Daemon II Blackfyre
Third son of Daemon Blackfyre the pretender, raised in Tyrosh under Bittersteel's eye. A dreamer of dreams who believes prophecy will do a rebellion's work for it — golden, charming, and better with a fiddle metaphor than an army.
The fuller tale
The third son born to Daemon Blackfyre, the rebel pretender who died at Redgrass Field before this younger Daemon was old enough to remember him, grows up in exile in Tyrosh under the watchful, embittered supervision of his uncle Bittersteel — a household organized entirely around the unfinished business of a war his father lost. Where that upbringing might have produced another hardened soldier in the family mold, it produces instead something the Blackfyre cause has not really had before: a charming, golden young man who believes that dreams and destiny will do a rebellion’s work for it more reliably than a sword ever could.
His temperament sets him apart from everyone else carrying his family’s grievance. Bittersteel deals in hatred and steel; Daemon the younger deals in fiddle-metaphors, prophetic dreams, and an open-handed warmth that wins him followers his more calculating relatives could never have recruited the same way. It is a strategy built on charisma rather than conquest, and it very nearly works.
He travels to Lord Ambrose Butterwell’s wedding at Whitewalls under a road name — a laughing, generous mystery knight calling himself John, ostensibly there for the jousting and the festivities, in fact there to let old Blackfyre loyalists gather under cover of a celebration nobody would think to suspect. The dragon’s egg offered as a tourney prize, the sudden convergence of men who once rode for the black dragon, the dreams he claims to have and shares selectively — all of it points toward a coronation nobody at the wedding feast is supposed to see coming.
That the plot collapses without a real battle being fought says less about Daemon’s charm, which by all accounts works exactly as intended on everyone it touches, than about the patience of the men watching him from outside the walls. He represents, within the tale’s own chronology, very nearly the last direct attempt by Daemon Blackfyre’s own blood to claim the throne his father died reaching for — a rebellion fought, characteristically for this particular son, almost entirely with words.
The page and the screen
This character’s identity as the true figure behind John the Fiddler is the central mystery The Mystery Knight is built around, and no season of the show has yet reached that novella, so there is no adaptation to compare against. Whenever the production does reach Whitewalls, the challenge will be considerable: sustaining a reveal that print readers already often see coming, in a visual medium that tends to tip its hand through casting alone.
In the books
The Mystery Knight. In The Black Dragon and the White — Dreamed a dragon would hatch at Whitewalls. It didn't.
Their fate — if death has found them, it is written here. Open at your peril.
The chronicle records no death for this soul — they are living when the tale leaves them, or their ending is a page the maesters have yet to turn.