The Farwynds there were even queerer than the rest. Many a bold mariner has sailed beyond the light of its beacon over the centuries, seeking the fabled paradise said to lie over the horizon, but the sailors who return (many do not) speak only of boundless grey oceans stretching on and on forever. Strange tales like this are common at the edges of the world, however, and the Lonely Light stands farthest west of all the lands known to us. Some say they lie with seal to bring forth half-human children whilst others whisper that they are skinchangers who can take the forms of sea lions, walrus, even spotted whales, the wolves of the seas. Queer things are said of the Farwynds and the smallfolk they rule. ON the largest rock stands the keep of House Farwynd, named the Lonely Light for the beacon that blazes atop it’s roof day and night. There seals and sea lions make their rookeries on windswept rocks too small to support even a single household. Mapmakers tells us that there are thirty-one Iron Islands in the main grouping off Ironman’s Bay west of the Cape of Eagles, and thirteen more clustered around the Lonely Light, far out in the vastness of the Sunset Sea.Ī second island grouping lies eight days’ sail to the northwest in the Sunset Sea. House Farwynd on Lonely Light Island rumored to have the Gift and their latitude is closer to that of the North, where the blood of the First Men runs strong, than that of the Iron Islands or Riverlands. ĭespite the Andal invasion, the blood of the First Men would have survived given that the invasion was facilitated by Houses Greyjoy, Drumm, Orkwood and Hoare of the Iron Islands. From here he ruled both stone and salt, wearing robes of woven seaweed and a tale pale crown made from Nagga’s teeth. Here he took his mermaid wife and planned wars against the Storm God. For a thousand years and seven he reigned here, Aeron recalled. Nagga’s ribs became the beams and pillars of his longhall, just as her jaw became his throne. She fed on krakens and leviathans and drowned whole islands in her wrath, yet the Grey King had slain her and the Drowned God had changed her bones to stone so that men might never cease to wonder at the courage of the first of kings. Nagga had been the first sea dragon, the mightiest ever to rise from the waves. The sight made Aeron’s heart beat faster. On the crown of the hill four-and-forty monstrous stone ribs rose from the earth like the trunks of great pale trees. Victarion could feel the magic of this place. Ahead loomed the sacred shore of Old Wyk and the grassy hill above it, where the ribs of Nagga rose from the earth like the trunks of great white trees, as wide around as a dromond’s mast and twice as tall. Victarion joined Nute the Barber at her prow. The wind was blowing from the north as the Iron Victory came round the point and entered the holy bay called Nagga’s Cradle. Nagga’s Ribs on Old Wyk is more than likely a petrified weirwood tree, an absolute connection to the First Men and Old Gods. The World of Ice and Fire, The Iron IslandsĮven if the First Men were not the initial inhabitants of the Iron Islands their finding of the Seastone Chair when they came to Old Wyk tells us that they eventually settled the islands. But this is the purest speculation and, in the end, Haereg himself dismissed the idea, and so must we. Haereg argued that the chair was a product of the first inhabitants of the islands, and only the later histories of maesters and septons alike began to claim that they were in fact descended of the First Men. The throne of the Greyjoys, carved into the shape of a kraken from an oily black stone, was said to have been found by the First Men when they came to Old Wyk. It is likely that the people of the Iron Islands are descendants of the First Men.Īrchmaester Haereg once advanced the interesting notion that the ancestors of the ironborn came from some unknown land west of the Sunset Sea, citing the legend of the Seastone Chair. Thus far all that we’ve met that have the Gift also have the blood of the First Men. This is evident by the powers in the Stark children, Bloodraven (via his Blackwood mother) and Wildlings. The power to be a warg/skinchanger is bestowed on descendants of the First Men. “That was the beast, not me,” he said in a hoarse whisper. The gift was strong in Snow, but the youth was untaught, still fighting his nature when he should have glorified in it. There would be a second life worthy of a king. Mance should have let me take the direwolf. One skinchanger can always sense another. His gift would perish with his body, he expected. Small, puny things, like Lump, and not one with the gift. And he taught me the way of the warg and the secrets of the skinchanger, though my gift was stronger than his own.
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