House Velaryon
An old Valyrian house that came to Westeros before the dragonlords themselves, seated at High Tide on the island of Driftmark. A silver seahorse on sea green, they are the realm's masters of ship and salt — and under Corlys the Sea Snake, the richest house in Westeros, richer even than the lions of the Rock. Their blood is joined to the dragon's by marriage twice over.
The fuller tale
House Velaryon reached Westeros before the dragons did — an old Valyrian seafaring line that settled Driftmark generations ahead of Aegon’s own ancestors, and never forgot the seniority. By the Dance their words, The Old, the True, the Brave, read less like a boast than an itemized résumé: oldest continuous Valyrian blood outside the royal line, truest allies a Targaryen king could ask for, and — under the lord who currently holds High Tide — the bravest voyagers the Sunset Sea has produced in living memory.
That lord is Corlys Velaryon, the Sea Snake, and his nine great voyages to Yi Ti, Asshai and the frozen Thousand Islands made him the richest man in Westeros before the war ever starts, richer even than Casterly Rock. His marriage to Rhaenys — the Queen Who Never Was, twice denied a throne her blood earned — joins the realm’s deepest purse to its most publicly wronged claim, and Corlys spends the rest of his life on one unfinished project: seeing Velaryon blood, however it has to get there, seated somewhere that matters.
The project’s cost is the family itself. Laena dies at Dragonstone birthing twins Vhagar’s saddle will later carry to war; Laenor’s death is staged rather than mourned, a disappearance dressed as a murder so a son with no taste for the succession can vanish from it entirely; and when Corlys’s own dying wish names Rhaenyra’s son heir to Driftmark, his brother Vaemond calls the boy’s parentage a lie to the queen’s own face and loses his head to Dark Sister for it, in a throne room already too used to paying its debts in blood.
In the war itself the Velaryon fleet is the Blacks’ one true advantage the Greens can never match — command of the seas around Dragonstone and the narrow sea both, a navy old enough and large enough that the green council has to go hire the Triarchy just to contest it. Even grief does not slow the house down: shipwrights’ bastards out of Hull, unacknowledged Velaryon blood a generation removed from any title, come forward at the Red Sowing to claim Seasmoke and prove the family line runs wider and further from the legitimate branch than anyone at High Tide had cared to notice before the war made it useful.
Corlys himself outlasts nearly everyone the war costs him — queen, children, a war he backed to the hilt — and the books grant him, almost as an afterthought, the best ending on offer: a seat on the regency council for the boy king who survives, and a death at sea, in his own bed, every horizon he ever sailed finally behind him rather than ahead.
The page and the screen
Laenor Velaryon’s fate is the sharpest fork between the two tellings. Fire & Blood keeps the ambiguity Mushroom’s account first suggests — a staged death, a lover named Qarl Correy, a disappearance across the narrow sea that the chronicle can only shrug at — while the show plays the same beats more plainly on screen, letting the audience watch the fabrication happen rather than reconstruct it after the fact from conflicting testimony. Both versions leave Laenor alive somewhere the story simply stops looking; only the book insists on reminding you it isn’t sure.
