The Dreamer and the Defiant

The Book and the Dragon

Daenys Targaryen had always loved the sprawling libraries of her home, of the wondrous city of Valyria. Without a dragon of her own, she had all her life relied on the stories of adventurers past to show her the world. At the age of seven-and-ten, she had yet to bond to a magnificent beast and fly on her own, and being terrified of the imported horses of the Dothraki, she relied instead on her own two feet to explore.

She had not made it very far.

In the cavernous space lit by hundreds of fires, Daenys felt truly herself. The Great Library was almost as ancient as Valyria itself, a towering presence in the middle of the great city. Surrounded on all sides by rivers flowing purple with magic and teeming with beauty, the library was home to thousands of years of knowledge from all over the world.

Daenys, her brother Gaemon, and their father Aenar would often frequent the great edifice when she was a young girl, her and her brother perched upon the lap of their father while he read to them the history of their home. However, after the death of his third and last wife, Maegys Mataeryon, and their son Daeherion in childbed, he stopped reading to his children. He had gone from three wives and four children to no wives and two, and it utterly destroyed him into hermitage.

After Maegys's death, Aenar became a sort of recluse, never straying far from the Targaryen holding, and definitely not going so far into the city as to get to the library. He encouraged his children to do the same, paranoid that harm would befall them and they would meet an unfortunate fate like his brides, that his remaining children would perish like his dear Daeherion and Aelyx had. But, no matter how much Daenys loved and revered her father, she would never stay away from the library.

Daenys was the second child of Aenar Targaryen, the only surviving of he and his second bride and cousin, Fahaera Saehaylor. Fahaera went mad and leapt from the top of the Targaryen holding after the death of her son Aelyx, when Daenys was just two years old. At just seven-and-ten, she died with a prophecy of doom upon her lips and tears in her eyes.

Gaemon, her elder brother, was the son of Aenar and his sister-wife Elaena. She died when Gaemon was aged seven and Daenys three, sick with sweat and never bearing her brother another child. Her dragon, Tyraxos, was left for her son to claim, which he did promptly upon his mother's death. Her own mother's mount, the small and swift she-dragon Abraxes, had fled to the skies after her rider's death, taking with her Daenys's hope of a loyal beast. The young woman had often dreamt of the lost dragon, had seen the beautiful red-and-cream beast atop a nest or flying over land and sea. She liked to believe Abraxes was guarding her from within since her dear mother no longer could, keeping a watchful eye on the blood to which she had once been bound.

Despite the innumerable fires lit throughout the gargantuan house of knowledge, the Great Library was always delightfully cool. Even though she, like all dragonlords, were born from the fiery Fourteen Flames, Daenys had always felt whole in the cold. Maybe it was because she had a cool fire within her instead of a red-hot one like the rest of her family had, one that was much smaller than that of her father and her betrothed.

The Great Library was magnificent. There was no better word to describe it. Made from ancient dragonstone, gold, and iron and forged with dragonfire, it was the very heart of Valyria. With hundreds of rooms, each holding thousands of books, and housing texts hailing from every country past and present, there was no place in the world that could rival it. Even the Citadel of Oldtown in faraway Westeros was like a sapling to the Great Library's towering and ancient oak. One day, Daenys liked to tell herself, she would accomplish the feat of reading all the books it housed, no matter how long it took her.

Daenys had a day of reading ahead, determined still to find the Shadow Texts of Asshai. Today marked day five of searching for them, every day seeming to pull them farther from her grasp. They were said to be somewhere within the Vault, the deepest room beneath the towering library. Poised at the bottom of a thousand-step spiraling staircase and hidden behind a door so heavy it required a dozen men to move, there was a strange air in the iron-and-dragonstone room. A rich shadowy magic stalked the stacks, akin to that of the Warlocks of Qarth, like the magic flowing in the veins of dragonlords. Daenys knew from this presence that the Shadow Texts rested somewhere amongst the shelves.