Waking up in the Valyrian Hold Pre-Doom

[Noxalia]

Like most nerds, I had always imagined what it would be like to be isekai'd.

Most people picture Truck kun barrelling toward them at an intersection loss of composure, maybe a heroic shove to save someone, and then bam new world, new life. Dramatic. Cinematic. The kind of death that makes for a good cold open.

Not me.

One moment I was three episodes deep into the newest season of House of the Dragon, half asleep on my couch with a bag of crisps balanced on my chest, and the next nothing. A void. Then pain.



I woke up with the kind of headache that makes you wish you hadn't woken up at all. It felt like someone had taken sixteen years of memories smells, sounds, emotions, lessons, names, faces and crammed them into my skull with all the delicacy of a sledgehammer. My vision swam. My stomach turned. I gripped the silk sheets beneath me



Silk sheets.



I bolted upright. The room around me was enormous. Vaulted ceilings carved from pale stone stretched overhead, inlaid with veins of gold that caught the morning light pouring through arched windows. Tapestries depicting dragons in flight hung from the walls, their threads shimmering with what I instinctively knew was actual spellwork. The air smelled of jasmine and salt ocean salt carried on a warm breeze that drifted through a balcony I didn't remember owning.



Because this wasn't my room. This wasn't my life.



The memories came in waves and gods, they came perfectly. Every single one crystalline, razor edged, filed away with an inhuman precision that made my old human brain feel like a sieve by comparison. I could remember the exact weave pattern of the dress I wore to my nameday feast three years past. The precise number of stitches in the banner that hung above the great hall. The flavour of every wine served at every dinner for the last decade, catalogued and cross referenced without effort.



Grand Archives. That's what the CYOA had called the perk. A memory so perfect it rivalled the great libraries themselves. And now it was mine which meant sixteen years of someone else's life had been recorded in flawless detail and shoved into my consciousness all at once.



No wonder my head was splitting.



A childhood spent in soaring spires of dragonstone and sorcery. A mother's voice, sharp and proud, drilling me in the fourteen flames of High Valyrian magic until I could recite them backwards. My father's calloused hand guiding mine along a practice blade and the shock on his weapons master's face when I disarmed him for the first time at age nine. The burning liquid in my veins that was not quite blood, pulsing with something ancient and divine. A name, spoken a thousand times in a thousand different tones reverence, affection, command.







Lady Aurion Varezys.



I knew that name. I knew it because I had made it. Sitting at my desk at two in the morning, clicking through a fan made CYOA, carefully allocating points and agonizing over builds. Human. High Valyrian. Youth. Beautiful. Major Lord. Fons Vitae. Master of Arms. Grand Archives. Mysteries of Spellforging and Dragonlore. I remembered selecting each option with the gleeful precision of a min maxer who'd found the perfect synergy.



I had built her. And now I was her.



And I was sixteen.



That part hit differently when you were actually living it. In the CYOA it had been a narrative choice Youth: You are a teenager, not quite an adult but getting there but in practice it meant inhabiting a body that still hadn't quite finished growing into itself, despite all the other gifts layered on top of it. A body that was already devastating and would only become moreso, but that still bore the faint softness of adolescence around the edges.



The absurdity of it threatened to overwhelm me. I pressed my palms against my temples and breathed slowly, deliberately until the world stopped spinning. The headache was receding, the two sets of memories settling into something almost coherent. I was still me. My thoughts, my awareness, my knowledge of a world that hadn't been written yet in this reality. But I was also her. Her muscle memory gods, the muscle memory, years of weapons training that my Master of Arms talent had turned into something bordering on prodigious her instincts, her knowledge of sorcery and dragonriding and spellcraft and the thousand small cruelties of Valyrian politics.



And it was that last bit the politics that turned my blood cold.



Well. Turned my elixir cold. Because that was the other thing.



I pressed my thumb against my forearm, hard enough to leave a mark, and watched with morbid fascination as the indent filled back in within seconds, the skin smoothing over as though it had never been touched. The Fons Vitae. The divine blessing I'd selected from the Valyrian Gods section, the one that had replaced my blood with something far more primordial. The elixir of life flowed through every vein, every capillary, saturating every fibre of my being. It granted me agelessness. It granted me regeneration that would make Deadpool weep with envy. And if I were to bleed if someone were to collect what spilled from my wounds a single shot glass of it could restore a dying man to perfect health. A full cup could grant near immortality.



I was, in the most literal sense possible, a walking fountain of miracles.



The CYOA had called it nerfed. I shuddered to think what the full version looked like.



But all of that the perfect memory, the combat talent, the divine blood, the spellforging knowledge sitting in my mind like a textbook I'd already memorized all of it paled in comparison to the situation I found myself in.



Because I knew exactly where I was in the timeline.



One week ago, Lord Aenar Targaryen had stood before the assembled dragonlords of the Freehold and spoken of his daughter's prophecy. Daenys the Dreamer, they called her though not kindly. She had wept before her father, begging him to flee, swearing on her dragon's fire that she had seen the Doom. The destruction of Valyria. The death of everything.



And I Aurion had laughed.



I remembered it now with sickening, perfect clarity curse the Grand Archives for that. Every detail preserved in amber. Standing among the other lords and ladies of the forty families, my lip curled in aristocratic disdain, dismissing the girl's ramblings as fever dreams or political maneuvering. House Varezys wasn't one of the top tier families not Belaerys or Qherys but we were significant enough to be present, powerful enough to have a voice. A Major House, with lands and armies and a dragon of our own. And I had used that voice to mock a frightened girl telling the truth.



The memory made me sick. But it also gave me something useful: a cover. Everyone had laughed. No one would think twice about my sudden change of heart if I framed it correctly.



Twelve years. That's what I had. Twelve years before the Fourteen Flames erupted in unison, before the very peninsula that housed the greatest civilization this world had ever known ceased to exist. Before every spell, every dragon, every library, every bloodline that hadn't fled was reduced to ash and memory.



Driven By Prophecy. That's what the CYOA had labelled this motivation. At the time, picking it had felt like flavour text. Now it felt like a noose around my neck or a fire under my feet.



The Targaryens would escape to Dragonstone. The Velaryons and Celtigars would survive through their existing island holdings. Everyone else? Dead. Erased. The greatest magical catastrophe in recorded history, and the fools around me were too arrogant to see it coming.



But I wasn't a fool. Not anymore. And I wasn't going to do what the Targaryens did either flee at the last moment to a cold, miserable rock barely large enough to house a single keep, scrambling to preserve what scraps they could carry. No. I had twelve years. I had perfect memory, mastery of spellforging, knowledge of dragonlore, divine blood, and the administrative skills to manage an entire domain.



I intended to use every advantage I had.



I swung my legs off the bed, my bare feet meeting cool marble, and crossed the chamber to the dressing room.







The mirror was floor length, framed in dark iron wrought into the shape of coiling serpents. I stood before it and allowed myself a moment just a moment to simply look.



The girl staring back at me was devastating.



Tall for sixteen easily five foot nine and still growing with the kind of figure that was already drawing lingering glances at feasts and would only become more dangerous with time. Long legs, a narrow waist, the early bloom of womanhood shaped by years of martial training into something both graceful and lethal. My skin was pale but luminous, almost porcelain, with the faintest shimmer beneath the surface that spoke of the elixir saturating my tissues. Immaculately clean, too another perk. The Hygiene blessing meant that despite living in an era where bathing was a weekly luxury for most, I looked perpetually fresh, my skin clear, my hair gleaming, never a speck of grime or imperfection to be found.



My hair fell past my shoulders in a cascade of platinum white, straight as poured silver with the barest wave at the ends the unmistakable mark of High Valyrian blood. It caught the morning light like spun moonbeams.



My face was angular, already settling into the sharp aristocratic beauty it would carry for the next several centuries assuming the Fons Vitae worked as advertised, and I had no reason to doubt it. High cheekbones, a jaw that would sharpen further with age, full lips set in a natural expression that somehow managed to look both serene and vaguely threatening. One eye the right was a deep, vivid amethyst, the colour of old Valyria.



The left was hidden.



A band of black silk wrapped across my face, covering the eye beneath. My Mark the imperfection that came with the build. The eye itself wasn't blind, not exactly. It was wrong. Milky white where it should have been purple, with something shifting in its depths that made people uncomfortable when they saw it. A soothsayer had once told my mother it was a "god's thumbprint" the visible sign of the divine blessing that ran through my veins. Whether that was true or not, the blindfold was easier than explaining it a hundred times a day.



I dressed with the efficiency of someone who had done it a thousand times because Aurion had. Black, mostly. A structured halter gown that left my shoulders bare, the fabric rich and dark as midnight. Gold chains draped across my collarbone and hips, an affectation of House Varezys we wore our wealth openly, a declaration that we had enough to spare for mere decoration. Long black gloves extended to my forearms, hiding the faint luminescence of my skin where the elixir ran closest to the surface. A fitted choker circled my throat not merely decorative, but a ward against poison, spellforged three generations ago by my great grandmother.



Spellforging. The knowledge sat in my mind like a master craftsman's lifetime of experience how to fold magic into steel, how to inscribe runes that would hold for millennia, how to create glass candles that could peer across continents. Valyrian steel, Dragonbinder horns, artifacts of terrible power I knew how to make them all. Combined with my Grand Archives ensuring I would never forget a single formula or technique, I was essentially a walking repository of magical craftsmanship that the world would lose forever when the Doom came.



Unless I saved it first.



I regarded my reflection one final time. Young. Beautiful. Dangerous. Prepared.



Good. I had work to do.







The corridors of the Varezys manse were grand in the way only Valyrian architecture could manage soaring arches of pale stone, pillars carved with reliefs depicting our house's history, floors polished to such a mirror shine that my reflection walked beneath me like a ghost. Through the archways, I could see the city beyond spires and towers reaching toward a sky perpetually painted in shades of amber and gold, the Freehold in all its terrible glory.



My hand drifted to the practice sword I'd strapped to my hip out of habit Aurion's habit, but mine now too. The Master of Arms talent meant that even at sixteen, I moved with a blade like someone who'd been training for decades. My weapons master had called me a prodigy. What he didn't know was that it wasn't genius it was a cosmic cheat code. Every technique demonstrated to me once was absorbed perfectly by the Grand Archives and executed with a natural talent that put me in the same breath as legends. Jaime Lannister. Maegor the Cruel. Daemon Blackfyre.



I'd never tested it against anyone truly dangerous in this world, of course. But the muscle memory hummed beneath my skin like a coiled spring, and some deep part of me knew that if someone drew steel on me, they would regret it.



Twelve years. Enjoy it while it lasts.



I caught one of my handmaidens in the corridor a young woman named Ryllae, who startled at my early rising.



"My lady! I wasn't expecting shall I prepare your morning "



"Send for Taevon Laertalor," I said, cutting her off with a tone that brooked no argument. "Tell him I require his presence in my study immediately. And bring tea the Lysene blend."



"At once, my lady."



I swept past her without another word, making my way through the familiar unfamiliar halls toward the study that Aurion's memories told me was mine. A large room lined with bookshelves, a desk of dark wood dominating the center, maps of the known world pinned to one wall. I settled into the chair behind the desk and waited.



The tea arrived first. The steward arrived fifteen minutes later.



Taevon Laertalor was tall, lean, and sharp featured, with the silver gold hair of Valyrian blood and eyes like pale jade. He moved with the quiet efficiency of a man who had spent thirty years turning numbers into power. He had served House Varezys since before I was born, and his loyalty was beyond question.



He entered with a bow precise, measured. "You summoned me, my lady?"



"I did." I set my teacup down carefully, watching the dark liquid ripple. "Tell me, Taevon do we own any islands? Far from both the western and eastern continents. Remote. Difficult to find."



If the question surprised him a sixteen year old girl asking about obscure property holdings at dawn he didn't show it. That was one of the things Aurion's memories told me to appreciate about him. He simply tilted his head, those jade eyes going distant as he rifled through his knowledge of our holdings.



"We do, my lady," he said after a moment. "A single island, roughly a thousand kilometres southwest of Valyria, situated in the middle of an otherwise empty stretch of sea. Well beyond any established shipping lanes."



"Go on."



"It is, by design, nearly impossible to find by accident. The surrounding waters are riddled with reefs. Fog banks settle over the area with unusual regularity some suspect sorcerous origin, though it has never been confirmed. The currents shift unpredictably; only our house navigators possess charts accurate enough to make the approach safely." He paused. "The island itself is approximately sixty two thousand acres. Uninhabited, but surveyed some forty years ago. Arable land, freshwater springs, natural harbour on the southern coast. It was acquired by your great grandmother as a contingency holding, though it has never been developed."



A contingency holding. My great grandmother had been a pragmatist. I made a mental note to honour her memory preferably by not dying in an apocalypse she'd apparently half anticipated.



"That will do nicely." I leaned forward, steepling my fingers a gesture that probably looked slightly ridiculous on a teenager, but Taevon's expression didn't waver. "What is our current population of smallfolk across all Varezys lands? And our standing military force?"



His eyebrow rose barely a twitch, but my Grand Archives caught and catalogued it. "Approximately one hundred and seventy six thousand smallfolk reside within our territories. Our standing army consists of ten thousand infantry and three thousand crossbowmen."



"Good. Here is what I need from you, Taevon, and I need you to listen carefully."



He straightened almost imperceptibly. "Of course, my lady."



"Begin the process of liquidating all Varezys properties and holdings on the mainland. All of them. Every estate, every warehouse, every vineyard, every mine. Convert everything to liquid assets."



Silence. For the first time in the sixteen years Aurion had known him, Taevon Laertalor looked genuinely stunned. I didn't blame him. To most Valyrians, land in the Freehold was the most valuable thing in existence. Selling it all was tantamount to madness.



"My lady "



"I'm not finished." I held up a hand. "Use those assets to commission or purchase five hundred galleon class transport vessels. Begin immediately prioritize shipyards in Volantis and the coastal free cities if our own yards cannot meet the timeline. Simultaneously, begin spreading word among our smallfolk, our soldiers, our mages, our builders anyone sworn to House Varezys. Tell them we are relocating. All of us. To the island."



"My lady, the cost alone "



"Will be irrelevant when every coin left on this peninsula is buried under molten rock." My voice was calm. Steady. The voice of someone who had already done the math and whose perfect memory meant she never had to do it twice. "I am not asking, Taevon. I am telling you. Every property we leave behind will be worthless. Every holding. Every stone. Ash. All of it."



He stared at me. I could see the questions burning behind his eyes you are sixteen, you laughed at the Targaryen girl a week ago, what has changed, have you gone mad? but he did not ask them. Whatever else Taevon was, he was observant. He had watched me grow up with an uncanny talent for arms, a memory that bordered on supernatural, and blood that shimmered gold when it caught the light. He knew I was not an ordinary girl. He knew there were things about House Varezys about me that defied easy explanation.



"I want volunteers only," I continued. "No one is to be forced. But make the offer generous. Passage, land grants on the island, guaranteed employment in the construction of our new settlement. For soldiers, continued service with increased pay. For mages, access to new workshops and resources. Make it appealing."



"And our vaults?" he asked quietly. "The libraries?"



"Everything comes with us." I let the weight of that statement settle. "Every tome, every scroll, every artifact, every spellforging schematic, every record. Every glass candle, every ingot of Valyrian steel stock, every dragon egg in our vaults. If it contains knowledge or power, it boards a ship. I will not leave a single formula or historical text behind."



My Grand Archives held copies of everything I'd ever read, of course every book in our library was already preserved in perfect detail within my mind. But minds could be lost. Books could be shared. And I intended to build something that would outlast even me.



Taevon was quiet for a long moment. Then he bowed deeper than before, deeper than protocol demanded for a lord's steward addressing his lady.



"It will be done, my lady. I will have preliminary logistics on your desk within the week."



"Thank you, Taevon. That will be all."



He turned to leave, then paused at the door. "My lady... may I ask one question?"



"You may."



"The Targaryen girl. Daenys." His voice was careful, measured. "You laughed at her prophecy with the rest of them. What changed?"



I met his gaze with my single visible eye and smiled thin, humourless, edged with something ancient peering out from a young face.



"I had a dream of my own. And unlike Daenys, I don't intend to merely flee."



He held my gaze for a heartbeat longer, then nodded once and departed.



I turned my chair toward the window, looking out over the gleaming spires of the Freehold. Somewhere out there, the Fourteen Flames smouldered beneath the earth, patient and inevitable. A hundred thousand people were living their lives in blissful ignorance eating, working, loving, fighting never knowing the ground beneath them was a bomb with a twelve year fuse.



I couldn't save them all. I couldn't even warn them. A sixteen year old girl screaming about prophecy would be dismissed even faster than Daenys had been. But I had something no one else in this world possessed: perfect knowledge of what was coming, the skills to prepare for it, and blood that could fuel miracles.



I pressed my thumbnail against my wrist harder than before and watched a bead of golden tinged liquid well up before the wound sealed itself in seconds. The elixir of life. One drop could fuel a dozen spells. A shot glass could heal a dying man. A cup could grant centuries of life. And my heart produced it endlessly, pumping it through veins that would never age, never falter, never stop.



I was sixteen years old, functionally immortal, and sitting on the knowledge of an apocalypse.



Twelve years to build something that would survive the end of the world.



I intended to use every single day.







## Four Months Later Varezys Harbour



The morning of our departure dawned grey and gold, the sun fighting through a bank of low clouds that hung over the harbour like a burial shroud. Fitting, I thought. We were, in a sense, attending a funeral just one that hadn't happened yet.



The harbour stretched before me in organised chaos. Five hundred galleons five hundred lined the docks and filled the bay beyond, their masts a forest of dark wood against the overcast sky. Each vessel flew the banner of House Varezys: a silver serpent coiled around a black flame on a field of deep violet. Their holds were packed to capacity grain, livestock, tools, building materials, seeds for every crop that grew in Valyrian soil. Crates upon crates of spellforging equipment: the specialised crucibles, the runescribing tools, the carefully preserved samples of dragonfire needed to work Valyrian steel. Glass candles wrapped in silk and packed in sand. Dragon eggs three of them, pulled from our deepest vaults nestled in warming containers enchanted to maintain the precise temperature needed to keep them viable.



And books. Gods, the books. Every scroll, every tome, every record our house had accumulated across centuries of existence. My Grand Archives held perfect copies of them all, but redundancy was survival. If something happened to me unlikely, given the regeneration, but not impossible the physical texts would endure.



I stood on the elevated stone platform at the harbour's edge, watching my people board the final ships. Ninety thousand souls had answered the call more than half our smallfolk. Seven thousand infantry in their dark armour. Twenty six hundred crossbowmen with their heavy Valyrian steel tipped bolts. Mages, scholars, healers, smiths, farmers, sailors, children an entire civilization in miniature, trusting a sixteen year old to lead them somewhere safe.



The weight of that trust would have crushed me if I'd let it. Instead, I filed the feeling away in my Archives and kept my spine straight.



Behind me, the ground trembled.



I didn't need to turn around. I could feel her a warmth at the back of my mind, a presence as familiar as my own heartbeat. The bond between dragon and rider was not something words could adequately describe. It was instinct and emotion and something older than language, a thread of fire connecting two souls across the space between them. My Dragonsblood sang in response, the mild heat resistance that came with the trait making the wave of warmth from her approach feel like a pleasant bath rather than a furnace blast.



Vaelithar.



She announced herself with a sound that was half growl, half purr a rumble so deep it vibrated in my chest and rattled the stones beneath my feet. I turned, and despite having seen her a hundred times through Aurion's memories, the sight still stole my breath.



She was enormous. An adult dragon in the fullest sense comparable to Caraxes at the height of his power, her serpentine body stretching over a hundred feet from horned skull to barbed tail. Her scales were white not the dull white of bone, but the luminous, shifting white of moonstone, catching and refracting light into subtle prismatic patterns that danced across her hide. Those scales were armoured, too denser and harder than any natural dragon's, layered like fortress walls. I had watched arrows shatter against her flanks without her so much as flinching. No scorpion bolt would find purchase on her hide only the one in a million shot through the eye could threaten her, and good luck hitting a target that moved like she did.



Her eyes were sapphire blue, deep and ancient and knowing, fixed on me with an intelligence that went beyond mere animal cunning.



But it was her form that truly set her apart from every other dragon in the Freehold.



Four legs. Thick, powerful, muscled like a great cat's she stood on all fours where other Valyrian dragons walked on two legs and used their wings as forelegs. Her claws were the length of longswords, digging furrows in the stone beneath her with casual, unconscious strength. She moved like a predator low, fluid, dangerous.



And four wings. Two primary vast and powerful, spanning perhaps two hundred feet when fully unfurled, the membranes pearlescent, shimmering between white and pale blue and the faintest blush of violet depending on the angle of light. And a secondary pair, smaller, attached further back along her body, granting her a manoeuvrability in the air that no two winged dragon could dream of matching. She could hover. She could turn on a wingtip. She could stop mid dive and reverse direction so sharply it would give a pursuing dragon whiplash.



Eight limbs in total. The Varezys mutation generations of dragonlore and selective breeding producing something that bore as much resemblance to a common dragon as a direwolf bore to a street mutt. Some of the other houses called her an abomination. I called her perfect.



And she didn't even need a mate to produce more. Somewhere in the hold of the largest galleon, wrapped in enchanted warming blankets, sat two eggs she had laid six months ago. Asexual reproduction another gift of the bloodline. Our dragon line would never die out from lack of breeding partners.



"Easy, girl," I murmured, pressing my palm against the warm scales of her jaw as she lowered her massive head toward me. A sound like a great cat's purr resonated through her throat, vibrating up my arm. The heat of her was immense but my Dragonsblood drank it in like sunlight. "Long flight today. Save your energy."



She huffed, a jet of warm air washing over me, and I took that as agreement.



I turned one last time to look at the city behind me.



The spires of the Freehold glittered in the distance, beautiful and doomed. Somewhere in those towers, other lords and ladies were going about their days attending feasts, forging alliances, playing their political games never knowing that in twelve years, all of it would be gone. The greatest civilization the world had ever known, reduced to legend and ruin and a handful of refugees scattered across the Narrow Sea.



I felt a pang of something not quite grief, not quite guilt. Something in between. I was sixteen. I should have been worrying about nameday celebrations and which lordling was making eyes at me across the feast hall. Instead, I was orchestrating the largest evacuation in my house's history based on foreknowledge I couldn't explain to anyone.



Driven By Prophecy. The CYOA had listed it as a motivation. It hadn't mentioned how heavy it would feel.



I couldn't save them all. I had made my peace with that in the quiet hours of the night when sleep wouldn't come hours I spent reviewing everything in my Archives, planning, scheming, running numbers. I couldn't save the millions who would die. I couldn't even save the great workings woven into the very stones of the Freehold that required the Fourteen Flames themselves to sustain. Some magic would die with Valyria no matter what anyone did.



But I had saved what I could. Ninety thousand lives. A library that would endure. A spellforge that would keep working. Dragon eggs that would hatch. A bloodline my bloodline, with its elixir and its perfect memory and its divine blessing that would survive and grow and remember.



It would have to be enough.



I climbed onto Vaelithar's back, settling into the saddle with practiced ease, my fingers finding the familiar grips. The Dragonlore in my mind hummed with quiet satisfaction I knew every pressure point, every subtle shift of weight that communicated commands to a dragon. I was not merely a rider. I was a master of this art.



She shifted beneath me, all eight limbs coiling, four wings spreading wide



"Take us home," I whispered.



She launched into the sky with a sound like thunder cracking the world open, and the Freehold fell away beneath us. Ahead, the open sea stretched to the horizon vast, blue, and full of possibility. Below, five hundred ships began to move, their sails catching the wind, turning their prows toward the southwest. Toward a hidden island surrounded by reefs and fog, waiting to become the foundation of something new.



Toward the future.



I didn't look back.

 

[theoretisch cool]

interesting.