The conversation that changed the world happened in the dead of night, in a rented manse that still felt haunted by the ghost of a dead queen. The city outside was quiet, its feigned grief finally exhausted. Inside, Harry stood before a map of King's Landing, his finger tracing a path to the scarred dome on the Hill of Rhaenys.
"The Iron Throne is a lie, Sirius," Harry said, his voice a low murmur that barely disturbed the silence. "It's a chair. A sharp and ugly one at that. The power of House Targaryen has never been in its castle or its crown. It's in a cage, sleeping on a bed of gold and bones. I intend to correct that oversight."
Sirius looked up from the sword he was polishing. He had grown unnervingly accustomed to the casual way Harry spoke of rearranging kingdoms, but this was a new level of audacity. "So, after playing kingmaker, you're now turning to dragon-thief?"
"Dragon-liberator," Harry corrected, a faint, dangerous smile touching his lips. "One is an act of greed. The other is an act of reclamation."
When he moved, he moved alone. The moon was a sliver of bone in a black sky. The Dragonpit was a colossal, sleeping beast, its domed roof like the skull of some long-dead giant. Harry walked toward the main gates, and reality itself seemed to part for him. He was wrapped in a localized fold of perception, a cloak of sublime indifference. The guards at their posts shivered from a sudden cold draft, their eyes sliding past the space he occupied, their minds refusing to register the shadow that walked like a man.
He passed into the great cavern. The air was hot, thick, and alive. It smelled of brimstone, hot stone, and the ancient, reptilian musk of slumbering gods. Deep, rhythmic exhalations, like the slow bellows of a world-sized forge, rumbled through the floor. In the gloom, vast shapes were chained in alcoves, mountains of scaled flesh dreaming of skies they no longer remembered.
He felt the burning hatred of Caraxes, the Blood Wyrm, a searing lance of fury from the darkness. A silent wave of calm from Harry's mind washed over the beast, soothing it into a confused grumble. He saw Syrax, her golden scales shimmering even in the gloom, and felt the echo of her bond with Rhaenyra—a magic of affection and loyalty he would not touch. For now.
His targets were the forgotten, the unclaimed, the wasted potential of an empire in decline.
He found Dreamfyre in a cavern deep within the pit. A slender creature of pale blue and silver, she should have been beautiful, but decades of captivity had settled on her like a shroud. A profound melancholy radiated from her, a sorrow so deep it stained the air. Harry didn't touch the colossal iron chains that bound her. He simply looked at them, at the very idea of them, and willed them to be undone. The metal did not shatter; it decomposed, turning to rust, then to flakes, then to fine dust that drifted away on the heated air. Dreamfyre lifted her head, her sapphire eyes wide with disbelief. Harry didn't offer a command. He opened his mind and showed her a vision: a sky choked with stars, the feeling of a cold, clean wind beneath her wings, a home among volcanoes that burned with the heart of the world.
An answer came back, not in words, but in a wave of yearning so powerful it almost staggered him.
He moved on. The chains turned to dust. The invitation was extended. And one by one, the silent, sleeping souls of the Dragonpit began to stir.
It was not a panicked awakening. It was a slow, dawning realization, a current of intelligent awareness that flowed through the pit. An exodus began. Under the silent cloak of Harry's will, they slipped from their lairs. Great beasts, vast as warships, moved with the silence of cats, pouring out of the great bronze doors and into the night. Above the sleeping city, a silent procession of dragons took to the sky, their wings beating a rhythm that only the stars could hear.
High above the dark ribbon of the Blackwater Rush, Harry tore the sky open. Reality fractured, splitting apart to form a shimmering, vertical sea of swirling starlight and raw creation. A gateway pulsed, and from it washed a call of raw, volcanic power—the promise of a true home. Drawn by an irresistible, instinctual pull, the liberated dragons banked and flew, one after another, into the stellar wound and vanished.
On the highest balcony of the obsidian citadel on Skagos, Aemma clutched Baelon tighter, her knuckles white. She and Sirius had watched as the sky ripped open in a display of terrifying, beautiful magic. Now, they watched as dragons streamed from the wound. Dreamfyre. Vermithor. A half-dozen more followed, their scales of bronze, silver, and jade glittering in the impossible light of the portal. They circled the island, a living constellation of restored gods, their ancient, joyful calls echoing across the waves.
They did not land in the city. They were drawn to the island's great, smoking peak, a volcano that now began to pulse with a deep, internal, crimson light.
Then, as the ground trembled beneath Aemma's feet, something rose from the caldera to meet them.
It was a dragon, but to call it a dragon was to call a tidal wave a ripple. It was a being of impossible scale, its body forged from cooled magma and shadow, its wings so vast they seemed to swallow the stars. Veins of what looked like molten gold pulsed with geothermal light beneath its obsidian hide. It was a force of nature, a god of fire and earth given form. It was Balerion the Black Dread, but reborn, remade, infused with the very core of the world.
He—It—opened its maw, and a roar unlike any sound Aemma had ever conceived washed over the island. It was not a sound of aggression. It was a note of absolute command, a declaration of primordial power that shook the stones and the soul. In an instant, the circling dragons responded. Heads bowed. Wings folded. A chorus of reverent, submissive cries answered their new king. They had not been brought to a new lair. They had been brought to their new monarch.
Aemma gripped the cold stone of the railing, her breath gone, her heart a frantic drum against her ribs. She had thought she understood the power of Harry Potter. She had seen his ships, his fortress, his magic. She had been a fool. That was the power of a man.
This, she realized with a dizzying, soul-shaking clarity, was the power of an empire. And he had hidden it at the end of the world.