King's Landing

The city is roughly rectangular and sealed behind tall walls, pierced by seven gates with names like the River, the Lion, the Gods, the Dragon, and Iron. Each one holds a portcullis and armed guards, and each opens onto a different road: to the harbour and the fish market, to the gold road, to the north.

It rises over three hills named for the first conquerors. On the tallest stands the Red Keep, the king's seat and a window onto the bay; on Visenya's Hill, the Great Sept of Baelor; on Rhaenys's Hill, the burned ruin of the Dragonpit, shut since the last dragon died.

Between tree-lined avenues and open markets run narrow lanes crowded with the poor, worst of all in Flea Bottom, at the foot of Rhaenys's Hill, where people live on stew of doubtful meat. The wealthy hold the other side of that same hill, and another pocket of money gathers near the Old Gate.

The city is guarded by the Gold Cloaks, its city watch, two thousand strong in peacetime and swollen whenever war comes knocking, backed by a royal fleet that watches the harbour and the river mouth.

Before the city existed, that stretch of coast was contested ground between the kings of the Reach, the Riverlands, and the Stormlands, little more than woods and hills with a handful of fishermen at the mouth of the Blackwater.

That is where Aegon the Conqueror came ashore and raised his first stronghold, of wood and mud, on the crown of the largest hill. Once the conquest was done, he chose that same spot for his capital, precisely because it belonged to no kingdom, turning the neighbouring lords into vassals of a new land: the Crownlands.

His Targaryen heirs kept building. The Red Keep, begun by Aegon, was finished under his son Maegor. On Visenya's Hill rose the Great Sept of Baelor for the Faith of the Seven, and on Rhaenys's Hill, the Dragonpit, built for the beasts the Targaryens had brought from Valyria.

When civil war broke out between Rhaenyra Targaryen's supporters and her half-brother's, the city ended up besieged and taken by Rhaenyra's own forces. The court that had ruled from the Red Keep suddenly found itself on the losing side.

That same year the city bled from within: an enraged mob stormed the Dragonpit, killing several thousand people and five of the last Targaryen dragons, and left the building the ruin it still is centuries later.

The following years brought three different kings to the Iron Throne within months of each other, and a night of riots and settled scores that would be remembered as the Hour of the Wolf.

Generations later, the bastard half-brother of King Daeron II Targaryen raised an army and marched on the capital, meaning to take the throne. He never reached its walls: his troops were stopped first, at the battle of Redgrass Field.

The city, this once, was spared a siege, though the threat made plain how fragile Targaryen peace still was even generations after the conquest.

A plague swept through Westeros and struck the city hard: something like four in ten of its people died. There was no way to bury so many, so the bodies were burned on pyres raised among the ruins of the Dragonpit, the same ground where dragons had once burned.

During the rebellion that ended the Targaryen dynasty's hold on the throne, King Aerys II decided that if he lost the city, no one else would have it: he hid caches of wildfire under its streets and buildings, meaning to burn it all down before the rebels could take it.

He never gave that final order. He was killed first, and soon after Lord Tywin Lannister marched into the city and put it to the sack, leaving a wound the people of King's Landing would take years to forget.

The war for the Iron Throne filled the city with refugees and sent prices soaring. Hunger and an outbreak of bloody flux fell hardest on the poorest quarters, and the common people found someone to blame in the Hand of the King, Tyrion Lannister.

The discontent broke into a riot: the mob attacked several members of the court and set part of Flea Bottom ablaze before the fires were put out that same night, at a heavy cost in lives. Afterward a curfew was imposed, with death for anyone caught in the streets past the bells.

With Stannis Baratheon closing in by sea, the city strengthened its walls and catapults, stockpiled wildfire, and strung a chain between two towers to seal the river. When Stannis's fleet came up the Blackwater it was caught by that same chain and burned; the men who managed to land were held off until the armies of Lord Mace Tyrell and Tywin Lannister arrived.

The victory left the harbour useless, its ships sunk and its docks wrecked, and two of the seven gates so badly damaged they would stay shut for years. In exchange came Tyrell grain, which fed the city and won them a popular affection the Lannisters had never quite managed.

Years later, forced to confess her sins before the Faith, Cersei Lannister walked naked the whole distance between the Great Sept of Baelor and the Red Keep, while the people of King's Landing watched her pass through the same streets that had once feared her.