A History of Casa Baratheon

Storm's End is older by far than the house that holds it now. The legends give its founding to Durran, first of the Storm Kings, who won the love of Elenei, daughter of the sea god and the goddess of the wind, and for that presumption saw his every hall thrown down by the storms her furious parents hurled against the coast. Six castles the gods destroyed; the seventh stood, and stands yet — raised, the singers claim, by a boy named Bran who would grow to build Winterfell and the Wall besides. The maesters smile at the tale, but Storm's End has never fallen to any storm or siege in all the long ages since.

From that unconquerable seat the Durrandons ruled the stormlands as Storm Kings for thousands of years, a line of hard, proud warriors who fought their neighbors in every direction and held their ground against all of them. By the time the dragons came the Durrandons had lost their once-wide domains to the encroaching kingdoms around them, but they had kept their pride entire — which would prove to be their undoing.

When Aegon the Dragon came, the last Storm King was Argilac the Arrogant, too proud to kneel and too old to prevail. Aegon sent his companion and rumored bastard half-brother, Orys Baratheon, against him. The two met in a great battle in the rain, and Orys slew Argilac and took Storm's End — then wed the dead king's daughter Argella, took the Durrandon arms of the crowned stag and their words, 'Ours is the Fury', and founded House Baratheon upon the bones of the house he had ended. Aegon named him the first Hand of the King.

It was a bloody beginning and it stayed bloody. In the First Dornish War, Orys was taken captive by the Dornish and lost a hand to their ransom; when he was free again he had his revenge, taking the sword hands of the Dornish lords who had shamed him — a hand for a hand, and interest besides. From the first the Baratheons were a house of strong arms and hot blood, and the fury in their words was never merely a boast.

For near three centuries the Baratheons held the stormlands as loyal bannermen of the Iron Throne, and the crowned stag might have stayed a lordly house among lordly houses but for one man. Robert Baratheon was fostered in the Vale beside Eddard Stark under Jon Arryn, and betrothed to Ned's sister Lyanna — until Prince Rhaegar Targaryen carried her off, and Robert's grief curdled into a fury that would topple a dynasty three hundred years old.

The rebellion that bears no one's name but is remembered as Robert's turned on his own two hands. Nearly cornered and killed at the Battle of the Bells in the town of Stoney Sept, he broke loose and carried the war to the royalists. At the Trident the two claimants met at last in the middle of the river, and Robert caved in Rhaegar's breastplate and his chest with a single blow of his warhammer, scattering the rubies from the prince's armor into the current. King's Landing was sacked, the Targaryen children slain, and the man who had risen to avenge a girl found himself, to his own evident bewilderment, sitting the Iron Throne as Robert of House Baratheon, the First of His Name.

Robert was a better warrior than he was a king. He had wanted the crown far less than he had wanted vengeance, and once the fighting stopped he found the sitting throne a tedious thing, giving himself over to feasting, whoring, and the hunt while his Hand and his wife's family did the governing. Six years into his reign the ironborn tested him, when Balon Greyjoy crowned himself King of the Iron Islands and put the sunset coast to the torch. Robert answered as he answered everything — with a hammer. He smashed the Greyjoy fleet and stormed Pyke, and for a moment the old war-king blazed up again in the fat one the throne had made him.

But it was the last of his fury. The stag grew heavier and idler and unhappier with each passing year, wed to a Lannister who despised him and haunted by a dead girl in a Dornish tomb. He had won a kingdom he did not know how to keep, and left the keeping of it to men and women with agendas of their own — a debt, like all debts, that would eventually come due.