War of Conquest

Before the war, Aegon ruled only Dragonstone, the rock his family had held for a century, the last piece of an empire the Doom of Valyria had already reduced to ash. For years he weighed two ambitions: joining the scramble for power in the Free Cities, or attempting something no one had managed before, uniting all of Westeros under a single crown. He turned down a request for aid from Old Volantis and flew instead to Pentos, then to Lys, where he burned a Volantene fleet before it could make landfall.

While Aegon made up his mind, Harren the Black was finishing the largest castle Westeros had ever seen, and word spread that he meant to use it to conquer more. Fear of Harren pushed the Storm King, Argilac the Arrogant, to offer an alliance: his daughter's hand in exchange for land that, in truth, was not his to give. Aegon answered by asking for Massey's Hook and the plains running to the source of the Mander, and proposed sealing the bargain by marrying the princess to his friend Orys Baratheon. Argilac took it as an insult and sent the messenger back without his hands.

Aegon called his bannermen and sent ravens to every king in Westeros: there would be only one throne, and whoever knelt would keep their lands. Queen Sharra Arryn offered her alliance if Aegon named her son heir to the Vale; Princess Meria Martell promised to fight the Storm King but bend the knee to no one. Aegon accepted neither condition, and no other lord answered the ravens.

Aegon landed at the mouth of the Blackwater with his two sisters, his three dragons, and little more than sixteen hundred men, and on the highest of three hills raised a wooden palisade he named Aegonfort. He sent Visenya and Rhaenys to bring the nearby lords to heel: House Rosby yielded without a fight, and at Stokeworth, where crossbowmen tried to bring Visenya down, Vhagar burned the castle before its lords surrendered too.

The first real test came from the lords of Duskendale and Maidenpool, who gathered nearly three thousand men to face him. Orys Baratheon charged them on the ground while Aegon fell on them from the sky; both lords died, and their heirs later swore their swords to House Targaryen.

With a dozen castles surrendered, Visenya crowned her brother with a diadem of Valyrian steel set with rubies, and Rhaenys hailed him before the newly bent lords as the first king of all Westeros.

Aegon sent his fleet under Daemon Velaryon, with Visenya and Vhagar as escort, to take Gulltown. A Vale fleet reinforced with Braavosi warships defeated them and killed Daemon; Visenya answered by burning the rival ships from above. The naval defeat had a consequence no one expected: the people of the Three Sisters, furious at losing their fleet in the battle, rose up against the Arryns and crowned a queen of their own.

The regent queen Sharra Arryn strengthened her gates and garrisons, but none of it counted for much against a dragon. Visenya landed Vhagar in the courtyard of the Eyrie while Sharra was inspecting defenses elsewhere; when the queen returned she found her young son sitting in the dragon queen's lap, asking if he could fly with her. No further threat was needed: Sharra handed all three crowns of the Vale to Visenya.

Aegon crossed the Blackwater on Balerion and marched toward the Gods Eye. He won at the Reeds, lost afterward at Sowbelly, and still managed to burn the ironborn as they retreated in their longships. When Harren summoned his river lords, Lord Edmyn Tully rebelled against him and pulled the rest of the riverlords along, swelling Aegon's army to more than eight thousand men outside the walls of Harrenhal.

Aegon came to the gates under a peace banner and offered Harren the chance to yield and keep the Iron Islands. Harren trusted the thickness of his walls. Aegon reminded him that dragons fly over any wall, and gave him until sunset. That night Harrenhal's towers glowed a color no one who saw it forgot; Harren and his last sons died in what would later be called the Hall of a Hundred Hearths, and House Hoare died with them.

The ironborn who fled toward their islands were hunted and cut down along the way. Edmyn Tully was the first to swear his sword to Aegon, who named him Lord Paramount of the Trident over the rest of the riverlords.

Orys Baratheon, now named Hand of the King, crossed the Blackwater toward Storm's End with Rhaenys and Meraxes flying above the column. The lords of Bronzegate and Sharp Point switched sides, but the rest of the Durrandon bannermen ambushed Orys's host and killed more than a thousand men before Rhaenys set the woods where they hid on fire; Lord Errol died there, and Fell and Buckler pulled back south.

Argilac the Arrogant, hearing that Harren was dead, swore he would not end up roasted in his own castle and rode out to give battle himself, outnumbering Orys's men in both foot and heavy horse. A storm broke as the armies met; three charges by Argilac's knights broke against the muddy hills before his spearmen finally cracked the center. That was when Rhaenys burned the storm lords' vanguard from above, Argilac was thrown from his horse, and Orys, after offering him the chance to surrender, killed him in single combat.

With the king dead, his daughter Argella shut herself inside Storm's End and proclaimed herself queen, but the garrison did not share her resolve: they opened the gates and handed her over in chains to Orys, who covered her with his own cloak and eventually married her, taking up the arms of House Durrandon.

Mern IX Gardener and Loren Lannister joined their armies near Goldengrove and gathered the largest host Westeros had ever seen, fifty-five thousand men against the few thousand Aegon could field. The three Targaryens met with their dragons at Stonebridge and moved south, crossing the Blackwater fast to get ahead of the two kings.

The armies met on dry plains south of the river, after weeks without rain. When Aegon's spearmen began to give ground, he and his sisters were already airborne; they set fire to the standing wheat and dry grass, and the wind carried flame and smoke into the enemy lines. More than four thousand men burned, another thousand died by arrow and spear, and tens of thousands were left scarred. Mern IX and all his line died that day, and three days later, with the last of his nephews, House Gardener ended.

Loren Lannister escaped the fire and surrendered the next day; Aegon gave him back his lands and named him Warden of the West. At Highgarden, the steward Harlen Tyrell handed over the castle keys without a fight, and Aegon made him lord of the castle and Warden of the South.

Aegon was planning to push on toward Oldtown, the Reach, and Dorne when word reached him that Torrhen Stark had crossed the Neck with thirty thousand northmen. He turned back at once, called on every lord who had already bent the knee, and reached the Trident with a host twice the size of Torrhen's, while Balerion, Vhagar, and Meraxes circled ever wider above the camp.

Torrhen's scouts had seen Harrenhal's smoking ruins and knew what dragonfire could do. Some of his bannermen pushed him to attack, others to fall back to Moat Cailin; Brandon Snow, his bastard brother, offered to cross by night and kill the sleeping dragons with weirwood arrows. Torrhen sent him instead with three maesters, not to kill, but to talk.

The next morning Torrhen crossed the river, laid the crown of the Kings of Winter at Aegon's feet, and rose no longer a king but Lord of Winterfell and Warden of the North. He is remembered since as the King Who Knelt, though no northman ever burned on the Trident.

Rhaenys flew into Dorne to demand its surrender and found empty castles instead: at Vaith, at Godsgrace, in the floating town of the Planky Town, only old men and children remained, and when asked where their lords had gone, they gave a single answer: "away." Dorne was dissolving in front of her rather than yielding.

With the rest of Westeros subdued, Aegon was crowned lord of six kingdoms and became known as Aegon the Conqueror. Each house kept the rule of its own land under his new crown: the Starks in the North, the Arryns in the Vale, the Lannisters in the Westerlands, the Tyrells in the Reach, the Baratheons in the Stormlands, the Greyjoys in the Iron Islands, the Tullys in the Riverlands. Only Dorne, after the failed invasion, was left outside it, ruled by its own princes.

Rather than settle in Oldtown, Aegon founded a city where he had first landed on the shore of Blackwater Bay, and raised the Red Keep there. He named it King's Landing. He had the swords of his defeated enemies melted down with Balerion's fire, and after fifty-nine days they became the Iron Throne.