130 AC, at the Battle of the Gullet, of wounds taken carrying Prince Aegon clear
Size
A hatchling barely grown when the war finally asked something of him — small even by the standards of the young dragons that died that year, and never remotely prepared for what the Gullet demanded of him.
Temperament
As untested and unwarlike as the boy who rode him, by every account — a child's dragon asked, without warning, to fly through the single worst afternoon of that child's life.
Stormcloud was Prince Aegon's first dragon, claimed as a small boy the way princelings of his house always had been, and for the brief span of his life he was flown for nothing grander than a child's pleasure — the Dance's other dragons were fighting wars while Stormcloud was still, by any adult dragon's reckoning, barely out of the shell. That changed when Rhaenyra's council judged King's Landing no longer safe for her two youngest sons and moved to ship them across the narrow sea to Pentos, under escort of the Velaryon fleet guarding the Gullet.
The Triarchy's ambush caught that fleet in the open water, and in the chaos of ninety enemy warships loosed on too few defenders, the boy prince's own small dragon became his only way out. Stormcloud carried Aegon clear of the wreck and the crossbow bolts both, flying wounded and losing altitude the whole way to Dragonstone, and died there not long after landing — his last flight the only thing standing between a nine-year-old prince and drowning in a battle he had no business witnessing at all. The horror of it marked the boy for life; Aegon III, crowned within the year, would rule as a dutiful, joyless king who flinched from dragonfire and never willingly climbed onto another dragon's back so long as he lived — a reluctance the maesters trace directly back to the flight that Stormcloud did not survive.
The fate of Stormcloud
This carries how the dragon's story ends in the published novels. Read on only if you do not fear to know.
Carried the boy Prince Aegon — barely ten years old, and later Aegon III — clear of the slaughter at the Gullet while riddled with crossbow bolts, reaching Dragonstone before his wounds finally killed him; a death the maesters credit with the young king's lifelong horror of ever mounting a dragon again.
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 & Blood
Who was Stormcloud?
Stormcloud was Prince Aegon's first dragon, claimed as a small boy the way princelings of his house always had been, and for the brief span of his life he was flown for nothing grander than a child's pleasure — the Dance's other dragons were fighting wars while Stormcloud was still, by any adult dragon's reckoning, barely out of the shell. That changed when Rhaenyra's council judged King's Landing no longer safe for her two youngest sons and moved to ship them across the narrow sea to Pentos, under escort of the Velaryon fleet guarding the Gullet.
Is Stormcloud 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.