In the dying years of the reign of King Aegon the Unworthy, when the Iron Throne was naught but a gilded seat of corruption and rot, there lived a girl with hair like pale silver fire and eyes like the calm before a storm. Daenerys Targaryen was her name, though in her youth she was often called Dany, or "the Princess of Tears" by those who whispered in court. For her mother was Queen Naerys, pale and devout, and her father was the king—Aegon IV, whose sins were too numerous for the septons to reckon, even in prayer.
She was born in the year 172 AC beneath the walls of Maegor's Holdfast, and from the first she was beloved by her mother and scorned by her father. The Queen, frail and cloistered, had hoped for another boy to protect her son, Daeron. A sister was a different sort of gift, but Daenerys clung to her mother like a shadow and never left her side if she could help it. The king, when he took notice of her at all, called her "the wriggling whelp" and once remarked that she had "the eyes of a mule, full of silent judgment."
Yet there was one who looked upon her differently—Daemon Waters, the bastard son of King Aegon by Princess Daena Targaryen, forged in secrecy and scandal and raised to prominence as a knight of great valor. Daemon would smile at Daenerys when they passed in the halls, his eyes catching hers like twin blades drawn in the dusk. It is said that he once rescued a kitten she cherished from a well, and gave it to her swaddled in his cloak, though this tale is likely apocryphal. Still, the songs would later say they loved one another before they knew what love meant.
And so the years passed. Aegon grew older, fatter, more depraved, and Daenerys blossomed into womanhood beneath the dismal gray skies of King's Landing. The court whispered of her beauty. Her hair was a river of silver-gold, her skin like moonlight, and her smile was soft and rare, as if it were a treasure she kept hidden in her heart.
But love was not to be her fate. When her brother Daeron ascended the throne in 184 AC, he brought with him a vision of peace and unity that had eluded their forebears. Where Aegon the Conqueror had failed with fire and where Daeron the Young Dragon had failed with blood, Daeron II sought to win Dorne not with swords but with silks. He looked to Sunspear, to the Martells, and offered what no Targaryen king had ever offered before: a royal marriage.
Thus it was decreed that Daenerys would wed Prince Maron Martell of Dorne.
She wept, they say, though never in the sight of others. Daenerys had long walked the gardens with Daemon, had known the taste of his kiss beneath moonlight, had dreamt—briefly, foolishly—that her fate might be her own to choose. But Daeron, ever the dutiful king, saw only the realm, and Daenerys obeyed. A princess must be more than a woman; she must be peace, a bridge, a promise.
The wedding took place in 187 AC at Sunspear beneath a sky of red and gold. The Dornish sang songs in her honor and scattered rose petals at her feet. Prince Maron, dark-eyed and courtly, was kind to her, but she would later say his touch was always cold. "Like water in a sun-warmed cup," she wrote once to her brother King Daeron The Good, "It wets the tongue but never quenches." But over time, duty evolved into sincerity.
The years in Dorne changed her. She rode out beneath the blazing Dornish sun, her silver hair bound in coils, her skin kissed bronze by the desert wind. She bore Maron two daughters and a son, and though she rarely smiled as she had in youth, the people of Dorne came to admire her. She visited the Water Gardens, which her lord husband created to appease her, wrote poetries in High Valyrian, and kept a locket with Daemon's likeness hidden in her jewelry box.
When Daemon Blackfyre rose in rebellion in 196 AC, taking his sword and his claim to the Iron Throne with him, some say a raven came to Sunspear. It carried no words, only a lock of silver-gold hair, bound in black ribbon. What message it bore, Daenerys never said. But she retired to her solar for three days, emerging only when word reached her that Daemon had died at the Redgrass Field, pierced by arrows alongside his sons.
Maesters never mention her mourning for the dashing Great Black Dragon in any Westerosi historical records, who was once her brother, her protector, and her lover. No one ever knew, save for few . . .