The Thousand Islands

The islands range from bare pebbles to landmasses the size of Naath, all scoured by constant wind and covered in dark stone. No one has ever raised a single city there, yet accounts describe a dense population scattered across the rocks.

Fish pulled from those waters come out twisted, shaped in ways no fish should be, with a bitter taste sailors cannot stomach. Some claim a drowned kingdom lies beneath the swells, swallowed by the sea thousands of years ago, and that the islands are nothing more than the tops of its sunken towers.

Those who live there have no hair and skin with a greenish cast. The women file their teeth to points and the men cut the foreskin from their members, and their tongue resembles no other known language. They are said to offer sailors to the sea-gods they worship, and it is strange that, island-dwellers as they are, they fear the water so much they never set foot in it.

Traces of ancient Ibbenese settlements remain scattered among the islands, a sign that Ibbenese whalers knew these waters long before any other people arrived.

From Westeros, the first to sail through these islands was Lord Corlys Velaryon, the Sea Snake, whose voyages carried him to corners of Essos no Westerosi had seen before.