How Jaime Lannister Could Play a Major Role in Game of Thrones’ War Against the Dead

You all despise me. Kingslayer. Oathbreaker. Man without honor. You heard of Wildfire? The Mad King was obsessed with it. He loved to watch people burn, the way their skin blackened and blistered and melted off their bones. He burned lords he didn’t like, he burned Hands who disobeyed him, he burned anyone who was against him. Before long, half the country was against him. Aerys saw traitors everywhere, so he had his pyromancer places caches of wildfire all over the city. Beneath the Sept of Baelor and the slums of Flea Bottom. Under houses, stables, taverns. Even beneath the Red Keep itself. Finally, the day of reckoning came. Robert Baratheon marched on the capital after his victory at the Trident. But my father arrived first — the whole Lannister army at his back — promising to defend the city against the rebels. I knew my father better than that. He’s never been one to pick the losing side. I told the Mad King as much. I urged him to surrender peacefully, but the King didn’t listen to me, didn’t listen to Varys who tried to warn him. But he did listen to Grand Maester Pycelle…’You can trust the Lannisters,’ he said. ‘The Lannisters have always been true friends of the crown.’ So he opened the gates and my father sacked the city. Once again, I came to the King begging him to surrender. He told me to bring him my father’s head. Then he turned to his pyrcomancer. ‘Burn them all,’ he said. ‘Burn them in their homes, burn them in their beds.’ Tell me, if your precious Renly commanded you to kill your own father and stand by while thousands of men, women and children burned alive, would you have done it? Would you have kept your oath then? First I killed the pyromancer and then when the King turned to flee, I drove my sword into his back. ‘Burn them all,’ he kept saying. ‘Burn them all.’ I don’t think he expected to die. He meant to burn with the rest of us and rise again, reborn as a dragon to turn his enemies to ash. I slit his throat to make sure that didn’t happen. That’s where Ned Stark found me…You think the honorable Ned Stark wanted to hear my side? He judged me guilty the moment he set eyes on me.