10 AC, at the Hellholt, felled by a scorpion bolt through the eye
Size
The smallest of Aegon's three original dragons, yet still large enough that being third behind Balerion and Vhagar left her, in any other stable, the largest and most fearsome dragon anyone had ever seen.
Temperament
Bonded to Rhaenys with an ease the histories credit to the queen's own restless, curious nature — mother and mount together made a habit of flying reconnaissance and errantry that neither Aegon nor Visenya's dragons much bothered with, a partnership built on exploration as much as war.
Meraxes belonged to the Targaryen who used her dragon least for burning and most for looking. Rhaenys flew Meraxes the length and breadth of the new realm during the Conquest and after — surveying coastlines, scouting resistance, and by some accounts simply satisfying a curiosity about Westeros that her siblings, more occupied with holding what they'd taken, rarely indulged. It made her the most well-travelled of the Conquest's dragonriders, and Meraxes the most widely seen dragon in the Seven Kingdoms outside her two larger kin.
That same restlessness carried her into Dorne during the First Dornish War, a campaign the Targaryens fought with fire and won nothing lasting from. At the Hellholt a defender turned a scorpion built for exactly this purpose skyward and put a bolt through Meraxes's eye; dragon and queen fell together, and Dorne's long, expensive resistance to the dragons had its first proof of concept. The Citadel still keeps more than one account of exactly how Rhaenys died in the wreckage, and declines to adjudicate between them — but on the central fact, that a scorpion bolt and a lucky angle brought down a dragon queens had thought untouchable, every version agrees.
The fate of Meraxes
This carries how the dragon's story ends in the published novels. Read on only if you do not fear to know.
Shot from the sky over Dorne by a single well-placed bolt from a defender's scorpion, dying with the rider she had never been parted from — the first dragon in Targaryen history to prove that fire and scale were not, after all, proof against a patient man with the right engine.
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.
In the timeline
SourcesFire & BloodThe World of Ice & Fire
Who was Meraxes?
Meraxes belonged to the Targaryen who used her dragon least for burning and most for looking. Rhaenys flew Meraxes the length and breadth of the new realm during the Conquest and after — surveying coastlines, scouting resistance, and by some accounts simply satisfying a curiosity about Westeros that her siblings, more occupied with holding what they'd taken, rarely indulged. It made her the most well-travelled of the Conquest's dragonriders, and Meraxes the most widely seen dragon in the Seven Kingdoms outside her two larger kin.
Is Meraxes from the books or the show?
Book canon. This entry follows George R. R. Martin's novels and histories, and notes where the television series diverges rather than following it.