Ice and Fire under the Microscope: A Worldbuilding Exercise for A Song of Ice and Fire by Witteric of the West

An amazing asoiaf Planetos history telling and world building fanfic

Words: 3.2k+

Link: https://forums.spacebattles.com/threads/ice-and-fire-under-the-microscope-a-worldbuilding-exercise-for-a-song-of-ice-and-fire.1101552/?post=93774175#post-93774175

Chapter 1

The following is a bit of a side-project. I've long been a worldbuilding whore, and I've been trying to come up with my own history for the world of ASOIAF. After much thought, I've decided to do this. In order to make it more interesting to read, This will be a fic, essentially, in a history book-like format, similar to the Komneniad. However, this is a much much more ambitious project in scope. This is inspired, in part, by the Grand Unified Theory of the Dawn over at Reddit, but I intend to take a... very different approach. That being said, I am definitely stealing wholesale a few ideas, such as the Arm of Dorne.

Thus, without further ado, let us begin.

Ice and Fire under a Microscope: A Compiled History of Planetos

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Taken from: "A Fool's Guide to the Dawn Age," published by the Red Door Printing House, Braavos. ca. 1002 AD[1]

The Birthplace of Mankind has long been debated. Asshai and the Shadow Lands that lay beyond, Yi-Ti, the Grey Waste, and the now submerged lands around the Thousand Isles have long been theorized to be the place where men first arose from among all creatures. However, recent discoveries point to a much more provocative answer. While for centuries the most widely accepted Birthplace of Humanity was the banks of the Ash River in the Shadow Lands, the discovery of the most ancient human remains in Sothoryos, deep in the jungles along the banks of the Upper Zamoyos in 894 AD led to a slow re-imagining of the origins of mankind. It would take until 981 AD for a team of historians from The Citadel to reach what is now believed to be the cradle of humanity. Deep in Sothoryos lies the Oyoron river, unlike the Zamoyos further north, its course is protected by two mountain ranges and a profound rift valley. Studies of the somewhat inhabitable lower Oyoron show that the region, and indeed much of Sothoryos north of the Equator were grasslands between approximately 1.5 million and 75000 BD. In this environment, the earliest humans would hunt various creatures, following them through the ancient grasslands as they learned to tame fire, and to hunt with stone spears and primitive axes.

The precise spread of Mankind from the Oyoron River Valley is hard to map, due in no small part to the inhospitability of the Sothoryi Jungles. However the broad strokes of it can be roughly charted out. From the upper Oyoron, Men spread north towards the coast of the Summer and Jade Seas. A population of men crossed the Toryon mountains in Western Sothoryos approximately 80000 years ago, near the end of the Sothoryi Grassland period. This population would later move on towards the Summer Isles. Another group would go East, through the Jade Sea coast and cross into Ulthos approximately 78000 years ago. From Ulthos, these ancient men crossed the Saffron Straits into Essos. This ancestral population began to spread, reaching the Bone Mountains approximately 60000 years ago. From there, the wide forests that covered the northern shore of the Silver Sea were the first encounter of these ancient men with another race of comparable intelligence. Known in more modern times as the Ifequevron, the diminutive creatures are similar, and recent studies confirmed that, they are also related to the Westerosi Singers, also known as Children of the Forest.

How these first meetings went is lost to history. What is known, is that mankind settled on the southern shore of the Silver Sea, while the Wood Walkers were left to their own devices to the north of it. Other tribes of men began to make their way down the Rhoyne approximately 45000 years ago. However, they did not reach the coast of the Narrow Sea, despite it being a rather short distance from the Upper Rhoyne, until the early Copper Age.

As the Sothoryi Grasslands turned into Jungle, the Brindled Men drove most humans out of the aptly-called Green Hell. However, by the time this process was completed about 35000 years ago, Mankind was already well-established on the coasts of the Saffron Sea and the Northern Coast of the Jade Sea. Tribes of men had settled as far as Valyria, the Upper Rhoyne, and what is now the Thousand Isles. The next step. however, was going from Hunter-Gatherer tribes to farmers and herdsmen.

Agriculture seems to have been discovered independently in three different locations. The Middle Rhoyne, approximately 14000 years ago, the Silver Sea around the same time -the Upper Rhoyne, however, showed no signs of agriculture until some 10000 years ago, something that puzzles scientists to this day- and the Ash River, approximately 18000 years ago.

Agriculture didn't spread much from its western origin points. Even though the region was not yet made of wide grasslands as it would be in later millennia, Central Essos was more suited for semi-nomadic hunter-gatherers and later herdsmen. While the Valyrian Peninsula at the time was undergoing a period of particularly active volcanoes. On the East however, the societies that began to form around the Ash River spread the use of Agriculture and Pottery to the neighboring regions. The earliest evidence of magic [2] also comes from this period. However, it is hard to pinpoint how did the practice of the arcane start among men. The cataclysm that would strike Stygai at the end of the Bronze Age left the area so saturated in natural and unnatural energies that it's hard to find evidence as to the how or even exactly when was sorcery first used.

Thus, even before starting to work Copper, the Ash River became the center of a civilization that, armed with stone axes and wooden shields, began its march to subdue the lesser farming communities and hunter-gatherers around them. While at first this civilization took the form of a confederacy of city-states, more united at some times than others, it would, in time, spawn the first empire that Mankind ever saw. The Great Empire of the Dawn, still spoken of in legends from Asshai and Yi-Ti, the same empire to which Yi-Ti claims to have succeeded.

[1] AD and BD being "After the Doom of Valyria" and "Before the Doom of Valyria"

[2] Magic... we'll see more about it in due time. While this particular project of mine is taking a different approach than your usual fic, we will explore both the origins, and as much as the seemingly modern Planetosi know about it (which is not a lot, as while its effects are clearly observable in Planetos, it is extremely hard to study in a scientific manner. Only very recently by 1002 AD has there been any advance in figuring out processes behind some spells.