Chapter Text
They Will Want To Kill Her
When they took her from where Drogon left her before the walls of Valyria, the troops guarding the city had come out to try and seize her body. Drogon had taken off, and with the malicious intelligence of a Zaldrizes, had burned the troops marching out from the Black Walls, while leaving the crowds surrounding Daenerys Targaryen’s body untouched. The crowds, worshippers of the Lord of Light, had erupted into cheers, and fallen on the survivors of the companies, who had been forced to beat a hasty retreat behind the Black Walls, with the gates closed, and a siege commencing of the inner city by the outer, as the slaves erupted in violent revolt with Drogon’s aid.
For the moment, of the revolt, Kinvara, the High Priestess of the Great Temple of R’hllor-upon-the-Wall (for only temples to the Old Gods of Valyria were allowed inside the walls, and they were little-used, the places of city rituals for civic duty for the elite, and no Red Priestess would be seen there, when her flock was outside the walls), knew that she could care little of its progress. She had a higher duty first.
The girl was ethereal in death, at a distance absolutely beautiful, as she had been in life. But her beauty was fading on closer inspection. The journey that Drogon had taken from King’s Landing had been a long one, and decay had already set in. She knew that the blow to the heart had been mortal, and it would challenge their resurrection magic. She had been placed on an altar, before which a great fire burned in a pit, tended constantly.
She was ready to attempt this, and would have done it regardless, but she would have feared the result, a creature barely human, if she had tried it without preparation. As it was, some hope was offered by the fact that a mysterious Shadowbinder of Asshai had arrived three days before, warning her to be ready. This woman, who called herself Quaithe, was very insistent. Were it not for the fact that the Red Priestesses themselves practised Shadowbinding, they would have had no truck with each other, and might have come to blows, for the wooden-masked woman clearly held herself at a remove from the Lord of Light.
But she had fulfilled the Lord of Light’s mission in bringing warning of this terrible blow to His champion against slavery and despair throughout the whole world. Thus, Kinvara accepted her as a friend, and the woman stood by and provided advice for the preparations.
There was no greater power than a willing sacrifice, and one presented herself to the flames. When the moment came within the fires of the temple, a dragon’s roar shook the night’s sky beyond, and the ground below seemed to shudder and crack.
Quaithe simply nodded her wooden-masked head with an almost ritualised precision. Kinvara shivered in fear and hope.
The brave young Queen’s eyes snapped open. She sucked in a breath, and then another breath, and shuddered out a horrible, ragged scream. Violet eyes focusing on Kinvara, they hesitated for a moment, focusing and unfocusing, and at last recognising her.
“Your Grace,” Kinvara dipped her head.
“Where… Jon… Treason… Vol…”
“Volantis,” Kinvara nodded, and had wet rags brought, to cool the fiery heat of the dragon’s body, for abruptly alive again, Daenerys was hotter than any normal human, closer to the Lord of Light than other mere mortals, a mark of the Valyrian race, but even this seemed uncomfortably hot for her, as if the light of her resurrection had burned bright indeed.
Daenerys’ eyes flicked to the other side, as a trapped animal, and widened as she saw Quaithe. There was part of her mind there. “Forgive me for not heeding your words.”
“Forgiven, Your Grace.”
Daenerys began to laugh, but it was tinged with hysteria. It was not a laugh of happiness or humour, but of desperation at the age of panic. “Why did I return, when I have nothing? Why did you bring me back?”
“The slaves of Volantis need you, Your Grace. The Lord of Light needs His champion.”
Daenerys’ laugh darkened, her hands uncontrollably tensed and relaxed as her body spasmed on the altar. “There are no more slaves in Volantis,” she said, like it was a statement of objective fact. “Now… True it.” She shivered from the cold rags on her forehead, as if they brought relief from a pain and pressure in her mind, and her voice turned dark. “True it.”
“This, Your Grace, we can do, for your Zaldrizes has shown us the way,” Kinvara replied, and bowed deeply. The war began that night.
For Daenerys, nothing ever seemed quite so clear as it did that night, when for a brief moment, she thought that her resurrection might be as easy as her traitorous nephew’s. But there was life enough for what mattered. Liberation. Revenge. Family. Her course seemed as plain as the hot sun of Astapor, when she had her moment she could never quite rival again. The Masters of Volantis would fall.
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The slaves and freedmen erupted in revolt across the city. Men were torn limb from limb as they were overcome with their swords. The guards of others revolted despite all their years of indoctrination and submission, and stabbed their masters fifty or sixty times with a dozen swords. They carried the women into the streets and raped them in broad daylight, and in many cases, then impaled them or set them on fire. The children, the young masters, were thrown onto spears or forced from upper balconies where their families had hidden.
Many families which attempted to fight back in some order were pressed back toward the docks and canals, where masses of the mob, armed with cudgels, and seized spears and clubs and every other kind of weapon, beat them until they were driven into the water to drown in great piles of corpses which choked the quays and rafted around the anchored ships. Those ships which could cut their lines in time escaped; the others were set upon, and their crews immediately butchered. Some of the freed slaves made a show of ceremoniously eating parts of the bodies of the slavers. Human beings, long denied freedom and dignity, avenged themselves with the same cruelty that had been visited upon them; such was the law of human nature.
Walls of villas that were resisting were thrown down by masses of workers who flung themselves into the effort with hand tools, even under fire from the occupants. There were rarely enough to matter. Those who could, fled to the black walls. But the old Noble Valyrians behind them would not open them for any half-caste slaveowners from the outer city who fled the vengeance of the people they had abused, degraded, raped, defamed, tortured for sport for centuries, unto generations passed. No, they would lower buckets and ropes to rescue a small number from the walls, as their loyal troops fired down into the masses. But nothing more than that, lest they allow the mob in.
They burned some of them, too, turning burning oil on them, dropping it down from the walls on the masses until they retreated. But the Temple of the Red God refused to burn, and instead became the natural rallying point along the walls for the great masses of the slaves who at last tasted liberty, and revenge for untold generations of silent, contemptuously forgotten, suffering.
As the Priests and Priestesses preached, people milled around. They knew that the Dragon Queen had come. They heard, also, that the Dragon Queen was dead. Her Dragon, in a last act of revenge, had burned the companies of soldiers of the Volantene Lordly houses. They celebrated and despaired, all at once, as fine foods were consumed from the tables of the slain, as fine wines were consumed by those who before had only presented them to their masters, if they had seen them at all.
On the second day, they milled around, celebrating, partying, in disorder. The Volantene Lords drew their forces together, and rallied the free men, and placed them under arms. They drew up their plans against the former slaves, who revelled in freedom. They would begin massacres, and when they had the upper hand, commence the tortures, visit upon random slaves crimes and evils and horrors a hundred times worse than any of the desperate and angry slaves had visited upon the half-caste slaveowners outside the walls. Then, when their spirits were broken, the rest would be clapped back into irons, and they would regain control of the situation.
In the meanwhile, fires raged out of control through many parts of Volantis, for the want of organisation to put them out. A body of troops had blocked the great bridge across the mouth of the Rhoyne, so the western city was still under the grip of the slaveowners, who began torturing any slave to death who was educated to read and write, even if they had no done absolutely nothing wrong, because the ones who could read and write were the most likely suspects to spread the revolt to their quarters of the city across the river. These slaveowners knew that the educated slaves—though it was unfortunate to waste them all--would serve as an example to the others not to revolt. Smoke and the scent of charred flesh hung heavy and low over the Rhoyne.
On the third day, a procession descended from the steps of the Great Fire Temple. Masses of the faithful, carrying spears, with or without points (sharpened wooden stakes worked fine for this purpose), and bearing wooden and leather shields, began to advance. The assembled faithful, the acolytes, they formed an Army which began to spread through the streets. As they spread through the streets, they ordered the people, liberated and slaves no longer, to pull down buildings as sacrifices to R’hllor to keep His fire from spreading through the whole city. They began to take control of supplies and gather them up.
Riders on chariots and horses went ahead of these rude but disciplined columns, with some blowing trumpets as others were crying out “The Army of the Lord of Light is in Control!” and thrusting their spears into the air and slamming them in long drumming motions against the sides of their chariots or their shields. As they passed through, a tremendous shout carried through the freed slaves, who were sympathetic to Azor Ahai. Many of them, taking up the arms they had seized, joined the columns which began to enforce order throughout the outer city. Still, the city was so choked with smoke that noon seemed like evening, and fires licked the skyline in several districts.
The Volantene Lords saw the Church moving against them as a great threat. The ominous cry of “The Army of the Lord of Light is in Control!” signalled discipline, and the revolting slaves gaining discipline would mean the end of their power and their lives, for they could only possibly regain control if they maintained the advantage in this factor, which was what allowed them to reign as masters of such a great majority.
The Gates of the Inner City opened, and masses of soldiers in regular order, with their ranks drawn up as tight as the teeth of a comb, began to advance in dreadful silence which was marked only by the deceptively gentle playing of flutes which kept the time of their advance as their sandalled feet tramped the stone streets under their coats of armour. These were citizens leading the remaining slave soldiers, now, and their discipline and readiness to fight for their patrimony made them far more dangerous than the slave-soldiers sent to suppress the revolt earlier on, who had met their fate at Drogon’s breath. Their mothers and wives and daughters stood on the walls and cheered them on, and bared their breasts to the slaves and beat them with the flats of swords to mock the freedmen, who would shortly once again be in chains.
And then a tight mass of a thousand men in mail with swords and hammered steel helmets descended from the Great Fire Temple. They were led by Targaryen banners. They formed a tight and disciplined mass, also, but along their flanks and front, some of their number danced with their swords, in wild and reckless displays of bravery and skill, blades flashing and twirling and spinning in the smokey light. They were the guards of the Temple, and they were transformed, not in their regular dress, but in armour which had been stored in the temple for this occasion, which gleamed in the sun and reflected the flames.
And after the first thousand descended, packed tight between them and the second mass of a thousand, two thousand in all, there was a single palanquin, surrounded by a hundred Red Priests and Priestesses, who chanted: “They will want to Kill Her, but death itself cannot conquer her!”
Laying half supine in silver and white robes on the palanquin, with a face drawn and pale and taut and eyes impossibly too large from the shrinkage of skin and muscle, with other skin, conversely, sagging at her hands, her body so tiny. They still recognised her, with her tremendous platinum silver-blonde hair, her violet eyes, all so distinctive, immediately recognisable.
The crowds erupted into screaming. “They Will Want to Kill Her, but death itself cannot conquer her!”
“MHYSA!”
As the news spread, a dull roar began to spread with it through the city. People began to scream, to jump up and down like they were seized with a mania, to beat objects and bang improvised drums. They all took up the screams and cries of the slogans, until they resounded like a roar of thunder circling the inner walls. The dames and matrons on the upper walls mocking the slaves were no longer so sure of themselves, now.
The terrible shouts came together with a certainty, that word, Mhysa, which began to remove all doubt, that the Dragon Queen was there to lead them in person. A terrible roar came up from the crowds as the palanquin was borne to a great square, in which a press of at least a hundred thousand people, freed slaves all, waited in awe at her arrival and cared nothing for her strange appearance.
At one side of her was a woman in the strange wooden mask of a Shadowbinder of Asshai. On the other was one of the most prominent Red Priestesses, Kinvara. The Red Priestess made a certain gesture, as if she were conjuring magic, and indeed she was. Her voice was unnaturally amplified, so that all could hear it:
“The Queen saved the people of the West from the Night King, the first finger on the right hand of the Great Other, and the demons he commanded. She lost the first of her children, Viserion, and thousands of her men sacrificed their own lives, that the people of the West might be saved. They dwell in bliss now, with the Lord. She saved them from the false queen, who ruled them as a tyrant. She lost the second of her children, Rhaegal, and her dearest friend, Lady Missandei. She is cherished by the Lord. Yet, she freed the people of the West.
But, the Great Other is cunning beyond measure. Many of the Queen’s own servants and allies were his thralls. The Imp of Lannister; the man who wished to restore slavery to Meereen. The Spider, who sought to slay her with poison. The traitor Queen of the North, who takes the form of a wolf to couple with the beasts and demons of her own Northern forests; the monster who enters mens’ minds and calls himself the Three-Eyed Raven.” A hush had fallen over the crowd.
“But, there was one who was worse, by far, than they. The man who professed to love her, who deceived her, who took from her all that she had to offer, whose life she saved repeatedly. The one who slew her with treachery. With false words, like honey on his tongue, he told her, “You are my Queen, now and always. I love you.” And then, he drove a knife through her heart. All this I have seen in my flames. I would tear out my eyes for what they have seen, did I not need them to serve the Lord of Light.” There were cries of excitement and rage now, across the crowd. Some were in tears, others began to chant. Holy words of war and vengeance. Briefly, Kinvara had a vision in her mind. Of millions of followers of the Lord of Light, raging across the world in frenzy, as they followed the banners of the Targaryens, exterminating the followers of the Great Other.
“But, the Lord of Light has still to accomplish his purposes through his champion. The will of the Lord of Light is greater by far than the Will of the Great Other. Behold, Azor Ahai is reborn.” Daenerys rose from the palanquin, as the crowd erupted in frenzy.
As with Kinvara, the Dragon Queen’s voice was amplified, so that everyone could hear it as if she were standing next to them. Hoarse and raw, that high and proud voice needed to muster only one word, and indeed, spoke only one word.
“Kill.”
“KILL.”
“KILL.”
Then she finished it, with a terribly dreadful look in her eyes as the crowd began to roar all the more fiercely, seeming to defy reason and possibility for how furiously they cried, and spoke a sentence that came comfortably to her cloudy mind. “KILL THE MASTERS!” She raised her hand into the air in a single, imperious gesture, and the crowd erupted into a surge of motion.
“KILL THE MASTERS!” They screamed.
“They will want to Kill Her, but death itself cannot conquer her!” They rejoindered in their screams.
A surging mass of hundreds of thousands of freed slaves reinforced the troops which had been formed from the adherents of the Lord of Light. Above them, too, picked men from the body of the Faithful had organised squadrons which had quietly occupied the roofs of all the high buildings along the avenues which led out from the gates of the inner city. This was their real surprise weapon. As the Volantene Citizenry formed in their blocks to receive the charge, they were abruptly met with masses of roofing tiles that were being stripped from the roofs of the high buildings, and hurled down with great force by strong freed slaves who had muscles well honed from countless years of physical labour.
The masses of slaves slammed into the ranks of the Volantenes. Their officers blew whistles again and again. “Stiffen up those lines!”
“Hold!”
“Front rank—thrust!” An instantaneous disciplined ripple of five hundred spears would send hundreds of slaves toppling away from the line with wounds.
“Front rank—receive!” They fell back into grounding position for their pikes.
“Second rank—thrust!” A second rank of thrusting spears tore through the next group of freed slaves, being pushed forward by those behind them, due to the sheer weight of the mob, the freedmen couldn’t stop if they had wanted to, and in their mad frenzy of furious and revenge, many were too worked up on drink and adrenaline to bother to care about their own likely deaths.
But from above, the roofing tiles were hurled, again and again, in great masses, by the hundred every second against the full of the thousands upon thousands of troops Volantis had sent forth to regain control of the lower city. Masses of archers formed up behind the ranks of shield-and-spear and pikemen. They fired up on the roofs, but the freedmen there took cover behind the fancy edges and ledges of the roofs, serving as serviceable parapets, and then rose after a salvo to again hurl the heavy roofing tiles down on the ranks.
The blood in front of the troops covered the paving stones from the masses of men—and women—that their methodical spearpoints had massacred. They had killed literally thousands of freedmen in the space of minutes, and the killing could continue without ending for hours, unto actual physical exhaustion of the soldiers, until the very moment when their enemies finally broke, or else they were too tired from the act of killing to actually raise their spears to stab again.
But the damned paving stones were wet with blood, and the opened and squashed entrails of the dead freed slaves, who sacrificed their freedom for the liberty of yet more, and embraced death, and now were ground under the heels of the advancing columns—literally.
The men slipped, and staggered, and stumbled, for so great was the concentrated killing that it was hard to make progress through the charnel house of the bodies they themselves had created with their merciless, disciplined thrusts. All the while, above them, roofing tiles slammed into their helmets and knocked them out, to collapse in their ranks, they broke their arms, they battered weapons from their hands, they broke their feet, they knocked them down, sometimes even through their armour, they dealt a lethal blow.
The casualties began to add up.
The ranks began to thin, and the progress of the Volantene soldiers slowed to a crawl. At some final, inestimable moment, they ground to a halt.
Daenerys, dimly seeing, hearing, feeling from the palanquin down in the square, a half-mile distant, raised her hand, and flung it forward, open, in a universal gesture that everyone could understand. The Red Priests translated it into action by the tremendous mass blowing of trumpets.
“The Army of the Lord of Light Attacks!”
“The Army of the Lord of Light is Victorious!”
The adherents, organised as soldiers, of the Lord of Light, made their rushing attacks, in picked bodies which reinforced and drove the slaves ahead of them forward into a terrible frenzy of suicidal attacks. The strikes occurred at a dozen places along the columns. The men on the roofs rose for a last exertion of throwing tiles, and this time they braved the fire of the archers, to keep their own pelting of the Volantene columns up despite the losses, and forced the attack.
Ahead, the Volantene troops wavered in their places. They hesitated. The sheer mass of the attack soon pitted spear again spear, the infamous “push of pike” which was the height of infantry combat between two regular armies in Essos. The Volantenes surely would have been the victors, but they had been so worn down by the roofing tiles from above, by the sacrifice of the freedmen ahead, they had slipped and stumbled through paving stones slick with blood, so that as they tried to ground their spears and hold their positions, letting the butts of the pikes rest between the paving stones for the force, the hedgerows required to hold back a great mass of men, they could find no purchase. They slipped and stumbled and fell, and now as they fell, they were crushed, beaten, and stabbed to death, their eyes ripped out and their heads cut off, as they were destroyed utterly and their bodies torn to ruins, by the mass of the enemy advancing over them, with their comrades falling back with no time to save them.
They broke, and with the roar of blood vengeance in every throat of every freedman, the slaughter was general.
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With their armies broken and the young men slaughtered, the Lords of Volantis had sent out Nobles to treat with the Dragon Queen, under flags of truce. She was, after all, also of the Blood of Old Valyria. They held the hope that she could be reasoned with.
She had their emissaries executed and their heads flung back over the black walls on catapults. With them was the message that she would treat with the people of Volantis only if the Triarchs presented themselves, if they came with shaven heads, without caps, and barefoot, with ropes around their necks, and surrendered themselves up for death.
Then Drogon had returned, and burned a portion of a district of the city inside the Black Walls. This caused a tremendous drop of morale among the Volantenes, to see part of the inner city burnt by a Dragon, when they were part of the blood of the Dragon themselves. So it was that on the tenth day, be it by drugs or compulsion from their families and the threat of worse consequences too, the Triarchs surrendered themselves up to death, and the elders of the city were permitted to arrive to treat with Queen Daenerys.
A fortnight later, she had been formally crowned as the Queen of Volantis. But for unknown reason, the Dragon Queen could no longer mount her dragon. Drogon stayed close by her side, and appeared to care, and understand, implicitly what she desired, which horrified and terrified the Lords of Volantis. But the Queen who could not be killed did not mount his back and ride above them as a Dragonlord of Old Valyria would have. Something had changed.
So this young girl of noble blood had gone forth, according to the call of the Queen, that she would permit young children to try to ride Drogon, to select a champion.
Now, the Queen arrived to watch on the appointed day, as freed slaves and worshippers carried her in her palanquin to the Great Temple, and others attacked and humiliated slaveowners who had lived in villas in the outer city—for even after all the terrible slaughter and destruction, not all of the half-caste slaveowners had been massacred in full, but now they were like wild beasts, mocked and humiliated by the freed slaves who now had power over them. The Valyrian lords of the inner city clung close to Daenerys, and bowed, and scraped, and looked on with envy at the Dragon which gave her all the power in the world, and the temple of the God who would not let her die.
There, up before the Lord of Light’s great Fire Temple, Daenerys Targaryen sat on her throne, watching the children from along the course of the outer walls, in a pavilion of fabric of reds and blacks, the Queen seemed a distant, immobile figure. She was shrouded in robes, and surrounded by an army of freed slaves, who had chanted with the fury of a thousand suns when they entered the Black Walls for her coronation, two weeks before, and broken taboo for the first time in history, by staying overnight. The chant had gone like this:
“They will want to burn her but she cannot be burned up!”
They will want to break her but she cannot be broken!”
They will want to kill her but death itself cannot conquer her!”
On the third day of her death, when it was believed all hope was lost, she screamed: FREEDOM! over the land must return. And death cannot conquer her!”
Anyone who seemed the slightest threat to the reborn Dragon Queen was instantly torn to shreds by the frenzied mob of defenders. Nothing had been able to calm them. So it had gone for weeks.
In front of the girl who considered that terrible, unearthly chant, was Drogon, a dragon to rival Balerion the Black Dread. The girl closed her eyes and repeated this mantra: “I am a Targaryen, my line is born of a Targaryen, my blood is of the old Freehold, down unto the thousandth generation. I am pure, and I need have no fear.”
Her name was Elaena Saerganyon, which was the surname (which meant ‘Line of the Glory of Saera’) permitted to descendants of the Princess Saera Targaryen, who had lived out her wealth and power behind the Black Walls, more than two centuries before. She was the natural choice to ride Drogon, but in fact her family had forbidden her from coming here.
Each day now, for a week, the hopeful had tried. They had approached Drogon, as the Dragon Queen tested the blood of the Old Freehold in Volantis. Each time they had approached this Balerion Reborn, they had failed, or if they were particularly unlucky, they had failed and died. A stream of a hundred and twenty casualties had been carried away, dead or wounded. Still, the interlocutors for the Dragon Queen insisted it must continue—the Red Priestess on her left, the Shadowbinder. The word now was that her miraculous recovery had left her unable to fly Drogon; and indeed, it seemed that the new Kingdom must have a champion.
The families knew the truth, the old blood saw how Drogon nuzzled close to his Queen and Mother despite the strange, mystical distance held between them. Though any one of them atop his back might destroy the Dragon Queen’s power in a heartbeat—it would only be if he obeyed. And though the terrible magic which had resurrected her had left her unable, or unwilling, to ride Drogon in war, it was clear the great beast would obey a different rider only to the extent that his mother permitted him to. Whomever sat on his back would be only the agent of Her will.
Elaena could not turn Drogon on the Dragon Queen. But she did not want to. She was a Targaryen by the blood in her veins; so was the Dragon Queen. She would adapt. She had seen the slaves parading through the streets as victors. She had heard what happened to the women who resisted them. She had decided she had no future, except through boldness. So she fled the house of her family, bereft of the slaves which had once made its vast halls comfortable, and presented herself with the masses, dressed in simple robes which had belonged to one of her family’s former slaves, to try and at least avoid being noticed as an aristocrat for as long as possible.
She would not die by the actions of the freed slaves who now lorded over her family’s city; she would die, if she were to die at all, because of Dragonfire. And if she would live, she would obey the Queen’s summons. The old ways were dead for-ever.
Now it was her turn, and with a swaying motion of confidence, and High Valyrian song on her lips, as in the days of old of the Storm Singers, though their magic songs had been lost, she advanced toward the great black dragon—from the side, where she could be seen, but did not approach head-on in challenge—at a comfortable trot under the faded glory of threadbare fine robes, irreplaceable for her family since the slaves had been freed.
As she approached, Drogon raised his head, and it swivelled sharply on its neck to face her.
She held no fear in her heart.