"Fire and Blood" by George R.R. Martin, List 1

Its location athwart the Gullet gave its lords a stranglehold on Blackwater Bay and enabled both the Targaryens and their close allies, the Velaryons of Driftmark (a lesser house of Valyrian descent) to fill their coffers off the passing trade.

Argilac had the hands of Aegon's envoy cut off and returned to him in a box.

Though claimed by both Storm's End and Harrenhal, the river mouth was undefended, and the closest castles were held by lesser lords of no great power or military prowess, and lords moreover who had little reason to love their nominal overlord, Harren the Black.

Aegon Targaryen quickly threw up a log-and-earth palisade around the highest of the three hills, and dispatched his sisters to secure the submission of the nearest castles.

Though possessed of the silver-gold hair and purple eyes of Valyria, hers was a harsh, austere beauty. Even those who loved her best found Visenya stern, serious, and unforgiving; some said that she played with poisons and dabbled in dark sorceries.

Whilst no one ever questioned Visenya's fidelity to her brother-husband, Rhaenys surrounded herself with comely young men, and (it was whispered) even entertained some in her bedchambers on the nights when Aegon was with her elder sister.

And Orys Baratheon he proclaimed to be “my shield, my stalwart, my strong right hand.”

The largest castle ever raised in Westeros, Harrenhal boasted five gargantuan towers, an inexhaustible source of fresh water, huge subterranean vaults well stocked with provisions, and massive walls of black stone higher than any ladder and too thick to be broken by any ram or shattered by a trebuchet.

Once inside, he sent every man of his to the parapets, armed with spears and bows and crossbows, promising lands and riches to whichever of them could bring the dragon down.

The riverlords outside the castle walls said later that the towers of Harrenhal glowed red against the night, like five great candles...and like candles, they began to twist and melt as runnels of molten stone ran down their sides.

The next day, outside the smoking ruins of Harrenhal, King Aegon accepted an oath of fealty from Edmyn Tully, Lord of Riverrun, and named him Lord Paramount of the Trident.

The other riverlords did homage as well, to Aegon as king and to Edmyn Tully as their liege lord.

Thrice Argilac the Arrogant led his knights against the Baratheon positions, but the slopes were steep and the rains had turned the ground soft and muddy, so the warhorses struggled and foundered, and the charges lost all cohesion and momentum.

At the town of Stoney Sept, both his queens joined him with their dragons—Rhaenys from Storm’s End and Visenya from Crackclaw Point, where she had accepted many fervent pledges of fealty from the local lords.

Lord Mooton's men, safely upwind of the conflagration, waited with their bows and spears, and made short work of the burned and burning men who came staggering from the inferno.

In reward Aegon granted him Highgarden and all its domains, naming him Warden of the South and Lord Paramount of the Mander, and giving him dominion over all House Gardener's former vassals.

When the High Septon told him of the vision vouchsafed him by the Crone, Lord Hightower determined that he would not oppose the Conqueror by force of arms.

As the Arryn fleet had largely been destroyed during the Conquest, the king commanded his Warden of the North, Torrhen Stark of Winterfell, to end the Sistermen's Rebellion, and a northern army departed from White Harbor on a fleet of hired Braavosi galleys, under the command of Ser Warrick Manderly.

The sight of his sails, and the sudden appearance of Queen Visenya and Vhagar in the skies above Sisterton, took the heart out of the Sistermen; they promptly deposed Queen Marla in favor of her younger brother.

Other claimants arose on Great Wyk, Pyke, and Orkmont, and for more than a year their adherents battled one another on land and sea.

On Old Wyk, the priest-king Lodos, purported son of the Drowned God, called upon the krakens of the deep to rise and drag down the invaders’ ships.

The denizens of the floating town took to the river for refuge from the flames, so fewer than a hundred died in the attack, and most of those from drowning rather than dragonfire.

The king's army was already running short of food and fodder by the time they emerged from the Prince's Pass to face the Dornish sands.

His horses struggled on the stony slopes of the narrow, twisting passes, but many balked completely when they reached the steepest sections of the road, where the Dornish had chiseled steps into the mountains.

After burning the Planky Town, she had taken Lemonwood, Spottswood, and Stinkwater, accepting obeisances from old women and children, but nowhere finding an actual enemy.

When word of the Defenestration of Sunspear reached the Hellholt, Lord Tyrell gathered his remaining strength and set off across the sands.

Oldtown’s walls proved too strong for the Dornish to overcome, but Dayne burned fields, farms, and villages for twenty leagues around the city, and slew Lord Hightower’s younger son, Garmon, when the boy led a sortie against him.

Only two of the killers lived to collect their rewards, however, and the Dornishmen took their reprisals, repaying blood with blood.

By then Dorne was a smoking desert, beset by famine, plague, and blight.

The king was weary of war, all men agreed, but granting the Dornishmen peace without submission would be tantamount to saying that his beloved sister Rhaenys had died in vain, that all the blood and death had been for naught.

Certain septons even went so far as to suggest that the missive was ensorceled, that it had been written by the Yellow Toad before her death, using a vial of Queen Rhaenys's own blood for ink, so that the king would be helpless to resist its malign magic.

The Dornish “victory” (if victory it was) was seen to be dishonorable, and the survivors of the fight, and the sons and brothers of those who had fallen, promised one another that another day would come, and with it a reckoning.

Their vengeance would need to wait for a future generation, and the accession of a younger, more bloodthirsty king.

Much of every royal progress was given over to feasts and balls and hunts and hawking, as every lord attempted to outdo the others in splendor and hospitality, but Aegon also made a point of holding court wherever he might travel, whether from a dais in some great lord's castle or a mossy stone in a farmer's field.

He allowed his lords to continue to rule much as they always had, with all the same powers and prerogatives.

Arguments between the great houses of the realm were adjudicated by the Crown.

Wealthy men raised walled manses on the hillsides, whilst the poor gathered in squalid hovels of mud and straw in the low places between.

Queen Rhaenys was a great patron to the bards and singers of the Seven Kingdoms, showering gold and gifts on those who pleased her. Though Queen Visenya thought her sister frivolous, there was a wisdom in this that went beyond a simple love of music.

She was not without humor, however, and for many years kept her own fool, a hirsute hunchback called Lord Monkeyface whose antics amused her greatly.

Some even suggest that she might have been a kinslayer and a kingslayer, though no proof has ever been offered to support such calumnies.