The House of the Undying

A corridor of visions given to Daenerys: three fires, three mounts, three treasons.

The prophecy

Qarth is a rich city on the strait between the seas, and it did not want Daenerys Targaryen so much as it wanted her dragons. Among those who courted her there were the warlocks, an order in visible decline: pale, blue-lipped men who lived on a drink pressed from a strange leaf and who had once been feared across the east and were now mostly tolerated as a curiosity. Their spokesman, Pyat Pree, invited her to the House of the Undying Ones, a long grey building without windows that the Qartheen avoided and called the palace of dust. She went, against every piece of advice she was given, because she was young, cornered, and needed something the city would not sell her.

She was told to drink first, and to walk alone, and always to take the door on her right. What followed is the strangest sequence in the books: a building that is larger inside than out, with corridors that do not lead where they should, rooms of dead and dying men, and doors that open onto scenes from other places and other times. Her dragon rode on her shoulder throughout. Whether she was shown the future, drugged into hallucination, or deliberately walked past a gallery the warlocks had arranged for her is never settled, and the three explanations are not exclusive.

The visions come without commentary and mostly without context. Among them: a great hall with a shattered roof and snow drifting down onto the seat of kings; a man with a wolfÔÇÖs head sitting crowned at a feast where the guests are dead; a beautiful woman shrinking from a man with a shadowÔÇÖs face and eyes of burning blue, who lifts a sword that blazes; a dying prince beside his wife and infant son, naming the child as the promised one and saying the familyÔÇÖs dragon requires three heads; a woman labouring on a bed of blood; a corpse standing at the prow of a ship with dead eyes and blue lips; a cloth dragon carried on poles by a shouting crowd; a beast of stone that lifts off from a burning tower; her own brother screaming; and a sweet-smelling blue flower growing out of a crack in a wall of ice. Some of the visions were her own past. Some belonged to other people entirely.

At the end of the walk the Undying themselves speak, and here the shape becomes formal ÔÇö three triads, delivered like a liturgy. She will kindle three fires, one for life, one for death and one to love by. She will ride three mounts, one to her bed, one to her terror and one to her love. And she will suffer three betrayals: one committed for blood, one for gold, and one for love. She is also given a string of titles that read as a description of a career rather than a person, marking her as the mother of dragons, a daughter of death, a killer of lies and a bride of fire. Then the warlocks tried to keep her, and she left the building in the only manner available to a woman with a dragon on her shoulder.

Where it comes from

The warlocks of Qarth are the decayed remnant of something that was once genuinely formidable. By the time of the story they are widely regarded in their own city as beggars in fine robes, mocked at parties and consulted by nobody who matters, and their power appears to have thinned along with the magic of the world. What is not in doubt is that whatever lives in the House of the Undying is real, extremely old, and hungry. The men at the centre of it are barely alive by any ordinary measure and are sustained by something that requires visitors.

This matters because it makes the source unlike every other one in this collection. A red priestess reads fire on behalf of a god; a woods witch dreams and hates what she dreams; the warlocks are a business. They wanted her dragons, and the visions were part of a transaction. Anything shown to her may have been selected, sequenced or seasoned to produce a particular effect on a fifteen-year-old girl with three infant dragons and no allies.

The Qartheen tradition also stands entirely outside the religions of Westeros. It owes nothing to the seven gods, nothing to the old gods of the weirwoods, and nothing to RÔÇÖhllor, though it shares with the red faith the eastern habit of paying for sight in blood or life. The maestersÔÇÖ dismissal of QarthÔÇÖs magicians was, on this evidence, complacent ÔÇö but so was the Qartheen merchantsÔÇÖ dismissal of them, and the merchants had better reasons.

How it has been read

The first argument is about order. The visions are not presented as a chronology, and several are demonstrably from the past ÔÇö one of them shows an event Daenerys was not born for, and another shows a person she knew as a child. So the corridor is not a schedule. The most common reading treats it as a set of unlabelled cards drawn from her past, her present and her future and shuffled together, with no marker to say which is which. That single structural fact defeats almost all attempts to use it as a guide, since a reader cannot tell a warning from a memory.

The second argument is about which images are literal. A few are almost certainly plain: the dying prince and his family is a scene from recent history, and the woman on a bed of blood is a birth. Others are just as certainly figurative ÔÇö a dragon made of cloth and poles is not a dragon, and everyone who has argued about that image agrees it means a counterfeit of some kind, while disagreeing violently about whose counterfeit. Between those poles sit the contested ones. Is the hall under snow a prophecy of a season, a description of ruin, or an image of ash? Is the flower in the ice wall a person, a place, or a memory?

The triads are the part most readers treat as trustworthy, because they are the only part delivered as a formula rather than a picture. Even so they are ambiguous by construction. A fire kindled for life could be a funeral pyre that produced life, or a healing, or a birth. A mount ridden to dread might be a horse or might not be a horse at all, since the woman being addressed had by then a very obvious third option available. The three betrayals are the most cited and the most abused: because the motives are named ÔÇö blood, gold, love ÔÇö readers assign them confidently, and because the count is fixed at three, any candidate that spoils a tidy list gets argued away.

There is a persistent minority reading that the whole sequence is a trap dressed as a gift. On this view the warlocks showed her true things precisely so that she would trust the frame and could be held inside the building, and the value of the visions to her is nil ÔÇö she cannot decode them, she has nobody to ask, and she leaves with a head full of images that will make her doubt her own judgement at the worst possible moments. That reading has the merit of explaining why the sequence is so much more useful to the reader than it has ever been to her.

It should be said plainly that most of the specific identifications circulating for these images are inference rather than confirmation. The books have paid off some of the corridor and not the rest, and the parts that remain unpaid are still genuinely open.

The problem with prophecy

This one is a case study in the uselessness of accurate information delivered in the wrong format. Suppose every image is true. Daenerys still cannot act on any of it, because she cannot tell which images are past, she cannot tell which are metaphors, and she has no way to date any of them. Handed an accurate map with no legend and no north, she does what anybody would do: she remembers the pictures that frighten her, forgets the ones that do not, and reinterprets both to suit whatever she has already decided.

There is a second and colder point. Prophecy in this story tends to arrive already spent. By the time a reader can confidently say what an image meant, the event has happened and nothing could have been done. The corridor in Qarth is the purest example: it is the densest concentration of true information anywhere in the books, and its practical effect on the person who received it has been close to zero.

How it has played out ÔÇö open at your peril

The hall under falling snow

The most famous image in the corridor, and the one the two tellings answer most differently. On the screen it is delivered exactly: Daenerys reaches the throne room of the Red Keep at the end of everything, the roof broken open and the air full of white flakes that turn out to be ash from a city she has just burned, and she puts her hand on the Iron Throne without ever sitting in it, because Jon Snow kills her where she stands. The vision was never a promise of victory. It was a picture of the last thirty seconds of her life.

On the page she has not reached Westeros, the throne is still occupied, and the image remains unspent. The showÔÇÖs reading ÔÇö snow that is really ash ÔÇö is elegant, and it is not confirmed by anything in the books. Readers should treat it as one solution rather than the solution.

The three betrayals

Treason for blood is almost universally assigned to Mirri Maz Duur, the godswife whose bargain in the first book cost Daenerys her husband and her unborn son. Treason for gold is usually Jorah Mormont, who had been selling reports of her to VarysÔÇÖs spymaster from the beginning and was exposed for it. Both of those have already happened in both tellings, and Daenerys named them herself.

Treason for love is where the two stories diverge and where the argument lives. The show gave it to Jon Snow, who killed her out of love ÔÇö for his family, for the realm, and for her ÔÇö after being told plainly that it was the only remaining option. Book readers have proposed a long list of alternatives, including Jorah a second time, Ser Barristan, Brown Ben PlummÔÇÖs sellswords changing sides for money, and Daario, and none of them can be confirmed. Some readers dispute the whole exercise on the grounds that the count of three is not necessarily exhaustive and may only mean the three that will matter.

The feast of the dead and the crowned wolf

The banquet where the guests are corpses and a man with a wolfÔÇÖs head sits crowned at the table is the Red Wedding, shown to Daenerys years before it happened, in a country she had never visited, concerning a family she had never met. Robb Stark was mutilated after his murder and his direwolfÔÇÖs head sewn onto his body in mockery of his title. Both tellings stage the event; only the book gives Daenerys the advance vision of it.

Nothing could have been done with this information by anybody. She did not know the man, could not have named the castle, and had no means of sending word across the world. It is the single strongest piece of evidence for the view that the corridor exists to inform the reader and to torment the character.

The blue-eyed shadow and the flower in the wall

The figure with a shadow for a face, eyes of burning blue and a blazing sword is generally read as the enemy from beyond the Wall, and the show eventually put a blue-eyed king of the dead on screen and gave him an ice-blue weapon of his own. The books have never named him, and the Others remain almost entirely undescribed on the page; the showÔÇÖs Night King is an invention of the adaptation with no direct book equivalent.

The blue flower growing from a chink in a wall of ice is the corridorÔÇÖs quietest image and probably its most important. Blue winter roses belong to the north and to one particular tournament, and to a woman who was crowned with them by a prince and vanished soon after. A wall of ice is not a subtle location. Most readers take the image as a statement about who was at the Wall and where he came from, and the show confirmed that parentage outright. The books, characteristically, have still not said it in plain words.

The cloth dragon and the dying prince

The dying prince beside his wife and son, insisting the child is the promised one and that the dragon needs three heads, is Rhaegar Targaryen ÔÇö a scene from before Daenerys was born, and the clearest evidence that the corridor mixes past with future. It also links this vision directly to the promised-prince prophecy and to RhaegarÔÇÖs reading of it.

The dragon of cloth and poles, cheered by a crowd that cannot see the men working it, is the book thread with the most unfinished business attached. On the page a young man is being presented in Essos as RhaegarÔÇÖs son Aegon, alive after all, with Golden Company swords behind him and a Targaryen exile vouching for him ÔÇö and Daenerys was warned in the same breath by Quaithe to beware exactly such a figure. Whether he is genuine, a Blackfyre, or a merchant princeÔÇÖs long-laid forgery is one of the largest open questions in the books. The television version cut this character and this plot entirely, so the screen has no answer to give.

Fires, mounts, and what she did with any of it

The fires are usually counted as her husbandÔÇÖs funeral pyre, which gave her dragons; the burning of the warlocksÔÇÖ house behind her; and the pit or the pyre at the end of her time in Meereen, depending on the telling. The mounts are read as the silver mare given to her at her wedding, the black dragon she first flew, and a third that neither telling has settled to everyoneÔÇÖs satisfaction.

The larger point holds across both versions. Daenerys left Qarth with an armful of true images and never solved a single one of them in time to use it. She misidentified her betrayers until after they had betrayed her, she did not recognise the counterfeit dragon when she was warned about it twice, and the hall full of snow ÔÇö the vision she remembered most vividly and returned to most often ÔÇö turned out on screen to be a picture of the moment she was killed. Of everything the warlocks showed her, the only thing she took from that building that ever did her any good was the habit of not trusting Qarth.