House Targaryen

Aegon III Targaryen

Aegon the Younger

Life: late 120 AC
House: Targaryen

Crowned amid the war's wreckage at ten years old — the chronicle keeps how his long, dragon-averse reign eventually ends for readers not yet there.

Aegon III was the son Rhaenyra Targaryen bore her uncle-husband Daemon, and he came to the Iron Throne at ten years old having watched, at an age no chronicler thinks a child should have to, the ruin the Dance of the Dragons made of both his parents. He saw his mother delivered to Aegon II's mercy and, by nearly every surviving account, fed to the dragon Sunfyre before his eyes; he lost his own young dragon, Stormcloud, in the chaos of his own flight to safety not long after. A boy who had watched dragons kill his family and eat his mother did not, understandably, grow into a man who trusted them, and the Citadel notes that no ruler before or since has come to the throne so thoroughly done with the beasts that built it.

The arc of Aegon III Targaryen

This carries the character’s road through the published novels. Read on only if you do not fear to know.

Crowned amid a regency council patched together from the war's survivors, Aegon III inherited a peace built on a marriage — to Jaehaera, Aegon II's own daughter, a treaty bride he outlived under circumstances the histories treat as more suspicious than settled — and later remarried, more happily, to Daenaera Velaryon. His reign closes a chapter no Targaryen king wanted to close: the last dragon in Westeros died within his lifetime, unmourned by a king who had buried too much of his childhood in dragonfire already, and it is that dying breed, not his conquests, that earned him the name history remembers him by.

Where the books leave Aegon III Targaryen: died in 157 AC of a wasting illness the maesters of his own reign could not name, having ruled twenty-six years without once willingly going near a dragon

These partings name deaths, endings, and roads not yet ridden in the books. Unveil them only if both roads are known to you — or if you do not fear to know.

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Who is Aegon III Targaryen?

The son of Rhaenyra and Daemon Targaryen, crowned at ten after the Dance of the Dragons killed both his parents and most of the dynasty's dragons with them.

Why is Aegon III called the Dragonbane?

Because the horrors he witnessed as a child during the Dance left him with a lifelong aversion to dragons, and the last of them died during his own reign.