The Prince in the Candleflame
Aerion Targaryen x f!reader - modern AU
Summary: Reciting an old Valyrian spell in the candlelight works and you end up summoning a dragon prince, getting more than you bargained for.
a/n: Modern AU but with magic, let's gooo! I know this is the third series I've started but the idea came to me suddenly and I had to share. Ok but older Aerion though, trained and matured from fighting in the Second Sons and Blackfyre rebellion, you could even say a dilf, still kinda insane though. You can imagine him younger too, ig, doesn't really matter.
Warnings: SMUT 18+ p in v, unprotected sex, possessiveness, power imbalance, manipulation, talks about killing, Aerion has insane ideas, attempted breeding, I don't think it's necrophilia...Ghostfucking, maybe?
The rain had not stopped all day in King’s Landing.
In a modern city it meant traffic snarled along black glass towers, water streaking down the windows of office blocks, umbrellas bumping shoulders on crowded sidewalks. It meant the smell of damp asphalt drifting in through the revolving doors of corporate buildings.
It meant another evening where you left the firm after dark.
You worked on the thirty-second floor of a sleek, cold tower belonging to one of the most prestigious legal and financial firms in the capital. The sort of place people envied when they heard about it at dinner parties.
You had the position people wanted. You had the salary people wanted. You had the life that, on paper, looked enviable. And yet every day you woke with the same weight in your chest.
The work itself was endless. Emails stacked upon emails, deadlines that crawled over one another like ants, clients who demanded urgency over problems that did not matter. The office lighting was too bright. The air conditioning was too cold. Every meeting felt like you were performing competence instead of living.
By the time you left in the evenings, your mind felt wrung dry.
You rarely had the energy to see friends anymore. Invitations gathered unanswered on your phone. Messages from old university acquaintances remained politely acknowledged but never expanded upon.
It wasn't that you disliked people. You were simply too tired. Too tired to dress up. Too tired to talk. Too tired to pretend enthusiasm.
Instead, you went home to the small apartment you rented not far from the city center, small but clean, with tall bookshelves and a desk permanently cluttered with notebooks.
And on those shelves sat the only thing in your life that made the exhaustion worth enduring.
Old Valyria had fascinated you since childhood. The lost civilization of dragonlords. The empire that had dominated the known world before its sudden destruction in the cataclysm known as the Doom.
Ten centuries ago the dragons had died out. Magic had faded.
What remained were fragments. Scrolls. Cracked tablets. Half-translated inscriptions.
You spent nearly all your extra income chasing them.
Museum memberships. Academic conferences. Antiquarian auctions. Collections of obscure journals and reproductions of damaged manuscripts.
The lost language of High Valyrian had become your obsession.
Not the simplified modern dialects still used in ceremonial contexts, but the ancient version scholars reconstructed from ruins and surviving texts.
A dead language. You loved it anyway.
The sounds were beautiful, sharp and liquid at once, like a blade moving through water.
Tonight, as you stepped into your apartment and closed the door behind you, rain still whispering against the glass, exhaustion pressed down on your shoulders the way it always did.
You dropped your bag onto the table. Kicked off your shoes. Stared for a moment at the stack of papers waiting on your desk. Then your gaze drifted to the newest addition.
The scroll lay carefully unrolled beneath a protective sheet of glass.
You had acquired it only two days earlier.
A rare thing, expensive, but not impossibly so because most scholars believed it to be little more than ritual poetry. The text itself was fragmentary and poorly preserved.
But the script was unmistakably High Valyrian.
You crossed the room slowly, fatigue temporarily forgotten.
Lifting the glass cover, you traced a finger just above the brittle parchment without touching it.
You had spent most of last night translating.
What you found had made you laugh quietly to yourself.
Because it appeared to be a spell.
Not metaphorical religious language. An actual ritual. A calling of ancestors.
The Valyrians had practiced blood magic, that much historians broadly agreed upon.
But that had been long ago. Magic had died with the dragons. Everyone knew that.
The only faith still claiming supernatural power in the modern world was the cult of the Lord of Light, and even they produced little more than parlor tricks and theatrical sermons.
Your scroll, by contrast, was charmingly archaic.
It described lighting candles. Reciting a prayer in High Valyrian. Calling upon the blood of the dragon to answer.
A poetic gesture, surely. Perhaps once performed as part of funerary rites.
Still, you had spent years studying the language. The translation had come surprisingly easily. Which was why, as you changed into comfortable clothes, the idea occurred to you. Not because you believed it would work but because you loved the language, and speaking it aloud felt like breathing life into something that had slept for a thousand years.
You placed three candles on the small table in the center of the room.
The rain outside softened to a steady whisper.
Then you struck a match. The first candle flickered to life. Then the second. Then the third. The small flames cast warm gold across the apartment walls.
For a moment you felt faintly ridiculous.
You glanced at the scroll again.
“It's not like anything will happen,” you murmured.
The words of the spell were delicate and complex. You had practiced them silently all day. Now you spoke them.
Your High Valyrian was careful but imperfect, the pronunciation shaped by years of academic reconstruction.
The invocation called to blood. To lineage. To the forgotten empire. To the ancestors who had once ruled from the smoking towers of Valyria before the Doom swallowed them.
The language built in rhythm, phrase upon phrase.
You read to the end. Then you lowered the scroll and waited. Nothing happened.
You huffed a quiet laugh, leaning back against the couch.
“Well,” you said to the empty room, “that would have been too easy.”
For a moment everything remained perfectly normal.
Then the flames changed. The candles did not flicker the way small flames usually did.
Instead they stretched upward, longer, brighter. A sudden wind swept through the apartment though every window was closed. The flames surged high, impossibly high, spinning together in a spiral of gold and orange.
Your heart slammed violently against your ribs.
The fire twisted. It gathered. The shape forming within it was wrong. Too large. Too alive. The flames roared upward like a storm. Something moved inside them.
At first it resembled a dragon. Not a full beast but the outline of one. Wings half-formed in fire, a long neck arched.
The heat did not burn you, but it filled the room with a crackling pressure that made your ears ring.
The dragon shape collapsed inward. Then the fire became something else.
A tall figure. Humanoid. Its body was made entirely of flame.
The figure shifted again.
And where the inferno had stood a moment before, a man now stood on your living room floor.
He was beautiful in the way statues were beautiful. Alabaster skin. Sharp, prominent cheekbones. Eyes the color of deep violet glass. His hair fell in pale silver waves down his shoulders. He wore clothing that looked like something pulled from historical paintings, dark black and crimson, richly embroidered, cut in the severe elegance associated with the old Targaryen dynasty.
The air still shimmered faintly with heat.
And there was something in it that made your stomach drop.
You pressed yourself against the back of the couch, heart racing so fast it felt painful.
The man tilted his head slightly.
It was a slow, pleased expression.
“Ah,” he said softly, voice smooth as velvet. “You speak.”
The accent was strange: archaic, precise.
His eyes moved across your apartment curiously before returning to your face.
“I wondered,” he murmured.
You forced your voice to work. “Who are you?”
The man drew himself up with easy, almost theatrical grace.
“I,” he said, “am prince Aerion Targaryen.”
The name meant nothing to you.
Your silence seemed to amuse him.
You felt the temperature rise slightly again.
“Prince Aerion Brightflame of the blood of the dragon,” he continued. “Son of a royal line of house Targaryen. Once heir to the Iron Throne.”
Your mind struggled to process the words.
“A Targaryen prince,” you repeated faintly.
He inclined his head. “Yes.”
You swallowed. “That’s impossible.”
His smile widened. “Is it?”
You glanced wildly toward the candles.
They still burned on the table but the flames had grown thinner now, flickering uncertainly.
“You…you were in the fire.”
“This…this can’t be real. Magic died centuries ago. When the dragons...”
“When the last dragons died,” Aerion finished calmly.
He considered you for a moment. “Magic fades,” he said. “But it does not disappear entirely.”
Your pulse still thundered in your ears. “What did I do?”
His gaze dropped briefly to the scroll on the table.
“You used an ancestral summoning. Crude by old standards but effective.”
“But I don’t have Valyrian blood.”
Aerion’s eyes lifted again. They glowed faintly in the candlelight.
“Child,” he said softly, “you would not have reached me otherwise.”
Your stomach tightened. “I…I don’t look Valyrian.”
“Time erodes many things.”
He stepped closer again. Too close. You could smell smoke and something sharp, like heated metal.
“There were many branches of the dragon’s blood,” he continued thoughtfully. “Not all remained within the royal line. Over centuries the blood thins…spreads…hides.”
He looked around your small apartment again.
His expression turned faintly disdainful. “And yet here you are.”
You bristled despite the fear. “What’s wrong with it?”
Aerion gestured lightly at the room. “You live in a cramped stone box. You labor for coin like a merchant’s daughter.”
He looked back at you. “You are blood of the dragon. Your ancestors ruled empires.”
Your laugh came out sharp. “Well my ancestors aren’t paying my rent.”
He regarded you curiously. “You are unhappy.”
You hesitated. Then sighed. “Yes.”
He studied you for a long moment. Then something like interest flickered across his face. “Fortunate.”
You frowned. “Why fortunate?”
Aerion stepped behind you suddenly.
You stiffened as he circled you. His chest brushed your back. The contact was startlingly solid, warm and real.
A low sound escaped him. A groan. As if the simple sensation of proximity pleased him far more than it should have.
“You feel alive,” he murmured.
His hands hovered near your waist.
You went very still. “Aerion...”
“Do you know what death is like for a Valyrian?”
Your throat tightened. “No.”
“We are not sent to darkness,” he said softly. “Nor to the heavens of other faiths.”
His breath ghosted faintly against your neck. “Our dead awaken in something…else.”
“An ancestral plane,” he continued. “A reflection of Valyria as it existed before the Doom. Towers. Rivers of fire. Endless skies.”
You swallowed. “That doesn’t sound so bad.”
His voice dropped. “We exist. We remember. We wait. Our gods don't show themselves. We do not posses a defined form as we did in life.”
His fingers finally settled on your waist. The touch was firm.
“I have not felt another body since my death,” he murmured.
A shiver ran down your spine.
“That was…centuries ago.”
You forced yourself to think. “You said I called you.”
“To a degree. Death has its benefits in that regard.”
His thumb traced slowly along your side. “Blood binds power.”
Your voice came out slightly breathless. “What does that mean?”
“It means I can influence your life,” he said. “Your fortune. Your path.”
Your mind snapped back to attention. “Luck?”
“You could just…make things better?”
You turned your head slightly. “And what would you want in return?”
Aerion’s smile returned. Sharp. Pleased. He leaned closer until his lips hovered near your ear.
“Three wishes,” he said softly.
“Within the limits of my power. Wealth. Opportunity. Freedom from the drudgery you despise.”
His hands tightened faintly at your waist. “Three moons.”
Your brow furrowed. “Aerion, that’s not very specific.”
He chuckled quietly. “Servitude.”
Your stomach flipped. “What kind of servitude?”
His mouth brushed lightly against the curve of your neck, not quite a kiss.
“Each night,” he said, voice low with anticipation, “you summon me.”
Your pulse pounded. “And?”
“And you offer me your body.”
Silence filled the room. Your thoughts spun wildly.
He continued calmly. “I cannot kill, unfortunately. I cannot resurrect the dead. Life and death is not within my grasp. My power also cannot reshape the world beyond your life. I am bound to you, my blood.”
His fingers slid slowly along your side again. “But within your life…I can grant much.”
You closed your eyes briefly.
A way out of the exhausting life you hated.
Money. Freedom. Security.
You opened your eyes again. “And if I refuse?”
Aerion withdrew his hands. His tone remained mild. “Then the candles burn out…and I return to my limbo.”
He paused. “And you return to your miserable life in the morn.”
You stared at the floor. Your job. The endless exhaustion. The quiet loneliness.
You exhaled slowly. “Three wishes,” you said.
“And I can summon you again.”
“With the spell. Add my name so only I will answer. Otherwise, next time you might end up with a man like Bloodraven.”
You hesitated. Then nodded. “Fine.”
The word left your mouth before you could reconsider.
Aerion’s eyes lit with unmistakable delight. “Excellent.”
He moved so quickly you barely saw it. His mouth crashed against yours. The kiss was fierce. Ravenous. Centuries of hunger poured into the contact. You gasped against his lips as he pulled you closer, the heat of him seeping through your clothes.
“You cannot imagine,” he murmured roughly, “how long I have waited to feel this again.”
He lifted you effortlessly into his arms. Your heart hammered wildly as he carried you towards the bedroom.
“The candles,” you said faintly.
He glanced toward the living room.
You barely had time to react before he laid you down.
Aerion’s silver hair fell forward as he leaned over you, violet eyes bright with something fierce and ancient.
“I can only remain while the fire lives,” he said softly.
Your breath came uneven. “And after?”
“You summon me again tomorrow night.” His fingers brushed your cheek with surprising gentleness. “Three moons.”
He smiled. “Let us begin.”
He did not remain gentle for long. He sank into you without much preamble.
Time had become difficult to measure.
The world had narrowed to warmth, the shifting weight of a body that had not belonged to the living world for centuries and yet felt startlingly real.
Aerion moved with a kind of restless intensity, as though he feared the candles might die at any moment and drag him back into whatever strange half-existence waited beyond the veil. There was eagerness in the way he touched you, curiosity as well, a prince rediscovering something he had once taken for granted and lost for far too long.
And, embarrassingly for him, impatience.
He finished quickly. You were startled to feel his seed spill into you. For some reason, you hadn't considered that he'd be capable of producing bodily fluids, even though he felt plenty alive and warm-bloodied. After the first time, he leaned back on his hands with a sharp exhale, silver hair falling across his face as he looked down at you with narrowed violet eyes.
“That,” he said slowly, “was…shorter than I would prefer.”
Despite everything, despite the impossible circumstances, despite the lingering shock, you found yourself laughing breathlessly.
“I’m sorry,” you said, still trying to steady your breathing. “Is there a proper schedule for ghost princes?”
He sounded mildly offended by the word, though his mouth twitched faintly.
“A spirit,” he amended after a moment. “A soul. A remnant of royal blood. But not a ghost.”
He considered the situation for another moment, clearly displeased with his own lack of endurance. Then he leaned down again, one hand sliding along your waist, his expression sharpening with determination.
“My body,” he murmured, more to himself than to you, “has not known warmth of a woman in centuries.”
His gaze lifted to yours again. “It appears it must reacquaint itself.”
The second time lasted longer. So did the third.
Aerion’s confidence returned steadily with each attempt, the impatience melting into something more controlled. The frantic hunger softened into fascination. Every touch seemed to delight him anew, as though the simple reality of another person beneath his hands was still miraculous. He even deigned to learn how to make you cum, tutting when you writhed beneath him. You suspected that he only helped you finish because he enjoyed the feeling of your wetness gushing as he was still rocking his hips into you, groaning as your walls tightened around his cock.
Several times he paused only long enough to study you with open curiosity, brushing his fingers over your arms, your shoulders, your throat as though memorizing the shapes.
“Remarkable,” he murmured once.
“You’re staring,” you pointed out.
You rolled your eyes, though the heat in your face betrayed you.
By the time the candles had burned noticeably lower, both of you were lying tangled in the sheets, the room warm with lingering heat. Aerion stretched beside you, one arm behind his head, looking far more pleased with himself now than he had earlier.
“That,” he declared with satisfaction, “is much better.”
“You’re very proud of yourself.”
He turned his head toward you, violet eyes gleaming faintly in the dim light.
“And now,” he continued lazily, “a promise must be honored.”
You shifted slightly, propping yourself on one elbow. “The wishes.”
Aerion reached out, his fingers tracing idle patterns along your stomach as he spoke, the motion absentminded and strangely intimate.
“Your first request was fortune,” he said. “Riches obtained through luck rather than labour.”
His expression turned thoughtful.
“Luck is easily bent,” he said. “Coins fall the right way. Opportunities appear at the correct moment. Men with wealth become suddenly generous.”
“And I assure you, there will be no consequences. I will not entangle you in misfortune disguised as gifts. Your fortune will come cleanly.”
You searched his face for a moment. “You can really do that?”
His hand moved slowly across your abdomen, warm and heavy.
“It is a pity,” he added almost idly, “that my power does not extend further.”
You frowned slightly. “What do you mean?”
Aerion’s fingers stilled.
“If I possessed the full strength of my blood as I did in life…I could shape flesh. Bind life.”
Your stomach tightened faintly when his hand pressed more firmly there.
“It is a shame,” he continued thoughtfully, “that I cannot create life now.”
You blinked. “That’s…a very strange thing to say so casually.”
Aerion tilted his head. “Is it?”
His eyes swept over you again with the same measuring look he had given earlier.
“You would bear strong children,” he said. “And with my blood, their Valyrian heritage would be far purer than yours has remained through the centuries.”
You let out a startled laugh. “I think we’re getting ahead of ourselves.”
“Perhaps.” He did not sound particularly convinced.
Instead, he shifted onto his side, propping his head on his hand as he looked at you more closely. “Tell me something.”
You stared at him. “Courted?”
You laughed again, louder this time. “No.”
Aerion’s brow creased. “No?”
“I work forty-five hours a week,” you reminded him. “I barely see my friends. Dating isn’t exactly a priority.”
He studied your expression carefully, as if confirming that you were telling the truth.
Then his demeanor shifted. The lazy amusement disappeared, replaced by something more severe. “You will not take lovers while you are bound to me.”
The firmness of his voice caught you off guard.
His gaze held yours steadily. “You have given three moons of service,” he said. “Your body belongs to me during that time.”
“That seems a little dramatic.”
Aerion’s expression hardened slightly. “You will not whore yourself out while you serve me.”
The blunt phrasing made you snort despite yourself. “I wasn’t planning on ‘whoring myself out,’ thanks.”
“Good.” He relaxed again almost instantly, the tension draining from his posture, satisfied.
After a moment of quiet, you stretched and glanced toward the doorway where the candlelight had grown noticeably dimmer.
“They’re burning down,” you said.
Aerion followed your gaze. “Yes.”
“You’ll disappear when they go out?”
“That is the nature of the spell.”
You pushed yourself upright slightly. “Do you…want something to eat before that happens?”
He looked genuinely puzzled. “Food?”
“There’s leftovers in the fridge.”
Aerion considered the suggestion for a moment before shaking his head.
“I do not feel hunger,” he said. “Nor cold. Nor fatigue.”
His lips curved faintly. “I would feel taste, I could gain little pleasure from eating but not so much that I want to eat for the sake of it.”
“But you do get pleasure from…” You gestured vaguely toward the bed.
His smile sharpened. “Yes.”
He reached out and pulled you gently back down beside him, brushing your hair away from your face with surprising care.
“That,” he said softly, “is something I remember well.”
The room had grown darker now, the candle flames reduced to small trembling points of light.
Aerion leaned closer, studying you as though committing your face to memory.
“For centuries,” he murmured, “there has been nothing but stillness.”
His fingers slid lightly along your cheek. “And then you called.”
You weren’t sure what to say to that. So you said nothing.
Aerion leaned down and kissed you again, slower this time, less ravenous than before but no less intense.
When he finally pulled away, the candlelight was flickering sharply.
One flame sputtered. Then another.
Aerion glanced toward the doorway, already fading slightly at the edges.
“Tomorrow night,” he reminded you.
“Tomorrow night,” you echoed.
He brushed his thumb across your lip once. “Do not forget my name when you summon me.”
The final candle guttered.
For a brief moment his figure shimmered like heat above a fire.
Then prince Aerion Targaryen vanished with the dying flame.
And you were alone again in your apartment, the rain still whispering against the glass as if nothing extraordinary had happened at all.
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