No mother should ever have to burn her child

“No mother should ever have to burn her child” is Alysanne Targaryen’s lament at the funeral pyre of her son Valerion. The sentence gives a stark, personal voice to a family’s repeated losses: of the thirteen children she bore to King Jaehaerys Targaryen, only three survived her.

Occasion and Meaning

The words are spoken at Valerion’s funeral, where the image of a mother beside her child’s pyre makes grief immediate and physical. The statement does not explain the circumstances of his death or assign blame; its force lies in naming the unbearable duty of mourning a child. The word “burn” anchors the expression in the funeral rite, while “no mother” turns Alysanne’s private anguish into a broader claim about maternal loss.

The Losses Behind the Lament

Valerion was one of three sons—along with Aegon and Gaemon—who died as infants. Other children died in very different circumstances: the Shivers took six-year-old Daenerys, a crossbow killed Prince Aemon, Alyssa and Daella died in childbirth, Viserra died drunk in the street, and Septa Maegelle died of greyscale after nursing the afflicted. Against this succession of bereavements, the funeral saying is not an isolated expression of sorrow but a concentrated statement of the cost of Alysanne’s many losses.

Place in Alysanne’s Story

The line’s directness contrasts with the scale of the history around it. Rather than recounting each death, it fixes attention on one mother and one funeral pyre, making the larger record of loss legible through a single, intimate image. Its significance rests in that compression: a brief lament that gives personal shape to the deaths of children who could otherwise become only names in a dynastic tally.