Part 1

"The Dothraki sea..."

Viserys had never seen a expanse of land so extense, so imposing. Sitting astride the high and short saddle, he thought that no plain of the Seven Kingdoms would do justice to the one in which he stood, where the tall, lustrous grass seems to dance softly with the breeze like a lover.

Although he had not seen more... Having spent his seven first years of life locked behind the thick walls of the Red Keep in King's Landing by order of his father, the man that others called "The Mad King", and the other fifteen fleeing from his sister from the insatiable wrath of the Usurper through the nine Free Cities, seeking allies that were fading like the rays of the moon in the morning and praying for their safety in the night... He had never had the opportunity to see such beauty, to feel such peace.

He never knew how deprived of freedom he had been until he first entered the Dothraki Sea. There were no oppressive walls, no narrow streets, no squares full of toothless prostitutes and ill beggars, and no stone arches or roofs or courtyards that shrank the sky. There was only him and his silvery mare...

"Anna Khal!"

... And the savages, of course.

His husband —how much he despised to call him his husband— rode before him, guiding the khalasar  through the sea. They were married under the fake gods that the savages worshiped, not the Valyrians nor the Seven, and since the "faithful" night of their wedding, sheltered by the warm winds of the desert, naked under the crimson skies of the dusk, they had been joined while their lives lasted. A shiver crossed his spine: since that shameful, execrable might, it had passed almost a moon, and the Khal hadn't called him to his tent. 'It is better like that', he thought, while he tangled his thin fingers between his mare's pale mane. A shiver crossed his body every time the memory of his decision came across his mind: He had agreed to be a wife and to be bedded by a man for the feverish dream of taking back a stolen, tainted, backstabbing kingdom. An undeserving kingdom. 

'Was it worth it to sell the last piece of his dignity for that? To become lesser than a vile Beggar King, to become the whore of a disrespectful savage?'

The answer was behind him, he remembered himself. Daenerys was riding not so far from him, dressed in a coarse cotton tunic and with her hair in a braid. Seeing her with that attire, surrounded by that people, Viserys knew that neither of them belonged there, riding alongside people who were more animal than human, wearing poorly tailored clothes and lowering themselves to a status worse than that of the former prostitute Doreah or that of the two copper-skinned girls that Khal Drogo had taken prisoner after defeating their respective khalasars. Their place was at home, in the kingdoms that the Usurper had taken from their rightful ruler after killing his brother and let that the vipers he had for minions shedded the blood of the other dragons. Rhaenys... Aegon... Elia...  

His face became bitter and his eyes shone like they were possessed by the wild fire of his hatred. He wouldn't bury those names in the past until its owners were avenged, until the blood was spilled in the same horrible way theirs was spilled. 'A defenceless woman with two defenceless kids, trapped inside a castle with a traitor dressed with the cloak of a protector... And a defenceless woman in the middle of a storm, giving her last breath to her last kid'. How... How was he going to forget?

How was he going to forgive?

Viserys was a dragon —"the last dragon", he said to himself—, and as long as the flame of life lived in his chest, he was not going to allow the traitors of his family to escape unscathed, unpunished.

Unburnt.

Becoming the "consort" of a Dothraki Khal came with duties and responsibilities, but that night Viserys hadn't enough energy to fulfil any of them. Specially, taking part of a feast near the fire, full of blood, nasty food and the sight of fornication.

Still, he was sat at a place far from the attention of most of the savages, surrounded by his future army and a quiet ser Mormont. Daenerys, Doreah and the two girls from rival khalasars were at the shelter of their tents, maybe sleeping, partially isolated of the obscenities that there could be showed and could have suffered otherwise. He had been faking a smile with the same conviction some men fake their wedding vows when Qotho, one of Drogo's bloodriders —or minions, as he prefers to call them in his imagination— handed him a leathery bottle with a weird, milky liquid floating inside. 

"It's fermented mare's milk, my lord", explained ser Jorah to his distrustful gesture, "A traditional Dothraki alcoholic-beverage". Viserys smelled it and he felt like he was going to puke.

"Tell him I don't want it", he commanded in a rough voice, but the knight denied, red of nervousness.

"But my prin... My King and Khal", he corrected himself quickly, "It would be seen as a sign of disrespect".

He felt tempted to laugh at his face, but he had no strength for that. Instead, he said with a straight face:

"See... I don't care, Mormont. Tell him some short of excuse or tell him nothing: I am more willing to drink my own blood and sweat that that"

He got up, getting the attention of the barbarians surrounds him: "Better, tell them I am going to rest. Today's ride was a long one, indeed, and I have no remaining desire to waste my last energies and my sleep hours for this shit".

Before waiting for a response, he left his place in front of the fire and quickly walked though the camp they had improvised some hours ago to his tent. 

Inside, he untied the tight laces of his old riding boots and throw them haphazardly onto the packed dirt floor; with a sense of liberation, he got rid of the wool suit, the pants and the belt that held them to his narrow hip, and after removing the dirt and the sweat of his body with a piece of clean cloth and the water of a basin, he put on a thin robe and lay down the mat.

He closed the eyelids and waited in the warm darkness until the chants and the grunts became less audible to began to fall into the arms of a fragile sleep...

A sleep so fragile that the sound of someone entering inside his tents without permission make him wake up, angered.

"For the sake of the Seven Hells", Viserys grunted, covering his sore eyes with his forearm, "Mormont, I am not going to..."

"No... I'm not"   

He wouldn't have mistaken that voice...

'For the Seven Gods... Why me'

The Khal had came to visit him. 

Author's note:

Hello, is it me you are looking for?.jpg

After almost a mont of not publishing anything of this two (except Gangsta, I finally return from the lands of the procrastination while in a reaaaaally brief break from my academic duties to give you something decent and, I hope, long enough. 

I can't promise I will came back soon with this or with Gangsta...

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R. M. Elster.