The Fall of the Dragons

The tragedy that ended very nearly three centuries of Targaryen rule. From the fire at Summerhall to the war that a prince's love and a king's madness lit between them, to the warhammer that fell at the Trident ÔÇö the story of how the dragons lost the realm they had conquered.

Summerhall and the Mad King

The last Targaryen age began in fire. Aegon the Fifth died at Summerhall trying to hatch dragons from stone, and the same blaze is said to have attended the birth of his great-grandson Rhaegar ÔÇö so that grief and hope were tangled in that prince from his first breath. In time the crown came to Aerys the Second, who began his reign bright, generous and full of grand schemes, and slowly curdled into something terrible.

Years of paranoia, humiliations real and imagined, and the whispers of a scheming Hand hollowed Aerys out into the Mad King. He grew obsessed with fire ÔÇö hoarding caches of wildfire, the alchemists' green flame, beneath the streets of King's Landing ÔÇö and took to burning men alive in his own throne room and laughing at their screams. The great lords watched their king rot, and said little, because the alternative to a mad Targaryen had not yet presented itself.

Rhaegar and Lyanna

It presented itself through Aerys's own gifted son. At the great Tourney at Harrenhal, Prince Rhaegar ÔÇö a melancholy, bookish man, a harpist who had read too many prophecies ÔÇö unhorsed every challenger and then, before the whole assembled realm, laid the victor's crown of winter roses not in the lap of his own wife but in that of Lyanna Stark, the young, wild, betrothed sister of the North. The hall went very quiet.

When Lyanna later disappeared in Rhaegar's company, the realm read it as an abduction, and the men who loved her ÔÇö her betrothed, the young lord Robert Baratheon, and her brothers Brandon and Eddard Stark ÔÇö demanded her back. Aerys answered by burning Lyanna's father Rickard and murdering her brother Brandon in his throne room, and then demanded the heads of Robert and Ned from their guardian in the Vale. Jon Arryn raised his banners rather than send two boys to the fire, and the whole realm came apart along the seams the Mad King had cut.

The Trident and the Sack

Robert's Rebellion swept from the Vale to the stormlands to the Trident, gathering the North, the riverlands and the stormlands against the crown. It was decided at last in the fords of the Trident, where Robert Baratheon and Rhaegar Targaryen met in the middle of the river and Robert's warhammer caved in the prince's breastplate and the rubies scattered downstream. With Rhaegar dead the royal cause collapsed.

King's Landing fell not to a siege but to treachery: the great Lannister host, which had held aloof the whole war, was admitted as friends and then sacked the city. The Mad King died at the hand of his own Kingsguard ÔÇö Jaime Lannister, forever after the Kingslayer, cut Aerys down before he could burn the city with his hidden wildfire. Rhaegar's young children were butchered in the Red Keep and their bodies laid before the new king. Robert took the Iron Throne; the last Targaryens ÔÇö a frightened boy and his pregnant mother ÔÇö fled across the narrow sea to Essos. There, years later, with the realm grown fat and forgetful under a fading king, the story that the maps call the Game of Thrones would quietly begin.