One thousand years prior to the events of the novels, a great host of refugees from the region of the River Rhoyne on the eastern continent-displaced by the growing power of a distant empire called Valyria-crossed the narrow sea under the warrior-queen Nymeria and landed in the southern-most part of Westeros.

There is afoot an evil design to remove from positions of leadership those noble and hard-working sons of American pioneers who made these islands great and to supplant them with crafty Orientals whose sole purpose is not the betterment of their people but the aggrandizement of a distant and alien empire.

If I should develop cancer of the eyes, then before I succumb to it or go blind, I will one late afternoon go down to the sea and stand facing those distant Asian empires where I will never walk.

The prospect of a triumphant military and religious unification with distant Christian empires thus increased in its attraction to European leaders.

It is debatable whether these new entities have behaved better than the cruel and distant empires they displaced.

Even among the gorgeous trappings of the men of Helium and the visitors from distant empires those of the stranger were remarkable for their barbaric splendor.

In ancient tales of quests, the hero travels to distant empires and then escapes home, leaving the distant land far behind forever.

But amid the political passivity that is a hallmark of the Balkans - the legacy of centuries of rule by distant empires and then Communist regimes - there is a particular raggedness and torpor about Serbia today that suggests a day of awakening, quite possibly a violent one, may come.

The distant empire of Kuromon is based on China and Japan.

In Britain the railways began in the 1800s, in Germany in the 1840s, but in invisible Poland the railways were not so much a network as the far flung provincial extensions of three distant empires.