Chroyane, the Sorrows

Once the Rhoynar's city of song and festival, now a drowned ruin in perpetual fog, its Bridge of Dream broken and its Palace of Sorrow haunted by the grey plague. Rivermen pole past quickly and quietly: the stone men who haunt the Sorrows are dying of greyscale, and their touch shares it.

The fuller tale

Chroyane was the festival city — the loveliest of the Rhoynar’s river daughters, a place of music, revels and the great span they called the Bridge of Dream. It was Prince Garin’s city, and its fall was its prince’s: when his quarter-million spears had been broken by Valyria’s dragons, the conquerors hung Garin in a golden cage on his own walls to watch his people die. The tale says he called on Mother Rhoyne for vengeance, and the river answered — rising in fog and flood to drown the city, and sending among the victors a curse that turns men to stone by inches. Chroyane has been the Sorrows ever since: a ruin standing in perpetual grey mist, its bridge broken, its palace haunted, the fog itself held to carry the greyscale.

The stone men live there now — the disease’s last stage given shelter, exiled from every port to waste among the ruins, their minds going as their flesh calcifies. Rivermen pole past the Sorrows fast and silent, for the stone men’s touch shares their sentence. In the books the Shy Maid threads the fog beneath the Bridge of Dream and the story collects its toll: stone men drop from the span, Tyrion is dragged under the black water and pulled back from it, and Jon Connington, saving him, takes the grey death into his hand and tells no one — a secret ticking under the whole invasion he leads. Garin’s curse, a thousand years patient, reaches into the story’s present and marks it.

The page and the screen

The show keeps the stone men and discards their address: the attack is moved from the fog-bound Sorrows to the ruins of Valyria, and Jorah Mormont takes the greyscale in place of the excised Jon Connington — his cure at the Citadel replacing the slow doom the books leave uncured. Chroyane itself, curse, bridge and all, never appears on screen; the drowned festival city remains a books-only haunting.

The fallen of this place — if any, they are named here. Spoilers.

No death the chronicle records has come to this ground — or none the maesters have set down.