Maegor I Targaryen

Even as a boy he was reckoned a fighter apart: at thirteen he put grown knights with years of arms behind them on the ground, and at sixteen, in the royal tournament King's Landing held in the year 28, he unhorsed three Kingsguard knights one after another before taking the final bout. His father knighted him that same evening — no one in the realm had earned the title so young.

He rode with Lord Aethan Velaryon on the naval push against the pirate Sargoso Saan around the Stepstones, and when his father died and the crown passed to his half-brother Aenys, Aenys told the court plainly that war was not his gift and handed Maegor the family sword, Blackfyre. Balerion himself, riderless since the Conqueror's death, ended up in his hands too — Maegor had wanted the dragon for himself for years and would not accept that any other claimant deserved him.

There was a proposal to betroth him to Rhaena, Aenys's newborn daughter, but the High Septon's protests were enough to bury it. Maegor married instead, in the year 25, Ceryse Hightower, the High Septon's own niece. When the Vale rose because Jonos Arryn had deposed and imprisoned his brother, Lord Ronnel, it was Maegor who flew Balerion to the Eyrie and hanged the rebels; Aenys rewarded him by naming him Hand of the King. The post did not last: in 39, by taking Alys Harroway as a second wife while Ceryse still lived, he scandalized the Faith, and his brother, trying to calm the outcry, stripped him of the office and sent him to Pentos.

In 42, after Aenys died, Visenya flew to Pentos on Vhagar to bring her son home. Back in Westeros, Maegor was crowned at Dragonstone wearing his father's old Valyrian steel crown, setting aside the showier one Aenys had worn. Grand Maester Gawen protested that the throne belonged by law to Aenys's elder son, Prince Aegon; Maegor answered by beheading him with Blackfyre. No one else spoke up.

He held Alyssa Velaryon, Aenys's widow, hostage at Dragonstone along with her two young children, Jaehaerys and Alysanne; the third, Viserys, he made his own squire, keeping him close to guarantee his mother's good behavior. It was proclaimed that anyone who questioned his right to the crown would die a traitor's death.

Maegor flew Balerion to King's Landing and planted his banner on Visenya's Hill to gather his men. When Visenya challenged anyone who doubted her son's claim to prove it by the sword, the captain of the Warrior's Sons took up the challenge, and Ser Damon Morrigen demanded a Trial of Seven. Maegor accepted: he and six champions faced Morrigen and six Warrior's Sons, and when the fighting ended only the king still stood — though a blow to the head had already dropped him, and he lay a month in a coma. It was Tyanna of the Tower, the mistress he had taken in exile, who nursed him until he woke.

On waking, without warning, he flew Balerion over the Sept of Remembrance on Rhaenys's Hill and burned it with everyone inside; archers he had posted around the hill cut down those who ran. It was said the screams carried across the city and that ash fell on King's Landing for seven days. The Mander ran red for twenty leagues in the battle that gave Bitterbridge its name, and another victory, at the Blackwater, still failed to break the Faith's rebellion. Maegor answered with the laws that bear his name, forbidding the devout to bear arms, and with bounties on their scalps — a gold dragon for every Warrior's Son, a silver stag for every Poor Fellow — which is how he earned the name the Cruel.

Aenys's elder son, Prince Aegon, then claimed the throne the law owed him and rose against his uncle. The dispute was settled in 43 beneath the Gods Eye, where Maegor, mounted on Balerion, killed Aegon and his dragon, Quicksilver.

In 44 Queen Alys lost the child she carried: it was born dead, eyeless, deformed. Beside himself, Maegor had the midwives, the septas, and Grand Maester Desmond executed. Tyanna convinced him the child was another man's, and the king had Alys killed, along with her ladies, her father — who was also his Hand — and every Harroway he could find between King's Landing and Harrenhal. With the house wiped out, he decreed that Harrenhal would go to whichever knight proved strongest in a contest: twenty-three fought for the prize in the streets of the village below, and Ser Walton Towers, badly wounded but alive, carried it off for House Towers.

Visenya, the mother who had always defended him hardest, died that same year, and the blow left him unmoored. In the confusion that followed, Alyssa slipped out of Dragonstone with her two younger children, Jaehaerys and Alysanne, taking Visenya's sword, Dark Sister, with her. Maegor turned his fury on Viserys, the son left behind as a hostage: he handed him to Tyanna, who tortured him for nine days until he died, then left the body on display in the Red Keep's yard for fifteen days, hoping Alyssa would come back to claim it. "Then let her die. Perhaps the whore will come for the funeral," the king said. Alyssa never returned.

The Red Keep was finished in 45, with Maegor personally overseeing even the four dungeon levels he had ordered dug beneath it; day-to-day rule, meanwhile, had been left to his Hand and godfather, Lord Lucas Harroway — the same man he had had executed the year before. Once the work was done, he threw a three-day feast for the builders and masons who had raised it, then had them all killed so the castle's secret passages would die with them. He further ordered the ruins of the Sept of Remembrance cleared to make room, on Rhaenys's Hill, for a pit to house the royal dragons; with few willing to work for him by then, he had to draw labor from the city's prisoners, watched over by masters brought from Myr and Volantis.

Over his reign he had three Grand Maesters put to death, Desmond among them in 44; that same year the High Septon died under circumstances no one ever explained and was replaced by a far more pliant one, without the war against the Faith easing at all. In 46 Maegor returned to the capital carrying more than two thousand skulls he claimed belonged to Warrior's Sons and Poor Fellows; many suspected they were common folk's, and the realm turned against him a little more each day.

The next year, 47, he married three women at once in a single ceremony: all fertile widows of men killed in his wars — Lady Elinor Costayne, Lady Jeyne Westerling, and his own niece, Princess Rhaena. They would be known as the Black Brides. Since Maegor had no children of his own, Rhaena's elder daughter, Aerea, was named provisional heir; her twin, Rhaella, was sent to Oldtown.

By 48 the realm's patience with Maegor had run out. In the Riverlands, Septon Luna and Ser Joffrey Doggett put the Poor Fellows in the field and took Riverrun; Lord Daemon Velaryon, until then his Naval Counselor, turned against him and pulled several great houses along with him. Aenys's last surviving son, Prince Jaehaerys, then claimed the Iron Throne with the backing of Lord Rogar Baratheon of Storm's End, whom he named Protector of the Realm and Hand.

The moment she heard of her brother's claim, Queen Rhaena found her way out of the marriage forced on her: while Maegor slept, she mounted her dragon Dreamfyre and fled, taking her daughter and Blackfyre with her. Two of his Kingsguard deserted around the same time. Between those betrayals and the final loss of his mother's guidance, Maegor was left adrift; he summoned his bannermen, but few came, and those who did were not enough to face down so many enemies.

During the hour of the wolf, the last men left with him walked out of the throne room too, leaving him alone. He was found dead the next morning, seated on the Iron Throne, his wrists slashed and his clothes soaked in blood. Some said a knight of his own Kingsguard, unable to stomach his cruelty any longer, had killed him; others blamed a builder who had escaped the massacre and come back for revenge; some even murmured the throne itself had done it. He left no heirs, after a reign of six years and sixty-six days.

The war against the Faith's militant orders, which he was never able to put down for good, only ended under his successor — his nephew, King Jaehaerys I Targaryen.