The Hidden Chamber
“If there is one place I’d wager she set a trap without fail, it’s this door.
So look carefully, Gaemon.
Check whether this one is the same as the others,” his father warned.
And he was right — there was a trap, the mana coiled inside the rock, compressed and tensed like an angry snake ready to strike.
But this mana didn’t flow the way it had in the traps Gaemon had disarmed so far.
There was no single point here for his blood to unlock, and the glyphs were many, layered over one another.
Still, Gaemon had spent long enough reading the movement of mana to tell the difference that mattered: a trap meant to kill on contact pulled its mana taut and straight, ready to snap outward the instant it was touched.
This one didn’t.
Its mana turned in slow circles, wound but not sprung.
Whatever it was built to do, it wouldn’t do it the moment a hand fell on the stone.
So the question was how to deal with it.
There was no doubt the mana in the door was a trap, set to keep whatever lay beyond safe from others.
But there was no key here to disarm it — no drop of blood, no single point to press.
Perhaps Visenya had laid this one on her final visit, so that no one after her could pass without heavy cost, or never pass at all and never reach what she’d hidden.
No.
That couldn’t be it.
Daemon’s view of the woman might be biased, but Gaemon’s wasn’t.
Why would Visenya, one of the Conquerors, seal away the last magic of Valyria for good, when her own son still lived at the time of her death?
She would want it found — by the right blood, at least.
Which meant the door wasn’t built to be impassable.
It was built to be passable only by someone who belonged.
“What is it, Gaemon?
Will blood not work here?” Gaemon turned toward his father and found impatience and something close to panic.
Daemon was restless, and he would do something reckless if Gaemon didn’t find a solution soon.
“No.
This trap is harder, and different from any we’ve met so far,” Gaemon replied, and explained the flow of the mana, and his reasoning about why Visenya would never have sealed the knowledge away for life.
“Hmm.” His father hummed, eyes drifting back to the flush stone they were calling a door.
“You said this one recognizes the mana of others, same as the ones before — but it doesn’t ask for blood to do it.
Yes?” Gaemon nodded, mildly surprised; his father could be shrewd when he cared to be.
Daemon nodded back, and with that confident, borderline arrogant smirk of his, stepped toward the door with the plain intention of opening it like any other door in the Red Keep.
Gaemon’s eyes went wide.
He reached to grab his father’s tunic and haul him back as he had before — but this time it was he who was dragged, rather than Daemon who was stopped.
“You foolish son of mine.
This trap doesn’t need blood to know a man’s mana, the way the earlier ones did.
It’s made of a more advanced form of magic than that.” Daemon halted before the door, Gaemon behind him with shock on his face and a fistful of tunic still clutched in his hand.
Gaemon watched the door’s mana with a tight, concentrated stare as his father pushed against it.
The stone didn’t budge, but the mana did.
It pulsed against the hand Daemon had laid on it, testing — and then, after a few pulses, it withdrew, its flow unchanged.
The mana had tasted him, found the Targaryen blood in him, and settled.
Gaemon released his father’s tunic and looked at last upon the chamber he’d worn his legs to the bone for.
Small was his first thought.
He’d grown used to the great halls of this world, and by that measure the chamber was small — only ten or twelve paces across.
Three bookshelves.
A single desk bearing an iron brazier, its flame already burning gold and bright with no wood or fuel of any kind to feed it.
And a low table set with a carved map, much like the Painted Table on the summit of the Stone Drum.
“So I was right.” Three words that pulled Gaemon from his wonder.
He turned to find his father’s face full of self-satisfied pride, plainly awaiting praise for a reckless, foolish act.
“For once — and that was pure luck.
Did you stop, even for a heartbeat, to think what might have become of us both if you’d been wrong?” Gaemon asked, disappointed and thoroughly disgruntled.
“I’m a warrior, boy.
When I take a step forward, I don’t do it because I had faith in luck, or in some fate that’ll swoop in to save me.
I trust my gut and my instincts — the things I honed in the training yards and the same things that saved me multiple times in real battles.
They told me to go for it, and the result is standing right in front of you.
Had we done it your way, we’d still be out there gawking at that stone, wringing our hands over whether to try or turn back.” Daemon said, half-snarling.
“Oh?
And it was my hands and my thoughts that got us here in the first place.
Where were those honed instincts of yours — many years honed and tested in real battle — when you couldn’t spot a door, let alone a trap that near killed you?” Gaemon said with a snort.
Ungrateful ass of a father.
Daemon let out a small chuckle, but there was no mockery in it, and no joy.
It came out on pure frustration and bottled anger.
Gaemon was about to glance sidelong, to check whether the man had lost his wits — but before he could, Daemon’s hand shot toward his throat with the speed of lightning.
Gaemon saw it before it was even fully raised; his Six Eyes caught the intent to harm and traced the path it would take.
But he could move only a little before Daemon caught him all the same, effortlessly.
His slight flinch changed what Daemon had reached for.
Instead of the throat, his father’s fist closed on the collar of his tunic — and slowly hauled Gaemon off his feet, up into the air, until they were eye to eye.
“Hold your tongue before me, Gaemon.
You’re my son.
That buys you some leeway.
It does not buy you the right to say whatever you please to my face.
And I do not like it — least of all from you — when you talk back to me like that.” Daemon said through gritted teeth.
“Don’t do anything stupid, and I’ll hold my tongue.” Gaemon snorted again, this time squarely in Daemon’s face.
If his rogue of a father thought he could frighten him, he was sorely mistaken.
That laugh rang out once more as Gaemon was dropped unceremoniously to the floor.
“One day.
One day, if you keep walking this path of rebellion, you’ll meet not the father I’ve been to you, but the Daemon Targaryen this whole world fears and flees from.
For your sake, I hope that day never comes — for I respected your mother far too much to ever inflict harm on you.” Gaemon caught his balance as his father strode past him into the chamber, anger in every step.
Once he was steady on his feet, Gaemon huffed, watching Daemon make straight for the map and the desk.
Out of pure childish spite, Gaemon went the other way, to the bookshelves.
The shelf was tall, and Gaemon — for now — was not, so he made his peace with the books and scrolls set low within his reach.
He looked to his father, who was already looking back at him.
Perhaps it was the horror on Gaemon’s face that drew him over.
Daemon crossed the room and read the scroll over his son’s shoulder.
A few moments later, a roaring laugh burst out of him, so loud that Gaemon flinched despite bracing for it.
His father laughed, and laughed, and laughed still, until tears stood in his eyes.
“Serves you right, I’d say,” Daemon managed, still laughing at Gaemon’s expense.
The scroll was written in High Valyrian.
Gaemon checked a few more while his father howled behind him — every one of them High Valyrian, not a word he could read.
Dispirited, he sulked his way over to the carved table, the second most interesting thing in the chamber.
“Gods, I can’t recall the last time I laughed like that.
You’ve made my day, my son.
Come, give your lord father a fatherly embrace, and perhaps I’ll read you what that scroll says.
Come here, Gaemon — hahaha!” While Daemon was busy drowning in his own laughter, Gaemon tried to ignore the barbs and swallow his embarrassment as he studied the carved map.
It was not a map of Westeros, like the one above.
It was far smaller than the Painted Table, yet far more was carved into it.
And when Gaemon shifted to view it from the opposite angle, he understood what he was looking at.
Then he saw something that left him confused and curious in equal measure.
“You recognize what’s carved here?” His father asked, coming to stand beside him.
“It’s near enough Westeros if I squint, but there’s no bridge joining it to any land east or west.
So why does this other land exist, and where?
Perhaps it’s only a bit of furniture, something to give this dull hole in the ground a little life.” Daemon said, eyeing the carving.
“You’re right that it’s Westeros.
And the land joined to it is Essos.
This bridge existed long before the Children of the Forest shattered it — the act remembered as the Breaking.
There are no Free Cities here, no Valyria, because this map shows the world as it was before either was founded.
If I’m not mistaken, this is how the world looked ten thousand years ago.
Perhaps longer.” Gaemon revealed, marveling at the golden dawn carved into the far east, the only brightly painted thing on the whole table.
He could tell Visenya had wanted that part rendered with the greatest care.
“If this is ten thousand years past, then this must be here,” Daemon said, pointing to that golden dawn, its light spilling over a dragon egg crowned in the far east.
“The Empire of the Dawn — I’ve read no end about it.
The scrolls above name it the greatest empire before Valyria, spanning nearly all the known world.
But why place a dragon egg there?
The Dawn I understand, and the crown.
Yet dragons were never bound up with the Empire of the Dawn.”
Fair warning to the impatient: nothing here gets locked behind a paywall.
If the story’s earned it, the support means more than I’ll admit in public.
Fair warning to the impatient: nothing here gets locked behind a paywall.
If the story’s earned it, the support means more than I’ll admit in public.