Viserys woke with a gasp.
Air tore into his lungs as though the storm itself had entered his chest. Black stone. Cold. Sharp. A ceiling carved with dragons watched silently, mouths frozen in eternal screams.
His hands clawed at his face. Small. Smooth. Childlike. No beard. No scars. No marks of the life he remembered—nights hunched over grimoires, chanting, calculating, testing, obsessing.
"No… wait…" he whispered, voice high and alien to his own ears.
The world tilted. Memories collided like jagged waves. Fluorescent offices. Rows of books. The hum of an air conditioner. Candle smoke curling above ash-stained parchment. Blood in ritual circles. Spells, diagrams, alchemy, runes. And then… fire. Screaming. Red. Dragons.
Pain erupted in his temples. A throbbing headache bloomed, as if his skull were being rewritten. Thoughts fragmented, collided, and spun out of control. Dizziness washed over him, threatening to send him sprawling onto the cold stone floor.
He remembered his other life with excruciating clarity: long nights alone in a tiny apartment, hands stained with ink and powders, mapping the impossible. Hermetic diagrams until the lines blurred into chaos. Kabbalistic structures until the symbols seemed to shift beneath his gaze. Ritual geometry, alchemy, runes—everything measured, cataloged, tested. Still… failure. Death had been quiet. Unremarkable. Obscurity had been his tomb.
And now… Dragonstone.
A boy's body. Fragile. Unpracticed. Small.
But beneath his skin, he felt it: a pulse, a slow, deliberate heat. Not metaphor. Dragon blood. Alive. Vibrating. Waiting.
Viserys pressed his palm to the wall. The basalt hummed faintly. Geometry, glyphs, angles… patterns buried in the stone.
Valyrian design. Magic made permanent.
Every carved dragon, every arch, every line had purpose. Not decoration. Conduits. Channels. Energy anchored in matter.
The storm outside screamed, waves smashing against cliffs, lightning cracking the sky. The wind rattled the windows as if testing him. He tried to steady his breathing, but his mind raced.
He recalled formulas, charts, rituals that in his past life had existed only as theory. He remembered the nights when he had begged the universe to respond, when he had whispered to fire and shadow, only to receive silence. And now… he felt it answering. Not with words, not with visions. Heat. Blood. Potential.
His temples throbbed. Memory surged again. Mistakes, failures, obsession—he remembered every sleepless night, every failed experiment, every moment he had been dismissed as a fool. And yet, that same obsessive hunger now surged through him stronger than ever.
He stumbled across the cold floor, gripping the walls, trying to reconcile the impossible: a child's body, a lifetime of knowledge, and a world that feared magic and had lost it.
Dragonstone itself seemed to breathe under his touch. The stone thrummed in response, alive with a rhythm that matched his pulse. He closed his eyes and tried to focus, to separate the chaos from the signal, the human frailty from the bloodline inheritance coursing through his veins.
The headaches persisted, sharp, stabbing, unrelenting, but he could feel it—the structure beneath the myth, the hidden system of the Valyrians, waiting to be understood. Fire had never left this island. It waited. Patient. Observant.
Viserys staggered to a window, wind tearing at his pale hair. The Narrow Sea churned below, waves slamming into black cliffs. He exhaled slowly, tasting salt and ozone.
He realized something terrifying. And exhilarating.
He was alive.
He had survived death once.
He had been reborn into the body of a prince whose legacy had crumbled.
And yet, the power, the knowledge, the obsession of his other life—of a man who had chased the impossible—was still with him.
Fire was not gone.
It waited.
And Viserys, dizzy, disoriented, painfully aware of the chasm between body and mind, understood one thing with clarity:
If he survived, if he endured the storm within and without, he would finally see whether all his study, all his obsession, all his life, had been in vain.
And this time, he would not fail.