First of his name. In a single year of war, mounted on Balerion the Black Dread and flanked by his sister-wives upon Vhagar and Meraxes, Aegon Targaryen welded the Seven Kingdoms into one realm and forged the Iron Throne from the swords of his fallen foes. He fixed the calendar from the year of his coming, raised the Aegonfort that became King's Landing, and ruled for thirty-seven years, long enough that the realm he built outlived its makers and his dragons both.
He was born on Dragonstone, last son of Lord Aerion and Lady Valaena of the Velaryons, raised in the shadow of the Doom that had swallowed every other dragonlord house of the Valyrian Freehold. From his cradle he flew beside his elder sister Visenya, dark and severe, and his younger sister Rhaenys, golden and laughing, and he took them both to wife in the Valyrian fashion before he came of age. Three dragons rose with the siblings: Balerion, hatched in old Valyria before the Doom and grown to a beast whose shadow could swallow a town; Vhagar, who would live longest of the three and reach a size to dwarf even her brood-brother at the end of her days; and the slender Meraxes, beloved of Rhaenys, whose skull the Dornish would one day hang in their halls.
The Conquest began in the second year before his coming, when Aegon landed at the mouth of the Blackwater and built a fort of mud and wood upon the hill where his city would one day stand. Harrenhal fell to the dragonfire that boiled Harren the Black in his own walls; Loren Lannister and Mern of the Reach broke together on the Field of Fire beneath the wings of all three dragons, the only battle on which they ever flew as one. Torrhen Stark knelt at the banks of the Trident rather than feed his northmen to Balerion, and was called the King Who Knelt forever after. Visenya, alone, brought the Vale to her brother by alighting on Vhagar in the Eyrie's courtyard and lifting the boy-king Ronnel Arryn onto the dragon's back for a single circuit of the mountains. Only Dorne held against him, where Princess Meria Martell emptied her castles before his armies and hid her people in the deep desert; there the Conquest stalled and was never finished in his lifetime.
He was crowned and anointed in Oldtown by the High Septon when the High Tower bent its knee without battle, and from that day reckoned the years anew. Of his thirty-seven years upon the Iron Throne the first were spent in war and the rest in slow, careful peace: he held judgement at the Aegonfort, on Dragonstone, and at the separate courts kept by his sisters; he rode royal progresses through every kingdom but Dorne, his bannermen feasting him in turn, and rebuked the greater of them when they overreached. His First Dornish War cost him Rhaenys and Meraxes both, struck down at the Hellholt by a scorpion bolt, and answered with the Dragon's Wroth that scoured the Dornish keeps for years before he made a wary peace with the spear that had bled him.
He died of a stroke upon Dragonstone in 37 AC, in the keep where he had been born sixty-four years before. The throne passed to his eldest son Aenys, born of Rhaenys; behind Aenys waited Maegor, born of Visenya, and the long contest between the two lines would shape the first century of the dynasty he had founded. His house would hold the Iron Throne for two hundred and eighty-two years before another rebellion cast its last king down, and even then the Seven Kingdoms he had forged would remain one.