Asshai-By-The-Shadow

Asshai sits at the eastern edge of the Jade Sea, where the Saffron Straits open into deeper water. The Shadow Lands rise to the northeast, their peaks cutting off most of the daylight, which is why the city carries the name Asshai-by-the-Shadow. Travelers describe streets built entirely of black stone that seems to swallow light rather than give it back, and nights so dark that one street cannot be told from the next.

The city spreads along both banks of the Ash, whose waters glow black under the noon sun and green after dark. Nothing edible grows there: grain, meat, and clean water all arrive by ship, while gold, by contrast, is never in short supply within its walls.

No one in Asshai can say who built the city. Its own people simply claim that a city has stood there since the world began and will still stand when everything else has ended. Its archives hold texts reaching back to the Age of Dawn, and its annals record the deeds of Azor Ahai during the Long Night, along with the old promise that he will come again.

Those same ancient books claim that the Shadow was where the first dragon in the world first appeared.

Centuries later, King Aegon V Targaryen sent expeditions as far as Asshai, chasing any scrap of lost knowledge that might help bring dragons back into the world.

Long before the Bloody Century, merchants out of Sarnor were already docking at Asshai to trade, and Jar Han, one of the rulers worshipped as gods in Yi Ti, once collected tribute from the city as well. In time Asshai became the far end of the trade routes linking the Summer Sea to the Jade Sea through the Straits of Qarth: amber and dragonglass leave its docks in exchange for the gold and gems merchants bring in.

Ships out of Asshai bound for Vaes Dothrak have to cross the Bones. And the gold of Casterly Rock, so the merchants of Yi Ti say, is famous even in Asshai — famous enough that word of it reached the city though the great wanderer Lomas Longstrider never once set foot there himself.

No child lives in Asshai. Anyone who walks its streets does so behind a mask or a veil, almost always alone, or carried in a closed litter of ebony and iron behind dark curtains borne on the backs of slaves. Warlocks, sorcerers, red priests, blood mages, poisoners, necromancers, and worshippers of gods considered monstrous elsewhere all live there side by side, and nothing they practice is forbidden.

Even the shadowbinders, the only ones who dare travel upriver at all, stop short of the gates of Stygai. Outside Asshai, dark rumors follow its people everywhere, and the Dothraki go so far as to call them seeds of darkness.

The people of Asshai speak a language of their own, bound up with their spells and their sorcery. Mirri Maz Duur, who learned her craft there, chants in it with a voice others describe as shrill and ululating, and Melisandre has prayed to R'hllor in that same tongue, as well as in High Valyrian and the Common Tongue.