House Arryn
The purest blood of the First Men and the Andal kings, Wardens of the East, enthroned in the Eyrie high in the Mountains of the Moon above the rich and sheltered Vale of Arryn. A white moon-and-falcon on sky blue, their mountain seat is reckoned impregnable, reached only through the Bloody Gate and a chain of castles.
The fuller tale
No army has ever taken the Vale of Arryn by force, and House Arryn has spent the better part of a thousand years making sure that record stays intact without having to test it very often. Descended from the Andal kings who first crossed the narrow sea and settled the mountain valley behind the Bloody Gate, the Arryns held their own kingdom for centuries before Aegon's dragons arrived ÔÇö and when they did arrive, the reigning Arryn queen chose to bend the knee rather than test dragonfire against a mountain pass, a decision that let the family keep its ancient seat, its ancient pride, and its complete lack of practice at losing wars.
The Eyrie itself is less a castle than an argument: a keep built where nothing should be able to reach it, seven thousand feet up a mountain, accessible only by a narrow mule track past waycastles named for what happens to the unwary, or by the Bloody Gate at the valley's mouth, a chokepoint so absolute that a handful of defenders have turned back armies there for centuries. The Eyrie's moon door ÔÇö a sheer drop from the throne room straight down the mountainside ÔÇö has functioned as informal Vale justice since before anyone thought to write the custom down, execution and metaphor collapsed into a single hole in the floor. As High as Honor is the house's motto, and the Eyrie is the rare seat in Westeros where that is a literal description as much as a boast.
For most of the story the Vale's great strength doubles as its great absence: mountain and gate that have kept every invader out have also kept the Arryns comfortably apart from every war the rest of Westeros insists on having. Jon Arryn's death as Hand of the King is the spark that lights the whole tale ÔÇö a quiet, honorable man poisoned for asking the wrong question about a queen's children ÔÇö but the house he left behind retreats rather than avenges him, as his widow Lysa withdraws the Vale's armies from Robert's Rebellion's sequel entirely and raises her sickly son Robert alone, at altitude, terrified of every window in the castle he will one day rule.
What follows is a slow hostile takeover disguised as a marriage of convenience. A minor lordling once fostered at Riverrun as an act of charity, and never quite forgiven for reaching above his station there, arrives in the Vale as Lysa's new husband and Sweetrobin's new Lord Protector, and inside a single season the ancient, unconquered, isolationist house that never lost a war finds itself effectively run by a man who never won one honestly in his life. The falcon and moon still fly over the Eyrie. Who is actually flying them has become, by the story's midpoint, an open and dangerous question.
The page and the screen
The books extend the Vale's political crisis far past where the show leaves it. Petyr Baelish's scheme runs much longer and much more elaborately on the page ÔÇö Sansa Stark spends an entire extended stretch of the novels disguised as his baseborn daughter, Alayne Stone, while Baelish maneuvers to marry her to Harry Hardyng, Robert Arryn's own heir presumptive, and a faction of Vale lords called the Lords Declarant begin quietly organizing against him, suspicious of how conveniently Lysa died and how thoroughly a landless outsider now controls their liege lord's upbringing. None of that machinery survives into the show, which resolves the Vale in a single compressed season and sends Sansa home to Winterfell long before the books' equivalent plot has finished ÔÇö or even fully revealed ÔÇö itself.
