Grey Worm

Commander of the Unsullied, the elite eunuch soldiers of Astapor: disciplined past fear or feeling, slowly learning to be a man as well as a weapon.

The fuller tale

Grey Worm was made in Astapor, which is the correct verb: the Unsullied are manufactured. Taken or bred as boys, the slave-soldiers of the Good Masters are cut, drilled from dawn to dusk, taught to feel neither pain nor fear, stripped even of names — each day they draw a new one from a bucket, vermin-names like Grey Worm, so that no man among them can imagine he matters. The training kills most of its candidates by design and finishes the survivors into the finest heavy infantry in the known world: eight thousand spears that do not break, do not rape, do not loot, and do not run, because everything in them that might want to was burned out before manhood.

The tale’s interest in Grey Worm begins at the moment the system’s logic inverts. Sold with his eight thousand brothers to Daenerys Targaryen for a dragon, he is freed by her in the hour of purchase and hears her first command as free men: kill the masters. When the Unsullied afterward elect a commander from their own ranks, they choose Grey Worm — and when Daenerys urges the freedmen to reclaim their birth names, he declines, keeping the vermin-name deliberately: it is lucky, he says, the name he bore on the day she freed him. It is the character in a sentence — a man building a self from the inside of an erasure, on his own terms.

In the queen’s service he becomes her most unconditional instrument — commander of her infantry, keeper of her person, the officer sent when the order must be executed exactly — and the tale takes care to show the cost and the growth in parallel. The show gives him the story the books decline to: his slow courtship of Missandei, conducted in language lessons and shy, stunning honesty, in which a soldier engineered to be nothing but a weapon reveals that fear survived the training after all — fear for her, which he names the first fear he has had since he was cut. For a series stuffed with lords wrecking realms over love, its most credible romance belongs to a eunuch and a translator, which one suspects is the point.

The final act breaks him deliberately. Missandei dies in chains on the walls of King’s Landing with the word dracarys in her mouth, and when the fire comes, Grey Worm — spear in hand at the gates — leads the massacre of the surrendered with a cold ferocity the show frames as grief wearing armor. After the queen’s death he holds her army and her justice in his hands and chooses, at the last, neither vengeance nor a crown but the strangest ending available: exile as fidelity. The ships he leads out of King’s Landing sail for Naath, Missandei’s butterfly isle, to protect a people who will not protect themselves — her homeland made his watch, the only order left from the only two people who ever saw him as a man.

Across both tellings Grey Worm is the story’s cleanest argument about freedom: the free man is not the one with no master, but the one who chooses what he serves. Everyone else in the saga inherits their loyalties; Grey Worm is the rare character who selects his, twice — once in a bucket of vermin-names, once on a ship pointed at Naath.

The page and the screen

Book Grey Worm is a far smaller figure: the elected commander of the Unsullied, present and trusted — he serves Meereen’s watch and its politics in Daenerys’s absence — but without a point of view, without the romance, and without the final-act prominence. The love story with Missandei is pure show invention (she is a child in the novels), and so is his entire ending: the massacre at King’s Landing, the confrontation over Jon Snow’s fate, and the voyage to Naath have no book counterpart and cannot yet have one. The novels do sharpen one detail the show softens: the Astapori training’s full horrors, including the killing of an infant before its mother as a graduation exercise, which makes the books’ Unsullied both more pitiable and more unsettling. In both tellings he is alive — the show simply wrote him an ending, while the books have him standing post in Meereen, waiting for a queen to come back.

Where they stand, season by season

Mentioned in the chronicle

• The Harpies ambush the Unsullied in the tunnels; Grey Worm falls wounded; Barristan the Bold falls forever. (S5·E4)

Their fate — if death has found them, it is written here. Open at your peril.

The chronicle records no death for this soul — they are living when the tale leaves them, or their ending is a page the maesters have yet to turn.