Sothoryos

No one really knows how large Sothoryos is. Qarthine maps drew it as an island no bigger than Great Moraq, though Qarth's own trading ships never found the end of its coastline. The Ghiscari who founded the northern colonies believed it was the size of Westeros.

The only person who ever tried to settle the question was Jaenara Belaerys, who flew her dragon Terrax farther south than any traveler before her, searching for the legendary boiling seas. She never found them — only jungle, desert, and mountain, one after another, without end. It took her three years to return to the Free Hold, and when she did she called Sothoryos as large as Essos: 'a land without end.'

During the Old Empire, the Ghiscari planted the first lasting outposts on the northern coast: at the mouth of the Zamoyos they raised the walled enclave of Zamettar, and at Wyvern Point, the penal colony of Gorosh. Qarthine explorers followed, drawn by the gold and ivory of the eastern shore, while Summer Islanders favored the west.

The Valyrian Freehold tried its luck three times at Basilisk Point. Painted men wiped out the first colony; an epidemic claimed the second; and the third was abandoned the day the dragonlords themselves seized Zamettar, during the Fourth Ghiscari War. Of every colony founded on that coast over the centuries, only Zamettar lasted more than a generation — today it is nothing but a handful of ruins the jungle has swallowed.

Upriver, deep in the interior, stand the ruins of Yeen, built from blocks of black, oily stone that a dozen elephants together could not move. No one knows who built them, or when: they say nothing in the world is as old as this city.

It has stood empty for thousands of years, and yet the jungle has never quite finished swallowing it — unlike every other ruin on the continent. Every attempt to resettle it has ended in disaster, though no account survives of why.

The Sothoryi are heavy-built, long-armed, and low-browed, with thick skin mottled white and brown that earns them the name Painted Men. Their women can only bear living children by men of their own people; children fathered by outsiders are born dead, many of them deformed.

Along the coast, some Sothoryi have picked up the trade tongue, enough to deal with merchants and slavers. The Ghiscari consider them poor slaves but fierce fighters, and put them in the fighting pits. Corsairs out of the Basilisk Isles raid the coastal settlements to take them, cage them at Fang, and sell them as slaves in Slaver's Bay.

Farther south, beyond the reach of any trader, the Painted Men keep none of that veneer: they worship dark gods in rites no outsider has ever fully described, and practice cannibalism, on enemies and on their own dead alike. Stories persist of other peoples who lived on the continent before them — lizard men, eyeless cave-dwellers — though none has ever been proven real.

When the corsairs who ruled the Basilisk Isles attacked her people and offered them land on the Isle of Toads if they paid a yearly tribute of young slaves, Princess Nymeria refused and led her people to take refuge in Sothoryos instead. They scattered along the coast: some settled at Basilisk Point, others made their way up the Zamoyos, and a group reached the ruins of Yeen. She herself stayed with her fleet at Zamettar, abandoned a thousand years before.

The venture lasted less than a year. The climate did not agree with the Rhoynar, and the mosquitoes that brought sickness after sickness hit the children and the old hardest. One day a ship came from Zamettar to Yeen and found no one: everyone who had settled there had vanished that same night. The next day, Nymeria gave the order to leave the continent.

Sothoryos breeds diseases found nowhere else: blood pox, green fever, red death, grey scale-rot, and a dozen other ailments with names just as ugly. Archmaester Ebrose reckons that most Westerosi who set foot there catch one of them, and that half of those never make it home. Yezzan zo Qaggaz, for one, fell ill there ten years past and has been dying by inches ever since.

And what the fever doesn't kill, something else might. Crocodiles big enough to capsize a whole ship lurk beneath the Zamoyos; other rivers teem with fish that can strip a body to the bone in seconds. Basilisk Point breeds basilisks of its own, some twice the size of a lion, and apes beside which giants would look small.

Farther south, in the Green Hell, the stories turn worse still: albino bats that can drain a man of blood, tattooed lizards that tear their prey apart with the hooked claws on their hind legs, serpents longer than seventy feet, and spiders that spin their webs between towering trees. But nothing is feared more than the wyverns — distant kin to dragons, breathing no fire but outmatching them in savagery: some are slow and never stray far from their lairs, others hunt by night in packs a hundred strong, their wings so black that no one sees them coming.