Valarr was the son of Baelor Breakspear, heir to the Iron Throne, and the grandson of King Daeron II, yet little of the dragon’s fire burned in him. Where other princes laughed loudly and lived recklessly, Valarr watched. Where they spoke, he listened. His face was solemn beyond his years, his manner restrained, as though he were already carrying a weight too heavy for a young man’s shoulders.

His wife, the sweetest of Daena, was his mirror in many ways. They had been wed young, as Targaryens often were, bound not only by blood but by duty. The court had expected passion, excess, the usual sins of dragonlords, but what they found instead was something quieter. Valarr and Daena shared a gentle, thoughtful affection, forged in long evenings of reading, in soft conversations held beneath the red keep’s windows, in the shared understanding that neither of them truly belonged to the world of feasts and scandals.

The smallfolk called them the gentle dragons. Valarr did not mind. He had long since learned that names given by others mattered little.

Valarr spent his mornings with Daena, and his afternoons among scrolls and maps. For a time, it almost seemed that the gods had been kind.

When Daena first conceived, Valarr’s joy was not loud, but it was deep. He ordered a cradle carved from pale wood and inlaid with silver thread. He studied the histories of his house late into the night, lingering on the names of children who had grown strong, wise, and beloved.

Sometimes, when he thought no one watched, he would rest his hand against Daena’s belly and speak quietly.

The gods answered with silence.

The child was born still, a son, pale and twisted, his skin cold before he ever knew warmth. Valarr stood unmoving beside the bed, his face carved of stone. Daena wept. Valarr did not.

He held the child only once. His weight was nothing. His absence, everything.

“I would have named him Jaehaerys,” he said softly, when they laid him beneath the Mother’s candles.

After that, something within their household changed. The maesters came with their careful words and cautious eyes. They spoke of blood too often folded upon itself, of wombs that could not bear the weight of dragonseed, of gods who gave no explanations. One warned, gently but firmly, that this might happen again.

Valarr listened. He always listened. Yet when Daena conceived a second time, hope returned despite itself. Valarr prayed more often then, not only to the Seven, but to whatever powers might still hear him. He gave offerings he did not believe in. He read aloud to Daena each night, steady and calm, as though knowledge itself might keep death at bay.

It did not. Their second son was born lifeless, silver-haired and perfect, save for the stillness that claimed him.

That night, Valarr buried the child himself. After that, grief settled into their lives like winter, quiet, enduring, merciless.

Daena grew thin. Her smiles faded. When the maesters told them she was with child again, no one celebrated. Daena wept in the dark and whispered that the Mother had turned her face away.

Valarr took her hands in his own, his grip firm despite the tremor in his fingers.

“The gods do not hate you,” he said, though he no longer knew if he believed it. “They are simply… indifferent.”