A Conspiracy of Dragons
Nineteenth Day of the Twelfth Month 292 AC
"I would know of dragons, then," you say. "Of their coming to Westeros, the building of the Dragonpit, their flowering and withering, as well as how I might hatch the egg that I possess and these others you have told me of. Was it a curse upon the Dragonpit, some conspiracy, or simple mischance that saw to their fall?"
"Again you ask for history, before dealing with the future before you," the old sorcerer replies. "And here I thought that it was the privilege of the old to bore their descendants with tales of days long passed." He sounds lighthearted, not something most would associate with the ghastly figure bound and sustained in bone-white roots, but so it seems to you nonetheless.
He speaks on in what must have once been a voice trained to shout commands across a battlefield, now little more than a whisper but somehow no less powerful for it. "Many claim the Dragonpit was cursed for having been built upon the ashes of the Sept of Remembrance. For myself I do not believe it, not only for having felt no malice beneath the broken dome, save perhaps the lingering weight of those who died to Dreamfyre's flame. The Storming of the Dragonpit holds a certain grim humor if you will consider it. Driven by their preacher the mob marched out to avenge Helaena and her children, and it was
her dragon that slew most of them. Even beyond my appreciation of the Seven's capacity for ironic slaughter or lack thereof, however, the supposed cause and effect do not match up. The Dragonpit was built by
Maegor, not Aegon the Third, and if the dragons somehow grew less in that period, well, no one seems to have told the lunatic traitors who used these 'lesser' dragons to bring about the Dance and the near-ruin of the Seven Kingdoms."
"So you think it was a natural thing, a lessening of magic perhaps?" Dany asks.
"It might have been," Bloodraven admits. "But to one of my experience it is impossible not to entertain at least the possibility of conspiracy. Yet if I would have to search for it it would be among the regents of the boy king Aegon the Third or..." he hesitates. There would be very few in that distant age he should have any reason to avoid accusing before you.
"The young king himself," you guess. "The boy who saw his mother devoured by a dragon before his very eyes, who had to rule a land in the shadow of the Dance and its horrors. You think Aegon Dragonbane deserved his title fully."
"I think he would have been too young to be at the head of such a conspiracy," the ancient Sorcerer says. "But he might have guessed later and offered his tacit approval, or simply done nothing as the dragons died." He sighs a soft rattling sound. "As I said this is merely my guess, but one thing I know for certain—the more brutal the war the more grudges it leaves behind. No war in the history of the Seven Kingdoms has been more vicious than the Dance. If the smallfolk could blame 'all dragons' for their ill fate and die in their thousands to 'avenge' themselves, why not the nobles? Why not the king?"
"The dragons were the steel fist of the royal House against the high nobles, but Aegon was raised as much or more by those same high nobles as by his kin," Dany muses. "It fits well enough, though it matters little so late. What thoughts have you on turning fate upon its head?"
"I have never seriously considered the matter since I was very young and dreaming a young man's dreams, but what I managed to gleam then I will share," Brynden Rivers replies. "For the egg you recovered from the Lannisters I would say give it to the girl to hold at all times, particularly when she is practicing sorcery. Teach her to conjure fire and have her cast it upon it each day at sunset, for that is when dragon mothers often returned from the hunt."
"And for the eggs of stone?" you ask.
"For that, one should remember that we live in an age of marvels... What is stone may yet be flesh to the sorcerer's will." His staring red eye fixes upon a stone the size of a large dog tumbled near the far wall of the cave. The spell he works then is no petty cantrip, but one as potent or more so than any you have ever worked. "From stone, life!" he
commands, and so where there had before been a stone there is now a lump of reddish meat.
"You think the stone dragons are petrified, as though touched by a gorgon's breath?" you ask, wondering why the notion never came to you. Perhaps you had simply been to fixated on the transformation from flesh to stone being weapon.
"It would seem a marvelous protection against the fading of magic, would it not?" Bloodraven says. "Once flesh has been transmuted one is neither living nor dead, not dependent on constant magic to endure, and of course as hard to damage as stone. Should that stone also be enveloped in the hard shell of dragon eggs, I would not be surprised if an unborn dragon could endure thus millennia."
"But who then would undo the magic?" Ser Richard asks, ever one to see flaws in wild flights of fancy.
"Dragons were not always mere beasts," Dany says grimly, though there is triumph lurking in her eyes.
What do you do next?
[] Ask more questions
-[] Write in
[] Speak with the Children of the Forest again
-[] Write in
[] Resurrect Rhaella
OOC: I really was a little surprised no one considered Stone to Flesh when speaking of stone dragon eggs.
