The Dothraki Sea

A thousand leagues of green and gold grass without a hill or a tree, where the khalasars ride and the ghost grass waits, tall as a rider, at the world's edge. The Dothraki say the first man rode out of it on the first horse.

The fuller tale

The Dothraki sea is an ocean with no water in it ÔÇö a thousand leagues of grass, green in spring and gold in drought, rolling unbroken from the Rhoyne country to the Bones without a tree, a hill or a wall to interrupt the horizon. Its people take their name from it and their worldview besides: the khalasars ride it as fleets ride water, following the grazing and the plunder, and the Dothraki hold that the first man rode out of this grass on the first horse. At its uttermost edges, the tales place the ghost grass ÔÇö pale blades tall as a rider that glow in the dark and will, the crones say, one day cover the world and end it. A people whose sea whispers apocalypse at its shores can be forgiven a certain fatalism.

The grass sea runs on tribute and terror. Cities that pay the khals in gifts are spared; cities that do not become the grassÔÇÖs new margin ÔÇö the Century of Blood after ValyriaÔÇÖs fall let the horselords break half the civilizations bordering the sea, and the Free Cities have bribed them ever since, calling the bribes gifts and the arrangement peace. Across this world Daenerys makes her first journey, sold into it as a khalÔÇÖs bride and remade by it: she learns its tongue, eats the stallionÔÇÖs heart, buries her husband and her son in its earth, and walks out of a fire at its heart with dragons. The grass sea is the storyÔÇÖs first teacher of its hardest course ÔÇö power is taken astride, not inherited.

The story keeps returning her to the grass. In the books her last written chapter strands her alone on the sea with a half-wild Drogon, sick and stripped of everything but her name, as Khal JhaqoÔÇÖs riders find her ÔÇö the wheel come round to where she began. The show plays the same return louder: taken by Khal MoroÔÇÖs khalasar, marched to Vaes Dothrak, and out of the temple fire with every khalasar on the grass at her back. Either way the meaning holds. Westeros gave Daenerys her claim; the Dothraki sea, twice, gives her an army.

Born here

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.