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demi-lancer · 5 months

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Euron's Götterdämmerung

Warning! Spoilers ahead for A Dance With Dragons, A Feast For Crows, and ASOIAF in general

Alternate Title: The One Where Euron Pisses Off the Volcano

Back with another analysis/theory that I happened upon while reading on break; this time our subject is Mr. Nihilism himself Euron Greyjoy, and his likely endgame in TWOW. My argument for this theory is two-fold: 1) The Iron Islands sit atop a dormant, partially submerged volcano, the caldera of which is formed by Great and Old Wyk; and 2) Euron will sound a 'kraken summoning horn,' aka The Hammer of the Waters, to pulverize Oldtown and the coast of the Sunset Sea, causing the Wyk volcano to erupt and setting the stage for a second Long Night.

A huge shout out to Company of the Cat and her video about the Iron Islands being volcanic (skip to 9:37 of the video for her explanations), which inspired me to pursue this theory. To summarize her arguments, everything about the islands from their rich ore deposits, the mythology of Nagga the Sea Dragon, the prevalence of fire in Ironborn culture and imagery despite being a sea-faring people, and the similarity of Great and Old Wyk's shape to the known volcanic islands of Marahai in the Jade Sea, point towards the islands being volcanic. A past eruption could also explain the Ironborn mythology surrounding the Drowned God's conflict with the Storm God; to Dawn Age observers, the collapse of the volcano's caldera combined with volcanic lightning within it's ash cloud (which may be referenced by the arms of House Kenning of Harlaw) could have been explained as the Storm God casting down the god of the Islands, giving rise to the legends of the Drowned God.

This brings me to my second argument; from where things stand at the end of ADWD, Euron's plan seems straightforward: Euron wants to rule the Seven Kingdoms and intends to marry Daenerys, bending her dragons to his will with the Dragon Binder horn he allegedly found in Valyria and crushing all those who stand in his way. But as anyone can attest that has read "The Forsaken," an excerpt of an Aeron Damphair POV from TWOW, these may only be a cover for his true aims:

He showed the world his blood eye now, dark and terrible. Clad head to heel in scale as dark as onyx, he sat upon a mound of blackened skulls as dwarfs capered round his feet and a forest burned behind him.

“The bleeding star bespoke the end,” he said to Aeron. “These are the last days, when the world shall be broken and remade. A new god shall be born from the graves and charnel pits.” Then Euron lifted a great horn to his lips and blew, and dragons and krakens and sphinxes came at his command and bowed before him. “Kneel, brother,” the Crow’s Eye commanded. “I am your king, I am your god. Worship me, and I will raise you up to be my priest.”

“Never. No godless man may sit the Seastone Chair!”

“Why would I want that hard black rock? Brother, look again and see where I am seated.”

Aeron Damphair looked. The mound of skulls was gone. Now it was metal underneath the Crow’s Eye: a great, tall, twisted seat of razor sharp iron, barbs and blades and broken swords, all dripping blood.

Impaled upon the longer spikes were the bodies of the gods. The Maiden was there and the Father and the Mother, the Warrior and Crone and Smith … even the Stranger. They hung side by side with all manner of queer foreign gods: the Great Shepherd and the Black Goat, three-headed Trios and the Pale Child Bakkalon, the Lord of Light and the butterfly god of Naath.

And there, swollen and green, half-devoured by crabs, the Drowned God festered with the rest, seawater still dripping from his hair.

...

The dreams were even worse the second time. He saw the longships of the Ironborn adrift and burning on a boiling blood-red sea. He saw his brother on the Iron Throne again, but Euron was no longer human. He seemed more squid than man, a monster fathered by a kraken of the deep, his face a mass of writhing tentacles. Beside him stood a shadow in woman’s form, long and tall and terrible, her hands alive with pale white fire. Dwarves capered for their amusement, male and female, naked and misshapen, locked in carnal embrace, biting and tearing at each other as Euron and his mate laughed and laughed and laughed …

As indicated Aeron Damphair's Shade of the Evening dreams, Euron aspires not merely to kinghood but godhood. This makes sense with George building-up towards a second Long Night, with Euron being an obvious parallel of the Bloodstone Emperor who was responsible for the first Long Night in Yi Tish mythology. They both came to power by murdering their elder sibling (Balon Greyjoy, the Amethyst Empress), and have committed similar atrocities. According to TWOIAF, Bloodstone "practiced dark arts, torture, and necromancy, enslaved his people, took a tiger-woman for his bride, feasted on human flesh, and cast down the true gods to worship a black stone that had fallen from the sky." While Euron has yet to marry a Tiger-Woman or raise the dead, on all other accounts he is emulating Bloodstone: he uses blood magic; we know from Aeron's POV that he tortures foes; he sells his captives from the Shield Isles into slavery; he forces the Qartheen warlocks he captured to eat their dead companion; and it is made abundantly clear that Euron is a godless man bent on destroying the existing organized religions.

With Euron set-up as the one who will unleash the second Long Night upon Planetos, the question remains as to how he will do this; for a concise account of how the first Long Night happened, I recommend consulting David Lightbringer's videos that I linked in my previous ASOIAF theory. Some have suggested that Euron means to sound the Horn of Winter, aka the Horn of Joramun, which may be in Sam's possession in Oldtown, but I find this very unlikely. For starters, Jon in ACOK and Sam in AFFC both describe the horn found by Ghost as being old and cracked, suggesting that repairs or magical intervention may be needed to get it to work if it is the Horn. There's also the problem of Euron being at the opposite end of the continent from the Wall; if the Horn is indeed used for lowering and raising the Wall (as suggested by Cat in her video), it would be a massive liability for it to be capable of doing so from anywhere in the world.

I believe a clue for how Euron will trigger a second Long Night is Aeron's first vision quoted above, in which Euron blows a horn and caused dragons, krakens and sphinxes to bow to him. As Company of the Cat argues in her video about magical horns in ASOIAF, a 'kraken summoning horn' most likely refers to the Hammer of the Waters and/or similar objects. We know that Krakens are drawn to bodies and blood in the waters, as mentioned in both Fire and Blood and Arianne's TWOW sample:

"It was said that the waters between the islands were so choked with corpses that krakens appeared by the hundreds, drawn by the blood." (Fire and Blood, Reign of the Dragon: The Wars of King Aegon I)

"And krakens off the Broken Arm, pulling under crippled galleys," said Valena. "The blood draws them to the surface, our maester claims. There are bodies in the water. A few have washed up on our shores." (TWOW, Arianne I)

From what TWOIAF has to say about the breaking of the Arm of Dorne, the Hammer of the Waters could also account for the dragons and sphinxes:

"And the old gods stirred, and giants awoke in the earth, and all of Westeros shook and trembled. Great cracks appeared in the earth, and hills and mountains collapsed and were swallowed up. And then the seas came rushing in, and the Arm of Dorne was broken and shattered by the force of the water, until only a few bare rocky islands remained above the waves." (TWOIAF, Dorne: The Breaking)

If we assume the sphinxes to refer to the statues that flank the gates of the Citadel, these would likely be destroyed by the earthquakes and tsunamis of the Hammer, 'bowing' at the command of Euron. High magnitude earthquakes would lead to volcanic eruptions, thus accounting for the dragons answering Euron's command. In addition to Wyk erupting, we'll likely see Dragonstone erupt as well, esp. in light of Melisandre's talk about 'waking dragons from stone.' Based on Jon and Tyrion's recollections in the eighth chapters of ADWD, an eruption at Hardhome can also be expected:

"Only the brightest stars were visible, all to the west. A dull red glow lit the sky to the northeast, the color of a blood bruise. Tyrion had never seen a bigger moon. Monstrous, swollen, it looked as if it had swallowed the sun and woken with a fever. Its twin, floating on the sea beyond the ship, shimmered red with every wave. "What hour is this?" he asked Moqorro. "That cannot be sunrise unless the east has moved. Why is the sky red?"

"The sky is always red above Valyria, Hugor Hill."" (ADWD, Tyrion VIII)

"Hardhome had been halfway toward becoming a town, the only true town north of the Wall, until the night six hundred years ago when hell had swallowed it. Its people had been carried off into slavery or slaughtered for meat, depending on which version of the tale you believed, their homes and halls consumed in a conflagration that burned so hot that watchers on the Wall far to the south had thought the sun was rising in the north. Afterward ashes rained down on haunted forest and Shivering Sea alike for almost half a year." (ADWD, Jon VIII)

The symbolism and imagery surrounding Euron strongly implies that he will use the Hammer of the Waters; as already noted, a volcanic eruption on Wyk may have inspired the mythology of the war between the Drowned God and the Storm God. Euron is heavily associated with the Storm God, starting with his murder of Balon Greyjoy:

"The Storm God cast him down," the priest announced. For a thousand thousand years sea and sky had been at war. From the sea had come the ironborn, and the fish that sustained them even in the depths of winter, but storms brought only woe and grief.

...

Better to be scorned by Balon the Brave than beloved of Euron Crow's Eye. And if age and grief had turned Balon bitter with the years, they had also made him more determined than any man alive. He was born a lord's son and died a king, murdered by a jealous god, Aeron thought, and now the storm is coming, a storm such as these isles have never known." (AFFC, The Prophet)

"Oh, and Balon was the third, but you knew that. I could not do the deed myself, but it was my hand that pushed him off the bridge." (TWOW, The Forsaken)

Euron's title is Crow's Eye, while his personal coat of arms feature ravens, further tying him to the Storm God:

He had no love of maesters. Their ravens were creatures of the Storm God, and he did not trust their healing, not since Urri. (AFFC, The Prophet)

"Crow's Eye, you call me. Well, who has a keener eye than the crow? After every battle the crows come in their hundreds and their thousands to feast upon the fallen. A crow can espy death from afar. And I say that all of Westeros is dying. Those who follow me will feast until the end of their days." (AFFC, The Drowned Man)

There's also the matter of House Goodbrother, an Ironborn house situated on Great Wyk who draw their wealth from their mines. Not only is their sigil is a warhorn while their house seat bears the interesting name of Hammerhorn, but Euron is compared to Urrathon IV Goodbrother ("Badbrother") in ADWD:

"Torgon Greyiron was the king's eldest son. But the king was old and Torgon restless, so it happened that when his father died he was raiding along the Mander from his stronghold on Greyshield. His brothers sent no word to him but instead quickly called a kingsmoot, thinking that one of them would be chosen to wear the driftwood crown. But the captains and the kings chose Urragon [Urrathon] Goodbrother to rule instead. The first thing the new king did was command that all the sons of the old king be put to death, and so they were. After that men called him Badbrother, though in truth they'd been no kin of his. He ruled for almost two years."

...

"Badbrother had proved to be as mean as he was cruel and had few friends left upon the isles. The priests denounced him, the lords rose against him, and his own captains hacked him into pieces." (ADWD, The Wayward Bride)

TWOIAF claims that Hrothgar of Pyke possessed a kraken-summoning horn during the Age of Heroes; assuming that this was the Hammer of the Waters, it's possible that the horn fell into the Ironborn's hands during their raids into the Riverlands, since we know that the Greenseers of the Children congregated at the Isle of Faces on the God's Eye lake when they called upon the Hammer to break the Arm of Dorne. It also makes sense that Euron would not reveal the Hammer, given the subtle hints George has given that Euron intends to sacrifice his fellow Ironborn in pursuit of his goals:

“Why would I want that hard black rock? Brother, look again and see where I am seated.”

...

“Your victories are hollow. You cannot hold the Shields.”

“Why should I want to hold them?” His brother’s smiling eye glittered in the lantern light, blue and bold and full of malice. “The Shields have served my purpose. I took them with one hand, and gave them away with the other. A great king is open-handed, brother. It is up to the new lords to hold them now. The glory of winning those rocks will be mine forever. When they are lost, the defeat will belong to the four fools who so eagerly accepted my gifts.”

...

The dreams were even worse the second time. He saw the longships of the Ironborn adrift and burning on a boiling blood-red sea. (TWOW, The Forsaken)

Euron seated himself and gave his cloak a twitch, so it covered his private parts. "I had forgotten what a small and noisy folk they are, my ironborn. I would bring them dragons, and they shout out for grapes." (AFFC, The Reaver)

Clearly, Euron's ambitions exceed those of his fellow Ironborn, and this makes Aeron's vision of longships adrift on a boiling sea particularly ominous. At the end of "The Forsaken," Aeron Damphair, Euron's pregnant saltwife Falia Flowers, and a collection of holy men and women kidnapped by Euron are tied to the prows of his ships. With a naval battle looming between Euron's forces and the ships of the Hightower and Redwyne fleets, Euron's plan seems to be to use this naval battle in the Whispering Sound alongside his captives as the sacrifice required for the Hammer.

The evidence that Euron will sound the Hammer of the Waters is very strong IMO, as is the evidence for Wyk erupting. Firstly, we have Daenerys' visions from the House of the Undying in ACOK:

"From a smoking tower, a great stone beast took wing, breathing shadow fire. . . ." (ACOK, Daenerys IV)

The smoking tower most likely refers to the Hightower at Oldtown, while a 'great stone beast' that breathes 'shadow fire' sounds an awful lot like a volcano. That the beast takes wing and appears to fly can be seen as a reference to Euron's crow/raven symbolism, as well as his obsession with flying:

"When I was a boy, I dreamt that I could fly," he announced. "When I woke, I couldn't . . . or so the maester said. But what if he lied?"

...

"Perhaps we can fly. All of us. How will we ever know unless we leap from some tall tower?" The wind came gusting through the window and stirred his sable cloak. There was something obscene and disturbing about his nakedness. "No man ever truly knows what he can do unless he dares to leap." (AFFC, The Reaver)

We then have Melisandre's vision in ADWD:

Then the towers by the sea, crumbling as the dark tide came sweeping over them, rising from the depths.

...

"If it comes, that attack will be no more than a diversion. I saw towers by the sea, submerged beneath a black and bloody tide. That is where the heaviest blow will fall."

"Eastwatch?"

Was it? Melisandre had seen Eastwatch-by-the-Sea with King Stannis. That was where His Grace left Queen Selyse and their daughter Shireen when he assembled his knights for the march to Castle Black. The towers in her fire had been different, but that was oft the way with visions. (ADWD, Melisandre I)

Many of the theories I've seen about this vision identify the towers as Oldtown, and while I agree that the Hammer will devastate that city, the description doesn't quite add up. The Hightower and the Citadel are the only real towers associated with the city while House Costayne's seat of Three Towers, at the mouth of the Whispering Sound, was only briefly mentioned by Sam as the Cinnamon Wind approached Oldtown in AFFC. There's also the issue of Oldtown's location well inside the Whispering Sound and many miles from the sea. The Iron Islands fit the description quite nicely, in particular Ten Towers on Harlaw and Pyke itself:

Ten Towers had always felt like home to Asha, more so than Pyke. Not one castle, ten castles squashed together, she had thought, the first time she had seen it. She remembered breathless races up and down the steps and along wallwalks and covered bridges, fishing off the Long Stone Quay, days and nights lost amongst her uncle's wealth of books. His grandfather's grandfather had raised the castle, the newest on the isles. Lord Theomore Harlaw had lost three sons in the cradle and laid the blame upon the flooded cellars, damp stones, and festering nitre of ancient Harlaw Hall. Ten Towers was airier, more comfortable, better sited . . . but Lord Theomore was a changeable man, as any of his wives might have testified. He'd had six of those, as dissimilar as his ten towers. (AFFC, The Kraken's Daughter)

As it happens, Harlaw is situated right next to Old and Great Wyk; but the tower imagery is even more pronounced with Pyke:

The Greyjoy stronghold stood upon a broken headland, its keeps and towers built atop massive stone stacks that thrust up from the sea. Bridges knotted Pyke together; arched bridges of carved stone and swaying spans of hempen rope and wooden planks.

...

Greydon left him when the sun was up, to take the news of Balon's death to his cousins in their towers at Downdelving, Crow Spike Keep, and Corpse Lake. Aeron continued on alone, up hills and down vales along a stony track that drew wider and more traveled as he neared the sea. (AFFC, The Prophet)

The shore was all sharp rocks and glowering cliffs, and the castle seemed one with the rest, its towers and walls and bridges quarried from the same grey-black stone, wet by the same salt waves, festooned with the same spreading patches of dark green lichen, speckled by the droppings of the same seabirds. The point of land on which the Greyjoys had raised their fortress had once thrust like a sword into the bowels of the ocean, but the waves had hammered at it day and night until the land broke and shattered, thousands of years past. All that remained were three bare and barren islands and a dozen towering stacks of rock that rose from the water like the pillars of some sea god's temple, while the angry waves foamed and crashed among them.

Drear, dark, forbidding, Pyke stood atop those islands and pillars, almost a part of them, its curtain wall closing off the headland around the foot of the great stone bridge that leapt from the clifftop to the largest islet, dominated by the massive bulk of the Great Keep. Farther out were the Kitchen Keep and the Bloody Keep, each on its own island. Towers and outbuildings clung to the stacks beyond, linked to each other by covered archways when the pillars stood close, by long swaying walks of wood and rope when they did not. (ACOK, Theon I)

What became of Valyria is well-known, and in the Iron Islands, the castle of Pyke sits on stacks of stone that were once part of the greater island before segments of it crumbled into the sea. (TWOIAF, Ancient History: The Coming of the First Men)

What remains of Pyke today is a complex of towers and keeps scattered across half a dozen islets and sea stacks above the booming waves. A section of curtain wall, with a great gatehouse and defensive towers, stretches across the headland, the only access to the castle, and is all that remains of the original fortress. A stone bridge from the headland leads to the first and largest islets and Great Keep of Pyke.

Beyond that, rope bridges connect the towers one to the other.... Beneath the castle walls, the waves still smash against the remaining rock stacks day and night, and one day those too will doubtless crash into the sea. (TWOIAF, The Iron Islands: Pyke)

Earthquakes, tsunamis and a volcanic eruption would more than suffice to submerge Pyke beneath the waves. Such a cataclysm striking the Iron Islands would also fit with Aeron's vision of Ironborn longships adrift on a bloody, boiling sea; while this could refer to Victarion's Iron Fleet and it's close proximity to Valyria and the Smoking Sea, we know that the ships of the Iron Fleet are larger than the normal longships of the Ironborn, and I believe it further points towards a disaster befalling the Ironborn as a result of Euron's schemes.

The final and most blatant evidence for Wyk erupting comes from Victarion, who offers this account of the Doom of Valyria while stopped at the Isle of Cedars near Slavers Bay:

On the day the Doom came to Valyria, it was said, a wall of water three hundred feet high had descended on the island, drowning hundreds of thousands of men, women, and children, leaving none to tell the tale but some fisherfolk who had been at sea and a handful of Velosi spearmen posted in a stout stone tower on the island's highest hill, who had seen the hills and valleys beneath them turn into a raging sea. Fair Velos with its palaces of cedar and pink marble had vanished in a heartbeat. On the north end of the island, the ancient brick walls and stepped pyramids of the slaver port Ghozai had suffered the same fate.

So many drowned men, the Drowned God will be strong there, Victarion had thought when he chose the island for the three parts of his fleet to join up again. He was no priest, though. What if he had gotten it backwards? Perhaps the Drowned God had destroyed the island in his wroth. His brother Aeron might have known, but the Damphair was back on the Iron Islands, preaching against the Crow's Eye and his rule. No godless man may sit the Seastone Chair. Yet the captains and kings had cried for Euron at the kingsmoot, choosing him above Victarion and other godly men. (ADWD, The Iron Suitor)

This passage is what sold me on this theory being more than just tin foil, as the elements it employs fit a Wyk eruption scenario perfectly. We have a massive volcanic eruption accompanied by tsunamis, along with Victarion's musing on whether the disaster was a punishment from the Drowned God. This fits perfectly with the idea of the Drowned God being a submerged volcano, as it's subsequent eruption could be seen as divine punishment for placing a 'godless man' upon the Seastone Chair.

Even more suggestive is the description of the wave's height, and how some Velosi spearmen survived due to being in a stone tower atop a hill. The Hightower of Oldtown is said to be as tall as the Wall or over 700 feet tall, with it's base being constructed from fused black stone similar to the Valyrian roads. Even more telling, the island on which the Hightower sits is called Battle Isle, which is similar to another name for the Isle of Cedars:

The girlish maester Euron had inflicted upon him back in Westeros claimed this place had once been called 'the Isle of a Hundred Battles,' but the men who had fought those battles had all gone to dust centuries ago. (ADWD, The Iron Suitor)

In the event that Euron attacks Oldtown, I expect him to make a bee-line for the top of the Hightower, and not so he can see the Wall and bring it down with the Horn of Joramun. Rather, it's because the top of the Hightower might be the only relatively safe place for miles when he sounds the Hammer of the Waters and unleashes a 'black and bloody tide.'

#asoiaf #got

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