Last Hearth

Home of the Greatjon and his enormous kin, the last hearth before the Gift and the Wall.

The fuller tale

Last Hearth is exactly what its name claims — the final lordly roof between the settled North and the Gift, seat of the Umbers, a house built to the same scale as its masters. The Greatjon is the tale’s definitive Umber: he draws steel on his own liege at a war council, loses two fingers to a direwolf for it, and roars with laughter — and from that moment is Robb’s fiercest friend, first on his feet to name him King in the North. Loyalty at Last Hearth is a full-contact sport.

The war splits the house against its own legend — an Umber delivers a Stark boy to the flayed men, a thing the Greatjon’s hall was built never to do — and the story saves the seat for its grimmest overture. Last Hearth is the first castle the dead reach when the Wall comes down, and what the living find there — a boy pinned to the wall at the center of a spiral of severed limbs — is the Night King’s calling card, left where the name Last Hearth could do its coldest work.

The chronicle here

• At Last Hearth, the dead leave the Umber boy pinned in a spiral: the Night King is south of the Wall. (S8·E1)

Souls the story brings here

The fallen of this place — if any, they are named here. Spoilers.

No death the chronicle records has come to this ground — or none the maesters have set down.