Daemon Blackfyre had the look of a king, the valor of a champion, and — thanks to a dying Aegon IV's deathbed gift of the ancestral sword Blackfyre — a claim that half the realm found more convincing than his trueborn half-brother's. When he raised his rebellion in 196 AC, great lords flocked to his black dragon banner, and the loyalist host that marched to meet him was, by every honest account, in for the fight of its life.
The two armies met in the Reach, and the slaughter that followed was reckoned the worst the Seven Kingdoms had seen since the Field of Fire itself. Daemon Blackfyre and two of his young sons, both bearing swords forged to look like Blackfyre so no man could say which pretender was the true one, were cut down together by the arrows of Ser Brynden Rivers — Bloodraven, the king's own bastard half-brother and no friend to bastards who reached for crowns not theirs. The rebel host broke apart soon after.
Daeron II kept his throne, but the victory cost him his stomach for another such day; the maesters note he never again rode to war himself. Aegor Rivers, Daemon's loyal half-brother, gathered what remained of the Blackfyre loyalists and fled across the narrow sea rather than kneel — the seed of the Golden Company, and of three further rebellions still to come.