Maegor I Targaryen’s death ended a reign of six years and sixty-six days and left the Iron Throne without an heir of his body. It came as his remaining supporters confronted the collapse of his cause, but the account preserves no settled answer to who—or what—killed him.

The Last War Council

Maegor summoned the lords still with him to the Red Keep to discuss his battle plans. They numbered only a score of lesser lords, commanding scarcely four thousand men, and no great lords were coming to join them. The weakness of their position weighed heavily on the gathering: Lord Hayford urged Maegor to abdicate and take the black.

Maegor had Lord Hayford beheaded on the spot, then continued the council with his head mounted on a lance behind the Iron Throne. The lords debated through the day and late into the night. At the hour of the wolf, Maegor finally permitted them to leave. Lord Towers and Lord Rosby were the last to see him; he remained behind, brooding on the throne as the others departed.

Discovery and Uncertain Cause

At dawn, Queen Elinor Costayne came looking for Maegor and found him dead on the Iron Throne. The account describes his robes as soaked with blood and says his arms had been cut open by the throne’s jagged barbs; another blade had passed through his neck. The scene establishes the violence of his death, but not who caused it.

One explanation held that the Iron Throne itself had killed him. Those who believed this pointed to the sequence of witnesses: Maegor was alive when Lord Rosby and Lord Towers left, while the guards at the doors swore that nobody entered afterward before Queen Elinor found him. Other accounts proposed that Elinor had forced him onto the throne, perhaps to avenge the murder of her first husband. The Kingsguard were also suspected, though that would have required cooperation among the knights posted at both doors. An unknown person or group might instead have used a hidden passage in the Red Keep. The narrative leaves each possibility open.

Death and Succession

Suicide was another proposed explanation. Maegor might, the account suggests, have despaired in the night at the defeat and disgrace awaiting him and killed himself. No version is confirmed, and the circumstances remain a matter of competing belief rather than established fact.

Afterward, Maegor’s corpse was burned in the yard of the Red Keep, and his ashes were interred on Dragonstone beside those of his mother. He died childless, leaving no bodily heir. Thus the end of his reign was also a dynastic break: the king’s death settled neither the precise cause of his death nor the question of succession by producing an heir of his own.