Rhaegal

Green with bronze markings, named for a dead prince, and the second dragon in centuries to take a rider.

The beast itself

Rhaegal is green ÔÇö a deep bottle-green over the body, shading darker along the spine ÔÇö with bronze running through the wing membranes, the crest and the horns, so that in low sun he looks like weathered metal rather than a living animal. He is the middle brother in every sense: smaller than Drogon, larger than Viserion, and neither the first nor the last of the three to do anything. His flame runs orange-gold. His voice is higher and more querulous than his black brother's, a sound with a note of complaint in it.

His temperament was bent by circumstance more than either of the others'. Years chained in the dark under a pyramid left him wary of enclosed spaces, wary of hands, and quick to snap at anything that came at him from the side ÔÇö a nervousness that never entirely went out of him even after he was flying free. He is watchful where Drogon is bold. He hangs back, circles wider, and takes a moment to commit. Handlers who worked around all three said the black one would ignore you and the green one would keep an eye on you, and that the second was the more uncomfortable to live with.

The years without a rider

For most of his life nobody rode him and nobody could. He was hatched into a household with one Targaryen in it, and dragons do not divide themselves up conveniently; Daenerys had Drogon, and the other two were, for practical purposes, unclaimed animals living in the orbit of a woman they tolerated.

Then came the chaining. Rhaegal and his cream-coloured brother were led down into the vaults beneath the Great Pyramid and shut in the dark for the good of the city's peace of mind, and they stayed there long enough to stop growing properly. What came out was warier, thinner and less trusting than what went in, and it is worth being clear that this was done to him by the one person in the world he had any reason to trust.

His rider: Jon Snow

On the screen, a man who had been raised as a northern bastard walks up to the green dragon in a field below Winterfell and gets onto him, and the dragon ÔÇö who had never carried anybody, who had been chained in the dark for years, who did not care for hands ÔÇö permits it. It is played almost as a joke, and it is the loudest quiet thing in the entire story: dragons do not take riders at random, and everyone watching who knows that also knows what has just been revealed about the man's parents.

The pairing itself is brief and never really becomes a partnership. Jon flies him badly, by his own account, and mostly for necessity rather than pleasure; there is no bond built over years here, nothing like Baela and Moondancer or the Old King and Vermithor. What there is instead is a fact that cannot be argued with, established in front of witnesses, and afterwards impossible to put away.

The page and the screen

This is one of the sharper divergences in the whole saga. On the page, Rhaegal has never been ridden by anyone; he is still a chained, half-starved, deeply unhappy animal under a pyramid in Meereen, and the question of who might eventually get onto him is one of the loudest unresolved threads the books are holding. Several candidates have been carefully manoeuvred into position and none of them has yet laid a hand on him.

The screen resolved the question. Whether the books will resolve it the same way is the sort of thing readers have been arguing about for a very long time, and the honest position is that nobody outside the author's study knows.

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

Rhaegal was shot out of the sky by Euron Greyjoy's scorpions near Dragonstone, exhausted from the war in the North. It is the moment the last of Daenerys's advantages ÔÇö and the last of her patience ÔÇö begins to go.