107 AC
By midsummer, the skies above Dragonstone had changed.
Not visibly, not to those who walked with heads down or eyes dulled by routine—but I felt it. Silverwing felt it too. The winds no longer carried just salt and sea. They carried questions.
The keepers grew wary. Some departed altogether. Others watched me not with fear, but unease. Maelion kept to his chambers more often, scribbling by candlelight and muttering of old bloodlines. When I brought him fresh scrolls from the rookery, he barely looked up.
"The prince grows strong," he said once, eyes fixed to a passage on Valyrian succession. "But the queen grows stronger."
He never said which queen.
That evening, I visited the hatchery. Not for duty, but instinct. Most of the eggs lay cold—dull things, inert. But two pulsed faintly with warmth when I passed, as if stirred by the blood that marked my veins now.
I knelt beside them, fingers splayed across the stone. No movement. No sound. Yet something ancient curled just beyond hearing, waiting.
Not all dragons slept.
Silverwing, from her perch high above, watched silently.
By the end of that week, a raven arrived with a sealed message, not addressed to Maelion, but to me.
The wax bore no sigil. Only fire.
Inside: a single line.
"You are not alone."
No signature. No mark. Just the weight of words that shifted the air around them.
That night, I climbed to the highest cliff and lit a brazier of my own making—ironwood soaked in oil, a signal of old.
If they watched, they would see it.
If they remembered, they would answer.
Silverwing landed behind me, her wings folding like a curtain around my form.
We waited in silence.
And far across the dark horizon, a light flickered in reply.
Not bright. Not near. But real.
Something stirs. Not just dragons. Not just blood.
The past is waking.
And I will meet it on dragonback.