Fallen Kingdom of Sarnor

Sarnor lay on the plains east of the Forest of Qohor, among the small lakes left over from a much older inland sea. It bordered the Dothraki Sea, the Kingdoms of the Ifequevron and Omber, and old Valyrian roads crossed it on the way to Qohor. The Sarne, the river the land was named for, rose in the Dothraki plains and ran north; further east a second river emptied into the Bay of Fangs.

The Sarnori called themselves the Highmen, tagaez fen in their own tongue, and claimed descent from Huzhor Amai, son of a legendary queen who had once bent three different peoples to her will. They were never truly one kingdom: a loose alliance of dozens of cities under their own kings, forever at odds with one another, nominally answering to a High King in Sarnath who ruled more in title than in fact from his palace of a thousand rooms. They fought, they worked magic, they studied, and worshipped a hundred different gods; most of what is known of them now survives only in scattered chronicles that outlived the kingdom itself.

Sarnori merchants travelled as far as Valyria, Yi Ti, Leng and Asshai, and their ships crossed the northern sea to Ib, the Thousand Islands and distant Mossovy.

Their kings drove the Qaathi south, backed the Freehold of Valyria in several of its wars against the Old Empire of Ghiscar, and led punitive raids against the riders of the eastern steppes.

Even in the Seven Kingdoms people spoke of Sarnath's towers: the traveller Lomas Longstrider counted its palace among the wonders made by man.

After the Doom of Valyria, Sarnor's kingdoms took less than a century to fall apart. While the free cities of the west tore each other apart in the Bloody Century, another war broke out on the eastern plains: for the first time, the dozens of feuding Dothraki tribes united under a single leader, an aging khal named Mengo, who once he had brought them all together turned his eyes west.

For generations the Highmen had treated the riders as a mere nuisance, even as their khalasars raided the eastern marches; some kings even paid them in gold and slaves to fight their rivals. Mengo took the gifts gladly and kept the land besides, burning fields and farms to return the plains to wilderness, since to the Dothraki tilling the earth is itself a kind of sin.

The danger only became clear once Khal Moro, Mengo's son, brought his khalasar to the gates of Sathar. The riders crushed the city's defenders and enslaved its women and children; three in every four died on the march to the slave markets of Hazdahn Mo, in the hills of Ghiscar. Nothing was left of Sathar but ash, and the Dothraki renamed the ruins the place of the Wailing Children.

Not even Sathar's burning brought Sarnor's kings together: Kasath and Gornath sent armies, but not to help their neighbour — only to grab a share of the spoils — and ended up fighting a pitched battle three days west of the city while smoke was still rising in the east.

Sathar was only the first. Six years later Moro destroyed Kasath as well, this time with Gornath's help, whose king had allied with the Dothraki and married one of Moro's daughters; twelve years after that it was Gornath's own turn, its king killed by his Dothraki wife, who then passed into the arms of Khal Horro — by then already the man who had killed Moro and ended Mengo's line.

Horro was the last khal able to hold every clan together: three years after Gornath fell, a rival killed him too, and his khalasar split into a dozen lesser hordes. The respite didn't last, since the khals who followed proved just as ambitious, and the river cities fell one after another as each victory's idols were carried off to Vaes Dothrak. Sallosh burned along with its great library, taking with it most of the Highmen's written memory; Kyth and Hornoth fell soon after.

Mardosh, the most heavily fortified, held out alone through six years of siege. Its people ate first their dogs and horses, then rats and vermin, and finally their own dead; when they could hold no longer, the last defenders killed their own wives and children to spare them slavery and rode out to die in one final attack, from which no one returned. The Dothraki named the ruins the City of the Bloody Herd.

Only after Mardosh fell did Sarnor's kings finally set their quarrels aside: they gathered before Sarnath's walls an army of six thousand chariots, twenty thousand riders and a hundred thousand spearmen and slingers, and marched east under the last High King, Mazor Alexi, determined to break the khals' power once and for all.

Halfway to the ruins of Kasath, among the tall grass, they met a combined force of eighty thousand riders under four separate khals. The battle that came to be known as the Field of Crows began well for the Sarnori but ended in a trap and a slaughter: more than a hundred thousand men died that day, Mazor Alexi among them.

Defenceless, Sarnath fell barely a fortnight later to Khal Loso, who burned the palace of a thousand rooms along with the rest of the city. The remaining cities fell one by one as the Bloody Century drew to a close, and Sarys, at the river's mouth, was the last: most of its people had already fled by the time Khal Zeggo's men took it.

Only Saath still stands, a modest port kept alive by trade with Ib and Lorath and by its closeness to the Lorathi colony of Morosh. There, and only there, do the descendants of the Highmen still call themselves tagaez fen — a few thousand left of a people that once numbered in the millions.