Game of Thrones' sixth season premieres April 24 on HBO, and we now have our first real taste of what it might look like thanks to a full trailer. Prepare yourself: It is bleak.
Set to the plaintive tune of James Vincent McMorrow's "Wicked Game" (get it?), the trailer shows characters from all across Westeros questioning themselves and trying to move forward while making dire declarations and furrowing their brows.
We see Jon Snow (Kit Harington), lying "dead" in the ice where his fellow Night's Watch brothers stabbed him in the season five finale. We see Dany (Emilia Clarke) walking amongst thousands of people with a dragon necklace circling her collarbone. We see Red Priestess Melisandre (Carice van Houten), despairing that she might have been wrong to predict Stannis Baratheon's victory all along.
And we see Cersei (Lena Headey), quietly furious with her newly shorn hair, gazing upon her cousin Loras and calmly smirking, "I choose violence."
From there, the trailer is off and running, giving glimpses of many ongoing storylines in rapid succession. There will be plenty to parse, like how old Bran Stark looks these days.
HBO
The trailer hints at plenty of unknown stories, even for those who've read the show's source novels; now that author George R.R. Martin has confirmed that he needs more time to complete The Winds of Winter (the book season six is based on), the television series will officially outpace its source material in season six and spoil plenty of stories rotten.
No matter what lies ahead, to borrow the words of Tyrion Lannister: "[We're] in the great game, now — and the great game is terrifying."
