Aerea Targaryen

Aerea Targaryen was born at Casterly Rock in the year 42, the elder of twin girls born to Aegon and Rhaena, both children of King Aenys I and Queen Alyssa Velaryon. Her parents had taken refuge there under the protection of Lord Lyman Lannister, fleeing the Poor Fellows' uprising. She was barely born when the High Septon denounced her from the Starry Sept as the cursed fruit of a marriage between brother and sister.

When Aenys died, the crown should have passed to Aegon, but his uncle Maegor seized it instead. Aegon tried to take it back by force in 43 and died for it, which made Aerea, by right, heir to a throne she would never sit on — she was barely a year old. Fearing for her daughters' lives, Rhaena dyed their hair, changed their names, and scattered them among families who had no idea who they really were; she made sure not even she knew where they had gone, so torture could not make her tell.

The plan was not enough. Queen Tyanna of Pentos found the girls and brought them to the Red Keep, and when Rhaena was summoned to court in 47 to marry Maegor himself, Tyanna used Aerea and her sister as leverage to make sure the wedding went ahead.

After the wedding, Maegor named Aerea his heir until one of his wives gave him a son, disinheriting his other nephew, Jaehaerys, in the process. It did not last: in 48, Rhaena fled by night with Aerea on Dreamfyre's back, taking the sword Dark Sister with her, to join her brother.

When Maegor died and Jaehaerys took the Iron Throne, some argued that Aerea's claim, as her father's eldest daughter, outweighed his. But Rhaena herself, seeing her daughter too young and too timid to rule, backed Jaehaerys instead.

Late that year Aerea traveled to Oldtown for her uncle's coronation, and came back a different girl: the fearful child had given way to a bold, sharp-tongued one, while her twin Rhaella, left behind at the Starry Sept, changed in the opposite direction. No one ever proved the girls had been switched, and no one pressed the question too hard, since the king's heir was still, on paper, Aerea.

In 50, Lord Rogar Baratheon proposed removing Jaehaerys before he came of age and crowning Aerea instead; the regent queen, Alyssa Velaryon, dismissed him as Hand for it. That same night, Rogar's brother Ser Ronnal Baratheon forced his way into the girl's chambers to carry her off to Storm's End, but arrived too late — she had already been smuggled out disguised as a common girl, her hair dyed, and Aerea spent a stretch working in a stable by the King's Gate, a time she would later call the happiest of her life.

In 51, Rhaena returned to court for her brother's second wedding, this time to Alysanne, and demanded two things: Dragonstone as her own seat, and the return of the daughter she had not seen since the coronation in Oldtown. Jaehaerys granted both.

Aerea moved with her mother to Dragonstone and hated it from the start. She had loved the court at King's Landing and found nothing like it there — no girls her own age, none of the attention she had grown used to as the king's heir. Mother and daughter barely knew each other: Aerea did not remember Rhaena from her years in hiding, and Rhaena knew nothing of the girl she had become. The one person on the island who paid her any mind was Lady Elissa Farman, as unhappy there as Aerea was and forever talking of the western seas.

Rhaena introduced her to the island's dragons and encouraged her to claim one of her own, and for a while they were the only company Aerea welcomed.

In 53 she stopped being the king's heir when Alysanne gave birth to Princess Daenerys, and took it badly. She skipped prayers, lessons, and meals, and greeted her mother's court with names like "Ser Stupid" and "Lady Farthead." The following year Elissa Farman left the island for good; Aerea begged to go with her and was refused. Not long after, when Elissa's husband, Ser Androw Farman, poisoned Queen Rhaena's friends, Queen Alysanne visited Dragonstone to comfort her sister and niece, and Aerea met her with fury — she resented Daenerys for taking her place as heir, and her own mother for never doing for her what Rhaena had once done for Alysanne as a child. She begged to be taken back to the capital; when Alysanne raised it with Rhaena, the answer was no, and that night mother and daughter had a fight Aerea would not forget.

Late in 54, Aerea vanished from Dragonstone on Balerion, the dragon that had made its lair there since the death of its previous rider, King Maegor. Rhaena, certain she had flown back to King's Landing, reached the capital and found no sign of her. Ravens went out to every lord in the Seven Kingdoms, and later to the crown's informants across Essos, with nothing to show for it.

Rhaena searched the realm herself on Dreamfyre. At court, Jaehaerys began to fear Balerion had thrown her somewhere; Septon Barth thought otherwise — a riderless dragon, he argued, would have flown home on its own, and since Balerion had not been sighted anywhere in Westeros, he guessed the two had gone east.

Aerea and Balerion were missing for more than a year. They returned to King's Landing on the thirteenth day of the fourth moon of 56, the princess clinging to the dragon's back, barely recognizable — thin to the bone, dressed in rags, her hair matted, her eyes bloodshot. She managed to say "I never..." before collapsing. Ser Lucamore Strong of the Kingsguard carried her to Grand Maester Benifer.

Benifer treated Aerea in her own chambers, with Septon Barth already summoned for the last rites; he let no one else in, not even the king and queen. He gave her milk of the poppy and lowered her fever with a tub of ice. Nothing worked. She had arrived that morning; she died that same evening, after dusk, and was burned at dawn the next day.

It was announced that she had died of fever, which was only half true. Ser Lucamore Strong said he could feel the heat through his armor, and that something was moving inside her, until the king ordered him to stop talking about it. Barth, in his private papers, described her final state: skin gone black, body reduced to almost nothing but bone, smoke coming from her mouth and nose, her eyes cooking in her skull until they burst. When they lowered her into the ice, something shifted beneath her skin and went still with the cold.

No one could say what it had been. Barth wondered whether it was not Aerea who had chosen where to fly, but Balerion, returning to a home where cursed creatures out of fallen Valyria might still linger. A raven reached Rhaena in Estermont too late for the funeral. King Jaehaerys offered to bury the ashes on Dragonstone with the rest of the Targaryens; Rhaena refused, since her daughter had hated the island and always wanted to fly, and scattered them to the wind from Dreamfyre's back instead.

After her death, Balerion went to live under guard in the Dragonpit. Barth began the studies that would become his treatise on dragons, and the king decreed that no ship known to have touched the Valyrian isles or crossed the Smoking Sea could dock anywhere in the realm, on pain of death for any Westerosi who set foot in that land.