Meraxes

Meraxes was the youngest and smallest of the three dragons that carried House Targaryen to the conquest of Westeros, though smallest is a relative term among the Conquest dragons. She was large enough to swallow a horse whole. Her scales were silver and her eyes golden, and she was ridden by one rider and one only: Rhaenys Targaryen, the younger sister-wife of Aegon the Conqueror.

The bond between Rhaenys and Meraxes was unusually close even by Targaryen standards. Rhaenys was noted to have flown her dragon more often than Aegon flew Balerion or Visenya flew Vhagar, taking to the sky for its own sake rather than only for war. Where Balerion was an instrument of terror and Vhagar a weapon of hardened experience, Meraxes was the dragon most associated with flight itself.

During Aegon's Conquest, Meraxes flew alongside her siblings in the campaign's decisive engagements. At the Field of Fire she joined Balerion and Vhagar against the combined host of House Lannister and House Gardener — the only time all three dragons were unleashed together on a single battlefield. The Gardener line was ended there, the Reach submitted, and the Westerlands followed. Rhaenys and Meraxes were afterward sent south to bring Dorne into the realm.

Dorne did not submit. The Dornish refused to meet dragons in open battle, abandoning their castles rather than offering a target, and the First Dornish War became a campaign with nothing to burn. In 10 AC, Rhaenys flew Meraxes over the Hellholt, where a scorpion bolt struck the dragon through the eye. Meraxes fell, bringing down part of the castle beneath her. Rhaenys died with her, though the accounts of exactly how are contradictory and were never settled. Meraxes's skull remained at the Hellholt long after.

Meraxes was the first of the three Conquest dragons to die, and the first dragon known to have been killed by a weapon in human hands. Her death carried a significance beyond the loss of a single dragon: it established that dragons could be killed from the ground, by men with the patience to wait and the nerve to aim. Aegon's retaliation, remembered as the Dragon's Wroth, followed — but the lesson of the Hellholt outlived it, and every scorpion later raised against a dragon traced its logic back to the bolt that took Meraxes's eye.