Casterly Rock

Casterly Rock rises on the coast of the Westerlands, facing the Sunset Sea, on a headland that popular belief likens to a lion lying down at dusk. It isn't the region's main port — that honour belongs to Lannisport, a few leagues away — but it has its own access to the sea, with docks and shipyards of its own.

Most of its halls, corridors and stairways are cut straight into the rock, on a mountain rich in gold veins that has been mined for generations; beneath its foundations lie caverns and mine shafts that vanish into the dark. The Lion's Mouth, its main gate, is a natural cavern two hundred feet high, wide enough now for twenty riders to pass abreast.

Very different spaces coexist within it: the Golden Gallery, where the family's treasures are kept; the Hall of Heroes, where Lannisters who died bravely are buried and where the armour of the fallen hangs; and the Stone Garden, a godswood reduced to a single weirwood twisted among the rock. Its scale — nearly two leagues from end to end — is spoken of in the same breath as the Wall or the Hightower.

Before the great realms existed, when this land belonged to the Casterlys, a landless man with no army, known as Lann the Clever, is said to have taken the Rock from them through wit alone, according to legends from the Age of Heroes. The story never explains how he did it, but the outcome stuck: the Casterlys vanished from history and their stronghold passed to a new line.

The Lannisters claim descent from Lann through the maternal line, and that distant kinship is the root of their claim to the Rock. In time, the family's lords took the name of their own castle as a title and styled themselves Kings of the Rock.

The Lannister kings of the Rock founded the port of Lannisport nearby, which would grow into the Westerlands' greatest city. When the Andals crossed the Narrow Sea and reached these shores too, the family chose to fold them into the realm rather than fight them to the last.

As part of that arrangement, they brought young members of the new Andal houses to serve at the Rock, officially as wards and, in practice, as hostages guaranteeing their families' loyalty.

A lost scroll, attributed to sorcerers of old Valyria, claimed that the Rock's downfall would come from its own gold, the very wealth that has made it famous across the Seven Kingdoms. No one has ever explained that warning, and the fortress has carried it ever since as a shadow no one mentions aloud.

Over the centuries the Rock became the symbol of Lannister power, reaching its greatest splendour under the rule of Lord Tywin Lannister, who restored to the house a wealth and influence few rivals could match. Of its dungeons, cut all along the mountain, it is said that very few prisoners have ever managed to escape.