The Year of the Red Spring

The Year of the Red Spring is the name by which 120 AC is remembered in the account of the Targaryen dynasty. The year’s defining pattern is a succession of family deaths: Laena Velaryon died after childbirth, and her brother Laenor Velaryon was murdered later that year. The chronicle presents these losses not as isolated tragedies but as part of a season in which long-simmering tensions across the realm came to a boil.

The Year’s First Tragedy

Laena’s death came after a day and a night of labor on Driftmark. She gave birth to a malformed son, who died within the hour; Laena, weakened by the labor and grief, developed childbed fever. Daemon Targaryen fetched Maester Gerardys from Dragonstone, but the more experienced healer arrived too late. After three days of delirium, Laena died at twenty-seven.

An account of her final hours gives the loss a particularly stark image: Laena rose from her bed, pushed away the septas praying over her, and tried to reach Vhagar, hoping to fly once more. She collapsed on the tower steps and died there. Daemon carried her back to her bed, while Rhaenyra Targaryen kept vigil with him over the body and comforted him. The personal grief of the household thus stands at the center of the year’s first tragedy.

Laenor’s Murder

The deaths continued when Laenor Velaryon, Rhaenyra’s husband and the putative father of her children, was stabbed at a fair in Spicetown. His companion, Ser Qarl Correy, fled after the killing, wounding men who tried to stop him; some accounts said a ship waited offshore, but Correy was never seen again. Laenor’s parents, Corlys Velaryon and Rhaenys Targaryen, were still mourning Laena when they lost their son.

The cause of the murder remains unresolved. Grand Maester Mellos records only that Laenor was killed by one of his household knights after a quarrel. Septon Eustace identifies Correy as the killer and attributes the act to jealousy. Mushroom advances a darker possibility: that Daemon paid Correy to kill Laenor and arranged his escape. The chronicle notes that Correy’s extravagant tastes and gambling debts lend some credence to that version, but stresses that no proof existed then or later. Corlys offered ten thousand golden dragons for information leading to Correy or the killer’s delivery to him.

Meaning of the Name

The chronicle calls 120 AC the Year of the Red Spring and also describes it as a year when the realm’s accumulated tensions and jealousies finally boiled over. Laena’s death in childbirth and Laenor’s violent, unexplained murder give that larger description its human measure: grief first entered the family through a birth that ended in death, then returned in the killing of a son whose fate remained disputed.

The name gathers these losses into a single historical marker without resolving their mysteries. Its spring is not presented as a reprieve from conflict; it is the season in which mourning multiplied and pressures long building across the Seven Kingdoms became newly visible.