sing me a song of a lass that is gone; say, could that lass be i?

[jalan]

When Daenerys felt the cold weight of her crown, watching her dragons cut through the blue skies of Kingslanding, the bite of pending winter in the air, she thought might never dream again, for she only ever dreamed of that which she desired.

That isn't how dreams work. Even hers.

She falls asleep to the sight of midnight snow flurries visible through glass panes, and they dance now, light as ash, cold as death. In spite of snowfall, a hidden fire seems to burn away beneath the edges of the world, glimmered on the edge of shifting shadow, unfelt wind pulling at colour and form. Her silver hair flutters free of braids and pins, her moon-white dress flapping like a loose sail against her legs. Her feet bare on cold stone and frost.

Daenerys can stand before a dragon's open maw and feel its fire breath like a hot august wind, but she has no such immunities against the cold. The dream has the vivid texture of dreams she's had before, the fine hairs on the backs of her arms standing up once she shivers. Are these trees, around her? Pillars? Is the movement beyond that of figures, or they shadows only?

Up ahead, she thinks she might see something. Someone. She opens her mouth to call out.

Her words are torn away in favour of a dragon's call, too big for her throat, the flex of her jaw. She bites her mouth closed, the ache of effort tasting like copper.

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[hardcut]

Someone awaits at the crest of a hill just beyond the pillars, and ancient trees twined with human-like shapes made from wood and moss, empty holes for eyes watching impassively in the cold blue-black dark. For another dreamer: no lucidity, and no hope of remembering. Magic touches each in its own way.

The figure looming ahead is cut in the shape of a man, featureless in shadow. His head rises at the primal cry-- a glint, then, two points of reflected light, like moonlight on water, and he's looking at her. No, past her. Something that's stalking her with the crackle of breaking ice, reaching out with dark spears and barbs to ensnare and draw in and change. Attention, a gaze, like a physical presence, though turning reveals nothing but ice, stone, black, empty, nothing. A part of what should be neatly cut away with the sharpest blade, a corner of the world snipped from existence, left with only the frozen void of unmaking.

Behind the figure erupts black fire, and it screams and screams like one of her dragons raging. He moves forward, as though underwater, sword in hand. Ice shatters around him, each movement casting hidden threats and outstretched claws into the light and obliterating them the next minute. The sound and screaming of the impossible fire rises.

[jalan]

Ahead of her: an unknown figure, with eyes made strange by what could only be magic, and shadow-fire. The dream does not puppet Daenerys' thoughts and feelings, and so she is wary without fear, her hands clutching into defensive fists. But she turns, in spite of her instinct to stare down likely predators, when that prickle of attention plays at her nerves, and so she see what lies behind her: a void.

She likes that less.

Chameleon-like in her own world when it comes to manners, practices, cities, and alliances, Daenerys is nonetheless a constant within her own universe that seems like it can transform with a thought, ever malleable beneath her hands, and under her eye. She could burst into flames in denial of all of this bitter cold and deathly nothing, she could transform into a dragon shape and escape into the sky, but then, she would not know what she must know from this dream.

Turning to face the figure, Daenerys firms her jaw and takes a step back as the man raises his sword and approaches, and her step back draws her closer to that absence.

[hardcut]

For Arthur, the reality of the dream is the only reality - slow and stagnant steps forwarded, a clouded mind, dark fire. He knows that the void must be stopped. He knows that the cold gets its claws in and tills the soil for its gruesome purpose, the cold must be defeated. The cold, a living thing, every crack of frost a monster ready to spring out from the frigid air into a hulking, sword-wielding monster. How he knows these things is irrelevant. This is all there is.

The dragon-woman steps back. Unease and something sharper twist in his chest like splinters of wood and iron. Wrong. She musn't. Not into the void. Arthur holds Excalibur away and extends his empty hand to her.

Not that way.

[jalan]

Darkness grasps after her, a cold wind that sucks back into its mouth, chasing the flutter of her skirt hem, the flick of a braid. She is cunning and readied as she watches the actions of the man and his sword and his white, moon-glint eyes.

And he surprises her. She can almost feel the shift of his manner and his focus like a current, and it's enough -- in a dream, it's enough -- that she moves too, reaching out her hand, and when her palm slots against his, she is hot to the touch. Just in time, too, for the sound of splintered ice rings sharp in the air as a figure takes shape in the churn of the void.

A sword comes out first. It is made of blue ice, a splinter plucked from a glacier's heart. Glowing eyes. Sunken face. Taller than a man ought to be.

Daenerys isn't turning back, but she can sense, hear, feel pursuit, and gamely pulls on Arthur's grip to propel herself away.

[hardcut]

In contrast to her preternatural burning touch Arthur is merely human - work-worn and scarred palms, a measly average temperature, but still very solid. She pulls on him and he doesn't so much as bend, drawing on her momentum to propel her behind him while he raises Excalibur to defend against the looming wraith, fearless - and angry. He is pissed off that this thing is here. He doesn't know what it is, not really, but he knows that it's come to lay ruin to his kingdom. This will not be permitted.

The sword of blue ice comes swinging down, sickeningly slow in the dreamscape yet unavoidable, inevitable. It meets Excalibur with a shriek of metal and cracks, Arthur's blade unbreakable and his arm unwavering. Does diamond-hard ice count as stone? (What an odd thought for Daenerys to be given; what does stone have to do with anything.) The walker-king lurches back but Excalibur is not to be shaken off until Arthur himself twists it, shattering the ice down the middle and leaving the thing with a handful of jagged splinters. No less dangerous. But insulting.

Foolish to think in such a linear way. The cold snakes around them in a wide arc, reaching to something, something--

They can see it, what wasn't there before, where they weren't standing, before. A circular space on stone floor, walls crumbled in, remnants of a staircase long gone, sitting beside a dark, rank body of water. A felled iron bell. The hold hands stretch out to it, triumphant.

[jalan]

He feels like a man. Human, blunt around the edges, mortal. None of that is shocking save for that Daenerys, suddenly, does not feel so alone within this dream, surrounded by wraiths of the past, of the future -- with company, whose thoughts bleed into hers. She turns to watch the unknown warrior advance on the White Walker, for she's seen them before, too -- but then, she'd been flying over head.

Shards of ice-sword skitter across the ground, the White Walker staggering back, but not defeated. Its maw opens, emitting an inhuman, barely even bestial sound. Slowly, if not slow enough, the long, broken remains of its sword begin to regenerated, ice on ice, gleaming sharp.

As Daenerys takes in the sight of water, bell, ruins, the Walker bears down, forcing territory, spreading chill. She is quick to scamper out of the way, darting through Arthur's blindspot, re-emerging in pursuit of the cold, the water's edge, the frost creating lacy patterns over the iron bell.

[hardcut]

What a prick is dream-Arthur's thought about the Walker's regenerating sword, unaware he can be heard. From behind Daenerys, a flash of blinding light from the gem buried in the hilt of his sword, and Arthur steps sideways into another way of thinking of time. The Walker's corpselike head is then-- neatly, but with a sound like an explosion-- cleaved from his neck. Almost instantaneously, Excalibur bursts through his chest, shredding armor and bone like soft bread.

The world resettles into its standard slow-moving surreality. Churning metal noises are muffled by their breathing, over-loud in the freezing cold, and the odd thunk.. thunk... thunk... of the White Walker's severed head tumbling along over the stone ground to the jagged circle.

Arthur kicks the frozen body into the void.

He looks over his shoulder, then, and wonders how they got here - or how here got to them? - and notes distantly the head looks different. Human, warm skin, blood pouring from the neck. Flesh burned in places, hair singed. Thunk, thunk. It rolls on, towards Daenerys and the bell.

[jalan]

Ice, forming like skin over the depths of the lake, a sound like creaking glass and splinter. Something beneath it catches Dany's eye, churning, sliding against it less like an attempt to escape, and more like a caress--

But she turns to the battle at hand in time to see steel cleave through cold flesh and bone.

She glances down at the rolling head, but doesn't feel compelled to back away from it where it comes to a halt at her feet. It looks more human, and so to does the man with the sword. For a moment, she is stiff and wary, as grateful for his having saved her life as a wild animal might be for having been freed of a trap, before better manners overtake better instincts.

She nods to him, ever the monarch.

The last time she opened her mouth, a dragon scream had torn from it, unbidden. She doesn't risk that happening now, so another gesture is needed. Perhaps a token. She is dressed in the same white as mountain-capping now, her feet bare, her hair wild -- but here. She unpins a brooch of heavy silver, and gives a dainty, if unqueenly underhanded throw for him to catch.

It is, of course, a dragon, its wings spread and tail curling, the intricate details of its teeth defined.

[hardcut]

Arthur catches in one hand, an overhanded grab out of mid-air that's all rough-edged street fighter. He sheaths Excalibur with the other. When both hands are free he holds the thing between his scarred palms and looks at it, how finely made, how strangely life-like. Because it is alive, its silver weight shifting, sharp claws and rough scales prickling his skin. But it doesn't fly away, doesn't bite him, just slithers in a circle and stills again. A messenger of her power, he thinks, and he raises his head to look at her again.

"I'm not going to remember this," he tells her, but it sounds like he's speaking underwater-- and without any vowels. His dreams are always in Welsh. Why. Maybe that's where magic comes from.

He takes a step forward, then another, frost cracking beneath his feet, and his gaze falls to the severed head.

Vortigern.

Arthur frowns and moves as if to reach down to it, but the corpsehead's eyes open and from them shines a blinding flash of light, making him stagger back. Before he can recover his footing a shock of ice so brittle the very air cracks with it snaps through, freezing the ground and splitting it, dragging king and queen apart.

[jalan]

The name Vortigern forms like ice on her tongue, knowledge crossing between minds in this intimate mingle of dreaming, shocking through as if on a molecular level to alter something fundamental. But it's an echo of knowledge only, and when she wakes (having remembered everything), she will have questions. Is this the name of a White Walker? Some sort of General? Some other, unknown quality?

The last one seems the likeliest, as this unknown quality in front of her is the source of knowledge. So she watches with sharp study as he steps closer--

The world breaks.

The sound of ice snapping, a sudden cold like a whip, and Daenerys pitches forward, landing hands and knees in the rock and frost. The winter is like this in the northern most parts of her country, where wind can strip leaf off tree in one blast -- and that's if it doesn't fell it. The severed head is gone, and beneath the rumble of the broken ground, Daenerys can hear something else -- the familiar weight of metal-clad feet on the ground. The shift and clink of armor. The beating of spear to shield.

Another beat can be felt, joining in -- slower, heavier. She knows it as the sound of dragon wings trying to claim lift in the empty, cold air.

She looks up.