#s&f

Vaelora had been little more than a pale coil of bone and fury when they placed her egg in your cradle. Gold shell, white veining, warm to the touch. The maesters said it was a good omen, the sort of thing men said when they were trying to sound less afraid. The dragonkeepers said nothing. They only watched the egg and watched you, their faces hidden beneath rough hoods while their eyes reflected candlelight.

For three days, the egg did not move. On the fourth, you began to cry.

Your nurse had tried everything. Milk, blankets, songs from King’s Landing, songs from Old Valyria, a silver rattle shaped like a dragon’s head… nothing quieted you. You screamed until your little fists turned red and the veins in your throat stood out blue. Then the egg cracked. 

Not all at once, and not dramatically like something from a song. Just a thin, ugly split down the side. Your nurse dropped the rattle and the dragonkeepers stepped forward. From the shell came Vaelora, wet and furious and bright as a shard of fallen sun. She was no larger than a cat then, all delicate limbs and translucent wings, her scales the color of pale gold in morning light. A ridge of white horns crowned her narrow skull. Her eyes were darker than any hatchling’s eyes had a right to be, molten amber ringed in black, ancient before she had taken her first breath.

She screamed once and you stopped crying. From that moment onward, people said the gods had made you for each other. You learned later that people loved to call things divine when they were too frightened to call them dangerous. 

Vaelora grew quickly, and so did you. By the time you were five, she could climb the outer walls of Dragonstone with her talons and cling there like a spider, wings tucked tight and tail lashing at anyone who came too close. By seven, she had burned three training posts, one goat, and the hem of your uncle’s cloak. By ten, she had learned your moods better than any living person.

When you were angry, Vaelora grew restless. When you were afraid, she refused food. When you wept, quietly and shamefully into your pillow where no courtier or cousin could see, Vaelora would shriek from the pit below the castle until the walls shook. You were never alone in your grief, that was the first mercy she gave you. The second was fire.

“Dracarys,” you commanded for the first time when you were seven years old, your voice small and uncertain in the dragonpit. 

Vaelora tilted her head at you.

The dragonkeeper beside you murmured, “again, Lady YN. She must hear that you mean it.” 

You had looked at Vaelora, at the pale soft thing she still was, and felt a twinge in your chest. You did not want to command her. Even then, that felt wrong. She was not a dog, or a horse, or some pretty and obedient creature bred for ribbons and saddles and men’s applause. 

She was Vaelora, and she was yours as you were hers.

So you did not point at the bundle of straw as the dragonkeeper instructed. You looked into your dragon’s amber eyes and whispered, “please.” 

The dragonkeeper stiffened, and Vaelora breathed fire.

It was not much, just a quick golden bloom, hot enough to singe your brows and send the dragonkeeper stumbling back with a curse. But to you, it was the most beautiful thing in the world. The straw blackened. Smoke curled upward as Vaelora chirped, pleased with herself. 

You laughed, and that was the first time anyone in Dragonstone heard you sound like a child. After that, they feared what you might become.

You did not know this then, of course. Children did not understand fear when it wore adult faces. You thought the whispers were admiration. You thought the careful distance people kept was respect. You thought your father’s tense pride meant love.

A Targaryen girl with a bonded hatchling was a blessing. A Targaryen girl with a dragon who answered please instead of command was something else entirely. 

By thirteen, you had taken your first real flight.  The sky didn’t welcome you gently, mostly due to Vaelora throwing you into it. The saddle straps bit into your thighs. Wind torre the breath from your mouth, and the sea below Dragonstone opened black and endless beneath you, waves breaking white against stone teeth. For one brutal moment, you thought you were going to die. Not because Vaelora meant to kill you, but because she had never understood the weight of human bones. She was made for the air, the sky. She thought you were too.

“Vaelora!” you screamed, gripping the leather handles until your knuckles ached. “Slower!” 

She did not slow, she only climbed higher into the sky above Dragonstone and the open sea. The castle dropped away beneath you, becoming a dark crown upon the island. Men became beetles and banners became threads. The world grew enormous and small all at once, and terror clawed up your throat so sharply that you nearly choked on it. Vaelora felt it and her wings shifted. The climb gentled, not much and never enough to be called obedience, but enough to allow you the opportunity to breathe.

You pressed yourself low against her neck, cheek against warm scales, and felt the thunder of her body beneath yours. Her heart beat like war drums, her blood ran hotter than yours, and you could feel her joy. Not in words, never in words, but in bright and pulsing flashes that lived behind your flesh. 

Sky. Wind. Mine.

You shut your eyes, and for a moment, you were not nobility, you were not bloodline or bargain or future bride. You were not a piece waiting to be moved across the painted table. You were fire and height and salt and wind. You were Vaelora’s rider. 

When you returned, your father was waiting in the yard with half the household behind him. He did not embrace you, he did not ask if you had been afraid. He did not tell you that he had watched the tiny shape of your dragon rise above the clouds and thought he might never see his daughter again.

He only said, “Again.” 

So you flew again. And again. And Again. And more.

By fourteen, Queen Rhaenyra had returned to the castle with her husband and their children, and Vaelora finally had company in the skies. By sixteen, the realm knew your dragon’s name. By seventeen, they knew yours.

Lady YN Targaryen, rider of Vaelora. Pale Fury, The Sun’s Ghost, The Golden Wraith of Dragonstone.

You hated most of the names. Vaelora hated all of them.

She snapped at singers when they tried to compose verses too near her pit, she burned one man’s lute to a pile of ashes for attempting to find rhymes to your name. You had laughed so hard you nearly cried. The poor singer had fled Dragonstone by morning.

That was Vaelora’s way, quick to wrath and quicker to offense, and utterly impossible to flatter. She loved only three things in the world. Flight, fire and you. That should have been enough. For many years, it nearly was. Then the Velaryon boy returned from the sea.

You were eighteen the year Jeongguk Velaryon came back to Dragonstone with salt in his hair and a dragon below him. You had known him before, in the vague and half-formed way children knew one another at court. He had been a boy from Driftmark then, all dark eyes and restless limbs, always vanishing down stairwells or climbing places he should not. Velaryon through and through, though some old Targaryen marriage in his mother’s blood had given him the right to stand near dragons without being immediately turned to ash. 

As children, you had raced once along the lower cliffs. He had beaten you, and you pushed him into a tide pool for it. He came up laughing, black hair plastered to his forehead and a cut blooming red across his cheek where stone had caught him. 

“You cheated,” you accused.

“You were slow,” he smiled. 

“I am royalty.” 

“And still slow!” He laughed. “Royal blood does not make you faster than everyone else.” 

You had tried very hard to hate him after that, but it did not work. He came back years later taller than memory had warned you he would be, broad-shouldered from sailing and training, his skin kissed warm by sun and sea wind. His hair was longer, tied carelessly at the nape of his neck. There was still something restless in him, but it had changed shape. As a boy, it had made him wild. As a man, it made him look as if he were always listening for something no one else could hear.

He arrived with a lesser Lord Velaryon’s household, a small host of knights, cousins, shipmen, and attendants sweeping through the yard beneath the black walls of the castle. Their sea green banners snapped hard in the wind. Silver seahorses flashed beneath the gray sky.

You watched from above, half hidden by stone, Vaelora’s great head looming over your shoulder. You felt her attention sharpen. Not at the men, but at the dragon beyond them. Morraen.

He landed on the far ridge with a sound like a storm breaking. Smaller than Vaelora, but still large enough to scatter horses and send men ducking under their shields. His scales were a deep blue gray, almost black where the clouds shadowed him, with silver membranes stretched thin between the bones of his wings.

Vaelora rumbled low in her chest. You placed a hand against her jaw, “no.” 

Her amber eye turned toward you. “No,” you repeated, quieter. “You are not burning the guests.” 

She huffed, smoke curling around your sleeve. Below, Jeongguk looked up. 

You hated that you knew him so immediately. Years should have blurred him, they should have been merciful, they should have made him strange to you. But he lifted his face toward the battlements, and your chest did something foolish. His eyes found you, not your father beside the yard. Not the banners or Vaelora first, though gods knew she demanded looking at. They found you. 

For one moment, the sea wind moved between you, and you were twelve again, furious and laughing on the cliffs. Jeongguk smiled, not broadly like he had in the tide pool. Just a small curve of his mouth, private and knowing, as if he remembered exactly what you had done to him and had decided, after all these years, to forgive you for it.

Vaelora growled again. You kept your eyes on him. “Behave,” you whispered,  not entirely certain which one of you the order belonged to.

That evening, the castle filled with Velaryon voices. They were louder than Targaryens in a way you had forgotten, less careful with their laugher. They smelled of salt and leather and ship oil, of lives lived under open skies rather than behind carved doors and painted tables. They made Dragonstone feel different, less like a tomb and more like a living organ.

You sat at your father’s right hand during supper, dressed in black silk embroidered with red thread. Your hair had been braided in the old Valyrian style, silver-gold woven with tiny rubies that caught the torchlight whenever you moved. The dress was armor and the jewels were warning, the name Targaryen sat upon you heavier than any crown ever would. 

Below your grand table, Jeongguk sat amongst his kin. You did not look at him, at least, not often. Not for too long… 

Vaelora was awake in the pit beneath the castle. You felt her like heat under your skin, pacing and turning, claws scraping against stone. Morraen’s presence unsettled her, or perhaps your current state of frustration did.

“Lady YN,” Lord Velaryon said, lifting his cup. “I hear Vaelora has grown into a terror.”

“Only to men who annoy her,” you replied. A few people laughed in response, your father had not. 

Lord Velaryon grinned. “Then she and I shall get along poorly, I fear.” 

“You may keep your distance and live.” 

That earned louder laughter for a second, then Jeongguk spoke, voice calm beneath the noise. “You’re awful merciful, aren’t you?” 

The table shifted, and your father’s eyes moved to him. So did yours. Jeongguk held his cup loosely in one hand, his expression almost innocent. Almost. He had not been given a place near the head of the table, but somehow the hall seemed to notice him anyway. He wore Velaryon blue rather than court black, a silver clasp at his throat shaped like a seahorse. There was a faint scar cutting through his left brow that had not been there since you were children. You wondered who had given it to him. 

“Merciful?” you asked. 

His eyes met yours. “You once pushed me into a tide pool instead of off the nearby cliff,” he shrugged. 

“Both were considered, I assure you.” 

“Undoubtedly.” 

The hall laughed again, but this time the sound felt distant, muffled beneath the rush of blood in your ears. There it was, the old and dangerous thing. Something young and sharp. Perhaps recognition. The strange discomfort of being remembered by someone who had known you before that connection had grown useful. 

Your father turned his cup in his hand. “You two were acquainted as children,” he said, not a question. 

Jeongguk bowed his head. “Briefly, My Lord.” 

“He was very irritating,” you said. 

“I was twelve.” 

“That is no excuse.” 

Jeongguk’s smile returned, softer this time. “No, My Lady.” 

My Lady. The words once might have restored the distance between you, instead they stung. After supper, you escaped. 

You did not wait to be dismissed. You did not linger for courtly conversation or marriage propositions or your father’s silent appraisal. You simply rose, murmured something about Vaelora, and left the hall before anyone could decide whether to stop you or not. 

The corridors of Dragonstone were narrow and black, carved from volcanic rock. Torches guttered in iron brackets and shadows moved like things alive. The castle always moved at night, old and hot and full of secrets. You descended toward the dragonpit. The deeper you went, the easier it became to breathe. Heat pressed against your face and the air tasted of ash and smoke. A dragon snarled in its sleep from somewhere below.

Vaelora was awake. She lay half curled in the largest cavern, milky scales gleaming in the firelight. Her head lifted the moment you entered. The dragonkeepers bowed and moved away without needing to be told. Everyone in Dragonstone understood that Vaelora only tolerated people. She welcomed only you.

You crossed the cavern and pressed your forehead to the bridge of her nose. Her heat soaked into you. 

“There you are,” you whispered. 

Vaelora made a deep clicking sound in her throat, almost scolding. “Yes, I know. I’m late.” Another rumble. “I could not exactly bring you to supper.” Her eye narrowed at you, accusing. “You would have eaten Lord Velaryon and that is not an argument in your favor.” 

You smiled and slid your hand along the curve of her jaw. Her scales were smooth near her face, rougher along the neck, warm enough that your fingertips pinkened against them. When you were little, you had believed no weapon could hurt her, no grief could reach you while she lived, and no world could be cruel enough to make a dragon helpless. You knew better now. That was the trouble with growing older. 

The gods did not make you wiser so you could be happy. They made you wiser so you could understand exactly how much there was to lose. 

Vaelora’s mood shifted, you felt it before you heard the footsteps. Her head rose, and the muscles beneath her scales tightened. A low growl rolled through the cavern, vibrating in your teeth. You turned, and Jeongguk stood at the mouth of the chamber. 

He had changed out of his formal clothes. No silver clasp now, no courtly Velaryon blue. Only dark riding leathers, sea-worn boots, and a loose white shirt beneath a half fastened jerkin. His hair had escaped its tie, strands falling over his forehead. In the torchlight, his face looked older than it had at supper. Less like a memory. 

“You should not be here,” you said. 

His eyes moved from you to Vaelora. He did not step farther into the cavern. 

“I was looking for Morraen.” 

“Did you often misplace your dragon on Driftmark?” 

“Only when he wished to be misplaced. You’ve never…?” 

Vaelora bared her teeth. Jeongguk lifted both hands slowly, “I mean no offense.” 

“She decides what offends her.” 

His eyes flicked to you, and for a moment, neither of you spoke. The cavern felt suspended in time. Then Jeongguk looked fully at Vaelora, and something in his face loosened. It was not fear, you were used to fear. Men tried to hide it, but dragons dragged the truth out of people. Fear had a smell, a posture, a pulse. This was something else, something close to wonder. 

“She is beautiful,” he said. Vaelora did not growl again.

“She knows this,” you replied, glancing toward the entrance behind him. “Morraen is on the eastern ridge. He’s been there since you dismounted.” 

Jeongguk’s mouth twitched. “You know where my dragon is?” 

“Vaelora knows where every dragon is.” 

“And she tells you?” 

“When she feels like it.” 

His eyes returned to you. “So yes.” 

You turned back to Vaelora, hoping the heat in your face could be blamed on the cavern. “You should go before she changes her mind about eating you.” 

Jeongguk did not leave. He had always had a terrible instinct for survival when you were involved. “I thought you would be so different,” he said quietly.

Your hand stilled against Vaelora’s jaw. You didn’t turn to face him, too afraid your face would give you away. “Different how?” 

“I do not know.” His voice came closer, though his footsteps did not. “Taller. Brighter.” 

“You are taller,” you replied. 

“So are you.” 

“That is what tends to happen when children grow, Jeongguk.” 

“I did not mean it like that.” 

“No,” you said, because the strange ache in your chest had returned. “I suppose you did not.” 

Behind you, Jeongguk was silent for long enough that you thought he finally might have gathered the sense to leave. “You look sadder.” 

Vaelora’s growl returned instantly. You faced him. It was a mistake, you knew it before your eyes found his. Anger would have been easier if he had looked smug, or if he had said it like a man trying to pry into a woman’s heart because he believed himself entitled to what lay inside. Jeongguk only watched you with an awful calm, with a quiet concern you had not asked for and did not want. 

“You should choose your next words carefully,” you said. 

“I am trying to.” 

“Try harder.” 

His jaw flexed. Good, you preferred him wounded to gentle. 

“You were always angry.” he said. “Even when we were children. But you were not always this.” 

“This?” 

“Gone somewhere.” 

The words struck too precisely. For a moment, you were thirteen again, high above the sea, Vaelora beneath you and terror opening your ribs. For a moment, you were six years old, whispering please to a hatchling while grown men watched and wondered what kind of weapon the pair of you would become.

Gone somewhere. Yes, perhaps you had. 

Perhaps every year at court had taken another piece of you. Every lesson in duty, every marriage proposal weighed like livestock, every look your father gave that warmed only when he spoke of your dragon, every whispered reminder that your royal blood meant you did not belong to yourself. 

You looked at Jeongguk Velaryon and wanted to hurt him for noticing it all. 

“You do not know me,” you said. 

His face did not change, but his eyes did. Something shuttered in them. “No,” he said. “I suppose I do not.” He bowed, the movement stiff with formality. “Forgive me, My Lady.” 

There it was again. My Lady. The title did what it was supposed to do. It put distance between the speaker and the receiver, built up stone and locked a door. Jeongguk turned to go. Vaelora watched him with predatory stillness, her great head hovering near your shoulder. Her thoughts burned against yours, not words but instinct and flashes. The urge to follow and repair. 

You swallowed hard. “Jeongguk.” 

He stopped, his name sounded different in the cavern, too soft and too human. He looked back at you, waiting. You should have apologized, you knew that. You were not so proud that you could not recognize cruelty after it left your mouth. But apology felt like kneeling, and you had been taught too young that kneeling was dangerous unless there was a sword at your throat. 

So instead you said “Vaelora likes you.” 

His eyes moved back to your dragon. Vaelora stared back, smoke curling lazily from one nostril. “She has an odd way of showing it.” 

“She still hasn’t eaten you.” 

“Ah.”

“That is nearly affection coming from her.” 

Jeongguk’s smile came slowly. It was not the one from the yard, not teasing or bright. This one was smaller and sadder, as though he understood the words you had not said. “Then I am honored.” 

You nodded once, as if his answer had settled something. He left, his footsteps fading up the tunnel toward open air. Far above, somewhere beyond stone and smoke, Morraen cried out across the eastern ridge. Vaelora answered with a sound that shook the cavern.

Though you didn’t know it then, and no dream or dragon or god was merciful enough to tell you, that was the first time your dragon would call to his. Years later, after the war would swallow half the realm and the sea would take and take and take, you would remember that sound.