Moondancer

A small, quick, slender dragon and a rider of the same description.

The beast itself

Moondancer was pale green ÔÇö a soft, cool, sea-glass green ÔÇö with horns, crest and wing-bones of a creamy pearl that stood out against it, and she was the smallest fighting dragon of the Dance by a clear margin. A big warhorse would have outweighed her. Everything about her was built for turning rather than hitting: slender neck, light frame, wings long out of all proportion to her body, and a habit of flying with quick shallow beats and then hanging almost still in a headwind.

She was fast, alert and thoroughly bad-tempered about being crowded, which is the disposition of a small animal that has grown up among large ones. Moondancer would not be handled by anyone she did not know and did not care to be looked at. Her flame was thin and very hot, more a jet than a gout, and her cry was a short hard bark rather than a roar. Nobody who watched her fly over Dragonstone thought she was a match for the beasts of that war. Everyone who watched her fly agreed she was the best flier on the island.

Her rider: Baela Targaryen

Baela was Daemon's daughter by Laena, which made her granddaughter to the Sea Snake and heir to more temper than sense, and she was raised on Driftmark half feral. She hatched Moondancer from an egg placed in her cradle and grew up alongside her, which is the oldest Targaryen method and the one that produces the closest bonds. The two of them matched almost comically well: small, quick, slight, and entirely unwilling to be told.

Their war was mostly waiting. Baela was kept on Dragonstone, considered too valuable and too young to be spent, while cousins and half-brothers flew off to do the fighting, and she took it about as well as could be expected. So when a broken golden dragon came out of the sky over the island, uninvited and carrying the man her family was at war with, Baela did not send word or wait for a council. She went to Moondancer, got up, and flew at something several times their size on her own initiative.

From the ground it looked, briefly, like the smallest dragon in the world winning ÔÇö she was quicker, she was cleverer, and she had the height. It is the one moment of the Dance in which nimbleness and nerve were nearly enough.

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

Moondancer and Sunfyre tore each other apart in the air above Dragonstone and came down together. Baela survived the fall, burned and broken; the dragons did not recover.