"Khaleesi, something's happening!"
At dusk, when the blazing furnace roasting the land rolled below the horizon, the horselords crawled out of their bedrolls. They drank some mare's milk, chewed on dried meat strips, and then returned to their digging.
First, they had to clear away the ashes left behind by the cremation of the ancient Dragon King's corpse. At the beginning, there was nothing unusual—whether it had been a demon's body or a cursed Valyrian Dragon King, everything had turned into charred, blackened fragments under the raging flames.
Even if there had been some virus Dany worried about, it was almost certainly roasted to death by the high temperature.
After jumping into the pit and seeing that it was no different from Drogo's funeral pyre remains, the horselords grew bolder and began scraping through the ashes with their bare hands.
Before long, one of them raised an arm smeared with black, sticky ash. In both hands, he held a palm-sized pitch-black iron plaque and shouted loudly to Dany, "Khaleesi, we found a piece of iron! I think it's a relic left behind by that Dragon King!"
Jorah took it first, rinsed off the grime with sand and dirt, examined it carefully, and only then handed it to Dany."This is Valyrian steel. It bears a dragon-shaped clan emblem and ancient Valyrian runes.
"Our earlier guess should be correct. This iron plaque is probably some kind of identification token—like the Hand of the King's badge."
In the Seven Kingdoms of Westeros, the prime minister was called the Hand of the King. The Hand could design their own insignia—it could be a brooch, a cloak pin, or a chain worn on the chest—but the emblem would always feature a small metal hand.
The iron plaque felt slightly heavy in Dany's hand, just enough to barely cover her small palm. It made her think of the 6.5-inch Huawei phone she'd just started using—about the same thickness and weight, though its surface area was only about one-third of a phone's.
Valyrian steel, in essence, was still a kind of steel. If you took it to a laboratory and performed elemental analysis, you'd find no fundamental difference from ordinary steel. But during its forging, magic unique to Valyrian civilization had been added, giving it an almost indestructible quality.
Oh right—weapons forged from Valyrian steel also possessed powerful anti-magic properties. For example, killing White Walkers.
Setting aside its solid, half-kilogram heft, the engraved images on the plaque were exquisitely detailed.
On the front was a massive dragon with wings spread, poised to take flight. In its claws, the dragon gripped a greatsword gleaming with cold light. It was delicate and vivid—you could feel the majesty in the dragon's face, and even make out the gemstone set into the sword's crossguard.
A ring of runes encircled the dragon. Dany recognized them as the most orthodox Valyrian script, yet she couldn't understand a single rune.
The other side of the plaque puzzled her just as much. Using a rougher carving style than the front, it depicted a mountain peak.
When she gently traced the mountain pattern with her fingers, she could clearly feel the raised and sunken grooves.
At the mountain's summit seemed to be wisps of smoke—but the craftsmanship was too crude. Dany couldn't tell whether it was black smoke or a single large tree.
"If the image on the front really is a clan emblem—if the dragon holding a sword symbolizes the Dragon King himself—then everyone, look carefully. There might be a Valyrian steel two-handed sword buried in the sand," Dany said excitedly, encouraging those in the pit.
Reality proved she'd been dreaming too beautifully.
When the moon reached its zenith, the horselords had dug through all the surrounding sand, reaching four or five meters deep. Groundwater had even started seeping in, yet they found nothing.
Jorah shook his head and sighed. "Under those circumstances, just escaping Valyria would've been hard enough. He wouldn't have had time to go home and retrieve his clan sword. If the sword the dragon is holding was real, its weight and size would be no less than House Stark's ancestral blade—Ice."
The knight then described Ice to Dany: wider than a palm, dark as black smoke, and when stood upright, taller than Dany by a full head.
Dany felt a bit awkward. Though her body was only fourteen years old and somewhat underdeveloped—no chest, no hips—she wasn't short. Even without measuring, she knew she was around 1.6 meters tall.
A head taller than her meant that even if it didn't quite reach two meters, it had to be over 1.8 meters.
"That long… even if you could lift it, wouldn't it be hard to swing?" she asked curiously.
"Eddard Stark uses that sword to chop off dozens of heads every year. After decades, he's trained with it to an absurd level of proficiency," Jorah said, his tone full of resentment and sarcasm.
He'd almost become experience points for 'Ned the Milkman's' greatsword skill.
In the end, Dany accepted Jorah's analysis. Under normal circumstances, a massive two-handed sword couldn't be carried around at all times, and the dead Dragon King wouldn't have had a chance to retrieve it.
Before midnight, the horselords dug more than twenty pieces of blackened dragon bone of varying lengths out of the sand. The longest exceeded ten meters; even the shortest, when stood upright, reached Dany's waist.
Many showed obvious fracture marks, further proving that the dragon had been gravely wounded, unable to fly, and had fallen from the sky.
"Alright, let's stop here. This is enough for every Khalasar member to have a dragonbone curved blade," Dany clapped her hands and called for the digging to end.
"Princess, dragonbone can only be used for sword hilts. It can't be forged into blades. Pairing dragonbone with ordinary steel would be a waste. In truth, except for Valyrian steel weapons, other steel weapons aren't worth using dragonbone for," Jorah reminded her.
"You said dragonbone is very valuable," Dany replied.
"It is valuable. There's only this much dragonbone left in the world. But don't you not need money?"
"Who ever complains about having too much money?" Dany waved her hand casually.
Before leaving, Dany ordered the dragon skull to be buried and piled into a small hill.
This was her treasure—she couldn't let anyone else get their hands on it.
If even a trace of raw dragonbone were exposed, even a fool would know she'd discovered a dragon corpse in the Red Waste.
Now that it was buried, even she herself wasn't sure whether she'd be able to find it again next time.
The truth was, this plain was full of similar low hills, and there were no distinctive landmarks nearby. Stacking stones or planting wooden poles would only work short-term—over time, they'd be buried by sand or blown over by the wind.
"Big Black, you remember this, right?" she asked her black dragon.
The black dragon did possess some intelligence, but compared to humans, it was severely brain-dead—literally brain-dead, the kind that came from underdevelopment.
That said, dragons had an extremely strong sense of direction. Often entering dragon dreams and dragon spirits, merging her soul with the black dragon's, Dany could clearly sense that dragons didn't just have the five senses of sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch—they seemed to have more than six or seven senses.
Uh… her dragon hadn't awakened any kind of small cosmos, though.
Just as birds can determine direction using Earth's magnetic field, dragons had similar means.
For example, Dany had once left the dragons in White Cloud City, then rode her little silver horse off in a random direction for several kilometers before hiding in a patch of grass. In the end, all three dragons were able to find her with pinpoint accuracy.
And at that time, she had deliberately cut off the dragon dream state.
Dany could receive the black dragon's seventh sense, eighth sense, and more—but she didn't know what they were, nor could she analyze or make use of them.
She asked repeatedly, then moved two kilometers away and had Big Black fly back to test it. After exhausting herself into a sweat, she finally barely confirmed that he might truly remember the location.
"Hey, Ser Jorah—were there any methods among the Targaryens over a hundred years ago to increase a dragon's intelligence? My dragons are too dumb," Dany complained to him in the early hours of the morning as the caravan rode back. "Being dumb is one thing. As long as they obediently listen to me, that's fine.
"But dragons are naturally arrogant. The black dragon is okay, but the green and white dragons—I can barely control them at all. Communication is far too difficult."
"I don't know," the Great Bear shook his head. "Bear Island is too far from the center of power. I'm not familiar with nobles outside the Starks."
"But you're a legitimate son-in-law of House Hightower, and House Hightower controls the Citadel," Dany reminded him.
No matter what, Jorah Mormont had been a favored guest of House Hightower for several years. He should have visited the Citadel a few times and at least known some learned maesters.
Mm—maesters also had ranks: acolyte, maester, doctor, and archmaester. Their rank was judged by the depth and breadth of knowledge they possessed.
"At the time, I had no interest in maesters or the Citadel at all. In fact, I still don't," he replied.
They encountered no mishaps along the way. Two days later, the group returned to White Cloud City with the dragonbone.
In the days that followed, Dany would leave the city in the cool mornings and evenings, carrying her dragons on her back to train her body. During the blazing heat of late morning and afternoon, she began giving the three dragons cultural lessons.
Their bodies grew larger and larger, transforming from skinny little "kitties" into burly "Pekingese," and now they were showing signs of advancing toward "mongrel dog."
As their size increased, so did their daily food intake. The sand lizards, scorpions, and sand snakes of the Red Sand Plain could no longer satisfy them.
So Dany used food as bait to lure them into studying.
The process was extremely difficult.
For math class, she entered the dragon dream state and demonstrated elementary-school arithmetic to the black dragon. For language class, she opened her mouth wide, making sounds while simultaneously conveying their meanings through the soul connection.
There was also physical education. Dany used a wooden stick to strike their scales. At first, the young dragons' scales shattered like hard eggshells. Smoking blood seeped out of their bodies and burned away before it could even drip to the ground.
Because she had a soul connection with the black dragon, Dany constantly soothed and encouraged the little dragon in her mental sea. Though the black dragon roared in anger, it could still barely cooperate.
The white and green dragons were not so obedient.
After they were born for one month, Dany completely lost her dragon-spirit connection with Little White and Little Green. The closer she became with the black dragon, the greater the rift grew between her and the other two.
Not only were language and math classes impossible—during one PE session, when Dany struck Little White's back hard enough to draw blood, the little beast didn't hesitate at all and blasted a stream of dragonfire straight at her wrist.
Dragonfire burned hotter than flames from burning firewood. For the first time, she was injured by fire. A ring of blisters the size of cockroaches rose on the skin of her wrist, painfully itchy. It took four or five days to recover.
The only consolation was that it left no scar.
Perhaps she really could draw power from flames. Or perhaps it was because of her increasingly intimate dragon-spirit bond with the black dragon—her injuries healed faster than those of ordinary people, and more completely as well.
For example, the knife scar on her abdomen.
To avoid letting others discover her plan, Dany didn't let her maids attend her baths for the next half month.
Mm. She explained that water resources were scarce, and from now on everyone would use fine sand to clean the grime from their skin.
She also had a sand bed prepared, covered with fine white sand.
Every night before sleeping, she would strip naked and rub herself over it once, cleaning away the dust from her skin—the grease and old flakes of skin were all burned away by fire.
But after half a month, Dany began living a decadent "slave-master" lifestyle again.
She discovered in amazement that the scar on her belly grew fainter the more it was burned, until it disappeared completely, and her skin returned to its former delicate smoothness.
It seemed that high temperatures promoted blood circulation, and within fierce flames, cellular activity became extremely high?
That was the scientific explanation.
A more fantastical explanation was that dragons and fire possessed magical healing power.
Just like over a year ago, when the original Dany had just married Drogo. Frail and unaccustomed to life on horseback, she was exhausted to the brink of death every day, her inner thighs rubbed raw and bloody.
Yet after a single dragon dream—just one night—all her injuries vanished, and her body became as strong as that of a native horselord girl.
...
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Here are a few fan-fic titles that I've recently uploaded on my Patreon:
"Game of Thrones: Dragon Prince"
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(End Chapter)