Laena Velaryon

Corlys and Rhaenys's daughter, rider of Vhagar — the greatest dragon of the age answering to the Sea Snake's girl. Wed to Daemon in his exile years, mother of his twin daughters.

The fuller tale

Corlys and Rhaenys's daughter grows up expecting to matter to the dynasty's future in some official capacity, and spends years courted, considered and ultimately passed over as a bride for Viserys himself before eventually marrying her uncle Daemon during his years of restless exile from court. Rider of Vhagar in her own right before the great dragon eventually passes to other hands, Laena carries herself, by every account, with her mother's directness and her father's ambition in equal measure.

Her marriage to Daemon takes her to Pentos and into a household built more around his restlessness than any settled domestic life, and she bears him twin daughters, Baela and Rhaena, raised largely in exile from the Westerosi court that spent years deciding what to make of their parents' match.

Her second labor in Pentos goes as badly as Aemma Arryn's did a generation earlier, and Laena, presented with the same grim choice the histories keep handing their royal women, makes a different one — refusing the birthing bed's usual outcome and choosing, instead, the ending a dragonrider is owed.

The page and the screen

The show gives Laena's death a deliberate, almost ceremonial staging — she walks from the birthing chamber to Vhagar's side and commands the dragon herself, dying by chosen fire rather than by the childbed's slow failure. Fire & Blood's account is considerably less certain about her agency in the moment: the book records her rising from her sickbed and attempting to reach Vhagar as death closed in, but has her collapse and die of the birth itself before completing the journey — a difference between a controlled death and a desperate, failed one that changes the entire emotional register of her ending.

In the show, season by season

Season One. In The Princess and the Queen — Chooses a dragonrider's death over a mother's.

Where they stand, season by season

Mentioned in the chronicle

• In Pentos, Laena Velaryon's second labor goes the way of Aemma's — she walks to Vhagar instead and commands her own pyre: 'Dracarys.' (S1·E6)

Their fate — if death has found them, it is written here. Open at your peril.

The show: Chose dragonfire over the birthing bed (S1·E6)

The books: Died of childbed at Driftmark (F&B, ch. 1)

Her second labor in Pentos went the way of Queen Aemma's, and Laena Velaryon refused the knife. She walked out of the birthing chamber to Vhagar, laid her hand on the old queen's snout, and gave the command herself: Dracarys. A dragonrider's death, on her own terms.

In the show's telling, Laena's second labor in Pentos fails as catastrophically as Aemma's once did, and rather than submit to the same ending, she leaves the birthing bed, finds Vhagar, and gives the command herself — a dragonrider's death, chosen and completed on her own terms.

Fire & Blood records her dying of childbed complications at Driftmark in 120 AC, delivered of a malformed son who survives barely an hour. The histories note that as her strength failed, she tried to rise and reach Vhagar, meaning to die as a rider rather than a mother in labor — but did not make it, dying on the way. The year is remembered afterward as the Red Spring, the first of the losses that begin the slide toward war.