Basilisk Isles

The archipelago spreads east of Naath and north of Sothoryos. Weeping Town is the largest island, its sunken valleys and black bogs hidden among flint hills; alongside it lie the Isle of Toads, the Howling Mountain, Talon and the Isle of Flies, among others. They take their name from fearsome beasts that once infested them.

No one truly rules these islands. Those who live there are corsairs, slavers, sellswords and killers drawn from every corner of the known world, people who find room here only because nowhere else will have them. Pirate towns spring up overnight, last a year or two, and sink back into the mud once someone burns them down or their own people abandon them; when one falls, another rises in its place under a different name and the same fate.

On the southern coast of Weeping Town stand ruins older than any corsair: a people almost nothing is known about died out there during the Dawn Age, and only on the Isle of Toads might any trace of them remain. Centuries later the Old Empire of Ghis founded a city on that same spot; the dragonlords of Valyria seized it during the Third Ghiscari War and renamed it Gogossos.

The name changed, but not the horror of the place: there Valyria sent its worst criminals to labor for life, and in its pits dark blood magic mixed with crossbreeding between beasts and slave women. Not even the Doom of Valyria ended its evil reputation; its wealth kept growing afterward, fed by the same slave trade that made the cities of Slaver's Bay infamous, until, seventy-seven years after the Doom, a plague born in its own slave pens killed nine of every ten people on the island and across the rest of the archipelago.

When the Rhoynar princess Nymeria crossed the Summer Sea with her people, she stopped at the Basilisk Isles to take on fresh water and supplies. The corsair kings of Talon and the Howling Mountain, who normally fought each other, set their quarrels aside to fall on the Rhoynar together, burning nearly forty ships and carrying off hundreds of her people as slaves.

They then offered the survivors a place on the Isle of Toads, if they would abandon their ships and hand over thirty maiden girls and as many comely boys every year as tribute. Nymeria refused and put back out to sea with what remained of her fleet.

After the plague, travelers avoided the islands for a century, until the Qartheen pirate Xandarro Xhore raised his flag there and built a grim black fort on Battle Isle overlooking the anchorage. The Brotherhood of Bone soon followed, settling the Isle of Flies; between the two of them they spent half a century preying on merchants who still ventured near the smoking ruins of Valyria.

No one remembers the Brotherhood anymore, and all that is left of Xandarro is his fort, but the corsairs never truly left. Once a generation some fleet is raised to root them out — the Volantenes among the most diligent — with mixed results: sometimes the pirates flee ahead of warning, sometimes hundreds end up hanged. One Lysene captain sent to clear the islands, Saathos Saan, turned pirate himself and crowned himself King of the Basilisk Isles for thirty years.

From there the corsairs have long raided Naath to enslave its people, and more than once struck at the Vale of Arryn until House Arryn's fleet drove them off. King Harwyn Hoare spent two years of his youth a captive of a pirate king on these islands, and Lord Dalton Greyjoy sailed here with his uncle to sack the pirate towns before he became Lord of Pyke.

In more recent times, a corsair manages to seize control of the Basilisk Isles and, emboldened, then launches an attack on Tall Trees Town.

Nothing is said of who this corsair is or what comes of it, but the episode fits the islands' old pattern: whenever a fleet manages to sweep the pirates away, sooner or later another takes their place.