Rhaegar and Lyanna, and the war that follows

Lyanna Stark went south with Rhaegar ÔÇö carried off, or gone willingly, depending entirely on who is telling it. Her brother Brandon rode to King's Landing demanding satisfaction and was murdered with his father Rickard by a king who had stopped pretending to be sane. When Aerys demanded Ned Stark's and Robert Baratheon's heads too, half the realm rose.

The fuller tale

Lyanna Stark went south with Rhaegar Targaryen. Carried off, say the Starks and the Baratheons and every history written after the war; gone willingly, say a smaller number of people, including some who knew her. The chronicle cannot settle it and should not pretend to: the two people who could have are dead, and the version that won is the version the winners had every reason to prefer.

Her brother Brandon rode to King's Landing with a handful of companions and shouted at the Red Keep gates for Rhaegar to come out and die. Aerys had him arrested for plotting the prince's murder and summoned their father Rickard to answer for him. Rickard demanded trial by combat. The king granted it and named fire as his champion, and hung him in his armour over a fire while Brandon strangled himself trying to reach the sword laid just out of reach.

Then Aerys sent to Jon Arryn demanding the heads of his two wards, Ned Stark and Robert Baratheon. Jon Arryn called his banners instead, and the North and the riverlands and the stormlands came with him. Every rebellion needs a moment where the alternative becomes worse than treason, and this was it: the king had made loyalty fatal.

The other reading

Rhaegar had spent his life reading about a prophecy and had been convinced since his own childhood that it was about him, and then about his son. There is a strong case that everything he did in his last two years he did believing he was preventing the end of the world, and that he was a scholar with an idea rather than a man with a passion.

It is not a defence. Whatever he thought he was doing, he did it by taking a sixteen-year-old girl away from her betrothal and leaving the realm to burn behind him, and he had to be told about the war by a raven.

Elsewhere in the wiki

 See the world as it stood in 282 AC 

What became of it ÔÇö if an ending is written, it is here. Spoilers.

The chronicle records no ending here ÔÇö or none the maesters have set down.