Sharp decline in the number of dragons after the Dance

The sharp decline in the number of dragons after the Dance was one of the war’s defining consequences: House Targaryen survived, but the living power that had helped make its rule formidable was vastly diminished. Fought from 129 to 131 AC between rival branches of the dynasty, the conflict turned dragons against dragons and brought their vulnerability into the open. Its name suggests a pageant; its consequences were closer to extinction.

The dragons and the war

The Dance began after the death of Viserys I, with his daughter Rhaenyra and his eldest son, Aegon II, as rival claimants to the Iron Throne. Their struggle drew the realm into civil war and divided House Targaryen itself, as the claimants’ kin and children became involved. The conflict was not confined to armies on land: dragons fought in the air, while fleets and coastal settlements became battlefields. The book characterizes the outcome in dynastic terms: the Targaryens remained, but their power was much reduced and the world’s last dragons were vastly fewer.

Before the Dance, dragons had served not only as weapons but as emblems of Targaryen rule. At Aegon the Conqueror’s first coronation, his battle standard showed a red three-headed dragon, and the dragons’ roar accompanied the acclamation of the new king. At his later coronation in Oldtown, he rode through the city on Balerion; the ceremony there became the accepted starting point of his reign. During the Dance, the Dragonpit was again a setting for royal ceremony: Aegon II was crowned beneath its dome, and Rhaenyra was crowned on Dragonstone. The contrast is stark: the dragons that had helped make royal authority visible became casualties and targets in the conflict over that authority.

Losses at Rook’s Rest

At Rook’s Rest, Criston Cole’s trap brought Rhaenys Targaryen on Meleys into battle against Aegon II on Sunfyre and Aemond Targaryen on Vhagar. Rhaenys did not flee. The three dragons fought above the battlefield and fell together; once the fires died down, Vhagar alone rose unharmed. Meleys was dead, while Sunfyre had suffered devastating damage and could no longer emerge from the encounter as an uninjured royal mount. The precise aftermath for Sunfyre’s rider was also severe, but the dragon’s fate is itself central to the tally of losses: one dragon killed and another gravely impaired, with only Vhagar unscathed.

The battle’s costs extended beyond the dragons. Eight hundred knights, squires, and common soldiers died, and a further hundred were killed when Aemond and Cole took Rook’s Rest. The head of Meleys was later paraded through King’s Landing, where its appearance stunned the smallfolk into silence. The episode made a dragon’s death both a military fact and a public spectacle: the beast was no longer an unquestioned sign of royal might, but a visible casualty of the war.

The Battle in the Gullet

The Battle in the Gullet brought dragons into a naval engagement and claimed Vermax, ridden by Jacaerys Velaryon. The surviving accounts disagree about how the dragon fell. One version attributes the death to a crossbow bolt; another describes a grapnel catching between Vermax’s scales and the dragon being dragged into a burning ship. The accounts differ in detail, but the reported outcome is consistent: Vermax sank with the galley, and Jacaerys was killed in the battle.

Dragons had initially driven the Triarchy’s fleet into retreat. Vermax attacked the Lysene galleys, and Silverwing, Sheepstealer, Seasmoke, and Vermithor then joined the fight. The account emphasizes the force of that arrival: the warships broke formation, and ships burned or were destroyed. Yet the victory came at a terrible cost on Driftmark. Spicetown was sacked and never rebuilt, High Tide burned, the Velaryon fleet lost almost a third of its strength, and thousands died. The book singles out Jacaerys’s death as the loss felt most deeply, linking the destruction of a dragon to the loss of its rider and heir.

Threats beyond battle

The assault on the Dragonpit shows that danger to the dragons was not limited to rival riders and enemy fleets. During Rhaenyra’s rule in King’s Landing, a mob gathered and marched toward the Dragonpit, urged on by the Shepherd. Rhaenyra ordered her men to disperse the crowd, seize the Shepherd, and defend the royal dragons, but the city’s disorder and the scarcity of loyal guards made success uncertain. Her refusal to send Prince Joffrey out to confront the mob reflected the immediate threat: she kept the swords available to defend the castle. The supplied account records the march and the attempted response, not the assault’s outcome; it nevertheless places the royal dragons at the center of a popular uprising as well as a dynastic war.

Consequences

The evidence does not provide a final inventory of surviving dragons or a numerical total for those lost. It does establish the scale and direction of the change: the Dance took a terrible toll across the realm, weakened Targaryen power, and left the world’s last dragons vastly reduced in number. Meleys and Vermax died in battle; Sunfyre was gravely damaged; and dragons faced danger in the Dragonpit as well as in the sky and at sea. Their decline was therefore not a single defeat but the cumulative consequence of civil war, in which the dynasty’s greatest advantage became part of the cost of fighting for the throne.