Daenerys Targaryen
The last Targaryen princess, born in exile and sold in marriage by her brother to a Dothraki khal ÔÇö a frightened girl who begins to discover she is anything but.
A soul of House Targaryen, born at Dragonstone.
The fuller tale
Season One
Sold to a Dothraki khal by her brother for the promise of an army, and everything that follows is her refusing, one step at a time, to be a thing that is traded. She learns command in Drogo's khalasar the hard way and finds she is good at it. She watches Viserys get the crown he asked for, poured molten over his head. Then a wound goes bad, a maegi's bargain takes her husband and her son together, and she walks into Drogo's funeral pyre with three petrified eggs and walks out of the ashes unburnt with the first dragons in a century and a half.
Season Two
The red waste nearly finishes what the pyre started. Qarth takes her in and then robs her: her dragons stolen, her people murdered in her rooms, and a long unpleasant lesson in the House of the Undying about what a queen with three lizards and forty followers is actually worth. She comes out of it with a stolen ship and a much shorter list of people she trusts.
Season Three
Astapor states her thesis out loud. She offers a dragon for eight thousand Unsullied, takes the city instead the moment the chain changes hands, and then does the thing nobody expected ÔÇö tells the slave soldiers they are free and asks them to choose whether to follow her. They do. Yunkai falls next, and she is carried out of it on the shoulders of people who have no other word for her than mother.
Season Four
Meereen, and the discovery that breaking chains is a morning's work and building what comes after is a life's. She crucifies a hundred and sixty-three masters for a hundred and sixty-three children on the road, and finds out afterwards how that looks. She decides not to sail for Westeros ÔÇö she will learn to rule here first ÔÇö and then chains two of her own dragons in the catacombs after the third burns a farmer's daughter.
Season Five
The Sons of the Harpy make the city ungovernable and she answers with everything she has: an execution against her own council's advice, the fighting pits reopened, and a marriage of state to a man she does not want. It all comes apart at Daznak's Pit with knives closing in from every side, and ends with Drogon coming out of the sky, taking the arrows meant for her, and carrying her out over the grass.
Season Six
Taken by a khalasar and marched to Vaes Dothrak to spend her life among the widows of dead khals. She burns the temple down with every khal inside it and walks out of the fire a second time, and forty thousand riders kneel in the ashes. Then she goes back to Meereen, wins it properly, and finally sails ÔÇö Dothraki, Unsullied, the Greyjoy fleet, and alliances in the Reach and in Dorne.
Season Seven
Dragonstone, her family's first seat, which she has never seen. Her advisers talk her into a careful war and Cersei takes it apart piece by piece ÔÇö the fleet, Dorne, Highgarden ÔÇö until she stops listening and takes a dragon and a khalasar to the Roseroad herself, which works completely. Then she flies north to save people who will not thank her for it, and loses Viserion doing it, and watches him get back up with blue eyes.
Season Eight
Winterfell receives her the way the North receives anybody: coldly. In a fortnight she loses Jorah, Rhaegal and Missandei, learns that the man she loves has a better claim than hers, and understands that this country will never love her the way Meereen did. The bells of King's Landing ring surrender and she burns the city anyway, and the argument about that hour has not finished yet ÔÇö it was seeded in every promise about the blood of the dragon and every counsellor who taught her that fear works where love will not.
How it ends for them
On the screen. Slain in the throne room (S8┬ÀE6)
She broke the wheel and burned a city, and stood at last before the throne she'd chased across the world. Jon Snow kissed her and put a dagger in her heart in the same breath. Drogon melted the Iron Throne and carried her east, toward Valyria.
In the show, Daenerys dies in the ruined throne room of the Red Keep, days after burning KingÔÇÖs Landing with the cityÔÇÖs bells still ringing surrender. Jon Snow ÔÇö her lover, her nephew, her most reluctant subject ÔÇö comes to her through the ash as she stands before the Iron Throne she has chased across two continents, touching it for the first and only time. They argue mercy; she asks him to build the new world with her; he kisses her and drives a dagger into her heart. The show frames it as the taleÔÇÖs last terrible duty: the man who never wanted power killing the woman who wanted it for the best reasons and became the thing she overthrew.
What follows is pure myth. Drogon, arriving to find his mother dead, does not burn her killer ÔÇö instead he turns his fire on the Iron Throne itself, melting the seat of the conquest into slag, the storyÔÇÖs three-hundred-year argument ended by a grieving animal with better judgment than most kings. He gathers her body in his claws and flies east over the water, toward Valyria and out of history; the last word of her in the epilogue is a rumor that the dragon was seen carrying her ever farther from the country that never learned to love her.
In the published books Daenerys is alive ÔÇö last seen in the grass of the Dothraki sea, burned clean of illusions, remembering who she is as a khalasar bears down on her. Whether MartinÔÇÖs road leads to the same throne room is the most argued question in the fandom, and the books have so far answered only with her own creed: fire and blood.
Their chapters, book by book
A Game of Thrones 10 chapters of their own
Daenerys I
In Illyrio's manse in Pentos, Viserys dresses his sister for sale; Daenerys meets Khal Drogo and learns her wedding will buy her brother an army.
Daenerys II
Daenerys is wed to Drogo under the open sky: three dragon eggs for a gift, a silver mare, and one gentle word of Common Tongue ÔÇö ÔÇ£no.ÔÇØ
Daenerys III
On the Dothraki sea Daenerys stops the khalasar to walk in the grass, faces down Viserys for the first time, and learns she carries Drogo's child.
Daenerys IV
In Vaes Dothrak Daenerys eats the stallion's heart and the crones name her son the stallion who mounts the world; Jorah stops Viserys stealing her eggs.
Daenerys V
In the market of Vaes Dothrak a wineseller pours poison for the dragon's daughter; Jorah's suspicion saves her, and Drogo promises his son the iron chair.
Daenerys VI
Drogo turns the khalasar against the Lhazareen towns for slaves to buy ships; Daenerys claims the women, and a wound opens the khal's chest.
Daenerys VII
The khalasar marches and Drogo's wound festers under a poultice torn away too soon; Daenerys watches her sun-and-stars begin to fall.
Daenerys VIII
Drogo falls from his horse; Daenerys bids Mirri Maz Duur work bloodmagic in the tent, Qotho defies her ÔÇö and her labor begins too soon.
Daenerys IX
Daenerys wakes to ashes: Rhaego dead and monstrous, Drogo an empty shell. She gives her sun-and-stars mercy with a pillow.
Daenerys X
Daenerys builds a pyre for Drogo, binds the godswife to it, and walks into the fire with three stone eggs. Dawn brings three dragons.A Clash of Kings 5 chapters of their own
A Storm of Swords 6 chapters of their own
A Dance with Dragons 10 chapters of their own
Where the page and the screen part
The published books leave Daenerys mid-arc and alive: A Dance with Dragons ends with Meereen under siege, her marriage to Hizdahr collapsing into poison and treachery, and Daenerys herself carried off by Drogon from the fighting pit to the Dothraki sea, where the last chapter finds her fevered, walking, and met by Khal JhaqoÔÇÖs riders ÔÇö her ending unwritten. Everything the show did afterward, from the burning of the khals to the bells of KingÔÇÖs Landing, is its own invention or extrapolation. The books also surround her with material the show cut whole: the prophecies of the House of the Undying in their full riddling form, the masked shadowbinder QuaitheÔÇÖs recurring warnings, the Meereenese knot of politics compressed on screen into a fraction of its factions, and two entire rival claimants ÔÇö Quentyn Martell, who dies reaching for her dragons, and Aegon, the boy said to be RhaegarÔÇÖs living son ÔÇö whose absence from the show reshapes her Westeros entirely.
The character reads differently in each medium, too. Book Daenerys is younger, more inward, and narrated from inside ÔÇö her chapters are a running argument between the girl who wants a house with a red door and the queen who must be fire and blood, with the phrase if I look back I am lost tolling through them. The show, without her interior voice, externalizes the same argument into advisers and consequences, which is partly why its final turn landed for some viewers as a swerve and for book readers as a long-foreshadowed arrival. On the page, the pieces of the ending ÔÇö whatever ending Martin writes ÔÇö are all still in motion.
Their journey
Where the two tellings send them to the same place the road runs whole; where they part, the screen keeps the left and the books the right.