The Storming of the Dragonpit

The night the smallfolk of King's Landing decided they had had enough of dragons and went up the hill to kill them.

Why it came to this

By the end of 130 AC KingÔÇÖs Landing had changed hands, changed rulers, and changed its mind about everything. Rhaenyra had taken the city, and taking it had not made her loved; she had raised taxes, executed people, lost the popular sympathy she arrived with, and presided over a capital that was hungry, frightened, and increasingly convinced that the dragons were the cause of all of it rather than the cure. The war had brought fire to the whole realm, and the realm had noticed that the thing all the fire came out of was stabled on a hill inside their own walls.

The immediate spark was fear and rumour. A dragon called Sheepstealer, or the sight of a dragon in the sky, or simply the accumulated dread of a city that had watched the war come home ÔÇö the accounts differ on the exact trigger, and it hardly matters, because the fuel had been piling up for two years. Into that walked the preachers, and one in particular, a wild-eyed prophet the histories call the Shepherd, who stood in the streets of Flea Bottom and told the crowds the plain thing that everyone was already feeling: that the dragons were demons, that they were the source of every horror the war had brought, and that the gods wanted them dead.

It is one of the very few moments in the whole history of Westeros where the smallfolk ÔÇö the people the great houses fight their wars on top of and otherwise never consult ÔÇö act, in a mass, of their own accord, and change the course of the realm. They had no lord, no plan, and nothing to fight with. What they had was numbers and the specific, unbearable knowledge of what the dragons had done to them, and one night they went up the Hill of Rhaenys to end it.

The ground and the hosts

The Dragonpit was the great domed structure the Targaryens had built on the Hill of Rhaenys to house their dragons within the city ÔÇö an enormous stone dome, its floor sunk below ground, with iron doors and a single great entrance. It had been built as a stable and it functioned, that night, as a trap. Several dragons were kept there, chained, in the dark, in a confined space they could not fly out of freely and could not manoeuvre inside.

That confinement is the whole reason the impossible thing that happened could happen. A dragon in the open sky is very close to unkillable by a mob; a dragon chained in a stone room with a low roof, unable to get airborne, unable to use its speed or its height, surrounded on all sides at close range, is a large dangerous animal in a pit with thousands of people ÔÇö which is a different and much worse proposition for the dragon.

The attackers were the population of a great city: thousands of them, tens of thousands by some tellings, unarmed or armed with whatever came to hand ÔÇö spears, knives, tools, stones, torches. They had no leaders worth the name and no tactics beyond mass and fury. The defenders were a handful of guards on the doors, who were simply drowned, and the dragons themselves, which did what dragons do and were killed for it anyway.

How it was fought

The mob broke down the doors of the Dragonpit and poured in. What followed inside that dome is one of the most horrifying scenes in the entire history of the realm and there is no way to make it anything less. The dragons burned attackers by the hundred ÔÇö a chained dragon in a stone room is still a dragon, and the fire in that enclosed space killed people in numbers that beggar counting. But the mob did not stop, because a mob of that size with that much accumulated rage does not stop for casualties; the people at the front were pushed on by the people behind, and there were always more people behind.

The dragons were killed the way you kill anything you cannot outfight one-on-one: by sheer weight of numbers, at close range, absorbing appalling losses to do it. Spears and knives found eyes and wings and the soft places; chains meant to hold the dragons also held them still to be struck at; the confined space that should have protected them from the sky instead denied them any escape from the floor. One by one, over the course of a night that the survivors never spoke of calmly, the dragons in the pit were brought down and butchered.

The cost to the attackers was enormous ÔÇö far more people died in the Dragonpit that night than dragons, by an overwhelming margin, most of them burned alive. But the exchange, from the mobÔÇÖs point of view, was one they were willing to make, and it worked. By morning the dragons in the pit were dead, the great dome was a charnel house, and the population of KingÔÇÖs Landing had done with their bare hands and their bodies what two years of armies and dragonriders had not managed: they had killed dragons, several of them, in a single night.

The mob did not stop at the pit. The city rose more generally that night and for days after; the ShepherdÔÇÖs followers and the general disorder turned into a broader collapse of authority in the capital. What became of the queen and her remaining household in the days that followed belongs to the fold below, but the storming of the pit is the hinge: it is the moment the smallfolk stopped being the ground the war was fought on and became, briefly and terribly, participants in it.

What it cost

It cost the realm four dragons in one night ÔÇö a catastrophic proportion of the dwindling number left alive anywhere in the world, killed not by rival dragons or by scorpions on castle walls but by a mob of unarmed townsfolk. Set beside the fact that killing a single dragon at RookÔÇÖs Rest had required two other dragons and a kingÔÇÖs whole scheme, the Dragonpit is the most efficient dragon-killing in the history of Westeros, and it was done by people with kitchen knives.

It cost the smallfolk of KingÔÇÖs Landing a number of dead that no source seriously tries to total, and cost the city itself the terror of a night when it turned on its own rulers and its own protectors at once. The Dragonpit was never used again; the great dome stood as a burned ruin on its hill for the rest of the history of the Targaryens, a monument on the skyline to the night the city killed the dragons.

Most of all it cost the Targaryen dynasty the thing the dynasty was built on. The dragons had been the argument for everything ÔÇö for the Conquest, for the throne, for a century and a half of obedience ÔÇö and after the Dance there were almost none left, and the last few were small, sickly, and dying. The storming of the pit is one of the deaths in that story, and symbolically it is the largest, because it was inflicted by the people the dragons were supposed to overawe.

What it changed

It effectively ended dragons as a force in the world. Between the aerial duels of the war and this one night of butchery, the population of dragons collapsed from an armament that ruled a continent to a handful of dying animals, and none of the survivors bred a healthy line. The empty sky that defines the realm for the next century and a half ÔÇö the reason the later Targaryens rule by marriage and council rather than by fire, the reason a rebellion three hundred years later can even be contemplated ÔÇö begins in no small part in the Dragonpit.

It also stands, uncomfortably, as the one time the smallfolk decided the course of the realm. The lesson the great houses took from it was not comfortable and was mostly suppressed: that the people they ruled were a force, that a hungry and frightened city could tear down the mightiest weapon in the world with its bare hands if it chose to, and that the thing keeping them from doing so more often was habit rather than any real inability. The ShepherdÔÇÖs crowd is a ghost that haunts the back of every subsequent rulerÔÇÖs mind, whether they admit it or not.

For the Dance specifically, the storming of the pit is close to the end. A war fought over which Targaryen should command the dragons ended with a mob killing the dragons on its own initiative, which is either the bleakest joke in the histories or their sharpest piece of commentary, depending on the temper of the person telling it.

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

The dragons killed in the pit that night were mostly the smaller and younger animals of the black cause, including RhaenyraÔÇÖs own Syrax, who is generally counted among the dead of the storming or its immediate aftermath. Their deaths, added to those already lost at RookÔÇÖs Rest, the Gullet, the Gods Eye and Tumbleton, brought the dragon population to the edge of extinction in the space of a single year.

The Shepherd, the prophet who lit the mob, did not long outlast his moment. When order was reimposed on the city he and a great many of his followers were rounded up and executed ÔÇö the standard fate of anyone who briefly reminds the great houses that they are outnumbered. He had, however, been proved right about the one thing he cared about: the dragons died.

Rhaenyra herself did not survive the collapse of her hold on the capital that this night began. Driven from a city that had turned on her, her cause coming apart, she came at last to a very bad end that has its own dark fame; it is told elsewhere, and it was not quick. The war she and her half-brother had fought over the dragons outlived nearly all the dragons it was fought over.

The Dragonpit was never rebuilt or reused. Its blackened dome stood over KingÔÇÖs Landing for the rest of the dynastyÔÇÖs history, and long after anyone living remembered the night, it remained the plainest possible statement of how the age of dragons ended: not with a battle, but with a crowd.