Prologue

Varamys Sixskins (copyright by FFG)

Three dogs are hunting. One of them clearly is a warg, and soon we learn that it is Varamyr Sixskins. The wolfs fall upon a group of wildlings and kill them, beasts that they are, in a bloody way. They eat from their flesh, and after that, we are with their master in a small, cold hut somewhere beyond the Wall. Varamyr is hurt, hungry and cold. He has fled after the battle, when Stannis’ knights descended upon the wildlings, and his time has nearly come. Delusional, he remembers his upbringings and tries to think of a way to survive. He knows that he is going to die soon, weak and hurt as his body is, and all he can think about is how to start his “second life”.

The second life is something given to all wargs, when they leave their human bodies and instead go into the body of a beast, in most cases the beast that accompanied them. Varamyr Sixskins has only three beasts remaining, a pack of wolfs. His eagle was burned by Melisandre, and he can still feel the terrible pain and the terror of this death. The shadowcat ran off, and the polar bear went mad and killed some wildlings before it could be brought down. Varamyr muses about the nature of the beasts one can warg in, as his master and mentor Haggon told him: dogs are easily warged, because they are so much like humans and trusting. Wolves can’t be tamed, but one has to forge a lasting bound much like a marriage. If you warg in birds, you soon loose contact to the mundane things of earth, and all you want to do is fly. Warg in elks or other prey, and you become craven. Cats, however, are cruel and vain beasts and can’t be easily controlled, only forced. To warg in humans is considered an abomination by most skinchangers, as well as mating with other beasts while you are in beast form.

We soon learn that Varamyr Sixskins never had much respect for such traditions and moral guidelines. He tried to mate as wolf with other wolves, he thinks of warging into the spearwife Thistle, should she turn up again, and he has killed his master Haggon, even ripping him of his second life as wolf. In his old village, Varamyr was cast out by his father after killing his brother in envy. Later, when his powers where brought to full fruition, Varamyr lived in a big hut and was paid homage in food and women by the surrounding wildling villages who lived in fear of him. Then Mance Rayder came and persuaded him to join him in reaching the lands south of the Wall.

Varamyr is nearly frozen to death when Thistle returns, the wights on her heels, and urges him to go on. Varamyr, knowing that his body is too weak and he is to die soon, attempts to warg into her body, to live his second life at least as a human, if only as a woman and an ugly one besides. He fails in the attempt, though, already too weak to control Thistle, who dies in the process. Varamyr finds his mind flowing over the land, for a moment thinking he could be the forest as a whole, seeing everything. But the moment is only a short one, and the chapter ends with him entering the body of One-Eye, the leader of the pack of wolves. With his last look back, he sees many wights and Thistle among them.

There are several interesting things to learn from this chapter. First among these are some truths about warging in general and the warg “community” along the wildlings. Obviously, the Stark children have chosen the right beasts in wolves, them being extremely loyal and fairly easy to “use” once accustomed to. The “second life” wargs take one we knew before, most prominent in case of Orell. Varamyr muses that Orell still was in the eagle and that when he took it over, he had to defeat Orell before (as he did with his master Haggon upon his first death, when he drove him out his favored wolf and then devoured his heart). Orell still was there and influenced Varamyr’s mind. It was Varamyr who attacked Jon Snow in eagle form, because he felt Orell’s hatred and took it for his own, even after he left the eagle. He was indifferent towards Jon before, and only came to hate and mistrust him after he warged in Orell’s eagle.

Another thing we learn from Varamyr is what happened to the wildling host after the lost battle at the foot of the Wall. Roughly, they divided themselves into five groups: a big one stayed with Tormund Giantsbane in the surroundings of the Wall, waiting for a chance to mount another attack. A second, smaller one marched to the Bridge of Skulls to attack the Shadow Tower. Two other big ones march to the valley of the Thenns (and have to be considered dead, since they are not mentioned again) and to Hardhome, a bay somewhere north of Eastwatch-by-the-sea. The group to Hardhome was lead by a woman named “Mother Mole”. Every wildling who didn’t join one of these groups tried to make for somewhere else, in most cases their old homes and hovels. Varamyr belonged with these, and they are doomed and soon to die since the wights aren’t far and killing them all.

At one point, Varamyr muses about Jon Snow and Ghost. He wanted to take over the direwolf when Jon came into the camp, but Mance Rayder forbade it. He felt that the “gift was strong” in Jon, but not trained, and was convinced that he could have won control over Ghost from Jon. It is not exactly clear what such an action does with the corresponding warg; Sixskins did it before with his master Haggon, who cried helplessly and was killed only instants later by Varamyr. The experience has to be a traumatic one. I hadn’t thought before that Jon’s gift was considered that strong. Surely, he had some possibilities looking through the eyes of Ghost and feeling him, but he didn’t strike me as full of potential as, say, Bran or even Arya. This sheds a special light on Jon’s fate in his final chapter in the book.

There are three last sidenotes before we will plunge into the first chapter of the book. First, Varamyr fears that the dead – the truly dead, not the ones with a second life – go into the trees and the nature and can see everything from there, merging with the Old Gods. We will learn later together with Bran that this is true in a sense. Second, wights are able to remember something. Jon comes to this conclusion later, too, and wants to conduct an experiment (which ends fruitless), but the look dead Thistle gives Varamyr in the skin of One-Eye is terrible. Third, we get a short glimpse of what wildling relations to the Watch were before Mance Rayder made himself King-beyond-the-Wall. Varamyr remembers his master Haggon saying that the lands south of the Wall were nothing for them, but showing him Eastwatch-by-the-sea, where he traded with the Watch. Many wildlings seem to have had stable, if scarce, relationships with the Watch at least for trading stuff. The relation between the two was never black and white, thus, and more complicated than one thinks at the first glance, which certainly makes it easier for Jon to negotiate with them later on.