The Dawn Age & the Age of Heroes

The oldest age of the world, older than writing and older than trust. In it the children of the forest still held the green places, the First Men came out of the east with bronze and fire, and a winter fell that very nearly ended everything. Almost none of it can be dated, and much of it is more legend than history ÔÇö but every great house of Westeros still traces its name back to a hero of these years, and the things that walked in the Long Night are walking again.

The children and the First Men

Before men, the land belonged to the children of the forest ÔÇö a small, secretive people with golden cat's eyes and dark wild magic, who worshipped nameless gods of stream and stone and wood, and carved faces into the white weirwood trees so that their gods might see. Their wise ones, the greenseers, could look through those carved eyes and, it was said, speak to beasts and stir the earth itself. They shared the woods only with the giants.

Then came the First Men, crossing out of Essos on a land bridge ÔÇö the Arm of Dorne ÔÇö perhaps twelve thousand years ago, with bronze swords, leathern shields, and horses the children had never seen. They cleared the forests and cut down the weirwoods for their fields, and the children fought back with the magic that was all they had. The histories say their greenseers called down the Hammer of the Waters and shattered the Arm of Dorne to stop more men crossing, drowning the land bridge into the scatter of islands called the Stepstones ÔÇö but it was already too late; the First Men were in Westeros to stay.

After centuries of war the two peoples were exhausted, and made the Pact on the Isle of Faces in the great lake at the heart of the land. The First Men would keep the open country; the children would keep the deep woods; the weirwoods would be left untouched. To seal it, faces were carved in the trees of the Isle so that the old gods might witness the peace ÔÇö and the First Men took up the worship of those gods, the faith the North keeps to this day.

The Long Night

The Pact opened a long peace, and out of that peace grew the Age of Heroes ÔÇö the legendary centuries the great houses date their founders to. But peace did not last. Out of the uttermost north, in the deepest cold of a winter that lasted a generation, came the Others ÔÇö the White Walkers, pale things with eyes like blue stars, who brought the cold with them and raised the dead to fight as wights. This was the Long Night: a darkness in which the sun hid, crops failed, children starved, and the dead outnumbered the living.

The tales say that a Last Hero went searching through the frozen wood for the children of the forest, losing his companions and his horse and his sword to the cold, to beg their help; and that the war for the dawn was won at last by the children and the first men of the Night's Watch together, with dragonglass and fire and courage nobody has been able to describe since. The Others were driven back into the land of always winter, and men swore it would never be forgotten. It very nearly was.

When the dawn finally came, Brandon the Builder is said to have raised the Wall ÔÇö seven hundred feet of ice from the Bay of Ice to the Bay of Seals ÔÇö with the help of giants and the magic of the children, and the Night's Watch took its black cloaks and its vow to man it forever. Whether one man did all of that, or whether "Brandon the Builder" is simply the name the North gives to everything old and impressive, no maester can say.

The heroes and the Night's King

The Age of Heroes is a catalogue of founders and marvels, half of them contradictory. Bran the Builder raised Winterfell and the Wall and, some say, Storm's End besides. Lann the Clever supposedly won Casterly Rock from House Casterly with nothing but his wits. Garth Greenhand made the Reach bloom and fathered a hundred lordly lines; Durran Godsgrief wed a goddess and defied the storm; the Grey King of the ironborn slew a sea dragon and took a mermaid to wife; Symeon Star-Eyes saw with sapphires where his eyes had been. These are the ancestors the lords of Westeros still name at their high tables.

The darkest of the tales is the Night's King ÔÇö the thirteenth Lord Commander of the Watch, who is said to have loved a woman cold as ice with eyes like blue stars, and named himself a king, and ruled thirteen years of horror from the Nightfort, giving sacrifices to the Others until a King in the North and a King-Beyond-the-Wall joined swords to bring him down. His very name was struck from the records. It is the kind of story men tell to frighten children ÔÇö and the kind that, in this world, has an unpleasant habit of turning out to be a supply problem rather than a nursery tale.