"Do not move," Helaena said, her voice breathless but firm as she fumbled with the iron lock. "There are still more chains. If you shift, I cannot reach them."
Her fingers were numb from cold and strain. The key scraped, slipped, then finally bit. She paused and lifted her eyes.
Dreamfyre's great head loomed above her, pale scales catching what little torchlight reached this corner of the Dragonpit. One vast eye regarded her, unblinking.
Helaena swallowed and glanced up at the dragon's wing, then back at its face. After a heartbeat, she placed her palm against the cool membrane and slid carefully down, boots scraping stone as she landed. Her knees wobbled, but she did not fall.
She turned toward the next set of restraints without another word.
Dreamfyre did nothing.
It did not recoil.It did not strike.
She only watched.
The chains around its foreleg lay thick as serpents, iron biting into ancient scale. Helaena knelt, bracing herself with one hand as she worked the lock with the other. Her shoulders trembled. Each turn of the key felt heavier than the last.
Clang.
The sound echoed through the cavernous pit.
Helaena flinched, then exhaled slowly and continued. Time stretched. Sweat stung her eyes. At last, with a dull metallic groan, the final chain slipped free from Dreamfyre's tail and fell slack upon the stone.
She sat back hard, palms flat on the ground.
"Oh," she murmured, rubbing her hands together as if to wake them. "I did not know chains could be so cruel."
She was shaking now, breath coming unevenly. For all her courage, she was still a child, small and slight beside the creature she had freed.
Behind her, Dreamfyre stirred.
The dragon unfurled itself in a long, deliberate stretch. Joints creaked softly, the sound like ancient timbers settling. Its tail swept a slow arc across the floor, stirring dust that had not moved in years.
Dreamfyre was not the largest of dragons, but there was an elegance to its frame. Long-limbed and lean, with sweeping, ram-like horns that curved back from its skull, it looked every inch a creature born for the open sky.
Helaena rose to her feet and turned.
"Dreamfyre," she said, carefully shaping the High Valyrian words. Her accent was imperfect, but the meaning was clear. She clasped her hands before her to still their shaking. "Would you like to fly? I can open the gates. You do not have to stay here."
She lifted her chin, forcing herself to meet its gaze.
Dreamfyre lowered its head.
A breath huffed from its nostrils, hot and sudden. The gust nearly knocked Helaena backward. She stumbled, caught herself against the stone, and laughed under her breath, thin and shaky.
"So," she said quietly, brushing dust from her sleeve. "You may mock me if you wish. I do not mind."
Her shoulders straightened.
"I only wanted to free you. Dragons are not meant for chains or darkness. You belong to the sky."
She did not look away.
Something in Dreamfyre shifted.
The low, rumbling sound in its chest faded. It settled back upon its haunches, vast head tilting as it studied the girl before it. For a moment, her shape seemed to blur in its sight, overlapping with another figure from long ago.
A tall woman, fierce and proud.
Rhaena Targaryen, once called Maegor's Black Bride. Its rider. Its companion.
Dreamfyre had flown farther than most of its kin, from Dragonstone to the Dragonpit, from Harrenhal to the western coasts. It had seen courts and castles, battlefields and feasts. It had seen men scheme and kill, whisper poison into cups, raise blades against their own blood.
It had known fear.It had known command.
It had known love, once.
So many humans had stood before it, eyes bright with hunger or clouded with terror. Some wished to master it. Others wished only to survive.
This child wished for neither.
Dreamfyre saw it clearly now. In Helaena's gaze there was no calculation, no desire for power. Only concern, raw and unguarded.
She wanted nothing from it.
That alone set her apart.
A dragon's instincts ran deeper than words or crowns. Through her small, steady presence, Dreamfyre felt the truth of her intent. There was no malice in her, not even the careless cruelty so common in the young.
It had seen such eyes only once before.
In Rhaena's.
Dreamfyre lowered its great head until its brow nearly touched the stone before Helaena. The heat of it washed over her, and she held her ground, fingers curling into her skirts.
Perhaps, after all this time, there could be another.
Not a master. Not a captor.
A rider.
And, in time, someone who loved it as it had once been loved in return.
*
Outside the cavern mouth, Ser Brayden waited with mounting unease.
If Princess Helaena emerged unharmed, it would mean only one of two outcomes. Either she had failed and retreated. Or she had succeeded beyond all expectation.
Minutes stretched into an aching silence.
No roar. No clash of steel. No tremor of wings.
Brayden shifted his weight, fingers tightening around the hilt of his sword as his gaze remained fixed on the darkness within.
Did Her Highness even find the dragon? he wondered, a knot forming in his chest.
In his mind, taming a dragon was never a quiet thing. It was a trial of fire and fear, of will locked against will. The songs were clear on that point. A dragonrider earned their bond through defiance, through standing unbroken before living flame.
That was how the bards told it, at least.
He exhaled slowly, jaw tightening.
"She is barely more than a child," he muttered under his breath.
If the gods were just, the Seven themselves ought to descend and shield her, rather than leave her alone with an ancient beast.
As a sworn sword close to Prince Baelon, Brayden knew, in reason, that dragons were not always claimed through bloodshed. Baelon had bonded with his dragon when both were young, growing together rather than contending as rivals.
But that was the flaw in the comparison.
Baelon had never stood before a full-grown dragon, unclaimed and set apart from human touch.
If Baelon could not truly understand such terror, then how could Brayden?
Twice he took an instinctive step toward the cavern, only to halt himself. Helaena's voice echoed in his memory, calm but unyielding, commanding him to remain outside no matter what he heard.
He forced himself to stay.
Then the cavern answered his doubts.
A roar thundered forth, deep and immense, rattling the stone beneath his boots. Dust cascaded from the rock face as the sound rolled outward like a breaking wave.
Brayden's blood turned to ice.
Before he could draw another breath, a violent rush of air followed, fierce enough to tear at his cloak and send loose gravel skittering across the ground.
That sound he recognized without needing to see it.
Dragon wings.
His training took hold where thought failed him. Brayden spun and ran toward the cavern's edge, putting distance between himself and the opening. He had never laid eyes upon Dreamfyre. He did not know its span, its weight, or how wide its shadow might fall.
Better to be bruised by flying stone than crushed beneath a dragon's descent.
Then light flooded the cavern mouth.
A dragon surged outward, pale blue scales catching the sun like frost over steel. Long and elegant, its wings unfurled with effortless power, each beat sending another gale across the ground.
Dreamfyre.
And seated upon its back, small hands gripping the saddle, pale hair whipped by the wind-
Princess Helaena.
Brayden stopped short, breath leaving him in a sharp exhale. His sword slipped half an inch from its sheath before he realized his hands were shaking.
"This… this cannot be," he whispered.
He had known she came to claim a dragon. All of King's Landing knew that much. Yet in his imagining, she would have bonded with one of the younger mounts kept within the Dragonpit. Dragons closer in size to Prince Aemond's or Prince Aegon's Sunfyre.
Even the largest of those should not have rivaled the scale of Grey Ghost, let alone surpassed it.
But Dreamfyre was something else entirely.
The reports from Harrenhal's Dragonkeepers came unbidden to his mind. Old lessons spoken in hushed tones.
The greater a dragon's age, the keener its mind. And the older the dragon, the harder it was to bend.
Brayden stared upward as Dreamfyre wheeled across the sky, Helaena seated steady upon its back.
Whatever had passed within that cavern, it had not been force.
And that, more than the dragon's roar, left him utterly shaken.
---------
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