Vaegon I Targaryen

Vaegon I Targaryen was the Lord of the Seven Kingdoms.

Succession
Even as a crown prince, Vaegon had already established himself as a controversial figure. The mutual disrespect between him and Lord Dorren Stark, exacerbated by the sudden dissolution of his betrothal to Lyarra Stark, provoked a crisis that came to be known as the Woe of Wolves. After Lord Stark declared himself an independent king, Vaegon advocated for an aggressive invasion of the North, while his father, Aerys III, was intent on a careful, diplomatic approach. This disagreement spurred the King to hasten his handling of the crisis, as he feared the prospect of his son provoking further tensions.

It was this very clash of personalities that came to define the court of Aerys III after Vaegon reached the age of majority. The feuding between father and son seemed without end - but where their arguments only emboldened the confident crown prince, they drew the King into fits of melancholy. This depression, coupled with a bout of consumption, took the life of Aerys III in 365 AC.

The succession of Vaegon I was not a welcome occasion for the majority of the lords of the realm, who had grown to better appreciate Aerys’ steady hand in light of his squabbles with his son. Though many hoped that the weight of the crown would straighten out their new king’s unsavory behaviors, the earliest years of his reign only proved Vaegon’s inability to change. He remained as belligerent, cruel, lecherous and narcissistic as he’d always been, and his regular abuses kept the royal court in a perpetual state of controversy.

Iron Law
Despite his many unsavory qualities, Vaegon’s rule was not without substantial support. In the eyes of many - especially the smallfolk in King’s Landing - he was more committed to justice and order than any monarch in living memory.

Dissatisfied with the city’s disorder, Vaegon routinely sent men from the Red Keep to root out criminal elements - and on some occasions, he led them personally. The justice he delivered was swift, harsh and visible; the hands of thieves, the heads of murderers, and the genitals of rapists often hanged in public squares as a firm warning to any would-be criminals. The King also cracked down on the unscrupulous practices of many of the city’s merchants. Under Vaegon’s rule, no longer did bakers cut their bread with sawdust, nor did butchers sell half-spoiled meat. Though such men were at first given stern warnings, repeat offenders were treated no more kindly than common thugs.

Vaegon’s professed commitment to law and order, however, never manifested as systematic reform. He enforced justice with the utmost indifference to legal codes, and largely at the behest of his impulses. The City Watch of King’s Landing saw its importance diminished, as Vaegon tackled crime only through spontaneous deployments of his own Red Keep men. His Master of Laws was all the more frustrated, as Vaegon had little interest in administrative reform. If not for the authority vested into him as King, Vaegon’s enforcement of justice would have been no more lawful than the very criminals he hunted.

Consequently, the rulers of Westeros' other towns and cities were seldom given new laws and protocols to to follow - but the King nevertheless influenced many to follow his example, sometimes through coercion. During his occasional visits to other towns and cities, he would engage in the same patrols of their poorest streets as he did in the capital. Those lords he perceived to have failed to maintain order were harshly chastised - and those who anticipated his visits would scramble to straighten out their towns’ most unruly quarters. Fearing the King's wrath, many lords under Vaegon's reign made law enforcement their highest priority.

Privately, many of the lords of the realm criticized the King's supposed commitment to justice as little more than a theatrical performance. At best they attributed his actions to a hunger for glory and respect; at worst, they were regarded as sadistic impulses. But for many, Vaegon's motives were irrelevant - as none could deny that his reign had made the towns and cities of Westeros safer than they'd ever been.

The Second Lysene Spring
If nothing else, Vaegon Targaryen was a fearsome warrior and a talented commander - and from the first day of his reign, he eagerly awaited a chance to display his true strengths. The King found such an opportunity in the Second Lysene Spring, a conflict that began with Lys’ conquests of the Disputed Lands and the Stepstones. After heeding his Small Council’s warnings for a few years, Vaegon eventually defied their advice and launched an invasion of the Stepstones in 369 AC.

Warriors from throughout the realm were called to war, and several moons of intense fighting culminated in a decisive Westerosi victory. Though the Seven Kingdoms ultimately gained little more than navigation rights from the ensuing treaty, the success of this campaign greatly bolstered the King’s reputation. For the next few years Vaegon’s sins and vices were all but forgotten by a realm that delighted in the feats of its warrior-king.

The Rainwood Campaign
The restoration of Tyrosh’s authority over the Stepstones was never fully realized, and neither were the remnants of Lys’ vanquished mercenary companies fully removed from the islands. In the immediate years after the war, coastal settlements in the Stormlands were regularly raided by corsairs operating out of the Veiled Isle. Many ventured further inland, finding the dense forest of the Rainwood perfectly conducive to a life of banditry.

Still recovering manpower after incurring heavy losses during the Second Lysene Spring, the lords of the Stormlands were unable to muster an adequate response to the raiders and bandits who still harried their villages. Their pleas for help did not fall on deaf ears, however, and late in 370 AC the King began mobilizing men from the Crownlands, the southern Riverlands, and the upper Reach to liberate the Rainwood. He led this small host personally, and won a few easy victories against the hopelessly outnumbered bandits. The rest saw the writing on the wall and fled the Stormlands.

Content with his immediate success, Vaegon hurried back to the capital to attend to the business of ruling, which he had already neglected during the Second Lysene Spring. A fleet was subsequently sent to defend the Stormlands’ coast from raiders, but it had neither the manpower nor the order to invade the pirates’ island hideouts. By the end of 371 AC, the Stormlands appeared to be at peace, and the fleet withdrew. Raids from Stepstones pirates thus resumed in its absence - but these were far less frequent and potent than those of the year before, and by then the Stormlanders were fully capable of dealing with the problem themselves.

The Dragonpit Affair
A grand parade was held in the streets of King’s Landing following Vaegon’s triumphant return from the war in the Stepstones. Though his intended itinerary went from the Red Keep to the Great Sept of Baelor, midway through the procession he changed course and made his way to the Dragonpit. Upon arrival an idea occurred to him, and he announced it immediately: the spoils of war would be spent in part on the renewal of the capital’s greatest landmarks, beginning with the Dragonpit.

Though Vaegon’s councilors were at first skeptical, popular support for the project eventually compelled them to comply. In 371 AC, the royal court welcomed the arrival of Sargoso Drahar, a celebrated architect from Myr. Though many at court doubted a foreigner’s fitness for the task, his designs reassured them that the Dragonpit’s restoration would be faithful to its original design. However, it would be repurposed to host ceremonies, tournaments, performances and other highly attended functions. To that end - per the King’s wishes - the top of the dome would remain wide open, “so that the gods could watch” every occasion held within.

No expenses were to be spared on what was intended as the first of many such projects. Each time funding proved inadequate, Drahar asked the King for more, and these requests were always granted. Along with growing costs came an increasing number of delays; at one point construction ceased for three moons while the architect awaited the arrival of a specialized craftsman. Accidents further complicated the matter, most notably when a dozen laborers perished after the unintended collapse of a wall.

By 375 AC - two years after the project’s projected completion - the restoration was not even half-finished. Enough progress had been made, however, to make both the floor and a small section of the stands functional, and the King was eager to validate all he’d invested thus far. Thus he arranged to put on a spectacle at the Dragonpit, inviting all of his court to attend. But they were presented with neither a theatrical performance nor a joust: instead the King brought in two dozen foreign gladiators to slaughter each other over white sands.

Already resentful of the project’s excessive costs and routine delays, the royal court was further scandalized by Vaegon’s introduction of Essosi bloodsport to King’s Landing. Their outrage reached a tipping point when evidence surfaced that Sargoso Drahar had been embezzling much of his generous funding - and before the King had a chance to arrest and try him, the architect had already fled across the Narrow Sea.

Unable to finance the Dragonpit’s restoration any further, Vaegon accepted the endeavor’s unpopularity and quietly suspended all construction. To his frustration, however, the King’s surrender to public opinion only emboldened his critics, now placing the financial mismanagement of his reign under greater scrutiny.

The Whitecloak's Trial
In the hopes of redirecting public discourse, Vaegon sought to suppress one controversy by creating another. Early in 376 AC, a young septa who had regularly attended to a princess in the Red Keep was found dead, apparently after she had been raped. Vaegon immediately placed the blame on Ser Gerold Darry, a recently-anointed knight of the Kingsguard who had unwittingly earned the King’s contempt. In private conversation, Vaegon would later attribute his displeasure with Ser Gerold to the way his good-daughter would often smile at him.

Both the royal court and the broader realm were fiercely divided on the matter; while some were inclined to trust the King’s word and commend his commitment to justice, others refused to believe that a man with an otherwise stainless reputation could be guilty of such heinous crimes. For much of the following year, this controversy held the royal court’s attention captive, and few spoke again of Vaegon’s ill-fated effort to renovate the Dragonpit.

In this matter too the King eventually decided to cave to popular opinion. He began the trial fully intent on declaring the defendant innocent - though he also intended to strip Ser Gerold of his white cloak, as he could no longer trust a man he had publicly slandered. Unaware of the King’s intentions, Ser Gerold boldly used the trial as an opportunity to accuse Vaegon himself of the septa’s rape and murder. Outraged, the King reneged and sentenced Ser Gerold to death.

Father and Son
When Vaegon’s eldest son and heir, Daeron, came of age, history began to repeat itself - albeit with the roles reversed. Like Aerys III before him, Prince Daeron was a perfect foil to his tyrannical father. Many of the King’s courtiers and counselors soon laid their hopes in the crown prince, believing he could help to rein in Vaegon’s misrule. Daeron, however, strove to be a man of honor, and believed it was not his place to interfere in his father’s rule.

Nevertheless, the crown prince still tried to serve as a voice of reason in an increasingly dysfunctional Red Keep. Whenever he deemd it necessary, Daeron offered his father candid criticism - and Vaegon nearly always responded with wrath. Well aware of his counselors’ favorable view of his firstborn son, the King began to perceive his own heir as a threat.

At the same time, Vaegon developed an obsession with the crown prince’s charming wife, Lady Argella Baratheon - the daughter of one of his foremost vassals. Convinced that every man in the Red Keep wanted to have his way with the future queen, Vaegon began threatening - and sometimes punishing - every man who dared cast an admiring glance her way. On one occasion, while receiving a large number of visitors at the Red Keep, the King locked his good-daughter in the Maidenvault. Within a few days he was convinced by Daeron to release her, but thereafter he kept both his son and good-daughter on close watch.

The King’s many prying eyes did not go unnoticed by the crown prince, who left King’s Landing to take up residence at Dragonstone. This move convinced Vaegon that his son was conspiring to undermine his reign, if not end it entirely. Convinced that the threat was now imminent, the King sent an assassin to Dragonstone.

During a day of celebration known as "Servant's Day", the assassin attempted to poison the crown prince's drink only for his wife, Argella, to be victim to it. The Strangler acted fast in her system and led to her, and the son within her womb, to perish. Immediately after their death, Daeron had the assassin imprisoned before he could leave Dragonstone's Hall and kept him prisoner as evidence of Vaegon's schemes.