The world began in pain.
Pressure, heat, a great crushing weight on all sides — then air, cold and thick with scent. He had known falling once, the sharp rush of wind before a distant ground rose to meet him. This was not that, but something slower. The pain gave way to sound: a woman's cry, high and ragged, and the frantic murmur of other voices, soft and strange.
He had died. That much he remembered. A balcony, a flash of white limbs, and then nothing. But this… this was new. Flesh bound him. Light stabbed his eyes. When he drew breath, the air burned. He screamed without meaning to, and the world rejoiced.
The next days — or weeks, he could not yet measure — passed in a blur of warmth and motion. He learned of touch before sight, of milk and arms and the rhythm of a heart that was not his own. The woman with the golden hair and tired smile called herself "Mother." Her voice was music, weary yet soft, and she carried a scent of salt and lavender that clung to the furs about her bed.
Another voice, deeper, uncertain, often hovered nearby. That was "Father." His hands were heavy, his breath sweet with wine. When he held Maekar, it was with reverence, as though afraid the child might break.
And then there was her.
He could sense her even when they were apart — a faint, steady heat, like the echo of his own blood. When their cradles stood side by side, she would wriggle and coo, reaching blindly until her hand found his. Their hair was the same pale silver; their eyes, pools of violet light. The servants whispered when they passed. The twins of fire, one had said. The king's mirror-children.
He liked the sound of that.
The days were bright, the nights full of strange dreams. Sometimes he remembered flashes of the old life — glass towers, iron chariots that roared without horses, faces that blurred when he tried to recall them. But they mattered little. That man had fallen, and this boy had risen from the ashes.
The first thing he learned in this world was the power of a cry. It brought milk, warmth, and soft hands. The second was the greater truth — that false tears worked just as well. He discovered that early, when the wet-nurse laid him down too soon. He had no hunger, only boredom, yet when he wailed, she came running. He stopped the instant she lifted him, and her laugh was tender, foolish. "Such a clever babe," she murmured.
He smiled against her skin. Yes, he thought dimly. Clever.
In time, he began to watch. The flicker of firelight fascinated him, as did the shifting faces above his cradle. The tall one with the clipped beard — that was Father, Prince Viserys. The older woman who scolded the maids was a septa, though he had yet to learn her name. There were others, all moving with a deference he did not yet understand.
But none so strange as the pair of eggs.
They rested in their small cradles beside him and his sister — twin ovals of stone and scale. One was pale gold streaked with white, the other dark as smoke with veins of purple fire. They pulsed faintly in the heat of the brazier, warm to the touch, alive in a way that unsettled him.
"Dragon eggs," Father had said once, in a voice thick with pride. "From Dreamfyre's last clutch. Rare as rubies."
Mother had smiled. "Then our children will have dragons of their own."
He did not yet understand what that meant. But he could feel something beneath the shell of the darker egg — a hum, deep and steady, like a second heart answering his own. When he touched it, the warmth grew. It soothed him.
His sister's egg hatched first.
It happened one morning when the sea mist still clung to Dragonstone's cliffs. The chamber smelled of salt and smoke, and the hearth-fire burned high against the damp. Maekar had been half asleep, watching the shadows tremble on the ceiling, when a crack split the air — sharp, like stone breaking.
Then another.
He turned his head. The pale-gold egg beside Rhaenyra rocked in its stand. The septa gasped, crying for the wet-nurse, for the prince, for anyone. But Maekar saw before they came: the shell fissuring like dry earth, a glimmer of molten light within.
And then — life.
The creature burst forth in a cloud of steam and hiss, slick wings clinging to its sides. It was small, serpentine, its scales soft as silk, but the eyes… the eyes were flame itself. Rhaenyra shrieked, but not in fear. She reached out, laughing — a sound bright and wild. The little dragon crept onto her chest and curled beneath her chin, smoke rising from its breath.
When their parents arrived, the room became a storm of joy.
Viserys wept openly. "The blood of old Valyria," he whispered, touching the hatchling with trembling fingers. Aemma only smiled, exhaustion softening her features. "She has her companion," she said.
Maekar watched in silence.
His own egg sat unmoving in its cradle, dark and cold.
That night, after the chamber quieted and the fires burned low, he reached for it again. His fingers were small, unsteady, but the moment his skin met the shell, warmth spread through him. He thought of the girl across the room, sleeping with her dragon nestled close. He thought of how easily the others had loved her for it.
And he whispered, without words, to whatever might lie sleeping within.
Not yet.
The hum answered — faint, distant, but real.
He smiled in the darkness.
---
In the weeks that followed, he grew stronger. He learned the faces of his world — the servants who gossiped when they thought him deaf, the guards who bowed to his father, the maester who muttered of omens. He learned that a smile could silence scolding, that a cry could bend attention, that warmth could be bought with mimicry.
His mother called him her quiet one. "Rhaenyra roars," she would say, "but Maekar only watches."
Viserys would chuckle. "Perhaps he thinks too much already."
Perhaps he did.
When the waves crashed against the rocks below Dragonstone, he would imagine falling again — but this time, landing on his feet.
In his heart, he could feel the egg's pulse, faint but steady, like the beating of distant drums.
It would hatch, in time. Everything did.
All it needed was patience.
And patience, he had learned, was the truest form of power.