The Red Waste

The red desert east of Lhazar — cracked earth, dead cities, poisoned wells. Daenerys led the remnant of Drogo's khalasar across it because every other road belonged to someone who wanted her dragons.

The fuller tale

The Red Waste is the desert that eats khalasars: a scald of cracked red earth east of Lhazar where the wells are poisoned when they exist at all, and the ruins of dead cities stand as the only proof anyone ever thought better of the place. Daenerys crosses it because the map leaves her nothing else — widowed, her khalasar reduced to a remnant of the old and the sick, every kinder road belongs to rival khals who would take her dragons and her freedom in either order. So she leads her people into the red comet’s path and the waste takes its fee in lives; in the books her handmaid Doreah dies of the crossing there, a debt the show defers so Qarth can collect it more cruelly.

The books grant the desert one mercy: Vaes Tolorro, a dead city of white bones and standing walls with sweet water in its wells, where the remnant shelters while riders go out in three directions to find the living world — and it is the third who returns with envoys from Qarth, drawn by the rumor of dragons. The show compresses the salvation to the city’s gates, but the crossing means the same in both tellings. The Red Waste is where Daenerys’s following is burned down to the people who would follow her anywhere, and where she learns the queenship that precedes thrones: keep your people alive, and they are yours.

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.