Storm's End

Seat of House Baratheon

A drum-towered castle whose walls have never fallen to storm or siege, ancestral seat of House Baratheon.

The fuller tale

Storm's End is a dare flung at the sea. The great drum tower rises from cliffs above Shipbreaker Bay, its seaward wall a hundred feet of doubled stone, and the gales that give the bay its name break against it as they have for thousands of years ÔÇö because, the songs say, the castle was built to spite a god. Durran Godsgrief loved a daughter of the sea and sky, and when her divine parents drowned his wedding guests he answered with fortresses, six of which the storms tore down; the seventh stands, raised (some tales insist) with the counsel of a boy who would be called Bran the Builder, and woven ÔÇö Melisandre herself senses it ÔÇö with old spells in the very stones. Whatever the truth, the facts are the legend's best argument: Storm's End has never fallen. Not to storm, not to siege, not to anything that came at its walls honestly.

The castle's history is the Baratheon founding myth in stone. Aegon's fierce bastard-born general Orys slew the last Storm King, took his daughter, his words and his banners, and planted the crowned stag here; every Baratheon since has been measured against those walls' stubbornness, and the three brothers of the tale each inherited a different piece of it. It was Stannis who gave the place its modern legend, holding it through a year of the rebellion's siege while the Tyrell host feasted within sight of the starving garrison ÔÇö a defense that ran to rats and boot leather, was saved by an onion smuggler's midnight run through the cordon, and forged both the grimmest lord in Westeros and his most honest servant. Robert's reward for that year was to give the castle to Renly, a wound Stannis files under justice and never stops paying interest on.

The war of the five kings puts the castle at the center of its strangest hour. Renly dies at its edge with his hundred thousand swords camped around him; the storm lords kneel to Stannis over his brother's body; and the castellan who refuses to yield the castle itself learns that these walls, proof against every army, have no answer to what Melisandre carries in her. The thing Davos ferries beneath Storm's End by night ÔÇö and watches, appalled, being born ÔÇö is the tale's clearest statement that the old defenses guard against the old threats only. The castle never falls, and it changes hands anyway; the distinction between those two sentences is where the whole war lives.

The endgame returns the stag to its rock from an unexpected direction. Robert's last unacknowledged son, a smith from Flea Bottom rowed out of two executions, is legitimized with a stroke and given the seat of his father's fathers ÔÇö the show's tidiest piece of dynastic housekeeping, a Baratheon at Storm's End again by way of an armorer's bench. The books are playing a longer and stranger game with the same square: another of Robert's bastards is hidden abroad, the castle's garrison holds for a king gone north, and the last chapters published leave professional exiles with a dragon banner and a young man who may or may not be Rhaegar's son taking the unfallen castle at last ÔÇö by escalade and audacity, from a garrison of dozens, footnote-style, as if the story wanted the record kept technically intact.

What Storm's End means in the tale is endurance as identity ÔÇö and its limits. The castle embodies the Baratheon words made architecture, fury answered with permanence; and the story spends its length demonstrating that permanence is not the same as posterity. The walls outlast the storms. Whether the house does is the question the tale keeps asking under every crowned stag, and the answer, in both tellings, comes down not to stone but to a boy nobody planned for.

The page and the screen

The tellings diverge underneath the castle. The show gives Melisandre one shadow, born in a cave on the shore, and spends it on Renly; the books give her two ÔÇö the first conceived for Renly, the second birthed directly beneath Storm's End to kill the castellan Cortnay Penrose, with Davos rowing witness and the castle's ancient wardings the reason the horror must be delivered from inside. The books also keep the castle strategically alive long after the show forgets it: Edric Storm, Robert's bastard, is garrisoned and smuggled from there in place of the show's Gendry arc, and the Golden Company's capture of Storm's End for young Aegon's cause ÔÇö a claimant the show cut entirely ÔÇö sets up a battle at its walls that the published books leave impending. On screen the castle is an heirloom awaiting Gendry; on the page it is a loaded position in a war still being played.

The chronicle here

Renly and Stannis parley and part as enemies; Davos rows Melisandre into a cave beneath Storm's End. (S2┬ÀE4)
Under the walls of Storm's End the brother kings meet to trade insults; Stannis offers Renly a night to reconsider, and a peach outlives the peace. (ACOK 32)
Davos rows Melisandre beneath Storm's End; in the dark under the castle she births a shadow, and Ser Cortnay Penrose falls from a tower onto nothing. (ACOK 43)