Aegon VII Targaryen

Aegon VII Targaryen is the Lord of the Seven Kingdoms and the twenty-third Targaryen to sit on the Iron Throne. He is the eldest son of Rhaegar II Targaryen and Rhaenys Targaryen, the wielder of Blackfyre, and the rider of Viserion. He ascended to the throne in 435 AC after his father's death at the Battle of Bitterbridge.

Controversially, Aegon is the first king to have engaged in polygamy since Maegor I Targaryen wedded six wives almost four centuries prior. Out of obligation, Aegon first married his eldest sister, Rhaenyra, during the Springtide Celebrations of 428 AC; worried in 431 AC that she was potentially infertile, he then married his newly widowed half-sister and longtime love interest, Visenya, in a proud and lavish ceremony. This act, which had been ministered by the future High Septon, Septon Bryce, would engender two rival political factions at court and help trigger a series of cataclysmic conflicts across the realm.

Appearance and Character
Aegon has his father's strong jaw and his mother's indigo eyes. Unlike either parent, he keeps his silver hair deliberately cut short. Dark circles hang heavy beneath his eyes, betraying a lack of sleep. He is of a wiry build, which has, since his coronation, slowly degraded in definition. Inspired by his brother, Baelor, Aegon regularly shaves and bathes, making them staples of his morning routine.

Aegon often carries a calm and collected demeanor, emanating the aura of a preordained king. He is widely known for his deliberate, but decisive, nature. When met with significant or complicated decisions, he turns to consideration and consultation to make a wise decision as soon as possible. Consequently, he often castigates incompetent courtiers and frowns upon those, such as Aerion, who display poor or impulsive judgment of the variety that Aegon believes himself to have been guilty of many times in the past.

The political and personal difficulties that have plagued Aegon's reign have transformed him from the boisterous, bold Prince before the Bleeding into a cynical, irreverent monarch in its aftermath. Aegon can be blunt and brutally honest, though he retains enough wit to know when to guard his tongue for the sake of civility. He rules as a man of action, though his continued failure to name one of his sons as his heir has been the one great exception to this style of ruling.

He is far more confident on the battlefield than he is at the decision table, and yet Aegon has made it a point to try and avoid delegating his authority and duty to advisers and agents unless it proves necessary. He desires all of the decisions he makes to be his own, even as he seeks wisdom and guidance from his advisers. Perhaps the most influential of which are his Queens.

His relationship with his two consorts had once been envisioned as a simple matter, wherein he would have the best of both worlds and the dynasty would prosper by it. Yet it has proved more complicated than that. The Bleeding did much to change Aegon's outlook on all matters of life and ruling, and this affected the nature of his dual marriage. Where once it was clear that Visenya was the favored Queen, Aegon has gained a new - or more accurately, re-discovered - admiration for Rhaenyra after her stalwart conduct during the Bleeding. In his view, Visenya may be the better wife, who can be his comfort and his joy, while Rhaenyra may be the better consort, who might stand beside him as his faithful, forthright, strong right hand. There is a great deal of conflict in his heart, full of desire, guilt, and worry, with regards to his Queens.

History
Aegon was born in the second moon of the year 411, the second child and first son of King Rhaegar II and Queen Rhaenys. (More TBA, consulting w/ tamy and others)

It was at an early age that Aegon was betrothed to his elder sister, Rhaenyra. Since then he has considered that perhaps this was his mother's doing, that she desired her eldest child to sit beside the throne if she could not sit upon it, though he is unsure of that assessment, and at the time figured it to be a natural conclusion to the question of a Queen, which he was told a King must have. Rhaenyra and Aegon had much in common growing up together. Both were active, at times rough, and seldom held back by fears and hesitation. Yet as he grew older, and became more aware of his desires and his future, he began to harbor doubts about her. She was abrasive, it seemed, and harsh. He found her difficult to be tender with, when he began to show an interest in the tenderness of girls. The child in him had seen Rhaenyra as an apt partner for riding and sparring and adventuring together, but in his burgeoning maturity he found her lacking in aspects only he himself was only just beginning to appreciate.

It was at this time that he began to turn his eye more and more to his half-sister, the same age as Rhaenyra, the bastard-born but legitimized Visenya Silvermoon. Despite her origins, the daughter of his father's paramour, Visenya had been raised like just another daughter of the King and Queen, doted upon by Her Grace almost as much as Rhaenyra was. Where Rhaenyra was awkward and abrasive, Visenya was charm and beauty personified. Gentle of nature and sweet of heart, Aegon was enthralled by her even as a child, though it was not until he was nearing the age of majority that he began to understand what was so enthralling about her. When he was fourteen, and she seventeen, Visenya came to him one evening a short while after returning from Lys and Dorne. That night, she made a man of the young prince. It was clumsy and awkward, but affectionate and sweet as well, and Aegon awoke that following morning to find himself madly in love with the sister who he was not to wed.

Their love affair continued for two years, and though their intimate meetings were full of passionate desire, they were not as often as either might have liked, always in the shadows. When Visenya was sent away in 426 to marry a son of the Sealord of Braavos, Aegon was devastated, but managed to hide his sorrow upon seeing how excited she was by the prospect of being a lady of an exotic court across the Narrow Sea. Once she was gone, he took what comfort he could from Rhaenyra. Much to her credit, the Princess provided a much-needed arm for her brother to hold tightly to, supporting and comforting him - in her own clumsy but well-meaning way - as his grief dissipated. By the time of their wedding, Aegon was once again an admirer of his full-sister, and was happy the day he laid a cloak over her shoulders and the pair of them went soaring through the skies. Yet deep down, he still thought of Visenya sometimes when he and his sister-wife were lying in bed silently, feeling a thousand yards apart when they had been coupling moments prior. Her return to Westeros with her husband and children had brought such feelings into the forefront of his mind, yet he remained faithful to Rhaenyra, who he knew would one day be his consort as he sat upon their father's throne.

That faithfulness came to an end just shy of two years after their marriage. The loss of Visenya's husband and been difficult, and the loss of her son had left her almost crippled with grief. It was in those fragile weeks after the child's unexpected loss that Aegon found his arms around his beloved sister again, desiring only to make her smile again, to give her respite from the grief. Yet it did not end with making her smile, nor did it end as the grief receded and she became herself again. His desire for her was only amplified as he saw the old Visenya return. She became his paramour, far more openly so than when they had been sneaking about a few years prior. As his affection for Visenya became more solidified, more 'official', Aegon began distancing himself more and more from Rhaenyra. He found her to be not only abrasive, but cold and harsh and difficult to love at all, not merely difficult to be tender with. Blinded by desire, he did not consider that his actions were what had made her cold towards him. The lack of a child after almost three years of marriage provided his conscious with the justification to go a step further, and to make his beloved paramour into his second consort.

This decision would have consequences that Aegon had never imagined, yet in hindsight considers himself a fool to have not. What little love remained between he and Rhaenyra was smothered to ashes and embers, and might have been snuffed out entirely and replaced with loathing, had he not sired a child upon her in a night of icy embraces borne out of duty, and no small amount of guilt that he hardly realized existed. When a son was born by her, in the very same hour that one was born of Visenya, Aegon found himself feeling rather like the subject of some mummer's comic tale. His most legitimate, perhaps his *only* legitimate justification for his actions, was now gone. Whenever he visited Rhaenyra in the days after, who appeared so abnormally gentle and innocent with their baby lying upon her breast, he was unable to look her in the eye, nor resist the venom that came subtly from her tongue, disguised as mundane chatting. Even as he wanted to celebrate that it had been Visenya's son who came first, he could not free himself from the guilt no matter how hard he tried, to the point that he found himself unable to name Daeron or Viserys as his rightful heir. A dilemma that continues to this day, and has caused him much grief.

Yet the challenges faced in his personal life would be overshadowed tenfold by the chaos that gripped the Seven Kingdoms in the aftermath of his taking a second Queen. Even 431, as he awaited the two children he had sired upon his two consorts, many fires were being kindled, helped greatly by a spark which his actions had provided. In 432, the Bleeding began in earnest with the outbreak of (TBA)

Family

 * King Rhaegar II Targaryen (387 - 435)
 * w. Selenya Targaryen (381 - 408)
 * Queen Visenya Silvermoon (b. 408)
 * m. Queen Rhaenys Targaryen (b. 387)
 * Queen Rhaenyra Targaryen (b. 408)
 * King Aegon VII Targaryen (b. 411)
 * m. Queen Rhaenyra Targaryen (b. 408)
 * Prince Viserys Targaryen (b. 431)
 * m. Queen Visenya Silvermoon (b. 408)
 * Prince Daeron Targaryen (b. 431)
 * Princess Elaena Targaryen (b. 433)
 * Prince Valerion Targaryen (b. 436)
 * Prince Aerion Targaryen (b. 412)
 * Prince Baelor Targaryen (b. 415)
 * Prince Daemon Targaryen (b. 416)
 * Princess Naerys Targaryen (b. 418)