Rhaenyra Targaryen was Viserys I's only surviving child by his first wife, and the first woman the Iron Throne ever recognized — however briefly, however bitterly contested — as its rightful ruler. Her father named her his heir over the claims of his own sons by a second marriage, a decision the great houses swore to honor at his court and unswore the moment he was in the ground.
Two marriages produced her heirs: first to Laenor Velaryon, a match of dynasty rather than devotion whose children's parentage the chronicles gossip about more than they confirm, and then to her uncle Daemon, whose sons gave her a second line of claimants the Greens would later use against every one of them. When Viserys died in 129 AC, her half-brother Aegon II was crowned in King's Landing before she could be, and the Dance of the Dragons — the war both sides fought over which crowning counted — began within the year.
She held King's Landing herself, briefly, sitting the Iron Throne her father had promised her and finding it as unwelcoming as the throne is famous for being. Driven out, captured, and delivered to her half-brother's mercy, she died on the twenty-second day of the tenth month of 130 AC — fed, by the account nearly every chronicler repeats without much appetite for repeating it, to Aegon II's dragon Sunfyre. The war did not end with her; her son Aegon III inherited it, along with a throne so weakened by dragons killing dragons that none would fly again for the rest of the dynasty's life.