The Dance of the Dragons

The civil war that broke the dragons. When Viserys I died, the greens and the blacks each crowned a Targaryen, and for the first and only time in history dragon was turned against dragon in the open sky. Both sides had the weapon that had made the dynasty invincible ÔÇö and so both sides spent it, until almost none were left.

Two crowns

The moment Viserys I died, his widow Alicent Hightower and her father Otto moved faster than the truth could travel. Before the realm even knew the king was dead, they crowned his eldest son, Aegon the Second, in the Dragonpit ÔÇö the party of the greens seizing the throne outright. On Dragonstone, when the news reached her, Princess Rhaenyra ÔÇö the daughter Viserys had named his heir and had his lords swear to ÔÇö crowned herself in answer, the queen of the blacks.

Each had a claim that half the realm believed. Each had dragons, and riders to fly them, and great lords sworn to their cause. There was no council that could untangle it and no marriage that could paper it over, because both sides were certain they were the rightful one and the other a usurper. What made it worse than any war before it was simple arithmetic: the thing that had always ended Westerosi wars quickly ÔÇö dragons ÔÇö now sat on both sides of the board.

Dragon against dragon

So the dragons fought each other, and the sky over Westeros filled with fire and falling monsters. There were battles that men still shudder at ÔÇö Rook's Rest, where a king's own dragon was crippled; the Gullet, a sea battle so bloody it emptied a generation of ships; the Butcher's Ball. Towns and castles burned. Young Prince Lucerys and his dragon were killed above Storm's End by his uncle, and that death turned a cold war hot. In the capital, hired killers murdered a prince in his own bed while his mother watched ÔÇö the crime the histories call Blood and Cheese.

As the trained dragonriders killed each other off, both sides grew desperate enough to try something reckless: seating dragonseeds ÔÇö bastards and smallfolk with a drop of the old Valyrian blood ÔÇö on the wild, riderless dragons, in the hope of gaining a weapon. Some of those claimings worked and some ended in a man being eaten in front of a crowd. King's Landing itself fell to the blacks and rose against them, and in one terrible night a mob, half-mad with fear and hunger, broke into the Dragonpit and killed the chained dragons with spears and stones, dying in their hundreds to do it.

The cost

In the end both the monarchs who had started it were dead. Rhaenyra was fed alive to Aegon II's dragon Sunfyre in front of her surviving son ÔÇö a deliberate, unforgettable cruelty. Aegon II, broken and burned, was poisoned by his own men soon after. The crown passed to Rhaenyra's boy, Aegon the Third, who took a throne of ashes and grew into a grey and haunted king who could not bear the sight of a dragon.

The true casualty was the dragons themselves. Of the many that had begun the Dance, almost none survived it, and those few that did dwindled, sickened, and died over the years that followed ÔÇö the last a stunted, deformed thing that perished in a cellar. The dynasty went on for another century and a half, but the great secret of Targaryen power was gone. They ruled after the Dance as men ruled: by armies, marriages and murder, and no longer by the certainty that they could burn any enemy from the sky. Everything that came after ÔÇö every rebellion that had a chance ÔÇö traces back to that.