The Empress Elaena Targaryen was crowned in 311 AC as the Empress of Westeros, and then made her progress with the Army of Liberation to Volantis, where she was crowned also in the year 311 AC as the Empress of Valyria. In 312 AC, she was crowned the Empress of Ghis. In setting right the administration of the realms, Tyrosh and the southern and eastern Stepstones were attached to the Empire of Valyria, as well as all of the Disputed Lands; however, Tyrosh was provided the position of a special tributary, under Daario Naharis, whom Elaena elevated to the rank of High Lord. The rest of the Empire, was centralised in the Valyrian fashion, with the appointment of Prefects, Governors and Archons.

Myr, however, with the Myrish being predominantly of Rhoynar extraction, was attached with the rest of the Stepstones to Dorne, which ruled it with a Governor appointed by the Prince of Dorne. Queen Arya in the North and Prince Mors in the south were integrated into the Empire, but with special and expansive privileges, including the right to have only one castle garrisoned by Imperial troops and to pay only a ceremonial tribute, and to maintain their own courts of Law and Appeal. Queen Arya, however, was compelled to cede Sea Dragon Point, the Stony Shore, and Cape Kraken as integral parts of the Iron Islands, to Queen Yara, independent from the Empire.

The rest of Westeros was divided into "Imperial Circles" of Justice, where men, and in some cases women, of talent were appointed to Parlements to administer the law and justice, and these powers were removed from the Lords; this was true even in the fiefs granted to Queen Yara of the Ironborn in the Westerlands, which she had to do homage for, as a Lady of the Empire separately from her independent Kingdom. However, from her perspective, guaranteed the expansive revenue of Casterly Rock, this was an acceptable imposition.

In the Empire of Ghis, Satraps were appointed to the lesser cities, and after some debate, Old Ghis was rebuilt at the command of the Empress, to serve as a new capital, separate from the rival claims of the other cities.

Having completed this reorganisation of the Empires into a proper, peace-time structure of governance, Elaena was kept busy by the day to day tasks of managing three Empires, from her preferred seat in Lys, which was, because of the speed of the ships and the prevailing winds, almost equidistant in time to all three of her Empires, and beside, a comfortable, Valyrian place, the native home of her husband the Prince Consort, Maekar. Prince Maekar and the Empress had a happy relationship with an almost stupendous fecundity. Together they had fourteen children, of whom eleven survived infancy. In all, the Empress Elaena gave birth to sixteen children, thirteen of whom survived infancy and eleven of whom reached adulthood, including both she had had with Jon Snow, legitimised by the order of the Empress Daenerys. Her calm disposition and firmness on the battlefield extended to the birthing bed, and the Empress astounded others with the way she conducted court business even when in labour, signing and sealing important documents, and making decisions of state, even while her contractions had begun.

Prince Maekar was given positions of command in the fleet, but only held them until circa 318 AC, when, while heavily pregnant with twins, the Empress permitted him to lead an expeditionary fleet to the Islands of Skagos. These had been annexed by the Empire directly from the North as part of the terms of Arya's accession, for the North had never been able to civilise them, and a garrison was placed on the islands. A great revolt led to the massacre of the garrison, which was cannibalised, as was the custom of the islands. Elaena allowed her husband to command the fleet, which with 95 ships landed 20,000 soldiers on the island; he defeated the tribes, which were mostly armed with stone weapons, but exacted a terrible punishment on them, massacring one-in-three of all the males on the islands, boys as well as men. Subsequently there were whispers that the desperate and starving women had in some cases sold themselves into slavery to Ibbish whalers, and so while Prince Maekar was never punished for his conduct, which few saw as wrong in and of itself, Elaena never permitted him to hold another active field command, and kept him busy as the nominal head of construction projects and port improvements in the Empires, and other sinecures.

Of her eleven living children, seven claimed dragons. The eighth dragon, named Daenera, was never claimed, and after five years of growth, often flew alongside Drogon, to the point that the Empress rarely flew, except on royal progresses, where Daenera would usually accompany Drogon. The exception was in 322 AC, when at last, with the Throne at a tremendous position of power and prestige, she set out against Qarth, in a campaign as scientific as anything waged by old Valyria. Elaborate preparations with wagons for water were provided for an army to cross the Red Waste, while another advanced by sea. In two great battles, one on land and one on sea, the Qartheen were totally defeated, but constant attacks by Jogos Nhai who had migrated across the Bone Mountains and invaded the Great Grass Sea, with the collapse of the power of the Khals, and who had responded to lavish payments of tribute from Qarth, caused punishing losses to the Empress' Armies.

The Empress arrived personally in 324 AC, taking command of the situation and burning holes through the triple walls of Qarth to allow its conquest by her Army. The Qartheen slaves were liberated, and she appointed a tributary client King. It was in this battle that the Empress was wounded, suffering a broken rib from a ballista bolt that touched her a glancing blow through her armour, while ricocheting from Drogon's scales. She recovered initially without apparent incident, to the great surprise of the Doctors of the Court (and some wondered at the presence of Lady Shiera), and continued having children for another seven years.

Recovering in Qarth, the Empress travelled east with Shiera, on Drogon's back. What she saw was subject to many fanciful myths, but the Unsullied guards on her back did whisper of a great black dragon over Asshai, which greeted them with an unusual lack of fury. Soon enough, it was impossible for the ruler of so much land and so many people to stay; they marched back to the north with her Army, in 325 AC, with Drogon as cover. It was a fruitless campaign against both Khals who refused to follow Daenerys, and the Jogos Nhai invaders, in which thousands were killed by little effect was had, and in the meantime Qarth was chronically placed with civil wars and dissensions, and against the risk of a Jogos Nhai invasion, and with the economic depression caused by the end of the slave trade, Elaena was forced to fund the reconstruction of the city's walls after an appeal by her tributaries; in response, she deposed the King for his incompetence with the fiscal administration of Qarth (refusing to accept his explanation that the economic consequences of the end of slavery were purely at fault), and tried to rule the city through Governors, but they were overthrown by relatives of her own former client-King in 335 AC.

In her mid-forties and with a great love of powder for her hair, which was widely copied throughout the Empires, in a court ruled by lace fashions and corsets, the Empress had grown rather stout, but was still strong, drilling regularly at arms and keeping herself fit enough to wear armour and go to battle on Drogon, and was said to be still greatly attractive in a curvaceous (or Rubenesque) way in a corset and fine court dress. She had endowed immense Temples of the Lord of Light at every one of her palaces and in all the major cities of the Empire, and gave lavishly toward missionary efforts to propagate the faith, but maintained an official policy of tolerance.

The strain of the immense scale of the Imperial policy began to cause problems. Two Armies were destroyed, trying to succour Lhazar client Kings coming under attack by the Jogos Nhai, who were now incorporating Dothraki traditionalists into the ranks of their hosts. She was compelled to take the field personally in 340 AC with two of her sons and one daughter at her side on their own dragons, to try and catch the Jogos Nhai between multiple fires and cut off escaping and dispersing groups, using almost two hundred thousand troops to drive them back, in a savage campaign which saw her adopt a policy of poisoning wells from Vaes Diaf to Vaes Efe. The campaign, which lasted until 342 AC, brought a respite of only a decade.

The lobby of the Army of Liberation remained strong at court. At length, returning from Ghis in 343 AC, she was compelled by the exhortations of an aging Grey Worm to keep the work of the Free going, and assembled an enormous naval force and Army for an advance up the Rhoyne, She defeated the combined Norvosi-Qohori navies on Dagger Lake, avenging the old defeat of Volantis, and conquered Norvos quickly in 344, forcing the end of slavery. Turning her attention then to Qohor, at the urging of the Red Priests, who despised the black magic of the place, Elaena ignored the entreaties and warnings of Princess Shiera, and assaulted the city as well. Bogged down in a siege of a year when the Qohori arranged for an immense khalasar to counterattack the siege lines, and beset by sorcerous assassins on multiple occasions, Elaena's third son, Prince Jaehaerys, was killed in action before the walls, by a sorcerer.

In a black rage, Elaena burned through half the city, causing a horrible number of deaths (tens of thousands, including the subsequent sack), and later returned to Volantis in 346 as a broken and guilty woman, regretting that she, too, had suffered her King's Landing and her own black stain on her reign. Blaming the Liberationist faction in court for Jaehaerys' death, she never spoke to Grey Worm again.

But more trouble was in store. She found that in the meantime, a major religious revolt had erupted in the Reach, Westerlands and Riverlands in Westeros, opposing the continued spread of the faith of R'hllor in the realms. It was severely exacerbated by dissensions in the Westerlands when the new King of the Iron Islands, who had succeeded Queen Yara on her death in 344, and inherited Casterly Rock, raised the taxes on the mainland. Although Queen Yara had governed her lands in the West effectively, many of the Septons and the Smallfolk hated her, as a follower of the Drowned God. There were scurrilous rumours too, of her partiality towards young women, in particular her close friend, Lady Yronwood of Dorne, who spent many years living at Casterly Rock. These were not dispelled by her marriage, to Ser Qarl of the Iron Islands, which produced a son and a daughter. The Faith would exploit these rumours, in the years leading up to the rising. Elaena was forced to quit Volantis immediately and did not even attend her own son's funeral, instead marching forth to deal with the immense and popular peasant revolt, now finding herself fighting the common people who Daenerys had loved. Many had risen to positions of power, privilege and rank in her somewhat meritocratic regime, but the essential government of the realms continued to allow Lords enormous power to extract wealth over their lands in Westeros. In a four year long campaign with a heavy toll of death, Elaena crushed the power of the Septons who had led the revolt, but was left reviled as Maegor with Teats. In the wake of this revolt, the Faith lost its status as the established religion of Westeros, and many of its privileges, although the Empress retained her policy of religious tolerance. In the capital, Kings Landing, the Crownlands, Vale, Dorne, and the Stormlands, a majority of the population now followed the Red God, and religious conflict would be a continuous feature during the reigns of Elaena's successors.

Shortly afterwards, Queen Arya died, to be succeeded by her son, Eddard. Hers had been largely a successful and peaceful reign, in which the North gradually recovered from its losses at the start of the century. She married Gendry Baratheon, the Lord of Storms End, and the natural son of Robert Baratheon, who had overthrown the Targayens, in 283, and ruled for a time as a Pretender. She restored good relations with the Free Folk of the farthest North, and with the people of the Iron Islands, despite lingering bitterness caused by the military campaigns of her notorious sister, Queen Sansa, known to history as "the Bloody". As her people were mostly followers of the Old Gods, the kingdom avoided the religious conflict which erupted South of the Neck. Although she welcomed refugees from the South, she made it plain to them that any attempt to bring their religious disputes with them would be brutally punished. She stimulated trade, exporting timber, pitch, furs and amber to Braavos, in return for corn, meat, wine, and Eastern luxuries. Famine, an ever-present threat in the North, was thus averted. The North's population, which was barely three million at the start of her reign, had almost doubled by the end of it.

After crushing the revolt, the Empress returned to Volantis only to find that another Jogos Nhai horde was sweeping through the Lhazarene lands, but had also crossed the mountains to attack Great Meereen herself! And so, with no choice, in 352 AC she immediately set out on campaign again. At the same time, her old injury over Qarth began to hurt, and it was said that she suffered from pleurisy of the lungs; she had just turned sixty years old. Atop Drogon, she nonetheless took to battle, and in another savage campaign on the steppe, drove the Jogos Nhai out of Ghis and Lhazar, burning twenty of their camps from the air.

She returned to Volantis in 354 AC, exhausted, broken, and ailing. Commentators said that her skin seemed grey. She had lost the weight that she had gained in her thirties, and was now rail thin and haggard. Worse, too, her husband took ill with boils of the lungs the next year, diagnosed only on the autopsy but suspected by the doctors beforehand, and the disease resisted all attempts at treatment, even by Princess Shiera; he died after a short illness of six months. Elaena blamed the Qohori Priests, and boasted furiously in court that she would return to the city, and finish the job, flatten it utterly with dragon-fire, and salt the Earth when she was done.

She never followed through with the savage boast. A month later, to the surprise of quite literally the whole known world, she did something that almost no Sovereign ever did: She abdicated.

Giving the throne of Westeros to her eldest son, Prince Aegon by Jon, and the throne of Valyria to her eldest daughter, Princess Rhaella the same, while saving the throne of Ghis for her eldest child by her husband, Princess Laena. The intermarriages of half-siblings had been carefully arranged to guarantee a permanent union of all claims and lines, and the intentional arranging of two heiresses cemented the fourth century AC as the "Century of the Matriarchy"; in the end, on average, the three Empires would be ruled by women for two of every three years in that century.

At the speech she gave at her abdication, the Empress Elaena presented in every respect an absolutely exhausted woman, whose attempts to follow in Daenerys' footsteps had fallen well short of the standard to which she had held herself, and whose attempts to propagate the faith of R'hllor had met with disastrous and bloody backlashes:

"I was given the Triple Crown of the Three Empires not in order to rule over a multitude of Kingdoms but merely to serve, entrusted by the great Azor Ahai, as the guarantor of the Liberty and prosperity of those realms; and to preserve the spirit of liberty, to maintain the rights of the freedmen and to promote free commerce in the whole of Westeros and Essos according to the charge that had been laid upon me by my predecessor. To this purpose have I made many arduous journeys and have been compelled to wage many wars… but never wantonly, always very much against my own will. I feel that having reached the point where I can no longer avoid wanton conduct, where revenge has become greater in my heart than good sense and duty, that I can no longer maintain these realms, and I have reached a point of exhaustion where my faculties and where the sagacity which allowed me to become the Empress of Three Nations has failed me, according to the Will of God. I once had great hopes for a pacific reign in which I could focus on the prosperity of a free people – only few have been fulfilled and few have remained to me, and at the cost of what travails! This has made me sick and weary. Do not think that I seek to avoid any travails or perils; it is a simple fact that my powers no longer suffice and my judgement is no longer sound. Place your trust in my given heirs, and I beg you all to be united, to observe justice at all times and never, never allow the great evils which plagued these lands to return, which I have fought so long against in pale imitation of the great acts of my illustrious predecessor."

It was with this, again taking the name Saerganyon, that the former Empress retired quietly to a tower in Mantarys along the docks, and took up residence there with Shiera. Elaena's health recovered somewhat in abdication to the surprise of almost everyone who thought her near death, and she was visited often by her heirs and other children as there were now more than twenty dragons spread thorough the three Empries. In the end, both the dark Princess and the former Empress were found dead in 362 AC, together, Elaena having fulfilled her last promise to Shiera as well, to keep her from becoming a monster at the end. And so it was that the House Targaryen had three branches, each ruling its own Empire, and each, one of the Three Heads of the Dragon.

Notes:

1. The number of children that Elaena has, and her habit of conducting official business up until the moment she gave birth, is taken from history in the form of the Empress Maria Theresa of Austria and Queen of Hungary. Elaena's appearance in her thirties and forties as stout but hale and given to leading troops in armour is derived from the Empress Elizabeth, who seized power at the head of the Preobrazhensky Life-Guards Regiment in a cuirass.

2. The Century of the Matriarchy is derived from the Russian experience in the 18th century, when, for sixty-seven of one hundred years, Russia was ruled by either an Empress Regent or an Empress Regnant. See the Empress Elizabeth above for an example less well known in the west than Catherine II. Elizabeth's father was Peter the Great-her mother was a Lithuanian peasant, Peter's last wife, who actually ended up ruling Russia as the Empress Regnant Catherine I despite her common origins.

3. Elaena's abdication speech is derived from that of Charles V, whose example, of course, she is meant to recall.

4. It seems logical that the faith of R'hllor would have spread, given the prestige it achieved under Daenerys, and Elaena's patronage. This in turn would produce a backlash on the part of the Faith. By the 340s, perhaps 30% of the population of the Seven Kingdoms were followers of R'hllor, compared to around 60% who followed the Seven. In line with the parallels between Elaena and Charles V, the growth of the new religion somewhat resembles the spread of Protestantism, albeit this time, with imperial support.