Drogon
Drogon is the largest and most aggressive of Daenerys Targaryen's three dragons, a black-scaled beast with blood-red eyes, horns, and spinal plates. He is the only one of her children who remains truly wild, refusing to be chained in the pit beneath Meereen and instead ranging far across the Dothraki sea. His return to Daznak's Pit during the reopened fighting games triggers a massacre, but also Daenerys's decisive flight from the city, marking the moment she abandons her role as Queen of Meereen to reclaim her identity as the blood of the dragon.
Appearance and Nature
Drogon's scales are as black as night, his eyes and horns and spinal plates blood red. Ever the largest of her three, in the wild he has grown larger still, his wings stretching twenty feet from tip to tip, black as jet. When he lands on the carcass of Barsena Blackhair and the boar that killed her, he sinks his claws into the smoking flesh and begins to feed, making no distinction between the woman and the beast. His breath is hot enough to blister skin, and when he roars the sound fills the pit, a furnace wind engulfing all nearby. He is fire made flesh, and so is Daenerys.
The Pit of Daznak
At the reopened fighting pits, Drogon descends from the sky as Barsena Blackhair is being disemboweled by a boar. A shadow ripples across Hizdahr zo Loraq's face as the tumult dies and ten thousand voices still. Drogon lands on the carcass and begins to feed, but when a spearman tries to play the hero by driving a boar spear into the base of the dragon's long scaled neck, Drogon twists, hisses in pain, and wrenches the man's arm from his shoulder. The dragon spits fire, bathing two men in black flame, and his tail lashes sideways, catching the pitmaster and breaking him in two. Daenerys, who has vaulted into the pit, seizes the pitmaster's whip and strikes Drogon across the snout, shouting "No" until the dragon folds his wings and stretches out flat upon his belly. She rips the spear from his wound, vaults onto his back, and the black wings crack like thunder as he carries her into the sky.
The Dothraki Sea
After the flight from Meereen, Drogon makes his lair inside a shallow cave on a stony hill Daenerys calls Dragonstone, a jagged tangle of bare rock thrusting into the sky. The air smells of ash, every rock and tree in sight is scorched and blackened, the ground strewn with burned and broken bones. He dwells there for some time, and Daenerys survives on his leavings, on burned bones and chunks of smoking meat half-charred and half-raw. Neither whip nor words can turn Drogon if he does not wish to be turned; his scales have grown harder than horn, and the whip annoys him more than it hurts. No matter how far the dragon flies each day, come nightfall some instinct draws him home to Dragonstone.
The Return to the Grasslands
When Daenerys finally decides to leave Dragonstone and walk south toward the Skahazadhan, Drogon appears above her three times: once so far off he might be an eagle, once passing before the sun with his black wings spread, and once flying right above her so close she can hear the sound of his wings. After she eats poisonous berries and collapses, fevered and bleeding, a Dothraki scout finds her. She calls until her voice is hoarse, and Drogon comes, snorting plumes of smoke, the grass bowing down before him. She leaps onto his back, her bare legs tightening around his neck, and turns him north by east after the fleeing scout. He descends on a lagging horse, breaking its back, and Daenerys, starved, slides off his back and eats with him, ripping chunks of smoking meat from the dead horse with bare, burned hands. When Khal Jhaqo and half a hundred mounted warriors emerge from the drifting smoke, she rises, wipes her hands on her ragged undertunic, and goes to stand beside her dragon.
