Jon Snow, Daenerys Targaryen, and their respective armies are waiting to battle the Night King at Winterfell in the next episode of Game of Thrones - but what if he’s attacking King’s Landing instead? The plan for defeating the White Walkers and their massive army of the undead hinges on luring the Night King to the godswood and killing him, but if the Night King doesn’t show himself then Jon and Daenerys have little chance of winning the Great Battle of Winterfell.
After making a false promise to send the Lannister army to help with the fight, Queen Cersei is currently sitting smugly on the Iron Throne in King’s Landing, waiting for the armies of the living and the dead in the North to decimate one another so that her forces can deal with whoever’s left. However, now that the Night King has the ice dragon Viserion under his thrall, he is free to fly down to King’s Landing and devastate the capital while his followers fight the main battle.
Bran Stark thinks that he knows what the Night King wants, and how to draw him out, but so far we’ve seen no evidence that the Night King is even at Winterfell. Here why there’s good reason to believe he’s planning to attack King’s Landing instead.
The Night King Wants Bran Stark Dead
In Game of Thrones season 8, episode 2, “A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms,” Bran revealed that the Night King is determined to kill him, specifically. The leader of the White Walkers wants to bring about eternal night and an end to the realm of man, and as the Three-Eyed Raven, Bran is that world’s memory. So long as he lives, the Night King will never have the victory he wants.
The plan, then, is for Bran to wait in Winterfell’s godswood and lure the Night King out, where he can be killed. The White Walkers’ numbers are so overwhelming that this appears to be the only way to defeat them. But the Night King is an ancient and intelligent military leader, so the idea that he would stupidly walk right into a trap seems unlikely. After all, if he wants Bran Stark dead then one simple way to achieve that would be to simply let his army overwhelm Winterfell and kill everyone there.
The Night King is Conspicuously Absent From Winterfell
“A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms” ended with the White Walkers finally arriving for the Great Battle of Winterfell, and we saw a number of the army’s leaders at the front of its ranks. Noticeably absent, however, are both Viserion and the Night King - and Viserion in particular is difficult to miss. The trailer for episode 3 shows a dragon flying through the snow with what appears to be a rider on its back, but it’s unclear whether this is Viserion or Daenerys on the back of Drogon. At one point in the trailer Jon says, “The Night King is coming,” which indicates that the Night King still hasn’t arrived. Why would the army of the dead’s leader, and its most powerful weapon, be so apparently absent from the battle?
In terms of storytelling, there’s a logistical reason why the Night King might not be at the Great Battle of Winterfell: he’s simply too powerful. Simply by swooping over Winterfell on Viserion and letting loose blue fire, the Night King could kill most or all of our favorite characters in one go. This will be the longest battle scene ever filmed for TV, and having Viserion and the Night King there could cut it short. Moreover, it makes sense strategically for the Night King to head to King’s Landing instead.
Page 2: The Night King Could Destroy Cersei… or Vice Versa
The Night King’s Surprise Attack Could Destroy King’s Landing
It’s important not to underestimate just how devastating a dragon attack can be. A famous example in Game of Thrones lore is the (seemingly cursed) castle of Harrenhal, which was built to withstand any kind of attack from land, but was reduced to ruin by Aegon the Conqueror and his dragon, Balerion. A vision that Bran had back in season 4 showed a single dragon’s shadow being cast over King’s Landing, and while this may simply have been a vision of the past (from when the Targaryens ruled), it could also been a glimpse of the war to come.
There’s some confusion among fans over whether the resurrected Viserion now breathes fire or ice, but “Dragon and the Wolf” director Jeremy Podeswa told Huffington Post that what he breathes is “certainly still fire - it has the ability to burn the Wall and melt snow. But it’s going to have a different kind of magical quality to it, because it’s coming from an undead dragon.” Podeswa compared its blue hue to the green of wildfire, which destroyed the Great Sept of Baelor.
If the fire that Viserion breathes has the power to destroy the Wall then it’s likely even hotter than regular dragonfire, which itself was hot enough to melt the stones of Harrenhal. With that in mind, the Night King probably doesn’t even need an army to destroy King’s Landings defenses, the Red Keep, and even the Iron Throne itself. Fighting with the rest of his army at Winterfell would be a poor strategic move if the theories about the Night King being a kind of “queen bee” and the wights being his drones are correct, since killing him would end the war immediately. But if the Night King is planning to attack King’s Landing, he might find it to be dangerously well-defended.
Could Cersei Defeat the Night King?
While it might be satisfying to think of the Night King swooping down on Queen Cersei and killing her before she even has a chance to mount a defense, the past seven seasons of Game of Thrones have taught us that Cersei doesn’t go down without a fight. Moreover, we know that Cersei has a weapon at her disposal that is capable of felling dragons: the scorpion, the miniature ballista that Bronn used to injure Drogon at the Battle of the Goldroad. That particular scorpion was destroyed, but since Cersei knows that she will likely have to fight dragons again, it wouldn’t be at all surprising if she’d had more made.
Even with a scorpion, however, there’s another challenge in killing Viserion: now that the dragon has been raised again by the Night King, he can presumably only be killed by dragonglass or Valyrian steel. All the Valyrian steel blades that we’ve seen so far in the show are currently in Winterfell, but a woman with Cersei’s resources could no doubt get her hands on another weapon. Moreover, now that all of Jon and Daenerys’ forces are in the North, the dragonglass mines on Dragonstone (which is conveniently close to King’s Landing) are unguarded, and a shrewd woman like Cersei will surely have been preparing to deal with the undead. Ironically, if she does kill the Night King she could accidentally save Jon, Daenerys, and everyone else in Winterfell by neutralizing the army of the dead.
It would certainly make for an interesting twist if one of Game of Thrones’ greatest villains ended up defeating another.
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