Rhaegar Targaryen

Rhaegar came into the world on the same day Summerhall went up in flame around his grandfather and namesake-in-waiting, a coincidence the smallfolk of Westeros have never once let a Targaryen forget. He grew bookish and melancholy where his father grew cruel, favoring the harp over the lance in his boyhood, though he trained himself into a capable jouster by manhood all the same. He was said to be forever chasing an old prophecy of a prince who was promised, and to have read something dark and consequential into his own place in it, though what precisely he believed the text does not preserve in his own words.

He wed Elia Martell of Dorne in 280 AC and fathered two children with her, Rhaenys and Aegon. The following year, at the great tourney of Harrenhal in 281 AC, Rhaegar won the joust and then, before the whole assembled realm, set aside the laurel crown of winter roses in his wife's lap and rode past her to place it instead in the lap of Lyanna Stark, a girl already promised to Robert Baratheon. The court read it as an insult, a scandal, or an omen, and the maesters have never been able to prove which.

Some months later Lyanna Stark vanished from Winterfell. Whether Rhaegar carried her off against her will or she went with him gladly is a question the text raises and never answers outright; both readings survive in what different characters believe, decades on. What followed is not in dispute: King Aerys II demanded the heads of Robert Baratheon and Eddard Stark on the strength of rumor alone, executed Lord Rickard Stark and his son Brandon when they came to protest, and lit a rebellion he could not put out.

Rhaegar met the rebel host at the Trident in 283 AC, wearing black armor sewn with rubies, and fell in single combat against Robert Baratheon's warhammer. The chronicles record that the river ran red where he died and that rubies from his ruined breastplate washed downstream for years after, which is the sort of detail maesters distrust and poets cannot resist.