Prisoner of Dragonstone

97 AC (Conquest calendar 97), Dragonstone.

The sensation of suffocation clutched at his throat, as though the smoke of the Red Grassland had solidified into something tangible.

Daemon Blackfyre's eyes snapped open. Sulfurous heat lodged in his windpipe like shards of scalding glass, and every labored breath brought tearing pain.

Beneath him was not blood-soaked, scorched earth, but a cold, hard Dragonglass floor glimmering with a faint green light.

Under the pitch-black stone, winding veins like congealed venom flowed silently through the absolute darkness.

"Seven hells..." He tried to curse, but his voice came out broken, like a rusty saw dragging through rotten wood.

A violent headache seized him. Instinctively, he raised a hand to his chest—the three poisoned arrows that had pierced his lungs and ended his life in a triangular pattern were gone.

Under his fingers was the frantic, fragile heartbeat beneath a boy's thin chest. The weakness of this body made his stomach turn.

"I'm not dead? My hands!?" Daemon spread his hands in shock. They were not the callused, scarred hands of a warrior hardened by years of battle, but a boy's hands with slender knuckles and smooth skin.

He immediately dismissed the possibility that he had been captured and imprisoned by Brynden Rivers after being gravely wounded.

Bloodraven would only have locked him in the deepest dungeon of the Red Keep, wearing him down slowly with chains and humiliation—not in this Dragonglass prison unique to Dragonstone, radiating ancient magic. Unless...

Memories pierced his mind like poisoned arrows, carrying the cold despair of the Red Grassland: Brynden's arrow tearing through his knee; his eldest son Aegon's bloodstained silver hair drifting beneath the Black Dragon banner; the death-throes-like roar when Blackfyre slipped from his hand and struck the ground...

Daemon clenched his right fist. The pain in his palm did not come from a sword hilt, but from the remains of a broken silver hair chain.

Several dark red, dried flecks of mud clung unmistakably to its cold metal edge—the soil of the Red Grassland, the final mark left by the place where his life had ended.

"Prince Baelon coughed up blood again last night," came the dull conversation of guards outside the stone cell, their voices colliding through a volcanic-rock corridor and echoing hollowly through the silence. "The attendants said the chamber pot was full of clots, soaking the dragon sigil on the prince's robes. Some say he misses Princess Alyssa so badly that heartbreak made him ill. Others say the gods punished him for slaughtering the Myrmen too ruthlessly in avenging Prince Aemon. Me? I say it's this damned Dragonstone. The damp crawls into your bones like maggots and gnaws at your lungs!"

"Still better than King's Landing," another voice said, tinged with barely perceptible fear. "That Greyscale outbreak last year spared not even Princess Maegelle. She had only just reached Oldtown to seek treatment when... Sigh. Such a pitiful flower, withering at the height of her bloom."

Daemon's pupils contracted sharply, as though bitten by a venomous snake!

Baelon? Alyssa? Aemon? Maegelle?! Those names were like a bucket of ice water dumped over his head, freezing him to the marrow in an instant! They were ghosts who had rotted into the dust of history a century ago! Names he had read on yellowed parchment in the library of the Red Keep in King's Landing!

An utterly absurd chill shot up his spine and into his skull. Staggering, he threw himself toward the cold iron bars, trying to peer through the gaps for more.

Outside the bars, the Dragonglass veins embedded in the dark corridor walls flickered with his hurried footsteps. Strange shadows floated in their ghostly green glow: the smoke-filled Red Grassland overlapped bizarrely with the shadow of vast dragon wings; Bloodraven Brynden Rivers's cold, blood-red eye twisted and stretched in the vision, finally becoming a dragon's eye burning with sorcerous flame! The rain of arrows pouring from the sky transformed in the warped light into all-consuming black dragonfire!

"The dragons are not gone..." Daemon murmured unconsciously, his trembling fingertips brushing the rough stone wall. Beneath them was a deep groove carved into the Dragonglass—Blood and Fire.

The ancient Valyrian inscription carried an aura of primal savagery and curse. Clearly, he had clawed it into the wall with his nails while unconscious or in some state of madness.

At that moment, the disturbance of his awakening finally alerted the guards outside.

"Well! The little brat from Lys is awake!" Chains clattered as the heavy cell door was pushed open. Two guards in rough leather armor blocked the entrance, followed by a burly, menacing man.

A clear seahorse sigil was branded on his leather armor—the emblem of House Velaryon! At his waist hung a curved sword, its sheath inlaid with iridescent mother-of-pearl native to Tidehead Island.

"Pirate scum? Or a stowaway thief?" The Velaryon guard bearing the seahorse sigil spat out the sourgrass leaf he had been chewing, his eyes sweeping contemptuously over the thin silver-haired boy in the cell. "No need to waste your breath answering me, boy. Lord Corlys, the Sea Snake, will personally come to Dragonstone tomorrow to question you. As for you two," he said, turning to the guards, "give him some water and hard bread. Don't let the little brat rot in—"

His words cut off abruptly!

The instant the Velaryon guard reached through the bars, seemingly to grab his collar, Daemon's body moved faster than his mind!

Battle-honed killing techniques erupted awake within this immature body!

He struck like lightning, clamping onto the wrist reaching through the bars like a viper's jaws, precisely catching the thumb and wrenching it at an impossible angle!

The agony made the guard scream and bend over instinctively. Daemon's other hand had already locked around his throat like an iron vise, and with all his strength, he slammed the man's head into the cold Dragonglass bars!

Bang! A dull, teeth-grinding impact echoed through the corridor. The guard's huge body immediately went limp. The instant the mother-of-pearl curved sword slipped from his grasp, Daemon deftly caught it in his own hand.

"Demon! Kill him!" The other two guards drew their swords in frantic terror.

Memory fully took command of this body. Daemon shifted aside from a vicious slash, and the stolen curved sword traced a lethal arc in his hand, carrying the fierce trajectory Blackfyre had once possessed.

The blade drove precisely through the gap between the second man's underarm armor and iron rings. The familiar sensation of tearing flesh came to him, and for an instant he was back on the Red Grassland—the savage thrill of his blade tip lifting out an enemy's beating heart seemed to pierce through a hundred years of time!

"Demon! His... his shoulder brand is glowing!" The last guard was terrified out of his wits. Screaming, he stumbled backward again and again, a trembling finger pointing at Daemon's right shoulder.

Daemon instinctively looked down.

On his right shoulder, an old burn scar of unknown origin was now emitting a dim dark-red glow!

More bizarre still, the shape of the brand was perfectly clear—a lifelike black three-headed dragon! It pulsed and writhed beneath his flesh as if alive, and every beat drew forth a low, distant dragon's roar, as though from an ancient abyss! The roar did not come from outside, but reverberated directly inside his skull!

The uproar and fighting from the upper levels of the dungeon finally drew more guards. Chaotic footsteps and clashing metal rapidly approached from the stairwell.

Without hesitation, Daemon became a trapped beast breaking free. With the combat instinct carved into his bones and the bloodstained curved sword in his hand, he forcibly carved a bloody path through the guards rushing toward the noise and burst out of the dungeon's upper level.

Thick, pungent sulfur mist rushed at him, shrouding Dragonstone's grim castle built of black stone.

He raced along the castle's steep edge and abruptly skidded to a halt at the cliff!

Within the sulfur mist, the stone dragons atop the castle towers seemed to writhe their wings in the setting sun—and a real shadow was tearing through the clouds before him...