By the autumn of 130 AC King's Landing had turned against Queen Rhaenyra. Her reign had grown harsh with executions and confiscations, food ran short as the war choked the roads and rivers, and the death of Queen Helaena, said to have thrown herself from a window of the Red Keep, set the city seething. Into this misery came prophets and madmen preaching doom, chief among them a one-legged beggar the smallfolk called the Shepherd, who night after night proclaimed to swelling crowds that the dragons were demons whose fire had loosed all the woes of the realm, and that the city would know no peace until every last one of them was dead. On the night the mob rose, tens of thousands poured through the streets, and a great tide of them broke upon the Dragonpit atop the Hill of Rhaenys, where the beasts of House Targaryen were kept chained in the dark.
The dragonkeepers died defending the doors, but no company of men could hold against so vast a mob, and the crowd surged into the pit with torch and spear and axe. Within were four dragons: Helaena's Dreamfyre, the young Shrykos and Morghul, and Prince Joffrey's Tyraxes. Chained and half-blind in their pit, the dragons could not take wing, yet they did not die cheaply. Their fire and fury filled the great dome with screams, and the beasts slew hundreds, perhaps thousands, of their attackers before the numbers told. Dreamfyre, oldest and largest, broke her chains and killed so many that her death alone was said to have cost the mob a fifth of their number; in her final throes she brought down the pit's very dome, and the falling stone crushed hundreds more. When dawn came, all four dragons lay dead amid a slaughterhouse of the slain.
The storming of the Dragonpit was among the darkest nights of the whole Dance, for the smallfolk of King's Landing had done what armies and rival dragons could not, and slain the dragons of the Targaryens with their own hands. The loss crippled Rhaenyra's power at the very heart of her realm and hastened her flight from the city that had once hailed her queen. More than that, the maesters mark it as a wound the dynasty never truly healed, for the dragons of House Targaryen dwindled thereafter and would in a generation pass from the world altogether.