Vermithor

The Old King's mount, and the second-largest dragon alive when the Dance began.

The beast itself

Vermithor was bronze, and the word is exact: not gold, not brown, but the dull warm metal-sheen of a bell that has been rung for a hundred years. His wings were a paler tan, so thin at the trailing edge that the sun came through them, and when he banked over a field the shadow he threw was the colour of weak tea. By the time of the Dance he was the second-largest living dragon in the world, close on a hundred years old and still growing, with a chest like a granary and a head that had gone knobbed and craggy with age.

He had a slow, ill-tempered patience that made him easy to underestimate. Vermithor did not fuss. He lay in the smoking caves under the Dragonmont for whole seasons together, half-buried in warm ash, and looked for all the world like something that had stopped caring. But he had been ridden and handled for fifty years by a king who was careful with him, and the habit of tolerating men never entirely left him ÔÇö he would let a person walk up, which was the most dangerous thing about him, because that tolerance had a bottom to it and nobody could see where. His fire was heavy and orange and came out in slow gouts rather than jets, and his roar was a bass note that people at Rosby claimed to feel through their floors.

His first rider: Jaehaerys Targaryen

Jaehaerys the Conciliator claimed him as a boy and flew him for the better part of fifty-five years, which is very likely the longest working partnership between a man and a dragon in the whole history of the house. What they did together was almost nothing that a singer could use. They flew progresses. They landed in the yards of lords who needed reminding that the Iron Throne existed. They went up and down the kingsroad while it was being built, and they were seen at Winterfell, at Oldtown, at the Wall.

The realm's longest peace was held together partly by law and partly by the fact that a bronze dragon might turn up over your keep at any time, and the man on it would be perfectly courteous about it. That was the bond, seen from outside: the least violent use anyone ever made of a great dragon, and arguably the most effective.

The long years without a rider

After the Old King, nobody took him. He went back to the Dragonmont and lived there ÔÇö not wild, exactly, since the keepers still knew where he was and he still came out to be fed, but unridden for the better part of thirty years. Dragonstone got used to him. Shepherds a mile from the caves went about their business with the second-largest dragon in the world asleep in the hill above them, on the reasonable grounds that he had never yet done anything about it.

Claimed by: Hugh Hammer

When the war made the blacks desperate enough to invite anyone of dragonseed blood to try their luck, most of the volunteers found out very quickly that the beasts of Dragonstone did not want them. Hugh Hammer, a bastard blacksmith with shoulders like a door and no particular claim to anything, walked up to the Bronze Fury and was not eaten. It is not recorded that he did anything clever. He simply went, and Vermithor let him.

The pairing worked far better than anyone had any right to expect ÔÇö the dragon was used to being handled, and Hugh had spent his life around large hot dangerous things that had to be managed rather than argued with. Within weeks a smith was flying the Old King's own mount into battle. It also worked far worse than anyone had thought about, because a common-born man on the second-largest dragon alive is not, in practice, anyone's subject. Hugh worked that out sooner than his masters did, and began letting it be known that a crown might suit him.

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

Vermithor died at the Second Battle of Tumbleton, brought down in a burning town by men on the ground after his rider was killed. The dragonseeds' betrayal and death there is one of the war's ugliest chapters, and it cost the blacks the largest dragon they had left.