(Sorry for the lack of chapters; I just started university and was busy. I am going to try and get back on track starting next week; as an apology, I'll drop three chapters tonight.)
The sea stretched endless and gray beneath Dreamfyre's wings, sunlight breaking in scattered shards across the water wherever the high clouds thinned enough to let it through, and Damon had been flying now for the better part of three hours since leaving Casterly Rock behind him at first light.
He had spent the night there after all, his dragons too weary from the previous day's journey to press on through darkness over open water, and Kevan had seen him fed, housed, and sent off again at dawn with the same careful courtesy that had marked the whole of yesterday's brief visit. The memory of it, and of Tyrion's small, startled smile, sat pleasantly enough at the back of Damon's mind as the coastline finally fell away entirely behind him, replaced by nothing but sea in every direction, gray-green and endless beneath a sky the color of old iron.
Caraxes flew a short distance to his right, wings beating in the same steady, unhurried rhythm Dreamfyre kept beneath him, both dragons settling into the long, patient cadence of a journey they understood, in whatever way dragons understood such things, would not end for some hours yet.
It was nearing the third hour when Damon finally caught sight of Pyke itself, a dark, jagged smudge rising from the sea far ahead, castle and cliffs both barely distinguishable yet from the ocean surrounding them. He allowed himself a moment's satisfaction at the sight, the journey's end finally within reach, before something else drew his eye, closer, lower, moving against the gray water in a pattern too deliberate to be anything but ships under sail.
He counted quickly, instinctively. Near twenty vessels, moving in loose formation, cutting a steady course that would bring them into the Iron Islands' territory.
His first thought was simple enough. Ships. But whose?
No house in Westeros he could name had any business sailing these particular waters, not now, not with the whole realm well aware that the Iron Islands had spent the better part of three years tearing themselves apart in civil war. No merchant fleet worth its cargo would risk these currents without cause, and no lord loyal to the Crown had any reason to send ships anywhere near Pyke without the King's own order preceding them. And these, Damon thought, studying the distant shapes more carefully, did not carry themselves like Ironborn longships either, riding too high and too broad in the water, built for cargo rather than raiding.
Curiosity rose in him, sharp and immediate, and his first instinct was to urge Dreamfyre faster, to close the distance and see plainly what he was looking at.
But something else held him back.
He had learned, across two lifetimes now, to trust that particular quiet warning when it rose in him unbidden, the feeling of a piece not yet fitting cleanly into the picture forming around it. He was flying lower than he usually preferred over open water, low enough that sound might carry, low enough that sharp eyes below might already have marked two dark shapes against the sky and begun wondering at them in turn.
Damon decided, without further hesitation, to trust the warning rather than the curiosity.
"Sōvegon acesse," he murmured, quiet and even. Climb, quietly.
Both dragons responded at once, wings angling sharply upward, carrying them higher and higher until the thin bank of cloud above swallowed them whole, gray mist closing around Damon on every side, muffling even the sound of Dreamfyre's own wingbeats. Hidden now from anything watching below, he urged more speed from her, Caraxes matching the pace beside him somewhere unseen in the surrounding cloud, both dragons cutting swiftly and silently toward the distant fleet.
---
On the deck of the lead ship, a man made his way aft, boots uneven against the gentle roll of the sea, until he found the vessel's captain standing near the wheel, eyes fixed forward on the dark smudge of land still some hours distant.
"Captain," the man said, "I still don't understand why we've made so many stops. We'd have reached our destination days ago otherwise."
The captain scoffed, not bothering to turn from his study of the horizon. "Why do you think our customer had us deliver these things instead of using their own fleet? Why do you think I had every flag and mark stripped from these ships before we ever left port?" He continued without waiting for an answer. "The reason's the same for both.
The risk of word spreading, some unsuspecting fisherman, some fool with a loose tongue in the wrong tavern, word of what we're carrying reaching the dragon king's ears, that risk isn't great. But it isn't nothing either. If he learned of this, every one of us would burn for it."
The man frowned. "Then why take the risk at all?"
The captain's mouth curled, something greedy and satisfied in the expression. "Why else? They're paying a mad amount of coin for it, enough that none of us would have to work for years after this job."
The man's gaze drifted forward to the ship's bow, where a great iron frame rose above the deck rail, angular and unmistakably a weapon, though far larger than any scorpion he'd seen mounted on a ship before. "What is that thing, anyway? This makes what, four shipments now, to those rebel Greyjoys?"
"Scorpions," the captain said. "Special ones. Bigger than the standard make, built to punch harder and further." Something almost like pride crept into his voice. "The dragon king won't expect them; dragons have been gone for years, the weapons used against them have mostly been melted down or stored away, but these are made to injure even the biggest dragons. The dragon king won't expect them; our employer is, but one of the many people who want those dragons dead but won't get their hands dirty, the Greyjoys are the perfect tool for them. The free city, even the lords in..."
He never finished the word.
The weight came first, a sudden, pressing heaviness in the air that every man on deck felt at once, an instinctive wrongness crawling up every spine before a single eye had found its source. Then the sun vanished, swallowed whole; the ship plunged abruptly into shadow as though some vast hand had passed between it and the sky. A heartbeat later the smell arrived, thick and acrid, the unmistakable stench of sulfur rolling down over the deck from somewhere above.
Men scrambled, boots pounding against wood, heads craning back, and above them, breaking free from the cloud bank in a single terrible instant, two enormous shapes hung against the gray sky, wings vast and motionless as they glided, red and pale, patient, watching.
Damon still could not make out the individual faces of the men scrambling below, the height too great yet for that kind of detail, but he did not need faces. He needed only what he could already see plainly enough. No sigil marked a single sail among the twenty ships beneath him. No banner flew from a single mast. And on ship after ship, rising above the deck rails in identical iron silhouettes, sat the massive scorpions. Looking newly made, and big enough to injure his dragon if ridden low enough and by a foolish rider.
Below, the men had gone rigid with terror, some frozen entirely in place, others already scrambling toward the rails as though the open sea itself might offer better odds than what hung in the sky above them.
Damon gave them no time at all to find out.
He reached for that place inside himself that had, across two and a half years, learned to speak to his dragons without words, a single pulse of intent, sharp and absolute, carrying nothing but violence and purpose in equal measure.
Both dragons answered as one.
Caraxes folded his wings first and dropped, a red plummeting mass against the gray sky, Dreamfyre a heartbeat behind him, pale and swift, and the sea below erupted.
Fire bloomed across the fleet in twin colors, Caraxes's flame a furious, roiling orange-red that rolled across three ships at once, catching sail and rigging and deck alike, wood blackening and curling before it had even finished burning, while Dreamfyre's own fire poured out beside it in a paler, almost blue-white torrent, hotter somehow for its color, sweeping across the ships nearest her in a wave that left nothing recognizable behind it. The two flames met and mingled in the air above the fleet, blue and red twisting together in a single, monstrous curtain of heat that turned the gray afternoon briefly, violently bright.
The screams did not last long.
They rose all at once, a chorus of raw, animal terror cut short almost as quickly as it began, swallowed by the roar of flame and the groan of burning timber, by the sudden violent hiss of the sea itself boiling where fire met water along the ships' waterlines. Men who had scrambled for the rails leapt overboard in blind panic, some already burning as they fell, trailing smoke and flame into the water below, only to find the sea offered no true mercy either, the water around the burning fleet churned white with heat and steam, scalding wherever the flame had touched it deeply enough.
The great iron scorpions mounted on each deck never had the chance to be turned, let alone loosed. Several melted where they stood, iron warping and slumping under heat no forge in Westeros had ever been built to match. Others simply vanished beneath collapsing masts and burning rigging, buried under their own ships' dying weight before a single bolt could be nocked against the sky.
Dreamfyre and Caraxes banked together, circling wide before diving again, a second pass sweeping low over what remained, catching the handful of ships that had somehow survived the first onslaught relatively intact, and the ships still bearing men clinging desperately to broken rails or floating debris. Fire rolled across the water a second time, thorough and merciless, leaving nothing behind that still moved beneath its own power.
The two dragons circled the wreckage for a long while after that, ten full minutes by Damon's own quiet count, banking low over the smoking ruin of what had, less than a quarter hour before, been a fleet of twenty ships sailing quietly and unmarked toward the Iron Islands. Nothing stirred below now save drifting smoke and the slow, hissing collapse of blackened timber settling lower into the water; the sea around the wreckage littered with charred debris and worse, nothing living left among any of it.
Satisfied, finally, that the threat had been thoroughly and completely ended, Damon guided Dreamfyre back onto her original course, Caraxes falling into place beside her once more, both dragons resuming the same steady, patient rhythm that had carried them across three hours of open water already.
But something in Damon's expression had changed.
The easy, focused calm he'd carried since leaving Casterly Rock had hardened into something far more serious, violet eyes narrowed slightly against the wind, his jaw set tight beneath it. Someone had built those scorpions specifically to bring down a dragon. Someone had paid an enormous sum to see them delivered, secretly, to Balon Greyjoy's rebellion. Damon was too high to hear the man's words, but his mind told him this was not the first of such shipments, which meant the Ironborn rebellion had more, surely already mounted to their ships.
He didn't know who was helping the Ironborn, but the list of possible suspects was long, from Essos to even the lord of Westeros, mainly the Dornish.
He would learn which, eventually. He always did.
For now, as Dreamfyre's wings carried him steadily onward across the last stretch of open water toward Pyke's waiting cliffs, Damon allowed himself only a single quiet thought, spoken so softly that even the wind roaring past him nearly swallowed the words whole.
"The war has begun."