Elder of the twin daughters of Prince Daemon Targaryen and his second wife Laena Velaryon, born on Driftmark in 116 AC, a quarter-hour before her sister Rhaena. Where Rhaena was a quiet child happiest with a book, Baela was a creature of salt and wind from the start, a girl who took to her father's hand and to her mother's dragon Vhagar before she could read, and who learned to ride a colt and a longboat in the same season. After Laena died in childbed in 120 AC their father carried the twins to Dragonstone, where they grew up at the court of his new wife Princess Rhaenyra, and where the egg laid in Baela's cradle hatched at last into a slim green she-dragon she named Moondancer.
When the Dance of the Dragons opened in 129 AC, Baela was thirteen and already a rider. Princess Rhaenyra kept her with the court on Dragonstone through the first year of the war while Rhaena was sent across the sea to Pentos for safety, and named her castellan of the castle when the queen flew off to take King's Landing. There at the end of the war's first round Baela met the worst of it: Aegon II and the great Sunfyre, broken at Rook's Rest and crawled at last to the Dragonmont, had been smuggled into Dragonstone by his own loyalists in a quiet coup, and when their green banner went up on the walls Baela took Moondancer into the air against him. The young she-dragon, swift and unscarred, harried the wounded Sunfyre through the rocks above the keep and tore him so deeply that he never flew again. Moondancer fell in pieces with him on the courtyard cobbles, and Baela was thrown clear half-burnt and half-broken, but living, and was carried off by Aegon's men in chains.
After the peace, the regents who governed for her young half-brother King Aegon III gave Baela in marriage to Alyn Velaryon, the Sea Snake's youthful heir and the boy who would in time be called Oakenfist for his sea-victories against the Triarchy. Of that match came daughters whose own marriages would in turn carry Velaryon blood back into the line of kings, and a long life of her own on Driftmark and at the court at King's Landing. She sat at her brother's small council when he asked it of her, played part of a sister and part of a mother to his children, and at her death on Driftmark in 158 AC she had been a rider without a dragon for almost thirty years, the last Targaryen who could remember the dragons of the Dance from the inside of a saddle.