In the tenth year after Aegon's Conquest, Queen Rhaenys Targaryen brought her dragon Meraxes into the skies above the Hellholt, the grim seat of House Uller upon the banks of the Brimstone. For six years the dragons had scoured Dorne and found no lasting purchase, for the Dornish would not stand to be burned and struck instead from ambush. The Ullers, a house long reckoned half mad by their neighbors, had made ready for the day a dragon should come. As Meraxes passed low over the castle, a scorpion mounted upon the walls loosed a bolt that took the great she-dragon in the eye.
The chroniclers differ on the manner of the queen's death, and the truth was lost with her. Some say Rhaenys was thrown from the saddle and dashed upon the stones of the Hellholt as Meraxes fell; others that she was taken alive and died slowly in the dungeons of the Ullers, and darker tales still are whispered of what was done to her there before the end. What is certain is that neither queen nor dragon was ever seen again, and that the skull of Meraxes, smaller than her brother Balerion's but greater than Vhagar's, is said to have remained at the Hellholt long after. The bones of Rhaenys were never returned to her family.
The death of Rhaenys, the third and youngest of the conquering Targaryens and the most beloved of the three, was the pivot upon which the First Dornish War turned. Where Aegon had made war with a measure of restraint, seeking submission rather than slaughter, now he sought only vengeance. His grief and his fury together kindled the years of burning that men would remember as the Dragon's Wroth, when Balerion and Vhagar fell upon the castles of Dorne again and again, and no Dornish stronghold was safe beneath the open sky.