Dreamfyre

A blue dragon with silver markings, bound to two queens more than a century apart.

The beast itself

Dreamfyre was pale blue ÔÇö a soft, cloudy, almost milky blue ÔÇö marked along the spine and wings with silver that caught the light in a way people described as frost rather than metal. She was a slender dragon, long in the neck and fine in the head, and she was very old: she had hatched more than a century before the Dance and had watched the dynasty through most of its good years. Age had made her large without making her heavy, and she kept a light, drifting quality in the air that the bulkier beasts had lost.

She was as close to gentle as a dragon gets. Not tame ÔÇö she killed handlers who got careless, like all of them ÔÇö but placid, tolerant of noise, easy to lead, and by the end so used to the chains and the dark of the Dragonpit that she seemed content there. Her voice was odd for her size: a soft, mournful, almost musical note, quite unlike the tearing shriek of the war dragons. She laid clutches of eggs over the years, more than any other dragon of the age, and a great many of the beasts on this list are hers by some line or other. If any dragon in Westeros could be said to have been a mother, it was this one.

Her first rider: Rhaena Targaryen

Rhaena, eldest child of King Aenys, claimed her as a girl and flew her through a childhood that turned very bad very fast. When her family's grip on the throne came apart she took Dreamfyre and went ÔÇö to the Vale, to the west, wherever a young woman with a dragon could be given hospitality and not be handed back. Later, married against her will to an uncle everyone had reason to fear, she still had the one thing he could not take from her, and there is a fair reading of that whole grim decade in which Dreamfyre is the only reason Rhaena survived it.

In her later years Rhaena kept the dragon on Dragonstone and made a project of the eggs and the hatchlings there, which is how a great many of the Dance's beasts came to exist at all. The bond looked, from outside, like refuge. Where Vhagar was a weapon and Syrax an ornament, Dreamfyre was somewhere to go.

Her second rider: Helaena Targaryen

A century later Dreamfyre took a girl who was as unlike a war-rider as it is possible to be. Helaena Targaryen kept insects, spoke sideways about things she could not have known, and had no interest whatever in the quarrel her mother and brothers were assembling around her. The court found her strange. The dragon, evidently, did not.

They were extremely well matched and completely useless to everybody who wanted to use them. Helaena flew for pleasure and stopped when it stopped being pleasant; she never took Dreamfyre to a battle, never made a show of her, and when the war came she was in no condition to fly at all. So the largest gentle dragon in the world spent the crisis of the age chained under a stone dome in the middle of a starving city, listening to it. Those who visited her there said she called, on and off, for a long time.

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

Dreamfyre broke her chains during the storming of the Dragonpit and brought the dome down on herself and hundreds of the mob. She died in the rubble of the building the Targaryens had raised to keep their dragons safe.

Her rider did not live to see it. Helaena went from a window of the Red Keep shortly before, in the days when the city had gone past reason, and whether she went of her own will is one of the things the Dance leaves unsettled. The news of it is part of what sent the mob up the hill in the first place.