Baelon Targaryen and Alyssa Targaryen

Baelon Targaryen and Alyssa Targaryen were siblings whose marriage joined an evident personal closeness to the Targaryen dynasty’s practice of marrying within the family. Their life together was marked by affection, shared enthusiasm for dragonriding, and the births of three sons. Alyssa’s death following the birth of their youngest child cut that life short; the loss of both wife and infant son left Baelon grieving, though he found solace in the two sons who survived.

The Match and Its Family Context

In 68 AC, after the death of Princess Daenerys, there was some consideration of marrying Prince Aemon to his sister Alyssa. Queen Alysanne rejected that possibility and instead declared that Alyssa was intended for Baelon. Her reasoning was rooted in the closeness already apparent between the younger siblings: Alyssa had followed Baelon since she could walk, and, in Alysanne’s view, they were as close as she and King Jaehaerys had been at the same age. The match was therefore not presented simply as a dynastic arrangement imposed on two strangers; it formalized a bond their mother believed had long been visible.

The marriage also belonged to a wider Targaryen family practice. King Jaehaerys and Queen Alysanne were themselves siblings, as were other Targaryen royal couples. Alyssa and Baelon’s union continued that custom while securing the next generation within the royal family. Its dynastic importance would become particularly clear through their sons, but the account also emphasizes the couple’s mutual attachment rather than describing the match only in terms of succession.

Marriage and Shared Life

Baelon and Alyssa married in 75 AC at the Red Keep. Alyssa was fifteen and Baelon eighteen. The wedding was described as splendid, and the marriage quickly became a notably close partnership. Baelon remained cheerful after their wedding, and when he was not flying, he and Alyssa spent nearly all their time together. The chronicle’s account of their domestic life presents them as intensely devoted to one another, not merely as royal spouses sharing a household.

Their shared interest in dragons gave that partnership a public and distinctive dimension. Baelon was already a dragonrider; Alyssa was determined to become one as well. At fifteen, she sought to claim a dragon and had to be dissuaded from choosing Balerion, whom the Dragonkeepers considered old and slow. She instead rode Meleys, a scarlet she-dragon who had never before been ridden. Alyssa was thereafter seldom far from the Dragonpit, and Meleys’s speed made her a formidable match for the dragons ridden by Alyssa’s brothers. Their independent flights did not make their pursuits identical, but they placed both spouses within the royal family’s visible world of dragonriding.

Children and Dynastic Continuity

Their first son, Viserys, was born in 77 AC. Alyssa’s devotion to flying continued after his birth: when the child was nine days old, she strapped him to her chest and took him aloft on Meleys, despite advice against doing so. This early episode became a recurring feature of her approach to motherhood. When she bore a second son, Daemon, in 81 AC, she again carried the newborn into the sky, this time within a fortnight of his birth. These incidents connect Alyssa’s identity as a dragonrider with her role as a mother, showing that the two parts of her life were not kept separate.

In 84 AC, after a long and difficult labor, Alyssa gave birth to their third son, Aegon, named for the Conqueror. Baelon, known as the Brave, told her that she had shown greater courage than he could have shown in battle. Alyssa spoke of the three boys—Viserys, Daemon, and Aegon—and hoped to have more children. Her words convey both the couple’s happiness in the family they had begun and the scale of the future she imagined for it. The three sons also gave Baelon a direct line of male descendants, a fact that later mattered in the royal succession: when Prince Aemon died, Baelon was named heir to the Iron Throne, and his sons Viserys and Daemon were among the considerations supporting that choice.

Death and Aftermath

Alyssa never fully recovered from Aegon’s birth. She died within the year, aged twenty-four. The infant Aegon survived her by only about six months and died before his first nameday. Their deaths transformed the family’s hopeful expansion into a double bereavement. Baelon was left with Viserys and Daemon, the two sons who outlived their mother and youngest brother; the chronicle says that he took solace in them and continued to honor Alyssa’s memory.

The relationship’s lasting significance lies in the contrast between its intimate warmth and its dynastic consequences. Alyssa and Baelon’s marriage began as a match encouraged by their mother because of the siblings’ closeness, and the account remembers them as devoted companions. It also produced the sons through whom Baelon’s later claim to the succession was strengthened. Alyssa’s death ended their shared life early, but the surviving children carried its political importance into the next generation.