"This is bull, this is so freaking bull!" I bemoaned, watching the foreign snowwhite mountain caps beneath me flashing by like pieces on a checker board as I flew further inland.
Underneath my saddle, Balerion growled in response to my frustration. His irritation through our bond threw me for a loop since I wasn't quite used to such an overwhelming amount of emotion coming from my bonded.
At least it snapped me out of my gloom, as I reached past my saddle and brushed my gloved hand against the black scales of my unruly lizard.
"Sorry bud, you're right. There's no point fretting over something that I have no control over." I said, pulling on our bond.
A low thrum reverberated underneath me as I felt what amounted to a draconic version of a scoff. My dragon then sent me mental images of a variety of his prey.
I understood his intention right away and sighed exasperatedly as I sent my agreement for us to hunt later through our bond, although not before making a note to check the surrounding waters for anything that could threaten my dragon, like a kraken and what not.
It might seem paranoid considering the near mythical status of those beasts, as well as Balerion size—being almost as large as two whole carracks.
But when I found myself, as well as my entire ancestral island stranded in whatever fresh hell this world was without so much as a peep, I'd say my paranoia was very much justified.
Hell, if it wasn't for Rhae's early morning flight with Meraxes today, we'd be none the wiser to the disappearance of a whole continent in the name of Westeros.
At least not until part of our merchant fleet set sail for old Harren, and Argilac's contested land (aka the future Crownlands) to trade and to scope out the place for my future endeavors.
Fourteen knows how many ships would have been lost during such a trip considering there was nothing but the open ocean for hundreds of leagues to our west.
For now, to prevent mass panic, I had placed a gag order on our state of affairs with only me and my siblings—minus Orys—in the know.
That wouldn't last long though with both Vhagar, and Balerion taking flight at the same time, Senya bound for the south and north to check for the status of our vassals—should they be even brought with us at all—while I flew east.
This massive landmass, which I was becoming increasingly certain was a continent, was the result of said trip.
You'd think being reborn as baby Aegon the bloody Conqueror was the most bizarre thing to happen to me, but this definitely takes the cake.
Not that I was complaining since there were far worse characters to be reborn into, and being a Dragonlord, as well as a lordling and later a Lord, wasn't that bad if you managed to look past the whole incest affair.
It of course helped a lot that I wasn't the most upstanding person—morally speaking—as well as my sisters being smoking-hot blondes with genuine affection for me, even if Senya's way of displaying it was by smacking me in the yard with her stick.
It was still icky to me, mind you, sleeping with my sisters but I understood the necessity of keeping the Dragons in our line.
Regardless, this whole teleporting thing did throw quite a big wrench in my design for my House's future.
I wasn't going to follow canon of course since Aegon's—or at least the original's—conquest was very much done in haste and lacked the time required for the consolidation of our family's power base.
We'd be ruling a hostile population foreign to our culture. People who would gladly denounce our custom at the smallest sign of our weakness and condemn us in their faith as devils and incestuous spawn.
It was a bit ironic when Westerosi nobles and Kings were just as much inbred as we were with the amount of cousin to cousin, or uncle to niece, or nephew to aunt found throughout their lineage spanning for thousands of years.
Humans in Planetos were just built differently I supposed, considering the amount of eerily beautiful noble ladies, and men—especially within our House—we've managed to produce in spite of the whole banging your family shebang.
I blamed it on some sort dormant blood magic personally, fixing all the genetic imperfections, as well as preserving dominant traits unique to certain houses like black hair for the Durrandons, or blonde and green-eyed for the Lannister, and perhaps most famously being our platinum blonde hair and violet eyes.
Back on topic though, it was folly, what the original me did—not only sparing those the ruling monarch houses of Westeros, but also letting them retain their power, even if I understood the necessity of it.
It would have been a logistical nightmare, managing the seven kingdoms without a pre-existing framework of governance to rely on. But that certainly didn't make his decision to not upset the order of things and his failure to shift the power balance heavily toward our Valyrian vassals any less stupid.
You can't just thrash Kings and Lords with King blood in their line, then expect them all to fall into compliance without even a smidgeon of rebellious thought in their hearts.
The Lords and Kings of Westeros were a prideful sort of people, and beside either the total annihilation of their lines, or the stripping of all their holdings, the latter of which I favored, I simply couldn't see how House Targaryen would ever sit easy ruling Westeros, even if we took all the hostages in the world.
Too much bad blood would need to be spilled in the taking of Westeros after all.
Then there was the matter of kingship… Which fit my House, or the Dragonlords in general about as well as a square peg to a round hole.
Oaths of allegiance and bent knees could only go so far when one rode weapons of mass destruction as well as a knight rode a horse.
A dragon magnified personal might to the extreme with the power it brought to their rider. And despite all the shameless rhetoric I preached about Valyrian's superiority, I knew deep down that Dragonlords were just as corruptible as any men in the face of absolute power.
All it'd take was an ambitious cousin or a slighted brother to kickstart the Dance of Dragons in one iteration or another, regardless of how much my future descendant—Viserys the I—mucked it up when it came to the matter of the succession in canon.
The dragonlore in my family's vault was quite clear on the self-destructive nature of a dragon dogfight.
Unless one dragon outsized the other by a significant margin, or great feats of magic were involved, the risk of all participants as well as their dragons dying in battle was quite high.
It was why dragon battles were considered a last resort even during the peak of the freehold, let alone when we had a scant few dozen of dragons at the peak of our reign in canon.
No, if House Targaryen was to rule at all, we'd need to rule as an oligarchy—similar to those Essosi city states—in which every Dragonlord has a say in the matter of governance regardless of the order of their birth.
Of course the overlords of Westeros would never have stood for it which was why I had never intended to conquer them in the first place, at least not all at once.
No, my goal was to take Westeros piecemeal, starting with the contested land between old Harren, and Argillac or what would later be dubbed as the Crownlands in canon.
It was perfect with me serving as a buffer zone between the Stormland and the Riverland. Neither Argilac nor Harren would be eager to retake the land lest they risk reigniting war between each other, especially when they had the other Kings to worry about.
And with Dragons in store as well as thousands of freed Valyrian's slave I had obtained as spoil for my participation in fending off the Volantis in Essos, I had a solid chance of establishing my desired sovereign state that was also radically different and almost heretical to any other Kingdoms in Westeros.
But then all that went up in smoke with whatever the fuck happened to Dragonstone…
I could only hope the Celtigar, and Velaryon were also brought here with us.
I chuckled internally at the absurdity of everything that was happening much to my bonded interest, before something drew my attention in the distance.
Beyond the horizon, where the seemingly endless mountain range had finally ended was a large lake spanning several leagues with many dark spots dotted along its shore.
Pulling on my mount's rein, I had Balerion approach the lake while slowly ascending up just below the clouds as I fished my Myrish spyglass out of my satchel.
Technically the Myrish called it a far-eye but like hell was I going to use that ridiculous name, plus using such a crass term as spyglass to refer to their most prized invention pissed those uppity cunts off something fierce which I found hilarious.
Through my spyglass, what used to be dark spots in my vision turned out to be a village of about two scores houses sitting south of the lake with a forest to their back while a lone keep sat inconspicuously on the opposite side of the lake on a gentle slope leaning against the mountain.
I found that rather peculiar since what lord would build their keep several miles away from their own smallfolks' settlement—no matter how small said settlement was—or vise versa, until I took a closer look at the keep.
The castle under a cursory scan looked to be abandoned with wild vegetation growing out of numerous cracks in the stones. Its lone wall had numerous holes from the ramparts collapsing onto itself.
Overall, it certainly made my decision to go for the visibly more inhabited village a lot easier.
A/N: Just getting in the groove of things, and this is a reboot so might want to reread it.