Daenerys, who is 17 at the start of the TV series, is a daughter of the former royal house Targaryen, who were deposed by the current king Robert Baratheon. Daenerys and her brother Viserys escaped when the new king took power and have been living in exile, but Viserys is determined to reclaim what he sees as his throne. In order to gain a sizable fighting force, Viserys married Daenerys to Khal Drogo, the leader of a tribe of the people known as the Dothraki, who are nomadic and survive through their horsemanship. (Khal is a formal title for the leader of a Dothraki tribe.) Daenerys and Khal Drogo grew to love one another and Daenerys becomes pregnant, but Viserys threatened Daenerys' life and that of her child when he comes to believe that his sister will take the throne, not him, so Khal Drogo killed Viserys by pouring molten gold on his head. However, Khal Drogo later became wounded in battle, and Daenerys desperately made a deal with a tribe wisewoman to try to save his life. The wisewoman warned her that such magic could have a heavy cost, but Daenerys agreed anyway. Khal Drogo was revived, but he lay in a coma, and the cost of the magic is revealed when Daenerys' baby is born, but dies. Unable to stand seeing Khal Drogo in such a state, Daenerys smothers him, and after a funeral pyre is built for the fallen leader, with dragon eggs Daenerys received as a wedding gift on the flames, she walks into the burning pyre. The Dothraki tribe is amazed to find her unharmed, with three hatched dragon eggs, the next morning. Daenerys is now determined to take the royal throne that she has also come to see as hers.
Mark Sappenfield
Dear Reader,
About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:
“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”
If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.
But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.
The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.
We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”
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