“We will want a place near water,” the deep, even voice echoed, from somewhere out beyond the treeline, calling to Danae. “Water, shelter, wood for a fire, and enough of a vantage point that we won’t be taken unaware. Can you remember all of that?”

The silence of the forest stretched on after the voice died, and the only sound she could hear after that was the crackling of leaves beneath her boots. She inched forward through the trees, her eyes in search of the familiar voice.

Nothing stood before her but a dark, empty forest. Any light from the stars or the crescent moon were lost in the thick canopy. The common cadence of insects and owls disappeared the further she went, leaving her enveloped in a world of deafening silence.

“Repeat it to me, Danae.”

She turned sharply to the left, in the direction of the speaker, and pushed away the crooked branch of a sapling growing directly in her path.

A familiar, low hum rang in her ears, rising suddenly to match the beating of her pulse in her throat.

Orange light flickered in the distance, and a child’s voice answered the speaker.

“Water, wood, shelter…”

She was running now, through the brambles and branches, taking little notice of the thorns that tore into her clothing. They cut into her body as she ran.

The light in the distance flickered through the treeline.

“Again,” the man’s voice was amplified loudly over the humming in her ears. “This is vital. There will come a day when I cannot be with you-”

”Father!”

The light disappeared, and the last echoes of his voice faded into the trees.

“Father!” Danae cried again, cupping her now bloody hands to her mouth and shouting into the void. “Where are you? It’s me!”

The forest swallowed her words whole, and in the darkness the quiet took command once more.

Danae looked around her frantically for any sign of the orange campfire, though she found nothing but shadows.

She closed her eyes then, and choked out a sob.

In answer to her cry, the forest came to life with the screams of its inhabitants. Her skin was bathed in a warm light, and when she opened her eyes she found the trees alight with the crackling of gold and white flames, rising in columns to surround her. She allowed the flames to engulf her, licking at her skin, cleansing her, devouring her whole while the world around her crumbled to ashes.

Danae awoke with a start on the side of the Mander, somewhere west of Cockleswhent, with the sun on her face and her toes dipping into the swollen banks of the river. Her clothing was stripped from her skin and crumpled in a wrinkled pile beneath her while she slept. More than one bur from the grassy shore was tangled in her hair.

She pulled herself up into a sitting position and surveyed the scene around her. The sky was cloudless, the Mander overflowing, yet the usual sounds of the forest were silent. She could hear no cicadas buzzing, no birds chirping in and out of trees, and no rustling from between the bushes as tiny animals searched for their mates.

The only sound to reach her ears, besides the rhythmic trickling of the river, was the occasional clap of thunder fading in the distance.

The clothing beneath her smelled of sweat, and she stood from the silty shore, thinking she might scrub them later. For now all she wanted to do was wash the dirt and grime from her skin, and with her stripped smallclothes now floating halfway in the shallows, she let her feet sink into the mud as she waded naked into the cool river.

Tiny silver fish darted away from her steps, and a turtle was quick to duck its head back beneath the safety of the waves. The water was cold against her calves, and then her knees, and she inhaled deeply but continued on when the coolness brushed against her inner thighs. Soon she was submerged up to her waist but the river went no deeper.

Danae cupped her hands beneath the water and lifted some to her shoulders, and her chest, and her neck, letting it run through her hair and down her back. Her long hair grew heavy as she drenched it in the water of the Mander, and she gathered it all to one side and draped it over her breast while she ran a hand along the dip in her collarbone.

The sound of movement on the shore brought a halt to her bathing, and Danae instinctively searched for her garments to cover herself, only to find them still crumpled in a pile on the beach.

She searched around her for the source of the noise, but saw nothing except for the dappled shadows and the trunks of closely neighboring trees and flowering bushes drowned by the flooded Mander.

Danae turned back to the river and knelt in the stream to bring a handful of water to her breasts next, letting the coolness of the water run across skin that felt like fire. The forest seemed to quiet once more, and she drenched her hair again before splashing water onto her face.

The tall bushes rustled again with movement, and she froze, a shiver running down the length of her spine. The skies above her were clear, the trees silent, the earth quiet with an eerie stillness, and yet the sound of footsteps grew closer and closer in the bushes, creeping to the edge of the shoreline.

A tanned face appeared, peeking out through green leaves.

“Show yourself!” Danae shouted, taking a step back among the smooth, slick stones of the river.

A man appeared, not much older than she was, with a head of unkempt dark curls and a beard lightened by the sun. His chest was bare of any clothing, revealing a field of unruly matted hair and skin tanned from hours spent in the fields.

“Who are you?” Danae snapped, taking yet another step backwards and covering her naked breasts instinctively with her hands.

“A shepherd,” the man answered, crossing the shoreline eagerly. “Better question is, m’lady, who are you?”

Danae felt her pulse racing, and the hum in her ears grew to an almost deafening loudness. She took another instinctive step back as the man pulled his muddy trousers from his frame and stepped naked into the water, his eyes never leaving her body.

“You alone?” he asked, wading closer.

“No,” Danae lied. Her heel caught on the back of a steep incline this time, and she stumbled backward into the water, barely recovering before falling and smashing her frame against the rocks beneath the shallow waves.

The man grinned.

“I don’t see anyone here to guard you,” he continued, stepping ever closer. “A woman like you needs a man to protect her. Are you telling me you wandered here alone, with no horse? Testing your knowledge of the forest? Running away from your father?”

Danae shook her head back and forth in reply, her words stuck in panic in her throat. The man took a step closer.

“Are you a Dayne?” he asked in earnest, his dark eyes running over her silver hair and coming to rest on her undoubtedly worried gaze. “A runaway courtesan from Lys? Can’t say I’ve ever seen anyone like you.”

The sound of thunder clapped in the distance, and they both looked up to the sky in distraction for a moment before the man spoke again.

“Whoever you are, I imagine I’ll receive a hefty reward for your return. Dragons, even.”

He took a step closer again, and let his eyes wander down her frame once more, coming to rest upon the curves of her waist.

“The view doesn’t hurt either.”

Danae was frozen to her spot in the river, thoughts of a dark bedroom on Dragonstone and a sellsword captain flooding her mind. A chill replaced the warmth of the sun on her skin, and the hum in her ears drowned out the sound of even her own heartbeat.

“I was just- I need to go.” She stumbled out. “I-”

The man chuckled, and kept coming. He was close now, near enough that Danae could see the sweat on his brow, and the stain of yellow on his teeth.

“Stay back!” she commanded.

Danae looked to the sky as the treetops began to flutter, the man’s laughter masked by a clap of thunder in the distance.

The shepherd halted in his path toward her, his gaze now transfixed on the clouds as well. The wind around them grew stronger until the branches of the forest bent backward in the wake.

When Danae looked to the man, she noticed the color had left his tanned cheeks. His dark stare was turned upward in uncertainty before he turned back to her face, his eyes wide with fear.

“Who are you-”

An otherworldly shriek pierced through the forest, interrupting the man’s panicked inquiry and sending him stumbling in the river to his knees before Danae.

The dragon screamed again when he came gliding across the treetops, and a hushed silence fell upon the forest as his shadow blocked the light from the sun and cast the ground into darkness.

Persion circled once before making his descent, wings as white as freshly fallen snow stretched out across the bank. The earth seemed to shake when he touched his scaly talons to ground in the middle of the river.

The man cowered even lower against the riverbank, frozen in place between the Queen and her beast.

The dragon swiveled his long, serpentine neck, surveying the scene before him with eyes like molten pits of golden fire. He spread his wide wings out across the width of the river and beyond, his full size expressed in a threatening display. Smoke trailed upward from his nostrils. His jaws snapped in anger, flashing swordlike teeth stained with dried blood.

Danae took a step forward and calmly let her hands fall from her breasts, her fingers skimming across the water as she moved in a circle around the shepherd.

“Your- Your Grace,” the man stammered, stumbling away from the dragon on his hands and knees. “Please. I did not know.”

Persion stilled by the time Danae reached him, and she placed a small hand against his scaled neck before turning to face the shepherd, her nakedness displayed without shame. The scales were fire against her flesh, a burning on her palm that cleansed and purified. The flame that made her new.

“I have a wife, Your Grace,” he pleaded. “And children. Two of them. A boy and a girl. Just like you.”

She’d seen the look that had been in his eyes countless times before, from the wandering gazes of her cousins at the docks of Sharp Point, to the lingering stares of sellswords and kings and nobles alike. Each time she saw it, it fueled a flame inside of her, stoking and building in her stomach, climbing and licking upward against the walls of her throat, threatening to explode.

Her advisors would counsel restraint, she knew. They would persuade her to forgive, and they would warn her of the dangers that lurked in the shadow of her anger and wild, unrestrained power.

Her advisors were not there. The forest was a silent as a tomb, waiting with baited breath for her move. The dragon beside her had calmed at her touch, and the world around her seemed to still, save for the trembling of the once arrogant shepherd who had dared look upon her naked frame.

“Does my dragon frighten you?” she asked calmly.

“Y-Yes, Your Grace.”

Danae smiled as she ran her palm soothingly across Persion’s scaled neck. The dragon remained silent, poised waiting and motionless at her side like one of the massive stone beasts carved into the walls of Dragonstone.

“Even now?”

The shepherd’s eyes never left Persion, and he nodded silently from where he cowered in the middle of the stream.

“Yes, Your Grace.”

“Then you are a fool,” Danae replied softly, her voice steady and unwavering. She could feel the tension in the dragon’s muscles building beneath her hand. An unnatural silence hung over the forest, thick and heavy like the morning fog, before she spoke again.

“The only thing you should be afraid of is me.”

The man’s eyes widened just as Danae let her hand fall from Persion’s neck.

“Dracarys!”

She watched as golden fire spilled forth from the dragon’s open maw, and the shepherd shrieked in agony, crawling and stumbling backward to no avail before another stream of flames fell upon him.

His tanned flesh exposed above the water was burned as black as night, melting like wax dripping from a candle, and the dragon lunged forward in the river to rip the charred flesh from the man’s body, tendrils of steam rising from his jaws. He took the corpse in between his teeth and tore limb from body, sending a spray of blood and entrails across Danae and turning the waters of the Mander a dark crimson.

By the time they departed the riverbank that afternoon, Danae had washed the blood from her body and donned the clothing that had been left to dry in the sun. The shepherd’s bones had long disappeared, sent scattering off into the steady stream.

She climbed atop Persion’s back and felt the familiar, comforting warmth of his scales against her skin. At her command, the river below them grew smaller and smaller, and she guided him with her hands over the treetops in the direction of Oldtown.

The whole world was laid out so perfectly beneath them, ashes and all.