Redd stood at the door, his eyes following the back of the little girl who disappeared around the corner of the corridor.
The silver-gold hair swayed at the last moment when he turned the corner, like a ray of moonlight blown away by the wind, and then was swallowed up by the wall and shadow.
The footsteps of the maid became further and further away, and were gradually covered by the ubiquitous and fuzzy background noises in Red Keep - distant voices, the dull sound of a certain door being closed, the rustling of the leaves in the courtyard - everything became calm again.
He closed the study door and did not go back to the desk immediately. Instead, he stood leaning against the door panel for a while.
The words Helaena said were still spinning in his mind, like a stone thrown into the water. The ripples had dispersed, but the fluctuations in the water's surface had not completely subsided.
Those words and phrases - dragon, flying, returning to a place, stones, fire and black smoke - each of them is not a rare thing if taken individually. In this world, dragons are not uncommon, volcanoes and black smoke are not uncommon, and someone standing in front of a group of dragons is not a rare scene.
But when they came out of the little girl's mouth, their arrangement and tone gave them different textures, like the same piece of fabric showing different colors and textures in different lights.
The more he thought about the words she said, the more he felt that they pointed to only one place - Valyrian Peninsula.
The shattered land shrouded in volcanic ash and curses, swallowed up by the six Centuries he sent, and still shrouded in the embers of the doomsday catastrophe.
There were stones, fire, black smoke, and hot air with the smell of sulfur rising up from the depths of the earth.
It was once the center of the most powerful civilization in the world, the birthplace of Demon Dragon and magic, and the ancient homeland of forty House Targaryen that ruled for thousands of years.
Now there are only ruins and ashes left there, as well as some surviving lives that survived the apocalypse and lingered in the gaps between volcanic ash and lava.
And if the dragons she talked about - many, many dragons - are real, and if she really saw something, it means that there may really be living dragons hidden deep in the cursed ruins on Valyrian Peninsula.
Not the two he found originally, but a larger, more complete group that survived the apocalypse.
Redd's fingers tapped on the door panel repeatedly, and the rhythm was uneven, as if his thoughts were beating fast and slow to the same beat.
He looked over and over again at Helaena's light purple eyes in his mind - there was something familiar to him in those eyes, a clarity of seeing the world through the mist.
This kind of people are called "Dream Walkers" on the Eastern Continent, but in Westeros, they are more commonly known as "Dragon Dreamers".
Occasionally, there will be people like this in House Targaryen's bloodline. They will see the future in their dreams, see the outlines of events that have not yet happened but have been woven by some kind of power, and see the figures and firelight at the nodes chosen by fate.
They often don't know the full meaning of those pictures, they just see a fragment, an intercepted moment.
Redd has never been too interested in so-called prophecies.
Along the way, he has seen too many the Seer, priests and dreamwalkers who claim to be able to see the future. Some of them can indeed see something, but those things are often as blurry as three layers of frosted glass covered by water vapor.
People need to guess, interpret, and fill in the gaps. Different ways of guessing often lead to vastly different conclusions, which eventually converge on any interpretation that is most beneficial to the speaker.
He didn't think it was a talent, at least not entirely.
He even more suspected that it was a script handed to people by those things called "gods" - allowing you to see a certain picture, and then you couldn't help but move in that direction, and finally made it come true with your own hands.
He has had a lot of dealings with those so-called gods in these years of experience, and his understanding of them is far deeper and more specific than any mortal priest on this continent.
In his opinion, those gods were actually quite defeated.
Their influence on the real world is much smaller than believers imagine. This is not because they do not want to interfere, but because their bodies are not in this world at all, but stay in another space.
To influence how the world works, they need media, agents, and those chosen by them to carry out their intentions.
Even a seemingly powerful existence like Cold God cannot allow its body to cross the space blocked by magic and borders. At most, it can only send out a weak Avatar, and there are strict geographical restrictions - the further away from Lands of Always Winter, the weaker its strength becomes, like a rubber band that has been stretched too long. The more it stretches, the less room it has to rebound.
To harvest death, Cold God needs to rely on the Night's King and Wights legions. Those resurrected Wights move stiffly and slowly. Their every step forward is accompanied by a long winter and continuous consumption. The efficiency is as low as sawing a big tree with a rusty and dull knife.
Therefore, when he heard about the prophecy that Helaena came to deliver, his first reaction was not gratitude, or even curiosity, but a kind of conditioned reflex vigilance.
Someone was staring at him. The person who showed him this picture, or the being who sent the picture to him through the little girl, wanted him to go to Valyrian Peninsula.
And she wanted him to go so desperately that she even hesitated to give him words through the mouth of a child.
Redd's first thought was: There shouldn't be any big pits waiting for him to step on.
This road has been paved for him to walk in, why should he obediently walk on that paved road?
His second thought came even faster: Do the opposite. You want me to do it, but I won't do it.
This idea arose in his mind almost instinctively, with a habit formed over the years of staying alert to the control and calculation of others.
He doesn't want to be anyone's pawn, doesn't want to walk on the route drawn by anyone, doesn't want to be pushed by any hand towards a destination that he hasn't fully seen yet.
But his third thought quickly diluted the first two thoughts: But what if this prophecy was deliberately the other way around?
If the being who delivered the message to him had predicted that he would have such a rebellious mentality, why did he deliberately let the little girl tell him the scene in order to stop him from going to Valyria for the time being?
What if the goal of that existence is not to urge him to set off, but to delay his steps, making him hesitate and miss an important opportunity because of suspicion?