Kyll.Ing.

Asshai serves one very specific purpose in the story, and for that matter the setting as a whole: To be a mysterious city on the far side of the world. The ultimate faraway, exotic location, so alien to the people of Westeros and so shrouded in riddles it might as well be a mythological place. It's to Westeros what China was to early-medieval Englishmen. Going there would defeat the whole purpose. It is meant to be far away and mysterious, not inspected up-close.

The length of your prediction is entirely on you. You decide how much you think the story will progress and how much time you want to do it in. As @Nevets said, you're giving multiple characters way more chapters than any character has ever had in previous books. You progress the story of key characters all the way to their death when there's one more book left after this. Basically, you're stretching things way beyond the point of reasonable.

Or more than any three of the other books combined. AGoT, ASoS, and ADwD are the longest books so far in terms of chapters, and together they add up to 228. 231 if you include the prologues. I redid my earlier count, and found that 235 chapters would be the equivalent of 70% of the chapters in the series so far.

235 now. The rest of the books put together add up to 338. You're more than two-thirds of the way there. Do you really not see how unrealistic that would be?

I'm a little torn on this. I definitely think The Colour of Magic is among the weakest Discworld books, but it and the direct sequel The Light Fantastic contain so much essential worldbuilding and introduction of key concepts and locations, that the other books introduce very piecemeal or only mention in passing. I really can't think of a better place to start, despite the drawbacks of these books (and definitely the first one).

And with that, you reach 225. Three times as long as the other books and then some. It's reasonable that TWoW will be a bit longer than the others, but completely off-the-rails bonkers to believe for half a second it will be this much longer.

So no Daenerys POV yet (and no Jon Snow, but he might lack a POV considering his, er, condition), and you're already at 208 chapters. The book with the most chapters in the series so far had 81. Can't you see that this is a little over-the-top?

But not twice as many, a milestone you're close to reaching already. Your latest batch is an additional +27 chapters, for a subtotal of 133, still with no Daenerys and no count of the Vale chapters. Assuming twenty-something chapters for each of those too, your estimate is up to 170-180 chapters. And that still leaves some plot arcs like Lady Stoneheart, the debacle at the Wall, Bran, and Arya. The book will be longer, sure, but not that much longer.

You're currently at 106 chapters, without counting any POVs in the Vale or even having started on Essos. ASoS, the most chapter-heavy of the books so far, is 81 chapters, including the prologue and epilogue. The others range between 69 and 72 chapters (except AFfC, 45 chapters). Needless to say, I think you're a bit off.

@Werthead Is the word "lasted" in the thread title intentional? If not, maybe it's possible to change it? It bugs me a bit ...

I'm half convinced that by "third book" she means The Slow Regard of Silent Things, and that the release date in question is October 28, 2014.

Worst case scenario, it's whoever poor schmuck gets to be in the prologue or epilogue this time.

Same here. I could live with the idea that the book was underway in some capacity, maybe half-finished and still with some massive knots left to untangle, but overall with some level of (very slow) progress. But when he is unable to produce a single chapter in so many months, it looks eerily like definite evidence that the book isn't just "unfinished and troubled", but "totally non-existent for all practical purposes". It's really hard to be optimistic for the book when not even a preview can be shown (despite promises, no less) despite half a year of waiting time. It should be enough to make even the staunchest fan waver a bit.

I've given the idea some thought over the years. If I ever were to write a piece of fiction with a magical setting, it would work somewhat like this: Magic is the manifestation of willpower. It is a means to make something imagined happen. It can be done by conjuring objects, energy, or forces, or by teleportation or transformation or a few other basic mechanisms. However, the difficult part is to precisely define what you want to happen, and how. The way from willpower to reality is full of intricacies that must be taken care of, otherwise nothing happens or something will go spectacularly wrong. Say for instance that you want a piece of wood to levitate. You can't just cancel gravity's affection of the wood, then it would just remain on the floor until acted on by an external force. Invert gravity? Now it accelerates upwards instead. Lifting it in some way, then? By what force? Tension from above, compression from underneath? A single vector on the centre of gravity, or a uniform force spread across its entire volume? How to balance the force so the wood stops in mid-air, never mind so it stops spinning? Cancelling out velocity and rotation is tricky business. Now imagine it with a non-rigid object, like a cloak. Or a clot of cream. Tricky business. In short, doing magic would be very similar to programming. The magician works in a physics engine, and would have to define precisely what they want to happen, like a programmer coding a video game or setting up a multiphysics simulation. Fortunately, programmers don't work with ones and zeroes. There are existing frameworks to work within on almost every level, from the basic machine code to operating systems, to programming languages, to code packages for each programming language. And even some visual code tools and libraries to assemble code out of pre-existing parts, rather than having to write everything from the ground up. Likewise with magic, there would be similar frameworks set up by arcane researchers of the past, ways to channel raw magic through words, and languages of those words that could be used to cast spells (that is, multiple languages could effectively work the same magic using entirely different words - like how Dutch and Chinese could both be used to make the exact same detailed descriptions of an object, even though they sound nothing alike). And then there could be further refinements of words and phrases into commands of stunning complexity despite the simple nature of the triggering word - for instance, like how a computer responds to the simple string "format C://". In other words, an aspiring spellcaster would need to learn a language, with its list of commands and the structure of how to give them. Commands would have to be given in a set order depending on the language (just keep in mind how something as simple as an "if" loop looks very different depending on what program you use to define it). But with mastery of a language, pretty much everything is possible. Or, well, there are always limitations, and that would also be something a spellcaster would have to learn. Building up a magical system of one's own is like building software from the ground up - a challenge for the master of the arcane, but technically doable. Self-taught magicians would be very rare, however, and rarely able to do anything intricate unless they've really thought things through (as shown above, even the simplest task can be intricate if you break it down). Forget making skulls talk, conjuring an army of demons, or transforming ropes into snakes. A "raw" magician might just be able to create blasts of force or heat, with very little precision. I've thought of a few other aspects of my magical system, but this is enough of a ramble already that I think I'll stop here for now.

Granted, given how GoT turned out in the end, that is a pretty big if.