In one 5322 years after the Dance of the Dragons, the last
dragon known in Westeros died. Though she laid a clutch of
eggs, the dragon had never thrived.
Curiously, neither had any of the Dragons hatched after the
Dance. There were still adult Dragons
in Westeros born before the Dance that survived.
Not many, but some. And they were strong and
powerful in at least a few cases.
But by 1:53 they were gone as well.
So how did this come to be? That's not a very long time,
right? Were there those who dreamt of a
dragonless Westeros, and of those for whom the answer was
yes, did they do anything about it?
I'm sure plenty of people just had that thought, but we're
talking about people who put it into action.
Or did it happen for reasons outside of human control?
Were there supernatural factors beyond comprehension that maybe
we can just touch on a little bit, or at least extrapolate?
Or was it a combination of things?
And if so, which things the maestros are commonly suspected?
And to be clear my friends, this is not a theory that originated
with. Well, I would say it didn't
entirely originate with fans. It did entirely originate with
fans at first. There were plenty of fans who
suspected the maestros of killing the Dragons before
Marwin the Mage expressed that belief on Paige.
Because Marwin the Mage did that at the end of A Feast for Crows.
And y'all are well aware that there were three books before
that one. So it's a conspiracy theory, but
it's a conspiracy theory believed by characters in the
story and by parts of the fandom.
So that's, well, that puts it in a different category.
We have a smart fandom, y'all. That's something that I'd like
to throw out there. You know, people figuring things
out before they're spelled out more.
I like that. But the maesters are not the
only ones with motive here. There's flaws with Marwin's
theory, and there's other factors that he didn't consider,
which, well, that's part of the flaws with his theories, but
that doesn't eliminate his idea, so we have to include them for
sure. Is the end motive of getting rid
of Dragons if that's what happened to get rid of magic or
to reduce it? If that's a question that needs
to be addressed here too, because do Dragons actually
bring magic, or does the magic bring Dragons?
The question will take on today is if killing Dragons kills
magic. Well, where did that idea come
from in the 1st place? The world had Dragons in it for
thousands of years before it suddenly didn't.
So where did the idea that getting rid of them would have
an effect like that? Who could have experienced that
prior to it happening? Right?
That's a bit of a conundrum, isn't it?
So we have questions. It's a three-way cultural battle
that's tangible in Westeros that we're going to get into as well.
Because magic is real. The realm of science is not
happy with it. They're antagonistic towards it,
at least as far as what we've been told.
And there's Dragons and magic, which it's his own realm, but
also there's the realm of faith that right, the seven aren't big
fans of the Dragons. The the high Septon, maybe not a
big fan, whichever high Septon you're talking about, they were
the big power in Westeros before the Dragons.
So they stand to gain something by them being gone.
And of course, with all that, we have all this wrapped into a
nice whodunit package because if it wasn't the maesters, who was
it and why did they do it and how?
We need motive and we need method.
So we got a lot of stuff going on.
The supernatural forces behind all Planetos, Dragons, mages,
perhaps the biggest whodunit case in Westeros history.
All that more on this episode of History of Westeros podcast.
Hello and welcome back everybody.
We are streaming live as we so often do here, Monday at 3:00
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we modify that to Mondays at six.
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listen to it on Patreon. That's where you get that.
So thanks to those of you all supporting us and sharing the
word and all that. Let's get to it.
Also a thank you to Good Queen Alley Nina.
She was on vacation this week, so no new blog post over on
goodqueenalley.tumblr.com, but there's so much good stuff on
there, even if you've read them all.
May be time to do some rereading.
Valar reread good queenalley.tumblr.com.
If you have questions for us.westeroshistory@gmail.com is
probably the simplest way to get in touch, but you can also
e-mail us on Patreon, even just by being a free member.
You don't have to be a paid member to to contact us there or
on any social media platform. We're pretty much everywhere.
Here's a trivia question to get us started.
How many eggs did the last dragon lay?
Interesting question, huh? The answer is revealed in this.
It'll get dropped if you're paying close attention.
Maybe you already know and the answer could be it could be a
trick question, right? It might be none.
It could be so. Now, those of you who are
patrons might be familiar with our Parallel Lives trivia and
exploration of parallel characters within A Song of Ice
and Fire, whether they're in the same timeline or separated by
hundreds or thousands of years. Something we did a lot of
between 19/18/2018 and 2022. Yeah, we've been doing these
since before George R Martin was born, y'all, and they're a lot
of fun. They were all on Twitter and I
don't really use Twitter anymore for reasons I think you probably
all understand. So we're going to be recycling
some of them and putting them on Patreon and making some new ones
in the meantime. So if y'all, a lot of y'all
don't know what I'm talking about, so just stay tuned and
you'll see they're pretty fun little trivia comparisons.
If those of y'all those of y'all who are familiar, well, you know
what you're getting into and it'll be fun to bring back that
fun weekly thing. To be clear, Patreon has rolled
out something called Quips which is in the mobile app and anyone
could see, not just people who support your Patreon.
So they will be posted as quips. Very quippy.
You're very quippy. Yeah.
It's kind of like a timeline type of thing, I guess, like a a
news feed. A news feed.
Yeah, it's a lot like that. Yeah.
So they're trying to move into that direct, which makes sense.
I don't I often find myself a little disconnected from the
people I'm supporting on Patreon, so having a a few more
ways for connectivity makes some sense.
But anyway, let's get to the topic at hand, The last dragon.
It's kind of, you know, we almost call this one the last
Dragons because, well, it's we're looking up at that,
looking at them as a whole. However, the final one does have
extra weight on it because, well, just think about this
Senator where we I've raised this topic is very supernatural
and you know, whodunit murder mystery kind of thing.
But it's also very political because I mean, think about
being in Westeros as the last dragon is dying.
I mean, what a weird thing to be living through The Targaryen's
like everything's fine. It's that meme where the dog is
staring forward with the stupid grin on his face and the house
is on fire. That's a good metaphor because
of the fire especially. But what are they like?
What are they supposed to say to everybody?
Like, yeah, it's fine, the Dragons are dying off.
What? Who cares, right?
We're fine, not a problem. We can we only have them for
thousands of years and now we don't.
Big deal, right? So yeah, it is it it, it creates
this feeling not just in King's Landing, although it would be
stronger there, I suppose, but everywhere in West was like,
what's going to happen now? What's going to happen?
Is this going to change things? Like things have been the same
for a long time. I mean, are we going back to pre
Aegon? Is the Kingdom going to collapse
in the Seven Kingdoms again? So that would be a lot of
thoughts and it wouldn't be positive, a lot of fear.
So that is a big part of this as well.
Right now, the section headers, we have the last Dragons, lost
dragon lore, the magic or the egg?
Yes, it's like the chicken or the egg.
And then we have the dragonless dragon Lords, dragonless but not
eggless, 9 mages, What or who done it and how to kill a
dragon, kind of like how to train your dragon.
But yeah, you get it. So just some basic questions
we're going to seek to answer here today.
Other than the ones I've already pointed out in the intro, what
do we know about the last Dragons?
You know, what physical characteristics and other
details like that. Why were the final Dragons so
weak? And what like, what was there a
reason for that? Is it just coincidence?
Is was there a bunch of factors for that?
Is there one thing we can point to?
Did someone kill them off or did it just kind of happen?
And if it was an organization that killed them off, who was
it? Why did they do it and how did
they do it? So when Daenerys hatched 3
Dragons at the end of A Game of Thrones, we assume it was still
the year 298. Maybe it was 299.
Regardless, they were the first known to us since the year 153.
That's again 22 years after the end of the Dance of the Dragons
and the day, the year rather than the last dragon died.
Now Danny's Dragons are growing quickly.
They are an example. Now some of that is probably a
little bit on the meta side because George scrapped the five
year gap and that was supposed to give the dragon some time to
grow. But even with that in mind the
last dragon and her siblings or sibling got nowhere near the
size of Danny's. So even if you take out the
George needs them to grow faster aspect it still doesn't align
which implies some other factors were in play.
Now, if you don't like a comparison to the miraculous
Dragons born from stone, I get it, that might be different.
But look at the Dragons born a generation before these last
ones. Look at two or three generations
before. Nothing seemed to go wrong with
them other than the civil war that was started in their name,
but nothing in untoward with their growth patterns or
anything like that. So whatever happened was pretty
sudden. Even taking away Danny's kind of
unusual example that hadn't happened by that time.
It still looks peculiar, doesn't it?
The last Dragons, we'll start with the Dragons themselves and
then work into the theories and all the other stuff surrounding
it. After that, we'll talk a little
bit about what life was like maybe when they were gone.
Like now that that once that milestone was hit, what did how
did people react? What was next, etcetera.
Here's a famous and fun quote we return to every so often.
It reminds us, as it often does, along with it informing us of
other things, whatever we happen to be looking at it for, in this
case, The Last Dragons. It reminds us that George had a
lot of this planned out ahead of time, even if certain details
maybe weren't. A lot of this groundwork was
laid in their first few chapters.
Quote. There were 19 skulls.
The oldest was more than 3000 years old, the youngest a mere
century and a half. The most recent were also the
smallest, a matched pair, no bigger than Mastiffs skulls and
oddly misshapen, all that remained of the last two
hatchlings born on Dragonstone. They were the last of the
Targaryen Dragons, perhaps the last Dragons anywhere, and they
had not lived very long. Yet one of the two lived long
enough to bear eggs. So there's a little something
there that's a little odd. I mean, animal Kingdom pretty
widespread. You don't generally lay eggs or
breed or anything like that when you aren't healthy.
So that's, you know, maybe a little odd, but so this dragon
maybe was sick, but not fully sick or it's it's unusual,
definitely noteworthy. And how many others were born
after the dance? We don't actually know.
I I thought when we started this episode, we would have a more
clear answer, but we don't know. We know, we know that these last
two hatchlings with these skulls are mentioned here, but perhaps
there's another skull that Tyrion didn't include that maybe
died five years earlier because these last two, he doesn't say
that in this quote. Well, you know, he does.
He calls him a matched pair. They're very similar.
So that's why maybe he wasn't noting the third one that's also
an example, but died 10 years before but still after the
Dance, right. That would just kind of belabor
the point. He wouldn't need to get into
that. And Tyrion doesn't necessarily
even know that level of detail, even though Tyrion is, of all
the Povs, the one who seems to know the most about Dragons.
Now, we know that Prince Viserys's egg, for example, it
was one that did not hatch Prince Viserys, meaning the
Viserys that became Viserys the Second, as in Aegon the Third's
younger brother. And of course, Aegon the Third
was the king during this time where the Dragons died out.
That's part of why he's called Aegon the Third, the Dragon
Bane. So if these hatch Dragons, these
two misshapen, oddly matched pair, if they were given to
certain Targaryens, were they cradle eggs?
They probably were. Which ones?
Like we. This is an interesting thing
that we're missing some of this detail.
Whose Dragons they belong to? We don't even have the Dragons
names. That's not too strange,
honestly. We didn't have pretty much any
of the young Dragons names during for the Dance until Fire
and Blood. Like a lot of it.
Well, maybe World of Ice and Fire.
Some of those Dragons didn't even have names then, like we
were a few. Basically those were late in the
game names, we'll say. So this is kind of the same meta
pattern here. The names aren't super
important, maybe to historians, or maybe that's like remembering
the name of a specific ship. You know, like the ship that led
to all the other ships. You can see why that might
matter, but you could also see why that it's not very important
just to have the name of the ship.
There were left Targaryen Dragons that may be marking down
the name of all the smaller ones didn't seem important.
Some of them may have had temporary names, you know what I
mean? Like they give a a working name
until the dragon rider decides what the real name is.
Let me make take a little while. Name days are a thing in
Westeros, right? You don't always name things
right away. Maybe that applies to Dragons
too. So out of the four, Elena had
her egg when she was an adolescent, so her egg wasn't
one of the ones that hatched. Viserys has three children.
We don't. Meaning aiming the egg on aiming
the dragonite egg on the 4th and nares we don't really know.
I could have been one of their three.
And Baila Targaryen gave her egg to her daughter Lena, and that
egg hatch. We'll talk about that one later.
That one was a that was a bit of a horror show.
And there's also Hightower Daughters of Reyna.
So there's quite a few different people that could add eggs.
So we couldn't really narrow it down all the way.
That's basically your list of candidates, but it also tells
you, given that list of candidates, there's a lot of
people that had eggs. And so far we only know of these
two or three that actually hatched.
And like I said, one was a horror show.
So that's it's pretty distinct. The pattern of Dragons born
before the dance seem fine, even one born during the dance
morning. I mean, she never got large and
older and we don't know how she died, but she didn't seem to be
stunted either. There's no description of her in
that state. Maybe that came later and we
never learned that, but as of now, there's no word on that.
So it doesn't seem random, does it?
None of the Dragons born after the Dance seem to have been
healthy. All of the ones before it seemed
fine. And if there were only two
hatchlings, why not more? So that's a that's a mystery
too. If.
If it was only the two hatchlings.
So a lot of people have seen these calls.
The ones that Tyrion looked at, they used to be prominently
displayed in the throne room. It was Robert who took them down
and moved with the basement. So that's historically speaking,
that's only 20 years ago that they were put in the basement,
less than 20 really. So a lot of people saw them, a
lot of people got to wonder about them.
And people probably had thoughts along Tyrion's lines as to,
gosh, what was the deal with those little ones and dying out
young. What happened there?
And almost more peculiar, I pointed out morning, the pink
and black dragon that died within 23 years of her birth,
roughly. That's a little less mysterious
than say, Silver Wing. Silver Wing flew off after the
dance to live alone on a Stony island.
The Cannibal. We don't know when for sure the
Cannibal died. I don't think it's easy to pin
the death of either Silver Wing or the Cannibal on maesters,
right? Like, that seems far fetched.
Why would they? Well, how would they, right?
Like are they poisoning dragon stuffed Dragons to make the
cannibal eat that? Like, oh, I can go eat that
hatchling and it's really just a a plushie and filled with poison
Like I don't right? And sheep stealer.
That's another one. I mean that dragon flew off and
hid in the veil where no one lives except the burned man
apparently. So honestly, I think the
maesters are a little precise with a date.
They shouldn't be. And it's a pattern we've seen
with other supernatural creatures.
For example, world advice would fire and people like Maestro
Lewin and others will say things like the children of the forest
have been dead for thousands of years.
They'll say things like the giants are extinct.
They'll say things like skin changing.
If it was a thing, it probably was a thing.
It doesn't happen anymore. Those are blatantly wrong,
right? And they're not just wrong by a
little. They're like the children died
of thousands of years ago. That is way wrong, right?
They're not even gone at all. That's let alone thousands of
years ago. There's giants walking around at
the wall right now, and the maestros don't know that, so how
are we supposed to be sure that they know for a fact?
Sheep stealer died before 153. Now it's a dragon.
There'd be sightings, but this is a very remote area of the
Veil where this dragon kind of lived, kind of unknown for a
long time, semi unknown before she became famous.
So sinking back into obscurity by being out of sight, out of
mind. I can believe that.
So there we got to keep that in mind that this one date at 1:53,
yeah, it might not be 100% accurate.
However, I am willing to believe that it's close because Yeah, I
mean no one seems to have spotted Silver Wing or the
Cannibal or Sheep Stealer after these dates.
At least no confirmed sighting, no sightings in large numbers.
So it's probably not off by a lot, but the point is the same.
That's several adult Dragons that were also all dead by this
say the one 50s if we're not going to use 153 as a precise
date. I can believe humans killing the
dragon Morning Light. I can believe Dragons being
killed as hatchlings. Heck, a 10 year old could kill a
hatchling. It doesn't take much to smash an
egg, even a dragon egg. But killing Sheep Stealer and
Silver Wing and that cannibal, yeah, I really, really doubt the
maesters did that. I kind of doubt humans did that.
So that's a problem for all the theorizing here.
Has to keep that into keep that in mind so highly relevant as to
the question of whether the death of Dragons actually had an
impact. We're going to get into the a
little bit of the question of well, Dragons, magic, magic
Dragons, what brings what how what's the what's the
association there? And here is a quote.
The last one perished during the reign of King Egon the Third.
The Last Dragon in Westeros. Insisted Malander.
The last dragon in Westeros was the last dragon, said Armand
doggedly. That is well known.
No Dothraki present to chorus. It is known because that really
emphasizes the point when you got like a someone standing
behind you to say it is known. It's like having a hype man or
woman you know, but for but for facts anyway, Mollander argues
that the world is too big ash eye too distant and mysterious,
as well as being associated with Dragons.
To be sure, he says Old Town is not the world.
And given the point I just made about how maesters have been
wrong about these things, like right in front of our eyes
multiple times, I'm with Mollander.
Even Danny says the same thing early in the Game of Thrones.
She's like, Dragons died in the West, but in the east.
Are we sure about that? How can we know that there's no
Dragons over there? And she makes a good point.
It's like, yeah, how could you know?
You can't, you silly maesters, How could you possibly know
what's over there? They're making assumptions.
So I'm definitely with Mollander there.
And Armin counters. That's so much of this is just
stories about Dragons, sailors, stories.
Why can we trust sailors yet Armin, whose name is probably
unintentionally similar to Eamon?
What does Eamon do when he gets to Braavos and he hears the
stories of Danny's Dragons? He says, hey, Sam, go get more
sailor stories. So sorry, Armin, you're
outranked on this one. There's some merit there.
Even Eamon thinks there's something to do here.
So yeah, if all the stories have similar details, you can you can
glean something from that. That's an exercise that comes up
several times throughout A Song of Ice and Fire, including in
this scene, the Feast for Crows prologue.
That's what Molinder sort of pins Armin down on.
EC ends up saying, yeah, but Armin disagrees that the stories
are similar and Molinder says yes, they are.
They all talk about a three headed dragon or Dragons, and
they all refer to the same place.
Maybe this story is fake, but there is a common element.
We know it's real too. So of course I'm more on
Molinder's side for that reason as well.
Something George is good at though is loading both sides of
a competing mystery with evidence.
He's he's good at making both sides of a mystery compelling.
If it's a 2 sided mystery, maybe there's 3 or 4 possibilities,
he's good at loading all those in there, or loading multiple
possibilities by by just being clever with the evidence, being
realistic with it. Armin and Mollander's argument.
Even though we can pretty easily take Mollander's side, it's a
very believable type debate, it seems like.
Yeah, that seems like the type of things people would be
talking about. And I use this quote early in
the episode because of what I said a little before it relating
to what a subject this would be in terms of, Yeah, of course,
people in and in right now, it doesn't matter that it's Old
Town, as long as they have this news, as long as the word of
Dragons has gotten to them, that's what they're going to
talk about, Right. So it's just such big news.
It's a big deal. There's Dragons.
What Dragons are back? Like who wouldn't talk about
that? It's all the biggest gossip
item. It would be #1 Google News
trending or, or what have you, if they had such a thing.
So imagine when the Dragons were dying out.
It would be a similarly constantly discussed thing, like
who did it? Why are they dying?
Did anyone do it? Is there is this really the last
dragon in the world? It's very, very similar
conversations but with a very different outlook because one is
are the Dragons back? 1 is what does that mean?
One is, are the Dragons gone? What does that mean?
Right. So honestly with the competing
evidence here with adult Dragons and the idea that it's hard to
pinpoint why anyone would think magic would end because of a
loss of Dragons, like where did that idea come from?
So I definitely in the beginning here, I lean towards the
maesters may have killed the Dragons off or someone did, but
I'm not so sure about the the reason that we're given.
We'll continue to build this case as we move forward, Nina
adds on. The case of Silverwing wasn't
young by the time of 153, more than a century old, but still
that would that's a lot younger than you know, Vergar lived
longer than that. Obviously Vergar was killed
violently, but Vergar was well over 100 when she died.
Valerian died. Well, I'm almost 200 years old
and had really gnarly wounds, right that were unhealed.
So I don't know. We don't have a lot of data on
Dragon Age lengths like Vergar and Valerian might have been a
little outstanding for all we know.
We just don't, we do not have a lot of Dragons that lived over
100 years to compare to Dragons that didn't.
So it's possible 100 years is actually about right.
But that's not really according to what we've heard.
We're more told that it it goes longer than that.
And it's also just hard to know, like when did Silverwing die?
Did someone never go collect those bones, those valuable
bones? Did people not find that
somewhere? Even in fire and blood?
Gildained admits that the reports of Sheep Steeler just
stop after 136. That's not the that's nowhere
near the same as evidence that she died around that day.
It's just there's no more reports, which is just could
easily be a factor of sheep's dealer was too deep in the Vale.
The northern Vale is not very populated.
It's still pretty much clan territory.
And then we hear not reports of sheep's dealer.
That means in common society the plans.
I bet they're still seeing Sheep's dealer.
Up until the time that she actually did pass, the cannibal
was. You can maybe fudge the cannibal
a little more because it's possible.
Cannibal was very old, so that one is the least likely to have
been killed by a human, but the most likely to be old.
Gandalf reports that the Cannibal just vanished after
war's end. Just we still know.
So that gives you 20 years of maybe they were wrong.
Maybe Cannibal was still alive of like runway.
Maybe Cannibal had gotten too old and was no longer able to
fly around a lot. And of course the dragon that
can't hunt is going to pass 20 years is enough time to account
for that. So you can squint and see how
some of these would fit. The problem is fitting all of
them right chief Steeler, cannibal and and silver wing
like plus morning light like something might be up.
So yeah, keeping in mind all that plus the uncertainty of the
maesters figures is important here.
To me, this could also suggest that if they were killing off
Dragons, they didn't have a goal of just kill every single last
one. Because if they weren't trying
to kill every last single one, that might imply that there was
some sort of hey, that will reduce magic in the world type
end state. But otherwise, if we're looking
at a different motive, like just kill as many of them as we can
because they're terrible and because they're Dragons, like,
isn't that motivation enough? Get rid of the Dragons because
Dragons are bad for people. Maybe that's the reason.
Maybe that's why they weren't trying for total extinction, not
just because it didn't produce a desired result, but because it
wasn't feasible. Lost dragon lore.
The Dance didn't just kill most of the Dragons, it destroyed
most of all of the dragon keepers.
Now here's where we have to remind ourselves that book and
show dragon keepers are a bit different.
They're not super different. They look a lot different.
That's partly for budget reasons.
In the books, they wear armor, they're a little more decked
out, they're a little more guardian than caretaker, but
they're both. And in the show, they're less
guardian, more more caretaker, but still both.
Either way, whichever version, they have a similar place in
this whole thing, which is yeah, they're dragon keepers.
They guard them from outside harm, they guard them from each
other. They make sure basic things
happen. I'm sure they were involved in
feeding and some basic rearing and things like that.
After all, it's the dragon keepers who were given the order
when one dragon is brought from one place to another, meaning a
dragon that doesn't have a rider.
We've seen an example of that in Fire and Blood.
So when the dragon pit was stormed during the Dance, the
dragon keepers sort of had a last stand.
There were 77 of them and 50 of them faced the mob.
And I don't know that any of those 50 survived and the
organization wasn't restored afterwards.
Aegon the Third maybe just didn't care.
I mean, he is the dragon Bane. He may not have been so
interested in restoring the order because of his feelings on
Dragons, which are a little more nuanced than we're told.
He didn't just hate Dragons, he was a little afraid of them.
Yes, but his reign was 26 years long and his thoughts on Dragons
were not consistent the entire way through.
So the guardian aspect is important of dragon keepers
because without them, well, someone's sneaking in and doing
violence to hatchlings or young Dragons is a lot more feasible.
Going to be harder to do when they're well guarded in a non
destroyed dragon pit. They don't even really have the
edifice to keep the Dragons in anymore after the dance.
So this could be related. Plus actual caretaking right?
What would happen to our society if just one day aliens came and
took away all the people that do childcare?
That's bad. These are a smaller group than
all the people in the world that do childcare, right?
It's only 77 people, but they represent probably 90% of the
knowledge of how to take care of Dragons day-to-day, right?
And they're just gone. It wasn't just that they
couldn't be replaced, that they weren't replaced.
Rather, they might not. It might not have been
impossible to replace them. The the training, the
techniques, the things they knew might have just been lost.
Might be it. I'm just gone.
Their techniques, their body of knowledge just wiped out on that
day at the dragon pit, I think is it.
You're looking at all those Dragons getting killed in the
collapse of the dragon pit. But a lot more than people and
Dragons were lost that day. I think a lot of knowledge was
lost too. It's hard to believe that
knowledge wasn't at least deeply affected, if not somewhat wiped
out. I think it's nearly certain,
yes, they were guardians, but one of the things they're
guardians of is they know how Dragons can be harmed.
Like that's part of security is knowing your weaknesses, right?
Like, well, if someone's going to sneak in to try to harm
Dragons, this is what they might do because we've seen it before.
And B, this is the things they might try because we've seen it
before. And C, this is the things that
if they do, we're actually in trouble because these are the
things that might actually work. And we know that because, see,
we've seen all this before. These aren't the kind of things
they're necessarily reporting to the kings and Princess.
This is day-to-day like management stuff.
This is administrative stuff. This is steward business, this
is not. I don't think the Targaryens in
Valyria knew this stuff either. This was mostly their
subordinates. Maybe the occasional Targaryen
took a distinct interest and got into the nitty gritty of how
these things worked, but I doubt it was common.
It's the same with like horses. Noble, the nobility own the best
horses, but only a few of them are actually like horse experts.
A few they know like fighting on horses.
They know they are, they're expert at fighting from
horseback. But as far as breeding and care
and all that stuff, the dude that runs the stables for them
knows more of that like by a mile, with a few exceptions.
And so that's the same comparison I'm drawing here.
The probably not many Targaryens that were super knowledgeable
about these kind of things. So when the dragon keepers were
gone, who's filling that in? The answer is no one.
And you go another 10 years, you go to Baylor, the blesseds time.
So whatever was written down, they still had.
Then it got burned, a lot of it. So as we're looking to the loss
of people and Dragons, we really need to be looking to the loss
of knowledge that made all this work in the 1st place.
That's a big part of this. And I think that is somehow
related to maybe why the Dragons were so weak.
Maybe they weren't poisoned, maybe they just had really bad
caretakers. On the other hand, that argument
can't go too far because Danny didn't have any knowledge.
All she needed to do would be like, oh, look, they like to
burn their meat. At first she was struggling like
they didn't. She didn't figure that out.
They once she figured out that they like their meats burned,
they started gulping down huge amounts of it.
She figured out that pretty quickly because the Dragons were
kind of like guiding, pushing her towards that, right?
They're like, yeah, we don't want to eat that.
As a mom, you're like, hell, I got to find something my kids
going to eat. You're going to be putting all
your attention on that. So maybe they were just this
laziness. Maybe they didn't know that the
Dragons wanted their meat burned, but the Dragons would do
it themselves. This is a dragon that hatched,
that laid eggs, laid five eggs. How are you going to think this
dragon didn't get some nutrition?
It's not complicated giving a dragon a goat and letting it do
its thing, right? If you don't burn it first,
it'll burn it first. So I don't know that we can take
this argument too far, but I do think it matters.
I think it's included, but I don't think it can be
everything. So let's move on.
One thing that matters here is who the king was.
If we had a different king, we might have had somebody that was
more interested in restoring the dragon keepers, making sure that
the remaining Dragons were well taken care of, just dealing with
the problem in general. But we had perhaps the least pro
dragon king of all time in charge during the time where the
Dragons died out. So this next part, the magic or
the Egg George when riding the hedge night of all things,
included some lore that's relevant to us here.
Quote. Why would they name it a
dragonfly? He wondered.
It looks nothing like a dragon, not that Dunk had ever seen a
dragon. The old man had though.
Dunk had heard the story half 100 times, how Sir Arlen had
been just a little boy when his grandfather had taken him to
King's Landing, and how they'd seen the last dragon there the
year before it died. She'd been a green female, small
and stunted, her wings withered. None of her eggs had ever
hatched. Some say King Aegon poisoned
her. The old man would tell.
The third Aegon that would be not King Garon's father, but the
one they named Dragon Bane, or Aegon the Unlucky.
He was afraid of Dragons, for he'd seen his uncle's beast
devour his own mother. The summers have been shorter
since the last dragon died, and the winter's longer and crueler.
Sir Arlen kind of sounds like he could be a radio presenter in a
nice way. Complimentary.
So he said he saw it the year before he died, which means the
year 152, which would be 57 years before the hedge night.
So very young he was at the time, he was very sad that Nina
writes the circumstances here. The the Red Keep or King's
landings. I like they have some sort of
menagerie, right? Like a lot of the Dragons aren't
just on display all the time. So I'm, I'm not really sure what
the circumstances are here, but it might relate to Egon the
third not really wanting to be around them.
So maybe they spent more time outside aware they couldn't get
at people. I I'm not really clear on it,
but it's unusual but not inexplicable that someone of Sir
Arlen Station, well, he wouldn't even been a Sir then of course
could see a dragon while visiting King's Landing.
That's not something you can just go do right?
There may have been an event though, a a public celebration.
It could have been King Aegon, the future King Aegon, Prince
Aegon, future King Aegon the 4th betrothal to his sister who
would be married the next year. This is actually a big deal
because there hadn't been a brother sister union since
before the Dance at this point. So this is in the one 30s and
there hadn't been a brother sister union since Aegon
marrying Helena, Aegon the second.
So that could be when they roll this dragon out for the
marriage. Be like, hey, look, everybody,
you know doctrine of exceptionalism, right?
The only reason Targaryen incest is accepted in Westeros is part
of the doctrine of exceptionalism.
So they might be kind of, you know, reminding everybody of
those that connective connective tissue.
Like the reason the Targaryens can do this is because they have
Dragons. See, like this one, even though
it's weak and dying, it is a dragon.
Another suggestion by Nina here is that, well, there were
several false Darrons after Daron the Daring was killed in
the Dance, with the circumstances not being quite
clear, his body not found, several Prince Darrons popped up
after the fact to claim they were him.
Now those false Darrons probably didn't have Dragons.
If the Dragons hadn't died out, this false Darren wouldn't have
even appeared because it would be a a non starting point.
It wouldn't be a start. You can't have this dragon
Prince who doesn't have a dragon in the era when all the dragon
Princess have Dragons. So that wouldn't fly literally
and he wouldn't get anywhere militaristically either because
of that whole lack of dragon thing.
Now false Darrons can appear in a dragonless or near dragonless
society because, well, there you go, you don't have to have that.
That form of proof is removed like, well, how can you prove
you're Targaryen? You have no dragon.
Well, no one can prove that they're a Targaryen via that
method anymore. So that's one of the things that
it isn't just the strength of Dragons, it's gone.
That encourages people to say, hey, maybe we can take down the
Targaryens because they don't have that ultra unbeatable
weapon anymore. It's also just the identity of
Targaryens. It creates more claimants out in
the world because it's easier to fake being a Targaryen.
The era of fake Targaryens didn't really happen when the
Dragons were around. It happened after the fagons,
the young griffs or whatever, and the false Derrons and all
these others. They didn't.
And there were no fake, you know, Visenyas or fake Megors
and fake dragon Princess. There were, to be clear, there
were people who claimed to have dragon blood and they were outed
or not when the time of dragon seeds was upon us.
So, yeah, there was a way to prove or not prove the truth of
those words in that way. That proof died out, went
extinct for the most part. Did people realize this was this
public knowledge? When people saw this dragon
Arlen in his case, did they know what they were seeing at the
time? Did they know that this was this
is probably going to be the last dragon?
Did they know that they were looking at what would be the
last dragon they ever saw at the time?
Did that is were they told that? Were they informed that?
Like, I don't think they rolled it out because it was the last
dragon. Like, hey, everybody take a look
at the last dying dragon. I kind of don't think those were
the circumstances because that that's like projecting weakness.
Why would the throne do that? Even with Egg on the third being
not such a fan of Dragons, I don't think he's going to
trumpet their weakness either. Like, hey, we don't have Dragons
anymore. Come get us so the false dragon,
the false Darrons is a possibility like a a a parade to
celebrate victory where they show their real dragon to be
like see this is where's the side with real Dragons, even
though they're not very formidable, we still have them
that's still meaningful. It's still connection.
A tournament maybe is possible as well, like having a dragon
hang out just nearby, just again to remind people that they yes,
they still do exist because there might be rumors that
there's nothing. And maybe if they don't show a
dragon, then those rumors only get fueled.
Unfortunately, showing the dragon they did show just fueled
rumors probably of my Dragon's not very healthy.
Is it green and weak and the wings are withered and small.
And this doesn't look good. You know, like you go to, I mean
it, it reminds me kind of of what we hear about people going
to see King Robert. You know, there's a couple
examples of this. Someone goes to see King Robert
and they're like, oh, that man. He doesn't look like this
powerful, unstoppable. Warhammer charisma guy.
He looks overweight and and red faced and kind of sad and tired,
right. And the same thing happens when
John sees Jaime Lannister compared to Robert, he's like,
well, that looks like a king. You know, even though I don't,
even though he's not a good person, that's kind of what I
think a king should look like. So I feel like you go to West,
you go to the Red keeper, you go to King's Landing and you're
expecting to see a dragon and you see that and you're like,
we're supposed to be afraid of that.
I mean, that thing, like you said, it's the size of a big
dog. Like a big dog is dangerous, but
it's not like all fearsome like, Oh my God, this is going to burn
our whole village type fearsome. In fact, it, it probably looked
easier to kill than a big horse, than a big angry horse.
So it's kind of you're damned if you do, if you're damned if you
don't with these Targaryens, if you don't show them the Dragons
are still there, then people assume you don't have Dragons.
If you do show them the Dragons, you have people see that your
Dragons are weak and you can't even ride them or fly them.
And yeah, So it, it must have been very strange.
It's like the kind of thing that everyone talked about but no one
talked about to the Targaryens like the Small Council.
Are they bringing that up? Are you the guy on Master of
Laws? Say so.
Everybody on the agenda for today.
Let's discuss this, this blooming extinction of Dragons,
shall we? You know who brings that up?
You know, like, you're at the board meeting and you're the guy
that's going to bring up who wants to be the first guy at the
corporate meeting that brings up how terribly the company is
doing. You know, like, yeah, we should
probably all be thinking about quitting.
And in this case, it might be like, yeah, So folks, have we
considered that the lack of Dragons is going to probably
lead to civil war? You know, we should think very
distinctly and thoroughly about who's going to benefit from this
the most, who's going to come attacking us like those are very
uncomfortable subjects. And this again, we got King egg
on the third here. A man who just was that wasn't
just a didn't just dislike Dragons.
He didn't really like life. He was just a sad person.
He was traumatized for very obviously for very
understandable reasons. He didn't really like governing
all that much. He liked the commoners.
He thought that they should have rights and, you know, be taken
care of, at least at a basic level.
In a lot of ways, egg on the third had a lot in common with
egg on the 5th and some unfortunate similarities to come
later. Too small and stunted, right?
The drats. That's the basic description of
this dragon. It just sounds kind of pathetic,
which if that's the symbol of your house, you've presented the
world with a pathetic symbol. That's like, you know what?
We're not going to go with Dragons anymore.
We want to go with little tiny plush Dragons.
That's our new sigil. Or you want to change your sigil
to, I don't know, a cricket or a an apple?
An apple, Yeah, We'd all be a deal saver if they thought
themselves apples. Yeah.
Like, it's just, it's not intimidating anymore, is it?
You're like, look at that sigil. And then they think of the
dragon. The only dragon they've ever
actually seen in real life is a stunted small thing.
And then how are they supposed to compare that to the three
headed sigil of power? And it doesn't evoke what
Valerian evoked. I mean, that's night and day,
right? People were scared to hell of
that dragon. They tested it.
They're like, we're going to fight this dragon just to see.
And they came up, as you would expect, losing badly without
even hurting the thing here. They'd be like, if we went up
against this dragon, it would barely get in the way.
Like I could stomp on it and I could kick it and it would be
out of my way. Like that's all we'd have to do
to it. It really is not a problem.
I mean, I I really cannot emphasize how different this is
in terms of, oh, my God, that's the biggest thing I've ever
seen. It could eat 20 people in three
seconds versus that thing looks like it would struggle to finish
a chicken leg. You know, like it it might not
be able to defeat a living chicken.
Yeah. So notice as well that in that
quote, some say King Aegon poisoned her.
That would have been the talk of the time.
That's the talk of that era during Arlen's time.
Notice that no one is saying the maesters did it.
At least we're not given a quote from that era that says the
maesters did it. The theory about the maesters
came from two places. One, as I said within our own
fandom, came up with that just clever and creative to Marwin in
A Feast for Crows. It's not some widespread
conspiracy theory that pops up in a lot of different places.
I'm pretty sure it doesn't pop up anywhere else in the world.
There's definitely a lot of them who weigh in, a lot of other
takes we're going to be getting to throughout the episode, but
got to keep that in mind. This idea really only has the
one source in world at this point, so there were probably
other other culprits in mind at the time.
People didn't start with the maesters, or at least people
like Arlen didn't. Arlen didn't tell Dunk 60 years
later either that it was the maesters.
Dunk is still under the impression of what Sir Arlen
told him, which was a lot of people think the King did it
right. That's got nothing at all to do
with the maesters. Are you sure?
Maybe the king ordered the maesters to do it.
I mean, you could see a little bit of connective, you can
imagine a little and have some overlap there.
But that's not what we're presented with.
But let's not just let's, let's examine the rest of the quote
here too, because there's some other ideas.
But I do want to know when the Maester conspiracy began in
world. Like who came up with that?
I don't think that Marwin started it.
I think he probably got the idea elsewhere, although it is
possible it came from him. More on him later.
Of course. Now later in his reign, Aegon
did try to hatch eggs. We'll come to that.
But it should be remembered that yes, he that argues very
strongly against Tim being the culprit for poisoning them if he
tried to bring them back later doesn't omit it entirely because
again, 20 some years he could change his mind be like, that
was a mistake. I shouldn't have done that.
I, I do want Dragons because, well, they give me more
authority. The same reason Aegon the 5th
reached that same conclusion. He's like, well, I'm a pro pro
small folk guy and I can't get these Lords to do anything they
wouldn't back. They wouldn't buck my authority
if I had a dragon though. Now the last sentence there from
Sir from Sir Arlen is peculiar and when we definitely need to
take a look at he says that the let me get an exact wording
here. The summers have been shorter
since the last dragon died and the winters longer and crueler.
Well, that's not actually true in part, not in the long run.
We can't discount it. Sir Ellen lived 60 years, so he
saw a lot of winters and summers and he slept outside a lot, so
he'd be more keen on the weather than most.
He didn't have a, you know, pavilion, right, No tents,
things like that. But we have a lot of data on
winters and summers in more recent times and there it's
pretty much a pendulum. If it's a seven-year winter,
you're going to have a seven-year summer, you're going
to have a seven-year winter, one year winter, one year summer.
It doesn't seem to fluctuate too much, so he might be wrong about
the shorter shorter shortening of summers, but I do think he
might be right about the length of seasons.
We have fire and blood, so a lot of those early decades are well
covered, but the first noted really long winter was the one
that started during the Dance of the Dragons itself, which
confounds things a bit. We have dragon dying out during
the same time that we have the longest winter at the time, and
it's only been beaten by winters that have come after it.
And the 100 years later, there was another six year winter that
went through the end of Makar's reign into the beginning of
Aegon's. And then there's the ten year
summer that A Song of Ice and Fire is ending on the beginning
of A Song of Ice and Fire that is ends with that 10 year
summers going away as well. And presumably A10 year winter
or something, the magical winter.
This one could be different because it's the winter, but you
see what I'm saying? Like we look back on what we,
the data we have for like Aegon's range, Harris's reign,
you maybe find a three-year winter, but most of them are
normal length, one year or maybe 2.
The really long ones, all the ones on record for being like
5-6 years or more. And there's not that many, but
there's four or five of them are all Dance or later.
So maybe it's related. Again, doesn't mean it's the
death of the Dragons that created it, but there could be
some sort of connecting tissue or connective tissue between
these concepts or these results. So that's pretty noteworthy.
It's probably a topic worthy of greater expansion.
It's too, but it's also too relevant to just simplify here
entirely. We have to get into at least to
some level, do Dragons increase the level of magic in the world?
And how did the season lengths reflect that?
How do they, how did that push or pull against the data we have
elsewhere? Did the Dragons come back in
part because the magic in the world was sufficient to open
that window for them to climb through again?
Or was it, you know, the other way around, Chicken and the egg.
Now I I say enhanced rather than brain because there's no chance
that all the Dragons being gone kills all the magic or vice
versa, because there's just too much magic in the world between
the period where there were none in Westeros, right?
We've got Bloodraven doing glamours.
We've got Melisandre doing glamours.
We've got, technically speaking, Miriam Hezdur did that ritual
right before the Dragons were born.
I mean, like a chapter or two, right?
So that that was pretty serious magic, even though it didn't
really amount to that much necessarily.
Drogo being slightly alive still.
But it was definitively magic and supernatural and creepy as
heck. It definitely happened before
the Dragons came back. The comet was there.
They hadn't seen it yet because they didn't have like a
telescope necessarily. But you know, Lewin did and he
saw it. So here's a few.
We had a few other takes from variety of sources on what they
think and it's curious when we put them all together.
A prominent example from A Clash of Kings.
Tyrion speaking to the pyromancer.
Helene quote. The Alchemist shifted
uncomfortably. Certain spells, Ancient secrets
of our order. Very delicate, very troublesome,
but necessary if the substance is to be all it should be.
Tyrion was growing impatient. Sir Jaclyn Bywater was likely
here by now, and Iron Hand misliked, waiting.
Yes, you have secret spells. How splendid.
What of them? They seem to be working better
than they were. Helene smiled weakly.
You don't suppose there are any Dragons about do.
You not, unless you found one under the dragon pit.
Why? Oh, pardon.
I was just remembering something old Wisdom Politor told me once
when I was an acolyte. I'd asked him why so many of our
spells seemed, well, not as effectual as the scrolls would
have us believe, and he said it was because magic had begun to
go out of the world the day the last dragon died.
So Sir Arlen was actually there for at least the seasons and can
experience those, but he's not really a guy deep in magic, so
he can't really comment on that, nor would would he.
And here's the problem with listening to these guys.
Well, Wisdom Politord wasn't alive when the Dragons died out
either. He doesn't know, and he might be
speaking sort of poetically because the Dragons died.
Most of them died when Valyria died, and magic died with
Valyria, not literally, but in a very symbolic sense, or in a
very metaphorical sense because they had so much magic and then
it's just all gone. Whether or not the Dragons are
directly connected to that or not, they all for the most part
died too, minus the Targaryen Dragons and maybe a few others.
Certainly a massive percentage of all the living Dragons in the
world were snuffed out there, so maybe there's a connective
there. It's like, well, the Dragons
died at the same time as all those other things, so we don't
know really what the effect was, but all that happened at once,
so it's just a way to say it. So maybe Wisdom Halene is taking
it a little too literally. Either way, there's problems
with it because of what we said, however.
There's every reason to include his belief and his
considerations. However, however, again, who is
Helene talking to? POV dragon expert Tyrion, the
guy of all our PO VS who knows the most about Dragons.
And this is complete news to him.
He doesn't even have a comment or reaction to the idea that
Dragons being back would increase the magic of the
spells. He's more focused on whether
Helene is BS ING him the the concept is foreign to him.
Right? If he was like Oh well actually
yes, Dragons in the world would increase the spells.
Well, I don't think there's any Dragons in the world, but at
least I've heard the that before.
Like maybe Tyrion would be familiar with that concept, but
there's he isn't bat an eye. He doesn't react at all.
He just says, yeah, OK, well, whatever, go do your do your
job. You know, like I don't, I've got
no answers for you. So he kind of just shrugs it
off. He's more interested in making
sure a subordinate isn't isn't, you know, lying to him.
He's want to make sure that these these wildfire fruits
actually have wildfire in them. So that's pretty peculiar,
right? Tyrion does not notice this at
all. There's nothing he says.
Our own dragon expert doesn't react to the notion that Dragons
in the world would bring more like magic or fire magic or
whatever. I kind of was guessing that his
lack of reaction means he'd he had read this and had always
dismissed it as BS. OK either way, so.
He's saying something that's not new to him, but that he's long
since just dismissed as like, no, Dragons certainly don't do
that. OK, Yeah, yeah, that's a good
way to interpret it. Either way, it kind of first
blips. This is the same point, which is
that yeah, maybe Politor believes it, but that doesn't
mean that it's well supported and and Tyrion may be against it
as well. Now Helene, keeping with the
Lannisters here. Helene goes and asks.
Cersei says, hey, when you take Dragonstone from Stannis, if you
get any dragon eggs from there, let us have them.
The pyromancers. What the dragon eggs?
Oh boy. Cersei dodges the issue saying
well surely if Stannis had any dragon eggs, he sold them to pay
for his war. And her mind, she's thinking
Summerhall. So even Cersei knows it's a
terrible idea to give the wildfire guys dragon eggs.
Even Cersei, the one who is perhaps the most in common with
Aries, The Who loved the pyromancers.
That's one thing they don't have in common.
Aries and Cersei is Aries is Cersei doesn't love the
pyromancer. She's like, yeah, you can burn
the Tower of the Hand down, but I don't really like you guys
that much otherwise. So of course, maybe this doesn't
need saying, but no one in the world has the answer we're
seeking. No one actually knows if the the
Dragons bring magic or if the magic bring Dragons or whatever,
or if there is someone who knows it.
We don't know that they know it. And how could they know it,
right? It doesn't seem something that a
character could know. It seems unknowable.
So what's fascinating to us is how well, this is a very good
example of how George RR Martin makes very believable in world
mysteries. Lots of different people have
lots of different takes on what this is.
And let's that's true for a lot of things in this world that we
don't have definitive answers on.
And even some that we do because that definitive answer isn't
widespread or the proof of it isn't trusted or also not
widespread. And that's a great foundation
for theorizing, right? We, we, what we do is make sure
you have the right details, even if they aren't certain and build
from there rather than, you know what a lot of real world
conspiracies are. Well, you just kind of start
from nowhere. You kind of start with vibes and
just go from there. Now we want to have we need
something even for conspiracy. Even conspiracy theories should
have some sort of basis. So there's a a great parallel
question here with the others, right?
Do they emerge in great darkness and cold or do they bring it
with them? Now in terms of when they
emerge, like first emerge, like return to the world, that's
harder to say. That might be different than
just, hey, it's cold tonight, let's go.
We're already in the world again, but it's undeniable that
they bring cold with them. That part we've seen.
We've seen Sam and the others like, whoa, it's so cold all of
a sudden. Oh my God, there's another.
They know why. Like Will experiences this in
the prologue. That was one of the first
concepts were introduced. They absolutely bring the cold
with them. Now maybe they can't emerge
unless it's sufficiently A sufficient baseline of cold, but
it gets colder wherever they are.
When Dragons are fire made flesh, they feel warm, if not
hot to the touch, so that that that concept is paralleled, or
if not reverse paralleled here, the Others bring cold with them.
I guess the Dragons bring fire with them.
So maybe that's where we should be at with this.
Maybe we should narrow it down because it's kind of hard to
think Dragons returning to the world.
Well, that's why the Others are back.
What? The Dragons brought back the
Others on their own. That's just kind of weird, isn't
it? Are we supposed to think that
that the Dragons are responsible for ice magic?
I don't know about that. Maybe the death of the Dragons
had an impact on that type of magic, Fire magic, right?
And maybe the lack of Dragons reduces the use or potency of
fire magic. We've seen some examples of
that, like the Quaithe points out the guy doing the fire
ladder, he's doing it better now, you know, And she points to
Dragons as a reason for that. And Quaid seems pretty
knowledgeable, at least she has that gravitas behind her.
But she might be making that correlation causation error that
is common enough in the real world.
Just because you see something that happens at the same time or
something that happened just before doesn't mean it's the
reason, right? Dragons came and so did magic.
That doesn't mean the Dragons brought magic.
It might, but it doesn't. Neither the word correlate nor
causation appears in a song. I said fire.
There's people that know how to use logic, but it's not quite as
widespread in our world. And, you know, I know the bar is
low, but it's still true. And this thing about fire magic,
I don't think we can really. I don't think that idea flies.
I brought it up to sync it, frankly, because check this out.
Thoros resurrected somebody before the Dragons were born.
He didn't know. He wasn't even trying to do it,
and it happened. He accidentally resurrected
somebody before the Dragons were born.
So yeah, that doesn't sound like the Dragons brought that because
they weren't there yet. So it does seem to sound like
the Dragons were part of what came back, not the reason it
came back. Which all that said, if someone
in world believes killing the Dragons will end magic, they'll
act on that whether it's true or not.
We have to remember that what they believe is what they act
on, not necessarily what's true. So we can maybe establish all
this evidence and say hey, it doesn't look like the death of
Dragons ends magic. It may not be connected at all.
The reverse connection looks like it's more likely, but
people in the world don't necessarily reach that
conclusion. They're going to act on their
conclusion or their vibes if if it's not if calling it a
conclusion is too much. So Danny had these instincts.
Like Nina points out that she to try to hatch the eggs.
There was something in her that made her do that that that
definitely gets more into supernatural like her bloodline.
She had voices in her head telling her to do it like
they're calling her mother of Dragons in her fever dreams.
So yeah, there's a little something going on there.
I don't think egg on the third had the voices of his ancestors
parading through his mind and a fever dream saying kill the
Dragons. Yeah, choke them all out, drown
them, drown those things. Like the thing to me that might
be the best clue for when magic came back to the world or
surged. Like if you look at it like a
stock ticker, like it was down here, then all of a sudden it
shot up to here. To me, it would be like the
glass candles. They didn't work, then they did.
That's the most like, that's like the closest thing to an on
off switch I can think of out of all the examples we have here.
Because, like, Dragons coming back in the world.
Well, yeah, but when was the exact moment that happened?
Only we know that because we saw Danny do it.
But we don't know that that's actually the trigger.
That might have been part of the trigger.
This is, hey, magic came back. We know that because Thoros
resurrected somebody. The others were in the prologue.
Melisandre's been using glamours.
Blood Raven used glamours 100 years before the Dragons were
born. There's plenty of other examples
of magic prior to the Dragons coming back.
But none of those things are super distinct, like the glass
candles coming on and off again. Like that to me is like, oh, the
moment those glass candles came on, maybe they all switched on
worldwide at the same exact moment.
To me, that would be, you can't get more definitive than that.
However, because that's so definitive, I doubt we'll get
it. And who would be able to
coordinate that? It's like, yeah, well, it's 522
in the morning. Our glass candle came back on
5/22. That's when ours came back on.
Yeah. I don't know that anyone wrote
that down. If they did whoo that note
comparing session would blow some minds court in half and
another example of approaching this for another example from
another angle, someone who's completely detached from
anything dragon related right. He he said the trees have eyes
again. He said is he is that because of
Dragons? Are we supposed to believe the
weirwoods have eyes again? The heart trees are the children
are looking through the heart trees again because the Dragons
were born. Maybe they came back for the
same reason. Maybe the same magical on off
switch was flipped or maybe some magical floodgate was opened and
all this stuff poured back into the old Dragons were one of
them, you know, and maybe the others coming back was the
trigger. You know, it's like, hey,
Dragons need to be back because the others are back.
You know, we need to fight them. One big on switch turning it all
on is a metaphor I prefer to the Dragons being the on switch.
I don't know what this on Switch is, but I don't think it's the
Dragons. But here's another one.
Here we go. There's a yet another take.
I briefly touched on this one earlier, but it's Danny.
Probably what she learned from her brother, which you maybe
take that from a grain with a grain of salt, but Visceras
probably learned that from his their greater family which might
have some relevance. Either way, here it is quote.
Magic had died in the West when the Doom fell on Valyria and the
lands of the Long Summer, and neither spell forged steel nor
storm singers nor Dragons could hold it back.
But Danny had always heard that the East was different.
There's not even really a mention of Dragons is neither
spell forged steel nor storm singers nor Dragons could hold
it back when the doom fell on Valyria, right?
Yeah, of course nothing could hold back the doom.
The spells had held it back for a while but they they gave out I
suppose. So she's not saying the end of
Dragons had anything. She's connecting it to the Doom.
She's not connecting it to Dragons.
Which yes, the Doom killed a whole lot of Dragons, but still
that's a a different source she's pointing to for the fall
of magic. I I am curious where she learned
that from. Obviously besides she learned it
from Viserys, but did Viserys learn it from their father Aries
the Mad King or did? Or from Rhaegar, the guy who was
really actually into that stuff? He was reading books and and
digging into these old prophecies.
So I I kind of think Rhaegar. But on the other hand, Viserys
was just so young. Like his rate, how many
conversations did Rhaegar and Viserys have?
So I'm not really sure that's that's a tricky one because
Viserys was so young when so much of this happened.
All we know for sure is that Danny was even younger and she
never even met Rhaegar. So definitely not that.
Now King Airy's the 1st around that time just after Ashford
Meadow and before make ours reign.
So this is this is the era of 209 to 2:21.
That's when Erius the First was king.
He discovered a prophecy that the Dragons would return.
The prophecy was surely far older than the Dance of the
Dragons. I doubt it was some 100 year old
prophet or 50 year old prophecy. This is something super old,
same as Rhaegar right? That would help explain why it
had been ignored and lost in the 1st place.
What's the relevance of a prophecy to say I don't know
Aegon the Conqueror of the Senya that says the Dragons will
return? Like well what do you mean
return? They're here now so they can
they can safely ignore a prophecy that says the Dragons
will return because they're not gone, right?
The the idea of a prophecy that the Dragons return would only be
of interest to people who are living in a dragonless society
or a society that's becoming dragonless.
And maybe someone could find that prophecy potentially before
the Dragons have died, not long before they've died, and say,
hmm, I see the Dragons are dying out now and this says they'll
return. So that's interesting.
I don't know where you'd go with that from there, but I do think
people would largely ignore a prophecy about Dragons returning
in an era where they're all over the place.
So that means sometime after 131 but before two O 9.
And what was that source I got? I wish I knew.
Wish we knew which book it was. Right?
And maybe if I expand this concept, maybe it does fit.
Maybe we're looking at something like the prophecy that said the
Dragons would return also included a passage about them
dying out. So it says, yes, they're going
to die out, but they'll also come back.
That would be of more interest to someone living in a dragon
knee society. Be like, oh, they're going to
die out and return. Just they'll return one day is
confusing. You know, you might start to
think more metaphorically, like, well, like, does that mean
Valyria? Like, what do they?
You know, that just doesn't really register in the same way
when Valerian is walking around, flopping around, whatever he's
doing. It's possible that humankind
noticed, maybe there was an actual drop off in magic after
the doom and they made that association kind of like Danny
did. Like, Oh yeah, magic died in the
West with Valyria. Not like the powers became
untouchable if they cease to exist in this world.
It's that the knowledge, the people that had all like the
same thing with the dragon keepers, but on a much larger
scale. All the people that were
permitted to practice magic, all the people that had the ability
to, the people that had the resources to.
Because I'm sure a lot of this magic cost huge amounts of
money. That's part of why Prince's
Sorcerer Princess were a thing. You don't have a lot of hedge
Wizards don't have the resources for some of these things.
Like you need rubies and slaves and awful things to make these
grand sacrifices and these rituals and all that.
Yeah, like you got to have wealth, or at least the form of
magic that the Valerians engaged with was a kind that was for the
wealthy. There's maybe other types also,
but they're they certainly were the big spenders.
And So what and whatever records were in the Freehold, obviously
that's all gone. And whatever was brought to
Westeros and managed to survive may have been burned by Baylor,
as I hinted at before. But still, there could be an
observational angle here. You got the end of the doom.
You got 100 years of people looking at things and going,
yeah, they're certain spells don't work as well as they used
to. People that actually practice
magic who weren't Valyrian, there's definitely some of them
Pyromancers, right? Even though we aren't 100% with
Wisdom Politor and Wisdom Wisdom Haleen, they're definitely doing
things. They're definitely using some
form of magic, even if it's something that they've puffed up
to make them seems more important.
I believe Haleen when he says their methods are working better
and he, the fact that he doesn't know why it must be magic, I
believe that too. And he's he believes it's
Dragons. That's where I'm not so sure.
But it's happening even if he is unable to identify the source.
Yeah. And we, we've often used the
metaphor that it's like maybe it's a pendulum or like a wave.
Magic comes in and then it comes out and it's stronger in certain
cycles. It's like winter is stronger
when we're farther from the sun, right?
When the closer to the sun we are, the warmer it is.
It's it's not hard to understand conceptually, solar panels work
better when we're closer to the sun, when there's more sunlight
to absorb. Imagine solar panels as magical
absorbers, like they the more magic there for them to absorb
from whatever is projecting it, the more they can fire back out
into the world. It's not that hard to
conceptualize I think. And maybe the Dragons dying out
had nothing to do with those ebbs and flows.
They just aligned with it kind of on their own, and it made
harder for the dragon population to recover because it was in an
ebb state. The magical forces were in an
ebb state, then they were at a nadir.
Dragons are magical creatures, there's no doubt about that.
So you could see that if like a creature of warmth being born in
winter, they would struggle to be healthy or even survive at
all. I'm using that term winter kind
of metaphorically here, but in this case you get what I'm
saying. Like the Dragons are born in a
time when magic is weak, then they're weak.
You don't have to imagine maesters or other people are
doing anything. But again, we are not the type
of people to say, oh, we found a reason, that's it.
No, no, no, no. There could be multiple reasons.
There could be multiple things at play here.
So we continue. By the way, if Dragons
themselves aren't engineered magical species, where did the
magic come from? If if it wasn't coming from
them? So there's yet another reason
that there had to be magic before Dragons.
They couldn't have started with them.
And maybe Valyrians pushed the idea.
Maybe the reason so many people think Dragons and magic have
this connection like that is because they people were told
that the people who are experts in magic pushed that idea for a
long time, maybe even because it was true.
I'm not. I don't know why Valyria would
lie about that. I mean, there's plenty of
reasons they would lie about lots of things, but there's no
obvious motive for this one. Bring bring that red comet back.
And I mean literally bring it back.
Think about it for a minute. Did it herald magic or did it
herald Dragons or did it herald both?
Did it bring those forces with it?
There's a book called The Tugging, our short story called
The Tugging by Ramsay Campbell, an author from back in the day
writing in the Cthulhu world, but he's not HP Lovecraft.
But like a lot of authors, he wrote stories in it.
And I might have mentioned this before, I'm pretty sure I have,
but this is a good time to bring it up again.
The Tugging is a story about a wandering planet, a Red Planet.
So it's kind of like the Red Star bleeding that when it it's
actually a giant eye, it's really creepy.
And when it's close, it does that.
It is a magical activator. When this wandering planet gets
near to another planet, it sort of activates the supernatural
aspects of on that planet. It turns things on.
Basically it's it is, it is like sending out signals saying hey,
you turn on, you turn on, you turn on.
And basically it's activating magic on that planet where it
was either very weak or not existent.
That's a model that I think works here.
The red comet does work as a herald for those things.
The red comet was seen even by Maester Lewin.
If we can believe Brand's vision, Maester Lewin saw the
red comet even before the prologue.
So there, yeah, there's been other red comets, There's been
other comets, but those could just be ordinary comets.
This could be the special comet. This could be the one that
heralds the either literal just heralds it, it's the symbol of
it, or it could be the actual reason the comet could be
emanating all this. And given this story by Ramsey
Campbell, we know the the concept exists out there in
fantasy. I know George has read that
George likes Ramsey Campbell and the a lot of these prophecies
from Azora High or from the Reloris or what have you says
when the Red Star bleeds, they are referring to the Red Star.
They know it's part of it. They may not realize when
writing the prophecy that it is the cause.
The Red Star is the 'cause it isn't just a symbol.
It isn't just a, hey, the signal of what's coming.
No, this is the reason. The red comet itself is the
symbol and the cause. So, yeah, when you really add up
all the things that happened before the Dragons return in
Book 1, it's a lot, some major ones.
The resurrection of Barrack Merry, Masdor's ritual, all the
things Melisandre did, you know, long before, even before she
came to Westeros. And of course, the return of the
others themselves. Yeah, there's just so many
things that have nothing to do with the Dragons coming back
because the Dragons hadn't come back yet.
So it's really, it gets increasingly hard to say the
Dragons are the cause. So I really lean against that.
I really lean against the dragon being the 'cause I, I, I think
they're a symptom of the return. They're part of it rather than
the cause. And but I can and I can
understand why people see it this way.
They're such a loud, prominent thing.
No one else saw the Others. No one else saw the comet until
it was past the time of the Dragons being born.
The comets was overhead for everyone to see at the beginning
of A Clash of Kings. It's the first thing you see in
Crescent's prologue now, but it was there before, and this no
one saw it. Dragons being back is something
that everyone's talking about. It's on every sailor's lips.
It's not on every sailor's lips that the Others are at the wall
or that the dead walk again. People aren't talking about
that. Maybe they would if it was more
widespread and or believable. But The thing is, people have
seen these Dragons, like a lot of people have seen Danny's
Dragons. It isn't just a few people.
Only a few people have seen these others.
And most of them got killed. And the few that survived, even
some of those don't believe it. Right.
Even like Cotter Pike was questioning whether Sam really
killed. Let them kill.
Let them saw another. Yeah.
So even though even Nights Watch are doubting that the Others
have been seen, so like that is a big part of it.
The Dragons are so prominent and talked about that promotes them
to cause rather than symptom in. In fact, Nina suggests it's
possible that the Others had there's more intelligence behind
the Others returning who'd seem to have intelligence, whereas
the Dragons don't. They come back to the world
because they know the Dragons were coming.
So to them, like imagine the others have their own prophecies
or ways of seeing the future and they're like, oh, Dragons are
coming. That's our big enemy.
So we're coming back first or we're coming back because of
them. So maybe don't, if we don't
center humans in this, if we center it around the others, it
it, it might look a little different or a lot different.
So that's a compelling idea that the others themselves are the
ones taking action because of what they see coming in this
world. The and it may relate directly
to Dragons, if not other things. So here's a huge question that I
have for us all. Where did this idea come from
the first place? I touched on it in the intro.
Dragons have been around thousands of years.
Where did the idea even come from that ending Dragons would
end magic? No one's lived under that state
of affairs in like 5000 or plus years if ever.
So who? Who came up with that?
Where did it come from? Was it propaganda?
Did someone just like get people to believe that?
And it took who though? Why after the fact?
If you're looking at all the dead Dragons and seeing the drop
off in magic, or at least drop off invisible magic, you might
make that correlation. You might think it's the cause,
but without, without that precedent of seeing the Dragons
dying and going, hey, look, there's less magic in the world.
Where did it come from? Right?
Maybe it's the idea that hey, there's inherent magic in these
Dragons. So if we get rid of magical
things, then the world is less governed by magical things.
That might be more of their idea rather than, hey, we can end
magic. It just people didn't
understand. That's what's what they heard.
They hear, oh, you're going to end magic by ending Dragons.
And that's just what stuck. But in reality it was no, we
just want to get rid of magic things and the Dragons are one
of them. That's right.
The Citadel isn't exactly pro magic in other ways either, are
they? It's not like it's not just the
dragon stuff that they avoid, is it?
No, they don't really like prophecies.
They don't love talk about the others.
Or I mean, some of the stuff is according to Marwin, and he
might be exaggerating a little bit, but it's definitely not
something they emphasize, right? Like Maestro Lewin downplays it
all. Eamon had sort of downplayed
some of it. He'd kind of given up on a lot
of it. Only near the end of his life
had some of it come roaring back.
Like actually that we were right all along, we just had a few
details wrong, that kind of thing.
So even though there's a sudden sickness and weakness amongst
the last generation of Dragons, I don't think the motivation is
just end magic. I think it's a little more
straightforward to think Dragons are dangerous.
Dragons are fire made flesh. Dragons are of flaming sword
held above the world. Take up the prophecy stuff out
of that. They're just dangerous.
They kill lots of people and they give undue power to those
few who can control them. I think the Citadel, that might
be the quote UN quote world they're building is a world
where people aren't under the thumb or claw or Talon or wing
or dragon breath of those very few, because that's not a world
they want to be under. Because look what the results
have been. We've gotten Magor the Cruel and
Aegon the 4th and well, Aegon the 4th didn't even have
Dragons, but it's because of Dragons that he's he was in
power at the time of the Dragons that came before him.
So we can't assume that the end of Dragons for magical purpose
was was the goal of the maestros or some other agency or some
other organization. But that doesn't mean they
didn't have that motivation in general.
Like forget the magic stuff, just kill the Dragons.
Did you see what Vergar did to the Riverlands during the dance?
How better example do you need? You're like this one crazy dude
just decided to burn half the riverlands and no one could stop
him even though other dragon writers tried like Prince Damon.
You could fully acknowledge that Damon and Nettles tried to stop
the sky and they couldn't. Cause you can only the
Riverlands is massive. How are you going to guard the
whole place? It's like trying to guard the
shorelines from the Ironborn. They can always find a spot.
You're not. And this is 1 big dragon.
They still couldn't track them down.
So, like, everybody knows that the whole Riverlands is like,
yeah, we hate Dragons. This Vegard burned.
Everyone knows someone who lost a home or family or it'd be that
kind of situation or, or worse, you know, like your your farm
was burned by Vegard too. Yep.
I get you. Yeah, we lost all our goats.
Everybody would have this either a direct encounter, multiple
direct encounters, their families encounters, their
friends encounters, all of the above.
It's just such a bad look. And this is right before this
era where the Dragons die out. So it's not it's anything but
subtle, right? Everybody knows.
Everybody saw it, you know, like before it was potential.
Before it was Aegon burned the soldiers on the field of fire.
He burned a castle owned by a guy that everybody hated.
For the most part, the mass burnings of people were soldiers
and people that fought back. It wasn't just a military
strategy employed by the Targaryens against other
Targaryens. When the people became
expendable, they're just a resource to use again for a
family struggle. That's a lot worse.
It's just a whole different look.
It's just the, the, the loyalty, the waning loyalty the
Targaryens had was plummeting, right?
It was, it was waning faster. And the IT was even more about
fear and keeping them in line than it ever was.
And then all of a sudden the biggest tool to keep people in
line is gone. Now what if you're the faceless
man, right, The faceless man, they're obviously anti dragon
dragon Lord. They didn't kill the Targaryens.
They've said, OK, well, we blew up Valyria, probably.
Let's operate on the thinking that they did that they that
they assassinated sorcerers and caused the doom, but they didn't
kill the Targaryen. They said OK, that's fine.
We don't care about them. Just leave that alone.
They're not they're in Westeros for whatever reason.
That didn't matter to them. If you're a faceless man, you
saw the worst thing that could happen.
You saw that what happened when there was a Valyria?
You're like, OK, the world where Valyria existed and used the
power of Dragons not just on one nation but on half the known
world or more. The real life equivalent is like
you're an anti nuclear activist with a chance to actually wipe
out all the nukes on the planet. It's like, you know, if we do
this, there won't be any new. It won't just be that.
It won't just be like we've encouraged people not to use
their nukes. You know, they'd literally be
gone. Imagine that.
Just a blink of an eye, all the nukes are gone.
And not just that they're gone. The means to make more, like the
knowledge to make more is lost too.
It's like, you know, how did we do that?
I don't know how we did that. Just like this, you don't know
how to handle Dragons anymore because all the people that knew
how to do that, they're gone too.
So if you're the maestros, Marwin makes this seem sinister.
It's like, oh, the world the Citadel's building without
Dragons. Oh, you don't want to do blah,
blah blah. He makes them seem evil.
But bro, getting rid of the Dragons kind of seems pro human
to me, right? I mean, I can see the good side
of that pretty clearly. In fact, I'm not so sure I'm on
your side, Marwin. I'm on his side in on in terms
of believing some of his theories.
But even that there's some problems.
Let's get into that a little bit.
I don't think Marwin wants to live in a world covered by
darkness and ice. So he's also operating on well,
we've got this whole ice and fire theory to deal with as
well. This prophecy, you know, the
Dragons being around. Maybe we have a good reason for
that. He might be thinking those,
those fools in the Citadel are trying to kill the Dragons.
We need those Dragons to save the world.
He might be thinking on a very high level here with that.
I'm not positive of that, but giving him some credibility as
I'm criticizing him, I think is is worthy because I don't want
to push back entirely. Now people in the Citadel, if
what they're asking for is, hey, we want merit and ideas and
quality to rule, not who rides the biggest dragon.
We don't want that to be who rules society.
We want or which side of the family rules the biggest dragon.
So that that's why I'm like, yeah, Marwin, maybe see that
side of it and be be understanding of why some good
sides to get rid of the Dragons here.
And if it's for other reasons, maybe you should be more clear
about that now. I think the Faith gained an
awful lot by the loss of Dragons 'cause they were the biggest
unearthly power in Westeros before the Dragons, and then the
Dragons kind of something didn't replace them but kind of
overtook them. Right?
Aegon adopted the Seven because they're so powerful.
He wanted to ease the transition to his rule.
Now the High Septon definitely wields more power in a
dragonless Westeros than in one with.
That doesn't mean it's every High Septon is the same.
Of course, some of them are weaker, but the High Septon had
to watch what he said. Remember the High Septon when
Visenya and Megor that that there's a High Septon that was
mysteriously found dead the next day, and the new High Septon was
all about accepting the Targaryens.
So that tells you a lot right there.
You got to be careful what you say when you're the High Septon,
when you're a commoner, period, anywhere in between.
You have more leeway when you're the High Septon, even though
your words carry farther and you have more power.
But that's part of why, because you have more power.
You can't just kill the High Septon, although you can't.
You just have to be careful about it.
But if we're all being careful about what we say because
Dragons exist, well, if the Dragons don't exist any more
than the High Septon and the rest of us can be a little less
careful what we say, Targaryens can't quite easily push back.
Mae Gore can't just mount his dragon, fly it towards Old Town,
and they go, never mind, never mind, never mind, please stop,
please stop. Don't, don't, don't.
There's no equivalent. They go, what do we send a Raven
and say stop, or we'll send an army.
They say they send an army. We might be.
We could probably beat that army and maybe a lot of other people
will join us. It really is a massive, massive
difference. Now, Nina says maybe this is
maybe I'm taking this point a little too far because there
isn't any obvious leap forwards by the faith in terms of power.
I think maybe that I think, I think she's right.
The power that they gain is more social and soft.
It is a soft power they gain. They don't suddenly have armies
marching on their side. It's just they get, they have
more leeway and they may have more leeway than anybody else to
say things because they represent the gods.
And that's not something you argue against lightly, even when
you're a Targaryen. It's just that with the Doctrine
of Exceptionalism powered by Dragons, even the Faith didn't
want to argue against them because their lives were at
risk. You can threaten the people who
have the mouth to say be afraid of these people or don't, or
think of them as abominations or don't.
The Faith was in lockstep, at least the leaders of it, during
the when the Doctrine of Exceptionalism was in its
heyday. But everybody forgot about that
book, that pamphlet, whatever you call it, when the Dragons
were dead, because it was clearly backed by the force of
the Dragons. And once that force was gone,
well, then it really wasn't worth the paper it was printed
on. I mean, Megor flew across the
city and burned the Sept of Remembrance, and that was that.
I mean, nothing like that is equivalent.
Later, Jairus notably travelled with just Vermithor all the time
because he knew that was enough people would be like, yeah, I
don't want to face that. And I know they got 15 more of
those back at the Red Keep. So even if they think they could
be Vermithor, which they're probably weighing that and
going, yeah, probably not actually.
Then they got to fight more of them.
Yeah. So it's it's such an easy like,
Yep, we're not doing that. Once the Dragons are gone, not
only do you have people thinking maybe we can beat them, but you
have peaceful people knowing that the non peaceful people are
thinking about challenging who's at the top.
And so this is where I land on it.
Nina points out that yeah, some of the some of the Lords
actually gain more power than the seven.
They're the ones that actually have the armies which are now no
longer threatened by Dragons. Whereas the faith doesn't really
have that because they'd already lost the Faith militant.
The Faith Middle was already gone.
So it'd be one thing if they were still around.
So Nina makes a great point there.
However, I would drill this down one step farther and say it's
the most powerful houses that gain the most, and that in some
ways that's very straightforward thing to say, but it's the
weaker houses that benefited from Targaryen rule because
they're safe. Because if anyone comes and
messes with their borders, it's as if they mess with the
Targaryen borders. The Dragons come say hey, you
broke the King's peace, face the Dragons.
Without the Dragons, the King's peace is not well.
It literally lacks the teeth that it had before.
It doesn't have the Dragon's teeth anymore backing it.
So the lesser Lords all of a sudden start sweating and going
Sir Eustis, right? He's like, they might take my
land, they might demote me or I got to cut a deal to try to get
my land back and stick sides with this rebel.
You know, it's it's these houses that are like, we're, we're on
those, we're on the outs. We're we're losing our power.
We haven't even existed in another few generations.
They're the ones that are really, they relied on the
Targaryens to keep them around. Now that protection is gone.
So I think that's what it is. It's the rich get richer when
the Dragons fell off, it's the rich to get richer except for
the Targaryens themselves. It's everybody in the number two
slot is like the gap between Targaryen and Great Houses was
massive when they had Dragons. The gap between Targaryen and
great Houses, it's like you can see the difference.
It's like a small step up. There's they only they, they can
only lean so much on their ancestry.
They can only lean so much on. Well, possession is we have the
throne now, so let's keep it. But no one's fooled anymore as
to how hard it would be to take it from them.
You know, they barely beat the black fires.
That was obviously later than this.
But the black fires would never have happened if the main house
had Dragons and the black fires didn't.
So, yeah, it, it gets a little complicated.
But when you lay it all out like that, I think it it starts to
make a lot of sense. The the ones who were held in
check the most by the Dragons are the ones that gained the
most or stood to gain the most. It isn't necessarily the ones
who exercised that power. For example, if the high septon
in power at the time of the last dragon dying was kind of a
weakling, then maybe they wouldn't have taken so much
advantage. But maybe he was kind of a
firebrand. Maybe he was one of the maybe.
Maybe he was one of those guys that was held in check by common
sense and realized without the dragon said, hey, he could start
pushing. He could start at least see
where the new boundary is. What can I get away with now?
What, will Aegon the Third, a particularly kind of ass, do
what you want kind of king? Yeah.
It's a new day. Not only are there no Dragons to
threaten, but the king on the throne at the time is kind of
doesn't care. So any way you look at it, it's
enormous loss of authority, of perceived authority, of military
strength, all this. And it happened gradually.
That's part of what made it super interesting here, too, is
it didn't just happen overnight. You got these Dragons slowly
dying out, maybe an adult dragon here and there.
Silver Wings apparently dead now.
People aren't talking about the Cannibal anymore.
The Dragons that are there are weaker.
The idea that the Targaryens aren't what they were.
It has a lot of time to set in. It isn't just a boom.
We've got to figure out what all this means overnight now.
No, no, you got like 2 decades of thinking about it, of the
whole society, of everyone in Westeros on different levels,
whether you're poor, whether you're rich, whether you're
noble, whether you're not. It's such a huge subject that
everyone's going to be talking about or thinking about off and
on for decades, and then it actually happens and that fires
up the conversations against. Now this day has come.
The Dragons are gone. Folks.
We definitely rely on your support.
We have been doing this for over 10 years, me and Ashaya, and
well, we've loved watching this fandom grow and change and do
lots of different things, bring people in, encourage all sorts
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So we're so happy to be here. And we were.
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That's an Amazon company you get we we have a lot of great book
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now just dropped its second book.
It's called the faith of beasts. That series is called the
captives war. First book is called Mercy of
Gods and there's a a short story called Live Suit Me and Shaya
and Bran the Builder are all reading it.
We love it. A lot of you out there are
reading it as well. If you haven't picked it up,
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Go there, pick whichever one works best for you are multiple
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We'll keep bringing these almost every week, bringing you news
theories, deep dives, puns, all the above.
The dragonless dragonlords, the transition from dragonlords to
Royals with dragon imagery. We've talked about it in a
variety of ways, from different kings, different reigns.
It's usually a particular Targaryen reign that we look at
it for. We're kind of doing that here as
well. But if you look forward, Darren,
the first was the first king after the end of the Dragons,
the first new king. Once the Dragons died out, he
went aggro. He was like, it's almost as if
he wanted to show everybody that you can't push the Targaryens
around, that there's still a force to be reckoned with.
He didn't think of himself as a dragon in the sense that like
Aryan Targaryen did. At least we don't think so.
But he did say that in a metaphorical way to prove it to
as a measure of strength. Baylor went was the next was the
next one, right? Four years after Darren, we got
Baylor the blessed. He was super faithful.
And then two reigns later, after Viserys and Aegon the 4th, we
got Darren the second, who was also very faithful.
Les zealots, zealotus, but very much on the side of the face.
You can see why I made this point about things.
A lot of power shifting towards the faith because the Targaryens
were starting to do that. They were shifting a lot of
their hey, we're the arbiters of the faithful and we have Dragons
as a symbol, but we don't have Dragons, but we still have the
faith. Now Igon the 4th didn't really
care all that much. He's an example of someone that
just did his thing, used power to gratify himself.
So he kind of is a exception in that sense.
But Aegon the third, in many ways, he was the perfect king
for this transition because he wasn't going to be the kind of
guy that was really worried about it.
He wasn't like, Oh no, we're we don't have Dragons anymore, what
will we do? He did eventually see the
problem, but it wasn't something that I don't know, made him
paranoid or made him panic. He, he was at, at first,
arguably he wasn't sad to see them go at all, even though he
did later in his reign, near the end of his reign, apparently try
to bring them back using magic. We'll talk about that in a
minute. He wasn't scrambling to save
them and projecting this fear of what is our dynasty going to do
without them. He kind of just, you know, it's,
it's not great, but it's happening.
So had he projected that fear, it might have projected fear on
to other people, the same kind of peaceful people I was
referring to earlier, who they're not going to start
anything, but they recognize the state of affairs has shifted.
That in a world without Dragons, you might have a lot more high
Lords starting wars because they're no longer held in check
by gigantic, gigantic flying fire lizards.
So it's the elephant in the room or the elephant dragon in the
room. How do you talk about this?
You don't talk about it in front of Targaryens.
I think that's like, because that's treasonous, almost like
this borderline treason. I mean, think about Tanzel and
her puppets. Even Baylor Brake Spear pointed
out that yeah, that is borderline treasonous.
You know, I don't agree with breaking her hand and destroying
all her stuff. But Aryan, from a legal
perspective, it's hard to completely push back against
what he what his his conclusion was there.
So think about it that in that sense, like, who's going to
bring that up? Who's going to bring up
Targaryen? Like, is that, is that
treasonous? Are you going to have puppet
shows about Dragons dying? I don't think so.
That'd be way more pervasive in this era.
I mean, Sir Arlen, you know, would probably have told told
you something like this. Like, yeah, you don't.
You don't do that. You don't have imagery of dead
Dragons, especially at a sensitive time when the Dragons
are dying out. Right.
Yeah. So kind of get that whoever
Master of Whispers was for Aegon the Third would be hearing a lot
of stuff that it's like, yeah, they're again, they're talking
about those Dragons dying out. I don't know that it amounts to
treason, but it isn't that where this leads next?
Isn't that where they when they start realizing that we're not
holding them in check, what comes next?
Are they going to not be in check and come for us?
Yeah, there might be a lot of worry in the Red Keep,
especially because they have a king that maybe doesn't worry
along with them. He's like, yeah, you guys are
worried. I don't care.
So it's actually believable we have a king who sort of treats
it like sour grapes, at least for a while.
Maybe when he was younger. And again, that's why he wasn't
all about restoring the dragon lore, finding new sources of
information for the things they had lost, dragon keepers,
etcetera. Just his heritage.
He was fine to let it go, even if he regretted it later.
And but also Aegon the Third, it represents a broken link to the
past, just as the dragon keepers, maybe so many of them
dying, if not all of them, they weren't able to pass their
knowledge on to the next generation of dragon keepers.
Aegon the Third was not really raised by his family.
He was raised during a civil conflict.
By and by the time that civil conflict was over, his parents
were dead and he wasn't very old.
He didn't have uncles, he'd have aunts like that.
The prior Targaryen kings and Queens had all of that they had.
They were basically nuclear family.
Were the 2 best rulers. Jairus and Alison had a whole
lot of that. They had a very active mother.
Alyssa they had, I mean they had Megor but that wasn't good, but
they had other siblings who and then their own children.
I mean it was just a big bunch of Targaryens and they got to
confer with each other and the quantity of them probably made
them all feel safer as a group, especially because so many of
them had Dragons. And if we move on to the
supernatural topic Aegon prior to Aegon the Third, we can kind
of assume even if the show handled it differently.
I think the show probably got most of Got the gist of it
right. Which is to say Aegon had a
dream of some kind about the others or something like that.
Aegon the First, That knowledge was passed down through the
other kings. Maybe it's skipped over Magor,
maybe not. Either way, Viserys the First
probably knew it his he reigned over a long peaceful time.
Any of his very likely Jahari's told him before he passed things
like that. However, I don't know that Aegon
the Third was ever told by Rainier, certainly not by Damon.
He was too young, right? Rainier probably learned it, but
when would she have passed it on?
She might have told she told Jason the show probably would
have told him in in the books. But then after that, she wasn't
expecting Aegon to inherit. And this is 1 by 1.
These drag it. These her children die.
And we mostly focused on it from that angle, as from Rainier's
angle. But that was Aegon the Third's
three older brothers. They all died on their Dragons.
Well, Joffrey died on someone else's dragon.
But again, it isn't just him seeing his mom's get eaten by a
dragon. It's his brothers and his dad
all died on Dragons. All of them literally so bad.
So not only did he not get the lessons that pretty much all
Targaryen kings and Queens and Princess and Princess has gotten
just by living amongst the family that had all these shared
knowledge and that was just gone, he was turned off on it.
He didn't want to know. A lot of this stuff, probably,
like learning about Dragons is probably just puts him in a bad
mood, you know, probably recalls his trauma.
Why would he want to learn about that?
And there's little reason to think, say, Aegon the Second
knew anything about that. Like, when would Viserys have
told him? Yeah.
Like in the show, Allison kind of tries to tell him.
And he's like, I don't even know you're talking about.
I don't think that happens in the books anyway.
Either way that line is broken because Aegon third dies and you
know he doesn't. His line doesn't continue anyway
so it's irrelevant even if it did happen that way in the books
for the most part. So that is a big part of this
too. The whole why does it matter if
the Dragons died out in terms of that?
Like the Targaryens didn't spread that news, but of the
people who knew, if any of them did, that is devastating.
That's why I think they looked so hard for evidence that the
Dragons would come back, not just because it restores their
power, although that would be relevant, but because they might
know that the world is going to end if the Dragons don't come
back. That family secret, at least
that conclusion might have passed down, if not all the
details. And they're not just talking
about Aegon's dream. The idea that target a lot of
Targaryens are dreamers. That's the kind of thing that
would be discussed by Targaryens in a family situation, in a
family setting. You know, like, yeah, a lot of
us have prophetic dreams. That happens sometimes.
Aegon wouldn't have learned about that much either because
again, he's too young. When would that come up?
Right, Like during the civil war when everyone's dying?
Well, let me pull you aside and have a conversation with you
about dreams. Dreams weren't actually that big
of a deal during the Dance, right?
Not in terms of the Targaryens taking action or not.
It's those, those were more a big deal at other times.
The Dragons also were sometimes used as a way to, you know, show
Targaryen strength, kind of an intimidate the commoner, show
how strong they are. Aegon didn't like doing that
anyway. Even if he had Dragons, he
probably wouldn't have done that.
So he ended up kind of, like we said, like an Aegon the 5th,
where he wanted the Dragons because of how strong they would
make him in the eyes of the nobility, not in terms of the
entire realm because the commoners were already on his
side. Makar an Aryan, those are
examples of Targaryens who projected strength.
One was the genuine strength, one was the toxic, bullying,
insecure type. Either way, they're trying to
sort of project themselves into the space where dragonic
strength was projected before. Like, well, we can't show you
all our strong Dragons, so we just show you how strong we are
and you can fear that instead. That that was kind of make our
thing was like, yeah, we can still be powerful war leaders
and they'll respect us for that. We don't have Dragons, but if
we're really good at what we do, no one's going to want to mess
with us. That's the best we can do.
That that made sense. Aryan just wasn't only got half
the memo, right. And the ultimate example of this
was Darren the first, right? The minute he ascends to the
throne, he's like, we're going to go to conquer.
We're going to prove we're going to do what Dragons do in human
form. And this is the guy who grew up
with that as a kid. Like, he's 8-9 years old.
And everyone around him was talking about how the Dragons
are gone, how the Targaryens are weaker now.
He's hearing it. He's hearing it.
And his dad isn't doing much about it.
You can kind of understand why he was just raring to go to
prove otherwise. Like, oh, I'm, I grew up with
Targaryens being talked about as weak.
And I am so ready to prove that wrong.
I'm so ready to invade Dorn. This will prove it all.
For a while it did, and then it didn't.
And then it kind of backfired horribly.
But he didn't live to see that because he was.
Part of that backfiring was his assassination.
Taking Dorn but not holding it. He kind of did prove it though,
right? He kind of proved, yeah, we're
Dragons. We took Dorn and couldn't hold
it. That's exactly what the Dragons
under House Targaryen did before.
So yeah, dragonless but not eggless.
Though the eggs went from infrequent to rare and the
hatchlings to, well, I don't know, normal to weaker or rare
or less frequent? I'm not sure exactly.
There were still plenty of eggs. And despite Egg on the 3rd's
wariness around Dragons, the tradition of eggs and cradles
continued for a little while. But here's where it stopped.
And here's where there's other things going on.
Let's also remember that when the Dance of the Dragons ended,
it was a horrible winter that raged for several years past.
So there are lots of problems in the realm at this point that
this anecdote we're about to read is 135.
So we're on year 6 of winter at this point.
Quote. The trouble might have ended
there with talk, but soon thereafter a series of disasters
befell the realm and royal family, each following hard upon
the heels of the other until even men who mocked the gods
like mushroom began to question whether the Seven had turned
against House Targaryen and the Seven Kingdoms in their wrath.
The first omen of the dark times to come was seen on Drift Mark
when the Dragon's Egg presented to Elena Valerian upon her
birth, quickened and hatched, her parents pride and pleasure
quickly turned to ash. However, the dragon that
wriggled from the egg was a monstrosity, A wingless worm,
maggot, white and blind. Within moments of hatching, the
creature turned upon the babe in her cradle and tore a bloody
chunk from her arm. As Lena shrieked, Lord Oakenfest
ripped the dragon off her, flung it to the floor, and hacked it
into pieces. After that, King Egon banned
dragon eggs from the Red Keep. Wow.
Yeah, he took pretty heavy measures there.
Maybe that relates to why the last dragon was so visible and
so people could go see it like Arlen did, because he didn't
want it inside the castle, so maybe he spent a lot of time
outside. I don't know, Maybe this is
related somehow. Either way, that clearly got
reversed because after egg on the third, dragon eggs were back
in cradles again. But winter did break that year,
so maybe some superstitious few thought that it was related.
He kicked all the dragon eggs out of the Red Keep and then all
of a sudden summer breaks, You know, people are getting very
superstitious or winter breaks rather.
So people are very superstitious.
You have that quote in there that I say I read about.
Even Mushroom was starting to think that the Seven had turned
against the Targaryens and the guy who doesn't even really
believe in the gods. Well, if the people who don't
really believe in the gods think that 7 have turned against the
Targaryens, well then you got to believe that people who are a
little more sincere with their beliefs in the 1st place would
have been thinking that way for a while.
Again, no wonder the Targaryens turned to the faith, started
adopting the Ways and Means and and language and dress and all
that and into much more seriously than they had before.
It wasn't just about power. It's also about pushing back
against the idea that the gods are against them.
You know, like the gods have turned on, there's so many bad
things have happened during their reign.
The Targaryens have had so much so many losses and and
negativity that you would think that they would want to push
back against this, this perception of them.
Yeah, you can hear the high septon saying that stuff, right?
Even the maybe the high Septon, this is a time where he's like,
he feels like he can say what he wants because, yeah, what are
they going to do to me? What is it?
This this dragon king is not going to send a dragon at me.
He doesn't even have one to send at me.
Which dragon is he going to send?
Who's going to burn Old Town? The this last dragon that
doesn't even have a name and can barely fly?
Like who? What are they worried about,
especially in winter? Well, like, they can't Marshall
some big army to send to Old Town, especially right after the
dance, like we're almost weak. So I wonder if it's that would
have been a particularly good time for the the face to test
the waters as to what they could get away with and what they
could say and then what not Power can't be held back for
long. Power in check is eventually
going to explode. And yeah, open preaching against
the Targaryen, perhaps unlikely. Yeah, I I feel like it just got
the the bar moved just a little bit every year.
But here's another example. Here's this is fun.
We get to go back to Dunkin Egg and discuss some more dragony
stuff from their perspective. Do you want a cloud in the ear?
There are no Dragons. No, but there are eggs.
The last dragon left a clutch of five and they have more on
Dragonstone. Old ones from before the dance.
My brothers all have them too. Aryan's looks as though it's
made of gold and silver with veins of fire running through
it. Mine is white and green, all
swirly. Your Dragon's egg.
They put it in his cradle. Dunk was so used to egg that
sometimes he forgot egg on was a Prince.
Of course they put a dragon egg inside his cradle.
So this is well after the reign of egg on the third, who banned
dragon eggs from the Red Keep. So like I said, that's how we
can be very sure that that was undone because here we go with
Egg had an egg in his cradle. So this is 40 ish years gone.
Basically. Dunk, again, he's a personality
entirely of the post dragon era. That's a point that is made
early in the hedge night. So people get their bearings as
to when the Dragons died out. And it's an important milestone,
right, to keep in, to keep in consideration.
So he's not someone that lived through both sides of it.
Duncan and obviously Arlen did, but barely.
He was so young there. What we really need more of are
takes from people who were alive and adults before the dance that
survived it and then lived for quite a while afterwards.
So they could maybe weigh in on the seasons, if that was really
a thing, if there was any evidence there.
And was there any other differences between the Dragons,
Right. What was the vibe like?
This is what did am I right that just it was the talk of all the
pubs and Taverns all the time and what was the vibe?
Was it fear? Was it curiosity?
Was it like a sort of a giddy excitement for the fall of the
top house? Like people do kind of get
excited to see, you know, the rich fall like the the powerful
people get excited about that, you know, even even though it
might cause problems for them. It's you like to see the high
and mighty fall when they deserve it or because they've
had it coming, which is kind of the same thing.
I guess this is some schadenfreude I guess.
But yeah, there would have been a lot of people eager to see
what would happen and or worried at the same time, like a little
of both. So he mentioned that yeah, Aegon
the Third was against Dragons. He kicked them out.
But later in his reign some things changed and this is very
Aegon the 5th ish. And I think you'll agree he sent
off for 9 mages from Essos, not sure where in Essos but and it
was his brother Viserys idea. So it was like a milder version
of Summerhall because go Agon the 5th wanted to change laws,
the nobility was resistant. Same thing here.
Agon the third wanted to change laws but the nobility was
resistant. Both of them were very pro
commoner and that's a big part of where they wanted those
changes to be focused on. They wanted to promote the
commoners more. They wanted to lift, raise the
floor so to speak. And there was some sort of
ritual and some kind of debacle, we're not sure what.
Almost certainly not the kind of debacle of Summerhall.
It feels like that wouldn't be glossed over if so many people
died. To be fair, Summerhall sort of
gets glossed over a lot, but it's the language is a lot more
severe about it. It's clear that it was some sort
of tragedy. This is a debacle.
Debacle is not tragedy. Tragedy means people died.
Debacle does not. Debacle just means this was
just. It could just mean it was
stupid. It could just means it was ill
conceived. It could just mean it made them
look bad. It could mean all the above.
Yeah, it just could make them looking bad.
I think it's probably the the best way I think we can take
away from this without reaching too far.
But it didn't. It still, it was a failure,
bottom line, no matter what. Anyway, you look at it and you
wonder if what other Targaryens thought about that, whether that
just made Daron the First, who would have taken over as king
not long after this. Because this is probably near
the end of Aegon the Third's reign and Aegon the Third died
of consumption. Dare on the First seeing this
fail too. This is one of many things that
he just got in his head. The only thing that's going to
work is just me leading an army into Dorn and proving everybody
that we're still strong. So let's talk about what or who
done it. We've laid out a lot of
evidence, a lot of different details, a lot of timelines.
Let's get into the possibility that it was intentional by
somebody we've talked around it. Let's get more specific. 4 basic
possibilities. The three who's and one what the
what is grand supernatural forces beyond human control.
That's the whole idea with the tides flowing in and out like
magic flowing in and out like tides or like cloud cover.
You know sometimes it's cloudy day on cloudy days.
The magic works well on some days.
Maybe you guys are feeling with the Dragonlance series.
In Dragonlance there's three moons.
All three moons are magical. Whichever moon is closest to the
planet at that time, that magic works best.
There's white, there's red, there's black.
So when the red moon is big in the sky, the red magic works the
best. It's not an old fantasy concept.
It's not hard to understand either.
It makes sense. It's not something that George
invented, nor Ramsay Campbell, nor the red comet concept.
It's just magic having a governing body.
Maybe that body is a comet. Maybe it's a moon, maybe it's a
sun. Maybe it's some giant hole in
the ground, a chasm that leads directly to the center of the
earth. Who knows?
There's lots of creative ways to express this, and that is one
that's the hardest for us to get at.
But there's evidence it could be something like this, partly
because the the whodunits I'll have some flaws too.
Now, we can always have multiple possibilities, so none of this
get gets discarded easily. So who here are the three?
Who's the human motivations? Why and what the Citadel K,
we've kind of touched on that. That's actually referred to
directly in the books by Marwin the Faith.
I talked about how since they gained the most from the end of
Dragons, maybe socially and maybe politically you can look
at them as a possibility. They also ideologically are
opposed to the Dragons and they're connected to the Citadel
as well. So if the Citadel's an anti
dragon, maybe this is a sort of a faith slash Citadel
cooperative effort. And behind them both is House
Hightower, who represents the nobility in this scenario, which
Nina pointed to. A lot of the nobility have a lot
to gain by seeing the end of Dragons.
House High Tower. House High Tower will be one of
them because it's the higher nobility.
The more powerful the nobility, the more they gain from the loss
of Dragons. However, it's less easy to
believe some sort of coordination between powerful
noble houses with regards to the end of the Dragons.
It's already hard enough to believe it with the Great
Northern Conspiracy. Now I believe a lot of Lords got
gathered to do to do what's best for themselves right before
Aries went completely full crazy.
That isn't necessarily a conspiracy to unseat him, it's
maybe just them planning for the inevitable.
That aside, you don't have to assume that a conspiracy is only
by one group or by one by the OR the whole group is involved
right. That's especially hard with the
nobility. There's so many noble houses,
like just the great houses got involved, or maybe just
Hightower and a few of their vassals, who knows.
But the Citadel and the the Citadel and the Faith are a
little bit more of a closed organization than the nobility.
So yeah, maybe one or two noble houses, but it's hard to imagine
like dozens of them being involved in this.
And then third, but certainly not last, is the Faceless Man.
They obviously are very capable of killing.
They're the most capable perhaps of murdering Dragons, murder in
general. They also have ideological
opposition, just like the maestros do.
They're opposite. I mean, sorry, just like, well,
all of them have ideological opposition really, but theirs is
perhaps the most severe. Maybe you could say the faces.
But the Faceless men, I think, I think they have more hatred of
Dragons and Valyrians than the the faith do more, more
ideological opposition there. It's actually hard to top the
Faceless Men in that regard. Born in their a slave mines.
That's that's rather straightforward.
Anyway, it's a compelling possibility to put them very
high on the list. So the Faithless men are
generally for hireright. This is their own thing,
probably. Again, I point to the fact that
they just kind of left the Targaryens alone, which is a
little suspicious. Maybe, maybe, I don't know, But
they definitely have to be included in this conversation
anyway you look at it. In the case of the Citadel and
the Faith, yeah, they could be working together.
Don't know that about. Don't know about that here.
I don't think the Faceless Men would be working with anybody
else here unless they were hired to do so, which we don't think
is the case because of their straightforward ideological
opposition. The problem with comparing that
to now, like did the Faceless Men kill the Dragons before?
Do they want to do that now though?
Because Danny's anti slavery, She wants to save the world from
the other potentially. I'm not even sure if they're
aware of that part, but they definitely know about the anti
slavery part. She is very famous for that
already, like the smashing the slave trade is the talk of
Western Essos, right? She's just just completely
upended the economy amongst the rich.
The faceless men are more than aware of that.
That's partly because they have a connection to the Iron Bank.
They would have a they would know anyway though.
So there's a lot of of the most powerful organizations in the
world are involved in this or potentially involved in this.
They all have their own very straightforward reasons to be
involved and potentially some other reasons that we're not
aware of. And that, and these are these
reasons are out there. They're obvious.
I think. So it's that's why it's not too
hard to imagine some of these groups working together because
they all know each other's motivations.
They all have some of the same motivations.
Like, yeah, we all, we all benefit if the Dragons are gone,
right? Don't we all with this group of
us in this room right now, like, yes, that's why we're here,
because we're very obviously people who benefit from the
Dragons being gone. I don't know who was in this
room at that moment, but we've given you a lot of candidates
here, actually. I mean, killing off the Dragons
before, like imagine the face those men wanted to kill the
Dragons off. Well, that would have been
really difficult. Now they can, but that still
gets us. That still leaves us with the
confusion of, well, the Targaryens are still there.
If they wanted to get rid of the Dragons, couldn't they have just
killed the dragon riders? Maybe that's worked.
Maybe that just means the Dragons were running rampant.
And I don't know. I don't know how they think
they're a weird religious death cult and there there's a lot we
don't know about them still, but but we know enough to very much
include them here. Hey, let's talk about Marwin a
little bit. His conspiracy stuff has been
off and on in this episode, but we should get into more detail
here. One peculiar thing he says is he
tells Sam maybe it's good that Eamon died at sea on the way
here, otherwise they'd have had to kill him.
It's a weird thing to say. Sam is shocked they'd kill
anyone, let alone Eamon. Which brings us to Marwin's
great conspiracy thesis. Who do you think killed all the
Dragons the last time around? Gallant dragon slayers armed
with swords? The world the Citadel is
building has no place in it for sorcery or prophecy or glass
candles, much less for Dragons. Ask yourself why Eamon Targaryen
was allowed to waste his life upon the Wall when by Rice he
should have been raised to archmaester.
His blood was why he could not be trusted No more than I can.
So that's compelling. You like hearing that?
That moment when you first read it is like, yeah, whoa, what is
this? This is cool.
And it's it's it's near the end of the book, so it feels kind of
climactic. And it is.
But there's some flaws here in his story.
As we've said earlier, I seriously doubt the maesters
killed Silverwing, Cannibal or Sheep Steeler, let alone all
three. So he's like, who do you think
killed the last track? Well, they didn't.
The maestro didn't kill them. I don't think.
If Marwin said, who do you think finished off the dragon or who
do you think killed the last few Dragons?
I I'd be more likely to align that aligns with what we've been
saying. But he he says gallant dragon
slayers with swords. Like that's ridiculous and it
is. But a maestro killing the
cannibal is pretty ridiculous too.
Probably right. I mean again, Maestro can poison
eggs, but a 10 year old child could kill a hatchling.
You don't. That doesn't take a gallant
dragon Slayer with a sword and his take on Eamon.
That's that's just not accurate is it?
Not all of it anyway. Eamon chose to take the black to
help his brother's reign be more secure.
Where does the not being trusted by the citadel part enter into
all this? They did he take the black
because he thought that Archbatrios would kill him
otherwise? I mean, that's a bit of a
stretch, but that's the only way I can really reconcile those two
statements, so I doubt it. I doubted Marwin, while it's
possible Eamonn had other motivations for taking the
black, those reasons would be maybe prophecy related.
Like hey, the front lines of the supernatural war to come is up
here. This is where I need to be.
That to me is a lot more likely than, well, if I go to the
Citadel, they'll kill me, you know?
So if Eamonn saw that danger, why didn't he say it to Sam?
Why didn't he? Why didn't that come up?
Why did he? Why was he so eager to go there?
You know, like, oh, that place where they're going to kill me,
It's been 50 years. They don't care about that
anymore. It doesn't even come up from his
perspective. He doesn't even think of it.
He doesn't Warren doesn't say anything.
Like, why wouldn't Marwin warn Sam?
Don't bring up prophecy or they might put poison in your in your
oatmeal. Why did Eamon warn Sam of that?
If it's true or if it's if it's something that Eamon himself was
worried about. So I think Marwin is putting
words in Eamon's mouth or maybe going a little farther with his
conspiracy then is warranted. He's also talking about things
that were long gone by the time he was born.
Like if he isn't to be trusted, if the maestros to other arch
maestros don't trust him, then how did he learn these inner
circle secrets in the 1st place? Like who taught him, who told
him, who gave him these, gave him this information?
He's obviously didn't learn it first hand.
He wasn't around when the Dragons died.
Maybe he wasn't always so mistrusted.
Maybe early on, like he was inner circle, and then over time
they realized he couldn't be trusted.
Eamon wasn't trusted from the beginning because he's a
Targaryen. Maybe.
So yeah, they're both black sheep, not Gray ones.
Eamon especially, you know, black brother and all that.
But now I'm not a. It's not necessarily a flaw in
or this isn't necessarily another criticism of what Marwin
says, but I wonder which archmaester he thought Eamon
would because you're there's not just generic archmaesters.
There's each archmaester is of something Archmaester of black
iron, archmaester of, you know, archmaester of gold, archmaester
of. So would it be Valyrians to you?
Is that the one they thought they would put him in as well?
If they're trying to control the type of information that comes
from that office, if they're trying to suppress magical
knowledge, they would put a yes man, somebody who doesn't
believe in magic in that position.
They'd, you know, it's like, like all the time we see people
in really high political office appoint someone incompetent or
hostile to that office to run it in order to destroy it or to
bring usher in its slow downfall.
So, yeah, I don't wonder, like they wouldn't have how much
damage could Eamon have really done?
Like, why would they kill this guy?
He's 102 years old. And like, what?
What really are his? Are his words really that
dangerous? I mean, maybe, maybe aside,
maybe they people, too many people would believe him and it
could send the Citadel spinning. Like if he, he starts talking
about the others and all that other stuff.
And yeah, but Sam's going to do it, right?
Or, or is he? I don't know.
I don't I, I don't think Marwin's wrong overall, but you
can clearly see that he's a little too far in some of these
directions. These these some of these things
just aren't supported. Maybe he's exaggerating a bit,
but he can't again, can't push it aside.
He's he's got some truth that he's speaking to, even if he's
not 100% right. How to kill a dragon.
So we have some motives, we have some culprits, but the how how
do you actually kill the Dragons?
What's how do you keep it a secret?
What's the means all that. So if we go through our three
main possibilities, the poisoning of the Dragons
themselves is perhaps possible. Maybe that's how you kill the
bigger ones. Maybe you really can kill Sheep
Stealer and the Cannibal and Silverwing by feeding them
poisoned sheep or something like that.
Yeah, maybe that really works. I don't know.
It could. I can't say.
No. I can't say.
That would never work. Why not?
Why? Why?
Why would I be able to say that? Maybe it does.
So if there is a murder mass that that works, they might be
trying for that. I think poisoning the eggs is a
little more straightforward. I mean, eggs are obviously a
little more fragile. Poisoning a hatchling, you know,
I don't think poisoning a hatchling explains why that one
hatchling was so aggressive and violent that it bit someone.
We don't have any example of that.
In fact, that might be the only example of a dragon harming A
Targaryen that wasn't encouraged to do so.
No dragon has ever harmed A Targaryen that's trying to ride
it that we know of, unless it's one that wasn't theirs.
Like obviously Cyrax harmed Joffrey by kicking him off, but
that wasn't that was somebody riding the wrong dragon either.
A riderless dragon hasn't harmed any Targaryen.
They've harmed plenty of dragon seeds.
They've harmed plenty of other randos.
But actual Targaryens? There was nothing on record of
that, so that is odd. That makes the one case of a of
the White Dragon Sing attacking Lena a little unusual, but by
itself, you can't go too far with that one example.
So I think poison's the only thing you can get away with
here. I can't think of another method
that wouldn't be just obvious, you know, like, well, that
dragon was had his head cut off. Someone did that, you know,
poison's the only thing that you could get away with that
wouldn't be traced, wouldn't be tracked.
Wouldn't because the maesters would be the ones giving that
autopsy. They'd be like, yeah, no poison
here. The faith, I feel like that's
the only thing they have going for them too, and they're not
the ones who administer it. Which is why I would guess that
if the faith were involved, it was alongside the Citadel.
Because who's going to dose the Dragons with poison?
Not the wandering septons, right?
How how they going to do that? They don't have that knowledge.
They don't have that access even.
But yeah, can I go in the can I go hang out with the Dragons for
a minute? Why do you want to do that?
Oh, just because I just like Dragons, man, you know?
But don't watch me while I'm there.
So if it was the the what rather than The Who, if it was ebbing
magical forces, that helps explain a lot.
The Dragons would be easier to kill if the less magic in the
world, they'd be weaker. That would explain their
weakness or a lot of their weakness.
Maybe there's no human involvement at all.
Maybe it's entirely that. It just, that's not something
that's easy for people to accept, so they blame other
people. They have to.
It has to be a human answer here.
It can't just be magical forces. Our fandom struggles with that
as an answer too. Frankly, because it isn't super
satisfying. I I don't I don't love it as an
answer, but I think it could be a partial answer.
I'm cool with it being a partial answer, but I feel like there
has to be more to it. If it's easy for faceless men to
kill Dragons, at least adult Dragons, then what's Jakin still
at the Citadel for? Why is Jakin Agar hanging out
there looking for that dragon Death of Dragons book?
Maybe that's not why he's there. Then why is he there and why was
that book mentioned to us? Why did Tyrion bring that book
up if it's not relevant? It's if it's not relevant to the
Faceless Men, maybe it's relevant to somebody else, maybe
Sam. I mean, someone else at the
Citadel, I guess, or someone else who could be getting access
to the Citadel. Euron, I don't think Euron wants
to kill Dragons. He wants to have one of his own.
So yeah, what is Jockin doing there if he's not trying to get
that book and if Dragons are easy to kill, well, maybe
they're not. Maybe he's looking, Maybe he
needs to learn how to do that. He's like, well, I got an
admission to go kill 3 Dragons, but I need to learn how to do
that first. I don't know how to kill
Dragons. I don't want to just stab them
because then it's going to be seen that they were stabbed and
maybe that's not good enough. I mean, Drogon's too big for
that now. I don't know that AI don't know
that a faceless man could accomplish that task.
Maybe they could, you know, make themselves look like one of the
dragon keepers with with a glamour with their face changing
ability. Dragon wouldn't be fooled
though, would they? We already know that we already
we've seen Arya didn't fool Caso the seal even though she looked
extremely different. Cause animals have too good a
sense of smell. Animal senses work really well.
As an aside by the way, that's an interesting connective tissue
between skin changers and faceless men.
You can't a human human eyes can't detect that is kind of
glamours and and stuff, but noses can.
A skin changer, a human using this the nose of a wolf or a dog
or something like that would be able to tell the difference.
So that's kind of cool. I don't know that that's
certainly not relevant here. I just kind of literally just
occurred to me in the moment here.
But in conclusion here my friends, King Aegon the Third
lived another four years after the death of the last dragon.
He died in 157, the last dragon in 153.
It may be that his those last four years of his were when his
attempts to bring the dragon back were the most sincere or he
tried the hardest, but we can't be sure about that.
It would be the again, the absolute talk of the realm as it
had been before, maybe more so once they died.
Boy, that talk was big. Boy, the talk was loud.
And again, that is like, how did they handle it?
Did they toll bells? Like the bells toll for the
death of a king? Do they toll the bells for the
death of the last dragon? Or is that something they kind
of just want to like let that pass by unnoticed even though
everyone's going to notice it anyway?
You don't need to draw attention to that.
Everyone is going to pay attention to it regardless.
Every Tavern in Market Square would gossip about this realm
wide, if not worldwide. I mean the rumors would be going
everywhere. People would be hearing about it
in Ash Eye, People would be hearing about it in ET Lang.
Like the wildest, farthest away places.
It's worldwide news, global news.
It'd be funny to people who hearing the news that maybe
still have Dragons really far to the east or something like that
like that. We got Dragons.
What do they mean extinct suckers?
Don't they know how to take care of their Dragons?
Or maybe they're more knowledgeable and they're like,
yeah, well, they didn't handle the ebb and flow properly of
magical tides. We do.
We know our magical knowledge wasn't destroyed.
Our dragon keepers weren't wiped out.
Baylor didn't burn our books. It's funny to think too, that
amongst all the rumors told in these Taverns and elsewhere,
that maybe even the truth was spoken unwittingly, like someone
might have the right answer or or combination of answers.
There's just no way to verify it.
And again, this is the realm that Deron the first, the young
dragon inherited, A realm where everyone's talking about the
death of the Dragons. Everyone's questioning whether
House Targaryen is still powerful enough.
So you could tell his actions were very geared towards
speaking to that. Now here's something else to
consider going forward. Maybe a last couple of questions
that that have no answers, or at least don't have answers yet.
Danny's Dragons might all pass during the story.
They may all three die. Either way, they are again kind
of the new last Dragons. Maybe only one of them will
survive. Maybe it will grow weak as
magical forces ship. Maybe we'll get examples from
them that teach us more about these other last Dragons, these
nameless last Dragons, that maybe one day we'll have a name.
Fire and blood too, may give that to us.
Maybe we'll see one of Danny's Dragons killed by poison sheep
and that will be like, oh, that is possible, that can happen.
That maybe helps us explain how the other Dragons were killed.
The adults, the younger ones, it's easier to figure out.
I mean, they're it's not so hard to kill a younger dragon.
We're not looking for answers there.
We're only looking for whether it actually happened.
But this, it's one of many possibilities that could come up
and give us more clues as to what happened during this end of
the Dragon's phase that began 150 ish years before Song of Ice
and Fire. The dragonless times of
Westeros. Westeros, the time when things
were different, the time of Dunkin Egg, they lived in the
middle of it. They didn't realize how
different it was. Because you can't.
It's hard to do anything but see your times as normal because
they're the only experience you have.
But we can look at these different eras and see these
huge differences and draw many fun conclusions and many fun
theories. And we'll have to see what comes
next in this saga of the many whodunits, the what done it and
all these other mysteries associated with the last
Dragons. Trivia question was how many
eggs did the last dragon lay? Five.
It was not 0. Not a trick question.
The last dragon did lay five eggs.
And those those eggs did not hatch.
Those were weakened, apparently weaker eggs, shriveled, maybe
lighter. So maybe not some of the eggs
that ended up with like on the sun to buy the sun chaser.
You know, Alyssa farming was probably aren't among the three
of her five or those five were not among her three came from
her three rather and etcetera. So these these might have been
notably different looking just because they came from this
weaker dragon. But we don't have certainty on
that because we haven't seen these are the five that came
from that. We just don't know.
But it'd be interesting to to discover that one day.
See, Hey, these are shriveled dragon eggs that are that are
turned to stone. Those must be from that last
dragon. We do have an episode on Deron
the first. We have an episode on the comet,
we have an episode on many episodes on fire and blood that
would be related to this off and on.
We of course have Valerie read us for Sam chapters.
The Sam Marwin chapter, we did an episode that referred to
Jakin's presence, the Faceless man's presence in that final
scene where Sam is talking about everything he saw north of the
wall, while Marwin is talking about Dragons and killing
Dragons and all that, all right in front of a faceless man.
So that's pretty important too, right?
All these, a lot of these things bleed into other areas.
So check those out and do your own thinking and questioning and
let us know what you think. I'm always curious to know what
you guys have for us and whether it differs or agrees.
This is part of the fun. Thanks to Nina for her add-ons
and her great thoughts for this one.
Helped me work through some ideas and had a lot of great
thoughts of her own. Thanks to Joey and Jesse for our
music. We have lovely theme music that
plays in various parts of our episodes, sometimes at the end,
always at the beginning. And thank you to Michael
Klarfeld for the maps you see behind us and in many of our
episodes and including our video intro.
Michael Klarfeld's work can be found at claradox.de.
That's KLARADOX. Klar Raddox.
Yes, Klar Raddox. Yeah, it's down in the
description. Don't listen to me.
Just find the button there and and click on it that way.
On behalf of Ashea, I'm Aziz. We'll see you next time for
more, and you know what to do in the meantime.
Valar, Ririus.