The Fall of Meraxes at Hellholt

The ConquestÔÇÖs one clean failure, and the day Westeros learned a scorpion could kill a dragon.

Why it came to this

Dorne is the exception to the whole story of the Conquest, and it is the exception for reasons of ground rather than heroism. Every other kingdom in Westeros had cities, castles that mattered, roads an army must use, and lords who could be killed or bought in one afternoon. Dorne had a desert, a scattering of strongholds with nothing worth burning in between them, and a nobility that had spent a thousand years being invaded across the marches and had drawn the appropriate conclusions. Against that, a dragon is a weapon looking for a target that will not present itself.

Aegon and his sisters conquered Dorne on paper twice and each time discovered they had conquered sand. When the dragons came, the Dornish did not muster on a field to be burned; they emptied their castles, went into the desert and the mountains, and let the invaders occupy stone buildings full of nothing. The moment the dragons left, the lords came back down out of the hills and cut the throats of whatever garrison had been posted, and the process began again. There is no Field of Fire to be had against an enemy who declines to assemble.

By the tenth year the Targaryens had settled into a war of reprisal, which is the kind of war dragons are worst at and cruellest in. Rhaenys and Meraxes ranged over Dorne burning towns and castles as punishment for a resistance that punishment only fed. She was doing this over Hellholt, the seat of House Uller in the deep south, a place with a reputation for producing people equally given to poison and to fury. The garrison had done something almost no Dornish garrison had done in ten years of war: instead of running, it had mounted its scorpions and waited.

The ground and the hosts

Hellholt sits above the Brimstone, a river that runs yellow and stinking with sulphur out of the mountains, in about the least hospitable corner of an inhospitable country. It is not a great castle and it commanded nothing an invader wanted. Its only importance to history is what its garrison happened to be holding when Meraxes came over the walls.

A scorpion is a mounted crossbow scaled up to throw a bolt the size of a spear. It is a siege weapon, meant to punch through shields and mantlets and the timber of an enemyÔÇÖs works, and until this day nobody had recorded one being used successfully against a dragon in flight. The problem with shooting a dragon is not the toughness of the animal so much as the difficulty of the shot: a dragon on the wing is fast, high, and moving in three dimensions, and a scorpion is slow to load and slow to traverse. To hit one you need it to come low, come close, and hold something like a straight line ÔÇö which is exactly what a dragon does when its rider brings it down to burn a wall.

Rhaenys had been burning Dorne for years and had every reason to think Hellholt was one more afternoonÔÇÖs work. Meraxes was a great dragon, third of the three that had won the continent, and had faced Dornish arrows before without consequence. The garrison had one advantage and it was a single-use advantage: they knew she was coming, they had loaded their engines, and they were prepared to lose the exchange of fire in order to win the one shot that mattered.

How it was fought

There was no battle in any ordinary sense ÔÇö an attack by one dragon on one castle lasts minutes, and this one lasted less. Rhaenys brought Meraxes down over Hellholt to do to it what she had done to a dozen other Dornish seats. The garrisonÔÇÖs scorpions loosed as the dragon came in low across the walls.

One bolt found Meraxes in the eye. Precisely how ÔÇö whether it was a marksmanÔÇÖs shot, a lucky one out of a volley, or, as the more romantic Dornish accounts have it, a single defender holding his nerve until the animal filled his sight ÔÇö is not recoverable and the sources flatter whichever party is telling it. What is not disputed is the result. A dragon shot through the eye into the brain does not glide down; it drops, all at once, with its full weight, and it drops wherever it happens to be, which in this case was onto the castle it had come to burn.

Meraxes came down inside the walls of Hellholt and the impact wrecked a portion of the castle as thoroughly as fire would have. Rhaenys was in the saddle, and what became of her from that instant is the hinge of the whole affair and belongs in the fold below ÔÇö for the reason it has never been settled is a simple one: the only two witnesses who could have told it were the dragon and the castle, and both were destroyed in the same moment.

This is the whole of the engagement. There was no host to rout, no pursuit, no second phase. A single spear-length bolt, launched from a weapon that had been sitting in Westerosi castles for centuries, ended in a few seconds the career of an animal that two kingdoms had failed to stop with fifty-five thousand men.

What it cost

It cost the Targaryens a third of their dragons and, far more importantly, the myth that their dragons could not be touched. Balerion and Vhagar were still alive and enormous, but the arithmetic of the realm had quietly changed. A weapon existed, it was already installed in every serious castle, and it had been proved to work. Every scorpion in Westeros looked different after Hellholt, and the Targaryens knew it.

It cost Dorne everything short of surrender and then some. AegonÔÇÖs grief and his fury ÔÇö the two are hard to separate in the accounts ÔÇö turned the war from reprisal into something much worse. The years that follow are remembered in Dorne as the time the dragons stopped taking castles and started simply burning the country, hunting the Dornish lords with a persistence that had not been there before. It did not work. It never works. But a very large number of people died proving it did not work.

And it cost the war any prospect of ending well. What had been a difficult conquest became a blood feud with a body count on the Targaryen side that no other kingdom had come close to inflicting, and it stayed unresolved for longer than any of the principals lived.

What it changed

Strategically it ended the Conquest as an unbroken run of success. Aegon the Conqueror conquered six kingdoms and failed at the seventh, and the failure is instructive precisely because it was not a failure of force ÔÇö he had more force than anyone in history. It was a failure of the whole theory that force decides things, run up against a people who had decided in advance not to give the force anything to land on.

It also fixed DorneÔÇÖs peculiar status for the next century and a half. Dorne was not part of the realm after this; it was a thing the realm had failed to swallow and had agreed, exhausted, to leave alone. It came into the Seven Kingdoms in the end through a marriage two hundred years later, on its own terms, keeping its own laws ÔÇö which is the single most successful piece of resistance in the recorded history of Westeros, and it was bought partly with the Queen the realm lost at Hellholt.

The narrower lesson was the one about the scorpion, and it was learned and then, characteristically, half-forgotten. It resurfaces every time anyone in the following centuries has to fight a dragon on purpose, and the people who remember Hellholt do noticeably better than the people who do not.

What became of it ÔÇö if an ending is written, it is here. Spoilers.

Queen Rhaenys Targaryen died at Hellholt when Meraxes fell, in the eleventh year after the Conquest. Her body was never returned and its fate was never established. The Dornish let it be known, in the years afterward, that she had not died on impact ÔÇö that she had lived a while under the ruin, or been taken, and that things had been done to her; the tales are numerous, mutually contradictory, and were clearly designed to be exactly as unbearable to Aegon as they in fact were. No version can be confirmed and several were plainly invented as weapons. The honest position is that she died at Hellholt and that everything past that point is Dornish psychological warfare, some of which may nonetheless be true.

Meraxes was the first of the three Conquest dragons to die, killed by a weapon a footman could operate, which is the detail every later enemy of the Targaryens found most encouraging. Her skull, by some accounts, remained at Hellholt for years as a trophy of the one castle in Westeros that had killed a dragon.

Aegon and Visenya answered with the years the Dornish call the DragonÔÇÖs Wroth, and it settled nothing. The war guttered out into an exhausted, unofficial peace that held less because either side wanted it than because both had run out of things to burn. The Conqueror died with Dorne still outside his realm, the only ambition of his life he did not achieve.