The broken wheel

Jon Snow kills the woman he loves in front of the throne she spent her life reaching for; the dragon melts the chair rather than the man. What replaces three hundred years of hereditary monarchy is a council of tired lords electing a boy who remembers everything ÔÇö and a North that walks away from the whole arrangement. The wheel is not so much broken as quietly repaired with different spokes.

The fuller tale

Jon Snow went to her in the ruin of the throne room, in the ash, and she told him what she had always told him ÔÇö that they would break the wheel together, that she knew what was good ÔÇö and he embraced her and put a knife in her, and she died in front of the chair she had crossed the world for.

Drogon came, and did not kill him. He melted the Iron Throne instead: a thousand swords worked into a chair by Balerion three hundred years earlier, gone in a few seconds, and the dragon took her body and flew east and has not been seen since. Whatever a dragon understood about what had happened in that room, it understood something.

What replaced it was a council of surviving lords in the Dragonpit, who considered democracy for one entire sentence before laughing at it, and then elected a king: Bran Stark, who cannot walk and remembers everything and did not want it, or said he did not. The North was granted its independence and walked away. Jon Snow was sent to the Wall, to an order that no longer had a wall or a purpose, and went north through the gate with the free folk.

A wheel, repaired

Three hundred years of hereditary monarchy ended and were replaced by a monarchy that is elected by great lords, which is the same lords choosing among themselves with a new procedure. The small council that sits at the end is arguing about brothels and ships in the second sentence of its first meeting.

There is no version of the ending in which the smallfolk are consulted, which was the one thing every claimant in the story had promised to change. The wheel is not so much broken as taken apart and put back together with different spokes, and the one genuinely new thing in it is that the North is gone.

What was left

A queen dead in the ash, a king who did not want a crown, a Stark girl sailing west off the edge of every map the chronicle has drawn, another crowned in Winterfell, and a man walking north through a gate into a country that has no lords in it at all. It is not a happy ending and it is not meant to be one. It is an ending that a great many people did not survive to see, which is the closest this history comes to a verdict on the game itself.

Elsewhere in the wiki

 See the world as it stood in 305 AC 

What became of it ÔÇö if an ending is written, it is here. Spoilers.

The chronicle records no ending here ÔÇö or none the maesters have set down.