Chapter Text
Changing the Rules
A House of the Dragon Fanfic
By Sif Shadowheart
“Aegon Targaryen changed the rules. That’s why every child alive still remembers his name, three hundred years after his death.” - Tywin Lannister to Arya Stark
“Aegon and his sisters. It wasn’t just Aegon riding his dragon. It was Rhaenys and Visenya too.” - Arya Stark to Tywin Lannister
Chapter One: Worse
Fuck the gods.
Fuck Kaguya. Fuck Hagoromo. Fuck Hamura.
That was Ono Toshiko’s endless refrain from the moment she closed her eyes on a blood-drenched gorge deep within the Mountains of the Moon and then opened them in a different place and time, a different world and universe entirely.
Fuck. The. Gods.
Fuck them all.
Fuck the Seven. Fuck the Fourteen. Fuck the Old Gods and the New, the Weeping Lady of Lys and the God of Many Faces, the Black Goat and the Lord of Light.
Fuck them all.
If she were given to nihilism or to fatalism, Toshiko might’ve just… stopped when she recognized what had happened to her - again - all too well.
When she’d been reborn - again - instead of allowed to rest.
Only this time, to prove just how fucked up and fucking cruel and punitive they were, she didn’t get a loving family or a good education, a chosen brother or a chance at love. No. Not this time.
This time proved how unintentionally ironic she’d always been as Ono Toshiko when she’d thought “it could always be worse” regarding being born into Konoha, to a shinobi family, and expected to do her duty to kin and country and become a kunoichi.
Because this?
This life she’d been unceremoniously dropped into like so much spirit-waste-scrap and soul, was not only part of the A Song of Ice and Fire universe from what she’d noticed once her new - third, fucking third - body and mind were matured enough to notice anything, which was already worse than the Narutoverse but:
She was a slave, born to a captive former-freewoman, both of them prized for their silver fucking hair.
Worse?
With the exception of being born in one of the slave pits of the Ghiscari or Dothraki, it didn’t get worse.
So yes: fuck the gods, fuck them all, and fuck them hard.
Because, at the end of the day, they weren’t the only ones capable of worse.
It wasn’t a fast realization. Her mind didn’t snap into remembering who she was one moment and the next she had a full grasp of what world she was in or her birthplace within it. Birthplace in more than one way at that: both the physical location and her positioning within the stratified society at large.
Unlike awakening as Toshiko, in comparison figuring out even her name took time let alone anything else.
The language was so strange she didn’t have even a flicker of recognition regarding what language it might be.
Her developing vision made it impossible for her to tell the difference between a necklace and a slave collar around the necks of those surrounding her.
She didn’t know anything for months, maybe even a year, as her tiny toddler body struggled with the weight - and grief - of not only one life lost to her, but two.
She picked up words as fast as she could, but whether the conventions of the place or the language barrier in play kept her from learning her name.
Or, as she realized with an equally glacial slowness, that of her mother.
Then the wheels within her brain began to spin.
Others around them had names. She’d learned enough by the time the disparity became clear of the tongue everyone around her spoke to tell the difference between a personal name and a simple word. Even other young children of an age with her had names, which was the first hypothesis to be tested and discarded.
If that was so, if everyone else was named, why not them?
It was reasonless as far as she could discover by then, but such an othering couldn’t have been without reason, it just meant that the reason wasn’t readily apparent to her.
Her mother didn’t look strange compared to the other women around them - and it was only women around them, which was one of the first “facts” about her new, third, life she learned - or foreign. She was beautiful. Objectively so, once her vision gained enough clarity for her to focus on the entire composition of her mother’s face instead of one piece at a time.
Icy blond hair that might’ve been white blond if her mother was allowed to spend more time out in the hot sun of wherever-it-was they lived - but so did several others among the women-slaves. Her skin was moon-pale, like fresh milk, probably also resulting from being kept mostly sequestered in the women’s quarters and again wasn’t unique. She had good bones in her face, finer maybe than the others with high and sharp cheekbones but she thought that might have more to do with her mother always being sick or recovering from sickness or having a heavy menses than anything.
Even her eye color, a pretty purple-violet wasn’t rare or unique among the other slaves - which was the first but not the last clue regarding the provenance of her new life, no matter how loath she was to admit it.
So if there was nothing strange about her looks or race, if her mother spoke the same tongue as the others and wore a collar and shackles the same as the others, why didn’t she have a name?
Why didn’t she, as her daughter, have a name either?
What was different about them?
Being a toddler kept sequestered in the women’s slave quarters, there was no way for her to find out, regardless of how the question burned at her and left her clinging to the vestiges of her former identity.
However, by the time she had the vocabulary in her new tongue to ask the questions that ached in her mouth to be unable to speak them, they had already been answered, and in a way that left her with nothing but unrelenting rage to hold onto in place of hope or faith or even a name.
The first sign that something was happening came when instead of her mother being called out to by the elderly slave woman who ran - inasmuch as anyone had authority within the women’s quarters - things.
They called her Pretty Girl, a descriptor in lieu of an actual name among the women, watched as her mother called Silver Womb - both epithets were unimaginative as far as she was concerned, hers being shallow and her mother’s reductive to her status as a breeding slave for all that she had originally thought were heavy menses were a series of miscarriages - hurried over and took a basin and a packet that was handed off to Matron by a eunuch who remained respectfully outside the ephemeral boundary between the women’s quarters and the rest of what she thought was a large estate.
At least from how the other slaves talked about it.
She wouldn’t know.
She’d never left the women’s quarters in the period of time from her self-knowledge returning to her that she estimated might have been a year.
Maybe.
When every day was the same as the last, and she was in a situation that was hopeless in the current status quo, it was hard for even a survivor like her to care to keep track when apathy and numbness at least made the days pass quicker than grief and railing at the gods.
All she had to do in that time was listen and learn or rage and grieve.
Eventually, even her depths of emotion would run dry, leading to a cycle of days where she would be apathetic and lethargic, others where she was active and bright-eyed, and others where she was sulky and grim.
Her fellow slave children as well as the aged matrons alike would try and cajole her when she was apathetic, but quickly learned to let her be when her moods turned truly dark.
It was an apathetic day where things changed.
Where something was happening that hadn’t happened in all those days that she’d been watching and trying to learn the routine of the women’s quarters and any bits of the language spoken around her and to her.
Nothing was familiar, and with the hair and eye colors in play around her, she couldn’t even say that anything was familiar in a historical context, making her feel held apart in a way that not even Konoha had managed. Not simply a reincarnate in a mythical land, but an other. The world around her so foreign and strange that she could find no comfort in it.
She watched as her mother gathered water and urine from the collection pots, both fascinated and horrified as she mixed them together with the contents of the package and realization broke over her.
Her mother was making a pre-industrial type of hair dye as no sooner had the noxious concoction been mixed than her mother was submerging the ends of her chin-length hair into the bowl before removing it and taking up more with careful hands to scrub it through the roots until every last hint of icy blond hair was concealed.
Filling her with nothing but dread.
For her mother to do that, to have to do that for some reason, then perhaps one of the reasons they were othered had to do with not the color of their hair that others shared but why they in particular possessed it.
Fuck. Don’t let us be captive Targaryens, don’t let us be captive Targaryens, don’t let us be captive Targaryens…
That was her frantic prayer for the first time she prayed after awakening in this life.
Please, whatever gods might be listening, don’t let them be enslaved members of House Targaryen or a part of the A Song of Ice and Fire universe.
When she’d thought it could be worse than a kunoichi in Konoha, it hadn’t been a fucking dare!
Only, once her mother’s hair was dyed - fucking blue, one more point on the board for ASoIaF god-fucking-damnit - not only did her mother leave the women’s quarters but for the first time she went with her. The suspicion that this world might not be so unknown to her in totality gave her no comfort as they were escorted through a lavish, well, palace; she couldn’t think of another term. Far from what was probably the rear of the building or estate, and into a room that was equally as lavish as the flawless white stone walls and frescos and tapestries and vases and even glasswork that they’d passed along the way.
Into a room that was draped in silk with pillows all around and a wide open balcony leading off of it that overlooked the sea.
And on those silken pillows, with a golden (gold plated?) shackle around his ankle connected to a golden chain that had been bolted into the wall with enough slack to presumably allow him to move around the room and wearing little more than a silken loincloth, was a fucking young teenaged boy who looked far too much like Viserys Targaryen if the Beggar King had black irises instead of purple.
Motherfucking piss shit cunt twatting gods.
They were fucking captive Targaryens weren’t they?
Fuck.
While she was having an existential crisis, her mother was carefully inspecting the room, waiting long moments in quiet with an intently listening expression and tilt to her head, before rushing over to the boy in chains and all-but-falling down onto a cushion at his side, throwing her arms around him as she was squished between them as he raised thin arms and joined in.
They spoke to each other in whispers. Using a language that sounded like a distant memory, and the sinking feeling in her stomach grew heavier. That…that might be High Valyrian.
Kinda.
Maybe.
(Probably FUCK.)
Until one of the whispers was a word she recognized even through twenty years, two deaths, and a third life:
“...mandia.” It was the boy speaking but that didn’t matter. She knew mandia. She knew it was High Valyrian and what it meant.
Sister.
The boy in chains was her mother’s brother, her uncle, and she examined him carefully once this fact burrowed inside her mind, her attention splitting again between that task and attempting to listen to their conversation even if she was only able to pick out less than one in twenty words.
Mandia - sister; lēkia - brother: how they addressed each other. A few more that had to do with other forms of relation: kepa - father, which was used by both of them and she took to mean that they had other relatives alive and helped discount the fucked up universe they were in as an alternate version of Game of Thrones with herself as the child of an enslaved Daenerys Stormborn. Then her uncle snapped a word at her mother that she couldn’t dismiss as it wasn’t a word so much as a name:
Targaryen.
Double, triple, sextuple fuck.
If her uncle and mother weren’t Viserys and Daenerys Targaryen, and she didn’t think they were from the limited information she was working with, then the next most likely suspect regarding time period was pre-Mad King somewhen.
Which…didn’t really narrow it down very much, as that could mean anytime following Aegon’s Conquest…or any era before it so long as House Targaryen existed including the same era as the ten thousand years of the Valyrian Freehold.
She simply didn’t have enough information to narrow it down further than that, and even then she could be wrong and her assumptions were way off base.
And not that it even mattered for a slave-born girl with silver hair.
Until she was more than a helpless, vulnerable, weak child there was shit-all she could do about anything happening to or around her, or her situation at large, or that of her apparent pair of immediate family members.
“Mama,” she tapped on her mother’s chest, using the language that she’d been learning through osmosis. “Who?”
Her mother sent another glance around the room, this one far more anxious than the last, and then said in a barely-there whisper:
“Vaera drēje perzys,” she said, tapping her own chest in mimicry of her daughter, but also seeming like an introduction. “Muña se sodjisto.”
Sodjisto she didn’t recognize, but the first word and the conjunction she did: ‘mother and-’ nor did she know what was said after Vaera which in context she thought was the missing name she’d been puzzling over for so long.
It at least sounded like she assumed a name should sound, especially with the looming dread of oh fuck we’re Valyrian she was fighting to keep at bay.
“Rastaban uēpa ānogar,” her uncle introduced himself next, using more presumed High Valyrian she didn’t understand. And then things immediately got worse because she did understand it. “Kepa se kepus.”
Kepa se kepus.
Kepa se kepus?!
Kepus - fine, expected, wonderful even despite the dire straits they were all in. Uncle. He was introducing himself as her uncle with the second part of the phrase.
It was the first part that was the problem. Kepa. High Valyrian for motherfucking (literally) Father.
Not only had she been born into slavery to enslaved Valyrians - maybe Targaryens - of some extraction but it was of an incestuous pregnancy.
One that she was guessing, based on her father-uncle’s sheer youth that seemed to her eyes barely out of boyhood and her own age, had occurred if not the moment his balls had dropped then not long after.
The explanation she had was that given their given state of slavery, it was almost impossible that either of her sibling parents had chosen to breed with one another, let alone when her father was so young. Too young probably to have been naturally interested in sex at all. Rape, assault, total control without end, that was what she’d been reborn to and as a result of.
It was both a comfort and a violation all tangled together. She existed. She only existed as their daughter because of what was forced upon them.
From what she’d seen, the male slaves of the estate didn’t even look at the females without permission from “the Master” let alone do anything that might result in pregnancy without a direct order to procreate.
Every part of a slave’s days and nights were by order and the will of the Master, and it was enforced with brutal rigor.
She’d seen the welts, the bruises, the scratches and scars. She knew down to the bone that outside the slave quarters was a ruthless violent world. She knew that within the quarters could be ruthless as well, that it could be violated at any moment by the will and whim of the Master.
She knew, even if she had yet to feel the direct sting and burn and tear of the lash herself.
With the beauty both siblings possessed she wouldn’t be surprised if they’d been forced to breed and create her along with any other potential siblings to carry their looks and Valyrian traits down, if not strengthen them further at the command of the Master.
Last both siblings laid their hands on her chest, speaking slowly and tapping her several times until they were assured she understood.
“Daena,” they said. “Daena,” and kept going with the repetitions until she acted as if she only just realized what they wanted in keeping with being a toddler and echoed them, tapping herself on the chest and saying what demonstrably was her name.
“Daena.”
“Good.” Vaera nodded in approval, sending another anxious glance around the room and then continued. “My Daena, his Daena,” she pointed back at first herself and then her brother. “Our Daena. Talus. Daughter. Īlva tala. Our daughter.”
Once Vaera seemed assured that Daena understood her, she repeated her self introduction but this time supplied the translation for the word Daena hadn’t known: aunt.
Vaera something-something, mother and aunt.
Rastaban (not a Valyrian name, maybe? but again, black eyes so…) something-something, father and uncle.
Daena, daughter, without an epithet like it seemed both of her parents claimed, but very much their own.
“Daena,” Rastaban nodded with a slight smile that brought life and light to his deadened black eyes. “Talus. Ānogar hen uēpa Valyria.”
Oh shit. She knew that phrase too as more and more Valyrian came back to her, rising from the depths of a memory more than twenty years gone from watching shows two lifetimes ago and being an epic nerd about the languages. (She’d been a translation studies and adaptation student. Sue her.) Ānogar hen uēpa Valyria.
Blood of Old Valyria, one of the favorite ways for Targaryens to refer to themselves…even a pair who weren’t claiming the Targaryen surname.
Her name now was Daena. She’d been born in slavery to a slave woman who may have been a free woman of Valyrian descent at one time. Her mother’s existence might be a secret given the whole dyed-hair to venture deeper into the estate thing.
She was the product of what was acknowledged, albeit forced, incest. Her father/uncle was kept chained in a room draped in silk and was luxuriously appointed. Conclusion? Together with his scanty clothing, pretty face, youth, and gold-plated restraints - pleasure slave.
She didn’t know where or when they were, other than being safe in assuming that they were in one of the “Free” Cities of Essos since what she’d seen out her father/uncle’s window didn’t look anything like what she remembered of how Ghiscari architecture when reading or watching a tale during her long-gone first life.
From the mentions of both Targaryen and Blood of Old Valyria, they were post-Doom, pre-Robert’s Rebellion (maybe/probably on the last bit.)
The tongue everyone else spoke - but not to or around the guards - wasn’t High Valyrian nor was the language her mother used with the guards who brought them to sit and speak with Rastaban.
Conclusion?
Until she grew more and convinced her body to activate whatever magic rested in her veins to access jutsu, she was so fucking boned and was clearly being punished for her failure to save her people from Kaguya.
It bore repeating: fuck the gods, fuck them all, fuck them hard, dry, and without mercy.
Fuck ‘em all.
For the next two years, approximately, Daena and her mother were allowed to visit Rastaban every few months. Just enough to ensure compliance, if she had to guess. Her mother left the women’s quarters more often, but not Daena.
She didn’t want to think about what went on when Vaera left.
It was bad enough that she knew where another small child wouldn’t have any idea of the horrors that stalked their lives.
That the way they lived wasn’t normal. That there was more to the world than the women’s quarters. More than the path to Rastaban’s gilded cage.
That there was more to life than orders, collars, punishments, and chains.
She didn’t get the sweet ignorant bliss that was young childhood. That wasn’t for her. She knew what happened to her mother when she left fine and came back slightly hunched with a limp in her step.
She knew what happened when her belly grew and then she bled what seemed like a river of blood. What happened when her belly didn’t grow. What happened after her belly grew and grew and grew…but her mother wept and there was no living brother or sister that came sliding from her in a gush of amniotic fluid and death.
Daena knew.
And with every day her rage, a burning far greater than any mere anger, her fury and wrath grew.