Balerion

The largest dragon ever to fly over Westeros, and the one that made the Seven Kingdoms seven no longer.

The beast itself

Black from snout to tail-tip, and not the black of coal but of a hole cut in the evening sky ÔÇö a colour the eye slid off rather than settled on. His fire came out the same way, black shot through with swirls of red, and it did not so much burn stone as unmake it. Men who saw him land tended to describe the teeth first: curved, yellowed with age, each the length of a man's arm. His jaws could take an aurochs whole, and had. With his wings spread a village beneath him lost the sun, and the wind of one downstroke stripped thatch off roofs.

For all that, Balerion was not a frantic animal. Two centuries had made him deliberate. He hunted like something that had never once needed to hurry ÔÇö a slow circle, a long look, then a drop that arrived faster than anyone watching had prepared for. His roar was low and travelled a long way, felt in the chest before it was heard. Toward his keepers he showed the flat indifference of a beast that could have ended them with a turn of the head and could not be troubled to. Toward other dragons he was simply the fact around which they arranged themselves. Nothing that flew ever challenged him.

His first rider: Aegon Targaryen

Aegon claimed him on Dragonstone as a boy, which in the Targaryen way meant walking up to something that could have eaten him and finding out. Balerion had carried nobody since the Freehold burned, and he took the boy. For the next thirty-odd years the two of them were, in practice, the Westerosi state.

What they did together is the shape of the map. At the Field of Fire, with Vhagar and Meraxes on either wing, Balerion turned a host of thousands into a burning wheatfield in an afternoon. At Harrenhal he did not besiege the largest castle ever raised in Westeros; he went over its walls in the dark and came down the towers from above, and by morning the stone had run like candle-wax. The swords the beaten lords laid down were fed into his fire until they were soft enough to be beaten into a chair. From outside, the bond looked less like affection than agreement. Aegon rarely spoke of the dragon and never boasted of him. He simply arrived on him whenever a question needed to stop being a question.

His second rider: Maegor Targaryen

Maegor was the second man ever to ride him, and the pairing was more natural than anyone cared to admit. Where Aegon had used the Black Dread as a threat he preferred not to spend, Maegor spent him. Balerion burned the Faith's great sept on the hill for his new rider without hesitation, and beneath the Gods Eye he met his own kind ÔÇö a smaller, quicksilver-pale dragon carrying a rival king ÔÇö and took it apart in the air in front of both armies. Onlookers said the old beast seemed neither eager nor reluctant. He did what the man on his neck asked, at a scale nobody had asked for in a generation.

The girl who took him: Aerea Targaryen

Then, for some years, nobody rode him at all ÔÇö until a girl of about ten got past the dragonkeepers. Aerea Targaryen was Rhaena's daughter, kept at court in the Old King's early reign and, by every account, bored past bearing with it. Of all the beasts under the hill she chose the largest dragon in the world, which tells you most of what there is to know about her.

The two of them vanished. Balerion was gone the better part of a year, and when he came back over King's Landing he was carrying an injury nobody could account for: a raw seam along his belly that the keepers had no name for and no remedy against. Where dragon and girl had been in that year is the oldest open question in the Citadel's dragon-lore, and the one the Citadel has been least eager to answer.

His last rider: Viserys Targaryen

The last man on his back was a boy again. Viserys Targaryen, not yet a king and not yet anything much, claimed Balerion in his final years and took him up a handful of times over Blackwater Bay. By then the dragon was two centuries of accumulated weight and disliked leaving the ground at all; the flights were short, low and carefully managed, and the court treated them as a curiosity rather than a threat. It was still the greatest inheritance in the world ÔÇö the beast that had made the kingdom, carrying the boy who would inherit it ÔÇö and it made Viserys no more formidable than he was ever going to be.

What the maesters dispute

Every number attached to Balerion should be handled with tongs. The wingspan given in the older accounts is the one figure in Westerosi natural history that no two chroniclers repeat the same way, and the long habit of measuring later dragons against him guaranteed the measurements would grow in the telling. The Aerea business is worse. Some maesters hold that girl and dragon went to Valyria itself and that what came back was quietly kept out of the published histories; others say a bored child took a slow old animal somewhere hot and unremarkable and the rest is romance. Both camps agree that the records for that year were tidied by someone.

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

Balerion died of old age in the Dragonpit in 94 AC, more than two hundred years old, too heavy at the end to leave the ground. Every dragon that came after him was smaller, and the family never entirely stopped measuring their beasts against his memory.

Aerea Targaryen did not long outlive the flight she took him on. She came back to the Red Keep burning from within, and no maester's art could hold her. Grand Maester Barth's account of that day is among the papers the Citadel is least willing to discuss.