Drogon

The black-and-red dragon born on a funeral pyre, and the largest to fly in three hundred years.

The beast itself

Drogon is black and red, and the two colours are arranged the way they are on hot iron: black over the whole of him, with red running in the seams between the scales, along the ridges of the wings and up the throat, so that he seems to be lit from inside when he moves. His flame is black at the heart with red at the edges, the same signature the histories give Balerion, and he is the first dragon in three hundred years to grow to a size that makes the comparison worth making at all. He grew faster than any beast the maesters have a record for ÔÇö from something that could sit on a shoulder to something that can carry a rider and take a horse off a hillside, in a handful of years.

His nature has been consistent since the day he came out of a fire on the Dothraki sea that should have destroyed him. He is the boldest and least biddable of the three brothers: the first to fly, the first to hunt, the first to go off on his own for weeks at a stretch and come back fat and unrepentant. He does not tolerate handling. He does not come when he is called unless he feels like it. He is loud ÔÇö a deep tearing shriek followed by that long descending note that empties a market square ÔÇö and he has a habit of landing directly in front of people rather than beside them, which is either display or contempt and has never been satisfactorily distinguished. The one thing he has never been, at any point, by anyone, is tame.

His rider: Daenerys Targaryen

The bond began before he had a name worth using. Daenerys carried three petrified eggs across half a continent as a wedding gift nobody expected anything of, walked into a fire with them, and came out with three living animals ÔÇö one of them black, one green, one cream ÔÇö and a reputation in the east that never afterwards left her. She named him for a dead husband, and for a long while the three of them were less a weapon than a claim: proof that the girl asking for ships was who she said she was.

He grew, and the arrangement changed. Drogon began hunting where he liked, which in a city means somebody's flock, and eventually the people of Meereen laid a death in the fields outside at his door. Daenerys did the thing that no Targaryen ruler had ever quite been able to avoid doing and put his brothers in chains beneath a pyramid, and Drogon ÔÇö who would not be caught ÔÇö simply left. For a long stretch of the story she is a queen with dragons in the same way a woman is an owner of weather.

The first time she rode him she had not planned to. He came down into a fighting pit in front of a crowd, into a situation nobody had arranged and nobody could stop, and she got onto his back because the alternative was worse. That is the shape of the whole partnership: never quite an agreement, never quite obedience, but a repeated discovery that when things become impossible the black dragon turns up. From outside it looked like sorcery to some and like the return of an old and specific danger to others. The Dothraki, who had watched her walk out of a fire once already, drew their own conclusions and followed her.

What the two of them did together altered the balance of the known world twice over. A city's slave-masters were made to negotiate with a girl because of him. A khalasar that should have discarded her instead swore to her. And when she finally turned west, the argument she brought with her was not the Unsullied or the ships or the claim, but a black animal that no army in Westeros had been designed to fight.

In the histories of the east

In Essos he is not a Targaryen dragon at all. In the freed cities they tell the story as a prophecy answered ÔÇö a black wing over the pyramids, the harpy pulled down, the collars struck off ÔÇö and no amount of Westerosi pedantry about the actual sequence of events is going to dislodge it. In Volantis and Qarth the same animal is a warning about what happens when the old blood is allowed to gather strength again, and merchants price their voyages accordingly.

The maesters, characteristically, are interested in something duller and more important: how a species declared extinct produced three hatchlings from stone-hard eggs in an ordinary funeral fire, and what exactly was different about that fire. There is no agreed answer. There are a great many careful papers arriving at the phrase we cannot say.

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

Drogon carried Daenerys's body away east after melting the Iron Throne ÔÇö the chair, not the man who had killed her. It is the most pointed thing any animal does in the entire saga, and where he took her, nobody in the story ever learns.