King's Landing

Aegon's city on Blackwater Bay, half a million souls beneath the Red Keep and the Great Sept of Baelor.

The fuller tale

King’s Landing is where the Dance is lit and where, in the end, it very nearly burns itself out. Viserys I dies here in 129 AC still trying to keep two factions from open war by simple force of not naming a winner between them; within the same day Otto Hightower and Alicent maneuver Aegon II onto the throne and have him crowned in the Dragonpit, and Rhaenyra, learning of it from Dragonstone, answers with a coronation of her own — one city, one crown, and now two kings wearing it.

The capital pays for the theft in full. The mob that has cheered every coronation since Aegon the Conqueror turns feral once the war goes badly and the grain stops coming up the roads; the Storming of the Dragonpit is the ugliest single day of the entire Dance, smallfolk and City Watch butchering the dragons too young or too tame to defend themselves, the great dome burning with them inside it. Rhaenyra herself dies here at the war’s bitter turn, fed to Sunfyre on the Red Keep’s grounds while Aegon II, ruined and vengeful, watches from a chair he can no longer stand up from.

Twice in the Dance the city changes hands without much of a fight — first when the greens simply take it by being first to Viserys’ deathbed, and again when the blacks occupy it after Aegon II’s flight, and a final time when the greens retake it as the war grinds to its exhausted close. Through all of it the Red Keep keeps functioning as a seat of government even while its occupants are being murdered in their nursery and its dragonpit is burning above their heads — the single most telling fact about how thin the line between crown and chaos actually is.

What King’s Landing remembers of the Dance afterward is not a battle so much as an appetite: half a million people who cheered a coronation, then starved through a siege of their own city’s making, then tore a temple full of dragons apart with their bare hands rather than starve one season longer. The Iron Throne survives the Dance; the smallfolk’s patience with it does not, not entirely, ever again.

In the first season

Ned Stark serves as Hand here and pulls one thread too many. It ends on the steps of the Great Sept, with Ice in a stranger's hands.

The chronicle here

• Corlys's blockade closes the Gullet; King's Landing begins to feel the first pinch of hunger. (S2·E1)
• Rhaenyra slips into King's Landing in a septa's robes to ask Alicent, face to face, if war is truly past stopping. It is. (S2·E3)
• Meleys's head is dragged through King's Landing as a trophy; the smallfolk see only proof that dragons can die, and begin to slip out of the city. (S2·E5)
• Hunger bites King's Landing; Rhaenyra and Mysaria feed the city from black ships, and the smallfolk begin to love the queen who feeds them. (S2·E6)
• Larys Strong smuggles the broken Aegon out of King's Landing before Rhaenyra's dragons can find him. (S2·E8)
• The queen's arithmetic: the Red Sowing gives dragons to bastards and boasters — Hugh Hammer on Vermithor, Ulf White on Silverwing, Addam of Hull on Seasmoke — and the sky belongs to the blacks. The price is paid in the Gullet, where the Triarchy's ninety ships break the blockade and Prince Jacaerys falls with Vermax into the sea. But King's Landing cannot be held against six dragons: the gates open, Rhaenyra takes her father's throne — and the Hightower host coming up the roseroad meets betrayal at Tumbleton, where the Two Betrayers burn the town they were sworn to. (F&B 5)
• Cregan Stark comes south too late for the war and just in time for the reckoning: for six days the Wolf of the North rules King's Landing in all but name, trying poisoners and turncloaks, taking heads where the new king's councillors would take pardons. Aegon the Younger — Rhaenyra's son, Aegon the Third — is crowned and wed to Aegon II's daughter Jaehaera, joining the broken halves. The dragons are done: a boy king who flinches from them, a realm of graves, and a peace made of exhaustion. The Dance is over. What it was for, the maesters still argue. (F&B 8)

Born here

Souls the story brings here

The fallen of this place — if any, they are named here. Spoilers.

• Viserys I Targaryen — Died in his bed, the realm's peace with him
• Alicent Hightower — Outlived her war, and died of a winter fever (the books' telling)
• Aegon II Targaryen — Poisoned by his own council (the books' telling)
• Helaena Targaryen — Fell from Maegor's Holdfast onto the spikes (the books' telling)
• Jaehaerys Targaryen — Murdered by Blood and Cheese
• Aemma Arryn — Died in the birthing bed
• Vaemond Velaryon — Beheaded by Dark Sister before the throne
• Joffrey Velaryon — Fell from Syrax over the burning Dragonpit (the books' telling)
• Otto Hightower — Executed when the queen took the city (the books' telling)
• Lyman Beesbury — Opened at the green council's table
• Larys Strong — Beheaded in the Hour of the Wolf (the books' telling)
• Mysaria — Died in the city's fall (the books' telling)
• Joffrey Lonmouth — Beaten to death at the betrothal feast
• Borros Baratheon — Fell in the Battle of the Kingsroad (the books' telling)