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Daeron dreams.
When he was three (and this would be his first concrete memory of being, of himself as something separate from warmth and milk and lullabies) he dreamed—a nightmare, truly—of a malformed creature, with withered wings like that of a bat and a face of a man; agonized, and when it screamed, green fire poured from its mouth.
He woke screaming. Screamed until his throat tore raw. They said later he woke half the keep, though he remembers only hands—too many hands—and candlelight shaking on stone.
His nursemaid said he had only had a bad dream.
His mother pressed cool fingers to his forehead and murmured sweet comforts.
No one asked what he saw that had frightened him so.
Later that month, his mother delivered Aerion into the world.
-
When Daeron dreams of the dragons’ return, he is deep in his cups (and this will frighten him most, afterward—that indulgence did not dull the sight as it ought) and pleasantly drowsy in the way only good wine grants him: limbs loose, thoughts softened, the world blurred at its harsher edges.
He had almost thought himself safe that night. Almost thought the visions might pass him by—distracted, perhaps, by stronger vessels than he.
(A foolish hope. They always find him.)
The dream comes gently at first—too gently.
That is often how the worst of them begin.
He sees dragon eggs: luminous things, faintly warm, beautiful in that uncanny Valyrian way. Not so different from the old stone relics he and his brothers were given as children—curiosities more than promises, heirlooms of a glory no one quite expected to see restored.
He does love dragons. That is the tragedy of it.
Not the grotesque fascination Aerion cultivated, nor the political nostalgia his father and uncle entertained, but something softer—almost childish, truth be told. He collected little carvings of them. Traced illustrations in old histories. Once cried quietly after reading of the last dragon’s death (a hatchling, sickly, wings that never unfurled—that detail stayed with him).
So—for good or ill—he does not resist the dream as it draws him onward along its wiry, inevitable path.
He rarely fights them anymore.
(It never helps. It only makes the waking worse.)
The souring comes quickly after.
Heat first. Then the sound—a fine, hairline crack threading through the eggs. One crack, then many. The fragile cusp between miracle and catastrophe.
Fire follows.
In quick succession; crowds cheering, crowds screaming, crowns melting, cities bright as funeral pyres. There is a long, bitter cold, and a terrible shade of blue. He sees death and birth braided together so tightly they are indistinguishable, and across the sky: streaks of green, gold, and shadow moving like living comets.
There is a single, piercing flash of purple eyes before he begins to stir—deep violet, almost black at their center. They seem fixed on him, impossibly direct. The expression within them is difficult to name: disappointment, perhaps. Sorrow certainly. And longing—that most dangerous Targaryen inheritance.
He wakes before dawn, unfortunately sober, terribly cold, and absolutely certain. The chill clings to him longer than it should, as though some part of the dream-fire burned everything except the warmth from his bones.
He lies there awhile, staring into the dimness, and wonders—not for the first time—whether dragons choose their dreamers poorly.
Daeron, after all, has never been much suited to flame.
-
Daeron tells Egg of the dream one night, (wine-loosened because courage rarely comes neat), the boy hiding in his rooms from their brother.
Aerion’s tempers have been particularly inventive of late.
Daeron does not ask what sparked this latest exile.
Egg does not volunteer.
The moment he mentions dragons, Egg nearly springs from his seat; eyes bright in that wholly boyish way only the youngest of his siblings still possess. It catches Daeron off guard—it always does—that flash of uncomplicated wonder.
It reminds him, sharply, of Egg’s age.
(Which in turn reminds him that he himself had already been halfway to a drunk at that age—and he very carefully does not follow that thought any further.)
“Isn’t it wonderful, brother?” Egg exclaims, rocking faintly on his heels, excitement making him restless. “What if it’s my egg that hatches?”
Daeron smiles—or tries to. It feels a little crooked on him.
“I fear it was only a dream, little Egg,” he says, and hears at once how dull, how insufficient it sounds.
“But your dreams always come true, Daeron,” he retorts, and he sounds, disconcertingly, like Aemon when he got that thoughtful, quietly authoritative tone—as though the truth is simply a thing to be observed, not debated.
Daeron does not like that Egg knows this, likes it even less that he believes it; he had dreamed of a raging fire before Egg’s birth, and he does not like that either.
“Well,” he says lightly (too lightly), “if every dream of mine came true, I’d be across the Narrow Sea by now—surrounded by pretty wenches and drinking truly exceptional wine.”
Egg frowns the way he always does when Daeron speaks so: a child’s disapproval edged with something older, something almost protective.
He does not argue, though. Only shrugs—conceding the joke if not the sentiment—and after a moment says:
“Tell me again.”
So Daeron does.
And if he omits certain details—the screaming crowds, the melting crowns, the particular shade of blue that never bodes well—he cannot say whether the mercy is meant for Egg or for himself.
Perhaps both.
-
After Egg slips out, Daeron remains where he is.
He tells himself he is relieved to have spoken. That secrets fester worse than bad vintages. That Egg deserved some honesty, at least.
He drains his cup.
Pours another before he can reconsider.
The flagon glugs softly—an indecorous sound in a prince’s chamber, though Daeron has long since ceased pretending at princely dignity when alone. Wine sloshes near the rim; he steadies it with exaggerated care, as if balance here might translate elsewhere.
It never does.
Sobriety has an unfortunate tendency to sharpen his memories of the dreams. Not immediately—no, the first waking moments are always dull, cotton-headed, deceptively gentle—but as hours pass the details creep back with uncomfortable precision.
Tonight promises to be one of those nights.
He can already feel it: the heat that wasn’t heat, the light that wasn’t light, the terrible certainty that whatever he saw was not metaphor but rehearsal.
A part of him—the boy who collected dragon carvings, who traced their wings in dusty books, who cried over that last frail hatchling—still wants it to be true in the most innocent sense.
But prophecy (he has learned, slowly, resentfully) has very little interest in innocence.
He wonders, not for the first time, why the dreams come to him at all.
Aemon would parse them better. Egg would believe in them better. Even Aerion—gods help them—would wield them better, though likely toward ruin.
Daeron does none of those things.
He drinks. He jokes. He edits the worst parts when speaking aloud. He survives them rather than interpreting them.
A poor vessel for dragonfire, by any sensible measure.
(Perhaps that is precisely why.)
The hearth has burned low. Embers pulse softly—red, gold, occasionally a greenish flicker when sap pockets catch. He watches that longest.
Green fire.
Always green in the worst dreams.
Aerion’s favorite color, too, though Daeron doubts the gods share that particular sense of humor. Or perhaps they do; the gods, historically, have shown a marked appreciation for irony at Targaryen expense.
Daeron rubs a hand over his face, suddenly tired in a way sleep will not remedy.
Egg had looked so hopeful. Not naive exactly—the boy has seen enough of Aerion’s tempers to cure anyone of pure naivety—but hopeful in that stubborn, luminous way that refuses full extinction. As though the future might still be negotiated rather than endured.
Daeron envies that. Fiercely.
Fears for it, too.
Because if dragons do return—when, his mind corrects with quiet cruelty—hope will either harden into greatness or burn out entirely. There is very little middle ground where dragons are concerned.
In the morning, he will half-convince himself the certainty was exaggerated. That the chill in his bones was imagination. That dragons, if they return at all, will choose better dreamers than Daeron the perpetually half-drunk.
It is a comforting fiction.
He intends to keep it as long as possible.
-
At nine, he made the mistake of speaking.
It was breakfast—grey morning, drizzle threading the courtyard, Aerion already restless beside him because he hated damp weather (“It dulls everything,” his brother complained, though Daeron suspected what it dulled most was attention). Their father sat at the head of the table, tense even in peacetime, posture stiff as ironwork.
Daeron said it lightly—he thought lightly.
“I dreamed the sept bell cracked last night.”
There was a pause just long enough for Daeron to realize his mistake.
His mother smiled first—a quick, smoothing gesture, the way one pats rumpled fabric. “Dreams are curious things, darling.”
His father did not smile. He simply looked.
And Aerion laughed.
Laughed in that bright, cutting way he would perfect later—already edged, already searching for weakness.
“Well,” Aerion said, “if it breaks, we’ll know Daeron did it in his sleep.”
More laughter. Courtiers eager. Servants cautious.
Conversation moved on, but Daeron understood something essential in that moment: prophecy unsettles; ridicule soothes.
The bell cracked two days later.
Hairline fracture first—then a clean split after the noon toll. The sound it made (he remembers this vividly) wasn’t loud. Just wrong. A note sliding sideways.
No one mentioned his dream.
That omission frightened him more than open disbelief.
-
By ten, he knew which wines burned least going down.
By twelve, he knew how much produced laughter instead of concern.
By fourteen, he understood the precise slur necessary for adults to stop asking serious questions.
It was almost scholarly, his approach. Controlled and intentional. (It is what he would tell himself—not addiction, not yet, no, strategy.)
And it worked.
The dreams remained—dragons glimpsed behind hills, cities shimmering with impossible heat, faces he would later recognize only after tragedy had already unfolded—but no one asked about them anymore.
He became safe.
Harmless.
The princeling who liked his cups too much.
-
By fifteen, the court had settled on his epithet. Not officially—never officially—but inevitably.
Daeron the Drunken.
He heard it first from a servant who thought him asleep. The words weren’t cruel, exactly. More resigned. Categorizing.
He found, oddly, that he didn’t mind.
A reputation can cage you; but it can also hide you.
And Daeron, increasingly, preferred hiding.
-
Long after Ashford, (after the knight who remembered his vows, after the big dragon fell, after after after—), the dreams continue their cruel cadence.
Daeron continues to be the drunk.
But occasionally—very occasionally—he also dreams of a tall hedge knight laughing, and a stubborn bald boy arguing about honor, and a summer field where nothing prophetic happened at all.
Those dreams he treasured most.
Even if they weren’t true prophecy.
Even if they were only longing.