Dreamfyre

Dreamfyre was born on Dragonstone in the year 32 after the Conquest. Freshly hatched, she was given to Princess Rhaena Targaryen, then nine years old, and it took the girl three more years to climb onto her back: she did not begin flying her until 35 AC. Something changed in Rhaena from then on; those who knew her said the dragon had given her the courage she otherwise lacked, shy as she was.

When her father Aenys I took the throne, the royal family made a long progress across the Seven Kingdoms, and Rhaena chafed at having to part with Dreamfyre for much of the journey. On the stretches when she did fly, she more than once carried her brother and a friend along with her.

At sixteen she declared herself a grown woman free to fly wherever she pleased, and she was seen over Harrenhal, Tarth, the Stepstones' Runestone, and Gulltown. Rumor had it she had taken a lover on one of those trips, and the king settled the scandal by marrying her to his own brother and heir. On the royal progress that followed the wedding, Aenys forbade her to bring Dreamfyre along, fearing his son would look less manly riding a horse beside a dragon — so the groom made the journey on horseback instead.

In 42 AC King Aenys I died, and his brother Maegor seized the throne behind his sons' backs. Late in 43, Rhaena and her husband used one of Maegor's trips to Oldtown to slip into King's Landing: she reclaimed Dreamfyre, he took his father's dragon, and the two of them fled toward the Westerlands.

There they gathered an army of supporters. Rhaena's husband rode to battle against his uncle and fell to Balerion, while she waited with her daughters and her dragon at Maiden's Rose Keep.

Widowed, Rhaena tried to hide, but a dragon cannot go unnoticed for long: Maegor sent for her, and she flew to the capital to protect the family that had sheltered her, only to learn her uncle meant to make her his wife. By then Dreamfyre had already laid two clutches of eggs.

Rhaena fled King's Landing on her dragon's back in 48 AC, when her brother Jaehaerys was proclaimed king at Storm's End. She took with her Maegor's young heir and a Valyrian steel sword. Having a second dragon on his side won Jaehaerys further support, and Rhaena flew alongside her siblings when they set out to claim the throne after Maegor's death.

Rhaena traveled to Oldtown to see her brother Jaehaerys crowned by the High Septon, then returned with the court as far as Highgarden, where she turned off toward an island in the west. She settled there after marrying Androw Farman, though she never flew with him — she preferred the company of her friends Elissa Farman and Samantha Stokeworth.

Dreamfyre kept growing in size and appetite, and the islanders grew wary of her, especially after she laid a fresh clutch. When Lord Marq Farman died, his son Franklyn inherited the title, and his contempt for Rhaena drove her to leave.

She settled at Casterly Rock, where Lord Lyman Lannister welcomed her with a feast at which a flock of sheep was offered to Dreamfyre. But the Lannisters coveted the dragon and her eggs just as much, and Rhaena packed up again: she passed through Ashemark, Castamere, Golden Tooth, Wayfarer's Rest, and Maiden's Rose Keep once more, finding the same greed dressed up as hospitality everywhere she went.

She ended up flying to King's Landing for her sister Alysanne's wedding to Jaehaerys, and there agreed to take Dragonstone as her seat. The eggs laid on the island had already hatched in her new home, and Rhaena encouraged her daughter to choose one of the hatchlings for herself. In 54 AC, Elissa Farman, her closest friend, fled Dragonstone secretly carrying off three of those eggs; Rhaena felt betrayed and flew to the capital to tell the king.

That same year, 54 AC, Rhaena flew to Storm's End for the death of her mother, Queen Alyssa Velaryon, who had died in childbed. She blamed Lord Rogar Baratheon for it and warned him that if he took another wife she would turn his castle into a second Harrenhal.

Late that year she reached King's Landing to announce that her daughter had claimed Balerion as her mount and vanished into the sky. It was said that when Dreamfyre landed in the capital, the two other dragons kept there rose up hissing and snapping, and for a moment it seemed all three might turn on each other.

After seven days without word, Rhaena set out to search for her. She passed through Oldtown, Highgarden, Crackclaw Point and Casterly Rock, and there the trail went cold; some swore they had seen Dreamfyre over the banks of the Fever River, the Red Mountains, the Fingers, the Mountains of the Moon, Cape Wrath, the Shield Islands and the Whip, until the princess finally found some peace at Greenstone, staying with a cousin.

Her daughter returned to the capital at last in 56 AC and died there. By the time Rhaena arrived, the body had already been burned.

Rhaena spent her final years with Dreamfyre at Harrenhal, as she had agreed with her brother Jaehaerys, and kept riding her until the end of her life in 73 AC.

It was said that every year she flew to Oldtown to visit another of her daughters.

By 120 AC, decades after Rhaena's death, Dreamfyre had come to be ridden by Princess Helaena Targaryen. At just eleven, the girl was already flying with her, and it became one of her greatest joys.

King Viserys I died in 129 AC, and the war that would be known as the Dance of the Dragons broke out. But Helaena, sunk in deep grief after the death of one of her sons, never rode Dreamfyre again for the whole of the conflict.

Helaena died not long after the fall of King's Landing to the Blacks, and Dreamfyre was left riderless. It was said that at the moment of her death the dragon suddenly reared up in the Dragonpit with a roar so loud it snapped two of the chains holding her.

She was one of four dragons caged there when, in 130 AC, thousands of the city's people rose against them and stormed their dens. She broke fully free as the mob closed in, and with tooth and flame killed hundreds before archers, crossbowmen and ranks of spearmen hemmed her in against the barred gates.

An arrow took her in the eye as she carpeted the pit's floor with bodies. Half-blind and bearing a dozen lesser wounds, she tried to break out through the dome into open sky, but it collapsed and crushed her along with many of her attackers.

Her head, together with those of the other dragons who died that day, was mounted among the ruins of the Dragonpit, where the man known as the Shepherd would later set up his stronghold.