Oldtown

The oldest city in Westeros, where the maesters forge their chains beneath the Hightower's beacon — where Egg's brother Aemon studies for his own chain.

The fuller tale

Oldtown is the oldest city in Westeros and, in an age still counting the cost of a broken succession, its steadiest one — a port of septs, scholars, and the Hightower’s beacon fire, ruled by a family that has learned over centuries never to bet everything on a single throne. Its true business is the Citadel, the grey fortress-college where the maesters of the realm forge their chains link by link, and in this era that business is personal to the tale: Aemon Targaryen, elder brother to the boy squiring for a hedge knight on the roads to the north, studies there for a chain of his own, choosing a maester’s service over a throne he stands closer to than almost anyone alive.

That choice — a Targaryen prince declining the crown in favor of grey wool and a raven — says as much about the era’s exhaustion with its own royal house as anything that happens at Ashford. Oldtown does not produce kings; it produces the men who advise them, heal them, and eventually record what they did, and Aemon’s decision to disappear into that quieter tradition is the sort of small, sane rebellion Oldtown has always made room for.

In the first season

Egg's eldest brother Aemon is here, forging a maester's chain of his own free will — the rarest thing a prince ever did, until his little brother took up squiring.

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.