Daenerys Targaryen

The last Targaryen princess, born in exile and sold in marriage by her brother to a Dothraki khal — a frightened girl who begins to discover she is anything but.

The fuller tale

Daenerys was born on Dragonstone in the middle of the great storm that wrecked the last royalist fleet, which is why the world calls her Stormborn, and orphaned in the same hour, which is why nothing else about her life was ever simple. Her mother died bringing her forth; her father and eldest brother were already dead across the water; the knights who guarded the island were preparing to sell the children when loyal hands smuggled them out to Braavos, to a house with a red door that would remain, all her life, her private image of home. She grew up in Viserys’s shadow and Viserys’s exile, hawked from city to city, taught by her brother’s rages that she was small and owed and his — the last daughter of a great house, raised as luggage.

The story meets her at the moment she is spent: sold at thirteen (the show ages her up) to Khal Drogo, a warlord who does not share a language with her, for the promise of an army her brother will never see. And then the tale does the thing that makes her its center of gravity — it refuses to let the sale be the story. In the grass sea Daenerys learns the Dothraki tongue, the court politics of a khalasar, the management of a husband who has never been managed; she eats the stallion’s heart, takes the khalasar’s awe, and discovers that the fire her family babbled about is, in her case, not a metaphor. By the time Viserys points a sword at her belly, the girl who flinched is gone, and she watches his golden crowning with a stillness that frightens even the Dothraki.

Everything is taken from her anyway — husband, child, khalasar, all burned away in a single season by a wound, a witch, and a bargain gone wrong — and her answer is the tale’s most audacious image. She walks into Drogo’s funeral pyre with three petrified dragon eggs and the bound maegi singing in the flames, and walks out at dawn unburnt, with three living dragons at her breast, the first the world has seen in a hundred and fifty years. It is the moment the entire saga tilts: magic returns to a world that had rationalized it away, and it returns answering to a nineteen-year-old with nothing left to lose. The handful of survivors kneel in the ashes. She is done being sold.

Her rise through Slaver’s Bay is conquest as moral argument. In Astapor she buys the Unsullied with a dragon and pays in fire, freeing an army in the same stroke that beheads the city’s masters; Yunkai’s freedmen hail her as mhysa, mother; Meereen falls to her and then, crucially, holds her. Because this is where Daenerys differs from every other claimant in the tale: she stays. Ruling a bitter, ancient slave city — the insurgent Sons of the Harpy, the grain politics, the marriages of convenience, the daily arithmetic of mercy and terror — is the hardest thing she ever does, and she does it on purpose, refusing to sail for Westeros and leave a graveyard of good intentions behind her. The chained dragons beneath the pyramid are the chapter’s perfect emblem: her power and her conscience, locked in the same cellar.

She is a character built from collisions — the gentle mother of freedmen and the blood of old Valyria; Mirri Maz Duur’s lesson that all magic has a price and the pyre that proved she could pay it. Around her gathers the tale’s strangest and most devoted court: an exiled bear of a knight who loves her hopelessly and betrays her and crawls back; the greatest living swordsman of the realm she has never seen; a scribe from Naath and a eunuch commander who learn, in her service, to be people; a sellsword with a dyed beard who offers her the version of herself with no rules. Each of them holds a mirror, and the seasons in Meereen are the long scene of her deciding which reflection is true.

Westeros, when she finally sails, gives her the war she wanted and takes everything she brought. Her fleets are burned and scattered, her allies rolled up one by one, a child of her body — for the dragons are that, the story insists — dies beyond the Wall winning a war for the living that the living barely thank her for. She comes out of the Long Night with her armies halved, her best friend beheaded on a wall for her to watch, her closest advisers whispering another claimant’s name — the man she loves, whose secret unmakes her whole story of herself. The city that hated her father rings its bells in surrender, and Daenerys, at the top of the arc the tale spent eight seasons and five books building, hears them and chooses fire.

Whether that choice was seeded or sprung remains the great argument of the ending, and the argument is the point. Every element was laid down early — the crucified masters, the burned Tarlys, the promise to break the wheel and the growing suspicion that wheels are broken with people under them — and so was every counterweight, the girl who locked her dragons away because one had killed a child. She is the tale’s most complete study of power: how it is earned, how it is deserved, and how the deserving is precisely the thing that makes it dangerous. Fire and blood, the house words say. She was the only one who ever meant both at once.

The page and the screen

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 Jhaqo’s riders — her ending unwritten. Everything the show did afterward, from the burning of the khals to the bells of King’s 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 Quaithe’s recurring warnings, the Meereenese knot of politics compressed on screen into a fraction of its factions, and two entire rival claimants — Quentyn Martell, who dies reaching for her dragons, and Aegon, the boy said to be Rhaegar’s living son — 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 — 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 — whatever ending Martin writes — are all still in motion.

In the show, season by season

Season One. In Winter Is Coming — Sold to a khal, wed at sunset with three stone eggs. In The Kingsroad — Learns that a khaleesi commands — starting in her own tent. In Lord Snow — With child — and suddenly her brother is the beggar. In Cripples, Bastards and Broken Things — Strikes her brother with a belt and doesn't apologize. In The Wolf and the Lion — A death warrant with her name crosses the narrow sea. In A Golden Crown — Watches her brother die and does not look away. In You Win or You Die — A wineseller's poison buys her a khal's war. In The Pointy End — Claims the healers and the women — mercy with a price. In Baelor — "Only death pays for life." She doesn't ask whose. In Fire and Blood — The Unburnt. Mother of Dragons. The world is different now.

Season Two. In The North Remembers — Leads her people through the red waste toward distant lights. In The Night Lands — The red waste takes its toll in horses and riders. In Garden of Bones — The greatest city that ever was opens — a crack. In The Ghost of Harrenhal — Xaro offers half his wealth for a wedding; Jorah offers truth. In The Old Gods and the New — "Where are my dragons?!" In A Man Without Honor — A warlock's invitation: come to the House of the Undying. In Valar Morghulis — Dracarys. The vault of Qarth pays for its own greed.

Season Three. In Valar Dohaeris — An army that feels no pain, for a price she won't name yet. In Walk of Punishment — A dragon is not a slave. But the slavers don't know that yet. In And Now His Watch Is Ended — Bought an army with a dragon, then took the dragon back. In The Bear and the Maiden Fair — The Yellow City's envoy leaves without his gold and without his slaves. In Second Sons — Gains a sellsword captain with flexible loyalties: Daario Naharis. In Mhysa — Not a queen to them yet. Something more dangerous: a mother.

Season Four. In Two Swords — Marches on Meereen past a mile-markers of crucified children. In Breaker of Chains — Speaks to the slaves of Meereen, not their masters. In Oathkeeper — Answers crucifixion with crucifixion; mercy loses the vote. In First of His Name — "I will do what queens do. I will rule." In The Children — The catacombs close on two dragons crying for their mother.

Season Five. In The Wars to Come — Gold masks in the alleys; her city stabs from behind. In The House of Black and White — Justice for all turns out to please no one. In Kill the Boy — Fear and marriage, tried in the same week. In Hardhome — "I'm not going to stop the wheel. I'm going to break the wheel." In The Dance of Dragons — Leaves the pit on dragonback — the first Targaryen to fly in a century. In Mother's Mercy — Drogon's rest stop ends in a khalasar's circle.

Season Six. In The Red Woman — Marched to the city of the horselords as a khal's widow. In Oathbreaker — Sentenced to the temple of the dosh khaleen — pending trial. In Book of the Stranger — Every khal at once, and the door barred from outside. In Blood of My Blood — A hundred thousand riders, and a dragon overhead: the speech writes itself. In Battle of the Bastards — Three dragons over a burning bay; the Masters' terms invert. In The Winds of Winter — Tyrion pinned as Hand; the horizon finally points home.

Season Seven. In Dragonstone — Home, one hundred and fifty years of exile later. In Stormborn — "Are you a sheep? No. You're a dragon. Be a dragon." — Olenna In The Queen's Justice — Two crowns in one room and neither will bend first. In The Spoils of War — "Dracarys" at scale: the first Field of Fire in three hundred years. In Eastwatch — Two Tarlys refuse the knee; the dragon doesn't ask twice. In Beyond the Wall — Flew beyond the Wall for a man who won't stop being right.

Season Eight. In Winterfell — "Your sister doesn't like me." The North agrees with her sister. In The Last of the Starks — Loses a dragon, a best friend, and the room's love — in one episode. In The Bells — The bells rang. She heard something else.

In the books

A Game of Thrones. In A Hand's Summons — A silver-haired girl wed under the stars with dragon eggs for a dowry. In The Road South — Learns to ride, then to command — starting with her brother. In The Eyrie and the Heart — The crones name her son the stallion who mounts the world. In The Wine and the Boar — The khalasar turns west for the first time in history. In The Green Fork and the Whispering Wood — Only death pays for life. The maegi never said whose. In Fire and Blood — The first dragons in a hundred and fifty years wake to her voice.

A Clash of Kings. In Wolves and Krakens — The greatest city that ever was opens for the Mother of Dragons. In The Kraken in the Godswood — The Undying show her three fires, three mounts, three treasons.

A Storm of Swords. In Wolves at the Crossing — Eight thousand Unsullied, and a plan the slavers never priced. In Dracarys — Freed an army and burned a city's masters in the same hour. In The Bear, the Wall, the Bath — The Yellow City opens its gates to Mhysa's freedmen.

A Dance with Dragons. In The Lost Lords — Locks her dragons under a pyramid and her nature under a crown. In The Griffin and the Rhoyne — Suitors multiply: a Ghiscari noble, a Dornish prince, a corsair's promise. In The Harpy's Bargain — Flew from her own wedding feast on a black dragon's back. In The Dragon's Peace Breaks — Passes bloody grass and burnt bones; a khalasar finds her smiling.

Their journey

Where they stand, season by season

Mentioned in the chronicle

• Daenerys Targaryen steps ashore at Dragonstone, touches the sand, and says: "Shall we begin?" (S7·E1)

Their fate — if death has found them, it is written here. Open at your peril.

The show: Slain in the throne room (S8·E6)

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 King’s Landing with the city’s bells still ringing surrender. Jon Snow — her lover, her nephew, her most reluctant subject — 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 tale’s 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 — instead he turns his fire on the Iron Throne itself, melting the seat of the conquest into slag, the story’s 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 — 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 Martin’s 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.