Mantarys

An ill-omened city whose people are said to be born twisted, on the haunted road to Valyria.

The fuller tale

Mantarys stands inland on the demon road, the old Valyrian highway that runs from Volantis to Meereen through the Lands of the Long Summer — a road so ill-reputed that sane travelers add months of sailing to avoid it. The city’s own reputation matches its address: its people are said to be born twisted, monstrous more often than chance allows, as if the Doom’s poison had settled in the soil and the bloodlines both. Whatever the truth of the tales, Mantarys endures where the cities nearer Valyria died, trading warily along a road that eats caravans.

The story brushes it at arm’s length. In the books it is numbered among the powers courted in the war around Meereen — even a city of ill omen has spears to promise — and in the tale’s imagination it serves a darker purpose: proof that Valyria’s fall did not end Valyria’s reach. The Freehold’s roads outlived its dragons, and something in the land they cross remembers. Mantarys is what living downstream of an apocalypse looks like, three centuries on.

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.