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Stygai


Son of Man

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Stygai is known as the city of corpses.  What that means exactly is anyone's guess.   Corpses could people the city.  It could also mean the city full of tombs like one big boneyard.  It is located to the north of the city of Asshai and no one goes there.  We may have to look closely at Asshai and use that to infer what we might find in Stygai.  A city full of tombs does not leave enough for us to discuss so let's just say the city is peopled with the walking dead. 

Asshai is very sparsely populated.  There are no animals there and no children.  All forms of magic experiments are allowed in the city.  It's clear to me why there are no animals and no children.  They're being sacrificed!  We have a city practicing blood sacrifice.  To the north, we have a city of the dead.  The dead feed on the living.  It's not a stretch to say Asshai supports Stygai.

All this should sound familiar.  The farthest north of Westeros is off-limits except to the wildlings.  We know that the northern part of the kingdom of humans practiced blood sacrifices to the trees.  We know the white walkers "fed their servants" on the blood of humans.  The weirwoods also seem to thrive on blood.   I would not be surprised if there is a corpse city beyond the wall.

Asshai and the Wall are the frontiers of the living world.  What lies beyond is death.  The Asshai pay with blood to keep the dead away.  The north and the wildlings also paid with blood to keep the others away. 

Qaithe wanted Dany to come to Asshai to get this information and much more.  She wants Dany to fly her dragons to Stygai and put the dead to rest once and for all.  This could stop the cycle of bloodletting and Asshai can thrive again.  We know from GM that Dany will not go to Asshai.  And there may be a good reason for Dany refusing to do this.  The ancient Valyrians didn't do anything about it.  They left Asshai alone and their reasons may be good.  They also left Westeros alone despite their constant need to resupply their giant mining operations with fresh slaves.  Westeros had workers for the taking and yet Valyria left it alone.  I think they wanted Asshai to serve as the buffer zone between the living and the dead.  Westeros was their buffer zone in the west.  I think the North was supposed to be a neutral area that served as the buffer where the living and the dead can coexist but the living are required to pay with blood.

 

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49 minutes ago, Holley 4 Barrel said:

We know the white walkers "fed their servants" on the blood of humans.  The weirwoods also seem to thrive on blood.   I would not be surprised if there is a corpse city beyond the wall.

Where are you getting this from? The former sounds like an Old Nan story and the latter makes no sense. Weirwoods are biologically trees; their whole blood mythology is because of their red sap. 

As for Stygai, that's a pretty neat idea, but I wouldn't put too much stock on it being relevant to the story. I personally don't consider anything to have been introduced in AWoIaF to be too relevant to the main books -- especially any far-off lands in the east. 

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I still say Asshai DOES have children, they are just kept indoors to protect them from the harmful magic/fallout/whatever in the air.

Traders and travellers don't stay long enough to see them and/or are not permitted into the inner regions of the city where the children are kept. 

Stygai being a city of corpses could mean a lot or nothing at all, it might be a Necropolis with lots of graves or a city that was abandoned after whatever it was that created the Shadowlands made the region uninhabitable (or killed its entire population)

Also the Shadowlands are definitely not the border of the living world. Asshai is located at the Saffron Straits and the implication is that the Saffron comes from east of Asshai, so somewhere beyond it and Stygai. Someone has to farm that saffron, or at least gather it. 

Makes you actually wonder just how freaking huge Essos is...

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I think GRRM used TWOIAF to indulge his love of Lovecraft and Robert Howard, especially in the far east.  Stygai comes from a Conan story "Shadows of Something or Whatever," and through that comes from the river Styx.  Asshai by the Shadow comes from The Shadow Over Innsmouth.  Innsmouth is a dilapidated fishing village where most people, the natives, have a weird froglike look to them and the only elderly in the town come from neighboring villages.  Because the natives of Innsmouth are halfbreed frog people spawned by the Deep Ones who become even more froglike and return to the sea as they grow older.

So I think the children in Asshai are not recognizably human, maybe those weird fish nobody but shadowbinders will eat.

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The first dragons came from beyond the Shadowlands, Asshai and the Jade Sea so something pretty nasty must have happened around that particular area. I suspect that although the characters won't exactly visit the area someone maybe Bran or Dany will learn something via skinchanging, collective conscious, magic etc.. that explains why the area is so messed up.

Perhaps the secret is lying somewhere in Stygai the corpse of an empire that were once dragon riders like the Valyrians themselves, it could even be that the Valyrians and Asshai'i were once even the same people.

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On 4/14/2017 at 7:20 PM, Holley 4 Barrel said:

Stygai is known as the city of corpses.  What that means exactly is anyone's guess.   Corpses could people the city.  It could also mean the city full of tombs like one big boneyard.  It is located to the north of the city of Asshai and no one goes there.  We may have to look closely at Asshai and use that to infer what we might find in Stygai.  A city full of tombs does not leave enough for us to discuss so let's just say the city is peopled with the walking dead. 

Asshai is very sparsely populated.  There are no animals there and no children.  All forms of magic experiments are allowed in the city.  It's clear to me why there are no animals and no children.  They're being sacrificed!  We have a city practicing blood sacrifice.  To the north, we have a city of the dead.  The dead feed on the living.  It's not a stretch to say Asshai supports Stygai.

All this should sound familiar.  The farthest north of Westeros is off-limits except to the wildlings.  We know that the northern part of the kingdom of humans practiced blood sacrifices to the trees.  We know the white walkers "fed their servants" on the blood of humans.  The weirwoods also seem to thrive on blood.   I would not be surprised if there is a corpse city beyond the wall.

Asshai and the Wall are the frontiers of the living world.  What lies beyond is death.  The Asshai pay with blood to keep the dead away.  The north and the wildlings also paid with blood to keep the others away. 

Qaithe wanted Dany to come to Asshai to get this information and much more.  She wants Dany to fly her dragons to Stygai and put the dead to rest once and for all.  This could stop the cycle of bloodletting and Asshai can thrive again.  We know from GM that Dany will not go to Asshai.  And there may be a good reason for Dany refusing to do this.  The ancient Valyrians didn't do anything about it.  They left Asshai alone and their reasons may be good.  They also left Westeros alone despite their constant need to resupply their giant mining operations with fresh slaves.  Westeros had workers for the taking and yet Valyria left it alone.  I think they wanted Asshai to serve as the buffer zone between the living and the dead.  Westeros was their buffer zone in the west.  I think the North was supposed to be a neutral area that served as the buffer where the living and the dead can coexist but the living are required to pay with blood.

 

everything Qarth is fodder for the world book. GRRM has stated that no characters will visit there during a POV chapter. At best we may see flashbacks, and since only one character has been there, it will be a Mel POV flashback. 

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1 hour ago, Dorian Martell's son said:

everything Qarth is fodder for the world book. GRRM has stated that no characters will visit there during a POV chapter. At best we may see flashbacks, and since only one character has been there, it will be a Mel POV flashback. 

Mel says a lot of things. So I'm not so sure it will be her.

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13 minutes ago, Dorian Martell's son said:

But she is the only POV that has been there and George has said that we won't get any new POVs 

@CornishDornish - What DM said. Also, from what we have seen in her POV, her memories and her inner dialogue seem pretty reliable. She's even pretty honest with herself about the room for error in her interpretation of visions. So Mel might be able to give us a fair snapshot of Asshai.

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