Doom of Valyria

Twelve years before Valyria fell, the daughter of Lord Aenar Targaryen had a dream that marked her: she saw the free city's end in flames. They called her Daenys the Dreamer, and her father chose not to wait and see if she was right.

The family packed what they could — including their five dragons — and crossed the narrow sea to Dragonstone, a volcanic rock at the western edge of the known world. Other houses that trusted the warning, the Velaryons and Celtigars among them, settled on nearby islands of their own.

No one else moved. To the rest of Valyria, a girl's dream was no reason to abandon palaces and temples.

Nobody can fully explain what happened that night. Within a few hours, every hill for five hundred miles around exploded at once, filling the sky with ash and fire so fierce it caught and consumed the dragons flying above the city.

The ground split open and swallowed whole palaces. Lakes boiled or turned to acid, mountains spat rivers of molten rock a thousand feet into the air, and a red rain of dragonglass and what witnesses later called black blood fell from the sky.

North of the city, the land cracked and collapsed in on itself, swallowed by a sea that had suddenly turned violent. The ground around Valyria itself was broken into hundreds of small islands, separated by the waters now known as the Smoking Sea.

Thousands of miles away, on the Isle of Cedars, a wave nearly a hundred metres high wiped whole cities off the map, Velos and Ghozai among them.

No one has lived in Valyria since. Those who venture too close speak of demons and of an evil that lingers, as though the Doom never quite ended.

Whole crafts died with the city, ones nobody has managed to recover — how to forge Valyrian steel, the spells behind the statues and carvings that adorned its fortresses. That knowledge died that night with the people who kept it.

Nearly two centuries later, the Doom still lingered, if only as decoration. In Pentos, the nine-towered mansion where Khal Drogo lived had a stained-glass mosaic depicting the cataclysm.

The scene stayed in the background of Drogo's household, where Daenerys Targaryen — a descendant of the family that had fled in time — spent the months before becoming his khaleesi.

At King Joffrey Baratheon's wedding feast, the singer Collio Quaynis performed a High Valyrian ballad about two lovers who die in the midst of the Doom.

Tyrion Lannister, listening among the guests, thought the song really called for two voices, one male and one female, and that sung by a single performer it lost half its meaning.

In Meereen, the merchant prince Xaro Xhoan Daxos gave Daenerys Targaryen a tapestry that had sat in his family's vaults for generations, woven before Valyria fell. On it the seas were blue silk and the lands green, with mountains in black and brown; the Smoking Sea appeared nowhere, because when it was woven Valyria was not yet an island. Astapor, Yunkai and Meereen itself were marked as three silver stars beside the blue of Slaver's Bay.

Months later, sailing the Selaesori Qhoran closer to Valyria than the crew liked, Tyrion Lannister came out on deck one night and saw the sky stained dark red to the northeast, under a moon that looked swollen as though it had swallowed the sun. It was said the sky over Valyria is always like that; Tyrion wondered if it was only the Fourteen Flames reflected in the clouds.

Not long after, several ships of the Iron Fleet ran into three storms in a row, winds smelling of ash and sulphur driving them toward that ruined land.