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Searchers after horror haunt strange, far places.
But are not the dreams of poets and the tales of travellers notoriously false?
-- Lovecraft
Exile set him on his course. Exile gave him wings.
In a cask of Shade of the Evening he found more.
Its taste first reminded Euron of the bloated seals that washed up on Pyke. He would have spat it out and claimed another pound of flesh from the warlocks in his hold, except they stiffened and hissed when he poured the dark drink. Like children if he’d stolen their cakes. The taste changed as he wondered why they clamored for it. Stolen cakes, the salty lips of his brother’s wife, the wine from the Myrish merchant prince. It was every taste and none, the liquid thicker than wine and almost oily down his throat.
Only when the goblet was empty did he remember why it was called Shade of the Evening. Did he dream?
That first taste was over three years ago. In three years he has dreamed, seen, and sauntered through the crossroads where the two meet. It mattered not which one he chose to believe. He won his throne anyway.
He sits on the Iron Throne, the Shade still warm in his throat. The swords are cold at his back, blades happy to slice him open. Some of his salt wives were like that, but all bore his whelps or cried his name in the end. The chair is unlikely to do the same, but he expects it will warm in time.
The hall is empty in the hour of the wolf, sparsely occupied in midday, apart from the dragons. He had their skulls freed from below, but found no reason to hand them on walls when they could scatter across the floor. The hall is now a dragon graveyard more than a throne room—an improvement, no doubt.
They call him the Crow’s Eye. A crow does not bring down a lion when others can do its work. Taking his throne was rather dull, in truth. Longships so close to Highgarden sent the Reachmen running for their fleet, not knowing it floated in charred pieces across several harbors. What forces remained in King’s Landing broke soon enough. The Velaryon bastard likely sighs in relief he robbed the listing ship before the Crow’s Eye made port.
And so Euron Greyjoy swirls what is left in the heavy goblet, bored, but so rarely sleepy. When he spots a shadow darker than the ones around it, the prickling feeling of being watched suddenly has a face.
“I know you’re there, Asha.”
His niece, the strongest of Balon’s get, has taken the Iron Islands in a sweep of blood and promises. Her crippled brother stands beside her in name only. Does she know her other uncle limps back to Pyke with his shattered fleet? Euron vaguely recalls promising him the Iron Islands, but Victarion performed so miserably in acquiring the dragon girl that he has little desire to remember. Join, fight, or fuck our dear niece, brother? He doubts his brother is in any position to choose, no matter which god he has crawled to during the voyage.
Euron grins. He was leaning on one arm, fingers grazing the edge of a jutting sword, but he straightens now.
“Why be subtle when your righteous indignation led you here?”
She steps out of Silverwing’s shadow, cloaked but unhooded. Like most of their kind she is not a skulker. Perhaps not even an assassin. Her thin face bears little expression, a sharp cheekbone catching the moonlight that trickles from the high windows.
“Drink?” he asks. “Little will compare.”
He offers his own glass, which she ignores, though she takes another step closer. He finishes the draught himself. The dreams are lucid, less a world that never was than myriad paths to a new one. The Shade is best sipped, not gulped. How different the world would be if the dragon she stood next to still lived, guarding her with blazing eyes and steaming breath. His night would be far less boring.
“Did you truly go to Valyria?
“You sneak into my throne room to ask me?” Euron tosses the goblet away. The metal rings overloud in the hall of dead dragons.
Asha is a vision in her own way, all sharp-cut contempt in the way she glares at him. “Yes.”
A thousand answers and one. He idly turns his wrist. “Sit on my lap and I‘ll tell you. You used to like my stories.”
She was the only one of Balon’s four ducklings not to interrupt his tales of blood and vengeance and plead for a kinder story. Perhaps she liked them, or merely understood any request for a gentler one would be met with the cruelest stories he knew. It seems so long ago he could laugh at his eldest brother when his nephews sobbed from nightmares.
Asha scoffs. She stays just out of reach, her axe-child no doubt close at hand. Her uncle leans back in his throne. A disadvantage to a crew of mutes is an occasional dearth of conversation. Whatever her recalcitrance, she looks curious.
Lowering his voice so she must step closer to hear, he thinks back to that cask, to the first time he truly dreamed.
A dry scoff from the cell, then that trawling language of Qarth—“You’ve had too much, fool, you’ll like as not throw yourself into the sea.”
Euron leaned against the metal bars as he licked the traces from his teeth, eyeing the reedy-necked warlock. Who would pass a chance to try Shade of the Evening? Especially when it enraged them so.
“Shall I lock myself in with you then?” He grinned. “Mayhaps dreams will make you pretty.”
The warlocks huddled like wet street cats. One fixed him with a pale-eyed glare. “May your dreams rot around you.”
They were wrong, as wisemen often were. Euron left them to their mutterings. His blood was warming, his sight unfurling. The taste in his mouth made him think of the wench his brother held so close she grew to hate him. He made it as far as the deck when the world changed.
Does he pass like a crow above Harren Hoare, or does he wear the failed king’s skin? The perspective twitches and fades whenever he thinks about it. All he knows is this is not the Silence. Its rigging is all warped, and his crew has magically grown tongues.
A black castle, a black dragon, a fool who called himself Harren the Black. When the dragons came, King Harren fled like a rat, hiding in his castle until he burned alive.
Euron had always scoffed at this story, even at the nursemaid’s knee. But now, the Crow’s Eye sees what could have been. What he would’ve done, had he been born in a different age.
An ironborn king stronger on land than sea? Not until the sea drowns the world.
Instead of fleeing for his pile of rocks, he blows out his horse racing to his ship, the fastest in the Iron Fleet. Other ships, stronger and larger, weigh anchor. The dragon is a speck on the horizon, likely already steaming as rain drizzles against his hide. The king has picked this day for his stand, a day of storm. Let the Drowned God’s foe aid them, for is not the enemy of one’s enemy a provisional friend? His vanguard and closest vassals bolt for the open sea, toward the squall blackening the skyline. It drowns out the dragon’s fury, but the Iron King sees the flames as Balerion catches the slowest of the fleet. Like as not the would-be dragonking thinks him craven.
Would the Conqueror pursue them straight into a storm? He is not a callow gloryhound. But as mighty as his dragon’s wings, they cannot beat back the storm that roars toward land. The water has grown rougher by degrees, but it is a single, clear-frozen moment when the icy rain suddenly engulfs the ship and the seas churn beneath his feet. No one can outrun a storm, all true reavers learn, only attempt to avoid it if far enough ahead, and to weather it if not.
The king’s ship pitches across the waves as the dragon screeches above, the Black Dread fighting the wind and rain as his rider fights for his attention. That is when the Iron King orders his crossbowmen to fire. Quarrels fly wide, stolen by the squall. Others glance off the beast’s obsidian hide. Still, some wedge between scales and joints.
The king feels the crackle along his arms, as do the rest of his crew. The ironborn have long torn away the light steel they wear at sea. Even the king must look aside when a lightning bolt strikes close to the prow. The order is still to fire.
His men cannot hear him over the wind and dragon screams, but they can see him, braced against the railing on sealegs less steady than his father’s. Those who begin to vomit when the ship drops from a high wave still reach for bolts once there is nothing left to retch.
Balerion tries to battle his way above the storm but lightning confuses him and winds change too fast to steady his great wings. He shrieks out another blast of fire but the winds skew it to a different ship. And so the Iron King watches, daring to smile, as the dragon twists and bucks like a horse chewed with gadflies. Then he orders the grappling hooks.
What can kill a dragon? He knows not. But if the hooks can pull the Black Dread closer, his men can unload their bolts into his eyes. They could drag him low enough to crash into the waves, drowning his rider if not the beast.
The next bolt of lightning steals his plan. It snaps across the dragon’s hide, cracking across Balerion’s wings and bounding between the iron arrowheads lodged between his scales. For an instant the sea goes white.
And that is how the dragon dies.
Euron, or perhaps the Harren who would never be, shakes with laughter as the beast plummets in a daze. It is merely stunned, not dead, but it drowns like any other creature. Of course, this is the Crow’s Eye’s dream. He would not allow the Conqueror to die. That will come months later, after he has dissuaded Aegon’s wives from their vengeance by promising every burned field will ensure another part of their brother hacked off. He knows with unfailing certainty they will take to the ground to plot their recourse. Setting down their wings will not save the would-be king, only leave his sister-wives open to more blades.
When Euron’s eyes opened the world changed little. He stood on a high crosspiece, arm hooked around his mast, laughing as rain soaked him to the bone.
It was a dream, not a vision. What could have been—the question that drives some men mad. Fortunate for Euron he possessed a sterner mind. Or a madder one. He shook himself off as he went below deck. The lanterns blazed far too bright. Robbed of shadow, still huddled in their cell, the warlocks were just old men. Old meat, even past its prime, was still meat.
Euron balanced a forearm against the wall, unsure if he shivered from cold or euphoria. He grinned all the same.
“Hungry?”
That night, amid crackling flesh and mindless screams, he knew he wanted to see Valyria.
Not all plunder requires swords and bloodshed. Other times it calls for persuasion and an offer of rare drink. Thus Euron lounged in the brothel’s solar, wolfish smile in place, as the archmaester studied the Shade of the Evening. Some whispered the maester consorted with slatterns and shadowbinders. He seemed hardly surprised when Euron first spoke. Doubtless he could’ve dragged the maester to his ship and tortured it out of him, but the reaver knew from experience that torture was better for pleasure than knowledge.
Shrugging off any study of poisons, the stocky man tossed back the Shade like cheap wine, the Tyroshi girl licking away the drop that ran down his chin.
Thus they spoke, happier to meet in dreams than daylight. Eyes faraway, the chuckling maester spoke of his order’s part in the death of the dragons. He spoke of Valyria, and the lost treasure of the dragonlords. When Euron mentioned several of the tomes onboard his ship, taken from merchant ships, the maester just grinned and said the only books worth reading were lost ones, whatever the half-mad man meant. Euron grew tired of the maester’s interminable circles.
“If I took my ship to the Smoking Sea and walked through Old Valyria, would I return?”
A drowsy smile but sharp eyes paced the Archmaester’s reply. “Likely not. But it is only when you fall that you learn if you can fly.”
Euron liked this sentiment so much he let the maester leave the solar alive, after asking the questions he came for.
There were diversions between Oldtown and the shattered ruins. A lifetime’s worth of gold spent, another lifetime’s worth stored below. An endless cycle of nodding when crew died and heating his pincers when new men came aboard.
Different colors, and different dreams. For months he was a merry reaver, savoring the wind as it carried the Silence alongside a lumbering trade vessel, warming his bed more often with charm than force. For a time later his mood turned black as his crow’s eye, where he hacked his way through begging sailors, raging at the day he left Pyke without gutting his older brother. Balon stoked grief and regret and called it vengeance; as long as he fought and failed he was content to say he glorified the Seastone Chair. As if waylaying a few Myrish spice ships offended any but a fat merchant.
When they truly sailed for Valyria, Euron’s fury had cooled as it always did from the succor of blood. His taciturn crew was growing anxious as the red sky grew higher. Likely remembering stories told by their mothers of the Doom. Stories made them afraid of death, but Euron made them afraid of worse things, and so they stayed the course.
It was useless to guess days or nights once they sailed between red sky and red water. His men coughed on the sulfurous reek, and even his eye was streaming. After days of trawling through the windless Smoking Sea, he found an estuary to anchor the ship. From there it was a walk to the ruined city.
A walk through hell, he was sure his crew would say if they had their tongues. First Euron saw to his warlock, a quarter of the original stock. The first he burned and fed to the others—he might’ve coaxed them into being crew, after he ripped their tongues out, but these warlocks only interested him as far as they could speak.
The second interested him too much. The old man had glared at him through the cell bars, cheeks hollow, blue lips stark. His voice was jagged and raspy.
“Still sailing to Valyria?” he rasped. “Fly, fool, and see how you break.”
Euron was against the bars and dragging the warlock closer in half a heartbeat.
“What far-sight is this?” His teeth scraped the prisoner’s cheek. “Besides the only talent you’ve shown.”
The warlock squirmed against his hold. “That is not yours to know. You may drink our Shade, but truth eludes you.”
Rebuffing the reaver’s curiosity always made him surly. The old man would not say, even after Euron had few things left to cut. He confessed disappointment to finding the third dead in a pool of his own blood, his tongue spat clear of the cell. The fourth was younger and less suicidal. In truth the warlock was not old enough to know all the Undying’s secrets, but he spoke of their magic with enough color to hold the reaver’s interest.
When Euron ducked into the hold, the Silence bobbing in the estuary, he fixed the last warlock with a cankerous smile.
“They say Valyria is riddled with traps and demons. Can you see them?”
The warlock pulled himself onto his haunches, watery eyes wandering and glassy. Euron held up a wineskin of the Shade and the man was all but begging to suck his cock. It wasn’t physical want like in those enslaved to wine. The warlock was already swiping at tears, the mummer in some play where the lady finally saw her love return. After dreaming a different world, one more colorful and generous with secrets, the true one seemed bled white.
“I can keep you from the fire below your feet.” The warlock’s red-rimmed eyes implored him. “Better, ironborn, if I have sipped.”
The iron squealed as Euron stepped inside the cell. Crouching, he took a long pull from the skin and handed it to his prisoner. Stick-thin, dressed in robes long gone to rags from bandaging cuts, the warlock made him think of a carrion bird. An easy creature to keep close, provided it was fed, but a pet bird must be pinioned all the same. While the warlock sat in dazed contentment, lips freshly stained, Euron snapped a too-loose slave collar to his neck. He never saw the point of snug collars when a brand could easily show ownership. What good a collar that could not be pulled? The man tripped and staggered up the stairs, either from the weight of iron or the long captivity.
When the rowboat dredged to a stop on the gritty beach, Euron leapt off, wondering if he was the first man in Valyria since the doom. Mayhaps. The sand was dark and untouched. The ground ahead was gray. He half-expected a ruddy earth to match the sea and sky. Alas, it was a field of dark rock—not solid stone though. It felt hollow, almost thrumming, like it waited for the best moment to split open and drag him down. And then you’ll know if you can fly. The same question, no matter which sea he sailed or ship he reaved. The saddest question and the only question.
And fuck, it was hot. Not the heat of the Summer Islands, lightened by sea breeze and palms, nor the sweltering heat of Lys, where a walk to the brothel district soaked one in sweat before they even chose a whore to tumble. Old Valyria’s heat was leeching. Dryer than bones left after dragonfire, and dusty with their ashes. His crew was already coughing, a rather grotesque sound without their tongues.
He kept the warlock close, ordering his crew to stay alert. He assumed their silence for assent, but realized his error when the first stepped somewhere Euron had not. A brittle crack, a sigh like steam, and the Lorathi was squawking as he vanished. His other crew froze. The hole where the Lorathi fell was…molten. Like a sunset or hellfire. Euron wanted so much to touch it, but that seemed unwise. And so he ordered them all to continue, shoving the warlock into a walk, back onto the pale stony road and toward the city. The Qartheen continued picking his way along.
He knew there was no actual white-paved road, no distant city where high towers gouged the sky. When he closed his eyes and thought of his question, thought of his enraging exile, Valyria was a wasteland once more. The only city was a distant ruin, jagged like broken teeth.
Mouth dry, temples dripping, he continued with the warlock. If he needed to remind his crew to follow his footsteps, he’d do better to kill all the fools right there and find himself new sailors. Dry winds were the only sound, besides a staccato of coughing and rattling scree. At least, until he spied the crater. The white-paved path to the ruined city was on a small incline, and the massive gouge revealed itself early, even through the Shade.
A new smell came, more than char and fouled air. Spoiled, roasted meat, not so different from the warlock he fed to the flames. The faint skitterings were nothing compared to scrape of earth and rib-thrumming growl. The warlock tottered worse now, raw feet trailing blood. Doubtless the scent roused the beast in the crater. Smiling for the first time since he left the Silence, Euron walked faster, swiping at the blood beginning to trail from his nose. Valyria had no love of visitors. But what secrets did it guard?
It was a deep hole but the sides were sloped. He looked aside at a Lysene youth, the lad’s eyes red and watery unlike his native kith. Euron took the boy’s crossbow, considerately loaded and drawn. Without a word—as if he could offer any—the Lyseni unbuckled his bag of quarrels and handed them over. Euron preferred blades but even more he preferred a prize. Even if it’s an ugly one, he thought as he stepped to the crater’s edge and peered down.
The withered creature coiled in the pit, clinging to warmth like any old fool. It was black once, he’d heard, though its scales had faded to gray, and the rot clinging to its neck and jaw was paler still. The forgotten dragon. Too mad to ride, too bloodthirsty to slay. Once it was mad and wild and proud, and when its appetite grew, smallfolk named it the Cannibal.
But that was long ago, before the maesters took their part.
Euron kept his rakish grin as he twined the hair of the pretty whore. The archmaester was cozy, neck bent in languor in the chair across from him. The Shade treated him to softer dreams than the reaver. Euron has almost reached the end of his patience for coaxing. Already the doxy is tensing as she rests on her knees, her back to his sprawled form on the gaudy sofa. Perhaps she senses his twining is less affection than braiding a noose.
“It must’ve been a sight, to see those creatures fall from the sky.”
A wet chuckle. “None did. My order never figured out how to bring down the dragons. Only the dragonlings. Hatchlings, poisoned inside their shells. The rest died without our help.”
Euron had heard dragons were fire made flesh, but this one’s heat seemed an infected wound. Though close in length to his longship, its wings were spindly and its ribs jutted like fishbones. When a golden eye rolled to him, the reaver wondered if it knew its crippling came from its own gluttony.
The raw shriek made the warlock stumble into him. Euron shoved him aside and bared his teeth in greeting.
“Have you lived so long you’ve forgotten your name?”
The crossbow missed its eye, scraping across its jaw and glancing off a shoulder. He grinned when its gaze seemed to clear, and the black creature heaved back onto its haunches and scrabbled at the rocky slope. If it remembered its own legend, he would be dead in moments.
Its wings blasted sweltering air when they unfurled, scattering shale and ash. Just enough strength remained that it could crawl from its tomb. Euron reloaded the crossbow. Not that he was one to hold a bow close, but he was less keen on breaking a sword across its muzzle. The smoke bubbled from its mouth as its neck straightened, cracking through scabs and rot. A last stand, a memory of its old terror—whatever it was, Euron had long sprang away by the time the dragon sputtered out its flame, engulfing the Pentoshi mute behind him. Humans never danced better than when they burned.
The bolt cranked into place and he whistled. The dragon was a hunter, and hunters looked forward. Only when it twisted its smoking maw, guttering fire behind its teeth, did the Crow’s Eye have a straight shot. A cranking choom and the bolt ripped through the Cannibal’s right eye. It snapped back with a screech, just as the fight seemed to go out of its forequarters—there was only a ghost of a fight in it anyway. Hissing, smoking, the dragon collapsed onto the slope. Euron loaded a third bolt. His crew had retreated twenty paces, all but the charred Pentoshi. That one squealed like a dying pig; one with truffles in its mouth to explain the tongueless hacking. He almost fired his quarrel at the wrong target just to shut him up.
Instead, Euron picked his way down the slope to the dying beast. The dragon snuffled on blood leaking down its face and nose, steam hissing whenever blood touched its fire-brushed teeth. Its remaining eye did not leave his. Eye to eye, the Cannibal was more than a mad beast. Doubtless it waited for him to come closer so it could rip him in half. Cut off a wolf’s head and it can still bite, did not the saying go? Euron buried his third bolt in its last eye.
The Cannibal was dead ever since it poisoned itself. What could kill an unborn dragonling could only cripple the full-grown beast, he supposed. But Euron cared less for the last of its kind than the progeny. Sick and wounded, the creature limped here for a reason. When its emaciated sides had stopped heaving, he walked close enough to touch the half-buried bolts.
He grinned. When one dreams as long and far as he does, there is some pleasure in uncertainty. He’d suspected at least one of the beasts was still alive, but it was only a guess drawn from the Shade and the trunks of books he’d looted over the years. He hadn’t stopped to wonder the more scholarly details. You may fly yet.
The impaled bolt is yanked out with a crunching squelch. Dragon blood was dark as the Silence under a new moon. Tossing away the skewered eye, he cupped his hand beneath the black socket. It was hotter than human blood, but not scalding like he’d heard.
The Targaryens called themselves blood of the dragon. Was that such a high pedestal?
It was hot and metallic—true iron, not coppery tang like the blood dripping from his nose. He hardly expected it to give him wings. But what was freedom if not indulging small whims? Imagining he looks a cannibal himself, he continued down the shale-strewn slope, to where the dragon made its sunken grotto. They said dragons horde treasure; Euron had plenty enough, but he looked for something rarer.
He had thrown a dragon egg into the sea. It was a green beauty that caught a reddish sheen in the right sun. If he is telling the true story though, it was not a sea so much as a harbor, and he had not thrown so much as dropped it, when the Faceless Man smirked too long. He’d known it would be the price they would ask. He hadn’t known they were insufferable, all distant airs and mysterious smiles. It wasn’t a very deep harbor—he could’ve been truly cruel and dropped it in the middle of the Smoking Sea, but they might not have honored their bargain.
A bargain they upheld, despite any difficult negotiations. They weighted his dice and bettered his aim. And now he is a king.
His niece has listened in silence, eyes hard and dark as a sea mink’s.
“Now mine uncle is a king. And you married me with a seal.”
“The fairest seal on Pyke, I swear it.”
Asha’s laugh bounds off the dragon skulls. Not at his jest. Her eyes remain just as sharp, his jackal of a niece. She has walked to the dais, just out of reach.
“You took that crown from a child.” She mocks a bow. “I suppose every crow’s a king of the carcass it picks clean.”
His backhand snaps across her cheek.
It is enough to sunder the dream. Asha is not here, has never been here. His irritating niece is on Pyke with her brother, like as not plotting how to win her other uncle to her cause. Asha plotted before she brawled—he should’ve sent her to court his dragon queen instead of his hapless brother. It had been an experiment more than anything, but he would not refuse a Valyrian queen his bed.
He scoffs to himself. His phantom niece had not stayed long enough to ask the question he wanted. Of all who would ask it, he thought Asha most likely. Sadly, no one wonders about the interesting things anymore. Not even the Faceless Man asked if the sea-green dragon egg was the only one of its kind.
Rising, he walks among the blackened boneyard. His other two eggs are cradled behind Vhagar’s bottom teeth. Euron slips through a groove where her jaws meet. The black egg is brindled with a blue so dark it might have been dipped in the Shade. It’s always warm in his hands. The second has a pale gray shell flecked with amber. Pretty things have always caught his eye; the harder to have the better to hold. Even if he must play mother bird to a clutch of dragon eggs.
Shade of the Evening makes for intriguing dreams, but like any man he craves something more. The dragon eggs are a taste of the unknown. He may dream of what could have been, but he has no idea if the pretty shells will ever crack to reveal little dragonlings, much less ones not putrefied by the maesters’ taint. Or should they hatch, if they will only avenge their slain sire. The possibility, that fraught roll of the dice where the dice are not weighted, makes him almost as ecstatic that first night he tasted the Shade.
But what fun is a roll of the dice with no one to throw them against? And bones, even skulls, make for almost as poor conversation as his crew.
Euron carries blades, not quills, and so he pulls out his smallest dagger and draws it across his forearm. A shallow cut, but blood quickly wells. He dips into it with the small dagger, and begins to write on the gray shell. It is for his niece and no other. If Victarion cannot court a lonely dragon queen, how could he court a dragon?
Perhaps the eggs will not hatch at all and she’ll take him for the madman he never denies. Or she will hatch it and raze his new castle to the ground. He has never dreamed of his niece beyond killing or bedding her. Not knowing what she might choose…the Iron King grins as he writes. A fool’s poetry, scrawled on a treasure without compare.
Fly to me.
Fly, niece, by wing or sail or sorcery.
He’s not sure if he’ll offer her a crown or if she’ll burn his face off, or sell his gift and hire an army. Dreams cast no shadows. But he has a guess. His niece always did like the darker stories. For once he finds a question that distracts him more than falling or flying. What passing bliss to a man who walks bloodied dreams and broken lives and finds scarce few answers at all.