Essos, from West to East

The Free Cities

The Nine Daughters of Valyria and the city that was never a daughter

Strung along the western coast of Essos, nearest to Westeros across the narrow sea, stand the nine Free Cities — quarrelsome, wealthy, and jealous of one another as only sisters can be. Eight were founded as colonies and outposts of the Freehold of Valyria and still carry its blood, its bastard Valyrian tongues, and its taste for the whip. The ninth, Braavos, was founded in secret by slaves who fled that same Freehold, and alone among them keeps no slaves at all. Their sailors, sellswords, and coin reach every harbour in the known world, and their feuds spill across the Disputed Lands without end.

• Braavos
• Pentos
• Myr
• Lys
• Tyrosh
• Volantis
• Norvos
• Qohor
• Lorath

The Lands of the Long Summer

The Valyrian peninsula and the Smoking Sea

South and east of the Free Cities lies the peninsula the Valyrians called the Lands of the Long Summer, and its ruin. For five thousand years the Freehold of Valyria rose here upon the Fourteen Flames — a chain of volcanoes that gave the dragonlords their steel, their sorceries, and their empire. Then came the Doom, in a single night of fire that shattered the peninsula, drowned it in the Smoking Sea, and ended the greatest power the world had known. Sailors give the smoking wreck a wide berth to this day; those who venture too near, the tales agree, are not often seen again.

• The Fourteen Flames
• Old Valyria
• The Smoking Sea
• The Demon Road

Slaver's Bay

The Ghiscari cities and the ashes of an older empire

Around a great bay on the southern coast stand the slaver cities of the Ghiscari — Astapor the red, Yunkai the yellow, and Meereen the greatest of the three, each built of the same crumbling brick and the same casual cruelty. They are the inheritors of Old Ghis, the empire whose legions Valyria broke and whose city its dragons burned five times over, until nothing was left but a people who remembered how to trade in flesh. From Astapor's fighting pits come the Unsullied, the eunuch spearmen bred and broken to obedience; from all three cities comes a commerce in human beings that has poisoned the bay for centuries.

• Astapor
• Yunkai
• Meereen
• Old Ghis
• New Ghis

The Dothraki Sea

The great grass sea and the horselords who own it

East of the ruin of Valyria the land opens into an ocean of grass that runs on for a thousand leagues, taller than a man on horseback and rippling in the wind like water. This is the Dothraki sea, home to the horselords who scorn walls, coin, and sitting still, and who reckon the whole of the earth theirs to ride across. Their only city is Vaes Dothrak beneath the Mother of Mountains, where no blade may be drawn and the crones of the dosh khaleen read the future in the guts of horses. South of the grass huddle the peaceful Lamb Men of Lhazar, whose flocks and folk the khalasars harvest as they please.

• Vaes Dothrak
• The Mother of Mountains
• The Womb of the World
• The Lamb Men of Lhazar

Qarth

The Queen of Cities, at the mouth of the Jade Gates

Far to the east, beyond the red waste, the trading city of Qarth guards the strait where the Summer Sea meets the Jade Sea — and calls itself, without much modesty, the greatest city that ever was or will be. It is ruled by the Pureborn from their Hall of a Thousand Thrones, and haunted by stranger powers: the merchant princes of the Thirteen, the Ancient Guild of Spicers, the Tourmaline Brotherhood, and the blue-lipped warlocks of the House of the Undying, whose dusty sorceries proved less spent than they seemed. Beyond Qarth's gates lie the sea roads to the far and legendary east.

• The Jade Gates
• The House of the Undying
• The Hall of a Thousand Thrones
• The Red Waste

The Further East

Yi Ti, Asshai, and the edge of the maps

As the tales tell it — take with salt

Past the Bone Mountains the maps grow vague and the tales grow taller. Here, sailors and half a dozen contradictory books place the golden empire of Yi Ti, with its god-emperors and its cities of a hundred names; the jungle isle of Leng; the grasslands of the Jogos Nhai; and at the world's eastern end, Asshai-by-the-Shadow, a black city of oily stone beside a river where nothing grows and the very air is said to sicken. Of these places a maester can honestly report only that they are far away and that no two travellers describe them alike. Take every wonder of the Shadow Lands, and take it with salt.

• Yi Ti
• Asshai-by-the-Shadow
• The Shadow Lands
• The Bone Mountains
• Leng