Hardhome

**Hardhome** is a wildling settlement on the tip of the peninsula Storrold's Point on the Shivering Sea. Though a forsaken and abandoned ruin for more than six hundred years, recently its population has started to grow.

## Layout

Hardhome sits on a sheltered bay and has natural harbour deep enough for the biggest ships afloat. Wood and stone are plentiful near there. The waters teem with fish, and there are colonies of seals and sea cows close at hand. A great cliff looms above the settlement, pocked with cave mouths.

In the sixth moon of 370 AC, Hardhome has become populated by wildlings once again. Originally living in the caves, the free folk of Hardhome now have a wall around their settlement and houses made of wood and broken ships. The free folk there live off the fish that swim in the bay and by hunting in the Haunted Forest. The settlement has become known among other free folk tribes in the vicinity, such as those of the Haunted Forest, Whitetree and the River Antler through the accomplishments of its chieftain, Rorge of Hardhome.

## History

Hardhome was close to becoming the only true town north of the Wall. Before its destruction, Maester Wyllis journeyed to Hardhome aboard a Pentoshi trader and established himself as a healer and counselor under the protection of Gorm the Wolf, one of the four chieftains who controlled the settlement, so that he may write of the local customs. However, Gorm was murdered and Wyllis, in mortal danger, fled back to Oldtown, where he wrote *Hardhome: An Account of Three Years Spent Beyond-the-Wall among Savages, Raiders, and Woods-witches*. One night, 600 years ago (about 300 years before Aegon's Landing), Hardhome was destroyed.

Something terrible happened that night; the details are uncertain. Its people are said to have been carried off into slavery by slavers from across the Narrow Sea or slaughtered for meat by cannibals out of Skagos, depending on the tale one chooses believe. The homes of the inhabitants of Hardhome were said to have burned with flames so high and hot that the watchers on the Wall far to the south thought that the sun was rising in from the north. Afterwards, ashes rained down on the haunted forest and the Shivering Sea alike for almost half a year.

Traders and a ship sent by the Night's Watch to investigate reported only nightmarish devastation where Hardhome had stood, a landscape of charred trees and burned bones, waters choked with swollen corpses and blood-chilling shrieks echoing from the cave mouths that pock the great cliff that looms above the settlement, a cliff where no living man or woman could be found.

After that Hardhome was shunned. The wildlings never settled the site again, and rangers roaming north of the Wall told tales of the overgrown ruins of Hardhome being haunted by ghouls, demons, and burning ghosts with an unhealthy taste for blood. This was, until around 355 AC or earlier wildlings had begun to take refuge in the caves near Hardhome.

Around 357 AC the wildlings began restoring the settlement in Hardhome and came out of the caves. They brought down trees and captured ships that were sailing nearby, and made wooden houses and a small, wooden wall to protect Hardhome from other wildling tribes. In time, the settlement grew larger and stronger, with the leadership of Rorge of Hardhome behind it. In 365 AC, a chieftain by the name of Gorne the Gargantuan attacked Hardhome. When the chieftain learned that the leader of the people of Hardhome was his own son, he allowed himself to be slain, making his clansmen either disband into the Haunted Forest or join the settlement.