George R.R. Martin recently offered a few tantalizing hints on the characters and crises to come in The Winds of Winter.
The Winds of Winter is coming… eventually. Don’t pop the Arbor Gold just yet, readers – the sixth book in George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series has not yet received a release date. However, the curmudgeonly author has recently offered Entertainment Weekly a few hints on the feverishly-anticipated novel.
According to Martin, The Winds of Winter will “start out with a big smash.” The author teases “two enormous battles” – known in fandom as the Battle of Ice and the Battle of Fire – which were cut from A Dance With Dragons for publication purposes. Several spoiler chapters have been released from the Battle of Fire segment, and suggest that the early pages of The Winds of Winter will not lack for excitement, grandiosity, or gore.
About the story which follows these epic engagements, Martin is more general – and more sinister. “We have more deaths, and we have more betrayals,” he says. And for those looking for their next wedding theme, he promises, “We have more marriages.”
Uh… mazel tov?
Martin does get tantalizingly specific when he touches on the pivotal characters of Tyrion and Daenerys. The embattled queen and disgraced dwarf “will intersect, in a way,” he says, “But for much of the book they’re still apart.”
Much of Tyrion’s story will be the character’s focus on survival, a life choice which took the character about five hundred pages to reach in A Dance With Dragons. In regards to Dany, Martin says that the Dothraki will return as a significant force in The Winds of Winter. The would-be queen herself “has embraced her heritage as a Targaryen and embraced the Targaryen words” – the ominous phrase, “Fire and Blood.”
Both Tyrion and Dany, Martin says, are “coming home.”
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