Aenar Targaryen

Aenar Targaryen, called Aenar the Exile, was the lord who carried his family out of Valyria and settled them on Dragonstone before the Doom. His departure, prompted by his daughter Daenys’s vision, preserved the Targaryens when Valyria fell. The move also established the dynasty’s western refuge: a bleak island beneath a smoking mountain that would become the base of a family whose later history transformed from survival in exile to rule over much of Westeros.

Identity and Migration

Twelve years before the Doom of Valyria, dated in the account to 114 BC, Aenar sold his holdings in the Freehold and the Lands of the Long Summer. He moved to Dragonstone with his wives, wealth, slaves, dragons, siblings, kin, and children. The scale of the departure matters: this was not a solitary escape but the transfer of a household and its resources, including the dragons that distinguished the Targaryens among Valyria’s ruling families.

Dragonstone was a stark new home, but it was not an unknown outpost. For two centuries it had marked the westernmost reach of Valyrian power, set across the Gullet and positioned to control passage into Blackwater Bay. The Targaryens and their Valyrian allies, the Velaryons of Driftmark and the Celtigars of Claw Isle, benefited from the trade passing through those waters. In this setting, Aenar’s migration placed his house at the edge of Westeros while keeping it connected to the maritime routes of the narrow sea.

Daenys’s Vision and the Doom

At the height of Valyria’s power, its shining walls enclosed the greatest city in the known world, where forty rival houses struggled for influence at court and in council. The Targaryens were not among the most powerful dragonlords. Their withdrawal to Dragonstone was therefore read by their rivals as surrender and cowardice. The account instead identifies the cause as a warning from Aenar’s maiden daughter, Daenys, later known as Daenys the Dreamer: she had foreseen Valyria’s destruction by fire.

Twelve years after the family’s flight, the Doom came. The Targaryens alone among the dragonlords survived it. The narrative sets the contrast plainly: what looked to Valyria’s rivals like weakness became the condition of survival. Aenar’s significance lies less in any recorded conquest or public deed than in the consequence of believing, or acting upon, the warning in time. The account does not describe his private reasoning beyond connecting the move to Daenys’s vision, but the outcome gives the decision its historical weight.

Dragonstone and the Targaryen Succession

Aenar’s successors maintained the house on Dragonstone through the generations that followed. His brother-in-law and son-in-law Gaemon Targaryen, known as Gaemon the Glorious, succeeded him as lord. After Gaemon’s death, their children, Aegon and Elaena, ruled together. The lordship then passed to their son Maegon, to Maegon’s brother Aerys, and to Aerys’s sons Aelyx, Baelon, and Daemion. Daemion’s son Aerion inherited Dragonstone in turn.

Aerion’s son was the prince who became Aegon the Conqueror, born on Dragonstone in 27 BC. By then the island refuge established under Aenar’s lordship had become the birthplace and starting point of the conqueror whose campaigns would reshape Westeros. The continuity from Aenar to Aegon gives the migration a dynastic consequence: the flight did not merely save a family in one generation, but kept its line, its dragons, and its claim to lordship intact across successive generations.

Legacy in the Realm

The Targaryens’ later position rested on an inheritance Aenar helped preserve, though the policies of later rulers belong to their own reigns. Aegon the Conqueror’s rule sought to reconcile the Seven Kingdoms to Targaryen authority by drawing people from across the realm into his court and councils and by encouraging marriages between noble houses. The contrast between the family’s precarious survival after leaving Valyria and Aegon’s later effort to bind conquered territories into one realm marks the scale of the dynasty’s transformation.

Aenar’s name also appears at the beginning of a belief about Targaryen bodies. The account says that, since he first staked the family’s claim to Dragonstone, Targaryens were understood not to die of common diseases. Their supposed immunity was explained through the image of a purifying fire in the dragon’s blood. Later events would challenge that conviction, but its origin is attached to the house’s earliest history on the island. Aenar thus stands at the starting point of two enduring inheritances: a surviving Valyrian dynasty and a belief about the exceptional nature of its blood.