.
But Gaemon was staring at the step as though it were a coiled viper.
“Wind,” he said quietly, pressing blood to the stone.
“If you’d set your foot down, it would have peeled the skin from your leg like a fruit.” Daemon lowered his foot slowly onto the disarmed step and decided, not for the first time, that he was glad the boy had come.
Daemon did not know how much time had passed, but the stairs seemed to have no end he could see.
Glancing back, he saw Gaemon growing slightly tired.
His son had endurance that might be called monstrous for his age, but the boy had outdone himself today — a morning of arms training, then a full day exploring the island, then the climb up the Stone Drum, and now this descent far beneath it.
Daemon could feel that they were well past the tower’s length by now, sinking into the ground the Stone Drum had been raised upon.
“It seems even Queen Visenya had her limits. Read this novel at g.com for the best experience.
The traps have gone almost nonexistent on whatever floor we’re on,” Gaemon remarked.
Daemon threw a glance over his shoulder and turned forward again with a smirk.
The boy hadn’t complained once — not of his legs, not of the endless stairs — though Daemon could see plainly, even in this dark, how fatigued he was.
Daemon’s train of thought halted as the stairs ended and a rough basalt path took up the way forward.
“It seems we’re getting close, Gaemon.
Look,” Daemon said, turning his body to the side so his son could see what lay ahead.
Gaemon’s face brightened at the sight of the stairs’ end, and Daemon’s smirk widened to match.
The stairway had been miserable for how cramped it was, and with no room for air to move, both of them were drenched down to their smallclothes.
Daemon hoped there might be another way in, because if there wasn’t, his brother Viserys would never manage the descent without at least three days and water enough to slake the thirst of the elephants Daemon had seen at the Great Council.
Snorting at his own thought, Daemon stepped down onto the rough basalt path, Gaemon behind him studying walls more uneven and unplanned than Daemon’s own worst impulses.
So his earlier guess had been right: they were well past the tower’s length now, down into the foundation it had been built upon.
“These do not look man-made, Father,” Gaemon said, eyeing the walls and the rounded, still-more-uneven ceiling.
“Because they aren’t.
These are one of the many lava tubes threading the underground of Dragonstone.
The shapes tell it plainly enough.
You can feel it too, can’t you?
The heat’s climbed.
We’re far beneath the ground Dragonstone was built upon.
No surprise no one ever found this hidden chamber, though many after Viserys tried.
One of them was my father — your grandfather — together with his brother, Aemon Targaryen.
Three days the two of them searched every corner of the keep and Dragonmont, and found nothing.” Daemon said, as Gaemon stopped him and disarmed another trap with a drop of blood.
“You said, back on Dragonstone, that there’s information on what magics the ancient Valyrians used.
Tell me of it.
At least that way I’ll know what to expect, what we’ll find in this deeply hidden chamber we’re crawling toward.” Gaemon asked, scanning the walls and the black rock of the lava tube for traps.
“Bending fire to their will is my favorite, because it makes true our name as the House of the Dragon.
Like our dragons, the ancient Valyrian sorcerers held dominion over flame.
Then there are the less savory practices — evil, the Andals and their Faith would call them — Blood Magic.
In that scroll, one line came again and again: only death can pay for life.
From that comes flesh-shaping, a branch of blood magic.
The Valyrian sorcerers mated man and beast and got children by the art.
The practice, diluted, was passed down to the Lyseni, who I’ve heard still practice it behind closed doors—”
“They really mated men with beasts?” Gaemon cut in.
Daemon caught the flicker of revulsion on his son’s face and let out a short laugh.
“You wanted the truth of Valyria, boy.
It was never a gentle place.” He went on.
“Last, and not least, the binding magic — the same our ancestors used to bind dragons to their blood.
Dragonbinder, it was called.
A few once existed in Valyria, but only ever in the hands of the wealthiest and most powerful dragonlord families.
Gone now, all of them — destroyed in the Doom, like Valyria itself.”
Gaemon said nothing for a few moments, and Daemon tried to guess where the tube might be leading them.
Dragonstone was built on the slopes of Dragonmont, so Daemon reckoned this tube might open on the western face of the mountain, directly opposite the keep on the northern side.
“Do you think the Valyrian steel swords and ornaments were lost to the Doom as well?” Gaemon asked, though Daemon heard well enough that it was no true question.
“Dragonsteel is indestructible by any means we know.
You can reshape it, but destroy it?
Near impossible.” Daemon replied, resting his hand on Dark Sister as he said it.
“Then don’t you think the dragonlords who owned a horn powerful enough to bind any dragon to their will would have wrought that horn from dragonsteel — or sheathed it in the metal, or locked it away in a chest of it?
What I mean, Father, is that these horns are a threat to the Targaryens.
To us.
What if some man mad enough to sail for Valyria returns alive with a few scraps of armor and one of those horns?
The most powerful weapon our house ever forged, turned against us.
There would be little we, or any Targaryen, could do if such a day ever came.” Gaemon’s words left Daemon confused for a breath before he laughed, the sound ringing loud down the hollow tube.
“You think a madman would survive the horrors that scarred Balerion, the Black Dread himself?
No number of madmen could ever return from Valyria once they set foot on that land.
The place where Valyria once stood has become the antithesis of life.
You needn’t even hear what became of Aerea Targaryen, who flew there on Balerion’s back.
Believe me — that thing gives even me chills.” Daemon said, and a faint shiver did pass through him as he said it.
He let it show a moment longer than he meant to.
Daemon had fancied himself an adventurer and explorer in his youth, and had announced, loudly and often, his intent to one day see Old Valyria — the land that had birthed his house.
So his grandfather had called him to his chamber and, without a single word, handed him a few pages of parchment.
What was written on them had painted the horror of Aerea’s final moments in colors Daemon had never been able to scrub from his mind.
From that day on, he had never once thought to bring Caraxes within a hundred leagues of Valyria.
Even now, standing in the dark with the heat rising around him, the memory of those pages sat colder in his gut than any trap on the stairs behind them.
Then he shook it off, the way he shook off most things.
“Time, Father — it washes away everything.
There will come a day when even the Doom loosens its grip on Valyria, and then it would take only a single madman to do what I’ve described.” Daemon waved a dismissive hand.
His son was still a child.
If Daemon remembered this conversation when Gaemon was grown, he would give him the same pages King Jaehaerys had given him.
Those words would open the boy’s eyes to the truth that some things can never be washed away, not even by time.
Asshai was proof enough of that.
“We’re here,” Daemon said aloud, though both of them could already see it.
Before them stood the entrance to the thing they’d come so far for.
The chamber door — if it could even be called a door; it was more a slab of rock shaped to sit flush with the wall.
Yet both Daemon and Gaemon looked upon it as though it were the greatest work man had ever made.