Don't Get Attached: Here's How Many Dragons Survive Dance Of The Dragons
House of the Dragon will tell us the story of the civil war that tore apart the Targaryen dynasty: the Dance of Dragons, with the first season being a build-up towards the conflict. So, naturally, it features quite a lot of dragons, and is going to feature even more.
At the beginning of House of the Dragon, at least going by George Martin 's book universe, 20 dragons are alive and well. Half a dozen play substantial roles in the show so far, with a couple more appearing in the background. Other dragons will certainly be introduced.
However, as anyone who watched Game of Thrones, to which House of the Dragon is a prequel, knows, the dragons are going to go extinct between the two series, so that hatching of three new dragons from surviving eggs will become a momentous event, important to the whole world. And it is no spoiler at all to say that most of Targaryen dragons, alongside with their riders, are going to be killed during the upcoming civil war.
By the end of that horrific bloodbath, only four dragons survived: Sheepstealer and Cannibal, two of the wild dragons of Dragonstone at the onset of the Dance, alongside with Silverwing and Morning.
Sheepstealer and Cannibal have vanished at the end, Silverwing was left without a rider and lived on a lake island until perishing soon after. And Morning, who hatched during the Dance, died before even reaching dragon adulthood.
With every known dragon missing, or perishing early, despite the fact that dragons of Valyria normally lived for hundreds of years, and quite a few of them had seen many generations of dragonriders come and go, another, even worse problem struck the bloodied dynasty.
Though there were remaining dragon eggs (as we, again, know from Game of Thrones), these eggs have stopped hatching. Only one further dragon managed to hatch after the Dance of Dragons, 22 years since it ended, and that dragon was a sickly, deformed creature which died very quickly as well. That marked the official extinction of dragons in Westeros, and earned King Aegon III, who ruled at the time, the nickname of "Dragonbane".
There is a number of theories among the fans trying to figure out true reasons for that final dragon dieout. Martin is quite unlikely to clarify things. But all the survivors who disappeared to nowhere or died suspicious early deaths have yet to appear on screen. As for the dragons who participated in events of House of the Dragon so far, well, you better not get too attached to them.