The Battle Above the Gods Eye
Two men and two dragons over a lake, by appointment.
Why it came to this
By the second year of the Dance both sides had discovered that dragons are a poor instrument of policy. They win engagements and they do not win wars, and every time one was committed the realm below got worse. KingÔÇÖs Landing had turned on its own rulers, the countryside was being burned by both sides, and the councils on Dragonstone and in the Red Keep were each running short of the two things that actually decide wars: food and men willing to fight for them.
The riverlands were where it was being decided on the ground, and Harrenhal was the key to the riverlands ÔÇö a ruin of a castle, far too large to garrison properly, but sitting on the crossing of every road that matters in the middle of the continent. It had changed hands more than once already. Prince Daemon Targaryen held it at this point with almost nothing: his troops had been drawn off to the fighting elsewhere, and he was sitting in the largest castle in Westeros with a skeleton household and a dragon.
Aemond Targaryen had spent months burning the riverlands from the air on the theory that a country that has been sufficiently punished stops supporting the enemy. It does not, and he was by now the most hated man in the middle of the realm. The two of them had been circling each other for the whole war. Daemon was the older man by decades, the most experienced fighter in the family, and the one person alive who had beaten harder opponents than Aemond had ever met; Aemond had the largest dragon in the world and knew it settled most arguments by itself.
The challenge was DaemonÔÇÖs. He arranged, deliberately, to be found alone at Harrenhal, and let it be known where he was ÔÇö an invitation that only worked because he knew exactly who he was inviting. What he was proposing was not a battle. It was a duel between the two most dangerous men on the continent, with the understanding on both sides that the survivorÔÇÖs faction would probably win the war by default.
The ground and the hosts
There were no hosts. This is the only engagement in the histories of Westeros of any consequence at all that involved four combatants and no army, and it is the reason the accounts of it are so unreliable: there was almost nobody there to see.
The ground was the Gods Eye, the great lake at the centre of the realm, with HarrenhalÔÇÖs burned towers on its shore and the Isle of Faces sitting out in the middle of the water where the last of the green men are said to keep the old weirwoods. Whatever one makes of that, it means the fight was staged above the single most sacred and least visited place in Westeros, and no chronicler has ever been able to resist saying so.
The hour was sunset, which matters tactically as well as poetically. The two riders came at each other over open water with the light low and behind one of them, at a height the accounts put at something above the clouds, and there was nothing beneath them but lake for miles.
Caraxes, called the Blood Wyrm, was a long red dragon of vicious temper and considerable age, ridden hard for most of a lifetime by a man who had used him in real wars in the Stepstones. Vhagar was a century and a half old, the last living dragon that had flown in the Conquest, and simply larger than anything else in the world. On any straightforward reckoning Vhagar wins that matchup without effort, and Daemon knew it perfectly well. He was not planning a straightforward reckoning.
How it was fought
The opening was conventional and brief. Both riders climbed for height, because height is the whole of dragon combat, and they made passes at each other above the lake with fire. Neither could hurt the other decisively this way. Dragonscale turns dragonfire tolerably well, and two experienced riders trading passes will do that for a long time without a result. This phase seems to have gone on for a while and did nothing.
The decisive thing was that Daemon chose to close. A smaller, faster animal against a much larger one has one advantage ÔÇö it can dictate the geometry ÔÇö and exactly one way to use it, which is to force a grapple where the smaller animal is on the outside and where the fight stops being about size. Caraxes went in at Vhagar, into the teeth of the disadvantage, and got his jaws and claws into her at contact range. From that moment neither dragon could disengage. They were locked, and they were falling.
What happened during the fall is the part that everybody knows and nobody witnessed. The version the histories settled on, and the one every singer in the realm has repeated since, is that Daemon Targaryen unbuckled himself from his saddle in the air, at whatever height that was, and jumped from Caraxes onto VhagarÔÇÖs back ÔÇö landing behind his nephew as the two locked animals went down turning, and driving Dark Sister, the ancestral blade he had carried since he was a boy, down into the one eye Aemond had left.
It should be said plainly that this is an extraordinary claim, that it comes to us through a small number of accounts written after the fact, and that the accounts do not agree on who saw it. One tradition names a single witness on the shore. Another says the fisherfolk of the lake villages watched the whole of it from their boats and it is from them the story comes. A third simply reports the result and declines to describe the middle, which is the most honest thing any of them do. What is certain is the state of the wreckage afterwards, and the wreckage is consistent with the story, which is not the same as proving it.
The two dragons came down into the Gods Eye together, still locked. The lake is deep and it swallowed them. There was no pursuit, no rout and no rally, because there was nobody present to do any of those things ÔÇö the largest single blow struck in the entire war took place in front of an audience of perhaps a dozen frightened people in fishing boats.
In the days afterwards the lake gave up what it had taken, in pieces and slowly, and the remains were found and identified. One of the dragons had crawled out of the shallows onto the shore before it stopped. The other stayed in the water and was located much later by the fishermen who make their living over that ground.
What it cost
In men, nothing. In everything else, more than any other single engagement of the Dance. Two of the five or six most consequential people in the realm and two of the largest dragons in the world were removed from the war in the space of a few minutes, and neither side gained a foot of ground by it.
VhagarÔÇÖs loss is the one that changed the shape of the world. She was the last of the Conquest dragons, the last animal alive that had been at the Field of Fire, and with her went the largest concentration of destructive power any single person had ever held. Nothing of her size has existed since, and on the current evidence nothing of her size is coming back.
The greens lost the man who had actually been running their war and the weapon that made their war winnable, in one stroke, at a moment when their king was still an invalid. The blacks lost the most capable soldier they possessed and the one man whose judgement Rhaenyra had ever really deferred to, at the exact point in the campaign where she needed him most.
What it changed
It ended the aerial war. There were dragons left after the Gods Eye ÔÇö a handful, mostly young, mostly ridden by people with no business on them ÔÇö but the era in which a great dragon could decide a campaign by arriving was finished on that lake. Everything that follows in the Dance is fought by men on the ground, ugly and slow, and the outcome is decided by hunger and by cities changing their minds rather than by fire.
It also broke the TargaryensÔÇÖ monopoly on being unanswerable. The house had held Westeros for a century and a half on a demonstrated fact, and within a few years of the Dance that fact was no longer demonstrable. Everything about how the realm is governed afterwards ÔÇö the councils, the marriages, the careful cultivation of lords who could not previously have mattered ÔÇö proceeds from the sky over the Gods Eye being empty.
And it left behind an unresolved question about what exactly the lake swallowed, which the maesters have been arguing over for a century and a half without getting anywhere. The Gods Eye is very deep, and it kept most of its evidence.
What became of it ÔÇö if an ending is written, it is here. Spoilers.
Prince Aemond Targaryen died over the lake. When VhagarÔÇÖs remains were eventually recovered from the shallows, a body was found still strapped into the great saddle, and a sword was found where the accounts said it would be. That much is physical and about as close to proof as this battle offers.
Prince Daemon TargaryenÔÇÖs body was never found. Caraxes reached the shore and expired there with no rider aboard. The lake was searched and gave up nothing, and this is the single most argued-over absence in the histories of the realm. The official position is that he drowned in armour in deep water, which is entirely plausible. The unofficial positions are numerous: that he survived the fall and went to ground; that he had already arranged his disappearance and the duel was the cover for it; that he lived out his years in the Vale or on the Red Mountains with the dragonseed woman Nettles, whom he had been protecting against his own sideÔÇÖs orders in the weeks before Harrenhal. There is no evidence for any of these and they have never stopped being repeated. Several of them may come from the same interested party, since the only person who can be placed at Harrenhal with him in those last weeks ÔÇö Alys Rivers ÔÇö had every reason to shape the story that came out of it.
Rhaenyra was told, and never accepted the version she was told. Aegon II received the news of his brother while still recovering from RookÔÇÖs Rest, and the war he inherited from that point was one neither of them could win in the air.