Aegon VII Targaryen

**Aegon VII Targaryen** is the Lord of the Seven Kingdoms and the twenty-third Targaryen to sit on the Iron Throne. He is the eldest son of Rhaegar II Targaryen and Rhaenys Targaryen, the wielder of Blackfyre, and the rider of Viserion. He ascended to the throne in 435 AC after his father's death at the Battle of Bitterbridge.

Controversially, Aegon is the first king to have engaged in polygamy since Maegor I Targaryen wedded six wives almost four centuries prior. Out of obligation, Aegon first married his eldest sister, Rhaenyra, during the Springtide Celebrations of 428 AC; worried in 431 AC that she was potentially infertile, he then married his newly widowed half-sister and longtime love interest, Visenya, in a proud and lavish ceremony. This act, which had been ministered by the future High Septon, Septon Bryce, would engender two rival political factions at court and help trigger a series of cataclysmic conflicts across the realm.

Early in the year 439 AC, Aegon died fighting in the Battle of Castle Black on the back of his dragon, after an iron harpoon shot by a giant tore through his chest.

## Appearance and Character

Aegon has his father's strong jaw and his mother's indigo eyes. Unlike either parent, he keeps his silver hair deliberately cut short. Dark circles hang heavy beneath his eyes, betraying a lack of sleep. He is of a wiry build, which has, since his coronation, slowly degraded in definition. Inspired by his brother, Baelor, Aegon regularly shaves and bathes, making them staples of his morning routine.

Aegon often carries a calm and collected demeanor, emanating the aura of a preordained king. He is widely known for his deliberate, but decisive, nature. When met with significant or complicated decisions, he turns to consideration and consultation to make a wise decision as soon as possible. Consequently, he often castigates incompetent courtiers and frowns upon those, such as Aerion, who display poor or impulsive judgment of the variety that Aegon believes himself to have been guilty of many times in the past.

The political and personal difficulties that have plagued Aegon's reign have transformed him from the boisterous, bold Prince before the Bleeding into a cynical, irreverent monarch in its aftermath. Aegon can be blunt and brutally honest, though he retains enough wit to know when to guard his tongue for the sake of civility. He rules as a man of action, though his continued failure to name one of his sons as his heir has been the one great exception to this style of ruling.

He is far more confident on the battlefield than he is at the decision table, and yet Aegon has made it a point to try and avoid delegating his authority and duty to advisers and agents unless it proves necessary. He desires all of the decisions he makes to be his own, even as he seeks wisdom and guidance from his advisers. Perhaps the most influential of which are his Queens.

His relationship with his two consorts had once been envisioned as a simple matter, wherein he would have the best of both worlds and the dynasty would prosper by it. Yet it has proved more complicated than that. The Bleeding did much to change Aegon's outlook on all matters of life and ruling, and this affected the nature of his dual marriage. Where once it was clear that Visenya was the favored Queen, Aegon has gained a new - or more accurately, re-discovered - admiration for Rhaenyra after her stalwart conduct during the Bleeding. In his view, Visenya may be the better wife, who can be his comfort and his joy, while Rhaenyra may be the better consort, who might stand beside him as his faithful, forthright, strong right hand. There is a great deal of conflict in his heart, full of desire, guilt, and worry, with regards to his Queens.

## History

Aegon was born in the second moon of the year 411, the second child and first son of King Rhaegar II and Queen Rhaenys. Growing up, most of young Prince's guidance came from maesters, septons, and men-at-arms in the King's service. His father tended to be distant and distracted with matters of the realm, and his mother had seldom given him the attention she showed his sisters. From a the beginning, Aegon showed a penchant for martial pursuits, insisting that he be allowed to spar with older boys from the time he was six, though usually he was denied this request until old enough to be thought of as a page. He was never particularly bookish, and tended to only halfheartedly pay attention to his lessons from the maesters, septons, and septas.

It was at an early age that Aegon was betrothed to his elder sister, Rhaenyra. Since then he has considered that perhaps this was his mother's doing, that she desired her eldest child to sit beside the throne if she could not sit upon it, though he is unsure of that assessment, and at the time figured it to be a natural conclusion to the question of a Queen, which he was told a King must have. Rhaenyra and Aegon had much in common growing up together. Both were active, at times rough, and seldom held back by fears and hesitation. Yet as he grew older, and became more aware of his desires and his future, he began to harbor doubts about her. She was abrasive, it seemed, and harsh. He found her difficult to be tender with, when he began to show an interest in the tenderness of girls. The child in him had seen Rhaenyra as an apt partner for riding and sparring and adventuring together, but in his burgeoning maturity he found her lacking in aspects only he himself was only just beginning to appreciate.

It was at this time that he began to turn his eye more and more to his half-sister, the same age as Rhaenyra, the bastard-born but legitimized Visenya Silvermoon. Despite her origins as the daughter of his father's paramour, Visenya had been raised like just another daughter of the King and Queen, doted upon by Her Grace almost as much as Rhaenyra was. Where Rhaenyra was awkward and abrasive, Visenya was charm and beauty personified. Gentle of nature and sweet of heart, Aegon was enthralled by her even as a child, though it was not until he was nearing the age of majority that he began to understand what was so enthralling about her. When he was fourteen, Visenya came to him one evening a short while after her return from a journey to Lys and Dorne. They admitted their feelings for each other, and by the following morning Aegon found himself madly in love with the sister who he was not to wed.

Their love affair continued for two years, and though their intimate meetings were full of passionate desire, they were not as often as either might have liked, always in the shadows. When Visenya was sent away in 426 to marry a son of the Sealord of Braavos, Aegon was devastated, but managed to hide his sorrow upon seeing how excited she was by the prospect of being a lady of an exotic court across the Narrow Sea. Once she was gone, he took what comfort he could from Rhaenyra. Much to her credit, the Princess provided a much-needed arm for her brother to hold tightly to, supporting and comforting him - in her own clumsy but well-meaning way - as his grief dissipated. The pair would also have the aid of their dragons in coming together again. The same year Visenya had first become his lover, the ancient dragon Viserion had accepted Aegon as her rider. He and Rhaenyra found common ground in their love of their dragons, and could be seen aflight late into the evenings over the capital.

By the time of their wedding, Aegon was once again an admirer of his full-sister, and was happy the day he laid a cloak over her shoulders and the pair of them went soaring through the skies. Yet deep down, he still thought of Visenya sometimes when he and his sister-wife were lying in bed silently, feeling a thousand yards apart when they had been coupling moments prior. Her return to Westeros with her husband and children had brought such feelings into the forefront of his mind, yet he remained faithful to Rhaenyra, who he knew would one day be his consort as he sat upon their father's throne.

That faithfulness came to an end just shy of two years after their marriage. The loss of Visenya's husband and been difficult, and the loss of her son had left her almost crippled with grief. It was in those fragile weeks after the child's unexpected loss that Aegon found his arms around his beloved sister again, desiring only to make her smile again, to give her respite from the grief. Yet it did not end with making her smile, nor did it end as the grief receded and she became herself again. His desire for her was only amplified as he saw the old Visenya return. She became his paramour, and though it was still a secret affair in theory, they were not nearly as careful to hide it as they once had been. As his affection for Visenya became more solidified, Aegon began distancing himself more and more from Rhaenyra. He found her to be not only abrasive, but cold and harsh and difficult to love at all, not merely difficult to be tender with. Blinded by desire, he did not consider that his actions were what had made her cold towards him. The lack of a child after almost three years of marriage provided his conscious with the justification to go a step further, and to make his beloved paramour into his second consort.

This decision would have consequences that Aegon had never imagined, yet in hindsight considers himself a fool to have not. What little love remained between he and Rhaenyra was smothered to ashes and embers, and might have been snuffed out entirely and replaced with loathing, had he not sired a child upon her in a night of icy embraces borne out of duty and no small amount of guilt that he hardly realized existed. When a son was born by her, within days of the one that was born of Visenya, Aegon found himself feeling rather like the subject of some mummer's comic tale. His most legitimate, perhaps his \*only\* legitimate justification for his actions, was now gone. When eventually he flew to Dragonstone to visit Rhaenyra, who appeared so abnormally gentle and innocent with their baby lying upon her breast, he was unable to look her in the eye, nor try and counter the venom that came subtly from her tongue, disguised as mundane chatting. Even as he wanted to celebrate that it had been Visenya's son who came first, he could not free himself from the guilt no matter how hard he tried, to the point that he found himself unable to name Daeron or Viserys as his rightful heir. A dilemma that continues to this day, and has caused him much grief.

The challenges faced in Aegon's personal life would be overshadowed tenfold by the chaos that gripped the Seven Kingdoms in the aftermath of his taking a second Queen. Even as he awaited the two children he had sired upon his two consorts, many fires were being kindled, helped greatly by the spark which his actions had provided. Of all the conflicts in this period, it was the Second Hammer Uprising would have the greatest effect upon the Crown and Royal Family. Beginning in Oldtown, within weeks of his wedding to Visenya, the Uprising would gradually spread throughout the Reach, Stormlands, Riverlands and even into the Crownlands over the following years. Yet the Crown did nothing to intervene.

Lord Perceon Vance, the Hand of the King, had advised against a strong reaction to the growing uprising, and was supported by Visenya and others. They argued in favor of a passive approach to dealing with the rebels, for fear of spreading ill will against the crown by reacting violently against the zealots. Rhaenyra, on the other hand, had insisted on taking a direct, pragmatic, and likely bloody approach before the Warsmiths became too powerful to be quickly decisively defeated. Aegon remained quiet in this debate, which went on and on within the King's court for the first years of the Uprising. He found himself more partial to Rhaenyra's arguments for war, yet his adoration of Visenya discouraged him from contradicting or siding against her openly. Their father, still grieving from their mother's death in 431, followed the passive approach put forward by the Lord Hand and Visenya, as well as many advisers who were in agreement with them.

In 434, the palace of Summerhall was taken by the Warsmiths, now a proper army with the powerful patrons. It became clear to the King, and clearer than it had been to Aegon, that the passive approach had failed, and that a great deal of valuable time was lost. For the first time in a long time, Aegon was in agreement and cooperation with Rhaenyra more so than with Visenya. It was he and his first sister-wife who shaped House Targaryen's response to the situation, and how best to dispatch the fire and blood they often promised. Within a fortnight of the palace's fall, Aegon was dispatched to the Stormlands upon Viserion to lend royal support to Lord Gwayne Baratheon against the Warsmiths who were now supported within his domain by Lady Ravella Swann, while Rhaenyra and their father flew to the Reach with a royal host to support the efforts of the Tyrells and other loyalists.

This was Aegon's first - and thus far only - taste of war. Before departing, he had spent his last night in Visenya's arms. There had been tears in her eyes as she had pleaded with him to be careful, to think of her often, and to never lose hope as he was faced by terribly things. He had gone forth expecting to resent every moment of the terrible war. It was a great surprise, then, when he found himself most suited to warfare. That it seemed to fit him like a well-tailored surcoat. It was refreshing, to be spoken to as an individual wielding fire and blood in his own right, not merely as his father's son. So too was it emboldening to be without wives to draw him in one direction or another, to fill him with second-thoughts and guilt and worry. In war he found a starkness, a simplicity that he felt born to. Yet it would prove a dangerous, frustrating endeavor as well as a glorious one.

During a skirmish with the Warsmiths, Aegon was grievously wounded by a bolt from a scorpion, the long quarrel piercing his shoulder and exiting on the other side. The resulting infection came very near to killing him, and was only saved by efforts of the travelling maester attached to Lord Gwayne's host. The incident left him with a terrible scar upon his left shoulder, and his whole left arm has not functioned as well as it ought to ever since, and almost certainly never shall again. While still recovering from the wound, Aegon entered into a fury on receiving news from Rhaenyra of their father's death at Bitterbridge, and her taking of command. Without even stopping to consider that he was now, in effect, the King, he took to the skies again with Viserion and indiscriminately scoured the Rainwood. He burned vast swathes of the ancient forest to ashes and forcing the Warsmiths who sheltered therein to flee, driving them out of their hidden strongholds. It was not long after, in 435, that Stonehelm yielded to Aegon and Lord Baratheon, though not before Lady Ravella made good on her promise to slaughter Lord Gwayne's brother at the first sight of the Prince's dragon overhead. With the taste of victory soured, and a bitter hatred formed for the Lady Swann, Aegon returned to the capital with his prisoners and found Rhaenyra to be on her way back as well. The war had come to an end, and there was a new King to crown.

The first task of the new King was to judge the ringleaders of the rebellion, and it was in this long affair that he came into his own as a sovereign. The way had left him scarred in body and mind, cynical and irreverent when he had been optimistic and gregarious before. Most notable was the new perspective he now held for Rhaenyra. Her actions had ensured victory in the Reach as he had fought and won in the Stormlands, while his beloved Visenya had remained in the capital wringing her hands and praying for peace. He wondered, for the first time since the second wedding, if he had been wrong to take a second wife. Moreover, he began to consider that Rhaenyra could be a stronger and more reliable consort, even while Visenya remained a better spouse. For the first time since they were children, Aegon felt as if he had more in common with Rhaenya than with Visenya. The both of them valued action over patience, and it seemed they had both been vindicated by their successes, and all that might have been done had their father listened to Rhaenyra's advise. Or if Aegon had spoken up on her behalf.

Many may not realize it, but ever since the seizure of Summerhall the Queens have been more balanced with regards to Aegon's favor than they had been before the war. In the years since the end of the fighting, Aegon has contemplated their futures together, as the three heads of the dragon. He has no intention of being ruled by his Queens, or of letting them snap each other to pieces while so many pray for a sign of weakness in the royal family. He longs for balance between the pair, favoring Rhaenyra for some qualities and Visenya for others. Now Aegon is prepared to move forward after taking these past three years to settle into his role as King of the Andals, Rhoynar and First Men, as well as assessing the roles suited to his Queens. Both politically, and with regards to his heart and mind.

## Family

* King Rhaegar II Targaryen (387 - 435)
	+ w. Selenya Targaryen (381 - 408)
		- Queen Visenya Silvermoon(b. 408)
	+ m. Queen Rhaenys Targaryen **(b.** 387)
		- Queen Rhaenyra Targaryen (b. 408)
		- **King Aegon VII Targaryen (b. 411)**
			* m. Queen Rhaenyra Targaryen (b. 408)
				+ Prince Viserys Targaryen (b. 431)
			* m. Queen Visenya Silvermoon (b. 408)
				+ Prince Daeron Targaryen (b. 431)
				+ Princess Elaena Targaryen (b. 433)
				+ Prince Valerion Targaryen (b. 436)
		- Prince Aerion Targaryen (b. 412)
		- Prince Baelor Targaryen (b. 415)
		- Prince Daemon Targaryen (b. 416)
		- Princess Naerys Targaryen (b. 418)