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.

Comments

[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.