Terri Schwartz is Editorial Producer at IGN. As for what's ahead, here's how the season finale promo seems to set up a certain fan theory. Watchers on the Wall spotted that HBO has listed running times for all seven upcoming episodes of Game of Thrones.
As we only saw his eye flick open at the end of the episode, it's unclear - though very likely - that Viserion will now be breathing icy blasts instead of fiery ones.įor more on "Beyond the Wall," check out our full review. Game of Thrones will have a record-breaking Season 7 finale episode, reportedly lasting 81 minutes long.
Of course, it seems unlikely Game of Thrones the TV series will ever introduce a true ice dragon, so it could be that Viserion took on some of the Night King's frigid powers in his transformation. So what does that make the Night King's new undead dragon pal? Like the giants he brought back from the dead are giant wights, not ice giants, we would classify Viserion in the same category. As Martin later clarified on his LiveJournal blog, The Ice Dragon "is not" in the world of ASoIaF as "the world of Ice & Fire did not exist when I wrote THE ICE DRAGON." Clearly, though, he did have some alternatives to the typical fire-breathing variety of dragon on the mind.
It appears this description is inaccurate, however, despite the way it aligns with tales of ice dragons told in Game of Thrones. When it was republished with a new cover in 2014, book publisher Tor described this as being "set in the world of the New York Times best-selling series A Song of Ice and Fire." Interestingly, Martin actually wrote a children's book called The Ice Dragon in 1980, telling the story of a girl named Adara born during a long winter and who befriended an ice dragon. In A Dance with Dragons, Jon remembers Old Nan telling him stories about ice dragons when he was a boy, while in A Clash of Kings, Osha references the "Ice Dragon" as a type of star alignment in the sky.
Like the Children of the Forest, it sounds as though children in the North of Westeros were raised hearing tales of ice dragons existing. As ice dragons supposedly melt when slain, no actual proof of their existence has ever been found." Whereas common dragons (if any dragon can truly be said to be common) breathe flame, ice dragons supposedly breathe cold, a chill so terrible that it can freeze a man solid in half a heartbeat. These colossal beasts, many times larger than the dragons of Valyria, are said to be made of living ice, with eyes of pale blue crystal and vast translucent wings through which the moon and stars can be glimpsed as they wheel across the sky. "Of all the queer and fabulous denizens of the Shivering Sea, however, the greatest are the ice dragons. In A World of Ice and Fire, ice dragons are discussed as being native to the Shivering Sea off of Essos (if they even do exist at all in this world, of course).
In those works, ice dragons are described as being a different type of species than a fire-breathing dragon, and not necessarily an undead version like seen here. Stories of ice dragons have appeared in the majority of the A Song of Ice and Fire book series, and most notably were discussed in the canon World of Ice and Fire Game of Thrones compendium.