the Dothraki Sea.

Named not for its waters but for how freely its conquerors roam upon it.

A traveler on the Dothraki Sea will find few villages and no farms.

Because the Dothraki view it as a sin to cut into their Mother Earth with plows and shovels.

And the Dothraki know only one punishment.

The closest the Dothraki approach to civilization is Vaes Dothrak.

Though to outsiders, it doesn't look like a city.

There are no walls, because the Dothraki believe only cowards hide behind them, instead of

facing an enemy blade in hand.

But the Dothraki couldn't do that here either.

Within the bounds of the city, no one, not even the mightiest khal, may carry a blade,

by order of the priestesses of the Dosh khaleen.

Not that any enemy would be foolish enough to attack the sacred city of the Dothraki

in the first place.

Two giant bronze stallions rear over the entrance to the city, their hooves meeting in the air

to form an arch.

The famous Horse Gate.

Through it is the Godsway, where the Dothraki drag the sacred idols of the cities and peoples

they've broken.

Along one side, stone gods look down on you from cracked thrones with chipped and stained

faces, their names lost to time.

Across the road, monsters watch you pass.

Black iron dragons with jewels for eyes, roaring griffins, manticores with barbed tails poised

to strike and other terrible beasts from every corner of Essos.

But there is nothing to fear.

If these gods and devils had any power, they would never have ended here.

Not all foreign gods in Vaes Dothrak are broken.

In the Eastern and Western Markets, merchants worship their god of trade with the sufferance

of the Dothraki, who themselves don't understand buying and selling.

The Western Market is a great square of beaten earth filled with animal pens, drinking halls

and a maze of stalls and crooked aisles.

Even goods from Westeros find their way here.

Though the merchants who sell them wouldn't know a Lannister from a Frey.

The Eastern Market is, fittingly, a stranger place.

The elders of the Dosh khaleen view it with suspicion and most Dothraki stay away.

They aren't wrong.

The great elephants, the basilisks in silver cages and the striped black-and-white horses

of the Jogos Nhai are harmless enough.

But I can see how the elders wouldn't want their younger members to see the warrior maids

of Hyrkoon, who wear iron rings in their nipples and rubies in their cheeks.

Or listen to the Shadow Men, who cover their bodies with tattoos and hide their faces behind

masks and whisper dark secrets for a price.

This is all of Vaes Dothrak that foreigners ever know.

For only Dothraki are permitted in the inner city where the Dosh khaleen live out their

lives.

A bloodrider, drunk on fermented mare's milk, once told me that the Dosh khaleen are stewards.

They prepare for the day when every rider of every khalasar shall return to the city.

And the Dothraki truly will be one blood and one khalasar again, under the greatest khal

of all, the Stallion Who Mounts the World.

He will ride to the ends of the earth and grind nations into dust, and take the whole

world as his herd.

Or so the prophecy goes.

Yet the world is vast, with many places a horse can't go.

The Stallion Who Mounts the World couldn't rear above a mountain range.

Or leap across the sea.

Still, the world has been conquered before.

Just not with stallions.