Balerion had returned to King’s Landing.

It had been long years since the Black Dread had last been seen in the skies above the city, and the sight filled many a Kingslander with dread, wondering if somehow Maegor the Cruel had returned from beyond the grave to mount him once again. Alas, the rider clinging to his neck was not a dead king but a dying child.

Balerion’s shadow swept across the yards and halls of the Red Keep as he came down, his huge wings buffeting the air, to land in the inner ward by Maegor’s Holdfast. Scarcely had he touched the ground than Princess Aerea slid from his back. Even those who had known her best during her years at court scarce recognized the girl. She was near enough to naked as to make no matter, her clothing no more than rags and tatters clinging to her arms and legs. Her hair was tangled and matted, her limbs as thin as sticks. “Please!” she cried to the knights and squires and serving men who had seen her descend. Then, as they came rushing toward her, she said, “I never,” and collapsed.

Ser Lucamore Strong had been at his post on the bridge across the dry moat surrounding Maegor’s Holdfast. Shoving aside the other onlookers, he lifted the princess in his arms and carried her across the castle to Grand Maester Benifer. Later he would tell anyone who would listen that the girl was flushed and burning with fever, her skin so hot he could feel it even through the enameled scale of his armor. She had blood in her eyes as well, the knight claimed, and “there was something inside her, something moving that made her shudder and twist in my arms.” (He did not tell these tales for long, though. The next day, King Jaehaerys sent for him and commanded him to speak no more of the princess.)

The king and queen were sent for at once, but when they reached the maester’s chambers, Benifer denied them entry. “You do not want to see her like this,” he told them, “and I would be remiss if I allowed you any closer.” Guards were posted at the door to keep servants away as well. Only Septon Barth was admitted, to administer the rites for the dying. Benifer did what he could for the stricken princess, giving her milk of the poppy and immersing her in a tub of ice to bring her fever down, but his efforts were to no avail. Whilst hundreds crowded into the Red Keep’s sept to pray for her, Jaehaerys and Alysanne kept vigil outside the maester’s door. The sun had set and the hour of the bat was at hand when Barth emerged to announce that Aerea Targaryen was dead.

The princess was consigned to the flames the very next day at sunrise, her body wrapped in fine white linen from head to toe. Grand Maester Benifer, who had prepared her for the funeral pyre, looked half dead himself, Lord Redwyne confided to his sons. The king announced that his niece had died of a fever and asked the realm to pray for her. King’s Landing mourned for a few days before life resumed as before, and that was the end of it.

Mysteries remained, however. Even now, centuries later, we are no closer to knowing the truth.

More than forty men have served the Iron Throne as Grand Maester. Their journals, letters, account books, memoirs, and court calendars are our single best record of the events they witnessed, but not all of them were equally diligent. Whereas some left us volumes of letters full of empty words, never failing to note what the king ate for supper (and whether he enjoyed it), others set down no more than a half-dozen missives a year. In this regard Benifer ranks near the top, and his letters and journals provide us with detailed accounts of all that he saw, did, and witnessed whilst in service to King Jaehaerys and his uncle Maegor before him. And yet in all of Benifer’s writings there is not a single word to be found concerning the return of Aerea Targaryen and her stolen dragon to King’s Landing, nor the death of the young princess. Fortunately, Septon Barth was not so reticent, and it is to his own account we must now turn.

Barth wrote, “It has been three days since the princess perished, and I have not slept. I do not know that I shall ever sleep again. The Mother is merciful, I have always believed, and the Father Above judges each man justly…but there was no mercy and no justice in what befell our poor princess. How could the gods be so blind or so uncaring as to permit such horror? Or is it possible that there are other deities in this universe, monstrous evil gods such as the priests of Red R’hllor preach against, against whose malice the kings of men and the gods of men are naught but flies?

“I do not know. I do not want to know. If this makes me a faithless septon, so be it. Grand Maester Benifer and I have agreed to tell no one all of what we saw and experienced in his chambers as that poor child lay dying…not the king, nor the queen, nor her mother, nor even the archmaesters of the Citadel…but the memories will not leave me, so I shall set them down here. Mayhaps by the time they are found and read, men will have gained a better understanding of such evils.

“We have told the world that Princess Aerea died of a fever, and that is broadly true, but it was a fever such as I have never seen before and hope never to see again. The girl was burning. Her skin was flushed and red and when I laid my hand upon her brow to learn how hot she was, it was as if I had thrust it into a pot of boiling oil. There was scarce an ounce of flesh upon her bones, so gaunt and starved did she appear, but we could observe certain…swellings inside her, as her skin bulged out and then sunk down again, as if…no, not as if, for this was the truth of it…there were things inside her, living things, moving and twisting, mayhaps searching for a way out, and giving her such pain that even the milk of the poppy gave her no surcease. We told the king, as we must surely tell her mother, that Aerea never spoke, but that is a lie. I pray that I shall soon forget some of the things she whispered through her cracked and bleeding lips. I cannot forget how oft she begged for death.

“All the maester’s arts were powerless against her fever, if indeed we can call such a horror by such a commonplace name. The simplest way to say it is that the poor child was cooking from within. Her flesh grew darker and darker and then began to crack, until her skin resembled nothing so much, Seven save me, as pork cracklings. Thin tendrils of smoke issued from her mouth, her nose, even, most obscenely, from her nether lips. By then she had ceased to speak, though the things within her continued to move. Her very eyes cooked within her skull and finally burst, like two eggs left in a pot of boiling water for too long.

“I thought that was the most hideous thing that I should ever see, but I was quickly disabused of the notion, for a worse horror was awaiting me. That came when Benifer and I lowered the poor child into a tub and covered her with ice. The shock of that immersion stopped her heart at once, I tell myself…if so, that was a mercy, for that was when the things inside her came out…

“The things…Mother have mercy, I do not know how to speak of them…they were…worms with faces…snakes with hands…twisting, slimy, unspeakable things that seemed to writhe and pulse and squirm as they came bursting from her flesh. Some were no bigger than my little finger, but one at least was as long as my arm…oh, Warrior protect me, the sounds they made…

“They died, though. I must remember that, cling to that. Whatever they might have been, they were creatures of heat and fire, and they did not love the ice, oh no. One after another they thrashed and writhed and died before my eyes, thank the Seven. I will not presume to give them names…they were horrors.”

The first part of Septon Barth’s account ends there. But some days later he returned and resumed: