Tarth

Tarth rises out of Shipbreaker Bay, facing the Stormlands across a strait that bears its own name. The interior is rugged — peaks, waterfalls and green valleys — and the almost violent blue of its waters earned it the name Sapphire Isle.

Evenfall Hall, seat of House Tarth, crowns the island. To the west, those same mountains act as a shield against storms, which makes the Tarth Strait calmer water than the Narrow Sea or Shipbreaker Bay on the island's other shores.

Before it joined the Stormlands, Tarth had kings of its own, who styled themselves the Evenstar. The maesters hold that the union came through marriage: King Durran Durrandon the Just wed the daughter of one such king, Edwyn. The bond didn't stop the island from rising in arms three times, generations later, under the reign of Durwald I Durrandon.

When the Andals crossed the Narrow Sea, Tarth was the first land in the whole Stormlands to fall to them. The local lords, descendants of the First Men, eventually accepted the newcomers and married into them; House Tarth itself, of Andal blood, comes out of that mixing, and has ruled from Evenfall Hall ever since.

On the eastern shore, now in ruins, stood Morne, seat of petty kings who came before the Durrandons; Maester Hubert believed it too was of Andal origin, and both lords and smallfolk in the area claim descent from a certain Ser Galladon. Marble from the island traveled far — it went into building the Eyrie, in the Vale — and its waters weren't always calm: on that same eastern coast, Prince Aemon Targaryen fell fighting Myrish pirates who had seized that stretch of the island.

When the realm split apart in the War of the Five Kings, Lord Selwyn Tarth met Ser Davos Seaworth on the island in secret, and through him sent Stannis Baratheon the answer he didn't want to hear: Tarth would not back his claim to the Iron Throne.

Years later, with the realm bled dry, the island fell to the Golden Company, the band of exiled sellswords that landed in Westeros in the war's last stretch.