100 AC.
By the time the winds turned and the moons shifted above the jagged ruin of Valyria, Hadrian and his men had taken more than any sane man would dare.
Vaults had been emptied. Gold had flowed like wine. Steel had been sung back into the world. And yet, something deeper than greed gnawed at Hadrian still. Not gold. Not glory. But truth. Something had haunted him from the first night—when ash fell like snow and the stars above the city refused to shine.
It was Riff who had first spotted it, rising in the distance like a broken tooth. The last great structure. A colossus of stone swallowed in ivy and half-sunk into the earth like the bones of a dying god. Its domes were cracked, its spires warped by heat, and around it loomed a silence unlike the rest of Valyria—a silence not of death, but reverence. No beasts made their dens there. Even the wind refused to whistle through its arches.
They thought it a temple, and in the end, they were not wrong. But Hadrian would come to wish it had only been that.
On the seventh morning of the third week, with the sun a pale red coin rising behind soot-streaked clouds, Hadrian approached the structure, bringing with him only a handful: Riff, Toff, a sworn warrior named Jareth, and two of his most trusted men. The others remained behind, content to count coin and catalogue relics.
As they passed beneath the cracked archway, the air changed. The scent of sea salt and soot gave way to something heavier—iron and incense, old dust and burned oil. The walls loomed high, carved with massive flame motifs that crawled like tongues toward the vaulted ceiling. Dragons were everywhere—twisting through columns, leering from stone braziers, their eyes inset with black glass that seemed to follow Hadrian as he walked.
At the heart of the structure lay the altar chamber.
It was a round room, its ceiling long fallen in. Vines and ivy now clung to the ribs of the broken dome like carrion feeders, but nothing grew near the center. The floor was scorched black, smooth stone glassed by unimaginable heat. The smell was faint—old blood, burned flesh, the copper tang of sorcery done long ago.
There, on a raised dais, sat the altar.
It was a single slab of black stone, impossibly smooth and without seam, cracked down its middle by some ancient violence. Despite its age, it thrummed with a pulse that made the hairs on Hadrian's neck rise. The air above it shimmered, and faint tendrils of heat curled upward as if something invisible still burned within.
The altar had channels—not decorative, but functional. Thin grooves, branching like veins, ran outward across the floor, ending in open mouths at the chamber's edge. Some were wide enough for a man's hand. Others as thin as needles. Dried dark stains lingered still, untouched by time.
Skeletal remains lay at the foot of the dais—dozens, perhaps more. Some were curled in poses of agony, others splayed out, blackened bones stuck fast to the scorched stone. Footprints marked the floor, burned into the very rock—bare feet, by the shape of them. Some large, others small. Men, women... children.
Toff whispered a prayer under his breath. Riff said nothing, but he gripped his blade tight enough to whiten his knuckles.
Hadrian moved forward, his staff in hand, the crystal at its crown casting a pale light. Runes carved around the altar's edge lit as he neared—not with flame, but with a soft crimson glow, like embers stirred beneath ashes. They were old Valyrian, and older still. Not the noble tongue of dragonlords, but something closer to the language of fire itself.
One phrase circled the base of the altar, repeated again and again in a spiral of heat-scored script:
Perzys Ānogar.
The Flame's Bond.
Hadrian touched the stone. It was warm, but not from the sun. It beat like a slow, sleeping heart.
He spoke the words aloud.
"Perzys Ānogar."
The chamber responded. Not with sound, but sensation. A presence stirred. Something deep in the stone, deeper in the bones. The light on his staff flared, then dimmed. The runes glowed brighter. Whispers flickered through the chamber—not spoken, but felt. Words that crawled along the spine and pressed behind the eyes.
The altar chamber gave way to silence once more, save for the fading pulse of the runes that had briefly flared like open wounds. But Hadrian was not done. Not yet. There was something else—he could feel it. A tremor in the stone, the whisper of air where there should be none.
At the far side of the room, half hidden behind a curtain of vines and crumbled statuary, stood a wall of obsidian smoother than any glass. Riff was first to notice it. His fingers brushed the surface—and the wall rippled like water. A shimmer of runes blinked across its face, then faded. When Hadrian approached with his staff, its light surged once more, and the obsidian slid open soundlessly, revealing a narrow stair descending into darkness.
No one spoke. They followed him down.
The air grew colder with each step, though the walls remained dry and smooth. It was no crypt of damp decay, but something older, more carefully wrought. The staircase ended in a chamber hewn from black stone flecked with veins of red glass that caught the light from Hadrian's staff and shimmered like slow-burning coals. The ceiling was low, the air thin, but the power here was undeniable—thick as oil, old as the roots of mountains.
Seven sarcophagi lined the chamber's heart, shaped of fused stone and steel, their lids unmarked save for a single rune each—names long lost to time, or perhaps known only to those who had no need of writing. The lids had not been disturbed. Whoever lay within had turned to dust in peace, their secrets unmolested by looters or dragons.
But what surrounded the sarcophagi was of greater interest.
Shelves of carved bone and volcanic glass lined the walls, holding scrolls bound in dragonhide and etched tablets glowing faintly with fire-touched script. The scrolls were brittle with age but intact, preserved by sorcery beyond mortal reckoning. Hadrian unrolled the first with reverence, the others gathering close behind. The script was High Valyrian, but older than what even the archmaesters taught in Oldtown—words that twisted the tongue and heated the blood just to read them.
He spoke aloud, translating slowly.
"From the line of fire must fire be born. Let their blood anoint the body, let their ash anoint the soul. In fire they burn—through fire they endure."
There were more. Pages upon pages describing the ritual in meticulous, brutal detail.
Once every hundred years, each dragonlord family was required to return to this place—or one like it. There, they would anoint themselves in the blood of kin, of servants, or sworn companions—those closest and most loyal. The blood was smeared upon their skin, their faces, their hearts. And then—together—they would step into dragonflame.
No protection. No warding. Only fire.
Those who survived were reborn. Their blood purified. Their gifts renewed. Dragon dreams, fire-immunity, long life, the sharpness of sight and mind—all of it came not by inheritance alone, but by ritual. By sacrifice.
Hadrian's mouth was dry as he read the next lines:
"Let them burn, that their blood not stagnate. Let them bleed, that their power not fade. From the Flame's Bond shall come purity. From the pain of ash, clarity. Let none escape the fire, else the fire will forget them."
One of the tablets went further, warning what happened if the ritual was neglected.
The gifts would weaken with each generation. Fire would burn what it once spared. Children would grow sickly, witless, barren. Dragons would no longer obey. Dreams would dull. Magic itself would turn away.
Hadrian sat down before the tombs, the scrolls in his lap. His face, always calm, was unreadable now. His companions dared not speak. Even Riff stood silent, eyes lowered.
He stared at the words again and again.
So this was the truth. The legacy of Valyria, laid bare—not forged in pride and dominion, but in ritualized blood and fire. An empire bought not by conquest alone, but by sacrifice. An unbroken chain of burning, bleeding, and rebirth.
No wonder their descendants had grown weaker. No wonder the bloodlines had dulled, their magic flickering out like a dying candle.
The others might recoil in horror. But Hadrian... Hadrian was fascinated.
He had always known there was a price to power. And now he knew the coin. This truth—this terrible, precious truth—could reshape the world if one was bold enough to wield it.
The skies above Valyria wept ash, not rain, as Hadrian and his men descended from the ruined palaces with their spoils in tow.
Wagons groaned under the weight of gold and jade, their wheels grinding through streets choked with bone dust and black sand. Dragonbone spears clattered beside crates of spices from lands that had ceased to exist, if those spices were still edible was another question. Great tapestries, their threads kissed by fire and shadow, were rolled with care and lashed to muleback. But it was the bundles of dark, cold-forged Valyrian steel—more than the North had seen in a thousand years—that made the elves-turned-men grin with disbelief.
Toff hefted one broken blade in his arms, as long as he was tall, and whistled low. "This one could gut a kraken."
"Let's hope it never needs to," muttered Riff, glancing at the far-off harbor, where their ships waited, sails furled like slumbering wings.
The wind from the sea was dry and hot, tinged always with the scent of smoke. They had been in Valyria nearly a month, and though they had grown used to the heat, none of them breathed easy beneath that dying sky.
Only Hadrian moved with purpose still unshaken. Cloaked in red and gold, his black hair streaked with soot, he said nothing as he led them through the broken streets toward the harbor. But when the great temple's silhouette was beginning to fade behind them—its towers half-swallowed by vines, its bones still intact—he paused.
He turned.
His men stopped as well.
The scrolls were gone, of course. Consumed by his eyes, his mind, and memory—no longer needed in ink and skin. He had read them all, etched every cursed word into the marrow of his soul. But none could leave this place. Not those scrolls. Not that knowledge.
The world was not ready.
Perhaps it never should be.
Hadrian lifted his staff from the cracked obsidian paving stones and held it before him. It had been a simple walking stick when first he entered the ruined temple, but now it burned with silent light—white and gold at its tip, blue deeper down, like the heart of a star.
The others backed away, instinct rising where reason had no place. Even Riff, ever bold, shielded his eyes and took a step back.
Hadrian looked at the far away temple one last time.
There was no rage in his eyes. No grief, no triumph. Only resolve.
Then, without sound, he slammed the staff down.
The earth trembled—not in quake, but in response.
From the foot of the temple, flame surged like a tidal wave of molten gold and shadow. No ordinary fire was this. No hearth-flame nor torch-blaze. Fiendfyre, born of sorcery so dark even the strongest and darkest of wizards in his old world only used its seldom and then not from such a distance, but Hadrian was no ordinary strong wizard, he was the wizard and had no reason not to use it lightly.
It roared to life with a scream like a thousand dragons keening at once. Serpents of fire coiled through the windows, bursting through stone like it was parchment. Towers melted, walls wept flame, statues cracked and collapsed under the hunger of that unnatural heat.
The glyphs within lit up in one final protest—red, then white, then gone.
Even the black stone altar, old as the Freehold itself, burned.
The fire did not merely consume the temple. It erased it.
Within moments, all that remained was a smoldering crater where the great structure had stood. No stone, no ash, no bones—only scorched earth and heat that shimmered like the breath of the sun.
Hadrian watched until the last flicker faded.
Then he turned and walked away.
No one spoke as they returned to the harbor. The ships, white-sailed and iron-ribbed, loomed like ghosts at the edge of the broken land. Men loaded their cargo in grim silence. The sea hissed against the ash-choked shore.
As Hadrian stood at the prow of his vessel, watching Valyria recede into the haze, he closed his eyes.
The truth was burned. But not forgotten.
It lived in him now.
And whatever legacy remained of the Dragonlords... it would find shape again. Whether in flame.
Or in frost.