Before the dragonlords of Valyria rose to rule the eastern world, the first and greatest of its empires was that of Old Ghis, a realm founded upon the marching valor of its fabled lockstep legions and the toil of its numberless slaves. When the Valyrian Freehold began to spread outward from the Lands of the Long Summer, the two powers could not long abide one another, and they fell to war not once but five times across the better part of a thousand years. Each time the might of Ghis was set against the sorcery of the dragonlords, and each time it was the dragons that decided the matter, for no legion, however disciplined, could stand against fire falling from the sky.
In the fifth and last of these wars the Valyrians made an end of their rival. Old Ghis was taken and put to the torch; her mighty brick walls were pulled down, her people slain or bound into slavery, and the fields about her sown with salt and sulfur so that nothing would ever grow there again. So perished the oldest empire of the known world, and Valyria stood without peer. Yet the Ghiscari themselves did not wholly vanish, for the cities of Astapor, Yunkai, and Meereen along Slaver's Bay were their heirs, and their descendants clung stubbornly to the memory of the empire that was, even as they spoke the tongue of their conquerors and worshipped the dragons that had unmade them.