A Dance with Dragons — Prologue · Varamyr

The warg Varamyr Sixskins dies his first death in the snows south of the Wall and steals his second life from his wolf — while the cold winds rise, and the dead walk under the trees.

The chapter retold

The book opens not with a name anyone in the great houses would recognize but with Varamyr Sixskins, a skinchanger fleeing south with the wreck of Mance Rayder’s army, more comfortable inside his wolves than his own failing body. Starving, frostbitten, trailed by the memory of every beast he has ever worn — an eagle stolen mid-flight from a dying man, a shadowcat, a snow bear that nearly kept him — he is run down by Night’s Watch bowmen in the snow. Dying, he breaks the last taboo his old teacher Haggon ever taught him: a skinchanger may wear a hundred animals, but never another man, and never, ever try to outlive his own death by force.

Varamyr does it anyway, hurling himself into his wolf One Eye rather than accept the end, and the chapter’s closing image — a man’s mind looking out through an animal’s eyes at a body already going cold in the snow — sets the book’s terms before a single lord or dragon appears. This is a story about what people become to survive, about power taken from things too weak to refuse it, and about a dead world just north of the living one that nobody south of the Wall is prepared to believe in. The prologue asks for no sympathy for Varamyr and gets none anyway, which is the point: the world he dies in does not care what anyone deserves.

This movement: The Lost Lords

• Tyrion drinks his way across the narrow sea in a wine cask, bound for a queen with dragons — 'wherever whores go' ringing in his ears.
• Jon Snow rules the Wall: he sends Mance's son away in secret, gives Slynt one last order, and takes his head personally.
• Dany rules Meereen in a tokar while the Sons of the Harpy paint the bricks red by night.
• Bran travels north beyond the Wall with cold hands guiding — toward a cave, a weirwood throne, and a thousand eyes.

The fallen — spoilers

• Varamyr Sixskins — Died a man in the snow and lived on, for a while, as a wolf — the abomination he was warned of.