Baelon Targaryen

Baelon was born in King's Landing in 57 AC, the third son and fourth child of King Jaehaerys I and Queen Alysanne Targaryen. Two days after his birth, white ravens arrived from the Citadel proclaiming the start of spring, earning him the name Prince of Spring; his given name honored an old lord of Dragonstone from before the Conquest. As an infant he nursed with such force that his wet nurses marveled, and he soon grew inseparable from his elder brother Aemon, sparring with him every morning before a crowd of onlookers.

Unlike Aemon, Baelon never feared dragons: as a small child he struck Balerion on the snout inside the Dragonpit, a bold act that earned him the name Baelon the Brave from a Kingsguard knight. When his sister Alyssa was born in 60 AC, the prince came to feel for her the same devotion he felt for Aemon, and by 68 AC their parents were already speaking of marrying them to each other.

In 73 AC he entered a tourney at Old Oak in disguise as the Silver Fool, defeated several knights, and was unmasked and knighted on the spot by Ser Rickard Redwyne. Back in King's Landing he claimed Vhagar, the she-dragon left riderless since the death of the dowager queen Visenya Targaryen, to the astonishment of Aemon and his own dragon Caraxes.

At eighteen, in 75 AC, Baelon married his sister Alyssa; the bawdy noise of the bedding that followed their wedding feast was still being joked about days later, said to have carried as far as Darkdell. The marriage was a happy one, the prince dividing his time between flying with his wife on Vhagar and Meleys and their own chambers. Two years later their first son, Prince Viserys, was born, and a second son, Daemon, followed in 81 AC.

In 83 AC Baelon fought beside his father and his brother Aemon in the Fourth Dornish War, when their dragons and Vermithor burned Prince Morion Martell's fleet and ended the war within a single day. Back in the capital he had further cause to celebrate: Alyssa was again with child, and this time, he confided, he hoped for a daughter.

The birth in 84 AC was long and difficult, and though Prince Aegon was born, Alyssa never fully recovered and died that same year; Aegon followed her half a year later, before his first nameday. Baelon turned to his sons Viserys and Daemon and kept his wife's memory alive for the rest of his life.

Two years after Alyssa's death, his sister Viserra slipped past the guards into Baelon's chamber one night; he found her drunk and naked and sent her away. When she died in 87 AC riding drunk on the eve of her wedding to Lord Theomore Manderly, the prince wondered for a long time whether a gentler word that night might have kept her alive.

In 92 AC Aemon died on Tarth during a campaign against Myrish pirates, a crossbow bolt through his throat. Grief-maddened, Baelon fell on the island astride Vhagar and burned every Myrish ship before joining the slaughter sword in hand with Dark Sister; he returned to King's Landing with his brother's body to a hero's welcome from the smallfolk, though before his mother he broke down weeping for what he had lost.

After Aemon's death, Jaehaerys named Baelon heir to the Iron Throne and Prince of Dragonstone, passing over his niece Rhaenys; the choice, resting on the smallfolk's love for Baelon and the precedent of the king's own succession over his elder sister, angered Rhaenys, her husband Lord Corlys Velaryon, and her mother, Lady Jocelyn Baratheon, and opened two years of strife between the monarchs.

In 97 AC Baelon became a grandfather when Aemma Arryn, his niece and daughter-in-law, gave birth to Princess Rhaenyra, the only grandchild he would live to know. Two years later, after Ser Ryam Redwyne's poor performance in the role, the king named him Hand of the King; without a maester's training, the prince proved a shrewd judge of men and surrounded himself with loyal counselors, so much so that people spoke of a future reign under him as prosperous as his father's.

In 101 AC, while hunting in the Kingswood, Baelon felt a stab of pain in his side that worsened on his return to the Red Keep: his belly swelled and hardened with pain so severe it left him bedridden. The newly arrived Grand Maester Runciter managed to bring down his fever and ease him with milk of the poppy, but the sickness ran its course, and after five days the prince died in his chambers in the Tower of the Hand with his father at his side; on opening the body, Runciter judged that something had ruptured within him.

That same year, Jaehaerys called a Great Council at Harrenhal to settle the succession anew, and it chose Baelon's elder son Viserys as heir. Through the lines of Viserys and Daemon descend all the Targaryens who would come after, along with the houses that married into them.