The History of Valyria

by Karmic Acumen

The History of Valyria and Her Sons, Kin of Bloodstone, Children of the Green Hand, from the Long Night to the Doom of Fire, from Myth to Magic's End.

A/N: This is part of the distant backstory of The Logistics of Good Living, but I figure it can work standalone too, given all the hints and thematic analogies in canon.

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The History of Valyria and Her Sons, Kin of Bloodstone, Children of the Green Hand

From Myth to Magic's End

"-. 8,000 BC – 278 AC .-"

Once upon a time there was civilization.

Then it exploded.

This tale begins with the end of the world, when the First Son of the Last Emperor reached out through roots of blood and bone to rip the Lion of Night out of the sky. The Lion roared his spite and took a bite out of the sun and cracked from the heat. A thousand thousand dragons poured forth, tumbling down from the heavens drunk on the sun's fire. The Maiden of Light fled, her face stained red with tears of blood. The Sun gave her succour and turned his face away. The sky went dark. The world entire fell to night never ending. The Old Gods stirred. Giants awoke in the earth. Then all the world shook and trembled.

The Storm God raised his hammer and smote the Lion's corpse as it fell. Great cracks split the world from one horizon to the next. Hills and mountains collapsed and were swallowed up. The Sea God's wrath came rushing in. The hinge of the world was broken and shattered by the force and the water until only barren rocks remained. Tremendous waves swept across the land, then they receded, and receded again as great whirlpools opened and the deeps drank their fill from all the world's seas and oceans. The Deep Ones drowned. The Deep God drowned. The Silver Sea dried up. The Summer Sea joined the Narrow Sea. The bridge between East and West vanished for all time.

The Emperor died. The Empire died. Trees died. Beasts died. Vermin died. Dragons died. Men, singers, giants, abominations, all died screaming, praying, begging and braying at themselves and each other. Dregs huddled among the cold bones of the old world's burned ruins, living off the smothered corpses of the withering wild. Then the flesh of their own kind and kin as the Long Night drove them to horror and desperation. Some fled underground, only to find themselves fighting for their lives and every inch of every cave and grotto against those driven out in turn, by the great floods unleashed in the deep places that now belonged to the Drowned God. Some even took to the seas, braving the furious waves and storms until they found themselves at the feet of the bloodroyal, he who'd been Second, then First, then Second Son again of the Emperor, inheritor of none of his power or lands but all his bitter hate and wrath. Yet even he and his disappeared amidst uncharted rocks beyond the western shores, the last whispers on the wind speaking only of man-eating trees and sea dragons. The greatest seafaring legacy that ever was and ever would be, even that crumbled in the face of kin-strife like everything and everyone else in the world.

Almost.

To the south of the broken world there endured a tribe of shepherds roaming the hills and plains of a great peninsula. This tribe witnessed the end of the world, and for the first time learned of winter. Learned of it and learned to fear it when the first snows fell, the ice wind came howling out of the north, and little children were born to live and die all in darkness while the sun hid its face for so long that it seemed it would never shine its light on the world again. But they did not grow cold, for they were the children of the fourteen mountains of fire. They did not fear the dark, for clouds of smoke and pitch were all that stood between them and the tyrants of the southern skies. They did not fall when the ground shook under them, for they strode the land beneath which the wyrms of the underworld gnawed on the bones of the earth. They conquered their fear, for they knew the Maiden of Light had blessed them with her final act, sending her very daughter to live with them and guide them as the inheritors of the world-to-follow.

She was Valyria, the divine beauty, with skin the color of peach, hair of palest gold, and eyes the color of amethyst found nowhere else amongst the peoples of the world. She was the trueborn, the heir to the last Fisher Queen, child of the Empress whom the Last Emperor had cast down and slain beneath the grinning skull, now shattered at last with its oily black pillar and the rest of his terrible legacy. She shepherded them, first as soothsayer, then as wife to their chieftain, then as chieftess unto herself when her husband passed on and left them in her hands. She taught them how to read, how to write, how to build within the warm embrace of the Fourteen Flames themselves. She taught them the draughts that cleansed the earth, the chants that soothed the breath of the dark caverns, the spells that sparked and bound the hottest fire. And when the desperate and envious started crossing the Bay of Grief in such numbers that it looked like the Long Night would claim their fate in blood, she descended into the underworld and cried out her plight into the dark.

The First Son roused one last time. He came from the deep earth, he who was her bane and her brother. He taught her his history and knowledge and his arts, the seeds that sprouted troves, the words that compelled souls, the songs that summoned storms. They joined together. They emerged together. They ruled together. They had children together, fair of skin and eyes the color of gemstones and hair of the purest silver and gold.

The people were in awe. The invaders fled. Some died. Some stayed and begged to serve them. All who were left bent the knee and hailed them as the Gods-on-Earth come to bring light and love anew to the world. Their King then taught them war, that none others would be able to stake a claim upon them again.

Then came the draught, famine and plagues, and though the people still loved and praised their rulers, they didn't have it in them to keep to any Gods anymore.

The First Son grew despondent, blaming himself for a butcher and kinslayer. He left behind his wife and children, abandoned his people and sailed into the east alone, beyond sight, beyond hearing, beyond Valyria's dreams, disappearing beyond the horizon. Valyria lingered, torn between love and duty. She and her husband had taught much of their knowledge to their children, but none of them were grown enough in might and wisdom to command their people. So she stayed and ruled alone in the dark, until her children were grown, only then sailing after her husband. Her sons pled that she stay, but when she proved more resolute than all of them combined, they chose to sail with her, far and away. Only the lone daughter of their queen was left behind, she who bore her name but was the least of her children.

The people despaired. The world was broken, the surface grew ever more deadly, the forests were dwindling with every trunk thrown upon the eternal bonfires, the cave rivers and lakes yielded less and less bounty, children lived and died without seeing any light their parents didn't drag out of wood and stone, and now even their rulers had abandoned them to the night never-ending. Once again they learned to fear, but this fear was for strangers, neighbours and their own kin, those that would become the final enemy once the dying world could no longer sustain them. Words turned to quiet, then wariness, suspicion and resentment, until, finally, blood was spilled between blood. The fear turned inward and consumed the people until it was too much to contain.

Valyria the Lesser watched all this and laughed. She asked them why they sought more grief when the world already gave them more than their share. She told them she lacked the craft of her father and mother, but that didn't mean she didn't have any of her own. She taught them to mull pleasure from roots, coax dreams from bark and spores, to find the smoky caves of fantasy, how to taste and breathe the dusts and tinctures that chased augurs away so that only pure bliss remained. The people's fear turned from cold to hot, from harsh to cloying, from deadly quarrel and bray to revels and carousing. The promise of strife fated to end in blood was abandoned for the stirrings of flesh and the thrill of smiling oblivion.

The world shook. The earth rumbled. A red flash lit the east and great wafts of ash and pitch and smoke started rising to replace the old. The gloom blocking the sky grew even darker. The north wind's bite grew even sharper. Snow began to mix with the cold ash falling upon the lands of fire once again. The people found that they didn't have it in them to care about any of it, and were relieved.

The ragged remnants of Valyria's sons returned to a den of debauchery and grew wroth. They spilled the cups of stardust, broke the casks of dreamwine, collapsed the entrance to the caves of dreams. They seized their sister, dragger her out of her lovers' arms and into to their mountain hall, bound her to her bed and forced her to eat and drink only what, when and how it pleased them. They denied her all her own arts even when her children were stillborn and she begged for death to take her. They slew the men who defiled her, locked children away from their parents, barred wives from seeing their husbands, they put all the food and water under guard so that none may consume anything save what and when they wished it. They spared what few men had turned their sister's gifts away, only to punish their choice to sit by and watch by sending them on a deadly quest to the southern continent.

The people grew as sick in body as they were in soul. For days and days they suffered the revenge of their own flesh as it turned against them. Those who cried out for mercy or oblivion were ignored. Those who tried to fight or take their own lives were subdued and bound, for the sons of Valyria had grown much in might and spellcraft. Those who died were thrown into the mouths of the fourteen mountains to join their forebears. But none starved or suffered thirst unduly, and by the time the handful of survivors returned with eggs and fledglings of the sky tyrants from beyond the Summer Sea, the cries for stardust and dreamwine had almost completely given way to pleas for forgiveness.

The Sons of Valyria tasked the warriors to gather all the people who could stand on their own, young and old alike, and bring them before the gates to their mountain fastness. There, as ashen flakes fell amidst the light of the four tallest bonfires to ever be lit since the world's breaking, the people learned that their new king was not walking the same path as his parents at all.

"Damnation!" the man roared. "There is the warning! Behold our Father's scourge!" From his vantage, the vast column of smoke glowed with a deep red glow in the Far East, looming above the Fourteen Flames themselves despite being so far away. "We have become swollen, bloated, foul! Father couples with son and daughter in beds of rags and waste, and the fruit of these unclean unions die unheard to the piping of twisted demons wholly imagined. Gentle ladies fornicate with fools and give birth to corpses. The strongest men gorge on rancid meat and inhale poison and brimstone while weapons rust, food rots and forges cool. Even my own sister, your princess, has fallen from grace. She bathes in foul waters and lays in filth with the brazen and mindless while her people fall to madness around her! Fear comes before wisdom, pride is all but trampled, chaos rules our fastnesses, and debauchery is all… but no more! The Rotten Night will not end unless we make it, and the Gods themselves have chosen to stand in the way of that! Behold!" He jabbed his fist towards what would have been the east, were there still a sun and stars to guide by. "See the Storm God himself brought low! When his carcass rose impaled on the spikes of the corpse city, a great stench surged to heaven, a thousand worms slid forth from his belly, hissing and biting, and the earth itself grew sick and retched its foulest flames!" He waved to his brothers who brought forth a palanquin. "Behold your vindication!"

The red sheet was removed, and the people recoiled.

It was the Queen mother, Valyria, and she was burning. Her skin was flushed and red, and when the snowflakes touched her brow, they hissed and steamed as if they had landed in a pot of boiling oil. There was scarce an ounce of flesh upon her bones, so gaunt and starved did she appear, but even from afar they could see…swellings inside her. Her skin bulged out and then sunk down again, as if…no, not as if, for this was the truth of it…there were things inside her, living things, moving and twisting, searching for a way out, and giving her such pain that even the deepest stupor gave her no surcease. A raw throat whispered her agony through her cracked and bleeding lips that begged for death that never came.

Before their very eyes, Valyria was cooking from within. Her skin was brittle, the flesh beneath darker and darker, every time she flinched it cracked. Her skin resembled nothing so much as pork cracklings. Thin tendrils of smoke issued from her mouth, her nose, even, most obscenely, from her nether lips as the things within her continued to move. Her very eyes had boiled within her skull and burst, like two eggs left in a pot of boiling water for too long.

"Behold the gods' judgment!" the king spat. "They say we should act with compassion but let the Fisher Queens die to stunted brutes. They say the struggle for justice is a mission eternal, but gave no succour to our mother or her mother when she stood alone against the Bloody One. They speak of freedom but give the most cowardly vermin the power to violate the bodies and will of others. They demand virtue but serve only those that worship and sacrifice to them in the greatest numbers. They watch and laugh as savages consort with the creatures on whose behalf the gods themselves called down this destruction upon us, all because they begged and debased themselves harder than the rest! All the while, they hold us in contempt for being fallible when they are no better! And when they make a mistake, they don't heal the harm like they command of us, they break the world to fit their folly until we hack up ash that was the people we knew! All these decrees to inspire nobility only to do this!" Roaring in anger, he drew a knife and slashed open Valyria's breast.

Things came out. Unspeakable things, they were… worms with faces… snakes with hands… twisting, slimy, unspeakable things that seemed to writhe and pulse and squirm as they came bursting from her flesh. Some were no bigger than a child's finger, some were as long as a man's arm and… oh, the sounds they made…

"This. Is. Unforgivable! I will not stand for it! My father died defying it. My mother is holding onto her last gasps to turn this last jape of the Gods against them! If the Gods will keep the world from mending, then I will simply do it myself!" A wave of warmth spread from the man as he unsheathed the sword at his side and lifted it up. For the first time in almost a generation, the people once again felt awe. The blade was pale as milkglass, alive with light. "I will see the world mended. I will create our own place of peace and prosperity for those who live in suffering. Perhaps the work will not be finished in my generation, but I will be the one to take that first bold step. And when I am spent and the Gods presume to demand accounting of me, I will say to them: 'We no longer need heaven or your trials. We have our paradise on Earth!'"

Something cracked. Terrified silence and bitter sobs gave way to ragged cheers of defiance as hope came alight in the breast of man where it had been dead for so long. They were sparse at first, but the cheers quickly grew in number and strength until even the wails of the hellwyrms could barely be heard.

"I ask now: who among you would share my toil?" The king grasped the largest of the creatures in his bare fist. He held it out, gaze hard but alight with their same hunger. "Who among you would claim themselves my brothers?"

Some quailed. Many didn't. Some died. Some didn't and instead lasted through the worst agony imaginable before or since. Those, the sons of Valyria fed and watered until they grew tall, fair and strong enough to follow them down into the fiery depths. More of them died. Enough didn't. Thus did swell Valyria's kin of gemstone eyes and golden hair. Thus did Valyria's sons pass on the arts that their Father had sworn to see expunged from memory and time.

Thus did dragons spring forth anew from the Fourteen Flames of Arraea.

Then, lifting high the great winged banner of Artys the Lighbringer, the Arrin went to war.

Their journey is its own saga and spawned many thereafter, but above all it was swift. They invaded the western continent. They made common cause with giants and merlyngs eager to have their revenge on the wood walkers that wore their bodies as skins for centuries. They slew every Child of the Forest they could find, cut down every sacred oak, drove the First Men from the Vale when they raised arms in their defense, and Artys himself flew with his army of dragons and slew the Griffin King atop the Giant's Lance. When he came upon the man's wife and found her to be kin to the loathsome wood walkers, he took her for himself, challenged and broke her greatest magics, then forced her to reveal the place from whence her kindred had dragged the second moon out of the sky through rite of blood.

They descended upon the Neck with fury unseen since the hammer of the waters itself and burned the woods for miles and miles. When land gave way to mist and bog and even dragon flames didn't spread on the soaked and frosted branches, they joined their footmen in chopping down the groves with saw and axe. They did not parley, for they knew the wood walkers could see out of others' eyes and dominate minds to deceive and beguile. They gave no quarter, took no prisoners and slew all who stood against them. They hardened their hearts to the cries of women and children as they burned in their huts of branch and thatch. They swooped down on Moat Cailin and were vindicated, for they found walkers and men together working to restore that place of horrors. They burned them. They burned them all.

And then the ice dragon came roaring down from the north.

The beast was white as crystal, a shade of white so hard and cold that it was almost blue. It was covered with hoarfrost, that when it moved, flakes of rime fell off and its skin broke and crackled as the crust on the snow crackles beneath a man's boots. Its eyes were clear and deep and icy. Its wings were vast and batlike, colored all a faint translucent blue through which the clouds above could be seen when the beast wheeled in frozen circles through the skies. Its teeth were icicles, a triple row of them, jagged spears of unequal length, white against its deep blue maw. And when the ice dragon beat its wings, the cold winds blew and the snow swirled and scurried and the world seemed to shrink and shiver.

The dragonlords scattered before it, for it was mighty and ancient beyond all reckoning, such was its size that bonfires cast shadows the size of mountains upon the eternal blanket of gloom above. And when the ice dragon opened its great mouth and exhaled, it was not fire that came streaming out, not the burning brimstone of their mounts. The ice dragon breathed cold.

Ice formed when it breathed. Warmth fled. Bonfires as tall as fortress walls guttered and went out, shriven by the chill. Trees froze through to their slow secret souls, the great black slabs of the Moat slid apart, animals turned blue and whimpered and died, their eyes bulging and their skin covered over with frost. The dragons fared better, but only barely for they couldn't abide such cold, they were like mice before a lion, and their riders quickly began to die as their breaths were stolen and their limbs turned brittle and cracked from their own weight.

It was then, with over half his number vanquished and the rest scattered or soon to follow their brethren in frozen shards across the frosted bog below, that Lightbringer carved a path through the freezing winds and the Arrin King saw her.

A woman riding on the back of the dragon.

The realisation lit once more in him all his fire and fury.

From across the sky he assailed her, mind to mind, soul to soul, vengeance on vengeance. She was a sharp edge against him, a crystal sword slashing him apart, sharp icicles stabbing deep inside him. But the ice dragon became wild beneath her, the dragonlords rallied, and the tide began to turn as gouts of fire from their hundred of small ones rained on her great other, steam hissing and billowing wide with every swoop.

The ice dragon turned to flee despite her, tried to find escape deeper in winter's lands, but failed. Its end was dearly bought, in the lives of brothers succumbing to its death throes and the cold until less than half of them remained. But Artys was the Winged Knight, the son of his Father and Mother, and he held Lightbringer in his hands. The ice dragon fell from the sky with the force of a mountain, cracked the earth beneath so deep that it freed a hot spring that had somehow endured even in that accursed land, and then the corpse melted from the heat until all that remained was an ice-cold pool of black water.

When the woman dragged herself onto dry land, Artys stood over her and was spellbound. He asked for her name.

She laughed in his face. It was the laughter of one in on a joke only they understood, hearty and mad with the knowledge that everyone had gotten exactly what they wanted and would suffer the consequences. She said her name was Adara. She said her dragon had been called Winter. She asked why her uncle was burning down her people and her lands. Then she died of her wounds.

And the Winged Knight learned to fear the winter when the ice wind came howling out of the north, direwolves charged out of the trees, the white walkers moved through the woods while snow fell a hundred feet deep, and the dragons themselves went mad with fear. The Lightbringer fled for his life away from the place where Winter fell.

Barely a score of dragonriders were still with him when he made it back past the Neck, and none of the landbound.

The people left behind to hold the forts witnessed their king seized by a wild frenzy. He rescinded commands, ordered prisoners taken, abandoned all battles, recalled all the men, and didn't even pretend to hear his brothers' pleas for caution and sense when he interrogated the captives before a gathering of all the dragonlords and champions. The tongue they spoke was garbled, the curses foul, their grief honest, their hate the same bitter, tired thing the Arrin themselves felt for a world that heaped cruelty upon them. And their answers were fantastical and outlandish, but so earnest in their spite that it finally dawned on some to question just what had taken place beyond the horizon, if even their wise and mighty ruler had come back deceived. Perhaps.

The Winter Maiden had been a brother's daughter, the fruit of a truce with the Cold Ones that should have given mankind enough reprieve to work to mend the world. The Griffin King had been another brother. His union to his mongrel wife was in alliance with the wood walkers not responsible for the world's demise, who worked with the shamans and druids of the First Men to rip from the black weirwoods the spells that had been stolen from their Father even as the Long Night came upon them. They were told that the Old Gods had all passed into trees to keep the Bloodstone at bay while men did their part in the world of the living. They were told of greenseers, pale corpse-like creatures stuck in weirwoods that were actually dream sending, hive-mind depositories of dead, fey-like people... and that before the breaking it had been the closest thing the world had to a bridge to heaven. The sacred oaks they destroyed would have become their foil.

They had arrived late. They had assumed the wood walkers were all of one mind when they weren't. They had killed the wrong Children. They had killed the wrong men. They had burned the wrong trees. They had slain their closest kin and destroyed their own Father's legacy.

The Arrin knew disbelief. They knew horror. They even knew regret, but it was too late. The riders scattered by the other of ice were returning from across the land, with news of slaughter upon all sorts of tribes and villages. More brought dark words of woods beasts savaging entire warrior bands, and great flocks of black birds descending unseen from the shrouded sky to harass them no matter how high they soared. Some were blinded, others dragged out of their saddles by what griffins hadn't been attending their king in the beginning. More dragons had scattered across the continent, scared, hungry, riderless, and well learned to burn people alive. The spirit of the Griffin King's wife had left her body. The giants and merlyngs had fled, in treachery or fear, none of them knew.

The Arrin King tried to send emissaries, by wing and land and river, but they were rebuffed. The dragonlords strong in magic reached out to minds from far away, but all those they swayed were locked away or killed. What horses they'd acquired during their journey had to be slaughtered after they started going mad, throwing their riders out of the saddle and trampling them. What hamlets had survived along the rivers beyond the Moon Mountains were found abandoned, the First Men taking shelter in the rickety woods with the walkers and animals. The dragonlords ordered swathes of forests cleared just so they could rest without fear of ambush, which only turned the world against them more. Wells were fouled. Large fields of grain grown sunless off blood sacrifice were always freshly burnt to ash ahead of their path. Raiders of all stripes came screaming out of woods and cracks in the cliffs, dying with looks of mocking rapture at the glorious deaths they won instead of merely 'going hunting' like everyone else too old or useless to be kept alive.

Releasing prisoners brought no quarter. Emissaries were turned away. Warriors were met with bone and bronze and poison. When a dragonlord tried to land atop a hillfort and demand audience, great winds buffeted him and flocks of ravens ripped out his eyes. A handful were unlucky enough to run afoul of a man whose great long bow could shoot an arrow through a dragon's eye, well before he was close enough to spit out flame. Further to the west, forts were emptied outright and the people delivered their enmity through murder holes dug in the walls of a great hill of rock on the seashore. Only a handful of riders ever got that far, as blizzards unlike anything they had imagined set out to smother them on foot and wing alike.

Men and even some of the dragonlords called for retreat. They had been deceived, they had misunderstood, they had caused too much harm, they should never have come and done such things as were against all that Valyria had taught them.

But the northern wind howled louder with every day that passed, the dragons refused to fly north or back east, and every day drove more of their fellows from the Vale's high rise inland, their lips blue, their noses, ears and fingers broken off from frostbite, all with tales of the Vale being buried in snow deep enough to swallow men entire. There was no going back.

So the king turned them south and found out why there were men in those lands that could fell dragons.

There were other dragons. Few but large and mighty. Their riderswere warriors and kings, some so ancient that they still remembered the Empire from before the breaking. Some were born to a loyalist of the Amethyst Empress, the Lightbringer's own grandmother. The others sprung from the Bloodstone Emperor's vassal sent to cull them. All were gaunt, pale and haggard from famine lasting through all the decades of hunting, besieging and burning out the last holdouts of the true enemy that had tried to wipe mankind from the face of the Earth. They saw the invaders that forced them to break away from their charge and resented. They saw the ones who killed their kin and the promise of relief after death and hated. They saw upstarts who didn't deserve the power given to them and decided to take it away. They'd endured the worst hopelessness and despair every bit as badly as the Arrin had, and were mad.

The Arrin had more dragons and the bigger army on the ground. They sued for peace. But now they went ignored when they called for parley.

The desolation of the world saw one last dance beneath the black sky, while the clouds thundered and the only light was the lightning. The men of the west fought for justice and vengeance. The men of the far south beyond the sea fought for their lives. The new clashed with the old. Assaults by spell were rebuffed and paid in kind. Old age and skill faced youth and talent. Size matched against numbers. Numbers told, but only barely. Half the dragonlords left were vanquished before a leap of faith slew Maris the Fair above the Oakenseat. Dayne cursed Artys for a thief when he saw the sword forged from the stolen star of his forebears. He fell above his own fortress, asking the Lightbringer how it felt to wield a sword forged in his grandfather's murder of his grandmother, then laughed his last breath as the blade lost its light the moment it drove him through. When Uthor fled, Artys and his last wing mates pursued him all the way to the Sunset Sea and was ambushed. Birds so many they blocked out the sky swooped down on them. Griffin riders whose mounts were no longer their own slew them in the saddle even as it killed them. The dragonlords remembered that their mounts were kin to the underworld wyrms and pursued Uthor into the underbelly of the isle where they did that last battle, only for the man to use his dragon as bait and collapse the Hightower down on all their heads.

When the dust settled and the King managed to dig himself out from under his dragon's corpse, the only people standing witness were captive scouts far away across the arm of the river mouth. They watched Uthor hold his sword at Artys' throat while he looked back and waited. For what, they didn't know. But the blow never fell. The other man stood there for a long time, then stepped back. Words were exchanged. Artys stood and dropped Lightbringer at the man's feet, cold and lightless. Then the king returned to them, ashen faced, and accompanied them to what remained of the warriors and camp followers, on horses they feared the whole way and ran off the moment they dismounted.

His last command was for them to go home to their families. Then he left them, turned north, and was never heard from again.

Barely a score made it back to their home, only two of Valyria's trueborn among them, and none of the dragons.

The end of the world passed in a whimper of disbelief, for surely they could not have erred so soundly, surely the king had only gone seeking the dragons left riderless. But soon there were few who still looked to the sea for his return. Grief swept over them then, for all had lost husbands, sons and brothers. Cries went up, for time to be rewound, for explanations that didn't make a difference, for their rulers to let them take succour in the bliss of oblivion once more, but no one stood to answer. When despair came this time, it was a numb, hollow thing, and it seemed that all that was left was to wait for the world to finally end. But they didn't descend into madness and debauchery again, somehow. The fear and mistrust was spent just like everything else. Instead they… lingered. Together. Watching the bleak horizon in strange silences.

The world shook. The earth rumbled. The pulsing red glow in the east went out. The great wafts of ash and pitch grew too weak to escape the Shadow. The gloom blocking the sky faded. The north wind went sighing back to its home. Ice thawed, snow melted, and rain began to fall upon the lands of summer once again, washing away the ash. The people looked up and beheld the stars and saw the Maiden of Light shine bright and clear and golden white. They saw that she had weaved herself a new pattern along the firmament. And then the Sun rose in the east, and young and old alike all wept in gratitude all-consuming.

The Long Night ended to laughter and tears as dragons gone wild to roost in the Fourteen Flames roared mightily to greet the brightest light.

Life seemed to bloom again, and hope and wonder awoke in the hearts of men. Love blossomed too, for kin and craft and fellow. Food became plentiful, and so did warmth and time. The warriors suffered few and fewer sleep terrors as hope and succor pushed the memories of the Worthless War far away. Only Valyria's last sons fell back into despondence and grief, for they were as children in the fleshcrafting arts of their parents, they knew no other way to replenish the dragons' numbers, and none of those that roosted in the Flames would obey them, their spells and minds failing to find purchase on the beasts. They had lost their birthright, they did not know what to do, and it was only a matter of time before others came again with steel raised bloody in their fists.

The princess emerged from her seclusion. She sang new songs and taught new crafts, of joy and clean, soul-wracking passion. She walked across fields and up the mountains, played her music to men and plants among the hamlets and pastures. Shepherds and beasts of the pens and the wilds all gathered to listen to her voice and instruments, and she was glad. She went and sat to sing at the mouths of the fire caves and the rims of the fire mouths, and the dragons gathered to listen too. She took to singing to them daily, then visited the one that was always first to come when she sang, and last to leave when she stopped. She started visiting its nest when it stopped growling or blowing smoke at her touch, to sing and talk to it and sleep in its shadow. She took to bringing one whole sheep for it to eat every day. Until, one day, the dragon welcomed Valyria's touch, took her on its back and lifted her up into the sky.

The people were amazed. The last dragonlords were awestruck. They courted dragons of their own and won the right to soar through the sky once more. When they once again tasted the power and freedom of heaven, they looked upon their sister and were smitten. The three were wedded under the bounding shadows of their dragons' dance, and were happy. And when the union bore three-fold fruit, Valyria set an egg in each of their cribs, and they hatched into the first of many new dragons to come since the last king had led his host into the west.

And he was the last king, for the people decided they would never be beholden to a single folly. They would start over. They would be free. They would be mighty unto themselves. They chose to forsake their old name with its old pain and their original sin. They began calling themselves Valyrians, after the mother whose spirit they had gone against by breaking what should not have been broken further. They abandoned all thought of war and shunned conquest to live and keep to themselves in peace.

And for a thousand years, they did.

Up until Grazdan the Great, high off his creation of the first great empire from the preeminent survivors of the Long Night on the mainland, crossed the Gulf of Grief with his lockstep legions to see whether dragons could contend with the harpy.

The first war was brutal and short, for the tyrant. Time and plenty had restored the Valyrians' vigor, the wealth of kept land and the freedom of having voice in rule brought much pride to the freeholders, and the dragonlords had multiplied their numbers that they matched their height during the Worthless War. When the great City of Ghis opened its gates, out poured its lockstep legions to control Slaver's Bay and the Gulf of Grief. With their lockstep discipline and absolute obedience, the Empire of Ghis ground nations beneath their boots, destroying that which they did not enslave. But they were no match for fire-breathing dragons. The Valyrians taught them this. Then taught them again when the lesson didn't keep, claiming lives and concessions that turned their star ascendant in the Summer Sea through no aim of their own.

But there always came a Ghiscari Emperor who mistook Valyria's surcease for weakness and cowardice, challenging their might and right to live in peace. And when force of arms failed one time too many, the sons of the harpy tried to hem them in, blockading the routes across the Gulf, seeking to dispossess, impoverish and starve them.

So Valyria taught the Ghiscari that the most terrifying force of death comes from the hands of men who wanted to be left alone. They tried, so very hard, to mind their own business and provide for themselves and those they claimed as theirs. They resisted every impulse to aggrieve, knowing the forced and everlasting change of life that would come from it. They knew that the moment they began seeking conquest, their lives as they had lived them would be over. The moment the Valyrians, who wanted to be left alone, succumbed to their enemy's provocations and retaliated in kind, it was a form of suicide. They were practically submitting to the Ghiscari vision of how the world should be. But Valyria was brought to the edge of their patience.

And so those men who wanted to be left alone fought with unholy vengeance against those who murdered their former lives. They fought with raw hate, and a drive that could not be fathomed by those in Ghis and its tributaries that played at rule and sowed terror. True terror descended on dragonback, and the Ghiscari screamed, cried out their pain, and bellowed pleas for mercy that all fell upon the deaf ears of the lords of heaven who just wanted to be left alone.

The Ghiscari were repaid in kind, on all counts. The dragonlords grew deaf to the dying screams of the burned. The freeholders turned from hesitant to righteously gleeful at seeing the proud Ghiscari brought low and forced to pay the price for all the farmhands and miners lost to conscription and death on foreign shores. The other people of Essos welcomed the Valyrians as liberators and paragons.

Then, against all might and reason, Ghis declared war for the fifth time. They had the gall to justify it as a noble undertaking to liberate their kinsmen from the Valyrian enslavers.

The Valyrian Freehold began to understand the wrath the last king must have felt.

There would not be a sixth. The ancient brick walls of Old Ghis, first erected by Grazdan the Great himself, were razed. The colossal pyramids and temples and homes were given over to dragonflame. The fields were sown with salt, lime, and skulls. Many of the Ghiscari were slain, and still others were enslaved and died laboring for their conquerors. Most mines are dank and chilly places, cut from cold dead stone, but the Fourteen Flames were living mountains with veins of molten rock and hearts of fire. So the mines of old Valyria were always hot, and they grew hotter as the shafts were driven deeper and deeper. The slaves toiled in an oven. The rocks around them were too hot to touch. The air stank of brimstone and would sear their lungs as they breathed it. The soles of their feet would burn and blister, even through the thickest sandals. Sometimes, when they broke through a wall in search of gold, they would find steam instead, or boiling water, or molten rock. Certain shafts were cut so low that the slaves could not stand upright, but had to crawl or bend. What had once been Ghiscari nobles, commonners, merchants and soldiers, they all perished by the score, and their new masters did not care. Red gold and yellow gold and silver were reckoned to be more precious than the lives of the Ghiscari that had so aggrieved them. The slaves rose up and fought, revolts were common in the mines, but few accomplished much. The dragonlords of the old Freehold were strong in sorcery, and lesser men defied them at their peril.

Thus the Ghiscari became but another part of the new Valyrian Empire, and in time they forgot the tongue that Grazdan spoke, learning instead High Valyrian. All that remained of the of the once-proud empire of Ghis was a paltry thing – a few cities clinging like sores to Slaver's Bay, filled with the most wretched and once wealthy of Valyria's humbled enemies that were too contemptible to deserve death's release. So did an empire end and another rise in its place.

The Valyrians looked upon their way of life and saw it changed to the inverted mirror of Grazdan's get, but they minded but briefly. The Ghiscari had woken the dragon, fate had blessed them by washing their original sin from living memory, and turnabout was the fairest judgment. Honor, mercy, benevolence, they were no different from domination, death and cruelty, privileges only afforded to and by the strong. The peoples of Essos all but worshipped Valyria's might, but none among them could lull the dragon back to slumber. And so the Ghiscari whom the Valyrians conquered were the first to be thus enslaved, but not the last.

The Valyrians expanded in all directions, stretching out east beyond the Ghiscari cities and west to the very shores of Essos, where even the Ghiscari had not made inroads. As Valyria grew, its need for ore increased, which led to ever more conquests to keep the mines stocked with slaves. The burning mountains of the Fourteen Flames were rich with ore, and the Valyrians found that they hungered for it like the dragons themselves, who ate it raw and studded their maws and throats in gold and platinum. The freeholders wanted copper and tin for the bronze of their weapons and monuments. Iron for the steel they learned from the Rhoynish, they who were their friends and their bane before Valyria surpassed them in their own greatest craft by rite of blood. And always gold and silver to pay for it all. The mines grew deep, and then deeper, and they claimed lives as quickly as they were fed.

But the tale of Valyria's spread across the surface of the world is just the one half that went down in the written records of others. The Fourteen Flames ultimately made up a very small part of Valyria'as territory. The mines didn't only drive deeper in, they also drove outward, and they also drove down. The volcanoes were the best place to find pure gold, but they were just fourteen mountains at the heart of a much larger landmass. They could never have accounted for the true scale of the flesh trade. There was another side to the story, one the dragonlords kept as close to their breast as the tale of their founding sin. It was the tale of why, save when a war had been declared outright, the Valyrian Freehold always dragged its feet.

Westeros was crippled long after the Long Night ended, but Valyria chose not to return even though they became expansionist well before the First Men recovered. It was too far and large to bother with, at first, and they still remembered the dragons running mad in fear of the breath of winter. But Valyria still had both the means and motive to at least secure forward bases throughout the Narrow Sea. Yet the dragonlords showed no interest, claiming such cowardice as to fear a prophecy about western gold.

There were thousands of years when they didn't wage any wars unless provoked, notwithstanding their growing dependency on slavery that gave its rivals all the just cause in the shape of abductions. It wasn't just Ghis they made peace with repeatedly, they did the same with Rhoyne despite not needing to. They may not have known precisely where Braavos was, but there was no point in history when they lacked the lives to spend on finding out, the motive and means to war against them. They left the Dothraki be, they did not challenge or reach out to Qarth despite the dragon skeletons in the Red Waste, they did not challenge or reach out to Asshai despite their claims about true dragon origins, they ignored Qarlon the Andal until the last moment. Even when the freeholders realised why the second Worthless War didn't end after the first score of years, the Freehold kept its dragons home and let its slavers and colonies to their frustration.

In truth, at some point between the fall of Ghis and the rise of Sarhoy, the Valyrian dragonlords became preoccupied with something else. Something they kept to themselves. Something they found out through the blood and toil of others: the red darkness in the depths of the earth held more than firewyrms. Their miners found it. They struck gaps in the rock that didn't lead to steam or boiling water or molten rock. They found huge caverns full of lakes, rivers, fresh air and riveting luminescence. They found a whole other world.

They found the deep forests.

The dragonlords were amazed – a land every bit as vast as the one above, land and sea and lake, caverns big enough for dragons to fly in, just there for them to claim!

Then they learned the reason why the First Men, the Mazemakers of Lorath, the Hairy Men of Ib, the Andals, the Dothraki, why there wasn't a single people in the world that hadn't waged total war of extermination against the wood walkers. What fools they were, who thought themselves so wise. The error crept in from the translation. It wasn't deep forests that were ceded to them in the Pact of Ice and Fire, it was the forests deep. Forests in the deep. The Children were allowed no land above the earth, they went below ground where the light of the sun never reaches, vermin and predator and prey can live without eyes, and the weirwoods grow downwards from water springs and magma chambers, like black and white stalactites covered in leaves of amber and blue.

The few dragonlords beheld the place from whence had come their first king and realised that no – they had not understood the wrath of the last king. The home that their Father had left behind to be with them, it was being squatted in by the same creatures that had almost succeeded in killing them all.

There was no war. There was quick slaughter. Firewyrms were the miscreants' natural bane and dragons themselves could burrow underground when their flames grew hot enough. Even without them, eradicating what few beings weren't needed for interrogation and fleshcrafting experiments was as easy as cracking a path in the nearest lava vein. The same spells made to control the rumblings of the Fourteen Flames could just as well do the opposite, even if it meant slaves had to die by the hundreds every once in a while to keep that great and terrible discovery secret. And if the mountain erupted outright, well, that was a setback indeed, but no threat to those who spent most of their lives in the air and spires hundreds of feet taller than the deepest lava stream.

The dragonlords conquered what caverns they had the bodies to secure, collapsed the tunnels leading to the rest, and gave the captives to their sorcery to learn all they could. They kept all of it a secret from the rest of the Freeholders, for they were alarmed. They did not know how far and wide the deeps stretched, what other walkers might be scurrying beneath the other realms of mankind, never mind giants and other things. They worried that enough time would let them rebuild their numbers sufficiently for them to try and rid the world of man again. This, at least, proved a needless worry: by the time they got all the answers they could, they learned that the wood walkers were a much diminished people, reduced by war, and breeding far more slowly than the other races. Above all, they learned that their claim and control of the weirwoods was no longer uncontested. Even the deepest torpor that once thought as one, the Greendream, was no longer theirs.

The dragonlords were relieved.

Relieved and eager to claim the arts of the ancient enemy. With time, experimentation, and chimeras fleshcrafted from walkers and dragonseeds, they were able to tap into the weirwoods. With practice and focus, they began to see into the past and present far away, despite attempts by the other minds in the roots and branches to stymie them. Eventually, and only after rediscovering and using the same arts that had so incensed their ancestors, they were able to delve the Greendream itself.

That, more than anything, ended the last whimpers of Valyria's restraint – the so-called bridge to heaven was a quagmire, a morass of frothing insanity where dreams went to be broken, the last spite of the wood walkers caused brainstorms, idle thoughts tossed you down into visions of crooked creatures in crooked dwellings that you could seldom find your way out of… Those who succumbed woke up not remembering anything but distant crowing, every time a bit less powerful, a bit less wise and a bit more mad. Some who succumbed were mighty high lords, and their sudden, inexplicable madness or death while involved in secret dealings, dealings more secret to their own closest kin than who they were dealing with, threw the Forty Families into a tangle of confusion, blame, and deadly revenge that never ceased after. The dragonlords persevered, even after the enmity between their kin spilled over to them and their power plays became deadly and personal. But when the sorcerers among them finally achieved the will and focus needed to push past all of that, they found the Underworld itself to be just an inside-out patchwork of ancient history, and lingering wills reprising, again and again, the ancient crimes of the past that the Valyrians had put behind them.

The dragonlords were no longer relieved. They sympathised with Grazdan the Great. They understood the Ghiscari and envied their enlightenment. The New Gods were fake. The Old Gods were dream and delusion. There was no meaning in any church's bell. The world did not have a heaven, but it did have a hell.

Valyria's expansion truly began then.

And while the freeholders were busy with that, the Forty Families came together, in spite of their blood feuds, and conferred. They pooled their gathered knowledge and worked to find more. They sent expeditions to Oldtown,Qarth, Asshai, beyond the Wall, even Stygai beneath the Shadow. The Maesters' records about the Greenseer Wars confirmed their worst fears. Wildling skinchangers proved useless to the cause, but the Valyrians saw potential in their blood gift and bred it into some of their cadet branches. The Shadowbinders traded spell and knowledge willingly, ways to delve upward rather than down through blood and shadow, even how to birth creatures of shadow to do their bidding afar. The ship sent to Qarth returned with Shade of the Evening, and a Warlock that proved just short of wilful enough to stop them from learning how to make more. The expedition to the Shadow was never heard from again, but a year and a day after they had given up on its return, spicers from Yi Ti docked with a lone survivor that the Dawnguard of the Five Forts had stumbled upon in the Grey Waste. The man that was once their peer was mad, spending half his waking hours in terrified silence, the rest trying to claw out the face of first person in reach while raving about crows that needed a tribute of eyes so they wouldn't take his again. But in his rare, lucid moments when he remembered his name, he also remembered things that he'd never known before, and he passed it all on with a focus that bordered on the sinister.

Sever the roots. Sacrifice for life. Like calls to like. Blood flows down. Fire soars up.

Claim the path. Blood and Fire.

In the deep forests beneath the earth, through the sacrifice of countless slaves to fuel the blackest arts, the Valyrian dragonlords wed not men to the trees but dragons.

At first, nothing changed. The dragonlords were torn between denial and resignation. Those that had driven the design felt foiled. Those who'd argued against severing their weirwoods from the rest, so that at least they'd be able to use them as their eyes and ears, felt vindicated and slighted. All felt they had lost parents, siblings and children for nothing at all. Their concurrence broke. They returned to their palaces and lost themselves in their normal affairs and the deadly games that had grown to rule Valyria's tall spires. Generations passed, and with each one the number of those in the know dwindled as rivals fell to rivals without passing their knowledge on.

Eventually, however, things did change. Dragons from certain lines grew faster, flew higher, learned quicker until they barely needed need training and whips to command them. They bonded easier, some older ones even bonded on sight when the would-be rider approaching them was kin to their last one. Dragons began to live longer lives, even past the point where their bodies had once given out under their own uncontrollable growth. The innate magic that made them buoyant enough for flight had strengthened, and now they lived long enough to reach colossal size. All magic in them had strengthened – when they were nearby, sorcerers found their spells more potent and easier to cast.

The dragonlords looked into the ether and found nothing. Then they looked through their dragons' eyes and witnessed a veil weaving itself into the sky, its threads made equally of fire and shadow. It reached up and outward through the ether instead of down and in. The Grand Design projected outwards and high into the unseen world, their will manifested in the heavens themselves, a realm of soul and flame growing ever larger.

The dragonlords still in the know convened and were divided on what to do next. They hadn't forgotten the walkers' folly that saw their very afterlife fractured and lost to the First Men they snared, when their souls finally grew to outnumber them. The work was too young, barely a seedling, they couldn't risk more sacrifices even no matter how greatly it would hasten it. They already had to feed a steady stream of blood so the trees didn't die and petrify due to being cut off from the rest. Too many wills thrown in at once would destabilise it, perhaps even turn the whole design against them – even vermin could harass a lion if they hated in great enough numbers. But that was just one door of several now open, and they explored the others avidly, each feat more godlike than the last.

When they used dragonflame to work the bounty of the earth, a shadow of the Grand Design interposed upon the physical world, just long enough that they could affect a permanent change in the work of crude matter with the right application of blood magic. Fused black stone, eversharp edges, Valyrian steel, they wrought all that and more.

Casting their scrying spells through the new medium let them spy on every far off place touched by the red light, when before they'd had to make long and perilous flights of the soul for any hope of clairvoyance the farther they went, and could get lost or imperilled. Glass candles, once limited to single pairs, could be spellcrafted to run through the new medium, which let them function every bit as the weirwoods themselves but better. The dragonlords allowed others to purchase glass candles just to test the range – their colonies, Qarth, Yi Ti, they even allowed a few to reach Oldtown for old time's sake. The results were everything they could hope for. Some warlocks, shadowbinders and maesters discovered the backdoors but did not live long, for the dragonlords could scry the history of their creations and reach into the spellcraft on the far end to do harm or break completely if they wished.

Playing god with the Andals showed that the Grand Design was not so fragile as to be warped by the faith of lesser men, putting the last of the uncertainty to rest. And so, as time went by, the might of the dragonlords grew, their sight stretched further, the fiery souls of the wed dragons burned away the impotent rage of the mad sacrifices, more slaves were fed to the roots of the growing flame, and the Grand Design steadily expanded through the Valyrian Freehold's sky unseen.

When the first Rhoynish War started, it was because the Valyrians killed a giant turtle whom the Rhoynar held sacred, viewing them as the consorts of Mother Rhoyne herself. It was what Old Ghis would have done. So were the wars that followed. Then Garin the Great mustered the full might of the Rhoynish people, and the Lords of Fire and Air met the full might of the people who just wanted to be left alone and stomped it underfoot.

They looked upon the lesser men, then, and saw. Their subjects worshipped them, lived to imitate them. The Norvosi played at fleshcrafting, the blacksmiths of Qohor were obsessed with Valyrian steel, Volantis was entirely rebuilt in fused black stone. The ones who hated and envied the dragonlords' might worshipped them too, however unknowingly. Septons claimed the Valyrians were damned for their promiscuous belief in a hundred gods and more, but could only sputter uselessly when asked why that godlessness hadn't unleashed the fires of the Seven Hells on the Freehold after so many centuries. Maesters asked Valyria what they would be without the spells they used to tame the Fourteen Flames, what they would do when they ran out of slaves and wealth to sustain them. They did not realise the godlike scale they themselves ascribed to Valyrian sorcery. The remnants of Valyria's conquered people and enemies whispered hopefully about the curse of Garin the Great or the fire of R'hllor, even the curse on the Tomb of the First King far away, not realising what they did in believing that their vengeance could only come by such unearthly means. Where some looked on the dragonlords as gods, those who challenged and loathed their pre-eminence could only do so by elevating them to the same pedestal as their all-powerful devils.

The dragonlords knew, then: they were ready. Just one more step and they wouldn't need even the loathsome trees. They were ready to fulfil the vow of the Lightbringer that their ancestors had shared in. They considered the many faiths in their empire and their empty promises of salvation and damnation. They looked at themselves and knew that the other peoples of the world looked upon them as the closest thing to gods. They remembered that their kin from the west had almost succeeded, even though they hadn't a fraction of the knowledge and might that they themselves possessed. They remembered the words of the Lightbringer, that mankind would never see a heaven they hadn't crafted for themselves.

Fourteen Flames. Fourteen Trees. Fourteen dragons.

Balerion, Caraxes, Meraxes, Meleys, Syrax, Terrax, Vhagar. Kepa, Muna, Azantys, Setegon, Rina, Abra, Morghul.

They forgot that a trapped animal might chew off its leg to escape a trap. They did not consider that a human, or child, might remain in the trap, endure the pain, and feign death so he might kill the trapper and remove a threat to his kind. They did not consider what it might lead to when unjust mass slaughter became combined with the bad blood of ages. They did not consider all it could mean that the Faceless Man seemed to possess so many different identities and lived such a long time. They ignored Aenar Targaryen. They ignored Uthero Zalyne.

The world shook. The earth rumbled. Unintended consequences of godlike scale came home to roost all at once. Every hill for five hundred miles split asunder to fill the air with ash and smoke and fire, blazes so hot and hungry that even the dragons in the sky were engulfed and consumed. Great rents opened in the earth, swallowing palaces, temples, entire towns. Lakes boiled or turned to acid, mountains burst, fiery fountains spewed molten rock a thousand feet into the air. Red clouds rained down dragonglass and the black blood of demons, and to the north the ground splintered and collapsed and fell in on itself, and an angry sea came rushing in. The proudest city in all the world was gone in an instant, its fabled empire vanished in a day, the Lands of the Long Summer scorched and drowned and blighted. And high up in the sky, dragon dreams of flame and wrath reminded the fourteen that they were not proof against fire even as they were finally proven right in their death knell.

The world may or may not have had a heaven, but it did have a hell.

The world turned. Time passed. A new world was born in tears and bloodshed. The Old Gods were silent. The Septons praised the Seven's Judgment. The Red Priests of R'hlorr proclaimed their God had shown himself. Magic died in the west and neither spell-forged steel nor stormsingers nor dragons could hold it back. Things were not so bleak in the east where Valyria hadn't spread as forcefully. Manticores prowled the islands of the Jade Sea, basilisks infested the jungles of Yi Ti, spellsingers, warlocks, and aeromancers practiced their arts openly in Asshai, while shadowbinders and bloodmages worked terrible sorceries in the black of night. But their arts soon began to grow weak and feeble as well, the unseen world turning more sparse and dry as time went by. What few still could looked beyond and found a draught they could not explain. The increasingly few who could push past it looked up and saw a strange red haze, empty and bereft of any guiding will. Hot. Aimless.

Unreachable.

Except, it turned out, to children that still knew they could fly but didn't look where they were going.

They burned too.

Until one didn't, because there were those in the world that hadn't dismissed what the Valyrians had. There were those that thought further ahead. There were those for whom the strong and brave were willing to lay down and die, and more. And there were those on whose behalf the young and idealistic could learn forgotten secrets by complete accident, because the unintended consequences of their actions could actually be good ones.

Once upon a time there was civilisation.

Then it exploded.

But not before getting answers to all of its questions.