Dragonstone

The old island fortress of the Targaryens, seat of the heir to the Iron Throne — Prince Baelor Breakspear's own, and after him the sickly Valarr's.

The fuller tale

Dragonstone is older than the Seven Kingdoms it eventually conquered — raised by dragonlord art on a smoking island a century before Aegon ever looked west, its towers carved to writhe and scream in shapes no mason since has managed to explain. In Daeron II’s reign the island castle is the customary seat of the Targaryen heir, and in these tales it passes hand to hand with the succession’s bad luck: Baelor Breakspear held it as Prince of Dragonstone until Ashford Meadow cost him his life, and afterward it descends to his son Valarr, a boy inheriting his father’s title years before he was meant to inherit anything at all.

That inheritance turns out to be nearly as unlucky as the last — the Great Spring Sickness that follows hard on Ashford’s heels claims Valarr along with much of his generation, one more turn in a succession crisis that keeps handing Dragonstone to men who never get to grow old in it. The island itself remains what it always was through all this: an ancient, faintly alien fortress that outlasts every prince assigned to hold it, indifferent to a mainland dynasty’s bad decade.

In the first season

The seat of Baelor Breakspear, Prince of Dragonstone, Hand of the King, and heir to the Iron Throne — the finest knight and best man in the realm, men say.

The chronicle here

• One man short at the horn's blowing — until the Prince of Dragonstone takes up a plain shield: 'It seems my helm is dusty.' (S1·E4)
• The blow that seemed nothing was everything: Baelor Breakspear, Prince of Dragonstone, Hand of the King, dies of a broken skull — killed by his brother's mace in a hedge knight's quarrel. (S1·E6)

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.