In the disorder of the early Dornish war there arose a Dornish lord who styled himself the Vulture King, though his true name is not recorded, and gathered to his banners a great rabble out of the Red Mountains and the passes above the Dornish Marches. His host was said to number in the tens of thousands, more a swarm than an army, and it fell upon the marcher lands of the stormlands and the reach, burning and looting the holdings of Dondarrion, Caron, and their neighbors. Because his followers were many and ill-disciplined, the Vulture King could not hold them together for long, and the very size of his host proved his undoing.
The uprising was met and broken by the marcher lords in concert with the crown. Lord Orys Baratheon, Hand of the King, led the royal answer, and by some accounts Prince Aegon and his sisters lent their dragons to the scattering of the vulture's rabble. The great host was dispersed and its would-be king undone. Yet the marches would not lie quiet, for a second Vulture King and later a third would rise in the years to come, and the wars of the Red Mountains long outlived the first pretender to bear the name.
It was in the fighting of the marches that Orys Baratheon met his bitterest reversal, taken captive by the Wyl of Wyl, the fierce lord whose house held the pass called the Boneway. To ransom him the crown paid dear, for the Wyl struck off Orys's sword hand and sent it back with the message that he was returning the Hand's own hand. Orys never rode to war again with the same vigor, and he nursed a hatred for House Wyl to the end of his days, a hatred his son would one day carry back into the mountains in blood.