When Lord Staunton of Rook's Rest declared for Queen Rhaenyra and refused to open his gates, Ser Criston Cole, Hand to King Aegon II and Lord Commander of the Kingsguard, marched a host from King's Landing to bring the castle to heel. Yet the siege was in truth a snare, laid by Cole and Prince Aemond Targaryen together, for they knew that so bold a challenge upon the very doorstep of the crown could not go unanswered, and that whichever dragon came to answer it might be brought down. Aemond held his monstrous Vhagar, oldest and largest of all the dragons then living, waiting in the woods; and unknown to nearly all, King Aegon himself lay hidden with golden Sunfyre close at hand.
The answer came, as they had hoped, from Dragonstone. Princess Rhaenys Targaryen, the Queen Who Never Was, flew to the relief of Rook's Rest upon her scarlet she-dragon Meleys, the Red Queen, and fell upon Cole's ranks with fire and fury. Then the trap was sprung. King Aegon rose upon Sunfyre to meet her, and while the two dragons tore at one another in the sky, Prince Aemond loosed Vhagar upon them both. Against so vast a beast neither Aegon nor Rhaenys could stand. Sunfyre was flung down grievously wounded and the king with him, his body broken and half his flesh burned so that he lingered near death for the rest of the war. Meleys was caught between two dragons and torn from the air; she died beneath the walls of Rook's Rest, and Princess Rhaenys perished with her.
Rook's Rest was the first great battle of the Dance in which a dragon slew a dragon, and its meaning was not lost upon the realm: the beasts that had made House Targaryen invincible could be killed, and their riders with them. For the greens it was a costly triumph, for their king would never again be whole; yet they had struck down one of the ablest and most redoubtable of Rhaenyra's champions. The maesters reckon the fall of Rhaenys and Meleys the first mortal wound the queen's cause suffered, and the beginning of the long dying that gives the chronicle of the Dance its grim name.