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Where did Balerion take Aerea?


Serddar
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On 6/19/2021 at 12:29 PM, Serddar said:

Considering everything we know about Aerea and Balerion, could it be that some of our characters lie about their travels to Valyria? Or, at the very least, if they actually did go to Valyria, they are lying about what happened there, and how they obtained certain items (wink wink, Euron's armor).

Agree! But still - VS armour, a magic horn, and maybe a dragon's egg... that's quite a haul. Maybe he did go to Valyria, and just got lucky not falling into one of the danger spots. That could be true for Aerea/Balerion most of the time too - they only got infected/attacked right at the end.

On 6/21/2021 at 12:51 PM, Leonardo said:

That means Aerea spent real time in Valyria, as did Balerion, and somehow made it BACK. TOGETHER. As in Aerea didn't just die along the way, Balerion and her must have bonded etc otherwise I don't see him sticking around to help her flee.

That is a really key point. I go with those who say there is no half-way house - a ridden dragon is a bonded dragon. This fits better with all we know about dragons not tolerating another rider. (I'm not sure Drogon is typical, because there's so much Dany does not know.) So, in that case, either Aerea specifically wanted to go to Valyria, just as an adventure, maybe; or she had no destination in mind and the only thought she gave Balerion was anywhere but here. Or, find me a home.

5 hours ago, Daeron the Daring said:

The other thing bothering me is where does the knowledge comes from that the horn is for controling dragons? (I actually think that's not its purpose, but I also can't guess what is it then) He either made this thing up, asked someone (but who? The warlocks?) and is being misled (or not).

Victarion's red priest said the glyphs translated as 'Dragonbinder', which is all the clue you need to connect with the old tales of controlling dragons with whips and sorcerous horns. It is a bit odd though - I mean, did all Valyrian dragon horns have the name Dragonbinder? Why did it need a name?

The glyphs also said 'blood for fire, fire for blood' - which is tricky. Very like the Targ words, but what does it mean? Maybe a blood sacrifice will bond a dragon, but a fire sacrifice will bond humans. Or something else.

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  • 9 months later...
On 4/13/2022 at 5:13 AM, LynnS said:

I'm trying to remember why I said that.

I’ve had this silly idea of geometry word use, plumb, square and level, used for navigation or construction. The use of the word elbow was once used for a square. Coordinates maybe, reminds me of a classical phrase that’s bugged me to no end. “Thus leaning on my elbow…”. Most likely means below in GRRM world.

Corruption from below taking hold of his hand? 
His corrupted hand reaching below?

Ive been looking at the map and golden company landing, 90 angle? It’s a very weak and baseless thought of mine. 

A thought is a seed planted and GRRM has mastered the subtle planting into ones subconscious. Maybe I’m reading to much into it but your quote sparked something similar in me.

Edited by Fool Stands On Giant’s Toe
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8 hours ago, Fool Stands On Giant’s Toe said:

I’ve had this silly idea of geometry word use, plumb, square and level, used for navigation or construction. The use of the word elbow was once used for a square. Coordinates maybe, reminds me of a classical phrase that’s bugged me to no end. “Thus leaning on my elbow…”. Most likely means below in GRRM world.

Corruption from below taking hold of his hand? 
His corrupted hand reaching below?

Ive been looking at the map and golden company landing, 90 angle? It’s a very weak and baseless thought of mine. 

A thought is a seed planted and GRRM has mastered the subtle planting into ones subconscious. Maybe I’m reading to much into it but your quote sparked something similar in me.

Oh!  Corruption from below.  I get it.  What an interesting thought.

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Valyria's role in the story seems to me to be something like... it's a fallen paradise full of cursed treasure. So the idea is that this place used to be the wealthiest, most advanced, sophisticated, high fantasy paradise that this world has ever seen in rememberable history. And because of that, it's full of treasures. The treasures are things that the world has mostly forgotten how to produce, like Valyrian steel swords, dragon horns, and towers that are so tall that they seem to have no end. 

People who visit Valyria never return, except potentially Euron who may or may not be lying. And except Aerea who did return but died a freakish death shortly after. So there's a question implied in there about whether or not *everybody* who has ever visited Valyria did not return. Aerea's return, however brief, gives the lie to that bit of mythology surrounding Valyria. And it seems a more grounded explanation for the origin of the mythology.

If many people who visit Valyria don't return, and if many or most people who do return from Valyria don't live long enough to tell the tale or share the treasures of knowledge about what's in Valyria or what happened there, then Valyria would understandably retain this mythology despite it not being strictly true. Because it's useful to protect people, and then there's a correlation between people who are protected and people being alive, and then a correlation between people being alive and people being able to proliferate mythology. So contradictory mythology like "Valyria is a great place to visit" would tend to die out with the people who carry it, leaving the "stay away" mythology dominant.

Valyria also seems to be rooted in asoiaf's version of the eastern-world tradition, as opposed to the western-world tradition. Valyrian society was steeped in blood magic, slavery, dragonology and even gene technology to such a level of advancement as to earn its people the characterization of playing god. Asoiaf's eastern-world tradition is said and shown to be much older than the western and its cities much grander in scale, which is noteworthy considering that many western cities are larger than life themselves. To contrast, western cultures have strong stigmas against magic and slavery. They see dragons more like a monster to be defeated than a power to be harnessed, partaking in mythologies of valiant dragonslayers like Serwyn of the Mirror Shield and looking upon Valyrians like Targaryens as something between exotic and strange. 

Mythologically speaking, maybe the idea with Valyria being full of cursed treasures and forbidden knowledge is that whatever value you think to extract from a fallen paradise, beware of it because it's forbidden fruit, being the products of the activities, values and customs that in some way or another brought their paradise to a catastrophic end. 

When I look at things that way, the uniqueness of Aerea's experience with Valyria seems to point me to a general idea of what happened to Aerea in Valyria. She's the only one in the story so far who has, with reasonable certainty, visited Valyria and returned alive. At the same time, she's the only one who, as far as we know, has suffered a death so horrific from visiting Valyria. Being boiled from the inside out by giant worms seems like a noteworthy contrast to Gerion's almost romantic status as a windblown teasure hunter who continues his hunt for Brightroar in imaginations the world over, and the tigers of Volantis whose ships merely disappeared into the mists. The implication with Aerea's situation, then, might be that her suffering is narratively proportionate to the significance of the forbidden knowledge she learned from her visit to Valyria. 

As to the reason Aerea was able to mount Balerion, the pattern of Balerion's riders seems to be that you only get to mount Balerion if when you attempt it you're genuinely content to die. So riding Balerion has some relationship with conquering the fear of death, with indifference to whether you took the bravery route or the suicidal route. That's why Aerea's story chokes me up sometimes.

Edited by Lissasalayaya
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  • 4 months later...

Glad to have stumbled upon this thread. Aerea’s disappearance and return are so fascinating.

A couple other sub topics to theorize about.

How in the world could Balerion have gotten “a jagged rent down his left side almost nine  feet long, a gaping red wound from which his blood still dripped, hot and smoking,” and the other “half healed scars that no man recalled ever having seen before” ?????

Then there is Aerea’s “I never..” which she uttered before Ser Lucamore Strong took her to GM Benifer. 

If they were missing for a whole year, could Aerea and Balerion have somehow settled in Valyria? Then things went to shit towards the one year mark? Or maybe there are inhabitants there that took Aerea captive and tortured her. And Balerion was able to rescue her while taking heavy damage? 

It’s mind blowing and I love George for these few pages of mystery.

 

 

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On 6/26/2021 at 10:16 PM, Serddar said:

Could we look at this in a different way - maybe Valyria went up in flames like a nuclear bomb or power plant would (for example), and now, the radioactivity (magic etc) is weaker than before, and trips to Valyria are safer than before (safer, not safe). 

That would explain how Euron made it out, or how someone else obtained the items, before they ended up in Euron's hands.

All the FM are mutants, like Mystique/Raven

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Aerea was an adventurous girl. Balerion did not fly non-stop. She could have gotten off and found a way back home if she had wanted to. She was not completely unwilling. She also had little control though. 
 

Why is the story significant? Because it happened to Dany with Drogon. First time rider was taken where the dragon wanted to go. It happens with wolves too. Rickon could not control his direwolf. Stranger is not an easy horse to ride.  I would think an F1 is not an easy car to drive. Viserion and Rhaegal will do the same to their riders, take them for a ride. 

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16 hours ago, Darth Sidious said:

Why is the story significant? 

The significance lies in where they went and what was there, and how such a place is untouched by our main characters and storyline.

The fact that Aerea had arm length wyrms in her body, and Balerion took noteworthy damage seems pretty significant.

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  • 4 weeks later...

In Fire & Blood, they rule out Westeros and Essos as no sightings were reported by any agents at home or abroad. And with huge Balerion being so easy to spot in the sky, they feel sure that he didn't go to either of the known continent's usual places. This seems logical enough. The septon then concludes, however, that he must have gone to Valyria - but he would've needed to fly over the free cities on the way to Valyria, which brings us back to the original problem - he wasn't spotted over the free cities. This actually rules out a lot of routes.

It does leave the sea path north, then east over the Shivering Sea, though. Much less populated and easier to remain unseen. Also, oceans are where you are more likely to find enormous beasts capable of inflicting the 'nine-foot' bleeding wound in the dragon's side. So maybe he encountered some kind of giant kraken or worse.

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  • 2 months later...

They either flew to Valyria, which is where I think they went, or Sothoryos. Sothoryos has parasitic worms, similar to what Aerea suffered. I also believe that Sothoryos is mostly inhabited by monsters because of Valyrian expiriments with cross breeding species, in an attempt to gain “the blood of the dragon”. But if the beasts of Sothoryos are of valyrian origin, then naturally it can be possible that they could be found in Valyria as well. I think what Aerea had were a Alienesqe parasite in her body. Similar to Ridley Scott’s Xenomorph, the parasite mates with Aerea via combining DNA. So the worms with faces, were actually her children in a way.

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1 hour ago, KingEuronGreyjoy said:

They either flew to Valyria, which is where I think they went, or Sothoryos. Sothoryos has parasitic worms, similar to what Aerea suffered. I also believe that Sothoryos is mostly inhabited by monsters because of Valyrian expiriments with cross breeding species, in an attempt to gain “the blood of the dragon”. But if the beasts of Sothoryos are of valyrian origin, then naturally it can be possible that they could be found in Valyria as well. I think what Aerea had were a Alienesqe parasite in her body. Similar to Ridley Scott’s Xenomorph, the parasite mates with Aerea via combining DNA. So the worms with faces, were actually her children in a way.

There's a parallel imo between the way dragons reproduce and the conceptual "mother" of the Others: self-fertilization: parthogenesis or autogamy.

There is a curious number that appears: 19 dragon skulls, 19 forts at the Wall and Craster's 19 wives who are mother, sister and daughter to each other all at once. Despite the plot point of making Craster completely gross to us with his forced incest on his own daughters, he is also one of those Night's Kingy characters: he commits the greatest sin of the Night's King, the act for which the name of the Night's King was obliterated - sacrifice to the Others. Craster may not be partnered with the "corpse queen", but he does not need to be. Gilly takes the stand-in role of the corpse queen several times. When she asks Jon to take her with him, promising to be his wife, when he wakes in an an enchanted forest. She is smuggled into the Nightfort to the southside of the Wall, with a son, and Bran fears the-thing-that-comes-in-the-night is shuffling towards them to come and get them. She is left alone for a while in a kitchen where a rat cook served a king his son in a pie. Just to give some glaring examples. But if Gilly is a stand-in corpse queen to a stand-in Night's King, then basically all of Craster's wives are stand-in corpse queens. And how would you metaphorically illustrate self-fertilization (which is basically making copies of yourself) with human characters? Via incest. Incest between humans, especially a parent with a child is the closest we come to self-copying. This is also fairly obvous a theme for the incest between Cersei and Jaime, especially from Cersei's POV (who's also a mum, and very annoyed at being defined by her sex).

We see this incest concept of course with the Targaryens and there's a whole debate between maesters whether dragons have a sex, because nobody is able to determine which sex they are unless a dragon ends up laying eggs. Other maesters hypothesize a dragon may alter sex depending on the need. The Valyrian word for dragon is gender neutral. So, there are plenty of suggestions, that dragons can perform some kind or type of self-fertilization, thus also making copies. Dany having been the sole human since after the Dance to have been able to hatch eggs succesfully, proved it was not just the heat of the fire, or the number of people dying for it (a great number of people died in the blazing fires of Summerhall), but the involvement of a female Targ is the crucial component. In particularly, Dany has to step into the fire herself. Somehow, the three dragon eggs got magically bonded to her, as if they were an extension of her ovaries, and when she stepped into the fire, this basically had an incubator effect. The eggs crack the moment she steps into the blaze. And she was hot from fever already before that (and she noticed the eggs being warm, while Jorah could not detect any  heat). This makes some sense since a real dragon mom is fire made flesh and heated all the time.

Now the noteworthy thing about Aerea's flight with Balerion is that it happens after Farman stole the clutch of three eggs, and Jaehaerys was unable to recover them. Balerion was old by then, and isn't mentioned to ever have laid his own clutch. I gather  Balerion was a male without able to revert into female, and therefore not able to self-fertilize, but he wanted to be reborn into a copy. There was an egg for him to be reborn into at Dragonstone until Farman stole it and it ended up in a place where it could not hatch. Everybody else was basically bonded to a dragon, except Aerea and she seemed the next best thing to him: a female Targaryen. And he thought that by heating her, he could provoke a self-fertilization process with her. But for that he needed heat, so that's why I do think he took her to Valyria. And it sortof worked, for all of Aerea's eggs in her ovaries hatched all at once into wormlike creatures with faces. But it also went horribly wrong, because those wormlike creatures with faces have a human component and Balerion did need an actual black-red egg to rehatch into.

 

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11 minutes ago, sweetsunray said:

Now the noteworthy thing about Aerea's flight with Balerion is that it happens after Farman stole the clutch of three eggs, and Jaehaerys was unable to recover them. Balerion was old by then, and isn't mentioned to ever have laid his own clutch. I gather  Balerion was a male without able to revert into female, and therefore not able to self-fertilize, but he wanted to be reborn into a copy. There was an egg for him to be reborn into at Dragonstone until Farman stole it and it ended up in a place where it could not hatch. Everybody else was basically bonded to a dragon, except Aerea and she seemed the next best thing to him: a female Targaryen. And he thought that by heating her, he could provoke a self-fertilization process with her. But for that he needed heat, so that's why I do think he took her to Valyria. And it sortof worked, for all of Aerea's eggs in her ovaries hatched all at once into wormlike creatures with faces. But it also went horribly wrong, because those wormlike creatures with faces have a human component and Balerion did need an actual black-red egg to rehatch into.

If this is true GRRM is even more fucked up than I realized! :bawl:

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On 6/26/2021 at 2:33 PM, Springwatch said:

Agree! But still - VS armour, a magic horn, and maybe a dragon's egg... that's quite a haul. Maybe he did go to Valyria, and just got lucky not falling into one of the danger spots

With a stiff wind, one can maybe stay reasonably cool while sailing the smoking sea.  And a stiff wind is something Euron can summon using blood magic.

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7 minutes ago, Phylum of Alexandria said:

If this is true GRRM is even more fucked up than I realized! /cdn-cgi/mirage/6dc3d3eb1a38505cabd90fb7ffd43995f14702a0df4cf40d6136ae67a48e140e/1280/https://asoiaf.westeros.org/uploads/emoticons/default_bawl.gif

The whole Aerea story needs told IMO. It’d be an awesome idea for an HBO miniseries. Like a survival/horror miniseries about her time in Valyrian. Maybe add a stranded group of sailors or something to add more characters to it. I dunno, I’d watch it.

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  • 11 months later...
On 1/9/2023 at 9:36 PM, sweetsunray said:

Now the noteworthy thing about Aerea's flight with Balerion is that it happens after Farman stole the clutch of three eggs, and Jaehaerys was unable to recover them. Balerion was old by then, and isn't mentioned to ever have laid his own clutch. I gather  Balerion was a male without able to revert into female, and therefore not able to self-fertilize, but he wanted to be reborn into a copy. There was an egg for him to be reborn into at Dragonstone until Farman stole it and it ended up in a place where it could not hatch. Everybody else was basically bonded to a dragon, except Aerea and she seemed the next best thing to him: a female Targaryen. And he thought that by heating her, he could provoke a self-fertilization process with her. But for that he needed heat, so that's why I do think he took her to Valyria. And it sortof worked, for all of Aerea's eggs in her ovaries hatched all at once into wormlike creatures with faces. But it also went horribly wrong, because those wormlike creatures with faces have a human component and Balerion did need an actual black-red egg to rehatch into.

 

Such a sucker for theories like this.  

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