Did Aegon III Really Kill the Last Targaryen Dragon? Why I Think the Name Dragonbane Is a Lie

The last Targaryen dragon may have died because one boy grew tired of dragons and decided to put an end to the craziness and bad omen they bring. That boy was Aegon III, Rhaenyra's son. But when I look at what the books actually give us, I do not think he killed her, and I think the name the realm gave him is a lie.

This piece contains heavy book spoilers.

The last Targaryen dragon died in King's Landing with no name at all

We know the names of many dragons: Vhagar, Sunfyre, Caraxes, Syrax, Moondancer. Even the dragons that were never claimed still got named by the small folk. The last dragon died with no name at all. This happened in King's Landing in the year 153 AC. She died anonymously, and the maesters who noted her death did not think to ask what she was called.

The only thing we know about her, and yes, she was a female dragon, is that she was small, green, stunted and misshapen. Her wings were withered to the point that she was useless. Even though she was sickly, she at least managed to lay a clutch of five eggs before she died. None of them ever hatched.

Aegon III saw his uncle's dragon devour his mother

Aegon III, also known as Aegon the Younger, son of Rhaenyra and Daemon Targaryen, was the king on the Iron Throne while this unknown green dragon was dying. Some 23 years earlier, when the old world was still alive and the Dance was brimming with fire and blood, this boy saw his uncle's dragon eat his mother alive.

Just imagine the kind of trauma that would have on a boy of his age. It is not easy for a mother to die, let alone to die before your very eyes, screaming as a dragon burns her alive and eats her afterwards. That completely changed the boy. Because of how he saw his mother die, he developed a hatred and fear of dragons. The realm gave him the name Dragonbane because the last living dragon died during his reign.

The charge against Aegon comes from Ser Arlan of Pennytree, not any court or confession

There was a charge against the king. It was said that he killed the last dragon, the nameless green female. But he was not charged by the maesters or the septons. It was not a charge in a courtroom, so it does not appear in any court record, and it was not a confession he made. In fact, Fire and Blood does not cover it at all. The history breaks off in 136 AC, 17 years before she died, and there is no eyewitness account of the death of the last dragon anywhere in the corpus.

We know about it because of what a hedge knight tells a boy roughly a century and a half later. In 152 AC, the year before she died, a child named Arlan of Pennytree was brought to King's Landing by his grandfather and taken to see her. He saw the five eggs too, and he remembered them for the rest of his life: hard as stone, but beautiful. Decades later, as Ser Arlan, he told his squire Duncan the Tall, the Dunk we know from A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, what he had seen.

According to Ser Arlan, "Some say that King Aegon poisoned her." He clarifies that he means the third Aegon, not King Daeron's father, but the one they named Dragonbane, or Aegon the Unlucky, who was afraid of dragons because he had seen his uncle's beast devour his own mother. Just like me, Arlan is repeating what others said. He was not alleging that Aegon did it, and he could not back it with any official confirmation because there was none. So it is basically a rumour.

Could the rumour be true? The motive was already on the table

Could the rumours be true? Absolutely, yes. The fact that it was never documented or confirmed by a person of authority does not rule out the possibility. The realm knew Aegon III was terrified of dragons. Everyone knew. It was the most famous fact about him.

So when the last one died on his watch, the motive was already lying there on the table, and somebody just picked it up.

Aegon III tried to bring the dragons back with nine mages from Essos

Here is the point worth noting: Aegon III did try to bring the dragons back. At the urging of his brother Viserys, the boy he had abandoned to the Triarchy and spent four years believing he had killed, Aegon brought nine mages across the Narrow Sea from Essos after the last dragon was already dead and buried. He set them to work kindling a clutch of dragon eggs with sorcery.

Things did not go according to plan. The result was an expensive and humiliating failure, and the end product was just ash. You know how quickly rumours fly, and the story spread that the king had wasted precious silver on foreign conjurers who could not live up to their name.

This is a man so damaged by dragons that when his half sister Rhaena came to visit him with her hatchling, Morning, perched on her arm, he went white and ordered the guards to take it out of the room. He could not be in a chamber with a dragon the size of a cat. And that same man imported nine sorcerers, handed them a clutch of eggs and asked them to make more. It looks like he does not know what he wants, hating dragons one moment and trying to revive them the next.

I think he did it because, though he was afraid of dragons, he understood that a Targaryen king without a dragon is completely useless, just an ordinary man sitting on a chair made of swords. The realm now knew it could kill dragons, and that dragons were no gods. They were just meat, as Hugh Hammer put it. His regency was five years of Unwin Peake and Thaddeus Rowan, assassins, poison and Kingsguard he did not trust. He had seen what happened to the king before him. There was no fear of a Targaryen king with no beast beside him. So though he hated dragons, he also wanted them so he could feel powerful.

Why would a dragon killer leave five eggs sitting in King's Landing?

If the rumours were true, and that is a big if, why would a man said to have poisoned the last dragon spend a fortune trying to hatch the next one? And crucially, why would he leave five viable looking eggs sitting in King's Landing for one random boy from Pennytree to walk in and admire? It just does not make sense to me.

If Aegon III really set out to end dragonkind, there is a lot of explaining to do about why he stopped one clutch short of finishing the job, and why those eggs stayed in Targaryen hands long enough for his descendants to keep trying all the way down to Summerhall.

Aegon spared Rhaena's dragon Morning when he could have killed her

Go back to the hour of the wolf, when Cregan Stark took King's Landing. Aegon is 10, newly crowned and confined to Maegor's Holdfast for his own safety, with no companion but Gaemon Palehair, a bastard boy who was briefly a pretender king during the moon of the three kings. His half sisters Baela and Rhaena are allowed in to see him, and when Rhaena brings Morning, Aegon pales and has her removed.

I bring this up again because I think it is the truest thing we have about him, and it goes on to prove he could not be a dragon killer. Morning was a harmless hatchling. She was his sister's joy and the only new dragon born in the aftermath of a war that had cost them so much. Aegon could have killed her, but he did not. Rhaena kept her dragon because Aegon never touched her. He only flinched because he was scared, and being scared does not mean you are capable of killing. You just take the blame when one dies.

Stormcloud was the only dragon Aegon ever flew, and it died within the hour

Before the war and before Sunfyre, there was Stormcloud, and this part of Aegon's story seems to get shut away. He was not dragonless. He bonded with Stormcloud on Dragonstone but never rode him, because he was young and there was no need to. Then Jace sent him and Viserys east for safety.

The Gay Abandon was taken by Triarchy ships in open water, and Aegon did the only thing a Targaryen child can do in that situation: he climbed onto a dragon he had never flown and ran. He made it back to Dragonstone clinging to Stormcloud's neck, shaking, and told the garrison what had happened. Stormcloud had been shot to pieces on the way and died within the hour.

So before Aegon III ever became the Dragonbane, this had already happened to him. He flew a dragon exactly once, and it led to the death of his dragon. The price of his survival was his little brother left on a captured ship and presumed dead for four years. The counterattack that followed killed Jace and Vermax in the Gullet, though things are different from what we see in the show. He never rode a dragon again for the rest of his life.

Dragonstone was the day that started Aegon's fear of dragons

What started this whole fear is what happened on Dragonstone, and that should be the worst day of his life. Rhaenyra has lost King's Landing. She has seen Joffrey fall from Syrax from the roof of Maegor's Holdfast, with Aegon standing beside her. She flees to Duskendale, then sails home to Dragonstone with her son at her side, a small pale shadow, as the histories call him.

When they reach the gates, there are burnt corpses hanging from them. The boy's mind works fast, and he shouts to his mother to run, but Rhaenyra does not. Her last three Queensguard are cut down in front of him. He picks up one of their swords because he is 10 and it is what you do, and Ser Alfred Broome knocks it out of his hands like he is swatting an insect. They are marched into the ward, where Aegon II is waiting with Sunfyre, half dead and starving.

They pull Aegon away from his mother so he has a clear view, and he looks on as his uncle feeds her to the dragon. He saw the dragon tear his mother limb from limb. Ser Marston Waters stood there in white and said nothing, which is why years later, when Unwin Peake made Waters Lord Commander of the Kingsguard, Aegon III could barely be in the room with him.

Afterwards, Aegon II debated whether to geld the boy, send him to the Wall, or simply kill him, and settled on keeping him alive as a hostage. He spent the last two months of that year in the dark under Dragonstone, then his uncle shipped him back to King's Landing and kept him there as a hostage for another year. Then his uncle was poisoned by his own men, and they brought the boy out of the dark and put him on the Iron Throne.

The Dance, not Aegon, killed most of the dragons

Put plainly, from the way the rumours and the arguments present themselves, Rhaenyra's son could not have killed the last dragon. Besides, the Dance had already killed most of them. We saw what happened at Rook's Rest, the Gullet and Tumbleton, and very soon in season 4 there is the Gods Eye, plus the mob tearing the Dragon Pit apart with bare hands and dying by the hundreds to do it. In one generation, Westeros went from 20 living dragons to a handful of stunted, inbred, sickly hatchlings that could barely fly.

There is an even bigger accusation from Archmaester Marwyn, who tells Sam Tarly plainly that the maesters killed the dragons. I do not know why he said that, and whether you believe it depends entirely on you. This is the same Citadel that noted some say Aegon poisoned her, so they are probably capable of anything. Still, I think that is unlikely, and I have not seen anywhere how they played a role in the dragons dying.

One boy, five names, and I think Dragonbane is the lie

Aegon just happens to be on the wrong side of history. The dying of the last dragons happened under his reign, so even if he was not directly responsible, he could easily be blamed. They just wanted someone to blame.

This boy had a lot of names: Aegon the Younger, Aegon the Unlucky, Aegon the Unhappy, the Broken King and Aegon the Dragonbane. One boy with five names, "but if you ask me, the last one is a lie."

At this point in the show, we already know what is in store. Season 3 has a lot going on, and it is leading to the moment when the dragons are finally written off the face of the world, just because these power hungry men could not keep their pride in check. When they are gone, the younger generation is left to pick up the pieces.

Do you think Aegon III poisoned the last dragon, or was he simply the king who took the blame?