Chapter Text
A History of the Third Daughter of King Viserys I
-As recorded by Maester Gerardys of the Citadel, compiled from the annals of the Red Keep and the testimonies of surviving members of the court of King Viserys I Targaryen.
Among the many curiosities of House Targaryen's long and turbulent history, few figures are so shrouded in uncertainty as the second daughter born to Queen Alicent Hightower and King Viserys I Targaryen. The queen herself, by all accounts, did not know she carried the child. Maester Mellos, in his private correspondence with the Conclave, wrote only that Her Grace was delivered of a daughter with no warning and no preparation, and that the child came into the world as though the world had not thought to invite her. Queen Alicent, it is recorded, wept when she first held the child. Whether from relief, or from some premonition the queen herself could not name, no account specifies. The babe was given a name, as all Targaryen children are given names, though the particular name has been rendered inconsistently across surviving records, and shall be noted elsewhere in this volume. She was the second daughter born of Queen Alicent and King Viserys, and the fourth of their surviving children together, following Aegon, Helaena, and Aemond, and preceding Daeron.
She was born small and silent, a pale and fragile thing whose grip on life seemed, to those who attended her, more a matter of stubbornness than constitution. The septas of the Red Keep lit candles and offered prayers with an urgency that implies they did not expect those prayers to be answered. Among the smallfolk who served within the keep's walls, a whisper took root and spread. They believed that the gods had not meant for this child to draw breath, that she had slipped into the world through some crack in their design, and that they were even then reaching to take her back. It was said, though never recorded in any formal chronicle, that she burned with fever for the first three years of her life, and that healers came and went from her chambers with a frequency that made her survival seem, in retrospect, something approaching miraculous.
Archmaester Gyldayn appended: The whispers of the smallfolk regarding this princess are not without a certain grim poetry. That a child so near to death in her infancy would later die, or not die, in so strange and unresolved a fashion is the sort of symmetry that septons are inclined to call the will of the Seven, and historians are inclined to call coincidence. I record both possibilities without preference.
She survived. This much is beyond dispute. She grew, in the manner of Targaryen children, attended by servants and maesters and the cold, formal affections of a court already fracturing under the weight of questions of succession. She was close in age to her brothers Aemond and Daeron, and her sister Helaena, and there are records, in household accounts and servants' gossip preserved in the letters of lesser lords, suggesting she moved through the Red Keep with a quietness that made her easy to overlook. She was not overlooked by all. Among those who knew her, it is said she was possessed of an unusual quality: a stubbornness not of temper but of presence, as though having once refused to die in infancy, she found the act of simply continuing to exist to be, in itself, a form of defiance.
Her siblings regarded her variously. Prince Aegon paid her little mind. Princess Helaena, whose own strangeness is well documented, is said to have looked at the child with particular attention from the moment of her birth, and to have remarked, once, to no one in particular, that her sister would outlast them all. Prince Aemond, who had little patience for weakness in any form, reportedly avoided her entirely during her first years, though accounts suggest this distance softened somewhat as she grew older and demonstrated that she was not, in fact, going to perish at the first inconvenience.
The she-dragon Silverwing had belonged to Good Queen Alysanne, wife to King Jaehaerys the Conciliator, and was among the oldest living dragons at the time of the Dance of the Dragons. She had gone unridden for decades following her queen's death, dwelling in the Dragonpit with the patience of a creature accustomed to time passing in measures that men do not use. It is not recorded precisely when the princess first approached Silverwing, nor by what method she claimed of the great silver she-dragon's loyalty.
What is recorded, in the memoirs of a dragonkeeper named Orryn and copied by a novice at the Citadel some years later, is that the princess came to the Dragonpit alone and without leave, and that Silverwing, who had been known to respond to no one since Queen Alysanne's passing, did not burn her. The keeper Orryn wrote that the dragon regarded the girl for a long time, and then lowered her great silver head to the stone floor, and that the girl placed her hand upon the dragon's snout and wept, and that he did not understand why either of them did what they did, but that it was, in his words, "a thing that felt older than either of them."
When the Dance of the Dragons reached its bloodiest crescendo, and the mob that had stormed the Dragonpit turned upon the great beasts within, the princess was not among those who fled. The record of what occurred next is fragmentary and largely composed of accounts given by survivors who were not, at the time of the events in question, entirely calm, and whose testimonies conflict on a number of points. What is agreed upon is the following: that the princess was seen within the Dragonpit, or very near to it, when the mob fell upon the dragons; that she went toward Silverwing rather than away from her; and that she was gravely wounded, some accounts say by blade, some by the crushing press of the crowd, some by the fall of burning timber, before Silverwing spread her wings over her.
What followed is the part that passes most thoroughly out of the domain of history and into the domain of story. The surviving witnesses agree that Silverwing bore her rider, whether living or dead, none could say with certainty, aloft and flew away from the fires and the screaming, away from the city and the sea. She was not seen again over Westeros. No report was ever received by raven or by ship of Silverwing landing on any known shore. The body of the princess was never recovered. No body was burned. No funeral rites were spoken.
Several witnesses, questioned in the aftermath by Ser Torrhen Manderly on behalf of the small council, stated independently and without apparent collusion that Silverwing flew east. One, a chandler's apprentice whose account is otherwise unremarkable, was specific: he said the dragon flew toward the Smoking Sea. He is the only witness to name Old Valyria by implication, and it is the Conclave's position that no weight should be placed upon the testimony of a frightened boy watching the sky through flames.
History has its proper limits. This account was compiled from household records, servants' testimonies, a dragonkeeper's memoir, and the fragmented reports assembled by the small council in the aftermath of the Dance. On the matter of the lost princess, the record is honest in its uncertainty: she was born, she lived, she claimed the dragon Silverwing, she was wounded, and she disappeared. Whether she perished in the flight over the Smoking Sea, or perished en route, or survived by means no maester is equipped to theorize upon, this account cannot say.
She left no recorded heirs. She left no letters of particular substance. She was, in the annals of House Targaryen, the sickly princess who should not have survived her first year, who rode a dragon, who walked into a burning place to defend her dragon and was carried away into the dark.
The smallfolk, who had made stories of her since her birth, made one final story of her departure. They said that a child the gods had tried so hard to take could not truly be killed. They said that Silverwing had flown east not to die, but to wait. They said she would come back when she was needed.
Maesters do not traffic in such stories.
They record, however, that no body was ever found.
And they record, as they must, what is not known alongside what is.
Please let me know what you think! I have written 3 parts as of now, nothing too long. I hope you like the premise! <3