Oldtown

The oldest city in Westeros, where the maesters forge their chains at the Citadel beneath the Hightower's beacon.

The fuller tale

Oldtown is where the greens’ war effort is quite literally born — it is Otto Hightower, of the city’s own ruling house, who engineers Aegon II’s coronation from within King’s Landing, and Oldtown’s wealth and shipping underwrite the faction he builds around his grandson. The Hightower fleet and the Citadel’s learning both belong, in the end, to the same family whose ambitions light the Dance’s fuse.

Late in the war Oldtown becomes something more than a treasury: Daeron Targaryen, youngest of Alicent’s sons, operates from the city and its surrounding Reach country astride his dragon Tessarion, fighting alongside a scattering of loyal knights and the unofficial help of a Dornish company to hold the greens’ southern flank together after Tumbleton’s disasters have shattered everything else. The oldest city in Westeros ends the war exactly as it began it — Hightower gold and Hightower ambition, for better and very much for worse, at the center of the whole affair.

In the first season

Every grey-robed maester at every castle this season — Luwin, Aemon, Pycelle — earned his chain in this city.

The chronicle here

• Alicent arrives late — in Hightower green, the color of Oldtown's beacon when it calls its banners to war. Everyone understands. (S1·E5)
• The king is a day dead before the green council has crowned a new one: Aegon, the Conqueror's crown on his head, anointed before the mob in the Dragonpit while his sister labors on Dragonstone, unknowing. Grand Maester Orwyle is sent with terms; Rhaenyra answers with her father's crown on her own head. The realm chooses sides — the Vale, the North and the rivers for the queen, Oldtown, the Rock and Storm's End for the king. And at Storm's End, in a storm, Vhagar falls upon a boy flying home with an answer. (F&B 2)

Born here

Souls the story brings here

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.