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daenaera targaryen was born on the 4th day of the 6th moon of 111 AC alongside her twin brother, baelon, at the cost of their mother queen aemma arryn. the prince was lively and healthy, while the princess was sickly and deathly pale; it was expected she would not survive throughout the night. when the sun rose, he had taken a turn for the worse while she had recovered marveously. before it set, the king had lack of a son. some believed her to be a curse upon the house targaryen, that she sucked the life force out of the heir. king viserys, devastated at the loss of both his wife and son, did not take kindly to daenaera at first - he did not hate his secondborn daughter, but he could not look at her, either.

for the first year of her life, daenaera was handled by wet nurses and nannies, though when the king remarried to the young lady alicent hightower, she had been put forth as the new mother figure for the princess before she had even given birth to her own child. while she grew to love her as one of her own, there was always a sense of alienation that daenaera felt when it came to her and her half-siblings with their mothers attention, and an underlying tension that only grew as daenaera became older and wilder. while daenaera grew up close to aegon, who was only a year younger than she, it was her elder sister the princess rhaenyra that she clung to and favored.

the young princess seemed wild, even as a girl, and too smart for her own good. she did not often follow orders and by seven years old, she was already sneaking out of the castle at night, only to always be caught trying to enter the dragonpit. the princess was never given a dragon egg in her cradle as her existence came unexpected, and baelon's own was burned in memory with his mother's corpse. at one-and-ten, while the princess played on the balcony in her father's chamber, the wild man-eating dragon 'the cannibal' landed, as though it'd come for her. to her stepmother's shock, the young girl reached out and pet its muzzle, and the dragon did not eat her for it. this was the first human interaction recorded with the cannibal that did not end in death. a summer later and she was riding him. he would then be known as 'syndarys' thanks to the princess - high valyrian for 'shadow king'.

rest wip🥹 i have it planned out but i dont feel like typing it out rn