The World of Ice & Fire

by George R. R. Martin

  It may be so. Or not. Until some new Sea Snake arises to sail beyond the sunrise, no man can know for certain.

  THE B ONES AND B EYOND

  EAST, BEYOND VAES DOTHRAK and the Mother of Mountains, the grasslands give way to rolling plains and woods, and the earth beneath the traveler’s feet turns hard and stony and begins to climb upward, ever upward. The hills grow wilder and steeper, and soon enough the mountains appear in the far distance, their great peaks seeming to float against the eastern sky, blue-grey giants so huge and jagged and menacing that even Lomas Longstrider, that dauntless wanderer (if his tales be true), lost heart at the sight of them, believing that he had at last reached the ends of the earth.

  The ancestors of the Dothraki and the other horse peoples of the grasslands knew better, for some remembered crossing those mountains from the lands that lay beyond. Did they come west in hopes of fairer fields and plenty or in search of conquest, or were they fleeing before some savage foe? Their tales do not agree, so we may never know, but of their travails we may be certain, for they left their bones behind to mark their passing. The bones of men, the bones of horses, the bones of giants and camels and oxen, of every sort of beast and bird and monster, all can be found amongst these savage peaks.

  From them the mountains take their name: the Bones. Tallest of all the mountain ranges in the known world from the Sunset Sea to Asshai-by-the-Shadow, the Bones extend from the Shivering Sea to the Jade Sea, a wall of twisted rock and sharp stone stretching more than five hundred leagues from north to south and a hundred leagues from east to west.

  Deep snows crown the northern Bones, whilst sandstorms oft scour the peaks and valleys of their southern sisters, carving them into strange shapes. In the long leagues between, thundering rivers roar through deep canyons, and small caves open onto vast caverns and sunless seas. Yet however inimical the Bones might seem to those who do not know them, they have been home to men and stranger things over the centuries. Even the snowcapped northernmost peaks (known as Krazaaj Zasqa or White Mountains in the Dothraki tongue), where the cold winds come howling off the Shivering Sea winter and summer, were once home to the Jhogwin, the stone giants, massive creatures said to have been twice as large as the giants of Westeros. Alas, the last of the Jhogwin disappeared a thousand years ago; only their massive bones remain to mark where they once roamed.

  “A thousand roads lead into the Bones,” wise men say from Qarth to Qohor, “but only three lead out.” As impassable as the Bones appear from afar, there are indeed hundreds of footpaths, goat tracks, game trails, streambeds, and slopes by which travelers, traders, and adventurers may find their way into the heart of the mountains. In certain places, ancient carved steps and hidden tunnels and passages exist for those who know how to find them. Yet many of these paths are treacherous, and others are dead ends or traps for the unwary.

  Small parties, well armed and well provisioned, may make their way through the Bones by myriad ways when led by a guide who knows the dangers. Armies, trading caravans, and men alone, however, are well advised to stay to the main routes, the three great mountain passes that bridge the worlds of east and west: the Steel Road, the Stone Road, and the Sand Road.

  The Steel Road (so named for all the battles it has seen) and the Stone Road both originate in Vaes Dothrak, the former running almost due east beneath the highest peaks, the latter curving southeast to join the old Silk Road at the ruins of Yinishar (called Vaes Jini by the horselords) before beginning its climb. Far south of these, the Sand Road passes through the southern Bones (sometimes called the Dry Bones, for water is scarce there) and surrounding deserts, connecting the great port city of Qarth with the market city Tiqui, the gateway to the east.

  Even along these well-traveled routes, crossing the Bones remains grueling and hazardous … and safe passage comes at a price, for on the far side of the mountains stand three mighty fortress cities, last remnants of the once-great Patrimony of Hyrkoon. Bayasabhad, the City of Serpents, guards the eastern end of the Sand Road and exacts tribute from all those who seek to pass. The Stone Road, with its deep defiles and endless, narrow switchbacks, passes beneath the walls of Samyriana, a grey stone city carved into the very rock of the mountains it defends. In the north, fur-clad warriors ride the Steel Road over swaying bridges and through underground passageways, escorting caravans to and from Kayakayanaya, whose walls are black basalt, black iron, and yellow bone.

  Many accounts inform us that the mountain warriors of Kayakayanaya, Samyriana, and Bayasabhad are all women, daughters of the Great Fathers who rule these cities, where girls learn to ride and climb before they learn to walk, and are schooled in the arts of the bow, the spear, the knife, and the sling from earliest childhood. Lomas Longstrider himself tells us that there are no fiercer fighters on all the earth. As for their brothers, the sons of the Great Fathers, ninety-nine of every hundred are gelded when they reach the age of manhood and live out their lives as eunuchs, serving their cities as scribes, priests, scholars, servants, cooks, farmers, and craftsmen. Only the most promising males, the largest and strongest and most comely, are permitted to mature and breed and become Great Fathers themselves in their turns. Maester Naylin’s Rubies and Iron—named for the penchant of the warrior women to wear iron rings in their nipples and rubies in their cheeks—speculates on the circumstances that led to such strange customs.

  The three fortress cities began as true forts, outposts and garrisons raised up by the Patriarchs of Hyrkoon to guard the western marches of their realm against the brigands, outlaws, and wild men of the Bones, and the savages who dwelt beyond them. Over the centuries, however, the citadels grew into cities, whilst Hyrkoon itself withered into dust, as its lakes and rivers dried away and its once-fertile fields turned to desert. Today the heartland of Hyrkoon is the Great Sand Sea, a vast wasteland of restless dunes, dry riverbeds, and ruined forts and towns baking beneath the sun. Water is said to boil away, it is so hot in the deep, southern portions of the sea.

  Beyond the Great Sand Sea another world awaits: the Further East, a vast land of plains and hills and river valleys that seems to have no end, where strange gods rule over stranger peoples. Many great cities and proud kingdoms have risen and flourished and fallen here since the dawn of days; most of these are little known in the west, even their very names long forgotten. Only the broadest outlines of the histories of the Further East are known to the Citadel, and even in those tales that have come west to us, over long leagues of mountains and deserts, there are many omissions, gaps, and contradictions, making it all but impossible to say with any certainty what portion is true and what portion has arisen from the fevered imaginings of singers, storytellers, and wet nurses.

  Yet the oldest and greatest of the eastern civilizations endures to our present day: the Ancient, Glorious, Golden Empire of Yi Ti.

  YI TI

  A fabled land even in the Seven Kingdoms, Yi Ti is a large and diverse country, a realm of windswept plains and rolling hills, jungles and rain forests, deep lakes and rushing rivers and shrinking inland seas. Its legendary wealth is such as to allow its princes to live in houses of solid gold and dine on sweetmeats powdered with pearls and jade. Lomas Longstrider, awestruck by its marvels, called Yi Ti “the land of a thousand gods and a hundred princes, ruled by one god-emperor.”

  Those who have visited Yi Ti as it is today tell us that the thousand gods and hundred princes yet remain … but there are three god-emperors, each claiming the right to don the gowns of cloth-of-gold, green pearls, and jade that tradition allows to the emperor alone. None wields true power; though millions may worship the azure emperor in Yin and prostrate themselves before him whenever he appears, his imperial writ extends no farther than the walls of his own city. The hundred princes of whom Lomas Longstrider wrote rule their own realms as they please, as do the brigands, priest-kings, sorcerers, warlords, and imperial generals and tax collectors outside their domains.

  This was not always so, we know. In ancient days, the god-
emperors of Yi Ti were as powerful as any ruler on earth, with wealth that exceeded even that of Valyria at its height and armies of almost unimaginable size.

  In the beginning, the priestly scribes of Yin declare, all the land between the Bones and the freezing desert called the Grey Waste, from the Shivering Sea to the Jade Sea (including even the great and holy isle of Leng), formed a single realm ruled by the God-on-Earth, the only begotten son of the Lion of Night and Maiden-Made-of-Light, who traveled about his domains in a palanquin carved from a single pearl and carried by a hundred queens, his wives. For ten thousand years the Great Empire of the Dawn flourished in peace and plenty under the God-on-Earth, until at last he ascended to the stars to join his forebears.

  Dominion over mankind then passed to his eldest son, who was known as the Pearl Emperor and ruled for a thousand years. The Jade Emperor, the Tourmaline Emperor, the Onyx Emperor, the Topaz Emperor, and the Opal Emperor followed in turn, each reigning for centuries … yet every reign was shorter and more troubled than the one preceding it, for wild men and baleful beasts pressed at the borders of the Great Empire, lesser kings grew prideful and rebellious, and the common people gave themselves over to avarice, envy, lust, murder, incest, gluttony, and sloth.

  When the daughter of the Opal Emperor succeeded him as the Amethyst Empress, her envious younger brother cast her down and slew her, proclaiming himself the Bloodstone Emperor and beginning a reign of terror. He practiced dark arts, torture, and necromancy, enslaved his people, took a tiger-woman for his bride, feasted on human flesh, and cast down the true gods to worship a black stone that had fallen from the sky. (Many scholars count the Bloodstone Emperor as the first High Priest of the sinister Church of Starry Wisdom, which persists to this day in many port cities throughout the known world).

  In the annals of the Further East, it was the Blood Betrayal, as his usurpation is named, that ushered in the age of darkness called the Long Night. Despairing of the evil that had been unleashed on earth, the Maiden-Made-of-Light turned her back upon the world, and the Lion of Night came forth in all his wroth to punish the wickedness of men.

  How long the darkness endured no man can say, but all agree that it was only when a great warrior—known variously as Hyrkoon the Hero, Azor Ahai, Yin Tar, Neferion, and Eldric Shadowchaser—arose to give courage to the race of men and lead the virtuous into battle with his blazing sword Lightbringer that the darkness was put to rout, and light and love returned once more to the world.

  Yet the Great Empire of the Dawn was not reborn, for the restored world was a broken place where every tribe of men went its own way, fearful of all the others, and war and lust and murder endured, even to our present day. Or so the men and women of the Further East believe.

  Hyrkoon the Hero with Lightbringer in hand, leading the virtuous into battle. (illustration credit 185)

  At the Citadel of Oldtown and other centers of learning in the west, maesters regard these tales of the Great Empire and its fall as legend, not history, yet none doubt that the YiTish civilization is ancient, mayhap even contemporary with the realms of the Fisher Queens beside the Silver Sea. In Yi Ti itself, the priests insist that mankind’s first towns and cities arose along the shores of the Jade Sea and dismiss the rival claims of Sarnor and Ghis as the boasts of savages and children.

  Whatever the truth, Yi Ti was beyond question one of the places where men first climbed from the pit of savagery to civilization … and literacy, for the wise men of the east have been reading and writing for many thousands of years. Their most ancient records are cherished, almost venerated, but are also jealously guarded by their scholars. Such accounts as we have are pieced together from hearsay from travelers and scattered texts that have escaped Yi Ti to find their way across the seas to the Citadel.

  To tell the tale of Yi Ti is far beyond our scope here, comprising as it does hundreds of emperors and myriad wars and conquests and rebellions. Let it suffice to say that the Golden Empire has known golden ages and dark ages, that it has waxed and waned and waxed again throughout the centuries, that it has weathered floods and droughts and sandstorms and quaking of the earth so violent as to swallow entire cities, that thousands of heroes and cravens and concubines and wizards and scholars have passed across the pages of its histories.

  Since the Further East emerged from the Long Night and the centuries of chaos that followed, eleven dynasties have held sway over the lands we now call Yi Ti. Some lasted no more than a half century; the longest endured for seven hundred years. Some dynasties gave way to others peacefully, others with blood and steel. On four occasions, the end of a dynasty was followed by a period of anarchy and lawlessness when warlords and petty kings warred with one another for supremacy; the longest of these interregnums lasted more than a century.

  THE GOD-EMPERORS OF YI TI

  To recount even the most important events of this long history would require more words than we have, yet we would be remiss if we did not at least mention a few of the more fabled of the god-emperors of Yi Ti:

  HAR LOI, the first of the grey emperors, whose throne was said to be a saddle, for he spent his entire reign at war, riding from one battle to another.

  CHOQ CHOQ, the humpbacked, fifteenth and last of the indigo emperors, who kept a hundred wives and a thousand concubines and sired daughters beyond count but was never able to produce a son.

  MENGO QUEN, the Glittering God, third of the jade-green emperors, who ruled from a palace where the floors and walls and columns were covered in gold leaf, and all the furnishings were made of gold, even to the chamber pots.

  LO THO, called Lo Longspoon and Lo the Terrible, the twenty-second scarlet emperor, a reputed sorcerer and cannibal, who is said to have supped upon the living brains of his enemies with a long, pearl-handled spoon, after the tops of their skulls had been removed.

  LO DOQ, called Lo Lackwit, the thirty-fourth scarlet emperor, a seeming simpleton cursed with an affliction that made him jerk and stagger when he walked, and drool when he tried to speak, who nonetheless ruled wisely for more than thirty years (though some suggest that the true ruler was his wife, the formidable Empress Bathi Ma Lo).

  THE NINE EUNUCHS, the pearl-white emperors who gave Yi Ti 130 years of peace and prosperity. As young men and princes, they lived as other men, taking wives and concubines and siring heirs, but upon their ascent each surrendered his manhood root and stem, so that he might devote himself entirely to the empire.

  JAR HAR, and his sons Jar Joq and Jar Han, the sixth, seventh, and eighth of the sea-green emperors, under whose rule the empire reached the apex of its power. Jar Har conquered Leng, Jar Joq took Great Morag, Jar Han exacted tribute from Qarth, Old Ghis, Asshai, and other far-flung lands, and traded with Valyria.

  CHAI DUQ, the fourth yellow emperor, who took to wife a noblewoman of Valyria and kept a dragon at his court.

  Though Yi Ti is a vast land, much of it covered by dense forest and sweltering jungles, travel from one end of the empire to the other is swift and safe, for the great web of stone roads built by the Eunuch Emperors of old have no equal in all the world, save for the dragonroads of the Valyrians.

  The cities of Yi Ti are far-famed as well, for no other land can boast so many. If Lomas Longstrider can be believed, none of the cities of the west can compare to those of Yi Ti in size and splendor. “Even their ruins put ours to shame,” the Longstrider said … and ruins are everywhere in Yi Ti. In his Jade Compendium, Colloquo Votar—the best source available in Westeros on the lands of the Jade Sea—wrote that beneath every YiTish city, three older cities lie buried.

  Over the centuries, the capital of the Golden Empire has moved here and there and back again a score of times, as rival warlords contended and dynasties rose and fell. The grey emperors, indigo emperors, and pearl-white emperors ruled from Yin on the shores of the Jade Sea, first and most glorious of the YiTish cities, but the scarlet emperors raised up a new city in the heart of the jungle and named it Si Qo the Glorious (long fallen and overgro
wn, its glory lives now only in legend), whilst the purple emperors preferred Tiqui, the many-towered city in the western hills, and the maroon emperors kept their martial court in Jinqi, the better to guard the frontiers of the empire against reavers from the Shadow Lands.

  Certain scholars from the west have suggested Valyrian involvement in the construction of the Five Forts, for the great walls are single slabs of fused black stone that resemble certain Valyrian citadels in the west … but this seems unlikely, for the Forts predate the Freehold’s rise, and there is no record of any dragonlords ever coming so far east.

  Thus the Five Forts must remain a mystery. They still stand today, unmarked by time, guarding the marches of the Golden Empire against raiders out of the Grey Waste.

  Today Yin is once more the capital of Yi Ti. There the seventeenth azure emperor Bu Gai sits in splendor in a palace larger than all King’s Landing. Yet far to the east, well beyond the borders of the Golden Empire proper, past the legendary Mountains of the Morn, in the city Carcosa on the Hidden Sea, dwells in exile a sorcerer lord who claims to be the sixty-ninth yellow emperor, from a dynasty fallen for a thousand years. And more recently, a general named Pol Qo, Hammer of the Jogos Nhai, has given himself imperial honors, naming himself the first of the orange emperors, with the rude, sprawling garrison city called Trader Town as his capital. Which of these three emperors will prevail is a question best left for the historians of the years to come.

  No discussion of Yi Ti would be complete without a mention of the Five Forts, a line of hulking ancient citadels that stand along the far northeastern frontiers of the Golden Empire, between the Bleeding Sea (named for the characteristic hue of its deep waters, supposedly a result of a plant that grows only there) and the Mountains of the Morn. The Five Forts are very old, older than the Golden Empire itself; some claim they were raised by the Pearl Emperor during the morning of the Great Empire to keep the Lion of Night and his demons from the realms of men … and indeed, there is something godlike, or demonic, about the monstrous size of the forts, for each of the five is large enough to house ten thousand men, and their massive walls stand almost a thousand feet high.