Alyssa Targaryen

Alyssa Targaryen was a princess of the dynasty’s next generation whose short life joined exuberant personal independence to the demands of royal marriage and childbearing. Close to Baelon Targaryen from childhood, she became his wife, rode the swift dragon Meleys, and bore three sons. Her death after the birth of the youngest, followed six months later by the infant’s death, made the cost of dynastic succession painfully personal for the family of Jaehaerys Targaryen and Alysanne Targaryen.

Identity and Background

Alyssa was one of the daughters of Jaehaerys Targaryen and Alysanne Targaryen. After the death of Princess Daenerys, Alysanne rejected the idea that Alyssa should marry her older brother Aemon Targaryen. Instead, she intended Alyssa for Baelon, observing that the girl had followed him since she could walk and that the two were already exceptionally close. The match thus formalized an attachment formed in childhood rather than creating a new political bond between strangers.

Alyssa did not resemble an idealized image of a delicate, conventionally feminine princess. She was long-faced and skinny, with untidy dirty-blond hair, one violet eye and one striking green eye, and a nose that remained crooked after a childhood accident. She did not appear troubled by her looks. Her preferences were equally direct: she trailed after Baelon, wore boys’ clothes when she could, and favored riding, climbing, and mock sword-fighting over sewing, reading, or singing. Baelon complained that she followed him like a puppy, but her persistence also shows the confidence with which she claimed a place in activities her brothers might have considered their own.

Marriage and Shared Life with Baelon

In 75 AC, when Alyssa was fifteen, she married Baelon, who was eighteen. The wedding at the Red Keep was splendid, but the narrative’s emphasis quickly turns from ceremony to the couple’s ease together. They did not maintain the reserve their parents had shown after their own wedding: Alyssa’s uninhibited manner became court gossip, and she spoke openly about her enthusiasm for married life. Her candor sets her apart from the decorum expected of a royal bride, while the account presents the marriage itself as affectionate and mutually joyful.

Their closeness continued beyond the wedding celebrations. Baelon and Alyssa spent much of their time together, often in their bedchamber, and she was soon pregnant. The account gives their intimacy an important dynastic consequence, but does not reduce it to a mere succession arrangement: Baelon’s happiness in the marriage and Alyssa’s forceful personality remain part of its portrait. Their partnership combined private affection with the public expectation that a royal couple produce heirs.

Meleys and Alyssa’s Independence

Alyssa’s marriage did not exhaust her ambitions. At fifteen, the same year she wed, she set out to become a dragonrider. Her brothers Aemon and Baelon had first flown at seventeen and sixteen respectively; Alyssa intended to fly younger. The Dragonkeepers dissuaded her from trying to claim Balerion, urging her to choose a swifter mount. She instead rode Meleys, a splendid scarlet she-dragon who had never before been ridden.

The choice suited Alyssa. She was seldom far from the Dragonpit afterward, and flying became one of her great pleasures. Meleys’s speed gave that pleasure a competitive edge: when Alyssa flew with her brothers, Meleys could outpace both Caraxes and Vhagar. The episode echoes Alyssa’s childhood refusal to be confined to pursuits considered suitable for girls. She does not merely admire her brothers’ dragonriding; she takes to the sky herself, on a dragon distinguished by speed and previously without a rider.

Children and Dynastic Consequences

Alyssa bore Baelon three sons. Their first, Viserys Targaryen, was born in 77 AC. When he was only nine days old, Alyssa wrapped him securely, strapped him to her chest, and took him aloft on Meleys despite the advice against doing so. She later maintained that he had giggled throughout the flight. The episode brings together her two defining roles: she was a new mother, but did not surrender the freedom and exhilaration of being a dragonrider.

A second son, Daemon Targaryen, was born later, and Alyssa took him into the sky on Meleys within a fortnight of his birth, repeating the extraordinary practice she had begun with Viserys. The accounts portray these flights as expressions of her boldness and attachment to riding, not as a departure from her care for her children. Baelon’s family grew at a moment when the royal succession depended heavily on the survival of heirs, and the births of two healthy sons strengthened his position within the dynasty.

In 84 AC, after a long and difficult labor, Alyssa gave birth to their third son, Aegon Targaryen, named for the Conqueror. Baelon, who was celebrated as the Brave, told her that she had shown greater courage than he could have managed in battle. Alyssa laughed and spoke of having more children, imagining a family of twenty sons. Her words convey the vitality with which she faced motherhood, but the future she imagined was not to be.

Death and Legacy

Alyssa never fully recovered from Aegon’s birth and died within the following year, aged twenty-four. The infant survived her by only about six months, dying before his first nameday. Baelon was left with Viserys and Daemon, the two sons who lived, and continued to honor Alyssa’s memory. The sequence of childbirth, maternal death, and an infant’s death turned what had seemed a flourishing branch of the royal family into a reminder of how uncertain dynastic continuity could be.

Alyssa’s life is marked by a striking contrast between constraint and self-direction. Her marriage was part of a royal family’s succession, and her three pregnancies carried consequences for the future of the throne; yet the narrative also preserves her as a girl who chose movement, adventure, and dragonflight, and as a wife whose marriage to Baelon was described as happy. The later account of Alysanne’s grief over the children she lost includes Alyssa among the daughters who died in childbirth. Within that larger story of a mother outliving most of her children, Alyssa’s brief life stands not only as a dynastic episode but as one of the family’s intimate losses.