Maegor Waters

Maegor Waters, formerly known as Maegor Targaryen, is the rider of the dragon Morghul. The first child of the marriage of Lenore Blackwood and Aenys Targaryen, Maegor was expected to one day become Lord of the Seven Kingdoms before the intrigues of court saw the marriage of his parents annulled, his last name stripped from him, his mother executed, and his father dead. Disappearing days after his father's suicide, Maegor has at various times appeared and vanished in Westerosi politics. There have been few confirmed sightings of Maegor or his dragon in the past ten years, but there are a plethora of rumors regarding his exploits in that period.

Appearance and Character
Maegor's appearance is hard to pin down: though everyone agrees he possesses the silver hair and purple eyes of his father, and that he is just a hair over six foot, the specifics are harder to pin down, for they change too often, and people see him too infrequently. He just goes clean-shaven just as often as he wears facial hair, and he wears his hair long as often as he does short. His personality is similarly enigmatic. Often appearing detached and aloof, Maegor seems to have his head trapped in the clouds. It is not often that this is painstakingly stripped away to reveal the bright, vibrant man underneath.

Early Childhood
Maegor was once destined to be King. Many would rather forget that fact--Gods know Viserys and his ilk have spent long enough trying to wash it away, but a lifetime of scrubbing would not be enough to remove the memories of a silk-swaddled Maegor from the world. Though his name is now Waters, there are many still living who remember Maegor Targaryen.

Maegor is not among them. His first memories are as Maegor Waters, far from King's Landing and Dragonstone, in the halls of the Eyrie. For the man who would once be King, the life of royalty and its trappings are shadows that loom over him: undeniably present, but lacking detail.

How the royal babe came to be at the Eyrie is a story few know the details of. With the execution of his mother and the suicide of his father in 367 and 368, respectively, the child of their erstwhile union was easy enough to erase from the history books. When Maegor disappeared from Dragonstone mere days before Prince Viserys arrived to assert his will over his newly-acquired domain, it was assumed by many that his influence had beaten him there and ensured the boy--the only remaining challenge to his future inheritance--permanently dealt with. Most assumed Maegor had been killed; it was easy to imagine a three year old getting lost in the depths of Dragonstone. Some, not willing to attribute something so malicious to the future Lord of the Seven Kingdoms, assumed he had instead shipped the bastard boy off to some forgotten corner of the globe, where he would live out his life doing whatever it is bastard boys do.

Their ideas weren't too far from the truth. The child had been stolen away from Dragonstone in the dead of night, taken away to some distant land to be raised in secret. It just wasn't Viserys who did so.

Though men are often quick to denounce Lenore forty years after her passing, one must remember that the Princess was not always so universally reviled. She had a magnetism that charmed most all the Realm, and that had afforded her a great deal of friends and allies. Most were killed or disgraced alongside her. Those that were not, their numbers vanishingly few, and growing fewer by the day as the influence of Viserys's faction ran unchecked, made their way to Dragonstone to extract her son. Long before the sun rose, while the entire island slept, Maegor and his egg were wrapped in black and spirited away to the hold of a merchant's ship. By the time the farmers took to their fields and the fishermen went out to see, the vessel was long gone.

From Dragonstone, the ship sailed north, eventually coming to land at Gulltown. From there, the party traveled north through the Vale. Few in numbers, they made it to the Eyrie only by sheer luck and strength of arms. The final journey up the side of the mountain was easy in comparison.

They found a court ready for war. The Warden of the East, Roland Arryn, who had inherited the title from his father only weeks earlier, had made no secret of his admiration for the royal couple. When their marriage was annulled and their child stripped of his station, he was one of the first and loudest voices to call for an uprising to exact justice for Lenore. It was no secret that such a war, righteous or not, would be ill-fated. When Maegor showed up on his doorstep, dragon egg in hand, and Roland chose to give him shelter, those close to him let out a collective sigh of relief. War had been prevented--if only for now.

The Eyrie
==== And so came Maegor, dubbed Florian Stone, to the Eyrie. Ostensibly the bastard of a cousin of the main line and a Lyseni prostitute, Florian was nevertheless hidden from those suspected of being less-than-loyal to Roland. In a castle like the Eyrie, where visitors could be seen half a day before their arrival, such undertakings were rather simple. It's unclear whether the King's court ever came to recognize Maegor Waters and Florian Stone as one and the same, but even if they did, the Eyrie's isolation and Roland's strong base of support in the Vale made covert actions against them difficult, and overt actions impossible. ==== This safety afforded Maegor a great deal of freedom. While he was not provided the life he would have had as a royal, he was not exactly left wanting, either. Roland raised him like he would his own child. Tutors in most every subject imaginable were provided for him, in addition to regularly scheduled lessons with the castle's Maester and Master-at-Arms. Maegor never showed much of a gift for anything the latter two had to teach him, but he did have a natural proclivity for painting that has waned over the years. His frequent travels left little time to hone the art.

Among his truest companions in these early years was the younger cousin of Roland, Alaric Arryn. Only a few months younger than the Arryn, the two were constantly making trouble together, and often trained in the yard together under the tutelage of Ser Vardis Ruthermont--though Alaric was much more proficient than Maegor.

The Mountains of the Moon
As the boy grew older, doubt began to fester in the minds of those few who knew his parentage. If the boy were really the trueborn son of Aenys and Lenore, then why had his egg not yet hatched? The easiest explanation was that he wasn't, and that the accusations that his true father was Crispian Celtigar were true.

Those concerns were silenced in the early days of 378 AC when at long last, in the dark depths of a moonless light, the forgotten egg hatched.