High above the clouds where the air grows cold and thin, the jagged crown of Phoenix Mount pierces the sky. Carved directly into its face of blood-red granite, bronze towers, and gold and silver marble sits Dragon's Wake, the sovereign seat of House Pyrotharis and the heart of the Grand Duchy.
Before we ruled these peaks, we were born from ashes and blood magic. It was Anar the Phoenix, our founder, whose glorious death gave life to our domain. From his monumental funeral pyre, three dragon eggs hatched in the leaping flames—giving birth to Vhealorax the Juggernaut, Sun Dancer the Sun-Kissed, and Kragor the Sleeping Mountain. And in those same miraculous fires, his Valyrian steel blade, Last Light, and his grand armor were transfigured, stained forever a lethal, crimson red.
When Aegon the Conqueror brought the Seven Kingdoms to their knees, he found his true boundary line at our peaks. For the Dukes of Pyrotharis do not bow. Born of the pyre, Anar the First, the Dragon Slayer, brought down Queen Rhaenys and her dragon Meraxes over these very gorges. And when Aegon sought vengeance—when his Dragon's Wrath consumed twenty thousand of our men on the plains of the Reach—we did not break. We withdrew into our mountain fortress, sovereign within the Grand Duchy, backed by every Marcher lord sworn as our bannermen, and bound by our sacred motto: We Burn Brightest.
History remembers us not as subjects, but as the arbiters of the realm. When Maegor the Cruel held the Iron Throne in a grip of fear, it was my great-grandfather, Anar the Second, who answered Prince Jaehaerys's call. On the fields before Harrenhal, my great-grandfather rode out before his host of fifteen thousand men to meet Maegor's twelve thousand, and shouted at the top of his lungs, declaring that Maegor's mother was a witch and that he would mount her head on the crimson walls of Dragon's Wake. Maegor accepted the duel, and though my great-grandfather lost an eye to Blackfyre, Maegor lost his head to Last Light. Seeing their tyrant slain, Maegor's twelve thousand men threw down their weapons and swore fealty on the spot. Blood still leaking from his empty eye socket, the One-Eyed Duke marched a combined host of twenty-seven thousand men to the Starry Sept and crowned Jaehaerys himself—forever remembered as the Kingmaker.
And when Prince Morion Martell thought us distracted—sacking Starfall, Skyreach, and Sandstone while our Marcher bannermen gathered in Drake City for the ascension of my paternal grandfather, Aegor the First, the Old Dragon—our wrath was absolute. Before the feast grew cold, four dragons took to the sky: Kragor the Sleeping Mountain, Vermithor, Vhagar, and Caraxes, ridden by my grandfathers—Aegor and King Jaehaerys on my mother's side—alongside my uncles, Prince Baelon and Prince Aemon. Six hundred Dornish ships were set ablaze, lighting the water and sky so fiercely that men across the continent called it the Night of Fire. And while the sea boiled, my father, a ten-year-old Lord Aerion, stood in the high halls of Dragon's Wake, called the Marcher banners, and led twenty thousand men south to take back our lands and shatter Dorne's spine.
The Red Mountains remember. Below our keep, Drake City hums with the forge-fires of dragon-tempered steel, while in the deep caverns of Phoenix Mount, Vhealorax the Juggernaut, Sun Dancer the Sun-Kissed, and Kragor the Sleeping Mountain slumber upon beds of warm stone. The Seven Kingdoms look south and see a mere buffer zone.
They are mistaken. They see a cage. But we are the flame waiting to catch—and when the wind changes, the Grand Duchy will make the world burn.