The birth of every new life represents the continuation of a house's future. In this era, having many children is not merely a grim compromise against the horrifyingly high infant mortality rate; it is the ultimate measure of a family's internal strength and prosperity.
The newest infant soon received his name: Valerion Targaryen.
It was a name steeped in the history of House Targaryen. By bestowing it upon the fragile newborn, King Jaehaerys imparted a silent prayer—a desperate hope that this child, much like Gaemon, could survive the brutal trial of his birth and find the strength to live.
Grand Maester Elysar had only reported the grim truth of Valerion's condition to King Jaehaerys in secret. However, as a Draconic Bloodline Sorcerer attuned to the flow of life force, Gaemon could clearly see the boy's fading vitality. The infant's life fire was horrifyingly dim, flickering as though it might be extinguished by the next gust of wind.
Determined to keep the child alive, Gaemon formally requested that he be allowed to take charge of his new brother's care. After a tense, private discussion, King Jaehaerys and Queen Alysanne agreed.
Gaemon was only four years old, but he possessed the power of magic. In the face of a certain death sentence, magic was the only hope the King and Queen had left.
Ever since Elysar had delivered the dire prognosis, Jaehaerys had been agonizing over how to save his son. Every conventional medical option he considered ultimately ended in despair. Gaemon was their final, desperate gamble. Since Gaemon lived in the Red Keep alongside them anyway, granting him "custody" simply meant allowing him to dictate the infant's daily routine.
Upon taking charge of Valerion, Gaemon didn't resort to the Blood Sorcery his parents secretly feared he might use. Instead, he immediately enacted sweeping, fundamental changes to the child's diet and living environment.
The very first step was revolutionizing the water supply.
In this era, sanitation was practically nonexistent. The vast majority of King's Landing's water sources were heavily contaminated. To avoid falling violently ill from drinking water, people almost exclusively drank wine or ale to stay hydrated.
Gaemon ordered servants to line the Red Keep's primary cisterns with layers of sand and gravel to filter out large impurities. Afterward, he mandated that all water given to the infant—or used for his care—must be boiled vigorously to neutralize the invisible microbes.
With the water supply secured, Gaemon turned his attention to the air. He ordered the windows in Valerion's nursery to be thrown open every single day to allow for cross-ventilation.
Normally, because King's Landing produced an unfathomably foul stench, the windows of the Red Keep facing the city were kept firmly shut. While this successfully blocked the smell, it also plunged most of the castle's interior into perpetual, stagnant darkness.
These warm, damp, unventilated rooms were perfect breeding grounds for toxic molds, fungi, and lethal bacteria. It was precisely this invisible miasma that triggered so many fatal illnesses in frail newborns.
In a world without antibiotics, infections caused by these pathogens were almost always a death sentence. The maesters, with all their learned texts, had no effective treatments for the invisible killers.
Gaemon's first line of defense was environmental control: drastically reducing the infant's exposure to these harmful agents.
But Gaemon wasn't relying on hygiene alone. He had quietly prepared a secret weapon—a primitive but highly effective antibiotic commonplace in his past life: Allicin.
Given the absolute lack of modern technology in Westeros, Gaemon had racked his brain for an antibiotic that could be manufactured quickly using available resources. Allicin, derived from garlic, was the only viable option.
While it wasn't a miracle drug like modern synthetic antibiotics, it was the absolute best the current technological level could produce.
The extraction process was straightforward; ancient medicine from Gaemon's past life had utilized a similar method for centuries:
1. Peel and thoroughly crush purple-skinned garlic.
2. Mix the crushed garlic with highly concentrated alcohol (roughly a 1:10 ratio of garlic to alcohol).
3. Stir thoroughly and seal the mixture in a container to steep for one to three hours.
4. Filter out the solid matter.
5. Gently heat the remaining liquid at a low temperature to evaporate the alcohol, leaving behind a concentrated allicin extract.
Infants were incredibly susceptible to bronchitis and pneumonia caused by bacterial or fungal infections. Allicin was highly effective at treating these specific ailments and possessed massive broad-spectrum antibacterial properties that inhibited further growth.
To modern eyes, Gaemon's methods might seem rudimentary, perhaps even crude. But in Westeros, they were revolutionary.
Under Gaemon's strict regimen, Valerion's frail body slowly began to stabilize and gain strength. This steady improvement deeply puzzled King Jaehaerys and Queen Alysanne. They knew it wasn't the result of Blood Sorcery, as Gaemon had never asked them for the "sacrifices" required to cast the spell.
When they eventually questioned him, Gaemon didn't hide his methods. He explained the concepts of boiled water, ventilation, and the garlic extract in detail. However, the explanation only confused his parents further. Concepts like "microbes" and "antibiotics" were completely alien to them. To Jaehaerys and Alysanne, Gaemon's scientific explanations sounded exactly like complex, incomprehensible magic. They eventually gave up trying to understand and simply accepted the results.
The only person who truly grasped what Gaemon was doing was Vaegon.
Vaegon had been by Gaemon's side throughout the entire process of manufacturing the allicin extract. For the bookish prince, it was like stepping into an entirely new universe.
Vaegon loved reading simply because he loved knowledge. He had never imagined that knowledge could be weaponized like this—that it could offer tangible, practical solutions to diseases that had terrified the world for millennia. He realized that the despair surrounding illness wasn't inevitable; it was simply a lack of understanding.
After successfully producing the allicin, Vaegon became obsessed. He constantly badgered Gaemon for more of this hidden knowledge. Gaemon, recognizing an eager and brilliant mind, held nothing back. He shared everything he could remember from his past life.
He even explained the theoretical frameworks for producing far more powerful antibiotics, like Penicillin and Sulfonamides, based on short educational videos he had watched in his previous life.
Armed with these new research directions, Vaegon was ecstatic. He treated the theories like sacred texts, throwing himself entirely into the pursuit of manufacturing these "miracle drugs."
However, trying to single-handedly invent Penicillin and Sulfa drugs using Westerosi technology was an impossibly steep mountain to climb.
After countless failed experiments, Vaegon realized a harsh truth: relying solely on his current resources and knowledge to produce these era-defining drugs was a fool's errand. Therefore, one year after Valerion's birth, Vaegon made a shocking request that baffled the entire Targaryen family—yet made perfect sense to Gaemon.
Vaegon announced that he wanted to travel to Oldtown to study at the Citadel.
He felt deeply inadequate and believed he needed to immerse himself in the accumulated knowledge of the maesters to further his research. King Jaehaerys was initially reluctant to let a Targaryen prince study at the Citadel, but after a long, private conversation with his son, he eventually relented and granted his permission.
Gaemon didn't try to stop Vaegon. In fact, during one of their final conversations before his departure, Gaemon laid out a portion of his grand, overarching plans for the future.
Vaegon was utterly spellbound. It was inconceivable that a five-year-old child could possess such terrifyingly ambitious and meticulously structured designs for the world.
But as the shock faded, a fierce, burning ambition ignited in Vaegon's chest. If a child can envision reshaping the world, Vaegon thought, then I, who pride myself on my intellect, have been nothing but a coward, locking myself in a cage built of family expectations and royal duty.
Gaemon's vision struck Vaegon like a thunderbolt, shattering his lifelong sense of aimlessness. He finally realized just how vast the world was, and how much room there was for him to make his mark upon it.
Before leaving for Oldtown, Vaegon coordinated his goals and academic targets with Gaemon. As he rode out of the Red Keep, Vaegon Targaryen made a silent vow: he was betting his entire future on Gaemon's vision.