Daenerys Targaryen

Daenerys was born on Dragonstone in the year 284, in the middle of a storm, while her mother Rhaella lay dying after the birth. Her father Aerys II was already dead — the war that ended Targaryen rule over the Iron Throne had closed months before. She was left in the care of her brother Viserys, older than her and the only family she had left.

Ser Willem Darry took the two children off the island and carried them to Braavos, beyond the reach of the new king, Robert Baratheon. They spent quiet years there in a house with a red door, until the old knight's death left them without a protector or a fixed home.

A wandering life through the Free Cities followed. Viserys styled himself king in exile and dragged his sister from door to door looking for armies no one would give him; humiliation hardened his temper into something violent, and he took it out on her. Daenerys learned to fear him and to keep quiet, dreaming not of Westeros but of the house with the red door she barely remembered.

Their fortune turned when magister Illyrio Mopatis took them in at his mansion in Pentos and promised to back Viserys's cause.

In Pentos, Viserys arranged her marriage to Khal Drogo, lord of a Dothraki khalasar, in exchange for warriors to reclaim his father's throne. Daenerys married with no choice but to obey. At the wedding, an exiled Westerosi knight, Ser Jorah Mormont, swore his sword to her service and would in time become her most loyal shadow. Illyrio gave her three petrified dragon eggs; Drogo, a silver mare.

Her early fear of her husband and his people gave way over time. Drogo led her toward the heart of the Dothraki Sea, to Vaes Dothrak, and by then Daenerys, pregnant, was barely fourteen. The crones of the dosh khaleen declared that the son she carried would be the rider who united every horse people under one sky.

Viserys, desperate for help Drogo never intended to give, broke the city's sacred laws by drawing a blade. Drogo punished him by pouring a cauldron of molten gold over his head. With her brother dead, Daenerys was left the last known Targaryen, and after an attempt on her life, the khalasar rode west with a promise to conquer the Seven Kingdoms.

During the sack of a Lhazareen village, Daenerys stopped the rape of captive women and took several under her protection, among them the priestess Mirri Maz Duur, whom she asked to heal a wound of Drogo's. The cure hid a betrayal: the blood magic left Drogo an empty shell and killed the son she was carrying. She ended her husband's life herself, and that same night walked into his funeral pyre with the three dragon eggs. At dawn she emerged unburned, with three newborn dragons around her: Drogon, Rhaegal, and Viserion.

Daenerys followed a red comet east, crossing the Red Waste with her diminished khalasar to a ruined city she renamed Vaes Tolorro. There they rested and recovered before scouts returned with envoys from Qarth, the great walled city behind its gates of bronze.

In Qarth she learned that King Robert Baratheon was dead and that war had already broken out in Westeros. The city's merchants, fascinated by her dragons but uninterested in her cause, courted her without committing to anything; only the warlock Pyat Pree talked her into visiting the Undying at their tower.

The visions the Undying showed her turned out to be a trap; she escaped with Drogon's help, the dragon setting the tower ablaze on the way out. Soon after she survived a poisoning attempt, saved by two strangers who turned out to be sent by Illyrio: the eunuch Strong Belwas and an old Westerosi man calling himself Arstan Whitebeard. With the ships Illyrio had sent to bring her to Pentos, Daenerys set her own course instead — toward Slaver's Bay.

Ser Jorah convinced Daenerys to detour to Astapor, one of the great slaving cities on the bay, to buy an army of Unsullied before returning to Pentos. There, uneasy about trading in human lives, she traded her ships, her possessions, and Drogon for eight thousand soldiers. The city's masters threw in a slave girl, Missandei, as an interpreter; Daenerys freed her at once, and the girl chose to stay at her side.

With the Unsullied under her command, she turned her dragons loose on the masters of Astapor and took the city. She freed every slave in it, earning the name Breaker of Chains, and left a council to govern before marching on Yunkai.

At Yunkai she treated with the captains of the sellsword companies hired by the city. Daario Naharis, commander of the Stormcrows, killed his own officers and threw his company in with her; the Second Sons she got drunk on gifted wine and struck at night. Yunkai's army, with no allies left, couldn't hold, and the city surrendered.

On the road to Meereen, a former mercenary tried to kill her; she was saved by Arstan Whitebeard, who turned out to be Ser Barristan Selmy, a former knight of her father's Kingsguard. Around the same time she learned that Ser Jorah had been reporting on her to Varys in King's Landing since the day they met. She forgave Barristan; Jorah, who wouldn't admit any wrongdoing, she banished from her service, though part of her wanted to forgive him too.

Meereen fell after she sent both knights through the sewers to free the slaves from within, a mission she barely expected either to survive. With the city won, and with Astapor and Yunkai both failing to hold the peace she'd left behind, Daenerys decided to stay and govern Slaver's Bay before setting her sights on Westeros.

Word reached Westeros of a young queen with dragons, while in Meereen Daenerys found her rule harder and harder to hold together. Her dragons, grown large and wild, were hunting whole flocks; when a shepherd brought her his small daughter's bones as proof of an attack, she had Viserion and Rhaegal chained in the catacombs. Drogon, though, escaped and vanished.

Yunkai took up arms again, and Xaro Xhoan Daxos, speaking for Qarth, declared war on Meereen, joined by Tolos and New Ghis, cutting off trade with Lhazar with their ships. Inside the city, the Sons of the Harpy kept killing freedmen and Unsullied by night.

The Green Grace offered a way out: marry a Ghiscari nobleman to pacify Meereen from within. Quentyn Martell arrived too, asking for her hand and offering Dorne's support for a conquest of Westeros. Daenerys chose Hizdahr zo Loraq instead, who had managed to halt the Sons of the Harpy's killings.

Once married, she reopened the fighting pits she had closed on taking the city. In the middle of the games, Drogon reappeared, drawn by the smell of blood, and killed the men Hizdahr had sent to kill him; Daenerys went down into the pit to face him armed with nothing but a whip and her voice, mounted him, and the dragon carried her off into the sky, leaving Meereen in her husband's hands.

Days later, in Drogon's lair above the Dothraki Sea, near Vaes Dothrak, Daenerys set off on foot along a stream, hoping it would lead her back to the bay. Hunger and foul water wore her down along the way. It was then that the khalasar of Khal Jhaqo, once one of Drogo's own riders, found her beside her dragon in the Dothraki Sea.