Viserion

Cream-white with gold, the gentlest of the three ÔÇö and the one whose death changed the war.

The beast itself

Viserion is cream and gold ÔÇö a pale bone-white over most of the body with gold banding the wings, the horns and the ridge of the back, and gold fire to match. He is the smallest of the three brothers, though only just, and the most delicate-looking: finer in the head, lighter through the shoulders, with a pale translucence to the wing membranes that makes him look lit up when he flies against a bright sky. Against a cloud he is the hardest of the three to see, and against water he is the easiest.

He is the gentle one, insofar as the word survives contact with a dragon. Viserion is the least aggressive, the slowest to bristle, the most willing to be near people, and the one who stayed closest to home while his black brother was off hunting whatever he liked. He follows rather than leads: where Drogon goes he goes, a beat later and slightly higher, and left alone he becomes uncertain and calls for the others. His voice is the highest of the three and carries a plaintive quality that keepers noticed and remarked on. In a family of animals that answer everything with fire, he is the one that hesitates.

The dragon nobody claimed

Viserion carried a rider exactly never. He was born into a story with one Targaryen and three dragons in it, and there was no second claimant for most of his life ÔÇö no dragonseed call, no line of hopefuls on a mountain, nothing like the machinery the old realm had built for exactly this problem. He was a beast in a woman's household, fed and named and fond of her, and structurally spare.

He shared his brother's chains under the Great Pyramid and took them worse. Where Rhaegal came out of the dark warier, Viserion came out of it diminished ÔÇö a biddable animal that had been shut in for its own owner's political convenience and had no idea why. The two of them were eventually let out by someone who went down into that vault alone with a torch and an argument, which remains one of the more remarkable things anybody in the story does without a weapon.

The name he was given

The three brothers were named for three dead men, which is a considerable weight to hang on animals, and Viserion got the worst of the three names. Viserys Targaryen sold his sister to a horselord for the promise of an army, spent the rest of his short life complaining that the army had not arrived, and received in the end a crown of a sort. That his sister named a hatchling for him anyway says something about her that the story never quite spells out ÔÇö sentiment, or duty, or the simple refusal to let the last of a family go unremembered even when it deserved to.

It is at least fitting that the beast turned out to be the mildest of the three. Whatever else can be said of the man, he never had the teeth to match the temper.

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

Viserion was killed beyond the Wall by the Night King's ice spear, dragged from a frozen lake, and raised as a dead thing. He then brought down eight thousand years of the Wall with blue fire. No single death in the saga does more damage after the fact.