As I promised last time, here’s my depiction of young Aegon Targaryen for Game of Thrones latest Chapter Pack, The Shadow City, by Fantasy Flight Games.

Now, I was about to write “hey, this is the second time I draw Aegon, the first being this one in the book World of Ice and Fire”.

Luckily I did double check before writing that, and as it turn out I was being wrong.
I mean, wrong all along, even when I was working at this illustration.

First, the Targaryen I drew back then was Aerys the Mad. Of course I knew it at the time, the names just got mixed up in my mind after so long.

That left me with the question “bloody hell, who is this guy I just drew?”

The only Aegon I remembered was the son of Rhaegar and Lyanna Stark, whose head was smashed in by The Mountain when he was just a baby.
That clearly couldn’t be it.

Intrigued, I went as far as looking for a family tree of the Targaryen family.
As pretty as it is, that left me with even more questions, as there’s a whole bunch of Aegons in that family tree, and none of them rang any bell.

I eventually looked up his entry on Wiki of Ice and Fire (yes, I should have done that first thing), and that left me flabbergasted, as I had NO MEMORY WHATSOEVER of all this after reading all the books. Twice.

Once aboard the Shy Maid, Tyrion is introduced to Griff’s son, “Young Griff”, a young man who dyes his hair blue in memory of his late mother, who was from Tyrosh. He is a lithe and well-made youth, with a lanky build already as tall as Griff. Tyrion notes that the boy’s eyes seem to be dark blue, but look black by lamplight, and purple in the light of dusk. He has long eyelashes. […]

[…] After being rescued from the Sorrows, Tyrion admits his suspicion that the youth is claiming to be an incognito Aegon. The young man explains his apparent survival to Tyrion while they play cyvasse. According to his account, the infant killed during the Sack of King’s Landing was a tanner’s infant son born at Pisswater Bend, a street of King’s Landing. The child’s mother had died at birth. The tanner sold his boy to Varys for a jug of wine, since he already had other sons, but had never tasted Arbor gold. Varys arranged the swap between the two infants. Elia received the tanner’s son, whom Tyrion dubs the pisswater prince, while Varys took custody of the real Prince Aegon.

So, moral of the story is that if you have a memory as shitty as mine, the world looks new every time you open your eyes in the morning.

Also, I can save in books by keeping just a dozen at home, and then periodically going “aw, I’ve never read this, cool”.

by Paolo Puggioni