Game of Thrones - Conquest & Rebellion: An Animated History of the Seven Kingdoms

This world wasn't always so small and petty.

Thousands of years ago, while the rest of men prayed to gods,

the Valyrians became them.

Through magic or sheer will,

they mastered the greatest creatures in history.

A horse grants man dominion over the land, a ship, over the sea.

But dragons gave us the sky, and everything, and everyone beneath it.

At its height, my ancestors ruled the known world.

Whatever parts we didn't weren't worth knowing.

Our capital of Valyria shamed the magnificent cities of the east,

for hammers and chisels were no match for dragonfire and sorcery.

It was a city and an empire built to last until the end of time.

It didn't.

Four hundred years ago, the Doom fell on Valyria.

Mountains cracked open like eggs.

Lakes and rivers boiled.

Fountains of fire, ash and smoke spewed from the ground,

so high and so hot that even dragons burned in flight.

The land splintered, and the angry sea rushed in.

In hours, the greatest city in history became history.

But my ancestors didn't burn or drown with the rest of their race.

Twelve years before the Doom, despite the sneers of his rivals,

Aenar Targaryen abandoned the capital with his family.

Legends claim that his daughter foresaw the destruction of the city in a dream.

More likely, Aenar met with some mishap at court

and chose exile over execution.

He and House Targaryen slinked away to a dreary, remote, godforsaken island.

Forsaken no longer.

With arts now lost to the world,

we transformed a tiny outpost into Dragonstone,

a fortress fit for the last dragonlords.

Then Aenar's descendants settled into it like a tomb for their lost homeland.

Until Aegon.

When he looked east,

he saw the past, old, tired, dead.

But when he looked west,

he saw the future,

gold in the ground, gold in the fields,

and no dragons in the sky but his.

He and his sisters Rhaenys and Visenya flew over the great continent,

ostensibly visitors to a strange land.

But when Aegon returned,

he ordered construction of a massive table carved in the shape of Westeros,

with all the notable rivers and mountains that they had seen.

A personal map of the Seven Kingdoms,

then ruled by seven squabbling families.

House Durrandon held the Stormlands from their seat at Storm's End,

due south of Dragonstone.

House Hoare of the Iron Islands had also conquered and enslaved the Riverlands,

and ruled them from Harrenhal,

a monstrous castle rising on the shore of the Gods Eye.

House Stark held the frozen wasteland of the North,

the oldest, largest and emptiest of the kingdoms.

House Lannister held the Westerlands,

the wealthiest kingdom, thanks to their gold mines.

House Gardener held the Reach,

the second wealthiest kingdom, thanks to their crops.

House Arryn held the Vale, or rather the Vale held them.

The mountains were impassable except through the Bloody Gate,

which had never been taken.

House Martell held the deserts of Dorne,

probably because no one else wanted them.

Together, the Seven Kingdoms made Westeros,

a realm that wasn't yet a realm,

ruled by great families who didn't know what greatness was.

Aegon would teach them.

Though House Durrandon titled themselves "Storm Kings,"

they were little more than gusts.

Their kingdom in the Stormlands had been doddering to its end

for the past few centuries,

helped along by other houses,

most of all by House Hoare,

who were nearly finished with the monstrous castle of Harrenhal,

too large and too costly a seat to rule only the Riverlands.

King Argilac knew where the ironborn would soon turn.

You'd think a king who wanted to keep his crown

would be wary of a man with fire-breathing monsters,

but King Argilac Durrandon wasn't called "the Arrogant" for nothing.

Determined to arrest his family's decline,

he sent an envoy to Dragonstone

to enlist Aegon Targaryen and his dragons against his enemies.

In exchange, Argilac offered lands he didn't have

and a wife Aegon didn't need,

for, as the Valyrians did, Aegon had wed his elder sister, Visenya.

Then, as the Valyrians didn't, he took the younger Rhaenys as well.

Two sisters, two wives.

Perhaps that's why he was so keen to get off Dragonstone.

Aegon countered Argilac with courtesy.

He sent his own envoy requesting

that Princess Durrandon's hand be given instead to Aegon's closest friend,

and rumored half-brother, Orys Baratheon.

Argilac answered with a box and a note,

"These are the only hands your bastard shall have of me."

Inside the box were the hands of Aegon's envoy.

How long had Aegon been waiting for such a pretext?

As his army prepared to sail,

ravens flew to every great lord of the Seven Kingdoms.

All bore the same message.

From this day forth, there would be but one king in Westeros.

Those who bent the knee to Aegon of House Targaryen

would keep their lands and titles.

Those who took up arms against him

would be thrown down, humbled and destroyed.

Poor old Argilac.

He couldn't even match Aegon in arrogance.

Aegon landed at the mouth of the Blackwater River

and raised a primitive "Aegonfort"

in the disputed land between Harren's and Argilac's kingdoms,

so that neither could decide whose problem he was.

Adopting the customs of the Seven Kingdoms,

Aegon unfurled his own banner

with a red three-headed dragon breathing fire upon a black field.

Visenya crowned him with a ruby-studded circlet of Valyrian steel,

while Rhaenys hailed him as

the first high king the continent had seen since the Dawn Age.

As his lords and the gathered locals cheered him,

Aegon named his loyal friends to a "Small Council"

led by Orys Baratheon, whom he called, "My strong right hand."

The title stuck,

and a bastard became the first Hand of the King.

But for now, Aegon's kingdom contained only a rocky island and a handful of fields.

The other kings had larger armies, ships, castles and thousands of years of rule.

But Aegon had dragons.

He had chosen for the words of his house, "Fire and blood."

Before he was done, the rivers, fields and skies would turn red.

Harren of House Hoare inherited a kingdom

that stretched from the Iron Islands to the Trident,

too great a kingdom to rule from a castle as shitty as Pyke.

For 40 years, his ironborn

- plundered the Riverlands - (METAL CLANKING)

for stone, timber and slaves to build a seat worthy of him.

Legend has it that masons laid the final stone in Harrenhal

on the very day that Aegon landed in Westeros.

Could've been a divine omen.

Could've been the masons wanted to fuck off before the dragons got there.

They weren't the only ones.

At Aegon's approach,

Harren's riverlords revolted, led by House Tully.

I doubt Harren noticed.

Harrenhal could repel an army of a million men.

No ladder could summit its walls,

and no ram could shatter them.

The castle was as impregnable as an old maid's cunt.

Harren shut his gates around himself, his sons, and his ironborn,

and waited for Aegon's army to drain back into the muck.

When Aegon finally saw the monstrous castle, he asked for parley.

Harren granted it.

Valyria had been the greatest empire the world had ever seen.

Harren wanted to piss on its ashes.

"Yield now, and you may remain as Lord of the Iron Islands.

"Yield now, and your sons will live to rule after you.

"You see my army outside your walls.

"You see my dragons."

"What is outside my walls is of no concern.

"Those walls are strong and thick."

"Dragons fly."

"But stone doesn't burn."

"When the sun sets, your line shall end."

Harren spat and returned to his castle.

Once inside, he promised lands, riches and Tully's daughters

to whoever could bring down Aegon or his dragon.

As the sun sank below the horizon,

all of Harren's men patrolled the battlements,

hearing wings in every gust of wind.

But the moon rose, and sank,

and no dragon appeared.

While the ironborn were ringing the battlements,

Aegon drove his dragon Balerion higher and higher in the night sky

so that even the great castle of Harrenhal looked like an anthill below them.

Then they plunged straight into the castle, well inside the guarded walls.

The five towers of Harrenhal reached towards Aegon like a hand.

Balerion opened his mouth and bathed all the fingers in flame.

Harren was right, stone doesn't burn, but men do,

even when they're ironborn. (SNIGGERS)

The dragon blasted my ancestors into ash

that choked the survivors when they screamed.

Harren's soldiers leapt from the battlements and died.

They huddled against the walls and died.

They fled across the yard and died.

Harren and his sons took shelter inside the castle.

The stone didn't burn,

but as Balerion blasted it with fire, it glowed white-hot.

The world's greatest castle became the world's greatest oven,

baking the last of House Hoare within it.

Outside the castle walls,

the towers of Harrenhal glowed red against the night

and began to twist and melt like five huge candles

with liquid stone trickling down their sides like wax.

The next morning, Aegon forged a new Riverlands.

He named the rebel Edmyn Tully as his Lord Paramount of the Trident,

and had the other riverlords swear him fealty as their new liege.

For centuries, House Hoare had terrorized the Riverlands.

Under House Tully,

the Riverlands would at last return to peace and prosperity.

After the castle cooled enough to allow men inside,

Aegon ventured into the ruin he'd made of Harrenhal.

He saw the ashen bodies, the scorched stone

and the mangled and melted swords of his former enemies.

To his men's confusion,

he ordered these useless swords collected and sent to his Aegonfort.