Laena Velaryon

Born late in 92 AC, Laena Velaryon was the realm's great beauty of her generation and, at the Great Council of 101 AC, a candidate bride for the man who became Viserys I — a proposal she and her father pursued longer than the court appreciated. She instead wed Prince Daemon Targaryen, and by him bore the twins Baela and Rhaena.

It was Laena who rode Vhagar, the oldest dragon in the world and the last living creature to remember the Conquest. On her back the great she-dragon crossed continents, and the bond the two of them shared was the last Vhagar would know before the war.

In the first moon of 120 AC — the Year of the Red Spring — she laboured for a day and night on Driftmark and delivered a malformed, stillborn son. With her strength spent and childbed fever rising, she rose from her bed, walked down to the shore, and called Vhagar's fire upon herself: a dragonrider's death instead of a death in childbed. She was twenty-seven, and within nine years her daughters were orphans of the war her family had helped to start.