I AM A DRAGON - HOTD AU

Chapter 7

Maenera was... tired. Yes that was the right word. She was also old. Maybe not in physical years, but she felt old. She spent lifetimes lost in visions and dreams. Sometimes she would only get an impression, a kind smile or a song, a lovers touch or a mother's kiss. Those impressions were the worst because she could never truly differentiate between memories and dreams.

Maenera knew she lived another life before, but couldn't remember clearly. She remembers her father's kind smile and her mother blue eyes. Her lover's burning gaze and the pain she was in when she gave birth to her child. But not much more than that. She didn't see their faces or remember their names. Maenera didn't remember her child, and oh how that thought made her want to weep. She didn't remember her own name from Before.

She always tried to stay positive when she was a child. Because she was not born an adult in the body of a child, no. She was born inocent and wide eyed, and then the visions came. It wasn't brutal at first or so her parents told her. She would sometimes wake up with tear stained cheeks and she had a period when she would cry every time she saw Baelon, but nothing too drastic.

Then she started to get them more and more, more time spent in lifetimes not her own. Feeling daggers and arrows piercing her skin, the touch of them burning. She would keep in her arms children not of her womb and sing sad songs to sick men she didn't even met. But still she was a child, she wanted to braid her mother's dark hair and play hide and seek with her father and she did that. Her parents more than happy to make her smile and laugh and run without a care in the world and then one day, when she was playing hide and seek with her father, the visions came hard and fast. She was outside, trying to blend in with the snow, see if her father could find her again. She usually could stay hours hidden, her dragon blood keeping her warm, but that day when the visions came she fell head first into the snow and didn't get up. A blizzard came fast and without warning covering her unmoving body. Her father, mother and servants spent hours outside searching until the sun began to set and they had to give up. Not her father, her father searched and searched through the night until he found her. Blue, with ice in her hair and barely breathing. They nursed her back to health, but it was the last time they played hide and seek.

She was enraged when her father told her there will be no more hide and seek. She was only just a child and her father was forbidding her, her favorite pastime. Maenera didn't understand then the visceral fear her father had been put through. Unable to find her, blizzard unrelenting, unable to use Vhagar's flames to melt the snow in fear of burning her. The fear that he will find her come morning dead, frozen and alone in the snow. She didn't understand then, she understood later, when a vision came. Her brother atop Carraxes fighting with another dragon rider that was atop Vhagar. She saw her brother jump from the Blood Wyrm and killing the other rider with Dark Sister, only to fall to his death. She woke up screaming and begging. Her father barged in her room taking her into his arms asking what is wrong. She told him. She told him how her beautiful brother is going to die. She told him the vision and when Maenera looked up, beneath the sorrow on his father's face at hearing of his child's death, was pride. So she screamed at, why was he proud when her brother was going to die. Her father simply told her that it was a good death, a dragon rider death. Maenera resented her father in that moment.

Fuck his good death, she was going to save him. She was going to save her beautiful, wild, bloodthirsty brother and nobody could stop her. He was going to die old, drunk, in his bed surrounded by beautiful women like the little man in her dreams described. She was going to kill Vhagar the old beast before she even got near her beautiful prince. She was going to kill her rider too, she didn't know then who the other Targaryen looking man was, but he was a dead man walking. She started to plan. Small things at first, from meeting her brothers to saving them. More visions came, one more gruesome than the other. Her kingly brother deformed, desease eating at his flesh, leaving him blind and in pain. Her sister in law cut open by harsh hands for a child that will only live for a day. Her niece burned and eaten in front of her son. Her Prince's beautiful children die one by one. Not all on them from his seed but holding a place in his heart all the same. One dyeing at the hand of the same rider atop Vhagar, his body never found. That was the death that started a dragon war.

Consumed by her desire to save them she didn't manage to save her father. The vision coming too late, her being too young and her father too far away from her. She saw in her visions he died surrounded by family, her name on his lips in the final moments. She saw how the Old King discarded her name as babblings from a dying man. She was not with him in person when he died, no, but she was there in her visions and he died with her name on his lips, that was enough, it had to be. Then she dreamed her mother's death, she tried to change it, she didn't let her mother leave her room the day of her death faking illness. Her mother didn't die like in her vision, she lived for another 3 moons. In  that time she grew confident, her mother was safe, she didn't need to look out anymore... She was wrong.

So her obsession with her family began. She looked more closely at her visions. Made more elaborate plans. The little fortune her father has left her had been invested. After her meeting with Viserys she left quickly, angered that he took her help and threw it away. She hadn't made far, her visions changing so rapidly with every decision he made. Maenera came back to Kingslanding and hadn't left since. She had a little mansion there inherited from her father where she stayed, all her maids and servants were still North, taking care of the mansion and the land under the iron hand of her castellan. Two years she lived on her own, following her family in the shadows. Her prince with his gold cloaks strutting through the city like he owned it, and he did. There was no one more adored and hated at the same time as Daemon Targaryen. He got the name Lord Fleabottom, those that named him thought that the name was an insult but she knew differently. Her brother wore his title with pride, he brought justice into a city full of criminals, helping hundreds of children and women in the process. Even the whores loved him, and not necessarily for his purse or his skill in bed but for the safety he offered.

She investigated thoroughly his favorite whore, the Lady Misery. Her visions didn't paint a good look on her, so she waited and watched and watched some more until she saw her selling his brother's secrets. Another dead woman walking along with his wife. Oh.. only thinking about his wife was making her blood boil. She took one look at him and decided that her brother was unworthy. Too beautiful, too bloodthirsty, too wild, too other. Closer to gods than men. She sprung him from her bed the night of their wedding, throwing insults left and right to a young man of only six and ten. Her brother was too good for her, she would find her brother a good wife, one that will love him and give him children to love and spoil. His wifes in her visions left her wanting. While the Velaryon girl had potential and gave him his heir she was not sold. Rhaenyra was out of the race before it started. Her prince died because of her, she saw her niece give the order to bring Nettle's head. She saw her brother send her away and fighting alone, knowing that is going to lead to his death. And Rhaenyra? She succumbed to madness killing her only unwavering supporter, the father of her children, the only man that would willingly die and did die for her and her right to the throne.

She couldn't kill Rhaenyra, she was still a child and had no blame yet, but that didn't mean that she will ever sink her little claws into her brother nor would she see a day on the throne. She couldn't kill Rhaenyra now, not when she was still a child, but children grow and if she has the misfortune of taking bad decisions her life is forfeit. She would be a kinslayer, her soul be damned. Daemon will die old drunk and surrounded by beautiful women even if she had to curse her existence in the process.