Born in 127 AC to Daeron Velaryon, a cousin of the Sea Snake's grandson Lord Alyn, and his wife Hazel of House Harte. Her mother went out of her in the Winter Fever and her father drowned at the Stepstones during Lord Alyn's attack of 133 AC, leaving her an orphan of six taken into Lord Alyn and Lady Baela's keeping. When King Aegon III's first marriage to his cousin Princess Jaehaera ended in her plunge from the wall of the Red Keep that same year, the Hand Lord Unwin Peake of Starpike declared a great Maiden's Day Ball in the throne room to find a new bride for the boy-king, with his own daughter the heavy favourite among the near-thousand maidens who came. Near the close of that day Lady Rhaena and Lady Baela brought Daenaera forward themselves and put her before the king; she was surpassingly beautiful even at six years old with silver hair laced in gold and eyes blue as summer-sea, and when the gloomy boy-king returned her smile and called her pretty all the hall knew Lord Peake's daughter would not be queen. The little Velaryon was wed to King Aegon on the last day of 133 AC.
Lord Peake's bitterness ran deep, and within the year apple tarts laced with the tears of Lys had been smuggled to a quiet supper she shared with the king and his food-taster Gaemon Palehair; Gaemon died of the poison and Grand Maester Munkun's purgative saved her by an hour. Her ladies Lucinda Penrose, Cassandra Baratheon, and Priscella Hogg were after caught up in the treason trials of 136 AC, the first having owned to wishing Daenaera dead. The grand royal progress that Lord Torrhen Manderly planned around her sweet nature for the king's sixteenth name day was never made, though her presence in the city softened the dour boy-king and bought him friends he could not otherwise have made. She gave Aegon five children — Daeron, Baelor, Daena, Rhaena, and Elaena — saw two of them crowned king and the third Princess of Dorne, and outlived her husband by thirty-four years to die in 191 AC at sixty-four, a Queen Dowager who had spent the longest part of her life in the queen's chambers of Maegor's Holdfast.