Corlys Velaryon
The Sea Snake: nine great voyages, a fleet larger than the crown's, and High Tide built from the profits. Lord of Driftmark, wed to the Queen Who Never Was — the richest man in Westeros, and the most stubborn about what his blood is owed.
A soul of House Velaryon, born at Driftmark, sworn to The Blacks — the Queen's Party.
The fuller tale
Season One
In The Heirs of the Dragon — The Sea Snake — richest man in the realm, and married to the queen who should have been. The lords of the realm, Corlys and Rhaenys among them, kneel and swear to Rhaenyra Targaryen, first of her name. In The Rogue Prince — Twice insulted — his daughter refused, his sea ignored. Corlys and Rhaenys offer Viserys their daughter Laena, aged twelve; the king chooses Alicent Hightower instead, and the Sea Snake leaves court cold.
Spurned by the throne, Corlys brings his fleet to Daemon: a war for the Stepstones, fought without the king's leave. In Second of His Name — Pays in Velaryon blood for a war the crown disowned. In Driftmark — Buries a daughter and holds his tongue about his grandsons' hair. Six years on: Corlys takes a wound in the Stepstones that festers; his brother Vaemond sails to court to claim Driftmark over the 'strong boys.'
In The Black Queen — Rises from his sickbed to lay the Velaryon fleet at the black queen's feet.
Where they stand. King's Landing, Driftmark, The Stepstones and Dragonstone.
Season Two
Corlys's blockade closes the Gullet; King's Landing begins to feel the first pinch of hunger. In The Red Dragon and the Gold — Waits at the heart of the blockade for a wife who doesn't come home. In Regent — Made Rhaenyra's Hand — and faced at the docks by his unclaimed blood. On Driftmark, Alyn of Hull — the sailor who pulled the Sea Snake from the waves — is owed more than wages, and Corlys knows it.
In Smallfolk — Watches a bastard son rise on a dragon he never dared acknowledge.
Where they stand. Driftmark and Dragonstone.
Their story
Corlys Velaryon builds, with his own hands and his own risk, what most of the dragonlords merely inherited. Nine great voyages across three decades — to Yi Ti, to Asshai, to the Thousand Islands at the edge of every map anyone in Westeros has bothered to draw — earn him the name the Sea Snake and a fortune that makes Driftmark's High Tide a court rivaling the Red Keep itself. He is, by any honest accounting, the richest man in the Seven Kingdoms who does not currently sit a throne.
His marriage to Rhaenys Targaryen unites the realm's greatest self-made fortune with its most wronged royal blood, and the match is, by the standards of arranged Targaryen marriages, something close to an actual partnership — two people passed over by history in different ways, building something neither the crown nor the Great Council thought to offer them. Their children, Laena and Laenor, are raised dragonriders in a house that answers to no one else's calendar.
Corlys's defining ambition, pursued with a stubbornness his own family finds exhausting, is simple to state and enormous in consequence: that the blood of the seahorse should sit every throne worth sitting, joined by marriage to Targaryen fire until Velaryon and dragon are functionally the same word. It is this ambition, more than any single event, that pulls his family into the center of the succession dispute — his grandsons' contested parentage is not incidental to his politics, it is the entire point of them.
The project costs him everything it touches. His daughter Laena dies in childbed at Driftmark; his son Laenor's own death is staged to escape a marriage neither he nor Rhaenyra particularly wanted, and Corlys, by most accounts, never fully learns the truth of what happened to him; his brother Vaemond dies by Dark Sister for saying aloud what half the realm already whispers about the grandsons' hair. Corlys spends the years before the Dance breaking men, quietly and thoroughly, for questioning a legitimacy he privately has every reason to doubt himself.
In the war itself, his fleets are the black cause's spine — the Velaryon navy is what lets Rhaenyra contest the narrow sea at all — and his political weight, considerable even in old age, functions as her council's conscience of last resort, the one voice willing to tell the queen things she does not want to hear. He survives wounds that would end a younger man and keeps sailing, keeps commanding, keeps outliving nearly every person his ambition was meant to benefit.
Fire & Blood gives him, almost uniquely among the war's principal figures, an ending that isn't a punishment: the Sea Snake outlives the entire Dance, serves through the regency that follows it, and dies at sea in his own bed in extreme old age — every horizon he ever set out to chart finally sailed, the hull, after nine great voyages and one great war, simply coming to rest.
How it ends for them
The chronicle records no death for this soul — they are living when the tale leaves them, or their ending is a page the maesters have yet to turn.
Their chapters, book by book
Where the page and the screen part
Corlys is one of the few major figures the show and the book keep in close alignment, though the series gives him a specific and painful wound Fire & Blood only implies — the death of his son Laenor is handled on screen as a fully staged escape Corlys is complicit in covering up, whereas the book leaves that cover story to Rhaenyra and Daemon's convenience and Corlys's own knowledge of it ambiguous. The show also compresses his nine voyages into backstory and dialogue rather than dramatizing them, where the book treats his career as history in its own right, worth pages of its own before the Dance even begins.
Their journey
Where the two tellings send them to the same place the road runs whole; where they part, the screen keeps the left and the books the right.