House Velaryon

House Velaryon’s presence at Driftmark predates the Doom of Valyria by generations the family itself no longer troubles to count precisely; unlike the Targaryens of Dragonstone, they came to Westeros with no recorded prophecy driving them, only the old Freehold’s talent for building things that floated and things that burned, applied rather more to the former in the Velaryons’ case.

When Aegon Targaryen gathered his fleet for the crossing of the narrow sea, House Velaryon was already an established Westerosi power and a Targaryen ally of long standing; Velaryon ships carried a considerable portion of the army that landed at the Blackwater’s mouth, and the family’s loyalty to House Targaryen — sealed, over the following century, by marriage as often as by service — would prove one of the steadiest threads in the dynasty’s first two hundred years.

No Velaryon did more to make the name feared and respected in equal measure than Corlys Velaryon, called the Sea Snake, who built and captained a ship of his own design and sailed it nine times to the far edges of the known world — to Yi Ti, to the Jade Sea, to ports few Westerosi lords could name, let alone reach. He returned from each voyage richer than he left, until House Velaryon’s coffers, by the reckoning of the maesters who tallied such things, rivaled or exceeded the Iron Throne’s own.

His marriage to Rhaenys Targaryen — a princess passed over for the crown in favor of her cousin and remembered ever after as the Queen Who Never Was — bound Driftmark to the dragon throne more tightly still, and his later partnership with Prince Daemon Targaryen in the Stepstones, where the two men carved out and briefly held a self-declared kingship over the pirate-choked straits, showed a Velaryon willing to fight for a crown even when it was not, strictly speaking, his to win.

The succession war that split the Targaryen dynasty in two cost House Velaryon more than perhaps any other family on Rhaenyra’s side of the fight. Corlys’s own son Laenor was married to Rhaenyra as part of the alliance that bound sea power to her claim; their sons — Jacaerys, Lucerys, and Joffrey Velaryon, raised as Laenor’s own though the household’s private rumors ran otherwise — inherited both the Velaryon name and, in time, the war that name had helped provoke.

Jacaerys Velaryon commanded a dragon in his mother’s cause and died leading the fleet at the Battle of the Gullet; his brother Lucerys had already been killed pursuing a diplomatic errand that turned to violence over Storm’s End’s cliffs. Their great-uncle Vaemond, who challenged Rhaenyra’s sons’ claim to House Velaryon’s succession on grounds of parentage the family still will not discuss aloud, was executed for the accusation before the war had even properly begun.

Corlys Velaryon survived the Dance that had cost him a wife’s crown and both of her grandsons’ lives, and lived to see the exhausted peace after Aegon II’s poisoning — an old man advising a new child-king, the last of his generation still standing on a field that had buried nearly everyone he loved.