Eldest of the three siblings who made the Conquest. A grim, warlike woman who bore the Valyrian steel sword Dark Sister at her hip and rode Vhagar in war. She wed her brother Aegon by Valyrian rite and bore him one son, Maegor, in whom she invested all the iron of her own ambition. She founded the Kingsguard in the second year of her brother's reign and outlived him by seven years.
She was the eldest child of Lord Aerion Targaryen and Lady Valaena Velaryon, born on Dragonstone three years before her brother and seven before her sister. She had the silver-gold hair of her line and the hard violet eyes that came down the centuries to Daemon and Maegor and the Mad King; she was reckoned beautiful in her youth and grew the colder for it. From girlhood she took the sword and the dragon both, claiming the great green Vhagar before either of her siblings reached for a saddle, and never set either aside thereafter.
In the Conquest she was her brother's mailed fist. She rode Vhagar above the Crackclaw Point and at Harrenhal; she answered Dornish raiders in the latter wars with fire and blood; and when at last Aegon's host stood gathered in the riverlands, it was she who flew alone to the Eyrie and brought the Vale to her brother by lifting the six-year-old Ronnel Arryn onto Vhagar's back for a single circuit of the mountains, then depositing him safely upon his own high seat. She was the first to draw blood for Aegon and the last to sheathe her blade after every battle of the year was done.
After the Conquest she would not be merely a queen. She held her own court on Dragonstone, judged her own cases, kept her own household guards, and rode her own progresses through the realm her brother had made. When an attempt on Aegon's life in 10 AC laid bare the inadequacy of his ordinary guard, she designed the Kingsguard in a single night, drawing on the Valyrian model: seven knights of the white cloak, sworn for life, oathbound to die for the king's body, with the office of Lord Commander given to the first of them she had chosen. The institution she built would outlast her line by three hundred years.
Aegon died first, of a stroke upon Dragonstone in 37 AC. Visenya bent her will then to the cause of her son: when her stepson Aenys faltered and died in 42 AC, the chroniclers whispered that it was Visenya who flew Vhagar to Dragonstone and brought Maegor home to take the throne over his nephew's heirs. She lived to see him crowned, to see him take Rhaena from her brother Aegon, to see him butcher his rivals one after another, and she died in his sixth year at Dragonstone, the old grey terror of the realm refusing the maesters' attendance to the end.