Old Ghis

The mother city of the old empire the dragons of Valyria burned five thousand years ago.

The fuller tale

Old Ghis was an empire when Valyria was a rumor of shepherds among volcanoes. The harpy city built the world’s first great war machine — the lockstep legions, freeborn soldiers with tall shields and iron discipline whose memory the Unsullied are bred to counterfeit — and planted colonies around the bay that still bears its business model’s name. Then the Freehold rose, and the two powers fought five wars. Ghis won none of them. Legions, courage and empire proved to be answers to every military problem except dragons; the fifth war ended with the mother city burned to ash, her walls thrown down, her fields sown with salt and sulfur, and her people yoked into the very trade they had practiced on others.

What survives is instructive: nothing of Ghis but the habit. The old tongue is dead — the slaver cities speak a mongrel Valyrian with Ghiscari pretensions — yet Astapor, Yunkai and Meereen paint the harpy on their gates, file their teeth, and intone that brick and blood built Ghis five thousand years on, a civilization reduced to the cosplay of its own conquerors’ victims. The ruin itself sits south of the bay, unvisited by the story and unneeded by it: every pyramid Daenerys storms is Old Ghis’s echo, and the empire’s true monument is the trade she comes to burn.

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.