Rhaella Targaryen
The last Targaryen queen, sister and wife to the Mad King, who died giving birth to her daughter on storm-lashed Dragonstone.
A soul of House Targaryen, born at King's Landing.
The fuller tale
How it ends for them
Died before the story ÔÇö before this story begins.
Rhaella died on Dragonstone in 284, nine months after the Sack of KingÔÇÖs Landing, giving birth to Daenerys while the worst storm in the islandÔÇÖs memory tore the royalist fleet from its anchors and threw it against the rocks. Both tellings agree on the essentials because both inherit them as history: the queen did not survive the birth, the newborn was named for the storm, and the loyalists who remained had nothing left to protect but two children.
Her death set the last piece of the sagaÔÇÖs board. With Rhaella gone, Ser Willem Darry smuggled Viserys and the infant Daenerys out of Dragonstone ahead of the garrisonÔÇÖs surrender ÔÇö to Braavos and the house with the red door ÔÇö and the Targaryen restoration became the property of exiles. Daenerys carries her mother as pure absence: no memory, no portrait, only the knowledge that the storm that killed the fleet gave her a name.
Their chapters, book by book
Where the page and the screen part
Rhaella never appears in either telling ÔÇö she is dead before both begin ÔÇö but the books carry nearly all of her substance: the prophecy-driven marriage, JaimeÔÇÖs guilt-ridden memories of guarding her door, her flight to Dragonstone and death in the storm. The show gives her only a handful of glancing mentions, and viewers could be forgiven for knowing nothing of her but DaenerysÔÇÖs line about the mother she never knew. Book readers tend to rank her among the sagaÔÇÖs quiet tragedies, and her story is one of the sharpest arguments the novels make against the dynastyÔÇÖs habit of marrying prophecy to power.