Daeron Targaryen

Daeron the Daring, youngest of Alicent's sons, fostered at Oldtown as a Hightower squire and cupbearer — the best-natured of the brothers, with the she-dragon Tessarion, the Blue Queen.

The fuller tale

Daeron the Daring is the youngest and, by nearly every surviving account, the best-liked of Alicent and Viserys's sons — fostered at Oldtown as a Hightower squire and cupbearer well before the war begins, which spares him the worst of his siblings' court intrigues and lets him grow up largely outside the specific poison that curdles Aegon and Aemond. He bonds with the she-dragon Tessarion, the Blue Queen, and earns his epithet honestly, on campaign rather than in a tavern.

Kept mostly in the south during the war's opening stages, Daeron becomes the greens' answer to the crown's need for a dragon and a name in the Reach, flying alongside Lord Ormund Hightower's great southern host as it marches up the roseroad through a long stretch of slow, grinding victories against Rhaenyra's western and riverland allies.

The good nature that made him the easiest of Alicent's sons to like does not, in the end, buy him any particular protection from the war his brothers started. His campaign's fortunes turn sharply once the fighting reaches Tumbleton, where the greens' hired dragonseed riders prove considerably less loyal than the crown paid them to be.

The page and the screen

Daeron receives comparatively little screen time in the show's aired seasons relative to his siblings, appearing mostly as a name and a distant presence in the Reach rather than a developed character — a gap Fire & Blood does not share, since the book follows his southern campaign in close and specific military detail across its second half.

Where they stand, season by season

Their fate — if death has found them, it is written here. Open at your peril.

The books: Fell in the fires of Second Tumbleton (F&B, ch. 7)

Daeron the Daring died at Second Tumbleton, the histories' kindest guess being smoke and fire in the burning camp — the best of Alicent's sons, and Tessarion the Blue Queen dying slow beside him.

The series has not yet reached this stage of the war; Daeron's fate remains ahead of the current seasons.

Fire & Blood places his death at Second Tumbleton, in the chaos and betrayal that follows Hugh Hammer and Ulf the White's defection from the greens' cause — the histories' kindest reconstruction has Daeron caught in the fires and confusion of the turncoats' camp, Tessarion burning slowly beside him, in what may be the single greatest loss of promise the greens suffer in the entire war.