The battlements of the Red Keep were one of Rhaenyra's few remaining sanctuaries. Up here, the wind from Blackwater Bay was a clean, sharp thing, whipping her silver hair across her face and carrying away the suffocating scent of the court below. She watched a trader's cog struggle against the tide, its sail a tiny brown speck on the vast grey water.
"They look at me and see a problem to be managed." The words left her before she'd intended them to, a bitter whisper carried on the wind.
"No, Princess."
Harry's voice was as calm and steady as the stone beneath her feet. He had a habit of appearing in these quiet places, his presence never startling, almost as if he were a natural part of the solitude she sought.
"They see a symbol," he continued, standing a respectful distance away, his gaze also on the bay. "And symbols are simple. They are placeholders for ideas. A crown for power, a dragon for fear. You… you are a symbol for change. And men like your father's Hand do not like change. It is not you they fear. It is the future they cannot control."
He said it so plainly, with such unnerving certainty. He dissected the men she had known her whole life—their ambitions, their fears—with the detached precision of a maester examining a cadaver. He never traded in the whispers and rumors that fueled the court; he dealt only in the cold, clear logic of motive. For the first time, she felt like someone was handing her a map to the viper pit she lived in.
She found herself seeking out these conversations, these moments of quiet clarity. He would listen, truly listen, as she spoke of her father's suffocating grief or her uncle Daemon's terrifying, possessive ambition. He never judged, never offered easy advice. He simply provided a space for her to be a daughter, not just an heir.
The gifts were just as quiet, just as unnerving. One evening, she returned to her chambers to find a single, impossible flower resting on her table. Its petals were the colour of a midnight sky, and as she watched, they slowly unfurled, releasing a soft, silvery light and a scent of night-blooming jasmine and cool stone. There was no note. There didn't need to be. It was a piece of his enigma, a reminder of the strange, magic-touched world he came from, and it fascinated her more than any jewel.
Far to the north, under a sky just as clear, Aemma watched her son take his first stumbling steps on a lawn of impossibly green grass. Baelon, his hair a shock of silver-gold, giggled as Sirius, in his great black dog form, nudged him gently with his nose. A peace settled in her chest, a warmth she had never known in the Red Keep. This was real. This was safe.
Her gaze, as it often did, drifted to the smoking peak of the island's volcano. A new sound echoed across the citadel, not the sharp blast of a warning, but a series of deep, resonant horn calls from the port city. A sound of reverence.
Right on cue, a colossal shape launched itself from the caldera, soaring into the sky. Aemma had seen the beast many times now, but always at a distance. Today, it circled lower, its shadow a vast, moving eclipse over the citadel. She knew the legends. She had grown up playing beneath the skull of the first Balerion, its empty sockets a testament to a bygone age. That Balerion, like every dragon she had ever known, was a wyrm. A bipedal beast of immense power, with two legs and two wings.
The creature that soared before her was different.
It was built like a catastrophe, a force of nature given form. Four massive, powerful legs were tucked beneath its continent-spanning wings, each tipped with obsidian claws the size of shortswords. This was not a wyvern. This was not the creature from the history books. This was the dragon from the oldest myths, from the age before Valyria, a true dragon made terrifyingly real. It moved not with an animal's grace, but with a terrifying, regal intelligence, its molten gold eyes sweeping over the domain it now commanded.
He didn't just resurrect a legend, she thought with a chill that had nothing to do with the northern air. He perfected it. He looked at the legacy of my House and decided it wasn't good enough.
The sun was setting over King's Landing, painting the sky in shades of bruised purple and orange.
"What is it you truly want, Lord Potter?" Rhaenyra asked, the question she'd been holding back for weeks. "Everyone at court wants something. A title, a marriage, a favour. You ask for nothing."
Harry turned to her, and the fading light softened the intensity in his eyes. "Power is not the crown, Princess. It's not the throne everyone is scrabbling for. Real power… it is the ability to build a world where the people you love can be safe. Truly safe. A world like that," he said, his voice dropping to a near whisper, "is worth any price."
Rhaenyra looked at him, at this strange, quiet man from the edge of the world. He spoke of power not as a thing to be won, but as a thing to be built. In a court filled with grasping hands and whispering schemers, he was a rock of quiet, immovable certainty.
She didn't know what game he was playing, what his ultimate ambition was. But in that moment, watching the sun bleed out over her troubled kingdom, she knew with a conviction that startled her, that she wanted to be on his side when it was over.