CHAPTER 1 HERE BE DRAGONS

Where we discover whether dragons are entirely the stuff of legend; how real-life dragons have sex, whether they could actually fly, and the truth about fire-breathing.

A world with dragons is a world where nowhere is safe. The greatest defensive fortress ever built in all of Westeros was Harrenhal. To the north west of King’s Landing, in the Riverlands, Harrenhal sprawled with its thick walls and high towers, its great hall blazed with the warmth of 35 hearths. But before our story even begins the proud towers have been melted like candles, the defensive walls are charred and broken, and many have died and left no trace because of the force that rained down on Harrenhal–dragonfire. A dragon breathes fire with the intense heat and strength of a blast furnace. A juvenile dragon can burn a man alive within seconds. Grown larger, a dragon will easily take on a warship, explosively breathing flames with such power that the ship isn’t just set ablaze but blown apart from the force of the shockwave.

This all seems like the stuff of fantasy, but is it? Well let’s stop wondering and take a look, beginning by exploring the strange and mysterious origins of dragons and lizards in our world…

Arrested Development

When George RR Martin and Parris McBride married in 2011 their wedding gifts from the Game of Thrones producers included one of the three dragon eggs used in the show. Unfortunately, we have no record of how Mr & Mrs GRRM reacted to the egg (‘No, it’s lovely, really, but we did specifically ask for a non-stick wok…’). They may have barely noticed it while they were delighting in the afterglow of their by-all-accounts very lovely nuptials–at which no-one died or anything. But in order to push our narrative forward, let’s imagine that a single question drifted gently through their minds, like smoke from the charred remains of someone Dany’s Drogon has just taken against: ‘Could we ever ride a dragon of our very own?’

In short, could life imitate art?

We begin the Game of Thrones when dragons (and magic) have long been absent from the Seven Kingdoms. According to Westeros’ ancient lore, dragons gradually declined and finally died out, with Maester Pycelle helpfully informing us that their skulls line the throne room of the Red Keep in order of birth. The oldest, biggest skull, that of Balerion, could swallow an ox whole, whereas the last skull of the last dragon was barely able to manage a chicken nugget.

The 150-year-old dragon eggs that Daenerys is given to celebrate her marriage are a valuable curiosity. They are pieces of portable wealth that she is expected to sell at some point to further the cause of her House Targaryen, but nothing more. However, as is often the case in the Seven Kingdoms, all is not quite as it seems. After her husband’s death, Daenerys orders a huge bonfire to burn several objects and people, including a magical ‘wise woman’ (who Daenerys holds responsible for her husband’s demise), herself and her dragon eggs. Remarkably, from this fiery destruction Dany wanders out, singed but very much alive, and we discover that the eggs have hatched into three adorable baby dragons.

Now, intriguingly, eggs that hatch after a long delay are not entirely unheard of in our world. Reptiles in their eggs can experience what is known as ‘arrested embryonic development’. This may suggest a sitcom about an interrelated bunch of socially dysfunctional fetuses, but the term actually refers to an unhatched reptile that essentially presses the ‘pause’ button on its own development and waits until more favourable environmental conditions arrive (e.g. burny-burny-magic-y-fire, in our particular Game of Thrones case). Researchers believe that two main factors have contributed to the evolution of this remarkable process–it’s speculation but, both of these factors might particularly apply to the eggs of our fictional dragons. First, it’s something that happens particularly to eggs with very thick shells, and second, to offspring who don’t receive much in the way of parental care (we can’t imagine Dany’s Drogon, for example, being super-nurturing). However, typically this developmental ‘pause’ only lasts up to about a year in reptiles, compared to the 150-year intermission of the spark of life of our dragons, so perhaps not.

Sex and the Single Dragon:
A Beginner’s Guide

Once you actually have some dragons it might be relatively easy to make more? Obvious sex differences don’t seem to be a big deal in the dragon world as we know it: males generally grow a bit bigger but it’s hard for the human eye to tell dragon-ladies from dragon-gentlemen. Nevertheless, observations of dragon mating have been made by singularly determined biologists, who testify that in the wild, Komodo dragons–the non-flying, non-fire-breathing kind of dragons we have in our world–will seek out chances for sexual reproduction, given the right conditions, and despite their solitary nature.

Let’s travel to the Komodo’s native Indonesia, and watch… When an opportunity for socialising with the other sex comes up–say, while gathered around the messily slaughtered carcasses of their prey–Komodo courtship can occur. It just isn’t going to make for a cute viral YouTube hit anytime soon. The male dragons often kick things off with some bipedal wrestling. Their bout of wrestling can go on for several days and the females are expected to watch and look interested.

All good things must come to an end, however, and eventually a male will win over a female’s favour. After licking her scales attentively for some time, he reveals his hemipene. Which–if you wish to imagine it–is a sort of double-headed penis, for confusingly half (hemi) the fun. He produces it/them from a sort of pouch called a ‘cloaca’, like a magician producing a bunch of flowers from up his sleeve. Ta-da! Or, if you must have the scientific and appropriately serious description, he ‘everts his hemipene’, and impregnates the, by-now, well-licked and possibly ever-so-slightly bored and wrestled-out female dragon. If all goes according to plan, she lays some fertilised eggs, at which point Monsieur Dragon seems quite eager to forget the whole sorry business ever happened and pays no attention whatsoever to the resulting offspring.

Alone, the female dragon will repel potential predators and guard her nest containing the vulnerable eggs as they develop–a task so stressful biologists have speculated it accounts for why female Komodos don’t grow as large as males, and also why they die much younger. Researchers observing the Komodos over a period of eight years found plenty of males leading active lives, fighting and mating into their 60s. The researchers also found, or rather couldn’t find, any females older than 33, (sort of like a Hollywood Rom-Com casting, but with lizards).

Once the eggs have hatched, Ms Komodo leaves them to it and gets back to her life–what’s left of it. The young dragons must toughen up from day one and fend for themselves, usually by hiding up a tree until they’re big enough to avoid being eaten by the other dragons–including their forgetful, hungry Ma and Pa. Ah, Komodo family life!

Virgin Births and Flaming Hot Eggs

But what about Dany’s dragons? Given that they are, as far as we know, the only three dragons in the Known World, can they reproduce and if so how? George RR Martin penning a dragon sex scene? I think we’d all be curious to see that…

Like their distant cousins, the Komodos, might Dany’s dragons be able to reproduce sexually (with each other) or even asexually (alone)? As Chester Zoo keepers discovered in 2006 Komodo dragons are not at all like picky and hard-to-please pandas when it comes to reproduction. The world’s largest living lizards are endangered and down to their last few thousand in the wild. As a result a Komodo in the family way is a particularly welcome and happy sight. But Flora–Chester Zoo’s Komodo dragon–was unusual in that she had become pregnant without any contact with a male dragon, ever, at any point in her life.

When her eggs hatched as all-male baby dragons, it was discovered that the young lizards’ genes were entirely derived from their mother’s own biological makeup, although they were not exact clones of Flora’s. This is known as virgin birth or, as biologists call it, ‘parthenogenesis’ (from the Greek parthen meaning ‘virgin’ and genesis, meaning ‘well-known progressive rock band whose songs, let’s be honest, can drag on a bit’). Flora’s babies caused no end of excitement in the world of sexy dragon studies and beyond, with Scientific American proclaiming that this curious phenomenon may even provide ‘one explanation why Jesus was not a clone of Mary’.

From the get-go, dragons (in fact, many reptiles) are not quite like us when it comes to reproduction. In humans and most other mammals, the X and Y chromosomes determine biological sex at conception, or even before. Females have two of the same kind of sex chromosomes (XX), and males have two distinct sex chromosomes (XY). However, as Jennifer Harrison, lizard specialist explains, Komodo dragons work with a ZW chromosomal system and it’s the females that have the mix (ZW) and the males that have two of the same (Z) chromosomes.

An unfertilised Komodo egg gets a Z or a W chromosome from the mother. Usually the father will supply a Z, making some children ZZ and some ZW: males and females. Perfect. What the virginal zoo Komodos are doing, Harrison points out, is doubling the chromosome in their unfertilised egg. So the unfertilised Z becomes ZZ (male) and the W becomes WW (fails to develop). Parthenogenesis in Komodo dragons always results in male offspring; you never get a mix of ZW asexually. Also, if you’re a lonely female looking to occupy a new ecological niche, producing males is the best strategy ever. You can create males to reproduce with and keep the line going. If that’s an adaptive evolutionary strategy, it’s a brilliant one!

The Maesters of Westeros in their wisdom tell us that dragons are as ‘changeable as flame’–gender fluid even–meaning they can magically choose to become male or female at the drop of a (probably burning) hat. As it turns out, reptiles and dragons in our own world don’t quite have that power, but some do have rather a neat system for deciding on male or female offspring, and Mother of Dragons Daenerys, with her flaming egg-hatching technique, should probably take note…

Even though they are eager to tell you many details about their pregnancy and upcoming childbirth that you haven’t necessarily asked for, many human parents willingly remain in the dark about the sex of their unborn child. ‘We don’t want to know!’ they’ll declare. ‘We want it to be a surprise!’ Of course, it’s best to respect this and change tack to something more neutral. (For example, say, ‘What if it turned out you could give birth to, say, a litter of puppies or something, that would be wonderful, wouldn’t it?’ and then speculate about the pros and cons of bringing various breeds and sizes of dog into the world, whether they join in or not. Probably don’t say, ‘ Yes! A surprise! Have you seen Rosemary’s Baby?’)

But even if dragons could have those kind of pre-birth sex conversations, they almost certainly wouldn’t, because there’s an intriguing temperature scale which determines whether, for instance, a young Australian bearded dragon, native to south-eastern Australia, is male or female.

Scientists have found that some Jacky dragons with ZZ chromosomes (genetically male) come out female. Whether the chromosomal signature ZZ is also directly responsible for a super-long beard, astonishing musical longevity and technical prowess with a guitar, is yet to be determined.

What’s going on? Well, some species of dragon can bypass chromosomes as sex-determiners altogether and instead respond to temperature while still unhatched. With Jacky dragon eggs, when incubated hot hot hot (well, 30–33°C) they hatch as females, and also when the eggs are chilled to 23–26°C female dragons will appear. In the middle, er, lukewarm temperate band, that’s when you hatch male dragons.

But in the curious world of temperature-dependent sex determination, even these rules aren’t fixed. When it comes to the eggs of crocodiles and alligators, males will hatch in hot conditions, while females will emerge from cooler eggs.

Why does this happen? Well, like so much in the world of reptiles and dragons, it’s still deeply mysterious–no-one’s entirely sure. It would be neat if a parent dragon (or even Daenerys Targaryen) could decide the sex of their offspring by incubating the eggs at different temperatures, but we don’t have much evidence this happens. Forty years ago in the journal Nature, Eric Charnov and James Bull put forward the theory that parents will adapt to local environmental conditions depending on how males or females of their species fare. So if you’re a dragon, the chances of having plenty of choice in meeting and reproducing with your scaly soulmate are informed by climate and temperature.

Dragon Flight

So, we know much more about the sex or not-so-sex lives of dragons and lizards of our world, but what about the more unusual, fantastic elements of dragon anatomy? Are huge wings and flaming mouths really beyond the realms of possibility? Is the quintessential dragonyness of dragons really disbarred by nature? Could huge, fire-breathing lizards with an affinity for silvery-violet-platinum blondes soar through the skies of Essex as well as Essos? Have they ever?

On the face of it, this does seem to be an easy one: of course not. Dragons are magic, and magic isn’t real (apart from Dynamo, he is definitely real and magic). But evolution is even more creative than George RR Martin, and just as keen on sex and death. It seems that for every possible dragony trait there may be real-world creatures that could happily perch on Daenerys’s unsinged shoulder.

For instance, our world can totally do the big flying lizard stuff… we’re just about 70 million years too late. Fossilised remains of Quetzalcoatlus northropi–a huge pterosaur with an estimated 10 metre wingspan–have been found in Texas, North America. Thought to be the largest creatures ever to take to the air, and weighing in at up to a quarter of a tonne, these ancient reptiles must have been a terrifying sight to behold, even on land where they would’ve stood tall enough to look a giraffe straight in the eye.

If you happen to visit Crystal Palace Park in south London today, you’ll notice it contains some 19th century pterosaur-esque statues that look, well, kind of dragon-ish. (And if you can visit you definitely should, because antique reptiles in all their peculiar,–‘really? Victorian’s thought they looked like that?’–glory are a wonderful thing, even if, er, Jurassic Park it ain’t.)

Earth’s atmosphere may’ve been slightly denser all those millions of years ago when dinosaurs roamed the Earth, hence it was a bit easier for heavier creatures to fly about. That’s one theory. But both our fictional dragons and the factual 70-million-year-old pterosaurs have a similar problem: how exactly did they (or even could they) get off the ground? Could they really fly higher than an eagle? And, if so, what of the wind beneath their wings?

Pterosaurs have a certain amount in common with birds. For instance, their durable hollow bones are strengthened by internal struts. Pterosaur skeletons are tough yet light–one of the most robust things to ever evolve. If this extraordinary beast really flew, it hefted its bulk aloft and through the air with bones whose walls were as thin as playing cards. It seems so unlikely, and yet the latest thinking is that these lizards flew thousands of kilometres, reaching speeds of up to 120 kilometres an hour, then gliding for 90 kilometres an hour, far above the dinosaurs that roamed the Earth below them.

But… how? Well, for a start they definitely couldn’t just ‘take off’, like birds do. In fact, some believe they couldn’t have taken off at all. Japan’s Katsufumi Sato of the University of Tokyo travelled to the nature reserves of the remote Crozet Islands in the southern Indian Ocean, close to Antartica, to study the largest birds alive today. Sato believed the upshot of his study showed that any creature weighing over 40 kilos–twice the weight of our current biggest flying bird, the wandering albatross–simply couldn’t keep flapping enough to stay aloft, particularly if it hit any kind of bad weather. Hmm.

But Sato’s conclusions about weight, flapping and flight are disputed by those who definitely believe pterosaurs could fly, who believe that pterosaurs could, pretty much, touch the sky. And they’ve been thinking about it every night and day (with apologies here to R Kelly). As well as theories about there being a denser atmosphere on Earth back then, differences in anatomy and physiology need to be taken into account too. Experts believe pterosaurs probably wouldn’t ‘flap’ much, they’d soar on thermal currents, like eagles and other large birds we see today.

We cannot ignore the schism that runs through the realm of pterosaur experts with regards to how this flight may have happened. The camp is divided between the ‘they ran and jumped off a cliff ’ theorists, and their fierce adversaries, the ‘they did this sort of straight-up jumping, thrust-y thing’ believers. At the moment, the thrust-y corner are certainly making the most convincing case. And despite universal agreement that real pterosaurs didn’t really look all that much like dragons, if you watch Game of Thrones carefully, next time one of Dany’s dragons takes flight, you may well see it doing this very same thrusting skywards move I have knowledgeably dubbed ‘the straight jump-up’, just like one of their real-world bygone cousins. (Though they are also able to soar off cliffs too. That’s the privelege of being magic.)

This isn’t accidental. The special effects team behind the TV show have talked extensively about how, even though they’re creating a fantasy show, they want the audience to believe in and feel the organic ‘reality’ of the unreal dragons. Joe Bauer, the Emmy-award winning visual effects supervisor for the show, reveals that he and the crew have extensively studied and modelled their dragons’ behaviour on real-world creatures–birds, bats, prehistoric creatures and reptiles–including, of course, our friends the Komodo dragons. For instance, they spent a considerable amount of time working out when the young dragons in the early series would start to develop a ‘threat pose’ and what exactly that pose would be like. Making the fantasy reality wasn’t easy. ‘We started with a lot of George’s ideas about dragons,’ series creator DB Weiss revealed, ‘because George has definitely spent more time thinking about dragons than anyone I’ve ever met.’

It’s possible though that paleontologist and biomechanist Dr Michael Habib from the University of Southern California could give George RR Martin a run for his money. Dr Habib is more than a little obsessed with the anatomy of giant flying reptiles. He worked out that if pterosaurs were trying to fly by ‘gliding’ off like a flying squirrel, given how they were built, take-off would involve them dislocating their hips every time they took flight, thus dealing a major blow to the ‘they flew from cliffs’ camp. Pterosaurs also wouldn’t have been great at moving about on the ground. In fact, they would probably have moved like a bat–that is, a bit weirdly. Go look up a video of a bat walking along the floor–odd, right? But again kind of reminiscent of how we see Dany’s dragon Drogon move and sometimes take flight on Game of Thrones.

How do we know this? Well, we’re millions of years too late to observe pterosaurs in their natural state, but we can feed the information that we do know about them–from fossil evidence of size, wingspan, bone density, super-strong legs and so forth–into a computer, and see what’s possible… Just such a computer model by Dr Habib showed that pterosaurs were only ever a powerful hop away from flying. They could then spread out their wings and, with a strong downstroke, generate the lift needed to take flight. Vampire bats take flight in the same way. Take-off would be a very important consideration for dragon rider Dany. We’ve seen her dragons run-then-glide to take wing. The more plausible jumpstart for a creature of this size would involve the great hope of House Targaryen really having to hang on to her Drogon for dear life.

Fire-breathing

Fire-breathing is less easy. It’s not really something that occurs in nature, but we do have a much smaller equivalent, though it works, kind of, in reverse. The bombardier beetle sprays a mix of hot, noxious chemicals from its abdomen when it’s feeling threatened. It stores two compounds (hydrogen peroxide and hydroquinone) in its body, mixing them together with water and catalytic enzymes in a separate internal chamber to create an unholy hot, gassy, explosive spray.

But if tiny creatures farting bleach doesn’t quite capture the dragon-y grandeur of ancient Valyria, what are our other options? One might be the, er, power of actual farts. As some readers will know, many animals produce an abundance of flammable flatus. At the risk of over-egging the potential of colonic gas, if you couple it with a spark, perhaps via a pulse of electricity (hat tip, the electric eel who can generate 600 volts plus) you’re definitely getting warmer in your hunt for dragon breath.

I’m truly sorry to go there but human wind contains methane, hydrogen sulphide and hydrogen, and can be relied upon to explode enthusiastically with the addition of two friends, three bottles of hard cider and a cigarette lighter. But even with some sophisticated biological rerouting so that it’s coming out of the right end, it’s clear that humans, like most other animals with just the one stomach, can’t manufacture gas in the quantities necessary to burn down the towers of Harrenhal.

This is an area where the ruminants, with their multiple stomachs full of methane-creating bacteria, have definite advantages. A cow can produce between 250 and 500 litres of highly flammable methane a day and, as it happens, most of this is belched out. In 2013 it was reported that a build-up of methane from a particularly afflicted dairy herd, coupled with an accidental spark of static electricity, ‘nearly blew the roof off [the] barn’ in Rasdorf, Germany (though doubt has subsequently been cast on the ability of even the windiest cow herd to achieve this through gas alone).

So we’re not exactly talking Balerion the Black Dread here, but it may be that one day, who knows? After a lot of genetic tinkering, a Danearys Targaryen in our world will be able to ride valiantly into battle to claim what’s hers on the back of a genetically modified fire-breathing heifer…

But where does the idea of fire-breathing come from? It’s often supposed that our early ancestors’ ideas of dragons come from finding the fossilised remains of dinosaurs, and quite reasonably imagining the terrifying flesh that covered these great bones, in all its fierce glory. Countries that are rich in dinosaur finds, such as China, England and Wales tend to also have a rich mythology of dragons. But that still leaves us with a puzzle. Given that we simply don’t find fire-breathing in nature, where does the idea of dragon fire actually come from?

A number of intriguing and wildly different theories have been put forward over the years.

The first and most obvious one to rule out: ‘It looks a bit like they are breathing fire…’ Komodo dragons, for instance, flick out their forked pinkish tongues, which… looks a bit like a flame? If you squint? Could the story have got started because our forebears saw dragons sticking out their tongues, and embellished? This is certainly possible, but it makes our ancestors seem a bit like easily frightened myopic dummies. So maybe not.

Anthropologist David E Jones puts forward a meatier and more intriguing theory about the origins of dragons in his book An Instinct For Dragons. Interestingly, he posits that our terror of these beasts is far older than human history itself. He believes that a fear of certain predators is passed down through evolution. As we modern human sophisticates update our Facebook status and pick up a Starbucks, something from our origins as scurrying, hairy, tree-dwelling creatures in a hostile world of predators still stirs within us. A faint hint of leathery-skin-slither, just heard as we fall asleep; a half-remembered guttural roar as we brunch. It’s there, lurking.

Jones notes that African vervet monkeys get distinctly rattled about three particular kinds of predator. They give out a specific warning cry when they spot either serpents, big cats or birds of prey. So, what do you get if you cross a snake and a lion with an eagle? A dragon! Dr Jones answers, enthusiastically, in his (very serious) book. The mental image of a winged-roaring-scaly dragon therefore becomes a life-saver of a mnemonic for things that you (and the vervet monkey) really, really want to avoid being grabbed by. His argument is that the fear of dragons has somehow become hardwired into our imagination by evolution, passed down through a million and more generations and hence we still find it easy to conjure up our own frightening ‘brain dragons’.

For many millennia, our mammalian ancestors lived in a threatening world where every day they were presented with potentially dangerous situations that required them to make a single basic choice: fight or flight? These days, of course, when we modern humans need to make even the most pressing decisions, there are always more options–such as fight, flight, or kick back for a bit and procrastinate by checking Facebook and those wedding pics from that girl your brother used to work with, while sadly regretting your own life choices… But it was different back then in our prehistoric days. Those potential ancestors of ours who didn’t ‘fly’ in fear of the unholy trinity of lion-eagle-snake were less likely to live long enough to pass on their genes to their descendants; one of the aforementioned predators would eat them before they had a chance to breed. Hence the cautious and fearful creatures would live to shriek and run away (and have similarly nervy offspring) another day. Survival of the scarediest.

Of course, most of us live very different lives motivated by very different fears today. (At least I hope for your sake you aren’t reading this to kill time while keeping an eye out for hungry lions; for goodness sake concentrate if you are.) However, even though it’s not necessary, our bodies hang on to things just in case, kind of nostalgically, from earlier stages of our evolution. Just look at our coccyx, a tail bone from back when we all had tails. or male nipples, from back when men did all the breast-feeding. (That last one is definitely true.) Of course, there’s no way to know for certain if this dragon-fear theory is correct. But I must make a mental note to never show vervet monkeys that Disney animated Robin Hood, where all the villains we know and love from Sherwood Forest are played by lions, pythons and vultures. It’s sad to know they will never be able to relax and enjoy Friar Tuck heartily portrayed with gusto by a badger.

So how does fire-breathing blast across this warning from our furry tree-dwelling past? As Jones notes, even when fictional dragons don’t actually breathe fire, their breath is always described as noxious–poisonous, smoky and hot. While not actually fiery, the experience of being suddenly, unexpectedly close to the open mouth of a big cat predator, its hot breath steaming in the cold morning air, reeking of dangerously fresh meat, would have truly terrified our vegan monkey forebears. But… well, this doesn’t seem to quite add up. I’m a vegetarian, and I’ve stood at close quarters having a conversation with someone who’s recently wolfed down a Big Mac, and while it’s really not great I’ve never yet reached for a fire extinguisher. While Dr Jones’s theory is intriguing and in some ways highly persuasive, it just doesn’t fully answer our question about real fire-breathing…

So… what if it was real fire? What if people believed in frightening dragons breathing fire because they witnessed the blast of fiery breath with their own eyes? Matt Kaplan, in his book Science of Monsters, explains that this is what could have happened. Dragons are often imagined to live in caves, or under the Earth, and be guarding treasure. When our forefathers ventured underground, to mine for resources or even to raid ancient burial mounds for valuable relics, they would certainly have encountered natural gas–specifically methane, the highly explosive chemical compound that ignites ferociously with the introduction of the flaming candles these underground explorers would’ve carried to make their way in the dark. Kaplan recounts a story told in the Middle Ages about the 5th century warlord and leader of the Britons, Vortigern.

A castle in Wales kept collapsing, so Vortigern asked his advisors what he could do about it. They recommended finding a boy with no father and sacrificing him so that his blood could appease whatever was causing this construction headache (thus setting the scene for the most grisly episode of Grand Designs ever). The ‘bastard boy’ they found was brought before King Vortigern, but he told a different story of the castle–that there were dragons fighting under it and hence to rebuild it somewhere nearby. The king wisely spared the boy’s blood, took his advice and they never looked back; and the boy grew up to be Merlin, the greatest magician in all the land. Though, as Kaplan points out, the area in Wales where this nightmare construction is said to have taken place is rich in coal deposits, so there could well have been issues with the king’s palace and natural gas. Maybe Merlin was not just a great magician, but also a canny geologist on the side?

This idea of underground gas explosions giving rise to the likes of Drogon may seem a little far fetched, but when you combine this with the idea of bones of dragon-dinosaurs emerging from underground, perhaps even after a dramatic landslip, it’s certainly a nice neat theory.

CHAPTER 1

HERE BE DRAGONS

Arrested Development

Sex and the Single Dragon: A Beginner’s Guide

Virgin Births and Flaming Hot Eggs

Dragon Flight

Fire-breathing

Capturing the Targaryens: the Blood of the Dragon

Sex and the Single Dragon:
A Beginner’s Guide