Only surviving child of King Viserys I by his first queen Aemma Arryn, Rhaenyra was a child of the Red Keep from her cradle, doted upon by her father and feted by the court as the Realm's Delight. When her mother and infant brother were lost together in a difficult birth in 105 AC, Viserys set aside the custom that ranked any son of the line before a daughter and named the seven-year-old Rhaenyra his heir over his own brother, Prince Daemon. The lords of the Seven Kingdoms came in their hundreds to King's Landing and swore upon the Iron Throne to defend her right, and for twenty-four years she stood Princess of Dragonstone and presumed queen.
She was wed first to her cousin Laenor Velaryon in 114 AC, an arrangement of state more than affection. By Laenor she had three sons (Jacaerys, Lucerys, and Joffrey), though all three were dark of hair and broad of nose, and the court whispered their true father had been Ser Harwin Strong of Harrenhal. After Laenor was struck down at Spicetown in 120 AC she married her uncle Daemon, and by him bore two further sons, Aegon and Viserys, with a stillborn daughter Visenya between them. Mounted on her own butter-gold Syrax and ringed by the dragons of her sons, she commanded the most formidable assembly of dragonriders the realm had ever seen.
When King Viserys died in 129 AC, his small council crowned his eldest son by Alicent Hightower while Rhaenyra was still on Dragonstone, and Aegon II took the throne. The Dance of the Dragons followed: Lucerys was caught above Storm's End and killed in the air by Prince Aemond on Vhagar; in answer the assassins Blood and Cheese took the head of Aegon II's son Jaehaerys in the queen's bedchamber. Rhaenyra's faction took King's Landing for a season after the death of her cousin Rhaenys at Rook's Rest, but the smallfolk turned on her over taxes and tithes, the Two Betrayers Hugh Hammer and Ulf the White carried two of her dragons over to her enemies, and her boy Joffrey was killed during the Storming of the Dragonpit. With Jacaerys lost at the Gullet she fled back to Dragonstone, only for Aegon II to find her there in late 130 AC and feed her in pieces to his dragon Sunfyre as her surviving son Aegon watched from a window of the castle she had been born in. The realm afterwards remembered her as the Half-Year Queen.