Chapter Text
“Oh, hello.”
The chirpy greeting - he thinks it’s a greeting anyway - has no place within his dreams.
Daeron Targaryen’s dreams do not weave chirpy greetings for him to respond to. His dreams are an indistinct world of muddled metaphors, inevitable premonitions, and tragedies made clear only in retrospect.
Rarely is something ever presented to him in an orderly fashion and, often, he’s found those prophetic visions to be the most frightening of the lot. The inexorability of it all, of knowing with clarity what is to come, but being able to do nothing to defy it?
That’s the worst.
His gaze is drawn once again to the three stalks of wheat that are withering away before his eyes, a malicious kind of ailment to them that Daeron, with his lack of knowledge upon tending to the land, does not understand. All he knows is that it fills him with a sense of dread so deep that it digs into his very marrow.
(In three days, he shall hear that Lord Selmy of Harvest Hall has met the Stranger, dead of a wasting disease that has ravaged his body. For now though, Daeron remains ignorant.)
“Heavens, it’s no wonder you were throwing prayers out to whoever may answer.”
This time, at the exclamation from the same voice, Daeron turns to the source. He’s not sure what he expects - some metaphor or another, some representation that escapes him - but the sight that greets him is both unsurprising - it is a woman’s voice, so a woman is to be expected - and a total shock.
A young lady stands beside him, her hands folded neatly before her body, her gaze on the withering wheat, not him. She’s clothed - for Daeron does not get to experience those kinds of dreams; it’s always the horrors for him, a night where he doesn’t dream is a rare relief - but the fabric’s cut and styling is foreign. It’s silk, he recognises that much. Swathes of the stuff, and folded strategically so that it only gives suggestions of the body that lies beneath— it does not advertises. In Westeros, even so much as hinting towards a woman’s curves like this would be the mark of a whore, but—
It’s silk. All silk.
Daeron may not be an expert upon fashion, but he knows enough to recognise the woman wears a lower lord’s ransom. Coupled with the crisp golden patterns woven into the fabric…
Definitely not a whore. Whoever this woman is that his dreams have chosen to fixate on, she’s from good stock. Not that it matters.
They’re all the same before the Stranger.
Even pretty young ladies with the silvery-gold hair of Valyria.
Her eyes aren’t though; they’re strange. A brown so bright, so saturated, that they verge dangerously close to orange, to the veins of magma that Daeron had found upon Dragonstone when exploring with Valarr some years ago.
And then the realisation comes. The shock comes.
For she is not interacting with the other elements, not gazing upon what is happening around her.
She’s looking directly at him.
Like she can see him.
“Do you still wish for aid, Daeron Targaryen?” she asks, tilting her head to one side in such a way that her silken riot of curls spills over one shoulder, pouring down the curve of a tanned arm bared from the folds of her deceptively complex dress.
Daeron swallows, working his throat, suddenly unsure.
The dreams do not address him. He is only ever an observer. Nothing ever meets his gaze, nothing ever acknowledges him, be it with a reaction or the spoken word.
Yet, the woman does.
She is perhaps a few inches taller than he, in spite of her naked soles being planted in the same stance as his own booted feet. He will continue to grow, but she is perhaps taller than the average woman, limbs willowy in a way that makes her appear graceful for it instead of awkward.
“Aid?” he questions tentatively, watching those unusually eyes fixate on his face, linger on every cut upon his jaw (for Father had grown disgruntled with the scruff that he has begun sporting there and instructed him to go receive his first shave; Daeron had attempted it himself instead and made a dreadful mess of half his face in the process).
She meets his gaze and a soft smile - the likes of which he has not seen since his mother passed three moons ago - touches her curving lips.
“Aid,” the woman repeats, extending one hand towards him, her palm up, fingers spread in offering. “You requested help in managing your dragon dreams.”
And it washes over Daeron, a shock of winter’s harsh breath crashing down upon him.
Prior to falling asleep, having suffer near a sennight of nightmares, an endless procession of dreams from which there was no abatement, Daeron had dropped to his knees and thrown out a prayer, begging for the gods - any god at all - to bring him relief. Even just a single night to sleep undisturbed… all he needs is a break.
But for her to know this—
Daeron looks upon the woman again, suddenly noticing all too well just how very off her face is. Valyrian and otherworldly for it, yes, but there’s more to it than that. It’s in the shape of her eyebrows, how she tilts her chin, how her smile doesn’t rise so much as curves across her face.
Is—
“My name is Baeraxes,” the woman says, her hand still extended before her. “Can you recall a couple of moons ago? Your learned men should have heard of one of the Fourteen Flames sprouting a new volcano? A satellite volcano is the correct term, though I feel that’s lost upon you…” She trails off, withdrawing her hand to tuck an errant lock behind her ear.
And Daeron can only stare, the rest of the dream forgotten. For… what is this? What does this dream mean, to present him with the visage of—
“Anyway,” Baeraxes continues, brushing down her silks and Daeron tries - and fails - not to notice how the motion pulls as the fabric, allowing a little more translucency— he’s near a man grown now, such a thing will catch his eye, even if it is maybe blasphemous. She continues, either unknowing or ignoring it, “You threw that prayer out without intending it to any specific god, and given you’re of Valyrian descent… you’re the first to address me, in a roundabout way.”
The look she gives, an expression akin to childish guilt, the sheepish look of a cherubic girl who knows they have done wrong but is confident none shall find fault with her— it doesn’t belong on the face of a deity.
It remains anyway.
“You’re…” The words fail him. Daeron works his tongue around his mouth, tries to stretch the sentence out from between his teeth, but verbal communication is lost to him. All he can do is gaze helplessly at the woman who just smiles back at him, flicking her gaze down once, twice. Thrice.
He follows at the third, glances down, finds her hand there once again, held out to him.
Do you still wish for aid, Daeron Targaryen?
Does the sun still rise in the east? Does the hound still howl?
Daeron reaches forward, hesitates, palm just above hers.
Daeron Targaryen wakes, the taste of smoke in his mouth, the sensation of ash between his fingertips, and, for once, his vague dreams are not due to their nature.
He can still feel the hand within his own.
He spends the day in a wispy kind of haze; not the sweat-slicked exhaustion that comes from witnessing the obscured terrors as normal, but a light indistinctness that clings to him even now, in his waking hours.
It’s not a case of waking visions, for all that they have been known to haunt him in the past. He is both frightfully present and utterly absent at the same time.
He moves through the day in a daze, one that his father’s staff mistake for grief, the wound of his mother’s death still raw, still haunting the household even now, moons later. It’s painfully present in the way his father’s face has hardened, in the way Aerion runs wilder, in the way Aemon disappears into his books and Daella sews until her fingers bleed. Aegon can barely grasp the concept of death, young as he is, and Rhae… Rhae’s too young to hope to remember when she ages.
They all know it.
And Daeron? Daeron drinks.
He drinks more than his mother allowed when she still graced Summerhall with her presence, and there’s no one present enough to stop him from trying to drown his dragon-dreams in Arbor Red or honeyed wine. Whatever he can get his hands on, really.
Still, he’s not so far into his cups that he misses when the maesters talk, doesn’t miss the mention of the new volcano to the east, nestled within the smoking sea, a volcano they suspect to be branching from Balerion’s beneath the surface of the boiling ocean.
And he doesn’t miss when the maester confirms the name of the new volcano— Baeraxes.
“When I said to go explore the remnants of Valyria, I was referring to the location, not the people.”
Lowering himself to sit beside her, Balerion, Valyrian God of Death and Fire and a whole lot of other domains, levels an accusatory gaze her way as he stretches out his long legs.
Baeraxes studiously ignores him.
Before them, the still smoking ruins of Old Valyria, the greatest empire this world has ever seen, stretch far beyond what even their immortal eyes can see, it’s dilapidated structures and corroded architecture that’re still littered across the barren landscape made muzzy by the toxic fumes.
Though perhaps barren is not yet the correct term, given the horrors that currently exist within the heart of the ancient civilisation…
“Can it be referred to as ancient yet?” Baeraxes asks, abrupt, her gaze sharpening as one of those dragon-devouring monsters emerges from a self-styled hole in the earth, its myriads of teeth gleaming black beneath the rising sun.
Lightning surges, exploding from a wisp-thin cloud, striking the beast in an act of divine intervention so obvious that it has Baeraxes eyeing the god beside her.
The dark smile that lifts Balerion’s lips is confirmation enough. It is quick to depart from his face though, and those burning red eyes swiftly turn on her, his expression stern, and she knows there’s no escaping his earlier statement.
“Baeraxes.”
“Can it really be classified as exploring if I’ve only interacted with one descendant?”
Balerion heaves out a sigh, a heavy thing, the kind that makes broad shoulders hunch and wise heads shake, as if mystified by the stupidity of a younger generation that doesn’t know better.
It has Baeraxes’ own shoulders tensing, a mulish tilt to her mouth, hands curling into the silks of her dress. She says, “I didn’t know them. Not like you and the rest of the Fourteen did.”
“Fifteen,” Balerion corrects, not gently, for he is a god made of death and fire and shaped into the approximation of a man. There’s a weight to him, an omnipotence to his presence that cannot be overlooked, cannot be dismissed. Coupled with his colouring, so akin to the namesake that’d torn through the skies in the west? Skin darker than any she has seen before, eyes a red so blistering they scorch?
No. Nothing about Balerion is gentle.
He can, however, be considerate.
“Fifteen,” Baeraxes dutifully repeats, “though I don’t think the humans will be so swift to change their tune from the ballad we once witnessed.”
It goes unspoken between them that, of the remaining fourteen, none have appeared before Baeraxes to welcome her to their pantheon, broken and bygone as it is.
Perhaps even Balerion himself would not have been here had her own volcano not been a parasite of his, a satellite crafted from the explosive power of his own domain.
As things stand, Balerion had been the one to decide he wished to experience as close to an approximation of ‘fatherhood’ as a god can do. As Athena had once sprung from Zeus’ skull fully formed, Baeraxes too has come into this world far beyond her infancy. She has, well—
“Why do I remember a past life?”
Balerion does not look to her, instead eyeing the smoking carcass he has made of the dragon-devourer, contemplating, perhaps, if he wishes to make something of it. A meal, perhaps.
And that truly is a blessing of the gods, that she has escaped whatever concept Balerion would classify as ‘food’. Inhuman or not, Baeraxes is rather sure she wouldn’t have been able to stomach that eldritch horror for her supper.
“Because you are a god,” her sire settles upon after a moment of thought, “and gods cannot be born knowing nothing.”
What Baeraxes hears there is that Balerion did not have the time nor patience to raise a true child from infancy, hence why she had awoken in this body fully formed.
The wind picks up, sending searing sand - sand that would burn a human - scattering across their bared feet.
Neither of them flinch, neither of them give the particles any true worth.
Instead, Balerion turns to her again, his crimson eyes in brilliant contrast to his dark face beneath the cresting sun. Then, he gestures to ruins of Valyria with one lazy wave, an expression that doesn’t suggest grief for the people gone, but perhaps grief for what they could have become – or maybe even what they once were – as he says, “They were hardly worth knowing. Not by the end.”
And the visceral need to ask, to confirm if the destruction of Valyria – which originated from the Fourteen Flames erupting – was in fact a case of divine intervention, pours through Baeraxes like wildfire, vivid and relentless.
By some miracle, she pushes it down.
There are some questions to which answers are not supposed to be known.
“Are you going to forbid me?”
“From knowing them?” Balerion snorts, red eyes rolling, the air around his human nostrils smoking in a distinctly non-human way. “No. But know this; they will disappoint you. Humanity persists, and humanity disappoints.”
“And yet, the gods remain steadfast.”
“The gods rarely, if ever interact anymore. Perhaps those of the North may gift a child or two, perhaps the Seven may bless a maiden or favour a knight.”
“And the Fourteen?” Baeraxes questions, gaze upon her hands, cupping her knees with her palms, legs half drawn up to her chest and tangled in her silks for it.
“And the Fifteen,” Balerion corrects yet again. “The Fifteen… allow their newest member the freedom to make her own decisions, to know her people, just as they once did thousands of years ago before the race of men proved themselves… disappointing.”
And there’s little that Baeraxes can say in response to that, is there?