SERPENTINE ... hotd

lysette

the outside people of volantis watched as amaxeys– in all of her glory, clad in a ghostly grey-white and pale green scale pattern, dawning cleaned white claws and horns– flew overhead, half-sheathed in the clouds.

if one did not know better, they might think amaxeys shared parentage with seasmoke. the two looked the same; though where amaxeys was green, seasmoke's scales were complimented with the slight red tinge of his wings. the she-dragon was only slightly larger than ser laenor's, though. it was said by sealords and passed on that amaxeys and jadeclaw had been brought to braavos in 54 AC by a woman called alys westhill, and the late king jahaerys had made many attempts to find them. however, the braavosi feigned their uncertainty on the collection's whereabouts. the last time jahaerys had sent his hand to meet with the braavosi was in the year of 57 AC, veiled threats from the targaryens met with the then-sealord's amusement and suggestion of employing the faceless men to assassinate king's landing's royal people. the three dragon eggs did not hatch until 64 AC.

when they did, they proved too fiery for the sealord to handle, and he sent men clad in steel armor to chain the young dragons to separate ships and sail them off to the forest of qohor, where a sailor had once brought back the gift of a silver-furred lemur, its eyes shining purple– the lemur itself wound up stuffed upon its death, and resided in lysette's quarters, on her desk and beside a cherry harp imported from yunkai. the baby dragons remained there, abandoned, for years.

it wasn't until 105 AC, when saera targaryen had come to braavos and begun her exclusive relationship with the current sealord, twylor merling, that she had been informed of the dragons dropped at the shores of qohor, and pleaded travellers to take her there, so that she could find them. and then, in 107 AC she'd finally seen them, three-and-forty years of age. she'd already bonded with a dragon– the great unknown sea dragon frostfyre. she wasn't of much use aside from keeping saera company, but she was a beautiful dragon, gleaming blues and greens like a large castle made of crystal.

lysette's mother and father had never said much on their domesticating of the dragons, and all she'd known was what lorys told her– only three of the fifty men to accompany their parents on their travel had made it back in the end, as ellagon (who would go on to be the fattest of dragons, unclaimed and content to be spoiled rotten by twylor) allegedly burned the lot of them and the three ate all of the dead men, picking through their armor like a narrow-sighted maiden pulling the skin from her chicken, and slurping them up like a starved wolf opening up bones and guzzling down the marrow.

whatever the case, lysette kept very certain to read all of the history records and scrolls, determined to figure out her dragon's birthday so that she could keep track of its age. she often spent her younger years wondering what all the white beast could have seen in her wild, unclaimed years. she wondered if she really did eat any people up. however, as they flew over essos, lysette could not recall a moment she ever feared or distrusted the girl.

the history lesson used to bore her mindlessly, but she often thought about it with wonder now. how lucky she was, the girl would think, to grow up with a dragon, to fly over places most of the people she'd ever known would never get to see. certainly, commonfolk in king's landing would never know this sight. she flew over the lands of the long summer, a long and grueling stretch southward of central essos. there, it was desolate and gray, drowning after the doom took it.

she passed it atop amaxeys, and watched the boiled tides of the smoking sea and the rock stacks and the dragonglass, peaking in and out of the water. her mother once told her that krakens lived in its depths, the large and hungry squidbeasts. here, ships vanished and never returned. valyria had only been isled after the doom, and the smoking sea had only been born after it as well.