TBOV: Chapter Twenty-Two: Spring Sorrow

Chapter Twenty-Two: Spring Sorrow

“Valyrian steel was always costly, but it became considerably more so when there was no more Valyria, and the secret of its making were lost.”

―George R. R. Martin

…

Old men ought to dream of hearth‑fires and mulled wine, yet most nights, Vaegon Targaryen dreamed of fouler things. In those dreams he heard chains grind, saw scales ripple beneath black stone, tasted ash upon his tongue—taste enough to wake him every time, coughing like some bleary rook in the rookery.

Tonight, though, was no dream. Tonight the forge‑hall beat like a second heart beneath Dragonstone, and Vaegon walked its corridors with the slow, stiff gait of a man whose knees had forgotten spring. Above, storms clawed the turrets; below, hotter winds howled through slag‑cracked vents, smelling of brimstone and myrrh. The air thrummed with heat and power, an ancient and malignant alchemy that turned his old bones to aching lead.

Dragonstone had always been a grim fortress, but since the young prince’s occupation, it had become something else entirely—an edifice pregnant with mysteries of a darker sort. Gone were Rhaenyra’s banners and faded remnants of Daemon’s decadence, replaced now by symbols older and far stranger: glyphs carved upon stones blackened by dragonfire, braziers smoldering with herbs whose names Vaegon had nearly forgotten.

They had taken Rhaenyra’s old wine cellars and hollowed them wider, chiselling fresh chimneys through basalt ribs. Where once the princess had kept honeyed wine, Aemond Targaryen built the forge. Thick pillars lined the hall, soot-stained and scarred. 

The prince was waiting when the Archmaester arrived, stripped to breeches and boots, long silver hair braided roughly to keep it from his face. The sapphire in his ruined eye drank the furnace‑glare and threw it back tenfold. He did not look like Baelon’s grandson, save for the jut of the jaw, and the glow of skin sheened with sweat and soot, and stretched over muscles corded like a bowstring.

Between two anvils lay the thing they meant to tame—a length of heartwood cut from a weirwood tree that had long grown twisted with a rusted spike of star‑iron hammered into its trunk. The trunk had swallowed the poison metal and lived, though from what Aemond spoke of the Children they would have called it blighted. In the furnace’s throat, that wood glowed a sullen violet. Where red sap should bead, molten motes of iron wept instead, hissing that blue shade of evening when they met the coals.

Vaegon lifted the visor of his spectacles and let the sight prickle his eyes. “Forgive my tardiness,” he rasped. “Shall we begin.”

Aemond hefted the hammer. “Yes.”

He drew the billet from the fire. Every stroke rang double—first the honest clang of hammer on the heated grain, then an after‑note, thinner, like crystal splintering. Layer by layer he folded the glowing stave, just as the smiths of old fold the red and the black to birth damask. Sweat steamed from his arms; each breath came silver‑white in the furnace’s mad blue light.

Vaegon marked the pattern blooming—waves inside waves, black‑striped and shimmering, as if the blade‑to‑be already dreamt of winds high above the Narrow Sea. A song hidden in steel, he thought, and only those with dragons for ears may ever hear it.

“Keep the flux light,” Aemond warned calmly as Vaegon doused the glowing wood with powdered dragonglass. “Too much will chill the grain.”

Vaegon obeyed, and for a time the hall filled with nothing but the liturgy of iron and flame. When at last the billet lay flat and bright upon the anvil, Vaegon spoke again. “You have not told him.”

The hammer paused, raised like judgement. “He is not ready.”

“Still?” Vaegon gave a thin smile. 

Aemond’s hammer fell again, punctuating his thoughts. “Daeron’s heart is good,” he said, almost tender before setting the billet back into the fire. “But he remains innocent. Naïve, even. He has yet to gain more than a surface understanding of reality, or even human nature. Until he comprehends such subtleties, prying open ancient doors of this nature would only be foolish.”

Vaegon rubbed his knuckles thoughtfully, joints popping softly. “Is that why you gave him Storm’s End? Cruel, but clever. Nothing hardens the heart quicker.”

Aemond doesn’t respond.

Another hour bled away beneath the hammer. The blade finally took its shape—broad‑shouldered, leaf‑tapered, patterned like night tide under a hungry moon. It glowed incandescent, swirling patterns shifting as if alive, as if it breathed upon its own accord.

Setting the blade to the side, Vaegon watched as Aemond nodded at the Speakers in black lingering in the corner of the room. The prisoner they held was brought forth—heels scraping stone, his wrists scored raw by iron. Essosi, judging by the dusky skin and the guttural curses he spat. One of the sailors, perhaps; certainly a rebel. He fought them until the final moment, strength born of terror, but the Speakers pinned him against a stone pilaster streaked dark with older offerings.

Aemond held the newborn blade aloft. The tip smoked blue; the fuller glowed sullen red. “Balerion,” he intoned in the old tongues, “Father of Dragons, I bind this offering to your service.”

One thrust—clean, deliberate—straight through the prisoner’s breast, until unpolished guard kissed flesh. Blood met the blade with a shriek like torn parchment; steam burst red‑violet, showering sparks that smelled of rust and myrtle. The captive shrieked then sagged. His eyes—brown, frightened, very human—clouded, then went still.

Vaegon felt the pull then, the wrench behind the eyes that comes when a soul is unmoored. A faint filament of light—some would call it ghost‑fire—drew from corpse to steel, sank, and was gone. The forge fell silent enough that Vaegon heard his own heart laboring in his chest.

Aemond withdrew the sword. No smoke clung to it now; the metal—wood no longer—shone a deep dusk hue, as if twilight had been quenched in it. Vaegon reached, compelled, but stopped short. The air around the blade was cold, impossibly so, and whisper‑thin frost feathered the anvil where a drop of blood had fallen; all the heat and light surrounding the weapon had been drawn in and trapped within the steel.

“The first since the Doom,” the archmaester murmured, reverence and dread wrestling in his throat.

“Indeed,” Aemond answered softly. He turned the blade, letting runes of swirling grain catch the furnace‑glare. Faces seemed to writhe inside the metal, angry and afraid. Perhaps only Vaegon saw them; perhaps Aemond heard their screams instead.

“Have you thought of a name?” the archmaester asked.

The prince was silent for a long while. “Spring Sorrow,” he said in the end.

Vaegon bowed his head. The forge‑fires guttered, suddenly small, as if humbled by what they had midwifed. Somewhere high above, a distant roar echoed through Dragonstone’s chimneys: Vhagar restless in her lair, sensing birth.

This blade marks the beginning of a new age, Vaegon thought. An age of forging, and of unmaking. His knees ached, and yet a bright, bleak anticipation sang in his blood. Aemond wiped the steel clean upon a cloth of black silk, then offered his arm to the old man.

“Come, great-uncle,” he said. “There is other work waiting—and dawn will find us soon.”