The Dawn Age
Before kings, before crowns, there were only the trees — and the eyes that watched from them.
Of the dawn of days the Citadel holds no records, only the songs of the children of the forest and the stones the First Men raised. What follows is legend, weighed and found — mostly — worthy.
The First Men cross the Arm of Dorne
Out of Essos the First Men came with bronze, horses, and fire, over a land bridge that no longer stands.
The True History gives twelve thousand years; some archmaesters argue for eight. The First Men found a Westeros of wolves and weirwoods, held by races older than memory — the children of the forest and the giants. They burned the trees to clear fields, and the burning was answered.
The wars of First Men and children
Two thousand years of war between bronze and the old magic, with neither able to end the other.
The children were few and slight, but their greenseers wielded the strength of the woods themselves. The First Men were many and strong, and every felled weirwood was a wound. The songs say the war lasted two thousand years — the songs are fond of round numbers.
The Hammer of the Waters
To halt the invaders, the greenseers broke the Arm of Dorne into the sea. Later, they drowned the Neck.
Gathered at Moat Cailin — or on the Isle of Faces, the tales disagree — the greenseers called down their deepest magic. The Arm shattered into the Stepstones; the second hammer made the Neck a swamp. The sea obeyed. The First Men, already landed, did not.
The Pact of the Isle of Faces
On an island in the Gods Eye, men and children carved peace into the trees: the coasts and fields to men, the deep woods to the children.
Every weirwood on the isle was given a face so the gods might witness. The green men were set to keep them, and keep them still, if the tales are true. The Pact held for four thousand years — the longest peace the chronicle records, and the least deserved.
The First Men take the old gods
In the peace that followed, the First Men set aside their own gods and knelt to the nameless gods of stream and stone and tree.
From the children they took the worship of the weirwoods, the carving of faces, and the keeping of godswoods — but not, the septons note with relief, the older customs of blood sacrifice. Not everywhere, at least. The North keeps these gods yet.
The Age of Heroes
Every castle keeps a name in its stones. Most are lies. The best are true enough.
Four thousand years of peace under the Pact, a hundred petty kingdoms, and the founders whose names every great house still wears like armor.
The Age of Heroes begins
A hundred kingdoms rose across Westeros, and the founders of the great houses walked out of legend and into it.
Garth Greenhand who made the Reach bloom, Bran the Builder, Lann the Clever, Durran Godsgrief, the Grey King — men who lived hundreds of years and did impossible things, if you believe the singers. A maester believes the houses are real, and lets the rest be songs.
Bran the Builder raises Winterfell
The Builder raised Winterfell over hot springs, and his line was crowned the Kings of Winter.
House Stark would rule the North from that seat for eight thousand years, longer than any dynasty the known world can name. The same Brandon is credited with Storm’s End, the Hightower, and the Wall itself — which would make him very well travelled, or very many men.
Durran defies the gods at Storm’s End
Durran wed Elenei, daughter of the sea god and the wind goddess, and their fury broke six of his castles. The seventh stands yet.
Storm after storm the gods sent, and castle after castle Durran raised against them, until the seventh — built, some say, with the counsel of a boy who would be Bran the Builder — could not be thrown down. The Storm Kings of House Durrandon reigned there for millennia.
Lann the Clever winkles the Rock
With no army and no gold, Lann talked, tricked, or haunted the Casterlys out of Casterly Rock. The gold came after.
The tales cannot agree on the trick — ghosts in the walls, lions loosed in the larders, a stolen sun woven into his hair. They agree on the result: the richest seat in Westeros passed to the cleverest man in it, and his descendants have been paying their debts ever since.
The Grey King and the Drowned God
On the Iron Islands the Grey King slew the sea dragon Nagga and took the Drowned God’s ways for his people.
He roofed his hall with Nagga’s ribs, wed a mermaid, and reigned a thousand years. From him the ironborn take the Old Way: what is dead may never die, and what a man cannot pay the iron price for, he does not deserve. The greenlands have never forgiven them the lesson.
The Hightower and the founding of the Citadel
At the mouth of the Honeywine, the Hightowers raised their beacon — and sickly Prince Peremore’s curiosity became the Citadel of the maesters.
Peremore kept wise men about him as pets, the story runs: healers, stargazers, sorcerers who could not sorcer. On his death his brother granted them land along the river. From those "pets" grew the order that chains knowledge link by link — and writes chronicles such as this one.
The Kings of Winter subdue the North
Over thousands of years the Starks broke the Barrow Kings, the Marsh Kings, the Red Kings of the Dreadfort, and every rival between.
The chronicle compresses what the North does not: centuries of war against the Boltons — who flayed Stark lords for cloaks — the taking of Sea Dragon Point, the fall of the Warg King. The North remembers all of it, which is rather the point of the North.
The Long Night
A winter that fell for a generation. A night that fell for the world.
In the darkest hour of the age, the Others came from the uttermost north. Of all the chronicle, no chapter matters more — and none rests on thinner parchment.
The Long Night falls
A winter that lasted a generation, and a night that lasted years. Out of the farthest north, for the only time the chronicle records, came the Others.
Cold, dead things with eyes like blue stars, riding dead horses, raising the slain to fight for them. Kingdoms starved in the dark. Mothers smothered children rather than let them freeze. Of every legend in this chronicle, this is the one the Citadel most wants to be false — and builds a Wall’s worth of doubt against.
The Last Hero seeks the children
With twelve companions, a horse, a dog, and a sword that shattered in the cold, the Last Hero went into the dead lands to find the children.
His companions died one by one, and the tale as Old Nan tells it breaks off with the Others closing in, smelling warm blood. He found the children, it seems, for the dawn came. In Asshai they tell the same war differently, and name their hero Azor Ahai, and his sword Lightbringer.
The Battle for the Dawn
First Men and children together threw the Others back into the uttermost north, and the sun rose on a broken world.
The songs say the Night’s Watch was forged in this battle — the black brothers who would hold the line thereafter. What broke the Others, no record says: dragonglass, dragonsteel, sacrifice, or something the singers thought too terrible to keep. The Citadel files it under victory, and does not look north.
The Wall is raised; the Watch begins
Seven hundred feet of ice across the neck of the world, credited to Bran the Builder, giants, and spells woven into the ice itself.
Whatever raised it, the Wall is no legend: it stands, three hundred miles long, cored with sorcery the free folk swear they can taste. The Night’s Watch took the Nightfort as its first seat and swore to wear no crowns and win no glory — the sword in the darkness, the watcher on the walls.
The Night’s King
The thirteenth Lord Commander took a dead woman with cold blue eyes to wife, named himself a king, and made the Nightfort an abomination for thirteen years.
He bound his brothers with sorcery and gave sacrifice to the Others, until the Stark in Winterfell and Joramun, King-Beyond-the-Wall, brought him down together. Afterward every record of his name was struck. Old Nan says he was a Stark, and that he was named Brandon. Old Nan says a great many things.
The Coming of the Andals
They carved seven stars into their flesh, and the old kingdoms fell one by one.
Out of Andalos came iron, the Seven, and the end of the First Men’s dominion everywhere but the North. When the year is asked, wise maesters answer slowly.
The Andals cross the narrow sea
From the hills of Andalos came a fair-haired people with iron swords, seven-pointed stars cut into their flesh, and a new faith with an old hunger.
The True History says six thousand years; Archmaester Perestan argues four thousand, Denestan but two. The Citadel has fought over this longer than the Andals fought the First Men. They landed first in the Vale, called it the Fingers, and began carving stars — and kingdoms — from the moment they beached.
The Battle of the Seven Stars
At the Giant’s Lance, Artys Arryn the Falcon Knight broke the last First Men king of the Vale, and the mountains changed hands forever.
Robar the Second had united the Vale’s First Men too late. The songs give Artys a flight over the mountain and a stolen banner trick; the maesters give him a good flanking march. House Arryn has ruled the Vale from that day — the oldest and purest Andal line in Westeros, as they will tell you.
The south falls, kingdom by kingdom
Riverlands, stormlands, Reach, Rock — one by one the First Men kingdoms fell to iron, or wed themselves to it.
Where the Andals could not conquer they married, and where they married they converted. Within a few centuries every crown south of the Neck sat on an Andal head or an Andalized one. Only the ironborn kept their god, and only by drowning the septons the Andals sent.
The Faith of the Seven takes root
Septs rose where godswoods had stood, and the Starry Sept of Oldtown became the seat of the Faith in Westeros.
Seven faces of one god: Father, Mother, Warrior, Maid, Smith, Crone, Stranger. The Faith brought holy orders, knighthood’s vows, and — in time — its own swords: the Warrior’s Sons and the Poor Fellows, whose zeal kings would come to regret licensing. Weirwoods south of the Neck were mostly put to the axe.
The North throws back every host
Every Andal army that marched on the North broke against Moat Cailin’s causeway. The old gods kept their last kingdom.
The ruined fortress on the Neck can be held by a hundred archers against an army — bogs to either side, lizard-lions beneath, and crannogmen with poisoned arrows everywhere the eye fails. The Kings of Winter added the heads of Andal warlords to its charm. It has never been taken from the south.
The Freehold of Valyria
The Freehold was neither kingdom nor empire. It did not need to be. It had dragons.
Across the narrow sea, shepherds found fire sleeping in fourteen mountains. Five thousand years of Valyrian noon follow — ending with one family’s remove to a smoking rock called Dragonstone.
Shepherds tame the dragons of the Fourteen Flames
In a ring of volcanoes on a peninsula of Essos, herdsmen found dragons laired — and learned, with horn and lash and sorcery, to ride them.
So began the Freehold of Valyria: no king, but every citizen who held land a freeholder, and forty dragonlord families above them all. The Ghiscari legions marched on the upstarts five times. The lockstep legions were very brave, very disciplined, and very flammable.
Old Ghis burns; the first empire ends
After the fifth war, Valyria razed Old Ghis, salted its fields, and sold its people. The oldest empire in the world became a memory with a harbor.
Five thousand years of Ghiscari civilization ended in dragonflame. The slave cities of Astapor, Yunkai and Meereen would later dress themselves in the empire’s corpse — harpies, pyramids, and the fighting pits — while speaking their conquerors’ Valyrian. History has a sense of humor, though a cruel one.
Braavos, the Secret City
Slaves of the Freehold rose, took the fleet that carried them, and hid a city in fog and brackish water at the edge of the world.
The moonsingers led them to the lagoon. For over a century Braavos grew in secret — a city founded by every race and no masters, where the Titan now wades and the Iron Bank now counts. Even its founding year is argued, which the Braavosi rather enjoy. When it finally unmasked itself, Valyria was politely furious.
The Rhoynish Wars and Garin’s curse
Garin the Great led a quarter of a million Rhoynar against Valyria’s colonies — and won, until three hundred dragons came.
The river people’s water wizards had broken Valyrian steel before. They could not break the sky. Garin, caged and dying at Chroyane, cursed the conquerors; his city drowned in fog and greyscale, and the Sorrows bear the curse yet. The Mother Rhoyne, the orphans say, heard her son.
Nymeria’s ten thousand ships
Rather than kneel to Valyria, the warrior princess Nymeria put her whole people on the water — ten thousand ships, sailing for anywhere.
Fisherfolk’s boats, barges, trading galleys — anything that floated, packed with the Rhoynar remnant, mostly women and children. They failed at Basilisk Point, failed in Sothoryos, failed in Naath, and came at last to the driest, poorest corner of Westeros, which suited: no one would follow them there.
Nymeria weds Mors Martell; Dorne is made one
Nymeria burned her ships, wed the Lord of the Sandship, and in a decade of war sent six rival kings to the Wall in golden fetters.
From that union came House Nymeros Martell and a Dorne unlike the other kingdoms: princes rather than kings, daughters inheriting equal with sons, and Rhoynish stubbornness soaked into the sand. Three hundred years of Targaryen dragons would fail to unmake what one refugee fleet built.
Daenys the Dreamer; the Targaryens quit Valyria
A dragonlord’s daughter dreamed the end of Valyria. Her father Aenar sold his holdings and removed his house — and five dragons — to a bleak rock called Dragonstone.
The other thirty-nine dragonlord families laughed at the Targaryens for exiles cowering on a Westerosi outpost. Twelve years later, every one of those families was ash. Prophecy runs in that blood, the chronicle notes — and rarely runs kindly.
The Doom & the Blood
In a single day, the glory of five thousand years was unmade.
The Fourteen Flames burst, the dragonlords perished, and a century of blood followed as the Freehold’s orphan cities tore at the carcass. On Dragonstone, one house of dragonlords remained.
The Doom of Valyria
In a single day the Fourteen Flames burst as one. Mountains of fire, seas that boiled, a rain of ash and molten stone — and the Freehold of five thousand years was gone.
Every hill for five hundred miles split open. The peninsula shattered; the Smoking Sea covers what was the heart of the world. Nearly every dragon and dragonlord perished, and with them the spells, the books, the steel-craft. What caused it — the gods, the fire-priests’ failure, the fourteen too-deep mines — the chronicle cannot say. Sailors say the Doom still rules there. Sailors do not linger to check.
The Century of Blood
With the mother city dead, her daughters went to war. Volantis grasped at empire, the Dothraki poured out of the east, and for a hundred years nothing held.
Volantis took Lys and Myr and reached for Tyrosh before the other cities — with Braavos’s coin and, at the last, Targaryen dragonflame at Lys — broke her pride. In the grass sea the khals burned what Valyria had guarded. It was a fine century for sellswords and gravediggers.
Aegon at the Painted Table
The last dragonlords sat on Dragonstone a hundred years, trading and waiting. Then Aegon had a table carved in the shape of Westeros — with no borders on it.
Fifty feet long, painted with every river and mountain of the seven kingdoms, and not one line dividing them. Aegon declined a crown in the Free Cities’ wars, answered letters courteously, and studied a country he had never ruled. The table said what he did not. It generally does.
Aegon’s Conquest
Seven kingdoms. Three dragons. One count of years, beginning anew.
Aegon Targaryen and his sisters landed with a small host and a great fire, and the reckoning of the world changed — literally: all years hence are counted from his conquest. His sons would nearly unmake his work.
Aegon lands at the mouth of the Blackwater
With fewer than sixteen hundred swords, two sisters, and three dragons, Aegon Targaryen came ashore and began building a wooden fort on three hills.
The lords of Westeros commanded tens of thousands. Aegon commanded Balerion the Black Dread, whose fire was black as his wings, and his sisters rode Vhagar and Meraxes. The Aegonfort’s hills would one day carry King’s Landing. The lords sent ravens demanding submission be sent to *them*. The ravens were not answered in ink.
Harrenhal burns
Harren the Black finished the greatest castle ever raised on the very day Aegon landed. Stone walls, Aegon observed, do not reach the sky.
"Dragons fly," Aegon told him beneath the walls, and offered mercy for submission. Harren trusted his five monstrous towers. That night Balerion came down out of darkness, and Harrenhal’s towers melted like candles with Harren and all his line inside. The castle has been cursed, and cheap to rent, ever since.
The Field of Fire
The Kings of the Rock and the Reach met Aegon with fifty-five thousand men. For the only time, all three dragons flew as one. Four thousand men burned.
Mern the Ninth of House Gardener died with all his line, ending three thousand years of Gardener kings; the steward Harlan Tyrell yielded Highgarden and was raised to it. Loren Lannister survived, knelt, and kept the Rock. The lesson was arithmetic: an army is only as brave as its distance from the flame.
The King Who Knelt
Torrhen Stark marched thirty thousand men to the Trident, looked across at three dragons, and chose to be the last King in the North rather than the deadest.
His bastard brother urged battle; Torrhen had heard what arithmetic was done on the Field of Fire. He crossed the river alone and laid the ancient crown of the Kings of Winter at Aegon’s feet. The North has honored and resented him for it in equal measure for three hundred years.
Oldtown opens its gates; the count of years begins
The High Septon anointed Aegon in the Starry Sept, and the maesters began the calendar anew: the first year After the Conquest.
The High Septon had prayed seven days and declared the Seven themselves had crowned Aegon — sparing Oldtown the Citadel, the Faith’s seat, and everyone’s dignity. Aegon, King of the Andals, the Rhoynar, and the First Men, dated his reign from that anointing. Every year in this chronicle bends around it.
The First Dornish War
Dorne would not kneel and would not fight. The Dornish melted into sand and mountain — and dragons cannot burn what they cannot find.
"Unbowed, unbent, unbroken," said Meria Martell, the Yellow Toad of Dorne, eighty and blind and unimpressed. Nine years of raid and reprisal cost Rhaenys her life at the Hellholt — a scorpion bolt through Meraxes’ eye — and taught the Targaryens their one lasting limit. Aegon made peace, not conquest. Dorne stayed Dorne.
The Conqueror dies at Dragonstone
A stroke took Aegon at the Painted Table, telling his grandsons the tale of the Conquest. He left one realm, two sons, and an unanswered question of succession.
Aegon had ruled lightly — each kingdom keeping its laws, with the king forever on progress among them. His gentle son Aenys took the crown, his fierce son Maegor took Blackfyre, the Conqueror’s Valyrian blade, and every lord in Westeros quietly noted which felt more like an omen.
The Faith Militant rises
When Aenys wed his daughter to his son in the Valyrian fashion, the Faith’s swords rose against the dragons’ "abominations," and the realm burned over gods and marriages.
The Warrior’s Sons held the Hill of Rhaenys; Poor Fellows swarmed the roads. Aenys — the gentle king who wanted only to be loved — died at Dragonstone of illness and despair at thirty-five, having pleased no one. His brother would try the other approach.
Maegor the Cruel
Maegor took his nephew’s crown, broke the Faith Militant with fire and mass graves, finished the Red Keep — and slew every builder so its secrets died with them.
Six wives, no living heirs, a crown seized over trial by seven, thousands of Poor Fellows’ skulls collected at a silver stag apiece. He died alone at night, seated on the Iron Throne, wrists opened on the blades — by the throne itself, said the smallfolk, who had already chosen his name for the histories.
The Conciliator’s Peace
Fifty-five years of peace, bought with patience — and spent by his heirs.
Jaehaerys the Old King and Good Queen Alysanne knit the realm together with roads, law, and marriages. Under Viserys the realm grew richer, the dragons more numerous, and the household quarrels more dangerous.
Jaehaerys the Conciliator is crowned
Fourteen years old, Jaehaerys took the throne his uncle had bled on — and chose amnesty where Maegor chose graves. The Faith laid down its swords for a king’s justice.
His peace with the Faith — the crown to protect and defend the Faith, the Faith Militant to disband — held for two and a half centuries. With Septon Barth, a blacksmith’s son, as Hand, he gave the realm one law, roads, and fifty-five years of ruling as though ruling were a craft. The Citadel rates him the greatest of the Targaryen kings, and does not expect the rating to be tested.
Good Queen Alysanne flies to the Wall
Alysanne brought Silverwing to the Wall, heard the Watch’s complaints, and shamed the realm into the New Gift — though Silverwing would not fly beyond the ice.
Three times the queen’s dragon balked at crossing the Wall, which the black brothers still repeat with meaning. Alysanne’s women’s courts carried smallfolk grievances to the crown; her word ended the lord’s right of the first night. The Watch named a castle Queensgate for her. She earned it, which is rarer.
The Old King builds a realm worth keeping
Kingsroads spread from the capital like a hand’s fingers; King’s Landing gained drains, wells, and watchmen. Peace, it turned out, could be engineered.
Fifty-five years, ten children with Alysanne, one law for one realm, and the Doctrine of Exceptionalism to quiet the Faith on Targaryen marriages: the dragon answers to neither gods nor men. Dull work, sung by no singers, envied by every king since.
The Great Council at Harrenhal
His heirs dead before him, the Old King summoned every lord in Westeros to choose the succession. They chose Viserys — the male line — by twenty to one.
Fourteen claims were heard; it came down to Laenor Velaryon, grandson through the eldest daughter, and Viserys, grandson through the eldest son. The lords’ verdict made precedent: the Iron Throne passes to males before females. Twenty-eight years later, half the realm would pretend it hadn’t said that.
Viserys I and the realm at high noon
Open-handed and quarrel-averse, Viserys presided over the richest realm and the most dragons — twenty and more — the dynasty would ever hold.
He named his daughter Rhaenyra heir after his first queen died, and had the lords swear to her — then wed Alicent Hightower and got four more children, and never resolved the contradiction, because resolving it would have spoiled dinner. The court split into greens and blacks over a tourney’s dress colors. Everyone smiled. Everyone armed.
The nine voyages of the Sea Snake
Corlys Velaryon sailed the Ice Dragon past Ib and the Thousand Islands, traded to Asshai and back, and made Driftmark richer than the Rock.
Nine great voyages on the Sea Snake — silk, spice, and saffron enough to raise High Tide and fill it with treasures no lord could name. The greatest seafarer Westeros ever produced would spend that fortune, in the end, on his family’s claim in the war to come. The sea gives; the throne takes.
Daemon wins a crown in the Stepstones
Restless and unindulged, Prince Daemon carved a kingdom out of the pirate isles with Caraxes and the Sea Snake’s fleets — and laughed as he laid his little crown at his brother’s feet.
The Crabfeeder died at Daemon’s hand on the shores he had haunted. The Rogue Prince held his won kingdom two years before boredom won instead. The realm learned what Daemon was: the finest warrior of his generation, and the least safe man in it to leave unamused.
The Dance of the Dragons
When dragons dance, the ground beneath them is the realm.
The great Targaryen civil war: green against black, brother against sister, dragon against dragon. Two years that cost the house its future and the world most of its dragons.
Viserys dies; the greens crown Aegon II
The king died in his sleep; his council hid the body, crowned his son Aegon in secret haste, and sent knives after dissenters. On Dragonstone, Rhaenyra donned her father’s crown in answer.
Ser Criston Cole — the Kingmaker — set the crown of the Conqueror on Aegon’s head before the smallfolk in the Dragonpit; Rhaenyra, heavy with grief and child, was crowned with her father’s own band on Dragonstone. Twenty years of green and black had found their war. The realm’s dragons chose sides, which was the whole catastrophe in brief.
Blood and Cheese
For the death of Rhaenyra’s son Lucerys, Daemon sent two hired men into the Red Keep by the rat-catchers’ ways. "A son for a son," they told Queen Helaena — and made her choose.
A butcher’s man and a rat-catcher took the head of six-year-old Prince Jaehaerys while his mother watched. Helaena, gentlest of the greens, was never whole again. The chronicle records many battles with fewer consequences than this one crime: after Blood and Cheese, no peace was possible, only victory or graves.
Rook’s Rest: the Queen Who Never Was falls
Lured to a trap, Rhaenys Targaryen and the Red Queen met Aegon and Aemond and two dragons. She could have fled. She turned Meleys into the fire instead.
Rhaenys — passed over at the Great Council, wife to the Sea Snake — died as dragonlords once died, fighting in the sky. Aegon II was burned so badly he spent a year abed; Sunfyre’s wing was ruined. The war’s ledger began filling with dragons, which was arithmetic the house could not afford.
The Battle of the Gullet
Ninety warships of the Triarchy fell on the blacks’ sea lanes. Prince Jacaerys and Vermax fell with them — the bloodiest sea battle in the histories.
Rhaenyra’s heir died in the smoke over the water, and with the fleet fight the war lost any pretense of chivalry: the Gullet ran with wrecks for weeks. The Velaryon blockade held, barely. The singers made no songs of it; there was no one left afloat to pay them.
King’s Landing falls; the Dragonpit is stormed
Rhaenyra took the capital without a battle — and lost it to the mob. A one-handed prophet raised the city, and the Dragonpit’s five dragons died under ten thousand hands.
Taxes, terror, and Helaena’s leap from Maegor’s Holdfast broke the city’s patience; the Shepherd preached the dragons were the sin. The storming of the Dragonpit cost thousands of lives and five dragons — butchered in their chains by men with spears and madness. Rhaenyra fled the city her ancestor built. The Iron Throne, they say, had been cutting her from the first.
Tumbleton and the turning of cloaks
Twice armies met at Tumbleton, and twice treachery decided it: dragonseeds sold their queen, and the town was given a burning it never recovered from.
Rhaenyra had called for riders of dragonseed blood to mount the unclaimed dragons; two of them, Hugh Hammer and Ulf the White, turned their beasts on her cause for better pay. Both betrayers were murdered by their own side soon after, there being, even that year, standards. Tumbleton smolders in every account of why the smallfolk came to curse both colors.
Rhaenyra fed to Sunfyre
Fleeing to Dragonstone, Rhaenyra found her half-brother there before her. Aegon II gave the Half-Year Queen to his wounded dragon — while her son watched.
Betrayed by her own garrison, sold for a promise of pardon, Rhaenyra Targaryen died in Sunfyre’s fire below her childhood castle. Aegon the Younger, nine years old, was made to see it. The greens had their victory. It would keep for half a year — about as long as her crown had.
Poison ends the Dance
With the blacks’ armies converging and no dragons left worth the name, Aegon II’s own lords fed him poisoned wine. He was twenty-four. The war died with him.
His counselors, offered a choice between surrender and a corpse, chose practically. Rhaenyra’s son was wed to Aegon’s daughter and crowned Aegon III — a boy who had watched a dragon eat his mother, now king of a house that had spent its dragons on itself. The Dance cost the Targaryens the one thing that had made them more than a family with good hair.
After the Dance
The dragons died. The dragonkings remained, and learned what crowns weigh.
Broken kings, boy kings, blessed kings, unworthy kings. The last dragon died in a courtyard, Dorne was won and lost, and a deathbed word lit a fire that would burn for a hundred years.
The Hour of the Wolf
Cregan Stark came south too late for the war, so he held the capital for six days as Hand, trying the poisoners of kings and offering the guilty a choice: the block, or the black.
One man alone chose the block. The Lord of Winterfell judged, sentenced, resigned the Handship, and marched home, all within a moon — the shortest and most respected Handship in the records. The North, having settled the matter of king-poisoning, resumed ignoring the south.
The regency of the Broken King
A rotating council of regents ruled for the boy king while lords squabbled over the scraps of the Dance. Aegon III grew into a somber man who wore black and kept no court fools.
They called him the Broken King and Aegon the Unlucky — he had watched Sunfyre take his mother at nine. He was a dutiful, joyless, decent king who flinched from dragonfire and hated sorcery, prophecy, and celebration in roughly that order. The realm healed anyway. Realms mostly do.
The death of the last dragon
On a spring day in King’s Landing, the last dragon died — a stunted, sickly green thing no larger than a dog is remembered wrongly; she was the size of a horse, and she was the end.
The hatcheries failed; the eggs that came after were stone. Whether the Dance had spent the bloodlines, or the maesters’ quiet hands helped — as some whisper of the Citadel — the age of dragons ended in a courtyard, not a battle. House Targaryen now held the realm by habit and marriage. Habit is a weaker cement than fire.
The Young Dragon conquers Dorne
At fourteen, Daeron I did what the Conqueror could not: he took Dorne — ten thousand men to win it. Holding it cost fifty thousand more, and then it cost the king.
His Conquest of Dorne is still assigned to squires as a lesson in prose style; the occupation is assigned to princes as a lesson in everything else. Dorne rose the moment his back was turned, and at a parley under peace banners, at eighteen, the Young Dragon was cut down. His book outlived his conquest by a great deal.
Baelor the Blessed
Daeron’s brother walked the Boneway barefoot to make peace with Dorne, charmed vipers with prayer, locked his sisters in a tower against temptation, and began the Great Sept that bears his name.
The Faith reveres him; the Citadel exchanges glances. Baelor pardoned the Dornish, fasted against sin, considered replacing the ravens with doves — the doves declined — and finally starved himself to death at twenty-eight during a purification fast. Holiness and fitness to rule, this reign is cited to show, are separate qualities.
Aegon the Unworthy
Nine mistresses, a court of flatterers, wooden dragons that burned in the Kingswood short of Dorne — and on his deathbed, one sentence that armed a century of war: he legitimized all his bastards.
Aegon IV gave the sword Blackfyre — the Conqueror’s own — to his bastard Daemon, and men marked it: the sword of kings to the bastard, and only the crown to the trueborn Daeron. Corpulent, capricious, and vindictive, he ended as the worst king of his line; his last decree made his Great Bastards princes and his realm a powder-house.
Dorne joins the realm — by marriage
What four kings and two invasions could not do, two weddings did: Daeron the Good wed a Martell, gave his sister to another, and Dorne came into the realm on its own terms.
Dorne kept its princes, its laws, its taxes gathered by its own hands — terms no other kingdom had. The lords who had bled in Daeron I’s war muttered that the Dornishman had won at the table what he lost afield. The muttering had a name waiting for it: Blackfyre.
The Blackfyre Rebellions
The black dragon or the red — a question asked five times, always in blood.
Daemon Blackfyre’s claim outlived him by three generations. Between the risings: plague, a hedge knight and his squire, an unlikely king, and a fire at Summerhall that consumed a dynasty’s dreams.
The First Blackfyre Rebellion: the Redgrass Field
The black dragon rose against the red. Daemon Blackfyre — the Warrior himself, men said — died on the Redgrass Field under Bloodraven’s arrows, with his sons beside him.
Daemon had the sword, the skill, and half the realm’s chivalry: those who wanted a warrior king instead of Daeron’s books and Dornish court. Bloodraven’s Raven’s Teeth shot him down as he paused to spare a fallen foe; Bittersteel and Bloodraven, half-brothers both, met over the corpse and traded an eye for exile. Ten thousand died. The grass, they say, came up red the next spring.
The tourney at Ashford Meadow
A hedge knight of Flea Bottom defended a puppeteer’s honor against a prince, and a trial of seven decided it. The realm lost Baelor Breakspear; Ser Duncan the Tall gained a squire called Egg.
Prince Baelor — heir, Hand, the best of Daeron’s line — died of a brother’s mace-blow taken in Duncan’s defense, and the succession bent toward strange places. The bald squire was Aegon Targaryen, fourth son of a fourth son, who chose the hedge knight’s road over a court he’d seen too closely. The chronicle finds most of its warmth in this entry, and apologizes for it.
The Great Spring Sickness
Plague swept Westeros and carried off tens of thousands — among them King Daeron the Good and both his heirs’ heirs. In King’s Landing the dead were burned in pits by the thousand.
Aerys I took a crown he had never expected between the covers of his books, left no children, and handed the realm to his Hand: Brynden Rivers, Bloodraven, the sorcerer-spymaster with a thousand eyes and one. Men blamed the comet, the gods, the Blackfyres, and each other, in the traditional order.
The Second Blackfyre Rebellion dies at a wedding
A conspiracy dressed as a wedding tourney at Whitewalls, a dragon’s egg for a prize, and a pretender who dreamed dreams — all folded before a single arrow flew. Bloodraven had been at the table the whole time.
Daemon the Younger believed his dreams made him his father’s heir; Bloodraven let the plot ripen precisely so he could harvest it whole. The egg vanished, the castle was pulled down, and the realm learned the second lesson of the Blackfyre wars: the black dragon’s worst enemy was always the quality of its Daemons.
Bittersteel forges the Golden Company
Across the narrow sea, Bittersteel bound the exiled Blackfyre lords into a sellsword company with a contract never broken — and a purpose never forgotten: home.
"Beneath the gold, the bitter steel." The skulls of the company’s dead commanders, dipped in gold, march with it still — Bittersteel’s own at their head, so that even dead he would not quit the war. Four generations of Blackfyre hopes would ride on those spears. The company’s word became proverbial; its cause, patient.
Dagon Greyjoy reaves the sunset sea
While Bloodraven watched for black dragons, the ironborn remembered the Old Way: Dagon Greyjoy’s longships burned the western coasts from the Arbor to the wolfswood.
A weak king across the realm and a strong lord in Pyke is the oldest recipe in Westerosi cookery. The wolves and lions eventually drove Dagon back into the sea, but on the Iron Islands his name is still sung — proof, a maester observes, that the ironborn grade success generously.
The Third Blackfyre Rebellion
Bittersteel came again with Haegon Blackfyre and the Golden Company. It ended as before: a dead pretender, an escaped Bittersteel, and a realm wearier each time the dance repeated.
Haegon was slain after yielding his sword — a stain the victors did not wash out of the histories. Bittersteel, captured and paraded, escaped the Wall-bound ship and returned to his gilded skulls. The rebellions were becoming ritual: each generation’s Blackfyre, each generation’s field of the dead, each generation’s vow of never again.
The Great Council of 233: Egg is crowned
Maekar died storming an outlaw’s wall, and the council passed over a mad prince’s daughter and a maester’s chain to crown the fourth son’s fourth son: Aegon the Unlikely.
Aemon refused the crown for his vows and took himself to the Wall so no man could use him against his brother. Bloodraven, who had promised safe conduct to the pretender Aenys Blackfyre and then took his head, was given the choice of the block or the black: he chose the Wall, and in time ranged beyond it and out of the record. Officially.
The Unlikely King and his unwilling lords
Aegon V ruled as the hedge knight’s squire he had been: rights and protections for the smallfolk, and lords who fought him for every clause. His own sons undid his marriage alliances for love.
Prince Duncan gave up the crown itself for Jenny of Oldstones and her woods-witch, who prophesied that the prince that was promised would come of Aerys and Rhaella’s line — so those two were wed, unwilling, to fulfill it. Aegon, blocked by his lords at every turn, began to dream an old dream: that only dragons make kings obeyed.
The Tragedy at Summerhall
At his summer palace, with seven eggs and wildfire and every pyromancer’s art, Aegon V reached for dragons. The fire took the palace, the king, and Ser Duncan the Tall. In the smoke and grief, Rhaegar was born.
The Citadel’s account of that night is seven parts blackened parchment; what the fragments say, the archmaesters do not repeat. Jenny’s song of it is still played, and Prince Rhaegar — born amid the ashes — grew melancholy beneath it, a harp in one hand and a prophecy in the other. Dreams of dragons, the chronicle observes, have a body count.
The War of the Ninepenny Kings
Nine outlaw kings carved up the Stepstones as a stair to Westeros. The realm went to meet them, and Barristan the Bold cut down Maelys the Monstrous — the last Blackfyre of the male line.
The Fifth Blackfyre Rebellion never touched Westerosi soil. On the Stepstones a generation blooded itself: Barristan slew Maelys in single combat, young Tywin Lannister and Aerys Targaryen served together as friends — the chronicle pauses on that word — and the black dragon’s male line ended. The Golden Company endured, having outlived its purpose, which is when companies grow interesting.
Robert’s Rebellion
The mad king called for two heads. The realm answered with a hammer.
Aerys the Second’s reign began in promise and ended in wildfire. A tourney, an abduction — if abduction it was — and the dragon’s three-hundred-year dynasty fell in a single bloody year.
Aerys II and the young lion
Aerys the Second took the throne at eighteen, glittering and generous, and made his friend Tywin Lannister — twenty — the youngest Hand in history. For a decade men called it a golden age and meant it.
Tywin ruled while Aerys reigned; trade grew, debts were paid, lords were tamed. Then the whispers: the king’s japes at his Hand’s expense, his liberties toward Joanna, his envy of a servant more kingly than himself. The friendship curdled by degrees, as the dangerous ones do.
The Defiance of Duskendale
A petty lord took the king hostage in his own town for half a year. Barristan the Bold went over the wall alone and brought Aerys out — but what came out was not what had gone in.
Aerys had gone to Duskendale on a whim, against Tywin’s counsel, and Lord Darklyn seized him. Tywin prepared to storm the town, king or no king — the lesson Aerys never forgot. After the rescue: House Darklyn extinguished, and a king who would not be touched, would not cut his hair or nails, and saw knives in every shadow. The realm’s slide had found its slope.
The tourney at Harrenhal
In the year of the false spring, the greatest tourney of the age gathered every name in the realm under Harrenhal’s melted towers. Rhaegar unhorsed them all — then rode past his wife to crown Lyanna Stark queen of love and beauty.
A crown of winter roses, blue as frost, laid in the lap of a betrothed northern girl: the chronicle has recorded the fall of kingdoms with less consequence. That same tourney, Aerys — coaxed from the Red Keep by rumor of plots — made Jaime Lannister the youngest Kingsguard ever sworn, to spite Tywin by stealing his heir. A mystery knight with a laughing weirwood shield rode and vanished; Aerys saw treason in the laughter. Every thread of the war to come was on that field.
Rhaegar and Lyanna vanish; Stark blood burns
Rhaegar took Lyanna Stark — by force or by choice, the realm chose its own answer — and Brandon Stark rode to King’s Landing shouting for the prince to come out and die. Aerys answered with fire.
Lord Rickard, summoned to answer for his son, demanded trial by combat; Aerys named fire his champion and cooked him in his armor while Brandon strangled himself reaching for a sword. Then the king demanded two more heads of Jon Arryn: his wards, Eddard Stark and Robert Baratheon. The Eyrie’s answer was banners.
The Battle of the Bells
Wounded and hunted, Robert hid in Stoney Sept while Jon Connington tore the town apart searching. The bells rang the alarm, the rebels came, and the Hand’s failure sent him into exile.
Connington would say for the rest of his life that he had lost the war in that town by fighting with honor instead of burning it. Aerys said roughly the same, minus the regret, and exiled him. Robert killed six men that day, they sing. The bells, not the king, are what the town remembers.
The Trident: rubies in the river
Rhaegar came north at last with forty thousand men and met Robert at the ford. The warhammer ended it: the dragon prince died in the water, the rubies of his breastplate scattering in the current.
Men still dive for rubies at the crossing they now call the Ruby Ford. Rhaegar died with a woman’s name on his lips, the tale goes — and the realm has argued about the name ever since. Barristan the Bold, near death from wounds, was pardoned by Robert for fighting well: a kingly gesture the new king would repeat until it filled his court with other men’s knights.
The Sack of King’s Landing
Tywin Lannister came to the gates professing loyalty; Aerys opened them. The lions sacked the city, the Mountain murdered Elia Martell and her children, and Jaime Lannister opened the Mad King’s throat before he could burn it all.
Aerys’ last command was to his pyromancers: wildfire lay cached beneath the whole city, and the king meant to let the dragon rise from ashes of half a million people. Jaime killed the pyromancer, then the king he was sworn to, and sat down on the throne to wait — earning with one just act the name Kingslayer and a lifetime of being wrong about which act men would judge. Tywin presented the children’s bodies wrapped in crimson cloaks, so the blood would not show. It showed.
The Tower of Joy; a promise kept
Far south in the Dornish mountains, Ned Stark and six companions found the last three Kingsguard holding a lonely tower. Eight men died. Inside, Lyanna lay dying in a bed of blood — and Ned made her a promise he has never told.
Why the White Bulls of the Kingsguard — Hightower, Whent, and Arthur Dayne, the Sword of the Morning himself — stood guard at a nameless tower rather than beside their king or the queen on Dragonstone, the chronicle cannot say. Ned pulled the tower down for cairns, returned Dawn to Starfell, and came home with Lyanna’s bones and a baseborn son. The realm counted, and mostly declined to count.
The stag crowned; the dragons scattered
Robert took the throne by right of conquest and a grandmother’s Targaryen blood, wed Cersei Lannister to bind the lions, and made Jon Arryn his Hand. On Dragonstone, in the year’s worst storm, Daenerys was born — and smuggled to Essos before Robert’s fleet landed.
Queen Rhaella died birthing her; loyal men spirited the girl and boy Viserys across the narrow sea, where they would wander from patron to patron, the Beggar King and the storm-born princess, selling the last of their mother’s crown. Robert kept the skulls of the dragons in a cellar and his hatred of dragonspawn on display. Peace of a kind followed. The debts — all of them — accrued.
The Greyjoy Rebellion
Balon Greyjoy crowned himself and burned the Lannister fleet at anchor, wagering the greenlands would not bleed for a new dynasty. They did. Pyke fell, and Balon’s last living son went to Winterfell as ward and hostage.
The Old Way met the united realm and lost in a year: Stannis smashed the Iron Fleet off Fair Isle, Robert’s hammer came over Pyke’s broken wall — Thoros of Myr first through the breach with a flaming sword. Balon knelt and stayed king in his own head, a common ironborn arrangement. Theon Greyjoy grew up a wolf among wolves, more or less, mostly less.
A Song of Ice & Fire
The chronicle here overtakes the historians, and becomes the tale itself.
The events of the five published novels, set down as history. New readers, be warned: this chapter is veiled for your protection. Unveil it when you have read, or when you no longer fear to know.
Here the chronicle speaks of the novels themselves. Read on only if you do not fear to know.
Here the chronicle speaks of the novels themselves. Read on only if you do not fear to know.
Here the chronicle speaks of the novels themselves. Read on only if you do not fear to know.
Here the chronicle speaks of the novels themselves. Read on only if you do not fear to know.
Here the chronicle speaks of the novels themselves. Read on only if you do not fear to know.
Here the chronicle speaks of the novels themselves. Read on only if you do not fear to know.
Here the chronicle speaks of the novels themselves. Read on only if you do not fear to know.
Here the chronicle speaks of the novels themselves. Read on only if you do not fear to know.
Here the chronicle speaks of the novels themselves. Read on only if you do not fear to know.
Here the chronicle speaks of the novels themselves. Read on only if you do not fear to know.
Here the chronicle speaks of the novels themselves. Read on only if you do not fear to know.
Here the chronicle speaks of the novels themselves. Read on only if you do not fear to know.
Here the chronicle speaks of the novels themselves. Read on only if you do not fear to know.
Here the chronicle speaks of the novels themselves. Read on only if you do not fear to know.
Here the chronicle speaks of the novels themselves. Read on only if you do not fear to know.
Here the chronicle speaks of the novels themselves. Read on only if you do not fear to know.
Here the chronicle speaks of the novels themselves. Read on only if you do not fear to know.