Vermax

The dragon of Rhaenyra's eldest, who flew to Winterfell to win the North with a promise and a pact.

The beast itself

Vermax is the dragon the chroniclers were least interested in describing, which is itself worth noting: he was a young beast belonging to a young prince, and by the time anyone had reason to write about him at length the reasons had run out. What the accounts agree on is that he was middling-small, well grown for his years and still growing fast, and hardy ÔÇö hardier than his size suggested, since he did things no other dragon of the war was asked to do.

He flew north in winter weather, over the Neck and past the Wall's own latitude and back, and he did it without complaint. That is the measure of him. Where Arrax was a nervy child of a dragon and Moondancer a sprinter, Vermax was an endurance animal: steady, unspectacular, willing to be up all day in bad conditions with a rider who needed to be somewhere. He was calm around strangers and around horses, which mattered a great deal in courtyards full of northmen who had never seen a dragon and had opinions about the Targaryens. In the whole record of his travels there is not one report of him doing anything alarming, and for the diplomatic use he was put to, that was the entire point.

His rider: Jacaerys Velaryon

Jace was Rhaenyra's eldest, a serious boy who had been raised to expect a throne and had been hearing whispers about his parentage for as long as he could remember, and he answered both facts by working harder than anyone required. He and Vermax were flown properly and often, which is why the dragon was fit enough to do what came next.

What they did together is the single most useful thing anyone accomplished for the blacks in that war, and it involved burning nothing at all. Jace flew Vermax to the Eyrie, to White Harbour, to Winterfell, and to the Wall, and in each place he got off the dragon and talked. He came home with the Vale, the North and a pact sealed at Winterfell ÔÇö armies his mother did not have and could not have bought. That a boy of fifteen on a mid-sized dragon delivered more to his cause than Vhagar delivered to the other one is the closest thing the Dance has to a moral.

Those who saw them said Jace used the dragon exactly as a rider should and never as a threat: he came down outside the walls rather than inside them, dismounted first, and let Vermax be looked at. It made an impression in halls where the Targaryens had never been anything but a rumour with wings.

In the histories

One durable northern story holds that Vermax left a clutch of eggs somewhere in the vaults beneath Winterfell during that visit, hidden in the warm dark where the hot springs run. Maesters point out the obvious objection ÔÇö nothing in the record suggests Vermax was female ÔÇö and the story survives anyway, because Winterfell is a castle built over heat and because a hidden clutch of dragon eggs is exactly the sort of thing the North would rather believe than not. No one has produced one.

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

Vermax died at the Battle of the Gullet, in the bloodiest naval fight in the history of the narrow sea. Jacaerys went into the water with him.