Valyria

The shattered heart of the greatest civilization the world has known, where the sea still smokes and demons are said to walk.

The fuller tale

Valyria began with shepherds who found dragons lairing in a chain of volcanoes called the Fourteen Flames, and ended as the greatest civilization the world has known. The Freehold ÔÇö no king, but forty rival families of dragonlords sharing power ÔÇö broke the empire of Old Ghis in five wars, shattered the Rhoynar, planted the Free Cities as colonies, and ruled from a capital of impossible architecture where towers were grown from fused stone and sphinxes watched the roads. Its arts have never been equaled since: the dragon-roads straight as spears, the seamless black fortresses, and the spell-forged steel that holds an edge forever ÔÇö every Valyrian blade in the story, Ice and Longclaw and Oathkeeper and the rest, is salvage from this one drowned forge.

The Doom came four hundred years before the tale, and no one knows why. In the space of hours the Fourteen Flames burst apart, the earth split, the sea rushed in, and every dragonlord, dragon and library in the heartland was burned, drowned or buried ÔÇö an empire deleted in an afternoon. The peninsula shattered into a scatter of smoking islands amid waters men call the Smoking Sea, where the ruins still glow on dark nights and demons are said to walk; sailors hold that the Doom still rules Valyria, and the proverb that a man who looks on that coast does not come home keeps most of them honest. Of the forty dragonlord families, one survived: the Targaryens, removed to Dragonstone twelve years earlier on the strength of a daughterÔÇÖs prophetic dream, which is why the story exists at all.

The ruin exerts a pull the story keeps measuring. Gerion Lannister sailed for Valyria to recover his houseÔÇÖs lost blade and never returned; Euron Greyjoy claims to have walked the smoking ruins and lived, and his sorceries invite belief; the maesters quietly note that every attempt to chart the Smoking Sea ends the same way. The show alone actually takes the audience in: Tyrion and Jorah drift through the drowned colossi in the fifth season, reciting a rhyme about the Doom, when the stone men fall on them from the ruins and Jorah takes the touch of greyscale ÔÇö and above the broken towers, in the storyÔÇÖs most eloquent image, Drogon flies over the wreck of the civilization that made his kind an instrument of empire.

Valyria is the taleÔÇÖs deep floor ÔÇö the fact under every other fact. The Iron ThroneÔÇÖs dynasty, the swords the plots turn on, the dragons that reorder every battlefield, even the high tongue of the east: all of it is salvage from the Doom. The story sets its entire game of thrones in the shadow of a power beside which all its kings are provincial, then shows that power as a smoking hole in the map. Every character who dreams of empire is dreaming, whether they know it or not, of Valyria ÔÇö and Valyria is the storyÔÇÖs standing answer about how empires end.

The page and the screen

The showÔÇÖs voyage through Valyria is its own invention twice over: in the books no one sails the Smoking Sea and expects to live ÔÇö Tyrion and Jorah go by the Rhoyne and the open sea ÔÇö and the stone men who attack them belong not to Valyria but to the Sorrows, the drowned Rhoynish ruin half a continent away. The transplant folds two hauntings into one and hands Jorah the greyscale that, in the novels, strikes Jon Connington ÔÇö a character the show cut entirely. What the screen gains is the sight of the ruins themselves, something the published books have only ever approached in rumor.

The chronicle here

• A catspaw comes for the comatose Bran with Valyrian steel ÔÇö Catelyn and the direwolf Summer stop him. (S1┬ÀE2)
• Jaime gives Brienne his Valyrian sword and a quest: find Sansa, keep her safe. She names it Oathkeeper. (S4┬ÀE4)
• Tyrion and Jorah sail through ruined Valyria, past stone men ÔÇö and one grabs the dwarf. (S5┬ÀE5)
• Fire in the library tower ÔÇö and a catspaw with a Valyrian steel dagger at Bran's throat; Catelyn's bare hands and Summer's teeth end him. (AGOT 15)
• For a burned hand and a saved life, Mormont gives Jon the Valyrian blade Longclaw ÔÇö while word of his father's fall gnaws at him. (AGOT 61)
• In Astapor Kraznys mo Nakloz shows off his Unsullied in Valyrian obscenities that his translator softens; Daenerys pretends not to understand a word. (ASOS 24)
• The kingsmoot on Nagga's hill: Asha offers peace, Victarion strength ÔÇö and Euron Crow's Eye offers dragons, with a hellhorn from the smoking ruins of Valyria. The ironmen choose madness. (AFFC 20)

Souls the story brings 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.