Castle Black

The chief fortress of the Night's Watch at the foot of the Wall — where, in the end, both a hedge knight's squire's brother and stranger things will one day serve.

The fuller tale

Castle Black anchors the Wall’s middle stretch, chief fortress of a Night’s Watch that has spent the long, mostly peaceful decades of Daeron II’s and Aerys I’s reigns quietly shrinking — fewer criminals sentenced to the black, fewer younger sons with nothing better to do, and a border duty that feels, to a realm at peace with itself, more like ceremony than necessity. That complacency is precisely what makes the Watch’s decline dangerous rather than merely sad: an institution runs thinnest exactly when the era around it has stopped bothering to ask what it's still guarding against, and Castle Black’s garrison in this age is smaller, by any measure, than the job description on its gate.

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.