Varamyr Sixskins
A powerful, wretched wildling warg who wears the skins of six beasts, one of Mance's skinchangers (book only).
A soul born at Beyond the Wall.
The fuller tale
How it ends for them
(book only) ÔÇö before this story begins.
On the page. Died in the snows south of the Wall (ADWD, ch. 1)
The great skinchanger of the free folk, who wore a shadowcat and a bear and men's fears, died a beggar in the snows after the Wall broke Mance's host. His second life in his wolf One Eye opens the fifth book ÔÇö and shows what waits inside the storm.
His death opens the fifth book, and it is a masterwork of poetic justice conducted in a snowstorm. Broken by the eagleÔÇÖs burning and the hostÔÇÖs shattering, Varamyr staggers south among the wildling refugees, robbed, wounded and dying in a nameless village ÔÇö and at the end, in terror of the true death, he commits the abomination one last time: he hurls his spirit at the spearwife Thistle, the one human being who had shown him kindness, to take her body for his own. She fights him from inside ÔÇö screaming, biting off her tongue, clawing at her own eyes to force him out ÔÇö and both of them die in the struggle, her ruined body rising minutes later with blue eyes among the villageÔÇÖs new wights. VaramyrÔÇÖs spirit escapes into his wolf One Eye for his second life: a fading passenger in a beast in a world filling with the dead, the great skinchanger reduced to exactly what his teacher warned him all men become who love the skin too much. The show, having no Varamyr, never owed him an ending; the books gave him a perfect one.
Their chapters, book by book
A Dance with Dragons 1 chapter of their own
Where the page and the screen part
Varamyr never appears in the show, but his estate is everywhere in it. His warg lore ÔÇö the second life, the beast that carries a dead manÔÇÖs grudge ÔÇö was handed to Orell, whose expanded screen role absorbs both VaramyrÔÇÖs teaching function and his stolen eagle; his cautionary shadow over BranÔÇÖs gift survives in the Three-Eyed RavenÔÇÖs warnings; and his prologueÔÇÖs vision of wights rising among the wildling dead was folded into Hardhome. The books also give him a small, crucial on-page role before his prologue: at the battle beneath the Wall it is VaramyrÔÇÖs beasts and OrellÔÇÖs inherited eagle that serve Mance as the hostÔÇÖs reconnaissance, and when MelisandreÔÇÖs fires burn the eagle out of the sky with Varamyr riding it, the agony breaks him ÔÇö the beginning of the ruin his prologue completes. A book-only figure, and the richest single deposit of skinchanger doctrine in the saga.