The Drowning of the Summer Isles

The talking histories of the Summer Isles — for the islanders entrust their past to trained speakers rather than books — tell that the isles were once far greater than they are: a realm of many more islands, and those larger, before the sea rose in wrath in the deep past. In that cataclysm, whole cities went beneath the waves and the low country drowned, leaving the isles smaller and scattered as the sailor knows them today, green mountains standing where a wider land had been. Fishermen still speak of streets and towers glimpsed below clear water, and the memory of the flood runs through the islanders' oldest prayers. The maesters, having no writings of the isles from that age, mark the tale as legend — while conceding that the singers of every land, from the children of the forest to the Rhoynar, remember some great breaking of the waters in the morning of the world.