Chapter Text
Aerion’s head felt like wood.
He didn’t open his eyes yet, lest the sun make his sinuses implode. His mouth felt like cotton. His neck felt like ants.
And the rest of his body…
He flexed his fingers. He commanded the intricate cages of bone and tendon, as he had done a thousand times before, willing his pale skin to pull taut over his bruised knuckles.
Nothing.
His brow furrowed.
Once more. He coaxed his bruised digits to close, to feel the hot, sluggish thrum of royal blood pushing through his veins, for his hands to feel a wisp of air.
Still…
Nothing.
Confusion bled through the thick, suffocating mire of the poppy. He tried to shift his hips beneath the heavy furs. He tried to bend his knees. He strained, the muscles in his neck cording with effort, sending the desperate, willing signals of a dragon down the length of his spine.
But below the ants in his neck and collarbones, the world simply ceased to exist.
It did not feel like a tingling slumber—the kind you’d get when you slept in a bad position—nor the heavy ache of a wounded limb. It felt like a vast, empty nothingness where half of his physical form used to be.
It was a void.
A cold, panicked spike of adrenaline pierced straight through the chemical haze.
He remembered the incinerating agony of the phantom fire. He remembered the heavy, crushing weight of his father and uncle pinning him to the butchery table. And then, the gleaming Valyrian steel scalpel. The blade dipping into his spine, about to sever his very soul in two.
The horrific, wet snick.
He opened his eyes.
The stifling, blood-soaked chamber was gone. He was lying in a vast, shadowed bedchamber, the heavy velvet curtains drawn tight against the Ashford morning.
Beside the bed, sitting in a heavy oak chair, was Maekar.
His father looked like a corpse. His shoulders were slumped, his harsh face hollowed out and carved with the devastating trenches of an unfathomable grief. He still wore his blood-stained breeches.
Maekar saw the amethyst eyes open. He lurched forward, dropping heavily to his knees beside the mattress.
"Aerion," he rasped, broken and guilty. He reached out with a trembling hand, stopping just short of touching his son's sweat-dampened hair, terrified his brute strength would somehow shatter the boy all over again.
Aerion stared at him.
"You are awake," Maekar stammered, the fierce battlefield commander reduced to a weeping, desperate ruin. "The gods be praised. The fever… it broke an hour ago. The maester swore if you survived the shock of the cut, the worst of the shadow had passed."
The cut.
Aerion did not blink. He saw, and somehow also felt, the terrifying deadness of his own legs stretching out beneath the blankets.
The lower half of his body was a sealed tomb.
"Are you in pain, my boy?" Maekar asked, his violet eyes frantically searching Aerion's pale, bruised face. "The fire… are the fire ants—you said—gone? Do you feel the burning in your blood?"
No. Aerion felt nothing.
It was worse than the burning. He was a severed head resting on a ruined corpse. He kept his jaw locked, his mouth dry as sand, refusing to give his butcher the satisfaction of a single syllable.
"Speak to me, Aerion," Maekar pleaded, the desperation cracking his voice into a pathetic sob. "Curse me. Scream at me. Demand my head! But do not look at me with those empty eyes. Tell me what you feel."
Aerion looked away, slowly turning his head on the pillow to fix his dead gaze on the stone wall.
Maekar let out a shuddering, agonizing breath. He scrambled to his feet, his bruised hands shaking violently as he reached for a silver pitcher resting on a nearby table.
"You need water," he choked out, his chest heaving.
He was frantic and desperate to fill the silence, desperate to perform some physical, menial act of fatherhood to bridge the colossal, bloody chasm he had carved between them.
"Your lips are split. You lost a terrifying amount of blood. You must drink, Aerion."
Aerion listened to the liquid splashing unevenly into the heavy iron cup. He heard the pathetic rattle of his father's trembling hands against the metal.
The indignity of it all washed over him like a doused candle.
He, Aerion Targaryen, a dragon of the blood royal, the Brightflame, was lying in a bed of his own ruin, entirely crippled, waiting to be watered like a wilted plant by the very man whose mace had crushed his chest.
Maekar leaned over him, slipping an arm beneath Aerion's pillows to gently elevate his head.
The proximity was a bad idea.
Aerion could smell the stale sweat, the lingering copper tang of his own butchery, and the overwhelming stench of his father's overflowing guilt. And the worst part? He was trapped. He could not shove the man away. He could not kick, or thrash, or flee.
He was a prisoner inside his own severed flesh.
"Drink, please," Maekar begged. Aerion thought he sounded pathetic. How audacious to be a trembling, ragged mess while his son lay mangled.
"I know you hate me,” Maekar continued. “I know what I have done to you. The mace… the meadow. I swung the iron, Aerion. I crushed your chest. And I gave the maester the order to sever the cord. I did it. I had to."
His shoulders shook with violent sobs, the cup rattling against Aerion's teeth.
"I could not let you burn," his father wept, tears falling freely now, landing hot and wet on Aerion's pale cheek. "I could not watch the pain rip your mind apart. I swore to your mother I would protect you, but I broke you instead.”
He swallowed. “But you are alive. You are alive, my beautiful boy. Here. Just a small sip. Slowly."
Aerion didn't open his mouth.
He let the cool water hit his bruised lip and spill uselessly down his chin, soaking into the collar of his nightshirt. He remained perfectly still in his father's arms, burning with a silent, absolute hatred that was infinitely hotter than the phantom fire they had cut away.
The indignity of the situation burned worse than the phantom fire ever had, anyway.
"Why?"
The word slipped from Aerion’s mouth. It was completely dead.
Maekar froze. The heavy silver pitcher shook violently in his grip.
He pulled it away, his chest heaving with a desperate, fractured relief. "Aerion… my boy. You were burning alive. The nerves were shattered. The maester sa—"
"Then why?!" Aerion snarled.
The sudden force of his own shout tore at his ruined chest, making him cough weakly, but his eyes blazed with infernal hatred. The hollow shell cracked wide open to unleash the blinding rage within.
Maekar took a breath then set the pitcher down on the bedside table with a loud, trembling clatter.
"To save you," he choked out, his deep voice cracking. "To keep you in this world."
"Would you not mercy kill a horse?" Aerion hissed. "If a prized destrier took a lance to the spine, if it lay thrashing in the mud, its hind legs dead and entirely useless… you would draw your dagger. You would slit its throat and call it a kindness."
Maekar’s harsh face twisted in revulsion. He recoiled as if struck.
"You are not a horse! You are my son!" he roared, horrified.
"I AM A DRAGON!”
Aerion thrashed his head violently against the pillows, completely unable to arch his back or move his lower half to emphasize his fury. It made him feel like a child throwing a tantrum.
"I begged for death!” he cried out. “I looked you in the eye on that butcher's block and I asked you for the steel!"
"And I could not give it to you!" Maekar bellowed back, matching his son's volume.
He leaned over the bed, his hands gripping the edges of the mattress so hard the wood groaned. Tears poured down the scarred trenches of his cheeks, completely dismantling the Anvil and leaving only a desperate father.
"Call me a coward! Curse me to the Seven Hells! Hate me until your dying breath, Aerion, but I would not be an accomplice to your death! I would not bury the babe I swore to protect!"
"You already buried me!" Aerion bared his teeth, his lips slick with a thin film of pink froth and saliva. "Look at me! I end at the collarbones! The rest of me is a rotting corpse attached to a living head!"
"You have your mind," Maekar wept. He reached out to touch the boy's shoulder.
Aerion violently snapped his jaw toward the hand. His teeth clicked together like a rabid hound’s.
Maekar jerked his fingers back in horror.
"You have your mind, and you have your blood," he pleaded. "You will heal, and you will adapt—"
"Adapt to what?" Aerion spat, his chest heaving with shallow, agonizing gasps. "To being carried like an infant? To having my ass wiped by trembling servants who pity me? To sitting on a wooden wheelchair while the realm laughs at your broken monster?"
Maekar squeezed his eyes shut, a ragged, guttural sob tearing from his throat. His mouth opened and closed pathetically, as if finding for the words to say in the empty air.
Aerion stared at his father. His ruined chest vibrated with a cruel, devastating sneer that sounded like grinding glass.
The manic rage slowly bled out of him, replaced by hollow, lamenting resignation.
"If I died, Father," Aerion said, his tone dropping to a cold, concentrated venom that pierced straight through Maekar's armor. "If you had just let my heart stop on that table… I would have died a martyr. I would have died a hero. The bards would have sung about the loyal son who threw himself in front of a maddened beast to save his father."
Maekar collapsed forward, resting his forehead against the mattress beside Aerion's dead legs, sobbing with a force that threatened to shatter his own ribs.
"But now?" Aerion continued, twisting the blade deep into his father's soul, entirely merciless. "I will wither away. And I swear to you, I will not be silent about it. The world will know me as the broken dragon who screamed at the maids. The prince who soils himself in the night. I will be crippled, cruel, and completely, utterly useless."
Aerion let his head fall back against the pillow. He stared up at the dark, heavy canopy of the bed, his eyes completely devoid of the brilliant, violent light that had once defined him.
"You should have let me go out in glory," he whispered.
The air in the room grew suffocatingly dense. And then, it turned charged, like the ground before a lightning strike.
The father was grieving, yes, but the Prince remained ever prideful. Pushed to the breaking point by the piercing venom of his son’s hatred, his sorrow fractured into a desperate, defensive wrath.
The Anvil could only withstand so many hammer strikes before the iron sparked, after all.
Maekar surged to his feet, the heavy oak chair scraping harshly against the floorboards. His chest heaved, his bloodshot eyes locking onto the broken boy in the bed.
The battlefield commander resurrected itself.
"Do not forget that you started all of this!" Maekar bellowed. He pointed a trembling, blood-crusted finger at Aerion's ruined chest. "The puppeteer. The tavern. You invoked the trial! You demanded seven champions and turned a brawl into a war of the royal blood! I swung the mace, yes, but this was your doing, boy! You built the pyre!"
Aerion did not flinch. What were a few words to a lifetime of emptiness?
Even though the accusation landed, it did not breed guilt. It sparked vindictive spite. He knew he had commanded the meadow, but Maekar had brought the slaughter.
Aerion let out a harsh, wet scoff. “My doing, perhaps.”
He stared up at his father, his eyes completely devoid of warmth, reflecting only a cold, terrifying serenity.
"But this,” his eyes raked down his own ruined body, “is your damning, Father."
Maekar felt the words like the very injury he had afflicted on his own son—a mace to the chest. The fierce, defensive rage evaporated, sucked out of the stifling room, leaving behind nothing but unbearable sorrow.
He stared at the pale, flawless face of his son. He realized with certainty that he could not win this war.
He could not comfort a son who despised him, nor could he punish a boy who was already burning in hell. The air in the room felt impossible to inhale. He backed away from the bed as if the mattress had caught fire.
The colossal weight of his own guilt bowed his shoulders, completely dismantling his pride. He turned his back on the ruined dragon and walked toward the door, his heavy boots dragging across the stone floor like a man marching to the gallows.
The door clicked shut behind him.
The room was silent, once again.
Aerion lay perfectly still, his pulse thrumming erratically against his throat. His mind, still sharp and violently feral, screamed commands to a kingdom that had completely seceded.
He commanded his hips to turn. He commanded his knees to bend, his calves to tense, his toes to flex.
Nothing. Only the vast, terrifying void.
A panicked mania began to crawl up his throat. He wanted to thrash. He wanted to hurl the heavy silver pitcher across the room and listen to it shatter against the stone. He wanted to tear the velvet curtains down and scream until his lungs gave out.
But he was entirely trapped. He was a severed head stitched onto a dead log, buried alive inside the rotting bark of his own skin.
A damp, freezing chill began to settle over his sweat-slicked body. He shivered violently, his teeth chattering in the dim quiet.
Aerion wanted to reach down with his hands, for his fingers to grab the thick edge of the heavy fur blanket resting near his waist.
But his hands were dead weights too.
Those hands—the paramount accessory of his power, the dancers of every movement he had ever made in the training yard—were numb. The nerve bundle was unreachable. He had absolutely no leverage.
He strained, willing the muscles in his weak, blood-starved arms to move, but they disobeyed the dragon.
The supposedly comforting weight of the blanket mocked his pathetic, infantile weakness. His phantom grip faltered. His fingers, despite doing absolutely nothing, seemed to cramp in exhaustion.
He couldn't even move a blanket.
He couldn’t even move a fucking blanket.
Aerion stared up at the dark canopy of the bed, his chest heaving with weak, trembling breaths. The Brightflame finally let out a single, devastating sob.
The horror of his own permanence crashed down on him, completely shattering the arrogant prince.
The heavy silence pressed against his eardrums, even though his mind screamed into the void of his body.
He would have given anything—his titles, his gold, his very eyes—to feel the excruciating, incinerating agony of the phantom fire once more.
Pain was a cruel master, but it was a living one. Pain meant the flesh still belonged to him. This vast, bottomless nothingness was infinitely worse. It was the permanence of a grave he was not allowed to fully occupy.
He did not want to endure another second of this hollow, paralyzed existence.
A dark, harrowing idea took root.
He could not lift the blankets over his own head. But he did not need to do it alone.
"Kepa."
Father.
The word was weak, a ragged scrape of sound, but it carried through the thick oak door. A moment later, the latch clicked. Maekar had been standing right outside, tethered to the broken son by a father’s love.
He stood in the threshold, his violet eyes wide with a frantic, desperate hope that his son had called him back to grant him forgiveness.
"I am cold," Aerion whispered, his jaw trembling. He looked at the towering Prince of Summerhall. "The furs. Pull them up. To my chin."
Maekar nearly sobbed at the perceived absolution.
But Aerion had not offered forgiveness. He offered a trap.
Maekar crossed the room, a pathetic eagerness bleeding into his movements. He reached down and gently gripped the heavy, layered furs, drawing them up over Aerion's mangled chest, tucking the thick edges snugly around the boy's pale neck and right beneath his split, bruised chin.
He lingered, his scarred hands resting near his son's shoulders. He looked down into Aerion's eyes. He saw the vast, bottomless hollowness there, the crushing despair of a wild creature permanently caged.
It was to be expected. His son was shocked and traumatized, after all.
"I am sorry," Maekar choked out, a fresh tear cutting through the dried blood on his cheek. "I am so sorry that I could not let you die, my boy."
Aerion kept his face perfectly still.
“Thank you, Father.”
Maekar finally sobbed. Aerion was shocked, traumatized, but he thanked him in spite of it all. He kissed his son’s forehead. Aerion did not blink at the affection.
He could see the relief in Maekar’s eyes as he pulled back.
Thank you for helping me, the thought dripped with a cold, devastating irony.
Maekar slowly moved away, his shoulders still sagging under the colossal weight of guilt, and turned back toward the corridor. The heavy door clicked shut.
Aerion did not waste a moment.
His father was a fool.
It was not shock. It was not trauma.
It was suicidal resignation.
He dipped his chin slightly on the damp pillow. He opened his bruised mouth and sank his teeth into the thick, heavy edge of the fur blanket resting just millimeters from his lips.
The coarse hair filled his mouth, tasting of dust and animal musk. He clamped his jaw shut with every ounce of feral, morbid strength he possessed, and violently wrenched his neck upward.
It was a daunting, humiliating, grueling labor. The sheer indignity of it was a searing brand against his royal pride.
He was a dragon of the blood royal, reduced to behaving like a starving hound tearing at a scrap of meat.
That was his final straw.
The muscles in his neck screamed. His ruined chest throbbed with a sickening, wet pressure, but he refused to release his bite. He dragged the heavy pelts upward, a fraction of an inch at a time. He turned his head, bit down on a higher fold, and pulled again.
Up over his split lip. Up over his nose.
Again and again.
Then, the work was finished.
His head fell back flush against the mattress. The weight of the furs settled entirely over his face. It was heavy. It was suffocating.
The air could not enter.
It was what he wanted.
His lungs, already compromised by the pulverized sternum and the jagged splinters of bone, desperately tried to heave out of instinct. But the thick, dense layers of animal hide completely blocked the draft.
The darkness beneath the blanket was his salvation.
A base, animal-brain panic flared in his chest, his heart hammering wildly against his battered ribs, begging him to thrash, begging him to knock the blankets away. But his arms lay uselessly at his sides and his severed spine anchored him to the mattress like a slab of stone.
The air grew terrifyingly hot and thin. His chest burned with a frantic, starving ache.
As the oxygen bled from his brain, the terror began to fracture, dissolving into a swirling vortex of regret.
He saw the Ashford mud. He saw the puppeteer's terrified face. He felt the crushing momentum of his father's iron mace. All of it, a monument to his own blinding arrogance.
The burning in his lungs began to fade, replaced by a strange, heavy lethargy. The dark room melted away.
He was back at Summerhall.
The air smelled of crushed lavender and sweet summer rain. He heard his mother’s soft, musical laugh drifting across the water gardens.
He was a young boy again, standing at the edge of the deep river that snaked through the Dornish marches. He had just caught a big fish, and now the child wanted to be a fish too.
The sun was hot on his silver hair. He remembered taking a deep, vital breath, filling his small, unblemished chest with the sweet air, before slipping beneath the cool, rushing surface.
The young boy let the current take him.
The water swirled around his head, swallowing the sounds of the world, turning everything muffled, weightless, and entirely peaceful.
He held his breath, sinking deeper and deeper into the quiet dark. He swam, his arms and legs—whole and unbroken—paddling through the water until his muscles felt like fire.
The young boy laughed, delighting in glee at the water bubbles spurting from his held breath.
“Don’t stay down there for too long!” his mother’s muffled voice called from above.
But Aerion was a disobedient child.
All he wanted to do was swim. It was the closest likeness to the feeling of flying a dragon.
He pushed himself deeper into the abyss, the water wrapping around his body like a comforting embrace, like a silken shroud. He kicked his strong, agile legs, soaring through the liquid sky, chasing the fragments of sunlight that danced just out of reach.
Then, the sky was violently torn open.
He was pulled up from the river. He was pulled down from the heavens.
It wasn’t Mother.
Massive hands—calloused, incredibly warm, and impossibly large—held the dragon still. They did not crush like how the father did on the butcher’s block, only tethered with a fierce, panicked desperation.
Where is Mother? he thought, confusion bleeding into every word. Where is the sweet summer rain?
Aerion’s vision swam with violent black spots, the edges of the world warped and spinning. He blinked weakly, his eyes rolling back before focusing on the face hovering above him.
These eyes were not violet. They were blue, earthy, and wide with naked franticness. They were kind, worried eyes, framed by dirt and exhaustion. A muffled, vibrating voice washed over, the words completely unintelligible, sounding as though he was still trapped beneath the current.
The ringing in Aerion’s ears remained, but the phantom sensation of his kicking legs vanished.
Where is the river?
He was no longer swimming. He was no longer flying. The dead, leaden weight of his severed spine anchored him to the mattress once more.
The ringing stopped.
"What were you doing?!" the voice yelled.
He was a half-corpse in the Ashford keep again, and the heavy fur blankets he had painstakingly dragged over his face had been cast aside.
"My Prince, what were you doing?” the voice asked again, but this time it was softer, kinder, more gentle. The massive hands trembled against his collarbones.
For the first time since waking up, the dragon didn’t feel the ants. Aerion focused his gaze onto the giant’s. Amethyst met blue.
The shade of the river, he mused. Or the sky. Perhaps both.
He took a lungful of air, and parted his lips.