ASOIAF: What brought dragons back to life in A Song of Ice and Fire?

That's the mystery isn't it? How do you hatch a dragon? People had been trying for decades and decades and all anybody had to show for it was a huge pile of ashes, some charred remains and a gaggle of stories regarding the "Mad Targaryens.".

Yet the dragons hatched SOMEHOW.

A Theory:

Now some people simply think it was time. Magic is cyclical and they were headed for a cyclical revival. This is a very popular theory on Quora, especially, though I've seen it on other sites.

This doesn't hold a lot of water for me:  the dragons certainly hadn't died because of a cyclical turn in magic. They were killed, one way or another.

Killed. They didn't 'fade away' as magic leaked out of the world.

And anyway, magic had been around in one form or another for years before the dragons hatched or wights started turning up at the Night's Watch's doorstep: wargs, Faceless Men, ShadowBinders, visions in fire, thousand year old Undying in Qarth, freaky doings by Bloodraven, and so on. And as far as anybody knows, the Others had been taking Craster's children for two generations.

No. The "cyclical magic"  theory has way too many holes in it for me.

Another theory:

There was an incredible, one-in-a-million chance  occurrence of events that led to it.Some of the events or actions may have been irrelevant, some not.

But let's review those events.

Here's what happened:

1. Dany agreed that the maegi Mirri Maaz Duur revive the dying Khal Drogo with some fearsome blood magic that MMD warned her would come at a dreadful price.
2. Drogo's stallion was sacrificed to this end, his throat slit and captured..
3. MMD enacted some magic rituals, conjuring up weirdnesses out of nowhere:  Strange shadowy figures, you know: Men, wolves, lions, and strange beasts.
4. All sorts of shit proceeded to hit the fan: bloodriders were fighting and killing each other;  Mormont killed somebody; Mormont's ear was sliced off.
   
   It was a damned bloodbath! And it was almost as if the weird shadow magic in the tent was causing it all.
5. Dany, feeling birth pangs, sent  Jorah Mormont into the tent where all the weirdnesses was going on; and even went in herself.
6. Dany blacked out and had a LOT of weird dreams about 'waking the dragon''.
7. She woke up to find that her unborn baby, who had been strongly kicking in her womb for days, was a stillborn, deformed monster, filled with grave worms, scaly-skinned with a tail and the stubs of wings--and had been "dead for years."
8. In a sort of trance, she bathed vegetable Drogo and then smothered him to death.
9. She built a funeral pyre in a traditional Dothraki way and put him on it, tying Mirri Maaz Duur to the woodpile in the process.
10. She sacrificed another horse and put it on the pyre.
11. She placed dragon eggs around and on Drogo.
12. She lit the fire.
13. Mirri Maaz Duur started chanting and ululating in a strange tongue before finally breaking down into screams of pain.
14. Dany walked into the fire.

When the smoke cleared, she was unburnt,(except for her hair) and there were three dragons. And a red comet in the sky.

Now somewhere in these actions, there is a recipe for waking dragons. I don't know exactly what it is. Nobody does.

If you want my belief, it is the fact that both Rhaego(the unborn child) and Drogo died together; and maybe Dany herself was a sacrifice of sorts. Maybe even Viserys' death was hovering around things waiting for a ritual to unleash it's power. (This is pure speculation, of course: I want to emphasize that dragon hatching is a MAJOR mystery in Westeros.

Here's a relevant passage from A Dance with Dragons:

Burning dead children had ceased to trouble Jon Snow; live ones were another matter. Two kings to wake the dragon. The father first and then the son, so both die kings. The words had been murmured by one of the queen's men as Maester Aemon had cleaned his wounds. Jon had tried to dismiss them as his fever talking. Aemon had demurred. "There is power in a king's blood," the old maester had warned....

--JON 1, A Dance with Dragons

Who died first? Drogo or Rhaego? Rhaego's body died before Drogo's. But possibly Drogo's spirit died first.

There are other questions. 

• Was Mirri Maaz Duur instrumental in the dragons birth?
• Were her words a long-forgotten incantation meant to raise dragons? Or would any random sacrifice-by-fire be sufficient?
• What about the Dothraki who died on the night of the ritual?
• And what about Dany's firewalk? Did she sacrifice her own self?
• Dany doesn't seem in her right mind. Is she mad and just incredibly lucky?
• Or is she guided by something: some weird dragon-waking instinct; or someone planting suggestions in her mind while she dreamt(and if so who? Bloodraven? Marwyn the Mage, who had worked with Mirri Maaz Duur?
  
  It's said that the glass candles ignited at the birth of the dragons, but we've seen Bloodraven insert himself into dreams before this(in Bran's chapter, certainly, possibly in others', as well.)

I can't answer these questions for sure. No one can. Maybe even George RR Martin doesn't know. It is mysterious enough that we can call it a miracle.

Written April 29th 2016