Aegon glanced at his aunt Rhaenys, who stood quietly beside the wine cabinet with a glass of deep red wine. Though he respected his elderly uncle by marriage, Corlys, that respect fell well short of admiration.
To be fair, Corlys was an outstanding politician, military commander, and adventurer-objectively speaking, there was probably no one else in all of Westeros who had reached such heights in all three fields.
Nor could anyone deny that Lord Corlys, the "Sea Snake," was brave, fearless, and adventurous, a great navigator and sailor who had explored seas and lands most people of Westeros had never set foot in.
But... without House Targaryen's dragons, would House Velaryon ever have had the chance to act so high and mighty?
If their ancestors had not granted House Velaryon the favor of intermarrying with them generation after generation, if his aunt Rhaenys had not brought Meleys with her when she married into the family, if his grandfather, the "Good King" Jaehaerys, had not, in a moment of guilt-driven mercy, tacitly allowed Seasmoke to hatch from the dragon egg in Laenor's cradle-
House Velaryon's Driftmark would still have been nothing more than a "slightly" wealthier dependent island beside the Targaryens' Dragonstone.
And without dragons to protect the Velaryons...
Hadn't their eventual fate in the original story been to decline, clinging to a few barren rocks at the mouth of Blackwater Bay, with no one left to protect even their old livelihood of ocean voyaging?
Aegon was not alone in this view. Daemon, leaning by himself against the window, shared it.
He had changed into a lightweight black coat that day, his long silver-gold hair tied loosely behind his head. He leaned against the window frame with a wineglass in one hand, while the thumb of the other idly hooked the