Jacaerys

The world ceased to make sense the moment Sheepstealer hit Vermax. One heartbeat earlier, Jace had been fighting to keep control of the battle unfolding beneath him. The Gullet had become a vision torn from a nightmare: burning ships drifting through black water, shattered masts jutting from the sea like broken bones, dragonfire painting the smoke-choked sky in violent shades of orange and gold. Everywhere he looked there was chaos. Sailors threw themselves overboard to escape flames. Men screamed from sinking decks. Arrows rose in dark clouds only to vanish into the haze. Vermax was banking low over the fleet, fire spilling from his jaws as another enemy vessel erupted beneath them, and despite the terror of it all, despite the overwhelming scale of the slaughter, Jace had felt something dangerously close to certainty. They were winning.

Then something crashed into Vermax's flank with enough force to nearly tear him from the saddle. The dragon's scream ripped through the battlefield. Not a roar. Not a challenge. Pain.

Jace's head snapped toward the source of the impact and for a brief, disbelieving moment he could only stare. Through the smoke he caught sight of ragged brown wings, a massive body twisting erratically through the air, and a rider who clearly had no control over what was happening. Sheepstealer. Gods. Sheepstealer. Rhaena's dragon? The realization struck with horrifying speed. The dragon was frightened, confused, overwhelmed by the battle unfolding around him. Fire. Blood. Noise. Dragons. Ships. Men. He was reacting to instinct rather than commands, and Vermax had simply been unlucky enough to be in his path. Jace opened his mouth to shout, though he didn't know whether he meant to warn Rhaena, calm Vermax, or curse the gods themselves. Nothing emerged except a strangled breath before Sheepstealer slammed into Vermax a second time.

The impact shattered everything. Jace felt the saddle jerk beneath him. Felt leather straps snap. Felt his own body lurch sideways as the world suddenly tilted at an impossible angle. One hand lost its grip. Then the other. For a fraction of a second he remained suspended between sky and sea, weightless and helpless, staring at the battlefield spinning around him. He saw Vermax thrashing wildly through smoke and flame. Saw burning ships below. Saw fragments of timber tumbling through the air. Then gravity finally claimed him, and he began to fall.

The sea struck like stone. Every bit of air exploded from his lungs as darkness swallowed him whole. One moment there had been fire and screaming and sunlight filtering through smoke. The next there was only cold. Crushing, suffocating cold. Water surged over him from every direction, dragging him downward so violently that he lost all sense of direction. His eyes opened instinctively and found nothing except murky green darkness filled with bubbles and drifting debris. Panic arrived immediately. Not the distant fear of battle. Not the calculated fear of death that every dragonrider learned to live with. Pure animal panic. His body fought upward, desperate for air, but something yanked him back.

The saddle harness. Even before he looked down, he knew. A strap had wrapped itself around his leg. Jace twisted violently, trying to free himself, but the movement only tightened the leather. The remains of the saddle dragged behind him like an anchor. His armor suddenly felt impossibly heavy. His boots seemed filled with lead. Every attempt to swim carried him nowhere. The sea continued pulling him deeper while his lungs began to burn with unbearable intensity. He clawed at the buckle with numb fingers, but the metal refused to move. His chest convulsed. A desperate instinct demanded breath, yet there was no breath to take. Only seawater and darkness and pressure. His pulse thundered in his ears. His vision blurred around the edges. For the first time since the battle began, the possibility of death became terrifyingly real.

Not in battle. Not with a sword in his hand. Not beside Vermax. Here. Alone. Drowning in darkness while the war continued without him.

A surge of desperation flooded through him. Jace grabbed the strap with both hands and pulled with every bit of strength he possessed. The leather groaned but held. His lungs burned hotter. Black spots began dancing across his vision. Another pull. Another violent twist. Something tore. He wasn't even certain whether it was the harness or his own muscles. Then suddenly the tension vanished.

He was free. Jace kicked upward immediately. Every movement felt sluggish. Every second stretched into eternity. The surface seemed impossibly distant. He no longer knew how deep he had been dragged. The pressure in his chest became agony. His vision narrowed. His body screamed for air. For one horrible moment he genuinely believed he would never reach the surface. That he would black out only a few feet beneath it and sink quietly into the depths.

Then light appeared above him. Dim. Blurred. Beautiful. He surged toward it.

The moment his head broke through the waves, he inhaled so sharply it felt like knives entering his lungs. Air flooded into him in ragged, painful gasps while seawater poured from his mouth. He coughed violently, struggling to stay afloat as waves crashed against his face. The battle still raged around him. Smoke drifted across the sky. Flaming wreckage floated nearby. The sea itself seemed to burn in places where oil and fire mixed together. Everywhere he looked there was destruction. Yet none of it mattered. Not at first.

His eyes searched the sea. Searching. Praying. Begging.

"Vermax."

The name escaped him as little more than a whisper. Nothing answered. No familiar roar. No shadow passing overhead. No flash of pale green scales. Only smoke. Only fire. Only empty sky.

The realization settled slowly, sinking deeper than the sea ever could. The bond that had existed for most of his life was gone. Not distant. Not weakened. Gone. A hollow ache opened inside his chest so suddenly and so completely that for a moment it eclipsed everything else. The battle. The cold. The danger. Even his own survival. Vermax was dead.

Movement along the water finally dragged his attention away. A Triarchy galley. Far too close. Close enough to distinguish faces through the smoke. Close enough to see soldiers lining the railing. One of them pointed directly at him. Another shouted something he couldn't hear over the waves. Then an arbalest was dragged forward.

Jace's blood turned cold. The weapon settled against the rail while the crossbowman adjusted his stance with practiced calm. Around him, men continued fighting and dying. Dragons still wheeled overhead. Ships still burned. Yet the soldier seemed concerned with only a single target. Him.

Jace treaded water, exhausted, weaponless, stranded in open sea with nowhere to hide. The arbalest slowly turned. Followed him. Stopped. Its iron bolt pointed directly at his chest. And the crossbowman smiled.

The battle had swallowed the sea whole. Smoke rolled across the water in heavy black sheets, torn apart only when dragonfire split the sky and painted the waves red-gold. The fleet below had become a graveyard before it had finished fighting — ships locked together by grappling chains, masts splintered, sails burning, men screaming over the roar of wind and flame. The Gullet was no longer a passage of water between Dragonstone and Driftmark. It was a killing field. Jacaerys Velaryon had known fear before. He had known it in council chambers, beneath the quiet weight of lords measuring the shape of his face and the color of his hair. He had known it when envoys looked at him too long, when loyalty felt fragile, when every word spoken in his mother’s name had to be steadier than the man beneath it. But this was different. This fear had teeth. It tore through the air around him with every scorpion bolt, every desperate cry from the decks below, every beat of Vermax’s wings as the young dragon fought to keep them above the storm of iron and fire. Still, Jace did not turn away. He was Rhaenyra’s son. Her heir. The Prince of Dragonstone. He had begged for action, had flown as prince and dragonrider because sitting safely behind stone walls while others bled for his mother’s crown had felt like a cowardice he could not stomach. His hands tightened around the saddle straps until his knuckles ached, his damp curls whipping against his face as he leaned low against Vermax’s neck. “Hold, Vermax,” he shouted, though the wind nearly tore the words from his mouth. “Hold!” The dragon answered with a furious scream. Then the bolt struck. It came from below, hidden by smoke until it was too late — a massive iron shaft launched from the deck of a warship, cutting upward with brutal precision. It punched through the membrane of Vermax’s wing, and the dragon’s cry changed at once. Not rage. Pain. Shock. A sound so raw that it carved straight through Jace’s chest. Vermax lurched. The world tilted. For a heartbeat, Jace saw everything at once: the burning sea beneath him, the pale flash of waves, the dark shape of a ship rising through smoke, sailors turning their faces upward, Vermax’s blood scattering like rain. He tried to hold on. He truly did. His fingers found leather, then slipped. His boot caught in the stirrup, tore free, and suddenly there was nothing beneath him at all. The sky vanished. The sea took him. The impact drove the breath from his lungs. Cold closed over him like a fist, dragging him down into darkness and noise. His armor pulled at him, his cloak tangled around one arm, and for one terrible moment Jace did not know which way was up. The surface was only a blur of firelight above him, broken by shadows, wreckage, and the distorted shapes of ships fighting overhead. Panic clawed at him. Not like a prince. Not like an heir. Like a boy who wanted air. Like a son who thought, with sudden sick clarity, that his mother would never know whether he had died bravely or simply disappeared beneath the waves. No. The thought struck harder than the sea itself. Jace kicked upward. His lungs burned. His limbs felt heavy, clumsy, too slow. He fought the drag of his wet clothes, shoved aside a piece of broken timber, and burst through the surface with a ragged gasp. Saltwater filled his mouth. He coughed, choked, and nearly went under again as a wave smashed into him from the side. Above him, Vermax screamed somewhere beyond the smoke. Jace turned desperately toward the sound, but the sky was chaos — flame, arrows, sails, wings, and ash. He could not reach his dragon. He could barely keep himself alive. A warship loomed ahead. It was close enough that its hull rose like a wall from the sea, black with pitch and smoke, its sides scarred by fire. Grappling hooks held it fast to another vessel, the two ships grinding together with every surge of the waves. Men fought across the joined decks, slipping in seawater and blood, their blades flashing beneath torn banners. Jace swam toward it. Every stroke was agony. His shoulder screamed. His chest burned. Twice the sea dragged him back, and twice he forced himself forward again, teeth clenched so hard his jaw ached. He caught a trailing rope, lost it, then caught it again with both hands. For a moment he hung there, battered against the hull, boots scraping uselessly against wet wood while the battle thundered above him. A lesser part of him wanted to let go. The part that was exhausted. The part that was young. The part that had never asked to be born beneath a crown’s shadow. But Jace had spent his whole life being watched for weakness. He would not die beneath a ship like refuse. With a harsh, broken sound, he hauled himself upward. By the time he dragged himself over the rail and crashed onto the deck, he was soaked, shaking, and half-blind from salt and smoke. For a few seconds he could only kneel there, one hand braced against the planks, water pouring from his hair and sleeves. His breath came in ragged pulls. His heart hammered so violently it seemed to drown out the battle around him. Then a man fell beside him. The sailor hit the deck hard, his sword skidding free across the wet boards until it struck Jace’s knee. Jace looked at it. The blade was not his. It was heavier than the sword he was used to, nicked along the edge, its leather grip slick with seawater. It was not princely. It was not elegant. It belonged to a desperate fight on a dying ship. Jace took it anyway. His fingers closed around the hilt, and something inside him steadied. Not peace. Never peace. But purpose. The same hard, stubborn thread that had carried him through courtly whispers, through the burden of his mother’s claim, through every silent insult he had learned to swallow because a prince could not afford to flinch. He rose. An enemy boarder turned toward him, eyes widening at the sight of the drenched young man climbing from the sea as if the water itself had rejected him. Jace did not wait for recognition. He stepped forward and met the first strike with both hands on the sword. Steel rang. The force of it shuddered up his arms, but he held. Again. This time he pushed back. The deck heaved beneath them. Spray, and ash clung to his face. Around him, men shouted, ships groaned, ropes snapped, and somewhere above the smoke a dragon’s cry still tore through the sky. Jace’s fear did not leave him. It stayed in his throat, in his ribs, in the tremor of his fingers around the stolen sword. But courage had never meant the absence of fear. It meant standing anyway.

Moments earlier, Jace had fallen from the sky. The memory came back in fragments, sharp and disjointed, flashing through his mind even as he struggled to stay afloat. Vermax screaming in pain. Sheepstealer bursting from the smoke. The violent collision. The sensation of weightlessness as the saddle tore loose beneath him. The freezing impact of the sea. Darkness. Panic. The desperate fight against the harness dragging him toward the bottom. The horrifying realization that Vermax was gone. Truly gone. Not wounded. Not lost in the smoke. Dead. The bond that had existed for as long as Jace could remember had been ripped out of him so suddenly that even now, with death looming from every direction, part of him could not fully comprehend it. Dragons did not simply disappear from his life. Yet every instinct inside him reached for the familiar presence and found only emptiness. The absence felt wrong. Unnatural. Like waking to discover an arm had been severed without his noticing.

Then he saw the arbalest. The soldiers aboard the Triarchy galley looked impossibly far away and impossibly close at the same time. Their ship rose and fell with the waves, drifting through smoke and floating wreckage while battle raged all around them. Men were dying by the hundreds. Dragons still circled overhead. Entire vessels burned from bow to stern. Yet somehow the world narrowed until there was only Jace floating helplessly in the sea and the crossbowman calmly drawing a bead on him.

Fear settled in his stomach. Real fear. Not the fear he had felt before battles. Not the fear of falling from a dragon. Not even the fear of drowning. This was different. This was the fear of seeing death approach and knowing there was nothing left to stop it.

His arm barely obeyed him. His muscles trembled from exhaustion. His armor dragged him lower with every passing second. He could hardly keep his head above water. There was nowhere to hide. No sword. No dragon. No ship. Just open sea.

The crossbowman fired. Jace tried to move. Too slow.

The bolt slammed into his shoulder with enough force to spin him sideways. Agony exploded through his body. He felt flesh tear. Felt something crack beneath the impact. The scream that escaped him dissolved into seawater as he crashed beneath the surface. The sea rushed into his mouth and nose. For several horrifying seconds he couldn't tell which pain was worse—the burning wound or the sensation of drowning all over again.

Gods. Gods, it hurt. His body reacted before his mind could. He fought upward desperately, kicking through the darkness until he burst back into open air. The moment he surfaced, he coughed so violently he nearly sank again. Blood streamed from the wound. He could feel it mixing with the seawater around him. His left arm was useless now. Every movement sent unbearable pain shooting through his chest and neck. The bolt remained lodged in his shoulder like a piece of molten iron.

The soldiers were reloading. Jace stared. For a moment he could only stare. A strange disbelief settled over him. This cannot be happening. He had survived dragonfire. Survived the fall. Survived drowning. Survived the sea itself. Only to be hunted down like some wounded animal floating among the wreckage.

The second arbalest was raised. The crossbowman took aim. Jace's pulse hammered in his ears. Move. Move. MOVE.

His body refused. The bolt launched. For an instant he saw it clearly. A dark shape cutting through smoke and sunlight. Fast. Too fast. Impossible to avoid.

The projectile screamed past his throat. Something sliced across the skin. Heat erupted along his neck. The bolt vanished into the sea behind him.

Jace froze. His hand flew to his throat. Blood. Not much. But enough. The realization struck with terrifying clarity. A finger's width. Less. Had the bolt flown slightly lower, it would have punched straight through his neck.

The thought made his stomach turn. Suddenly he could see it. Not as an abstract possibility but as reality. Himself sinking beneath the waves with a shaft protruding from his throat. Choking on blood. Drowning while still conscious. Vanishing beneath the surface without anyone ever knowing what had happened.

A tremor ran through him. For the first time since entering the battle, he wanted nothing more than to go home. Dragonstone. His mother. His brothers. The simple certainty that there would be another day. The thought arrived without pride or shame. Just truth. He didn't want glory. He didn't want songs. He didn't want heroic last words. He wanted to live. He wanted one more sunrise. One more conversation. One more flight with Vermax.

The realization only made the fear worse. Because his body was failing. The wound continued bleeding. The cold had worked its way deep into his bones. His breaths came shorter now. Faster. Shallower. Every wave felt heavier than the last.

The shoreline appeared through the haze ahead of him, a distant strip of land that seemed to belong to another world entirely. Jace fixed his eyes on it and forced himself forward. One stroke. Then another. Then another. His wounded shoulder screamed in protest. His vision blurred. His legs felt numb. More than once he slipped beneath the surface and had to fight his way back up. Every instinct urged him to stop struggling. To simply close his eyes and rest. That terrified him more than the arrows. He knew enough about death to recognize surrender when it came.

The sea no longer felt cold. That was wrong. Very wrong. His thoughts became sluggish. Disconnected. Memories surfaced without warning. Vermax hatching. His mother placing a hand on his shoulder. Baela laughing at something he'd said. Luke grinning during a race along Dragonstone's cliffs. Luke. The memory hit unexpectedly. For a moment he saw his younger brother standing beside him exactly as he had before Storm's End. Alive. Smiling. Waiting.

"No..." Jace whispered weakly.

Whether he was speaking to the memory or to death itself, he didn't know. Another wave struck him. The world tilted. His vision narrowed. The shoreline blurred into a smear of light and shadow. His body no longer felt connected to him. The pain seemed distant now. The fear too. Everything was becoming distant.

His final conscious thought was not of war, dragons, or crowns. It was the simple, desperate hope that if he closed his eyes for only a moment, he would wake again.

Darkness took him before he could finish the thought. Hours later, long after the battle had moved elsewhere and the fires on the horizon had begun to fade, the sea delivered him to shore. The tide dragged his unconscious body across wet sand and scattered shells before retreating once more. Blood stained the water around him. The bolt still protruded from his shoulder. Salt crusted his hair and clothes. His chest rose and fell in shallow, uneven breaths that were almost too weak to notice. To anyone passing by, he looked less like a prince and more like another casualty cast aside by the sea.

The waves continued to wash against the beach. Jacaerys never stirred. Unconscious, wounded, and utterly alone, he remained motionless where the tide had abandoned him, while somewhere far beyond the horizon the world continued under the assumption that he had died with his dragon.

At first there was only darkness. Not the gentle darkness of sleep, but something deeper. Heavier. A darkness filled with cold water and distant screams. Even unconscious, Jace could not escape the Gullet. His mind dragged him back into the battle again and again, forcing him to relive fragments of it in broken, shifting pieces that refused to fit together. Smoke swallowed the sky. Ships burned across black water. Men screamed somewhere beyond the haze. Dragonfire flashed through the darkness in violent bursts of orange and red before vanishing once more. The sea reflected every flame, turning the water into a field of liquid fire. Somewhere overhead dragons roared. Somewhere below men drowned. The entire world seemed trapped between fire and water, and Jace stood helplessly in the middle of it. Then he heard a familiar cry. Vermax. The sound cut through the chaos instantly. Relief flooded him so suddenly it nearly hurt. He turned toward it and saw his dragon circling overhead, pale green scales shining through the smoke. Alive. Whole. Uninjured. For one precious moment everything else disappeared. The battle no longer mattered. The arrows no longer mattered. The sea no longer mattered. Vermax was alive. That was enough.

Then the scream came. It was not the roar of a dragon going to war. It was pain. Pure agony.

Jace watched helplessly as Vermax's body twisted violently in the air. Flames spread across scales and wings. The dragon's cry echoed across the battlefield, louder than the crashing waves and burning ships combined. "Vermax!" Jace shouted, but his voice seemed impossibly small compared to the chaos around him. The dragon looked toward him for a brief moment, and the sight of it filled Jace with a terrible sense of dread. There was fear in Vermax's eyes. Confusion. Pain. Then the dragon began to fall. Slowly at first. Then faster. Jace tried to run. Tried to reach him. Tried to do something. Anything. But his legs refused to move. No matter how desperately he struggled, his feet remained rooted in place while Vermax disappeared into smoke and flame. The sea rose to meet the falling dragon. One final cry echoed across the battlefield. Then silence. Vermax vanished beneath the waves.

The world broke apart. The water that had been crashing harmlessly around his boots suddenly surged upward. It climbed past his knees, his waist, his chest. Cold. So cold. Jace staggered backward, but there was nowhere to go. The battlefield vanished beneath black water. The ships disappeared. The fire disappeared. Even the sky disappeared. Everything became ocean. He was drowning again. Saltwater flooded his mouth. His lungs burned. Panic exploded through him. He kicked desperately toward the surface, but there was no surface to find. Every direction was darkness. Every direction was water. The same crushing helplessness returned. The same terror he had felt beneath the waves after falling from Vermax. The same certainty that he was about to die. His chest screamed for air. His vision blurred. He could feel the ocean dragging him deeper and deeper into the darkness below.

Then shapes appeared. At first they were only shadows. Then faces. Luke stood several feet away beneath the water. Exactly as he had looked before Storm's End. No wounds. No blood. No sign of what had happened. Just Luke. Alive. Smiling. Waiting.

The sight hit harder than any wound. Guilt twisted through Jace's chest with such force that it felt impossible to breathe. He tried to swim toward him. Tried to reach him. Tried to explain. Gods, he wanted to explain. Wanted to tell him how sorry he was. Wanted to tell him he should have protected him. Should have been there. Should have done something. Anything. But the words never came. Water filled his throat instead. Luke's smile slowly faded. Disappointment settled across his features. Then he began drifting farther away, disappearing into the darkness while Jace watched helplessly. No matter how hard he struggled, the distance only grew.

Another figure appeared. His mother. Rhaenyra stood somewhere beyond the darkness, illuminated by distant light he could not reach. Her hand was stretched toward him. Calling him home. Calling him back. Jace reached for her immediately. Every instinct inside him demanded he reach her. Yet the distance between them never changed. He swam. Fought. Kicked desperately through the darkness. Nothing brought him closer. The sea continued pulling him downward while she remained impossibly far away. The realization struck with sudden horror. Did she think he was dead? Had word already reached Dragonstone? Was she mourning him now as she had mourned Luke? The thought hurt more than the drowning. More than the arrows. More than the loss of Vermax. He tried to call out to her. Tried to tell her he was still alive. The sea swallowed every word before it could leave his mouth.

Then voices began to bleed into the dream. At first they sounded distant and distorted, blending with the screams of battle. Gradually they became clearer. Real voices. Human voices. Close voices. The darkness around him began to fracture. Cracks spread through the sea itself. The water dissolved. The battlefield vanished. Luke disappeared. His mother disappeared. Everything shattered apart.

Jace's eyes snapped open. Pain arrived immediately. A sharp breath tore from his lungs as consciousness crashed back into him. His shoulder felt as though someone had buried a blade inside it and left it there. Every muscle in his body ached. His throat burned from saltwater. His head felt heavy. For several long seconds he simply stared upward, struggling to separate dream from reality. Wooden beams crossed the ceiling above him. Sunlight filtered through somewhere nearby. The smell of smoke, herbs, and old wood hung in the air. None of it made sense. None of it was familiar. This was not Dragonstone. This was not a ship. This was not the battlefield.

The realization struck him all at once. He was alive. And he had absolutely no idea where he was. Alarm surged through him immediately. Jace pushed himself upright far too quickly, and agony exploded through his injured shoulder. The room spun. His vision blurred. He nearly collapsed back against the mattress. Somehow he managed to remain sitting, breathing heavily while panic threatened to overtake reason. His eyes darted around the chamber. Every detail felt foreign. The furniture. The walls. The blankets covering him. Whoever had brought him here had removed parts of his ruined clothing. Fresh bandages wrapped his shoulder beneath a loose linen shirt. Someone had treated his wounds. Someone had pulled the bolt from his flesh. Someone had carried him here after the sea left him for dead.

But who? The question settled heavily in his mind. Who had found him? Who knew he was here? Did they know who he was? Did they know he was the heir to Dragonstone? Or was he merely another wounded survivor dragged from the wreckage?

His voice emerged rough, hoarse, and barely recognizable after days of unconsciousness.

"Where am I?"