The Game of Thrones
The age of the story itself ÔÇö from the death of one Hand of the King to the breaking of the wheel. Five kings warring over one chair, a queen waking dragons in the east, an older and colder enemy marching south while they all squabbled, and a winter that in the end came for every one of them.
A dead Hand and five kings
It began, as so much does, with a death that looked natural and was not. Jon Arryn, Hand of the King and the man who had raised Robert Baratheon and Ned Stark like sons, died suddenly ÔÇö and the secret he had uncovered died with him, or nearly. Drawn south to serve as the new Hand, Ned Stark pulled at the same thread and found the same truth: that Queen Cersei's golden children were not King Robert's at all, but her twin brother Jaime's. Ned tried to handle the knowledge with honour, and it cost him his head.
Robert's death and Ned's execution lit the War of the Five Kings. The boy Joffrey held the throne; in the North they crowned Robb Stark the Young Wolf; Robert's brothers Stannis and Renly each claimed the crown for themselves; and Balon Greyjoy raised the kraken and reaved the coasts for a crown of his own. The realm burned from the Trident to the Blackwater. Two weddings did what battles could not: the Red Wedding, where the Freys and Boltons murdered the Young Wolf and his mother under guest right, and the Purple Wedding, where Joffrey choked to death on poison at his own feast.
The dragon queen and the dead
While the great houses of Westeros tore at one another, two far older forces were stirring at the edges of the map. In the east, Daenerys Targaryen ÔÇö the frightened girl who had fled the Sack in her mother's womb ÔÇö walked into her husband's funeral pyre and walked out again unburned, with three newborn dragons on her shoulders, the first the world had seen in a century and a half. She marched through Slaver's Bay breaking chains and cities as she went, gathering an army and a terrible reputation.
And in the true north, beyond the Wall the First Men had raised against exactly this, the thing out of the Long Night came again. The White Walkers and their endless dead marched south out of the land of always winter, and the Night's Watch ÔÇö a few hundred old men and criminals on a crumbling wall ÔÇö were the only ones watching, while lords and ladies a thousand miles south played their game of thrones over a chair as if winter were only a word in a motto.
The breaking of the wheel
In the end the wars all ran together. The dead broke against the living at Winterfell, and were ended there by a knife in the dark that had been passed hand to hand across the whole story. The last dragons burned and fell. King's Landing itself was put to the torch by the dragon queen the realm had once hoped would save it ÔÇö and the conqueror was cut down in the ruins by the man who loved her most, one last kingslaying to close the book the first one had opened.
Out of the ashes the surviving lords did something the realm had never tried: rather than crown the strongest sword, they chose a broken boy with no ambition and a long memory to rule six kingdoms, and let the seventh, the North, go free under its own queen. Whether that truly broke the wheel that grinds the smallfolk under the great, or only gave it one more turn, is a question the maesters are still arguing over, and will be arguing over long after everyone who fought the wars is dust.