Dragonstone

Island seat of the old blood

A brooding fortress of black stone shaped like dragons, raised by Valyrian art on a smoking island.

The fuller tale

Dragonstone is the piece of Valyria that got away. Raised by dragonlord arts on a smoking island at the mouth of Blackwater Bay, the citadel is stone made to flow ÔÇö towers shaped as dragons crouching and screaming, gates through fanged mouths, a thousand gargoyles instead of merlons ÔÇö and no mason alive can say how it was done. When Aenar Targaryen quit the Freehold on the strength of his daughter's dream, twelve years before the Doom proved her right, this grim rock became the last outpost of the greatest civilization in the world; and for a century his descendants perched here, the dragon's egg from which the Conquest hatched. Aegon planned his war in its great hall over the Painted Table, a carved map of Westeros fifty feet long with no borders on it ÔÇö a piece of furniture that is also a thesis.

As a possession it has always been more symbol than prize. The island is sulfur, fishing villages and obsidian; its revenue would embarrass a middling Reach lord; and the title Prince of Dragonstone became the traditional style of the Targaryen heir precisely because the place's value is dynastic, not agricultural. After the rebellion it goes to Stannis Baratheon, who reads the gift correctly as an insult ÔÇö the grim rock for the loyal brother, storied Storm's End for the charming one ÔÇö and fifteen years of that arithmetic shape the man who broods here over Jon Arryn's letters and the truth about Cersei's children. It is on Dragonstone that the red god's fires first burn in Westeros, where the Seven are pulled down on a beach at Melisandre's word, and where a king's war is argued nightly between an onion smuggler's conscience and a priestess's flames.

The story keeps returning to the island because the island keeps mattering more than its garrison. Daenerys was born here in the teeth of the storm that named her, carried off as an infant while the last Targaryen fleet broke on the rocks; when she returns at the head of a new one, the homecoming is staged in silence ÔÇö a queen touching the sand of a birthplace she cannot remember. From Dragonstone she conducts her Westerosi war, and it is here that Jon Snow comes asking to mine the mountain: the island sits on dragonglass, the one substance besides Valyrian steel that kills the dead, and so the old Valyrian outpost ends the tale as it began ÔÇö the place where the weapon against the dark is quarried, and where a king and a queen who do not yet know they are kin argue themselves into an alliance.

Its meaning in the larger tale is the one carved into its walls: power that outlives its makers. Every faction that holds Dragonstone ÔÇö Targaryen, Baratheon, the red god's court, Targaryen again ÔÇö borrows the same authority from the same black stone, and the stone outlasts each of them. The maesters who catalogue its wonders cannot reproduce them; the smallfolk who fish its waters barely look up at the towers. It is the story's standing reminder that the age of wonders ended, that everyone since has been squatting in its ruins, and that ruins, on the right island, are still worth a war.

The page and the screen

After Stannis sails north the tellings part company over the island's fate. The show simply empties it ÔÇö the castle stands unclaimed and unexplained for seasons, conveniently vacant for Daenerys's arrival, and her war councils unfold in a redesigned interior whose Chamber of the Painted Table becomes the series' best map room. In the books Dragonstone is a fought-over prize: the crown wants its garrison gone and its symbolism extinguished, and the assault that finally takes it is reported to King's Landing at a terrible price ÔÇö including, if the reports are true, the ruin by fire and boiling oil of the Reach's most celebrated young knight, a casualty the show never charges because it kept him in the capital to die a different way.

The chronicle here

Stannis Baratheon proclaims his claim and burns the Seven on Dragonstone's shore for the red god. (S2┬ÀE1)
Daenerys Targaryen steps ashore at Dragonstone, touches the sand, and says: "Shall we begin?" (S7┬ÀE1)
Euron's scorpions ambush the fleet off Dragonstone: Rhaegal falls into the sea. (S8┬ÀE4)
On Dragonstone under the red comet, old Maester Cressen tries to poison Melisandre with the strangler; she drinks first, smiles ÔÇö and only he dies. (ACOK 1)
Dragonstone burns its Seven on the beach; Stannis draws a flaming sword from the fire and sends ravens naming Cersei's children bastards born of incest. (ACOK 11)
Half-dead on a spur of rock in the bay, Davos is rescued ÔÇö and sails back to Dragonstone with one purpose: to kill the red woman. The dungeons take him first. (ASOS 6)
In the dark under Dragonstone, Davos hardens his purpose against king and god alike; Melisandre comes to the bars to explain her fires ÔÇö and his. (ASOS 11)