Sunspear

The winding-walled seat of House Martell at the edge of the eastern sea, shaded and slow to anger.

The fuller tale

Dorne holds itself formally apart from the Dance — the last region to bend the knee to the Iron Throne, and in these years still governed by its own princes rather than any oath of fealty to a Targaryen claimant. Princess Aliandra Martell rules from Sunspear’s winding, sun-warmed halls through most of the war, and rather than choosing a side, she spends the chaos eyeing old, half-forgotten claims of her own — dreaming, briefly and not entirely seriously, of what a distracted and dragon-poor Iron Throne might let a sufficiently bold Dornish princess get away with.

Sunspear’s neutrality is a policy, not a wall — individual Dornish lords and free companies drift north into the fighting on their own initiative even while the princedom itself declines to commit, and by the war’s ragged final chapters a Dornish company turns up fighting alongside the greens’ last defenders around Oldtown, unofficial and unacknowledged by Sunspear even as it happens. Dorne emerges from the Dance the way it usually emerges from Westeros’s quarrels — untouched by dragonfire, unbound by any new oath, and quietly amused at everyone else’s expense.

In the first season

Dorne keeps its distance this season — but the name of Elia Martell, wife of the last dragon prince, is not spoken lightly at court.

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.