THE FALL OF THE QUEEN OF CITIES AND THE SECOND DAWN OF DRAGONFIRE
Extracted from "The Great Discords of Essos: The Rise and Fall of the Eastern Kingdoms," by Archmaester Marwyn, Volume IV, deposited in the vaults of the Citadel of Oldtown, 275 AC.
Toward the first moon of the year 58 after Aegon's Conquest, Essos rested upon an axis of false certainty. The so-called Queen of Cities, Qarth, stood as the last great bastion of ancient splendor on the edges of the Red Waste, a city whose opulence defied the imagination of the lords of Westeros. Protected by her famous Three Walls—those colossal masses of dressed stone where the stonemasons of antiquity had carved, in meticulous detail, the deeds of warriors, kings, and beasts already forgotten by the memory of men—the members of the House of the Undying and the magnates of the Thirteen observed the horizon with haughtiness, men who believed themselves beyond the reach of death.
The reader must understand the nature of the Qartheen of that century. To a citizen of the great city, the rest of the known world was nothing more than a barbarian periphery, a collection of lesser lordships destined to enrich the coffers of the maritime guilds through the exchange of merchandise or to provide slaves for their marble palaces. When the news of the failed and vile attempt against Great Khal Caspian Darkwood in the chambers of Vaes Dothrak reached the ears of the lords of the spice trade, there was no fear in their assembly halls. The plot, hatched in the shadows with the complicity of the Warlocks and executed by the silent steel of the Sorrowful Men, had been designed to decapitate the incipient and troublesome Kingdom of Xandar. The Qartheen awaited the immediate collapse of the Dothraki hordes and the dispersion of the witches of Ischyros. They believed, in their infinite pride, that the distance and the vastness of the Red Waste placed them safe from any reprisal.
But what they summoned down upon their heads was not the ruin of their enemies, but a cataclysm that would eclipse the worst nightmares of Ancient Valyria. They did not suspect that the man they had attempted to assassinate possessed arts that defied all known laws of life and death, nor that his survival would be told in the centuries to come as a dark and terrible miracle. What followed was not a conventional war of siege, nor a dispute between legates over payments and empty apologies; it was a sentence of total exterminion executed by a force that distant Essos believed extinct since the days of the Doom, and of which stories were only heard from Westeros.
The retribution began exactly one week after the attempt in Vaes Dothrak. Like a sea of bronze, leather, and steel bursting from the plains, the personal khalasar of Caspian Darkwood appeared before the colossal defenses of Qarth. It was no disorganized horde of plunderers, but a formidable host of thirty thousand elite riders, disciplined under an iron command that broke with all precedents of the horselords. The swiftness and readiness of their march were unheard of for the strategists of the era, and of the present; in barely a single day, the Dothraki completely surrounded the perimeter of the city, cutting off all land exits, strangling the vital caravan routes that connected the city with the interior of the continent, and transforming the surrounding fields into a desert of horseshoes, arakhs, and tents.
The Qartheen, nonetheless, contemplated the siege from the top of their outermost walls, thirty cubits high and bristling with iron ballistas, with a smile of disdain. They trusted in the stone that had protected them from the ancient warlords; they trusted in their silos and grain storehouses that could withstand years of famine, and in the vastness of the sea that their high-masted ships still dominated. The parchments of the few survivors of the sea who left their testimonies in the ports of the Free Cities concur on a dreadful truth: the besieged did not understand, until it was tragically late, that the thirty thousand Dothraki riders were not there to batter down the gates. They were not the real danger, but the containment wall. Their sole task was to ensure that the rats did not escape the burning. The true horror did not march upon the earth; it came from the sky.
It was at the twilight of the first day of the siege when an unnatural wind, frigid and heavy with a thick scent of storm and brimstone, descended from the north, sweeping across the Red Waste and making the horses of the Dothraki whinny in response. The Qartheen observers on the battlements of the outer wall descried a colossal silhouette that darkened the last rays of the sun. The chroniclers of the era, drawing from reports gathered in the ports of Slaver's Bay, compare the arrival of Caspian Darkwood on the back of his beast to the ancient folk tales of the scourge of Old Valyria, when the great shadows descended upon the kingdoms of Old Ghis to claim their tribute of blood and ash.
It was no ordinary dragon. It was Endaxia, the bronze-colored dragon of the Khal, a creature whose scales reflected the light of the rising stars and whose wings beat with the dull thunder of a storm upon the endless plain. Those who gathered the testimonies of the sailors who managed to cut lines and weigh anchor before the port was closed by fire, affirm that Endaxia did not emit an earthly or animal roar as she flew over the bay. Instead, from her jaws escaped a metallic hiss, sharp and vibrant, a sound of pure friction that set on end the skin of the thirty thousand Dothraki waiting on the plain and condemned, in that very instant, the more than six hundred thousand souls crowded within the walls. They discovered that there would be no requests for surrender, nor banners of truce. Only the silent decree of absolute destruction.
What burst from the jaws of Endaxia was not the golden, red, and smoky fire to which the annals of Westeros had accustomed us since the invasion of Aegon the Conqueror and his sisters. From the throat of the beast erupted a purple bolt resembling plasma, a discharge of power so concentrated, hissing, and searing that the air itself seemed to fracture with a crash that deafened those present leagues away. The first wall, that structure of dressed stone that had resisted the onslaught of centuries, armies, and catastrophes, melted like syrup under the summer sun. The engravings of ancient heroes, the granite joints, and the guard towers liquefied in a matter of heartbeats, turning into rivers of glowing stone that ran down the hill, burying the defenders in their own watch posts before they could utter a cry.
The dragon swept the city from one end to the other, in an implacable advance that surpassed in horror and speed the darkest descriptions of the burning of Harrenhal. The rich mansions of the nobles, with their roofs of ivory and columns of jade; the hanging gardens that defied the aridity of the desert; the temples where the warlock priests worshipped their gods, and the immense warehouses crammed with precious spices, silk, and gold, were erased from the face of the earth in less than an hour. The purple bolt of Endaxia left no flammable ashes or embers to extinguish; it disintegrated everything it touched. The marble turned into a fine, whitish dust that the desert wind dispersed, and men were reduced to blackened shadows, silhouettes of soot printed against the stone highways they had once walked with pride.
The cry of the city was unanimous: an immense chorus of collective agony that was extinguished sector by sector, as the storm of death consumed the foundations of Qartheen civilization. All of Qarth was lost that night. No capitulation was granted, the pleas of women and the supplications of wealthy elders went unheeded, and not a single living inhabitant remained within the walled precinct to give direct testimony of the cataclysm to future generations. What was once the pearl of the East dawned the next day as a smoldering crater of slag and gray dust.
For the thirty thousand riders of Caspian's khalasar who witnessed the attack from the safety of the plain, the destruction of Qarth was not merely a military victory; it was a mystical revelation that forever altered the foundations of their beliefs. The Dothraki, a people who measure power by the number of mounts, the length of braids, and the edge of the arakh, found themselves before a manifestation of strength that escaped their understanding of the world. In their traditional songs, fire is a tool for plundering, something that devours the thatch of huts and forces the enemy to flee into the open field to be hunted. What they saw in Qarth, however, was a divine and implacable power that left no spoils to plunder nor flesh to cut.
The reports gathered by the merchants of Xandar, formerly Volantis, who traded on the fringes of the Dothraki Sea moons after the event, describe a profound change in the behavior of the hordes. They tell that when the purple bolt of Endaxia tore through the sky and liquefied the stone walls, thousands of Dothraki warriors fell to their knees upon the desert sand—an act of submission never before seen in an ethnicity that prides itself on never kneeling before any king of the earth. The bells in their braids, which usually rang with the impetus of battle, fell into a deathly silence, drowned out by the dread of the dragon that brought Essos and the world to its knees.
The Great Khal was no longer simply a successful warlord or a fearsome warrior in the eyes of his people; he had become the Stallion Who Mounts the World made flesh, a living deity who commanded thunder and purple light to erase entire kingdoms with a gesture of his hand. The kos and bloodriders who lived through that campaign spread terror across all the plains of Essos. The reverent respect toward Caspian Darkwood turned into a fanatical and absolute obedience. The lesser khalasars that still roamed the interior of the continent, upon learning of the fate that had befallen the inexpugnable Qarth, renounced their claims to independence and flocked in droves to the rebuilt Vaes Dothrak to prostrate their arakhs before the Great Khal. No horselord would dare, from that day forth, to question the orders of the Khal, for they knew that to defy him did not mean death in combat, but total extinction under the fire of the sky.
If dread seized the plains of the Great Grass Sea, the panic that ran through the Free Cities of Essos was of a much deeper political and economic nature. For years, the Free Cities had operated under the premise that dragons were an exclusive heritage of the House Targaryen, confined to distant Westeros and subject to the courtly intrigues of King's Landing. The sudden appearance of Endaxia and the demonstration of her destructive power in Qarth shattered the balance of power on the continent.
The three sister cities of the Discord—Myr, Lys, and Tyrosh—usually mired in petty wars for control of the Stepstones and shipping lanes, declared an immediate truce. The Archons and magisters understood that their sellswords, their Myrish crossbowmen, and their longships were of no use against a beast that destroyed granite with bolts of purple fire. Braavos, the Secret City, reacted with a frigid caution. The Iron Bank, whose spies and informants kept a meticulous record of every coin that moved from the Wall to the lands of Yi Ti, saw all its account books disrupted. The debts contracted by the Qartheen magnates turned to smoke in a single night, forcing the Keyholders to reevaluate their stance toward Xandar. The fear that Caspian Darkwood's tide of iron, witches, and riders might advance westward transformed the proud Free Cities into potential vassals, who sent emissaries laden with golden gifts and promises of friendship to the highways of Xandar, in a desperate attempt to deflect the gaze of the conqueror.
While Essos writhed in panic, the news of the cataclysm crossed the Narrow Sea, finally reaching the shores of Westeros and the chambers of the Red Keep in King's Landing. In the year 58 AC, the Iron Throne was occupied by the young King Jaehaerys I Targaryen, justly remembered in our days as the Conciliator, who ruled a kingdom that was barely finishing healing the bloody wounds left by the tyranny of his uncle Maegor and the rebellions of the Faith Militant.
The records of the sessions of the Small Council from that moon, preserved in the secret chronicles of Grand Maester Benifer, describe the impact of the news as an earthquake at court. They tell that King Jaehaerys, accompanied by his wife and counselor, Queen Alysanne, remained in silence for a long space of time after hearing the report of the Master of Whisperers, who related how an entire city, defended by walls that made the ramparts of the capital seem modest, had been reduced to slag in a single afternoon by a dragon that did not belong to the blood of Valyria.
For the House Targaryen, the existence of Endaxia and the rise of Caspian Darkwood represented a dynastic and military crisis of the first order. The power of the reigning line in Westeros was sustained upon the incontestable dogma that they were the only dragonlords who had survived the Doom, the only men with the capacity to ride such beasts. The appearance of a monarch in the heart of Essos who not only possessed a dragon of great dimensions but employed it with a destructive ferocity that rivaled that of Balerion the Black Dread himself, called into question Targaryen supremacy over the known world.
Furthermore, the strategic landscape in the chambers of the Red Keep was made all the more delicate by a singular truth: King Caspian was already wedded to the blood of the dragon, having taken Princess Aerea Targaryen as his queen. Thus, the traditional avenues of securing peace through new dynastic marriages were firmly closed to the Crown. Grand Maester Benifer records in his writings that, amidst the panic, several members of the council urgently advised the Conciliator to mend the deep fractures within his own house. It was argued that the king must swallow his pride and restore relations with his sister, Princess Rhaena, and his niece Aerea, whom he had previously exiled. To recall them from their banishment and welcome them back into the royal favor was seen as the only viable path to improving bonds with the formidable King of Xandar, leveraging the blood ties that now bound the two thrones.
Jaehaerys I, displaying the wisdom that would characterize his long reign, opted for a posture of armed vigilance and indirect diplomacy. The king understood that Westeros was in no condition to sustain a war against the Kingdom of Xandar on its own ground, and that to directly defy the husband of Aerea—a man who commanded dark arts, legions, and a dragon of purple fire—was a folly that could cost his family the crown. He chose to look into the matter of his estranged kin with utmost care. Yet, the shadow of the destruction of Qarth projected itself over all decisions of the Red Keep for decades, prompting the construction of the Royal Fleet and the fortification of the eastern ports, out of the perennial fear that the sky of Westeros might one day be dyed the color of the death that struck Qarth.
At this point in the chronicle, we scholars who reside in the safety of the Citadel must pause to reflect upon the historical magnitude of what occurred on the shores of the Jade Sea. Since King Aegon the Conquistador burned Harrenhal in Westeros during the days of the Conquest, the known world had not witnessed the true, absolute, and indisputable power of a dragon unleashed for the sole purpose of total extermination. The fall of Qarth was the unequivocal demonstration that the era of monsters, absolute kingdoms, and king-warlocks had returned to the world of mortals, reclaiming its place with a violence that made rulers shudder from the Free Cities of the west to the distant lands of the Golden Empire of Yi Ti.
That day in the year 58 AC, in the burning sands of the Red Waste, there died not only a millennial civilization that bragged of its poets, its riches, and its inexpugnable walls. From the smoldering and desolate ruins of Qarth was born the irreversible spark that would give rise to the greatest and most devastating conflagration that the continent of Essos has ever seen since the Doom of Ancient Valyria.
That initial campaign, which pitted the military discipline, resources, and arts of Xandar against the remaining coalitions of the Queen of Cities, the slave kingdoms of Slaver's Bay, and the bastions of the deep east, would become over the years the bloodiest conflict in the history of the known world. Even today, nearly three hundred years after Aegon's Conquest, when we maestres of the Citadel sum the casualties of past centuries, review the decimated censuses of the Free Cities, and analyze the annals of fallen kingdoms, no other war has matched in number of deaths, in cruelty, and in alteration of maps the storm of fire and iron that Caspian Darkwood unleashed upon all of Essos. Qarth was only the beginning; the first thunder of a storm that would devour an entire generation and whose echoes, two centuries later, still resound in the sands of the Red Waste as an eternal warning to those who dare, as the motto of Xandar mentions, to tickle a sleeping dragon.