House Hightower

The record the Citadel keeps of its own founding is, appropriately, the most carefully hedged in Oldtown. Some maesters hold the Hightowers for First Men, ancient lords of Battle Isle since before the Andals; Archmaester Yandel, no small authority on the question, argues instead for seafarers and traders older still, who built the first Hightower — a black stone fort, nothing like the tower that stands now — before anyone called this land Westeros. King Uthor of the High Tower is the first Hightower the record trusts by name, credited with raising a fifth tower entirely of stone atop the ruins of the four before it.

Uthor’s two sons divided the work of building a dynasty between them: King Urrigon ruled, and Prince Peremore, called the Twisted for a crook in his spine rather than his character, gathered the scholars, healers, and record-keepers who would, over generations, become the Citadel. Few houses in Westeros can claim to have founded an institution that outgrew them in fame; the Hightowers did it without appearing to notice, or mind.

When Aegon Targaryen’s dragons made landfall on the Blackwater, Oldtown was the largest and oldest city in Westeros, older than the Iron Throne would ever be and, the Hightowers judged, not worth burning to prove it. The Lord Hightower of that year — the sources differ, unhelpfully, on which cousin or son he was — took the counsel of the High Septon and opened the city’s gates without a fight. He was not the first great lord of the Seven Kingdoms to kneel — that distinction belongs to Lord Tully of the Trident, who bent the knee at Harrenhal before Oldtown was ever tested — but Oldtown’s bloodless surrender closed the Conquest out almost as it had opened, and Aegon was crowned in the city’s own Starry Sept within the year.

The surrender bought Oldtown its walls, its Citadel, and its Hightower intact while Harrenhal burned and the Reach bled at the Field of Fire; it also set the pattern the family would keep for three centuries after — power measured in influence, wealth, and the goodwill of septons and archmaesters, rather than in swords Oldtown was never especially eager to draw.

House Hightower’s deepest entanglement with the Iron Throne came a century into Targaryen rule, when Otto Hightower served as Hand of the King across three reigns — Jaehaerys the Old King first, then Jaehaerys’s grandson Viserys I, and finally Viserys’s own son Aegon II — and married his daughter Alicent to Viserys I, the king he served longest and most consequentially. When Viserys died and the succession split between Alicent’s son Aegon and the king’s named heir, his daughter Rhaenyra, the Hightowers backed the child they had raised for the crown — the faction the realm would call, from Alicent’s colors, the greens.

Ormund Hightower led the Reach’s greens south to relieve King’s Landing and never arrived; he fell at Tumbleton in the fighting, cut down by Lord Roderick Dustin’s northern charge, and it was only after his death — through treachery the maesters still argue over, the so-called Two Betrayers turning their dragons’ fire from black to green mid-battle — that the host he no longer commanded held the field regardless. Otto’s son Gwayne survived to see the war’s exhausted end, but the Hightower that emerged from the Dance of the Dragons was poorer in sons, if no poorer in influence, than the one that entered it.

Poison, not battle, finally ended the war that Hightower ambition had helped begin: Aegon II died within two years of his victory, and the throne he and Alicent had fought to secure for their line passed instead to Rhaenyra’s surviving son. The Hightowers, characteristically, remained too wealthy and too useful to be made to answer for the cost.

By the time this chronicle’s own century turns, House Hightower has retreated to the role it plays best: rich, watchful, and conspicuously uninvolved. Lord Leyton Hightower kept Oldtown’s great fleet and its considerable coin out of Robert’s Rebellion entirely, and out of the War of the Five Kings after it, judging — correctly, so far as this maester can tell — that a city this valuable survives longest by choosing no side its neighbors can resent.

Within the Citadel itself, an aged and blind archivist, Malora Hightower, is said to hoard forbidden dragon-lore in a locked vault few living archmaesters have entered — a rumor this chronicle repeats with the customary caution such rumors deserve, and no more. A new apprentice at the Citadel, one Samwell Tarly, sent south from the Wall on Lord Commander Mormont’s order, arrived in Oldtown to begin his own study of these same halls; whether his notes will one day correct or confirm this account is a question for a later edition.