Lys

An island Free City of perfumed gardens — where Prince Aerion Brightflame is sent in gilded exile after Ashford, to Lys's misfortune.

The fuller tale

Lys is an island Free City built almost entirely around pleasure — perfumed gardens, famous courtesans, a reputation for indulgence that draws exiles and wastrels from every kingdom that has ever needed somewhere discreet to send an embarrassment. Prince Aerion Targaryen, called Brightflame by nobody but himself, is dispatched here in gilded disgrace after the incident at Ashford Meadow, his father Maekar apparently reasoning that a cruel, vain prince causes less damage spending his family's money on Lys's pleasures than he would loitering closer to the succession.

Lys gets rather the worse end of that bargain than the Targaryens do. Aerion's stay abroad does nothing to cure whatever runs wrong in him — if anything the years away seem to deepen his conviction, half poetry and half madness, that he is meant for something more than mortal — and when he eventually returns to Westeros he acts on a delusion that a cup of wildfire might transform a man into a dragon outright. It does not, of course; it only kills him, horribly and rather publicly, and clears a space in the succession that nobody engineering the Whitewalls plot anticipated needing to plan around. Lys, for its part, is left to explain to visiting Westerosi lords for years afterward that no, it did not put the idea in his head — he arrived that way.

In the first season

Prince Aerion Brightflame's punishment for Ashford is exile here in silk — the realm's relief, and Lys's problem, for a few years at least.

The chronicle here

• Aerion is packed off to Lys, Daeron to a watch he'll drink through. And a hedge knight rides south for Dorne with a prince shining his kettle helm — Ser Duncan the Tall, of no house, of the Seven Kingdoms. (S1·E6)
• The blow that seemed nothing was everything: Baelor Breakspear dies of a broken skull. Maekar comes to Dunk with a question and an offer, Aerion goes to Lys, and a hedge knight rides for Dorne with a prince polishing his kettle helm. (THK 10)

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.