Chapter Text
When she requested passage upon the merchant’s vessel they had looked upon her with distrusting bemused gazes. Traders carrying grain to a war torn Westeros where grain was worth its weight in gold was what they said they were. She did not believe them, knew them to be smugglers of less than savory contraband, but she did not care.
They had asked her what purpose had a red priestess of the temple of R’hllor in Volantis to go to the dreary sunset lands in the West. They would not welcome her faith there they warned her. There was only war and bloodshed there.
A bloodthirsty queen who fed her subjects to her dragons. A queen who burned her subjects with wildfire. A half wolf bastard king in the North. Armies of savages and knights who claimed honor and yet would harm children.
They warned her.
She did not care for their warnings. She doubled the gold she offered and did not answer their questions and they ceased asking as coin smoothed over any misgivings.
She spent the following dreary weeks in the small cabin they had provided her. Waiting.
For this ship would never make it to Westeros. She had seen it in the flames.
She had seen much.
She had watched the twisting shapes as in the light of R’hllor all truth was revealed. She had seen the Wolf bow to the Dragon. She had seen the Dragon fall to the Night and she had seen the Night fall to Death. She had seen the Kraken’s twisting limbs drag a Dragon into the sea before the Kraken was brought low to a Lion. Then the Lions were crushed beneath the Dragon. And then Dragon killed Dragon.
The crackling flames she had observed in her temple sounded like a cacophony of screams. Terror and pain. Monsters rose and fell in the flames.
A Wolf with a pelt flickering with hundreds of scars rose before the North and with a long howl of anguish and victory claimed the North as hers. A broken Dragon fled so far from the broken crown it vanished in the Snow. And far in the West a dark three eyed raven leered at her with knowing eyes daring her to try to usurp it. A false god the raven was.
She felt her Lord’s rage.
What was his had been stolen. Usurped. This was a land that belonged under his fire kissed children’s dominion. They had fought and bled for it.
He had given much. His power to bring a dragon who would rather be a broken wolf back. His power to bring three children of fire into the world. His power to stop the dead and the dark.
And they shunned him. Clung to their false gods. Killed his chosen.
R’hllor was the one true god.
And it was she who would raise the one who would prove it. Who would spread the word.
She had seen it. Her task. Her mission. Her purpose .
Go.
The flames whispered to her. Sang to her.
Find my chosen bride. Give to her my gift so that the world shall be mine. Through Fire and Blood.
And Kinvara obeyed.
She rose to her feet, shoving away the nausea which had crept upon her and made the past weeks a miserable trial. She suffered it gladly though. The seasickness and the uncomfortableness. The poor food and the ache in her bones from the poor dwellings. The leers of the sailors whose eyes were almost always fixed on her bosom.
It ended now.
“Dragon!” The terrified shout heralded her own arrival on the deck.
Like all on the ship her own eyes looked up. Far ahead, still near indecipherable in shape to that of a dark bird a shadow approached soaring over the sparkling blue sea on measured wingbeats.
The man who had identified the dragon had better eyes than her and yet it did not matter. For in a mere matter of seconds the small form grew larger, nearer.
A mere silhouette against the sun turned from little more than a speck into a quickly approaching behemoth.
“What do we do?” Another screamed.
Panic and fear rippled like the plague among the people on the ship. She alone smiled at the dragon’s approach.
He had come. Just as she had seen it.
Without hesitation she crossed the deck to stand near the railing at the side of the ship.
Around her the crew panicked. Dread suffusing the air. After all this ship was from Volantis, a city of slavers, and there was only one person in the entire world to whom the Black Dragon listened and she was not known to be kind to her enemies.
And Volantis was her enemy.
Perhaps if Daenerys Targayen lived the men’s fate might be different Kinvara mused. For the Dragon Queen she knew would not attack a ship without provocation, she knew restraint when it mattered and would not be eager to start a war with Volantis. It did not matter in the end. Daenerys Targaryen was dead.
Her enemies did not yet know that. It was not the Dragon Queen’s judgment that they would face but her son’s.
And Kinvara already knew the choices that both the men aboard this ship and the dragon would make.
She did not know the names of the men around her. They did not matter.
Only the dragon and the precious fragile broken body the men did not know the dragon carried were important.
It was not her place to change the outcome of this moment nor did she have any intention to do so. Her Lord had forbidden it.
The dragon slowed as it approached. High above it looked down upon them with crimson eyes that burned .
Kinvara felt the moment the black dragon saw her. She felt it in every inch of her as heat seemed to engulf her and her heart raced in her chest.
High above the ship the dragon stopped.
Massive black wings beat in the air to stay in place and the ship was engulfed in the dragon’s shadow.
Kinvara wrinkled her nose at the unmistakable smell of piss.
Men whimpered and screamed in fear. A few muttered prayers to their gods. Kinvara heard whispers to the gods of Ghis, to the gods of Westeros and even one man to R’hllor. None of the gods would save them today.
It was one youth who incurred the dragon’s wrath. One misguided attempt at bravery. It doomed them all.
It was a fishing spear thrown by the hand of a sailor. It did not go far. Nowhere near the massive dark beast that hovered above them and yet the dark beast roared with anger, understanding the intention behind the man’s ill thought attack.
Both the dragon’s brothers had been stolen by weapons that had looked too alike to the one the sailor had cast. The boy had tried to attack. He would receive no mercy from the dragon.
Kinvara felt the familiar warmth of her Lord suffuse her, guide her, his presence an order and a caress.
She obeyed without hesitation. Her gaze fell from the dragon to the dark heaving sea below. There was no doubt as she leaned forward and over the railing.
The Narrow Sea embraced her in its terrible icy gasp. Unwittingly she gasped at the cold and then gagged and coughed against the water.
The water at her back felt warm but she did not dare approach it. Did not dare look up or or back. She knew the heat from behind her came from the scorching dragonfire which now obliterated the ship.
Against seizing muscles that struggled to obey her she fought the water to push further away from the death behind her. Beneath the water surface it was calm but she knew that above there would be the sound of dying screams, snapping wood, and the roars of a dragon.
Her chest felt tight, her lungs protesting, and here in the dark and the cold she felt alone. Bereft of her god’s grace.
And yet this was his will.
Even as the water dragged her down weighted as she was by her crimson High Priestess attire.
Black spots danced before her gaze and the world seemed to be growing darker.
She felt no fear.
Even as the water around her swirled, shifted, and made way for an obsidian taloned shadow which wrapped around her snatched her away from the cold.
Trembling, coughing, and gasping for breath Kinvara pressed herself into the warm, almost burning midnight scales of the dragon.
She blinked looking between a small crack formed by two talons sharper than any weapon except perhaps Valyrian steel and watched as below her the sea fell away. In the distance, already so small was a plume of smoke that hid the scorched remains of the ship she had been on for the past weeks. Except for the whistle of the wind the world was silent.
With a soft exhalation as her breath returned she began to whisper her thankful prayers to her god. Yet even as she spoke the words her eyes drooped with exhaustion from her struggles against the cold.
She drifted asleep slowly still mumbling her prayers, uncomfortable against the hard hot scales and yet uncaring knowing there were days more of flying before the dragon would reach his destination. All she could do now was wait until the dragon arrived at its destination and she fulfilled her task.
There was a beauty to the world she glimpsed from her dark cage she lived in, trapped as she was by the dragon’s talons which held her firmly.
She knew few ever got to see the sights she did. The world was so different from her vantage in the sky. How many could say they had flown?
The water of the sea was a glittering blue jewel of hundreds of colors. The ships they passed were little more than insignificant specks against its vastness. The grasslands of the great grass sea almost appeared like the ocean, a great bright green and yellow field with seemingly no end. The city of Myr with its glittering glass no longer seemed so great.
However, as the dragon flew above the city Kinvara could swear she heard the hopeful shouts of Mhysa! As they begged for salvation from one they did not know could not hear them, cold and still in death as she was ensconced in the safety of the dragon’s other foot.
This was Kinvara’s mission.
To guide their savior back to this twisted painful world. Daenerys should have - would - save these people. Free them as she had those of Slaver’s Bay. She would usher in a new world.
Kinvara believed this. She knew this was not the end for Daenerys Targaryen. She had seen it in the flames. She had seen the Dragon Queen open her eyes once more, reborn in ash and flame.
After the Dragon Queen rose Kinvara had seen…she had seen…nothing.
Her Lord had yet to reveal his plans past the Queen’s resurrection to Kinvara.
It was night when the dragon arrived at its destination. Two and a half days after it had snatched her from the cold ocean and near a week since the dagger had been buried in Daenerys’s chest.
Kinvara had little warning beyond the realization the ground was getting nearer. She hadn’t quite noticed the descent in the dark.
One moment she was merely leaning against the dark scaled flesh and the next she was falling. The dragon had slowed significantly since it had grasped her days ago but she had assumed the slowness due to exhaustion.
It was not exhaustion. Or not entirely. They had arrived.
Her fall was brief only a few feet for the dragon was hovering over the gently waving grass of the dothraki’s great grass sea. She landed upon numb uncooperative limbs that refused to obey her stiff as they were from being immobile for so long.
The dragon was hardly gentle in releasing her.
All that gentleness however was reserved for the other it held in its grasp.
With his leg that had held Kinvara now free the dragon settled heavily and somewhat awkwardly on it before carefully, with heart wrenching tenderness, placing its mother’s corpse in the grass beside it.
It took some time for Kinvara’s limbs to recover and for her to rise unsteadily, the world around her wavered, and she still felt as though she were flying. The dragon watched her impatiently all the while as she stumbled around awkwardly with far less coordination than usual.
Under the light of a bright moon and stars she built a pyre. She did not quite know why she built it, or what purpose it would serve for the Dragon Queen would not burn and yet she had seen they pyre in the flame and so she built it.
She built it upon the yellow sand glancing curiously at the charred remains from long ago of another pyre that had been burned in this same place.
Her work was completed soon after.
Cautiously, slowly, she approached the Queen’s body under the dragon’s watchful gaze.
She inhaled sharply at the sight before her.
Death had not been kind to the Queen’s body. It had already begun to decompose and bloated from the days since the heart had stopped beating. There was a red tinged foam that seeped from the Queen’s mouth and nose. The Queen’s eyes were closed.
She cleaned the body as best she could. Removing the glittering bloody blade. Smoothing out wrinkled clothes. Brushing windswept hair and then braiding it slowly.
Chanting softly, Kinvara began to speak R’hllor’s words. Words turned to song as she beseech her Lord to grant his gift to the fallen Queen.
At some point she noticed the dragon beside her was humming, the sound deep and rumbling and strangely in tune to her words. She didn’t think the dragon knew the words and yet he seemed to understand the intent.
The sky was just beginning to brighten when she stepped away from the pyre.
The world seemed to hold its breath as the black dragon moved forwards. It nudged the still form of its mother and then reared up, flaring massive wings, and opening a glowing jaw.
She held her breath as the dragon’s black flames consumed the corpse with a great crackling sound and a wave of heat that even standing far away made her skin blister and eyes water.
Before her eyes the sand turned to dark glass around a body that refused to burn. A great ring of glass that gleamed like the night sky expanded around the fallen queen and dragon. It looked like a twisted altar with golden sand flying away from the gale the heat and fierceness of the dragon’s breath stirred up. Like a thousand fleeing figures they tried to escape the flame before they were consumed leaving only sharp spikes reaching outwards in their place.
In the fire she saw death.
She heard death in the whistling of the wind that sounded like millions of screams.
More sand whipped past her, cutting her exposed skin, her hands, her face with a thousand small blades.
She had seen life in the fire and yet all there was before her was death.
The Dragon Queen did not rise.
She had seen it.
She had seen it.
And yet…
Drogon’s flames died out. The great beast was unable to keep unleashing his fury, rage, and pain in his flames.
The black and crimson dragon fell forwards, his wings drooping and head lowering nudging at his mother once more.
She did not move.
The dragon roared. Grief and fresh fury. The hope of a moment ago snuffed out once more.
Kinvara wished to cry.
The stinging pain of her flesh was distant to the great sense of failure which consumed her. She did not understand. She had seen the Dragon Queen rise in her flames. It was her mission given to her by the Lord of Light. She had performed the rites. She had looked into the flames. So why now was R’hllor denying his light?
Why was he not aiding her? Why was he not bringing his chosen child back to this world?
Had she seen wrong? Had she misinterpreted the flames?
For a long time and a brief eternity the red priestess and the dragon waited. Nothing happened.
The calm was pierced by a low growl and her gaze lifted from the still form of the pale Silver Queen to fix upon crimson eyes which looked upon her in building fury.
She could not blame the child for his anger. He had seen in her hope and salvation and she had failed. Daenerys Targaryan remained dead.
Why?
Why?
Why?
She had seen Daenerys Targaryen rise. She had seen it in the flames!
And yet she had also seen darkness.
She had seen death .
Realization gripped her.
Instead of balking from the dragon’s mounting anger she approached.
“Valar Morghulis” she whispered.
The dragon heard her and her words snuffed out its rage.
She moved forwards to stand before the still form of the Queen.
The dragon looked down upon her crimson eyes holding a strange glowing light, an understanding. A silent thanks.
The taloned tip of a dark wing brushed gently against her neck and Kinvara shivered as she looked up into the dragon’s gaze.
Beautiful.
A magnificent monster.
Kinvara smiled. She could ask for no greater death or purpose than this.
“ Dracarys ” she whispered to the creature above her. To fire made flesh. To fire that would destroy her flesh and return her to R’hllor’s embrace.
The monster and her savior rose once more and she saw the glow deep within the creature’s throat as its jaws opened wide.
She turned from her death to look instead to the hope for life. Her fingers dipped into the Silver Queen’s hair and she lowered herself down to kneel before the dragon as her warm, alive, lips brushed softly against the cold dead lips of the Dragon Queen.
She released her last breath.
The fire swept over her. She felt no pain.
But as her thoughts fled her body she heard a soft gasp and saw a glimpse of vivid violet.
Surrounded by ashes and sand with the sound of dragon song to herald her return the Dragon Queen opened her eyes.