DORNE AGAINST THE DRAGONS
Of all the challenges the Dornishmen have faced, none have loomed so large as that posed by Aegon the Conqueror and his sisters. Great was the valor the Dornish showed in battle, and great the grief at the losses they suffered, for the price of freedom was steep. Yet alone of all the Seven Kingdoms, Dorne remained independent of House Targaryen, resisting attempt after attempt by Aegon, his sisters, and their successors to make the Dornish bend their knees before the Iron Throne.
The Dornishmen fought no great battles against the Targaryens, nor did they seek to defend their castles against the dragons when they came, for Meria Martell, Princess of Dorne at the time of Aegon’s Conquest, had learned much from the Last Storm and the Field of Fire, and from the fate of Harrenhal. Instead, when Aegon turned his eye to Dorne in 4 AC, the Dornish simply vanished before the dragons.
Queen Rhaenys led the first assault on Dorne, moving swiftly to seize Dornish seats as she approached Sunspear and burning the Planky Town on Meraxes, whilst Aegon and Lord Tyrell warred in the Prince’s Pass against the mountain lords. The Dornish defenders harried and ambushed the Targaryen forces, then would scamper beneath their rocks as soon as they saw the dragons take flight. Many of Lord Tyrell’s men died of sun and thirst as they marched on Hellholt. Those who survived to reach the castle found it empty, the Ullers all fled.
Aegon had more success, but other than the brief siege at Yronwood, where he was opposed by a handful of old men, boys, and women, he found little opposition. Even Skyreach, the great seat of the Fowlers, was abandoned. At Ghost Hill, the seat of House Toland atop the white chalk hill that overlooks the Sea of Dorne, Aegon saw the banner bearing the Toland ghost flying above the walls and received word that Lord Toland had sent out his champion to face him. Aegon slew the man with his sword, Blackfyre, only to learn that he was Lord Toland’s mad fool and that Lord Toland himself was gone with his household from the castle. In later days, the Tolands would take a new banner, showing a dragon biting its own tail, green on gold in memory of the motley of their brave fool.
Elsewhere, Lord Orys Baratheon’s assault up the Boneway proved a disaster. The canny Dornishmen rained rocks and arrows and spears from the heights, murdered men in the night, and in the end blocked the Boneway both before and behind. Lord Orys was captured by Lord Wyl, and many of his bannermen and knights besides. They remained captive for years before finally being ransomed for their weight in gold in 7 AC. And even then, each and every one of them returned lacking a sword hand, so that they might never take up arms against Dorne again.
Aegon I unleashing Balerion’s flames during the time of the Dragon’s Wroth. (illustration credit 154)
FROM THE HISTORY OF ARCHMAESTER GYLDAYN, ON THE DEFENESTRATION OF SUNSPEAR
Lord Rosby, Castellan of Sunspear and Warden of the Sands, had a kinder end than most. After the Dornishmen swarmed in from the shadow city to retake the castle, he was bound hand and foot, dragged to the top of the Spear Tower, and thrown from a window by none other than the aged Princess Meria herself.
Still, save for the assault in the Boneway, the Dornish simply yielded up their seats, the lords refusing to defend them or bend the knee. The same was the case when the Targaryens at last came to Sunspear, where Princess Meria (mocked by her foes as the Yellow Toad of Dorne but to this day a hero to the Dornish) had herself vanished into the sands. There Queen Rhaenys and King Aegon gathered what courtiers and functionaries remained and declared themselves the victors, placing Dorne under the rule of the Iron Throne. Leaving Lord Rosby to hold Sunspear and Lord Tyrell in charge of a host to put down any revolts, the Targaryens returned to King’s Landing on the backs of their dragons. Yet they had hardly set foot in the royal city than Dorne rebelled against them and did so with shocking rapidity. Garrisons were put to the sword, and the knights who led them were tortured. In truth, it became a game among the Dornish lords, to see which knight would live the longest as bit after bit of him was removed.
Setting out with his garrison at Hellholt to conquer Vaith and retake Sunspear, Lord Harlan Tyrell and his entire army vanished in the sands, never to be heard from again. The reports of travelers in the area claim that occasionally the winds shift the sands to reveal bones and pieces of armor, but the sandy Dornishmen who wander the deep desert say that the sands are the burial grounds of thousands of years of battles, and the bones might be from any time.
The war against the Dornish entered a different phase after the release of Orys One-hand and the other handless lords, for King Aegon was by that time intent on revenge. The Targaryens unleashed their dragons, burning the defiant castles again and again. In return, the Dornish responded with fire of their own, sending a force to Cape Wrath in 8 AC that left half the rainwood ablaze and sacked half a dozen towns and villages. Matters escalated, and more Dornish seats fell to dragonfire in 9 AC. The Dornish responded a year later by sending a host under Lord Fowler that seized and burned the great Marcher castle of Nightsong and carried off its lords and defenders as hostages, whilst another army under Ser Joffrey Dayne marched to the very walls of Oldtown, razing the fields and villages outside it.
So again the Targaryens turned to their dragons, unleashing their fury upon Starfall and Skyreach and Hellholt. It was at Hellholt where the Dornish had their greatest success against the Targaryens. A bolt from a scorpion pierced the eye of Meraxes, and the great dragon and the queen who rode upon it fell from the sky. In her death throes, the dragon destroyed the castle’s highest tower and part of the curtain wall. Queen Rhaenys’s body was never returned to King’s Landing.
FROM THE HISTORY OF ARCHMAESTER GYLDAYN
Whether Rhaenys Targaryen outlived her dragon remains a matter of dispute. Some say that she lost her seat and fell to her death, others that she was crushed beneath Meraxes in the castle yard. A few accounts claim the queen survived her dragon’s fall, only to die a slow death by torment in the dungeons of the Ullers. The true circumstances of her demise will likely never be known, but the histories record that Rhaenys Targaryen, sister and wife to King Aegon I, perished at the Hellholt in Dorne in the tenth year After the Conquest.
The death of Meraxes. (illustration credit 155)
The two years that followed were later called the years of the Dragon’s Wroth. Grief-stricken at the death of their beloved sister, King Aegon and Queen Visenya set ablaze every castle, keep, and holdfast in Dorne at least once … save for Sunspear and the shadow city. Why this is so remains a matter of conjecture. In Dorne, it was said the Targaryens feared that Princess Meria had some cunning means of slaying dragons, something she had purchased from Lys. Likelier, however, is Archmaester Timotty’s suggestion in his Conjectures that the Targaryens hoped to turn the rest of the Dornish, who suffered so much destruction, against the Martells, who were spared. If this is true, it may explain the letters dispatched from the marches to the Dornish houses, urging them to surrender and claiming that the Martells had betrayed them by buying their safety from the Targaryens at the expense of the rest of Dorne.
Regardless, the last and least glorious phase of the First Dornish War then began. The Targaryens placed prices on the heads of the Dornish lords, and half a dozen and more were killed by assassins—though only two of the killers ever lived to collect their reward. The Dornish responded in kind, and many were the pitiless deaths that followed. Even in the heart of King’s Landing, no one was safe. Lord Fell was smothered in a brothel, and King Aegon himself was attacked on three separate occasions. When Queen Visenya and an escort were set upon, two of her guards died before she cut down the last villain herself with Dark Sister. Worse occurred at the hands of the Wyl of Wyl, whose deeds we need not recount; they are infamous enough and still remembered, especially in Fawnton and Old Oak.
Dorne was a blighted, burning ruin by this time, and still the Dornish hid and fought from the shadows, refusing to surrender. Even the smallfolk refused to yield, and the toll in lives was uncountable. When Princess Meria at last passed away in 13 AC, her throne passed to her son, the aged and failing Prince Nymor. He had had enough of war and sent a delegation led by his daughter, Princess Deria, to King’s Landing. This delegation carried the skull of Meraxes with them, as a gift for the king. It was ill received by many—Queen Visenya and Orys Baratheon among them—and Lord Oakheart urged that Deria be sent to the meanest of brothels to service any man who would have her. But King Aegon Targaryen would not countenance such an act and instead listened to her words.
Dorne wanted peace, according to Deria—but the peace of two kingdoms no longer at war, not the peace between a vassal and a lord. Many urged His Grace against this, and the phrase “no peace without submission” was often heard in the halls of the Aegonfort. It was claimed that the king would look weak should he agree to such a demand and that the lords of the Reach and stormlands who had suffered so much for his cause would be angered.
Swayed by such considerations, it is said, King Aegon was determined to refuse the offer until Princess Deria placed in his hands a private letter from her father, Prince Nymor. Aegon read it upon the Iron Throne, and men say that when he rose, his hand was bleeding, so hard had he clenched it. He burned the letter and departed immediately on Balerion’s back for Dragonstone. When he returned the next morning, he agreed to the peace and signed a treaty to that effect.
What the letter contained, none know to this day, though many have speculated. Did Nymor reveal that Rhaenys lived still, broken and mutilated, and that he would end her suffering if Aegon ended hostilities? Was the letter ensorceled? Did he threaten to take all the wealth of Dorne to hire the Faceless Men to kill Aegon’s young son and heir, Aenys? These questions shall never be answered, it seems.
The result, however, was a peace that lasted through the troubles of the Vulture King and beyond. There were other Dornish Wars, to be sure, and even during times of peace, raiders out of Dorne continued to descend from the Red Mountains in search of plunder in the richer, greener lands to the north and west.
Prince Qoren Martell did lead the Dornish to fight in support of the Triarchy when they warred with Prince Daemon Targaryen and the Sea Snake over the Stepstones. During the Dance of the Dragons, both sides courted the Dornishmen, but Prince Qoren refused to take part: “Dorne has danced with dragons before,” he was reported to have said in response to Ser Otto Hightower’s letter. “I would sooner sleep with scorpions.”
It was not until the ascent of King Daeron I that the treaty of eternal peace proved to be less than eternal, and we know the cost of that. The Young Dragon’s conquest of Dorne was a glorious feat, rightly celebrated in song and story, but it lasted less than a summer and cost many thousands of lives, including that of the bold young king himself. It was left to Daeron’s brother and successor, King Baelor I the Blessed, to make the peace, and the cost of that was grievous as well.
The later attempt by King Aegon IV the Unworthy to invade Dorne with “dragons” of his own design is hardly worthy of discussion; it was a mad folly, start to finish, and ended in humiliation. It was Aegon’s son, King Daeron II the Good, who finally brought Dorne into the realm … not with iron and fire but with soft swords and smiles and a pair of well-considered marriages, and a solemn treaty that granted the Dornish princes their style and their privileges and guaranteed that their own laws and customs should always prevail in Dorne.
Aegon the Conqueror reading the Prince of Dorne’s missive. (illustration credit 156)
Dorne continued to be closely allied with House Targaryen in the years that followed, with the Martells supporting the Targaryens against the Blackfyre Pretenders and sending spears to fight the Ninepenny Kings on the Stepstones. Their loyal service was rewarded when Rhaegar Targaryen, Prince of Dragonstone and heir to the Iron Throne, took to wife Princess Elia Martell of Sunspear, and sired two children by her. But for the madness of Rhaegar’s father, Aerys II, a prince of Dornish blood might very well have one day ruled the realm, but the upheavals of Robert’s Rebellion brought about the end of Prince Rhaegar, his wife, and his children.
Prince Qoren’s daughter would be of a different mind. Princess Aliandra came young to her seat and thought herself a new Nymeria. A fiery young woman, she encouraged her lords and knights to prove themselves worthy of her favors by raiding in the marches, but also showed great favor to Lord Alyn Velaryon when his first great journey took him to Sunspear, and again when he returned from the Sunset Sea.
A lady of House Martell in the Dornish desert. (illustration credit 157)
SUNSPEAR
Sunspear’s history is a curious one. Having been little more than the squat, ugly keep called the Sandship in early days under the Martells, beautiful towers bearing all the hallmarks of Rhoynish fashion would eventually spring up around it. It became known as Sunspear when the sun of the Rhoyne was wedded to the spear of the Martells. In time, the Tower of the Sun and the Spear Tower were both constructed—the great golden dome of the one, and the slender, high spire of the other becoming the first things that visitors beheld by land or by sea.
The castle sits on a spur of land, surrounded on three sides by water … and on the fourth side by the shadow city. Though the Dornish may call it a city, it remains no more than a town, and a queer, dusty, ugly town at that. The Dornish built up against the walls of the Sunspear, then built up against the walls of their neighbors’ homes, and so on out, until the shadow city took on its current form. Today, it is a warren of narrow alleys, bazaars filled with the spices of Dorne and the east, and the homes of the Dornish built of mud brick that remains cool even in the height of the burning summer.
The Winding Walls were raised some seven hundred years ago, wrapping Sunspear and winding throughout the shadow city in a snaking, defensive curtain that would force even the boldest enemy to lose their way. Only the Threefold Gate provides a straight path to the castle, cutting through the Winding Walls, and these gates are heavily defended at need.
Sunspear. (illustration credit 158)
The mist-enshrouded ruins of Chroyane, the festival city of the Rhoynar. (illustration credit 159)
O THER L ANDS
WESTEROS FORMS BUT one small part of our world, the far reaches of which yet remain unknown even to the wisest of men. Though our purpose here was to chronicle the history of the Seven Kingdoms, it would be remiss of us to ignore the other lands beyond the seas—at least in brief—for each has its own character and contributes its own colors and patterns to the vast tapestry that we call the known world.
Sadly, the Citadel’s knowledge grows thinner the farther we travel from the lands that the men of the east call the Sunset Kingdoms, for congress with the more distant realms of Essos has ever been sparse. We know even less about the southern reaches of Sothoryos and far Ulthos, and nothing at all about whatever lands may lie beyond the Last Light and across the Sunset Sea.
And the same strictures, of course, apply to time as well as distance. As we have shown with Westeros itself, the more ancient the civilization, the less that can truly be known of it. Thus, I will neglect entirely the vanished civilizations of Valyria and Old Ghis and whatever remnants of those cultures remain—whose known particulars I have already touched upon elsewhere in this volume. While as for mysterious Qarth, I can point to no better source than Colloquo Votar’s Jade Compendium, the foremost work on the lands around the Jade Sea.
Yet still there are kernels of knowledge to impart, even from the most exotic of locales … though much and more of what we know of these far places derives from travelers’ tales and legends and should be viewed as such.
For now, let us begin with our closest and best-known neighbors, the Free Cities. Their histories are known to us from the records their own scholars and magisters have made over centuries, reaching to the earliest times of their establishment as freeholds. It is thanks to these same records that something of the histories of the peoples who preceded the Valyrians are known to us.
One issue that plagues all studies of the ancient records is how differently the varied cultures reckon days and seasons and years. Archmaester Walgram’s great work, The Reckoning of Time, delves deeply into this problem, but there is little consensus on what the dates we have actually mean in our own reckoning.
The coins of the Free Cities (top l. to r.) Braavos, Pentos, Lys, Myr, Tyrosh; (bottom l. to r.) Volantis (front and back), Norvos, Qohor, Lorath. (illustration credit 160)
THE F REE C ITIES
ESSOS, THE VAST continent across the narrow sea, teems with strange, exotic, and ancient civilizations, some still extant and striving, others long fallen and lost to legend. Most of these are far too distant to be of any concern to the people of the Seven Kingdoms, save mayhaps for those seafarers bold enough to sail strange waters in search of gold and glory.
The Nine Free Cities, however, are our closest neighbors and chief partners in trade, and their histories are much entwined with our own. For centuries, trading galleys have sailed up and down the narrow sea, delivering fine tapestries, polished lenses, delicate lace, exotic fruits, strange spices, and myriad other goods, in return for gold and wool and other such products. In Oldtown, King’s Landing, Lannisport, and every port from Eastwatch to the Planky Town, sailors, bankers, and merchants from the Free Cities can be found, buying and selling and telling their tales.
Each of the Free Cities has its own history and character, and each has come to have its own tongue. These are all corruptions of the original, pure form of High Valyrian, dialects that drift further from their origin with each new century since the Doom befell the Freehold.
Eight of the Nine Free Cities are proud daughters of Valyria that was, still ruled by the descendants of the original colonists who established themselves there hundreds or thousands of years ago. In these cities, Valyrian blood is still greatly prized. The ninth stands as an exception, for Braavos of the Hundred Isles was founded by escaped slaves fleeing their Valyrian masters. Those first Braavosi came from every land beneath the sun, it is said, but as centuries passed, they bred with one another regardless of race or creed or language to form a new mongrel people.
We speak of Nine Free Cities, though across the width of Essos one may find many other Valyrian towns, settlements, and outposts, some larger and more populous than Gulltown, White Harbor, or even Lannisport. The distinction that sets the Nine apart is not their size but their origins. At their height before the Doom, other cities, such as Mantarys, Volon Therys, Oros, Tyria, Draconys, Elyria, Mhysa Faer, Rhyos, and Aquos Dhaen were grand and glorious and rich, yet for all their pride and power, none ever ruled itself. They were governed by men and women sent out from Valyria to govern in the name of the Freehold.
Such was never true of Volantis and the rest of the Nine. Though born of Valyria, each was independent of its mother from birth. All but Braavos were dutiful daughters, neither making war upon Valyria nor defying the dragon lords in any matter of significance; they remained willing allies and trading partners of their mother and looked to the Lands of the Long Summer for leadership in times of crisis. In lesser matters, however, the Nine Free Cities went their own ways, under the rule of their own priests and princes and archons and triarchs.
LORATH
The Free City of Lorath stands upon the western end of the largest in a cluster of low, stony islands in the Shivering Sea north of Essos, near the mouth of Lorath Bay. The city’s domains include the three principal islands of the archipelago, a score of smaller isles and outcrops (almost all uninhabited save for seals and seabirds), and a thickly forested peninsula south of the isles. The Lorathi also claim dominion over the waters of Lorath Bay, but fishing fleets from Braavos and whalers and sealers out of Ib often venture into the bay, for Lorath does not have sufficient strength to make good its claim.
In former days Lorath’s rule extended as far east as the Axe, but the city’s power has dwindled over the centuries, and today the Lorathi exercise effective control over only the southern and eastern shores of Lorath Bay; the western shore of the bay is part of the domains of Braavos.
Lorath is the smallest, poorest, and least populous of the Nine Free Cities. Save for Braavos, it is also the northernmost. Its location, far from the trade routes, has helped to make it the most isolated of the “daughters of Valyria that was.” Though the Lorathi isles themselves are bleak and stony, the surrounding waters teem with shoals of cod, whales, and grey leviathans that gather and breed in the bay, and the outlying rocks and sea stacks are home to great colonies of walrus and seal. Salt cod, walrus tusks, sealskins, and whale oil form the greater part of the city’s trade.
In ancient days, the isles were home to the mysterious race of men known as the mazemakers, who vanished long before the dawn of true history, leaving no trace of themselves save for their bones and the mazes they built.
Others followed the mazemakers on Lorath in the centuries that followed. For a time the isles were home to a small, dark, hairy people, akin to the men of Ib. Fisherfolk, they lived along the coasts and shunned the great mazes of their predecessors. They in turn were displaced by Andals, pushing north from Andalos to the shores of Lorath Bay and across the bay in longships. Clad in mail and wielding iron swords and axes, the Andals swept across the islands, slaughtering the hairy men in the name of their seven-faced god and taking their women and children as slaves.
Sprawling constructs of bewildering complexity, made from blocks of hewn stone, the mazemakers’ constructions are scattered across the isles—and one, badly overgrown and sunk deep into the earth, has been found on Essos proper, on the peninsula south of Lorath. Lorassyon, the second largest of the Lorath isles, is home to a vast maze that fills more than three-quarters of the surface area of the island and includes four levels beneath the ground, with some passages descending five hundred feet.
Scholars still debate the purpose of these mazes. Were they fortifications, temples, towns? Or did they serve some other, stranger purpose? The mazemakers left no written records, so we shall never know. Their bones tell us that they were massively built and larger than men, though not so large as giants. Some have suggested that mayhaps the mazemakers were born of interbreeding between human men and giant women. We do not known why they disappeared, though Lorathi legend suggests they were destroyed by an enemy from the sea: merlings in some versions of the tale, selkies and walrus-men in others.