Sunfyre

The most beautiful dragon of his age, and the most horribly broken.

The beast itself

Every account of Sunfyre begins with how he looked, because there was not much else to say about him at first. His scales were gold ÔÇö beaten gold, worked gold, the gold of a coin fresh from the mint ÔÇö and they threw the light so hard that a man standing at the wrong angle could not look at him at all. His wing membranes were a pale rose that lit up from behind at height, so that he seemed to be flying inside a shell of pink glass. Even his flame was wrong in the same lovely way: gold at the root and blush-coloured at the tips. He was, by the flat consensus of chroniclers who agreed on very little else, the most beautiful dragon anybody had ever seen.

He was also small. Not a hatchling, but small for the company he kept, and light, and quick in a nervy sort of way rather than a useful one. His temperament matched his looks and it was not a fighting temperament: fussy, preening, easily distracted, given to displaying ÔÇö he liked to bank and turn where crowds could see him ÔÇö and prone to a kind of sulking when he was made to do something he disliked. He was the only dragon in this collection about whom a chronicler thought to use the word vain. In the air against beasts twice his weight he was outmatched from the first day to the last, and it took a very long time and a great deal of damage for anybody to notice that he did not seem to mind.

His rider: Aegon Targaryen

Aegon was given him young and the two grew up together, and for years the whole of it was decorative. A golden prince on a golden dragon, flown over tourney grounds and down the length of the Blackwater for the pleasure of being looked at, is not a war machine; it is a pageant. Neither of them was worked, neither of them was blooded, and both of them were, by every honest account, indulged.

Then a war arrived that Aegon had not especially wanted, and Sunfyre was put in the sky against beasts that had been bred, sized and tempered for exactly that. The first serious use of them was over Rook's Rest, in an ambush that was supposed to be one-sided and turned into the ugliest thing in the air since the Conquest. Sunfyre came out of it broken in a way that never mended: a wing that would not hold him, a body that could no longer do what his instincts kept telling it to do.

What is remarkable is that this is the point at which the pairing became real. The pretty prince and the pretty dragon spent the second half of the war maimed, hidden, half-forgotten by both sides, dragging themselves around Dragonstone on the strength of nothing but the refusal to stop. Sunfyre could not fly properly and kept killing. Aegon could barely walk and kept ruling. Nobody who saw them at the beginning would have guessed either of them had it in them, and it is not clear that either of them was improved by finding out.

The dragon in the songs

Sunfyre is the one beast of the Dance the singers can do something with, and they have. He is the golden dragon of a hundred bad ballads and a few good ones, the beautiful thing ruined, the ornament that turned out to be a weapon after all. The maesters are drier about it and note, correctly, that most of what he did in his broken years was done to people who could not fight back. Both readings survive because both are true, and because the family that raised him would rather be remembered by the ballad.

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

Sunfyre's last act was to devour Rhaenyra Targaryen on the shore of Dragonstone in front of her son, at Aegon II's order. He died soon after of wounds that had never healed. It is difficult to think of a more complete image of what the Dance did to the house that started it.