Damon Darry

Damon Darry was a knight who survived the disastrous attempt to retake Harrenhal from Alys Rivers and her followers. His escape and the warning delivered by a captured man who returned the following day made him a principal source for the regents’ knowledge of the force within the castle, though they rejected his account of sorcery and a dragon.

Identity and Assignment

At the end of 132 AC, Tyland Lannister entrusted Ser Regis Groves with reclaiming Harrenhal, which had become a refuge for outlaws, robber knights, and broken men preying on people nearby. Groves set out from King’s Landing with fifty seasoned men. At Castle Darry, Damon Darry joined him with a like number, making the force about a hundred men. Groves assumed that this would suffice against the castle’s supposed squatters, but the scale of the opposition proved far greater than expected.

The Attack and Escape

Before the walls, Groves found the gates shut and hundreds of armed men on the battlements. Alys Rivers came out to parley with a child beside her, claiming that the boy was Aemond Targaryen’s trueborn son and heir. Groves refused her demand that he submit. He was killed moments later; the accounts differed over whether Alys’s gesture caused his death through sorcery or signaled an attack from the walls.

The gates then opened and armed riders charged. In the ensuing fight, the king’s men were routed. Damon was among the few to escape, aided by his good horse, armor, and training. Alys’s followers pursued him through the night before giving up. Of the hundred men who had set out, only thirty-two returned to Castle Darry that night.

The Warning and Its Reception

The next day, another survivor arrived: a man who had been captured with a dozen others and forced to witness their deaths under torture before being released to carry a warning. Damon assured the messenger that no one would laugh at him. The man reported that Alys had threatened anyone who approached her walls and claimed that the stones held power and that she possessed a dragon. The messenger’s name is not recorded, nor is the name of the man who laughed; after one of Damon’s men did so, the messenger appeared to choke and died within moments. The account leaves uncertain whether this death was caused by a curse or by some other means.

Damon’s report of sorcery and a dragon alarmed Tyland Lannister, but Unwin Peake dismissed it and attributed Groves’s death and the losses to outlaws. The other regents agreed that a larger force would be needed to clear Harrenhal. Before Tyland could arrange another assault or consider a replacement for Groves in Aegon’s Seven, Winter Fever reached King’s Landing on the third day of 133 AC. The planned response to Harrenhal was therefore overtaken by a more immediate crisis.