Chapter 16: A Table for Two
The sky above the Gods Eye was a canvas of bruised purple and blood orange as the sun bled out along the horizon. Two specks of black and green resolved into the forms of dragons, circling each other in a silent, predatory ballet. Below, on the shores near Harrenhal, thousands of men—riverlords, knights, squires, and men-at-arms—watched with bated breath, their individual squabbles and fears momentarily forgotten, united as an audience to the end of an age.
Aboard Vhagar, Prince Aemond Targaryen felt a purity of purpose he had never known. The world had resolved itself into this single, perfect moment. All the grief, all the rage, all the frustrating games of shadow and whispers had led to this: a simple contest of wills between two dragons and two princes. He spurred Vhagar closer, the wind whipping at his eyepatch.
"Uncle!" he roared, his voice carrying across the water, sharp and clear. "You came! I confess I had wondered if the beast you serve had lost its nerve and ordered its pawn to stand down!"
Daemon, astride the lean, vicious form of Caraxes, let out a short, barking laugh. The sound was genuine, free of the tension that had plagued him for weeks. He was no longer a player, merely a piece, and in that knowledge, he had found a strange and terrible freedom. "I serve no beast, nephew. Unlike you, who seems to serve only grief and madness." He drew Dark Sister, the Valyrian steel blade shimmering in the dying light. "I came to rid the world of a rabid dog before he bites his own tail off in his madness."
"You are the madness that has infected this kingdom!" Aemond bellowed, wheeling Vhagar around to face him. "You and your whore of a wife! But your reign of shadows is over. Today, I kill you, I kill your worm, and I send a message to your dark master that we are not so easily broken!"
"So many words," Daemon sighed with theatrical boredom. "Have you come to talk me to death, or to fight?"
With that, he spurred Caraxes into a dive. The battle was joined.
It was a contest of diametric opposites. Vhagar was a fortress, a flying mountain of ancient scale and indomitable strength. Her movements were ponderous, but her power was absolute. She opened her great maw and a river of green-gold fire, wide as a street in King's Landing, poured forth, seeking to engulf the smaller dragon.
But Caraxes was a sword, a living blade of vicious speed and agility. He twisted in mid-air, the great wave of fire passing harmlessly below him, and came up under Vhagar's immense belly, snapping and tearing with his serrated teeth. Vhagar roared in fury and pain, her hide thick but not impervious to the persistent, targeted attacks of her smaller, faster rival.
Aemond was a skilled warrior, guiding his ancient mount with practiced hands, trying to catch the nimble red dragon in a blast of flame or a swipe of her colossal claws. But Daemon was a master, a veteran of a dozen battles, his bond with Caraxes so complete they moved as one being. He anticipated, he dodged, he goaded. He was a gadfly stinging a great bull, darting in to draw blood and dancing away before the horns could find him.
On the shore, the assembled men watched in awed silence.
"By the gods," Lord Blackwood murmured to the knight beside him. "The Blood Wyrm… he is magnificent."
"But the size of her," Lord Bracken countered, unable to tear his eyes from the sky. "One clean hit. That's all it would take. One mistake."
The duel raged across the sky, a spectacle of fire and blood against the twilight. Caraxes was wounded, a deep gash on his wing leaking smoke and blood. Vhagar was bleeding from a score of smaller wounds, her rage growing with every failed attack. Aemond, frustrated, pushed his mount harder, forcing her into a steep climb, hoping to gain the advantage of height.
Daemon saw his opening. It was not a tactical opening for Caraxes. It was a personal one. An opening for a prince of Old Valyria to write his own ending to the song.
"Now, my friend," he whispered to his mount. "For the feast."
He urged Caraxes forward, not dodging, but meeting Vhagar's charge head-on. The two dragons collided with a sound like the world cracking in two. Jaws locked, claws tore, and the two great beasts, one ancient and vast, one vicious and serpentine, began to fall from the sky, locked in a mortal embrace. They tumbled through the air, a great, tangled knot of scales and fury, plummeting towards the placid grey surface of the Gods Eye.
The men on the shore cried out in horror and amazement. This was the end. Mutual, absolute destruction.
But it was in that fall that Daemon Targaryen made his final, legendary move. As the dragons fell, locked together, he stood up in his saddle. With the grace of a dancer and the suicidal pride of his ancestors, he took one great leap through the open air, from the back of his own dragon to the back of his foe's.
Aemond looked up from his saddle, his single eye widening in disbelief as his uncle landed neatly on Vhagar's great, green back, Dark Sister held high. He had no time to react. He had prepared for a battle of dragons, not a boarding action in mid-air.
"Nephew!" Daemon roared over the shriek of the wind and the death cries of their mounts. "I believe you owe me an eye!"
With his final breath, he plunged the Valyrian steel sword down with all his might. Dark Sister, the blade of queens and conquerors, found its home, sinking to the hilt through Aemond's empty eye socket and into his brain. The last Prince Regent of the Greens died instantly, a look of pure shock on his face, chained to the saddle of his dying god.
A moment later, the two dragons, still locked together, hit the water. The impact was apocalyptic. A plume of water and steam erupted hundreds of feet into the air, and a wave, a miniature tsunami, radiated outwards, crashing against the shores of the lake. The great duel was over.
And deep beneath the surface, the feast began.
Krosis-Krif did not see the impact; he was the impact. The moment the two dragons died, their life forces, intertwined with those of their royal riders, detonated in a silent, psychic explosion of unimaginable power. It was a star going supernova in his soul.
He opened his metaphysical mouth and inhaled.
The rage of Aemond, a pure, cold, obsessive hatred, was the first flavor. It was sharp and potent, a distilled essence of vengeance that Krosis-Krif absorbed and cataloged. With it came Aemond's memories: his bitter childhood in the shadow of his brother, the loss of his eye, the claiming of Vhagar, the taste of his first kill above Storm's End, the maddening frustration of hunting a ghost.
Then came the pride of Daemon, a complex, intoxicating vintage of arrogance, love, and a poet's soul wrapped around a killer's heart. He felt Daemon's fierce love for Rhaenyra, his complicated bond with his brother Viserys, his mastery of war, his secret pact with the being that was now consuming him. He absorbed Daemon's cunning, his charisma, his knowledge of every secret passage and hidden affair in King's Landing.
And then came the dragons. Oh, the dragons.
Vhagar's essence was like swallowing a piece of history. A hundred years of battle, the memories of Visenya Targaryen, Baelon the Brave, Laena Velaryon, and finally Aemond. The burning of the Dornish fleet, the Field of Fire, the weight of ages, the weariness of being the last of her kind. Her power was immense, a vast reservoir of ancient fire that flooded into Krosis-Krif, reinforcing his own.
Caraxes was different. His was a wild, vicious energy, the spirit of the Blood Wyrm. It was the joy of the hunt, the thrill of speed, the furious, indomitable spirit of a creature born for battle. His fire was hotter, more focused, and Krosis-Krif integrated it, refining his own plasma breath into something even more potent.
The combined energy of these four beings—two of the most powerful princes and two of the most formidable dragons of their age—was a power source beyond all measure. Krosis-Krif felt his very being undergoing a fundamental change. It was not just about getting bigger or stronger. His consciousness was expanding. He was not just a reincarnated human in a dragon's body anymore. The memories of Rhaenys, Daemon, and Aemond swirled within him, not as distinct personalities, but as absorbed data sets, libraries of experience he now possessed. He was becoming a living repository of the entire Targaryen legacy, its greatness and its madness, its loves and its hatreds.
His scales hardened, shifting from mere obsidian to something that resembled the star-flecked void of the vision he had sent Daemon. A new, internal light, not just gold, but shot through with streaks of Vhagar's bronze-green and Caraxes's blood-red, began to glow between his plates. He had not just eaten a meal. He had devoured a dynasty.
On the shore of the Gods Eye, the silence was absolute. The great wave had receded. The steam had dissipated. The two greatest dragons in the world were gone. The two most dangerous princes were gone.
"They… they killed each other," Lord Blackwood finally stammered, his voice trembling with awe.
"Who won?" asked his squire, a boy of fifteen.
Lord Bracken, for once not arguing with his rival, simply shook his head. "Does it matter? They're gone." He looked around at the other lords. "What happens now?"
No one had an answer. The great duel that was meant to decide the war had created only a void.
The raven that reached Dragonstone was slow, its message terse, written by a terrified scribe at Harrenhal. "They have fallen. Both of them. Into the lake. They did not resurface."
Rhaenyra Targaryen received the news in the Chamber of the Painted Table. Jacaerys stood beside her, along with Lord Corlys. She read the scroll, her face impassive. She looked up, her violet eyes seeming to see something far beyond the walls of her castle.
"He won," she said, her voice a hollow whisper. "My husband… he did it. Aemond is dead. Vhagar is gone."
Jacaerys let out a cry of triumph. "Victory! The Greens have nothing left! We can take the city tomorrow!"
But Lord Corlys did not celebrate. He looked at his queen, at the cost of this victory written in the deadness of her eyes. He looked at the map, at the great space where Vhagar and Caraxes had once been pieces, and he felt a profound, chilling emptiness.
"He paid the price for it, my Queen," the Sea Snake said, his voice heavy with a truth no one else seemed ready to accept. "As did we all. The two most powerful dragons left in this world are now at the bottom of a lake." He shook his head, his gaze sweeping over the council. "This is not a victory. It is a void. And I have lived long enough to know that a void is always filled by something far worse than what came before it."
The Queen did not seem to hear him. She was lost in her own private grief, the victor in a war she was no longer sure she understood. And in the silent depths of the Gods Eye, the thing that had truly won the day continued its silent, transformative feast, growing stronger, growing smarter, and preparing for the final act of a play in which all the other actors had just been swept from the stage.