Storming of the Dragonpit

The night after Queen Helaena Targaryen's suicide, fear spread through King's Landing like flame through dry grass. Riots broke out that same night: the mob tore down the River Gate and cut down Ser Luthor Largent along with the five hundred gold cloaks sent to arrest the Shepherd. The preacher himself slipped away in the chaos.

Most dispersed by dawn, but they returned the following night in greater numbers still — the day Grand Maester Munkun would later call the Last Day. The Shepherd climbed a platform in Cobbler's Square once more to address his "lambs": when the dragons came, he told them, the whole city would burn, and no prayer or the Stranger himself could stop it. Salvation, he insisted, lay only in killing the beasts caged inside the Dragonpit.

From atop Maegor's Holdfast, Rhaenyra Targaryen watched events unfold alongside her two sons and her loyal men. She had sent riders to the Old Gate and Ser Garth the Harelip to the Dragon Gate to catch the Shepherd and secure the dragons, still unsure whether they had reached their posts in time. Young Joffrey begged to fly and defend the beasts; his mother refused — she needed every sword she had to hold Aegon's High Hill, now that Rhaenys's Hill had fallen.

Joffrey disobeyed. He slipped down to the yard, freed his mother's dragon Syrax, and flew out over the city — whether to join the fighting or reach his own dragon, Tyraxes, trapped in the Pit, no one can say. He could not hold his seat on the dragon's back and fell two hundred feet onto Flea Bottom. The knights Rhaenyra sent after him — Medrick Manderly and Gyles Yronwood among them — arrived to find the crowd already tearing his body apart; they recovered every piece but one foot.

The City Watch marched out from their barracks by the Dragon Gate to defend Rhaenys's Hill, but the human tide swept over them. Fewer than fifty Dragonkeepers remained to guard the Pit itself when the crowd battered down its lesser gates of oak and iron with rams and axes; others climbed in through the windows. Not one keeper survived.

Inside, the four chained dragons woke to the din, furious and unable to fly. They fought with horn, claw and tooth, and the flame they loosed turned the pit into a furnace. Shrykos fell first: Hobb the Hewer climbed onto his neck and split his skull with an axe — seven blows, by Septon Eustace's count. Morghul died next, speared through the eye again and again by the Burning Knight, who waded into the dragon's own fire and burned alongside him.

Tyraxes scorched everyone who came near the mouth of his den until bodies choked the entrance, but the Shepherd sent his followers around through the back, and the dragon, tangled in his own chains, was cut down by the mob, who then stripped the membrane from his wings to sew into cloaks. Dreamfyre, last to break free, took to the air inside the dome and killed more men than the other three combined, until a crossbow bolt tore out an eye. Half-blind, she crashed into the stone roof; the dome cracked and half of it came down on her and her attackers alike.

No one has ever managed to count that night's dead. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, and many more left wounded.

By the time the dome finished collapsing, the storming itself was over — but the killing was not. Syrax, the dragon Joffrey himself had freed hours earlier, swooped down on the survivors crawling out of the smoking rubble and tore into them with teeth and claws rather than fire. Mushroom described the din as "a thousand screams and shrieks" mixed with the dragon's roar; Rhaenys's Hill seemed crowned in flame, bright enough that it looked like dawn had come at night.

Rhaenyra watched it all from Maegor's Holdfast, her only living son held tight against her, until Syrax fell too. Even the chroniclers cannot agree on how she died: Grand Maester Munkun credits Hobb the Hewer, though Archmaester Gyldayn doubts it — he finds it hard to believe one man killed two dragons the same night in the same way. Others point to an unnamed spearman, "a giant drenched in blood," or to Ser Warrick Wheaton, said to have sheared off a wing with a blade of Valyrian steel. One crossbowman claimed the kill for years, until one of Rhaenyra's loyalists, tired of hearing it, cut out his tongue.

Gyldayn thinks it possible that all of them, save Hobb, played some part in the dragon's death. But the version told most often in King's Landing's taverns is another one entirely: the Shepherd standing alone against Syrax, calling on the Seven until the Warrior himself took shape — thirty feet tall, a sword of smoke turning to steel in his hand. Even Septon Eustace repeats it in his account, and singers have been performing it ever since.

The loss of her dragon and of Joffrey left Rhaenyra broken — inconsolable, by Mushroom's account. Her advisers agreed on something she resisted hearing: King's Landing was lost to her cause. They talked her into leaving.

The next day, reluctantly, Rhaenyra slipped out of the city with what few loyalists remained to her and with Aegon, her only living son. After a grueling journey she reached Dragonstone, her own castle — where Aegon II Targaryen's people, who had spent weeks seizing the fortress, were waiting to take her prisoner.