Vigilance

The ancestral Valyrian blade of the oldest and richest house in the Reach.

The blade itself

Vigilance is a longsword of the Hightowers, dark and rippled and unremarkable to look at beside the wealth that surrounds it. What is recorded of its appearance is little; what can be said with confidence is what can be said of all such blades ÔÇö that it is far lighter than its length suggests, that its edge has never been ground and never will be, that it will part mail without complaint, and that it makes a low clean note when it comes out of the scabbard.

The reason it matters is the reason all of them matter. Valyrian steel cannot be made. The FreeholdÔÇÖs smiths worked with dragonfire and with spells that were never written down for outsiders, and the Doom ended both in an afternoon; every existing blade is a survivor and no new ones are coming. For a house like the Hightowers, who could buy most things in Westeros twice over, owning one of the few objects gold cannot produce is a particular kind of satisfaction.

The house that does not need it

House Hightower is older than the Andals, older than most of the Seven Kingdoms, and rules Oldtown from a lighthouse that has been burning since before anyone was counting. They have the Citadel in their city, the FaithÔÇÖs heart was there for centuries, and their vaults are widely believed to rival Casterly RockÔÇÖs. All of which means the Hightowers have very rarely needed to swing anything. Their preferred instruments are the maesters, the septons, marriage and money, deployed patiently over generations, and it has worked so well that people routinely forget how powerful they are.

Vigilance therefore spends most of its existence as a statement rather than a weapon: worn at ceremonies, mentioned in inventories, and quietly noted by everyone who does business in Oldtown.

The one war it is remembered in

The exception is the Dance of the Dragons. Lord Ormund Hightower brought the strength of the Reach out for the greens and carried Vigilance through that campaign, up through the west and north toward the capital, in what was for a while the most successful land army in the war. It is the only period in which the Hightower blade appears repeatedly in the histories doing what a sword does.

Beyond that the record is thin, and there is no point inventing more. Vigilance has had a long, comfortable, largely uneventful life in one of the safest cities in Westeros ÔÇö which, for a Valyrian sword, is a much better outcome than most of the blades on this list managed.

What became of it ÔÇö if an ending is written, it is here. Spoilers.

The chronicle records no ending here ÔÇö or none the maesters have set down.