Valyria & the Doom

1. The shepherds and the flames

   The Freehold Rises

   c. 5,000 BC

   Before the Freehold there were only shepherds, or so the Valyrians told it afterward, when they had grown too proud to remember having been anything so humble. What raised them above every empire the world had known was neither steel nor number but the dragons they found sleeping in the smoke of the Fourteen Flames — a ring of volcanoes whose fire and iron the shepherds learned to master.

   How a herder tames a beast that can turn a knight to ash is a question the histories answer with a shrug and the word sorcery. The Valyrians were content to let it stay a mystery; a secret shared is a secret spent. What is certain is that where the dragons went, the Freehold followed, and no rival kept its walls for long.

   SourcesA Song of Ice and Fire (Daenerys, Tyrion) · the Citadel's fuller histories

2. Forty families, no king

   The Dragonlords

   c. 5,000 – 114 BC

   Valyria crowned no king. It called itself a freehold, and its great houses — the dragonlords, some two-score of them — ruled together in a manner the maesters have never quite untangled, save that every one of them thought himself the equal of any three others. Wealth flowed from the mines their slaves died in; power flowed from the dragons only the old blood could ride.

   Their sorcery worked wonders that Westeros has spent four centuries failing to copy. Valyrian steel, folded and spell-forged in dragonflame, still holds an edge no smith in the Seven Kingdoms can match or mend. Their glass candles were said to burn without heat and let a mage see across the width of the world. Much of this the wise account as legend — but the swords are real enough, and a man may test their edge upon his thumb.

   SourcesA Storm of Swords (the Valyrian steel) · A Feast for Crows (the glass candles)

3. The first empire falls

   The Wars with Old Ghis

   c. 5,000 – 4,700 BC

   The only power that dared name itself Valyria's rival was Old Ghis, an empire of brick and slavery already ancient when the dragonlords were young. Five times the two went to war, and five times the harpy's legions marched in their lockstep ranks against the dragons — a discipline that availed them nothing once the sky itself caught fire.

   In the end the dragonlords burned Ghis to its foundations, threw down its walls, and — the tale insists — sowed its fields with salt and skulls so that nothing might grow there again. What Ghis had built over centuries, Valyria unmade in an afternoon. The slave trade it left standing, having found it far too profitable to burn.

   SourcesA Song of Ice and Fire (Slaver's Bay) · the Citadel's fuller histories

4. The water wizards drowned

   The Rhoynar and Garin's Curse

   c. 700 BC

   Westward the Freehold pressed, until it came upon the Rhoynar of the great river — a gentle, clever people whose water wizards were reckoned mighty in their own art. Against dragons their art proved a poor shield. The Rhoynish Wars ended their cities one by one; when Garin the Great raised a quarter-million spears, the dragonlords broke him and, the songs say, left a curse behind them for their trouble.

   Rather than kneel, the warrior-queen Nymeria gathered ten thousand ships and what remained of her people and fled across the world to Dorne — a flight that seeded a kingdom, and a grudge, that would outlast Valyria itself.

   SourcesA Feast for Crows (the Dornish histories)

5. A maiden's warning

   Daenys the Dreamer

   114 BC

   Among the forty families the Targaryens ranked well down the ladder — dragonlords of middling wealth, seated not in Valyria proper but upon the smoking rock of Dragonstone at the edge of the world. Their fortune, and the fortune of every king who would later sit the Iron Throne, turned on a single dream.

   Daenys, called the Dreamer, foresaw the Freehold's ruin, and her father Aenar was wise or fearful enough to heed a girl's night-terrors where prouder men would have laughed. He sold his holdings, loaded his household and his dragons onto ships, and quit Valyria for Dragonstone. Twelve years later the Dreamer's warning came due, and the Targaryens were the only dragonlords left alive to profit from it.

   SourcesA Song of Ice and Fire (the Targaryen histories) · The World of Ice & Fire

6. The day the world broke

   The Doom of Valyria

   102 BC

   It came in a night and a day. Every hill for five hundred miles split open; the Fourteen Flames erupted as one and drowned the Freehold in fire and molten stone. Dragons died screaming in the air. Lords and slaves alike were consumed together, for once the mountains cared nothing which throat wore the collar. Where Valyria had stood, the sea rushed in through a broken peninsula, boiling.

   In a single day the mightiest civilization the world had known ceased to be. No maester will say for certain why. The Freehold's sorcery, its slaves, its dragons, and its pride all went into the fire together, and the smoke has not yet cleared. What is left is a sea that steams, a coast no captain will approach, and four hundred years of men picking through the ashes for a scrap of the old power.

   SourcesA Song of Ice and Fire (Daenerys, Tyrion)

7. The vultures descend

   The Century of Blood

   102 – 2 BC

   A world does not mourn an empire quietly. With Valyria gone, its colonies and client cities fell upon one another and upon its corpse alike — a hundred years the histories call the Century of Blood, or the Bleeding Years. Dothraki khalasars rode where roads had run; free companies sold their swords to whoever paid; and out of the wreck the Free Cities carved themselves loose, none more grasping than Volantis, which fancied itself Valyria's rightful heir.

   When it was done, the map of the east had been redrawn in ash and the dragonlords were a memory kept alive on one lonely island in the west — where a girl-child of that fugitive house would one day be born to set the whole tale burning again.

   SourcesA Song of Ice and Fire (the Free Cities)

8. Where no captain sails

   The Smoking Sea Today

   the present reckoning

   Four hundred years on, the ruin still smokes, and sailors give it a wide berth by long custom and longer fear. They speak of demons in the fog, of water that boils and burns, of ghosts that ride the wind above the drowned streets. Every man who has tried to plunder Valyria's riches has failed to return to boast of them — a record unbroken enough to discourage the sensible.

   The greyscale that scars the survivors of these waters lends the tales a grim credibility. Whether the terrors are truly sorcery clinging to the stones, or merely the ordinary hazards of a sunken volcano dressed up in a captain's imagination, the chronicle cannot say. It notes only that the wise stay home, and the bold do not come back.

   SourcesA Dance with Dragons (the Sorrows, the Smoking Sea)

Why did Valyria fall?

No maester will swear to the cause of the Doom. Five explanations have outlived every scholar who first set them down — take your pick, or hold them all at arm's length, as the chronicle does.

• The Fourteen Flames burst

  The plainest reading, and the one a maester will offer first: the ring of volcanoes that made Valyria rich simply erupted together, as such mountains sometimes will. No curse required — only fire, and the poor judgment of building an empire in its lap.

• The spells slipped their leash

  Some hold that Valyrian sorcery, not stone, kept the Fourteen Flames sleeping — and that when the spells that bound them failed, or were meddled with, the mountains woke all at once. A tidy answer, and one no one living can put to the test.

• A slave's curse

  The Faceless Men are said to have been born in Valyria's mines, where they gave the god of death his due when no one else would. Their kind take credit for little and deny nothing; the tale that they called down the Doom to free their brothers persists chiefly because they will not trouble to correct it.

• Mother Rhoyne's wrath

  The Rhoynar hold that Garin the Great, drowned in a golden cage for defying the dragonlords, cried out to Mother Rhoyne with his last breath — and that the river's grief followed the conquerors home a lifetime later. A curse that takes six hundred years to land is hard to disprove, and harder to trust.

• The wages of pride

  The pious need no volcano. A people who kept ten thousand slaves, bred men like hounds for their pleasure, and named themselves the equals of gods were, they say, simply paid their wages. The chronicle records the sermon without endorsing the arithmetic.