The Real Reason Daemon Wanted to Conquer the Winged Men

[00:00:00]There is a city so far east, that the men who drew our maps simply stopped drawing. And the people who live there, if they live there, are said to have wings. No maester has ever seen it. No ship has ever returned from it. And yet the most dangerous dragon rider who ever lived spoke of it like a man describing something he intended to take. The strange part isn't that the city might exist. The strange part is why he, of all men, believed in it. By the end of this video, you'll know exactly where the city of the winged men sits, what surrounds it, because what surrounds it is worse than the city itself, and why George R.R. Martin buried it in the one corner of his world where no character can ever go. Because when you understand what that city actually is, you'll understand something uncomfortable about the Targaryens. They weren't dreaming about the winged men. They were looking in a mirror. Let's start with the moment itself. When Daemon Targaryen speaks to Rhaenyra of conquest, of a world larger than Westeros, larger than the quarrels of greens and blacks, he reaches for a legend. Somewhere at the edge of the known world, he tells her, there stands a city whose men can fly. Now, here is your first payoff, because most viewers assume that line was invented for television. It wasn't. The city of the winged men is real, as real as anything gets in the archives, anyway. George R.R. Martin placed it himself in the world of ice and fire, >> [music] >> and on the official maps of the lands of ice and fire, it sits in the far east of Essos, on the northwestern shore of a body of water called the Hidden Sea, >> [music] >> cradled inside a mountain range named the Mountains of the Morn. The world book records that its inhabitants are said to possess wings of leather, and that they fly the way eagles fly. Wings of leather, not feathers. Remember that detail. It's going to matter more than you think. But before we can understand the winged men, you need to understand where Martin put them. Because a writer like Martin does not choose an address by accident, and the neighborhood he chose for this city is the single most disturbing region on any map he has ever drawn.

[00:02:01]>> [music] >> Follow the road east with me as far as roads go and then further, past the free cities, past the Dothraki Sea, past Qarth and the Bones, those mountains of grey stone said to be littered with the remains of every army that ever tried to cross them. Beyond the Bones lies Yiti, the Golden Empire, the oldest civilization the maesters will still admit is real. Silk and saffron, god emperors in cities so ancient that Valyria, [music] by comparison, was a child. And at the northeastern edge of Yiti, >> [music] >> the world begins to come apart. First you reach the five forts, colossal strongholds of fused black stone, each one large enough to garrison thousands, standing in a line like teeth. No one knows who built them. The Yitish say they were raised in the morning of the world to hold back demons from the darkness beyond, [music] that they guarded the Golden Empire during the long night itself, when a generation lived and died without ever seeing the sun. Think about what that means. On the far side of [music] the planet from Westeros, thousands of leagues from the Wall, another civilization [music] built its own wall against its own darkness, and theirs still stands. Beyond the five forts lies the grey waste, a dead expanse [music] where almost nothing grows, prowled, the tales claim, by things that eat men.

[00:03:19]Somewhere in that waste sits a city the maesters will barely name, Kadath, a place spoken of only in whispers, [music] where the rites practiced are called unholy even by the standards of Asshai. The accounts do not describe those [music] rites. The accounts refuse to. Turn south instead, and you skirt the dry deep and reach settlements our sources call the cities of the bloodless men, inhabited by people so pale that travelers' tales insist they are not entirely alive.

[00:03:47]>> [music] >> The maesters scoff at this, of course.

[00:03:49]The maesters scoff at everything east of the Bones. Hold that thought because the scoffing is part of the story. And then, folded inside the mountains of the morn, reachable only through treacherous hidden passes, you find it. A vast inland sea that no river feeds and no river drains. Its waters described in some accounts as strangely dark, the hidden sea. A sea that by every law of nature the Citadel teaches should not exist. On its northwestern shore, the city of the winged men. And on the opposite shore, staring across the water at them, stands a second city. Its name is Carcosa, and Carcosa is ruled by a sorcerer lord who claims to be the 69th yellow emperor of Yi Ti, an emperor in exile, brooding at the edge of the world, waiting to reclaim a throne that stopped acknowledging his dynasty long ago. So, ask yourself the question the maesters [music] never do. Why would men with wings, men who can go anywhere, choose to live there? [music] Hemmed in by demon-haunted wastes, dead-eyed neighbors, and a sorcerer king across the water, unless the wings were never for leaving, unless the wings were for surviving. Now we come to the question that unlocks what Martin was really doing. Who told us all this? Because no character in the novels has ever stood on the shore of the hidden sea.

[00:05:09]Everything I've just described comes from the world book, and the world book is not a neutral encyclopedia. Martin wrote it as an in-world document, the work of maesters at the Citadel compiled from travelers' tales, merchants' boasts, [music] and texts copied from texts copied from texts. Martin has been open about this design. The maesters get things wrong. They dismiss what they cannot verify. They flatten what they do not understand.

[00:05:34]>> [music] >> The further you travel from Old Town, the less our narrators actually know, and the more they fill the silence with wonder [music] and horror. This is not sloppiness. This is one of the oldest traditions in human history, and Martin [music] is deliberately recreating it. In our own medieval world, European scholars did exactly the same thing. At the edges of their maps, [music] always the Far East, always just beyond the last kingdom anyone had visited, they placed dog-headed men, men with faces in their chests, men with a single giant foot.

[00:06:06]The travels attributed to Sir John Mandeville, the legend of Prester John's impossible kingdom, the pattern never changed. The known world ended, and imagination rushed in to fill the void, dressed up as scholarship. The city of the winged men is Westeros' version of that. It is what a civilization writes [music] down when it reaches the limit of what it can know, and cannot bear to write the word unknown. But here is where Martin twists the knife, and this is the detail that separates his world from ours. In our history, the dog-headed men weren't real. The edge of the map monsters were pure invention.

[00:06:46][music] In Martin's world, the maesters also dismiss the others as legend. They dismiss the children of the forest. Some of them, even after the conquest, struggled to believe dragons could truly be controlled. And every single one of those legends turned out to be walking, breathing, [music] killing truth. So when the Citadel waves away a city of flying men as a sailor's fantasy, how confident are you, really? The maesters have theories, naturally, and so do the readers who have studied this passage for a decade. Perhaps the winged men craft artificial wings, gliders of hide and bone, leaping from the peaks of the morn, which would explain wings of leather rather than feathers. Perhaps they tame some flying creature, and were mistaken for winged beings by terrified travelers watching from a distance. Or perhaps, and this is the theory that should raise the hairs on your neck, they are something older.

[00:07:42]a bloodline changed, shaped the way the dragon lords of Valyria were said to have shaped themselves and their beasts with blood and fire until the line between rider and ridden began to blur.

[00:07:53]The honest answer is that no one knows.

[00:07:56]Martin gave us two sentences and a dot on a map and he has never explained further, but he did leave clues. Not in the geography. Well, not only in the geography because before we read the names you need to see what the geography is quietly doing. Lay the far east beside the far north of Westeros >> [music] >> and something unsettling happens. They line up. Westeros has the wall, 700 ft of ice raised in the Age of Heroes to hold back a darkness out of legend. The far east has the five forts, mountains of fused black stone raised, the Yitish say, [music] in the morning of days to hold back their darkness. Westeros has the lands of always winter where no ranger goes and none return. The east [music] has the gray waste where the caravans simply stop. Westeros has the Others, pale, cold, and beautiful walking where the living cannot. The east has the bloodless men, so [music] white and still that travelers swear the grave already claimed them. And both edges of the world remember the same catastrophe. The Yitish tell of a long night of their own, a generation born, living, and dying in darkness brought on, their legends claim, by the blood betrayal when [music] the Bloodstone Emperor murdered his own sister, cast down the true gods, and knelt to a black stone that fell from [music] the sky.

[00:09:10]When the maiden made of light turned her face away, the lion of night came forth to punish the wickedness of men. Sound familiar?

[00:09:17]>> [music] >> It should. It is the story of the long night told in another tongue, half a world from the wall, which means the region around the city of the winged men is not a random collection of horrors.

[00:09:27]>> [music] >> It is the other end of the same ancient war Westeros is about to fight again.

[00:09:32]Martin didn't hide the winged men at the edge of the world. He hid them [music] at the edge of the last apocalypse, the one survivors on both sides of the planet remember only in broken myths.

[00:09:42]Now, [music] the names. Look again at the city across the hidden sea, Carcosa. If you know your literary history, that name just made your blood run cold. Carcosa was born in 1886 in a short story by Ambrose Bierce, [music] a dead city glimpsed by a man who does not yet realize he himself is dead. A few years later, Robert W. Chambers borrowed it for the King in Yellow, a collection about a forbidden play that destroys the mind of anyone who reads it, set in a lost city where black stars rise. And from Chambers, Carcosa passed into the mythos of H.P. [music] Lovecraft, becoming part of the deepest bedrock of cosmic horror.

[00:10:21]And Kadath, that unholy city in the gray waste. Lovecraft readers know Kadath, the cold, forbidden dwelling place of the gods in the dreamlands, which no man may look upon. This is not coincidence.

[00:10:34]This is confession. George R.R. Martin grew up devouring exactly this fiction, >> [music] >> the weird tales, the pulps, the planetary romances, where heroes crossed impossible landscapes and cities of winged men waited beyond the horizon.

[00:10:50][music] And when he built the far east of his own world, he did something quietly brilliant. He made the genre itself part of the geography. Close to Westeros, the world obeys the rules of grounded historical fiction. Politics, logistics, tax rolls, and treachery. But the further east you travel, the further you travel backward through the history of fantasy itself, through Dunsany, through Chambers, through the lurid painted covers of the old pulps, until at the very edge of the map, you are no longer standing in a medieval chronicle at all.

[00:11:23]You are standing in a weird tale, a place where an exiled yellow emperor rules a city named for the capital of cosmic horror, and men with leather wings circle above a sea with no source.

[00:11:36]The edge of Martin's world is not just the edge of knowledge. It is the edge of genre, the place where his realism deliberately dissolves into the older, stranger dreams that made him a writer in the first place.

[00:11:48]>> [music] >> And that tells us what the city of the winged men is. Structurally, it is a monument to the idea that wonder survives at the boundaries, that no matter how political, >> [music] >> how brutal, how grounded the story becomes, somewhere out past the last reliable map, magic is still true. So, mystery solved then. The winged men are a love letter, a literary homage, a maester's fairy tale built from the books Martin loved as a boy with no bearing on the actual story of ice and fire. End of story. [music] Except, except that line wasn't given to a maester. It wasn't given to a sailor, or a merchant, or a drunk in a Braavosi tavern spinning tales for coin.

[00:12:29]>> [music] >> It was given to Daemon Targaryen, a man with wings. Say it plainly and you'll hear it. What is a dragon rider to a farmer in [music] the Reach who looks up and sees a shadow cross the sun? What was Aegon the Conqueror to the armies that burned on the field of fire? The small folk of Westeros did not need to imagine a city of flying men at the edge of the world.

[00:12:48]>> [music] >> Flying men came to them. They landed at the mouth of the Blackwater and built a throne out of melted swords. The Targaryens are the winged men of Westeros, the legend made flesh, arriving as legends do from the east.

[00:13:02]And once you see that, Daemon's whisper to Rhaenyra stops being a piece of trivia and becomes one of the most revealing things he ever says. Because Daemon isn't telling her a bedtime story. He is telling [music] her the world is full of powers stranger and older than the Iron Throne. And we, of all people, are equipped to [music] reach them. When a man who rides a dragon dreams about men with wings, he is not dreaming about them. He is dreaming about what his own bloodline might still become [music] if it stopped playing at kings and remembered what it was. That is the seduction. Now, here is the warning buried inside it >> [music] >> because in Martin's world, there is always a warning buried inside the wonder. Flight [music] in A Song of Ice and Fire is never free.

[00:13:42]It is the oldest hunger in the entire saga. A broken boy in Winterfell dreams of nothing else. And the dream that [music] teaches him to fly begins with a fall that destroys his legs. The green dreams name him a winged wolf bound to the earth. And the price of his wings is everything a boy loves about being a boy. In the veil, they still sing of the winged knight, Artys Arryn, who legend says soared upon a giant falcon to slay the Griffin King. A hero so beloved, they dressed his myth in feathers because men cannot bear for their greatest kings to merely walk. And in the east, the dragon lords of old Valyria did not wait for legends. They took wings by force, through fire, through blood, through practices so dark that even their own descendants preferred not to write them down. They became the winged men of their age, and the earth reached up and took them back in a single day of fire and ash. The greatest flying civilization in the history of the world was unmade, and the sea that swallowed it still smokes 400 years later.

[00:14:47]>> [music] >> Exactly the way the hidden sea sits dark and unexplained in the mountains of the far east. Two impossible seas at two edges of the world, each one wrapped around the wreckage of men who rose too high. That is what Martin must have understood when he set a city of winged men at the world's end, and then put its legend in a Targaryen's mouth. The wings are the whole story of his world in miniature. Every civilization in it, the green seers, the Valyrians, the winged men of the hidden sea, >> [music] >> the dreamers and the dragon lords, reaches for the sky by a different road and every road has a toll. Bran [music] pays in his body. Valyria pays in fire.

[00:15:31]The Targaryens pay across three centuries in madness, in blood, in a dance that fed their own children to their own dragons. So, what did the winged men pay? The world book doesn't say, but look at where they live.

[00:15:44]>> [music] >> Penned inside the mountains of the morn, demon waste to the north, the bloodless men beyond the ridges, Carcosa [music] and its sorcerer emperor watching from across the water. Men who can fly like eagles, who could in principle go anywhere on earth, and who as far as any record shows have never once left. Maybe wings weren't their gift. Maybe wings were their sentence. Damon Targaryen looked at the edge of the map and saw an empire waiting to be taken. A world where his house's wings would make them gods, but he never asked the other question. If the tales are true, if they really are men on the shore of that dark sourceless sea who ride the wind on wings of leather, then somewhere at the edge of the world they have their own maps, their own maesters, [music] their own legends about the impossible lands far to the west. And in those legends, there is a family at the edge of their world. Pale haired, purple eyed, a family that wanted wings so badly they bound themselves to fire to get them and were devoured by it >> [music] >> generation after generation in a land too distant for any winged man to bother saving. We tell stories about the edge of the world. We never stop to wonder which side of the edge we're on. I'm your maester at the black dread. The bones remember. Damon Targaryen told Rhaenyra of a city at the edge of the world where men have wings and it wasn't invented for House of the Dragon. The city of the winged men is real canon placed by George R.R. Martin himself [music] in the world of ice and Fire on the shore of the hidden sea deep within the mountains of the morn in far [music] eastern Essos.

[00:17:23]In this video, we travel past Yiti, the five forts, the grey waste, and the unholy city of Kadath to find it and uncover why Martin surrounded it with the darkest [music] geography on his map. Why the city of Carcosa across the water is a direct nod to the roots of cosmic horror and what the legend of the winged men reveals about House Targaryen itself. Because in a world where dragon riders exist, the winged men were never just a fairy tale. They were a mirror.

[00:17:53]Deep dive Targaryen history, Valyria, Fire and Blood, and House of the Dragon Lore every week. Subscribe and join us in the archives.