The Cannibal

A wild dragon that nested on Dragonstone and ate other dragons, including hatchlings and eggs.

The beast itself

The Cannibal was black ÔÇö flat black, without Balerion's depth or sheen, a dragon-shaped absence against the smoke of the Dragonmont ÔÇö and his eyes were a bright poisonous green that people picked out of the dark long before they made out the rest of him. He was large. How large is anyone's guess, because nobody who was in a position to measure him wanted to stay long enough to do it, and the estimates that survive were made by frightened men at a distance. He was certainly one of the biggest things on the island, and he had been there, apparently full-grown, for as long as the records go back.

His temperament is the whole of his reputation. He did not hunt herds, and he showed no interest at all in the villages, the fishing boats or the castle; what he ate was dragons. Hatchlings taken off the rocks, half-grown beasts caught out alone, and ÔÇö the detail that fixed his name ÔÇö eggs, cracked open and emptied. He was silent, which the older dragons never are. He did not roar to announce himself and he did not circle for show. He hunted the vents and the high ledges of the Dragonmont at dusk on a slow flat glide, and the first anyone usually knew of him was that something else had stopped making noise.

Those who tried to claim him

Over the years a number of people went up the Dragonmont to try their luck with the Cannibal, and the record of what happened to them is short because the record of what happened to them is the same. Some were dragonseeds with more blood than sense. Some were knights who had decided that the biggest unclaimed dragon in the world was worth a wager. At least one, by the Dragonstone telling, was a maester of the castle who thought the beast could be studied at close range.

None of them rode him. None of them, so far as anyone recorded, came back to say why. When the blacks made their great call for riders during the Dance ÔÇö when they were desperate enough to offer knighthood and lands to anyone who could get onto anything ÔÇö the Cannibal was explicitly left off the list of beasts available to try. The men who kept the dragons were prepared to see volunteers burned. They were not prepared to send them to that one.

What the smallfolk of Dragonstone said

The islanders had a different account from the castle's, and theirs was older. They held that the Cannibal had been on the Dragonmont before the Targaryens came from Valyria at all ÔÇö that he was not one of the family's beasts gone wild but something that had always lived in the mountain, and that the dragonlords had simply built their castle next to him and agreed not to mention it.

There was a second story, quieter and more practical. Fishermen and shepherds said the reason the great black beast never troubled them was that he was not interested in men, and that the safest place on the island in a bad year was the ledge below his caves, because nothing else would come near it. They also said, with the flatness of people repeating something everyone knows, that you did not go up there in the evening. Both halves of that were believed at once, and neither the maesters nor the dragonkeepers ever produced anything better.

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

The Cannibal was never ridden and never killed in any account we have. He simply stops appearing in the records ÔÇö which, for a dragon of that disposition, may be the most unsettling ending on this list.