How Will Game of Thrones End?

It should be obvious by now that George RR Martin is never going to finish his series, because he patently has no interest in writing it when he could be having far more fun not writing it. But if he did write it, how would he actually end the saga?

“Kill me now…”

Now, Friedrich Bagel (which I strongly suspect of being an assumed name) is a man who knows something about not finishing a writing project; we have been assiduously not finishing our masterly screenplay for the great Irish short film for some nine years now. Moved by Martin’s plight he has suggested some endings, and I have helped out some. So, for the consideration of the blocked GRRM, here are some ways to fill the blank page of the final page…

 

Hard Boiled Manner

What did it matter where you lay once you were dead? In a dirty sump or in a marble tower on top of a high hill? You were dead, you were sleeping the big sleep, you were not bothered by things like that. Oil and water were the same as wind and air to you. You just slept the big sleep, not caring about the nastiness of how you died or where you fell. Me, I was part of the nastiness now. Far more a part of it than Jon Snow was. But the old Targaryen didn’t have to be. She could lie quiet in her canopied bed, with her bloodless hands folded on the sheet, waiting. Her heart was a brief, uncertain murmur. Her thoughts were as gray as ashes. And in a little while she too, like Jon Snow, would be sleeping the big sleep.

 

Augustan

Last, o’er the urn the sacred earth they spread,
And rais’d the tomb, memorial of the dead
(Strong guards and spies, till all the rites were done,
Watch’d from the rising to the setting sun).	1010
Kings Landing  then moves to Cersei’s court again,
A solemn, silent, melancholy train:
Assembled there, from pious toil they rest,
And sadly shared the last sepulchral feast.
Such honours Westeros to her hero paid,	1015
And peaceful slept the mighty Jon Snow’s shade.

 

Elegiac

And as I sat there brooding on the old, and new, gods, I thought of Melisandre’s wonder when she first picked out the white fire hidden in Jon Snow’s afterlife. She had come a long way to this Iron Throne, and her dream must have seemed so close that she could hardly fail to grasp it. She did not know that it was already behind her, somewhere back in that vast obscurity beyond Kings Landing, where the dark fields beyond the Wall rolled on under the Night’s Watch.

Melisandre believed in the white fire, the orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter – tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther…And one fine morning –

So we charge on, knights against the dragons, borne back ceaselessly into the Targaryens.