"Fire and Blood" by George R.R. Martin, List 5

The Dance of the Dragons is the flowery name bestowed upon the savage internecine struggle for the Iron Throne of Westeros fought between two rival branches of House Targaryen during the years 129 to 131 AC.

Septon Eustace, writing on these events some years later, points out that the manservant delivered his dire tidings directly to the queen, and her alone, without raising a general alarum. Eustace does not believe this was wholly fortuitous; the king's death had been anticipated for some time, he argues, and Queen Alicent and her party, the so-called greens, had taken care to instruct all of Viserys's guards and servants in what to do when the day came.

Daemon will find some pretext to put them all to death.

Though glib of tongue when need be, the master of whisperers hoarded his words like a miser hoarding coins, preferring to listen rather than talk.

There was Silverwing, Good Queen Alysanne's mount of old; Seasmoke, the pale grey beast that had been the pride and passion of Ser Laenor Velaryon; hoary old Vermithor, unridden since the death of King Jaehaerys.

But when the two queens—his mother, Queen Alicent, and his wife, Queen Helaena—spoke in favor of Orwyle's proposal, the truculent king gave way reluctantly.

Munkun tells us that Orwyle gave a long and erudite reply, citing Andal law and the Great Council of 101.

And so whilst Lord Grover thundered and fulminated from his deathbed, Riverrun barred its gates, manned its walls, and held its silence.

When the Old King visited us so long ago, he spoke of the wrong that had been done to us and promised to make redress.

The first battles in the Dance of the Dragons were fought with quills and ravens, with threats and promises, decrees and blandishments.

The murder of Lord Beesbury at the green council was not yet widely known; most believed his lordship to be languishing in some dungeon.

Afterward she would not eat, nor bathe, nor leave her chambers, and she could no longer stand to look upon her son Maelor, knowing that she had named him to die. The king had no recourse but to take the boy from her and give him over to their mother, the Dowager Queen Alicent, to raise as if he were her own.

Ser Otto Hightower had been busy as well, winning over lords, hiring sellswords, strengthening the defenses of King's Landing, and assiduously seeking after other alliances.

After the rejection of Grand Maester Orwyle's peace overtures the Hand redoubled his efforts, dispatching ravens to Winterfell and the Eyrie, to Riverrun, White Harbor, Gulltown, Bitterbridge, Fair Isle, and half a hundred other keeps and castles.

Eleven magisters from each city made up its membership, every man of them intent on demonstrating his own sagacity, shrewdness, and importance, and winning every possible advantage for his own city.

When provisions inside the castle began to run low, he dispatched a raven to Dragonstone, pleading for succor.

The would-be dragonslayers easily drove off the cordon of guards who had been left to feed, serve, and protect the dragon, but Sunfyre himself proved more formidable than expected.

For all the vaunted strength of its walls, King's Landing fell in less than a day.

His lordship used the pretext of Dornish incursions into the stormlands to justify this, but many and more were heard to whisper that it was the dragons ahead, not the Dornishmen behind, that prompted his change of heart.

Only the intercession of his bedmate Alys Rivers had saved the boy's life.

Queen Alicent was fettered at wrist and ankle with golden chains, though her stepdaughter spared her life “for the sake of our father, who loved you once."

The dragon's egg she sent to Lord Hightower at Longtable, in the hopes it might assuage his wroth.

Legend has it that during the Age of Heroes, Serwyn of the Mirror Shield slew the dragon Urrax by crouching behind a shield so polished that the beast saw only his own reflection. By this ruse, the hero crept close enough to drive a spear through the dragon’s eye, earning the name by which we know him still.

That such a tale was told in the wine sinks and pot shops of King's Landing cannot be doubted, but it may be that its provenance was later, when King Aegon II was seeking justification for the cruelty of his own acts.

“I do not think you would lie to my face,” she told Gerardys, “but I cannot have men around me that I do not trust implicitly, and when I look at you now all I can recall is how you prated at me about the Nettles girl.”

'Twas in this dark hour that there rose up in Cobbler's Square a certain itinerant brother, a barefoot scarecrow of a man in a hair shirt and roughspun breeches, filthy and unwashed and smelling of the sty, with a begging bowl hung round his neck on a leather thong.

Vhagar, older and much the larger, was also slower, made ponderous by her very size, and ascended more gradually, in ever widening circles that took her and her rider out over the waters of the Gods Eye.

The remaining bonds she burst now, tearing the stanchions from the walls as the mob rushed her, then plunging into them with tooth and claw, ripping men apart and tearing off their limbs even as she loosed her terrible fires.

With the dragons dead and the threat of immolation no longer
 imminent, the prophet turned his wroth upon the highborn and wealthy.

They were the worst sort of men, to be sure: sellswords, robber knights, and like rabble, men of tainted blood and uncertain birth who loved battle for its own sake and lived for rapine and plunder.

Their discipline had grown lax (drunkenness was endemic in the camp, Grand Maester Munkun says, and disease had taken root as well), the death of Lord Ormund Hightower had left them without a leader, and the lords who wished to command in his place were at odds with one another.

In the sky above, Addam Velaryon could see the battle turning into a rout below him.

The rising sun would find her flapping listlessly across the field, feeding on the burned remains of horses, men, and oxen.

As such, he had expected to be named as castellan when Rhaenyra went forth to seize the Iron Throne...but Ser Alfred's sullen disposition and sour manner inspired neither affection nor trust, Mushroom tells us, so the queen had passed him over in favor of the more affable Ser Robert Quince.

The old man had proved to be surprisingly intractable, however. “My knees are old and stiff and do not bend easily,” Lord Corlys responded, before setting forth terms of his own.

On the last day of the year, two hundred forty-one “barefoot lambs,” the Shepherd's most fervid and devoted followers, were covered with pitch and chained to poles along the broad cobbled thoroughfare that ran eastward from Cobbler's Square up to the Dragonpit.

Though the lords thus accosted, through their stewards and castellans, were quick to lower Rhaenyra's quartered banner and raise Aegon's golden dragon in its stead, each in turn was brought in chains to King's Landing and forced to do obeisance before the king.

In the riverlands, the aged and bedridden Lord Grover Tully had finally died (of apoplexy from having his house fight against the rightful king at Second Tumbleton, Mushroom says), and his grandson Elmo, now at last the Lord of Riverrun, had called the lords of the Trident to war once more, lest he suffer the same fate as Lords Rosby, Stokeworth, and Darklyn.

The muscles of that leg had atrophied, the knee stiffening, the flesh melting away until only a withered stick remained, so twisted that Orwyle thought His Grace might do better were it cut away entirely.

After these sessions, the fool says, the king would weep for shame and summon Septon Eustace to grant him absolution.