The Returned and the Lost
Third Day of the Tenth Month 294 AC
Gendry woke on something soft... softer by far than his bed ought to be. Strange, he didn't remember going to sleep. Only... no, that had to be a nightmare.
I must have gotten drunk somehow and fallen into some strange bed. He squeezed his eyes tight and refused to think about it, tried to will it away. Alas, Gendry Waters was no great magician to be able to make his will manifest upon the world.
"Gendry... are you alright? Do you need something... some water maybe?" The voice was soft, but unmistakable, the little princess with her rolling rs and sharp hissing eses. Her eyes were soft as fading twilight.
"Your Highness, no, I..." for a moment the courtesy his master had so struggled to teach him when they had come into the service of the Dragon battles with his worry. Courtesy did not stand a chance. "What happened?"
She sighed. "There was an attack, a firestorm. The Dale is gone, all of it, everyone. I'm sorry...."
For a long moment the boy lay in bed, unable to understand the words, almost like there might be some trick to them, some riddle he had to unlock in order to learn the truth, his mind rebelling at the meaning of them.
All of it, the furnaces and the workshops, the hardening chambers and the alchemical factory, the tea shops and the little bakery on the corner of main street where they sold the best honey and cinnamon pies? It couldn't all just be gone, all that in an instant, as if by some wizard's spell.
Finally, Gendry managed to grind out. "How?" His voice sounded strange in his own ears, not because it was rasping from the smoke he could now dimly recall, nor deeper as he had been hoping it would turn one of these days, but because it sounded so distant, like someone was telling a story in a place far, far away.
"It was agents of the Brazen Throne, the efreeti lords who dwell in the City of Brass." The girl's silver-crowned head tipped slightly, as though inviting him to ask questions and Gendry suddenly realized this wasn't mummery. It wasn't that she wanted something from him, or was waiting for him to gather his wits so he could say something about what had happened before he... died. No, Daenerys Targaryen, Imperial Princess and heir to the Steel Throne, was willing to sit here and answer the questions of a blacksmith's apprentice whose only remarkable quality was being the bastard of a dead, drunken usurper king.
That did not make him feel proud. It did not make him feel happy. It just sent a shiver of fear down his spine. There had to be a reason she was being so kind to him.
"No need, I know what that is," he replied quickly. The memory of the old fire-bearded smith who kept shop not far from Master Mott, his back still marked by whip marks that shone sickly white by day and by night came back to him.
'Never healed quite right, not even with proper magic, but I got away and that's what matters', he said when he caught Gendry looking, and then he had basically drafted the boy to help with his forging and did not speak with him until they were done, but he always paid for the help in good coin.
'Never a bead of sweat unrewarded in my shop...'
"They got you in the end, didn't they, old timer?" Gendry said softly to himself as he got out of the bed. He had a feeling the princess could hear him, but she said nothing.
The silence stretched uneasily between them as the young smith struggled to find the words as a man might struggle to find his footing on a ship in a storm. It was the princess who broke it. "Valeria is fine. I know she told you to stay put, but it did not matter in the end."
A chill of premonition came over him when he heard not the words but the way she said it. "And Master Mott?" Gendry did not doubt he was worth the magic to bring back. More worth it than him for certain.
"He did not return," she replied carefully. "I am sorry, I do not know exactly where he is right now. Divining the souls of the dead is not a sure thing, but I am certain he will find his peace..."
"No, that's..." the boy could feel the corners of his eyes burning, but he did not care. "He would have wanted to live. He said to me that he was going to drink a beer at his old forge once the city was taken and show me around. To laugh at fools and marvel at wonders, he called it."
"Death is not just a curtain you can pass through as you will," she replied gravely. "Sometimes it can be too wearying to return to the world under the sun. I know it's not... fuck it," she cursed under her breath so sharply it shocked Gendry into peering at her more closely. "I am not very good at condolences, but if you need anything, anything at all, keep in mind that you have friends in some really high places."
Gendry knew that would matter eventually, but for now all he wanted to do was return to the bed and go back to not thinking about it. He fell almost at once into an uneasy sleep.
OOC: A bit bittersweet. I thought about rolling for magical awakening, but it just did not fit. It worked better just letting the grief unfold naturally. He will still get that roll, later, the experience was certainly traumatic enough. 
Making the changes now.