A Dance with Dragons — Tyrion VII
The cog Selaesori Qhoran wallows south with a red priest aboard; Moqorro reads Tyrion in his fires: dragons old and young, true and false, bright and dark.
The chapter retold
Tyrion, Jorah and Penny board the cog Selaesori Qhoran bound south for Meereen, sharing the deck with a red priest named Moqorro whose fires, he claims, show him things worth knowing. He reads Tyrion in the flames and offers a prophecy dense enough to mean almost anything and specific enough to unsettle anyone who’s had a hard year: dragons old and young, true and false, bright and dark, a catalogue of claimants and monsters that could describe half the cast of the book.
The chapter drops the reader’s first extended taste of R’hllor’s fire-magic filtered through a character with no religious investment in believing it, and Tyrion’s characteristic skepticism does nothing to make Moqorro’s vision feel less ominous — if anything, watching the least credulous man in Essos rattled is more effective than a true believer’s awe would be. The prophecy itself is the kind the book plants and then makes the reader wait, chapters or books, to see resolved, and it does the useful work of tying Tyrion’s fate a little more tightly to the dragons he hasn’t met yet.
This movement: The Griffin and the Rhoyne
- Aboard the Shy Maid, Tyrion unmasks his companions: Jon Connington, exiled griffin lord — and 'Young Griff', a blue-haired boy who may be Rhaegar's son Aegon.
- Stone men attack on the Bridge of Dream; Tyrion pulls Young Griff from the river; Connington comes up with greyscale he tells no one about.
- Quentyn Martell crosses half a world with a marriage pact signed in old ink, to court a queen who's never heard of him.
- Tyrion is snatched in Volantis by a knight in a merchant's skin: Jorah Mormont, buying his way home with a dwarf.