Dragons

Dragons were the Targaryens’ great advantage in Westeros: weapons of conquest, emblems of royal authority, and living creatures to which members of the dynasty formed intensely personal bonds. For generations they helped the family rule a realm whose castles and armies could rarely resist them. Their decisive role in the Dance of the Dragons, however, became a catastrophe for both dynasty and species: dragons fought dragons, and the survivors dwindled until the last died during Aegon III’s reign.

Origins and the Conquest

The Targaryens brought a history of dragonlore with them from Valyria. Of the five dragons that had flown with Aenar the Exile, only Balerion, later known as the Black Dread, survived to Aegon’s day. The other great dragons associated with the Conquest, Vhagar and Meraxes, were younger and had hatched on Dragonstone. Aegon and both his sisters had established themselves as dragonlords before their marriages, making the family’s command of dragons a foundation of its power rather than a skill acquired after taking the throne.

During the Conquest, the dragons made resistance to Targaryen rule immediate and perilous. When Aegon established a palisade on the highest of the three hills that would become the center of his new city, he sent his sisters to secure nearby castles. Rhaenys and Meraxes received Rosby’s submission without a fight; at Stokeworth, crossbowmen shot at Visenya before Vhagar’s flames set the keep’s roofs alight and the castle yielded. The contrast between surrender and the threat of destruction marked the choices faced by those who resisted.

Harrenhal demonstrated how little the apparent strength of a fortress could guarantee against a dragon. After waiting until darkness, Aegon took Balerion high above the clouds and descended within the castle walls. Balerion’s fire consumed the combustible stores and structures inside, while the heat became sufficient to make even the castle’s stone towers crack and melt. The fall of Harrenhal established a lasting image of dragon power: stone walls, an assurance against ordinary siege, offered no certain protection from a dragon’s fire.

At the Field of Fire, the dragons worked in concert with one another and with the Targaryens’ human allies. As the forces of Mern IX Gardener and Loren I Lannister charged, Aegon, Visenya, and Rhaenys took to the air. Balerion attacked the advancing ranks from above, while Vhagar and Meraxes set fires behind and upwind of the enemy. Smoke, flames, and panicked mounts disrupted the charge; the troops of Lord Mooton, positioned upwind, then attacked those who emerged from the burning field. The dragons did not simply overpower an opposing army: their flames and position transformed its battlefield into a trap.

Dragons remained instruments of royal power after the initial Conquest. In 2 AC, Aegon flew Balerion to end the fighting in the Iron Islands, accompanied by fleets from the Arbor, Highgarden, and Lannisport and a few longships sent by Torrhen Stark. The islanders, weakened by a year of internal warfare, offered little resistance, and many welcomed the dragons’ arrival. Aegon killed Qhorin Volmark but allowed his infant son to inherit his father’s lands and castle, combining the threat of dragonfire with a limited act of continuity in local rule.

Rule, Inheritance, and the Dragon’s Limits

The dragons’ military value did not make every conflict easy to resolve. In the wars against Dorne, they repeatedly burned castles, and the Iron Throne offered rewards for the deaths of Dornish lords who had gone into hiding. The violence also invited retaliation: Dornish reprisals killed lords in the Reach and Stormlands. Meraxes, after surviving earlier battles, was struck in the eye by a bolt fired from a scorpion above the Hellholt. Her fall showed that dragons were formidable but not invulnerable, and that a sufficiently powerful weapon could change the course of a campaign.

Prince Morion later built a fleet equipped to exploit that vulnerability. His ships carried crossbowmen and large scorpions modeled on the weapon that had brought down Meraxes. When the fleet crossed the Sea of Dorne, Jaehaerys and his sons Aemon and Baelon met it with Vermithor, Caraxes, and Vhagar. Some bolts struck the dragons, but none found a vulnerable spot that stopped them; the dragons set the ships alight. The episode illustrates the persistent contest between dragon power and attempts to counter it: the threat was understood, but meeting it successfully remained difficult.

Dragons also shaped the Targaryens’ ideas of succession and dynastic identity. As the number of dragons and royal princes increased under Viserys I, it became customary to place an egg in the cradle of a newborn princeling. The eggs did not guarantee that every child would become a rider: many eggs failed to hatch, and the evidence distinguishes among hatchlings, young dragons, mature mounts, and unclaimed wild dragons. Still, the custom joined the promise of a dragon to the birth of a royal child, making the bond between dynasty and creature visible from infancy.

The royal family’s capacity to claim and fly dragons was not unlimited. During Jaehaerys’s reign, Balerion’s unauthorized departure with Princess Aerea became the specific precedent for stronger precautions. When Balerion later became the first dragon housed in the Dragonpit, the king ordered dragons guarded night and day wherever they were kept. The decree recognized both their value and the danger of leaving their movements uncontrolled. It established an organized human presence around the dragons, rather than treating royal ownership as sufficient protection.

Dragonriders, Bonds, and Habitats

A dragon’s life and abilities changed with age. Its scales protected the flesh beneath, becoming thicker and harder as it grew, while its fire grew hotter. A hatchling could set straw alight; the flames of the oldest and most powerful dragons could melt stone and steel. In combat, dragons could rely on more than fire: claws, jaws, and tails made them dangerous at close range. These attributes made a dragon more than an aerial source of flame, while its changing size and strength meant that not every dragon was ready to carry a rider or fight in battle.

The relationship between rider and dragon could develop from proximity and familiarity. On Dragonstone, Rhaena encouraged her daughter Aerea to choose one of the hatched dragons as her own. The island offered access to hatchlings and young dragons, to Rhaena’s Dreamfyre, and to older dragons including Balerion and Vhagar. Aerea had known Vermithor and Silverwing at court, but had not been allowed as close to them. On Dragonstone, she could visit the dragons often, and they became her companions. The account connects that closeness with her longing to mount a dragon and fly away, while Balerion’s later escape with her also demonstrates why proximity demanded vigilance.

The Dragonpit changed how dragons were housed in King’s Landing. Its long, brick-lined tunnels were sunk into the hillside and fashioned to resemble caves; they were five times the size of the lairs on Dragonstone. Balerion was the first to be kept there, and three younger dragons joined him. Vermithor and Silverwing remained near their riders at the Red Keep. Jaehaerys’s order that dragons be guarded wherever they laired was carried out by the Dragonkeepers, a seventy-seven-strong order in black armor whose helmets and backs displayed rows of dragon scales. Their establishment turned the keeping of dragons into a standing institution.

Dragonstone, by contrast, remained a place of abundant dragon life. Dragons nested beneath the shadow of the Dragonmont, and wild dragons made lairs in caves beyond the castle walls. During the Dance, six other dragons occupied the mountain’s smoky caverns, among them Silverwing, Seasmoke, and Vermithor; the wild dragons Sheepstealer, Grey Ghost, and the Cannibal remained unclaimed. Dragonstone’s population gave Rhaenyra’s supporters a potential advantage, but it depended on finding riders for dragons that had never been mastered. The difference between a dragon being present and a dragon being available for war was therefore a crucial one.

The bond could also mark a rider’s coming of age. At seventeen, Aemon won recognition at a tourney and received his knighthood; after returning to King’s Landing, he became a rider of Caraxes, a blood-red dragon known to the Dragonkeepers as the Blood Wyrm. Baelon, unwilling to be overshadowed, claimed Vhagar, who had not been ridden since Visenya’s death twenty-nine years earlier. In 93 AC, Baelon’s son Viserys claimed the aging Balerion. The dragon struggled to rise, and Viserys circled the city three times rather than continuing to Dragonstone, judging that the Black Dread lacked the strength for the longer flight. The great dragon’s age had altered what even a prince could ask of him.

The Dance of the Dragons

The Dance of the Dragons was a civil war between rival branches of House Targaryen, fought from 129 to 131 AC. Its name, the account observes, makes the conflict sound more graceful than it was; the struggle divided the Seven Kingdoms and drew the royal family, lords, knights, and smallfolk into the fighting. Armies still met on land, but much of the war’s slaughter took place on water and in the air, as dragons fought one another. In this conflict, the creature that had helped make Targaryen rule possible became an instrument of dynastic destruction.

At the war’s outset, Rhaenyra’s forces counted dragons among their strongest advantages. Rhaenys compared the two sides’ mounts, noting the number and size of the dragons available to the Blacks. The Greens had four dragons of fighting size: Sunfyre, ridden by Aegon; Vhagar, ridden by Aemond; Dreamfyre, ridden by Helaena; and Tessarion, ridden by Daeron. Helaena’s twins had hatchlings, while Maelor had an egg. Rhaenyra’s side had Caraxes and Syrax, three dragonriding sons with Vermax, Arrax, and Tyraxes, and Rhaenys’s Meleys. Stormcloud was young and not yet ridden; Baela’s Moondancer was still growing toward a size that could carry her. Rhaenyra’s other daughter, Rhaena, had lost an egg that hatched as a creature too weak to live.

The count extended beyond dragons already paired with riders. Silverwing, Seasmoke, and Vermithor lived in the caverns of the Dragonmont, while Sheepstealer, Grey Ghost, and the Cannibal were wild and unclaimed. Rhaenys argued that securing riders for the three older dragons could give her side nine dragons against the Greens’ four; claiming the wild dragons could raise the total further. Her assessment made recruitment a military necessity. Dragons were not merely inherited assets in this war: the side that could bring more of them under a rider’s control might gain a decisive advantage.

The battles showed both the scale of that advantage and its terrible cost. At one engagement, the arrival of Silverwing, Sheepstealer, Seasmoke, and Vermithor broke the Triarchy’s line of warships. The ships turned away or were destroyed, and men leapt into the sea as the dragons attacked. Elsewhere, Criston Cole’s trap drew Rhaenys into an encounter with Aegon on Sunfyre and Aemond on Vhagar. A dragon’s size, a rider’s judgment, and the timing of an ambush could make a forceful advantage suddenly precarious.

Second Tumbleton brought three dragons into combat: Seasmoke, Vermithor, and Tessarion. Seasmoke died first; Vermithor then collapsed and died after failing to take flight. Tessarion survived until sunset, but was unable to regain the sky. The account leaves some questions about the battle unanswered, while making its central result plain: dragon combat consumed the creatures that the rival factions had committed to it. The war’s losses were not confined to the people who fought for the throne.

Decline and Extinction

The Dance sharply reduced the number of dragons left in the world. At the Dragonpit, forty large underground chambers had been carved into the Hill of Rhaenys, enclosed by iron doors. Several dragons once housed there had flown to battle; among those still present were Tyraxes, Seasmoke, Morghul, Shrykos, and Dreamfyre. The custom of keeping at least one dragonrider at the pit was intended to let the dragons defend the city, and the duty had fallen to Addam Velaryon because Rhaenyra kept her sons near her. The pit’s large scale and its guards could not guarantee safety when the city turned against the dragons: during the Storming of the Dragonpit, four Targaryen dragons died, and the Dragonkeepers were overwhelmed. Syrax remained alive afterward, but the destruction within the pit had already removed several dragons from the dynasty’s store of power.

Nor did every dragon’s fate become known. Fisherfolk near the Dragonmont reported the remains of Grey Ghost at the mountain’s base. Its coloring identified it as that dragon, but the account does not establish who or what killed it. In the later accounting of dragons at King’s Landing, the creatures named among the survivors and residents represent a diminished remnant, while once-prominent mounts had departed to fight and some riders themselves were dead or absent. The records preserve losses as particular absences and uncertain discoveries, not as a single final battle that ended the species.

The consequences reached beyond military strength. During the Dance, Targaryen power diminished even though the dynasty survived, and the world’s dragons were vastly reduced in number. In 135 AC, Rhaena’s first flight on Morning brought a dragon above King’s Landing for the first time since the dark days of the Dance. She circled the city and returned to the Dragonpit; on the following days she flew farther. The sight offered a striking reminder of what the city had lost, but the recovery was limited: the account records that the last of the Targaryen dragons died during Aegon III’s reign.

By then, the dragons’ historical meaning had turned against itself. They had made the Targaryens formidable conquerors, helped maintain royal power, and shaped the habits and expectations of the royal family. The Dance revealed the cost of making those same creatures central to a struggle for succession: each faction treated them as strength to be accumulated and deployed, while their deaths permanently narrowed the dynasty’s power. Their extinction closed not just a chapter in warfare, but the living bond between the Targaryen monarchy and the creatures on which its authority had so often depended.