#wingedumbra

Many a night had once been passed in her brother’s company with only the stories of home to warm them. In the end, that’s all they’d been: words, half-remembered tales passed from one mouth to the other. Faced with the reality in front of her, they all fell short. 

Her dragons were growing not only in size, but in skill. Where once they could only crawl, they now fluttered around her, spreading their wings as far as they dared. Drogon was the most impatient of the three, the most determined to take to the air...and the first to breathe fire. No more than a small stream of flames, in time it would rage hot enough to melt stone. If she didn’t learn how to direct him now, she’d have no hope of commanding him in battle as her ancestors once did. 

Easier said than done. Daenerys sat cross-legged with a bowl of pork in her lap. She took a piece between her fingers and held it up for her dragon to see. His eyes were two bright pools of molten orange; they stayed fixed upon the meat even as his head swayed slightly from side to side. “Are you ready, Drogon?” she asked, smiling as she paused but a moment longer before tossing it into the air.

Unspoken fluff starters // ACCEPTING

When he was but an egg, he fit so easily against the swell of her stomach. She would never bear a child of her womb, but now she was mother to something else, mother to dragons, and the largest of her children nuzzled her chest beneath the covers, his head pressed against the beat of her heart. 

“Someday, when you are grown, I’m going to take us home,” she whispered, in the same soft voice Viserys used when they were children. Before the world took all they had, before bitterness consumed him, all he wished was to return to the land of their birth, where they belonged. Drogon chittered, blinking up at her with bright, fiery eyes. She stroked the scales between his budding horns. 

“Dragonstone is built upon a smoking mountain. The Earth is warm there. I think you’d like it.” Could dragons survive the fires inside the Earth? It struck her again, how little she knew of her children, how much there was to learn. Daenerys drew him closer, the heat of his tiny frame washing over her like a hot bath. Deeper and deeper into that pleasant warmth she sank, welcomed after another exhausting day with the Qartheen; yet before surrendering to sleep entirely, she murmured one more word, a promise –

Thunder, in a clear noon sky. The coming of her children. Daenerys tipped her head back, violet eyes searching the endless blue until she spied him soaring toward her, nothing more than a dark blur. He’s spotted her too, or so it seemed as his body arched, twisting gracefully toward the ground. She stepped forward to meet him, trusting those mighty wings to catch his fall. They opened with a crack that shot through her chest, beating a gust that would have knocked her to the ground had she not dug in her heels. Once settled, the Mother of Dragons drifted closer, only slightly concerned as to why she’s yet to hear so much as a rumble in greeting. 

Why that is so became clear when the deadly points of his teeth finally parted, and a shower of petals, plants, and flowers rained down upon her. Yellows, blues, pinks, purples, every color the surrounding mountains had to offer. She laughed, lifting an arm over her hair to no avail; the blossoms clung to her braids, her coat, her cheek, damp with dragon spit where her fingers moved to pry them off. 

“...Thank you, sweetling.” From the ground she plucked a rose, one that hadn’t been too damaged from the flight back in Drogon’s mouth. 

um wow i literally  love you  for sending both !!!   thank you so much,  friend !!!

8. i absolutely,  genuinely do want happiness for asha  !!!   she  deserves  a happy life.   in her canon,  i’m honestly not sure how it would work out for her to have a happy ending.   we all know that grrm’s intentions for future books is a little bit murky,  &  when your best babe is not a main character,  there tends to not even be rumors for their fate.  currently in the released canon,  asha is an injured prisoner,  her crew has mostly been killed  &  her longships either captured or burnt,  &  she is unable to return to the iron islands even if she were free because it is likely that if she did,  her uncle would have her killed.    but even if i’m not sure how it would work out,   it is my absolute goal to see asha survive the books  &  find some form of joy  &  peace,  whatever that may be.   that’s partially why i love writing her so much  –  i get to give her all kinds of happiness that the books deny her  !!!

as to what would make her most happy,  this is pretty simple  :   really all asha wants is a ship to sail  &  a home to come back to.   she wants to live on her islands in peace,  without participating in senseless wars  &  without having to steal and scrounge for everything they need.   she doesn’t necessarily  want  to rule them,  but she will if there is no one else she trusts to act with the best interests of the ironborn at heart.   we see this in her kingsmoot speech,   &  also in her AFFC conversation with victarion in which she offers to split the rule between them for the good of their people.    she wants  peace  &  victory  for those she loves.   nothing more,  but also nothing less.

9.  THAT BEING SAID  i also really do enjoy putting my muse through some pretty intense angst.   however,  i like for threads and arcs to have happy endings !!!   angst  &  emotional turmoil is there to force the growth of character that makes happy endings enjoyable  &  worth it.   happiness is fun,  but asha would never be able to grow,  expand,  &  heal if all she ever experienced was happiness.   this is particularly obvious in the books  –  she starts  AFFC  confident  &  proud  as the greyjoys are winning their battles.   but in  ADWD,  she loses  &  is captured,  &  it is in that book that we see her have the most emotional growth.   i love that i am able to learn more about her  &  grow her character by putting her through emotional situations  &  seeing how she reacts.

as for what would break her heart the most …    i can think of a few things.   if what remains of her family were killed,  she would be distraught.   even if she doesn’t always like those she shares blood with,  she relies on them heavily for support.   if she were forced to live away from the iron islands,  such as in an arranged marriage,  she would struggle a lot.   if she didn’t have a ship,  she would feel very claustrophobic  &  trapped.   if the iron islands were destroyed entirely in the war,  she would lose her primary source of motivation  &  probably kinda just break apart.   the most miserable thing she could go through in canon at this moment would be watching theon be sacrificed to r’hllor,  then having euron win the iron throne.   that would essentially be her  game over.

this is a  particularly  amazing question,  thank you so so very much for sending it in !!!   i as the writer  &  asha would indeed say very different things to answer this question.   my answer is asha’s  emotionality.   asha’s answer would be her  strength.    &  if i may expand on these answers a little bit …

the reason for my answer is that asha feels her emotions on an incredibly deep level.  i have been saying for awhile now that asha is a love-motivated character.   every action she takes within the canon of the books is motivated by love.  the most common motivation for her is her love of her family,  her country,  &  her people.   asha loves the iron islands.   they are a hard place to love,  but she sees the beauty in their strength  &  resilience.  she grew up surrounded by her people,  &  in many ways,  all ironborn are very much her family.   she follows her father’s orders out of love for her people,  &  she stands against his philosophies at the kingsmoot after he is gone out of love for her people.

asha’s answer for herself would be vastly different.  in ironborn culture,  strength is non-optional.  the weak die or are killed early.  strength is valued above all else,  &  it is what she has been raised to value in herself as well as her people.   she is certain that if she were to show strong emotions in front of the ironborn, they would mock her as being soft-hearted  &  womanly,  &  therefore worthy of less than a man.   she also feels that strength must involve keeping your emotions or attachments from others,  &  associates lack of visible emotion as strength.

asha would absolutley say that our answers are exact opposites of each other.   asha is of the cersei-esque opinion that loving something  ( or someone )  really means that it can be used to hurt you.  love gives you soft spots.   she believes that her emotionality is a weakness.   but i firmly disagree with her line of reasoning,  although i understand from where it stems.   i believe that she draws her strength from her intense love.   i believe that it is her loving heart that makes her strong far more so than her toned biceps.   &  i love threads that allow her to explore along that vein and lean into how much she actually cares about things.

The City of Splendors, they called Qarth, and not without good reason; everywhere she looked burst with color, from the richly dressed Qartheen nobles to the flowers that lined the terraces, spilling their sweet perfume into the streets. Above all else Qarth seemed a city of comfort. They were loathed to do anything that might disturb that leisure, including granting her the ships she needed to carry her people to Westeros. Fresh off yet another rejection ( this time from the guild of spicers ), Daenerys traveled back to Xaro’s palace in silence. Before long they would run out of places to turn. Neither did she expect the generosity of Xaro  Xhoan Daxos’ to prove unending. She would need to make some sort of plan with Ser Jorah and her Blood Riders come the evening.

Yet for now her worries melted away at the sound of her children. Every day they grew larger, more lively, and Daenerys could not help but smile when they clambered over each other in their haste to greet her. 

“Now, Sweetling, take care you don’t crush your brother--” The chastisement fell short when she laughed, offering an arm to Drogon all the same. He climbed up without pause, and she held him close as she offered Rhaegal and Viserion scratches of their own.