Hugh Hammer

Hugh was the bastard son of a Dragonstone smith, with no name behind him and no schooling to speak of. He was said to bend steel bars with his bare hands and to fight with a war hammer as his weapon. When the Dance of the Dragons broke out, Prince Jacaerys Velaryon gathered men in 129 AC willing to risk their lives before a riderless dragon. Hugh stepped up to Vermithor, the beast that had once carried King Jaehaerys I, and against all odds he mounted him.

The smith took the name Hugh Hammer and, now a dragonrider, threw in with the Blacks. At the Battle of the Gullet he fought astride Vermithor over open water, in one of the fiercest clashes of the whole war.

After the fall of King's Landing, Daemon Targaryen proposed marrying Hugh to the late Lord of Rosby's daughter, but Rhaenyra would not allow it. The queen chose instead to knight him alongside Ulf the White and grant them both lands at Driftmark.

According to the fool Mushroom, Hugh beat one of Rhaenyra's own knights to death in a quarrel over a woman on the Street of Silk. When Daemon suggested destroying Houses Baratheon and Lannister for backing Aegon II and handing Casterly Rock to Hugh, it was Lord Corlys Velaryon's opposition that made Rhaenyra drop the idea.

In 130 AC, Rhaenyra sent Ulf and Hugh to reinforce Lordsport, threatened by the advance of Lord Ormund Hightower's host. Two dragonriders risen from nothing were meant to decide the city's fate with their own beasts.

But during the first battle there both men deserted to the Greens, earning themselves the name of the Two Betrayers from that day on.

Now with the Greens, Hugh began calling himself Lord Hammer and dreaming of something more than a title: a prophecy was going around among the soldiers, of a new king who would rise once a hammer fell upon a dragon, and more than a few men believed it was made for him.

He took to wearing a crown of dark iron, until Ser Roger Corne tore it from his head. Hugh answered by driving three horseshoe nails into Roger's skull, and the brawl between their followers left three dead and a dozen wounded. Around this time he took to bed the widow of a knight he himself had killed at the battle for Lordsport.

A band of officers known as the Brackens plotted to kill Hugh and Ulf, but the second battle there cut their scheme short. As Hugh readied for combat, Ser Jon Roxton reached him with Orphan-Maker, his Valyrian steel sword, and cut him down. Roxton did not outlive him by much: Hugh's men killed him afterward, said to have slipped on the dead man's own entrails.