Tyrion Lannister, Viserys thought.
A faint smile curled Viserys's lips. He wanted to test something: whether Tyrion really was, as others suspected, the child of his body's father, the Mad King Aerys II, and Tywin's wife, Joanna Lannister.
So he had Blackflame and the other dragons descend and circle slowly above the Red Keep, drawing closer to the tower where Tyrion stood to get a careful sense of his bloodline.
Tyrion watched the dragons drawing ever closer through the sky. His legs went weak with terror, leaving him rooted to the spot. Blackflame's wings blotted out the sunlight, his enormous shadow enveloping the entire Red Keep below.
His face was pale, but his mismatched eyes held more than fear. There was something far more complicated in them.
"Seven preserve me," he murmured to himself. "These dragons really are more terrifying than the legends."
Tyrion remembered his childhood.
Once, his uncle Gerion, whom he was closest to, had asked what he wanted for his name day. He had said he wanted a dragon. Gerion had laughed and told him that dragons had been extinct for over a hundred years. There were none left.
He had refused to believe it then and kept pestering Gerion to tell him stories about dragons. So Gerion had told him about Aegon, about Balerion the Black Dread, about Vhagar, and about Meraxes.
He had heard those stories countless times afterward, yet he had savored every telling. He had imagined what dragons looked like countless times, too, but only after seeing them with his own eyes did he realize that his imagination could never match reality.
He had once dreamed of nothing but having a dragon, of riding it into the sky one day and gazing down at the world.
Now the dragons had truly returned, but