A Dragon-Sized Probate Dispute

The longer I work in estate law, the more I notice its patterns surfacing in places that have nothing to do with a courthouse. They turn up in family dinners, in the way a sibling lingers over a piece of furniture, and lately, in the fantasy series my wife and I have been watching each week.

House of the Dragon, the HBO prequel to Game of Thrones, is marketed as a story about dragons and honor. Watch it with a probate practice in your peripheral vision, however, and something else comes into focus. What you are actually watching is a multi century-long estate dispute with a body count.

The Targaryen family had wealth beyond measure, a written history maintained by trained scholars, and the closest thing their world had to a nuclear weapon. What they did not have was a single properly executed instrument that said, in plain and unambiguous language, who inherits it all, and why. Hundreds of thousands died as a result.

Great houses were extinguished from history. Dragons that had existed for centuries were killed in the span of a few years. Nearly all of it traces back to failures that any estate planning attorney would recognize on sight.

When You Decline to Decide… Status Quo Rules

The trouble begins before the series does. King Jaehaerys I outlived his sons, and in 101 AC he convened a Great Council to settle the succession. The strongest claim by tradition belonged to Princess Rhaenys, the only child of his eldest son, and by extension to her son Laenor. The assembled lords chose her cousin Viserys instead, favoring an unbroken male line over the ordinary rules of descent which would have placed the first woman on the throne. Rhaenys became known ever after as “The Queen Who Never Was.”

Set aside the politics and look at the mechanics. The realm faced a genuine question about who should inherit, and it answered that question by deferring to custom rather than by documenting a considered decision. Jaehaerys had every tool available to him. He could have declared his intent formally, sealed it, explained his reasoning, and distributed copies to the lords who would later be asked, rather one-sidedly, to honor it. He chose instead to let an assembly interpret tradition on his behalf.

This is precisely what happens when a person dies without a will. The estate does not evaporate into chaos; it passes according to a statutory formula that the State wrote for the average family, not for yours (and the Targaryens were no average family either). Washington’s intestate succession scheme is perfectly rational as a default.

This default simply has no idea that your daughter has run the family business for eleven years, that one child received substantial help with a down payment, or that a stepchild you raised from age four is not legally your descendant. A default rule is unable to know any of that, and will never ask. Your estate planning attorney will.

The Great Council preserved the status quo and forfeited a chance to memorialize something better. Every family that skips estate planning makes the same trade without realizing a trade is being made.

Viserys and the Verbal Will

If the Great Council was a missed opportunity, what King Viserys I did with the succession following was something closer to malicious negligence.

Viserys made a genuine decision. He named his daughter Rhaenyra his heir, and he did so deliberately, in the presence of witnesses, more than once across the span of his reign.

So far, so good.

The failure came in everything he did not do afterward. The decision was never reduced to a formal, sealed instrument under the king’s seal. It was never delivered to the great houses who would be asked to enforce it.

This succession plan was also never reaffirmed after his household changed shape through remarriage and the birth of sons who had their own claims and their own advocates. His declaration lived entirely in the memory of people whose interests would later diverge violently.

Then came the deathbed.

Weakened and confused, Viserys spoke to his wife about a prophecy handed down through his family, one concerning a promised prince who would one day unite the realm against a coming darkness. In that prophecy the prince shares the name Aegon, a name carried by roughly every third Targaryen ever born.

Alicent, his wife, who had no knowledge of the prophecy and every reason to hear something else, understood her dying husband to be naming their teenage son Aegon as his successor.

One utterance. Zero context. Two entirely reasonable interpretations.

The treasury dried. The realm burned.

Washington law addresses this scenario with unusual bluntness. Under RCW 11.12.020, a will must be in writing, signed by the person making it, and attested by two or more competent witnesses who subscribe their names to the document.

Oral wills, which the law calls nuncupative wills in RCW 11.12.025, survive in only the narrowest of circumstances. They apply to members of the armed forces and merchant marine, or to personal property valued at no more than one thousand dollars, and even then the words must be spoken during a final illness, witnessed by two people, committed to writing, and offered to the court within six months.

A kingdom does not qualify. Neither does a house in Washington.

The Targaryens are a fictional family, but the problem they faced is not (minus the dragons of course).

When Aretha Franklin died in 2018, her sons spent nearly five years litigating which of several handwritten documents found around her home reflected her wishes. A Michigan jury eventually concluded that a four-page draft discovered wedged beneath a couch cushion, complete with a smiley face beside her signature, controlled the disposition of her estate.

Research by legal scholars examining hundreds of probate cases found that contested matters of this kind carried roughly seventeen thousand dollars in additional attorney fees on average. That figure describes ordinary families in ordinary courtrooms, with no dragons involved.

Ambiguity Is the Only Fuel a Will Contest Needs

Here is the part of the show that estate practitioners find most instructive. Both factions believed they were in the right. ‘Team black’ had heard Viserys name Rhaenyra for twenty years. ‘Team green’ had heard him say Aegon with his last breath. Neither side was lying. Both were reasoning honestly from incomplete information, and that shared honesty is exactly what made the conflict unresolvable.

Public support followed the same fault line. Lords and smallfolk alike chose a side because there was a side to choose. Had a sealed, witnessed, widely distributed declaration of succession existed, the debate would have collapsed into a single question of authenticity rather than an open contest of interpretation. There would have been no ambiguity to organize an army around.

The same dynamic plays out in probate courts every week, at a smaller scale and with better lighting. Grief makes people literal. A vague phrase, an outdated beneficiary designation, or a promise a parent made verbally to one child and never repeated to the others becomes the hairline fracture through which a family separates.

An attorney who demands precision in definitions while drafting is not being fussy or running up billable hours but establishing a tool to prevent future conflict.

Full legal names rather than nicknames, defined terms rather than assumed ones, clear contingencies for the beneficiary who dies first, and an explicit statement of intent all serve the same purpose: leaving nothing for a grieving family to argue about in good faith.

The Sword Everyone Was Watching

Gifting that involves heirlooms is where inheritance stops being arithmetic and starts being about who feels loved, who feels trusted, and who feels seen.

The lesson about heirlooms comes from a generation after the House of the Dragon, and it may be the sharpest one in the entire saga.

Blackfyre was the Valyrian steel sword carried by Aegon the Conqueror and by every Targaryen king who followed him. It functioned as a scepter at court and was, in every practical sense, the physical embodiment of the crown.

In 182 AC, King Aegon IV gave that sword to his bastard son Daemon, a gifted young warrior, rather than to his trueborn heir Daeron, who was scholarly, slight of frame, and no swordsman at all.

By one reading, this was a father matching an object to the child who would actually use it. Ask any parent who has given good tools to the kid who has a workshop and works with their hands.

The realm read it with their own bias lenses.

Nobles took the gift as a signal that the king considered Daemon his true successor. Daemon took the sword’s name as his own and founded a rival house. The resulting ‘Blackfyre rebellions’ tormented the region for the better part of a century.

A father assigned one meaning to an object. Everyone else assigned another. The gap between those two meanings cost thousands of lives and the temporary extinction of dragons.

Families do this with far humbler things. A grandmother’s ring, a hunting rifle handed down through four generations, the dining table where every holiday of a childhood was spent.

Clients frequently tell us these items are worth little. While usually true of their fair market value, this is almost never true of their emotional weight.

Gifting that involves heirlooms is where inheritance stops being arithmetic and starts being about who feels loved, who feels trusted, and who feels seen.

Two practices address this well. The first is a personal property memorandum, a document referenced in your will that lists specific tangible items and their intended recipients, and which can typically be updated without re-executing the entire will.

The second costs nothing at all. Tell your family what you are planning while you are alive to explain your reasoning.

Gauge the reaction.

If your decision lands badly, you will learn it at a kitchen table rather than through a petition filed by one of your children against another once you’re gone. Aegon IV never explained himself, but it was the generations who followed him that paid the price for that lack of explanation.

Even Good Plans Go Stale

One final lesson we picked up, and this one belongs squarely to the living.

While Viserys’s original declaration was defensible when initially orated, it became dangerous due to a conflicting interest developing that was never cleared by an update in writing.

Washington families have been given a vivid illustration of this recently. The state estate tax exclusion sat frozen at $2.193 million for years. Legislation effective July 1, 2025 raised it to $3 million and pushed the top marginal rate to 35 percent, briefly the highest in the nation.

Less than a year later the legislature reversed itself, and for deaths occurring on or after July 1, 2026, the top rate returned to 20 percent with the exclusion reset to $3 million. Three sets of rules inside twenty-four months. A plan drafted with confidence in 2024 may now be calibrated to a statute that no longer exists.

Marriages, births, business formations, property purchases, and moves across state lines all have the same effect on an estate plan that new legislation does.

An estate plan is not a monument of a single moment but a living document that deserves review every few years and after any significant change in your family or your holdings.

The Realm Cornerstone Legal Can Actually Save

The HBO series required a specific and preventable sequence: an unwritten decision, an ambiguous final statement, an heirloom that carried a meaning its giver never intended, and a family that never sat down together while sitting down together was still possible. Take any one of those away and the story becomes considerably less dramatic television (based on a book).

Your estate will likely not be settled by dragon fire. Your estate will likely be settled by a court, by documents, and by whatever your representative believes you would have wanted.

The difference between those last two carrying the same answer is the work of an afternoon with an attorney who asks the right questions.

The attorneys at Cornerstone Legal PLLC help families across Washington, Idaho, and Montana put their intentions into instruments that hold up, and just as importantly, into conversations that keep families intact afterward. If your current plan lives mostly in your memory, or in a document you have not opened since a different set of tax rules applied, we would welcome the chance to talk.

Schedule a consultation today.