House Targaryen

Rhaenys Targaryen

the Queen Who Never Was

Life
d. 10 AC (born year unrecorded)
House
Targaryen
Titles
sister and wife to Aegon I Targaryen

She helped conquer a continent and was never crowned to rule an inch of it

Rhaenys Targaryen was Aegon I's younger sister-wife, third of the Conquest's dragonriders astride Meraxes, and by most surviving accounts the most sociable of the three — fond of singers, fond of travel between the new kingdom's courts, and reportedly the family member the lords of the Reach and the Vale found easiest to actually enjoy hosting. The epithet later chroniclers gave her, "the Queen Who Never Was," marks a real gap in the record: for all she did to win the Seven Kingdoms, only Aegon sat the Iron Throne, and only his son by Rhaenys — not Rhaenys herself — inherited it.

She died attempting to finish what her husband's Conquest had left undone. In 10 AC she flew Meraxes to Hellholt during the fighting the Citadel groups under the First Dornish War, and a scorpion bolt loosed from the castle's walls caught the dragon through the eye. Dragon and rider fell together, and the war that killed her taught the Targaryens a lesson about Dorne that took them the better part of two centuries to fully absorb: dragons make conquest look easy right up until they don't.

Legacy

Later Dornish telling holds up the marksman who felled Meraxes as a folk hero of the resistance; the Citadel's own sources give him no name it can vouch for, and treat the story as more legend than record beyond the bare fact of the kill.

Sourcesfire-and-bloodtwoiaf

Who is Rhaenys Targaryen?

She helped conquer a continent and was never crowned to rule an inch of it

Is Rhaenys Targaryen from the books or the show?

Book canon. This profile follows George R. R. Martin’s novels and histories, and notes where the television series diverges rather than following it.