i.
Rhaenyra Targaryen is born weak and sickly after her mother's difficult labor, but she survives the ordeal. Her parents celebrate tentatively, even as the court whispers she will not live to see the year.
She is cared for and attended to at all times, swaddled and coddled and never left alone, and as she begins to grow stronger, the King and Queen rejoice. She is their precious daughter, the only one of their children to survive pregnancy and birth, and they adore her.
Then Winter comes, and they command she's brought to fires and fed warm broth and for a dragon egg and warm stones to be placed in her cradle. Their efforts are to no avail. Before she sees her first full year, Rhaenyra catches a chill. As an infant, and especially a weak one, she stands so chance.
She is dead within the week.
The King goes deep into his cups and beats at the walls until the skin across his fists splits and the Queen sobs and prays in the septs and begs the gods to tell her what she's done wrong.
Rhaenyra is placed on a simple yet elegant pyre, steady and heartbreakingly small, and burned and buried upon Dragonstone.
When her mother dies and her father remarries, he confides in his new bride his fears, and she takes his hand to her belly and promises that this time, things will be different. And it is.
Time passes and Viserys dies and Aegon, the Second of His Name ascends the Iron Throne. His reign is just a footnote in history, nothing more, nothing less, and he is remembered only for bringing House Velaryon back into the fold by marrying Rhaena Targaryen.
Rhaenyra is lost, forgotten in the pages of history. In the books of the maesters, she garners not even a page. But some may argue that is better this way. As just another lost child of Viserys and his first queen, there is no Dance. Thousands upon thousands do not die. And, mayhaps, it is better to be forgotten than to be remembered as a monster.
ii.
Rhaenyra dies in childbirth. She labors for two days and two nights and the child will not come. Her husband grips her hand, as does her beloved Harwin Strong as Dragonstone's maester and Driftmark's maester both desperately search for some solution to this madness.
The sheets of her bed are soaked with sweat and blood and she sobs for an end to this, recalls how her mother and both of her grandmothers died in childbirth and begs the gods to have mercy.
They do not.
Eventually, her child does emerge, but by the time he is out of her, she is weak and fragile. As fever takes her, her maester presents House Velaryon with its new, dark-haired son.
Lord Corlys curses furiously and Lady Rhaenys is no better. Lady Laena cradles the boy and Ser Laenor worries his lip.
Come morning, the new mother is at the Stranger's door. Come noon, she joins him.
Many whisper this was the Princess of Dragonstone's price, for birthing a bastard, though none dare to suggest so near her father.
Without his greatest protector, her son Jacaerys is more vulnerable than he ever should have been. The Velaryons open their hearts and care for him as well as they can, but someone- and history will point to the Hightowers, though definitive proof has never been discovered- is mad and ambitious enough to smell opportunity.
Less than three moons after his birth, the little prince is found dead in his cradle. Upon examination, his eyes are bloodshot and feathers are splayed around him, and all evidence points to murder.
House Velaryon revolts, furious that their last chance at the throne has been stolen from them, furious, too, at the murder of a child whom they have adopted as their own. Other lords and ladies strike their banners, unable to simply roll over and let the Hightowers sit in power after what they have done. The Rogue Prince, who has always hated them since his estrangement with his brother's Queen joins the rebels.
War breaks out and the realm runs red with blood. By the end of it, nothing will ever be the same. Viserys, though he was not the target of the revolt, is caught in the crossfire. Alicent Hightower is strung up with the rest of her family. The lords all agree that they cannot let a child of Hightower blood sit the throne, especially after the murder of the royal children's mother. So they crown Daemon, grudgingly, and he takes Laena as his Queen. And things go well, for a while, but he is a dragon in truth, fierce and blazing, and he has only ever destroyed everything he has ever touched.
The realm bleeds, first. Then it burns.
iii.
When Ser Criston Cole begs her to run away with him, Rhaenyra laughs right in his face. "I love you," she says, "But you are mad if you believe I will ever give up my throne for you. What would you offer me in Essos? Love cannot supply my rings, my gowns, my power. Love cannot give me the Iron Throne." Then she caresses his face and draws him close and begs him to speak no more of this, tells him they can still be together regardless.
In another life, he reacts differently because she does not destroy his pride so. Because she is gentler in her rejection of him. Now, in his white cloak, with his sword at his hip, consumed by disgust and shame and rage and hurt, he draws his blade. Without thinking, his vision flashing red, mind fogged by the liquid courage he had consumed to make it this far, Ser Criston takes the sword he promised would always be in defence of her and drives it through her stomach. She screams and gasps out and reaches to the wound as blood pools from it, and he stares back at her in horror. As she crumples to the floor, he catches her.
"I'm sorry," he pleads for forgiveness. "I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry." But it is too late now and the life leaves her eyes slowly, terribly. Cole holds her until her body goes cold. Then he takes her and carries her for all to see and confesses to his crimes, and the King, consumed by grief and fury, orders him to his excruciating death.
He is drawn and quartered and no one blames Alicent Hightower or her Greens because Ser Criston Cole loved his Princess Rhaenyra, all know- so much that he killed her when he realized he could not have her. With the blood of a single innocent, the blood of thousands more will never touch the earth. But Viserys is never the same again and his reign will never be a joyful, and Aegon's rule, for all that he is a man, will always be shadowed by the heir his father chose and the guilt that only her murder has placed him where he is.
iv.
Corlys convinces Rhaenyra to fly to Griffin's Roost. She races there with Rhaenys, and they bring fire and blood upon the soldiers below. But in this life Aegon still lays a trap, and Vhagar and Sunfyre still appear from the cover of the clouds. Rhaenys snarls at the sight of her late daughter's dragon, enraged at the thought of her being used against House Velaryon, and charges. Rhaenyra follows her closely.
She puts on a good fight, for all that she can, but Syrax is fat and slow and they have not flown competitively for quite a while. The Queen buys her former goodmother enough time to flee with her tail tucked between her legs, but she herself falls. As Syrax's ruined form crashes atop her, her death is painless.
The same cannot be said for her family.
For all Jace is charming and intelligent, he has neither the looks nor the age and experience to call upon his banners. With his mother dead, the realm thinks his cause is as good as lost. Followers and allies abandon him by the droves.
In Aegon's name, Aemond, the Prince Regent, smashes them time and time again. The heads of House Velaryon's members, and Laena Velaryon's Targaryen children are placed upon pikes in King's Landing, along with the Rogue Prince's and anyone who stayed loyal to the Blacks until the end.
Rhaenyra is remembered as an arrogant, greedy fool who did not know her limits, but, worse than that, is the eradication of anyone she ever loved.
(Instead of cursing her for not going to Griffin's Roost, this time, old Sea Snake curses her for heading his advice.)
v.
Rhaenyra notices Joff's disappearance sooner. As the boy tries to mount Syrax, she chases after him like a madwoman. "I am you mother and queen!" she screams desperately. "I command you not to go!" But her wayward son only shoots her an apologetic look and forges ahead.
They clamber upon Syrax's back together, and in another world, they might have survived. But the dragon knows something is wrong, feels it in the way her rider's son grips the reigns instead of the Queen herself, and as parent and child struggle for control of her as she rises higher and higher in the air, she twists and rolls and struggles until they both crash to the ground.
In her final moments, Rhaenyra cradles her last Velaryon boy close as he sobs for forgiveness from her. She is remembered for this, in the books of the wise men, not for her atrocities. She is remembered as a mother desperate to protect her son. They write song after song about her and craft beautiful ballads about the Queen who was too much a mother for the throne and her poor son who was too desperate to prove himself, and though she is cast in a better light in the pages of history, her last few moments are torture as she soothes her to her eldest remaining boy and worries for her last and what will become of him.
(If she knew about the singers' beautiful stories of her, she would tell them it was not worth it.)
i.
Rhaenyra does not go to Dragonstone. She follows her cousin's advice and flees to the Vale and waits. When Cregan Stark bursts forth from the North with his men, when her own cousin Jeyne sees an opportunity and forces her vassals to give up their own levies, she marches. They take Dragonstone first, and she gets her precious egg.
Then they take King's Landing.
With a new dragon perched on her shoulder and a new Prince of Dragonstone is tow, the victorious Queen is crowned for all to see.
The smallfolk, who still recall her cruelty, do not cheer, but they do not oppose either. They are too tired of war to do so.
Rhaenyra, broken as well, leaves a good amount of ruling to her small council, though she always makes sure to have the final say. She lives long enough to mourn Corlys, lives long enough to support his bastard son's claim to Driftmark. She lives long enough to see her precious Viserys returned to her, and to burn down the Rogares who dared to keep him from her and make him a father so young. It is only for his sake that she spares his wife, and when she abandons him, she is killed as well.
Rhaenyra lives long enough to arrange a marriage between Baela, Laena's eldest girl, and another one of her sons- Aegon, of course. They are a smart couple, but she weeps at the ceremony, for the groom should have always been Jace. She lives to see a few of their children, as well as Viserys'.
She does not rule particularly well, but for twelve years, the Seven Kingdoms see relative stability. She proves that a woman can sit the Iron Throne, that a woman can reign, and she is remembered for that. When her granddaughter, a different Daena but still ever so defiant, is brought up as a viable candidate for the throne after her last brother's death, she is not passed over. Instead, she is married to her cousin, Aemon, for Aegon is already wed to Naerys, and she rules for thirty good years as Daena the Wise.
In this life, Rhaenyra is still not happy- how could she be, after losing a man and a woman who were like her second parents, after losing her husband, her daughter, and three sons?- but she leaves behind a legacy she can be proud of, and her line prospers.