The silence in the room wasn't just quiet; it was sacred. And then, it was broken by the sound of knees hitting stone.
Kellan, the normally unshakable Castellan who had stood firm through decades of storms and political turmoil, had collapsed forward. He didn't just bend; he sank to his knees before my nightstand, his head bowed in what looked like genuine prayer. For a man born on Dragonstone, dragons weren't just history they were the island's soul. Seeing an egg, real and warm, was like seeing a god descend to earth.
I stared at him, then at the others, feeling the sudden, sharp sting of being the only person in the room not speaking the language of myth.
"Come on," I said, breaking the spell with a dismissive wave. I forced a grin, trying to steer the conversation back to territory where I felt comfortable. "It's pretty, aye, but think about what this means for our coffers! Think of how much gold we can extract from this when we sell it to the highest bidder in Pentos or Braavos!"
The reaction was instantaneous. The awe vanished, replaced by a wave of collective fury so potent I felt it like a physical blow. Larys looked at me with genuine disgust, as if I had just suggested we sell the castle's foundation stones for scrap. Gareth looked physically pained, his mouth hanging open as if my words had personally insulted every coin he'd ever counted. Even Olyvar's smirk vanished, replaced by a hard, dangerous glare.
They didn't look like my council anymore. They looked like a congregation of saints who had just watched a demon walk into their temple.
"What?" I stammered, my smile faltering as I backed away from them toward my bed. "What? It's just an object. An asset. Why are you all looking at me like I just kicked a puppy?"
"You are mad," Larys breathed, his voice shaking with indignation. "Prince Vaegon, this is not a piece of jewelry or a shipment of grain. This is the rebirth of your house! This is the power to make kings kneel and empires crumble!"
"Exactly," Gareth added, and for the first time in his life, he wasn't talking about profit margins. His face was flushed. "The gold from selling it would be a fortune for a year, but the prestige of hatching it? The political leverage? That is worth more than every gold mine in the Westerlands combined! To sell it would be the stupidest financial decision in the history of commerce!"
Even Kellan spoke without rising from his knees, his voice muffled but fervent. "My Prince, the people of this island have waited generations to see the dragons return. If word spreads that you found a dragon and sold it for coin, you will not be seen as a merchant prince. You will be seen as a traitor to your own blood and to the very stone of Dragonstone."
I looked from Kellan to Olyvar, who was shaking his head in disbelief. I felt like the only sane person in a room full of fanatics. To me, this was a world of survival, numbers, and cold politics. These people were talking about legacy and destiny as if they actually meant something.
"I'm the one who found it," I argued, though I felt myself losing ground. "I'm the one who crawled through sulfur and ash while you all stayed here debating dock depths. Why shouldn't I be the one to decide what happens to it?"
"Because you're young and foolish," Olyvar growled, though there was a strange note of respect in his voice now. "And because you're too clever for your own good. Stop thinking like a shopkeeper for one damn minute and look at what's in front of you."
I looked back at the egg. The blood red spots seemed to glow brighter under their collective attention. I wanted to dismiss it again, to call it a rock and talk about the Iron Bank, but something about their reaction this raw, unfiltered devotion made me hesitate.
I let out a long, weary sigh, rubbing my temples. The tension in the room was suffocating, and their sanctimonious stares were making my skin crawl. I needed to puncture this bubble of myth before they started treating me like a prophet instead of a prince.
"I can't hatch it," I said flatly, my voice cutting through their reverent silence like a knife. "You all know that. None of us can. Magic hasn't been a real force in this world since before my grandfather was born. It's not something you just summon with a prayer and some expensive incense."
I turned to Vaelen, knowing he would understand the cold reality of the world better than anyone else here. "Tell them, Vaelen. Remind them that we live in a world of steel, coin, and blood, not fire and blood."
Vaelen stepped forward, his one eye scanning the room with its usual detached calculation. He didn't share the awe of the others; he looked at the egg as one might look at a dangerous, unexploded siege engine. This chapter was taken from novelping . com without permission.
"The Prince is correct," Vaelen said, his voice quiet but carrying the weight of centuries of accumulated knowledge. "Magic is a fading ember, a memory held by old women and madmen. To believe that a dragon would simply wake because it was touched by a Targaryen is to indulge in dangerous superstition."
He glanced at the egg, then back at me. "The world has become transactional, Your Highness. Dragons belonged to an era where fate was written in flames. Now, fate is written in ledgers and contracts. Without the proper blood rituals, without the ancient knowledge that died with the last dragonlords, that egg is merely a very beautiful, very expensive piece of stone."
"Exactly," I said, feeling the relief of being understood. "So stop looking at me like I've committed sacrilege. It's an asset. A rare, priceless asset, but an asset nonetheless."
"An asset that could change everything if you were wrong," Kellan muttered, though he finally rose from his knees, looking exhausted.
"But I'm not wrong," I countered, meeting his gaze. "And we have work to do. Larys, get back to the docks. Gareth, I want those projections for the grain shipments on my desk by dawn. We have an empire to build, and we can't do it while staring at a rock."
"Nevertheless," Vaelen interrupted, his voice cutting through my dismissal with that particular brand of calm that always preceded a complication. "I believe we should keep it. And I will make it my personal mission to see if we can find methods to hatch it."
I nearly stumbled backward, my heel catching on the rug. I stared at him in genuine betrayal. "Not you too, Vaelen!" I exclaimed, throwing my hands up in frustration. "You're the one who just gave me a lecture on transactional reality! You're the Master of Whisperers, for fuck's sake, not a maester studying dragon lore!"
I reached up and ruffled my own hair which had grown quite long over the months, falling into my eyes in messy black waves as if trying to shake the madness out of the room. I felt like I was the only person left who remembered how to count to ten.
Vaelen didn't flinch at my outburst. Instead, he looked at me with a smile a real one, rare and unsettling. It wasn't the smile of a schemer; it was the smile of a man who had seen something in me that I hadn't even acknowledged myself.
"If there is one person in this realm who can hatch it, it's you, my lord," Vaelen said quietly.
I stopped mid motion, my hand still in my hair. "Why? Because I'm a Targaryen? I just told you that's not enough."
"Not because you are a Targaryen," Vaelen replied, stepping closer. "But because you are an outsider. You see this world differently. You have survived things that would have broken any other prince. You've built something from nothing in the Green Hills when everyone said it was impossible. You don't follow the rules of this world, Vaegon. And magic... magic has never been about following rules. It's about breaking them."
The room went quiet again, but this time it wasn't about the egg. It was about me. I looked at Vaelen, then at the charcoal grey egg pulsing with heat on my nightstand. For a second, the idea of being the one to bring fire back to the world didn't seem so ridiculous it seemed like just another problem to solve, another impossible thing to make real.
Kellan, a man who had served as Castellan through years of hardship and had seen the worst of the Targaryen legacy first hand, sank to his knees before me. His scarred hands trembled slightly as he lowered his head, his voice thick with emotion.
"Please, my Prince," he whispered, the words rough and desperate. "At least try. I know I don't have the right to ask you this after everything you've done for Dragonstone and the Peninsula. You saved us from starvation, you gave us hope when we were forgotten by the Crown. I know I have no claim to ask for anything more."
He looked up at me, and for the first time, I saw tears welling in the eyes of the old soldier. "But please. For the people of this island. For the memory of what we once were. I beg you."
I stared at him, feeling a familiar, uncomfortable tightness in my chest. I wanted to scoff. I wanted to tell him that I wasn't a savior, that I was just a guy who knew about crop rotation and supply chains. But how could I refuse this? Kellan wasn't asking for a political favor or a gold coin; he was asking for a miracle on behalf of a people who had nothing left but their pride and their black stone. Get faster updates on novelping.com.
I looked from the kneeling Castellan to the expectant faces of my council. Even Olyvar was silent now, watching me with an expression that lacked its usual mockery.
"Seven hells," I muttered, running a hand through my messy hair. "You're all going to make me do this, aren't you?"
I looked back at the egg on the nightstand, its blood red spots seeming to pulse in time with my own heartbeat. I didn't believe in destiny, and I certainly didn't believe in magic. But as I looked at Kellan, I realized that building an empire wasn't just about grain and ports. It was about giving people something to believe in.
"Fine," I said with a dramatic groan, though I couldn't quite hide the spark of curiosity in my eyes. "I'll try. But if this thing turns out to be nothing more than a very expensive paperweight, I'm selling it to the Iron Bank anyway. Deal?"
Kellan's face transformed into a smile of pure relief. "Deal, my Prince."
***
The next few days were a descent into something approaching madness. I became obsessed. The practical, calculating part of my brain the part that built the Green Hills was screaming at me that I was wasting valuable time, but another part, a part I didn't quite recognize, wouldn't let me stop.
I tried everything. I placed the egg in the heart of the hearth in my chambers, letting the flames lick at its scales until the room became unbearably hot, but the egg remained stubbornly inert, its pulse faint and unchanging.
I tried the blood. I took a dagger and made small, stinging cuts across my palms, letting the crimson droplets seep into the porous surface of the charcoal grey shell. Nothing. No glow, no crack, no sound. Just cold, unyielding stone.
Frustration began to gnaw at me like hunger. When the experiments failed, I couldn't bear to sit in my room staring at it, so I took it with me.
I spent my afternoons wandering through the garden I had built, the egg cradled in my arms like some strange, priceless child. The other council members watched me from the windows as I walked past, their expressions ranging from concern to amusement, but I didn't care.
"You know, you're being very difficult," I whispered to the egg as I walked past a cluster of newly planted lavender. The sun was warm on my neck, but the egg remained cool, despite the heat of my body. "Most things respond to effort. Fire, steel, even people. But you? You're just... stubborn."
I sat on a stone bench near the center of the garden, where the scent of damp earth and growing herbs was strongest. I ran my thumb over one of the blood red spots.
"What do you want from me?" I asked it quietly, my voice lost in the rustle of the leaves. "Do you want more blood? More heat? Or are you just waiting for something I don't understand?"
I sat there for hours, talking to the stone, telling it about the wind in the Green Hills, about the way the sea looked at dawn, and about the loneliness of being a prince who was never meant to be one. I spoke to it because it was the only thing in this world that didn't expect me to be anything other than what I was: a boy trying to make sense of a broken world.