While Aegon and his sisters burned their way through the Reach, a smaller force under Orys Baratheon — a landless knight said by some to be the king's own bastard half-brother, though no one troubled to say so to his face — marched south to answer the Storm King's boast that he would feed Aegon's dragons Dornish spears once he had finished with the invaders himself. Argilac the Arrogant, last of a line that had ruled the stormlands since before the Andals came, rode out to meet him rather than endure a siege.
The battle that followed was short and one-sided; Argilac's stormlanders fought with the desperate fury of men who knew what defeat meant, but knew it too late. Orys slew the Storm King in the field — some say in single combat, though the maesters note that men do love to simplify a rout into a duel — and took for himself Argilac's armor, his stag sigil, and, in time, his words. What had been House Durrandon's for eight thousand years passed in an afternoon.
Storm's End itself did not fall so easily. Argilac's daughter Argella held the castle for a time and named herself Storm Queen, until her own garrison, half-starved and disinclined to die for her pride, delivered her to the besiegers to end the siege. She wed Orys Baratheon, who took the castle, the title, and — so the singers claim, more delighted by the pun than the history — gave the war its lasting name, for it was the last time the Storm Kings' banners rode to battle.