King’s Landing was always going to burn. Not because of dragons, not because of Daenerys, not even because of the Mad King before her but because it was built the way Sodom was built: on arrogance, on cruelty, on the quiet agreement of an entire civilization to look the other way while the powerful did whatever they pleased. The storming of the Dragonpit and the burning of King’s Landing are my two favorite moments in all of Game of Thrones mythology both in George R.R. Martin’s books and in the series and the reason is the same for both: they are not just plot events. They are biblical reckonings.

In Genesis, God does not destroy Sodom and Gomorrah because of one sin committed on one day. He destroys them because the corruption had become so total, so woven into the fabric of the cities themselves, that there was nothing left worth saving. The cities had to be unmade. What falls from the sky is not punishment in the small sense it is erasure. And when you watch King’s Landing burn under Daenerys’s dragon, or when you read about the smallfolk tearing the Dragonpit apart with their bare hands, that is exactly what you are witnessing. Not a battle. An erasure.

The Storming of the Dragonpit, which takes place during the Dance of the Dragons in Martin’s Fire & Blood, is the more forgotten of the two moments and that is exactly why it hits harder. The smallfolk, starving and terrified and abandoned by every lord and king who was supposed to protect them, pour into the streets of King’s Landing and do something unthinkable: they kill dragons. These are the most powerful creatures in the known world, beings that the nobility has used for generations as weapons of control and symbols of divine right. And the people of the city tear them apart with torches and pitchforks and sheer, desperate fury. It is not heroic. It is not clean. People die horribly on both sides. But it is righteous in the oldest, most primal sense of that word the sense that Sodom and Gomorrah understood too late. When a city treats its people as expendable long enough, the city eventually pays for it. Not through politics. Not through war. Through fire.

Then there is the burning itself the one Daenerys brings in the show’s final season, and the one that Martin has been building toward across five books. What makes this scene so mythologically powerful is that Daenerys is not wrong about King’s Landing in the way we want her to be. She is not burning an innocent city. She is burning a city that has watched slavery, executed her allies, cheered at executions, and bent the knee to whoever terrified it most. She is burning a city that burned others first, many times over. And yet and this is the Sodom and Gomorrah part the innocent burn too. The children burn. The people who had no power burn alongside the ones who did. That is not a flaw in the storytelling. That is the point. That is what the Bible was saying too. When judgment comes at that scale, it does not sort carefully. It does not distinguish between the guard who tortured prisoners and the woman who sold bread in the market below. Fire does not negotiate.

What connects both moments so deeply, in the books and on screen, is that they are not about dragons or warfare or political power. They are about what happens to places to civilizations that have been wrong for too long. King’s Landing is a city that exists because of conquest and maintains itself through fear. The Targaryens built their throne by melting kings alive. The Lannisters held it through gold and cruelty. The smallfolk suffered through all of it, generation after generation, holding their tongues because the alternative was worse. Sodom was not destroyed for one crime. It was destroyed for a culture of cruelty that had become so normalized that the people inside it could no longer even see it.

Both of these scenes understand that. They understand that the fire is not coming from outside the story it was always inside it, building, the way it builds in every city that mistakes power for righteousness and obedience for peace.

King’s Landing was always going to burn. Sodom was always going to burn. The only question, in both cases, was how long the sky would hold.