c9: Dragon Flame
"Is that so, butler?"
Illyrio Mopatis was not a man easily swayed by superstition or panic. Yet only two days had passed since the Targaryen siblings had entered his manse, and already strange disturbances rippled through his household. His time that day was consumed listening to detailed reports from Ani, the maid assigned to Daenerys, and his chief steward. Their observations while thorough contained one alarming note: Viserys had attempted to harm Daenerys, and Ani had intervened.
According to her account, Viserys had slashed Daenerys's palm with a dagger, tasted her blood, and muttered about "testing" something. The girl had been terrified.
The butler, cautious and measured as always, confirmed only part of it. "I didn't see it myself, my lord. I heard a commotion. When I opened the door, the young master held a dagger, and the young lady was shaking beside the bed. She looked... violated."
Illyrio narrowed his eyes, imagining the scene. Viserys's treatment of his sister had been noted by Varys's little birds long ago. His cruelty wasn't a surprise. But cutting her, drinking her blood?
That bordered on madness.
Still, Illyrio was a practical man, and certain lines could not be crossed at least, not yet. He turned to Ani, who stood still as a statue.
"You moved too quickly, Ani," he said. "Even if he meant to go further, you should've waited. Let it unfold to a certain point. We need the girl unharmed, yes but also believable as a victim, should we need to leverage her."
Ani lowered her gaze. "Apologies, my lord. I thought you needed her intact."
Illyrio nodded slowly. That was her priority. Gain Daenerys's trust. Keep her docile, useful.
Then a memory surfaced an old tale whispered in shadowed halls. King Aerys, the Mad King, had once left Queen Rhaella bruised and bleeding after his violent outbursts. He had demanded strange rituals, spoken to unseen forces. What if his son had inherited more than his silver hair?
Illyrio's mouth twisted.
"Tell me, Ani," he said at last. "Is she still a maiden?"
He asked it without emotion, like a man taking inventory of coin.
Ani hesitated. "She should be, my lord."
"Should?" Illyrio's voice sharpened. "I need certainty. Confirm it, Ani."
"Yes, my lord," she replied and curtsied.
Illyrio waved her off, and she disappeared like a shadow into the corridor.
When the door shut, Illyrio turned back to the steward. "Why do you suppose he told you about Prince of Pentos?"
The man blinked, confused. "I don't know, my lord."
Illyrio didn't expect an answer. It was a rhetorical question. Viserys spoke of things he didn't understand proud of knowledge he barely possessed.
He changed the subject.
"His fighting ability. What do you make of it?"
The butler shrugged. "He is thin, weak. I could take the dagger from him without effort."
"Still obsessed with the pendant?"
"Not today."
Illyrio frowned. That was… interesting.
"Keep watching."
——
After a day spent adrift in confusion and dread, Daenerys finally drifted into sleep.
And she began to dream.
At first, it was gentle memories of the house with the red door in Braavos. She was a child again, curled under warm blankets. Ser Willem Darry, though aged and sickly, read to her in a wheezing voice. Viserys was kind then, smiling, gentle. He told her stories of dragons soaring over the Seven Kingdoms, and of how he would reclaim the Iron Throne and make her his queen.
But those memories soured, becoming mist.
Ser Willem died. She and Viserys were cast out, wandering from city to city Lys, Tyrosh, Myr. Begging before princes and merchant lords, selling her mother's crown for a bag of coins. Viserys's kindness eroded. Bitterness hardened him. He became cruel, angry, unpredictable.
Then came flashes of thunder and fire chaos and vision. She saw what Viserys had seen the night he was struck by lightning. A sky rent by fire and ice. Storms rolling like angry gods. And in the heart of it, a monstrous shape: a three-headed dragon roaring into the void.
Suddenly, all light vanished.
She fell.
Abyss swallowed her. Silence crushed her ears. Cold seeped into her bones, not like winter, but like death. Her limbs twitched, but she could no longer tell where her body ended and the void began.
It was fear,raw and pure.
And something more: disconnection. Her body was no longer hers. Her awareness unraveled.
She was floating.
Then came the color.
A cloud of violet dust shimmered around her, born from her skin or her soul. It curled into the darkness like tendrils of smoke. It wasn't magic she recognized, but something older, deeper.
The purple mist mixed with the shadows, forming a whirlpool that swallowed stars. Her essence her self was drawn in, torn away, consumed.
She tried to scream, but had no mouth. Or perhaps she did, and no sound emerged.
Only fear remained.
Time had no meaning here. She couldn't tell if moments passed, or centuries.
Then something changed.
Her awareness her soul, perhaps escaped. She found herself standing outside the abyss, watching.
A curtain of darkness stretched in all directions. Up, down, sideways it had no end. A veil over the world. Within it, the last specks of violet light faded into nothingness.
She looked down.
She saw her "hand," but it wasn't a hand anymore. It was black, speckled with sparks. As if something had burned away her flesh and left behind stardust.
Then everything collapsed into oblivion.
Viserys suddenly opened his eyes and placed a hand on his chest, his expression frozen in disbelief.
He had just awoken from a dream no, a vision.
In it, a sphere of swirling violet smoke floated before him, pulsing like a heartbeat. The moment his eyes locked onto it, instinct surged through him: this was what he had been chasing in madness and memory. The dragon soul.
Without hesitation, he devoured it reflexively, almost involuntarily before the thing could escape.
In that instant, something deeper within him stirred. He sensed it: a vast, hidden sea.
An ocean of magic, buried beneath the skin and sinew of his mortal body. Its waters teemed with arcane potential but a veil, like an invisible wall, separated him from it. Some ancient law of this world bound it, sealing his true power. It was the barrier between realms, between the world he came from and the one he now inhabited.
And yet, in the wake of swallowing the dragon soul, that veil had briefly shimmered. Something breached it. Something trickled through.
It was a single drop from that vast, arcane ocean.
It coalesced into a scale.
A dragon scale.
Viserys gasped as he felt itsomething hard, alien, forming on his chest. Beneath his palm, his skin had grown dense, like lacquered horn. Heat pulsed beneath it, coiled and alive. From that hardened scale, he felt a whisper of something ancient: elemental fire, a trace of magic born from the blood of Valyria, or perhaps... something older still. Something from his world.
The name came to him instinctively Li Oak, the ancient king of his previous world, whose magic was sealed in dragon souls.
He didn't know how he knew it.
He simply did.
And he knew something else: he could now exhale that trace of power not as breath, but as flame.
Dragonflame.
His heart thundered, but he forced himself to remain calm. He slipped out of bed, mimicking a man waking to relieve himself in the night, and padded to the privy. Once inside, he shut the door behind him, crouched, and drew a steadying breath.
Then he exhaled.
Hooom.
The air shimmered, and for a heartbeat, a tendril of flame leapt from his mouth a flicker, no longer than the blink of an eye. But it was real.
It was dragonfire.
Brief though it was, and though it drained him utterly, Viserys was not disappointed.
This was only the beginning.
He reached for his chest again. The hardened scale was gone, dissolved. He surmised the tiny flame had exhausted his limited magic, consuming the scale as fuel. But he could feel the magic slowly restoring itself, drop by drop. Soon, another scale would bloom.
In that moment, he understood:
When he had devoured the dragon soul, he had drawn from the ocean of magic sealed within him. The scale was a conduit, a spell slot like in the Dungeons & Dragons lore of his previous life. Each scale was a vessel an interface between worlds that allowed him to channel the elemental essence locked deep inside.
He was no longer a mere exiled prince.
He was now something more.
A Dragonfire Warlock.
Granted, one with only a single usable slot a single breath of flame. More a trick than a weapon.
Still, it was a start.
He returned to his bed, pulled the blankets around him, and closed his eyes not to sleep, but to think.
[First: the source of the dragon soul.]
Almost certainly, it came from the dragonbone pendant. Earlier that day, the pendant had vanished when placed against Daenerys's skin. That moment must have triggered a transfer Daenerys's latent connection as a true Targaryen awakening the fragment within the relic. Then, through blood contact, the soul passed from her to him. It was an eerie, metaphysical theory but it fit. He would need to test it again to confirm.
[Next: the relationship between the dragon soul and the magic power.]
It reminded him of power projection. The elemental magic within him the reservoir from his old world needed a medium to manifest in this one. The dragon soul acted as that medium. The more souls he collected, the greater his capacity for magic. What he had consumed was likely just a remnant, a sliver.
[What could he do with such limited power?]
Too little, for now. And worse his mortal body was ill-suited for channeling this force. When he expelled the flame, he'd felt his throat burn. A significant portion of his power was wasted, dissipated instinctively as his body protected itself from combustion.
Until he reformed a draconic body, or constructed internal magical organs, this process would remain dangerously inefficient. Even now, he wasn't sure that tiny flicker of fire could wound a man.
So what good was it?
[Then: the matter of surveillance.]
Before, he hadn't cared. He'd had no secrets worth keeping. Now, with real power inside him, he couldn't risk exposure. Someone Varys's little birds? Illyrio himself?could be watching.
And that led to a final thought.
[Should he still be living under Illyrio's roof?]
He ran a hand through his hair and sighed. It wasn't the right time to escape. He was weak, watched, and vulnerable. His arrival his behavior had already stirred attention. If he fled now, assassins would come. Not just Robert Baratheon's, either. Others would move against him. Some wouldn't aim to kill, but to capture, to manipulate.
He had read the books. He remembered the fates of fools and pawns.
Illyrio might be an ally for now.
Viserys's story had never been one of peace.
But now, at least, it could become one of power.
Only two paths remained: ascend, or perish.
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