Addam of Hull
Alyn's elder brother, another of Hull's conspicuously silver-haired sons — until Seasmoke, riderless since Laenor, chose him out of the sky and made the whispers unnecessary.
The fuller tale
Alyn's elder brother shares the same conspicuously silver Velaryon hair and the same unacknowledged parentage, another of Hull's shipwright sons whom the court's whispers link, never quite openly, to the Sea Snake's own bloodline.
His moment arrives when Seasmoke — riderless since Laenor's departure from the story, and unclaimed by anyone in the years since — chooses Addam out of the sky during the Sowing, the desperate period when the black cause opens dragon-claiming to anyone with the blood and the nerve to attempt it. The dragon's choice makes the whispers about his birth essentially irrelevant; a dragon does not lie about lineage.
Legitimized in recognition of both his birth and his new bond, Addam fights the war's final campaigns as a fully acknowledged Velaryon, flying Seasmoke in battles that ask considerably more of him than his shipyard origins ever prepared him for.
The page and the screen
The show and the book agree closely on Addam's arc — the Sowing, Seasmoke's choice, and his legitimization are treated with similar weight in both tellings, one of the clearer points of continuity between the current aired seasons and the book's fuller account of the dragonseed campaigns.
In the show, season by season
Season Two. In Smallfolk — Ran from a dragon and got chosen anyway — the first of the seeds.
In the books
Fire & Blood — The Dance of the Dragons. In The Fall of the Dragons — Flees a traitor's warrant to die proving it wrong.
Where they stand, season by season
Mentioned in the chronicle
- Seasmoke does his own choosing: he hunts down Addam of Hull on Driftmark and takes him into the sky alive. (S2·E6)
- The queen's arithmetic: the Red Sowing gives dragons to bastards and boasters — Hugh Hammer on Vermithor, Ulf White on Silverwing, Addam of Hull on Seasmoke — and the sky belongs to the blacks. The price is paid in the Gullet, where the Triarchy's ninety ships break the blockade and Prince Jacaerys falls with Vermax into the sea. But King's Landing cannot be held against six dragons: the gates open, Rhaenyra takes her father's throne — and the Hightower host coming up the roseroad meets betrayal at Tumbleton, where the Two Betrayers burn the town they were sworn to. (F&B 5)
- Rhaenyra, sold by the garrison of Dragonstone, is given to Sunfyre in front of her son: the king watches his sister eaten, and thinks it justice. It buys him half a year. Second Tumbleton kills a Betrayer and the young Prince Daeron; Addam of Hull dies proving a bastard's honor at Second Tumbleton; and with the Wolf of the North marching south and no dragons left worth the name, Aegon II drinks poisoned wine poured by his own council. 'Let there be an end,' the lords agreed — and made one. (F&B 7)
Their fate — if death has found them, it is written here. Open at your peril.
The books: Fell at Second Tumbleton, proving a bastard's honor (F&B, ch. 7)
Named a traitor for his blood when the Betrayers turned, Addam Velaryon — legitimized by the queen — spent his death proving them wrong: he fell at Second Tumbleton riding Seasmoke against the greens' whole host. 'Loyal,' reads the stone the Sea Snake raised him.
The series has not yet reached the battle in which Addam dies; his fate remains ahead of the current seasons.
Fire & Blood has him fall at Second Tumbleton, in the same chaotic engagement that claims Hugh Hammer and very nearly costs the greens the war entirely — flying Seasmoke against the greens' whole assembled host even after his fellow dragonseed Ulf the White turns traitor, proving with his death exactly the loyalty the whispers about his birth once made people doubt. The Sea Snake, the book notes, has a headstone raised for him reading simply 'Loyal' — the shortest epitaph in the entire history, and among its most sincere.