A Song of Ice and Fine Writing

In 2019, HBO airs the last season of the sword-and-dragon saga Game of Thrones, with stories going chronologically past what author George R. R. Martin has completed in his series of novels, A Song Of Ice And Fire.  
 
We’ve obtained permission to reprint some of Martin’s original prose, to remind fans why they loved the books and to encourage them to keep up the pressure on the perfectionist author to finish his epic.

 

Ceirse Lannister was all scowly-scowl as she walked to the gold and silver and blue-tinged ivied window, without her long hair moving at all from side to side because she was angry, as per her usual. One of her children had sat on the Iron Throne like a child torturing small dogs, and one, her only daughter unless she’d forgotten one, was murdered by a foe, and now the third child, also on the Iron Throne, was a wuss. She handled her supple thighs. Oh! she thought, if only I was having sex with my brother! For this was her secret vice that only the people around her and the people they talked to and their families and friends and courtiers and the people they talked to were aware of.

Jon Snow’s face puckered in a fearful way, his mustache drooping above his downturned mouth like a spoon balanced on an egg. He thought he was doomed because of being an outnumbered bastard as usual, but then! Zoom! Gallop! A whole other army came around the corner of the mountain! It was a saving army from the Vale! Gallop, stab, swoosh! Bastard, eh? he thought, in his self-doubtful way, I’ll show them! And he no doubt would, if he could somehow overpower his deep inner bastard-being.

Meanwhile, Denaerys smiled her enigmatic smile. I have dragons, she thought, even though they can’t be trusted not to set fire to sheep and children. And I am the Breaker of Chains, she thought, even though that only happened once and it was because the dragons softened the steel, so it was really basically all them. I wonder whose slaves I will free next, she thought, kindly. But it was more complex than that! She took a bath, revealing her supple nipples.

Meanwhile, Tyrion Lannister the dwarf, brought some comic relief by drinking and screwing a supple whore. But there was a dark side to him, too! Like, why didn’t his father love him the way he loved money and power and swords of Valerian steel? He briefly considered printing-up visiting cards that said I’LL BE WITH YOU… SHORTLY, another example of his humor. His day would come, he thought in his querulous accent.

Arya Stark looked around. And there was a lot of around to look, for she was on the ocean vast. It was an enormous ocean, liquid in its size. Where across this magnificent but terrifying expanse was her mother, and her home, and her family, the formerly powerful Starks, from whom distance, perfidy and unlikely plot twists had estranged her? She had learned in a quick montage to fight with a sword and wear the faces of the dead, but was this truly whence lay happiness?

“I love you Jon Snow,” she snarled, “even though I am your sworn enemy by blood, tradition, and the relative cleanliness levels of our clothes.”

Little Finger smiled as if he had just unexpectedly got TSA Pre Check. His new power, he reflected, was a rebuke to all those who doubted he would ever get any power. A revenge like that is sweeter than even butter. Sweet butter, he clarified. But then Zowie! his whole life was reverse-avenged by one of the many people he had burned in his grinning way. How had he, who was so cunning, not seen this coming? It was like a bee on top of his soda can, he thought as he expired lavishly.

Sansa Stark poofed out a big balloon of air and looked around with pride and nervousness. Everyone in her family had been murdered vengefully and she had been married to two of the worst human beings ever. How was this legal? But her haughtiness, learned from trial and tearing food off the bone with her fingers, gave her strength. Some day, she thought, I will sit on the Iron Throne. And maybe, for I have traveled so very far, make an iron footstool.