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123 AC, Dragonstone
Daphne stood there in silence, watching the sea move faintly on the shores of Dragonstone. Things were quickly coming to a close; that was something she was sure of. Her husband's plan was… unconventional, but then again, she had encouraged him to find the most insane, ridiculous plan possible, so that might have been her fault since he had certainly not disappointed.
They had gone to the Isle of Faces just as he planned, and while Daphne was not particularly happy with the role Harry planned the Old Gods had in his plan, she would admit that it was fitting. Sure, they had tried to trap Harry with their little pact, which was… cute, though they would have probably reacted differently had the Old Gods not been necessary for their plan to work.
The pact itself was an interesting piece of magic, of course, and strangely enough, very related to traditional druidism and sacrificial magic. It was something of a vow, a pact with the world, that would empower them to fight against those who would break it. She had achieved similar results with Blood Magic, and Harry, out of curiosity, had tested its limits, learning to skirt around its workings. There was no reason why it wouldn't work against the Old Gods, where he would indirectly work to cause them a lot of grief and damage, without going against the words of the pact itself.
She could understand why they tried it, despite the risks. This was probably the only time that they had seen Harry at a disadvantage, and even if neither she nor her husband planned anything regarding the Old Gods after the coming confrontation, their actions regarding most gods were not exactly reassuring. If the illusion of safety would bring them some peace of mind, then Daphne supposed that she could respect that and let things go.
After all, there were many more pressing issues that they would need to deal with: the Elder Dragons, the coming divine war for the fragment of Light, and the Outsider incursion that was slowly spreading from Sothoryos.
Speaking of which, her husband should be done with his preparations soon. Just as the thought left her head, a giant portal appeared behind her, and she watched, without a hint of worry on her face, as her husband walked out of it, followed by a large black dragon. It was not any dragon, but the infamous Cannibal, or whatever it was that the inhabitants of Dragonstone called it.
Harry had told her a bit about the malformed dragon that leaked life force, which he killed the rest of his kind to receive and survive for as long as possible, and it truly was an abhorrent existence, for it was just a matter of survival. The creature was probably half-mad, given the constant influx of foreign life force, and also the fact that it tried to attack Harry, whereas most dragons were terrified of his presence. Looking at it now, briefly, she understood how abominable a creature it was, since to her magical sensing, the dragon's magic felt on the brink of collapse, with all that kept its cohesion being a constant, non-ending desire for survival.
Alas, the black dragon fell from the sky the moment it left through the portal, stuck in the ritual that Harry had concocted to immobilise it, and the giant creature started to shrink as it approached the ground. The sight was comical, with the mighty dragon becoming nothing more than a Dragonglass statue that was barely the size of a closed fist, by the time it hit the ground, making a small clink as it fell.
Harry casually walked towards it and picked it up, examining the statue closely, and she couldn't help but ask, "So, did it work?"
"Alchemically turning a dragon to Obsidian somehow bypassed a lot of their magical resistance, not that the Cannibal had a lot of it, since every drop of energy he had was used to bolster his leaking life force. But yeah, it's very faint, but there's a trace of the Elder Dragons' energies in the dragon. After all, diluted as it might be, the Valyrian Dragons' creation could be traced down to them. Unfortunately, messing with these energies would be a certain way to alert them, so I'll hold off on it for now. What about you? How are things going on your end?"
Daphne smiled at him, "Well enough. I scattered the seeds across the world, mostly in southern Westeros and Essos. They should start to connect with one another in a few decades, depending on how much magic and life force they get."
She might have played around with the seeds a bit. After all, she was part of a long line of druids, and she had never seen anything quite like the seeds of the Old Gods. She had no idea how it could have come to be, only that it must have been specifically engineered to be like this. There were patchworks that were obviously not natural, and at its core, the Old Gods were meant to be a parasite, a weapon, one that would infect entire worlds, draining the life force and their magic, endlessly hungering for blood and death, until the world was dead, and it would inevitably perish with it.
It had been specifically altered to gain a conscience built on whoever died on it, and to use their spark, to create life built upon the memories that soaked the soil and its roots. Each seed that the Old Gods gave them likely held as much power as was necessary to make a Child of the Forest. Creating life was a very complex endeavour, and aside from the energy required for such a conception, each child takes a fragment of their parent, a seed of a soul, that would grow and flourish. The Old Gods were no different, creating sparks of souls that would grow into the Children of the Forest, while having no real soul of their own. It should have been impossible, and yet, it had happened.
Daphne found the entire thing to be fascinating, perhaps more so, given the fact that her curse was gone. She had tried to mimic these results but was constrained by the concentration of magic and life force likely necessary to replicate the parameters of the experiment. She'd likely need to consult with Harry and work together on this; she didn't know of anyone who understood souls as well as he did. She had gathered enough data to know that he'd be interested. Maybe it would be a nice anniversary gift in a few months.
Though she did make some modifications to the seeds themselves, mostly to ensure that the plan would work well, for example, she made it so the range of the network was wider, so that each tree could connect to Weirwoods further away, and there was also some notice-me-not spells so that the trees themselves would grow in peace without some idiot trying to chop them down in the future.
Daphne only had a single seed left with her, one that was larger than the others, and that she might have tinkered with more than the others, but she raised it to show it to her husband; nonetheless, the seed was almost pulsating crimson light, like a heartbeat, one filled with energy.
Harry clapped his hand in excitement at the sight, "Nice. I suppose that we're ready then."
The Greengrass Witch nodded in agreement, "I suppose we are."
Her husband raised his hands, and in the distance, his sailboat rose from the depths of the calm waters and made its way towards them. She had been a bit surprised when Harry had built the damn thing and enchanted it to hell and back, and she still thought that it was utterly ridiculous, but a small part of her grew to like it over time. Sailing the ocean with nothing but each other's company, except maybe a nice book, if he made the ride extra smooth.
Of course, it wasn't Daphne's preferred way of travel. With a husband of Harry's talents, she barely had to walk if she wanted to go anywhere. His portals were certainly very useful, but unfortunately, travelling by manipulating space and time was certainly risky in a place where there was an incursion by beings that destabilised reality with their sheer presence, which actually made the boat a viable option, not that she would ever say it out loud.
She refused to look at Harry as they set foot atop the ship, knowing that he would have that insufferable smug look on his face, one that made her want to send a curse at him, not that it would hit him anyway.
They were not going as quickly as they could have. A lot of Harry's plans hinged on its secrecy, and the unpredictability of their actions, and he wanted to avoid any space warping until it was necessary. She supposed that most of his plans were like that when he felt pressured, at least.
So far, they were using normal acceleration charms, not quite dissimilar from the charms that one might find on a broom, for the boat was pretty much flying more than sailing, if she were honest. They were even ensuring that they would only go at subsonic speeds to avoid any other complications, that's aside from the many privacy charms that they both put around them.
And so, the blonde mage's eyes drifted towards the sky. It was a beautiful day. The sky was bright with the sun shining with barely any clouds in sight. The wind was nice and refreshing. No one likely knew that this day would change everything, that this world would not be the same by its end, for better or for worse.
Finally, after some time, she looked at her husband, who was probably doing the same, staring into the distance. Of course, she imagined that he was thinking of hundreds of different scenarios in his head, of different paths to victory.
Daphne decided to break the silence that had been present since they began sailing, "I have to say that I'm surprised you didn't bring anyone with us this time."
Harry stiffened for a moment, likely registering her question, before snorting, "Come on, Daph. I'm not that reckless."
She gave him an unimpressed look, "Need I remind you that you brought a teenager with us when we went North of the Wall?"
"Cregan is a Stark; they're just built differently."
"If I remember correctly, there was an undead Elder Dragon, even if he was barely more than a deformed hatchling, the eldritch necromancers and all-around insanity in the Lands of Always Winter, and the Night King, who wielded Death as his sword," Daphne answered dryly, counting each disaster after another.
"Come on, you can make anything sound ridiculous with that voice," Harry complained, before slumping, "Alright… Maybe we should have taken things a bit seriously on that front, and just dealt with it ourselves, but it would have felt… lesser, if that made any sense. A descendant of Bran the Builder was meant to kill the Night King. It's hard to explain, but it feels like the last notes of a song."
Daphne would admit that she had a hard time understanding some of her husband's explanations or motivations for certain actions, which would make complete sense to him. She had learned since they were young that Harry saw things… differently, experienced the world differently because of his Arcane Hearing, and she supposed that this would be doubly so for a world as strange as this one. She found it endearing, even if she knew that most people would have been unsettled by it.
The moment he described anything as music, Daphne immediately recognised a lost cause, and often just trusted her husband not to steer them wrong, though he often took very… unexpected paths. Daphne chose to feel some comfort at that, for she knew that life would never be boring alongside her husband.
She was so lost in her thoughts that she forgot to answer Harry, which made her husband blush adorably in embarrassment, as he continued his explanation, "This… What we're doing now was not part of the song of the world; of the story it tells. It is not something that they should be burdened with in the first place, no matter how remarkable Cregan and Helaena might be. Does that make any sense?"
Daphne chuckled and nodded, "Yes, that makes perfect sense."
Tellingly, Harry only mentioned Helaena and Cregan as the only viable people to accompany them, and Daphne couldn't help but agree with that sentiment. Rhaena and Baela were too young and should not be forced to experience the horrors that they were about to, and the rest, mainly Daemon and Aemond, were almost shaken by their last trip with Harry, something that she found exceedingly amusing, no matter how dangerous that little adventure was.
Despite her best efforts, Daphne found herself smiling at the memories on Dragonstone with the Targaryen girls, and perhaps even getting to know Cregan. They would all grow to be remarkable people, she knew for certain. "We did have some good times there, didn't we?"
Harry had a similarly nostalgic look, "That we did. We met some new people, solved many mysteries, and yet, here we are, our last puzzle in this place. It's a bit more daunting than the others, huh?"
Daphne looked up into the sky and saw that it was darkening and froze. She did not know how to describe it other than the sky itself being completely and utterly split in half, where it quickly shifted from normal into a nightmarish shifting darkness in the distance, moving around like an endless horde of dementors that were joined together. The contrast alone was enough to leave most people breathless.
Harry did say that he had used the excess energy of an Elder Dragon hatching to ward off an Outsider incursion, but she hadn't thought that he'd been underselling what he pulled off, as well as the scale of the Outsider incursion. This was, probably, the largest ward that she'd ever seen in her life, and that's aside from its complexity. From a cursory glance, it seems to be based on the Patronus Charm, though there were certain modifications, both in terms of scale and effect. It had to be, if it was used to fight… this.
To think that Harry had done that with barely a few seconds of thought…
Daphne was, objectively, an impressive mage, but sometimes she forgot just how bullshit her husband could be. She could easily see the entire Department of Mysteries spending decades just studying that ward, just trying to understand it, and they would likely end up barely scratching its surface.
That being said, Daphne felt a sudden shiver go up her spine, and she saw Harry wearing his invisibility cloak, which was shimmering away as if it were made up of liquid metal, while he was pressing his hand onto the boat's hull. Despite having done it many times, she still felt uncomfortable when he activated the cloak like this to include her in its range, as if a ghost had floated through her back in Hogwarts. Harry obviously knew this, given the small uplift of his lifts, but whatever she was going to say, she stopped as they went through the barrier.
If she thought that the world would have been different from the outside, then it was nothing compared to experiencing it inside. The sea had turned completely black and was like it existed completely on the precipice of a storm, while moving oddly slowly, as if it were made up of tar, and not water. She saw obviously corrupted creatures in its depths, with many giant Leviathans just floating there, looking half-corroded, likely living only through the grace of the chaos that imbued every inch of space around them.
The sky itself was ever swirling, filled with darkness, that simply would not stand still, like an endless shift of shades of grey. The moon looked dimmer and almost crimson, and she even saw its craters shift around somehow. There were also strange half-human creatures, often turned into hybrids of fish and everything around. It was strangely similar to the mutative nature of magic in this world on a very… very accelerated timeframe, and far more drastic changes.
They should have been attacked by an entire primordial force of pure chaos the moment they entered this domain, their domain. And yet, they didn't, for they were cloaked by Harry's cloak, whose protections could only be seen through Death itself.
However, it was obviously straining Harry to maintain this. Well, it was obvious to her. She saw how tense his shoulders were becoming and the sweat that dripped from his brow. She also, tellingly, noticed that the ship itself was darkening, rotting, the deeper they entered, meaning that Harry couldn't manage to both hide them and fully ward the ship from corruption at the same time.
Finally, they reached land, and they set foot on it. The moment they did, the boat had been subsumed, turning into nothing more than rotten wood that scattered away into the darkness. Harry had paused for a moment, watching it with a faint sadness, as he likely would have anything that he would work on being destroyed before him. Honestly, this boat was probably better warded than a Gringotts vault, and it had barely lasted a few minutes in the Darkness's domain.
With that done, both she and Harry finally looked at the land that they had landed in, and she would admit that she had expected something like Valyria. Unfortunately, this was worse… much, much worse…
Before them was a jungle, or at least, what would have looked like a jungle to a normal observer. To her eyes, that of an experienced druid, she knew that this was no forest, not truly, only a mockery of what probably lay there once, with its trees looking more akin to tentacles, with small teeth as leaves, constantly shifting as if they fluttered in a non-existent wind. The darkness in the distance seemed to breathe, and with every breath the jungle answered in kind, its grotesque forms twitching and writhing.
She had seen much in her adventures with Harry, but this… she needed some time to recollect herself briefly. She turned to her husband, who seemed to be entirely focusing on the ever-shifting darkness as well, with a very serious frown on his face.
It was he who broke the unnatural silence, "So, this is Sothoryos, huh?"
Despite the sheer unnaturalness that was before her, she released an amused snort, "You did say that you wanted to explore it when you first heard of it. Charming, isn't it?"
It was his turn to release a chuckle, "Charming isn't exactly the word I'd use. So, are you ready with this?"
She turned and gave him a small, certain smile, "Always."
He returned her smile, and so, both Potters walked forward into the depths of the cursed jungles of Sothoryos, ready to face the darkness ahead.
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Of Lost Dragons and House Targaryen
By Archmaester Aemon of King's Landing
It is an unspoken rule for every member of House Targaryen to first earn a copper link for their chains, should they enter the Citadel, one that would signify mastery over history. However, it is of no surprise to anyone that every Targaryen who has walked through the halls of the Citadel would choose a topic that pertains to the symbol of their house, dragons.
Alas, I am no different, for I, too, am fascinated by the species in question, or perhaps dreaming of an era where I should have soared the skies as well. After all, I am but a Targaryen of Dorne, and so far from the succession, that it was all but impossible that I would one day ride the great beasts, especially given the obvious care that the royal family had ensured to avoid spreading dragons from their line, and even from the branch family in Dorne, and they had done so by moving all hatcheries to Dragonstone, and securing the island. I do not know how it works, but eggs tend to turn to stone the further away they are from Dragonstone, as House Targaryen of Dorne had learned the hard way over generations, all but guaranteeing a subservience to the Targaryens of Dragonstone.
The politics and magicks of it are unimportant, at least for this, but every child with our blood ached to soar the skies atop their own mounts. One of the topics that had always fascinated us was the lost dragons.
An unclaimed dragon, either having never been ridden before or having its rider die, often flies around the world unconstrained, for the skies do belong to them. They tended to gravitate towards Dragonstone, perhaps because it was where most of them hatched. Alas, some had simply disappeared, never to be seen again, and we call these the lost dragons.
Before the many expeditions to Valyria, many had assumed that they had flown there, to their homeland, likely because of the infamous tale of Balerion the Black Dread, having flown to the ruins of Valyria, ending with the painful death of Aerea Targaryen, and the great dragon returning greatly wounded. However, there had been no sightings of dragons in the remnants of Valyria, nor much of anything really, which had not fallen within the Doom, a great mystery that remains unsolved to this day.
The truth was that many dragons simply disappear after some time, preferring not to have any riders, and this predated the founding of the branch of House Targaryen in Dorne. For example, one of the earlier disappearing dragons, who had once been ridden, was that of Dreamfyre, the mount of Princess Helaena Targaryen, who had never been seen after her funeral. Of course, the disappearance of Sheepsteeler after Naerys Targaryen, its previous rider, perished in the birthing bed, which her husband, Prince Aegon, publicly blamed the royal family for such an act, claiming that they wished to weaken the Targaryens of Dorne.
Of course, wild dragons also disappeared without a trace, most importantly being the infamous Cannibal itself. While it is but a legend to our times, of a wicked egg-devouring dragon, there were many reports of its existence on Dragonstone. The dragon was said to be the Black Dread come again, an intelligent one that was considered the bane of the Dragonkeepers on the island, but had simply disappeared one day, without a single sign of a battle or even a corpse.
The question remains as to what occurred to these dragons. The most troubling hypothesis would have been of some remnant of a Dragonlord family of Valyria claiming them in secret; alas, dragons are hardly subtle, and their existence outside of the Seven Kingdoms would not remain secret for long. It is in my personal opinion that these dragons held some magicks of their own, some sort of prophetic dreams perhaps, that allow them to predict their own deaths, and they refuse a rider when they do, and fly away for comfort, before their demise. Perhaps it is a poetic thought, of dragons dreaming, seeking solitude in their final days, far from the eyes of those who once rode them. It may be a kindness of their kind to spare their riders the grief of watching them wither and die, or perhaps they are drawn to something beyond our understanding, a final destination that calls to them alone, for no corpse has ever been found, and that absence is a mystery far greater than any tale of their flight.
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AN: We're finally getting to the good stuff with Sothoryos. This chapter wasn't really meant to be that long, but it really got away from me, and I had a lot of fun writing with Daphne. I tried to keep her cynical point of view about a lot of things, while also how highly she thinks of her husband despite his shenanigans, but I'm not sure it came out as well as I'd hoped. As usual, I don't mind rewriting this chapter depending on your feedback, so please let me know what you think and if you have any suggestions.
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If you want to support me, check out my patréon at https://www.patréon.com/athassprkr
I tend to upload drafts of early chapters on there to get people's opinions on them, so you can read up to 20 chapters ahead as a bonus.
Thank you guys for your support in these hard times.