PROTO-VALYRIAN SOCIETY AND ORIGINS:
CIRCA 9,000-7,900 B.D.

“I served the Freehold. My duties were clerical, not martial, yet I lent my hand to the ordering of records, the classification of rites, and the quiet removal of those deemed obsolete. I believed, as many did, that Valyria was permanent, and that what was permanent could afford to discard what it no longer required. The Doom proved otherwise. Thirty-five years have passed, and I write now among ruins that care nothing for hierarchy, pedigree, or intent.

This work forms part of the Reclamation, an effort undertaken by survivors who understood, too late, that memory is as fragile as stone. We gathered what could be gathered, fragments of inscriptions, half-kept rituals, songs remembered without meaning, and testimonies shaped by fear, pride, or grief. Much of what we found contradicted what I once helped record. Much more had no surviving frame at all. The people here, named the ‘Proto-Valyrians’, are described not with certainty, but with approximation, a term applied for convenience to cultures that existed before dragons reshaped power and before blood determined authority.

I do not claim neutrality. I benefited from the Freehold’s order, and I outlived it by chance rather than merit. What follows is not an absolution, nor an indictment, but a reckoning assembled from what escaped both suppression and fire. If these pages seem incomplete, it is because they are. If they seem to argue with themselves, it is because Valyria did so long before it fell. We preserve these remains not to restore what was lost, but to ensure that what endured beneath the empire is not erased a second time.”

-From On Ash and the Ordering of Memory, a Reclamation record, by Belarys of the Fourth Registry, formerly a functionary of the Valyrian Freehold, set down in the thirty-fifth year after the Doom

TL;DR: PROTO-VALYRIAN SOCIETY

Social Order:

Clans ruled through ritual authority, mineral wealth, and rites of passage.
Influence was tied to metallurgy, gemcraft, and interpretation of divine omens.

Cultural Character:

Early Valyrians revered natural cycles, sacred landscapes, and harmony with the land.
Their society emphasized craft, religious rites, ancestor veneration, and social rituals.

Knowledge Systems:

Oral traditions dominated, centered around elemental lore and mytho-historical lineage.
Caves and ritual groves housed early records and sacred ritual tools.

Trade and Economy:

Worked-crystal objects, obsidian blades, and bronze tools
Sea Trade: The Valyrians are believed to have traveled as far as Oldtown, predating the arrival of the First Men and trading with the elder races, according to Jellicoe.
Septon Barth also claimed Valyrians came to Westeros because their priests prophesied that the Doom of Man would come out of the land beyond the Narrow Sea.

PROTO-VALYRIAN, GEOGRAPHY AND HISTORY:

Before the rise of dragonlords and empire, the peoples later known as Valyrian existed as a distinct but ununified population shaped by the harsh geography of the peninsula. Contemporary descriptions, preserved only in fragments, describe a long-limbed, pale-skinned, dark-haired people accustomed to volcanic soil, unstable ground, and a landscape that is both fertile and dangerous. Their communities were small, dispersed, and bound more by custom than by centralized authority.

Several Proto-Valyrian settlements are known to have existed before the rise of the Freehold, sometime between 9,000 and 7,300 years before the Doom of Valyria. Though their early forms were modest, their locations shaped the development of Valyrian power:

Valyria stood at the heart of the lower peninsula and served as the central settlement around which Valyrian identity and authority gradually coalesced.

Draconys lay to the south of Valyria at the farthest tip of the peninsula, overlooking the seas and anchoring Valyria’s earliest southern reach.

Mhysa Faer was situated east of Valyria, likely serving as an early agricultural and pastoral hub supporting nearby communities.

Rhyos rose to the west of Valyria, its position suggesting early engagement with coastal routes and inland movement.

Tyria emerged north of Valyria near a mountain pass that helped shelter the lower peninsula, later becoming a strategic gate through which movement and defense were controlled.

PROTO-VALYRIAN PEOPLE, LANGUAGE, AND CULTURE:

The language spoken among them was an early precursor to High Valyrian, lacking its later formalization but already marked by precision and ritual use. Meaning was preserved not solely through speech, but through carved glyphs set into stone, formalized chants, and oral recitation. These served both practical and ceremonial functions, carrying lineage, obligation, and memory. Cultural practice was deeply animistic, with reverence shown to ancestors and to the land itself. Sacred groves, volcanic springs, and burial cairns formed the spiritual and social centers of settlements. Those regarded as healers or dream-readers practiced forms of herbal augury and omen-reading, while artisans embedded symbolic meaning into worked stone and bronze, producing objects that served ritual as much as utility.

Despite the isolation of individual clans, cultural continuity was maintained through movement. Seasonal gatherings, rites of fertility, and communal feasts reinforced shared identity, while wanderers traveled between settlements, carrying songs, tales, and remembered events. In the absence of a written chronicle, these itinerant figures served as living record keepers, ensuring that knowledge, custom, and memory endured beyond any single place or generation.

STRUCTURE OF PROTO-VALYRIAN SOCIETY:

HIGH CLANS:

Ritual leaders, metallurgists, sky-watchers, grove tenders. Authority based on cultural centers, ancestry, and elemental magic.

ARTISANS AND CRAFTERS:

Skilled works of obsidian, crystal, bronze, or other ritual, ceremonial, or everyday use items.

CLANSFOLK:

Shepherds, herders, and agriculturalists. Clan identity is central to daily life.

RITUAL SSTEWARDS:

Conducted seasonal rites, maintained sacred sites such as groves, springs, and caves.

HEALERS, DREAMERS, AND SINGERS:

Herbalists, bone-charters, and cloud-readers. Mystical intermediaries.

WANDERS AND PILGRIMS:

Traveling singers, lore-bearers, weather-priests.

PROTO-VALYRIAN MAGICAL TRADITIONS:

The magical practices of the Proto-Valyrian peoples appear to have been inseparable from daily life and the natural world. Surviving descriptions suggest a tradition rooted in pastoral and elemental observation, drawing perceived power from the rhythms of land, weather, animal movement, and seasonal change rather than from abstraction or formal doctrine. Magic, where it was recognized as such, manifested through chants, mineral resonance, herbal augury, and the maintenance of sacred spaces, particularly groves and volcanic springs believed to hold enduring potency.

Divinatory practices were varied and local. Omens were sought in hoofprints, shifting clouds, smoke patterns, and dreams, while some accounts describe the use of harmonic chanting within caves or enclosed stone spaces to induce healing, trance, or vision. These practices were not uniform across the peninsula and appear to have differed from clan to clan, shaped by geography as much as by inheritance.

There is no evidence of centralized schools, codified texts, or institutional authority governing Proto-Valyrian magical knowledge. Transmission occurred orally and ritually, passed between generations through symbolic acts, trance states, and instruction overseen by elders, spirit-callers, or those recognized for their aptitude. Authority derived from experience and communal recognition rather than hierarchy, and magical practice remained embedded within social and spiritual life rather than standing apart from it.

PROTO-VALYRIAN TRADE AND ECONOMY:

The Proto-Valyrian communities sustained themselves through herding and small-scale agriculture, adapted to the peninsula’s volatile terrain. Archaeological fragments and later accounts indicate a high degree of skill in metallurgy, particularly in the working of bronze and obsidian. From these materials, they produced blades, tools, and ritual objects, which entered early networks of exchange with neighboring peoples. In return, they acquired goods scarce in their homeland, including salt, timber, and rare herbs. These exchanges were limited in scale but enduring, and they formed the foundation upon which later Valyrian trade routes would be expanded and formalized under the Freehold.

Some later sources suggest that Proto-Valyrian contact extended farther than the peninsula itself. The chronicler Jellicoe records traditions claiming Valyrian voyagers reached as far as Oldtown, predating the arrival of the First Men and engaging in trade with elder races whose identities are now uncertain. Such accounts are disputed and lack contemporary corroboration, yet their persistence across multiple traditions has prevented their full dismissal.

Other explanations for westward travel are explicitly theological. Septon Barth writes that Valyrian priests believed calamity, described as the Doom of Man, would one day come from the lands beyond the Narrow Sea, prompting exploratory voyages motivated as much by prophecy as by commerce. Whether such beliefs reflect Proto-Valyrian practice or later Valyrian reinterpretation remains unclear, and no surviving record reconciles these traditions. What can be said with confidence is that Valyria’s engagement with the wider world began earlier and more tentatively than later imperial histories often admit.

PROTO-VALYRIAN BONDING WITH DRAGONS AND CULTURAL SHIFT:

The mastery of dragons lies at the foundation of Valyrian power, yet its beginnings are obscured by distance, loss, and deliberate shaping of memory. Long before dragons were wielded as instruments of war, they were feared and revered as forces of nature, dwelling amid the volcanic lands of the Fourteen Flames. In the oldest Valyrian traditions, these beasts are said to have been native to the peninsula, endured rather than controlled, their presence woven into the dangers and rhythms of daily life. Familiarity, purchased through generations of peril and sacrifice, is presented as the slow and costly precondition for later mastery. Within these accounts, the first dragonlords do not appear as conquerors by intent, but as survivors who learned, at ruinous cost, to bind living fire to human will.

Other traditions dispute this origin. Beyond Valyria, particularly in the east, the shadowbinders of Asshai-by-the-Shadow claim that the knowledge required to command dragons was not discovered but taught, carried west from older and darker sources. These accounts do not contest the presence of dragons in Valyria, but instead assert dominion over the means by which they were bound. Horns, whips, spells, and blood are named as tools of subjugation, and the telling grows more elaborate with each retelling, shaped by rivalry, resentment, and the desire to claim primacy over a power that reshaped the world.

THE RISE OF THE VALYRIAN FREEHOLD:

The emergence of dragonbonding marked the most profound rupture in Valyrian history. It was not merely the acquisition of a new weapon, but the introduction of a force so disproportionate that it shattered the balance of an existing world. A society previously ordered around land, season, and survival was suddenly possessed of a power capable of annihilation beyond scale or precedent. From this moment onward, Valyrian history ceased to move gradually; It accelerated, violently and irreversibly.

Ancient Valyria had long been sheltered within the ring of the Fourteen Flames, its people shaped by volcanic soil and ever-present danger. Valyrian traditions insist that dragons were native to these lands, creatures endured and feared long before they were mastered. Other accounts, preserved far to the east, contest this claim. The shadowbinders of Asshai-by-the-Shadow maintain that while dragons may have dwelt in Valyria, the knowledge required to command them was imported from older and darker traditions, taught by a vanished people from the Shadow Lands. In these tellings, dragonbinding was not a discovery, but a theft. No surviving source reconciles these traditions, and both likely reflect competing attempts to claim authority over a power that reshaped the world.

VEIL OF FIRE GAME OF THRONES INSPIRED ROLEPLAY ​

PROTO-VALYRIAN SOCIETY AND ORIGINS: CIRCA 9,000-7,900 B.D.