The Blackwater Rush

The deep, swift river that meets the sea at King's Landing, spanned by no bridge for three hundred miles. Its bay burned green with wildfire the night Stannis Baratheon came for the city and the Imp's chain closed behind his fleet.

The fuller tale

The Blackwater Rush is the deep, fast river that drains the Gods Eye down to the sea at King's Landing, and its mouth decided where Westeros would keep its capital: Aegon landed there, built there, and three centuries of the realm's traffic have flowed up the bay to his city ever since. It is not a companionable river ÔÇö swift, dark and bridgeless for hundreds of miles, crossable only by ferry and ford ÔÇö and its stubbornness shapes every war that touches the capital, because an army on the wrong bank of the Rush is an army with a problem.

Its name belongs above all to one green night. When Stannis Baratheon's fleet came up the bay, the river burned ÔÇö wildfire seeded ahead of the ships, ignited into a wall of emerald flame that ate hulls, men and the king's hopes together, while the pyromancers' work lit the city walls like a second dawn. The battle of the Blackwater is the tale's greatest set-piece of fire and water: the capital saved at the last hour by a Tyrell-Lannister host out of the dark, a dwarf's unthanked engineering, and a river that did exactly what the defenders paid it to. The Rush has run black and ordinary ever since, carrying trade past the rebuilt quays ÔÇö but sailors old enough to remember still say you can dredge up green glass candles of the stuff from the bottom, and nobody swims there for pleasure.

The page and the screen

The tellings fight the battle differently. The show gives the wildfire to a single hulk, detonated by one flaming arrow into a fleet-killing blast, and lets Stannis reach the walls with ladders; the books make it a system ÔÇö the pyromancers' fruits seeded through expendable ships, and above all Tyrion's great boom chain, raised across the river's mouth behind Stannis's fleet so that the burning ships and the trapped ones became the same list. The chain is the books' whole point about the battle: the city was saved less by fire than by arithmetic, a smith's project mocked for weeks closing like a trap at the one moment it mattered. The show, having no chain, gives the arithmetic to a bigger explosion ÔÇö cheaper to film, and admittedly the greenest thing television ever burned.

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

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