Daemon Targaryen
The Rogue Prince: rider of Caraxes and bearer of Dark Sister, commander of the City Watch, King of the Narrow Sea for a fortnight, and the most dangerous man in Westeros by broad consent. His brother can neither keep him nor be rid of him.
A soul of House Targaryen, born at King's Landing, sworn to The Blacks — the Queen's Party, The City Watch.
The fuller tale
Season One
In The Heirs of the Dragon — Gold cloaks at his back, a crown in his eye, and a toast he will never live down. At the heir's tourney, Daemon fights like the war the realm hasn't had in a lifetime — while Queen Aemma dies in the birthing bed, and baby Baelon a day after her. Daemon toasts 'the heir for a day' in a pleasure house; Viserys strips him of the succession and sends him from court. In The Rogue Prince — Steals an island, an egg, and every scene.
Daemon takes Dragonstone with his gold cloaks and steals a dragon's egg — the one meant for Baelon's cradle. Spurned by the throne, Corlys brings his fleet to Daemon: a war for the Stepstones, fought without the king's leave. In Second of His Name — Wins a three-year war with one unforgivable, unbeatable lie. Viserys finally sends aid; the letter's arrival shames Daemon into fury — he beats the messenger with his helm.
Daemon rows to the Crabfeeder's line under a peace banner, feigns surrender, and butchers a path until Craghas is cut in half beneath Caraxes. In King of the Narrow Sea — Gives back a crown to keep a grievance. Crowned 'King of the Narrow Sea' by his victorious army, Daemon sails home — and lays the driftwood crown at his brother's feet. Rhaenyra tires of suitors counting her castles; Daemon shows her the city instead — Flea Bottom, a mummer's farce about her succession, a pleasure house.
In We Light the Way — Widowed by his own hand, and refused a Velaryon bride for his trouble. Daemon calls on his wife at Runestone. Lady Rhea Royce falls from her horse; the stone that ends her is in her husband's hand. In The Princess and the Queen — A husband and father in Pentos, almost at peace — until the pyre. In Driftmark — Grieves a wife, frees a 'dead' man, and weds the heir to the throne.
Rhaenyra and Daemon wed on Dragonstone's shore in the old Valyrian way — over a fresh corpse in Laenor's clothes, while Laenor rows for Essos, alive and free. In The Lord of the Tides — Crowns his brother with his own hands; uncrowns Vaemond with Dark Sister. Rhaenyra and Daemon come back to a changed Red Keep — Otto restored as Hand, Alicent ruling a king kept swimming in milk of the poppy. Viserys drags himself to the Iron Throne, half a face and half a body, to hold the succession for his daughter one last time; Daemon picks up the fallen crown.
In The Black Queen — Chokes his queen over a dream he was never told, then brings her the worst news in the world. Ser Erryk Cargyll arrives with a stolen crown; Daemon sets Viserys's crown on Rhaenyra's head on the shore of Dragonstone. The painted table counts its strength: the Vale, the North, the riverlands to win; thirteen dragons to the greens' four — and Daemon wants them flying now.
Where they stand. King's Landing, Dragonstone, The Stepstones, Runestone, Pentos and Driftmark.
Season Two
In A Son for a Son — Buys vengeance in the city he once policed — and doesn't specify enough. Daemon buys two ratcatchers — Blood and Cheese — and sends them into the Red Keep for 'a son for a son.' In The Burning Mill — Wins Harrenhal with a landing, then starts losing to the castle itself. Daemon flies Caraxes to Harrenhal and takes the greatest castle in Westeros without a blow; Ser Simon Strong yields it with supper.
In The Red Dragon and the Gold — Fights the only enemy Caraxes can't burn: Harrenhal, and himself. Daemon holds a ghost-ridden Harrenhal, dosed by Alys Rivers's draughts, dreaming of everything he broke. In Regent — Crowns himself in dreams while the rivers wait for him to wake. Daemon's Harrenhal dreams deepen; the riverlords test him, and Willem Blackwood's brutality against the Brackens does his recruiting.
In the riverlands, Daemon lets the Blackwoods loose on Bracken lands — and learns that terror recruits enemies faster than banners. In The Queen Who Ever Was — Sees the dream at last, and kneels to it — the rogue prince, done running. At Harrenhal, Daemon's visions end in the one that matters — the Song of Ice and Fire — and when Rhaenyra lands, he kneels: her king consort, her army, hers.
Where they stand. King's Landing, Dragonstone and Harrenhal.
Their story
Daemon is the throne's spare part and knows it — younger brother to Viserys, a superlative swordsman and dragonrider raised one accident of birth order away from the crown he never stops circling. He commands the City Watch in his brother's early reign and remakes it into an armed force loyal chiefly to himself, gilds it with gold cloaks bought from his own purse, and earns the epithet the Rogue Prince for a talent, evident from adolescence, for turning royal indulgence into royal liability.
His grief and his ambition are hard to separate, which is the most honest thing about him. When Viserys's infant son Baelon dies, Daemon calls the boy 'the heir for a day' in front of the court, a joke that costs him his place at his brother's side and exiles him, not for the last time, to his own devices. He spends those exiles productively and badly by turns — marrying Rhea Royce for her Vale lands and visiting her as seldom as courtesy allows, and later throwing himself into the Stepstones war against the Triarchy's pirates half for the realm's sake and half because a war is the one place his talents are uncomplicated by rank.
The Stepstones campaign is Daemon distilled: years of brutal, half-sanctioned fighting against the Crabfeeder's pirate fleets, a driftwood crown he takes for himself and then, with the same theatrical carelessness, gives away rather than let it define him. He returns from it more legend than man, and the court's fear of him is, for once, entirely earned — this is the prince who besieged an island chain on his own authority and came home more popular for it, not less.
His third marriage is the one that finally gives his loyalty an address. After Rhea's death and a brief, politically loaded courtship of Laena Velaryon, whom he weds and loses to childbed, Daemon marries Rhaenyra — his own niece, his brother's named heir — in a match the court reads as either the family's greatest strength or its worst indulgence, depending on which color they already favor. Twin sons follow, Aegon and Viserys the Younger, and Daemon spends the peaceful years before the war doing something almost unrecognizable for him: settling.
When the crown is stolen at Viserys's death, Daemon becomes the black council's edge in every sense — its fiercest advocate for war, its most experienced commander, and its most volatile asset. He authorizes, or at minimum blesses, the darkest bargain of the Dance: a contract on a green child's life in answer to his own grandson's murder, carried out by two hired killers the smallfolk name Blood and Cheese. It is the single act that convinces the realm the war has no floor left to hit, and Daemon never quite disowns it.
His command of Harrenhal — the cursed, oversized ruin he takes for the blacks almost by accident, garrisoned by too few men and haunted, by his own account, by things older than the war — is the strangest interlude the Dance offers. Alone there with the bastard herb-witch Alys Rivers, who reads storms and knows things she should not, Daemon spends a season half-soldiering and half-unraveling, waiting for a battle that keeps not arriving while the realm's other fronts burn without him.
His final campaign takes him to the Gods Eye, where the war's accounting finally comes due in the sky above the lake — the encounter that ends both his story and his nephew Aemond's in the same collision. Whatever else is disputed about Daemon Targaryen, the sources agree he never stopped being exactly what the realm named him at twenty: the most dangerous man in Westeros, loved and feared by people who never quite decided which reaction was correct.
How it ends for them
On the page. Fell with Caraxes and Vhagar above the Gods Eye (F&B, ch. 6)
The Rogue Prince's last flight ended the Battle Above the Gods Eye: he leapt from his own dragon to kill Vhagar's rider, and went into the lake with both. His body was never found — which the singers, and one witch of Harrenhal, have made much of since.
The series has not yet flown Daemon to his ending; as of its current seasons he remains alive and at war. Fire & Blood does not spare him that wait.
Above the Gods Eye, in the war's most storied single combat, Daemon on Caraxes meets his nephew Aemond on Vhagar — the collision the whole Dance has been building toward. The dragons lock together in the air; Daemon, in the boldest and most reckless act even he ever attempted, leaps from his own dragon's back onto Vhagar's to reach Aemond directly, driving Dark Sister through the prince's remaining eye as both riders fall. Caraxes and Vhagar go into the lake locked together, and Daemon goes with them. Fishermen and singers alike swear the bodies were never recovered — a silence the book treats less as mystery than as the kind of ending Daemon Targaryen would have chosen for himself, unrecoverable and endlessly argued over.
Their chapters, book by book
Fire & Blood — The Dance of the Dragons 3 chapters that name them
Where the page and the screen part
The show compresses Daemon's decades of pre-Dance restlessness — the City Watch years, three marriages, a driftwood crown — into a tight character study of a man perpetually one grievance from treason, while giving him invented interiority Fire & Blood never bothers with: visions and hauntings at Harrenhal, a fraught, half-poisoned marriage to Rhaenyra played out in real time, a much more overt hand in commissioning Blood and Cheese. The book, narrated at a chronicler's distance and stitched from conflicting testimony, keeps Daemon more opaque and more mythic — a man whose true motives at Harrenhal, in the Stepstones, and in his final flight above the Gods Eye are relayed secondhand, disputed by Mushroom and Eustace alike, and never fully resolved even by Archmaester Gyldayn.
Their journey
Where the two tellings send them to the same place the road runs whole; where they part, the screen keeps the left and the books the right.