Thousands of years after the First Men had made their peace with the children of the forest and taken up the worship of the old gods, a new people came out of the east across the narrow sea. These were the Andals, a tall and warlike folk who had learned the working of iron in the hills of Andalos and who carried a new faith, the worship of the Seven, cutting the seven-pointed star into their flesh so that all might know their devotion. They came first in a trickle and then in a flood of longships, landing at the Fingers of the Vale and along the shores of the riverlands and the narrow sea, and wherever they landed they made war upon the kingdoms of the First Men. Their iron swords bit through bronze, and their septons preached that the Seven had granted them the whole of Westeros; they burned the weirwoods, put the children of the forest to the sword wherever they were found, and hunted that ancient people to ruin, so that south of the Neck the children all but vanished from the world.
Kingdom after kingdom of the First Men fell before them. In the Vale the Andals overthrew the old kings and raised up new houses of their own, and in the riverlands they broke the last of the river kings, for even Tristifer IV Mudd, the Hammer of Justice, who had won ninety-nine battles against them, was slain in his hundredth. Yet the histories agree that the Andal tide, which drowned all the south, broke and turned back at one place only, the swamps and bogs of the Neck. There the Kings of Winter of House Stark held the causeway against every host the Andals sent north, and the crannogmen harried the invaders through the fens until they gave up the attempt, so that the North alone of all the realms of Westeros was never conquered by the Andals. From that day the North kept the blood of the First Men and the faith of the old gods, while the six kingdoms to the south became a mingling of Andal and First Men, worshipping the Seven and remembering the old ways only in the songs and in the ancient names of their houses.