Chapter Text
You cannot live in your dreams. Every dreamer knows this. It is an indelible fact, the one truth binding them to the ground as surely as their brethren without their dragons. Dreams are the rushing eaters of potential, the creeping inevitability of the possible. Every dreamer knows this.
Dreamers are creatures of faith. Ones who live in the air, as certain as their dragonrider siblings. They fly, ephemeral, built on tenuous conviction. The stones of prophecy rise from a foundation of pure belief, thinner than a wing’s membrane, translucent if held to the light. It doesn’t pay to look too closely. To fall into fascination with your own dreams is to risk becoming a thrall to your own fancies, your own fears. Every dreamer knows this.
Every dreamer but her, for she is the first.
The first dream is of blood, and birth. The girl on the bed twists and cries out, her pale face wet with tears and sweat, glimmering like a ghost in the suffocating dark.
“Give her air, for pity’s sake,” the dreamer says, but they do not hear her, this wisp from the past. Instead, the stifling darkness, and the screams, and the iron-tang in the close air, like the iron-clash outside, far away.
The girl on the bed hears it too, her eyes fluttering shut, bloodless, bitten lips moving in a prayer that will be fruitless.
The baby emerges before the clashing below ceases; a small, wrinkled thing, little worth the cost, she thinks. But she has never cared for children, not since her own siblings were small. Still, she creeps closer as red blooms over the linens, as his mother whispers something to the baby only the three of them hear, as footsteps race up the stairs.
The child opens iron-grey eyes and sees her, and in the city of Valyria, Susaenya Pevynsae wakes with a sense of foreboding the silence of the night cannot quell.
“Bad dreams again, Su? Not the one where all the Fourteen Flames erupt at once, I hope. I do dislike hearing of that one.” Though it’s beneath her dignity, she flicks her little brother’s ear as he passes, reeking of dragon. Her siblings always do.
“That won’t happen for millennia, I’ve told you,” she says, leaning against the parapet, watching as Aedmond shakes silver hair from his eyes, tugging off one leather glove with his teeth. “If it should ever happen at all.”
“A problem for someone else to worry about, I say.” Hopping up to sit on the wall beside her, he ignores the thinning of her mouth. None of them fear falling, not the way she does, but Aedmond is by far the worst. “Jadix and I could distract you, if you like.”
His dragon sits in the massive yard below them, white scales and long, elegant neck gleaming in the sun, one black eye rolling in their direction at the sound of her name. Su shudders. “She doesn’t like me. I’d prefer to go with Luce on Azlan if I’ve an urge to take to the skies, thank you very much.”
Her brother shrugs. “She doesn’t like anyone. But she’ll suffer you on her back if I ask it of her. Or ask Pete.” From some inner pocket, he withdraws a handful of sugared almonds, popping one in his mouth. “Caxspyan adores you.”
“And Petaerys does not like to share him, no matter how he likes to act the generous and lordly head of the family,” she says, stealing an almond for herself. “That is a bond that will allow no others. Besides, this business of flying was your idea. Some of us are perfectly happy on the ground.”
She doesn’t meet his eyes as she says it; Aedmond has always been the most perceptive of her siblings, the one most able to see past her facades, her masks and manners. From the corner of her eye, he studies her like a book, and below them, Jadix shivers, resettling her black-edged wings along her back with a snort that sounds suspiciously like derision. “As you like,” he says, eventually. “What was the dream this time, then?”
Under her fingers, the sun-warmed wall carries a chill. “A child. A doomed child.” Shadows shift with Aedmond, and the white stone between her fingers turns grey.
“Well,” he says, voice so soft the breeze nearly blows his words away, like ash from the mountains, “that’s a thing we’ve no lack of experience with.”
Dreams bring her pieces of him, layers of life flowing into one another like lava down the slopes. A lonely little boy, different and excluded, crying under unfamiliar trees, bone white and blood red. An older child, stiff with fierce, wounded pride, eyes already shuttered against an unfriendly world. A boy tipping over the edge of a man, forsaking his life to an oath below a wall of ice; a man who grows, and loses, wins and loses again and again, until all his love is stripped away, and her heart bleeds to watch.
A man who falls beneath knives in the dark, falling in a wasted welter of blood, staining the cold white ash below.
Again and again, she dreams of it. She wakes with a throat torn ragged with screaming, with hands that sting from phantom cuts where she’s caught at falling blades, with a heart that burns with all the fire of the Fourteen.
“Why this one?” Lucerya sits in their garden, back to a lemon tree, a pile of tawny scales and leather in her lap. Pressing them together, she frowns for a moment, the chosen scale shifting under her fingers, the curve of its shape altered by increments until she’s satisfied, fitting it into place beside its fellows, its edges melting seamlessly under the next. Most crafters still need to speak, to murmur a few words to shape their magic, but not Luce, the most adept of them all. “You’ve had ill-omened dreams before. You’ve dreamed of all of this going up in flames hotter than dragonfire.”
And she has, that and more besides; a little castle breached by flames, as though consumed by an angry dragon from within, of dragon fighting dragon in the skies, of a prince in black armor falling in a shower of blood in a river, a silver-haired girl alone before a ring of men with cruel faces on horseback. All of them are different. “I can’t explain it.” Above her, smoke curls across an azure sky, sinuous, lazy. Like the curl of hair that falls over the white of his forehead on that final, fatal night. “It’s the difference between losing an unearthed clutch of eggs to the lava and losing Azlan out from under you. Both would be a tragedy, but the one would be easier to bear, even if it were objectively the greater in scale.”
Holding up her half-finished armor, Luce shivers, her dragon’s shed scales chiming together like music. “Don’t say such a thing, Su, not even in jest. You mean it’s personal, then?”
She frowns, smoke blurring out the sky, the ground rumbling beneath them with a volcano’s familiar purr. “I didn’t say that. I can’t. I don’t even know him. He may not even be real!”
“You did say it,” her sister says, firm and inescapable, as she’s always been. “You compared your dream lord to my bond with Azlan, and you know well that what I feel for him is quite the equal of what I feel for you, or Aed, or Pete.”
“So you all tell me.” Though she tries to keep it back, she hears the bitterness in her own voice, flying free and untrained as ever. “And he isn’t a lord.” How she knows this, she couldn’t quite say - the boy’s home in her dream is a far cry from the soaring, delicate spires of her own, a plainer fortress in a bleaker land, but still, it is a place of power, of privilege. Just not his. “It’s only - I feel he’s important, with all my heart.”
“Why not ask why?” she asks, around the scale clutched between her teeth, both hands busy folding another into her stubborn pattern. Luce has never met an obstacle she couldn’t surmount with a leap and a smile.
Closing her eyes, Su sees him again, sightless eyes staring up at her, and trembles like the ground beneath her. “Ask whom?”
“The gods.”
“Our gods aren’t real,” she says, hands tightening to fists in her skirts. “You know that. You were there when we created them.”
“One of them is,” Lucerya says, placid as still waters, fitting the last scale into place with a snap like breaking bone.
That night, she murmurs a request to the Lion who shares his name with her sister’s great golden dragon; the Lion who’d led them, so many years ago, stumbling and confused, out of the endless shadow in the East. The Lion who’d breathed on her, all warmth and light, and given her that first dream; the eggs nestled in the volcano’s core, and the words to hatch them, to bond them, human to dragon, forevermore.
“You will not like what you see, Daughter.” Though the great Lion is warm beside her, hot as the fires of her homeland, the air around them in her dream is bitter cold, her breath a plume before them.
Burying her hands in his mane, she rubs her cold cheek to his, unafraid. “I often don’t, and yet your gift shows me without regard to what I like.”
He sighs, sorrowful, and lifts his chin, pointing the way ahead. “Look, then. See what lies ahead for this world, in ages to come.”
She looks, and looks, and cannot comprehend.
All the world ahead is coated in white, in silver-blue, in a shimmering blanket that sparkles and ripples, until it resolves itself, and she gasps, the icy air scraping through her lungs. An army, large enough to cover the land, stretching out in every direction to the horizon. Pale white creatures ride on bone-bleached spiders big as horses, the endless tide of them creeping closer. At their head, a pale king rides on a horse sculpted from marble. Under an inhuman brow, his blue eyes glow as they stare ahead, his head turning this way and that as though he can feel her gaze. As though at any second he will look up and see her there, and she knows as clearly as she’s ever known anything that he will see her, that he will spur his terrible horse into the sky and draw the crystal sword shining at his side-
The pale king looks up, and her breath dies, strangled in her throat, before he’s caught, pinned in a wall of flame. Too stunned to cry out, she tips her head back, watching the belly of a dragon sweep overhead, flames pouring from its throat, melting great swathes of the endless army before its brethren join it, two and then three dragons blotting out the stars, their beating wings stirring gusts of flames.
“The Great Winter will come out of the North.” Under her fingers, wound tight in his mane, the Lion’s voice rumbles, deeper even than the chorus of the Fourteen. “And the darkness they bring will cover the lands of the living. Only the fires of life can stand against the ice of death. Only the blood of the promised ones.” His voice echoes down her blood, resonating through her bones, damming up in the cavern of her skull. Prophecy. “This is why I guided you to this world, Daughter. This is why you dream.”
Watching the dragons dance, their graceful arcs and rushing flights, faster than bow-shot arrows, their wheeling turns painting the night with fire, she cannot help but envy, even as her dream form floats, weightless and free.
“Do not despair, child,” the Lion says, nuzzling her cheek. “You will find your dragon yet.”
Overhead, the dragons glide, calling out, their song a counterpoint to the crackling flames, the screaming steam. The storm of wings pulses like a heartbeat, pounding in her ears as one dragon breaks from the pack, soaring nearer and nearer, until it looms above her, close enough for her to lock eyes with its rider.
She wakes with his living face held in her memory, and does not scream.