Daenerys Targaryen

Daenerys Targaryen, daughter of Jaehaerys Targaryen and Alysanne Targaryen, was a joyful and fearless princess whose brief life ended during the Shivers epidemic. Her death was both a private catastrophe for her parents and a public challenge to the conviction that Targaryens, by virtue of their Valyrian blood, were beyond the reach of ordinary disease.

Identity and Family

Daenerys was born in the seventh moon of 53 AC, after Alysanne had previously suffered a difficult childbirth. The child was strong and healthy, and Jaehaerys, who had hoped for another son, nevertheless doted on her from the moment he held her. The realm shared the king’s delight, though the birth unsettled Aerea Targaryen, whose place as heir to the Iron Throne had been displaced by the new princess. Daenerys’s arrival thus brought joy to her parents while also shifting the succession around her.

Her early childhood coincided with a profound loss in her mother’s family. After Queen Alyssa Targaryen died in 54 AC, Alysanne found comfort in her young daughter. Not yet a year and a half old, Daenerys was already talking in her own fashion and had progressed from crawling and walking to running. Alysanne delighted in her daughter’s quickness and spent time playing with her and reading aloud, sometimes neglecting council sessions. The princess was not simply a source of comfort in her mother’s grief: her energy and curiosity actively reshaped the queen’s daily life.

A Lively Childhood

Daenerys was remembered as happy, curious, and fearless. Her restless movement through the Red Keep made her difficult for her mother and attendants to keep track of. She liked to pretend that she was flying on a broomstick dragon, a small domestic echo of the dragons that defined her family’s power. The contrast between her play and the dynastic world around her is striking: the king and queen’s hopes for the succession were present from her birth, but the surviving accounts of her early character emphasize a child absorbed in motion, play, and discovery.

Her temperament differed from that of her elder brother, Aemon. When Baelon was born in 57 AC, Daenerys was four and Aemon was two. She was described as lively and laughing, while Aemon was serious, cautious, and obedient. The comparison gives her a distinct place within the royal family’s portrait of its children: she was the exuberant one, forever in motion, whose favorite toy was a dragon she could ride in imagination.

Illness and Death

In the winter of the Shivers, Daenerys fell ill at six. During the night, she woke Alysanne and told her that she was cold. The king and queen summoned every form of help available to them: prayers and poultices, warm food and baths, blankets, furs, hot stones, and nettle tea. A wet nurse was called despite the princess having been weaned years earlier, because some believed a mother’s milk might cure the disease. Maesters, septons, and septas attended her, while Jaehaerys ordered a hundred new ratcatchers hired and offered a silver stag for every dead rat, grey or black.

Daenerys asked for her kitten, and it was brought to her. As the princess grew more severely affected, the kitten slipped from her grasp and scratched her hand. Near dawn, Jaehaerys ordered that a dragon hatchling be brought from Dragonstone, hoping that his daughter should have a dragon. The effort came too late. A day and a half after she had woken her mother to say she was cold, Daenerys died. Jaehaerys flew on Vermithor to Dragonstone to tell the Dragonkeepers that the hatchling was no longer needed. On returning to King’s Landing, he sought an answer from Septon Barth, but neither the king nor his adviser could explain why the gods had taken her.

Loss and Dynastic Significance

Daenerys’s death was part of a wider disaster: thousands of people, highborn and low, died of the Shivers that winter. For the royal family, however, her illness carried an additional meaning. The Doctrine of Exceptionalism held that the Targaryens were unlike other people and, among other claims, that they did not become sick. Daenerys was of Targaryen blood on both sides, yet the disease killed her. Her death therefore made the epidemic not merely a public calamity but a direct contradiction of a belief central to how the royal house understood its exceptional status.

The loss remained part of Alysanne’s later grief for her children. In the queen’s final days, she reflected that the Mother Above had taken many of them from her; Daenerys, dead at six, was one of those losses. The account records no adult life or political role for the princess. Instead, her significance rests in the sharp contrast between the fearless, much-loved child her parents cherished and the disease that no royal remedy, prayer, or dragon could overcome.