The Moonshadow Mountains emerge as a perilous passage through the Vale, where winter conditions and attacks on marching forces could undo a campaign before its army reached the Bloody Gate. They also formed part of the setting for Prince Aemond’s raids and the last recorded sighting of Nettles and Sheepstealer in Westeros.

Terrain and Passage

During the Vale campaign, Ser Robert Rowan’s host advanced along the high road through deep snow in the higher passes. The conditions slowed the army to a crawl, while mountain clans repeatedly attacked its baggage train. The clans were described as descendants of First Men driven from the Vale by the Andals thousands of years earlier. Their attacks, combined with cold and hunger, steadily depleted the force as it struggled through the mountains.

The route offered little shelter. One night, with the column gathered around its campfires, a cave mouth could be seen from the road. A dozen men climbed to it seeking protection from the wind; bones scattered at the entrance did not stop them from going inside, where they disturbed a dragon.

Sheepstealer and Nettles

The dragon that emerged was Sheepstealer. In the fighting that followed, sixteen men died and sixty more were burned before the brown dragon took flight, carrying a ragged woman on its back. The woman was Nettles, whose escape with Sheepstealer became the last known sighting of the pair recorded in Westerosi annals.

The account distinguishes that recorded disappearance from the stories that endured locally. Mountain clans continued to tell of a fire witch living in a hidden vale, and of youths who brought her gifts and returned with burns as proof of their courage. The tales preserve Nettles and the dragon not as figures of the campaign record alone, but as presences in the mountains’ folklore.

Campaign’s Cost

The dragon encounter was only one of the expedition’s dangers. By the time the surviving men reached the Bloody Gate, a third of Ser Robert Rowan’s host had died from clan attacks, cold, or hunger. Ser Robert himself was among the dead, crushed when clansmen brought down part of a mountainside onto the column. Bloody Ben Blackwood took command in his place.

At the Bloody Gate, the survivors found food, warmth, and welcome, but their ordeal had left them in no condition to fight. Ser Joffrey Arryn judged that the exhausted force would burden rather than aid the Vale’s campaign. The mountains had therefore exacted a strategic cost as well as a human one: the army arrived diminished and unable to provide the military support expected of it.

Raids in the Foothills

The Moonshadow Mountains also appear in the account of Prince Aemond’s movements during the Dance of the Dragons. While Prince Daemon Targaryen and Nettles searched for him from Maidenpool, Aemond struck at Stonyhead in the foothills of the mountains, as well as settlements elsewhere in the riverlands. He repeatedly vanished before the dragonriders hunting him could arrive. In this episode, the foothills mark one point in a wider pattern of swift raids, rather than a place where Aemond was brought to battle.